Instead of answering, Scott rolled out of the Jeep and sprinted to waylay the Lexus as it braked at his makeshift roadblock.
“Shit,” he heard Ryan say, but when he reached the Lexus’s window—fool had already rolled it down, probably to ask what was up with the Jeep blocking his path—and shoved the pistol in Grant’s face, his brother, jiggling uneasily but there, was at his back.
“What the . . . ?” Grant gasped, gaping at him in disbelief even as Scott barked, “Get out of the car.”
“Buchanan? Is that you? My God, have you lost your mind?”
“Get the fuck out of the car.”
Because Grant was sputtering, not moving fast enough, Scott reached in, grabbed a handful of the slimy bastard’s jacket, and practically yanked him out. Then he shoved him into the Lexus’s backseat and got in with him, making sure he could see the gun, making sure Grant knew he had trouble. Ryan, having already been briefed on his part in the plan, got behind the wheel and did a one-eighty, pulling into the driveway of their dad’s deserted house.
Then Ryan turned off the headlights and got out of the car. As dark as it was, the Lexus would be practically invisible.
“Stay put,” Scott told Grant when the older man made a move to get out, too. “I want to talk to you.”
“This is kidnapping, Buchanan.” Grant’s voice wavered between outrage and fear. Scott wished for the advantage of light—it would help if he could read what was going on in Grant’s eyes—but light would draw attention, so he was going to have to do without it.
“Where’s Lisa?” Scott’s voice was very quiet. Deadly quiet.
“What? Do you think I know?”
Clenching his teeth, trying to control his impulse to slam his fist into Grant’s mouth before repeating the question, Scott looked at him steadily. The moon was high enough now so that it cast sufficient light to allow him to see, if not the nuances of Grant’s expression, at least the broad strokes. The man was looking at him as if he was a live grenade.
God, Lisa’s been missing for more than two hours; please let her be alive. Let her be safe.
The thought filled him with a cold rage that it was all he could do to keep under control.
“Before we go any further with this, let me tell you what I know. I know your daughter was born with a potentially fatal kidney disease. I know the skeleton of a baby has been recovered that was buried under a fountain in Grayson Springs’s backyard. I got some medical records a couple of days ago pertaining to a woman named Angela Garcia”—Grant started, and Scott gave him a wolfish smile—“yeah, I can see you’ve heard of her. I know from those records that she was a little over eight months pregnant when she and her family disappeared. I know you were making regular payments over a period of some five years prior to her disappearance to Angela Garcia through a dummy corporation. Just so we’re clear, I’ve got copies of the checks with your signature on them. I know the family moved here just a few months before they disappeared, and I know the husband was bragging to a few people that he was getting ready to come into a large sum of money.” He paused to look hard at Grant and was satisfied with what he saw. The man had shrunk back against the door. His eyes were wide and scared, and unless Scott’s nose was misleading him, he was sweating like a pig. “Now let me tell you what I can prove if I have to. The baby buried under that fountain had ARPKD. So did yours and Miss Martha’s newborn daughter. Lisa doesn’t have, and never has had, ARPKD. She’s your daughter, all right, but not with Miss Martha. She’s your daughter with Angela Garcia.”
He broke off as Grant started to make gasping noises. He looked as though he’d seen a ghost.
“You fathered Angela’s older daughter, too, didn’t you? You bought that older girl a doll for her fifth birthday right before she disappeared. Oh, yes, I can prove that, too, if you make me. As you know, Lisa has the doll, and the company kept the names of the purchasers of all the My Best Friend dolls sold.” As Grant’s hand rose to cover his mouth Scott pressed on relentlessly. “You were having an affair with Angela all those years you were in Washington, right under the noses of your wife and her husband. You even had a relationship of sorts with the older girl, Marisa. What, did she know you as uncle something? Those checks you wrote Angela were for child support, weren’t they? And then she got pregnant again. This time the husband found out what was up. This time you two got caught. He was pissed, wasn’t he? He wanted big money to keep his mouth shut, didn’t he? When you didn’t cough up big enough or fast enough, he moved his family here, practically right next door to your rich wife with her rich daddy who was funding your political career, and threatened to tell all. And you had a problem, because you knew that no matter what you did, no matter how much you paid, you weren’t going to be able to keep the husband quiet forever. So, you dealt with it. You either killed them or hired somebody to do it. All except for your little baby, who was in your girlfriend’s womb when the murders went down. Somehow she was born. Somehow she was spared. That baby is Lisa. For whatever reason, you switched your wife’s dying child for Lisa. And now you’re afraid it’s all going to come out, that you’re looking at multiple charges of murder one that will put you in prison for the rest of your life, if you don’t get the death penalty, and you decided to get rid of the one absolutely irrefutable piece of evidence of the crimes you committed: Lisa.”
“No, no, no!” Grant’s hand had fallen away from his mouth, and his breathing was so loud and harsh that it sounded as though he was dying. Scott didn’t give a shit, as long as he told him where Lisa was first. “You’ve got it all wrong! I—”
“Shut the fuck up,” he growled, lunging toward Grant and pinning him to the door with one hand around his neck while Grant flapped and fussed like a chicken whose neck was about to be wrung. Smiling grimly, he positioned the gun maybe six inches from Grant’s forehead, and the man went still. “You’re going to tell me where Lisa is.”
“I don’t have her! I wouldn’t hurt my own daughter!” Grant wheezed with panic. His eyes were practically starting from his head. “What do you take me for?”
“Here’s the deal,” Scott said, speaking through his teeth as he tried not to panic in the face of Grant’s continued denials and the amount of time that was passing. “If you tell me where Lisa is, if I get her back alive and in one piece, I’ll forget I know any of this. The Garcia thing is in the past. As far as I’m concerned, you can work it out with God or whoever. But I want Lisa. So, I’m going to ask you one last time: Where the hell is she?”
That last was a muted roar.
“I don’t know. I swear to you, I don’t know.” Scott’s hand tightened around his neck and he must have looked as murderous as he felt because Grant held up both hands in surrender even as he choked and coughed and squirmed. “Jesus, Buchanan, listen to me a minute. I tell you you’ve got it wrong!”
“How?” Fixing him with a murderous glare, Scott eased his hold on Grant’s neck enough so that the man could talk easily. “You’ve got about one minute to convince me.”
Grant took a great, rasping breath.
“All right. All right. I admit, Lisa is my daughter with Angie Garcia. You’re right about that. I know it’s true, although I don’t have any proof other than the way she looks. I did have an affair with her mother. Her other daughter—Marisa—was my daughter, too. And you’re right that that violent animal of a husband of Angie’s found out and threatened us. Me. He was going to kill her and expose me if I didn’t pay him a million dollars to keep quiet. But I didn’t have a million dollars. All the money I had came from Martha’s family. I told him that, and the bastard moved the family down here practically right next door to my wife’s and told me he was going to go to her father for the money if I didn’t pay up. But I never did anything to any of them. My God, I loved Angie, and Marisa, my little girl, and even her boy, Tony. I never knew what happened to them.” The sudden anguish in Grant’s eyes made Scott’s eyes narrow. “I never knew. They just disappeared. But then, as Lisa started to gro
w up, I noticed how much she looked like Angie, and I began to suspect.”
He broke off, licking his lips. Blood pounded in Scott’s temples as he faced the terrifying realization that he might indeed have gotten this wrong. Jesus God, if he was wrong, where did he go next? Where was Lisa? Breathing hard, he let his hand drop from around Grant’s neck, and lowered the gun.
“You began to suspect what?” Scott’s voice was hoarse.
“It was the old man. Martha’s father. He did something to them. He and that damned Frye.”
She was alive. Hurt and sick and scared to death but alive. She’d fallen a long way, maybe twenty feet, but because she’d landed in water, the fall hadn’t killed her. She’d been dropped into a well, she thought, an old, abandoned well with standing water in the bottom. It was capped, which meant that down where she was, way at the bottom of the shaft, it was absolutely pitch-black. She wouldn’t have been able to see her hand in front of her face even if she’d managed to free her wrists from the duct tape and hold one up there. There was no sound, either, except for the sounds created by her movements: sloshing water, squelching mud. The smell of mold and stagnant water was strong. The fall, plus the sounds, plus her sense of touch and smell, had given her a general picture of where she was. The well had curving walls that, from the feel of them, were made of brick. Slimy brick. She had to lean against the wall to keep her balance because, bound as she was, staying on her feet was difficult. Everything she could feel above the waterline was covered with slime. The water was armpit-deep and cool but not cold, with a thick layer of leaves and mud and who knew what else at the bottom that her bare feet kept sinking into. She’d plunged beneath the surface when she’d landed, and for a minute or so, bound as she was, she had feared she might drown. Without the use of her hands, she’d writhed and fought to get to the surface as terrible flashbacks of the car accident had spun through her mind. Then her feet had touched bottom, and in a spasm of blinding terror she’d launched herself upward. And then she had discovered that the water was shallow enough so that she could stand upright in it and breathe.
At first, that discovery had seemed like cause for elation.
But gradually it had borne in on her that the only way she was going to survive was if she could continue standing upright. If she could not, if her legs grew tired and gave out, if exhaustion overwhelmed her and she had to sleep, she would sink down into the water and drown.
And then as more time passed, minutes stretching into hours stretching into what felt like eternity, and she got cold and her muscles weakened and her breathing grew more and more labored, it wasn’t so much if she was going to sink down into the water and drown. It was when.
Frye wouldn’t talk. Not a word, not a syllable. Nothing more than a contemptuous “You’re crazy,” even after Scott’s hands closed around his neck. Hampered by the fact that Frye was in the house surrounded by people when he caught up with him, and Ryan had taken back his gun before they got inside, Scott was pulled off before he could choke or beat or do whatever he had to do to get the truth out of him, which was what he fully intended to do. Held by two deputies, he could only watch as Watson, having been told the whole story but still threatening to arrest Scott, too, if he didn’t back off, had Frye carted off to jail.
“He knows where Lisa is. You’ve got to let me get it out of him,” Scott pleaded, practically on his knees.
Watson was obdurate: There would be no abuse of suspects on his watch. But Frye’s demeanor convinced Scott that what Grant had long suspected was the truth: Frye and Martha’s father were responsible for the disappearance of the Garcias. And Frye alone was responsible for whatever had happened to Lisa.
Which left Scott more terrified than he had ever been in his life. He was bleeding inside, shaking inside, a basket case, as he realized that Frye was going to be given refuge in the legal system and Lisa still hadn’t been found.
On the verge of an explosion fueled by sheer panic, he caught himself: Giving in to emotion was the worst thing he could do.
Lisa, where are you? The thought morphed into a prayer. Please, God, let her be found. Let her be alive.
Then he remembered Mrs. Baker.
Lisa had no idea how long it had been: days, months, years. Her strength was fading, and in order to stay upright she had to brace her back against the wall and dig her feet down deep in the silt. The good news was that the water had eroded the duct tape’s adhesive until she’d been able to get it off. Her arms and legs were free, and she could scream. She’d tried that, screaming for what felt like hours, screaming until her throat ached and her voice went and she just couldn’t scream anymore. No one had come, and she suspected that if the sound could be heard beyond the shaft at all, it wouldn’t carry very far.
But she wasn’t going to give up. Just as soon as her throat had recovered enough she was going to start screaming again.
That, and praying, was all she could do.
She had already prayed so much that the words ran in a never-ending loop through her mind.
Dear God, please help me. Please don’t let me die.
But she was afraid she was going to. She had made a grisly discovery, down there all alone in the dark. That had been when she had still been trying to find a way out. She’d been feeling around on the bottom to see if the hard things she kept bumping her toes into and stepping on might be rocks or something she could use to dig hand and footholds with in the slippery brick, maybe by prying out some of the old mortar that held them in place. What she’d found, when she had maneuvered one to the surface, was that she was holding a skull. Oh, it had taken her a few minutes to realize, because of course she couldn’t see a thing. The curving shape of the head and then the unmistakable spacing of the eye sockets and nasal cavity were what had clued her in.
She had screamed and dropped the thing.
Now she knew there were at least three of them in there with her. At least three skeletons scattered at the bottom of the well. Actually, there should be one more.
Because she was pretty sure she had found the Garcias. And she was pretty sure she knew who had dumped them in this horrible, stinking, wet hell to die.
Down there in the dark she had nothing but time, and she had used some of it to review every minute detail of what had happened to her. She took the shadowy glimpses she’d caught of the man who had brought her here, added in his height and build, which she had absorbed while being carried over his shoulder, considered the truck and the metal box that she’d been confined in, and came to a conclusion: The man who was probably going to turn out to be her murderer wasn’t Barty at all. It was somebody she liked a whole lot better: Andy Frye.
Taken to the Woodford County jail and threatened with capital murder charges, Mrs. Baker crumbled. She cried and shook, wailing that she’d never meant for any harm to come to anyone. At Scott’s urgent request, Janice Bernard, the no-nonsense, twenty-year veteran Woodford County DA, offered Mrs. Baker a deal: tell everything she knew, cooperate with the prosecution in every way she was asked to, and the worst she would face would be several counts of accessory after the fact. She’d probably be out of prison in less than five years.
Her court-appointed attorney advised her to take the deal. She did.
Scott, meanwhile, who had no jurisdiction in Woodford County, could only chew his nails and watch from behind the one-way mirror that formed a window on the interrogation room as this negotiation took place. A glance at his watch told him that it was already after eight a.m.—full daylight now. Lisa had been missing for more than eleven hours.
Oh, God, where was she? What were the chances that she was even still alive?
Please, God, please, God, please.
The first question Mrs. Baker was asked was: Where is Lisa Grant?
Snug in the protection of her new deal, Mrs. Baker said she didn’t know.
Spewing curses, Scott tore out of the viewing room, determined to shake the truth out of the damned woman if need be. Stymied
by the presence of two armed deputies ranged outside the door, he was just about to go ballistic on them when his cell phone rang.
A glance at it told him that it was Chase.
His heart skipped a beat. His nephew would be calling him at a time like this only if there was news.
“Yeah?” he barked by way of answering it.
“Hey, Scott, guess what?” The excitement in Chase’s voice made Scott take a couple of steps back until he could lean against the wall. “We found her. We used Noah’s metal detector. She’s in a well on the Garcias’ property.”
It was all Scott could do not to slide down the painted concrete blocks.
“Is she alive?” His voice was hoarse.
“What, you think I’d call you if she was dead?” Chase sounded indignant. “I’d leave that for Rinko. Or Dad. Of course she’s alive.”
Scott closed his eyes.
34
By the time Scott got to her, Lisa had already been pulled out of the well, which was at the very edge of the woods where the kids had discovered Marisa’s medal. According to Chase, they’d found the well—actually, what they’d found was its metal cap—while they’d been searching the woods that Sunday. Sometime after Lisa went missing, it had struck Rinko that since everything bad that had happened to Lisa had happened after she had started looking into the Garcia case, the answer to her disappearance might be found on their property. So he and Jantzen and the kids had started searching it at dawn, and one of them—they couldn’t agree on whom—had remembered the capped well. Having decided to check it out, they couldn’t locate it again amid all the undergrowth until Noah had gone home and come back with his metal detector. After that, according to them, it had been a snap.
The TV trucks were pulling up even as Scott jumped out of his Jeep at the top of the driveway. Cop cars were all over the place, blocking him from driving any closer to the place where the assembled crowd told him Lisa had to be. A forensics team van—a Fayette County forensics team van, because now they were back in his bailiwick—was parked near the woods on the far side of the house. The actual team members were probably off in the trees. He knew they were there to check out the skeletons that had been found in the well with Lisa.
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