Chapter Twelve
Candice and I barely made it out of that yard alive. My new leather coat wasn’t so lucky. Cujo got hold of my sleeve and I almost didn’t manage to escape with my arm intact. Luckily the mutt liked fine Italian leather almost as much as I did.
“That son of a bitch!” I said, breathing hard as we toppled over yet another wall to the grounds outside.
“You okay?” Candice asked me.
“I’m fine,” I grumbled while Cujo continued to growl and bark and eat my coat.
A light went on inside the house; we crouched down and waited a moment before Candice motioned for me to follow her.
We dashed across the street to another row of houses and stuck to the bushes, slowly making our way out of the neighborhood as quickly as we could without being spotted.
The patrol car cruised up and down the street—no doubt having been called by Cujo’s owner and having the torn remains of a leather jacket on hand to confirm that someone was prowling around the neighborhood. Eventually we emerged from a small patch of woods on the edge of the subdivision and next to a street where several cars whizzed past us and one or two honked as we made our way toward a corner gas station. I walked as close to the inner edge of the shoulder as I could, so as to give Candice enough room on the shoulder not to get hit. Traffic might have been lighter than usual, but at this time of night there was no telling how sober the people driving were.
As if to prove my point, I heard a car approaching us at a fast speed and I turned my head just in time to grab Candice’s arm and yank her hard. She barely missed being hit, and as if that weren’t bad enough, the car suddenly skidded to a halt with tires screeching as it kicked up a little smoke in the process.
Candice stepped in front of me and I watched with mounting panic as she took up a defensive posture. “If there’s trouble,” she said through gritted teeth as the car door opened, “you run for that gas station and don’t look back.”
Trouble was exactly what stepped out of the car, but there was no way I was going to run for it. Judging by the furious expression on the man facing us, I doubted I’d get ten feet before I was shot. “Get in,” he commanded, loud enough to be heard over the traffic, but not quite shouting.
Candice relaxed her defensive position and said, “Evening, Agent Harrison. You’re looking better than I would have expected for someone who’s just been in a plane crash.”
His eyes narrowed and his lips thinned as they pressed firmly together. “Get . . . in . . . the . . . car!” he roared.
I dropped my chin and tugged on Candice’s coat. “I think we better do as he says.” Then, without waiting for her to answer, I ducked over to the opposite side of his car and hurried into the backseat.
I turned in the seat and watched Candice walk calmly over to the other door and open it, smiling wide at Harrison as she smoothly got in.
Harrison slammed her door and then got back into the front seat, his cast making it obviously difficult to steer the car, and likely why he came so close to hitting us out on the road.
He didn’t say a word, but the tension inside the car was thick. Candice, however, looked like she was enjoying a nice drive in the country and that happy grin never left her face the whole time we were moving.
Harrison took us into downtown and then into a parking garage. I got a little nervous at the setting, as there was no one around and he still seemed really mad. I wondered whether he might torture us for a while with a Taser gun or something, but he parked near a door and lifted his eyes to the mirror. “One false move from either of you and I will bring down a world of hurt on you so fast it’ll make your heads spin.”
Candice rolled her eyes, completely unfazed, and opened the door.
“We’ll be good,” I promised. I seriously didn’t know how she could be so cool. I was scared shitless.
We followed Harrison, who was walking with a bit of a limp, through the door to an elevator and rode up two floors. Exiting the elevator, we followed obediently behind him to a double set of glass doors. He swiped his badge through a slot to the right of the entry, and a green light above the doors flashed. Harrison pushed them open with his good arm and motioned us through.
Inside we again followed him over to another set of elevators and waited while the boxcar descended from the sixth floor. We loaded onto the car and rode up, then stepped out into a brightly lit space divided by cubicles. “This way,” he growled, and he led us straight down the middle of the cubicles to an open space at the far end of the room.
As we got close, I could hear muffled voices, and as we drew still closer, I recognized one of them with a pang of guilt. We finally came to a stop among a group of very surprised but very tired-looking men wearing dress slacks and wrinkled shirts with loose ties. “Abby?” I heard Dutch say from off to my right.
“Hey, cowboy,” I replied with a small wave.
“Hiya, Dutch!” Candice added exuberantly.
“Sit!” Harrison ordered, obviously irritated by our reunion. Turning to Dutch, he commanded, “Agent Rivers, come with me into the conference room. Now.”
“Yes, sir,” Dutch said, and eyed me with irritation.
“Crap,” I mumbled as they walked away.
“He’ll be okay,” Candice assured me. “This is just Harrison’s way of keeping you in line from now on. He’ll yell at your boyfriend the minute you do something stupid, like run around with me.”
“Did you have to antagonize him?” I asked. I was really worried about Dutch, especially as we could clearly hear Harrison begin to yell.
“He doesn’t scare me,” Candice said, looking casually at her nails. “He’s all bark and no bite.”
I sighed and glanced up, suddenly conscious that we were being stared at by the other agents in the room. “Hey,” I said to them.
They all looked away and began whispering to one another. I pouted in my seat and let my eyes wander. Straight ahead was a whiteboard much like the one Candice and I had used, but taped to the board were pictures of the four missing kids. I shied away from looking at the crime-scene images around Bianca and Kyle and focused on the other two. And then I noticed something that caused me to inhale sharply and sit bolt upright in my chair.
“What’s the matter?” Candice asked. When I didn’t respond, she said, “Hey, Sundance. Talk to me.”
I ignored her and got up, dashing over to the whiteboard. I traced my fingers over Leslie Coyle’s photo, the very image that her mother had handed to me only two days before. “Oh, God!” I said, and I started shaking.
Candice was at my side in an instant. “What’s happened?” she whispered.
I ignored her and shouted, “No!” as moisture formed in my eyes. “That son of a bitch!” I slammed my hand on the whiteboard with a loud thwack, before dissolving into tears.
Candice reached around to hug me tightly and whispered in my ear, “Hey, now,” she said. “Take it easy, honey.”
“We’re too late!” I sobbed, pulling away from her. I was so angry and upset that we’d utterly failed Leslie that I didn’t want to be comforted. “We blew it, Candice! We didn’t find her in time.”
“What’s going on?” I heard Harrison’s commanding voice say behind me.
“Leslie Coyle’s been murdered,” Candice said, turning to him.
He stared in shock at us for a beat or two, before he asked, “How do you know?”
“I don’t,” Candice said.
“But Abby does,” Dutch guessed, his eyes looking intently at me. “It’s her photo, right?” he asked me.
I nodded. “She was alive only two days ago, Dutch! That bastard’s killed her within the last forty-eight hours.”
“How can she tell?” Harrison said to Dutch, and I noticed that he asked it curiously, not doubtfully.
“It’s the way the image looks to her,” Dutch explained. “If she focuses on a picture of a person and the image appears flat, or two-dimensional, then she knows they’re deceased.”
> “How accurate is she?” Harrison asked as he stepped over to the whiteboard to pull down Leslie’s photo.
“One hundred percent, sir.”
Harrison’s face turned grave as he considered Dutch, then me, then Leslie’s photo. The other agents in the room looked at one another with a mixture of confusion and concern. Dutch came over to me and wrapped me in his arms, and I knew I was forgiven and accepted comfort now without protest. “That’s why Michael was abducted,” I said. “The killer took out Leslie and that left him with an opening.”
A hush fell on the room as everyone seemed to consider that. “Can you find her?” Harrison said to me, holding out the image of Leslie.
I looked at the flat appearance of the young girl so full of promise and choked back a sob. With some effort I collected myself and said, “I need to calm down. Can you give me a quiet room so that I can focus?”
Harrison pointed with his cast toward the conference room he and Dutch had just exited. “You can have a seat in there,” he said. I started to walk toward the room and I heard him add, “Can we get you anything, Ms. Cooper? A glass of water or something to eat?”
“Water, please,” I said without looking back, and hurried toward the conference room before I had another meltdown.
Once behind the closed doors I sat on the floor in the corner and cried. I felt so responsible for not coming up with the answer in time, but I’d thought we’d had a little bit more than two days to find her. Something seemed to have sped up the timeline and I didn’t know what. I huddled there with my knees pulled up and my head down and let the tears fall.
This had happened to me once before, when I’d acted too late to save someone in time, and then, as now, I felt the weight of the responsibility firmly on my shoulders and how I’d failed the people who’d counted on me the most. I thought about Leslie’s parents and winced as I pictured how they might take the news. This would destroy them—I knew it would. It would shatter their calm bravado and tear out their hearts. I’d let them down. I’d let her down. I’d let everyone down.
I heard the door open and imagined that either Dutch or Candice had come in to check on me. I wiped my eyes and looked up and was shocked to see Agent Harrison step into the room with a bottle of water. He saw me sitting on the floor and considered me for a moment before he shut the door and came over to sit down next to me. For a long time neither one of us spoke, and somehow that made me feel a little better.
Finally, he broke the silence by cracking the seal on the water bottle and handing it to me. “Drink a little,” he suggested.
I nodded and took a sip, then wiped my eyes. “You must think I’m pathetic,” I said.
“Emotional I’ll give you,” he said calmly. “Along with hot-tempered, irrational, and maybe even a bit delusional, but pathetic? Not so much.”
I was stunned by his assessment, but when I turned to look at him, I saw that he was wearing a slight smirk. And then I started to laugh. In the back of my mind I thought how crazy it was that I could be crying one minute and guffawing the next, and I tried to compose myself, but then I heard Harrison chuckle and that made me laugh even harder.
Finally, though, I managed to get hold of my emotions and I wiped my eyes and took another sip of water. “You okay now?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
With a grimace of discomfort Harrison stood. “Good. Now focus on finding Leslie. You give me a description of where her body is and hopefully we can narrow our search. And here,” he added, handing me the picture from the whiteboard of Michael. “Try and give me anything you can about where you think he might be while you’re at it.”
“Yes, sir.”
With that, Harrison left the room.
I took a deep breath and got up and moved to the conference table. Sitting down, I pulled close to me a pad of paper and a pen that were lying on the surface, and then focused on Leslie’s photo. I closed my eyes and called out to my crew for help. I got much of the same imagery as before when I’d told Dutch where I thought she was being held, but this time I kept smelling something like antiseptic. I opened my eyes and jotted the word down on the paper. I concentrated again and begged for more information, but I kept getting the same clues over and over. A large area that was enclosed by concrete. Lots of chairs and the smell of antiseptic. There was also something else here that I couldn’t quite grasp, but the energy of the area really upset me. It felt chaotic and dark and full of despair. I knew intuitively that there were grounded spirits in this place and lots of them. Wherever Leslie was, ghosts were abundant and they felt agitated and malcontented.
I shivered involuntarily. “Jesus, honey,” I whispered to her image. “Where are you?”
I fought for another ten minutes to come up with more, but it seemed there was nothing new to pull out of the ether other than what I’d already gotten. It all felt disjointed and disconnected, and I was so frustrated because I knew I was so close to pinpoint ing where she was, but I seemed to be missing the one thing that would tie it all together.
Taking a deep breath, I moved on to Michael. Immediately, I felt the very same images that I’d gotten for Leslie and I felt all the air leave my lungs. The killer had him in the same haunting location. I wondered whether all the ghosts that I felt around their energy were other unknown victims. But the thing that I found most frightening was that the killer had obviously changed his pattern. He wasn’t killing his victims shortly after abduction. He was saving them for this concrete dungeon, perhaps to torture them for months before finally doing away with them.
I felt my stomach clench and I thought about what horrors he might expose them to, and it was a long time before I trusted my hands not to shake as I got up and went to the door.
I was surprised to see Candice, pacing back and forth just outside. “Hey!” she said when I opened the door, and then her eyes became pinched as she scrutinized my face. “How’re you doing?”
“Not good,” I admitted. “Are Dutch and Harrison around?”
“I’ll round them up,” she said. “You go sit down. You look like you’re about to drop.”
I did feel a little woozy, so I followed her instruction and sat heavily down in the chair while I waited for the cavalry. Harrison, Dutch, Candice, and all the other agents filed into the conference room, which surprised me because I hadn’t thought they would take seriously what I had to offer.
As Dutch sat down, he shoved a bag of cashews at me. “Eat something,” he ordered, and he looked as concerned as Candice did over my appearance.
“Thanks,” I said, popping a few nuts into my mouth. When everyone was seated, Harrison gave me a nod to begin. I stood up and pulled close the pad of paper I’d written on. “Leslie’s body and Michael—who I believe is still alive—are in the same location,” I announced, and waited for everyone to take that in. “I know I’ve given a few of these clues to Agent Rivers, but I think I may have gotten a tiny bit more about the physical description of the place.
“The structure they’re hidden in is large, but the specific area of that structure where they are located is at least one level belowground. There are no windows that I can sense and no other persons present, which is unusual for such a large structure, so I would venture to say that this might be some sort of abandoned building. There is also lots of seating in the particular room where Leslie and Michael are. It might be an old theater or small stadium of some kind. But the truly curious thing is that I smell a lot of antiseptic, and the only thing I can equate that to is a hospital.”
I paused to look around the room. Every face staring back wore the same confused look. “I know it sounds odd,” I said to them. “But these are the physical clues that I’m able to pick up on. They describe a structure’s characteristics, not necessarily what that structure is utilized for.”
“So, we’re looking for a small stadiumlike theater-slash-hospital that’s partially underground?” asked one agent.
I gulped. “Something like that,” I said.
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“Abs,” Dutch said. “Could it be that the place used to be a hospital and was converted into a theater?”
I let go a big breath and said, “Yes! It absolutely could be that. Which would explain the ghosts too.”
“What ghosts?” Candice asked.
“The place is totally haunted,” I said. “Lots of grounded energies who are super agitated. And the general atmosphere there is just god-awful! There’s this unsettling quality about it, like lots of terrible things happened there over a long period of time. It’s no wonder, then, that it’s haunted.”
And that’s when I knew I’d said a little too much because every face in the room save Dutch’s and Candice’s turned incredulous, then comical.“Ghosts?” said Agent Blass from across the room. “Sir,” he added, looking at Harrison as if he had to be kidding, “is this bullshit for real?”
Harrison didn’t have time to answer because Candice came immediately to my defense. “Instead of questioning whether Abby is for real, Agent Blass, I would suggest that you remember that the information she supplied earlier led you directly to Kyle Newhouse when this task force had no leads and had made no progress in locating him for months!”
There was a small eruption of noise as Blass took offense and some of his buddies, including Agent Albright, came to his defense, and both Dutch and Candice spat a few more defensive remarks at them until Harrison stood up abruptly and everything got quiet.
“Thank you, Ms. Cooper,” he said quietly. “We will take your information under advisement.”
“Sure, you will,” muttered Candice, and Harrison’s eyes narrowed at her.
“Agent Rivers,” Harrison said next. “Please escort these two to the airport. I’ve booked them on the six a.m. shuttle back to Detroit.”
“I’ve got a car in town,” Candice growled. I knew she didn’t like it when Harrison played travel agent.