An Evil Mind (39 page)

‘How much further?’ Taylor asked.

Lucien turned and looked out his window before carrying his gaze across to the one on the other side.

‘Not long.’

The road swerved left again in a half-moon shape, following the contour of the river on their right. The nicely cropped fields were all but gone. Now they had only dense forestland on both sides of the road.

‘Keep your eyes peeled for a sharp left turn that’s coming up, Robert,’ Lucien said. ‘Not a dirt path.’

Hunter slowed down and drove for another one hundred and fifty yards.

‘Yep,’ Lucien said, and nodded, ‘that’s the one. Right ahead.’

Hunter bent left.

The road, now flanked by more forestland, seemed to stretch forever into undiluted darkness. Since they’d left the airport, they hadn’t crossed a single vehicle in their path. No one in their rear-view mirror either. The further they went, the more it felt like they were driving away from civilization and into some sort of twilight world. One thing was for sure: Lucien knew how to pick a secluded hiding place.

They drove for another mile before the road turned into a bumpy dirt path. Hunter shifted down and wondered if he should engage the four-wheel-drive just in case.

‘We’re lucky,’ Lucien said, ‘it looks like there’s been no rain lately. These roads can easily turn into a nightmare of water pools and deep mud when rain comes.’

Hunter slowed down a little more, moving from one side of the road to the other, choosing the best path, trying to avoid making the car jerk too much.

‘There’s a right turn coming up,’ Lucien announced, tilting his head to one side to get a better look at the windscreen. ‘We’ve got to take it, Robert.’

‘This one?’ Hunter asked, pointing to a turn about twenty-five yards ahead of them.

‘That’s it.’

Hunter took it.

They were now clearly driving through the middle of nowhereland. The last sign of human life they’d seen had been miles back. If a bomb exploded right where they were, no one would hear it. No one would care. No one would come.

The road got bumpier still. The next mile seemed to take them an eternity to cover.

‘One more left turn coming up,’ Lucien said, ‘and we’ll be almost there, but keep your eyes open, Robert, it’s a tiny path, and it’s quite hidden away.’

Hunter saw it after another fifty yards, but he almost missed it. It really was a minute path. If they weren’t specifically looking for it, no one would ever notice it.

Hunter veered left. The trail was barely wide enough for the Jeep to fit through, and everyone heard the shrubs and bushes scrape the side of the vehicle.

‘Ooh,’ Lucien commented, ‘I don’t think the air traffic controller back at the airport will be happy about this, but then again, since his car was commandeered by the FBI, I’m sure it will be federally insured.’

This time, Hunter had nowhere to go to swerve away from the bigger bumps and holes. Good thing that they were in a brand-new car and the suspension was strong and steady.

They had to sit tight inside the shakemobile for another half a mile, until the road came to an abrupt end. Hunter put the car in neutral and looked around him. Taylor did the same. There was nothing but forest surrounding them.

‘Did we take a wrong turn somewhere?’ Taylor asked.

‘No,’ Lucien replied. ‘This is it.’

Taylor looked out the window again. The Jeep headlights reflected on the shrubs and trees.

‘This is it? Where?’ she asked.

Lucien nodded toward the front of their vehicle. ‘We have to walk the rest of the way. You can’t get there by car.’

Ninety-Two

Hunter was the first to leave the Jeep. Once he was out, he unholstered his weapon and opened the back door for Lucien. Taylor followed shortly after.

‘Now what?’ she asked, looking around her.

‘Through there,’ Lucien said, indicating a few loose tree branches that’d been piled up against each other just ahead and to the right of where the Jeep was parked.

‘We’re going to go deep into this forest with no light and no shoes?’ Taylor asked Hunter, looking down at their bare feet.

‘Not much I can do about the shoes,’ he replied, before reaching back inside the car for the glove compartment. He came back with a Maglite Pro Led 2. ‘But we do have light.’

‘That’s handy,’ Taylor said.

‘I knew night was approaching,’ Hunter said. ‘And I wasn’t counting on Lucien’s hiding place being very straightforward. So I also asked the air traffic controller for a flashlight.’

‘Robert Hunter,’ Lucien said, nodding and pursing his lips as if he was about to whistle. ‘Always thinking a step ahead. Too bad you didn’t foresee the shoe problem.’

‘Let’s go,’ Hunter commanded.

They assumed the same formation as when they were leaving the plane. Hunter took point, Lucien came second, and Taylor stayed four to five steps behind Lucien, her weapon always trained on his back, just a couple of inches below his neckline.

Hunter quickly removed the branches Lucien had indicated, and it revealed a well-worn trackers’ trail.

‘Just follow it,’ Lucien said. ‘The place isn’t very far from here.’

Despite already being in a hurry, Hunter’s gut feeling filled him with an extra sense of urgency, as if something he couldn’t quite pinpoint was off, but he didn’t have much time to dwell on it.

‘Let’s move,’ he said.

The flashlight had an ultra-bright and wide beam, which made things a little easier.

They took to the trail and, surprisingly, Lucien didn’t try to slow them down with the excuse of his shackled legs. He didn’t have to. Pebbles and little rocks and sharp-edged dried sticks forced Hunter and Taylor to move a lot slower than they would’ve liked.

They had covered only about thirty yards when the track swerved hard right, then left, and then it really felt as if they had crossed some sort of twilight gate. All of a sudden the bushes, trees and scrub gave way to a plain field – a clearing in the middle of nowhere.

‘And here we are,’ Lucien said with a proud smile.

Hunter and Taylor paused, their eyes looking around in disbelief.

‘What the hell is this?’

Ninety-Three

Hunter shone his flashlight on the structure standing before them.

It was a stiff and squared, ivy-covered brick house, with white Romanesque columns that must once have been imposing outside the front entryway. Now, only two of the original four were still standing, and those had cracks running from top to bottom.

The house had been built one hundred years earlier, and then reconfigured again twice after that, so whatever remained of its first incarnation as someone’s grand hillside home was now merely memory. Add to that the disfiguration caused by the elements and a total disregard and lack of care for a property, and you’d end up with the carcass of a house they had in front of them – a battered shell of a home of long ago.

Three out of the four outside walls still remained, but they all had several holes and major fissures in them, as if the house belonged in a warzone somewhere in the Middle East. The south wall, on the right side of the house, had almost entirely crumpled onto a pile of rubble. Most of the internal walls had also collapsed, giving the place nearly no room separation, and filling it with what looked like destruction debris. The roof had caved in almost everywhere, with the exception of the old living room at the front of the house, the corridor beyond it, and the kitchen on the left, where it was still partially in place. Weed and wild vegetation had grown through the floorboards and among the debris just about everywhere. The windows were all broken, and some of the window frames had been ripped from the walls as if by some sort of internal explosion.

‘Welcome to one of my favorite hiding places,’ Lucien said.

Taylor blinked the surprise away. ‘Madeleine?’ she yelled out, taking a step to her right.

No reply.

‘Madeleine?’ she yelled again, this time even louder. ‘This is the FBI. Can you hear me?’

She got nothing back.

‘Even if she’s still alive, she won’t be able hear you,’ Lucien said.

Taylor looked at him with fuming eyes. ‘This is bullshit. There’s nobody here.’

‘Are you sure about that?’ Lucien questioned.

‘Look at this shithole. This is not a hiding place. How can you hide or keep anyone locked in a place without doors or walls? Where anyone can simply walk in, or out?’

‘Because no one knows this place exists,’ Hunter said, trying to analyze the area surrounding the house. ‘And no one will ever come looking for it out here.’

‘Right again,’ Lucien said, looking at Taylor. ‘Hence the term
hidden
place.’

‘This is bullshit.’ Taylor couldn’t hide the anger in her voice. ‘You’re telling us that you left Madeleine somewhere in this ghost shell of a house – no windows, no doors, no walls, and she never walked out?’

Lucien’s gaze went to Taylor and right then his eyes looked like dark vials filled with venom.

‘Not somewhere inside it, Agent Taylor.’ He paused and ran his tongue over his bottom lip like a lizard. ‘Buried underneath it.’

Ninety-Four

Lucien’s words sent fear crawling like a rash across Taylor’s skin. Her now confused gaze immediately returned to what was left of the house, before moving to the soil surrounding it.

‘Well, not exactly buried,’ Lucien clarified. ‘Let me show you.’ He lifted both cuffed hands and pointed toward the north side of the disfigured structure. ‘Through there.’

In a hurry, Hunter and the flashlight took point again. Lucien and Taylor followed.

‘My friend’s grandfather,’ Lucien said, as they started walking, ‘and by friend, I mean the person I got this place from, was a hardcore, old-school patriot. I was told that he had his best years in this house during the USA versus USSR era. You know, “death to all communists” kind of thing. And he really subscribed to that ideology. And there was plenty of talk about a very possible atomic war.’

As soon as they reached the side of the house, Hunter and Taylor understood what Lucien was talking about.

On the ground, halfway along the north wall, they could see a very large, external, thick metal, basement-entry double door. The doors were locked together by a Sargent and Greenleaf military-grade padlock, very similar to the one they’d found in the house in Murphy.

‘My friend’s grandfather,’ Lucien continued, ‘in his paranoia and deep belief that an atomic war was inevitable and imminent, refurbished the whole place, extending and adding a substantial bomb shelter to the original basement.’ He nodded at the padlocked doors. ‘The house might look like an earthquake site, but the shelter has more than lived up to its expectations.’ He indicated the padlock. ‘The key for that is on the keychain.’

Taylor immediately reached for it.

‘Which one,’ she asked urgently, holding up the bunch of keys.

Lucien leaned forward and squinted at them for a second. ‘The sixth one starting from your left.’

Taylor selected the key and reached for the padlock.

Hunter and Lucien waited, and as they did, Hunter’s awkward sensation that something wasn’t quite right came back to him. He looked around him for an instant.

‘What’s at the back of the house?’ he asked.

Lucien studied him for a moment, and then let his gaze move toward the far end of the house.

‘A very badly treated backyard,’ he replied. ‘There’s a large pond as well, which now looks more like a deep pool of mud. Would you like me to give you a tour? I have all the time in the world.’

Click
. The padlock came undone. Taylor unhooked it from the doors and threw it away before grabbing one of the handles and pulling it toward her. The door barely moved.

‘Heavy, aren’t they?’ Lucien commented with a smirk. ‘As I’ve said, this isn’t a regular cellar, Agent Taylor. It’s a fallout shelter.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Hunter said.

Taylor stepped back while Hunter first pulled the right door open, then the left one.

They were immediately hit by a breath of warm, stale air. The doors revealed a concrete staircase that took them down a lot deeper than one would’ve imagined. There were at least thirty to forty steps.

‘Deep, isn’t it?’ Lucien said. ‘It’s a well-built shelter.’

Hunter went down first, and they all moved down in a hurry.

At the bottom, they were greeted by another heavy metal door with a very sturdy lock.

‘The seventh key,’ Lucien announced, ‘the one to the right of the one you used on the padlock.’

Taylor moved forward and unlocked the door before pushing it open.

The air inside the dark room beyond it was leaden with dust, and felt even staler, but there was something else in the air, something that both Hunter and Taylor could easily recognize because they’d been around it too many times.

The smell of death.

Ninety-Five

Sometimes sour, sometimes putrid, sometimes sickly sweet, sometimes bitter, sometimes nauseating, and most of the time a combination of everything. No one can tell you what death really smells like. Most would say that there’s no specific smell to it, but anyone who’s been around it as many times as Hunter and Taylor had been would recognize in just a fraction of a second, because as soon as you smell it, it chokes your heart and saddens your soul in a way that nothing else does.

As they sensed death, Hunter and Taylor were filled with a disquieting fear, and the same thought exploded inside both of their heads.

We’ve wasted too much time. We’re too late.

Hunter shone the beam of his flashlight into the room and moved it around the place almost frantically.

It was empty.

There was no one there.

Lucien took a healthy deep breath, like a hungry man taking in the aroma of freshly cooked food.

‘Wow, I’ve missed this smell.’

‘Madeleine?’ Taylor called into the room, her gaze chasing after the beam of the flashlight. ‘Madeleine?’

‘It would’ve been very stupid of me if I had left Madeleine locked inside the very first room one comes to in the shelter, wouldn’t it?’ A cryptic smile graced Lucien’s lips.