Twisted (17 page)

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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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The trooper finally radioed in and asked his dispatcher to get Tom Geisel on the blower. It took a while, but the Alabama State Police finally patched a call through the National Crime Information Center and got Geisel on the phone, and everything was cleared up within minutes. Geisel told them yes, it was true that Grove was affiliated with the bureau, in an
unofficial
capacity now, basically as a consultant, but the Alabama authorities should extend all courtesy to the man and his colleague. The trooper showed very little emotion upon receiving this information, and clicked off the radio with the stoic neutrality of a toll taker. He simply told Grove and Kaminsky that, in the future, they should watch their speed, and they were free to go, and they should have a nice day.
All told, the entire encounter, from beginning to end, took only about twenty-five minutes; but deep down inside his secret thoughts, Grove knew these minutes were critical. Not only because of the imminent storm ...
. . . but also because Maura County was down there all alone, following leads, putting herself in great jeopardy once again for Grove.
It was sixteen minutes after two o'clock when Kaminsky finally fired the Jeep back up and pulled back out onto the highway.
 
 
It wasn't really a
secret
room. The word
secret
implies hidden, inaccessible, known only to a select few. But the door that Maura found in the rear of the walk-in pantry was not exactly camouflaged from view. A person standing in the middle of the kitchen could clearly see into the little six-by-ten-foot alcove next to the refrigerator, past the shelves of Campbell soup cans and cylinders of Jiffy cornmeal flour, to the narrow inner door in back. It was even visible from the east edge of the living room.
Maura had discovered it quite by accident. She had been frantically looking for a flashlight, in case they lost power, and had checked in the pantry. That's when she saw the narrow, burnished pine door embedded in the rear wall. It had a natural blond finish that was so old and chipped it looked like tree bark, and its little stained porcelain doorknob was the color of an old tooth.
Now Maura stood in the pantry, staring at that little door, the distant thunder rumbling so hard it was rattling the contents of the kitchen, dishes and glassware clanking with each volley. The moaning of the wind was omnipresent now, like a gut-shot wolf howling in its death throes. Maura squeezed her way past the bottles of store-brand olive oil, past jars of home-canned peaches and cherry peppers, to the rear of the pantry. She took a deep breath and turned the knob.
Locked.
She turned away and considered giving up, but something stopped her. There was a faint odor hanging near the door like an aura, a chemical smell that tweaked at Maura's curiosity. She searched the pantry for something to use on the lock. Then she remembered the old credit card trick. She didn't have her purse with her, but she saw a thin metal lid on one of the shelves, and she grabbed it.
It took a few tries, jabbing the lid between the lock and the jamb—Maura was not a large woman, and had virtually no upper body strength—but on the third thrust, the old rusty bolt clicked. The door groaned open, sending a plume of dust upward into the light of a bare bulb.
Maura coughed a little, then took a single step inside the hidden chamber.
She couldn't believe what she was looking at.
14
She had to step back in order to take in all the images calling out to her in that cluttered hundred-square-foot room, with its low ceiling of termite-infested wooden joists and exposed fiberglass insulation. Photographs were tacked everywhere, on the drywall panels, on the studs, and on the ceiling. Shelves contained glass containers of unidentified objects, and things dangled from twine and twisted wires hanging off the joists. Maura stood there, frozen, blinking, trying to make sense of the overall impression of chaos that screamed at her.
A cold sensation seeped down through her bowels as she began to identify objects.
A human organ, all gray and pebbly, floated in a beaker filled with yellowish fluid. Another jar held perhaps a kidney or part of a brain. Other jars held other human organs—fingers, eyeballs—some of them modified, pierced with nails or quills, wound with colored yarns. Maura's gaze, now wide and hot, played over the pictures tacked to the walls: grainy, indistinct photographs of monstrous screaming faces, ghastly drawings of demons, people flayed open, disemboweled, their cartoon innards spilling across the ruled notebook pages in scarlet spirals forming crude renderings of aerial hurricane imagery. In fact, every psychotic doodle, every drawing, every feverish diagram emulated that inimitable spiral satellite perspective of a hurricane.
Maura backed farther away.
She now stood out in the pantry, at the threshold of the secret room, holding her hand to her mouth. What she was looking at, the madness of it, had yet to fully compute, had yet to fully register in her brain. But even now, she was beginning to split her traumatized thoughts into two halves. One side silently shrieked in terror and wanted to flee this terrible place while Maura still had a chance. The other side ordered her to shape up:
Look at it! Come on, you're a journalist! Get your ass back in there and look at it and notate it and understand it!
She forced her legs to move, forced herself to take a step back inside that pungent-smelling insanity. The ceiling seemed lower, the space closing in on her. She took a closer look at some of the images. Most disturbing of all were the close-ups of faces. They were
real.
They were real people captured in their death throes, distorted silent screams ... torturous, contorted facial expressions. Where in God's name had these faces come from? They looked almost like still frames from some hellish snuff film.
At length, Maura had to look away.
She glanced to her right and saw a long black raincoat, still damp, hanging on a spike. Another nail had ropes and chains with metal hooks dangling off it. Bottles of amber liquid, each one carefully labeled, were lined up along one galvanized metal shelf. Maura forced her legs to move, and she went over to the shelving unit and picked up one of the bottles with a trembling hand. She read its label.
Sodium pentobarbital
.
Now both sides of her brain screamed for her to get out of there right away. But she could not tear her gaze away from a bizarre little shrine in one corner of the secret room.
Down on the cracked cement floor lay an old Magnavox VHS recorder, so ancient and greasy with dust it looked as though it were lined with fur. Spaghetti-knotted clumps of old quarter-inch magnetic tape dangled from every corner like shiny brown bouquets, some of the tape charred in ceremonial flames. Broken shards of VHS cassettes were glued to the wall, the front panel of the deck, and across the moldy carpeted floor in lunatic patterns. But the detail that caught Maura's attention and held it was the VHS cassette that lay on a tarnished silver serving dish, congealed in the melted wax of ritual candles: the hand-scrawled label on the spine said:
GROVE EXORCISM—4/28/05.
Maura County spun toward the gallery of monstrous faces lined up along the opposite wall, and for one terrible moment she could not draw a breath. She realized the photos were indeed close-up frames from a movie—a
home
movie, in fact—but they were not different people. They were all the same person. Captured in bleak, out-of-focus, poorly framed tableaus, they were all close-ups of Ulysses Grove.
A sudden blast of thunder made her jump, her back molars biting down hard enough to crack.
All at once the electricity flickered out, plunging the bungalow into darkness.
“Damn it to Hades!”
Ivan Kaminsky's heavily accented baritone boomed above the noise of the rain, which was now tommy-gunning across the hood of the Jeep. Over the last half hour, the wind had risen to hurricane-force speeds, and despite the Jeep's heavy undercarriage, the vehicle had begun to hydroplane and pitch and lurch sideways across the fast lane.
“Go around it!” Grove clutched at the upholstered armrest and gazed through the oscillating wiper blades at the roadblock up ahead, about a quarter mile away, clearly visible in the blur of rain. A pair of unmarked vehicles were canted across the right lane near an underpass, a row of flares across the highway like shimmering yellow diamonds in the rain.
“Are you again insane!”
“Trust me on this, Kay, just keep going!”
The Russian grunted something under his breath, tightened his grip on the steering wheel, and chewed his cigar.
As they approached the roadblock Grove realized the two vehicles were Mobile County cars, probably emergency management people, or perhaps Department of Interior folks. That was good, because those guys would never give chase. Hot pursuit was the province of cops, rangers, or state troopers. At most, these guys would shake their fists and jot down Kaminksy's license plate number, and probably forget to even report it.
The Jeep roared past the roadblock on the shoulder, sending up a plume of mist and gravel, kicking up one of the flares, sending it skyward in a shower of sparks and embers.
“Good, good!” Grove looked out at the side mirror, checking to see if they had raised any ire, or even roused the men into a chase. Nothing stirred back there. The cars remained stationary, the flares shimmering. Now Grove wondered if there had even
been
anybody in the vehicles.
The roadblock vanished into the storm behind them. Grove looked at his watch—3:11 p.m. At this rate, they were still a good couple of hours away from New Orleans. Buzzing with anxiety, he refused to get caught outside the city when Fiona hit. He was also worried about Maura—he had been unable to reach her cell phone for over an hour now, and was starting to wish he had told her to wait before she went off and tracked down this Doerr kid. But on another level, he trusted Maura completely. The little fair-haired woman could handle herself in
any
situation. She was a rock.
Besides, what could possibly go wrong in a simple Q-and-A with one of Moses De Lourde's former boy toys?
 
 
She fumbled her way out of the secret room and into the pantry, nearly tripping on a sack of potatoes leaning against one of the shelves.
Her eyes had not yet adjusted to the darkness, and yet her other senses were as sharp and sensitive as Geiger counters. She smelled the unsettling mixture of banal food staples—the earthy aroma of root vegetables, grains, and dried spices—and the overpowering odors of formaldehyde and rotting tissue. She felt the cool edges of the galvanized shelves, the grit of spilled cornmeal beneath her Doc Martens. And she tasted the coppery tang of fear on her tongue as though she were sucking dirty pennies. But mostly she heard the bone-shaking mortar fire of thunder, and the lunatic whistle of wind outside the bungalow, as she felt her way out of the pantry.
She reached the kitchen and dug in her pocket for her Bic lighter. It was the only thing she could think of doing—the place was so dark. It made no sense. Her mind raced. The bungalow had been full of gray daylight when she had arrived an hour or so ago. Doerr had turned on a few lights then, but now the place was as dark as a tomb, despite the fact that it was still officially daytime.
Maura sparked her Bic, and the tiny flame flickered for a moment but basically did no good. The kitchen windows gave off a pale gray glow, but much of that room—and most of the living room adjacent to it—lay in utter darkness. “Ouch!” she cried, the hot lighter burning her thumb. She shook it out and put it back in her pocket. Her heart was thumping so rapidly, so fiercely now, that she could feel it in her ears and her neck. She tried to take deep breaths, tried to steady herself and think, think, think—
Thunder crashed, and lightning flickered, and Maura nearly jumped out of her skin.
Stay calm, girlfriend, stay calm
, she admonished herself.
The only way you're going to get out of here alive is to stay calm.
She found her way over to the back door, and she paused there for a moment, her brain swimming. It was too late to call the police, the lines were down, and anyway, by now, most cops were busy with the evacuation. She pulled her wireless out with a severely shaking hand and looked at the luminous display. Still no signal. And besides, what would Grove be able to do in a car, en route? Sure, he could advise her, tell her how to process the scene, but she was no detective, she was no cop.
What are you waiting for, hotshot?
she silently scolded herself.
Get the hell out of this place now!
Something made her hesitate, something in the back of her mind that hummed like a counterpoint to her frantic internal dialogue. She found herself thinking of the victims—De Lourde lying pasty and painted in his coffin, all the others that had perished for no good reason—and then she found herself thinking of her own kidnapping, and the subsequent ordeal in the back of a panel van a year and a few months ago. Something deep down inside her turned then like a tumbler in a lock. If she left this place now, the man out on the floor of that living room could very easily escape to kill again, to torture and murder and mutilate another innocent person, maybe another woman just like Maura. She could not let that happen, she could not.
The ropes!
All at once a plan formulated in Maura's feverish midbrain. She remembered those ropes dangling in that inner sanctum—the perfect means by which to secure Doerr, to keep him safe and sound until Maura had a chance to get help. A renewed sort of vigor coursed through her then. She was not going to be a victim this time.
She made her way through the gloom of the kitchen to the pantry, slipped between the boxes of powdered mashed potatoes and canisters of pasta shells, and reached the inner door, which still hung open and stank of death and degradation like a coffin liner that had come ajar.
It was absolute blackness in there, and Maura balked for a moment. She did not want to go back in there. She would have rather had hot pokers driven through her eyes than go back in that horrible chamber filled with floating specimens and bloody souvenirs and thousands of contorted faces. But now she could see the faint shimmer of those chains and hooks dangling in there, the ropes hanging right next to them. How perfect and ironic it would be to bind the madman with his own instruments of bondage. Maura's rage seethed in her gut, those old terrible emotions bubbling up to the surface. It never occurred to Maura that Doerr might have a distinct and separate personality, or that Doerr might be catastrophically ill. She simply wanted to hurt him now as harshly and permanently as possible.
She plunged into the room and fumbled around in the darkness for a moment, touching things she would rather have avoided touching, and finally got her shaking fingers around the ropes. They felt rough and hairy in her hands. She pulled them free and then managed her way back out the doorway, through the pantry, and into the kitchen. Her eyes had adjusted enough now to see the pale shadows of the living room. She saw the pine armoire against one wall, the silhouette of the big Eames chair canted against the hutch. She even made out the quilts on the wall.
Her scalp prickled with panic suddenly. She dropped the ropes.
Doerr was gone.
She started simultaneously backing away and turning in little nervous circles, eyes popping wide, scanning every shadow in the kitchen, every dark corner of the hall, every alcove, every nook and cranny. The wind outside bellowed as though feeding off her sudden terror, and lightning flickered again like camera bulbs popping in the windows, illuminating the place with brilliant white light as hot as burning magnesium. Maura made a mad dash for the back door.

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