“I just need a minute alone in the house.”
He shrugged. “Sure. The techs should be out in a few minutes. Bill’s at the local police precinct so you can have until they get him back here.”
Sarah sat on the hood of the car as Gio finished up inside. He came back out with the three forensic techs and nodded to her as he touched base with another federal agent there. Sarah hopped off the hood and quietly entered the home. She shut the door behind her. Every house had its own sounds, its own groans and scrapes that people would hear when they were alone. She heard them now. The floor upstairs creaked, the refrigerator fan turned on and off, and a soft electric hum emanated through the house.
Sarah sat in the living room, the same spot Heather had sat in. Over years, Sarah had learned to close her mind off to the impressions that were always fighting to make their way in. But sometimes, she could open up the gates. Sometimes, she could let everything in. The process was painful, and even dangerous, but she could do it if she had to.
She closed her eyes and relaxed her body. Focusing on her feet, she flexed and relaxed each muscle going up her legs and stomach, her arms, shoulders and neck. By the time she reached her head, she felt loose and at ease.
The first image came like a stab wound to her brain.
It pushed pain down into the rest of her body, as if she’d swallowed fire. Her throat hurt, then her chest, then her stomach. She crumpled over, bending at the waist. She would’ve hit the floor if she hadn’t caught herself. Forcing herself up, she leaned back.
The first image was of several people in the living room. By the way they were dressed, she knew it was a long time ago. Decades. The people moved, mingled, ate, and drank. She could hear some of them, voices as soft as whispers. Others she couldn’t hear at all. They were silent as a crypt.
“Hello?” Sarah said.
No one responded. Every instinct told her to close her mind like a steel trap, to force every thought away, that this was harmful. But she thought of the child on that video, and of Heather, lost in a world she couldn’t possibly understand, and she kept her mind open.
The decades flew by right in front of her. This house was bought by people who cared what other people thought, the kind who threw parties not to give their guests a good time but to attempt to impress them with their wealth. Sarah saw people fighting, children growing up and leaving… entire lifetimes that flew by in a matter of seconds.
The pain was excruciating. Her nose bled from both nostrils, and the throbbing in her head grew so intense she thought she might faint.
As time sped by, she watched for Heather. For the soft doe eyes that took everything in and seemed to hold an optimism that hadn’t been corrupted yet. And she saw her.
Heather flirting with Bill. Bill had his hand on her butt and was squeezing it, talking in her ear. She seemed uncomfortable but allowed him to continue. Then they walked into a different room.
Sarah rose from the couch and nearly fell over from the pain. She braced herself, held herself upright as much as she could, and then followed them into the other room.
Heather lay on a bed, and Bill was doing something on a dresser. Sarah hobbled over and saw he was preparing a spoonful of a urine-colored substance that turned brown when he heated it with a lighter. Then he came over to the bed, tied a thin plastic tube around Heather’s right arm, and slapped the flesh. When he saw what he was looking for, he sucked up the brown fluid into a hypodermic needle, and injected it inside her.
Heather seemed to melt away. A smile came over her face, and her legs moved seductively across the sheets as though she were in the throes of passion. Bill began to undress. When he was nude, he stripped off her panties and mounted her. Sarah turned away. She couldn’t watch this. With one hand on the wall to hold herself up, she staggered back out to the front room and saw Heather again. This time she was wearing a dress and looked older, more worn out. More like what Sarah had seen of her for the first time. But that hint of optimism was still in her eyes.
The party featured mounds of cocaine. Heather did several lines and washed it down with wine and Bill, his brother Justin, and several other men groped her. After a long time, Sarah saw Bill slip something into Heather’s wine when her attention was on another man. Then Heather drank the wine. Within minutes, she appeared loopy and couldn’t hold a conversation. Bill picked her up and led her to the kitchen table where he laid her down and then pulled up her dress. All the men, at least half a dozen, began taking off their pants.
Sarah closed her eyes. The agony was making her vision swirl. She felt as if she’d been struck by a car and gotten up from the road by instinct and was stumbling around, trying to hold onto something.
Another image. Of Bill and Justin alone in the house, talking. Water dripped down from the ceiling, and both men looked up. They took the stairs to the second floor. Moments later, they came down with the rug Heather had been rolled in. They took her outside, and Sarah followed. She went to Bill’s car and watched him. They stuffed the young woman into the trunk, and Bill drove off.
Sarah watched the car. She could see it on the interstate, see it driving past canyons and rolling hills. The ocean far off in the distance.
Bill’s car stopped in the middle of a canyon next to a stream. Up on the hill away from the stream was a radio tower. Across the front of it, written in black lettering, was “T-467.” He took the rug out and dumped it into the stream. The water, perhaps only a few feet deep, washed the rug downstream. The rug got caught on a branch and unfurled, the body rolling out and continuing down with the current.
Sarah wanted to follow the body, to see where it would end up. But she didn’t have it in her. The throbbing felt like getting hit in the head with a rock, small bursts of white taking up her vision every couple of seconds. Soon, her knees gave up and she fell backward, staring at the sky. She felt hands on her and tried to fight them off, but they calmly held her down. And then the world went black, and she was gone.
30
When Sarah woke, she was lying in a hospital bed. Someone had dressed her in a gown and taken her shoes off. The throbbing in her head was gone, but a trace of pain remained in her body, like an earthquake’s aftershocks. Her hand came up to her head, and she closed her eyes and took a deep breath before sitting up in the bed.
Gio sat in a chair across the room, his head lowered over his phone. He must’ve heard the rustling of the sheets because he looked up and gave her a weary smile.
“You okay?” he said.
“I’ve been better. How long was I out?”
“Not long. A couple hours. I was scared you’d gone into a coma. They wanted to give you drugs to wake you, but I wouldn’t let them.”
“Thanks.”
He stood up and approached the bed. “You passed out on the driveway. The doctor said there’s nothing physically wrong that they can see, but your blood tests haven’t come back yet.”
“I don’t need them. Let’s get out of here.”
She tried to rise, but Gio gently placed his hand on her shoulder. “Let’s hang out just for a minute. I don’t think your realize how much blood you lost.” He grabbed the chair he’d been sitting in and pulled it next to the bed. “You want anything? Water or juice or something?”
“No.” She paused. “Gio, I saw her.”
“Who?”
“Heather. I saw her in that place. She’d been to that house a lot. Bill used to drug her and rape her, him and his friends. When she drowned, he took her body to a canyon and dumped it into a stream. The rug she was in got caught on a branch, and her body rolled out and kept going. It’s probably in the ocean by now.” She noticed tingling in her fingers and opened and closed her hands to try to get some blood back into them. “Maybe we can still find the rug.”
“Did you notice anything else about the canyon or the stream? Anything that can help us find it?”
“Well, there was a radio tower on a hill nearby, maybe, like, a hundred feet away. It had T
-467 on it in black.”
Gio thought a moment. “I don’t think we need the body, but it’d be nice to have the rug. Let’s have the doc clear you, and then we’re gonna pay a visit to Bill. I’ll call the field office here and see if they can identify the radio tower.”
The doctors didn’t seem too interested in Sarah’s case. After waiting for the blood results, which didn’t show them anything—least of all the use of narcotics, which was what they were looking for—they decided she had fainted from a combination of fatigue and dehydration. She went along with it and was discharged with instructions on rehydrating herself and getting enough rest.
Her shirt was unwearable. The front looked as if it had been sprayed with blood. Gio bought her an LA Dodgers sweatshirt from the gift shop, and she put it on in the women’s bathroom.
Once in the car, she laid her head back on the seat and closed her eyes. Every ounce of her ached and felt drained, as if she’d just run a marathon.
“I’ll need to eat something soon,” she said.
“We can get something now. The agent I spoke with says he found the tower and they’re heading up there. I wanna give them some time.”
They stopped at a burger joint, and Sarah ordered a chicken sandwich and a Coke. They sat at a table by the windows, and Sarah watched the way the dust swirled in the beams of light raining into the restaurant.
The first bite of food was the best, and she tried to relish it as long as possible by closing her eyes and tasting every morsel. When she opened her eyes, Gio had a smile on his face.
“What?” she asked with her mouth full.
“It’s cute when you’re starving.”
She grinned and took a sip of her drink. “I feel like all the energy in my body just disappeared in under a minute.”
“Does that happen all the time?”
“Only when I let it. I can open myself up sometimes, pick up on things I usually block.”
“What’d you see?”
She took a moment to chew and take another drink. “I saw decades in that house. Starlets and actors, producers, writers… everybody used to come to that house as some place to congregate and do drugs, have sex, meet people. The only difference I saw with Bill is that he lured Heather there and abused her in the worst ways possible.”
“Did he kill her?”
“I don’t think so. They were downstairs, and water leaked down from the overflowing tub. They seemed pretty surprised by everything.”
“So at most, we got negligent homicide. If he gave her the drugs, we might be able to make a case for involuntary manslaughter. In the federal system, that can mean ten years, easy. I’m sure an assistant US attorney would be willing to knock that down in exchange for information about the Murder 42 video.”
She wiped her lips with a napkin. “All you have is what I saw. If he denies it, what’re you going to do?”
He grinned. “What else? Lie.”
Sarah wanted to be there when Gio confronted Bill with what she’d seen, but the energy just wasn’t in her. She decided to stay in the car outside the precinct and see if she could possibly get some sleep. Even ten or twenty minutes would be heaven at the moment.
But her brain had other plans. Thoughts came and went in a flash. Bill, Stefan, Gio… Heather. All of them appeared in her mind’s eye and then disappeared again. As she tried to calm her mind, she saw a sedan pull up with two men in suits. They got out of the car and went to the trunk, pulling out a crimson rug wrapped in plastic wrap and marked with an evidence tag. The men carried it inside.
Sarah tried to go in but didn’t have the strength. She reached for the door handle, pulled it halfway, and then let go. Gio didn’t need her now. She’d done her part. In fact, all she wanted to do now was go home and lie in bed with her cat. But as she thought about it, she realized that that actually didn’t appeal to her. In comparison with the sunshine and palm trees of southern California, Philadelphia seemed gloomy and dirty, with too many memories stored there.
The worst of them were the memories of her being thrown out of the Amish community—the only thing she had known her entire life—and the death of her mother and sister.
Sarah closed her eyes and kept them shut, counting slowly in her head to occupy her mind. Only when she felt the jolt in her neck did she realize she had fallen asleep. Checking the clock on her phone, she saw she’d slept for over an hour and a half. A long time, but it hadn’t brought any sort of recuperation. She was as tired as before and felt as though she could sleep for days.
Gio came out of the precinct. She looked at him and mouthed the word, “What?”
He just smiled and nodded.
31
The morning sunlight streamed through the windows. Farkas preferred his home cold, and the sun warmed it gently every morning. He lay in bed and watched it, lifting his hand and letting the beams illuminate it. He put his finger over his eyes and stared directly into the light. At just the right angle, he could see the red outline of arteries and blood.
He rose, noticing the paint and blood stains on his nude body. Fatigue slowly washed away with the movement as he got up and stretched his back then his neck and arms. The kitchen beckoned him, and he made a fresh pot of coffee, leaning over the counter and rolling his neck around as it brewed. When it was finished, he poured it into a black mug and then strolled into his studio.
The canvas stood complete: a whirling mass of black and red on a white canvas as though the two colors were at war and neither side won. Etched across the corner on the bottom right, his name stood out as part of the war. It was chaos… it was entropy… it was beautiful. Everything Farkas believed about the universe and man’s place in it was represented in that painting, an unconscious representation of his philosophy.
He had hoped, early in his career, that his art would draw likeminded others to him, people who would see the cold and the black that existence was. And out of that cold and black, man made himself by a conscious act. Chaos was beautiful, because out of that chaos man could choose to impose order… or add to the chaos: the volitional animal.
He sat in his chair in the front room, the sunlight pouring over him and warming his cool skin. He picked up the Times and saw something that caught his attention on the first page. The headline read: Feds Make Biggest Child Porn Bust In Los Angeles History.
The article was well written and had first-hand accounts of what had occurred. A man named William Davidson, better known as California Bill, in exchange for leniency on a case involving a young porn star whose death he attempted to cover up, had led them to a cache of child pornography the likes of which the agents working the case had never seen. Over half a million videos. California Bill was one of the biggest child pornographers in the world.
Farkas couldn’t help but smile. What a damned fool. He would’ve served less time keeping his mouth shut and taking a murder charge than he’s going to serve with that amount of child pornography. No matter. He was a worm, and he deserved what he was going to get.
But the most interesting part of the piece was buried about halfway down. The FBI, when asked how they discovered the death of a girl from over a year ago, stated that they had outside help from a previous consultant. They wouldn’t release the name of the consultant.
Farkas lowered the paper and thought a moment. What kind of consultant did the FBI turn to when they needed help? He would certainly be interested in finding out. Regardless, he wasn’t worried. He had taken all the necessary precautions. When he’d sent California Bill the disc, he made certain there was no information there that could lead back to him. Bill wouldn’t be able to give the authorities anything.
He smiled inwardly and decided to reward himself for the hard work of the completed painting with a massage.
32
When Gio and Sarah walked into the FBI’s field office in Phoenix, they were met with applause. A banner saying Great Job! hung on the wall. Sarah got the impression from how worn it looked that it had been used befo
re.
The five days after the arrest and before they’d been able to get back to Arizona had been a blur of interviews. The investigators needed to know Sarah’s exact role in the case, as they were preparing reports to be sent to the U.S. Attorney’s office. Gillian Hanks covered for her and made sure no one really knew her exact role. “Consultant” seemed to describe it well enough when it came from high in the Bureau.
Charges would be filed. Sarah had been told that California Bill would be cooperating in locating the manufacturers of the child pornography he possessed and sold in exchange for something called a 5-K Letter, which was apparently a letter to the judge asking for leniency. Gio said he would still serve about fifteen years in prison, even with his cooperation, but that it was better than a life sentence.
Everyone gathered around Gio and asked for details of the bust and the investigation. Everyone except Stefan, who walked up to Sarah with his hands in his pockets and a smile on his face.
“You did awesome. This is the biggest child porn bust I’ve ever heard about. Tens of thousands of children are going to get some sense of justice because of you. Especially if they can find the people who made the videos.” He paused. “No closer to Murder 42, though. I got someone who’s testifying against Jay and Naughty Nancy’s that they’ve been distributing child pornography for about eight years now, but I couldn’t get anything from Jay about that disc.” He shrugged. “It’s a monstrous video, but it was only one out of half a million California Bill had. Maybe sometimes we just gotta take the wins where we find them.”
“Maybe. I couldn’t do what you guys do—be an agent or a detective.”
Murder 42 - A Thriller (Sarah King Mysteries Book 2) Page 12