The Fourth Victim (8 page)

But she wasn't too young. She'd been sold into the drug trade. One of her close friends had died of leukemia and another had been murdered. Her mom was in jail. She was in love with a man who was at least thirty. And she'd had sex. There wasn't anything left that was young about her.

Mom rubbed Maggie's palm with her fingers, and the chains at her wrist clanked against the table. “Listen, Mags, this isn't stuff you need to be worrying about, okay? I'm going to get out of here soon and we'll be together again. Just you and me. Like it used to be.”

“They aren't going to let us live together again,” Maggie said. If her mother was behind Kelly's disappearance, which was what Maggie was scared of, then she had to realize it would all be a waste.

She had to tell them to let Kelly go.

“You admitted that you allowed Chuck Sewell to trick me into delivering drugs when I thought I was helping sick kids. You're guilty of child endangerment. They were going to take me away from you no matter what.”

Mom's face got stony-looking. “You were never in any danger, Maggie. Not from the deliveries. I made certain of that. And the money was going to pay for you to go to college.”

So Mom said. “Then why isn't there more than the couple of hundred dollars I got for my paper route?”

“Because we were just getting started.” Mom looked her straight in the eye and Maggie could tell how much she loved her. She loved Mom, too. But…

“You were buying drugs and using them,” she said now. No one had ever told her that for sure, but she knew. She wasn't stupid.

“I wasn't doing much. Only enough to get me through sleeping with that Sewell creep so he'd stay away from you.”

Maggie didn't want to think about that. Didn't want to think about Chuck Sewell doing to Mom what Mac had done with her. It was…wrong.

And gross.

She had to go. Kyle was waiting. And the smell was making her feel like she was going to throw up.

“Mom, please.” She took both of Mom's hands in hers. “Just tell whoever took Kelly to bring her back. Please.”

“I can't, Mags. I told you, I had nothing to do with it.” Mom slid her hands away and the knot of fear in Maggie's stomach grew into a huge lump. “And even if I could, I wouldn't. That woman's taking you away from me. You think I can't see that? You're changing already. Look at you here today. You didn't come because you missed me and needed me. You came to get that woman out of trouble. To get her back. And I can't be part of that.”

Mom stood and Maggie sat there and watched as the guard came forward to take her away.

“Everything I did, I did for you, Maggie,” Mom said just before she left. “I'm in here because of you. Because I love you this much. Don't forget that.”

Like she could. Or would.

And if something really bad happened to Kelly, if she died, that would be because of Maggie, too.

C
lay took the highway back to Ohio. Given the amount of time between Kelly Chapman's disappearance and the discovery of her car in Tennessee—adding in time for Dr. Chapman to be moved someplace else and for the Nitro to be thoroughly cleaned—he figured the kidnapper hadn't bothered with side roads.

He was looking at someone who wanted to blend in rather than hide out. Someone right under their noses?

Did that mean Kelly Chapman was right under their noses, as well?

He pushed the gas pedal a little closer to the floor as he phoned JoAnne on his hands-free device.

There hadn't been any positive ID on Kelly Chapman in spite of the three-state search. From which he deduced she hadn't been taken very far.

“I have names for you to check out,” Clay said the instant his second-in-command picked up, listing off the names of Segura's men, already committed to memory.

“I'll get Greg right on it.”

“No.” Clay passed a van. And then a couple of trucks. “I want
you
to do them.” He needed her instincts on these. “And there's one more, a Randall Wyatt. He's ex-military.
A higher-up who died in October. See who he was connected to.”

“I'm on it. I also got the list from Florida. You want me on those, too?”

“Give those to Greg.” They were fact-finding only at this point. “I want all known Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee associations with any of those names. And whether anyone associated with
any
of them have left Florida in the past few days.”

“Got it. Barry went out to the prison to see James Todd. And to check records there. The man's a model prisoner. He's convinced some of the other inmates to attend an unofficial literature class and even managed to get books sent by one of his old college associates. And yes, it's all been monitored. His only visitor has been his wife, who hasn't missed a visiting day since he was incarcerated. Barry said he's completely confident the guy didn't know Chapman was missing until he told him.”

Clay considered that. And drove too close to the back of a yellow sedan that was barely doing the speed limit in the fast lane. The car moved over. And he sped on.

Kelly Chapman's photo watched him. Begging him to get her home. To get there in time.

“I was just going to call you.” JoAnne's words pulled Clay's focus back where it belonged. On the road—and on her conversation. “Barry questioned everyone in the vicinity of the bike path. There's a lot of farmland out there, but some homes, too. And there've also been several calls on the information line. By all accounts the only person anyone saw on that path yesterday was a city worker in a four-wheel-drive utility cart. The city issues them. They have small beds on the back to carry tools and things. Barry tracked down the worker and had him brought in. He'd been on the trail cleaning up debris. He saw Kelly Chapman putting on her skates, but that was it. He checks
the trail a couple of times a week. He starts at one end and goes to the other. He doesn't go back.”

“And he didn't think to let us know he'd seen her when he heard she was missing?”

“He went fishing with his son up at Alum Creek last night. A tackle shop in the area has him and the boy on video. He hadn't seen the news.”

Alum Creek covered miles of camping and woods a couple of hours northeast of Chandler.

A perfect place to dump a body. To lose a body.

“I'll call the Columbus office and get a team there. They can organize volunteers to help.”

“Levin already made the call. They've got a hundred volunteers combing the area.”

“What about the cart?”

“They're going over it now, but preliminary reports say there's nothing there. No sign of blood, no hair, no scraps of ripped clothing or obvious marks from skates. But then, that cart's used for hauling trash and debris and tools. It's pretty beat-up.”

“So several people saw this worker, but no one saw a lone female skater?” Clay asked.

“Makes you think she wasn't out there very long, doesn't it? That would explain why Willie lost her scent so quickly.”

Clay glanced at his traveling companion. “Yeah.”
What happened to you, pretty lady?

“There's more,” JoAnne said, her tone matching the urgency raging through Clay. “David Abrams, the alleged pedophile lawyer, was in court all day yesterday as he claimed. Mercy Littleton spoke with several people who interacted with him in person.”

So the lawyer was out.

“But she just called,” JoAnne continued. “Abrams left his house alone early this morning and got in his car. Based
on the number of seemingly unnecessary turns he took, it was pretty clear to her that he was making sure he wasn't being followed.”

Mercy had been with the bureau a little over five years and was a good detective. “I take it she wasn't seen.”

“She doesn't think so. He drove out of town, parked in some brush that all but hid his car and then walked about half a mile into a thicket that would've been nearly impossible to get through if there'd been leaves on the trees. He ended up in a clearing. Walked around for a bit, picked something up, set it back down again and then left.”

“What'd he pick up?”

“A silk rose.”

“Did Mercy leave it there?”

“Until she followed Abrams back home. She went back out and brought the rose in for fingerprinting. After that, Barry returned it. He's combing the area now.”

“And?”

“No fingerprints at all.”

Shit. One break. All they needed was one fucking break. He glanced at Kelly Chapman again.

And almost felt the need to excuse his language.

“Mercy's back on Abrams. I've got Ken camping out near the clearing,” JoAnne said.

Ken Sizemore had survival training. And Clay's team of three had doubled in less than twenty-four hours.

“Do you think Abrams knows where the woman is?” That was all Kelly Chapman was, he reminded himself. A woman. A missing person. Like all the others.

“Nothing yet, but I think we should stay with it, Clay. That man has a stake in Kelly's disappearance. I can feel it.”

“You think someone took her out there?”

“I don't know, but Barry and Ken are searching for any recently dug graves just in case.”

Clay could not consider graves. And he couldn't look at the picture on his dash, either.

“In-line skates, a purse, zipper pulls, a beanbag dog—those things have to be
somewhere.
”

“Or they've been destroyed.”

It bothered him that, right now, the best alternative was that arms runners or DOD moles had abducted their missing person. She might be in pain, but at least chances were good she was still alive.

“What else have you got?”

“I've reached most of her current clients and will be going through recent past ones next. The gay man's ex-wife who sent the threatening letter moved to Colorado six months ago. The guy who lost custody of his kids for putting them in a closet is in jail in Wisconsin on domestic violence charges. He's been there for a couple of months. The guy whose wife divorced him after seeing Kelly is here in town. I met him this morning. He and his new, young blonde girlfriend. They'd just returned from a gambling trip along the Canadian border. I checked on James Todd's wife, too, just to be sure. She owns a couple of local businesses, purchased with money she inherited from her father. Before she married Todd, she lived alone. She's clearly devoted to him.
More
than devoted.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'd say she's obsessed with the man. But while she doesn't seem all that fond of Kelly Chapman, she has nothing to gain from her disappearance.”

He had miles to go. Listening, thinking, working on the case made them less unbearable. He'd hoped, when he'd made the trip down the night before, to have his missing person with him for the return journey.

“There's one guy I'm watching, though.” Clay sat up straighter. “Marc Snyder, a soldier recently back from a
second tour of duty in Iraq. According to Kelly's files, he's suffering from pretty severe post-traumatic stress disorder. She can hardly keep him in the office long enough to have a conversation. She actually chased him down the street once to get him to keep an appointment. A good thing she did because he had a bottle of pills he'd been planning to take and she managed to talk him out of it.”

“Why's he a threat?” Other than the obvious—he was unstable. Maybe noteworthy in another case, but they were on the hunt for a psychologist, who presumably dealt with people like this all the time.

“When I told him about Dr. Chapman's disappearance he didn't show any emotion at all. He'd heard about it on the news, so the information wasn't a surprise, but as I spoke with him, I sensed relief. I called him on it and while he said that he had absolutely nothing to do with what happened to her—said he was working out at the Y at the time of her disappearance—he wasn't sorry to have her gone. Said she meddled too much. Pushed too hard. Said she didn't know when to quit and leave people to their own lives.”

“Maybe she pushed him over the edge.”

“He said that if she'd pushed any harder he was going to have to push back.”

“Verify his alibi, get a search warrant for his place and keep an eye on him.”

“There still aren't any hits on her credit cards or bank accounts.”

He hadn't expected there to be. Particularly not with a ransom call. But it would've been nice.

“Greg's got nothing on Kyle Evans or anyone else to do with the meth superlab that was discovered and dismantled on the farm outside town last summer. All the indications are that drug use has dropped in the county—and in
Dayton, too—in significant enough numbers that it doesn't look like there's a major dealer left.”

“Were any outside sources involved?” Anyone with an ax to grind due to loss of revenue?

Someone who wouldn't shy away from taking whatever action was necessary to protect his interests.

“No. It was a wholly local operation. So whoever supplied the area before the locals took over would be pleased to have return business, not angry enough for revenge. All the money from the lab stayed right there in Chandler, supporting city services, if you can believe it, via so-called donations. Other than David Abrams, the two main players were killed. The distributors were high school kids. Greg's found all but one of them. All clean.”

“Find the one,” he said tersely. One was all it took. And teenagers were unpredictable. Especially if their lives had been changed in ways not to their liking.

“Levin said to tell you the ransom money's been approved and is ready.”

“I'll call Detective Jones and fill her in.” He wanted to know more about Abrams and figured Jones, with her personal vow to get the man, was his best source. “You okay?”

“Fine. Why?”

“Your voice. You sound…engaged.”

They didn't get emotionally involved with their cases. They couldn't. They'd never survive. And neither would their victims.

“And you aren't?” Clay asked, glancing again at the photo on his dash. This case was different. And not just because so many people wanted the woman found.

“I hope I get a chance to meet her someday,” JoAnne said.

Which neither of them would if they didn't stay focused on the job.

Day/Night

Night? Couldn't be sure. December? Dark early in December.

Or eyes closed.

Head pounding. No pillow.

Side hurt.

Move.

Soon.

Sleep first.

 

Sam's head hurt. Pushing at the clip holding her long hair up, she attempted to ease the pain. Didn't work. Her bun wasn't the problem.

Oh, God, Kel, where are you?

Sam had been exposed to the seedier side of life for years now. Her grandpa had been a cop. Her dad had been a cop—killed in the line of duty when she was only ten. Her mom had been raped before she was born. As a cop herself, Samantha had been on the phone with a man when he committed suicide, right after he'd killed his wife. She'd seen her town slowly traumatized by an infusion of illegal drugs. Had held a young girl who'd been murdered. And just this past summer, she'd shot and killed a fellow officer.

And through it all—through every last incident—she'd had Kelly. First as a kid at school who always seemed able to get to the real point and, in doing so, helped Sam see things clearly, too. And later as a friend who happened to be a shrink.

They hadn't been bosom-buddy close, not like some girls were. Neither of them was the bosom-buddy type. But they'd been there for each other.

They'd been born the same year. In the same small town. They couldn't help but be there for each other. It wasn't
like there were a million kids in Chandler, Ohio, thirty-one years ago.

Focusing on her computer screen in the private office Kyle had set up for when she'd moved out to the farm after her promotion, Sam read lists. Statistics. And tried to wall off the emotion crashing in around her.

She'd gone to the office briefly, long enough to sign out the files she wanted, and was now connected to her work computer through a secure network. Camy was on a chair beside her and Kyle's German shepherd, Zodiac, had curled up in the open doorway about half an hour ago. Probably listening for Kyle's grandfather, who lived with them.

Kyle and Maggie had been gone longer than she'd expected. They should've been home more than an hour ago. She'd fixed Grandpa's lunch. Fed him. And helped him into bed for his afternoon nap.

She'd stared at the phone hard enough to make it ring a dozen times over if she'd had any telepathic power at all. Ransom instructions would give them leads.

Still looking at the computer screen, Sam called Kyle from her cell phone.