Chapter 9 - Scent
1548 Words
A SWAT detective knocked and stood back, but nothing happened.
Gillian felt the adrenaline shoot through her veins, ready to react if anything should happen.
“This is the police, and we have a warrant to search this property,” he yelled. “Open the door or stand clear; we are coming in.”
He waved the warrant in clear sight, but stood beside the door to avoid being shot if the suspect had a gun.
Still nothing. He’s probably waiting for us to breach with an automatic weapon or maybe a bomb.
Boss nodded, and two officers rammed the door in.
She fell in line behind the others.
Dark-clad figures with guns and body armor streamed into the house like some scene out of a cheap movie, and within minutes, the all-clear rang out.
There’s nobody home. Did he escape, or was he expecting us?
Gillian followed Colt inside as the rest moved out, and the forensic guys came in.
She reset the safety and holstered her gun.
Maybe he’s out there killing his next victim and doesn’t even know we’re here.
She walked the house with Colt until the detective began giving orders to their team.
There wasn’t much to see, and nothing screamed serial killer.
Gillian went off on her own because something once again teased at her sense of smell, and she followed it. Near the kitchen, she could almost taste it, but not in the room itself—and she kept losing it.
The house was neat, the furnishings clean, sensible, and starting to wear around the edges.
The carpets were dusty but not dirty yet, getting that scuffed aesthetic.
There were no family portraits, just a few framed reproductions of the city. Odd knick-knacks littered the room here and there, even some baseball memorabilia.
An ordinary lower-middle-class home for a man who lived alone.
Something crunched underneath her foot, and she froze, looking down. Then she squatted to investigate what looked like a small glass bead.
She pulled a bag from her pocket and picked it up with her gloved hand.
Her mouth unexpectedly filled with saliva.
Blood.
The overly familiar scent mixed with the fragrance of damp and underground.
She lifted her eyes and tracked the scent trail to the closet underneath the stairs.
The door stood slightly ajar—probably left that way during the search.
Her body followed of its own accord as she allowed her vampire to rise just a little.
The well-oiled door didn’t squeak when she opened it.
The handle was worn, even though there was nothing inside the little hidey space—not even a hanger for coats.
No dust streaked the floor, and the odor of damp earth was much more pungent, but so was the metallic tang of blood.
It’s not fresh, but not old.
She stepped forward, and the floor creaked. She froze again and tested it with her foot.
It’s not the same sound as outside the door. This was hollower and deeper.
She stepped back before lowering herself onto her haunches.
It only took a few moments for her to notice the mark against the opposite wall where something banged against it regularly.
She measured the opposite distance with her gaze.
There is no way to reach there and lift the floor—there has to be some kind of mechanism.
She searched the nearest wall, near the switch.
Slight grime had accumulated around the button from constant contact.
Her fingers followed the little bits of grime to the right of the door. She kept her feet on the outside of the doorjamb, and there it was—a switch the size of a pinkie nail. It was on the other side of a thin wooden slat that hid the wiring to the overhead light.
The square of floor lifted soundlessly on a well-constructed ratchet system underneath the wood.
The aroma was overpowering.
Time to call for help.
She tucked her phone out of her pocket and texted Colt. Within seconds, both the detective and Boss arrived.
“Did I leave you unsupervised again?” Colt needled.
“I only touched the lever,” Gillian said, pretending to be obtuse, and they frowned at her—not buying it for a moment.
“How the hell did you find it?” Boss muttered.
“Too much Nancy Drew?” she said with a shrug, and his blank expression made Colt grin.
“He has no idea what you’re talking about; he’s not into detective stories,” the detective mocked. “He’s a National Geographic and True Crime type of guy.”
Boss glared at his second in command. “I read Tom Clancy and James Patterson,” he defended, already reaching for his gun.
He leaned slightly forward to get a good view into the gloomy space before putting his foot on the first step.
“I need backup,” Colt said, using her phone as a walkie-talkie. “You stay here,” she ordered Gillian.
“She has to learn, Colt,” Boss said. “She can follow behind me.”
They proceeded down the wooden staircase, and every creak of the wood sent her adrenaline into overdrive.
Whoever was down there would hear them coming from a mile away.
It was as good as an early warning system.
Gillian didn’t expect the space underneath the house to be so large.
They fanned out, their guns trained forward.
It is not just a basement but a bunker. The house must have been constructed on top of some old underground bomb shelter.
The damp had seeped into everything, and she wrinkled her nose.
That entire space was clean and uncluttered, but she barely paid attention as her gaze settled on the one thing that was out of place.
“f**k,” Boss said as the others entered behind them.
‘That’s sick,” someone muttered behind them.
Colt was rooted to the spot, her gun lowering slightly as she took in the horror before them.
It wasn't the wooden table fitted with restraints that drew her attention. Or the wall of photographs of the dead meant to resemble a clock face. Nor was it the walk-in cooler, standing half-open, that drew their attention. Neither was it the floor-to-ceiling glass and wood shelves filled with little trinkets or trophies of his kills—displayed and lighted up as if they were part of a macabre museum exhibit, either.
No, the art piece in the center of it all left them without words.
It took Gillian more than a minute to get control of her inner vampire before she could tear her eyes away from the body and examine her surroundings.
Suspended from a reinforced beam in the ceiling by two meat hooks that had been forced through his hands, hung the man himself.
Eyes open, he stared at them with that empty, lifeless gaze.
A shudder went down her spine.
Andrew’s jaw hung open, and his lips were dark blue, nearly black.
His feet were caught in chains anchored to the ground, spread-eagled and suspended like a specimen in a lab—naked and slit open from below the ribs to the groin.
Someone had yanked out his entrails and hung them around him like the meaty web of some grotesque spider—with him at the center of the web, caught, helpless, lifeless.
The killer has become the victim.
“That must have hurt.” Sally was in her fifties but didn’t look it. She had red hair and, for all the world, looked like one of those women from a nineteen-eighties movie.
She was brilliant, from what Gillian gathered, and didn’t look like a medical examiner.
“Meaning he was alive when his killer gutted him?” Boss concluded.
Sally nodded.
“The poor fucker was pretty much conscious for most of the decorating, too,” Sally told them, but her voice lacked empathy.
She had seen firsthand what this man did to his victims.
“Andrew died when his heart was ripped from him, and that’s what lies at his feet.” Most of them only noticed it then.
“It was very obviously ripped out and violently at that,” the coroner concluded. “Blood still pumped from it and also from the arteries in his chest. Oddly, there is not as much of it on the ground as there should be.”
A frown tugged at Sally’s brow. “It takes a lot more strength than one would think to do that to a man or to lift him way up there.”
Sally tugged on her gloves while wandering closer. She pushed aside some intestines to peer at the empty abdomen.
Most of the cops migrated upstairs in a hurry.
“There’s a note inside here wrapped in plastic,” Sally announced.
Her assistant kept taking photographs as Sally teased it out carefully and opened it.
“It’s written in what looks like blood and says: ~I, Andrew, hereby declare that I am a butcher. I killed many, and if I had been granted the chance, I would have sacrificed more. This is my murder space and trophy room.~”
She squinted, and the assistant brought her glasses and put them on her nose.
- Writer
