by Jen Blood
“Leave her alone.” He stood on shaky feet and limped to my side.
Rainier watched the whole thing play out with his rifle still in hand, a faint smile hiding behind his Grizzly Adams beard.
“Oh… This really is gonna be fun.”
He took the knife from me, then bound Diggs’ and my hands. When he was doing mine, he twisted my broken wrist until I bit through my lip to keep from crying out. Diggs remained silent, ashen and shaking beside me. Rainier marched us deeper into the woods.
Chapter Twenty-One
The afternoon brought no news about Diggs or Erin. Erin’s mother refused to answer Juarrez’s calls, and between the heat and a forest fire in the area, the search party had stalled out just beyond the perimeter Juarez had established earlier in the day. He called his assistant in DC at three o’clock in the hope that she might have something more promising to tell him.
“Did you find them?” Mandy asked the moment she realized it was him. She was sixty-two, but remarkably adept at all the technology that stymied Juarez.
“Not yet. What do you have for me? Any background on the Lincolns?”
“You won’t like it.”
“Then you should probably just tell me.”
“Surly today, aren’t we? I looked for Wallace and Willa Lincoln in Lynn, Mass, as you suggested, but I found no record. So, I did a search for those names in every other Lynn in the country: Lynn, Georgia; Lynn, Colorado; Lynn, Texas—”
“I get the picture. What did you find?”
“Zilch,” she said without hesitation. It was one thing he normally liked about her: Mandy didn’t sugarcoat anything. He wasn’t as happy about it today. “At least, not under those names.”
“Did you find something under any other names?”
“I started thinking about the fact that Erin’s dad told her she was named after his sister—right? If you’re going to name someone after someone, you’ll do the actual name, not the name they took later on. I mean, if I changed my name to Matilda Mae now, I hope someone would have the good sense to name their child Amanda Paulette if they were going to pay homage. You see what I mean? So, even if these Lincolns changed their names at some point along the lines, I thought, ‘I bet they kept their first names, thinking no one would tie them together if they moved.’ ”
Juarez rubbed his temples. “Mandy…”
“I know, I know—the point. Keep your britches on, stud. The point is: A Wallace and Willa Monroe lived in Lynn, Indiana, up until 1965. They’d moved there from Chicago. Sweet old Wally was up on prostitution and racketeering charges, but he managed to finagle himself out of that by agreeing to testify against some very nasty folks in Chi-Town. At the last minute, Wally flaked on the whole arrangement, and his whole family went missing.”
“When they moved to northern Maine.”
“That’s my guess,” she agreed.
“What about this Mr. E? Anything at all about any Eliot?”
“So far, no luck. If he was in a mob family, who knows what his real name might have been. Or whether he was from Chicago or Lynn. Or somewhere else, for that matter.”
“You’ll keep looking?”
“I’ll keep looking. How you holding up?”
“I’ll be better when we find her,” he said.
“I know you will. Just keep the faith—and don’t forget to eat. And sleep. Where’ll I be if you up and drop dead in the boonies somewhere?”
He smiled. “As long as you were still there, they wouldn’t even notice I was gone. I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Yes, you will.”
After she’d hung up, Juarez considered the information she had provided. Wallace Lincoln had been a mobster. Not only that, but he’d been a mobster on the run from both the mob and the government. It was no wonder Erin’s father had some issues growing up.
Juarez left the police station and headed for the Sauciers’ at shortly after four that afternoon, after attending to paperwork and reporters’ inquiries and the dozens of other administrative details that drove him up the wall when he was dealing with a case of this magnitude. All he really wanted was to get back in the field, where he might actually make a difference in getting Diggs and Erin home again.
When he arrived at the Sauciers’, Sarah was working in her garden. She wore overalls and a sleeveless t-shirt, her fleshy arms surprisingly muscular considering her size. Juarez took off his suit jacket and tie, rolled up his sleeves, and joined her in the soil.
“Your brother isn’t out here helping with this?” he asked.
She looked up in surprise at his appearance, wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her arm. “Non,” she said. “All the police scared him. He works inside on mal days like this.”
“I can understand him being upset,” Juarez said. “You must not be crazy about having people tearing up your property, either.” He knelt and pulled a couple of carrots from the ground, adding them to a canvas bag already overflowing with fresh vegetables.
“You shouldn’t be out here,” she said disapprovingly. “Your suit…”
“That’s what dry cleaners are for. It’s nice to be outside. Feel the soil under my hands.”
“You garden at home?”
“Not now—I live in the city. When I was a teenager, we had fruit trees.” He thought of Sister Mary Louise, watching him with her sharp eyes under the brutal Miami summer sun while he helped pick bananas and mango, grapefruit and oranges. He didn’t mention Lucia’s garden in Santa Rosa; kissing her after a day’s work, when she smelled of strawberries and sunlight.
“Where was this?” she asked.
“Miami. The sisters at the place where I grew up loved having fresh fruit. They had no problem putting me to work.”
“Ah,” she said. “C’est bien. It’s good putting boys to work. Less trouble, non?”
He couldn’t argue with that. A giant, long-haired gray cat strolled into the garden and made for Juarez directly, rubbing against him with a low, rumbling purr. He held up his hand and she butted her head against it, tail twitching.
“Miranda,” Sarah said to the cat. “Va-t’en.”
“It’s all right,” Juarez said. “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m more of a cat person anyway. Let her stay.” He resumed working in the soil while Miranda wove around him.
“When you were growing up,” he asked after they’d worked in silence for a short time, “did Bonnie ever talk to you about being at Eagle Lake the weekend Jeff and Erin went missing?”
She didn’t answer.
“Sarah?” he pressed.
She looked at him unhappily, her lips in a tight line. “Her and Jeff—they were together sometimes, oui? He didn’t usually date just one girl, mais he liked Bonnie. All the boys liked her. Elle est très jolie.”
“Did you know a Mr. E—or an Eliot, maybe—who spent time with them, too? Or maybe hear them talking about someone with that name?”
To his surprise, she nodded readily. “Bien sûr. He came to stay that summer. Avec Jeff et Erin.”
“So you knew him?”
“Oui.”
“Do you know where he is now? Or have any idea what he did after they disappeared in 1970?”
She shook her head. “Non,” she said. “He wasn’t here long. Everybody liked him, though. He never did nothing mal the way they did. He was très intelligent. Very quick.”
So, nothing since 1970 according to Sarah. Except that if Rosie really had heard this Eliot at Will Rainier’s when she was a child, that couldn’t have been longer ago than the late ’90s. Juarez excused himself and left Sarah and Miranda to finish in their garden. He jogged along the by-now well-traveled path to the crime scene, his head clearing with the movement.
Sophie Laurent, the medical examiner, was just finishing up when Juarez arrived. The entire clearing had been taped off. Stakes and string cordoned off the sites where each of the bodies had been buried. Bonnie Saucier and all four of the other bodies had already been excavated and were no
w in transit. A small team from CSU was all that remained now, painstakingly covering every inch of the area to ensure no evidence had been missed.
Sophie finished discussing something with the crime-scene techs and greeted him with a pleased smile.
“I was just getting ready to call you. We have some interesting developments I wanted to speak with you about.” He waited while she leafed through her paperwork.
“First,” she began. “Bonnie Saucier… Something seemed a bit off with her COD, so I had someone double check something for me.” She consulted one of the reports again. “She died of asphyxiation, as I suspected when first examining her. The distribution of weight and the pattern left by the belt were inconsistent with strangulation, however.”
“So how did she die?”
“Suicide would be my guess,” she said promptly. “Off the record until a thorough examination can verify that, of course. Hanging.”
“And someone moved the body here,” Juarez said. He thought of Red Grivois’ story about the phone call he’d received at three o’clock the previous afternoon. “Can you tell when that was done?”
“Oui. Time of death would have been between noon and four p.m. yesterday, based on liver temp and lividity.”
“You can’t pinpoint any closer?”
“Not until further tests can be done.”
“That’s all right, it’s a good start.” He made a mental note to speak with Red Grivois again about that phone call. “Was there anything else?”
“I spoke with the technicians about that belt you wanted analyzed for fingerprints.” Juarez was still stuck on the revelation about Bonnie’s suicide, but nodded absently for her to continue.
“Ms. Saucier’s fingerprints were on the belt, of course, so no surprise there. But Jeff Lincoln’s prints were not. There were fingerprints from an unidentified male who was not in the system, but there was no trace of Lincoln’s.”
“That’s impossible,” Juarez said. “I saw him holding it. He dropped it right in front of me; there was no time for him to wipe his prints, and he wasn’t wearing gloves. You’re positive about that?”
“I knew you’d ask, so I had them run it through twice. There’s no question.”
His head was awhirl with questions. Everyone to that point had agreed that Adam Solomon and Jeff Lincoln were the same person; that the teenager in Black Falls was the same man in the photos on Payson Isle years later. Juarez excused himself, already dialing Mandy as he walked back up the path toward his car. It felt as though a huge piece of the puzzle was about to drop into place.
“I need a photo of Jeff Lincoln,” he told her. “One taken directly from the Lansing asylum where he was held in ’72. The place where we first got prints on him.”
“That won’t be easy. This is an awful lot of years later—I doubt they even have anything like that.”
“You said I should keep the faith. Right now, it’s all wrapped up in you,” he said.
He could practically hear her roll her eyes. “That’s low, Jack. But I’ll see what I can do.”
He hung up and stood there for a moment, his body humming. The assumption up to that point had been that the Jeff Lincoln who went missing from Eagle Lake in 1970 was the same Jeff Lincoln who resurfaced in Lansing in 1972, was fingerprinted, and then escaped two weeks later. But what if that had merely been someone posing as Jeff? Someone who knew the scant details necessary to steal someone’s identity in the ’70s. If the mysterious Mr. E was a friend of Jeff’s at the time, he would know the time and place of Jeff’s birth, and would likely have access to his social security number, as well.
He could have killed Erin Lincoln, then left her brother reeling and in shock in the woods. Juarez had no idea where the fifteen-year-old might have gone from there, but it made sense that he might simply disappear rather than going home to tell his abusive father what had happened. He became someone else…and Jeff Lincoln was reborn a monster.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I don’t know how long we’d been going before Rainier slowed. Diggs and I had been silent through most of the trek, my body sapped of strength, running far too long with no food or water or sleep. It turns out it’s basically impossible to maintain any kind of good humor during a death march.
We were back at the side of yet another mountain in the middle of yet another wooded glade when Rainier ordered us to stop.
“It’s about fucking time,” he said with a sigh. “We’re here.”
I looked around. All I saw were more deep woods; more horseflies; more mosquitoes and sunlight and blackflies and pain. I wondered if he was going to kill us there. If he’d rape me first, while Diggs watched. I tried to imagine my life back in the real world, shopping Trader Joe’s and walking Einstein around Portland’s Back Bay. I closed my eyes.
I really missed my dog.
Instead of raping me or torturing us both or even just killing us and getting it over with, Rainier pushed us toward a tangle of brambles and brush on the mountainside. We were less than two feet away before I realized he wasn’t trying to force us into the side of the mountain.
Or he was—just not in the way I’d expected.
Concealed behind the brush, painted to blend perfectly with the landscape, was a door.
Rainier brushed past us both and unlocked it with a rusted skeleton key. He stepped aside and motioned us through, then followed behind. The door echoed when it closed behind us. He snapped on the lights.
I blinked twice, taking in our new surroundings. Carved into the side of the mountain, deep in the woods and completely concealed from the rest of the world, was a simple, tastefully furnished subterranean prison.
“Welcome to the Sanctuary,” Rainier said. He pushed us farther inside. “You can check out, but you can never leave.”
The neatly decorated foyer was only a way station for Diggs and me before Rainier pushed us through the dimly lit living area, to a barred door with another reinforced steel one behind it. He opened both doors with his magic skeleton key, and turned on more lights inside. I could hear a generator humming somewhere inside the mountain.
“You stay here tonight,” Rainier said. “I’ll come for you at five o’clock tomorrow morning. Be ready. Rules are on the dresser.”
He untied both of us, left the room, and closed and locked both doors behind us.
When he was gone, Diggs went straight to the dresser, while I took in our surroundings. The floor was poured concrete, with a couple of sedate throw rugs. The walls were carved into the mountain wall itself. There was a kitchenette with a stocked refrigerator, small stove, microwave, and a cabinet with a few dishes; a double bed with a down comforter and a dresser; a bathroom with a working toilet and a double shower. The medicine cabinet was stocked with first aid supplies. The apartment was notably lacking computer, telephone, or TV.
“So, we’re basically being held captive in the Bat Cave,” I said to Diggs. “Is that what you’re getting from all this?”
“Basically,” he agreed. “Listen to this.” He took a placard from the dresser and sat down on the bed: “ ‘Welcome to the Sanctuary. During your stay, you can be assured of the following: All food is safe; All clothing, first aid supplies, and food are available for the taking; You are under neither auditory nor visual surveillance; You will not be disturbed until your prearranged wake-up call; Subjects are allowed one night in Sanctuary with a partner; After said shared night, the victor in subsequent matches will periodically be allotted additional time in Sanctuary; Suicide is discouraged, but not prohibited. Best of luck. – J.’ ”
I scratched my head. “What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t have a clue. But would you look at this place?”
“Martha Stewart meets Soldier of Fortune. Pretty sweet.” I tried to ignore the bubble of hysteria welling in my chest. “What are we supposed to do now?”
He lay back and closed his eyes. “I don’t have a clue. Sleep comes to mind, though. And food. And a shower. In that
order.”
“You’re going to sleep now? Aren’t you freaked out?”
“Mm hmm,” he said. “But I’m also exhausted. And so are you.”
I sat there another minute or so before I knew I’d come unglued if I didn’t do something. Anything. I went in the bathroom and checked the shower. The dual showerheads shuddered and sputtered, but eventually came to life with surprisingly good water pressure. I raided the medicine cabinet, pulling out bandages and ointments and everything else I could imagine us possibly needing. When I returned to the bedroom, Diggs was already asleep. I pulled the blanket around him, but I resisted the urge to lie down myself. According to the clock on the dresser, it was already after five p.m. We had less than twelve hours to figure out some kind of plan. I refused to sleep that time away.
I started by searching the place for hidden cameras or wires or any other sign that Will Rainier and whoever else was in on this was listening. I found nothing, but that didn’t mean I believed for a second we were really on our own for the night. I went to the refrigerator next and surveyed the contents: bottled water, bread, eggs, cheese, bacon. Juice. Oranges. There was peanut butter and Shredded Wheat and a few canned goods in the cupboard. On the inside of the refrigerator was a note that read: For those who have not eaten in excess of 24 hours, moderation is critical. May have difficulty digesting ‘heavy’ meals. – J.
I took out the bread and cheese and sniffed them both. They smelled fine. Of course, unless they were well past the Best If Used By date or someone had laced them with almond-scented cyanide, I didn’t really have a clue what the hell I should be smelling for. I made a sandwich, grabbed a bottled water and some aspirin, and sat on the floor in the far corner of our cell, my eye on the door.
I ate slowly, in case it started to feel like my intestines were filled with razor blades or the room transformed into a Degas painting. Neither of those things happened.