The Bottom (21 page)

“What the fuck do you want?”

I almost crap my pants. Whoever has what feels like a gun pressed against the back of my head came out of nowhere.

He repeats the question, with a little more enthusiasm and a rap upside my head with his free hand. I do a quick assessment and realize that I am at least 200 yards from other human beings. The guy with the cane pole across the river is probably the closest thing to help I could hope to rouse by screaming. I can’t believe it. It’s two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of a decent-sized city, and I am alone, except for the guy with what I am now sure is a big-ass gun.

I start to explain that I’m just a guy out for a drive, enjoying the scenery.

He laughs, more or less, then reaches in, cuts the ignition and takes my keys.

“Yeah, I bet you are. I bet there’s no chance you’re that nosy-ass reporter my sister told me scared her into telling him about me. Yeah, no chance at all.”

I guess that, for Mary Kate, blood turned out to be thicker than my promise not to drag her into this if her older brother turned out to be the monster I suspected he was. Or maybe she was just scared. Either way, I’m fucked.

Before I can deny my identity, he clips me pretty good with the gun.

“C’m’ere, asshole,” I hear him tell somebody else. “Help me with these cuffs.”

I hear the rear right-side door open. As I feel my hands being pulled behind me, I get a glimpse of my assailant’s partner in the rearview mirror.

“Imagine meeting you here,” I say as Ronnie Sax snaps the handcuffs behind me.

Ronnie gives that wheezy little laugh, which in some ways is scarier than his big brother and his big pistol.

They manage to get me out of the seat and over to the passenger’s side, damn near separating my shoulder in the process. Ronnie hops back into the backseat and Cord Kusack gets behind the wheel.

He is able to maneuver the car down the side of the hill and into the small space between the warehouse and the river. I wonder if the guy across the way will notice and call the cops. When I glance over there, he looks like he’s napping in his Kmart lawn chair.

I turn and get my first good look at Cord Kusack. What I see does not inspire confidence. While brother, Ronnie, mostly comes across as a perv who likes to mess with little girls, Cord is more along the lines of something out of the latest chainsaw movie.

For one thing, he’s got to be eight inches taller than Ronnie, at least six seven, and I’d guess he goes about 280. He looks like a goddamn NFL defensive tackle, only scarier. His hair has either turned white or been bleached. It’s standing more or less straight up. He has snakes tattooed on each side of his neck and a tuft of white soul patch on his chin that looks like somebody stuck a cotton ball there. His eyes are what get your attention, though. Or I guess you should say “eye.”

The left one seems to be fixing me with a perpetual laser stare. The right one isn’t there. Well, I mean, something’s there, kind of milky and glassed over, floating there like a dead planet.

He must have noticed me staring.

“You like that?” he says as he orders Ronnie to pull nails out of the piece of plywood over the doorway and then pushes me inside. “Son of a bitch up at Lucasville did it with a razor blade. I’ll show you how he did it a little later.”

He laughs, his baritone and Ronnie’s tenor harmonizing.

I can hear sirens in the distance, but they’ll be waiting for me in that parking lot I can’t get to. I tell my captors that I’ve called the police.

“Well,” Cord says, “maybe you did. But I doubt it. If you did, we’ll all go down together.”

He laughs again, and they undo the handcuffs and throw me onto a floor that is partly decaying wood, partly dirt.

I could make a run for the opening where we came in, but Big Brother grabs me and puts a dog collar around my neck, then ties the rope connected to it to a post.

“There now,” he says, “we’ll have to gag you later, so nobody hears you, when we start going to work on you, but we won’t do that just yet as long as you’re good.”

I promise to be very good. This is not turning out to be one of my ten favorite days. The sirens obviously aren’t getting any closer.

“I bet you’ve got some questions,” Kusack says, “you being a reporter and all.”

MARY KATE HAS told me some of it. How Cord always had Ronnie in his hip pocket when they were single-parent latchkey kids, growing up in some dog-ass mill town in Ohio. How Cord and Ronnie got in trouble, with Cord always leading the way, when they were boys. Fires. Tortured animals. Terrorizing other kids. The usual psychopath-in-training stuff.

“Ronnie didn’t want to be bad,” she said, back in her living room an hour and a few light-years ago. “But Cord wouldn’t let him alone. He made him do . . . stuff . . . and then threatened to tell everybody afterward if he didn’t obey. He was so much bigger than us.”

I didn’t get into the “stuff” part, but I had the very strong impression that Mary Kate was forced to do “stuff” with her older brother, too.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “He has this way of making you do things. Not even physical. Well, not just physical. It was like he was inside our heads.”

Mary Kate and then Ronnie somehow managed to get out of there and be pretty good students. They eventually went off to college, her to Ohio University and him to Virginia Commonwealth. She eventually transferred down here, too. Around the time Mary Kate left for Ohio U., Cord was arrested for a couple of rapes in his hometown. He had a record already, as a juvenile. Ronnie did, too, but compared with his brother, his transgressions were kids’ stuff. I’m thinking VCU wasn’t doing a lot of background checks on incoming freshmen.

The judge had dealt with Cord before, more than once. He knew a train wreck when he saw one, and he sentenced Cordell Kusack to twenty years, the most he could give him under state guidelines. Both girls were afraid to identify him on the witness stand, and the court had to settle for the testimony of a convenience-store clerk who saw him pull one of the girls into his car.

Cord managed to get more time added on while he was locked up. Looking at the son of a bitch now, I wonder what moron parole board ever saw redemption in this asshole.

“My mother had lost track of him,” Mary Kate went on. “She said he just stopped writing. And, well, Ronnie and I, we didn’t get back home much. Too many, you know, bad memories.”

But Cord did get out, back in 2008. He showed up in Richmond in 2009.

“We never knew what he did after he got out, but when he got here and found Ronnie, it was like nothing ever changed. And the fact that Ronnie was, like, hanging around with models and all must have just played into Cord’s hands.

“I never knew what they were doing, but I knew it wasn’t good. But I didn’t know, I swear.”

The night of September 11, when Ronnie came to her house, she could tell something was wrong.

“He was all jittery, and then the next day I heard about that girl. And then they made Ronnie a suspect.”

Mary Kate said she saw her older brother once after he moved to Richmond, and that he made it clear that she was never to tell anyone he was here. He’d busted parole in Ohio and done God knows what in his first year of freedom.

“I was scared,” she said. “He can make you so scared you’ll wet your pants.”

Apparently he could make you scared enough to call him and tell him that a nosy-ass newspaper reporter was on his trail.

And so the best I could glean from today’s little chat, Cordell Kusack, rapist, murderer and who knows what else, has been living incognito in our fair city for four years now. It makes you wonder who else is out there under the radar.

KUSACK, GOING UNDER the premise that dead men tell no tales, brings me up to speed on his more recent activities.

While he has me tied to the post, just for fun, he tases me. I’ve passed two kidney stones in my time, and this hurt worse. He gagged me first, so as not to disturb the neighbors.

“Just a preview of coming attractions,” he says. I hear Ronnie snickering.

“We’ve been having fun, shithead and me,” big brother says.

He sued the state of Ohio for letting one of his playmates have access to the razor with which Cordell Kusack’s right eye was ruined. He won, somehow. Good thing he didn’t try that crap in Virginia. So he’s been drawing on that tidy sum for the last five years “plus my disability pay. Uncle Sam’s been kind. And Little Ronnie’s been helping out, right, Bro?”

He transferred the money to a joint bank account with Ronnie and has been drawing off of it. He’s been off the grid since then.

“Had to move a couple of times, but this place looks like it’ll do for a long time to come. We don’t get too many visitors, though. Just the girls.”

There are cloths over the windows, blacking out everything inside, but somehow we have a little bit of light. I’m just starting to wonder where it’s coming from when Cord says, “Here, let me show you what I’ve done with the place.”

Suddenly the far side of the room, which had been dark as a coal mine, is lit up like midday. I wish it hadn’t been.

There, in living color on the brick interior wall, are the girls. I recognize them. Kelli Jonas. Chanelle Williams. Lorrie Estrada. And little Jessica Caldwell. None of them are dead yet in the first set of photographs, blown up to about three feet by four, which makes it all the more horrible. They all have arrived at a point at which death would be a mercy. Ronnie Sax’s masterpiece: gagged and already put through hell, their eyes all say, “Kill me.” I am afraid I’ll throw up in my gag and choke to death.

“Ronnie does good work, don’t you think?” my captor asks. He raises the Taser again, and I nod as emphatically as I can.

He explains how they managed to lure them all into this hellhole with drugs or force or both, and then scattered their bodies around town.

It apparently was quite the game for the Kusack boys, leaving the remains at well-known places around the city.

Kusack laughs, relating how easy it was to lure the women to dark, helpless places.

“They are so gullible,” he says. “And I appreciate that. I really do.”

Kusack is working off a generator and batteries here. Not all the comforts of home, but enough.

He learned about tattooing inside and then outside prison. He thought he might want to do that for a living. Richmond, to the anguish of the West End bluebloods, is America’s tattoo capital. Go figure.

“But with the lawsuit money, well, I decided it’d be more fun to pursue my life’s passion, make my masterpiece as it were.”

He tells me about a couple of “practice sessions” he enlisted Ronnie in, where prostitutes suddenly disappeared and nobody really gave a shit.

I do have a vague recollection of a couple of hookers going missing, back when I was still covering the crooks in the General Assembly instead of the street variety.

“And then we got serious.”

Kusack had been in town for nearly three years when he and Ronnie made their first grab.

“I wanted to leave a signature,” he says, “so people wouldn’t think this was some kind of mindless killing. I wanted it to have meaning.”

They tattooed the girls here. Ronnie proudly adds that the silver dollars in the girls’ clothing was his idea.

“Just a little calling card,” big brother says. “After the second one, I wondered if the cops would even figure it out. They finally did. Do you know what a thrill it is, Mr. Reporter, to have a whole town scared shitless?”

Well I know what it feels like to be on the other end of that emotion.

I wonder, though, how this is going to work. Even after they kill me, the whole police force and whatever help they can bring in from outside is going to be looking for Ronnie Sax. Right now a large chunk of Saturday’s crew must be a mile away. From where I’m standing, things don’t look so good for Ronnie. I wonder if he’s smart enough to know that.

“The key,” Kusack says, “is to do one every six months, then lie low, just kind of letting the suspense build. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to wait. Well, you’ll provide us with a little entertainment in the meantime.”

He knows his sister told me where he was. He doesn’t know that Cindy Peroni shares that secret. For Cindy’s sake, he’s not going to find that out from me, no matter what.

He seems especially proud of the way he got Ronnie out of jail. He’s been staying indoors most of the daylight hours and then using Ronnie’s car at night, in addition to those throwaway cell phones, to convince our boys in blue, through me, that Ronnie Sax couldn’t possibly have committed those terrible crimes.

He says he wore sunglasses so as not to spook the 7-Eleven clerks and other citizens.

“Ronnie knew I’d get him out,” he says. “Hey, we’re family. Can’t let my little brother take the rap, can I?”

I’m thinking that Kusack’s motives, humanitarian that he is, might not be quite that pure. Even if, as Cord says, Ronnie had sworn to forever hide his brother’s identity, forever is a long time, especially if you’re looking at a chemically induced dirt nap down at the prison where they put people like Ronnie out of our misery. Ronnie is capable of singing like a goddamn Tweety Bird. I think his brother and I both know that.

If I were Ronnie Sax, I wouldn’t be buying any green bananas.

But you’ll have to excuse me if Ronnie’s health isn’t my primary concern right now.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

X

I
come to. My first thought is that I’m going to be breaking yet another date with the lovely Cindy Peroni. My second thought is that I could definitely use a Camel and a Miller. And then the pain hits me.

Before they did the tattoo, the brothers dragged me over to a chair in the back of the room and tied me to it, my arms behind me and my ankles strapped to the legs. I was advised by Cordell Kusack to “shut the fuck up and hold still.” It was as good a bit of advice as I was going to get under the circumstances. It hurt like a bitch when I thrashed around, which was hard not to do when he went to work on me with the needle. This was my first tattoo. I hope it’s my last. It definitely was not on my bucket list. The bucket, by the way, seems well placed for that final kick right now.