Untouched The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,39

Ormann’s eight year old daughter, called 911 and this man, Officer Lance Nealey, responded.”

She picked up the picture of the cop, and I couldn’t look away. He was young too, probably in his twenties, around Zack’s age. He had cocoa skin, big brown eyes, a warm smile, and his head was shaved. He was the perfect picture of a cop, the kind of image that was everything my skewed perspective thought a cop should be. He just...looked like a nice guy, there to help. “Seidell killed him and stole his cruiser, escaping the scene. That night he stopped at a convenience store outside Ottumwa, Iowa and ran across this girl, the clerk, Jeannie Sabourin.” She handed me the picture of the young woman and I took it, even though I really didn’t want to and forced myself to look into the girl’s face.

“She was a high school senior who worked at the store at night to help make ends meet for her family.” Ariadne shook her head, a kind of muted rage present on her face that made her pause. When she went on, her voice cracked. “She had been through one robbery already and knew to give him whatever he wanted. She went with him into the back where he assaulted her and once he was done, he killed her.”

Ariadne paused, and I watched her face twitch as she struggled to maintain her composure. When she began again, her words came out strained. “Afterward he went behind the convenience store to the low-rent housing complex where he found Karina Hartsfield smoking a cigarette outside her patio door.” She moved to the last photograph. “He killed her and stole her car, leaving behind her four-year-old daughter alone in the apartment.” She pointed to the child in the photograph with Karina Hartsfield. “Odds are good that if he’d known she was there, he would have killed her too.”

“Seven people dead.” She reached back into the sheaf of photos and pulled out a half-dozen more, scattering them in front of me and causing me to hold my hand in front of my mouth as I heard a small gasp escape. They were photos of bodies, burned around the torso, the hands, the legs, burned so their insides showed and I nearly gagged from seeing them. “See, Darrell Seidell is what we’d call a fire jotnar—a fire giant, from the same Norse myths as,” she looked to Old Man Winter, “well, you know. Not nearly as potent as our friend Mr. Gavrikov, but up close, he’s the breath of hell brought to earth. Without anyone to stop him, he was free to keep driving west, leaving burned corpses and sundered families in his wake.”

She pulled newspaper clippings out of the stack. “Want to read his press reports?” They were emblazoned with headlines, “Killer Burns Family to Death One by One, then Kills Police Officer” and “Arson Killer Claims Two in Iowa.”

“What...” I felt myself speak in a hoarse whisper. “What happened to him?”

“That part isn’t in the clippings.” She reached into the file and pulled out another page, handing it to me.

It was a report, signed by Roberto Bastian, the head of M-Squad. I skimmed it then looked up to Ariadne. “Your people caught up with him halfway to Des Moines.”

“They wrecked his car, beat him to a bloody pulp,” she said with a haunted look, “and dragged him back here where we slapped him in restraints and sent him to Arizona to spend the rest of his life in a deep, dark hole in the middle of the desert.” Her eyes found mine, and I looked away first. “This is why we’re here. To protect people from this sort of monster.” She picked up another file from a stack to her left, slapping it onto the table in front of me, followed by another, and another. They weren’t loud, but the sound of the paper hitting the rock of the desk made me flinch each time. Finally she grabbed the rest of the pile and let them fall in front of me with a thud.

I stared at it, then pulled a file from the middle of the stack, opened it, and thumbed through. It was a series of reports from an incident in Birmingham, Alabama, that was handled by their Atlanta campus. A murder committed by a kid who was no older than me. Then another, and another. They caught him on his sixth victim. They were all committed in the course