by CJ Lyons
The jacket was black, cheap cotton, but what caught her eye was the silver stitching on the sleeve. With the help of the binoculars' magnification, the pattern jumped out at her: the Statue of Liberty.
"I've seen that jacket before," Lucy told Walden as she edged away from the house, avoiding the camera's sight lines. "Vera Tzasiris was wearing a jacket like that when I interviewed her. Right before she went missing."
She handed him the binoculars and leaned over as if catching her breath, but really to hide her face from Walden for a moment. How blithely she'd assured Vera that the worse was over, that no more harm would come to her—right before she'd handed her into the arms of a killer.
"Vera Tzasiris?"
Lucy blinked hard, ignoring the sting of unshed tears and straightened, pain lancing through her shoulder. "Call Taylor, have him pull the files for Operation Triple-play, it was a joint DEA, ICE, FBI op, went down last year. Fletcher was involved.
"We're going to need warrants for the house, the barn and a BOLO for any vehicles registered to Arthur Moore." Lucy paced as she spoke, the long grass whipping at her legs, movement her best defense against her emotions.
"Get the Allegheny County bomb-dogs up here and their EOD team to clear the buildings. And we'll need the ERT." She paused. Once the explosive ordinance disposal guys handled any nasty surprises Fletcher may have left behind, the FBI Evidence Recovery Team could then search the house in safety. The sun was in her eyes, nicking the tree line with a sharp orange blaze. It'd be dark by the time they cleared the buildings.
"We'll need lights," she added, her gaze now on the barn. She jogged towards it, wanting to get a good look before they lost the light.
It wasn't very large, maybe twenty feet by thirty. Traditional frame, white-washed with peeling paint and a wooden roof. Not quite two stories high. A pair of half doors on one side below the roof eaves, a ladder standing beside them was the only access to the hay loft she could see. She didn't see any cameras on this side, so ventured closer to check the ladder. It was aluminum, looked fairly new. But it had been sitting there long enough to leave indentations in the ground. Only one set, so it hadn't been moved.
Finally she approached the front side of the barn. Over the door, fixed to the metal frame of the spotlight was a camera. Just the one. She edged close to the wall, staying out of its field of vision. The barn doors weren't locked, although a heavy clasp and padlock hung from one door. The doors were cracked open, not wide enough to see through but enough to give her a whiff of an unpleasant and all too familiar scent. Decomp.
Damn, damn, damn. She swiped her face with her palm, felt the tension in her jaw go supernova. It couldn't be Ashley.
Which was a lie. Not as hot as it had been lately. She pressed her palm against one door. I'm so sorry.
Whoever was in there, it was too late to help them, but maybe they could help her find Fletcher.
A loud thump reverberated through the silence. Lucy jumped, drew her gun without even realizing it. "Anyone there?" she shouted. "In the barn, anyone there? FBI!"
Another softer sound, more of a rustle than a thump. Lucy's heart went into overdrive. Maybe Ashley was alive, just a few feet away from her.
Walden came running just as she reached for the door. "Stop there," she told him, pointing to the camera. He had his gun out as well. "I heard something. Inside the barn."
He eased his way along the wall to join her, his nose wrinkling in distaste as the smell of decomp hit him. "We should wait for EOD."
He was right. And she knew it. It was exactly what the Operations Manual, the FBI's Big Book, would tell her to do. She clenched her jaw, not even feeling the stabs of pain radiating down her neck. What if Ashley were hurt? What if she waited and they found her dead when they finally got to her?
"Go, wait by the car," she told him in a strained voice. The sun was almost gone, all that remained were a few brave streams of light battered and broken by the trees.
"No. Lucy, you can't go in there. It's exactly what Fletcher wants."
"Special Agent Walden, I know what I'm doing. Go wait by the car." He ignored her, his face stony. "If I'm wrong, one of us has to be able to get help. I can't leave her in there. Not if there's a chance."
"I'll go in."
"I gave you an order, now follow it." She put every ounce of authority she had behind her words. He narrowed his eyes, frowning even as he gave her an infinitesimal nod, and finally obeyed. She waited until he was clear, all the way back at the car before opening the barn door.
The door swung out, so she could only open it a little less than a foot without risking the camera picking up the movement. She clicked on the Surefire light mounted below her gun barrel, poked her head through the opening.
A wall of hay bales stood about five feet in front of her. They rose to the rafters above. Strange way to store hay. The odor of decomp was overwhelming, as if the straw had absorbed it and concentrated it. She searched for signs of any booby traps and after finding none, she stepped inside.
Listening, she heard another rustle. Something moving against the straw. It sounded as if it was coming from the other side of the wall of hay bales. She paused. If it was Fletcher making the noise—no, that made no sense. He could have cut and run while they were out of sight at the house. If he planned an ambush, there were much better ways to arrange it. Logically, it couldn't be Fletcher setting a trap.
Logic wasn't helping the churning in her gut or the adrenalin-frayed nerves sputtering beneath her skin. She forced herself to breathe, choking down the cloying stench, and stepped forward.
She scanned the darkness ahead. One step, then another into the blackness. Soon she was at the end of the wall of hay. There was a small gap, maybe a foot, before the next wall, this one perpendicular to the first and following the outside wall of the barn.
Lucy remembered the corn mazes she used to run through at Halloween. Farmers would mow labyrinths into their fields, leading kids down spooky paths where anything could be hiding in the towering corn stalks beyond. She'd always emerge, shrieking with laughter and terror, clutching the hands of her friends, frightened to their bones and loving every minute of it.
Somehow, this grown up, indoor version wasn't quite as much fun. She stepped between the two perpendicular rows of hay, now entering the interior of the ring of straw bales.
The space opened up. It was total darkness, but with the help of the Surefire she could see a vertical pole eight feet in front of her. Beside it was an overturned bucket. She took another step.
Stumbled as her foot fell on something soft and moving. Gasping, she lurched to one side, hitting the wall of straw. A heavy weight thudded against her shoulders. She leapt back, reached for whatever had hit her from above. Her hand closed on a writhing mass of muscle, cold, scaley and flailing against her back.
Hell. Not again. She whipped the snake away from her body, shuddering in revulsion. More rustling came from the darkness, it seemed to surround her. She stood rigid, trying to still the pounding of her heart.
The pale circle of light carved out glimpses in the darkness. The ground before her was littered with snakes—one of whom took that instant to slither over her foot. She kicked it away, hearing the thump as it hit the ground.
Her Glock-22 held seventeen bullets and she had two spare clips on her vest. She swung the light around. Everywhere she looked, the ground was moving. There were snakes clinging to the bales of hay, snakes dropping onto the ground, snakes in front of her, snakes behind her, snakes everywhere.
More snakes than she had bullets.
Chapter 31
Sunday 6:18 pm
Lucy's pulse hammered a jungle rhythm. She scuffed her shoes along the floor, kicking away any snakes that crossed her path until she reached the metal pole. At its base lay a thick, vinyl-coated cable ending in a padlock.
He kept her here. With all these snakes. She swallowed, it was hard work with her throat closed tight against the stench of decomp. Talk abo
ut a living hell.
She squatted, examining the cable and the overturned bucket without touching them. Why would Fletcher torture Ashley like that when he kept saying he wanted to save her?
Stretching her jaw, she popped her ears and thought hard. Was she wrong in her profile of Fletcher? Was he really just another sick sadist like Ivan, the Canadian? Or that other lover of snakes, Pastor Walter?
The padlock was closed, attached to a piece of metal that had once clamped a loop of cable. It was the cable itself that was cut. Fletcher wouldn't need to do that, he'd have the key.
Unless...Someone else had rescued Ashley?
No. They would have triggered Fletcher's traps. It had to be Fletcher playing at being Ashley's knight in shining armor. Subjecting her to torture, then swooping in for the rescue. Just like his father.
If so, then not only was Ashley still alive, she'd be indebted to him, ready to do anything he asked.
Aw hell, she did not like where this was heading. She stood, swept the area with her light and saw the outline of a portable commode to one side and layers of hay bales arranged like steps on the other. Strange shapes reflected the high-powered beam of light, dark yet shiny. Carefully, she approached the large objects.
The smell of decomp was stronger here, strong enough to gag her.
Wrapped in sheets of clear plastic like mummies, sitting side by side on the hay bales as if they were spectators at a Steelers' game, were two women and a man. Their mouths gaped open in death grins, their eyes bulged out, and they had a front row seat to Ashley Yeager's suffering.
Puddles of body fluids covered their feet, but the plastic kept it contained. No flies or insects had penetrated the coverings; the decomposition had come from their own bodies' bacteria, eventually bloating their abdomens with gas until the intestines and skin ruptured.
Thank God they were fully clothed, sparing Lucy that sight. She backed away, retracing her steps until finally she stood outside once more.
Night had fallen quickly, it was now as dark outside as it had been inside the barn. Walden waited at the Blazer, standing at the bumper, jogging forward as soon as she left the barn.
"You okay?"
"Boy are you glad I outrank you," she said, drinking the cool, crisp air as if she'd been holding her breath for too long. Not far from the truth. "How do you feel about snakes?"
He looked at her sharply. "Hate 'em."
"I used to not mind them." She leaned against the car door, trying to hide the sudden wobble in her legs. "Even played with them when I was a kid." She shook her head and glanced back at the barn, now just a pale blob shadowed against the trees beyond. "Not any more."
"What the hell happened in there?"
It didn't take long for the pristine and silent farm to morph into a cacophony of light and noise. The area was taped off, everyone held back while the EOD guys walked their bomb-sniffing dogs around first the barn, then the house. The dogs alerted at both sites.
Which meant more men and equipment and lights and crackling radios, ribald jokes as two bomb squad members squeezed into their bulky suits, followed by several turf battles that Lucy was forced to referee.
ERT wanted to photograph the barn crime scene prior to the EOD squad searching for the bombs—just in case.
EOD wanted to get the hell in and out again before the heat made them pass out while confined to the self-contained suits that weighed eighty-some pounds and reached temperatures of over a hundred degrees when sealed.
The ME wanted no one to touch anything until they got to the bodies—which may or may not be sitting on top of a bomb.
The Staties groused against the inclusion of Allegheny County's bomb squad since apparently the Moore homestead was just over the Butler county line, making it their jurisdiction. They kept insisting that they could have flown their EOD team in from Harrisburg if they'd been given enough advance notice. Like Lucy had begun her day planning to find a few homemade incendiary devices.
Grimwald showed up, trying to spin-doctor the fact that Fletcher was a bad guy and in his direct chain of command.
Local police and fire turned out in force, acting like it was a fall carnival, wandering over the scene, taking photos with their camera-phones.
Then, just when things were starting to get under control, the media flocked to the site like carrion-eaters to road-kill.
Until the Staties finally had them corralled behind the perimeter, they plowed past crime scene tape, stomped through the woods, blinded hard-working cops with their spotlights and interrupted every conversation with inane questions bellowed in self-righteous voices.
"Agent Guardino, did you see Ashley Yeager? Is it true the perpetrator turned her into a mummy?"
"Agent Guardino, is it true a rattle snake bit you when you rushed in to save the girl?"
"Agent Guardino, how does it feel to be a woman working with all these men?"
The last was especially a puzzle seeing as it came from the only female reporter present—not Cindy Ames, thank God—and since there were three other females working the scene in addition to Lucy.
She shielded her face from camera flashes, rustled up reps from ERT, EOD and the ME and shepherded them to the relative peace of the mobile evidence recovery unit, a large black RV parked in the field beside the lane.
"Anyone got an Advil?" she asked, massaging her jaw joints, feeling them crackle and pop. Never mind her shoulder. It was frozen in place, pain using it as its own command center, hurling new waves of agony whenever she dared to forget about it. "Or six or seven?"
The ERT squad leader, a guy named Jiminez, found her a sample pack containing two Aleeve. Lucy dry-swallowed them and spread out a rough sketch of the property on the counter. The three men clustered around her, jostling racks of CSI paraphernalia.
"Okay, here's where the dog alerted, right?" She pointed to both doors of the house and the rear of the barn.
"A definite on the house," Donohue, the EOD tech confirmed. He was wearing the bulky pants of his bomb suit, held up by wide suspenders over a plain white T-shirt. "The barn she was a bit vague—definitely explosives there but either they're spread out over a fairly wide area or maybe they were moved several times, leaving residue behind."
"Could the smell of decomp have thrown her off?" Curtis, the ME guy asked.
Donohue shook his head. "No way. Cookie's the best at what she does. The decomp disturbed her a little, but as soon as she focused, she was good to go."
"Here's my problem, gentlemen." Lucy re-directed their attention. "I have no evidence to help me save a young girl's life except what is in this barn and maybe in the house. What's the best way to maximize evidence collection and minimize the danger to our people?"
"I could go in and photograph, video the interior of the barn since we have an entry there," Jiminez volunteered. "Maybe even collect the items in the center of the barn?"
"But she's going to get most of her evidence from the bodies," Curtis argued. "And the bodies are sitting right where the dog said there were explosives."
"That might be why Cookie alerted to such a large area," Donohue said. "If he had the explosives sitting near the bodies, then moved the bodies to booby-trap them and finally returned them to that location."
"So the bodies are probably rigged." Lucy gnawed the inside of her cheek. "Donohue, could you start your guys working on the two IED's at the house while we document and collect evidence from the front of the barn? We won't disturb the bodies, only photograph them in situ."
Donohue frowned, his two shaggy eyebrows meeting in the middle of his forehead. Obviously a by-the-book kind of guy. Which probably explained why he still had all his fingers and toes. By-the-book was not a bad thing when you dealt with unstable explosives on a daily basis.
"If time is that vital, yeah, we could go that route," he finally conceded. "But I want one of my guys with them, make sure they don't touch the wrong thing."
"Sounds like a plan. Let's get to work. I need to see the ph
otos of the bodies asap. I might have an ID on one of them." It had been too dark in the barn for her to tell for sure, but she had a sinking feeling that one of the women was Vera Tzasiris.
Which meant Lucy's promise to her that the bad part was over had been a big, fat lie.
On that less than cheerful note, she waved them on their way. The EOD guys had what looked like a miniature cement mixer on wheels—their explosive containment device. They also had a neat looking robot she knew they were just itching to play with once they made sure the windows were safe to breach and could maneuver it inside the house.
Jiminez and his crew were busy dragging lighting equipment to supplement their camera flashes. Curtis trudged behind them, carrying only two cameras and looking disgruntled that he was going to have to let the EOD guys touch his bodies before he did.
Medical examiners got that way, very territorial. Nobody touched their bodies unless they said so. And usually they didn't. You told them what you needed: an ID from a victim's wallet, the cell phone shoved into their pocket, the locket with the perpetrator's fingerprints on it. They would fastidiously document it, remove it and allow you to examine it. But the bodies were their domain.
Speaking of people guarding their domain, behind her she could hear Grimwald barking at Walden. She turned to intervene but her cell rang.
"Guardino."
"Hey, it's Burroughs. I've a situation here."
"I kind of have my hands full myself," she replied, wondering what kind of trouble the detective could have gotten himself into. She'd pretty much sidelined him—diplomatically of course. "Where's here?"
"Three Rivers Medical Center."
Lucy's breath caught, a tight knot of fear that seized her chest and wouldn't let go. "Wh-what happened? Is Megan—"
Her voice broke. She turned away from the scattered clusters of law enforcement, hunched her shoulders as she pinched the bridge of her nose, willing back tears.
"No. Shit, I'm sorry. She's fine. Megan's fine," Burroughs' voice finally broke through the vise grip of terror that held her hostage. "No, that's not it. I'm here with Cindy Ames."