is the set on, with the sound off? She quickly scanned the room, which also contained a rocking chair on an oval braided rug, and a small dresser. Steel security bars were mounted on the inside of the window frames, probably to prevent anyone from leaving that way, as opposed to preventing someone from breaking in. This was Sibby’s room.
Alexa left Sibby’s new cell without searching.
Maybe Veronica’s call to Decell had caused him to warn Fugate to vacate, to move her prisoner. The house sure felt abandoned. As if in answer to the question, Alexa heard, from the back of the house, the loud creaking of a floorboard, followed by the unmistakable sound of a door snapping closed. She pulled out her Glock and held it aimed at the ceiling. “FBI! Come out, I have a gun!”
Getting no response, Alexa lowered the barrel and moved to the swinging kitchen door. Heart pounding from an adrenaline rush, her mouth dry. Breathing slowly, Alexa steadied herself. If she’s armed and it’s between the two of us, I’m the one going home and she’s the one going to the morgue zipped in a bag.
Taking a position of cover behind the jamb, Alexa pushed the door open with her left foot and followed her gun into the kitchen, pivoting and taking in the entire room. The putrid stench of decomposition hit her like the wave of heat from an oven door.
The kitchen and dining room were combined in one large space. There were two partially open doors-a pantry and a broom closet-as well as a third door, this one closed, beside the refrigerator, and a back door with glass panels. Buzzing black flies performed acrobatic maneuvers in the still air over the garbage can.
A bucket filled with rose-colored bleach water rested against the back door, which was locked; the dead bolt was missing the key required to open it. The window over the sink was cracked open, its screen missing, which was obviously how the flies got in.
The flies were gathering on the garbage can. Thanks to its partly open lid, flies crawled in and out freely. Pressing her foot on the pedal to fully open it, Alexa saw a paper sack filled with shrimp husks, the source of the stench.
Stiff spaghettilike strands of a cloth mop filled the sink, its handle resting on the counter. The message machine-also on the counter, beside the telephone-was blinking the number eighteen; the open trapdoors showed her that both its cassettes had been removed. From the time she had called and gotten Nurse Fugate’s outgoing message, someone had removed the tapes in the ten minutes since.
Alexa kept her attention focused on the one door that was closed. Whoever was in the house had to have pulled that door shut from inside, and was hiding behind it.
The floor creaked as she moved carefully to the side of the door. “Nurse Fugate! FBI! I have a gun, come out now!”
Using her left hand, Alexa twisted the knob, pulled the door open, and was surprised to find a set of steep stairs leading down into the darkness. She knew that basements were rare in New Orleans because of the water table. Bodies were buried aboveground in crypts or inside concrete vaults, because a casket buried belowground would, with the first rain, pop up out of the ground like a surfacing submarine.
“Ms. Fugate! You need to come up here. I need to ask you some questions.” Like why you’re running a private insane asylum.
She didn’t see a light switch where it should have been located, so Alexa figured the switch for the light must be downstairs. There wasn’t one good reason to go downstairs alone, and a hundred reasons not to. Even if Fugate was down there with Sibby Danielson, how would Alexa justify coming into the woman’s home and pointing a gun at her? That she’d sweat over later. Alexa, you’ve got some ’splainin’ to do!
She reached her left hand into her purse for the small SureFire flashlight. “I said come on up!”
Alexa took a tentative step down, turned on the flashlight, and aimed it down the steep stairs. She was assailed by flies swarming up into the kitchen, and put her hand up to protect her face. There was a creaking noise behind her, and before she could turn, someone shouldered the door hard, slamming it against her and knocking her down the staircase-her left side, her hip, and her arm hitting the edges.
She saw a flash of light when her head struck the floor. The flashlight and the Glock landed noisily on the concrete floor.
She blinked her eyes slowly, stunned. She knew, lying there, unsure whether she was seriously injured, that Fugate or Sibby must have been hiding in the pantry or broom closet, and she cursed herself for not looking inside them. She had driven that person to the kitchen, where there was no escape without the back door key, so they had shut the basement door and had hidden in one of the tiny spaces.
Lying there dazed, Alexa distinctly heard the skeleton key turning-the door into the basement being locked.
She listened to footsteps moving out of the kitchen and down the hallway. When the front door slammed shut, it sounded a million miles away.
Alexa rolled her head and saw the flashlight a few feet away from her, illuminating a circle of brick wall next to the base of an old furnace. Flies swarmed in the beam. There was an odor of blood and decomposition down here that wasn’t coming from a pile of shrimp.
Lying still for a few seconds taking inventory, Alexa moved her arm at the shoulder, then the elbow, the wrist, and finished by wiggling her fingers and making a fist. It was painful, but nothing was broken except her self- respect.
She sat up slowly, wincing. Her head was sore, bruised, but not wet, so she wasn’t bleeding. Her hip felt numb and she knew that she was going to be bruised from her ankle to her shoulder.
Alexa crawled over to the flashlight, and picking it up, she swung the circle of light around to locate her handgun, illuminating as she did a shelf where ancient spiderwebs covered dust-caked jars of canned fruit and pickles so old the tin lids were painted with the white powder of oxidation.
She shifted the light and saw a single, unlaced white orthopedic shoe with a brick-colored sole, and beyond it the foot it belonged to, looking like an overstuffed sausage. The skin on the leg looked like sun-dried earth. The other shoe was still on its owner’s other foot.
Alexa steeled herself before raising the circle of light.
A female corpse sat on the concrete floor, her shoulders against the wall, legs splayed open. Her open left hand rested beside her leg as though positioned to catch a flipped coin. Her right hand gripped an unusually large aluminum meat-tenderizing hammer that was caked with dried blood, bone chips, hairs, and blackened brain tissue.
Alexa had seen all manner of dead bodies in various stages of mutilation and decomposition, but nothing more horrific than what she was sharing the small basement with.
She raised the beam, whimpered involuntarily, as tears filled her eyes.
The woman’s head had been smashed in with such force that the top of her skull was indented in the way of a rotten rubber doll’s head that some child had pushed her thumbs into and peeled open like an orange. The froglike eyes appeared to be coming out of her cheeks. The open mouth was so completely filled with blackened tongue and animated larvae that the jaw was resting against her chest.
Alexa scooted back against the furnace and, using it for support, made it to her feet.
Based on the shoes, Alexa assumed that this horror was what remained of Dorothy Fugate, since the alternative was that the nurse had gone crazy and beat Sibby to death with a meat hammer, which seemed highly unlikely. Although why Sibby would have positioned the corpse that way was a mystery best left to psychiatrists. Maybe it was some sort of humor springing from an insane brain.
Using the flashlight, Alexa located and tugged on the string to turn on the overhead bulb. Flies reacting to the sudden light filled the room like a cloud. Alexa located her gun and stuck it into her purse’s holster compartment.
Alexa was trembling. She wanted only to get out of there, into breathable air, away from the corpse. She heard a noise and realized that it was the sound of her own whimpering as she moved as quickly as she could up the narrow stairs. Peering into the keyhole, she saw that the key was no longer in the lock. Her flashlight caught a glint of the skeleton key, which had been pushed under the door.
Sibby knocks me down into hell and then is thoughtful enough to leave me the key before she flees the house?
Alexa opened the door and after she slammed it shut she leaned with her back against it and took her first deep breaths since she’d been pitched down the steps. Then she started crying, overwhelmed by the
