their body to get more comfortable?
The car slowed and the whine of asphalt beneath the tires was replaced by something softer and more bumpy. The dunes? Surely he wouldn’t take her there. That’s where Seth and Sheriff Atkins and all his men were working a crime scene.
But Seth had mentioned at one point or another that there was more than one way into the dunes and that the area was big enough that it couldn’t all be seen by mere eyesight, and by now it was surely dark. Nobody would see him bury her.
Tears once again filled her eyes and fell down the sides of her cheeks as the car came to a stop and the engine was cut. No more time. She’d heard that drowning was a relatively painless death. What about drowning in sand? She had a feeling it was going to be a terrible way to die.
The trunk lid opened, the small light inside radiating out enough that she could see Steven’s face. The smile on his lips read of pleasure, but the darkness in his eyes spoke of the need for revenge.
I’m not your mother, her brain screamed inside her head. Please Steven, don’t do this. Don’t kill me for any sins you think your mother committed. I didn’t commit them. She tried to put all those emotions into her eyes as he bent over and picked her up in his arms.
“Time for the ostrich to bury her head, just like you did when I was little and Dad was beating the hell out of me,” he said as he began to walk.
She could hear the whisper of sand beneath his feet and the terror inside her peaked to where she wished she’d lose her mind, prayed that her heart would stop beating before she heard the very first scrape of the shovel against the sand.
He bent down and dropped her onto the grainy surface and then walked away. They were at the dunes. Someplace, perhaps not so far away from where Seth and the other lawmen were working. If only she could just scream, if she could just crawl, but she could do neither.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” Steven said from nearby and she heard the first rasp of the shovel against the sand and she knew he had begun to dig her grave.
* * *
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for Seth to get the information that Tamara wasn’t at Linda’s place and the front door had been standing wide open.
She was with him. The Sandman. He’d already directed several of the deputies to get in touch with Henry Todd and with Jerome Walker and Ernie Simpson, the other two young men who had been with Sam when Tamara had been discovered.
Raymond Michaels was officially off Seth’s suspect list. He couldn’t be here and with Tamara at the same time. The one thing Seth refused to do was run out of here half-cocked, with no specific suspect and no known location in mind.
He knew the key to the whole thing was an ostrich. That memory that Tamara had of the perp calling her an ostrich held the key to the killer’s identity.
There was no way he could run fast enough to catch a person he didn’t know; he couldn’t knock on doors and try to gain answers. The time bomb had exploded and if he didn’t figure something out fast, Tamara would be dead.
Ostriches. As he paced across the sand, he considered what he did know about the oversize birds. They were too big to fly. They could kill a man with a kick of their powerful legs. He frowned. What else? There had to be something else.
With each tick of his heart, with every blink of his eye, he felt as if time had run out and Tamara was gone and when he thought about that the absence of her nearly cast him to his knees.
Darkness had fallen complete across the dunes, the only lit area being the main entrance where the deputies’ car headlights provided illumination.
Ostriches. Don’t bury your head in the sand. The descriptive saying jumped into his consciousness. “Don’t bury your head,” he muttered aloud. He’d heard that somewhere recently. Where? Where had he heard something along those lines?
You’d be surprised by how many people just bury their head in the sand. It had been at the animal pound. Steven Bradley. Thoughts flashed through Seth’s brain, processing like a minicomputer. Steven in his official uniform would appear safe to a