Light Before Day (45 page)

"She left me," he said. "Took the kids. I haven't seen them in months."

"What else did these people do?"

"Someone started fucking with my credit," he said. "They got all my account numbers somehow. I used to shred everything—"

"Did you have that information on your computer?" I asked.

"I keep everything on my computer," he whispered. "I'm a fucking systems analyst for Christ's sake." He sobbed. "I
was
a systems analyst. They fired me."

We were traveling a winding, swelling road. I couldn't tell the Suburban's speed.

"What about you?" Cameron Davis asked. "What did they do to you?"

Davis would have to earn the right to that answer, and I seriously doubted he would be able to do that. The cuffs that pinned both of our wrists above our heads were the wrong height to constrain a child. Roger Vasquez and Ben Clamp had been making regular late-night trips in a vehicle outfitted to confine two grown men at a time. I wondered how many other customers of this operation had ended up in the back of this Suburban. This was not just a child porn ring; it involved the abduction of young boys and the systematic destruction of the men for whom the boys were violated. My new captors believed that I was even worse than their customers. Thanks to Billy Hatfill, they believed that I had not just watched a child but violated a child myself. I remembered the strange light sparking in Billy's eyes when he realized I was going to hunt down the men he worked for. He had taken his own life to guarantee I would do so. He had guaranteed that the very men I was looking for would try to punish me for a crime I had not committed.

"How did they get to you back there?" I asked Davis.

"He got me when I came back to the hotel."

"Just one."

"The Latin guy."

I was sure that Ben Clamp had gone after Caroline while Vasquez had subdued me. Caroline had been right on Cameron Davis's tail. Why hadn't Ben Clamp caught both of them? Why had Roger been forced to work double duty?

The Suburban rolled to a stop. Cameron Davis cursed under his breath. I heard footsteps crunching gravel.

The back doors flew open. Over Roger's shoulders I glimpsed a terraced cliff descending toward a two-lane blacktop and saw rolling white-caps in the near distance. We were on Pacific Coast Highway.

Roger yanked Davis's right ankle toward him and drove a syringe into the skin. Then he seized mine.

"There's been a problem, right, Roger?" I said. He gave me a look that blazed in the dark. His jaw had a thin coat of black stubble. I couldn't imagine his face forming the bright smile he displayed in the picture I had carried with me for a week.

"You haven't heard from Ben, have you?" I asked. "He ran into some trouble with my girlfriend, didn't he?"

Roger grimaced and drove the syringe into my ankle.

C H A P T E R 22

I awoke to the smell of wood rot and a damp chill that told me I was below ground. I struggled to assemble the sensations I had experienced in my stupor: footsteps creaking the boards overhead, Cameron Davis whispering the Lord's Prayer over and over from somewhere close by his muffled cries as he was torn from the room.

A dim light seemed to come from miles away. I tried to focus on it. I was in a long narrow cellar. There was a cube of exposed drywall at one end. A half-open door revealed a prison-issue toilet and a single overhead bulb. I managed to get myself off the cot I'd been lying on and backed up toward the bathroom so that I could use its light to see the rest of the cellar. It was almost fifteen feet long and seven feet wide. There was a large bookshelf against one wall.

Once my eyes adjusted, I moved to it and read some of the titles on the spines:
If It Doesn't
Feel Right, No More Little Secrets, Journey Into Healing.
The topic remained the same for all of them. Some were books intended for children dealing with sexual abuse, featuring drawings of round-faced kids and their parents engaged in conversation. Others were thick psychiatric tomes.

In the bathroom, I gulped from the faucet. When I straightened up, I saw there was

handwriting on the wall. It started in ink, but then the pen had obviously run dry, and the author had used its ballpoint tip to scratch into the drywall. First there was a ledger of days, six vertical lines crossed through by a seventh. Then the writer started to lose count. Daylight obviously didn't penetrate down here. There were nonsensical fragments of words:
First Account. Empty . .

. Maybe Just a Punishment. . . First Broken Promise: NO WALKS!
When I turned around, I saw that words were scribbled all around me, above the doorway and down the opposite wall. In the mess of etchings on the inside of the door, I saw the phrase
I am not quality material!
It was followed by the letters NQM, scrawled in a sloping column all the way down to the floor, the acronym that Joseph Spinotta had written atop project proposals.

Joseph Spinotta had been held in this cellar. After a while, his ledger of days had run out.

Joseph Spinotta was gone.

I returned to the bed and tried to make sense of this. In our final conversation, Billy Hatfill had never uttered Spinotta’s name. But at dinner several days before, he had told me that Spinotta was a pedophile and had expressed a hatred for the man that shocked me. I thought of the drama teacher Billy had arranged to have beaten nearly to death, his hatred for the older gay men he had manipulated. Spinotta’s operation had been hijacked by the men who worked for him. Now it served a far different purpose from the one Spinotta had intended.

Footsteps shook the ceiling overhead. A few seconds later, a section of wall swung inward and Roger Vasquez entered the cellar. He was wearing a supply belt that held a two-way radio, a large pager, a Bowie knife, and an empty holster for the pistol he was aiming at my face.

"How long?" I asked.

He approached me.

"How long did you keep Spinotta alive?"

Without any change in his face to warn me, he hit me across the forehead with the butt of his pistol. He waited for me to right myself and then slammed the pistol across my jaw.

"Billy told us you ask a lot of questions," he said. "He said it's a defense mechanism. You use it to hide things like the fact that you're a disgusting drunk who likes to rape little boys." His voice was prim and matter-of-fact. Here in his controlled world, there was not a question he did not have an answer for.

He watched as I lay on the damp floor, feeling at my bleeding head and trying to work my mouth. I didn't tell him that I had never laid a hand on a young boy. I figured it would get me a shattered jaw. He ordered me to my feet. He walked me up the stairs out of the cellar, holding my wrists with one hand and keeping the pistol between my shoulder blades with the other.

When I realized he wasn't going to restrain me in any way, I figured that meant he was walking me toward my death. I tried to control my panic.

On the top step, he shoved me too hard and I fell to my knees on the floor of a massive barn lined with rotting wine barrels. He jerked me up and walked me out of the barn and into weak gray light. I couldn't tell if it was dawn or dusk. Low, wind-driven fog blew through a stand of squat oak trees up ahead, smaller than the ones I'd seen on Caroline's property.

He walked me into the trees. I wanted to plead for my life, but another blow to the head would knock me unconscious, and I didn't want to meet death in a blackout.

We stepped over the twisted roots of giant sycamores. The foliage thickened around us. Then we entered a clearing where a ghost was waiting for us. Cameron Davis had been suspended by his ankles from a high branch. His bare chest was heaving with labored breaths. He was stripped naked, and his face was covered by the same black leather mask Daniel Brady had worn in my apartment: two tiny inverted triangles for eyeholes, a leering grin with fat lips painted gold. Off to the right was a wooden platform with a high pole in the back. It was missing a rope, but I could tell that it was a gallows. Two chairs were positioned side by side, each with metal spikes covering the seat and the wooden slats in the back and steel cuffs at the ends of the arms.

Cameron Davis was situated so that he could survey all the different forms of torture that awaited him.

Roger Vasquez slammed me against the trunk of a giant sycamore. There were two steel cuffs nailed into the trunk, just like the ones I had been confined by on the ride there. I dropped my eyes to the dirt to avoid the sights before me, but Vasquez seized my chin and brought my eyes to his. I worked to keep my body from shaking.

"Calm down," he whispered. "It's not your turn yet." My vision blurred. My mouth had turned to sandpaper, but I could feel bile in my throat. Roger's eyes took on an almost sympathetic cast and he patted me lightly on the cheek. Then he went to Cameron Davis's suspended body and pulled his Bowie knife from its leather holster.

I looked back in the direction we had come. Beyond the barn, a sea of withering grapevines stretched toward a low hill, with what looked like a one-story Italian villa at the top. The house was surrounded by a dense stand of Monterey pines, and the golden light in its front windows was gaining luminescence. Night was falling. An entire day had come and gone while I had lain unconscious in Joseph Spinotta’s prison cell.

Roger Vasquez put one arm around Cameron Davis's bare chest, then dragged the knife blade down Cameron Davis's abdomen too gently to break the skin.

"Let me tell you what makes me angry, Adam Murphy," he called back to me. "A man like this, a man with wife and kids, will stop off at a children's restroom or some other secret place and inflict his disease upon an innocent young boy. Now what if that boy turns out to be gay, Adam Murphy? Eventually he might talk about the abuse he suffered at the hands of a diseased, liar like this man. Maybe the boy tells a family member, or a therapist."

He checked my face to make sure I was still with him. "And what happens? What happens when that young man finally decides to seek help? When he tells the truth about what happened to him? For one thing, people assume that his abuse
made
him gay. And then, as if that's not enough, they assume that his abuser was gay as well."

He let this hang in the air as he studied his victim.

"Do you see what that means, Adam Murphy?" I didn't answer. "Thanks to men like Cameron Davis here, gay men everywhere are given the blame for the crimes of the deceitful, the diseased. Those gay men have risked everything to come out to their families, to themselves, and then they're blamed for the crimes of liars!"

With a flick of the wrist, Roger opened up a small wound above Cameron Davis's left nipple.

The man let out a muffled cry into his leather mask as blood streaked down his chest. I dropped my eyes and heard Roger's footsteps coming toward me.

"Let me tell you something about our customers," he said. "Not one of them lives in West Hollywood or the Castro or Chelsea. They live in Los Gatos. Simi Valley. Daly City. They have wives, children, and respectable lives they hide behind while they commit crimes that are blamed on men who have done nothing more than be honest about who they are."

He studied me as if he were mildly concerned that I might not be getting his point. He was speaking from a well of personal experience that had driven him to the point of madness, and for the first time in a week, I was too terrified to utter a word. I was tempted to try to use the sexual abuse in his past in an attempt to connect with him, but I doubted this would yield anything more than the choice between a noose and a bed of spikes.

"And then," he said, "here I am, doing all I can to rid the world of the men who abuse us and demonize us, and then I hear about someone like
you.
One of our own. A traitor within our own ranks. Disappointment doesn't even begin to describe it, Adam Murphy."

He must have felt the same fury toward Joseph Spinotta, the man he had served. I recalled Billy Hatfill's hatred of the man and realized that the Vanished Three had shared that loathing while they fed him boys, keeping him happy until they could get their hands on his money and his operation.

He brought the bloody knife blade to my throat. I closed my eyes but felt it against my Adam's apple. Then the blade left my throat. When I opened my eyes, Roger was standing next to Cameron Davis's body as the blood jetted out of the man's throat from a fresh gash.

"Collect your thoughts," Roger said. "You're next."

"I can prove to you that it wasn't me on that tape," I said. "But it doesn't matter, does it?

You're going to kill me anyway. Now that I've seen what you do."

"You never should have tried to find us," he said. "Besides, we would have found you soon enough."

We had just emerged from the trees when I saw a figure running toward us across the vineyard.

Roger stopped and tightened his grip on the back of my neck. Terrance Davidson raced toward us. His blond hair was cut short and he had added bulk to his small frame. His white T-shirt was sweat-stained, and his round blue eyes were wide with panic. I recognized my cell phone in his right hand. "It's her!" he gasped. He handed the phone to Roger, then regarded me as if I were an alien being. He lacked Roger's supply belt and weaponry.

"What does she want?" Roger asked.

"She says she wants to talk," Terrance gasped. "To all of us. She's hurting him, Roger. I can hear—"

"It's Caroline, isn't it?" I asked.

"Shut up!" Terrance roared.

"She's got your friend Ben," I said.

I felt something warm and wet hit the side of my face. Terrance Davidson had spit on me.

When he saw the expression on my face, his eyes widened and he took a step backward. He lacked his friend's controlled rage. From behind me, I heard Roger ask Caroline what she wanted. The answer came in the form of a bloodcurdling male scream that was so loud it turned to static in the cell phone's speaker. Terrance Davidson's hands flew to his ears and he spun away from us. "Do something, Roger!" he screamed. "Do something!" It was clear he had deep feelings for the man Caroline held captive.