Lost Girls

CHAPTER NINE

Gant went over to interview the boy who had found her. Jackson something. The boy was back by the clearing, far from the body but close to the memory. At first glance Gant didn’t think Jackson would ever really recover from his discovery. Maybe a person wasn’t supposed to forget this kind of thing, it occurred to Gant as he walked over to the boy. He noted that Golden followed him, probably more to be away from the corpse than anything else. So far she hadn’t been very useful and Gant still had the question of why Nero had brought her into this. He wasn’t sure he bought into Nero’s explanation in the office. He also found it odd that she had been living one island south of him off the coast of South Carolina. As with everything else that the Cellar was involved in, Gant did not think that happened to be a coincidence.

Gant knew change was overdue everywhere, including the Cellar, given what had happened on 9-11. Such a gross failure indicated serious flaws in the national security system and he also knew that Nero had taken the disaster very personally, even though the Cellar’s mandate was to look inward at the nation’s own security apparatus rather than outward.

The thing Gant liked about the Cellar was the sense of personal responsibility. When he was sent to do a Sanction, it was his complete responsibility. No passing of the buck, no blaming someone else if it went wrong.

Gant did feel bad for the boy’s luck.

Checking with a local, Gant found out that the boy’s name was Jackson Lerner, and he was 16 years old. Early this morning he had set off with his dad for a nice hunting trip. Why they were hunting out of season no one had brought up given the circumstances. Seeing the state of their truck, Gant had a feeling it wasn’t simply for the thrill. They needed the meat.

Jackson was sitting on the ground with a man Gant presumed was his father. They both appeared a little shaky, but the boy looked like he was in pain. Gant gently eased his body to the ground, kneeling in front of the kid. The boy paid no attention.

“I’m Agent Gant.” He said it to no one in particular, but Jackson raised his head.

“And I’m Doctor Golden.”

The father stepped forward. “Hey. I’m Buddy Lerner and this is my son Jackson. This has been pretty rough on him. We’d been up all day and it was late, so Jackson had a hard time waking me up. He got it in his head that I was dead, too. He got pretty scared.”

Gant could smell Buddy a few feet away. He guessed the boy had had a hell of a hard time waking him up. “Jackson would it be Ok if I asked you a few questions?”

Jackson continued to stare at him without really seeing anything.

Golden knelt next to Gant, a move that surprised him. “Mr. Lerner,” she said, “could you help us here? We need to know what happened and he probably needs to talk about it.”

“Hey Jackson, come on, you talk to this guy and the Doctor and then we can get our butts on home. You’re moms about crazy with worry.”

“Yeah, I want to go home.” The boy’s voice was a flat monotone.

Gant decided to let Golden earn her place and remained silent.

“Can you tell me how you first discovered the body?” Golden asked.

“You mean the girl?”

This was a nice boy, Gant thought and he noted that Golden flushed at his response. “Yes, the girl. How did you first find her?”

“Just after dark I climbed up in that tree.” He pointed to a clump of dark trees east of them. One, a gnarled and weather- beaten, oak stood above the others. Gant noted it had a good field of fire across the field. “I got me a good spot in a blind someone must have built and waited for the moon.”

Gant looked up. The moon wasn’t quite full but it gave enough light to see things, but not really know what they were.

Jackson continued. “I had my binoculars and I was looking around. I spotted something shiny. I saw it a couple of times. The moonlight was hitting on something in the dark. After — you know— I climbed down and went to check. It seemed Ok, so I got closer. Then I guess I just freaked out. I tried to get my dad, and everything just gets screwed up after that.”

“It must have been terrible,” Golden said. “It’s a shame you had to go through that. After you woke your dad what did you do?”

Gant realized that Golden hadn’t quite grasped what they had seen at the body, but he remained silent.

“We hiked back to the truck and called my mom. She called the police. We’ve been waiting here ever since.” He started to cry. At that moment, he seemed a lot younger than 16. “I’m real sorry. I didn’t know. I mean, at first I thought it was my fault. You know, until I saw her leg. I mean, I knew that wasn’t me. Why would someone do that to a person?”

“Hey, Jackson.” Gant reached out and patted the kid on the back. “No one here blames you. Don’t you worry about that. Anyone could have made that mistake in the dark. She’s been gone a while.”

Comprehension flooded over Golden’s face, but Gant ignored her. “You see anyone else in this area?”

“Today?”

“Any time,” Gant said.

The boy shook his head. “It’s a pretty dead—“ he stuttered, then started over—“pretty isolated.”

No shit, thought Gant shooting a glance at the father who was remaining quiet. That’s why the old man had chosen it to hunt in. It had occurred to Gant on the way here that the spot might be a trap, the cache report designed to lure them in to an ambush. A four-wheel drive pulled up and he noticed that the Cellar’s forensic expert was getting out. Gant reluctantly stood, towering over Buddy and Jackson.

“We know how to find you,” Gant said, “so you go on home with the deputies. I heard your truck broke down.”

Jackson almost smiled. “Yeah, we got to tow it home. My mom’s mad about that.”

“Remember, try to get over this.” Gant hated himself for the patronizing statement. Maybe he was just running out of things to say. He was not impressed with Golden’s professional expertise, but of course, he imagined she’d never worked in the middle of a forest with a body nearby. He made his goodbyes and walked over to join the doctor and Bailey.

“Another victim,” Golden said.

“What?” Gant wasn’t sure what she was talking about.

“The boy. That will be with him the rest of his life.”

Gant glanced back at the boy sitting with his father. He didn’t want to tell Golden that there was most likely going to be several more victims before they caught up with whoever was doing this. As Gant walked he pulled a cravat out of his pocket and wrapped it around his nose and mouth.

“What do you think?” Bailey asked the expert as soon as they were there. Bailey had a surgical mask on, as did the expert. A set of halogen lights had been rigged up and they highlighted the area.

The man who had seen everything in his 23- year career looked a little shocked. His name was Padgett and he was an MD with extra degrees in forensics and crime scene investigation and many years of practical experience seeing the gruesome situations the Cellar waded into. “She tried to smash her own foot with the stone. Tried to break the bones so she could get it through the shackle. She was too far gone from dehydration and starvation to realize it would just swell. She probably died soon after.”

Bailey looked in the folder. “She was reported missing five weeks ago. Disappeared on the way home from work.”

“She’s been dead about three days,” Padgett reported. “I’ll have to do an autopsy but I’d say cause of the death was dehydration.”

Gant looked around. Over four weeks chained to this tree. It had to have rained several times. He knew a person could do around four weeks without food — he’d gone three weeks one time. But water was essential. One couldn’t last more than five days or so without fresh water.

Whether it was the smell of the corpse now that they were right next to it or the sudden understanding of how long the girl had been here, Golden turned and rapidly walked away to the edge of the clearing, where she knelt. The sound of her retching carried clearly. Gant could see some of the FBI men looking over, a few of them snickering evilly and making comments. Golden’s reaction didn’t bother Gant — in fact, it relieved him that she obviously wasn’t a sociopath who could stare at death without emotion.

Padgett opened his kit and began to do some work on the body.

Golden came walking back, her gait a bit unsteady. “We’ve got to find Emily.”

“We’ve got to find who did this,” Gant said. He knelt down next to Padgett and felt the heavy links. “The kid probably saw the chain, probably even moving a bit as the body swelled up. Thought it was a deer — the eyes. Thought he had a big one.” He looked at the arrow sticking out of the body. “They were hunting out of season.”

“So?” Bailey asked.

“He took his son hunting,” Gant said.

Bailey stiffened and looked at Gant. Golden had a distant look in her eyes. A breeze blew through the clearing, ruffling the feathers on the tail of the arrow.

Gant had grown up in New York. His father had never taken him hunting. His father had always worked. Always been gone. The first thing Gant had ever hunted was human. He’d never understood the concept of hunting as a sport. With Goodwine he’d done some hunting, but the Gullah ate what they caught, as had Gant. And the Gullah respected their prey. No matter how much Gant had hated whoever he was after, he’d always respected the target for the very simple reason that human prey could turn and kill him just as easily as he could do it. It was fair and equal. And in the Cellar his hunts had always ended eye to eye with the quarry. And he’d always known, looking into their eyes, that they deserved their fate. It was something that would never stand up in a court-room but on occasion Gant had crossed paths with hardened homicide detectives and they had told him the same thing: they’d known whether they had a killer by looking in the eyes.

“You have Cranston’s file?” he asked Bailey. He noticed that Golden still seemed pre-occupied. Death did that to people, Gant knew. Of course he didn’t know how wrong he was about what she was actually experiencing.

“Yes. And Caulkins. And I’ll have Svoboda’s shortly. I’ll also have headquarters run deep backgrounds for links.”

Gant knew what Bailey meant about deep background. In the covert world a person’s file, even a classified one, only held the surface. There were dark waters that only a deep background check could begin to unveil. Gant had done things that were not recorded on any piece of paper or digitized in some computer memory. He had done things that he wished he could wipe out of his own memory.

Gant glanced at Golden. “She’s right. He’s taunting us. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Have the Auxiliary report anything,” he said to Bailey.

“The ‘Auxiliary’?” Golden asked. “You mentioned that before.”

Gant figured the question was a good sign. She was getting past the immediate horror. Give her a few more years of this and she might even be an asset. Of course she would have to last those years.

“We have a network of people who watch for unusual crimes,” Bailey said, as usual not going into detail.

“This was brutal,” Gant said. “And personal.”

Golden frowned. “And?”

“I’m used to dealing with professionals,” Gant said. “People who do a job. Not this. Who do things for a reason.”

“This was done for a reason,” Golden said. “And as you said, a very personal one. If we can figure that reason out, we can figure out who did it. That’s why I’m here.”

“I was wondering about that,” Gant said, ignoring the flush of anger on her cheeks as he turned and walked away. He tuned out everyone. He focused on the body, allowing his senses to expand from himself, to the shackle, to the chain, to the tree, the clearing. He had to pass over to the other side, the side where all his skills and training and experience could be warped to hurt and kill.

No conscience.

No soul.

This site was not random. The cache report indicated that. Gant had put in a number of caches during his time in Special Operations. And he had recovered some too. He remembered diving in the harbor in Kiel, Germany and recovering a Nazi cache of weapons from World War II. The guns had been wrapped in oil cloth, water-proofed in plastic and still functional after over half a century. Put there near the end of the war in the hopes of supplying a Nazi guerilla force that never materialized.

A cache was designed to be hidden and only found by someone with the report. Gant looked at the arrow. But this cache had been found before they arrived. By a father and son hunting with bow and arrow out of season. Thus this cache had been a mistake. A good plan, but events had overcome it. Not by much, by only a few hours.

But still.

If Jackson and his father had shown up five days earlier, they might have been able to save the girl. Or they might have been killed by someone watching her suffer. That was something to factor into Emily’s situation, although the entire point of a cache was to hide something and be able to leave and come back later and recover it, not sit and watch the site. But Gant had never heard of a human cache so this one might have developed differently.

Still, there were rules to covert operations, procedures to be followed. There was more to a cache operation than just the report. There was preparing what was to be cached. He looked at Padgett. He’d get the man’s report as soon as he could autopsy the body. Then there was preparing the site, the first step of which was to put observation on the location prior to insertion of the cache.

Gant looked at the tree the boy had pointed out as his hide site for hunting. Leaving the three around the body, he walked across the field. It was an oak tree, and there were worn boards nailed in to the side to allow easy access to the lower branches. Gant clambered up. A couple of one by sixes had been hammered into position forming a rough seat about twenty feet up with an excellent view of the field and the pine tree in the center. The wood was old and beginning to rot, which indicated this had been put here years before.

Gant sat down and he instinctively knew that the man he was after had sat here also. It wasn’t what someone in combat conditions would do, as the site was too obvious, but for the Kentucky woods it was good enough. But it hadn’t been.

Would he and his new partner be good enough, Gant wondered? They had a week, maybe more, but they couldn’t count on rain. For all they knew Emily was staked out in the desert, which could shorten the time considerably. But it would still take time to get to the desert. And he had a feeling that whoever had taken her would not want to travel far with her. That would make the risk of being stopped too high. A day’s travel, no more, Gant decided. By vehicle, since it appeared that was how she had been taken.

A week, Gant decided. For Emily. A lifetime to catch whoever was doing this.

Then he realized Golden was right: they needed to find Emily first. Catching the target was secondary. It was a novel situation for Gant.

He looked across the open field to the tree where the girl had died. He could see Golden standing there alone. Staring at the body. She looked like a ghost, an apparition.

Gant reached into his pocket and pulled out a satellite telephone. He hit the speed dial. He knew there was a good chance the old man wouldn’t answer the phone this late.

He was right as he got the answering service.

When the beep came he had a question. “Mister Nero. This is Jack Gant. How did my brother die? And what happened to Jimmy, Doctor Golden’s son?”