just sneaking in a quick ride. He’s sobbing and snotting his innocence all over the back of my car, but him being here again is the kind of coincidence I just don’t believe in.”
Seth thought about the night he’d caught Sam lurking across the street from the house. Apparently he’d been casing out the house, seeking a new entrance in an attempt to grab Tamara. He’d definitely fooled Seth, who’d believed his story about feeling bad because he hadn’t helped dig her out of the sand.
Atkins clapped Seth on the back. “We’ve got him now. He’s not going to hurt anyone again. Finally my town will be rid of the Sandman.”
Seth nodded. “And now I guess it’s time to do the hard part. Find out who his latest victim is. Let’s get photographs of the scene first, especially ones of Sam’s quad and any of the tracks he made in the sand. We’ve only got a few minutes of daylight left—you might want to get some artificial lighting in place and ready.”
“We’re a small town. We don’t have any special lighting for night work, but I’ll see what I can do.” As Atkins left Seth to take care of the initial business, Seth stared out over the dunes and tried not to think about the fact that tomorrow morning Tamara would be gone.
Maybe it was a blessing that she couldn’t remember what had happened to her after she’d been kidnapped from the rest area. Maybe she’d never have to remember whatever happened in those missing hours. Her brain had obviously kept those memories from her because they were too heinous to remember.
There was nothing more he’d like than to explore a true relationship with her, invite her to Kansas City to share his life. But more than once she’d mentioned some unpleasant, unfinished business awaiting her in Amarillo. He couldn’t ask her for a future until she knew all there was to know about her past. There might be something in Amarillo that would halt her from having any kind of a future with him.
Besides, she might get away from this place, away from him and realize that her feelings for him were formed in that single instant of eye contact when he’d pulled her from the sand, that what she felt for him all along was nothing more than gratitude and a sense of safety she’d needed while she’d been here.
He shoved thoughts of Tamara out of his head as Atkins had the deputies park their cars so that their headlights shone directly on the crime scene area.
With feet weighted by dread, Seth and Tom advanced toward the macabre scene where the hand protruded from the sand. Who were they going to find beneath the sand? For sure a brunette. Seth vaguely wondered what brunette had done such damage to Sam that it had turned him into a killer. Did he get a kick out of riding his quad over his own personal cemetery? Were there bodies out here that hadn’t even been discovered yet?
Seth didn’t even want to go there. The idea of this playground for dirt-bike riders and quad runners being a burial pit just beneath the surface made his stomach queasy.
As he waited for everyone to get into place and the photos to be taken, he walked over to Atkins’s car and opened the back door.
“I didn’t do it,” Sam cried. “I was just out here sneaking in a ride before I have to go to work at the bar. It’s been tough since they closed the dunes. I’m, like, addicted to riding.” He bent his head to wipe his nose on his shirt shoulder. “I saw that hand and totally freaked. I was driving away to get to my truck so I could get help when Deputy Michaels came after me. I stopped to tell him, but he threw me down on the ground and cuffed me.”
Sam’s sniffling stopped and his eyes narrowed. “He kicked me in the side a couple of times even though I was down and already cuffed.”
Seth wasn’t surprised and he intended to speak to Atkins before he left Amber Lake about Michaels’s penchant for bullying. But if Sam really was the Sandman Seth could understand Michaels’s added touch of finesse to the arrest. Seth fought his own desire to punch the kid as he thought of Tamara’s face shining up from her sand grave.
“What’s up with the ostrich?” Seth asked.
Sam stared at him in what appeared to be genuine puzzlement.