Bobby Cole - The dummy line

With that, Zach and Marlow walked out and shut Ollie’s office door. Ollie stared at the chaos beginning in the outer room. He picked up the phone and dialed information.

Lindsay Littlepage, assisted by Sumter County’s only female deputy, Lakreshia Gibbons, tried to contact her husband, Scott. Lindsay called out his cell number to Lakreshia, who slowly dialed it. Once Lakreshia heard the first ring, she handed the phone to Lindsay.

Listening impatiently to the ringing, Lindsay started getting emotional. Finally, she heard her husband answer sleepily, “Uh”-he cleared his throat-“hello?”

“Scott!…Scott!” She immediately started sobbing.

“Lindsay? Lindsay! What’s the matter? Are you OK? Are the kids OK? Lindsay!” he said frantically. Scott had stayed out late gambling and drinking whiskey with several other pharmaceutical sales reps. His head was pounding.

When Lindsay heard her husband’s voice, she couldn’t speak. Lakreshia gently took the phone from her.

“Mr. Littlepage, I am Deputy Gibbons with the Sumter County Sheriff’s Department, and we have your wife here in the hospital in Livingston. She’s fine now. This is going to sound crazy, but we think she was kidnapped and somehow escaped.”

“Kidnapped? Livingston? Alabama?” Scott was trying to force the thoughts to make sense.

“Yes sir,” the deputy responded.

“Is…is she OK?” Scott asked, sitting up and running his left hand through his hair.

“Yes sir. I’m looking at her right now. She’s obviously tired and the doctors are checking her out.”

“Wait…say all that again. I’m lost,” Scott pleaded as he fumbled for the light on the nightstand.

“Sir, we don’t have all the details. We do think that she was kidnapped sometime during the night. She escaped and was found by one of our deputies. We have her in the hospital, and she is stable.”

“Stable? She’s OK?”

“Yes sir.”

“What about my kids?”

“Apparently they were spending the night with some friends. We have officers checking that out…hold on…I think she can talk to you now-hang on.”

“Scott, he said you killed somebody! Did you? What’s going on? Who’d you kill? Please tell me you haven’t killed somebody,” she begged, on the verge of hysterics.

Totally stunned by the head-on collision of events, Scott shook his head, trying to make sense of Lindsay’s babbling.

“Lindsay, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about! I’m in Biloxi working. Who said that? I haven’t killed anybody. Are you OK? This is crazy!” Scott exclaimed.

“Scott, please come get me. I’m scared,” she pleaded.

“I will, honey. Don’t be scared. Are you all right? What about the-”

“Yeah…yes, and the kids are safe, I’m sure. They spent the night with the Johnsons.”

“Honey, I’m leaving right now, but it’ll take me at least three hours to get there from Biloxi.”

“Please hurry!”

“I’m on the way, baby,” he promised. “Let me speak to the deputy again. I love you.”

She handed the phone to Lakreshia and lay back down.

“Hello?” the officer said.

“Who kidnapped her?” Scott asked in disbelief.

“We don’t know, sir.” The deputy shrugged her shoulders.

“This is just crazy! Why?” Scott asked, obviously in shock.

“I don’t know, sir, but we’re working on getting answers to all these questions.”

“Has she…has she been…was she…was she raped?”

“No sir. There are no such indications,” she replied and smiled kindly at Lindsay.

Scott’s mind was whirling. “Hey, look, I have a friend, actually he’s my next-door neighbor, who’s at a hunting club ten miles or so from Livingston. His name’s Jake Crosby, and the club’s called the Bogue Chitto. I hunt there some with him. Can you have someone go out there and get him so he can stay with Lindsay? I’m sure he’s at the camp house.”

“Yes sir. I’ll see what I can do.” Deputy Gibbons jotted down “Jake Crosby” in her notebook and took a stab at spelling “Bogue Chitto.”

“Is there a number where I can call you back?” Scott asked. “I’m goin’ to have a bunch of questions while I’m drivin’.”

“Yes sir.” She gave Scott the hospital number and the sheriff’s office number. He promised to be there as fast as he could. Scott hung up the phone and stared in disbelief at the hotel walls.

Lakreshia again smiled warmly at Lindsay and told her that her husband was on his way and had said to tell her that he loved her. Lindsay smiled weakly, closed her eyes, and allowed the Xanax to work its magic.

Lakreshia walked out and called Martha O’Brien with the details. When she mentioned the Jake Crosby connection, Martha immediately took the information to Ollie. At this point, Ollie believed Jake was one of the good guys, but he sure wanted to ask the man some questions. Ollie had just gotten off the phone with the sheriff’s office in West Point. They really didn’t know anything about Jake Crosby. They did know he had a perfectly clean record, and a deputy on duty knew Jake because Jake had coached his daughter’s softball team two years earlier. The deputy didn’t think Jake could be criminally involved in anything this bizarre. West Point was dispatching units to the Johnsons’ to check on the children and to the Littlepage and Crosby homes to investigate the kidnapping. The deputy promised to call him right back.

“Thank you, Miz Martha,” Ollie said as he rubbed his head with both hands.

“You need anything, Sheriff?”

“Some fresh coffee please…if you don’t mind.”

“You got it.” Martha turned to leave and stopped. “Do you think this Jake character kidnapped the woman from West Point?”

“I don’t know what to think…common sense dictates we consider that angle, though,” he responded.

“Nothing’s ever as it seems; is it?”

“No ma’am.”

“I’ll get your coffee; you’re gonna need it.”

The head ER nurse saw Tanner’s right eye open slightly. He was blinking rapidly, trying to adjust to the bright lights. His left eye was swollen completely shut. She eased to his side, saying a few comforting words. When he seemed to relax a bit, she quietly left the room and paged Dr. Sarhan. She looked back into the room and noted that he had closed his eye.

The nurse walked across the hall to the waiting room to tell Mrs. Tillman that Tanner was waking and that she would be allowed to see him as soon. Olivia Beasley was there, wringing her hands. The two mothers hugged each other. The nurse’s next duty was to call Martha O’Brien at the sheriff’s office to alert her.

Dr. Sarhan walked very deliberately down the hall into the room and immediately checked the dilation in Tanner’s right eye. “I am Dr. Sarhan. Tanner? You know where you are? What happened to you?”

Tanner’s eye slowly rolled back in his head, then shut. Dr. Sarhan recognized the morphine fog in which Tanner’s mind floated. “You been in bad accident. You serious injuries…but you be all right. You very lucky.”

Tanner started to sit up and talk but couldn’t. Dr. Sarhan placed both of his hands on Tanner’s shoulders and gently forced him to lie still. Tanner was moaning. Dr. Sarhan looked up to check the morphine drip, then made a note on his chart. As soon as the doctor took his hand off him, Tanner tried to sit up again. He groped at the tube protruding from his mouth. Dr. Sarhan grabbed him. “Stop struggling, Tanner. You lie still…relax.”