Count to Three

by T. R. Ragan

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Carlin carried an armful of blankets down to the basement. It was time to get everything in order so he could finally introduce his mother to Ali, let Mother decide if she was worth salvaging. He’d known all along it would take some time to earn Ali’s trust, but her inability to cooperate worried him. How could he go about his business if she wasn’t even willing to try?

  Not once had he questioned his love for Ali and all the possibilities that lay ahead of them. Not until he watched her attempts to leave the house, again and again, despite the obvious pain it must have caused her. The note she’d slipped in with a utility bill, though, was the worst kind of betrayal.

  It made no sense.

  He was offering her the world—a beautiful house and his complete and utter devotion. Wasn’t that what all women wanted? To be loved and cherished and treated like the delicate flower that they were?

  He flicked on the light and set the blankets on a cot where his mother used to sleep until she badgered Carlin enough to make him bring down a table and a couple of chairs so she could sit up.

  Mother was sitting at a small rustic wood table, right where she always was, her body tilting to the left. Her hair could use some attention, and it was probably time to change the flowery muumuu that hung loose, like the skin on her face. But overall she looked pretty good, considering she’d been sitting down here in the basement for quite some time.

  After he’d drowned her, he’d placed her lovingly on her bed upstairs. It had been fascinating, watching the stiffening of her muscles, but after three days the pungent odors became too much. That’s when he’d invested in the dental equipment, including the chair. He hadn’t added the straps until later, of course, but Mother had always wanted him to be a doctor or dentist, so he figured he could practice dentistry on his mother without all the schooling. But first he’d had to learn how to embalm a body to get rid of all the horrid bodily fluids that were making it hard to breathe around her.

  It was amazing what a person could learn on the internet. He’d used a scalpel to make incisions in her carotid artery and internal jugular vein, but without the machine embalmers used, he’d had to make all sorts of incisions and then massage her obese body for days on end just to drain most of the blood without making a huge mess. Once that was done, embalmers would usually distribute the embalming fluid and then suction fluid from the organs using some other fancy machine he didn’t have. Instead, he’d sliced Mother open and burned most of her organs out back. He could have bought formaldehyde-based chemicals, but it would have been too much work. Instead he did what taxidermists did and scraped the fat from the underside of her skin, rubbed her with borax to help the skin dry, then stuffed her with cotton and sewed her back up. After that he carefully washed her body and then her hair, combing it back nicely. He even applied some lipstick.

  The whole process had taken him weeks. By the time he started working on her teeth, some of them had fallen out.

  “You’re looking good, Mother. Sorry about the racket upstairs. You’ve probably been wondering what I’ve been up to.”

  He dropped down into the seat across from her and folded his hands on the table. “No. I’m not going to give you a bath. Those days are over. Thank God. That was wrong of you to touch me improperly. In fact, you’re lucky I’ve kept you here with me all these years.”

  He listened to her rattle on about it being her house and her money. It was true. Even though he had his own business, her social security checks were still deposited into their combined checking account every month, which covered most of the bills and then some.

  His fist came down hard on the table in front of him, startling her. Finally, she was quiet. “I’m going upstairs to get Ali. But you have to promise to behave.”

  She nodded, even tried to be cute with a pinky swear for good measure, but he just rolled his eyes and headed back upstairs.

  Ali hung in his arms like a rag doll as he headed back to the basement. She’d lost some weight, which was a good thing because otherwise he might have tweaked his back. He wondered if he’d given her too many drugs. She looked comatose. He put her down on the cot, felt for a pulse.

  Mother started nagging immediately, afraid he’d killed the girl.

  He made sure Mother didn’t see him roll his eyes before he looked her way. “When she wakes up,” Carlin told Mother, “the two of you will have a chance to get acquainted. You’re probably going to fall in love with her. She’s stubborn and feisty like you. But I’m conflicted,” he said as he walked toward Mother. “She’s done some things I’m not happy about, which is why I need your help deciding whether or not she’s truly the girl for me. She’s beautiful, but—”

  A loud thud interrupted his speech. He straightened. Listened.

  The noise had come from the garage. He’d almost forgotten about the boy. Between the extreme heat and the lack of oxygen, he figured Ethan Grant might be dead by now and hadn’t been in any hurry to find out. Obviously that wasn’t the case. It was a good thing he kept the garage, like everything else, locked up tight. The only way Ethan Grant would be able to open the trunk or the garage door would be to pull on the emergency release cord. But Carlin had removed the cord. He wasn’t stupid. He’d also removed the device inside the trunk of the car.

  Maybe an animal had gotten into the garage when he’d pulled in; it had happened before. He told Mother he’d be right back, then headed up the stairs, locking the door behind him in case Mother or Ali got any grand ideas of escaping.

  He marched through the kitchen to the side door that led to the garage. Again, he slipped his keys from his pocket. When he stepped inside, he listened carefully for any sound. No need to turn on a light since plenty of sunlight spilled in through the barred window. He got down on all fours and looked under the frame of the car. No critters and no kid. He pushed himself to his feet and went to stand in front of the trunk. Again, he listened, heard nothing. Not a peep. Hoping to scare the kid if he was trying to pull a fast one, he hammered a fist against the trunk. “Are you in there, kid?”

  No answer.

  He was about to pull out the fob and push the button to open the trunk when warning lights flickered in his brain. What if the kid was smarter than he looked? If he was alive, he could be waiting for Carlin to open the trunk just as he was about to do. Carlin’s imagination ran wild. What if Ethan Grant had a grasp of his tire iron and was just waiting to bash Carlin’s head in? There wasn’t much space in the trunk, but the kid was small.

  Two could play this game.

  He made his way to the corner of the room where he kept his tools, looked around, and then grabbed the sledgehammer leaning against the wall. He then walked back to the trunk and stood far enough away that the kid would have to reveal himself before he could take a swing at him.

  Carlin hit the button on the fob, pocketed the keys, then held the sledgehammer like Babe Ruth held a bat in his prime as he watched the trunk slowly open. He felt as if he were watching some sort of horror movie, waiting in anticipation for Pennywise to pop out and show himself.

  He felt unreasonably let down when nothing happened.

  Inching his way forward to see inside, still holding the sledgehammer, Carlin stepped close enough to see that the trunk was empty.

  What the hell?

  He hardly had a chance to let the empty trunk register before the kid leaped from atop a high cabinet, pouncing on him like a jungle cat taking down its prey, his scrawny legs circling his waist, squeezing tight while his hands grabbed hold of Carlin’s face, his fingers poking into his eyes as he sank his teeth into Carlin’s neck.

  Somehow Carlin managed to stay on his feet, gritting his teeth as he pulled at the kid’s arms, swiveling around and slamming his backside into a cabinet to get the kid to drop.

  When that didn’t work he staggered to the area where he kept his tools and reached for a hammer. The kid dropped to the ground and ran for the door. He was fast and Carlin had to leap across
the space in order to grab the kid’s ankle, hitting his chin on the cement floor in the process. White-hot pain shot through his jaw, but he held on tight to the boy’s ankle, spittle building at the corners of his mouth as he pulled the kid toward him, inches at a time, until he had hold of the kid’s waist.

  The boy thrashed like a slippery fish, twisted around, and hawked a loogie that hit him square in the eye.

  “I’m going to kill you, kid,” Carlin said through gritted teeth. “That’s a given. But if you don’t stop fighting me, I’m going to kill your mother too.”

  It took a few seconds, but his threat worked. The kid stopped fighting him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Dani stayed in the car and scrolled through her phone messages while Quinn knocked on the door to Ethan’s home. She heard Quinn bang hard and call Ethan’s name more than once before finally returning to the car and jumping into the passenger seat.

  “Nobody’s home. Should we call Detective Whitton?”

  “It’s been only a couple of hours since you saw Ethan last. James won’t be able to do anything. Let’s stick to the plan. We’ll head back to the office and figure out where we go from here.”

  Quinn was quiet on the ride back to the agency.

  Dani made sure to enter first, still acutely aware of what had happened. “Thanks for cleaning up the place.”

  “No problem.” Quinn walked over to her desk and opened her computer. “I didn’t have time to see how much damage, if any, was done to the basement. I’m going to take a quick look while my computer boots up.”

  Dani followed her downstairs. Whoever had hit her over the head had definitely been looking for something. The contents of every bin had been dumped onto the floor. She picked up a bin and started piling her things back inside.

  “Do you think someone was looking for valuables?” Quinn asked as she collected scattered photos from the ground. “Or could it be linked to one of the cases?”

  “I wish I knew.” When Dani straightened, she found herself looking at a wall of faces. Quinn had added to the wall since Dani was down here last. Three missing persons had been circled in red marker.

  Dani set down the box and stepped close enough to read the article below one of the pictures. Her name was Gretchen Myles. Her family had just moved to Sacramento when Gretchen snagged a job cutting hair at Best Cuts Salon in East Sacramento, not far from where Ali was taken. Three weeks later, at the age of seventeen, Gretchen Myles went missing.

  Quinn walked up behind her. “I’ve been looking for missing girls who disappeared in the past three years, females who were around the same age as Ali. Gretchen’s the only one who fits the criteria.”

  Dani nodded, her mind swirling with speculation. “Tell me what you know.”

  Quinn pointed to a girl named Alice Walker, fifteen, and Tanya Lee, sixteen. “These were both runaways. Both found. I’ve been meaning to remove them from the wall.”

  “What about Gretchen Myles?” Dani asked.

  “I called the investigator working Ali’s case to talk to him about Gretchen, but he shut me down. He told me that if old man Whitton wanted to waste his time with me that was one thing, but the more time I sucked out of his day, the less he got done. ‘For every person they find,’ he told me, ‘another goes missing, and without a body or any tangible evidence, that missing person gets lost in the quagmire.’”

  Dani had heard it all before. The enormous backlog of homicides and missing persons, along with dwindling resources, made it difficult to get the job done, which was where Dani and Quinn came into the picture. Dani tugged the article from the wall and headed upstairs.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Our computers should be ready to go. I’m going to see what I can find out about Gretchen.”

  “What about Ethan?”

  Dani waved the picture above her head and kept walking. “Gretchen Myles went missing eighteen months ago, disappeared less than a mile from the spot Ethan swears he saw Ali picked up. She was seventeen, the same age as Ali. We need a connection to this guy, and Gretchen Myles could be it.”

  Quinn dropped the pictures she was holding into a bin and followed her up the stairs.

  Once they were both seated at their desks, Quinn said, “I should have followed up on Gretchen Myles, but once Ethan Grant entered the picture, I thought the rest would be a cinch.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up. I’d like you to look up every locksmith in a ten-mile radius from where Ali was taken, while I do a search on Gretchen Myles.”

  Dani clicked away at the keyboard while inwardly, she prayed for a break. They needed one fast. The girl could be fighting for her life, and now Ethan could also be at risk.

  It was time to focus. For the next thirty minutes they worked in silence, the only noise the clacking of their keyboards.

  The thought of Ethan possibly being scooped up by a madman added urgency to the case. The clock was ticking.

  Dani glanced at the time. Four o’clock. Best Cuts Salon closed at seven. She usually got the best results when she talked to shop owners in person rather than on the phone. Talking to family was another matter, though. If she just showed up at a residence and knocked on the door, people were less likely to talk. She tapped in Gretchen’s home number and waited. A young man answered on the second ring. Dani explained why she was calling and asked if anyone who knew Gretchen would be willing to answer some questions. He said he was Gretchen’s brother and to go ahead and ask away.

  He was friendly and easy to talk to. He missed his sister and wanted to know what happened to her.

  “I realize your family had just moved to Sacramento when your sister went missing, but do you know if Gretchen had made any friends in that short time? Male or female?”

  “Not really, but she seemed to like everyone at the salon where she was working.” He cleared his throat. “Before you ask about her being a runaway, the answer is no. She was the one who was most excited to move from our small town of Alexander City, Alabama. I, personally, wasn’t happy about the move. But go on.”

  Dani took notes as he talked. “Did Gretchen ever talk to anyone in the family about someone bothering her . . . asking her out, anything like that?”

  “I know she was upset about two accidents that occurred at the hair salon where she worked. One lady wanted to be a blonde but walked out of the salon with orange hair. Another guy lost a part of his ear.” He let out a sigh. “To tell you the truth, we were all surprised she got the job, considering she’d really only cut family’s and friends’ hair in Alabama. When she interviewed for the position, I think she made it sound like our little kitchen was some sort of fancy salon.”

  “So her clients weren’t happy with her?”

  “Not at all. The woman with the orange hair wanted her fired.”

  “What about the other guy? Was he upset?”

  “I don’t think so. We all laughed about it when Gretchen told us how she was the one crying and he was the one trying to make her feel better.”

  “And that was that?” Dani asked.

  “Well, not really. Before she vanished, Mom and Dad said she was the same as always, but I noticed a change in Gretchen.”

  “How so?”

  “She seemed less happy-go-lucky. When I asked her if she was okay, she admitted being worried about losing her job, something about a client being upset, but that’s all I know.”

  “Did she ever mention a name?”

  “No. I told her to stop worrying so much. She was getting better at hair. I even let her cut my hair.” He laughed.

  “Do you know if she kept clients’ numbers?”

  “No idea. When she disappeared, so did her phone.”

  Dani thanked him for his help and disconnected the call. She looked at Quinn. “How’s it going?”

  “Not good,” Quinn said. “There are hundreds of locksmiths who do work in the Sacramento area. It will take days to look up every place, and what if this guy doesn’t have a webs
ite?”

  “What about the man you talked to at the construction site. Any luck?”

  “He looked busy. I’ll be surprised if he even remembers he talked to me, but I’ll give him a call later tonight.”

  “Grab your bag and come with me.”

  As Dani drove, she told Quinn about her conversation with Gretchen Myles’s brother. When Quinn failed to respond, she asked her what was wrong.

  “I can’t get excited anymore,” Quinn said. “Every time Ethan remembered a new detail about Ali’s abductor, I figured this was it! We’re going to nab the sucker and bring Ali home. And then the construction guy recognized Ethan’s drawing and Ethan remembered what he’d seen in the back of the van. Both times my adrenaline spiked.” Quinn released a long, ponderous sigh. “I feel like I’m on the craziest roller-coaster ride of my life and I can’t get off.”

  “Sadly,” Dani admitted, “hitting roadblocks comes with the job.”

  “Yeah, but I wonder how many PIs can say they lost someone who was just trying to help out.”

  “We’ll find him,” Dani said, praying it was true.

  Two blocks from the salon, they finally found a parking spot. Dani paid the meter and hurried to catch up to Quinn. By the time they got to their destination, sweat trickled down Dani’s back.

  Quinn asked the receptionist sitting at the front desk if the owner of the salon was around, explaining that they were investigators and it was very important that they speak to her.

  Without a word spoken, the receptionist turned and walked away.

  Dani watched her walk past a row of stylists dressed in black and wearing aprons with pockets, then disappear into a back room. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had someone cut and style her hair. She made a mental note to return once the stitches dissolved and her hair grew back.

  The receptionist was already on her way back with a woman Dani assumed was the owner trailing her.

  She introduced herself as Sandra Mason. Her skin and makeup were flawless. Dani wasn’t a slacker when it came to working hard, but everything about the woman made Dani realize she’d been neglecting herself.