The Enemy Inside (41 page)

Oh fuck.

Straining against the bonds, he desperately tried to break free. After a good few minutes he gave up. He was well and truly stuck, the rope wrapped tightly around each limb several times.

As the bright, fluorescent bulb flickered above him, he shifted his weight as much as he could in the chair so he could take in his location and figure out a plan of action.
 

He was not gagged, so either the room must have been soundproofed or well away from civilization.

He was in what looked to him like a basement, surrounded by sealed, bare concrete walls and floor. There was only one entrance and exit, an industrial-looking steel door in front of him to the right. There were no windows, so he couldn’t get any kind of idea what time it was. Despite the lack of air, he was bitterly cold.

The room itself was small, barely ten feet by ten feet, and looked like it had been built many decades prior. There was a single drain located directly underneath his chair, which itself was locked into sturdy metal hooks embedded into the concrete. Above him, there were a few more of the same hooks anchored in the bare concrete ceiling.
 

Jay remembered Dr. Dwight’s words from his last autopsy report.
“He fractured his own wrists, he was trying so violently to escape his restraints
 . . .
the wrist fracture was a stress fracture from trying to yank his arms down.”
 

Vomit once again rose in Jay’s throat, this time from fear.

The concrete floor and walls were a uniform gray, apart from odd stains—brownish-red marks in no particular pattern, thick in some places and barely noticeable in others. The stains were concentrated around the drain over which he was seated.
 

Jay had been in law enforcement long enough to recognize old blood when he saw it. His heart kicked against his ribs.

Suppressing the urge to yell for help, he took stock of himself. He was fully clothed, he noticed in relief, and appeared to be uninjured apart from the pounding headache and a few scrapes and bruises. Whoever had dragged and tied him here had not been careful.
 

His right arm ached and the skin burned from the stun gun, but he was okay in body and prepared to go down fighting, if that’s what it came to.

His mental health was a whole different story. Sitting and wallowing in his own predicament for a moment, he tried to recall what had happened. Then he remembered her face.
It was Rosario, one of Berg’s missing hitchhikers!

He was still trying to clear his head and decide on a plan of action when he heard a key turn in the deadlock and a heavy bolt slide back with a clang. The steel door swung open toward him. The hallway beyond remained dark, and he strained his eyes to look beyond the bright light illuminating him for whomever was watching.

Jay saw two dark shadows move closer to the door and appraise him like a cheap piece of meat. He was expecting to see Uncle Ted.
 

So what came next was a complete surprise.

One of the figures moved into the light, eyeing Jay gleefully while playing with a very large hunting knife. “Well, well. Haven’t we been a bad boy?”
 

Jay’s breath caught in his throat. He was well and truly screwed.

Chapter Forty-Three

“That’s it, Berg. Trucker case closed,” Cheney said to a frustrated Berg as she argued with him the next day in the station. “Give it up, you were wrong.”

“Oh, come on.” Berg grabbed his arm to prevent him from walking away. “The note was nothing more than the ramblings of a sick, guilty old man, not a confession!”

Cheney rolled his eyes. “Your prime suspect’s been cleared of murder, and the old man had a stun gun covered in Williams’s skin cells, a hunting knife with Taylor’s blood on it, not to mention the pictures and a blowtorch. His fingerprints on all of it. You yourself said he wanted them to die. He had the means, the motive, and the opportunity. Case closed.”

“And where did he carry out these killings? There was no blood at his house. And what about Dell? Winchester? Stella? Melissa? The database?” she shouted, her voice rising with each question. “Not to mention Colt was about four hundred years old. No way he could subdue and torture four healthy, strong men!” Her temples pounded in frustration.

“He had a stun gun. He also knew all four men, and they trusted him. They never would have seen it coming.”

“You haven’t answered my question about the other victims, or the database,” Berg replied.

“The database was unfortunate, but human error does sometimes happen. And the other murders were never linked,” Cheney said. “You got Consiglio fired, but he was right. We’ve all been man enough to admit to McClymont that we were wrong. Are you man enough, Berg?”

“What crap,” Berg said, folding her arms across her chest.
 

The entire station was subdued now, watching the argument.

“Look, you heard McClymont. The trucker murders are solved, and the captain will be back next week to start her new job. If she reports to him that we are off the books again, we can kiss our jobs good-bye and say hello to being mall security guards. Is that what you want? To shoo horny teenagers out of shopping malls for a living? ’Cause I think I’d rather take Shipper and Hamilton’s lead and start growing my own retirement fund.”
 

Berg snorted, looking around. It was early morning and she was expecting her partner at any moment. “Where’s Jay? He’ll tell you.”

“You didn’t know? He put in for a transfer and he’s taking a few personal days. He’ll be back next week to tie up loose ends here,” Cheney said.

Berg’s knees collapsed, and she fell into her chair. “What?” she asked. “He told you he put in for a transfer? When did you speak to him?”

“He sent—”

“Lemme guess. You got a text message?” Berg interrupted. “Tell me, when was the last time anyone actually
spoke
to Jay?”

Cheney shrugged. “A few days ago? He made no promises to check in every day, and you know it.”

Berg glared and stood back up. Her fear for Jay was matched only by the thought that he might not want to be her partner anymore.
 

“And you don’t think it’s strange he’s only sending texts to you?” she eventually shot.

“No. Don’t get all bitchy because Jay doesn’t want to speak to you, Berg,” Cheney said. “I don’t know what happened between you two, but he’s been acting really weird lately. In fact he nearly punched Rodriguez in the face for making a joke about you. Did he add you to his extensive list of fucks? Hope you weren’t expecting a commitment.”

Berg staggered away from Cheney as if he had struck her.
 

Cheney laughed rudely and walked back to his desk, leaving Berg standing alone, the eyes of the station upon her.
 

Desperately trying to quell the tears that were threatening to overflow, she grabbed her files, jacket, and bag and fled to the refuge of her car.

Berg sat on her sofa, punching Jay’s number into her cell over and over again.
 

Each time it went straight to voice mail she became increasingly desperate for him to answer, for him to assure her that he was okay, that he wasn’t transferring. She had even tried to locate his cell using GPS, but it was switched off.

Tears flooded her vision. Her fingers shaking, she dialed incorrectly three times before giving up. Sickened with Jay and herself, she jumped off the sofa, opened a window and threw her cell out into the rainy night.

He doesn’t love you, he never did. How could he?

“Shut up!” she yelled, covering her ears.
 

In an effort to drown out the voice, she flicked on the television. It was late, but there was no question of her going to bed. Worry for Jay had taken up permanent residence in her stomach, and there was no room for anything else. Jay was now the subject of her late-night terrors, and more than once she had awoken after a few precious moments of sleep, awash in cold sweat after hearing his screams in her dreams.
 

She remembered Cheney’s none-too-subtle dig and felt the black despair settle deeper. Sitting up, she reopened the files and studied them.
 

But she couldn’t concentrate and was beginning to fear Cheney was right—it had been Colt all along and the other murders were never related.
 

If she could get it so wrong, how long could she remain a cop? And there was no point living without her job. It was all she was. There was nothing else.

She stared at the television and saw the soap Helen loved. She watched, detached, as a good-looking man apologized to a pretty young woman for raping her, like that made it all okay.
 

Berg frowned, unhappy with the bubblegum way the show dealt with such a real, raw issue and the way the victim accepted his phony apology and then seemed to be over the ordeal.
 

If only real life was that easy
.
Even if you get an apology, does that make it all better?
Can it erase the dark smudge you carry around? The smudge everyone else can see if they look hard enough? The smudge that stops anyone from loving you? Would things be different for me if my father had just said he was sorry?

Her mind wandered to her own past before she quickly wrestled back control of her errant thoughts. Straying into those memories was never a good idea.

She watched some more of the sugarcoated, supposed rape explanation and, unable to help it, allowed herself to sink down into the comforting dark of her own black thoughts. She relished the feeling of not having to fight the blackness for just one, small, blissful moment, and let the shadows envelop her.
 

Just one iota of time where she wasn’t being ripped and pulled in all directions like a leaf in a tornado.

She remembered the death of her father. It was not the death he deserved, the death Berg had wanted to inflict. Instead, she imagined every facet of his violent death at her hands.
 

She had wanted to kill him slowly and painfully, dragging it out to the last second. Flaying him alive . . . plucking out his eyes . . . cutting off his fingers.
 

She would have laughed as he whimpered, cried tears of joy as he finally lay still, knowing he was unable to inflict himself upon anyone else. She would have done it and gladly gone to prison for the rest of her life. It would’ve been worth it.

She thought of that rape victim thirty years ago and the death she suffered at the hands of four drunken animals. Raped, beaten, stabbed, searing cigarette burns on tender, young flesh . . .

Suddenly, she sat bolt upright on the couch, remembering what Helen had said to her mother about the rape case she saw, how the woman was covered in cigarette burns and cuts.

“But Colt said they killed her,” she muttered to herself.
But they never found her body. What if, like the missing hitchhikers, she somehow survived?
 

Berg picked up her home phone, her cell now five stories down and undoubtedly in pieces, hitting the speed dial for her mother’s hospice. “Helen Zameski, please.”
 

She waited as they transferred her, tapping her foot on the floor. It seemed to take forever for Helen to come to the phone and then even longer for her to understand what Berg wanted. Finally, Berg put the phone on speaker and picked up her notebook, ready to take notes.
 

“Why did you want to know about it?” Helen’s voice crackled over the phone.
 

“What do you remember?”

“Not too much, just that it was terrible. This young woman walked in off the street, unrecognizable, almost beaten to death. She had been raped repeatedly and was very . . . damaged . . .” Helen said. “From what I remember, she had also been stabbed, burnt with cigarettes . . .” Helen’s voice faded with the memory.

The cogs in Berg’s head clicked into place like a winning slot machine. Danny Taylor, stabbed. John Rogers, raped. Daryl Williams, beaten. Andrew McEnery, burnt. “When was this?”

“Oh, I guess it was the late 1970s.”

“Do you remember a name?”

“No, sorry. The police came, took her statement, but she refused to say she had been raped or who attacked her. Then she just walked out of the hospital one day, and we never saw her again.”