“Eleven,” Glenda corrected him.
“But only nine with their heads removed. Then nine here.” He thought about it. “They got a thing for the number nine.”
“Clearly that ain’t the only thing these people have a thing for. We never did find the heads,” Neufield said.
Zach and Glenda shared another knowing glance, but neither of them said it out loud. Not yet.
Neufield turned and started further into the house. “Follow me,” he said. “We’ll show you the locations of the murders.”
Zach and Glenda followed the detectives down a wide hallway with sitting rooms on one side and a grand dining room off the other. In the dining room, on the table that could clearly host probably twenty people, there was a puddle of blood, but that part of the house clearly wasn’t their first stop.
They came to double doors that opened into a study. “We think this is where the owner of the house was killed,” Neufield said. Blood dried in a dark-red spot on the otherwise pristine rug in the center of the room.
“Name?” Glenda asked.
“The name on this guy’s ID was Johnathan Long. We’re running it now,” Neufield said. He blew out a breath.
“You don’t sound convinced,” Glenda said. “Let me guess. They’re all fake names.”
Neufield looked a little surprised. “How’d you know?”
“Educated guess,” Glenda said.
“The name Robert Graft ring a bell to any of you two?” Glenda asked.
Both detectives shrugged and shook their heads. “Should it?” Neufield asked.
Glenda shrugged. “Connected to the San Diego murders,” she said.
Zach paid little attention to the exchange. Instead, he wandered over to the large oak desk that sat in the center of the room. He reached down and rifled through some of the papers. Mostly what he expected to find on a desk in a large house—a couple bills, some sort of printed spreadsheets that looked like a balance statement, among others. Nothing remarkable.
Until he opened a file folder.
On the top page, there was a picture of a high-school kid. The pages looked like the workup for a private investigator’s report that included a background check, a list of last known locations, the name of a high school in Lufkin, TX, along with the school records, and the reports of a murder-suicide in the same town. On the bottom of the topmost page in the file, just beneath the photograph was Chicago, IL, circled.
The name written at the top of the page was Liam Coyle.
Zach looked at the kid’s last name again. “I think we just found our connection,” Zach said. Glenda moved closer and looked over Zach’s shoulder. The detectives moved in too. Zach pointed to the kid’s name. “Coyle. It was a name underneath one of the big portraits on the wall.”
“In the secret stairwell?” Glenda asked.
Zach nodded.
“That’s hardly a connection,” Hanks said. He crossed his arms.
“Too much of a coincidence,” Zach said. He moved away from the desk.
“I’m calling the station,” Detective Hanks said, and he stormed out of the study.
Neufield, at least, looked apologetic. “I’ll deal with my partner,” he said.
“We’ll just walk around, get a feel for the place,” Glenda said.
Neufield gave a nod. “We’ll be here too, doing the same thing. Come find me if you need anything,” he said.
“Upstairs?” Glenda asked.
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Zach said. The door in San Diego had been upstairs, and the stairwell led down to a sub-basement. It was a deliberate attempt to draw attention away from its entrance. But if that was the case here, there would have to be space in the house to accommodate stairs like the ones that were in the La Jolla house.
Zach led the way up, and once they made it onto the upper landing overlooking the vast entry hall, they split up. Zach began sizing up the walls. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he had an idea from the other house. The doorway wasn’t obvious there, and he didn’t expect it to be here either. He passed bedrooms and blood spilled in those rooms. A lot of the people in this scene must’ve been sleeping at the time of the attack as most of their deaths appeared to have taken place in their beds. Egyptian cotton sheets with two-thousand thread count ruined with blood still glistening wet in spots, even after having sat for most of the day.
“I think I found something,” Glenda called from the other side of the house. When Zach came out of the bedroom he was in, he saw Glenda standing at the corner on the far end of the long upper hallway.
“See this?” Glenda pointed to the wainscoting on the wall. “There’s a break here that seemed odd to me, so I felt along the wall until I found this.” She pushed into a part of the wall, and it popped out.
“A handle,” Zach said. Then he could see it. There, flush in the wall, the seam so thin that it was easy to miss. The corners of the doorway and the edges met the wall in such a way that they could easily be mistaken for small flaws in the architecture. Whoever put this in meant for the room to remain hidden even under intense scrutiny. “Hold on,” Zach said to Glenda.
He went to the section of the upstairs that overlooked the lower level, and he called down to the detectives. He thought maybe calling them up right away might mend some fences.
When they were all together in front of the door, Glenda showed them the handle.
“You weren’t kidding. A god damn secret door,” Neufield said. Hanks only grunted.
“It doesn’t seem to be unlocked,” Glenda said. She gave the handle a pull, and the door didn’t budge.
“There has to be a lock somewhere.”
They searched the walls, the obvious things like the nearby wall sconce, but that would be too easy. With all this trouble to hide a door like this, a throw back to every single movie with a secret door in it would be a disappointment. The people who put a door in like this were more clever than this. Zach knew they were. And, there were no books on a nearby bookshelf to pull back to open the doorway either.
As they looked along the walls and on the tables nearby, lifting up crystal vases and bowls that probably cost more than a month of Zach’s federal-employee salary, Zach finally got on his hands and knees to examine the baseboards.
It was hidden much in the same way as the door. If he didn’t suspect there would be something like it here, he never would have noticed it himself. It looked like a raised seam on the baseboard, something that could naturally occur in the course of building a house, like a carpenter’s mistake. But a mistake in a house like this? Zach took a harder look at it. A flaw such as this would be repaired without question. He first tried to push it with his fingers, but it wouldn’t budge. He pulled at it too, almost to the point where he thought the wood on the baseboard would come off. It still didn’t budge.
Finally, Zach stood, and he used the weight of his body and pushed with the toe of his shoe. It depressed in, and a latch on the door clicked. The door squeaked a little as it opened a crack.
“Holy shit,” Detective Hanks said.
But what surprised Zach more was the fact that the locking mechanism was as simple as this. All that trouble to hide a doorway, and they only locked it with a toe catch? He expected there to be a number pad or perhaps a biometrics system somewhere that…
The door burst open, and a man flew out at them. He threw Detective Hanks to the ground.
He looked like a man, but pale, the skin of his arms visible through a white uniform top. Too pale. There was screaming. Detective Hanks screamed. But so did the man who was attacking him. He had long fingers around Detective Hanks’s throat, and he began to choke him.
It seemed like it took ages for Zach to react. The passage of time was only seconds. Glenda was quicker. She had her gun out first, followed by Zach. Detective Neufield did too, only Neufield shouted for the man to stand down and show his hands. Neither Zach nor Glenda gave any orders. They opened fire and shot the pale man, body shots. Whe
n the bullets in the side appeared to have no effect, the pale man still strangling Hanks, Zach put one in the head.
The pale man fell dead and left Hanks sputtering and clutching his throat as he pulled himself out from under the dead man’s weight.
“What the hell?” Neufield shouted at Zach.
“He was killing him.”
“He might have had information,” Neufield shouted back.
“And he might have killed Hanks!”
Hanks scrambled back from the now-dead body of the man—or, as Zach looked closer, a type of man. Man-like. “What the fuck was that?” Hanks sputtered and struggled to right himself, staring wide-eyed at the dead man.
Zach moved toward the pale man with his gun still drawn. He’d fallen with his back to Zach, and Zach carefully, gun aimed, turned the man so he lay on his back. He got a closer look at the man’s face. What was left of the man’s face, anyway. His skin was pale, his features gaunt. It was…misshapen somehow, elongated. The man’s ears had changed too becoming more angular than to be expected on a normal human being. His mouth was open, and he had a mouthful of needle-like teeth. Not like vampire teeth or anything, but all his teeth came down to sharp points.
“What is that?” Glenda asked. She still hadn’t put up her weapon either.
The pale man wore a Fed Ex delivery uniform. “I think we found our driver,” Zach said.
“Drugs?” Hanks asked. He’d come up behind Zach, still holding his throat. “What would do that to a guy?”
Zach turned to him. “You’re okay?”
“I’ll live,” Hanks said. He put a hand on Zach’s shoulder. That was one way to win the guy over: Save him from getting strangled to death.
Neufield seemed to be reconsidering his position too as he peered down at the dead Fed Ex driver. “Seattle’s got some weirdos,” Neufield said. “But this one’s new. I’m going to call this in.” He turned away and got on his phone.
“Some kind of body modification?” Glenda asked.
“I don’t know,” Zach said. “Maybe.” He reached down with a thumb and lifted the eyelid of the dead man’s only good eye. The eyes were black. Not just the irises or the pupils, but his entire eye. This went beyond somebody altering their physical appearance with a lot of cosmetic surgery. Maybe an ME would tell him different. He hoped an ME would tell him differently.
The wound on the man’s head gave him pause too. It oozed. The blood seemed to still move out of it, as if the blood inside the driver’s body still pumped. Impossible if the heart was stopped. An odd sensation hit him too, something that gripped his heart like a cold hand. At any moment, this guy could open his eyes. He knew it like he knew his own face. An arm twitched on the driver, and Zach jumped back.
He lifted his gun and put two more bullets into the man’s head.
“What the fuck?!” Neufield shouted. Hanks stared at him. Glenda had her weapon out again, eyes wide.
“It moved,” Zach said.
“It’s dead,” Glenda said. She moved over to Zach and put a hand on its arm.
Zach continued to watch the driver, though. Now the blood had stopped. No more seepage, now that the head was nothing more than pulp. Now he believed her. The driver was dead.
The doorway stood open, unlit. Zach still hadn’t put away his gun yet. Glenda hadn’t either, and if Zach knew his partner, she had no plans to. Zach moved away from the pale man and went to the doorway.
“We should wait for backup,” Neufield said.
But Zach ignored him. He felt it stronger now, the tingling on his skin. Almost like standing in front of a blast furnace door but without the heat. It was stronger here than it was at the house in La Jolla. They hadn’t even descended the stairs yet. He reached inside the doorway and felt for a light switch. When he found it, he turned it on.
The stairwell was just as nicely decorated as in the other house. Wall sconces that illuminated the way down and pictures with museum lights shining down on them. These pictures were the same as the ones at the other house, the same people with the same names. If there were any lingering questions about a connection, these pictures put them to bed.
He wondered if there would be the battle scene at the bottom of the stairs as there was in the other house.
Zach peered back at the dead driver, and it sent a chill down his spine. That was where he’d seen something like this guy—the demons in the picture.
“This is starting to feel a little too much like an X-Files episode,” Glenda said. She turned to the stairs leading down, and she held her weapon at the ready. Zach moved down the steps doing the same.
“I really think we should wait,” Hanks said. But when Zach and Glenda continued moving, Hanks cursed and pulled out his weapon to follow.
This time, Zach paid more attention to the name brass plates beneath the pictures. Nicholas Reed Maystone, Randall Fionn Corbett, Lawrence Holder, and six others, each with different last names: Penrose, Kovac, Chapman, and Auttenberg. Maybe he was reading too much into it, but then why would both houses have the same pictures up on their walls, both tucked away into hidden passages, no less.
Zach stopped in front of one of the pictures, and he pointed. “Coyle,” Zach said. Like the kid in the picture.
Glenda stopped next to him to read the name. She glanced at Zach with her lips pressed tight.
“Who are these people?” Hanks said.
“People with a lot more money than any of us,” Zach said. And apparently with some very powerful enemies who wanted their heads separated from their bodies.
As Zach moved further down the steps, he could already hear the whine, the same as before in the house in San Diego. And he found himself almost nervous as he neared the bottom, waiting for the battle scene picture to come into view. And, as he expected, it was there, only it was different than the other house. This time, the picture was woven into a great tapestry that looked as if it might fit nicely in an old castle. He peered at the demonic creatures at the bottom. Hundreds of them. The scene implied even more. It sent a cold shiver down his spine.
Zach knew to look for the ritual room. And he knew enough not to step into the circle. Everything else was the same, so why not this too?
He stopped at the dark doorway. Already he could see the polished granite. He could also smell the blood. But he didn’t turn on a light. He knew already what he would see. But he was focused on what he saw in the center of the dark room. “Do you see that?” Zach pointed.
“What is that?” Hanks asked.
Zach glanced over at him to make sure he was talking about the same thing. “So you do see it. The light?”
“I see it too,” Glenda said.
It was directly in the center of the dark room; the room almost pitch black. Except for the pinpoint that sent a shaft of light down onto the floor, a bright spot there on the polished granite stone. It looked like sunlight shining through a hole in a wooden wall. Dust motes passed in front of the hole.
“I see it,” Hanks said in a whisper.
Zach felt on the wall and flipped a switch.
“Holy shit,” Hanks said, and he took a quick step back when Zach turned on the light in the ritual room and the heads were there at the same points in the room. There were nine of them. The decor of the room was almost identical, down to the empty pedestal standing in the center, missing whatever item it was meant to display. Could that be some kind of alter, maybe? If so, it was a small one. The only difference was a slight variation in the color of the granite stone. “I’ll go get Neufield.” Hanks turned and left Zach alone in the ritual room. He moved too quickly to get out of the place.
Zach turned the light off to see if the bead of light was still there, about the size of a coin. It was, perfectly situated at the height of the pedestal.
“I don’t get that,” Glenda said. “Where’s it coming from?”
There was no discernible source, and when Zach turned the light on, it seemed to be floating in the center of the room.
“Agents, you might want to see this,” Hanks called from behind them.
He followed Glenda up the stairs only halfway. They stopped at what would have been the ground floor of the mansion. And a door stood open, and Neufield was already in the room.
“How did you find this?” Glenda asked.
“It was just open,” Neufield said.
“What do you mean it was ‘just open’?”
Neufield shrugged.
“These people got a real thing for hidden rooms and doors,” Hanks said when he saw Zach.
Inside the room were viewing screens, various rooms in the house. There were security cameras, even though Zach hadn’t seen any. But that stood to reason. Rich people wouldn’t want something as mundane and ugly as a security camera in easy view. Each of the rooms was covered, even the bedrooms, though the private areas were hidden from view. And bathrooms apparently didn’t make the list.
Neither did the ritual room downstairs.
Zach pointed to a corner of the room. “That what I think it is?”
Black server blades blinked in a glass case that appeared to be attached to a cooling system. Beneath that, a bank of what looked like hard drives.
Zach grinned. “Looks like they record everything,” he said.
Seven
Chicago, IL
Liam ran out of the café, followed closely by Nina and Justin. They dodged a group of people and rounded a corner, another busy city street lined with businesses and restaurants. He doubted that Preston and his gang of idiots were following them—the guy was probably still trying to squeeze a suspect out of the people in the café. With any luck, the cops would be called, and Preston would go to jail.
“What the hell just happened back there?” Nina spoke through half laughter, half confusion.
“Apparently we’re not the only ones who think Preston is a prick,” Justin said and laughed. Liam didn’t tell them what he saw. He wasn’t sure he believed it himself.
Nobody said much. They continued moving down the street, walking by now. Liam sensed they were just as confused and weirded out by everything that happened back there as he was.
The Stone (Lockstone Book 1) Page 9