Shattered (44 page)

And then as more time passed, minutes stretching into hours stretching into what felt like eternity, and she got cold and her muscles weakened and her breathing grew more and more labored, it wasn't so much if she was going to sink down into the water and drown. It was when.

Frye wouldn't talk.
Not a word, not a syllable. Nothing more than a contemptuous "
You're crazy,"
even after Scott's hands closed around his neck. Hampered by the fact that Frye was in the house surrounded by people when he caught up with him, and Ryan had taken back his gun before they got inside, Scott was pulled off before he could choke or beat or do whatever he had to do to get the truth out of him, which was what he fully intended to do. Held by two deputies, he could only watch as Watson, having been told the whole story but still threatening to arrest Scott, too, if he didn't back off, had Frye carted off to jail.

"He knows where Lisa is. You've got to let me get it out of him," Scott pleaded, practically on his knees.

Watson was obdurate: There would be no abuse of suspects on his watch. But Frye's demeanor convinced Scott that what Grant had long suspected was the truth: Frye and Martha's father were responsible for the disappearance of the Garcias. And Frye alone was responsible for whatever had happened to Lisa.

Which left Scott more terrified than he had ever been in his life. He was bleeding inside, shaking inside, a basket case, as he realized that Frye was going to be given refuge in the legal system and Lisa still hadn't been found.

On the verge of an explosion fueled by sheer panic, he caught himself: Giving in to emotion was the worst thing he could do.

Lisa, where are you?
The thought morphed into a prayer.
Please, God, let her be found. Let her be alive.

Then he remembered Mrs. Baker.

Lisa had no idea
how long it had been: days, months, years. Her strength was fading, and in order to stay upright she had to brace her back against the wall and dig her feet down deep in the silt. The good news was that the water had eroded the duct tape's adhesive until she'd been able to get it off. Her arms and legs were free, and she could scream. She'd tried that, screaming for what felt like hours, screaming until her throat ached and her voice went and she just couldn't scream anymore. No one had come, and she suspected that if the sound could be heard beyond the shaft at all, it wouldn't carry very far.

But she wasn't going to give up. Just as soon as her throat had recovered enough she was going to start screaming again.

That, and praying, was all she could do.

She had already prayed so much that the words ran in a never-ending loop through her mind.

Dear God, please help me. Please don't let me die.

But she was afraid she was going to. She had made a grisly discovery, down there all alone in the dark. That had been when she had still been trying to find a way out. She'd been feeling around on the bottom to see if the hard things she kept bumping her toes into and stepping on might be rocks or something she could use to dig hand and footholds with in the slippery brick, maybe by prying out some of the old mortar that held them in place. What she'd found, when she had maneuvered one to the surface, was that she was holding a skull. Oh, it had taken her a few minutes to realize, because of course she couldn't see a thing. The curving shape of the head and then the unmistakable spacing of the eye sockets and nasal cavity were what had clued her in.

She had screamed and dropped the thing.

Now she knew there were at least three of them in there with her. At least three skeletons scattered at the bottom of the well. Actually, there should be one more.

Because she was pretty sure she had found the Garcias. And she was pretty sure she knew who had dumped them in this horrible, stinking, wet hell to die.

Down there in the dark she had nothing but time, and she had used some of it to review every minute detail of what had happened to her. She took the shadowy glimpses she'd caught of the man who had brought her here, added in his height and build, which she had absorbed while being carried over his shoulder, considered the truck and the metal box that she'd been confined in, and came to a conclusion: The man who was probably going to turn out to be her murderer wasn't Barty at all. It was somebody she liked a whole lot better: Andy Frye.

Taken to the Woodford County jail
and threatened with capital murder charges, Mrs. Baker crumbled. She cried and shook, wailing that she'd never meant for any harm to come to anyone. At Scott's urgent request, Janice Bernard, the no-nonsense, twenty-year veteran Woodford County DA, offered Mrs. Baker a deal: tell everything she knew, cooperate with the prosecution in every way she was asked to, and the worst she would face would be several counts of accessory after the fact. She'd probably be out of prison in less than five years.

Her court-appointed attorney advised her to take the deal. She did.

Scott, meanwhile, who had no jurisdiction in Woodford County, could only chew his nails and watch from behind the one-way mirror that formed a window on the interrogation room as this negotiation took place. A glance at his watch told him that it was already after eight a.m.--full daylight now. Lisa had been missing for more than eleven hours.

Oh, God, where was she? What were the chances that she was even still alive?

Please, God, please, God, please.

The first question Mrs. Baker was asked was: Where is Lisa Grant?

Snug in the protection of her new deal, Mrs. Baker said she didn't know.

Spewing curses, Scott tore out of the viewing room, determined to shake the truth out of the damned woman if need be. Stymied by the presence of two armed deputies ranged outside the door, he was just about to go ballistic on them when his cell phone rang.

A glance at it told him that it was Chase.

His heart skipped a beat. His nephew would be calling him at a time like this only if there was news.

"Yeah?" he barked by way of answering it.

"Hey, Scott, guess what?" The excitement in Chase's voice made Scott take a couple of steps back until he could lean against the wall. "We found her. We used Noah's metal detector. She's in a well on the Garcias' property."

It was all Scott could do not to slide down the painted concrete blocks.

"Is she alive?" His voice was hoarse.

"What, you think I'd call you if she was dead?" Chase sounded indignant. "I'd leave that for Rinko. Or Dad. Of course she's alive."

Scott closed his eyes.

34

By the time Scott got to her,
Lisa had already been pulled out of the well, which was at the very edge of the woods where the kids had discovered Marisa's medal. According to Chase, they'd found the well--actually, what they'd found was its metal cap--while they'd been searching the woods that Sunday. Sometime after Lisa went missing, it had struck Rinko that since everything bad that had happened to Lisa had happened after she had started looking into the Garcia case, the answer to her disappearance might be found on their property. So he and Jantzen and the kids had started searching it at dawn, and one of them--they couldn't agree on whom--had remembered the capped well. Having decided to check it out, they couldn't locate it again amid all the undergrowth until Noah had gone home and come back with his metal detector. After that, according to them, it had been a snap.

The TV trucks were pulling up even as Scott jumped out of his Jeep at the top of the driveway. Cop cars were all over the place, blocking him from driving any closer to the place where the assembled crowd told him Lisa had to be. A forensics team van--a Fayette County forensics team van, because now they were back in his bailiwick--was parked near the woods on the far side of the house. The actual team members were probably off in the trees. He knew they were there to check out the skeletons that had been found in the well with Lisa.

Everyone was assuming they had once been the Garcias. Scott was almost a hundred percent certain they were right.

An ambulance was over there, too, next to the forensics van. It was idling with its rear doors open, and as he got closer he saw that paramedics were doing something to Lisa's left arm. Chase and his friends--God bless that kid with the metal detector--were standing around, looking proud of themselves. Rinko and Jantzen were there, too, talking to a pair of cops. Rinko, to whom he'd given a pretty good dressing-down for continuing to investigate the Garcia case against his express orders a little more than a week ago, looked slightly nervous as he watched Scott's approach. Scott barely glanced at any of them. All his attention was for Lisa. She must have heard his approach, because she looked his way. She was pale and haunted-looking, her long black hair dripping water as it trailed toward the ground. Lying barefoot on a stretcher in the torn black rag that had once been the chic dress she'd worn to her mother's funeral, soaking-wet and covered with mud, she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life.

"Hey." His throat was so tight that that was all he could manage as he reached her.
Pretty eloquent, huh?
But it was the best he could do. He took her right hand, careful to be gentle. Her fingers twined with his.

"Scott." She looked exhausted, but she smiled at him as she clung tightly to his hand. Looking down at her, he realized that that beautiful face with those big caramel-colored eyes was seared forever on his heart. Ryan's theory about him never falling in love had officially been blown to smithereens. Whether she knew it or not, he was hers for life. "I was afraid I wasn't ever going to see you again."

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

"It wasn't my father."

"I know."

"It was Andy."

"I know. He's in jail. It's looking like he killed the Garcias, too."

"Mr. Buchanan?" One of the paramedics wrapped a blanket around Lisa as he spoke. Scott knew him, but he sought for and failed to remember his name. Probably it would come back to him sometime. When he hadn't just been through the scare of a lifetime. "Could you stand back, please? We've got to load her up."

Lisa's hand tightened on his. Her eyes sought his and clung, a touch of panic in their depths. "Don't leave me."

Scott shook his head. "Not in this life." He looked at the paramedic. "I'm going in the ambulance with her."

The paramedic met his gaze and nodded.

After they got Lisa inside, Scott climbed in, too. He rode beside her, holding her hand all the way to the hospital.

By late that afternoon, after the hospital staff had checked her out and patched her up--she had a concussion, a badly bruised left arm, and other assorted small injuries but nothing serious enough to require her to stay overnight--they waited in the curtained-off room in the ER where she'd been treated for her to be discharged. She'd been allowed to shower, and she was dressed in a yellow T-shirt, a pair of white jeans, and some sandals, all of which Nola had brought with her when she had rushed to the hospital on getting word that Lisa had been found. There had been so many visitors after that that a nurse joked that instead of a curtain their room needed a revolving door. Even Grant had come. Scott and Lisa's father had shaken hands, all animosity from their last encounter put aside in the light of Lisa's safe recovery, but Grant hadn't been able to have a private word with his daughter because there had been too many people around. Still, Scott thought Lisa had been pleased that her father had come. Finally there'd been so many people in the room that the staff had shooed everyone out except him, and that was only because he'd made it clear that he wasn't going anywhere, and Lisa had made it clear that she didn't want him to. At the moment she was propped up in the hospital bed while he sat in a chair beside her. Scott had just gotten off the phone with Watson, who had called to tell him that the baby whose skeleton they found beneath the fountain had definitely suffered from ARPKD. It would be a few weeks before the actual DNA tests came back, but as far as Scott was concerned, that made the baby's identity definitive.

Something else he still had to tell Lisa. Tomorrow, maybe, when they weren't both half dead from exhaustion and still shaken from the previous night's trauma.

"What did he say?" Lisa was looking at him with a frown. Scott sighed. Since her mother's death, he'd been keeping a lot of things from her that he thought might add to her distress. Chief among which was the fact that Angela Garcia had been more than eight months pregnant with Grant's baby when she died, and that Lisa was, in fact, that child.

"How about we talk about it when we get home?" he asked. He had a feeling the conversation might get emotional, which could very well call for more privacy than a curtained-off cubicle in a busy hospital ER afforded.

She seemed to get that he didn't feel this was the place to talk about it, because instead of arguing she nodded agreement. Then she smiled at him a little wryly. "Speaking of home, I guess I better start to think about getting my own place."

He looked at her for a moment without saying anything.

"What?" she asked, wrinkling her brow at him.

"You're welcome to stay with me for as long as you want." The next bit was the part that bothered him, but he'd be damned if he would let it show. Just to make sure it didn't, he kept his tone carefully casual. "It would be kind of a waste to rent something if you're thinking about moving back to Boston anytime soon."

It was what she had always meant to do after her mother died, he knew.

"I'm not sure about moving back to Boston now." She looked at him steadily. "What I do next kind of depends."

His pulse started pumping a little faster. He knew his girl inside and out, and that was a statement designed to lead to a question with an answer he could see coming a mile away.

He asked the question. "On what?"

She smiled at him, a heart-stoppingly beautiful smile that blinded him to everything except her.