Condemned: A Thriller Read online

  I turned on my red light and swept it across walls black with soot and smudged by hands using them as guides in the dark. The reek of human waste was dizzying. Bare wooden stairs that hardly seemed capable of supporting my weight guided me up to the second story. To my left were walls burned to the bare brick and mortar and doors that couldn’t be opened for the rubble collapsed against them from the other side.

  The light entering around the seams of the boarded window sparkled with motes of dust that alighted on a filthy mattress and tarps soiled with fluid of indeterminate origin. The floor was covered with broken glass and the walls were decorated with colorless graffiti with no sense of aesthetic style. I could see all the way into the stripped kitchen with its pulverized walls and broken tiles, a bedroom heaped with trash and blankets, and a bathroom scavenged to the bare, waterlogged wood.

  The adjacent apartment was nearly identical, save for the pile of broken wood exhumed from the carcass of a box-spring mattress. It was piled against the wall beneath an arrow and the spray-painted words “START FIRE HERE.”

  The staircase to the third floor made cracking and popping sounds I could barely hear over how loudly my heart was pounding. The hallway was riddled with holes, forcing me to walk with my shoulder against the wall. One of the two units was positively filled with fallen debris from the apartment above it, which now served as a tall brick frame for the rotted roof, through which seemingly palpable columns of light shined, while the other housed soggy furniture white with mold and dust.

  Half of the stairs to the top floor were broken or missing altogether and the iron railing squealed and barely clung to the wall when I used it as leverage to haul myself over gaps through which I could see thirty feet down onto chunks of concrete spiked with rusted rebar. The landing was in little better shape and the entire wall to my right was gone. There were far fewer footprints in the dust and plaster. I imagined whichever evidence tech was tasked with examining this level had done so in a big hurry and with sweat beading his brow.

  There was nothing left of the first apartment but a hole where the floor had once been, a ring of rotting carpet clinging to the edges like scum around a bathtub, and the residual framework of the walls, which now lay below in moldering mounds. The floor of the final room was so rotted with damp that it sagged between the supporting joists, which I used as stepping stones to cross the room.

  I stood in the center and turned slowly in a circle. The access point to the roof of the Eastown had to be somewhere in here.

  I ran my light across a ceiling that bowed visibly downward to gaps through which I could see the framework of the tarred roof. The kitchen was bare, the framing of the walls exposed. The bedroom appeared to be in reasonable shape, all things considered, with the exception of the bat guano all over the floor and the holes in the walls where I could only assume the sources hung from the rotting two-by-fours. The wall between the bedroom and the bathroom was eroded. The tiles on the northern wall were broken or outright missing. The brick firewall between the apartment and the Eastown showed through the crumbling plaster. There was a hole in the floor where the toilet had fallen through onto the one below, shattering both. Shards of broken mirror glimmered beneath a medicine cabinet orange with rust.

  Someone had scratched a design into the plaster above it with a nail or some other sharp object. There were three figures standing side by side, their heads bowed so their foreheads touched. Each extended an arm downward at such an angle that they met in front of the middle figure and pointed down at the medicine cabinet. My heartbeat accelerated with the revelation…

  I’d found what the killer had meant for me to find.

  EIGHT

  I’d gone off to college with the intention of becoming a doctor. I was going to save the world and make a fortune in the process, and I was going to remain in this community where I could make a difference on a local level.

  Funny how things turn out sometimes. I no more make a difference than the world wants to be saved.

  I remember my freshman year at UM-D clearly. I was still wide-eyed and ambitious, and eager to jump right into the heavy science classes. If I could have enrolled in pathology and virology out of the gates, I would have done so without thinking. Instead, like every other freshman across the country, I fell victim to the core curriculum, which I’m convinced is designed to beat the will to live out of you.

  Before I could take any classes even remotely related to my dream profession, I was forced to take two years of throwaway classes intended to make me a more well-rounded person and run up the tab on my student loans. Social Diversity, Literature & the Arts, Written Communications, Contemporary Societies. It was my forced placement in Creative Writing 101 and Intro to Humanities that started me down this road. Were it not for those classes, I never would have heard this calling and would probably be driving a BMW and living in a mansion in Bloomfield Hills. I try not to think about that too often.

  Surprisingly, I enjoyed classic literature and art, especially from the end of the Dark Ages and the Early Renaissance, which I equate to today’s fascination with all things apocalyptic and zombie. There was just something about that era that spoke to me on a personal level; it was the age when people first opened their eyes to the world around them, saw it for what it truly was, and tried to rationalize their place in it. And no work hit home more than Dante’s The Divine Comedy, with its nightmare imagery that in many ways reminded me of what I saw happening to the city in which I was raised.

  I remembered late nights in our dorm room studying with Dray—who noted on more than one occasion that hell was apparently reserved exclusively for white people, so he had nothing to worry about—and realizing how relevant the work still was in today’s society. Granted, the context was all wrong and we were far removed from the Black Death, but you could almost insert the modern faces of politicians, bankers, and leaders of industry over those of their fourteenth-century Florentine counterparts.

  I spent hours staring at the illustrations and sculptures inspired by the epic poem. I was fascinated by the works of Gustave Doré and Hieronymus Bosch, and especially by a sculpture by Auguste Rodin called The Gates of Hell. It was an elaborate, life-size doorway that featured three-dimensional characters and scenes, hideous and horrible figures who seemingly crawled over the door with stunning realism, like a writhing gateway into The Inferno itself. Chief among these reliefs was The Three Shades, or Les Trois Ombres, who stood beside each other on the very top of the lintel crowning the tympanum, their heads pressed together, and pointed as one to the words carved below them: LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA, VOI CH’INTRATE.

  Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

  I transferred my light to my left hand and took hold of the medicine cabinet door with my right. Took a deep breath and felt my pulse throb in my temples. Tried to steady my trembling hands. Threw the door open and stepped back so quickly I nearly tripped over my own feet.

  The back of the cabinet had been removed and there was a dark hole leading through the firewall and into the Eastown. The bricks were jagged and cracked and appeared to have been smashed by a sledgehammer. Even with my light, I could see little more than a short tunnel terminating in darkness.

  There was no turning back now.

  I braced my elbows on the ledge and climbed inside. The tunnel was barely five feet long and led to a room filled with debris from the crumbling ceiling. Dust and a crust of dried pigeon crap covered everything. I heard the clap of wings as startled birds took off from the ceiling joists and passed unseen through the holes in the roof.

  I was inside the Eastown. My best guess put me somewhere above the corridor leading to the stage and beside where the screen once hung. I walked at a crouch to keep from knocking myself unconscious on the low ceiling. There were stacks of rusted cans of reel-to-reel film with names like For Your Thighs Only, Kinky Business, and Poonies written on them in black ink I could barely read through the dust. I noted areas on the floor where it looked as thoug
h the dust were only beginning to settle again where it had been swept aside, presumably in an attempt to erase whatever prints the killer had left…or by the body he dragged behind him.

  I followed the trail to the far side of the attic and a section of plywood that slid aside to reveal the inside of the wall. I shined my beam down into a pipe chase maybe two feet wide. All of the pipes and conduits had been scavenged, leaving behind brackets on the brick walls staggered in such a way that I could envision using them almost like the rungs of a ladder to reach the bottom, which my light was barely strong enough to reach.

  I knew exactly where it would come out.

  Maneuvering my body so I could swing my legs over the edge took some doing, but I managed to slide inside the wall. I braced my upper arms against the bricks and picked my way own. There were score-marks on the walls from acetylene torches and webs housing spiders that watched me with cold disinterest.

  The bottom was maybe eight feet down and carpeted with dust, asbestos, and broken bricks. I walked back and forth through the narrow passage in search of a way out. I was beginning to think I’d been wrong from the start when I pushed against the back of a fuse box and it slid outward. Another shove and it fell from the wall. It made a loud clattering sound when it struck the iron lattice of the loading galley.

  I stuck my head through and looked down at the slender catwalk and the pin rail from which the body had been suspended. From this vantage point, I could clearly see center stage, where I had stood obliviously underneath where the victim hung.

  This was where he watched me.

  He wanted me to know he’d been here the whole time, to realize that I’d been alone inside this building with him and completely unaware of his presence. He wanted me to understand that I was at his mercy. And something else, I could feel it, although for the life of me I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was a sensation I equated with walked into a room and being unable to remember why you entered in the first place.

  I was too tired to be doing this now. Surely I’d be able to make sense of it after a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.

  They loading galley raised a ruckus, but supported my weight long enough for me to reach the lattice track, which I descended easily enough. I stepped down onto the stage, clapped the dust off my hands, and turned—

  A dark shape stood directly in front of me, silhouetted by the sunlight shining through a hole in the ceiling.

  It was upon me before I could react.

  NINE

  My back struck the wall. I barely got my hands up between us. Its face was only inches from mine. I felt the heat of its breath, smelled the overwhelming scent of…coffee?

  “The hell you doing here?” a familiar voice said.

  Dray shoved me hard in the chest and stepped back into the light, his fists balled at his sides. Aragon stood beside him, head cocked, arms crossed over her chest. She wore a white T-shirt with DPD on the breast and navy blue cargo pants with a utility belt that looked far too big for her diminutive frame.

  I rubbed the back of my head were Dray had bounced it off the wall and checked my fingertips for blood.

  “How’d you know I was here?”

  “You’re kidding, right? You think those guys are parked out front just to look pretty? They saw you casing the place and called in your plates. I said you couldn’t possibly be that stupid—”

  “I said you could,” Aragon interrupted. “Someone owes me lunch now.”

  “How’d you get in here? Tell me you didn’t break the tape.”

  “I’m not a complete idiot.”

  “Despite all evidence to the contrary,” Aragon said.

  Dray shot her a look. She just shrugged and stared at the gallery landing and the hole in the wall where the fuse box had been. I didn’t know why she disliked me so passionately. Maybe when it came to Dray we were like siblings vying for his attention. Who knew? At least I knew better than to take it personally; from what I’d seen, that was pretty much how she interacted with everyone.

  “Then tell me why on God’s green earth you thought it was a good idea to break back in here,” Dray said.

  “I didn’t break in.”

  “You better hope not or we’ll find out how far I can stick my boot up your ass.” He whirled and pointed at Aragon before she could speak. She smirked and tested her weight on the lattice track. “So start talking before I forget how far we go back and show you how I treat reporters who bust in on my cases.”

  “Don’t you have to work for a real news outlet to be considered a reporter?” Aragon said. “I think he’s technically a blogger, isn’t that right? There’s no shame in that, though. They don’t let just anyone get one of those, do they?”

  She chuckled as she ascended the track. I kind of hoped one of the rungs would break.

  “The printed word’s nearly extinct and corporate interests own the few remaining dinosaurs of the publishing world.”

  “Whatever…you’re still way out of your depth on this one.”

  There was nothing I could say to that; I’d be the first to admit she was right.

  “You say you didn’t break the tape,” Dray said. “Then how’d you find a way in here when Northville couldn’t?”

  “I figured since there weren’t any footprints on the stage, the perp had to have entered some other way, and the only thing I could think of was through the roof.”

  “Perp? So, what? Now you’re Castle?” Aragon said as she climbed onto the landing. Her eyes scanned the room as she put the pieces together.

  “So you thought you’d just come on down and do a little investigating on your own,” Dray said. “Show us how much smarter you are then the rest of us.”

  “It’s not like that at all and you know it.”

  “Then why didn’t you call me first?”

  “Would you have let me come?”

  Dray sighed. He appeared to shrink when he did so. I wondered when he’d lost so much weight.

  “Let’s start over. How’d you get in here?”

  “Through the apartments next door.”

  “Our people swept the whole place.”

  “They didn’t know what to look for.”

  “A team of the best crime scene techs in the state? And you did, with your vast experience. That what you’re telling me?”

  “There had to be a reason the killer sent the tip to me, something I might recognize that everyone else might not.”

  “You saying you know our guy?”

  “He at least knows me to some extent.”

  “So what did you see that forensics didn’t?”

  “The Three Shades.”

  “All of those windows are boarded. Don’t none of them have shades—”

  “From Dante’s Inferno. They were the souls of famous nobles in the realm of the Sodomites.”

  “I have no doubt Webber here’s an expert on—” Aragon started.

  Dray looked up at her with an expression that could have stopped a runaway train. She held up her hands in mock surrender.

  “In the sculpture by Rodin, they point to the gates of hell. Someone carved their likeness into the wall. When I saw them, I knew that was where I was supposed to go.”

  “Our guy fancies himself a literary man.”

  “Everyone has to read The Divine Comedy at some point or other. Doesn’t necessarily mean he liked it.”

  “But how’d he know you did is the question.” I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It was a good question and one for which I had no answer. “So you went through these gates of hell…?”

  “There was a tunnel hidden behind the medicine cabinet in one of the apartments on the top floor.”

  “And it led you right up there.”

  “Through the hole behind the fuse box.”

  I glanced up at the landing as Aragon ducked her head inside the wall, then pulled it back out. She unholstered her Maglite, clicked it on, and shined it upward into the pipe chase.

  “You realize
I got to call Northville back out here to go through there now, right?”

  I nodded.

  “They’re going to want to know what you were doing up in there.”

  “I told you—”

  “They’re going to want to know why you contaminated their crime scene.”

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  “And they’re going to find your fingerprints all over everything up in there, aren’t they? What do you think the odds are they’ll find anyone else’s?”

  I stared up at the roof and the beams from which the body of Lindsay DeWitt had been hung.

  “Shit.”

  “Shit? That all you got to say?”

  “Sorry, Dray. You know I didn’t mean—”

  My cellphone vibrated in my pocket.

  Dray sighed and threw his arm over my shoulder. It was an affectation I’d seen his old man make a thousand times. I wondered if I mimicked my dad, too.

  “You should have called me, Webb.”

  There was no point in arguing with him or attempting to justify my actions.

  “This ain’t a game, man. You saw what our guy did to that little girl. You’re smart enough to know what he wants us to think he is. Guy like that wants people talking about him, wants to see his name up in lights. Only way to do that is to keep in killing. That sound like the kind of thing you want to get caught up in?”

  I had to look away. He and I inhabited two different worlds and what I saw in his eyes made me realize I wanted no part of his.