Wrong Turn (26 page)

A cavalcade of dead women rode relentlessly through his mind. One pretty little face after another. Their desperate pleading for their lives. Their screams as they died. He closed his eyes and savored those moments, pausing on the most delicious few seconds of all, the time he spent staring into their eyes as the light faded and their lives slipped away.

He would have to do something about it before he made his run for the border. He had to find someone new. He’d be too careless if he didn’t take care of the need first.

J
ake raced over to Mack Rogers’ former home as quickly as traffic would allow. The anthropologist had called. Another body had been found in the garden. He wanted to see it for himself.

When he arrived, he walked to the back of the house, tiptoeing around the marked, strung areas scattered across the yard. In the spot where vegetables once grew was a barren section of earth. The sun shone down on the unmistakable curved shape of the top of a human skull.

The anthropologist, holding a trowel in one hand and a small brush in the other, said, ‘The only one, so far, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t the only one in this garden patch. We also had indications of disturbed earth and suspicious shapes, over there, there and there,’ she said pointing to three yellow flags further out in the yard.

‘What about those?’ Jake asked pointing to the flags toward the markers closer to the house.

‘That’s where they started rolling through with the equipment. At that point, even the slightest indicators merited a flag. The best hits were at this spot and beyond. We’ll go back and check the others but want to check out the most promising locations first.’

‘Makes sense. Do you have any idea of how this body fits into the chronology of the ones found in the basement?’

‘Can’t give you a definitive answer at the moment but if you want an educated guess, I’d say he planted this one before any of the ones inside.’

‘How long before you think you’ll finish up back here?’

‘You do know that we don’t just shovel up dirt like we’re digging a ditch, right?’

‘Yes, ma’am. I—’

‘It’ll take as long as it takes, agent. I’ll alert you of any important developments as they happen.’ She crouched back down to the earth and brushed at the skull.

Jake, realizing he’d just been dismissed, backed away and went into the house to check on the progress made by the forensic techs. All the walls had been stripped of drywall and nothing remained but the bare wood framing. Planks stretched across floor beams now that every piece of oak flooring had been removed. Jake felt a little giddy staring through the gaps into the basement below.

‘Agent Lovett,’ the lead tech greeted him. ‘We’ve just about torn everything out of this place. Haven’t found anything of significance in days. Of course, they’re still finding little bits of bone and other artifacts down in the crawl space. That process moves at its own speed – sort of like traffic at rush hour when accidents are blocking the road.’

‘Don’t call it quits on the rest of the house until you’re certain. The landlady said she’s bringing in a crew to level this place when we’re done.’

‘Can’t say that I blame her. Who’d want to live here after what we found? Is she going to rebuild?’

‘Last time I talked to her, she hadn’t decided,’ Jake said. ‘I think she’s inclined to hold on to the property and sell the lot after the news dies down. I told her that might take some time. We gotta find the guy first.’

‘And who knows how long till trial?’

‘Exactly. What do you have left to do?’

‘The bathroom has a shower that doesn’t look more than ten years old. We’ll rip that out and then I’ll be satisfied that we’ve taken care of everything – unless someone decides they want us to jackhammer out the concrete floor in the finished section of the basement.’

‘Do you think that’s necessary?’

‘I don’t but I’m not calling all the shots. C’mon down the hall and look through to the old crawl space on the far end of the house.’

In a back bedroom, Jake stared down a deep hole, where workers in blue Tyvek suits labored away in the dirt. The floor was now much further away than it had been the last time he was at the house.

‘As you can see, they’re still at it. They think they’ve gone deep enough in the main area where the bodies were found, but now they’re working at the far corners. They want it flat and a bit deeper than the finished basement floor, all the way across the whole area. Glad I’m not working down in that hole.’

‘You and me both,’ Jake said. ‘Give me a holler if you find anything.’

‘Will do, Agent Lovett – but don’t hold your breath. I suspect we played this thing out a couple of days back.’

On the drive back to the office, Jake called Lucinda and told her about the discovery of yet another body.

‘Whoever it is, I’m glad for the family; but I sure hope I haven’t been involved in another wrongful conviction.’

‘That would be too much of a coincidence.’

‘I don’t know, Jake. I feel very disillusioned about my department and the DA’s office. I’m questioning everything.’

‘Well, in this case, you’re probably in the clear. The anthropologist said that she thought the skeleton she found pre-dated the bodies in the cellar.’

‘I can take some personal comfort in that, Jake. But what if Boz tampered with more than just the Sherman case? What if his high closure rate was based on the unlawful concealment of evidence?’

‘At one time, you said he was a good cop. Do you really think your judgment is that impaired? Isn’t it more likely that the situation with Martha Sherman was an anomaly?’

‘I hope that’s true, Jake. But if it’s not, the department is going to have to clean up the mess. I only hope the captain is proactive about investigating old claims of innocence. It would be better if we found it instead of some muckraking reporter.’

‘Now just hope we can find Mack Rogers before he kills again. That would give the press even more ammunition to shoot at your department and my agency, too. They’re already calling any time a young woman goes missing to ask if I think he could be involved in the disappearance. So far, every one of them has been a runaway, or someone who just left town for a short while without explaining her absence to anyone. I’m afraid, though, our luck won’t hold out forever.’

T
uesday morning, Lucinda drove to the Justice Center worried about the outcome of the plea bargain negotiations in the Chris Phillips case. She didn’t trust the DA or any prosecutor to reach an agreement that would leave any of a perpetrator’s victims or their loved ones with a shred of peace of mind.

She went straight up to the sixth floor, hoping to find out what transpired the previous day. On the way up, she grew progressively peeved that Reed did not bother to inform her on his own. She brightened up when she saw the door to his office hanging wide open.

Cindy shot down her rising optimism. ‘He’s in a staff meeting with the ADAs. I don’t expect them to wrap up for at least an hour.’

‘Do you know what’s happening with the Phillips plea bargain?’

‘Mr Reed said they were considering his offer overnight. He wasn’t sure if they’d accept it or make a counter-offer.’

‘What did Reed offer?’

‘That’s something you’ll have to ask him – but I’m not sure if he’s talking to you yet.’

‘You’re kidding me,’ Lucinda said. ‘Just how old is he and when will he stop pouting?’

‘Lieutenant,’ Cindy said as she tried to stifle a grin, ‘you know I can’t answer that question.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah . . .’ Lucinda said as she walked away. Back in her office, she got busy on reports. She despised the time spent on paperwork and was relieved when Brubaker called offering a distraction.

‘Lieutenant, I thought you’d want to know that Cafferty just hauled in those two other high school punks involved in the vandalism.’

‘Really? How did he manage to identify them?’

‘Got me. But he’s letting them stew in separate rooms for a while. Might be a good time for you to ask him.’

Lucinda disconnected and took a flight of stairs down to the second floor. As she entered the property crimes division, she spotted her prey sipping from a mug of coffee as he spoke to a colleague. ‘Hey, Cafferty!’

Cafferty spun around. ‘You,’ he said, pointing a finger in her direction. ‘If you say “I told you so”, you’re really gonna piss me off.’

‘Jeez, sergeant, settle down. I came to congratulate you for identifying the other two little hoodlums in the case.’

Cafferty gave her a sidelong glance through eyes narrowed to slits.

‘Aw, c’mon, Cafferty, ease up. How did you manage it?’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Yeah. Honest,’ she said, raising her hand in a two-finger scout pledge. ‘I come in peace, Cafferty.’

‘OK. Well, it was kinda lucky, I guess. I told each set of parents about the evidence against their kid, or kids in the case of the Pruitts. At the time, they were all sticking to the stories their children gave in the interviews – the maybe-the-other-kids-were-involved-but-not-my-little-darlings line.

‘Apparently, Mr and Mrs Pruitt were putting on a false front till they got their “little darlings” back home. Then, they came down on them hard – even told them not to expect any visits or spare change after they were locked up in juvie hall.

‘Finally, they wore ’em down. Not sure which one cracked first. But after they pulled the whole story out, they marched the pair of them back into my office and made them tell me the complete sequence of events. Jessica admitted that she made the 9-1-1 call reporting that there was vandalism in progress even though she knew that wasn’t true. She said that she wanted to see what her friends had done and just happened to arrive at the apartment complex when Charley was climbing through the window – not sure if we’ve gotten the whole story there, but I let that slide.

‘Tyler gave up the names of the other two guys but begged me not to make him testify against them. His father clapped him on the back of the head and told him that he’d do what needed to be done and feel good about it. One of the kids he named is seventeen, the other eighteen, so we can question them without their parents present. Might call the younger one’s father in to play it safe – it sounded as if he was a little worried that his dad might find out and that could work to our advantage.’

‘Not really luck, Cafferty. You planted the right seeds and the parents simply harvested them for you. Good job,’ Lucinda said.

‘But, I really was about to pin it on the little Spencer girl.’

‘Yeah, but you would have seen the holes in that theory eventually. I just helped move along the process a bit, that’s all. See you around, Cafferty,’ Lucinda said and walked out of his division toward the stairwell.

She had one hand on the door when her cellphone rang. Jake started talking before she could even say her name. ‘Lucinda, the car’s been spotted. My office is in between you and the location.’

‘I’m on my way,’ she said. ‘My car. I’m driving.’

‘You got it.’

Lucinda screeched into the parking lot, braking hard beside Jake. When he got inside the car, she asked, ‘Where to?’

‘Turn left,’ Jake answered.

She squealed out into the traffic, causing horns to blare.

‘And you think my driving is bad?’ Jake said.

‘Don’t start, Jake. Just tell me where to turn.’

In ten minutes, they were one block from the location where a patrol car sat, hidden from a possible sighting by anyone in the home housing the Hyundai inside its garage. The officer got out of his patrol car as they pulled up.

‘You the one who spotted the vehicle?’ Lucinda asked.

‘Yes, ma’am, lieutenant.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘I saw the car pull out of a convenience store parking lot on Wright’s Crossing Road. It seemed like he spotted me, so I turned onto another street at that four-way stop down thataway. I parked my vehicle and followed on foot. I went from cover to cover to minimize the possibility of being seen but still managed to catch him turning into the driveway there. I ran up to those bushes in time to see the garage door lowering with the vehicle inside. The car hasn’t come out of there since. I called for backup and now another patrol car is on the street running past the front of the house, in case he goes out that way on foot.’

‘Sharp eyes and quicker thinking, officer. We’re going to go up and see what we can see from behind that line of bushes. There’s an extraction team on the way. Tell them where we are and make sure they know that there is a possibility that he has abducted another woman since we lost track of him – we have nothing to confirm that one way or the other; but we don’t want to take a chance that he’s been behaving himself since the last kill and could have a potential hostage in his control.’

Lucinda and Jake crouched as they ran down the line of shrubbery toward the driveway entrance. They found positions where, between them, they could have eyes on all the windows and doors of the home. Lucinda was settling in place when she heard yipping and whining coming from the side yard. She sidled down and looked. A small ball of gray fur was tangled up in a chain wrapped around a tree. It looked as if it might choke itself to death if it didn’t stop fighting with the restraint.

Lucinda scurried back to Jake’s location. ‘I think I found Prissy.’

‘Who?’

‘The dog – Helen’s dog.’

‘Oh, right,’ Jake said. ‘I’d forgotten.’

A hacking, choking sound came from the side of the house. ‘Damn. She is going to kill herself,’ Lucinda said and took off up the driveway and cut into the yard with Jake begging her to come back. Lucinda didn’t pay the least bit of attention to his pleas or warnings. She moved as fast as she could while staying as low as possible to the ground.

Jake moved down the bush line to keep her in sight. As she tried to untangle the leash from the chain, the little dog fought her in desperation to get free. Out of the corner of her eye, Lucinda saw a flash of light in a window. At the same time, she heard Jack shout, ‘Get down.’

She threw herself flat as a shotgun blast erupted from inside the home embedding pellets in the tree trunk above her head. She stopped trying to untangle the mess and just jerked the collar over the little dog’s head. She grabbed the dog and held her tight.