“Give me the name. I swear to you, Nat, I’m not going to do anything that puts her at risk.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“I deserve to know the name of the man who kidnapped my daughter, Nat. Jesus—she’s my daughter. My daughter!”
“Oliver Church,” he says, and I recognize the name. “That’s all I know. I don’t know any addresses or anything else.”
“Thank you,” I say, and I hang up.
“See, I knew they’d answer the phone,” Dad says. “I’m your good-luck charm.”
“Give me the folders.”
He hands them over. The fourth one in belongs to Oliver Church. Out of the list of crimes in the files, Oliver Church is the only one who has kidnapping and manslaughter next to his name, but there are no details of the crimes.
“Address won’t be current,” Dad says, “so no point in going to his house, and even if it is current he sure as hell won’t have taken Sam there.”
“You ever hear of him?”
“Never. Can’t your in-laws go online and find out about him?”
“They barely know what online means.”
“Well, there has to somebody you can ask.”
“Not really. What we need is a computer,” I say, looking out the windows, knowing that nine out of every ten houses out there has one. I think about all my conversations with Schroder, about my dad in jail, about the stabbing, about the ex-cop working for Schroder trying to solve part of the case.
The ex-cop.
Because Christchurch is clinging to the past, it’s still possible to pass an occasional phone booth, and I drive back toward town to find one. The Yellow Pages have been torn out, and so has the phone receiver, but the White Pages are still there and I use them to look up a name and address.
All the lights are off inside the house, as they are in every other house in the street. The difference between this house and the others is the others all have a Christmasy look about them, lights and decorations in the window, oozing joy and peace to the world. This house is cold and certainly empty, and when I break a window and make my way inside it feels like my house, like something has been lost from this home the same way something was lost from mine.
I use the cell phone to create some light, then decide that it’s so late in the night I’d have to be really unlucky if somebody saw the lights burning, so I flick them on. I open up the back door for Dad and he comes inside.
It’s a three-bedroom home with one bedroom set up for a young girl, perhaps one similar to Sam’s age. The room hasn’t been slept in for a long time, and it’s far tidier than any young girl would ever leave it. There’s an office with not much in it, but it has a computer,
and the remaining bedroom has a big bed with folded clothes lying on top.
“Who lives here?” Dad asks, looking at some of the photos. “You know this guy?”
“Not really,” I say.
“He seems familiar.”
“Maybe you’ve seen him around.”
“Only place I’ve been around lately is jail,” Dad says.
“And there’s your answer.”
The house belongs to Theodore Tate—the ex–police officer Schroder told me about a few times, the man in jail for drunk driving, the guy who figured out who stabbed my dad. There are other photos on the wall—a pretty woman and a young girl around Sam’s age. I wonder what happened to Tate’s family, and have a real bad feeling that somehow the virus got them the same way it got mine. Maybe Tate lost his wife and went seeking revenge in an attempt to save his daughter. Maybe when he gets out of jail he’ll keep on searching.
I go online and quickly scan the latest news reports. The name of the man I ran over this afternoon has been released—Adam Sinclair. There are already many details: a year or so ago there wouldn’t be any names released for at least a day, let alone facts, but these days you can see a dead body on the front page of the newspaper.
The reports spell out the events and are unusually accurate. They say two men tried to kill me; one of them was hit by a car when I fled the scene, and the second man then executed the first. The reports are unclear on why the men were after me—but hint at my involvement in the killing of Shane Kingsly. The phrase “revenge killing” shows up about five times—as my hypothetical reason for killing Shane Kingsly, and as their reason for trying to kill me. It’s the first time in twenty years that the media has guessed correctly what I might be capable of.
Tonight’s deaths are still too soon for there to be any details, plus it’s Christmas, so most of the reporters are doing society a favor and taking the night off. There’s only a vague outline with no names,
stating that one of the two victims is a police officer. Bracken’s death is still too early to even get a mention.
I type Oliver Church’s name into the computer and a minute later we have his story.
Nine years ago Church kidnapped a six-year-old boy and tried to ransom him back to his parents, but he got busted when he went to pick up the money. Church took the child to an abandoned slaughterhouse north of the city. When he got caught, he wouldn’t give up the location of the child. He tried to make a deal to cut back jail time for the safety of the child. Lawyers came to the party, but by the time they struck a deal the child had died—combination of cold and hunger and everything else that happens when you tie a kid up and leave them in a place like that. Poor kid probably died of fright. That’s why it was manslaughter and not murder. Because of the deal he made, he only got six years. Didn’t matter that the boy had died: the deal was for the boy’s location, and since nothing specific was put in writing saying the boy had to be alive, nothing could be done to reverse the deal.
“You think he could kill a child deliberately?” I ask Dad.
“Make no mistake, son. That is what he did. He was in custody for three days without giving up the location. He knew that kid was going to die and he did nothing to stop it. That means he can do it again. It should only be about the money, but this guy—shit, look at these stories. The men who robbed the bank, maybe they’re all killers, maybe just one or two of them, but if Bracken hired this guy it means none of that crew are capable of killing a child. Church is.”
“Oh Jesus, Dad, what do we do? What the hell do we do?”
“He’s not going to take Sam somewhere she can figure out how to lead the police back to. He’ll have somewhere else. For now, it’s about the money.”
“But there is no money, don’t you get that? There never was! Bracken knew I never had it, he was just playing the game so the others would believe.”
“Then maybe Oliver Church believes it too,” Dad says. “You better hope like hell that he does.”
“It still doesn’t tell us where she is.”
“Criminals return to what they know best,” Dad says. “That I know for a fact. The slaughterhouse has been abandoned a long time,” he says. “Way back when I was a teenager. We used to call it the Laughterhouse.”
“You think she’s there?”
“At this stage we have nothing else.”
It’s a twenty-five minute drive which I cover in about twelve, at times hitting speeds that Santa would be impressed by. Christmas decorations pass us in a blur, turning into streaks of light. We don’t see a single car on the road. I slow down at red lights before blowing right through them. Suburbia ends and the pastures start again like they do in every direction in this city—except for the east; only way you can keep going east in this city is if your car can float. I try the cell phone number from Bracken’s phone again but there’s no joy, which isn’t fair because Christmas is supposed to be a time of joy.
When we reach the slaughterhouse we pull up short of the road leading up to it. I leave all three cell phones—my one, Kingsly’s, and Bracken’s—in the car, and we get out. The ground is cool and damp, as if the ghosts of thousands of animals have drained into the soil. I stash the bag of money in the boot and grab a flashlight from the emergency breakdown kit.
“This prostitute at the probation officer’s house, you get a name?” Dad asks.
“What? Why?”
“Just curious.”
“No. No name.”
The road is ankle-breaking material, cracked and busted from the weight of trucks that once upon a time used to go up and down it, so we walk off to the side where the dirt is hard packed. We have to walk slower because of our wounds, Dad’s and mine. I figure it’s been a long day for him too.
Christmas doesn’t quite reach out here. No tinsel or lights, just a bleak setting with shadows cast only by the moonlight and stars.
“What’d she look like, then?”
“What?”
“The prostitute. What’d she look like?”
“I don’t know. The way they all look.”
“They all look different, son. Trust me. It’s only on the inside they look the same.”
I don’t ask him what he means by that and thankfully he doesn’t elaborate. We keep walking.
“You’re not really going to take me back after all this, are you, son?” he asks.
I don’t answer him.
The slaughterhouse comes into view. It seems to grow out of the earth the closer we get, looming out of the darkness and bearing down on us. The words
NORTH CITY SLAUGHTERHOUSE
have been stenciled in letters a meter high, big enough to make out in the dark. The smell is still here, even decades after the place has shut down, hanging in the still air. Or maybe the smell is only in my imagination. There’s certainly something here. I wonder how bad it smelled back then. The slaughterhouse was only up and running for two years or so before it was closed down, a victim of expanding suburbia that never did expand. The building was shut down before the road leading up to it could be repaved in thicker cement, the land sold, and then nothing, until somebody came along with a couple of tins of spray paint and blacked out the “S” on the word Slaughterhouse.
Fifteen years ago this building was the scene of a double homicide, and nine years ago it was used to hide a boy who died from fear while a man tried to shave some years off his sentence. Tonight it possibly holds my daughter.
A dark four-door sedan is parked in front of the building. We split up; Dad heads toward the back and I head toward the car. We work well together, not having to talk, only a minimum of hand gestures, as if we’ve done this before. I can tell my dad is enjoying it and I hate him for that. I reach the car and take a look inside before moving on.
The slaughterhouse walls are mostly made up of concrete blocks, with some sections of corrugated iron. The base of it is lined in mold that grows up the walls, darker near the bottom where it grows
the thickest, and there are plenty of weeds growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk. I reach a window but can’t see a damn thing inside. The side door leading into an office area is lying on the ground, the top hinge busted, the bottom hinge still attached but twisted ninety degrees. The temperature drops when I step through. I stand still and listen before turning on the flashlight. There’s no furniture anywhere, nothing hanging on the walls, nothing on the concrete floor. The room has been completely stripped. The door to the corridor has been removed. I head through, and another empty doorway later and I’m in the slaughterhouse, a huge, cavernous room that smells of rot. The air is graveyard cold, and the darkness seems to suck at the back of my eyeballs. The flashlight doesn’t even break the dark, just lights up a thin beam of it and is lost. I can sense large hooks hanging from the ceiling ahead of me somewhere, but can’t see them. There’s machinery left here to rust—the tools of the trade that started the animals down the path from living, breathing entities to supermarket specials and hamburgers. No wonder a young boy, tied up and left alone out here, died.
I turn back into the corridor. There’s a bend in it, and once around it I can see a light coming from beneath a door not too far ahead—one of the few doors remaining. It’s a heavy wooden door, the bottom of it lined with vertical scratches, probably from rats. I reach it and put my face against it and listen but can’t hear a thing.
I suck in a couple of deep breaths, tighten my grip on the shotgun, and swing the door open.
The second name on the list, Zach Everest, is a bust. The Armed Offenders Unit ended up breaking into a house that Everest hadn’t set foot in for about two years, and the new residents weren’t thrilled at the intrusion—let alone the kids who, having heard the commotion, were horribly disappointed to see six men in black storming into their home instead of one man dressed in red. There are no other known addresses for Everest, but Schroder knows it’s only a matter of time now—probably less than a day, he guesses—before they have him in custody.
Reports have already come in about the gunshot victim half an hour ago. Tyler Layton was tied to a chair and executed. Witnesses woken by the noise reported two men fleeing the scene in a four-door sedan that certainly doesn’t belong to Edward Hunter, because Hunter’s car got busted up in town, but which might have been his wife’s. At this point there’s nothing to connect Hunter and his dad to the killing, and nothing to connect Tyler Layton to any of
the men responsible for the bank robbery or the abduction of Sam Hunter—but Schroder is confident there will be a link somewhere. Layton has a criminal record long enough to pretty much guarantee some interaction with Jack Hunter or the bank robbers—and the way the night is going, Jack Sr. seems to be the catalyst for all the violence around here.
At the moment Oliver Church is the far more urgent target. Church kidnapped and killed a boy, for which he only served six years. Schroder knows Church’s involvement ups the danger factor for Sam Hunter. Bracken didn’t choose somebody who would just stash the kid away for a few hours and free her somewhere, but somebody capable of ending the life of someone so young.
He redirects the assault team to Church’s address, and twenty minutes later it’s all for nothing. The address is current—there’s mail inside addressed to Church, there’s fresh food in the fridge and a half-empty packet of cigarettes on the table, but no sign of Church.
More detectives arrive, among them Detective Watts, who has Church’s criminal record with him.