Already Dead, page 18
Or was that paranoia talking, overlaying the whole scene with something darker than was really there? Wasn’t it actually normal enough for a church to be well-kept, for someone to perform routine maintenance on it? And even if someone did regularly go down into the basement… for all she knew, this was actually the entrance to the apartment, and the door at the back she had found locked was simply a door to the outside.
Or maybe a creepy basement was a creepy basement, and Laura was just trying to tell herself everything she could to try to steady her own nerves.
She inched forward, looking over the edge of the hole, remaining cautious. The gun was down at her side, but easy to raise quickly if she should see something that sparked her instinct. There was nothing but a ladder leading down into the basement space, down to another wooden floor, and a faint glow from somewhere beyond it.
A faint glow that flickered slightly as she watched.
Candles.
That settled it. There was no way Laura could stay up here when she’d been given such an obvious clue. She thought about trying Agent Won again but decided against it. She was here now. If she risked speaking on the phone, anyone who was down there would hear her – and the cell phone itself would be a distraction, something to reduce her reaction times.
She had to go down on her own.
Laura took a breath, uttering a quick mental prayer – since she was in Rome, after all – that she wasn’t about to walk towards her own death. For the sake of her daughter, at least. It wasn’t completely reassuring, but it would have to do.
She climbed onto the ladder and then swung herself around so that she was facing outwards, climbing in an awkward one-handed grip with her legs twisted. It was either that, or put her back to the room, and there was no way in hell she was doing that. She kept her gun in her right hand, away from the ladder, so that at least she had something to defend herself with.
Even so, it was a hair-raising moment. As she climbed down rung by rung, moving carefully and slowly, she was all too aware that anyone down there would have her in their line of sight before she saw them. She would be a pair of legs, then a torso, and a head last – and she would be exposed.
She found herself breathing heavier, short and sharp gasps, as she took each rung. With each step lower, she prayed she wasn’t walking into danger. That she wasn’t about to be shot, or stabbed, or have herself wrenched bodily from the ladder and thrown to the ground. At last, she descended far enough that she could duck her head and look.
It wasn’t much of an improvement on being able to see nothing at all. The basement was a dark mess of furniture and perhaps adjoining antechambers, from what she could see in the vague flickering light. The candles were placed at random intervals: here on top of a spare, old desk, there on what looked like a broken pew, over there attached to an actual wall sconce. It was like descending into the past.
The walls were bare stone and brick, rough-looking and damp. It was colder down here than it had been up there, even with the night air flooding into the church. Laura shivered as she touched down on the floor at last, straightening herself and casting around, trying to will her eyes to adjust to the dimness.
It was hard to focus. There was such a deep contrast between the light of the candles and the darkness between them, which seemed almost to be made of a thick substance with how deep the shadows became. And the light itself danced and flickered, making shadows move on every surface and in every corner, leaving Laura jumpy and tense.
She took in what she could see, which at this juncture wasn’t much. There was a length of rope coiled up on a nearby table, though that meant very little. She hadn’t seen any evidence of rope marks on the three victims so far, and the coroner’s reports had not suggested they were in existence either.
Still, it didn’t make her feel any better about being down here on her own.
There was also a low shelf which appeared to be stacked with cleaning supplies – all of them much more modern than the rest of the things she could see, which on closer inspection were threaded with dust and spiderwebs, clearly long-abandoned. There was bleach, several different kinds of spray bottles which held different cleaning fluids, a stack of sponges and clothes inside plastic packages, several packs of rubber gloves…
Why keep the cleaning supplies down here, if they weren’t going to be used here? And they clearly hadn’t been, because the place was filthy. There was only a kind of swath across the floor, an area where it looked as though feet must have passed time and time again, keeping the dust at bay.
Laura followed it with her gun held in front of her, on high alert for any sign of movement or sound.
It led between the desk and the table, through a kind of doorway into another part of the space. It seemed as though the whole thing had been subdivided at some point, perhaps into separate rooms to be used by the previous custodians of the church. It made for a confusing mess of a space, with openings seeming to come in every direction and no real way for Laura to know how much more of the basement there was to explore. She emerged into a new space which was altogether different from the first – a space that sent her heartrate skyrocketing once again.
It was set out with plastic sheeting. Plastic along the walls. Plastic across the floor. Plastic over every piece of old furniture, except for one, right at the far edge of the room. Another old desk, this one looking like something that might have been used in an old-fashioned school, perhaps as much as a century ago.
Laura was beginning to get the impression this basement was only used as a storage space – except for whatever it was that was being done here, now. It could have been that someone was trying to refurbish it and hadn’t got very far yet.
So why did she feel a creeping sense of dread that that wasn’t the case?
The interior of this room was also lit only by a few scattered candles, leaving everything cast in uncertainty and darkness around the edges. Laura stepped carefully, cringing as her feet hit the plastic sheet and made a clear crinkling noise. She hoped to God that no one else was down here – an ironic thought, she realized, given where she was.
She moved across to the desk on which she saw something shining dully in the light, pushed against the back wall. There were a number of tools lined up on it. A hammer, which was what had caught her eye. A mallet, a chisel that was so old and rusted it didn’t shine at all, the broken handle of a saw. Construction tools, probably.
She hoped.
There was a strange space between the hammer and the mallet, as if something else was accustomed to lying there and had been removed. Laura lingered on that space for a moment, wondering.
There was no point in dwelling. She took one more glance around the strangely sterile room with all its plastic and hesitated. There were two more openings leaving this space: one right ahead of her beside the desk, and one to the left. She had no clues as to what lay beyond the shifting plastic sheets on either of them. She took a gamble, stepping forward through the nearest opening and brushing the sheeting aside.
As it turned out, Laura didn’t need a vision to find the killer’s next victim.
She was lying right there, on the floor of the next room.
Laura stumbled forward as soon as she saw the body of the woman, tied up and slumped on the floor on her back, her eyes closed. Her throat wasn’t cut, but she was dead still – not moving at all – Laura dropped to her knees beside her, desperately fumbling towards her throat to feel for a pulse.
She concentrated hard, holding her own breath, trying to feel…
There!
Laura had made it in time – she was still breathing. Just unconscious. She quickly slipped a hand around the back of the blonde woman’s head to feel for any damage, but there seemed to be done. If he was staying true to his MO, she was probably drugged.
There was no candle on her chest, no sign of any attempt to harm her beyond the ropes. Laura figured the killer must have knocked her out at some point before and brought her here, then tied her up in case she awoke while he was gone. That meant she had time, maybe.
She had a chance to save her life.
Laura grabbed her cell phone out of her pocket, having to put the gun down on the floor to do so. She stood, hearing the plastic which also covered the floor of this room crinkle underfoot even more as she did so. Her heart was hammering in her own ears so wildly. She scrolled through the list to Detective Waters’s number, knowing that he would at least answer. She hoped he would answer. It was either that or she would need to go through 911.
The woman was so young, Laura couldn’t help but think as she found the Detective’s number in her contact list. So young. Maybe only her early twenties, just like the others. She didn’t deserve to die right now, while she still had her whole life ahead of her.
Laura found the number, taking a couple of crunching steps back to give the girl space as she did so, and –
All she was aware of for a moment was the sensation of falling. In that space of time, which could only have been a split second but felt like so much more, she realized two things. The first was that she was about to hit the floor, though she did not apparently have enough time for her synapses to fire to instruct her body to save herself.
The second was that something had hit her hard over the head.
There was no third thing, because by the time Laura had made these two realizations, she was already losing herself to darkness – her consciousness spiraling away from her at the same rate with which the floor came up to meet her.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
Laura woke in pieces, little bit by little bit. The first thing was her head and the ache in it, which momentarily made her not want to wake up at all. Then there was light, dimly filtering through her eyelids and turning everything a dull red, until she realized that she could, in fact, open her eyes.
Awareness was among the last things to come back to her, but when it did, she immediately tried to move – and found that she could not.
This was a puzzle to work out. First, she tried again and had the same result, so Laura realized that something was holding her back. Something around her wrists, her legs, her back. She worked out that the thing holding her body was a chair, and then from the rough grazing feeling, she looked down to understand that she was tied with ropes.
One puzzle solved left another barrage of questions rising in her head. Where? Why? Who?
She slowly took in her surroundings; the light was dim but still painful to her eyes, seeming to increase the throbbing in the back of her head every time she so much as glanced in a new direction. Moving her head was another trigger. But she could move her head, which was good; she looked at the walls and realized she was in a room that she recognized, a room with strange plastic sheeting on the walls, a kind of ghostly room…
The basement.
She remembered it now: the basement under the church! She had been in here, looking at something – looking at her cell phone, because –
Because of the girl.
She looked down to the left and saw her, still laying exactly where she had been when Laura found her. She was still unconscious, or so Laura hoped. There was no sign that anything new had been done to her.
How long had it been? Down here, it was impossible to know. There was no way to see the outside, and even if she could have, Laura remembered it had been night already when she ventured down. If it was still night, she wouldn’t be able to know whether it had been five minutes or five hours.
For the sake of her own skull, she hoped it had been five minutes. Or even less. She knew how dangerous it could be to have a head injury that knocked you out for longer than that, and with the way her head was throbbing…
A noise behind her made Laura flinch, letting out a startled cry. That was when she realized she was not gagged, which was a relief in itself – but an extremely short-lived one. Because the sound from behind her came again, and she recognized it as the sound of a footstep crunching across the gathered plastic.
Someone was behind her.
She froze, her eyes going as wide as they could as if more light could somehow help her see through the back of her own head, trying to stay still and keep her breathing under control. If he didn’t realize she was awake…
She needn’t have bothered. A man stepped around in front of her, dressed in shabby blue overalls and with his hands stuffed in his pockets. He looked her right in the face and showed no surprise at all that she was looking back. He must have known she was awake already.
Laura fought against the ropes that held her arms down, struggling, trying to get free. All he did was look at her, his head cocked at an angle like he was curious. He was such a nondescript man, the absolute worst nightmare for a cop who needed to describe a suspect: brown hair receding from his hairline, a weak chin, thin lips, a nothing of a nose. Nothing about him was strong or memorable. Even his eyes were a little watery. Laura figured he was in his late thirties, but with that hairline he could have been older; with those eyes he could have been younger. It was almost impossible to say.
Laura stopped struggling and just looked back at him. The ropes weren’t coming loose. Now that she’d had more than a moment to live with the situation, to understand how much danger she was in, she tried to calm down. Panic wasn’t going to get her anywhere, here.
But she was a damn good FBI agent, and she had a lot of tools in her arsenal when it came to negotiation and investigation. Maybe, if she stayed calm, she could talk him into letting her go – or at least, letting his guard down.
“Who are you?” she asked, softly, moderating her voice on purpose. Making it a curiosity, not an accusation.
“I work here,” he said, by which Laura gathered he must have meant the church. “You’ve seen me, you know.”
“I have?” Laura said, blinking. She tried to place him. Maybe if he was wearing different clothes…?
“Up there,” he said, raising his eyes towards the ceiling momentarily. It was a curious gesture, especially in a place like this. Like he was talking about heaven, not just the church. “And elsewhere. I live here in town. You’ve walked past me a dozen times.”
“At the places where the women were found?” Laura asked. She had enough of her wits about her still to avoid the words ‘crime scene.’ Anything that might trigger him. Killers didn’t tend to enjoy hearing about the fact that they were killers. It might make him angry. Especially if he saw what he was doing as art, or ritual, or a necessary act.
“And others,” he said, straightening his head. He began to move around the space, with a slow, careful walk that barely produced any sound from the plastic sheeting. Laura realized that he must have been making sound on purpose a moment ago, or she wouldn’t have heard him so clearly. No wonder he’d been able to sneak up behind her, given how much noise of her own she had been making at that point.
Laura took advantage of him turning his back on her, ambling around to some other part of the room that was mostly hidden in shadow, to look down at herself and try to assess what she had. Her ankles were tied to the legs of the chair, and her wrists were bound to the arms. But it wasn’t a plastic chair, or a new one. It was wooden. That was something. Maybe something she could use. And she wasn’t sure she was looking at the kind of knot a professional would tie, either – there were just two loops of the rope around each hand, with the knot orientated on top of her wrist. No loop around her chest or between her arms to hold her more securely.
“You know,” he said, making her snap her head up and pay attention again. “It’s funny. People just don’t see me.”
“They don’t?” Laura asked, trying to keep him talking. If he wanted to chat, she was happy to. It meant she wasn’t dying. “I can see you now.”
“Yes, but I’ve brought attention to myself this time,” he said, with a kind of self-effacing smile in her direction. “You didn’t notice me before. Not even Pastor Williams notices me most of the time, and he’s the one who hired me to take care of the maintenance.”
“That’s the work you do?” Laura asked. “That’s why you have access to this basement?”
“No one else ever comes down here,” he said, then made an ‘ah’ sound and reached for something that was hidden on a shadowy shelf by the door, far from the nearest candle. It seemed he’d been looking for something. Whatever it was, it disappeared into his pocket quickly. “Not even the Pastor. I can’t say I like it too much myself, but I make do. With the police patrolling more up there, I have to spend as much time down here as I can.”
“Why don’t you like it?” Laura asked. It was probably an inane question, but the more she understood about him, the better.
He only looked at her with a kind of pitying expression on his face, as if he could see right through what she was attempting to do. He glanced around then at the plastic-clad walls, the decaying old furniture, and the cobwebs, as if to convey that there was plenty not to like about the place.
He moved out of sight for a moment into the other room, and Laura took advantage of the moment to start wriggling her hands. Not pulling up against the ropes or trying to force them but slipping her limb into the right place to slide right out of them. They were still too tight, even when she took it slow. She quickly relaxed her arms, pretending that she hadn’t been moving at all, as he stepped back through the plastic-curtained doorway.
“You know, my mother died recently,” he said. It was like they were just chatting away while standing and looking out over the sea at an observation point, two strangers who might as well shoot the breeze together. There was no hurry about his movements, no panic in his voice. Everything was so matter of fact.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Laura said, almost automatically.
“Yes, well,” he said, as if that was to be expected but also not entirely needed. “Funny thing was, we were never very close, my mother and I. Even though we lived together for so long. I suppose we just didn’t connect in that special way in life, whatever the reason was.”
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