KILLER
ON THE LOOSE
Chapter
2 – Emily Stone
Emily
Stone deliberately slid down the rocky hillside and cautiously approached the
house. The heat and humidity of the
summer bore down on her. The dense trees on the large 200-acre homestead made
for a convenient camouflage as she approached the first building.
She
checked to make sure that her Glock and Beretta were still secured in her hip
and ankle holsters.
Adjusting
the listening device, she whispered, “Rick, you read me?”
“What
took so long?” he replied.
Ignoring
his irritated response she stated, “I’m at the first storage building on the
west side of the property.”
“I
don’t need to remind you of our protocol?”
he pushed.
“Of
course not.”
“And?”
he curtly interrupted.
Emily
could hear the growing tension in his voice, and could imagine his usual dark
stare and clenched jaw. “Just locate and
observe,” she sighed.
Of
course, she knew the protocol. They had tracked
serial killers and abductors on many occasions, all with covert anonymity and
shadowing of law enforcement.
Their
search and investigation brought them to the rural location near Mason City,
Iowa to find the three missing girls taken from a suburban neighborhood in
California.
Footsteps
approached.
“10-3,”
Emily whispered, alerting Rick to radio silence.
She
moved stealthily away from the building, deeper into the wooded area.
Voices
ensued and the words became clearer.
Emily
strained to hear the conversation, but realized that they were speaking another
language – nothing that she had heard before.
She
crouched low and tucked herself completely out of view.
Retrieving
her cell phone from her pocket, she pressed the recording app and held it in the
direction of the unknown men, hoping to catch some of their dialogue for later translation.
The
two men talked excitedly in their foreign dialect with a few interjected
English words. They stopped at the front
of building.
A
cigarette butt landed on the ground near Emily, still smoldering before it eventually
extinguished.
Emily
leaned forward and craned her neck to get a look at the men. They were dark-haired, one with a beard, and
both were dressed in casual dark kakis and t-shirts. One man carried an automatic rifle, while the
other had a large hunting knife sheathed on his right hip.
Several
times Emily heard the English letters “DC” and word “train” or “trainer”.
The
shorter man unlocked the large doors, swung them open, and disappeared inside
for a couple of minutes.
It
remained quiet. No conversation, no
movement, it was as if everything had stopped.
When
the man finally returned, he seemed agitated swinging his weapon erratically as
he spoke. After engaging the padlock,
both men left.
Emily waited for a few more minutes until she
could not hear the conversation between the men anymore.
She
updated her partner, “Two suspects, one AK-47, one hunting knife, heading east in
your direction toward the main house.”
“I
can see them. Two suspects,” responded
Rick.
“I’m
checking the building now.”
“Copy
that,” he replied.
Emily
emerged from her hiding place, taking a moment to survey her surroundings for
traps or possibly another suspect. She
eased forward and noted there were no windows located anywhere on the building,
nothing to give her an idea what was inside.
The
small padlock was secured, but not impossible to break.
Emily
searched around the area and found wooden boards from an old fence discarded in
a neat pile. She dug deeper, but kept alert.
“Em,”
her earpiece crackled.
There
were nails and pieces of wire hiding beneath the old fencing.
“Em?”
Rick said again.
She
had almost given up her search when she spotted a piece of steel resembling
some type of rebar.
“Emily!”
“What?”
she stressfully whispered.
“Update…”
“I’m
getting ready to break the lock and look inside, out.”
She
knew that Rick worried about her safety, and he had told her on countless occasions
that she took too many risks.
The
risks during the search for missing children were necessary.
She
took the metal bar and inserted it into the lock at an angle, taking the extra
precaution to make it as quiet as possible.
Leveraging the bar, Emily used all of her strength to break the lock,
but it wouldn’t budge.
She
took a step back. It would have been much
easier to shoot the lock off, but she would have had only seconds to escape the
barrage of bullets. The men’s firepower
was no match for her.
With
determination, she sucked in a breath and forced the bar downward.
The
padlock finally snapped, released, and fell to the ground.
Emily
stood still, body rigid, listening, and half expecting an alarm to sound.
Nothing.
She
then carefully opened the door barely wide enough to slip inside.
Large
tarps covered the majority of the area, the shapes underneath appeared
symmetrical and about six feet high.
Emily’s eyes adjusted to the dim lighting as she grabbed one of the corners
of a white tarp and flipped it up.
Her
skin prickled turning icy despite the mugginess.
Approximately
25 large wooden crates along with several heavy black plastic suitcases were
exposed.
Emily
had never seen anything like it in any of her searches, but the symbols on the
sides of the crates were unmistakable. The
containers held military weapons and explosives.
AUTHOR JENNIFER CHASE'S WEBPAGE: http://authorjenniferchase.com/books/
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