Body of Shadows (32 page)

She climbed in.

Water dripped
off her face and hair and clothes onto a carpet. She stood still and listened for the charging feet of someone who’d laid a trap.

No charge came.

She fired up a flashlight to find herself in a small bedroom. A quick scan showed nothing of interest, which is what she expected. If someone had souvenir ears of murder victims, they’d be well stashed. A main level bedroom wouldn’t be the first choice.

She headed downstairs into the basement.

The planks creaked.

The musty odor of stale humidity hung in the air. If the place ever had French drains they must have clogged up twenty years ago. The ceiling was low, six foot or thereabout, probably initially built for storage rather than living. She could stand upright without hitting her head on the joists but not by much.

In the corner was an old furnace.

Next to it was a shiny water heater, recently installed.

The flicker of a pilot light danced eerily behind a shield. Crude wooden shelves lined a wall, filled with junk and cobwebs.

The splash of the flashlight was creepy.

A bare light bulb screwed into a crude ceiling fixture had a pull chain hanging from it. She was half-tempted to see if it worked but there was a small garden-level window that could give her away.

She stayed with the flashlight.

There were no rooms, doors or enclosures.

The only hidden space to speak of was the one under the stairs, jammed with boxes and junk. Given the dust and spider webs, no one had disturbed it for some time.

Then she noticed something.

Over in the corner
against the wall there were several vertical two-by-fours running from the floor to the ceiling and serving as supports for water pipes and ductwork. One section of those studs had a wooden cover. On inspection, it was a piece of plywood with circular holes in the top corners, approximately one inch in diameter. Those holes fit over nails, which supported the wood.

She lifted the wood off and set it on the ground.

What she saw she could hardly believe.

Between the studs were a number of horizontal, two-by-four shelves.

On those shelves were ten or more mismatched jars filled with some kind of yellowish liquid.

Inside each jar, sunk down at the bottom, was a human ear.

Cave’s face
jumped into Pantage’s brain.

It was his face that she saw at Jackie Lake’s.

It was his face that she saw when he chased her out the door that fateful night. It was his face that she saw right before he grabbed her foot and sent her flying into the fire hydrant.

It was his face.

There was no question.

This wasn’t a dream.

It wasn’t a trick of the night.

It was a memory.

105

Day Six

July 23

Saturday Night

Kelly was nowhere.
She never showed up for the 4:30 meeting, never went back to the firm, never answered her phone and never called Drift. He swung past her house three times and her car wasn’t in the driveway.

She was gone.

A dark thought emerged.

Maybe the gladiator took her to mess with Drift.

Maybe that’s why the man didn’t kill Drift last night. Maybe he was going to entice Drift to rescue his little squeeze and then murder her in front of his eyes.

It was night.

A nasty thunderstorm beat down on Denver.

Drift swung over to Kelly’s house for the fourth time. Everything was the same as before. There was no car in the driveway. No interior or exterior lights shined. No one was home.

Still, Drift pulled into the driveway and killed the engine.

When he stepped out the weather assaulted him.

The rain was almost horizontal.

The front door was locked. He pounded on it, hard, and mashed the doorbell in again and again and again. No one came.

He went around to the back.

To his surprise, the back door was wide open and the kitchen floor was drenched with rain. Kelly’s purse was sitting on the granite countertop. Inside were her wallet, keys and cell phone.

Then he spotted blood on the floor.

“Kelly!”

No one answered.

He searched the house.

She wasn’t there.

Her car was in the garage.

Drift raced
out to the Tundra, fired the engine and spun the back tires, heading for the gladiator’s.

His stomach quivered.

His breath was short and rapid.

The beating of last night played with his brain.

Another trauma like it would be his death.

Halfway
to the gladiator’s his cell rang. He answered hoping beyond hope that it was Kelly with some stupid explanation.

Instead Pantage’s voice came through.

“Dent it’s me,” she said. “Listen carefully. Cave is the one who killed Jackie Lake. I’m at Cave’s house right now. I broke in. I found the ears. They’re in jars down in his basement. I remember him being at Jackie’s. It’s not a dream. It’s a memory. I’m positive of it.”

“You’re at Cave’s right now?”

Yes.

She was.

“Where’s Cave at?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s not here.”

“Get the hell out of there right now!”

“It’s okay. He’s not here.”

“Do it!”

“Drift, you don’t have to yell—”

“Just do it! Go, go, go! Get out of there right now, this second.”

“I’ll bring a jar with me.”

“Forget the jars. Just get out of there! Do you hear me? Do it now.”

The line got silent.

“Are you there?”

No answer.

“Pantage, I said are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here. I think I heard something. I got to go.”

The connection died.

Drift almost hit
re-dial but had the presence of mind to consider that if the noise was Cave, the last thing Pantage needed was for her phone to ring.

Where to go?

The gladiator’s?

Cave’s?

He smacked his palm down on the dash.

Choose!

Choose!

Choose!

A bolt of lightning struck a telephone pole to his left and lit the night with a force that made his eyes shut. The thunder was so explosive and immediate that he instinctively jerked the wheel to the right.

106

Day Six

July 23

Saturday Night

Pantage flicked
the flashlight off and stood perfectly still, frantic to not hear another strange sound, desperate to learn that what she heard before was simply a trick of the night. The storm pounded against the upper level, rattling the windows, loud but constant, with no jagged interruptions except for thunder.

Then something bad happened.

Glass shattered.

A door opened and then slammed shut.

Heavy footsteps walked almost directly above her.

She flicked the flashlight on just long enough to wedge into the junk under the stairs. No more than a second after she turned it off, the door above her opened and someone walked down, using a flashlight for a guide.

It was a man.

She could tell by his breathing.

Cave no doubt.

He didn’t come at her when he got to the cement. Instead he shined the light at the corner where the jars were. Then he walked in that direction. Enough light splashed off the walls for Pantage to see that he was carrying a jar.

He set it on the shelf next to another one.

There was liquid inside the jar.

A human ear was in that liquid, sunk to the bottom.

Pantage gasped.

The flashlight jerked in her direction.

Then the man charged.

She scrambled back and raised her arms to protect her face.

The flashlight came down on the top of her skull.

Colors flashed in her brain.

She tried to stand but her legs wouldn’t respond.

The flashlight stuck again.

Then everything went black.

107

Day Six

July 23

Saturday Night

From Honest Ed’s Junkyard
Yardley saw something she didn’t expect, namely a woman broke into the side window of Cave’s house and disappeared inside. She didn’t turn on any inside lights. A flicker of flashlight washed across the walls.

What was she doing?

Robbing the place?

Not more than five minutes later Cave came home, parked in front of the structure and entered from behind.

Strangely, he didn’t turn the lights on.

Three or four minutes later he dragged a woman around the side of the house, put her in the trunk and took off. Yardley hopped on the Kawasaki and followed with the headlight off.

Cave’s car was easy to keep in view; the right taillight was weaker than the left, as if there were two bulbs inside and one had burned out.

Vision was dangerous.

The storm built up too much on the helmet’s faceplate to see through. She had to keep it raised. The rain stung her face with cold needles. She squinted but the occasional needle still got through to her eyeball.

East.

East.

East.

Forever east, that’s where Cave was going. The traffic thinned then got almost non-existent. The sky was black and the road was equally so. She couldn’t see it, not an inch. With the headlight off, she could only gauge where to go by the movement of the taillights ahead.

Half an hour passed.

Then five more minutes.

Then ten more.

Her face was so raw that it had to be bleeding.

Then something bad happened.

Her front tire hit something. The bike went down and slid out from under her. Her body skidded down the asphalt and then slammed into something hard and immobile.

The breath flew out of her chest.

She tried to stand.

Her knees buckled and her body crumbled.

108

Day Six

July 23

Saturday Night

Pantage regained consciousness
to find she was tightly jammed into the trunk of a moving car. Her legs were tied at the ankles and knees, and her wrists were bound behind her back. The noise from a storm above and the road below was deafening.

Another person was inside the trunk with her.

It was Kelly Ravenfield, identically bound.

“See if you can get your hands by mine,” Kelly said.

Pantage tried to shift her body.

There was no room.

There was hardly enough room to expend her chest to breath.

“I can’t.”

“Let me try.”

She wiggled.

The wiggle did no good.

“He’s going to kill us,” Kelly said. “He already told me he was.”

“Cave?”

“No, Michael Northway,” Kelly said.

“That lawyer from New York?”

Yes.

Him.

“I don’t get it.”

“He killed Jackie Lake,” Kelly said.

“No, Cave did.”

“No, he did,” she said.

Northway used to be a hotshot lawyer in Denver but he had a dark side and got himself mixed up with a serial killer. Bad things happened and he ended up on the run. He had a friend in Denver named Grayson Condor.

“From my firm?”

Right.

Him.

Condor got Northway a lawyer job in San Francisco under the name Rydell Rain. It was a complicated reciprocity scheme implemented by Condor’s right-hand man, Marabella Amberbrook, who delegated almost everything to Yardley White.

“Jackie Lake was in San Francisco taking depositions,” Kelly said. “She saw Northway on the street and knew who he was and the fact that he was on the run. She also knew that Northway had been a client of Condor’s at one time. She called Condor to let him know she’d seen him. He talked her out of calling the police right away. He said he’d go with her to the station tomorrow morning. They’d play it up and make sure they got lots of kudos in exchange. She didn’t see the harm in it. She had a status conference set for the morning and sent you a text to see if you’d cover for her.”