best thing for everyone was for Olivia to speak to the authorities and give them a statement, and then be spirited away from here and into some sort of protective custody far away from Cold Plains.
It was this thought that filled his head as he slipped back into the cave where June and two other women were seated at the rough-hewn table. Olivia wasn’t one of them.
“She took a shower and then went to bed,” June said before he could ask. “The poor thing was absolutely exhausted after being in the woods for two nights all alone with her baby.”
Micah poured himself a cup of coffee and then joined them at the table. “Hawk is planning on checking out her story. We want to make sure she really is who she says she is.”
“Her little boy is a doll. I peeked in on him when I heard they’d arrived,” Darcy Craven said.
As always when Micah looked at Darcy with her beautiful long, dark hair and blue eyes, he felt a strange sense of familiarity. Her eyes were those of a woman he’d known a long time ago in his hometown, but then again he couldn’t imagine what this young woman would have to do with anyone from his past.
He knew little about Darcy, only that she’d come to Cold Plains seeking news of a mother she’d never known and had developed a romance with Rafe Black, a new doctor in town.
Rafe had shown up in town because the fourth murder victim, Abby Michaels, an old girlfriend of his, had contacted him to tell him he was the father of her three-month-old baby boy. Abby’s body had been found in a wooded area in Laramie, fifty miles away from Cold Plains Day Care Center, where she’d worked as a teacher’s aide. The baby, now an almost nine-month-old named Devin, had been missing since her disappearance.
A month earlier a little boy had been found by police officer Ford McCall with a note stating that he was Devin Black and needed to be reunited with his father. According to what Micah had heard, Rafe believed he’d finally had a happy ending, not only with his son found but also with a romantic relationship with Darcy.
But, the happy ending had been short-lived. The baby boy had been kidnapped by a man claiming to be the real child’s father. A birthmark on the boy had confirmed it. He had said he’d been forced by Samuel and Bo Fargo, the chief of police and Samuel’s right-hand man, to give up the boy for the good of the community. He’d done what he’d been told, but couldn’t live with his actions.
He’d stolen the baby back from Rafe, leaving the doctor to wonder about the whereabouts of his own son. The man had refused to make any official statements indicting either Samuel or Bo Fargo in the scheme and had disappeared from town soon after.
Even though he and Darcy were still very much in love, Rafe had insisted Darcy go to the safe house until his son could be found again.
There were so many players in this deadly game, and both June and Hawk had spent a lot of time trying to fill Micah in on everything that had been happening both in the town of Cold Plains and in his brother’s life.
At night Micah’s head spun as he tried to put names with people and figure out who was on their side and who was one of Samuel’s Devotees. There were so many people in town that nobody knew exactly where they landed in the grand scheme of things—if they were Samuel’s people or not.
In the brief time he’d been in the safe house, Micah had recognized that it was basically a clearinghouse where June helped deprogram those who needed it and the FBI aided in relocating victims to new lives. The people were in transition and most didn’t stay too long, but rather were eager to get as far away from Samuel and Cold Plains, Wyoming, as quickly as possible.
He now leaned back in his chair and took a sip of his coffee, his thoughts on the newest members of the house. “If she’ll talk to Hawk and some of the other FBI agents, then we could potentially get an arrest warrant for Samuel for the murder she witnessed,” he said. “We’d have a reason to get inside his house, maybe find some real concrete evidence to put him away forever.”
“I wouldn’t push her too hard,” June warned. “She seemed pretty fragile.”
“This whole situation is fragile,” Micah replied drily. “We have five murdered woman that were all tied in one way or another to Cold Plains and Samuel. We have enough additional dead bodies to fill an entire cemetery.”
“And missing children and people with disabilities who seem to have vanished into midair,” Darcy added, her hauntingly blue eyes darkening.
Micah frowned and took a sip of his coffee. Aside from the murdered women, this was one of the most disturbing things about this case. The streets were filled with only attractive, robust people seemingly not only physically fit but mentally well. There was no sickness, no imperfections of any kind and those who showed signs of either disappeared and were never seen again.
“There are rumors that those people are held in secret rooms or basements, prisoners for the good of the town. The worst part is the children,” Darcy said. “I think we’ve all heard the rumors of children who are born with slight ‘defects’ or deemed unworthy in some way and are hidden away someplace in town and eventually adopted out.”
Her face displayed a myriad of emotions and Micah suspected she was thinking of Rafe Black’s missing son. Was he hidden in some secret location in town or had he already been adopted out by Samuel for a huge fee to a couple in another state, another country, desperate for a child?
“Of course, we don’t have to worry about anything now that the FBI have arrested some of Samuel’s henchmen and they’ve confessed to the murders of some of the women,” June said sarcastically.
Micah snorted. “They might have confessed to being the ones who actually pulled the triggers, but they still refuse to give up Samuel as the brains. Until we can cut off the head of the snake, nobody is safe and we’ll never know for sure who in town we can trust.” He knew that a man and a woman had been arrested by the FBI and had confessed to some of the murders of the women, but they’d refused to name the man who had given them the orders to commit the crimes.
Once again his thoughts turned to the pretty blonde now sleeping in the depths of the large cave. She was the key. She had the kind of solid information that could put Samuel behind bars.
All he had to do was figure out a way to force her to do the right thing.
Olivia awakened slowly, her brain fuzzy with residual dreams of her childhood. It had not been a particularly good upbringing and the dreams hadn’t been pleasant ones.
She’d grown up in a trailer park with her sickly mother who liked to drink. Olivia never knew if her mother was sick because she drank, or drank because she was sick. Her main memories of her youth were of too little food, too little heat and far too much responsibility.
Her mother died when she was twenty-two and Olivia had known two things: she wanted to get as far away from the trailer park as possible and she was desperate to build a different kind of life for herself.
Two children later, abandoned by her boyfriend on Main Street in Cold Plains, Olivia had embraced the town and thought she’d finally come home.
As she thought of that moment in the alley when she’d watched the man she’d believed was her salvation and mentor cold-bloodedly shoot the man in the alley, she had gasped and sat straight up, disoriented for a moment as she looked around.
The cave walls in this room were
