“What can you tell us about where you were being held?” Gallo asked.
“Well, what I was in looked like a rectangular padded cell but homemade. I put two and two together and realized it was the back of the girls’ truck that I was inside of. The padding looked like memory-foam mattresses with screws holding them to the inside of the trailer. Everywhere—floor, ceiling, walls, all completely covered. Like I said, it was basically a padded cell.”
A noise from a door opening caught my ear, and I turned to see a nurse enter the room.
“I just need a minute,” she said.
“Should we go out?” I asked.
“Nope, you’re fine. I just need a second.”
Gallo and I took a few steps back from the foot of the bed and waited while the nurse checked the machines Sarah was connected to, swapped an IV bag, and asked her how she was feeling. On her way out of the room, the nurse told Gallo and me that she would be back in a couple minutes to redress Sarah’s wounds, which I took as her telling us to wrap up before she got back.
Gallo and I walked back to the foot of Sarah’s bed as the door closed.
“Let’s just pick up with you getting free and getting out of the truck,” I said.
Sarah rubbed her bruised eye and let out a long breath. “Okay well, I tell the others inside that I’m almost free and I’m going to get them all untied as soon as I am. All I hear is mumbling for responses and see them start moving around. Then I feel the room start to vibrate a bit—we were moving. So I get to work on freeing my hands so I can get the others untied. It took me a good ten minutes or so of trying to use my lighter to burn through the straps tying me. Before I could burn through them and help anyone else, the truck stopped again. A second later, I heard what sounded like faint voices at the back of the truck. I ran to the back and stuck my ear against the padding to listen. The girls were shouting at someone. I kept trying to work the lighter and finally got the strap burned enough that I could break it. As soon as I turned to go and help the people inside, I heard a clank and saw a flash of daylight from the back door opening. I had to make a decision. I turned for the back of the truck and leapt out from inside, swatting and kicking at whoever I could in hopes of getting free. There were two people with hoods and bound, kneeling at the back of the truck. I knocked the gun out of one of the girl’s hands and just started running down the gravel road. There was nothing but fields on my left and right. A few seconds later, I heard the gunshot that hit me in the leg. I fell pretty much immediately.”
“How far away were you at this point?” Gallo asked.
“Not very far. Maybe a hundred feet from the back of the truck.”
I thought about what we were told regarding the homicide and abandoned vehicles close to where Sarah was found. “Did you happen to see any other vehicles around where you were?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yeah. There was one parked a couple of car lengths behind the semi when I got out. And then there was whatever happened to whoever was driving the pickup truck. Is, um, did that person die?”
I looked at Gallo. The only information we had was that there was a homicide and two abandoned vehicles near where Sarah was found. It sounded as though she might have actually witnessed what had occurred.
“Sarah, we don’t really have any details on what happened out there,” I said. “What exactly did you see?”
“Well, as I’m lying there in the road, I glanced back to see the blond-haired girl walking toward me. Then the other girl yells, ‘Car!’ and I see a pickup truck passing the trailer of the semi. The girl that was coming for me, Carrie, turns back toward the pickup and just starts shooting. I pushed myself to my feet and used everything that was left in me to run. I knew if I didn’t keep trying to get away, they were just going to kill me. I ran off the road and into the field. I didn’t look back once—just kept running. The doctor said that it had to be straight adrenaline that was keeping me going. I don’t know if they ever came after me or not. I don’t even know how long I was running for, but I remember seeing the house where I guess I was found at.”
“Did these girls ever tell you where they were headed?” I asked.
“They never said, no,” Sarah said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Gallo and I left the hospital room and rejoined Bill, Scott, and Beth in the waiting area.
“Well?” Beth asked.
“We have it all recorded,” I said. “Hell of a story.”
“Let’s hear it,” Bill said.
I glanced around at the other couple people seated in the waiting room. “How about we head outside,” I said.
Beth, Bill, and Scott rose from their chairs and followed Gallo and me to the elevators.
“Did she see our suspects? Anything we can run with?” Scott asked.
I pressed the elevator’s down button. “She gave us a lot. We might be able to find these two on video from a truck stop in Tennessee.”
The elevator doors opened and took us inside. We rode down and left the hospital toward where we’d parked. We gathered at the back of Beth’s and my rental car.
“Let’s have a quick listen and then get over to the office to start going through this,” Gallo said.
I pulled out Beth’s voice recorder from my pocket and clicked Play on the recording.
We stood at the back of the car in silence as the recording played the interview with Sarah Goff. Eventually, Beth’s recorder beeped, signaling the end of the recording.
“Play it again,” Bill said.
I let it run one more time.
“We have our suspects,” Scott said. “We have names, a place where we can find them on video, and a firsthand account of what transpired.”
“And that girl in that bed is a witness to a murder,” I said.
“These two women have people in that trailer. Where are they going?” Beth asked.
I shook my head.
“Okay. Let’s get to the office,” Gallo said. “Did you guys just want to follow me?”
“Yeah, where did you park?” I asked.
“A row over. Gray sedan. I’ll loop around, and you guys can follow me.”
“Sure,” I said.
Bill and Scott walked to their car. Beth and I got in our rental and backed out of our parking spot.
Beth stopped the car, waiting on Gallo to come around and take the lead. She pulled her seatbelt over her shoulder and looked over at me. “So we know it’s just these two girls in the truck and driving.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We need to get on Bill’s idea that he had on the weigh-station thing. We also need to get the video of these two from this Tennessee truck stop, get some stills from it, and get the photos distributed to every damn truck stop along the interstate.”
Gallo pulled around us, and we followed him from the parking lot. I glanced back over my shoulder to see Bill and Scott following in their rental car.
“What do you think our chances are that these girls were using their real names?” Beth asked.
“I guess I couldn’t say. On one hand, they could have been using their real names, knowing that they were going to abduct Sarah Goff and do who-knows-what after that. On the other, fake names kind of seem smarter if you’re up to no good. The name Kitty sounds like a nickname, anyway.”
Beth made a face as if she was in thought.
“What?” I asked.
“What the hell are they putting people in the back of the truck for? Where are they taking them? And why are they killing some people and not others?”
I shrugged. “All good questions we don’t have answers for. The trailer description is intriguing. Almost has a kind of human-transport vibe. I highly doubt the padding is for the comfort of the passengers. More than likely for sound deadening. Let me give Ball a buzz here and let him know the latest news. Maybe he’ll have some insight.”
I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialed Ball at his desk in Manassas. He picked up within a couple rings.
“Ball,�
�� he said.
“It’s Hank.”
“What’s up? Get anything from the witness?”
“You know about her?” I asked.
“Scott called me this morning and said you guys were about to head over to the hospital for an interview.”
“Oh, okay. We actually just left there a few minutes ago.”
“And?” he asked.
“And we have some new information.” I filled Ball in on all the highlights from the interview and gave him the names we’d received.
“Any way you can get that recording sent over to me?”
“We’re headed to the field office here as we speak. One second.” I cupped the mouthpiece of my phone. “Beth, we can send that recording to Ball, right?”
“All we need is access to a computer. I have a cord for the recorder in my bag.”
I brought the phone back to my mouth. “Yeah, I’ll get it sent over to you as soon as we get to the office. What do you think we can do about trying to hunt down these names and the footage from this truck stop in Tennessee?”
“Let me make a call to the field office there and get someone going on it right away. Do you have a location of this truck stop?”
“She said Union Road and Interstate 40. Kingston, Tennessee.”
“Okay. As far as your names that the witness gave you, I’ll get the twins on trying to cross-reference those first names with what they’ve been going through. I’ll let you know as soon as we get anything with that. Same goes with this truck-stop video footage.”
“Appreciate it,” I said.
“I’ll give you a call back soon,” Ball said.
I clicked off from the call and stuffed my phone into my pocket. We followed Gallo toward the field office for the rest of the fifteen-minute drive, tossing around ideas about the investigation and the twin women. After ten minutes of back and forth, we both came to the most obvious conclusion that we needed to find out where the hell the final destination of those two was. Beth exited the highway behind Gallo. Not a minute later, Gallo made a right onto Justice Way—the big light-stone-colored FBI building, while only five or six stories, couldn’t be missed. The building’s surroundings were sparse, consisting mostly of flat grassy areas and scrappy-looking wild brush. I didn’t see a neighboring building within a half mile—just a freeway overpass in the distance. We followed Gallo to a set of gates and waited as he spoke with the man hanging out of the window at the guard shack. The gate swung open, and Gallo pulled through, stopping just inside. Beth pulled forward to the shack. After a quick show of our credentials, we followed Gallo to the parking lot and stepped from our car. I grabbed my bag from the backseat and swung the door closed.
“Looks like half hospital and half prison.” Beth pointed her chin toward the field office.
I glanced up at the building and couldn’t argue with her observation.
Bill and Scott pulled in and parked, and our group followed Gallo into the complex. We passed through security and got in the elevator.
Gallo pressed the button for the fifth floor. “We’re going to have to get a list made up of our moves. Start getting people on checking things off.”
“I talked with our superior, Ball, back at our Manassas office,” I said. “He was going to get in touch with the Tennessee office and get someone out to this truck stop. He also was going to put some people on cross-referencing these two names we got with what our team back there was already looking into. I’ll need access to a computer to send this recording over to him.”
“Sure. I’ll get you to one as soon as we get upstairs.”
“Appreciate it.”
“Okay,” Gallo said. “I’m going to get everyone on this into a conference room so we can go through the recording again. We should probably get in touch with the local department where this Sarah Goff was found and let them know that she was a witness to their homicide.”
“What’s the thought on the other vehicle?” Beth asked. “On the recording, she said that these two looked like they were getting ready to put two more people in the back. The other vehicle she mentioned could belong to them. If that is the case, that could give us an identity of two abductees. With that, we could get on their bank and phone records. Those two things could lead us to another point where we may be able to get these twins on video or maybe even pick up the vehicle owners’ cell phones via GPS.”
“That’s a good line of thought and more things for our list,” Gallo said.
The elevator doors opened, letting us off in a hallway on the fifth floor. Gallo made an immediate right and walked the stark white hall. We followed him until a point where the hallway bent to the right and the walls turned to glass at my waistline, allowing us to see inside a large room filled with desks. Gallo walked to the door marked Serial Crimes twenty feet after the hallway turned and pulled it open. We entered. Gallo led us past three aisles of desks filled with agents at computers and showed us to a large conference room at the back.
We funneled in, and I took in the room, which consisted of a large rectangular conference table dead center, with maybe fifteen or so stainless-steel-and-leather executive chairs parked underneath it. A couple of bulletin boards on stands bookended a large projector screen that came down from the ceiling on the back wall—the bulletin boards had numerous photographs of people that I imagined were from a separate investigation. The left side of the room was windows looking out at another part of the complex and parking lot. A single potted ficus sat in the back corner of the room, soaking up light coming through the glass. The right side of the room held a small table with coffee supplies and a couple of file cabinets.
“Grab a seat. I’m going to round a couple of people up, and we’ll get going on this.”
I walked to the nearest chair, set my bag down at the edge of the table, and had a seat. Bill and Scott walked past me and took chairs beside me at the long conference table.
“Rawlings, you said you needed a computer for sending that recording off?” Gallo asked.
I nodded.
“You can come with me, and I’ll get you set at a station quick.”
I glanced up at Beth, who was rolling out a chair at my left side—the recorder was hers, and she was familiar with the process—plus, she’d mentioned a necessary cord in her bag.
Beth rolled her chair back under the table and looked down at me. “I’ll get it taken care of. Just send it to Ball?”
“Yeah.”
“Got it.” She headed toward Gallo, waiting at the door.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Silas
Silas stood at the rear of the truck and watched his daughters remove the straps hog-tying the captives. His girls walked all the people to the edge of the truck’s trailer and then pushed them out. Kerry shoved the final woman off the edge. The woman, wearing a leather skirt, landed chest first on the gravel driveway just a few inches from his feet. Kerry jumped down from the trailer and grabbed the woman by the back of her shirt and got her to her feet.
“Stand, bitch,” Kerry said.
The woman swayed a bit before getting her balance. Kerry arranged the hooded woman near the other three hooded people, standing in a line at the back of the truck. All of their hands remained bound behind their backs.
Harper stood with his arms crossed over his chest, looking at the four people in a line beside Kerry. “We have seven in the shed already. What do we have here?”
“The two girls are probably me and Kitty’s age. They’re both truck-stop hookers,” Kerry said. “Then we have the old couple that we picked up outside of Dallas.”
Silas’s eyes went from one person to the next. The people, while hooded, were easy enough to distinguish by their styles of dress.
Harper turned toward Silas, leaned in, and spoke softly. “What do you think? You want to do one or two of these right away?”
Silas cracked his neck to one side. “Well, I guess we may as well just get this party started now.”
“I’m fine w
ith that. You’re the guest of honor.” Harper took the hunting knife from the sheath on his hip and held it out toward Silas, who took the knife in hand.
“Get them on their knees,” Silas said.
Kerry and Kitty did as their father instructed.
The captive who Silas deduced was the old woman tried getting to her feet. The woman rose and took two lunging steps, only getting a few feet before being tripped by Kitty and falling face-first to the ground.
Silas chuckled. “That was pathetic. Line her back up.”
Kitty dragged the old woman back near the rest of the group.
“Well, it looks like we have our first volunteer. Get the hood.” He jerked his chin at the old woman.
Kerry pulled a knife from her pocket and cut the strap securing the hood to the old woman, who’d made the half-hearted attempt at escape. Kerry pulled the hood off, revealing the gray-haired and gagged woman. The woman mumbled something that Silas couldn’t make out.
“Cut off the rest of their hoods so they can watch this,” Silas said.
Kerry cut the plastic ties securing the hoods, and Kitty yanked the coverings from their heads.
Silas watched the faces of the captives as their hoods were removed. Each captive reacted in the same fashion—squinting in the bright Texas sun before fear crossed their faces as they surveyed their surroundings. The two women whom Kerry said were prostitutes both had sickly faces—Silas figured that was from drug use. Both women’s hair was wet from sweat. The single male appeared to be in his seventies, from his mostly white hair and the droopy bags of skin under his eyes.
The old woman said something into her gag.
“Pull her gag,” Silas said. “It sounds like she wants to talk.”
Kitty undid the knot securing the cloth in the woman’s mouth.
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