Painted Skins

by Matt Hilton

  ‘You don’t recall Calvin being home when you lived with the Hopewells? OK, let’s assume I believe you. But what about Jasmine Reed?’ Tess waited for his next lie.

  ‘Jasmine wasn’t there when I was. Maybe she came along later.’

  ‘So you remember that, but not if Calvin was there?’

  ‘What can I say? Maybe my memory is selective.’

  ‘I bet,’ said Po from the doorway.

  Bruin turned his head, to peer back him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Let’s assume I don’t believe you,’ said Po.

  ‘No. Let’s assume I don’t give a shit what you think of me,’ Bruin said.

  ‘I’m thinking of coming over there and ripping that stupid moustache off your top lip.’

  Bruin blinked slowly. ‘Insults I can deal with. What does concern me is being threatened in my own office. I think it’s high time you both leave.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ Tess said and stood abruptly. She nodded at Po that it was time to go. ‘I’ve clarified what I wanted to hear from Mr Bruin.’

  ‘Could have told you he was a lying piece of dirt without traipsing out here in a storm,’ Po said.

  Bruin laughed at the latest of Po’s insults. Then dismissively, he reached for his cellphone and dabbed in a number, reminding them he had important calls to make. ‘You can show yourselves the way out,’ he said without looking at them. ‘It’s the same way you sneaked in. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.’

  Once they were back in the elevator and the doors had swished shut, Tess squeezed Po a smile. ‘I didn’t expect much from him, but what was more interesting was what he didn’t admit. I think that visit was worthwhile, don’t you?’

  ‘The only thing that would’ve made me happier was if you’d let me yank off his moustache and slap the truth out of his lying mouth with it.’

  ‘Another time,’ she promised. ‘I hope I’m there when you do it, because I think he’ll deserve it.’

  ‘He got you thinking about something,’ Po stated.

  ‘Yes. Timescales.’

  ‘You’re going to have to explain.’

  ‘I need to do some more checking on it,’ she replied, ‘but there’s one thing I’m sure about.’

  The doors opened and they stepped out into the entrance foyer.

  ‘How did Jasmine know about Hopewell’s release from jail, and his impending return to Maine, if someone wasn’t keeping tabs on him? I’m thinking somebody warned her off.’

  ‘Not Bruin.’

  ‘No. He’s too eager to speak to her, or worse. Somebody she came into contact with at Bar-Lesque I’m betting.’

  ‘Max? Can’t see him giving a damn about her welfare.’

  ‘Not Max. Not Chris Mitchell either.’

  Po’s frown deepened, but it wasn’t for Tess’s enigmatic teasing.

  A figure blocked some of the external exit light.

  Trojak? Tess wondered.

  But Po’s mouth turned up at one side, and he pushed the door open before the new arrival could hit the intercom button.

  Drenched through, a skinny youth stood on the threshold, lugging a large vinyl bag over his shoulder. The bag carried the decal of a local pizza delivery service.

  ‘Ah,’ said Po, holding open the door. ‘Mr Bruin won’t be eating free tonight. Here, buddy, how much do I owe you?’

  ‘I’m really sorry for arriving late, sir,’ said the young man as he delved in the bag and hauled out a box large enough to conceal a manhole cover. ‘I’ve a twelve-inch classic pepperoni deluxe right here!’

  ‘What kind of guy’s going to complain about you being late on a night like this?’ said Po and handed over enough cash, plus a weighty tip – more than the miserly two bucks Bruin would have. ‘He’d have to be a complete a-hole, right?’

  ‘Definitely not a concerned philanthropist,’ Tess added.

  TWENTY-SIX

  It was time to put aside dark fantasy, Elsa Moore concluded, and face the grim reality of her situation. Hiding behind the facade of her imagination was akin to burying her head in the sand – well all that assured was that she’d present her rump for another serious assault, and she’d had enough of that already to last ten lifetimes. Thankfully her abuse hadn’t been sexual on this occasion, but at the toes of the whispering devil’s boots as he’d kicked her mercilessly. And all because she’d had the temerity to ask after her friend Jasmine, and what he’d done to her.

  It wasn’t that he was enraged that she’d the nerve to question him; it was how she’d learned the other girl’s name. The psychopath didn’t require covert listening devices or hidden cameras when the slip of Elsa’s tongue had proven they’d broken his cardinal rule.

  To save the others a beating, Elsa admitted she was the one who’d pushed Jasmine into revealing her name, but that none of the others had spoken. He didn’t believe her, and the other girls had been severely punished too.

  Now Elsa lay on her side in the filth, unable to sit down or even crouch on her haunches. It was a miracle that he hadn’t broken any bones, but her butt and thighs were swollen and sore, abraded and even cut in places. As he’d thrown wild kicks at her she’d curled into a ball against the back wall as far as her chains would allow, but it hadn’t been enough to save her. She’d lost count of the blows. As a parting shot her abuser had sent her toilet bucket spinning, then stomped it flat, and the floor beneath her was now muddy with her own waste. She was fearful of her wounds becoming infected, but with no fresh water she could neither clean herself nor slake her raging thirst.

  How long was it since he’d left her cell to punish the others? She couldn’t tell. An hour, perhaps two? She was in intense pain, and she knew it would get worse before it began to ease. She’d grow stiffer too, and before long would be unable to walk – let alone run. Yet now was the time to try to escape, because he’d believe her too hurt, too cowed, too weak, to attempt to flee. His berserk attack had left him gasping for breath, and he’d stalked back and forward as if he were the caged beast, throwing his fists at the ceiling, kicking out at empty air in his madness. He’d then come to a sudden decision and practically sprung from her cell, slamming the door behind him and securing locks, but in his haste he’d forgotten to check her restraints, and left the tin bucket in a flattened lump on the sodden earth.

  The other girls had gone silent, biting their lips to stifle their whimpers. Elsa expected they were aiming dark thoughts at her because of her disobedience, rather than at the one that truly deserved them. They were angry with her, and hardly surprising, but she was equally pissed at them. If they were going to get out of this predicament alive they had to unite, not allow the beast to continuously segregate them, and set them against each other. Jasmine, she hoped, would understand. She’d been brave enough to fight their captor, though God knew what fate that had led to. But it gave Elsa strength to similarly fight: she’d rather die than go on being a rough play toy for the whispering devil.

  Stop calling him that!

  He’s just a man. A sick-minded freak, but still just a man.

  Moaning, she uncurled. Pain trickled through her limbs before exploding in scarlet flashes behind her eyelids. He hadn’t hit her face, and yet that was where most of the agony was centred. She rubbed her temples with trembling fingers. Her skin was slick, plastered with coagulated mud and pee, but her mouth and tongue were arid, a desert. The pain in her skull was dehydration induced, as was the weakness in her arms. Tentatively she pushed up to her knees. The skin of her haunches felt too tight for her, which was incredible considering the pounds she’d lost in weight since held here. She was tempted to give in, to lie down, but her head shook in counter-rebellion to her limbs, her hair thrashing her cheeks. She got the flats of her palms beneath her and pushed, coming to a stoop with her feet under her. The pain. The pain. She chewed her lips, trying not to surrender to it, shook her head again and turned for the engine block.

  The rusty old metal weighed almost as much
as she did, perhaps more in her current emaciated state. At full strength and vigour she might be able to haul up one end, but she’d no hope of that now. She didn’t have to. Prior to the attack, her captor had instructed her through the slot to turn her back and retreat to the far wall. Once she was in position he’d unlocked the door and entered, and he’d unclipped the chain securing her to the block: an act that usually meant a visit to his pleasure room. He’d normally fix shackles to her feet, and use the length of chain attached to her wrists to guide her before him like a dog on a leash. But she’d incited his ire, and taken a hellacious beating for it, but the bastard had been so incensed that he’d neglected to reattach the chain to its lock.

  Dull light found its way inside her cell through chinks near the ceiling, and the longer she’d stayed cooped inside her vision had adapted to it. Squatting, grimacing against the fresh pulses of pain in her thighs and buttocks, she traced her chain to its source. One end disappeared under the engine block, and was wedged tightly, and one loop was wrapped around the engine, but she found the free end where it had been unlocked and allowed to fall in the dirt. She sat in the muck, braced her feet flat against the rough metal, and pulled. The chain didn’t move an inch from where it was pinned to the earth. She wasn’t finished trying though. She wrapped links around the ones between her wrists, and gripped the chain again a few inches down its length. Using the leverage so that the rusty links didn’t tear the skin from her hands, she again braced and pulled. The pinned chain gave a couple of inches, but so did her thighs. They shook, and then almost contracted in on themselves and the colossal agony of muscle cramps racked her. She cried out, drawing her ankles to her butt and digging her fingertips into her thighs, as she fought the spasming of the muscles. It seemed an age before she felt ready to try again, and when she did it was tentative. Her backside slid away rather than place any counterweight on the engine block, and she knew it was a subconscious rebellion against experiencing the cramps again.

  ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ she said, using an oft-used quote whose origin she couldn’t credit. ‘Or it just hurts like hell,’ she added and giggled silently with a hint of madness.

  She settled herself, got a grip on the chain again, after ensuring the shackle between her wrists would save her from most of the chafing, then pushed with both feet until she got her knees braced: only then did she haul backwards, allowing the arching of her spine to add strength to her shuddering arms. The chain sprang loose from under one side of the block, but was still pinned tight at the other. It didn’t matter, she was making progress, and energized. She repeated the process, groaning, dying to shout and scream at the damn stubborn chain, and suddenly she went flat on her back as the chain tore free.

  She sat, gathering her breath, grinning in triumph.

  Her captor had thought himself clever. He’d looped the chain counter-clockwise so that where it crossed it would be buried beneath the engine block, making it more secure, but he was wrong. It meant she had only to unhitch that one length of chain before the entire thing came free. Still sitting she spooled in the cumbersome chain and placed it in her lap. She was free of the dead weight, but that was only one of a list of barriers. Now she had to escape the room, the labyrinth, and her demented abuser. Still, she was on the way now, headed in the right direction.

  She checked the door first.

  It was impregnable as far as she could tell, and that was without the extra locks and bolts on the other side. But was it? She felt for the hinges and they were not recessed. Her fingertips found the heads of ancient screws, but without tools she’d no hope of unscrewing them: they’d been there so long they were corroded and held solidly by the expansion of the damp wooden doorframe. Even with tools she would probably never defeat them. The hinge pins! Her fingers fluttered again, and sure enough she could feel the brass heads of pins. If she could press them out she could force a gap between door and frame.

  Good luck, she told herself sarcastically. She required a hammer and screwdriver to knock the pins out. She had neither.

  But she had a heavy length of chain and a distorted tin bucket.

  She scrambled for the bucket, picked it up, and upended it so that the last dregs of urine spilled out, then moved to drier flooring. The bucket was lozenge-shaped now, with the sides buckled, but it largely held its integrity. It would need work, but for the first time in for ever she saw a glimmer of hope. She stood on the base end, got her fingers around the buckled rim, and began working it slowly and silently back and forward against the crease line, one ear cocked for any hint that the whispering devil – no, the demented sicko – was returning.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ‘You mentioned timelines,’ said Po, as he and Tess arrived outside her house on Cumberland Avenue. Finally, and thankfully, the storm had begun to subside, although the wind still retained most of its bite.

  The power supply had been reconnected by a contractor she’d called earlier in the evening, who’d charged an excessive fee for turning out so late at night and in the middle of a storm. He’d coordinated with the local power company because Cal Hopewell had used a spade to chop repeatedly at the main cable entering the building so that the rainwater got in through the metal shielding and shorted out her supply, so Tess had steeled herself to expect another bill from them too. It was necessary and immediate work, though, and had to be paid – she didn’t want to be held responsible for Mrs Ridgeway losing another day’s trade. When Hopewell was finally brought in, she was tempted to sue for compensation but was happier to see him returned to prison for his crimes. And if her suspicions were correct, somebody else would join him.

  ‘Let’s get inside and I’ll explain,’ she said.

  Po drove his Mustang on to the ramp behind her Prius. She hadn’t checked her car for damage: Hopewell had forced her over the hood and it had possibly been scratched and buckled. Fixing her car was another expense to sue Hopewell for, she thought whimsically, though Po would likely carry out the repairs for little more reward than a sweet smile.

  Po carried Bruin’s liberated supper up the steps behind her, and Tess let them in. Her house felt cold and damp, and her first task was to go around throwing on lights and the central heating. Calling out the contractor on short notice had been worth every cent. Most of her equipment had been decamped to Po’s ranch house, but she’d brought her iPad and cellphone back with her: she plugged in the tablet at her work station, but keyed in to the databases she’d been pouring over the last few days on her iMac.

  Po was seated on her settee, eating congealed pizza, when she turned to him.

  ‘Want some?’ he asked around a mouthful of stringy cheese.

  She shook her head.

  ‘It’s good,’ he said, and wagged a slice at her.

  She ignored the temptation, though admittedly she was hungry. All of that cheese and dough on her stomach this late at night and she’d be good for nothing. She fetched a yoghurt drink from her fridge, and although it wasn’t as chilled as she’d like, she downed it voraciously while ordering events in her mind.

  ‘Bruin’s a damn liar,’ she announced as she wiped away a yoghurt moustache on the back of a finger then licked it clean.

  ‘Already established,’ Po said, and took another bite.

  ‘He claimed that he didn’t know Calvin Hopewell’s name: a lie. Then he changed his tune, but still said he didn’t recall Calvin being resident when the Hopewells fostered him: another lie. He also said that Jasmine came to the home after he’d already moved on; well I need to check, but I’m pretty sure that on that occasion he was telling the truth.’ At Po’s nonplussed expression, she added, ‘OK, only partly telling the truth. Wait here a moment.’

  ‘I ain’t going nowhere,’ Po assured her. ‘Still got pizza to eat.’

  Tess dug under her work station, sifting through the drawers where she’d placed some of the old documents she’d previously interrogated. She found the sheets of paper she was looking for, scrut
inized them a moment, and then nodded to herself. She carried them to Po as if they were objects of great value: in a way they were, because they were a hinge-pin to solving the connection between Hopewell, Bruin and Jasmine.

  She sat alongside Po and he set aside the pizza box. He smelled strongly of garlic, tobacco, and damp denim, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Tess angled the papers so he could see them too.

  ‘I knew it,’ she said, and indicated what she was referring to first on one sheet of paper, then the next.

  ‘Jasmine was fostered by the Hopewells three times?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Tess said. ‘Granted, the first and latter times were only for a few days. The last time corresponds with when Calvin would have been home from military college, and was when he must have attacked her. She also stayed with the Hopewell family as a younger teen here’ – she indicated the middle term – ‘after Bruin had already left the home. But look at these earliest dates where Jasmine stayed for a couple of weeks on what has been logged as “respite care”. He lied to us: Bruin and Jasmine did cross paths in the home for a short time.’

  ‘Giving him the benefit of the doubt, he might not remember her if she was a young child and he was in his late teens by then. Plus if she was only there on a short-term basis he might not have come into much contact with her. The difference in age isn’t a big concern now, but to kids it would have been a wide gulf that separated them.’

  Tess nodded in agreement, but she wasn’t done.

  ‘Portland’s a small city. What’s the population, around sixty-five thousand people?’

  ‘I guess,’ said Po, ‘but that doesn’t include the outlying areas. You’re probably looking at a couple hundred thousand or more. What’s your point?’