Condemned: A Thriller

by Michael McBride

  “What about…?” I inclined my chin toward the hole in the wall. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words out loud, for in my mind I could only think of it as hell.

  Dray turned at the sound of my voice. His expression metamorphosed from confusion to anger as he saw me for the first time.

  “The fuck you doing down here?”

  “You’re contaminating the scene,” Aragon said.

  Before I could react, she shoved me squarely in the chest and I stumbled into the ladder, knocking it out of the hole. It fell against the wall and crashed to the floor.

  “You wouldn’t have found this place without me, damn it,” I said.

  “Convenient, isn’t it?”

  “Look. I don’t know why this guy brought me into this, but the fact remains that he did. For whatever reason, he wants me here. And you need me if you want to find him.”

  “You think this is a game? That this guy’s going to just let you walk when it’s all done? You don’t get it, do you? When he’s done with you he’s going to throw you away like he did those girls.”

  “Take it easy,” Dray said.

  “Once he decides you’re no longer of any use to him, you won’t see him coming. He knows how to play you, how to make you jump through his hoops. You’re a dead man and you don’t even know it.”

  What I did know was there was a very real possibility she could be right.

  “Maybe—” I started.

  “Maybe?”

  “Leave him be, Marcela,” Dray said.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said, “but there’s only one thing we know for sure. This guy’s going to continue killing until we stop him, and he’s going to make sure we find each and every one of his victims. Make sure I find them. Whether any of us likes it or not, I’m a part of this and, like you said, he’s not about to let me off the hook. I’m in this to the end, and if you want to stop him, you’re just going to have to accept that you’re stuck with me, no matter how badly you despise me.”

  She cocked her head and pursed her lips, looked me up and down, then returned her attention to the hole.

  “I’m going first,” she said.

  “No,” Dray said. “I got this—”

  “I’m smaller than you are and have a better chance of being able to react quickly in such a small space. You’ll be like a dog trying to dig its way into a snake’s den in there.”

  His lips writhed. He said nothing for several seconds.

  “You see anything, you shoot first. Hear me?”

  She looked at him and something indescribable passed between them. I recalled Dray’s missing wedding ring and couldn’t help but wonder where their partnership ended.

  She shined her light into the hole, took several rapid breaths, and hauled herself up into the hole. She scurried forward on her elbows until her feet vanished into the darkness.

  Despite my earlier bravado, I’d never been more terrified in my life. Not just because I knew I would eventually have to follow her in there, but because I finally understood my role in this drama. I was the Dante to this monster’s Virgil, and it was my lot to follow him into the bowels of hell, knowing full well that the only way out was by traveling deeper into it and surviving an encounter with Lucifer himself, who, in Milton’s words, believed it was better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

  FOURTEEN

  Dray climbed up into the hole behind her, leading with his pistol. His shoulders barely fit inside and he was forced to use one elbow and his feet to propel himself deeper. He quickly developed a rhythm and vanished from sight. I stood alone in the room filled with bat carcasses and dried blood and contemplated the rationale behind directing me to his most recent victim first, then sending me to search for a victim who’d already been dead for several days by the looks of her, and with the intention of using me to guide the police into a lair he had invested considerable time into creating and in which he had spent what had to have been months, if not years, collecting and bleeding the bats. By doing so he had sacrificed this place. It was his no longer, which signified that he had as much blood as he would need and this site was no longer of any use to him.

  Maybe he’d sent a tip meant to lead me here first and I simply missed it. The odds were definitely against it considering I religiously followed up on every single tip, no matter how asinine, but I couldn’t entirely rule it out. If he didn’t, then why not send me here first? Why now? Was there some significance to the order or was there some sort of pattern to the sites of discovery beyond the nature of their abandonment?

  So far that was the lone commonality between the Metropolitan Building and the Eastown Theatre. They’d both been stunning buildings in their primes and left to rot following the riots and the white flight to the suburbs. The former was in a much nicer district of downtown, the latter in an area that had seemingly commenced its inevitable decline the day of its opening. One housed upscale shops and powerful business brokers clear up until the end, while the other was renowned for its raucous concerts and drug use long before it degenerated into a house of porn. As far as I could tell, the only thing they had in common beyond their physical state was a link to a better time, which brought me to my own involvement.

  My news site might not have been unique among the scores of others that had popped up in recent years, nor was it more visually appealing or significantly more informative. When it came right down to it, the only real difference between Wake the Puck Up, Hockeytown! and any of the others was the tone of the narrative. It wasn’t angry like some of the others or overtly defiant like most. What separated my writing—and, by extension, the writing of those I commissioned—from all of the others who told the same stories with different words, was an almost melancholic longing for the past and a sense of its importance to our future, of which I tried to speak with a measure of hope, despite my growing sense of resignation. It was that voice that had drawn the killer to me. It had spoken to him on a personal level. It was the voice he wanted to tell his tale because deep down he viewed himself in the same way as I viewed this city: abounding with potential before the world turned its back on it and left it to rot.

  Then again, he could have just been bat-shit crazy and I was ascribing human traits to an animal.

  Whatever the case, I still couldn’t envision the story he expected me to write.

  “Webb.”

  Dray’s voice echoed from deep in the building. I approached the hole and shined my light inside. Brick and concrete dust covered the ground. The walls were coarse and jagged. I saw a light far ahead. A shadow passed across it, momentarily blocking the orifice through which it shined.

  I tried to respond, but produced little more than an unintelligible croak. I cleared my throat and tried again.

  “Yeah. I’m still here.”

  I knew what he wanted me to do. My body was reluctant to oblige, though. Not until he said the words. It was Aragon who spoke them.

  “We could probably use your help.”

  My heart was beating so hard it made a rushing sound in my ears when I crawled into the tunnel. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, as though the air were being sucked from the building, which would soon crash down upon me. I tasted dust and smelled mildew and couldn’t for the life of me make my body move as fluidly as Dray’s. I flopped and flailed like a trout on the bank and was on the verge of panic when the light resolved ahead of me and I saw their silhouettes limned by their flashlights.

  The passage seemed to go on forever. I had the vague understanding that some portion of the floors above had collapsed and the tunnel had been carved through the rubble. I couldn’t even be certain I was still on the third floor, considering the ground sloped progressively downward. I reached a point where it abruptly fell away from me and I had to slide down a slanted chunk of concrete before I could get my feet under me. The rubble overhead barely allowed me to rise to a crouch, from which I was able to maneuver my torso through a narrow gap that opened onto a room that had been spared the de
vastation. Or at least most of it.

  There were no windows and whatever plaster once covered the brick walls now formed a crust on the wooden floor, between the cracks of which I could see the hint of rusted girders. The air was warm and tasted as though someone else had already breathed it.

  I’d lost all sense of space and direction. If I had to wager a guess, I’d say I was now on the second story and in the suite closest to the narrow rear of the building. The ceiling sloped downward toward me from above an intact doorway, through which I could see the lights that had drawn me here.

  I dusted myself off and made it as far as the threshold before stopping dead in my tracks.

  In the center of the room was a wooden coffin made from weathered gray planks that appeared to be on the verge of petrifying. The lid was crafted from the same thick boards, through the cracks of which someone would have been able to see the body inside, or, I imagined, someone would have been able to see the outside while lying on his back inside. It had been slid aside just far enough to reveal that the inside was filled with dark earth. Not just dirt, but soil, the kind of rich, fertile loam you would expect to find on a farm, not in downtown Detroit.

  I looked at Dray, who caught my stare and then shined his light toward the far end of the dark room. His beam refracted into myriad colors that sparkled from the walls and cast a shadow onto the wall that seemed to writhe in exquisite agony.

  A figure stood over the coffin, a sculpture made entirely from the bones of different species of animals. It was an abomination. There were no other words to describe it. It was as though someone had raided a slaughterhouse and attempted to fashion his macabre trophies into the personification of evil and instead imbued them with the real thing.

  It was human in proportion, yet there was nothing even remotely human about it. The lower legs were those of a goat, bent backward at the knees and complete with fur-rimmed hooves. The upper legs and pelvis must have come from something larger like a deer, or maybe an elk. Its ribcage and spine were an obvious amalgam of at least three different species, cemented together with some sort of clear resin or caulk. Its upper arms were those of a cow, while its forearms and hands appeared to be those of a large dog. Each malformed palm clenched a handful of precious stones to match those set into the eye sockets of its bull skull, complete with horns that curved upward like most common depictions of the devil.

  Its gem-eyes sparkled with an eerie sentience.

  “So what do you make of this?” Dray said.

  I couldn’t speak, nor could I look away from the wall behind the statue, which had been decorated with more animal skulls than I could count, all of them leering at me through hollow sockets from which red gemstones glowed with sheer malevolence.

  FIFTEEN

  Despite the marrow-deep exhaustion, sleep eluded me. Every time I closed my eyes I saw that horrible skeletal creature standing before the wall of his crimson-eyed kin and quickly opened them again. My apartment felt foreign to me, as though in my absence someone else had lived his entire life within these walls and left it changed in ways I couldn’t quite articulate. Everything looked the same and yet nothing looked familiar. I was out of synch with the world around me, like a needle skipping from a record where once all of the grooves had been smooth.

  Red and blue lights crept across the ceiling from the gap above the curtains as a police cruiser screamed past on Orleans, reminding me that the vinyl continued to turn, regardless of my feelings on the matter.

  I sat up and let my head hang. The blood rushing away from it made it throb and summoned a wave of dizziness. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten anything more substantial than an apple—or at least the last time I’d kept it down—and my back ached from a lack of fluids.

  There’d been a rear exit from that horrible room. Dray had felt the movement of air from around a rusted panel on the wall where once the evaporative cooler had blown cool air into the former back office of an early Nadine Jewelry wholesale outlet. The unit had been mounted onto an odd little tarred roof over a triangular rear entrance to the first level. It easily slid aside and from the roof we were able to hop right down onto a Dumpster, which had been rolled right up against the side of the building beneath it.

  I was by no means an imposing physical specimen, but I figured even I would have been able to drag a body up there and through the hole behind the cooler. Either the killer had left his car parked there for some length of time while he worked or climbed back out and moved it to another location. Whatever the case, someone could have seen him. Someone should have seen him. From where we exited the building, I could clearly see the back of two bars and a restaurant, and all the way to Park Avenue and Grand Circus Park down the alley between the Madison Building and the Broderick Tower.

  Aragon was kind enough to arrange for an officer to drive me around the block and drop me off at my car, unnoticed by the few remaining reporters, and did so without a single insult. She’d even arranged for me to get my phone back once the CSRT was done with it. I’m not sure if I’d passed some sort of test with her or if she was simply as worn down as I was, but I was grateful for it. There was no further reason for me to be there. The CSRT had moved into the nether regions under the safe and there was more than enough to keep them busy down there for the foreseeable future. I didn’t envy them their task. Even the limited amount of time I spent down there had left me feeling tainted and in desperate need of a shower, some Ajax, and a box of steel wool.

  While the manner in which he presented it might have been designed to shock, the message had been simple and crystal clear. At the heart of Milton’s Paradise Lost was his thinly veiled contempt for the Catholic Church and what he considered the idolatrous practice of constructing elaborate cathedrals to serve as places of worship. It wasn’t so much the buildings themselves to which he objected, but that they served as massive gilded idols to which the love of God invariably became misplaced and adhered, storehouses for statues and relics in which people falsely invested their faith.

  The message wasn’t in the bones; it was in the jewels. The estimated value of the gemstones in that one room had been close to five thousand dollars. Not a fortune in the grand scheme of things, but a considerable amount to throw away to prove a point.

  The killer believed man worshipped money. It was money that had drawn a veritable army of jewelers and the idolaters who prayed at their glass-encased altars when the Metropolitan first opened. It was the removal of that money from the local economy by the auto companies that caused the population to abandon the city and follow the jobs to the suburbs, leaving downtown a skeletal monument to the city’s greed, a collection of forgotten idols at the feet of which people no longer worshipped. It was the absence of that money that had turned the city into a living hell.

  Try as I might, I could find nothing wrong with his message, and that was the reason I couldn’t sleep. It was the same message I’d been preaching, although without the religious overtones, for nearly five years. I understood the monster. Worse, I admired him in a way. Not for what he’d done, but for his passion. He and I were more alike than I wanted to admit, and it scared the living hell out of me.

  I got up and stood in my boxers in front of the open refrigerator, its light washing over me and casting my shadow across the floor. Nothing looked remotely appetizing and the prospect of trying to force anything down made me want to throw up, a sensation I now associated with the smell of decomposing bodies and the buzzing sound of fat black flies.

  I closed the door and sat down at my computer. Just yesterday I’d felt like a revolutionary, crying havoc and letting slip the metaphorical dogs of war. Now I felt old in a way I couldn’t define and realized that what I’d thought of as warning shots fired across the bows of the establishment, a call to arms for my fellow urban denizens, were little more than spitwads in a hurricane.

  No good could come from booting up my system, I knew, and yet I did it anyway. There would be no new stories tonight, no
blog posts. For the first time in my life words failed me. My mission had turned into a crusade, which, while all consuming in its self-righteousness, amounted to less than nothing next to the lives of two young girls. I couldn’t help but feel some amount of responsibility for their deaths, irrational though it seemed. Their killer had bound them to me in death and in doing so issued a direct challenge. He wanted his story to be told and he wanted me to be the one to tell it. The problem was he was still in the process of dictating it and the burden for any subsequent murders would fall squarely on my shoulders.

  The police made a positive ID on the girl while I was still there, although they had yet to made a formal public announcement, pending notification of her family. Her name was Alexandra Snow, Alex to her friends, and she’d been missing for more than a week. I searched her name and found the picture of a vibrant young woman with her entire life ahead of her. Her hair was so blond it was almost white, her eyes the blue of a mountain stream. In many ways, she reminded me of Lindsay DeWitt. She had the same aura of innocence about her. They were both beautiful, but not the kind who appeared to tread upon their looks. It was the kind of beauty that invited you into its radiance and made you want to stay because of how you felt in its reflective glow, not because of anything as base as biological urges.

  Alex was four years older than Lindsay and a first-year grad student at the University of Toledo College of Medicine and Life Sciences, just across the border in Ohio. Her fellow students held candlelight vigils on campus every night and plastered her picture all over town. The school itself had offered a six-figure reward for any information leading to her safe return.

  Unlike the case of Lindsay DeWitt, there was no doubt she had been abducted. Her car had been found two blocks from the UT Medical Center, in a parking lot behind the Southland Shopping Center at approximately 2:10 a.m., an hour after the end of her shift. The driver’s side door had been left wide open and the engine running. Police found her UT hospital badge on a lanyard under her car and her purse open on the passenger seat. Her wallet was left behind with more than two hundred dollars in cash and several credit cards. They found a can of pepper spray beside the emergency brake and blood on both the steering wheel and the dashboard. There were no security cameras behind the mall and those at the medical center had followed her vehicle only as far as West Campus Drive.