Quinn rapped on the door. There was a bit of a wait, some shuffling and knocking from within the house, and just when Quinn was about to knock again, the door opened. There was Jantz, dressed in blue jeans and a sleeveless muscle shirt that didn't do much for him because he didn't have the muscles to go with it, just two pasty white arms that hung from his side like wet noodles. His gray hair, just as before, was as blocky as cut granite. His face had an unnatural pink flush, and when he spoke, Gage got a good whiff of whatever booze the man was drinking.
There was so much nervous energy wound up in the man that Gage feared that if it came unspooled, it would knock the duplex down. For just a moment, Gage saw Jantz's eyes dart to the left, to the complex next door, and Gage suddenly understood why there was no car parked in the other spot.
"What do you want?" Jantz said.
"Mr. Jantz," Quinn said, "I'm sorry to bother you, but we just have—"
"You know exactly what we want," Gage said. "We want you to open up your place next door and show us what you're hiding inside."
"Gage—" Quinn began, sternly.
"What?" Jantz said, eyes doing the rattlesnake dance, his hands balling into fists. "I don't—"
"You're in big trouble, Patty," Gage went on, talking over both of them. "You know it and I know it."
"I didn't—"
"Let's make this easy instead of hard. You want to open the door or do we have to—"
Jantz slammed the door. It was so abrupt that it took both Gage and Quinn a few seconds to react to it.
"What happened to being a perfect little Boy Scout?" Quinn asked.
"That was me being a Boy Scout."
"I'd bet a thousand dollars you were never in the Boy Scouts."
"You'd win that bet," Gage said. "But did you see his face? He was panicked beyond belief. He's definitely got something over there. Let's find out what it is."
"Not without a warrant," Quinn said.
"Chief—"
"Gage, you may be able to play fast and loose with the rules, but I—"
Gage, knowing they would blow their opportunity if he argued any longer with Quinn, banged on the door. "Open up!" he shouted. "Open up, Jantz! Make this easy rather than hard!" He pounded on the door again. "Open up or we're kicking this door down!"
He raised his fist, but this time a cursing Quinn grabbed his arm and yanked him away from the door. They fell off the stoop into the rain. Gage took a few backward, stumbling steps, feet sliding on the slick pavement, and would have gone down if Quinn still wasn't gripping his arm. The icy deluge soaked through his clothes as if they were made of tissue paper. He ripped his arm from Quinn's grasp, and the two came back at each other like boxers in a ring. In a tiny back compartment of Gage's mind, he knew this was a bad idea, but his frustration had overwhelmed him.
That's when he caught the flicker of yellow behind the curtains.
It was behind the curtains on the right, not the left, and it wasn't a steady yellow but a pulsing yellow—from a fire! All at once Gage realized what was happening, that evidence was being destroyed, and if he didn't act right this second, then whatever hope they had of convicting Jantz was literally going to go up in smoke.
He was at the door on the right before these thoughts had barely taken coherent form in his mind, running despite the knife-jab of pain in his knee, Quinn hollering at him, kicking at the door with everything he had.
The first blow splintered the frame, but the door didn't give. He was raising his foot to kick again when he heard a scream from inside, a terrible scream of a man in agony, and Gage put even more force into his next kick.
The door blew open in a crackle of wood.
A wave of heat and smoke rolled over him. He heard Quinn shouting, but Gage was already inside, stepping into what first appeared to be an empty living room—blank walls, no furniture—until he saw the wall of flames to his right, and beyond them, totally engulfed in fire, some kind of cheap computer desk with bookcases on either side filled with DVDs. All melting to nothing before his watery eyes. Gage smelled gasoline.
From the back of the duplex, he thought he heard another sound almost lost in the cacophony of the fire—a click and a thud, like a door closing.
He thought it might have been Jantz fleeing from the back until he saw a figure on the floor in front of the desk, writhing and spasming, a black slash in the fire. Gage took a step toward him, but the heat pushed him away. The smoke found his eyes and his lungs, burning and choking, seizing him in a death grip. If Gage didn't get out of there, he was going to end up like the man on the floor.
He heard sirens approaching.
The barrier of heat had only strengthened, pummeling him, shoving him back toward the door. There was no help for Jantz. There was no help for the duplex either. Gage's survival instinct was compelling him to turn for the door, but, remembering the sound from the back of the duplex, he breathed into his arm and dodged past the flames. Through an empty kitchen with green Formica countertops. Down a narrow, bare hall, turning on lights as he went. Past an empty bedroom, the heat chasing, to a master bedroom with a couple of stained mattresses on the floor, cheap blinds over the windows, and nothing else.
Except for a handful of DVDs.
They were unmarked DVDs in transparent cases, the kind someone would buy and record themselves. The sirens grew louder. The fire trucks were on the street. The rain tapped on the roof and the windows. There was a sliding glass door, and when Gage tried it, he found it unlocked. Unlocked. Had that been the sound he'd heard, someone leaving through the back door? He heard Quinn shouting at him from the front of the house.
The DVDs. Why were they there? There was no TV in the back room, no way to play them.
They'd been left there intentionally.
Why?
Someone wanted them to be found. And the sirens? They'd arrived so quickly. Quinn may have called them in, but it was also possible someone had called 911 even before setting the place ablaze.
If Gage hadn't come inside, or if he'd backed out instead of running down the hall to the bedroom, the cops would eventually have found the stack of DVDs. That meant whoever had left them wanted the cops to have them, not Gage, which meant Gage needed to take them.
Or maybe he was imagining all of this. Maybe he hadn't heard a sound at all. Maybe these were just Jantz's favorite DVDs.
This all went through Gage's mind in the span of a few seconds. He snatched up the DVDs and, with the fire raging behind him, fled through the back sliding door and shut it behind him. He heard—even as he doubled over gasping for breath in the rain, coughing—the shouts of men, the blast of water from hoses. Big brakes screeching to a stop. More sirens. He'd stumbled onto a small patio, exposed to the rain except for the house's slight overhang, the whole area enclosed with a chain-link fence and, behind the fence, a wall of unkempt arborvitae. Nobody was there. There were no signs that anyone had been there recently.
He looked at the DVDs clutched in his hand. He had to make a decision fast. The right thing to do, the thing Quinn would undoubtedly want him to do, would be to circle back to the front of the duplex and hand over the DVDs to Quinn.
But Gage had to know what was on them first.
As risky as it was, he had a hunch that it might be his last opportunity to find out who was really behind all of this.
Gage shoved the DVDs into the inside pocket of his leather jacket. With the room behind him graying with smoke, he fled for the chain-link fence, picking a spot where a gap in the bushes on the other side would let him pass. Rain hounding him, he struggled over the top of the fence, dropping with a thud on the other side on his bad knee. He bit down so hard to stifle his own shout of pain that he drew blood. He heard men shouting on the other side, rounding the duplex, and he rolled through the bushes into another backyard—this one with a rusty swing set and a sandbox filled with puddles.
Now he just needed to go somewhere to play the DVDs, somewhere Quinn wouldn't think Gage would go.
And
he needed a way to get there. Without his van, without his cane, that was no easy problem to fix.
By the time he'd reached the gate, though, he knew both where to go and how to get there.
Chapter 21
At nearly three in the morning, the hospital floor was quiet except for a single orderly pushing a rattling cart over the tiles, making it easy enough for Gage to slip into Karen's room unnoticed. Her room was dark. He thought he might discover her asleep, still recovering from her injuries, so he was surprised to find her sitting up in bed, the bandage covering half her face lit up from the pale light of her iPhone. When she glanced up, her eyes widened. He was pleasantly surprised at how much more lively she seemed, how much more alert and present.
"You're—you're free," she said.
He closed the door behind him, and when he spoke, he kept it to a whisper. "Technically, yes. I'm glad to see your iPhone survived the crash. Now I can truly sleep easy tonight."
"What happened? How, how did you get here? Where's Quinn?"
"I took one of the free shuttles from the casino. Quinn? He's probably prowling the streets looking for me—if he's not helping put out the fire."
"Fire? What?"
He explained. He made it fast, raising a hand holding the DVDs when she started in with the questions, and nodded toward the TV in the corner. "I need to play these," he said. "I figured the last place Quinn would think I would go would be back to your hospital room. Do you know if it works? No, of course you wouldn't. You're watching YouTube videos of funny cats."
"Dancing babies, actually," Karen said. "What's on them?"
"We're about to find out."
Gage crossed over to the window, limping like a madman, his cane currently sitting in Quinn's backseat. He could go without his cane for short periods and make a good show of it, but more than that and all he needed was a humpback to look like Igor. He glanced at the parking lot. No police cars so far. The hospital might not be the first place Quinn would search for him, but he'd send someone over eventually, if only to ask Karen if she'd heard from him. He turned on the television, took out the first DVD, and slipped it into the player beneath the television. The screen, blue at first, flickered to static, then went black.
They didn't have to wait long to be appropriately shocked. Within seconds, the black screen dissolved to a close-up of Dan MacDonald's face, his eyes open, his stare as vacant as a dead man's. In fact, Gage thought he was dead until he finally blinked, his expression was so flat and emotionless. That wasn't what was shocking, though. The camera, shaky and slow to focus, quickly zoomed back, and there was Jeremiah Cooper on his knees in front of MacDonald. They were both naked.
"Oh my," Karen said.
"I don't know if I'm old enough to watch this," Gage said.
"Is that—?"
"Jeremiah, yes. And Dan MacDonald."
"It's like a bad porn movie."
"That's exactly what it is," Gage said. "Jesus."
The two were in a windowless basement with concrete floors and exposed yellow light bulbs among the maze of pipes on the ceiling—MacDonald on a folding chair, Jeremiah kneeling on the kind of padded, fold-up mats used in gym classes everywhere. Jeremiah's head bobbed up and down on MacDonald's lap with plenty of vigor, but when the camera caught his eyes, he wore the same flat, zombie-like expression as MacDonald. These were not two people who were in love with each other. These were not people who were even in love with what they were doing, or even trying that hard to fake it.
"Now we know what MacDonald was hiding," Gage said.
"And Jeremiah. But why leave these behind?"
"Let's look at the other DVDs."
"I don't know if my stomach can handle it."
"You can watch dancing babies later to clear your mind," Gage said.
"I'm not homophobic. It's just, Jeremiah …"
"I know."
Gage didn't think he was homophobic either, but he wasn't so sure. He was only slowly coming to terms with his own unease about the whole thing. He liked to think that because he was at least aware of his unease meant he was making progress. He'd always believed in gay rights and gay marriage and the whole "It Gets Better" campaign, but that was all on an intellectual level. There was still something about two men engaged in sex acts, displayed vividly on a screen in front of him, that elicited some deep revulsion. He didn't like himself for it, but it was there. Maybe it was the Montana boy in him. He just knew he didn't like that part of himself, even if it was known only to him, and he was going to keep working on getting rid of it.
The other DVDs were more of the same, MacDonald and Jeremiah in various sex acts, always in the same room, though sometimes in the chair and sometimes on the floor. They never looked like they were enjoying it. There was one difference on the third DVD, and it was a big one. Toward the end, Jantz stepped in front of the camera and slapped Jeremiah's bare bottom, and, when the kid jumped, laughed heartily. Jantz, though only in view for a few seconds, was dressed in his uniform and was clearly recognizable.
"Bingo," Gage said.
"What?" Karen said.
"Don't you see?" Gage said. "This evidence is supposed to lead us to where these sex videos were filmed. Probably beneath one of the buildings on campus. And when the cops search the place, they're going to find all kinds of evidence implicating Jantz. These DVDs were chosen so it looked like Jantz did this on his own."
"But who?"
"No idea. But whoever it is, I'm guessing he was already planning to do this when Quinn and I showed up unexpectedly at Jantz's place. Otherwise, where was his car? He must have parked it on a side street, which was why he was able to escape out the back just like me. It was his plan all along. He wanted it to look like a suicide, that Jantz was so distraught by it all that he killed himself. He was going to kill Jantz, slip out the back, and call the fire department from a cell phone so they'd get there before the entire place burned. He just wanted the other DVDs and the computer to be destroyed."
"He still managed to carry out his plan," Karen said.
"Except for me getting the DVDs. So right now there's no link to this basement sex dungeon."
"But why kill Connor?" Karen asked.
"Maybe he found out about what was happening. Maybe he threatened to expose them all. Killing him might have been the only way to stop him. And he made it look like Jantz, distraught by it all, committed suicide."
"And without Dan MacDonald around—"
"There wouldn't be anybody left to tell a different story."
"Except for Jeremiah."
"Yes," Gage said. "He's in prison, though. But for some reason, he doesn't want to expose whoever's really behind this."
"Who is behind this? That's the question."
"It is indeed."
Gage stepped to the window, peering through the crack in the curtains. Still no cops, just a rainy, windswept parking lot. The long day was finally catching up to him. The aches and pains, the pinching in the joints, the soreness of the muscles, it was all taking hold. He'd splashed some water on his face at the casino before the shuttle had arrived, cleaned himself up a little, but he still felt as if a mountain of dried sweat coated his body. Despite the late hour, he wasn't sleepy at all, but he did feel a deep fatigue settling into his bones.
But he had to keep pushing. He felt as if he were in a sinking ship, trying to find something before it disappeared into the ocean.
"DWR_forever," he said.
"It's got to mean something," Karen said.
He rubbed at his temples. "I've been focusing too much on that directly. What am I missing here? Let's focus on Jeremiah again. He walks in on Connor, finds him dead, then goes crazy with grief and threatens to shoot himself … wait a minute. Wait a minute here."
"What?"
"When I found him the first time on the beach with the gun, that was weeks before school started."
"So?"
"So," Gage said, "it's not very likely he'd met Jantz, right?"
&n
bsp; "Probably not."
Gage started to pace. His knee buckled, nearly put him on the floor, but he didn't care. He'd gotten the dragon by the tail. He could feel it. "On the beach that night, Jeremiah told me he was a coward. I thought he was talking about not being able to kill himself. And later, when he did try to kill himself, that made even more sense. But what if he'd wanted to shoot someone else? What if he couldn't go through with it, and that's why he thought he was a coward?"
"Who?" She sat up straighter in bed. "You don't think it was Arne Cooper taping those videos, do you? God, this gets even more twisted by the minute."
Gage considered it. "The problem is, Arne has a rock-solid alibi the night Connor was killed. He was drunk off his ass. And as hard as he is on Jeremiah, I just don't think he'd do that to his son. No, Jeremiah had someone else in his life. Someone who lured him into that sex dungeon, somebody he trusted. It also had to be somebody who'd known both Jantz and Jeremiah a while."
"Everybody in this damn town knows everybody," Karen said. "The regulars, I mean. You're either a tourist or you grew up here."
"It does seem that way sometimes. It doesn't help that most people think of me as the guy who brings a lot of bad publicity to the town." He scratched his chin. He had enough stubble there now to qualify for an entry-level beard. "Jeremiah had a pretty small circle of people he knew. Most of his world was the high school … wait. Wait, that's it. I can't believe I didn't see it right away!"
"Shh! The nurses are going to hear you. What?"
"High school. The same high school."
"Huh?"
"Arne's alibi. He was drunk. Who dropped him off that night? It was the good old family friend, Paul Weld. The assistant coach. The biology teacher. Remember, he dropped off Jeremiah's book with Zoe? Of course! He was fishing for information. He wanted to see how much we knew. And both Jantz and Weld grew up in this town. They both told me. I bet if we start asking around, we'll find out they were friends in high school."
"So they had this little sex dungeon before Jeremiah got sucked into it?"
"Maybe. Somehow they got MacDonald roped into it too. Probably with some kind of blackmail."
The Lovely Wicked Rain: An Oregon Coast Mystery (Garrison Gage Series) Page 22
