The Sam Prichard Series - Books 9-12 (Sam Prichard Boxed Set 3)

by David Archer

  Think, he told himself. Beauregard says I already know what I need to know, so what do I know about sunrise? What could possibly happen at 6:08 AM that would mean Tracy wouldn’t survive?

  There were very few things Sam could imagine that would work on such a timetable and could cause someone to die, but he tried listing them off. Could it be that she was chained to a bomb that would go off then? That sounded like something out of an old movie, not like something Jerry Lemmons might actually have done. That would make as much sense as tying her to a railroad track and waiting for a train to come along, and Sam just couldn’t imagine something like that happening in real life.

  Timetables, timetables…What else operated on a timetable that was set ahead of time? He thought about everything he could possibly identify as being set on a timetable as he drove around the city, but nothing he imagined seemed to be applicable to the situation.

  Okay, he thought, let’s forget about the timetables themselves, what about the way they’re set up? Trains and buses run on timetables, but those are set by operators who calculate the time it takes to get from one point to another. TV and radio programs run on timetables, but they’re set by program managers. What else, what else?

  A light ahead of him turned red and Sam came to a stop. He continued thinking while he waited for it to turn green, and the thought crossed his mind that traffic lights fit the bill. Their scheduling was flexible and changed throughout the day, depending on traffic patterns and such, but those were handled by computers. Was there something controlled by a computer that could possibly relate to this situation?

  The more he thought about it, the more frustrated he got. What on earth could possibly happen precisely at sunrise that could result in Tracy’s death?

  Sam glanced at the clock again and saw that it was almost two in the morning. Slightly over four hours to go, and he was no closer to figuring it out than he had been two mornings before, when Heather had come to him. Sam could barely recall the feelings he had once had for Tracy, but that didn’t change the fact that she deserved to live, that her daughter deserved to have her back. Sam’s stomach was tying itself in knots as he tried desperately to figure out his next move.

  20

  The ringing of his phone startled him. Sam snatched it out of his pocket expecting to see Indie’s number on the display, but it wasn’t. The number looked familiar, though, so Sam answered.

  “Hello?”

  A soft voice spoke. “Mr. Prichard, I’m sorry to bother you so late…”

  Sam recognized Heather’s voice. “It’s no bother, Heather,” he said. “Just want you to know, I’m still out looking for your mom.”

  “I just—I couldn’t sleep, so I was listening to the radio in my room and I heard the news. They’re talking about my mom, about how that detective hid her somewhere and nobody knows where.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. Don’t give up on me yet, though. I won’t stop 'til I bring her home to you.”

  “I never did like that guy,” Heather said. “He was always going on and on about how he was going to get rich someday, but I think he didn’t like it when I was around.”

  Sam’s eyebrows lowered, as he tried to figure out what she was saying. “What guy is that, Heather?”

  “That Mr. Lemmons, that detective. He dated my mom for a little while, but that was before she met Gary. I think he always just wanted Mom to himself, because he was always trying to take her places where kids couldn’t go. It just makes me sick to know that he’s the one who did this to her.”

  Sam started to nod and express his sympathy, but then another thought occurred to him. “Heather,” he said, “did he ever talk about anything in Lakewood?”

  “Lakewood? Not that I can remember. Why?”

  “I just wondered,” Sam said. “Earlier today, one of the people involved with him said something about how he might have hidden your mom in Lakewood, but I don’t know where.”

  “No, I don’t remember anything about Lakewood. He never really talked about places, just about how he was making a lot of money with his side business.”

  A tingle started at the back of Sam’s neck, and he felt those little hairs began to rise. “What kind of side business was he in, Heather? Do you know?”

  The girl laughed softly, but there was a sadness in it. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “That was pretty much all he talked about whenever I was around. I guess he used to blow stuff up when he was in the Navy or something, and he says he’s really good at it. He started a business where he works for different companies that want to tear down buildings. He could set it up so they kinda fell down, just by the way he put his bombs inside. He even took us to watch a couple times while he blew up a building. I guess it was kind of interesting, if you like that kind of stuff.”

  “There’s an old empty apartment building at Wadsworth and Florida…” “Traffic will be rescheduled during the demolition of this building…” “Making Way For Progress.”

  South Wadsworth Boulevard met West Florida Avenue in Lakewood!

  “Heather,” Sam said, “I think you may have just given me an idea. I don’t want to get your hopes up too high just yet, but I think I might know where your mom is. I’ll call you back in just a little bit and let you know if I was right, okay?”

  The girl’s voice suddenly had hope in it. “Really? Okay, I’ll be right here.”

  Sam checked the signs at the next intersection and realized he was almost into Littleton, so he whipped the wheel to the right and fishtailed around the corner. The big 460 roared as he shoved his foot to the floor, but three miles later he had to brake again so that he could make the next turn. That put him on Wadsworth, going north. He kept his foot down on the accelerator, flashing his lights constantly to make the traffic signals think he was an ambulance. Each light turned green as he approached, and Sam flew around the few vehicles that were on the street.

  There! The next intersection was Florida Avenue, and there was the abandoned apartment building. Sam heard the brakes squeal as he slid the truck into the parking lot. As soon as he was stopped, he slammed it into park and was out and running toward the boarded-up front doors.

  The streetlights on the corner were bright enough to illuminate the warning signs that were screwed to the building. They warned that the building was scheduled for implosion at 6:15 in the morning, and repeated the information that traffic would be diverted away from the intersection for a few hours.

  The plywood over the doors was secured with heavy screws, and Sam couldn’t get a grip on them. He ran limping back to the truck and started digging through it, shouting with excitement when he came up with a tire iron. Taking it back to the door, he managed to jam the pointed end in behind one edge of the plywood, and then began the painstaking task of prying it a little at a time away from the structure.

  It was slow going, but after fifteen minutes he managed to get one side lose. He dropped the tire iron and grabbed it with both hands, wrenching backward and finally snapping it free. The original doors had been removed, and he was looking into a dark hallway.

  Sam reached into his pocket and produced the small LED flashlight he always carried. He flicked it on and shined it into the dark, gaping maw ahead of him, then slowly began following the hallway.

  “Tracy?” Sam shouted. “Tracy, it’s Sam Prichard! If you can hear me, make some noise, I’m trying to find you.”

  There was no response. Sam moved through the first floor, shining the light into each apartment he came to, and hurriedly searching through several of them. The building had been stripped of fixtures like doors, windows, lights and plumbing, leaving mostly just bare walls. That made it easy to look into every room, but the building was four stories high and almost a block long. At a rough guess, Sam figured there could be as many as eighty apartments inside.

  Sam followed every hall, made every turn and checked every apartment he came to. When he had finished the first floor, he climbed up the stairs to the second and repeated his sea
rch pattern, calling out for Tracy the whole time. After nearly 40 minutes, he had finished searching the first two floors and moved to the third.

  As he moved from apartment to apartment, Sam had to fight down the doubts that began to assail him. Realistically, he knew, there was no way to be sure that this was one of the buildings Jerry would demolish, but it fit completely with everything Beauregard had said. Jerry had suggested it as a meeting place, which implied he had some connection to it, so Sam already possessed knowledge of this building, and it would certainly be a dangerous place to be around sunrise. If Tracy was not out by then, she would almost certainly die and her body might not even be found in the rubble.

  He found nothing on the third floor, and forced himself to climb up to the fourth. He’d been in the building for more than an hour, calling out to Tracy the whole time with no response. By the time he finished clearing the fourth floor, he was beginning to feel like there was no hope of finding her in time.

  When he returned to the stairway, Sam leaned on it for a few moments and tried to fight off the despair that wanted to settle in. It was probably close to four by then, which meant he had barely more than two hours to go. He made his way slowly down the stairs and toward the door he had ripped open.

  He walked outside and circled the building, looking for anything big enough to hold a person. Considering everything Lemmons had done, Sam wouldn’t put it past him to have locked Tracy into a barrel beside the building, but there was nothing. He made a complete circuit but didn’t find anything that might conceal anything bigger than a small child.

  He started back toward the pickup, trying to think of where else he might look, when a piece of plywood that seemed out of place caught his eye. Both the front and rear doors of the building were raised a few feet above the ground, and there were steps and a small porch at each one. This piece of plywood looked like it might be covering a door, but it was flush with the concrete walkway that circled the building. Sam stared at it for a moment, then walked as quickly as he could back to the front door. He retrieved the tire iron he had dropped there and hurried back again.

  This particular sheet of plywood was secured even better than the other one, and it took Sam another half-hour to rip it free. Sure enough, there was a low open doorway behind it, but this one opened on stairs leading down.

  It was a maintenance cellar, a partial basement that allowed plumbers and electricians to access the pipes and wiring and such that made it possible for so many people to live in a single building. Sam shined his light down the stairs and moved down them as quickly as he could.

  When he reached the bottom, he saw that most of the plumbing and wiring had already been removed. There were stanchions all around, supports to help hold up the floors above, but little else, and each stanchion had a small barrel strapped to its base, and each barrel had a timer sitting on top of it.

  Those barrels, Sam knew, would be the explosives that would bring the building down when they were detonated. Each of the timers was counting down, and they all indicated there was less than ninety minutes to go.

  Sam thought about trying to disarm or disengage the timers, but that wasn’t something he actually knew how to do. He forced himself to ignore the explosives and began searching the room. It was just big enough that the light couldn’t quite reach from one side to the other, so he walked through it, shining it everywhere he could.

  “Tracy?” he shouted again. “Tracy, it’s Sam, yell out if you’re here!”

  She had to be there somewhere, he kept telling himself. This was the only possible place that fit everything. It was in Lakewood, as Driscoll had said, it was scheduled for demolition at dawn as Beauregard had hinted, and it was the only thing connected to the entire case that might fit Beauregard’s insistence that Sam already knew something about the place where Tracy could be found. She simply had to be there.

  The maintenance cellar was under one whole half of the building, but there was a solid concrete wall at the point where he thought the center of the building should be. He put his ear against it and listened, but heard nothing.

  Sam turned and shined the light around, and it appeared to him that all of the pipes and conduit of the building might have come into this one section. If that were the case, then Tracy was nowhere to be found in the structure.

  On the other hand, it was possible there was a separate basement for the other side of the building. He didn’t remember seeing another access door, but with just over an hour to go before sunrise, he felt he had to be certain. He made his way back to the stairs and out into the parking lot, then began walking around the building once more. He kept the light shining on the wall as he walked, and this time he carried the tire iron with him.

  There it was! On the back of the building, there was another sheet of plywood screwed to the wall, just over the walkway. Sam attacked it like a madman, but this one was just as solid as the other. He tried to pry it off for a couple of minutes, then grabbed his phone to call for help.

  Still no signal! he thought in frustration, but then the reason for it became obvious. The explosives that were all in place were probably controlled by a computer that would send a signal at the pre-set time, so there was something set up around the building that would cancel out any other kind of signal. He’d read an article about that once, how cell phones could be blocked in situations like that.

  Sam looked down the street and thought about trying to go far enough to get out of the damping field, but with his hip screaming and the truck away on the far side of the building, he couldn’t risk the time. If Tracy was in there, she didn’t have a lot of time to spare, so he decided to keep at it alone and hope the demolition crew would show up early enough to help, or stop the explosions. He worked at the door for almost half an hour before he finally got one side loose enough to hook his fingers into it.

  This sheet was also thicker than the other one. Sam couldn’t tear it completely free, so finally, he pried it out as far as he could and slipped between it and the doorjamb.

  The light illuminated the stairs, and he held onto the handrails as he made his way down. He started yelling for Tracy before he ever got to the bottom, and stopped to listen for any response.

  Nothing. Still, he wasn’t going to leave without checking, so he began walking around the big empty space. Like the other one, the stanchions had barrels of explosives strapped to their bases, and he could see the timers counting down until the explosion—less than forty minutes to go. All of the pipes and wiring had already been removed, but there were pieces of conduit hanging from the ceiling, and he had to dodge around them. There was also ductwork, probably from the old air conditioning and heating system. It struck him as odd that those things had been removed from the other side and left in this one, but he supposed it was possible the workers had simply run out of time. He kept calling Tracy’s name as he made his way through the cellar, but she didn’t respond.

  His heart sinking, he finally turned around to start back for the stairs. This site had been such an obstacle course that it had taken quite a while to go through it, and he figured he had less than half an hour to go before the police and demolition crew would arrive to block the streets and supervise the blast. He swung the light around as he walked, silently praying for an answer.

  21

  There was a metal box over against one wall, and Sam had initially dismissed it as part of the ductwork, but when the light shone on it again he thought it seemed out of place. He turned away from the stairs to inspect it more closely, and he noticed a foul odor as he got closer.

  It was hollow, and not very heavy. Sam shoved it sideways and it slid away with little resistance, and suddenly the odor was worse. He gagged once and covered his face with his arm, and that’s when he saw that there was a square hole in the concrete wall. He squatted down and pointed the light inside, and a pair of frightened eyes looked back at him.

  Tracy was sitting at the back of a cavity that had been dug into the dirt, her ar
ms and legs secured with zip ties to the wooden framework that kept it from collapsing. A cloth was wrapped around her face, and Sam was sure that she was gagged as well.

  He turned the light to the side, and then he gagged again. Only a few feet away from Tracy, Sam could see what he was certain were the decomposing bodies of the teenagers he’d seen murdered in the video. He turned the light away from them and focused it back on Tracy’s face, and that’s when he saw the tears running down her cheeks.

  “Been looking for you,” Sam said. He stuffed the flashlight into his mouth, reached into his pocket for the Swiss Army knife he always carried and began crawling into the putrid space. Cutting the zip ties loose took only a few seconds, but when Tracy reached for the gag, he told her she should wait. She glanced in the direction of the bodies and then looked back at him and nodded.

  Her arms and legs were weak, and Sam ended up half dragging her out of the cavity. Once they got into the maintenance cellar, he reached up and took the gag away, and she started working her jaw. Sam glanced at the nearest timer and saw that it was down to only twenty-two minutes until detonation.

  “Think you can stand?” Sam asked, and she nodded her head. Sam got to his feet and extended a hand, but he had to help support her once she was up. He led her to the stairs and helped her get up them, then walked her around the building to the pickup truck, dropped its tailgate and helped her to sit down. .

  “Hey!” Sam looked toward the sound of the voice and saw a man wearing a hard hat standing outside the fence. “What are you doing in there? That building is about to blow up, get out of there!” There was a squad car sitting in the intersection, and Sam figured there were others not far away.