Chapter 37 Massimo
MASSIMO
Dr. Blackwood lived in an old apartment near the center of town. Sure, it wasn’t the best neighborhood, but it was the kind of place where people could go unnoticed. I was sure that the good doctor had a whole lot that he’d like to go unnoticed.
He had a top-of-the-line lock on his ancient door, but I’d never met a lock I couldn’t get around. I had a set of picks in my pocket just for the occasion, as well as something to jam a home alarm.
Once I was inside, I listened carefully for sounds of habitation. There was nothing. It looked like Blackwood still had places to be during the day. I didn’t like the thought that the psychopath was still out there in the city, treating innocent people.
He was a monster, just like the unholy trinity and just like me, and tonight, he’d answer for his sins.
His house was cluttered inside, the kind of place passed down through the generations, and in Blackwood’s case, he didn’t seem to have cleared out any of his elders’ belongings.
With its wood paneling and brown carpet, the seventies were jealous of his avocado bathroom suite. I went room to room until I found his bedroom.
A king-size bed took up nearly the entire space. The bedding was in disarray, a pet peeve of mine. Maybe it was my years in the military, but a man who couldn’t make his own bed in the morning didn’t have any kind of discipline.
I wandered around the room. Though it was cluttered, there were few personal effects there. An old ID badge with Blackwood’s face on it from a hospital downtown. Old train ticket stubs from years ago tucked into the corner of a mirror.
I sat on the creaky rocking chair in the corner of the dim room and waited.
I didn’t have to wait long in the end. The sound of the lock turning echoed down the hallway only an hour later, and Blackwood entered the dark apartment.
The rustle as he walked told me he carried grocery bags to the kitchen. He sighed when he set them down. The apartment was so small, every sound carried.
Then he tossed his keys onto a hard surface, and his footsteps started my way.
He came in but didn’t bother turning on a light. Instead, he shrugged off his blazer and loosened his tie in the moonlight. He hadn’t seen me. He didn’t seem to be on his guard at all. It was stupid and naive and certainly made my life easier.
I reached out to the table beside the rocking chair and clicked the lamp on.
Blackwood froze in the process of taking off his shirt. He was looking at the floor and didn’t even raise his gaze to me when he spoke.
“So it’s my turn,” he said quietly.
Ah, so it wasn’t naivety that had made him unaware of danger. It was resignation. How boring.
“Yes, it is finally your turn.”
He dropped the ends of his shirt and faced me.
“You got a weapon on you?” I asked. “Going to try and take me off guard?”
Blackwood laughed; it was a strangled sound. “Would a weapon work against L’Ombra?”
I sat forward, the gun in my hand pressing against my knee, pointing at Blackwood.
“Ah, so we’re dispensing with the formalities? How did you find out who I am?”
Blackwood shrugged. “I wasn’t sure until now. You fit the description, and Vargas—he was sure someone had put a hit out on him. That’s why his security was crazy, and he only let his guard down at the institute. He felt safe there.”
“Yes, he did, didn’t he? There in the place where so many young women should have felt safe . . . but weren’t. He fell for his own PR, I guess. On your knees.”
I jerked the gun down, showing Blackwood where I wanted him.
He sank slowly to the carpet and brought his hands up behind his head.
“You don’t have to do that,” I chuckled darkly. “This isn’t a holdup. There’s no way you’re leaving here alive. If you tried anything, you’d be dead before you could realize what had happened.”
Blackwood was quiet, letting his arms sag back to his sides.
“I have some questions that you will answer, if you want to die in the next hour. I am capable of making your death last all night, all week, all month. You understand?”
Blackwood nodded and blinked nervously.
“Why was Ivan Markovic so determined to marry Katarina? Even after all this time?” That fucking question had been weighing on me. It was all part of Katarina’s mysterious story and why she had been relatively untouched in Hallow Hall compared to others.
“Ivan Markovic. He’s my—he was my friend from school,” Blackwood said, his voice heavy. “Father Vargas’s nephew.”
I sat back and let that sink in. “So, why marry Kat? Was he obsessed with her?” That was something I could easily understand.
Blackwood shook his head. “He didn’t even like her. He was ambitious, though, him and Vargas, and when they learned about Katarina and her mother, they planned how they were going to use them.”
“Use them for what?”
“To get rich and inherit everything.” Blackwood looked up at me. “Katarina wasn’t an ordinary patient of Hallow Hall.”
“I noticed. Why wasn’t she?”
“She was special. Off limits. She was only supposed to be there temporarily, until Ivan could scare her into marrying him. But then she saw what happened to her friend, Mira . . . That was three years ago. Vargas convinced the director that Katarina was safer in Hallow Hall. That her soul would be saved from the vices of the modern world, and her body would remain pure and untouched. The director is quite paranoid about the state of the world . . . especially for his family. Once Katarina’s mother died, it wasn’t even in question.
Katarina would only leave when the director was ready to have her married and looked after by a husband.
She could never live alone and be exposed to sin. ”
Blackwood laughed bitterly.
I went over the words that Blackwood had just thrown at me and seized on one particular phrase.
“For his family,” I repeated.
“Katarina is the director’s illegitimate daughter. Her and Tatiana.”
I stared at him. I’d been expecting something along those lines. There was no other explanation for her treatment there, though Pavol and Benedict had hardly left her untouched. I supposed that they thought her medication regimen was enough to keep her confused and not remembering.
“The director,” I repeated. “Sergei Stoyanov.”
Blackwood nodded resignedly.
“How did you come to work there?” I asked, leaning in to look at Blackwood’s face.
“Pavol recruited me. I interned with him when he was still practicing, before the trouble and accusations got his medical license revoked. I found out about the director and Katarina when I was working there. Ivan went out of his way to meet her after that. He thought she was his ticket to big money. He fancied himself boss of the Stoyanov family after Sergei died.”
I nodded. “Okay, fine.” I flipped the safety off the gun.
“Wait! Don’t you want to know more?” Blackwood glanced around frantically, searching for a way to extend his pathetic life.
“Not really.”
“The Stoyanov family doesn’t just run Hallow Hall,” Blackwood shot out.
I paused and lowered the gun a fraction. “Explain.”
“They run a lot of these places. You might think Hallow Hall was just a one-off, a single abomination made possible because of Father Vargas and his influence in the community . . . but it didn’t even start in Italy.
It started in Bulgaria, and Sergei imported it.
There are a lot of Hallow Halls in small forgotten places, all over.
Italy, France, Croatia, Spain. It’s been going on for twenty years in some cases,” Blackwood said.
I took a deep breath, and my chest rattled. I felt the presence of my heart at that moment, an organ I had long believed dead. Now it hurt. It hurt at the thought of other Hallow Halls and other pregnant women disappearing.
A tight band of tension wrapped around my throat and pressed in.
“Where else?” I ground out. “In the South?”
Blackwood nodded quickly. He was excited that I’d taken an interest in his information, hastily tossed out to buy himself time.
“Yes, I’ve been collecting some of the patients’ records and drug therapies—”
“Why did you stay there so long?” I interrupted, getting to my feet and standing over him. “You’re a doctor. You’re supposed to do no harm,” I reminded him.
Blackwood glanced left and right, looking for a way to escape the simple question, and then shrugged. “Harm was going to come to those women whether I helped or not.”
The pain inside my chest intensified. It was an excuse I was familiar with. The way I justified my own profession. I had more in common with Blackwood than I liked to think, and that was fucking depressing.
“Besides, the drugs I was developing there, with free rein, they’d change victims’ lives,” Blackwood continued.
“In what way?”
“The power to forget the things you didn’t want to remember, to erase it. To be turned on by a pill slipped into a drink; instead of fighting it, she’d want it. The victim would become powerful—”
The shot was sudden, a flash in the darkness.
He slumped back against the bloody carpet, against the fragments of his sick and twisted brain.
I straightened up. I was breathing heavily, I noticed in a detached sort of way.
I was angry. I felt sick. I needed to know more. A swirling sense of foreboding had filled my head, and it wouldn’t go away.
I left the bedroom with its stink of gore and copper and walked through the apartment until I found Blackwood’s office.
It was stuffed to the brim with boxes. His small desk in one corner had a box open beside it, as well as a laptop.
He seemed to have been going through the boxes and categorizing the information.
Searching for insight from old patient records.
I stared at the boxes. They were the large, A4 size that you get in offices.
There had to be fifty of them that I could see, and even more behind them.