Chapter 21 Basements #2
She looked shocked, then wounded. “No. I would never.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “We asked for justice, not for…not for whatever this is.”
She dissolved into tears, as if something had broken open in her.
Kara held her. “I think that’s enough for today. Anna, could you please go into the kitchen to get us some more bags?”
I wasn’t going to be allowed to go further. I nodded and went to the kitchen. I found the bags underneath the kitchen sink, and then my gaze fell on a door. A door that had to lead to the basement.
I noticed that there was a lock on this side of the door. Gritting my teeth, I turned the knob and peered down the wooden steps.
I flipped a light switch, but nothing happened. The light bulbs must have been taken out. Eyes narrowed, I descended the stairs. I took my cell phone out, turned on the flashlight, and swept it before me.
It was an unfinished basement with cinder-block walls and a concrete floor. A washer and dryer stood at one end, a furnace and water heater at the other. Unused exercise equipment was jammed in a corner. Ordinary enough.
The copper pipes running to the washer and dryer caught my attention. I bent to examine them.
Connected to the copper pipes were three pairs of handcuffs. And next to the washer was a plastic bucket smelling of urine.
In the dust coating the side of the dryer, someone had drawn a circle. It might have been a circle, or it might have been an ouroboros.
I exhaled and texted Kara: Need you in the basement ASAP.
I vibrated with anger as I waited for Kara, imagining those girls huddled down here in the dark.
“Jesus,” she said. “There was more than one girl down here.”
Fuck that guy. I was glad he was dead.
—
The girls from Greenwood Kingdom Church were the witches dancing in the dark of Bayern County.
I thought I understood. The girls, powerless, sought control over their surroundings, even if it meant chanting in the dark and putting pins in dolls.
The girls channeled their rage, and Viv channeled them.
But did they kill the men related to the Kings of Warsaw Creek?
I couldn’t imagine Leah wanting to hurt an innocent like Mason; she seemed to truly love him.
The girls might’ve asked for justice in their ritual, but maybe justice had different ideas than they did.
I headed home to let the dog out and pace in the garden.
The heat had wilted the peppers and tomatoes, and weeds reached up from the cracked clay soil.
I soaked them with the hose. They seemed fragile and puny, though, unlike the spiky Russian thistles beginning to claw their way up from the earth.
I pulled them away from the heart-shaped stone for Nick’s mother, and the grave for the snake.
My phone dinged, announcing a text from the Vice guys on Sumner’s whereabouts:
Subject is at the worksite. No sign of the victim.
TY. Keep me posted, I typed awkwardly with my thumbs, around dog slobber.
I figured Sumner would be involved with work for at least a little while. I texted Monica:
Wanna head over to the Sumner house?
You know it. Meet you there.
If Jeff looked at the door-chime alerts on his alarm app, he would know if someone had opened the front door. But since I had access to his account, I could easily archive our movements, and I doubted he’d sift through the archives to check for unwanted visitors.
Gibby was thrilled to ride shotgun, his tongue flailing from his mouth like a pink banner as he stuck his head out the window. When we arrived at the Sumner house, I put him on his leash, tied him to the open car door’s handle, and put down a water dish for him.
“You gotta stay put, okay?”
He grinned his inscrutable doggie grin at me. I wasn’t sure he would stay put.
Monica rolled up, carrying evidence-collection bags. “Ready to rock and roll?”
I slipped the key into the lock while Monica rushed to the alarm’s panel to disarm it. I stood in the doorway, put my hands on my hips, and said:
“Well, that wasn’t what I expected.”
I wasn’t really sure what I had expected. I’d hoped to find Viv tied up and unharmed, and bring the case crashing down around the ears of the Kings of Warsaw Creek.
Instead, I’d walked into a frat house.
Beer bottles had leaked out onto the beige carpet and were scattered across the couches and the coffee table. The television mounted above the fireplace had a crack in its screen. Something smelled vaguely of garbage. The curtains were drawn, plunging the place into semidarkness.
I walked into the kitchen, finding more bottles, and an open pizza box with crusts hardened like bones. No dishes were in the sink, at least.
Monica peered into the fridge and grimaced. “Some new civilization’s in there, ready to call Sumner their leader.”
I headed down the hallway, looking into the bedrooms and closets. They were a mess, but not a criminal mess. I checked the garbage. Nothing unusual there.
I clicked my UV light on and swept it down the hallway. I didn’t see anything interesting in the living room or the bedrooms.
I went to the bathroom where I’d found Dana Carson’s prints.
The place had been painted in the twenty-five years since her disappearance, and the fixtures updated, so I wasn’t expecting to find much.
I’d lucked out with the prints because they had been in a protected place on the exterior windowsill, where they wouldn’t be disturbed.
“See anything?” Monica asked from the hallway.
“Not yet.” I held out hope, though, that I could retrieve some speck of evidence to blow the case wide-open. But there wasn’t anything in the bathroom.
I headed to the basement, while Monica went to check Sumner’s office. When I was halfway down the steps, I was nearly knocked over by a dark shadow.
“Gibby!” I hissed.
He thundered past me into the basement. He was the Houdini of dogs. I had no idea how he’d slipped his lead.
I swept my UV light on the carpeted steps before me.
It looked like the carpet hadn’t been replaced in a long time.
At the bottom of the stairs, I saw a couch, a television, a bar, and wood paneling dating back to the sixties.
It was weird that the Sumners hadn’t ripped it out, but basement bars had come back into vogue recently.
Everything else in the house had been updated.
I wondered why the basement den hadn’t been.
Gibby sniffed around the perimeter of the room, tail twitching.
“How did you get loose?” I reached for his collar, but he evaded my grasp, nose glued to the floor, and sprinted to the other side of the room.
I paused, seeing faint luminescent blue marks in the grooves of the paneling. My heart skipped a beat. They could’ve been blood, or any number of other bodily fluids I didn’t want to think about. I spritzed them with luminol, and the glow remained. Blood.
I swabbed the panel, hoping to get a sample. I followed my light to a spot where the glow pooled on a baseboard, and tore out a chunk of the baseboard. Maybe Forensics could work with it.
I turned my attention to the bar. There was no actual plumbing here, and the Sumners had evidently been using the bar for wine storage.
I peered below the bar with my UV light, and frowned. I saw some stubs of burned candles. I sniffed them, detecting a whiff of carbon. They’d been lit recently. Maybe Sumner was into mood lighting. Maybe something else.
I glanced over the bar. A railroad spike had been driven there. Peering at the corners of the room, I saw three more spikes, driven into the walls. I spritzed the spikes with luminol, but they remained inert.
Gibby found a spot in the middle of the floor that he was inhaling. He pawed at the carpet.
“Gibby, stop that!”
He sat down on the floor and whined.
Monica came down the steps. “Lookit this.”
She held up a black hood. “You think this is one of the kinky things Drema was talking about? Or do you think this belongs to the girls?”
“I doubt it belongs to the girls. They think costumes are for losers.” I took it from her with gloved hands. “I think that belongs to Jeff. Anything in his office?”
“Just a printer. He must work on a laptop that he takes with him. There’s nothing interesting in his paper files.”
“I think something happened here.” I showed her the luminol streaks.
Our eyes fell on the floor, on the incongruously old carpet, and on the perturbed Gibby.
“Wanna rip that carpet up?”
I shrugged. “I mean, we have the homeowner’s permission.”
“Cool. I’ll grab a crowbar from the car. Be back in a minute.”
I stared at the railroad spikes. They meant something to the Kings of Warsaw Creek, and to Viv. All I knew was that Viv had told me they were meant to keep evil out.
Monica came down with a toolbox. “Let’s get doing.”
We shoved the couch up against the bar, donned heavy gloves, and then started at a corner where the carpet was loose.
Monica jammed the crowbar into the tack strip, and we pulled the carpet back.
It was heavy as fuck, and the farther we went, rolling the dusty carpet back in an uneven roll, the heavier it got.
Gibby retreated up the stairs and watched us from the steps.
We sweated and shoved the carpet back to the far wall, warping it and leaving it flopping against the couch.
“Well,” I said.
There was a brown stain on the concrete floor.
It wasn’t body shaped exactly, but there sure as hell could have been a body there.
Untreated concrete sucked in a whole lot of stains.
The stain was smeared, like someone might have tried to clean it up at some time.
And it was right in the spot Gibby had pointed out.
I looked at him. “That’s a good boy.”
He thumped his tail once on the step, and whined.
I didn’t know much about Gibby’s background, but it disturbed me that he knew the smell of human blood.
I spritzed the stain with luminol. It glowed under my UV light. I slapped a ruler down on the concrete and snapped pictures.
Monica plucked a hammer and chisel out of the toolbox and started taking pieces of the concrete for evidence.
My phone rang.
“Hello?”
BEEP. “Hey, this is Calvert. Your boy Sumner is on the move, headed your way.”
“Oh fuck. We just ripped the carpet up in the basement.” My heart pounded. “Can you delay him?”
“Let me see what I can do. I’ll let you know when he gets within a mile.” BEEP.
I spun to Monica. “He’s on his way.”
“Shit. Shit. Shit. I mean…it’s an option to let him walk in on us, since we have Drema’s permission.”
“Yeah, and if he knows we’re looking this closely at this stain on the floor, he’ll be on a plane to Europe within the hour.”
We scrambled to roll the carpet back out, tugged it into position.
I was sweating hard through my clothes, and the salt stung my leg.
We got the carpet lined up with the tack strip.
Monica moved the couch back into position while I hammered the carpet into place.
Good thing it had been stretched out and the nails had come out mostly straight.
I tacked a bit around the room’s perimeter.
It wasn’t obvious at first glance that the floor had been ripped up, but it wouldn’t pass close examination.
Monica looked at her watch. “C’mon. We gotta go.”
We gathered our gear and evidence and thundered up the steps. I snatched up Gibby’s leash, grabbed his water dish, and shoved him into my car.
My phone rang, and I didn’t bother to pick it up. Fuck. Sumner was gonna be here in minutes.
Monica slammed the door of her car. With lights out, we peeled out on the gravel and lurched onto the road. We’d been on the road for only about thirty seconds when a single headlight appeared behind us.
I slowed and followed Monica to the next crossroads, where we pulled over. From this distance, we could see the house, but Sumner couldn’t see us running dark.
I quickly pulled up the alarm system app and archived the evidence of us entering and exiting the house. I watched the black video, listening to him open the front door.
Another car headed down the road. It was Calvert’s, and he was laughing so hard that he couldn’t speak when he parked beside us.
“Dare I ask what you did to delay him?” I asked.
“I plopped my bubblegum light on.” He pointed up at the magnetic red and blue light on the roof of the car.
“I came out of nowhere, with lights on, like a bat outta hell. He nearly pissed himself. In his rush to pull over, he hit two mailboxes and landed in a ditch. I blew past him, like I was chasing someone else.”
“Sounds satisfying,” I said. That explained the single headlight.
“Very.”
“Was he alone?”
“Yeah. No sign of the woman you’re looking for.”
I wanted to drive up to Sumner’s house and arrest him. I didn’t have enough evidence yet, though, for an arrest warrant. I had to have things airtight.
And more than arresting him, I wanted him to lead me to Viv.