Winter's Mourn

by Mary Stone

  “You’d better. Don’t send me any more bodies. I’ve got vacation time coming.”

  Noah disconnected, and Parrish glanced over at him. “Nailed down?” His tone was dry.

  “Sure. I’ve got a feeling about it.” As if in confirmation, Noah’s phone buzzed with a text. “See? I bet this is good news right now.”

  His grin fell away fast when he read the terse line from the Harrisonburg police chief.

  We have media.

  “Well, shit.”

  Aiden flipped on the turn signal for their exit. Behind them, a Fox News van did the same.

  “Good news, huh?” Aiden’s eyes went to the rearview mirror, assessing.

  Before he could come up with an answer, Noah’s phone rang. He picked it up, assuming it was the chief without looking at the display. “Has the circus come to town, Chief?”

  But it wasn’t Gary Miller. It was Tom Benton, and he sounded like a man dangerously close to the edge.

  Tom paced the floor, his mind in turmoil. He ignored the mess that cluttered the living room. The open pizza box on the table, surrounded by a dozen empty beer cans. The fact that he hadn’t taken a shower in days…and smelled like it.

  He couldn’t get Sam out of his mind. He had a growing, horrible certainty that the day of their fight would be the last time he’d ever see her. He wanted to howl. He wanted to break something. He wanted her home safe. He didn’t care if it was just the two of them and they never had the family he’d always wanted.

  He loved Sam. That was the most important thing.

  Her family didn’t know where she was. They blamed him. Her sister was even making noises about something having happened to her. Who better than a cop to commit murder and get away with it, after all?

  His dad was no help. He’d retreated into some kind of depression after whatever had gone down when the FBI agents had gone to see him. Maria, his long-time housekeeper, could hardly get him to eat.

  Tom kicked viciously at a shoe lying in his path. It hit the paneled wall, dangerously close to the TV, and thudded to the floor.

  The doorbell rang.

  He still hated the thought of asking them for help, but now that they were here, he felt something within him ease.

  Agent Dalton and Winter were waiting on the front porch, along with another man Tom hadn’t met. He had the stereotypical look of a ranking federal agent. Crisp suit, looking freshly pressed. A sharp-eyed, searching stare. A face that looked like it would break if it smiled.

  Self-consciously, Tom raked a hand through his uncombed hair and stepped back so they could enter. He felt his face flush as the third agent studied the room. Tom knew it was a mess, but he had bigger fucking problems to worry about than housekeeping.

  Winter stepped forward, her blue eyes looking dark with sympathy. “There’s been no word from her?”

  To his horror, Tom felt a lump clog his throat. He cleared it. “No. I’ve checked with all her friends. Borrowed a car from my dad and drove around everywhere, looking for the Subaru. It’s like she just disappeared.” He clenched his jaw so tight his teeth squeaked inside his head. “Her family thinks I did it. Did something to her.”

  “Sit down, man. Let’s talk it through.” Noah casually plucked a pair of dirty underwear off the back of the La-Z-Boy with two fingers and tossed it down the hall before moving a pile of newspapers off the couch so they could all sit down.

  Tom couldn’t even find it in himself to care. He sank down on the chair and put his head in his hands.

  “I just want her back,” he choked out. He felt a small hand on his shoulder, the warmth comforting. Winter. He almost lost it right there.

  “This is killing me,” he ground out, looking around at the three of them. Pleading for understanding. “Chief texts me regularly, but I’m fucking suspended. I can’t even be in the office. Out on the street. Involved in searching for her. They’re so wrapped up in the stupid cult case, they can’t be giving Sam their full attention.”

  “I’m SSA Parrish. Agents Dalton and Black gave me the backstory on your wife’s disappearance,” the clean-cut agent said, his voice cool and emotionless. “But I need you to tell me in your own words what happened.”

  Tom rubbed his forehead. “My wife, Samantha…she and I fought. She took off almost five days ago, and I haven’t seen or heard from her since. I’ve been calling her cell constantly. Voicemail every time.”

  Parrish pulled out a small notebook from the inside of his jacket and uncapped a fancy-looking pen. “What did you two fight about?”

  “We’ve had a lot of shit going on. Both of us stressed. I’ve been drinking a little too much lately. She snapped on her boss and got let go from her job. She’s pregnant. Kind of hormonal. She’s—we’ve—been trying to have a baby for a long time. She’s had a lot of miscarriages. It takes a toll, you know?”

  “When did you last see her?”

  Tom sighed. “I got suspended from my job. Two weeks, no pay. She started in on me, and I snapped back, and next thing you know, we’re screaming at each other. She locked herself in the bathroom. Said she was having cramps. I was so afraid she was losing another baby…” His voice broke. He scrubbed his face so hard with his hands he expected to see blood when they dropped back into his lap. “She wouldn’t let me in. She called somebody. I didn’t know if it was her mom or her doctor, but—”

  “Did you try to get her phone records?” Parrish interrupted, his eyes sharp.

  “I…no.” Tom couldn’t help it. He felt himself getting defensive, but the guy was a cold fish and it was pissing him off. “Chief told me to let him handle it.”

  Parrish pinned him with a look. “It would be easier to get your own wife’s phone records for you, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Tom’s jaw ached, he was clenching it so tightly. He could see Winter and Agent Dalton out of the corner of his eye. His temper eased a little. They didn’t look like they were enjoying this, and he wouldn’t have blamed them if they had been.

  “What do you think is going on, Tom?” Winter asked.

  “I think she’s with Rebekah Archer.”

  Dalton leaned forward, and even Parrish seemed to go on alert.

  “I tried to tell Chief Miller that, and he couldn’t see how it would fit. But Sam, she’d been so convinced that this baby would be the first she’d carry to term. I watched her go through each miscarriage like it would break her. Afraid each time that it would. She’d be so down afterward, so depressed.”

  He pressed the heels of his hands against his temples, feeling a stress headache pulsing from the base of his neck to the center of his forehead.

  “This time is different, though. She’s had this fearful, intense hope. She kept promising me, promising me that this time would be different. She lied to me. She told me her doctor was keeping a close eye on things, and she had appointments almost every week. But when she left, I called her doctor, and they hadn’t seen her in months. Not since the last pregnancy.”

  “Tom, why do you think she’s with Rebekah?” Winter asked gently.

  “We’ve talked about it before, but the Archer’s place came up again not long ago. We’d heard rumblings for years about babies and fertility drugs, and Sam asked a bunch of questions about it.”

  Winter frowned. “And you think that’s how she got pregnant?”

  He pushed out of the chair, frustrated. “It’s the only logical conclusion I can come up with. And if she’s with that Rebekah, will I see her again? Will she end up like that girl that was found in the burial site? Abandoned in some unmarked grave? You have to find her. You have to make her come home.”

  His eyes burning, Tom stared at them each in turn. Parrish was watching him like he was some kind of a bug under a microscope. Dalton looked concerned. Worried. Winter, though. Her face was intense. Focused. Determined.

  Of the three, her expression was the most reassuring.

  She stood up, and the other three followed suit. “We’ll find her, Tom. We
’ll bring her home.”

  He believed her.

  But when they left him in the trashed house, he felt more alone than ever.

  As their car pulled away, Tom caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror in the entryway. His eyes were bloodshot. His hair stood on end. His face was pasty and puffy from too much alcohol and too little sleep. Stubble roughened his cheeks, and there was a dark stain on the front of his dingy white t-shirt. He looked like a stranger.

  Hell, if Sam walked through the door right now, she might turn around and leave him all over again. And he wouldn’t be able to blame her.

  He headed to the back of the house, to his bedroom to grab a clean set of clothes. He was going to shower and shave. Then, he was going to call the phone company and have them send over the record of calls from their cell phones. And while he was waiting for them to do that, he was going to clean the house.

  He had to get his shit together. He wanted Sam to come back to a man a little more like the one she’d married.

  Two news vans had been set up in the parking lot of their hotel. CNN and MSNBC. Chief Miller had his hands full fielding media inquiries. He was furious that someone saw fit to tip off the big networks on the investigation after they’d been lucky enough to keep things quiet up until now. He warned them to stay away from the station. Their presence would just add fuel to the fire.

  Thankfully, “their” hipster coffee shop was deserted. The pierced barista with the big headphones gave them an almost friendly nod when they walked in, and Winter felt like a regular. But once the girl handed them their coffees, she was completely uninterested in them. The rap blasting out of her headphones was audible all the way across the room.

  “So, I think we can operate under the assumption that Kennedy took advantage of a friend’s depression and disillusionment.” Aiden had his little notebook out and was going over his notes.

  Winter would have liked to get her hands on that thing. He wrote in it constantly. It would likely be an interesting look into the workings of Aiden’s brain.

  “He probably talked Wesley Archer into going along with it, feeding him the ‘better living through chemicals’ line,” Noah agreed. He’d stretched out on the beat-up couch he’d claimed, his eyes half-closed. His mind, though, was firing on all cylinders.

  “Kennedy didn’t give a shit about peace, love, and happy babies,” Winter tossed in.

  Noah snorted his agreement. “He would have had the long game in mind, with dollar signs at the end of it. A marketable fertility drug that promised miracle babies with sweet, easygoing personalities. It would be a PR dream.”

  “The dream went bad, obviously,” Aiden replied. “Birth defects. Physical impairments. Cognitive problems. And later on, what looks like an almost one-hundred-percent chance of cancer for the mother.”

  Winter shivered, though the coffee shop was almost uncomfortably warm. Steam fogged the window behind the plants that lined the sill. If Sam was mixed up in this, had she signed her own death warrant?

  “So, how does he tie in with Rebekah?” Noah asked.

  “That’s the real question.” Winter shifted in her chair restlessly. They needed to parse everything out that they’d discovered so far, and she was dealing with a nagging feeling of exhaustion, but she was itching to get back out already. “Is Rebekah the pawn? She seemed to have a real affection for her father, but enough to want to carry on his efforts? Or is she interested in the monetary implications, too, no matter the cost?”

  “The body of the teenager would indicate the latter. That’s recent work, well within the time she’s lived at the farm.” Aiden flipped a couple of pages back in the notebook. “Samantha Benton went missing the same day as Rebekah. Nearly the same time.”

  “She’s pregnant,” Noah pointed out. “And desperate to have a baby. Seems weird that she’d go to someone who had no solid percentage of success. We’re missing something. Some connection between the two women.”

  “We’ll find it,” Aiden said calmly. “But the connection between the two women isn’t as important as locating them at this point. I don’t think Samantha is in any danger yet. As long as she stays pregnant, and she’s not far along yet.”

  “If anything,” Winter corrected, “that makes finding her more urgent. Benton said her doctor told her she has a weak uterus. If that’s a symptom of a congenital reproductive issue, she’ll miscarry. If she’s of no use as a test subject, she could be disposed of.”

  29

  The rest of the afternoon was starting to look like a total loss. Winter was having a hard time holding back her frustration. They needed to find the missing players, and they were running into repeated dead ends.

  It didn’t matter what Aiden thought or whether Noah agreed. Winter knew with cold certainty that they were working against the clock.

  David Benton refused to meet with them. The housekeeper turned them away at the door, telling them that they’d been inundated with phone calls and that he had gone to bed with a migraine. Someone had leaked David’s name to the press, and from her tone, it sounded like she was holding them fully responsible for both the headache and the phone calls.

  They went to Tony Collier next. He wasn’t home. The van in the driveway was gone, and the shades were pulled.

  Darin Bowman was the last revisit on their list before they turned around and headed to the station to meet with Chief Miller. To her surprise, he opened the door almost immediately after Noah’s knock.

  “Mr. Bowman?” Winter asked. “I’m Special Agent Black, and these are Agents Dalton and Parrish. Could we speak to you for a moment?”

  Darin Bowman was a man who looked like he’d taken every kick life had dealt him and still bore the bruises. He was stoop-shouldered and sad-eyed. All of him seemed gray and lifeless. His hair, his eyes, his lined face. He nodded, unsmiling, and let them in.

  His house was small and outdated, but tidy. As he led them into the living room, Winter immediately noticed the framed photos on the mantlepiece. On the far left was a picture of a pretty woman in her twenties, smiling brightly, holding a little boy on her hip.

  Without consciously meaning to, Winter moved closer to the picture.

  It had been taken at the Archer farm. She recognized the location from the background of the photo. The woman looked carefree and happy, her smile full of love and light. Her long red hair drifted around her shoulders and the boy she held gripped a handful of it in his small fist.

  “Patrick,” she murmured, touching the glass.

  The boy must have been around five years old at the time of the photo but looked smaller and younger. The curve of his back was pronounced, almost question mark-shaped. His jaw seemed crooked, but it didn’t dim the beauty of his playful grin. His hair was red and tousled, and she could make out a smattering of freckles across his smushed-looking pug nose.

  Winter experienced a quick flash of memory, seeing the small bones on the cold metal examination table in Florence Wade’s lab. For a moment, the bones were superimposed over the child’s features in the picture. Her throat tightened with a combination of anger and sadness.

  “My wife and son.” The voice to her right shook with emotion, and Winter turned to look at Darin. His eyes were fixed on the picture, filled with unshed tears. “God, I miss them every day. So much.”

  “Tell us.”

  The story came out in fits and starts, and several times, the man had to stop, overcome. Through most of it, silent tears slid down his face. As the three of them listened silently, Darin painted almost the same early picture of peaceful commune life that David Benton had. He and his wife were so excited when she became pregnant. So sure that they were doing God’s work.

  “Patrick was such an amazing child,” Darin said, his eyes soft with memory. “So happy. He may have come in a different package than other babies born without his handicaps, but he was a ray of sunshine. He had so much love bottled up in that tiny body of his. He was a gift.”

  His face darkened, a
nd he looked down at his hands clenched together in his lap. “But later on, when other babies were born like him, it seemed like everyone started thinking of those beautiful babies as more of a curse. We hadn’t been good enough. Pure enough. We were doing something wrong. God was angry with us.”

  “But you knew your son wasn’t a curse,” Winter put in, stiff with anger. “Why didn’t you leave?”

  Noah nudged her subtly. Telling her without words to cool it.

  Darin looked up at her, his face heavy with the guilt that he’d carried for decades.

  “I know that now!” The words sounded like they were being wrenched out of him. “Don’t you think I know that? You don’t understand what it was like. We were a group, disciples united by a higher purpose. A higher power. And Wesley was our Bishop. He was closest to God. When he told us these things, we believed him.” He dropped his head again, and his shoulders shook. “Even when he told us that God had taken our babies back as punishment.”

  “But God didn’t take your babies.” Aiden’s voice was quiet. Calm.

  In the face of the unemotional statement of fact, Darin seemed to pull himself together.

  “No. God didn’t take our babies. Wesley did.” His voice hardened. “I told myself otherwise for many years afterward. Joanna and I, we kept up the pretense of believing Wesley Archer’s lies. The alternative was too unbearable. The guilt was just too much. But when Joanna died…” He swallowed hard. “The cancer took her quickly, but at the end, she would talk about Patrick in her delirium. Crying. Screaming. Apologizing.”

  Winter struggled under conflicting feelings.

  She’d read enough about cult leaders to know that they could hold their subjects in a kind of thrall. The outside world could cease to exist, or the followers would be indoctrinated so completely that everything about it would be taken as a lie. The leader’s word would be taken as gospel, and individual thought took a distant second place or was stifled altogether.