The Drowned Girls (Angie Pallorino Book 1)

by Loreth Anne White

“I don’t know.”

  The door opened. It was one of the male ERT officers. “Hoi, detectives, you’re going to want to see this.”

  The officer led them to what appeared to be a supply closet inside the yacht on the lower deck. He opened the door, showing them into a cubby maybe eight by eight feet. “We had to break the lock to gain access,” the SWAT officer said.

  Angie and Maddocks stepped into the tight space. The walls were paneled with wood. A padded swivel stool was positioned in the center. A small counter, under a foot wide, ran around the walls at about waist height. Wires fed from holes in the paneling. USB ports attached to the ends of the wires had been plugged into a laptop that rested on the narrow shelf.

  Maddocks snapped on gloves. He ran his hand along one of the wires up to the hole in the wall. “There’s a removable plug of wood around the wire,” he said, opening the little cover that had been carefully recessed into the paneling. He swore softly and removed another wood plug.

  “Cameras,” he said, his gaze snapping to the laptop on the tiny counter. “These wires all feed from cameras to that computer.”

  Angie took a pair of latex gloves from her pocket, pulled them on, and opened the laptop. She hit the ON key, and it fired to life.

  “Shit,” she whispered as she opened consecutive files, each showing footage of different cabins, men in various stages of having sex with women. “He was spying from here. The bastard watched it all, filming everything.” She looked up. Four walls. Holes in each. Wires all leading to this laptop station. “He can see into several cabins from here. It’s like a little nerve hub in the belly of the Amanda Rose beast,” she said, opening another file. Video footage came to life—a black-haired, naked young man leading a naked woman around on all fours by a rope. Angie’s heart stalled. She hit FAST FORWARD.

  “We got him,” she whispered, feeling sick to the pit of her stomach as she watched the young man hogtying, then hammering himself into the woman from the rear, her hair falling over her face, which was pointed toward the camera. Tears stained her cheeks, and her features were twisted in anguish as the rope tightened around her throat. Behind them, in the far right corner, was Norton-Wells. “We got them both,” she said softly. “With Faith Hocking.”

  The camera’s time-date stamps showed November 28. As they watched the footage, Hocking began to gasp, her eyes bulging at the camera. Her body slumped. Raddison kept at it. Bile rose into Angie’s throat as they watched the young woman die, the footage turning into bona-fide snuff.

  “He must have fled in a rush to have left this here,” Maddocks said, watching by her side.

  “Or he just uploaded all of this to a cloud from where he could download it and watch it somewhere else at leisure.” She wiped her sleeve across her mouth, the depravity suddenly getting to her. “If what Norton-Wells told us was legit, this Spencer Addams guy was summoned by his bosses right after this happened, to get rid of Hocking’s body. Once he’d dumped her on Thetisby Island, he returned to the Amanda Rose, presumably via smaller boat, and as he was leaving the marina, he saw Raddison and Norton-Wells up in that parking lot, and he worked the opportunity that presented itself. He secured the Lexus, with which he later abducted Drummond. Then, when Hocking’s body finally surfaced, with evidence of her mutilation getting into the press, linking her to Drummond’s abduction and mutilation, he couldn’t come back.” She met Maddocks’s eyes in the tiny space. “Because his employers would know by that point that it would have had to be him who’d mutilated Hocking postmortem. They were the ones who’d entrusted him to properly dispose of her body, but he didn’t.”

  Maddocks turned to the SWAT guy waiting right outside the door. “Have this room sealed off. We’ll get the crime scene techs in here as a priority.” He reached for his phone and called Fitz.

  “We need a residential address, stat,” he said into his phone, his gaze locked on Angie’s. “Spencer Addams. He’s our guy. James Bay. Apparently lives with his mother. We’re heading toward the subdivision now, will be on standby for the address and for backup.”

  CHAPTER 71

  The second tactical team had come quietly, no sirens. The James Bay house had been in darkness. The ERT guys had broken in the door, but Spencer Addams and his mother were gone. The forensics ident unit was en route.

  Receiving the all-clear, Angie and Maddocks entered slowly through the garage, which fronted the quiet, quaint street of period houses and white picket fences and neat little flower beds. It was dark and windy out, the waxing moon shining silvery on the slumbering neighborhood. A black bank of cloud was building in the distance. The homes in this area were all within walking distance from the sea, and from the pier where Angie had met Merry Winston, and from the legislature buildings and inner harbor—the bustling core of the city. The location was made all the more stark and horrific by the notion that a violent sex killer had been raised right here, nurtured in their midst, gone to school and lurked and festered, growing ever more sick and sadistic over time.

  Angie nodded to the faint oil stain on the concrete garage floor where a vehicle had been parked. The interior of the garage felt warm, and the faint scent of exhaust and hot engine lingered on the stale air, as if the occupants had only very recently departed the house by vehicle. Metal shelving units lined the walls. Plastic boxes containing gardening tools, household cleaning equipment, and other supplies rested upon the shelves. From a corkboard affixed to the wall, tools hung from hooks in symmetrical rows.

  “He’s a neat freak,” said Maddocks as they moved toward the door at the rear of the garage. It opened onto a stone path that led to the main house.

  Angie stalled. “Wait, over here,” she said. “Gun safe.”

  The door to the safe hung open. It was designed to hold long guns but was empty. An overturned ammunition box rested on the counter. Also empty. “Twenty-two caliber,” she said, reading the box. “He’s out there, and he’s armed with a rifle.”

  They exited the rear door, made their way up the small path to the white, gabled house with stained glass detail above the windows. The exterior lights had been put on, and they revealed a well-kept lawn, shrubs neatly trimmed.

  While they’d waited for backup, Vedder had started techs running searches and checks on the name “Spencer Addams.” His middle name was John. He had no criminal record. His DNA and prints were not in any database. His mother’s name was Beulah Lee Addams, née Cartwright. And this house was in her name. Spencer had been raised here. His father, John Addams, had been reported missing when Spencer was five years old. That case had eventually gone cold—the father was never found. Spencer had thereafter been raised by a single mother, had attended local schools, worked as a carpenter’s apprentice. Beulah appeared to have a long history of active engagement with Catholic-based charities and had been a member of Father Simon’s parish. And that was as much as the guys back at the station had managed to unearth so far.

  The forensics unit was pulling up outside as Maddocks and Angie entered the house wearing crime scene booties and gloves. It was warm inside, and it looked as though the occupants had definitely left in a hurry, because the television was still on, playing a recorded episode of Coronation Street. Embers glowed orange in the old fireplace, and a menthol cigarette had been left burning, its long column of intact ash resting on an ashtray full of butts, all stained with bright-red lipstick. Beside the ashtray was a box of blue latex gloves and a shopping bag with a logo that said DRUGGIE MART. They’d passed that store on the corner down the street on their way in.

  Coats hung on hooks by the door. A woman’s flower-patterned umbrella rested in a stand alongside a pair of men’s Salomon running shoes and a smaller pair of women’s Rockport walking shoes. The air was laden with the acrid, minty stink of the menthol cigarettes.

  Angie’s heart raced softly as she took it all in.

  While crime scene techs would comb carefully through this place, she and Maddocks had a more immediate goal—go through the hous
e quickly, looking for any sign that might tell them where the occupants had gone. The clock was still ticking. Their subject was on the run and armed. He could be feeling cornered, and thus dangerous. Whether his mother had gone voluntarily with her son remained a key question.

  Maddocks and Angie moved down the hallway and entered a small bathroom on the left. Angie caught her breath.

  Pasted down the side of a mirror above a white basin were photos of a naked Gracie Drummond engaged in sex acts with various men. Across the top of the mirror, scrawled large in bright-red lipstick, were the words Save the Girls. Right beside the lipstick scrawl, a red arrow pointed down to an image of another naked young woman engaging in intercourse with a bearded male who looked to be in his late fifties.

  “Lara Pennington,” said Angie.

  Under the image of Pennington and the male, smaller text had been scrawled: Next. To be baptized in the name of the Lord. Save them all. Out with Satan.

  Her pulse quickened. “They’re stills,” she said, leaning closer. “Taken from his recordings on the yacht. Addams watched Drummond, Hocking, and Pennington, along with other women working at the club—that’s what fixated him on these girls. He went after Drummond, perhaps, after tasting his thrill with Hocking’s body.”

  “He wanted a live one,” Maddocks said softly.

  “And Pennington is next,” Angie said, her gaze dropping to a pair of exfoliating bath mitts lying inside the basin. With gloved fingers, Maddocks lifted one. The fingers of the mitt were crumpled and stuck together with a dried substance.

  “Semen?” he said.

  Along the rim of the basin lay a selection of open safety pins, a razor. A tube of cream called Icy-Hot—for muscle pain relief. And what looked like some blood.

  Maddocks’s attention went from the mitt, to the pins, and the razor, then back up to the images of fornication. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  She inhaled, a dark sense of foreboding, of worse to come, filling her mouth. “Looks like he jacked off here, using those pictures of Drummond and Pennington with other men as stimulation. If he did it wearing those gloves, and if he also used that cream on his private parts, it would have burned like all hell.”

  “And there’s the pins and razor,” he said. “Pain gets this bastard off. Wonder what his mother thought of these photos on the mirror. If they were living together, she had to have seen them.”

  “Maybe she was a part of it,” Angie said, nodding toward the red scrawl. “That looks like her lipstick—same color as the lip prints on those menthol cigarettes. And she’s vanished with him.”

  They moved down the hall to the first bedroom and entered. It was austere—the walls unadorned apart from a wooden crucifix that hung above a simple twin bed with navy-blue duvet cover and pillows. Bare wood floors. No drapes.

  That dark sense of foreboding sank deeper as Angie followed Maddocks into the second bedroom.

  This one was bigger—frilly and flowery. A queen-size bed was covered in pillows and pink floral linens. A crocheted throw had been neatly folded and placed near the footboard. A framed Emily Carr print of an old church hung on the wall. A mirrored dresser—dark wood and shaped like a kidney—was positioned under a window that was covered by scalloped sheers. On the dresser a rosary curled among framed photos and a jumble of lipstick tubes, a blush compact, blue eye makeup, face powder, and a half-eaten bag of Hattie’s Candies from the Olde Sweet Shoppe. The sales slip indicated that the candies had been bought five days ago. Angie picked up one of the frames and studied the photo. It showed a cute-looking kid around ten years of age, tousled blond hair, an urchin smile. Bright-blue eyes. Skinny little legs with knobby knees stuck out of baggy shorts. The woman with him was somewhat pinch-faced. Cat’s-eye glasses.

  “This could be Spencer when he was a boy, with his mother,” she said, replacing the frame.

  There was no sign of a male in this room, nor in the en suite bathroom.

  Passing the crime scene techs entering the house, she and Maddocks quickly made their way down into the basement. A swinging lightbulb above wooden stairs lit their way.

  Both stilled at the bottom of the stairs. The basement ran the entire length of the house. At the far end was a makeshift gym complete with bench press, barbells, exercise bike, and treadmill.

  They entered slowly, a cold sensation pressing low into Angie’s stomach. It was as if she could feel him in here, his shed skin cells still hanging in the air, getting into her mouth, into her nasal passages and bronchia.

  A laundry and bathroom led off the gym area. Inside the laundry was a stainless steel trough large enough to have pushed Gracie Drummond’s head under water. At the other end of the basement was a fridge and a large chest freezer. In the center of the room a simple metal chair had been positioned. It faced a more comfortable-looking, padded wingback. Ropes strung from a support beam along the roof hung down to the floor around the wingback—reminiscent of the rope structure in the root cellar on Thetisby Island. Beside the wingback was a television screen and video equipment. Maddocks switched it on.

  The screen made a soft static crackle as the image came to life. Angie stared. Gracie Drummond. Bound. Her mouth duct-taped. A blond, well-honed, naked male forcing himself into her. Angie looked away, sweat breaking out over her skin as Alex Strauss’s words hammered through her.

  It’s rough, that kind of thing. On anybody … acknowledge it. In movies, sure, fictional cops are immune. Viewers are inured to violence. But this is real life. Real people. We’re not built to deal with an incessant onslaught of the kinds of things you deal with in sex crimes …

  She moved away from the screen toward the counter that ran the length of the wall between the fridge and the freezer. On it was a large concertina sewing box. She lifted the lid and was greeted by a bright array of spools of colored thread. Opening it wider, the top compartment slid back to expose the bottom layer. She stilled.

  “Maddocks.”

  He came to her side. “Trophies,” she said, staring at the locks of hair—all lacquered together at the top of each lock and tied with different colors of thread. “There have to be more than twenty different strands in here. And they have names, dates, places tagged to them.” She leaned closer, not wanting to touch or mess with this evidence. She tried to read the tiny hand-printed text on one of the minute tags. “It says ‘Malaga,’” she said. “And one that says … ‘Toulon,’ and that one says ‘Nice.’” She looked up at Maddocks. “Places along the Cote D’Azur and the French Riviera? He’s been at this, collecting, for years.”

  The sound of people coming down the stairs reached them. Angie moved quickly to open the fridge. It was filled with bottled sparkling water, vitamin water, sports drinks. She closed it. As she moved to open the freezer, Maddocks’s cell rang. He stepped aside to answer it as the crime scene techs and a photographer entered the basement. Angie lifted the freezer lid.

  “Fuck!” she gasped, pulling back and almost dropping the lid closed. Her stomach contracted violently.

  The blue, frosted face of a woman stared up at her with sightless, frozen eyes. Her lips were painted in the same bright-red lipstick that stained the cigarette butts and the mirror upstairs. The head was attached to the naked torso of a senior. But her legs and arms were stashed separately alongside her.

  “His mother?” she whispered, horror rising up into her throat. “Beulah Addams? Jesus. How long has she been in here?” Her gaze shot toward Maddocks as the techs came up to the freezer.

  His face had gone bloodless. He wasn’t looking at the freezer. He was clutching his phone.

  “It’s Ginny,” he said, voice rough. “She needs my help.”

  “What?”

  “She … says she went out with friends, had too much to drink, and she thinks her drink was spiked.”

  Angie motioned quickly to the techs to take over the freezer, and she went over to Maddocks. He looked ill.

  “She’s frightened … she sounds in a bad way, A
ngie. She needs me. Now. She asked me to come.” His eyes glittered. “I’ve neglected her—I thought I’d just give her time and that she’d come back to me. But … not in this way.”

  Urgency and conflict crackled through them both.

  “It’s your biggest case, Maddocks,” she said quietly.

  “And it’s my daughter. It’s why I’m here. I came to be here for her. This is my world, Angie. I came to be a better dad, to make up for all the lost time.” His gaze went to the freezer, to the crime scene photographer now taking photos of the body inside. “Can you handle it from here? Can you get a unit to pick up Lara Pennington, take her in before this monster gets to her, if he hasn’t already? Find out who else might be in jeopardy?”

  Her mouth tightened. She regarded her partner, her boss. Her lover. This beautiful man. He was a rescuer. And she believed she loved him. And she hurt at the pain she saw in his features. Emotion burned into her eyes, and she nodded. “Yeah. I’ve got it. Go. Go look after her.”

  And he was gone, up the stairs, the flip of his black coat hem the last thing she saw.

  CHAPTER 72

  Maddocks drove too fast in the unmarked MVPD vehicle he’d taken from the crime scene. Ginny’s small, slurred voice, her words, tumbled and tumbled through his mind.

  “Daddy … can you come? I screwed up … I … I’m so, so sorry …”

  Emotion burned into his throat as he swerved up against the curb outside her converted apartment block. He left his car door open, took the stairs three at a time, banged hard on his daughter’s door, then tried the knob. It opened. Inside her apartment it was dark. Dank. He could smell sweat—male sweat. Alarms began to clang inside his head.

  “Ginny?” He smacked on the lights, then stilled as the living room came into focus. Upturned chair. Mug on the floor. Spilled liquid. Ginny’s purse—her phone lying next to it. He rushed madly through the small apartment. “Ginny!”

  His heart jackhammered.