Kenny nods to his car, a yellow 1992 Subaru Legacy sedan AWD with a blue passenger door from some other vehicle. I think it was originally his father’s car, but we don’t talk about his old man because the guy has been in prison for the last decade. “So, if she comes out alone, we grab her and put her into the trunk. She’ll be so shocked that we’ll be in the car and driving back to the cabin before she can even react.”
“And if she doesn’t come out alone?” I ask. He takes a pocketknife out of his jacket then shoves it into the Cadillac’s left front wheel.
“She won’t get far before she has to pull over,” he says. “We have to do this now. Mason said we have a week. We need enough time to create an untraceable message to her daddy and give him some time to gather the money. Fuck, it’s cold out here.”
I scratch at my face. Damn. It feels like insects are crawling under my skin, but I know it’s all in my head. I stare at my reflection in the Cadillac’s side-view mirror. I don’t know how much time passes by—seconds, minutes, an hour—but then Kenny is grabbing my arm and jerking me toward the front of the car. He pulls me low to the ground, both of us crouching as I hear laughter in the distance.
“Oh, my God,” Sarah says. “I can’t believe you did that. You are crazy. What did he say?”
I peek over the hood of her car. She’s on her phone.
“Should we wait until she’s done with the call?” Kenny muses.
The feeling of insects under my skin is getting worse. I could tear off my face. I want to scratch until there isn’t any skin left. The agitation from the drugs and this whole plan is killing me. I jump up as Sarah approaches the car.
Her eyes widen and she takes a step back.
“Hey,” I say. “Sorry, Sarah, but I was wondering if I could ask you for a favor. It’s just, uh…um…my car. I locked myself out…and I…um…could use a ride home. Yeah. I could use a ride home.”
“Sorry, Alexis, I have to call you back. I’ll call you when I get home,” Sarah says into the phone. She hangs up and forces a smile.
I wonder if her mouth ever gets tired of smiling. I could find new uses for that mouth.
“Hey, Pete. Why don’t I call the police station for you? They have tools that can help you get into your car.”
Her words sound kind and genuine, but all I can think is that she wants the police to come arrest me before I have committed a crime. Well, I mean, I’m high as hell right now, but a real crime. A crime that hurts someone other than myself.
I grab her wrist and wrench the phone from her hand. She cries out in obvious pain as I throw the phone away from her.
“You’re not calling anybody,” I tell her.
Kenny jumps to his feet. She looks at him, bewildered.
“Look, guys, I know you have some kind of issue with my brother, but…we don’t even like each other. We don’t see each other that often…but I can help you. Whatever issue you have with him, I can help you. It’s not a big deal. We can fix whatever you need to be fixed. Let me help.”
“We can definitely fix it, and you’re going to help,” Kenny says.
I’m ready for this stupid plan to be over, so I grab for her other wrist. She jerks it away from me—her purse drops to the asphalt—and she thrusts her fist into my eye. I stumble back, releasing her.
“Bitch!” I snarl, clutching around my eye. I look up to see her running. Kenny tackles her. She begins to scream. He covers her mouth with his hand. Suddenly, his whole arm lurches back.
“She bit me!” he yells. As she begins to scream again, Kenny grabs her around the waist and throws her over his shoulder. “Open the trunk! Hurry!”
I lunge onto my feet then jerk his trunk open. She’s still screaming as Kenny throws her inside. Her head slams against the side…and she’s silent.
Kenny and I pause as the night is abruptly quiet.
“Is she okay?” I ask.
Kenny pushes her body all the way into the trunk. “We don’t have time to check. Let’s go.”
He rushes to the driver’s side. My heart and head are pounding. As I walk over to the passenger side of his Subaru, I notice her cell phone and purse on the ground, but all I can think is, Would the judge still pay for a dead daughter?
8
Aaron, 2015 (Late Friday night)
“HOW OLD ARE YOU, Lisa?” Becky asks.
“I’m fwee,” Lisa says, putting up three of her fingers.
“You’re three! Oh, my gosh, that is ancient.” Becky turns to me, her eyes bright with the laughter she’s barely containing. “Hand me the camera, love, so you can get Lisa her cake. Three! Can you believe it?”
Lisa had trouble with the “th” sound until she became fascinated with The Rolling Stones, singing along to “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Mother’s Little Helper”—inappropriate songs for a child, but she grew into a good young woman, so I suppose it didn’t hurt.
Dad steps in front of the TV, where the home video continues to play Lisa’s birthday party.
“Dad, I didn’t hear you come in. It’s nice that you let yourself in anyway.”
“You’re needed.” He shoves a mug in front of me, and the steam from the coffee rises to my face. “You’re taking lead on a kidnapping case because I’m still retiring on Monday.”
“Come on, Dad. I’m the worst person you could choose to become chief,” I grumble. “What about Woodson? Or Stalinski?”
“You want me to make someone chief that has the name Stalin in his name?”
“No, I want you to not make me chief.”
“It’s only as acting chief.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“Aaron,” Dad says through gritted teeth. “It’s Sarah Latham. Her purse and cell phone were found near her car, and nobody knows where she is. It can be safely assumed that somebody took her and we’re running out of time. If it was someone dangerous…you know the chance of finding her alive after forty-eight hours is practically zero. We need to organize everybody, search through the judge’s latest cases to see if someone could hold a grudge, and get the search dogs ready.”
“Dad, you could have done all that in the amount of time you’ve been talking to me.”
He grabs me by the arm and manages to jerk me into a standing position.
“Aaron, this is Sarah, Lisa’s best friend. What would Lisa think about you for not wanting to help her friend?”
I open my mouth to hurl back a retort—that Lisa can’t think anything and Sarah isn’t even mourning her still—when the doorbell rings.
Dad scowls. “That will be the judge and his wife—”
“His wife that’s about two decades younger than he is?”
“Shush,” Dad says.
I shake my head. “You invited them to my house?”
“I told them I would be here. Now finish your coffee and take a shower. I’ll run interference with the judge and his wife.”
“Sorry, if they want a mess taking care of their daughter’s abduction, then they get the whole mess.” I take a sip of coffee. It tastes horrid—Dad adds too much cream.
Dad shakes his head, but he doesn’t stop me from following him out the basement.
Earl Latham looks like a mixture of Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon. He has the square-shaped head and prominent Roman nose of both, with Nixon’s slicked back hair and Ford’s grim determination etched in his eyes. Usually, he has Ford’s slight curve of a smile on his lips in front of the public, but today his mouth is a straight line. He’s not showing sadness, anger, or despair. He simply appears tired of the way life has treated him. I suppose I can relate.
Vanessa, his second wife and Sarah’s mother, seems to want to look like her daughter. She’s had an obvious amount of plastic surgery done to her face, causing it to appear as if it’s made of porcelain, and her hair has been dyed a bright blond that seems like it would glow in the dark. She’s dressed in a short black skirt with a low-cut blouse, and Earl wears khakis and a white polo shirt.
/> “Judge Latham, Mrs. Latham.” Dad extends his hand to each in turn. “I am so sorry about all of this, but I can promise you, we will do everything we can to get Sarah home. You know she was like a second granddaughter to me.”
I snort, but try to cover it with a cough. A second granddaughter? As if he tried to replace Lisa with Sarah. Dad glances at me, but decides to ignore my interruption.
“But I received some bad news a few days ago…I have prostate cancer—”
“Oh, God, we’re sorry, Chief Grant,” Vanessa professes.
“It’s fine, it’s fine…good chance of survival and all…and I’ve been planning on retiring, so my son is going to be taking lead on this case,” he says, as I raise my eyebrows in an attempt to seem like I’m paying attention. “He knows Sarah well and is even more invested than I am in finding her. The FBI will also likely get involved considering she’s a judge’s daughter. Now, I’m not fond of the FBI, but I’ll put up with them as long as they can help find Sarah. And with how much money the government gives them, I’m sure they have more effective resources than we do.”
“Do you think this is someone who was found guilty in my court?” Judge Latham asks. “Not all of them went to prison, but I can’t imagine someone kidnapping my daughter over paying a fine or doing community service.”
“We can’t rule anything out,” Dad says. “But kidnappers aren’t generally the most rational people. It could be someone you sent to prison and they have connections on the outside. We don’t know. We’ll tap your phones in case the kidnapper or kidnappers call. We will find her, Judge Latham.”
The question is if we will find her alive.
Dad turns to me. “Do you have anything to add, son?”
I raise my head and look straight at him. I think of Lisa, growing up until she died a few months before her sixteenth birthday. As much as I’d like to close myself off from the world, I know Judge Latham and Vanessa must feel the same way about their daughter. I don’t want them spending the rest of their lives watching old home videos, wishing they could step into the TV screen and find themselves back in the past. I turn to Judge Latham and Vanessa. “We will find her. We will move heaven and earth to get her.”
Let’s just hope it’s not heaven that she has moved on to.
9
Pete, 2015 (Late Friday night)
I DIG MY PINKIE finger into my ear. It feels like the noise from the tires rolling against the road is scraping my eardrum, but the feeling only gets worse. I’m certain my head is going to explode and some medical examiner is going to have to peel my skull off Kenny’s windshield. There’s no way I could be crashing from the meth yet, so God must be punishing me for my sins. I should have gone to confession like my mother said I should.
“Oh, God, pull over,” I tell Kenny. He doesn’t seem to be any better than I am. He keeps rubbing his left eye with the heel of his hand and blinking like he can’t believe the interstate is in front of him.
“We can’t, man. I’m sure the police are following us. We have to keep moving. We can’t lead them back to the lab. We have to get the hell out of Dodge,” he says.
“I’m going to throw up.”
“NO! Not in the car.”
He jerks the wheel—as my whole body slams against the door—and parks on the shoulder of the road. I jerk the door open and dry heave over the tiny, jagged rocks separating the asphalt from the grass.
“We have to keep going,” Kenny mumbles. “If she’s dead—”
“She’s not dead,” I snap, though the fear of being a murderer has consumed me. “She’s just…she’s just—”
“Dead,” Kenny repeats.
I stumble onto my feet. “Pop open the trunk. We’ll see. We’ll see if she’s alive.” I walk around the car as I hear the trunk unlock, and then lift the trunk door up. Sarah is curled inside the trunk in almost the exact position when Kenny had shoved her in there.
Kenny. That’s right. Kenny is the one who slammed her into the trunk. If she’s dead, it’s his fault. I’m not a murderer. I’m not.
I poke Sarah’s shoulder as Kenny shuffles up beside me. She doesn’t move. I poke her again. Nothing.
“She’s dead?” Kenny asks.
I grab her wrist. Her skin is still relatively warm. How fast can a body lose heat? I try to find her pulse, but it feels like my own skin is trembling, so I can’t tell the difference between her pulse beating and my own strange bodily sensations. I press my hand against her chest, avoiding her breasts because I’m not a damn necrophiliac, and hold my breath.
It comes slowly. An unsympathetic heartbeat that doesn’t want to reveal itself to me. But it’s there.
“She’s alive.” I breathe.
Kenny’s whole body slumps against the car with relief. “Man, can you imagine if she’d been dead? We would’ve been killers. Killers! All for Mason and his stupid, greedy face. This plan better work. I’m not going to prison.”
I notice a red streak in Sarah’s hair. I trace up the strands until I find a small area where the blood is coming from. I run my fingers over it and find a large, raised lump. “She’s bleeding. She’s got a lump on her head.”
“What!” He shoves his head next to mine, hitting it against the trunk door. He runs his hand over where her lump is. “Motherfucker. We have to get this shit over with. Where’s her phone?”
“Her phone?”
“How else are we going to call her father? Where is it? She had it with her when we jumped her,” he says.
I stare at him, forgetting for a second what we’re talking about. Oh, the phone. Her phone. The phone with the pink case that I threw… “It’s still in the parking lot,” I whisper. “We left it in the parking lot.”
“Are you shitting me?” Kenny asks. “The police are gonna get us for sure. They’ll see that and know she was taken. No teenage girl goes anywhere without her phone. Jesus Christ! They’re probably already looking for us.”
“There’s no cell signal on this interstate anyway. We can…go to a gas station and use their phone.”
“Yeah, because the police won’t trace that call and ask the cashier about who used the phone.” Kenny rolls his eyes. “You’re an idiot.”
“I’m an idiot? You’re the one who tried to kill Sarah!”
“I wasn’t trying! Why would I try to kill our moneymaker!”
“Because you’re an idiot!”
Kenny swings his fist at me, but I dodge it.
He huffs and slams the trunk closed. He flips his hand over and inspects where Sarah bit him. “It’s beginning to swell. I hope she didn’t have rabies. Where does a girl learn to fight like that anyway? I bet she does have some kind of disease.”
I stare down the road. Interstate A-1 is barely used around this area. It’s not like the lower forty-eight states where the traffic is constant, but it still accommodates truck drivers…and truck drivers need to make calls back home since there’s no cell service out here. “There’s a pay phone at a truck stop not too far away. It’s about twenty-five minutes from here.”
Kenny nods. “I remember, but what about Sarah? We can’t just keep her in the trunk and drive around with her. What if we get pulled over? And there could be people at the truck stop. The last thing we need is for her to wake up and start banging against the sides of the trunk. We need someplace where nobody will go near—”
“—Like the cabin…”
“…that can’t be traced back to us,” he finishes.
I glance toward the horizon, hoping an answer will shine across the landscape. Instead of the usual beauty of Alaska, I see a large mountain of dirt far off in the distance. “Wasn’t that once a gold mine?”
Kenny peers at the dirt mountain and snorts. “More like a fool’s errand. Old Timothy Reever was certain there was gold there and used all of his funds to dig it up. He ended up dying in debt and living on the street. At least that’s what Pops told me. He could have just made that up to scare me into being a responsible adult.
Look how well that plan worked out.”
“But it’s abandoned, right?”
“Yeah. What? You think you’re gonna find some gold there and get the money to Mason that way?”
“No.” I grab the keys from him. “I think it’s a good place to keep Sarah. Nobody will think of going to find her in an old, abandoned mine. They’ll be looking for a house or something.”
Kenny grins. “You may be the brains in this operation.”
I open the driver’s door. “Of course I am.”
As I settle into the driver’s seat, it occurs to me Sarah might not be safe in the mines. It’s far enough away from the interstate that it’s become part of the wilderness. But I’m sure there aren’t any bears in it. Pretty sure.
* * *
It takes a few minutes for my eyes to adjust to the darkness in the mine. I shift Sarah on my shoulder. She’s knocked out cold, but alive and that’s what matters. Sarah’s arm bounces against my back with every step I take. She’s lucky she’s thin or else I would have just dumped her body right here.
Kenny walks behind me. “What if she wakes up, man?”
“Well, we’ll just have to make sure we get the ransom money fast. We won’t offer Sarah, we’ll just tell them where she is, so if we hide her deep enough in here, she won’t be able to find her way out, but a search team will be able to find her. I mean, girls have no sense of direction, right?” I ask.
Kenny stares at me. “My sister is a pilot for Chrome International Airways. I’m pretty sure she has a good sense of direction.”
I roll my eyes. “She’s an exception. Most girls I know get lost a mile away from their houses.”
“You don’t even know any girls.”
“I know plenty of girls.” I stop and glance around. “We should probably do something to make sure we don’t get lost.”
Midnight Sun: A Gripping Serial Killer Thriller (A Grant & Daniels Trilogy Book 1) Page 3