Behind the detective, a van labeled “K-9 Unit” was pulling into the parking lot, but Joe saw no benefit in talking to people who couldn’t possibly know where his wife was. McDaniel was the one who could help him find Faye.
When faced with the detective in charge of the case, moving like a man whose panic switch had been tripped, Joe knew what he had to do. He set out to chase McDaniel. And to catch him.
When Faye reached the graveyard, nobody was there. Worse than that, she saw no sign of Kali’s footprints. Once she reached the end of the stone path, she saw the prints of a big man wearing dress shoes everywhere she looked, but the smaller prints were gone.
Faye knew Kali. Presuming the child was alive and able, she was fighting. Faye heard nothing.
Was he carrying her? Faye studied the man’s prints. Joe would have known by the depth of his footprints, but she didn’t have Joe’s skill.
She walked through the nearest gate and paused to look around. Kali’s kidnapper had left tracks all through the area near her, weaving in and out of the headstones and crisscrossing his own trail time and again. Then he had walked out the only gate other than the one that Faye had just entered. His trail continued on, disappearing into the shadows of overhanging trees. She wasn’t sure whether to follow it, because she didn’t know if he was carrying Kali or if he’d hidden her somewhere.
Faye had been so sure that she would find Kali here. The killer’s obsessions pointed to this burial ground.
Under other circumstances, she would have enjoyed exploring the lovely old cemetery. It was bright and alive with rose-of-sharon bushes, and climbing roses clambered over the graves and the fence surrounding it.
She might have stood there for an hour, weighing her chances, if she hadn’t heard a faint sound, thin, hoarse, desperate.
She crept cautiously past row after row of small headstones. Only a few things in the graveyard were taller than she was, and they were the mausoleums that stood at its center. If the killer came back, he would see her before she had time to hide. As she crept forward, she prayed that McDaniel was on his way.
The sound came again, tenuous enough to be blown away by a breeze, but it was real. Clutching her only weapon, a purse loaded with a few ounces of pebbles, Faye stepped forward. As she did, she left the gate open behind her, in case she needed to get out fast.
There were simple headstones all around her now, more with each step, some so old that the lettering had worn off their faces. Chubby-cheeked stone cherubs marked the graves of infants. Archangels, hand-carved wings outstretched, decorated the mausoleums ahead of her.
She passed a small tent made of somber gray canvas, with a few folding chairs waiting beneath it, next to a big pile of soil. Beyond, a deep rectangular hole yawned. The darkness at its bottom terrified Faye, but she knew that she had to go there. What if he had put Kali in her own mother’s open grave?
Fighting memories of Frida in her first grave, mortally injured but alive, Faye walked to the edge of the open pit and looked down. No one was there, and she was profoundly relieved, but Kali was still missing.
Then she heard the faint sound again.
Faye held her breath and listened, really and truly listened. And there it was. Another sound, not a voice this time. Something firm was striking the ground, and it was coming from her right.
It could have been the sound of a killer letting the blade of a heavy shovel drop a few inches to the ground, but it wasn’t. Or she believed that it wasn’t. This sound was coming from the same direction as the quiet little whimper, and she thought it was the sound of a determined little girl throwing herself to the ground, again and again, trying to get herself free.
Faye looked at her feet, hoping to find footprints that told her which direction to go. They were there, but she wished by all that was holy that they led somewhere else, anywhere else.
The sound led her straight to the biggest crypt at the center of the graveyard. At its door, she saw the footprints of a large man wearing dress shoes, who had entered the crypt, then come out and walked away.
Chapter Forty-five
McDaniel moved through the trees as silently as he could manage. The man in the white shirt was alone, which he supposed was a good thing. He didn’t know where Kali was, or Faye either, but he knew that neither of them was being held by this man.
The dress code for a funeral was frustrating him. Every single man who might have grabbed Kali was wearing dark pants and a light shirt. To find out who this man-in-a-white-shirt was, he would need to move closer. So he did.
The man was running hard, like someone with a destination. He could see something McDaniel couldn’t see.
Kali? Faye? Both? McDaniel had no idea. But as his quarry moved his head back and forth, scanning as he ran, he gave himself away. A stray glint of light reflecting from his shaved head revealed him to be Linton, who was running with the efficiency and power of a man with military training.
Joe could see Detective McDaniel and, ahead of the detective, he could see the person the detective was chasing, a big man with a shaved head. Like everyone else but Joe, he was wearing dress clothes. He didn’t seem to know that McDaniel was after him, because he wasn’t so much running away from the detective as he was sprinting across McDaniel’s path from left to right.
The ground beneath Joe’s feet was slick with pine straw and leaves, but he maneuvered over similar terrain every day of his life. His surefooted lope gave him
