Now it was Balenger’s turn to pause. He could barely get out the words. “My wife.”
“Wife?” Cora whispered in shock…
Balenger looked at Tod in the surveillance room. “What I told you was the truth—I’m not a cop.” He hesitated. “But I used to be.”
Tod shook his head in disgust. “And that stuff about Iraq and the hood over your head and the guy with the sword?”
“Was true. I was a detective on Asbury Park’s police force. My wife and I live…lived here. She works…worked…I have trouble with tenses when I think about her. Two years ago, she disappeared.”
They listened so intently that, despite the rain, the bedroom seemed quiet.
“She was blond. Thin. Like Amanda. Thirty-three. But she looked younger, in her twenties. Like Amanda.” Balenger stared down at his clenched hands. “When Mack pulled the vault door open and I saw Amanda in there, God help me, at first I thought she was Diane. I thought I’d finally found her, that a miracle had happened and my wife was still alive.”
Balenger’s chest ached as he stared at Amanda, who reminded him so much of his wife. “Diane worked for a real estate developer here in town. The same developer who’ll be tearing down this hotel in two weeks. She often went to New York City to negotiate with the Carlisle trust for the land the Paragon sits on. The trust kept refusing. It’s a damned cruel joke that the trust eventually had to surrender the land for taxes. But two years ago, it still had control. And on Diane’s last trip to Manhattan, she vanished.”
Balenger drew a pained breath. “A lot of people disappear in New York. I used to go there on weekends and unofficially help the missing persons bureau. Leg work. Shoe leather. Finally the case got so cold, I was the only person doing anything. I kept asking for more time off work to look for Diane, until my boss suggested it would be better if I resigned and took all the time I wanted. I ran out of money. Then an ex-Ranger buddy told me about the quick cash to be earned in Iraq guarding convoys, provided I didn’t mind dodging booby traps and snipers. Hell, at that point, I didn’t much care if I lived or died. What I did care about was the twenty thousand dollars I’d earn for one month’s work, so I could get back to trying to find out what happened to my wife.”
Balenger forced himself to continue. “After a year, I didn’t have much hope she was still alive. But I needed to keep trying. It gives you an idea how desperate I was that I went to Iraq again. Diane had gotten me back on my feet after the first time. Damned Gulf War syndrome. She never tired of nursing me. It was her idea that I use my military experience and apply for a job with the Asbury Park police. Nothing demanding. A way to feel useful. Fucking Iraq. I told you how the second time turned out. But with the cash I got, I made myself keep searching. I followed every lead, every sex criminal who might have come in contact with her, every mugger who was known to work in the areas where she went. Double- and triple-checked. In the end, all I had was the feeling I’d had from the start but couldn’t prove, that Diane’s disappearance had something to do with the negotiations for the hotel. No, not the negotiations exactly. Something to do with the hotel itself. I asked permission to go inside, but the trust refused. Safety reasons. I did my best to break in, but the Paragon’s a damned fortress.”
Balenger’s voice tightened. “Three months ago, I read a newspaper article about urban explorers, how their expeditions are like special-ops missions and how some of them have a genius for infiltrating buildings that are supposedly impregnable. I checked urban-explorer websites and approached a group, but I made the mistake of telling the first group why I needed their help getting in. They treated me like I was an undercover agent wearing a wire. With the next group, I tried to convince them to take me into the hotel because it was a fascinating old building. But they didn’t trust an outsider any more than the first group did. Plus, there were plenty of old buildings they already had plans to explore. So I used the professor’s website next and arranged to meet him. This time, I tried the greed motive. I showed him copies of old newspaper articles from when Danata was killed—rumors about gold coins the gangster supposedly hoarded in a secret vault. Bob was polite. He said he’d look into it. I figured he was brushing me off. But it turned out he’d just been fired, and a week later, he phoned and said he’d help me on one condition.”
“That you’d get some of the coins for him,” Vinnie said.
“Yes. He admired you and Cora and Rick so much, he was certain you wouldn’t agree to take the coins. He was afraid about his health and how he’d pay for his heart treatments. He was angry about losing his professorship. You can’t imagine how angry. So the deal was, you’d unknowingly help me search the hotel for some clue about what happened to Diane. Then I’d come back the next night and get the coins for the professor. Of course, once I knew how to get in, I also planned to do a lot more searching.”
“I know Ronnie kept at least one other woman here,” Amanda said.
“What makes you sure?”
“In the dark, in the vault, the first time he locked me in, I touched something on the floor. About a half-inch long and wide. One end was smooth, the other jagged. I didn’t want to admit to myself what it was. A broken fingernail.”
Rain lashed the building.
Amanda pulled the Windbreaker around her. “You need to understand what it was like. We had candlelight dinners Ronnie made me watch him prepare. Elaborate gourmet menus. The best wine. CDs of Bach or Handel or Brahms playing in the background.” Amanda grimaced. “We spent hours reading in the library. Often, he read to me out loud. Philosophy. History. Literary novels. He’s especially fond of Proust. In Search of Lost Time. Lost time.” Her voice wavered. “He made me discuss what we read. I think that’s one of the reasons he kidnapped me—because I worked in a bookstore. We watched movies. Always art movies. Most were foreign, with subtitles. Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. All about the past. He never let me watch regular television. He never let me have any idea of what was going on in the world or how long I’d been here. With the shutters closed, I didn’t have any sense of whether it was day or night. There weren’t any clocks. I couldn’t tell hours from days. I had no way of calculating weeks. I couldn’t depend on my body rhythms to give me a sense of time. For some meals, Ronnie made me eat when I wasn’t the least bit hungry. For other meals, he made me wait till I was starving. In the vault, I couldn’t tell if I was dozing for a few minutes or sleeping for hours.”
“He must have slept, also,” Cora said. “How did he stop you from getting away from him?”
“Except for the first time, when I woke in that damned bed, the only place he ever let me sleep was the vault. When I was with him, he never turned his back on me. He kept a metal belt locked to my waist. The belt had a box on it, like the ones by the trapdoors. He said, if I tried to escape, he could blow me in half, even if I was a mile away. He said the charge was shaped to blow inward so that even if he was in the room with me, he wouldn’t be injured.”
“Where’s the belt?” Balenger asked.
Amanda made a futile gesture. “I don’t know.”
“We’ve got to find it.” His nerves on fire, Balenger pulled out bureau drawers, searching them. He heard Cora going through the closet. Vinnie looked under the bed.
“Nothing,” Cora said. “I’ll check the medical room.”
“And I’ll take the exercise room,” Balenger said. “Vinnie, you take the—”
“Wait a minute.” Vinnie stared upward. He grabbed a post on the bed and used it for support while he stepped up onto the ornate bedspread. He stretched and peered over the canopy’s top. “There it is. Got it.”
Amanda looked sick when he stepped down with a metal belt that had a box attached to it.
Balenger tugged at the lid, but it wouldn’t come off. “Sealed. I can’t disarm the…”
“I see him,” Tod said.
“What?” Balenger whirled toward the surveillance room.
“The son of a bitch is waving at me on one of the screens.”
Balenger charged into the surveillance room. The others followed. On the bottom right monitor, tinted green by a night-vision camera, a tall, thin, plain-faced man waved at them, silently saying either hello or goodbye. Amanda began to weep.
At least, it seemed that he was plain-faced. Hard to be sure when the man’s eyes were covered with what Balenger had feared he would have: night-vision goggles. Unlike the ones that dangled around Tod’s neck, these were streamlined, almost elegant, the latest high-tech version.
He had a weak chin. His thin nose was a counterpart to his thin lips. The baby-soft look of his skin made the wrinkles on his brow and around his mouth seem painted on. His salt-and-pepper hair was receding. He wore a dark suit, a white shirt, and a conservative striped tie.
“He always dresses that way,” Amanda said. “Never takes his coat off. Never loosens his tie.”
“Never?” Vinnie asked. “But how did—”
“I recognize him,” Balenger said.
“What?”
He turned toward Cora and Vinnie. “The professor described him for us. Remember? A blank-faced, bureaucratic type. In his fifties. No expression.”
“The guy in charge of Carlisle’s trust?” Vinnie looked startled.
“I spoke with him several times after my wife disappeared. The son of a bitch said Diane spent an hour in his office the day it happened. He showed me her name in his appointment book. Eleven in the morning. After their meeting, he said, he had a lunch appointment, and he had no idea where she went. But he doesn’t call himself Ronnie. The name he uses is Walter Harrigan.”
“Not Walter Carlisle?” Cora asked. “So much for his claim that he’s Carlisle’s son.”
“But why does he use different names?” Vinnie asked. “Who is he?”
On the monitor, Ronnie pointed toward something behind him. When he moved, Balenger saw that Ronnie was in the utility room, that the door to the tunnel was now shut. More than shut, Balenger realized.
“Jesus, what’s he done to it?” Cora asked.
A metal bar seemed to hang in mid-air in front of the door. No, Balenger thought in dismay. Not in front of the door. On the door.
Ronnie pointed toward something next to it.
“What the hell is that?” Tod said.
A metal cylinder resembled the kind of tank that scuba divers used. The tank was on a cart. A slender hose was attached to the tank. A short pole with a handle was attached to the other end of the hose. A mask with thick glass was propped against the cart.
Balenger felt nauseous.
Vinnie answered, “Welder’s tools. God help us, he welded a bar across the door. There’s no way out.”
Balenger stared down at the metal box in his hands. All the time he watched the monitor, he tugged fiercely at the lid, but the seal held firm. He feared that at any moment Ronnie would press a remote detonator, “Need to get rid of this.”
He rushed to the trapdoor in the surveillance room. “Cora, free the bolt!”
Holding the belt with his left hand, he drew his pistol with his right. “Open the trapdoor. Maybe this is a trick. Maybe we’re watching a video. Maybe Ronnie’s actually waiting under this trapdoor.” Balenger aimed. “If he is, I’ll blow him to hell. Vinnie, shine your flashlight at the opening. Ready? Cora, do it. Open the trapdoor!”
Cora pulled it up. Vinnie’s flashlight blazed into the darkness of another spiral staircase. Balenger reached under the curved handrail and dropped the belt and the box. They plummeted, clattering off metal.
Cora slammed the trapdoor shut. While she locked it and Balenger darted back, Tod said, “The bastard’s doing something else.”
Balenger whirled toward the monitor. There, Ronnie continued to display his neutral smile as he pointed toward something indistinct on a wall to the side.
“What’s that on the floor?” Vinnie asked.
“It’s moving,” Tod said.
“Water from the storm,” Cora realized.
Ronnie stepped sideways through the rippling water and reached the object on the wall. It was so far to the side that the camera hardly showed it. The object had a handle.
“No!” Amanda said, realizing what it was: an electrical transformer.
Looking surreal in his goggles, suit, and tie amid the water rippling in the utility room, Ronnie waved again, almost looking enthusiastic now, definitely communicating good-bye. He pulled down the lever.
The lights went out. The monitors became blank. The rain pounding the roof seemed to get louder as the group found itself for the first time in absolute darkness. Not even the skylight was available to show flashes from the storm. To Balenger, the darkness seemed to have density and weight, compressing around him, squeezing.
Cora gasped.
Fabric rustled, the sound of Vinnie’s arm moving as he turned his headlamp on. So did Balenger and Cora, the beams darting around the surveillance room.
“Give me the flashlight,” Tod told Vinnie.
It gleamed. For the previous four and a half hours, Balenger had been in semi-darkness. He had almost gotten used to it. By contrast, the bright lights of the penthouse had at first seemed unnatural, paining him. But how quickly he had adjusted to them. And now how quickly the semi-darkness was hateful.
“Amanda?” Cora asked.
“I’m okay. Fine.” But she didn’t sound fine at all. “I can handle this. I can handle this,” she said unconvincingly.
Unseen lightning cracked.
“I’ve been through worse.” She spoke rapidly. “Being in the vault was worse. Being alone was worse.”
“Alone?” Vinnie said, puzzled. “But—”
“Now’s our chance,” Tod said.
“Chance?” Balenger asked. “What do you mean?”
“He’s down in the basement. We can use one of these staircases to get to the ground floor.”
“I hate to agree with this creep,” Vinnie said, “but he’s right. We’ve got seven staircases to choose from. Ronnie can be in only one at a time.”
“But which staircase?” Cora asked. “You said you couldn’t find an exit down there.”
“And he said”—Tod indicated Balenger—“there must be secret doors.”
“Which staircase?” Cora repeated. “The one we already used is too obvious.”
“Or maybe it’s so obvious, Ronnie won’t think of it,” Tod said.
“I’m not going down that one.” Vinnie pointed toward the trapdoor where Balenger had thrown the metal box. “All Ronnie needs to do is press a remote detonator and—”
“That sound. What is it?” Amanda said.
“Just the storm. It’s bugging my nerves, too.”
“Something else. From in there.” Amanda pointed toward the bedroom.
“I hear it, too.” Cora turned.
“Not the bedroom. The exercise room,” Balenger said.
“The elevator!” Tod blurted.
Lights zigzagging, they ran toward the medical room, where they stared through the doorway into the exercise room. Despite the pounding of the rain, Balenger heard the whir of cables and gears. The whir got louder.
Behind the closed door, the elevator rose.
“If Ronnie’s in the elevator, he can’t stop us from going down the stairs,” Tod said.
Vinnie scowled at the closed door. “How do we know he’s in there?”
“He’s gotta be. Somebody’s gotta be in there to run the controls.”
“But what if the elevator works like a dumbwaiter?” Balenger asked. “What if Carlisle arranged for outside controls so his meals could be sent up without a waiter intruding on him?”
“Well, if that jerkoff isn’t in the elevator, who is?”
“Or what is? I’m not sure I want to hang around and find out,” Vinnie said.
The elevator stopped below them. Although the rain persisted, the absence of the whir made the room seem tensely quiet.
“Must be on a separate electrical circuit,” Cora murmured.
“When it gets here, shoot the door,” Tod urged. “It’s wood. The bullets will—”
“I don’t shoot what I can’t see,” Balenger told him. “There might be a policeman behind that door.”
“You want to open it and find out?”
The group stared at the door, concentrating on the stillness behind it. Then the stillness changed to the rattle of the interior gate being pushed aside.
“Shoot!” Tod yelled.
“You in the elevator!” Balenger aimed. “Identify yourself!”
“Pussy! Give me that gun!” Tod grabbed for it, but Balenger whacked the barrel against his forehead, knocking him to the floor.
Balenger whirled and realigned his aim as something thumped against the door. He motioned everyone into the medical room. Then he pushed the weights from the door and took cover behind the treadmill.
The door budged outward.
He tensed his finger on the trigger as the door opened slightly, revealing a portion of what seemed to be an empty compartment.
Tod groaned on the floor.
The door opened farther.
Balenger saw motion. Tod’s flashlight remained in his hand, gleaming across the floor. It revealed rats scurrying from the elevator, three, eight, a dozen, some with open sores, others with no ears or two tails or only one eye. Squealing in the lights from the headlamps, some leapt under the stationary bike or onto the treadmill, veering when they saw Balenger, following others that scrambled into the other rooms.
Cora screamed. But not because of the rats. A figure stumbled from the elevator.
Balenger almost fired but suddenly recognized the bloody jeans and Windbreaker, the muscular torso bent forward in pain, the blood, so much blood, a wooden spike sticking into the figure’s chest.
“Rick!” Cora ran to him.
“Wait!” Balenger said.
But his warning was too late. Rick tripped over Tod’s squirming body, lurched into Cora, and knocked both of them to the floor. Cora’s hard hat clattered away.
Creepers Page 19
