Daylight

Chapter 74

Kyle led the way to the cave. It seemed to Pine like ten miles instead of a fraction of that. She could feel her heart racing. And she felt light-headed.

Calm the hell down, Atlee. It won’t help Mercy if you drop dead from a stroke right now.

They had to pull at some vines and push through some bushes that had grown up on the path they were heading along.

Kyle explained, “We haven’t come back here in a long time. Guess it kind of grew over.”

Forcing their way through some more underbrush, they finally reached an old wooden door set into a small hill with ivy growing up all around it. There was an open and rusted padlock hanging from the clasp.

Kyle said, “When we found this place, the door was busted open. We fixed it up and got a new padlock.”

Pat Simmons looked it over. “I can’t believe this. All the time we’ve been here and we never knew about this.” He eyed his son. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

He shrugged. “It was me and Trey’s special place, Pops. Then when we stopped using it, we just sort of forgot about it, I guess.”

Pine impatiently pushed past them and thrust the door open. She turned on her light and entered. The others followed as Pat Simmons used one of his flashlights to help illuminate the way and handed one to Roberts, who did the same.

The space was small, maybe ten by ten. As Pine ran her light over the room, she saw many things. An old table, some rickety chairs. Boards on cement blocks for shelves. Some empty glass jars, a cracked baseball bat, a rotted sweatshirt, and some old tennis shoes. The floor was made up of sections of plywood that must have been laid right on the dirt, because they were dark with rot. There was the sickly sweet smell of old vegetation and exposed red clay. The walls were the rock and dirt of the hill.

Pine’s light hit near the back of the room and she froze.

It was a small cot, though there were no covers on it and the exposed mattress was old and rotted. She turned to Kyle. “Did you and your brother bring the furniture out here, and the bed?”

“Nope, that was already here. And those makeshift shelves. We found old cans of food and some water bottles. We used them for target practice with our .22s.”

Pine moved around the space, examining every inch.

She stopped and bent down near the bed.

Her light hit on a chain that was coiled up under the bed. One end had an open clasp that could be locked with a key. The other end of the chain had been sunk so deeply into the rock wall that Pine could not pull it free.

Blum came to stand next to her and eyed the chain.

“My God,” she said quietly.

Kyle joined them. “Yeah, that was here, too. We thought maybe they kept a dog or some other animal in here.”

Roberts came to stand on the other side of Pine and said quietly, “Or maybe the girl. Becky.”

Pine didn’t answer because her light had fallen on something else. It was hanging from a nail driven into the rock. She walked haltingly over to it.

Sally. It’s been over thirty years since I’ve seen you.

Pine picked the doll up and gazed down at it. This was Mercy’s doll. It was a twin of the one Pine had owned as a child. Her mother had been looking for it after Mercy had disappeared. At least someone who had known her parents in Andersonville, Georgia, had told her that; her mother had never mentioned it.

Pine looked down at the large, soft eyes of the doll, whose name was Sally. Pine had named her doll Skeeter, after the character in the Muppet Babies TV series. She had tried to get Mercy to name hers Scooter, because that had been the twin on the TV show. But Mercy wouldn’t hear of it because Scooter was a boy.

Pine’s features crinkled at the memory, but then she felt like sobbing.

Kyle said, “Yeah, that was kind of creepy. We thought about getting rid of it, but neither one of us wanted to touch it. It was pretty old and ratty.”

Roberts said, “You think that belonged to the girl?”

Pine nodded but said nothing.

Pat Simmons, who had overheard this, exclaimed, “Wait a minute, are you saying those people kept a little girl out here? What, like chained up and shit?”

“That’s exactly what we think happened here,” said Blum, watching Pine closely.

Pine turned and looked at Roberts.

“I’ll take you up on the offer to get the file on Joe Atkins’s murder. And anything you have on Desiree Atkins.”

“Okay. It won’t be much, I’m afraid.”

“It will be more than I have now. How big were Joe and Desiree?”

“Not big. Joe was about five seven, hundred and fifty pounds wet. Desiree was a petite thing, five feet, ninety pounds, maybe.”

Pine nodded. “Okay, does the sheriff’s office have a forensics tech?”

“Oh yeah.”

“I’d like prints and DNA samples taken from here. We can take samples from Kyle and his brother for elimination purposes.”

“Do you have samples of the girl’s DNA?” said Roberts.

Pine thought, Yes I do, because it’s the same as mine.

She nodded. “And any prints found here I’d like to match against Joe and Desiree, if you have those on file.”

“We have Joe’s for sure. I don’t know about Desiree’s.”

“Okay.”

They left the cave, with Pine reluctantly leaving Mercy’s doll behind, because this was a crime scene now. But then she stopped and turned back to the door.

“You said Joe Atkins was in the security business?”

Roberts nodded. “Yeah. He’d put together alarm packages, whatever you needed. Most folks around here don’t even lock their doors. But most of his clients were businesses. So he’d put in surveillance cameras and—” He broke off when Pine rushed back to the door and started ripping at the ivy that had grown up on the rock wall and around the door.

“Agent Pine?” said Blum.

Pine said, “Help me pull down this ivy.”

They all joined her and in short order had ripped enough of it away to reveal a small, decrepit surveillance camera mounted onto the rock wall and pointed at the door, with a cable snaking down the face of the wall and into the ground.

“Damn,” said Roberts. “He had this place under surveillance.”

Pine eyed the cable. “And this was before everything went wireless. I think that cable may run all the way to the house.”

“Well, let’s find out,” said Pat.

Pine sprinted back to the house and the others followed.