Girl, Sought (Ella Dark #24)

CHAPTER FORTY ONE

Luca found a brick propping open the entrance to the apartment building at 2951 Harbor View Boulevard. The place was four stories of institutional beige concrete that overlooked Chesapeake's naval shipyards, and it had the grayish, washed-out look of a building that had long ago given up the pretense of respectability and settled into a cozy relationship with urban decay.

He checked the address again. 2951 Harbor View Boulevard, Apartment 3C. This was the place, all right. The lair of one Lawrence Winters, mild-mannered accountant by day, psychopathic, skin-flaying serial killer by night. It was amazing the sickos you could be rubbing elbows with at the watercooler and never even know it.

The building made Luca's investigator brain itch, because why would a successful tax accountant, a man who helped millionaire collectors dodge six-figure obligations, live in this concrete purgatory? Gambling problem? Drug addict? Expensive tastes? Maybe the answer awaited inside.

Luca unclipped his Glock from its holster and strode towards the door. The building's lobby was as much of a shitshow as the exterior had promised, complete with water-stained walls and a bank of dented mailboxes with most of the names scratched out or covered with layers of spraypaint. The elevator was a no-go, even if the yellow tape plastered across its doors hadn't screamed ‘OUT OF ORDER’ in three different languages.

Three flights of stairs gave him time to think. About Ella staying back with Vanessa. About Vanessa's bruised throat. About what might be going through Mr. Lawrence Winters’ head right now. Did Winters know Vanessa was alive? If he did, his mind would be a whirlwind of conflicting ideas. To run, to not run, to hide, to throw himself off the nearest bridge.

Luca reached the seventh floor landing and paused to catch his breath and let the adrenaline settle from a rolling boil to a low simmer. Apartment 3C was just down the hall, a mere dozen yards and a flimsy particle-board door between him and the freak who got his kicks turning human skin into angel wings.

Winters might have had his head screwed on, but he was no soldier. No hardened gunman with military training and a small armory's worth of firepower at his disposal. He was just another pathetic little psycho playing make-believe with other folks' lives.

Luca hugged the wall as he moved toward apartment 3C. The door was as nondescript as any of the others. No arcane sigils scrawled in blood, no ominous Latin chanting emanating from within. Luca took up position to the side of the door with his Glock held rock-steady in a textbook firing stance. He raised his free hand, curled it into a fist. He knew that a thrice-murdering psycho might be sitting on the other side of this door, and a part of Luca would want to shoot him down and spare the justice system the hassle of processing him.

But Luca reminded himself that dead suspects didn’t talk, and death wasn’t nearly as much of a punishment as life imprisonment. Plus, Ella hated killing.

Then he knocked in three short raps. ‘Lawrence Winters? FBI, open up.’

Silence. Not even the scurry of roaches behind the walls. Luca leaned in, pressed his ear to the flimsy fiberboard, and strained to hear past his own pulse.

Another knock. ‘Winters. You’ve got ten seconds. Open up.’

Nothing. Or at least nothing that pinged on his threat radar. No muted footsteps, no telltale click of a gun's safety snicking off. For all he could tell, the apartment was genuinely empty.

He was just about to knock again, maybe add a little boot-to-door percussive persuasion for spice, when the clatter of feet on stairs froze him in place.

He pivoted, Glock swinging up to cover the stairwell.

But instead of Lawrence Winters, Luca found himself staring at a young couple. The woman's pupils were blown wide enough to park a truck in, and the man scratched obsessively at arms that looked like road maps of needle tracks. Luca didn’t have to think too hard about this one.

‘Hey.’ Luca kept his voice casual, badge visible. ‘You know the guy who lives here?’

The man shrugged, still scratching. ‘The tax man? Nah, not really. Quiet type. Keeps to himself.’

‘Seen him recently?’

‘Not for weeks.’

‘You ever talk to him?’

‘Sometimes say hello, but that’s it.’

‘What can you tell me about him?’

The woman offered, ‘Fifties, brown hair, kind of ugly, works weird hours, drives a Toyota sedan. Blue.’

Goosebumps rose on Luca’s forearms. Blue sedan. Just like the mystery car outside the library. Just like the vehicle their teenage witness had described. Combined with Lawrence's financial connections to the victims, that was probable cause in any court he could name.

‘A blue sedan? Are you sure?’

‘Sure as I am that in need a smoke,’ she said as she grabbed her partner’s arm and pulled him down the stairs. ‘Good luck, mister.’

‘Thanks.’ He waited until the couple shambled past, then squared up to the flimsy fiberboard of apartment 3C. The first kick trembled the frame, the second blew it off its hinges in a sadly-anticlimactic burst of wood and aluminum. Luca swept inside with his Glock leading the way.

‘FBI! Winters, Come out with your hands up!’

The living room was a depressing affair - stained carpet, sagging futon, an ancient TV squatting on a particleboard entertainment center. The kind of bland, characterless decor you'd expect from a guy whose only real joy in life came from getting elbow deep in other people's viscera.

He cleared the place room by room - kitchen empty, bathroom clear, bedroom devoid of life. Just the sad detritus of a life lived in margins: frozen dinners in the trash, generic furniture, walls bare except for a single framed accounting certification.

But the bottom line was that Lawrence Winters wasn’t here.

Back in the living room, something caught Luca’s eye. Something he'd missed on his first pass because his brain had been too focused on threat assessment.

The glint of glass and splash of color that that didn't fit with the beige-on-beige banality of the rest of the place. Luca edged closer, weapon still at the ready, every nerve thrumming with vigilance.

It was a curio cabinet. The kind of thing you'd see in an old woman’s living room.

Luca's breath punched out of him in a sharp, shocked grunt. He knew, on some level, what he'd see, but knowing and seeing were two different animals.

A porcelain doll with arsenic-laced eyes. Eleanor's pride and joy.

A massive preserved spider in a wooden box. Alfred's prize specimen.

And centerpiece of it all - a medieval crucifix that could only have come from Joseph Carpenter's collection.

‘Oh sh….’ The words rasped out, numb and distant to his own ears. His fingers shook as he fumbled his cell back out, nearly dropped it twice before finding Ella’s number. She picked up on the first ring.

‘Hawkins, you at Winters’ place?’

‘Ell, I’m here, and the trophies are right in front of me. Doll, spider, crucifix. I’m looking at them right now.’

Silence on the line. A breath, two. Then: ‘We found our unsub.’

‘Yeah, but he's not here. Place is empty.’

Ella's indrawn hiss was sharp as a whipcrack. ‘Damn it. Okay. He can't have gone far. Not this soon, not with us crawling up his ass. He's got to have a safehouse, something off the grid where he can get his head straight. We know he can plan things down to the last detail.’

‘Right. I’ve got uniforms out there searching the streets, but what if it’s not enough? What if he’s gone underground?’

‘Then dissect his apartment from top to bottom. Something in there will give away his location.’

‘Come on, Ell. Our guy is as organized as it gets. If he had a hideaway, he wouldn’t keep notes about it.’

‘Hawkins, you saying you can’t outsmart an accountant?’

‘They’re smart people. They can do numbers way better than me.’

‘Probably, but they can’t do detective work like you can. You found Winters. You know this guy. Start searching.’

Luca huffed a breath. ‘You gotta stop with these pep talks.’

‘They work.’

‘That’s the problem. Is Vanessa doing okay?’

‘Yeah, she’s with the EMTs. Stable.’

‘Good,’ Luca said. ‘Stay on the line just in case?’

‘Yeah. Go.’

Luca pocketed his phone while he began his search. He started in the bedroom. Seemed as good a place as any to begin unraveling the sailor’s knot that was Winters' psyche. Luca’s old mentor had once mentioned how you could tell everything about a man from two things; his bedroom and his shoes.

But if Winters' sleeping chamber held any deep, dark psychological treasures, they were buried deep. The room was as sparse and impersonal as a monk's cell - single bed, threadbare sheets, a battered dresser missing a drawer. The closet held a depressing collection of off-the-rack suits in nondescript grays and browns and not much else.

Luca rifled through pockets, checked under the sagging mattress, even pried up a loose floorboard or two. Nothing. No diaries or flash drives or paper trails leading straight to Winters' secret second home.

He moved on to the bathroom. Found the usual collection of toiletries and pharmaceuticals. The medicine cabinet was a bust, holding nothing more sinister than expired Rolaids and a crusty tube of Preparation H.

The kitchen was the last room on the list, and Luca didn't hold out much hope for a Eureka moment over the sink. Winters didn't seem the type to stash his master plans between the SOS pads and the spare sponges, but he had to be thorough.

And it was the stack of mail on the kitchen countertop that drew his attention first.

Most of it was junk that Winters hadn’t thrown out. Some of it was takeout menus, bills, handwritten envelopes that could very well have Christmas cards inside. Luca shoved aside a flyer for half-price carpet cleaning, and there, buried under the avalanche of dead trees - a sheaf of official-looking documents with a familiar name at the top.

St. Andrews Medical Museum.

A Division of the National Trust for Cultural Heritage.

St. Andrews. The burnt-out husk of a medical museum that had once housed one of the most extensive collections of anatomical oddities and forensic curios in the Mid-Atlantic. The same museum Vanessa Blackburn had been set to catalog and appraise before a fire had sent it all up in smoke.

Luca snatched up the papers. Insurance forms, lists of lost inventory, an entire binder's worth of legalese and fine print. And there, at the bottom of every page - the cramped, spidery scrawl of Lawrence Winters' signature.

The museum. An empty building – and one that Lawrence Winters would know about.

‘Ell,’ Luca barked into his cell. ‘Winters has links to that medical museum that burned down.’