Little Girl Gone

by Gerry Schmitt

  But Thacker and Jasper were explicit in their plans. Darden had his tracking device, as well as a broadcast mike and a miniature camera. They wanted to know what was happening every second of the way. Vehicles carrying the FBI and two SWAT teams would follow Darden closely on parallel streets, and a helicopter would track his every move from overhead. The Saint Paul Police Department was standing by on alert, ready to jump in if needed.

  Afton pulled Max aside. “What are we going to do?” In all the planning and furor, they hadn’t received a definite assignment. In fact, they’d effectively been sidelined. Everything was now in the capable hands of the FBI and the MPD hostage and rescue professionals.

  “We’ll go, too,” Max said in a low voice as they slipped down the hall. “We’ll tuck in behind the FBI and SWAT guys.”

  * * *

  DO you think the caller was the same guy from the other night?” Afton asked.

  “Darden thought so,” Max said. He was driving his Hyundai, following five minutes behind the dark, unmarked car that carried Jasper, Thacker, and Bagin.

  “So who is he? I mean, it’s not the doll lady and he’s obviously not the kid I tangled with, the one we suspect is the pizza guy.” Afton hung on for dear life as Max drove full bore down I-94. He was hitting speeds of almost seventy miles an hour, blowing past cars and trucks that crawled along tentatively on the snow-clogged freeway. Had they passed the unmarked car carrying Thacker and company? Maybe not. That car had been going like a bat out of hell, too.

  Max’s knuckles were practically white from his death grip on the steering wheel. “There must be three kidnappers, working in concert.”

  “Doesn’t feel right to me.” Afton fiddled with the radio equipment they’d been issued. Besides Max’s police radio, they had a special radio that was linked directly to Darden’s microphone. It would allow all parties concerned to listen in on any commentary that Darden made. More important, it would let them eavesdrop on his face-to-face confrontation with the kidnapper.

  “Nothing feels right to me,” Max said. “Turn up those radios, see if anybody’s saying anything yet.”

  Afton did. But Darden remained silent. And the police radio just carried the usual squeal. She peered through the windshield. “Damn, this snow just keeps coming down.”

  “More tomorrow,” Max said. “Weatherman is predicting some kind of superstorm. They’re saying maybe eight more inches.”

  “Think this will all be over by tomorrow?” She meant a resolution to the kidnapping, not the bad weather.

  Max stared straight ahead, fighting the wind that buffeted his car back and forth, trying desperately to stay in his lane. “I don’t know.”

  As they swept through Spaghetti Junction, the multifreeway tangle that cut through downtown Saint Paul, Afton said, “Thacker and Jasper and the rest of those guys probably got off at Sixth Street, right?”

  “Had to,” Max said. “That would be the logical way. That’s how we’re going to do it anyway.”

  They circled around the off-ramp and popped out on West Seventh Street. A Super America station was straight ahead; a warehouse sat directly to their right.

  “Where are they?” Max asked. He scanned both directions, sounding surprised that they hadn’t bumped up on Thacker and Jasper’s tailpipe.

  “Maybe we passed them. You were driving pretty fast.”

  “Huh.”

  “Darden was instructed to drive to Sims and Weide,” Afton said, consulting a hastily printed map. “In what’s known as East Saint Paul. That would mean a left turn. Here on West Seventh. Then heading across a couple of bridges.”

  “I don’t know,” Max said. But he turned north anyway, heading toward Payne Avenue. They passed Red’s Savoy Pizza on their left and shot across a freeway bridge.

  Afton couldn’t remember the last time she’d been over on this side of Saint Paul. The labyrinth of streets, the lack of sequential numbering, the lack of familiar landmarks made everything seem foreign. A former celebrity governor had once complained that Saint Paul’s streets had been designed by “drunken Irishmen.” His pronouncement—while crude and not terribly politically correct—wasn’t all that far off base.

  “Where the hell are we?” Max muttered. His windshield wipers were struggling to keep up.

  “Careful,” Afton cautioned. “We don’t want to overshoot anybody.” What she really meant was, We don’t want to overshoot Darden and blow everybody’s cover.

  “Now what?” Max asked, clearly flummoxed. “You’re the one with the map.”

  “Left. Hang a left right here. We need to go up Payne Avenue.”

  Max made the turn and swept north again, the whole of Swede Hollow Park, dark and deep, just off to their right. “Now what?”

  “Now pull over,” Afton said. “Because Darden just started talking.”

  Max pulled over to a curb that was delineated only by a huge ridge of plowed snow. “Hope we don’t get stuck,” he grumped. Saint Paul snow removal was often sketchy at best.

  Afton goosed the volume on their communications equipment. “Shush. Listen up.”

  They put their heads together and listened.

  Darden was talking now, his voice sounding low and cautious, giving a kind of play-by-play for the benefit of the FBI and SWAT teams.

  “Okay, I just pulled up at the corner of Sims and Weide,” Darden said. “There’s not a living soul here that I can see. Just a few houses, not many lights on. One quadrant of the intersection leads off toward a playground, although it’s covered with snow. I think maybe a ball field.” He hesitated. There was the sound of his car door snicking open. “I’m getting out now.” There were slight crunching sounds. “Nothing. I think this might be . . . Wait a minute.” Now they could hear his breath sounds, hoarse and a little panicked. “I hear something.” More crunching. “There’s a phone ringing. A pay phone over there.” Now there was wild excitement in his voice.

  “Holy crap,” Max said. “That must be the last pay phone left in existence.”

  “Kidnapper really plotted out the route,” Afton muttered.

  “Hello?” Darden had answered the ringing phone, his voice high and reedy. “Yes,” he said. “I know where that is.”

  There was more crunching and then the sound of his car door opening and closing. When he was safely inside, Darden said, “Same voice. This time he told me to head over to that old nightclub by the Wabasha Street Caves. I’m supposed to look around the parking lot for a pop can. Inside is supposed to be another set of directions.” He swallowed hard, and then said, “I hope you guys are listening in because this feels very dangerous. Like I’m walking into a trap.”

  “We’re listening,” Afton said, even though she knew Darden couldn’t hear her.

  Max shook his head. “This is like a bad scavenger hunt that . . . Oh, holy shit.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll bet the kidnapper is leading him toward those old beer and mushroom caves.”

  “It’d be hard for SWAT to follow him in there,” Afton said.

  Max pounded a fist against the steering wheel. “No, it’s going to be damn near impossible. That’s a terrible place. Those caves are dug right into the hillside. You’ve got a bluff that rises nearly eight hundred feet high above them and is nearly impossible to scale. And the Mississippi River dips within fifty yards of those caves. It’s mostly dense woods along there. There are no streets . . . no lights . . .”

  “And if those new directions send him farther back . . .”

  “The farther back you go,” Max said, “the more deserted it gets. Just a tangle of trees and underbrush. And if the kidnapper tries to lure Darden inside one of those caves, all bets are off ’cause it’s dangerous as hell. There are drop-offs inside, noxious gasses.”

  “What are we gonna do?” Afton asked. She remembered that some high school kids had
died in those caves a few years ago. They’d crawled in to drink beer and smoke pot, but ended up breathing deadly carbon monoxide.

  Max worried his upper teeth against his lower lip. “I can’t imagine what the SWAT team will do.”

  “Can we get over there somehow? I mean us, you and I?”

  “We can’t risk it. There’s only that one narrow road in, past Harriet Island Park. If the kidnapper is watching, and I’m sure he is, we’ll be spotted in a second.”

  Afton was almost frantic. “There has to be someplace we can go.”

  Max considered this for a few seconds. “There might be a spot up top. Way up on the river bluff.”

  38

  AS Afton and Max careened across the Lafayette Bridge, the lights of Holman Field, where they’d jumped onto a helicopter just five days ago, shimmered dimly off to their left. At this late hour, traffic was almost nonexistent in this industrial part of the city where large, low warehouses stretched for blocks and sodium vapor lights lent an unnatural yellow glow.

  All the while they listened to Darden’s mutterings and the squeal on Max’s police radio.

  They could hear Don Jasper screaming at the SWAT guys to pull on their white coveralls and get into position fast.

  But would they be fast enough, Afton wondered, even as sharpshooters were being dispatched?

  Cruising down Plato Boulevard, Max made a couple of turns, and then headed up Ohio Street, barely slowing as he blew through a stop sign. It was a narrow, twisty street that climbed upward at a steep angle. It took them directly up the east bluff that loomed over downtown Saint Paul and the Mississippi River.

  “Isn’t there a park up here somewhere?” Afton asked as they popped out on top. “A place where we can see what’s going on?”

  “I think . . . this way,” Max said, turning right.

  He churned along unplowed streets, and then pulled to the curb at Cherokee Avenue, where they both jumped out. Wind and snow buffeted them as they ran through knee-deep snow to a small overlook on the edge of the bluff.

  Downtown Saint Paul was spread out before them. At any other time the view would be spectacular, a twinkling wonderland of tall buildings interspersed with historic churches, ancient breweries, pocket-sized parks, turreted old sandstone buildings, and redbrick warehouses. But with the snow drifting down, the atmosphere was softened and fuzzed, as if a filter had been thrown across the entire city. Definition was hazy; lights were dimmed. On the opposite bluff they could barely make out the humped row of landmark mansions.

  Looking straight down, they still weren’t able to see the caves or the path that ran alongside them. The angle was too steep, and there was just too much forest and tangled brush.

  “Nothing to see,” Afton said, disappointed. She was hoping to get a glimpse of the main cave. Every time she’d seen the place, it had looked otherworldly. An enormous flat sandstone face set into a gigantic hill and fronted by a castle-like brick facade. Several rounded wooden doors, the kind a cadre of trolls might use, formed an entrance. Legend held that the caves had once been a speakeasy that entertained the likes of John Dillinger and Ma Barker. The natural refrigeration properties had also made it ideal for beer storage back when Saint Paul breweries had pumped out gallons and gallons of the amber suds. In the eighties someone had turned the cave’s carved-out, rounded interior into a nightclub. Now it was some sort of event center.

  Afton cradled the communications gear inside her parka and jacked up the dial up so they could hear what Darden was saying.

  “Okay,” Darden said. “I’m here outside the Wabasha Street Caves. There are a few cars in the parking lot and I can hear music playing inside.” He sounded lonely and scared. “I just got out of my car and now I’m looking around for that pop can.”

  Darden’s voice came to them fuzzy and laced with static. He sounded like a distant radio signal that faded in and out.

  “This is awful,” Afton said. She was actually feeling sorry for the man. He not only sounded terrified, but could be walking into an ambush. Yet he was willing to do whatever it took to rescue his daughter. His actions were definitely heroic.

  “He’s still hanging in there,” Max said. “Doing the best he can.”

  Darden’s voice crackled again. “There’s a Mountain Dew can sitting here. Kind of propped up on a pile of snow. I’m going to take a look inside.” The signal faded out for a moment and then he was back. “I think this is it. Yes, there’s a note inside. I’m going to pull it out and read it verbatim.” He cleared his throat. “It says: Drive toward Harriet Island and take the road south to Bauer’s Recycling Plant. Leave the car and follow the hiking trail that leads past the old caves.”

  “That’s a dead end,” Max said.

  “Holy shit,” Afton said. “I wish we could . . .” She cocked her head toward Max and suddenly looked past him. Through fat, heavy flakes she saw the faint outline of the High Bridge silhouetted behind him. She grabbed Max’s sleeve and spun him around. “The High Bridge. We’ve got to get up there,” she cried. “Maybe we can see what’s going on.”

  “Maybe,” Max said. They were scrambling back through the snow toward his car. “We’ll give it a shot.”

  Cherokee Avenue led directly to the High Bridge. On Max’s say-so, they left the car and walked out onto the bridge. It looked slippery and icy, and no cars were venturing across it. A panorama of city, river, and woods spread out below them. Since they were obscured by darkness and falling snow, it was doubtful that anyone would look up and be able to spot them.

  “Do you see Darden down there?” Max asked. “Anything?”

  “Not yet,” Afton said. “But I’ll tell you something. This kidnapper is a guy who knows Saint Paul. I mean, he either lives here or he grew up here.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “You take your average Minneapolis person. They hardly ever venture across the river into Saint Paul. You know why? Because they don’t think it’s worth it. Everything they’re ever going to want is right there on the Minneapolis side.”

  “That’s a pretty harsh assessment, don’t you think?”

  “But it’s the truth. I’m telling you, this guy, the guy who set this up is from Saint Paul.”

  “But where is he?” Max asked. “And where’s Darden?”

  Afton scanned the distance. “I don’t know. Wait . . . there’s a pair of headlights bumping toward us. I think that might be Darden. Looks like he’s about a half mile away.”

  Max squinted down. “Ah, he’s pulling into that recycling place. Gotta be him.”

  Afton lay down on the bridge and peered out through the struts of the metal railing. She pulled the communication device out of her parka and listened. After two seconds Max crouched down to join her.

  “The snow is almost knee-deep,” Darden was saying. “And I’m not seeing any tracks at all, so I’m guessing nobody’s been back this way for a while.”

  “He sounds scared,” Afton said.

  Max lifted a hand and brushed snow from his face, leaving wet streaks. “He should be scared.”

  “I don’t know if this is a double cross or not,” Darden continued in hushed tones. “Or if somebody is going to come in from the opposite direction.”

  Max studied the bluffs below. “Someone would have to skim down that cliff if they were approaching him from the opposite direction.”

  “Could be done,” Afton said.

  Max gazed at her for a moment. “Could you do it?”

  “Maybe.” She looked over and studied the bluff. “Probably.”

  * * *

  ALL right,” Darden said. “I’m still struggling through the snow. There’s that enormous cliff to my left, and the frozen Mississippi River is just off to my right.”

  The microphone was working well now, and Afton and Max could hear the crunching of snow along with Darden’s rag
ged breathing.

  “He’s getting tired,” Afton said. She could just barely see him, a tiny dot moving far below, trying to wade through a narrow, open patch of snow, following what was an obliterated trail.

  “I don’t see anything moving out here,” Darden said. “Of course, it’s darker than shit. Jeez, I hope those SWAT guys are in place. This is getting weirder by the moment.”

  “This feels like an ambush,” Afton said to Max.

  “Can’t see anybody else, though,” Max said.

  Darden continued to give his play-by-play. “I see a . . . I think it’s a wooden shack up ahead. Anyway, it’s all ramshackle and falling down. Maybe that’s supposed to be the spot where we make the exchange?”

  “Careful, careful,” Afton murmured. When she craned her neck, she could see the faint outline of the shack, too, and wondered if the kidnapper lurked inside? Was Elizabeth Ann waiting in there, too, in the terrible bone-chilling cold?

  “As soon as I make the exchange,” Darden said, “I’m going to fall flat on the ground and stay down. Then you guys take your shots, okay?”

  “Jesus,” Afton breathed.

  Darden moved closer to the shack. His raspy voice reflected his inner tension as he shook and shuddered in the freezing cold.

  “Damn it, I still don’t see anybody,” Darden said. He paused. “Wait a minute, I think I hear something.” He sounded both stressed and puzzled. “It sounds like something mechanical. Like an outboard motor or a chain saw.”

  Afton and Max heard it, too. An annoying buzzing sound, like some kind of giant, mechanized insect.

  “What is that?” Max wondered.

  Afton knew what it was, but before she could voice an explanation, a snowmobile jounced and roared along the riverbank far below them.

  “Shit!” Max cried.

  They watched as Darden caught sight of the snowmobile and stumbled. Then he flung his arms out wide and dropped to his knees.