Arden chased after her. The girl went for the front door. She was quick-footed. Just as she was about to open the door, Arden slammed against her. The girl’s front smashed against the door with a thud. Arden pressed the gun against her back. “Do what I say and I won’t shoot you.”
When the girl nodded, Arden pulled away and gave the girl a few feet of breathing room. She must’ve been thirteen. She wore yellow pajamas, had long brown hair, tan skin, and braces. Vomit crawled up Arden’s throat as she thought about the physical and emotional trauma she was inflicting upon this child.
There was no going back now. She led the girl down to the basement.
Joe took one look at her and was terrified. She must’ve reminded him of Jessica. Arden felt her heart break as she duct-taped the girl in the same manner as her parents.
The only person in the Rivera family that could speak was Hector, and he was dead silent. She could see it in his dark eyes. He wanted to kill Arden for doing this.
Arden sealed off the basement. She was confident no one would hear them.
Arden and Joe stood in front of the family. Tears streamed down Alma’s face, but she was completely still and unblinking. Arden knew she was trying to keep her strength for her daughter. Arden wanted to tell her that she’d be okay, but that would ruin the intimidation factor. Their daughter wept. Every breath puffed out the tape around her mouth. She leaned her head against her mother’s shoulder. Arden could tell it was breaking Joe. He was doing his best to hold it together, but the trauma went both ways.
Hector finally broke his silence. “The safe is upstairs. I can tell you the code if you let my family go. That’s fair, no?”
Arden waited for Joe to speak. He didn’t. Arden stepped up to the plate. She didn’t aim her gun at him. At this point, he knew she was serious. “We aren’t after money.”
“Then what?” Spittle escaped Hector’s mouth as he talked. “What does this have to do with my family?”
“We’re here for you, Hector,” Arden said.
“Then let my wife and daughter go. Please,” Hector begged. He pulled up his taped hands into a praying position. “I’ll give you anything you want. Was someone you know falsely accused? One phone call to the D.A. and I can let him out. I’m a powerful man. Understand? Please, use reason.”
Everything in Arden’s spirit wanted to leave this place, but the stakes were too high. Too high for what? To attack a family? What are you becoming? Arden internally questioned herself. “I want information,” Arden said.
“Anything within my power,” Hector said. “Just ask.”
Arden loomed over him. “Eleven days ago, you attended a lunch with Garold Grey.”
Hector shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Joe walked behind Alma.
Hector’s eyes went wide. “What are you doing?”
Joe pressed the barrel down on the back of her head.
Arden could see that the man behind the mask was no longer Joe. He was a machine.
“Please,” Hector fell on his knees before Arden. “Please. Tell him to stop.”
“You had lunch with Garold,” Arden said.
“Yes,” Hector admitted desperately.
“And that night, you went to a party in Jamesville.”
Hector’s pitiful expression turned to hard stone. Suddenly, like a switch was toggled, he glared at Arden. She felt chill bumps rise across her body.
Hector spoke with palpable hate. “Oh, I know who you are.”
Arden glared back at him. “I want the names of everyone who attended that party.”
Hector didn’t speak.
“Is it worth your wife’s life?”
Hector stayed silent.
Alma stared at him in horror.
Arden aimed his gun at him. “The names, Hector.”
Hector spit. “Screw you.”
Joe walked behind the daughter and aimed his gun. “How about her life?”
Hector tensed up. “You won’t do it.”
Arden and Joe traded looks. They needed to get a handle on the situation before they lost all control. Hector was calling their bluff. The moment the illusion was broken, they’d either have to leave or start shooting. Neither of those was an option. They had to make a choice.
Arden loomed over Hector. “Are you really going to sacrifice your family to save a few sickos? Would they do the same for you?”
Hector averted his eyes and pursed his lips.
Arden squatted down to his level and turned up his chin with the barrel of her gun. His eyes were dark and hollow.
“We’ll kill your family,” Arden said. “We’ll start slow, just like your friends were doing to Scarlet Gales. Or what about those who were in the special rooms beneath the shed? I heard the screams. I have a pretty good idea of what went down. Your friends toyed with them before the final blow.”
Hector cursed Arden ten ways to Sunday.
She ignored it all. When Hector finished, Arden said, “I’m not playing games.”
The man told her something that she should do to herself.
She turned to Joe. “Take the girl out of here.”
Joe blinked, unsure if he heard her right.
Arden repeated herself. “Take the girl to the closet. Let him hear her scream.”
Joe questioned her for a moment. Not taking his eyes off Arden, he told the thirteen-year-old girl, “Stand up.”
She shook her head but obeyed. Joe escorted her to the closet.
Hector spit. “You coward. You’re going to hurt her, do it out here.”
“I prefer the mystery,” Arden said.
Joe pushed the girl inside and closed the door. After a moment, she started screaming.
Arden kept herself from grimacing.
Alma fainted.
That was a blessing in disguise. It meant one more person Arden didn’t have to watch.
Arden faced off with the terrified police chief. His daughter’s screams grew more intense. Arden looked him in the eyes. She didn’t tell him what Joe was doing. The human imagination could be a terrifying thing.
After another painstaking thirty seconds of eye contact, Hector broke. “Stop. Stop!”
“Hey!” Arden yelled out to Joe.
The closet went silent.
Sweat rolled down Hector’s face. He was still on his knees. “You want names, I’ll tell you names, but you tell that man to get his hands off my daughter.”
“And lose my leverage? Nah,” Arden said. “Keep it going!” she commanded Joe.
The girl’s screaming started up again.
“Stop, please!” Hector begged. “Please.”
He groveled at Arden’s feet and wept.
Arden yelled at the closet. “Give her a break!”
The screaming died down.
Hector kept crying.
Arden stood over him. She turned on the video recorder on her cheap burner phone. “I want names and for you to tell me everything you did at that party. Don’t leave a single detail out.”
5
The Long Road
By the time Hector had finished talking, he was broken at Arden’s feet. He curled up into a fetal position and sobbed.
Arden’s face lacked all emotion. Her thoughts were a million miles away. They were things that were supposed to stay with Hector until the grave, but now Arden knew it all. It changed her.
She turned off the recorder and pocketed her phone.
Arden was parched. “You come after me, the whole world sees. Understand?”
Hector nodded.
Arden turned to the closet. “You can come out now.”
Joe stepped out. Behind his ski mask, his eyes were sobering.
“Bring her, too.” Arden said.
Joe grabbed the girl from under the armpits and dragged her out. She sat next to her mother.
Hector got to his knees. “Bella. Baby?”
She was unharmed, but scared.
“She’s a
good actor,”Arden remarked.
With that, Arden and Joe left them in the basement. They’d grabbed Hector’s keys from the countertop, went into his garage, and got into his luxury sedan. The windows were appropriately tinted. Arden and Joe kept their masks on. Silence lingered between them as they drove out of the upper-class neighborhood at the break of day.
They dropped the car off at a tow-away zone two miles from the factory. They stripped off their masks and stuffed them in their jacket pockets. They walked, watching the sunrise as they made their way to their hideout.
Arden let Joe climb in first.
She followed him. They walked through empty halls. Light breached the windows. Dust swirled in the beams of sunlight. The place felt forgotten. Exhausted, the two of them split up. Neither of them looked at one another. They hadn’t since they left the Riveras’ house. Arden went into the office and closed the door behind her.
Her hand fell away from the doorknob and she sank to her hands and knees. She wept bitter, silent tears that hurt when they came out. She hammered her right fist against the dusty floor and hated herself with every fiber of her being. She wanted to cry out to God, asking for forgiveness, but couldn’t. She was rotten. Bad. Yes, Hector was horrible, but so was what she did to his family. The guilt was an anvil crushing Arden’s back. The family was physically unharmed, but that didn’t matter. Arden’s goal was to help people, not break in and attack. She wanted to repent, but with all the names on the list, she knew it would only be the beginning.
She crawled into her sleeping bag and pulled it up to her chin. She rested her eyes but couldn’t sleep. Her soul felt like it was being pulled out of her chest. Turn to Me. She thought she heard a voice say in the back of her mind. It must’ve been nothing.
Hours drifted by, and her suffocating sorrow turned to guilt-ridden numbness.
She crawled out of the bed and dragged herself to the office.
Joe was out in the large open room. He did push-ups with rage. When he saw Arden, he stopped and got up.
“I’m not doing that again,” he said.
“It was the only way he’d talk.”
“Doesn’t matter. She was my daughter’s age when that monster--” Joe stopped himself before repeating the painful memory.
Arden’s expression was grey and lifeless. Deep creases etched beneath her eyes from crying so much. “I’m not going to argue with you, Joe, but you heard the names.”
“So what do we do with it?”
“We’ll have Derrick makes copies of the confession recording. If Hector starts moving against us, we’ll send it out to various journalists,” Arden said. “Until then, it's hunting season.”
Joe looked at her like she was a stranger.
“What?” Arden asked plainly. “Because I’m willing to make some hard choices, that makes me the bad guy? You heard what these people do. Hector confessed to countless girls and boys, men and women that were…” To start to describe the horrid acts made her want to vomit. She took a deep breath. “Besides, you’re the one who admitted to killing civilians. Don’t judge me.”
Joe marched up to her and grabbed her shirt with his fist. “What did you say?”
Arden stared him down. “Go ahead. Hit me. That will solve all our problems.”
Joe’s face glowed red. A vein bulged in his forehead. He looked ready to knock her face in. Arden almost wished he would. Maybe it would knock some sense back into her, remind her of who she was. Just like in one night her identity was shattered when she found her dead sister, one night of force interrogation plummeted her into a pit of self-destruction. The worst part was that she was fully aware of what she was doing. There wasn’t going to be an epiphany that she was going down the unrighteous path, she already knew she was.
Joe opened his fist and let go of Arden. He took a few steps away, turned his back, and rubbed his hand up his bald head.
There was a hole in the conversation. Arden did her best to mend it. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”
Joe walked over to the window and tried to collect himself.
Arden stayed put and waited for Joe to say something.
He didn’t.
Arden took a walk through the factory. Failing to clear her head, she returned to the office and listened to the recording. She typed the names into her burner phone’s notepad. Arden didn’t recognize most of the people listed. There were a few of Scarlet’s co-stars and the mayor of Jamesville. Arden wasn’t surprised in the least. She’d suspected anyone and everyone at this point. As much as she wanted to launch Hector’s confession tape into the world, it wouldn’t be anything but conspiracy fodder. She needed a permanent solution. Killing people wasn’t going to change this. She needed evidence. Witnesses. She needed to find the girls they had abducted. If Scarlet was alive, she’d be the perfect one, but that was unlikely. Arden couldn’t think of any reason why they would keep the girl alive. She was just a liability at this point.
Arden would need to contact Derrick again. He could help get her the information surrounding the people listed. Without that, she had nothing.
She found some scrap paper in the desk drawer and wrote a message to Derrick. She put it out by the dumpster where he had originally dropped off the list of names. She sent him a cryptic, spam-sounding text. Since they’d worked together, they’d developed a sort of coding system to keep Arden’s work under the radar. It should only take him two minutes to crack the code. He wouldn’t respond to avoid suspicion. Arden had to trust he got the message. She returned inside.
Joe bought dinner at a fast food joint. It was the only thing they had to eat today.
They sat across from each other at a dusty table and dug in.
Towards the end of the meal, Joe said. “How far are you willing to go?”
“No blood,” Arden replied.
“It would be easier,” Joe replied.
“We’re after their captives and we’re after confessions,” Arden replied. “You know, if we want to clear our names.”
Joe took a deep breath. “You think that’s still a possibility?”
“It better be,” Arden said.
The plan sucked, but it's what they had.
The next morning, Arden got up at daybreak and checked behind the dumpster. Derrick had replaced the envelope with an envelope of his own. Arden brought it back. It had the names and addresses they needed.
Joe stepped into the coffee shop and checked the news. The Riveras had reported the break-in as a robbery. It was impossible to know if that was just a cover story for a bigger investigation. Either way, Arden and Joe needed to move quickly. They needed a car, so they went to the bad part of town, looked around, and stole a 1980s Cadillac. There were automobile thefts all over the area, so it wouldn’t raise much suspicion.
Once they had the car, black clothes, and ski masks, the real hunt began. They started with those on the top of the list. He was one of the producers on Broken Roses, Scarlet Gales’s TV show. Arden and Joe followed him from his house to a strip club one night. They got him on his way out the back door. Joe choked him out and threw him in the trunk. They drove to the outskirts of town. At night, deep in the woods, they opened the trunk and dragged him out into the clearing, similar to where Arden and Joe had to dig their own graves.
The man begged and begged. He wouldn’t give them any straight answers, so Joe had to beat on him. Arden leaned on a nearby tree. They pressed the man for answers. After an hour, he confessed to being at the orchard on the night of Scarlet’s sacrifice. He didn’t know if Scarlet was alive, but he admitted to watching some very messed-up things at the party, ranging from occult rituals to cannibalism. It was all stuff Arden had heard from Rivera. Joe asked how they got victims, but he was ignorant about that part of the deal. He was just a customer. When they had finished getting the confession, they stripped him and threw him in a ditch.
“Pray someone finds you,” Arden whispered to him.
The investigators drove off.
The next person on the list was an acting coach. They found him in the apartment, held him at gunpoint, and had him listen to the confessions they already had. Knowing how screwed he was, he quickly pointed them to the names of the list that were “suppliers.” Joe thanked him for his cooperation by hog-tying him and locking him in his bathroom.
A week went by, and Arden had confessions from seven different people.
The news started reporting on the strange attacks. The “victims” were smart enough not to talk about Joe or Arden, but it became harder to crack down on the list. A few of the names took vacations, others put in new alarm systems, and some purchased firearms.
Arden and Joe moved from the factory to another abandoned building on the other side of town. They slept all day and worked all night. They’d get their targets when they were away from home. If there was any sign of the police tailing them, Arden and Joe would just move to a different name on the list. They were starting to put together a basic understanding of who bought and who sold, but they hadn’t had any luck finding Scarlet or any of the missing girls.
Another week passed and they’d only gotten three targets on the list. Tired of waiting until they got the girls, Arden and Joe decided release the confession tapes. They gave them to Derrick and had him bleep out all of the names they had yet to get on the list. They left in the names of those they’d already interrogated to give their argument clarity. He also distorted Arden and Joe’s voices whenever they asked a question. When the tape was edited, they put it on thumb drives. They paid homeless people to deliver the drives off at different news outlets around town.
Arden and Joe held back Rivera’s recording though. He was the only one that posed a major threat to their operation. The police were already looking into Arden and Joe. They had to be extra careful around any public place. Sadly, showering at the YMCA was no longer an option. Arden and Joe washed with water bottles and shampoo they stole from their victims. Their targets’ refrigerators were also their main source of food as well.
Secrets Boxset: A Riveting Kidnapping Mystery Collection Page 26
