Page 3 of Good Girls Don't Cry

“Well, hello there, Madison.” He eased away from the pine tree and strolled toward her. “What took you so long?”

Three

Black Rock Falls

Saturday

A call woke Sheriff Jenna Alton a little after three. The 911 calls went to Chief Deputy Zac Rio, so being disturbed in the middle of the night when she was currently nine months pregnant meant something bad had happened. She reached for her phone but her ex-special forces deputy and husband, Dave Kane, plucked the phone from her hand. She sighed. “Dave, it’s okay. It must be an emergency.”

“Go back to sleep. I’ll deal with it.” Kane answered the call. “This better be good, Rio.” He sat up in bed and switched on the bedside lamp. “You know darn well not to disturb Jenna.”

“I know the sheriff would want to know if kids were missing.” Rio’s office chair creaked. “I’m back at the office. I’ve had reports that a limousine filled with high school kids has gone missing. It’s the new stretch limo company that’s been doing the weddings around town. The wife of the driver said he hadn’t returned. Usually, he goes home until it’s time to pick up the passengers. He was due to pick up the kids at eleven and should have been home by one o’clock at the latest. She’s been calling him for hours and drove the route he would have taken in case something had happened. At one-thirty she started getting calls from the parents. They’ve all called 911. None of the kids have returned home. They were heading for the high school prom. Some of the parents have called others on the PTA, who were either on the door or chaperones. They know their kids and none of them recall seeing them, and Olivia Cooper and her boyfriend, Evan Blackwood, didn’t show to be crowned prom king and queen.” He sighed. “I don’t figure they made it to the high school.”

“It’s a bit late in the year for a prom, isn’t it?” Kane frowned. “As far as I know, they’re in May.”

“Apparently the school postponed it due to the flooding. So it was last night.” Rio yawned. “I’ve visited all the parents and they said the driver had a name tag. His name is Carl Winslow and that checks out with his wife. He fits the description they gave me.” He cleared his throat. “On the way to the kids’ houses, I checked alongside the roads in case he wrecked the limo, but all the kids were carrying phones. It makes no sense not one of them called if there was a problem.”

Jenna sat up in bed and gave Kane a long look. “Update the files and we’ll take it from here. Go home and get some sleep.”

“You got it.” Rio yawned again. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

Taking her phone from Kane, Jenna called search and rescue. “Sheriff Alton here. We have a white stretch limo missing filled with high school kids. The location is sketchy, so we need to search from Bear Peak in the north and Maple in the south and all along the route to the high school. I need a chopper in the air with searchlights. Deputy Rio has conducted a preliminary search and found nothing. No calls from the kids, so we need this pushed to high priority.”

“It will take maybe two hours to get a chopper and crew in the air. Do you need a search party on the ground at daybreak?”

Glad to hear his enthusiasm, Jenna nodded. “Yes, we need to locate the limo and find ten kids, so any help would be appreciated.”

“I’ll have teams standing by at daybreak. We’ll use the forest warden’s office at Bear Peak as a command center. They always help out.”

Jenna looked at Kane and smiled at his bleak expression. “Thanks.” She disconnected. “What’s that sour look for?”

“You’re honestly not considering heading out on a case today, are you?” Kane shook his head. “The obstetrician told you to rest. Dashing out at four-thirty in the morning isn’t what I call resting. I’ll go. I can handle this with Rowley until Rio gets back into the office. There’s no need for you to come.”

Having started a new life in Black Rock Falls as Jenna Alton with a new face and hair color, she’d left DEA agent Avril Parker long behind, but the grit and determination she had then had never left her. Becoming sheriff and marrying Kane, she’d grown tougher than ever. Being pregnant hadn’t stopped her taking down serial killers, so she didn’t believe it would get in the way of her finding ten missing kids. She leaned into Kane and gave him a hug. “I know you worry about me, but trust me, I’m not going to break. The chopper won’t be in the air for the next two hours. It’s too dark to hunt down the limo ourselves, so we’ll have time to eat breakfast and settle Tauri with Nanny Raya before we leave.” She gave Kane a side-eye. “Moving around some might bring the baby on, and to be perfectly honest, I can’t wait to get this over with and see who the little person is inside. I’ve been waiting long enough.”

The baby had been a wonderful surprise. Jenna had given up hope of having a child of their own and they’d jumped at the chance to adopt a four-year-old Native American boy. They both doted on Tauri. Big for his age and very smart, with eyes like an eagle and blond streaks in his dark hair, he’d filled their life with so much joy. He was coming up to six now and Jenna had hired a live-in nanny, with her own self-contained apartment, to care for him when they were on a case. The bonus was Nanny Raya slipped into the family like a grandmother and was able, along with their dear Native American friend Atohi Blackhawk, to teach Tauri about his culture.

“Well, you can rest until five.” Kane sat on the edge of the bed and stretched. “I’ll put on the coffee and go and tend the horses.”

Jenna watched him dress and wondered how he came immediately awake and ready to go in an instant. She never had that luxury; it took her a few minutes to get her head straight after waking—like normal people. There was nothing normal about Kane. Six-five and two hundred and sixty pounds of muscle, her ex-special forces husband had skills she hadn’t seen yet, and after knowing him for coming up to seven years, he still surprised her. She stared at her phone and then checked to see if Rio had loaded any information onto the server. Rio was gifted with a retentive memory, which meant he rarely wrote any notes. He could recall facts from cases years ago, which made him very useful to have around. She just knew he’d have the case file ready for her to view.

The seriousness of the situation hit home when she read the list of the missing kids, five boys and five girls, all between sixteen and seventeen years old. The boys—Evan Blackwood, Graham Whitaker, Liam Hawthorne, Victor Langley, and Martin Caldwell—they’d all congregated at Evan Blackwood’s house on Maple and the limo had arrived at seven. The girls—Madison Reed, Samantha Haimes, Isabella Coleman, Chloe Bennett, and Olivia Cooper—were collected separately. The last stop was for Olivia, who lived on Pine Cone Drive. All the kids were accounted for up to that point. The driver and part owner of the limo company, Carl Winslow, had opened the door for all the passengers. None of the parents who’d watched them all drive away had noticed anything amiss.

Wondering if this had been a prank gone wrong, Jenna meticulously ran all the names through the system. Being Black Rock Falls, aka Serial Killer Central, she insisted her team made files on every incident, no matter how small or who they involved. She’d seen so many terrible murders in her time in Black Rock Falls, and realizing not all psychopathic killers were drifters, she needed records she could trust. When she’d first arrived in town and won the election for sheriff, the files were practically nonexistent. She sighed in relief when all the names came back clean, including the driver. What had happened between Pine Cone Drive and the high school?

Four

The Mine

Olivia crawled to the old mattress along one wall and sat on it hugging her knees. What was happening to Madison? Would she ever see her again? Shivering, she peered into a black void, too afraid to move. Trapped in an abyss of darkness, she could smell the scent of damp earth and decay. The only light came from a flickering bulb outside, but it was enough for her to see the cockroaches scattering across the floor and words scratched into the walls of a cell. Like her, the previous occupant had been terrified. Names written and crossed out reminded her of her Christmas list, but there was nothing jolly about being locked in a cell deep in an old mineshaft. Had this man kidnapped girls like her before and kept them here before murdering them one by one? Why hadn’t Sheriff Alton caught him? The sheriff and her deputy had taken down all the threats that came into their town. How could she have possibly missed this one?

Her mom would be missing her. As her only daughter, she hated her going out anywhere and stranger danger had been drummed into her since she could walk. Her mom would blame herself and she wondered if she would ever know the truth about what happened. She rocked back and forth hugging her knees. Since the man had dragged Madison out of the mine, the only sounds had been from her friends crying. As the captain of the cheerleading squad, she needed to try and keep up their morale. There must be a way to escape, and she just needed to discover it. She went to the door, pressed her hands against the cold metal and peered through the tiny barred window. “Can anyone hear me? It’s Olivia. I believe the man has left for a time. We need to talk before he comes back and make a plan so we can escape.”

The small light barely penetrated the darkness, but she made out the pale faces of Isabella and Chloe at the two windows opposite her, and she could hear movement from the cell beside her. “I can’t see you, Samantha, are you beside me?”

“Yes, I’m here.” Sam’s voice was barely a whisper. “What do you think he wants with us and where did he take Madison?”

Trying to keep her own fear at bay, Olivia swallowed hard. “I don’t know but we need to stay calm. Sheriff Alton will find us. You know she’ll never give up searching.” A shiver went through her. Deep down she knew the truth. A crazy man had kidnapped them, and from the evidence scratched into the wall, he’d done this before.

---