Эд Горман - Blood Moon

“Pick it up.”

“Why should I?”

I raised the Ruger and aimed it right at his forehead. “Pick it up.”

He picked it up. Looked at it. His mouth twitched unpleasantly.

He tossed the photo back on the bureau. “That doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“I’ve got two witnesses who saw one of your white Lincolns pull up to an old closed-up shop in Cedar Rapids. And I’ll be glad to take you down there and show you the video equipment, and the blood from where the girls were beaten doing some bondage tricks.”

He shook his head. “It’s them.”

“Them who?”

“Them,” he said, sounding miserable. “I told them they were going to get in trouble. And now they have.”

“I still don’t know who ‘them’ is.”

“My wife and Mindy, who else?”

“What are you talking about? Why would Mindy and your wife get together?”

He smirked. “I spent a few nights with Mindy myself — before I learned that she’d once been a man. But it wasn’t me Mindy wanted, anyway. It was my wife. And it was their idea for the porno movies. All I did was sell them while I went around the midwest with my religious program.”

“I suppose that makes you clean?”

“No, it doesn’t. But at least I didn’t exploit those little girls myself.”

I startled both of us by hitting him hard across the mouth with my Ruger.

He sank to his knees, blood bubbling through his fingers.

He was crying, and somehow the idea of him crying sickened me, and so, again startling myself, I kicked him hard in the ribs.

He fell over on his side and got into a fetal position.

“Why does everybody go out to the old Brindle farm?” I said, standing over him.

He made the mistake of not answering.

My foot sliced into two more of his ribs.

He started blubbering, blood pouring through his fingers again. He was crying again, too. “That’s where they set up the new studio.”

“So McNally and Lodge were blackmailing Mindy and your wife?”

He shook his head. “Don’t know anything about blackmail.” He groaned, holding his ribs.

I remembered the two black men saying that they hadn’t seen the white Lincoln in a long time. “A trapdoor in the barn floor.” He looked up at me and said, “Don’t hurt me anymore, all right? I really can’t take pain. I really can’t.”

But I didn’t believe him. I raised my foot and kicked him again, this time in the chest.

But I guess he was right after all, the way he started sobbing. He really couldn’t take pain. He really couldn’t.

I left him there and walked back through the house and out the side door to my car.

I drove down past the church, past Kenny Deihl’s pagan guitar licks, and out into the country.

It was time for me to visit the old Brindle farm.

Fog wrapped round and round the old brindle farmhouse, a snake squeezing its victim to death, and glowed silver and opaque in my headlights as I glided down the gravel driveway. Distant and unseen, animals on the neighboring farm bayed and cried, like children calling out for help in the blind and smoky night.

I cut the lights when I pulled even with the farmhouse, and coasted several more feet before shutting off the engine, my tires making the gravel crunch and pop loudly in the oppressive and spooky silence.

Fog had swallowed up everything; I couldn’t even see the ornament on the hood of my car.

I did a check of my tools — Ruger, flashlight, knife. The rest would stay behind.

I got out of the car, closing the door softly, almost afraid of another sharp noise in the gloom, as if I might awaken some lurking monster.

In the fog, the shape of the near barn was virtually impossible to see, only the gambrel roof having any real form to it.

I stopped, listened.

I’d heard something, or thought I had.

I was sweating again, and trembling. I kept thinking of how vicious I’d been with Roberts. Unlike me, usually; and not a side of myself I wanted to see.

I listened intently. Nothing.

Shoes scuffing gravel, I walked down to the east door of the barn and let myself in.

Barns retain their odors for decades, all the milk and waste and hay and mud and rotting wood like wraiths on the deserted air.

I shone my light around. There was a bullpen and two wide stalls on the west end; and several narrow cow stalls on the east end. On the walls hung old bridles, the leather coarse and cracked; and rusted pitchforks and shovels and rakes; and half a rusty Schwinn bike that had probably been fine and shiny and new about the time John Kennedy was becoming president, the front wheel missing.

I found a wobbly ladder angled against the upper floor and climbed it, splashing my light around on the hayloft above. Except for a rotting bundle of hay, the loft was empty, stray pieces of the stuff shining like fool’s gold in the gleam of my flash.

Downstairs again, I found a small room that had probably been used for storing feed, and a milkhouse just outside the back door.

Rain fell through the holes in the roof and made hollow pocking sounds as they struck the floor far below.

It took me twenty minutes to find the trapdoor, concealed as it was beneath several boards in one of the narrower stalls.

I thought of what Joanna Lodge had told me about how people in this part of Iowa had dug subbasements and root cellars to hide runaway slaves.

I got down on my knees, set the boards aside, wrapped my hand around the ringbolt and gave it a yank. It was three feet by three feet, plenty wide enough for carrying things down. I remembered what Peary had said about the killer suddenly disposing of the bodies differently — and about what the FBI had told me about the Brooklyn man who’d started burying his victims.

Cold and fetid air, the air of the grave, rose from the room below, and I was rocked back on my haunches. I sat still a long moment in the dark and damp barn, letting the gaseous odors subside.

I angled the beam of my flashlight down into the room below. A ladder that looked much sturdier than the one leading to the hay loft stretched down into shadow.

I started climbing down.

The air grew colder, the smell more fetid, as I descended the ladder. Just from the air currents, I could tell that this was a much larger room than I had expected. A few times the ladder rocked, threatening to dump me off, but for the most part, I had no trouble.

I reached the floor of hard-packed earth and turned around.

The room was at least ten yards long and at least as wide. On the end where I stood, the wall had been clumsily bricked over. But at the opposite end, some trouble had been taken setting up wallboard and pouring a good stretch of concrete floor.

I walked down there, still shuddering from the chill, still trying not to take the unclean odors too deeply into my lungs.

On the far end was where the videos were filmed.

My light played over a bulky black portable generator that would be adequate to run a few lights and a camera. In this same corner was a bed, now mussed. I found streaks of blood on the white satin sheets and splattered across the wall. A pair of handcuffs hung from the brass bedpost. Blood had turned one of the cuffs dark. I touched it. The blood was dry, old.

For Mindy Lane and Betty Roberts, this subterranean room would be much safer than a rented store in Cedar Rapids. There would be nobody here to note the comings and goings of your white Lincoln.

And then I heard it, or thought I did, that faint mewling that had stopped me a few minutes ago when I was walking down to the barn.

What was it? And where was it coming from?

I took a last look around at the room, trying to imagine what it was like for little girls of eight or nine to be dragged down here and forced to perform sex acts. It would scar them, spiritually if not physically.