by D. K. Wall
He shook his head. “No. I’m not supposed to cry. It’s weak.”
Harold’s voice boomed in the room. “Bullshit.”
Shocked, Heather turned to look at him. “What?”
“You heard me. That’s the kind of macho bullshit I always thought—the kind of bullshit that got me into the mess I was in.”
He stood and walked to the side of the bed. He rested his hand on the boy’s bony shoulder and looked him in the eye. “Listen to me, Jax. Whatever that guy taught you about weak…” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “The strongest thing you can do is deal with how you feel. It’s taken me too damn long to figure that out, so understand that with your family, you can cry anytime you need to. We’ll never think that’s weak. You got it?”
Jaxon blinked his eyes. “Family?”
“Yeah, family. In front of your brother or mother… or me. It don’t matter. Family’ll never think less of you for crying. We’re gonna help you get through this.”
Heather straightened and looked at Harold’s determined face. She hadn’t heard a speech like that from him in a long time, maybe never. But he was right, and it helped her make a decision that had already been tickling the back of her mind. Jaxon needed to get out of the hospital.
He didn’t need the constant interruptions of doctors and nurses taking his blood pressure, listening to his heart, or asking him how he was every few minutes. They were doing their jobs and doing them well, but she could change his dressings and make sure he took his medications. And he certainly didn’t need cops arriving unannounced, asking questions and upsetting him. He needed to be safe with his family so they could protect him and help him heal.
She leaned over and kissed his forehead. “We’re going to get you discharged and go home.”
Jaxon sat stock-still and stared at her. Harold’s face filled with surprise. Connor’s head snapped around, and he raised an eyebrow as he asked, “Home? Today?”
“Today. Tomorrow. As fast as we can. All three of us.” She cocked her head at Trigger wagging his tail from his perch on the bed. “Fine. All four of us.” She caught Harold’s eye. “And we expect you to come by every day too.”
She had expected the boy to be excited, but instead, Jaxon’s face was clouded with doubt. “Will they let me go?”
“I don’t see why not. They’ve already said your injuries aren’t that serious, that what you need are good meals, lots of rest, and time to heal. The IV is coming out today, anyway. We can make sure you get your antibiotics. They aren’t doing anything else for you except monitoring. The sooner you’re sleeping in your own bed, the faster you can get better.”
“Will the doctors come there?”
She chuckled at the vision of doctors doing house calls. “We’ll come in for any appointments. Dr. Sorenson, the psychiatrist, will want to keep seeing you and help you work through things, but we live close, so that won’t be hard.”
With the softest mumble, he said, “I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”
Connor leaned against the bed, lowering his head so he could look Jaxon in the face. “I think it’s a great idea. Mom and I work different shifts, so we’re trying to get things done at the house and then come down here to spend time with you. This way, we can all be home together. One of us is always at the house.”
“I don’t want to be in the way.”
Connor scratched the dog’s ears. “In the way? Are you kidding? You’ll keep Trigger company while I’m at work. He gets lonely and would be in your bed the whole time. And he won’t have to pretend to be a service dog anymore.”
Jaxon ran his hand across the dog’s fur as Trigger’s tail thumped against the mattress. He turned his eyes up toward them. “I don’t know if”—he sniffled—“if I belong there.”
Connor wrapped his fingers around Jaxon’s, cocooning his brother’s smaller hands in his own. “Well, I know you belong. You belong in my room.” He paused and corrected himself. “In our room. I want to come home from work and find you there, keeping our dog company. I want to wake up every morning and see you there.”
Heather fought the tightening in her chest. She needed to be strong and try not to cry again. But she was so proud. Connor was playing the role he should have always been able to play—protective big brother.
And Jax. Her Jax. He was so different, but he was home. Finally. “We want you there.”
Jaxon’s eyes flicked from face to face, and his mouth opened, but words didn’t come out. As tired as he had to have been of crying, the tears flowed again. He buried his face in the dog’s neck, muffling his cries. Heather’s vision of him blurred as her own tears flowed, but she pulled him close, her heart filling as Connor said, “Welcome home, little bro.”
43
David climbed the narrow steps and opened the door to the second-floor situation room located over an old hardware store on Main Street near the sheriff’s department. In the three days since the FBI’s Evidence Response Team had been at the McGregor farm, the flood of evidence had quickly overwhelmed his small conference room at the station, and he’d needed to find extra capacity.
The landlord was thrilled at the good fortune to lease the space after it had sat vacant for so many years, a victim of the Walmart by the interstate sucking retail away from the small town. He even offered a vacant ground-floor storefront next door for press briefings, once they moved the dust-covered display shelves of a five-and-dime closed years earlier.
The large room was dingy but adequate for their needs. Portable whiteboards had been hauled in and set up around the perimeter. Crime-scene photos were taped to their surfaces with scribbled notes identifying them. Arrows were drawn to connect one scene to another. A scattering of folding tables served as desks for sheriff’s department detectives and FBI agents, who sat side by side as they typed on open laptops or chatted on cell phones.
Over the years, David had worked in a few such war rooms, though they were usually filled with the urgency of a manhunt or preparation efforts for a raid. He could feel the room humming with a sense of purpose, but he missed the raw energy of pursuit. No mystery existed in the identity of the perpetrator. He was already dead. DNA results had confirmed it. There would be no dramatic takedown or the associated adrenaline rush, no satisfying conclusion of putting the bad guy in jail or watching him die in a hail of bullets.
The people in the room, though, didn’t seem to share his feeling of missed opportunity. Agent Gonzalez headed up the FBI’s efforts to identify the bodies found in the graves. Their labs would turn results around much quicker than the state labs. Once a victim was identified, the sheriff’s department coordinated with the appropriate local law enforcement to notify relatives and to review the original investigations into the disappearances.
David and Roxanne worked together as circus ringmasters, keeping the investigation coordinated and information shared.
He settled into a metal folding chair at the end of a table covered in folders of notes then signaled for Agent Gonzalez to start.
“The Evidence Response Team has completed its search for additional graves and are satisfied that all bodies have been recovered. They were located in a tight grouping in a clearing and laid out in an orderly fashion, the oldest situated at the farthest point from the house and in a line to newest nearest to the house. Our final count is eighteen.”
Gonzalez paused for a moment and let silence fill the room before continuing. “Fourteen of those were young male children between the approximate ages of five and eight. Of the remaining four, the two who appear to be in the oldest graves are an older male and a female in her late teens or early twenties. Two more graves are also clustered, estimated to have been dug about three years ago—a male in his early twenties and a male in his early teens.”
David prodded with questions to keep the meeting flowing. “Let’s start with the children. How many are identified at this point?”
“Six of the fourteen have been identified.” Gonzalez stood
and pointed at a map of the Southeastern United States, littered with pushpin markers. “Their abduction points and the victims have striking similarities, showing a pattern. All disappeared from midsized blue-collar towns within a few-hundred-mile radius of Wattsville—Tennessee, Georgia, Carolinas, Kentucky, and Virginia. The victims were all white and from working-class families, mostly single-parent, and were five to seven years old at the time of disappearance. Their abductions all occurred during the summer months when school was out and from places commonly frequented by children—parks, playgrounds, fields.”
“The local police departments suspect abductions?”
“They all suspected it as a possibility, but none of them had any strong indications. The children all became isolated from their friends for one reason or another, and hours usually passed before anyone became suspicious. By that time, no one could recall any specific suspicious behavior that caught their attention, though all were also in locations where people didn’t know everyone, so seeing a stranger didn’t ring alarm bells.”
Roxanne turned to David. “I’ve fed the information to our behavioral analysts for their insight. The thought is McGregor preferred these midsize towns because he would have stood out in a more sophisticated urban environment or in a wealthy neighborhood, and everyone knew each other in tiny towns, so they would remember a stranger. He probably looked just like another unemployed worker or dad working a late shift and killing time in a park as he patiently waited to spot a child alone. Then he could use a ruse like the lost dog to isolate the kid without drawing attention.”
David scanned the map. “And no one ever spotted a pattern?”
“Sadly, no. Counting Jaxon, we now have seven identified victims kidnapped from six different states, all at least a year apart. They all appeared to be isolated.”
“So many kids, though…”
Roxanne grimaced. “And you know the statistics as well as I do. NCIC logs over four hundred thousand missing-children reports every year in the US. Most are recovered alive within hours. Those who aren’t are usually associated with family abductions. Since these victims’ families were headed by single parents, the estranged partner was often a suspect. Other relatives came into focus as well.”
Agent Gonzalez hesitated and looked up from his notes. “And sometimes we see patterns where they don’t exist. We have police departments contacting us with old cases, but we rule them out. They aren’t any of our victims.”
David picked up a paper clip and started twisting it out of frustration. “So how are we doing on the eight still-unidentified children?”
“We’re using the geographic and age pattern to scan for other possible matches. Already have a few DNA submissions coming from local police who didn’t suspect an abduction but assumed a child had wandered into the woods or drowned in a lake or river. Thus, they never submitted DNA to our database. And others will turn out to have been in the DNA database all along, but it takes time to churn through all the possibilities. The technicians are working it as fast as they can.”
“I get it. Good work so far.” David folded his hands together. “How about the adults?”
“As we suspected, the older male in the first grave is Rick McGregor, Matt’s father. The autopsy confirmed he died a violent death, a beating with a blunt object—perhaps an ax handle, baseball bat, or even a tree branch. The left ulna is shattered”—Gonzalez held his arm up in front of his face and rubbed the forearm—“which the ME suspects is probably a defensive wound to his lower arms from trying to ward off the blows.”
“Estimated date of death?”
“Still working on narrowing that down, but estimating fifteen to twenty years.”
David consulted his notes. “We can narrow that down some. We know from Buck he was seen in Wattsville a little over seventeen years ago. Sometime after that, I stopped him personally, driving that van in a routine traffic stop.”
Roxanne added, “The question for the analysts is whether Rick’s death was the trigger, but we don’t think so. We believe he did act as an inhibitor because of his disapproval, but we think something else happened. There appears to be too long a lag, probably several years, from Rick’s death to the first kidnap.”
“Why do you suspect a gap?”
Gonzalez picked his report back up. “Because victim number two, the female, appears to have died two or more years after Rick but before the first child victim.”
David drummed his fingers. “But we still don’t know who she is?”
“No.”
“A relative?”
“No, DNA rules that out. She’s not a genetic match to any of the McGregors and has not matched to any missing person we know of.”
David leaned back in his chair and stared at the board. “Okay, so he kills his father in a fit of rage. And then a couple of years later, he kills an adult female. And then a couple of years after that, he kills his first boy. So was she an experiment? Maybe an easy target like a prostitute for him to try out what he wants to do?”
Roxanne smiled. “Very good, Sheriff. The BAU might have an opening for you.”
David shook his head grimly. “No, thanks. I want to go back to normal crime.” He turned back to Gonzalez. “Looks like we identified the one adult killed three years ago.”
“DNA records submitted by the family of Chance Victor Street were a confirmed match to our young male. He disappeared three years ago at the age of twenty-three. An avid outdoorsman from Northern Georgia, he enjoyed solo hiking during the day and often separated from others during his through-hike on the Appalachian Trail. In fact, in the previous two years, he never came close to finishing the trek because he wandered off so many side trails to see other sights. He liked to go at his own pace and not be constrained with exact plans, so no one was surprised when he didn’t show up at his planned shelters. Concern grew several days after he was last sighted, as fellow hikers compared notes and realized no one had seen him. By the time authorities were brought in, the possible search area was very broad, including towns off the trail where he might have met and hung out with new friends, a pattern in his history.”
“So we never even knew he was missing in Miller County.”
“Nope. The Great Smoky rangers had been included in the missing-person notices since the trail runs through the park, but no one had any real idea where the man even went missing.” Gonzalez flipped a page and read, “Final autopsy results are being completed, but the skull of the deceased reflects blunt-force trauma consistent with an ax as the likely cause of death. We found the entire contents of his backpack in his grave with him, so everything points to this being the hiker Jaxon witnessed being murdered.”
“Which means the teenage boy found in the next grave must be Kevin? Killed the same day, according to Jaxon,” David added.
Gonzalez shuffled folders. “Early teens, deceased approximately three years, with multiple fractures consistent with long-term abuse similar to our survivor. Multiple broken bones and a crushed skull consistent with our survivor’s story of a significant beating that was the probable cause of death. Still unidentified, though his DNA is uploaded and being scanned against the missing-children database.”
“But no hits?”
“Not yet. With the pattern of the other young victims, though, we have focused our search parameters. Unfortunately, the lab’s pushing hard with all the other IDs as well. He’s in the same queue as the rest of the young victims.”
David tapped his pen on the table. “Well, we know he was taken after Jaxon because he told us about Kevin’s arrival. And we know they are about the same age. So let’s start with the date Jaxon disappeared and go forward two or three years. That should narrow the search down a good bit. And I think it will help Jaxon so much if we can tell him we found Kevin’s parents. Can we make him a top priority?”
Roxanne nodded. “I agree. Besides, identifying him might help us solve one of the other great inconsistencies the profilers are confused about—Kevin a
nd Jaxon.”
“How so?”
“We have fourteen victims that make a clear pattern. All young males abducted, abused, and died before they reached puberty. The hiker we know stumbled onto the scene and was killed. The father enraged Matt for some reason, but it is a clear case of patricide. The woman remains a mystery. But those two boys are the other big mystery.”
David leaned back and exhaled. “What made Kevin and Jaxon special enough to be allowed to live into their teens?”
44
Tammy—not Dr. Sorenson because she just wants us to chat—asks me how I feel. It’s her favorite question.
Matthew was a lunatic.
How does that make you feel?
I watched little kids die.
How does that make you feel?
He beat Kevin to death right in front of me and then made me dig his grave.
How does that make you feel?
Honestly, Tammy, I feel scared and happy and mad and sad and all of that at the exact same time. And I’m really freaked about leaving the hospital and its warm beds, fluffy pillows, three meals a day, nurses checking on me, and security guards on the doors.
The doctors are freaked too. I heard one of them telling Heather I should stay longer so they can make sure the antibiotics are working, my stomach is handling food okay, and my wounds are healing. She reminded him she was a nurse and could do those things and still get me back to the hospital for follow-ups. He finally agreed to the discharge as long as she kept bringing me back to talk to Tammy.
Psychiatrist—a medical doctor who diagnoses and treats mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders.
Which means they think I’m crazy.
I figured Tammy would object to me leaving, too, but she didn’t. “I think going home will be good for you. Your own bed. Your own space. How does that make you feel?”
Argh.
“I don’t belong there.”