And it dawned on me.
I was in a cistern.
A catch basin for rainwater or the flow of an underground spring, this cistern must’ve fed the Barrett farm back in the nineteenth century. Topped by a hand- or windmill-driven pump, it might’ve provided water for the house, the barn, and the outbuildings. In later years, pipes could’ve carried water directly indoors. But I didn’t see any evidence of plumbing now. And I didn’t see a way out.
I scooted again, leaned my aching back against the brick. Every bone in my body felt like it was collapsing into the right half of my torso, confirming my self-diagnosis. Still, the support of the wall made me feel better than standing or lying down would.
The cistern must’ve been capped. And I’d fallen through it during my flight. That explained the broken boards down here with me. But did anyone born in this century even know this vault existed? Whoever or whatever paced above certainly did.
I rested my head against the masonry. My attacker wouldn’t come down after me. After all, how would he get out? Immediately, however, a half a dozen possibilities involving ladders, ropes, and all sorts of weapons came to mind. Each one made me more uneasy than the last.
But the pain and fatigue took their toll. They overrode fear and I passed out again. And the next thing I knew, I heard my name on the wind.
Jamie? Jamie, where are you?
I opened my eyes to the pale yellow light of dawn. And alarm ricocheted along my nervous system. I was still in the cistern. But was I alone? Had my assailant found me?
Jamie? Jamie!
A shadow bounded over the hole above. Or maybe I imagined it. I began to lose consciousness again—and then I heard the barking.
It was Barrett’s dog, Theodore the Labrador, raising a ruckus.
Because she had found me.
Chapter 35
It took six men with shovels and a backhoe to open the cistern. And it took four paramedics to lift me out. Strapped as I was to a backboard and hauled up on ropes, the trip to the surface of the earth was the ride of a lifetime—not that I ever wanted to repeat it.
When I emerged from the reservoir, the morning sun blinded me for a split second. And in that moment, someone clasped my hand. His palm was warm and strong and felt so good to hold on to, I closed my eyes and sighed.
A cheer went up that would’ve made a major league baseball team proud. Half the town must’ve turned out to search for me. I tried to take a peek, but only nearby faces swam into view. I saw the paramedics, the tip of Theodore’s sweeping tail, Sheriff Rittenhaus’s ugly mug, and even Shelby’s curly head. I heard Marc’s voice, too.
“Stand back!” he shouted. “Give them some room!”
“I want an IV drip on her, stat,” Elise said.
I couldn’t see her, but I knew she was jogging beside me as the paramedics carried me along. I doubted she had admitting privileges at Fallowfield’s hospital, yet that didn’t stop her from ordering a long list of medicines for me. She prescribed procedures like a CAT scan, too—and one more thing.
“She’ll need a rape kit,” Elise said.
But that wasn’t true.
“No,” I rasped. “And when I find ’im, I’ll make ’im sorry ’e tried.”
Relief, as refreshing as a cool drink of water, rippled through my little contingent. Because broken ribs and a gunshot wound to the shoulder were bad enough. But these men and women who treated trauma everyday knew rape was more than an attack against the body. It was an assault against a person’s humanity. It was designed to denigrate and destroy. Survivors battled those effects for weeks, months—even decades. And no one deserved to be saddled with that.
“Can you ID him?” Rittenhaus asked, and I heard the tension in his voice.
I tried to shake my head, ended up wincing.
“But ’e raped Kayley,” I managed. “And Pamela.”
The hand gripping mine gave my fingers a gentle squeeze. Someone was proud of me. Someone was grateful I’d found out who’d hurt the others—and someone was grateful I hadn’t been hurt worse myself. I blinked, forced my eyes to focus on the cuff of his denim jacket. I followed the line of it up his arm and discovered Barrett holding my hand. It felt like he’d never let go.
He didn’t speak to me just then, didn’t say a thing when the EMTs loaded me into the ambulance. He didn’t open his mouth as we zoomed to the hospital, either. But he stayed by my side.
At the emergency room, Barrett paced beyond the flimsy curtain that offered the pretense of privacy. He kept his distance while the ER doc catalogued my injuries. I had three cracked ribs, plus a lot of bumps and bruises. To top it off, my gunshot wound was sore and on the brink of infection. And when the physician was done telling me this, Luke Rittenhaus wanted to question me.
“Be brief,” Elise warned him when he stuck his head into my cubicle.
She hovered, fussing with the beeping box that monitored me.
“I’ll cut right to the chase,” Rittenhaus said. “Help me identify who did this to you.”
“Definitely male,” I replied. “About your height. Five-ten?”
“Five-eleven.”
“Five-eleven, then. And he’s a smart one.”
I figured he’d have to be. He hadn’t left DNA traces with Pamela back when the technology to discover them was brand new. And Rittenhaus had admitted the guy hadn’t left traces with Kayley now.
“He’s fit,” I remembered. “He kept pace with me across Wentz’s field. He ran up the ridge right behind me and fought with me there.”
The sheriff scribbled in his little notebook. “Did you note anything about his appearance? Take in his aftershave? Facial hair? Tattoos? Skin tone of his hands?”
“He told me he attacked Pamela.” Which didn’t answer Rittenhaus’s question. But it was all the solid info I had. “He said he assaulted Kayley. And I know he hates Barrett.”
“Pardon?”
Rittenhaus’s lantern jaw was dark with five o’clock shadow, but his cheeks paled at my revelation. Elise, silent, turned to gape at me. And in the hall, beyond the privacy drape, I sensed Barrett halt and listen.
“He hates Barrett,” I repeated. “He hates Barrett because Pamela preferred him. He was jealous then and he still hates him now.”
“I see.” Rittenhaus wasted no time flipping his notebook shut. He crammed it in a pocket. “But you didn’t get a look at him? You wouldn’t know him if you ran into him on the street?”
“No.”
And I hated to admit it.
“Well, if you think of anything else…”
The sheriff retreated behind the curtain. If he exchanged words with Barrett, I missed it because my attending physician bustled in. He wanted to ship me upstairs for a nice, quiet hospital stay. But he’d already pumped me full of intravenous antibiotics and a whole lot of painkillers. Thinking of my assailant’s willingness to rub out his victims, my state-of-the-art security system, and my eiderdown duvet, I declared my intention to leave the hospital and go home.
Of course, my home was south of D.C. and about five hundred miles away. That little detail dawned on me a bit too late. But then Elise chimed in.
“Release Jamie to me,” she told the doctor. “She can rest at my grandmother’s.”
The notion of retiring to Miranda Barrett’s cheery farmhouse was so comforting, I had to blink back tears.
Barrett still said nothing as he drove Elise and me to the orchard. Mrs. Barrett was on the front porch when we pulled in, Theodore standing at her hip. Barrett tried to lift me from the passenger side of Elise’s car and carry me to the house in his arms. But my injuries weren’t about to stand for that. Rather cranky myself, I pushed his hands away.
“I swear to God, Barrett, if you put any more pressure on my ribs, I’m going to turn inside out.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
He might’ve been apologizing for setting off the pain cascading through my body. Or he might’ve been apologizing fo
r more than that. But I stopped myself from figuring it out because I needed to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other if I was going to make it into the house.
Moving slowly and stupidly, I knew, was as good as it was going to get for a while. Gone were the days when doctors bound up cracked ribs, rolling patients in bandages until they looked like mummies. Now medical science dictated prescription pain meds and rest. Breathing hurt. Standing and walking hurt. Lying down would be impossible.
Sitting wouldn’t be much of an improvement, but it was the best bet. Elise knew this better than I did, and when she guided me into her grandmother’s parlor, I found the rose-patterned side chair had been dressed up with goose-feather pillows, a blanket, and sheets. Gratefully, I sank into the little nest. With the pillows to support me, and my feet on the ottoman, I felt almost normal. Almost.
Still, I dozed off, sleeping into the afternoon and waking to murmurs in the hall.
“There she is,” Mrs. Barrett crooned when I opened my eyes. “My dear, there’s someone here to see you, if you’re up to receiving visitors.”
As she retreated, Marc swept into the sitting room bearing a bouquet of sunflowers. In his other hand, he carried a shopping bag. He laid both offerings across my knees.
“Today’s the second time you had me worried,” he said, and took a seat on the edge of the sofa.
I shoved myself higher on the cushions and regretted it immediately. Stan Liedecker was a pussycat compared to the guy who’d cornered me yesterday. But mentioning that to Marc would only make matters worse, so I thanked him for the flowers and for the bag.
“Go ahead and open it,” he said. “It’s stuff from your Jag. Rittenhaus had it towed at Fallowfield’s expense and the jarhead told me he’s having the windshield replaced.”
“His name’s Barrett,” I grumbled.
“Whatever.”
Marc grinned. And I forgave him for his impudence as I listened for Barrett’s low rumble coming from the kitchen, or for his footfall elsewhere in the house. I didn’t detect either one.
Marc said, “I did an end run around the sheriff while you were in the hospital, and got the autopsy results on Eric Wentz. His tox screen? Clean as a whistle.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. And since the sheriff’s had his hands full, I pulled some strings, got my hands on the crime scene snaps of the murdered deputy and of the Wentz girl, too. I sent them off to a forensic scientist I know. It’s not official, but my guy says the bruises match.”
“So my attacker throttled Dawkins before setting him on fire.” My hand drifted to my own throat. “And choked Pamela unconscious before hanging her two decades ago.”
“We’re damn lucky he didn’t do the same to you, babe.”
But something about all this didn’t sit right with me.
Why?
Marc said, “We turned up Vance’s stash hidden in the storage unit where he died, but the chemical composition doesn’t match the junk Llewellyn peddles, so I don’t have a link between Llewellyn’s drug trafficking and any of the residents here. Thanks to the tox screen, I don’t have a link between Eric Wentz’s suicide and drug trafficking, either. In short, I don’t have anything.”
“Maybe not yet,” I said. “But Eric Wentz didn’t kill himself. And I’m not going to automatically accept that Vance McCabe did, either.”
“Well, he’s looking good for it. Besides, the sheriff told that dentist who plays coroner they’re suicides. Slam dunk, Sinclair.”
I frowned, rested my head on the pillow tucked behind me. Marc took this as a hint that I was overtired and decamped. My body was certainly weary, but truth be told, my mind was restless—because no matter how I put the pieces together, they just didn’t fit.
Frustrated beyond measure, I pawed through the contents of the bag Marc had brought me. I found the XJ8’s owner’s manual in there, along with my vehicle registration, and the rest of the contents of my glove box. I found loose change, a tube of ChapStick, and a coupon for a dollar off dry cleaning, too. Last but not least, I found the phone book I’d lifted from Miranda Barrett’s kitchen and the mechanical pencil I’d used to mark McCabe addresses on the directory’s map. One by one, I erased every asterisk that marked the residence of a McCabe cousin.
Elise came to check on me when I was almost done.
“Take two of these,” she quipped, handing me a couple of capsules that could’ve choked a horse, “and call me in the morning.”
Speaking of morning, I hadn’t seen Barrett since he’d chauffeured me from the hospital shortly before noon. I swallowed the painkillers with a gulp of water and asked her, “Where’s your brother?”
“He’s out back. Over the garage.”
Elise tidied the table at my elbow even though it didn’t need it, picked up the flowers Marc had brought me, spoke to them instead of speaking to me.
“Jamie, Adam swore he’d find you if he had to search every stand of trees and every storm drain between here and Canada.”
But that didn’t mean he loved me.
Only that his compassion had driven him above and beyond the call of duty once again.
“I thought I saw Sergeant Shelby,” I said, trying to change the subject, “when they pulled me from the cistern.”
“You did. Adam phoned her,” Elise said, fading into the kitchen with my flowers. “He asked her to join the search for you.”
I didn’t like the sound of that at all. Barrett had dug himself deep by deciding to go AWOL. But I didn’t want him hauled off to a court-martial because he’d cared enough to recruit rescuers to save my skin.
The sharp ache in my side or the one in my soul had me blinking back tears. I glanced at the map on my lap. Without meaning to, I found the curving country road where the Barrett orchard stood—and I penciled a tiny heart in its place.
Once, poor Vance McCabe had proclaimed his love by doing something similar. And not for the first time, I wondered if Pamela had known of his affections. If she’d loved Vance instead of Barrett, would her jealous assailant have left her alone? I had no way of knowing. On the map, I pinpointed the approximate place where she’d lost her life and drew a question mark to commemorate her useless death.
Her brother had died as well, blasted in a bloody bathtub. Whether suicide or homicide, he was just as gone. Thinking of him, I picked out the location of the Starlite Motel and marked it with an X.
And when I looked at what I’d done, the sprockets of my brain whirred into high gear.
Vance had died at Hidden Hills Storage. The place felt rural, but it was just inside the town limit, and so was the rail yard where the two hikers had supposedly died of exposure. I added an X to the map for each of them.
That made four X’s in all—and Rittenhaus had had ready excuses for each of them. But the killings of Dawkins and Kayley? He’d been so angry about those, he’d made no attempt to explain them away.
Maybe losing his deputy and the abuse of an innocent teen had plucked at the lawman’s heartstrings. Or maybe, just maybe, those deaths were different. Because they’d occurred in a different location.
Hastily, I added exclamation points to the map where Dawkins and Kayley had each been killed. As the sheriff of a small town and surrounding county, Rittenhaus had these sites within his purview. They were inside his jurisdiction—even though they were outside Fallowfield’s town boundary.
Yet the killings inside the town limit hadn’t garnered the same kind of reaction from him. And I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. Dawkins had observed it as well.
There was a pattern here, if only I could bring myself to recognize it. According to the map, between the outlines of town and countryside, Fallowfield was a box within a box. And that’s when the truth hit me with all the shock of a lightning strike.
In military parlance, Fallowfield was a kill box.
Chapter 36
I struggled out of my chair and into the kitchen. I had to show the phone book’s
map to Barrett. He was a soldier; he’d understand what I needed to tell him. And he was a law enforcement officer. He could help me do what had to be done next.
Because Fallowfield was a kill box.
And everything that had happened in the last few days boiled down to that.
In the simplest terms, a kill box is a strike zone. To the soldier, sailor, airman, or marine, it’s his designated target area. The warfighter bore the responsibility for eliminating threats within his kill box.
But while the term might be a recent development, the concept wasn’t. In the late 1920s and through the 1930s, Al Capone and his cronies ran Chicago like a kill box, even slaughtering members of an opposing gang in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre when they dared to encroach on Capone’s plans for Chi-Town. Others knew they’d get the same treatment if they monkeyed around where the mobster said they didn’t belong, and despite the best efforts of Eliot Ness and his Untouchables, the city became a kind of kill box.
The trickiest kill boxes, though, are the ones where the authorities choose to turn a blind eye to the goings-on. At certain times and in certain places, the powerful have paid for this privilege. Some history books said that governments behind shadowy Cold War spies had done so in espionage hot spots like 1950s Istanbul. Others said 1980s drug cartels had paid out, too. In those instances, it could be said entire countries had been converted into kill boxes—and killers killed with impunity.
That, I was suddenly sure, was happening in Fallowfield.
“My dear!” Miranda Barrett exclaimed when I dragged my aching body into her kitchen. She was at the stove, stirring the contents of a tall stockpot. “What are you doing up?”
“Let me help you,” Elise said, and she rushed from washing vegetables at the sink.
But I brushed away her ministrations. “Is Adam still in the garage?”
Elise looked to her grandmother.
And Mrs. Barrett said, “He had to go.”
“Go?”
Elise sighed. “He made a deal. He asked his sergeant to help search for you.”
The Kill Box Page 25