The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels

by Travis Luedke

  “Bentley.”

  “Did you find her?” he asked, peering over his bifocals.

  “Amber’s his daughter, Bentley. She’s eight years old.”

  29.

  I paced a hole in the staff lounge’s cheap blue carpet, trying to focus. We needed Tony Vance’s home address, and fast. While Bentley searched the net, coming up empty, I contemplated a dozen angles and discarded them all. My watch read a quarter after seven; even if I could sweet-talk somebody at the company office into giving me what I needed, there wouldn’t be anyone there at this hour to answer the phone. Then I looked back to my screen, still showing Tony’s profile, and snapped my fingers.

  The last picture in the album was a shot of little Amber, cherub-cheeked and triumphant, at an elementary school gymnastics competition. A brightly painted sign in the background told me what I needed to know.

  “Bentley, look up an address for Springlake Montessori.”

  “She won’t be at school. It’s far too late—”

  “No,” I said, sitting down beside him. “I just need to know where it is. The founders of Carmichael-Sterling Nevada, Lauren and her inner circle, are all transplants from the company’s Seattle office. They bought Sheldon Kaufman a house—that’s how I connected the Kaufmans with Carmichael-Sterling in the first place. I’m betting everybody got one. I can get a list of all of the company’s properties from the Clark County assessor’s office, but not who lives there.”

  Bentley nodded, typing away. “And Tony Vance’s home will probably be the property nearest his daughter’s school.”

  “Exactly. It’s the best lead we’re going to get.”

  “What are you going to do?” he said, furrowing his brow.

  “Stop him. That girl isn’t dying tonight. Not on my watch.”

  Ten minutes later we had an address. I jotted it down on a scrap of paper and pushed my chair back.

  “I need you to round up whoever you can,” I told Bentley, “and get over to Spengler’s house. Someone’s going to come looking for him sooner or later, and the cops won’t be far behind. Do a locust job.”

  A locust job was the magician’s equivalent of erasing the porn from your dead buddy’s hard drive before his mom sees it. They’d scour Spengler’s house for any enchanted relics, journals, grimoires, and occult ciphers, anything that could raise a citizen’s eyebrow. It was never hard to enlist folks for that kind of work—and not just to protect our shared secrets. In a locust job, you keep what you take.

  I drove to the address I hoped was Tony Vance’s house. I didn’t pray, as a rule. If there was a God, we weren’t on speaking terms, and I didn’t think either of us cared what the other had to say. Still, pushing the pedal hard enough to make the engine whine, streetlights strobing across the dirty windshield, I was tempted. Then I remembered God’s track record when it comes to helping out little kids.

  I was the only person fighting for Amber Vance’s life tonight. Succeed or fail, what happened was on my shoulders alone.

  #

  Judging from the size of Tony’s house, being Lauren Carmichael’s lackey paid well. A low brick wall, more ornamental than protective, encircled his estate and its emerald green lawn. I ditched my car on a side street and came in from the back, hopping the wall and staying low as I skirted a playground. A swing dangled from rusty chains, listlessly rocking in the wake of a chill night breeze.

  I peered into the garage. A new Mercedes sat on the other side of a small window, but the garage was big enough for two cars. No way to tell if Tony was home or not. Worse, since he’d sat out the fight at Spengler’s place, I had no idea what he was capable of. I’d just have to improvise.

  A place this nice would have an alarm system on the front door, especially if Tony was hiding some of Lauren’s dirty little secrets inside. I wasn’t prepared to deal with that kind of security. My best bet was the door connecting the attached garage to the rest of the house. Most people don’t think to alarm those, and even fewer are in the habit of locking up when they come and go because they think their rolling garage door can keep them safe. Bad assumption.

  I scavenged a fist-sized rock from the yard, one that came to a blunt point, and wrapped my coat around it to help muffle the noise. A few firm taps broke out a corner of the garage window. I paused, listening for the whine of an alarm. Nothing stirred but the wind. A few minutes later, methodically busting out the glass and clearing the broken window one shard at a time, I’d made an opening big enough to climb through.

  I slipped through the window and onto the garage floor, crouching in the puddle of broken glass. Ears perked, I crept to the inside door and gave the knob a slow turn. Bingo. Light streamed from a silver wall sconce in the inside hallway, casting a warm glow against the blue Victorian wallpaper.

  Drifting from room to room like a ghost, I searched for signs of life. The plan was simple. If I found Amber first, I’d get her to safety any way I could and deal with the consequences later. If I found Tony first…well, I still hoped I could reason with him. He’d trudged along with the rest of the group, showing none of their enthusiasm or their bloodthirstiness, to the point that I wondered if Lauren had some kind of leverage over him. If I could turn him around, he’d be our best chance at shutting this whole thing down.

  I jiggled a doorknob in my hand. It was firmly locked. Odd, when the rest of the house lay wide open. Curious, I crouched and dug my lockpick case out of my pocket. The antique tumblers rolled over like a dog doing tricks. I let myself in. Shelves, drafting tables, and cluttered cubbyholes lined the walls of the octagonal study beyond the door, lit by a frosted-glass ceiling globe. The centerpiece of the room stood upon a wooden table, a scale model of the Enclave some four feet tall and built to exacting precision.

  I circled the model warily. Something about the scalloping spear of its tower, the reproduction so pristine I could see my warped reflection in the curve of its windows, set my teeth on edge. Little smiling people, refugees from a model train set, streamed into the black maw of the casino’s front doors. None were walking back out.

  A chrome thermos sat on the edge of a messy desk next to a half-finished mug of coffee. I touched the side of the mug. Still warm. If Tony and Amber were both gone, I needed to figure out where he’d taken her. Rummaging through the documents and clutter, leafing through bid bonds, construction reports, and tattered memos, my sense of uneasiness grew. I was no architect, but even I could see something was inherently wrong with the tacked-up blueprints. Stairwells leading to nowhere. Curving halls doubling back on themselves. Most of the plans were perfectly mundane, but the more I looked, the more the little details stood out, the incongruities that had no reason to exist.

  The corner of a book poked out from under a stack of drafts. The title caught my eye: Torments of the Inquisition. Most of the book was a dry history, the pages as pristine as the day they were printed. A fat chapter on torture methods though, illustrated with woodcuts and diagrams, had more highlights and margin notations than a college calculus textbook.

  “Reproduce w/16v electric motor, connect to pneumatic tube system.”

  “Plexiglas again—Meadow always wants Plexiglas.”

  “Hold design until L. does final work-up of the Throne. Still need de Rais’ help to finish the connecting patterns.”

  Tucked in next to the depiction of a ferocious, spike-lined chair for heretics was a sketch on engineer’s graph paper. Tony’s twenty-first-century version was lined with hypodermic needles and connected, at the back, to a cluster of rubber hoses. Flowery script on a yellow sticky note read, “Love the design, but can we make the whole thing transparent? -M.”

  I looked back at the scale model of the Enclave.

  What the hell are you people building? I thought, rummaging through Tony’s cubbyholes and shelves. I grabbed anything that looked relevant. Blueprint scraps, notes, their little catalog of torture, stacking it all up to take with me. Then I tugged open a drawer, and everything went wrong.
<
br />   It felt like that sickening stomach lurch as your car slides toward a collision, when you pump the brakes even though you know nothing is going to stop the impact. The drawer pulled out stiffly, too stiffly, and I looked down and saw the cord on the inside of the empty wooden nook just a second too late.

  The cord sprang free, slithering back into the wall. The study door slammed closed. I ran over and yanked on the knob, but a hydraulic arm at the top of the doorframe kept it wedged firmly shut. Tony’s mechanical genius extended to his own home: there were worse ways to trap a would-be thief. Taking a few steps back, getting ready to throw my weight at the door, I froze. From behind me came a soft, relentless hissing.

  I had snakes on the brain after Lauren’s death-curse, but the pungent scent rising in the room alerted me to a more dangerous threat.

  Gas!

  The lid of Tony’s thermos sat slightly open and off-center. I pulled at the flask and found it bolted to the table, nothing but a piece of clever camouflage. I lifted the lid to reveal a brass-tipped nozzle connected to a tube. It looked like he’d rigged an extension of the house’s natural gas line to pipe into the study. Inhaling natural gas isn’t fatal right away, but I needed to find a way out before the sheer amount of it choked the breathable air out of the sealed room.

  Shick, echoed a faint but insistent sound. Shick. A grating rasp every ten seconds or so, like the hammer of a gun falling on an empty chamber.

  Or the striker on a spark ignition, I realized, horror dawning as the entirety of the design became clear. Tony Vance was serious about protecting Carmichael-Sterling’s secrets. Serious enough to destroy his entire life’s work with a raging inferno, along with anyone locked in the room when his trap went off.

  Shick.

  30.

  I had to find that striker. I started to tear the room apart, trying to find the source of the sound, pulling out drawers and yanking down shelves, a whirlwind of paper around me as—

  Shick.

  I looked up. Inside the frosted globe on the ceiling, a black shadow slid sharply forward, the glass softly rattling. I climbed up on the table, balanced precariously next to the casino model, and strained toward it on my tiptoes. My fingertips slid feebly off the bottom curve of the glass. It was just too far to reach.

  One wing of the Enclave model, linked to the spear-like tower, sported a roof with a gentle slope. I put one experimental foot on it, adding a little weight. The model quivered but didn’t collapse. Delicately, moving as fast as I dared, I settled both feet on the tiny rooftop and gained a few inches of height. I held my breath as I unscrewed the frosted-glass sphere.

  The sphere came free. It slipped from my strained fingers and plummeted, smashing and sending shards of snowy glass skidding across the floor. A naked light bulb glared in my eyes as I studied the mechanism mounted beside it. It was simple, a chunk of flint mounted on a short iron rail across from a striking pad that resembled a thumb-sized match head. A timer rattled as the flint pulled back again to strike, riding the rail like the sole passenger on a roller coaster to hell.

  I grabbed the rail, feeling the mechanism jerk in my hand, just as the model roof caved in with a plastic crunch. Off balance, I shoved against the model, tipping the entire table and leaving me dangling one-handed with my feet kicking over empty space. If I let go of the rail, if I let the flint strike one more time, I was a dead man.

  With the muscles of my left arm burning for relief, I pulled myself up then dropped down hard, trying to use my weight to break the rail free. The mechanism bucked under my hand. Gears pinched my palm and threatened my failing grip. Seconds from letting go, I lifted myself up one more time and dropped. The rail came with me, breaking away from the device. It landed in the model’s crumpled remains as we both fell down.

  The smell of gas was overpowering now. I smeared tears from my eyes and rubbed my aching arm as I looked for a way out. With the trap disarmed, I was still far from safe. One spark, no matter how tiny, and this room would turn into a blast furnace. The hydraulic arm holding the door shut had regular, unshielded screws, but I didn’t have a screwdriver and ramming metal objects together didn’t seem like a smart move right now.

  The fallen model of the Enclave gave me an idea. I crouched over the section I’d stood on, the plastic roof caved in, and grabbed hold of a glossy wedge. It broke free in my hand, an improvised shiv with a killing edge. I gently slid the triangle of plastic against the first screw’s head, gripping it with both hands as I gave it a careful turn. The plastic bent but didn’t break. Gradually, slowly, the screw swiveled and rose from its housing.

  Three more screws and it was done. I took hold of the arm with a feather-light grip and pulled it away from the door. I held my breath. The study door whined on its hinges as it drifted open a crack.

  I left the papers behind. Out in the hallway, my eyes and throat burning, every instinct screamed at me to run. With the gas flooding free it wouldn’t take much to engulf the entire house in a screaming fireball. Still, I couldn’t leave yet. Tony and Amber were gone. If I hoped for the slightest chance of saving the girl, I had to find out where he’d taken her.

  The bedrooms lay empty, lived in but tidy. A lump tightened in my throat as I poked my head into Amber’s room, a swirl of white and pink. A well-loved teddy bear nestled between fluffy pillows. Hang on, kid, I thought, I’m coming. Down in the kitchen, a light flashed on the base of a wireless phone. One new message. I pressed the play button.

  “Hey hon,” said a tired-sounding woman, “it’s me. I’m stuck at JFK for another two hours. Worst airport, swear to God. Mom and Dad said they’d pick Amber up from school so, as promised, you have a nice long weekend all to yourself. No wild parties, young man, and by parties I mean working. Civilization will survive if the world’s best architect takes a couple of days off, I promise.”

  The rest of the words drifted past me like nonsensical syllables, blocked out as I scoured the drawers and cabinets looking for a clue. It was the perfect setup. With Amber staying at her grandparents’ house, Tony could strike at his leisure and have plenty of time to cover his tracks. I just hoped he planned to do it late tonight, when everyone would be asleep.

  The kitchen’s rummage drawer by the phone yielded a spiral-bound notebook filled with names, addresses, and phone numbers. On the first page, one neatly penned entry read “Mom & Dad.” Whose parents, though? Tony’s or his wife’s? I picked up the kitchen phone and dialed from there, so they’d see a familiar name on the caller ID.

  It rang once, twice, three times, each ring squeezing the breath from my lungs in an invisible fist. Come on, come on, pick up…

  “Jill?” an elderly woman said, answering the phone on the fifth ring. A television blared in the background, a laugh track underscoring a drum riff.

  “No ma’am,” I said, putting on a faint Southern drawl. “This is Officer Crosby with the police department. Now, don’t get alarmed, everything’s fine, but we’re responding to a break-in at this residence and we’re just calling to find the property owner. I understand you’re Jill Vance’s mother, is that correct?”

  “That’s right,” she said, her voice rising. “Oh, oh my, is everything all right? Is Tony there? Was he hurt?”

  “No, no, we think it was just some local kids. They got scared off by the alarm. We’re trying to get ahold of Tony. Now, according to our records, there’s a little girl named Amber who lives at this residence. We’re concerned because she isn’t here. Do you know if she would have come straight home after school?”

  “Oh, bless your heart for asking,” the woman said. “She’s staying with her grandfather and me for the weekend. She’s sitting on the couch right next to me, safe and sound.”

  My heart soared. I’m not too late. I’m not too late. I tore the page out of the address book, sticking it in my pocket.

  “Well, that’s great,” I said. “You just make sure to lock your doors and windows tight tonight. Thank you, ma’am.”

  I h
ung up, tossed the phone to the counter, and opened the sliding glass door leading to the back deck. I froze with my hand on the latch. I couldn’t leave the place like this, flooding with gas and ready to blow. Sooner or later somebody would come around, maybe a neighbor or another innocent bystander, and get a lethal surprise.

  Out on the deck, next to a high-end grill, I scavenged a couple of bottles of lighter fluid from a cardboard box. Good enough. I laid a trail from the hallway, through the kitchen and outside, snaking it along the grass until the final bottle gave its last sputtering spurt. The trail blazed to life with a touch of my lighter and streaked through the grass toward the house like a bullet from hell.

  I didn’t stay for the fireworks. I’d already lost too much time. The sky flashed yellow at my back as I got into my car. House windows shattered and doors blew out with an eardrum-pounding explosion. A car alarm went off, howling in the dark. I drove away.

  I hit the highway doing eighty, swerving up the ramp and redlining the engine the second I had a straight shot of clear road. I didn’t have a plan, just a mission. Priority one was grabbing Amber and stashing her someplace safe until I had a word with her father. He’d switch sides or I’d put him in the ground. Either way, he wasn’t laying a hand on that girl, not while I was still breathing.

  #

  Amber’s grandparents lived in a tract house on the outskirts of Vegas, a sleepy little neighborhood where retirees gathered to soak up the sun. Inside lights warmed the flimsy white curtains in the living-room window, and the faint flicker of a television set filled me with hope as I ran up the driveway. I pressed the doorbell, pressed it again, then hammered the heel of my hand on the door. I didn’t know what I’d tell them. I wasn’t thinking that far ahead.

  Nobody answered. I jogged around to the back of the house, to the kitchen door, and hammered on that one too.

  They’re old, I told myself. Maybe they can’t hear you, or they’ve got the television up too loud. I fished out my picks and went to work on the lock. If I stumbled in on them, I’d just have to keep them from calling the cops until I explained myself.