The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (15 page)

The second time he dropped a pick, he bent to retrieve it and the door opened in front of him.

He looked up at Harry Bosch standing on the threshold, a Glock dangling from his left hand. “I thought you said you could pick a lock.”

“I clearly overestimated my prowess.” He straightened. “How’d you get in?”

“He left a window unlocked.” Bosch shrugged. “People, right?”

Patrick had expected a dump inside, but the house was quite clean and mostly bare. The furniture was modern Scandinavian—lots of bright white and brighter chrome that clashed with the older wainscoting and dark wallpaper. Paisley was renting; the landlord probably had no idea about the lock.

“Something in here he doesn’t want people to see,” Patrick said.

“Gotta be in the basement then,” Bosch said. He jerked a thumb back at the shotgun layout of the apartment—foyer and living room and then a long corridor that went straight back to the kitchen, all the other rooms branching off it. “I cleared this floor.”

“You cleared this floor? How long were you planning to leave me out on the front porch?”

“I figured another half an hour before you snapped and kicked in the door. I didn’t have that kinda time.”

“L.A. sarcasm,” Patrick said as they headed down the hallway. “Who knew?”

Halfway down the hall, on the right, was a door the same dark brown as the wainscoting. Patrick exchanged a look with Bosch and the cop nodded—now would be the time.

Patrick drew the .45 Colt Commander off his hip and flicked the safety off. “You see a bulkhead around back?”

Bosch looked puzzled. “A bulkhead?”

“You know, an entrance to the basement. Double doors, steps down.”

Bosch nodded. “Locked from the inside.” And then, as though further explanation was needed, he said, “We generally don’t have basements in L.A.”

“You don’t have snow or a wind-chill factor either, so, you know, fuck you.” He tossed Bosch a bright, tight smile. “Any basement windows out back?”

Another nod. “Black curtains over them.”

“Well, that’s bad,” Patrick said.

“Why?”

“No one puts curtains over their basement windows around here unless they got a home theater or they’re playing Dead Hooker Storage.” He looked around the apartment. “Edward does not strike me as the home theater type.”

Bosch nodded, his pupils adrenalized to twice their size. “Let’s go back out, call it in legit’.”

“What if he’s down there with her right now?”

That was the dilemma, wasn’t it?

Bosch exhaled a long breath. Patrick did the same. Bosch held his hand over the doorknob and said, “On three?”

Patrick nodded. He wiped his right palm on his jeans and readjusted a two-handed grip on his gun.

“One. Two. Three.”

Bosch opened the door.

The first thing they noticed was the padding on the inside of the door—at least six inches thick of premium leather soundproofing. The kind one found only in recording studios. The next thing they noticed was the dark. The scant light to find the stairs came from the hall behind them. The rest of the cellar was pitch-black. Patrick pointed at the light switch just past Bosch’s ear, raised his eyebrows.

Bosch shrugged.

Patrick shrugged.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Bosch flicked on the lights.

The staircase split the cellar like a spine, straight down the center, and they went down it fast. A black heating oil tank stood at the bottom, quite old, rust fringing the bottom of it.

Without a word, Bosch went left and Patrick went right.

The element of surprise was no longer an option for them.

Only for him.

On the side of the cellar that Patrick chose—the front—the framing was old and mostly unfinished. The first “room” he came upon contained a washer, a dryer, and a sink with a cake of grimy brown soap stuck to the top of it. The next room had once been a workshop. A long wood table abutted the wall, an old vise still fastened to the table. Nothing else in there but dust and mice droppings. The last room along the wall was finished, however. The framing was filled in with drywall on one side and brick on the other, a door in the middle. Heavy door. And thick. The frame around it was solid too. Try and kick in a door like that and you’d finish your day getting fitted for an ankle cast.

Patrick removed his left hand from his .45 and rubbed it on his jeans. He flexed the fingers and reached for the doorknob, holding the .45 cocked awkwardly at about mid-chest level. It didn’t look pretty, he was sure, but if he had to pull the trigger, he had a fair chance of hitting center mass on anyone but a dwarf or a giant.

The doorknob squeaked when it turned, proving something a cop had told him years ago—you always made the most noise when you were trying to be quiet. He threw open the door and dropped to his knees at the same time, gun pointing up a bit now, left hand coming back on the grip, sweeping the room from left to right, sweeping back right to left even as he processed what he saw—

Edward Paisley’s man cave.

Patrick edged his way through the doorway onto an Arizona Cardinals rug, drew a bead on a BarcaLounger trimmed in Sun Devils colors. A Phoenix Suns pennant shared space with one from the Phoenix Coyotes, and Patrick had to peer at the latter to realize the Coyotes played in the NHL.

If he learned nothing else from this day, he now knew Arizona had a professional hockey team.

He found baseball bats signed by Troy Glaus, Carlos Baerga, and Tony Womack. Baseballs signed by Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson, framed photos of Larry Fitzgerald and Kurt Warner, Shawn Marion and Joe Johnson, Plexiglas-encased footballs, basketballs, and pucks, Patrick again thinking, They have a
hockey
team?

He picked up a bat signed by Shea Hillenbrand, who’d broken into the Bigs with the Sox back in 2001 but got shipped to Arizona before the Sox won the Series last year. He wondered if that stung or if being able to lie out in the Arizona sun in January made up for it.

He’d guess it didn’t.

He was putting the bat back against the wall when he heard someone moving through the cellar. Moving fast. Running, actually.

And not away from something, but toward it.

Harry had worked his way along the back of the cellar, finding nothing but wall and rocky, jagged flooring until he reached a tight space where an ancient water heater met a prehistoric oil heater. The space reeked of oil and mold and fossilized vermin. Had Bosch not been searching for an adolescent in possible mortal danger, he might have missed the corridor on the other side of the heaters. But his penlight picked up the hole in the darkness on the other side of a series of pipes and ducts that were half hanging, half falling from the ceiling.

Bosch worked his way past the heaters and entered a long thin space barely wide enough to accommodate any mammal with shoulders, never mind a full-grown adult male.

As soon as you entered a tunnel, the first problem you noticed was that there was no left, no right, and no place to hide. You went into an entrance and you headed toward an exit. And should anyone who wished you ill pop up at either point Alpha or point Zeta, while you were passing between those points, your fate was in their hands.

When Bosch reached the end of the passageway, he was bathed in sweat. He stepped out into a wide unlit room of dark brick and a stone floor with a drain in the center. He swept the room with his penlight and saw nothing but a metal crate. It was the kind used to house large dogs on family trips. A blue painter’s tarp covered it, held to the frame by nine bungee cords.

And it was moving.

Bosch got down on his knees and pulled at the tarp, but the bungee cords were wrapped tight—three of them crossing the crate lengthwise and six crossing it widthwise. The cords were clasped down at the base of the crate and stretched taut so that separating the clasps with one hand was not an option. Bosch placed his Glock by his foot as the crate continued to rock and he picked up the sound of someone mewling desperately from under all that tarp.

He pulled apart the clasps on the first of the three lengthwise cords and still couldn’t get a clear view inside. He put the penlight in his mouth and went to work on the second and that’s when the room turned white.

It was as if someone had hung the sun a foot above his head or lit up a ballpark.

He was blind. He got his hand on his Glock, but all he could see was white. He couldn’t tell where the wall was. He couldn’t even see the crate anymore and he was kneeling in front of it.

He heard something scrabble to his left and he turned his gun that way and then the scrabbling broke right, coming around his weak side, and he turned with the Glock crossing his body, his eyes adjusting enough to pick up a shadow. Then he heard the thump of something very hard turn something less hard into something soft.

Someone let out a dull yelp and fell to the floor in all that blinding light.

“Bosch,” Patrick said, “it’s me. Close your eyes a sec’.”

Bosch closed his eyes and heard the sound of glass breaking—popping, actually—and the heat left his face in degrees.

“I think we’re good,” Patrick said.

When Bosch opened his eyes, he blinked several times and saw the lights high on the wall, all the bulbs shattered. Had to be in the 700-watt range, if not higher. Huge black cones behind them. Eight lights total. Patrick had pulled back the curtain on the small window at the top of the wall, and the soft early-afternoon light entered the room like an answered prayer.

Bosch looked at Paisley lying on the floor to his right, gurgling, the back of his head sporting a fresh dent, pink blood leaking from his nose, red blood streaming from his mouth, a carving knife lying beneath his twitching right hand.

Patrick Kenzie brandished a baseball bat. He raised his eyebrows up and down and twirled it. “Signed by Shea Hillenbrand.”

“I don’t even know who that is.”

“Right,” Patrick said. “Dodgers fan.”

Bosch went to work on the bungee cords and Patrick joined him and they pulled back the tarp and there she was, Chiffon Henderson. She was curled fetal in the crate because there was no room to stretch into any other position. Patrick struggled with the door until Bosch just took the roof off the crate.

Chiffon Henderson had electrical tape wrapped around her mouth, wrists, and ankles. They could tell it hurt her to stretch her limbs, but Bosch took that as a good sign—Paisley had kept her caged but possibly unmolested. Bosch guessed that was supposed to commence today, an appetizer to the murder.

They bickered as they removed the tape from her mouth, Bosch telling Patrick to be careful of her hair, Patrick telling him to watch he didn’t tear at her lips.

When the tape came free and they went to work on her wrists, Bosch asked, “What’s your name?”

“Chiffon Henderson. Who’re you?”

“I’m Patrick Kenzie. And this other guy? He was never here, okay, Chiffon?”

Bosch cocked his head.

Patrick said, “You’re a cop. From out of town. I can barely get away with this shit, but you? They’ll take your badge, man. Unless you got a no-knock warrant in your pocket I can’t see.”

Bosch worked it through in his head.

“He touch you, Chiffon?”

She was weeping, shaking, and she gave that a half nod, half head shake. “A little but not, you know. He said that was coming. He told me all sorts of things were coming.”

Patrick looked at Paisley huffing into the cement, eyes rolled back into his head, blood beginning to pool.

“Only thing coming for this shithead is the strokes that follow the coma.”

When her hands were free, Patrick knelt to get at the tape on her ankles and Bosch was surprised when the girl hugged him tight, her tears finding his shirt. He surprised himself when he kissed the top of her head.

“No more monster,” he said. “Not tonight.”

Patrick finished with the tape. He tossed the wad of it behind him and produced his cell. “I gotta call this in. I’d rather be bullshitting my way free of an attempted murder charge than an actual homicide rap, if you know what I mean, and he’s turning a funny shade.”

Bosch looked at the man lying at his feet. Looked like an aging nerd. Kinda guy did your taxes out of a strip mall storefront. Another little man with soiled desires and furious nightmares. Funny how the monsters always turned out to be little more than men. But Patrick was right—he’d die soon without attention.

Patrick dialed 911 but didn’t hit Send. Instead he held out his hand to Bosch. “If I’m ever in L.A.”

Bosch shook his hand. “Funny. I can’t picture you in L.A.”

Patrick said, “And I can’t picture you out of it, even though you’re standing right here. Take care, Harry.”

“You too. And thanks”—Bosch looked down at Paisley, on his way to critical care, minimum—“for, um, that.”

“Pleasure.”

Bosch headed toward the door, a door only accessible from the front of the cellar, not the back. Beat the hell out of the way he’d entered the room. He was reaching for the doorknob when he turned back.

“One last thing.”

Patrick had the phone to his ear and his free arm wrapped tight around Chiffon’s shoulders. “What’s that?”

“Is there a way to get back to the airport without going through that tunnel?”

JOSEPH D’AGNESE

FROM
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

O
NCE A MONTH
the man parks his car at the top of her cul-de-sac. He sits behind his steering wheel and plays with his phone until she arrives. She takes no obvious note of him as she drives home from the mall. No looking. No waves. She simply parks in the driveway of her crappy townhouse rental and heads inside, leaving her front door unlocked. She kicks off her shoes, runs to the kitchen, and turns the oven to 350 degrees. Then she dashes upstairs to her bedroom and strips off everything but her bra and panties and slips into the little black dress or sometimes the cute red one. She steps into her Mary Janes, puts on her earrings, and checks her hair and makeup in the mirror. By the time she pops the disks of cookie dough into the oven and begins heating the kettle, the man is already making the rounds of her small backyard. It isn’t much of a yard, but he always likes to check the perimeter and that makes her think sweetly of him.