Already Dead (Laura Frost FBI)

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

Laura steadied the gun in her hands as she considered the door, figuring out how she was going to do this. It would have been better to call for backup, probably. But who was she going to rely on? The locals, who had gone down considerably in her opinion ever since they’d seen her bring in the  Pastor and seemed to simply give up? Agent Won, who wasn’t even answering his phone?

If Nate had been here, Laura would have waited. She’d have called him and known he would be there within minutes, and that she could go on with him as her backup. But he wasn’t. And she couldn’t stand there all night, waiting for someone to arrive. Not when there was still potentially a life on the line.

When there was no one to rely on but yourself, what did you do? You relied on yourself to get the job done.

Laura grasped hold of the heavy metal ring that served as a handle for the basement door and pulled, finding it surprisingly light. The door swung up and open, only clunking slightly as it hit the wall behind it. There was no creak of the hinges. They must have been well-oiled.

Which meant that someone went down here regularly – or at least, had gone down here recently. And when they went down, they preferred not to be heard.

Or was that paranoia talking, overlaying the whole scene with something darker than was really there? Wasn’t it actually normal enough for a church to be well-kept, for someone to perform routine maintenance on it? And even if someone did regularly go down into the basement… for all she knew, this was actually the entrance to the apartment, and the door at the back she had found locked was simply a door to the outside.

Or maybe a creepy basement was a creepy basement, and Laura was just trying to tell herself everything she could to try to steady her own nerves.

She inched forward, looking over the edge of the hole, remaining cautious. The gun was down at her side, but easy to raise quickly if she should see something that sparked her instinct. There was nothing but a ladder leading down into the basement space, down to another wooden floor, and a faint glow from somewhere beyond it.

A faint glow that flickered slightly as she watched.

Candles.

That settled it. There was no way Laura could stay up here when she’d been given such an obvious clue. She thought about trying Agent Won again but decided against it. She was here now. If she risked speaking on the phone, anyone who was down there would hear her – and the cell phone itself would be a distraction, something to reduce her reaction times.

She had to go down on her own.

Laura took a breath, uttering a quick mental prayer – since she was in Rome, after all – that she wasn’t about to walk towards her own death. For the sake of her daughter, at least. It wasn’t completely reassuring, but it would have to do.

She climbed onto the ladder and then swung herself around so that she was facing outwards, climbing in an awkward one-handed grip with her legs twisted. It was either that, or put her back to the room, and there was no way in hell she was doing that. She kept her gun in her right hand, away from the ladder, so that at least she had something to defend herself with.

Even so, it was a hair-raising moment. As she climbed down rung by rung, moving carefully and slowly, she was all too aware that anyone down there would have her in their line of sight before she saw them. She would be a pair of legs, then a torso, and a head last – and she would be exposed.

She found herself breathing heavier, short and sharp gasps, as she took each rung. With each step lower, she prayed she wasn’t walking into danger. That she wasn’t about to be shot, or stabbed, or have herself wrenched bodily from the ladder and thrown to the ground. At last, she descended far enough that she could duck her head and look.

It wasn’t much of an improvement on being able to see nothing at all. The basement was a dark mess of furniture and perhaps adjoining antechambers, from what she could see in the vague flickering light. The candles were placed at random intervals: here on top of a spare, old desk, there on what looked like a broken pew, over there attached to an actual wall sconce. It was like descending into the past.

The walls were bare stone and brick, rough-looking and damp. It was colder down here than it had been up there, even with the night air flooding into the church. Laura shivered as she touched down on the floor at last, straightening herself and casting around, trying to will her eyes to adjust to the dimness.

It was hard to focus. There was such a deep contrast between the light of the candles and the darkness between them, which seemed almost to be made of a thick substance with how deep the shadows became. And the light itself danced and flickered, making shadows move on every surface and in every corner, leaving Laura jumpy and tense.

She took in what she could see, which at this juncture wasn’t much. There was a length of rope coiled up on a nearby table, though that meant very little. She hadn’t seen any evidence of rope marks on the three victims so far, and the coroner’s reports had not suggested they were in existence either.

Still, it didn’t make her feel any better about being down here on her own.

There was also a low shelf which appeared to be stacked with cleaning supplies – all of them much more modern than the rest of the things she could see, which on closer inspection were threaded with dust and spiderwebs, clearly long-abandoned. There was bleach, several different kinds of spray bottles which held different cleaning fluids, a stack of sponges and clothes inside plastic packages, several packs of rubber gloves…

Why keep the cleaning supplies down here, if they weren’t going to be used here? And they clearly hadn’t been, because the place was filthy. There was only a kind of swath across the floor, an area where it looked as though feet must have passed time and time again, keeping the dust at bay.

Laura followed it with her gun held in front of her, on high alert for any sign of movement or sound.

It led between the desk and the table, through a kind of doorway into another part of the space. It seemed as though the whole thing had been subdivided at some point, perhaps into separate rooms to be used by the previous custodians of the church. It made for a confusing mess of a space, with openings seeming to come in every direction and no real way for Laura to know how much more of the basement there was to explore. She emerged into a new space which was altogether different from the first – a space that sent her heartrate skyrocketing once again.

It was set out with plastic sheeting. Plastic along the walls. Plastic across the floor. Plastic over every piece of old furniture, except for one, right at the far edge of the room. Another old desk, this one looking like something that might have been used in an old-fashioned school, perhaps as much as a century ago.

Laura was beginning to get the impression this basement was only used as a storage space – except for whatever it was that was being done here, now. It could have been that someone was trying to refurbish it and hadn’t got very far yet.

So why did she feel a creeping sense of dread that that wasn’t the case?

The interior of this room was also lit only by a few scattered candles, leaving everything cast in uncertainty and darkness around the edges. Laura stepped carefully, cringing as her feet hit the plastic sheet and made a clear crinkling noise. She hoped to God that no one else was down here – an ironic thought, she realized, given where she was.

She moved across to the desk on which she saw something shining dully in the light, pushed against the back wall. There were a number of tools lined up on it. A hammer, which was what had caught her eye. A mallet, a chisel that was so old and rusted it didn’t shine at all, the broken handle of a saw. Construction tools, probably.

She hoped.

There was a strange space between the hammer and the mallet, as if something else was accustomed to lying there and had been removed. Laura lingered on that space for a moment, wondering.

There was no point in dwelling. She took one more glance around the strangely sterile room with all its plastic and hesitated. There were two more openings leaving this space: one right ahead of her beside the desk, and one to the left. She had no clues as to what lay beyond the shifting plastic sheets on either of them. She took a gamble, stepping forward through the nearest opening and brushing the sheeting aside.

As it turned out, Laura didn’t need a vision to find the killer’s next victim.

She was lying right there, on the floor of the next room.

Laura stumbled forward as soon as she saw the body of the woman, tied up and slumped on the floor on her back, her eyes closed. Her throat wasn’t cut, but she was dead still – not moving at all – Laura dropped to her knees beside her, desperately fumbling towards her throat to feel for a pulse.

She concentrated hard, holding her own breath, trying to feel…

There!