Kurt
The SWAT team stormed the house first, even though Kurt knew there was no way Collin McAllister was holding Mollie there. As they searched inside from top to bottom, Kurt walked across the back yard to the big red barn he’d seen on the PVA website. He struggled with the doors, but after tugging on the handle several times, he managed to swing them wide open. With his gun held at arm’s length, he swept each stall on the bottom level, but they were all empty. No horses, no cows, no sign of Mollie.
He spotted the ladder to the loft, tucked his gun into its holster, and climbed the rickety wooden rungs until he reached the top. Again, nothing but straw and hay. No sign whatsoever that anyone had been there recently, let alone a kidnapped teenage girl.
Back on the ground, he searched again, this time scanning for any signs of a trap door that might lead down to a cellar. On Kurt’s family’s farm, they’d had a cellar underneath the barn where his parents stored canned vegetables and fruits between harvests. It had been built by previous owners during the Second World War to serve as a bomb shelter, but the Jamisons had found a more practical use for it. Sometimes he and Frankie would play down there and pretend they were at war, hiding from commies, or Indians, whoever the bad guy happened to be that day. Addie usually played a damsel in distress, and Frankie always insisted he’d be the one to rescue her. Looking back now, Kurt realized Frankie had probably always loved Addie.
After a good ten or fifteen minutes of searching every square inch of the barn, he came up empty. So, he’d been wrong. Collin hadn’t kept Mollie in the barn. But then where? With over forty acres of farmland that all looked the same, there was no way of knowing.
Kurt stepped outside in the cold and stood behind the barn with his hands on his hips, surveying the McAllister farm’s land. He tried to stave off more memories of him, Frankie, and Addie as children playing on his own family farm. Now wasn’t the time to reminisce about his childhood. He had to find Mollie before Collin McAllister hurt her any more than he probably already had. And before Franklin Cartwright found him. This was almost as important as saving the girl, in Kurt Jamison’s book.
Think, goddamn it. Think! He had to be somewhere on this property. Where else could McAllister hide girls away from the world and hurt them without anyone around him growing suspicious? And, of course, there was the fact that he’d stopped at the rundown grocery store for some unknown reason, and that store was on the way to the farm. There wasn’t much out past this property. They were nearly on the Madison County border, and if they traveled any further down DeLong, they’d run smack into the Kentucky River.
“Hey, Whiskey,” Lonnie said from behind Kurt, startling him.
Kurt turned around. “Please tell me you found something in there.”
“Didn’t find the girl, obviously. Or any trace of McAllister. But I found something after SWAT cleared the house I think you should probably come see.”
Intrigued and hoping Lonnie had found something that would lead them to Mollie, Kurt marched quickly toward the house in step with his partner.
The inside was conservatively decorated, and the air smelled of citrus and mothballs. What little furniture the room held looked like antiques that might be worth some money at auction. An orange cat meowed, jumped off the large wooden kitchen table, walked up to Kurt, and rubbed up against his leg. Lonnie chuckled, but before he could make a joke, Kurt gently kicked the cat away.
In the living room, a threadbare green couch and matching arm chair sat facing a wooden entertainment center, but the television was missing. Kurt noted this as a bit odd, but continued his visual scan of the room. On the wall above the couch hung a painting of Jesus Christ with several young children sitting at his feet. Given their reason for being there, the picture seemed a bit disturbing. Surely Collin McAllister wasn’t a religious man. Or maybe he was one of those overzealous, right-wing nuts who believed everything they did had been commanded and ordained by God. Kurt shivered at the thought.
“What did you want me to see?” Kurt asked over his shoulder.
“This way.”
Kurt followed his partner down the dimly-lit hallway a few paces until Lonnie stopped at the doorway of a bedroom on the right, which stood wide open. Lonnie pointed to a bureau in the corner. Kurt stepped into the room and looked around. To the right was a twin sized bed with a couple of pillows and a patchwork quilt which was folded back. Someone had been sleeping here recently. A rocking chair sat in one corner and a cherry bureau in the other. There were no decorations, no paintings, and no personal items anywhere.
“Collin’s room?” Lonnie asked.
“Probably,” Kurt responded. “What’s with the bureau?”
“Go check it out,” Lonnie said, seeming a bit too excited for Kurt’s liking.
When he approached the dresser, Kurt noticed a large black photo album lying on top of a white lace doily. It was open to the first page. Kurt looked at Lonnie, who gestured for him to go ahead and look. When he did, Kurt saw the very first picture was of a man in his mid-thirties with his arm around a pretty young woman who had a baby on her right hip. The woman was smiling, but the man had a more serious look on his face. His brows were furrowed, and a cigarette hung from between his lips. Kurt realized instantly he was looking at a picture of Julian and Martha McAllister and their infant son, Collin. But there was no way Lonnie knew about the whole Julian connection, so Kurt wondered what had his partner so excited.
“Keep looking,” Lonnie said when Kurt shot him a curious look.
Kurt reached into his pocket, pulled out a pair of blue latex gloves, slapped them on, and flipped the page. The next thing he saw was a newspaper clipping from April 2, 1979. The headline read LOCAL GYM OWNER STILL MISSING, COPS SAY. Kurt didn’t read the article because he already knew how that story played out. He kept flipping. It soon became obvious that Collin was obsessed with his father’s disappearance. But toward the end, the articles became more current. One clipping was dated January 15, 2014. It told the sad tale of a twenty-year-old college junior who had gone missing two weeks prior and still had not been found. In the upper right-hand corner of the article was a picture of the missing girl, Elena Patrinko, and around her face, Collin had drawn a red heart.
Kurt fought back the bile that rose in his throat as he flipped through the rest of the book and realized Collin McAllister had kept a scrapbook about all the girls he’d kidnapped—and killed—before Mollie. It was a macabre reminder for Kurt that he had failed at finding those poor young women. He felt dizzy, and his mouth was dry. He would have to live with that guilt for the rest of his life. The only thing he could possibly do to redeem himself was to find Mollie…alive.
Kurt didn’t read the articles. He’d read them all before, anyway. But right as he was about to close the book, he saw the last page had one picture taped right in the center. Kurt bent down and squinted. He cursed himself for refusing the bifocals, but after a couple of seconds of intense focusing, he was able to discern that the picture was of a tall, gnarly-shaped tree. That was it. Nothing but a tree.
What the hell?
Kurt’s mind raced. Why would Collin have a picture of this tree on the very last page of his scrapbook? It meant something, but what? He wiped the sweat that was beaded up on his brow and steadied himself against the bureau before he passed out.
“Whiskey, you okay over there?” Lonnie asked from the doorway. “I told you you’d want to see it. It’s some pretty messed up shit, isn’t it? Looks like he’s definitely our perp for all the missing girls. And he’s pretty obsessed with his father’s disappearance in ’79. But I can’t make heads or tails of that tree.”
It wasn’t just a picture of a tree. Kurt knew it in his gut. That tree meant something to Collin. Enough so that he put it at the end of his creepy scrapbook. It marked something. Maybe that was where he buried the girls. He looked down at the picture again and studied it as closely as he could. The tree held no further clues, but just as his eyes began to hurt from straining so hard, he saw it. There, on the ground, about two feet away from the base of the tree, was a handle. Like the handle of a door. Why on earth would there be a handle in the middle of the…
It came to Kurt like a bolt of lightning. He pulled the picture out of the album, spun around on his heel, and held it up for Lonnie to see.
“It’s there!”
“What’s where?” Lonnie looked utterly confused.
“The bumpy tree marks the spot, Lonnie. He’s got a bunker under the ground!”