Stolen Lives: A Detective Mystery Series SuperBoxset (17 page)

Miriam’s eyes suddenly opened and she swung up with a panicked gasp. Lou gripped her shoulders and tried to calm her as her eyes darted around the room in confusion.

“Miriam, listen to me. Everything is going to be okay.” One of the agents handed Lou a wet cloth which he gently pressed against the cut on Miriam’s head.

She flinched and squirmed back. “Ana? Where’s Ana?” she asked, too disoriented to see that her daughter was lying next to her. There were maybe ten other people in the room, flipping it in a desperate search for the culprit. When it became clear he was nowhere to be found, several of the agents ran upstairs to resume the hunt.

“Ana is going to be okay,” Lou said, holding Miriam at arm’s length by her shoulders. “You have to tell me what happened. Where did he go?”

Miriam held the warm cloth against her head, hesitating. Nothing was going to come easy.

“Please, Miriam. Time is critical here.”

“I don’t know,” she said, drifting off. The bump on her head had done a number. She sat up from the mattress, pushing against it and trying to stand. “Where is she?”

Agent Landis stood up, holding Ana in his arms. “She’s okay, Ms. Castillo.”

One look at her daughter’s battered face, and Miriam jumped into high gear, charging past Lou and toward Clark in a fury. But so much heightened emotion, coming so fast had its effects. Miriam stopped inches from her daughter, and held her head as dizziness consumed her. She collapsed to the floor as Lou ran to her aid.

“We need to get both of them to the nearest hospital immediately!” Throughout all the commotion, there was no sign of Phillip Anderson. The Snatcher had vanished again, leaving a few of the agents on the ground to wonder if he even existed.

A second helicopter landed outside the cabin, with Agent Nettles and his team rushing out. They had just cleared the other hideout cabin—vacant and most likely a decoy—and rushed to the scene to assist in the raid of the second cabin. Nettles’s partner, Agent Willis, hopped out from the helicopter as its circling blades blew gusts of wind across the tall grass, flattening all the vegetation within the area.

Nettles and Willis charged toward the cabin with their pistols out as the rest of their team followed—five men in all. The helicopter wound down as more could be heard approaching from a far distance.

They advanced from the rear of the cabin, and as they got closer, they could see Detective Landis from Bravo Team, sitting against a tree with his left leg wrapped in red-stained bandages. His face was pale and drenched and sweaty. He looked up at them warily with a sigh and held up his badge.

“I know who you are, Landis,” Agent Nettles said. “Now what the hell happened here?”

Exhausted, Landis leaned slightly to his side and pointed beyond the house. The agents looked up and could see all the back windows shattered. Shards of glass and bullet shells littered the ground. “They… they started shooting. The rest of Bravo… they went inside. I think they got him.”

Agent Willis pointed to his injured leg. “What happened? You get shot?”

“Sure did.” Landis stopped talking and winced in agony. “Did this little bandage job myself.” He tried to laugh but was in too much pain.

Agent Nettles turned to face two men from his team. “Patski. Roberson. Evacuate Detective Landis to the helicopter and get him to the medical ASAP.”

The two detectives nodded and ran toward the helicopter to grab a stretcher. Nettles slapped Willis on the shoulder and signaled ahead. “Let’s move.”

They pushed forward, past the side of the small cabin, carefully concealed by a camouflaged tarp that stretched above the cabin from two parallel trees on one side, to two parallel trees on the other. As they reached the side of the cabin, moving quickly but quietly, Nettles signaled the men to halt.

He backed against the house and held his pistol up, glancing out, around the corner. A large pickup truck not fifty feet away had its smashed front end lodged in a tree.

Two bodies lay on the ground outside the truck, riddled with bullets, their muscles and organs and blood clearly visible. One man was on his back, the other on his stomach. The driver’s face was buried in the steering wheel, covered in blood with a hole in the side of his head. He and his friends were dead. They all matched in their blue jeans and camouflaged jackets.

Faint smoke rose from the obstructed front end of the pickup. The woods beyond the carnage were undisturbed and quiet. Nettles could see a body of water far ahead past cypresses, palm trees, hanging vines, and thick underbrush. Bird calls rang out. A second county police helicopter had arrived and landed next to Bravo Team’s FBI helicopter. It was quickly becoming a very busy crime scene.

Agent Nettles stayed low, proceeding to the front door with Willis covering his back. Both agents stopped at the steps leading to the front deck and listened for sounds of movement. When the coast looked clear, Nettles signaled Willis to cover him as he ran up the stairs.

Nettles swung his leg back and, with one powerful thrust, kicked the front door open with the split of its frame. Nettles stormed into the room with Willis close behind. They stopped for a moment to survey the broken glass and tossed furniture all around them in the living room. They could hear movement in the basement—footsteps coming up the stairs fast.

Detective Clark suddenly entered the room with an unconscious young girl in his arms. Nettles lowered his gun, sighing in frustration.

“Holy shit, Clark. Where’s everyone else?”

“Yeah,” Willis added. “We’ve been calling you on the radio for the past five minutes.”

Not responding, Clark carried Ana to the living room and set her down. He then turned to the two agents, with a slightly rattled. “Castillo’s been hit.”

“What?” Nettles said. “Where is she?”

“They’re bringing her up,” Clark said, pointing down to the basement.

Nettles heard more footsteps. Lou entered the room, holding a barely conscious Miriam at his side with help from another officer. “She’s going to be okay,” he announced to the room. “Anderson shot her in the vest.”

“Where is that sorry sack of shit?” Nettles asked, stepping forward.

More FBI agents entered the house—new arrivals on the scene. Pretty soon the place would be crawling with feds. Lou continued past Nettles, searching for a place where Miriam could lie down.

“Let’s go ahead and get them out of there,” Nettles said.

“I’m on it,” Lou said. He then pointed to Ana as Agent Clark picked her up. “I’m more concerned about her daughter, but they both need immediate medical attention.”

Nettles nodded as other agents swarmed the room. “We’ve got one of yours in the helicopter already. Landis. Just load them up and get them to the nearest hospital. Whatever it takes.”

“Sound like a plan,” Lou said, walking out.

Not long after the helicopter flew off with its three injured, the FBI continued their search for South Florida’s most wanted man. Nettles was confident they would find Anderson. He was hiding somewhere, and they would find him soon as they brought the other half of the Bureau out to conduct a search, Anderson would run out of places to hide.

“You find out what she knows!” he shouted to Lou as they loaded Miriam and her daughter into the chopper. The blades began to turn, picking up steam while tossing debris in the air. Pine trees swayed and arched as the helicopter rose with steady precision and then flew off, back toward civilization.

The day continued without any sign of Phillip Anderson. Agent Nettles took charge as roughly twenty FBI agents descended on the area, ready to conduct an extensive search. A K-9 unit had also arrived in two armored trucks, ready to go to work. The county and the feds worked in conjunction, determined to do whatever they could to find the man who had plagued South Florida for so long.

Willis’s team emerged from the cabin, ten men in all, coming up short, while three separate search teams had begun their excursion through the ten-acre river of grass that made up Anderson’s secret compound. Leading one of the foot teams, Nettles listened closely to the helicopter transmissions from the two that circled the area overhead. He pressed against the ear piece trying to hear a status.
“Nothing sighted yet,”
they said.

“Damn it,” Nettles said, shaking his head. “He’s not far. He must have had some kind of hidden escape out of the cabin basement. You see anything that looks like a door or passageway out, you let me know.”

“Roger,”
one of the pilots said.

Nettles looked up into the sky, where the two FBI helicopters had just crossed paths. It was late afternoon and the sun was rapidly sinking below the clouds. He could hear the sounds of airboats in the distance—loud and abrasive—and immediately had a thought. He signaled to the K-9 team nearby and shouted to them, waving an arm in the air. “Trail the river!”

The handlers released the dogs—five in all—as they bolted off in an instant along the river. Nettles then called his team to pick up the pace. “He’s down here, I know it!”

The teams got into gear and assembled behind the cabin in one mass movement toward the wetlands, where the channel flowed all the way to Key Largo. The sense of urgency and danger heightened the closer they got.

“Just found some rope!” an agent yelled out as they reached a shaded area, drastically different from the open plains that comprised most of Anderson’s compound. Nettles sprinted toward the agent, who held a piece of rope—at least six feet long—examining it.

Ahead, the dogs barked in the distance with fierce intensity. Nettles turned. They were closing in. He could feel it in his gut. The team advanced, readying to strike, when a loud explosion rocked the area, sending out tremors for at least a mile. Nettles could see flames bursting up from behind the trees. Boaters nearby screamed. The ground shook. Black smoke billowed in the air. And then, for one moment, silence.

Painful Reunion

Miriam sat beside Ana’s hospital bed, finally reunited. The soft-hued pastel walls of the Miami-Dade hospital were familiar to Miriam. It was her second visit in the past two days. Brittany, the young girl she had rescued from Anderson’s men, had been checked out and gone home with her parents. Now it was Ana’s turn.

She lay in bed, sleeping, with an IV needle inserted into her right wrist. Her shoulder-length black hair was tied back and her face was covered in gauze patches from forehead to chin on one side of her face.

Phillip Anderson had done a number on her. And her injuries extended to a pair of bruised ribs. She also had a ruptured disc and a sprained ankle. Her medical assessment disclosed that she had endured relentless physical trauma at the hands of her captor. She had been punched, slapped, and thrown against the walls. For Miriam, anyone capable of such abuse wasn’t human. Anderson was a monster. Something, she believed, akin to the lowest evil.

The sight of Ana’s face devastated her. She couldn’t take her eyes away from it. In the dimly-lit, one-bed hospital room, she watched her daughter sleep, without a care for whatever else was going on in the world. Her own forehead had been bandaged as well. The knock to her head had left a mark. She held an icepack to her chest, which still ached from being shot twice by Phillip. The vest had saved her. She was lucky.

The doctors insisted that Miriam lie down and rest, but she couldn’t. Not until Ana was up and walking. She felt a little better now, after a shower and some fresh clothes, but there was no denying an acute pounding in her head—even with the Ibuprofen they gave her.

It was nighttime. The room was silent save for Ana’s quiet breathing. Miriam was wrought with concern. A knock came at the door. Miriam’s tired eyes shot open, and she looked up just as Dr. Bhandari—another familiar face—walked into the room with a file attached to his clipboard. He was a polite, bald Indian man with a thin mustache, circular-framed glasses, and a long white coat.

“How are we doing?” he asked, looking down at his notes.

Miriam got to the point. “Doctor, shouldn’t she be awake by now?” She stood up, holding her sides. “Something isn’t right. I just wish I could talk to her.”

Dr. Bhandari walked to the end of Ana’s bed and stopped, lowering his clipboard. “Her vital signs are good. No abnormalities.”

“There could be hemorrhaging. She could be slipping into a coma for all we know.” Miriam began pacing the room, lost in her own anxiety. Getting Ana back was all she wanted, and she couldn’t fathom the thought of her slipping into a coma. Ana belonged back home.

Then it suddenly occurred to Miriam that they had no home. She certainly wasn’t going to stay at the house where Freddy, her ex-husband, had been murdered and where Ana had been kidnapped. That wasn’t going to happen. They were going to move—far from Florida and out of the media spotlight and away from anything having to do with the Anderson family. Though she still wanted Phillip dead. And if there was any way of making it happen, she would see to it.

“Please, Ms. Castillo,” Dr. Bhandari said. “All this moving around and worry are not good for you.”

“I’m fine,” she said, turning to the nearest window and biting her nails. Her black hair was tucked behind her ears, still damp from her shower, and her face was free of makeup.

She peeked through the blinds to the parking lot below their room. There were three police cars parked near the entrance, with their lights silently flashing as the lights reflected on her face.

A knock suddenly came at the door. It opened and another familiar face peeked in, Detective Lou.

“There you are. We’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he said to Miriam.

He looked exhausted. His red hair was matted down and sweaty. His boots were encased in dried mud and his slacks were stained with dirt up to his hips. A walkie-talkie stuck out from his jacket pocket, and the blue windbreaker, opened to the sides, revealed a white button-down shirt stained with mud and grass. He was a mess, though Miriam didn’t feel so hot herself.

Uniformed police officers waited in the hall as he approached Ana’s bed, looked to Miriam and spoke quietly. “How’s she doing?”