Brian Freeman - The Burying Place

The doorway led to a narrow hall, where the line of dark, boarded-up windows stretched along the wall. Glass littered the floor. He shivered from the cold and dampness. The smell, as he moved down the hallway, got even worse. So did the gathering of rats.

Nick stopped.

It was impossible to move silently through the debris, and for a moment he was certain he had heard the clatter of someone else's footsteps on the far side of the school. He waited to see if the noise would recur, but a minute passed, and it didn't. He told himself he was letting the place get the best of his imagination. He was alone. No one else would dare to be inside.

When two more minutes of silence passed, he kept going.

He reached a doorway leading to a smaller room, where a broken wall of cinder blocks rose to the ceiling like a honeycomb. His flashlight shone on a row of concrete beams. Green algae bloomed on the floor. In this room, the smell soared, feeding rancid decay into the air. He covered the whole lower half of his face with his gloved hand, but he couldn't extinguish the stink. The rats were bolder here, running back and forth in front of him. Urgent. Excited. Hungry.

Four feet away, where the light made an arc on the floor, he saw them.

Six bare feet.

Nick lifted the flashlight and then dropped it and shouted. The flashlight fell and broke, bathing the room in darkness, but it couldn't erase the awful image from his brain. Three women, naked, were tied to old-fashioned school chairs. Their skin was bloodless and white, where they still had skin. Most of it had been eaten away, exposing muscle, organs, and bone. Rats scampered on the desks and in their laps and across their shoulders and breasts. 'FUCK FUCK FUCK!'

Nick backed up and staggered like a blind man, hands outstretched, colliding with the concrete pillars as he hunted for an escape. His feet tripped on debris, and he fell, cutting his hands and arms on sharp metal. His skin grew slippery with his own blood. He pushed himself up and felt along the wall until it ended, and he spilled into another hallway, tunneling through a house of horrors.

'Help!'

He reached out with his spread fingers, and his hand found the bat-shaped remnants of broken glass in one of the windows. He hammered his bloody palm on the plywood nailed to the outer wall, but the stiff wood refused to yield to his panicked blows. He wailed for someone to hear him in the lonely land outside.

'Help! Oh my God, help me!'

Behind him, out of the darkness, a human hand clapped on his shoulder. Nick screamed and spun. A flashlight dazzled his eyes. He saw the shadow of someone tall and large looming over him like a bear, and he thought for an instant he'd been rescued.

'Oh, thank God,' Nick cried.

His relief was short-lived. A fist as hard and strong as a brick hit his face and snapped his head against the peaks of glass. The light in his eyes went black. Nick tasted pistachios again and realized his mouth was filled with bile. His knees buckled, but as he fell, a powerful forearm locked around his neck, choking him and jerking him off the ground.

His chest roared, bellowing for air.

His legs kicked and flailed.

As he struggled, the cold and the stench slowly disappeared and left him in a vacuum of perfect silence. He floated away from the pain and, eventually, he floated so far that he felt nothing at all. He was somewhere else entirely, listening to water drip like the ticking of seconds on a clock. He was in a cave that he had all to himself. He was exploring.

On Sunday morning, the third day after Callie Glenn disappeared, frustration began to seep into the police war room in downtown Grand Rapids. Stride had seen it before. The first forty-eight hours were an adrenaline rush of urgency and determination. The phones rang incessantly. Emails flew back and forth among agencies throughout the state. Leads overwhelmed the system the way a sudden downpour overflows the sewer drains. No one complained because every contact in those precious early hours was an opportunity to break the case open.

Find a baby girl. Bring her home.

By Sunday, however, the lack of progress began to suck oxygen out of the investigation. Everyone knew that time was an enemy, and the enemy was winning. Two hours after a kidnapping, you can draw a small circle on a map and estimate the maximum area in which a missing person is likely to be found. You can set up road blocks. Canvass the region. Ten hours later, the diameter of the circle grows by hundreds of miles, bulging past the resources of the police to enclose and investigate it. Two days later, the universe of hiding places is essentially limitless.

Stride hoped that Callie Glenn was still alive somewhere within northern Minnesota, but the reality was that she could be anywhere by now.

He pored over hundreds of contact reports, hunting for a needle in a haystack. The tiny office on the third floor of the county headquarters was knee-deep in paper and littered with empty coffee cups and food wrappers. He knew that the dimensions of the search forced them to rely on a simple philosophy: do the right things, and hope they got lucky. If they were going to find Callie, someone had to remember the girl's face. Someone had to see her and make the call, and the police — wherever they were — had to make the right follow-through. He could manage the process, but Stride and the small team inside the Sheriff's Department couldn't have eyes and ears everywhere.

After an hour, he pushed the papers aside and got up and wiped the whiteboard hung on the opposite wall. His instinct was to go back to what really happened on Thursday night. Figure out why and how Callie disappeared. With a black marker, he drew a line down the center of the board and then wrote OUTSIDE on one half of the board and INSIDE on the other half.

Those were the two possibilities. Someone from outside the house came and stole Callie, or someone inside the house took her away. Underneath the OUTSIDE header, he scribbled several bullet points:

Stranger or local?

Had to be Callie or could have been any baby?

Ransom or other motive?

Needed to get to house, get in, get away

Alive or dead?

Where is she now?

Underneath the INSIDE header, he wrote different comments:

Alive or dead?

Accident or murder?

Marcus or Micki? (Both?)

Where is she now?

Stride stared at what he had written. In the past two days, his team had reconstructed the movements of Marcus and Valerie Glenn — and their baby — over the five days leading up to the disappearance. Members of the Grand Rapids Police and the Itasca County Sheriff's Department had checked every building, house, store, and street in Grand Rapids and Duluth visited by the Glenns during that time, hoping to find a witness who remembered something or someone unusual. The follow-up was continuing, but so far they had no credible evidence of an intruder watching the Glenns or their home.

He wasn't surprised. Grand Rapids was a small town. Even Duluth was small compared to a large urban center like Minneapolis. He doubted that a stranger could identify a target and plan a kidnapping in such a tightly knit region without leaving some kind of trail for them to follow.

So maybe it wasn't a stranger. Maybe it was someone who already knew the Glenns, their baby, and their home. But if that were true, he didn't know how someone local could hope to hide a stolen baby for any length of time without being discovered. How long could you really do that? A week? A month? Sooner or later, someone would expose the secret.

Assuming that Callie was still alive. If not, it was easy to hide a body in the northern woods.