But no shots rang out as I left the creek bed for a trail through hardwood trees. With dawn nearing, I could see tire tracks, obscure at first but growing more distinct the farther I followed them.
As I drove, I tried to anticipate Edgars’s next move. Either he was in full flight mode, in which case I would find his UTV abandoned and the tracks of a car leaving the area, or he had something more sinister planned.
In my mind, I saw Gretchen Lindel writhing in the truck bed. I began to fear that Edgars did not intend to take her or any of the other women with him. If he was as ruthless as I thought he was, he would kill Gretchen and the other blondes. Maybe he already had.
No witnesses, I thought. He’ll want no witnesses.
It was full daylight when I reached the rim of a bluff that looked out over a broad patchwork of farmland a good five miles from the estate. Looking down the steep trail, almost a quarter mile below me, I could see a farm, or at least the roof of a ranch-style home, most of a steel building, and definitely Edgars’s side-by-side Honda Pioneer 1000 parked in the snow beside it.
I switched off the Kawasaki and left it. Carrying my pistol and my phone, I sidestepped down the hillside, staying tight to the brush, hoping no one would spot me from below. I kept checking my phone for service, but there was none.
My ankle and shin were swollen and unhappy, but I refused to stop.
Snow was starting to melt off branches when I reached the rear of the farm. I stopped behind a tree, listening, watching. Nothing moved in the yard. Nothing showed in the windows of the ramshackle ranch house.
The three overhead doors on the long side of the steel building were closed. The porthole windows in the doors looked covered. The small sash window twenty feet to the right of the back door, however, was not shaded. I could see bright, glaring light inside.
I checked my phone. Still no service. But the fact that Edgars was a master coder, a creature of the dark web, made me check to see if he had Wi-Fi. He did, a password-protected access called Pharm, and another, Pharm Guest. I tried to log in to that one, thinking I could e-mail or text Bree, but it too required a password.
Inside the steel building, someone let loose with a heart-wrenching scream.
I clenched my jaw and went over the fence, moving with a stiff, painful gait. The scream faded and died. When I reached the rear window, I ducked beneath it, got to the right side of the sash, and turned to face the back door.
“No!” a woman screamed.
“Please!” another yelled. “Just let us go!”
I snuck a peek through the window and saw a John Deere tractor and some other farm equipment parked around a large open space in the middle of the building. Running down from pulleys attached to a steel beam overhead, seven taut cables were clipped to leather restraints around the wrists of Gretchen Lindel and six other women, who dangled in a line, arms stretched overhead, their toes barely brushing the floor.
I couldn’t tell exactly who was who among the other six at first or second glance. They were soaked in dark blood that dripped and pooled beneath them. Only Gretchen was clean.
Six others? I thought. Seven all together? I thought there were only six blondes missing.
In any case, three of the women looked unconscious, their chins sagging to their chests. Gretchen and the other three had their heads up, were focused on the two men in black clothes moving around them.
Wearing the GoPro camera on his head, Nash Edgars seemed agitated, hopped up, like he was on something chemical and a lot of it. In his left hand he held an SLR camera and in his right an AR-style assault rifle with a halo sight.
Edgars kept moving, videoing the women and the other man, who wore a black balaclava and carried a red plastic bucket and a knife with an obsidian-black blade that curved tightly back toward an ornate knuckle guard. It was the same knife I’d seen in several of the mock-execution videos.
The hooded man walked around behind Gretchen Lindel, who twisted, trying to see him, and dumped a bucket of blood over her head. She shuddered and trembled with revulsion but did not cry out.
“Last baptism before the fire,” he said, and I recognized his voice. It was Pratt, Edgars’s bodyguard.
Pratt dropped the empty bucket next to a second assault rifle leaned up against the tractor’s tire. He came around behind another of the alert women and pressed that wicked-looking knife to her throat.
She began to shriek and shriek. “Nash! Don’t let him! Please don’t let him! I’m not one of them! I’m Latina! I’m not a blonde!”
Edgars, the cameraman, came in close and laughed. “You’re a blonde in this scene, Lourdes.”
“Please, Nash,” Lourdes Rodriguez said, weeping. “You don’t have to do this!”
“Of course we do,” Edgars said in a reasonable tone. “It wouldn’t be a real snuff film if we didn’t snuff the blondes at the end.”
Pratt took the knife away from Rodriguez’s throat and gestured to one side at two stout green metal tanks about five feet tall and two feet around. They were chained to a metal post.
“We’re giving you a chance,” Pratt said. “You can die by the knife or take your chances and pray you pass out from the gas before this whole place ignites and blows you to kingdom come.”
Still videoing their reactions, Edgars moved sideways toward the gas tanks. He put the AR down, reached behind the tanks, and came up with a gas mask, which he tossed to Pratt before getting a second for himself. He put it half on his head, knelt, and retrieved the assault rifle.
Pratt said, “So what is it, ladies? Knife or fire?”
“Can’t you just make it look like we died, like all the other times?” another of them whimpered, and I recognized her. Delilah Franks, the bank teller.
“Everyone’s had it with special effects,” Edgars said. “We’re going all the way. For the first time. Show her, Pratt. Wake up the others. Let them see tough little Gretchen die first. Then they can decide how to go.”
CHAPTER
109
I STIFF-LEGGED AND hopped to the back door. The handle turned and the door swung slowly open on well-oiled hinges. I smelled something dead.
Sliding inside, my back to the wall, I saw Pratt forty feet away. He’d kicked awake the other three women and gotten behind Gretchen Lindel. His right leg was extended to the rear, braced against the floor. His left knee was pressed into the teenager’s spine, arching her back. Pratt had her by the hair too, her head wrenched back, his wicked-looking blade at her windpipe.
“Scared now, blondie?” Pratt said.
“No,” Gretchen said. “You can’t hurt me.”
“Oh yes, I can.”
He was so close to Alden Lindel’s daughter, I didn’t dare try a killing shot, and I didn’t want to shout a warning that might cause him to slit her throat. I aimed at the meat of Pratt’s extended right leg, touched the trigger, and fired.
The slug went through his right ass cheek, spun him around, and broke his pelvis. He fell down screaming, the flung knife clattering away.
I limped hard and fast to my right, seeing Edgars spin toward me with the cameras and the AR. Just as he opened up in full automatic, I dived and landed behind a steel seed spreader. Slugs clanged off the spreader and punctured the sheet-metal wall behind me.
The shooting stopped. The women were all screaming and crying. Pratt moaned in agony, then shouted, “Kill him! Shoot his ass, Nash!”
Amid the shouting and the confusion, Edgars yelled, “Come on out, Cross. Join the wrap party for the whole cast and crew!”
Saying nothing, peering all around me, I noticed a three-inch gap between the bottom of the spreader and its wheels. I rolled onto my side and extended my right arm and pistol, trying to spot Edgars’s feet and lower legs.
But he was too far to my right, blocked from view by the blade of a small bulldozer. I needed the man to move.
“The FBI is surrounding this place, Edgars!” I yelled out. “Put your weapons down!”
“Bullshit,” Edgars said, holding his ground. “The FBI would never let you come in here alone. I’ve hacked into their systems, read their protocols.”