Chapter Ninety-One
Ninety-One
At the bottom of the stairs, Mary unlocked the door to Quaddra’s office and quickly stepped inside.
As she did, she knew that the incessant shiver that had just started running up and down her spine wasn’t just because Quaddra kept the temperature inside his office a few degrees below comfortable.
That did play its part, but the head-to-toe goosebumps, the unsteady hands, the shallow breathing…
all of it was pure fear and anxiety, not cold.
Mary closed the door behind her and took a moment to try to calm herself down. Instinct told her not to turn on the lights. Instinct also told her not to touch anything that didn’t need touching either.
The curtains on the large west wall window were drawn shut, but Quaddra never overlapped one side over the other, which meant that there was always a gap running the entire length of the curtains.
That evening, it wasn’t a large gap – less than two inches, actually – but it was large enough to allow the full moon, high on the sky outside, to project some light into the office.
In seconds, as her eyes acclimatized, the darkness surrounding Mary began to disassemble itself into the shapes of the room – the desk, the computers, the filing cabinets, and the Victorian chest of drawers.
As soon as Mary was sure that she could get to the chest and then the filing cabinet without bumping into anything, she moved to it… fast. At the chest, she lost no time reaching down for the handle on the bottom right-hand drawer and twisting it clockwise.
Click. The filing cabinet to her right disengaged from the wall.
The twenty-one-gun salute inside Mary’s chest became a rapid-fire cannon.
She stood up straight and rushed to the cabinet before pulling it all the way open.
Just as before, the movement triggered the lights on the stairwell to activate, followed by those downstairs.
Against the darkness of the office, the light coming up from the basement burnt at Mary’s eyes, but she didn’t care.
Barefoot and only in her panties, she, once again, took the stairs going down to what she knew was a horror show.
‘Don’t waste any time, Mary,’ she told herself, already activating the camera on her smartphone even before reaching the basement under Quaddra’s office.
She needed to stay focused on the task of photographing those walls.
She wasn’t there to look at those Polaroids.
If she did, she would get emotional, she knew she would, and that would make her lose valuable time.
The air down in the basement felt even colder than in Quaddra’s office, and Mary’s skin, which was already gooseflesh, seemed to enter frostbite mode. Her whole body began shivering, and she had to clench her teeth hard to stop them from clattering.
After circling the workstation at the center of the room to get closer to the wall, Mary held her cellphone at eye level and used her index finger to repeatedly tap the shutter button on her screen.
As she did, she slowly moved the phone around, trying to capture the entire wall, but she was so scared and so cold that after just a few seconds, she didn’t seem to be able to tap the screen anymore – her finger becoming stiff and unresponsive.
‘Fuck this,’ she whispered, and she was sure that she could see her breath in the air.
With shaky fingers, she switched her cellphone camera into ‘video’ mode, tapped the shutter button once, and began shooting a clip.
Mary started at the far left of the wall, being careful to capture an entire column, from top to bottom, before moving on to the next one along, but as she moved her phone down to the bottom of the first column, she noticed something that she hadn’t noticed the first time – a small plastic container – about the same size as a shoebox.
Without pausing the recording, she peeled her eyes away from her cellphone screen to look at the container. Only then did she realize that there were similar containers, on the floor, at the bottom of every column, and they were all lidless.
‘What the fuck?’
She took a step closer, angling her body slightly forward, to look inside the first shoebox – the one at the far left, at the bottom of the first column.
Mary’s heart stuttered… re-engaged… then stuttered again.
Inside that first container, Mary could see a dainty silver bracelet, a hairbrush, a small compact powder case, and a pair of panties – black lace.
‘Oh, fuck me!’ The words came out strangled by tears, because Mary knew exactly what she was looking at.
Those were possessions – victims’ possessions.
In films – and Mary had seen plenty of them – the FBI called them ‘trophies’ and ‘momentos’.
The reason why serial killers took them was because ‘trophies’ symbolized their power and victory over the victim, while ‘momentos’ were souvenirs that helped the killer relive his crimes as a fantasy – the killing…
the rape… the torture… the abuse… everything – over and over again.
The items in those boxes were used to preserve the memories of the victims and to fuel Quaddra’s twisted sadistic desires.
The once victims’ belongings were now nothing more than Quaddra’s personal ‘fetish’ toys.
‘What in the actual fuck?’
Mary felt something somersault inside her stomach and she was forced to pause the recording and take a step back.
‘Don’t puke, don’t puke, don’t puke,’ she told herself, crossing her arms over her stomach and angling her torso forward just a touch.
It took her a few seconds, but the trick seemed to work.
Mary swallowed down the acrid taste in her mouth, breathed out despair, and nodded at herself, as if saying – ‘OK, let’s finish this and get the hell out of here’.
She tapped the record button on her screen once again, but as she tried to pick up from where she’d left off, she heard a familiar voice come from behind her.
‘You shouldn’t be in here, Mary.’