The 13th (14 page)

Christy stepped on the stained and yellowing black-and-white tile of the kitchen and slowly began to rise from her crouch. It didn’t seem like this was going to turn into a hostage/gunfire exchange. She instinctively reached out to push the door shut behind her and stopped.

“Aiiiiiiieeeaaaiiiii!”

The noise came from the floor behind the kitchen door.

Or, more specifically, from the naked woman bound and gagged on the dirty floor behind the kitchen door. Her long black hair tangled in knots all around her neck. She shook it away from her eyes, which bugged open wide, bloodshot and filled with desperation. The woman’s arms and legs were tied behind her back, leaving her exposed breasts and tummy to thrust forward in a terrible display of helplessness. Her whole body was smudged and smeared with dirt from the floor, and blood caked the edges of the bindings around her wrists where she’d struggled to break their hold to no avail. Her cheeks displayed the trails of a river of dried tears, and the floor in front of her still held a pool of yellowed water, where she’d apparently scooted forward to pee before inching back away from the mess. As Christy registered the scene in front of her, the woman let out another long wail behind her gag—a sad and horrible cry of anguish—and tried to bring her legs up tighter to hide her nakedness,
but she only succeeded in yanking open the wounds on her wrists again, resulting in a new round of whines from deep in her throat.

“Holy shit,” David said from behind her.

“I told you to stay
outside,
” Christy hissed.

“Again, it’s a free country,” he said. “Are you going to cut her loose, or should I?”

Christy stifled the urge to punch the cyclist right in the mouth, and knelt down by the bedraggled captive. She untied the gag first, gently pulling it away from the woman’s face. She took a deep, gasping breath when the material left her mouth, and whispered, “Thank you.”

“Is anyone here?” Christy prodded, nodding toward the inside of the shack.

The woman shook her head. “No,” she gasped. “They left me here the night before last. Nobody’s been back since.”

Christy stepped behind her and began working on the knots at her wrists and ankles. David reached into his pocket and pulled out a pocketknife. “Here,” he said. “She might want to get out of that, um, today.”

She took the knife without comment, and in moments, the woman lay limp on her back. Her whole body began to tremble, and she started to cry.

Christy put her hand on the woman’s forehead. “Shhh,” she said. “It’s okay now. We’re here.”

“I…can’t…move my arms,” the woman gasped. “Pins and needles.”

David knelt at her side and began to massage a shoulder and elbow.

“I think you should…” Christy began.

“Rub her other arm,” David insisted. “She’s been lying here for like thirty-six hours. We need to help the circulation come back.”

“What’s your name?” Christy asked.

“Amy Lynn,” the woman whispered. Her voice was raw as chopped meat. After a few minutes, she pushed herself away from their massage and sat up, slowly pulling her legs up in a crouch and crossing her arms over her bare chest. “Will you take me home, please?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Christy promised. She stood, and caught David’s eye. “Stay here with her a minute?”

He nodded, and pulled his gray T-shirt over his head. “I can’t say it’s totally clean,” he said, offering it to Amy Lynn. “But it’s better than nothing.”

The pale skin of her dirt-streaked face betrayed the hint of a blush and she whispered a thanks. Christy nodded at them and stepped through the kitchen, gun in hand, to investigate the rest of the house. Again, she was trespassing without a warrant. But this time, she had cause, and she wasn’t going to pass it up.

After she left the room, David put his arm around the girl, who now wore his Boston U shirt. It settled loosely over her middle, and she pulled its edge to cover some of her thigh. “It’s all right,” he promised. “It’s all going to be okay now.”

Amy Lynn started to say something, but then her eyes welled up, and she simply collapsed into his arms, hoarse cries coming fast and hard. He held her and tried to give comfort. But in his head, he had only one thought.

Was this what had happened to Brenda? Part of him grew cold at the idea of her naked and tied up in a basement somewhere. At the idea that she was just waiting, somewhere, for him to find and help her.

Christy returned to the kitchen a few minutes later, shaking her head. “Nothing,” she said. “C’mon, help me get her out of here.”

“Now it’s okay that I’m here?” he poked.

“Do you WANT me to bust your balls?” she asked. “There’s a woman who needs help and we’re here to give it. Shut up and help the girl up.”

Amy Lynn leaned heavily on both of them as they walked to the car. David helped her slide into the backseat, but as he stepped away, Christy nodded.

“You can take the other side.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ve gotta get to work. I’ve got my bike.”

“I need you to come down to the station and give a statement,” Christy insisted. “We can put your bike on the rack.” She pointed to the silver struts on the car’s roof.

David opened his mouth to protest and Christy put up a hand. “Look, just do this, okay? That girl in the car needs our help, and she needs an ironclad case whenever we find the guys who did this to her. Which means I need you as a strong witness to what just happened, and the best way to establish that is a statement immediately after the event. So take a ride with me and let’s get this girl a shower and some clothes faster, huh?”

He somehow couldn’t argue with that one. Christy helped him strap the bike down, and then the gravel was crunching behind them as they pulled away from the shack.

“Where are you from, Amy Lynn?” Christy asked, looking at the girl in the rearview mirror. The woman clearly was in shock, eyes wide, arms tightly crossed at her chest.

“Oak Falls,” she answered. “These guys…they picked up me and another girl at a bar there…They seemed really fun, you know? Kinda redneck, but good for a night, you know? I was making out with the one, he was a big guy, in the backseat while his friend drove. He had a girl in front too.”

“Do you remember his name?”

Amy Lynn shook her head. “No. Tom or Tim, or…T something. He had a black Mustang.”

In the front seat Christy smiled sourly. “After they brought you back to the shack, what happened?”

“They were taking the other girl somewhere else,” Amy Lynn said. “She was passed out in the front seat and T…TG! That was his name. TG said he wanted to hurry up and get their money so he could get back to me. Then he dragged me into the house and dropped me there on the floor. But he never came back.”

“Did he say where they were taking her?”

“To the doc’s, he said a couple times. And once he mentioned an asylum.”

David’s stomach turned to ice as he pictured again that girl in the upstairs window of the asylum. Meanwhile, Christy’s foot increased its pressure on the accelerator. Maybe
now
the chief would process a warrant.

Something cold interrupted the warmth between her thighs. There were voices, whispers outside. She could hear them. But as much as she tried, Brenda couldn’t open her eyes to see the speakers. Her world swirled with a hum of dark violet and sinister shapes slipped between the curves of silver clouds. Brenda floated in a sea of sensation; her arms and legs tingled with the touch of a thousand tiny pinpoints. A feather’s kiss of touch on every part of her. She seemed perfectly free, and yet
somewhere inside she knew that she was trapped here. Now, as she heard the voices just outside, she knew she had to escape.

“Open your eyes,” she whispered to herself.

“Open your eyes.”

Again the coldness between her legs, as the buzz of a vacuum grew inside her ears.

“Open your eyes.”

“She won’t be fertile for a couple more days,” a woman said. “That’s really cutting it close.”

And a male voice.

“It will be enough. She only has to have conceived for her to serve as the Eleventh.”

“What if it doesn’t take?”

The man laughed. “C’mon, Amelia. We’ll make sure it does. And you’ll enjoy every minute of it.”

“Can I talk to you a minute?” David asked. He was gritting his teeth as he said it, but he couldn’t hold back any longer. He’d been thinking about it throughout the morning as a police captain took his statement. Christy had disappeared to procure some clothes for Amy Lynn and get her statement. Now the blonde officer had come back to escort him from the station, and he knew he needed her help.

“Sure,” Christy said, raising an eyebrow. “What’s up?” They were standing near her cluttered desk in the middle of the station; Captain Ryan was just a few feet away, typing at his computer; probably keying in things about David’s statement.

“In private?” David asked softly.

Again, she cocked an eyebrow—well tweezed, he noted—and motioned for him to follow.

Outside the station, she led him around the back to the parking lot. Resting her butt against the hood of her squad, Christy looked him in the eyes and held empty palms out in front of her. “Okay,” she said. “What’ve ya got?”

“Something’s going on at the asylum,” he began.

“What do you mean?”

“The doctor…He isn’t really a psychiatrist.”

She nodded, but didn’t interrupt.

“And I don’t think they’ve got those women there to help them with mental illness.”

Christy shifted on the hood and looked toward the front of the station. When she looked at him again, she said, “What makes you think that?”

“I work there,” he said. “And yesterday, I saw what they were doing in the basement.”

“And that was?”

He told her about witnessing the ritual in the basement of the old hotel, and as he did, Christy looked toward the front of the station, as if waiting for someone. When he finished, she slid off the hood of the car and put her hands on his shoulders. David found his stomach went just a little weak when she did that. Her eyes were intensely blue as she leaned closer to his face and whispered, “Look, David. We’re looking into what’s going on at the asylum. That’s why I was out there the day we first ran into each other.”

“Well, actually you ran into me.”

She rolled her eyes at that. “Whatever. Look, I want you to stay clear of that place for a while, okay?”

“But my job…”

“Call in sick.”

David shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “Somebody’s got to do something. I don’t know what they’re doing to those women, but it can’t wait. And, there’s one other thing…”

“What’s that?”

“I’m worried they’ve got Brenda Bean in there somewhere. If those guys have been tying girls up and taking them to the doctor to experiment on…”

“We don’t know that.”

David grew insistent. “C’mon. They tied up the girl we found today. They took someone else to the asylum that night. And Joe, the bartender at the Shack, said they were in the bar that night that Brenda disappeared. If she’s there, I have to help her.”

“How do you suggest we do that?”

“We go there tonight after dark, when everyone’s asleep, and we look for her.”

Christy nodded, as if impressed. “Brilliant plan. I love it. Just one problem. How are we going to get in? I don’t think the front door is open after-hours.”

David reached into his pants pocket and held out the answer. “I have a key.”

Christy shook her head. “Look, David, I know you want to help. But you’re just asking for trouble that way. If Brenda is there, I promise you, I’ll find out. There are things going on that you don’t know about. And for once, I’d like you to not turn up in the wrong place at the wrong time, okay?”

She put a finger under his chin and forced him to meet her eyes. And again, David felt himself tremble just a bit at the intensity of her gaze. For an irritating cop, she sure was gorgeous!

“Promise me?” she insisted. “Go home to your aunt’s, and stay there?”

Christy watched David pull his bike off the car rack, and ride away in silence. He looked unhappy,
but what could she do? Nothing with him. But she could do something with a little help from the chief. Steeling her courage, she marched back into the station, determined to get the chief to get a search warrant issued. Today.

But when she went inside, the chief instead grabbed her first. He stood at Matt’s desk with the girl, who was now dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt that the chief had commandeered from the grocery. Her hair was still damp, and up in a ponytail; while they’d procured her some clothes, she’d taken a shower in the station’s locker room.

“Sorensen,” he called. “I’ve talked with Oak Falls, and they know Amy Lynn’s story, here. I want you to give her a ride home. Oak Falls will keep an eye on her for the next few days, at least until we track down TG and Billy.”

Christy’s heart sank. Now she was a taxi service?

“Chief, can I talk to you before I go?” she asked.

“After.” He patted Amy Lynn on the shoulders paternally, and then gave a curt nod to Christy before lumbering back to his office.

Christy forced a smile for Amy Lynn’s sake. “Two rides in a squad in one day?” she joked. “Better be careful this doesn’t become a habit.”

The girl gave a weak smile in return. “I hope this one will be my last, for a while anyway.”

By the time she delivered Amy Lynn to her apartment back in Oak Falls and then answered a shoplifting call at Smythe’s Grocery, the afternoon light was fading. As Christy reached for the door of the station, it opened, and the chief came out.

“Chief,” she started, but he held up a hand.

“I know what you want, Sorensen,” he growled. His face looked more lined than usual, the silver in
his hair a sign of weakness right now, not wisdom. “But you don’t have enough evidence. I can’t pull a warrant on a crazy house just because some girl said a couple of thugs were headed there with someone else. It’ll never stand up.”

He moved past her and shook his head. “Stay alert,” he said, repeating his police chief mantra. Then he added something to it. “And stay away from the asylum.”

Christy stood there holding the door open, as she watched him slowly lumber toward the parking lot. He looked exhausted in a way she’d never seen him. She was furious. Her mouth hung open as she followed his slouching figure until it turned out of sight. Taking a breath, she finally went inside the station, and noted that Matt was already gone too.

Wasn’t the captain supposed to be the last man on deck? she thought, as she sat down at her computer to file her paperwork for the day. But no, instead, it looked like in Castle Point, it was the rookie who manned the last station.

Or womanned it, she thought.

It was after six by the time she hit print and gathered the last forms to drop in Chief’s in-box. As she dropped them off, something on his desk caught her eye. A small card folded and tucked under his desk calendar. With the edge of a photo sticking out. Glancing behind her to make sure nobody had walked into the station, Christy stepped around the chief’s desk and slid the photo out. She knew why it had caught her attention before she even got to the face. It was the high school photo of Chief’s daughter, Stacy. A larger version was there in a frame on his desk; she’d seen it virtually every day since she’d started with the force. Slipping the card out
from under the calendar, she read the handwritten words inside, and her heart leaped.

If you’d like to see her again, don’t think about any warrants for the next few days. I think you know what I mean.

The card was unsigned, but Christy knew instantly whom it had come from: Dr. Rockford. But how? Why would he even know about her push for a warrant? She racked her brain, trying to think if she had mentioned it on the police band when she’d called in from the Terror Twins’ place this morning.

What the hell is going on out there?
she thought. Carefully, Christy tucked the photo back into the card and slipped it back under the calendar. Then she left the station and took a drive over to Stacy’s neighborhood. She slowed when she saw the squad in front of Stacy’s house. That’s why Chief had been in such a hurry to leave when she’d tried to talk to him. He’d been on his way here. And as she made a left turn to avoid passing directly in front of the house, she saw that he hadn’t found anything. The chief was sitting on the porch of his daughter’s house, hands wrapped around his knees, staring off into space. Christy thought that for as big of a man as he was, the chief suddenly didn’t look very large at all.