Full Circle

by Mariella Starr

  They arrived with skidding tires, both Jack and Clay jumping out of their vehicles.

  "Buck, stay with Alex in the truck," Jack ordered. Buck clamped a hand on the struggling boy's shoulder and pulled the truck door closed.

  Jack had his keys out, but the door wasn't closed all the way. Clay had already pulled his gun, and he entered the house first. They looked around the kitchen and saw the alarm-system control panel smashed and dangling by wires.

  "I smell pepper spray," Jack said, as he and Clay continued through the house. The laptop computer in the family room was smashed, and on the floor, the cables ripped out of the back of it. They searched room by room, and when they came back downstairs, Agent Bill Coulter and several other men were entering through the open back door.

  "Is she here?" Agent Coulter demanded.

  "We haven't found her yet," Clay Tucker answered.

  "We haven't searched the basement or the attic yet," Jack said, but when he headed toward the basement door, Agent Coulter motioned for his men to go instead. Several headed down to the basement while more went upstairs.

  "How long has it been since Sheriff Raintree was in contact with anyone?" Agent Coulter demanded.

  "About thirty minutes ago with our dispatcher," Clay Tucker said. "That was right after she sent out that email with the dates."

  "Let me go!" Alex's young and angry voice burst into the kitchen ahead of Buck by only a few steps. "What's wrong? Where is Josie?"

  Jack gave a nod to Buck, who caught the boy by the arm. "We don't know yet." Jack ran outside.

  "The basement's clear," one of the Agents said as they came back into the kitchen.

  "Attic and upstairs are clear," said the Agents coming down the stairs.

  "Her patrol car is in the garage, and the door was down," Jack said, coming back into the kitchen. "When she's driving a department car, she never puts it in the garage."

  "Check her vehicle, and check the garage and outbuildings," Agent Coulter ordered. "She could be simply out of contact. Check with the neighbors to see if they saw anyone here recently."

  Three hours later, more Agents milled around talking on cell phones or among themselves while Agent Coulter spent most of his time on the phone. They heard words such as task force, alpha teams, and crime labs, but little seemed to be happening.

  "Yikes, someone smashed Josie's computer," Alex said.

  "That's new," said Jack, aiming his words more toward Agent Coulter than to the boy. "The rest of the damage was done during the storm."

  "What happened to the TV?" Alex asked.

  "I told you last night, high-wind damage. You've been cleaning up damage from it all day," Jack said, somewhat short tempered. "We haven't touched anything because we need to take photographs for the insurance company."

  Alex frowned and walked over to the widescreen TV, still sitting there with a piece of fence speared through the screen.

  The boy looked around the rest of the room, "How?"

  "I don't know how," Jack snapped. "Tornado winds cause all kinds of strange damage."

  "I know that, but how did the spear fly into the TV?" Alex asked again. "You explained angles and trajectory to me, remember? It was part of my math homework. Even if the windows on this side of the house were blown out, the angle is wrong. The fence spear couldn't have flown through the broken window and hit the TV." The boy walked over and lifted his arm above the piece of metal. "It had to be thrown from a higher angle to land this way or at an arc. Either way it doesn't work from the angle of the broken window."

  Agent Coulter was listening and looking at the configuration of the room himself.

  Jack looked around and did the math angles in his head. The boy was right. There was no way high winds had anything to do with the metal spear going through the TV screen. He walked down the hallway followed closely by Agent Coulter. He looked around the library. It was true of that room too. The angles did not add up to the damage. A tornado touchdown or wind shears might have resulted in some damage to the room but from the position of the broken window even with circular wind funneling through the opening, it would not have displaced the furniture. Again, the angles were wrong. The kid was smart to notice what everyone else missed.

  Jack turned to Agent Coulter. "We assumed this was wind damage, part of the storm, but it's not. Someone must have ransacked the house—targeting the living room and the library. It had to have been done while we were in the storm shelter. Otherwise Josie would have heard them breaking the windows. The computer wasn't damaged yesterday; neither was the security system panel and I pushed that library unit back into place so the weight wouldn't topple it all the way over and damage it. I also boxed up those old books. They're scattered all over the room again."

  "Call into your dispatch and issue an alert on her. Make sure she isn't out on a call or visiting someone. Don't touch anything else, I'll get a print team in here," Agent Coulter ordered. "There's a connection here, somewhere. I want the name of every person in this town that knew Sheriff Raintree from the time she moved here until now."

  "That's most everybody in town," Deputy Tucker said.

  "Good, by the time we're through compiling her life story, we'll know everything. The more we learn, the better chance we find something that will lead us to her."

  Josie dragged herself to the surface of consciousness. Her eyes burned; her throat was raw, and her head was pounding. She was tightly bound and barely able to move. Her arms were strapped together behind her back. Her legs were bound together at both the knees and ankles. Her left arm was broken; she was sure of that, but she was sure the rest of her seemed to be in working order although her legs were asleep.

  She remained quiet and still for a long time, listening, before slowly opening her eyes to a dark room. She was lying face down on a cot of some kind. She forced herself to try to turn over. She was in an underground room. Narrow window slits at the top of stone walls provided a minimal source of light filtered through dark, filthy glass. There was another cot shoved up against the back wall, and it looked as if someone was in it or at least the form of a person under a blanket. It was probably the missing woman. There was a rusted dinette table from the 1960s era and a single chair. Several wooden crates overflowed with magazines. Josie closed her eyes against the pain, and she drifted into a black abyss.

  The Raintree house was full of FBI and state investigators. There were teams of interrogators, profilers, computer experts and criminologists. There were computers and laptops setup on every available surface. Jack, Buck and Alex sat in the sunroom at the back of the house and listened as the agents went about their work, but they had very little interaction with them.

  One by one, the interrogators took each of them into another room to ask their questions.

  Buck meticulously sketched in Josie's birth and her early childhood with him and her mother. He told the interrogators about returning from his overseas assignment to find his wife and child missing. He went over his failed attempts to find them. He explained how he had come to Rawlings to reconnect with her.

  Jack was next in line. He told of Josie's early life in Rawlings from what little she had told him. He detailed his part of the tale, from her stealing his horse, at eight years old, to her seven consecutive years of pranks and mischief until he left town for college and later joined the Navy. They took particular note of his return to town along with his immediate reconnection with Josie and their working together at his old family home until the discovery of the bodies.

  They interviewed Alex. He told how he had hidden in her shed, how she had taken him in and was fighting to get custody of him. After his interview, the boy wandered around the house trying to listen in on everyone, but also trying to go unnoticed so no one would send him to his room.

  They brought in Josie's neighbors one by one, as well as the staff from the sheriff's office. The FBI collected more data, and they continued to interview people. They could not locate a few people, and those people were
red-tagged until located.

  Mayor Aiden Roland raised the brightest flag. The investigators researched and charted his recent absences. They brought in Mrs. Greer, his aunt, for interrogation. They issued a bench warrant on him for questioning.

  The FBI did not stop questioning townspeople until well after midnight and resumed a scant four hours later. Agent Coulter asserted that if his team wasn't stopping to sleep, he didn't give a damn who they had to wake up. The list of people to question was long. Every individual on each team realized the importance of his or her job—time now, was the essential factor. The computer specialists compiled accumulated data as fast as they received it.

  Buck sat in a chair staring off into nothing. Alex eventually fell asleep on the couch. Jack sat beside the boy, silently cursing himself for not protecting Josie better.

  By morning, he was weary, but still alert. There had to be some way he could help.

  Josie knew she probably had a mild concussion. She was drifting in and out of consciousness. She had been awakened once. She tried to scream as a hood was pulled down over her eyes, her mouth duck taped, and the hood pulled down the rest of the way over her entire head. She hadn't had time to see who was doing this to her. She pretended to faint, slumping over, and remaining still. Apparently, her abductor was not ready for her because he didn't try to wake her again. However, he did feel up her breasts and groped between her legs. She pretended to be unconscious, and she didn't dare react. She was helpless at the moment, she and the other person on the cot. Her mind was fuzzy, and she was in pain, but she knew she had to remain still and silent.

  She didn't want to know if they were going to assault and murder the other woman, but there was nothing wrong with her hearing and she heard.

  The person in the other cot was awake, and low voices held a whispered conversation. Josie couldn't make out what they were saying. She couldn't believe what she was hearing. The person on the other cot was not another victim. Josie wasn't listening to a sexual assault. She was listening to loud, enthusiastic, consensual sex.

  Josie lay still, unable to move, unable to believe what she heard, only praying that she would not pass out again. She needed to be alert. The sexual activity seemed to last for hours as the two individuals grunted and moaned. There was male laughter. At last the noises stopped. She heard movement, rustling sounds and footsteps. A low and wheedling voice said, "Don't do her until I can watch! I deserve that much!" There was more laughter and sounds of heavy footsteps and a door closing. She heard the lock click.

  A continuous stream of people filed through the house as the interrogators interviewed more people and gathered more data. Jack's opinion of Josie, already high, was validated. The people of Rawlings thought the world of Josie. She had been the least likely child to succeed, and she'd fought her way out of a bad home situation and made something of herself. The townspeople respected and were proud of her.

  The FBI ordered a cadaver dog, which was in transport along with its trainer. They would go over every inch of the Rawlings' property searching for bodies or anything else that could be a clue.

  "I've got something! Two correlations at least," one of the computer technicians said, looking at a large chart on his screen.

  Agent Coulter looked at the chart.

  "It tracks sir, for at least three of the women."

  "What is it?" Jack demanded.

  "It's not conclusive," snapped Agent Coulter turning to one of his people. "Get a bench warrant out on Albert J. Richards. We already have one out on Aiden J. Roland

  "Jimmy and Aiden?" Jack exclaimed. "You interviewed Jimmy yesterday. He's been a friend of Josie's since childhood."

  The computer technician looked to Agent Coulter, who nodded, giving the technician his permission to speak. "We've asked everyone interviewed to supply dates and times when they were out of town. The last three dates when women disappeared correlate with the approximate dates of business trips Mr. Richards' wife said he took. She does the bookkeeping for his business and supplied the dates from his business logs. In her interview, she said her husband took road trips to locate supplies and parts for his business and he was occasionally out overnight. He left on one of those business trips early this morning.

  "Mayor Roland's sick days from work correlate with the dates of the missing burn victim and Layla Blackcrow's abduction."

  Agent Coulter looked at Jack. "I don't believe in coincidences."

  "Jimmy's real name is Albert?" Alex asked, only to receive stern looks from Buck and Jack. Jack pointed upstairs. The boy trudged up a few steps, stopped, turned around, sprinted back down and went to the bookshelf over the small desk in the family room.

  "Alex! Upstairs!" Jack ordered sternly.

  "Josie said if you don't want something found, hide it in plain sight," Alex said. "It's the on-going game we play. You know, I take something of hers and hide it in plain sight to see if she can find it. She does the same with me. Part of the game is we don't tell each other what we have taken. You have to be observant and notice what is missing or what shows up somewhere it's not supposed to be. She found what I hid before I went to camp. She told me as we were going upstairs last night, but she said she was busy so I could start the game over. So, I took a book with her initials on the cover. She doesn't tell many people because she doesn't like it, but Josie's first name is Adelia. Josie is her middle name. I took Josie's book and hid it."

  "What's that got to do with anything?" Buck demanded.

  "Jack said someone ransacked the library during the tornado storms," Alex explained. "That takes guts and desperation. He also said they came back and ransacked the house again. I found the book after I got here last night, and you all yelled at me. I went to bed, but I was still hungry, so I came back down to get something to eat and I was poking around for a while. I saw something sticking over the edge of that funny looking cabinet in the library and saw it was a book with Josie's initials on it. I hid it knowing that Josie would look for it in plain sight. Josie's initials are AJR. They've all got the same initials—Josie, Mr. Roland and Mr. Richards. What if the book I hid isn't Josie's? What if Josie found a book belonging to one of those other guys and he wanted it back bad enough to hurt her? What if one of those guys is the Sandbox Killer?" Alex plucked a brown leather volume off the shelf over the computer.

  "Give me that," Agent Coulter snapped, taking the book from the boy's hand, but he didn't touch it directly, holding it instead with a piece of plastic. He snatched a plastic glove out of a box on the kitchen island and jerked a plastic glove over his hand. He opened the book, flipping through a few pages before his eyes turned hard. "You, upstairs!" he snapped at the boy."

  Alex gulped and ran up the stairs.

  Agent Coulter turned to the head investigator for the State. "Change both those warrants to suspected murder."

  "What is it?" Jack demanded.

  Agent Coulter handed the book to the head of his forensic team. "It's the journal of a serial killer: dates and details," he said seriously.

  "How did Josie get it?"

  "I don't know, and I don't know why she wouldn't have turned it over to us," Agent Coulter said. "Especially if she suspected she was a target. She has an excellent record and it doesn't make sense."

  "She wouldn't have kept that kind of evidence from you," Jack said. "She's too good a cop for that. There must be another explanation."

  "Agent Coulter," the head of the forensic team interrupted with the book open as she and two others were reading it. "The killer has a den. He refers to it as 'my place.' It's not unusual for a serial killer to burrow in somewhere, find a place where he feels safe, a place where he can play with his victims. According to this journal, AJR has one."

  Jack's head came up as his mind was putting the facts together. "I sold off most of the furniture from my parent's house, but I kept a few of my mother's pieces and put them into storage. If this AJR person was using my parents' old house, he was probably comfortable enough to keep his jou
rnal there. About a week ago, Buck and I brought some of my mother's furniture over here. We probably brought the journal in with us hidden in the furniture. Everyone knows I sold off the contents of the house. I don't think I told anyone except Josie that I kept some of my mother's favorite pieces." Jack's eyes met the Agents.

  "The mayor asked me several times where I'd sold the furniture. He said he wished I'd asked him first before selling it, because there were some antique pieces he would have bought. He said he remembered the pieces from having visited my father's house when he was younger and that he is a collector of antiques. He might have been trying to find out where I'd shipped his journal off to accidently. He was also here early yesterday morning before Buck arrived. I was re-stapling a loose tarp over the library window, he came over and interrupted me. He said he wanted to talk to Josie, but I told him she'd already left for work. He was able to see my mother's furniture in the library through the broken window before I got the tarp fixed. Aiden was here, but according to Sheriff Tucker, he hasn't been seen around town or shown up for work in days. I didn't know that yesterday morning."

  "This is a small town. The killer must know we're here, and searching for Ms. Raintree," Agent Coulter surmised.

  "If he believes she has the journal, there is no reason for him to keep her alive," Jack said.

  "That may not be the reason he took her," the profiler inserted. "This killer's been going about his business for two decades with no one noticing. He hasn't been suspected, questioned or charged. Even though the scenario has changed lately, and his victims have been discovered, there's no reason for him to suspect we've uncovered his identity. Psychopaths have huge egos. They never believe they're going to be caught. Sometimes they're so disturbed, they don't believe they're doing anything wrong. He might still be playing his game. He's snapped, there's no doubt about that, but unless he is directly challenged, he won't know that anyone is onto to him. He probably still thinks he still has everyone fooled. It's possible, the identity of the killer may be either of the men you suspect. It's possible that it's neither of them. We're going to have to run these initials through our database of all the townspeople. We'll probably come up with a half dozen matches for these particular initials.