The Darkness Gathers (20 page)

Lydia almost wept with relief when she heard Jeffrey’s voice. “This is your last opportunity to walk away, you fat fuck. Drop your weapon.”

There was a cool, low chuckle from behind her, and in the next second, the club seemed to explode with shouts and sirens as the police pulled up and burst in the doors from the street. She felt the nose of the gun drop from her skull, and when she turned, the man was fleeing. All she could see was the back of his bald head.

“Are you okay?” asked Jeffrey, dropping to his knees and taking her face in his hands as the police swarmed around them. She nodded and tried unsuccessfully to hold back the sob of anger and fear and sadness that had welled up within her.

chapter nineteen

“I
s the body count so high everywhere you go, Ms. Strong?” asked Agent Negron in the back of an FBI surveillance van that smelled like stale coffee, cigarettes, and body odor. He leaned toward her, his face wrenched into an angry frown, his breath smelling of garlic. Lydia didn’t feel like answering him, or really saying much of anything, so she sat sullenly on a small swivel chair with her arms crossed, twisting herself back and forth slowly.

Agent Bentley sat with his head in his hands, his shoulders slumped. “I can’t fucking believe this,” he muttered.

“What the fuck is going on, Special Agents?” asked Jeffrey. Lydia could see how angry he was from the muscle twitching in his jaw. He was sweating in the overwarm van, which was cramped with too many bodies, and his forehead was drawn into a harsh scowl. Lydia thought he looked pretty intimidating. And while Negron seemed to cringe just a little, Bentley raised his head and matched Jeffrey’s angry glare.

“What’s going on,” he said, looking tired, “is that someone just killed a girl here. A girl who was at great personal risk, a key element in our investigation. Now, thanks to you and your partner, we are pretty much fucked.”

“Well, we didn’t kill her,” said Jeffrey. “We came here because she called us.”

“After we asked you to back off,” said Bentley, lowering his voice to almost a whisper. He looked truly sad, his eyes rimmed with red and his mouth turned down at the corners. Lydia felt bad for him suddenly. Not to mention guilty. They
had
fucked up his investigation, one he’d probably been working on for months. And Marianna was dead.

“We don’t work for you, Special Agent,” Jeffrey said.

“I have a hard time believing that Marianna was cooperating with the FBI,” said Lydia, a thought occurring to her.

“And why is that so hard for you to believe?” asked Bentley.

“Because she had nothing but disdain and distrust for your agency.”

“Marianna had a three-hundred-dollar-a-day habit. She was a troubled young girl,” said Bentley. “Are you going to believe what I’m telling you, Lydia, or some cokehead?”

Lydia felt confused. She wasn’t sure what reason Marianna would have had to lie to her … or why she would have risked her life to do so. On the other hand, she wasn’t sure why Bentley would lie, either. But her gut told her to put her money on the “cokehead.”

“She told me that Nathan Quinn was a client of Sasa Fitore’s snuff-film operation.”

“Give me a break,” said Bentley. “Did you take some ecstasy while you were hanging out at the G-Spot? Snuff doesn’t exist; it’s an urban legend. I had you figured for smarter than that.” His tone was harsh and sarcastic, but she could see in the narrowing of his eyes and how he leaned away from her that she had touched some kind of nerve.

“And she told me that Sasa Fitore and Jenna Quinn were lovers.”

“That’s bullshit. You got bad information from a messed-up girl.”

“If she was so messed up, so unreliable, what was she doing for you?”

He blinked slowly and looked at Lydia with dark brown eyes that revealed nothing. He was silent for a second, her words hanging in the air between them. I win, thought Lydia.

“Look,” he said, softening, changing tack. “I know you guys are looking for Tatiana. And I respect that. I have a daughter, too. And believe me, I hope that the little girl is all right. But I need you to
trust
me here, Lydia. You need to back away and leave me to do my job. Sasa Fitore has
nothing
to do with Tatiana Quinn.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’m going to say it one more time,” said Bentley. “This is your last warning.”

“I’ve been hearing that a lot tonight.”

He sighed and looked away from her, rubbing his eyes. She could sense his frustration with her. He was hiding something, but she couldn’t imagine why or what. She just couldn’t bring herself to believe that there was no connection between the two cases, as much as she wanted to. The buzz told her they were on the right trail; if they weren’t, there wouldn’t be so many people trying to get them to back off.

“What else did she tell you?” he asked, his tone quiet, exasperated.

She gave him a rundown of their conversation. She did not reveal that she had the DVD in her bag, which she had managed to hold on to during everything. She really had no choice but to repeat the things that Marianna had said, and eventually she would probably turn the film over to them as well, but not before she had a chance to look at it herself. If she gave it to them now, she might never know what was on it.

Meanwhile, she struggled to put out of her mind the fact that she was partly responsible for two deaths in four days’ time, that she had watched two women die in front of her. Just another reminder that people die in horrible ways every day and that there was nothing she could do about it. The hunt for Tatiana had already cost in flesh and blood, and the bill hadn’t even been totaled yet. Lydia felt numb.

“T
here’s no reason to be afraid.”

A nervous giggle sounded offscreen. Then came the heavily accented words of a young girl, her fear palpable: “I don’t want to take my clothes off. You never said that.”

“Why not? You’re not ashamed of your body, are you? You’re beautiful. You’re so beautiful.” The man’s voice was deep and soothing, gently coaxing.

“I’m not.”

“Oh, you are. Come here.”

The camera was trained on a bed of red satin pillows. The voices had been offscreen, but finally a man whose face had been blanked out in postproduction led a young girl dressed in an elaborate red lace bustier with matching panties and garter into focus. He held her hand gently as she positioned herself on the cushions. She was thin and pale and had limp blond hair and a sweet, full face. Too young for the lingerie she wore, barely filling it.

“Now lie back.”

She did as she was told. “You are going to be the most famous Victoria’s Secret model ever. When this issue comes out, your career is going to skyrocket.”

“Skyrocket, yes,” she repeated softly.

“You’ll have lots of money, live in a beautiful house.”

“With a pool?”

“Anything you want,” he said, the slightest hint of impatience creeping into the practiced veneer of his smooth and seductive voice. “You just have to do what I say. Now close your eyes and get comfortable.”

The girl stared uneasily at the camera, or the man behind it, seeming to detect the change in his tone, but she closed her eyes.

“Now, touch yourself.”

She opened her eyes a bit, then started to touch one of her thighs tentatively.

“Not there,” he snapped.

“Where, Sasa?” she asked, genuinely confused, fear starting to warp the features of her face.

Lydia paused the DVD. “Did you hear that?” Jeffrey nodded, then restarted it.

It was then that two large men in leather masks stepped into view, one on either side of the girl. The girl’s face dissolved into tears as she scrambled to all fours and began crawling away. A tiny yelp escaped her as she was pulled back by one of the men, naked except for tight black briefs.

Lydia reached out to pause the DVD player on her laptop and the image, in all its horror, froze on the screen, dominated by the girl’s terrified face. Lydia lowered her head into her hands. The blood rushed in her ears, and anxiety made her throat dry and tight. Jeffrey had turned away from the screen, as well.

“We have to watch it,” Lydia said after a minute, and pressed the play icon on her computer screen.

One of the men produced a syringe and stuck it into the girl’s arm, causing her to shriek. It was the last sound she made for a while. She went limp after a moment but was still conscious, moving her limbs slowly, slapping weakly at the men as they raped her repeatedly. She was like a half-conscious rag doll, trapped in misery and horror, unable to fight as they moaned and roared over her. Then she started to cry, deep, rasping sobs that would have been screams if she’d had any strength. When the men had each ejaculated on her small body, her cheap negligee ripped and lying next to her, they waited, pacing.

“Wait until she’s a little more lively,” said another voice from offscreen. They hadn’t heard this voice before on the tape, but they recognized it.

“Let’s get a fresh one,” came a muffled suggestion from behind one of the masks.

“You only paid for one, gentlemen,” said the voice sternly. “And there are other patrons waiting their turn this evening.”

“But this one didn’t have enough fight in her,” complained the masked figure.

“If you want to discuss this, let’s turn off the camera.”

The screen went blue for a minute, and Lydia was hopeful that it was over. But in a second, a horrible wail, the sound of unspeakable pain and terror, jarred Lydia and Jeffrey, both of them jumping. One of the men held what looked like a Taser gun and was sticking the girl with it as she tried to crawl away from him on the floor. The screen fluttered and then suddenly the girl was back on the bed, her arms and legs spread wide and tied to posts that hadn’t been there before. She had stopped screaming, and her head lolled back and forth as she mumbled something in another language that had the measured rhythm of a prayer or a nursery rhyme.

Lydia put her head back in her hands, unable to watch as the men proceeded to burn her with cigarettes. The screaming started again, this time weaker, more desperate wails.

Jeffrey distracted himself by examining the men, looking for identifying marks. Both of them wore matching thick gold rings on their right hands, though he couldn’t make out the insignia, and they both wore gold wedding bands on their left. The heavier man had a tattoo on his left forearm that had been blacked out in postproduction. The thinner man, with a mass of gray hair on his chest, had a large black mole on his right shoulder blade. Jeffrey had ceased to
see
the video, despite paying attention to every detail. It was a skill he had learned when he’d hunted a child murderer in New York, the case that had ended on a darkened rooftop in the Bronx, with Jeffrey taking the only bullet of his career. The crime scenes had been heart-wrenching, little boys murdered and violated in ways he chose to block from the personal memory of his life. But professionally, he remembered every detail. You had to be like that in this business; otherwise, the demons ate your life whole.

He looked over at Lydia, who had raised her head from her hands and wore an expression of horror. In the light of the screen, her face was pale, and dark circles shadowed her eyes.

“Wait,” she said, reaching over to the laptop and pausing it. “Look at their right hands.”

“The rings? I noticed them.”

“Is that the same ring Nathan Quinn was wearing?”

“It’s hard to tell,” said Jeffrey, reaching over to freeze the image and zooming in on one of the rings. The image was fuzzy and the features of the ring hard to distinguish.

“I wouldn’t rule it out,” said Jeffrey.

“I think it is.… Look,” she said, putting her finger on the screen. “You can see the scroll and the letters, and the shape of the sword.”

“It could be,” said Jeff, zooming out and pressing play.

When the DVD started again, the screaming grew louder. They watched as the heavier man opened the girl’s tiny body with a serrated knife. Jeffrey managed to turn it off again quickly, but not before the blood began to rush from the wound.

Lydia got up and ran to the bathroom, her two-day battle with nausea finally lost. When she returned, her eyes were red and she sat on the chair across from the bed. They locked eyes.

“What the fuck was that?” asked Lydia, coughing weakly.

“That was one of the snuff films Detective Ignacio was talking about. He was right,” said Jeffrey.

“Was it real?” asked Lydia. “Could it have been fake?”

“It looked real. I’ve never seen anything like that. The camera work was pretty unsophisticated; the angle never shifted. It felt real.”

Even when Manny had suggested the possibility after Valentina had been killed, Jeffrey hadn’t quite believed it. The FBI had always denied that snuff films were real, just as Agent Bentley had said earlier, had always claimed that there was no market for them, that no one had ever actually seen one, and that there was no way to distribute them without someone getting caught. There was little question that what they had just seen was real. Furthermore, Jeffrey realized that the market was a closed one. The target group was not just the people who wanted to
see
snuff but also the men who wanted to
make
snuff. Maybe that was why it had been impossible to prove, until now. Suddenly, what Marianna had told Lydia didn’t seem so far-fetched.

And now that they had seen the film, there was no turning back.

“Is that what happened to Tatiana?” Lydia asked, thinking aloud.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because that voice, the second offscreen voice, the one doing the negotiating?”

“It was Nathan Quinn.”

“I’d bet money on it.”

“And the other voice, the director—the girl called him Sasa.”

“Sasa Fitore.”

“So Sasa Fitore is making films with Nathan Quinn. Arranging for Quinn’s wealthy contacts to get into the act?” asked Lydia.

“And then probably arranging for closed viewings of the DVD for the men who’d rather watch than do the deed,” said Jeffrey.