“Malick, are you okay?” Sarah asked, answering lest she miss him again.
“Why haven’t you been answering?” Malick asked back just as breathlessly, “Never mind,” he went on, “Spalding’s compound has been found!”
“What?”
“Some girls, one of them Karl Stanver’s daughter escaped and they came into a police station last night. The local sheriff’s office thought they were full of shit until they finally looked up Stanver and then called in State Police. They are searching the house right now!”
“Where is it?” Sarah asked as she patted her clothes to make sure her car keys were on her. The briefest of thoughts of whether she was in any state to drive, drifted into her mind and left as quickly, this was way more important than her state of inebriation. Besides, she hadn’t drank in hours and she had slept since; she was fine, surely?
Malick told her where the house was and Sarah punched in the information on her phone's navigation system as he talked.
“I’ll meet you there in two hours,” she said as she hung up.
“I assume Spalding is not there?” Tyler’s voice startled her from the darkness. She spun to face him. He was dressed in only a pair of tight black boxer shorts and she couldn’t help but admire his body as images of their night together came back to her.
“No, but this is another step closer. I’m thinking he left there in a hurry once he knew the girls had escaped and hope something incriminating will have been overlooked.”
“Maybe,” Tyler shrugged, his eyes betraying doubt.
“You don’t think so though?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t, but that’s not my main concern,” Tyler replied.
“Then what?”
“I find it hard to believe anyone escaped from Spalding.”
“Are you suggesting these two girls might be in cahoots with Spalding?”
“Maybe, perhaps unwillingly, but yes.” Sarah felt her stomach lurch. What if he was right, what if this was just the next part of Spalding’s game with them? How were they going to know? And there was no legal reason they could hold these girls in custody, not to mention it would be a terrible thing to do to them if they were telling the truth.
“I gotta get over there,” Sarah said absently, “I have to see the place for myself.” Tyler nodded,
“I’ll get onto my contacts and find out where it is and get there with the rest of the press,” he said. Sarah smiled at him, glad that he hadn't asked her for the address but also fully sure he was going to follow her car to find out where the house was.
“See you out there,” she said and set off for her car. She could feel his eyes on her body as she left and she smiled a moment before getting on with the more serious work.
Malick came out from the Spalding house to meet her when she arrived. The place was so rural and she doubted anyone else had seen this house save from the air perhaps in many decades. How had Spalding come across it, she wondered.
“It’s worse than we thought,” Malick said as she got out of the car.
“How so?”
“There are bodies down in the cellar, lots of them.”
“How did they die?”
“Gassed.”
“Do we know who they are?”
“Working on it, but I can guess they will be on the list of missing people the Spalding case is looking into,” he said.
“Prints?”
“Surprisingly few in the main house,” Malick said, shaking his head. “Plenty down below but my guess is we’ll match those to the dead people before long.”
“How many?” she asked.
“Ten”
“Jesus,” Sarah said. Ten, just like that, she thought, and then Carson Lemond too. How high Spalding’s actual total must be.
They walked the house in the forensic suits amidst the working team around them. The house was clean and tidy but it had no sense of having ever been lived in. The area below ground was extensively remodelled and Sarah felt surely someone had helped Spading build it, that was one lead they could look into. It was luxurious as dungeons went but that didn’t change the face of things with all the dead bodies down there.
“Whatever it was, it was fast acting,” Malick said of the gas through his mask. Sarah looked around and saw the people dead sitting in chairs or sofas, one had even died while taking a shower. “This is where the two girls escaped,” Malick pointed out the hole in the wall they had made and she leaned in and looked up to see daylight up above.
“Any of them could have escaped if they knew the gas was coming,” Sarah said. How horrible but in a way it was probably a blessing they didn’t think they could escape just before they died.
“Agent Malick?” a voice said and they both turned to see one of the forensics people.
“Yeah,” Malick said.
“Initial reports are back on the fingerprints you wanted from upstairs,” she handed him an envelope. Malick took it and thanked her and then said to Sarah,
“We better go outside to open this.” He explained to Sarah that he had asked for the first samples to be sent to the lab in Quantico for analysis right away as soon as Malick heard about this place.
“Well, let’s see what we got,” Sarah said when they were out in the open air once more and had their masks off. Malick pulled the paper from the manila envelope and nodded before handing it to Sarah.
She poured over it hungrily, looking for the name of Dwight Spalding but instead there was only one name.
“The only prints in the whole of the upstairs house are Carson Lemond’s!” she said. It felt like another defeat and she tossed the paper on the ground in anger and walked away from Malick. He looked after her a moment before bending to retrieve the sheet and putting it back in the envelope.
As Sarah had spun around, her phone flipped out of her pocket and onto
