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On his way out of the hospital, Damien called everyone. Decker. 911. Sanders. Ted. The fire department. The mayor’s office. He wanted anyone within a sniff of law enforcement to start searching the land near Devil’s Bluff.

Charity was out there. She had to be. There were no more leads to follow. He had cracked through to his mother’s memory and found the unlikely destination for their first date.

Damien was going all in.

The stale cigarette smell overpowered the pine air freshener Sanders had placed on his rear view mirror. Years of smoking had left an odorous scar that no amount of pine tree scent could fix.

The land where Dotty and Earl started their first date was once a phosphate mine that had been abandoned since the mid-1970s. When the mining operation was active, the land was stripped of its soil thirty feet deep and then turned into a slurry where a large structure, called a beneficial plant, would separate the phosphorous from clay and sand. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water would spray through the soil per minute. The water and sediment would settle in clay lakes which, over time, would separate apart. The clay would fall to the bottom of the pit and the water would remain on top, to be reused to flush the slurry.

Some time before Damien was born, the combination of mining and water usage caused a massive sinkhole to open, pulling into it a portion of the beneficial plant and putting the mining company out of business.

Today, mining companies must have an approved reclamation plan in place before their draglines can begin scraping the soil. Endangered species are relocated, measures are taken to protect wetlands and other preservation areas and, after the mining is completed, foliage and trees are replanted.

Back in the early 70s, the land was left barren until nature eventually reclaimed it as its own.

The same happened with Devil’s Bluff. The sinkhole eventually tapped into an underground cave system fed by a spring. The spring filled the hole with cold, clear blue water that rarely warmed above seventy-five degrees.

The wreckage of the beneficial plant below the water line had rusted and disintegrated, leaving a cool watering hole or, for the more adventurous, used as a lovers lane. Dangerous sections of the grounded structure remained, tipping over the bluff’s edge, threatening to crumble at any minute.

Hurricanes and tornadoes hadn’t yet pushed it over the edge, but Damien felt it was only a matter of time before it collapsed into the waters below.

It was also where Taylor Lawson liked to jog and where Tobin claimed Charity was hidden. She was not only out of sight, but near the location of Taylor’s body and, more importantly, with a limited oxygen supply. Tobin said her death, like Taylor’s, was inevitable unless someone found her. Damien felt that must have meant she was locked somewhere tight.

Damien sped off the paved road and onto a gravel path, bouncing over the uneven ground, sucking the life out of the car’s shock absorbers, and pulled up to Decker’s patrol car, its lights flashing.

As he stepped out of Sanders’ car and into the cool fall air, he was immediately confronted by his commander.

“Give me one good reason I shouldn’t kick your ass out of the academy?” Decker asked.

“You should, sir,” Damien said. “I’ve disobeyed your direct orders and left an active crime scene. I know I’ve lost my chance at being a cop, but there’s still time to save Charity.”

More cars and trucks approached, their lights strobing against Decker’s hardened glare.

“You could have been a great police officer, Hill. One of the best.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Remind me to fire you later.”

“Yes, sir.”

Decker gathered the forces Damien had called and they surrounded his cruiser. He stepped onto his front bumper and stood on his hood.

“We have strong intel that Charity is somewhere near Devil’s Bluff,” Decker said. “Form teams of two and we’ll make a grid search of the area. Indications are her air supply may be limited. Let’s hope we’re not too late this time. Let’s bring our girl home.”

The land around the bluff was flat and sandy and spread out for acres around the sinkhole. Damien feared there wouldn’t be enough daylight to search all of it in time.

As the teams fanned out, Sanders appeared from the crowd.

“Not the best place for a first date,” Sanders said.

“That’s what my mom thought,” Damien said. “That’s why they ended up at Rocco’s”

“What the hell was your dad thinking, coming out here? And why would Mark pick this place for his first kill?”

“I don’t know.” Damien leaned back against Decker’s car, his energy drained from him. “I feel like I don’t know anything anymore.”

“Yeah,” Sanders said, his head dipping forward. “Life made a lot more sense when I woke up this morning.”

“Again, I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t raise a sociopath, cadet. I did.”

“Still…”

“Like you said. I have my entire life to mourn. Fortunately for me, that won’t be much longer.” He joined Damien, leaning on the car next to him. “I’m gonna rest here a bit, then get to it.”

“I’ll call you if I find anything.”

Damien looked out at the fields, cops and paramedics, firemen and the mayor’s staff, paired up, walking side by side, checking the grounds one foot at a time.

This was going to take too long.

Mark wasn’t a genius, he was a psychopath. Damien didn’t need to figure out where Tobin hid Charity, he had to understand where Mark would have taken Taylor.

Taylor liked her morning jogs. Her mother said she enjoyed the view from the top of the bluff.

Damien followed the worn hiking path that circled the sinkhole. The trail hadn’t changed since her disappearance. This was where Taylor jogged.

Somewhere near this path was where Mark had been waiting.

In high school, Mark was overweight. Slovenly. He wouldn’t have had the strength to take her anywhere far. Besides, he was nervous. Not sure if he could go through with it. He’d have to attack her when she was out of sight of anyone else near the bluff. He wouldn’t have used a gun. Its shot would have echoed off the edges of the sinkhole and the twisted remains of the mining plant. He wouldn’t have used a knife. Her shrieks would have traveled just as far.

He would have hit her with something, like the baseball bat Tobin used on Damien. One strike, knocking Taylor unconscious. No fighting back, noises, or screams. The thump of wood against skull, like a tree limb hitting the ground. It’d be a distance away from the entrance to the bluff in order to give him time to move her as far as his out of shape body could take her, which wasn’t far.

Damien’s walk down the path turned into a jog, the hard dirt winding up a slope and around a fallen oak, through a tree covered canopy, and behind the mining plant.

The beneficial plant resembled a multi-level carnival slide, four stories high at the start that decreased in height as the slurry moved down the rubber tracks and through wide pipes, water spraying against the material from all sides, sifting out the phosphorous from the clay and sand. The steel structure was once painted beige, but had faded to a sickly white and pocked with decades of rust, like untreated skin cancer.

A third of the plant leaned over the side of the bluff, the weight of heavy concrete footers keeping the structure from sliding off, and twin rounded silos used to store water teetered nearby, one angled toward the water like a domino in mid-fall.

Damien looked back toward Decker’s cruiser.

If it weren’t for the flashing lights, it would have been difficult to see the location through all the overgrown bushes and the twisted wreckage.
Damien continued another twenty yards down the path. All the cars and searchers were now lost behind the fallen structure.

This was it.

This was where Mark hit Taylor.

This was where Tobin brought Charity. She was nearby.

He could feel it.