Light Before Day

by Christopher Rice

  In the bathroom, I gulped from the faucet. When I straightened up, I saw there was handwriting on the wall. It started in ink, but then the pen had obviously run dry, and the author had used its ballpoint tip to scratch into the drywall. First there was a ledger of days, six vertical lines crossed through by a seventh. Then the writer started to lose count. Daylight obviously didn't penetrate down here. There were nonsensical fragments of words: First Account.

  Empty . . . Maybe Just a Punishment. . . First Broken Promise: NO WALKS! When I turned around, I saw that words were scribbled all around me, above the doorway and down the opposite wall. In the mess of etchings on the inside of the door, I saw the phrase I am not quality material! It was followed by the letters NQM, scrawled in a sloping column all the way down to the floor, the acronym that Joseph Spinotta had written atop project proposals.

  Joseph Spinotta had been held in this cellar. After a while, his ledger of days had run out.

  Joseph Spinotta was gone.

  I returned to the bed and tried to make sense of this. In our final conversation, Billy Hatfill had never uttered Spinotta’s name. But at dinner several days before, he had told me that Spinotta was a pedophile and had expressed a hatred for the man that shocked me. I thought of the drama teacher Billy had arranged to have beaten nearly to death, his hatred for the older gay men he had manipulated. Spinotta’s operation had been hijacked by the men who worked for him. Now it served a far different purpose from the one Spinotta had intended.

  Footsteps shook the ceiling overhead. A few seconds later, a section of wall swung inward and Roger Vasquez entered the cellar. He was wearing a supply belt that held a two-way radio, a large pager, a Bowie knife, and an empty holster for the pistol he was aiming at my face.

  "How long?" I asked.

  He approached me.

  "How long did you keep Spinotta alive?"

  Without any change in his face to warn me, he hit me across the forehead with the butt of his pistol. He waited for me to right myself and then slammed the pistol across my jaw.

  "Billy told us you ask a lot of questions," he said. "He said it's a defense mechanism. You use it to hide things like the fact that you're a disgusting drunk who likes to rape little boys." His voice was prim and matter-of-fact. Here in his controlled world, there was not a question he did not have an answer for.

  He watched as I lay on the damp floor, feeling at my bleeding head and trying to work my mouth. I didn't tell him that I had never laid a hand on a young boy. I figured it would get me a shattered jaw. He ordered me to my feet. He walked me up the stairs out of the cellar, holding my wrists with one hand and keeping the pistol between my shoulder blades with the other.

  When I realized he wasn't going to restrain me in any way, I figured that meant he was walking me toward my death. I tried to control my panic.

  On the top step, he shoved me too hard and I fell to my knees on the floor of a massive barn lined with rotting wine barrels. He jerked me up and walked me out of the barn and into weak gray light. I couldn't tell if it was dawn or dusk. Low, wind-driven fog blew through a stand of squat oak trees up ahead, smaller than the ones I'd seen on Caroline's property.

  He walked me into the trees. I wanted to plead for my life, but another blow to the head would knock me unconscious, and I didn't want to meet death in a blackout.

  We stepped over the twisted roots of giant sycamores. The foliage thickened around us. Then we entered a clearing where a ghost was waiting for us. Cameron Davis had been suspended by his ankles from a high branch. His bare chest was heaving with labored breaths. He was stripped naked, and his face was covered by the same black leather mask Daniel Brady had worn in my apartment: two tiny inverted triangles for eyeholes, a leering grin with fat lips painted gold. Off to the right was a wooden platform with a high pole in the back. It was missing a rope, but I could tell that it was a gallows. Two chairs were positioned side by side, each with metal spikes covering the seat and the wooden slats in the back and steel cuffs at the ends of the arms.

  Cameron Davis was situated so that he could survey all the different forms of torture that awaited him.

  Roger Vasquez slammed me against the trunk of a giant sycamore. There were two steel cuffs nailed into the trunk, just like the ones I had been confined by on the ride there. I dropped my eyes to the dirt to avoid the sights before me, but Vasquez seized my chin and brought my eyes to his. I worked to keep my body from shaking.

  "Calm down," he whispered. "It's not your turn yet." My vision blurred. My mouth had turned to sandpaper, but I could feel bile in my throat. Roger's eyes took on an almost sympathetic cast and he patted me lightly on the cheek. Then he went to Cameron Davis's suspended body and pulled his Bowie knife from its leather holster.

  I looked back in the direction we had come. Beyond the barn, a sea of withering grapevines stretched toward a low hill, with what looked like a one-story Italian villa at the top. The house was surrounded by a dense stand of Monterey pines, and the golden light in its front windows was gaining luminescence. Night was falling. An entire day had come and gone while I had lain unconscious in Joseph Spinotta’s prison cell.

  Roger Vasquez put one arm around Cameron Davis's bare chest, then dragged the knife blade down Cameron Davis's abdomen too gently to break the skin.

  "Let me tell you what makes me angry, Adam Murphy," he called back to me. "A man like this, a man with wife and kids, will stop off at a children's restroom or some other secret place and inflict his disease upon an innocent young boy. Now what if that boy turns out to be gay, Adam Murphy? Eventually he might talk about the abuse he suffered at the hands of a diseased, liar like this man. Maybe the boy tells a family member, or a therapist."

  He checked my face to make sure I was still with him. "And what happens? What happens when that young man finally decides to seek help? When he tells the truth about what happened to him? For one thing, people assume that his abuse made him gay. And then, as if that's not enough, they assume that his abuser was gay as well."

  He let this hang in the air as he studied his victim.

  "Do you see what that means, Adam Murphy?" I didn't answer. "Thanks to men like Cameron Davis here, gay men everywhere are given the blame for the crimes of the deceitful, the diseased. Those gay men have risked everything to come out to their families, to themselves, and then they're blamed for the crimes of liars!"

  With a flick of the wrist, Roger opened up a small wound above Cameron Davis's left nipple.

  The man let out a muffled cry into his leather mask as blood streaked down his chest. I dropped my eyes and heard Roger's footsteps coming toward me.

  "Let me tell you something about our customers," he said. "Not one of them lives in West Hollywood or the Castro or Chelsea. They live in Los Gatos. Simi Valley. Daly City. They have wives, children, and respectable lives they hide behind while they commit crimes that are blamed on men who have done nothing more than be honest about who they are."

  He studied me as if he were mildly concerned that I might not be getting his point. He was speaking from a well of personal experience that had driven him to the point of madness, and for the first time in a week, I was too terrified to utter a word. I was tempted to try to use the sexual abuse in his past in an attempt to connect with him, but I doubted this would yield anything more than the choice between a noose and a bed of spikes.

  "And then," he said, "here I am, doing all I can to rid the world of the men who abuse us and demonize us, and then I hear about someone like you. One of our own. A traitor within our own ranks. Disappointment doesn't even begin to describe it, Adam Murphy."

  He must have felt the same fury toward Joseph Spinotta, the man he had served. I recalled Billy Hatfill's hatred of the man and realized that the Vanished Three had shared that loathing while they fed him boys, keeping him happy until they could get their hands on his money and his operation.

  He brought the bloody knife blade to my throat. I closed my eyes but felt it against my Adam
's apple. Then the blade left my throat. When I opened my eyes, Roger was standing next to Cameron Davis's body as the blood jetted out of the man's throat from a fresh gash.

  "Collect your thoughts," Roger said. "You're next."

  "I can prove to you that it wasn't me on that tape," I said. "But it doesn't matter, does it?

  You're going to kill me anyway. Now that I've seen what you do."

  "You never should have tried to find us," he said. "Besides, we would have found you soon enough."

  We had just emerged from the trees when I saw a figure running toward us across the vineyard.

  Roger stopped and tightened his grip on the back of my neck. Terrance Davidson raced toward us. His blond hair was cut short and he had added bulk to his small frame. His white T-shirt was sweat-stained, and his round blue eyes were wide with panic. I recognized my cell phone in his right hand. "It's her!" he gasped. He handed the phone to Roger, then regarded me as if I were an alien being. He lacked Roger's supply belt and weaponry.

  "What does she want?" Roger asked.

  "She says she wants to talk," Terrance gasped. "To all of us. She's hurting him, Roger. I can hear—"

  "It's Caroline, isn't it?" I asked.

  "Shut up!" Terrance roared.

  "She's got your friend Ben," I said.

  I felt something warm and wet hit the side of my face. Terrance Davidson had spit on me.

  When he saw the expression on my face, his eyes widened and he took a step backward. He lacked his friend's controlled rage. From behind me, I heard Roger ask Caroline what she wanted. The answer came in the form of a bloodcurdling male scream that was so loud it turned to static in the cell phone's speaker. Terrance Davidson's hands flew to his ears and he spun away from us. "Do something, Roger!" he screamed. "Do something!" It was clear he had deep feelings for the man Caroline held captive.

  I couldn't make out Caroline's words, but her voice sounded calm and controlled.

  "Not a chance," Roger replied.

  Caroline spoke again. Roger frowned. Terrance was hunched over at the waist, his eyes wide and moist. If Roger Vasquez was their ringleader and Ben Clamp was their muscle, then the pretty boy in front of me was their hand-wringer and well of raw emotion.

  "Fine," Roger said. Then he clicked off the phone.

  "What does she want?" Terrance asked.

  "She wants to talk," Roger said. "To you and me, and him." He jerked his chin toward me.

  "You wouldn't give her our location," I said.

  "I believe Terrance told you to shut up," Roger said.

  The three of us started across the vineyard. The withering grapevines clung to their metal poles with what looked like desperation. The villa at the top of the hill had a fiat slate roof and a series of slender columns down the front porch. It looked like a palace for a Roman senator who had long since departed. The slender stone columns along the front porch were cracked and weathered, and their vines had outgrown their ornamental boundaries. The thick interlocking branches of the Monterey pines that surrounded the villa formed a kind of perimeter wall that also shielded a squat smaller outbuilding with a rounded roof and a single barred window.

  "Got a thing for Ben, huh, Terrance?" I asked.

  Terrance just looked at me, his face anxious and pouty. I could have sung him a sad song about what happened to skinny pretty boys who got involved with towering hulks of muscle that reminded them of the guys who used to make fun of them in high school, but I was too busy wondering where they were taking me and what I could hope for from Caroline.

  We moved up the villas front steps. Across the sea of trees that surrounded the vineyard below, I glimpsed green, rounded hills blurred by a low and fast-moving fog. It was impossible to see where the property ended, but I figured it was vast.

  The walls inside were eggshell white, the texture of the plaster visible. The floors were concrete. Floor-to-ceiling windows surrounded a central courtyard with a large dry fountain crowned by a reproduction of Donatello's David. The statue's head had been cut off. A window in the far wall revealed a dark hallway that danced sporadically with a television's flicker. I figured the boys were being entertained while their abusers were tormented and slaughtered by the men who had taken them into their care.

  I thought of the young man I had known as Everett and how coolly he had tightened his silver bicycle chain around Martin Cale's throat. His behavior made more sense if he had been exposed to the type of violent retribution I had seen visited on Cameron Davis. But so far I had not encountered a single boy. They were being shielded from the events that were unfolding on other parts of the property.

  Terrance Davidson sat me down in a large wooden chair that bore a frightening resemblance to the torture devices I had seen out in the clearing. He raised two wooden boxes that hung from the end of the chair, placed them over my wrists, and slid wooden pins through them. There were instruments of confinement even in the main house that told me that Joseph Spinotta or the men they abducted were sometimes brought here. I thought of all the markings Joseph Spinotta had made on the walls in the bathroom of his prison cell. His captors had kept him alive for a long time, and I wanted to know why.

  Roger Vasquez moved to the massive fireplace, lifted a phone off the floor, and placed it on the fireplace's empty mantel. He pressed Speaker-phone and dialed a number. Terrance stepped back against the wall and folded his arms over his chest. His hysteria had turned into fury, but it was directed at his comrade, who took a seat in a chair angled toward mine. I figured that Terrance blamed Roger for Ben's current predicament.

  The rings stopped. "Adam?" It was Caroline's voice. The sound of it brought tears to my eyes, made real the horror I just had witnessed outdoors. She said my name again.

  "Answer her," Roger Vasquez ordered.

  "I'm here."

  She was silent. Then, "Are you okay?"

  "I'm in one piece," I said.

  "East or west?" she asked me. I remembered our moment at the Stop 'N' Go in Wasco when we had studied the map. But Roger Vasquez stiffened.

  "East or west, Adam?"

  "If he gives you our location, I will kill him and then you'll have no reason to come here,"

  Roger said.

  "West," I said fast.

  Terrance shot forward. "Did you hear what he fucking said?"

  "Hey!" Caroline shouted. "Yeah, that's it, pretty boy. You keep your fucking mouth shut.

  Your boyfriend here's been crying for you—and he's only got seven fingers left!"

  Terrance's growl turned into a shriek. He spun around, gripping the back of his head with both hands. Roger rolled his eyes and rubbed at the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.

  I waited for the two of them to collect themselves.

  "What did Joseph Spinotta want to do out here?" I asked.

  Terrance answered. "Joseph said he was going to rescue boys from meth homes and make new lives for them. He said he was going to create a family for them."

  I had assumed that this had been Spinotta's cover story. But it had actually been his real mission, even if his obscene motivations lay close to the surface. "Was he lying?" I asked.

  Roger Vasquez said, "We all knew what he was really going to do to the boys once he had them."

  "So you took him prisoner," I said. "You held him down in that cellar. You held him for a long time. Why did you keep Spinotta alive for so long?"

  A man's gasping breaths came through the speakerphone on the mantle. Caroline was holding the phone down to Ben Clamp's mouth so we could hear his fear.

  "He had to show us how to use the technology," Terrance Davidson spat out.

  "The technology," I repeated. I waited for one of them to elaborate. Then I saw it. "You're saying Spinotta never wanted to create a child porn ring. That was all you guys."

  Roger bolted up. "How dare you—"

  Terrance shot forward and placed a hand on Roger's shoulder to quiet him. "The boys have no memory of what's done to them. No
ne! We've made sure of that! We take them out of hell and we give them a chance at a new life."

  "You use them," I said. "You rape them on camera and use it as bait for men like Cameron Davis."

  "We don't touch them," Roger said through clenched teeth. "We leave that to men like you."

  Terrance's mouth snapped shut. Rogers denial brought an icy glare from his comrade.

  "So the whole thing," I said, "it's just a giant trap. It's just an excuse for you to kill your customers." Neither man answered. "How many men like Cameron Davis have you killed?"

  Caroline broke the silence. "I heard a question, gentlemen. One of you better fucking answer it."

  "Five," Terrance answered.

  "How many customers are there?"

  "Twenty," he said. "And growing."

  The image of Cameron Davis dangling by his ankles as he bled to death was still fresh in my mind. But I had also seen one of the movies that men like Cameron Davis enjoyed. I had seen the helpless victim laid out, in a production designed and choreographed by men who felt their own innocence had been taken from them. The abused were catering to the abusers. For a few terrifying seconds, I saw their logic, felt the hot pulse of rage that had fed their madness over the past three years.

  Roger Vasquez was trembling with rage. Terrance Davidson still seemed panicked over the fact that Caroline had his lover in custody. I needed to calm them if I was going to get any more answers out of them. "Where was Billy Hatfill in all of this?" I asked.

  "You didn't ask him before you killed him?" Roger demanded. Terrance looked fearfully at the phone on the mantel. "Joseph needed guys like us to bring him the boys he wanted. Billy handpicked us for the job. But we were supposed to keep track of everything Joseph did. Take pictures. That kind of thing."

  "You were supposed to set Spinotta up?" I asked.