The Warning Read online

  Dolan reached out, turned a kitchen chair away from the table and took a seat. “What else is there?”

  “The unidentified dead guy had two bullets in the back of his head. It looks like they were fired from a gun the investigating officers found on site. Early ballistics information suggests that it’s the same gun used last night at Tate’s house. My guess is it’s Sarah’s weapon.”

  Dolan ran a hand through his hair. “This is out of control. What could she possibly be mixed up in? At least I can tell you this; she is not on the wrong side of the law.”

  “I know that Dolan. But there’s more.”

  “What else? Come on Sam, tell me everything.”

  “Do you remember Sarah’s parents, Caleb and Amelia?”

  “Yes I do.”

  “It appears they’ve been kidnapped.”

  Dolan shot up from the kitchen chair and walked to the front door. He looked out into the street.

  “How did this happen? How could this happen?”

  “I have no idea but I can tell you I’m pissed that two fellow officers have been killed. Whoever did this will get caught. They’ll probably be killed by the police before they’re brought in though.”

  “You know as well as I do that if these guys will kill a cop they won’t bat an eye at killing Sarah.”

  “You mean Sarah and Esmerelda.”

  “What?” Dolan asked as he spun away from the door and started back to the kitchen. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “It looks like the cops were doing a routine speed trap. They pulled Esmerelda’s car over. She’s missing too. The officers radioed in that they had Esmerelda, Sarah and Jack Tate and they were bringing them in. That’s all I got from upstairs on my break. This is serious.”

  “I know it’s serious. I can’t believe Esmerelda is mixed up in this too. It almost feels like it didn’t end four years ago.” He paused and then said, “I’m coming over. Get off early. We’ve got to do something.”

  “There’s not much we can do.”

  Dolan made it to his bedroom. He ripped open drawers and started to get changed. “Yes there is. We can find our friends. Have you heard if there were any witnesses to this shooting?”

  “Responding officers are on the scene right now talking to the few people who pulled over and called it in on their cell phones.”

  “Okay, do what you can to find out what they’re saying. I’ll be there inside a half hour.”

  “Dolan, let me…”

  Dolan terminated the call and stomped downstairs.

  He walked into the main hallway to grab his keys and was greeted by two men in black jackets.

  They were holding guns aimed at his face.

  Chapter 15

  The SUV lumbered along with its three occupants stuffed in the back, sitting awkwardly on the carpeted surface, destination unknown.

  “Sarah, the cop grabbed your notes and read something about a sect or cult. What was that?” Jack asked.

  Sarah sat leaned back against the door. “I don’t know exactly. That’s how the messages come through. Sometimes they’re specific about a certain person or event. That’s when I get more details. But when it comes to something I have to figure out it’s more of a riddle or just information. I’d assume that the people responsible for all this are the sect that the note was referring to.” She saw concern on Jack’s face. He looked quite worried. “What is it Jack? Do you know something?”

  In his eyes she detected something strange. “I think I know a little of what this is. There was even a warning about Armond.”

  Sarah glanced at Esmerelda and then back at Jack. “Go on.”

  “Armond used to be involved in cults. After he served his time in jail he formed a following. They did harmless stuff on the surface but I knew it had more to do with his sick desires. I think what happened to you and those other girls, four years ago, was Armond’s brainchild even though it looked like Alex was the one behind it. He was always trying to find a way to make money from his hallucinations.”

  “Could Armond be this powerful?” Esmerelda asked, her voice thick with doubt.

  Jack nodded and sounded confident when he said, “If left unchecked, yes. What I mean is if he has been at this as long as I suspect with the police staying off his back then he would have a large following and many insane people doing his bidding.”

  The driver got off the highway. Sarah looked out the back window trying to get a bearing on where they were but didn’t recognize anything. A sign raced past but all she got was a glimpse of its backside.

  “The fact that one person, a private citizen could become so powerful is insane,” Sarah said. “What does this have to do with us?”

  “Probably nothing,” Jack said. “Wrong place at the wrong time. You said you got a message that those two men were going to kill me at my house last night?”

  Sarah shook her head back and forth. “No, I received a message about my sister’s murderer. It wasn’t conclusive. It said that I would find her murderer and then it had your name and address. My goal last night was to question you to see how you were connected. I didn’t know if you were her murderer or not. When I got to your house, you were downtown with the police. I sat across the street and waited. That’s when I saw those men also staking out your home. They busted into the back of the van, checked their weapons and advanced on your house. One went in and one waited outside for you. I interfered because you were the only name my sister gave me and I assumed they had come to kill you.”

  Jack looked down into his lap. “You mean your dead sister? She’s the one who talks to you?”

  Sarah nodded. “It started about five years ago. Since then I have done some good things for people and saved my own life in more ways than one.”

  Jack tilted his head and frowned. “How have you saved yourself? Is there something you can do now to help us?”

  She looked at Jack and wondered how much to tell him. “I used to be depressed and a victim of trichotillomania, which means I used to be a puller.”

  “I feel dumb. What’s a puller?”

  “Someone who pulls their hair out strand by strand. It relieved the pain I felt on the inside. After what happened to me four years ago, I gained more self-esteem and found a way to stop pulling.”

  “Why would you do that?” Jack couldn’t hide his expression.

  “The operative word was ‘victim’. I didn’t do it by choice, really - it was more than that, I had to. It was comforting. But I’m past that now.”

  The SUV was coming to a stop. They all looked out the window. They were in a vast area of trees and grass with no visible buildings of any kind. The driver turned onto a dirt road.

  Esmerelda asked out loud where they were going. No one answered her.

  The SUV pulled into an opening about five hundred yards off the highway. Two other SUVs were parked in a small clearing, their back doors sitting open. Sarah counted four men, all wearing the same black jackets, standing by their vehicles. It looked like they were holding handcuffs.

  The vehicle they were in came to a stop and the driver got out.

  “Okay, everyone stay calm and do as they say. As long as they are the ones with the weapons they have the upper hand,” Sarah said.

  “I agree. I don’t want to die out here.”

  “If they wanted to kill us outright they wouldn’t have shown up with so many vehicles and handcuffs. That gives us time to figure this out.”

  The back door unlocked. Men were walking toward the truck. They all had guns in their hands now except for the driver of their SUV who reached to open the door.

  “Easy now,” he said and swung the door open so his cohorts could have a clear view. “Sarah, I want you first. Step out slowly and put these on,” he tossed handcuffs at her. “You don’t need to be told that if you make a wrong move you’ll get five or six bullets as your reward.”

  She looked over her shoulder at Esmerelda who nodded, “It’s okay. Take care of yourself
. Everything will work out.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah said and moved to the edge of the back of the vehicle.

  She dropped down to the ground and applied the cuffs to her wrists, keeping both arms in the front. One of the men walked up and grabbed her by the hair.

  The pain was intense. She felt her knees weaken. The only thing that kept her upright was the knowledge that if her knees buckled it would yank on her hair even more.

  “I am so angry I should fucking kill you right here and throw you in that ditch. You are such a meddling bitch. Do you know who is dead and lying in Tate’s foyer? No, you don’t. To you he was just another bad guy. To us he was a brother, you fucking whore.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” Sarah said. She thought her hair would separate from her scalp. Then the pressure was gone. Her peripheral vision saw his fist, but it was too late to do anything. Before it hit her cheek she thanked God that he’d holstered his gun. The punch knocked her to the ground. With her hands cuffed and nothing but her elbows to break her fall, the other side of her face connected with the gravel on the shoulder of the road. A sharp stinging rose immediately from her face, confirming a stone had torn her cheek on that side. What was most embarrassing was her cry of pain.

  For the last four years of saving people in scary situations and training to be better with hand-to-hand combat and weapons, she was surprised at how much that punch hurt. Her cheek felt double its normal size as the swelling started.

  Hands grabbed her just above the elbows. She was brought to a standing position again.

  “Please, she’s a young girl. Just leave her alone,” Esmerelda said.

  “Shut the fuck up old lady or you’re next.”

  The guy who punched her started to half walk, half drag her to one of the waiting SUVs. He opened the back door and shoved her in. She anticipated his move and got her legs up and in without banging them. Sarah tried to use them as a buffer for landing on the carpeted interior but only managed to go in tilted a little, landing hard on her right shoulder. At the angle she hit and with her wrists bound, she was surprised she didn’t dislocate it.

  A long time had passed since she had felt this kind of pain. No amount of training had prepared her for the splitting headache she was going through as a result of the hair pulling and face punching.

  He grabbed her again and brought her close. He had a black blindfold in his hand. Just before he wrapped it around her head she saw Esmerelda had been removed from the vehicle too. They were walking her to the other waiting SUV. Jack had remained in the original vehicle.

  Then the blindfold was on and secure. He shoved her back and slammed the door. She felt someone get in behind the wheel and then the vehicle was moving. She had no way to tell where they were going.

  She lay back and stretched, trying to will the pain away so she could think. She needed to figure this all out. Especially after what she had seen when they had pulled up to the clearing and gotten close to the waiting men: their untucked shirts all had small rips under the last button.

  The same rip Jack Tate had on his shirt.

  Chapter 16

  Sam had waited long enough. He’d tried Dolan’s house again and got no answer. He then tried his cell phone without success.

  That was half an hour ago. He tried the house number one more time as he turned onto Dolan’s street. Nothing.

  His tires squawked as he pulled up in front of Dolan’s house. In under a minute he was at the front door. It sat ajar, lights on behind it.

  “Dolan? You in there?”

  He heard nothing. Probable cause or not, Dolan was a friend. He pushed the door open and stepped in. Everything looked as it should. Nothing amiss. He searched each floor meticulously but quickly. With no sign of Dolan he left through the front door after securing it and ran back to his car.

  He had no idea where Dolan was and no reason to call it in except for the open door. It could be that Dolan got called out on some other errand or Sarah got in touch with him. Sam decided to give it some time; maybe he’d get a return call and if not, then he’d consider Dolan a missing person.

  It took him another thirty minutes to get to the highway area where the two cops had been shot. A temporary tent had been erected to shield the incident from the public driving by and to give respect to the fallen officers. The two-lane highway was reduced to one as the cops were rerouting traffic around the site.

  He understood. Two cops had been shot in cold blood and they had the body of one of the shooters. Multiple casings and a couple of guns on the ground would make this a crime scene lottery win.

  He showed his ID and pulled to the side, angling his car away from the setting sun. In the shade, he noticed the area was populated with vehicles and people in FBI jackets were milling around.

  How did they get involved so fast?

  Sam got out and walked over to one of the few officers he recognized.

  “Parkman, what’re you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same thing. Don’t they have you put away in the evidence locker?”

  “And they have you at a desk, which begs the question again. What are you doing all the way out here? Are you working with the FBI?”

  “I was the shooter this morning at Dolan’s house and I have a unique history with Sarah Roberts. Special Agent Jill Hanover asked for my assistance on this case and the request was granted.”

  “Assistance on what case? Since when does the FBI get directly involved in a police shooting this fast?”

  “Since today.”

  He heard Jill’s familiar voice.

  “Good to see everybody could join the party. What are you doing here, Sam?”

  “I just came from Dolan’s house. We were supposed to meet tonight. He wasn’t there and his front door was ajar. I thought maybe he would be out here. You know, trying to conjure something up as this was the last place Sarah was seen.”

  Jill got on her radio and told an agent to go to Dolan’s house. Good, Sam thought, that was the right move.

  She looked back at Sam. “I think we have all the help we need.”

  It was an obvious dismissal.

  “I’m coming down with déjà vu. This all reminds me of four years ago. Sarah kidnapped, I’m looking for her and you step in to take over the case.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t you ordered to stay out of it or be charged with obstruction of justice? Yet you didn’t and you got shot for your efforts? Do us all a favor and go home. We got this,” Jill said as she turned and walked away.

  “I don’t think she likes you,” Parkman said.

  “She’s never liked me. But that doesn’t matter. These are my friends. What can you tell me, Parkman?”

  “Not much; the investigation is just getting started.”

  “Just tell me what you know now,” Sam said and guided him to the side so they could talk more privately and further from the traffic going by.

  “All I know so far is much of what you probably know. There’s the dead guy in Tate’s house and the guy I shot at Dolan’s. Their names haven’t popped up yet. I was back at the station filling out paperwork when I heard about this. Half an hour later I get the call that the FBI has requested my presence. So here I am.”

  Sam gripped Parkman’s arm and pulled him farther away from the tents.

  “I can see it in your face. What else is there?”

  Parkman looked back at the assemblage of officers working on forensics and the other ones attempting to keep the area secured. Sam followed his gaze and saw Jill talking to two other FBI agents.

  Parkman turned back. “They found some notes on the ground.”

  “What did they say?”

  “I didn’t get a chance to memorize it, but I know there was some personal stuff about one of the cops who was killed here. Stuff about his wife and how dangerous this job could be. It looks like it was Sarah who wrote it.”

  “What else?”

  “Sam this is serious. Sarah didn’
t do what they think. They don’t know her like we do.”

  “Parkman, tell me what you know.”

  “The note said that the officers would die unless they let them go. The FBI is taking that as a threat. It’s in hand-writing. It looks like it was Sarah’s fingerprints on the gun that shot the guy in the black jacket. The way the FBI are seeing this is she shot the bad guy and then her gun was empty. The gun that shot the officers was still in the perp’s hand when we got here. So either the perp shot the cops or Sarah did because she was out of ammo and then she placed the gun in his hand.”