Kit tried to gather her breath and collect herself. Her heart threatened to burst through her ribcage. The blood that had pooled in her head now seemed to have left her completely, so she felt dizzy and slightly disoriented. She thought her normal cell (that's what it was, dammit) would have been to the right from the ... what was it, the Sales Floor? Where they measured and cataloged the goods for future transactions? Were images of Kit even now popping up on secret URLs all over the country? The world? Were sleazoid computer geeks entering bids on their own x-rated version of eBay? Were they jacking off to enlarged prints of her crotch? Kit shook her head, as much out of disgust and dismay as to try and knock a bit of clear thinking into it.
She stared at the silent video for a minute. Marissa went from consenting partner to victim to — to what? What was she at the end of it? Was she still a victim? Was she mentally ill? And now that they had mutilated her, was she any different? Kit turned away from the images, all too easily imagining herself there. She'd been granted a reprieve, but why? And for how long?
The office was bare except for the desk, the television, a couple chairs including hers and a leather executive swivel behind the desk. The PC and its keyboard were hidden. On the desk was a bare old-fashioned blotter and the strange cake platter. Would they offer her a tall slice of Black Forest cake? Despite herself, Kit found her mouth watering at the ridiculous thought.
She hoped whatever came of this meeting, or whatever it was, she would see the inside of her cell again. Strange how the terrible becomes almost palatable when one is confronted with even worse. The damned cell was almost comforting now, after what she'd been through.
Maybe Marissa's response was smarter, after all.
Kit glanced at the screen. Now it was a blond girl, and she wasn't even trying to pretend it was enjoyable. Kit stared hard. Was that Jill? The girl who'd been pulled out of the cell shortly after Kit arrived? The porn had a generic quality about it, almost as if it always took the same direction. As if... Kit struggled for an explanation. As if everybody got the same test drive. That was it.
But Jill, if that was Jill, wasn't having any of it. Suddenly there was a third male in the picture, and he slapped her in the face as if to quiet her down. When that didn't work, he pulled her off one of the masked men, who was thrusting painfully hard, and punched her in the face. Then the other masked man pulled her hair and she was forced into another painful position. Kit winced when they smacked her again and again, trying to tame her, maybe to get a better tape. Of course, there would be people who'd pay for this, too. The smacking around would be just as valuable as the sex. Kit was sure of that. She bet there would be buyers no matter how the video ended. No matter who or how old the victim.
She couldn't tear her eyes away from what was happening to the girl now, though, even though she wanted to. She wanted to very badly.
The door suddenly banged open and the long-haired man—
The boss?
—who had watched Marissa's session entered and sat behind the desk. Again his cologne made her gag.
"You will be happy to know you are already bringing in bids, my girl." His accented voice was soft — fake soft.
Kit blinked. She'd been right after all.
"But I am of the mind to buy you myself."
Dear God, can this get any worse?
Kit felt her bladder again, jabbing insistently at her belly.
"You see," he continued, "the last girl I wanted became, how you say, difficult to be handled? Yes? She is — was — a very valuable merchandise. In the end, I was given no choice. I had one bid for something very special, and it was interesting, you see. She became a star of film after all."
He reached over and grasped the cake platter cover, lifting it up with the flourish of a French television chef.
Resting on the clear glass plate was Jill's severed head, her eyes wide open in a terrorized stare, her bruised face blue and green. Her full purple, bloodied lips were stretched over a red rubber-gel ball-gag. Below her chin, her neck muscles and tendons had been sawn through jaggedly, and flaccid arteries lay like limp balloons arranged in jovial spaghetti loops.
Kit fainted in her chair.
TWENTY
Traffic was damnably slow. Another ramp closing in the freeway system reconstruction was probably to blame, and Colgrave sat fuming in her car. Bumper to bumper wasn't typical in medium-sized Milwaukee, but the interchange closings caused slowdowns and accidents at an alarming rate, so she crawled along with the rest of them and let her thoughts wander.
She had refreshed her memory on various aspects of the Serb's known businesses, as well as some of what they suspected he owned, and a conclusion now seemed to scratch at the back of her skull.
Brake lights flashed ahead and she almost slammed into a service van. She couldn't see beyond it and it drove her crazy.
Damn it, get off the road.
She dialed Zim on her cell, realizing that maybe, just maybe, she was making a mistake.
If Brant was right, she'd anger Zim by rubbing his nose in it. If Brant was wrong, she'd go down by association.
She pushed Send and decided to let chance have its way.
"Yeah, Colgrave?"
"Zim, I'm stuck in traffic-"
"How lucky for you."
She snorted. "I'm not joking with you on this."
"Of course not." His voice began sliding into the whiny, self-absorbed mode he often took with her of late. "The days when we could joke about anything are gone."
"Zim, can we just move on? Does everything have to be about us. About you?"
"Apparently not." He sighed. "Okay, what do you want me to do, rescue you from the traffic?"
"I want to talk about Goran, the Serb."
She heard only silence at the other end. As if he had even stopped breathing.
"Zim, if this Richard Brant is right and we can catch the Serb with a bunch of kidnapped girls – or even one kidnapped girl – or something worse, we can do the whole city a favor by taking the guy down."
"Listen Colgrave-" His voice went dead cold. "Last I checked you take orders from me. I told you Brant's a nut-job. Post-traumatic stress turned this guy into a fruitcake years ago. I told you to drop it and get with your regular case load. You don't, you'll be writing tickets at Brewers games or out of one of those cute little Jeeps. But you won't be working Homicide. Are you reading me?"
Colgrave saw the traffic ahead opening up and changed lanes. She wanted to scream with frustration at the clogged freeway and the ridiculous instructions from her boss. Her lover.
That is so over.
"What's the deal, Zimmerman? You've been giving me grief about this thing since you heard Brant was involved. He doesn't seem crazy at all, or PTSD-affected. Okay, you got history together. I get it. But why don't you want to take down this other scumbag? This may the perfect opportunity-"
"Colgrave, you don't drop it, you're out of a job. Hear me?" He was shouting into the phone now, sputtering. "The only uniform you'll be allowed to wear is for the sanitation department. Are you listening?"
His screaming nearly incoherent now, Colgrave silently pushed the End key and cut him off.
"Christ, what am I doing?"
The lane cleared ahead of her and she nudged the gas, making a decision even as she wondered the why of it. Maybe she was both defying Zim and punishing him. Maybe she was punishing herself.
But his voice had sounded scared. Now that scared her, too.
She maneuvered to the next exit, while speed-dialing her cell again.
"What's up, Danni?"
"I need a favor, Lynn. A big one."
"What else is new," Lynn Kryzcek chuckled. "Shoot."
Lynn was Colgrave's eyes and ears in the police department's Database Management, someone who did favors out of friendship rather than for reward. Colgrave did much of her own research and proficiently, but Lynn's training in information technology went far beyond what she needed in DBM, so the two of them had
become fast friends who enjoyed a well-made margarita, and now Lynn was Colgrave's best secret weapon in the daily struggle that was the homicide squad.
"I have two names. One's legit, the other's on our special database. Can you give me every address listed for both? The first name's only going to have one address associated with it. The second might be more, uh, difficult."
There were rapid keystrokes in the background. "Sure. How long do I have?"
"Take your time... no, what am I saying? I need it pretty much asap."
"You don't ask much."
"Sorry, Lynn. I owe you. Again."
"I'm keeping track."
"Lynn?"
"Yeah?"
"Use an off-site IP address to log in, and make sure it doesn't tie into you or me."
The keystrokes stopped. "Crap. Uh, okay. Dial your cell?"
"Leave it on voicemail – the private one."
"You got it."
Colgrave spoke into the cell and gave her friend the names.
"Hey, Colgrave?"
"Yeah?"
"Be careful."
KIT
The jolt convinced her she was dying.
Pain lanced through her nostrils and directly into the front of her brain, then spiked to the sides like an electrical charge unleashed to run amok.
Next she'd felt her heart beating too fast, threatening to burst from her chest, deafening her with its irregular but insistent pattern. Was this a heart attack, what they call cardiac arrest? Had they induced it by jamming an electrical charge directly into her chest?
But then she was able to flutter her eyes open and the face that hung over her belonged to one of the thugs in cartoon masks, this one melted on the left side and indistinguishable, his hand holding a vial under her nose. Smelling salts? She'd always wondered what that was like. Now she knew, and she didn't like it. Or the leering smile on the mask that swam in and out of her vision?
She sensed the thug grinning under the grotesque face and turned away for a moment. Then she turned back, faced him, and vomited on him.
He sailed backwards, cursing in some foreign language and shaking his hands to get rid of the foul-smelling liquid. The situation would have amused her, but she couldn't enjoy it because she was already bringing up more bile. The acid stung her throat and made her teeth feel gritty, but more happily it kept the thug away from her, even though his hands were now balled into fists. He would have smashed her in the mouth, she knew it, but for the vomit that continued to spew from her.
Where did it all come from?
She gagged and coughed, and brought up more, maybe bits of her lungs mixed in there, just suddenly thinking of Jill.
No, Jill's head, on the cake platter.
Jill's severed head, served up by that monster in there.
Her eyes burned, tears tracking down her cheeks, and she gagged dryly, no more liquid to bring up, and the thug was out of there, backing out, lost all interest suddenly, slamming the cell door, and she was alone. Well, alone with Anne Marie and Marissa, it turned out, who watched from the safety of their own bunks.
"Ew," Marissa said.
"Shut the fuck up," Anne Marie said.
Marissa turned away and started combing her hair.
Kit coughed and gagged a few more times, her neck muscles wanting to break down chunks of flesh and spew them up, anything, just to get rid of the image. But the image wouldn't fade. The jaggedly sliced neck and veins – arteries? – and the bits of bone and meat that flecked the area surrounding the cut, where the flesh itself was turning blue. The cold blue lips stretched around the obscenely bright ball-gag. The images would not leave her, and so she continued to retch even though her stomach contents had all been purged on the concrete beneath her bunk.
"You all right?" Anne Marie's voice was tiny, a little girl's.
"Yeah," Kit said. She spit, grimacing at the taste. "Yeah, I'm okay."
"You're disgusting," Marissa said. "I wish they'd taken you away and got rid of you like they did Jill."
Kit bit back her anger, still trying to ignore the awful taste in her mouth. There was no point angering a potential ally.
But who was she kidding? Marissa was gone. Whether it was Stockholm or Helsinki Syndrome, or whatever else, Marissa had decided her life depended on liking what they did to her, and that was all she had to hang on to. That was all she had, and who was Kit to take it away from her? Or maybe it was something else. Maybe Marissa was one of those porn-loving MySpace or Facebook girls. Maybe she really did enjoy this. Either way, she was sick. And Kit was in no position to cure her.
The sooner you get that through your head, the better.
Anne Marie was another thing altogether, and when Kit and the younger girl locked glances, they both knew the time had come.
They had no choice but to attempt their plan, or they would run out of time. It was too late for cute signing games. Now they would have to fight for their lives. The severed head on the cake platter had jolted Kit awake in more ways than one, and now she nodded at Anne Marie. But first she made sure Marissa wasn't looking.
TWENTY-ONE
Colgrave drove past the club's bland facade twice, trying to get a sense of the place. It didn't look like much. No sign, no neon except for that tacky martini glass, no name on a marquee, nothing. It was like a secret watering hole, except it couldn't be a secret since a steady stream of visitors entered. Where they were parking, she wasn't sure. Down the street was a pockmarked asphalt lot owned by some business, but apparently it doubled as club parking. Once as she drove past she rolled down her window and caught a snatch of screaming techno synthesizer. It seemed loud, and too obvious. But Lynn said this was the Serb's most rumor-inducing club, based on what the database search had turned up. Colgrave guessed the action was either in back or upstairs, because the legit traffic seemed mostly to consist of college students and tourists with the occasional older office hack.
She drove past a third time, then turned the corner and saw the alley mouth. A little B&E on the job would keep her limber. She had to smile. That was some poor rationalization. The fact was, she wanted to catch the Serb at something, and now she'd been given the perfect excuse. Even if Zim made it clear she was to back off.
Fuck him, anyway.
No, that's how this whole thing started, really.
She pulled past the alley and left her car, closing the door as softly as she could. There was freeway construction going on not far away, and the rumble of truck traffic on the main road seemed to take care of any noise she might make. Dump trucks bearing rock and torn-up concrete seemed a blessing as she stumbled over obstacles in the dim alley behind the row of buildings of which the club was the farthest. The alley was blind at that end, and she navigated carefully through slop buckets, Dumpsters, and bashed-in crates.
The sound made her fade back behind a stack of cracked wooden pallets. Twenty feet away, someone clambered around yet another Dumpster. Even in the low autumn lighting, Colgrave saw the hand extended, the pistol in it.
Then she saw another figure emerge from the shadows.
The scuffle was quick, brutal, and deadly. The hidden man shot the other twice and there was hardly any sound. Small caliber, maybe .22LR, and a very effective suppressor – the pistol barrel was long and cylindrical.
Jesus, what was she doing, waiting? Butterflies and adrenaline mixed into an acid concoction in her stomach and she swallowed hard. She drew her Glock, gripping it with both hands, and started to do her job.
Then the surviving second figure stepped into a tiny pool of light and her breath caught in her throat.
It was Brant.
The sonofabitch had just killed some guy in cold blood.
Christ.
Her mind whirled. The second guy was clearly following Brant, hunting him with bad intent – his gun had been drawn.
Christ shit fuck.
Colgrave felt herself almost vibrate in her shoes. The Glock burned in her hand. The acid in her belly see
med to bubble and burn. She would draw down on Brant and arrest him before he knew what was up. Zim would be pleased.
Shit, Zim would be pleased.
She made her decision.
Tasting the sour liquid crawling up the back of her throat, she melted back into the shadows. She watched as Brant extracted the dead man's wallet, then headed for the street. He would pass within ten feet of where she crouched. She held her breath to avoid making it visible in the chill winter air. Brant stood watch a few moments, likely waiting to see whether there would be additional attackers, holding the silenced .22 across his chest. Then he bent over and she lost track of him in the shadows, until he stood and, with some effort, tipped the bloody body into an open Dumpster. He looked around again, as if sensing someone was watching, then came on suddenly and was past her almost before she could hold back her breathing. He reached the street before she began to move, but when she did she had no trouble keeping him in sight.
Enough shadows dotted the half-revitalized area to keep her hidden as she tailed him to a black Maxima with slightly tinted windows. She watched from a block away, behind a raucous tavern, where she was sheltered by several vehicles parked in an overgrown slab next to the asphalt lot she had noticed earlier. Brant sat in his car interminably. Whatever he was doing, he wasn't worried about being caught at the scene. Suddenly the driver's door opened and Brant leaned out, puking into the street.
Christ. Colgrave guessed it was a delayed reaction from the shooting. She felt faint herself, caught up in events that had moved too fast and were leaving her dizzy with fear, worried about her mishandling of the alley situation. Now, watching him vomit like this, faintly hearing his heaving from her vantage point, caused her almost to join him. Her sour stomach rustled and flipped, so she held her breath, waiting for the urge to pass. Her throat muscles contracted and she hoped he couldn't hear her gag from his car, but then he settled back into his seat and softly closed the door.
Colgrave felt her stomach settle a bit and resumed breathing.
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