Authors: Leslie Parrish
pul ed me out of the barrel and tossed me to the ground. But my heart had,
and he certainly thought I was al the way gone.”
“Maybe you never . . .”
“I did,” she said. “Trust me on this. I would have been pronounced dead in
any hospital.”
He didn’t push it.
“Anyway, Jack revived me. I started to breathe, then clawed at him,
screaming how much I hated him.” Her voice broke, this memory seeming
worse than the other horrific ones she’d already shared, the final, brutal straw.
“Then I looked at his face and saw huge tears rol ing down his dirty cheeks.”
Her eyes drifted closed but not quick enough to stop a tear of her own from
slipping out. That tiny dot of moisture gave testament to a lot of pent-up grief.
“He told me he was sorry for suggesting the man drown me, but said he’d
seen something on TV about CPR and thought he might be able to do it. It
was al he could think to do.”
Gabe shuddered, not even wanting to calculate al the things that could have
gone wrong. “That’s one hel of a risk.”
She scraped the back of her hand over her cheek casual y, pretending she
wasn’t catching a tear. “I know. But he thought the odds were better with that
than letting Col ier cut me up, as he’d intended to.” She said it matter-of-factly
and apparently didn’t notice him flinch. “Jack knew I wouldn’t have much time.
As soon as he thought I was dead, Jack reminded Col ier he had to leave to
stake out the drop spot and said he’d take care of getting rid of me. I can’t
imagine how hard it was, worrying he might not actual y go.”
But he did. Miraculously, shockingly, the monster had left in time for some
poor, brainwashed, abused kid to resuscitate his intended victim.
She took another sip of her drink, deeper this time, and curled up in her
seat, tucking one leg beneath her. “I begged him to come with me. Literal y
grabbed his hand and tried to drag him. But he wouldn’t. He was terrified.”
That was, on the surface, hard to grasp. Having worked with some real y
screwed-up victims, though, he thought he could understand it.
The devil you
know
. . .
“He said that if he came back and Jack was gone, Col ier would know right
away he’d helped me escape and would hunt us both down. There was no
phone, no buildings anywhere we could see. Even Jack wasn’t sure where we
were. By staying, he could cover for me until I’d gotten to safety. Say he’d
buried me or whatever.”
“What did he think would happen when the media reported you’d been
found?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “We were young, both terrified, panicked. We
were thinking of the next ten minutes, not the next ten hours.”
He nodded, understanding. Trying to think rational y at such a moment, wel ,
it was amazing she had survived. It would have taken some kind of miracle for
them both to.
Maybe there would have been one, if the kidnapper hadn’t returned soon
enough to realize what Jack had done. Col ier had been kil ed by police later
that night . . . if only he hadn’t come back before going to pick up the money,
Jack might very wel have been saved.
Funny, how he was thinking of this whole scenario as such a likely one or, at
the very least, remarkably plausible. A part of him had already accepted it.
“So you ran for your life.”
Her mouth trembled the tiniest bit. “Yes.”
And, he assumed, she’d never seen Jack again. At least, not until she saw
his face in a forensic artist’s sketch. Or believed she had.
“I thanked him, told him I’d come back for him, and took off. I ran for a while,
then found a place to hide and stayed there, shivering, al night long. I didn’t
come out until dawn.” Her voice faltered and her hand, the one holding the
wineglass, trembled. “Looking back, I think Col ier must have come back
soon after I’d gotten away and realized what Jack had done. So he kil ed him
and took the body with him when he went.”
“
And
the camper and al their stuff?” he pointed out, stil hung up on the
timing of this whole thing.
She nibbled the tip of her finger. “I sat down with a piece of paper and
figured out the time line. It would have been tight, yes, but not impossible. He
could have kil ed Jack, ditched the camper, brought the body back into town
and wal ed it up, then gone to the ransom drop point. He had hours—seven or
eight at least.”
He could see by the twist of her mouth that she was regretting those hours,
every one of them, that she’d spent hiding. Poor, terrified kid.
“It wouldn’t have saved him,” Gabe murmured, leaning forward in his seat,
wanting to make sure she real y heard him—and believed. “If you’d kept
running, been rescued right away, it
still
would have taken a long time for the
police to figure out where you’d been.”
A scared kid, running in the dark, after what she’d been through? It probably
would have been morning, anyway. “It wouldn’t have made any difference for
Jack. You know that, right?”
She managed a short nod. But he didn’t imagine his words would help. She
hadn’t set down that heavy load of guilt; he doubted she ever would, not until
she found out for sure what had happened to the boy. He hoped to be able to
help her with that, especial y now that he knew her horrific story.
“So, what about his truck?” he asked, stil piecing it al together in his mind.
“The police found it at the bus station a few days later and figured Col ier
had parked there and walked to the drop site, wanting to scope things out
since he knew I’d gotten away.”
He made a mental note to look into that. “Was it registered to Col ier?”
She shook her head. “Stolen two years before from out of state.”
Damn. So many leads that went nowhere, so many unanswered questions.
If only the police had managed to take the man alive.
“What do you think, Gabe?” she asked, his name sounding real y nice on
her lips. “Do you believe me? Do you think I could be right, that he wal ed Jack
up?”
Yeah, actual y, he did. Somehow, he’d begun to believe in her. Maybe
because she was so sure, her description so dead-on. Maybe because of the
mother who’d come to the station today with her theories. Whatever the
reason, he strongly suspected the Jack whom Olivia had known was the boy
whose bones he’d looked at four days ago.
“I do,” he admitted. “He couldn’t risk burying him. He knew you’d be bringing
the police; that’s why he got rid of the camper.” Which would have been the
natural place to leave the body. But plenty of tourists and hunters visited the
swamps, and he couldn’t have known the camper would never be found,
especial y if it was ditched quickly and at night. Wal ing up his victim at a work
site like something out of a Poe story might have sounded a little safer at the
time. And hel , maybe he’d wanted to kil time, wanted to listen to the news
reports or even scan police radio traffic to see if anybody was talking about
picking up the missing Wainwright girl. His confidence could have built with
every hour that he didn’t hear that news until he’d decided to make a try for the
ransom.
“The police did find the site,” she said. “There wasn’t much. Some
footprints, tire tracks, trash that made it look like they’d been staying out there
for a while. Little else.”
Suddenly remembering what she’d told him that afternoon, he said, “Was it
somewhere near the cemetery? That’s where you were found, right?”
Her already pale face went the tiniest bit whiter, which just served to
emphasize its delicate lines. The high cheeks, huge eyes, those pretty,
trembling lips. “The old barn was in a big wooded area west of Laurel Grove
North. I actual y made it as far as the cemetery during the night. By that point, I
was jumping at every noise and just wanted to hide.”
Her throat worked as she swal owed, and, for the first time since his arrival,
she turned her gaze away, not meeting his eyes. This wasn’t fear. It was
humiliation. Shame. That was clear in the smal , quiet whisper. “So when I
found an old run-down crypt with a broken capstone, I pul ed it open, crawled
inside and hid until daylight.”
“Jesus, Mary and St. Joseph,” he muttered, repeating his late mother’s
favorite saying, which she’d used when she didn’t know what to say. He didn’t
punctuate it by making the sign of the cross, as she would have; there was no
religion in the expression. Just pure, utter shock.
How much agony had this one woman—girl, at that time—been expected to
survive? And where on earth had she come up with the strength, the utter grit,
to survive it?
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, not knowing what else to say, hoping she hadn’t
interpreted his outburst as a sign he was judging her for choosing to curl up
with the dead in order to save her own life. He wasn’t. In fact, the only feeling
he had right now was admiration that she’d dug so deep and found such
stamina to fight for her own survival.
“Thanks,” she said with a nod, confirming she didn’t think he’d been
criticizing the choice she’d made at a desperate moment. “The next morning,
when it was light, I crawled out. A caretaker spotted me stumbling around,
cal ed nine-one-one, and I was rescued.” She lifted her hands in a helpless
shrug. “There’s not a lot more to tel . The rest you know. Col ier was kil ed, and
the police never found Jack. Twelve years went by. Then, this morning, I saw
his face on the news.”
Had that just been this morning? Had he real y not even known her name
one day ago? That seemed impossible. Wrong, somehow, on a deep, primal
level he couldn’t quite understand.
He knew her now, though, knew her better than most people did, he’d
wager. While he’d come here determined to make her prove she wasn’t
frigging crazy, now he would dare anyone to suggest she was. And yet . . .
and
yet
. . .
She’d told him everything that had happened to her but stil had explained
nothing about the end result. Oh, sure, he had his suspicions that her back-
from-the-dead experience and her subsequent night spent in the embrace of
some old skeletons had combined to make her think she had some kind of
psychic ability. Whether it was real or not he wasn’t wil ing to say. He was the
biggest skeptic on the planet and would never have believed that an abused,
kidnapped, twelve-year-old boy could have schemed to have a girl drowned
just so he could later save her life. And that it would
work
. So what did he
know?
Final y, as if knowing his mind was again churning, she sighed deeply,
shaking her head to force out al those dark, unpleasant thoughts and
prepared to give him one more explanation. The big one. “As for what I can do
and why I want to examine the remains?” she said slowly, as if wondering if he
real y wanted to know.
“Tel me.”
“You remember how I said I was dead a little more than two minutes?”
“I remember.”
Vividly
.
“Wel , Detective Cooper, since that night, I’ve had the ability to touch human
remains and relive the final minutes of someone else’s life. See what they
saw, hear what they heard.” She cleared her throat. “Feel what they felt. Which
means if Jack’s bones are the ones you found, I’l know it. Give me two
minutes and ten seconds, and I promise you, I’l
know
.”
He hesitated, staring, not sure he’d heard right. Once he’d absorbed the
words and saw she meant every one of them, he spun them around in his
mind, thinking about everything that had happened. Everything she’d been
through. Everything he knew about this woman so far.
Then, when it had al fal en into place, he handed her his empty beer bottle.
“I think I need another drink.”
More than a drink. Maybe a lot of them. Not because he didn’t believe her
but because somehow, deep down in his true skeptic’s heart, a part of him
real y did.
Or, at least, was considering it.
Though it sometimes seemed like he was remembering a scene from a
movie or a TV show, the boy felt pretty sure his name had once been Tucker
and that he’d once had a mama and a daddy and a big sister.
Some Tucker had, anyway. Maybe it had been him. Maybe not. He couldn’t
hardly remember anything anymore, beyond the rickety old trailer with the
roaches living in the wal s. And the dead grass outside. And the heat, the
never-endin’ heat.
Once, maybe, he’d lived in a place that got cool inside even when it was hot
out. Not anymore, though. Now it was always hot. Day and night.
Always
.
Like now. As he stirred the pot of canned ravioli on the portable camping
stove in the kitchen, he couldn’t help thinking about what it might be like to go