Barns retain their odors for decades, all the milk and waste and hay and mud and rotting wood like wraiths on the deserted air.
I shone my light around. There was a bullpen and two wide stalls on the west end; and several narrow cow stalls on the east end. On the walls hung old bridles, the leather coarse and cracked; and rusted pitchforks and shovels and rakes; and half a rusty Schwinn bike that had probably been fine and shiny and new about the time John Kennedy was becoming president, the front wheel missing.
I found a wobbly ladder angled against the upper floor and climbed it, splashing my light around on the hayloft above. Except for a rotting bundle of hay, the loft was empty, stray pieces of the stuff shining like fool’s gold in the gleam of my flash.
Downstairs again, I found a small room that had probably been used for storing feed, and a milkhouse just outside the back door.
Rain fell through the holes in the roof and made hollow pocking sounds as they struck the floor far below.
It took me twenty minutes to find the trapdoor, concealed as it was beneath several boards in one of the narrower stalls.
I thought of what Joanna Lodge had told me about how people in this part of Iowa had dug subbasements and root cellars to hide runaway slaves.
I got down on my knees, set the boards aside, wrapped my hand around the ringbolt and gave it a yank. It was three feet by three feet, plenty wide enough for carrying things down. I remembered what Peary had said about the killer suddenly disposing of the bodies differently — and about what the FBI had told me about the Brooklyn man who’d started burying his victims.
Cold and fetid air, the air of the grave, rose from the room below, and I was rocked back on my haunches. I sat still a long moment in the dark and damp barn, letting the gaseous odors subside.
I angled the beam of my flashlight down into the room below. A ladder that looked much sturdier than the one leading to the hay loft stretched down into shadow.
I started climbing down.
The air grew colder, the smell more fetid, as I descended the ladder. Just from the air currents, I could tell that this was a much larger room than I had expected. A few times the ladder rocked, threatening to dump me off, but for the most part, I had no trouble.
I reached the floor of hard-packed earth and turned around.
The room was at least ten yards long and at least as wide. On the end where I stood, the wall had been clumsily bricked over. But at the opposite end, some trouble had been taken setting up wallboard and pouring a good stretch of concrete floor.
I walked down there, still shuddering from the chill, still trying not to take the unclean odors too deeply into my lungs.
On the far end was where the videos were filmed.
My light played over a bulky black portable generator that would be adequate to run a few lights and a camera. In this same corner was a bed, now mussed. I found streaks of blood on the white satin sheets and splattered across the wall. A pair of handcuffs hung from the brass bedpost. Blood had turned one of the cuffs dark. I touched it. The blood was dry, old.
For Mindy Lane and Betty Roberts, this subterranean room would be much safer than a rented store in Cedar Rapids. There would be nobody here to note the comings and goings of your white Lincoln.
And then I heard it, or thought I did, that faint mewling that had stopped me a few minutes ago when I was walking down to the barn.
What was it? And where was it coming from?
I took a last look around at the room, trying to imagine what it was like for little girls of eight or nine to be dragged down here and forced to perform sex acts. It would scar them, spiritually if not physically.
I went up the ladder, glad to be climbing out of this place.
Up top, I closed everything up, carefully replacing the boards, so that no stray cat or dog would hurt herself by falling down the rabbit hole to the very perverted Wonderland lying below.
And just as I was finishing up, my flashlight lying atop a stall ledge and giving me sufficient light, I heard it again.
Even above the chill rain and the cold soughing wind — that faint cry that I could only liken to the sound of a young animal crying for help. The fog made the sound even fainter.
I took my flashlight and went back outside to see if I could locate the source of the sound.
I got drenched for my trouble, rain even filling my shoes.
Where was it? What was it?
This time, when the tattered solemn plea came again, I turned back and realized that the cry was coming from the barn. Not the main barn I’d just been in but the much smaller and older barn to the east.
I walked down there, stumbling once through the fog on the foundation of some long-gone silo. They were ideal for tripping dumb human beings who didn’t take extra care in the fog.
The closer I got, the clearer the sound was, and by now I could recognize it for what it was: a woman screaming and screaming and screaming.
I wanted to hurry but the fog made that unwise. I carefully picked my way down the sloping hill, my head starting to go numb from the steady drilling force of the rain, my sinuses getting themselves ready for a good long siege.
The barn door hung skewed badly left, thanks to the fact that its only support was a lone rusty hinge. I eased it creaking open and shone my light inside.
No stalls in this one, no rooms for storing feed, no small round milkhouses or high shadowy lofts, just a square storage box, maybe four feet deep and three feet wide, built along the back wall of the aged barn — that and the rolling ancient dust and the smell of axle grease and motor oil. A 1952 Ford fastback, the kind of car small-town high-school boys drove well into the seventies, was up on blocks. A long time ago somebody had put a lot of time and care into it. But now, in the harsh eye of my flashlight, it looked abandoned and corroded, rust taking its eternal toll, the giggles of the high-school girls seduced in the backseat long ago flown away, like beautiful butterflies on the last day of summer.
The scream came from the back of the barn, past the Ford, past a shadowy stack of firewood.
I drew my Ruger and went back there, still trying to figure out how the sound could be so muffled.
And then I thought, If one barn has a basement room, why not both barns? Didn’t Joanna Lodge say that a lot of buildings had such hiding places?
I went to the west comer of the barn, dropped to my knees and began clawing through some bricks and loose hay that looked suspiciously neat, as if somebody had carefully contrived it to look messy.
I found trapdoor and ringbolt in seconds. This door was as wide as the other but looked as if it were heavier. I took the ringbolt in my hand and tugged but it didn’t budge. By now the woman below had heard me, and her screaming was constant. She was also sobbing and blubbering and crying out, “Hurry! Please hurry!”
It took several tries before the door even budged; three more tries before I got it open.
There on my knees, I clutched my throat, touched my stomach and vomited into the scraps of hay next to me. The odor from below was that foul.
The woman continued to scream but I was afraid to lean back toward the opening and shine my light down there, afraid of what I would see. The reeking odors told me it was something beyond comprehension.
But I had no choice but to crawl back there and play my light below.
I can’t tell you how many of them there were — a hundred at the least, perhaps two hundred at the most — enough to entirely cover the floor of the small basement, some the size of small fat puppies, others barely past the infant stage when rats are blind and deaf. And over all was the mad chittering of their hunger and zeal as they swarmed over what was left of Mindy, who lay on her back on the ground. Half her face had been eaten away so that an eyeball hung on a bloody cheek, and her gnawed and bloody arms shone white with bone. Her stomach was a bloody hole excavated by dozens of hungry rats. She was still screaming, but she wouldn’t be screaming much longer. She was very near death.