Chris Mooney - The Killing House

The gate rose a moment later and Fletcher entered an underground garage. Four high-end luxury vehicles were parked to the far left. Fletcher drove straight on and parked in a space near a set of concrete steps leading up to an elevator. Security cameras, each positioned in a corner, were fixed on the entire area. He knew they had been turned off, as Karim did not want any recorded video footage of a wanted fugitive entering his home.

Fletcher traded his leather gloves for latex. He insisted on wearing them when visiting the man’s home. Netbook in hand, he removed the evidence bag from the trunk, stepped inside the elevator and pressed the button for the fourth floor. The doors closed and the ancient piece of machinery, one of the few items Karim had not replaced or updated, waited as if deciding whether or not it wanted to move. Finally, it rose, slowly and unsteadily, the gears creaking.

The elevator doors opened to a long hall of cream-coloured walls and a hardwood floor covered by a Turkish rug. Fletcher walked across it, passing by a side table holding stacks of mail and a bouquet of orchids arranged in a vase, and stepped into an anteroom designed to resemble an old English library. The tall space held several leather armchairs and sofas, a pair of antique secretarial desks and folio stands. The bookcases, made of a deep mahogany, stretched from floor to ceiling, the shelves packed with rare first editions.

The elegant room usually smelled of old wood and aged paper. This morning, the pleasant aromas had been spoiled by Karim’s cigarette smoke. It drifted in through the cracked-open door to the man’s office, a Spartan, oval-shaped room of bare white walls and windows offering a sweeping view of Central Park. Karim, dressed in another one of his threadbare flannel shirts, sat behind a bank of flat-screen monitors displayed on a multilevel glass desk.

‘Good morning,’ he said in a dry, tired voice. ‘Would you like coffee? There’s an urn in the waiting room, along with some pastries and fruit.’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Do you want to rest for a bit or do you want to get right to it?’

‘Right to it.’ Fletcher placed the evidence bag on the desk and said, ‘The drinking glass from the closet.’

‘I’ll have my lab process it for fingerprints this morning, see if we can get a name to match this woman’s face. Speaking of which, that wildcat cartridge you found? No fingerprints. Any other presents for me?’

‘I also downloaded data from Corrigan’s phone, but I haven’t had time to examine it.’

Fletcher draped his coat over the back of the chair set up in front of the desk and settled into his seat.

‘Let’s start with my Baltimore contact,’ Karim said. ‘I told him I came across information from a credible source that the building you found might contain missing children, and he agreed to take a look.

‘The building was empty. No sign of the Lincoln or any other vehicles. There was, however, an underground garage. He found hoses and told me the floors and walls were damp. He also said the garage reeked of bleach. No blood — at least none that was visible. He can’t call in forensics until he gets more “concrete” information from me.’

Karim inhaled deeply from his cigarette. ‘I’ve got him wiggling on a fishhook. He thinks I’m sitting on something big, asked to speak to my source. He’s not going to wait for me. He’ll start sniffing around on his own.’

‘Who owns the building?’

‘Another limited liability company,’ Karim said. ‘This one is called Crowley Enterprises. David Crowley is listed as the LLC’s owner, and the address listed on the documents? Belongs to an undeveloped strip of land in Oregon.’

‘And the Baltimore plates I gave you?’

‘Both the Lincoln and the Lexus belong to ABC Property Management.’

‘The same LLC that owns the house in Dickeyville.’

‘Correct. So now we have two LLCs with phoney addresses: ABC Property Management and the one that owns these buildings you found, Crowley Enterprises. Two different lawyers filed the papers — one in Baltimore, the other in San Diego. Going after them is a waste of time — client confidentially and all that. I could use my own lawyers to press them, but the only thing we’d end up with is a physical description of our lady friend — and that’s if we’re lucky. Besides, I doubt she used her real name.’

‘I think she has a male partner,’ Fletcher said. ‘In addition to the king bed, I found an assortment of men’s clothing in the drawers. Someone lives with her.’

‘So we’re looking at a couple who kill together and sleep together.’ Karim stifled a yawn. ‘How romantic.’

‘And we know they employ at least two people — Jenner and his companion, Marcus. Have you spoken with Dr Sin?’

Karim nodded. ‘She told me about the missing kidney. What do you think that’s — ’ He cut himself off, looked at Fletcher sharply. ‘I didn’t divulge the doctor’s name to you, and I gave her explicit instructions not to — ’

‘She didn’t tell me,’ Fletcher said.

‘Did Boyd tell you?’

‘No.’

‘Then how do you know her name?’

‘I recognized her perfume.’

‘Her perfume,’ Karim repeated.

‘You asked for my assistance with her case. The home invasion that killed her — ’

‘Right, right. I completely forgot you handled that matter.’

‘The night I went through her home I found two bottles of Ce Que Femme Veut in the bathroom vanity,’ Fletcher said. ‘It’s quite rare. Last manufactured in 1965.’

‘When was that?’

‘The night I entered her home? Thursday, 19 October 1994.’

‘Your memory is goddamn remarkable.’

Fletcher said nothing.

‘There’s a name for your kind of memory, did you know that?’ Karim said. ‘It’s called “superior autobiographical memory”. A professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine, coined the term. It’s very rare, this type of memory. This professor has found only a handful of people who possess this unique intellectual gift. He gave each person he tested a random date and they could go back in time and recall everything they experienced on that day — what meals they ate, the people they spoke to and the content of their conversations. What they read and the television programmes they watched. These people can remember almost every single detail of their lives going back years, the way an ordinary person remembers what happened yesterday, if he or she can remember it at all.’

Fletcher did not share Karim’s wide-eyed enthusiasm. He had been born with this type of instant recall. For as long as he could remember, he could pick a date at random, travel back in time and relive any memory as though he were experiencing it in real-time. He remembered everything and forgot nothing.

‘Were you able to uncover any information on Nathan Santiago?’

‘Yes, I have the information right here.’ Karim started to root through various loose sheets and pads of paper. ‘I didn’t run Santiago’s prints yet, thank God. That would have set off a firestorm of questions. Here they are.’

Karim handed him sheets of paper holding printed aged-enhanced photographs of Nathan Santiago. In the photos, the young man had black hair worn in a variety of styles, but the face was identical.

‘That’s him,’ Fletcher said, placing the sheets on the corner of the desk. ‘What happened?’

‘Nathan Santiago left his three-decker tenement home in downtown Lynn, Massachusetts, to visit a friend who lived four blocks away. The boy vanished into thin air, never to be seen or heard of again — until now.’

‘Boy?’

‘Teenager,’ Karim said. ‘He was seventeen when he disappeared, which would make him twenty-five today.’