Shattered (21 page)

The basement at 11 Black River was similar to the one on Cottage Creek Drive in Alexandria, sunken below ground level but not completely subterranean. This one was
unfinished
, comprising about four hundred square feet of exposed wall studs and insulation, with a ceiling hewn out of tangled plumbing and furnace ducts. The cracked cement floor was marbled with water stains. The forced-air furnace was off in one corner, a squat, square, metal monolith filmed with grime. A washer and dryer sat on the opposite wall under bare lightbulbs, next to a dull white vertical hot-water tank. There was a single narrow, shuttered window, high on the north wall, and several boxes and paint cans from former tenants, crowding the space like the errant pieces of a Rubik's Cube.

The first time Maura had laid eyes on the basement, three days earlier during her move-in, she wondered what kind of people would have chosen those paint colors or filled those boxes with expendables. What kind of person washed their underwear and towels down here? Had they been Mafia informants? Government snitches? Hit men? The families of hit men? The paint colors that had dripped and streaked down the sides of the cans were so benign and cheery—buckwheat beige and periwinkle blue—that they only served to emphasize the creepy incongruity of the place, the bad karma. In fact, Maura had felt these vibrations from the moment she had entered the bungalow, a kind of leaden gloom, a rankness, like an odor that won't come out of the drapes. People dealing with death and dismemberment had lived here, leaving behind traces of their anguished existence like a spoor. And in no other room was it stronger than right here in the cellar.

Now, as she descended the wooden stairs toward the dark, dank space, holding the Ruger out in front of her, the flashlight pressed against the barrel like a beacon, she remembered something critical about the sublevel from her WITSEC orientation. It was a hidden feature known only to a few select people such as the two federal marshals who had moved her into the house. Unfortunately she had very little time to think about it now that the cellar was host to some kind of intruder.

She reached the bottom of the stairs and aimed the flashlight at the narrow window.

Panic trickled cold and bracing down her midsection as she gazed at the hole, the frame pried away from the wall, the glass pane hanging by a thread of rubber weatherstripping. No raccoon could have done that. Mice did not pry open windows. She backed toward the bottom step until her heel bumped the riser, her breath sticking in her throat. She wanted to turn and run back up those stairs, run screaming from this terrible place. She forgot she had a gun. She couldn't get air into her lungs, couldn't make her legs work anymore.

The feeling was overwhelming that somebody or some
thing
was hiding down here in this musty basement. She managed to shine the light on the wall to her left, the beam gleaming off white-painted surfaces, the washer and dryer, when a creaking noise startled her.

It came from her immediate right, and she swung the gun and flashlight over toward the furnace, the beam falling on the oxidized metal skin of the water heater tank. Something moved behind the tank.

Maura aimed the gun and held her breath.

A graying head of hair peered out from behind the water heater, and Maura cried out in a strangled, bellowing wail: “Don't goddamn move of I'll goddamn blow your head off!”

The furry gray object kept coming as though completely deaf, as though utterly oblivious to Maura's eardrum-shattering cry, and all of a sudden two things happened in quick succession, almost too quickly for Maura to even parse in her brain, her body moving almost involuntarily: a pair of beady, feral eyes shimmered in the beam of the flashlight, and Maura squeezed off three hard, quick blasts, the noise and heat popping like balloons in her ears, the muzzle flash lighting up the basement.

Only one .22 caliber round struck the animal.

The other two blasts went high, one of them piercing the skin of the water heater with a spark and a dull thump, a tiny geyser of H
₂
O blowing out of the hole, the other bullet chewing a divot into one of the studs. Maura reared back at the clamor and unexpected pain in her eardrums, blinking, swallowing the panic acid on the back of her tongue. Still clutching the gun with both hands, she aimed it at the dull gray lump on the floor. The lump twitched and Maura—momentarily dazed and uncomprehending—gawked at it, ready to fire again at a moment's notice. She stared at the twitching mass of fur and scales as it expired and became still.

At last she recognized the animal: Curled into a fetal death pose, its matted fur beaded with rubies of blood, the little fat possum had probably nudged the damaged window open earlier that evening, which would explain the musky stench wafting out of the basement.

Maura had seen her share of possums as a kid growing up on the edge of the Muir Woods in Northern California. She remembered west coast possums being a little nastier, a little faster moving and sinewy than their Midwestern counterparts. The Midwestern variety was a strange creature that moved with the lazy, drugged-out quality of a sloth, and looked like a giant rat crossbred with a raccoon. This one, especially in death, especially in the darkness of the basement, was downright repulsive. Its long snout and black-pearl eyes looked almost artificial, its reptilian tail resembling a coiled worm. Purplish entrails bloomed from its white, scaly belly.

Ears ringing from the muzzle bark, Maura lowered the gun and tried to breathe normally, a sense of relief passing through her body. She felt her muscles relaxing, but in the back of her mind a tiny spark of doubt had kindled a question: So who cut the phone lines?

Right at that moment, as if in answer to her silent query, came the sound of muffled footsteps.

Maura whirled toward the bottom of the staircase, the gun still gripped in her right hand. It wasn't just the
sound
of the footsteps that made her midriff tense up and raised the hackles on the back of her neck. It wasn't just the fact that they were heavy, rhythmic, male footsteps, or the fact that they were approaching.

The reason that Maura was paralyzed with terror at that moment was because the footsteps were coming from above. From somewhere upstairs.

From inside the house
.

 

A beefy, middle-aged federal marshal named Normann Edward Pokorny gripped the steering wheel of the SWAT van as it roared toward the Fox Run town limits. Dressed in bulky Kevlar and ammo-pouched pants, the marshal was standing on the gas pedal, the van screaming at ninety-five miles an hour over the pocked asphalt of Highway 231. The cargo bay behind him was loaded to the gills with armed personnel, the extra weight making the van vibrate wildly as vapor lights passed in a blur, the outskirts of town coming into view on the horizon.

He was tossing a cigarette through the vent when the radio sizzled with voices. “Mobile One here,” he spat into the handset after snatching it off the dash. “Go ahead, Base.”

Through the radio came a voice, stretched taut with nerves: “This is Special Agent Ulysses Grove, just touched down at Grissom, en route now, still a ways out, who do I have?”

Pokorny told him.

“What's your ETA, Pokorny?”

“About five minutes.”

“We've lost contact with the sheriff, they're supposed to be out there at the site already.”

“Copy that,” Pokorny said into the mike. “We're almost there.”

“Almost is not good enough.”

“Copy that, sir. Doing all we can.”

“This is my wife and my child we're talking about here,” the voice on the radio wanted Pokorny to know.

“Understood, sir.”

“Get there, Pokorny. You got thirty-five minutes on us.
Get there.
”

“Copy that. Will advise when we do. Out.” The marshal slammed the handset back onto its cradle, thinking of his own children at home in bed.

He started searching the dark horizon for a shortcut.

 

Maura stood at the foot of the basement steps, gazing up at the half-open door leading into the kitchen. She swallowed her panic and listened.

The footsteps sounded as though they were maybe two floors up, perhaps descending the living room stairs, but how was that possible? She was just upstairs not five minutes ago. Her pulse raced as she thought of Aaron up there alone in his room. She told herself to stay calm, think, focus. She listened and thought she heard Aaron crying.

It occurred to her in a flash of wishful thinking that it might be help coming, one of the marshals maybe, but why weren't they saying anything? Wouldn't they be calling out for her?

“Hello?”

Her voice was thin and reedy with terror. There was no reply.

She raised the .22 and aimed it up at the dim light spilling down the basement stairs. The footsteps were approaching, that telltale crackle of heavy soles on linoleum. Another sound, muffled but familiar, accompanied the footsteps, like the mewling of a cat.

“Please answer me!”

The pungent undertow of adrenaline and horror swam in her brain, but she managed to keep the Ruger raised and ready, despite her wobbling knees, holding it in the commando position, left hand cupped under the hilt, right hand around the grip, which her father had taught her so many years ago.

A shadow fell across the doorway at the top of the stairs, and Maura froze. The light from the kitchen illuminated Henry Splet.

The man held little baby Aaron in his arms, a grimy hand over the child's mouth.

Sheriff Eugene Tomilson arrived at 11 Black River Drive at exactly 2:06
A.M.

The old man sat in his cruiser for a moment, considering his course of action.

Transcripts of the evening's events vary as to how long the sheriff lingered in that vehicle, trying to figure out what to do. Most experts suggest it was something like three to four minutes—long enough for Henry Splet to force Maura to drop her weapon and lie prone on the basement floor. It is also believed that Sheriff Tomilson remained in his car long enough for the killer to descend the basement stairs with the wriggling baby, and proceed to bind and gag both mother and child to the wall beams in the cellar. But regardless of the exact duration of Tomilson's repose, one thing is certain: Tomilson smelled trouble the instant he laid eyes on the property.

The first thing he noticed was that Elkins's prowler was still idling. The dome light was still on, and the radio was still operational. The sheriff could hear the engine and the crackle of static coming through the vent. The next thing Tomilson discovered was that everything seemed oddly tranquil at 11 Black River Drive. The house was quiet, a light burning in the living room window, nothing out of place. But the third and final thing he noticed was that his gut was clenched with tension. The air seemed to ooze
wrongness
.

He got out, unfastening the safety strap on the Colt .357 long barrel pressed against the side of his belly. He hadn't shot the thing since Ronald Reagan was in office, and the last time he even
unsnapped
it was way back in '99 when Jubal Finnegan over in Salt Lick killed his wife and barricaded himself inside his dairy barn with a nine millimeter. Old Jubal took his
own
life that night, saving Sheriff Tomilson and Knox County the cost of one liquid-tip .44 caliber round. But tonight, it seemed things were already a lot more complicated.

And dangerous.

The old man ambled up the sidewalk with his eyes wide open, scanning the dark yard for any sign of foul play. His hearing wasn't what it used to be, and he now wished he had taken his wife's advice a few years ago and gotten fitted for one of those fancy Bell hearing aids. He needed a new prescription for his eyeglasses, as well, and to make matters worse, his reflexes had deteriorated to the point that he had a hard time poking magnetic cards through automated slots and slamming on the brakes in time to avoid fender benders.

He crossed the porch and knocked on the front door. He noticed there was a doorbell mounted on the door frame, but for some reason he elected to knock instead. It just seemed too late to ring the bell. From inside the house came the sound of footsteps, first creaking on rickety wooden risers, then crossing a linoleum floor.

The sheriff gently placed the heel of his palm on the Colt's trigger guard.

 

Henry Splet marched across the living room as though he were in a dream.

Clad in a rank, moldy winter coat torn from the body of a murdered homeless man, Splet walked with a stiff, self-conscious gait, like a bad actor in a bad play. He carried the Army .45 with the makeshift silencer discreetly at his side. He tried to ignore the chaos in his skull—the strange new voice overriding all the others—as he approached the door.

There was a little oval window embedded in the front door, through which occupants could see who was standing on the other side. As Henry reached the door he got a fleeting glimpse of the old man in the sheriff's uniform waiting on the porch on the other side.

Splet opened the front door and shot the old man twice in the forehead.

The back of Sheriff Tomilson's head erupted. The old man toppled backward and landed on the grass, expelling an involuntary, watery grunt. One big Timberland boot sprawled on the sidewalk, the other one wedged into a bush.

It was over so quickly the sheriff never even knew what happened.

Splet glanced up and down the street. Amazingly it was still deserted. The killer emerged from the house, crossed the porch, and descended the steps to where the sheriff lay still warm and twitching.

Hennnnnrrreeeeee…te possssssi audirrreeeeeee.

Splet had been hearing this hollow, papery voice in his head since he left the storage facility. He did not speak the language of the voice. But he somehow understood every breathy, hissing phrase. In fact, he could respond simply by nodding or thinking his reply.

The new voice sounded like a million voices, all speaking in unison, all in different languages, dead languages, languages that Splet could not begin to understand. But there was also an Over Voice translating everything into some kind of supple oily tongue, echoing, penetrating Splet's auditory canals. It knew things. It knew how to travel in the shadows, how to kill silently and quickly, and how to manipulate the physical and virtual realms. It also told Henry of the master plan, which was now unfolding amid the encouraging whispers.

Tu facerrrreeee multa…

He nodded, then crouched down by the dead sheriff and grabbed the old man by the boot heels. He began dragging the limp body toward the side of the house, its breached skull leaving a trail of pink frothy tissue and blood across the front lawn. The sound of sirens keened in the distance.

Festinaaahhhhtio Henreeee.

Splet hurried. He laid the sheriff's warm corpse down on the grass in the shadows next to the deputy. Then something snapped inside Henry Splet like a circuit breaker or a fuse cracking apart.

He staggered backward, his thoughts drifting for a moment like a shortwave radio losing its signal. Something hot and desperate bubbled to the surface of his mind. He thought of his children. He had brain tissue on his fingers and he was thinking of little Ethan with his freckled grin and carrot-colored hair. He was a father. His own child was not much older than that baby in the basement.

“Oh God, I almost forgot,” he muttered, going back over to the bodies, kneeling down as though he were about to pray. “I can't leave them like this, not like this—”

Desirere Accelerrrrrrarrrra trepidatio!

Splet tried hard to ignore the Over Voice, moving the bodies now like game pieces on a chessboard.

According to the official postmortems of that evening, the SWAT team was now eleven minutes and forty-five seconds away.

 

Maura bit her tongue hard enough to break the skin. A gush of salty warmth filled her mouth behind the gag.

With each muffled, strangled scream she strained and yanked at the plumbers' tape shackling her head and arms to the wall. Her voice had a touch of madness in it, as she watched her baby dealing with similar constraints across the darkened basement, now illuminated only by a single bare lightbulb swaying on a frayed cord. In the waxing, waning shadows across the room, little Aaron had been propped up like a sack of potatoes against a load-bearing column, his wrists taped together, his writhing, wriggling head attached to the column with a hank of thick gray adhesive. The baby was crying with such fury his tiny body seemed to be convulsing against the tape.

That's all it was:
duct tape
. But there was a lot of it, and it was impenetrable, and it was wrapping the baby like a greasy, wormy swaddling membrane. It also bound Maura's wrists together, wrenching them over her head and affixing them to a brace nailed across two wall studs in an unholy crucifix. Several feet of plumbers' tape was wrapped around her forehead as well, gluing it to the wall in perfect position for her to see her baby.

Had she
not
been gagged—the paint rag knotted across her mouth, smelling of turpentine and making her dizzy—Maura would have chewed her hands off at the wrists. She would have done it in a heartbeat in order to get to her baby, who was sobbing and wailing less than ten feet away. But she was gagged, not to mention trussed to the studs like a suckling pig, and the pain and the fury made it hard to think, and that was the one thing she needed to do:
think
.

As it would turn out, she had only a few critical minutes between the point at which the second knock on the door came, drawing the killer out of the basement, and the moment at which he returned.

By the clock, it was just under four minutes. But they were four crucial minutes because the moment the madman had vanished, Maura almost spontaneously flashed again on the secret part of the basement, the part the marshals had shown her three nights ago. Maura remembered what they had called it. They called it “the last resort.”

Aaron mewled and convulsed.

Maura tried to speak to him through her eyes, tried to blink a message to her baby, tried to calm him with steadying thoughts as though she could send her brain waves into the child's head. And maybe she could. Mothers and babies have freakish synchronicity with each other. They are connected on levels that defy physical laws.

Sure enough, all at once, little Aaron seemed to stop moaning and fix his raw, teary, mucusy gaze on his mother. He looked exhausted, and maybe even a little lulled by the fear into a sort of traumatic catatonia. But right then—Maura's mind allowing their connected gazes to fire one last synapse—she realized what was about to happen.

It dawned on her like the silent inhalation of air right before the onslaught of a nuclear holocaust, the first thump of ignition in the base of her brainstem sending a mushroom cloud of memories, half-glimpsed newspaper articles, snippets of conversations with her husband through her mind. She remembered the fact that this maniac always killed in pairs, and she remembered the whispered conversation in her bedroom many nights ago when Grove told her the killer's signature. She remembered seeing the photographs of makeshift eyelid retractors, and she remembered the repulsion she felt when she realized that here was a man who forced his future victims to watch their counterparts being tortured and killed.

She stared at her baby.

She realized right then, beyond all doubt, why the two of them—mother and child—had been bound in this fashion, facing each other. And why their heads were taped in place.
Facing each other
. And of course, the final and maybe worst revelation of them all: Maura realized that it was very possible—actually
probable
—that in a matter of minutes Splet was going to force the baby to watch his mother being killed.

Or vice versa.

Maura went into seizures of rage then, her sanity flying off its spindle for a moment. She yanked and yanked at the tape around her wrists, grunting and emitting garbled cries behind the gag. Across the dark basement the baby began to moan and cry again. And this went on and on until something sparked in the pit of Maura's midbrain like a linkage grabbing hold of a chain, gaining purchase and starting to tug at her, pulling her back to the here and now.

Only moments ago she had flashed on an image of a mother wolf caught in a trap, chewing off her paw in order to escape, to save her brood.

Now she realized the tape around her cranium had stretched enough for her to wrench her head a few inches to the left. The gag had loosened enough for her to bite down a few centimeters. Just enough to reach the bottom edge of the duct tape with her teeth.

In the darkness she began to gnaw at the tape with the ferocity of a wild dog.

 

In the moments before the SWAT team arrived at 11 Black River Drive, what was left of the original man known to friends and fellow Baptist parishioners as Good Old Henry Splet hurriedly worked in the darkness along the side of the house. Lifting the sheriff's blood-sodden body into a sitting position against the bungalow's brick foundation, Splet recreated the pose that had imprinted itself on his world since childhood. He worked as quickly as possible. It was amazing how heavy the old man was in death.

Grunting with effort, Splet finished with the sheriff and turned to the deputy. The younger corpse was lighter. Splet grabbed the body by the armpits and leaned Elkins's remains against the house so that the dead deputy was facing his boss. Two limp forms gazing emptily at each other. Both pairs of eyes still shocked open in death. Milky retinas like marbles gaping at each other.

Nodding, Splet stood back and admired the familiar post-mortem staging.

Unus ampliussssss—Henreeeee Acellerere!

Splet closed his eyes, the deep vibrating Over Voice resonating in his skull, chastising him.

Animus! Attentus!

Doubling over suddenly as though punched in the gut, Splet flinched at the unexpected memory of his foster father. His foster father spoke to him in a very similar fashion:
Pay attention, Pussy! Listen and learn! Get down on the ground before I beat ya senseless, faggot! Pay attention!

Splet held himself then, his arms cradled against his stomach, as though he might spill his internal organs at any moment, as he flashed back to that fateful night in the warehouse near the end of his eighth year.