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“Shut the doors,” Seth ordered as he propped a boot on the metal step and hoisted himself inside.
“Think I’ll wait out in the cruiser,” the heavyset cop said. “It’s getting kinda crowded in here.”
With the three boys and a female paramedic, it was actually more than crowded inside the ambulance.
Maddy lay with a cold pack pressed to the side of his head. He looked pathetically thin, with his oversize, white-stockinged feet sticking up at the end of the stretcher.
While Seth had a mumbled exchange with the paramedic, Rainey dropped to her knees beside the child, brushing back his wavy hair to cup one palm on his forehead, signing frantically with her other hand. Maddy signed back.
“What’re they saying?” Seth asked Dillon, who was squeezed onto a narrow bench next to the stony, silent Aaron.
Dillon held up palms with pink-tinged dressings taped on them. “Beats me,” he lied.
Rainey heard Seth unzipping his bulletproof vest. “Ms. Chapman told me you can read sign.”
Dillon shrugged. “Okay. He’s telling her about the two big dudes. How we ran from that cave and all.”
Rainey could only peripherally note what was taking place around her. Her focus was on Maddy, the most vulnerable of her charges. Unlike the other two, Maddy didn’t have his anger to shield him. When she heard how one of the men had struck him with a shovel, she pressed shaky fingers to her lips, feeling unbearable guilt.
Seth took off his hat and squatted beside her. Rainey noticed he winced as he arranged his legs, knees spread wide, around the foot of the stretcher. He was a massive man, but he moved with such grace that his bulk didn’t seem overpowering unless he was actually in your space, as he was in Rainey’s now. He tilted his huge shoulders and an involuntary image erupted in her mind: herself clinging to those shoulders. Feeling guilty for even thinking such thoughts at a time like this, she snapped her gaze back to Maddy.
“Maddy’s okay,” Seth reassured her quietly as he touched a warm palm to her shoulder. “The paramedic said the bump’s not a concussion or anything serious. His pupils are reacting normally.”
Rainey nodded and turned to concentrate on Dillon now. “Let me see.” Gingerly, she lifted the dressings on Dillon’s hands to have a look.
Seth eyed the back of Rainey Chapman’s tangled blond hair, wondering what had come over the woman just now. Her lightly freckled cheeks had turned as red as a rodeo clown’s, and as she replaced the dressing, he noticed her fingers were trembling. Maybe the gravity of the situation was sinking in afresh now that she’d seen the boys.
“Did they bleed much?” she asked Dillon.
“Yeah. All over the place.” Dillon seemed proud of that fact.
“Did they give you something for the pain?”
“Nah. It don’t hurt.”
“I offered him some Tylenol.” The paramedic spoke up from where she wrote on her chart.
Seth watched the boy. His body language said he was a little sidewinder. For instance, right now he was unnecessarily swiping at his nose. And why did the kid feel the need to gain more of Rainey’s sympathy? Were the other boys getting too much of her attention or something? No. It was more likely that he was hiding something. Seth eyed the huge pockets of the boy’s baggy shorts. Another knife, maybe?
Rainey turned her attention to Aaron. “And are you okay?” she asked.
Seth studied the third boy in this trio of misfits, trying to figure out what made this kid tick. The redheaded child looked as if he liked his groceries a little too much. His freckled face was about as expressive as a fence post, though he showed some responsiveness to Rainey. When she ruffled his hair, he gave her the barest, most pathetic smile, a mixture of adoration and trust.
“Can he write down his version of things?” Seth asked Rainey.
“He can hear you, Sheriff,” Dillon interjected sarcastically.
“I’m a cop,” Seth clarified. “Not a sheriff.”
“Whatever,” Dillon said. “I already told you what happened. Those two guys was aiming to kill us.”
Seth turned calmly to the boy. “And I won’t let that happen. So now I want you to be quiet unless I ask you a question.”
“You think I’m lying, don’t you? Well, I’m not!” Dillon jumped up, suddenly agitated. “Let us out of here! We ain’t done nothing wrong!”
“Nobody said you lied,” Seth said, though now he was pretty sure the boy had, somewhere along the way. “Sit down.” He kept his tone quiet, but firm. “Now.”
Dillon sat and slouched back against the bench, crossing his arms over his chest in a gesture of defiance.
Rainey leaned around Seth’s shoulder. “Dillon, it’s not that we don’t believe you. Officer Whitman just needs to know the other boys’ version of things. They may have noticed something you didn’t.”
“They didn’t see nothing,” Dillon muttered.
Seth let out a pressured breath and scrubbed a hand over his face. This was going to be, as his uncle Tack would say, like herding squirrels. Seth was suddenly grateful for his experience with kids. Volunteer coaching. Junior Rodeo. Boy Scouts. Only these kids weren’t exactly Boy Scouts. “Okay, Ms. Chapman. Ask Maddy where they were and exactly what happened when they first saw the two men.”
As Rainey’s delicate hands signed the question, Seth couldn’t help but note the absence of rings on her fingers. He was already hoping she was unattached.
Before Maddy answered he shot Dillon a secretive look, then his hands started reluctantly moving. After Maddy had finished gesturing, Rainey said, “They were up on the old railroad bridge again. This time they were planning to tie a rope off of it so they could swing down into the river.”
“And?”
“And…” Rainey watched Maddy’s hands “…they saw lights up in that hollow area of the mountain where the cliffs and caves are. Dillon switched off their own flashlights and led them up.”
“I already told all of this to your partner!” Dillon interjected.
“Quiet,” Seth warned again. “Could they tell what the men were doing?” he asked Rainey.
“I said they were rappelling down the cliffs!” Dillon jumped up, practically shouting in Seth’s ear. “And they took some tools into the cave.”
Seth struggled to keep his patience. “Son, sit down before you make your hands start bleeding again.”
Dillon did so, but with a defiant thrust of his shoulder in Seth’s direction.
“What else does Maddy have to say?” Seth urged.
Rainey spoke as she watched the child’s hands. “They made their way to the opening of the cave and Dillon sneaked inside, but Maddy and Aaron hung back at the entrance.”
“They never went inside,” Dillon claimed. “And I didn’t go very far. I stopped when I saw the men digging back in there.”
Maddy started to sign something else, but Dillon’s hand flashed and the deaf child’s abruptly halted.
“What did Dillon say to him?” Seth’s gaze shot to Rainey.
“I have no idea. I wasn’t watching his hands. Dillon, don’t play games. This is serious.”
“I didn’t say nothing,” Dillon lied.
“Ask Maddy to repeat it.” Seth wanted to stay on point.
But Maddy wouldn’t answer. After looking at Dillon with trepidation, he shook his head. But his darting brown eyes betrayed him.
“See?” Dillon shouted. “They didn’t see nothing.” He leaped up in the confined space of the ambulance again, this time bumping his head against a low cabinet. Rainey jumped up, trying to examine the injury, but the boy jerked away from her and turned his angry countenance on Seth.
“You should be out there going after the bad guys! They was gonna kill us. They was gonna take us back to the bridge and make it look like a accident.” Dillon’s arms flailed like an agitated monkey’s as angry tears spurted to his eyes. “We didn’t do nothin’ wrong and those guys were gonna kill us. You gotta believe me!”
“Calm down.” Seth clamped a hand on Dillon’s shoulder and levered him back to the bench. “Right now I want you to sit down.” He returned his attention to Maddy. “Ask him what happened next.”
Rainey frowned at his sharp tone. Her green eyes glared at him as if he were the bad guy in this deal. “Officer, these children are really very frightened.”
“I’m aware of that. But right now a couple of extremely dangerous men are running around on the loose. Anything the boy knows that might help me catch them has got to come out. Now.”
Rainey turned to face Maddy, and started signing again.
“He said he’s sorry,” she interpreted when the child answered. “He says that if it hadn’t been for him the men wouldn’t have seen them. He said he must have made a noise or something that made them look up.”
She turned her gaze up to Seth. “Maddy can’t hear himself when he makes noises.”
“I understand,” Seth replied. He didn’t have her ask why Maddy might have made a sudden noise. Obviously the boy had seen something. Obviously the boys had all gone into the cave. But Seth was going to have a hard time getting a straight answer out of this bunch. “Then what?”
“The men chased them and grabbed Aaron first.”
Seth glanced at the obese child, who probably couldn’t move all that fast. The one most likely to get nabbed.
“Maddy told me he and Dillon could have gotten away,” Rainey continued as she watched Maddy’s agitated hands and facial expressions, “but Dillon turned around to help Aaron.”
Seth frowned, wondering why the child wouldn’t own up to his heroism.
Rainey was steadily watching Maddy’s hands. “They bound them up with a big roll of duct tape and dragged them to the front of the cave—”
Which was where Dillon claimed the other two had been all along, Seth noted.
“—and he says the men were fighting about something.”
“Ask him what they said.”
Rainey turned to Seth with an impatient frown. He felt briefly captured by the beauty of her huge green eyes again before the meaning of her stare hit him. What an idiot—forgetting that Maddy wasn’t capable of hearing anything. “Never mind,” he muttered.
“They were fightin’ about us.” Dillon jumped up again, spitting the words as he jabbed a finger at his own chest. “About how exactly to waste us. And you ain’t doing anything about it.” Beneath the youth’s blazing anger, Seth read genuine fear, and he sympathized, but a cop couldn’t permit any disrespect. This time it only took a sidelong look to make the boy sit down.
After Dillon quieted, Seth glanced at Aaron. The kid had sat slumped in a trance, except for an occasional flicker of interest over something Dillon said, when it seemed like a kind of silent signal passed among the three boys.
Rainey had said the redhead was a psychological mute. From some sort of trauma, Seth assumed. Uprooting these kids again—even if it was for their own protection—was not going to be easy.
He moved to the front of the ambulance and spoke quietly to the paramedic, who had been busily making notes on a clipboard. “Has that kid talked at all?”
The woman shook her head sadly. “Looks to me like he has no intention of talking anytime soon. Better watch that one, Seth.”
Seth had no experience with such things, and no time to gently pry information by other means from a child who would not, or could not, communicate. He’d have to rely on Dillon’s version of the conversation for now.
“Okay, Dillon.” He turned to the taller boy. “Tell me what they said.”
“They were fighting about how now that we saw them, and how we seen what they was doin’, we’d most likely tell. And one said they would have to give us the business—that means kill us—”
“Dillon,” Rainey interrupted, shooting a look of concern in Aaron’s direction. “Just tell what you heard.”
“Look, Mizz Rainey.” Dillon’s emphasis of the title was not respectful. “They had us all trussed up with duct tape. They wasn’t takin’ us to no picnic.” He threw up his bandaged hand and signed at Maddy. “They was gonna make us part of their bones collection.”
Maddy made one of his involuntary noises. “Dillon, hush,” Rainey hissed. “You are scaring Maddy and Aaron, and I won’t—”
Seth put a palm up to silence Rainey. He didn’t want Dillon to hush. “Bones?” This time he questioned it.
The lad blanched. “Did I say bones?”
Seth gave him a sharp look. Earlier the boy had said the Slaughters were aiming to dig up some bones, as if he knew in advance what they were going to do. Then he’d claimed he’d caught them in the act. If he let the boy keep talking, he’d eventually get to the truth. “What else?”
“They was arguing about whether we was town boys or not, meaning from Tenikah, I guess, and how long it would be before somebody noticed we was gone, and all that. And one of them said something about how Howard was really gonna be pissed.”
“Howard?” Seth’s pulse kicked at the name. “Are you sure he said Howard?”
“Yeah. There’s nothin’ wrong with my hearing. They was talking about how he’d know what to do or he’d be mad or something, like, you know, ‘We’re gonna have to tell Howard about this.’ Talk like that.”
“Go on.”
“Then one of them—like I told you, they looked exactly alike, if you ask me—except one was big and one was kinda regular.”
“They’re twins,” Seth stated.
“Twins?” Rainey glanced up at him.
“Afraid so.” That fact had complicated matters in the wonderful world of the law. “The Slaughter brothers have used their identical looks to escape punishment more than once.”
“Punishment? For what?”
He let his gaze slide to Aaron to indicate that this was not something to discuss in front of kids.
Rainey’s freckled cheeks flushed. “And now these two men are just running loose in the countryside?” she accused.
Seth didn’t want to tell her that apprehending Lonnie and Nelson Slaughter wasn’t as easy as walking up, ringing their doorbell and slapping the cuffs on. He didn’t want to tell her that he was looking for crucial evidence, and that the closest he’d come to obtaining that evidence had been when she had crashed through the woods and scared them off. He certainly didn’t want to tell her that finding that evidence now involved these boys. “We’ll discuss this later. What else did you hear, Dillon?”
“Well, then one of them said first they’d have to go back and get the…get the… I don’t remember.” Dillon looked down, picking at the dressing on his hand.
Maddy tried to sit up, his fingers flying like one possessed.
Rainey frowned as she saw what he signed.
“My hands really hurt!” Dillon bellowed.
“Excuse me, Seth.” The paramedic, a robust-looking young woman with a bushy auburn ponytail and melon-size breasts that strained her uniform shirt, stepped forward with a suture kit. “I’d better tend to those cuts now.”
