Girl Undercover 8 & 9: Traitor & The Smiley Killer (16 page)

Chapter 5

We hurried over to the bed to get a closer look at the sheet of paper. Ian picked it up, sitting down on at the edge of the bed and began to read it.

I sat down beside him, peering over his shoulder.

“What does it say?” I asked.

He held it up so I could see for myself.

DO NOT RETURN TO THIS HOUSE. IT BELONGS TO ME NOW. IF YOU DO, YOU WILL END UP LIKE YOUR TWO FRIENDS. GONE. YOU WILL NEVER FIND ME OR THEM. GO HOME, FORGET ABOUT THIS. I DON’T WANT TO KILL ANYMORE. I DON’T WANT TO INFLICT MORE PAIN. PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME.

ALYSSA

I raised my gaze to meet Ian’s, not particularly surprised to find and read those words; after everything that had happened in my life in the last few months—and kept happening—I didn’t think I had the ability to be very surprised any longer. But I still had the ability to get upset about it, because I could feel how the anger surged through my blood now, heating up my insides.

“Well, I guess we don’t need to dust for prints then,” I said through gritted teeth.

Ian lowered the sheet to his lap, frowning. “I spoke to him a little over an hour ago, in the car. He didn’t appear like anything was wrong then, which means she must have shown up after that. Burt is a strong man and he was armed. She must have surprised him in order to take him out. I’m assuming that’s what happened after reading this.”

“Yeah, me too,” I said. “She also had time to clean up the area afterward.” I tilted my head to the now clean, rug-free hardwood floor before us. “That must have been her doing, not his, and I highly doubt she would have been able to do that while Burt was here. Which suggests they can’t be that far away. Unless she had someone to help her move him. Which I also doubt. Serial killers usually operate on their own.”

“Those are good observations,” Ian said, nodding slowly.

“We should search the premises. Maybe she’s hiding them in the basement, hopefully alive still. The house has a basement, correct?”

“Yes, it does. We should absolutely search that and the rest of the house more in depth.” Ian put the paper away and got to his feet. “We should be grateful she felt compelled enough to write this note and use the words that she did. She was obviously upset when she wrote them because they don’t quite make sense. The fact that people are showing up here clearly bothers her tremendously.”

I watched him as he stroked his chin in that way I’d come to learn he always did when he pondered something deeply. I thought I got where he was going with his words.

“Yes, she clearly values her privacy to the point that she’d do anything to keep it,” I said sarcastically. “She also seems to be very, very attached to this house for some reason. So attached that she can’t stay away for long.”

The corners of Ian’s lips went up into a small, mirthless smile. “Exactly. So far it seems she can’t stay away for more than a day or two. Burt had been here less than forty-eight hours before she returned. And after leaving this note, we know that she’s planning on returning again. She’s nice enough to give us a warning that she’ll kill the person who’s in it when she does. And that we shouldn’t doubt her ability to do so.”

“Well, let’s see about that. If we can’t find her, we’ll just have to wait her out and prove her wrong.”

Ian nodded. “Exactly. Only in her psychotic mind will she be able to kill us. When she gets here, we’ll capture her and make her tell us where and why she took Burt and Nadja.” He sighed heavily. “Hopefully they’ll both be alive still when we do. It’s unclear based on what she’s written whether she’s taking her time killing them or if she’s already killed them.”

I looked at the sheet Ian had placed on the bed and quickly scanned the words there again.
I don’t want to inflict more pain.
What exactly did she mean by inflicting more pain? As in torturing her victims, or just generally speaking? It was impossible to tell.

“Do you remember what her MO was when she went on that killing spree in New York?” Ian asked. “Twelve-year-old girls, was it?”

“Yes, all with long, dark hair because apparently they reminded her about herself, how she used to be before she started to change. It made her hate all such girls. I’m not one hundred percent sure if she killed them right away, or if she tortured them first.” I scrunched up my face, trying to remember what I’d read about the case. Even though I’d been fascinated by it, it was years ago now, making my memory fuzzy. “I think she may have tortured them for some time, but I’m not sure. That sad smiley was carved into the victims’ midriffs, but maybe it was after they were dead. Either way, serial killers tend to evolve. As they get better at their crimes, the MO, even the signature may change.”

“Yes, that’s what I’ve heard as well,” Ian said. “Let’s go down to the basement and see what’s going on there. By when do you have to be back in town?”

“My next client isn’t until Sunday afternoon, so I have about forty hours. Then there’s Jonah to consider.”

The stiffening of Ian’s body was so subtle and he pulled himself out of it so quickly that I almost missed it. I couldn’t tell whether jealousy or a sense of impotence over the situation had prompted it.

“Consider how?” he asked, his voice neutral.

“He wanted to get together tonight, but I managed to get out of it by claiming that I was sick and hanging over my toilet, throwing up. He told me to feel better and that he’d check in with me tomorrow. If I pretend to be sick tomorrow, too, he might insist on coming by my place to see how I’m doing. Don’t forget, he and I are supposedly dating now.” I stuck out my tongue in a show of disgust and rolled my eyes.

“Right. Well, let’s hope we’ve found Burt and Nadja by then. Let’s go.” Ian walked toward the open bedroom door and I joined him. We continued in silence down the stairs, he leading the way. We entered the kitchen where the door to the basement was, a green-painted door that blended in with the walls.

Ian pulled down the handle, which opened the door immediately, revealing a steep, descending staircase shrouded in darkness. He glanced at me, tilting his head toward my hip holster where my Glock was. I pulled it out and he got out his own gun from his waistband.

“Let’s go see what’s going on down there,” he said.

He flipped on a light switch next to the doorway, illuminating the better part of the basement stairs. You still couldn’t see what was hiding at the bottom, though, barely where the stairs ended. Hesitating momentarily, I followed him as he descended into the basement, hoping there would be more light switches somewhere down there. It didn’t appear that way; we both searched for them on the walls flanking the long staircase, but neither of us could find any. Even so, Ian continued walking.

He stopped suddenly, only a few steps into the darkness, making me almost crash into his back.

“Shouldn’t we get some kind of light before going deeper inside?” I asked.

He didn’t immediately answer, just raised his chin, turning it slowly side to side.

“Do you smell that?” he asked instead of responding to my question.

I sniffed the air that had an earthy, damp quality to it. As I inhaled deeper, I noticed that it also had a distinct rotten note in it.

Ian’s gun-free hand disappeared into his pocket and he pulled out his phone, holding it up. Within a few seconds, light shone out of it and I realized that he had turned on his flashlight app. He directed the light in front of himself, creating an illuminated half circle before him as he walked into the basement.

I followed him, the rotten smell becoming more potent. The basement was huge and it took us almost a minute of walking until Ian stopped short again, shining the flashlight into a corner. It took a little while before I could make out what he was highlighting, but when I had, chills rushed over my skin and I felt an urge to throw up. My hand flew up to my mouth, partly covering the “oh my God” that I gasped as I took in the horrifying sight.

Stacked on top of one another were bodies in varying stages of decomposition, most of them so far gone they had become mummified. I counted about ten of them, both men and women, all of them naked and mutilated to some degree.

Someone—Alyssa presumably—was using this part of the basement as a grave. Ian kept shining the flashlight over the corpses, enabling us to get a fairly good view of all of them. There was no question that they were very dead and had been so for a while. None of them looked like Nadja or Burt.

“Nadja!” Ian called out, removing the flashlight from the stack of bodies and shining it in other directions, like he was searching for something.

“Burt!” I called out.

We both called out their names a few more times, but got no response. I found my old phone in my pocket and checked if it had a flashlight app like Ian’s so we could see more of what was down here in the basement. Except for the bodies, there wasn’t much to see, only shelves along the walls with tools and construction material on them and some old furniture.

My phone didn’t have a flashlight app and the little light it provided when I turned it on didn’t help much.

“It looks she brings them here when she’s done with them,” Ian said, moving his light around over the rest of the big basement. “As a form of burial chamber.”

“Yes, maybe,” I said. “We need to search through this basement thoroughly. The reason we’re not getting a response from either Burt or Nadja might be because they can’t speak. Maybe they’re gagged or… or something else makes them unable to speak.” I had suddenly remembered having read something about Alyssa cutting the tongue out of her young victims’ mouths. Or threatening to, I couldn’t be sure which. I hoped this wasn’t the case with Burt and Nadja.

“Yes, you’re right,” Ian said. “Let’s give it a more thorough examination. Maybe she’s hiding them somewhere here. We could use some better lighting for that. My flashlight is not enough.”

“A lantern would be good. A big one. Can we be sure there aren’t any lights in the ceiling somewhere?”

“No. But you’d think they’d be somewhere along the staircase in that case.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe we missed them. Seems weird that someone would have this big a basement and no lights in the ceiling. The lantern might help us find them, too.”

“True. In the meantime, let’s check again as we go back up.”

We headed back toward the long stairs and started climbing them. The door at the top of them was ajar, the light from the kitchen that we’d turned on seeping in through the crack.

“You check the right side and I check the left,” Ian said as we ascended. As carefully as I could, I scanned the wall at the side of the staircase. I still couldn’t see anything that looked even remotely like a light switch.

“Did you find anything?” I asked Ian when we got to the top and pushed the door open all the way.

“No,” he said and we exited the basement, both of us squinting against the bright light the lamp hanging from the kitchen ceiling emitted.

He opened the tall pantry cabinet right next to the basement door and eyed its contents.

“Bingo,” he said and pulled out a handheld spotlight with a large reflector. “This should do the job.” He flipped on its switch and a strong light oozed from the spotlight.

“Great,” I said. “One of us should go back down there while the other stays up here. What if she comes back and sees the door open and slams it shut? We might get stuck in there. Look at this.”

I indicated the lock on the door, a deadbolt that looked unbreakable. The door itself was made out of very thick, sturdy material. “I don’t think we’ll be able to shoot our way through
that.”

“Good point,” Ian said, testing the deadbolt. “Okay, let me go down and check. In the meantime, keep your eyes open for her. And your gun at the ready. Not that I need to tell you that.” He gave me a quick wink. “Still, if she managed to take out Burt, she must be good.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said and squeezed the grip of my Glock in my hand. “Go downstairs and check for them now. And hurry.”

Nodding, Ian descended the stairs again, shining the spotlight before him, and was soon at the bottom. As I waited for him to search the basement, I kept scanning my surroundings, glad there was a full moon tonight and the sky virtually cloud free at the moment. The kitchen windows were tall and wide, enabling me to get a fairly good view of what was going on both outside and inside the house.

By the time Ian returned ten minutes later, I was still taking in the quiet kitchen with its yellow-painted cabinets and the rustic kitchen table in the middle, four chairs placed around it.

I turned to look at him and already knew that he hadn’t found anything else horrific by the expression on his face when he walked up beside me.

“Nothing then?” I asked, just to confirm.

He shook his head, a corner of his mouth quirking up. “Only those ten bodies. I took a closer look at them. It looks like the most recent corpse was brought there about a week or so ago.” He wrinkled his nose. “Hence the stench. The others have been there much longer judging from the state of decomposition.”

I nodded. “She’s been busy. I wonder how she gets the people. I can’t remember having read or heard anything about a serial killer lately. Can you?”

He screwed up his lips, then, “Not me either. Who knows how wide a net she’s been casting, though. Maybe she’s traveling across the country in search for people to kidnap and kill.” His face darkened. “This time around, the victims came to her.” His mouth parted and he let out a breath. “If only we had known. I should’ve taken a closer look at the house to be sure no one had been using it before I left Nadja here alone. I was so sure she’d be okay here I didn’t even give her a gun to protect herself with.”

I put a hand on his arm and caressed it; I could tell the fact that he hadn’t really bothered him.

“How could you have known?” I asked as I stroked his arm. “What are the chances that a serial killer the media has buried is using this particular house as her headquarters? Someone who was active years ago. One in a million, right? Don’t be so hard on yourself, Ian. You couldn’t have known that. She would have been fine had it not been for Alyssa.”