The Colour of Death (5 page)

Jordache glanced at Linnet.  “Gotcha, you bastard.  At least we can now identify the victims and inform the families.”

Glancing back to the lodge Fox thought he caught the ghost of a smile on Linnet’s lips.  “You only found three, Karl?”

“
Only?
”  The detective frowned.  “You think there’s more, Nathan?”  Keeping his eyes locked on Linnet’s, Fox considered the man’s hunting lodge:  the immaculate kitchen, the books, the DVDs, guns and stuffed animals.  The insight, when it came to him, made Fox groan.  “What is it?” said Jordache.

Fox stayed focused on Linnet.  “You need to control your immediate environment, don’t you, George?  Everything must be ‘just so’.  You like to keep everything you value close to you.  There’s only one reason you’d bury your hunting trophies out here.”  Linnet paled but said nothing.

“What reason’s that?” Jordache demanded.

“The house is full,” said Fox.

“What do you mean?”

“Check the basement, Karl.  It’s smaller internally than the kitchen above.  I bet it’s got false walls.”  He took some satisfaction from Linnet’s fading smile.  “You should find the rest of the bodies in the walls.”

As his team ran off to investigate, Jordache studied Fox for a moment.  “Christ, Nathan, your mind’s an interesting place to visit but I’d sure as hell hate to live there.”  Both men had known each other for years, ever since Jordache, as a young rookie cop, had escorted a ten-year-old orphaned boy out of a blood-spattered Chevron garage.  Over the years the cop had kept in constant touch.  When Fox had qualified top of his class from Stanford University’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, a newly promoted Detective Jordache had taken him out for a congratulatory beer and sought the younger man’s psychiatric advice on interviewing a particularly difficult suspect.  Since then, Jordache had become chief of detectives and Fox the youngest member of the psychiatry and neurology faculty at Oregon University Research Hospital.  In many ways the older man was Fox’s opposite.  Fox was a commitment-phobe who jumped ship before relationships became too serious and lived for his work.  Jordache was a committed family man who put his wife and two daughters before everything — including his work.  “How many bodies are they going to find, Nathan?” the detective asked, turning back to the lodge.

“My guess, given the space, would be about half a dozen.”

The sound of drilling, sawing and splitting wood filled the still air.  Followed by silence and a muffled exclamation:  “JEEZUS.”  A shout:  “Hey, Chief, the doc’s right on the money.  You better come see this.  We got five more bodies in here.  Maybe six.”

“I’m coming,” said Jordache.

Fox checked his watch.  “Look, Karl, you don’t need any more help from me with Linnet’s little house of horrors.  You mind if I get going?”

Jordache stopped outside the doorway and shook his hand.  “No problem, Nathan.  We’ve got it from here.  Thanks for your help, as always, I owe you a brew the next time we’re at O’Malley’s.”  He glanced into the lodge.  “Before you go, though, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“What?”

Jordache stepped through the doorway and reached for a pile of magazines and newspapers on a small table by the window.  He picked up the
Oregonian
and pointed at the unsettlingly beautiful face staring out from the front page.  “It’s about the Jane Doe who saved the other girls.  You want to know something strange?  We don’t need her testimony to put the Russians away — we got more than enough from the girls she rescued — but my people went the extra mile to help her recover her identity and discover how she knew those girls were in there.  And you know what my finest detectives came up with?  Nada.  Zip.”

As Fox looked at the picture an idea came to him.  He took the paper off Jordache and walked over to Linnet, who was being pushed into a police car.  “Hey, George, do you recognize the girl who burned down one of your houses and ruined your party?  Was she one of the girls you hunted?  Was she the one that got away?”

Linnet looked at the picture with cold eyes, then smiled.  “I’ve no idea who she is.  All I know is that none of the bitches I hunted got away.”

“Like I said, Nathan,” Jordache said, as the car door closed on Linnet, “no one knows who Jane Doe is or why she went into the Russian’s basement, unless she had a sixth sense about the girls or something.  I’m telling you, Nathan, she’s the real deal:  your classic riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.  The thing is, although she’s all over the news at the moment, no one’s coming forward to claim her.  The last I heard she was destined for the Oregon State psychiatric unit in Salem and no one deserves to rot in that snake pit.  Certainly not her, not after what she did.  I was wondering if…”

Fox smiled.  Jordache didn’t do detachment.  He couldn’t help getting involved with everyone and everything he dealt with.  “Don’t worry, Karl, Jane Doe’s coming to Tranquil Waters.  The handover meeting’s today.  She’s one of the reasons I’ve got to get back.”

Jordache nodded, satisfied.  “That’s all I wanted to know.”  He smiled slyly.  “Watch yourself, though, Nathan.  She’s got something about her.”  The detective patted him on the shoulder and disappeared into the lodge.  “She’s got a way of getting under your skin — even yours, my Teflon friend.”

Two hours later, entering the outskirts of Portland, Fox turned right when he should have turned left.  The almost subconscious detour meant he approached the city from a different direction — on a particular road.  After a few miles a familiar collection of run-down buildings came into view and he slowed the car.  Usually, he sought out the Chevron petrol station then drove on.  But today a new yellow sign forced him to change his obsessive ritual, brake hard and pull into a dusty car lot, gripping the steering wheel white-knuckle tight, forehead beaded with sweat.

He had lost count of the times he had altered his route to drive past the place where his life had changed, but he hadn’t ventured inside once.  Apparently the interior had been transformed over the last twenty years — the merchandising of the products, the décor and even the location of the cash register had altered — but that didn’t make the prospect of going inside any more bearable.

Although he had been only ten at the time, he still felt guilty about surviving the shooting and believed he should have done more to save his family.  When he had told Jordache about the cobra tattoos, the police had identified the killers as members of Sons of the Serpent, a small anarchic cult whose followers took hallucinogenic drugs to reinforce their belief that they were immortals chosen by Satan to sow discord in the world.  He had later learned that the strange looped crucifix tattooed on their arms was called an ankh, an ancient symbol for eternal life.  Fox used to fantasize about hunting the killers down until Jordache had informed him that both men, model citizens before they had joined the cult, had been shot dead in a later robbery:  ballistics had matched their guns to those used to murder his parents and sister. The Sons of the Serpent had disbanded shortly afterwards but Fox still possessed an almost phobic hatred of cults.  Numerous therapists, attempting to recover his memory of the event, had encouraged him to revisit the scene of the crime and confront his fears but he had always refused, rationalizing that sometimes it was better to let sleeping dogs lie.  The simple memory of arguing with his sister before she was murdered still had the power to upset him.  Recalling the moment of her death and that of his parents would surely be intolerable.

Deep down, however, he knew he’d never be at peace until he recovered those lost minutes.  That was why the yellow sign had shocked him.  It announced that the Chevron petrol station and many of the surrounding buildings would soon be pulled down to make way for a new shopping mall.  For reasons he couldn’t explain, he feared that once the petrol station disappeared all hope of ever remembering what had happened on that night would disappear with it.

Chapter 6

Across town, a stranger entered the Shanghai, a seamy bar hidden among the run-down hotels, strip joints, whorehouses and derelict warehouses that lined the Willamette River.  Vince Vega and other hardcore regulars looked up from their lunchtime beers to glare at the intruder who dared trespass in their domain.  Vega, sitting alone in the corner, shook his head in disgust.  Even the police knew to stay out of the Shanghai.  This rube had to be from out of town, too stupid to know better.

Portland’s Old Town, home of the original skid row, had a notorious and sordid past.  Not so long ago, men who drank in its numerous bars could have found themselves drugged and dragged through the infamous Shanghai tunnels which ran under much of the neighborhood, waking to find themselves on a ship in the middle of the ocean, forced to work for food and drink.  Young women faced an ever bleaker fate as white slaves sold into prostitution in some far-flung land.

Today, it was still one of the more dangerous parts of the city, edgier than its fashionable neighbor the Pearl District, and this suited Vince Vega just fine.  Over the years he had clawed his way to a position of power and now regarded Old Town, in all its seedy glory, as his fiefdom.  Most of the whores who walked its streets or operated out of the low-rent flophouses came under his control.  Many of the crack dealers who plied their trade in the district paid him a cut.

As Vega sipped his beer, his weasel eyes watched the stranger approach the bar and study the extensive array of Oregon beers chalked on the large blackboard.  The man wore a collarless white shirt but everything else was plain black:  trousers, long jacket, boots, the broad-rimmed hat that concealed his face, even the large bag he carried in his right hand.  His pale skin and lips added to the monochrome look.  The stranger was large, with a laborer’s build, but size had never intimidated Vega, who was a wiry ferret of a man.  In his experience bigger men were invariably slow and overconfident.  And this guy looked like one of those Amish pussies who wouldn’t step on a bug.  Some discarded marker pens lay scattered on the bar and the man picked them up, obsessively arranging the colors in a particular order before replacing them in their carton.

What an asshole
.

He listened to the rumbling growl of the man’s voice as he ordered a beer, and watched the way he inclined his head like a dog, to stare at the screen above the bar.  The guy seemed mesmerized by the TV, like he’d never seen one before in his life.

“Fucking retard,” Vega muttered into his beer.  Suddenly the man straightened and stepped away from the bar, literally taken aback by what he was seeing on the screen:  a news feature on the mystery Jane Doe.  Did the retard know her?  The man watched the screen intently, apparently in awe of how Jane Doe had gone into a dark basement armed only with an axe and single-handedly rescued eleven girls from the Russian Mafia.  Vega scowled at the television.  If that bitch had moved in on his merchandise he would have given her more than fucking amnesia, that’s for sure.  Nothing and no one got in the way of his business.

He shifted his attention back to the stranger and noticed he was sipping his beer and looking in his direction.  That stupid hat still obscured much of his face but Vega could sense the man was checking him out.  The stranger glanced at him and then back at the screen a couple of times, as if making some connection.  Then he tilted his head and Vega saw the man’s pale eyes for the first time.  The bastard
was
staring directly at him.  He looked surprised, like he recognized Vega.  Which wasn’t possible.  Vega never forgot a face and he sure as hell had never seen this fresh-off-the-farm rube before.

He reached for the gun in his waistband, intending to stand up and confront the stranger, show this asshole the natural order of things.  But something about his cold, unblinking gaze stopped him.  Vega could usually read a man’s eyes, detect his weakness and go for the jugular.  He detected nothing from the stranger, though, not a flicker of humanity.  It was like looking into the eyes of an animal — or a dead man.  Vince Vega didn’t ever try to stare him down because for the first time in a long while he felt the chill of fear.  The beer suddenly tasted sour in his mouth so he put it down slowly on the table, picked up his newspaper and walked out of the bar.  As he passed the stranger he detected a faint, almost imperceptible sickly-sweet odor.  He had smelt it before, on a number of occasions.  It was the smell of death.

Outside, he immediately felt better and cursed himself for not confronting the stranger.  He was Vince Vega, for Christ’s sake, and Vince Vega didn’t back down from anybody or anything.  Yeah, he reassured himself, if the guy was still there when he went back to the bar then he’d teach him a lesson he’d never forget.  Heading for the low-rent apartment he used as an office, he cut through one of the deserted alleys off Burnside Street.  It was only when he reached the end that he sensed someone behind him.  He turned, just as his nostrils picked up a waft of the cloying smell he had detected in the bar earlier, but he was too late.  The man was upon him.  Before he could cry out a large hand clamped over his mouth, something sharp pricked his arm and his legs collapsed beneath him.

Sometime later his mind cleared.  He had no idea how much later.  All he knew was that his head throbbed and his mouth felt dry.  His hands were bound and he was lying face down on cold concrete steps inside a dark stairwell that smelt of piss.  He was no longer wearing his own clothes, but a bra and women’s panties.

“Feel familiar?” rumbled the same low voice he had heard in the bar.  The smell wafted by him again and the big stranger came into view.  He had a cell phone taped to his forehead and it took Vega a beat to realize its video lens was recording everything the sick rube was seeing.

“What are you doing?  What the hell do you want from me?”

“Remember this place?” growled the man.  Vega heard the stranger’s excited heavy breathing and looked around frantically.  Where was this place?  Why should it be familiar?  The fucking retard must have him confused with someone else.  The man opened the black bag at his feet and Vega saw the carton of marker pens from the bar, a transparent box of large syringes and a copy of the
Oregonian
newspaper.  Reaching beneath the syringe box the man retrieved a staple gun and a large knife.