The Summer We Lost Alice (36 page)

Every county officer, on-duty and off, responded to the radio call. As the cruisers arrived, Sammy ordered them into positions surrounding Digger's compound. Chief Deputy Lew Carlyle was among the first, followed quickly by the county's full complement of two captains, three sergeants, and the remaining five deputies, including the canine unit.

An FBI agent hung on the perimeter in case the situation proved to relate to the missing children. Sammy had tried to downplay the connection, hinting that it was most likely drug-related, but the Feds' interest had been piqued. At least the agent was staying out of it—for now.

Within an hour the cruisers were in position, the command structure firmly in place, and all weapons were drawn and itching to fire. Wisely, Digger Walsh chose not to give them reason to pump his little villa full of lead. He had not responded to the bull-horned orders to surrender himself.

"Awful quiet," Carlyle said. "Could he have slipped out?"

"Could've," Sammy admitted. "We could only watch from one angle 'til the backup arrived, pinned down like we were."

Sammy took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead. It wasn't heat that had him sweating, but nerves. What if somebody got killed in this operation, a police action he'd initiated based on a fairy tale about witches and ghost dogs? How had he allowed himself to go so far down a path that, right now, looked a lot like a yellow brick road?

He considered packing it in, but damn it, Digger Walsh had fired on a police officer. Who knew the reason? But he'd done it. There was no turning back.

"Figure it's time to go in?" Sammy asked.

"No time like the present. Soften him up first?"

"Can't hurt.
Who's got the flashbangs?"

"Everybody's got a couple," Carlyle said. "They took them out of storage when your call came in."

"We hit all three trailers at once. Everybody in position. On my order."

Deputies on all three sides slipped in and, on Sammy's orders, broke windows and lobbed in the percussive grenades designed for
noise and light. The grenades exploded. The deputies kicked in the doors. The doors gave way, none too solid to begin with and rendered even weaker by time and decay. The deputies charged in, weapons at the ready. It took only a few seconds for them to scan each trailer. One by one they reported "all clear."

"He's gone, then," Sammy said. "If he sneaked out, he did it there on the north side, toward the scrap yard."

"Damn, I'd hate for him to take root there."

"Me, too.
He could pick off three, four of us before we ever got a bead on where he was. Gettin' him out would be like gettin' a rabbit out of a briar patch."

As Sammy and his second-in-command stared at the scrap yard, a column of smoke suddenly snaked up from the heaps of cars and scrap metal.

"What do you think—tires?" Carlyle said.

The scent hadn't had time to reach their noses. When it did, it did not have the stench of burning tires. It smelled like meat.

"Sonuvabitch!" Sammy yelled. He put the order out over the radio. The cruisers peeled out. They converged on the source of the fire. It flamed and crackled and spit bits of flaming gristle. A gasoline can lay nearby where it had been tossed by the victim after dousing himself, before he lit the self-immolating match.

Sammy called for fire extinguishers from the cruisers. Deputies put out the fire, far too late to save the victim but soon enough, they hoped, to preserve enough evidence for a DNA sample. Hopefully Digger Walsh was in the FBI database. If not, the body might never be properly identified. From what Agent Myer had said about Digger's bad teeth, it seemed unlikely that his dental records were on file.

"Do you think that's him?" Carlyle asked.

"I don't know what he looked like before. Get more of the FBI boys out here. I'm
tossin' this one to them."

"What's that he's holding?"

Sammy mentally chided himself for not noticing the odd position of the victim's arms. They were folded up to his chest, fused there by the heat. His hands held an object, apparently made of wood, that was now blunted and ashen.

The
Tiki
, Sammy thought.

"Point it out to the
feds, see if they can ID it. Tell 'em the wood might be from a palm tree."

"How on God's green earth would you know that?" Carlyle said.

"If it's what I think it is, it's a tourist item from the islands, a Tiki statue. They're usually carved out of native wood."

Carlyle aimed a finger at Sammy.

"If you're right about that," he said, "you should get your own TV show."

Sammy left a captain and a deputy to guard the scene. He ordered the rest of the crew back to Digger's compound to do what he'd started out to do—search the place. He still wanted that connection to Boo and Alice. If they could find any evidence linking Digger to Willy
Proost or the girl from the motel, it might lead them to the bodies, undoubtedly buried somewhere in the vicinity.

It was a stretch but a logical one, if what his father had told him was true.

He was particularly drawn to the shed, so that's where he started while the others searched the trailers. An extension cord ran from the nearest trailer to a multi-outlet strip that powered a number of devices including a single, bare overhead light bulb. A deputy reached for the light. Sammy stayed his hand before it reached the pull chain.

"Might be booby-trapped," he said. A good number of people chose rural areas to make their stand against whatever the government tossed their way. A deputy in a nearby county had been blinded by just such a light bulb, the glass carefully unscrewed from the base, half-filled with gasoline, and reassembled. When the deputy pulled the chain, the works exploded sending shards of glass into the deputy's eyes. Sammy wasn't taking any chances.

A quick search with flashlights didn't turn up anything but the usual assortment of paint cans, power tools, and junk, no kids' toys. Sammy couldn't shake the notion that something was amiss with the shed. After a minute he realized what it was. He ran outside for another look.

Sure enough, here was an eight-by-eight shed on a concrete block foundation, and right smack beside it was a perfectly good eight-by-eight concrete slab. The slab showed marks where the shed had once stood and had been slid onto the blocks. Why would anybody do such a thing?

Because they want a basement.

Sammy called for the canine unit, a dog named Johnson.

Like many canine officers in local jurisdictions, Deputy Johnson was trained in both search-and-rescue and drug detection. It was a combination of skills that proved handy when a dealer went to ground with his stash.

Johnson hit the shed running, nose to the floor. "He's onto something," his handler said.

Johnson pawed at a section of plywood floor under a layer of paint cans. The floor had been cut away and replaced. When Sammy tried to move the cans, he couldn't. They'd been screwed to the floor. He popped the lid of one of the cans. Empty. A section of floor about two feet on a side could be lifted, cans and all, and replaced from inside. A casual observer would never notice it was there.

Sammy ordered the rest of the deputies to the shed. He stationed three more inside
. The rest surrounded the shed on the outside. Whoever was in that hole under the floor wasn't getting away.

"The
burnin' body may have been a decoy," Sammy said. "Our boy might be down here, and we know he's armed. Be on guard."

Deputy Johnson barked a staccato alert as deputies opened the trap door. Sammy shouted for whoever was inside to stand in the middle of the
hole, arms over their head. Deputies closed in on the hole with flashlights, guns drawn. Johnson continued barking from the edge of the hole.

Cautiously, Sammy peered in.

He was expecting any number of horrific sights to greet his eyes, from a man with a gun to a pile of bones, but he did not expect this one.

Two children, a boy and girl, stood in the middle of the
hole, arms raised in surrender. They were skinny, dressed only in their underwear, faces and bodies filthy. They were terrified, but alive.

THE BLOWER that inflated the bounce house blew a gasket before the house could achieve bounciness, but nothing could deflate the spirits of children who had been cooped up too long and kept too close by worried parents, freed now and issued a license to squeal. They ran around as if they were insane. Marianne Mackie enthused over every gift, and the neighborhood echoed with a cacophony of rowdy young voices.

In contrast, conversation among the adults was hushed and grim. Most of the mothers and fathers at the party were old enough to remember the events of a quarter-century before. Others knew of the tragedy only secondhand. Whether contributing background on the previous disappearances or insight on the latest ones, venting fears or expressing threats, everyone seemed mindful that their words were not for the ears of children. They kept their voices conspiratorially low.

"It don't seem right, for one town to be cursed twice like this."

"It's the same person. It has to be."

"It gives me the chills that this crazy, evil person could be somebody I see every day. Somebody who lives here, or works here. It's somebody's husband or son. I tell you, it gives me the chills."

"Just give me five minutes alone with the guy and I'd—"

"The FBI's digging up the Proosts' basement. They think there's bodies buried under the floor."

"I hear he poured new cement. That's what made them suspicious.
That, and he's a Boy Scout leader."

"It's always somebody who works with kids."

"Five minutes. Hell,
two
minutes. Me, him, and a ball bat. That's all I ask."

"It just doesn't seem right, five kidnappings in one small town.
Why us?"

"It has to be the same person."

For Cat, it was as if her head were wrapped in wool. They were talking about a different killer than the one she knew. They were fixed on the idea of a human who killed with human hands, who climbed in through a window or snatched children in the parking lot and muscled them into a van. They weren't talking about a black, miasmic cloud that seeped in through cracks and spirited children away in some fashion that transcended all material restraints. They were talking about something you could hit with a baseball bat, for Christ's sakes! They had no idea.

Either
that, or she was crazy, which also seemed like a reasonable possibility.

The conversation droned around her. Occasionally a scream of delight would elicit a panicked response from a parent. Heads whipped to the side and spines stiffened until the source and the cause were identified. Then a hand would flutter over a breast and the conversation resumed, punctuated with nervous laughter.

A cell phone rang. Conversation drifted to a halt. The phone belonged to Serena Carlyle, wife of Chief Deputy Lew Carlyle who'd been called out on an emergency a couple of hours earlier. She listened for a moment. Then her face brightened. She registered the faces staring at her and held the phone away from her ear.

"They've got him," she said to the room. "They
've got the child killer. He's dead." She put the phone back to her ear as voices exploded around her. She gasped at what she heard next. The room fell silent. Her voice quavered as she announced, "The children are alive. By the grace of God, they're alive!"

* * *

Sammy dropped in on Marianne Mackie's birthday party knowing he'd find Cat there. He had only a minute since he was now facing a mountain of paperwork and a barrage of questions from the FBI. He planned to be as oblique as possible, but he knew that any explanation he gave for going to Digger's to search for stolen merchandise was going to set off alarms in their heads. It was thin no matter how he sliced it. At any rate, they'd taken over. Digger's compound was their domain now.

He entered to a standing ovation. Obviously, the rumor mill had been working overtime. By the time Sammy arrived, he had achieved the status of a rock star.

Embarrassed, he held up a hand and cautioned everyone not to jump to conclusions.

"Just be glad the kids are all right," he said. "Any judgments made on Mr. Walsh will be made by a higher authority."

A teary-eyed mother walked up and embraced him. She gave him a long kiss on the cheek. She pulled away and gazed at him with a mixture of awe and sexual heat.

"How'd you figure it out?" she asked. It was the question Sammy was least prepared to answer.

He managed to
aw-shucks
his way out of a direct answer. He extricated himself and practically ran to the sanctuary of his cruiser. Cat followed him out. She took a seat beside him. He told her all he knew about Digger Walsh, including what he suspected Digger was clinging to as his body was consumed by flames.

"Why'd he do it?" Cat said.

"My guess is guilt. The statue had been workin' on him, maybe influencin' him to do things he found—what's the word? Abhorrent. Maybe he realized where that influence was comin' from. When we started closin' in and he was gonna be held to account for his actions, he decided to end it all. Settin' himself on fire was the only way he could take the statue with him, to destroy it the way it had destroyed him."