by Ladew, Lisa
“So what do you know about the investigation? Are there any new developments?” West asked.
Blaise turned his attention to West and pulled a tiny notebook out of the back pocket of his jeans.
“Before I answer, I want to ask Katerina a question.” Without looking at Katerina, he stated his question like he was reading it out of his notebook. “Can you tell us anything that we don’t already know? You found the bodies under the house. Do you have any idea at all who this new killer is?”
Katerina shook her head violently and bit her lip. This time it was frustration that bubbled up inside of her. She was suddenly sick to death of being such an emotional basket case. “I’ve tried. For the last two days I’ve done everything I can think of to see if I know who could be doing this. I sat with every single thought and emotion and image left inside me and tried to pick over it for some hints or a clue for you guys. I have nothing.”
“Do you think if we took you back to Frank’s house, you could do what you did last time? Stand in the house and come up with something there?”
Katerina shook her head and looked at West imploringly. She didn’t want to do that again. “I don’t think so. I can try, but after we did that the last time – I came home and did everything I could to get rid of all of those memories and images. I can’t explain it very well, but, I …” Katerina felt her cheeks heat as she remembered asking West to help her forget. Something about being with him, and touching him, seemed to be able to burn the memories out of her brain from Frank Phillips. Three days ago she would’ve said it worked about 95%. But now, she wasn’t so sure. Were all of these alien thoughts and insane emotions actually coming from memories still left behind by Phillips? She didn’t want to have to explain all of this to Blaise. He always seemed slightly skeptical about the things she had seen anyway. He believed her, but seemed to think there was some sort of logical explanation for all of it that they just hadn’t figured out yet. Either that, or she was just a freak. Besides, she didn’t want to tell him exactly how West helped her forget.
Katerina sighed. “If you want me to go back to the house, I will, but I don’t think it will help things. I don’t think I’ll come up with any names for you.”
“Fair enough,” Blaise said. “Here’s what we found. There were seventeen bodies buried in the dirt underneath Phillips’ house.”
Katerina sucked in a breath and she saw Jordan turn white next to her. West squeezed his beer can hard enough that it crumpled in his fist.
Blaise went on like he hadn’t even noticed. “There were fourteen women between the ages of twenty and forty, most of them completely decayed, which tells us they’ve been down there for at least eight years. There was one woman over forty and one man over forty, and one man between the ages of twenty to forty. These last three bodies were at the very bottom and all were completely decomposed. None of the skeletons have been identified. We are working on that now. Some of the younger women might be foreign. The medical examiner says their dental work is strange, like it was done in another country, but he can’t narrow down which one.”
Blaise stopped talking and flipped a few pages in his notebook.
West leaned forward in his chair. “What about the rest of them? Can’t you identify anybody by their dental records?”
“It’s not that easy. There’s not some sort of central depository where everybody’s dental records are held. If someone has been reported missing and is suspected to be dead for a long time, and suddenly a body shows up that they have reason to believe might be that person, the police can try to procure their dental records to check that. But we can’t just run records through a computer database like we can fingerprints. We have tried comparing all of these sets of teeth to dental records of outstanding missing persons cases, but so far we have no matches.”
Katerina’s mind spun. Seventeen bodies now. And still no one had a clue who any of them were.
Blaise flipped another page in his notebook and kept talking. “We think the man and woman who were at the very bottom might be Phillips’ aunt and uncle. They both disappeared twenty-two years ago. Phillips himself filed a missing persons report on them. He said they went on vacation and never came back. I’ve looked at the police reports and the investigating officer found no reason to suspect Phillips. They were supposed to have gone on vacation to Mexico, and the story checked out. Several people reported talking to them about their upcoming vacation. Supposedly they just never came back and nothing ever came of the investigation.”
Jordan clucked her tongue, something she did when she was irritated or frustrated. Blaise looked up at her and she covered her mouth with her hands, looking mortified.
Blaise looked back at his notebook and went on. “We are also operating under the assumption that the other man might be Frank’s brother. His brother disappeared around the same time, but we don’t know much about that because no missing persons report was ever filed. No one ever missed him. They just assumed he had run off or joined the Army or something. He was always disturbed, and people were probably happy to see him go.”
“His brother’s alive,” Katerina said quietly.
Blaise looked at her expectantly.
“He talked about his brother, at the old morgue, when he was holding me down. He said something like, ‘Did my brother send you? What will my brother think if he gets you back in pieces? Or is that what he wants?’”
West’s beer can crumpled again and Katerina glanced at him. This time he was the one who looked angry enough to hurt someone.
Blaise nodded. “I remember you telling us that, but we still have to look into it. Maybe Phillips was delusional.”
That would make sense too, Katerina thought.
“What is the brother’s name?” West asked.
“Dylan Phillips.” Blaise grimaced. “He was a real jerk. I wouldn’t be surprised if people did nothing but breathe a sigh of relief when he disappeared.”
Katerina clenched her hands into fists. That wasn’t the brother’s body under the house. She knew it. She didn’t know how she knew, but she was certain the brother was the one who was hunting her now.
West lifted his chin, motioning for Blaise to go on.
“Frank and Dylan Phillips grew up in a very abusive household. We have police reports going back almost to their birth of people calling the police for domestic violence calls at their farm. Things were different back then though. CPS almost never took the kids away. And the cops almost never arrested anyone for domestic violence. They just calmed things down. When the boys were eight and ten, their mom took off and no one ever saw her again. The boys got in almost constant trouble at school. Both of them, but mostly Dylan, the older boy, would get sent home repeatedly for things like pinning girls to the wall and trying to kiss them or pulling up their skirts. When they were ten and twelve, there was a major incident and the boys finally got taken away from their father. Dylan went to live with their aunt and uncle and Frank went into a foster home. Frank never got in trouble again but Dylan was arrested for rape at thirteen. Dylan seemed to have very little control over himself and by the time he was seventeen he had been expelled from school and in and out of juvenile Hall multiple times. He’d been convicted of rape several times and they were about to try him as an adult.”
Blaise sucked in a deep breath and looked at both of the women before he went on. “Instead, he opted into an experimental program and chose to be castrated for a lighter prison sentence.”
Katerina and Jordan both gasped, while West made a face and put both hands between his legs. “They cut off his-”
Blaise shook his head quickly. “That’s what I thought too. But castration is not cutting off a penis. There’s chemical castration and there’s surgical castration. In surgical castration they take your testicles. He was surgically castrated.”
Katerina’s thoughts whirled crazily. “He chose to do that?”
“It seems so. He may have been pushed into it by his aunt and uncle, b
ut the doctor and prison staff say he went into the operation willingly.”
“If a man is castrated, can he still have sex?” Katerina asked.
“They can, but the loss of the testicles also decreases testosterone, and normally decreases the sex drive. That’s why it is offered to some criminals. Supposedly it helps them control their impulses.”
Katerina stood up and walked past Jordan to the kitchen. She turned around and came back quickly, her posture rigid, her face set determinedly. “What about the bodies of the women that were found in Westwood Harbor that you said were similar to the bodies that we found in Tetam County? They weren’t raped, right? This is the brother. I know it is! He’s doing the same thing that Frank Phillips did, except he’s not raping them.”
Blaise held up a hand. “That is a theory that we are looking into. We have thought of that. But, like I said, the brother disappeared ages ago. There has been no record of him anywhere in California for the last twenty years.”
“Maybe he’s been hiding in Frank Phillips’ basement,” Katerina said heatedly. “Just because the man hasn’t had a job or paid his taxes doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist anymore.”
Blaise shook his head. “It’s not that simple. We’ve been questioning Phillips’ neighbors and everyone he knows and works with. No one has seen him with a man that looks like his brother. We’ve been questioning everyone who knew the two boys back then. No one has seen Dylan Phillips in California in twenty years.”
“What about their dad?” West asked.
“Killed during a break in years after Dylan disappeared. The case was never solved.”
Katerina continued to pace. She knew she was right. “Do you have a picture of Dylan?”
“No pictures. There are no pictures at Frank’s house and none of the yearbooks from his high school have a picture of him either. He just wasn’t in school enough. There are some pictures of him when he was under ten, but they aren’t very helpful in showing what he would look like now.”
Katerina snapped her fingers and tried to put together all the connections in her brain. Dylan Phillips. That was the man they were looking for. She knew it.
West spoke up. “What about Frank Phillips? Is he being cooperative? Will he tell you anything about his brother?”
Blaise looked dejected. “We’re not even allowed to talk to him. His lawyer has got a security guard in front of the door who calls the lawyer anytime we try. In fact, his lawyer is pushing hard to get him released from custody. He’s saying this new murder proves his client wasn’t responsible for the old ones.”
“What about the bodies under his house?” Katerina cried shrilly, startling Jordan.
“The lawyer says they must have been planted there, or put there before Frank moved in. We’re investigating how long he’s lived there now.”
Katerina shook her head, disgusted. She looked at West, hoping he would have something illuminating to say. He was running his hands through his hair, his face contemplative. Katerina noticed how it made his hair stick up at spiky angles, offsetting his deep, blue eyes. A sudden lust for him pulsated through her entire body, warming her instantly. The wave of desire hit her so hard, it left her shaky, and she almost fell to the ground, revolted with herself. Talk about the wrong place and the wrong time. What was her problem?! She staggered into the kitchen, not wanting anyone to see her.
From the living room, she heard Blaise tell West he had to get to work, Detective Gagne was waiting for him at the station, but he would come by as soon as possible with anything new. Katerina leaned against the stove and fanned herself, trying to calm down. She hoped Jordan wasn’t leaving too.
She didn’t trust herself alone with West.
She didn’t know if she wanted to fuck him … or kill him.
Or both.
Chapter 5
Lance pulled into the driveway of the old farm and maneuvered his truck around the worst of the potholes. The mile-long driveway got worse every year, but he didn’t want to bring anyone out to lay stone on it. Mostly, he hoped people forgot this place existed. It was the very last homestead on a lonely dirt road, surrounded by miles of forest on one side and miles of farmland on the other. As he hit the halfway point of the driveway, a chime sounded on his phone. He picked the phone up and pressed the button marked driveway alert, silencing the alarm that told him whenever someone approached his farm. He and Frank had been the only ones to trigger it in the seventeen years since he’d installed it.
It took him at least ten minutes to make his way to the farmhouse, where he pulled behind the house itself and parked between it and the barn. He climbed out of the truck and stretched his lower back. The hot, dry air sat still and heavy on the dirt, but purple clouds boiled in the distance. A storm was coming. Lance didn’t worry about the storm. Weather always helped him. If a storm was coming, then it was because he needed a storm, for some reason.
He waited for a few more minutes, internally checking his mental radar, making sure no one was watching him. No one was, so he grabbed his backpack and packed it full of bags of food, then swung it on his back and started across the parched, dead grass to the bomb shelter. At least that’s what he and Zippy called the underground hole. The bomb shelter. They’d discovered it when Lance had been eight and Zippy had been six, during one of their many visits to the old farm. The farm had belonged to their father’s brother and the boys had spent many afternoons out back while their father and uncle drank beer in front of the old TV. The bomb shelter was located directly beneath the dilapidated red barn, its entrance hidden. The barn had been falling down even when they were children and they had been banned from going inside it, so they had never asked their father or their uncle what the bomb shelter really was.
It had been boring out in the yard with nothing to do except pump water from the old well or try to catch the horses. So they had dared each other to go into the barn. They had explored every empty stall and even the old hayloft, their light, young-boy bodies not weighing enough to fall through the decaying rafters that surely would’ve plunged the adult men to the cement floor below. One day, Lance had decided to fuck with Zippy. He had peered out of a high window, then whirled around to his brother and shouted, “Daddy’s coming! We’re going to get whipped!”
Zippy had slid down the old ladder so fast that he had splinters in both palms for a week. Then he’d run flat out across the barn floor, heading for the slightly adjacent back door, desperate not be caught in the old barn. Lance was still laid out in the loft, laughing silently.
As Zippy ran across the last ten feet leading to the door, his foot had broken through a board. They both heard the crack it made when it broke, like a gunshot in the overwhelmingly silent heat of the empty barn. It hadn’t slowed Zippy down at all, and he had charged out the back door, probably thinking Daddy was shooting at him. When Lance finally convinced him that he’d been playing a joke and Daddy hadn’t come out to the barn after all, they both crept back in to see what Zippy had broken. The boards were long and wide, painted red, and laid over the floor just before the back door. Or at least Lance and Zippy had thought they were laid over the cement floor, But upon examination, it turned out that the boards were actually covering open space below. By systematically pulling on each board, they discovered a trapdoor that swung open and revealed a ladder that plunged into absolute darkness below.
As the boys were discussing who should go down the ladder, they heard their father calling from the back porch and so exploration immediately ceased, to wait until their next trip. The two had been giddy with excitement about what could possibly be down there and it was all they could talk about when they were alone. Luckily, their father hadn’t waited long before heading back over to drink his brother’s beer. Four days later, they found themselves once again alone in the back of the old farm. They both had a flashlight in their pocket and were ready to explore the unknown, a boy’s paradise. They watched their father and uncle from the porch and as soon as they saw their fa
ther reach the end of his first beer, they crept into the barn from the back door, pulled up on the trap door, and made their way down, Lance going first. He was frightened, but he was the older brother, and although he could’ve made Zippy go first, this was one of those situations where it was just right for him to lead.
Before starting down, they shined their flashlights into the hole and revealed an open tube, into which the ladder plummeted farther than their lights could reach. Reluctantly, they turned their lights off and stuck them in their pockets, then began to climb down the ladder. The farther down they went, the colder the air became, and the more the darkness seemed to press in on them. Lance finally stopped, holding onto a rung with one hand and pulling his flashlight out with the other. Looking around, he saw the tube was getting smaller, but not small enough that he could reach the far wall. He looked down, and realized the floor was only a few more rungs down. He let go of the ladder and dropped to the ground, holding the light still so Zippy could see his way down. Still in the tube, they flashed their lights around 360 degrees. Lance felt bitter disappointment when it seemed to him that this was it. A dirt floor, and a cold dirt tube. But then Zippy had noticed a small, dark door. It was only half the height of a regular door and the same color as the dirt, which almost made it hidden in the dim light. Lance rushed to it and laid his hand on the knob, the feeling that he was about to discover a great secret that would change his life forever, coursing through him. And he had been right.
Lance opened the door. He had to duck slightly to go through it. Zippy didn’t have to duck at all. An adult would have to crouch and maybe even crawl through the door, which made the room that it opened up into that much more surprising. The room was large and the walls seemed to be concrete. There was no electricity, but gas lamps were hung from hooks every few feet. There was an old-fashioned ice box, plus counters built all along every wall of the square room. In the very middle were chairs, each fastened to the floor, and in front of each chair was a large metal ring. Back when they were children, the chairs and the metal rings had fascinated Zippy, but Lance had been more interested in what they found along the far wall. Twelve cells, each with a heavy wooden door, poured right into the concrete of the wall, so there were no hinges, and no way to open any of the doors once they were locked shut. Each of the doors was only half-size though, like the door leading into this room. Lance and Zippy could enter each of the cells at a slight crouch, but an adult would barely be able to sit down without their head touching the ceiling of the small cell. Lance knew they had to be cells, but were they for humans? They seemed to be too small to be for a human. They were a little over six feet long though, so a human could lay down in them comfortably.
