Deathscape

by Dana Marton

  “We fell through the ice, Maddie and Dylan and I.” She rubbed her hands over her arms, feeling the deadly chill all over again. “I was under for twenty minutes, but they pulled me out and revived me. I was in a coma for a week.”

  The cold water had slowed down her metabolism to the point where she didn’t suffer any brain damage from the lack of oxygen, the doctors had explained later, declaring her a medical miracle.

  “And after that—” It killed her to have to think back to the accusations, the tremendous guilt, the depression.

  The Millers, her neighbors, had lost Dylan. But she had lost her daughter too. Her father had taken Maddie while Ashley had been in the hospital. And considering the state she’d been in even after she’d gotten out, he’d been reluctant to give Maddie back.

  She wanted her daughter more than she wanted anything. But she was scared to the bone that there was something seriously wrong with her, that she was going crazy, that she would never get better, would never get Maddie back, would end up dying in a mental hospital like her mother, strapped to the bed.

  None of which she could share with anyone, not ever.

  All she could give Jack Sullivan was the most basic truth, which he had already seen and had refused to believe. “And now I paint the dead.”

  ~~~***~~~

  Chapter Four

  Jack smashed his fist into the boxing bag, the sharp slap the only sound that broke the silence in the small workout room in the back of the police station. The gym was utilitarian, nothing but the basics. He didn’t need much. He just needed a place to build his body back.

  He lost himself in the rhythm of his punches. He liked it when he was alone in here. He was still on leave—not by his own choice—but he could at least use the gym, part of his physical therapy. Maybe he was doing it a little harder than he was supposed to, but he didn’t have time for a slow recovery.

  So he came in, once a day, for the gym, and because he could usually sneak a few minutes at his computer, check on things, ask around about what progress the FBI was making.

  None whatsoever.

  Pretty much the same as he. His home visit a week ago with Ashley Price had netted more questions than answers.

  He’d spent the intervening days with identifying everybody on the paintings he’d taken from her. Other than himself, he couldn’t find a single link to Blackwell.

  Punch, right, left. Forearms, right, left. Elbows, right, left. Knees, right, left. He exhaled sharply on each blow. He was focused on the bag, but not as deeply as he would have liked to be.

  What did he know about her for sure?

  She painted the dead.

  People who died violently, to be more specific. Ashley Price, an untimely death, and geographical proximity were all the victims in her paintings had in common. Somebody coming in fresh and looking at those facts would have theorized that she was one of the rare female serial killers.

  Except, he’d met her, and she wasn’t a killer. She was a mess. And she hadn’t been the one who’d put him into the grave.

  But she was the one who’d dug him up.

  He’d be damned if he knew what that meant.

  He was almost puzzled enough to seriously consider her psychic tale. Almost.

  Punch, right, left. Forearms, right, left. Elbows, right, left. Knees, right, left.

  Maybe the FBI could make more sense of her. The four agents who’d arrived had taken over the single conference room at the police station and one of the offices. Bing wouldn’t let Jack near them. But even if he had, Jack wouldn’t have handed over the paintings. Ashley was his lead. He wanted to be the one who found Blackwell, dammit.

  He danced around the bag, working it over as it swung on the chain. Left, right, back, forth. Everything hurt. He thought he’d learned long ago to shut out pain, both emotional and physical. Not quite.

  Time to burn that pain out of his muscles. With every hit, he imagined Blackwell, let himself feel just enough to create a controlled flame burning in the dark. The sick bastard had left him alive even as he’d buried him, left him to die slowly so he would have time to think about how badly he’d failed.

  The faces of Blackwell’s other known victims played through his mind like a film on an endless loop, each one of the eighteen crying out for revenge. North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Long Island, Connecticut. He’d made it his career to follow Blackwell up and down the East Coast, transferring from department to department over the years.

  After a triple murder in Baltimore, he’d picked up on something in a forensics report the FBI had missed—spores at a crime scene, from some gourmet mushroom produced in only a half-dozen places in the country. He’d put six brown pins in the map on his wall at his rental, one for each location.

  The line of eighteen red pins that marked the victims all concentrated in the middle section of the East Coast. The six brown ones were distributed randomly over the US, only one on the East Coast, Broslin, PA, in the middle of all the red. A state surrounded by victim states but where no victim had been taken.

  Why? Because it would have hit too close to home for Blackwell?

  So Jack took the first police job that came up in Broslin and had been damn proud of himself for getting another step closer. Except now it seemed Blackwell had caught on. The bastard had trapped him and nearly killed him.

  Nearly.

  His turn. But he couldn’t let his revenge blind him. Every move had to be carefully calculated. They were in the endgame.

  Jab. Cross. Elbow. Uppercut. Jack let the force of his legs explode through his hips, torso, and shoulders, sent the energy through his arms and into the bag.

  Only when he was completely spent, covered in sweat, did he let himself drop to the mat. But even then, he couldn’t rest. He reached for his phone and shuffled through the photos he’d taken of Ashley’s bizarre paintings. He paused the screen at the painting of himself in the grave, eyes open but unseeing.

  Blackwell’s other known victims hadn’t been buried alive. They’d been buried in pieces. The FBI had never done a full recovery. The bastard was keeping trophies.

  But he hadn’t cut Jack. Why? Why bury him alive?

  He pushed back his rising anger. You go into a fight hot, you've already lost—one of the fundamental rules of combat he’d learned early on. He withdrew to the darkroom in his mind, as always when emotions threatened to get in his way. He liked the black, hollow space that let in no light. Except this time he wasn’t alone. He’d somehow carried Ashley Price in there with him.

  The woman carried a load of guilt, grief, and despair, along with some pretty dark secrets. They had that in common.

  Hot as all get-out, but a basket case. Then again, anyone who would hook up with Blackwell had to be seriously messed up. He sure as hell didn’t believe the psychic-vision bullshit. She was with Blackwell—either coerced or by choice. Probably the latter.

  For one, Jack had given her a way out: cooperate with the police and be taken into protective custody. But she hadn’t given up anything. Two, he didn’t want to think of her as a possible victim. He needed an enemy he could reach to fight, and right now Ashley Price was the only one within reach. He was going to bring Blackwell down through her.

  He’d rattled her before, had taken her paintings. She’d come close to breaking. He would push her as hard and as far as he needed to, to finish the job.

  His phone rang. Always hoping for a lead, he took the call. Then wished that he hadn’t.

  “Hi, this is Dr. Beacon,” the shrink Bing had sicced on him at the hospital said on the other end.

  “I’m in the middle of something.”

  “We need to make an appointment.”

  “How about I call you back?”

  “That’s what you said the last time.”

  “I really don’t have any problems.”

  “That’d be a miracle, after what you’ve been through. Denial is normal. What do you know about Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder?”

  “I don’t have time to have PTSD.”

  “Insomnia, trouble breathing, anxiety, hallucinations, paranoia… It’s a long list, Detective. Why not let me help before things get really bad?”

  “How about this? I’ll call you at the first sign of trouble.” He hung up on the man as Joe, one of two rookies, pushed through the door and dropped his gym bag on the floor, heading straight for the treadmill with a grin. “Fallen and you can’t get it up?”

  He’d been the town football hero back in his high school days, had gone to college on a sports scholarship. Never managed to turn pro, although he’d spent time with a couple of the East Coast teams before coming home and settling back into his small-town-hero life.

  “Odd that should be on your mind at your age.” Jack rolled to his feet. “Trouble in that department? You’ll get better with experience. Try not to worry.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, old man. Hot stud is my middle name.” The twenty-something flashed another cocky grin as he began running.

  He was so full of hot air it was a wonder he didn’t float to the ceiling. But he was well-meaning, and he would watch a man’s back if needed, so pretty much everybody liked him around the station and overlooked his strutting peacock tendencies.

  “What are you working now?”

  Joe picked up speed on the treadmill. “The burglaries.”

  “Still?” There’d been a rash of burglaries in town over the last few months, a pushed-in back door here and there, small items taken, things that could be quickly sold online. Property crime like that usually picked up as the economy dipped.

  Joe shrugged. “They stop for a week, then start again. I’ll get the sucker.”

  Jack nodded as he passed by the treadmill, ready to hit the shower. “Bing in yet?”

  “Came in, went out. Someone reported some hunting-camp bunker thing out by Spring Road. Filled to the rafters with guns and knives and axes and some weird shit. Chase went to pick up a flasher. Harper is at a tractor-trailer accident. I’m not sure where Mike is. Nobody’s in.”

  Jack picked up speed, the parting jab he’d meant to throw at Joe forgotten. He rushed through his shower, and stopped by the front desk on his way out of the station. “You got that number I asked for earlier?”

  “You bet.” Leila slipped a piece of paper across the counter.

  She was the sole admin support, a widow in her late forties with three boys to raise. She was competent and tough, wouldn’t take flak from anyone. She had short hair that hadn’t dared to gray yet, and the voice and demeanor of an admiral. Although the six men who made up the Broslin police often ribbed each other, nobody was fool enough to go up against her.

  He glanced at the empty conference room. Looked like the FBI was out. He wished he knew what they were doing.

  He pocketed the sticky note. “Thanks. You’re the best.”

  She gave a bark of a laugh. “Stop kissing up, Sullivan. Christmas is over. I’m not bringing in any more cookies.”

  He put on his best crestfallen expression. “The thought of those cookies brought me back from death, you know that?”

  “Your stubbornness brought you back. The same thing that’s keeping you from being home and recovering like you should be. You need to take better care of yourself, Jack. Gain some weight back.”

  “That’s exactly where the cookies come in,” he said, straight-faced.

  She was laughing as he walked out the door.

  In less than half an hour, he was in the woods off Spring Road, walking up to Bing.

  The captain’s eyes narrowed. “What are you doing here?”

  “Was driving by, saw the commotion.”

  “And I’m a woodland fairy. You know what sick leave means? You stay home and heal.”

  “You sound like Leila. So what do we have?”

  “A hiker called the place in.” Bing shrugged, then called out, “Anything back there, Mike?”

  “Locked up tight.” Mike, the other rookie who’d joined the team the previous year with Joe, came around the cabin, a round Irish kid, red hair sticking up all over, eyes green as shamrocks, and a grin that betrayed he hadn’t spent too much time on the force yet. He’d barely seen anything.

  “Who owns the place?” Jack asked. “You called it in?”

  Bing nodded. “It’s been for sale for a couple of years. Sold recently, but the new deed hasn’t been put into the system yet. When we’re done here, Mike will go to the county clerk’s office to look through the paper files.”

  “You think it’s connected to Brady Blackwell?” Mike asked Jack with a little too much enthusiasm.

  “Jack is not investigating Blackwell.” Bing stepped in and effectively ended that topic.

  Mike’s enthusiasm didn’t dim any. “Are we going in?”

  “What do you think?”

  The rookie’s shoulders slumped after a second of thinking. “No probable cause, no search warrant. We have to walk away.”

  “Heard that, Jack?” Bing turned to him.

  Jack strode up to one of the front windows, cupped his hands around his eyes, and looked in. A row of gun cabinets stood against the back wall, all filled. In the corner, a stack of metal boxes nearly reached the ceiling, probably ammunition and who knew what else. Instruments of torture, possibly. His muscles tightened.

  He glanced back at the captain. “Kids are out in these woods all the time. Some testosterone-flooded teenage boy gets his hands on this stuff…”

  “Until they do, there’s nothing we can do about it.” Bing swore under his breath.

  “And if it’s really connected to Blackwell?” Mike wanted to know.

  Bing glared at him. “Get a fingerprint kit from the car. Let’s see if you can lift anything off the door. If you get something, we can run it against the database.”

  They walked out to the road together. Bing drove away, heading back to the office. Mike popped the trunk of his cruiser. Among all the other emergency response supplies, a standard-issue army shovel caught Jack’s eye, brand-new, still in the wrapper.

  “Where you get that from?”

  “Sunday flea market, the old Polish guy in the back row. He’s gotten some army surplus in.” Mike caught on the next second. “Already checked him. He sold two dozen in the last month, but he keeps no record of his customers. No credit card record either. Place like that, most people pay cash.”

  Jack filed the information away. He’d go check out the flea market on Sunday. But that was two days away, and he had things to do in the meanwhile. He strode back to his car and got in but didn’t put the key in the ignition just yet. He pulled out his phone instead, then the piece of paper Leila had given him, with the phone number he’d asked her to track down.

  He needed ammunition to break Ashley, and he had a feeling her father, William Price, would have it. If he was raising Ashley’s daughter, it could mean only one thing: he didn’t trust Ashley with the kid. Why?

  He dialed the number, lining up his questions, hoping that this lead at last would take him somewhere, give him some answers. He let the phone ring a dozen times before he gave up and tossed it onto the passenger seat.

  He pulled a different piece of paper from his other pocket, this one well used and wrinkled, a list of buildings in town that had a somewhat isolated location. One could possibly be the site of Blackwell’s “workshop” where the bastard had tortured him.

  The farmhouse where he’d been trapped, tased by a rigged-up mechanism as soon as he’d opened the door, had already been inspected several times over but was spotlessly clean, not a speck of dust in the place, let alone a fingerprint. He needed to find the torture chamber Blackwell had taken him to from there.

  He’d been going through his list of possibilities one by one, whenever he had time for a drive. He’d already checked a dozen homes repossessed by various banks and sitting empty, closed-down businesses in town, and an old, crumbling silo that had nearly collapsed on top of
him.

  If he found a place, he might find a clue that could lead him straight to Blackwell. The “workshop” was somewhere in or near town. He’d been conscious—if tied and blindfolded—for the trip from the torture chamber to the grave. While the ride, with all that pain riddling his body, had seemed to last an eternity, he didn’t think it took more than twenty to thirty minutes.

  He unfolded the list and looked at the next item that hasn’t been crossed off yet, the old firehouse, abandoned when the new state-of-the-art facility had been built, just before the recession had hit.

  He drove over frozen roads, traffic sparse, then sparser yet as he reached the back roads again. The old firehouse had been built on the edge of town, back when they used the creek to fill the trucks with water. The new bigger one sat in the middle of the city, within easier reach.

  The township still owned the building that now housed road-maintenance equipment. The building stood deserted and locked up for the moment. Jack pulled up to the front and eyed the big padlock on the door of the single bay.

  Eddie Gannon had access to the place. Eddie was friendly with Ashley. Eddie was about the same build and age as Blackwell. Yet the voice was off, Jack thought. But could he trust his full-of-holes memory?

  He got out of his car and walked around, looking in windows. He saw no suspicious activity, and, more importantly, no door that could have led to a basement. The two inside doors were open, one to a bathroom, the other to the kitchen.

  And he’d definitely been held in some sort of a basement, the only thing he was sure of. The place had smelled like a basement. He could see a small strip under the blindfold, saw the stained cement floor. The light had been on 24/7. So he was looking for a basement without windows, most likely, but not necessarily. Could be Blackwell kept the windows boarded.

  He was looking for a place away from other buildings, in an area that was deserted. Nobody had heard his screams.

  For a few seconds, he stared at the big snowplow that took up most of the place, its cheery yellow color mocking him. Then he went back to his car with a disappointed grunt and crossed the firehouse off his list.