Then he would kill them both.
fifty-two
Lightning flashed as Barbara stepped out of the store, back into the rain. Of all nights for the sky to burst.
She went around the shopping center, to the drive that ran behind the shops. She was going to have to think like Emily. There was a dumpster outside each shop, so she ran from one to another, looking in each and calling for Emily. Rain soaked her clothes, plastered her hair against her head. It couldn’t be more than forty degrees, and she didn’t have a coat. Emily probably didn’t, either.
Emily wasn’t in any of the waste bins, so Barbara stood there, trying to think like her daughter. She saw an alley, cutting behind an adjacent strip of stores, and ran in that direction, calling. Finally, she came to a fork. If Greg Leigh was chasing Emily, which way might she have turned? There were more places to hide toward the right, so she ran that way, calling her daughter.
Wouldn’t Emily still be around here somewhere, waiting for Barbara? Maybe she hadn’t gone far. But as she ran, looking in every doorway and dumpster she came to, Barbara’s heart filled with terror at the possibility that Leigh had found Emily already.
fifty-three
Emily curled up and lay down on one of the cardboard boxes she had flattened in the dumpster. Rain fell so hard that, even though there was a lid over her head, mist sprayed inside the opening. She was cold and wet. It was going to be a long night.
She tore some boxes and unfolded them into a cardboard blanket. It helped a little with the cold, but the boxes were too damp to provide much comfort. She balled up in a fetal position, holding her knees close to her chest and shivering.
Bitter tears assaulted her. She was miserable, and had no one to blame but herself. If she hadn’t started using, she wouldn’t be an addict. If she hadn’t been an addict, she wouldn’t have been sent to rehab. If she hadn’t been sent to rehab, she wouldn’t have been kidnapped. She wouldn’t be lying here, scared, dope-sick, and absolutely alone, holed up in a dumpster in who-knew-what town, hiding from a man who wanted her dead. In her glamorous quest for the darkest light and the lowest high, she now found herself wallowing on the bottom of a filthy garbage bin.
So this was it. The “bottom” she’d mocked. It wasn’t an ambulance ride to the hospital where everyone gathered around, and you looked up at them with some glorious epiphany and announced that you had seen the light. No, it was damp darkness in a green metal box, with no one to tell … and fear crushing like a trash compactor as she came to the end.
In her loneliness and desperation, she looked up to God, the one person she’d been taught was always there with his eye on her. In her rebellion, she’d hated that thought. But now it brought her a thin, transparent sliver of hope.
“If you’re still there, God, I have a few things to say.”
She wept as she waited for a slice of lightning, an angry rumble of thunder.
“I wouldn’t blame you for turning your back on me, or leaving me here with the garbage.”
Suddenly she saw the absurdity of her life. Her mother had told her again and again that she was her own worst enemy. For the first time, she saw it too. It was as though she’d taken the razors of torture and destruction out of the devil’s hand, and begun slashing herself with them. That’s what the drugs had been. Torture turned on herself.
As she wept over her foolish self-destruction, she felt the pain of God’s weeping too. He didn’t hate her. He grieved like a devastated father.
A Scripture verse she’d learned as a child began to whisper through her mind.
“Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”
She wept so hard that she felt herself melting into a puddle that would drain through the cracks of the dumpster. In her despair, she finally called out. “I’m so sorry, Jesus. Please forgive me.”
An image came into her mind of the cross — that image she’d once thought was so overused. But now she saw it with new eyes. She saw it with a man hanging on it, suffering and bleeding, weeping the way she wept now. And from the top of that cross, she heard a voice.
“Emily, I took this for you.”
“I know you did,” she cried. “But it’s too late for me.”
“No.” He shook his bloody head. “It’s not too late. Not yet.”
She felt the sweet, warm cleansing pour through her heart. The blood of Jesus, which she had thought was another one of the church’s clichés, seemed to boil through her, blistering off all the sin, all the evil, all the hate and anger, and replacing it with the warm, sweet stream of life.
“Follow me, Emily. Follow me.”
Her strength renewed, she felt herself rising out of her pit. God had not turned his back on her. Maybe now he would answer her prayers. Whether he led her to freedom or to prison, she would trust him. She would finally do what her dad had admonished before he died … what her Savior invited.
She would follow him.
She looked out the opening in the dumpster. It was completely dark now, and there were no lights in the alley. The rain still fell. She didn’t see anyone around. The buildings around her didn’t appear to be open. But if she walked far enough, maybe she could find a convenience store that would let her use their phone.
“God, please help me reach my mom.” She climbed out of the box and walked through the rain with a renewed sense of courage, and a warmth that burned deeper than the cold rain could reach. For the first time since her terror began, she didn’t feel alone.
fifty-four
Do you have a siren in this thing?” Kent glanced at Lance. “Yeah, of course.”
“Sweet. Can I turn it on?”
“No.”
“Why? We could go faster.”
“The police light is flashing. It’s clearing the way for us already. If I need for someone to move, I’ll turn the siren on.” He checked his clock. Andy was on his way over to Leigh’s cabin with a crew of Dalton police. He hoped they’d find him there.
Lance looked out the window, brooding. “If we chase the kidnapper guy, can I turn it on then?”
“If we chase the kidnapper guy, you’re not going to be with me.”
“What’ll you do, just dump me out on the side of the road?”
“Hopefully, I’ll have time to be a little more discriminating than that.” He saw a sign for Dalton, Georgia. Twenty more miles.
“I’m thinking about being a detective when I grow up. I’m pretty good at it. I helped my mom find a lot of clues about Emily.”
Kent wished the kid would be quiet so he could think. But Lance was clearly nervous. “Yes, you did.”
Lance looked at him, oncoming headlights passing over his face. “What made you want to be a cop?”
Kent thought about that for a moment. “Anger, I guess.”
“Anger? At what?”
He checked his rearview mirror and changed lanes. “I think I had some delusion that I would be able to clean up the streets, run the drug dealers out of town, so my brother couldn’t get dope.”
“Your brother?”
“That’s right. He was an addict too.”
Lance seemed to run that through his mind for a moment. “So you were in the same boat I’m in.”
“That’s right.”
“What happened to your brother?”
Kent wished he hadn’t brought it up. He didn’t want to talk about it. Sighing, he said, “Almost died a few times, close calls. Wound up going to prison for armed robbery.”
“Armed robbery? Who did he hold up?”
“Convenience store. Tried to get cash with a gun to somebody’s head. He was high as a kite and wanted to make sure he stayed that way.”
Lance shook his head. “I don’t get why they call it high, when it makes you do such low-down things.” Lance looked away, staring through the passenger-side window. “I hope I never have a sister in prison.”
“I
know what you mean. I tried my best to keep my brother out. By the time he committed armed robbery, I was a cop already. Pulled every string I had, but I couldn’t save him.”
“And the drug dealers are still out there,” Lance muttered.
“Yes, they are. Business is booming.”
“So don’t you have that feeling anymore? That you’re supposed to get them off the streets?”
“Let’s just say that I’m more specialized now. When they start killing people, I go after them. There are others on the force who deal with the narcotics end.”
“Do you think most crimes are committed because of drugs?”
“I know it for a fact.”
“So how’s your brother now?”
“Prison changed him. He had a religious experience, and now every time I visit him, he tries to preach to me.”
Lance smiled. “But that’s good, right? You believe in God, don’t you?”
Kent hesitated. If he told the truth, he knew he would confuse Lance. Why challenge the boy’s faith if it was something that anchored him?
But Lance wouldn’t leave it alone. “Well, do you?”
“Sometimes.” Hoping to turn the conversation, he said, “So what do you think happened with your sister? Why did she turn to drugs?”
Lance gave him a long look. “She’s not a suspect anymore, right?”
“Right.”
“You’re sure about that? Because I can’t talk to you about her if you’re gonna use it against her.”
“I understand. We know who the killer is.”
Lance rubbed his chin. “Well, I don’t really know what she’s thinking most of the time. But when my dad was sick, she and I got pretty close. She used to do everything for me. Then when dad died … she just got kind of mean.”
“Mean? In what way?”
“I don’t know. She was just mad all the time, and grumpy. I couldn’t blame her, because I was pretty upset too.”
Kent saw Lance’s Adam’s apple move, and he wondered if he should have taken the boy down this path.
Lance traced one of the raindrops on his window. “That’s when Emily started going psycho. She didn’t want me around her … didn’t want anybody around her. She even stopped hanging out with the friends she’d grown up with and started hanging with losers. The ones who smoked weed and popped pills. I think she found other people who had sorry lives, and when she started drinking and using drugs, it made her feel a little better for a while.”
“For a while,” Kent said. “It never lasts. If you wanted to sign people up for a club, you wouldn’t advertise by saying, ‘Want dark circles under your eyes? Sores on your face? Want to go days without eating or sleeping? Weeks without bathing? We’ll help you spend every cent you have for dope and steal to get more, and you’ll never be able to hold a job … ’ Who would join a club like that?”
“I don’t know,” Lance said, “but lots of people do.” His voice lowered. “Sometimes, when your friends get real in-your-face, begging you to do what they’re doing, you almost, for a minute, think that maybe you should try it just once, just to make yourself feel better after all the junk in your life … ”
Kent frowned. “That would be a terrible idea.”
“Yeah, I know. When I get like that, I remind myself what a crock it all is. That it’s a big lie. I was always sneaking in Emily’s room, reading her journals and stuff, trying to figure out what needed to be done to fix her. And then I would talk to her about it and tell her not to hang out with losers, that they were bad news, that she was gonna wind up being a loser like them. She just said I was judgmental. Then I told her, ‘Okay, so if it’s so great and everything, why don’t I start doing it too?’ ”
“You asked her that? What did she say?”
He could see the pain on the boy’s face. “She didn’t even care. To her it was the best thing ever. Wallowing in a pigpen with her brain all fried. She would have been glad to have me join her.”
“Wow. That must have been hard.”
“Yeah, and I was mad enough at her to do it, just to show her. But I’m smarter than her. So I prayed that God would keep me from it. And he took away those stupid thoughts.”
“Sounds like a good prayer.”
Lance glanced over at him. “Does God answer your prayers?”
Kent didn’t want to tell him that the first prayers he’d prayed in twenty years were this very afternoon. “I guess I wouldn’t pray if I didn’t think God would answer. But I don’t think he’s sitting around, waiting to do my bidding.”
Lance seemed to mull that over. “I hope he’s answering my prayers now.”
Kent’s throat tightened. “I don’t know God as well as you do, Lance, but somehow I think he will.”
fifty-five
Barbara couldn’t find her daughter. She’d never felt more helpless. She stood in an alley, dark shadows jutting in the moonlight, luring her. But she’d already searched them, and Emily wasn’t there.
Had Greg Leigh already found Emily? Had he gotten revenge for the injury she’d inflicted on him?
She reached a dead end, turned and ran back the way she’d come. Darkness hung like a curtain, working with the rain against her. As she ran back up the alley, she saw a cluster of people hunkered in a doorway, but none of them was Emily. Up ahead, two men slogged toward her. Bolstering her courage, she didn’t turn away. She kept running right past them, almost daring them to get in her way.
She got back to the crossroads and went the other way, ran all the way to the other end of the alley, calling out for Emily.
Where was she?
Finally, soaked to the bone, she went into a doorway and fell to her knees. “God, please. I’m lost here.” She hugged herself as she knelt, and lowered her forehead to the cement floor. “I don’t know where to find her. I can’t do this by myself. But you can look down and see her. You know right where she is. Please, God, you’ve got to point me to her. You helped her escape and brought me this far. She’s around here somewhere. Please!”
Her pleading voice was muffled by the pounding rain.
Emily walked in the rain until she saw an Exxon station and convenience store up ahead. Feeling like she’d just reached the Promised Land, she sloshed through the parking lot. Stepping inside the brightly lit store, she looked cautiously around. There were several customers in line, and a stressed-out woman behind the counter, who looked as if she’d rather be shot than ring up another sale.
“Excuse me,” she said, shivering. “Can I use your phone?”
“It ain’t for public use,” the woman muttered.
“But it’s an emergency. Please … just one phone call.”
“Go find a pay phone.”
“I will, if you’ll tell me where one is. Please!” When the clerk ignored her, Emily turned to the people in line. “Can’t somebody let me use their cell phone?”
The woman who’d just paid turned to her. “You can use mine, darlin’. Come on out. It’s in my car.”
Emily eyed her suspiciously, afraid to get into any stranger’s car again. “Uh … could I use it inside? I’m really freezing.”
The lady got her bag and came toward her. “Sure, I’ll go get it. Look at you, sweetie. You’re drenched.” She pointed to a table where people could sit while snacking. “Go wait there, and I’ll be right back in.”
Emily went over and slipped into the yellow booth, watching through the window as the woman got her phone out of the car. She looked harmless … kind, even. Emily scanned the parking lot, the gas pumps, searching for the black car that had gotten her into this mess.
The lady came back in. “Here, honey. Take all the time you need.”
Relief swarmed through her. Emily’s hands trembled as she dialed her mother’s phone. She waited. Please, God. It began to ring, then went straight to voicemail. “No!” She hung up, then clicked it back on and pressed redial. “Why won’t she answer? It’s not even ringing through.”
Again, voi
cemail. Her mother must have a weak signal. How would she ever connect? She tried Lance’s number. It was a different cell phone service, so maybe it had some bars.
An operator’s recorded voice said, “This Inbox is full. Please try again later.”
“The Inbox is full?” she cried. “What does that mean?”
“Honey, calm down,” the woman said. “Keep trying. Why don’t you try texting her?”
Yes, maybe a text would get through. She navigated her way to the text window, typed in her mother’s number. She could give her the address, tell her to come here. “Where is this place?” she asked.
“It’s the Exxon right after the Second Street exit.” The woman lifted her voice. “Excuse me, what’s the address here?”
The desk clerk barked out the address, and Emily typed it in with a message that said:
mom i’m at Exxon station 2 nd avenue please come
“Are you hungry, honey?” the woman asked. “Can I get you anything to eat?”
She was too distracted. “No. I have to keep trying my mom.”
“You’re shivering. How about some coffee, at least?”
“Okay.” She kept trying to call while the woman got her some coffee. When she came back, she had bought her a sweatshirt too. She handed it to her. “It’s not much, but you can at least change out of your wet top. Might warm you up a little.”
“Thank you.” Emily took the coffee, but wouldn’t go into the bathroom to change, for fear of missing her mother. She sipped the coffee, grateful for the warmth.
As she dialed again, she looked up at the woman. “God sent you,” Emily whispered. “My mom must be praying.”
As Barbara prayed in that cold, wet doorway, her phone chimed. She stopped praying and flipped it open, saw a text from an unknown number.