Bree held up two fingers. Carney was in there with his accomplice. The woman who’d kidnapped the—
But then a second woman began making noises in a pleading tone.
A man yelled the first distinct words: “Shut up, you uncaring bitch!”
There was silence before babies began to bawl.
Chapter
71
“I’m going in there right now,” my wife whispered.
“I am, too,” I murmured. “But let’s do this by the book. Go around front, and through the door in thirty seconds. Remember, this guy is ex-marines. Very good with a gun.”
Bree understood and in a crouch ran around the front of the house and up onto the dilapidated front porch. I sidled along beneath the windows, climbed the rickety back stoop, reached out with my left hand, and turned the knob until I heard it click. The door came loose.
Swinging it open, I did a quick head bob around the doorframe, and another, enough to tell me that the old kitchen was empty. The babies were still crying. My gun led as I stepped gingerly inside, seeing a cereal box and a used bowl with milk still in the bottom. The air smelled of food rotting.
The babies’ crying grew louder, but the sound was weird, off, and coming from a room on the other side of the kitchen. Blood pounding in my temples, I heard the front door open and Bree take two creaking steps before a woman started yelling over the babies’ cries.
“What did you expect?” she taunted. “After what you did to us? What did you expect?”
“Please!” the other woman cried. “I’ve done nothing to you. The babies have done nothing to you!”
“Liar!” a man roared, and I heard a loud slap.
Taking two quick steps to the doorway, I shouted, “Police!” and ducked into the room, expecting to see three adults and two babies.
Bree came in through another doorway. We stared at each other, and then at the ratty old couch, a coffee table, and a laptop computer, and no one else.
“Please, no more!” the woman sobbed, and I understood.
Going straight to the laptop, I spun it around. “Jesus.”
Naked from the waist up, Cam Nguyen sat on a chair at the center of the screen. She held the two crying children and was sobbing hysterically. Cribs flanked her. In the foreground, there was an old claw-foot bathtub. In the lower right-hand corner of the screen a red Record button glowed, and I understood. Carney wanted memories of his sick ceremony. Same reason he’d stolen the hard drive at the spa.
“Where is he?” Bree demanded, horrified. “Where’s the woman? Where are they?”
“I don’t know. The feed must be wireless, a—”
Suddenly we saw the back of Carney’s head and his canvas jacket, and then the length of him. He was dragging a garden hose, which he dropped into the bathtub. He looked at Cam Nguyen and said, “You remember the tub, don’t you, Mommy?”
Chapter
72
“He’s going to drown the babies in there,” Bree said in a wavering whisper. “Where are they? Where’s that room?”
I found the Mute button and hit it. “We have to move. We have to listen.”
Given the way the babies and Cam Nguyen had been crying, we should have heard them if they had been anywhere in the main or upper floor of the farmhouse. But there was nothing but the gentle clacking of tree limbs outside.
I glanced back at the screen for some clue. But aside from the cribs, a table behind Cam, and the bathtub, the room was nondescript and small, with plain white walls. Carney came toward the camera and passed beneath it, disappearing from view.
I released the Mute button and heard that woman’s voice coming from somewhere off-screen, saying, “That’s it, Mommy. Be scared of the water, just like we were.”
Then a man’s voice followed, saying, “You didn’t give us a chance, so we can’t give you one, either.”