by Olive Balla
After walking down a long corridor, he came upon a nurses’ station, behind which sat a young man, his head bowed over a computer. The young man took his time finishing the sentence he was typing, sighed, and looked up at the deputy.
“All I can tell you is what I told the woman who was here earlier…Mina no longer works here.”
“The woman you’re talking about, was she short, with auburn hair and different colored eyes?”
“Yes, that’s her. She got really upset when I told her Mina had resigned. I got the feeling she was going to Mina’s house when she left here.”
Nick swiveled on his heel and headed for the exit. “Thanks,” he said over his shoulder.
Once back in his pickup, he reached for the manila folder on the passenger seat and found the nurse’s address in his notes.
“Twelve twenty-three Richardson,” he said into the GPS sitting on his dash. While the directions downloaded to his pickup, he headed for the hospital parking lot exit.
He should have used stronger language in telling Frankie to leave the investigation to him and Pritney. He should have threatened to charge her with interfering with an investigation. But it had seemed the more reasonable he tried to be, the more obstinate she became. And now she wasn’t answering her cell.
Fighting down the urge to floor the gas pedal, he followed instructions from the vaguely British female voice telling him to make a right turn at the next light.
****
Frankie’s eyes darted around the farm. But the bustling business of just an hour earlier looked like a ghost town.
“Too bad, so sad,” Baby Face intoned the children’s singsong taunt. “This place closes down at two o’clock. Nobody here now but us chickens. Get it? Nobody here but us chickens?” He slapped a hand against his thigh. “Oh man, sometimes I just kill myself.”
“Now there’s a thought.”
“Funny.” Baby Face hawked, and spat out a gob of coagulated blood. He drew the back of his hand across his blood-smeared face. Looking into Frankie’s eyes, he gagged, spat again and giggled. “We’re going to have us some fun. I’m going to teach you some of the lessons of life.”
“What you’re going to do is answer for my brother’s murder.”
Baby Face snorted again. “Not any time soon. Now walk, go on, over there.”
Several feet from where they stood lay the dome of an in-ground cistern used for water storage. About seven or eight feet in diameter, the dome resembled a huge upside down salad bowl. A round, chimney structure, perhaps ten inches high and twenty-four inches in diameter had been welded onto the cistern’s top. A metal manhole-type lid fit tightly into the opening through which farm staff would drop buckets and draw water in time of drought.
“Open it up and get in.”
When Frankie made no move to obey, the man lifted the gun up to her face. He grinned and pressed the barrel into her cheek, grinding the flesh against her teeth. Immediate and intense pain shot through her face and up her temples. “We don’t keep water in it nowadays, so you won’t drown. Now I said get in, or the first one will be through your face. In one side and out the other, maybe take a few teeth with it. It won’t kill you, but you’ll sure bleed.” He grinned. “The good news is it’ll make both your eyes the same color—black and blue.” Baby Face hooted again and clapped his hand against his thigh.
Frankie walked to the cistern and bent over the lid. Perspiration beaded on her upper lip, and her stomach muscles went taught. Once inside the metal enclosure, her chance of escape would be nil. She pretended to struggle with the lid. When Baby Face came closer, she threw the heavy metal cover at his head, turned, and ran.
After a couple of steps, gunshots rang out and puffs of dust blossomed at Frankie’s feet. She froze in place.
“You mess with me one more time, and I swear I’m going to kill you and tell Bellamy you just up and disappeared. He’ll be pissed, but he’ll get over it, you hear me?”
Frankie walked back to the cistern. She squatted down on her haunches, slipped her feet over the lip of the opening and sat on the rim with her feet dangling into the interior. The thin edge of the metal dug painfully into her buttocks as she bent forward and gripped the metal rim of the stovepipe opening. She began to lower herself into the cool darkness of the cistern. Pain shot through her hands and down her upraised arms as the full weight of her body came to bear on her fingers, the lip of the opening digging into the digits.
Extending her arms to their full length, she dropped into the blackness, her knees bent to avoid breaking her legs. She hit bottom almost instantly. Dust filled her nostrils and she coughed.
The air in the cistern smelled stagnant and foul. The horizontally rippled, galvanized steel walls of the cylindrical tank rose above her head. Shards of sunlight slanted through the opening, but the rest of the interior lay in darkness.
Baby Face’s head appeared in the circle of light, a black oval blotting out the sun. “You’re nothing special. We’ll see how pretty you are after a few days in here.”
“I thought you needed me alive.”
“I do. But how much alive is up to me.” Baby Face giggled as he slid the metal cover back into its sleeve.
The clang of metal striking metal set up a deafening echo. The ensuing darkness was thick enough to chew.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Nick knocked on the door of Mina’s condominium. He waited for several seconds before knocking again, harder. When the door moved a fraction of an inch, he pushed it open.
“Hello,” he called out. “Mina Landowski? Deputy Nick Rollins. I need to ask you some questions.”
Like a family of spiders backpacking to his scalp, a funny feeling started at the base of his neck—a feeling he knew all too well from his tour in Afghanistan. He unsnapped the strap on his holstered sidearm, rested his hand on its handle, and stepped further into the unlit condo.
A table lamp lay on its side on the carpeted living room floor, the bulb shattered. Something made of bright blue glass had either been dropped or thrown on the brick hearth in front of the cold fireplace. Rust colored splotches and smears marked a path from the wet bar back to the door.
Nick grabbed his phone and punched in a number. “Ted, it’s me. The nurse’s condo has been trashed. She’s not here, and there’s a good bit of blood splashed around.”
“I’ll call it in.” Ted broke the connection.
Nick scanned the room. An open handbag lay on its side on the coffee table. A cell phone, lipstick, comb and other feminine items lay scattered around the purse. A piece of white typing paper lay on the coffee table, as if someone had been sitting on the sofa studying it.
After snapping on the latex gloves he always carried when on duty, Nick lifted the paper by its corner. Printed on it was a matrix of names, dates, and strange abbreviations. Someone had circled four of the entries in red ink.
Hadn’t Frankie said something about finding a spreadsheet of patient information? Nick’s stomach formed into a hard knot. Wherever the nurse was, he had a sinking feeling Frankie was with her. And he couldn’t shake the feeling that time was running out for the two women—if it hadn’t already.
The image of Frankie O’Neil’s face swam into his vision. The determined set of her jaw. The light of battle in those compelling eyes.
Nick folded the paper and put it into his breast pocket. He ran back to his pickup, punching in Ted’s number again along the way.
****
Frankie struggled to stay calm. Her eyes felt as though they were bulging from their sockets in search for even a tiny ray of light. Her heart pounded and her breathing came in short gasps.
She choked back the scream she recognized as the precursor to a full blown hysterical frenzy. What if something happened to Baby Face before he came back for her? Or what if he decided to just leave her there? She would die of thirst. Or starve.
Uncle Mike had said the average adult could live for about five weeks without food. But that same perso
n would die within a week without water.
Knowing what took place in the human body under conditions of extreme deprivation told Frankie it would be better to starve than die of thirst. The process of dehydration did horrifying, painful things to the human mind and body. Even then, she felt comforted in the knowledge it would be quicker than having nothing to eat. And people could get awfully hungry.
Her thoughts flashed on her stores of provisions and her pitiful attempts at home security. All gone. No help to her in this place.
What about Collette? How long before someone at the motel realized something was wrong and broke open the door to her room? She didn’t allow herself to think of what would happen when the cat’s food and water ran out.
Frankie closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe deeply. Hyperventilating would waste air. And as to how long the air in a container this size would last, she hadn’t the foggiest.
When she’d calmed a bit, she poked and prodded her arms, legs, and ribs. Nothing seemed to be broken, and no fresh wetness indicated an open wound. Hopefully, she’d sustained no internal injuries either during her struggle with Baby Face or her subsequent fall into the cistern. Any one of several wouldn’t kill her quickly, but would slowly incapacitate her, making escape impossible.
Dust filled her nostrils and sent her into a coughing spasm. She tore a strip about four inches wide from the bottom of her cotton knit shirt, filled her mouth with saliva and spit into the cloth over and over, wetting a small area. She tied the makeshift air mask around her head so the moist area covered her mouth and nose. Although some dust sifted through the weave, most of it caught in the damp fabric. The panic that came with being unable to get enough air into her lungs subsided.
Based on her brief view of the cistern before Baby Face shut the lid, it was perhaps eight feet in height. Its diameter would render a chimney climb impossible, and she couldn’t jump high enough to pull herself out through the opening, even if she could somehow dislodge the tight fitting lid. If she removed her jacket and rolled it into a tight ball, she might add a couple of inches to her reach. But she needed a lot more than a couple of inches.
She moved her hands over the bottom of the cistern. The low lying spots in the warped metal floor held a fine powder of dust, and every movement stirred up a new cloud. She ran her hands in widening circles, her movements smooth and slow.
Within a few inches from where she knelt, Frankie’s searching fingers ran up against something hard. Hoping the thing could be used either as a weapon or to help her escape, she grabbed it with both hands.
But what she held was not a potential weapon, it was a shoe. A shoe on a foot attached to a very cold leg.
****
When Larry’s cell phone rang, he didn’t answer. Bellamy and Mel were the only people with his number, and he didn’t want to talk to either of them just now. Especially now. Just a couple more days, that’s all he needed.
Larry liked to think of himself as a planner. Just because some of his ideas never actually panned out didn’t keep him from coming up with them. And lots of his ideas worked just fine. He’d read somewhere that failing to plan was actually planning to fail, so from that moment on he’d done very few things on the spur of the moment.
He closed out his checking and savings accounts, packed his belongings, and sold what wouldn’t fit in his car. The subsequent heaviness of the zippered bank bag felt reassuring as he stuffed it into the glove compartment of the Mercedes.
Larry smiled in anticipation of a new life. “Our new life,” he said out loud.
****
Once back in his hiding place in the tree at Frankie’s house, Larry pulled out his phone. Beauty wasn’t home yet, but he’d wait. He pressed the voice mail button and listened to Mel’s recorded message.
“I found her sneaking around the farm.” Mel’s digitized voice sounded high pitched and agitated. It was a tone Larry recognized all too well. “She spotted the pickup. I called Bellamy, and he told me to bring her in.”
Larry broke the connection, jumped down from the tree and ran to his car. No time for a change of plan—what the old geezer called poo had hit the fan.
****
Frankie shrieked and jerked away from her discovery. She crab-scuttled across the cistern floor until she slammed up against the corrugated metal wall, sat up, pulled her knees to her chest, and folded herself into a ball.
“Is someone there?” Her muffled voice sounded pinched and thin, like dough extruded through the tiny holes of an angel hair pasta maker. She commanded herself to slow her breathing.
The form on the floor neither spoke nor moved. No sound but the echo of Frankie’s own voice rang in the hollow darkness.
As she struggled to regain control of her trembling body, snapshots of her life tumbled over one another in a cacophony of light and sound bites. She heard the plastic-against-plastic click Uncle Mike’s reading glasses made when he closed them and put them into their case. And she remembered the look on Alma’s face when she entered Frankie’s childhood room amid gales of laughter only Frankie could hear, the laughter of people only she could see. She felt again the joy of being surrounded by countless family members, of playing hide and seek with twin cousins who’d died centuries earlier, and of listening to stories about things that happened before the human race started writing things down.
Willing herself to dissolve into nothing, she bowed her head and pressed her face against her tightly folded knees as something shifted in her mind. She crossed an unseen barrier and became a child again. Panic bubbled up from the wellspring of repressed memory as the cistern morphed into a basement, the darkness of which had haunted her nightmares for years.
I’m afraid. Jenny’s voice.
A baby wailed from somewhere overhead.
Don’t you want to be with Jenny and Timmy? A woman’s voice, flat, devoid of emotion. I’ll be back. You wait here.
“Mommy?” the adult Frankie cried into the darkness. The single word bounced around inside the cistern, ricocheting off the metal walls.
Shut up, the neighbors will hear. My Jonathan would never have enlisted if not for the three of you. Always needing this and that, and never enough money. You’re the reason he’s dead.
Like a boat rhythmically bumping against its mooring, Frankie’s mind nudged the barrier between sanity and madness. It would be so easy to give in to the emptiness beckoning her. To feel nothing and know nothing. To become nothing.
The image of Tim’s spreadsheet came into her mind. In vivid detail she saw it lying next to Esther Emory’s original medical records. Suddenly, she knew why Mina had become so agitated. And she knew that if she didn’t manage to escape and tell the police, more people would die.
A flash of heat kicked up the pulse in Frankie’s blood. It began at her sternum and coursed through her insides—so potent her flesh grew warm. It flashed through her brain, sharpening her thinking and helping her focus.
Commanding her emotions to shut down for as long as necessary in order to do what she had to do next, she took a deep breath and moved back toward the body.
Chapter Thirty
Nick sat in his pickup, his cell phone pressed against his ear. In his left hand he held a black plastic ink pen which he manipulated, weaving it around each finger until it circled his pinkie, and moved back to his thumb, a skill he’d taught himself in high school to impress the girls.
“We got people headed for the nurse’s place,” Ted said. “And I’m on my way there now.”
“How long’ve we been friends?” Nick said. “Eight, ten years?”
“Oh, about that. Since Camp LeJeune, why?”
“Just making a point. You know how I work.”
“I know your instincts are pretty good. What gives?”
“I can’t shake the feeling that Miss O’Neil and Miss Landowski are in trouble. I’m going to talk to the neighbor where she stayed when her house burned. She may know something.”
“Okay, but you n
eed to know that Blinquet in Violent Crimes has been brought in on the investigation.”
“What’s that about?”
“It seems partial human remains turned up in Miss O’Neil’s freezer. But I told Pritney all this yesterday.”
“What human remains?” Nick stopped twiddling his pen, dropped it, and sat up straight.
“The arson investigator found a partial human leg. By the way, tell Pritney I’m sorry I missed her call this morning.”
“Wait, wait, a partial human leg?”
“You heard right. It was in her freezer.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”
“That’s not the worst part. Don’t know if you knew, but we’ve had a couple of recent disappearances. Blinquet has a theory that one or both of the O’Neils were abducting people and keeping them imprisoned somewhere.”
“Oh come on. Where’d they keep them? From what I understand, Miss O’Neil only recently moved into that house.”
“Hey, that’s Blinquet’s theory, I’m just the messenger.”
“What did Miss O’Neil have to say about the leg?”
“Blinquet’s trying to find her so he can bring her in for further questioning,” Ted said. “He’s thinking in terms of a kind of Jeffrey Dahmer scenario, like maybe they ate on people a little at a time before they finally killed them.”
“Good God.”
“The missing people had one thing in common: they both worked at the same hospital as O’Neil. Blinquet’s thinking he’s finally caught a break in that case. He’s trying to get permission to take the cadaver dogs to Miss O’Neil’s half acre backyard.”
“I don’t care how this looks, there’s no way she could have been involved in something so messed up.”
Ted snorted. “How well do you know her anyway?”
“I know her type.”
“We’ve been in law enforcement long enough to know that anyone is capable of anything, given the right circumstances.”
Nick sighed. “The problem is we’re at a standstill on the brother’s murder. The stuff going on now may be in your jurisdiction, but I know in my gut it’s all connected.”