The Summerland (7 page)

“
We can take a missing person’s report and investigate, but to be honest with you, most of my deputies are committed to this murder investigation. Unless we get more to go on within the next 72 hours or so, I don’t know what to tell you. We can post her picture on our website and make up some posters, but that’s about it for now. I’ll have one of our guys do a canvass of that neighborhood this afternoon, see if anyone saw anything, all right?” At her bemused nod he shifted gears.

“
Do you have somewhere to stay for now, or would you like to head back up from the Southland in a few days? Your car should be ready by Friday at the latest. Maybe you and your husband could see the Park or something in the meanwhile.”

Arden’s laugh was harsh, bitter, totally at odds with the personality she’d displayed thus far. “Ah, no. I’ll stay here until I can get my car back and figure out where the hell my sister is. My ex is in Korea right now, so he won’t be joining me. Any recommendations on a place to stay away from the maddening crowd?” she asked, referring to the press.

“
Sorry,” said the Sheriff crisply, all business now. “Didn’t mean to hit a sore spot. I just assumed you were married when you mentioned that Henning was your maiden name. As for a place to stay, you might try the Maple Street Inn. It’s a bed and breakfast far enough from the highway that the press probably hasn’t caught on to it yet.”

And so their conversation degenerated into the banalities that pass between a law enforcement officer and a crime victim. But as they conducted their business across the top of the battered, cluttered old desk, each felt a niggling sensation in the back of their minds. Bill dismissed it as something he might have missed in the investigation. Arden chalked it up to being tired and bitchy. Whatever it was, both of them were feeling it, and continued to feel it as he left to talk to the FBI and she checked into her hotel room.

The Third Fold

So, she has finally begun the process. I’m pleased she chose Grimassi’s book, it has been my inspiration. Fort Hood seems so long ago and far away. How cynical and young I was then. When I first attended a coven meeting I thought they were all frauds. How wrong I was. They never knew how close to the real truth they were. If only they had researched their history a little more, learned the true meaning behind The Sun, The Moon. If only they’d applied the lessons of the Egyptians and the Aztecs, the value of blood let in the name of God, they could have been my first disciples. Instead I am alone. Alone and living the only true religion. My religion. The Way.

Samantha knew he was watching her. She could feel his eyes on her as she sat pretending to read the hocus-pocus, “nature is love” drivel she was holding. Who believes this shit? Well, obviously he did, and that really frightened her. The fact that the bookcase held such a broad base of religion was extraordinary as well. She, who had grown up in a liberal Lutheran home, hadn’t heard of half of the religions represented, and couldn’t tell you what the ones she did recognize believed in. She and her secular education had parted ways when she turned sixteen, and she’d never looked back. In retrospect, she thought dryly, that might have been a bad choice.

She was glad she could look at this whole situation with a little detachment, because she knew that was what she’d need to get out of here alive. Allowing terror or any emotion at all, to dictate her moves would surely get her killed sooner rather than later. She was a survivor, and would apply the skills she’d learned on the streets of L.A. to keep her alive from one day to the next. She fleetingly thought of Arden, and that maybe the police would find her car and contact her. But no, her captor wouldn’t have overlooked such an obvious clue to authorities. From what little she’d seen, he was too smart, too methodical in his approach.

She could certainly appreciate, even as a victim, the elaborate measures he had gone through to make her prison comfortable and soothing. People paid big bucks to have lighting and sound systems like this one installed. The coupe de grace was the food delivery system.

That little nugget had dashed any hopes she had had of overpowering or outsmarting her captor in a one-on-one meeting. It was an ingenious dumbwaiter, computerized, of course, which reminded her of the gizmo used in a drive through bank teller. The ‘server’ would pop out of the wall, and as it did, a metal plate would drop in back, preventing her from even seeing what was behind the wall. When she was finished, she placed her dirty dishes into the server, and it disappeared into the wall. It, like the door she had discovered her first day here, was virtually seamless, and offered no means of escape.

She knew a kind of lethargy was settling over her in general, and knew exactly where it came from. Good as his word, she had never seen her captor, except perhaps in those initial moments of her abduction, and had heard from him only on that first day. She still couldn’t remember anything from that time, and doubted she ever would. So she pretended to read the Wiccan claptrap, because she knew it would make him happy, and therefore maybe, just a little, complacent. She wanted him to be pleased with her when they finally met, so he would have no reason to suspect that she was ready to claw his fucking eyes out at the first opportunity.

I know exactly what she is thinking. Haven’t I made the study of human nature my life’s work? Does she really think she’s fooling me with this transparent show of obedience? This only makes me surer she is the Chosen One. When she ascends with me, the world is ours.

Chapter Seven

The Maple Street Inn was quiet, quaint and hideously expensive. Apparently the reporters had taken every other room in town. Well, at least she got a killer, no pun intended, breakfast in the morning.

So here she sat in her nicely appointed room at ten in the morning, not quite sure of what to do, but knowing that planting her ass on the chair in the sitting room wasn’t going to get her any closer to finding Samantha. If she was really even missing. Arden had tried calling the number in Hollywood that Sheriff Ashton had provided her, but all she got was an answering machine.

Sam’s husky sex-goddess voice rippled over her, reminding her of times past, both good and bad. She left a short message, telling Sam she was looking for her, and how to reach her in Mariposa.

Samantha. When was the last time she had even entered Arden’s mind? It was almost like an anniversary, getting those calls in need of money. It had been her only contact with the one person in the world who should have been closest to her, her sister. It seemed like she was always there for Sam, but the reverse was never true.

Where had Sam been when her life went to shit, when she’d found out Tom had been cheating on her? Where had Sam been when she’d actually survived basic training as an enlisted troop, then five years later when she’d earned her degree and become an officer? Had she been there to revel in Arden’s triumph? No. Instead, she’d called, not six months later, looking for money for an abortion. Arden remembered asking herself even then if she cared enough to delve deeper and came up with a most dissatisfying answer. No. So she sent her a check and went on with her life.

Arden had never really figured out why she sent the checks and the money orders and the wire transfers. She did know that guilt was part of it. Building a nice, steady life where she was liked and respected had always been important to her. Even her marriage had been a concession to that. It had been a pleasant, quiet and safe union.

Someone as volatile as Sam would only wreak havoc in her carefully constructed life. And, she acknowledged to herself, there was always that quiet little voice in the back of her head that said that Sam was her sister and she wanted to see her succeed. She knew it was a foolish and naïve hope. People like Samantha never changed, they just used up people as fast as they could until family was all they had left.

Suddenly fidgety, Arden surged out of her seat, admiring the simple, clean lines of the décor, restlessly running her fingers along the nubby surface of the top of the fainting couch, across the pure softness of the down comforter, down the silky smooth finish of the intricate oak dresser. She’d always been a fan of Southwestern decorating, but she’d never seen it done so well, so elegantly. The colors and shapes and even the wallpaper flowed to soothe, to relax.

As much as she tried to embrace that feeling of comfort, to let it slide into her mind and ease away her worries, it did no good. Her mind kept returning to Samantha.

They had always been polar opposites. She’d been the good student, the good daughter, while Sam had run amok throughout her formative years. And run amok wasn’t even a good description of the terror Samantha had wrought in her late teens. Police visits to their nice suburban house had been frequent; the drugs found in her possession almost a weekly occurrence. Their parents had been puzzled. How could two girls raised in exactly the same loving, nurturing environment turn out so differently? Arden had her own take on the situation.

Sometimes shit just happened. God, or whoever was responsible for putting together the DNA that makes each person, sometimes just forgets to hit that one switch. The one switch that makes the middle-class, law-abiding suburbanite happy with their lot in life. That switch, which, when left ‘unflipped,’ seemed to absolve the concerned party of any moral or just obligation to the rest of the human race. And Samantha’s switch had obviously never been hit.

Arden balled her fists against the elegant needlework of the sitting room chair in unconscious anger. What the hell was wrong with her? She’d never been one to sit back, waiting for life to come to her, she’d always reached out and grabbed it by the throat. So why was she sitting in her pleasant prison, waiting for the cowboy sheriff to make an appearance, or grace her with a phone call? She knew why. It was Samantha.

Anytime she felt less than what she really was, Samantha was the root of it. She had always been the pretty one, the popular one, while Arden faded back into the shadows. Samantha’s short tenure on the cheerleading squad had totally eclipsed Arden’s four years of involvement in student council, her years of charity work in the community. Maybe not to their parents, no, but to each and every boy that attended their mid-size Oklahoma high school, Samantha had always been the first choice, Arden a distant second.

So now here she was fifteen years later and apparently not one whit smarter, at least when it came to her sister. Samantha was missing, for Christ’s sake, but she still felt like a pale shadow of the glory that was Sam. You would think basic training and Officer Training School would have washed away any and all indecision about who and what she was, she thought wryly. And it had, at least when it concerned anything other than her family life.

Shit
, she cursed under her breath,
no more sitting around like a lump
. I’m going to go out and make something happen, one way or the other, and Sheriff Bill Ashton is going to be the man to help me.

* * * *

If the Sheriff had even begun to glimpse the wheels turning inside Arden Jones’ head, he would have started running for the hills and never stopped. As it was, he was going over every painful detail of this case with Special Agent Drebin, reliving each moment of the search, and reviewing every piece of evidence the crime scene had yielded to this point. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot.

The Modesto crime lab specialists had thoroughly combed each crime scene over the course of the day yesterday, taking photographs and any evidence in clear sight, but leaving everything else for the FBI lab technicians who had arrived late last night.

Even though the sun had been up for over three hours now, both men had decided to let the experts do their job unencumbered by amateur questions, so they reviewed the information the first team from Modesto had compiled.

Kimmie Ross’ body had yielded liberally scattered green silk fibers. The other bodies were skeletons in all actuality, so finding fiber fragments on the ground around them would be a miracle on the scale of the Fatima visitation.

Each victim had been positioned in a south-north configuration. In the southwest corner of the Ross circle, right next to the victim’s left ear, a small wreath of wilted lavender was discovered, almost hidden by fallen buck brush leaves. Searchers had been unable to find additional wreaths at the other sites, but that was probably due to the fact that they had been exposed to the elements for a lengthy amount of time and had naturally degraded.

Whelan’s ad hoc report on the discovery of candle wax was confirmed. At five equidistant points around the circle red and yellow candles had been used, with blue, red, gold and green placed precisely at the four points of the compass.

Left with this information, Ashton and Drebin now sat alone, with piles of paper surrounding them on the conference room table in the high school library. Off to one side of the table sat a stack of files neither of them wanted to look at. It contained every missing person’s report, correction, and every missing
female’s
report for the last ten years within Mariposa and the surrounding counties
.
The pile was depressingly high. While Bill wanted to look at each and every one personally, he knew it would be an exercise in futility. He could not, and would not, divide his attention between overseeing this case and getting down in the weeds with details. He made an on-the-spot decision to have Sergeant Doug Brewster, his most trusted protégé, head up the missing person’s investigation. With that decision made he was ready to move on to other things.