Beneath a Buried House (Detective Elliot Mystery Book 2) (28 page)

Again Cunningham did not answer.

Elliot handed him the keys. He seemed okay, so Elliot left him there and walked back to his own car.

After a short drive, Elliot parked his car and walked into the Hive, a bar where music always played. He pushed through the crowd, making his way from one end of the bar to the other. Along the way, various girls stepped in front of him, trying to dance, but he kept moving, hoping to see what he was looking for: the sensuous face of Cyndi Bannister. It was where he’d run into her before, and he’d hoped it might happen again, but of all the people crammed into the place that night, Cyndi was not among them.

Elliot made his way to the bar, and when the bartender saw him, her mouth began to move, but he could not hear her. The band they had on stage, a bunch of guys wearing baggy jeans and black T-shirts, had their amps cranked up too high. Elliot pointed to the kind of beer he wanted.

Elliot stayed at the club long enough to finish the beer he’d ordered, then walked out. Several minutes later, he pulled into the driveway of his home in Broken Arrow. He didn’t know what to do next, so he sat there in the darkness, letting the events of the past few days run through his head, like some kind of late movie that he’d forgotten to shut off. Cyndi had to be somewhere. He couldn’t just give up. He had to find her.

There were other places to search, bars and clubs where people gathered to unwind with music, companionship, and booze. He punched the garage door opener, then traded the company car for his truck.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Elliot had stayed out late looking for Cyndi, and he hadn’t found her. Morning had arrived too early. But he wasn’t walking on firm ground with Lundsford, and he couldn’t complicate things by missing the nine o’clock appointment the captain had set up for him.

Just off Sheridan Road, Elliot found a street that led him to the address Captain Lundsford had given him, that of a newly constructed home built for Ashton and Monica Wheeler. Ashton didn’t live there anymore. He was dead.

Elliot pulled into the circular drive and parked, but he didn’t feel like going through with this. His mind was still on Cyndi. The Llewellyn case still concerned him as well. He couldn’t help feeling as if the captain had asked him to abandon an unfinished job.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Elliot left his office and took the elevator to the parking garage. Darkness had set in, and as he walked across the concrete floor toward his car, he checked his watch. It showed 7:00 p.m. He’d spent the entire day following dead-end leads that’d come from his interrogation of Monica Wheeler, and as he climbed into his car and fumbled the keys into the ignition he began to wonder if his fate was to be assigned to one unsolvable case after another.

Elliot wrapped his fingers around the key but hesitated as a sensation of impending danger tiptoed around his senses. He wondered if someone had tampered with the car, but then realized it was a ridiculous notion brought on by fatigue and frustration. He turned the key, but just as he twisted it he heard a noise. It was his phone. He flipped it open and brought it to his ear and the sensation of not-right intensified. “Elliot.”

“I suggest you pay attention this time.”

The voice that came over the phone was deep and riddled with bass, like the confidence-robbing sound of Enrique Savage, and while a tingling of nerves buzzed up Elliot’s spine, he wondered if Enrique was in the car with him, if he’d somehow busted out of his cell and was in the backseat, hunkering down with a satisfied grin on his pasty white face, and a gun pointed at Elliot’s head.

Elliot twisted around, looked in the backseat. It was empty. He scanned the garage but saw no one. “Who is this?”

The caller did not answer right away. Elliot could hear him breathing in the background.

“If you want to see your girlfriend again,” he continued, “do exactly what I tell you. The slightest deviation will not be tolerated.”

The phone went dead.

Elliot hit MENU then CALLS, but the phone number had been blocked. The phone dropped from his hand and fell to the seat. The car was running but he hadn’t put it in gear. A current of fear ran through him “My God. What have I done to you, Cyndi?”

In a near involuntary action, Elliot slid the car into gear and backed out of the parking space. He dropped it into drive and pressed the accelerator, driving into the night. He had no idea where he was going.
Do exactly as I tell you
, the voice had said. But how could he when the caller hadn’t told him anything? He’d left him hanging, like he was supposed to figure it out on his own by utilizing the kind of hoodoo magic Captain Lundsford was so fond of ridiculing.

Elliot drove until a particular brand of sign, glowing through a window, caught his attention, and he had to confess to not knowing exactly where he was, but he’d found a bar and right now that’s exactly where he wanted to be. He parked and went inside. He couldn’t remember having been there before, and several of the rough-looking patrons turned their heads as he walked by, which told him it was one of those places you didn’t go unless you belonged there. He didn’t really care right now. He went to the bar and ordered a beer, then sat a table in the corner.

Elliot’s present state of mind didn’t lend itself to the accumulation of details, but what he’d seen behind the bar didn’t require a heightened state of awareness to get his attention. Pinned to the wall alongside an array of required permits, was a sign of hate, a swastika. These people had no use for him, but he had news for them. It was right back at them two fold. He reached inside his coat and readied the Glock.

Elliot finished the first beer and was halfway through the second when a couple of guys with shaved heads decided it was time he left their little hideaway. They got up from their tables and walked over to his.

One of them leaned forward, placing his hands on the table. “You look a little out of place, mister. Are you lost, or just stupid?”

 That’s when Elliot’s phone rang. He knew who it had to be, which meant he had to take the call, and he didn’t have time for small talk with his new friends. He wasn’t sure what came over him at that instant, a sort of craziness to be sure, but his next actions were those kind that exist only within the confines of our imaginations, that secret world of fantasy where we play out ridiculous scenarios, knowing full well that we would never actually do such things. Elliot flipped open the phone and brought it to his ear, and at the same time he ripped the Glock from its holster and planted the barrel firmly against the forehead of the man who had spoken to him. As a silence fell over the bar, Elliot spoke into the phone. “Elliot.”

The other party didn’t answer, but Elliot knew he was there. He could feel his presence. Keeping both the Glock and the phone in place, Elliot pushed away from the table and stood. He forced his opponent to sit in a chair at the same table, then he slowly backed out of the bar. Luckily, his welcoming committee didn’t try to follow.

Once he was outside, alone on the sidewalk, Elliot pressed the phone closer to his ear. “Who the hell are you,” he asked, “and what do you want from me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Detective Elliot. Your lack of good judgment got us in this little jam. Now it’s up to you to get us out of it.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

The voice that came over the phone was just as intimidating as before, but this time Elliot detected something that he hadn’t picked up on earlier, a trace of apprehension and a mechanical quality, as if the caller was speaking into some kind of voice-scrambling device. Elliot thought about the listening equipment the individual who’d parked outside his house had dropped as he’d sped away. The equipment could have been purchased at the same outlet. He made a mental note to do some checking around, find out who’d recently acquired such things in the Tulsa area.

Once again Elliot’s phone relayed the distorted voice. “Are you listening?” Without waiting for an answer, the caller instructed, “This is what I want you to do.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

Douglass Wistrom pressed his face against the cold steel of the gate and peered into the black expanse ahead of him. The compound was supposed to be a self-sufficient community, like a town unto itself where the followers of the Church could live in harmony with church and community being one and the same, but it didn’t work out that way, becoming instead just another eccentric neighborhood in a town where normalcy was the exception and not the rule. Most of the cottages were empty now, and the smattering of small white houses that were still occupied needed fresh paint and a host of other repairs.

Just outside the gates of the dwindling community, Douglass stood quietly in the darkness, which he’d been waiting for, contemplating what he might do once he reached the reverend’s house. As he started to climb the fence, however, his phone went off. He wanted to believe that he’d simply forgotten to turn it off, but to be honest he hadn’t even considered it, and he cursed quietly as its ring tone reverberated through the night, breaking the silence like an alarm tripped by a careless burglar. He wrestled it from his pocket, its light shining like a beacon as he flipped it open and brought it to his ear. But the familiar voice that came over the phone eased his anxiety, and he had to admit to being both surprised and relieved that she had called him. Hearing her voice brought a touch of sanity to an otherwise desperate situation.

Being in Donegal had unraveled his nerves, affecting him on levels of consciousness that he’d buried, and for good reason, but he’d be all right as soon as he got out of this place, and back to never-never land. He paused as he realized he’d never said that before. Those were her words, and she had been just as shocked as he was that he’d used them. But a lot had happened in the last few days. He wasn’t himself, or was he? Was he the man behind door number one or the imposter inside box number three?

Nothing made sense anymore. He’d dreamed of this, going home and experiencing things left behind. In a moment of grandeur, he’d entertained the idea there would be an article, even a Pulitzer in it. At the very least he’d thought it might be, if not nice, then enlightening, but now that he was here, he couldn’t wait to get back to the comfort of their covenant, their make-believe world where they never spoke of what had come before. He was unnerved over the location she’d chosen, but his feelings at this point were of little consequence. To put it bluntly, he had no choice in the matter. And it wasn’t that far from his present location. The houses she’d spoken of were just on the other side of the wooded area east of the compound.

Douglass Wistrom turned away from the gate to the compound and started toward the trees. Going through the woods at night would not be easy. Clouds covered the sky, restricting the available light to nearly nothing, but there had been a pathway that’d run from the old house where he’d lived to the church grounds, and if he could find that, the trip would be manageable. He searched the edge of the forest, using the light from his cell phone occasionally when a particular area looked familiar, and a few minutes later he found what he was looking for. The pathway had not disappeared or even faded, but was even more obvious than he’d remembered. It was still being used.

He stepped onto the path, which led him into the trees, and about twenty minutes later he stood on the other side of the wooded area just above a clearing where several houses sat in the distance, barely visible in the darkness. The scene played with the eye, leaving what he saw hovering somewhere between imagination and reality like the faded ghosts that they were.

He made his way to the largest structure, the only two-story in the bunch, and as he drew near, the appearance of the place sent a shiver up his spine. It looked just like the house he’d lived in as a child. Over time, he’d driven that which had been from his mind, the troublesome memories being replaced by a peaceful existence of love, his own bedroom, and a closet full of clothes for school. But as he stared at the house, trying to convince himself that it wasn’t the same place, was in fact some specter arising from deep beneath a buried house of his nightmares, he began to suspect that in some sort of hellish purgatory it all still existed. That he needed only to make a wrong move, take a step in the wrong direction, and he would fall through time to be caught in the midst of some lost dimension where all that he had run away from still lived.

Stumbling across the weed-tangled lawn, worrying perhaps too much about being watched by someone lurking in the black wilderness that surrounded the area, Douglass reached the house and climbed onto the porch. Living in make-believe, it seemed, had inspired paranoia rather than the confidence of someone in control of his own destiny. Once again, he chanced using his cell phone for light, and when he flipped it open, he saw that there was no door blocking the entrance, but just a hole full of darkness where it had been. He did not step readily through the portal, but slowly pushed his head into the void and called out. “Hello, anybody here?”

The lack of a reply only served to deepen his anxiety. He wondered, and not for the first time, why she had chosen such a place. To safeguard their anonymity, they kept no physical ties and met only when the situation called for it, and even then only in predetermined locations. In the past few days, the need for such get-togethers and the frequency of their occurrences had increased dramatically, which could mean only one thing: their lives, make-believe or not, were in jeopardy.

Disregarding his internal alarm, which was telling him to get the hell out of there, Douglass Wistrom stepped inside the house and took a few steps across the wooden floor of the living room. He called out again. “Anybody here?”

As he’d feared, again he received no answer, and he began to worry that he’d gotten the location wrong. But she’d been quite specific in her instructions, and he’d followed them to the letter. He flipped open his phone and shone the faint light around the room, half expecting to see old man Saucier, back from the dead and crouched in a corner, a sly grin spreading across his ghoulish face, or perhaps Reverend Coronet, his arm outstretched and his hand readied to clamp on Douglass’s shoulder, adding a personal touch as he buried a knife in his back. But he saw no one. The room was empty. He shook his head. She’d been quite unhappy about his killing Saucier. He’d tried to explain that he had not intended to. Things just got out of control. He’d panicked.