The space was small, maybe ten by ten. As Pine ran her light over the room, she saw many things. An old table, some rickety chairs. Boards on cement blocks for shelves. Some empty glass jars, a cracked baseball bat, a rotted sweatshirt, and some old tennis shoes. The floor was made up of sections of plywood that must have been laid right on the dirt, because they were dark with rot. There was the sickly sweet smell of old vegetation and exposed red clay. The walls were the rock and dirt of the hill.
Pine’s light hit near the back of the room and she froze.
It was a small cot, though there were no covers on it and the exposed mattress was old and rotted. She turned to Kyle. “Did you and your brother bring the furniture out here, and the bed?”
“Nope, that was already here. And those makeshift shelves. We found old cans of food and some water bottles. We used them for target practice with our .22s.”
Pine moved around the space, examining every inch.
She stopped and bent down near the bed.
Her light hit on a chain that was coiled up under the bed. One end had an open clasp that could be locked with a key. The other end of the chain had been sunk so deeply into the rock wall that Pine could not pull it free.
Blum came to stand next to her and eyed the chain.
“My God,” she said quietly.
Kyle joined them. “Yeah, that was here, too. We thought maybe they kept a dog or some other animal in here.”
Roberts came to stand on the other side of Pine and said quietly, “Or maybe the girl. Becky.”
Pine didn’t answer because her light had fallen on something else. It was hanging from a nail driven into the rock. She walked haltingly over to it.
Sally. It’s been over thirty years since I’ve seen you.
Pine picked the doll up and gazed down at it. This was Mercy’s doll. It was a twin of the one Pine had owned as a child. Her mother had been looking for it after Mercy had disappeared. At least someone who had known her parents in Andersonville, Georgia, had told her that; her mother had never mentioned it.
Pine looked down at the large, soft eyes of the doll, whose name was Sally. Pine had named her doll Skeeter, after the character in the Muppet Babies TV series. She had tried to get Mercy to name hers Scooter, because that had been the twin on the TV show. But Mercy wouldn’t hear of it because Scooter was a boy.
Pine’s features crinkled at the memory, but then she felt like sobbing.
Kyle said, “Yeah, that was kind of creepy. We thought about getting rid of it, but neither one of us wanted to touch it. It was pretty old and ratty.”
Roberts said, “You think that belonged to the girl?”
Pine nodded but said nothing.
Pat Simmons, who had overheard this, exclaimed, “Wait a minute, are you saying those people kept a little girl out here? What, like chained up and shit?”
“That’s exactly what we think happened here,” said Blum, watching Pine closely.
Pine turned and looked at Roberts.
“I’ll take you up on the offer to get the file on Joe Atkins’s murder. And anything you have on Desiree Atkins.”
“Okay. It won’t be much, I’m afraid.”
“It will be more than I have now. How big were Joe and Desiree?”
“Not big. Joe was about five seven, hundred and fifty pounds wet. Desiree was a petite thing, five feet, ninety pounds, maybe.”
Pine nodded. “Okay, does the sheriff’s office have a forensics tech?”
“Oh yeah.”
“I’d like prints and DNA samples taken from here. We can take samples from Kyle and his brother for elimination purposes.”
“Do you have samples of the girl’s DNA?” said Roberts.
Pine thought, Yes I do, because it’s the same as mine.
She nodded. “And any prints found here I’d like to match against Joe and Desiree, if you have those on file.”
“We have Joe’s for sure. I don’t know about Desiree’s.”
“Okay.”
They left the cave, with Pine reluctantly leaving Mercy’s doll behind, because this was a crime scene now. But then she stopped and turned back to the door.
“You said Joe Atkins was in the security business?”
Roberts nodded. “Yeah. He’d put together alarm packages, whatever you needed. Most folks around here don’t even lock their doors. But most of his clients were businesses. So he’d put in surveillance cameras and—” He broke off when Pine rushed back to the door and started ripping at the ivy that had grown up on the rock wall and around the door.
“Agent Pine?” said Blum.
Pine said, “Help me pull down this ivy.”
They all joined her and in short order had ripped enough of it away to reveal a small, decrepit surveillance camera mounted onto the rock wall and pointed at the door, with a cable snaking down the face of the wall and into the ground.
“Damn,” said Roberts. “He had this place under surveillance.”
Pine eyed the cable. “And this was before everything went wireless. I think that cable may run all the way to the house.”
“Well, let’s find out,” said Pat.
Pine sprinted back to the house and the others followed.
Chapter 75
THEY REACHED THE HOUSE and searched the exterior all over for the other end of the cable.
Kyle spotted it behind an overgrown bush.
The others quickly joined him. Pine looked at the spot where the cable entered the house.
“What room is that?”
Kyle said, “That’s me and Trey’s bedroom.”
“I wonder if Atkins used that as a home office when he was here?” said Blum. She added in a disgusted tone, “Since they only needed the one bedroom, apparently, once the girl got too big to keep in that room.”
They rushed inside, and Kyle led the way to the bedroom. It looked like the bedroom of a typical teenager, meaning there was junk piled everywhere. And there was a giant flat-screen TV set on a table with Xbox controllers set in front of it.
“Where’s your brother?” asked Pine.
“He works at a 7-Eleven.”
She surveyed the room, eyeing the beds on either side.
There were two windows in the room, and one faced the rear yard.
“If I’m Atkins, I think I’d want to be constantly looking in the direction of that jail cell, because let’s just call it what it is.”
Roberts stepped forward. “Okay, desk about here,” he said. “And if he was using cable back then, I bet he was also using a VCR with a videotape.”
Blum said, “You would think that if whoever the bank used to clean out the house had found a tape they would have looked at it or turned it in.”
“Maybe it was in a place they couldn’t see,” said Pine, staring at the floor. “That carpet. Was it here when you bought the house?”
Hazel Simmons had joined them and answered. “No. It was hardwood floors. Made the room too cold.”
Pat added, “There’s no concrete slab under the house. It’s on raised footers with a crawlspace under it.”
“Okay, if the desk was there then, we have two options.” She glanced at the Simmonses. “Can we take the carpet up and look under it?”
Pat said, “Hell, yes, I’ll help you.”