“Or maybe the lid was sealed tight. You had to work in order to get it off. Did you take Dexter into the basement?”
“I did the other day, but not today. Why?”
Marty’s mind flew through possibilities. “Maybe he wasn’t getting air through the top, but from a crack in the side wall. And there’s another possibility. He could have been put in there after you searched the house.”
“Okay. You come with me. I’m going to get you out of here, and then Dexter and I will check out the basement.” He led the way out of the house and to the sidewalk. Marty stayed where he was. Grant returned to the back, and after less than five minutes he and Dexter returned.
“As soon as we got down there, Dexter led me to the cistern and sat right near a crack in the wall. That was how the boy was getting air. Shit. We were so close to finding him then. But….”
“Exactly. You have someone who took that little boy and put him in the cistern to die. Quite possiblyafteryou searched the house, which means there was nothing to find then. He, or she, probably meant for him to have suffocated pretty quickly, but by some miracle the crack in the basement wall allowed him to get air.” Marty felt his entire body go cold. “I hate to say this, but I have to. There are cisterns in houses all over town. A lot of them are hidden and forgotten.”
Grant paled, his chiseled features going white. “I sure as hell hope you’re wrong.”
“I do too.” He hoped that he had spent way too many hours watching cop shows on television, but the implications of what he was saying were difficult for him to get out of his mind. “I’m going to leave this with you and the police. I’m glad I could help, but now I think I’m going to go home and try to put it out of my head… if that’s possible.” He took a final look at stunningly hot Grant before striding home and locking the door behind him with a shiver.
Chapter 2
“YOU KNOWserial killers have to kill more than one person,” Atlas teased as they sat in the exercise yard, letting Dexter and Evie have some play time. He and Atlas had gone through training together. Grant had been paired with Dexter, an excellent dog who had already been trained in search-and-rescue, while Atlas had gotten Evie and trained her himself. Both dogs were amazing.
“I know you think you’re funny. But the implications are striking. What if we have someone in town playing out some power fantasy by locking people in cisterns and just leaving them?” Okay, maybe he was getting ahead of himself. And god knows they couldn’t go into every house in town to find out if they had a cistern and then check the damned thing out. There was the possibility that many current owners weren’t even aware those cisterns were there.
“I get your concern,” Atlas said as a spring breeze rustled the leaves overhead. It was a beautiful day, and Grant was happy to have a few minutes to sit with a cup of coffee. “Have you checked on missing child cases that are still open?”
“Yeah, I did. There aren’t many, thank god, and I suspect most of them are in divorced households where the kids were taken overseas by a parent. But there are two that I’m going to take another look at. I need to talk to Wes about them, but he’s out on a call. As soon as he returns, I can get his input on the situation.”
“You know this isn’t what we usually do,” Atlas told him. “We usually support other officers rather than lead cases.” Theywere typically called in to assist with investigations because of the dogs.
“I know, but I can’t seem to let this go.” Nor could he get the image of a certain cute, rather geeky guy out of his mind. He didn’t even know if the guy was gay, but the belly flutters he got when he was with him told Grant that there was a pretty good chance. “I keep thinking of Bobby in that cistern, alone and scared in the dark for days.”
“Is he okay?” Atlas asked.
“Yes. I spoke to his parents this morning. He’s eating a little and recovering from severe dehydration. Apparently we found him just in time, because his systems were beginning to shut down. But he’s going to be okay. I’m going to take Dexter up to see him after I talk to Wes.” He’d really wanted to be able to question Bobby about how long he had been in the cistern, but that had already been done with the help of a psychologist. They had been able to determine that Bobby was most likely placed in the cistern after they conducted the first search, because Bobby remembered being tied to a bed for a while by a man, but that he had had to go to the bathroom, and when he couldn’t hold it anymore, he had been taken away and placed in the dark. Reading the report had damned near brought tears to Grant’s eyes. He could feel the fear radiating off the page like a black cloud that threatened to overtake him.
“You know you shouldn’t try to talk to him about what happened,” Atlas told him.
“I’m not going up there for that. I’m going because I want to see that he’s okay. I need to actually see him.” The sight of that little boy curled against the side of the cistern had hit him like a ton of bricks. Grant stood and called Dexter over, and he came right away. Grant put his halter and leash on him, signaling that it was time for them to go back to work. “I’ll see you later.”
Atlas nodded. “Give me a call if you need anything.” Grant nodded and led Dexter into the station. He checked Wes’s desk and was a little surprised to find him already on duty.
“Paperwork, paperwork,” Wes groused as Grant took a seat and Dexter lay at his feet. “What’s up?”
“These two cases,” Grant said, giving Wes printouts of the first page of the files.
Wes sighed. “I knew those two would come back to haunt me again and again.” Wes pointed to a board on his wall. “Those two right there. I’ve had their pictures on the wall for a year. In both cases, we got a call from the parents that their child was missing. Cameras at the school show the boy, Cameron, leaving the building, and between there and his foster home, he disappeared. The girl, Melissa, disappeared from her grandmother’s house while she was playing. I always suspected that Melissa was taken by her father, because he returned to Mexico a week later and I figured that she was with him, but I didn’t have the resources to conduct an international search.”
Well, at least that explained one of the cases, and Grant set it aside. “Tell me more about Cameron.”
“Why? Do you think you have a lead?” Wes’s eyes brightened and his voice held excitement.
“Maybe. I don’t know. But what happened to him sounds a lot like what we can piece together about Bobby’s disappearance—the boy we recovered the other day. I was wondering if it could be possible the cases might be related. There are some similarities.”
Wes looked over the details of both cases. “I will agree to that. But a lot of child abduction cases have certain similarities. Kids taken from school or from their backyards while they were playing. It doesn’t mean one perpetrator; it means these are places where kids are. What makes this case so striking is where you found him. I mean, there has to be a reason why someonewould take a child. At least, there usually is. If there are foster parents, see if someone was trying to get leverage. Look into their backgrounds, just like we would with any other case, if for no other reason than to rule them out. Check on the owner of the house or past owners. It wasn’t like the house had a sign that there was a cistern, so our perpetrator had to know it was there.”
“I’m doing all that,” Grant said. “And maybe I’m being unreasonable, but this seems particularly evil. Why take a kid, keep him tied up, and then once he makes a mess, like kids will because he’s six, they toss him into a cistern as though he were trash?”
“That is something you’ll need to figure out. But there’s a saying: don’t look for a zebra in a horse barn.”
Grant shook his head. “Huh?”
