Chapter 15 #2
The others followed. There were no gunshots, no sounds of fighting.
They had made it inside without waking anyone or setting off an alarm.
Magda had noticed on her other visit that the woman who owned this house was like most people who did things they didn’t want the police to know.
The security company stickers on windows and the alarm panels attached to walls were for show, connected to nothing and meaning nothing.
Nobody wanted police responding to an alarm.
But now there were cheap alarm systems a person could install herself and receive the alarm on her cell phone with a recorded video image of the intruders.
This woman should certainly be smart enough to know those were available.
But Magda didn’t have time to think about that now.
Magda had her pistol in her right hand. She used her left to point silently at each of her four men, and then in a direction to search.
She sent Daniil and Dmitri toward the stairs to the bedrooms, Mikhail and Maxim through the dining room and living room to the front of the house.
Magda searched the pantry and closets, standing aside and flinging each door open with the gun pointed at belly height, and then going to clear the small office off the living room.
After about ten minutes, Daniil came to her and said, “She’s not here, but the place seems occupied. We haven’t found any cameras or silent alarms.”
Magda patted his cheek to signal that was enough, and walked out into the living room as the others came and joined her there. She said, “Okay. You four take the bedrooms. Get some sleep while you can. I’m going to look around a bit, and then sleep down here to wait for her.”
The men obeyed her order. She wondered what they thought of it.
Like all men, they would be sure to think it would be wiser if they were down here on the ground floor ready to overpower the woman.
But being here in this house had made Magda remember that other night she had spent here.
The only reason she had lived through it was that she had been sleeping on the ground floor with Albert McKeith when the woman had killed the ones sleeping upstairs with smoke and carbon monoxide.
The woman wasn’t here right now, and if she had been here, she couldn’t fight back the same way twice, but she would do something.
Magda waited until the four men were upstairs, and then she got up and walked from room to room.
She passed familiar things she had seen years ago—the office, the living room, the little area off the kitchen with the benches and the rubber mats and coat hooks.
What was the term? Mudroom. But all the time she had a destination and she was moving toward it.
Magda opened the door beside the pantry and saw the long, straight series of steps leading down into the dark of the basement.
After she and Mr. Porchen and the others had ambushed, swarmed, and beaten the woman, they had wanted to be sure she couldn’t escape while they slept.
They had taken her down into the basement, chained her to pipes along the wall, gone back upstairs, run a power saw through the top of the steps so the whole length of them crashed to the floor, and then closed the door at the top so the whole basement was in total darkness.
She remembered the loud clap of the wooden stairs hitting the floor, and the feeling she had as she walked away that there was no possibility of the woman escaping.
Magda had thought about this place many times in the three years since then.
She remembered feeling uncomfortable that the woman had taken so many blows without crying out, weakening, or telling Mr. Porchen even the tiniest bit of information about anything.
Seeing her left in this terrible captivity in the dark had made Magda smile in relief.
Magda knew, positively knew, that now the woman would weaken, give in and reveal what she knew, and Mr. Porchen would get lots of money.
Mr. Porchen was a boss who shared, and this would be enough to make them all rich.
Magda remembered seeing the others go upstairs, leaving her alone with Albert.
The night started full of joy. Albert was a treat to look at, and he was a manipulator, and over the weeks while they had searched for this woman, he had studied Magda and learned exactly what she liked, and how to make her happy.
That night was their last and the best. It had never occurred to Magda that if given the slightest chance, this woman would kill everyone in the house.
Magda listened for any sounds of movement from her new crew upstairs but heard nothing.
She knelt on the kitchen floor above the stairs, turned on her phone, held it beside the pair of thick vertical boards that held the steps, and examined them closely.
The stairs were made the same, but the whole structure was new.
She saw that what held it in place were a set of six quarter-inch bolts, and the bolts were silvery and clean and new.
The wood had been painted, but she could see a spot where the paint on the back of one of the steps had been brushed on too thin, and the wood beneath it was new.
She stood and walked down the steps. The basement was cool, because the walls were made of big stones joined with mortar.
There were no windows, so she knew it was safe to turn on the flashlight app on her phone and throw the bright white beam on it.
The space was as she had remembered it. There were a couple of old workbenches on the far end, with a vise and sharpening stones that must not have been used in a generation, and some paint cans, brushes, rollers, and pans.
She walked past them and then moved along the stone wall with her light, as though she had just unearthed this new place.
It almost was a new place to her. The last time she had seen it, this cellar had not yet been used to kill her Pachan and crew.
It had been a neutral place until they had used it as a cage for the woman they’d captured.
She passed the second pipe that the woman had been chained to that night, and there was the old furnace, and beside it the outline of a coal bin, many years after the coal furnace had been decommissioned and replaced by an oil furnace.
In the light of her phone, it looked like a giant octopus, the coal-burning part with a door in its belly, and above it, the several rounded heating ducts stretching up like tentacles toward the upper floors where the brass registers let the hot air pour into the rooms of the house.
That night, the woman had burned something in the furnace that filled the ducts with carbon monoxide that killed the men on the second floor and nearly killed her and Albert on the first floor, and probably half-killed the woman chained down here.
Magda had observed enough about the woman to know she had expected to die too.
Magda opened the old iron furnace’s door and looked in, but there was nothing to see anymore, nothing to learn.
Whatever the woman had burned had turned to ashes, and the ashes removed by a cleaning crew, or maybe by the workmen who had replaced the stairs.
She climbed them carefully, up to the small landing, and into the kitchen.
She closed the door and gave it a second push to be sure it couldn’t swing open again.
Magda walked back along the hall from the kitchen toward the front of the house. She was going to sleep in the small room off the living room that the woman used as an office, because it had an oversize leather couch to sleep on, and a door with a lock on it.
She reached the living room, and she was conscious that it seemed lighter than she had expected.
There was a faint glow from the street lamp about a hundred feet away that fell across the front curtains.
Then she noticed a shadow she didn’t remember across the curtain.
Her hand went to the back of her waistband and gripped the pistol.
She studied the shadow for a moment. What was throwing that shadow?
The shadow moved and she brought the pistol around her body and held it against her right leg as the figure’s arm rose and the fist knocked on the door.
The woman wouldn’t knock on her own door. Magda said in English, “Who’s that?”
The man’s voice was quiet, but there was an urgency to it. “Miss Whitefield, please don’t be startled. My name is Brian Finlay and I’m in trouble. Karen Alvarez sent me.”
Magda held onto the pistol. This was something unexpected, but there was so much to take in and understand, and it had to be done quickly. Miss Whitefield must be the woman who lived here. He obviously thought that Magda was her. Was this a threat or an opportunity? She struggled to think ahead.
Magda hid the pistol back in her waistband and opened the door. “Come in and sit on the floor over there.” She pointed at a spot in front of the couch.
He kept talking nervously. “I was very careful coming here, and I’m sure nobody could have followed me. I looked in your garage the night I got here and saw it was empty, so I put my car in it and slept there for a few days while I waited for you to come back.”
“What did she tell you was going to happen when you got here?”
“That once you knew the trouble I was in, you would want to help me.”
“With what? How can I help you?”
“She said you knew how to make people disappear.”
Magda said, “I would need to know more. What are you running from?”
“My old boss. He’s trying to have me killed.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s a long story.”
“It’s a long night,” she said.
“I was living in Chicago,” he said. “For about the last ten years. I was working as an executive assistant.” Even in the dim light he sensed from the way she tilted her head that she wasn’t sure what that meant in his case.