Malice Masterpieces 2

by K'Anne Meinel

  In Sacramento as the sun was coming up she pulled into another storage facility just outside of town and exchanged the sedan for her Pathfinder. She whiped down the sedan and again sprayed the aerosol to hide any DNA or organic material before locking the garage facility with the sedan inside and taking her duffel with her she headed south out of Sacramento to a Motel 6 she had booked for the week. She entered her room and saw that one of the beds had been used but the other one was still neatly made, her agreement with the ‘hooker’ upstairs had obviously been enacted. Alice left the wig on the second used bed; she mentally thanked the woman for her participation by lending her the wig. She looked over the wig carefully for strands of hair or other tell-tale signs but the washing she had given it at the last hotel should suffice, she repacked it in her duffel and shrugged, she couldn’t take the chance, she would give the woman money to replace it. Using the dead bolt she stretched out on the bed for a well-deserved rest, hoping no one would bother her and knowing that a hooker had used this room, no one probably would, they had an ‘agreement’ with the management. Alice knew her people well and they had both ‘benefited’ from the arrangement.

  Six hours later Alice was up and hungry. She had enough rest that she knew she could make the rest of the trip to Los Angeles and across it to her home. She made it by the time the kids came home from school, was able to shower once again, carefully apply her makeup and stow her bag, she dressed casually and she was thrilled to hug them and kiss them hello as they arrived. Even Kit seemed happy to see her home from her ‘business’ trip. Her carefully made up face concealed most of the damage but she winced slightly from the exuberant hugs she got from her children. The loose turtleneck she was wearing hid all the damage to her ribs and the deep dark bruises on her shoulders and arms, the tight bandages around her ribs made it easier to breathe. The makeup was a little thick but they didn’t notice that, they were kids.

  “Hey slugger, how’s it going?” she asked her and Kit laughed at the endearment.

  She had joined the girls’ softball team and Alice had sponsored it so that they could have new uniforms and gear. She had found new friends and was enjoying herself immensely. She wasn’t the best player but Alice’s offer of private coaching had been rejected, Kit was willing to learn to play on her own skills, her own merits. These last few months had been hell and she knew now that she could cope with her mother’s death on her own and without Dr. Dan’s help, Alice was there for her and she loved her for it. “I actually got a double hitter,” she said shyly, some of the last few months remnants still playing havoc on her psyche.

  Alice smiled, “That’s awesome,” she enthused and then asked, “Maybe you could explain what a ‘double-hitter’ is to me?”

  Kit laughed, Alice was the most un-athletic person she had ever met or so the kid thought but she was game to help and to try and Kit appreciated it. They shared a laugh as Alice took her baseball hat and put it on, it gave her face a funny look and then she took her hair and put it through the back like the ‘in’ mom’s they both joked about, they shared a laugh, mother and daughter at her new ‘look.’ They both turned as a black sedan pulled into the driveway. Alice watched for a moment and heard Nan come out for the younger kids. “Kit, go in with your brother and sister please,” she said quietly as she watched the sedan come to a halt at the bottom of the steps.

  Kit watched a moment but a look from Alice told her she better skedaddle and she made a game of racing her siblings into the house to distract them with Nan racing along to keep up.

  Alice walked down the steps. To the men getting out of the sedan she looked like a typical well-to-do Southern Californian. Her home alone told them she had to have money. Her well cut slacks and turtleneck had to be tailored they fit her so well. Her hair was beautifully blonde and looked endearing out of the back of the cap. Her makeup was impeccable but the brim of the cap hid the extra makeup she had had had to use to cover her cuts, bruises, and abrasions, her manicure-well perhaps she worked in her gardens it didn’t look that good. The jewelry she wore though was enough to pay their salaries; both of the men realized that as they watched her walk down the steps to greet them. Neither of them knew her well enough or could see the limp she was hiding effectively or the way she held her arm to her damaged rib cage. “Can I help you?” she asked in a well-modulated and carefully calculated voice.

  “We are looking for Alice Weaver?” the driver asked as he closed his door.

  Alice nodded and looked cool as she answered, “I’m Alice Weaver, how may I help you?”

  The second man pulled out a wallet and held up a badge showing that he was with the FBI, “I’m Officer Dansk and this is Officer Petrie,” his thumb pointed at the driver who also showed off his identification, “We have some questions we would like to ask you. Is there somewhere private we can go?”

  Alice nodded and led them, not back up the front stairs but around the house to a patio that led into her private offices. “Please have a seat; can I get you anything to drink? Coffee, tea, juice?”

  Both officers noticed the fine but bare furnishings of the office that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. It was a nice and expensive set up. The computers on one desk were state of the art. The other desk looked sadly bare with only a covered desktop and a laptop on it. They looked around at the paintings and the bookshelves and the fine leather chairs. They also noted that their host didn’t offer an alcoholic beverage. Both shook their heads at her offer as they seated themselves.

  Alice sat carefully down as well; she was adept at these mind games and was just waiting for their questions or ‘news’. She wanted answers but would give nothing away, they would have to offer it, give her an opening to ask expected questions and she had to think carefully so that she didn’t give anything away. The hat hid more than even she realized and she thought of removing it but was afraid to brush off any of her carefully applied makeup, only a few days had gone by since her visit to the compound. She was actually surprised at how soon these two had arrived, she had hoped for at least one more day and was grateful she had driven so determinedly back from her ‘business’ trip, it wouldn’t have been a good thing if she wasn’t here for this interview.

  “Ms. Weaver, we understand you lost your wife a little over a year ago?” he asked as he consulted a notebook and the other officer watched her face, she noted, very carefully.

  She didn’t have to fake the hurt that passed over her face. She could conjure up all the feelings she had felt back then easily, she had deliberately been thinking of them anyway over the past week, knowing this interview might come, would come. Her grief was obvious, the circles under her eyes very real. Both men could see it. The brim of the hat, her face slightly in shadow enhanced those circles on her pretty face. She nodded sadly.

  “Well ma’am we have reason to believe your wife is still alive,” Officer Dansk told her.

  She had known this statement too would be coming and was only surprised at how quickly they had delved into it. It was a good thing she was aware of their scrutiny because the surprise was noted and mentally filed on both the agents psyche. Then Alice’s careful control came back and she cynically asked, “Someone claiming to be my wife has shown up?”

  Both officers nodded but it was Officer Petrie who asked, “Would you be able to identify your wife from a picture?”

  Alice shrugged which hurt and she barely controlled the wince that followed her movement. “She’s dead, why would I want to see a picture of her?”

  “Could you look at a picture and possibly help us?” he tried again. This was important, they had identified many of the dead victims of the massacre up at a compound outside of Portland but the other victims were harder, some of them, like the woman they believed to be Kathy Weaver were nearly hopeless, their minds weren’t quite there anymore, their counselors were doing their best to identify these victims but they needed verification, their encryption team was hard at work on the computers they had found but it was proving difficul
t. Alice’s security precautions until she was ready to release the information ensured that they wouldn’t be getting the ‘breeding’ operations information too soon. Besides she didn’t want them to know the buyers, only the victims. She had plans for some of the buyers she had found on the computer.

  Alice nodded and looked expectant as Officer Petrie held up a photo. Alice could tell immediately that it was Kathy, a much older and haggard looking Kathy. The spark was gone from her face as she had seen at the compound; the beauty was stripped from her in resignation to her fate. Her life force had been draining away and the logs detailing it hadn’t lied. They had decided to impregnate her in hopes of giving her something to live for; her attempts at suicide under their care had been thwarted by their very security. Her repeated rapes to get her pregnant had only driven her farther into the depths of despair. But Alice wasn’t supposed to know all that; this was supposed to be a picture, possibly of her wife. She shrugged as she examined it closely and all those thoughts went through her mind. “She has the same hair as my wife but I don’t think,” she shook her head, “That this could possibly be my wife.”

  “We have reason to believe it is,” Officer Dansk asserted and Alice glanced up at him with an incredulous look. He swallowed at he knew not what, something about her look warned him of something, he just felt suddenly uncomfortable. “We’d like to have your cooperation in exhuming the body from her grave.”

  Alice stared at him waiting, she knew she could out wait him but then she knew a lot more than he did. She held onto the picture with one hand as she stared him down unknowingly looking menacing with her cat-like eyes.

  “We have reason to believe,” he repeated, “That your wife has been held on a compound for the last year. A raid was conducted recently on the compound and we believe your wife Kathy was one of the victims found at this place.” He watched carefully to monitor her reaction.

  To the two officers Alice looked incredulous and disbelieving as anyone would be, to Alice she was carefully schooling her reactions as she had thought over this scenario many times.

  “We can get a federal warrant to exhume the grave but we would like your cooperation,” Officer Petrie said kindly.

  Alice pretended to look down at the photo again for a pregnant pause and then she looked up after enough time had elapsed and silently nodded.

  As she stood in the pouring rain she thought the weather clearly indicated her state of mind as she watched the backhoe dig into the rich dirt. The men on either side of her watched surreptitiously as her face and demeanor conveyed no emotion. Alice Weaver was an enigma to most people but then she did it deliberately, letting no one in, letting no one know the ‘real’ Alice. She allowed certain facets of her personality to show to certain people but only one had seen most of them, only one had been allowed into almost every aspect of this woman’s unique personality. Part of it no one would ever know, some might suspect but no one would ever know, it simply was not allowed.

  The sod had been cut up and carefully put aside but the wide shovel of the backhoe made it look easy as it dug up the rich earth beneath it, going slower as it got to the desired depth and with a grating noise came across the top. A man held up his arm to the backhoe operator and he pulled the arm of the backhoe in and down resting it on the pile of dirt he had dug up. He was probably the only dry person in the little group that had gathered. Alice, despite the large umbrella she held and the two men on either side of her with their own were damp from the splashes as it rained hard, they watched silently as the men worked. Two of them now jumped down in the hole the machine had made with shovels to dig off the rest of the dirt. They worked quickly because the rain was making mud and quite a mess. In fact they had tried to put off digging up this grave until the rain slacked off but after three solid days of rain the FBI wasn’t willing to wait anymore and the work was progressing. They hooked the coffin up to the arm of the backhoe to lift it out of the gravesite and climbed out of the hole wearily, the mud was making it so much more work.

  Alice watched intently as the machine began to lift taking in the slack from the ropes that were lifting the coffin. As it cleared the hole the operator turned the coffin too quickly and it wasn’t fully clear, as a result it began to tip as it hit the edge of the hole. In slow motion the three watching saw it tilt towards them, the lid began to slide aside and Alice prepared herself to see a dead body, she wasn’t the only one surprised when instead sand began to pour from the coffin, and yet she wasn’t surprised. She stared at the sight, delighted that no one else had died to create this charade. Her companions though both mumbled under their breath, Alice clearly heard one say ‘holy shit’ and she smiled to herself. The men excavating the coffin yelled at the operator of the backhoe and he quickly stopped but not until all the sand had slid from the coffin that had held it.

  Alice waited patiently for everyone else to react and to the two FBI men she looked like she was in shock. Her carefully made up face had had extra time to heal but still held the ravages of the trip she had made to the compound it did not however betray her to the two men who thought she was standing there in shock at what their news meant. Her wife could very well be alive and in a Portland hospital.

  “We are so sorry Ms. Weaver, I don’t know how that could have happened,” the backhoe driver said to her as he came up. She thought ‘because you weren’t watching closely enough and were too anxious to exhume the coffin in this bad weather.’ She was okay with it though, while dramatic it had proven that no body lay inside the coffin she had bought to house her wife in her eternal rest over a year ago.

  “Ms. Weaver? Are you okay?” one of the FBI agents asked her solicitously as he watched her not react.

  Alice nodded short and simple; she was staring at the pile of sand that had poured out of the coffin rapidly getting wet and turning to mud. She turned from the scene and walked back carefully from the gravesite to the car she had sitting there waiting for her. Getting into the back of the short limo she handed the umbrella to the chauffer who had leapt out to open the door for her. She sat and waited watching the two FBI agents discuss what they had found. She watched as the two gravediggers got back in the hole with their shovels but pushed the casket aside first so it wouldn’t fall in on them. She wasn’t surprised when a shout went up shortly thereafter. A body must have been found under where the coffin had lain but only she knew for certainty that it wasn’t her wife, Kathy.

  Apparently someone or a group of someone’s had entered the compound owned by one Alex ‘The Flybird’ Johansen. The FBI agents who had been watching the compound and who had reason to suspect a connection between Alex and one Eli Watson formally of the Oregon State Prison System had been rendered unconscious and drugged and could not tell what had gone down. The person or persons of interest had taken down each of the bodyguards patrolling the perimeter and had done so very efficiently.

  Using a carefully sharpened arrow, almost a dart but with a flat blade similar to an elongated knife the force of the crossbow had slit across their necks one by one with careful aim. Alice had practiced until she was certain it would work like the knives she was so adept at. The distance and the open area from the trees to the house had worried her and her new weapon of choice had bought her enough time to finish each of the studs that had not only raped her wife but enabled the ‘master’ of this estate. By himself Alex wasn’t much but with the help of his money, his contacts, and these men he had raped many women and girls, impregnated them and sold them or their babies in probably one of the largest white slavery rings that existed, but then Alice didn’t know about other rings, this one however was going down and Alice would ensure that it died or someone would.

  Alice felt satisfaction as she carefully aimed and shot her new toys slicing into the large artery in their necks to make it messy, bloody, and immediately effective. They couldn’t call out and the hemorrhaging that occurred insured that they would be dead in moments. Those moments were precious to her as she stalked and
found each of her prey. Quickly she hid what evidence she could, made a couple of quick slices and calculated realignment of the corpses, retrieved her arrows and wiped off the blood on their shirts. It would take a genius team to realize their necks hadn’t been sliced by a knife and that too would buy her time, after all who would suspect petite little Alice Weaver of being able to wield a knife, much less a pair of modified crossbows and their deadly arrows? Her disfigurement of the corpses would sicken many but also when word got out what had happened here today she knew some of her intended visits would try to disappear.

  She made her way to the house. She now had a complete layout of the property including the tunnels in the hills and the surrounding buildings. Made up to look like a working vacation ranch no animals wandered the property that were domesticated, probably because the animals who used this property for its hidden use didn’t want competition. She slipped in through an open window and made her way to what she now knew was the ‘appointment’ room where videos were shot of the women and sometimes girls who were taught to service their masters. This wasn’t like the one in the basement where they were forced to obey one master and taught to fear men and their abasement of the women, where they were kept in cages. She found one of the other two bodyguards amusing himself with a guest of Alex’s and a woman. Both of them were pounding her apparently willing body because she moaned and groaned her way to an orgasm before Alice’s very eyes. She carefully aimed and shot the over muscled bodyguard between the eyes, she couldn’t hit his neck at the angle he was holding it but she saw with satisfaction that she had scored a bull’s-eye as he stopped his rutting and began to fall backwards from the arrow between the eyes. The ‘visitor’ stopped his own rutting in the woman’s mouth and stared in horror at the sight before him. Alice shot quickly and while she hit him she had to fire her second gun and before she could reload she was spun around by the sixth and final bodyguard. Her head propelled towards a mirror as he saw she was heavily armed and obviously an intruder in her black getup.