B00CCYP714 EBOK (30 page)

As she worked, she spoke aloud. “All right, Dad. I’m putting your parlor trick to good use. Who knew teaching me to pick open handcuffs with bobby-pins would come in handy?”

Bladen examined the handcuffs carefully. They were double-locked, which would make picking them more difficult, but not impossible. She inserted the bent end of her wire pick into one side of the keyhole, and pushed down, releasing one of the locks. She then flipped the cuffs, inserting the pick into the other side, and repeated the downward push. She felt the latch release, allowing her to open the cuff around her wrist.

Bladen squealed with joy, as she pulled her wrist free. It was a momentary celebration, because the fear returned, replacing her jubilation. If he came back now and found her free, there would be hell to pay. She huddled in the corner of the shower, listening, trembling, and even contemplated putting the cuff back on her wrist, before her survival instincts returned.

“Get out of this bathroom and find a weapon, Bladen,” she chastised herself. She stood and narrowed her eyes at the bathroom door. “If I die, I’m going to make sure I get one good shot at taking you with me, you son-of-a-bitch. Hooah! Come get some.”

#

It was nearing nine o’clock when they approached a crossroads with a small gas station on the corner. It was one of those old country quick-stop marts that had somehow survived, selling fuel and snacks to the locals through the years. Rainey and her father had stopped there several times, during the long, lazy Sunday drives they used to take, winding through the back roads talking about life. Billy Bell was not a man who enjoyed sitting still, watching football. He seemed always to be in motion. Rainey not only inherited her father’s looks, she acquired his restlessness too. Knowing what she knew now about post traumatic stress disorder, she imagined it was one of the ways he learned to deal with it, before the condition had a name.

“Pull in there, Colonel. I need to use the restroom and grab some coffee.”

They had been driving for an hour, checking the tailgates of the trucks they located for the telltale scratch, eliminating three so far. The last address they visited was nothing more than the burned out shell of an old farmhouse beside a dirt path that led into the woods. The owner and the truck were long gone.

“I could use a little coffee myself,” the colonel said, pulling his car into one of only two parking spaces in front of the little store.

Rainey knew he was not sleepy or tired. It would be a long time before Patrick Asher crashed. The amphetamine effect of a missing child would disrupt his sleep for nights to come. Even if they found her alive, the fear would wake him in the dark, panicked and out of breath. Should they find her too late, Rainey doubted the colonel would ever have another good night’s sleep.

In the bathroom, Rainey splashed water on her face and re-corralled her hair. She stared into the mirror, talking to the UNSUB. “You are so close, I can feel you.”

Her cellphone began to ring. She pulled it out of her jacket pocket and saw Katie’s face smiling up at her. She opened the door and stepped outside, careful to bring the key she had to return to the clerk, and answered the call.

“I guess you’ve been watching the news,” she said into the phone.

“Yes, I have,” Katie replied. “It’s been non-stop coverage on Cookie’s channel, and the networks keep breaking in with updates. I saw Danny and Brooks. I didn’t know she was coming.”

“Neither did Danny,” Rainey said, laughing. “She’s going to stay a few days, after this is over.”

“You sound pretty confident that you will find this guy.”

“Katie, he’s close, so close I can almost smell him.”

Katie was quiet for a moment. When she did speak again, some of the lightness had left her voice. “Are you out there looking for this guy without a weapon?”

“The colonel has one. We’re not confronting these people. We just pull up, shine a light on the back of the truck, and drive off. They don’t even know we’re there, most of the time. These are country folks. They don’t park their trucks in garages.”

“So you and the colonel are driving around looking at trucks, while your former colleagues are investigating, and I quote, ‘the largest body recovery in recent North Carolina history.’ Oh, and I think my favorite sound bite so far was the young cop, whose entire quote was, ‘This guy is a …’ followed by a long series of bleeps, interspersed with words like animal, freak, abomination. I was kind of glad to hear that last one being used appropriately for once.”

“I’m glad the show is still going on. He’ll be glued to the screen, probably multiple screens, watching every minute of the coverage. He won’t see me coming,” Rainey said.

“It’s obviously pointless to ask you not to do this without backup,” Katie said, followed by a deep sigh.

“If we find the truck, we back off and call it in. I know what I’m doing, Katie. You have to trust me.”

“Okay, then you have to trust me. Gunny and the grandmothers are going to watch the children for about an hour. They are already in bed anyway. Ernie and Henry are coming to take me to the hospital to see Mackie. I’m taking food for the boys and Thelma. I can’t let him go under tomorrow morning, without seeing him. I will be safe and well protected.”

“I’m okay with that,” Rainey said. “I need to see him too. Maybe I can swing by tonight sometime. Tell him I’m thinking about him.”

“I will, honey. I love you. Be safe.”

“I love you, Katie, and you be careful, too.”

Katie answered with Rainey’s signature, “Always,” and then she was gone.

Rainey joined the colonel inside the little store, returning the bathroom key to the clerk. The old man eyed her up and down, and then said, “Aren’t you Billy Bell’s daughter, that FBI girl?”

Rainey smiled at him. “Yes, I’m Billy’s daughter, but I’m not in the FBI anymore.”

“My name’s Wilton. Knew your daddy pretty well. I remember you coming in here with him when you were younger. Sure was sorry to hear he was killed.”

“I’m glad he had friends like you,” Rainey said. She pulled the tailgate picture from her back pocket. “Wilton, maybe you can help me. I’m looking for this truck.”

She handed the picture over the counter. Wilton studied it for a moment, and then handed it back to Rainey. “Well, Miss Virginia had a truck that color, but she passed about three years ago. I see her oldest son driving it sometimes, but I don’t think he’s supposed to.”

“Why is that?” The colonel asked.

“Well now, that’s one of those family tragedies, when greed and guile take over after a death. Miss Virginia had a small farm, just down the road a piece. John, her husband, died ten years back. He worked on heavy equipment and cars, when he wasn’t in the fields, and left her fair off. She rented out the land to her neighbor to farm. If she’d had no children, she could have lived to a hundred very comfortably, some say. I’m glad she’s not around to see what happened to them boys of hers.”

Rainey knew they would have to wait for the point of the story, as this was a southern tale. The narrator of such a story felt compelled to add in the details and embellishments, so the listener not only heard, but was completely immersed in the experience. Southerners were of the mind that too few words were more apt to leave the story up for interpretation. They would rather you fully grasp the situation, than form an opinion on just the facts. She dared not interrupt Wilton, and simply offered a nod of understanding.

The colonel was not so patient. “Was there trouble?”

Wilton took a deep breath, storing up for the remainder of his tale. “That oldest boy, Vance, he stayed around here, but the youngest one, Nate, moved to Maryland. Nate visited often, but Vance spent a lot of time with his mother. He also drained her bank accounts. Virginia was always bailing him out of one financial scrape or another after he got kicked out of the army. His divorce practically broke her. She loved that grandson of hers. It nearly killed her when the judge ruled Vance couldn’t see him anymore. I think she died of a broken heart, fighting to see him again.”

Wilton shook his head from side to side, a well-known storyteller tactic, giving the listener time to absorb the tragedy, before continuing. “When she died, Vance was befuddled to find his mother had been keeping a running tab on the money she’d given him. The land and everything on it, including her truck, went to Nate. She left Vance a few thousand dollars and called it even.”

“I take it Vance didn’t like that very much,” Rainey said, growing more interested in the story by the moment.

“No, not at all. Wasn’t long after the will was read that the farmhouse burned to the ground. Folks around here figured Vance done it to spite Nate. I seen ‘em fall out right here in the parking lot, fists a flyin’. They’ve been in court over the estate ever since, accusations going back and forth. That’s why I say Vance shouldn’t be driving that truck. It’s supposed to be put up in the garage with all of his daddy’s tools.”

“Are you talking about V. A. Wayne’s place, back that way about a mile?” Rainey asked, pointing in the direction from which she and the colonel had just come.

“Yeah, Virginia Afton Wayne, that was her. Knew her all my life.”

Rainey was very interested now. “We just came from there. I didn’t see any garage standing on the property.”

Wilton chuckled. “When John built that garage back in the seventies, Virginia made him put it up in the woods, away from the house. She said she couldn’t stand to hear him revving engines all day. You have to follow that little sand path into the woods about a hundred yards.”

Rainey pulled out some cash to pay for the two coffees the colonel had placed on the counter. Wilton waved his hand at her.

“It’s on the house. Your daddy ran down some bad checks for me once. Wouldn’t take no payment for it. I reckon I owe him two cups of coffee.”

Rainey could barely contain her excitement, but remained calm until they were back in the car. She didn’t want to get the colonel’s hopes up, but she had a really good feeling about this. He evidently did, too.

“Back to the Wayne address, right?”

Rainey turned to face him. “We locate and identify the truck, then we back off. Understood?”

“What if Bladen is in that garage?”

“If he is there, we have to back off. He’ll kill her before he lets us take her. We’re going to need help.”

The colonel backed the car out of the parking space, saying, “Like you said, I’ll do what I can live with.”

“Hooah, Colonel.”

#

Bladen stayed in the shower stall longer than she needed to. He was gone, but fear kept her behind the closed bathroom door until she was absolutely sure it was not one of his sadistic tricks. While she waited, she broke the remaining part of the brush head completely from the handle, leaving a jagged stake for a weapon. When she had steeled herself against the paralyzing fear, Bladen turned the handle on the bathroom door, pulling it open slowly. The light from the bathroom spilled out into the dark chamber. She was alone.

The first thing Bladen did was turn on the lights and head for his desk. She opened the laptop, powered it up, but was disappointed to find it password protected. She dug around on the desk for any form of communication, and finding none, she turned her attention to other pursuits. Bladen had one mission on the top of her list. She walked over to the shelf where he kept his “tools,” and located the Pear. She picked it up and threw it against the far wall as hard as she could. The force of her throw only bent it a little, so she picked it up and threw it again. Her fury grew, as she chased the torturous contraption around the room, repeatedly throwing it against the walls until there was nothing left but pieces of bent metal.

“Try using that again, asshole,” she raged.

Next, she went for his whip, seizing it from the wall hook, where he returned it after each torture session. She found a pocketknife in his desk drawer and took great pleasure in cutting the whip into little pieces. Bladen might die tonight, when he returned and found out what she had done, but she knew two things. He would never use that whip to scourge her naked skin again, and his precious Pear of Anguish was no longer a threat.

Once she was finished with the whip destruction, she set out to remove all the leather straps from the rack, yanked the hinged top off the pillory and used it to break the picquet stake from the floor. She cut all the ropes she could find into pieces, and general wreaked havoc on all his meticulously handcrafted torture devices. Bladen worked herself into such a frenzied state, she collapsed against a wall trying to catch her breath. She did not know how long she had been thrashing away at his possessions, but as she looked around the room, Bladen began to laugh for the first time in days.

#

The colonel drove the car slowly up the sandy path. Neither of them spoke. Both were processing the environment, as they slipped beneath the evergreen canopy. The headlights illuminated a structure in the center of a cleared area and surrounded by thick woods. The fine hairs on the back of Rainey’s neck stood up and her instincts screamed, “Alert! Alert!”

“Yep, if I was going to build a lair, this is exactly the kind of place I would do it,” she said.

“Rainey, are you willing to kill a man with knife?”

She thought that an odd question at the moment, but answered honestly. “I am trained in knife tactics and would stab an assailant if I had to, but I prefer the distance a firearm affords me from my attacker.”

He reached under his seat, never taking his eyes from the road, and pulled out a K-Bar, the seven-inch bladed U.S. Army fighting knife of choice. He placed it on the seat beside her. He then reached under his jacket, pulled his M-9 from its holster, placing it next to the knife.

“Pick your weapon,” he said. “You’re not getting out of this car unarmed.”

Rainey reached for the M-9. “Since I’m very sure that you are capable of defending yourself with that knife, I’ll stick with something I know I can use.” She looked at the colonel’s profile, seeing the muscles tightening in his jaw. “We need him alive, Colonel. Try to keep that in mind.”