Shattered

by Jay Bonansinga

  He staggered backward, his thoughts drifting for a moment like a shortwave radio losing its signal. Something hot and desperate bubbled to the surface of his mind. He thought of his children. He had brain tissue on his fingers and he was thinking of little Ethan with his freckled grin and carrot-colored hair. He was a father. His own child was not much older than that baby in the basement.

  “Oh God, I almost forgot,” he muttered, going back over to the bodies, kneeling down as though he were about to pray. “I can’t leave them like this, not like this—”

  Desirere Accelerrrrrrarrrra trepidatio!

  Splet tried hard to ignore the Over Voice, moving the bodies now like game pieces on a chessboard.

  According to the official postmortems of that evening, the SWAT team was now eleven minutes and forty-five seconds away.

  Maura bit her tongue hard enough to break the skin. A gush of salty warmth filled her mouth behind the gag.

  With each muffled, strangled scream she strained and yanked at the plumbers’ tape shackling her head and arms to the wall. Her voice had a touch of madness in it, as she watched her baby dealing with similar constraints across the darkened basement, now illuminated only by a single bare lightbulb swaying on a frayed cord. In the waxing, waning shadows across the room, little Aaron had been propped up like a sack of potatoes against a load-bearing column, his wrists taped together, his writhing, wriggling head attached to the column with a hank of thick gray adhesive. The baby was crying with such fury his tiny body seemed to be convulsing against the tape.

  That’s all it was: duct tape. But there was a lot of it, and it was impenetrable, and it was wrapping the baby like a greasy, wormy swaddling membrane. It also bound Maura’s wrists together, wrenching them over her head and affixing them to a brace nailed across two wall studs in an unholy crucifix. Several feet of plumbers’ tape was wrapped around her forehead as well, gluing it to the wall in perfect position for her to see her baby.

  Had she not been gagged—the paint rag knotted across her mouth, smelling of turpentine and making her dizzy—Maura would have chewed her hands off at the wrists. She would have done it in a heartbeat in order to get to her baby, who was sobbing and wailing less than ten feet away. But she was gagged, not to mention trussed to the studs like a suckling pig, and the pain and the fury made it hard to think, and that was the one thing she needed to do: think.

  As it would turn out, she had only a few critical minutes between the point at which the second knock on the door came, drawing the killer out of the basement, and the moment at which he returned.

  By the clock, it was just under four minutes. But they were four crucial minutes because the moment the madman had vanished, Maura almost spontaneously flashed again on the secret part of the basement, the part the marshals had shown her three nights ago. Maura remembered what they had called it. They called it “the last resort.”

  Aaron mewled and convulsed.

  Maura tried to speak to him through her eyes, tried to blink a message to her baby, tried to calm him with steadying thoughts as though she could send her brain waves into the child’s head. And maybe she could. Mothers and babies have freakish synchronicity with each other. They are connected on levels that defy physical laws.

  Sure enough, all at once, little Aaron seemed to stop moaning and fix his raw, teary, mucusy gaze on his mother. He looked exhausted, and maybe even a little lulled by the fear into a sort of traumatic catatonia. But right then—Maura’s mind allowing their connected gazes to fire one last synapse—she realized what was about to happen.

  It dawned on her like the silent inhalation of air right before the onslaught of a nuclear holocaust, the first thump of ignition in the base of her brainstem sending a mushroom cloud of memories, half-glimpsed newspaper articles, snippets of conversations with her husband through her mind. She remembered the fact that this maniac always killed in pairs, and she remembered the whispered conversation in her bedroom many nights ago when Grove told her the killer’s signature. She remembered seeing the photographs of makeshift eyelid retractors, and she remembered the repulsion she felt when she realized that here was a man who forced his future victims to watch their counterparts being tortured and killed.

  She stared at her baby.

  She realized right then, beyond all doubt, why the two of them—mother and child—had been bound in this fashion, facing each other. And why their heads were taped in place. Facing each other. And of course, the final and maybe worst revelation of them all: Maura realized that it was very possible—actually probable—that in a matter of minutes Splet was going to force the baby to watch his mother being killed.

  Or vice versa.

  Maura went into seizures of rage then, her sanity flying off its spindle for a moment. She yanked and yanked at the tape around her wrists, grunting and emitting garbled cries behind the gag. Across the dark basement the baby began to moan and cry again. And this went on and on until something sparked in the pit of Maura’s midbrain like a linkage grabbing hold of a chain, gaining purchase and starting to tug at her, pulling her back to the here and now.

  Only moments ago she had flashed on an image of a mother wolf caught in a trap, chewing off her paw in order to escape, to save her brood.

  Now she realized the tape around her cranium had stretched enough for her to wrench her head a few inches to the left. The gag had loosened enough for her to bite down a few centimeters. Just enough to reach the bottom edge of the duct tape with her teeth.

  In the darkness she began to gnaw at the tape with the ferocity of a wild dog.

  In the moments before the SWAT team arrived at 11 Black River Drive, what was left of the original man known to friends and fellow Baptist parishioners as Good Old Henry Splet hurriedly worked in the darkness along the side of the house. Lifting the sheriff’s blood-sodden body into a sitting position against the bungalow’s brick foundation, Splet recreated the pose that had imprinted itself on his world since childhood. He worked as quickly as possible. It was amazing how heavy the old man was in death.

  Grunting with effort, Splet finished with the sheriff and turned to the deputy. The younger corpse was lighter. Splet grabbed the body by the armpits and leaned Elkins’s remains against the house so that the dead deputy was facing his boss. Two limp forms gazing emptily at each other. Both pairs of eyes still shocked open in death. Milky retinas like marbles gaping at each other.

  Nodding, Splet stood back and admired the familiar post-mortem staging.

  Unus ampliussssss—Henreeeee Acellerere!

  Splet closed his eyes, the deep vibrating Over Voice resonating in his skull, chastising him.

  Animus! Attentus!

  Doubling over suddenly as though punched in the gut, Splet flinched at the unexpected memory of his foster father. His foster father spoke to him in a very similar fashion: Pay attention, Pussy! Listen and learn! Get down on the ground before I beat ya senseless, faggot! Pay attention!

  Splet held himself then, his arms cradled against his stomach, as though he might spill his internal organs at any moment, as he flashed back to that fateful night in the warehouse near the end of his eighth year.

  THIRTY-TWO

  “Get your bony little ass outta the car!” The foster father yanks the boy out of the battered Ford Galaxie by the nape of his neck. The kid, a miserable, trembling bundle of nerves known as Henry-honey to his alcoholic foster mother, goes sprawling across the powdery gravel lot outside the warehouse.

  “It’s not my fault!”

  “Shuddup!” The big, bearded German in flannel and denim circles around to the other side of the car.

  On the ground, out of breath, eyes red from crying, the eight-year-old Henry-honey curls into a fetal position and cries into the crook of his elbow. He’s a skinny kid dressed in corduroy pants and a baseball shirt, with a thatch of greasy chestnut-colored hair.

  “Your turn!” Henry-honey hears his foster father growl to the teenage girl who is cowering inside the car. From his
vantage point on the ground, Henry-honey can see the foster father’s scuffed work boots shuffling violently on the other side of the car as he drags the girl out the door and around the rear of the car toward the warehouse.

  “Stop it, you’re hurting me, leggo my hair!” The girl’s name is Peggy—“Peggers” to her school pals—and she is masking her terror with petulant anger. A sandy-haired girl with huge blue eyes and big braids on the side of her head, she has always hated this big hairy authority figure, this odiferous intrusion into her life, and now the mutual disrespect has finally boiled over.

  “Get your asses inside! The both o’ ya!”

  The foster father takes each kid by the neck, and roughly ushers them toward the building. The low-slung, windowless structure spans several acres of backwater farmland, and features a series of rusty garage-style doors stretching in to the distance in either direction. There’s a rust-pocked sign hanging above the lone steel door.

  The sign says U-Store-It Mini-Warehouses.

  Inside the building, the two kids are dragged down a pitch-black, cobweb-fringed corridor that smells of urine and moldy stone. Henry-honey’s heart is beating so hard it feels as though it’s about to crack his sternum.

  “Hurry up! Hurry up” The foster father’s voice slurs with rage, his breath hot with the stink of whiskey. Where is he taking them, and why? And what is he going to do to them? The foster father has spanked Honey-boy on many occasions, once on his bare bottom with a rubber hose that made welts and hurt for a week and a half, but this time the stakes seem higher. This time, it seems as though the man is planning on seriously hurting Henry-honey.

  “That’s far enough!” The foster father throws them both to the cement floor. “On your knees facing each other!”

  The two kids reluctantly obey the man. They each lower themselves to their knees and then sheepishly look at each other. At first, Henry-honey can glean nothing from Peggers’s blank stare. Her pale blue eyes shimmer with tears in the dark corridor, but they also seem emptied out as they gaze stoically back at him. Henry-honey starts to shake. “P-p-p-pluh-please…d-don’t hurt us, please, p-please.”

  “SHUDDUP!”

  Henry-honey starts to sob.

  The big man grabs the boy by the scruff of the neck, then wrenches his head up. “Are you the one took money from your mother’s jewel box?”

  “I-I—I don’t—”

  “Answer me!”

  “No.”

  The big man released his grip. Henry-honey collapsed back to his knees. The foster father turned to Peggers. “How about you, missy?”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  He slaps her, hard, across the cheek. “You speak when spoken to!”

  “Yes. Yes, I took the money.”

  The big man nods and walks back around behind her. He leans down, takes hold of her waist and yanks her bell-bottom jeans and panties down. Peggers flinches. Henry-honey watches, breathless, his tears congealing in his eyes.

  “Don’t move!” The foster father slips off his big belt with its Confederate-flag buckle, and then in one violent slashing motion he bullwhips it across the girl’s rear end. Peggers gasps.

  Henry-honey looks away.

  “Don’t you look away, boy!”

  Henry-honey forces himself to watch. The big man whips Peggers again and again and again and again and again, until the girl stops gasping and just stares straight ahead, that horrible blank stare solidifying on her face. Henry wants to die. He looks into his foster sister’s eyes, and she looks into his, and they share something then. Something secret. Something that will stay between them forever.

  “Don’t you goddamn move,” utters the big man, whose pants are falling down now. He pushes them down the rest of the way, exposing his enormous erection. He is breathing heavily now, his expression changing.

  The two kids keep staring at each other, but they no longer see each other.

  They stare through each other.

  The foster father positions himself behind the girl and starts sodomizing her. She keeps staring into Henry-honey’s eyes as the big man thrusts into her, jerking her skinny body with violent spasms. Henry tries to look away, but the big man snarls in a hoarse drawl between pelvic thrusts, “Don’t you look away, boy…. I want you to see this…. I want you to see what happens to thieves…”

  Henry-honey gapes, his sister’s terrible blank gaze searing his brain.

  Shattering his psyche into a horrible, beautiful mosaic.

  Sending him deep inside himself.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Federal Marshal Norm Pokorny and his team of tactical specialists reached the safe house at precisely 2:23 A.M., and eased the paramilitary van—a black Dodge Sprinter, to be specific, with the windows replaced by bulletproof alloy panels—over to the curb behind the two idling sheriff department vehicles. Following protocols established for search-and-assess missions, Pokorny immediately got on his radio and murmured softly, “Stand by, folks.”

  Pokorny clicked open his door and climbed out without a sound.

  He had no idea what they were walking into, as he strode past the sheriff’s cruiser, his eyes shaded by polarized night glasses, his gaze everywhere all at once. He unsnapped his Glock nine millimeter, drew it out of the holster, and carried it at his side.

  A light went on in the neighbor’s window, then another one, and another one. Pokorny noticed the entire block was lit up, lights in all the windows now, yet quiet. Lots of rustling drapes, people watching. The tension in the air crackled. Pokorny tasted it on his tongue, a sharp tang of danger, the silence hanging there like an echo.

  Pokorny was a stout, muscular man, and he moved with surprising grace as he approached the deputy’s prowler. He saw the interior light still on, the engine rumbling faintly. A turn signal clicked as though it were a metronome. Pokorny smelled an ambush and reached for his vest mike. He whispered into it: “I want two teams, right now, right now. On the line. Tell me you copy.”

  A voice popped: “Copy.”

  “I want Willings and the blue team to lay down a perimeter around the property. Got that?”

  “Copy that.”

  “I want Pelham and the sharpshooters positioned on the four corners. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “I’m going in the front, nice and casual. Willings, you better back my ass up this time.”

  The voice returned: “What about the tunnel?”

  “One thing at a time,” Pokorny whispered. “Everybody on the ready line?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “I want clean vectors this time. You get a head shot on the bogey, you do it quick and clean.”

  “Copy that, Cap.”

  “This may be nothing but jitters inside. On my mark. Ready…nice and quiet. Go!”

  Several things happened simultaneously at various corners of the property. Pokorny started around the front of the prowler and the rear doors of the Sprinter clicked open, and eight shadowy figures came out in single file, weapons down, silently dispersing across the parkway in front of the neighbors to the south. Pokorny casually strode up the sidewalk with his automatic pressed against his thigh, eyes up and alert. He could smell the night in his nostrils.

  Approaching the porch, the marshal saw several things that computed quickly in his brain: a flattened bush, footprints in the weeds, maybe blood. It was hard to confirm the latter, the pink stuff had mixed well with the gritty soil. In his peripheral vision he noted the rest of the team moving behind him: Half the grouping went east, the other half west. Black-clad commandos with souped-up assault rifles.

  Pokorny didn’t knock. The front door was ajar. Everything calm inside, though. He thumbed the hammer on the Glock, and turned away from the door.

  “Front of the house is not secure,” he murmured into his vest mike. “Repeat: not secure. I want everybody on standby mode, safeties off.”

  He descended the porch steps and went around the front of the house.

  “I wan
t all collateral—” he started to say as he rounded the corner of the bungalow and then saw the sheriff and deputy posed in the shadows. “What the devil is this, what is this, what’s going on?”

  “Negative copy on that, say again,” the voice crackled out of Pokorny’s pocket radio.

  The marshal didn’t answer. He approached the two men in uniform sitting against the house, facing each other. The back of the sheriff’s ruined skull gleamed in the moonlight. “Got officers down! Officers down! Move in! Now! Hard target! Now! NOW!”

  Grove and Geisel made it to the Black River Drive house five minutes later.

  Their escort, a young field agent from the Indy office named Nesmith, had pushed the government-issued sedan, an unmarked ’99 Pontiac Grand Prix, as far as it could be pushed, crossing the rolling hills and patchwork forests of Owen County in just under twenty minutes flat, running at an average speed of ninety-odd miles an hour. On some of the long dark straightaway sections the car actually reached 120, at one point causing Geisel to remark from the backseat that perhaps they would be defeating their own purpose by getting themselves killed. But Grove urged Nesmith to keep the needle pinned, the headlights on bright, and the two-way turned up.

  Grove spent the whole journey from Grissom to Fox Run clutching the radio handset. He never let go of it. He spoke numerous times to the SWAT team, to the sheriff’s dispatcher, and to the field office communications people in Indianapolis. After a while, he had forgotten he was even holding the mike. But now as the Pontiac careered around the corner of Burlington and Black River, Grove dropped the mike.

  His entire body tingled with adrenaline as Ne-smith zoomed toward 11 Black River. Grove could see the rest of the homes on the block blazing with light, some of the neighbors now gathering on their porches in robes and worried expressions. Grove could also see the cop cars and the SWAT van looming, lined up along the curb in front of a neighbor’s house. What he did not see was Marshal Pokorny and the other tactical officers drawing their guns, then pouring into the house through the back door, doing a frantic room-to-room.