The video showed that on the day of the abduction, this vehicle pulled up over the curb immediately adjacent to the school building’s rear door. The timestamp was 11:53:50 AM. The driver got out, exited the frame of the video, and several minutes later he returned and got back in.
The camera was mounted at the northwest corner of the building, to cover both the lot and the gate to the playground. The school’s entry had an architectural overhang that obscured the passenger side of the truck and the school door itself, but the front license plate was clear, even in the height of the storm.
Tom accessed the DMV data, but the associated phone number was disconnected. The landlord for the registered address reported that the resident had been evicted some months earlier for nonpayment. Tom queried for the license-plate-reader data of that truck for the preceding ninety-six hours and found that it had been all over the city, tracing veins and arteries for hours at a time, in almost constant motion until Friday. Likely the plow, but maybe not just that. He developed a heat map. Lots of repeat visits to public places. Drive-throughs, a convenience store—and schools, a number of schools. Lots of activity until mid-afternoon on Friday, and then nothing. He lengthened the search period a couple days back. Location pins clustered on one hit on successive nights. Likely a different residence.
Two things took up space in his ribcage: the excitement of finding a lead in the case and an interior flittering, an arrhythmia that came and went with a dry, brushing sound that had started its refrain after he’d looked at the little girl’s face, sought signs of life and found none.
Even though everyone thought it was ridiculously archaic, he liked to print out his list of hot spots. It would be satisfying to feel the smooth paper between his fingers, and he looked forward to driving to the first location, checking off the hit with a Sharpie, smelling the xylene tang of the ink. And then, if they didn’t find the truck’s owner there, they would work toward the bottom of the list before end of day, and he would prove to himself that he could fulfill what was asked of him. Something to drive his energy toward evening, toward the solitude of night.
So he walked quickly to the printer, picked up his pages, and folded them into neat quarters that would slide into his pocket. Was Nate keeping an eye on him? Watching his every move because he had previously shown mortal fallibility? Cops instinctively steered away from other cops who showed PTSD symptoms, as if it were contagious. But no, no one was looking in his direction. And when he mentioned a ride to the hot residence of the truck owner, Nate stood immediately and gathered his stuff.
Nate drove and they headed north through Noble Park. He chattered nonstop about getting his Cherokee certified for on-duty use so he could collect a subsidy. He talked about when he and his wife would take the kids to Montana to see their grandparents. He talked about the Broncos. He hardly took a breath. A litany that prevented Tom from adding anything. A good tactic. Let the silt settle.
Nate slowed when they turned off Valmont, and he smiled when Tom pulled out his pages of hot spots. They slowed to a crawl until they turned on Loveland, letting the automatic license-plate reader pick up all the plates in the vicinity. They found the hot address. Tom glanced at Nate, but the tenor of brotherhood was gone, and now there was only observation back and forth between them. They exited their cruiser and looked for the truck, but it wasn’t there.
Tom rapped his knuckles against the door of the small residence, and the subject who answered was an emaciated white male in his seventies, wearing a flannel shirt and pajama bottoms. He had no idea of the whereabouts of the owner of the truck in question, a casual renter he had no intention of keeping tabs on. The man’s demeanor was forthright, and he assented to a walk-through.
Tom and Nate explored the dingy rooms, heavy with the smells of boiled meat, ripening garbage, and marijuana smoke. They found nothing that merited special attention. They instructed the resident to contact them with any further information. Maybe something would float to the surface. They would have to wait and see.
As they waded through the snow back to their cruiser, Nate said, “Collateral piece of crap, accounted for.”
Tom replied, “Primary piece of crap, still unaccounted for.”
It was almost like it used to be. And he was confident that he was hiding the physical discomfort in his chest. He held himself upright with good posture, the heft of his vest pulling his shoulders down and back, the cold air making his muscles flex so the tremors wouldn’t show. But it was undeniable that something was going on inside his ribcage. That dry flittering, the twitches like a set of tiny claws, the slow clench that left him breathless.
Once he and Nate had settled back into their seats and they’d entered their findings for the hit, Tom pulled out his Sharpie, uncapped it, and checked off the address. The fumes from the black ink filled the car.
As Nate pulled away from the curb, he shook his head and, with a half-smile, said, “Well, at least that hasn’t changed.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
3:15 PM
Sunday, June 20, 2021 | Three Dog Knight Mining Mill
Time had pushed Erin even farther backward into the heat and stifling airlessness of the long-shut building. She paced the dry floorboards, dizzy with readjustments—misoriented was how Zac would describe it. This was summer. Her own time. Her phone read 3:15. Five hundred days away from Korrie. An hour since she’d last seen her.
Erin looked out the front window of the mill. No fire. A restless, dry wind moved through the grasses at the feet of the unburnt aspen. Shorter shadows, earlier again than before. Sun blared against the dirt around the front of the building. No tracks in the drive. No signs of anyone having been here for a long time. The place was a survey of abandonment. Dust, desertion.
She was trying to reason out a way that this regression could be something other than devastating. If the pattern was that she was going to be pushed only backward, earlier in the day, there was no point in staying here. But if they weren’t here in winter, they could be anywhere. And how could she find them now?
She walked again to the door at the back of the room and slowly opened it. The vestibule was empty. She crossed again to the far door that exited the building, opened it, and looked out onto the rocky fall-off. Nothing but decaying equipment, scattered trash, mining tailings piled up against the hillside. All of which would be destroyed in the fire she believed she had set, without knowing why, without remembering doing it, as if some fragment in the sequence had been lost.
She returned to the room at the front of the mill, half-hoping she would see Korrie standing there, ready to be taken home. This was one of the worst of the unknowns about what had happened to her. The investigators had never found this place, had never been able to explain to Erin where he’d taken her, so there was never any context, no way to grasp what had happened, because it was as if it had all taken place somewhere without a location, so not quite within reality. Even when faced with the final conclusion, Erin had felt that if she knew where he’d taken her, it might be possible to settle her mind and start to deal with her thoughts. But maybe that had never been true.
Erin stepped closer to the desk. Dust lay like a white skin on the surface. Absolutely undisturbed. For a second, she felt as if she’d glimpsed this perspective before. Almost without thought, her hand drifted out into the open space where Korrie had been the last time she’d seen her, sitting right here in front of her. The emptiness felt like nothing. She drew her hand back. And there stood the chair where the monster had sat, enthroned.
Under the wheels of the chair lay little wads of something. Erin bent down to look. Dusty little pieces of balled-up pink cloth. She reached for them and picked them up. Recognition. These were the socks Korrie had worn that day. Hatred fired in Erin’s throat, corrosive and penetrating. Her jaw tightened and her face flashed hot. She brushed the dust from the socks. Angry tears spilled, and she flicked them away.
Her thoughts fired in quick crosscuts. She’d started a fi
re here, at some time in the reverse order. Now she wanted to feel the violence of that blaze. She didn’t know why the memory was missing, but she had to re-create it now, to burn away every trace of him and the horrific things he did.
As she tucked Korrie’s socks into her pocket, she was shocked to find that her matches were there now. This must mean something, and she wanted to understand what it was. Did this moment somehow mirror the memory that was lost? She ran out into the heat of the afternoon and began gathering dry branches. There were many of them, and it didn’t take her long to find enough to build a campfire pyramid like the one she’d seen collapsed in carbonized remnants in what, from here, would be the future. She stomped the branches, breaking them into equal lengths, and gathered them together while she searched her memory for the image from the edge of the fire. Where had she placed it in the time that would follow this now? She centered herself in front of the mill’s door. Ten paces back. Ten more. This seemed right. She laid the wood down and started to build with three branches in a tripod shape. Next, she added all the others to the pyramid and placed twigs and dry grass under the center. When she was finished, she pulled the matchbook from her pocket, took one last look at the photo, struck a match, and set it in the kindling. As the twigs crackled, she laid the matchbook at her feet, where she would find it later. Because maybe this was important: remaking that memory she’d lost, mending the broken sequence.
Once the fire got started, she snatched one of the flaming branches. She used it as a torch to light the twigs on the other side. They caught, sizzled, fired up, and the campfire hissed to life. It grew upward in a pulsating triangle before her.
The day went suddenly darker. The interval had shifted, and she stood holding her torch in the snowy, sullen cold of nightfall. No campfire. Just the chalk-white layer of snow at her feet. Erin blinked hard because her vision felt strange, as if she were seeing two different distances at once. Only yards before her in the frail dusk sat the truck. The truck was here, and that meant he was here. And beyond the truck, light bled from the windows of the mill. They were here. She felt stunned and relieved and vengeful. And she tried to think fast about what to do.
The cold air stung her eyes, making them water, and when she looked to the side, she was swept with dizziness and disorientation, as if she were looking at her surroundings in the reflection of a curved mirror. She smelled smoke on the wind, not from her torch, but from the other direction. And the dimness of the air was unsettling, as if it had an invisible shimmer in it. Something was off. Corn snow pelted down, more granules than flakes. It caught in her hair and landed on her shoulders. She pulled a grain from her sleeve. When it collapsed between her fingers, it smeared white, like ash.
As Erin approached the truck, she saw that the black paint reflected light that was too bright and the truck was corroded in a way it hadn’t been before. She looked up to see what created the reflection, and she saw that the full moon shone smoothly golden despite the muffled ceiling of cloud. Something felt very strange about where she was. She had to control the fear that closed in on her. She had to find a way to draw Clype out of the building so she could get inside, get to Korrie. She needed to create a diversion without him seeing her.
His truck. The place where she’d set the fire when it was summer was near where his truck sat now. She looked at the torch in her hand. Was that it? Was that why she’d started the fire? So she could set fire to his truck?
She plowed forward, off balance because there seemed to be a powerful current of wind along the ground. Couldn’t be. Icy grains of snow and an itchy, papery, burning smell blew across her face. Through murky opaline shadows, she crept to the truck and knelt beside the front tire. The skin of the truck’s body seemed to blister before her eyes. She thrust her torch under the vehicle. Nothing happened. Snow melted into the knees of her sweats, but she could feel the sharpness of pebbles beneath them. A gust nearly blew out her flame as the wood dwindled. She drew it near her lips and blew until it flared again. She shoved it beneath the undercarriage again, but nothing caught. She swept it back and forth, waiting to see if something would ignite, but nothing did. Soon, the wood burned close to her fingers, and it was getting too hot to hold. She jammed it with all her strength into the metal parts, as far up as she could reach. Sparks pelted her hand, and she pulled it back, making herself keep quiet against the pain.
A smattering of carbonized embers hailed into the snow from the undercarriage of the truck and snuffed out. Maybe this wasn’t going to work. Erin stood.
Something else. Try something else.
The ground under her boots crunched like dry tinder instead of the squeak of fresh snow. The mill stood on the other side of the truck, wavering as if it emanated heat. No matter what this strangeness was, she had to keep moving.
She crept toward the door of the mill. The clouded windows obscured her view. What if she could crack the door slightly, enough to see inside? Have to risk it, she thought. She reached out and tried the knob. It was warm, as if it had been in someone’s pocket. So strange. But locked. She would have to try the other door.
She started to turn away, but just then the door swung open. He stood there. Him. He was framed in rippling light, surprise on his face. Huge, he was. Disheveled. Eyes red. Tiny black pinpoint pupils.
Involuntary stammers escaped her lips. “Hey, I—” she said. “I—my car died … and I saw your lights, and I need to use the phone …” She heard how false it sounded. “My cell has no service …”
From somewhere behind him, Korrie cried, “Mommy!” A piercing, terrified recognition. Erin searched for her beyond him. Korrie screamed again. The man reared up, and like a sledgehammer, his fist clubbed Erin in the chest. In slowed, emulsified time, she felt herself reeling backward. She reached out to catch herself, grabbing the doorframe just as the man flung the door shut. She saw the metal close on her fingers before the pain raced up her arm and splashed over her face. The door ricocheted back open, sparks somehow sifting upward in lazy swirls behind the man.
She pulled her smashed hand to her chest, the pain so enormous it penetrated all the way through her. She looked up at him. “Please let me have her.”
With one immense hand, he grabbed her by the front of her shirt, pulled her in, and threw her across the room and into a pile of rusted equipment. A gash of pain tore open along the back of her ribs.
Korrie screamed, “Mommy, Mommy!”
As Erin struggled to rise, he descended on her and stomped on her chest with the sole of his boot. She crashed backward onto a ragged blade of rusted metal, sharp, hot. Pain shot through her. He lurched at her again. She shouted at him, “Stop!” He planted his boot on her breastbone and pressed down. Korrie screeched from the corner of the room. Erin saw her in only a sweater and underpants, her hands behind her, tears spilling down her cheeks.
A roar of combustion erupted from outside. Clype jumped back and turned to the windows. In a dark shimmer of air textured like flame, he glowed. With another blast of detonation, a section of a burning bumper crashed through the glass of the mill’s windows.
Erin’s reflexes raced. She rose, weightless, and tore across the space, scooping Korrie into her arms.
Alive. Alive!
She slammed her way through the vestibule door. The tiny room glittered, haloes echoing around sparks she couldn’t see. At the outside door, she grabbed the knob, and her face tightened with the astounding pain of using her wracked hand. She hipped the stuck door open and plunged out into the open air as the room ignited in dark flames behind her.
Pressing Korrie against her bruised chest, she ran. Blind to her surroundings for the moments it took for her to understand that she held her daughter, alive, in her arms. Her legs pumped on autopilot, her mind gauging her ability to outrun him if he followed.
For a second, sirens whined, distant, faint. Her mind clutched at the thought Rescue us. But then the sound was gone. The white snow in the trees gleamed opalescent, rainbows of fluxi
ng heat radiation.
The snow-laden space before her cleared to instant black. This was some other place. No, some other time. The air was empty, crystalline, and bitterly cold. Underfoot, the snow was gone, and the ground was completely scorched. The soil crackled beneath her boots, dry and brittle, and before she could judge what was happening, the blackened earth splintered into carbon shards and gave way. She dropped; she let go, and Korrie seemed suspended before her. Then the queasy rush of falling. Her hand shot out to catch Korrie, but she was beyond her grasp.
PART IV
The Labyrinth
Chapter Thirty-Five
5:40 PM | Three Dog Knight Mine
They plummeted down a sooty shaft, and Erin tried to grab something to stop the fall. Her hand scraped over dirt, rock, splinters that pierced deep into her skin. She crashed to the floor. Hard earth, dark.
Korrie cried out in pain.
“Korrie,” Erin called, nearly blind. “Korrie.” She crawled toward the sound of crying, found her. She cradled her child, her Korrie, against her chest. “Are you okay, baby?” She kissed her head.
Korrie sobbed hard, “Yes.” She gulped, stuttering with the effort to stop crying. “I’m okay.”
Wherever they were, it was so ice-cold it hurt to breathe. Erin pulled herself up onto her throbbing knees and listened for a second to hear if the man was hunting them down, but she heard nothing except the stammer of Korrie’s ragged breathing.
She drew the phone from her pocket for light. It awoke, but the screen was laced with fractures, and the light it threw shone only dimly on Korrie’s face. Scratches and black streaks of char striped her cheek. Erin laid the phone in the dirt, stripped off her hoodie, and draped it over Korrie’s shoulders. She turned her around so she could free her hands, loosen the plastic of the cuff things he’d put on her. Cuffs. Her head swarmed with this reminder of his intent.
Once Again Page 14