by Jan Burke
He stepped back, then slammed against it. He felt it start to give. He slammed against it again just as Lefebvre came into the yard and asked him what the hell he was doing. The door gave way. He pushed what remained of it aside and went into the house.
He quickly went from room to room on the ground floor, calling to her. Moonlight came in through the windows, enough to see by in most of the rooms. Where it wasn’t enough, he used his flashlight. Lefebvre had followed him in and was doing the same. They met up at the stairway. “Let’s take a look around up there,” Lefebvre said, shining his light on the stairs, “then maybe I’ll arrest you for—”
Lefebvre grabbed his sleeve just as O’Connor was about to step on the first tread, and pulled him back. “Hold it,” he said, bending closer to the stair.
O’Connor saw what he was focusing on. Blood. A large splotch of it on the left side of the tread, another on the banister just above it.
“Oh God…” O’Connor said. “Oh God.”
Lefebvre seemed unperturbed. He used the radio again and called for backup and a crime scene unit and said to stand by, they might need an ambulance. He mentioned that the power was off, adding that they might want to bring a portable generator.
O’Connor, impatient, tried to break away from him, to rush up the stairs, but Lefebvre held tight.
“Listen to me!” the detective said, commanding, yet calm. “We’re going up there, but don’t touch the rails, and step to the right edge of the treads. I’m going first — try to step where I step. Watch that you don’t put your big feet in any evidence.” In a lower voice, he added, “Hold your flashlight away from your body, just in case we’re not the only uninvited visitors, all right?”
Lefebvre’s calm steadied him, forced O’Connor to struggle to regain his own.
Lefebvre watched him, then added, “Nothing is for the newspaper unless I say it is, or I handcuff you now and we wait here for a squad car.”
“Do you think for a moment that the damned front page is more important to me than she is?” O’Connor asked, outraged.
“Maybe you bleed ink, O’Connor, like some of your friends at the paper.”
“No more than you bleed blue.”
Lefebvre smiled and said, “All right. Just so long as we understand each other.” He took his gun out and started to climb. O’Connor concentrated on stepping where Lefebvre stepped, seeing the reddish brown spots they avoided, all the while telling himself that it wasn’t really so much blood, perhaps no more than a small cut would produce.
Then Lefebvre’s flashlight caught a smear of blood on the wall of the hallway. Much more blood than they had seen before. It was up high, at about the height of a man’s waist. “Someone was carried, I think,” Lefebvre said softly. “Not very carefully.”
They turned a corner; this hallway was much darker than the rest of the house. Moonlight came through an open doorway at the end of the hall. Lefebvre stood for a long moment, listening. Gradually, cautiously, opening doors one by one, they worked their way down the hallway. Below, they heard patrol cars pulling up, doors opening.
Lefebvre called to them once, telling them that O’Connor was with him, and to be careful not to step on bloodstains on the stairs, but otherwise continued his methodical clearing of each room.
Two of the officers caught up with them. They carried powerful portable lights and brightened the hallway with these. With the additional light and more men to check the rooms, they made progress more quickly. Lefebvre noticed some faint bloody shoeprints and again warned the others to avoid stepping near them or the drops of blood along the floor.
The rooms were empty and only briefly held their interest, save the last one — the open one.
It, too, was unoccupied, but the bright lights illuminated several large bloodstains and bloody shoeprints on the hardwood floor. A closet door stood open. There were several objects scattered on the floor. O’Connor immediately recognized one of these and felt woozy, as if he had taken a hard, unexpected punch.
“Her jacket,” O’Connor said brokenly, starting forward, then heeding the pressure of Lefebvre’s hand on his shoulder, did not move into the room.
“Yes. I recognize it, too. The one she had on today,” Lefebvre said. “And that’s her purse, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I think so.”
They could also see a wallet, some bloodied tissues, a rag, and a small bottle.
Lefebvre moved cautiously into the room, avoiding the bloodstains and spatter. O’Connor saw him briefly glance at the shoeprints — which seemed to have started when someone stepped in blood in this room, and became fainter as he had walked down the hall, toward the stairs. Lefebvre spent a little more time studying a handprint on the floor, and then looking at the bottle, although without picking it up.
“Chloroform,” he said.
O’Connor leaned against the door frame. “Jesus…”
Lefebvre looked up at him. “She probably left here alive. They wouldn’t have bothered moving the body if all they wanted to do was kill her.”
O’Connor said nothing, but Lefebvre perhaps read his next thought, because he added, “No use thinking the worst just yet.”
He put on a pair of gloves and carefully opened Irene’s handbag. He held up a reporter’s notebook, then a wristwatch.
“Hers. If he’s done something to her…” O’Connor said angrily.
Lefebvre ignored him and reached back into the bag. He found another wristwatch, a man’s watch — and a wallet.
O’Connor felt briefly puzzled. Two wallets? Two watches? Were they both attacked?
Lefebvre verified that the wallet from the handbag was Irene’s. “There’s some cash and a credit card here, so apparently she wasn’t robbed.” He gingerly opened the man’s wallet. Something wrapped in a piece of paper fell to the floor. Lefebvre ignored it for the moment and looked through the wallet’s contents. “Max’s temporary California driver’s license. And it doesn’t appear that he was robbed, either. I’d say they’re both in trouble, though.”
Lefebvre reached for the fallen paper and opened it. “A New Hampshire driver’s license. Kyle Yeager — Max’s old license.” He read the note that had been wrapped around it — the paper had been torn from a spiral notebook.
“What does it say?” O’Connor asked anxiously.
“It says, ‘Warren Ducane knows where we are.’”
47
I OPENED MY EYES IN UTTER DARKNESS. FOR A PANICKED MOMENT I WAS convinced I had been blinded. My cheek lay against a cold surface — hard and smooth. Concrete or marble, I thought. I could smell dried blood on my clothing. I remembered Max then. I tried to move and found that my wrists were taped together, as were my feet.
“Who’s there?” a voice called from nearby.
“Max? It’s Irene.”
“Irene? Oh God…”
“How’s your head? You were bleeding…”
“Never mind me — did they hurt you?”
“Not really. They used some kind of drug on me — chloroform or ether — I don’t remember anything after that.”
“Are you all right?”
“A little woozy, that’s all. Max, it’s you I’m worried about. Your head was bleeding so much. And you sound — I don’t know, you just don’t sound like yourself. Worse off than I am, anyway. Are you still tied up?”
“Yes. I’m — I’m okay. I don’t think I’m still bleeding, but I’m tied up. You are, too, I take it?”
“Yes. Your head must be killing you.”
“They hit me pretty hard, I guess.”
“Your cousins?”
“I can’t be certain, but I think so. Whoever it was hit me from behind.”
I had no idea how long I had been knocked out, and began to wonder how late it was. My father — I had to get out of here. He would worry…
No use thinking of that right now, I told myself. I felt groggy, but the chill air was helping to clear my head.
“Any idea where we ar
e?”
“No.”
“Somewhere in the house?”
“It has a big basement,” he said. “Maybe that’s where we are. No — wait. The basement floor has linoleum on it.”
We decided to try calling for help. We shouted a few times. It made my head ache worse than before.
“We could be anywhere,” Max said. His voice sounded odd, with a drowsy quality to it.
“I’m going to try to scoot over to you.”
I moved slowly and not in a very controlled way. I was now sure the surface below me was concrete; too rough to be marble. It felt like a cold, damp sidewalk.
I lost track of Max’s location in the dark. “Talk again,” I said.
“What?”
“Are you falling asleep?”
“I guess I kind of drifted off.”
It was enough to help me find him. Sort of. I found his shoes with my face. It startled him as much as it did me.
“Okay, I’m going to work my way up to your hands. You’re lying on your right side?”
It seemed to stump him for a moment, then he answered, “Yes.”
I remembered that his hands had been bound behind him with duct tape, as mine were now. It took me a while, but eventually I positioned myself so that we were lying back to back. He must have passed out again or fallen asleep by the time I reached his hands. A horrible third alternative occurred to me, and I called his name.
“What? Huh? Oh … Irene?”
“Try to stay awake, Max. I think you have a concussion. Talk to me while I try to get the tape off your hands.”
So he talked while I fumbled with his hands and tried to find an edge or end of the tape. His wrists had been bound much tighter than mine. I noticed his wristwatch was missing, and only then realized that my own was gone, too. While I worked at freeing him, he told me about Estelle, his adoptive mother. He told me about the military school, and about befriending the son of one of the instructors, a boy who was also a student at the school, of that boy’s family virtually adopting him into their own. His voice kept that sleepy quality. As I gradually started to work the tape off — a process that was not as easy as it looks on television — I urged him to keep talking. Every now and then I’d hear him start to drift off, and I’d yank a little harder, and he’d keep going. I began to wonder if he would pass out just as I got his hands free and be unable to help me.
But when that moment came, he was awake and fairly focused. I heard him let out a breath in the darkness. “Thank you,” he said. It took a little while for the circulation to return to his fingers. Both that and his head injury must have been painful, but he didn’t complain. He rolled toward me and, as soon as the numbness left his hands, tried to free mine.
It took him less time to return the favor, but undoubtedly longer than it would have if he hadn’t been injured. I spent a moment savoring the easing of the tension in my shoulders and back, then went to work on the tape around my ankles and helped Max to do the same.
We moved to our knees on the hard floor, staying close to each other, at first holding on to each other’s shoulders just to steady ourselves. Without speaking, we embraced in the darkness, held fast to each other in sheer relief. He felt strong and warm and good, and I could not help but think of how much worse it would have been if I had been there alone.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I nodded against his shoulder. “Yes, and you?”
“I’m doing okay.”
“Dizzy?”
“A little. Weird in the dark.”
“I don’t think they took us far. I can still smell the ocean.”
“Yes, I can, too. Maybe we’re in the basement, just some part of it I haven’t explored yet. There was a laundry room and another storage area that I didn’t look into.”
“I guess we’d better try to find a way out of here before they come back to finish what they started.” I thought for a moment. “Maybe we should crawl along on all fours, shoulder to shoulder. Trying to walk might cause us to trip over objects we can’t see, or run into things, or fall into a pit or something.”
He agreed with this plan. It wasn’t the fastest or most comfortable way to move, and was especially hard on the palms and knees, but it seemed the safest.
Before long, we realized that the space we were in was long and relatively narrow, and its walls as well as its floor seemed to be made of concrete. The utter darkness made it hard to be sure of much, though. We decided to stay along one of the walls, thinking we’d eventually come to some kind of opening or stairway. I took the position along the wall, since Max seemed to be having difficulty keeping his balance.
We came to a turning and moved to our right.
A glimmer of light came from some distant source, and we could hear the sea. The dampness increased, but the air was fresher. I felt wisps of my hair brushing against my face with a breeze. I could hear sounds of surf and wind.
This cheered me immeasurably. It also relieved some of the disorientation I had been feeling in the pitch darkness of before. And where light could get in, maybe we could get out.
It suddenly occurred to me where we were. “The bootlegger’s tunnel.”
“What?”
I told him what O’Connor had told me about the passageways.
“Then this leads to the house or the beach, right?” he asked.
“My guess is, we’re nearer the beach right now. Let’s try to stand.”
We traded places so that he could lean his right hand against the wall. We took careful, shuffling steps forward. Eventually, I felt a change in the surface under my shoes. We were still walking on concrete, but there was something gritty on it — sand. The air continued to grow cooler and fresher.
We reached the end of the passageway. The light turned out to be moonlight, coming in through chinks in an opening sealed with a thick, iron-plated double-door. On our side, a wide iron bar secured with heavy padlocks held the doors shut. The other side of the doors seemed to be covered with a thick lacing of bougainvillea vines. The wind caused the bougainvillea’s sharp, needle-like thorns to scrape against the metal doors as if it wanted to come in out of the weather. We tried dislodging the bar, to no avail. We pushed against each of the doors. They didn’t budge. We called out again, but I could tell that no one was nearby.
Max sat down, leaning his back against one of the walls.
“Let me rest a little,” he said. “Then I’ll try to think of something.”
I felt around the hinges, which were on our side of the doors, but they seemed rusted in place. Next I looked at the bottom edge.
To my delight, the concrete floor came to an end five inches or so before it met the doors. I began to claw at the sand with my hands.
“What are you doing?” Max asked, coming closer to see. “We can’t fit between the doors and the concrete.”
“No, but I think I could get an arm out, and maybe wave something to attract attention. Plus, it might give us more light and air.”
“Or a better chance to be heard,” he said. “Let me help.”
He lasted five minutes before he passed out cold again.
48
FORTY MINUTES AFTER THEY HAD DISCOVERED THE ROOM WITH THE bloodstains, Lefebvre and the rest of the LPPD were making every effort to find Max and Irene. O’Connor tried — and failed — to comfort himself with that thought.
The “be on the lookout” order for what Lefebvre had since admitted to him was Eric Yeager’s black BMW had been expanded to all local jurisdictions — an all-points bulletin saying that Eric and Ian Yeager were wanted for questioning in connection with an assault and kidnapping.
The crime lab team was at work on the shoe print, bloodstains, latent prints, and other forms of evidence from the scene.
Matt Arden was on his way, with another detective, to talk to Mitch Yeager. When O’Connor asked Lefebvre if Arden would have the balls to pressure Yeager, Lefebvre laughed. “Matt? He’s wanted to have a go at Yeager for a lo
ng time now.”
“Why?”
“You think you’re the only one who believes Mr. Yeager isn’t as respectable as he’d like everyone to believe? Besides, Eric and Ian have been thumbing their noses at the department for years. Skating just so close, just managing to keep clear of an arrest.”
“Paid-off witnesses and the like. No need to tell me.”
“You can trust Matt. He’s good at interrogation, you know.”
“I hear you’re better.”
“I learned from him, that’s all.” One of the uniformed officers came up to him just then and said that Haycroft from the lab wanted to show them something in the basement. “Do you know Paul Haycroft?” Lefebvre asked O’Connor. “He does excellent work with blood spatter patterns.”
Haycroft theorized that one of the victims had received a blow from behind in the room upstairs and had fallen forward and injured his face. “A guess based on the cast-off blood on the walls and on the ceiling by the door, and from some of the staining on the floor. At least one of your attackers will have flecks of the victim’s blood on his clothing. I’ll want to study it more carefully, but I can’t immediately see signs of more than one person being attacked in that way.”
“Probably Max,” O’Connor said. “He was here before Irene arrived.”
“Yes,” Haycroft said. “It’s possible she found him after he was injured and used the jacket to stop the bleeding — the pattern of staining on the jacket indicates it was bunched up and held to a wound. The stains are on the outside, not on the lining. If she was wearing it and had been, say, stabbed or shot, the wound would bleed from the lining to the outside. And the staining is not consistent with, say, a wound to the head bleeding down onto the collar and back.”
Seeing O’Connor’s relief, he added, “I’ll know more when we do more tests, but Ms. Kelly’s father told us that her blood type is A, and all we have found so far is type O. According to Lillian Linworth, that’s Mr. Ducane’s blood type. The bleeding had nearly stopped by the time the victim was carried down the hallway and stairs. But what I want to show you, Detective, are small spots on the stairs leading to the basement.”