Her Every Fear
Page 18
She looked through the labeled keys again, picking up the one that was marked storage. She’d seen that key before, and assumed at the time that it was for some storage unit that either Corbin or his father had rented, but what if it wasn’t? What if it was for a storage unit in the basement of the apartment building? It didn’t seem likely that with apartments so large there’d be extra space for storage, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized that of course there would be. She gripped the key tightly between her fingers. Maybe that was why she’d found so little evidence of Corbin’s personal life in his apartment; it was all in his storage unit. Detective James had said that she’d be at the apartment in about an hour. Kate decided she had time to quickly check the basement and see what was down there. As soon as the idea entered her head, she knew she had to do it. It was a compulsion she was familiar with: if she didn’t look, then there was something terrible in the storage unit. She needed to look to make that terrible thing go away. And what was that terrible thing? The halved remains of endless murdered girls?
Kate tapped her fingertips together, dropping the key. It hit the slate floor with a snapping sound.
She picked it up and unlocked the kitchen door. Mrs. Valentine had told her, when she’d first given Kate the tour of the apartment, that the door in the kitchen led to the basement. Kate swung the door open, then found the switch, and a dim yellow light flooded the narrow, steep stairwell. Testing first to make sure that the door wouldn’t swing closed behind her of its own accord, Kate took the stairs down the three levels, the air cooling as she descended. At the bottom of the stairwell was an unlocked door. She pushed through and into the basement. She was expecting dim lighting and damp walls, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was a wide, uncluttered, well-lit space. The floor was spotless poured concrete, and the finished walls were painted an industrial gray. Along one wall was a row of water heaters, and opposite them was a series of wooden doors constructed from particleboard. The doors all had stenciled letters on them and were padlocked. Storage units. Kate found the door marked 3D and tried the key. It slid into the padlock. Kate turned it and the lock snapped open.
This is it, Kate thought, her mind careening down its path of atrocities. She touched her upper lip with a dry tongue.
She swung the door open on its well-oiled hinges. It was dark inside but not so dark that she couldn’t see what was in front of her. There wasn’t a shrine to Audrey, splattered in blood. There wasn’t a corpse, or even a pool of blood. There were stacked boxes, plastic crates of sporting equipment and CDs. Kate stepped into the space, let her eyes adjust. A barbecue with a bubbled metal lid gave the space the smell of dusty charcoal. Stacked along one wall were half a dozen cheaply framed posters. She flipped through them. One was a crude picture she recognized as an album cover for a band called Ween. It was a photograph of a woman’s torso. She was wearing a plastic belt with the band’s logo, and a shirt that just barely covered her breasts. Kate stared at it, transfixed but not knowing why. The other posters were primarily of Italian sports cars, the types of posters that would seem pretty cheesy even on the walls of a university dorm room. There was also a poster for Fight Club, and a poster that listed the Twelve Reasons Beer Is Better Than a Woman.
Kate opened the nearest box. It was filled with comic books in plastic sleeves. She pulled one out—The Fantastic Four—and put it back. The rest of the boxes contained comic books, as well, all preserved in plastic sleeves. One box also contained a stack of sports car magazines, and hidden within them, a well-thumbed issue of Penthouse. Kate had a moment of guilt, prying through Corbin’s things. She thought of her own closet in her flat, the box that contained all her old sketchbooks, including one that was dedicated to drawings of boy bands and unicorns. She hoped he wasn’t looking through those. Then again, Kate wasn’t looking just to satisfy a prurient interest; she was looking for evidence. And suddenly, having that thought, she felt ridiculous. The police would be here soon, also looking for evidence, and they actually knew what they were doing. And there was nothing here in the storage unit to see. It was just items that Corbin wasn’t quite ready to throw out yet. Everyone’s storage unit looked like that.
She left the unit and swung the door shut behind her, and felt a splinter from the cheap wood slide into her thumb. She immediately put her thumb in her mouth, then took a look. The dark splinter was visible under her translucent skin. She felt for its bottom ridge with her index finger and tried to push it out, but it was in deep. I’ll deal with it upstairs, she thought, and was about to relock the padlock, when she felt a sudden compulsion to look again at the posters. There had been something odd about the one of the girl with the large breasts. She opened the door and went to the posters, pulling it out. The frame was incredibly light. There was a darkish line that ran down the center of the poster. That was what had brought Kate back. The sides of the posters were held by thin plastic frames—Kate pulled the top one off, and the sides fell away. The thin transparent plastic covering the poster slid away as well, and Kate saw that the poster had been sliced down the middle. The line she’d seen had been a cut, and half the poster fluttered to the floor, landing face up so that Kate was looking at half a woman, severed down the middle.
The blood rushed from Kate’s head and she felt cold all over. She crouched, instinctively, to pick up the poster half and try to put it all back together, then abandoned the idea and decided to get out of the storage unit, out of the basement.
She backed away, shutting the door, and locking it this time.
She turned to go, but a flash of movement from the shadows behind one of the water heaters caught her eye. She stopped and listened, heard scratching noises, then crouched and saw Sanders emerge, something in his jaws. He turned toward her, his eyes two buttons of reflective yellow. She tried to make out what he had caught. It was either a small rat or a large mouse. He dropped it to the floor and it moved sluggishly away. Sanders leapt and pinned it under his paws. Then Sanders looked directly at Kate and hissed loudly.
Kate left the basement on hollow legs. What did the mutilated poster mean? Was it possible that the poster had been folded and had, over time, separated at the crease? No, not really possible. The poster wasn’t torn, it was deliberately cut. Deliberately cut, then reframed. Did Corbin have some kind of sick fantasy about mutilating a woman? A fantasy that he had finally enacted with Audrey Marshall? Kate reentered the apartment and stood for a moment, thinking, tapping her fingertips together in a deliberate pattern.
Back in her living room, Kate heard a commotion in the hallway. She looked through the peephole, just in time to see Detective James removing the police tape from Audrey Marshall’s door while a middle-aged couple—Audrey’s parents—waited quietly. They looked older than Kate would have imagined. The woman used one of those canes with a large four-pronged base. Maybe they’d had Audrey late, or maybe these were grandparents. With the tape clear and the door open, the detective led the couple into the apartment while two uniformed officers remained in the hall. Kate stopped watching, went to the kitchen to get a drink of water.
A knock came at the door, sooner than she expected, and she let in Detective James, plus one of the uniformed officers.
“I need to talk with you,” Kate said to the detective as she crossed the threshold.
“Okay. Let’s sit.”
The uniformed officer—a young black man with a shaved head—seemed to know what to do without being told. He went toward the kitchen, pulling on gloves. Kate tried hard to not look at the holstered gun on his belt.
The detective sat on the edge of the couch, smoothed out the legs of her black pantsuit, and said, “Are you okay? You look a little upset.”
“Was Audrey Marshall mutilated?”
The detective’s face didn’t change, but Kate thought she saw an alteration in her eyes. A look of interest, and also concern. “Where did you hear that?”
“I met a woman in a class I’m taking, and she told me that
she’d read it on the Internet. And then I heard from someone else that he’d also seen it online, in the comments section of an article that he’d read.” Kate was aware that she hadn’t mentioned that one of the sources of her information was Alan Cherney, but if the detective asked, she’d tell her. She’d decided to tell her everything.
Detective James nodded slowly at the information. She seemed to be considering her options. “Without going into too much detail, Kate, yes, Audrey Marshall, after she was dead, was cut in several places. I’m going to ask you to keep that information to yourself since we haven’t released it to the press yet. Although clearly someone has.”
“Okay, I promise,” Kate said. “How was she cut? I mean, where was she cut?”
“Why do you want to know that?”
“I’m pretty sure that Corbin, that my cousin Corbin, had something to do with Audrey’s death. I went down to the storage units in the basement—”
“In the basement here in this building?”
“Yes.”
“When did you do this?”
“Just this morning. Just now, before you got here.”
Kate told her what she’d found, describing the poster of the sexy girl, and the way it had been sliced down the middle, and then reframed. As she explained it, she wondered if she sounded paranoid, but the detective was interested, noticeably sitting a little taller on the edge of her seat. When Kate was done, the detective thanked her, then said she wanted to make a quick phone call. She stood, pulled out her cell phone, and walked over to the window. Whoever she called, they talked for less than a minute, the detective pocketing the phone as she walked back toward Kate.
“Audrey Marshall’s cause of death was a knife wound to the throat, but, there were also postmortem wounds, a slice from her head down the length of her body.” The detective ran her finger down her own center.
“Oh,” Kate said, her mind immediately picturing the skin folded back, a skull revealed. She tasted bile at the back of her throat.
“Why did you go to the storage unit in the first place?” Detective James asked. “Are there other reasons you suspect your cousin?”
Kate filled her lungs with one long, deep breath, then let it out. She knew she had to tell this detective everything. She began, first telling her about what she had learned from Alan Cherney, how he was able to see into Audrey Marshall’s apartment, and how he had become convinced that Corbin was dating Audrey. How he’d seen them kiss.
Kate thought the detective would want to know why Alan Cherney was spying on Audrey Marshall, but, instead, she asked: “Even if Corbin was romantically involved with Audrey, why would that make you so suspicious? There must have been something else.”
“Well, it was because he denied it. And Alan says they were involved, and so does Audrey’s friend, Jack—he seemed to think that Corbin had something to do with what happened, as well.”
“I definitely want to get back to Jack Ludovico, and hear more about that conversation, but first, is there anything else that has caused you to suspect your cousin? Obviously, you’ve been looking around . . .”
“I told you about the key that he had to Audrey Marshall’s apartment.”
“Yes.”
“There’s that. Although that could mean anything, of course. He was her neighbor, after all. And, then, there was what I found in the storage unit. The cut picture.”
“Do you have the storage unit key with you now?”
“Yes, here,” Kate said, reaching into the front pocket of her jeans, but not finding the key. She stood, searched her other pockets. Nothing.
“Did you put it back in the drawer?” Detective James asked.
“God, I must have,” Kate said, and turned to walk to the kitchen.
“That’s okay,” the detective quickly said. “We’ll find it.”
Kate sat back down. Yes, now she remembered: she’d put the key back in the drawer of the kitchen. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t been sleeping, and I’ve been freaking out about what happened in this building.”
“Totally understandable,” Detective James said. She reached out and briefly placed two fingers on Kate’s knee to reassure her. Kate recognized the gesture, and the detective’s half smile, from the dozens of psychiatrists and counselors she’d had contact with in the course of her short life. She wasn’t crazy, though. Not right now. The police presence proved that. There had been a murder next door. And Corbin was somehow involved.
“Tell me more about Ludovico. Do you know how he spells his name?”
“I don’t know. The way it sounds, I guess,” Kate said. “Why?”
“Because after I talked with you last, and you told me that you’d talked with him, I tried to look him up, and didn’t find anything.”
“Didn’t he come by the police station?”
“He didn’t. Did he tell you that he had?”
Kate tried to remember. She was still frazzled by not remembering where she’d put the key, and suddenly all of her memories felt unreal to her. “He did,” she said at last. “I’m sure of it. He came here to the building to get information. He said that he’d been to the police but that they’d told him nothing. He said he’d been questioned, I think.”
“Did you tell me everything about your conversation?”
Kate thought back. “I did. He was a friend but he clearly had a thing for Audrey. He said he worked in the hotel business.”
The detective was rapidly writing in her notebook. She looked up, and asked, “Can you describe him for me? What he looked like?”
Kate thought hard. She kept picturing the sketch she’d done that had changed somehow. She almost went to get it, then said, “I can draw him for you, if you’d like,” she said. “I’m better at drawing than describing.”
“Sure,” Detective James said, and passed Kate her notebook and pencil.
She quickly sketched Jack Ludovico, his smallish features that made him look more like a boy than a man, the hair that stuck up. The strange picture from her sketchbook kept jumping into her mind as she drew, getting in the way of her memory, so that his eyes came out wrong somehow, in a way she didn’t quite understand. Still, she handed the notebook back to the detective.
“His hair is red. I should have indicated that.”
“I’ll remember. You’re a good artist. This is helpful,” the detective said.
“It’s not perfect. I only met him the once.”
“It’s good. Thanks. Can I ask you one more thing? When did you and Corbin make the decision to swap apartments? Do you know when he first contacted you?”
Kate thought back. She remembered her mother broaching the idea of the swap after dinner on a Sunday. It was late February, she thought, or early March, the days still short.
“Sometime in late February,” she told the detective.
“Any chance you can be more specific than that?”
“Oh. I would say either the last Sunday in February or the first Sunday in March. I can ask my mum. She’ll remember, and if she doesn’t, she’s probably written it down somewhere.”
“That would be great.” Detective James closed her notebook, rocked backward a little in preparation for getting up. Kate noticed how perfect the detective’s posture was, her back straight, her wide shoulders back, and sat up a little straighter herself.
Before the detective had a chance to get up, Kate asked, “So Corbin was involved with Audrey Marshall? That’s why you’re here, right?”
“He was. Audrey kept a diary, and he’s mentioned in it. And we’ve confirmed from one of Audrey’s friends that they were involved for a period of time over the past couple of months.”
“Oh.” Even though she’d suspected it—known it, really—the blunt fact still surprised her. “So they were definitely involved. So he’s a definite suspect.”
The detective smiled and scratched at her wrist, underneath the strap of a chunky watch. “He is a definite person of interest, Kate. We’d very much like to ta
lk with him.”
“I thought you had.”
“There was an e-mail exchange, but a London police officer went to question him at your flat and he wasn’t there.”
“No. He’s gone missing from there, I think.”
“How do you know that?”
Kate told the detective about her friend Martha, and how she hadn’t seen him around.
“If you communicate with Martha again, please ask if she’s seen him come and go.”
“I will. Are you going to arrest him?”
“We just really want to speak with him. Sooner rather than later.”
The detective’s phone rang, and she pulled it from her pocket. “Good, you’re here. Just come straight up. It’s one down from Audrey Marshall’s, the door at the end of the hall.” She ended the conversation but kept the phone in her hand as she said to Kate, “My colleague from the FBI will be coming up, as well.”
“Why the FBI?”
“There’s a chance, Kate, that this crime is connected with two previous crimes, one of which occurred in Connecticut, and that was when the FBI became involved. We’re following every lead, and I am very interested in seeing what you found in the storage unit downstairs.”