chemist.”
I glanced around again, and something by one pair of cuffs glinted in the light and caught my eye. I edged closer to it. It was a contact lens.
I pointed it out to Villaverde, and—given that he had gloves—he collected it and slipped into an evidence bag.
I thought about the timing, and despite the fact that whoever was tied up down here could well turn out to have nothing to do with Michelle or the kidnapped scientists or the shoot-out upstairs and that they could all be separate deals that the bikers were involved in, the timing was troubling me. These guys seemed to have too many balls in the air for these events not to be connected. I found myself wondering if the massacre upstairs didn’t have something to do with whoever had been living off the cheap burgers down here, and, if so, how it could possibly relate to Michelle. There were still too many unknowns, which was frustrating me. The key was figuring out who had hired the bikers. Which got me thinking about who else might know that.
“You said this was the mother chapter of the club?” I asked Villaverde as we made our way back upstairs.
“Yeah, why?”
“So there are other chapters?”
“A few,” he said, scrolling through the ATF file again. “Here we go. The club has three other chapters scattered across the state and, weirdly enough”—he looked up—“one in Holland. As in Holland, Europe.”
“We need to talk to the nearest ones, the ones they might be closest to. They might know who these guys were working for.”
Villaverde’s brow furrowed with skepticism. “Sure, but club business like this—it’s usually compartmentalized. I doubt other charters would be in on what these guys were up to. And even if they were, they wouldn’t talk to us about it.”
“Maybe after what just happened here . . .”
Villaverde still seemed doubtful. “It’s not in their DNA.”
I nodded in the direction of the bike shop. “What about the prospects? Even if they weren’t in the circle of trust yet, one of them could have heard something. And one of them might know who was being kept down here.”
“Absolutely. They seem pretty shaken up as it is, so it should give us a leg up into scaring any leads out of them.”
As we got back to the main room, I saw the bloody corpses again and it made me think about Soulpatch/Scrape. I was getting a bad feeling about him, and an uncomfortable urgency was goosing the hairs on the back of my neck.
“We need to find Scrape,” I told Villaverde.
“His jacket’s got his last known address, last known girlfriend, parents. We’ll have something soon.”
I thought about the bullet hole in his shoulder. “He would have called in to give these guys a heads-up on what happened at the terminal. Which means the psychos that did this might know about him. They might even know where he’s headed. If they wiped these guys out, they might have the same thing in mind for him. We need to move fast.”
I felt a mounting frustration. We needed to find him, like, now. There was a solid chance he’d be able to tell us what we needed to know about what this was all about—and who these new players were.
Just then, I heard some commotion outside the clubhouse’s entrance.
“No, ma’am,” a man was insisting with a raised voice. “I said you can’t—”
“Don’t tell me what the hell I can and can’t do,” a woman cut him off forcefully. “This is my husband’s place and I want to see him.”
Two uniforms appeared in the doorway, visibly trying—and failing—to stop a woman who was pushing and shoving her way past them. She slipped through and barged into the room. She looked like she was in her early forties. She was curvy and had auburn hair that was streaked with highlights, and she was in low-cut jeans, snakeskin boots, and a denim shirt that was tied in a knot around her midriff. She wasn’t someone you’d describe as pretty, but she had something else going, a kind of raw, savage appeal that was hard to ignore.
Her eyes immediately latched onto the butchered biker, and she stopped in her tracks and just froze, dropping her bag, her hands rushing up to cup her face.
“Wook!” she screamed, tears bursting across her face. “Wook, oh Jesus, no, Wookie baby, no no no . . .”
She wobbled and looked like her legs were about to give out from under her. I rushed across the room to help her, with Villaverde close behind.
“Ma’am, you shouldn’t be here, please,” I said as I reached her, placing myself between her and the biker’s body. “Please,” I repeated, putting my hands on her shoulders.
“I don’t . . . ,” she muttered, the words trailing off as tears streamed down her face now. Then her voice came back, full of rage. “What happened? What did they do to him?”
I pulled her in and held her for a moment, trying to calm her and give her a chance to catch her breath. “Let’s go over there,” I said, guiding her into the meeting room while making sure I stayed between her and the dead body. “Come on.”
I couldn’t avoid passing close to two of the other dead bikers and did my best to shield her eyes from them, but she still caught sight of them and flinched with each new shock.
I pulled up a chair for her, facing away from the main room. “Please, sit down, ma’am.”
I asked her if I could get her some water—I don’t know why we always do this, as if water has some magical curative power that lets people just brush away the most traumatic events. In her daze, she nodded a yes. Villaverde went out to get some from the bar.
I had to tread softly, but I also needed to get anything useful from her, fast. I felt the clock was ticking on Scrape, and we were playing catch-up. She said her name was Karen, she was Wook’ s wife—Wook being Eli Walker, she informed us, the club’s president. One of the prospects had called her as soon as the grisly discovery had been made, and she’d immediately rushed over.
I tried to answer her questions as gracefully as possible, within the limitations of what I could actually tell her, but very quickly, I had to steer her away to what we really needed to know.
“We need to find Scrape,” I told her.
She looked at me in total confusion, like I was suddenly discussing the weather.
“Why?”
“He’s still out there,” I replied. “He’s wounded, and I think the guys who did this might be after him. We need to find him first or he might end up dead, too.”
She looked at me, jittery and nervous, then asked, “Wounded?”
“He’s been shot.” I let it sink in, then pressed on. “Do you know how to contact him? Do you have the number of his cell?”
Her eyes darted away and she blinked a few times, finding it harder now to keep eye contact with me.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “This isn’t about you. This is about keeping Scrape alive. I just need to know how to reach him.”
She hesitated again, then shook her head. “I don’t have his number. But if he was out doing something for the club,” she added with a look that made her subtext about it being something illegal clear, “he wouldn’t be carrying his cell anyway. He’d have a fresh prepaid for the job.”
I turned to Villaverde. “You find a phone on Walker?”
“No.”
I frowned, feeling time slipping away from us, like a sea that was receding before a tsunami. “What about a safe house, somewhere Scrape might go to wait for help. A doctor the club works with, someone’s house maybe? A girlfriend?”
She was still visibly nervous and kept shaking her head like she didn’t know anything.
“Please, Karen,” I insisted, gently. “We need to find him.”
“We’ve got a friendly doc at St. Jude’s who doesn’t ask too many questions, but Scrape wouldn’t go there, not if he has a bullet in him.”
“Where then? Think, Karen.”
