The Dead Room (43 page)

He stepped up onto the porch and checked the mailbox, but couldn’t find a name. Just the initials, E.T., printed in gold. Eddie Trisco. Evan Train. The extraterrestrial head case who’d landed from some black hole on the other side of Mars.

The woman passed the house with her stroller. She glanced at Teddy and seemed nervous.

“Where do you live?” he asked, following her eyes to the gun.

Her face locked up, and she wouldn’t answer.

“You need to go home,” he said. “Check your doors and call the police.”

She hurried down the sidewalk. As she passed out of view, Teddy noticed the house on the corner with the satellite dish on the roof. The bricks had been mortared and new windows installed. It looked like the family was living in the home despite the renovations. A little boy, maybe six years old, stood before a window on the first floor looking outside. After a moment, his father joined him. Teddy knew they were too far away to see the gun, yet they were staring. Maybe keeping an eye on Trisco’s house was just part of their routine. Maybe E.T. didn’t exactly blend.

Teddy turned back to the house. When he tried the door, the knob turned but the deadbolt was locked. He moved to the window and looked inside. He could see the entryway rug pushed against the wall and half turned over. What looked like a rag at first glance had been tossed on the floor. As he mulled it over, Teddy realized it wasn’t a rag at all. He was looking at the signs left behind from a struggle. The rag was a piece of someone’s dress.

Rosemary’s dress.

He slammed the butt of the rifle into the window, numb to the sound and feel of shattering glass, and climbed in. His eyes ate through the room in edgy gulps. As he walked through the dining room and kitchen and found a den, he tried to ignore the ringing phone. Still, the first floor was clear.

He raised the pump gun and headed upstairs. He went through every room in the dim light until he found Eddie’s bedroom at the end of the hall. A lamp was on. He could see a towel thrown on the bed beside the extraterrestrial’s clothing. Teddy moved into the room, lowering a hand to the towel as he eyed the closet. The cloth was damp. Eddie had recently showered and changed. Curiously, the windows had been covered with sheets of aluminum foil.

He shrugged it off and stepped into the bathroom, noting the water drops on the shower curtain. There was a hypodermic needle by the sink and an IV bag filled with an amber liquid that looked as if it had been stolen from a hospital room. He read the label.

Morphine.

He backed out of the room into the hall. Moving down to the landing, he spotted a door with an unusually heavy latch. And then the phone stopped ringing. A wave of fear blew through his body as he listened to the silence. It was an oppressive silence, the kind with voices in it that chanted
turn back
.

Teddy swung the door open, revealing a narrow set of steps ascending to an attic. Leading with the pump gun, he flipped the light switch, listened a moment, and started upstairs. The steps creaked, but he kept moving. He checked behind his back, to the left and right. Nothing except for the body of a woman stretched out on the floor.

Another corpse. Another victim. This one frozen all the way through.

He turned the body over with his foot and examined the face long enough to realize it wasn’t Rosemary Gibb. When he noticed the windows were open, he walked over for a lung full of fresh air. The house was clear. Yet someone had picked up the phone and hung it up again. He looked outside, then down at the backyard. There was a greenhouse attached to the house. Another floor.

He raced for the stairs, legging it down to the first floor as quietly as he could manage. He went through the rooms again, checking every door until he found the one in the kitchen.

He swung it open and peered into the basement. The lights were on, but he still couldn’t hear anything. Not even a distant siren from outside. His hands were trembling. He wiped the sweat from his brow. Then he planted his foot on the first step and started down.

Although the stone walls remained unfinished, the basement had been subdivided into a maze of various rooms. Teddy found himself standing in a narrow hallway, the doors at each end closed. He could smell mold, the scent of paints and chemical solvents wafting in the air. For a moment, it crossed his mind that he might be in the waiting room outside another version of hell.

He moved toward the door closest to the base of the stairs, thinking it would lead to the greenhouse and a possible exit to the yard out back if something went wrong. Then he turned the handle, cracked the door open and paused. When he didn’t hear anyone react, he pushed the door open and entered. He could see the greenhouse on the other side of the room. A chair and easel. He was standing in Trisco’s studio.

He crossed the room to the easel, glancing at the chair and noting the chains and handcuffs. The canvas was large, five feet by six, maybe even bigger. As his view cleared the back of the painting, he spotted the French doors opening to the backyard. Then he turned around for a quick look at the painting and stopped dead....

It was a cityscape. A young woman with blond hair stood on the corner at night waiting on a red light as men in suits openly stared at her naked body and pawed at her breasts with their hands. As Teddy looked at her face, it dawned on him that her features were a composite of the faces tacked on Nash’s wall before the jury table. The eyes were used from one victim, the chin from another, with Trisco’s memory of his mother as a young woman the standard everyone had been judged by.

Eddie was painting his mother, then killing her over and over again.

But it was the background that left Teddy dead inside. He took a step closer, eyeing the buildings carefully as the horror reached out with a cold finger and pushed his soul closer to the grave. The buildings were littered with graffiti, but hadn’t been painted with a brush. Teddy let out a deep groan as he stared at them and realized exactly what Trisco had done. He recognized the graffiti, even though he’d never seen the images sprayed on a single wall in the city. They weren’t drawn in paint, but had been inked in by another hand.

Teddy knew that he was staring at the very thing that made the void black. He was staring at Darlene Lewis’s tattoos....

The buildings were made of human skin, stretched across the canvas and sealed with a thin coat of varnish or shellac. He felt his stomach turn, thought he might be sick and stepped back. He needed distance. The canvas was huge, and there were a lot of buildings with graffiti filling out the background. More tattoos and skin than Darlene could have provided. As he thought it over, Teddy realized there had to be another list of victims no one was aware of. A list of women whose faces didn’t match, only their skin.

Someone moaned.

Teddy heard it and flinched. He looked about the room and noticed all the doors feeding into the hellish maze.

He heard it again, trying to get a grip on himself. The sound was coming from the door to his right. He inched over, listening through the wood. It was a woman.

Teddy raised the pump gun and gave the door a push.

He saw Rosemary stretched out on a worktable. When she lifted her head, her eyes rolled back, then forward again, passing over him without seeing him. He scanned the rest of the room, didn’t see anyone else, then rushed to her side. It didn’t take much to realize that she was overdosing on something. She was sweating profusely, her skin hot to the touch. Even worse, tremors rocked through her body as she tugged at the rags holding her down. She was in a continual state of involuntary motion. Teddy watched her try to get up, hit the limit of her restraints and fall back, then try to get up again. Rosemary was on automatic pilot. She couldn’t stop moving. She was circling the drain.

Someone walked across the living room floor. Teddy froze, listening to the footsteps overhead. Trisco. When he heard them start downstairs, he looked at Rosemary. All he could think about was the videotape he’d seen in Nash’s office. The kid overdosing on the sidewalk outside a nightclub, bucking like a fish until he was dead. He needed to do something, but what? He needed to do it now.

He checked the door, ripping the rags away from her wrists and ankles. Then he picked her up in his arms, grabbed the Winchester and burst into the studio. In spite of the dress she was wearing, he could feel the burn of her body as he pulled her closer. Kneeing open the French doors, he stepped out into the cold night air. Then he set the gun against the doorjamb and lowered her into the snow. She seemed to be looking at him now. Staring at him. Trying to communicate without words or even reason.

He dug his hands into the snow, pushing the stuff over her body as quickly as he could. One armful after the next until he sensed something behind his back. A shadow in the gloom. Someone’s presence. He stopped and turned.

Edward Trisco was standing in the doorway watching him. His eyes were the color of morphine—the same shade of amber Teddy had seen in the IV bag upstairs. There was a glow about them that flared up, then appeared to die out in the smoke of his ravaged face. He wore a short robe and a new pair of Nikes. His body was thin, his muscles still well defined.

Trisco took a step closer, passing the pump gun leaning against the doorjamb without noticing it. Teddy’s heart skipped a beat. If Trisco spotted the gun, he’d snatch it up with one sweep of his hand. The safety was off, a round in the chamber, the weapon ready to rock and roll.

“Help me,” Teddy said. “She’s dying.”

Trisco took it in, surprised by the request and gliding his hand over the hundreds of cuts and scratches etched into his face. Then he spawned his rotten teeth and smiled. Teddy had to admit that asking for the madman’s help was ridiculous. But it had given him a chance to adjust his legs. If he needed to, he was ready to spring.

The sound of a door opening and closing came from somewhere in the basement. Trisco had heard it, but didn’t move, his eyes locked on Teddy’s.

Teddy struggled to hold the glance, searching the perimeter of his vision for the madman’s other hand. Although he couldn’t look directly at it, he didn’t think Trisco was armed. A muscle in Trisco’s neck rose and began twitching. After a moment, Trisco backed into the house and vanished, so smooth on his feet he might have had wings.

Teddy shuddered, hyperventilating. He looked down at Rosemary’s face and caught her staring at him. As he smoothed his hand over her forehead and hair, he noticed that she’d stopped fidgeting. He dug his arms into the snow, raking the flakes over her until her body was entirely covered. And then he heard the sound of a gunshot.

Teddy grabbed the pump gun and ran back into the basement. The sound had been muffled, and he guessed it had come from one the rooms behind the closed doors at the other end of the studio. Bolting past the greenhouse, Teddy kicked the door open and raised the gun. As he found his mark, saw it standing before him, he felt the blood in his veins heat up and boil over.

It was the district attorney.

It was Alan Andrews, in the room and crouching over Trisco’s body. He held a semiautomatic in his right hand, pressing the weapon into Trisco’s head as if he wanted to take another shot but had just been interrupted by a witness. Trisco had been hit in the mouth. He was pawing at the wound, gasping for air, unable to swallow the blood gushing out as he lay on the floor.

Teddy stared at the missing piece to the puzzle and shuddered. Andrews wasn’t protecting Trisco and didn’t have plans to ship his mistake off to an insane asylum. Andrews had come to get rid of it. He’d seen his way out. Murder Eddie Trisco and prosecute Oscar Holmes for the crimes in spite of his innocence. Teddy took the jolt, his mind racing. The district attorney had read their profile and knew they were looking for an artist. But he’d also known about Trisco. That’s the only possible explanation for why he made the deal with Barnett so quickly. Andrews wanted to rush Holmes through and win a conviction. He’d known about Trisco since he read the profile. Andrews was on his own, trying to keep everything secret.

“You knew,” Teddy said.

“Lower the gun,” Andrews shouted.

There was a gas mask on the floor. Trisco reached for it and was trying to place it over his face.

“You
knew
,” Teddy repeated.

“Lower the fucking gun, kid.”

Teddy shook his head. Andrews glanced at him, then turned back to Trisco. He kicked the gas mask away, wiped his forehead and seemed overwrought.

“You think I did this?” Andrews shouted. “I just got here. It’s an obvious suicide.”

“Bullshit.”

Teddy flicked his eyes around the room. He saw the open door directly behind Andrews. To the right was a passageway leading to the stairs. On the other side of the hall was an open door to the room he’d found Rosemary in. The dead room.

“Lower the fucking gun,” Andrews spit through his teeth.

Teddy shook his head again. Andrews was staring at him now, mulling it over with a crazed expression on his face. He knew the way it looked. The way it really was. After a moment, he raised the semiautomatic and pointed it at Teddy.

The man had come to murder Eddie Trisco.

In the end it was his only way out. His misguided attempt to save face, continue his career and become the city’s next mayor. Teddy adjusted his grip on the pump gun. The dots were finally connected, the picture drawn.