I wandered upward, discovering law offices, just as I’d suspected, but also financial services and investment bankers. Pretty much any kind of job you’d imagine a suit would perform was contained within these walls.
By the time I got to the fourteenth floor, I was starting to get wigged about being trapped. If security, or the Strega, caught me here, I’d be running down thirteen flights of stairs to escape. Not pretty or practical.
I decided to let fourteen levels of recon be enough. However, when I opened the final doorway, I gaped at a completely different hallway.
Dim lights, muted gray walls, mahogany doors, black tile. Most disturbing of all, no people.
I couldn’t resist. I started opening the doors. Each room was empty. No desk, no phone, no windows. Nada.
Now I couldn’t just leave. I hiked up to fifteen and discovered more of the same.
I was kind of surprised no one had come after me yet. They had cameras in every hall. Despite the extreme security of the front entrance, I was less than impressed with it as a whole. It hadn’t been that hard to get in and even easier to stay.
As I was making my way back to the stairwell, debating whether I should ascend to sixteen or hightail it to the lobby before my luck ran out, I caught sight of something seemingly discarded in an alcove halfway down the deserted hall.
Leaning over, I reached for it, then snatched my hand back when I saw what it was.
A Yankees cap.
Panic flared, but I talked myself down. Jimmy’s Yankees cap was still in a plastic bag, tagged as evidence in Milwaukee. This could be anyone’s. Yankees’ crap was everywhere, along with I heart ny. They should just make everything i heart the Yankees and be done with it.
As I stared down at that cap, I convinced myself it belonged to anyone but Sanducci. What were the chances he’d bought another, then dropped it right where I’d find it?
Pretty damn good if he was pulling a Hansel and Gretel.
As if in slow motion, I saw my hand reaching out, getting closer and closer as I bent to pick up the dreaded navy blue hat with the annoying ny. The instant I touched it, I saw him.
Bound and gagged, bare-chested and bleeding in a room very much like the ones I’d just searched.
Chapter 31
I dropped the cap and ran, crashing into the stairwell and heading up. I’d checked all the rooms on the two floors below me, and they were empty.
On the landing outside of sixteen, I paused to catch my breath and forced myself to make a plan. Blasting in there, especially when I had nothing to blast with, would get us both killed.
The only weapon I had was Jimmy’s silver knife, so I withdrew it from the fanny pack and peeked into the hall.
This one was the same as all the others—dark and depressing, as empty as the rooms that lined it. I continued upward.
Now that I’d seen Jimmy, now that I believed he was in trouble and not one of the sources of the trouble, I couldn’t leave. In a perfect world, I’d call for backup and the cavalry would come. In my world, which was so far from perfect the word had very little meaning, the backup was in New Mexico, which meant the cavalry was me.
Jimmy had looked bad—pale, sweating, bruised, and unconscious, with streams of blood trailing down his bare chest. I couldn’t risk losing him by waiting even an hour. Not when I was so close.
I kept checking rooms, finding nothing, no one, until I reached the twentieth floor, last room on the left.
I smelled the blood as soon as 1 opened the door, saw it as soon as I hit the lights. I stepped inside, hesitating only an instant before I locked the door behind me. “Sanducci?”
No response.
Jimmy was tied to a chair. Unfortunately he was tied with chains, not rope. Someone meant business, which I’d already figured out from the cuts. across his chest. They healed, even as I watched, but slower than they should have, so I knew that whoever had made them had done so with something that hurt a dhampir more than silver. Whatever that was.
Fury boiled in my gut. Talk about inhumanity, but then I guess that’s what we were talking about. From the appearance of this room, humanity had died badly over and over again.
The place was both similar to and very different from the others I’d seen. Same shape and size, but outfitted a little better, or perhaps worse, depending on your point of view.
Of course, from the point of view of most sane humans, a torture chamber wasn’t a good thing.
The walls were lined with spiky implements, both ancient and spanking new—a scimitar, a mace, knives in every shade of metal, a chain saw, even a flame torch.
No guns, bum luck. I supposed a bullet was too far removed. Whoever this place belonged to—and I was pretty certain I knew who that was—liked to get up close and personal with his victims.