The Mall of Cthulhu (16 page)

"Nothing's compromised! You weren't there! She believed me!"

"Christ. Well, I was there, briefly, but it doesn't matter. This always happens, Ted, you throw your trust away on these women, and usually it's just your heart that gets broken, but this time it's going to be—we don't know if an extra person in the mall is going to make the difference. You might have put the whole fucking world at risk!"

"I'm going to be in the mall, first of all . . . "

"You'll be there five minutes before Providence police take you away in cuffs, Ted."

"Bullshit!"

"It's not bullshit. It's the way any rational woman would respond to—"

"No—it's the way you would respond. Just because you don't trust anybody doesn't mean she's like you. And it damn sure doesn't mean I should be like you. Maybe I want to at least try to get close to somebody. Maybe I don't want to drive away every woman who's interested in me."

Laura was so angry she thought her head might explode. "You—you know what, fuck you. I have carried you for ten years, wiped your nose every time you had a bad dream, and okay, I owe you that, I owe you at least that much, but that doesn't mean it's been easy. I don't have the nightmares, okay, but I don't get to have a normal life either, okay? So, yeah, I don't have anybody else, because how am I going to explain why I have to take care of you? How am I even going to have time to get close to anybody? So don't throw that shit in my face, because it's your fucking fault! Okay?
Okay?"

Tears were forming in Ted's eyes. "Get the hell out of my apartment," he said.

"It's
my
apartment. But I'm leaving anyway. Don't go to the mall. I'm not bailing you out this time."

Ted didn't say anything. He just looked at her as she left, and Laura felt like she'd kicked a puppy.

As she drove to William Castle's house, Laura kept punching the seat next to her. Fuck Ted and his fucking stupidity. Ruining the whole thing. Being right about her not trusting anybody. Well, she was right too—he had no idea what a burden he'd been—but as she replayed her three failed relationships from the last ten years . . . (Three! Jesus Christ—all those hormones and all that alcohol at college, and she'd only managed one in her three years of post-fire college. What the hell?) Perhaps Ted had a point about her not trusting anybody. Shit.

He also had a point about how a visit to William Castle's house would be pointless, but she was going to do this right anyway. Well, to do it right would be to get a warrant and knock on the door, but failing that, she was going to do a systematic search. She called 411 and got William Castle's home phone number. She blocked her number with *67 and called. She could hear the phone ringing inside the house, and no one answered.

She waited five minutes, then went to the door and rang the bell, preparing to whip out her badge and question him if he answered the door. She had no idea if it would be a good thing or a bad thing to announce that the FBI was aware of what was going on at the mall, but if William Castle got the idea that the might of the United States Government was working against him, it might cause him to at least postpone the mall operation. He'd never have to know that Laura was pretty much the only US Government employee who gave a shit about what was happening at the mall.

But William Castle did not come to the door. Laura checked the house and found no evidence of a security system. Which of course made it that much less likely she'd find anything of interest here, but she had to check. It was ridiculously easy to break in once she'd ascertained that nobody was home. The guy had an unlocked window right behind the gas grill on the back porch. He was practically asking for it. Laura slid on latex gloves, opened the window and crawled into what was supposed to be a pantry that held nothing but a few lonely cans of franks and beans. Moving as quickly and efficiently as she could, she examined the rest of the house and found nothing at all interesting. Linoleum that needed replacing on the kitchen floor. A fridge covered in dirty handprints containing a Coors Light longneck and a package of Fenway Franks, an old, filthy sofa parked in front of a thirty-six-inch television. No art on the walls. A few Lovecraft books were the only books in evidence, but that hardly counted as a lead. Some racist pamphlets sat atop the toilet with the filthy, brownish-yellow bowl, but that was protected free speech, and if Laura hadn't been so constipated, she would have been tempted to wipe her ass with them. She booted up the computer and poked through the hard drive. There was, of course, some pornography, but nothing more unusual than you'd probably find on the hard drive of every man with internet access, so they wouldn't even be able to nail the guy on kiddie porn charges. She quickly glanced at his documents file and saw a file titled "necro.pdf." Probably pornographic fiction about the guy's corpse fetish, but it was enough to make her want the entire documents file. She inserted her flash drive into the USB port and felt a surge of adrenaline as she heard a car door. She dragged his documents file onto the flash drive icon and saw the dialogue box pop up. "Copying file 1 of 562," it said, "30 seconds remaining."

She heard the rattle of keys outside the front door. "Copying file 124 of 562," the computer said. Should she pull the flash drive and run? The front door opened, making her choice for her. Finally the copying finished. She put one hand on her gun and, with the other, she yanked the flash drive from the side of the computer and stuck it into her pocket.

"What the fuck?" William Castle shouted. Great. He was at least a foot taller than Laura and probably twice her weight, and clearly shot steroids and pumped iron for a hobby. Fantastic.

Before William Castle could figure out exactly what the fuck, Laura drew her weapon and aimed it at his head.

"Sorry, Mr. Jimenez, but your ex-wife really needed a look at your financials, so I—"

Castle's face reddened. "Jimenez? I'm a member of the pure white race! Do I look like some kind of greasy—"

"You're going to look like a stain on the wall if you don't shut up."

"You're in the wrong house, you dumb bitch! I'm calling the cops!"

Laura leveled her gun at his head. "No you're not."

He looked her up and down. "Honestly, I don't think you've got the balls to shoot me dead in my own house. You look soft. I'm gonna take my chances." Smiling, he moved to the phone.

Laura knew he was right. Insane white supremacist Cthulhu cultist or not, she wasn't going to murder the guy. Fortunately, she wouldn't have to.

A swift kick to the groin sent William Castle to the floor before he could dial the second 1. Laura didn't want to get shot in the back, so she gave him quick disarming blows to the neck, stomach, knees, and, for good measure, the groin again.

"Krav Maga," she told the gasping William Castle. "Learned it from a Jew." She ran from the house and down the block to her car. She fired it up and drove away, feeling exhilarated. A part of her was alarmed at how good she felt. Just two days ago, when she was driving a desk, the idea that she'd ever use her Krav Maga training had seemed absurd. And now she'd just stolen some evidence and neutralized a man twice her weight.

"Yeah!" she shouted to the empty car. "That's some fucking law enforcement!" It was actually some law breaking, but she didn't care. She'd said she was willing to go to jail to save the world, and she'd much rather be in jail for crushing William Castle's steroid-shriveled nuts than for accidentally shooting a shopper in the Providence Towne Centre.

For all that, she had no idea whether the file she'd retrieved would be of any use at all, but her elation over cleaning William Castle's clock lasted until she got to the van. She tossed the flash drive to Killilea, who copied it onto the hard drive of his computer.

"Do I want to know where you got this?" Killilea asked.

"Pretty sure you don't," Laura said.

Killilea just smiled. "Okay then. We'll see if anybody can make anything of this and just make sure we wipe everything clean before the subpoenas start flying."

"Anything happening next door?" Laura asked.

"Zip," Killilea replied. "Haven't seen a single human enter or leave since they all ran out of there last night."

"So, I'm just wondering, if somebody were to go in there, might there be a chance that the equipment might malfunction and erase the portions of the tape that revealed their presence?"

"You are full of piss and vinegar, aren't you? But the answer is no—I mean, don't get me wrong. I like you and I think some extra-legal means might be called for in this case, but I've got three kids and a mortgage. I can't go destroying evidence and put my income and my pension and, for that matter, my freedom at risk. So if you're going to go in there, I have to tell you now that I will deny you were in here before or that I had any knowledge of what you were doing. But I can also tell you that given the official indifference to this location, at this point it's extraordinarily unlikely that anyone but me will ever look at this . . . "

"Good enough. Thank you." Laura grabbed an extra-large Maglite—handy as a bludgeon as well as a flashlight—and headed over to the temple. Traffic was sparse, and the second she saw no cars on the street, she slipped in through the hinged board over one of the temple windows. She shone her Maglite around the large, empty room she found herself in, holding her gun in her other hand. "Providence police!" she called out. "We had a call for trespassing in here? Anyone inside this building must show themselves now."

No one showed themselves.

Having established to her satisfaction that the temple was empty, Laura examined her surroundings more closely. She was in a large room with scraps of ancient linoleum clinging to an ancient wooden floor that was filthy where it wasn't rotten. Pillars covered in cracked tile lined the perimeter of the room. At one end of the room, a cracked slab of granite that had once been a bar slumped onto the floor. The ceiling had once featured some ornate mural, but it was so badly water stained that all Laura could make out was that there had once been something painted there.

There was a lot of peeling paint, rotting wood, and God knew what kind of animal droppings everywhere. She glanced up and let out a yelp of surprise. Bats. But they seemed to be snoozing. It smelled like scented candles in here, but not as much as it smelled like mold and shit. Despite her best efforts, Laura felt her shoes squishing in piles of bat droppings.

"Hey," she thought. "I mean, I knew these guys were batshit, but this is ridiculous!" She imagined Ted rolling his eyes and laughing. "Thank you! I'll be here all week. Tip your waitresses . . . " A pang of sadness hit her in the side as she realized that she might never get to share this very Ted-esque line of humor with Ted himself, since he was probably cooling his heels in a Providence lockup by now.

She pushed thoughts of Ted away and got back to the job at hand. She was pretty sure that this place was empty of anything that could harm her, but it was still creepy to be in here in the artificial darkness among the rot and decay and filth. She realized how right Ted had been to reject her initial hypothesis about this place—nobody was perverted enough to want to bring a date in here.

In the center of the floor, she saw evidence of a new secret society—Ye Olde New England Candlery scented candles, still in their attractive glass jars, sat in a circle on the floor. Some symbols were drawn in chalk on the ancient, peeling linoleum floor, and there were metal folding chairs arranged in a circle around the symbols. This was where it all happened. Laura pulled out her phone and quickly snapped a few pictures of the graffiti on the floor. Mastering her fear that she'd be sucked into another dimension just by touching the chalk inscriptions, she stomped on the floor. She then ran her flashlight carefully over the linoleum, looking for seams, looking for hinges, and finding nothing. Whatever secrets this temple held, a trap door was not among them. There was nothing here but some linoleum even nastier than what Laura's grandma had in her kitchen, which was saying something. She took a few more pictures of the floor in question.

She returned to the van. Killilea looked up. "Find anything?"

"No."

"Well, I guess even if you had found something, we couldn't have used it anyway."

"But it's what I didn't find that's important! There's no trap door! Shouldn't that convince them of something?"

Killilea just looked at her. "It should. But I can tell you from my conversation with Nguyen that it won't."

Laura thought of arguments, thought about calling Nguyen herself, but she was new and inexperienced, and all telling him she'd broken the law would accomplish would be to get her suspended or fired, and then she'd really be no good to the investigation. Fuming, she sat down, put on her headphones, and clenched her teeth. She spent the day listening to nothing happening in the temple and poring over William Castle's cached web pages, pathetic job application letters, and angry racist letters to the editor. Necro.pdf opened as a bunch of unintelligible symbols—she checked against the pictures on her phone and found several that matched. She supposed she could spend a day calling various professors at Brown or Providence College until she found somebody who knew what the symbols meant, but even if she had the time to do that, she doubted that anybody practicing an ancient, depraved religion in an abandoned building would amount to anything more than a trespassing complaint in the eyes of her superiors. If Nguyen didn't believe a supernatural conspiracy was afoot, then the fact that a document she'd obtained in an illegal search matched some graffiti she'd found on an illegal search wouldn't really carry much weight, even though it seemed like rock-solid evidence to Laura.

Sitting in silence, Laura felt her bad mood infect her every thought. She started playing back memories of Ted that she still resented. Countless times in college when she'd helped him through drunken puking, acid freakouts, and weed-induced paranoia. That exam in her first year of law school that she'd gotten a B on because Ted called her after midnight crying about some girl who'd told him he was a scary delusional lunatic after he'd confided in her . . . sitting in the van, she just felt the weight of ten years of Ted on her shoulders. It might be kind of a relief if he did get arrested, a nasty little part of her pointed up, but her rational brain reminded her that this would mean losing the only other person on earth who believed in the seriousness of what was going on here. And as she tried to imagine life without Ted, it felt strangely empty.