Eye for an Eye (An Owen Day Thriller)

by Rachel Ford

  I didn’t. I took a seat across from the Millers. They had the television playing some daytime soap opera, where a very made-up woman was professing her love to a bronzed guy old enough to be her father. Neither were going to win any kind of awards for their acting, that was for damned sure, but between them, they probably kept at least one tanning parlor in business.

  The guy started to reject her, for whatever had led up to this scene. I didn’t know, mercifully. But apparently, it involved someone named Rodrigo. That I knew because the woman with the makeup assured the guy with the tan that Rodrigo meant nothing to her.

  “That was a mistake. You have to believe me darling.” She was laying it on thick, with big, emotive expressions and all kinds of forced feeling in her tone.

  The guy with the tan took the opposite approach, like he was dying a little more inside with each new line. “You broke my heart, Diamond.”

  “I’m sorry, darling. I’m so sorry. But I love you. I love only you.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I said to Shannon. “If my choice is this crap or death, just shoot me already.”

  She stared at me, then laughed. “The old woman picked it. But shooting her for it did cross my mind.”

  “I can change the channel,” Mrs. Miller said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. Not for me, anyway.”

  The old woman glanced at Shannon, who seemed to consider for a moment, then shrugged. “What the hell. Keep it. Let’s find out if Damion forgives Diamond.”

  There was amusement in her tone, but Mrs. Miller responded seriously. “He won’t. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Oh no,” Shannon said, in the same mocking way.

  “I think they’re going to have him get together with that floosy Rosie first. She’s been trying to get her talons into him for three seasons now.”

  Mr. Miller said nothing to all this. He just stared absently ahead – maybe at the TV, maybe at the wall, maybe at nothing in particular.

  Then, Tyler returned with Cody. “Let’s go,” he said.

  So I did. Shannon called, “I’ll let you know if love conquers all.”

  “Please don’t.”

  She laughed to herself. Cody shot me a questioning look. Tyler ignored it, and said, “You two are going to carry the body to the truck. I’m going to be behind you all the way. If you try anything stupid, I will shoot you. If I shoot, I will kill you. So if you don’t want to die, don’t be stupid.”

  * * *

  Deputy Austin Wagner, 2:30 PM

  I figured out which of the four counties had jurisdiction over the campground and reached the sheriff. At which point, my boss took over, sheriff to sheriff. He laid out the problem, and why we thought Tesch might be involved.

  To which the other sheriff replied, “I can send someone to take a look, but I got to say, I’ve never heard of a thing like that. Not in all my years.”

  My boss said he appreciated the other man’s cooperation, but a car might not be enough.

  And then, my cell rang. It was Curt Travers, the FBI special agent on the Rabbitt case. I excused myself with a motion and a mouthed, “Got to take this.” My boss nodded, and I headed out of the command center.

  “Wagner here.”

  “Wagner, it’s Travers.”

  “Afternoon,” I said.

  “You got anything for me?”

  “No. There’s been a hiccup.”

  “What kind of hiccup?”

  “Our witness has gone missing. I’m working on it now, but–”

  “Missing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Missing, as in he got lost in the woods, or missing as in someone silenced him?”

  “Neither. Someone took him, some time yesterday; him and his niece and nephew. We think–”

  “Rabbitt,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Not someone: Rabbitt.”

  “We actually have a different suspect in mind. A guy he had a fight with at the campground.”

  “It’s not him,” Travers said. “I’m telling you, it’s Rabbitt. Day was the only witness to the body, so he took Day, the same way he took Callaghan. It’s how he operates.”

  I considered that for a long moment. “Day didn’t see anything, though.”

  “Maybe Rabbitt didn’t know that. Or maybe seeing the body was enough. But Rabbitt’s your guy. You can bet on it.”

  I thought about the sheriff’s words. Keep your eyes open. I think there’s something we’re missing here.

  “There’s more to it than you know,” I said.

  “What?”

  So I told him about the call, and all the subtle clues that something was wrong. I told him about the few seconds of post-call dialogue I’d overheard.

  “Are you tracking the phone?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “That needs to be your top priority.”

  “We’ve got a guy on his way out to Tesch’s campsite.”

  “Forget Tesch. You’re barking up the wrong tree there, Deputy. This has nothing to do with a campsite disturbance, and everything to do with Joey Rabbitt.”

  “Suppose you’re right,” I said. “How do we proceed? I’m assuming you’re going to be involved?”

  “I’m booking my tickets as we talk.”

  Great, I thought. Aloud, I said, “That’s a little premature, isn’t it? We haven’t confirmed anything.”

  “You won’t confirm it, until you find him – either alive or dead. But I’m not territorial, if that’s what you’re worried about. You know the lay of the land. I’ll be working with you, not against you.”

  Great, I thought again. That was exactly the kind of thing people about to pull a takeover would say. But I didn’t have grounds to complain, one way or the other. Rabbitt was an FBI case, so if anything pointed to Rabbitt, it was his business, not ours. If.

  “Okay. We can work out the details when you get here, I guess. You’ll need to talk to the sheriff.”

  “I will. But for now, tell me about the scene of the kidnapping.”

  I hesitated. The more I told him, the more grounds I might give him to build a case that this was Rabbitt, and therefore his case.

  “I’m working with you, Austin,” he said again. “Not against you. If this is Rabbitt – and I’m a hundred percent it is – you need to know what you’re dealing with. If it’s not, well, you’ll have the FBI’s resources backing up your manhunt.”

  “Alright,” I said. And I told him all about the scene – exactly how I found it, and everything that put my back up about it.

  He listened silently. Then he said, “It’s Rabbitt. Think about it. Your guy, the brawler, did he strike you as the kind to pull off something like that? Just spiriting people away?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “It’s not him.”

  “We should still check,” I said.

  “By all means. But in the meantime, you need to be tracking that phone. That’s going to get you to him – whoever’s got him. And you need to be pursuing the Rabbitt angle.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Deputy Austin Wagner, 2:45 PM

  The sheriff was still talking to his counterpart when I got off the phone. They had a man heading out to the campground – just one.

  I dialed Jade again. She didn’t pick up, and I rang through to her voicemail.

  I tried again. It rang four times, and then she picked up. “Deputy Wagner, I told you, there’s a process–”

  “Kidnapped kids,” I interrupted.

  She cut off. “What?”

  “Kidnapped kids: that’s who we’re trying to trace. That’s why I need your help, Jade. A little boy and a little girl got snatched.”

  “Jesus, Austin,” she said. “Why didn’t you say so before?”

  “I tried.”

  “You didn’t try. You just went on. If you told me kids were involved…Jesus.” She went silent for a moment. I could hear the clacking of keys in the background. “Give me the
info.”

  So I did. I told her Day’s phone number and told her he might not be in the area anymore. There was a possibility he was long gone, but that he’d placed calls forty-five minutes or so ago.

  She typed and clicked and hemmed and hawed for a long minute. Then, she said, “Well, I see the phone. At least, I see where it was. The last contact it had with any of our towers was about half an hour ago. But I can see where, anyway.”

  “You do? Do you have an address?”

  “No. It’s very rural, and there’s only one tower in the area. But I can narrow it down to about…fifteen, maybe sixteen, miles. Out by Jay Road, and the highway.”

  Jay Road, again. “Where on Jay Road?”

  “No idea. Like I said, it covers at least fifteen miles. A little closer to twenty, actually.”

  “One tower?”

  “It’s very rural,” she said again.

  “Shit,” I said. “That’s a big area.”

  “But it tells you that he’s still here, or was, up until half an hour ago anyway. Right?”

  I snapped to attention at that. It did. Which meant we’d sent the guy we had heading to Tesch’s site on a fool’s errand. Day had never left the area, at least as of half an hour ago. So he wouldn’t be at a campground in the Dells now. He couldn’t be.

  “Shit,” I said again.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Just – I got to go.”

  “Don’t you want the data?”

  “Yes. Can you send it to me?”

  “Email?”

  “Perfect.” I started to pull the phone away from my ear. I added, “Thank you, Jade. I mean it.” Then, I hung up, and raced to the command center.

  The sheriff was still there, but the situation had changed. I was too late. The deputy from the Dells had reached the Tesch site. He’d talked to Aaron – and gotten an earful in the process.

  Tesch had taken it into his head that he was the victim of some kind of targeted harassment. He’d threatened to sue. “The whole state of Wisconsin, apparently,” the Dells’ sheriff explained dryly.

  “No sign of the missing family?”

  “Nope. My guy checked the vehicles, and he could see the interior of the popup. Nothing. I’m sorry, Sheriff. But it’s a bust. Whoever has your missing family, it’s not Tesch.”

  Which left me with a lot of explaining to do, as soon as the call ended. I told the boss everything, except the part where Jade had hung up on me in the beginning. He listened, a little less patiently than the first time.

  “Would have been nice if you figured this out before I made an absolute idiot of myself,” he said.

  “I didn’t figure it out,” I said. “Travers did.”

  “FBI, eh? Well, this should be good.”

  “I don’t know that it is Rabbitt,” I said. “Not yet, anyway.”

  “You have a better theory?”

  “No.”

  “You have a feeling?”

  I considered, then nodded. “I think he’s right, personally. If Rabbitt is up here for the auction, chances are his hideout is pretty close. Which matches with what Jade found. And a rural hideout makes sense too. Fewer people to spot them.”

  “And Jay Road is where the body was found.”

  “Which ties it back to Callaghan.”

  “Which ties it back to Rabbit.” The sheriff nodded. “Okay. It’s a good theory. It feels better than Tesch. A lot better.

  “So start with the phone data. Get it to the team.” He paused. “And I suppose you’d better get it to the FBI guy too.”

  “Understood. Sir?”

  “What?”

  “How do you want us to proceed on this? Do we follow his lead?”

  He considered for a long moment. “He’s not here yet, so proceed as normal. Just, keep him in the loop.”

  “And if he wants us to do something different?”

  “Then I guess we better do it differently. If it’s Rabbitt, it’s their case.”

  “Understood.”

  “And look on the bright side, Wagner: if anyone else ends up dead while they’re in charge, it’s on them. Not us.”

  I thought about Day, and the boy and the girl. I thought about the orderly campsite, and the mom who had left them to go to Disney World with her new boyfriend.

  Our job was an unsentimental one, sometimes. You dealt with death, and things worse than death. You couldn’t afford to be sentimental about it.

  Still, the idea of that weird little family ending up dead didn’t sit right. It couldn’t.

  “It’s a joke, Wagner. Silver linings.”

  I forced a smile. “Got to look for those, right?”

  “Damn right you do. Now get to work.”

  * * *

  We drove Joey, or what was left of him, back behind the sagging barn. I drove, and Cody sat in the passenger seat. He looked numb.

  Tyler sat in the backseat, his gun at the ready as he gave orders. “Turn here. Slowly. That’s it. Pull up, by that patch of fresh dirt. That’s right.”

  Then came the work of digging the grave. There were shovels propped up against the barn, presumably from the last burial: Matthew Callaghan’s. Cody took one and I took another.

  They were old tools, with well-worn wooden handles and blunted blades. But they got the job done, slowly but surely.

  The sun was hot, and the sod thick and heavy. Tyler sat in the shade of the barn, his gun trained on us. Cody worked in a kind of daze, slowly and without making much headway.

  “The sooner we finish,” I said, “the sooner we can get out of the sun.”

  He stopped altogether at that and stared at me. “They’re making us dig our own graves. Can’t you see that?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Are you blind?”

  “Hey,” Tyler called. “No talking.”

  We went silent for a long moment. Then Cody said, “They’re going to kill us. First me and you, then Paige and Avery, and your kids. We’re digging their graves.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not big enough.”

  He blinked. “What?”

  “The grave: it’s not big enough for all those people. If he was having us dig a mass grave, it’d have to be bigger.”

  He watched me like I was some kind of ghoul. “Jesus.”

  “I’m not saying he should. Just that that’s the way they’d do it.”

  “Jesus,” he said again.

  Tyler stood up now, and started walking over, turning the gun on one and then the other of us. “I said, no talking.”

  I glanced at him, at his casual stride, and then at the hole: maybe two feet deep, and six feet long. “You trust me?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, a little apologetically. “Not really.”

  “No talking,” Tyler said again. He was close now, maybe four feet away.

  “That’s okay,” I said to Cody. “I don’t trust you either.”

  Tyler turned my way, angry now. “You deaf, dumbass?”

  “But we’re going to get out of here.”

  Tyler’s step quickened, and he started to kick. I could see it in the way his heel sprang off the ground with the last stride. He was aiming his boot for my head, saying, “Shut your goddamned mouth.”

  I turned and pivoted away from the leg, bringing my shovel up as I went – straight into the gun hand. His arm flew wide, and the gun whipped through the air.

  I leaped upward at the same time, out of the hole and straight toward him. I drove my knee into him, aiming for the groin. The knee missed by a few inches, which was too bad. It was a hard hit, the kind that would have finished the fight instantly if it hit its target. But I hit the thigh instead. He’d bruise badly, but nothing worse than that.

  He swung for my face, and he grazed my chin. But his hit landed badly too. We were too near to do any real damage.

  Cody scrambled for the edge of the grave and emitted some kind of strangled scream, a protest maybe, or a call for help. I hoped i
t was a protest. That at least made sense. But I didn’t have time to think about him.

  We landed hard on the uncut earth. I drew back, trying to reach a better vantage; and he grappled with me, trying to pull me back down. So I obliged, snapping my neck forward, hard and fast. My forehead slammed into the center of his face. I could feel bones shatter as my skull pancaked his movie star nose.

  Then, he did let go, just for a second or two. But it was long enough for me to get to my knees, hovering over him. I punched him once, hard in the face. He was still moving, so I hit him again twice, thrice, and a fourth time, with everything I had in me.

  His head lolled to one side, and he tried to speak. Nothing but blood came out of his mouth. He was down for the count. “Okay,” I said, breathing heavily. “We’ve got to move fast. We’ve got ten, maybe twenty, minutes before they start looking for him. Less than that before he comes to.” I fished through his pockets, finding the keys first and his cellphone second. Finding both, I stood and started to turn to Cody. “Do you have any rope–”

  I didn’t finish the thought. A shot rang out, loud and booming in the stillness. Half of Tyler’s face dissolved into a spray of blood as a 9mm bullet tore through meat and bone.

  Then the puff of blood dissipated, and the face returned, more or less recognizable. Bone had broken, and kinetic energy had pulverized some of the tissue. But it was Tyler’s face.

  And he was undoubtedly dead.

  “What the fuck?” I demanded, rounding on Cody.

  He was standing there with Tyler’s gun in his hand, trembling. “I…I had to. It was…self-defense. You said it would be self-defense.”

  “Not here. Not now. They’re going to hear that. Fuck.” My mind was racing. Everyone in the house would have heard that. Whatever time advantage we’d had – ten minutes, or twenty, or whatever – was gone now. We had seconds left, maybe a minute if we were lucky.

  “Let’s go,” Cody said. “You’ve got the keys. Come on.”

  We could outrun them. With a vehicle, and a head start, we could outrun them. We could get away. But what about Maisie and Daniel? What about Paige and Avery?

  I glanced at the cellphone. It was locked. So I thumbed through to the emergency call screen and dialed 911.