Among the Shrouded (32 page)

“Commissioner, I need you to let
her go or I will be forced to shoot you.  Please don’t make me do that,” he pleaded.

Slowly, slowly, she could no longer focus on Jack’s face and
was unable to control the urge to breathe.  Her body began to spasm wildly as her respiratory muscles shut down.  And then, without a single thought as to the significance of her own life or death, Mia Rosetti stopped breathing altogether.

CHAPTER

44

THOMAS

“Even if they don’t find them here, at this facility, they will find them,” Thomas
reassured Kate as he slid across the back seat of the police cruiser.  “Mia won’t stop until she finds your sisters.  You can count on that.”

“I can feel it,” said Kate
, as she eased in beside him and fastened her safety belt.  “I just know we are going to find them today.  What a wonderful birthday gift it will be.”

“Is today your birthday?”
he asked.

“No.  It’s
actually not until next week.”

“My birthday’
s next week too,” he commented. “I was born on the seventeenth.”

“Me too!” cried Kate.  “What are the chances of us having the same birthday?  How old will you be?”

“I’ll be twenty-five.”

“
As will I.  That’s very strange, Thomas,” said Kate as she turned to look out the car window at the sea of abandoned row homes passing by.  After a moment, she turned back to face him.  “It’s funny, but I feel almost as if…”

“Almost as if what?”
he interrupted when she didn’t continue.

“Almost as if we are supposed to be together for so
me reason.  That we were destined to meet.  It’s stupid,” she said, shaking her head.

“No,”
he replied.  “It’s not stupid.  You never know why you’re on the path you’re on.  You just have to trust that you are where you’re supposed to be I guess.”

Kate
nodded but was silent for the remainder of the trip to the holding facility.  He studied her as she fidgeted nervously with a strand of hair that had worked its way loose from her ponytail.  It was difficult for him to imagine how she was feeling.  Her devotion to her sisters and the obvious lengths she was willing to go to protect them was something foreign to him.  Having never had a sibling, he imagined the love he felt for Mildred would most closely approximate the love Kate felt for her sisters.  He admired her tenacity and determination and as the police car parked at their destination, he realized he too would do whatever it took to see her safely with her sisters once again.

The officer from the front seat of the cruiser turned to face
them.

“I need for you both to stay in the car.  The rest of us are going to head into the house
from around back.  You need to wait until one of us comes back here and gives you the ‘all clear’ before you will be allowed out of the vehicle.  And, if for some reason the operation doesn’t go as planned, whatever you do, don’t get out of the car until backup arrives.  Are we clear?”

“Yes, of course,” he replied
.

“I understand,” she said
.

He
watched as both of the officers exited the vehicle, made their way down the block, and joined with the other two officers from the second car.

“I can’t do this,”
she cried suddenly.

“Can’t do what?”
he asked.

“I can’t just sit here, waiting for them to get back.  What if something happens?  What if my sisters need me?  I don’t want to just be stuck here in the backseat of this car!”

“Kate, it’s not safe to go with them.  And you know firsthand what those men are capable of.  We need to stay here.  You’d be no good to your sisters if something were to happen to you.  And besides, this is a police car and the doors won’t open from the inside even if we wanted them to.”

She
fell silent and drummed her fingers nervously on the seat beside her.  As she stared blankly out the window, his mind raced, searching for something to say which would bring solace to her aching heart.  Sadly, he couldn’t think of a single phrase that didn’t sound trivial or clichéd. 

And then, out of nowhere,
he noticed a man crossing the street, heading in the direction of the police cruiser.  It was as if he was being drawn to the car by some unseen force.

The sound of gunfire
shook Kate from her trance and she began to cry.

“They’re shooting them!  I have to get to my sisters!”
she screamed, pulling frantically on the door handle and motioning to the man who was now only inches from the car.

“No
, Kate!  No!” he cried.

The door to the
police car swung open as the man released the latch from the outside.  At that moment, the police scanner crackled to life and Kate froze in place, already halfway out the door.

“We’ve got an officer down in the 200 block of Rose Street.
  Requesting emergency services and immediate backup.”

Their eyes locked for a split second
.  In that flickering moment, he felt her desperation and knew there was nothing he could do to keep her from the house or the hope of her sisters.

He
heard more gunfire and anxiety began to grow inside of him, deep in the pit of his stomach.

“We have a second officer down,” the scanner reported. 
“Requesting immediate backup.”

The next thing he knew,
she was gone.

“We can’t help them
, Kate!” he called to her as she took off down the street in the direction of the house.

For a moment, all he could do was watch
her running down the sidewalk.  The fear inside of him, which manifested itself as gut-wrenching anxiety, kept him safely seated in the back of the car.  And yet, he knew he couldn’t stay behind.

As
she disappeared out of sight, he mustered the courage to slide across the seat toward the open door.  Strangely, he found that although he knew the danger awaiting him, he was prepared to confront it.  Determined to ignore the voice in his head that was screaming for him to stay put, he stepped out of the car.  He took off at a run down the street and as he approached the house, watched in horror as he saw Kate repeatedly throwing herself against the front door in an attempt to get inside.  He scrambled beside the stoop and without thinking of the consequences, kicked through the blackened glass pane of the basement window.  Carefully, he reached his arm inside and felt for the latch to release the lock.  When she realized what he was doing, Kate joined him at the window and one at a time, they squeezed through the tiny opening and entered the house.

He immediately recoiled at the scene before him.  The stench of human excrement was overwhelming and he was surrounded by almost a dozen women, each shackled to the floor by short lengths of chain.  A few cried out in anguish as they passed through the room.  At first he didn’t understand why most of the girls were lying motionless on the floor.  And then, in a state of utter disbelief, he realized all of the women had been shot.  Recently shot.  He tried desperately to keep from throwing up as he scanned the room and saw every woman lying in a pool of her own blood.

“Do you see your sisters?”
he called to Kate who was consoling one of the women clinging to life at the far end of the room.

“No!  They’
re not here!  Perhaps they are upstairs,” she called back.  He watched as she knelt beside the woman at her feet and asked, “Have you seen twins?  Girls who are the same?”

“Yes!  Yes!” the woman replied.  “They are here!”

Kate was halfway up the stairs before he could advise her against going any further.  He followed behind her as she burst through the door and emerged into the eerie stillness of the main level.

“There’s no one here,”
she whispered.

“Not even the police.  They must still be outside,”
he said.

The deafening
sound of a gunshot pierced through the silence.  A second shot rang out before either one had time to react.  By the time the third shot was fired, he had pulled her onto the floor and they huddled together in the corner of the empty room.

“We need to get out of here,”
he urged.  “Please, Kate.  We can’t help them anymore.”

“This is
all my fault,” she cried.  “I
wished
for this.  I wanted it.  But it was never their dream, only mine.  And I can’t let them die because of my short-sightedness.  I have to try,” she wept, the tears streaming down her face.

He
had never felt so torn in his entire life.  Every fiber of his being was screaming for him to leave the building as quickly as possible because he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt he was in mortal danger.  However, as he looked at the woman sitting beside him, he also knew he couldn’t just leave her and that she wasn’t going anywhere without her sisters.  And so, he took her hand in his.

“Come on,” he whispered.  “Let’s go find you
r sisters.”

Together,
they climbed the staircase to the second floor of the row house.  The windows were boarded shut and the space around them was dark and cold.  As they reached the landing, he could feel danger close by in the form of another human being.  He quickly scanned the hallway and chose the room that felt the least threatening.  Kate followed him inside.

There was no furniture in the room.  Nothing covering the floor. 
Slivers of daylight surrounding the window’s plywood covering struggled to illuminate the darkness.  He could barely make out the room’s occupants, two women, who were crouched on the deteriorating hardwoods in the far corner of the room.  Like the others they had discovered in the basement, both of the women before him were shackled to the floor.  Curiously, instead of looking to see who had entered the room, the girls buried their heads under their arms as he quietly shut the door behind him.

“Tetyana?  Natalya?” Kate called into the darkness.

“Kate?” both women replied in unison, as they lifted their heads from beneath their arms.

He
saw her descend upon her sisters in one swift motion, a chaotic mass of limbs and hair and tears.  She immediately began to pull frantically at their chains and he watched in anguish from beside the door as she realized she would be unable to free them from their restraints.

“
I hear someone walking down the hall,” he whispered to the women.

“Perhaps it’s the police,” Kate replied hopefully as she continued working to free her sisters’ hands.

He looked upon the women in their frenzied desperation and felt strangely envious of them.  A sadness washed over him as he painfully acknowledged that although he had managed to maintain his sanity throughout his childhood, he had never had the opportunity to experience the bond of flesh and blood as Kate and her sisters had.  He knew that no one had ever felt about him the way Kate was feeling about Natalya and Tetyana and his heart ached with longing to be loved as they loved one another.

He
was pulled from his thoughts by the sound of the door on its hinges, and the subsequent motion of it being thrown open elevated his anxiety to new heights. 

However,
he found, for the first time in his cautious life, he was able to shut down the voices in his head and persevere.

The man who entered the room was brandishing a semi
-automatic handgun and he took aim at the women immediately.  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kate collapse on top of her sisters, shielding their bodies with her own as the first deafening shots rang out.  From his vantage point behind the door, he remained unseen by the shooter.  He knew immediately his only chance of saving the women was to use the element of surprise to his advantage.  With all the strength he could muster, he threw himself against the door, ramming it into the man, but not before he had the chance to fire off a second round of shots. 

He
found himself face to face with the gunman who was still clearly surprised that he was confronting a more dangerous adversary than the shackled women he had been murdering throughout the house. Without a moment’s hesitation, Thomas threw his shoulder into the man’s gut using the entire weight of his body.  The man took several steps back into the hallway but was quickly able to regain his balance and level his gun at Thomas’ head.  He was fully aware that the intensity of hatred he saw in the gunman’s eyes was reflected in his own with an equivalent level of fear.  And yet, in that moment, he willed himself into action, hurling himself once again at the man who teetered for an instant at the top of the staircase before pulling the trigger one final time and tumbling headfirst to the foyer below.