Stolen

by Daniel Palmer

  “Anything you say, Hutch,” I said.

  “Screw you,” Clegg said, getting out of the car. “And if anything, I’m Starsky.”

  I watched Clegg slide like a shadow across the street, then saw him work his way along the side of the house until eventually he vanished from my view around back. During my watch, the Swain home, lovely as it ever was, remained dark and uninviting. Using the binoculars Clegg brought, I tried to see if the curtains were moving, a flutter or a part, but these weren’t the night-vision variety, so I had a hard time seeing anything. I don’t know how much time had passed while I kept watch over the house, a while, anyway, when somebody knocked hard on the driver’s side window and I jumped in my seat—okay, maybe I screamed a little, too.

  I swiveled my head and saw Clegg standing there.

  “The back door is open, and nobody is at home,” he said. “Let’s go have ourselves a little look-see.”

  I followed Clegg around back, seeing the same stuff I had seen before : the rusted, lopsided trampoline—who ever jumped on it?—the toolboxes, and of course, that ugly birdbath. The back door was shut, but Clegg turned the knob and pulled it right open.

  “How’d you get it unlocked?” I asked.

  Clegg flashed me a compact kit that contained a gleaming set of silver tools, the likes of which I’d never seen before. “Brought a lock-pick kit with me,” he said, sporting a pleased-with-himself smile. “You should know the closest thing to a criminal, John, is a cop.”

  I flashed again on Ruby and her usually spot-on instincts.

  Clegg removed two small flashlights from his back pocket and handed one to me. I followed Clegg inside, shining my light around to get a good look at the wood-paneled basement into which we had entered. It smelled musty, and I could almost feel the mold growing underneath the nappy carpeting. If ever there was a place to hang a velvet painting of a leopard in a tree or a sad clown holding a balloon, well, this was it. A patchwork couch with toy blocks for legs stood in front of a thirty-two-inch television that had a milk crate for a TV stand. A tall bookshelf on one wall, covered by a dark varnish and scratched like a well-loved Beach Boys record, was stocked with paperback novels that added to the moldy smell. An upright piano stood against another wall—a flea market purchase at best—which surely would have been out of tune had I dared tickle the ivories. There wasn’t much in the way of evidence down here. Smelly piles of clothes, empty food containers, and stacks of yellowing newspapers, but nothing that said, “Hey. I’m the Fiend.”

  I heard a sound, a click of some sort, and quickly shone my light in that direction.

  “Easy, John,” Clegg said, gripping my arm. “I checked the house from top to bottom. Nobody is home. Houses make noises, so don’t get freaked every time you hear one.”

  “Where could they be?” I asked, whispering.

  “Who knows?” Clegg said, not whispering. “Maybe our little police visit spooked ’em. Maybe Mommy and sonny boy split town for a while, until the Uretsky heat dies down. Anyway, we’ve got the run of the joint for now, so let’s have a good look around.”

  Four rooms comprised the entire lower level—the basement family room, into which we had entered, usable only by a family that didn’t mind mold and filth in equal measure; a nasty bathroom that had a fetid stench all its own; a paneled bedroom with two twin beds set atop a different nappy carpet; and a utility room with linoleum flooring and plasterboard walls. Clegg and I searched the family room and bedroom thoroughly but came up empty. Nasty clothes, unclean rooms, and mold might get unsanitary marks from Good Housekeeping, but it wasn’t going to inspire a judge to sign a search warrant order.

  Clegg went upstairs, while I explored the utility room some more. My flashlight beam gleamed off the yellowing linoleum floor as I scanned the baseboard perimeter, looking for whatever, something useful, all the while surprised that my heart rate kept to a steady and even rhythm. Here I was, breaking into somebody’s house, calm as if the owners had given me the key. The Fiend’s game had trained me for this moment—transformed me into a pro’s pro of the criminal variety.

  I found a box of electronics, old cell phones, wires, speaker cables, and such, and was rummaging through that when Clegg called, “John! Come here! Come quick!”

  I found Clegg in a carpeted hallway, standing beside an unfolded stairwell, which I presumed led up to an attic space. He had a grin on his face that made me think of the clichéd cat having eaten a certain yellow bird.

  “You’ve got to see what’s up here to believe what’s up here, amigo,” he said.

  CHAPTER 50

  My first thought: How many computers does this guy own? My second thought: What the hell is all this crap? I stood upright on a carpeted floor in the middle of a stuffy, airless attic.

  Clegg found a switch that turned on a bank of overhead lights. A long particleboard desk ran parallel to the sloping ceiling. The desk was jam-packed with computers, four monitors, two laptops, and a couple printers, nice ones, too. Underneath the desk I found a jumble of wires, hubs, and Internet routers—a typical computer nerd setup with all the accoutrements associated with digital know-how.

  But it was the other wall that had me all sorts of freaked out. Neatly arranged on pegs and shelving units was—and I knew this only from bad cable movies—a wide variety of BDSM equipment, an acronym made up of the interchangeable words bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism.

  Clegg took out his flashlight and shone it on one particular item hanging close to my head. “Does that look like the kind of gag SHS used?”

  I looked at the big black ball secured to a leather strap containing silver locking buckles and thought of Dr. Lisa Adams. I remembered her so clearly—tied to a heavy oak chair, a naked bulb dangling above her head, a ball gag that could have very well been this one stuffed into her mouth.

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice carrying softly on the stream of unpleasant memories. “It could be this one.”

  I didn’t know what a lot of this stuff was, but Clegg seemed to have a good idea.

  “I used to work SVU,” he said. “We learned these things. Over here, you’ve got your basic bondage mittens,” he said, shining a light on pouch-like coverings that could be secured around the wrists.

  “I’m impressed that anybody could make a mitten creepy,” I said.

  “And here we’ve got a nice assortment of rings, not for your fingers, and here we’ve got your classic humbler.”

  “What’s a humbler?” I asked.

  Clegg paused, holding his flashlight steady on the apparatus with a cuff and a clasp mounted to a concave bar. The device could easily fit around the back of a person’s legs. “Let’s just say it’s nasty, and leave it at that,” Clegg said.

  Some of the items I could figure out on my own—something to spread the legs apart, a straitjacket, ropes, shackles, black leather masks, hoods, restraints of one variety or another. What I didn’t see were any masks of Super Mario with cutout eyeholes or even a black ski mask with red stitching around the mouth and eyes.

  Clegg walked by me, headed to the other side of the attic, where a shuttered door offered the promise of a needed discovery—something that would make this cache of the ultra-creepy a slam dunk from a warrant perspective. Maybe the incriminating masks would be stashed in there. Perhaps we’d find videotapes of Dr. Adams’s and Winnie’s kidnapping and torture sessions. Maybe we’d even find the bloody pruning shears used to sever the fingers of the Fiend’s four known victims. I wondered, too, about those computers. What did they have on them? Deranged pornography probably, the stuff that made use of all that equipment hanging on the walls, perhaps something else, something even more sinister.

  Clegg whistled me over, and I soon found myself inside a large, windowless room about the size of the single-car garage that I figured was directly below us. The ceiling was sloped here as well, but there was still plenty of room for a wooden bed that had all sorts of loops and hooks and chains and
things for strapping and holding and restraining people. The bed wasn’t made, but a pillow and a crumpled pile of blankets convinced me that somebody actually slept up here.

  “I’m guessing Mom doesn’t change the sheets,” Clegg said.

  “Clearly, Swain hasn’t vanquished all of his sexual proclivities,” I said.

  “I’d say you’re right,” Clegg answered.

  “So what now?”

  “Now you look at those computers and see what you can find,” Clegg said.

  I was about to tell him that was a great idea when a sound made my breath catch. It was a rumbling noise directly below our feet, a steady churn, and I heard the distinct rattle of a chain being moved by a motor.

  “Aw, shit,” Clegg said. “Looks like somebody’s come home.”

  My heart was beating fast. Clegg didn’t seem the least bit bothered.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked. “There’s no way we’re getting out of this house without being seen.”

  In response, Clegg took out his smartphone and snapped a bunch of pictures. He took pictures of the bed, pictures of the computers, pictures of the BDSM collection.

  He put his arm around me in a comforting gesture. “John,” he said, speaking calmly, “we’re going to have to leave here now. No time to search those computers, I’m afraid. But we’ve got something here.” He showed me his smartphone. “I’ll say that somebody anonymously sent me these pictures I just took.”

  “Can you do that?” I asked.

  Clegg cracked a half smile. “Why not?” he said with a shrug. “I’m the police.”

  “You think that’ll be enough?” I asked. All the while I was imagining that the person who’d driven into the garage was entering the house.

  “It’s the best we’ve got,” Clegg said.

  “How are we going to explain being here to the person or persons downstairs?” I asked.

  Clegg went over to the wall and took down two black BDSM hoods from their respective nail pegs. He used a penknife, which he took from his back pocket, to rip open two sets of eyeholes.

  “Put this on,” he said.

  “What?”

  “We don’t have much time,” Clegg said. “Put on the hood, and do everything that I tell you to do.”

  I slipped the hood over my head. Without a lot of ventilation, my quick breaths made the hood stiflingly hot. I looked over at Clegg, who had a hood on as well, gun drawn, and a bunch of ropes in his hand.

  “Okay, John,” he said, his voice sounding muffled. “Time for us to leave.”

  That’s when I heard a voice call up the stairs, a voice I recognized as belonging to Carl Swain’s mother, Lucille.

  My heart felt like it was moving to a calypso beat. Clegg motioned with his gun for me to take a few steps back. He stood on one side of the stairwell, while I took a position on the opposite side of the stairs. If anybody came up the stairs, we wouldn’t be seen until they actually entered the attic space and turned around. I heard a creak as some weight was applied to the bottom step, followed by another creak, and still another. With the black hood on, Clegg looked like an executioner in waiting, and I assumed I looked the same.

  “Carl? Are you up here, sweetie?” a scratchy voice called, and a head poked up through the folding stairwell opening.

  Clegg waited until Swain’s mother had ventured all the way up the stairs before making his move. He stuck the gun into the small of her back and said, “Get facedown on the floor now. Right now! Do it!”

  Swain’s mother turned her head to the right and then to the left, seeing both our shapeless, covered heads. She shrieked as Clegg pushed her to the floor. “I said, get facedown on the floor. Is anybody with you?” Clegg asked.

  Lucille didn’t answer.

  “Is anybody with you?” he asked again.

  “Yes, my son is here,” she said. Her voice carried a noticeable tremor.

  Clegg wrenched her arm up toward her shoulder until she cried out in pain.

  “Tell the truth,” he said. “Are you alone?”

  “Yes! Yes! Please! I’m alone! Please don’t hurt me.”

  “Where is your son?” Clegg asked.

  “I don’t know,” Swain’s mom said.

  Clegg did the arm wrench thing again, and she shrieked again.

  “Please . . . I don’t know where Carl went. . . . He took off after the police questioned him about the Uretskys. That’s the truth. Please don’t hurt me.”

  Using one of the ropes, it took Clegg all of thirty seconds to secure Lucille’s wrists behind her back. He used another rope to tie her ankles. Then he got the ball gag from off the wall. He knelt down so that Swain’s mother could see his hooded face.

  “You’ll have to wear this,” Clegg said.

  Her protest lasted only a few seconds before Clegg forced the ball into her mouth. He tightly secured the strap around her head.

  “Can you breathe all right?” Clegg asked.

  Swain’s mom nodded, her eyes widening.

  “I’ll make a call in a bit so you won’t stay tied up for too long. Sorry about this.” Clegg turned to me and said, “Down the stairs posthaste.”

  We got down the stairs, ripped off our hoods, and tossed them back up into the attic. Clegg kept his gun drawn, checking every corner. He couldn’t trust the word of a woman he had just bound and gagged. Seeing no obstacles in our way, we dashed out the back door, ran around the side of the house, and before I could say, “Holy freakin’ cannoli”—which is exactly what I ended up saying—I had the keys in Ziggy’s ignition and the engine fired up. I drove down the street past the Uretskys’ house with the headlights off and didn’t turn them on until Swain’s house was out of sight.

  I was about say a lot of things to Clegg—“Are you nuts?” “Are we nuts?” “What did we just do?”—when I felt a buzz in my pocket and realized I hadn’t sent Ruby a text in ages. My hands were shaking as I went to retrieve my phone. I thought it was strange, because she hadn’t sent me a message, either.

  I pulled the car to the side of the road a safe distance from Swain’s house.

  Where are you? I thought you were downstairs at the back door? she had written.

  My blood turned icy. No, I thought. Why would she even think that? I never told her I was headed back. I never asked her to meet me downstairs at the back door. I had my keys. A horrible sick feeling crawled through my stomach.

  I texted Ruby, my shaking hands making it hard for me to type: Where are you?

  Clegg watched the whole thing unfold. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

  No response from Ruby. I texted her again, ignoring Clegg, feeling my throat close up. Where are you! I wrote. Answer me!

  I told Clegg to hang on. He hung. A few minutes later, the wait pure agony, my phone finally vibrated.

  “What’s going on, John?” Clegg shouted.

  “Oh please . . . oh please,” I kept saying, terrified to look at the phone’s display.

  “John!” Clegg yelled. “Talk to me!”

  I glanced down at my phone, and a sob broke from my mouth, low and shaky, like a rumbling earthquake. The words written on the display blurred as my vision went blank, but I saw them long enough to make sense of it all.

  The opening line of the message read: You’re not the only one who knows how to spoof a phone number. The second line read: You and I need to have a little talk.

  The third line was a link to a Web site.

  CHAPTER 51

  “It’s Ruby. He’s got Ruby!”

  I tossed Clegg my phone so he could read the message for himself. My ears were buzzing. Soon everything went dark. Each breath felt like it would be my last. I blanketed my face with my hands, feeling sick with dread.

  “I don’t get it,” Clegg said. “How did he do this?”

  I don’t remember speaking, but I had the vague sense of having explained all about phone spoofing—how hackers used the technique to make a call or send a text from one nu
mber and make it look like it came from another. I think I told him I used the technique myself to steal the Uretskys’ identities. The buzzing in my ears made it hard to think.

  “Turn the car around,” Clegg said. I lifted my head and looked to him for clarification, but his cool eyes were as revealing as a fog.

  “Where are we going?” I asked. “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going back to Swain’s house,” he said.

  “Why?” My voice sounded unrecognizable, so steeped in desperation. “Shouldn’t I just call up that URL on my iPhone? I’ve got to see Ruby!”

  “John, there are plenty of computers back at Swain’s house,” Clegg said, sounding like an experienced climber conversing with a skittish novice. “Let’s use one of those.”

  “I still don’t get it. Why go back there?” I asked. My body trembled with worry, while Clegg, as a counterpoint, didn’t so much as twitch an eyebrow.

  “If you’re right, and Mr. SHS is Carl Swain, then I think what we’re going to need is a hostage to exchange.”

  This time I parked Ziggy right in front of Swain’s house. Clegg and I climbed out at the same time and slammed our doors shut synchronously, too. Distress had replaced prudence. Again we went around back, and again Clegg used his lock-pick kit to open the door. This time, Clegg followed my frantic dash upstairs. I made my way hurriedly to the attic’s foldout stairwell, but before I could take a single step up, Clegg grabbed my arm from behind and pulled me back down.

  “You don’t want her to see your face,” he said. “Let me go up first.”

  I nodded, unable to speak. What I could do, and easily, was imagine the absolute worst. My mind’s eye saw Ruby tied to the same horrible oak chair as Dr. Adams and Winnie once were. An all-consuming despair overcame me as I thought about her struggling to break free from those restraints. I pictured the Fiend flashing those bloody pruning shears, threatening to do what he liked to do.