Hennessey had removed his helmet, and he pointed with his MP-5 rifle into the room. “Recording equipment. Sound and audio. A stage of children’s toys and clothes set up.”
Leon had to brace himself against the smell of ammonia. “Jesus Christ,” he said, eyes watering. “Where’s the body?”
“Bathroom. Or, what used to be a bathroom.” Hennessey led him past three other SWAT officers who were inspecting the room further. When they came upon her, the black bag was already opened, and the little one looked like she could be sleeping, except for her eyes, opened and rolled back as they were. “Hydrofluoric acid in the bottles along the wall there,” Hennessey informed him, pointing about the room with his black gloved hand. “Bathtubs been removed. Plastic tubs probably used for melting vics down. God damn, Detective, what the fuck’s goin’ on here tonight? What’ve we stumbled on?”
Leon was about to answer when suddenly the room came alive with screams. It was the screams of a little girl, and someone shouting at her in another language. The volume was tremendous and shook the walls. The sound stopped as abruptly as it started, and Leon screamed, “Fucking Christ, what was that?”
“Sorry,” one of the SWAT officers called. “Touched a button.”
Leon swept back into the staging room and said, “Hit it again, but this time find the volume knob and turn it the fuck down first.” The officer did as told, and a few seconds later the seven or so men in the room stood there, transfixed by what they were hearing. In all his years on the force, Detective Leon Hulsey had never heard torment quite so bottled, crystallized, and packaged, to be replayed again and again. Few people knew what it was like to have a job like a policeman. Somebody had to watch those tapes created by pedophiles in order for the taps to be submitted as evidence, somebody had to chronicle what was in those recordings, so that somebody could testify later as to what was on those tapes. It fell on people like Leon Hulsey to go through video evidence of people being raped and murdered in order to ascertain the truth in an investigation.
But this was different. He’d been forced to both see and hear some of the most disgusting things human beings could do to one another, men and women, young and old, black and white, religious and non-religious, but never had it been served up like this. Never had the screams been so well recorded, made so crystal clear.
The girl’s dying screams rose to a crescendo, and Leon said, “Turn it off. Now.”
The officer did as told, and when he did the room was left in an unbreakable silence. Most of the guys in the room looked pissed off, a couple looked queasy, and none of them would have any humor for the rest of the night. Police officers and firemen saw a lot in their day, and made morbid japes about a lot of it, but not tonight. Tonight, none of these men would be able to sleep. Leon would stake his badge and his life on that. “All right,” he said. “Enough’s enough. I want this motherfucker pulled in. I want all of these cocksuckers pulled off the streets. Tonight. We need to find Tidov. And Pelletier.”
Agent Porter said, “I’ve already called the bureau and they’re putting out a description of the Russian to all police agencies in the state. And Pelletier’s face is gonna be on every news channel for the next forty-eight hours, I can guarantee that.”
Leon nodded, for the moment glad of the feds’ involvement. “We’ve been going around and around with this all night. We’ve been one step behind him all this time, and we’ve just barely missed him at each stop. I’m fucking fed up.”
Lieutenant Hennessey cleared his throat. “There’s more you should see down the hall, Detective.”
They stepped out of the room and walked a short ways to the end of the hall, and there they found the cages, as well as the animal feeder and a few empty buckets in the corner that looked good and washed out. Undoubtedly waste buckets for the captives who remained here. “Inch-thick steel,” Leon said, gripping one bar and tugging on it several times. It never budged.
“God damn,” Sergeant Warwick said. “This is what monsters do. I mean, true to life, no bullshit, monsters. Like something out of a God damn Stephen King novel.”
“Stephen King never dreamt up something like this,” Leon said darkly. He bent to examine the locks, which were heavy-duty ADEL Trinity-788 biometric fingerprint lock. It wouldn’t open for anybody without the right fingerprint, and no amount of lock-picking would work on it.
Leon jumped as someone shouted over his radio, “We’ve got a live one down here!”
Lieutenant Hennessey got on the radio, “Say again?”
“A survivor! In the basement! Pulling him out now!”
Leon turned and looked at Porter, and then all at once they fled from the room and raced down the stairs. The house was filled with the thunder of dozens of booted feet clomping their way down. Rorion Vaulstid and Joey Heinrich were standing there in the doorway that led down a set of bare wooden steps. Vaulstid was on the radio, calling for the ambulance. Leon hustled downstairs, Hennessey just ahead of him and the agents behind.
It was a finished basement that was brightly lit with both lamps and overhead fluorescent lighting. A workbench with a wide pegboard dominated most of the room, the pegboard adorned with tools of any sort one might imagine, from commonplace to industrial, from Black & Decker drills to monobolt guns to a jackhammer. There were soldering guns piled high on a tungsten welder, and a smattering of old Hustler magazines spread across the floor. There was also a stack of comic books, a Daredevil graphic novel and a bundle of Savage Dragon issues. Leon recognized these at once, because he’d gone through an Erik Larsen phase of his comic reading.
“Where are you?” Hennessey shouted.
“In here!” another officer cried. They followed the sound of his voice, and came to a darkened room at a corner of the basement. The door had been kicked down, and inside it was nothing but a concrete floor and a trap door. Two SWAT officers were inside, one kneeling at the trap door’s edge, the other pushing out a creature in a small bundle. When he got close, Leon saw that it was a boy, African American, his skin ashy and his arms skinny as rails, his eyes wide with terror, his face covered in soot, fingers caked in dirt and clutching at the purple blanket around him. Leon could smell the filth on him. “It’s okay, son,” the officer said. It was Klein. “It’s okay, you’re gonna be all right now. Warwick, get that light outta his face!” The boy had winced and shrank from the light. “Clear a way!”
Leon stepped aside, and got a glimpse of the child’s terrified face. He looked out from the blanket hood around his head with the eyes of one who didn’t know if he was with the good guys or the bad guys. He may never know the difference again. How would his life be different? How would he view basements now? How would he view people with Russian accents? How would he view the whole fucking country of Russia? Impossible to say, but a single glimpse told Leon that the boy would never live a normal life again. Nightmares waited for him, awkward conversations with people who joked about man rape in his presence without realizing what he’d been through, and relationship problems that would run deep.
When they stepped back outside, neither Leon nor the agents were speaking, though Porter was certainly doing a great deal of texting. David Emerson approached. He’d hustled over to see the kid into the ambulance, but now looked at Leon staunchly. “What the fuck is in there, Hulsey?” he demanded.
“Find this fucker,” he said. “Find him. Find Tidov. They’re running right now. They’re all going to ground. This is an operation, one they’ve worked on for years, and gotten damn good at it, and at keeping hidden. If we don’t get them within the next few hours they’ll have closed up shop and left town. They’ll just open up somewhere else, and do this all over again. That’s what they do. We have to find them, David.”
Leon had never gotten to know David Emerson well. He didn’t know what sort of TV shows or women he liked, he didn’t know what high school he’d gone to, he didn’t know if he preferred Coors to Budweiser, he didn’t even know what David thought of him, but he kn
ew the guy was committed to his job and that he had a bullet waiting for anyone that fucked with his partner. David nodded wordlessly and turned and bolted for his patrol car. He was gone before the ambulance carrying the kid could get out.
For a minute, Leon stood there, looking back at the House, rubbing his cheek with the back of his right hand, considering. Then he turned and looked for Porter, who was standing beside his SUV talking to Mortimer and Stone. He hustled over there and said, “Baton Rouge. What happened there? Anything connected with this?”
Porter halted midway through discussing what they’d seen inside with his fellow agents, and looked at Leon. “No,” he said. “I told you. We were just onto Pelletier, I’d never even heard of the Rainbow Room before tonight.”
“So what happened in Baton Rouge?”
At first, Leon thought the agent would keep hush, but Porter surprised him. “Pelletier killed six contract killers that the Aryan Brotherhood sent after him. They were still plenty pissed at him for what he did to one o’ their boys in CRC. It was their complaint that helped fuck him over, got him transferred to Leavenworth, where the biggest prison population of AB members was at that time. Word travels through the grapevine fast, even in prison. Pelletier probably knew if he hung around in Leavenworth long enough he’d get it in the shower or in the work houses. He got out before they could get their payback.”
“Six assassins? They wanted him that badly?”
“That’s what the Brotherhood is best at. They account for only one percent of the prison population, but they’re responsible for about twenty-five percent of all prison murders. They work in extortion, prostitution and murder-for-hire. They’re exceedingly good at it. Before a person can get inducted into their ranks, the person have to show that they’re well learned—AB members aren’t just dumb rednecks, they’re educated inside prison on Nietzsche, Sun Tzu, Socrates, Plato, Buddha, and they’re encouraged to learn about the many different religions of the world. You have to show undying loyalty. Blood in, blood out. Only the most committed of men can join, and so it’s easy to put out a hit when they want it done.”
“How’d Pelletier survive it?”
“He got a heads up of some kind. One of them made a mistake.”
“What mistake?”
“We don’t know. All we know is that six are dead and one was mutilated pretty badly for several minutes postmortem, maybe as long as an hour. He killed the guy and spent a while working on his corpse. Cut his dick off and shoved it in his ass. A woman was nearby, terrified form all the gunfire that had just gone off, scared to the point that she couldn’t move. She covered her eyes, but still peeked. Said she saw Pelletier…eat one of the testicles.” Porter shrugged. “Then he cut the belly open, and pulled out the intestines. Played with ’em. She said he…um…ah, hell, what did she say he did with them?” he asked of Stone and Mortimer.
Mortimer said, “She said he tossed the intestines around his neck, and looked at her and said, ‘Do I look like Greta Garbo?’ The woman said she looked away, but said she heard the sound of pants being unzipped and a belt buckle rattling, then some squishy noises. ‘Lots and lots of squishy noises.’ That’s how she put it.”
“And laughing,” Stone put in. “Don’t forget that.”
“And laughing, yeah.”
Leon didn’t blink for a moment. And while he imbibed what the agents had said, they went back to their chatter. He finally turned back to the house of horrors, and had the briefest of insights. He was fortunate he had been born relatively sane, to relatively sane parents, and not anywhere near the Bluff.
The rain started in again.
At first, the sky completely dropped on him, drenching him in a torrential downpour to end all downpours. It lasted only a few seconds, though, and petered off to a drizzle. Spencer was already upset about having come across no vehicles that could be easily stolen, and now he would have to walk the rest of the night soaking wet. Not only that, but his quarry was likely to get away. Not only that, but he was still hungry.
Then, he spotted lights up ahead through the drizzle. “You still there, partner?” he asked of the wind.
Yeah, came the Voice, from everywhere and nowhere. I’m still here.
“Are ya movin’ yet?”
Silence.
“That means no. You better get to moving, savvy? I think I’ve found a way to get to you, but you’re still gonna need to buy me some time. It won’t be long before the police get to Tidov’s place and somebody gives Dmitry and the others a heads up. Cops are probably already there now.”
I…hurt.
“What’s wrong with you?” he said, leaping over a chain-link fence and moving ever towards the light. He saw a parking lot wreathed in the orange glow from various lampposts.
I got hit with a stun gun, and my sister…and Bonetta…I can feel their pain and fear, too. It’s…crippling.
“Let me rephrase that: what the fuck’s wrong with you?” he said, stepping around a few cars which undoubtedly belonged to the late-night workers hitting that third shift grind. Up ahead was a warehouse of some kind, a manufacturing plant. A sign nearby read Keegan Corporation – Building Better Trucks. “Ya just gonna lie down and let these fuckers get away with what they’ve done to you an’ yours? Huh?” He peeked at a few of the cars, but saw none that would be easily boosted. Then, he looked fifty yards up at the manufacturing plant itself. Two large bay doors had opened up to let a pair of Penske trucks out. An assembly line. They build Penskes here. “After all they’ve done, you just gonna lay there an’ take it? Let ’em fuck you like they fucked yer sister?”
Don’t you talk about her! Don’t you use that filthy fucking mouth to—
“An’ what’re you gonna do about it?” he said, laughing and walking through the rain and speaking to air. “Nothin’! That’s what. Nothin’, because you’re nothing but a fucking loser who gives up. Fuck you, you little bitch. Lay there and get raped and fuckin’ die. Die without even givin’ them a fight. See if I give a fuck. See if anybody gives a fuck.”
Don’t tell me I’m nothing—
Spencer wasn’t listening to her anymore, at least not for the moment. He saw things inside of her. He saw her own private fears, her shame at her lot in life, an unspoken self-loathing for being the daughter of a woman named…named…Jovita Dupré! Yes, that was her name! And he saw something else, he saw that her teeth were rotted, her eyes sunken and hollow. “Jovita Dupré,” he said aloud. “That’s yer mother, right? A crack whore and a—”
Shut your mouth! the Voice cried. Don’t you look at my thoughts! They’re not yours! They’re mine! Stay out of my head!
Spencer smiled.
The Voice babbled on as he approached a pair of guys who’d stepped outside for a smoke break. They stood underneath a tin overhang, protected from the rain. “Hey guys! Is Terry in?” he said to them.
They looked between one another. “Terry?” one of them said. He was a bearded guy wearing a checkered flannel shirt and work gloves.
“Yeah, ain’t he the plant manager here?”
The bearded man took a puff of his cigarette and said, “Naw, man. Plant manager’s Nathan Hunter. You might be thinkin’ o’ Perry, not Terry. Perry’s second shift manager. Who’re you?”
“I was supposed to drop off some new quarter-inch washers,” Spencer said, pulling a story right out of his ass. “I guess I should speak to Nathan about that, huh?”
“Probably.”
“Where can I find him?”
“Ah, he’s probably back in QC right now.”
Quality control area. “Great. I appreciate it. You guys pushin’ anymore trucks out tonight? I don’t wanna keep my truck in the way.” Spencer didn’t have any automobile, of course, and he certainly didn’t have anything parked in their way. But it didn’t matter, all he had to do was keep his lips moving, keep asking questions, and unless they were incredibly sharp folks (and they couldn’t be because they had found themselves so desperate in life that t
hey worked third shift jobs building trucks on an assembly line), they wouldn’t pick up on it.
“Yeah, but the rest’ll come outta QC later. Probably out back. You can park yer truck up here, it oughtta be fine, man.”
“Thanks, man,” Spencer said, and started to step inside before he stopped himself. “Oh, hey! I got another delivery tonight to Avery Street. Either o’ you guys know how to get there?” Spencer had looked up the directions to Avery Street on Tidov’s Droid phone and had gotten conflicting reports. Some of the streets were probably recently renovated and the maps were updating poorly.
The other smoker scratched his scraggily beard. When he spoke, he revealed blackened teeth that had to be the work of meth or heroin. “Yeah, uh, Avery…yeah, that’s…first, you head north on Mansell. That’s this road right out here,” he said, pointing through the rain. “Go about four stoplights up, then turn left onto Huckleby Ridge Road, go about a mile I wanna say? Then turn right onto Kingsley Street. Stay straight, ’cause that road turns into Umway Street. Go another mile, you’ll see a big billboard that’s fallin’ apart, turn left. That’s Avery.”
“Thanks, friend,” he said, and stepped on inside like he was meant to be there. “Hey, I don’t guess I could be a total prick an’ bum a cig off o’ you, huh?” The man obliged, if only because he appeared to find it too awkward to say no. He also lit the cigarette before Spencer went on his way, smiling his thanks.
They didn’t stop you, said the Voice. Spencer felt the other’s dull curiosity creeping across his brain. She was in shock, and in such a detached state. Brain dead, like when watching TV.
“Of course not. Why would they?”
You’re not supposed to be here…there at the plant.
“They don’t know that. Those guys probably see two dozen people a day that they’ve never met before just come traipsin’ into the plant. Regional managers, district managers, plant inspectors, what the fuck do they know about them? Those two knuckleheads work the goddam third shift on an assembly line.” Spencer walked past the area labeled ROOF PIT, where an aluminum roof was being situated on top of a yellow Penske truck. One of the men looked down from the catwalk at him. Spencer called up, “Hey, man! Nice to see you again!”
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