The Brain Vault (Stephanie Chalice Thrillers Book 3) (6 page)

The odor of cigarettes was heavy in the air, as the bedroom door was pulled shut. John Doe could hear the metallic thud of the dead bolt as it slammed home. He knew the sound by heart, the terrifying clang he had endured on a daily basis for weeks on end. He was once more alone in his cell.

The room in which Doe was held captive was on the top floor of a brownstone. The room was large, with a high ceiling. A skylight with security bars kept the room bright during the daylight hours. No shadows crossed the light during the daylight hours, and Doe intuited that to mean that no tall trees or large buildings were close in vicinity. All in all, it was a very pleasant room, had it not existed for the express purposes of incarceration and torture.

Doe was naked in the center of the bed—just where he had been left. A wall-mounted surveillance camera was focused on the bed. It had been turned off for some time. Doe had grown into the habit of listening for the hum of the camera’s reciprocating motor which would come on at the end of each session. The camera was frozen now, as it had been for weeks. The reason was obvious to Doe—his captor had tired of him or was no longer concerned with his escape, perhaps both. Either explanation reinforced Doe’s belief. He was no longer worthy of anyone’s attention.

“Maybe I’ll feed you today, maybe I won’t.” The captor’s adenoid voice was callous. He abruptly dabbed out his eighteenth cigarette of the day and shut the video camera. “You’re fucking useless, you know that?” He said nothing else before leaving the room.

Sound and smell were all that Doe had left. He had been blinded by repeated injections of Drano to his eyes. The room’s freshly painted white walls had become a canvas upon which he saw, or imagined only shadows. The muscles in his hands and arms were almost useless from constant restraint with piano wire.

The room was silent now in the aftermath. The captor had satisfied his curiosity and had left Doe to his solitude.

Doe sank back onto the pillow, careful not to allow the piano wires that bound him to cut into his already raw wounds. There was no way for Doe to avoid the pain when the captor was in the room with him. The best he could do was shrink into a corner of his mind and wait for the humiliation to end.

He felt tears rising up again; tears that consistently followed each encounter. He had been imprisoned a very long time and now accepted the fact that he would never know freedom again. He tried humming but his throat still ached from the needle that had been thrust into his voice box. He swallowed gingerly—it ached as if the needle was still in there, still lodged in his throat, preventing the swallowing mechanism to function normally. He wasn’t sure who could hear him, but apparently the captor wanted to safeguard against Doe screaming and being overheard. Drano had been injected into his throat as well, and it had destroyed his vocal cords. But he had taught himself to hum, using only the canals of the nose and throat as resonating chambers.

The windows were open, allowing the warm spring air to wash over him. He had a vague memory of how the room looked, memories from before he had lost his vision. Wrought iron bars were bolted on the inside of the windows over heavy white shades. The floor was composed of tan and brown linoleum squares. The walls were a glossy white. That was how Doe remembered it. He had been heavily sedated in the early days, the days when he still had the strength to resist.

The piano wires were anchored to the ceiling. They allowed him access to a sink and toilet on the north side of the room away from the windows. Not that it mattered. Doe lacked the strength to escape. He no longer fought back when he was tortured. He was fed enough to stay alive, but not enough for adequate nutrition. His muscles were badly atrophied. His will had been crushed.

He no longer thought about escaping. He now truly understood the curse of his vanity. His once youthful body had been scarred and burnt. He had been tortured with cigarettes, leaving scars on his face and body. The more he resisted, the more pain was inflicted on him. His captor would stick needles into his back and face and turn the needle slowly, painfully enlarging the hole. But the most horrible disfigurement had taken place in Doe’s mind—he had been turned into a pathetic freak, a blind, mute, deformed gargoyle. He would wake in the middle of the night to his friends’ horrified expressions—in his mind, he had become the elephant man, a circus sideshow attraction. He had lived his life striving for physical perfection. Doe no longer hungered for the outside world. His wish was to die in this white room and to be buried anonymously. He hoped that death was not long off.

What Doe did not remember of the room was that the captor kept a cabinet by the door where he maintained the tools he used to incarcerate and torture. The locked cabinet was white Formica with glass doors. There were bottles of sedatives stored on the shelves: alprazolam, diazepam, Versed, morphine, and Triavil. He kept an assortment of hypodermic needles of varying sizes there too; some were used to administer medication, others were used for torture. An unopened bottle of Drano had several small pinholes in the plastic container where the bottle had been pierced with a hypodermic needle to draw out the corrosive material that had been injected into Doe’s eyes and throat. And there was the photographic equipment: Polaroid cameras, packs of film, digital cameras, and video cameras capable of being remotely operated. There was a large assortment of batteries and an unopened brick of VHS tapes. The drawers were filled with restraints: heavy gauge single-strand piano wire, nylon rope, and bungee cords. One drawer contained cartons of unfiltered cigarettes and matches.

Doe lay silently on the bed, allowing his body to forget the torment it had just endured. The bedding stunk from the embedded odor of cigarette smoke. He focused on the raw flesh on his wrists, convincing himself that the wounds could be magically healed. He remembered a scene from a horror film where a vampire’s wounds shrunk and closed before his eyes. Doe pretended that he possessed the same supernatural power—before his mind’s eye, the cigarette burns healed, the scars faded, and his muscles, once again, swelled and rippled with vitality.

It was easier for him to doze these days. The spring air was intoxicating. He found that blindness acted as a sedative, making his mind less active. He was almost out when he heard the sound of an intense struggle from the room next door.

A bud popped open in Doe’s mind, and from it sprang the first glimmer of hope Doe had felt in a very long while. He was not alone.

I
t was after eleven when I got the call from Ambler, putting an abrupt end to my plans for a good night’s sleep.
He was calling to ask Lido and I down to FBI headquarters in lower Manhattan. Our crime lab had been all over our skull and had then transferred it to the FBI, who was now ready to share its findings, if any, with us. I was hopeful that they had found something before the case went cold again. No information had come from our medical examination of the comatose John Doe. Amazingly, no one had seen a wretched, half-naked man drag his battered body into Central Park. Stuff like that just drives me wild.

We were meeting Ambler at the FBI’s crime lab. The night receptionist led Lido and me to the conference room to wait for Ambler and Evans Jack, the department chief. There were still a few technicians working; cases I assumed that could not wait for morning and the next business day. On our way to the conference room, we passed the skull preparation unit. I stopped for a moment to watch a heavyset woman working on a small object, meticulously picking away at it with what looked like a dentist’s curette. I took a step closer as she placed the object into a small sink, which was set into her workstation. She began to irrigate with water flowing through a brown rubber tube. The breath caught in my lungs when I saw what she was working on. She used compressed air to dry the moisture from an infant’s skull.

I heard Madonna’s voice whispering in my ear, “Naponu still needs a mother. That little girl and thousands like her need someone’s help, your help.” So there I was, Stephanie Chalice, titanium-clad, invulnerable, and cool as a proverbial cucumber, standing on the floor of the FBI’s crime lab, pushing back tears.

Lido noticed that I was lagging behind. He stopped and turned. “Hey, what’s the matter?”

I turned away from the child’s skull and caught up with him.

Lido took my arm. “What’s going on?”

“I just needed to catch my breath.”

Lido had an incredulous look on his face. “You, the same woman who did a wind sprint in an evening gown the other night? You’re out of breath?”

“Just let it go. I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

The impenetrable shield was back up. I was no longer Lido’s girlfriend. I was no longer a woman with a soul that could be touched. I was back on the job and pushing past Lido before someone else saw the breach in my armor. God knows what kind of insane dream I’d have tonight. Would tonight’s reverie see the return of Madonna, Batman ... Brad Pitt? Any and all were possible and were among the visitors that frequented my subconscious hallucinations. Only time would tell. For now, though, it was time to get busy. “Time’s wasting. Let’s see what Ambler’s got for us.”

Ambler was seated at the head of the conference table. The skull was on the table in front of him, facing us. Absent the white Persian cat, with skull before him, Ambler smacked of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE, and James Bond’s number one nemesis. At his side was Evans Jack, the department head. Jack was a huge man with short hair and a full beard. He looked odd wearing a suit. Except for the Gibson SG, he looked a lot like Billy Gibbons, ZZ Top’s lead guitarist and longtime oddball; but who am I to judge. He also looked like he could have been Blofeld’s, Number One, in any number of James Bond movies. Evans Jack jumped up to welcome us as soon as we entered the room. I shook his huge paw, and then sat down off the corner of the table, close to Ambler.

Ambler turned toward Lido and me, cool as ice, looking at us as if he had never seen us before and didn’t care if we’d ever meet again—the man was good.

“Make my day,” I said to Ambler. “Give me something we can sink our teeth into.”

“It’s the skull we’ve been looking for,” Ambler said. “There was a one hundred percent allele match to the remains of Kevin Lee—no question.”

“That sounds promising,” Lido said.

Ambler picked up a container of Starbucks coffee and sipped. “Promising in so far as we haven’t hit the wall, yes. Our UNSUB isn’t perfect. He lost one of his prized possessions, this skull. We had thought that he was meticulous because the trail has gone cold for so long, but by allowing John Doe’s escape, he has shown us that he’s capable of making mistakes.”

“Not to mention that he captures and tortures people. Have you had a chance to look in on our John Doe?”

“Not yet, Chalice.” Ambler replied. “I hear he’s a mess.”

“You have no idea. His body is covered with scars and burns from head to toe. He’s been blinded and restrained. God knows what that poor man has been through.”

“Any chance he’ll regain consciousness?” Ambler asked.

“Slim. We’re circulating his photo on the street. We think that’s our best chance for determining his identity.”

“You’ll make his photos available to The Bureau?”

“Already done,” Lido said.

“Was there anything found on the skull that will lead us to the UNSUB?” UNSUB was Bureau lingo for unidentified suspect.

“It’s clean,” Ambler said, with disappointment in his voice. “Jack’s people have been over it top to bottom. They found Doe’s fingerprints, which unfortunately are not on file. They found common household dust, some cigarette ash…that’s about it.”                

“How’s that possible?” Lido asked.

Evans Jack picked up the skull. It looked like a baseball cradled in his huge hands. “It’s no small job to make a skull look like this. An adult skull articulates with blood, cartilage, membranes, sinew—you know what I’m talking about, yes?”

Lido and I nodded. Ambler pulled out his Blackberry and began scrolling through his emails.

Jack continued, “So now that we understand that human bones are not pure white as found in nature, it begs the question, how and why was this skull cleaned? Typically, a specimen like this has been prepared for anatomical study. You find them at universities, teaching hospitals, museums—you get the picture.”

“So you think our UNSUB is using his victim’s skulls to perform anatomical studies? That’s a wild one.”

“You’d think he’d just take an evening class at NYU,” Lido quipped.

“I’m sure the UNSUB’s interest in the human skull goes way beyond the ordinary,” Ambler said.

“He doesn’t want anyone to know what he’s doing. This is very private work he’s performing,” I said. “Why he’s doing it, that’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question.”

“How hard is it to prepare a skull in this way?” Lido asked.

“It really takes a lot of work, but it doesn’t require much training,” Jack said, “All it really requires is a strong stomach and a great deal of determination. I’m sure your UNSUB has both.”

“So you think he did this himself?” Lido asked.

“Most likely,” Jack replied. “There are signs in the finished product that point to the work of an accomplished amateur. There are several shops out there; some are very advanced and others are just slightly more than butchers. I don’t think this example falls into either category.”

“Butchers, how so?” I asked.

“If you picture Uncle Jed and Granny sitting around the still, the image wouldn’t be too far from wrong. Remember, bone cleaning is a very primitive art form. Professional operations have refined it to a much higher level, but the nitty-gritty is that it was first performed by savages: tribal medicine men, shamans, head hunters—picture a shrunken head. We’re not exactly talking elite company.”

“I’m intrigued, repulsed, but intrigued. Tell me how you know so much about the way this skull was cleaned.”

“There are three ways to clean a bone like this: bug cleaning, boiling, and maceration. Our technicians said that tiny particles of sinew were found on the articulating surfaces of the middle nasal concha, which leads us to believe this specimen was bug cleaned because the beetles were too big to get into those really small crevices.”