The address in Highland Park was an apartment rented to Muhammad Kontig, who, according to the databases that Venice could access most quickly, was something of a nobody. Certainly, he was not on any of the publicly accessible terror watch lists, and he didn’t have a known criminal record.
Not that that meant anything. It just reinforced her first thought that the guy was a rookie. He owned a car, though, and the car had a license plate number that traced to a two-year-old Chevy Impala. Beyond that, she had nothing.
It was time to bring Jonathan into the loop.
The room in the farthest corner of the basement hospital suite was a slaughterhouse. All but the deepest pools of blood on the floor had coagulated. Great fans of blood reached high on the walls, with even a few spatters on the ceiling.
“Jesus Christ,” Boxers said. He sounded like he had a bad cold. Like Jonathan, he had developed a knack for using his soft palate to shut off his smeller. It was a skill that had saved Jonathan from a lot of puking.
At first glance, the bodies were unrecognizable, just lumps amid the gore. Upon closer examination, though, Jonathan noticed that the body that sat tied into the hard-backed chair — he guessed it was stolen from a dining room and brought down — was that of a naked female, and that the body trussed to the cylindrical steel ceiling support was that of a middle-aged man. Three other men lay dead of bullet wounds to the head.
It was the sight of the children that turned his stomach. A preteen boy and a younger preteen girl sagged against the wall opposite the man, each of them bound and mutilated. This wasn’t so much the scene of torture as it was the scene of ritual murder.
Jonathan had seen too many horrible sights to even catalog them, let alone rate them in order of awfulness, but this one was beyond the pale.
“Whoever did this wanted information that came too slowly,” Boxers said. “Looks to me like they tortured the kids in front of the parents.”
“I bet one parent,” Jonathan said. “I think the lady is Sarah Mitchell. This is a covert hospital. She came here to be treated, but the bad guys caught up to her.”
“And who, exactly, are the bad guys?” Boxers asked.
“I don’t know,” Jonathan said. “But I have every intention of finding out.”
“So long as I get to pull the trigger,” Boxers said. Big Guy had a thing for kids in jeopardy. Jonathan had never asked the questions to pursue it further, but there had to be something in Boxers’ past that made him particularly homicidal when it came to protecting kids. All things considered, it was hard to think of that as anything but a strength.
“Are you okay?” Jonathan asked.
Big Guy puffed out a little. “I’m fine,” he said. Lest anyone doubt, Big Guy was far too tough to be affected by something so simple as a couple of gutted kids. “Like I said, I get dibs on pulling the trigger on whoever did this.”
Jonathan said nothing for long enough to draw Boxers’ gaze.
“I got this, Dig.”
Jonathan acknowledged his friend with a quick nod. “You say you’ve got it, you’ve got it.” Part of the job was to accept reality for what it was, free of the demonstrative emotion that defined humanity. For Jonathan and Boxers, the job required an ability to project false normalcy.
Jonathan keyed the mike on his radio. “Mother Hen, I think we’ve found Sarah Mitchell and Doctor Wilkerson,” he said on the air. Boxers had already pulled a camera from his pocket to take pictures of the bodies. “We’ll have images coming to you in a few seconds. Prepare yourself. They’re pretty awful.”
“They’ve definitely been tortured,” Boxers said. “Look at this. The lady’s had her skin peeled away, and the guy on the floor looks like his legs and arms are broken.”
Jonathan walked out of the room. He’d take Big Guy’s word for it. “Take care not to leave any trace,” he said. Sooner or later, these bodies were going to be found by law enforcement personnel, and the last thing they needed was to leave evidence that could be traced back to either of them.
Thanks to the work they’d done in their previous lives for Uncle Sam, no record existed of either Jonathan or Boxers. No fingerprints, no DNA, no hair samples, no pictures, no anything. Jonathan harbored no fear of being identified through forensics. He did, however, worry about someone connecting the dots of various “crime scenes”—every hostage rescue done in the private sector technically violated the law — and creating a road map of sorts for curious reporters or prosecutors. If that happened, and the various pieces of the puzzle were tracked around the world, the emerging profile would threaten everything.
Even when the chances of getting caught were infinitesimal, it paid to take precautions.
“I don’t know where we’re going,” Jolaine said. “East for now. We’re putting distance between us and last night.”
“Do you think those cops last night know who we are?” Graham sat in the front passenger seat with both legs drawn up beneath his butt.
“I think if they did, we would have been stopped by now,” Jolaine explained. “I think we got a bye.”
“At the motel,” he said. “Did they really think we were… lovers?” He snorted out a laugh, but Jolaine knew that he secretly lusted after her. In all fairness, though, fourteen-year-olds lusted after any girl with a heartbeat.
“Actually, no,” she said. “I think they suspected prostitution.” As soon as she said it, she knew she’d made a mistake.
He laughed. “Ha! They thought you were a hooker!”
Jolaine smirked and let his laughter peak before she said, “Feel better?”
“A little bit, yeah.”
“Well consider this,” she said, shooting him a glance over the console. “You were the one without any clothes on. I think they thought you were the hooker.”
“What?” The look of horror was everything she’d hoped for.
“Sure,” she said. “There are boy whores just like there are girl whores.”
Graham laughed again. “Paid to have sex. Huh. I might have found my career plan.”
She laughed in spite of herself. “I don’t think it’s the carnal carnival that you think it would be,” she said.
“I’d get paid,” he reiterated. “To have sex. How could it get better than that?”
How should she put this? “You watch cop shows,” she said. “Do you know what the police call prostitutes’ customers?”
It took him a few seconds. “Johns, right?”
She tilted her head and waited for him to get it.
“Oh,” he said. “You mean dudes?”
“I mean dudes,” she said. Beyond the windows, farmland continued to expand. Inside, the stink of mildew from the upholstery was beginning to irritate her eyes. “And not to be unkind, I’m not sure what a boy your age would have to offer to a more… experienced woman.”
“Like you, you mean.”
Okay, this conversation just crossed the line into weirdness. She started to answer, but didn’t know what to say.
Graham sensed the hesitation and went for the gold. “First of all, you obviously haven’t peeked at me in the shower.”
“Oh, good God.”
“No, I mean seriously,” he said. “We’re talking eight or nine inches.” He held out his hands marking the appropriate separation.
She’d opened the door for bullshit guy banter, and she knew from her years with Sandbox boys barely older than Graham that the banter quickly became self-perpetuating.