Condemned: A Thriller

by McBride, Michael

  “Where’s Dray?”

  She leaned back and smiled.

  “Would it surprise you to know that all of the accounts from which those messages originated were deleted minutes after sending them to you? Or that the texts came from disposable cellphones activated for just that single use?”

  “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Anyone can create a fake email account on a public computer and use it to build a whole fictitious life in this modern world of social media. You can even pick up a prepaid cellphone at the grocery store for less than fifty bucks. Probably get an even better deal if you buy in bulk.”

  “If you have something to say to me, then just come out and say it. I came down here to help, not to be subjected to thinly veiled accusations.”

  I stood up so quickly I knocked over my chair.

  “Clam down already, would you?” She offered a lopsided smirk and gestured to the chair on the floor. “No need to get your panties in a bunch. Sit back down before you hurt yourself.”

  I looked at the chair, then back at her. I was in no mood for any more of her abuse. I’d done what I’d come her to do. Let her deal with it.

  She sighed, walked around her desk, and righted the chair herself.

  “Please,” she said.

  I was so surprised by her tone and her use of a word I figured must have burned like acid on her tongue that I sat down without consciously making the decision to do so.

  “I’ve seen that shithole you live in.” She sat down and appraised me through eyes so tired they were nearly a uniform red. I could see that she no longer had the energy to fight. “You obviously couldn’t afford to buy a second cellphone, let alone a dozen.”

  I scratched the stubble on my cheek. If this was her version of an apology, I wasn’t entirely sure she understood the definition of the word.

  “How you keep a roof over your head is a mystery to me. I look at the companies affiliated with your site and have to wonder why they advertise with you at all.”

  “My site appeals to the urban exploration crowd. People who like to explore historic landmarks.”

  “People who need survival gear and bulletproof vests to go into abandoned buildings?”

  “This is Detroit.”

  “How much do you charge for ads like those?”

  “Not nearly enough.”

  “I can see that.”

  I refrained from telling her that I often negotiated trades, largely because it proved her point more than it validated my position. If her point was to make me feel like a complete failure, anyway. And I could feel her building toward something, although what I hadn’t the slightest clue.

  “I read your work, you know.” She smiled. “Don’t look so surprised. I didn’t say I liked it. It’s just really not my thing. It’s too…I don’t know. To whiny, maybe.”

  “Umm…thanks?”

  “It’s not bad. The writing’s solid, anyway. The thing I don’t get is why you want to spend all your time pining for the past when it’s gone and there’s nothing we can do about it. Want to make a difference? Fix the future. That’s where we’re all going to live. Forget about the old buildings and figure out how we’re supposed to pay for municipal services like electricity and water. Tell me a single mother working two jobs gives a rat’s ass about demolishing any of these deathtraps when she hasn’t had running water in a month.”

  “The past is the foundation of the future. You can’t build a house on rubble and expect it to last.”

  “You can’t build anything without money and you can’t bring money into the community without jobs. You think anyone out there’s going to look at all of these abandoned buildings and want to relocate here?”

  I shook my head and looked away. This conversation was going nowhere. We were saying the same thing, only where I believed the heart of the city could be made to beat again, she’d already started digging a hole to bury the body.

  “He followed you,” she said.

  “I know. I read the freaking texts, too.”

  “Not him. Detective Rogers. He followed you after you left the American.”

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I could only stare at her in confusion.

  “Right now there’s about a dozen people checking every camera from every intersection, security camera, and ATM within a five-block radius of Grand Circus Park and a physical evidence team working the park itself. That’s where your buddy Dray is.”

  The way she said the word “buddy” gave me a sinking sensation in my stomach and I suddenly understood exactly what was going on.

  “You used me. Both of you. You used me as what? As bait?”

  “You were never in any real danger.”

  “Never in any…? Did you not see this?” I grabbed my cellphone and shook it as I spoke. “You read these messages. Tell me you believe a single word coming out of your—”

  The phone made a buzzing sound and vibrated in my hand. I felt like I was holding a rattlesnake by the head, but didn’t dare release it for fear it would strike me. I turned the phone around and swiped the screen.

  “What does it say?” Aragon asked.

  The message was from @linett41325. A Twitter account.

  “Is it from him?”

  I read the message, then turned the screen so she could see it.

  She was already on her phone and slipping into the jacket draped over the back of her chair when I turned it around so I could read it again. This time there was no pretense, no effort to trick me into discovering his work.

  Lee Plaza. Peacock Alley.

  I feared the message he’d left there would be even more direct.

  TWENTY

  The Lee Plaza Apartments were commissioned in 1927 by real estate tycoon Ralph T. Lee, who hoped to bring a little of the flavor of Manhattan to Motown. It was a seventeen-story Art Deco monument to opulence, an I-shaped, orange-bricked masterpiece with Mediterranean flourishes, a red tile roof with ornamental lightning rods, and walls adorned with terra cotta lion heads. It began its life as a residential hotel—which was all the rage at the time—where the rich could live the best of both worlds, in private apartments with room service and concierges. Those who could afford one of the more than two hundred luxury apartments were rewarded with a basement that featured a beauty parlor, billiards room, and a grocery store so they never actually had to leave. There were even flower and cigar shops, not to mention twenty-four-hour valet parking in the adjoining garage.

  It made a certain amount of sense that when the wheels came off the Motor City, this building was hit the hardest.

  Streets once lined with majestic elm trees were now bordered by cracked sidewalks riddled with weeds. Stately mansions sat back from West Grand Avenue, decomposing behind feral lawns gone to seed. The Lee Plaza itself was enclosed behind a six-foot chain link fence topped with concertina wire, behind which the wild trees and weeds had begun the slow process of reclaiming the structure. All of the windows had been broken out long ago. Those on the main level were now filled with sloppily mortared concrete blocks. A fist of either solidarity or black power had been spray-painted above the brick rectangle where the front door had once been and ambitious taggers had risked disemboweling themselves on the fence to cover the ornate stone façade with graffiti so elaborate that I couldn’t tell what the words were supposed to say.

  Aragon pulled to the curb in a wash of red and blue lights. DPD cruisers already blocked off both West Grand and Lawton and their drivers were in the process of securing the surrounding vacant lots, which were overgrown with weeds and riddled with heaps of rotting construction materials. Dray strode across the sidewalk and was at Aragon’s door before she even opened it.

  “There’s an ingress on the east side.” He guided her by the shoulder toward the lot separating the Lee from the neighboring apartment complex. The majority of its windows were boarded over, but it showed signs of continued habitation. “We found where he cut through the chain link about
halfway to the alley.”

  I climbed out and closed my door.

  Dray glanced up at the sound and offered me a tight nod, but couldn’t bring himself to meet my stare. We both knew that things had changed between us, and there was no going back to the way they’d been before. I felt the kind of soul-deep sorrow I hadn’t experienced since my mother left and realized it was because I’d lost a brother in a very real way. Not just because he’d used me in an effort to draw out the killer, but because for the briefest of moments he’d considered me a viable suspect. If anyone should have known that I was incapable of even contemplating such horrors, it was Dray. Were our roles reversed, I never would have doubted him. Not for a second.

  I followed them through the gate of a wrought iron fence that seemed strangely out of place and past a uniformed officer who appraised me with unconcealed distaste.

  Dray pulled back the chain-link flap and held it for us to crawl under. We were hidden from both West Grand to the north and Ferry Park to the south by a thicket of wild birches collecting trash and leaves around their trunks as we approached the side of the Lee. Someone had taken a sledgehammer to the concrete blocks in one of the windows and created a hole more than large enough to climb through without overly exerting ourselves.

  Dray clicked on his flashlight and shined it across an enormous room hazy with dust. I recognized the ballroom from pictures, but I’d never been inside. Whatever romantic elements they’d captured on film weren’t evident in person. The broken piano in the corner didn’t look forlorn; it looked dead. Whatever residual life this building had once contained was now gone, leaving a vulture-picked carcass with paint peeling from the walls and more of the water-damaged ceiling on the floor than overhead. Rusted chains marked where crystal chandeliers once hung. The wrought iron railing had been stolen from the balcony, where once orchestras played to the delight of a hundred tuxedo-clad men swirling their ladies across the dance floor. Enormous windows filled the interior wall opposite us. All of the glass was gone, and yet the thin panes dividing the windows into smaller rectangles still remained. The doors were designed to be inconspicuous and customized to resemble the windows. One stood open wide enough to reveal the darkened hallway. And the silhouetted figures inside.

  I approached on numb, wooden limbs. At first, I saw only long, slender legs floating above the ground. Then the curves of their bare bottoms and the slopes of their lower backs. Dray raised his flashlight beam and I had to look away.

  There were two of them this time. Two naked girls suspended from the ceiling by cords that pinned their upper arms behind their backs. One’s head hung to her chest, while the other’s leaned back against her shoulders. The wound on her throat opened so wide that it revealed her discolored vertebrae. They hung about five feet apart, two young girls whose lives intersected in this horrible place.

  I watched the shadows of their legs sway against the opposite wall of the ornate corridor known as Peacock Alley, where residents long ago relaxed in easy chairs under the hand-painted, barrel-vaulted ceiling, surrounded by mirror-paneled walls that produced an infinite number of reflections. The mirrors were now little more than shards of glass that crunched underfoot. The flashlights swept the shadows of the two victims down the bare walls as though they were attempting to run away.

  “Stop right there,” Aragon said to one of the uniformed officers. “Go back. Shine your light that way. No, damn it. Back…there. Stop.”

  I followed the beam toward the pale body of a young woman, her legs and abdomen mottled with bruises, her throat torn open and her sightless eyes looking up at the crumbled ceiling. At first I didn’t see what had caught Aragon’s attention, and then I saw the girl’s shadow on the wall. It aligned with twin crescents of smudged soot and grime, which in conjunction with the shadow of her head made her appear to have grown the curved horns of a bull. Suddenly I knew exactly which scene the killer had attempted to recreate.

  “Shine your light at the other one,” I said to Dray.

  I felt the weight of his eyes upon me for several seconds before he shined his flashlight at the other victim. He took a step to his left and her shadow moved to the right. The beam highlighted the tangled hair hanging in front of her face and her shadow aligned perfectly with another pair of horns.

  “It’s an invocation to Hecate,” I said.

  “The hell you talking about?” Dray said.

  “This is the metaphorical gateway to hell. ‘There was a deep stony cave, huge and gaping wide, sheltered by a dark lake and shadowy woods, over which nothing could extend its wings in safe flight, since such a breath flowed from those black jaws, and was carried to the over-arching sky.’ I’ll paraphrase the rest. The Greeks called it Aornos. The bird-less.”

  “What’s that from?” Aragon asked.

  “The Aeneid. By Virgil. It’s an epic poem describing Aeneas’s descent into Hades.”

  “What’s with the horns?”

  “’Here the priestess first of all tethered four black heifers, poured wine over their foreheads, and placed the topmost bristles that she plucked, growing between their horns, in the sacred fire, as a first offering, calling aloud to Hecate, powerful in Heaven and Hell.’”

  “You’re saying he sacrificed them,” Dray said.

  “You said four,” Aragon said. “There are only two of them.”

  “’Others slit the victim’s throats and caught the warm blood in bowls.’”

  “That’s why the others had their throats mauled. Why their blood was drained.”

  “They’re all connected. The four combined are meant to invoke Hecate, the Greek goddess whose favor warriors sought before entering battle. He’s calling for her protection as he embarks upon his own descent into hell.”

  “I’d be happy to send him there myself.”

  She stared directly at me when she said it.

  I turned uneasily away from her and looked to Dray for support. He was crouching on the floor in front of the second body, shining his light upward at such an angle as to see her face, which was concealed from nearly every other angle by her ratted hair. I tilted my head and followed his beam. I recognized Samantha Kent—the girl who’d gone missing from UM nine days ago—almost immediately.

  I glanced back in time to see Aragon look from the girl’s face to mine with an expression of recognition.

  It was Samantha’s face she’d seen on my laptop when she approached me in the waiting room of the police station.

  TWENTY -ONE

  My head positively throbbed from the lack of sleep and dehydration. Even the sparse light that passed through my closed lids burned like acid and prodded my brain with needles. I wanted to make myself throw up just to see if that might at least take the edge off this wretched migraine, but I didn’t figure Aragon would be too pleased if I did. As it was, I could feel the anger radiating from her in waves from the driver’s seat and was grateful for any excuse not to have to look at her.

  She had yet to address the fact that she’d recognized the victim from the picture on my laptop, although I could almost hear the gears in her brain grinding as she worked out exactly how to phrase her questions. Each passing mile brought us closer to the inevitable confrontation I dreaded, despite being one hundred percent confident of my innocence. And yet, I found myself formulating counterarguments and lining up my alibis for the last couple of weeks in my head.

  As stage magician and noted scientific skeptic James Randi said, you can’t prove a negative. That was the inherent flaw with our justice system. Innocence was simply impossible to prove. As they say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I could offer whatever excuses I could come up with and yet, when it came right down to it, I totally followed her thought process and could find no theoretical holes in the logical progression of damning evidence against me. Outside of the fact that I had absolutely nothing to do with the deaths of these young girls, of course. But I couldn’t help thinking that in some existential way, I just might have.
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br />   I heard the bleep of a police siren and knew we had to be nearing the station. A part of me wished we’d stayed at Lee Plaza. At least there I had Dray to serve as a buffer. But the truth was—whether I wanted to admit it or not—a part of me had seen this as a game, a contest between me and the man who’d called me out and challenged the police through me. Now all I could think about were the four dead girls for whom none of this had been a game. Four girls whose deaths I would carry with me for the rest of my life.

  The cruiser slowed and veered into the parking lot. A hard right and I heard the bumper scrape against a concrete parking blocker. I felt the weight of her eyes upon me and knew the time had finally come.

  “You have to know how this looks from where I’m sitting,” she said.

  I opened my eyes and stared at the back of the station.

  “Kind of like an elementary school,” I said, and regretted it immediately.

  “You think this is a joke?”

  I shook my head and looked out the window at the people walking past on the street, oblivious. The engorged veins in my temples pulsed with such force that the corners of my vision tapped in time.

  “We’ve got the picture of a girl we didn’t know was dead yet on your computer, a string of crime scenes you led us to, and some obscure references to classical texts about hell, which you can apparently quote off the top of your head.”

  “They’re not really all that obscure. Every college freshman—”

  “Serial killers like to put themselves right in the middle of the investigation. And every time I turn around, there you are.”

  “You can’t possibly believe—”

  “And what about your agenda with that blog of yours?”

  “It’s a legitimate news outlet.”

  “Think this will bring attention to your preservationist cause? I got news for you…once word gets out, those old piles of bricks will be torn down so fast it’ll make your head spin.”

  I looked her dead in the eyes. The scar through her lip was pink and livid and made it look like she was sneering at me.