Cross My Heart ac-21 Read online

  “They have to be,” I agreed, scanning the area with the glasses, understanding that we did not want to cross that open field to get to the farmhouse. We could be seen too easily.

  My wife was thinking the same way and said, “We take the ditch on the left side of the road up to that tree line, then go across.”

  It made sense. We took off, running low at the left side of the road, and jumped down into the drainage ditch. Stooped over, even I couldn’t be seen as we covered the hundred and fifty yards until the line of pine trees blocked any possible view of us from the farmhouse.

  Moving along the road, hugging tight to the big conifers, we crept toward the farmyard and stopped behind the very last tree. Carney’s Impala was parked next to the house and a door. The shades were drawn in every window. And what was that noise? Almost like chickens clucking?

  “Cover me, then call for backup,” I whispered, drawing my pistol and meaning to run around the pines, through the brush, and get to the side of the house as fast as possible.

  But when I cut around the last tree, I ran directly into an explosion of cackling, squawking, and beating wings and flying feathers that became a flock of wild turkeys flushing all around me, ten or more.

  I almost had a heart attack, so surprised and startled that it was at least ten seconds before Bree grabbed me by the elbow and together we sprinted around the back of the Impala and plastered ourselves against the side of the farmhouse.

  “So much for being sneaky,” I whispered, still shaking inside but aiming my pistol at the side door, expecting it to open at any moment. After that much racket, how couldn’t Carney come to investigate?

  But a minute passed, and then two. Was it possible he hadn’t heard any of it? Where was—?

  A man’s voice, the words unclear but the tone threatening, echoed to us from inside the house. Then a woman’s voice chimed in, equally abusive in tone.

  Bree held up two fingers. Carney was in there with his accomplice. The woman who’d kidnapped the—

  But then a second woman began making noises in a pleading tone.

  A man yelled the first distinct words: “Shut up, you uncaring bitch!”

  There was silence before babies began to bawl.

  CHAPTER 71

  “I’m going in there right now,” my wife whispered.

  “I am, too,” I murmured. “But let’s do this by the book. Go around front, and through the door in thirty seconds. Remember, this guy is ex-marines. Very good with a gun.”

  Bree understood and in a crouch ran around the front of the house and up onto the dilapidated front porch. I sidled along beneath the windows, climbed the rickety back stoop, reached out with my left hand, and turned the knob until I heard it click. The door came loose.

  Swinging it open, I did a quick head bob around the doorframe, and another, enough to tell me that the old kitchen was empty. The babies were still crying. My gun led as I stepped gingerly inside, seeing a cereal box and a used bowl with milk still in the bottom. The air smelled of food rotting.

  The babies’ crying grew louder, but the sound was weird, off, and coming from a room on the other side of the kitchen. Blood pounding in my temples, I heard the front door open and Bree take two creaking steps before a woman started yelling over the babies’ cries.

  “What did you expect?” she taunted. “After what you did to us? What did you expect?”

  “Please!” the other woman cried. “I’ve done nothing to you. The babies have done nothing to you!”

  “Liar!” a man roared, and I heard a loud slap.

  Taking two quick steps to the doorway, I shouted, “Police!” and ducked into the room, expecting to see three adults and two babies.

  Bree came in through another doorway. We stared at each other, and then at the ratty old couch, a coffee table, and a laptop computer, and no one else.

  “Please, no more!” the woman sobbed, and I understood.

  Going straight to the laptop, I spun it around. “Jesus.”

  Naked from the waist up, Cam Nguyen sat on a chair at the center of the screen. She held the two crying children and was sobbing hysterically. Cribs flanked her. In the foreground, there was an old claw-foot bathtub. In the lower right-hand corner of the screen a red Record button glowed, and I understood. Carney wanted memories of his sick ceremony. Same reason he’d stolen the hard drive at the spa.

  “Where is he?” Bree demanded, horrified. “Where’s the woman? Where are they?”

  “I don’t know. The feed must be wireless, a—”

  Suddenly we saw the back of Carney’s head and his canvas jacket, and then the length of him. He was dragging a garden hose, which he dropped into the bathtub. He looked at Cam Nguyen and said, “You remember the tub, don’t you, Mommy?”

  CHAPTER 72

  “He’s going to drown the babies in there,” Bree said in a wavering whisper. “Where are they? Where’s that room?”

  I found the Mute button and hit it. “We have to move. We have to listen.”

  Given the way the babies and Cam Nguyen had been crying, we should have heard them if they had been anywhere in the main or upper floor of the farmhouse. But there was nothing but the gentle clacking of tree limbs outside.

  I glanced back at the screen for some clue. But aside from the cribs, a table behind Cam, and the bathtub, the room was nondescript and small, with plain white walls. Carney came toward the camera and passed beneath it, disappearing from view.

  I released the Mute button and heard that woman’s voice coming from somewhere off-screen, saying, “That’s it, Mommy. Be scared of the water, just like we were.”

  Then a man’s voice followed, saying, “You didn’t give us a chance, so we can’t give you one, either.”

  “That wasn’t Carney,” I said.

  Bree shook her head. “The other two must be in some kind of anteroom off that room. The barn?”

  “Or the basement,” I said.

  “I’m going out … shit, I never called for backup,” she said.

  “Call on the way to the barn. I’m going downstairs. If you hear them, you call me, understand? Go through the kitchen and out that side door.”

  Bree nodded, turned, and left, while I went looking for a way downstairs, the ranting of various voices and the crying of Cam Nguyen and the babies on the computer making me more frantic than ever to find them before it was too late.

  After two tries revealed only an empty pantry and a small closet, a door in the hallway off the kitchen opened onto a rickety wooden staircase. I listened. Nothing. I flipped on the electric switch. No lights, either.

  Digging in my pocket, I came up with a Maglite and held it under the barrel of my pistol as I dropped down the staircase into a basement filled with moldering junk and rusting tools.

  They have to be in the barn, I thought, and almost turned to climb out after Bree. Then my flashlight beam picked up footprints in the dust that quickly became a well-trodden path across the basement to an empty set of floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves. Why there? Had Carney emptied the shelves recently? What had been there?

  For the second time, I almost turned around.

  Then I felt the slight breeze hitting my cheeks. But it wasn’t coming through the open door and down the stairs. It was blowing at me from the direction of the empty shelves. Moving fast now, I crossed to them, shining my light, seeing thick dust, and then fingerprints on the right side.

  I reached out and tugged. The shelf barely moved. I set my pistol and flashlight down and grabbed it with both hands. The entire unit came free of the wall and swung toward me, moaning on rusting hinges.

  “Alex?” Bree whispered over the radio. “I called Montgomery—”

  I snatched up my radio, whispered, “Come back.”

  Nothing.

  “Bree?”

  Nothing.

  I hesitated, ducked down into the narrow, low-ceilinged tunnel, and tried again. “Bree?”

  But all I got in return that time was static.r />
  CHAPTER 73

  Outside in the mist, Bree clicked on the Transmit button of her radio again but got zero. Her unit had died. She set it down on an old picnic table and hesitated, wondering whether to call Alex on his cell.

  But then she heard something and all thoughts of calling her husband disappeared. It had been a brief noise that seemed to come from inside the old barn. Gun up, she angled fast through the high grass toward the near front corner of the sagging structure. Had that noise been the breeze whistling softly through the decrepit building? Or a muffled cry of desperation?

  She stopped, listening, and then heard it again, short and almost squeaky, as if she was catching only the highest part of a longer cry. Up close, she could see how the barn had come off the sills and foundation in places. Was it safe?

  The cry came a third time, louder, and Bree turned selfless. She was here to save those children from a madman. Nothing less would do.

  She rounded the corner toward a set of big sliding doors and tried to push one open. It moved about eight inches before jamming in the mud. But it was enough for her to squeeze through into a dim space that smelled of old hay and spoiled leather.

  Pigeons flushed from roosts on the beams above her and fled for that burned hole in the roof. Bree got out her Maglite and shined it around, seeing a loft, and a trail where lightning had spiraled from the roof down a massive wooden support post and scorched the floorboards.

  The noise came louder now. Bree recognized words.

  “Please!” Cam Nguyen was crying. “Please!”

  It was coming from deep beneath the floorboards.

  Bree shined her light, seeing gaps between the boards, and got on her knees, looking through the gaps to see a stone-walled basement cluttered with rusting old farm equipment.

  There had to be a way down. She moved farther into the barn, casting the light into every corner and stall, looking for a stairway or a trapdoor. But she found none. Maybe she had to go back outside, find an entrance to the lower level. She turned and headed toward the doors.

  As she crossed the charred lighting scar on the barn floor, she heard cracking before planks broke away beneath her.

  CHAPTER 74

  I would later learn that a man named Ezra Pike must have built the tunnel sometime in the late 1850s. Pike was a farmer on the land, a Quaker, an ardent abolitionist, and a vital cog in the Underground Railroad, which helped slaves reach Canada before and during the Civil War.

  But that day, from my perspective, Pike’s tunnel was being used as a pathway to enslavement, torture, and murder. I was having no part of it, and that steeled me, made me determined to rescue Cam Nguyen and those babies. I was fifty feet down the tunnel when I heard the babies squawking somewhere ahead of me. And then the muffled voices of Carney, Nguyen, and the other man and woman we hadn’t seen yet.

  Adjusting the beam, changing it to red, I cupped the bulb of the slender flashlight and stalked forward, then turned the light off altogether when the voices got loud enough to distinguish.

  “Who’s going to be first, Kenny-Two?” the woman asked.

  “I hate to say it because it’s so sad, sister, but it’s the boy, of course,” Carney replied. “Kevin was the first to go.”

  His sister? I thought. Kevin? I moved close enough to see light glowing through cracks in the plank wall that blocked the way.

  “I went first?” the other man said in a wavering voice.

  “I saw it with my own eyes,” Carney replied in a grief-stricken voice. “She drowned you first, little brother. Mother of the year! Mother of us all!”

  I pressed my eye to a slit in the wood and saw into a low-ceilinged space with a stone foundation, Ezra Pike’s root cellar, a way station on the long road to freedom. Carney had recently built a crude room inside the root cellar that stuck out of the stonework to my left about fifteen feet. I could see exposed two-by-fours and thick foam insulation coating what would turn out to be plywood walls. Soundproofing, I guessed.

  But for some reason Carney didn’t care about sound that day. He had left the steel door ajar. Light spilled out of the room into the main root cellar.

  “So Kelli went into the water next?” Kevin asked.

  “As soon as there were no more bubbles rising in the tub,” Carney replied as if in awe. “She wanted us to go in reverse order of how we came into the world. Isn’t that right, Mommy?”

  My hands searched the corners of the door that blocked the tunnel, trying to find the mechanism that would open it. But I couldn’t find it.

  Carney said, “Mommy, give me Kevin to hold while you get down on your knees by the tub. You’ve got dirty work to do.”

  In desperation, I pushed against each edge of the wall. The left one budged just as Cam Nguyen screamed, “You’re insane! I won’t do it!”

  The babies began to screech and cry. Over their wailing, from somewhere far above me, I thought I heard a crash.

  CHAPTER 75

  Bree felt the floor giving way and instinctively threw her arms out wide. She fell through splintered wood that ripped at her legs, waist, and ribs before she slammed to a stop, trapped at her armpits. Her lower body and legs dangled in the basement below.

  The impact had knocked the pistol from her hand. It lay a few inches away. But she still clutched the little Maglite.

  She felt like she’d broken a rib, maybe two. And was that feeling blood?

  Like ice fracturing, boards all around her started cracking and popping. For a terrifying moment she thought it would all collapse and she’d plunge through onto the rusting blade of some old piece of farm equipment in the darkness below her. But the boards held long enough for her to realize that she might escape if she acted quickly.

  To get her elbows beneath her, she wiggled, strained, and struggled, trying to ignore the sharp pieces of wood biting at her from all sides like so many sharks’ teeth. She made it to her elbows and stopped there, breathing hard and thinking for the first time that the floor busting must have made a terrible noise.

  Had Carney heard it? Was he coming for her from wherever he was keeping Cam Nguyen and the babies? Would he spot her lower body, shoot first, and ask questions later?

  Sweat poured off her brow and she began to breathe short and fast. She realized she was starting to panic and forced herself to take deep breaths, to calm down, to take things one step at a time.

  She began to move her upper body back and forth, trying to get enough momentum to rock forward up onto her hands and then push herself up out of the hole. But she gasped in pain; one of the sharp pieces of wood had found her broken ribs. And she knew for certain now that she was bleeding. She could feel the blood soaking the side of her blouse.

  Biting against the pain, ignoring the fact that she was wounded, Bree tried rocking to her left. It worked, giving her just enough room to sharply wrench her weight up onto her right elbow and then her right hand, which found one of the sharp pieces of wood sticking in her ribs. She pushed at it, trying to get it out of the way so she might rock to her right and get her left hand down.

  But when she did, the piece of wood snapped away, taking another board with it.

  Her right arm and shoulder scraped down through the hole. Her gun went through, too. She heard it clang below in the darkness.

  Her left elbow and forearm slid toward gravity, and she began to thrash and grope wildly beneath her.

  CHAPTER 76

  For a second or two I thought Carney had heard the noise above me, Bree, no doubt, and I got up my gun, figuring he’d come out of the room to check. But the screaming of babies in that confined space must have masked the sound of the crash, because I heard the woman Kelli say, “Course you will do it, Mommy. You’re a crack whore and we know what crack whores will do.”

  “When times get rough and the drugs get thin,” Kevin added.

  “I won’t do it!” Cam Nguyen screeched, and I pushed at the passage door, getting it open enough for me to squeeze through into the root cellar
.

  “Then I’ll make you, Mommy,” Carney said, and I heard a sickening thud that set the babies off all over again.

  “That’ll fix her,” Carney’s sister said. “Fix her good, Kenny-Two.”

  Gun up, I took two steps toward the open door, sniffing the air, smelling body odor and diapers and fear.

  “I’ll get her on her knees,” Carney’s brother, Kevin, said.

  I took three more soft steps and then a fourth sideways into the light that streamed from the door, looking straight into the chamber of horrors.

  Cam Nguyen was slumped in a chair. Her head swung lazily the way a boxer’s will when he’s been dazed by a blow. Her nipples and lips had been smeared with lipstick, making them grotesquely large and gaudy. The babies squalled on the floor next to the tub, which was now close to full. But where were Carney and the others? They had to be either to the immediate left or right of the door.

  I heard the rattle of metal to the left as I eased toward the doorway.

  From what sounded like the same side, Carney said, “Is everybody in? The ceremony’s about to begin.”

  The muzzle of my gun leading, I did a head bob left. My brain registered the fact that no one was there an instant before white fireworks went off in my head, blinding me as I stumbled forward and crumpled.

  CHAPTER 77

  Groping crazily beneath her with her right hand, Bree felt the burned boards under her left elbow splinter and then collapse. As she fell, her right cheek struck the jagged edge of the hole, which stabbed and cut her. Her head twisted from the pain and her right arm snapped up to protect her face from further damage.

  That reflex saved her life. She felt something hit her hard beneath her upper arm and elbow; and for an instant she was hung up on something metal, tubular and strong, like a pipe. The rest of her body swung forward beneath it, dislodging her, and she fell a third time.