Possession (10 page)

* * * *

Sitting quietly in the back, J let the sounds from outside filter through to her, allowing the familiar noises to wash over her like a calming background. She could think better when there was some chatter going on. Dead silence was too eerie, too unnerving to try and concentrate. J had learned long ago that her powers worked at their peak when she had some kind of background sound to help keep her focused.

All too soon Sam pulled up to the apartment building, a swear word on his lips. “What?” J asked, curious.

“Road construction,” Kiel told her. “They’ve blocked off the street running in front of the building. We’re going to have to go in the back way.”

Getting out on her own, J waited for Kiel to take her arm to guide her. “Watch your footing,” he warned her. “There’s all kinds of shit piled up back here.”

At one time the apartment had been surrounded by a privacy fence, with a gate at both the front and back entrances. The little post where residents would swipe their keycards was gone now. The tall wrought-iron gates sagged on their hinges. Kiel pushed the right side open as he guided J. Sam followed directly behind.

Crime scene tape also covered the back entrance into the building proper. Tearing it off, Kiel jiggled the handle to find it locked. “You’d think they would have given us a key to get in,” he grumbled.

“Why don’t you just pop in on the other side and open it like you did last time?”

He glanced at her in surprise. A tiny smile was curling up the corners of her mouth. Shaking his head in amusement, Kiel said, “This’ll just take a sec,” and disappeared. A moment later, the door rattled then opened. Sam took her elbow and led her inside.

The oppressive atmosphere of the place had not dissipated since their last visit. Standing in the lobby near the elevators, J slowly turned around, cocking her head slightly to listen. The two men watched her, waiting, not interrupting.

“Let’s go back up to the third floor.”

“You sure?” Kiel whispered. There was something about this place that made them all want to whisper, even though they were the only people in the building. At J’s nod, he instructed his brother, “Can you take her? I want to go up there first to have a look around. Make sure it’s safe.”

“Yeah. Go ahead.” Taking J’s arm, Sam headed for the stairwell next to the elevators. Once they had begun up the three flights, Kiel disembodied himself and materialized in the hallway in front of 316. Squaring his shoulders, he drifted through the door.

Morning sunlight beamed through the windows and balcony doors, but the brightness failed to dispel the gray-black fog of death in the place. He went from room to room, noticing a spot of blood here, a telltale stain there—errant bits and pieces that the cleanup crew had missed. But it didn’t matter. Their job had been to get rid of as much of the evidence as possible so that gorehounds wouldn’t be able to break inside and cart off any grisly mementoes to keep as souvenirs or sell on eBay. Anyway, in another couple of months it wouldn’t matter. The building was going to be razed and a new condominium built over the site. If he and Sam couldn’t find the answers by then, they would be SOL.

He heard Sam call out his name. He went to meet them in the hallway.

“Anything?” Sam asked.

“Nothing, but it still feels stuffy in there.” Kiel looked at J, who was wearing a frown on her lovely face. “What is it, J?”

“I keep getting shadows.”

“What do you mean, shadows?”

She shook her head slowly, then walked past him into the apartment. “Did you find out who owned this place?”

“Yeah.” Sam pulled out a little spiral notebook from his inner jacket pocket. Flipping the pages until he found the right one, he said, “Three-sixteen was leased to a Mr. and Mrs. Randall Pommerantz. They moved out after the company bought the property four months ago so they could rebuild.”

“What company?”

“Six Star. It’s listed as a limited partnership. I looked into it. They own at least two dozen condos along the Eastern and Western Seaboards. They’ve just invested in two others, plus this one, along the gulf. The spokeswoman I talked to on the phone said they were wanting to expand their holdings all the way down into Mexico.”

J waved a hand as if brushing away a fly. “It’s not the owner of this complex or this particular apartment who had a hand in those killings.” Lifting her face slightly, she held out her arms and began walking toward the hallway, back to the bedroom where the triple homicide had taken place.

Both men followed her. They could tell she was picking up something, but what they couldn’t tell. They knew, however, that she would let them know when she was ready.

“You doing okay?” Sam whispered to his brother as they followed behind. They had parted company a little past one that morning when Kiel had gone back to the hospital room to spell him and let him go home to grab a few winks.

Kiel nodded. “This place gives me the creeps.”

“Still getting that suffocating feeling you had the other day?”

“Yeah. Not as bad, but bad enough.”

They entered the bedroom to see J standing where the bed had been. The room was bare now. Before they could ask her anything, she abruptly swept past them and walked into the master bath, using her arms and hands to guide her and keep her from bumping into the walls or door. Suddenly her head jerked back. Her eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling. “Up there.”

“Where?” Kiel reached her first as the blood drained from her face. He looked up but couldn’t see anything unusual. “What is it, J?”

“Up there. The guy last night. He was killed up there.”

Sam immediately understood. “Next floor,” he almost barked, and ran out of the room. Grabbing her arm, Kiel quickly led J out of the apartment, into the hallway, and back to the stairs. They reached the fourth floor in time to hear Sam trying to kick down the door to 416.

“No! Not that one,” J called out to him. “The one behind you.”

“Huh?” Sam turned to see 415 with the door slightly ajar, as if someone had left and forgotten to close the door all the way. He had pulled his gun when he’d entered the fourth floor. Holding the weapon close to his face, he carefully moved into position and prepared to enter the other apartment.

“Let me go first,” Kiel hissed.

Sam quickly complied.

Dropping J’s hand on his brother’s arm, Kiel melted through the wall and disappeared from sight. Less than a minute later he reappeared in the hallway. “It’s clear, but you’d better hold on to your breakfast,” he warned in a wavering voice.

As homicide detectives with many combined years of experience, they both had seen enough carnage to last them a lifetime. Sam often commented that there was no comparing what they saw to wartime kills because in most cases those were times where the body count was tallied by the number of bombs exploded. Or by the number of bullets sprayed by whole platoons. Homicides were like war fatalities, only they occurred because of human nature’s darker side. They weren’t committed in self-defense, or per the orders of a commanding officer. The large majority came about because one—or in rare cases more than one—killer sought retribution for a wrongdoing.

Serial killers were the worst. Most often those killers had no motive for their actions. Or, if they did, they used factors such as mental disease or revenge to justify their brutal acts.

Many times the revenge they thirsted for was due to one person—one individual who had turned their normal life into a sadistic one. Unfortunately many people would have to die for the sake of that one guilty person before the killer was caught. But if their revenge was the result of the deeds of many people, the results could be wholesale slaughter.

Killers the police could handle because at some point the murderers would make a crucial mistake. Insanity and brilliance rarely became permanent partners. And, given time, the killers would be found. Given time.

Too bad so many innocents had to die before that time came.

Walking into the apartment, Sam halted in the living area and fought the acid rising in his throat. “Jesus Almighty,” he swore softly. Laying a hand on top of the smaller one clutching his jacket, he could feel the iciness of her skin. “You okay, J?”

He felt her nod. Slowly.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” she whispered.

“Yeah. Pretty bad.”

She took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “It reeks of blood in here.”

Staring at the walls washed in the substance, Sam nodded. Kiel emerged from the back rooms. “Back is clear. No sign of violence there.”

“So the killer did his work in here.”

“That man last night died here,” J said almost too softly to hear.

“And the killer transported him away to that alley where he was found,” Kiel concluded.

Sam felt a sudden jerk on his arm as Kiel’s expression became one of alarm. As he turned to look at J, he could hear his brother ask, “What, J? What’s wrong?
What’s wrong?
”

She was backing up until she hit the wall beside the doorway. Her face was the color of paper. Her eyes were enormous hazel pools, so wide Sam could see the gory room reflected in their surface.

Suddenly she took a deep breath and let out a terrified shriek. It was enough to make their skin crawl. “
He’s here
,” she gasped, and bolted through the door.

Sam heard her slam against the opposite wall in the hallway before he had a chance to catch up with her. He glanced back over his shoulder to see Kiel standing rigid as a statue, hands clenched by his sides, and facing toward the kitchen area. “Kiel?”

“Go, Sam,” the man ordered through gritted teeth. “Get out of here. Get J out of here.”

“But—”

“Get
out
, Sam! I’ll take care of him.”

Sam ran, snatching J, then dashed past the apartment once again to reach the stairs. As he passed the open door he could barely made out a dark shape hovering like a cloud over Kiel’s head as his brother faced the killer one-on-one.

Neither he nor J made a sound as they half-ran, half-stumbled down the four flights of stairs and burst through the door into the apartment lobby. He paused a second to get his bearings, slightly disoriented because of the way they had been forced to go the back way this time. J started to say something when he tightened his grip around her waist and almost dragged her out the rear entrance.

The second they crossed the threshold and were at the rear of the building, the heavy weight lifted. It felt as if they had exited into a sudden burst of spring. Sam took a deep breath almost as second nature before realizing he had nearly succumbed to the killer’s presence. Bent over and grasping his knees, he drew the fresh air deep into his lungs as he fought the dizziness. Something clattered, and he looked up to see J stumbling over to the back wall of the yard. She appeared disoriented, her arms out in front of her for protection. She was in the middle of a virtual mine field cluttered with chunks of broken brick and slabs of concrete. He watched her bounce off a portable cement mixer, then turn to continue fighting her way out of the debris. He started toward her to give her his arm when she suddenly went down with a little cry. Running over to her, he bent forward to help her up when Kiel materialized between them and grabbed her outstretched hand. J hesitated a second.

“Kiel?”

“It’s okay. As long as we stay out of the building, we’re safe,” he murmured, drawing her into his arms and holding her tightly against him.

“Wh-what happened? What did that thing do to you?” Her hands were wiping over him, searching for any sign of injury.

Sam remained frozen where he was, observing in silence. Something had happened in that building. Something terrifying. His brother looked positively ill. He hadn’t seen Kiel like this since they had discovered he was dead.

Kiel gave a humorless chuckle. “He ordered me out.”

“He who?” Sam finally spoke up. “That thing I saw hanging over you? That black shape?”

The look on Kiel’s face was his answer. “What matters right now is I’m fine, but we can’t go back in there.” Giving his brother another warning look, he added, “The sooner we get away from this place, the better off we’ll be.”

“She’s bleeding, Kiel,” Sam commented, noticing the red rivulet running down her arm.

Kiel drew back to find where she was hurt. She had landed on a section of the concrete wall that had been torn down and left scattered about in jagged chunks of cement. The wound to her palm and wrist was serious, but nothing that would require stitches.

“I fell on that,” J commented, pointing downward. “I…” She paused to stare. Giving a little wiggle, she pulled away and bent down to touch the place where she had fallen. Her hands fluttered over the rough slabs. “Kiel?”

“What?”

“This.” She stopped and glanced in his direction. “I told you if I felt it, I would recognize it.”

Sam grasped what she meant. “The murder weapon?”

J nodded. “Not
the
weapon, but some of what he used.”

Both men stared at what she was holding onto with both hands.

Round, like a pipe, but without the hole inside. It was solid, like a gigantic piece of spaghetti. Oh, and it had curves on it. Grooves. If I felt one, I would recognize it.