To Trust a Friend Page 14

  “Have you and Gary ever had…difficulties…in your marriage? I’m not coming out of the blue with this,” he said at her worried look. “I’m trying to decide whether I need to involve you and your husband more deeply in our investigation. Honestly, I’m hoping for every reason not to, because we’ve got something extremely serious going on.”

  Diana’s dark eyes filled with tears. “Around the time that Sarah was born things got sort of odd for us. Gary was distant and angry a lot, and he stayed that way through her infancy. And when Sarah was less than a year old he lost his grandmother, who raised him, and I put our problems down to that and being a new dad.”

  “You lived in this area then?”

  Diana nodded. “We were managing another group home about four miles from here. Then when Sarah was a toddler we moved here and we’ve been here ever since.” She looked down at the table in front of her, and then looked up with troubled eyes. “There’s something very wrong, isn’t there?”

  “I’m afraid so. I think that a young woman who was one of your foster kids at one point has been abducted by your husband. And I’m really worried that she was taken to lure Kyra into a trap.”

  Diana choked back a sob. “Part of me wants to scream that what you’re saying isn’t possible. That my husband could never be involved in something like that. But I can’t be sure. Gary’s not…well…and I don’t think he’s been following up on doctor’s visits and medication lately. And several times lately I’ve woken up in the middle of the night and he wasn’t in our room.” She looked out the windows, as if to make sure they weren’t being watched. “He wasn’t even in the house. When I asked him about it, he said he’d been taking long walks to clear his head. It’s the same kind of thing he did when Sarah was a baby.”

  Josh could feel his palms sweat while his mouth was cotton dry with fear. “Does Gary have access to any weapons? And can you think of anywhere he would be likely to go if he wanted to hide something?”

  “He’s a hospital security guard, so he has plenty of access to weapons. You probably didn’t know that because I make him leave his uniform at work, along with his gun, so he doesn’t upset the kids. But as far as places he’d go, I have no idea.”

  “I know, Mommy.” Sarah’s small voice came from the doorway.

  Josh frowned, wondering how long she’d been there listening. He looked at Diana, wondering what to do next. He didn’t really want to involve a second-grader in this kind of business, but on the other hand he wanted to hear what she had to say.”

  “What do you mean, Sarah-bug?” Diana tried to sound light, sitting down in a kitchen chair and motioning for her daughter to come into the room. The child did, climbing up on her mother’s lap.

  “You know how Daddy is always saying I’m his favorite girl in the whole wide world? I think that’s silly, because I’m his only little girl, but he thinks it’s funny because he smiles. Sometimes when we go out for ice cream on Saturdays he takes me someplace else after that. One place he calls his secret garden, but last week he said we couldn’t go there anymore because somebody dug it up.” Her brow furrowed and she looked up at her mother. “Why would somebody do that, dig up somebody else’s garden?”

  Josh had to sit down on one of the other kitchen chairs. He couldn’t trust his knees to hold him up any longer. “That sounds mean, doesn’t it?” Sarah nodded. “You said that one place was what he called his garden, Sarah. Is there another place?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t like it. One time a spider got in my hair. Daddy says spiders aren’t scary and they live in barns, anyway, and we shouldn’t kill them. I told him that the spiders could have that old barn because I didn’t want to go there, anyway.”

  “How far away was this barn? Did you drive there?” Josh tried hard to keep from sounding harsh with the child. She might be the only link to finding Jasmine and Kyra while they were still alive.

  Sarah looked up at her mother’s face again, and Diana silently urged her to go on. “I don’t know how far it was because I fell asleep on the way there. Daddy said his nana had horses there a long time ago. Does that help?”

  “It helps a lot, sweetheart,” Diana told her. “Now, why don’t you go upstairs and finish your homework, okay?”

  “Okay. But if you go to that barn, watch out for spiders,” Sarah told Josh.

  “I will,” he promised, then stayed silent until they could hear her going up the stairs. “Does that give you an idea of where this place might be?”

  “Yes. Gary’s grandmother lived out in the more rural part of Frederick County. She didn’t own a lot of property, but I do remember going for a drive with her a long time ago and her pointing out a farmstead she said belonged to a good friend.”

  “Could you find it again?”

  “I think so. I could probably narrow it down on a map for you, but it would be a lot easier if I just went with you. I’ll need to find someone to watch Sarah and the other kids.”

  Josh hesitated. “I don’t want to involve you in this, especially since all of this could be a wild-goose chase.” He didn’t really believe that, but involving civilians in something like this when a family member was a suspect was never a good idea.

  “Please. I promise, once we find the place you can take me somewhere out of the way. I don’t want to be there, anyway, if I’m right.”

  Josh made a quick decision. “All right. But I’m going to hold you to your word on taking you somewhere else and quickly if we find Gary there. Now, do you have a map in the house that would show that area, or should I go out to the car?”

  “I’ve got one,” Diana said, leaving the kitchen and coming back a few minutes later with a map of the area. “I need to call a friend to come and be here for the kids. I need somebody over twenty-one to be in charge.”

  Josh nodded and studied the map while she made a couple of calls. He used his own phone to call back to the lab and reach Allie, giving her the information so that troopers could meet them at a main intersection. By the time he’d finished his call, Diana was standing in the kitchen doorway with Sarah. The girl had both fists wrapped in the hem of her mother’s sweater. “She’s not going to let us leave her behind,” Diana said, sounding exhausted. “If you want me, you’re going to have to take both of us.”

  It was against everything that Josh had ever learned, but he knew they were probably running out of time. “Come on, then. We’ve only got a few more hours of daylight to find this place.”

  Kyra’s arms ached and her head hurt. Every time the van hit a bump she jostled against Jasmine, usually making her whimper. When she’d found the teen sitting on a bus stop bench a few doors down from the crack house, she’d looked small sitting next to a stranger who sat reading the newspaper. His tweed cap had been pulled low over his eyes, and as Kyra got out of her car and crossed the street she had wondered why Jasmine wasn’t standing up to meet her.

  Once she got within a few steps of the bench she could see why. The man’s left wrist and Jasmine’s right one were cuffed together with plastic restraints like the state troopers used for temporary handcuffs. Reaching his right arm over his body, behind the paper he now let drop, the man held a stiletto-thin blade to Jasmine’s midsection. “Do what I say, stay quiet, or she dies right here. I’m fast with this. If you scream, she and the baby will go in one thrust.” Jasmine’s eyes were huge with fear and Kyra stood frozen, dumbly wondering why she’d left her cell phone in the car and why the three of them seemed to be the only people around.

  The man’s voice was familiar, but his taut face and wild eyes weren’t…until she’d stood there another long minute. “Gary? What’s going on? Why are you doing this?”

  “Because it’s time. I couldn’t stop the urges anymore and she wouldn’t stop staring at me. Her and the rest of them.” He got to his feet, wrenching Jasmine along. “Come on. Walk over there to that white van. Now.”

  Kyra wanted to scream or run or do anything that could save the two of them from getting anywher
e near that van. She knew the cardinal rule with dangerous people was not to let them get you alone, or let them control you. But Jasmine gasped and a tiny flower of red bloomed on her shirt. “I said move and I mean it.” He motioned with his head to the van and Kyra walked to the van. “Now, open the back.” Her nerves screamed silently, but she did what he told her to, conscious of Jasmine’s terror.

  “I don’t want to die,” the girl said in a tiny voice, hardly more than a whisper.

  “Then you’ll do what I tell you.” He was too close to Kyra for comfort, but before she could shift or move he’d leaned against her, blocking her from moving away from the open hatch of the van. He pushed her and she felt a sharp jab, blaming it on the knife until she looked down between them and saw a needle in Gary’s hand instead. “Relax,” he said with a sneer. “It’s not anything fatal. You’ll probably be out only a few minutes. Working at a hospital has some advantages.”

  That was the last she’d been aware of until coming to with her face pressed against the carpet of a moving vehicle. Now she wasn’t sure how long they’d been traveling, but what little she could see out of the darkened windows hinted at rural areas.

  Another bounce rocked her against Jasmine, who made a high-pitched sob. “Are you hurt?” Kyra asked as quietly as possible. “Do you think you’re bleeding?”

  “Not anymore. I think that place on my stomach stopped bleeding. But I’m so scared.”

  “I am, too,” Kyra admitted. “I know God is here with us, though, and will be with us no matter what.”

  Gary looked back at them briefly, then faced the front of the van again and turned up the radio. It was on some kind of heavy-metal station that grated on Kyra’s nerves. The music sounded harsh, but at least it might offer them the chance to keep talking if they could hear each other over the music.

  Before they could have much meaningful conversation, the van pulled off the main road and onto what felt like a gravel road or a trail of some kind. The vehicle came to a stop and Gary got out. Kyra heard a noise she couldn’t identify, and then Gary was back in the van. They drove a little farther and the whole routine happened again. Kyra tried to figure out what she had heard, and after a minute it came to her. The noise and Gary’s pattern of getting in and out of the van suggested that he was opening gates and driving through them. They were probably on some kind of farm or ranch property.

  Her suspicions were confirmed when Gary stopped the vehicle one more time, turning off the ignition. At the passenger side of the van she could see the weathered wood of a building that might be a barn. This time Gary got out and took a few minutes, and Kyra could hear a screeching like unoiled metal on metal. Then Gary came back and jerked the back door of the van open. “Okay, we’re going to go inside.” He pulled Jasmine roughly to the edge of the hatch and hauled her into a sitting position. She whined softly, but Kyra was sure nobody was going to hear them out here.

  As Gary yanked Jasmine to her feet, she stumbled and Kyra gasped. “Don’t think you’re going to do something heroic,” Gary warned. “There’s nobody around for over a mile in any direction, so they won’t hear you if you scream. And if you try to run I’ll kill her. I’d rather take my time, but that won’t stop me from doing her in if you try to get away.”

  With his wild eyes and twitchy demeanor, Kyra believed every word Gary said. She prayed silently, frantically, trying to figure out what to do next. She almost wept in frustration for the cell phone that she had left on the seat of her car. But then she had thought she’d be getting out of the car only long enough to cross the street and get Jasmine. There hadn’t been any need for the phone. She wondered if anybody would even miss her such a short a time after she had left her office. Allie knew where she was going, and maybe Josh had gotten back by now. Maybe Jasmine’s school would start actively looking for her now that she’d been missing without any word from her for several hours.

  Gary was back standing in front of the hatch now, and he pushed and pulled Kyra up to a standing position. The plastic cuffs made her wrists burn and sting behind her back, but she had decided not to give him the pleasure of crying out.

  “Come on,” he said, half guiding and half dragging her into the barn. “We’re going to get started.”

  Whatever that meant, it couldn’t be good. Kyra suppressed a shudder and tried to concentrate on the ground ahead of her.

  The gate was open. Josh took that as a good sign, given the dilapidated state of the property he could see behind the trees. There were buildings a distance from the “main” road, which was just a little rural two-lane stretch of asphalt with no shoulder to speak of. “How sure are you that this is it?” he asked Diana quietly. In the backseat, the movement of the car had lulled Sarah to sleep.

  “Pretty sure. Do you want to drive just a little way up the property and see if we can find Gary’s van?” Josh could tell that Diana was still hoping they wouldn’t spot her husband’s vehicle and he didn’t blame her. What a horrible thing it must be to consider your spouse capable of a crime of the magnitude they had been talking about. He drove slowly up the gravel road at hardly more than a crawl. After the path jogged to the left slightly, he could see what looked like a light-colored van on the side of a weathered gray building.

  “That’s it,” Diana said. She managed to pack all the intensity of a shout into her short, quiet statement. Josh stopped the car, then backed it up until he came to a place where the gravel was a little wider. He turned the car around slowly, trying to avoid the sound of crunching gravel. He drove back to the main road and pulled off into what little flat space was available, about half a mile from the abandoned farmstead. He could see anything that went on outside here, but they were far enough away not to attract immediate attention from anybody in the barn.

  Pulling out his cell phone, Josh punched in the numbers for the state police dispatcher that he’d been communicating with most of the afternoon. He delivered a brief message about where they were, and what the situation was, and she promised to send the officers standing by less than five miles away.

  He put the phone back in his pocket only to have it vibrate to life almost as soon as he’d let go of it. Allie answered and launched into such quick speech he could hardly follow her. “They found Kyra’s truck and her keys only a couple of blocks from Jasmine’s school. Her purse was on the floor of the truck, and her phone was on the console.”

  “Slow down a little. Where were the keys?”

  He could hear Allie sigh. “On the street across from the truck, dropped at the curb and hidden under some trash. I guess we got lucky, because if they’d been out in plain sight I don’t think we would have found those keys or the truck they go with.”

  “You’re probably right. Did they find anything else?” Josh didn’t want to come straight out and ask about other signs of a struggle, like bullet casings or blood. He nearly sagged in relief when Allie told him that there wasn’t anything else besides the keys and truck.

  “Wait a minute. There was one more thing, but nobody knows whether it even has any bearing on the disappearance. Under a bus stop bench nearby there was a hardcover book, open on the pavement.”

  Allie described it a little more. “That’s Jasmine’s. She had it with her Friday when Kyra picked her up. It should mean that all three of them are together. And I think we’ve found them.”

  “Have you called for backup?”

  “They’re on their way,” Josh assured her. “I’ll call you back when I have good news.” He ended the call to Allie’s protests and ignored the phone when it almost immediately started vibrating again.

  He knew he should wait for his backup, especially so that he could be sure that Diana and Sarah were safe and stayed at least this far from the barn. But Josh wanted to charge in now just to know that Jasmine and Kyra were unharmed. He strained to hear anything, hoping for raised voices, perhaps, but no screams or gunfire. After about two more minutes he couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “I need a prom
ise from you that you’ll stay right here and make sure Sarah doesn’t get out of the car. I don’t want to wait any longer out here when I could be doing something to break things up in there. I’m afraid if I wait, somebody’s going to get hurt or killed. If we move fast, that might not happen.”

  Diana looked back at her sleeping child. “Go. We’ll stay here. If all three of them are still safe, see if you can keep it that way.”

  “I will.” Josh took his gun out of its shoulder holster and made sure he was ready for anything that might happen. He holstered the gun and walked toward the barn, keeping the closed doors in his focus, moving as quietly as possible and listening for any noise that might be able to tell him how this would all turn out.

  FOURTEEN

  Kyra strained to see what Gary was doing in the dim light that filtered through the closed door of the barn. Cobwebs and dust didn’t make it any easier to discern his expression, and the tears that kept overwhelming her didn’t help, either. Mostly he paced and muttered to himself, seemingly trying to decide what to do now and how to do it.

  It was much easier to see Jasmine, sitting on the cracked concrete floor of the barn, arms behind her like Kyra’s were, stretched uncomfortably and tethered with the plastic handcuffs. Kyra was glad to see that the cut on Jasmine’s stomach had stopped bleeding quickly. So far she didn’t appear to be in active labor and Kyra prayed that she stayed that way. She could only imagine what Gary would do if Jasmine’s water broke or she showed any signs of being in labor. Kyra wasn’t sure why, but she thought that something like that would probably send Gary over the edge.

  “This is all your fault,” Gary said, wheeling around and coming to face Kyra. He loomed over her, standing while she sat on the ground. “You should have just left everything the way it was. There was no reason to disturb anything.”

  “The floods disturbed everything,” Kyra told him. She echoed his language, noticing that he didn’t refer to his victims as human beings or even bodies, but just talked about the situation in general. “Once somebody discovered what turned up in the spring floods, I didn’t have a choice but to try to identify what had been found.”