Already Dead (Laura Frost FBI)

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

Laura woke in pieces, little bit by little bit. The first thing was her head and the ache in it, which momentarily made her not want to wake up at all. Then there was light, dimly filtering through her eyelids and turning everything a dull red, until she realized that she could, in fact, open her eyes.

Awareness was among the last things to come back to her, but when it did, she immediately tried to move – and found that she could not.

This was a puzzle to work out. First, she tried again and had the same result, so Laura realized that something was holding her back. Something around her wrists, her legs, her back. She worked out that the thing holding her body was a chair, and then from the rough grazing feeling, she looked down to understand that she was tied with ropes.

One puzzle solved left another barrage of questions rising in her head. Where? Why? Who?

She slowly took in her surroundings; the light was dim but still painful to her eyes, seeming to increase the throbbing in the back of her head every time she so much as glanced in a new direction. Moving her head was another trigger. But she could move her head, which was good; she looked at the walls and realized she was in a room that she recognized, a room with strange plastic sheeting on the walls, a kind of ghostly room…

The basement.

She remembered it now: the basement under the church! She had been in here, looking at something – looking at her cell phone, because –

Because of the girl.

She looked down to the left and saw her, still laying exactly where she had been when Laura found her. She was still unconscious, or so Laura hoped. There was no sign that anything new had been done to her.

How long had it been? Down here, it was impossible to know. There was no way to see the outside, and even if she could have, Laura remembered it had been night already when she ventured down. If it was still night, she wouldn’t be able to know whether it had been five minutes or five hours.

For the sake of her own skull, she hoped it had been five minutes. Or even less. She knew how dangerous it could be to have a head injury that knocked you out for longer than that, and with the way her head was throbbing…

A noise behind her made Laura flinch, letting out a startled cry. That was when she realized she was not gagged, which was a relief in itself – but an extremely short-lived one. Because the sound from behind her came again, and she recognized it as the sound of a footstep crunching across the gathered plastic.

Someone was behind her.

She froze, her eyes going as wide as they could as if more light could somehow help her see through the back of her own head, trying to stay still and keep her breathing under control. If he didn’t realize she was awake…

She needn’t have bothered. A man stepped around in front of her, dressed in shabby blue overalls and with his hands stuffed in his pockets. He looked her right in the face and showed no surprise at all that she was looking back. He must have known she was awake already.

Laura fought against the ropes that held her arms down, struggling, trying to get free. All he did was look at her, his head cocked at an angle like he was curious. He was such a nondescript man, the absolute worst nightmare for a cop who needed to describe a suspect: brown hair receding from his hairline, a weak chin, thin lips, a nothing of a nose. Nothing about him was strong or memorable. Even his eyes were a little watery. Laura figured he was in his late thirties, but with that hairline he could have been older; with those eyes he could have been younger. It was almost impossible to say.

Laura stopped struggling and just looked back at him. The ropes weren’t coming loose. Now that she’d had more than a moment to live with the situation, to understand how much danger she was in, she tried to calm down. Panic wasn’t going to get her anywhere, here.

But she was a damn good FBI agent, and she had a lot of tools in her arsenal when it came to negotiation and investigation. Maybe, if she stayed calm, she could talk him into letting her go – or at least, letting his guard down.

“Who are you?” she asked, softly, moderating her voice on purpose. Making it a curiosity, not an accusation.

“I work here,” he said, by which Laura gathered he must have meant the church. “You’ve seen me, you know.”

“I have?” Laura said, blinking. She tried to place him. Maybe if he was wearing different clothes…?

“Up there,” he said, raising his eyes towards the ceiling momentarily. It was a curious gesture, especially in a place like this. Like he was talking about heaven, not just the church. “And elsewhere. I live here in town. You’ve walked past me a dozen times.”

“At the places where the women were found?” Laura asked. She had enough of her wits about her still to avoid the words ‘crime scene.’ Anything that might trigger him. Killers didn’t tend to enjoy hearing about the fact that they were killers. It might make him angry. Especially if he saw what he was doing as art, or ritual, or a necessary act.

“And others,” he said, straightening his head. He began to move around the space, with a slow, careful walk that barely produced any sound from the plastic sheeting. Laura realized that he must have been making sound on purpose a moment ago, or she wouldn’t have heard him so clearly. No wonder he’d been able to sneak up behind her, given how much noise of her own she had been making at that point.

Laura took advantage of him turning his back on her, ambling around to some other part of the room that was mostly hidden in shadow, to look down at herself and try to assess what she had. Her ankles were tied to the legs of the chair, and her wrists were bound to the arms. But it wasn’t a plastic chair, or a new one. It was wooden. That was something. Maybe something she could use. And she wasn’t sure she was looking at the kind of knot a professional would tie, either – there were just two loops of the rope around each hand, with the knot orientated on top of her wrist. No loop around her chest or between her arms to hold her more securely.

“You know,” he said, making her snap her head up and pay attention again. “It’s funny. People just don’t see me.”

“They don’t?” Laura asked, trying to keep him talking. If he wanted to chat, she was happy to. It meant she wasn’t dying. “I can see you now.”

“Yes, but I’ve brought attention to myself this time,” he said, with a kind of self-effacing smile in her direction. “You didn’t notice me before. Not even  Pastor Williams notices me most of the time, and he’s the one who hired me to take care of the maintenance.”

“That’s the work you do?” Laura asked. “That’s why you have access to this basement?”

“No one else ever comes down here,” he said, then made an ‘ah’ sound and reached for something that was hidden on a shadowy shelf by the door, far from the nearest candle. It seemed he’d been looking for something. Whatever it was, it disappeared into his pocket quickly. “Not even the  Pastor. I can’t say I like it too much myself, but I make do. With the police patrolling more up there, I have to spend as much time down here as I can.”

“Why don’t you like it?” Laura asked. It was probably an inane question, but the more she understood about him, the better.

He only looked at her with a kind of pitying expression on his face, as if he could see right through what she was attempting to do. He glanced around then at the plastic-clad walls, the decaying old furniture, and the cobwebs, as if to convey that there was plenty not to like about the place.

He moved out of sight for a moment into the other room, and Laura took advantage of the moment to start wriggling her hands. Not pulling up against the ropes or trying to force them but slipping her limb into the right place to slide right out of them. They were still too tight, even when she took it slow. She quickly relaxed her arms, pretending that she hadn’t been moving at all, as he stepped back through the plastic-curtained doorway.

“You know, my mother died recently,” he said. It was like they were just chatting away while standing and looking out over the sea at an observation point, two strangers who might as well shoot the breeze together. There was no hurry about his movements, no panic in his voice. Everything was so matter of fact.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Laura said, almost automatically.

“Yes, well,” he said, as if that was to be expected but also not entirely needed. “Funny thing was, we were never very close, my mother and I. Even though we lived together for so long. I suppose we just didn’t connect in that special way in life, whatever the reason was.”

Laura’s ears had pricked up. She swallowed uneasily. “In life?” she asked, unable to stop herself.

“No, well, it wasn’t her fault,” he said, casting about for something on a table at the other side of the room. Laura heard a clink and saw a familiar shape and saw that he was arranging the tools she’d seen before. He must have carried them through. “Nor mine, I don’t really think. But sometimes it happens that way. Anyway, it was after she died that it all started with the candles.”

“Did you light one for her?” Laura guessed. It wasn’t a hard leap to make, but she hoped she was right. If she was going to have any chance of getting out of this, they needed some kind of rapport. Something to make him relax, or even change his mind. She wasn’t just going to go down like this. She needed to get him on her side.

“As soon as she was taken away, I came down here and lit a candle,” he said. He picked up a candle now, an unlit one, and moved purposefully across to the other side of the space. “She lit one for my father, you see. So, I thought she’d like it. And after I lit it, I didn’t want it to go out. I kept it at home, and I kept it burning. And every time it was almost about to go out, I’d take another and light it from the same flame and keep it going.”

He did the very action he was describing now, lighting the candle from one which was set into the wall. He carried it over then, closer to Laura, and she couldn’t help but flinch. She didn’t want that candle anywhere near her. Not if he was going to do what she thought he was going to do with it.

Instead, he set it down on a ledge she hadn’t noticed, covered as it was with the plastic. Smoothing it out carefully so that that candle wouldn’t fall, he took his time, turning slowly afterwards to face both Laura and the unconscious girl on the floor.

“Do you know, this is going to be very strange,” he said. “I’ve never had an audience before.”

“Then why have one now?” Laura asked. “You might as well let me go.”

He only smiled, like he was trying to tell her he wasn’t going to fall for that one. “Do you know what happened after I lit that candle?” he asked. “The one for my mother, I mean. It was so very odd. I started to feel something.”

“What was it?” Laura asked. She was trying to keep him distracted, but it didn’t seem to be working. He wiped his hands briefly on his overalls and then pulled out a pair of gloves, almost as an afterthought, and slipped them on. Workman’s gloves, oversized and padded, that made his hands look bigger than they were. Laura’s heart was beating so fast it was making her feel dizzy. Those gloves meant he was about to get to work, and time was running out.

“I was close to her at last,” he said, pausing for a moment to give a little wistful sigh. “Really close to her, in a way we never were when she was alive. I felt this genuine connection. She would come to me at night and talk to me and listen. Even just to feel her around all the time – it was so comforting. And she never would have been so gentle with me before it happened. After the candle went out at last, she stayed with me anyway. I knew, then, what I had to do. You see, I’ve never really been close to anyone. People don’t notice me, and when they do, they don’t have a lot of interest. I’m just like a piece of furniture, for the most part. I might be tolerable to have around, but people don’t think about me, and they certainly don’t want to talk to me.”