Condemned: A Thriller

by McBride, Michael

  Dray took me by the arm and offered me a small tube of IcyHot.

  “Better than Vicks,” he said. “Put a little inside your nostrils. It’ll burn like a mother, but it’s the burning that makes your eyes tear up. Most people don’t know you can smell through your eyes.”

  I looked at the tube, then at him again.

  “Trust me.”

  I did as he suggested and followed him down the hallway with mentholated fire licking at the underside of my brain and my vision obscured by tears. We stood at the threshold, beyond which was a room I’d hoped never to see again. Aragon glanced up from where she crouched beside the victim, studying the victim’s broken fingernails through the plastic bags tied over her hands. Her knees popped when she stood and crossed the room to meet us. She pulled Dray aside and spoke to him in a low voice so I couldn’t hear.

  The girl was still exactly as I’d found her. I’d really hoped the ME’s people would have collected her by now. Seeing her like…this…just wasn’t right. Like Lindsay DeWitt, she’d been stripped and hung naked by her ankles. A hole had been pinched though the ten-foot ceiling to expose the steel braces in the reinforced framework. The rope binding her ankles had been run over one of the girders and back down to the handle of the old safe in the corner of the room, which served as a counterweight. The backs of her hands rested on the floor. Her long blond hair swept the dust when anyone walked past. The rats had found her first. They’d consumed her eyes and cheeks and the tip of her nose. Still, I could tell she’d been beautiful in life. Her breasts were small and masticated, her stomach and thighs addled with bloodless lacerations from the claws of so many vermin climbing her inert form. Her skin was a sickly shade of grayish-white and marbled with bruises. The wound on her neck had been used as an access point for the rats to enter her body and scavenge her organs. As I watched, a whiskered face poked out of the hole.

  I turned away before I started heaving again.

  “Tell us what you see,” Dray said.

  The portable lights erected in the corners of the room evaporated the shadows and laid bare every ugly detail of the room. The ceiling was brown and warped by water rot, the plaster crumbling from the brick walls. The dust and plaster on the ground were hard and crusted, much as I imagined the surface of the moon must look.

  I fanned away the bloated flies as I walked a circuit of the main room, then through the doorway into the adjoining room. Footsteps creaked on the floor behind me. This room was smaller than the last and must have served as an office or storage area of some kind. Perhaps this was where the jewelry had been manufactured or sized for the fancy display cases that once occupied the room where the dead girl now hung. The walls were scored with carbon from the remediation efforts. There were rusted machines of indeterminate function with cranks and levers that couldn’t have been moved with all of our combined strength. To my right was a lavatory stripped to the wooden frame and a hole in the floor through which I saw only darkness where the plumbing had been.

  I stood in the center of the room and turned in a full circle, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. No words or figures carved into the plaster or wood. No objects that shouldn’t have been there or should have been there but weren’t. I felt the weight of eyes upon me and looked in any direction that spared me having to see the expressions on their faces.

  “We’re wasting time,” Aragon said. “If there was anything here, we’d have found it by now.”

  “Give him a chance,” Dray said.

  I walked past the ancient machinery. Pipes protruded from the upper half and entered the wall. Presumably it was either powered by natural gas or steam funneled up from below or the pipes vented exhaust or some other byproduct to the outside. It looked like if you pulled the lever, the armature on the right would lower—

  I could see how it worked now. It was an engraver.

  On the wall above it was a heat register. It was circular and featured an ornate pattern that reminded me of gothic crosses and holly leaves. It was thick with soot and clogged to the point that I doubted any air could pass through it. Above it, someone had smeared the carbon so it looked almost like flames rising from it. Black flames.

  I looked at the engraver, at the horizontal bar at roughly waist height, then down at the powdered rust on the floor beneath it.

  My heart rate accelerated. I spun to look at Dray, then back at the engraver.

  I raised my right foot, braced it on the bar, and hauled myself up onto it using one of the pipes protruding from the wall for leverage. It was nearly impossible to balance up there as I clawed at the corners of the heat register, trying to get my fingers underneath it.

  “A dungeon horrible, on all sides round, as one great furnace flames,” I said.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Aragon said.

  I pried the edge up just far enough to slide my fingertips under. Pulled. It came outward with a squeal. Another wiggle and the register popped right out of the wall, clattered from the pipes, and fell to the floor.

  “Yet from those flames no light; but rather darkness visible.” I peered into the hole in the wall, but couldn’t see a blasted thing. “Served only to discover sights of woe, regions of sorrow, doleful shades…”

  “What did you find?” Dray asked.

  I clicked on my light, switched the lens from red to clear, and shined it into the wall. The ductwork was gone, leaving a clear view into a pipe chase filled with spider webs, with the exception of one swatch of bare bricks directly ahead. And the three numbers carved into them with the tip of some sharp implement.

  “Where peace and rest can never dwell, hope never comes that comes to all…”

  “What do you see, damn it?” Dray said.

  I stared at the numbers.

  43. 19. 34.

  My stomach sank and I nearly fell from my perch in my hurry to turn around. I stared past the others into the adjacent room as I finished the quote.

  “…but torture without end.”

  TWELVE

  It was from the seventeenth century poem Paradise Lost by John Milton. And again, it was a description of the gateway to hell. The poem itself was written in blank verse and iambic pentameter and served as a classic example of the Baroque Period of literature. It was written during an era of religious reformation—both Protestant and Catholic—and attempted to tell the story of Adam and Eve in a way that justified the actions of God to a population truly questioning His will for the first time. It detailed the rise of Satan from a version of hell called Pandemonium and the subsequent tragedy he wrought upon the Garden of Eden. It was from a pit beneath the ground that he clawed his way into an idyllic world and set it on its path to ruination.

  I studied it in great detail in a 300-level English Lit class—junior year, if I remember correctly—although I recall little about that time in my life beyond living in a cramped house far from campus in an effort to save money and spending more time riding my bike to get there than actually sitting in class, and even then I could hardly afford it. I worked as many hours as I could as a night clerk at a chain motel. The pay wasn’t great, but I could study on the job. The problem was I existed in a perpetual state of sleep deprivation. I rarely saw my friends and had neither the time nor the energy to keep up with my girlfriend at the time. Dray occasionally swung by to hang out or watch a game on the TV in the lobby. Sometimes he brought a date and borrowed a key to the pool. Outside of that, I hardly saw him until senior year, when I learned that I could make as much in a couple hours tending bar as I could during an entire overnight desk shift.

  I hadn’t thought about those days in a long time. They weren’t the best years of my life, but I had to admit they were a whole lot more fun than what I was doing now.

  The CSRT had mercifully lowered the victim to a gurney and transported her body to the morgue. Dray had been spot-on about the IcyHot, which had nearly entirely concealed the scent, although for a much shorter period than I would have liked. I could still smell
her, though, even an hour later as the criminalists took their sweet time poring over every inch of the safe. It was roughly the size of a washing machine, only narrower, and set flush with the floor. The black paint was gray with dust and spotted with rust. The raised copperplate letters read: The Reliable Safe & Lock Co. Inc. Covington, KY.

  The evidence techs discovered gouges in the floor where someone had slid the safe to its current location and prints they attributed to gloved fingers on both the handle and the combination knob, most of them light enough so as not to overly disturb the decades’ worth of settled dust. They’d found no indication that the safe had been wired or booby-trapped in any way, but continued to evaluate it with an extreme level of caution considering the legs upon which it had formerly stood appeared to have been only recently removed and no one could come up with a good reason as to why. I was beginning to think they were just stalling for fear of what we might find inside.

  The lead crime scene investigator was a criminologist named Jaye, although I’m not sure if that was her first name or last. She was Asian and spoke with a French-Canadian accent and was totally in her element running the show. She positively glowed when she took her military-grade through-wall radar from its case and explained how the device could detect both heat signatures and movement through eight inches of solid concrete, so if there was anything of a biological, chemical, or radiological nature in the safe, she’d find it.

  While she pressed the radar against the safe from every conceivable angle and her team did its best to give her space while searching for fingerprints and body fluids and gathering trace evidence, I paced the room across the hall. Not only was the waiting killing me, but I was going stir crazy without my phone, which had already been confiscated as evidence, although no one held out much hope of divining the location of the account from which the tip was sent or the identity of magic3124. I wanted to go online to see if I could identify the victim, as I had Lindsay DeWitt, but my iPad was in my car beyond the dwindling gathering of reporters, most of whom dispersed once word traveled that the body went out through the back alley. So I paced clear up until I heard commotion and crossed the hall to see Jaye dialing in the combination.

  The dial squeaked when she turned it first one way, then the other. I couldn’t tell if the tumblers were falling into place or not until after she reached the third number and there was a dull thud. She looked back over her shoulder before turning the handle. It made a grinding sound and she had to set her feet to put more oomph into it. The bolt retracted with a clang and she swung the door open.

  There was nothing inside. No jewels or valuables. No files or papers. No boxes or shelves. Nothing. And, thankfully, no body as I had initially feared.

  I sighed in frustration and ran my fingers through my hair. The exhaustion I had somehow held at bay came crashing down upon me with the revelation that we’d just wasted an inordinate amount of time opening a safe inside of which there wasn’t a single clue as to the reason why.

  Jaye glanced back with an expression of surprise on her face and scurried backward from the safe. I caught a glimpse of the hole in the floor before Dray drew his pistol, stepped in front of me, and aimed down into the darkness.

  “Give me some light,” he said. A mini-Maglite appeared in Aragon’s hand. She knelt behind him and shined it down into the hole from between his legs. I saw the top rung of a ladder in a beam sparkling with motes of dust. “Watch my six.”

  Without the slightest hesitation, he contorted his body in such a way that he could slide his legs down into the hole. The tapping of his footsteps on the rungs echoed from a space that sounded considerably smaller than this one. When he reached the bottom, he turned in a circle, sighting the room down the barrel of his pistol.

  I couldn’t tell what he saw down there, but when he looked up, it was with an expression I couldn’t interpret, like the face of a stranger.

  “What’s down there?” Aragon called.

  Dray opened his mouth, then closed it again. He returned his attention to the space around him, which none of us could see through the small hole.

  Aragon pushed past me, ducked into the safe, and clattered down the ladder. Jaye and the other evidence techs stood back. This was not a part of the job with which they had a lot of experience and it showed. The perpetrators were generally long gone by the time they arrived and for the first time the realization hit me that the killer might be down there right now. A part of me thought of him in abstract terms, but the reality was that a murderer who, for whatever reason, identified with me could be hiding down there in the darkness.

  Dray didn’t even look up as Aragon descended, drew her weapon, and stepped down beside him. They stayed in the wan column of light shining through the hole in the safe.

  “We need more light down here,” Aragon said.

  I clicked on my beam and shined it down on them. It wasn’t good enough, I knew. Without thinking, I twisted and turned and somehow fed my feet through the hole and descended on legs that didn’t feel like my own.

  I’m sure Dray would have hauled me back up the ladder by the scruff of my neck if he knew I’d come down there without his explicit approval, but he was so captivated by his surroundings that I don’t think he even knew I was there.

  The moment I saw the walls, I understood why.

  THIRTEEN

  The third-floor unit must once have sold the kind of jewelry families passed down through the generations. We were inside a vault roughly the size of a prison cell and filled with the same aura of hopelessness. It was a physical sensation that permeated the skin and bones and settled in the marrow like lead. I imagined this was how it felt to be buried alive.

  There was a locked iron gate inside the lone doorway. Through the gaps I could see a complex system of gears and machinations built into the door, all of them rusted together so completely that I was certain the last person who knew the combination had taken it with him to the grave long ago.

  I looked back up at the ceiling. That was the sole point of egress. The warped edges marked the path of the acetylene torch someone had used to cut through the floor and the top of the vault. It must have taken days to carve through the steel-reinforced floor, days when the glow of sparks would have been visible through the windows from the outside if anyone had looked. If anyone had cared.

  It probably took even longer to cut through the wall of the vault and excavate the tunnel through the bricks and concrete. I could see only darkness through there, darkness so cold I could positively feel it radiating into the small chamber. The rear wall was one large floor-to-ceiling cabinet with discolored brass locks on the drawers, most of which stood open and housed spider webs thick with dust. Many remained closed and locked, and there were no scrapes or scratches to suggest anyone had attempted to force them open. Surely with all of the time he spent down here he must have gotten at least a little curious about their contents. The fact that he hadn’t so much as tried to open them in search of possible caches of gold or gemstones frightened me more than everything else, for it indicated to me that this was a man who cared nothing for his future on this earth, only for his forays into what he considered hell and the victims he brought along with him.

  The remaining walls were covered with the carcasses of bats in varying degrees of decomposition. Hundreds of them. They’d been nailed to the walls through the abdomen with such force that their heads and wings folded forward, as though attempting to fly away. Some were so old they’d turned to bones that littered the marble floor beneath the nails from which they’d once hung. Others were so fresh their furry bodies were bloated with the gasses of early rot and I could clearly see the distinct lacerations where their throats had been slit in order to collect the blood from their arteries. Their bellies were black and crusted with it, and what I had mistaken for a marble pattern on the floor was actually dried blood.

  “At least now we know where he got the bat blood,” Aragon said.

  “There’s too much of it here,�
�� Dray said. He kept his weapon trained on the hole in the far wall. “It can’t all be from the bats.”

  I prayed he was wrong, although I had a horrible feeling that the last thing at least two girls had seen on this earth were these dead bats leering down at them, their jaws opened in agony.

  I wondered how the killer had gotten his victims in here, if he’d somehow lured or forced them inside the building or if he’d carried their unconscious bodies from his car, right out in the open. Had people become so accustomed to not looking that they were no longer able to see?

  I stared into the tunnel and I saw it for what it was. If we’d just entered through the gates of hell, then somewhere in the darkness was hell itself and I didn’t even want to speculate as to what it was like if this was only the anteroom.

  “I smell traces of ammonia,” Jaye said from above me. I flinched at the sound of her voice.

  “What does that mean?” Aragon said.

  “Urine. Probably from the victim. We can’t rule out our unsub, though. He obviously spent enough time down there that it could just as easily be his.”

  “He’s too careful for that,” Dray said.

  “You could well be right, but nobody can spend any amount of time in a confined space without leaving some physical trace.”

  “Right now we need to make sure there isn’t more than just a physical trace of him down here.”