by Tim McGregor
~
The Charger was due back in the motor pool hours ago but Mockler was glad he hadn’t turned it over just yet. It was fast and the growl of the engine was extremely gratifying when he kicked down on the accelerator and raced to Billie’s building. Kaitlin’s call had rattled him. He had tried her number but, like Kaitlin, hadn’t gotten through. That’s when fear began sweating to the surface. Screeching to a stop before Billie’s building, he jumped out and made for the door when something farther down the street caught his attention.
A quartet of kids were skipping down the sidewalk, a parent following along behind them. The children were chattering excitedly and bursting with laughs and squeals. One was dressed as a pirate, another as a witch and two were superheroes. Trick-or-treaters traipsing from door to door. Remembering what Gantry had told him, he rushed inside and took the stairs two at a time.
Her door was unlocked. Why did Billie never lock it when she left? He darted from room to room calling her name but the apartment was empty. He knew it would be. She didn’t have a landline so he couldn’t check to see if anyone had called. The place looked messy but that was normal for her.
A noise rattled from the sink and he darted back into the kitchen but it remained empty. The mystery cat again. The one he’d heard rattle around the apartment but had yet to actually lay eyes on. Reconsidering, he reminded himself that this was Billie he was talking about, so there was a chance that whatever was rattling around her flat might not be a cat at all.
Back in the Charger, he shot seven blocks west to the north quarter to the bar where Billie worked. No one there had seen nor heard from Billie in days. Returning to the car, he fired it up and doubled back and raced to his own house. The last place he had seen her.
His pulse calmed by a degree when he pulled into his driveway and saw her bicycle still leaning up against the front porch. Billie was still here. He could think of only two reasons to explain the unanswered calls to her phone: she was sound asleep or she was ill. Both sounded so calmly rational that he marched quickly into his house rather than sprinting.
“Billie!”
His bark echoed through the untidy house. Now he broke into a sprint, checking every room, upstairs and down. Then the backyard. No sign of her. Stepping back onto the porch, he looked down at her bicycle as an icy tendril of panic frosted his insides. A ringing noise blurted up from somewhere. He descended the steps to track it down.
Billie’s cell phone lay in a knot of wet clover, its screen lit up from the incoming call. Kaitlin’s name appeared on the display. He picked it up and let it ring until it stopped. By then, the cold panic had taken over. Dropping her phone into a pocket, he took out his own and dialled his partner’s number.
“Mockler?” answered Detective Odinbeck. “Where are you?”
“Up to my eyeballs,” Mockler said. “Listen to me. Billie’s missing.”
“How long?”
“Long enough. But I think I know where she is. Can you corral a patrol car for me?”
“Sure,” Odinbeck replied. “Where we going?”
“The house on Laguna Road.”
There was a pause. “You really think she’s there?”
“I know she is,” Mockler stated, marching back to the car. “Just get a unit and meet me at the Murder House.”
Chapter 28
THE PATROL UNIT HAD gotten there first. Mockler rolled up the overgrown driveway of the house on Laguna Road to find the cruiser parked before the front entrance, two uniformed officers standing in the grass, watching the unmarked Charger pull up. He recognized both constables.
“Walton,” he said to one as he climbed out of the vehicle. “Thanks for getting here so fast.”
“We were in the area,” Officer Walton replied. She looked up at the crumbling mansion. “What are we doing here?”
“Missing woman. I think she might be inside. Her name’s Billie Culpepper. Five foot, three. Dark hair.”
Officer Chen came around the cruiser to join them. “Culpepper? Isn’t she the spook you caught hell for employing on a case?”
“Same one,” the detective confirmed. “I have reason to believe she’s been abducted and brought here.”
A third vehicle turned into the long driveway and rumbled up before the house. Detective Odinbeck climbed out and stomped through the weeds toward them. “How did you guys beat me here?”
“We were on Hess when you called,” Walton replied. She turned and looked back at the house. They all did. “So what’s the plan?”
Mockler was already marching for the side entrance. “We work in pairs and search the premises top to bottom. You two start upstairs and work your way down. Odin and I will start in the cellar and meet you on the main floor.”
Officers Walton and Chen nodded, flashlights already in hand. Detective Odinbeck swallowed hard, a sheen of sweat already beading his forehead. He looked at the younger detective. “I’m really starting to hate this place,” he said.
“That makes two of us,” Mockler replied. He tossed aside the mess of yellow tape and stepped inside.
~
Gantry wanted to murder somebody. It didn’t matter who, he simply had a wicked urge to bludgeon someone’s skull against the floor. The nicotine fit was that bad. Smoking was prohibited inside the walls of the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre, the prisoners allowed to smoke in a designated area of the yard once a day. It was positively inhumane, he concluded.
Processed through a few hours before, Gantry’s clothes had been boxed away and he’d been issued prison scrubs and released into the common area of the facility where he looked the same as every other prisoner. Pegged as fresh meat, he had been eye-fucked by glares both menacing and contemptuous across the vast room where the benches and tables were bolted to the floor.
“This is gonna be a laugh,” he muttered to himself.
He clocked three men whom he knew by name but none of these men acknowledged his presence. Gantry guessed there was some unspoken protocol to freezing out the newbies before saying a word to them. Or it was just him. He had a habit of putting people off, which in these circumstances would either work in his favour or get him killed.
“He’s pretty,” said a voice.
Gantry sighed. The most prudent thing to do in this instant would be to ignore the voice but he couldn’t help himself and the nic withdrawal was grinding away what little sense of self-preservation he had left. He turned around.
Three of them, leaning against a rail and eyeing him from crown to toe. There were big men with thick arms and shaved heads and the obligatory tattoos. They were almost too cliched to be taken seriously.
One of them leered at him, his wide grin stretching his features in a way that suggested an upright ape. “He might have some fight in him.”
“Good,” said another man. His thick neck was ringed by a tattoo of a snake, its forked tongue stretching up his left cheek. “Makes it more sporting if they fight back. That last one just lay down and gave in.”
The third man simply grunted, cupping his crotch with one hand.
Gantry nodded a hello to the three men. “You ladies the welcome wagon then?”
“Ooh,” grinned the one Gantry had tagged as Ape. “He’s got an accent.”
“English,” said Snake. He broke into an exaggerated accent. “Fancy a cup of tea, luv?”
“Aye,” Gantry said. “Milk and sugar if you would please, Tinkerbell.”
The man holding his crotch blew him a kiss and then a bell rang throughout the block and the men shuffled off to the corridor. Gantry exhaled loudly and got to his feet, realizing how much he would need to watch his back in this place.
As it turned out, he was bunked with the Ape in a narrow closet of a cell. Without his two compadres, Ape wasn’t so chatty but Gantry felt the man watch his every move. After the lights went out, Gantry lay back on his bunk waiting for two things to happen. One was the moon rising in the window of the cell and the other was for Ape to make a mov
e. He wondered which would happen first.
The moon won. Although he couldn’t see it through the bars on the window, the light of the moon filtered against the dirty glass, casting a square of moonlight on the floor. It would be enough for what he needed.
Ten minutes later, perhaps emboldened by the moonlight, Ape tried to crawl in the bunk with him. He flopped out of the bunk to the floor with a bloody nose. Gantry sprang up and booted the man’s face until blood dribbled onto the dirty concrete floor.
Ape whimpered, waving his hands in the air for mercy or to surrender or both. Gantry hauled the big man to his knees, snatched him by the ear and dragged him toward the toilet bowl. “Come over here, Ape,” he gritted. “Over the bowl with you.”
Ape balked, thinking the Englishman was going to drown him. Gantry kicked him again before all but yanking his ear clean from his skull. “Chin up and hold still,” he snarled. “There you go.”
Blood dribbled from the man’s chin into the toilet, blooming and circling red ribbons in the water. Satisfied, Gantry hauled him back by the ear and held him still.
“Just a few drops more, mate. Scrying pools require a certain amount of the red stuff.” He shook the man’s head as if to wring more blood from him. The droplets spackled the floor like a Pollack painting and then Gantry released the man. “All right. Back in your bunk and keep quiet.”
Moaning, Ape crawled into his bunk and held his face in his hands.
Gantry brushed his hands and stood over the toilet, watching the blood curl and diffuse. He glanced at the man in the bunk. “Fair warning, Ape. You might not wanna see this.”
The man in the bunk held his bleeding nose, his eyes dished open. Gantry had his back to him and Ape watched him make a few gestures with his hand and he was muttering something that sounded foreign. Then Gantry knelt down before the blood dribbled over the floor. He tipped his finger in it and wrote something on the concrete.
Ape leaned up on one elbow to see what he had written. A single word, that had no meaning to him. Albee.
Gantry took a step back and waited, eyes on the porcelain throne.
The man on the bunk shivered as the temperature dropped suddenly. Then his eyes were pulled toward the space above the toilet. What looked like a dark mass or shadow formed in the air, darker than even the shadows around it. It diffused at the edges, like smoke drifting away, but it took on the general shape of a human form.
“Howard Gunther Albee,” Gantry said, speaking to the shadow. “Issat you?”
The mass bubbled and smoked.
“I need some answers,” Gantry said to it. He nodded at the mess on the floor. “Use the blood there if you need to.”
Ape tried to look away but he was unable to tear his eyes from the dark silhouette. It seemed to turn toward the man addressing it.
“I saw that little spell you concocted for the Bourdain woman,” Gantry said. “Real piece of work, that is. Did she force you to do that?”
On the floor, the drops of blood began to move, pooling together and then thinning out into lines until it took the shape of letters. The word ‘YES’ appeared briefly and then the blood swirled and reformed into another word. NO.
Gantry watched the blood move. “What’s it for? What is she after?”
The blood trickled together and thinned, forming another message on the floor. ASK HER.
“I tried. She’s got a temper, that one.” He considered his next question, knowing he didn’t have long before the shadow over the toilet would vanish. “The ritual you cobbled together. It’s meant to rip the soul out of someone, isn’t it?”
The word ‘YES’ appeared in the blood.
“Right. What the hell does Evelyn Bourdain want with a woman’s soul?”
The dark mass bubbled over, taking on a more solid form. The cratered features of a face became sharp. Watching it, Ape began to drool on his pillow.
Gantry paid it no mind, his eyes locked on the blood as it pooled anew and ran out into a new message. Longer this time, stretching the blood into spindly lines.
IT’S NOT HER SOUL SHE WANTS.
That’s when the big man on the bunk began screaming. A high shrill cry, calling out for help.
~
The house was empty.
After working through the grim cellar and checking every dark corner and mildewed crevice, the two detectives methodically worked their way back to the main floor where they were met by officers Walton and Chen.
“There’s no one upstairs,” Walton said. “And no sign that anyone’s been up there for a long time.”
“Shit,” Mockler cursed.
Chen spoke up. “No luck in the basement?”
“Nothing,” Odinbeck said. He turned to his partner. “Maybe you were wrong on this one, Mock.”
Mockler scratched his chin. “This doesn’t make sense,” he mumbled, half to himself.
Odinbeck shrugged. “You wanna give it a second sweep?”
“No. If she was here we would have found her.”
“We could check the grounds,” Walton suggested. “There’s a lot acreage to this property.”
Mockler agreed but held little hope that they would find Billie out there. He followed the others outside and looked up over the broken windows of the former Bourdain manor. Like eyes, the windows seemed to mock him, like they held a secret that they refused to share.
Billie was missing. She could be anywhere. She could be dead. Trampling the weeds to the fence at the rim of the estate, it took everything he had to push those thoughts away and focus on the ground sweep. Never much of a religious person, the detective offered up a silent prayer now for her safety.
~
The vibrating hum is what woke Billie up. Everything around her seemed to be rattling and buzzing. She opened her eyes but everything was still dark. So pitch black she thought she was blind at first. She couldn’t breathe properly. The dirty rag cinched in her teeth prevented her from screaming out, her mouth dry as cotton. It was hot and it was dark and it was confined. No room to move or stretch out her legs. Her wrists were bound.
The rumble of the engine and the jostling up and down told her she was locked in the trunk of a car. When she remembered the black Camaro as it idled in the driveway, she lost control. Kicking out against the metal body and pushing on the ceiling of the trunk, she raged against the tight space until she exhausted her strength and lay back in a hot sweat.
She thought of her mother. Attacked and abducted, she too had been tossed into the trunk of a Camaro and spirited away. Was she to repeat her mother’s death like this? Who was driving the car? Had Franklin Riddel shuffled out of the morgue to collect his old ride from the impound yard and come for her? A family tradition, she mused in a moment of sweaty delusion. They had so few of them, this tormented family of hers. Crazy gypsy Mom, violent Dad and their psychic weirdo daughter.
In a moment of reflexive morbidity, she wondered if she somehow deserved this. If this was what she had brought down on her own head for talking to dead people?
She started kicking again, bashing her feet against the metal skin of the trunk. Then she felt the car slow, the tires hitting the gravel shoulder at the side of the road. The vehicle stopped, the engine idling as it was geared into park.
A click and the trunk lifted open. Stars and trees. Two figures looking down at her. The two men that Kaitlin knew. The ghost hunters who had tried to kill Kaitlin in her hospital room. Billie couldn’t remember their names.
“Shut up and stop kicking,” said the one. “Or I’m gonna fucking hurt you.”
Billie reared back and kicked at him. He snarled and lashed out, punching her hard in the face. Her head knocked back against the metal and stars bloomed in her eyes.
Justin, she remembered. The meaner one was named Justin.
“Easy,” protested the other. Owen. “You’re gonna hurt her, man.”
“Are you fucking serious?” Justin spat. “Do you know what we’re gonna do to her?”
Billie’s legs were draped limp over the latch. Owen folded them back into the trunk. “Doesn’t mean she has to suffer, does it?”
“You make me sick, know that?”
Whoom. The trunk lid slammed down hard and everything went dark again.
Chapter 29
“BILLIE IS MISSING.”
Bad news, Mockler believed, was best delivered straight out and as as simply as possible. He was almost surprised at the effect it had on John Gantry. The man’s eyes went wide in bafflement.
When the ground sweep turned up nothing, Mockler cursed under his breath as he strategized his next move. Gantry needed to know. As much as it galled him to admit it, if there was one person who could help it was the British national currently locked up on a murder charge. He called ahead to the detention centre to arrange the interview.
Gantry seemed half the man he knew. Shackled at the wrist and turned out in prison scrubs, the fugitive was escorted into the private meeting room and ordered to sit. The prison guard stood near the door. Mockler asked the guard for some privacy but the man politely said that that was against protocol. Gantry had sneered at the intrusion.
The sneer dropped the minute he heard the bad news. “She’s at the Murder House, mate. Get your arse there now.”
“I just came from there. We swept the house twice. And the grounds. She’s not there.”
“Then check her flat. The bar where she works. Call her cell.”
Mockler sighed impatiently. Digging into his jacket, he placed Billie’s cell phone on the table. “Billie is missing,” he said a second time.
“Shite.”
Both men went quiet. Gantry took up the phone, swiped a pattern across the number pad and went through her calls.
Mockler looked on with suspicion. “You know her password?”
