by Lane Hart
I glance at the bag of files. All the time I spent off the clock investigating…because of one girl. One girl that rattled me to the core. I couldn’t get the image of her out of my mind for days afterward; her broken body lying on that ER gurney. The medical report that detailed the extensive abuse she suffered.
She was only sixteen.
They’ll kill me, she said.
I tried to get her to talk, to tell me who had harmed her, but the trauma to her body and the psychological damage kept her silence firm. It was the they in her brief statement that shook me. And when, after a sleepless night of going over the lack of evidence, I returned to question her again, she was gone.
I breathe through the memory, my gaze lingering on the image of Hudson and Myer, but not really seeing it. I can feel the press of Easton’s judgment from behind, like a dominant force towering over me, waiting for some miraculous revelation.
But I have nothing.
Whatever this means to him…I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want to.
A sick feeling twinges my stomach as I glimpse a card pinned to the top right of the board. I go to reach for it, then stop. I have the same card in my file.
Myer Keystone Enterprise.
It was the only evidence found on Laura’s person in the ER. The nurse bagged it after she removed it from her torn jeans. It was the only slim lead I had on the case, the case Hudson insisted needed to be closed, because we no longer had a victim or a witness.
But I couldn’t let it go.
I saw Laura’s bruised and cut face everywhere I looked. She haunted me. She was so terrified…and I should’ve tried harder to get her to talk. She fought her way to that ER room, and I failed her.
There was no report of her after that. I checked death records and hospital records. But she never resurfaced. Then, when the hunt started to turn obsessive, I had a tech analyst search the dark web for any hit on MK Enterprise. There was only one mention—such a faint lead—but I took it.
Milton Myer had conducted a trade for something on the black market under the name Phiser. The tech couldn’t get detailed information on what the trade was, only the price: seventy-five thousand dollars. I then started my own search into what items on the newest version of the silk road could bring in that kind of money.
It could’ve been diamonds. Or drugs. It could’ve been any number of things…but I knew—because I kept seeing her face, the terror in her eyes. With my gut instincts, I made the connection.
Someone in Myer’s company bought a girl.
And there could be more.
They, Laura had said.
She was gone. And I was not dropping the investigation until I found them.
Hudson warned me to stop the investigation; I was making accusations against a rich, powerful man with a pristine reputation. And I, technically, had nothing. My partner, my other half, was trying to protect me.
I still believe that. I have to. Hudson could’ve met with Myer at any other time, for any number of reasons…
I close my eyes and turn my head away. The chilly air of the cellar leaches my exposed skin, draining all the warmth from my body, as I try to force the belief.
Then I feel a feather light touch to my shoulder, and I shiver. I open my eyes as a picture drifts to my lap.
“Your partner,” Easton says, and I grasp the picture. It’s the one of me and Hudson that was taken the day I made detective. Easton stole it from my apartment. “Had secrets.”
We all have secrets.
Easton’s black boots move into my line of sight. “What did you hear the other night?” he asks. “When you tracked Keller to Myer’s building.”
“Nothing.” And that’s the truth.
Easton reaches behind his back and untucks an envelope from his waistband. He tosses it on the floor before me. “Open it.”
I tuck my hair behind my ears and grab the packet. My heart rate climbs as I slip out the pictures from within. The pictures from my camera. He printed them. Pictures of Milton Myer in his office. The shooter—Keller—holding a gun outstretched. It’s the proof of what happened. It’s the proof that I was there…to witness it.
Easton angles the flashlight so the beam highlights the pages pinned to the front of the board. “You want proof. Facts. Here they are,” he says. “Compare it to your own investigation. There’s a connection between Keller, Myer, and your partner that you’re missing. When you find that, you can leave this cellar.”
My heart vaults to my throat. I drop the images and push to my knees. “What do you mean I can leave?”
Arms crossed over his broad chest, Easton is more alarming now with a thread of hope than he was in that dark alley.
“Just like that. You’ll set me free,” I press.
He tilts his head, gaze traveling over my semi naked body. “A lie can be more telling than the truth.” With that, he turns toward the door.
A branch of ice cracks inside, shattering me to the core. “Where did you hear that?”
It’s what Hudson used to say before we entered an interrogation room. How does he know this? It was no spree attack at the ravine. Luke stalked Hudson.
Luke doesn’t respond. Instead, he opens the cellar door. Silent for too long as my nerves collide. Then: “I’ve killed eleven devils.”
I swallow hard, unable to blink, scared any movement will shift the still air too much and he’ll flee. Eleven devils. He saw Hudson as something evil.
There are other victims.
“The bodies aren’t inside my work,” he says. “That’d be an insult to what I do. Keep digging for your answers, Mak. I promise, you’ll find him.” He steps through the door. “And put some clothes on.”
The door closes, taking all the air from the room. I struggle to breathe as I press a hand to my throat. My blood pulses, every bang matching the storm rioting inside me.
Chapter Eleven
Voices
Luke Easton
Everyone hears voices.
We have a constant, internal monologue running in the background of our thoughts. Just like the heart, the brain never stops. The heart keeps beating while we sleep, a muscle that never gets a break, pumping blood to our cerebral cortex, supplying the brain with literal food for thought to keep that monologue going.
Some voices are louder than others.
Some voices are in such direct contrast to our subconscious, it’s as if they’re screaming inside our skull.
If you force yourself to listen, if you try to silence everything, you can hear a muffled form of your own voice whispering inside your head. It’s the conscience. Guiding us to make choices. We hear it so often we no longer notice it, the voice so internalized it’s become a comfort.
I don’t fear the voices. They’re supposed to be there.
I fear when they stop.
There is nothing I dread more than absolute silence. It’s a terrifying thought that washes me in a blanket of cold sweat. The day the voices stop…I’ll have no guidance, no conscience.
You become a monster when you start removing pieces, carving out your humanity. No conscience, no empathy—just the void—is the perfect breeding ground for devils.
Monsters are made by what we allow to be stolen.
As I sit parked across the street from the morgue, I have two voices battling for dominance. One whispers so quietly I have to strain to hear. The other roars and thrashes.
This voice has been winning out more and more.
I’ve let this go on long enough. Makenna can’t untangle the web. She’s buried herself too far down in denial. Hell, she might even deserve her revenge. Who am I to decide if it’s directed in the wrong place? Faced with the terrifying truth, she might come completely undone. She’s already broken. Whatever I’ve done to her, Royce Hudson broke her long before I got to her.
But the other voice dominates that notion, beating it down.
She’s a part of this.
I saw it in her eyes tonight, that utter look of los
t. But she’s not an innocent victim, or a damsel. She’s a hack ex detective who had a crooked, sadistic cop for a partner, and she will never accept that fact.
Guilt by ignorance is still guilt.
Truth hurts. But I fucking guarantee the girls who have been abused by those fiends were hurt worse than Makenna can ever imagine.
She locked herself in that cellar. I might hold the key, but she holds the way out.
I pull my hood over my head and slip on leather gloves. Then I get out of the damn car. I break into the morgue fencing, my conscience just a gnat easily swatted away.
As I’m disarming the alarm, I hear footsteps. I was hoping tonight would be easy, but there hasn’t been anything easy since Makenna crashed the party.
Back flattened to the side of the building, I unsheathe the knife from my leg strap, and wait for the security cop to come around the corner. This time, I made sure to cover my face with a rag. The cellar is getting crowded.
I hear the jangle of keys. The blade touches his throat, and I silence his surprised wail with a forearm to his mouth as I shove him to the wall.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I say in a hushed tone. It’s the same thing I said to Makenna, and the realization that I’ve already come close makes me pause. Seeing Jules’ necklace around her neck… I was too close then. One second longer in the beast’s grip, and the rage that’s always simmering just below would’ve strangled her.
She’s not the enemy.
The time it takes my brain to work this out costs me. The guard gets in a quick jab to my ribs. My knife slips lower, giving him enough room to attack again, and dammit to hell. She might as well be the enemy. She’s going to get me killed.
He’s not very tall or large, but he’s a wiry mother fucker, and those guys are surprisingly strong. He wrestles the hand holding the weapon, gaining the upper hand and I drop the knife. But I follow through with a direct punch to his stomach, and he folds over. I grab a handful of his hair at the back of his head and wrangle him along the wall, forcing him to move toward the main door.
“Now I don’t have to waste time picking the lock. Open it.”
The security cop unlatches his key ring, fumbling to locate the key. “Please. I have a family.”
For shit’s sake. “You all do. Are they here? Are they in danger? No. Your dumbass life is. Open the fucking door.”
He finally gets the key inside the deadbolt, and I hold him back. “Don’t move.” I open the door and reach up, feeling for the security camera. I had the luxury of casing the morgue the day I was asked to identify my sister. There’s another camera affixed above the body lockers.
“Go in and sit at the desk,” I order him. “Make one motion for help, do anything stupid, and I’m making a visit to your home.” I pluck his wallet from his back uniform pocket. “Go.”
He does as instructed, but his movements are stiff, and he’s breathing too hard, shaking. It’s good enough, though. The cams only monitor video, not sound. Once he’s seated before the monitor, I ease along the wall toward the bank of lockers. I remove that camera as easily as the first.
Unlike the hospital morgues, there’s not a lot of security in government facilities. Who wants to rob a morgue?
I open and close drawers near the sink area. I find a roll of bandage tape, and strip off a length as I walk toward the guard.
He’s already practicing his plead, primed to beg with his hands in the air. “Please,” he says again. “I have no idea who you are. Whatever you want to do to the bodies…I won’t say a word.”
The answer to that question seems obvious. Who wants to rob a morgue? A necrophiliac, that’s who. At least, it’s the logical leap here for this guy. I can’t be too offended; I am planning to desecrate a body.
I say nothing as I wrap the bandage around his face, then I pull a couple of Zip Ties from my jacket pocket and link his wrists together behind his back. His rapid breathing is loud against the bandage. I should probably offer him some assurance that I’m not going to kill him. But it might be better for him if he passes out.
I’m not a bad guy. But I’m not a good guy, either. I’m not out here at night protecting innocence, or punishing evil doers in the name of justice. I’m not that charitable. There is justice, and then there is vengeance. They’re not interchangeable.
If the security cop made this difficult, if he wanted to be a hero and defend the deceased their right to rest in peace, he’d become an obstacle, and my blade would find a home in his belly just as easily as my hands snapped Keller’s neck.
I’d like to say that it takes time to slip this far, that it’s a gradual process to become a killer. But really, it’s a simple choice. And it can happen in a blink.
My watch beeps, reminding me of the body waiting in the burn barrel. Bodies are starting to pile up.
This started with one man—one devil with talons and horns that I couldn’t stop drawing. He was a ghost in this very morgue, a wisp in an Armani suit and expensive cologne, and his presence didn’t belong.
Jules and I had been on our own since she was in grade school. Our mother taken by stage four breast cancer, and then our father followed in a head-on collision. We’d already overcome the hardest of hardships. This made us close. I was the one who made sure her homework got done, and that she had enough money to buy the trendy outfits all her friends were wearing.
And that wasn’t a problem then. The insurance money alone would’ve been enough to take care of us both, but I had a job, a career. I wore tailored suits and rode elevators up to a sixth-floor office, where I was a respected information security director.
I had a long-term girlfriend who was riding my ass about marriage and babies, and I had a great insurance package, with medical and dental. I was normal. I was bland and ordinary. I don’t even recognize that Luke Easton now.
It was another life.
The switch got flipped right here, in this spot, staring at the body lockers. Dread casing my body in ice, so that the medical examiner had to ask me three times if I was ready. Ready to identify the body.
I wasn’t ready, but I didn’t really believe she was in there. It was a mistake. Jules had disappeared three weeks before, never coming home after cheerleading practice. And I kept telling myself that she’d been in an accident, that she was in a hospital room, or at someone’s house, with people trying to wake her, trying to figure out who she was, to find her family…
Until the ME popped the locker and rolled her pale body from the steel unit.
I blink the memory away.
I worked hard not to remember her in that state. Instead, I see the man in the black suit. His curious gaze watching me, assessing me too closely. Right then, a brush of sixth sense adhered to my senses.
When I asked the ME what the man wanted from me, his forced, vacant denial stirred a primal response from somewhere deep down and dark. I’m 6’3” and have had a shit ton of guys try to provoke a fight out of me, and I always walked away. Before that moment, I’d never hit another person.
I dropped the morgue doctor to the floor in one punch.
By the time I went after the man in the suit, he vanished just as quickly as he appeared, a fucking ghost. I’d almost convinced myself he was a stress-induced delusion…if not for the medical examiner. I expected him to press charges, but he excused my behavior with grief.
That right there proved to me that something was fucking amiss.
He wanted to make it go away.
That’s when I started hearing the voice. I guess it’d been there the whole time, some part of my psyche, never given the chance to be heard before then.
The day I buried Jules, I also buried Luke. He disappeared from his career. From his relationships. Luke had no family. There was one missing persons’ report sent out, and then he was forgotten.
For the past three years, I’ve lived and breathed retribution.
I had a touch of artistic talent once. In my spare time, I still dabbled. Blown glass,
welding, drawing. I resurrected that neglected part of my existence and drew the face of the man in the suit. From every angle, every sharp feature, and then I used my skills to search his face on the dark web.
The modern world is covered in cameras. They are everywhere. Home security videos, bank footage, retail stores. Even coffee shops, and everywhere in-between. All that video footage is stored in the cloud. Gaining access to all this stored footage is a practice in the black arts of security networking.
I found my ghost. Christian Lazier got a hit on a security camera walking into a bank in Costa Rica. He was real. I drug the bowels of the Internet and scoured every connection to him, until I’d built a profile on my first devil. Then I stalked him. I followed him to a bar in upper Washington, where I discovered a network of other devils who liked to prey on underage girls.
I tortured Lazier for a week before I finally got a second name.
It became a game of warped dominoes. Knock one down, and the next topples. And the next.
Lazier, along with five other devils, had raped, mutilated, and beaten my little sister to death. I collected all the names. But somewhere along the way, taking revenge on the five bastards who tortured my sister wasn’t enough.
The hunger grew.
There was something bigger at work.
I hunted for a long three years, adding to my collection. Until I hit a wall.
I throw Myer’s corpse over my shoulder and haul him to a gurney. I cover his vile corpse with a sheet, then I search for a white coat and scrub hat. It’s a lot easier breaking in than it will be breaking back out…with a body.
Before this point, I’d have taken extensive measures to plan this carefully, efficiently. But the fact that Keller put a bullet in Myer’s head proves they’re closing in, they’re cleaning up.
Make it go away.
One crowned devil at the top of the food chain is eradicating all the vermin, and I’m on that list. Time is limited. They’ll find me in the same way I found them, no matter how far below the radar I keep myself buried.