“Maybe you’re right. You should put yourself in the line of fire. It’d be worth the paperwork just to get rid of you.”
I watch through the windshield as the armed-offenders unit slowly moves forward, six people dressed in armor as dark as the night, and they fade out of view about ten meters ahead of me. Schroder goes around to the trunk of the car and puts on a bulletproof vest. I get out of the car and he hands one to me. I put my arms through the holes and strap it on tight. Out of the car I can feel the tension in the air, and I’m certainly contributing to what’s feeling like a trigger-happy mood. If there are any scarecrows out in the fields they’re in danger of being shot. Emma Green is in this building somewhere, she has to be, and if not then she’s in Sunnyview.
I follow the team with Schroder who has his hands tightly on a pistol, but I fall back with each step because of my knee. By the time they reach the driveway, I’m already twenty meters behind and frustrated. The road is hard-packed dirt and the heat of it is coming up through my shoes. The unit ahead splits up, two go left, two go right, and the other two go straight ahead. Schroder waits for me, then we follow the two straight forward at my pace, and come to a stop twenty-five meters back from the door. The building looms up out of the ground, the front of it lit up by the moon, it looks pale white and run-down, the ivy climbing the front of it so black that it looks like strings of holes in the walls. It looks like the sort of place we should have come armed with crucifixes and holy water. There are no cars out front. One of the teams makes it around the back and I can hear a voice coming through Schroder’s earpiece but can’t make it out. He puts his finger against it and listens carefully, cocking his head slightly to the side.
“No cars around the back,” he tells me.
“Doesn’t mean they’re not here,” I say. “Might just mean that Adrian is out and not back yet.”
“Well, if he’s on his way back we’ll get him. We’ve got two units hidden a few blocks back. No way anybody is getting past without getting pulled over.”
The team in the middle reaches the door. One of them stands off to the side, half crouching while pointing his gun ahead as the other person swings a metal battering ram that opens the door quicker than a key and echoes across the fields. Flashlights are switched on and the team disappears. There are loud footsteps as they make their way quickly through the building. I want to join them but Schroder puts his hand on my shoulder.
“Give them time,” he says.
We give them five minutes. The moon reflects off some of the windows but the light seems to be absorbed by others. There are constant updates coming through Schroder’s earpiece. None of the shapes out in the field move. Flashlights appear in all the windows. We can hear the officers moving around inside. There’s the occasional stuck door being shouldered open, the odd floorboard creaking. Then the scene is clear and we move into the building.
The building seems much bigger than it ought to be up close, and even bigger inside. We step in through the main door. The framework has been splintered from where the team knocked it in. The air is dry and has the texture of dust. We start on the ground floor and make our way upstairs. We take a good look around, there are padded cells that are empty and no basements with thick iron doors and scream rooms. There is leftover furniture abandoned, a few broken windows, but no vandalism, just like Grover Hills. The living arrangements are crowded, small rooms that would take two people and I can’t imagine there was much hope for anybody living out here, and I think about my wife, about her care home, about the room she has all to herself even though she’s not aware of it, and I can’t help but think the people sent here could have done better if they had rooms and care like that. How hard was it for the nurses and doctors to care about people who’d done really bad things? Surely many came here with good hopes but ended up being burned too many times until they just treated everybody like shit.
No scream room. No basements with thick iron doors. No Emma Green, no Cooper Riley, no Adrian Loaner, and no indication they were ever here.
“Shit,” I say, voicing my anger. “We chose the wrong one. She must be at Sunnyview,” I say, but nobody is listening. The armed team is going back through the rooms, and one man is covering the room I’m in with Schroder, while Schroder is on his cell phone, so I’m talking to myself.
Schroder is slowly shaking his head and I have a real good idea of what he’s about to tell me and a real bad feeling about it. He slips his cell phone back into his pocket.
“Don’t tell me,” I tell him.
“It was a good idea, Tate, and nobody here rejected it, but that was the team at Sunnyview and it’s empty.”
“No way,” I say, punching the padded wall of one of the cells. “It can’t be. They have to be there or here. Have to be.”
“There are signs somebody was there,” Schroder says. “Apparently there’s a new chain and lock hanging from the door that’s just been smashed, there’s dirt on the front steps, and there are some empty water bottles in one of the padded rooms. Forensics are going to take a look around; it’s possible she was being kept there, and just as possible some homeless guy was using it for shelter.”
“Emma’s still somewhere.”
“I know. She’s just not here.”
“Then where?” I ask, hitting the padded wall again, this time not as hard.
“I don’t know. But it has to be somewhere big enough for four people.”
“Why four?”
“I got another call while I was on the phone to the other team. Adrian’s collected another person.”
I almost can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Jesus,” I say, “are you joking? Who?”
“He’s taken Cooper Riley’s mother.”
chapter forty-six
The bandaging is tight but it makes the wound feel much better and Adrian is thankful for her help. He did to Mrs. Riley what he did to her son, and she rode in the trunk of the car in the same style too. Cooper would want him to have treated her worse than that, but of course he’ll never admit to it. He didn’t need to use the Taser though. He only needed to point the gun at her and hold the rag over her face, and it was enough. Cooper’s mum had to be a hundred years old and was never going to put up much of a struggle, and she didn’t, not when he told her he was taking her to see her son.
He should have thought of her immediately, especially after his conversation with Cooper that morning. But instead he sat parked on the side of the road for twenty minutes before her name tumbled into his head. This time, as he had predicted, there were no cars outside her house when he got there. He parked in the driveway and he planned what he would say, but at the door those same words tangled in his mouth and he said nothing that made any sense. So instead he cried and he pointed the gun at her and told her he would kill her if she didn’t help. When they were done, he found some clothes in the back of a wardrobe before putting her into the trunk of the car alongside the other girl.
By now the police will have unearthed some of the bodies at the Grove. He doesn’t know how many are there. Grover Hills ran for over fifty years before he got there, and he imagines records of patients back then would have become as lost or as buried as some of the patients. Could be there were other orderlies, other “Twins” who tormented other patients and put them in the dirt. There might be a hundred graves out there. He never saw any ghosts but he’s never believed in them, and he suspects the two things are related, that you can only see what you believe. He must remember to ask Cooper about that. If there are ghosts, is it possible the ghosts of the Twins are haunting the ghosts of those they killed out there, their souls tormenting other souls? Ever since that first visit down to the Scream Room, the Twins have been haunting him; in fact, it’s only been since he killed them that they’ve finally left him in peace. They took him down to that basement eighty-seven times over the twenty years he was there. He doesn’t know how many times a year that is. Sometimes it was once a month. Other times twice a year. One year they only took him down there on his birthday. Eighty-seven times. He doesn’t like that it ended on an odd number. It was the irregularity of it all that frightened him the most. You just never knew. Any minute they could come and take you.