Scene of the Crime: Mystic Lake

by Carla Cassidy

  “No matter how I twist and turn things, I can’t make anything fit,” she finally said.

  “We all feel the same way,” Roger replied. “We’ve never had crimes like this in Mystic Lake, but we’re all doing the best we can to solve them.” There was a touch of defensiveness in his voice.

  “You all are a great team, and Cole is a terrific, smart sheriff. I’m certainly not dogging the team. I just can’t believe that none of us can get a break that might lead us toward solving these murders.”

  “It’s not from lack of trying. I’ve never worked the kind of hours I have in the last month.”

  She nodded. “I’ve only been here a short time, and I already feel about half burnt out.”

  “Sheriff thinks something is going to happen any day now. He thinks the killer won’t be able to control himself much longer. He’s deputized a couple of extra men to do night patrols around town.”

  Cole hadn’t told her about it, but it didn’t surprise her. She knew his biggest worry at the moment was that somehow the killer would get to her, or take another of the young women in the town he considered his own.

  It was almost five when Cole came into the room, and instantly Amberly’s heart lifted at the sight of him. When had it happened? When had the mere sight of him caused butterflies in her stomach to dance happily? When had the sound of his voice made her feel so safe despite any danger that might lurk nearby?

  “Hi,” he said to both her and Roger, although the warmth of his eyes lingered on her. “How are we doing?”

  “My list is pathetic,” Amberly confessed as she shoved the legal pad toward Cole.

  He picked it up and looked at it. “You really don’t make many enemies, do you?”

  “Granny Nightsong always told me that my moccasins should never leave footprints of anger behind me,” she replied. “And I’ve tried to live my life with that in mind.”

  “It would be a hell of a lot easier on all of us if you had some real enemies,” Roger replied with a rueful grin.

  At that moment, Amberly’s cell phone rang. With a frown, she dug it out of her purse. She’d had few calls in the past week, and when she saw John’s number on the caller identification, her heart gave a little lurch of anxiety.

  “John?” she said.

  A low, deep moan filled the line and panic stabbed through her. “John, is that you?” She jumped up from the table, her heart pounding so fast she felt like she might throw up.

  There was another moan and then silence.

  “John! John!” she yelled, but there was no response, just the ongoing silence, which chilled her to the bone. “Something’s happened at John’s house,” she said to Cole as she hung up her phone. “We’ve got to get there right away. It sounded like he was hurt.”

  “Call it in to the Kansas City police,” he instructed Roger and quickly gave him John’s address. Then within seconds, he and Amberly were out the door and on the highway with sirens blaring and lights swirling.

  Amberly’s heart continued to rap a rhythm that was near heart-attack pace as she tried over and over again to call John back, but her calls kept going to his voice mail.

  “Why doesn’t he answer? What could be wrong?” She heard the hysteria in her voice but had no control over it. She couldn’t even mention the question that pounded in her head. Where was Max? He should be there with John. So, why hadn’t Max picked up his father’s phone?

  If something terrible had happened to John, then where in the name of God was Max? Everything faded away except the cell phone buttons she continued to punch and the fear that exploded in every molecule of her being.

  She turned to Cole and saw his lips moving, but she couldn’t hear him. She was trapped in a void of terror where no sound could get in, where nothing mattered except getting to John’s as quickly as possible.

  The drive from Mystic Lake to Kansas City seemed to take forever. With each mile, every minute that passed, Amberly’s emotions rose to greater heights, threatening the loss of complete control.

  As they pulled onto the street where John lived, her heart nearly stopped beating as she saw several police cars and an ambulance in the driveway.

  She was out of the car before Cole’s vehicle had come to a full stop. The dying grass rasped beneath her shoes as she raced across it toward the front door of the house. “John? Max?”

  A police officer stopped her at the door. Holding back a sob of apprehension, she fumbled to show him her credentials. “I’m his ex-wife. Where is my son?”

  She looked past the officer and saw John seated on the sofa. A couple of paramedics were working on the back of his head, and he looked dazed and half-conscious.

  She shoved past the officer and fell to her knees in front of her ex-husband. “John…what happened? Where’s Max?”

  He stared at her as if he’d never seen her before. “I just answered the door. He hit me in the head with something.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. He had on a ski mask.” John wobbled, and his eyes drifted shut.

  “John! Where’s Max?” she asked urgently.

  “We’ve got to get this man to the hospital,” one of the paramedics said, and at the same time, an officer pulled Amberly to her feet and away from John.

  She turned to him. “My son. Do you know where my son is?”

  She was vaguely aware of Cole stepping up next to her and quickly introducing himself.

  “Ma’am, there was no child here when we arrived. We found your ex-husband just inside the door on the floor unconscious.”

  “I have a six-year-old son. He was here with John.” Once again Amberly felt a rising hysteria. She tore down the hallway, searching in every room of the house, but there was no sign of her son.

  “We’ll put out an Amber Alert on the boy,” the officer was telling Cole as Amberly returned to where they stood. John was being loaded into the ambulance, and she felt that if she didn’t find Max in the next minute, she was going to die.

  It was at that moment her gaze fell to the floor next to the front door, and there, shining in a shaft of sunlight, was Max’s necklace.

  AS AMBERLY FELL TO HER knees in the doorway and plucked up a silver owl on a broken piece of rawhide, Cole saw her shatter apart.

  It began in the tremble that started in her hand and worked its way through her entire body. Her eyes went black, and for a moment, he feared she was going to pass out. He reached down and pulled her to her feet and into his arms, where the shaking of her body was violent.

  “He…he doesn’t have his necklace.” The words haltingly came from her, as if jerked out by a chain of agony. “It’s his protection…the owl around his neck.”

  “We’ll find him,” Cole said as he tightened his arms around her, almost frightened by the powerful tremors that swept through her. “I swear, we’ll do whatever we can to find him and get him back safe and sound.”

  Unfortunately, Cole was out of his jurisdiction and was left powerless as the Kansas City Police Department took over. Amberly took a picture from her wallet of Max and gave it to Sergeant Mick Davis, who had taken over the scene.

  Cole knew that, within minutes, the picture of the boy would be flashed on all the local television channels. But that didn’t mean an instant success at locating him.

  Sergeant Davis led them both into the kitchen, and they all sat at the table so they could be interrogated. Amberly told him what time Max normally got home from school; the problem was nobody could be certain when the attack had taken place. And nobody knew how long John had been unconscious after the attack.

  During the interview with the sergeant, Cole held Amberly’s hand tightly, hoping he was somehow helping keep the horror at bay.

  It didn’t take a stretch of the imagination to realize that somebody had hit John over the head and taken Max from the house. The broken necklace indicated that Max had not gone willingly. There was also no question in Cole’s mind that whatever had happened in this house was related to
the crimes he’d been dealing with in Mystic Lake.

  Cole could tell that Amberly had gone to a very dark place inside her head as he explained to Sergeant Davis what was going on in Mystic Creek. She sat perfectly still, but he knew it was the eerie stillness that came before the damaging storm.

  And then the storm exploded. She jumped out of her chair, wild-eyed and obviously half-crazed with fear. “We have to do something. We can’t just sit around and do nothing. We have to go and find him. He’s out there all alone…in the dark, and he’s scared. He needs me.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes and spilled onto her cheeks as she gazed first at Sergeant Davis and then at Cole. “Please,” she whispered. “Please do something.”

  Cole realized this was her nightmare come true, and as her gaze held his with such pleading, such intense pain, he wanted to move the world to find Max.

  “The best thing we can do right now is sit tight and let the local police work the case,” Cole said with a helplessness that gnawed in his gut. “Maybe whoever took him will call.”

  “Why is this happening? Why would anyone want to hurt Max? Hurt John?”

  These were questions that Amberly continued to ask over the next couple of hours, but nobody had any answers for her. John was conscious at the hospital but had been unable to give anyone any more information than he already had, other than the fact that Max had been standing just behind him and had been home from school for only about fifteen minutes when the attack had occurred.

  As the evening turned into the darkness of night, Cole could feel Amberly’s desperation. “Why don’t you go lie down for a little while,” he suggested when the ten o’clock hour arrived, and her face was so pale, her eyes so red from weeping that she looked as if she were terminally ill. “I’ll let you know if anything happens.”

  She hesitated. “You promise?”

  “I swear. Come on.” He held out his hand and pulled her from the kitchen chair where she’d been sitting, staring at John’s telephone as if willing it to ring, for the past hour.

  She got up with the weariness of a broken old woman. “I should be strong,” she said, her eyes once again tearing up. “I’m an FBI agent.”

  He pulled her against him and held her tight. “And you’re a mother, and it’s okay to be a little weak right now.” She stood in his embrace for several frantic heartbeats and then stepped back and nodded.

  He led her down the hallway toward John’s bedroom, but she stopped at the door of the first bedroom they came to. “I’ll just rest in here for a few minutes,” she said.

  The room was obviously the place where Max slept when he was at his father’s house. There was a twin bed covered in a navy spread and a desk with an intricate puzzle halfway put together on it.

  Cole watched as she curled up on the bed and pulled the pillow close to her chest. As she drew a deep breath, he knew she was inhaling the very essence of her son, and as she began to cry once again, he gently closed the door and left her there, knowing at the moment he was absolutely helpless to do anything to comfort her.

  Another hour passed with Cole talking to the officers on scene, listening for any reports coming in and praying that somebody someplace would find Max alive and well.

  He knew the woman he loved would be broken completely if she lost Max. He understood the kind of grief she would experience, and his heart ached with his need to shield her from it.

  A crime-scene unit pulled prints off the front door, but John had told them the perpetrator hadn’t even stepped into the house before smashing him over the head.

  One thing was certain. John Merriweather had officially dropped off the suspect list for the murders in Mystic Lake as far as Cole was concerned. The man certainly hadn’t hit himself over the head.

  Through the next hour, Cole watched the Kansas City police at work and realized how much he had missed working for a bigger force. Until the murders in Mystic Lake, he’d felt stale, as if he were slowing wasting away in the small town. He’d been ready to consider making a move before the first murdered woman had been found.

  But he wouldn’t leave his position as sheriff of Mystic Lake until the town was safe again, until the murders had been solved and the killer was behind bars. Only then would he think about his options for his future.

  At the moment his greatest concern was for the woman in the bedroom. He knew the agony that stabbed through Amberly’s heart as she waited to hear about the welfare of her son. He knew that agony intimately, had experienced it when Emily had initially gone missing.

  With Amberly in his mind, and nothing to do to move the investigation forward in John’s attack and Max’s vanishing, he quietly walked down the hallway to the room where Amberly had lain down.

  He knocked softly on the door, and when there was no reply, he cracked it open, assuming the stress of the situation must have caused her to fall asleep.

  Gone.

  She wasn’t in the bed, and the window was open, the screen displaced. Cole’s heart crashed against his ribs as he raced to the window and peered out into the darkness of the night.

  Had she been taken from this room as all the cops had gathered in the living room and kitchen? He looked closer at the screen. It appeared as if the screen had been removed from the inside.

  If that was the case, then Amberly hadn’t been taken by anyone, but rather had run away. But to where? To hunt for Max? There was no clue where to look, no trail to follow. His gut clenched as he realized the only thing she’d had with her when she’d come in here was her cell phone.

  Had she received a call from the kidnapper? Didn’t she realize that in all probability, the man who had taken Max was also the same man who had hung the items on her mailbox? The same man who had killed the three women in Mystic Lake?

  He had to find her, but he had no idea where to begin to look. And he knew he couldn’t look alone. He raced from the bedroom in search of Sergeant Davis to tell him that they didn’t have just a missing boy anymore, they also had a missing woman who had been marked for murder.

  Chapter Twelve

  Amberly had been in limbo, in a strange state between numbness and a screaming, silent terror when her cell phone had rung.

  She hadn’t recognized the caller number, but the moment she’d answered and heard Max’s voice, she’d bolted up on the bed, adrenaline firing through her.

  “Max! Max, are you okay? Where are you?” Frantic fear danced through her veins as she clutched the phone more tightly against her ear.

  “I’m okay, Mom, but he wants you to come here to get me.”

  “Where, baby? Where am I supposed to go?”

  Max’s voice was replaced by a low snarl. “If you want to keep your son alive you come alone to the storage units at 95th and Baylor Road. If I smell a cop or anyone else with you or anywhere else in the area, then you’ll never see Max again.”

  “Wait.... Who are you? What do you want?” But she knew she was talking to a dead line. She clicked the phone closed, her heart beating frantically and her head spinning.

  Her first thought was to run to Cole, to tell him about the call, but as the man’s warning played and replayed through her head, she was afraid to risk having him anywhere near 95th and Baylor Road.

  She had to save Max at whatever cost. She knew whoever held him didn’t want the boy, he wanted her. She was his intended victim, and she’d do whatever she had to do in order to keep her son alive. She had her cell phone and her gun. That’s all she needed.

  With the stealth of a thief, she had crawled out the window and now ran down the street. Ninety-fifth and Baylor was a good two miles from John’s house, even if she cut through yards and jumped fences.

  Thank God she was in great physical shape and her incentive for getting where she was going couldn’t have been better. The night was dark, with scarcely a moonbeam apparent. Still, she sought the shadows rather than racing beneath streetlights.

  She had no idea if or when Cole might find her gone, and the l
ast thing she wanted was for him to somehow follow her and accidentally screw things up in forcing a situation that would cost Max his little life.

  She would die for her son. Of course, that wasn’t her grand plan. She hoped to not only save Max but to save herself, as well. She wanted to live to see Max go to the high school prom, she wanted to be there when he chose his path in college. She needed to see the kind of man he would become, a man she knew would make her proud.

  She wasn’t even aware of the tears that streaked down her cheeks until she paused for a moment to catch her breath and realized the night was awash with an unnatural shine.

  Angrily she swiped at her eyes, knowing she needed to remove herself emotionally as much as possible and reach for the cool calculation of a seasoned FBI agent. Still, there was no question that it was difficult to separate the professional from the terrified mother.

  She began running once again, wondering who had Max and why he was after her. It didn’t matter now. Whoever it was would hopefully be a dead man by the time she was finished. She’d kill him for scaring Max. She’d shoot him for hurting John. She’d make sure he never had the opportunity to kill another woman.

  With this thought in mind, she picked up her pace, knowing the bomb she and Cole had discussed had exploded, and only she could control the damage.

  She knew the storage facility at the location. There were between fifteen and twenty metal sheds, which were rented monthly. The place was named U-Store It, and there was no security on the premises. It was simply surrounded by a chain-link fence.

  When she reached the business, she saw that the padlock on the gate had been cut off, and it gaped open in a dreadful invitation.

  She held her gun tight in her hand as she slid through the small opening in the fence. There were security lights scattered about the area, and her gaze darted in all directions, seeking the man who had called her here, the man who held her child hostage.

  Cocking her head, she listened, trying to discern from what direction danger would come, but she heard nothing but the sound of her own pounding heart.