by Karen Rose
She got to the bottom and took a final step, far bigger than she needed to. It caused her to stumble, and Deacon quickly grabbed her shoulders.
‘Steady,’ he murmured. ‘You’re down. You did it.’
She froze. ‘No. I’m not. There are two more steps. Always twelve.’
Her eyes were clenched shut. ‘Faith, open your eyes and look at me.’
She swallowed hard and opened her eyes. ‘There were always twelve steps.’
‘Maybe you’re just remembering it wrong.’
Her eyes flashed and he was relieved. She was still in there. He was a little worried he’d pushed her off some kind of emotional ledge.
‘I remember twelve steps. Always twelve. I’d always count.’
‘Why? Why would you count?’
‘Because I wouldn’t look.’ She drew a deep breath, her nose wrinkling. ‘I smell bleach.’
‘Yes. Why wouldn’t you look?’
She looked side to side, her eyes growing wide. ‘None of this was here. This was all open.’
‘He added walls, then.’ Which surprised him. That was not the behavior of a wolf just biding his time as he waited on Red Riding Hood. Her attacker hadn’t just set up shop. He’d set up house. ‘Why wouldn’t you look, Faith?’
‘I never liked this basement. It always scared me, even when I was really small.’ She looked up, squinting at the overhead lights. ‘None of that was here. It was dark and dank. Gran’s cook used to send me down here for canned vegetables. She didn’t like it down here either.’
‘What do you dream?’
She sighed wearily. ‘Of the steps. Always twelve. You think I’m misremembering. I’m telling you there were twelve fucking steps.’
He blinked at her, surprised not only by the curse, but by the softness with which she’d uttered it. ‘Okay. I’ll tell Tanaka.’
‘Your forensics guy. He swabbed my hands. He was very kind. Where do I go next?’
‘Can you look in each room?’
‘Of course.’ She checked the office first. ‘I know that desk came from upstairs. It was in my grandfather’s study. How did he even get it down here?’
‘Good question.’ The desk was massive. ‘Maybe he took it apart.’
‘Maybe. The metal file cabinet wasn’t in the house. He must have brought that.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Gran wouldn’t tolerate anything that looked so common. Everything was wood.’ She shrugged. ‘I guess I remember more than I thought.’
‘I thought you would.’ He pointed to the small kitchen. ‘And this?’
‘The table came from my grandmother’s bedroom. She had a vase on it. A blue vase with clouds. The vase she took with her when she moved to the city. It’s Uncle Jordan’s now. He got all the furnishings she’d taken from the house. I got everything else. Go me.’
‘Could there be an item in the house valuable enough that someone would kill you for it? Something one of your family members doesn’t want you to have?’
She gave him a level look. ‘You’re suggesting my uncles are involved.’
‘Maybe.’
‘That’s ridiculous. If there was anything here of value, either of them could have come back at any time over the last twenty-three years to retrieve it. Nobody’s lived here and the alarm system is fairly new. Anybody could have come back and looted.’ She pointed to the refrigerator, stove and microwave. ‘None of those are original to the house.’ She turned to leave, then noticed the blanket hanging over the dug-in hallway. ‘What’s that?’
‘There’s a crawl space back there, where someone was sleeping.’ Except that he’d found a women’s small T-shirt in the box and nothing to indicate that a man Combs’s size had been down here.
Neither Corinne nor Arianna wore a size small. Who else had he had down here?
He followed her to the room with the cot and the shackles in the wall and heard her small cry of anguish. ‘He held them here?’
‘Probably,’ Deacon murmured.
She stared at the cot for a moment longer. When she turned, she was pale again, her eyes cool and detached. She brushed past him and opened the door to the final room.
The torture room. Deacon waited for another cry of anguish, but she made no sound. She was staring straight ahead, ignoring the autopsy table, where Tanaka was collecting samples.
‘Where’s the door?’ she asked quietly.
‘What door?’
‘There was a door in that wall. It led to the outside.’ She turned right, avoiding the autopsy table completely. ‘And there were windows on this wall. Up near the ceiling. I remember.’
‘She’s right,’ Tanaka said. ‘About the windows, anyway. They’ve been covered up outside. Someone plastered over them and painted to make it look like they were never there, both inside and outside. I think this interior wall is a fake. I ordered X-ray equipment to be brought out here. I want to be sure nothing is being hidden in these walls.’
‘How long ago were the door and windows covered?’ Deacon asked, frowning.
‘Hard to say without some analysis. We can look at the kind of paint used, how much it’s oxidized, run it through a few aging models. Doesn’t look recent, though.’
‘Like older-than-a-year not recent?’
‘Like older-than-ten-years not recent,’ Tanaka said, and Deacon swallowed a curse.
His timeline was unraveling, he realized. Combs had only crossed Faith’s path four years ago. Something else was going on here and he didn’t like any of it.
‘She also remembers twelve steps,’ he said.
Tanaka’s brows lifted. ‘There are only ten.’
Faith’s jaw clenched. ‘I know what I remember.’
‘I believe that you remember it,’ Tanaka said.
She turned to look at him. ‘But you don’t believe it’s true.’
‘I didn’t say that, Dr Corcoran.’ Tanaka left the torture room and crouched at the base of the steps, shining his flashlight on the floor seams. Then he straightened and went back into the room with the cot and shackles in the walls.
Faith followed him, Deacon at her back. They stopped in the doorway, watching Tanaka walk carefully across the floor. The forensic specialist paused, bounced softly on his toes, then took a giant step back. When he turned to face them, his eyes gleamed.
‘I thought I felt a slight give in this floor when I came through earlier,’ he said. ‘I was going to check it further, but I didn’t feel it anywhere else, so I back-burnered it.’
Faith had gone very still. ‘The floor is fake, too? Like the wall?’
Tanaka shrugged. ‘It’s not supported in that one spot, that’s all I can tell you.’
‘Are you saying that someone lifted this entire floor by sixteen inches?’ Deacon looked up at the ceiling, roughed out beams and exposed pipes. ‘I’d have thought I’d be bumping my head right now, but there’s still six inches of clearance. That would have meant the ceilings were very high to begin with.’
Faith’s breathing had grown rapid and shallow again. ‘Yes. They were high.’
Deacon tipped her chin up so that he could see her eyes. ‘Why? Why were they high?’
She closed her eyes and shook her head, pulling free of his grip. ‘It would take someone a long time to raise a floor by sixteen inches, wouldn’t it, Detective Tanaka?’
‘Sergeant,’ Tanaka corrected mildly. ‘Possibly. I heard you telling Agent Novak that the walls were different too. Were any of these partitioned rooms here when you were a child?’
‘Yes. That one.’ She pointed over her shoulder to the torture room. ‘But not the way it is now. The door opened into a little alcove, where you could change your clothes if you got muddy. My grandmother didn’t let muddy shoes in the house.’
‘Were your shoes often muddy?’ Deacon asked quietly, still trying to get to her dream.
‘Yes. I liked to play outside.’
Tanaka looked concerned. ‘Maybe you should sit down, Dr Cor
coran. You look pale.’
‘I’ll sit down when I’m done. I’d really like to get this over with.’
‘You’ve seen everything down here,’ Tanaka said.
‘No,’ she said shortly, tersely. ‘I would like to see you remove that piece of flooring. If something is under the floor, I’d like to know.’
Tanaka looked at Deacon, who gave him a nod. ‘Let me get photographs of the floor first, then we’ll take up the tile.’
‘Will you see the rest of the other room while we’re waiting?’ Deacon asked her.
She swallowed hard. ‘Of course.’ She marched herself through the door to the torture room, straight to the corner furthest from the autopsy table. ‘This is where the little changing room would have been. There were hooks for coats and drying stands for boots.’
Deacon took her shoulders and gently turned her so that she faced the metal table and the wall beyond, feeling her body stiffen with dread. ‘What was there? On that wall?’
‘Shelves with jars,’ she said. ‘Jams and jellies mostly. My grandmother’s cook made preserves back then.’ Her forehead wrinkled. ‘And olives.’
He blinked. ‘Olives? Your grandmother’s cook canned her own olives, here in Ohio?’
Her forehead smoothed and she gave him an odd look. ‘Of course not. They bought them already canned.’ Voices drifted across the hall and Faith slipped from his grip again, hurrying back to where Tanaka and one of his techs huddled around the floor tiles in question.
Tanaka looked up when Deacon and Faith entered the small room. ‘This tile is loose. Just stay where you are. We’ll pull it up and see if there’s anything under here.’
The tech inserted a thin file in the seam between the tiles and raised one, immediately recoiling. He jumped to his feet, dropping the tile as he did so. ‘Holy shit.’
Faith’s strangled cry pierced Deacon’s ears as his own stomach turned inside out, bile bubbling up to burn his throat. Oh God. Not again.
Looking up at them from below the floor were the remains of a human face.
Mt Carmel, Ohio, Tuesday 4 November, 7.15 A.M.
‘Update,’ Isenberg demanded as soon as she walked through the O’Bannions’ front door.
Deacon took a quick glace out the front door to be sure Faith was still all right. She was curled up in the passenger seat of his car, her eyes closed. He hoped she was getting some sleep. ‘We’ve only pulled up the floor in that one small room so far. We found three bodies, all female. All blondes who appear to have been in their twenties. None were buried in the earth. All were encased in Plexiglas coffins resting on the original dirt floor. We don’t know what we’ll find under the remaining floor tiles.’
‘God.’ Isenberg looked as worn as he felt. ‘What’s the connection to Corcoran?’
‘Her recollection of the number of steps down into the basement led us to check under the floor tiles,’ Deacon said. ‘Otherwise we may have thought this house had been used only to torture Arianna and Corinne.’
‘So if Corcoran was dead, you might never have looked for the bodies.’
Deacon’s stomach twisted again. ‘It’s very possible.’
‘Except that we found that women’s T-shirt, size small,’ Adam said. ‘Neither of the victims wears that size. Nor does Corcoran. Someone else was down there.’
‘Maybe his accomplice.’ Isenberg looked over her shoulder. ‘Did Corcoran see the body?’
‘Just the face of the first one,’ Deacon said. ‘She got sick. I got her out of there.’
Isenberg gave him an assessing look tinged with sympathy. ‘And you?’
Deacon grimaced. Watching the bodies recovered and knowing more could be right under his feet . . . It was way too close to the dozens of unmarked graves he’d uncovered on his last case in West Virginia for his liking. ‘I’m okay.’
‘Good enough. Do we still like Combs for this?’
Deacon rubbed the back of his neck. ‘It’s looking less likely.’
‘Whoever did the renovations spent a lot of time down there,’ Bishop said. ‘Weeks. Maybe months. Two of the bodies appear to be recently deceased. Combs could be involved.’
‘But the house was modified perhaps ten years ago,’ Tanaka said. ‘And Dr Corcoran only met Combs four years ago.’
‘But we know the same gun was used here and in Florida, so we need to figure out what role her ex-con plays in all this,’ Isenberg said.
Adam’s mouth curved, but it wasn’t a smile. ‘I wouldn’t use that term with her, Lynda,’ he said mockingly. ‘She’s pretty damn adamant that he’s not her ex-con.’
‘Adam, do you know something about Dr Corcoran that you’d like to share?’ Isenberg asked sharply. ‘Something that makes you suspect her more than the rest of us obviously do?’
Adam shook his head. ‘No.’
‘There is something else, though,’ Deacon said, shoving his anger at Adam aside. ‘She’s dreamed of this house since she was a child. She would go down the steps and count them.’
‘Which is how she knew there were two less than there were supposed to be,’ Isenberg said. ‘What happened to her in that basement?’
‘I don’t know, but when she first came down, she wouldn’t look behind her. When she finally did, she was shocked to see a wall. She said it hadn’t been there back then.’
‘She also said the ceilings were higher before,’ Tanaka said softly. ‘What trauma would make her remember such a detail, Agent Novak? She was just a child. Why would she even notice how high a ceiling reached?’
Deacon met Tanaka’s sympathetic gaze and realized the man had picked up on something he had not. Not until that moment, at least. Now understanding dawned and he couldn’t stop himself from looking at Faith, asleep in his car.
‘Oh God,’ he murmured. ‘She called it “that last day”. The day her mother died. She said she died in a car accident. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe Faith saw something that day when she came down the stairs. Something so traumatic that she hasn’t returned to the house in twenty-three years.’
Bishop sighed. ‘Something that made her look up at the ceiling. Dammit, Deacon. You could always check the death certificate for her mother’s cause of death, to see if was suicide.’
But Deacon was pretty certain it was. Oh baby, he thought sadly. No wonder you hate this house. But why hadn’t she just told him? Why keep it a secret?
‘It would have been a terrible day for her,’ Isenberg said, ‘but we need to focus on identifying the bodies that are down there.’
‘And on finding Corinne Longstreet,’ Adam said.
‘And the locksmith and the power tech,’ Deacon added, ‘who are also still missing.’
Bishop sighed again. ‘And on finding out who shot the bellman and Anthony Brown, the victim in the hotel room.’
‘Plus the three who died in Miami,’ Deacon said. ‘Someone has been actively trying to kill Faith Corcoran during the last month, but if the door and windows of this basement were covered up and hidden ten years ago, it’s almost impossible that Combs could have been involved back then. If he wasn’t involved then, how could he be involved now?’
‘I thought she said she saw him breaking into her apartment in Miami a few weeks ago,’ Isenberg said, frowning.
Deacon considered what Faith had told him. ‘She said that she couldn’t see him well enough to shoot him because she didn’t have her contacts in. She may not have seen his face, only that he was the same size as Combs. That it was Combs would have been the natural assumption.’
‘I still think we should get her uncle in for questioning ASAP,’ Adam said.
‘On that we can agree,’ Deacon said.
‘Who else should we be talking to?’ Isenberg asked. ‘Who else had access to this house? The lawn looks like it’s been recently mowed. Who does the maintenance?’
‘The historical society takes care of the outside,’ Deacon said. ‘They employ a gardener. We’ll talk to him this morning. But remember, he has to ha
ve access and knowledge of the contents of her grandmother’s will.’
‘Dammit,’ Isenberg muttered. ‘Check him out anyway.’
‘Bishop, can you take the gardener?’ Deacon asked, and she nodded. ‘Thanks. We need information on the bodies downstairs. The ME will take them as soon as you’re done, Vince.’
‘We’ll pull up the rest of the tiles,’ Tanaka said. ‘I estimate it will take us several hours.’
Deacon looked out the side window where the O’Bannion land spread as far as he could see. His stomach gave another vicious twist. Lots of land. Lots of space for bodies. ‘We need to make sure he didn’t bury any bodies outside.’
‘It’ll take us a good deal longer to do an adequate search there,’ Tanaka said.
‘Can you use ground-penetrating radar?’ Deacon asked. ‘I’ve had good results with it. I know someone who’s nationally known for GPR.’ He remembered the weeks he’d spent digging up bodies in West Virginia. ‘She should be able to recommend someone local.’
‘I’ll let you know if I need a name. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of work to do.’
Isenberg looked over her shoulder at Faith, still sleeping in the car. ‘Corcoran can’t go back to her hotel. It’s a media circus. She’ll have to go to a safe house.’
‘Absolutely,’ Deacon said. ‘I’ll take care of it.’
Chapter Sixteen
Cincinnati, Ohio, Tuesday 4 November, 8.00 A.M.
Faith woke with a start, then relaxed when she smelled the faint cedar that lingered on Novak’s skin. They were moving. She’d fallen asleep in the passenger seat while waiting in front of the house, so far gone that she hadn’t woken when he started the car and drove away.
‘I have to call my father when I get back to the hotel,’ she murmured. ‘I have to tell him what’s happening before he hears it on the news and starts to worry. Especially since I’m not answering either of my cell phones now.’
‘You can use mine to call him, if you’d like.’