Spider - Michael Morley [92]
‘Is it too much to hope that this was all captured on camera?’ asked Marsh.
Fernandez smiled. ‘I think you’re a mind-reader, boss. The parking lot wasn’t one of the regular approved ones; it was on an old building lot a couple of blocks behind Jetport Road. No cameras.’
‘That’s interesting,’ said Jack. ‘To pick a parking lot that doesn’t have surveillance cameras you first have to visit the ones that do, and eliminate them. Let’s get someone in Myrtle to call all the car rental places near the airport and have them save their surveillance footage from the last three weeks; there’s an outside chance they may have caught him on tape.’
‘Sounds great viewing for some wet-behind-the-ears detective in Horry County,’ said Marsh.
Jack poured himself water, then added, ‘Guess Myrtle have impounded the car?’
‘Forensics have it in their playpen already,’ said Fernandez. ‘If there are any hairs, fibres or trace evidence of any kind, they’ll find it.’
‘There’s just one drawback,’ said Howie.
Jack finished his sentence for him, ‘We don’t have a friggin’ suspect to match it to.’
60
Marine Park, Brooklyn, New York
They live in a small white cottage with a thatched roof beside a river with a waterwheel and their young children chase each other in a garden that has an old stone path meandering across a lawn full of daisies. Lu Zagalsky is hallucinating, and she’s glad she is. She and Ramzan are married and have two beautiful young children, a boy and a girl who look exactly like them. They want for nothing and they live a perfect life in a perfect home in a perfect country where summer never ends, and no one ever strips you naked and leaves you to die like a dog. She’s been dreaming a lot since being held in the basement, and few of her dreams have been as pleasant as this. Mainly they’ve been about pain, humiliation and death. Some have been so terrifying that she’s now afraid of falling asleep.
For the past hour though, she’s been fantasizing about Ramzan. In her life of a few days ago he was just a tall, good-looking waiter who’d caught her eye and turned her head. Today, she imagines him as her lover, her husband and the father of her children. The last thought hurts most, for she realizes now that she will never be a mother, her womb will never carry her children and she will never see smiles on the faces of her babies.
Lu opens her eyes and stares vacantly at the black plastic ceiling, with the shiny rodent eye of the camera peering back down at her. At times she is sure he is still in the house with her, watching her from somewhere on the other side of the door, moving the cameras to get a better look and no doubt jerking himself off as she inches her way towards death. She’s met some sickos in her time, sadists and masochists, scopophiliacs and scatophiliacs, but this guy is a wacko way beyond her experiences.
How can you get your rocks off watching someone starve to death? What kind of warped mind finds that a turn-on?
It’s been eighty-seven hours since Lu last had any sustenance, and even then it had only been a vanilla milkshake. The effects of starvation and dehydration are becoming more acute by the hour. As well as the onset of delirium and hallucinations, her body temperature is now sky high. Despite the lack of food she is vomiting a lot, dry-heaving doctors call it, because her stomach is completely empty and its lining is as dry as parchment paper. Each bout of retching brings spasms of crippling cramps and shooting pains through her abdomen and chest. She’s almost completely stopped urinating, but when she does, it’s like a burning trickle of acid that destroys the last shreds of her dignity.
Maybe someone will find you, Lu. Maybe they’ve caught him and right now they’re on their way here and they’re going to break down the front door. Any second now you’ll hear them coming down those basement steps.
And then what?
Boom! That’s what.
Didn’t he say the whole place was wired and that it would explode into a fireball and burn