Her Last Scream (26 page)

“This horror is inside the system
now
?” Sinclair said after my three-minute synopsis of events. “Christ.” He shook his head in disbelief. “It’s for real.”

“What’s for real?” Cruz asked.

“A destructive action against women. I’ve been hearing about it for months.”

“How about you start at the beginning?” I said.

“The real beginning starts forty years ago.”

“Edit tight.”

Sinclair paced the room as he spoke, hands in pockets. He looked like a hulking pirate someone had mistakenly dressed in tweed and corduroy.

“My father died when I was eight. My mother remarried when I was ten, an angry and domineering military man who called me Sissy, Nancy-boy, Faggot … If I challenged him I’d regain consciousness five minutes later. It was horrific is all I’ll say. When she’d gotten me safely off to college my mother walked out. My stepfather found and killed her.”

Faces dropped in the audience, intakes of breath. Murmurs of consolation. Judging by the faces, only Miz Balfours had known of Sinclair’s history. Sinclair continued.

“I finally felt I could deal with my history from an intellectual point of view by writing a book. I researched misogynist websites but needed a more personal interaction with these … people. I learned the language of hate and joined in secretive chat rooms using the idiotic handle of Promale. I joined extreme sites and met all manner of women-haters, most of whom were notable only in their insecurities. Some, however …” He raised a dark eyebrow.

“Were flat-out scary,” I finished.

“One of the most disturbing entities went by HP Drifter. He was intelligent – very well spoken when not ranting – yet brimming with hatred. I yearned to get closer, to find the genesis of his hatred. But I was just one more angry newcomer to that world.”

“It’s hard to gain acceptance,” I said. “The paranoia effect.” I’d done research on the Aryan movement, knew newbies were automatically suspected of being plants.

A wry smile from Sinclair. “I engineered a breakthrough, Detective: I revealed to Drifter that a fellow chat-room member named Raisehell was a spy.”

“Excuse me, Doc,” Cruz said. “But how could you know that?”

Sinclair set his hands like a pianist spanning five octaves. “Two computers. My right hand played Promale, my left played Raisehell. I built suspicious little aspects into Raisehell. Promale detected them, snitched to HP Drifter.”

“Creating a bonding experience with HP Drifter,” I said, impressed.

“It allowed me to tout an anti-feminist essay I’d written. Such screeds abound, but Dorothy and I engineered mine to push every button –”

“Academic and insane in equal measure,” Balfours said.

“These people love pseudo-intellectual justifications of their pathology,’ Sinclair said. ‘Drifter was excited by my screed, ready to appoint me philosopher of his movement. He implied it was about to enter a new phase, something big was about to happen. But in that nasty little world …”

“Everyone’s planning something,” I finished.

“Still, something in Drifter felt sinister. I was trying to get closer to him with the screed. Then something amazing happened: I found out who he is …” Sinclair clapped his big hands. “Bang! Just like that.”

“You know who Drifter is?” Cruz said.

Sinclair pulled pages from his briefcase and a pen from his pocket and began underlining. “Copies of a recent chat-room conversation,” he said.

I peered over his shoulder at the underlined text:

“I’m missing something,”

I said. “Just hours before this conversation occurred, I’d spoken with a minor character in my department, an undergrad working – slowly and poorly – on a degree in sociological statistics. While waiting for him to make some copies, it occurred to me that I’d been a bit hard on the pathetic sap. So I took a few moments to talk to him, a meaningless chat about loving the outdoors.”

“And?”

Sinclair took the pages and snicked them with a finger. “The underlined words in the chat-room conversation are virtually identical to things I said to the undergrad … a boring little fellow named Robert Trotman.”

Her captor seemed to move in and out of the cavern for no particular reason, Rein noted from the floor of the cave, her eyes riveted on the rock above. Sometimes he crossed at the edge of the room, sometimes making a point of stepping over her. It seemed ritualistic, as if he needed to demonstrate the territory was his. There was something childlike in his motions.

“I have to pee,” Rein said on his fourth repetition. “Plus the other.”

Robert Trotman stared. She said, “You do them, too, I expect.”

He left the chamber without saying a word. Rein heard the scrape of a shovel. He returned ten minutes later with a coil of lariat in his hand.

“Sit up and lean your head forward.”

Taking a deep breath, Rein did as told. The man swung a noose-like coil in front of her. “Put your head in there,” he said.

“Can’t I just –”

“PUT YOUR FUCKING HEAD THERE, YOU LITTLE PUNK!”

Rein shot a glance at her captor. He seemed to be looking through her with eyes like stones. She held up her hands in acquiescence and slipped her head through the circle of rope. He pulled tight and Rein’s hands went to her neck. “Y-you’re choking me,” she gasped. His eyes flickered as if awakening from a reverie. He fed rope through his palm, loosening the coil, and walked her like an upright dog down a lantern-lit tunnel, Rein moving in six-inch steps, all her leg-hobble allowed.

He pointed to a fresh hole in the ground and pulled a wad of tissues from his pocket, tossing them to the floor. Rein lowered her jeans and panties and positioned herself over the hole. He backed up a few feet, feeding out rope. Finished, she wiped with the tissue. A dark stain caught her eye, blood.

She’d started her period.

Rein turned away and secured her jeans. The man stood across the room, shovel in one hand, and rope in the other. Rein thought a moment, stepped back from the hole, stared at her captor as if waiting for him to perform a task.

“What?” Trotman said.

“Cover it up so we don’t have to smell it.” She put a whisper of demand in her voice. He frowned and started forward, stopped himself.

“Cover your own shit,” he said, throwing the shovel to the floor. Rein picked up the implement and began slowly scraping puffs of dirt over her excretion, feeling the shovel’s weight and balance.

“Enough,” he ordered. “Set the shovel down.”

Rein judged the distance to her captor at a dozen feet. He had his end of the rope wrapping a wrist.

“Just another little bit,” she said.

Her captor tugged the rope, pulling Rein off balance. “Put the shovel down, whore!”

Again,
she thought.
Do that again, harder.
She started to scrape another puff of dirt into the hole. He yanked hard, the rope pulling Rein toward him. She launched, bound legs jumping twice, halving the distance, quartering it. Rein swung the shovel like an ax, the blade slicing toward his head. He threw up his arm in wide-eyed defense, ducking. The shovel slammed his shoulder and swooped over his head. He dove back, tightening the rope, a flaming wire around Rein’s neck.

She tumbled to the floor.

“YOU WHORE!” Trotman screamed, his words echoing down the rock corridors. He put his foot on her chest and pulled the rope tighter, cutting deep into her flesh. Rein felt her face swelling, saw the rock walls begin to swim in a lazy circle. Her eyes felt like they were about to explode. Rein’s captor moved his foot to her throat as he leaned low, sniffing the air above Rein like a rare wine.

His nostrils flared. “You went ripe,” he said. “I smell it.”

He went to the corner, opened a trunk and produced a rag and a metal bottle.

Cruz and I sent everyone from the room except for Sinclair. I tried to keep the incredulity from my voice as I studied the professor. “You’re saying the hardcore misogynist in the chat room – HPDrifter – is some guy in your own department?”

“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Sinclair said. “There was no doubt Trotman was HPDrifter. The asshole I’d been trying to dissect for weeks was just down the hall from me. I was pretty sure Drifter worked in a university setting. He was always ragging on college women and intellectuals. And he referred to my in-process diatribe as a manuscript, the proper academic term.”

“What’d you do when you found out?” Cruz asked. “With Trotman?”

“We were alone in the office yesterday. I tried to bond with him, pretending to be half screwy, affecting some anti-women attitudes. He was scared and pleased in equal measure, not knowing the best way to please Daddy. I made sure to pat his skinny butt, a little homoerotic behavior is catnip to these pinheads. I invited him to dinner this weekend.”

“Why?”

“To pretend to buddy-bond for another week or so, find out what made him tick – part of my research – then chuck his ass out the door.”

“That’s too weird,” Cruz said. “The guy you’re after is a colleague.”

“I started thinking about it,” Sinclair said. “And it made perfect sense. If you’re a misogynist statistics student who lives in this locale, getting into the Sociology department here would be a coup.”

Cruz nodded. “The Women’s Studies department is part of the Sociology department.”

“The plan was, in its own nasty way, inspired,” Sinclair continued. “Little Bobby Trotman doubtless saw himself as a master spy gathering information about the enemy. If you dream yourself as leading an uprising against women, where better to battle them than from behind enemy lines?”

“Unfortunately,” I said, “Robert Trotman didn’t just dream of leading an uprising, Professor. He was commanding one.”

Cruz and I stepped outside and told the center folks they could return to the meeting room, and to hang loose. Liza Krupnik looked worn and I figured she was dreading telling her boss she’d grabbed his papers. We still had the issue of the security code given to Bromley, then to Bemis, who’d opened the system as if cracking a coconut. Cruz had some calls out. Her cell rang and she took it. I watched her face turn to puzzlement. She stepped to the curb and stared upwards with a confused frown. She ended her call with her head shaking.

“Campus security reports that Trotman’s not in the Sociology building,” she said.

“You got his address, right?” I said. “Where he lives?”

“We’re already there, Carson,” she said. “We’re at his front door.”

“What?”

She pointed to the apartment above the Beacon. “According to university records, Trotman’s been living above the bar for one year and two months.”

Robert Trotman’s rooms had less personality than the waiting room at a muffler-repair shop. There was a chair in which to sit, a folding table from which to ingest food, a chest of drawers for the scant array of clothing. His bed was a mattress beside a shade-less lamp. The kitchen held only a stove, microwave and refrigerator, nothing in the latter save for a carton of apple juice and a dozen cheap frozen dinners. The bathroom held the basic personal-maintenance items. There was no television, no radio.

There was, however, a professional-grade camcorder set on a tripod and aimed across the street at the center. “I’ll bet he records every second,” Cruz said, checking the angle of the lens. “Who goes in and out, license plates. Everything.”

“Cerberus,” I said. “The dog that never sleeps.”

We creaked across the age-warped floor, not covered by so much as a ratty rug. “It’s like a shell in here,” I said. “Not even a computer.”

“He probably uses a laptop,” Cruz said. “Boulder has free wifi everywhere.”

I stood back and studied the sad and desolate digs. Something didn’t add up, and I thought of obsessive people I’d dealt with in the past.

“Trotman doesn’t live here,” I said.

“What are you talking about, Carson?” Cruz said. “It’s a shitty little life, from the looks of things, but –”

“He eats and sleeps and performs his ablutions here. But he doesn’t
live
here.”

“Ah. You mean he comes alive somewhere else.”

“Where he lives the fantasy. Where he’s not Robert Trotman, minor academic assistant in statistical analysis or whatever.”

“Scary shit,” Cruz said, checking a closet. I saw her start to close the door, pause, stick her head back inside. The next thing I knew she was on her hands and knees, leaning her head to the floor.

“Think the camera is something, Carson?” she said. “Come take a listen.”

I dropped to hands and knees and listened between slats in the floor. I heard the jukebox in the bar, an old Green Day piece. I listened closer.

“…
maybe we should contact other centers and
…” Madrone.

“…
hold on until the detectives find out something that
…” Balfours.

“…
you found and copied my little piece of fiction, Liza?
…” Sinclair. Laughing, thankfully.

“We’re directly above the meeting room,” I said. “You can hear every word.”

Cruz shook her head. “Didn’t Madrone say they had meetings and training sessions down there? Talking about everything from procedures to passwords?”

“Answers that question,” I said.