Only the Strong

by Ethan Cross

  Baxter concluded that Corin had been the one who decorated the condo.

  The other element that stuck out was the smell of old garbage. The dishes overflowed the sink. Takeout bags and empty junk-food boxes littered the counters and table tops.

  Baxter concluded that Blake had been the one who destroyed the condo.

  Obviously, Corin had been in charge of cleaning, and judging by the preciseness of her decorating, he suspected she’d be pissed to see what Blake had done with the place.

  The kid said, “So you’re a private investigator?”

  Baxter smiled warmly. “Something like that. But, if I may say so, that is quite a suit. Didn’t know medical students wore that sort of thing.”

  Blake had brown hair, slightly receding into a stylishly spiked widow’s peak. He wore a suit more expensive than Baxter’s fees would be for this whole case, and he smelled like cigar smoke and gin and tonics.

  Blake said, “Don’t let it fool you. The suit was a gift from my father. I had lunch with him today at the club. He insists I look the part.”

  “And what part is that?”

  “Son of a high-priced lawyer.”

  Baxter nodded and made notes in a pocket-sized, leather-bound notebook.

  He wrote: FIL=lawyer. Enemies? Revenge? Ransom?

  He said, “Has he been helping in your search for Corin?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “No particulars. Just figuring that high priced meant money and resources and access to the police chief and a whole swarm of private investigators.”

  Blake’s gaze fell to the table covered in burger wrappers and Chinese takeout boxes. And beneath those, flyers displaying Corin’s face and a 1-800 number.

  Baxter didn’t shy from the obvious. “So let me guess, man. Your dad didn’t want you to become a doctor, and he felt threatened by your relationship with Corin.”

  Blake’s lip curled in disgust. “My father simply doesn’t care. At all.”

  “Sounds like a difficult sort of dude.”

  “As long as I don’t ask for money and don’t make him look bad, he could care less.”

  “My dad was just the guy who drove our house around when I was a kid. So I feel you on that, brother.”

  Blake shrugged it off. “I honestly don’t think my father could have gotten anything more done than what’s being done already.”

  “The cops have been helpful?”

  “Yeah, they’ve been fine. Not that I would know any different. I’m not an investigator.”

  “No leads?”

  “Nothing they’ve shared with me. We’ve put up thousands of flyers. I’ve been on TV twice, offering a reward. My father did offer to pay that.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably tax-deductible, and good publicity. Nothing came in on the wires?”

  “No. The only thing the cops found was that her Facebook account had been hacked and some photos altered. Apparently, it’s a kind of Internet prank going around right now. Adding some skull face in the background of people’s pictures to freak them out.”

  Baxter made a note of that. “Do you have any of those pictures?”

  Pulling out his cell phone, Blake swiped around and then showed the device to Baxter. It took him a moment to find the skull face, a twisted game of Where’s Waldo. He stared at the face a moment, feeling a vague familiarity with it. As if he’d seen it before.

  “Can you send me those pictures, please. Number’s on the card I gave you. Another thought. I’m just putting this down to see if you pick it up, brother. Are you absolutely sure she didn’t make it home that night?”

  Blake shrugged. “I can’t say anything for certain. But nothing was out of place, and the police couldn’t find any signs of forced entry. Plus, her car would have been here if she was abducted from the condo.”

  “Unless the person who took her also took her car. But that’s only if someone else is involved.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time that a person put on one face to the world and hid their true self. Maybe she just split.”

  “Why would she ever—”

  “I don’t mean to imply anything or twist you up, man. But the questions have to be asked and answered and contemplated. In a case like this, with a missing person, you have to establish a lot of questions that have simple yes or no answers. The first is: Did she leave or was she taken?”

  Anger filled Blake’s eyes. “She wouldn’t have run. She was happy. She loved her life, and she loved me. The only reason she would be gone is that someone took her.”

  Baxter had studied Blake’s eyes and facial expressions throughout the whole exchange. He was an avid student of kinesics, the study of body language and facial expressions, and from every indication his trained eye could identify, the young man was being truthful.

  “Okay, the next questions I would ask are: If she was taken, did she know the person or was it a stranger? A single perpetrator or a group? That sort of thing.”

  “You think Corin is dead?”

  Baxter measured his response. “The odds aren’t in her favor. But I’m a bit like an old bloodhound. Once I’m onto a scent, I don’t let up. Dead or not, I intend to find out what happened to her.”

  “How can I help?”

  “Enemies?”

  “None.”

  “Guys who may have taken a perverse interest? Even if she thought they were just friends.”

  “Nothing like that. She didn’t even have many girlfriends.”

  “Where was she seen last? Or where was she supposed to be last?”

  Blake seemed to consider his answer carefully, not as if he was hiding anything but as if he wanted to ensure that his answers were precise. “She would have come home after her last class.”

  Baxter considered this. The car was an obvious point of abduction. She could have also parked in the wrong spot and been accosted by someone out to rob and mutilate her, but Baxter’s gut told him this was premeditated. “Where did she usually park for class?”

  “In the parking garage, but it has security. The footage shows her getting in and leaving the lot. She must have stopped somewhere between here and there.”

  “If you had to guess what happened to her—and be honest—what do you think?”

  The young medical student looked toward the oak floor. “I hate to even speak it aloud, but Corin was tough and smart. She knew how to defend herself. She wouldn’t have been taken by some crackhead, and she wouldn’t have abandoned me and her life. The only thing that I can think is that she was kidnapped. But we haven’t received any ransom demands . . .”

  The implications hung in the air like flies buzzing over a fresh corpse. Baxter asked, “Nothing else that seemed strange? Nothing she was worried about? Any changes in behavior? Listen, brother, don’t hold anything back. Finding her may depend on the most insignificant of details.”

  “Just the skull-face thing in her pictures. But the cops said that particular hack has affected thousands of people. If there was anything else, I would have told the cops and would tell you now. It’s like she vanished into thin air.”

  ~~*~~

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Corin Campbell tried to mentally project herself to a happy place. A meadow or a park or playing in the snow with Sammy on some early childhood vacation. Anywhere other than this cold, concrete chamber. She had completely lost perspective on how long she’d been here. Several weeks at least, but she supposed it could have been any amount of time. She could have been in this hell for days or weeks or only a matter of hours, and she wouldn’t have known the difference. Everything was relative. Pain could make seconds seem like hours, and pleasure could make days seem like a matter of a few moments.

  She couldn’t say that her time here had been marked by nothing but pain. There w
as also the fear. Which she found to be even more soul-crushing than the pain. Corin had been in a constant state of fear and despair from the moment she had seen the man in the skull mask. Even when her tormentor wasn’t with her, she could feel his presence in the air pressing down on her, pushing inside her.

  The only way she was able to mark time was by his visits to her lonely corner of hell.

  She wondered if Blake would still want her after all this. Not because of the physical aspects; she didn’t doubt his understanding. But her mind was shattered in a way now that made her doubt she could even look at him the same. The world would never be bright and safe to her again. She would never be the petite brunette in love with life, the girl Blake had fallen for. Although, she supposed that the woman he had fallen for wasn’t truly the real her either.

  Corin rolled over on her bare, sweat-stained mattress. Her legs shook with spasms of pain at the slight movement. That was another reason she doubted that she actually was in hell. She reasoned the genuine Satan would not feel the need to break the shins of his captives in order to ensure they couldn’t escape. That act itself inspired hope in a strange way. If her tormentor felt the need to cripple her, perhaps that meant help was within reach.

  The thought had faded after the first days spent searching for weaknesses in her cell, pulling herself along the concrete floor, trying to find a way to escape or a weapon of any kind. She found neither. There was nothing her five-foot-four broken body could do against a man of his size and strength.

  No way out and no way to resist.

  He owned her. She was his property to use as he saw fit.

  People would be looking for her, but she doubted they would make it in time to save anything of the college student and girl she had once been. That woman, that sister and lover and friend, seemed like a person she had dreamed up in another life. The tears, a mattress on the floor, and the rape of her mind, body, and soul seemed to be her whole existence now.

  And she wasn’t the only resident of this hell.

  She had heard doors opening. The muffled whimpering of other women as the devil chose to visit them. Trying to communicate, she had pressed her face to the door and yelled for someone to answer her. But the only reply had been the man in the skull mask shocking her with a cattle prod. The other girls, if she hadn’t simply imagined them, had apparently learned not to speak up.

  Still, a small part of her former self had clung to life. A room inside her heart where she refused to succumb, where the girl with the genius-level IQ still listened and waited for a way to turn the tables on the devil himself.

  Corin clenched her fists and thought of Blake and her sister. She thought of that other girl in that other life, the one who now hid somewhere deep inside her mind, struggling to stay alive and sane. She refused to let that girl die.

  Long ago, she had heard of the concept of memory palaces, a technique which some used to retain vast amounts of information through internal visualization. Corin had constructed a memory palace of her own—not for the purposes of preserving memories, but for the purposes of preserving the girl who refused to die.

  Separating herself from the cold darkness and the helplessness of her situation allowed her to, in essence, become two people. One who lay naked on a filthy mattress in an empty concrete cell, and one who lived in a bungalow the color of driftwood with steps leading to the beach. She tried to make that place her reality, stealing the details of the bungalow from a memory of the last family trip before her mother’s untimely death.

  The strong woman inside her mind now stood at the railing of the vacation house’s deck, looking down at the beach, detached from the horrors of reality, ever thinking, ever plotting.

  She wouldn’t die here. Instead, she would kill the devil himself.

  She tried to maintain her cognitive distance and suppress fear and revulsion as she heard a key turn in her cell’s metal door. Imagining herself still in a place of sun and sand, she made mental notes of the number of seconds before the door closed again. His footfalls seemed to be louder than before. Normally, he entered her room naked, except for the skull mask, but now she heard the slap of leather on concrete. She dared not open her eyes or look at him, for fear of her mental barriers crumbling, allowing the despair of her reality to shatter what was left of her fragile defenses.

  Corin had been naked since the moment she awoke, as if she was merely a piece of cattle or a sex toy built solely for his sick gratification. But now, something had changed. Instead of violating her, the devil threw a blanket over her bruised and shivering body and said, “Your blood tests came back. Congratulations, you’re going to be a mother.”

  The barriers she had worked so hard to erect crumbled at those words.

  At first, she didn’t comprehend the implications. She heard the devil’s footfalls retreating from the room as the full meaning of those words pierced her heart. Pregnant? She heard the door close as the man who called himself the Gladiator raped her again with this knowledge and left her to drown in her own hopelessness.

  Corin Campbell wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. Instead, she pushed down both urges and made up her mind that, at this point, survival had become a secondary concern. Her primary goal was now to murder the devil himself, even if it cost her own life.

  Although, she supposed it wasn’t only her life she needed to consider now, but the life of her alleged child. She pulled the blanket close to her body, curled into a ball, and wept, dreaming of bungalows on the beach.

  ~~*~~

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Francis Ackerman’s family had never owned pets, even before his mother escaped with his brother in her womb. Father didn’t understand the concept of bringing animals into a home. Why take on the excess baggage of another living thing? At least human children could be put to some use.

  Still, Ackerman had befriended the rare insect or arachnid that wandered into his concrete cell, and he could understand the appeal of pet ownership. The eight-legged predators fascinated him, but they didn’t make for good friends. They were too much like him, and he wanted to form a friendship with a being whose personality would provide balance to his own. He and the spiders had spent most of their time in each other’s company devising ways to kill and eat one another, which hadn’t seemed to be a good basis for a lasting kinship.

  His favorite childhood playmate had been a pill bug. Although, he had later learned the little gray bug—which earned its name by rolling into a ball when threatened—wasn’t a bug at all, but, rather, a crustacean, more closely related to shrimp, crabs, and lobsters. He supposed that the tiny creature had actually been his only toy as well as a companion. The best of both worlds, a bug and a ball.

  He was reminded of pets because Emily Morgan now approached with a small black-and-white canine tugging at a retractable leash. Emily wore a gray pantsuit with a purple shirt. Her dark hair was cut short. The sun lit upon subtle, dark-red highlights that she had recently added. A small smile unconsciously formed on his lips as he imagined running his hands along her porcelain skin.

  She and the small vermin on the leash approached across the black asphalt parking lot of the Golden Gate bridge info center. The wind licked at the shortened strands of black and red, making it easier to picture what it would be like to run his fingers through her hair.

  Then the little dog thing spoiled the moment by jumping on his leg and looking up at him with a closed mouth and a tilted head. He scowled at the little beast, fighting the urge to dropkick.

  Emily said, “I think he likes you. I’ve never seen anyone have that reaction before. Not initially, at least.”

  “I thought a counselor would build up my self-esteem, not tear me down.”

  “Under normal circumstances, that may be true. But in your case, your self-esteem needs to be dialed down. How do you like the dog?”

  “I don’t work with animals. Too unreliable
and unpredictable.”

  Emily chuckled. “You think this little Shih Tzu puppy is here to help track down serial killers?”

  “I assume he’s to be used as some kind of cover or distraction. A trojan horse, perhaps? How many pounds of explosives do you think it would be able to carry?”

  She shook her head as if she was trying to wake from a dream. “We’re not blowing up the dog. He’s just here to be your friend. He’s for you. I think it would help you to have another living thing under your care.”

  “Take it back. And if you insist on pursuing this ‘living thing’ therapy technique, then buy me a nice fern.”

  “Fern’s don’t make good friends. They aren’t very intelligent.”

  “That’s a rather stereotypical and offensive way of thinking. Every fern is different. There may be a strain that is quite personable.”

  She held out the leash with a rigidly extended arm.

  “I’m not taking that.”

  “He’s yours now. Take him.”

  “I will do no such thing.”

  “Don’t be a baby. Take him on a walk and get to know one another.”

  Ackerman ignored her and the vermin. Trying to change the subject, he said, “I’ve been thinking about the Gladiator. If the pattern of the victims being competent opponents continues, then he would need to be quite a skilled fighter. Local mixed martial arts training facilities would be a good place to start. But I’ve heard over the years that there is a thriving underground fighting scene in San Francisco. I would suggest we visit the gyms, and while there, we gather intelligence on the underground.”

  The dog hadn’t moved. It had only cocked its head to the other side. It was looking up at him as if it smelled he wasn’t human. He shook the vermin from his leg.

  Emily jammed the leash in his chest. His skin briefly electrified at her touch. These were the moments during which a reformed Ackerman had the greatest difficulty controlling his hunger.