Beyond the tangle of vines there was an open field or meadow, where tobacco had once been planted and grown. Beyond that was more thick woods. The air was hot and still. Sampson was getting impatient, and he knocked down honeysuckle with a vengeance. He was stamping his feet, trying to locate the hidden door. He listened for a hollow sound, some kind of wood or metal under the tall grass and thickly tangled weeds.
“This was originally a very large cellar on two levels. Casanova might have even expanded it. Built something grander for his house of horror,” I said as I searched through the heavy undergrowth.
I thought of Naomi kept underneath the ground for so long. She had been my obsession all these days and weeks. She still was. Sampson had been right about these woods. They were eerie, and I felt we were standing at an evil place where forbidden, secretive things had been done. Naomi could be somewhere close by, underneath the ground.
“You’re getting hoodoo-spooky on me again. Trying to think like this nutty squirrel. You sure Dr. Emeritus Sachs isn’t Casanova?” Sampson asked as he worked.
“No, I’m not. But I don’t know why the Durham PD arrested him, either. How did they just happen to find out the underwear was there? How did the underwear get in his house in the first place?”
“Because maybe he is Casanova, Sugar. Because maybe he put the victims’ underwear there so he could sniff it on rainy afternoons. FBI and Durham crime-fighters going to close down the case now?”
“If there isn’t another killing or abduction for a while. Once they shut the case, the real Casanova can relax, plan for the future.”
Sampson stood up tall and stretched his long neck. He sighed, and then he moaned loudly. His T-shirt was soaked through with sweat. He peered up at the overhanging vines. “We got a long walk back to the car. Long, dark, hot, buggy walk.”
“Not yet. Stick with me on this.”
I didn’t want to leave and stop our search for the day. Having Sampson around again was a major plus. There were still three more farms on Dr. Freed’s map. Two of them sounded promising; the other seemed as if it might be too small. So maybe that was the very one Casanova had chosen for his hideaway. He was a contrarian, wasn’t he?
So was I. I wanted to keep searching through the night, dark woods or not, black snakes and copperheads or not, twin killers or not.
I remembered Kate’s terrifying stories about the disappearing house and what went on inside. What had really happened to Kate the day she escaped? If the house wasn’t in these woods—where in God’s name was it? It had to be underground. Nothing else made sense…
Nothing made any goddamn sense yet.
Unless someone had purposely cleared away every last remnant of the farm.
Unless someone had used the old wood for other building purposes.
I finally took out my pistol and searched around for something, anything, to shoot at. Sampson watched me out of the comer of his eye. Curious, but not saying anything yet.
I needed to get some anger out. Release some venom, some stress. Right here and now. There was nothing to target-shoot at, though. No underground house of horror.
But also no rotting planks from the farmhouse or barn. Not one remnant that I had seen.
I finally fired a round at the knobby trunk of a nearby tree. In my incipient craziness, a knot in the tree resembled the head of a man. A man like Casanova. I fired again and again. All direct hits, dead-solid perfect. I had killed Casanova!
“Feel better now?” Sampson peered over the top of his Ray-Ban sunglasses at me. “You hit the bogeyman in his evil eye?”
“I feel a little better. Not much.” I showed him my thumb and forefinger, spread about a millimeter apart.
Sampson leaned against a small tree that looked like a human skeleton. The little sapling wasn’t getting enough light. “I do think it’s time we packed up and left,” he said.
That was when we heard screams!
Women’s voices were coming from under the ground.
The screams were muffled, but we could hear them clearly all the same. They were to the north of us and even farther into the thick bramble, but closer to the open meadow beyond the old tobacco fields.
A tightly wound ball of tension hit me with tremendous force at the sound of the voices under the ground. My head slumped involuntarily toward my chest.
Sampson took out his Glock and squeezed off two quick shots, more signals for the trapped women, for whoever was screaming under the ground.
The muffled screams were getting louder, rising as if from the tenth circle of hell.
“Sweet Baby Jesus,” I whispered. “We found them, John. We found the house of horror.”
CHAPTER 106
SAMPSON AND I got down on our hands and knees. We searched frantically for the hidden entryway into the underground house, running our fingers and palms over the undergrowth until they were cut and bleeding. I looked down and my hands were shaking.
I fired off several more gunshots, so the women trapped below would know we’d heard them, and that we were still up here. After I fired the shots, I quickly reloaded.
“We’re up here!” I yelled, with my head close to the ground. The weeds and grass were scratching my face. “We’re police!”
“Here we go, Alex,” Sampson called to me. “The door’s over here. There’s some kind of door, anyway.”
Running through the high thick weeds was like wading in water. The trapdoor was hidden in honeysuckle and waist-high grass, where Sampson had been searching. The door had been covered over with an extra layer of sod and a thick blanket of pine needles. The door wasn’t likely to be found by a search party, or anyone else hiking through the woods.
“I’ll go down first,” I told Sampson. Blood roared and echoed in my ears. Usually he would have argued. Not this time.
I hurried, rumbling down a steep, narrow wooden stairway that looked as if it had been there for a hundred years. Sampson followed close behind. The good twins.
Stop! I told myself. Slow it down. At the bottom of the stairs, there was a second doorway. The heavy oak plank door looked new, as if it had been installed recently, possibly in the past year or two. I slowly turned the handle. The door was locked.
“I’m coming in,” I shouted to anyone who might be behind the door. Then I fired two rounds into the lock and it disintegrated. The wooden door heaved open with a hard shove from my shoulder.
I was finally inside the house of horror. What I saw made me retch. A woman’s body was laid out on a couch in what appeared to be a well-appointed living room. The corpse had begun to decompose. The features were unrecognizable. Maggots were swarming all over the victim.
Move, I had to tell myself. Go! Go now.
“I’m right behind you,” Sampson whispered in his deep, homicide-scene voice. “Watch yourself now, Alex.”
“This is the police!” I called out. My voice was shaky and getting hoarse. I was afraid of what else we might find in the hideaway. Was Naomi still here? Was she alive?
“We’re down here!” a woman called out. “Can anybody hear me?”
“We hear you! We’re coming!” I shouted again.
“Please help us!” A second voice sounded farther away in the underground house. “Be careful. He’s tricky.”
“See. He’s tricky,” Sampson whispered. Never at a loss.
“He’s in the house! He’s in here now!” one of the women shouted a warning to us.
Sampson was still standing behind me, keeping close. “You want to keep the point, partner? Walk on the ridge line?”
“I want to be the one to find her,” I told him. “I have to find Scootchie.”
He didn’t argue. “You think loverboy is down here someplace? Casanova?” he whispered.
“That’s the rumor going around,” I said and moved forward slowly. Both of us had our guns drawn and ready. We had no idea what to expect next. Was loverboy waiting for us?
Move! Move! Move those legs!
I led
the way out of the deserted living room. There were high-tech lamps in the ceiling of the adjoining hallway. How was he able to get electricity in here? A transformer? A generator? What should that tell me? That he was handy? That he had connections with the local electric company?
How long had it taken to get the underground cellar in this condition? I wondered. To fix it up like this? To make this fantasy come true?
The space was extensive. We entered a long hallway that snaked off the living room to the right. There were doors on either side, and they were bolt-locked from the outside, like prison cells.
“Watch our backs,” I said to Sampson. “I’m going in door number one.”
“I always watch your back,” he whispered.
“Watch your back, too.”
I went up to the first door. “This is the police,” I called out. “I’m Detective Alex Cross. Everything’s going to be all right.”
I yanked open the first door and peered inside. I wanted it to be Naomi. I prayed that it was.
CHAPTER 107
SUCH UTTER fools,” said the Gentleman, intolerant and impatient as always. “Two carnival clowns in blackface.”
Casanova smiled thinly, growing impatient with the Gentleman. “What the hell did you expect? Brain surgeons from Walter Reed in Washington? They’re a couple of ordinary street cops.”
“Not so ordinary, perhaps. They found the house, didn’t they? They’re inside right now.”
The two friends watched everything coming together from a nearby hiding place in the woods. They had tracked the detectives all afternoon, observing them with binoculars. Plotting, planning, but also playing with their prey. They were careful as they moved in for the final confrontation.
“Why didn’t they bring the others out here? Why didn’t they bring the FBI?” Rudolph asked. He was always inquisitive and very logical. A logic machine; a killing machine; but a machine that ran without a human heart.
Casanova looked through the powerful German binoculars again. He could see the open trapdoor that led down into the underground house, the masterpiece that he and Rudolph had built by hand.
“It’s their policeman’s arrogance,” he finally answered Rudolph’s question. “In some ways, they’re like us. Cross is especially. He trusts himself and no one else.”
He glanced over at Will Rudolph, and both men smiled. The irony was beautiful, actually. The two detectives against the two of them.
“Cross probably thinks he understands us, our relationship, that is,” Rudolph said. “Maybe he does a little bit.” He had been paranoid about Alex Cross since the close call in California. Cross had tracked him down, after all, and that frightened him. But the Gentleman also found Cross interesting as an opponent. He enjoyed the competition, the blood sport.
“He understands some things, he sees patterns, so he thinks he knows more than he actually does. Just be patient, and we’ll expose Cross’s weaknesses.”
As long as they were patient, Casanova believed, as long as they thought everything through carefully, they would win; they would never be caught. It had been that way for years, from the first day they met at Duke University.
Casanova knew that Will Rudolph had been careless out in California. He’d had that disturbing tendency even as a brilliant medical student. He was impatient, and had been sloppy and melodramatic when he killed Roe Tierney and Tom Hutchinson. He had almost been caught back then. He was questioned by the police, and had been a serious suspect in the famous case.
Casanova thought about Alex Cross again, evaluating the detective’s strengths and weaknesses. Cross was careful, and he was a thorough “professional.” He almost always thought things through before he acted. He was certainly smarter than the rest of the pack. A cop and a psychologist. He’d found the hideaway, hadn’t he? He’d gotten this far, closer than all the others.
John Sampson was more impulsive. He was the weak point, though he certainly didn’t look it. He was physically powerful, but he would be the one to break first. And breaking Sampson would break Cross. The two detectives were close friends; they were extremely emotional about each other.
“It was stupid for us to split up a year ago, to go our separate ways,” Casanova said to his only friend in the world. “If we hadn’t begun to compete and play egocentric games, Cross would never have found out anything about us. He wouldn’t have found you, and we wouldn’t have to kill the girls and destroy the house now.”
“Let me take care of the good Dr. Cross,” Rudolph said. He didn’t react to the things Casanova had just said. Rudolph never showed much emotion, but actually he’d been lonely, too. He’d come back, hadn’t he?
“No one takes care of Dr. Cross alone,” Casanova said. “We’ll go after them together. We make it two against one, the way we work best. First, Sampson. Then Alex Cross. I know how he’ll react. I know how he thinks. I’ve been watching him. Actually, I’ve been hunting Alex Cross since he came to the South.”
The two human monsters moved closer to the house.
CHAPTER 108
I SWITCHED ON overhead lights in the first room and I saw one of the captive women. Maria Jane Capaldi cowered like a frightened little girl against the far wall. I knew who she was. I’d met her parents a week or so back, I had seen old, cherished photographs of her.
“Please don’t hurt me. I can’t take any more of this,” Maria Jane pleaded in a hoarse whisper.
She was hugging herself, rocking gently back and forth. She had on ripped black tights and a wrinkled Nirvana T-shirt. Maria Jane was just nineteen years old, an art major and aspiring painter at North Carolina State in Raleigh.
“I’m a police detective,” I whispered in the softest voice possible. “Nobody can hurt you now. We won’t let them.”
Maria Jane moaned, and she began to cry tears of relief. Her whole body was quivering.
“He can’t hurt you now, Maria Jane,” I reassured her in the softest voice I could manage. I could barely speak, actually. “I have to find the others. I’ll be back, I promise you. I’m leaving your door open. You can come out. You’re safe now.”
I had to help the others. His harem of special women was right here. Naomi was one of them.
I broke into the next room in the passageway. I still couldn’t catch my breath. I was exhilarated, frightened, saddened—all at the same time.
A tall blond woman in the room told me her name was Melissa Stanfield. I remembered the name. She was in nursing school. I had so many questions, but there was time for only one.
I gently touched her shoulder. She shuddered, then collapsed against me. “Do you know where Naomi Cross is?” I asked her.
“I’m not sure,” Melissa said. “I don’t know the whole layout here.” She shook her head and began to cry. I don’t think she even knew who I was talking about.
“You’re safe now. The nightmare is finally over, Melissa. Let me help the others,” I whispered.
Out in the hall again, I saw Sampson unbolt a door. I heard him say, “I’m a police detective. It’s safe now.” His voice was soft: Sampson the Gentle.
The women we had freed were wandering, dazed and confused, out of the prison rooms. They hugged one another in the hallway. Most of them were sobbing, but I could feel their relief, even their joy. Someone had finally come to help them.
I entered a second hallway at the end of the first. There were more locked doors. Was Naomi here? Was she alive? The pounding in my chest was unbearable.
I opened the first door on the right—and there she was. There was Scootchie. The best sight in the entire world.
Tears finally streamed from my eyes. I was the one who couldn’t talk now. I thought that I would have a permanent memory of everything that happened between the two of us. Every word, look, nuance.
“I knew you’d come for me, Alex,” Naomi said. She staggered into my arms and held me tightly.
“Oh, sweet, sweet Naomi,” I whispered. I felt as if thousands of pounds had been lifted off
me. “This makes it worth everything. Well, almost.”
I had to look at her up close. I held her precious face in both my hands. She seemed so fragile and tiny in the room. But she was alive! I had finally found her.
I called out for Sampson. “I found Naomi! We found her, John! In here! We’re in here!”
Scootchie and I folded into each other’s arms, just like old times. If I’d regretted becoming a detective at any other time, this made up for it. I realized now that I’d thought she was dead—I just couldn’t give up the fight. Never give up.
“I knew you’d be here, just like this. I dreamed it. I lived for this instant. I prayed every day, and here you are.” Naomi managed the most wonderful smile I have ever seen. “I love you.”
“I love you, too. I missed you like crazy. Everybody did.” After a moment I gently pulled away from Naomi.
I remembered about the monsters, and the way they had to be thinking now. Still plotting everything. Leopold and Loeb all grown up, committing perfect crimes.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” I smiled finally, the beginning of a smile, anyway.
I could see some of the old intensity returning to Naomi’s eyes. “Alex, go. Get the others out,” she urged me. “Please let the others out of these cages he kept us in.”
Just then a strange, terrible sound echoed in the passageway. A scream of pain. I ran from Naomi’s room and saw the one thing I could never imagine happening, not in my worst nightmares.
CHAPTER 109
THE LOUD, deep-voiced call for help had come from Sampson. My partner was in trouble. Two men, both wearing ghoulish masks, were struggling over him. Casanova and Rudolph? Who else could it be?
Sampson was down in the hallway. His mouth was open in shock and pain. A knife, or ice pick, protruded from the center of his back.
It was a situation I had faced twice before, riding patrol on Washington’s streets. A partner in trouble. I had no choice and probably only one chance. I didn’t hesitate. I raised my Glock and fired.