Stutter Creek (21 page)

The chief began to wonder if searching in the darkness was wise. Then he imagined Allie’s face, and he knew the search would go on. Just have to be even more careful, he thought, as he holstered his pistol. That’s when the dispatcher relayed the message from the detective about Turk.

“That animal we heard must’ve been him,” Chief Brown whispered. “Glad I didn’t shoot.”

Halfway up the trail, John stopped, too. He was listening to the forest. And he was waiting for Turk to find him. In a matter of moments, the big dog was there. This time they both headed up the pitch-dark trail, swiftly and silently. John kept his hand on Turk’s collar so they wouldn’t get separated.

Inside the cave, Kurt pulled the remaining length of cord from his coat pocket and stretched it between his hands like a garrote. The knife he’d taken from the cabin was gone. He’d been unable to locate it in the darkness.

It didn’t matter. He intended to finish the job right now. He crept toward the wall where the woman was cowering. Those damn fireflies had followed him into the cave. He’d never seen anything like it—they seemed to glow with all the colors of a Christmas tree. Must be hallucinating, he thought. Certainly wouldn’t be the first time; maybe it was an acid flashback or something. Nevertheless, he swatted at them as if they really were multicolored insects.

Beth thought she could outsmart the man with her dad’s help. Since she could see the colored lights around him, she thought she could make it to the entrance and slip outside to hide in the brush. She was almost certain Turk had been looking for her. If she could stay hidden from the kidnapper long enough, she was sure the big dog would find her.

Carefully, even more quietly than the dripping of moisture off the cave’s ceiling, Beth eased her feet across the floor until she was crouching right next to the lighter shade of darkness that signified the cave’s opening. She could feel a cold draft coming through from outside. From out of the silence, she heard a soft moan. Perhaps the boy was alive after all. She had to go. She had to get help for herself and for him.

Inhaling as deeply and quietly as her clogged nose would allow, Beth stepped through the opening and into the night. She was no longer thinking, now she was just doing. Without another moment’s thought, she slid through the draft and was gone.

Kurt was right behind her. He had realized what she was doing, but when Danny moaned, Kurt had hesitated, and that hesitation afforded her the fraction of a second she needed to disappear.

Desperately, Kurt flipped the noose of cord sideways and downward just past the last place he had seen her crouched outside the cave.

Beth gagged as the cord skimmed over her face like a lethal thread thrown by a giant spider. She tried to jerk free, but that made it worse. Kurt yanked upward with both hands and Beth’s world fell away. Colored lights were everywhere, in her eyes, in her head, in the air around her. She couldn’t breathe at all. He had won.

Suddenly Turk exploded from his master’s grasp and launched himself up the remaining thirty feet of ground. In three gigantic leaps, he crashed solidly into the man like a fur-covered freight train. One hundred fifty pounds of teeth and muscle took him down. The impact was accompanied by a nightmare of guttural snarling, gnashing, and crushing. It sounded as if the guy’s flesh was being ripped straight off the bone.

Powerful flashlights lit up the scene as a scream of agony split the night like an axe splitting dry wood. The screaming went on and on as Turk dragged the bad guy around the clearing by his forearm. He was waiting on that one word from John that would okay the kill.

Beth lurched forward into the thorny brush as the cord fell harmlessly away from her throat. She sucked in as much precious air as her nostrils would allow, but her vision was still iffy. This time the spots in front of her eyes had nothing to do with her father; they were purely from lack of oxygen.

Over the sounds of the melee, a man’s voice could be heard shouting, “Call off your dog before he kills the guy!”

Beth wanted to say, “No! Don’t you dare call off the dog.” But she couldn’t say anything, her mouth was still covered with filthy dirt and leaf encrusted tape.

The Chief was right, John knew he couldn’t risk having Turk put down simply for doing his job. This wasn’t Kazakhstan. With a sharp command he instructed the dog to “drop and release.” Turk let go and dropped to the ground.

The man rolled to his feet dripping blood and cradling one crushed and mangled arm in the crook of the other. He raced directly between the two men, the Chief, who had come hurrying upon the scene from above the cave, and John, who had come upon the scene from below the cave. Neither man had yet seen Beth lying in the brush. But just when the kidnapper appeared to be about to vanish into the trees, John snagged his jacket.

The forward motion pulled them both off balance and down they went.

Suddenly they were upside down rolling head over feet down the mountain. Somehow John grasped the short chain that had been connecting the handcuffs on his wrists and now it was cutting right into the kidnapper’s windpipe, one end still fastened around John’s big wrist, the other securely grasped inside his opposite fist. Together, they rolled over and over and over down the steep trail until they came to a violent stop in a stand of slender saplings. There was no fight left in the twisted little man.

He was dead.

Detective Woody James found them just as John disentangled himself from the suspect. The young detective did not know what to say or where to start. He put two fingers to the suspect’s neck, checking for a pulse, but he found nothing. When the senior detective caught up, Detective James was just unlocking his bloody cuffs from John’s wrist. The big man explained what had happened.

Kendra Dean nodded. “Saved the taxpayers the trouble and expense of a trial.” The she indicated the cuffs. “Those will go into an evidence bag.”

Detective James pulled clear plastic gloves and a brown paper bag from a pouch on his belt.

“Beth?” John gasped, head down, heaving.

But neither detective knew where she was. Then Turk was beside him and he simply allowed the dog to lead him back up the trail to where Beth lay, still bound, valiantly attempting to pry the tape off her mouth by grinding her face into the wet earth.

John knelt beside her and gently helped her stand.

Jerking her head from side to side, she let him know that the tape on her mouth had to come off first.

Chief Brown was there with his flashlight. He’d already alerted dispatch for an ambulance and the Medical Examiner, and as soon as one side of the tape was peeled up, Beth cried, “There’s a boy in there. I think he’s still alive!”

The Chief started toward the cave. “What about Allie?”

Beth yanked her head sharply. The remainder of the tape ripped away taking a layer of skin off her bottom lip. “What do you mean?” she asked, tasting blood. “What about Allie?”

“They think he may have taken her,” John explained, indicating the crumpled figure lying halfway down the slope.

Beth followed his glance. “Is he dead?” Her voice was rough.

John nodded. He, too, was covered in dirt, scratches, and damp leafy debris. But his calloused fingers were working deftly at the knot binding her wrists together. “Did you see the girl, Allie?” The knot came free and he pulled her to his chest as she grimaced at the pins and needles flooding her hands. Rubbing them gently, John continued, “Her car was at your cabin when we got there.”

Beth shook her head, confused. “That can’t be. She wasn’t there.”

Then the Chief was shouting for someone to come and help him with the boy. “He’s barely breathing. Eric, tell that ambulance to hurry!”

The two detectives rushed to the cave to lend their flashlights to the darkness. The Chief had already pulled his utility knife and cut the cords tying the boy’s feet and hands together.

Suddenly, massive barking from the rear of the cave ricocheted off the walls as Turk alerted his master to the location of someone else.

John and Beth rushed inside, and, with the aid of Woody James, shined the police issued megawatts down into the abyss.

“Help,” a tiny voice cried. “Please!”

Allie was crammed onto a jagged ledge ten feet below the lip of the shaft. The beams of the flashlights reflected dully off the remains of the silver tape still tangled in her blonde hair. She had spent the last couple of hours wondering if the sounds above her were real or if they were in her head. She’d banged it pretty hard when she leapt.

Later, she told them that she’d remembered the shelf when she jumped up to run away from her captor, but she hadn’t known if she could land on it, or if she would just careen off and crash all the way to the bottom. “I took a chance,” she told them later. “I knew I was going to die anyway.” They were all amazed at her bravery and her presence of mind. Her ability to keep her wits about her had undoubtedly saved her life.

With gear from Chief Brown’s patrol car, John and Woody James were able to fashion a rope “chair” for Allie to sit in while they carefully hoisted her to the surface. She looked a lot worse than she sounded. But of course she hadn’t had the chance to tell them about the struggle in the car and the horrible sprint up the mountain. Chief Brown and Officer Hagar already knew about that, though. Those were the tracks they had been following all along.

Allie collapsed shortly after they pulled her up. The way she was bent over in pain, John was pretty sure she had some broken ribs. He just hoped they hadn’t punctured a lung or worse. He’d once seen a shard of rib bone driven right through a victim’s pericardium and into the heart itself. Allie’s left wrist was obviously fractured, and her head, well, if she didn’t have a concussion he’d be surprised. She was so cold that he suspected she might also be hypothermic.

But the boy . . . it was nothing short of a miracle that he was alive at all. He was a skin-covered skeleton. Even he couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually had a meal. A hamburger he said, but then he retracted that memory when he further recalled that Kurt—whom he insisted was really his father, for pity’s sake—had thrown it out the window when he’d complained that it was gritty. He’d had some beef jerky, he thought. But he just wasn’t certain. By the time the paramedics loaded him onto the stretcher, he was unconscious again. He’d slipped away as soon as they started trying to insert the intravenous line into his poor, dehydrated arm. The pediatrician at the E.R. radioed that they should quit messing around and get to the hospital as quickly as possible.

Beth was strong. Other than some balm for her bleeding lip and the numerous cuts, scrapes, and superficial knife wounds, all she wanted from the paramedics was something to ease the rope burn across her throat.

Allie had that same thin line across her throat, too.

“Karma,” John said when he saw the marks on the women. “He’s sporting his own jewelry, now.” Secretly, he thought it very fitting that he had accidentally killed the guy in the same manner that he had attempted to kill the two women. Later, he would learn that Kurt’s first two victims had sported strangulation “necklaces,” too. Only their marks were bruises, and they had not lived to tell about it.

Chief Brown insisted on following the ambulance carrying Allie and the boy to the hospital in Stutter Creek. He made John, Beth, and Turk ride with him. Once in the car, he immediately instructed the dispatcher to notify Joe and Martha to meet them at the hospital. They, in turn, called Greg and Angie who were just getting into town. Angie then called Ginger and told her that Allie had been found alive.

Ginger said she would meet them at the hospital.

Officer Hagar was left to wait for the Medical Examiner. Detective James stayed with him. Detective Dean drove to the hospital to interview Beth and Allie for her report.

Allie was not able to answer any questions. In fact, once she was being cared for in the hospital, she went to sleep and did not wake up for two days.

The doctor in Pine River—where she was transferred when it was decided she needed to be near a neurosurgeon just in case the head trauma was worse than they thought—said it was most likely just her body’s way of coping with the aftereffects of her ordeal.

Beth agreed to spend the night in the Stutter Creek hospital for observation, but she asked John to retrieve her purse and her cell phone from the cabin. She wanted to call Abby and Cindy and let them know everything was okay. She wasn’t the least bit surprised to find both a text and a voice mail from Abby wanting to know what was wrong. Her daughter seemed to think she had been in danger.

“You must be psychic,” Beth texted back. “I’m okay, but you were right, I was in danger.” Immediately, the phone trilled.

It was Abby.

Beth couldn’t help it; she sobbed out the whole sordid story. When she came to the part about her heroes Turk and John, Abby interrupted with a question of her own: “John . . . the childhood friend you ran into?”

Beth admitted that he was one and the same. Then she had to explain who Turk was and what part he played in the rescue. Finally, she took a deep breath and told Abby all about the colored lights and the text messages from her dad.

“Grampa texted you from the great beyond?”

Beth wasn’t surprised at the skepticism she heard in her daughter’s voice. “Not only that,” she replied. “He saved my life by showing me where the killer was inside the cave.”

“But I thought you said the dog saved you . . .”

Beth frowned. “That’s true, even though I got outside with Dad’s help, the maniac caught me again. That’s when Turk arrived. But if Dad hadn’t helped, I wouldn’t have been out in the open at all. I probably would have been lying at the bottom of that shaft—it’s hard to explain.”

Beth figured that Abby wondered about her mental state, but Beth, of course, insisted that she was fine. “No, I don’t need you to come home. You just barely got back to Rome. I’m fine, I promise! As a matter of fact, I’m just about to call Cindy and give her a report. And you know what? I think I’ll make a trip to visit you and Terry before the summer is up. I’ve never been to Italy. Will you show me the sights?”