Say Goodbye

THIRTY-SEVEN

BY THE TIME KIMBERLY AND SAL ARRIVED, THE HOUSE at the address provided by Ginny was engulfed in flames. The fire department had deployed, stubbornly working their hoses, but Kimberly and Sal could tell it was a lost cause.

They stood at the perimeter, watching orange flames light up the night sky while feeling the heat of the blaze against their cheeks. Neighbors clustered around them, belting their bathrobes against the drizzling rain as they gathered in the street to watch the show.

“Pity,” an older woman commented, gray hair neatly arranged in row after row of pin curls, “used to be such a pretty house in its day.”

“You know the owner?” Sal asked sharply, he and Kimberly moving closer.

But the woman shook her head. “Used to, long time ago. But the house sold two, maybe three years ago. Rarely saw the new owner. He certainly didn’t take an interest in caring for the house or garden, I can tell you that.” She gave a disapproving sniff.

“You said he,” Kimberly pressed.

The woman shrugged. “That’s all I ever saw-younger guy climbing in and out of his black SUV. Always wearing a baseball cap, even in the dead of winter. Struck me as an odd sort. He definitely wasn’t friendly.”

“He wasn’t,” another man chimed in, standing a few feet away in a blue flannel robe. “My wife brought over a plate of brownies to welcome him to the neighborhood. Through the side window, she could see him standing in the entryway, after she rang the doorbell. But he didn’t open the door. Finally, she just set down the brownies and left. Definitely an odd duck.”

“Ever see a boy?” Sal asked.

Man frowned. “Eighteen, nineteen years old? He rarely left the house. I figured he was the son.”

“There’s a younger boy, too.” The first woman spoke up authoritatively. “At least lately, I’ve been seeing one out in the yard. Don’t know if he’s just visiting or not.”

Sal and Kimberly exchanged glances. “And tonight?”

“Didn’t see a thing,” the woman provided. “Least not till I heard the sirens and realized there was a fire.”

They turned to the man. He shrugged apologetically. Apparently, the neighbors on this street actually slept. Which was more than Sal or Kimberly could say for their evening.

They rounded up the first responder, a young deputy who didn’t have much to add. He’d heard Dispatch ordering all units to the address in pursuit of an unidentified suspect. When he’d arrived, the first red coils of fire already glowed in the front windows. Next thing he knew, the windows blew out and the house was one giant fireball. He put in a call to the fire department and that was that.

They tried the fire chief, a portly man with a graying mustache and a weathered complexion.

“Definitely an accelerant,” he boomed. “No way a structure would’ve lit up this fast in these wet conditions without a little help. From the smell, I’d guess gasoline, but we gotta get Mike in before we’ll know more.”

Mike turned out to be the county arson specialist. He’d been called, but couldn’t begin his walk-through until the fire was extinguished and the building cooled and secured. Probably late morning at the earliest, if not midafternoon.

In other words, nothing to report, nothing to do. Get some sleep, the fire chief advised them. He’d let them know when it was their turn to play.

Kimberly thought that was pretty funny. As if she’d ever sleep again. Just the thought of it made her giggle in a way that wasn’t entirely sane. And she could feel the heat again, smell the astringent odors of burning insulation, melting electrical wires, sprayed gasoline.

She wondered about the younger child. If somewhere in that burning structure, a small body was already curling up in a pugilist’s stance. She had failed one boy this evening. And his younger counterpart? The so-called replacement?

The fire punched its first hole through the roof, discovering a fresh supply of oxygen and exploding with an ear-cracking roar. There was a warning groan from the old structure. A yell to fall back from the fire crew.

Then, with a tremendous, creaking sigh, the old house twisted, seeming to hang in midair one last moment. Then it collapsed. Red embers spewed into the darkness. Fresh flames skyrocketed into the overcast night. The neighbors gasped. The fire crew surged forward with renewed determination.

Sal led Kimberly back to his car. They drove wordlessly to the hotel, where Rainie and Quincy slept, where Kimberly’s ERT team worked, and where the remains of a lone boy were finally being loaded up by the EMT. Ginny Jones had already been taken away to the county lockup. One ordeal ending, the next just beginning.

Sal led Kimberly to his room.

“He knows,” Kimberly murmured. “Dinchara knows that Aaron failed. That’s why he lit the fire. Because he knew we were coming and wanted to cover his tracks.”

Sal drew back the bedcovers, sat her on the edge of the bed, then carefully laid her down and tucked her in.

“We need to do something,” Kimberly continued relentlessly. “What if he decides the younger boy is a liability? Or what if he decides to come after us? We need a plan.”

Sal picked up a pillow, placed it on the floor.

“He’s coming, Sal. I can feel it. He’s going to do something awful.”

“Sleep,” Sal told her. He lay down on the floor, no blankets, just the pillow.

Kimberly stared at him in amazement. Then, much to her own surprise, she closed her eyes and the world mercifully disappeared.

“Here’s the deal,” Sheriff Duffy explained shortly after eleven a.m. He’d convened the first task force meeting in the basement of the Smith House. Everyone was in attendance, including Kimberly’s evidence response team and a bunch of local deputies who’d already been up all night. Coffee flowed fast and furious, followed by platters of buttermilk biscuits and homemade sausage. As task force meetings went, the food was superb.

“There are two major trails leading up Blood Mountain.” Sheriff Duffy had a large USGS map spread out on the first table. Now he stabbed the first thickly drawn line with his dark finger. “There’s the Woody Gap trail off of Highway Sixty. Or, you can take Highway One-eighty to Lake Winfield Scott and head up Slaughter Gap to Blood Mountain. Slaughter Gap is shorter and steeper; might be an issue if you’re lugging a body and supplies. Both hikes are pretty damn popular, however. I sure as hell can’t figure how two men could drag dead bodies up time after time without someone noticing something.”

“They didn’t follow a major trail.” Kimberly spoke up tiredly. She sat beside her father and Rainie at a second table, cradling a mug of steaming coffee between her hands. Her cell phone was clipped to her waist, still stubbornly silent though she’d already left multiple messages for Mac.

She’d slept for three hours, showered for thirty minutes. She was as close to human as she was going to get.

Sal sat all the way across the room from her. If her father or Rainie thought anything was odd about that, or wondered where she had spent the night, they hadn’t said anything yet.

Kimberly continued now. “The boy, Aaron, said they had their own trail. One above the major trails where they could look down at other hikers. Cub Scouts,” she added belatedly. “He said Dinchara liked to watch the ‘skippy little Cub Scouts.’”

Duff arched a brow. “Last I knew, scout troops hiked either trail. So we’re still looking for a trailhead next to either Woody Gap on Highway Sixty or Slaughter Gap on One-eighty.”

“Or around the other side entirely,” Harold interjected, his lanky frame bent over the map. He drew several lines with his finger. “Look, you could access, here, here, or here. By the time you crest the summit, you’re looking down on either trail. And any of these options would be safer than trying to hike up parallel to a major trail, plus over here in particular, you have a nice smooth ascent. That’s what I’d look at. You know, if I were to haul bodies up a mountain.”

He glanced up in time to catch them all watching him curiously. “Well, I am a hiker.”

“I think the problem,” Rachel Childs started to say from her position beside Harold, “is that there are too many options for accessing the summit. You’re talking a good eight miles just to get from the trailhead of Woody Gap to the summit of Blood Mountain. Then there’s the Slaughter Gap side, the connection with the AT, and miscellaneous other ascents. From an ERT perspective, it’s a huge search area in very difficult terrain and in very difficult conditions.”

She gestured absently toward the outside, where the rain fell in a steady drizzle.

“True, true,” Duff conceded. “But if they were carrying bodies up the trail on litters, they must have trod a pretty decent path. We’re not talking bushwhacking our way up a mountain. More like searching the bottom perimeter for the proper opening-”

“Easier said than done given the dense underbrush,” Rainie cut in.

“It will be accessible.” Quincy spoke up abruptly. “Given what we know about the UNSUB, his skill as an outdoorsman, his aptitude for secrecy, it’s quite possible that he’s covered or disguised the entranceway to the trail. But the UNSUB is obviously quite familiar with this area and Blood Mountain. And the dumping grounds in particular are even more special to him, something geographic profilers refer to as a ‘totem place.’ It’s where he can relive his fantasies, as well as alleviate his anxieties. It’s the one place he feels powerful and in control. Naturally, he will want to reconnect with that feeling as much as possible by returning to the totem place.”

“So,” Rachel Childs quizzed drily, “if we just whisper Abracadabra, the secret passageway will magically open up and show us the way up the mountain? Either way, we gotta find the opening to the trail. And to do that, we’re gonna need help.”

“You mean the National Guard?” Duff scowled.

“No, I mean trained search experts. Presumably with dogs.”

Duff’s eyes widened. “You think cadaver dogs could catch a scent? I haven’t worked with ’em much myself, but like you said, it’s a good eight miles from trailhead to summit. Can a dog really catch the whiff of a decaying corpse eight miles away?”

Rachel pursed her lips. “I don’t know. I’m not a dog handler. Special Agent Quincy said the subject reported dragging the bodies up the mountain on a litter. That should leave a scent trail.”

But Harold, their resident expert on everything, was shaking his head. “Dogs work off of scent. The human body is constantly shedding skin rafts and bacteria, creating an odor we never notice but is discernible to dogs’ keen sense of smell. In the case of cadaver dogs, the scent is from decomp and starts off strong, but fades as more organic matter disappears. If these dumping grounds are too old, and too far away, there might not be enough scent for the dogs to home in on.”

“I once worked with a pair of dogs that hit on fully skeletalized bones in a dry creek bed,” Rachel countered. “There wasn’t any decaying matter left at that point, either, and they still found the bones.”

“Was the dry creek bed your target area?”

“Yes-”

“Well, there you go. The dogs were working a limited target area, which enabled them to home in on a fainter odor. But in your own words, we’re not a small geographical search area. We got a whole friggin’ mountain.”

“Search dogs,” Kimberly interrupted quietly. “Forget a cadaver dog. What we need are search dogs.”

Her two teammates stopped squabbling long enough to study her.

“Why search dogs?” Rachel spoke up first. “I thought we were looking for the bodies. At the magic totem place.”

“Who were carried up the mountain by two men, one of whom’s clothing we now possess.”

Harold got it first. “Get the socks from the boy’s body,” he filled in excitedly. “Give ’em to the dogs-”

“And tell the dogs to look for the boy. With any luck, they’ll pick up his trail and follow it straight up to the dumping grounds,” Kimberly finished for him, taking another sip of scalding coffee. Her father had finally relaxed beside her, a tacit sign of approval.

“God knows the last time the men headed up the mountain,” Duff spoke up, “I thought, for trailing dogs to work, they had to be on track within hours.”

“Not bloodhounds!” Harold supplied cheerfully. “They can follow a scent that is weeks old, especially in these kinds of cool conditions. Sure, Labs make better cadaver dogs, but still nothing like a pair of bluetick hounds for tracking the escaped felon. Find us a pair of bloodhounds, and we have a chance.”

Everyone stared at the local cop.

“Bloodhounds? In Georgia?” Duff smiled. “Let me make a call.”

The bloodhounds were named LuLu and Fancy, and they were handled by an old-timer who called himself Skeeter. Skeeter wore faded blue overalls and wasn’t much of a people person. He spoke to Sheriff Duffy in a series of shoulder shrugs and head bobs. He didn’t speak to the rest of them at all.

At Harold’s insistence, they started at Highway 180, following a ridgeline Harold had picked up from the elevation map and considered the best hiking option. Despite some mutterings about “totems,” the team had taken to heart Quincy’s assertion that the subject would favor a trail that was accessible and manageable. Even killers were practical.

LuLu and Fancy started working the underbrush with Skeeter, while a German shepherd named Danielle was sent over to the Woody Gap trail with her handler. Another search team was on its way from Atlanta and would be ready to go after lunch, picking up at Lake Winfield Scott.

With LuLu and Fancy on the job, there was nothing for the rest of the task force members to do but stand around, watching the rain drip off the brim of their caps.

Kimberly wandered over to where Rachel and Harold were hanging out under the relative cover of a large fir tree, each wearing a bright yellow rain slicker. The rest of the team was parked along the road in a short train of cars, led by one very big white crime scene trailer. The trailer was their basic model, stocked with a large canopy, evidence bags and tags, surveying equipment, protective eye gear, all-weather gear, generator, tarps, and rolls of butcher paper. Already, Kimberly could tell Rachel wished she’d brought the Green Gator all-terrain vehicles for roaring over Blood Mountain. The life of an ERT leader: so many toys, so little time.

Rachel had just lifted a hand in greeting when the cell phone finally rang at Kimberly’s waist. She checked the digital display, keeping her features calm while giving Rachel an apologetic shrug and heading for a quieter spot on the other side of a tree. She had to push back the hood of her raincoat to place the phone against her ear. It took her trembling fingers two tries to get it right.

“Hey,” she said into the phone, voice slightly breathless, pulse accelerated.

“Hey yourself,” Mac replied.

“Your night?”

“Bagged eight dealers, seized couple hundred pounds of cocaine. You know, the usual.”

She smiled, pinching the bridge of her nose against the pressure building behind her eyeballs. “When’d you wrap up?”

“Two hours ago.”

“You must be tired.”

“Sleeping sounds like a terrific idea. But I wanted to call you first. You know, listen to my wife’s lovely voice.”

His voice sounded edgy to her. Angry, tired, hurt? She didn’t know anymore and the silence dragged on until she knew he was feeling it, too, the distance that hadn’t seemed like such a big deal at first, but had now grown large enough to frighten.

“Your night?” he asked finally, his voice somber, and not at all like himself.

“There was…an incident.”

“Kimberly?”

“I’m okay. But the informant, the one who’s been calling me. He showed up at the hotel where we were staying and shot himself.”

“Kimberly?”

“He confirmed that Dinchara has been kidnapping and killing prostitutes. The boy helped dispose of the bodies. He was one of Dinchara’s victims, too, kidnapped when he was just a child. He didn’t…He couldn’t…He shot himself. He placed the gun on the side of his temple and blew out his brains. All over my hotel room.”

“Are you okay?” Mac asked softly.

And she surprised them both by saying, “No. I’m not okay. I’m angry. I’m furious. I want to scream, but what’s the use? I’m too late. We’re all too late. This boy needed us ten years ago. We failed him. We failed Ginny Jones, we failed Tommy Mark Evans. This case is nothing but a long trail of heartaches that never should’ve happened. And now I’m standing at the base of something called Blood Mountain, where if I get really lucky, we’ll find even more bodies dumped by the son of a bitch who started it all. I can’t believe I’m going to have a baby in a world where child sex slave rings are growing larger not smaller. Where children are snatched out of their beds, or hotel rooms, or family vacations in state parks. If law enforcement is a war, then we’re losing it, and I’m just…pissed off.”

“I’ll drive up,” Mac said.

“Dammit, no. You’ve been up all night. Get some sleep.”

“Are you by Woody Gap trail or over by the lake?”

“You know Blood Mountain?” she asked, startled.

“I grew up here, remember?”

“Mac…You really should sleep.”

“Just give me two hours. What can go wrong in two hours? I love you, Kimberly, and I’ll see you soon.”

The call ended. Kimberly stood behind the tree, trying to figure out if she was nervous or relieved, frightened or confused. Mostly she was aware of her pulse, still pounding too hard at the base of her neck. And rain, dripping off the tree branches, onto the top of her head and down the back of her neck, until it felt to her as if the woods were crying, and she wasn’t the kind of person for such foolish notions.

So she touched her stomach instead. Gently, tentatively.

“Hello, baby,” she whispered. And a moment later, “I’m sorry,” though she wasn’t entirely sure what she was apologizing for.

Out of the corner of her eye she caught her father standing next to the road, trying to get her attention. She sighed, walking toward him.

“Have you spoken to Ginny Jones this morning?” her father wanted to know.

She shook her head, eyeing him curiously as Rainie crossed the road to where they stood.

“I have a question,” Quincy said. “Something I’d like to ask her. It might help shed light on some things.”

Kimberly shrugged. Bloodhounds were working, the rest of them just standing around. It’s not like they had anything better to do.

“All right, let’s give her a call.” Kimberly dialed the county sheriff’s department, putting her cell phone on speaker and holding it between herself, Quincy, and Rainie, as they huddled close.

When the phone picked up, she gave her name and requested to speak with the officer in charge of booking Ginny Jones. It took a few minutes, then a harried deputy came on the line.

“What’ dya want?” he asked.

“FBI Special Agent Kimberly Quincy. I’m following up on a recent arrest, Virginia Jones. I was wondering when she was scheduled to be arraigned-”

“Already happened.”

“Excuse me?” Her startled gaze flew to her father and Rainie, who appeared equally surprised.

“Arraignment was at nine-thirty a.m. We took her over, bail was set, and she was released at ten-fifteen-”

“Excuse me?” Rainie and Quincy blinked at her angry exclamation, while at the end of the line, the deputy paused.

“Well, the bail was set at ten grand,” the deputy started.

“For accessory in the attempted murder of a federal agent?”

“Well, the subject in question killed himself, not you, so that seemed to take the heart out of the DA’s argument.”

“Ginny had no way of knowing that’s what Aaron would choose to do.”

“I’m just telling you what the judge said. Bail was set at ten grand. The bond was paid-”

“By whom?”

“Umm…” They heard the thunk of a phone being set down, then a voice calling to the back of a room. “Hey, Rick. You know who posted bail for the Jones girl? Was it a local bondsman, family? Huh. Okay.” The deputy returned. “Not a bondsman. Some local. Had a cashier’s check for ten grand. Rick assumes he knew the girl because she hugged him in the parking lot.”

Kimberly closed her eyes. “Tell me he wasn’t wearing a baseball cap.”

“Hey, Rick…” A moment later. “Yep, a red baseball cap.”

“Fuck!” And in that moment, she got it. And she didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, so she slammed her phone shut and kicked a clump of grass instead. “How could we have been so stupid? Goddammit, she played us like violins!”

Her father and Rainie were looking at her wide-eyed, so she spelled it out for them, still kicking at the grass, feeling almost crazy with rage. “You must kill the one you love. Those are the rules. You must kill the one you love. Aaron Johnson died. What does that really mean?”

Quincy got it first. “She graduated. Ginny Jones set Aaron up so she could graduate.”

“Yep, and we’re the morons who let her get away. Dinchara posted her bail and picked her up. She was spotted hugging him in the parking lot. They’re out, they’re together, and we’re screwed.”

“You don’t believe…” Rainie started.

But their conversation was suddenly interrupted by the loud baying of a hound dog, followed by an excited shout. The three looked up to see a surge of humanity running forward, followed by more excited exclamations. The dogs had picked up the scent, pulling Skeeter and the rest of the team into the woods.