Shamed (Kate Burkholder #11)(78)
I cross to her, introduce myself, and we exchange a quick shake.
“Sheriff went out to help search the barns,” she tells me.
Tomasetti jogs down the stairs, Maglite in hand. “Upstairs is clear,” he says.
“Attic?” I say.
“Nothing there.” He crosses to me. “You want to take a look around?”
Anxious to get outside, I’m already striding toward the door.
* * *
The gray light of dawn hovers atop the tree line to the east as Tomasetti and I make our way to the hog barn. Two more cruisers are parked in the driveway. Rain pours from a low sky and I’m relieved we had the forethought to bring slickers. We find Sheriff Pallant, and two deputies, flashlights in hand, running a dozen or so hogs from the barn. The smell of manure hits me like a sledgehammer when I walk in the door. To my left, one of the deputies wades through muck, arms spread, herding the last of the hogs through the lower half of a Dutch door and into the muddy pen outside. None of the men look too pleased to be here.
Pallant is smoking a cigar and saunters over to me. “You still think this mystery couple has a kidnapped child somewhere on this property?” he asks.
Skepticism rings hard in his voice; I feel that same doubt crowding my own certainty. “I don’t think I’m wrong about this.” I’m aware of Tomasetti standing a few feet away, watching the exchange. Even the deputy has paused. “It’s the best lead we’ve got,” I tell them.
After a moment, the sheriff sighs. “Well, we’re here. We got the warrant. Let’s do our jobs. If there’s a kid here, we’ll find her.”
While the deputies and sheriff continue their search of the hog barn, Tomasetti and I move on to the bank barn. Rain patters against our slickers as we wade through mud and clumps of grass and weeds. Tomasetti slides open the big door. It’s a massive structure. The interior is dark and dusty and jammed full of ancient farming implements—a wooden wagon, a manure spreader, a rusty harrow, and a beat-up galvanized trough.
“We don’t have enough manpower to search a farm this size,” I say as I step inside.
“We’ve got our warrant and a sheriff who’s bent over backwards to accommodate us.” Tomasetti shoves open the sliding door as far as it will go, trying to usher in more light. “Let’s give it our best shot.”
Sighing, I raise my Maglite. There’s a row of horse stalls to my right, the boards covered with cobwebs and dust. Ahead, there’s a raised wood floor where a dozen bales of hay have been left to rot. To my right are the stairs to the loft. Beneath the stairs, burlap bags containing some kind of grain have been torn open by rodents.
“I’ll take the horse stalls,” I say.
“I got the loft.”
I go to the stalls, checking the trough as I walk past. I stop at the first door, slide it open. It’s a typical twelve-by-twelve horse stall with a wood hayrack. Any manure or straw left on the floor has composted to dirt. At some point a groundhog has dug a hole in the corner. I check all four stalls, even the floor for trapdoors, but it’s obvious no one has used this place for years.
A few minutes later, I meet Tomasetti in the aisle. He doesn’t say anything as we make our way toward the door, but I can tell by his expression he’s thinking the same thing I am: The missing girl isn’t here.
“Tomasetti, I don’t think that old woman abducted Elsie Helmuth.”
“She’s not your typical child abductor. Then again, she could be lying about her son.”
“What if I’m wrong about this?” I say as we go through the door and into the pouring rain.
“We don’t always get it right, Kate. We do our best. That’s all we can do.” He slants me a look. “It doesn’t mean we should pack it up and go home. Let’s finish this. Walk out of here with the certainty that we’ve done our jobs to the best of our ability and the girl isn’t here.”
Not an easy task when you have a hundred and fifty rugged acres to cover and a handful of people with which to do it. To make matters worse, the temperature is hovering somewhere around forty degrees and the rain shows no sign of abating.
It’s eight A.M. by the time Tomasetti and I reach the back of the property. A Scioto County cruiser is parked on the other side of the gate, but the deputies are nowhere in sight. More than likely they followed the fence line due west to the property line and then turned south toward the house and outbuildings.
Tomasetti stands there a moment, shaking water from his slicker, and looks around. “If you were going to stash a kid outside, where would you put her?”
As if on cue the tempo of the rain increases, pounding the canopies and ground. Shit, I think, but neither of us complains.
“A cave. A defunct mine.” I think about that a moment. “Storm shelter. Root cellar.”
“Didn’t someone tell us there was an old quarry on the property?”
I nod. “I saw it on the aerial view. It’s to the west, past the creek.”
“Let’s head that way and then cut south toward the house.”
We slog through high weeds and grass and mud for twenty minutes. We’re standing on a relative high point of the property. Despite the bad weather, the views are pretty. A few yards ahead, the ground drops away steeply. At the base of the hill a muddy creek the color of creamed coffee churns south toward the river. Even though we’re fifty yards away, I can hear the rush of water. Beyond are the house and barns. I can see the lights of the sheriff’s department cruisers. Disappointment presses into me when I realize we’ve covered the entire property.