Prey (Jefferson Winter)

by James Carol

  ‘See what?’

  ‘The path that’s been trodden through the backyard?’

  ‘Of course I see it.’

  He jogged from the room and ran down the stairs, his feet thudding on the bare floorboards. Mendoza was yelling after him, demanding answers, but Winter ignored her and kept running. He sprinted along the hallway, pushed through the front door and took the porch steps sideways. He stopped and looked around for the best way to get to the back yard.

  Mendoza caught up with him and started to ask something, but he ignored her again and sprinted around the left side of the house to the yard. From down here, it looked even more of a jungle. He didn’t even want to guess when it had last been tended to. It was longer than six years, though. He could just about make out the ruined wire and wood of something that might once have been a chicken coop, and a fenced area that might once have been used for growing vegetables. The grass was waist high, and the path that cut a line through it went on for about thirty feet before disappearing into the trees. Mendoza came to a halt beside him, their arms momentarily touching. Winter looked at the path, his eyes tracing the route all the way to the treeline.

  ‘The only reason you make a path, or a road, or an interstate, is because you need to get from A to B. And this path is well trodden, which means that Amelia used it regularly, maybe even every day, so the question I’m asking myself is, why?’

  Mendoza moved past him and stood there looking for a moment, her eyes following the same route as his.

  ‘There’s no evidence of a dog,’ he added. ‘So she doesn’t come out here to exercise it.’

  ‘What about the bowls in the cellar?’

  ‘Yes, but where were the tins of dog food, the dog basket, the lead and the chew toys? There might have been a dog here once upon a time, but there isn’t one here now.’

  ‘Maybe she goes running then? You said she was thin.’

  ‘Maybe, but I don’t think so. Judging by the food in her refrigerator her weight is controlled by diet, not exercise.’

  ‘So where does it lead to? If we can work that out, then maybe we’ll be able to work out why she needs to use it so regularly?’

  ‘That’s what I’m thinking.’

  Winter broke into a run again, the grass stems brushing against his jeans. Mendoza was close behind, her stride matching his. They reached the treeline and the day disappeared behind the tangle of high branches. The path snaked from left to right, navigating a course defined by the trees. A couple of hundred yards further on, they came to a small clearing. At first glance, it appeared to be empty. Winter looked around, his eyes tracing a quick counterclockwise circuit around the trees, but he couldn’t see where the path started up again.

  ‘Looks like we’ve found Point B.’

  ‘But there’s nothing here.’

  ‘There’s something here. We just haven’t found it yet.’

  Winter stepped into the clearing, back into the October sunlight. He stopped for a second to let his eyes adjust, then carried on walking, looking high, looking low, searching. The path suddenly stopped a part of the way into the clearing. He glanced down. Smiled. The scattering of leaves at his feet were too ordered to have been blown here.

  ‘Strike that earlier comment. This is Point B.’

  He crouched down and brushed the leaves away. The ground underneath appeared to be covered in moss. He ran a hand over it. Not moss. It had an artificial felt-like texture. Winter banged down hard with the flat of his hand. A hollow wooden echo rang back. Once he’d brushed the rest of the leaves away it was easy to see the outline of the trapdoor. The hinges were on the left side, and on the right was a gap just big enough for a small hand to get beneath.

  He squeezed his fingers into the gap. It was a tight fit, and he could feel the dirt scratching at his skin. He kept pushing until he managed to get a good hold, then heaved the trapdoor open. It went up and over and smacked against the ground, revealing a set of concrete steps leading down into the dark.

  ‘We need to call this in,’ said Mendoza.

  ‘And who do we call? Birch? Who knows where he’s got to. And Peterson would be no help at all. As for the sheriff’s department, I wouldn’t hold my breath.’

  ‘Now we’ve got something solid, that should get them moving.’

  ‘Tell you what. You make your call and I’ll go see what’s down there.’

  Winter moved to the top of the steps and Mendoza laid a firm hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Wait. What if this is some sort of a trap?’

  ‘It’s not a trap. Amelia doesn’t want to hurt me. I’m too important to whatever game she’s playing.’

  Mendoza sighed, then tried again. ‘She’s a psychopath. You can’t know what she’s thinking.’

  ‘Newsflash, Mendoza: I can.’ Winter shrugged her arm away and placed his foot on the first step. He turned to face her and softened his tone. ‘It’s probably best if you stay up here. If it turns out that this is a trap, then I’m going to need you to come and save my ass.’

  ‘Don’t count on it. There’s no way I’m going down there without proper backup.’

  40

  Winter walked down into darkness, the temperature slowly dropping the deeper he went. Up above he could hear Mendoza talking on her cell. Halfway down he removed his rubber gloves and stuffed them into his jacket pocket. Then he took out his Zippo and lit it. The flame danced yellow and red and orange, creating patterns on the whitewashed cinderblock walls. He sniffed the air. It smelled damp and earthy, but underpinning that was the faint smell of decay. By the time he reached the bottom that was all he could smell.

  He held his lighter up higher and stepped forward into an empty space that was about five yards wide and four yards long. The floor was rough-cast concrete and the ceiling was concrete, too. Like the stairwell, the walls down here were made from whitewashed cinderblock, There were empty shelves fixed to one wall and an empty gun rack pushed up against another. An old-fashioned gas hurricane lamp hung from a nearby hook. He lit the lamp and put his Zippo away. Then he pulled his rubber gloves back on, lifted the lamp down from the wall and stepped back into the stairwell.

  ‘It’s not a trap,’ he called up. ‘It’s an old bomb shelter.’

  There was no answer. Maybe Mendoza had heard, maybe she was still on the phone. He moved away from the stairs, the lamp held high. The smell of decay was stronger than ever, but there was no sign of the source. He walked into the middle of the room and the light from the lamp crawled up the end wall. This wall wasn’t made from cinderblock. It glittered darkly in the dim light.

  He stepped closer and saw that it was made entirely from jars of different shapes and sizes that had been stacked carefully on top of each other. All were filled with some sort of translucent yellow liquid, the colour differing subtly from jar to jar. The overall effect was to create a kind of mosaic. In its own weird way it was really quite beautiful. He bent forward to get a closer look, moved the lamp right up against the jars. Flames played inside the liquid. He tapped one of the jars with his fingernail and a dull tink sound whispered through the room.

  Winter reached up to the top of the wall and carefully removed a jar. He could see a second jar behind it. As far as he could tell the jars had been arranged to create a wall that was two deep. He took a closer look at the jar in his hand. There was no label but judging by the size and shape he figured it had contained some sort of cook-in sauce. He removed the lid and the unmistakeable smell of ammonia wafted out. Urine.

  He stepped back so he could see the whole wall. There had to be hundreds of jars, thousands even, and they were all full. Suddenly it felt much colder in here. He pulled up the zipper on his jacket but it did nothing to alleviate the chill crawling down his spine. He waved the lamp in front of the jars, making the contents shine and glisten and darken. Organised serial criminals loved to make statements because it made the game more exciting. They loved to pose puzzles then watch to see if the cops could solve them. Winter
had seen plenty of those puzzles. He’d been presented with plenty of those statements, too. However, if that’s what was going on here, this was one of the grander, and stranger, statements he’d come across.

  This wall represented hours of painstaking, methodical work. It would have taken time, effort and patience to construct. One jar at a time, one row at a time, the wall slowly climbing higher. Winter leant in close enough for his nose to touch glass and peered through the gaps. Because the jars differed in shape and size all he saw were the ones on the second row.

  He knelt down and tried looking lower. Again, all he saw was liquid and glass shining back. He tried a little to the left. Same thing. A little more to the left, and this time he found what he was looking for, a place where the gaps between the two rows lined up. He moved the lamp around to make sure that his eyes weren’t playing tricks.

  There was a void beyond the wall of jars.

  41

  ‘You’re sure this isn’t a trap?’ Mendoza yelled out from the stairwell.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  Footsteps on the stairs, footsteps crossing the room. He tore his gaze away from the jars and turned around. Mendoza was standing there holding her cell phone in one gloved hand and her service revolver in the other.

  ‘So where’s your backup?’

  ‘The sheriff’s department are on their way.’

  ‘But they’re not here yet.’

  ‘I couldn’t hear you and I got worried, okay? And before you read too much into that. I’m a cop and technically you’re a member of the public, therefore it’s my duty to protect you.’ She nodded towards the wall of jars. ‘What the hell is this? And why can I smell a dead body when I can’t see one?’

  Winter lifted the hurricane lamp up, making the jars sparkle.

  ‘Some sort of coloured water?’ she suggested.

  ‘Not exactly. It’s urine.’

  She stepped back so she could see the wall better. Her eyes scanned from left to right, starting at the top and working downwards. Winter could almost read her thoughts. She’d be counting the jars and calculating how long it would take to fill them all. She pushed her cell into her pocket, but kept the gun out.

  ‘This is really messed up, Winter.’

  ‘It gets worse. The wall is two jars deep.’

  ‘Jesus. So where’s the body?’

  Winter nodded towards the jars. ‘My guess is it’s behind here.’ She gave him a puzzled look. ‘Rooms within rooms,’ he reminded her.

  She stepped up to the wall and gently tapped one of the jars on the top row, making it wobble. ‘I don’t think it would take much to bring this whole thing down.’

  ‘Well we’d better be careful then.’

  Mendoza caught his meaning and shook her head. ‘We need to wait for the sheriff’s department before we go back there.’

  ‘Because a sheriff’s department out here in the middle of nowhere is going to be better qualified to deal with this than we are. Come on, Mendoza, you know how territorial cops can be. When the sheriff’s department gets here we’re going to be left sitting on the sideline. Now by my reckoning it’ll take about half an hour to get here from Rochester, so we need to hurry. Assuming, of course, that they are actually on their way.’

  Mendoza stood there weighing up the pros and cons, her mouth shut tight. She seemed to come to some sort of decision because in the next second she had her gloves off, her cell phone out and she was ushering him out of the way. She started taking photographs from different angles, the small flash cutting through the gloom.

  ‘You get to leave when this is all done,’ she told him. ‘But I have to deal with the aftermath. There’s no way I’m letting you screw up a conviction by moving all of these, not without having some sort of photographic evidence of what we found.’

  ‘Fine, but please be quick.’

  Mendoza took one last picture. The cell phone disappeared into her pocket and the rubber gloves went back on. They started in the right-hand corner and quickly got into a rhythm. Winter was able to reach higher, so he lifted the jars down and passed them to Mendoza, who put them in a neat pile against the nearest wall. They stopped a couple of times and tried to look through, but couldn’t see anything. Once they’d cleared a two-foot-wide corner from the first layer, they started on the second. Winter stripped the second layer back to eye level then held up the hurricane lamp. Mendoza squeezed in next to him and stood on tiptoes so she could peer over the top. He couldn’t see anything at first, but then his eyes started to adjust and he was able to make out vague shapes.

  ‘I think we’ve just found Eugene Price,’ he said.

  ‘At least we now know where the smell is coming from.’

  Winter put the lamp down on the floor and reached for another two jars. They worked their way down until the jars were low enough to step over. Mendoza went through first, sideways so she didn’t nudge any jars and send them crashing to the floor. Winter passed the lamp through, then followed.

  Eugene Price was lying naked on a small single mattress. A thick grey beard covered the lower half of his face, long white hair covered the rest. His skin had blistered and the body had begun to bloat. He was chained to the wall by his left wrist. Judging by the scarring on his other limbs, Amelia had rotated the limb she had used. When his wrist got too raw she would have moved on to a different arm or leg, eventually working her way back to the left wrist.

  ‘Going on the smell, and the state of the body, I’d say he’s only been dead for about three days,’ Mendoza said.

  ‘Maybe a little longer. It’s cold down here. That would slow the rate of decomposition.’ Winter became aware of Mendoza watching him and turned to look at her. ‘What?’

  ‘Maybe you were right about this being the trigger for Omar’s murder. Maybe this is the reason for changing her MO.’

  ‘The timings work, but why New York? And why target me?’

  ‘New York’s one of the biggest cities in the world. It’s much easier to kill someone there and get away with it.’

  ‘Agreed. But why me? Because that’s the question we keep coming back to here.’

  Mendoza shrugged and Winter turned his attention back to Eugene. When his heart stopped pumping, gravity had taken over and caused his blood to pool in the parts of his body lowest to the ground, making the skin look bruised. As you looked higher the purples and blacks turned to yellow and grey. The untidy scars that covered his body were more noticeable on the top part where the background was lighter.

  ‘What do you think Amelia used to make these?’ Mendoza asked.

  ‘She didn’t do this, Eugene did. Can you see how the scarring gets less as you get to the parts that are harder to reach?’

  ‘In which case these weren’t done with a knife or a razor blade. If he’d had access to something like that he would have killed himself.’ She leant in for a closer look, then suddenly straightened up, a look of horror on her face. ‘Jesus, he did them with his fingernails, didn’t he?’

  ‘Griffin would need to confirm that, but yeah that’s my guess.’

  Winter held the lamp up high and moved closer. Eugene’s hair and beard was thick and dirty and matted together in clumps, making it impossible to see his face. Griffin would be able to get a match to the hair left in the Bible. He used a gloved finger to move the hair from Eugene’s face. Mendoza inhaled sharply and exhaled a breathy ‘Holy shit.’

  Winter shined the lamp closer. The scarring here was different from the scarring on the rest of his body. It was hard and dark. Melted. The empty eye sockets made him think of black holes. ‘Amelia did this. She burned his eyes out with a cigarette.’

  Mendoza just stood there staring. ‘So what does your inner psychopath have to say about this?’

  Winter ignored her and lifted the lamp higher. The small table that had been positioned near the back wall was like a miniature version of the one in the house. White tablecloth, a red place mat, silver flatware. The main difference was that it had been set fo
r one. Because everything was scaled down, there was a single candle in a silver holder instead of a candelabra.

  And instead of a record player there was a small portable CD player. Winter hit play and the unmistakeable sound of Strauss’s Blue Danube filled the air. He looked back at the mattress, saw the scuffmarks on the concrete floor near the top end.

  ‘I know what the dog bowls in the cellar were for.’

  Mendoza’s head was tick-tocking between the mattress and the table. ‘Amelia ate at the table, while Eugene ate from a dog bowl on the floor.’

  ‘Exactly. She heated up one of those TV dinners, scraped it into a dog bowl, then prepared a nice healthy salad for herself. Then she came out here, turned on the CD player and they ate together.’

  Empty jars had been piled up in one corner beside a black bucket. Next to the bucket was a urine-stained plastic funnel, and next to that was a cardboard box filled with medical supplies. There were bandages and tubes of antiseptic to dress Eugene’s wounds, and packets of over-the-counter painkillers. Winter picked up a small orange medicine tub and looked at the label. A prescription for Vicodin made out to Amelia Price.

  He put the pills back in the box and walked over to the mattress. The manacle and chain was attached to a metal plate that had been fixed to the wall. The metal was tarnished and speckled with rust. It looked years old. He knelt down and lifted up the manacled arm. It moved easily, which was to be expected. The effects of rigor mortis were temporary and usually started to wear off after twenty-four hours. The fingers were curled into the palm, the skin felt waxy. He put the arm back down carefully, then stood up and lifted the lamp to eye level. More white cinderblock, but unlike the blank walls on the other side of the glass jars, these ones were decorated with crude childlike paintings. Long sweeping diagrammatic brushstrokes in black and red.

  ‘I should go back up top and update Hitchin,’ said Mendoza.

  ‘Yes you should.’

  ‘And you should come with me.’

  Winter shook his head and met Mendoza’s eye. They stood frozen like that for the best part of ten seconds. It was Mendoza who broke the silence.