Thomas O`Callaghan - The Screaming Room

“Did you ever see him use drugs?”

“That’s the thing. He wouldn’t take a sipa beer, for Chrissake! I doubt if he was using. Never did with me. But the mood swings had me wondering.”

“How long the two of you been seeing each other?”

“On and off for a few months. Like I said, it wasn’t what you’d call a regular thing. Hell, we never even-” She stopped abruptly. Driscoll wasn’t surprised. He’d found that most teens weren’t comfortable sharing intimate details with adults. More so when that adult was a cop she’d just met.

“What don’t we see in the picture?”

“Whaddya mean?”

“In it, he’s wearing a hood. Did he keep his hair long or short?”

“Somewhere between the two. The photo hides it, but his hair is blond.”

“How tall is he?”

“About five-eight.”

“Any distinguishing marks?”

“You mean like moles or freckles? Things like that?”

“Exactly.”

“No. He didn’t have any. His complexion was better than mine.”

“How ’bout the rest of him?”

She became flushed. “Um…” A half smile. “This is sort of embarrassing.”

A fatherly smile told her he understood.

“He kept his clothes on,” she said. “Always! Even when-” She stopped short again.

Driscoll waited.

“It could be ninety freakin’ degrees out and he’d be in pants, socks, shoes, and a long-sleeved shirt. Buttoned. To the neck!”

What’s he hiding? Driscoll wondered.

“Nothing was ever…what you’d call regular with Angus. Every time I turned around, he and his sister were either headin’ outta town or coming back.”

“Ever tell you where they went?”

“Nope.”

“What’d she look like?”

“I guess like him.”

“You never saw her?” Driscoll found that surprising. Surprising and disappointing. He watched as anxiety collected on the girl’s face.

“He’s in a heap of trouble, isn’t he?”

“He could be.”

Silence settled. But not for long.

“With his sister! Can you believe it? He dodged having sex with me. But he goes and does his goddamn sister!”

Driscoll believed that if Angus had gone through half of what he had claimed, elective sex would be the last thing on his mind, but he wasn’t going to let Potter know what he was thinking. Instead, he’d rely on the adage about hell having no fury as a woman scorned. It’d just be a matter of time before she erupted. In the meantime, he’d light some fuses.

“You may have heard about the killing spree in New York City.”

“Jesus! Is he wanted in connection with that?”

Driscoll’s expression said “you tell me.”

“Figures. The guy was whack city.”

“Sally, you’re in a position to help us stop the killings.”

The teen narrowed her eyes. Driscoll sensed she was still reeling with jealousy and rage. He waited for that fury to ignite. His wait was short. With her eyes still tapered like a honing blade, she gave him up, feeling like she was a descendant of Judas Iscariot.

Sally Potter wasn’t much help in providing a last name for the twins. When asked, she said Angus told her it was LTB. At first, Driscoll thought the letters may have some Native American significance. That notion ceased when Sally explained LTB meant Like The Beef. Angus Like The Beef was clearly fond of games.

But she had told him where they lived.

The clapboard one-story house sat under a sprawling willow, fifty yards in from a dirt road, some six miles from the outskirts of town. Well hidden. Weathered plywood covered the windows and a 1962 Plymouth Belvedere was decomposing by its side.

The tall grass that helped conceal the residence was now matted down by a twenty-man Sullivan County SWAT team that was sitting tight and awaiting Driscoll’s orders.

The Lieutenant, armed with an arrest warrant, radioed Thomlinson, who was in place with Margaret, some thirty yards away. On Driscoll’s orders, two SWAT team officers, armed with a three-foot battering ram, stormed up rickety steps and charged the door. A barrage of armor-clad policemen hustled inside, machine guns at the ready.

In seconds, they swept from one end of the house to the other. Besides the chirping of a canary and the skittering of a calico cat, the place was deserted.

“Secure!” the team leader shouted.

Driscoll entered. In what appeared to be the living room, he spotted a padlocked door.

“Break that down,” he ordered.

An officer, using a two-foot industrial cable-cutter, made short work of the padlock. When the door swung open, Driscoll stood staring at a set of steps that led downward. Three members of the SWAT team rushed past him and hurried down the steps. “Secure!” sounded within seconds. The Lieutenant descended into a small cellar. There was an opening behind the furnace that led into a windowless room where a faint smell of copper lingered. He recognized the scent. It was the characteristic odor of dried blood. Who or what was slaughtered in here? he wondered. In the center of the room was a table. On it sat a cardboard box with “New York, New York” scrawled in felt-tipped marker across its top.

Driscoll donned a pair of latex gloves and opened the box. It contained a game board. Its surface was a map of the city of New York. A snaking trail of one-inch squares meandering in and about the five boroughs. At the site of each landmark, the square appeared to be raised. He traced his finger along the path, beginning in the northwestern corner of Brooklyn, up and onto the Brooklyn Bridge. There, he depressed the square. Something metallic sounded, followed by Sinatra’s voice singing “New York, New York.”

“Who had made such a game?” he asked Thomlinson, who was now at his side. He turned his attention back to the game box and saw a velour pouch, stuffed in its own cardboard compartment. He emptied its contents into his hand. Miniature representations of city landmarks crowded his palm. He had found more trophies. As if the scalps weren’t enough. They included an inch-high tin replica of a carousel. Driscoll recognized it as matching the one on Coney Island’s Surf Avenue, a stone’s throw from the Wonder Wheel, where the body of the second victim had been discovered. There was also a silver charm bracelet, dangling an imitation sapphire. He was sure he’d be able to trace that one back to the gift shop at the museum. He fingered a two-inch brass-plated model of an aircraft carrier; surely from the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum. There was a small magnet characterizing Central Park, and a tiny orangutan; no doubt from the Bronx Zoo. Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, the bus operator’s find, was indeed missing. But, so, too, was any item relating to the murder on the Brooklyn Bridge. That he found odd. Still, he allowed the rush of adrenaline to warm him.

“Lieutenant, whaddya make of that?” Thomlinson was gesturing to an item, sitting on the floor, in the corner of the room.

The two lawmen approached. They stood staring at a small square package covered in newsprint that had been wrapped in such a fashion so as to showcase Angus’s sketch. Smoke rings, which had been penciled in, spewed from his mouth. Driscoll and Thomlinson exchanged glances. Glances that read caution. They may have happened upon something they wish they hadn’t.

“Everybody out!” hollered the Lieutenant.

For Driscoll and the platoon of law enforcement personnel, it had been a tense fifty minutes, spent three hundred yards away from the perimeter of the house. Some quelled their anxieties by exchanging war stories while Driscoll pondered what his next move might be. The Lieutenant, knowing he was closing in, wanted to get closer.