“Lieutenant,” I started. “The front door opens into what appears to have been a moderate-sized living room. Maybe fifteen feet wide by fifteen deep, best guess. There’s trash everywhere, but I don’t recall any major obstacles. On the back wall, there’s an arched doorway that leads directly into a hallway running parallel to the room. If you go to the right, it T’s with another corridor coming in on the left. Down that corridor, there is a charred door that leads to the basement. It’s on the right, about mid way.”
“What about the back?” Penczak asked.
“Sorry, I’m afraid that’s all I have.”
“That’s all right. It’s more than we had a minute ago,” he replied. “So how do you know all this? Have you been in the house?”
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean, sort of?”
Ben reached over and snatched the cell phone from my hand. “Trust me, Lieutenant, you don’t want ‘im to explain it. Are you ready to go?”
“We’ve got spotters on the house. There hasn’t been any activity for almost fifteen minutes now, so we’re setting up to move into position soon.”
“Good deal,” Ben grunted. “We’ll be there in five.”
“We’ll hold the party until you get here.”
“Yeah, thanks,” he replied with a definite note of sarcasm. “Captain Albright show up yet?”
“Not that…” The lieutenant’s reply was cut short by a burst of static and a voice in the background. When he spoke again he simply said, “Hold on…”
There was a clatter as if the cell phone was dropped, or at least tossed onto a hard surface. Over the tinny speaker, we could hear the muffled sounds of physical activity along with several unintelligible words being barked. Even though we couldn’t make them out, the brevity and tone told us they were probably a series of commands.
“What’s happening?” I asked Ben.
“Dunno, but it doesn’t sound good.”
We exited the highway and shot through an intersection, slowing only enough to avoid a collision and make a quick right. A languid forever later, a voice came back on the line.
“Storm, you still there?”
“Yeah, Madden, what’s goin’ on there?”
“It’s gone to hell in a hand basket,” she replied. “A spotter just put eyes on a woman entering the back of the house. He’s pretty sure it was Captain Albright. SWAT is already moving.”
“Goddammit…” Ben moaned. “Don’t you have a friggin’ perimeter set up?”
“Of course we do,” she replied harshly. “We have no idea how she breached it.”
“What a fuckin’ mess,” my friend huffed.
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
“We’re about three minutes out,” Ben told her. “Do what ya’ gotta do.”
He snapped the phone shut then tossed it onto the console as he slowed at another intersection then quickly accelerated the van while threading it through the cars that were still coming to a halt.
CHAPTER 32:
Three minutes became five when Ben missed a left turn from his hastily scribbled directions, and we were forced to double back up to the main thoroughfare from a narrow dead-end street. A quick flash of his badge saw us through the vehicular barricade at the end of South Millston, and thirty seconds later we had coasted down the block-long hill to a cluster of emergency vehicles scattered haphazardly around the T intersection at the bottom.
Splashes of luminance played across the fronts of the houses from active lightbars, casting an angry harshness across the entire scene. However, the strobing lights seemed to be the only things garish about the tableau. Everything-and everyone-else appeared to be almost somber.
Ben levered the van into park then switched off the engine as he watched the uniformed officers milling about in the street. On the sidewalk we could see a few members of the SWAT team who appeared to be casually chatting, their weapons pointed toward the ground in a somewhat relaxed posture.
“Yeah…” my friend breathed. “It’s all over but the paperwork.”
I scanned the area as I unlatched my seatbelt and allowed it to slowly recoil through my fingers. The metal buckle eventually struck the upper stop with a dull thunk as if to highlight his comment. After several seconds and multiple sweeps with my eyes, I said, “I don’t see Albright anywhere.”
“Yeah…me neither,” Ben muttered with a slight nod. “And that ain’t good. Let’s just hope she’s either bein’ a nuisance or warmin’ a seat in the back of a patrol car.”
We climbed out of the vehicle and into the cold night air. There was a palpable chill that transcended the physical, for me at least. I glanced over at Felicity as she slid the door shut on the side of the van, and from the way she shivered then cast her eyes around, I could tell that she was feeling it too.
“Detective Storm?” a questioning female voice called out from several yards away.
I heard my friend respond, “Yeah. You Sergeant Madden?”
By the time Felicity and I came around the front of the vehicle to join him, Ben was facing a sprightly, uniformed woman with a shoulder length shag of medium brown hair. She was resting one forearm casually atop her high-riding sidearm with the thumb of her other hand hooked into her belt. Being of average stature like the majority of the people on this planet, she was forced to look up at the tall Native American cop in front of her.
They had dropped their voices back down to a normal level, so the ambient noise of radios and other officers kept us from making out their conversation until we drew close. We probably hadn’t missed much, but when we were only a few steps away, the first intelligible thing we heard was the tail end of a sentence from Madden. “…still inside. I’ll warn you, it’s not pretty.”
“It never is,” Ben sighed.
“These two with you?” Madden asked, leveling a stone-faced gaze on us as we stopped near Ben.
He nodded. “Yeah. They’re consultants for Major Case.” He wagged his index finger between us. “Rowan Gant, Felicity O’Brien. This is Sergeant Madden, Overmoor Police.”
“Sergeant,” I said, reaching out and briefly shaking her hand. Felicity did the same.
Madden lowered her forearm back to its waist level prop then jerked her head toward the house. “I’m not sure what kind of consultants you are, but I was just telling Detective Storm it’s definitely not for the squeamish in there.”
“Unfortunately we’ve seen our share,” I replied.
“Sorry to hear that.”
“So, how many?” Ben asked.
“Two that they’ve found, and that’s counting the one Captain Albright shot,” she replied, focusing back on him. “Both of them are in the basement. The upstairs is pretty much empty, but they’re going through it again just to be sure.”
“Was it a clean shoot?”
She shook her head. “I’m not the one to ask. It was already going down when SWAT made entry. We heard two shots coming from the interior. Sergeant Gordon was first in, and from what I understand, he saw what was probably a muzzle flash light up the stairwell. But he was still in the hallway and hadn’t made it to the basement door yet.”
“Same weapon?”
She shrugged. “One of the vics has two holes in him, center mass. Two shots, two holes, so that’s how it looks.”
“He have a weapon on ‘im?”
“That’s being determined,” she offered carefully, glancing at us then back to him. “We’ll know more as soon as they talk to Captain Albright.”
“Yeah,” my friend muttered in response to the veiled comment. “I got ya’… So how is Albright doin’ anyway?”
Madden shook her head. “I’m not really sure. Physically she looks fine, but she hasn’t said much. Just surrendered her weapon, flashed her badge, and then sat down in a corner. They’re working on bringing her out right now.”
“Yeah, well I’m sure ya’know one of the vics is prob’ly one of ‘er relatives. Her…” He gave a barely perceptible pause
as he caught himself and then quickly finished the sentence with, “Niece.”
“Would that be Judith?”
“Yeah.”
Madden shook her head again. “Then I don’t think so. That’s about the only thing she has said so far. Where are you, Judith?”
“Hmmph,” he grunted as he furrowed his brow. Then he asked, “So, you okay with us goin’ in?”
“Let me check with the crime scene guys just to be sure,” she said. “The scene is pretty straightforward as far as the physical evidence goes, so I doubt there will be a problem.”
The sergeant left us and engaged in a short conversation with someone who appeared to be the technician running the scene. He glanced up in our direction as she pointed at us and then gave her a quick nod. A few seconds later she returned, pausing briefly to point us out to someone else.
“Sign in with Officer Fisk,” she told us, gesturing in the direction of the uniformed man she had most recently spoken with. “He can give you shoe covers and gloves too.” Then she leveled her gaze on Felicity and me. “Are you two really sure you want to go in there?”
“I never want to,” I sighed through a heavy frown. “But I do my job.”
“Yeah…” She nodded. “I hear you on that one.”
“Ya’know, this is pretty much over,” Ben said, looking over at us. “You can prob’ly skip it… I don’t think anyone’ll blame ya’, and you’ve already done what the brass asked ya’ to do.”
“No,” I replied. “I’m going to need to go in.”
“TZ?” he questioned.
I didn’t miss the inherent meaning behind the initials. “Yeah. Pretty much.”
He shot a glance at my wife. “Firehair?”
“Aye,” she said with a slight nod. “I need to be there for Rowan.”
“You gonna need any salt?” he asked.
Sergeant Madden cocked an eyebrow and gave Ben an odd look.
Felicity nudged me, so I glanced at her then shook my head.
“No,” she replied. “Not here.”
“Yeah, okay…” Ben said with a nod. “Then let’s get this over with.”
I could feel Sergeant Madden’s curious gaze burning into our backs all the way to the door.
*****
The upstairs interior of the house was just as I had earlier described it. What I had seen of it in the vision, anyway. The basement itself was no more and no less than I expected. It was in large part barren. Little more than a low-ceilinged rectangular room with pock marked cement walls and peeling paint-and of course, the two slowly cooling bodies that occupied it.
I had seen worse, but that didn’t make the garish scene any easier to look at. The first horror to befall us when we reached the bottom of the stairs was the nude corpse of a young woman, hanging upside down from the rafters. Her flesh was pallid and so devoid of color as to appear ghostly, just as we had seen before. Her arms were bound tightly behind her in such a way as to bend her shoulders back into what had to be a painful curve. As with the two victims resting in metal drawers downtown, a starkly defined swan tattoo stood out on her right upper arm.
The odor of the musty basement mingled with the smell of old smoke from the fire that had partially destroyed the upper level. A sharp note of urine pierced through the aged funk, most likely where one or both of the victim’s bladders had evacuated upon death. As bad as it was, the intermingled malodor was an almost welcome change to the sickening stench permeating the atmosphere upstairs. It turned out that my stomach-churning ethereal brush with improperly prepared liver was nothing as compared to how it truly smelled in this plane of existence. I was beginning to think I would have to swear off the dish for some time to come.
Bright flashes from a camera strobe burst every now and then as a crime scene tech documented the sadistic tableau. I flinched upon the first then barely noticed when the second and third erupted to cast harsh shadows across the walls. Albright had already been taken out of the house by the time we entered, so it was just the corpses, him, and us down here. However, in some odd sense I felt all alone.
I stood motionless for a full minute, staring at the woman hanging from the rafter above. The crown of her head was only inches from the floor, her blue-black, stringy hair hanging down and splayed out behind her across the filthy cement like the strands of an old cotton mop tossed carelessly aside.
Still mute, I continued slowly around the suspended corpse. As I reached her left side, a plastic tube came into view. It was taped against her neck where it terminated in what appeared to be a large gauge needle piercing a vein. The opposite end was still dangling inside the mouth of a glass gallon jug, which was almost half full of red fluid. It didn’t take deep thought to figure out exactly what it was.
Glistening shards of a similar vessel were shattered in an outwardly showering pattern nearby. The same red fluid was pooled around it, as well as splattered several feet in an oblique circle. A healthy measure of it was already drying to deep rust on the dead woman’s face. Tented evidence markers littered the area.
“You okay, Row?” Ben asked in a low voice.
I didn’t reply with words. I simply looked back over my shoulder and gave him a shallow nod.
“We in your way?” he asked, looking past me and addressing himself to the crime scene photographer.
I hadn’t been paying attention, but I now noticed that the flashing from his strobe had stopped. I looked over at him and saw that he was standing off to one side of the room, observing me. He wore a flat expression, neither curiosity nor surprise evident in his features.
“No,” he replied, shaking his head. “Just waiting.”
“Sorry. I can move,” I offered.
“You’re fine,” he told me. “I’m done with her.”
I glanced around the basement but remained quiet. I wasn’t quite sure what he was waiting for, but I didn’t figure it was my place to ask.
I returned my gaze to the latest victim, wondering who she was when she was alive. I found myself in an odd quandary. My headache had subsided before we even arrived at the top of the street. I was certainly grateful for the relief, but at the same time I cursed the fact that I now seemed completely numbed to the ethereal. If this woman’s spirit was trying to talk to me, I couldn’t hear her. I was completely unaware.
I closed my eyes and took in an even breath. There seemed as though there should be some humor in the fact that I was mentally cursing the sudden lack of something I considered to be a curse in and of itself. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find it.
I opened my eyes and turned away from the woman. Several feet across the room, against the back wall of the basement, the second body was resting. He was nondescript, though somewhat effeminate in appearance. His skin was almost as pale as that of his drained victim.
He was in a slouched sitting position, partially propped up and appearing almost as if he had simply sat down on the floor right where he had been standing and fallen back. The obvious evidence to the contrary was the dark, wet stain on his chest and the two large blood spray patterns on the wall just above his head. Their relative positions told me they would be right at chest level if the man had been standing.
I took notice of the fact that his arms lay relaxed at his sides, hands empty. Sergeant Madden’s answer to Ben’s query about a weapon rolled through my mind, and I now considered it in a different light. I didn’t see anything nearby that would qualify. Nor were there any of the evidence markers that were prevalent in other parts of the room.
I kept my gaze leveled on the dead man for a moment, looking into eyes that were staring out of darkly rimmed sockets. A trickle of blood was running from the corner of his mouth, and I had to wonder if it was his or the woman’s. Although his face was slack, there seemed to be a surprised look in his sunken eyes. But the perceived expression was all I had to work with. Even where he was concerned I could feel nothing.
No malevolence.
No insanity.
Nothing.
>
As we stood there I heard the sound of footsteps above us, creaking and thudding purposefully across the floor. A few seconds later they grew louder as they started down the stairs. Soon afterward, a uniformed officer stepped off at the bottom and gave Ben a nod.
“You Detective Storm?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Ben answered.
The officer regarded him for a moment. “We just finished talking to Captain Albright,” he said then raised an eyebrow and nodded toward Felicity and me. “Lieutenant Penczak said you’d probably want to clear your consultants out now.”
Ben gave him a shallow nod in return as something secretive passed between them in the silent gesture. Turning to me he asked, “You done, white man?”
In a slow turn, I surveyed the horror one last time. There was nothing left to see, and for some reason, nothing left to feel. I came back around to face him and gave my own curt nod. “Yeah… I’ve seen enough.”
“Thanks,” Ben told the uniformed cop as we walked toward the stairs.
“All good,” he replied.
We started up the rickety wooden staircase, and a quick flash caught the corner of my eye. I assumed that the tech was snapping pictures once again and that it was simply his strobe that grabbed my attention, but out of pure reflex I still paused and turned my head in that direction.
“Keep movin’, Row,” Ben urged, giving me a light push in the middle of my back.
I continued up the steps, but before the upper wall obscured my vision, I caught a second glint of light through the railings. The cop was now squatting next to the body of the dead man, and I was almost certain I saw what appeared to be a large butcher knife clutched in a cold, once empty hand.
As we topped the stairs, I distinctly heard the uniformed officer say, “Okay. You can take pictures over here now.”
CHAPTER 33:
I stood in the front yard of the house, looking up into the sky with a blank stare. Cops and crime scene technicians were still moving in and out of the front door behind me, but I paid them no heed. I was well out of their way, and my attentions were focused elsewhere at the moment.
Blood Moon argi-9 Page 27
