by Chelsea Cain
“It took you long enough,” a voice said. The room filled with light. Kick aimed the Glock in the direction of the voice, finger on the trigger. It was Bishop. He stood in the doorway, across the room from her. Between them were the remnants of a child’s bedroom: circus wallpaper, purple carpeting, broken toys strewn in the corner. She looked to Bishop for an explanation. The ugly expression on his face made her insides go cold. He was as still as ever, but now Kick recognized the stillness for what it was: contained violence. He held a dog collar out, jangling its tags.
“I had the code to the lockbox,” he said. He tossed the dog collar at her feet. “If we’d done it my way, I wouldn’t have had to kill the dog.”
7
VISUALIZE A RELAXING EXPERIENCE. Close your eyes and travel there in your mind.
Kick is in her backyard. It is before Mel, before everything. She still has only one father, her real one, and he still loves her. The grass is thick and green and thatched with clover. She is on a tire swing, and she is swinging back and forth, and she is so high she can almost touch the clouds.
“We don’t have time for this,” Bishop said.
Kick opened her eyes. Sometimes she could convince herself that the backyard was real, but not tonight.
“Smell that?” Bishop asked. He hadn’t moved from the door.
The faint, harsh odor of bleach burned slightly at Kick’s nostrils.
Bishop sniffed the air. “They cleaned up,” he said.
“I’m calling 911,” Kick said, reaching for her phone. If he came near her, she would punch him in the throat.
“What are the police going to do?” Bishop asked.
“Collect trace evidence,” Kick said. “See if it matches Adam Rice or Mia Turner.”
“They bathed the place in industrial bleach,” Bishop said. He pointed at the carpet. “It’s new,” he said. “The place is clean. There is no trace evidence.”
The corner of his mouth twitched up in a smile. “But the cops will certainly be interested in the blue handprints leading up the side of the house.”
Kick looked down at the phone in her hand. It was powdered with blue chalk dust. She wiped it on her shirt and then rubbed her palms against her thighs.
“I told you I had my people here,” Bishop said.
His people, again. But Kick had other things to worry about. The chalk dust was everywhere. On her pants. All over her shirt. She looked like she’d fallen into a vat of 1980s eye shadow. It had mixed with her hand sweat and formed a kind of Smurf epoxy.
Bishop held a white handkerchief out.
Who even carried handkerchiefs anymore?
She snatched the handkerchief from his hand and blew her nose. Her snot came out blue.
“Keep it,” Bishop said.
She glared at him.
He’d positioned himself well. She wouldn’t be able to get back through the sliding doors easily without getting past him. She could make a run for the door, but clearly he knew the house better than she did. The cops had her fingerprints on file. They were part of her missing-person file.
“This wasn’t a setup,” Bishop said. “I didn’t know that you’d coat your hands with blue dust and climb the outside of a house.”
He had a point.
“Here’s my problem,” Bishop said. “The satellite photos aren’t admissible because they were illegally acquired. Having a kid’s room when you don’t have a kid is weird, but it is not probable cause to search a house. Adam was here. The car from the Mia Turner Amber Alert was here. This house is somehow connected to their abductions.”
Bishop didn’t have the microexpressions other people did. He didn’t give anything away with gestures or posture. He had learned that somewhere, which meant that he had also learned how to read microexpressions and body language in other people. Maybe he was reading her right now. Kick straightened up and tried to relax the muscles in her face.
How had he done it? she wondered. How had he killed the dog? He said he didn’t like guns. Had he strangled it?
“I need your help,” Bishop said.
He was taller than she was, and this close the angle of his face changed. She could see the shadow of his lower eyelashes, the million light-brown dots of facial hair pressing against the surface of his chin and jaw. The color didn’t match the black of his hair.
“I have a gun,” she said. “I will shoot you if you come closer.”
“You have a gun,” Bishop said, “in your backpack.”
“I can get to it in under four seconds,” Kick said. “Try me.”
“You should keep your hands free,” Bishop said. “You’re more dangerous with your hands free.”
“I will shoot you,” Kick said. “I swear I will.”
“I believe you,” Bishop said.
Something changed in his eyes, in the way that he was looking at her, and he blinked and looked away. “I shouldn’t have brought you here,” he said. “This was a mistake.” He backed away from her and then turned and headed for the door like he was going to leave her there, alone, in that terrible room with its circus trains, its rows of elephants marched trunk to tail, its girls standing on horses, its poodles walking on their hind legs, and its men brandishing whips at lions.
“The houses we stayed in,” Kick called. “There was always a box. A place to hide if anyone ever came looking.” Her stomach twisted as the words left her mouth.
Bishop appeared back in the doorway. “Put the gun away,” he said.
She looked down to see her hand inside her backpack, fingers already curling around the grip of the Glock. She hadn’t reached for it consciously.
“You carry that thing around enough, you’ll end up shooting someone,” Bishop said. “And I don’t want it to be me.”
Kick didn’t need the gun. She knew 571 ways to take someone to the ground with her left hand alone. She left the weapon in the backpack. “Fine,” she said, securing the backpack straps over her shoulders.
Bishop lifted his eyes from his phone and turned the screen toward her. It was displaying some sort of architectural blueprints. Kick peered at it. “That’s here,” she said. She didn’t bother asking how he’d managed to acquire them so quickly.
He scrolled through several pages of the prints and then tapped his finger over a faded line of blue ink. “Let’s start here,” he said. “Stay behind me.”
Kick followed him. Plan B was to punch him in the kidney and make a quick exit back through the sliding doors and down the side of the house. Plans C through F were variations of Plan B, and Plan G involved the Glock.
She walked a few steps behind him, through the bedroom door into the hallway, where the lilac carpet continued. The white walls still had nails where pictures had hung a week before. Bishop had left a trail of lights on when he’d come upstairs, and now they retraced his steps downstairs. All that empty space and lilac carpeting made the house seem especially desolate.
The smell of bleach wasn’t as strong on the first floor, or maybe Kick was just getting used to it. She was a good adapter. Wasn’t that what the shrinks said?
Bishop’s eyes moved back and forth between the walls and his phone, like he was comparing every spec. Kick kept her distance, a good arm’s length back. Bishop led her down another lilac hall past a closed door, then stopped at a second one. He stepped past the door before he opened it, she noticed, so that he pushed it in from the doorknob side. It was how you opened a door if you wanted to lessen the chance that someone would shoot you through it. Frank had taught Kick that. Bishop seemed to know it by rote. This room was bigger than the bedroom, with a small double-paned window and a louvered closet. The walls had recently gotten a sloppy coat of white paint. A bulletin board still hung at desk height on one wall. Kick wandered over to it. All of the pushpins were lined up along one edge of the board, separated into rows by color.
What did it say about her, Kick wondered, that when she saw pushpins she thought, Missing kids?
“That’s not rig
ht,” Bishop muttered.
Kick glanced back at him. He was scrutinizing the louvered closet. It was a standard-enough-looking closet, the kind of thing that you can buy in kit form from Home Depot and install yourself. Standard enough that it didn’t attract attention.
Bishop was already crossing the room to the closet. “That’s not right,” he said, again.
He slid open the closet door and Kick heard the click of a chain light being pulled. She stepped beside him. The closet was double-wide and empty except for a few abandoned wire hangers. He gave her a sideways look and then stepped inside the closet, hunched under the clothing bar, and began running his hands over the closet’s back wall like he was trying to crack a safe. Kick did her own survey. It was a good drywall job, professional-looking, without lumps or cracks. A lot of attention to give the back of a closet. Bishop got tangled in the wire hangers and they jangled as he slid them away from him. He dropped to his hands and knees and started inspecting the line where the wall met the floor.
“You won’t find it,” Kick said.
“It’s here,” Bishop said, moving his hands over the carpet. “The blueprints show the room should be bigger. This closet—this whole wall—shouldn’t be here.”
“It’s there,” Kick said. “But you won’t find it.”
Bishop sat back on his haunches and looked at her.
She dropped her backpack at her feet and tucked a loose piece of hair behind her ear. “Do you want me to find it?”
“Yes, please.”
“If I find the box, we’re done. I fly home tonight on the fancy jet. And you find someone else to play Charlie’s Angels with.”
Bishop stood up, wrestled with one of the wire hangers that got caught on his shirt, and then stepped out of the closet. Lilac carpet fuzz stuck to his jeans.
“Deal?” Kick said.
“Show me the box,” Bishop said simply.
“Fine,” Kick said. She stepped past him into the closet and pulled the light chain. “I need dark,” she said, closing the louvered door behind her.
The slats of the louvered door let in light from the office, so it wasn’t really dark, just shadowed, but that was fine. It wasn’t the dark Kick needed; it was the solitude.
She approached the wall.
Funny how stuff comes back to you.
Sometimes, when they moved into a new house, the box was already there, and sometimes they had to build one, framing it out, wiring it, putting up drywall. Mel was handy. Sometimes he would let Kick help build the spring loading for the door while he built the mechanically controlled lock. You could do a lot with a tiny speaker, a gear reduction motor, some PVC pipe, a few suction cups, and an open-source prototyping platform. You could hide a door in plain sight.
Kick put her hand in the lower right corner of the closet where the wall met the carpet and then walked her fingers up five steps and over to the left five steps.
“Well?” Bishop asked through the louvered door.
“Go away,” Kick said. She made a fist against the wall where her finger had been, and knocked.
Shave and a haircut. One knock, followed by four quick knocks, followed by one knock.
The back of the closet popped open an inch.
That sound. She had forgotten the sound the doors made when the spring released.
Kick gave the wall a push and it swung open.
The louvered door started to rattle open behind her. She glanced over her shoulder at Bishop.
Lit from behind, he was a faceless, dark shape.
The edge of the bright rectangle of light touched Kick’s knee.
She scrambled forward, through the door, into the box, slamming the trick panel shut behind her. She moved on her hands and knees in the dark, feeling ahead of her, until she found a corner to sit in.
She could hear Bishop pounding and hollering her name on the other side of the wall. She didn’t respond. She heard the sound of the wire hangers being ripped from the clothing bar and thrown against a wall.
Kick didn’t have a plan. Before, when she was a kid, she’d spent so much time in dark cubbies like these that she had learned to let go of time.
She hugged her knees to her chest.
The bleach smell was stronger in here, and there was some other smell, too, something more rancid. Kick could taste the stench, feel it settling in her lungs along with the dust and cobwebs. The walls weren’t framed out, so her back was pressed against an exposed two-by-four.
“You’re contaminating evidence,” Bishop called. She could hear him knocking. Shave and a haircut. He’d figured out that much. He was working his way along the wall.
There was always an override just inside the door. She just had to reach it and she could lock the chamber from the inside. The knock wouldn’t open the panel then.
She crawled forward.
Her socked toe caught on something in the dark. She cried out. With the nail torn off, the toe bed was so sensitive that any contact felt like a dropped anvil. She didn’t know what she’d hit. But it had felt hard. She went after it, thinking it might be the override.
“Open the goddamn door!” Bishop hollered.
“I’m not coming out,” Kick called, poking at the air with her foot. She got to stay in the box as long as she wanted. That was Mel’s rule. She didn’t have to come out until she wanted to.
Her toe made contact with something again. She twisted around and reached for the spot with her hands. There was something there, on the floor. Too large to be the override lever. Her fingers touched plastic. She explored the surface, following it to the wall, against which it appeared to be propped. Thick plastic, and under it something cool to the touch, and solid. The plastic crinkled under her touch. Some places felt softer and gave when she pushed; others were hard. She gave it another nudge. . . .
She knew an instant before it fell. Something shifted in the dark.
She squawked and jumped out of the way. She felt the air move as it went by. The thing hit the floor with a sickening thunk and the floor vibrated.
“What’s going on there?” Bishop called, a new urgency to his voice.
Kick stayed frozen, trying to orient herself. Whatever was in there with her was big. The sound it made when it hit the floor, that solid thud, it sounded like meat.
Bishop was swearing up a storm. Kick could hear him banging around on the other side of the wall, like he might put his elbow through the drywall.
Kick eased her phone from her pocket, hit the “home” button with her thumb, and aimed the blue light of the screen toward the thing on the floor.
She absorbed it in a series of mental snapshots, a head, a hip, the curve of a knee. The shape forming a word in Kick’s brain: body. The body was wrapped in Visqueen, and blood pooled underneath the plastic. The head was inches away from Kick’s toes, faceup, or more like the suggestion of a face, pale and lumpy, like unformed clay. Underneath the plastic Kick could see a blond swath of shoulder-length hair. There was something else, too, something packed around the lower part of the body. The phone was shaking, so it was hard to make out much in the jumpy blue light. Kick held the phone closer and trained the screen on the corpse’s face. Someone had scrawled capital letters in black Sharpie on top of the Visqueen over the thing’s forehead. Kick’s mouth silently made the word.
“Boom.”
Boom?
“Do you smell that?” a small voice asked from the darkness.
Kick spun the light around.
The little girl was standing perfectly still. Barefoot, hair a long tangle of brown. Her skin was pale. Kick could tell it had been a long time since she’d been let out of the box.
“Go away, Beth,” Kick hissed. “It’s not safe here.”
“Who are you talking to?” Bishop called. “Is someone in there with you?”
“You can’t stay here,” the girl said.
Kick heard the soft boing of the panel’s spring mechanism again and turned her head. Bishop had done it. Light spill
ed into the box. They were never as nice lit up, just dirty glorified crawl spaces, hidey-holes. The girl was gone. The body was still there.
The stomp of Bishop’s feet vibrated the plywood flooring under her knees. And then he stopped. She glanced at him, his long neck, his stricken gaze fixed on the corpse, the scrawl across its face. Bishop wasn’t supposed to be in there.
“Go away,” Kick said.
Bishop squatted next to the thing, head turning back and forth, taking in every detail. Then he said, “Shit.” He pivoted and lunged at Kick.
He caught her off guard and managed to get his hand around her elbow before she could react. Kick felt a stab of pain from her shoulder to her wrist as he stood, pulling her up roughly with him. He was dragging her back, out of the box. She clawed at his clamp-like grip on her arm, and managed to free his pinkie and bend it back as she pulled and twisted the joint. She got away, and tried to get back to the corner of the box. But he got her by the waist, his arms hooked around her hips. She tried to stamp on his feet, but without shoes she was at a disadvantage. He was grunting and swearing, hauling her toward the closet, out of the box. He was hurting her. She screamed and scratched at his arms, but he wouldn’t let go.
He was saying something to her, in her ear, over and over again. He wrestled her through the secret door, back onto the lilac carpet. She tried to slam her heels into his knees, but couldn’t make contact. She was gulping air, adrenaline on overdrive. He didn’t understand. She couldn’t leave Beth. She was just a little girl. They couldn’t leave her alone in the dark with that thing. Kick’s socked heels bounced on the carpet as they cleared the closet threshhold and moved through the office.