The wind worked on you with a honed blade, coming over those fields with nothing to disrupt it. Mark closed his eyes and felt the wind and thought of Julianne Grossman’s recap of his hypnosis session.
You said that it was probably a house, you weren’t sure about that, but you knew that it was someplace where you couldn’t feel the wind, though it was still cold even without the wind. Your memory of getting inside involved walking a plank.
He opened his eyes, turned back to the trailer, and studied that ramp, the way the connecting bolts were sheared, leaving it loose at the top. He walked down the drive and up the ramp slowly, and this walk he made with his eyes closed, paying attention to every other sense. The thin metal boomed with each step and flexed beneath his weight because it was no longer anchored to anything, the top end floating in the air. With his eyes closed, it felt very much like walking a plank.
There were hinges for a storm door, but there wasn’t a storm door. The knob on the main door didn’t turn. Locked.
He removed a credit card from his wallet and slipped it between the door frame and the door. It slid down past the dead bolt without making contact, which was good. Dead bolts were more time-consuming, though hardly impossible. Shimming a lock was a skill you picked up fast when you were regularly evicted from apartments. Mark’s mother had been a hell of a lock pick.
He felt pressure on the card and then twisted the knob hard to the left and flicked the card down. The door swung open, releasing a wave of dank air. On the other side was a strip of peeling linoleum and stained carpet beyond that. A skim of ice had formed on one portion of the carpet.
Cold even without the wind.
As Mark stepped inside, he heard a plinking noise and saw that water was dripping through the molded tiles of the drop ceiling, probably right below the place where the roof bowed severely. He stood on the linoleum square and looked around, wishing for a flashlight. Not that there was much to see. The trailer was vacant and had been for years, save for the occasional rodent. There were mouse droppings on the kitchen floor to the right, beside a chair that been smashed and left in shards.
He slipped his cell phone out and used its flashlight function and swung back to the left, where the trailer’s only source of sound was provided by the steady plinking of the dripping water on the skim of ice over the carpet, and then he stopped scanning the place and stared at the far wall of the living room. It was covered in the faux-wood paneling that had once been popular and now made most people shudder, the kind that was supposed to give a room a log-cabin feel. There was clearly another leak behind the wall, because the paneling was peeling away from the studs, warped and bubbling.
He stepped over the ice and walked up to the wall. Ran his fingertips along the warped panels. Moisture had caused some to peel free and others to sag, although a few remained in place. The final effect was something you wouldn’t want in your home but that Salvador Dalí might have appreciated — it looked like the wall was melting.
“Well done, Julianne,” Mark whispered.
He’d been here before, and she’d gotten him to tell her about it. During hypnosis he’d ranted to her about a melting wall. It made no sense unless you’d seen these warped panels through a semiconscious haze, which was exactly what he’d done. He dropped to one knee and looked at the filthy carpet, tracked back through it until he found what he was looking for: four faint impressions, the kind left behind by the legs of a chair. Yes, this was where he’d been. The chair would have faced the wall. It was probably the one in splinters in the kitchen. Evan Borders had taken some frustration out on it. There were red stains on the carpet. Mark’s blood, probably. He lifted the cell phone higher and passed the faint glow over the filthy carpet. He turned halfway to the kitchen, froze, and then — slowly, as if rapid motion would scare off what he’d seen — brought the beam back.
There was a piece of plastic in the shadows on the floor. He slid forward and then lowered himself until he was resting on his hands and knees and could see the plastic squarely centered in the light.
It was about the size of a poker chip and bore the logo of the Saba National Marine Park. A diving permit.
Mark reached for it and managed to stop himself when his fingers were about an inch away. He closed his eyes again and breathed a few times and then he rose without allowing himself a look back and went outside in the hard white glare of the day and called the sheriff’s office and asked for Dan Blankenship.
47
It took the sheriff just over fifteen minutes to arrive and when he did, he was alone. He was in uniform with the badge gleaming high on his chest and even had the brown trooper hat. Very Wild West.
“Let me guess,” he said. “The door was standing open when you found it.”
“You’re good at this,” Mark said.
Blankenship spit into the snow, trying to hold his trademark sour expression with Mark, but he was struggling. Something about the place excited him, and that was interesting, because the only importance Mark could attach to it was that this was where he’d been beaten, drugged, and interrogated — all crimes that Blankenship claimed he didn’t believe had occurred.
“You’ve got unique law enforcement in this county,” Mark said.
“How’s that?” Blankenship answered.
“Fieldwork tends to be handled by deputies. But I get the elected official himself, and I get him solo.”
“You didn’t call 911, Novak, you called me direct. I always answer direct phone calls. Part of my duty to the taxpayers.”
“That must be it,” Mark said. “In Florida, we don’t pay state income tax. I’ve always suspected policing was a lot more hands-on in places where you did.”
Blankenship almost smiled at that. He walked through the snow and up to the ramp and put one gloved hand on the railing.
“You said you had evidence, not just a story. Is that inside?”
“Yes, sir. You’ll find a plastic dive permit on the ground in there that was previously in my pocket.”
“The kind of thing you could have just dropped on the ground before you called me, in other words.”
“Exactly that kind of thing. Only I didn’t. And the dive permit doesn’t belong to me. It belonged to my wife.”
Blankenship turned away from the trailer and his expression softened.
“You carried it with you?”
“Every day, Sheriff. Every single day.”
They looked at each other in silence and then Blankenship said, “Anything else?”
“Bloodstains on the carpet. They’ll belong to me. Maybe not all of them, it looks like the sort of place that has seen some blood before, but I can point you to some of them.”
“Stand where you are for a bit, all right?”
“Sure.”
Blankenship went up the ramp, walking carefully, and then withdrew a small tactical flashlight and used it to illuminate the interior of the trailer. He didn’t cross the threshold, but he didn’t need to in order to see the living room.
“I didn’t touch the dive permit,” Mark said. “Sure wanted to, but I left it.”
“You think it’s worth bagging and tagging?”
“I doubt it, but that’s why I didn’t touch it. Two of them wore gloves, but maybe they took them off at some point. Test it, but I’d like it back when you’re done. Please.”
The sheriff turned the light off and walked back down the ramp to join him.
“So this is where they brought you, eh? Three masked men. An abandoned trailer. And you just happened to come across it?”