“Let’s find out,” said Carmine, standing up and walking to the camouflaged door. “That, I think.” His foot lifted a piece of plumber’s pipe, apparently painted a mottled brown, though it was hard to tell in the absence of light. “The dog knows the way to the door, but it can’t tell her when she’s reached it. When she feels the pipe she knows she’s at the top edge of the door. After that, easy. Or it would have been on other occasions. Tonight she had a spooked dog to deal with, and you could see that it really threw her off.”
“So she’s the second Ghost,” Abe said.
“Looks like it.” Carmine pressed the button on his two-way. “Okay, are we ready for the trip to hell? We have nine minutes before Marciano moves.”
“I hate to undo all Claire’s good work,” Corey said with a grin, scraping leaves aside.
The tunnel was large enough to crawl on hands and knees, and was square; easier, Carmine supposed, to shore up with the planks that covered walls and ceiling. About every fifteen feet was a small ventilator shaft that appeared to be made from four-inch piping. No doubt the pipe barely poked above the ground, had a grating, and wasn’t uncovered until the moment came to use the tunnel. Tread on a pipe outlet, and you wouldn’t even know you had. Oh, the time! The effort! This was the work of many years. Dug by hand, shored up by hand, the rocks and soil hauled away by hand. In his relatively crowded life, Charles Ponsonby would not have had sufficient leisure to dig this. Someone else had.
It seemed to go on forever; at least three hundred yards was Carmine’s guess. A five-minute hurried crawl. Then it ended in a door, not a flimsy wooden affair but solid steel with a massive combination dial and a wheel lock like a ship’s companionway watertight door.
“Jesus, it’s a bank safe!” Abe cried.
“Shut up and let me think!” Carmine stared down the beam of his flashlight, dancing with motes and mites, thinking that he should have known what kind of door it would be to keep contamination out. “Okay, it’s logical to assume that he’s inside and doesn’t know what’s happening outside. Shit, shit, shit! If Claire’s the second Ghost and didn’t use the tunnel, then there has to be another entrance to the killing premises. It’s inside the house and we have to find it. Move your ass, Corey!
Another frantic crawl, followed for Carmine by a headlong gallop down the slope to the Ponsonby house. Lights were going on as people woke to the wail of sirens; the lane was choked with cars, an ambulance stood by. Biddy thrashed, snarling, in a dog-pound net, while Claire stood blocking Marciano’s path.
“Cuff her and tell her the charges, Danny,” Carmine gasped, grabbing at a porch pillar to steady himself. “She covered the secret door with leaves, and that makes her an accessory. But we can’t get into the killing premises from the tunnel, he’s got a bank vault door blocking it. I’ve left Abe and Corey guarding the tunnel – get some men up there and relieve the poor guys so they can wallow in tomato juice.” He rounded on Claire, who seemed fascinated by the handcuffs, feeling what she could of them with spidery fingers. “Miss Ponsonby, don’t make yourself more than an accessory to murder, please. Tell us where the house entrance to your brother’s chamber of horrors is. We have absolute proof that he’s the Connecticut Monster.”
She drew a sobbing breath, shook her head. “No, no, that’s impossible! I don’t believe it, I won’t believe it!”
“Take her downtown,” Marciano said to two detectives, “but let her have her dog. Best get her to untangle it, it’s pretty mad at us. And treat her right, make sure of that.”
“Danny, you and Patrick come with me,” said Carmine, able to stand unsupported again. “No one else. We don’t want cops all over the house before Paul and Luke start examining it, but we have to find the other door before Chuck can do anything to that poor girl. Who is she?”
“We don’t know yet,” Marciano said miserably as he followed Carmine inside. “Probably no one in her home is up yet, it isn’t even six.” He tried to look cheerful. “Who knows, we might give her back to her folks before they even know she’s gone.”
Why did he think it was in the kitchen? Because that was the room wherein the Ponsonbys seemed to live, the hub of their universe. The ancient house itself was like a museum, and the dining room was no more than a place to park their concert hall speakers, the hi-fi and their record collection.
“Okay,” he said, leading Marciano and Patrick into the old kitchen, “this is where we start. It was built in 1725, so its walls should sound fragile. Steel backing doesn’t.”
Nothing, nothing, nothing. Except that the room was freezing because the Aga stove wasn’t alight. Now why was that? Discovery of a gas stove hidden by paneling and a gas hot water cylinder in a closet had shown that the Ponsonbys didn’t roast in summer, but summer was a long way off. Why therefore was the Aga out?
“The answer has something to do with the Aga,” Carmine said. “Come on, let’s concentrate on it.”
Behind it was its water reservoir, still hot to the touch. Groping, Patrick’s fingers found a lever.
“It’s here! I’ve found it!”
Eyes closed, breathing a prayer, Patrick tugged. The whole stove moved outward and to one side on a pivot, smoothly, silently. And there in the stone chimney alcove was a steel door. When Carmine,.38 drawn, turned its knob, it opened smoothly, silently. Suddenly he hesitated, slipped the pistol back into its holster.
“Patsy, give me your camera,” he said. “This isn’t a shoot-out situation, but Danny can cover me. You wait here.”
“Carmine, that’s an unnecessary risk!” Patrick cried.
“Give me your camera, it’s the weapon of choice.”
An ordinary wooden door stood at the bottom of a flight of stone steps. No lock, just a knob.
Carmine turned it and stepped into an operating room. His eyes took in nothing save Charles Ponsonby bending over a bed on which lay a moaning, stuporose girl already stripped naked, bound by a broad canvas band that confined her arms from just below the shoulders to just above her wrists. Ponsonby had removed whatever he wore for his forays into sleeping homes, was himself naked, his skin still wet in places from a quick shower. Humming a happy little tune as his experienced hands assessed his prize’s conscious state. Dying for her to rouse.
The camera flashed. “Gotcha!” said Carmine.
Charles Ponsonby swung around, mouth agape, eyes blinded by the brilliant blue light, no fight in him.
“Charles Ponsonby, you are under arrest on suspicion of multiple murder. You don’t have to say anything, and you are entitled to legal representation. Do you understand?” Carmine asked.
It seemed not; Ponsonby compressed his lips and glared.
“I’d advise you to call your lawyer as soon as you reach downtown. Your sister’s going to need one too.”
Danny Marciano had opened another door and now emerged carrying a shiny black raincoat. “He’s alone,” he said, holstering his weapon, “and this is all I could find. Put your arms in it, you piece of shit.” Once he had bundled Ponsonby into the coat, he took out his handcuffs. The ratchets clicked cruelly tight.
“You can come down, Patsy!” Carmine called.
“Jesus!” was all Patrick could find to say as he gazed about; then he went to help Carmine wrap the girl in a sheet and carry her up the stairs, Marciano and Ponsonby in their wake.
When they put him in the caged back of a squad car, Ponsonby seemed to come back into the real world for a moment, watery blue eyes wide, then he flung his head back and began to laugh, a shriek of monumental mirth. The cops who drove the car away kept their faces expressionless.
The victim, her identity still unknown, was rolled into the waiting ambulance; as it moved off, Paul’s and Luke’s van arrived, scattering the residents of Ponsonby Lane, who had gathered in murmuring, marveling groups to watch the circus at number 6. Even Major Minor was there, talking avidly.
“May I have my camera back?” Patrick asked Carmine as they entered the killing premises, Paul and Luke behind them.
Everything was either white or stainless steel silver-grey. The walls were paneled in stainless steel; the floor was what looked like grey terrazzo, the ceiling steel interrupted by a blaze of fluorescent tubes. No dirt from the tunnel could penetrate this glaringly pristine place, for that door was airtight as well as a foot thick. Vents and a faint susurration betrayed very good air-conditioning, and the room smelled clinically clean. The bed was on four round metal legs, a stainless steel platform surmounted by a rubber mattress sheathed in a rubber cover, over which was spread a fitted white sheet, not only clean, but ironed. The ends of the restraint were pushed into grooves along the edges of the platform and locked into place by rods that were slightly smaller in bore than the grooves. There was also a stainless steel operating table, bleakly bare. And, more horribly explicit, a meat hook and hoist suspended from the ceiling above a declivity in the floor that held a big drain grille. There were glass-fronted cabinets of surgical instruments, drugs, injection equipment, cans of ether, gauze swabs, adhesive tape, bandages.
