When he was finished he picked up the glass and drank the water. It was nice and cold, refreshing even. Jacques savoured the feeling of the moisture on his lips.
I hope Claude has been having some better meals, maybe McDonald’s or something.
He spent his time visualizing what Claude might be doing and then he imagined himself there beside him – at the park, at school, playing video games at home, eating dinner and wrestling in the snow. It gave him strength and a little bit of happiness.
“Open your mouth.”
Jacques did as he was told and winced as the gag was tied in place once more. The man picked up the bowl and glass and left Jacques alone, shutting and locking the door behind him.
Chapter Nine
The snow stopped just as the sun rose above the fields. The meteorologists had been clear; it was just a break in the storm, but it was enough to make the work easier for Kara and Yuri. The sun climbed through the sky, its rays bursting through small breaks in the clouds, casting its light over the snow-covered field.
Kara stood in the doorway to the building and looked out over the area. If she turned her head just a little to the right, the trenches dug through the snow by heavy boots worn by trudging police officers disappeared and the ground was uniform, pure, pristine. It was the beauty of winter that Kara loved, the simplicity before the monotony of the day-to-day kicked in – the driving, the shoveling, the wading through slushy parking lots, and of course scraping the ice off of the windshield.
“You good?”
“Yeah,” Kara said. “Just needed a breather.”
Yuri nodded. “No doubt. This case is getting really heavy. There is so much I would rather not think about, so much I wish we could imagine never happened. But I guess we wouldn’t be very good at our jobs if we did, right?”
“It’s disgusting what people will do to each other. Before homicide, I was a detective in a unit investigating sex crimes and child abuse. Some days those things were separate. It was the days where they overlapped that were the hardest. I’d really hoped I was done with it. Those cases, those kids… they needed help, that’s for sure, and it felt great to be able to save them from what they were going through. I just never felt strong enough.”
“I am not sure anyone does. Not when it comes to children. If someone can handle these kinds of cases, day in and day out without a problem, they are either completely numb or inhuman.”
Kara kicked the snow beside her. The drift was nearly to her waist and the light snow collapsed inward onto her boots.
“Shit.” She laughed for a moment. “Doesn’t matter, I’m still wet. Probably going to have trench foot after today.”
Yuri smiled. “Sensible footwear tomorrow?”
“I’m coming in Antarctic survival gear.”
“Hopefully we can avoid foot pursuits then.”
“Shall we go back in? Finish this up?”
Yuri nodded and stepped back inside. Kara shut the door behind them; the sound of steel on steel rang through the small building.
“Not designed for acoustics, apparently.”
Once daylight broke, Kara had been better able to inspect the building. They had found the light switches earlier, but there was only one weak bulb in each room. It sufficed, but they still found themselves having to use their flashlights to search through the building.
It was, for all intents, a square. There were four main rooms, five if the bathroom was included. Each room was about the same size. Kara tried to determine what the building had been built for, if it had been made for the sole purpose of what it was most recently used for. The room with the window seemed like an odd place to use to keep the children though. It was the only one they could escape from.
Was it sympathy on their captor’s part? A little bit of light and air coming into the room might have helped to keep them in better spirits. But would he have cared? Kara hated to admit it, but they knew very little about how the suspect operated and what his motives were. All they knew was how it had ended the first time. In between, however, they had almost no information.
They needed to speak to Claude, figure out what the suspect did, how he acted, what he looked like, what he had said to them, anything that might help. They had received word from the hospital that he was awake and able to speak, but they had not had a chance to leave the building yet. If the suspect had left something behind, that was the best chance they had of catching him. Claude’s testimony would help, but Kara knew he wouldn’t be able to identify the man, and there was no way Claude could know where Jacques had been taken.
There was little to go on in the building. Once the initial adrenaline was gone, Kara and Yuri began to search for evidence. There wasn’t much. Kara believed it to be a matter of there never having been much to begin with. She doubted someone careless enough to forget to flush the toilet would remember to remove everything else that could tie him to the scene.
Especially when there were a few very obvious fingerprints left behind.
“Do you see that?” Kara pointed her flashlight at the back of the microwave. There was a visible print on the metal frame. “Another print. How many is that now? Seven?”
“I think so. Wait until forensics gets here. If we can see that many, I’m sure they will find a ton more once they dust.”
“It’s a little worrisome,” Kara said. “If he’s this careless, he’s probably not worried about being caught. Which means we won’t have him in the system. Doesn’t matter if we have his prints and DNA.”
“Maybe he was in a rush once Claude got away. He must have known we would not be far behind.”
“I hope so. If we’ve got him on file…”
“We are going to get Jacques back either way.”
Kara nodded.
“Here, help me pull the fridge and stove out.”
Kara walked over and she and Yuri each took a side of the fridge. They grabbed hold and pulled, the feet scraping across the concrete floor until they reached the middle of the room. Yuri let go and looked behind the fridge.
“Nothing. Let’s do the stove.”
They took hold and pulled once more, the familiar scraping sound like nails on a chalkboard filled the room once more.
Yuri took a look behind the stove. “I have something here.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, a couple of papers. Must have slipped behind.” He bent down and picked them up then began to look through them, shuffling through three yellowed pages. “This guy really was careless.”
“Why? What is it?”
“Bills. With a name and address on them.”
Yuri took his radio off of his belt and pressed the button to talk. “Can I get a location on an address?”
“Go ahead.”
“1342 Rue de Rennes. It’s Belgian.”
There was a long period of silence before the operator returned to the radio.
“Is this a joke, Detective?”
Yuri and Kara looked at each other, unsure of what was happening.
“No, not at all. Why?”
“That’s where you are. As close as we can tell anyway. It’s a large property. That address probably refers to the main house.”
“Sorry, main house? How big is this property?”
“Quite large. Did you not see the other building on your GPS?”
“We don’t have imagery of this location. Just the drawn maps.”
“Okay. From what we can tell, based off of the GPS in your radios and aerial imagery, the main house is about a kilometer south of you. Looks like there’s some heavy brush and trees in the way.”
“Between that and the snow, it explains why we never saw it. Thanks.”
“Let’s go check it out,” Kara said.
“I just want t
o take one more look at the room.”
Yuri walked back to the room where the boys had been held. Kara had climbed in through the open window Claude had escaped from only hours before. It was a barren room, with cinder block walls and a concrete floor. Only two small yoga mats on the floor would have given the boys any warmth. They had been bound with ropes - they knew that from Claude - but they had been able to move around the room. The one corner held a bucket, half-filled with a mix of urine and excrement. Empty food dishes and cups lay on the floor amidst telltale patches of dried blood.
A pair of ropes lay in the middle of the room, their fibers stained red. Yuri didn’t want to look at them, not again. The small pieces of torn flesh that clung to the ropes were a painful reminder of what Claude had gone through in order to escape. They were a painful reminder of the past as well.
You need to toughen up. Push it aside and just focus on the case.
Even without children of his own, cases involving kids were the hardest on Yuri. They were the hardest on just about every officer. To see what people were capable of - the willingness to destroy a child’s innocence, to kill something so pure - was a cross no one should have had to bear.
You need to bear it. For them. And when you find him, you can nail the fucker to it.
A morbid grin crossed his face. There would be no death penalty, Belarus was the only country in Europe that still allowed for capital punishment, but he knew what happened to men like their suspect once they went to jail. It didn’t matter who he was, he’d spend the rest of his life paying in blood for his crimes.
Justice comes in many forms.
* * *
Kara knocked on the front door of a large farmhouse. The home wasn’t far from the building in the field, and it was right where dispatch had told them it would be. It was a kilometre south, hidden behind a narrow but dense strip of forest.
“You sure we shouldn’t have gotten a warrant or kicked the door down?”
“Yuri, look around you. All of this hokey farm décor, it’s just like back home. I bet you twenty euros the person who answers the door is well over sixty.”
“You’re on.” They waited a moment longer before the sound of someone fidgeting with the lock made them stand at the ready. “Here goes.”
The door opened and an elderly lady of at least seventy stood behind the glass storm door.
“Dammit,” Yuri said under his breath.
“Bonjour, Madame,” Kara said. “Do you speak English?”
The lady shook her head then turned around and yelled for someone. An elderly man came out from another room and walked toward the door, shuffling with each step.
“Hello,” he said. “How can I help you?”
“My name is Kara Jameson, and this is Yuri Shevchenko. We’re detectives with INTERPOL.”
“Really? What brings you here?”
“Do you mind if we come in, sir? It’s quite cold.”
He opened the door and ushered them in. “My apologies, in my shock I forgot my manners. I’m Heinrich Schmidt.” He turned and gestured to his wife. “My wife, Virginie.”
Yuri and Kara shook hands with the couple.
“Thank you.”
“Please, come in and sit.”
Kara smiled. “Thanks, but we’re both quite wet from all this snow. We can stand here, I don’t want to get water all over your house.”
He nodded, but seemed uncertain about it. A proper gentleman. She envisioned that they would have sat down on a plastic-covered couch and had snacks and tea brought in minutes later by the lady of the house.
“So, you’re from Germany?” Kara had noticed the accent the moment Heinrich spoke; hearing his name confirmed it.
“Yes, born and raised in West Germany.”
“Your English is very good.”
Heinrich smiled. “Thank you. I was in the military and was stationed around the world several times, mostly working in American bases. Virginie and I met only recently, after my first wife passed away from cancer. She and her first husband had lived here and worked the fields until he passed ten years ago.”
“How did you meet?” Virginie was still standing with Heinrich at the front door, listening intently but Kara could tell she wasn’t understanding the conversation.
“Online, believe it or not.”
Kara smiled. “My grandfather can’t even send an e-mail. I think online dating would be too much for him to figure out. How long have you been married?”
“Almost two years now.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you. So, I hate to pry, but might I ask why you’re here?”
“Have you heard the news stories about the missing boys from Luxembourg?”
Heinrich nodded, a look of sadness crossed his face. “They think they were taken by the same person who killed the other two, am I right?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think they’re somewhere nearby? I’m not sure what this has to do with us.”
“The building you have out in the fields, when was it last used?”
“Not since Virginie’s husband passed away. He used to hire people to work on the farm. He built it for them to use. It was a place where they could relax, have lunch, maybe take a nap. But no one has worked the fields since he passed.”
“Do you ever go out there?”
“I did once, shortly after I moved in. I had gone for a walk and was exploring the property. Virginie had told me about it so I brought the key along and took a look. There was an old couch in there, and a fridge and stove, but other than that it was empty. The power had been shut off a while ago. There’s a panel on the one wall outside that was locked. Wait, do you think someone has been using it?”
“They have. One of the missing boys was found last night on the road west of here. He had escaped from the building and run, then fell down the hill to the road. We found the place a few hours ago, it’s clear that it had been used by the suspect.”
Heinrich took a step back and sat down on the stairs leading to the second floor. “Mein Gott. We had no idea. Did you catch the killer?”
“No, he was gone by the time we got there. And he took the other boy with him.”
Heinrich shook his head. “If only I’d known. It’s so far removed from the house, we never go out there and you can’t even see it from here.”
“We found these inside,” Kara said, holding up the bills. “Do you know a Sergio Salvatore?”
“Virginie?” Heinrich looked at his wife. She leaned in to take a closer look at the name on the papers.
“Oui,” she said. “Il a travaillé pour nous. Il était un homme bon.”
“Did you get that?”
“Yes, thank you. How long ago did he work for you?”
“Combien d’années il ya?”
Virgine thought for a moment. “Douze ou treize ans.”
Kara looked at Yuri. “It’s worth looking into, but I doubt it would be him. Not unless he came back to use the place again after all these years.”
Yuri nodded. “Do you know of anyone who might have used the building?”
Heinrich turned and asked his wife. He spoke for a while, and Kara could only catch parts of the conversation. It seemed like he was explaining the situation to her. When he was finished she began to cry.
She spoke through her tears, but her pace was too fast for Kara to understand.
“She says she’s very sorry. She didn’t know. A man came looking for her husband; he had worked for them many years ago. Not Sergio, though.” He looked at Virginie.
“Maxime,” she said. “Max… je ne me souviens pas. Il était Flamand.”
“What does that mean?”
“Flemish,” Heinrich said. “From the northe
rn region of Belgium. It’s predominantly Dutch.” He looked at Virginie again. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She lowered her head and spoke softly. Kara and Yuri waited for her to finish. Yuri’s French was much better than Kara, but it was hard to hear Virginie, and harder still to understand her. She was upset and shaking so much Heinrich had to get her to sit down.
“You could have told me.” Heinrich looked at Kara and Yuri. “Apparently her financial situation is a little more dire than she had let me know when we married. A lot more dire, actually. When this man, Max, came looking for her late husband, he wanted to know if there was still any work. Virginie told him her husband had passed and Max asked if anyone was using the building. When she told him no one was, he asked if he could rent it. Said he was working on a novel and wanted a quiet place to work where he wouldn’t be disturbed.”
“How much did he offer?”
“Five hundred euros a month. He said he’d need it for six months and handed her an envelope with three thousand dollars in cash. His only rules were that she tell no one he was there and that no one was to come out to the building.”
“When was that?”
“Two months ago, give or take.” He looked back to Virginie. “I wish you had told me.”
“Do you have anything with his contact information? Either from now or from when he worked here before?”
Heinrich asked his wife but she shook her head.
“We cleared out all of her husband’s files shortly after I moved in. I doubt he would have had anything though. He wasn’t very organized and I remember Virginie saying he usually just paid his workers cash under the table.”
“Can she describe him for us?”
Heinrich translated as Virginie spoke. “She says he’s probably about thirty-five to forty years old now, and he’s put on weight since she last saw him all those years ago. Not really fat or anything, just a bit of a beer belly. And he’s tall, probably about as tall as the Russian.”
The Longest Winter Page 5
