“I don’t know, but I know he’s close. I fought him last time, but I couldn’t stop him. Please…get out.”
Suddenly the house was pitched into blackness, only the candles offering a respite from the all-encompassing darkness
“Someone’s here,” Adam said.
And Leslie felt suddenly cold.
Matt had left her.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Officer Dale Nelson was young, just out of the academy. Joe didn’t mind that fact. Nelson was willing and adventurous. He was just uncertain. Whether Nelson or O’Hara and Myers, the two older cops, believed in their quest or not, they had been told to listen to him and give him their best. He’d sent the two veteran cops down a northeastern tunnel, while he had chosen the more westerly one for himself and Nelson.
Closest to the prostitutes’ street, Hastings House, the dig—and the site where they had found the body earlier. If Leslie really had heard sobbing from inside Hastings House, he had to be going in the right direction. If only the remains of the system didn’t add up to such a labyrinth. Progress had left behind a bone structure that was now sad and dilapidated.
And dark.
“We’re looking for a room of some kind. A room that might be used as a cell,” Joe explained. “Look for anything that might be a door.”
“Gotcha,” Nelson said. Suddenly he let out a hoarse cry.
“What?” Joe demanded.
“Rat,” Nelson said apologetically. “Sorry.”
“Right.”
They kept on trudging.
“Douse those,” Adam said, and Nikki quickly put out the candles. They stood in the pitch dark, and Leslie nearly jumped a mile when she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Adam. “I’m going for the gun.”
“Upstairs?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“No!”
“I have to.”
“Adam—”
“I’ll be careful.”
He disappeared, but Leslie could hear Nikki breathing at her side. “We can’t just stay here,” she whispered.
“Do you have a better suggestion?” Nikki asked.
She did. Down in the basement. There were tools down there. Weapons with which they could fight back.
“Hey!” They heard a sudden cry from the parlor. “What’s going on in here?”
Brad! Leslie didn’t know whether to trust him or not. Had he cut off the electricity to take them by surprise? Or was someone else in the house, too?
She didn’t know the answers to any of those questions.
She dragged the table aside and moved the braided rug.
“Come on,” she whispered urgently to Nikki.
“No…you go down there. No one knows anything about me. You hide, and I’ll cover the floor with the rug. Go!”
“Nikki, I can’t leave you in danger.”
“I’m not the one in danger. I’ll hide, too, but if I don’t put the rug back, it will be obvious where you are. Now get down there!”
Leslie did. She moved down the stairs blindly, trying to remember where she had left a lantern. She groped her way around the various boxes, until her fingers curled around a lantern at last. After more exploration she also found a scraping knife. Then she hesitated, listening, trying to see the room in her mind’s eyes. A stack of boxes was piled to the right of the hearth. She slipped behind them, against the wall, the knife in one hand, the lantern in the other. She waited. And waited.
There was silence. Then…
Sobbing. She turned, staring in the direction of the sound, but the room was pitch black, and she couldn’t hear a thing. She remembered the way Joe had been running his hands over the wall the other day. In the dark, she began to do the same thing herself.
She touched a brick, and it gave. Stunned, she paused for a moment. Then she fumbled in the darkness, found the uneven brick again and pushed until it gave even farther. Her hand met something cold and metallic. She felt it with her fingers, trying to picture what it was. Finally she pushed it, and the air itself seemed to fill with a loud, creaking sound.
The entire wall moved. She swallowed, blinked, still in darkness, aware of what had happened only because a gust of stale air struck her. The door, however, had made a sound loud enough to wake the dead. If there were indeed a killer in Hastings House, he had heard it, which meant there was no way she could go back upstairs.
There was only one way to go.
Forward.
Someone was in the house. Adam Harrison knew it even before he heard the voice call out from downstairs. When neither Leslie nor Nikki answered that call, he decided to play it safe and made his way along the upstairs hall as silently as possible, reached his gun quickly and started back toward the stairway. Then he heard a whisper in the darkness.
“Adam?”
It was Nikki.
Before he had a chance to reply, there was a commotion from below. He hurried down the stairs. He could just make out a single figure in the entry hall, but it seemed to be fighting with an unseen opponent.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” Adam shouted.
The figure stumbled out of the house, Adam in pursuit. “Stop, Adam!” Nikki called. “We’ll call the police!”
“No! He’ll be gone before they get here,” Adam shouted without stopping.
As he tore out of the house, he realized that Nikki was right behind him.
“Shit!” Nelson yelled.
Joe spun around, wondering if he should have saddled himself with such a rookie.
But this time there was a look of agony on the young man’s face.
“What?”
“My fucking ankle. I stepped into some kind of rut…there’s a twisted rail here. Hell!”
“I can’t walk. I’m sorry.”
“All right. I’ll get you out of here.”
“No…hell, no. You go on.”
“You want me to leave you in an abandoned tunnel?”
“I’ve got a light. My radio is shit down here, but the light is working. Just send help as soon as you can.” He winced. “I’m serious. I’ll be all right. Find that girl.”
Joe nodded. “All right. I’ll get someone back to you as soon as I can.”
“It’s a plan. Go on.”
Joe nodded and left.
Leslie turned on the light; there was no reason not to. She could hear footsteps overhead. It could be Nikki or Adam, she supposed.
But maybe it wasn’t.
She hurried through the doorway, checking out the door as she passed. It seemed to her that the latch and the hinges should have been far rustier. When the hell had the door been put in?
It must have been during the Civil War, when the house had been part of the Underground Railroad. She wasn’t in a subway tunnel. This passage might lead to an old one, but…
She shoved at the door, closing it as best she could. Then she lifted her light. There was only one way to go.
She started walking, and then she froze.
“Leslie? Are you down here? What the hell is going on? The house was pitch dark and the door was open.”
It was Brad, and he sounded truly baffled. But if Brad was in the basement behind her, where the hell were Nikki and Adam?
She kept silent. Then she heard the door opening and started running along the tunnel, quickly turning out the light. She heard the creaking of the door as Brad opened it.
“Leslie, it’s me. Brad.” He sounded indignant. “Dammit, Leslie, you’ve got me scared to death. Where the hell are you?”
She went still, barely daring to breathe. But she had to move, so she inched forward in the darkness, feeling her way along the wall. It was tile here, she thought. Then more brick followed concrete, before it turned to tile again.
“Leslie, it’s dark in here!” Brad called.
She heard a cry in the dark, followed by a thud, like something heavy falling.
Brad?
Then nothing.
She hurried along, silent, desperate. Some
one was behind her. She was sure of it. And something told her that it was no longer Brad.
Tile…concrete…damp and slick beneath her hand.
Then…wood?
There was noise coming from the shaft ahead, but Joe couldn’t tell what the hell it was. He drew his gun, holding his lantern high.
It seemed close…yet simultaneously far away.
Swearing, he paused to pull out the map again.
There was a tunnel that ran parallel to the one he was in. Apparently, it had never been part of the subway. There was a notation on it. Old passageway, unusable, storage.
Storage. That meant there had to be access to it somewhere. He strained to see the tunnel ahead. Was that something in the wall, about fifty feet ahead? He hurried forward to check it out.
There were bolts; she could feel them. A door! All too aware that someone was coming up behind her and with no idea how much distance there was between them, she felt for the bolts and began to work at them. She had no choice.
There was a snick as the first bolt gave. She moved faster, heedless of the noise she was making. Without meaning to, she began to scream. “Help!”
The sound came back to her as an echo as she slid the last bolt back and the door gave. Suddenly there was light. She blinked furiously against the abrupt brightness of it. She was in a room, a room that smelled of death. There was a cot in it, and a table by the cot that held a few bottles of water.
There was something piled on the far side of the room.
And there was a woman. She was dark-haired and blue-eyed, thin to the point of emaciation. Her ankles were chained together, but she was on her feet, pale and sickly but ready to do battle. Genevieve O’Brien.
“Get in! I can’t believe you’ve found me, but he’s right behind you.”
Leslie turned. She screamed. He was almost on them.
“Get in!” Genevieve implored.
Leslie hurried into the room and quickly shut the door behind her. Both women laid their full weight against the door as someone pounded against it from the other side. Genevieve looked at her. “Who are you? How did you get here? Now he’ll kill us both.”
“But you’re alive,” Leslie gasped, fighting to hold the door. How long could they manage it? Who knew she was here? Adam and Nikki.
If they were still alive.
“Who is he?” Leslie demanded. “Who?”
Even as she asked, their enemy hit the door with staggering force and sent them flying backward.
And she knew.
Joe found the door. He thundered his weight against it time after time, trying to break through the rust of decades. Finally it gave.
He was in another tunnel. At one end, he could see a gaping doorway. Hastings House. If he had his bearings right, that was Hastings House. The crypt. And he had been right. There was a false wall, and it was open now.
He heard groaning and hurried forward, his light high. There was a body on the floor. He knelt down beside it and heard another groan.
Brad.
The man blinked. “What the hell…? Why did you hit me like that? I swear, when I got to the house it was dark and the door was wide open. I started looking for someone…I went down to the basement and…Look, I wouldn’t hurt Leslie, I swear!”
“Where the hell is she?”
“How should I know? You hit me.”
“I didn’t hit you.”
It was then that he heard a bloodcurdling scream.
Robert Adair came in, a sad look on his face. “Leslie, I knew you were trouble.”
“Robert,” Genevieve said, bizarrely cheerful. “You’re here. Please don’t be angry. I think it will be wonderful to have Leslie with us.”
Leslie shook her head, stunned, thinking as fast as she could, playing for time. Playing for her life. “Robert…think about what you’re doing. I think you wanted to be found. You set Joe up with Eileen Brideswell. You’re a good man. You don’t want to hurt me.”
His gun was drawn. She knew that he had killed before. She swallowed, suddenly realizing what the pile on the far side of the room was. One or more of the other girls. He had left their bodies here with Genevieve so she would know her inevitable fate. So she would behave. So he could bend her to his will.
“Leslie, why couldn’t you have died in that blast? Then…you could have stayed away, but you didn’t. Ask Genevieve—there’s only one way to handle women. She had such a fit about those hookers going missing. She was going to do something. So she had to come here. She’s been a delight, I have to say. But then, she wants to live.”
“Leslie wants to live, too,” Genevieve said.
“Robert,” Leslie said, a shocked whisper of disbelief. “I just can’t believe it’s you.”
“Who else?” he asked lightly. “Who else had access to sites and houses and cars, and who else could go all over the city, doing as he pleased? These tunnels are quite something, you know. You can get right into Hastings House. Of course, you figured that out, didn’t you, Leslie? But did you know there’s an entrance right into that crypt you discovered? I would have taken care of things the morning you were down there alone, but then Laymon had to show up before I could drag you away. No one would have known. But he showed up and I had to leave in a hurry. You’re remarkably hard to kill, young lady. Not even a push onto the subway tracks could do it. You’ve got to understand. I never wanted to hurt you. But you know way too much. I don’t know how you know, you just do. You would have discovered me eventually. You have some kind of a touch or a sight, and it got even stronger after you survived the explosion. A shame, that. Four people dead, but I missed the one I meant to kill. I’m really sorry, Leslie,” he said softly.
She saw that his fingers were twitching on his gun.
He was going to shoot her. Then and there.
“Stop!” a voice roared. She heard running footsteps.
Joe!
Robert turned and fired into the tunnel, but his arms jerked and the shot went wild. It looked as if he was fighting with himself—or an invisible opponent. Despite that, he kept pulling the trigger.
Again and again.
The blasts were horrendously loud in the confined space, and he was cursing and screaming even as he kept firing, the shots still going wild.
Suddenly he was slammed up against the door, his mouth an O of horror, but he wouldn’t let go of the gun.
Matt! Leslie thought joyously as Robert twisted, struggling to aim his gun up the tunnel.
Suddenly Joe loomed out of the darkness, and it looked as if Robert couldn’t possibly miss him. “No!” Leslie shouted.
She jumped on Robert Adair’s back. Genevieve shouted, desperately trying her best to distract him. A shot rang out from the tunnel, and Robert was spun around by the force of it, staring straight at the two of them.
He smiled.
Leslie wondered why.
Then she knew.
He fired one last time, even as he died himself.
“No!”
She heard Joe scream out the single word. But she was falling. Genevieve tried to catch her as she fell, but the other woman had no strength. Leslie could only imagine what she had endured over the past weeks. They fell to the floor together as Joe raced toward them.
But she didn’t see Joe.
She saw Matt.
He was down on his knees beside her, wrapping her in his arms.
There were tears in his eyes. “No, Leslie, no…”
“Leslie!” Dimly, she heard Joe shouting. He was desperately trying to staunch the flow of blood coming from her chest.
“Leslie, hang on, hang on….”
She was dimly aware that the tunnels were alive with footsteps.
She smiled. She’d been blessed with good friends.
“Leslie,” Matt whispered, cradling her. “Fight. Fight.”
She couldn’t fight. And she knew it. She reached for Matt, saw his eyes, the tears. The love.
“Some things,” she whispered, “a
re meant to be.”
EPILOGUE
Joe sat on a concrete bench in the cemetery, staring at the newly tamped ground. He was alone; he needed to be. The funeral had been far too huge; he’d felt that he needed to take a step back, so this afternoon he’d come back on his own. So many good people had loved her. Adam. Nikki, who had been with Leslie when she’d discovered the street-level entrance to the tunnels, the route by which Robert had escaped the night Joe had chased him. Nikki and Adam had been there when the paramedics had desperately tried to save Leslie. They had been there when she was pronounced dead. They had suffered. As had Brad Verdun, who had cried like a baby. Even Dryer had broken down when he had to go on TV to talk about what had happened.
But that was over now. Just as the torture Robert Adair had inflicted on his victims was over. Genevieve had been able to shed some light on what had made the man crack, based on his lunatic ramblings when he came to visit her in her makeshift prison. He’d never had much of a social life, so he’d turned to hookers, then finally turned on them. In his opinion, prostitutes deserved whatever happened to them. Genevieve hadn’t been alone there when he first grabbed her and he had hurt them all, she said. When he tired of a girl, when she angered him…he killed her. Joe was there when she stoically informed the police that she’d done what she had to do to live. She’d also informed them that she thought he’d gone psychotic because he was impotent. A powerful respected man with no one to come home to—because, in his way, he was powerless.
Joe’s astonishment was fading. Despite the fact that he had listed the man as a suspect himself, he had never been on top of the list, even at the end. It was still almost inconceivable. And yet, and in retrospect, someone should have figured it out before. Except that Robert Adair had been the lead detective on the case.
The pain of Leslie’s death seemed dulled now, but sometimes it struck him like a knife. He went over and over the series of events in his head, trying to create a scenario in which everything worked out differently. In which she lived.
He was carrying a single rose, and now he tossed it gently onto the grave. “I failed you,” he said softly. She had no tombstone yet, but Matt’s was there, a handsome, simple memorial in white marble. He’d chosen it himself. “I failed you, too,” he said.
The Dead Room Page 30