“Don’t shoot,” the girl said as she appeared in the doorway. Her eyes looked down at the body on the stairs “Please, we need help.”
“Is anyone else down there armed?”
“No!”
“Come on up.”
She looked down at the body again and then back at the deputy. “I—I… please, I can’t.”
“Larry, can you cover me?” the deputy asked. His name was Blake. Deputy Blake Bradley or BB as they sometimes called him.
Deputy Lawrence nodded and came over, gun drawn. “Go ahead.”
“I’m coming down,” Blake said. “Just stay right where you are.”
Paul watched as Blake disappeared down the stairs the words, “Sweet Jesus,” suddenly rising from within followed by, “We need several paramedics here now!”
Chapter Thirteen
The following newspaper clippings can be found in a scrapbook kept by Tina Thompson, most of which were cut from the Ashland Creek Weekly Chronicle:
Last night, what started out as a simple but vicious fight in the parking lot outside of the Ashland Creek High School Prom quickly escalated into a police shootout at the abandoned Hood residence, one which left two local high school students, Jimmy Hawthorn and Brett Murphy, dead, and another high school student, Alan Hawthorn, wounded in the leg. Deputy Paul Widgeon, veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was shot as well, but sustained only minor injuries due to his police issue body armor that the town purchased two years earlier for all its deputies. Following the shootout, which took place around the shed on the Hood property, deputies discovered a secret underground chamber which held captive the two high school senior girls, Samantha King and Megan Reed, who had gone missing earlier in the week. One of the girls, Megan Reed, was pronounced dead at the scene, the cause of which has not yet been disclosed. Samantha King was taken to the local hospital and is listed in Critical Condition. Witnesses to the events report hearing Sheriff Reed screaming for them to ‘cut my daughter down!’ while being forcefully kept away from the scene, all while the near dead body of Samantha King was being loaded into the waiting ambulance. When asked about this an unnamed deputy said, “We left her body hanging there because we didn’t want to disturb the crime scene.” The investigation into who was responsible for the abduction and torture of the two girls is ongoing…
Early this morning police reported that Samantha King identified the late Jimmy Hawthorn, shot and killed by Deputy Paul Widgeon, as being the one responsible for her kidnapping. Unspecified evidence found within the shelter is reported to support this claim, though no official charges have been brought. The Sheriff’s Department also will not comment on whether Jimmy Hawthorn may have acted alone or had an accomplice, or what his motive may have been…
The investigation by the local Sheriff’s Department, State Police, and FBI has concluded that Jimmy Hawthorn acted alone in the kidnapping, rape, torture and murder (Megan Reed) of the two girls who were discovered in a secret underground room on the abandoned property of the Hood family. Earlier claims that the late Brett Murphy was involved due to the tapes found in his bedroom, tapes his friends said were taken from Jimmy Hawthorn, have been dismissed…
The funeral of Megan Reed, which is expected to draw many mourners tomorrow afternoon, will not be attended by the Hawthorn family due to a request by the Reed family. It is also unclear at this time if Samantha King, recently released from the hospital, will be in attendance. When asked how their daughter was doing, the King family said she was ‘recovering slowly’. The events of Samantha King’s captivity have not yet been made public, and investigators refused to comment…
Alan had just given himself a pump from his pain medication device when there was a knock on the door followed by Tina stepping into the hospital room.
“Hi Alan,” she said.
“Hi,” Alan replied.
Tina took a seat next to his bed, her face and body looking completely worn out, which, of course, was to be expected after everything she had been through.
“How’s your leg?” she asked.
Alan glanced down at the leg, which had been encased in a futuristic looking device and said, “I would be lying if I told you it was fine.” He sighed. “Thankfully I got this nifty little thing.” He pushed the button on the pain pump to signify what it was, his mind knowing this time around the press would be useless because he had already used up his ration of afternoon pain killers.
“Does it really work?”
“It takes the edge off and makes you loopy to the point where you don’t care, but doesn’t really kill it completely.” He yawned, a nice swirl of nothingness filling his head. “They should really call it a Pain Duller or Memory Masher or… I don’t know.”
Tina smiled.
“It really helps when you want to try and sleep at night.” He yawned again.
“I didn’t wake you, did I?” Tina asked. “If you need some rest I could go.”
“No,” Alan shook his head. “Please stay.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Aside from the police and that really grumpy detective you’re the only one who has visited me.”
“What about your parents?”
Alan shook his head. “I think… I don’t know what’s going on with them.” He knew they were having a difficult time in town with locals and reporters.
A quiet rumble came from foot of the bed.
Tina twisted toward it.
“It’s just my blood-clot thing,” Alan said. “It tightens every now and then. The nurses keep getting mad at me because I take it off, and because I’m not blowing in this thing every couple of hours.” His hand motioned toward an odd looking clear device with a blue mouth piece and measuring scale. “They—” he stopped when he saw the look on her face and softly asked, “How are you doing Tina?”
“I’m tired,” she said. “The police keep asking me questions and today I actually had to talk to the FBI, and these stupid reporters keep hounding me wherever I go.” She hesitated. “You know they are pretty sure Jimmy was the one who kidnapped those girls.”
Alan didn’t reply.
“Do you think they’re right?” she asked.
Alan nodded.
Tears welled in the corner of her eyes. “But he was so good to me. How could he do that to them and then be so good to me?”
Alan didn’t have an answer for this. Instead he kept playing over the events in his mind, angry with himself for not putting all the pieces together.
“I knew about it,” Alan said without much thought.
“What?” she snapped.
“Deep down inside I knew and I should have realized it because I had seen his video.”
“One of the bondage videos Brett had?” Apparently the tape Tina had seen had been just one of many.
“No. The tape he made when he was younger. I found it when looking for a tape to record…” he thought for a second but the title didn’t come to mind “… I don’t remember what, but I couldn’t find a blank tape by the TV in the basement and went into his room to see if he had one because he was always taping stuff and found one that looked good because it didn’t have a title on it and put it into his VCR to see if it really was blank.”
Tina nodded.
“It wasn’t. Instead it was full of scenes of girls hanging from their wrists, one right after another, that he must have taped from TV. I was so young I didn’t really understand it, but now that I look back, it makes so much sense. And I should have put it together with how strange he was acting and the girls disappearing and all his bike rides.