by Rachel Caine
“Bet breakfast is fabulous, too.”
“Probably.”
We look at each other for a few seconds, and then I put my backpack on the desk. I dig out the papers, find the USB, and take out my laptop. There’s an Internet sign on the wall that gives me a password, but I don’t bother. I don’t want to be connected yet. I plug in the power cord, then turn the USB drive over and over in my fingers. My laptop’s on, ready to go, and somehow, I still hesitate.
I feel Sam’s warmth behind me, and he says, “We have to know.” He doesn’t sound any more eager about it than I feel.
I slide the USB stick into my computer, and a window pops up. Files, available for review. Some of them are documents. Some, ominously, are video files. A few are just audio.
Best to get the worst over with first, I think, and I click on the first video file.
At first, it’s hard to make out what it is I’m watching, but when I realize, I involuntarily flinch backward, and then I spin the chair sideways and stare at the crisp, soothing fabric of the window curtains instead of the screen. I hear Sam murmur, “Ah, goddamn,” and hear him turn away, too. I have the volume low on the laptop. It doesn’t completely mute the harrowing, awful screams. I am shaking, I realize; my pulse is suddenly a jackhammer in my head, and my hands are quivering until I clench them hard enough to hurt. The room feels colder, and suddenly I smell cold dirt and mold and that awful stench of blood and metal that rolled out of my shattered garage that day, years ago, when Melvin Royal’s hidden life finally saw the sun.
Sam reaches past me and presses keys to stop the screaming, and I’m so glad I could sob, but I don’t. I just breathe. I keep doing that until I feel safe enough to turn and look at the computer again.
Sam’s walked away a few steps now, head down, hands fisted at his sides. Like me, he’s living in the past, but our pasts are different. I don’t know where his has taken him, but I know from the tense set of his shoulders, the harsh, rapid breathing, that it’s somewhere I wouldn’t want to be.
“They’re going to find bodies,” he says, and I agree with him. I’m horribly glad that we didn’t open that door and see what lay beyond. I’m grateful that horror wasn’t the last sight I had on earth. Sam’s voice is rough and low, and I close the laptop and get up. I go to him, but I don’t touch him. I just stand there, facing him, until he looks up. There’s a distance in his eyes that’s both painful and self-protective. “I can’t—” He stops. Just . . . stops. I know he’s thinking about his sister, Callie’s, torturous, horrific death. About the photos my ex-husband took, all those pictures that were blown up and shown to the court. He liked photographing what he called the process. In the first photo, she’s scared, alive, untouched. What’s left by the last is . . . unimaginable. And though Sam wasn’t in the courtroom for it, he’s seen the records. The video taken at the crime scene.
Even for a combat veteran, which he is, it’s too much.
“Hey,” I say softly, and this time, I do touch him. Just a light brush of fingers on his sleeve, not bare skin. There need to be barriers between us right now. “Sam. Stay with me.”
I see him snap back, as if his soul has catapulted into his body, and he blinks and focuses back on me. For an instant I see a wash of emotion so powerful I can’t guess what it is. Love? Hate? Revulsion? And then it’s gone.
Sam Cade nods, reaches out, and takes my hand in his. It’s unexpected, and I tense just a bit, but he’s careful, and the warmth of his skin eases some silent, animal howl inside. “We don’t need to watch the rest right now,” he tells me. “Not now. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say. I’m grateful he isn’t going to make me do that, or do it to himself. There’s bravery, and then there’s punishment. Not masochism, because neither one of us gets any kind of release from facing this demon. It’s just more scars. More damage. “How about the paper files?”
“Yeah, that’s an idea,” he says. We let go of each other and divide up the crumpled papers that we rescued from the inferno. They still smell of smoke, and—I just now realize—so do we. My hair feels crisp at the ends. We were so, so lucky.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I frown and check it. It’s not a number I recognize. I ignore it.
Another second later, Sam’s cell buzzes. He locks gazes with me, then puts the phone to his ear. “Hello?”
I freeze as I watch him, looking for clues in his expression, his body language. I see a slight frown, and—paradoxically—a relaxing in his shoulders. Then he says, “Hey, Mike? How’d you get Gwen’s number? I didn’t call you from it.” He puts the call on speakerphone and lays the device on the polished wooden table between us.
“How you think?” Mike Lustig asks, and his deep voice makes the small speaker rattle. “You were both unconscious at the scene. I copied her number down while you both were out. Not surprised Ms. Proctor skipped my call, by the way. I hear she’s a tough nut.”
“And she’s on speaker,” Sam says.
“Figured that. How do, Ms. Proctor?”
“Cut the country charm, Agent Lustig,” I say. “I’m not in the mood. So what did you find at the cabin?” I brace myself. Hard. The memory of that awful video grazes me, and I flinch away from it. As I’m asking the question, Sam gets up and goes into the right-hand bedroom, which seems odd until I realize he’s looking for a window with an angle on the road we came up. He returns, shaking his head. No sign of police coming our way.
I’m waiting for the obvious, for Lustig to tell us that they’ve found a torture room, bodies, horrors . . . but he says, “Nothing much. Some file cabinets, tough to salvage anything out of them but ashes. Some camera equipment and such. Some old-school videotape, but it’s melted to shit; the lab’s working on it, remains to be seen if they get anything. We won’t know for months, most likely, if they come up with a result. I’m trying to light a fire under them—so to speak—but every case they work on is a priority, so it’s not likely we’re getting the express lane.”
I’m so surprised I don’t know what to think. But we saw . . . I reach forward and stab the “Mute” button on Sam’s phone. Then I say, “They didn’t find shackles, chains, winches? Then that video wasn’t filmed there. Not in that basement!”
Sam’s standing near me now, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, as if he can’t quite bear to be still. “Son of a bitch,” he says. “Then why burn the place?”
“File cabinets,” I remind him. “Maybe there were documents in there that linked him to the videos. Or had info about Absalom. We still don’t know how big this group is, do we?” I wonder if Arden knows. It might be important to talk to her again—but I think and hope that she’s already gone. I imagine her landing in Stockholm and walking away free. I hope that’s where she is.
I hope Absalom hasn’t found her.
Before Sam can comment, Mike Lustig says, “Y’all still there? Take me off ‘Mute,’ because if you’re having a chat without me, that’s just rude.”
I’m starting to like Mike Lustig. Cautiously, which is the only way I like anyone now. I hit the button to add him back to the conversation. “Sorry,” I say. I almost mean it. “So we’re back to square one, then? No more leads from the cabin?”
“Look . . .” He stops, then sighs, and I can almost see him shaking his head. “I took a chance you two would keep your heads and not go charging in to make a mess of things, which you did. Why in the hell would I give you any more leads even if I have one? I like my job. Damn hard to keep it if there’s an obvious line to draw from you reckless fools to me.”
He is not, I notice, saying that he intends to cut us out. He’s saying, Don’t drag me down with you. That’s a different thing entirely. Mike Lustig is a hell of a good friend, I think, and I wonder if Sam will mind when I ask him how the two of them got to be so close. Mostly, he doesn’t care if I dig into his past . . . but then, mostly, I don’t ask.
“So,” Sam says, “why the hell would you give us any more leads? Great ques
tion, man. Do you want to know the answer?”
“I might.”
“Because we’re about to move your investigation along. We have a USB that came out of that cabin. And receipts. You’ve got ashes.”
I whip my head around to stare at him, but it’s too late to stop him. He’s not just let the cat out of the bag; he’s set the bag on fire, and the cat’s over the state line. I mouth, What the hell? at him, but he doesn’t take his gaze from the phone.
“Hmmm.” Lustig draws that out, a rumble that rattles the phone on the table. “Don’t suppose you plugged it in somewhere to take a look at what might be on that stick.”
“Might have.”
“Don’t suppose you found anything interesting on it, then.”
“Might have done that, too. Look, Mike, I’ll hand it to you, no strings, but you have got to share the rest of what you know. We can stop this bastard if we work together. If you keep us out—”
“If I’d kept you out, as I should, then I’d have had that damn thumb drive, and the chain of evidence would be intact!”
“Most likely,” I say, leaning forward, “you or your guys would have opened that door downstairs and blown themselves up, all the evidence would be ashes, and not a damn thing useful would have come out of it. We didn’t make that mistake because we understand who we’re dealing with.”
His voice hardens just a touch, skimming off the charm. “And you think I don’t?”
“Have you met Melvin Royal?” I ask. I feel a cold ball forming in my stomach, heavy as lead, just from having his name on my tongue. “Interviewed him? Interrogated him? Even been in the same room with him?”
“No.”
“I lived with the man for years. I slept next to him. I saw him when he was angry and happy and stressed. I know how he thinks.”
“Respectfully, ma’am, if you knew how he thought, you’d have known what was swinging in your own goddamn garage.”
It’s sharp, but I’ve felt that piercing observation before. I don’t let it stop me. “There’s a difference. I have the knowledge of him now, and what I knew then. And each informs the other. I’m an asset, Agent Lustig. You’re going to need me.” I take in a slow breath. “Because Melvin Royal isn’t like the other killers you hunt. If he was, you’d have already found him, wouldn’t you? You caught all the others he escaped with.”
He’s silent on that. I catch Sam’s eye. We have a lot to talk about, but he just nods in agreement with me for now.
“Hey, Mike?” Sam says, crouching down to a height nearer my chair. Like me, he still reeks of smoke and sweat. It’s more suffocating in this clean, pleasant room. “Don’t shut us out. You’d rather have us where you can see us. We make great bait. Right?”
“You’re killin’ me,” Lustig says, and then I hear him moving. I hear the crackle of wind in the speaker, and the sound of passing traffic. “Tell me where you are. I’ll come pick up the USB, and we’ll talk.”
I hit the button to mute the call instantly and say, “No way in hell—”
“I wouldn’t,” Sam assures me, and unmutes. “Tomorrow, Mike. We’ll meet wherever you want. Call in the morning.”
He hangs up before Lustig can answer. We both look at the phone, waiting for it to ring again, but it doesn’t. After a full minute, Sam stands up. He looks as tired as I feel. “He could have traced it,” I tell him.
“Yeah, I know,” he says. “But unless something shifts in a major way, he won’t. I’m taking a shower. If SWAT’s here when I come out, at least I’ll be clean for jail.”
I have to laugh. He’s right. We have to trust Lustig this far, if no farther. And now that Sam’s said it, the idea of a hot shower sounds meltingly good. For a dizzying moment our gazes meet and hold, and I wonder what it would be like to stand in the shower with him, fully naked with another person for the first time since . . . since Melvin. It’s an involuntary thing, the picture that comes into my head, and it makes my breath catch, my pulse trip.
Then Sam looks away and says, “I’ll go first.”
“Such a gentleman.”
“Damn right.” He walks away to the bedroom on the left, the one nearest the stairs, and closes the door behind him—no, he almost does, and then it opens again, and he leans out. “Don’t watch that fucking video without me, Gwen.”
He knows me too well. He knows that I’d force myself to do it, now that we know it was filmed somewhere other than that basement. I’d make myself watch it for clues, anything that might tell me where it was done, and by whom. Maybe familiarity would provide some kind of buffer from the human suffering captured on it.
I nod, but I don’t promise, and he disappears. I hear the shower start. I don’t open the video, but I do grab a pair of blue nitrile gloves from a pack I carry in my bag, then take a handful of papers and move them back to the coffee table. Preserving fingerprints is probably useless; whatever evidentiary value these had ended when we stole them from the cabin. But being careful wouldn’t hurt anything, either.
The papers look like the normal life of just about every person on earth—receipts for supplies, an online order for electronic games and gadgets, bills for electricity and propane. They’re all billed to a bland corporate name that the FBI can track, if that leads anywhere at all. I assume, due to the lack of a bill, that the water and septic were his own. Some clothing orders, all male, in sizes I note down on a sheet of rose-pink paper from the desk, though I am certain that finding the owner of that cabin is going to be difficult, if not impossible. A job for the FBI, for sure, now that he’s alert and on the run. This man, I think, is quite the record keeper; he not only buys in bulk, but he tracks every single purchase. There doesn’t seem to be any differentiation between the trivial—like bulk orders of toilet paper and paper towels—and what might be important, like the purchase of sets of steel chain in varying lengths. I start separating the pages out into what is likely nothing, and what might be something. The distant, steady drum of the water in Sam’s shower calms me, and by the time it shuts off, I almost feel centered again.
When he opens the door and comes out, he’s wearing what must be a hotel-provided bathrobe and slippers, and his sandy-blond hair has been toweled dry but is still slick at the ends. He looks warm and at ease. “Sorry,” he says, indicating the clothes with a sweep of his hand. “Mine need a wash. They reek.”
“Mine do, too,” I say. “Don’t suppose they have a laundry service . . . ?” We have extra clothes in our backpacks, but I don’t know when we’ll next have a shot at cleaning things. So he goes to call the front desk while I head to the shower.
It’s magnificent, and I linger in the water, letting the pounding spray on the top of my head drive out the images I glimpsed on that video. I want to call the kids again. I want to make sure they’re okay, even though I’ve already done that, even though I know that they’d look at it as half-crazy behavior. I get out of the shower and dry off, find the robe—lush and fluffy—and slide my feet into the clean, new slippers. This feels like a kind of luxury I’ve never really known before. I can see how someone could get used to it.
I hear my phone buzz, and I grab it. I check the number, which at a glance seems familiar—Mike Lustig’s, from before?—and I click on and say, “Hello?”
I get dead air, and a rattle of static after, and my defenses come up fast. “Mike?”
“Mike?” says a voice on the other end, and I freeze. I forget to move, though I have a sudden urge to throw the phone away like I’ve grabbed a spider. “Who’s Mike? Are you cheating on me again, Gina? That’s disappointing.”
I close my eyes, and then I open them again, because I don’t want to be trapped in the dark with him: Melvin Royal, serial killer, ex-husband, father of my children. I’ve sunk down on the edge of the bed without knowing it; my legs have lost their strength. I stare blindly at the cheerful pale-yellow wall, the framed print of a peaceful Monet garden, but all I can see is shattered bricks, a gaping dark maw where a wall had been.
The cracked egg of the two-car garage that Melvin used as a workshop.
The odor of death and rot, metal and terror.
The swaying body hanging from the wire noose of a winch.
I have the sudden, horrible sensation that Sam’s dead sister is right behind me, looming close. Melvin’s conjured that ghost, but I’m the one who’s haunted.
The icy stillness in my chest releases, and I’m suddenly flooded with heat, blood, rage. My hand shakes, and I take a firmer grip on the phone now. “Where are you, Melvin? Come on, tell me. You’re not afraid of me, are you?”
I know instinctively how much he’ll loathe that idea, and sure enough, it sparks an immediate reply. Not as controlled as the first. “You?” The barked word, and laugh, has so much contempt in it that it’s like a knife across my skin. But my skin’s thicker now, and the edge doesn’t draw blood. “No, Gina. I’m not afraid of you. How’s the weather in Georgia, by the way?” Gina, not Gwen. He’ll always call me that.
“Cozy,” I say calmly. “How’s hiding like a cornered rat?”
“Oh, I’m not hiding, sweetheart.” His tone drops into a range that feels wrong. A little frightening. “I’m looking up at that warm square of light where you are. If you turn out all the lights, you’ll see me. Pull back the curtains, Gina. Take a good look.”
My free hand fists itself in the bedclothes, a violence the lovely room doesn’t deserve, and I take in a deep, slow breath tinted with the faint scent of lavender. “The hell I will,” I say. “Because you’re a goddamn liar. You’re not here. You have no idea where I am.”
“Prove it. Go and look.”
“Fuck off with your mind games, Melvin. You’re not there. If you were, you’d be knocking on the door.”
I bolt to my feet, because at that very moment, there’s a knock. Brisk. Three taps on the main entrance.
I hang up the call, drop the phone, and lunge to open my bedroom door. “Sam! Don’t!” I grab my handgun from the shoulder holster slung over the chair, and he pauses, already in the act of unlocking. I rush to put my back to the wall. My heart’s pounding, and although I do not believe Melvin is the boogeyman he wants me to think, the timing is too eerie. I calm myself, then nod to Sam. I’m ready, but I hold the gun at my side, pointed down.