Stanton stared at him. “You haven’t found the body yet?”
“No. We looked everywhere, and there’s nothing.”
Stanton glanced up and around at the stains again. “It’s not on this floor.” He went out into the main office and told Laka, “I’ll be back in a minute.”
46
The floor above—the actual fourteenth floor—was dark except for a few lights. He opened his flashlight app before going down the hallway.
He saw four businesses: two accounting firms, an engineering company, and a law firm. He checked the doors for each, and they were locked. A utility closet at the far end of the hall was locked as well, but not the men’s and women’s bathrooms. He went through them.
When he flicked on the light in the women’s bathroom, he thought he saw something under the stall. Instinctively, his hand reached for his firearm and grabbed nothing but air. He pushed his back against the door and held his breath for a second before ducking down. No feet.
He pushed open the stall door: empty.
He turned around, and a woman’s white face with yellowed eyes stared at him.
Stanton tripped backward and hit the toilet. The figure stood in front of him, quietly staring. Stanton clawed his way up and rushed at her. He flew right through and into the sink. When he turned around, the figure was gone.
Sweat drenched him. He hurried back to the elevator.
He couldn’t let anyone see him like that, so he went down to the twelfth floor. Leaning against the wall outside the elevator, he slid down to the floor and tried to catch his breath.
His clothes were cool against his back from the sweat that seemed to never stop pouring out of him, as though someone had poked holes in his flesh. He leaned his head against the wall and stared at the ceiling.
When he’d composed himself, he searched the floor. It was the same as the other floor: four offices, a utility closet, and bathrooms, all empty.
He did the same for the eleventh and the tenth, then got a text from Laka asking where he was.
Searching the other floors for the body
You sure it’s even here?
If it’s the same people, it’s here
Stanton got off on the ninth floor and glanced around. It looked the same as the other two floors, but then he noticed a light was on in one of the offices.
It belonged to an accounting firm and had glass double doors at the entrance. He pulled one of the handles, and the door opened.
The office smelled of polish and dust kicked up from a recent vacuuming. It looked plush, like somewhere that handled the accounts of giant corporations. A photograph of two men shaking hands hung behind the secretary’s desk, and he recognized one of the men, some big shot in the business world.
Stanton turned on his flashlight app again and began going through the office.
The light was on near the back in an office with windows looking down on the main street below. Stanton went inside.
Pushed against a wall was a bathtub, and inside was the body of a woman.
Stanton sat out in the hall while Lorenzo, Jimmy, and several uniforms transferred everything. The medical examiner’s people had been called, too. A couple of them joking around. Gallows humor was necessary in this line of work; laugh at the atrocity, or get eaten up. Those who didn’t laugh about it drank, shot up, or ate a bullet. Stanton didn’t have a desire to do any of those things, and he wondered how deeply it would affect him later on.
Lorenzo came out and snapped off his latex gloves. “Hoo, boy. That’s some shit right there, Johnny. Girl’s frozen.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they froze her. Probably with liquid nitrogen.”
“Then they poured lime over her?”
“No lime this time, my man. They froze her and dumped her in there. The liquid you saw was her thawing.”
Stanton looked down toward the office where the ME assistants were trying to figure out how to remove the body.
“We’re on the ninth floor, and she’s frozen…”
“That’s what I said.”
Stanton pushed himself up and brushed past Lorenzo. In the office, Laka stood behind the desk with her arms folded, watching two men in hazmat suits lift the body out of the tub, and he wondered why they hadn’t asked everyone to wear protective gear.
“It’s Dante,” Stanton said.
“What?”
“We’re on the ninth floor. In the ninth circle of hell, in The Inferno, Dante wrote about the freezing cold, because the deepest point of hell wouldn’t be hot, it would be cold, since it’s the place in the universe farthest from God’s presence. So everyone there was frozen.”
“Could be a coincidence.”
“No, it’s a message.”
“What message?”
“It has to do with who was sent to the ninth circle.”
“Who?”
Stanton stared at the frozen body as the assistants lifted it gently and placed it in an open body bag on the ground.
“The betrayers.”
47
Stanton stayed at the scene as long as he could. Normally, he would wait until everyone had left and then run his eyes and mind over everything in front of him. But the figure in the bathtub had sent a dark jolt through his body. He didn’t want to be here anymore.
He left the building and saw he had a text from Julie, asking when he’d be home and if she should save his dinner. He felt a stab of guilt: she had cooked for him, and he didn’t even bother to tell her how late he would be.
I’ll be home in thirty. Sorry
Don’t be, she replied. I know what it’s like to get caught up in something
He got into his jeep and sat for a second, watching the last of the uniforms come out of the building. Tomorrow morning, or maybe even tonight, a crime scene cleanup crew would be called. They could get the blood out in less than a few hours. They would leave no trace that anything had happened.
He drove home. Julie was asleep on the couch, Hanny curled at her feet. Stanton sat there and rubbed Hanny’s head as Julie slowly awoke.
“You okay?” she said.
“I’m okay. Just tired. I think I’m going to try the sleeping medication again tonight.”
“Why tonight? Did something happen?”
Stanton gently placed his hand on her leg and squeezed. “I’ll be upstairs.”
He took two sleeping pills from the amber bottle in the medicine cabinet and popped them without water. Then he climbed into the shower, changed his mind, and took another two pills.
As the water heated up, he closed his eyes and let it run over his head and back. The water here could get boiling hot, and his skin would be deep pink afterward.
Once he felt the drowsiness of the medication, he got out and put on basketball shorts before going to bed. He so badly wanted to sleep that he could feel it in every muscle and bone. If he didn’t get sleep, his body would force him by passing out.
Quietly lying in the dark, he thought about the woman’s body in the tub. Why Dante? What message were they trying to send, and who had she betrayed? Tomorrow he’d look into any recent lovers the woman had had, if they had an ID on her by then. Maybe she’d cheated on someone who didn’t take the betrayal lightly.
Stanton thought of Thomas Wells. Had he betrayed someone, too? And if so, why wasn’t he frozen? He was a large man, obese, and…
Stanton jumped out of bed and got his MacBook off the desk in the corner. He went out onto the balcony in the warm night air and sat down, putting his feet up on another chair. He Googled the circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno.
The third circle…
It gave him a rush to find it, and the drowsiness of the medication seemed to dissipate into the air. In the third circle of hell were the gluttons: people who took more than their fair share and were overcome with greed: for money, power, sex, food, and drink. Their punishment was to drown in slush that never drained because of an eternal rain. Slush… like the
tub of lime and goop that Wells had become before being placed on the third shelf up in the warehouse.
They were punishing people using The Inferno as a roadmap.
The next morning, Stanton left the house at four. He hadn’t slept at all, even after the quadruple dose of medication. He sneaked out of the house without waking Julie.
Once at the station, it didn’t take him long to paint a picture of Thomas Wells’s life. Wells had fourteen different lawsuits filed against him in the past twenty years, all from former business partners or people he had conducted business with. They ranged from breach of contract to outright fraud. In each one, the plaintiff was accusing him of hiding money or simply refusing to pay.
Stanton also found the divorce filings from his first marriage. His former wife accused him of domestic abuse as well as having multiple affairs.
Stanton leaned back in the chair and thought. Then he looked at his watch. It was only seven in the morning, but he couldn’t wait any longer. He got up and headed out to the Wellses’ house.
It was seven thirty when he arrived, and he decided to let Joan Wells sleep a little longer. He turned on soft jazz and reclined his seat. The medication still buzzed through his body, slowing his thoughts and motions but not affecting his inability to sleep. His brain had decided there would be no sleep and nothing could change that. He closed his eyes anyway, and the first thought that came to him was Dane gliding softly on a wave, the ocean sparkling in broken fragments of sunlight. Stanton thought of himself in the water. He felt the warm waves against his body, the rush of adrenaline as the wave picked him up as though he were nothing and flung him under the surface. Today, he knew, he would need to go surfing again if he could bring up the strength. And then a disturbing thought entered his mind: he wanted to go surfing, but only if he could go with Dane.
Stanton had to think back to the woman in the tub and to Thomas Wells’ skinless body. If Dane had been the one to commit those crimes, then he was disturbed, and Stanton had to remember that. If he somehow slipped up and forgot that, the results could be disastrous. He’d seen officers undercover get swept away, forgetting which life was real and which was fiction. It had always ended in destroyed careers, prison, or even death.
Stanton checked his watch: it would be well past nine on the East Coast. He dialed his son Mathew’s number. He didn’t answer.
“Hey, Matty, it’s your dad. Give me a call anytime, if you can. I know you’re busy, but I just wanted to chat.”
He hung up and tried his younger son, Jon, and it also went to voicemail.
Since they’d become adults, they’d thought less and less about their father. Stanton didn’t blame them. Matty was getting ready to apply for medical school, and Jon had a scholarship to Boston College to play baseball. They had girlfriends and jobs and school: full plates. Still, he had to admit to himself how much it stung when he’d call and they wouldn’t call him back. He doubted they did the same with their mother. Perhaps that was just boys, and Stanton felt the guilt he’d carried with him ever since Mathew’s birth. He’d wished he had girls instead of boys. Until, that is, he saw exactly how men viewed girls.
He saw the bloody, broken bodies, the tears and the screams. He’d watched the videos of brutal rapes while the men and boys howled with laughter. There was even one where a father forced his fourteen-year-old son, a virgin, to lose his virginity by raping a young woman who had been jogging by their house. And when he remembered the savagery men were willing to inflict on women in this world, he was grateful he had boys.
He got out of the car and went up to the door. Joan took a long time to answer, but he kept knocking until she did. She answered in a silk robe, looking confused at first, but then recognized him.
“Detective?”
“Sorry, I know it’s early, but this couldn’t wait. Do you mind if I come in for a minute?”
She hesitated, still rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, and ran a hand through her hair, instantly aware of her appearance, which Stanton hadn’t even considered. She was beautiful, exceptionally so, and he didn’t think there was a time in the day where that didn’t shine through.
“Um, yeah, okay.”
He followed her into the living room. A tiger-skin rug covered part of the massive floor. On the walls were paintings of predatory animals: sharks, bears, lions.
She sat on an elegant loveseat that looked like it had come from medieval France, and Stanton sat in a chair near her. She adjusted her hair again and cleared her throat.
“You’ll have to excuse how I’m dressed.”
“You look lovely,” Stanton said, and then blushed. He put his hands together and rubbed them a moment. “Your husband had multiple affairs during his previous marriage, and I bet he did the same to you. My guess is there’s a prenuptial agreement somewhere, and he was controlling to the point of abuse but maybe not quite. Every aspect of your life had to be run through him. If you were out late with friends, he would text or call twenty times wondering where you were.”
Stanton felt uncomfortable with this next part, but he had to shock her. To throw her off-guard so she wouldn’t have time to come up with artificial, carefully thought-out answers.
“In the bedroom, he dominated you. If you couldn’t or wouldn’t have sex, he would threaten or pout until you gave in. He never took no for an answer for that. He also—”
“Stop,” she said, almost yelling. “Just stop it.”
Tears wet her eyes, and she put her hand to her forehead, covering her eyes from him. He let her stay like that for maybe half a minute before he said, “How much of it was right?”
She cleared her throat and wiped a couple of tears away before she inhaled deeply and adjusted her robe. “Almost all of it. How did you know?”
“Men like him have a pattern—all men do, really—and once you identify their pattern you can predict what they’ve done and what they’re going to do. Your husband was no different.” He waited a beat. “Someone killed him for it. For the way he treated you, for the way he treated his first wife, and for all his shady business dealings. This was a revenge killing of sorts. The killer thought he was handing out justice.”
“He’s dead?” she said quietly.
“I’m guessing you knew that the second I showed up at your door the first time. I think you knew someone would eventually kill him.”
“You don’t have to be nice now,” she told him. “You can say it. He was a bad person. There were times I felt like leaving, and he would threaten me that I would be left penniless. And he was right. The prenup covers everything. I came to this marriage with nothing, and I would’ve been left with nothing. So I chose to put up with it all and stay in this beautiful house, and drive my beautiful car, and have money over having my dignity.” She paused. “Does that make me a bad person?”
“No, it makes you human.” He leaned back in the chair, feeling that the wall she had put up to hide the hell she had been living in had finally come down. “Who knew about all this, Joan?”
She shook her head. “Me and Beth, his first wife. That would’ve been it. He never opened up to his business partners. He just stole money from them. It was like you said, a pattern. He would become friends with these wealthy people at the country club and convince them to go into business with him. That was what he was best at: convincing people to do things. And then once they were in business, he would bleed them dry, keeping the money for himself and then playing dumb about what happened.”
“How’d he get away with it for so long?”
“He’d hire the best lawyers he could and have them fight it out in court as long as it took. Most of his partners would just give up and write it off as a loss. He knew how to work the system.” She rubbed her wrist, staring off into space. “He broke this arm once. I wouldn’t have sex with him one night, and he broke my arm and made me drive to the hospital alone.”
“There was a lot wrong with him, but there’s nothing wrong with you. You have no reason to fe
el guilt or shame. You did what you had to do to survive.”
“Did I? I could’ve left.”
“No, I don’t think he would’ve let you.” Stanton took out his phone to take notes. “Did he ever mention a man named Dane? Or Mackie? A guy with a red droplet tattooed on his face?”
She shook her head. “No, never.”
“He might go by a different name. He’s handsome, like model-handsome, with brunette hair and darkly tanned skin. His arms have several tattoos, a large yin-yang on his shoulder.”
“Oh, you mean Mike.”
Stanton’s heart seemed to stop. “Who’s Mike?”
“Tom had a personal trainer at the country club. A guy named Mike. I saw him a couple of times training him. That sounds exactly like him. The tattoo and everything.”
“When was the last time Thomas saw Mike?”
“I don’t know. He went to the gym three times a week. He had high blood pressure. He was a food addict and couldn’t stop eating. So he went to the gym when his doctor told him he was only a few years away from a heart attack.”
Stanton thought he should be feeling elation, but he just felt sick.
“I’ll need the name and address of the country club.”
48
The country club was a sprawling estate up a private road. Valet parking was mandatory, and Stanton let them take the jeep. The entrance was taken up with expensive furniture and plants, a tennis pro-shop on one side and a golf pro-shop on the other. Even the air had a fruity aroma to it, and he wondered if they put some sort of fragrance in the air circulation.
He went to the girl at the front desk and said, “Hi, I need to talk to whoever’s in charge of the personal trainers.”
“Um, sure. Can I tell her who’s asking?”
“Jon Stanton, I’m a detective with the Honolulu PD.”
Purgatory (Jon Stanton Mysteries Book 11) Page 13
