“Those are definitely the same chimes,” Tavia whispered in my ear.
I nodded, sweeping my attention around the room again and seeing something odd sticking out of the bottom of the bookcase.
I crossed to it, crouched, and saw it was a feather. I pulled on it and out came the samba mask from the video.
Chapter 32
WE WERE IN the right place, which was both a relief and a ratcheting-up of our anxiety levels. The Wise twins were here in the cigar factory. But so were the kidnappers.
“Whatever happens, we do not shoot the girls,” I muttered to Tavia.
“Clear fields of fire,” she said.
We left the mask on the floor and crept down the stairs as quietly as we’d climbed them. Twice as we crossed the old rolling room, our weight provoked creaking noises in the floorboards, and we froze for more than a minute each time.
The girls and the kidnappers had to be in the basement. Every noise we made was a potential warning. Every noise could get them killed.
We went to the only other door off the old factory floor. Outside in the lumberyard, the pit bulls went nuts, barking and snapping. After a moment’s hesitation, I motioned for Tavia to cover the door while I reached around the jamb for the handle. It twisted as if oiled. I let the door sag ajar, waited, and then pushed it open with two fingers.
Something shot out of the darkness. For some reason, I thought, Pit bull, and I almost took a shot before I saw it was an enormous black cat. It darted between us and across the factory floor.
After several deep breaths, I looked around the corner, saw a steep, rickety wooden staircase down into a cellar. My gut said it could be a trap, but I pointed it out to Tavia and we went anyway, trying to place our weight where the riser had the most support. We still ended up making several more soft squeaking noises.
But we reached the bottom of the stairs without incident. It was cooler and drier in the cellar than it was above. There was so little light down there that the goggles only barely revealed a blurry green hallway with doors on both sides.
“Take your goggles off,” I murmured. “Go to flashlight.”
“You sure?”
“I’d rather risk being shot at than make a mistake because of the goggles.”
She understood, pulled her goggles off, and went to her vest for a Mini Maglite. I did too, setting my goggles down on the floor and sliding the thin, powerful flashlight under the barrel of the Beretta before flipping the switch on.
The beam cut the gloom all the way to the back of the hallway. We went down it, trying the doors, finding them unlocked, and peering inside each. These rooms were evidently where the tobacco had been stored, but they were empty now.
The hallway reached a T. A heavy wooden door stood at each end of the stubby arms. The right-hand door was padlocked. The left was ajar. A breeze from the other side caused it to move slightly.
I heard a voice. Female. Scared. Crying behind the padlocked door. I immediately cupped the end of the flashlight, and Tavia did the same, both of us letting just enough light through our fingers to see our way toward the voice.
Tavia and I snuck forward. Another woman spoke, louder, threatening in tone, but too muffled to make out. Tavia pressed into the wall two feet shy of the door, shotgun up.
I stepped right up to the door, started to check my watch.
Beyond the door, there was a loud, flat crack of wood on flesh. The first woman began to scream and sob.
I shot the lock.
Chapter 33
THE BULLET SNAPPED the hasp.
I ripped the lock free, pressed the latch, and shouldered my way into a dirty concrete-floored room with a painting on the rear wall. The mural depicted scenes from a town during a tobacco harvest. Dead center of the painting, on their knees in front of a church, were the two praying children we’d seen in the background of the ransom video.
The Wise twins were gone. There was no one in the room. All we found were two mattresses, a filthy yellow cotton scarf, a thin hemp bracelet, several empty water bottles, some greasy waxed paper, and, on a stool, a tablet computer playing a two-minute video loop.
In the video, Natalie was slumped in a chair, unconscious, the yellow scarf around her neck. The camera swung, revealing Alicia on her knees, praying like the children in the mural, showing the hemp bracelet on her wrist. She was begging her parents to pay the ransom and not try another rescue.
Then the woman in the primitive mask appeared.
She hit Alicia with a blackjack, knocked her senseless and bleeding to the floor. Then she spoke evenly to the camera.