Black Sunrise

by Brett Godfrey

  Jensen chimed in over the channel. “What did you find?”

  Kenehan chose his words with care. “Digital images of women at shopping malls, taken covertly. None of Christie or Jackie, but women of similar ages. He’s been hunting in recent weeks. The shots are dated, going back to June of this year.”

  Kenehan remembered the headshot of Christie Jensen that had so captivated him days ago, and he replayed in his mind the image of her and Jackie dropping suddenly out the frame of the computer enhancement. He felt a powerful need to end the sick fuck who had taken these shots.

  It could be significant that none of the pictures depicted Christie or Jackie. Were they merely targets of opportunity? Maybe. Maybe not. If he had picked them at random, that could be a very bad sign. If the abductors had taken them for money, the chances were greater they would still be alive. But if they’d snatched them on a whim for sexual abuse or a thrill killing, the likelihood that they were either already dead or on their way to another country as part of a human trafficking operation was very real. This would be hard news to deliver, especially to Janet Jensen. Maybe he would just keep his thoughts between himself and the Brecht team. No, he thought, the Jensens and Sand deserved to know.

  He could see Christie Jensen through Pessoa’s eyes, as she must have looked to him, strolling through the mall with her stunning companion, scantily dressed on a hot summer day, innocent and oblivious to the threat, just as Pessoa had been oblivious to the fact that she was a human being. To Pessoa, she’d been nothing more than a desirable piece of meat.

  The world will be a better place when you’re gone, buddy.

  Partridge handed the photos back to Roady. “These are probably on the hard drive. We could find some metadata to confirm the dates written on these.”

  “Better yet, we may find something to help track the phone he took the photos with,” Kenehan said, folding the papers into his pocket. “We’ll take them along with the laptop.”

  A few minutes later, the team left through the front door, relocking it as they did so. One car remained behind to maintain watch over the house. Roady briefed Jensen and Sand on the way back, with Thomas and the rest of the team listening in. He knew Janet was listening as well, and that his words were cutting her heart apart.

  Chapter 35

  Beeman let the broken lock slip from his hands. Antonio flinched as it struck the floor, his eyes fluttering like a high-speed camera shutter, his thin shoulders flexing involuntarily. Beeman slowly mimicked the motion, shrugging and batting his eyes, absorbing the man’s terror and confusion the way a wine aficionado savors the bouquet of an expensive vintage.

  Antonio’s mouth hung open, and Beeman mimicked this also, dropping his jaw, while he watched the other man intently. Copying the soulless opening and closing of the man’s jaw, Beeman recalled a fleeting memory from years ago.

  Standing on a street corner. A drunk speeding through a red light, broadsiding another car. A horrific, satisfying impact. Beeman’s face pressed to the cracked glass, absorbing from inches away the final moments of the victim trapped within. He’d tried for days to duplicate the spastic convulsions of the mortally injured woman as she writhed in agony. Twitching, choking, blood spraying from her mouth as she tried to scream, her head lolling from side to side in a paroxysm of agony, panic and neurological shutdown.

  Physical mimicry was his way of preserving the raw power of what he had seen, internalizing the primal instinctive reaction to life-threatening events, splicing to his visual record a reconstruction of how it must have felt to wrestle intimately with the terror of imminent death.

  A paramedic shoving him away, depriving him of the chance to savor the moment when the woman finally succumbed and went still.

  He’d fantasized for years about what it would have been like to sit beside her in the car and touch her as her connection to this world dissolved, to absorb every detail as she went finally still, becoming an object rather than a being.

  What a shame.

  Death is life is death.

  With Dove, Kitten and Antonio, he’d planned to make up for the frustration of that lost opportunity. Now months of planning were ruined.

  What had happened was obvious. Kim and his men had removed the females from the cabin to contain what Kim saw as an insanely unpredictable situation that could wreck his own delicate undertaking.

  At that moment, as he stood there silently but absurdly mimicking Antonio’s visceral shock and confusion, Beeman realized that an interesting opportunity had presented itself. Antonio had instantly become a liability but still had some residual value. Antonio would have to suffice. He was all Beeman had, at least for now.

  So dessert without dinner—but better than nothing.

  The confusion and fear painted on Antonio’s face was a potent aperitif. The idiot was struggling to come to grips with how badly things had turned, trying in vain to process how suddenly his nightmares had become real. His future now opened up before him like the open jaws of a python; his moist eyes bored desperately into Beeman’s, silently imploring him to provide answers, reassurance, guidance—hope of any kind.

  Without me, he is less than nothing. For him, oblivion will be a promotion.

  Total panic had overcome Antonio. Beeman could help him hold himself together, but the very idea sickened him. It would be better to fuel this fire and see how hot it could burn.

  Beeman let a sorrowful, pathetic moan escape his narrow lips as he slowly turned away, presenting his back to Antonio.

  “Oh, no,” he crooned. “We’re caught. Our lives are over.”

  He reached out and pushed the door of the cage shut, as if to seal their fate.

  Antonio sank to his knees on the cold cement floor and buried his face in his shaking hands. Beeman watched as the man trembled and cried.

  “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” Antonio burbled. “We’re fucked, so fucked, completely—”

  “Yes,” Beeman said, his voice matching the tone of Antonio’s plaintive whine. “We. Are. So. Very. Fucked. Everything is out of control. You’ll be lucky if you even make it to prison.”

  Beeman knew that the dissociative anxiolytic compound he’d laced Antonio’s breath mints with would soon wear off; the average half-life of the drug was only ninety minutes. Antonio’s chemical protection would be gone, leaving his nervous system a jangling bundle of raw electricity. As the last vestiges of his chemical armor evaporated, his panic would worsen exponentially. What came next could be marvelous, but Beeman’s had to execute his quickly formulated plan with deft skill, lest a switch in Antonio’s primitive mind might flip and cause him to rally, to try to be strong. Beeman had seen signs of that kind of mental software in Antonio—such as when he’d become chivalrous with Kitten before he’d baited him into raping her. Beeman had to remain dominant, to keep Antonio completely overwhelmed.

  One can control, steer, feed and harness panic, like a wild horse.

  He turned to face the young idiot rocking back and forth on his knees and grabbed a fistful of his hair. “We’re dead!” he shouted into Antonio’s ear, savoring the man’s quivering. Then, more quietly, he added, “But wait! Maybe they’re still in the house?”

  With that, he darted for the stairs, fingering the hilt of the hunting knife on his belt as he bounded up to the kitchen. He turned and waited, planning to hobble Antonio—perhaps by slicing his hamstrings with his razor-sharp knife—before working on him more surgically. He drew the blade from its scabbard and held it behind his leg as Antonio came into the room, out of breath, his eyes still moist, but with a flicker of hope on his face.

  “It’s no use, Antonio,” Beeman said hopelessly, a trace of panic added for effect, crushing the hint of hope he’d planted as quickly as he’d instilled it. “They’re gone. They’d never just wait here for us to return. We’re helpless, totally helpless. We’re out of options. Nothing we can do. Those women will tell the whole story of how you abducted them.” Beeman took a deep sigh and softened his voice
. “Oh, well. At least the charges against me will be minimal. But you’ll go to jail for life.”

  “What—what do you mean?”

  Beeman tightened his grip on handle of the knife behind his leg and allowed some strength and calmness into his voice. “You beat and raped that girl, Antonio. You punched her senseless and you raped her, again and again. You tortured her. I kept my pants on the whole time. I never touched her. Not once.”

  “But you were part of—”

  “I have knowledge the government must protect, Antonio. Don’t you understand? The Army would kill to keep what I know secret. I’m the only one who knows what I do, and I’m the only one who can do it, so I’m actually a national treasure. I can afford the best of lawyers. I can cut a sweetheart deal. In the process, I can help convict a kidnapper and rapist. Rapists get long sentences, but it doesn’t matter, because in prison they only last a short time. It’s the code of the cellblock: rapists get raped. Again and again. Constantly. Brutally. Savagely. They are used by the biggest, strongest and most vicious convicts—homosexual sadists. Rapists usually commit suicide within the first year of incarceration. And you are a rapist.”

  Antonio’s jaw flapped silently once again. Tears trickled down his cheeks.

  Beeman kept on, speaking more slowly now. “I’m an old man, Antonio. A professor. You coerced me, threatened me. You bullied me. My employer won’t want me in prison, and neither will the government. At worst, I’ll spend a short time in a special facility—assuming I can’t cut a deal. But you know I can. You, on the other hand, hold no cards, none at all. You’ll be the guest of honor at a human sacrifice. It’ll lasts for months—before you pull the plug. You’ll eventually hang yourself.”

  “We’ve got to run, while we have the chance!” As Antonio shouted, drops of spittle hit Beeman’s face.

  “Run?” Beeman shrugged. “Where to? In this day and age? It’s impossible. Without Kim’s help, we can’t just disappear. And Kim won’t help you. You have nothing to offer—to him or to any prosecutor. You’re going to be a conviction statistic—that’s your only value. Kim will kill you. Or his men will. They’re professional mercenaries, working for the deadliest and cruelest man on the planet. He watches children being killed for entertainment while eating his dinner. They work for him. You are a threat to them.”

  Antonio began to hyperventilate. He turned and walked toward the living room, teetering, as if on the verge of passing out. Beeman followed, raising his hunting knife to the level of his belt. Antonio was perfectly positioned. When he turned into the living room, Beeman would come up behind him and slash through his hamstrings. Then he’d hack away the man’s hands and feet, stemming blood loss by cauterizing the stumps with a torch before performing real surgery. He’d begin cutting, slowly, torturing Antonio to death, talking to him the whole time. And listening. Listening so very carefully.

  It would be delicious.

  But Antonio never made it into the living room.

  He stopped abruptly in the entryway, looking beyond in even deeper shock at what he saw.

  Chapter 36

  “It will take some time to process the data,” Brecht said to Jensen. “You’ll be more comfortable resting at Robert’s house, or your hotel. We’ll call you as soon as we come up with anything.”

  Jensen shook his head. “If it’s alright with you, we’d rather stick around. We’ll keep out of your way.”

  “Sir?” Kenehan interjected. “Why not give Mr. Jensen a terminal and let him examine the data along with us. He’s trained to examine evidence. It’ll give him something useful to do.”

  Jensen gave Kenehan a look of gratitude, nodding and mouthing the words “thank you.”

  Brecht nodded. “Excellent idea, Mr. Kenehan.” Thomas guided Jensen to a chair at one of the workstations. Jensen had analyzed data from many computer hard drives during his years as a commercial litigator. He was exceptional at fitting pieces together, finding connections others missed. It was one of the abilities that had made him wealthy. He began opening folders and files, working his way through the data volumes they’d mounted on his desktop.

  Pessoa, they’d learned, was an odd-job man, working intermittently as a limo driver, supplementing his income with occasional construction work, hanging drywall, moving furniture, planting sod, painting houses and performing other day work. He’d stored some rudimentary floor plans on his computer, made by a bare-bones architectural program.

  “I’ve got the digital photos Roady found,” one of the technicians reported. “The mall girls. They date from the five-week period before the girls disappeared.”

  Jensen’s mind whirled.

  Kenehan had taken Brecht aside and told him of his belief that the lack of photos of Christie or Jackie meant their abduction had probably been a spur-of-the-moment choice, rather than a ransom kidnapping, and how that might portend a bad outcome. Brecht had agreed, but they’d kept this concept to themselves to protect the Jensens from added stress—at least for a while.

  “Check them carefully to see whether any are of Jackie or Christie,” Brecht ordered. “Backgrounds as well as key subjects. Be thorough. Use facial recognition. Check every person in every image.”

  “Who’s looking at his email and word processing?” Jensen inquired.

  “Him,” Brecht replied, pointing to the tech opposite Jensen.

  “Seems like we should cross-reference our findings, in case something that looks innocuous has meaning in relation to something else,” Jensen suggested.

  “We are,” Kenehan assured him. “They’re making entries into a database, tagging metadata and running it through an AI engine.”

  Jensen nodded, rubbing his eyes. Of course, they would have thought of that. Compared to these specialists, he was likely to add little of value on his own, despite his experience handling computerized evidence. Brecht was humoring him by giving him access to a terminal. To avoid duplication of effort, Jensen decided to examine the files less likely to draw the scrutiny of the technicians.

  He opened the files for home remodeling projects, asking himself even as he did so how this kind of data could possibly be of help.

  Then it hit him: Pessoa might have constructed a place to keep his victims.

  If Pessoa had been meticulous enough in his planning to photograph potential subjects, he must have made other plans as well; he was obviously comfortable with his computer, so it was conceivable these architectural files might yield useful data.

  What kind of files would answer two questions?

  “He must have had a place to put them, and he had the help of at least one person,” he muttered to himself. “Where? Who?”

  “Exactly,” Sand said.

  “But why two victims? Why double the risk?”

  “Double the pleasure, double the fun? Maybe he’d been looking for a pair of women they could take together. There might be a specific reason.”

  Janet spoke for the first time since the raid, her voice very soft. “A specific purpose? That would support an argument that they’re still alive, wouldn’t it?”

  “They are still alive.” Jensen met his wife’s eyes. “At least Christie is.” Then he looked at Sand. “They both are.”

  Feeling silly, he went back to opening the architectural files, of which there were about twenty. Five minutes later, Jensen came upon a file that captured his attention. Fighting down his fear, he called out to the group. “You’d better have a look at this.”

  The others gathered behind him. On his screen was an image of a basement, divided into two rooms. The image depicted a smaller compartment in one of them. It bore the label “chain link cage,” but the label was unnecessary. The program displayed a three-dimensional cage made of chain link fencing over metal bars in an inset at the top right corner. It listed quantities and measurements at the bottom and even itemized the prices.

  “That could be a dog cage, a kennel?” one of the technicians observed.

  Sand turned to him, exci
tement on his face. “A kennel with welded-in roof and a toilet? I don’t think so, son. That’s a cage for human prisoners.”

  Silence reigned for several seconds.

  “There’s a box for the job address here, but it’s empty,” Jensen said. “We’ve got to find out where this work took place.”

  “Wait,” Jennifer Takaki blurted. “I think I saw something.” All eyes turned to her. “An email—something about a basement.” As she spoke, she turned to her monitor, typing and clicking with a speed that only younger people trained from birth on computers can match.

  The techie generation takes charge. No more jokes about fucking millennials.

  A minute later she spoke again. “Here it is!”

  The group moved to hover behind her. The email read as follows:

  From: eagle666@mailstore.com

  To: wolf666@earthlink.net

  Subject: basement party

  44 Mountain Top Drive. 6pm.

  “No date?” Jensen asked.

  “It was scrubbed from the metadata. I don’t usually see that,” Takaki explained.

  Janet spoke. “Wolf? Eagle? 666? What do you suppose that means?”

  “Six-six-six. Biblical. Mark of the Beast,” Sand filled in. “‘Wolf’ and ‘eagle’ are probably self-assigned call signs. How these assholes see themselves. Psychological profilers would have a field day with this, including the design of the cage.”

  Takaki raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

  Sand added with a thin smile. “You all amaze me. Really. I know you are trained in that stuff. But to a hayseed like me, it seems clear these men are acting out a sick fantasy, filling in for a sense of inadequacy. Could be cult stuff.”

  “Look in Pessoa’s Outlook contacts for that email address,” Thomas said.

  “Yes, sir,” Takaki answered. “Holy shit, sir.” A window opened on her screen.