Redemption Road

30

Channing felt as if she were dying, and that was all about the heat. It filled the silo, pressed her into the dirt. After so many hours, she didn’t have any tears left, or sweat. She had the dark and the heat and a single question.

When was he coming back?

That was the only thing that mattered. Not why it would happen or where she was, but when?

When would he come?

She rolled onto her knees, her face flat against the hot soil. She could taste it on her lips and in her mouth; feel it in her nostrils.

“One more time.”

She straightened, and the plastic ties cut her again. Same pain. Same slickness. The earth tilted in the blackness, but she got to her feet, hands still behind her back, ankles still lashed together.

“I can do this.”

She’d already fallen fifty times, or a hundred. It was pitch-black. She was bleeding.

“Okay.”

She shuffled an inch, didn’t fall.

“Okay, okay.”

She tried a hop and kept her balance. She did it two more times, and that was the most she’d managed without going down. That was the pattern. Stand. Fall. Spit out the dirt.

There had to be an exit.

Something sharp.

She tried again and fell as an ankle twisted, and her body whiplashed. She couldn’t catch herself, and her face hit hard enough to drive dirt into her throat. She rolled, choking.

“Elizabeth…”

The name was like a prayer. Elizabeth would know what to do. Elizabeth would want her strong. But, Channing felt terror like a palm on her back.

The basement.

Now this.

The palm pressed hard enough to drive everything good right out of her. She’d killed two men, so maybe this was just, to be alone in this place.

Sliding through the dirt, she covered an inch at a time, first on her side, then on her stomach. She was sobbing quietly as she did it, but, at the far wall, pulled herself up and felt her way along it, finding vertical beams every ten feet, each of them as rusted as everything else. It took an hour, or maybe two; but the fourth beam had a narrow edge where metal had rusted away enough to make it sharp.

So sharp…

Channing backed against it, working her wrists, the zip ties. Skin went with the plastic, but she didn’t care.

Now!

It had to be now!

The plastic parted with a snap, and her arms swung like deadwood as she sobbed again and waited for them to burn. When she could move them, she lay on the ground and used the same sharp metal to strip the ties from her ankles. After that, she followed the curve of the wall until she found the door. Made of solid steel, it opened half an inch before the chain outside snapped tight. She stared out with a single eye, saw dirt and grass and trees. Afternoon, she thought, yellow light. She called for help, but knew he’d chosen the silo for a reason. That meant no one was coming. No one was there.

Channing pushed fingers through the crack a final time, then dragged herself up to explore the silo again. The structure was ancient and rusted and crumbling. She went around the perimeter from the door all the way back, tripping twice, then circling again. She found the ladder on the second trip. The lowest rung was high above her head, so she almost missed it, her fingers grazing it once, then coming back. When she pulled it made a clanking sound, and bolts scraped in the concrete. She dragged herself onto it, finding enough strength to reach the third rung, and pull her knees onto the first. When she stood, everything swayed. The ladder was skinny, barely a foot wide. Moving carefully, she climbed another rung, then a dozen more. Twice, the ladder groaned, and each time she froze, thinking it would pull from the wall or drop away beneath her. She managed another twenty rungs before she froze from all the blackness that tried to drag her down. Only the weight on her hands and feet told her which way was up and which was down. Channing closed her eyes and counted to ten.

The ladder was solid; the ladder was real.

Ten feet later, the first rung came off in her hand.

It broke quickly, and she spun into the dark, screaming as something in her shoulder stretched and tore. It took a mad scramble to get her feet back on the ladder, another rung in her hands.

But, the damage was done.

She felt all the space below and pushed a cheek so hard into the ladder it ached.

“Please.”

It was a useless plea, no more substantial than the air beneath her feet. Channing was alone and going to die. She’d fall or he’d kill her.

That simple.

That sure.

But did it have to be? Would it be like that for Liz?

Taking a breath, she forced herself past the empty space where the broken rung had been. It wasn’t easy. The metal was rusted thin, and her mind painted every rung the same.

It would break.

She would fall.

Already, she was fifty feet up, maybe sixty. How tall was the silo? Eighty feet? A hundred? She counted rungs, but lost track when the ladder shifted in the concrete. She held her breath for a hundred count, then started again, thinking, Please, please, please…

She was still thinking that when she reached up, and her hand struck the dome of the roof. It was inches from her face, and she couldn’t see it.

So black.

So still.

But the ladder was there for a reason; there had to be a hatch.

She pushed against the roof and found the hatch easily because it wasn’t latched or locked. A line of yellow appeared, fresh air spilling in as she pushed harder and the crack widened. Channing drove the hatch until it fell backward and struck the roof with a clang. Light burned her eyes. Fresh air was a gift. She clung until she could see, then clambered onto the roof, finding handholds and a place for her feet. A breeze blew, and the forest walked away beneath her. Miles of it. Many miles. She leaned out, thinking there should be another ladder going down; but it had broken off years ago. She saw bolts snapped clean, and a tangle of ladder twisting away from the silo halfway down. Everything else was sloping roof and sheer sides. She climbed to the top of the dome to be sure; but there was never any real doubt.

Inside or out, she was just as trapped.

Elizabeth made sure Channing’s name and photograph went out to every officer in the county. The FBI stepped up, and so did the state police. That was politics, Francis Dyer holding up his end of the bargain. When it was done, she returned to the conference room. The stares still lingered, but not all of them were distrustful. Maybe, it was the badge. Maybe, the novelty was wearing thin. Whatever the case, she put her back to the glass wall and focused on what she had. There was the message, the blood on the stoop, the broken glass, and the abandoned phone.

Could Channing’s disappearance have something to do with the church?

Elizabeth came back to that repeatedly. Too much coincidence, she thought. Too many moving parts. Other women had disappeared; others were dying.

Was there a connection?

Elizabeth combed through the files, the evidence. She worked it all, then ran it again going all the way back to Adrian’s conviction, looking first at Julia Strange, Ramona Morgan, and Lauren Lester. They were found in the church, on the altar. What did they have in common? Why were they chosen? They were different ages and backgrounds, different heights and weights and builds. What about the ones found beneath the church? What about Allison Wilson and Catherine Wall?

Photographs of all five women hung from the murder board, and Elizabeth walked the line, studying their faces. Adrian was convicted of killing Julia Strange. Did the others die because the wrong man went to prison?

She walked the line again. Some of the victims were buried, and others posed as if meant to be found. Was that about Adrian?

The questions piled up, yet Elizabeth found herself staring most often at the photograph of Allison Wilson. Something bothered her, and it wasn’t a small thing.

“They look like you.”

Elizabeth turned to see James Randolph. “What did you say?”

“I said they look like you.” He crossed the room and stood beside her at the whiteboard. “Julia Strange. All of them.” He touched one photo, then another. “Something about the eyes.”

Sixty miles away, armed men gathered in an empty lot two miles from a decrepit motel that rented rooms by the hour. Stanford Olivet was among them, though he did not wish to be.

“The room is in the back. You know the target.” That was Jacks. He checked the loads in a Sig Sauer.45, then holstered it. “He’s fast and strong, and liable to freak when he sees us. That means we get him down fast and we get him in the van.”

“I don’t like this,” Olivet said.

“When do you ever?”

Olivet looked from Jacks to Woods. They didn’t care for him. They never had. “The cops have the same address. You know that, right? They could be here any second.”

“Fuck the cops.”

“You’re joking.”

“Just get in the van.”

Jacks shoved Olivet through the rear door and rolled it shut. When everyone was in the van, it lurched from the lot and rolled fast until the motel appeared around a bend in the scrub. The building was old, the earth around it sandy and baked. For an instant, Olivet peered into the haze behind them. The warden was out there somewhere. Ten miles away, or twenty. Somewhere safe, Olivet thought. He wouldn’t take a chance like this, not with cops coming, too.

“Here we go.” Woods twisted in the seat. “Slick and fast and get the hell out.”

The van rocked into the parking lot and turned for the back. Olivet rolled a ski mask over his face, said, “Come on guys, masks.”

But Jacks wouldn’t have it. “Uh-uh. You saw what he did to Preston. I want that son of a bitch to see our faces when we come through the door. I want him afraid and aware. I want to see it register.”

Olivet wanted to argue, but they were already past the office and nearing the side of the motel. The parking lot was empty, the pool full of green slime. They rounded into the rear lot, backed up to the door, and spilled from the van, Woods with a sledge, Jacks with the.45 out of the holster and low against his leg. Nobody said a word. They squared up on the door and, when the lock burst, took the room in a silent rush.

It was empty, the bed rumpled.

“Shower.”

Jacks pointed, and they fanned out around the bathroom door, everybody’s gun up now, Jacks counting down to three as water stopped running and he eased the door open. Steam rolled out. They saw gray tile, a shower curtain, and clothing on the floor. For that instant, the tableau held, then plastic rings scraped, and the curtain slid back. Behind it was a man in his thirties, and a girl ten years younger. She screamed when she saw them. The man screamed, too. He was skinny, with eyes too large for his face. The girl covered herself with the shower curtain.

Woods said, “Ah, hell.”

“You.” Jacks centered the.45 on the man’s face. “How long have you been here?”

“Please, don’t hurt us. There’s money-”

“How long have you been in this room?”

“Two days. Jesus, don’t shoot me. We’ve been here since the day before yesterday. Two days. Two days.”

“You’re certain?”

“Of course, yes. God. Please-”

Olivet saw it coming a second before it actually did. He opened his mouth, but there was no stopping it. The.45 spoke twice: sprays of blood on tile, bits of brain and bone.

“Damn it, Jacks! Why’d you do that?”

“They saw our faces.”

“Whose fault is that?”

Jacks ignored Olivet. He collected the casings, then closed the bathroom door and pulled Olivet from the smoke-filled silence. “Get in.” He pushed Olivet at the sliding door. “Just get in and shut the hell up.”

In the van and accelerating, Olivet skinned off the mask and watched the motel fade into the same, dull haze. He heard sirens rise and watched state police cars blow past in the other direction. There were four of them moving fast; and that’s how close it was, he thought.

Seconds.

By the time he turned around, Jacks had a cell phone to his ear. “It’s me, yeah. He wasn’t there… No, I’m sure. Wrong motel, wrong room.” The needle crossed fifty-five, then sixty. “Tell your cop buddy the woman lied.”

Some people were blessed with the ability to forget bad things. Elizabeth lacked that particular skill, so if she chose to face the ugliness straight on, she could close her eyes and see the past with perfect clarity: the sounds, the slant of light, the way he moved. The memory was about after.

It was about Harrison Spivey and her father.

It was about the church.

Sunlight struck the cross, but it was rosy through the glass and made her think of blood: the blood in her skin, the memory of it between her legs. That color on the cross was wrong, but there it was, salvation and sin and the face of the boy who’d raped her. His reflection twisted in the metal, but it was real, like he was real, a hot-skinned, grass-smelling boy who used to play games and wink in church and be her friend. He knelt beside her as she listened to his lies and pretensions of remorse. He said the words because her father told him to; and like the follower she’d always been, Elizabeth said them, too.

“Our father…”

Damn you for letting this happen to me.

She kept the last part to herself because that’s what her life had become, a veil of normalcy stretched across a well of hurt. She ate and went to school and allowed her father to pray by her bed, to kneel in the dark and ask God to forgive her.

Not just the boy.

Her.

She lacked trust, he said. Trust in God’s purpose, and in her father’s wisdom. “The child you carry is a gift.”

But, it was no gift, and the boy kneeling in her father’s church was no giver. She could see him from the corner of her eye, the beads of sweat on his neck, the fingers squeezed white as he repeated the words of prayer and pressed his forehead so hard against the altar she thought it, too, might bleed.

They spent five hours on their knees, but there was no forgiveness in her.

“I want the police.”

She said it many times, a whisper; but her father believed in redemption above all things, so urged her to stillness and heart and greater prayer.

“There is a path,” he said.

But there was no such thing for Elizabeth. She had no God to trust, and no father, either.

“Take his hand,” her father said; and Elizabeth did. “Now, look in his eyes and tell him you find it in your heart to forgive.”

“I’m so sorry, Liz.” The boy was crying.

“Tell him,” her father said. “Show him your eyes and tell him.”

But she could not do it, not now and not ever, not if heat was salvation itself and she was offered all the fires of hell.

The painful memory filled Elizabeth with equally painful questions. She couldn’t see the whole picture, but possibilities were lining up: the church, the altar, the women who looked like her.

Could a teenage rapist grow into something worse?

Maybe.

But, had he?

After that day at the church, Harrison Spivey spent three summers working for her father. Mowing grass. Painting. Digging graves with the ancient backhoe. To him it was penance, and to her one more reason to leave. Yet he’d spent hours kneeling at that altar, knew every inch of the grounds and building. She needed to confirm something else, too-something to do with Allison Wilson. Elizabeth picked up her keys, surprised when she turned and bumped into James Randolph. She’d forgotten he was there.

It was the memory.

The burn.

“I can’t let you go just yet.” His hand settled on her arm. She looked at it. “Please, you need to see this one last thing.” Her eyes rose to his face. He looked old, but alert and scrubbed and sincere. “Here,” he said. “Sit.”

He took the other chair and looked out at the cops in the bull pen. He sat close enough for her to smell the aftershave, the mint on his breath. Were people watching? That was his concern. “There’s orders,” he said. “And then there’s orders.” His hand went into a jacket pocket. “You’re not supposed to see this. Dyer thinks you’ll freak or something, so he sent the word down. Me, I think you need to know. Safety and shit. Common sense.”

Elizabeth waited. The hand stayed in the pocket.

He flicked another glance through the glass, and when the hand came out, it held an evidence bag. Elizabeth couldn’t tell what was in it, but it was flat and small and looked as if it could be a photograph. “Beckett found this under the church. It was wedged behind a floor joist above the bodies. Only a few people know about it.” Randolph pressed slick plastic against her leg, said, “Keep it low.”

He moved his hand, and Elizabeth trapped the plastic with three fingers. She saw the back of the photograph. The paper was yellowed, the edges tattered. “Under the church?”

“Right above the bodies.”

She turned it over; stared for long seconds. Randolph watched her face. She couldn’t move or speak.

He gave her a moment, then tilted his head so he could look at it straight on. “I didn’t think it was you, but Dyer says it is. He says he knew you from church and childhood, that even that young and long-haired he knew it was you the second he saw it. I’m guessing you’re what? Fifteen?”

“Seventeen.”

The word was an exhalation of loss. The photograph was faded and cracked and water-stained. In it, she wore a plain dress with her hair drawn back and tied with a black ribbon. She was walking near the church. Wasn’t smiling. Wasn’t sad. She wasn’t there at all. Not really.

“Do you remember this photograph?”

She shook her head, and it was not a total lie. She’d never seen the photograph, but she knew the dress, the day. “Did you find fingerprints?”

“No. We’re thinking gloves. Are you okay?” She said she was, but tears were on her face. “Jesus, Liz. Breathe.”

She tried, but it was hard. She remembered the walk by the church.

Five weeks after she was raped.

The day before she killed her baby.

Elizabeth was still glassy-eyed when she stepped into the bull pen. In seconds, everyone was looking at her, but she barely noticed. She was thinking of a black ribbon in hair that hung halfway to her waist. As a girl, her ribbons had always been blue or red or yellow-the only real colors she was allowed. But she’d twined a black one in her hair that single day, and her thoughts were trapped there on that ribbon, as if she could touch it or take it back.

“Liz!”

She heard her name from across the room, and even that seemed faint.

“Hey!”

It was Beckett, working his big body through the room. She blinked, surprised by the urgency of his movements. He was bulling the crowd, and the crowd was angry. A buzz was in the air, and it wasn’t like before. The whispers were back, the distrustful looks.

Shit… She knew what that meant, too.

“Liz, wait-”

But she didn’t wait. She couldn’t. The hallway door was twenty feet away, and she was moving-fifteen feet, then five, Beckett still coming. Her hand was on the knob when he caught up and took her arm. She tried to pull it away, but he didn’t let go. “Walk with me.” He pushed her into the hall and then into an empty stairwell. The door clanked shut, and it was just the two of them, Beckett squeezing hard, the look on his face desperate enough to keep her quiet. He was frightened, and it wasn’t a normal kind of fear. “Just keep walking. Don’t talk to anybody. I mean it.”

He led her down a flight, then into another hallway and to a side exit. He hit a metal door with his shoulder. It crashed against the wall, and they were outside. “Where are you parked?”

She pointed, and he dragged her in that direction. “Dyer knows?”

“That you lied about the motel, yeah.”

“I guess word spreads fast.”

“You think?”

She looked up and saw faces in the windows, watching. A few men were on cell phones. One was snapping his fingers and pointing. “How bad is it?”

“Dyer’s about to sign a warrant for your arrest. Obstruction. Accessory. You made him look like a fool.”

Elizabeth saw it, of course. She’d lied about Adrian, and the lie had caught her out.

“Tell me where he is.”

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said.

“You’re lying.”

“What if I am?”

“Tell me where Adrian is, and maybe I can make this go away. Talk to the state cops. Convince Dyer to rescind the warrant. You have to give me something, though. A real address. A phone number.”

“Francis will settle down.”

“He won’t.”

“So I made him look foolish.” They reached the car. Elizabeth pulled her arm free. “I gave him a bullshit address. So what?”

“People died.”

“What?”

“State police went to the motel you gave us. They found two people shot dead in the shower. The room still smelled of gun smoke. That’s how close it was.”

“I don’t understand.”

Beckett took her keys, opened the car, and got her inside. “Tell me where to find him.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

Elizabeth kept her eyes straight ahead; felt the intensity of his stare.

“I need him, Liz. You can’t understand how badly. But please. I need you to trust me.”

Beckett was hurting. Was it jealousy? Anger?

“Trust? What trust?” She started the car and let him twist. “You should have told me about the photograph.”

“James Randolph.” Beckett’s jaw clenched. “He showed you?”

“Yeah, he did. It should have been you.”

“Liz-”

“Partners, Charlie. Friends. You don’t think I had the right to know?”

“Francis didn’t want you to know about the photograph. Okay? He said you were vulnerable and weak and that nothing good could come of it. He made a good argument, and I agreed with every bit of it. You’re not thinking straight. You’re a danger to yourself and everyone around you.”

“You still should have told me.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Yeah, well”-she put the car in gear-“I guess that’s where we’re different.”