She didn’t know how long she had been out when she came around again. It didn’t matter. She had to get out. Maybe she would walk out a door into a neighborhood and someone would see her and call for help. Or she might walk out into the wilderness, wander aimlessly, and die of exposure. At least that would be on her own terms.

Karly pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and began to crawl. Better to stay on the ground, and still she lost her balance and fell again and again. She ran into a cabinet and slowly felt her way up the front of it until she was standing again.

Her hands swept over the surface—a counter, cluttered with things, tools maybe. Maybe she could find a weapon. Each object she picked up she carefully studied with her fingers until she found a screwdriver. That would do. She could stab someone with a screwdriver. Maybe she could gouge his eyes out, blind him as he had blinded her. Maybe she could sink it into his body and tear at his internal organs as he had torn at her.

Adrenaline came with the ideas of revenge. She began to feel giddy. Laughter bounced up and down inside her chest. The laughter segued into hysteria. She was losing it. She had to pull herself from that mental ledge. She had to keep going. She had to keep moving. She had to get out.

Now that she had found a wall, she lowered herself back down to the ground and began to crawl again. There had to be a door. And she had to get out.

Chapter 36

36

Dawn was a pale sliver of color on the eastern horizon when Mendez pulled into Gordon Sells’s salvage yard. Despite the hour, the place was a hive of activity.

Crime scene teams from two counties and the state Bureau of Forensic Sciences were working over the property. Besides the trailer house, the place was cluttered with garages and sheds half falling down—all packed with machinery, parts, cars, and junk of all varieties. Behind the salvage business was a dilapidated barn and a pen full of twenty to thirty hogs. As if the place wasn’t disgusting enough to begin with.

Mendez went on in search of Dixon. In an hour the main investigative team would meet and they would be briefed as to what had been found so far during the search.

He walked down the field of cars, the dew-damp grass soaking his shoes and wetting the hem of his pants. A crowd had gathered at the end of the first rows. Deputies, people in street clothes, forty or fifty volunteers in search and rescue windbreakers, all milled around, waiting for something to happen.