CHAPTER FORTY
The address on Curlew Street was the last house on the right before the road ran out.
It sat by itself at the end of a row of three, separated from its neighbors by a strip of yard on one side and a wire fence on the other.
The lawn was knee-high in places and bare in others, and a section of the gutter on the front of the house was hanging off its bracket and swaying with no wind to make it move.
This was it. The home of Simon Varro. Few men could survive a bullet, but she imagined that Simon Varro was no stranger to pain. If anyone could take six bullets and keep on swinging, it would be a six-foot-eight, roided-up giant of a man.
Ella left the car across the mouth of the drive and went up to the house with her hand resting on the Glock.
There was no car that she could see, and no driveway for a car to park.
She tried the front window first. The blinds were down and pressed flat to the glass.
She moved along the side of the house to the next one.
Same. Round to the back. A kitchen window with a thin curtain pulled across it.
She could make out the dark shape of a fridge and the suggestion of a table and nothing else.
She came back round to the porch and tried the handle.
It held. Locked, and solid in the frame, a better door than the house around it deserved, which told her something on its own.
Knocking would be a fool’s move. Alerting a serial killer to your presence was only a good idea if you could threaten to shoot him if he moved. If he smelled a cop, he could sneak out another exit and be on his way to Wisconsin within minutes.
Waiting was out of the question too, because if Simon Varro wasn’t here, then he was out catching his next victim. And given the hour, Ella figured that if he was striking, he was striking now.
So she did the only thing she could.
Ella stepped back, lifted her boot, and drove the heel of it into the door beside the handle.
The frame split on the second kick and the door swung in and banged off the wall.
Ella was through it with her Glock up and the dead air of the house closing in, and she found herself in a kitchen. It was a long room, but the light was on, and that suggested someone was home. Ella moved along the wall with her shoulder against the wall and her Glock raised.
It became clear that the kitchen had been used in the last hour, because a mug had a small pool of coffee in the bottom, and it hadn’t yet developed a film over the top.
She listened. The freezer. The road outside. Her own breath. That was the inventory of the house.
A man Varro’s size would have made the floorboards speak. However, the boards were quiet. She glanced into the sink and saw a syringe in there, with crystals of light yellow liquid in the tube.
She could call out, or she could keep the gun up and clear the rooms one by one.
The second option seemed the safest – and the most likely one to take Simon Varro down without issue.
So she continued on, and through the kitchen door she came into a hallway.
There were three doors in total, and Ella tried the first one in line.
Locked, but given it was solid metal with an equally metal frame, she guessed it descended into a basement.
She crept to the next one, pushed it open and found the sparsest office she’d ever seen.
One desk, piles of junk. It was devoid of living souls, but curiosity propelled her inside.
When she reached the desk, Ella’s heart rose to cardiac arrest levels.
Because sitting there on the desk were drawings.
In the same style as the one she’d brought from the prison gift shop.
The first depicted another scene that she’d stood in in the flesh.
It showed a man kneeling at a low block with his hands bound behind him.
The hooded figure was drawn out of scale, twice the height of the kneeling man, his shoulders as broad as the page allowed.
He stood with his ax raised. Curtis Brennan, drawn before there was a Curtis Brennan to draw.
The next was the field. The stake, the figure bound to it, the wood stacked at the base as it had been at Marston Hollow, and the giant standing off to the side to watch it take.
The third was a cabinet.
It stood upright on a flagstone floor, taller than a man, the inside shaped to take someone standing.
The front had been drawn open on hinges.
The inner face of each door was lined with iron points the length of a finger.
The hooded man stood beside it with one hand on an open door and the other arm raised toward the cavity within.
Three were done. This one was not.
T.G. in the lower right. All three.
Reuben Hoy had called Greaves a gentle giant.
A wronged man. Maybe both still held. But the gentle giant had also sat in a cell on death row and drawn the deaths he wanted for his enemies.
The giant in his sewing class had watched him put them on paper week after week and learned the picture by heart.
Then, noises from the other side of the wall.
Ella snapped to attention and followed it to the source. She readied her gun, moved to the next door in the hallway and grabbed the handle.
Three.
Two.
One.
She exploded into what her peripheral vision identified as a living room. She cleared the corners in one circle, and then her attention was automatically drawn to the room’s central feature.
A bound man, writhing and struggling on the sofa.
He was a big man gone small with fear, folded into the corner of the sofa where the arm met the back, and someone had tied him so he was part of the furniture.
His wrists were lashed to the wooden frame of the arm, and the cord had cut white lines into the skin where he’d been pulling against it.
A man tied like this could thrash all night and move nothing.
His mouth had been stuffed with a strip of dark cloth and the cloth fixed in place with another strip wound twice around his head.
His eyes were what reached her. They were wide and stripped and shot through red, and they were fixed on her face with a force that was trying to convey a message.
And the message was not help me.
His head jerked toward the doorway behind her. Then again. He was screaming behind the cloth in his mouth, and still his eyes kept cutting past her shoulder and back to her, past her shoulder and back, telling her the one thing she had walked in without checking.
Not in front of you.
Behind.
Ella spun around.
A hand came over the top of her head from behind and closed across her brow and her eyes; a hand so wide it folded the side of her face into her ear.
The world went out. A small bright sting opened in the side of her neck and she felt the cold of it spreading down the length of her throat to her collarbone and then up into her jaw.
Her gun was the first to know.
Her knees were the second.
Her last clear thought was of Barton’s eyes, and the room he had been telling her about with them, and how he had been telling her not to come in.