“He told me that you supported the family—your mother too—from the time you turned eighteen. He told me that when your mother died you kept taking care of them just like they were your kids, not hers.”
“Did he?” Something rough and warm in his tone sent a shiver down Molly’s spine. Will turned sideways so that he was facing her. One hand came up to brush the hair away from her face.
“You know what I think?” he said.
“What?” Molly asked, turning onto her back so that she could look up at him. He was very close, his face just inches above hers. The hand that had been stroking her hair moved down to rest against her cheek. It was hard, and warm, and it felt like it belonged on her skin.
“I think that makes you pretty special. Pretty wonderful, in fact.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“I think you’re pretty wonderful too.” She turned her head a little, and pressed her mouth to his palm. Will went very still as her lips touched the warm saltiness of his skin.
“I really have missed you,” she whispered.
“I missed you too,” he said.
Then he bent his head and kissed her with an intensity that shook her soul.
46
“Molly, I—” Will began, lifting his head.
A shriek interrupted. It was a hideous sound, shrill and echoing. It sliced down Molly’s spine like the cold blade of a knife.
“Sam!” she gasped, scrambling up, knowing it was Sam instinctively. Will was on his feet, too, following her as she dashed for the stairs, the quilt left forgotten behind. As they reached the head of the stairs Eaton emerged from the girls’ room with a pistol in his hand and a sheet wrapped hastily around his waist below his bare chest. The light came on in the boys’ room moments before Molly reached the door. Mike was kneeling beside Sam’s bed with his arms around his little brother, she saw as she ran into the room. Sam, who was in the stage where macho was all and who scorned anything that smacked of femininity, like tears, clung weeping to Mike.
“He had a nightmare,” Mike said over his shoulder to Molly as she dropped to her knees beside the bed. As she took Sam in her arms she was vaguely conscious of Will and Eaton, with Ashley trailing them, crowding into the small room.
“Susan’s in the dark,” Sam sobbed into Molly’s shoulder. “She’s in the dark and she’s scared. I saw her in my dream. The place she’s in—it’s like a big hole, or a cave. She wants to come home.”
“Oh, God.” Molly shut her eyes and held Sam close while she fought to keep control of her own emotions. For Sam’s sake, for Mike’s and Ashley’s and Susan’s, too, she had to stay strong. “It was just a bad dream, Sam. That’s all. Just a bad dream.”
“But I saw her—she was crying. Oh, Molly, are they gonna find her? She wants to come home.”
“Shh, shh,” Molly said, stroking his hair. “Shh.”
It was a long time before they got settled down again. This time Sam was in Molly’s bed sandwiched between his sisters, and Mike slept on a mattress dragged downstairs to lie beside them.
47
“Susan.”
The coaxing voice made Susan shiver in horror. A man was in the hole with her, searching for her with a flashlight. She could see its yellow beam bouncing off the wall.
“Susan.”
She pressed back farther into the Assure she had found in the stone. Instinct had sent her scrambling into it when she had first heard him coming. It was long and narrow, perhaps ten inches wide at the opening and tapering gradually inward until it came to a point some five feet inside the wall. Slender as she was, she had managed to wedge herself almost to the end.
Maybe the man wouldn’t find her.
“Aren’t you hungry? I’ve brought you something to eat. A pizza, Susan.”
She could smell it. The spicy aroma wafted tantalizingly beneath her nostrils. Her stomach growled. Susan stiffened, terrified that the slight sound would give her away.
She was hungry. It had been a long time since she had eaten. Her last meal had been scrambled eggs. Susan remembered sitting at the kitchen table with Molly and Sam and Ashley and Mike, and almost whimpered before she caught herself. She couldn’t make a sound. She knew the man who was looking for her was bad. She knew if he got hold of her he would hurt her. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did.
She wanted to go home. She was hungry and thirsty and cold and dirty and scared to death.
“You’re not afraid of me, are you, Susan? I’m not going to hurt you.”
His voice was gentle, coaxing—and false. It chilled her to the bone. He was closer now. The flashlight played over the walls opposite where she hid. Susan turned her face to the wall and closed her eyes. Tears slid down her face.
“Oh, there you are,” he said. Against her closed lids Susan felt the bright beam of the flashlight.
She dared a peek sideways to find that his arm was in the opening and he was reaching for her. With a shriek she pushed farther into the narrow crevice—just out of the range of that grasping hand. His fingers brushed the stone no more than three inches away.
He withdrew his hand and pressed his face to the crack, shining the flashlight on her while he looked at her consideringly. Meeting that dark, merciless gaze, Susan choked back a frightened cry. She was electrified, mesmerized, by the evil she saw there.
“Come here, Susan,” he said, and reached for her again.
48
November 17, 1995
At just before seven the next morning, Will stood before a desk in the Lexington office of the FBI. A file was in front of him, lying open on the desk, turned the wrong way around so that he could read it. Libby Coleman’s file. In 1982, when she had disappeared, computers had not been put to work on every crime as a matter of course. Her name was in the NCIC data bank, along with the standard identifying information. That was all. The rest of the story—the whole case, in fact—was contained in this thick sheaf of papers that no one had yet gotten around to entering into a computer. Grim-faced, Will sifted through the stack of papers, scanning ones that caught his eye.
“Want me to brief you?” asked the young woman entering the office behind him. A glance told him that she was perhaps thirty, attractive, with chin-length blond hair and a businesslike manner underlined by her navy suit. She carried a styrofoam cup of steaming coffee in one hand. “Special Agent Cindy Rayburn.”
She set the coffee on her desk and held out her hand.
“Will Lyman.” Will shook hands. From Hal Matthews, the veteran agent who was in charge of the Lexington office, Will knew that Special Agent Rayburn had spent most of the night locating the Coleman file and sifting through the information. According to Matthews, Rayburn was one of his best. The whole office had been working flat-out on finding Susan since approximately 6:00 p.m. the previous night, when Dave Hallum had phoned Matthews from Chicago to apprise him of the situation personally.
“Brief me,” Will said.
“There is a difference in the MO,” Rayburn said. “As far as we know, Libby Coleman was abducted from her front porch at approximately 7:30 p.m. Susan was abducted from her bed at some time between 11:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m.”
“What about the victimology?” Will asked, glancing down at a photograph of Libby Coleman dated approximately one week before she disappeared. The child had round, rosy cheeks and curly brown hair that did not quite reach her shoulders. In the picture she wore jeans and a sweater that did nothing to disguise the fact that she had not yet outgrown her baby fat. A brown-and-white-spotted horse stood beside her; it was saddled and she was holding its reins. She was laughing, her eyes sparkling, as if whoever held the camera had just said or done something hilarious. Happiness and exuberant good health radiated from her. If she felt the slightest premonition of what was to come, it did not show in the picture.
“Very similar: Libby Coleman, white Caucasian female, aged twelve years at the time of her disappearance; Susan Ballard, white Caucasian fem
ale, aged eleven years at the time of her disappearance.”
“Other similarities?”
“Both disappearances occurred within five miles of each other. Both occurred on exactly the same date, thirteen years apart.”
“Exactly the same date?” Will asked, glancing at Rayburn, suddenly alert.
“See for yourself.” She extracted the NCIC form from the pile without any difficulty and tapped the date with a pink-polished fingernail. “November 15, 1982. November 15, 1995.”
“That’s it, then.” The date was the clincher, as far as Will was concerned. He had learned long ago not to believe in coincidence. Susan and Libby Coleman were victims of the same perp.
“I think so too.”
The phone rang. Rayburn spoke into it briefly, then hung up.
“They want me down in the lab,” she said. “They’re comparing fibers taken from Susan’s bedroom to fibers saved as evidence in the Coleman case. Want to come?”
Will shook his head. “I’m going to look through this.”
“You’re welcome to use my desk,” Rayburn said, picking up her coffee and leaving the room.
Will took advantage of her offer, sitting down in her chair and skimming the file for any information that might point to a particular individual as the perp. The investigators then had drawn a blank; working with the information they left behind, Will drew one too.
Like Susan, Libby Coleman seemed to have vanished into thin air. There was no doubt that someone had abducted her. But who? The disappearance of Libby Coleman had never been solved; she was still listed as a missing person. She was out there somewhere, dead or alive. And the same lunatic who had taken her had Susan.
Will was as sure of that as he was that the sun would come up in the morning.
He shut the folder, stood up, and left the office, taking the file with him. His next stop was the Woodford County Sheriff’s Department.
As it always did when he was under stress, his stomach started acting up again. Will pulled into the nearest fast-food place to get some milk to soothe it. Frowning as he waited for change, he glanced through the open pickup window at the security monitor above the clerk’s head without really seeing it; another car was behind him, distracting the clerk’s attention. Will’s milk was on the counter beside her; his change was in her hand. He watched impatiently on the black-and-white TV screen as the other driver placed his order into the microphone. The teenage clerk repeated it twice before she got it right. Finally she quoted a price, and the other driver pulled away from the order box and out of camera range, driving around the side of the building to stop behind Will.
“Have a nice day,” said the clerk as she passed Will’s milk and change through the window. Will dropped the change in the console, flipped the lid off the milk with his thumb, and drove. It was only as he was pulling out into the street and happened to glance at the restaurant’s sign that he realized where he was: at the Dairy Queen where Howard Lawrence had died.
Will took a swallow of milk and headed out Versailles Road. Lawrence’s death still bothered him. It was a loose end, another coincidence that he did not believe in. But it was not, he reminded himself, his problem. He had a far more urgent matter to worry about at the moment.
Susan had been missing for more than twenty-four hours. Everything he had ever learned about missing persons told him that time was running out.
“You’re wasting your time, in my opinion,” Deputy Dennis Hoffman said to Will half an hour later. Clad in his brown uniform, fingers thrust inside the front of his waistband, he watched as Will thumbed through the black metal cabinet that held all the department files from 1982. The file cabinet was one of many in the dimly lit basement of the sheriff’s office. Will was looking for crimes, perps, anything out of the ordinary that was the same thirteen years ago as it was today. In his car he already had an R. L. Polk Directory listing area residents from the year 1982. It contained about thirty thousand names. Of course, once the names of those who’d moved out of the area since were crossed off, there would only be about twenty-five thousand left.
That was just Versailles and the counties immediately surrounding it. If he expanded the search to include Lexington and Frankfort—both easy commutes—and other nearby communities, he would be dealing with a cast of nearly a million.
And none of the information was on computer.
“You want to know what I think?” Hoffman continued after a pause during which Will, ignoring him, scanned the records of burglaries. Fortunately, Will thought, Versailles was a law-abiding community. There weren’t that many.
“What?” Will asked over his shoulder, moving on to homicides, of which there were three.
“I think you ought to look at the brother.”
“What brother?”
“The older one. Mike.”
“Why do you say that?” Hoffman had Will’s attention now.
“You think about it. The boy doesn’t have an alibi for the time period in question; he was not asleep in the house as he first claimed; he was in fact outside in the middle of the night by his own admission; he runs with a bad crowd; I’m as certain as I can be without actually catching him with his hand in the cookie jar that he smokes marijuana, and he may be into other drugs too. We’ve been looking into a satanic cult in the area—devil worshipers, you know. My guess is he’s a part of it, along with some of his friends. Just say, for a minute, that they took that little girl for some sort of ritual.”
“Susan is Mike’s sister. He loves her,” Will said. At Will’s insistence Mike had changed his statement to the police the first thing that morning. It hadn’t endeared him to the locals, to whom Molly had originally reported Susan missing. They’d been the ones to dismiss her disappearance as a case of just another runaway. To have their judgment overruled, as it were, by the feds clearly stuck in this man’s craw.
Hoffman snorted. “Fact remains, the boy lied to us, he lied to the state police, he even lied to you folks at the FBI. Why’d he lie, you have to ask yourself? What’s he got to hide?”
“He was scared of getting in trouble with his sister for sneaking out at night,” Will said. “He’s just a kid.”
“A bad kid.”
“He is not.” Will was surprised at the vehemence of his response. “Mike’s just an ordinary mixed-up teenager like any other ordinary mixed-up teenager. What’s surprising is when they don’t get into trouble.”
Hoffman looked him over for a minute in disapproving silence, “That’s right—you been seeing the sister, haven’t you? She’s a looker, and I don’t know anything to her discredit, but I’m telling you the older boy is one to keep your eye on.”
Will didn’t know why he was surprised to find that a deputy at the local sheriff’s office knew about his involvement with Molly. He had already figured out that in little towns everybody knew everybody else’s business.
God save him from little towns!
“Mike didn’t have anything to do with Susan’s disappearance,” Will said evenly, and turned back to the files. Hoffman, who’d been on the force for only a decade and thus could tell him nothing about the Coleman case, was more annoyance than help. Will wished he would go away.
He was just opening his mouth to send the other man on a fictitious errand when a file caught his eye: Animal Mutilations.
Will pulled it out and skimmed its contents. Then he passed it, open, to Hoffman.
“Look at this,” he said, pointing to a particular passage.
Hoffman read. When he glanced at Will, he was frowning. “It’s the same darn thing that’s going on right now. Somebody was cutting up race horses.”
“Yeah,” Will said grimly. “Know what that means? It means Mike couldn’t possibly be involved in either the horse slashings or Susan’s disappearance. Because the same things were happening in 1982, when he was only a year old. Horses were being mutilated in the months before Libby Coleman disappeared, just like they were in the months before Susan was kidnapped.
Know what that makes me think? Susan and Libby were taken by the same perp who attacked the horses. He uses the animals to whip himself up to a frenzy before moving on to little girls.”
“Could be a coincidence,” Hoffman said.
“I don’t believe in coincidence.”
Hoffman stared at him. Will could see the wheels slowly turning in the other man’s mind.
“If you’re right,” Hoffman said at last, “and I’m only saying if, mind you, where’s he been for thirteen years?”
“I don’t know,” Will said. “We want to look for any area residents who were away for that time period. Say they moved, and came back. Or went to prison.”
“I’ll get on it,” Hoffman said, shaking his head. “But I can tell you right now it’s gonna be a hell of a job.”
49
Will was gone even before the bloodhounds got there, and they arrived at 7:00 a.m. Daylight was just breaking when Molly came out of the house with a sweater of Susan’s in her hand. The handlers, Bert and Mary Lundy, had asked for something that Susan had worn recently for the dogs to sniff. Mary Lundy took the sweater from Molly. She and her husband let the large brown dogs out of their crates in the back of the van, restraining them with firm hands on their harnesses. The sweater was held under each dog’s nose; they snuffled eagerly, then put their noses to the ground. While Mary Lundy held one harness and Bert Lundy held the other, the dogs moved around the house, muscles rippling under their loose coats. The Ballards waited tensely, huddled together on the porch, as the dogs quartered the property.
All of a sudden one of the glossy-coated animals began to bay.
“They’ve picked up the scent!” Bert Lundy called out. Clinging to the dogs’ harnesses, he and his wife led a contingent of police through the wooded area that ran parallel to the fields. In a few minutes the group was out of sight.
A crew from WTVQ arrived just after 10:00 a.m., followed shortly thereafter by reporters from the other local TV stations and the newspaper. Susan’s disappearance was suddenly big news; Lydia Shelly, a local reporter, asked Molly if she would like to make an appeal to the kidnapper on the air. After a brief conference with Ron Eaton, Molly agreed.
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