chapter Thirteen
By the time Seth pulled up to the main entrance of the dunes, the last gasp of sun was attempting to shine through the thickening layer of clouds. Within the next thirty minutes or so it would be dark.
He saw Sam Clemmons handcuffed and locked into the back of Atkins’s patrol car. Sam’s quad runner sat nearby. Atkins approached, his face holding a mixture of the same emotions Seth felt at the moment. It was relief and elation that Sam had been caught, mingled with the dread of discovering another dead woman.
“Since we don’t have the funds for fancy surveillance cameras, I’ve had my deputies doing drive-bys here, especially during the nighttime hours. Deputy Michaels did an evening run by here and saw that.” Atkins pointed in the distance where a hand protruded from the sand. “At the same time he saw Sam riding off hell-bent for leather. He went after Sam and got him in custody, then called me to let me know what was going on.”
Seth looked toward where the hand appeared to glow almost translucently in the last pale glow of sunlight. “He didn’t take much time to hide this one. Anyone coming in this way would see the body part. What’s Sam saying?”
“That he had nothing to do with it, that he was just sneaking in a quick ride. He’s sobbing and snotting his innocence all over the back of my car, but him being here again is the kind of coincidence I just don’t believe in.”
Seth thought about the night he’d caught Sam lurking across the street from the house. Apparently he’d been casing out the house, seeking a new entrance in an attempt to grab Tamara. He’d definitely fooled Seth, who’d believed his story about feeling bad because he hadn’t helped dig her out of the sand.
Atkins clapped Seth on the back. “We’ve got him now. He’s not going to hurt anyone again. Finally my town will be rid of the Sandman.”
Seth nodded. “And now I guess it’s time to do the hard part. Find out who his latest victim is. Let’s get photographs of the scene first, especially ones of Sam’s quad and any of the tracks he made in the sand. We’ve only got a few minutes of daylight left—you might want to get some artificial lighting in place and ready.”
“We’re a small town. We don’t have any special lighting for night work, but I’ll see what I can do.” As Atkins left Seth to take care of the initial business, Seth stared out over the dunes and tried not to think about the fact that tomorrow morning Tamara would be gone.
Maybe it was a blessing that she couldn’t remember what had happened to her after she’d been kidnapped from the rest area. Maybe she’d never have to remember whatever happened in those missing hours. Her brain had obviously kept those memories from her because they were too heinous to remember.
There was nothing more he’d like than to explore a true relationship with her, invite her to Kansas City to share his life. But more than once she’d mentioned some unpleasant, unfinished business awaiting her in Amarillo. He couldn’t ask her for a future until she knew all there was to know about her past. There might be something in Amarillo that would halt her from having any kind of a future with him.
Besides, she might get away from this place, away from him and realize that her feelings for him were formed in that single instant of eye contact when he’d pulled her from the sand, that what she felt for him all along was nothing more than gratitude and a sense of safety she’d needed while she’d been here.
He shoved thoughts of Tamara out of his head as Atkins had the deputies park their cars so that their headlights shone directly on the crime scene area.
With feet weighted by dread, Seth and Tom advanced toward the macabre scene where the hand protruded from the sand. Who were they going to find beneath the sand? For sure a brunette. Seth vaguely wondered what brunette had done such damage to Sam that it had turned him into a killer. Did he get a kick out of riding his quad over his own personal cemetery? Were there bodies out here that hadn’t even been discovered yet?
Seth didn’t even want to go there. The idea of this playground for dirt-bike riders and quad runners being a burial pit just beneath the surface made his stomach queasy.
As he waited for everyone to get into place and the photos to be taken, he walked over to Atkins’s car and opened the back door.
“I didn’t do it,” Sam cried. “I was just out here sneaking in a ride before I have to go to work at the bar. It’s been tough since they closed the dunes. I’m, like, addicted to riding.” He bent his head to wipe his nose on his shirt shoulder. “I saw that hand and totally freaked. I was driving away to get to my truck so I could get help when Deputy Michaels came after me. I stopped to tell him, but he threw me down on the ground and cuffed me.”
Sam’s sniffling stopped and his eyes narrowed. “He kicked me in the side a couple of times even though I was down and already cuffed.”
Seth wasn’t surprised and he intended to speak to Atkins before he left Amber Lake about Michaels’s penchant for bullying. But if Sam really was the Sandman Seth could understand Michaels’s added touch of finesse to the arrest. Seth fought his own desire to punch the kid as he thought of Tamara’s face shining up from her sand grave.
“What’s up with the ostrich?” Seth asked.
Sam stared at him in what appeared to be genuine puzzlement. “What ostrich? What are you talking about?”
Sam looked like nothing more than a scared, barely legal-aged kid, and Seth slammed the car door closed, a disturbing uncertainty simmering inside him.
He wanted to believe that Sam was guilty. It made everything so neat and clean. Bad guy caught, case closed and no more danger of horrendous live burials to the women in Amber Lake, no more danger to Tamara.
Desperately, he wanted it to be Sam, but there was just a sliver of uncertainty in his mind about the kid’s guilt. It was just a gut feeling that he hoped was wrong. But when he’d asked Sam about the ostrich, Sam’s look of total incomprehension had appeared so genuine.
By the time he walked back to Atkins, it was time to get closer and check out who, exactly, was buried in this latest murder. “I was thinking earlier that hopefully there aren’t bodies out here that we don’t know about,” Seth said as they walked.
“Bite your tongue,” Atkins replied and a deep sigh escaped him. “I’ll tell you one thing—if there are bodies out here they aren’t locals. We’ve got no missing persons reported in Amber Lake.”
“Tamara was taken from the rest area,” Seth reminded him.
“I know, and hopefully she’s the anomaly and really was the third victim in the beginning of this nightmare. Sam fits the profile for a serial killer. He’s about the right age when they begin to kill, he comes from a bad background and he’s pretty much a loner.”
Seth flashed Tom a terse grin. “That could describe half the men I work with at the FBI.” His grin fell as they drew closer to the hand sticking up out of the sand.
It looked odd...the fingers fatter than normal female fingers. “Something’s not right,” he murmured more to himself than to Tom. As he reached an area close enough to lean down and look closer, he cursed beneath his breath and grabbed the hand. It came loose easily from the sand.
“Hey!” Tom yelped in protest.
“It’s not real,” Seth said. He stood up and held out the detached forearm. “It’s a damn prosthesis.”
He stood up and stepped aside, indicating that some of the other deputies complete the dig to see if anything else had been buried there. His mind raced with suppositions. This had been a well-executed trick. Every law enforcement person working for the town was here.
Heart starting to pound an uneven rhythm of fear, he yanked his cell phone from his pocket and quickly punched in Linda’s phone number.
One ring. Pick up, Tamara, he thought urgently. Two rings. He clenched the phone more tightly to his ear. Three rings. Why wasn’t she answering? Four rings and then the click of the answering machine coming on. Linda’s voice filled his ear with her prerecorded announcement to wait for the beep to leave a message.
“Tamara, it’s Seth. Pick up the phone,” he said when the beep had sounded. He was vaguely aware of Tom stepping closer to him. “Tamara, please, pick up the phone.”
The urgency inside Seth grew to mammoth proportions. Where was she? Why wasn’t she answering him? Because the Sandman had fooled them all. Because she wasn’t there to answer the call. She was with the Sandman.
His heart crashed against his ribs in sheer terror. “He bluffed us. He set it up so that all of us would respond to a body in the dunes so he could get to his real target.” Seth could barely keep the tremble from his voice.
“Tamara.” Tom said her name flatly, as if she were already nothing but another tragic victim in a madman’s game.
“Send somebody over to my sister’s house,” Seth said, although he was certain they would find the house empty...Tamara gone.
He didn’t want to leave here. He needed to think. He needed to crawl into the mind of the clever man who had set up such a ruse to obtain his ultimate goal. He desperately needed to figure out if he had Tamara, and, if so, then where was he going with her? And how long did Seth have left to try to save her life?
Seth had to do what he did best, delve into the mind of a killer.