Primal Fear (13 page)

Chapter Eleven

Harry was in his office by six-thirty the next morning, feeling better after a few hours of sleep, but still troubled over what he’d witnessed the day before.  So far, he’d managed to steer his thoughts away from Slater’s post-mortem attack, concentrating instead on the briefing scheduled for later that morning with his deputies and the State Police.

He knew he would have to confront the memory of the event sooner or later, but he intended to put it off for as long as he could. 

By the time Captain Dick Brochu and Sergeant Gene Tappert of the New Hampshire State Police arrived at his office, Harry was well prepared to go over the case in an organized and thorough manner.  The officers showed up with a plain clothes detective in tow and proceeded immediately to Harry’s office.

Ben Dugan and Charlie Sandler, Harry’s senior deputies, joined them and the meeting began.  Once the introductions were out of the way, Harry tossed a small wink in Dana’s direction at the end of the hall and closed his office door.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ve made each one of you a copy of the official coroner’s report.  It covers everything Delbert Hughes was able to come up with yesterday, including the wounds to his ears I told you about last night.  It also includes the preliminary results of the blood and tissue samples taken from the body.  There’s no sign of any significant drug or alcohol abuse, and no indication that Slater’s actions might have been the result of any known type of controlled substance.”

He paused, returning to his chair as the officers leafed through their copies of the report.

Captain Brochu used the opportunity to present a bit of his own information.  “I haven’t gotten a call back from the forensics team about the children’s clothing recovered at the site, but I’m expecting that by noon today.  We’ll also be bringing in some of the parents who have reported missing children recently.  Hopefully, some of the clothes might give us a positive ID.”

Harry nodded.  “That still won’t tell us where these kids are, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.”

“Agreed,” Brochu said.  He motioned towards the detective, a thin, unsmiling man with a thick mustache and wire-rimmed glasses.  “This is Detective Sergeant Alex Hardt, from the Attorney General’s office.  He’s in touch with the criminal psychology team over in Concord, and they’ve come up with a precursory profile of Slater based on everything we know about him.  And, of course, on what we found at his house.  That could help us form some kind of lead on exactly what he did with those children.  The trail’s got to start somewhere; let’s just hope it’s still warm.”

Harry turned towards Hardt, who was seated just to the left of the office door.  “I’d like a copy of that, too, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Hardt nodded.  “It’s only a thumb-nail sketch.  We’re keeping it open for a few more days, to revise it as we go.  Most likely we’ll be learning a lot more about Slater as the investigation continues.”

“In the meantime,” put in Tappert, “what else do we have?  What about priors?  Did anybody look into that?”

Charlie raised his hand and stepped forward from his spot beside the file cabinet.  “I checked into it again this morning.  Locally, all we’ve got is one DWI from about four years ago, couple of parking violations.  Other than that, Slater’s right as rain, at least around here.”

“What about everywhere else?”

“Same thing.  His record is clean.  One incident in 1977, over in Cambridge, Mass.  Barroom brawl.  No charges were filed and he was released the next day.  I went further back, but couldn’t dig up a thing.  Nothing more than we had yesterday.”

They moved on to a discussion of strategy, trying to formulate some dependable plan of action to locate the missing children, or—in a worst case scenario—their bodies.

Harry’s choice of words here didn’t go over well.  None of them was eager to face up to the possibility that the children might already be dead, but Harry felt it was necessary to lay all the cards on the table as quickly as possible.

Brochu seemed as though he was about to protest, but Harry held up a hand to stop him.

“Please . . . just let me finish and then you can say anything that needs saying.  I’m just trying to pull this thing together the best way I know how.”  He took a deep breath.  “I know how cold all of this is going to sound, but believe me, I would be lying if I said none of this bothers me.  The fact is, it bothers the shit out of me, but we have to be able to look at this from every angle.  We all want to believe these kids are still alive.  That’s a valid belief and I’ll do my best to support it.  However, there may come a time when we have to turn around and re-think our options.  If we’re wrong, we’re all going to have to face some hard reality.”

He looked around, letting his eyes sweep over the other men in his office, and began counting off points on his fingers.  “A reality is that the most recent missing child report we have is nine days old, and that might not even be connected to this case.  Another reality is that at least four or five sets of children’s clothing were found in Slater’s basement.  What that tells me is that if these kids are alive and imprisoned somewhere, it appears they’re unclothed.  The temperature over the First City Bank this morning said seven degrees.  That’s not even adding in the wind-chill factor.  If these kids aren’t inside, if they’re not in a place that’s heated, well . . . I hate to think about this just as much as the rest of you, but if that’s the case, then there’s no hope of finding them alive.  Exposure would kill them.”

He paused to let that sink in, and when no one interjected, he pushed ahead.

“And the last bit of reality: Marty Slater is dead now.  If he had those kids tucked away somewhere, their location died with him.  Assuming he was keeping them alive, that means no more food and no more water.”

“And they won’t live much longer without that,” Brochu pointed out.

Harry returned to his chair.  “Exactly.  So we’re wasting time.  I recommend we scrape together a team to start an organized search.  It’s a small town, but we’ve got a lot of empty houses.  We’ve got to at least give those a try.”

“Agreed,” Brochu said.  “What else?”

Hardt cleared his throat, gaining the attention of everyone in the room.  “I’d like to put together a list of Slater’s acquaintances, see who he might have been mixed up with.  From what we’ve learned about most kiddie porn enthusiasts, a lot of them do quite a bit of trading and such.  May not have been the case with this guy, but if it was, that kind of information—”

Charlie sprang to his feet in the corner of the office, his expression bright with sudden understanding.  “Holy shit,” he muttered, “I don’t believe this.”

“What is it, Charlie?”

“Something just came to me, something I couldn’t put my finger on before.  But when we were talking about the search, and you said that it’s a small town but . . .” 

He trailed off, his eyes on the floor, as if meeting anyone’s gaze would distract him from his train of thought.

Harry stared at him.  “Charlie, what’s your point?  We have a lot to get through this morning.”

“I think I know where those kids are, but if I’m right, they’re . . . well I’m sorry, but they won’t be alive.”

“Where?”

“It’s something you said about Marty having them stashed away somewhere, and then again when you said there are a lot of empty houses in town, they could be anywhere.  I started to think, where would Marty hide them, if he didn’t want anybody to ever find them?  And if he’d . . . you know, if he’d killed them, where could he dispose of the bodies where they’d be impossible to find?  There’s only one place in town big enough, and it’s the reason for all the empty houses in Glen Forest.”

His eyes snapped up to meet Harry’s just as the same realization was dawning in Harry’s thoughts.  At the same moment, they both spit out the answer.

“The quarry.”

“The Stratham?” Ben asked, his tone grim.

“It’s the only place.”

Brochu sat up.  “Are you guys talking about the granite quarry?  Do you have any idea how deep that water is?”

Harry nodded.  “Believe me, I know.  We’re up there every other weekend in the summer trying to keep the local kids from using it as a swimming hole.  We’ve had our share of injuries out there.  Even a drowning or two since they closed down.”

“But what I’m getting at is how difficult it would be to search.  It could take months to dredge a body out of there, and that’s supposing we could even find one.”

“It’s worse than that,” Harry said.  “The water’s frozen over.  It’s a good thought, Charlie, but right now we don’t have any evidence that the quarry is the place to start.  It’d be a bitch to search, so unless we had some sort of positive lead, we’re going to have to use our manpower wherever else we can.”

Charlie was already nodding his head.  “I know.  That’s what I’m coming to.  There’s one more thing that’s been bothering me and now it all adds up.”  He took a breath, as though trying to be certain he was making his point as concisely as possible.

“The mud we found on Marty’s kitchen floor, the same shit he had all over his boots.  It’s been driving me crazy, trying to figure out what it reminded me of.  It wasn’t ordinary dirt, definitely not top soil or anything like that, but it still seemed familiar to me.  Now I got it.  It’s from the quarry.  It’s granite dust, caked up and turned to mud.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I’m positive.  When I was a kid, my uncle Arthur used to work at the Stratham.  Whenever he’d stop by to see my dad straight after his shift, he’d leave the same sort of trail all over our house.  My mother used to hit the roof.  I can’t believe I missed that connection.  From the look of Slater’s floor, he’s been out to the quarry pretty often.  There was an awful lot of that granite mud caked up.”

Harry leaned forward, nodding in agreement.  “And the shit on his boots was still tacky when we found him.”

“So he’d just been out to the quarry that morning, or at least late the night before.”

Brochu reached for the phone.  “I’m going to see how many men I can get out here, then we’ve got to come up with a plan, see how we’re going to tackle this.”  He nodded in Charlie’s direction.  “Nice work, deputy.”

Harry rose to his feet and crossed to the office door.  “I’ll order up the latest surveyor’s maps from the town hall.” 

He stepped out into the corridor, his mind racing, almost as discouraged as he was hopeful.  If those kids had been hidden away at the quarry, then at least they were looking at a reduced search area.  But that still gave them a lot of ground to cover.  The Stratham Granite Works was three-quarters of a mile wide at some points, and Lord knew how deep.

And that was just the pit itself.  The Stratham’s surrounding property covered more acreage than Harry wanted to think about right now.  A good deal of that area was covered in dense woodlands, extending to the northbound lanes of route 71, five miles away.  It would take days to carry out a proper search with that kind of ground to cover. 

Worst of all, though, was the possibility that Slater had drowned the children in the icy depths of water at the bottom of the quarry.  If he’d done so recently, he would have had to chop a fairly sizable hole in the thick ice.  The evidence of such a hole might still be there, but more likely, it would have frozen over by now.

If that was the case, they wouldn’t find those kids until spring. 

If at all.

John pulled the door closed behind him, fighting a sudden gust of wind until he heard the solid click of the latch sliding into place.  The weather was getting ugly outside, promising snow, and the wind was picking up steadily.  The sky was the perfect white of a fish’s belly, the bright orb of the sun little more than a faint disc beyond the heavy cloud cover.

On the long drive north, he’d heard numerous reports on the radio news warning of an impending storm, one the weather service had been tracking all the way from the Gulf of Mexico over the past forty-eight hours.  They expected it to hug the coast and then blow out to sea, pushed off to the east by a massive cold front descending from the north.  The central and northern regions of New Hampshire were unlikely to see any snow at all in that case, one local meteorologist had reported, but if the blast of arctic air from Canada were to stall out, a possibility he wasn’t yet willing to discount, then the storm would continue along its current path. 

The result would be a classic Nor’easter, and if that happened, the weatherman had said, then it would dump anywhere between eighteen to twenty-four inches over the Lakes Region and the North Country.

John had listened to the forecast with one eye turned to the sky.  It was bad enough he was travelling through unfamiliar territory; he had no desire to do so in the middle of a blizzard.

His concern had been unfounded, as it turned out, because two hours later, he’d pulled into Glen Forest and the sky had still not produced even a single snowflake.  He’d had no trouble finding the police station and by nine-thirty he’d been mounting its front steps.

Now, standing at the reception desk, John felt a heavy sense of anxiety wash over him.  On the way here, he’d had the road to command his attention, the threat of the blizzard to constantly occupy his thoughts.  Now there was nothing to push away the uncertainty he felt, nothing to divert his attention away from the fact that—quite likely—he was about to make a fool of himself.