An Accidental Family. Darlene Graham

never went inside,” Dillon claimed. “And I didn’t go very far. I stopped when I saw the men digging back in there.”

      Maddy started to sign something else, but Dillon’s hand flashed and the deaf child’s abruptly halted.

      “What did Dillon say to him?” Seth’s gaze shot to Rainey.

      “I have no idea. I wasn’t watching his hands. Dillon, don’t play games. This is serious.”

      “I didn’t say nothing,” Dillon lied.

      “Ask Maddy to repeat it.” Seth wanted to stay on point.

      But Maddy wouldn’t answer. After looking at Dillon with trepidation, he shook his head. But his darting brown eyes betrayed him.

      “See?” Dillon shouted. “They didn’t see nothing.” He leaped up in the confined space of the ambulance again, this time bumping his head against a low cabinet. Rainey jumped up, trying to examine the injury, but the boy jerked away from her and turned his angry countenance on Seth.

      “You should be out there going after the bad guys! They was gonna kill us. They was gonna take us back to the bridge and make it look like a accident.” Dillon’s arms flailed like an agitated monkey’s as angry tears spurted to his eyes. “We didn’t do nothin’ wrong and those guys were gonna kill us. You gotta believe me!”

      “Calm down.” Seth clamped a hand on Dillon’s shoulder and levered him back to the bench. “Right now I want you to sit down.” He returned his attention to Maddy. “Ask him what happened next.”

      Rainey frowned at his sharp tone. Her green eyes glared at him as if he were the bad guy in this deal. “Officer, these children are really very frightened.”

      “I’m aware of that. But right now a couple of extremely dangerous men are running around on the loose. Anything the boy knows that might help me catch them has got to come out. Now.”

      Rainey turned to face Maddy, and started signing again.

      “He said he’s sorry,” she interpreted when the child answered. “He says that if it hadn’t been for him the men wouldn’t have seen them. He said he must have made a noise or something that made them look up.”

      She turned her gaze up to Seth. “Maddy can’t hear himself when he makes noises.”

      “I understand,” Seth replied. He didn’t have her ask why Maddy might have made a sudden noise. Obviously the boy had seen something. Obviously the boys had all gone into the cave. But Seth was going to have a hard time getting a straight answer out of this bunch. “Then what?”

      “The men chased them and grabbed Aaron first.”

      Seth glanced at the obese child, who probably couldn’t move all that fast. The one most likely to get nabbed.

      “Maddy told me he and Dillon could have gotten away,” Rainey continued as she watched Maddy’s agitated hands and facial expressions, “but Dillon turned around to help Aaron.”

      Seth frowned, wondering why the child wouldn’t own up to his heroism.

      Rainey was steadily watching Maddy’s hands. “They bound them up with a big roll of duct tape and dragged them to the front of the cave—”

      Which was where Dillon claimed the other two had been all along, Seth noted.

      “—and he says the men were fighting about something.”

      “Ask him what they said.”

      Rainey turned to Seth with an impatient frown. He felt briefly captured by the beauty of her huge green eyes again before the meaning of her stare hit him. What an idiot—forgetting that Maddy wasn’t capable of hearing anything. “Never mind,” he muttered.

      “They were fightin’ about us.” Dillon jumped up again, spitting the words as he jabbed a finger at his own chest. “About how exactly to waste us. And you ain’t doing anything about it.” Beneath the youth’s blazing anger, Seth read genuine fear, and he sympathized, but a cop couldn’t permit any disrespect. This time it only took a sidelong look to make the boy sit down.

      After Dillon quieted, Seth glanced at Aaron. The kid had sat slumped in a trance, except for an occasional flicker of interest over something Dillon said, when it seemed like a kind of silent signal passed among the three boys.

      Rainey had said the redhead was a psychological mute. From some sort of trauma, Seth assumed. Uprooting these kids again—even if it was for their own protection—was not going to be easy.

      He moved to the front of the ambulance and spoke quietly to the paramedic, who had been busily making notes on a clipboard. “Has that kid talked at all?”

      The woman shook her head sadly. “Looks to me like he has no intention of talking anytime soon. Better watch that one, Seth.”

      Seth had no experience with such things, and no time to gently pry information by other means from a child who would not, or could not, communicate. He’d have to rely on Dillon’s version of the conversation for now.

      “Okay, Dillon.” He turned to the taller boy. “Tell me what they said.”

      “They were fighting about how now that we saw them, and how we seen what they was doin’, we’d most likely tell. And one said they would have to give us the business—that means kill us—”

      “Dillon,” Rainey interrupted, shooting a look of concern in Aaron’s direction. “Just tell what you heard.”

      “Look, Mizz Rainey.” Dillon’s emphasis of the title was not respectful. “They had us all trussed up with duct tape. They wasn’t takin’ us to no picnic.” He threw up his bandaged hand and signed at Maddy. “They was gonna make us part of their bones collection.”

      Maddy made one of his involuntary noises. “Dillon, hush,” Rainey hissed. “You are scaring Maddy and Aaron, and I won’t—”

      Seth put a palm up to silence Rainey. He didn’t want Dillon to hush. “Bones?” This time he questioned it.

      The lad blanched. “Did I say bones?”

      Seth gave him a sharp look. Earlier the boy had said the Slaughters were aiming to dig up some bones, as if he knew in advance what they were going to do. Then he’d claimed he’d caught them in the act. If he let the boy keep talking, he’d eventually get to the truth. “What else?”

      “They was arguing about whether we was town boys or not, meaning from Tenikah, I guess, and how long it would be before somebody noticed we was gone, and all that. And one of them said something about how Howard was really gonna be pissed.”

      “Howard?” Seth’s pulse kicked at the name. “Are you sure he said Howard?”

      “Yeah. There’s nothin’ wrong with my hearing. They was talking about how he’d know what to do or he’d be mad or something, like, you know, ‘We’re gonna have to tell Howard about this.’ Talk like that.”

      “Go on.”

      “Then one of them—like I told you, they looked exactly alike, if you ask me—except one was big and one was kinda regular.”

      “They’re twins,” Seth stated.

      “Twins?” Rainey glanced up at him.

      “Afraid so.” That fact had complicated matters in the wonderful world of the law. “The Slaughter brothers have used their identical looks to escape punishment more than once.”

      “Punishment? For what?”

      He let his gaze slide to Aaron to indicate that this was not something to discuss in front of kids.

      Rainey’s freckled cheeks flushed. “And now these two men are just running loose in the countryside?” she accused.

      Seth didn’t want to tell her that apprehending Lonnie