In Her Tracks (Tracy Crosswhite #8)(86)

“What did she do?”

“Picked up the pot and put it back on the stove.” Lindsay shrugged. “I slipped out the back door, ran to a main thoroughfare, and took the first bus that came. I was eighteen, an adult. I called Olympia and said I wanted to find my brother and my sister. Eventually, I learned my brother had been killed, but they gave me the name of the family that had taken in my sister. I tracked them down, but they told me they hadn’t heard from Aileen in years. They said she’d had a drug addiction, and they had dropped her at a recovery clinic in Eastern Washington. They said she’d taken up with a young man. It took time, but when you’re desperate you don’t have a choice. I had to find Aileen. I made my way to the clinic in Yakima, and I learned that Aileen had married a man at the same clinic. They gave me his name.

“When I found her, we decided to play Ed’s game and let Lindsay Sheppard die. I was still afraid of him, that he’d come for me, but with each day that passed, I feared him less and less. Years later I was curious, and I looked up his name online. I found an obituary. That was the first day in years that I took a deep breath.

“I felt bad for Evan. I hoped that maybe Carol Lynn didn’t say anything, but I figured Evan got beat good when Ed got home that night. Maybe her too.”

“I’m sorry,” Tracy said. “I know that doesn’t mean much coming now. It didn’t when people said it to me after my sister disappeared.”

Lindsay nodded. “I stopped blaming everyone else, including myself, a long time ago, Detective. Ed was a psychopath, plain and simple.”

Remarkable, Tracy thought, that this young woman could go through hell and not blame anyone. “I’m holding out hope we might still find Stephanie Cole alive also,” she said.

“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Detective. Franklin and Carrol could very well have kept her alive for the same reason Ed kept me.” She shook her head and closed her eyes. “But maybe not.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are graves in the basement, and at the cabin in the mountains.”

The last comment caught Tracy by surprise. She’d done a property search for Ed Sprague and not found any other property. “What cabin?”

“They had a cabin near Cle Elum. In the canyon.”

“I looked up land records for Ed Sprague—”

“It isn’t in his name. It was the wife’s, Carol Lynn. Her family.”

It could have been where Carrol had gone the two days that he called in sick to work. It could be where he brought Stephanie Cole. A remote location. For the first time in days, Tracy had hope Stephanie Cole remained alive. “Do you know where the cabin is?”

“I can draw you a map.” She paused. Then she said, “My one regret is that I never said a word. I was afraid it would lead Ed back to me . . . Maybe I could have saved one of the others. I live with that thought every day.”

During her career, Tracy had dealt with her fair share of young women held captive. Most didn’t survive. Many eventually acquiesced to their captors’ needs and wants, some even sympathized with them. “Stockholm syndrome,” they called it. That Lindsay Sheppard, just fourteen when the abuse began, just eighteen when she ran, had never succumbed, after all she’d been through, after all the years, was truly a testament to the woman’s inner strength.

“What gave you the courage to do what you did, Jessica?”

“To run?” Lindsay closed her eyes and lowered her head. She began to cry. Tracy handed her another napkin to blot the tears. After a minute, Lindsay said, “I wasn’t going to let what happened to me happen to my child. I did it for her. I escaped for her, and I hid for her.”

And the reality hit Tracy like a freight train, where Lindsay’s strength had come from. “You were pregnant.”

“I have a daughter . . . and a son now. We live here in Yakima. My daughter has a good life. So do I. She doesn’t know any of this. And I’ll never tell her. Never. She wasn’t conceived in love, but I’ve done my best to raise her in love.”

“That’s why you ran—why you needed to find your sister.”

“I knew I would be better off with people thinking I was dead than living another day in that house. I wasn’t going to let them do to my daughter what they did to me.”

They. Tracy sensed something in the word, in Lindsay’s intonation. “Is Ed the father?” she asked, though she thought perhaps it could be Franklin or Carrol.

“It could only have been one of two people,” she said. “And Bibby always wore a condom. Always.”





CHAPTER 36

Kins peered into the cluttered living room where Carrol Sprague sat, looking forlorn. He had his hands cuffed behind his back, his knees vibrating like a man on speed. Kins took Carrol into custody and sent Faz and Del to the retirement home to take Franklin into custody and bring him downtown. He wanted to keep Franklin separated from the other two brothers, but Faz and Del had learned that Franklin was not at work—it being his regular day off—and Evan wasn’t at the house.

Through a lot of stuttering, Carrol told Kins that Franklin and Evan had gone hunting somewhere in Eastern Washington and were not reachable. Calls to Franklin’s cell phone went straight to voice mail.