This room was empty, not just of people but of furniture. She padded across the floor as quietly as she could and entered an out-of-date kitchen. It had probably been new somewhere around 1970 and never updated or remodeled since. Unlike the previous room, this one at least showed signs of habitation, although a quick glance gave no indication of how many people lived here or how long it had been since their arrival.
Sharon took a step and froze. Someone was sobbing, crying quietly. The sound seemed to be coming from an open doorway on the far side of the kitchen. The sobs were muffled, as though the person making them was trying to keep quiet but could not quite manage it. She strained to hear; it sounded like a female, or perhaps a child. It was definitely not Mike.
This changed everything. Whoever was through that door—probably a basement door, from its positioning—might be injured and in need of medical assistance.
Or it could be a trap. Whoever was sobbing might be trying to lure her down the steps.
Sharon cursed under her breath and crossed the kitchen to the door. It opened to her left and a set of stairs descended into the basement, as she had suspected. She started to holster her gun and then thought better of it. Taking a deep breath, she said, “This is the Paskagankee Police. Identify yourself.”
The sobbing stopped instantly. There was no answer.
Sharon tried again, a little louder, although she was certain the basement’s occupant had heard her the first time. “This is Officer Dupont of the Paskagankee Police Department. I need to know who’s down there. Are you hurt?”
Another moment of silence. Sharon was debating how to proceed when a small voice said, “My name is Raven. I think . . . I think I have a concussion.”
Sharon frowned in concentration. Raven was supposed to have been the name of the young woman they were looking for, but this voice sounded more like that of a young girl than a grown woman. “Can you walk?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“Is anyone else down there?”
“Yes. . . No . . . Um . . .”
“Who else is down there with you, Raven?”
“Um, Max.”
“May I talk to Max, please?”
“Uh . . . I don’t think so.”
“Why not, is he hurt?”
“He’s . . . um . . . I think he’s dead.” The voice broke and the woman/child began sobbing again, this time more forcefully.
A chill ran down Sharon’s spine and she raised her gun, not quite aiming down the stairs but not pointing the barrel at the floor any more, either. “Who else is down there besides you and Max, Raven?”
A short pause. “No one.”
“Okay,” Sharon said, much more forcefully. “I want you to move very slowly toward the stairs. Put your hands out directly in front of you, as far as they’ll go, just like you’re a zombie in a B movie. I want to see your hands first as you approach the stairs. Can you do that for me, Raven?”
“I . . . yes, I think I can do that.”
“Okay, come on, then, slowly.” Sharon doubted she could believe Raven about no one else being in that basement. Mike’s cruiser was out front. Mike was not. So unless he had left the house on foot or as a prisoner, he was here. Somewhere. Goddammit, don’t you dare be lying down there dead, Mike McMahon!
She forced herself to focus, despite her fear and her nearly overwhelming urge to scream at the young woman, hurry up! Every second counted, especially if Mike was injured and lying helpless in the basement or somewhere else on the property. But this was the wrong time to rush things. If she didn’t handle this situation properly, she could end up injured or dead herself. How would she help Mike, then?
A pair of small hands appeared, fingers spread apart, floating as if by magic beyond the wall to the right of the stairway. Raven’s forearms followed, and then her entire body became visible. Even from the top of the stairs, Sharon could see a purplish-green welt forming on the side of her head.
“Okay, Raven, that’s far enough. Are you armed?”
The young woman shook her head gingerly—she had to be suffering from one hell of a headache—and Sharon told her, “All right, I want you to lie face-down on the floor, Raven, and I’ll come down and have you back on your feet in just a moment.”
Without another word, the woman bent at the knees and lowered herself to the cement as instructed, spread-eagled. Sharon edged down the stairs slowly, still concerned about a trap, knowing her legs and lower body would be exposed before she had an opportunity to see into the rest of the basement.
She continued to move. When the entire basement had come into view she stopped, horrified. In roughly the center of the basement an older man lay in a pool of blood, his throat ripped open, veins and tendons and unidentifiable gore trailing out the wreckage of his throat and scattered around his unmoving body on the cement.
This had to be Max, the man Mike had come here to interview regarding the couple’s connection to the missing Earl Manning. Rose Pellerin had said the man was considerably older than the woman, that his name was Max, and that he had called his companion “Raven” that day a few weeks ago inside Needful Things.
Max was clearly dead, and as relieved as Sharon was to see that Mike was not dead on the floor as well, her concern over his disappearance intensified. Was it possible this slaughter had occurred before Mike had arrived? If so, where had he gone?
“Dammit,” Sharon muttered under her breath, and Raven whimpered.
In her concern for Mike, she had almost forgotten about the young woman lying virtually at her feet. Sharon holstered her weapon and leapt down the last three stairs, wrinkling her nose in disgust at the stench suspended in the basement like a noxious cloud. The air smelled like a bag of hamburger that had been left in the sun for a few hours. She glanced at the freezer in the corner and noticed it was unplugged. What the hell . . .?
She shook her head to try to clear away the smell with no measurable success, then knelt and patted Raven down quickly. The woman was unarmed. Sharon helped her to her feet and led her to the stairs, sitting her down on one and kneeling in front of her. “What happened here?” she asked roughly, still trying not to gag from the overwhelming odor.
Raven covered her face with her hands and whispered, “He killed Max,” and began sobbing again, and Sharon’s temper exploded. Time was ticking and Mike was missing and there was a dead guy on the floor in a pool of blood and it smelled so bad down here and she just didn’t have time to coddle this whiny bitch.
“I can see that,” she snapped. “Who killed Max is what I need to know right now, and where did they go?”
“The drunk killed Max, the skinny guy, the one Max killed. He killed Max.” She spread her fingers and peeked through them at Sharon. Her cheeks were flushed and tear-streaked. “And I don’t know where he went.”
“You’re talking in circles. Who’s ‘the drunk’? Are you talking about Earl Manning?”
Raven nodded, reclosing her fingers over her eyes to avoid the intensity of Sharon’s stare. “Okay,” Sharon said. “Now we’re getting somewhere. But you said Max killed Earl and then Earl killed Max. You can’t have it both ways. Which is it?”
For a long moment Raven didn’t answer. Sharon prepared to ask the question again, more forcefully, and then from somewhere under Raven’s hands came the mumbled reply. “I think I’m going to puke.”
Sharon had seen stories on the news and read reports in the paper of law enforcement officers beating up suspects in custody and had never understood how a sworn officer of the law could do something so stupid, so patently destructive, both to his career and his case, but now she understood. There was so much at stake—a murdered man lying on a cold cement floor, the kidnapping of a billionaire right out of his home, Mike’s disappearance—and Sharon knew all three events had to be connected. She just didn’t know how.
And now the only person who could shed some light on the situation was refusing to cooperate. She wanted to slap this little bitch silly, punc
h her square in her pretty face, shake her until she spilled whatever she knew.
Instead she stood and yanked Raven to her feet, ignoring the young woman’s whimper of pain. Sure, she had a nasty knock on the head, she probably was suffering from a concussion as she had said, and the sudden rise had probably made her head feel like it was about to explode. Sharon didn’t care.
“Fine. Have it your way. Let’s get you some medical attention,” she said evenly, marching Raven up the stairs faster than the woman would probably have liked. As she climbed, she took one last look around the basement, wondering distractedly why these people would have closed the lid on an unplugged freezer, especially if there was meat inside. And judging from the stench in the air, there must have been. That nasty smell certainly wasn’t coming from the dead guy on the floor; his body hadn’t begun to decompose yet.
Something wasn’t right. She was missing something; she knew it. She just couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was. The situation with the freezer seemed off somehow, but then, finding a dead body would shake your perspective. She exhaled sharply in frustration and the whiny bitch whimpered again and the freezer vanished from her thought process as she continued up the stairs. She needed to plan her next moves—call for an ambulance for Raven, get a crime scene team out here as quickly as possible, continue the search for Mike. Not necessarily in that order.
They clambered into the kitchen, leaving the death and destruction and stench of the basement behind. Sharon kicked the door closed with her foot so the smell wouldn’t take over the whole house.
29
Mike struggled to force himself awake. It was hot in his apartment. Unbelievably hot. Stiflingly hot, especially for the middle of the night in northern Maine. He couldn’t even remember moving back into the tiny piece of shit apartment yet after getting the boot from Sharon, but he must have done so because here he was. The place had never been this hot, though. Humid, too. Just taking a deep breath was a struggle.
And his head was pounding, like someone was drilling straight into his brain from the back of his skull, like he had—
—Wait a second. His head felt like he had fallen onto a concrete floor and smacked it, like he had toppled backward after being tackled by someone, which was exactly what had happened. He wasn’t at home in bed at all, he had blacked out after hitting his head fighting Earl Manning.
Shit.
He reached for the service weapon at his hip and banged his knuckles against a piece of metal or some sort of wall. His holster was empty. His gun was gone.
And suddenly Mike knew exactly what had happened. He replayed it in his pounding head clear as day, as if he could see it happening right in front of him. Manning tackling him, packing a lot more of a punch than the wasted one hundred thirty-five pound body of a lifelong alcoholic should be able to manage. The pair of them tumbling to the floor, Mike’s head bouncing off the concrete like a rubber ball. Trying to maintain consciousness but blacking out.
Manning must have tossed his unconscious body into the freezer in the basement of the crumbling house and then slammed the lid. The bastard had either killed the dead guy lying on the basement floor or had witnessed it and undoubtedly was long gone by now. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that in all likelihood Earl Manning now had Mike’s Glock.
“Jesus,” he mumbled bitterly, and the sound went nowhere, not bouncing off the corrugated aluminum of the freezer’s interior, not squeezing out of the airtight tomb. It simply seemed to shrivel and die, disappearing like his last hope.
Sweat dripped off his face, plopping onto the freezer floor, the sound reminding him of the ticking of a clock. Mike wondered how long an adult human being could survive inside one of these things and guessed it couldn’t be more than thirty minutes, forty at the most, before all the air was used up and the victim began breathing his own carbon monoxide, eventually poisoning himself.
But even if his guess about the timing was right, it gave him nothing to work with. He had no idea how much air was left because he had no way of knowing how much time he had already spent inside the freezer. It probably wasn’t long—more often than not when the brain gets scrambled and shuts down, it’s for no more than a few seconds, a couple of minutes at the most, then it reboots like a computer hard drive—but it could have been thirty seconds or fifteen minutes or anything in between.
At least while he had been unconscious he had been breathing slowly, not using much air, unlike now when panic was starting to take over and he could feel himself breathing heavily, nearly panting, feeling like he had just run ten miles. He forced himself to slow down, to conserve air, to think.
Gordie knew he was out here, and the Paskagankee Police dispatcher had been doing his job a long time. He would expect Mike to check in after searching the house, whether he had found the couple he was looking for or not. If enough time went by and no communication had been received, Gordie would send another cruiser to investigate. Either Harley or Sharon would be dispatched.
And they would find an otherwise empty house with a dead body on the floor of the basement. Who knew whether either one of them would think to check the closed freezer? And, really, even if they did, what were the odds they would get here quickly enough to discover anything beside his cooling corpse huddled in the bottom of the thing?
Mike realized he was starting to breathe heavily again and forced himself to calm down. Panicking would do no good. But it was definitely getting hotter in here, a sure sign that the oxygen was rapidly disappearing.
He forced himself to be still and think, although it was becoming harder and harder to concentrate. Brett Parker and the young woman had been lying on the floor when he first entered the basement. They had both been unconscious but not suffering from any apparent serious injuries. Manning was undoubtedly long gone, but what were the chances he would have killed both of them before leaving or taken both as hostages?
Maybe one or both of them were still out there and had awoken and recovered sufficiently to help him. Maybe if he screamed loudly enough, some of the sound would force its way out of this metal coffin and alert them to his presence.
Maybe.
But there was a risk; a big one, the way Mike saw it. If neither of them had regained consciousness yet, or if Manning had killed both before leaving, or if they had both already gotten up and made their way out of the basement, he could scream his fool head off and the only result would be to burn through the remainder of his oxygen that much more quickly, effectively condemning himself to death.
He tried to stay calm and weigh the options. Sweat continued to drip; he was soaking, he felt like he had jumped into a pool with all his clothes on. The decision was simple, really. In all probability he was going to die inside this freezer. There was no getting around it. And if that was the case, he wasn’t about to go down without a fight. If yelling for help brought the end about more quickly, so be it. At least he would go to his death knowing he had tried.
Mike took a deep breath, wondering whether it would be his last, and bellowed as loudly as he could.
30
Driving a car was hard when you were dead, and coordinating all the muscular activity needed to shift a manual transmission properly was damned near impossible. All of the problems he was having took what had been a lifelong dream—putting a Porsche through its paces—and made it seem like more of a pain in the ass for Earl Manning than the joy ride he had been expecting. Plus, a fire engine red Porsche 911 would stick out like a sore thumb with the authorities, who would undoubtedly already be in the process of launching a massive search for Software Boy and the suddenly missing chief of police.
He should have taken the minivan. He knew that. It would have been easier to drive and might have made blending into the scenery at least a possibility. Goddammit.
Thinking logically had never been Earl’s strong point—he wasn’t sure he had ever even had a strong point—and being dead had scrambled his faculties even more, but one thin
g he knew was that it would be suicide to return to that piece of shit house in the woods and try to change vehicles now, so all he could do was continue on in the Porsche and hope for the best.
It would be suicide; that was a good one. Could someone who was already dead even commit suicide? How could you kill yourself if you weren’t alive to begin with? Earl wasn’t sure, but he thought that might be what the eggheads called a conundrum. Whatever it was called, it was the sort of philosophical discussion that would have kept the alkies and barflies at the Ridge Runner busy for a good long while, that was for sure.
The Porsche weaved back and forth along the remote Paskagankee roads, mostly staying on the right side, occasionally drifting across the centerline whenever Earl became distracted, which seemed to be happening more and more. He knew enough to keep to the lightly-traveled roads as he headed out of town, and so far, since leaving The Fucking Devil Max Acton’s house, had seen only a handful of vehicles.
He glanced over at his billionaire passenger, slumped in the sports car’s other bucket seat. Parker had been moaning and occasionally twitching, and Earl guessed he would be regaining consciousness soon.
He wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. It would make him much harder to control, which was bad, but on the other hand, Earl figured a guy who had invented and sold enough computer software to end up one of the richest men in the world couldn’t help but be smarter than he was, and he definitely needed some serious brainpower.
Because, well, here was the thing: Earl had no goddamn clue what to do next. He had outsmarted The Fucking Devil Max Acton precisely by not planning anything out, by just acting on instinct and attacking when The Fucking Devil’s attention was elsewhere.
He had known enough to take cover in the only available hiding place when the cop showed up, catching the guy by surprise and somehow taking him down.
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