Rise of The Iron Eagle (The Iron Eagle Series Book 1) (4 page)

Jim’s unit was sent in from LA County to investigate with West Covina PD. When he arrived on scene, he asked where the homicide was but no one had an answer. He was told that four young girls had been found alive, between eight and fourteen; three had been in cages in the basement; the fourth was, indeed, Cheryl Pruitt, who told the police that she was rescued by a man who hid her behind him in the closet of the home. Jim walked up to speak to the first two officers on scene and asked why homicide had been called in. They both shrugged their shoulders. “So let me get this straight. You two have your guns and badges, and you’re cops. Jesus Christ! I just drove all the way from downtown. I’m a homicide detective not a missing person locater. Now someone better give me a good goddamn reason why I’m here!” He scowled as one of the West Covina PD detectives emerged from the house sheet white. Jim recognized him and called out, “Tony. What the fuck is going on? Do you have a homicide here, or are you stiffs busting my balls?” Tony only nodded. Jim talked to the first two officers on scene, and they explained that they found the missing Pruitt girl. They didn’t know much else. Jim asked where the girl was, and they pointed to an ambulance with the back doors open. He walked over to the unit where the little girl was. She was sitting in an ambulance awaiting transport when he went over to speak to her. She was wrapped in a blanket, and the paramedics were setting an IV as she sat shivering.

“Cheryl, my name is Detective O’Brian, sweetheart.” She jolted from the prick of the IV needle. “It’s okay, honey; you’re safe. The paramedics are going to take you to the hospital. We’ve called your mom and dad; you will be together soon.” She started to cry. “I need to ask you some quick questions. Can you understand me?” She nodded. “How did you get to Mr. Roskowski’s house?” She was shaking badly but he needed to get what he could from her now. The paramedics gave her five milligrams of Valium to relax her, and she started to calm down. “Did you hear what I asked you, Cheryl?” She nodded. “Can you tell me?” “Mr. Roskowski invited me to his house after finals.” Jim held his midi recorder to take her statement. “Did Mr. Roskowski bring you to his house from school?” She shook her head. “Then how did you get to his house?” She told him that he asked her to walk to a grocery store about a mile from school. He had some errands to run, and he would meet her there. She said that when she got there she saw the front of his car behind the store, so she walked back to see if he was there. “When you got to the back of the store was he there?” She shook her head. “Do you know where he was?” She shook her head again. “Do you remember how you got to his house?” Once more, she shook her head and started to slip off to sleep.

Jim put his hand on her head and asked, “Did Mr. Roskowski do bad things to you here in his house?” She was starting to fall asleep as she replied, “I woke up, and I was in a room on a bed. Mr. Roskowski came in and told me to take off my clothes. I told him no, and he hit me with a long stick. I begged him not to hit me. I begged him, but he hit me again, so I took off my clothes. Then he took off his clothes and started taking pictures of me. I did all he asked, so he wouldn’t hit me anymore, but he wouldn’t stop.” Jim could see the trauma in her face. Her eyes were red, and she was bruised on her face and arms. “One last question, Cheryl. Did Mr. Roskowski touch you?” She was almost asleep but whispered to Jim as she was going out, “He put things inside me. He put his penis inside me. He hurt me, he hurt me… screaming, I was screaming.” The Valium finally lulled her to sleep, and Jim turned off the recorder. He softly told her, “It’s over, Cheryl; you’re safe. It’s going to be okay,” and he stepped out of the ambulance.

Once the ambulance was out of sight, he went back into the house. “How are the other three girls?” “They’re a mess, Jim. Someone hurt them really, really bad.” “Sexual assault?” The young female detective he was speaking to from the WCPD was really shook up. “I need you to focus. Are the first arriving officers still here?” She pointed to two officers standing off to the side near the front door. One was tall, thin, and looked to be in his early forties. The other, five foot eight and a more muscular build and also much younger. Jim walked over to them as they were getting ready to clear the call and get back on patrol. “Other than the girls, was there anyone else in the house?” The tall officer responded, “Yes. A body. We received a dispatch from a 911 operator. At first I thought it was a false alarm, then my partner came back from canvassing the house and found signs of forced entry. So we called for backup and made entry.” “Is that when you found the girls?” “No… we started to search the house, and we found the first girl in a back bedroom on the floor. I recognized her right away as the missing Pruitt girl.” “What about the other girls?” “My partner started through the house. He heard screaming, but he couldn’t tell where it was coming from. When backup arrived, they started to search the residence and found a basement. When they entered, they found the other three girls, nude and locked in dog kennels.” “And the dead body?” “There was a horrible smell. I recognized it immediately as the smell of death, but we had not cleared the house at that point. The body was discovered by backup.” “Any sign of the homeowner?” “Negative. We searched after we had the girls and the house secured but no sign.” “Do you know if anything else was found?” He nodded, “Yea… go to the basement. It will answer all of your questions.” “Did you know who the homeowner was when you were first called on scene?” “No… but Dispatch gave me the information once we had made entry. It’s Stewart Roskowski, the principal at Coston Middle School.” Jim nodded and walked back into the house.

The neighborhood was abuzz with news and police choppers. There were neighbors milling around and none of them knew what was going on. He could hear people asking questions, but there were no answers. He walked back into the house and grabbed a pair of blue latex gloves and started to look around. He heard a voice call up to him from the basement. “Detective, you need to see this.” He walked down the stairs, and one of his deputies was standing over a box of nude photos of children.” “Looks like we got ourselves a real pervert here.” Jim nodded. The basement was now well lit, and he could see the kennels where the girls had been kept. He looked around more and saw several more boxes of photos. There was a strange mix of old and new photographic technology. Everything from old black and whites to Polaroids and other types of film and more modern digital photographs. A yellow tarp covered the body, and he could see that the figure was small. He walked to the back of the basement and leaned against the wall, and when he did the wall gave way. He pushed on it a little more and called out to two of his people to come over to try and help him open the door, but it was somehow locked.

He called out to the firemen who were still on scene, and they were able to use pry bars to open the makeshift door. No one was prepared for what they would find on the other side.

Chapter Four

‘He had vanished into thin air, or, as Jim
told Steve in one of their conversations,
“Into the talons of The Iron Eagle.”’

S
tew Roskowski woke up in a dark room. His head was throbbing, and he had no idea where he was or how he got there. He was dizzy; he tried to move his arms, but they were restrained to his sides. He was cold, extremely cold, like a thousand knives were being driven into his flesh. His head was still foggy when a slit of light hit his eyes, and a tall muscular man entered the room. He was groggy but not groggy enough not to ask where he was. The Eagle moved out of his line of sight and came back with a large five gallon bucket in his hands and poured the contents all over him. It was ice water, and for the first time he realized why he was so cold – he was nude, and he was drenched in water and ice. He was lying on a steel table which was conducting the cold through his body like electricity. His teeth were chattering as he asked, “Who are you…why are you doing this to me?” The Eagle said nothing but reappeared with another bucket and poured it over his head, chest, and genitals. He cried out from the pain of the ice water; it felt like fire.

“You’re awake now, aren’t you Stew?” The voice wasn’t familiar to him. “Yes!… Yes! Please, no more.” The Eagle walked out of sight again and came back with another bucket and placed it in front of the steel table. “Are you pleading for mercy, Stew?” “Oh God, yes. Mercy, please, mercy.” The Eagle picked up the bucket and spoke as he poured the water over Stew’s body. “What’s God got to do with it? Where was your mercy when those children begged it from you?” Stew started crying uncontrollably. “Please… please, I beg you. Please don’t kill me.” The Eagle stepped back into the light, but Stew couldn’t see his face. “Really Stew? You’re kidding, right?” “I’ll do anything. I will confess to everything. I’m so sorry for the things that I’ve done. I’m sick. I have a mental illness. That’s what the doctors have told me. It’s a compulsion that I can’t control. I will make a full confession to the police. Take me in. I’m ready to pay for my crimes.”

The Eagle pulled a chair out of the darkness and sat down. “You are correct, Stew. You are going to make a full and complete confession. You are also correct that you deserve to pay for your crimes.” Weeping and weeping, he responded, “I was very bad to my pets. I should have treated them better.” The Eagle sat back in his chair. “Your pets? Stew, you have a warped sense of reality. You didn’t have pets. You abducted, raped, tortured, and then murdered young girls. They weren’t pets; they were human beings just like you…well, not just like you; you are a savage animal.” Stew didn’t know what to say. He was so cold that he was starting to black out. “Stew…oh…Stew…I can’t have you falling asleep. I need your full attention. You and I are going to relive some of your greatest hits…if you know what I mean.” Stew started screaming as light flooded the room and his eyes adjusted. He could see all of the instruments of torture that he had used on his victims. He felt the table start to move toward the light, and he screamed all the way through the door. It crashed closed on Stewart’s screams with a hollow steel sound.

Jim had put a call into Steve because he knew that he would need him and his resources on this case. Steve pulled up with his investigators in a van behind him. He walked up to Jim and shook his hand. “So what do you have here that would concern the FBI?” “The Iron Eagle.” Steve’s face showed no reaction. “Are you saying that you think that this is the home of The Iron Eagle?” Jim shook his head. “Then what?” Jim started for the front door, and Steve followed. They walked into the bedroom where Cheryl had been held. Steve looked around and at first nothing seemed of any real interest; then he saw it. He walked over to the wall behind the bed where it appeared a large object had struck, leaving a huge break in the plaster. He took a pair of gloves and tweezers and pulled off a piece of black material and placed it in a plastic bag. There was blood on the wall, and it had pooled in a small amount on the mattress below. “Which girl was in this room?” “Pruitt.” “Was she bleeding?” “Nope!” On closer examination he saw that the blood had been drawn with a pen like object from the pool across the mattress. A pair of wings were painted on the pillow in blood. At first glance it looked like a Rorschach ink blot, but on further review it was the deliberate calling card of The Eagle. “He took Roskowski?” “It sure as hell looks that way,” Jim said as he walked out of the bedroom and toward the bathroom where Roskowski had been showering.

He pulled back the shower curtain and pointed to the photographs on the wall. Steve looked hard at the three pictures before asking Jim who the girl was. “That’s the Pruitt girl. I spoke to her in the ambulance when they were taking her to the hospital. She told me that he had done this to her, but here she is, her contorted face and his cock in her pussy.” Steve shook his head. “Do you always have to be so damn vulgar?” “Hey, I call them like I see them, and I see a sick pedophile with his cock in a fourteen-year-old girl. Now that’s vulgar.” Jim turned and started toward the basement. When the two men made it to the hidden room, Steve knew that Mr. Roskowski was in the hands of The Eagle. “How many bodies have you found?” “We’ve recovered four alive and at least fifteen dead so far. The coroner is working with us, but this is turning into an archeological dig.”

“So The Eagle has Roskowski. Innocent,” Jim asked, “until proven guilty?” “No…I feel a confession coming.” Steve walked out to his car. Jim was behind him, and he couldn’t help himself, “So we know we’ll get a confession…but most likely posthumously.” Jim lit a cigarette as Steve opened the door to his car. “I have to admit I feel no urgency in finding Roskowski. It’s in my jurisdiction, and my team will work it up,” said Steve as he called for his crime scene investigators to come to the house. “I want to be updated on everything that you find here. I’m also going to have my team pull a comprehensive background check on Roskowski. I have a feeling that what you found in there is only the tip of the iceberg.” Jim nodded, smoke from his cigarette blowing out his nose as he waved Steve off and walked back to the house. “Hey… you better stop smoking those things; they’re going to kill you,” Steve yelled. “I have a feeling that the job will get me long before the smokes do.”

When Jim got back into the house he saw the lead CSI walking out from behind the false wall in the basement. “Well, what are we dealing with?” He had known Jade Morgan for ten years, and she looked horrible. She was a hardened CSI. He could see, however, that this scene had gotten to her. She walked toward the back door without saying a word as he followed. When they reached the back stairs she began to vomit, and he reached out to grab her. “What the hell’s going on, Jade? Did you come to work sick?” She wiped the sweat from her face. She was flushed, and if he didn’t know better he might’ve thought she had the flu. She pulled her shoulders back to get some air. “I’ve never seen anything like what’s in that house.” “Come on, Jade; you’ve seen your fair share of crime scenes.” “You haven’t been back inside in the last hour, have you?” He shook his head. “Go in there and then come back and tell me it’s just another crime scene.” He was startled by the seriousness of her tone. He stood up, and, without saying a word, walked back into the house and down the stairs into the basement.

Plastic had been put up around the opening of the door to the hidden room. He could see that Jade’s team now wore full hazmat suits. He pulled back the plastic, stepped into the room, and the smell alone made him gag. What he saw next was like nothing he had ever seen in all of his years in homicide. The room which once was about the size of a one hundred square foot closet had three separate doorways each draped with plastic. As he entered the nearest, he looked into the now well-lit rooms. His olfactory senses were assaulted by the stench of death, then he could see what he could only equate to the catacombs he had seen in Europe years earlier. Burial chambers stacked with bodies in varying degrees of decomposition. Some were just bones, others were recognizable, and all of them were children. The combination of smell and sight assaulted his senses. He became violently ill, running up the stairs and barely making it to the back door before vomiting on Jade, still sitting on the steps.

She didn’t move; he didn’t know what to say. They both just stared at each other until Jade got up and grabbed a hose and began to wash his vomit off her smock. Jim walked out into the yard and collapsed in the grass. Jade walked over toward him but didn’t completely approach. “I saw three separate rooms off the initial room that we found,” he said. “Are the contents the same as the first?” She knelt down on the ground behind him. “There is one other burial chamber, and the third is…” she paused, “what I can only describe as a medieval torture chamber.” “Is there anyone in there?” Jim couldn’t see her, but he could hear her breathing. “Yes.” “Is there anyone alive in there?” There was a long pause. “He brought his victims in there alive, and based on my quick review of the contents of the room, he worked very hard to keep them that way while he did the unspeakable to them.” Jade paused then asked, “Do we know anything about the homeowner?” “Yea… he’s the principal at one of the best schools in the area.”

He heard her stand up, and he did the same. She looked at him and said, “Well, these children didn’t come from his school I can tell you that. It looks like he’s been collecting these kids for a very, very long time. He has become very, very good at what he does.” Jim turned to look her in the eye. “He may have been doing this for a long time, but someone else found out before law enforcement.” She had a confused look on her face. “I don’t understand.” “There was a 911 call made from the house that led police to find the missing girl and then accidently the three others that are now in the hospital.” She had a thoughtful look on her face, “Was it the girl who called 911?” “I was only able to interview her for a few minutes before they took her to the hospital, but from what I gathered from her she didn’t make the call. She told the first officers on scene that someone else was in the house, and that he saved her and protected her from her assailant before the police arrived. You haven’t processed the rest of the house yet have you?” She shook her head. He started walking toward the house and said, “Follow me.”

She did as he asked and followed him to the bedroom where Cheryl had been held. He pointed to the bed in the corner of the room. It now had crime scene markers all around it, and there were a few FBI agents mulling around. She walked over to the bed and looked down at the pillow where a large yellow marker sat. A sad look fell upon her face. “The Eagle,” she said softly. He nodded. “Is this the girl’s blood?” He shook his head; she called to one of her team members to get into the room. “Get a sample of this blood over to the lab stat. Have them type, cross, and rush a DNA analysis. Have we harvested the scene for DNA?” The tech just gave her a glazed look. “Jade, we’ve been digging in a basement for the past several hours. There was no sign of a homicide up here.” She ordered him back to the basement, grabbed a crime scene kit from one of the cases, and started carefully bagging things from the home. She started in the bathroom and worked her way to the kitchen. When she was finished, she handed the bags to one of her associates. “If this ends up in court, I want this scene processed by the book. Start a chain of custody report for all DNA evidence. I don’t want questions on who had what down the road. And get them to the lab right away.”

Jim had been watching her on the periphery as he scoured the scene for other evidence. After Jade had sent off the specimens, she asked if Roskowski was in custody. He shook his head. “Well, are you planning on getting him into custody?” He sat down on a chair in front of a table in the kitchen. “Would love to do it, Jade, but Mr. Roskowski is missing.” “The Eagle.” “Are you asking me or telling me?” She sat up straight. “This is not the work of The Eagle; it doesn’t fit his profile.” He nodded. “But The Eagle was here?” He nodded again. Her face got a strange look on it, one he didn’t know how to read. “The Eagle took Roskowski?” “That’s the way it looks, Jade. Steve and his team are working on The Eagle aspect of this case; we need to focus on processing this crime scene and trying to figure out just how many kids are in that basement. And who they are.” She put her elbows on the table and put her head in her hands. “Shit, Jim…the son of a bitch is going to kill Roskowski before we can get any answers out of him as to whom he has in this house.” He stood up and tidied his suit coat. “You’re right and wrong. If The Eagle follows his previous M.O., he will kill Roskowski…however, he will also get a detailed confession out of him before he does.” She stood up as well. “That’s not his fuckin’ job! It’s your job. This animal needs to face justice.” “Which animal are you referring to, Jade?” She started down the stairs to the basement, yelling “both of them” back at him.