Scene of the Crime: Deadman's Bluff (20 page)

Seth didn’t even want to go there. The idea of this playground for dirt-bike riders and quad runners being a burial pit just beneath the surface made his stomach queasy.

As he waited for everyone to get into place and the photos to be taken, he walked over to Atkins’s car and opened the back door.

“I didn’t do it,” Sam cried. “I was just out here sneaking in a ride before I have to go to work at the bar. It’s been tough since they closed the dunes. I’m, like, addicted to riding.” He bent his head to wipe his nose on his shirt shoulder. “I saw that hand and totally freaked. I was driving away to get to my truck so I could get help when Deputy Michaels came after me. I stopped to tell him, but he threw me down on the ground and cuffed me.”

Sam’s sniffling stopped and his eyes narrowed. “He kicked me in the side a couple of times even though I was down and already cuffed.”

Seth wasn’t surprised and he intended to speak to Atkins before he left Amber Lake about Michaels’s penchant for bullying. But if Sam really was the Sandman Seth could understand Michaels’s added touch of finesse to the arrest. Seth fought his own desire to punch the kid as he thought of Tamara’s face shining up from her sand grave.

“What’s up with the ostrich?” Seth asked.

Sam stared at him in what appeared to be genuine puzzlement. “What ostrich? What are you talking about?”

Sam looked like nothing more than a scared, barely legal-aged kid, and Seth slammed the car door closed, a disturbing uncertainty simmering inside him.

He wanted to believe that Sam was guilty. It made everything so neat and clean. Bad guy caught, case closed and no more danger of horrendous live burials to the women in Amber Lake, no more danger to Tamara.

Desperately, he wanted it to be Sam, but there was just a sliver of uncertainty in his mind about the kid’s guilt. It was just a gut feeling that he hoped was wrong. But when he’d asked Sam about the ostrich, Sam’s look of total incomprehension had appeared so genuine.

By the time he walked back to Atkins, it was time to get closer and check out who, exactly, was buried in this latest murder. “I was thinking earlier that hopefully there aren’t bodies out here that we don’t know about,” Seth said as they walked.

“Bite your tongue,” Atkins replied and a deep sigh escaped him. “I’ll tell you one thing—if there are bodies out here they aren’t locals. We’ve got no missing persons reported in Amber Lake.”

“Tamara was taken from the rest area,” Seth reminded him.

“I know, and hopefully she’s the anomaly and really was the third victim in the beginning of this nightmare. Sam fits the profile for a serial killer. He’s about the right age when they begin to kill, he comes from a bad background and he’s pretty much a loner.”

Seth flashed Tom a terse grin. “That could describe half the men I work with at the FBI.” His grin fell as they drew closer to the hand sticking up out of the sand.

It looked odd...the fingers fatter than normal female fingers. “Something’s not right,” he murmured more to himself than to Tom. As he reached an area close enough to lean down and look closer, he cursed beneath his breath and grabbed the hand. It came loose easily from the sand.

“Hey!” Tom yelped in protest.

“It’s not real,” Seth said. He stood up and held out the detached forearm. “It’s a damn prosthesis.”

He stood up and stepped aside, indicating that some of the other deputies complete the dig to see if anything else had been buried there. His mind raced with suppositions. This had been a well-executed trick. Every law enforcement person working for the town was here.

Heart starting to pound an uneven rhythm of fear, he yanked his cell phone from his pocket and quickly punched in Linda’s phone number.

One ring.
Pick up, Tamara,
he thought urgently. Two rings. He clenched the phone more tightly to his ear. Three rings. Why wasn’t she answering? Four rings and then the click of the answering machine coming on. Linda’s voice filled his ear with her prerecorded announcement to wait for the beep to leave a message.

“Tamara, it’s Seth. Pick up the phone,” he said when the beep had sounded. He was vaguely aware of Tom stepping closer to him. “Tamara, please, pick up the phone.”

The urgency inside Seth grew to mammoth proportions. Where was she? Why wasn’t she answering him? Because the Sandman had fooled them all. Because she wasn’t there to answer the call. She was with the Sandman.

His heart crashed against his ribs in sheer terror. “He bluffed us. He set it up so that all of us would respond to a body in the dunes so he could get to his real target.” Seth could barely keep the tremble from his voice.

“Tamara.” Tom said her name flatly, as if she were already nothing but another tragic victim in a madman’s game.

“Send somebody over to my sister’s house,” Seth said, although he was certain they would find the house empty...Tamara gone.

He didn’t want to leave here. He needed to think. He needed to crawl into the mind of the clever man who had set up such a ruse to obtain his ultimate goal. He desperately needed to figure out if he had Tamara, and, if so, then where was he going with her? And how long did Seth have left to try to save her life?

Seth had to do what he did best, delve into the mind of a killer.

Chapter Fourteen

If Tamara wasn’t certain she was going to die, she might have found her current situation almost peaceful. She couldn’t move, there was no question of somehow escaping or fighting back. And with final resignation all the missing pieces of her memory came rushing back to her.

Steven had been the man with the dog at the rest area, and she hadn’t been afraid because he’d been wearing his khaki uniform. He’d looked official and respectable and worked for the city of Amber Lake. Why would she have any reason at all to fear him?

She’d made it so incredibly easy for him, bending over to pet the cute little terrier she now remembered seeing in the animal pound. She also realized that when she’d been in the pound and had needed to get out, had felt as if she was suffocating, it had been because on some deep level she’d recognized the scent that had clung to Steven...a scent of dog and heat and feces.

When she’d gone with Seth, Linda and Samantha to the animal pound to pick out Scooter, it hadn’t been her first visit. She’d spent a night and half a day locked in a cage in a back room next to a caged German Shepherd that looked like he’d like nothing better than to tear out her throat.

Each time she’d started to come around, to get the feeling back in her body, Steven would appear to give her another shot, rendering her helpless all over again.

The next afternoon when he’d taken her out of the cage and moved her to the trunk of his car, he’d muttered to her as if she were somebody else...as if she were his mother.

“Just like an ostrich,” he’d said. “Bury your head in the sand, that’s all that you did when he beat me to within an inch of my life. Mothers are supposed to protect their kids, but you just hid your head in the sand and now I’m going to hide your head for you.”

She’d wanted to scream at him, to tell him that she wasn’t his mother, that she’d never done anything to harm him, but she couldn’t speak. Her lips wouldn’t move, her mouth refused to form a single word. She was trapped in her own body with only her brain working overtime.

Along with the memories of what had happened to her immediately following Steven grabbing her came others, as well. Her unhappy marriage to Jason, the final straw that had broken their marriage and finally the reason she’d dreaded going home, the reason for the core of grief inside her.

The casket had been white and barely bigger than a shoebox. The baby had been a little girl, born too early and never having drawn a breath of life.

Grief tore through her and it was impossible to blink away the tears that filled her eyes. It had been that sorrow, along with an abiding loneliness that had filled her apartment in Amarillo, which had made her reluctant to go home.

It had been Seth who had filled up that loneliness, eased any pain that might have been left behind and made her want a future with him, a future filled with all the things that had been absent in her life.

And now it was too late. It was all too late.

The Sandman was going to put her to sleep forever. Her heart beat a slow rhythm despite the fear that filled her as she thought of the scrape of a shovel against the sand, as she thought of the weight of that sand falling first on her feet and legs, then on her midsection and finally covering her face, smothering her to death.

She wished she’d told Seth she loved him. She wished she’d said the actual words to him. Even if he didn’t love her back, she wished she had given him the gift of knowing that he was deeply loved.

Too late. Now it was all too late. She hoped it wouldn’t be him who found her. She hoped he wouldn’t frantically dig in the sand to find her, to try to save her when it was evident she was gone. She didn’t want his last image of her to be her dead body.

She forced her thoughts away from Seth and to her current situation. Steven was driving relatively slow, an occasional bump shifting her body. The last bump had shifted her into a position where something sharp poked her in the back, but there was no way for her to move into a more comfortable position.

Was this what it had been like for Rebecca Cook and Vicki Smith? What had been their final thoughts as they’d been driven to their deaths? Had they entertained regrets? Clung to happy memories? Or simply wished for another bump to allow their body to get more comfortable?

The car slowed and the whine of asphalt beneath the tires was replaced by something softer and more bumpy. The dunes? Surely he wouldn’t take her there. That’s where Seth and Sheriff Atkins and all his men were working a crime scene.

But Seth had mentioned at one point or another that there was more than one way into the dunes and that the area was big enough that it couldn’t all be seen by mere eyesight, and by now it was surely dark. Nobody would see him bury her.

Tears once again filled her eyes and fell down the sides of her cheeks as the car came to a stop and the engine was cut. No more time. She’d heard that drowning was a relatively painless death. What about drowning in sand? She had a feeling it was going to be a terrible way to die.

The trunk lid opened, the small light inside radiating out enough that she could see Steven’s face. The smile on his lips read of pleasure, but the darkness in his eyes spoke of the need for revenge.

I’m not your mother,
her brain screamed inside her head.
Please Steven, don’t do this. Don’t kill me for any sins you think your mother committed. I didn’t commit them.
She tried to put all those emotions into her eyes as he bent over and picked her up in his arms.

“Time for the ostrich to bury her head, just like you did when I was little and Dad was beating the hell out of me,” he said as he began to walk.

She could hear the whisper of sand beneath his feet and the terror inside her peaked to where she wished she’d lose her mind, prayed that her heart would stop beating before she heard the very first scrape of the shovel against the sand.

He bent down and dropped her onto the grainy surface and then walked away. They were at the dunes. Someplace, perhaps not so far away from where Seth and the other lawmen were working. If only she could just scream, if she could just crawl, but she could do neither.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” Steven said from nearby and she heard the first rasp of the shovel against the sand and she knew he had begun to dig her grave.

* * *

I
T DIDN’T TAKE LONG
for Seth to get the information that Tamara wasn’t at Linda’s place and the front door had been standing wide open.

She was with him. The Sandman. He’d already directed several of the deputies to get in touch with Henry Todd and with Jerome Walker and Ernie Simpson, the other two young men who had been with Sam when Tamara had been discovered.

Raymond Michaels was officially off Seth’s suspect list. He couldn’t be here and with Tamara at the same time. The one thing Seth refused to do was run out of here half-cocked, with no specific suspect and no known location in mind.

He knew the key to the whole thing was an ostrich. That memory that Tamara had of the perp calling her an ostrich held the key to the killer’s identity.

There was no way he could run fast enough to catch a person he didn’t know; he couldn’t knock on doors and try to gain answers. The time bomb had exploded and if he didn’t figure something out fast, Tamara would be dead.

Ostriches. As he paced across the sand, he considered what he did know about the oversize birds. They were too big to fly. They could kill a man with a kick of their powerful legs. He frowned. What else? There had to be something else.

With each tick of his heart, with every blink of his eye, he felt as if time had run out and Tamara was gone and when he thought about that the absence of her nearly cast him to his knees.

Darkness had fallen complete across the dunes, the only lit area being the main entrance where the deputies’ car headlights provided illumination.

Ostriches.
Don’t bury your head in the sand.
The descriptive saying jumped into his consciousness. “Don’t bury your head,” he muttered aloud. He’d heard that somewhere recently. Where? Where had he heard something along those lines?

You’d be surprised by how many people just bury their head in the sand.
It had been at the animal pound. Steven Bradley. Thoughts flashed through Seth’s brain, processing like a minicomputer. Steven in his official uniform would appear safe to a woman alone. Steven had access to a dozen different dogs...dogs to walk in a park...dogs to lure a woman closer.

Seth remembered how the dogs had silenced at Steven’s command, how the little terrier had instantly rolled over on his belly when Steven had approached. Had the little pup been looking for a belly scratch or had he been showing complete submission?

The killer liked power and who better to have power than an animal control officer who wielded authority over cage after cage of helpless animals?