Mariah Stewart - Cold Truth

“Why, Cassandra Burke, I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out,” he replied, a touch of glee in his voice. “I’m taking you home.”

“How could she have just disappeared like that?” Rick ran a worried hand through his hair. “She’s vanished.”

“That’s ridiculous. Are you certain she isn’t in the house?” Chief Denver pressed. “Did you think to look in the backyard?”

“We’ve been through every room of the house, Chief. I’m telling you, she isn’t here, and no one saw her leave. She got a phone call from Khaliyah…”

“Khaliyah Graves?”

“I don’t know the girl’s last name, the girl she plays basketball with.”

“What did she want?”

“I don’t know. Cass said the reception was bad, and she was going to take the call outside. That’s the last I saw of her.”

“Khaliyah lives over on Westbrook, but I don’t know the house number. Hold on, Rick, let me see if I can contact the department, see if we can get the girl’s number.”

Rick paced the sidewalk outside Jon Wainwright’s house, his phone close to his ear. How could it be that Cass had disappeared seemingly into thin air?

Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. He knew that she hadn’t just vanished. He knew, too, that she wouldn’t just walk off the scene, without at the very least telling him what she was doing. He shook his head. She’d do more than tell him. She’d take him with her.

She’d have to. She didn’t have a car.

“We got through to the girl. She says she didn’t call Cass. Says she can’t find her phone, she thinks someone took it from her gym bag while she was playing basketball.”

“I guess we know who that someone was, don’t we.” There could be only one explanation, and the very thought of it turned Rick cold inside.

Wainwright had her.

Rick didn’t know how he’d done it, but he was one hundred percent certain he had.

“Get the men who are still there to start canvassing the neighborhood. See if anyone saw her. I’ll see how quickly I can get out of the Carsons’. With Lilly still missing, I can’t do a quick hello good-bye. In the meantime, you keep in touch, you hear?”

“Will do.”

Rick closed the phone with a snap, then went into the house to call together the officers on the scene. He told them what had happened, what he and Chief Denver suspected, and what the chief had directed them to do. There was a mass exit out the front door, as the officers took to the streets in search of a sign of Cass or someone who might have seen her.

Within minutes, someone called from across the street.

“Here. I’ve found something.”

“What have you got?” Rick rushed to him, and looked down. Two handguns lay on the ground in the haze of an officer’s flashlight.

They stood silently, staring at the ground. Finally, the officer said, “How’d he get her to do that? Cass would never give up her guns, leave ’em lying on the ground like that.”

Rick knelt down to inspect the guns. He picked up the ankle holster he knew she had strapped on only hours before.

But there’d been three guns, he knew. If two were left here, she still had a weapon. Assuming, of course, that Wainwright hadn’t found it and turned it on her. He hoped that wasn’t the case.

Rick punched in a number on his cell, and waited while it rang.

“Annie, it’s Rick Cisco. We have a problem here in Bowers Inlet…”

He filled her in, listened, then thanked her. He disconnected, and immediately dialed the chief’s number.

“We found two of her guns, but not her,” Rick told him as he strode to his car. “Annie thinks he took her to where it all began. I’m thinking the bird sanctuary. I’m headed there now.”

“I’ll send a few cars out to meet you,” Denver said before Rick hung up.

The street was too narrow to make a U-turn, so Rick threw the car in reverse and drove backward to Bay Avenue, where he took a left. Wishing he had lights and sirens so everyone would get out of his way, Rick followed the route he remembered to the sanctuary.

What was Wainwright’s plan? Were his hands, even now, around her neck, strangling the life from her? Rick’s heart skipped a beat, imagining Cass fighting for her life.

“Fight the bastard,” he said aloud. “Fight him with everything you’ve got. Just hold on…”

Rick stopped the car at the entrance to the sanctuary, got out, and moved the gate aside. He drove straight through, his tires kicking up sand and small stones as he sped down the road to the Jenny Burke Memorial. After the second turn, he slowed, his high beams glancing off the rails on the side of the road at the left. Finally, he saw it, and pulled over. His Glock in one hand, a flashlight in the other, he closed the car door softly.

Rick stood by the side of the road and strained his ears to listen. He heard… nothing.

Finally, there was a rustle overhead, followed by the whooooooooo whooooooooo of an owl. The winged predator took off from its perch and disappeared into the night, leaving Rick with his mounting fears.

He found the path that led to the blind and followed it. When he arrived at the structure, he stood in the shadows and watched, and listened. Nothing. No movement, no sound.

He climbed the ladder silently, the Glock still in his right hand, but when he reached the top and looked over, he realized he’d been wrong. The blind was empty. He shined the light around the interior, but there was nothing.

“Where the hell are you?” Frustrated, he banged a hand on the floor of the blind before heading back down.

Cass stiffened when Jonathan pushed her through the cattails and the weathered brown house appeared in the moonlight.

“See?” Wainwright whispered in her ear. “Just like I told you. I brought you home.”

“Is she here?” Cass asked, her mouth dry.

“You’ll be able to answer that yourself in a moment.” He forced her to the top of the concrete basement steps, and she hesitated.

“Don’t be a child,” he told her, shoving her down the steps and through the basement to the stairs that led to the first floor. “Nothing to fear down here.”

“Where’s Lilly?” Cass asked as she was pushed through the door and into the living room of her childhood. Miraculously, everything was just as it had been twenty-six years earlier. The dark green sofa had, long ago, faded pale from the sun that beat in through the front windows. A magazine from 1979 lay on the floor next to a chair. After the murders, Cass’s grandparents had come into the house one time, and then only to get the things that Cass needed. Clothes, favorite toys, important papers. They had then simply locked the house when the police were through. Incredibly, to the best of Cass’s knowledge, no one had been inside since. Except for the thick layer of dust that covered everything, and the cobwebs that hung from the ceilings, all was as it had been.

“Lilly is upstairs.”

“I want to see her.”

“Patience, Cass.”

“Uh-uh. I want to see her now.”

“As you wish, then.” He gestured with the gun. “Up you go. And don’t forget who has the gun.”

“Oh, I haven’t forgotten.”

She climbed the steps slowly, the child within her screaming silently with every step. Her hands shook and her knees threatened to simply give out. It took all of her willpower to force herself to continue forward. She could not be a coward. She could not fail Lilly.

There’d been no chance to save her mother. She hadn’t gotten to her sister in time.

This time, she was not a child. This time, she was not helpless.

This time he would not win.

She stood on the top step and took a deep breath.