Anamnesis: A Novel (22 page)
Read Anamnesis: A Novel Online
Authors: Eloise J. Knapp
The room was about fifteen square feet. The
walls and ceiling were padded with thick, wavy soundproofing panels. Pushed
against the corner was a bare mattress, stained with blood and other bodily
fluids. There were rings coming from the ground and wall with cuffs attached to
them to keep the victim restrained.
Watching over the scene was a camera on a
tripod. It was plugged into a power outlet in the wall. The screen was open and
ready to use. Behind it was a set of floodlights, set onto the lowest setting
but still casting blinding light onto the scene. A metal stool was near the
tripod. There was a spiral bound notebook sitting on top of it.
To my right was a wall of rusty metal
lockers. It looked like the room was built around them. Black plastic tubs were
stacked in front of them with lids hiding their contents.
Olivia moved past me into the room and
picked up the notebook. She only looked at it for a second before handing it to
me. “I can’t believe this.”
She could. She just didn’t want to. I took
the notebook and flipped it open to the middle. Printed in neat handwriting
were names of girls on the left side and dates on the other. Between this data were
names, but they didn’t make sense. Eagle, Herring, Azure, Captain, Bolt. The
first two could be connected since they were birds, but the rest didn’t fit in.
Considering where they were, they had to be code names.
I was looking at a page from two months
ago. I turned to the most recent pages and my gaze fell on the latest entry. It
was for Olivia. The code name was Herring. Hugh Raven was Herring. It made
sense in a pathetic he-thinks-he’s-clever kind of way. I wondered if his father
was in on it. Father and son code named after birds.
Besides Olivia’s name I recognized Kaylee,
but no others. Olivia appeared sporadically, but Kaylee came up nearly every
week. Only one other girl, Miranda, showed up as often as Kaylee. I flipped to
the front of the book and saw that the dates had started a year ago. Did it
mean that’s when this whole operation started? Or it was it just when they
started logging?
It wasn’t any of my business to look, but
I did. As I flipped through the pages I looked for Olivia’s name. Two names
kept coming up: Herring and Captain. At most Olivia had been drugged twice in
one month, otherwise she was the least used of any of the girls. If I were her,
I’d find it reassuring, but since I didn’t know if she wanted the information,
I kept it to myself.
“It’s a log,” I started to say, then
realized Olivia probably guessed that much. “Do you know anyone named Miranda?
Olivia?”
She was fixated on the bed. Her eyes were
impossibly wide. When I set my hand on her shoulder she finally looked at me.
“No. How much is Kaylee on there?”
“A lot,” I said. “I think these are code
names for the other people involved. Does Azure, Captain, or Bolt mean anything
to you?”
A nod. Suddenly her body was in motion and
she darted from the room, then fell to her knees by a workbench. She dry
heaved, then regained enough composure to say, “Azure was our dog.”
“Who is it then?”
Her answer was cut off by the sounds of
footsteps upstairs.
The third option, my least favorite, made
the most sense. I needed to know who each of the men were. I was confident
Eagle was Hugh’s father. Olivia knew who Azure was. That left Bolt and Captain.
I wanted to take out everyone involved in Whiteout. Until I knew all the players,
I had to avoid direct confrontation.
The internal dialog took place in seconds.
I grabbed Olivia’s arm and hauled her up. There were few places to hide outside
of the room. The shelves offered no cover. We went into the last place I knew
either of us wanted to go.
My heartbeat thundered in my ears. It made
my whole body pulse. I wondered if the Xanax didn’t work anymore, because it
sure as fuck wasn’t relaxing me.
I shoved aside one of the black tubs and
opened the locker. It was narrow, but empty and deep enough for Olivia to fit
in with room to spare vertically. I pushed her in. “We have to hide. Be quiet,
Olivia. Whatever you do be quiet, okay?”
I didn’t wait for an answer and closed the
locker on her, then returned the black tub to its original position. The door
to the room was still open. It was impossible to get the locks back on and
hide, but I shut the door anyway hoping no one would read into it. I opened the
locker next to Olivia’s. Ropes and chains hung from giant hooks. Shit. I opened
the next one and found a ratted jacket hanging inside. Good enough. I squeezed
myself in. My body pressed against it and I smelled motor oil and dust. As
quietly as I could, I pulled the locker door shut until it clicked.
My head pressed painfully into the locker
ceiling. If someone out there didn’t kill me, I’d die of claustrophobia or a
panic induced heart attack inside the confined space.
With the door to the padded room shut, it
felt oppressed and quiet inside. I was aware of my own labored breathing and
tried to stay it. Four narrow slats, angled downward, provided my view of the
room. The tubs, tripod, stool, and edge of the mattress were in my field of
view. Olivia would have a similar view where she was. I needed her to watch—as
painful as it might be—because she was our fastest way of identifying the men.
I heard the door swing open and multiple
sets of footsteps enter the room. Two men dragged the body of a woman. They
tossed her on the mattress. I saw black high heeled shoes, black tights, and
the hem of a black dress. Whoever she was, I’d bet anything they got her from
the funeral.
“Didn’t plan on doing this today, but
since the slot opened up.” The voice was older, deeper. Definitely not Hugh.
“Cross out yourself and Olivia and put me down for Julie.”
“I bet you’re really fucking pleased with
yourself about that.” The second voice was Hugh. I recognized the tone, the
snobbery. “It was my turn with Olivia. Who knows how long I’ll have to wait
now. No one screams like that girl.”
“She’s no Kaylee.”
“Jesus, you’re insane. No repeat of that
or the Cap is going to destroy you. You almost destroyed all of us. You break
the rules too much. If we hadn’t found her running around Westlake, who the
fuck knows what would’ve happened. And the markers!”
“How was I supposed to know she’d go
postal from smelling markers?”
“Maybe if you didn’t draw on her every
fucking time you had her she wouldn’t have been triggered by it.” Hugh kicked
the wall of the room with a soft thud. “And you
know
we only bring them
here and we only kill one if we all agree. You did the messiest kill ever in
her fucking apartment. The cops investigated me when the parents reported her
missing, you know that? Because I used to date her.”
My body felt like it was going to tear
itself apart from the inside out. Kaylee’s murderer was there. Two of the
people I held accountable for Skid’s death, for Olivia’s suffering, were right
there. I was aware of the Glock’s presence against my hip, pressing hard
between me and the locker wall. I wanted to unload every round I had into them.
“Don’t knock it until you try it.” The
older man grunted as he knelt down. I saw more of him now. He wore a tailored
suit and was unbuckling his pants. “You don’t know what power feels like until
you have someone trussed up like that.”
Hugh snickered. “I know what power feels
like. I keep your videos.”
The older man was quiet for a minute, then
said, “Get out. I’ll call you when I’m ready for you to take her back.”
Hugh said nothing more and left, closing
the door behind him. The older man stood and walked behind the tripod and
adjusted the camera. His pants sagged low on his hips. He shimmied out of them
and placed them on the stool, followed by his jacket then the rest of his
clothing until he was buck naked.
The girl moaned and shifted. “Where am I?”
“Did you say something, slut?” The man
went to the top of the bed, out of my line of sight. “You acted so sweet at
Kaylee’s funeral. The crying had everyone fooled but me. I know you’re a tease.
I know you don’t care about anyone but yourself. I know…”
His trail of profanities continued into
incoherent mumbling. The girl was sobbing now, her cries cut off occasionally
by him hitting her. Eventually he stripped her clothes off and climbed behind
her. The screams shifted, the pain different now.
My stomach clenched into a hard knot. I
squeezed my eyes shut and wished I could cover my ears to block out the sounds
of the twisted bastard raping the girl. His name calling, his grunting, the
sick sound of flesh slapping against flesh.
What the fuck was I doing? This wasn’t me.
I wasn’t going to let this happen.
Just as I was about to open the locker
door, I heard Olivia’s open first. The man kept going, oblivious to what was
happening behind him. I slowly pushed my door open and unholstered my gun.
Olivia stood behind the tripod, her gaze
fixed on the man and girl. He rooted at her like an animal, one hand on the
back of her head pressing it into the mattress. Olivia turned to face me. Tears
streamed down her face. She held her hand out to me. At first I was confused,
then saw her hand reaching for the gun.
I let her take it. She took a deep breath,
then was in motion. She blocked the edge of the floodlight which caught the
man’s attention first. He turned but was blinded, then I’d imagine everything
went dark as Olivia slammed the butt of the gun against his temple. She dropped
to her knees and began removing the manacles from the girl, who was too
overwhelmed to speak. I picked the gun up from the floor where she dropped it.
“Get the chair from out there,” Olivia
said. “Tie him up before he wakes.”
It took me a second before I followed her
order and stepped out of the room into the remainder of the basement. Even the
air out here felt lighter than in the torture room. I gulped in deep breaths of
it as I went to the chair we saw earlier and dragged it back into the room.
Olivia had the girl’s dress back on and her arms wrapped around her.
“It’s okay, Julie,” she murmured. “We’re
going to get you out of here. Just stay calm, okay?”
I pushed the tripod aside to make room for
the chair. The naked man was twitching so I picked up the pace and lifted him
into it. Moving unconscious bodies was much harder than I thought. He seemed
heavier than he should have and his limbs flopped as I settled him. I tied the
ropes around his wrists and ankles and looked to Olivia.
“Do you have anything I can give her?”
There was no more Xanax. I had some
uppers, but that was the last thing she needed. “I have some pain killers.
That’s it.”
“Give me one. Turn the floodlight on him.”
I searched my pockets and found my last
Oxy and handed it to Olivia. Whatever her plan was, she seemed to be confident.
The girl knew her or trusted her, because when Olivia held the pill up she took
it and swallowed it.
“Olivia, what are we doing?” I asked.
“What are we doing with
him
?”
She looked away from the girl at the man.
Her glazed expression finally shifted into pure anger.
“That’s Azure,” she said. “That’s my
father.”
Olivia’s pain wasn’t the same as mine. I
didn’t try to quantify or qualify it. I saw the agony on her face and for the
first time ever, I empathized. I was not in this ordeal alone, and neither was
she. Whatever she needed,
whatever
she needed, I would do what I could.
I continued to wait for Olivia’s lead. She
retrieved her father’s phone and sent a text to Hugh saying he was taking the
girl back himself and there was no need to come back. Then she stared at him for
nearly ten minutes. He’d been awake for half of it. He yelled for help at
first, then quieted down.
The girl sat in the corner beside the
mattress. She drifted in and out, the pain killers making her loopy. Olivia
stayed by her side until her father woke up, then she stood beside me watching
him.
The first thing I’d noticed about him was
that Olivia looked nothing like her father. His hair was black, peppered with
gray, and his complexion was more olive than hers. The only thing they had in
common were the eyes, a shade of light blue that seemed to glow. His brows were
furrowed low into a scowl. He glared past the floodlight with hatred so pure I
felt needles prickling my skin.
His chest was still slick with sweat. Wiry
gray hairs sprouted from his upper body and stomach. I’d tightened the cords on
the chairs as far as they would go. His arms were red from where they rubbed
against his skin.
“What the fuck is this?” He struggled
against his restraints and tried squinting through the blinding light. “Who the
fuck are you?”
Olivia leaned over and whispered in my
ear. “Ask him whatever you want. I need a minute, okay?”
I nodded, glad to have the chance for some
interrogation. “Tell me who’s supplying you with Whiteout.”
A vein bulged in his neck. “How do you
know about Whiteout?”
“Does it matter? Tell me who’s giving it
to you.” I didn’t care about hiding behind the floodlight any longer. I came
forward and pressed the muzzle of my gun against his head. He didn’t shy away
from it, but pressed into it instead. I lowered the gun and backhanded him. A
dribble of blood went down his lip.
“Do you think you can intimidate me? I’m a
professional intimidator, you sorry piece of shit. When I get out of here, I’m
going to destroy you.”
“When you get out of here?” I laughed.
“You’re an optimist.”
I hadn’t put a second of thought into the
looming issue of what we’d do with her father when we were done. The
motherfucker deserved to die. I planned on killing everyone else involved. But
he was Olivia’s father and that wasn’t my decision to make. I still held the
same cards, but couldn’t play them the same way anymore. Not for him.
“I don’t know how you got down here or
what you think you know, but you’re screwed. My people will find you. They’re
going to end you for this, whether I live or die.”
“So protect the brotherhood then, that’s
your story. Do you think Hugh Raven would protect you like this, Mr. Holloway?
We already know half of your fucked up clan. You’d just be saving us time if
you told us now.”
A flicker of hesitance went across his
face as I used his real name and Hugh’s. It felt good to be on the delivering
end of information reveals. He stared at his lap. I thought he was crying as I
watched his shoulders move up and down, then realized he was chuckling.
“They wouldn’t protect me. They’ve been
out for me since the very beginning, God only knows why. You caught one of us,
but you caught the least important one.”
Olivia took a step forward, but I stopped
her. “Are you sure you want to do that? Once he sees you, there’s no going
back.”
“I know,” she said. There was resignation
in her voice. Something I’d never heard before.
When Olivia walked into his field of view
in front of the floodlights, his body went still. The hell beast I’d just
spoken to melted away. I saw the mask go up, just like his daughter did. They
had more in common than their eyes. “Livvie? What are you doing here?”
She unhinged the camcorder from the tripod
and held it in front of his face. “Did you know what they were doing to me?”
He tried to look away from her, but Olivia
reached out and squeezed his chin in her hand. Her nails dug into his flesh.
She repeated her question two more times. Then, “I want to hear you say it.”
“Yes!” He choked on his own blood and spit
as he said it.
Olivia released her grip and walked away,
her back to him. She returned the camera, then wrapped her arms around herself
and took a deep inhale. I stayed out of the way. Unlike with Fearnley, this was
all her. I wouldn’t dare interfere with this moment unless she wanted me to.
“Why? Why would you let them do this to
me?” She pointed at the mattress where the other girl had been only moments
ago. “Do
you
do
that
to me?”
“Jesus, no, Livvie! I’d never touch you
like that. Please tell me you believe me.”
“How could I? You’re a monster. You’re
abusive, sadistic, and insane. You’re a rapist. You’re a murderer. How could I
believe anything you tell me? You sent Laurel away to the drug trials. You lied
to everyone about it for years.”
At the mention of Laurel he clenched his
jaw and spat on the ground. “Your sister was a whore. Do you know how many of
my clients she managed to fuck? How many associates? She was trying to destroy
me. Do you think I could’ve gotten as far in my career as I have if I let that
go on?”
“You’re out of your mind,” Olivia shouted.
She took a slow breath. “No, Laurel shouldn’t have let those men take advantage
of her. That should never have happened. But doesn’t any part of you see that
they
were wrong to accept her advances to begin with? They were committing a
crime. You should’ve called the police. You should’ve stopped them. You didn’t
care.”
Holloway sneered. “Laurel was a little
slut through and through. I don’t blame them for what they did.”
“It’s your fault! Laurel was trying to
destroy you because you were destroying other people’s lives. Our lives. She
was a good person and you threw her away like she was trash.”
“She
was
trash.
You
are my
good daughter, Livvie. I love you. You’re the one that made me proud.”
“Are you fucking serious?” Olivia threw
her arms into the air and turned in a circle. “Look at this place! You say you
love me, that I make you proud, and you’re letting men drug me, do things to
me. How does that make any sense?”
“I had to. You don’t understand, when I
was on the board for those Whiteout trials, I saw a way to get something I
need. I need to do these things or I don’t feel whole. The Whiteout makes it so
I can get what I want without hurting people.”
Olivia was right. He was truly insane. All
of the people involved were power hungry lunatics who got off on controlling
and hurting people. Holloway was trying to play Olivia. I saw it clearly; he
was trying to make himself look like a victim to his own desires. He wanted to
look like a saint for using Whiteout so people wouldn’t remember the pain he
inflicted on them.
“Tell me how you managed all this. Tell me
everything and I might forgive you.” Olivia turned the table. I was proud of
her. Assuming she wasn’t telling the truth about forgiving him.
“So you know about all the trials? The
IRB?” Olivia gave him a nod. He grinned. “You’re smart. You should’ve been a
lawyer like I said.”
“Shut up. Just tell me what you know.”
“Halfway through the trials, we
blackmailed Draper to forget everything to do with ethical research and do all
he could to make a better version of Whiteout. Off the records. He’d been
abusing his participants since the very beginning, so we had a lot on him. He
selected a group of people who had minimal outside connections, a history with
drugs, and contacted all their families with fake death certificates, runaway
notes, you name it. Anything to make them disappear. The IRB was told they’d
voluntarily withdrawn from the program. No one questioned it. It was all tidy.
“He experimented on those ten for the next
two years in addition to others. The official participants were treated well,
but the only reason why was because of what Draper was doing off the record.
The actual subjects received the lowest doses of the drug, underwent harmless
psychology and intelligence tests. Nothing truly useful. The real gains came
from the dosages of Whiteout given to the ten, the physical tests. Of course,
by the time he was done, the ten were destroyed mentally. We learned a lot from
them. About how to use the drug most effectively, how to avoid forming triggers.”
Olivia looked at me, then to her father.
“What did you do with those ten?”
“Most of us voted to kill them. Some were
already dead, no one would care. But Draper and his fairy assistant Fearnley
suddenly developed a conscience. They told us the ten would never remember what
happened to them, especially if we got them addicted to drugs again, which
helps prevent the brain’s attempt at repairing itself, so they tried to
integrate them back into society. Halfway houses, mental institutions. It was a
terrible idea.”
“Fucking hell it was a terrible idea,” I
spat. How could their plan to save us include getting us addicted to drugs?
“You should’ve killed them all. Would’ve been more humane.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying!”
That wasn’t what I meant. Not really. I
felt blood rush to my face. I clenched my jaw to keep from spewing anything
else.
Olivia ignored both of us, her gaze fixed
on her father. “Keep talking.”
“It was a huge clusterfuck. Fearnley
assured us he knew what he was doing and would do it right. He had already
given them new names in the off-the-record trials after we faked their deaths.
More stupidity. He treated them like pets. Had too many feelings for them. He
should’ve numbered them like we told him. It turned out, when he restarted
their new lives, he used their old social security numbers to try and get
everything in order. Applications to apartments, unemployment. They weren’t
legally dead so the numbers were still valid.
“But it doesn’t work like that; to do it
right they needed new
identities,
new social security numbers, new
towns, everything! We didn’t know how piss poor of a job Fearnley did until one
of them strangled his fucking roommate Fearnley came crying to us. We had to
swoop in and clean up the mess ourselves. Not just that one, but
all
of
them. Imagine if the cops got involved? It would come back to us. We’d be
screwed. We took the ten back, ran a few more months of trials, then tossed
some of them in the Sound, staged deaths for the others so they couldn’t be
identified.”
My dream. The salt water, the drowning.
That was my cleanup.
Ten lives and they thought they could toss
them out like garbage. I was one of them. I was a stepping stone in the grand
plan for some corrupt rich people to have Whiteout for themselves. The life I
forged after I woke up was one given to me out of pity, and one created
recklessly. I almost knew everything I wanted to find out when I started this
whole thing with Olivia; all the who’s and why’s. The answers I’d found made my
life feel more meaningless than ever before. I might’ve learned empathy being
with Olivia, but that didn’t magically make me okay with myself. I still hated
myself. I was still worthless. If anything, what Holloway was saying made my
perceived worthlessness more solid.
Fuck the self-help books. Some people
aren’t meant to have happiness. There was no coming back from this.
I willed myself to postpone an inevitable
breakdown and focused on Olivia and her dad. On the feeling of the gun in my
hand, the musty smell of the room. Anything but what was going on inside my
mind.
“And me? How did you get me involved in
this?” Olivia asked.
“Look at yourself!” he shouted. “You’re
sweet, you’re a princess. You’re exactly the kind of girl they want. I told
them no, that you were my daughter. They said if I didn’t let them take you,
they’d cut me off. They’d frame me and end my career. My life! At first the
videos were fun. We watched them after, shared them. Then they were blackmail.”
Her face sparkled with tears. “Who are
‘they’? Who wanted me?”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“The hell you are!” She screamed. She
backhanded him. The rings she wore tore up the skin on his cheek, drawing more
blood. He sat, stunned, staring at the dirty floor. Olivia came over to me and
held out her hand. “Give me your knife.”
If she expected me to tell her not to kill
him, that it wasn’t going to be the justice she wanted, she was wrong. If I
were her, I’d kill him in a heartbeat. I reached into my back pocket and
withdrew my folding knife. She turned and went back to her father.