I pick up the phone. It’s sticky. I miss my cell phone. I drop some coins into the slot. I have to press the receiver tight against my ear to block out the loud music being pumped from every open doorway of every open bar and every passing car. I dial the number and nobody answers immediately, which I figure to be a good sign, then an even better sign comes along: an answering machine picks up.
“You’ve reached Ellis and Murray and we’re out and you know the deal, so go ahead and leave a message if you want.”
I don’t bother leaving a message.
The adrenaline is starting to pump. It’s closing in on two-thirty and the drag racers have either moved on or all broken down on another stretch of the four avenues because I don’t get caught up in traffic again. I race through the streets doing about 20 kph over the limit, passing a couple of speed cameras, which flash at me, but I’m in a detective’s car so the tickets will be waived. The Hunters live in a part of the city where there aren’t any junked-up cars resting on front lawns. In fact it’s a nice neighborhood where most houses look no more than ten years old and you can drive for five straight minutes without passing any crime scene tape. I find the address and there aren’t any cars parked out front. I pull over a block away and grab a flashlight and make my way back. My heart is racing. Adrian has my gun and a Taser and who the hell knows what else. First thing I check is the garage window. There’s one car in there that doesn’t belong to Emma Green, and a space for another car. There aren’t any lights on inside the house. I shine my flashlight on the back door and crouch in front of the handle. I use a lock-pick gun. It only takes a few pulls of the trigger and some good placement and thirty seconds to make my way inside. Not as quick as kicking down the door, but the door here looks far more sturdy than Jesse Cartman’s house, and back there I wasn’t trying to be quiet. I step into the hallway. I can hear the beep beep of an answering machine. It sounds frantic. It sounds like it’s desperate to unload its secrets. I use the flashlight to light my way, stepping carefully. In the living room there are photos of Murray and Ellis Hunter and there’s no doubt they’re the two men I saw in the ground. There’s a large patch of blood in the center of the living room with hair and what could be bone fragments stuck in it. There is more blood leading from the front door and drag marks in the carpet.
I go from room to room. Nothing. And nothing to suggest Cooper Riley or Emma Green were ever here.
“Damn it,” I say, kicking at one of the walls and putting my shoe through the plasterboard. White dust settles onto the carpet from the hole. It looks like cocaine, and reminds me of a case I worked with Schroder five years ago, where we busted into a house and a guy dropped his drugs onto the carpet by accident, then dropped onto his knees and began snorting them, trying to hide the evidence, and he snorted so much in that few seconds that it almost killed him.
Where the hell can Emma and Cooper be? There aren’t any more abandoned mental institutions. Best I can think of is Adrian is holed up in the house of another victim. I close the back door in case Adrian is planning on coming back. Hope that he’s going to return is all I have. After everything I’m still back at square one with no idea in the world where Emma Green is being held.
I think about what Buttons said, about the twin boys being evil. There was no doubt in his mind the Twins carried on hurting people, probably even killing some. I start looking around the house not exactly sure what I’m looking for, but I go through everything. Maybe there’ll be a scrapbook or something. I switch on the computer. I read through emails. I check the attic access in the ceiling to see if anything is hidden up there, I check beneath the carpet in the bedrooms in the corners, and an hour into the search I check the closets for loose floorboards and my search pays off. Beneath the house is a cardboard box. I open it up. I lay the contents on the floor side by side. Nine wallets in total, each of them with credit cards and driver’s licenses and photos of children or wives, none of them with any cash. Three of the names I recognize from my last few years on the job-names of people who dropped off the face of the earth. Another one I think I recognize but can’t be sure.
The computer is still switched on. I spend twenty minutes running the rest of the names through the news database online, along with the ones I remember. Nine names and each of them comes back with a story. Nine men all gone missing dating back to the time Buttons said the Twins left Grover Hills. Nine men who were never found. A different range of men, family men, single men, a lawyer, a plumber, a couple of unemployed men, the youngest nineteen years old, the oldest forty-five. Each of them sharing in common a very bad fate according to the cardboard box hidden beneath the floorboards in the closet.
Buttons said the Twins got their first taste of what they could do when that man approached them wanting revenge. Since then they spent years at Grover Hills using the Scream Room as an outlet. Then one day they just up and left. They built a Scream Room of their own. Had to have. But where? Certainly not here. Not in this part of the city. None of the rooms here would stop a scream from traveling outside, and in a neighborhood like this somebody would have called the police.
So where? Where in the hell is their torture chamber? And if it’s in a house, why not live there? Why bring the souvenirs back here?
Because this is their home. Maybe this is closer to where they work. And they needed the souvenirs here for when they’re not visiting their other place.
I go back through everything. I go through their address book. I stop on a name I recognize. Edward Hunter. It was his father who was stabbed in jail. Edward was in jail too, but not till a few days after that. Edward was sentenced for killing two men. His father Jack was sentenced twenty years ago for killing eleven prostitutes. Are they related to Ellis and Murray? Is there a family trait that makes these men want to hurt people?
I go through the rest of the address book. I head out to the car in the garage and check for a GPS unit in case there’s a location plotted on it, but there’s only a map and the map doesn’t have any circles or crosses scrawled across it. I go through files and boxes of bills. I find tax statements but only for this address. If they own property somewhere else there’s no record of it here. If they’re paying for power for another house, the bills are getting sent to that address.
There’s a Scream Room somewhere, it could be a cabin in the woods, it could be a house with a soundproof basement, but nothing in this house tells me where.
It has to be somewhere. It’s who they are. A Scream Room is what makes them tick.
And I’m wondering if Edward Hunter might have an idea where that is.
I’m suddenly hit by a wall of exhaustion. It’s almost six-thirty and it’s daylight by the time I leave the Hunter house. It’s a slow drive home, not because of traffic-the roads are empty-but because fatigue is trying to convince me that nothing would feel better right now than driving into a lamppost and falling asleep.
There are patrol cars and crime scene tape outside of my house and I completely forgot that I wasn’t supposed to return. I switch cars, getting back into the rental, then drive to the nearest motel I can find, a place that looks okay in the dim early-morning light, and I figure since only two of the neon letters in the word vacancy are busted it can’t be that bad a place. The clerk behind the desk is asleep when I step through the doors but he snaps to attention pretty quick. He swipes my credit card and five minutes later I’m in a room that smells of furniture polish. I phone home and check my messages, of which there are four. One from my parents, the other three from Donovan Green. He tells me he’s been trying to get hold of me all night but the cell phone he gave me is switched off. I figure Schroder is asleep, so rather than waking him on his cell phone, I call the police station and leave a message for him. I give him the Hunter address and a brief rundown of what he’ll find. I also tell him to send somebody to check on Jesse Cartman. I don’t call Donovan Green.