Friendly Fire

by John Gilstrap

  He wore khaki cargo pants and work boots, along with matching untucked khaki shirt. Somewhere under there, she imagined he carried a firearm. As she got closer, she noticed that the shirt bore the logo for the Ashland Police Department on his left breast. You can take the man away from the cops, but you can never take the cop away from the man. An ample gut testified that he knew his way around pasta and beer, and his face displayed a bright smile as he walked to meet her.

  “Detective Hastings?” he said as he extended his hand. His left hand held a small gym bag that rattled as if filled with tools.

  “Pam,” she said. “Thanks for taking the time to meet me.” They shook hands.

  “I’m retired,” he said. “I got nothing but time. Thanks for making the drive. It must be a long one.”

  “If police work were easy, everyone would do it,” Pam said with a smile.

  Dooley pointed to her car. “Do you mind driving some more? We’ve only got one car and my wife has a mahjong tournament at three.”

  “The computer game?”

  “Nope, the real one. They play it with tiles and I have no idea how it works. But my wife loves it, and you know what they say: A happy wife is a happy life.”

  Pam forced a chuckle. One of the precious few parts of the cop’s life that she disliked was the constant husband-wife bullshit comments. The whole ball-and-chain meme had worn thin to the point of see-through. She got that no one ever meant any harm, but it got wearisome having to always feign amusement.

  In a perfect world, she’d have preferred some time to stretch her legs, but Dooley apparently didn’t want her to come into the house. If experience was any judge, that meant that the interior was less pristine than the exterior.

  She led the way back to her car, pressed the button to unlock the doors, and slid in behind the steering wheel. Dooley helped himself to the shotgun seat and Pam cranked the engine.

  “You need to head west,” Dooley said. “Maybe ten miles.”

  She pressed a button on her console-mounted computer screen and pulled up pre-programmed turn-by-turn directions. “Got it right here,” she said. She pulled a U-turn in front of the house, and they were on their way.

  “So, you think you have a lead on this case?” Dooley said.

  “I don’t know that I’d call it a lead in the sense that it will bring you any closer to your killers, but I think I’ve found a connection.” She relayed the story that Ethan Falk had told, filling in some of the details she’d left out of the previous conversation on the phone. By the time she was done, they were already on Wells Road, the street where the shoot-out took place eleven years ago.

  “It’s down there on the left, about three hundred yards,” Dooley said, pointing through the windshield with a bladed hand.

  They were in farm country now, but with a feeling that times were tough. White clapboard was the standard for the houses, and she didn’t see a single one that didn’t need a new paint job.

  “Have you talked to the current owner?” Pam asked. “Are they expecting us?”

  “Technically, the county is the owner,” Dooley said. “Word travels fast out here, and no matter how far you drop the price, it’s tough to get rid of a place that hosted a triple murder and has a torture chamber in the basement.”

  “So it’s been empty for eleven years?”

  “Yeah. The owner of the place at the time—a guy named Mullins—had taken a job transfer to Cleveland and had hung on to the place as an investment. Back then, he’d rented it to a Robert and Gayle Rancek, but of course those turned out to be fake names. They paid in cash, though, and Mullins never thought to ask any questions.”

  “So, Mullins built a house with a torture chamber?”

  Dooley laughed. “No, that was an addition by the renters. Mullins was freaked out by it when he heard. I’m not sure he ever stepped foot into the house again after that. He put it on the market, couldn’t sell it, and then died of the big C about five years ago. The house went into probate, then foreclosure, and finally the bank wrote it off completely. I’m sure the county will give you a good deal if you want to buy it.”

  “Not today,” Pam said.

  “This place here.”

  Pam pulled the left turn onto a long an unmanicured gravel driveway. Ahead lay the drooping remains of a clapboard saltbox with a sagging roof, surrounded by the remains of a picket fence. She found it surprising that the front windows were still intact. “No vandalism,” she observed.

  “Like I said, word travels fast. You know the place is now haunted, right?”

  She shot him a look.

  He laughed. “Hey, if enough people say it, it has to be true.”

  Pam parked her car in front of the remains of the fence gate, and they got out of the car together. “Tell me what you found during your investigation.”

  Dooley led the way to the front door. “The shooters came in through here and through the back door,” he said. “You can still see some of the splintering in the jamb there.” He pointed to the scars on the knob side of the door panel, just above a closed padlock. “After the investigation, Mullins paid to have the doors repaired, and once the property reverted to the taxpayers, we paid for the locks and hasps.”

  “Do you have a key?” Pam asked.

  “This is an official investigation, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Cleared through the Ashland chief of police?”

  “Yes. I talked to him yesterday.”

  “Okay, then.” Dooley took two steps back and fired a massive kick with the sole of his boot-clad foot. The door moved but it did not open. A second kick moved it more, and the third did the trick. “That was the only key I had,” he said with a big smile. “God, it’s been a long time since I’ve gotten to do that.” He pulled a long-handled MagLite from his gym bag and clicked it on. “Let’s go in.”

  Pam’s MagLite was much smaller, carried in a loop on her belt. She clicked hers on and followed Dooley into the darkness of what had once been a living room. A musty, mildewed odor spoke of an unrepaired water leak somewhere, and judging from the growth of mold on the walls, it had been leaking for a long time. Shag carpeting covered the floor, but it was heavily stained, and no doubt served as the home for all kinds of mites and bugs. The linoleum surface of the tiny square that probably had been called a foyer was covered with hundreds of rodent turds.

  “Think of it as a fixer-upper,” Dooley said.

  “Where’s all the furniture?”

  “On the heels of the shooting, and in the absence of any evidence, we seized just about all of it for examination. We logged what little we found, and when we offered to return it, Mullins said just to trash it. That’s what we did. Like I said, he was pretty freaked out.”

  “So go back to what happened,” Pam said.

  Dooley panned his flashlight beam to a burn spot on the far side of the living room where the floor met the wall. “We found a spent flashbang grenade there,” he said, “and there’s another one on the other side of the wall and down the hall near the back door. We figure that the shooters coordinated their entry front and back and tossed flashbangs to mess with the decedents’ heads.”

  “Are those bullet holes?” Pam asked, pointing to erupted bits of the far wall.

  “Yes, but they’re exit holes. Here, let me show you.”

  He led her through an archway to the back part of the house, to what used to be a kitchen. Only the sink remained, barely balanced atop the rotting remains of wood and Formica cabinetry. The mold was much thicker on the walls here, and the linoleum floors had buckled badly. “Watch your step,” Dooley cautioned. “Have you seen any of the crime scene photos yet?”

  Pam shook her head. “That’s on the agenda for tomorrow when I stop by the station. I wanted to get the lay of the land before I get lost in the photos.”

  “I get that,” Dooley said, as if offering his approval. He walked through the kitchen into another small room, maybe ten by ten feet. A dining roo
m, perhaps? Pam supposed it was possible if you ate off a card table. Dooley pivoted to the wall separating that room from the living room and indicated a vertical space in front of the bullet holes. “A tall chest of drawers sat here,” he said. “My wife would call it an armoire.” The he took a long step backward, into the center of the room. “This is where we found one of the bodies. You’ll see it in photos. He was shot at close range—from right there on the other side of the archway—a perfect triple-tap. Chest, chest, forehead. Five-five-six through and through. Those holes in the wall are from where the bullets went through the decedent, through the drawers and then through the wall. Standard ball ammo, we found all but one of the bullets in the cushions of one of the living room chairs. We figure the other just fragmented all to hell.”

  “Were there shell casings?” Pam asked.

  “Exactly three,” Dooley replied. He pointed back through the archway toward the kitchen. “They were on the counter, as I recall. Maybe one on the floor, but there were only three.”

  “Why do you keep emphasizing that it was exactly three?”

  He recoiled as if it were the most obvious question in the world. “Three kill shots is good shooting,” he said. “And at this range, to select such precise targets—as opposed to yelling, ‘oh, shit!’ and spraying bullets—says professionalism to me.”

  “Professionalism,” Pam said, tasting the word.

  Dooley’s confusion deepened. “I thought you said you’d read the reports,” he said. “I’ve made my thoughts on this as clear as crystal since the very beginning. There’s no doubt in my mind that this was a hostage rescue of some sort.”

  She had, indeed, read that in his reports, and that was, indeed, where her inclinations lay, if only because of the vehement testimony of Ethan Falk. But she wanted to know about his reasoning. “What makes you so sure?”

  Dooley seemed to sense that he was being gamed, but then he shrugged, as if to say it didn’t matter. “Follow me,” he said. He edged past her and led the way back through the kitchen toward the back door in the far corner on the right, and then he buttonhooked left.

  He addressed a heavy-duty door that stood closed, directly across from the comparatively flimsy back door. “Just so you know, Mullins didn’t know anything about this door until we showed him pictures. The occupants at the time installed it on their own.”

  “The door to the torture chamber?” Pam guessed.

  “Well . . . indirectly,” Dooley said. “Remember, you wanted this tour.”

  Something about the way he said that last part chilled Pam’s neck at the spot where it attached to the base of her skull. She tried to imagine—while trying not to imagine—what this place would have looked like through the eyes of an eleven-year-old. As that thought formed, she realized that she now undeniably believed every word that Ethan had said.

  “Watch your noggin,” Dooley cautioned as he rapped a knuckle against the low overhead. Not an especially tall man, he had to cock his head to the side and bend his knees to negotiate the steps. Pam probably could have made it standing upright, but she ducked anyway. The beam of her flashlight reflected straight back from Dooley’s shirt, but the beam from his seemed to get consumed by the absoluteness of the dark. Dampness and mildew and rodent shit combined to form a nauseating, toxic stench.

  “I know this is pretty awful,” Dooley said without looking back at her, “but I’ll tell you that it actually smells better now than it did the first time I was here. Coroner estimated that the bodies had been dead for about seven, eight days when we found them.”

  The low ceiling continued the length of the twelve stairs to the concrete floor of the basement, which was roughly the size of the house’s footprint. The stairway more or less split the space. Pam played her light to the right, which revealed a wide open space, concrete floors rimmed with moldy white-painted bricks.

  “When you look at the pictures, you’ll see that this whole side of the space was lined with hard-backed wooden chairs.”

  “Lined?”

  “Along the walls. Well, those two walls there.” He pointed to the back of the room and the far wall that ran perpendicular to it. “They were arranged like they were a dance floor or something.”

  Or as a place from which to evaluate your next human purchase, Pam thought. She played her light to the left. That view revealed an archway, beyond which there was a narrow hallway whose far wall was lined with four closed heavy doors. The ceiling hung low down here, barely allowing them to stand.

  Dooley stepped into the hallway, leaving Pam standing at the base of the stairs. “The shooter who took out the second guy stood about where you are now,” he said. “Again, three shell casings, five-five-six, but with different ejector marks.”

  “A second gun, then,” Pam said.

  “Exactly. And we found that body right about here.” He walked to a spot in front of the second door. “Another perfect triple-tap.”

  “What’s behind these doors?” Pam asked.

  “That first one there, in front of you, is the furnace room. Some food storage, too. This second one”—he opened the door and shined his light inside—“we’re not sure what it was for, exactly, but I have an idea. There was a mattress on the floor and it was a DNA farm. Blood, semen, saliva, every body juice you can think of. I don’t even want to think of what went on in there.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Oh, trust me. That’s not the worst of it.”

  Pam was beginning to regret her decision not to look at the photos first. It would have been nice to have some forewarning. Not that she couldn’t already figure it out.

  Dooley turned the knob on the third door and opened it. He stepped aside so she could see into it. Her MagLite revealed an empty rectangular room, maybe ten by seven, more or less identical to the mattress room, only this one sported a rodent-gnarled braided rug in the middle of the floor. “Ready to see the torture chamber?”

  “Not really.” That of course meant yes.

  Dooley lifted the rug to reveal an etched square in the concrete. Call it three feet on a side.

  “What am I looking at?” Pam asked.

  Dooley didn’t answer. Instead, he handed his light to Pam and reached back into his gym bag, from which he withdrew two T-shaped metal tools. “When we closed this place up after the investigation, the county attorney was terrified that vandals would somehow lock themselves in the hole, so we removed the handles to the hatch and covered it with the rug. I made these special for you when I heard you were coming.”

  “Why not just seal it up permanently?”

  He smiled. “Well, probably the most truthful answer is laziness,” he said. “But beyond that, I think I always secretly hoped that the investigation would become active again. Can you hold the light on the hatch?”

  Pam sidled into the room to get a better angle, then held the light high for an overhead angle. Dooley bent at the waist, inserted a T tool into each of the two holes that she hadn’t seen until he did it. With considerable effort, he lifted the hatch out of the way and slid it off to the side. “There you go,” he said as he stood tall again. “Welcome to Hell.” He reached for his flashlight, and played the beam down the hole. “I swore I’d never go down there again.”

  He gathered himself with a deep breath. “Oh, what the hell? Be careful on the ladder. It was rickety eleven years ago.”

  Pam watched Dooley descend the vertical ladder, doing her best to illuminate more than just the top of his head. When he was at the bottom, he brought his hand to his nose. “Oh, this just keeps getting better and better.”

  Pam could feel the change in the quality of the air as she descended into the hole. It seemed thicker somehow, and it was certainly colder and moister. The smell of the place was unlike anything she’d encountered in the past. Musty, certainly, but there was an organic element to it, not as pungent as a decomposing body, but on the same spectrum. “What is that stench?”

  She’d meant the question as a rhetorical
one, but Dooley answered it. “I think of it as the smell of evil. This is the place that the original owner had no idea was here, the space the occupants dug out.” The ceiling here couldn’t have been six feet higher than the dirt floor.

  “We think the decedents kept people down here,” Dooley explained as he knelt on the dirt. He pointed to the far corner with his flashlight beam. “There was a pit over there, used as a toilet. Judging from an analysis of the waste in the bucket, this space housed multiple occupants. The third body was found just about where I’m standing.”

  “Another perfect triple-tap?”

  “No. This one was a single shot through the forehead. It’s hard to tell exactly where the shot came from, but from the location of the casing—same rifle as the one used to kill the one out in the hallway—I figure that the shooter was either on the ladder or at the base of it. This dead guy had his pants down around his ankles.”

  Pam’s stomach churned. It was entirely possible that she’d just found the limits of her emotional shields.

  “For all these reasons,” Dooley said, “I’m ninety-nine percent convinced that what went down here was some kind of a rescue operation. I checked with the State PD and with the FBI, and they didn’t claim it, so I guess it was vigilantes or something.”

  “Or maybe a rival criminal operation,” Pam said. She wanted to push her own assumptions as much as she wanted to push Dooley’s.

  Dooley nodded. “Always possible,” he said. “Hell, anything is possible. But I’ve got to tell you. There can’t be more than one or two gang guys in the world who deploy flashbangs and have this kind of marksmanship.”

  “What did your investigation turn up on the shooters?”

  “Not a lot. Nothing, actually. But to be honest, we didn’t press all that hard.”

  Pam waited for it.

  Dooley prepared with another deep breath, and then winced at the air he inhaled. “You remember that armoire I told you about upstairs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It was filled with kids’ clothing. One drawer was just underpants. The only reason I’d want to catch the people who killed animals like that would be to shake their hands and buy them a drink.”