The Killing House (20 page)

She had no idea, not even a working theory. The lack of answers made her feel cold all over.

Maybe Brandon was right. Maybe it was time to get out of Dodge while they still had time.

Then her thoughts turned to James Weeks and any idea of leaving vanished.

45

Jimmy Weeks was thinking about water. When he wasn't thinking about it, he was dreaming about it. The only thing he cared about right now was something cold to drink. Yes, it was crazy - bat-shit crazy, given his circumstances - but, for whatever reason, his mind had fixed on it, despite the terror of being locked away in the dark.

Every once in a while he'd hear the big, steel door outside his cage swing open. A moment of darkness would follow and then he'd hear the click of a light switch and the bare bulb would expose the small room, with its concrete walls and floor. Erected on either side of him were two more cages, both empty.

The woman who had pretended to be an FBI agent smiled every time she came to bring him food. The first time she visited, she gave him a plastic Wal-Mart bag holding someone else's clothing: a pair of tight-fitting black sweatpants, wool socks and a big crimson sweatshirt that had the Harvard emblem printed on the front and a tear along the collar.

The food was either hard dinner rolls or Wonder Bread smeared with peanut butter, a bottle of Gatorade or water. He had tried to speak to her, asking her questions, but she simply ignored him. She gave him
his food, left and shut the door. There had been no showers, and he hadn't brushed his teeth.

She hadn't hurt him or threatened him in any way - which made sense, because this was nothing more than a cut-and-dry kidnapping. Jimmy had seen enough movies and TV shows to know the procedure: the woman would keep him locked up in here until the time came to bring him to the drop-off point, where he would be traded for some gym bag stuffed full of cash. Do what he was told and everything would be fine.

That inner voice kept disagreeing with him, and it spoke up again now:
You're wrong, Jimmy.

No, he replied. No, I'm not.

Let's review some key facts, then. Let's start with -

No, I don't want to -

Fact number one: every time she comes in here, she's not wearing a mask. Why would she let you see her face? If she lets you go, she
knows
the police are going to question you. She
knows
you've seen her all up close and personal. You can describe her from head to toe. You think she doesn't know that?

Shut up, please, just shut -

And here's fact number two: you're not alone. You know what I'm talking about.

Jimmy forced himself not to think about it, but his mind had this really shitty way of making him see things that he didn't want to see. Every time the heavy door opened, he'd heard someone moaning, the sound near and yet far away at the same time - from a room close by, he thought.

Not just one voice, Jimmy. Several. You're not the only person here.

He hugged his knees to his chest, swallowing.

I know that scares the living shit out of you, but you know as well as I do this isn't a kidnapping. A kidnapper wouldn't lock you naked inside a goddamn dog crate - and then there's the matter of that wound on your back. I don't know what that's about, and I'm not going to bullshit you and say I have the first clue as to what's going on here, but there's one thing I do know, and you need to hear it. And I'm going to keep repeating it until it sinks into your head.

He jumped at the sound of the deadbolt sliding back.

You're going to have to find a way to kill this woman.

A key was moving inside the lock.

You need to escape from this place, Jimmy. If you don't, you're going to die a horrible death down here.

46

Fletcher reached Midtown Manhattan a few minutes shy of 7 a.m., dry-eyed and weary. A cold and milky predawn light had broken across the streets and buildings of Fifth Avenue, the setting of Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
The Age of Innocence
. The horse-drawn carriages that had once dominated this area over a century ago had been replaced by hustling delivery vans, taxis and limousines. Joggers, dog-walkers, and early risers off to work paced the streets, while doormen in garish uniforms poised like sentries guarded gold-plated gateways leading to luxury kingdoms owned by the new century's robber barons.

Karim lived and conducted his day-to-day business operations from inside a historic five-floor neo-Italian Renaissance mansion commissioned in 1922 by a wealthy German merchant and designed by one of the city's most prominent architects at the time, C. P. H. Gilbert. Karim did not employ a doorman, driver, maid or chef. With the exception of Boyd Paulson - and now, the mercurial Emma White - Fletcher did not know the names of the employees who worked out of the man's home. Every time Fletcher visited, Karim sent his people to the company's main office in Downtown Manhattan.

Snaking his way towards his destination, Fletcher saw a businessman step over a vagrant passed out in the middle of the pavement. A patrolman directing street traffic turned his back on a young woman repeatedly slapping her child. Seeing the common ugliness on display beyond the Jaguar's tinted glass made him long for a hot shower, followed by an even longer, uninterrupted sleep.

He turned left and drove up the short ramp leading to Karim's private garage. The metal gate was closed. A pair of security cameras watched him.

The gate rose a moment later and Fletcher entered an underground garage. Four high-end luxury vehicles were parked to the far left. Fletcher drove straight on and parked in a space near a set of concrete steps leading up to an elevator. Security cameras, each positioned in a corner, were fixed on the entire area. He knew they had been turned off, as Karim did not want any recorded video footage of a wanted fugitive entering his home.

Fletcher traded his leather gloves for latex. He insisted on wearing them when visiting the man's home. Netbook in hand, he removed the evidence bag from the trunk, stepped inside the elevator and pressed the button for the fourth floor. The doors closed and the ancient piece of machinery, one of the few items Karim had not replaced or updated, waited as if deciding whether or not it wanted to move. Finally, it rose, slowly and unsteadily, the gears creaking.

The elevator doors opened to a long hall of cream-coloured walls and a hardwood floor covered by a Turkish rug. Fletcher walked across it, passing by a side table holding stacks of mail and a bouquet of orchids arranged in a vase, and stepped into an anteroom designed to resemble an old English library. The tall space held several leather armchairs and sofas, a pair of antique secretarial desks and folio stands. The bookcases, made of a deep mahogany, stretched from floor to ceiling, the shelves packed with rare first editions.

The elegant room usually smelled of old wood and aged paper. This morning, the pleasant aromas had been spoiled by Karim's cigarette smoke. It drifted in through the cracked-open door to the man's office, a Spartan, oval-shaped room of bare white walls and windows offering a sweeping view of Central Park. Karim, dressed in another one of his threadbare flannel shirts, sat behind a bank of flat-screen monitors displayed on a multilevel glass desk.

'Good morning,' he said in a dry, tired voice. 'Would you like coffee? There's an urn in the waiting room, along with some pastries and fruit.'

'No, thank you.'

'Do you want to rest for a bit or do you want to get right to it?'

'Right to it.' Fletcher placed the evidence bag on the desk and said, 'The drinking glass from the closet.'

'I'll have my lab process it for fingerprints this morning, see if we can get a name to match this woman's
face. Speaking of which, that wildcat cartridge you found? No fingerprints. Any other presents for me?'

'I also downloaded data from Corrigan's phone, but I haven't had time to examine it.'

Fletcher draped his coat over the back of the chair set up in front of the desk and settled into his seat.

'Let's start with my Baltimore contact,' Karim said. 'I told him I came across information from a credible source that the building you found might contain missing children, and he agreed to take a look.

'The building was empty. No sign of the Lincoln or any other vehicles. There was, however, an underground garage. He found hoses and told me the floors and walls were damp. He also said the garage reeked of bleach. No blood - at least none that was visible. He can't call in forensics until he gets more "concrete" information from me.'

Karim inhaled deeply from his cigarette. 'I've got him wiggling on a fishhook. He thinks I'm sitting on something big, asked to speak to my source. He's not going to wait for me. He'll start sniffing around on his own.'

'Who owns the building?'

'Another limited liability company,' Karim said. 'This one is called Crowley Enterprises. David Crowley is listed as the LLC's owner, and the address listed on the documents? Belongs to an undeveloped strip of land in Oregon.'

'And the Baltimore plates I gave you?'

'Both the Lincoln and the Lexus belong to ABC Property Management.'

'The same LLC that owns the house in Dickeyville.'

'Correct. So now we have two LLCs with phoney addresses: ABC Property Management and the one that owns these buildings you found, Crowley Enterprises. Two different lawyers filed the papers - one in Baltimore, the other in San Diego. Going after them is a waste of time - client confidentially and all that. I could use my own lawyers to press them, but the only thing we'd end up with is a physical description of our lady friend - and that's if we're lucky. Besides, I doubt she used her real name.'

'I think she has a male partner,' Fletcher said. 'In addition to the king bed, I found an assortment of men's clothing in the drawers. Someone lives with her.'

'So we're looking at a couple who kill together
and
sleep together.' Karim stifled a yawn. 'How romantic.'

'And we know they employ at least two people - Jenner and his companion, Marcus. Have you spoken with Dr Sin?'

Karim nodded. 'She told me about the missing kidney. What do you think that's -' He cut himself off, looked at Fletcher sharply. 'I didn't divulge the doctor's name to you, and I gave her explicit instructions not to -'

'She didn't tell me,' Fletcher said.

'Did Boyd tell you?'

'No.'

'Then how do you know her name?'

'I recognized her perfume.'

'Her perfume,' Karim repeated.

'You asked for my assistance with her case. The home invasion that killed her -'

'Right, right. I completely forgot you handled that matter.'

'The night I went through her home I found two bottles of Ce Que Femme Veut in the bathroom vanity,' Fletcher said. 'It's quite rare. Last manufactured in 1965.'

'When was that?'

'The night I entered her home? Thursday, 19 October 1994.'

'Your memory is goddamn remarkable.'

Fletcher said nothing.

'There's a name for your kind of memory, did you know that?' Karim said. 'It's called "superior autobiographical memory". A professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine, coined the term. It's very rare, this type of memory. This professor has found only a handful of people who possess this unique intellectual gift. He gave each person he tested a random date and they could go back in time and recall everything they experienced on that day - what meals they ate, the people they spoke to and the content of their conversations. What they read and the television programmes they watched. These people can remember almost every single detail of their lives going back years, the way an ordinary person remembers what happened yesterday, if he or she can remember it at all.'

Fletcher did not share Karim's wide-eyed enthusiasm. He had been born with this type of instant recall. For as long as he could remember, he could pick a date at random, travel back in time and relive any memory as though he were experiencing it in real-time. He remembered everything and forgot nothing.

'Were you able to uncover any information on Nathan Santiago?'

'Yes, I have the information right here.' Karim started to root through various loose sheets and pads of paper. 'I didn't run Santiago's prints yet, thank God. That would have set off a firestorm of questions. Here they are.'

Karim handed him sheets of paper holding printed aged-enhanced photographs of Nathan Santiago. In the photos, the young man had black hair worn in a variety of styles, but the face was identical.

'That's him,' Fletcher said, placing the sheets on the corner of the desk. 'What happened?'

'Nathan Santiago left his three-decker tenement home in downtown Lynn, Massachusetts, to visit a friend who lived four blocks away. The boy vanished into thin air, never to be seen or heard of again - until now.'

'Boy?'

'Teenager,' Karim said. 'He was seventeen when he disappeared, which would make him twenty-five today.'

'He's been missing for eight
years
?'

Karim nodded sombrely. 'There's more,' he said, stubbing out his cigarette in a small and crudely shaped
clay ashtray created by a child's hand. Jason Karim, Fletcher knew, had made that for his father.

'Nathan Santiago's mother?' Karim said. 'She vanished too.'

47

Karim reached across the desk and handed Fletcher a thick sheet of paper. It was a colour picture of a round-faced, middle-aged woman with light brown skin and shoulder-length black hair. Her nose was crooked. Fletcher suspected it had been broken one too many times by a husband or boyfriend. The haunted look in her eyes brought to mind Dr Sin, the way the doctor had stared into space, wondering what she had done wrong for such horror to have entered her life.

'Louisa Santiago was a single mother and a nurse,' Karim said. 'She left her job at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital, and that's the last anyone saw of her. The police found her Honda Civic in Lynn, parked in the lot for the subway stop for Wonderland Station. Husband's not in the picture, as far as I can tell. I won't know anything further until I get copies of the police reports.'