Chapter Eighty-Seven
Eighty-Seven
Mary sat in her en-suite bathroom, with tears streaming down her face, and the door securely locked behind her. Quaddra had left the house just twenty-five minutes ago and since then, all that Mary could do was cry.
She knew that she needed to get a grip on herself, she needed to calm down and think of what to do next, but how the hell do you calm down and get a grip of yourself when you just found out that your husband, the man that you’ve been sharing a bed with – a life with – for over a year and a half, had a fucking chamber of horrors just under your house.
‘Did he kill all those women?’ she asked herself in thought.
The answer came from her internal voice, like a sucker punch to the gut.
Of course he did. Why the fuck else would he have their photos in his basement…
photos showing different stages of their torture?
Not to mention that fucking video. We didn’t look, but do you really think that that was the only video he had saved in that computer?
He probably has a video for each of them.
Mary closed her eyes for a moment then opened them again, but it didn’t really matter. What she saw down in that basement kept on playing and replaying inside her head like a horror film on an endless loop, regardless of whether her eyes were open or not.
‘This can’t be fucking real,’ she whispered to herself, as she slapped her face as hard as she could a couple of times. ‘Wake up, Mary… fucking wake up. This has to be a nightmare. What else could this be?’
Reality, her internal voice replied.
The horror film kept on playing inside her head in its never-ending loop. Then, all of a sudden, it paused.
Mary’s body stiffened to nearly spasms.
‘Holy shit… the printouts… the newspaper clippings,’ she said out loud.
Down in that crazy basement, Mary’s eyes had settled on a couple of different printouts and newspaper clippings for just a few seconds. The printouts all seemed to be internet articles of some sort… the clippings, from different newspapers around the country.
She splashed her face with some cold water and tried to think.
Her memory was usually very good with things like that.
She could read something today, and still remember a lot of it in a few months’ time.
She had no idea of how she did it. It wasn’t down to some technique or anything.
It was just something that she was born with and it happened effortlessly – when she wasn’t freaking out, that was.
‘Calm down and you’ll remember,’ Mary told herself and immediately went back to her breathing exercise, counting back from ten. This time, she had to do it twice before she felt her heart slowing down to a steadier rhythm.
Mary hadn’t stopped to properly read the printouts, but her eyes had scanned through what looked to be news headlines, right at the top of the printouts. All she needed was to…
Mary gasped, sucking in a lung full of oxygen.
She immediately exited the bathroom and rushed to her bedside table, where she retrieved pen and paper before writing down a name – Kelly Holder, City Terrace, California.
That had been one of the names that she had read on the headline on one of the printouts – Kelly Holder, from City Terrace, in California. She was certain of it.
‘C’mon,’ she urged herself. ‘Think… think.’
It took her almost a full minute, but there it was again – as if the horror film inside her head had re-engaged, only to slow down as her eyes moved from one printout to the next.
‘Aileen Thompson,’ Mary said the name out loud as she wrote it down, just under Kelly Holder. ‘From Chicago, Illinois.’ Those were the two names that she’d read on that wall.
In a flash, Mary reached for her cellphone, opened her internet browser, and typed the name ‘Kelly Holder’, then ‘City Terrace’, then ‘California’.
It took her cellphone browser just a second to return a results page. The headline for the first link was – ‘Kelly Holder, missing in Los Angeles’.
Mary tapped on the link and a new webpage loaded onto her cellphone screen.
Kelly Holder, a twenty-three-year-old actress, who lived in City Terrace, an unincorporated area of East LA, was reported missing by her flatmate on 19 July 2024.
Mary’s eyes widened at the screen. That was over a year ago. She and Quaddra weren’t married yet, but they were certainly dating already.
She returned to the article, which went on to explain that Kelly was originally from Spokane in Washington, but she had moved to LA to pursue her dream of being an actress.
She’d been living in Los Angeles for only a year when she went missing.
The missing persons investigation was still ongoing.
The article ended with a recent photo of Miss Holder.
‘Oh fuck!’ The word dribbled out of Mary’s lips as her eyes settled on Kelly Holder’s picture. In it, Kelly was wearing a white sweater and smiling at the camera. Her black hair was tied up into a messy bun on the top of her head.
Mary had only looked at the photo on the wall in the basement for maybe a couple of seconds, if that, but she was sure that it was the same girl.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’
Mary cleared the search box and typed in the second name she could remember: ‘Aileen Thompson’. She then typed in the word ‘Chicago’. A second later, she had another results page. The headline for the first link read – ‘Aileen Thompson, twenty-six-year-old dancer, disappears without a trace’.
Mary tapped on the link and it was as if she was watching a nightmare come alive right before her eyes.
The article was pretty similar to the one that she’d just read about Kelly Holder.
Aileen Thompson, a twenty-six-year-old pole dancer from Chicago, was last seen on 15 May 2022.
She worked at a gentlemen’s club called PoleKatz in the downtown area of Chicago, and she had disappeared after finishing her Saturday shift, in the early hours of Sunday morning.
The article also ended with a portrait photo of Aileen.
Right then, Mary remembered that she had all of Quaddra’s traveling dates, right from when they’d started dating, marked down on the calendar in her cellphone. Knowing exactly when Quaddra would be away or not was important to her plan.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’
Mary called up her calendar app and swiped back until July 2024, and as she did, her heart stuttered. The day that Kelly Holder was reported missing – 19 July 2024 – had been a Friday. Quaddra had arrived in Los Angeles at the beginning of that same week, and he’d stayed until the weekend.
Mary was about to put her phone down, when she remembered something else… something that sent a cold shiver running down her spine.
‘The blood,’ she said, her eyes fixed on the calendar app on her screen. ‘Oh fuck!’
July 2024 was when Denise had turned up at her old apartment in Bayview.
That was the trip that Quaddra had made to LA and when he got back, Antonia had found specks of blood on the sleeve of one of his running shirts.
Quaddra had told her that the blood belonged to an older gentleman, who’d had a nosebleed while running at the beach, but that had to be a lie.
That was probably Kelly Holder’s blood – the woman that Quaddra had murdered that week.
A drop of water fell on Mary’s cellphone screen and she blinked. Only then did she realize that she was crying.
‘No, no, no,’ she tried telling herself. ‘This isn’t happening. This isn’t for real. It can’t be. This is just a sad coincidence.’
Well, that fucking basement under his office sure as shit is for real, the voice inside her head volleyed back.
And those photos on the wall are no fucking coincidence.
They are all Polaroids – the same type of photos that you use to register the bruises on your body.
The reason why you use them is because they can’t be altered…
they can’t be photoshopped. Those are the real deal…
you know that. And shall I remind you of that video?
That gargling noise? That poor woman’s face as he sliced her throat open?
Those images seemed pretty fucking real to me.
Right then, something else came back to Mary.
In her cellphone’s calendar, she only had Quaddra’s traveling dates since they’d started dating, but Quaddra kept a paper calendar on the wall in the kitchen, so that Antonia and Gabriela knew when he’d be away.
As the old year ended and the new year started, Mary had seen Antonia change the old calendar for a new one and just out of curiosity, she’d asked Antonia if she threw the calendars away.
Antonia had replied that she never did. They were all in the attic storeroom, above the large three-car garage outside.
Instead of going into the kitchen and asking Antonia where exactly in the storeroom the old calendars were, Mary decided to go look for herself. Being busy with something would calm her down and give her time to think. Plus, Mary asking about the old calendars would certainly make Antonia wonder.
In the storeroom, it didn’t take Mary long to find the box labeled ‘Calendars and Misc’. Antonia was an extremely organized person and the storeroom looked more like a file room than anything else. Every box in there was properly labeled and neatly stored in shelves and modules.
Mary pulled out the box from the shelf and sat on the floor with it before throwing its lid to one side and rummaging through the large wall calendars. The one from 2022 was the second from the top. She took it out and flipped the pages until she got to the month of May.
As her eyes found what she was looking for, bitter bile dripped from her throat into her mouth. Aileen Thompson was last seen on Sunday, 15 May 2022, in Chicago, as she finished her pole-dancing shift. Quaddra had arrived in Chicago on Friday, 13 May 2022, and he’d stayed until Tuesday, 17 May.
Another coincidence? the voice inside Mary’s head asked.
Mary felt the room begin to spin around her.
How could any of this be real? How could someone like Quaddra, the most understanding and the kindest person she’d ever met… someone who had never, not even once, shown an ounce of violence while around her, turn out to be this kind of monster?
Because evil doesn’t always wear an ugly mask, the voice inside her head replied. Its best disguise is hiding in plain sight.
All of a sudden, things began making a lot more sense inside Mary’s head.
The reason why Quaddra hated publicity… the reason why he stayed well away from social media…
the reason for his obsession with anonymity…
the reason why he had a very small group of friends…
had nothing to do with the fact that he was a billionaire.
He was simply keeping the odds in his favor.
The less recognizable he was, the easier it would be for him to approach strangers in places like strip clubs and seedy bars.
It was then that Mary remembered something else that practically froze the blood in her veins.
‘Oh, hell no!’ she said as she got to her feet. ‘No, no, no, no.’
A second later, she was running out of the garage, fueled by pure terror.