Escape chapter 2A

Kelly didn’t want to get out of the Jeep. She was too tired and weak. The Scrambler sat in the middle of the old ghost town, Booth… just half a dozen dilapidated buildings… and she just sat in the seat. But she’d stopped shivering and a little color had come back into her face. Garrett had already given her his last sandwich, and another Coke. She’d finished off a bottle of water and a couple of candy bars, too. But she still only barely talked to him. Nothing beyond a few one-word answers to basic questions.

“Kelly,” he finally said, “I want to help you. You just need to do is tell me what I can do. Where do you need to go? What can I do to help?”

Her eyes were sad and glistening. She was wringing her hands, like she was trying to scrub something off of them. “I don’t know… I don’t know where to go.” She started to cry in earnest. She wrapped her arms around herself and her shoulders shook as she sobbed.

Garrett didn’t know what to do. When he’d gotten too close to her before, she’d been jumpy and nervous, but everything inside him said she needed to be held, that he could give her some of his strength if she just let him hold her. He reached his arm across the Jeep and put his hand on her opposite shoulder. She leaned toward him and folded into his arms. He could feel her hot breath through his shirt, and she sobbed in aguish into his chest. He just sat and held her, seemingly for an hour, but only a couple of songs had played softly on the radio in the background.

She finally pulled back and looked at him. Her face was wet with her tears, her eyes puffy and red. “I’m sorry, Garrett. I’m a mess. You’re being so nice to me, but I just can’t…” as she started to cry again and clutched him to her.

“It’s ok. We’ll figure it out,” he said, continuing to hold her.

A little while later she had gathered up her composure and they continued through the valley. She started to come out of her shell a little more and talked to him. He found out that her family had just moved back from Washington state. They were looking for houses and had been staying in an extended stay hotel.

She, along with her brother and parents, had been driving around looking at houses in Grand County. Kelly and her brother had been arguing about something in the back seat when her mother screamed. She turned to look and caught a flash of a person in the middle of the road before her father swerved to avoid him. The car tumbled down into a ravine and landed upside down.

Kelly knew she had lost consciousness at some point because the next thing she remembered was that it was dark, and someone was carrying her up the side of the ravine. She passed out again and when she woke up, she was tied to a table in a small room and her clothes were gone.

Suddenly she stopped talking again. Garrett figured that she’d gotten to a part she was still trying to process. She didn’t tell him that the man had raped her, both before and after she regained consciousness.

“Look, there’s only one extended stay hotel on this side of town. We can go there and see if they have heard from your parents. We can check with the police there… and we can try to find the accident scene if we need to… Whatever it takes, ok?”

“Thank you, Garrett,” she said as she smiled at him, tears still rolling down her cheeks. She reached up and pulled a strand of hair behind her ear.

***

Deke Stutz pulled back into his brother’s driveway. A state crime scene van was there, and the techs were combing through the shed. Apparently, they had already seen his brother and released him to the funeral home. For the first time, he took a closer look around. This was going to be a problem.

When he looked more closely at the inside of the shed, he saw the workbench. There were ropes hanging off it, and they were bloody. There were other bloodstains on the top of the bench and on some of the tools around it. Then he noticed that the crime scene techs were taking blood samples. He had no doubt that they would find DNA evidence from at least a couple of unsolved disappearances that he had been able to deflect away from his brother. He was screwed, it was only a matter of time.

Luckily, there shouldn’t have been anything that tied him to this case, except for his brother.

“I saw tracks going off into the woods back there. I’m going to follow them,” he said to his deputy, who was still there watching over the scene.

“Need help, Deke?” Tate asked him.

“Naw, if I do, I’ll give a shout.”

Sheriff Deke Stutz trotted off into the woods along a path. She’d made it pretty easy to track her. Her steps were shuffling, and she had left an easily visible line. There was blood on a few trees where she’d leaned against them, as well.

An hour later he came across the creek where it crossed Stage Road. There were a few other footprints… booted ones… and then just the tire tracks.

“Gotta be that Jeep,” he said to the trees.

He needed to figure out how to find it. The trail through Booth Valley had at least eleven exits. Four of them were in other counties. But putting out a BOLO for a “blue Jeep” would be a little vague. He didn’t have a plate number, or even a model. He thought it might have been a CJ or a Wrangler. Not much to go on… and, when the state lab started getting results back, things were going to close in around him.

Next part...

This is the fourth part of Escape, an ebook available for free download to subscribers at my blog, LaneBailey.info. I hope you enjoyed it.