Max followed me in with two deputies behind us.
“Police! Anyone here?” he shouted.
No answer.
We split up and I took the kitchen. I tried the light switch and a bare bulb flickered into life in the center of the ceiling. The place was disgusting. We dodged bags of garbage, boxes piled up, dirty clothes. Clumps of food on dirty plates rotted on the table, more in the sink. A rat watched me as it nibbled on something in a corner. I kept walking. I heard the others, the sound of their feet slapping on the floorboards, the squeak of opening doors, as I circulated through the room. I held my breath, and slowly edged open the pantry.
Empty.
While the others finished combing the first floor, I joined Max in the hallway and we headed upstairs. The second-floor hallway had four doors. Four rooms. We walked in the first. A bed, rumpled sheets, piles of clothes. It looked like one Evan used when he slept at the house. I opened the closet door, half expecting someone to jump out. Plaid shirts and faded jeans hung haphazardly from hangers. Next was the bathroom, where wet towels soaked the floor. We circulated through another bedroom. Bare. Not even furniture. The closets gaped open with nothing but cobwebs inside. We tried the last door, at the top of the stairs, and it creaked open. This room was darker than the others. I flipped on the light. Someone had boarded up the only window.
A frayed and stained cushion lay on the floor, a bucket beside it. A single chair sat in the center of the room. The room smelled of urine.
“What’s that?” Max asked, pointing at the wall above the cushion.
A wave of disquiet surged through me. I thought once again of Sadie’s body and the bruises Doc had shown me. He’d thought they were caused by a chain.
“It’s an anchor,” I whispered to Max. It felt as if everything had clicked into place. I understood. “Evan chains them to it. He keeps them locked up. That way he doesn’t need any help, anyone to guard them.”
Max shook his head, as if it were too depraved to comprehend.
“Chief Deputy, we found something in a room down here,” one of the deputies called up.
The first-floor room appeared a near copy of the one we’d just left—a filthy mattress on the floor, a bucket, a boarded-up window, and a steel anchor screwed into the plaster wall.
My anger was building, but I reeled in my emotions. I couldn’t think at that moment about the chains and the anchors in the walls. I couldn’t let myself be overwhelmed by my growing sense of dread about what the monster who had the girls did to them. Finding Delilah required that I keep my cop face on. “There’s urine in the bucket upstairs and some down here. Two buckets.”
“Two hostages?” Max asked.
“Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking. Two hostages.”
“But where are they?” Max asked.
I shook my head. I didn’t have an answer.
As soon as we stepped outside, Mullins approached. He introduced the guy he had in the car with him as Officer Bill Conroy. I hadn’t met him before, but I felt sure that his face wasn’t usually ash gray.
“We checked out the barn, Detective Jefferies,” Mullins said, surprising me by dropping the Miss and without instruction addressing me by my title.
“Did you find anything?” I asked.
Mullins spoke, and I thought perhaps my heart might stop. “Yeah. And I put in a call for Doc Wiley.”
“We have a body?” I asked, afraid to hear his answer.
Every muscle in my chest contracted when he answered. “A woman. It’s bad.”
Twenty feet from its open door, the unmistakable stench of decomposition emanated from the barn. Max grabbed a handkerchief from his pocket. I took off my jacket, bunched it up and held it over my nose and mouth. It took our eyes a moment to adjust to the murkiness inside the barn. When mine did, I saw the decomposing body of a slender young woman. She hung by her handcuffed wrists suspended from a hook designed to move bales of hay. She had long dark hair, and wore a stained white prairie dress.
I took a closer look. Dried blood formed rows of irregular stripes down her dress. Thinking about how Doc said Sadie had been strangled, I examined her neck. She had a thin wound, ear to ear. Her throat had been slashed.
“Do you think it’s Delilah?” Max asked.
I felt ashamed to look at such an outrage and feel any relief, but I did. The girl’s body was bloated, her skin a ghastly greenish-brown. I would have bet she’d been dead for at least a week. In any case, I felt fairly sure this wasn’t my sister. “I don’t think so. Remember, Delilah has Sariah’s auburn hair.”
“That’s right.” He, too, sounded relieved, yet we were both looking at the girl as if we wanted to scream.
Another body. Another dead girl. Staring at the awful tableau, I couldn’t think of anything but Delilah. Evan Barstow was confined on his ranch, but he had to have her stashed somewhere. Did he have yet another hiding place? Or was my sister dead? I wondered if we’d ever find her or her grave.
Max must have understood how lost I felt. He took over. “I’ll send a few units to Evan’s ranch to make the arrest. Once the forensic folks arrive and we turn the scene over to them, we can head to the office to question him. Let’s not panic until we know more.”
The CSI unit came quickly, but by then, the last of the light gone, the sky had transformed to a deep navy blue and the stars shimmered. Outside the full moon shone, but inside the barn the dimness turned to pitch dark. The team set up a generator to power floodlights. The resulting ring of light gave the macabre scene an eerie glow.
I was leaning against Max’s car, waiting for him to
