Psycho Save Us (55 page)

He closed his
eyes because that felt best.

Lieutenant
William Hennessey’s men had found Agent Mortimer and had secured the area
enough to bring in the medics.  The house he was lying against was empty. 
Flash-bangs were tossed in just to be sure, but as they swept inside the house
and cleared it, all they found was a smoking ruin that looked weeks burned and
smelled of barbecued hair.  The basement, where it appeared most of the Rainbow
Room’s filthy acts were conducted and recorded, was mostly left intact.  There
were a few scorch marks here and there, but nothing else.  Nothing besides the
fresh blood beside the horse saddle.

The utter lack
of bodies was perhaps the most unsettling thing to Hennessey and his team. 
Something serious had happened here, something more than just accelerant tossed
onto a stove fire. 

And then there
was the thing in the basement.  “What…the…fuck?” Lawrence Klein breathed.  The
flashlight at the end of his assault rifle was aimed at a mound of
still-sizzling meat left at the center of the basement, the beam from the
flashlight catching wisps of smoke dancing off of it.

Screams suddenly
filled the basement.  A recording device had been left on, its blinking light
showing that its battery was low.  The lens cap was still on, but it appeared
Heinrich had wanted to listen to what audio it might’ve recorded.  They were
screams, but not of any child.  They were a woman’s.  They begged something in
Russian.

14

CNN
picked it up first, of course, because its headquarters was in Atlanta and it
had a powerful presence in the streets of the city.  At first, the story didn’t
appear that surprising.  Another gunfight in or around the Bluff, no biggie. 
However, some were interested to hear that it was not only the work of the
vory
v zakone
, but that it involved a child sex ring the likes of which no one
had ever seen before.  The gunfight on Avery Street was just the icing on the
cake, a final showdown between the good guys and people who were obviously the
scum of the earth.

Seven law
enforcement officers shot, three killed, including two FBI agents, Nicholas
Mortimer and Derek Stone.  And one of them, Officer David Emerson, was
strangely missing.  All in all, twenty-two
vory
, including three women,
were injured, while twelve of those died of their wounds.

Witnesses and
officers willing to make statements had been rounded up for the early morning
news.  Once seven o’clock was upon the state, all Georgians would come to hear
the details, but that was still an hour and a half away.

After the
gunfight had ended, six officers were tasked with the duty of organizing the
incoming fire trucks and ambulances.  Fire marshals and inspectors were rushed
to the house at the end of the cul-de-sac to determine whether or not the house
was in danger of catching flame again.  Strangely enough, the inspectors
couldn’t even determine whether a fire actually
had
occurred at all. 
While it certainly
looked
like a flashover, key clues would be found
missing in the weeks ahead, most notably that the charred marks did not
indicate that the fire had moved towards ventilation, which was a typical
post-flashover pattern.

The lumps of
melted flesh found sizzling in the basement would never be identified with any
one person.  Footage would be found that would show the heinous torture and
rape of thirty-seven children.  Their bodies would never be found, though scant
DNA evidence would find hair, blood and skin samples in the two rooms in the
basement.

Bonetta Harper
was found two weeks later, soaking wet and filthy, living in a culvert several
miles away from Avery Street.  She would need serious psychological care.  Once
her story was known, several celebrities donated secretly to her care.

The surviving
members of the Rainbow Room would be put to the question in a media frenzy that
would haunt viewers and terrify parents for a full year.  Six weeks before the
first
vor
was convicted, he would cut a deal with the prosecution and
name all other cells and collaborators that he knew of.  There was a baker who
lived in Downtown, a tech guy who lived in Savannah, and even a few partners in
Tallahassee, Birmingham, Frankfort, Houston, and Montpelier, and that was only
in the U.S.  Interpol managed to take information from computers and routers in
all six houses on Avery Street and follow links, keystrokes, and e-mails to
supporters in other countries.  Customers of the Avery Room included two
teachers in Ukraine, a mailman in Germany, a police officer in Australia, three
nobodies living on the Dingle Peninsula, one of the most remote places in the
world, and even a minor politician in China.

But the biggest
surprise to many in the U.S. was something that wouldn’t come to light until a
full year had passed.  Vincent Pastone and Jerry Baker, a ten-year veteran of
the Atlanta Police Department and a sergeant for Zone One respectively, were indicted
on charges of conspiracy and collaboration with members of the
vory v zakone
,
including the Ankundinov family: Boris, the father, and his children, Olga,
Mikhael, and Dmitry.  Though they would later claim they had no knowledge of
what was really happening on Avery Street, they did confess to accepting money
from dead drops to give heads up to any police activity involving their
neighborhood, and Sergeant Baker was able to control frequency of patrols to
that area, and rather easily since the place had long been forgotten.

Basements identical
to those set up in the burned home were found in all but one of the other homes
on Avery Street.  Some had video equipment, others didn’t.  They found large,
steel cages in most.  Confessions from survivors said that duties for handling
captives were rotated, children were moved from one house to another to keep
one group in one house from having to listen to all the wailing or handled
feeding and cleaning the children.

Facebook
pictures of some of the Ankundinov family would be on the news for months, and
their faces would go on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for quite some time, since
they had all disappeared without a trace and none of the Avery Street survivors
claimed to know where they’d gone.

Two Rainbow Room
members would hang themselves in their prison cell before the next year was
out.  Also, the Chinese politician would be poisoned, and one of the teachers
in Ukraine found a razor to slit his wrists with.

The fallout
would last for half a decade, one confession leading to another outlet of the
Rainbow Room, which eventually would change its name to Angel’s Haven, then to
Everyone’s Playpen, then to the Little Dollhouse, before it then fell, finally,
into extinction.

Two years after
the events on Avery Street, Patrick Mulley would get busted and his chop shop
shut down, and it would come out that Detective Leon Hulsey was his
brother-in-law and many suspicions would be raised over this.  He wouldn’t be
fired, but enough questions would be asked about how much he knew and when that
he would eventually feel compelled to resign.

This was all yet
to come.  For Kaley Dupré and her sister Shannon, the night still wasn’t over.

Spencer drove
them ten blocks away from the epicenter of all that activity.  He found a
bridge and pulled under it, remained there until a police helicopter passed
over, then pulled on out.  It was a green ’96 Pontiac Grand Prix, with leather
interior.  “Ya know,” he said, jumping back onto the road.  “This year o’ Grand
Prix was the last for the fifth generation.  A sport package with five-spoke
alloy wheels an’ dual exhaust.  Somebody took care o’ this thing, she still
hums but doesn’t rattle like the rest of ’em always did.”

In the back
seat, the eldest girl said nothing.  She glanced up and looked at Spencer’s
eyes in the rearview mirror, then went back to rubbing her sister’s hand and
sniffling.

He drove them
south, where they crossed over two sets of train tracks and bounced up and down
in silence.  Spencer took them through an area with plants shut down on each
side, which eventually gave way to dilapidated homes that looked long
unoccupied.

Blood pooled
inside Spencer’s mouth, and he spat it out the window.  He’d found a rag in the
glove compartment and had torn parts of a child’s shirt that he’d found on the
floorboard, and tied the makeshift bandage around his grievous wound.

He checked his
bloodied hand.  Bits of brain still clung to it. 
Wonder which thoughts that
part held?
he mused. 
The capital o’ Kentucky?  The date o’ the
Emancipation Proclamation?  Nah, probably somethin’ Russian, like Boris
Yeltsin’s birthday
.  He let the piece hang there.  Dr. McCulloch had told
him that psychopaths rarely cared all that much about how they looked, but some
few had intense grooming rituals.  He figured he was more the former than the
latter.  “You listen to music?” he said, switching on the radio.

“Are you gonna
take us to a hospital?”

“Hospital?” he
chortled.  “That’s a joke, right?”

“No, it’s not.  You’re…you’re
hurt.  Your mouth is all slashed up.  And my sister’s…she’s bleeding from her
private parts.”

“You will too,”
he told her.  “Someday.  Someday some lucky guy’ll do the same thing to—”

“She’s hurt! 
She’s bleeding!  She could die!”

“Nobody ever
died from gettin’ fucked.  Besides, I take you to a hospital, an’ then there I
am, a wanted man.  Even if nobody recognizes me, how long before you an’ yer
sister there start talkin’ about the white man who brought ya?”

“We
won’t—”

“—tell anybody,
got it.  Yeah, heard that one before,” he chuckled, turning the radio dial.  He
had forgotten all the local stations, and so surfed through Stone Temple Pilots
territory, Bonnie Tyler, Janis Joplin and Metallica before finally landing on Jefferson
Airplane’s “Somebody To Love.”  He turned it up, and was just about to start
singing along when he felt a fist slam hard into the back of his head.  “Ow! 
What the f—”

“
Stop this
car, now!
” Kaley shrieked, slapping him several times more.

Spencer slammed
on the brakes, screeching to a halt and sending Kaley between the seats.  Her
little sister almost fell to the floor.  He reached down and grabbed her by the
throat.  “It’d be a mighty tragedy if you were to survive all ya did tonight
an’ then just die right here, wouldn’t it? 
Wouldn’t
it!”  Her mouth
opened, but no words came out.  She was choking to death.  Spencer finally let
her go, and then watched her gag and cough as she went back to seeing about her
sister.

Once all was
settled in the car, he put on the gas again.  Behind him, a car honked at him
to go faster.  He held up his bird finger, and the car must’ve seen this via
its headlights through the rear windshield because it flashed its lights. 
Spencer put the brakes on again and said, “Please get outta yer car.  Oh, dear
god, please let this motherfucker get out…”  But the driver didn’t.  Instead,
he waited, and Spencer drove purposely slow and held him up even longer to let
him know who was boss.

They drove
another mile, slowly and obeying all the traffic laws.  Spencer checked the
glove compartment thoroughly while driving.  “God damn it, not a single fuckin’
cigarette or stick o’ gum or
nothin’
.  What do they do while they
drive?”

His stomach
growled.  He still hadn’t eaten, and he was still losing blood.  Not good.

“Please let us
out,” said a tiny voice from the back, only this time it was the little
sister.  Shannon was her name, if he recalled correctly from what
he’d…experienced while sharing their unique Connection, which was now long gone
and only like a faint echo between his ears.

Spencer glanced
back at them in the rearview mirror.  Kaley sat with Shannon’s head in her
lap.  They both stared at him with expectant, frightened faces.  “Izzat all you
two are gonna do now?  Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘would you be so kind,’
shit like that?  Izzat how it’s gonna be?”

“How else are supposed
to act?” asked the older girl, Kaley, a bit defiant.  “What way would suit
you
?”

“Well, there’s
no way to ‘suit’ me, per se,” he said.  “But if there’s one thing that pisses
me off more than the Miles Hoovers of the world, it’s the
Roberto
Castillos of the world.”

“The who?”

“Not the
bullies, but the bullied.  Nobody wants to fight back anymore.  Everyone’s
afraid o’ hurtin’ somebody else’s feelings.  Instead o’ trustin’ their
instincts an’ tellin’ some creep to fuck off, people just duck their heads in
the earth like ostriches, hope that it’ll all be all right an’ that the bad men
will pass them by, find someone else to fuck with.”  He looked in the rearview
mirror again.  “That’s what happened to you, I’ll bet.  Am I right?”  Kaley
said nothing.  Spencer smiled.  “Yeah, I’m right.  But hey, ya fought back. 
Hell, ya just tried to smack the shit outta me.  Guess that’s somethin’.”