Forgotten Secrets

by Robin Perini

  This shouldn’t be. She wasn’t finished. She had too much to do. Too many secrets left behind.

  “Say good-bye.” The order was soft, emotionless, final.

  A tear escaped the corner of Cheyenne’s eye and slid down her cheek. “Let Gram go. I’m begging . . .”

  She couldn’t understand the mumble that escaped her lips. Someone rolled her over. Her mind tried to force her body to action, but she couldn’t fight, couldn’t move. Couldn’t help her grandmother. Or herself.

  Her arms were yanked behind her, her wrists bound with a hard plastic zip tie.

  Nothing she could do.

  At least one person knew she was in trouble.

  God, please get Thayne here fast. Save Gram.

  With that last prayer, Cheyenne’s world fell into a dark nightmare.

  The mid-August evening sun beat down on Thayne’s forehead through the windshield. He jerked the steering wheel, and the tires laid down tread around the corner. The sirens screamed out a warning when he sped through the stop-and-go light and a four-way stop.

  Thayne couldn’t care less that the few folks milling in front of several Main Street shops stood openmouthed, staring. All he could hear in his head was Cheyenne’s scream.

  A slow-moving Buick turned onto the road in front of him. Thayne yanked the SUV around the car without so much as tapping the brakes.

  Ed fell to his side in the backseat. “You trying to kill us?” he shouted, speech slurred.

  Thayne didn’t bother to respond.

  Almost there, Cheyenne. Promise.

  He swerved back to the right lane of the two-way road. Singing River might be less than two miles from end to end, but Thayne could’ve sworn he’d already driven across the entire state of Wyoming.

  He zipped past the empty sheriff’s office. No more vacations for anyone. Ever. He slammed on the brakes in front of his sister’s clinic and bolted from the SUV, Glock in his hand.

  His backup was on the way—sirens wailed in the distance, growing louder by the second. He couldn’t afford to wait. Two steps and he hit the door of Cheyenne’s medical clinic.

  The place looked like a herd of buffalo had stampeded through. His gaze lit on the bloodstain at the edge of the front desk, then whipped to the frail figure sagged against the wall of the waiting room, eyes closed, a bloody gash on her forehead.

  “Gram!” He hurried over and knelt next to his grandmother. He pressed his fingers to her neck, searching for a pulse, any sign of life.

  At first he felt nothing. His gut sank. He shifted his fingers along her paper-thin skin and held his breath. One second, another. Finally, he detected a faint throb beating in her throat.

  The clinic door banged open. Thayne pivoted on his knees and raised his weapon.

  Norma Baker skidded to a halt, her typically elegant silver hair in complete disarray. Her hands shot into the air.

  “Get out of here, Norma,” Thayne hissed. “Now.”

  Surprisingly enough, the retired sheriff’s office dispatcher didn’t argue with him like usual. She whirled and rushed out the way she’d come. He scooped his grandmother into his arms and followed Norma outside, settling his grandmother on the sidewalk.

  Norma hovered over them, her starched and pressed tan pants reminiscent of her days working for his grandfather and then his father.

  “Call for an ambulance. I’ve got to find Cheyenne.” Thayne tossed her his phone.

  “Be careful,” Norma said, stroking his grandmother’s face. “Even with her illness, she worries about you kids.”

  He ran into the clinic, activating his radio. “Pendergrass, where are you?”

  The speaker crackled. “Just hit Main,” the deputy responded.

  “Assault and break-in at the clinic. Keep a lookout. You see anyone heading out of town, stop them.”

  Weapon at the ready, Thayne stepped across the threshold and held still and silent, even though his first instincts screamed to shout out for his sister. He’d learned better on the streets of Kandahar. Going in with guns blazing just got people dead.

  He stepped over the stain on the floor. Too much blood.

  “Cheyenne,” he whispered, a chill piercing straight through his heart.

  He eased up to her office and rounded the open door.

  Clear.

  And nothing out of place.

  Closing and locking the door so anyone still hiding couldn’t get in or out without making noise, he shouldered into the pharmaceutical supply room. Chaos. They’d ransacked the drug cabinet and emptied several shelves.

  And no sign of Cheyenne.

  Thayne spun around, his heart pounding inside his chest, fast and desperate. He’d faced fear before. He’d searched Kandahar neighborhoods, knowing insurgents could take him out each and every time he’d opened a door, but he’d never experienced such suffocating tightness clamping down on his chest.

  His mind flew to the worst case. Cheyenne would’ve fought. Hard.

  He burst across the hall into an exam room. Empty. He pivoted and without hesitation searched the last two rooms in the clinic. No sign of Cheyenne. His knees weakened, and Thayne held onto the wall for a moment. He bowed his head. He’d been willing to go to battle, to unleash fury against whoever had terrified his sister. He’d been primed to find and save her.

  He hadn’t been prepared to not find her—or for the sick dread building in his gut.

  Jaw set so hard it throbbed, Thayne strode outside. No ambulance yet. He knelt beside Norma and his grandmother, gently taking her frail hand in his. “How’s she doing?”

  “She hasn’t opened her eyes.” Norma blinked several times. “Did you find Cheyenne?”

  Thayne shook his head.

  “Oh Lord. I saw blood. You don’t think—”

  “I don’t know.” Thayne studied Norma. “What made you burst into the clinic after hours? Were you meeting Gram and Cheyenne for dinner?”

  Norma shook her head but avoided his glance. “I monitor the radio. I heard your call and rushed over.”

  “What were you thinking taking that kind of chance? If you’d interrupted them, you could’ve ended up—” He stopped himself.

  “Maybe I could have stopped them.”

  A twitch pulsed in Thayne’s left eye. Any other time, he would’ve ripped into Norma. She prided herself on her fifty years as part of the sheriff’s office, but she’d gone too far. Again. “We’ll talk about your eavesdropping on the official scanner later.” He gave her the harshest glare he could to a woman who’d changed his diapers. “Or I might just let Pops and Dad do it for me.”

  Norma winced. “You’ve got no call to threaten me, young man.” She dabbed Gram’s forehead with an embroidered handkerchief. “Oh, Helen.” Norma looked over at Thayne. “She doesn’t deserve this. None of you do. Isn’t the Alzheimer’s enough to deal with?”

  Some things in life couldn’t be fixed. Cheyenne’s disappearance, though, he intended to do something about. Another sheriff’s office vehicle screeched to a halt. Thayne stood and faced Deputy Quinn Pendergrass, his father’s right hand for a dozen years. “Block the roads out of town and organize every person we’ve got. Dad can contact Lincoln, Fremont, and Teton counties and bring in the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, if we need them.”

  “What happened here?” Quinn asked, scanning the scene. “Where’s Doc Blackwood?”

  Thayne hated saying the words, but he couldn’t deny the truth. “My sister’s missing.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The isolated cabin could have belonged to the Unabomber. Set back in a rarely traveled stretch of woods in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, the location made for a perfect hideaway if you were a sexual sadist and didn’t want anyone to hear your victims scream.

  FBI Special Agent Riley Lambert double-checked her Kevlar vest and unholstered her standard-issue Glock. She gripped the butt of the gun and let out a long, slow breath. Five minutes and it would all be over. An unlucky first-grade teache
r named Patricia Masters would be safe, and Vincent Wayne O’Neal would never hurt anyone again.

  She had to believe that. She couldn’t think about the two months she’d spent living on double-shot coffee and wasabi-flavored nuts trying to uncover the connection between a half-dozen missing persons cases.

  It didn’t matter that she wasn’t the only member of a newly formed behavioral analysis unit specializing in the most heinous crimes received at the National Center for Analysis of Violent Crime. Or that no one on the multijurisdictional task force examining the case for the last year had come up with so much as one solid lead.

  All that mattered was that two days ago Patricia Masters had been taken right outside an elementary school by the merciless psycho who’d been stalking the east coast for three years. Yesterday Riley found the connection—a common bus route, a few hotel bills, some grainy surveillance video, and one big mistake in the form of the deed to this cabin.

  Today, the task force would save Patricia.

  SWAT moved into position. Riley caught the team leader’s hand motion. Sixty seconds.

  She gripped her handgun tighter and glanced at her supervisor. “She’s alive in there, Tom,” Riley whispered.

  He gave her that piercing you-can’t-hide-the-truth-from-me look and drew his own weapon. “O’Neal usually spends a week playing with them. We’ve got a good chance.”

  Not wanting to face his impenetrable stare any longer, she focused on the cabin’s door. Right here, right now was the culmination of a destiny that had started just one week after her tenth birthday.

  The public would have called her a profiler. The FBI called her a special agent with the new, experimental Behavioral Analysis Unit 6.

  Supervisory Special Agent Tom Hickok had pegged her to become part of the provisional team with the express purpose of embedding itself with local law enforcement task forces. Riley had jumped at the opportunity to take her psychological profiling skills on investigative assignments. The job hadn’t gone quite as planned.

  Three, two, one.

  Riley sucked in a deep breath. SWAT stormed the front door. Guns drawn, Riley and her unit followed in their wake.

  The raid took all of thirty seconds. The local authorities secured the scene with no need to search for their suspect.

  There he stood. Vincent Wayne O’Neal. The mouse of a man waited in the corner, his calm, unafraid gaze triumphant. He didn’t look like the stuff of nightmares. Riley had learned they hardly ever did.

  He cradled a rifle in his arms. “You’re too late,” he whispered, staring directly at Riley. “I win.”

  He raised the barrel, aiming at her chest.

  Riley dropped to the floor. Not fast enough. Red-hot heat sliced across her arm. She rolled to her back and squeezed off two quick rounds. A slew of bullets flew above her.

  O’Neal slumped to the floor, dead.

  Suicide by cop.

  Riley’s heart raced. Her head fell back to the floor with a thud. She lowered her weapon.

  O’Neal’s words, You’re too late, chilled her very soul. He’d been too smug. She closed her eyes against the foreboding blackness creeping around her. Not again. This time had to be different. Patricia was here. Alive.

  “Search the place,” Tom shouted. “Find Patricia Masters.”

  The pounding of boots on wood thundered through the cabin.

  Riley sat up. She had to help, but the moment she moved her arm she bit back a yelp. She glanced down at her shirt. Blood seeped through the blue cotton.

  “Medic,” her boss yelled, crouching beside her.

  The red blotch swirled. Riley blinked in an attempt to focus. A paramedic knelt down, cutting her sleeve.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Just shut up and let them do their job, Riley,” Tom said. “We’ll find her.”

  “Search behind the cabin,” Riley hissed as the paramedic worked on her arm. “He wants them close.” She didn’t mention the spots swirling in front of her eyes.

  A few minutes later, a slow thud of footsteps joined them.

  Riley looked up. “You found her?”

  “You were right in your profile, ma’am,” the cop said. “There’s a row of graves behind the cabin. Each marked by a rose bush.”

  “Patricia?” Riley swallowed deep. She couldn’t bear the pity on the man’s face.

  “We were too late. I’m sorry. She’s dead.”

  Riley froze. No! Not again.

  She squeezed her eyes shut against the truth.

  She hadn’t been able to help Patricia.

  Just like Riley hadn’t been able to help her own sister.

  The world tilted and swayed.

  “Riley.” Tom gripped her uninjured arm. “Stay with me.”

  Her wound burned. Blackness closed in on her. She was going to pass out.

  What does it matter? Really?

  She’d failed. Again.

  An unfamiliar clock’s booming chimes roused Cheyenne through the fog in her head. Eight, maybe nine times?

  She lifted her head from a hard pillow and squinted through the pitch-black room. A quick touch of the rough upholstery beneath her fingers told her she wasn’t in her own bed or at the clinic. But where?

  Her head pounded, and she gently palpated her temple. Memories sliced through her pain-filled mind. Someone had hit her. They’d hurt Gram. A sweet smell had overwhelmed her. She’d passed out.

  Say good-bye. Cheyenne remembered the words, but being dead shouldn’t hurt this much.

  So, if she wasn’t dead, she was alive.

  For now.

  A slow, metallic creak pierced the darkness. Footsteps crossed the floor toward her, coming closer and closer.

  Her heart raced. Could her kidnapper hear the pounding against her chest? The whoosh of her pulse throbbed in her head. She closed her eyes and held her breath, biting back the groan of agony. Every survival instinct urged her not to move, not to reveal she’d regained consciousness.

  A small click echoed from across the room. They’d turned on the light. She froze. The footfalls stopped. The room went silent but for a few jagged breaths above her prone body.

  “Revive her,” a deep male voice ordered. “The procedure must occur now.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  A door slammed, followed by a bolt locking them in. The sound sent agonizing ricochets through Cheyenne’s skull. She didn’t move. A sharp, stinging odor pierced her nose. She yanked her head away and gasped for air, unable to contain the cough.

  Another sharp whiff and she snapped open her eyes. Her vision blurred from the tears. “Stop,” she said, her voice cracking. “Please.”

  She pushed herself to a sitting position and swiped at her eyes, unable to focus. She heaved in a breath. The flow of air seized her throat. She clutched at her neck and erupted into a fit of coughing.

  A hand thrust a cup of water in front of her face. “Drink.” A boy of about sixteen hovered beside her. The teen tilted the glass to her lips.

  Cheyenne drank and licked her parched mouth. For the first time, her eyes focused.

  She gripped the loveseat’s cushion. Her gaze fixated on one of the rustic log walls with two doors and no windows. The gray steel one was closed, its locks appearing impenetrable, the other opened to what appeared to be a small bathroom. She scanned the back of the large room and gasped. A woman lay on a twin bed, her face flushed and wet with perspiration.

  The patient groaned, moved a little, and yelped, clutching at her belly. “Hurts,” she whispered between pants. “Help.”

  Cheyenne shoved herself to her feet and shot the kid a glare. “What did you do to her?” She stumbled across the room to the bed, ignoring the throbbing in her skull, and placed the back of her hand against the woman’s forehead. Burning with fever. She pressed her fingertips against the woman’s wrist. Pulse 117. Not good.

  “What happened?”

  “Her stomach’s been hurting for a couple of days,” the boy said, chewing on h
is lip. “She collapsed right after lunch.”

  Cheyenne palpated the woman’s abdomen. She whimpered a bit. When Cheyenne’s hands moved to the right lower quadrant, an excruciating scream ripped through the room. Rebound tenderness.

  “We have to get her to a hospital.” Cheyenne stood. “It looks like an appendicitis. She could need an operation.”

  “We know,” the boy said. He walked over to a table tucked in a corner and lifted a blue surgical drape.

  Cheyenne’s eyes widened at the array of medical supplies. She shook her head at the horrifying realization. “I’m not a surgeon.”

  The teenager sidled up to the feverish woman’s bedside and clutched her hand, his expression obviously worried. “You’re the only chance she has.”

  Cheyenne placed her hands on the boy’s shoulders and turned him to face her. “Look . . . what’s your name?”

  “Ian.”

  “Ian, she needs a hospital. She could die.”

  The boy flinched, his eyes clouded with fear. “That’s why Father arranged for you to come here, Dr. Blackwood. To save her.”

  A lock clanked and the door creaked open, revealing a woman with her hair draped across one side of her face. “Ian, Father wants a complete report on the visit into Singing River this evening.”

  Memories of Ian entering the clinic, of someone coming at her from behind, of her grandmother’s cries, catapulted through Cheyenne. “You were there.” She swayed, clutching at his arm to steady herself. “My grandmother? Is she OK?”

  He hesitated.

  “Please, don’t anger Father, Ian.”

  The woman’s pleading words sent a shiver straight to Cheyenne’s core. Father obviously terrified both of them.

  The boy nearly bit through his lip. “Yes, Adelaide.”

  He disappeared out the doorway. Pounding footsteps faded before a second door slammed shut in the distance.

  “My grandmother?” Cheyenne repeated, facing Adelaide. “Is she OK?”

  “You should be worrying about yourself.” Adelaide’s gaze softened in sympathy. “I’ll try to find out for you, but I can’t promise anything.”

  She frowned, and a tingle of familiarity niggled in Cheyenne’s mind. She looked back and forth between her patient and Adelaide. Similar hair color, with that unusual tint of auburn. Similar mouth shape, bone structure, and height, except for the scar that began at the corner of Adelaide’s eye and traveled to her chin. Related maybe?