Fear the Dark (3 page)

“And then?” Stuart demanded again.

Jonah had never responded well to bullies, but his job had taught him to at least be calm. “Stuart, as I said, we'll take this a step at a time, following the procedures for missing persons. While this storm is pounding us and most of the other kids are either at home or with friends, we have an excellent opportunity to make phone calls. I assume you're all willing to help?”

“Of course.” It was snapped almost in unison by everyone but Monica, who merely sobbed again.

“Okay, you all know the conference room is next door. There are several phones as well as legal pads and pens. Coffee too. I called before I got here and had two of the high school yearbooks left in there. Stuart is a senior and Amy a junior, so you can divide up the list like that if you want; even if you don't know names, look for faces you've seen with your kids more than others. However you choose is fine with me. Just please write down who you call and what they said. Jean's getting a list from the school with phone numbers, home and cell.”

And it was a good thing Jean and Jack Rollins, the school principal, were . . . very good friends. He'd been willing to leave his coffee and his snug, dry house and slosh out to the high school for numbers he'd fax back to the police station.

There were, Jonah had thought many times, benefits to living in
such a small town that virtually everyone knew everyone else. The downside, of course, was that nearly everyone knew everyone else's business. So if they didn't already, the whole town would soon know of an elopement that apparently didn't go as planned.

Jonah personally got the parents settled in the conference room and then returned to his office. All his instincts told him he wouldn't get much use from whatever the parents found—except to spread the news faster—but they needed to be busy, procedure needed to be followed, and he needed them out of his hair while he tried to think.

Sarah tapped on his door and came in. She didn't look the least bit wet, so either they had beaten the storm back, or water just slicked off her like a duck. It was something he had thought before.

She held a thumb drive in her hand. “You need to look at this.”

“Ah, shit,” he groaned. “Don't tell me this whole thing is even stranger than I think it is.”

Without another word, she went around his desk to the credenza behind it, plugged the thumb drive into his computer, and called up the pictures on the drive.

“Take a look for yourself. I got every shot before the rain started.”

Jonah swiveled his chair around and stared at the large screen of his computer. He stared for a long time, his gaze moving from photograph to photograph, each one clear, correctly lit, expertly focused. Very professional, obviously taken by an expert.

Except . . .

“Did you close the car doors?”

“Not until after I took those pictures,” Sarah said calmly.

In each shot of the car, the doors were closed.

“And the footprints?”

“They were just as you saw them, same as I did, when I took the shots. The camera is working fine; I checked it as soon as I saw these. What the hell, Jonah?”

He really didn't know. Because there were no footprints in any of the shots. None. And he could tell from the wide shots Sarah had included that she had taken the pictures where they had both seen muddy footprints of two people.

Footprints totally gone. Gone as though they had never been there.

May 12

Judge Phillip Carson had called Serenity home for most of his life, minus the years away at college and law school and a five-year stint at a big legal firm in Atlanta.

He'd hated Atlanta. Hadn't thought much of the firm either.

Coming home to Serenity had suited him perfectly. Even a small mountain town of hardly more than five thousand people could always use another lawyer—and had definitely needed a judge. Since the county in which Serenity resided could claim only two other towns, both also small and with small populations, it had been more or less tacked in a judicial sense onto the larger circuit that was literally on the other side of the mountain. And that one contained several large towns, which made for a busy judge.

So it hadn't been very difficult for Judge Carson to convince the powers that be that it would just be a good idea all around for this smaller county to become a single district, and for the judicial circuit
to have its own judge residing in Serenity. Unless something really unusual came up, he only had to leave Serenity to hold court in one of the other small towns maybe once or twice a month.

Holding court
in
Serenity—in the single courtroom on the second floor of the small police department—tended to consist of mundane traffic violations, the occasional half-assed assault between two drunks, and rare property damage from the handful of troubled high school kids they had to contend with seemingly every year.

But all in all, it was a peaceful town. That was what he liked about it. He had lots of leisure for his favorite sport, fishing. And though it looked hardly more than a wide creek, there were plenty of fish, so the stream that was less than a mile from downtown Serenity suited him perfectly. He'd staked out his special spot—which everyone in town knew and respected—and the walk out there and back two or three times each week was what he considered to be sufficient exercise.

Today, rod and tackle box in hand, he stopped in at the police station. “Is he in?” he asked Jean at the reception desk.

“He's in, Judge, but I've seen him in better moods.”

“I'm not surprised.” The information didn't deter the judge, and he passed through the nearly deserted bullpen to the chief's office. He didn't let the closed blinds deter him either.

He walked in without knocking, saying briskly, “Nothing new, I take it?”

Jonah looked up from the usual clutter on his blotter with a frown, but it was a general expression of mood rather than anything directed at the judge. He looked very tired and a bit haggard. “Nothing. I've reached out to every law enforcement agency in three states, issued a
BOLO, and took Sully's dogs out for miles around on three different days even though there wasn't much hope after that damned rain.

“There's been no ransom note. We've personally interviewed every single high school student in Serenity,
plus
all the teachers and the guidance counselor, and contacted distant relatives of both kids. We've searched both their rooms and their lockers at school. Everything points to a deliberate and well-planned elopement, nothing else. An elopement that just . . . stopped . . . near the edge of town.”

“Nothing in the car?” The judge sat down in one of the visitor's chairs, setting the tackle box at his feet and propping his rod against the other chair.

“Nothing unusual. Once we went over everything and got it all out of the car, I had the parents back here sorting what belonged to who. Some stuff was obvious, but not everything. And nothing stuck out as not belonging to a couple of reckless kids taking off without much in the way of planning for the future.” He didn't add that Monica Church had sobbed the entire time the parents had sorted their kids' belongings.

Jonah drew a deep breath and leaned back in his well-worn chair until it creaked. “Those two kids might as well have vanished into thin air for all the evidence I've found.”

“Maybe they were just smart enough to lay down a false trail,” the judge suggested.

Thinking of the vanished footprints that, so far, only he, Sarah, and Tim knew about, Jonah said, “From all I've been told, Amy was the brains of that pair—and she wasn't that smart. All she wanted was to get out of Serenity and out from under her parents' thumb, and it was the same for Simon. I'm betting they hadn't thought much beyond
just getting out of here. No elaborate plan. They had relatively little money, relatively few skills, and like most teenagers, they thought they could build a life on that foundation. Somewhere other than Serenity.”

“Stranger things have happened,” the judge said mildly.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. And if either one of them had been in touch with
somebody
, I wouldn't be so worried. But they haven't. It's been a week, and nobody's heard from them. And since Amy left her purse behind, they only had whatever cash Simon had in his jeans. About two weeks' pay at most, his father thinks. That won't get them very far, especially if they have to rent a room somewhere.”

He paused, then added, “Something else. Their cell phone usage—high as hell like every teenager's—stopped abruptly. Nothing after Saturday night, about the time they left. Which figures; probably Stuart letting Amy know he was waiting with the car. Nothing since. I mean nothing. The phones are either off or destroyed. And I have to lean toward the latter, because both had GPS locators in them; the parents had made sure of that
and
that the GPS was locked on at all times, so the kids couldn't disable without destroying the phones. A condition of them having their own phones, I gather.”

“And no joy.” It wasn't a question.

Jonah nodded. “How many teenagers do you know who can be more than a foot or two away from their cells? If they aren't in a pocket, they carry them in their hands. A lot of the girls don't even bother with purses anymore, just a little billfold-like thing on a long strap that holds their cell, driver's license, and car keys if they have a car, and maybe a few bucks or an ATM card.”

He held up a hand before the judge could ask. “I know that because they volunteered the info and showed me the billfold things.
Most of the girls seem to have them. The twenty-first-century version of the fanny pack, I guess. Handy. But not helpful to me.”

“Maybe they tossed their cells and bought burners,” the judge suggested.

“It's a possibility, especially given the locked GPS signals, but who would they call except friends or family? I don't really know Amy, but according to her BFF, she would have called once they were out of town and on their big adventure, proud of herself for having pulled it off. The friend seemed sure. And worried.”

“Because there was no call.”

Jonah tapped his fingers on the stack of papers on his desk. “You signed the warrants so I could get the phone records of all the kids—
plus
everybody with a kid in town. And it's a sign of everybody's worry that they don't seem to mind. Anyway, I've pored over these records every day
and
had Sarah go over them in case I missed something. No strange numbers on any of these accounts. No unknown numbers. No untraceable numbers.

“We've also gone over their laptops or desktop home computers, and no joy there either.” He sighed again. “Two very ordinary teenagers started to elope, and something stopped them near the edge of town. Not only stopped them—but took them.”

“With no ransom demand.”

“No. But . . . there are possibilities I'm not about to mention to the parents or anyone outside the investigation unless I have to. For one thing, there's a hell of a lot of money to be made these days in human trafficking, and kids in their age range are typical for the targets. I'm not talking about pretty girls sold to be sex slaves for some sicko, though there is that. I'm talking about something even worse.
Something I didn't know anything about until I took those FBI courses last year.”

“I'm afraid to ask,” the judge said.

“I wish I didn't know about it,” Jonah responded frankly. “Even the FBI isn't sure if it's a huge organization or a bunch of smaller ones. Sort of like a bunch of secret clubs whose members are pedophiles, monsters into torture and snuff films, whatever horror you can imagine. The FBI has a unit set up just for the human trafficking, and they have young undercover operatives all over the country trying to infiltrate the groups.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. Dangerous as hell for the young agents. The FBI can't go in as buyers and commit crimes, so they have to send in undercovers to be potential victims.”

“Jesus, who'd volunteer for that?”

“Some dedicated young agents, I'd say. As for the buyers . . . Pay a small fortune, and you can have your pick of attractive young people or kids, and do with them whatever you want, in a nicely discreet location and among other monsters with the same . . . tastes. The FBI hasn't yet figured out how these perverts communicate, how they're notified that one of the traveling groups will be in their area, but somehow they find out where to meet, at some very isolated location. Twenty-four to forty-eight hours later, the club is gone, the perverts are gone, and someone in the organization takes care of the cleanup and disposes of the bodies, most of which are never found.”

“Nobody gets out alive?”

“Not according to the FBI. They believe some of the kids last for more than one . . . encounter . . . but eventually the client pays enough to kill to get off, and does just that.”

“I wish I didn't know that,” the judge said, adding immediately, “You think our two missing teenagers might fit?”

“Maybe some good news there. I was on the phone an hour yesterday with an agent in that FBI unit. The more I told her about the situation here, the less she thought they could have been targets of these traffickers. They tend to go for street kids, college kids, or clubbers in major cities. They apparently keep them under observation for a while, learn their habits and schedules, learn which kids are vulnerable, on the point of dropping out or burning out, or just don't have anyone to worry about them. Then they take them. Sad as it is to say, more often than not nobody even reports these kids as missing for weeks—if at all.”

The judge frowned. “A stranger watching our kids would stand out here, especially if he or she watched for that long.”

“Yeah, that's what the agent said. No way would one of the traffickers have taken a couple of high school kids a mile from their homes in a little mountain town. Just not where they hunt. Too high-risk for them.”

“So you're back at square one.”

“Yeah. All I know for sure is that they're gone—and there was no sign of struggle near the car. That's pretty much it.”

“Then you're doing all you can.”

“Tell my conscience that, will you? Then maybe I can sleep tonight.”

The judge eyed him. “I'm a little older than you, so let me give you a piece of advice. Understand that you aren't going to win them all, find every bad guy, rescue every damsel—or couple—in distress. Even in a little town like this, there'll be murders you can't solve, other crimes you can't solve. And lost people who never get found.”

“I don't like it,” Jonah said. “It's not why I became a cop.”

“Course not. Also why it makes you such a good one. But you won't
win every time, Jonah, no matter how good you are. No one wins all the time. Do everything in your power, do your job. But don't let it eat you up inside.” He rose to his feet, gathering his tackle box and rod. “You're a good cop, and that's good for the town. But nobody expects you to be perfect.”

Jonah glanced at the clock on his desk and raised his eyebrows at the judge. “Thanks. Aren't you going out a little late? It'll be dark in another hour.”

“Full moon. I get some of my best fishing then. And it's so peaceful. I very much enjoy being alone with the fish and my thoughts.”

“Well, I hope you get lucky,” Jonah told him.

Words that would haunt him for a long time.

—

AS HE HAD
every night since the young couple had disappeared, Jonah worked late, going over and over information already burned into his brain, hoping to see something he'd missed, overlooked, or misunderstood every other time he'd studied it.

Nothing. Not a clue where those kids had gone.

Or where they had been taken.

Or any answer to the fairly spooky question of why both his watch and Sarah's watch
and
Tim's had stopped when each of them had reached the abandoned car, and why all their cell phones, still functioning, had all been missing the time spent out there.

As if they had stepped into a fucking time warp, or something else right out of science fiction.

“It's my night to work, not yours,” Sarah said as she came into his office. “Go home, Jonah.”

“You know, I
am
your boss,” he reminded her.

“Yeah, yeah. Look, you can go home under your own steam, or I can call Tim and the tow truck.” When he didn't even frown at that, she lowered her voice and kept it matter-of-fact. “A week in, we aren't likely to find anything new, and you know it. If nothing else, you need a good night's sleep so you can come back at it with fresh eyes in the morning.”

“It doesn't seem right for me to just . . . go home,” he said finally.

“You won't be any good to anybody if you spend another sleepless night in this office,” she said.

“I slept. Sort of.”

Sarah glanced at the old leather couch across the room from his desk. “That wasn't sleep, that was time on a medieval torture device. Unless you confessed you're a heretic, it was useless time.”

Not even that earned a smile from him.

“Jonah. You've done every single solitary thing a cop could do on a missing-persons case.”