Feeling around on the wall perpendicular to the door, he found the light switch and flicked it on. A stretch of hallway that ran straight to the back of the house was instantly illuminated. Morris clutched the rifle, fully expecting to see Wolfe coming at him with a gun or a knife or some other awful instrument of death designed to kill him where he stood.
But there was nobody. Just the tasteful entryway of a big house.
“Sheila!” Morris stage-whispered. It sounded ridiculous somehow. “Sheila!”
He walked down the hallway, his finger hovering over the trigger. The Remington’s trigger pull was heavy. It minimized the possibility of unintentionally firing a shot. He was especially happy about this since his hands were shaking. He moved swiftly from room to room, continuing to whisper Sheila’s name. Nobody responded.
The door to the master bedroom was open, and he entered. Turning the light on, he let out a breath when he saw that nobody was waiting for him, ready to blow his head off. In actuality, the bed was neatly made, the furnishings surprisingly nice even though the large room was minimally decorated. He crossed to the bathroom ensuite, but nobody lay in wait there, either. The room was spotless and smelled faintly of disinfectant.
Three more bedrooms yielded nothing-two were empty, and one held a desk and nothing else. Another bathroom, also pristine. At the back of the house, the enormous kitchen displayed state-of-the-art appliances, gleaming as if they had never known the joy of cooking.
Something was off about this house, and Morris couldn’t put his finger on it. It came to him a moment later.
The entire space was completely devoid of personal items. No photos on the walls, no clothes in the closets, no dishes in the sink.
Did Wolfe even live here? Why buy a house like this and then rent a crappy one-bedroom apartment in Seattle? What was the point?
Back in the main hallway, he spied a connecting door to the garage. He opened it and poked his head inside, his eyes widening at the sight of Wolfe’s vintage Triumph motorcycle.
The kid was here somewhere. But where? Morris had checked the whole house. Frustrated, he shut the connecting door and stepped back into the main hallway.
Something flashed in the corner of his eye and he turned toward it. A little green light was blinking on a keypad that was mounted to the wall a few feet away. Beside the keypad was a door he must have passed earlier, but apparently hadn’t noticed. It looked out of place. Keypads belonged on the outside of the house, to keep folks out, but this one was inside. Frowning, he walked toward it and tried the handle. Locked.
His heart, already well into tachycardia, kicked into an even higher gear. No locked door had ever seemed so sinister. The goddamned front door had a crappy lock and no alarm system, but this one was bolted with a keypad? Why? What was behind it? Closet? Crawl space? It was impossible to know without either looking at the blueprints or looking inside. Morris wished he had the blueprints.
He rattled the handle again but it didn’t budge. There was only one way to find out what the door was concealing. Insanely, Monty Hall’s voice from that old game show Let’s Make a Deal echoed in his head. What’s behind door number one?
Damp with sweat, Morris stood back as far as he could before hitting the wall behind him. Aiming the Remington, he took a deep breath and pulled the trigger.
The sound was louder than anything he could have anticipated. Bits of wood flew everywhere, one fleck hitting Morris’s cheek just below his eye socket. The rifle’s crack was scary and exhilarating. Obviously, he’d never fired a rifle inside a house before; it was crazy to think he’d just done it in Wolfe’s house in the middle of the night. The neighbors had to have heard that. The old biddy next door was probably ripping out her curlers.
The door handle was gone. In its place was a huge, gaping hole. Morris kicked out his foot and the door swung open easily.
It was a basement. Morris was stunned. Nothing on the outside of the home indicated the house even had one. A set of stairs covered in gray industrial carpet led straight down to the bottom. His heart accelerated once again. Nothing good could be down there.
“Sheila!” he yelled at the top of his lungs before fear could overtake him. Trotting down the stairs as fast as his stiff knees would allow, he felt half out of his mind with panic. A few steps down, he yelled again, the rifle cocked and ready. He had three rounds left. If Wolfe was holding Sheila captive, he wouldn’t hesitate to pump all three of them into the bastard’s body. “Sheila, are you down here?”
As if to answer his cry, he heard a whimper, a small sound, a pitiful sound, but it pierced his heart.
Sheila.
Turning the corner into the main room, not waiting to fully process what he was seeing, Morris aimed the rifle and fired.
CHAPTER 43
U nrecognizable voices were speaking in hushed tones when Sheila awoke, but it was the strong smell of antiseptic that told her she was somewhere new.
“I’m telling you, Kim, it was the creepiest shit I ever saw,” the man said in a low voice. “All these masks, like real human faces, lined up neatly. A whole shelf of them. At first I thought they were actual heads with the eyes gouged out. I didn’t think they could make masks that looked so real. Sick motherfucker.”
“What about the wall?” The female was whispering, but there was no mistaking the horror in her voice. “Jesus, they think there could be a dozen women inside there. And those are the ones he kept. Who knows how many others there were?”
Sheila blinked, her eyes crusty with sleep. A pretty blonde was sitting at her bedside, wearing a fitted jacket, a small black notebook in hand. Her young face was expectant, and she was staring at Sheila with an intensity that was frightening.
“Stop looking at her like that.” The dry, male voice came from somewhere in the corner of the room. “You’re gonna scare the shit out of her.”
Too late. The panic of not knowing where she was had already begun to ball up inside her. What was this place? Was Ethan here? Where was Morris?
The blonde put her hand gently over Sheila’s fingers. “It’s okay. You’re safe.” A smile lit the younger woman’s pretty features. “Welcome back, Dr. Tao.”
Sheila turned her head and saw the medical equipment, the light-mint-colored walls, the large window with the blinds rolled all the way up. A snippet of sunshine streamed into the room through a hole in the clouds. Her hand was stinging and she looked down. An IV needle was burrowed into the back of her hand near her bruised wrists. The tears came then.
“I’ll give you a minute.” The blonde retreated into a shadow before Sheila could say anything.
A nurse clad in cheerful pink scrubs entered the room. She headed briskly toward Sheila, checking the monitors. “She’s awake? How wonderful. Hi, honey.” She dabbed gently at Sheila’s cheeks with a warm, moist cloth. Turning to the man and the woman in the corner, she said, “You two wait outside until the doctor’s had a chance to look her over.”
They didn’t move fast enough and the nurse jerked her thumb. “Out. Now. ”
The story came out in a steady stream, though Sheila honestly didn’t feel there was much to tell. She was so, so tired, and she thought at one point she might have actually fallen asleep midsentence. If she had, the police detectives who had come to take her statement were polite enough not to say so. The young, kindly doctor-Sheila couldn’t remember his name-had explained that her crushing fatigue was normal after such a stressful experience, and he advised her to sleep as much as she needed to. They’d given her a mild sedative, which helped stave off the bouts of panic. There were no dreams.
The doctors had left, the detectives were gone, and the nurse had dimmed the lights in the room. Visiting hours were over and the hospital was quiet. The clock on the wall told Sheila it was 9:00 p.m., but time felt meaningless to her. She lay on her side, her back to the door, staring out the window at the moon. She wished to God the sun- which she hadn’t seen for three weeks until earlier today-would come back out. The darkness was awful.
