by Rachel Caine
“The context is, the man who’s being tortured in the video we got out of that cabin says he was hired by someone named Rivard. We already know Absalom specializes in blackmail. Somebody that rich could be a hell of a target.”
“Could be,” Mike agrees. “You’d better be goddamn sure before we go after that particular pale whale. You sure you want to keep involving her?”
“I’m sure.” Her means Gwen. Mike isn’t convinced of her innocence. Like most people, he can’t fathom how she couldn’t have known something, since Melvin was bringing victims home to the garage just on the other side of their kitchen wall.
That’s where we differ. I got sucked under on the Internet. I got indoctrinated by the echo chamber of like thinkers who set out to believe Gina Royal was guilty, and I swallowed it completely. I was blinded by my own hatred to the extent of planning just exactly how to kill Gina Royal. Not a merciful end. One that would deliver back to her all the pain and suffering that Callie had endured.
I had a cold, hard lesson in how easy it could be to lose your way, get lost in the shadows of your own rage and other people’s delusions. I understand how Gina Royal might have been blind to her husband’s horrors. She had been innocent. Too innocent to understand the depth of evil on the other side of that wall.
But I know Mike won’t understand that. Not yet.
“You still with me, son?” Mike says. He means son in the sense that other people say brother. We’re similar ages, though he comes across as much older. “’Cause you’re keeping me from my bed.”
“Not your wife?”
He laughs. “Vivian’s dead asleep. After all these years of me being a field agent, she can sleep through a bomb blast, bless her. Don’t make for much spontaneous late-night fun, though.” He sobers quickly. “Don’t let that woman get too close to you, Sam. You’ve got a weakness.”
“I know,” I say. “See you in the morning.”
“Hell, yes, you will. Now go to sleep.”
He hangs up.
I shut down the computer, take out the USB, and after a moment’s thought, put it in a zippered pocket of my backpack. I take the pack with me into my bedroom, then shut and lock the door.
I don’t want Gwen getting up and doing the same thing I just did. I’d rather spare her that, even though she might hate me for it.
Only one of us needs to live with those images. I’ve got the thing that matters out of all that pain.
Ballantine Rivard. Rich, eccentric old man who retired years ago from the company he founded—Rivard Luxe—and hasn’t been seen outside his tower fortress since. No obituaries that I could find before I called Mike Lustig. The man was still alive and kicking.
Tomorrow we are going to find him and ask him why he hired a man to infiltrate Absalom.
And what he knows about Melvin Royal.
Gwen and I have coffee out of warm, heavy mugs downstairs in the B and B’s dining room. It’s far too early for breakfast to be ready, but we wolf down the rest of the now-cold, still-delicious blueberry scones from the night before. The proprietor’s up, and presents us with our carefully folded clean laundry, which we add to our packs, and we’re gone long before the first light of dawn even begins to blush the horizon. As Morningside House disappears behind us, I hope they do well. They deserve to. Maybe someday, we’ll come back for a real weekend retreat, once all this horror show is done.
The drive to Atlanta goes smoothly, and we’re already inside the city limits when Mike Lustig finally calls. He gives directions to a downtown coffee shop, which mostly involves various iterations of “Peachtree,” and when we find it, it’s almost exactly 10:00 a.m.
Mike’s sitting calmly at a table in the busy place, with a huge to-go cup sitting in front of him as he checks his phone like the twenty-or-so other people in the place. He’s not visibly FBI just now; he’s wearing a nice sports jacket, black pants, and a dark-gold tie. The jacket almost disguises the gun he wears in a rig at his hip, but every cop, local or state or fed, has that same habit of scanning the room like a laser, looking for anomalies. The scan catches and holds on us, and he nods at me.
“Hey,” he says. “Get your own damn drinks. I don’t even have a budget for my own.”
I take a risk. I leave Gwen at the table with him and get in line for the coffees; I make them simple and keep an eye on the table. To all appearances, Mike and Gwen are having a civil conversation.
Appearances are wrong.
I get there with the coffee and set Gwen’s down in front of her, and I see the hard shimmer in her eyes. I’m familiar with that look, and the unyielding set of her chin. They’re staring at each other without speaking, and I slip into the chair to make it a triangle and say, “So I see we’re getting along.”
“Oh yeah,” Mike says to me in an offhand kind of way that I know from experience means nothing in particular. “Ms. Proctor here was just telling me in detail why I don’t know how to handle her ex-husband. So you go on, ma’am, and tell me all about how to do my damn job.”
I can’t tell if Mike’s actually mad, or just pretending to be. Mike has made an art form out of separating how he looks from what’s inside; back in the war zone, he was able to smile like a son of a bitch and drink all night with the guys, and then tell me as we were staggering home that he’d spent the whole night wanting to scream and rip his eyeballs out. I was never able to hide it that well.
“Let’s not,” I say, then take a too-fast, too-big swig of boiling-hot coffee. My tongue stings and goes mercifully numb. “You got info for us about this warehouse address?”
“Yeah,” he says. “You want to tell me how the hell Ballantine Rivard figures into it?”
“Wait,” Gwen says. “You mean the Ballantine Rivard?”
Mike gives me a questioning look. “You got that video for me?”
“Yep. But I wouldn’t watch it here,” I tell him. Mike is wondering what I’ve told her. I confessed going through the recording on the drive over, and we’ve gotten that inevitable argument out of the way. She’s made it clear she’s not happy with my choice to take that on for her, but she understands why I did it. “She knows I watched it.”
“Uh-huh.” Mike taps on his phone for a few seconds, then turns it outward to show a photo of an old white man, hair wispy around his skull, black-rimmed glasses framing watery brown eyes. He has a face like a basset hound, but somehow it manages to convey cleverness, too. Maybe it’s the focus in the eyes on whomever, out of frame, he’s addressing. He’s wearing a dark-blue silk suit and tie. Hand-tailored, probably. He looks perfectly stylish despite being in a motorized wheelchair. “Ever seen him in person?” he asks her, and she immediately shakes her head.
“I only know the name. I don’t exactly shop at Rivard Luxe.”
“Yeah, you wouldn’t, unless you were a one percenter who thought Neiman Marcus was too down-market,” Mike says. “It’s a department store for people with so much cash they use it for carpet. Upside to only selling to the stupidly rich: they never stop buying, no matter how much everybody else starves. Rivard turned a few million into about ten billion in ten years. He’s worth upward of forty billion now.”
“And the man who died in that video probably worked for him,” I say. “Or at least, he said he did. Rivard makes sense both as a blackmail target and as somebody with the resources to try to fight back on his own terms.”
“And . . . we think those people in the video torturing him are from Absalom. Right?”
“No idea,” Mike says, “since I haven’t seen the damn thing yet.” He holds out his hand. I unzip my backpack and hand it over. Gwen’s eyes narrow, and I see her biting back an impulse to say something cutting to me. I’m sure it’ll come later. We’ll have a good argument about how I don’t have any right to protect her, and she’ll be correct. But Gwen doesn’t need my permission, and I don’t need hers, and sooner or later she’ll protect me, too. She already has, more than once.
The USB drive disappears like a ma
gician’s assistant with a quick, fluid motion of Mike’s hand. Now you see it, now you don’t. I’m glad I made a copy and put it up in cloud storage. Just in case. “And the documents?” he asks. Gwen’s turn; she hands them over in a manila folder. He seems satisfied with that, though he gives the rest of the papers a good going-over, too, once he puts on a pair of evidence gloves. The paper with the warehouse address is on top, and he nods. “Okay, then. Let’s drink up and do this thing.”
My coffee is still too hot to give it another attempt, and Gwen doesn’t seem to want hers at all. Pity, but I dump both cups on the way out the door. Mike follows us, and I frown back at him. “You’re not taking your own car?”
“Nope,” he says. “My official car has monitoring.” And, I realize, he doesn’t want it showing up on any routine GPS checks the FBI might do. He crams himself into our backseat, which isn’t easy to do with those long legs, but then again, he must manage it in airplanes, and the FBI damn sure doesn’t pay for business class. While I’m getting the car started, he takes out his phone and powers it off. “You should shut both of yours off, too,” he tells us. “Trust me.”
I hand mine to Gwen, and she takes care of both. Lustig gives me quiet, terse directions as we glide through Atlanta; we leave the gridlock of downtown and head out into a less affluent part of town. It turns industrial, and then it turns into rusted, mostly abandoned structures that look ready to fall down in another stiff wind. The few people I see are homeless, or hopeless. A group of sullen young men in what passes for Atlanta winter wear sit on a corner and watches us drive by with impassive interest. The gang signs are everywhere.
I drive past the address, turn the next corner, and park. “We’d better take everything with us,” I say. “Not the place you leave stuff in view.”
“Good plan,” Mike says. “Common wisdom is, you don’t park in this neighborhood unless you leave somebody behind to watch the ride.”
“You volunteering?” Gwen asks drily, then gets out. I know she’s armed underneath that leather jacket. My gun is in a pancake holster on my left side; I like cross-body draw because it gives me time to assess before the weapon’s in my hand. Too many shots get fired before the brain catches up. “So. How do we want to do this?”
I lock the rental and mentally kiss the deposit goodbye. “Split up?”
“No,” both Mike and Gwen say. They exchange a look, as if surprised they agree on anything. “Outer perimeter only,” Mike says. “Start at the back, work our way ’round. We see anything sketchy, we’re out, and we sit on the place until I can get some guys here.”
“What are you going to tell them?” Gwen asks as we start walking. To our right is an old, boarded-up convenience store. There are eyes looking out between the boards, so it’s probably being used as a squat. “Since all your evidence is inadmissible.”
“I’ll say we heard sounds of a person in distress,” Mike says. “Which, when we find this video, won’t be too hard to believe. I’ll drop it inside, some point.”
“You seriously think that’s going to play.”
He shrugs. “Gets us a step farther. Right now, progress is all I got.”
We turn right at the alley, which makes my skin tingle and hair prickle painfully on the back of my neck. With two-story crumbling warehouses on either side, it looks like a place shadows gather. I’d rather not get knifed out here. Mike isn’t wearing a protective vest, either. This feels like an ambush waiting to happen.
The first warehouse we pass on the right-hand side is concrete blocks, so it’s surviving better, though the corrugated roof has rusted heavily. The chain-link fence is cut in two places. But the next warehouse, the one we came for, looks worse. Yet this chain link is new and shiny, and there’s a loop of barbed wire across the top to keep out anyone thinking of hopping it. The NO TRESPASSING signs are new and bright red, lacking the gunshot spatter that I’d seen on the ones in front in Google Street View. I wonder if someone has been out to renew all of it. Probably.
“Over here,” Gwen says, pulling on the chain link right at the farthest pole. It rattles, and when I come over, I see that it’s been cut and fastened with a couple of paper clips. I work them free, and Gwen shoves the opening back. It’s big enough to crawl through.
I look at Mike. He holds up both hands. “Not my circus,” he says. “You take care.”
He’s using us. Still. But I get why. I watched the video. I have a dim sense of what lies behind Mike’s calm face and unflickering smile.
I want to rip my fucking eyeballs out, he’d said, leaning heavily on me as we staggered back to our quarters that night. I want to scream until I throw up.
All night, he’d been smiling that same smile.
9
GWEN
Inside the perimeter fence, it feels like we’re alone on the face of the earth, and I instinctively check around me for escape options. It’s not good. One exit, behind us. I prefer multiple ways out. If I have to, I can scale that fence, sacrifice the jacket to provide some protection from the cutting wire edges. What if he’s in there . . .
He isn’t, I tell myself firmly. Though, honestly, what better place for Melvin Royal to be holed up? A deserted warehouse, with his followers to bring him food and comforts and victims. It’s so eerily possible that I slow, nearly stop, and earn a look from Sam. He doesn’t see it. He’s intent on finding clues.
I’m terrified we’re about to find something much, much more dangerous.
It feels like the zombie apocalypse has arrived inside this yard. The Atlanta sky has grown cloudy above us, and the coverage is low enough that I can’t see jets cutting through to remind me that the world still turns. I hear nothing but the wind hissing through the fence and the rattle of graying plastic trash as it listlessly drifts and flutters. The area where we stand was a parking lot once, but it’s long surrendered to the assault of weeds, grass, and weather. It’s a minefield of up-jutting, broken asphalt, mixed in with dead or dying stalks. Easy to lose footing in here. Impossible to run safely. Even from here, I can see the shiny padlock on the back door. The clasp that holds it looks newly installed.
“Gwen?” asks Sam, who’s retreated to stand next to me. “You okay?”
I don’t want to do this, I want to tell him. I want to remind him that I was right about the basement. But I know the difference between a genuine instinctive warning and the chaotic product of fear. So what if Melvin’s squatting here? There are two of us, both good shots, both with reason to see him dead. It means my nightmare could be over in a few minutes instead of days, or weeks, or never.
“Okay,” I tell him, and I make myself give him a nod. I’m still simmering about him watching that horror show of a video alone, because it feels like protection, like a man making decisions for me. We’ll have that conversation later. For now, it’s business. “Let’s do this. Careful of the footing.”
We move around the side. Wherever the corrugated siding might have peeled away, it has been nailed back; the nail heads are still bright, no sign of corrosion. Windows way up high, broken, but also unreachable; no handy stacks of crates or discarded ladders we could use to boost up to them, and even if I get on Sam’s shoulders, I’ll be several feet short of the goal. This is starting to look like a waste of time, I think, and then I see a side door. Like the back, someone’s put a new lock in place; unlike the back, they didn’t bother to swap out the original steel clasp. The nails look old. Rusted.
I point it out to Sam, and he nods. He reaches into his backpack and pulls out the kind of multitool pocketknife they don’t allow at airports anymore; he chooses the thickest blade and uses it to pry the nails, and it doesn’t take much for the entire clasp, lock still stoutly fixed, to swing away. It’s almost silent.
Sam stops me and hands me a pair of blue nitrile gloves; he puts on a pair himself. Smart. The last thing we want to do is leave fingerprints here. The fewer traces, the better.
I open the door and step inside, carefully and as silently as
I can manage, and despite all my focus and control, I can feel sweat beading on my forehead, under my arms, on my back. I’m trembling with the thunder of adrenaline dumping into my body, and I’m flat-out terrified that I’m about to see Melvin’s pallid face looming out of the shadows, eyes as empty as a doll’s as he reaches for me. The fear is so real that I have to take a second to imagine locking it behind a door, where it can pound and rage without damage.
He’s not here.
But if he is here, I’ll kill him.
It’s a mantra I think to myself, and it helps.
The floor is gritty, cracked concrete, but at least I don’t need a flashlight to see my footing; the milky light that filters in shimmers on floating dust, but it provides enough light to see that this part of the warehouse is open space, littered here and there with rusted parts, a discarded engine, and a pile of old debris.
“Watch your feet,” Sam whispers to me, a thread even I can barely catch. “This place is a tetanus factory.”
He’s right. We’ve both got on thick-soled boots, but I keep watch for nails, broken glass, anything like that. Broken glass is often used as a cheap alarm system by squatters in these places, and nails are hammered through boards and placed points-up as home defense. Last thing I want to do is step on one of those improvised booby traps.
We stop and listen. Except for the whistle of the breeze blowing and creaking through the roof and windows, there isn’t much to hear. No movement at all. But there’s a smell. Rust. Blood. Decay. It’s so familiar, so loathsome, that I feel dizzy.
Melvin’s signature perfume.
There’s an open doorway ahead, and I make my way carefully toward it. I stay out of the line of sight of anyone on the other side, and I halt when I see what looks like a pile of clothes along one side of the wall beyond. I draw my gun, and Sam does the same. He moves to flank me on the other side of the door and raises three fingers. He counts down, and we both pivot in, smooth and quiet.
I almost run into the dangling chains. I flinch back at the last second, and I can’t help the silent explosion of breath that comes out of me, but at least it isn’t a cry. I look down. More chains, anchored in fresh, shiny steel loops driven into the concrete. The chains above are hooked to a pulley system, and I follow the line of the rope back to a tie-off on the wall beyond me.
