caller. We should call it in, ask for backup. Let the guys with the big guns do the job they’re trained for.
Another gunshot goes off, obliterating my doubts. We draw our weapons. Another gunshot.
“Jesus,” Alan mutters. “What if he’s executing prisoners in there?”
“Go!” I say.
James shoves the gate open and we make a beeline for the building’s front door. I try the knob.
“Locked!” I whisper. I wave to the right. “Let’s go around.”
We head at a dead run toward the right side of the building. Sweat runs freely down my scalp. My heart hammers in my chest. My teeth chatter, and I feel cold and hot at the same time.
We get to the roll-up door. “Try it,” I tell James.
He reaches down and, to our surprise, it opens without difficulty.
I recognize the space immediately. My heart does a jig. This is where the darkness came.
“This is where he brought me,” I say. “Entry into the main part of the building is through that door.”
James rushes forward and tries it. Again, it opens without a problem. My finger throbs and, for a moment, I wish I could take a Percocet after all. Bells of alarm clang away in my head.
“Too easy,” I tell James, putting my free hand on his back. “Let’s go slow.”
He frowns back at me. Nods. He takes the lead, entering. I am behind him. Callie and Alan are behind me. We head down the hallway, passing the three doors that I remember, turning right to find the stairs. We climb the stairs until we reach the top. To the right is the door that leads to the hallway my cell was in. To the left is another door.
“Left one,” I whisper.
James opens it and we enter a longer hallway. Doors are on both sides. My stomach churns when I see the padlocks and hasps.
How many? Ten doors on each side? Are they all occupied?
I ignore my nausea and the yammering. We head down the hallway until it turns, and then there are only two doors, one at the end and one on the wall to the right. The doorway to the right is open. James puts a finger to his lips and inches toward it. I smell blood and death, that scent of shit and copper. James enters the room, gun trembling in his hands. I follow. The smells are stronger here.
I almost faint when I see the two tables and the two women there.
I lurch forward and vomit. Not because of the women with the fresh bullet holes in their foreheads, but because of the memories. My vision swims, and I stagger to one knee.
“You okay?” Alan whispers.
I can’t respond. I point out to the hallway. We have another room to clear.
Then a sound of another gunshot, the fourth and last, louder this time. James and Callie race out the door toward the other room. I hear a door open and then I hear nothing. I force myself to ignore the flashing white lights behind my eyes. The meadow calls, maybe my baby is there waiting, but now is not the time. I walk out of the room on unsteady legs. The other door has been flung wide.
“What is it?” I call out. “Is everyone okay?”
“Come and see,” Callie calls back softly. “Come and see.”
I enter the room with my head and finger throbbing. It’s a large room, made into an office. It’s stark. The floor is uncarpeted, the walls bare and unpainted. A single file cabinet sits next to a cheap faux-wood desk. There’s a computer monitor on the desk. A man is there too. His brains are splashed on the wall behind him.
“Coward,” James mutters. “He must have known we were coming.” He sounds frustrated. I understand. I wanted to kill Dali too.
“What about it?” Callie asks. “Do you recognize any part of him?”
I lean forward. I see an obliterated forehead above a set of surprised eyes and a slack mouth. I put him in his late forties to early fifties. His hair is in a crew cut, and it’s a semi-handsome but mostly unremarkable face. All of these things fit, except for perhaps the most important thing: the thing I saw and kept to myself. I wasn’t sure why I did it, before. Now I do.
“Yes,” I say. “That’s him. That’s Dali.”
It’s a lie, but that’s okay. I think I understand everything now.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
We sit in my living room, Tommy, Kirby, and I. Bonnie is being watched by Alan and Elaina for a few days. They think it’s to give me time to recover from everything that’s happened. The truth is that it’s to give me time to do what must be done.
“He knew you were coming because he was tracking the GPS chip in your phone,” Tommy says. “The techs didn’t find anything when they checked out your phone because there was nothing to find. He just locked on the signal and kept an eye out. A little reverse telemetry gave us what we need.”
Kirby examines me with an unreadable gaze as she cracks her gum. “You sure about this, boss lady? I have no problem with it, but this is new territory for you.” She nods a head at Tommy. “And you.”
“I’m sure,” I reply.
Tommy says nothing.
“Okeydokey,” Kirby says, grinning. “Let’s saddle up.”
Eric Kellerman. That is the name of the man with the obliterated forehead. He was forty-eight years old. He was an orphan, adopted by no one but the city, put out to pasture when he was eighteen. There’s not much after that but an excess of evidence.
His fingerprints matched the unknowns that were inside the body bags. Videos and photographs of the car accidents were found at the Los Angeles location, along with some poetry he’d written about how watching a car crash was better than having sex with any woman. There was a trunk containing over fifty thousand dollars in cash. Finally, in a desk drawer, held inside a plastic bag covered with his fingerprints, was the severed end of my own finger. It was all incontrovertible.
“The symphorophilia is what really clinches it,” James had remarked. “The statistical probability that someone else would have that particular paraphilia at that location combined with all the other factors is next to nil. He was Dali.”
The victims were the worst. Three women, all missing for a various number of years, most of them in worse shape than Heather Hollister. The husbands of these women were rounded up. Some broke quickly, some broke slow, but all of them broke. They were cowards at the core, narcissists whose biggest regret was being caught. They each had the same story, just sung to a different tune.
There were no clues to the locations of the Oregon or Nevada buildings. That’s okay. Tommy, Kirby, and I found them ourselves. It took a little work, but we have them, and we’ll provide an anonymous tip once we’ve done what we need to do.
I asked for time off, and it was given without any fuss. I think AD Jones was too relieved at my request to be suspicious. I hope. Director Rathbun wanted to do a press conference first, but he relented when I insisted I was in no shape to get in front of the cameras.
“Fine,” he said. “Go home; rest. Get yourself together. But don’t let the hair grow in too much before the conference. It’s a great image. We’ll use it to our advantage.”
It wasn’t all a lie. I did take a day or two to rest. Then I sent Bonnie packing and pulled in Tommy and Kirby and told them everything: what I knew, what I suspected, what I was unsure of. They were skeptical at first, until I told them about the thing I’d seen. After that, they shut up and listened.
Tommy had been the one to figure out that Dali was tracking the GPS chip in my phone. It’s how Dali knew that I was closing in on the LA location. Once again, simplicity had been his brilliance. He knew the techs at the FBI would check out my belongings for bugs, so instead of installing one, he just figured out how to track what was already there.
Tommy had used his knowledge and technical contacts to reverse-engineer the GPS. This enabled us to track
