Esta Quinn had been stretched spread-eagled across her soiled bed and shackled to the bedposts. She was nude and gaunt and barely conscious, tied down in a painful stretch. Only her right hand remained free; a stack of dirty plates and water glasses on the nightstand suggested she’d been allowed to feed herself.
The longer she lived, I thought darkly, the longer the torment could continue.
I downed Clyde in the hallway and stepped into the room next to Phillips. In the confined space, the stench hit like a baseball bat to the knees.
Mac stood on the far side of the bed, her fingers on the woman’s wrist to take a pulse. Mac was pale, and her black eye looked like a fresh wound in the sudden pallor of her face.
“I’ll radio for an ambulance,” Phillips said and went back out into the hall.
I forced myself to the bed and looked down at the ruin of what was now barely a human being. Esta had been tortured over a period of days, maybe weeks, and what had been done to her body revealed both the woman’s astonishing determination to survive and her torturer’s capacity for evil. Broken bones, knife wounds, burns. The room was chilly despite the July heat outside, and I retrieved a blanket tossed over a nearby chair. Mac helped me spread it gently over Esta’s unmoving body. Esta moaned in pain.
I examined the shackles holding her in place. Chains and padlocks. Easy enough.
“I’ll get my tools,” I said to Mac.
When I returned, Esta’s eyes were open. They were overbright, bloodshot, the eyes of a woman who’d gone so far around the bend she wasn’t even within shouting distance of sane. Rick Wolanski had called her a nutcase. But she was well beyond that offhand description, wandering in a faraway fever dream of despair and pain.
Her eyes tracked me as I moved around the bed, my pick and tensioner making quick work of the padlocks. She began a low keening as I worked, and Mac gathered the old woman’s hands in hers.
“Sh, sh,” she murmured. “You’re safe. It’s okay now.”
Esta’s mouth cranked open as if on rusty hinges, the teeth within long and yellow. Her tongue licked out, trying to moisten her cracked and bleeding lips, and Mac went into the bathroom, returned with a glass of water. She cradled Esta’s head, cupping the fragile skull so she could dribble water down the woman’s throat. Esta drank greedily, then coughed. Mac waited until she quieted, then lowered her head back to the pillow.
Clouds rolled over the sun, and such light as there was went to almost nothing. The old woman seemed to fade into the bed until she looked like nothing more than a rumpled blanket. Phillips came back into the room and turned on a lamp.
Esta’s mouth opened. “He . . . he . . .”
We leaned closer. Her voice came from deep in her chest, a ghoulish rattle.
“Who?” Mac asked. “Who did this to you?”
Esta’s fevered eyes turned bright as opals. “He . . . killed . . . them all.”
“Who?” Mac asked again. “Who do you mean?”
The old woman began to thrash. Her body twisted, her back and neck arched, her head lashed back and forth.
“He’s mad!” she screamed. “My wild child. Mad, mad, mad!”
Her hand shot out and clamped onto my wrist with surprising strength, biting down to the bone. Clyde barked until I quieted him.
“My grandson,” Esta hissed, her fingers digging. “Roman. He will haunt me forever. You’ve got to get me out of here!”
“Raya had a child?” I asked. Stray threads began to weave into a picture.
“Raya’s baby. Roman.” Esta’s gaze latched on to mine. She looked as feral and helpless as the rabbits on the porch. “He was hers, but I—I was the she-wolf who suckled the murderer.”
Mac frowned. “You think she means the nephew that Rick Wolanski mentioned?”
Esta cackled. “Nephew. Everyone thought that. Raya’s secret.”
“Do you know where he is?” I asked. “Raya’s son. Where is he?”
A crazy light shot into her eyes and she cackled. “He’s in the ground now. Where he belongs. Deep in the ground, God rot his soul.”
CHAPTER 24
A life lived selfishly is a heavy load.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
“You think he killed himself?” Phillips asked. “And took the little girl with him? You think that’s what she means?”
“We’re going to assume not,” Mac said.
We were standing in the hallway, whispering. Esta groaned and muttered from the bedroom.
“She’s pretty wacko,” Phillips went on. “All that stuff about him being in the ground. You think it’s true? That she has a grandson and he’s the one who hurt her?”
I ignored him. “Lucy could be here.”
Mac massaged her temples. “Sydney, you and Clyde search the house and grounds. Phillips, get tape up, secure the scene. I’ll stay with Esta and get on the phone, see what I can find out about a grandson.” She dropped her hands and looked at me. “No stone unturned.”
While Mac returned to the bedroom and Phillips went outside, Clyde and I headed for the stairs. I phoned Cohen, left a quick summary on his voice mail of what we’d learned, and asked him to call me as soon as he could. Then Clyde and I went through another run of the house, this time peering into every small place where a child might be stashed. My heart gave a panicked heave each time I opened a cupboard or closet door or looked behind furniture and in shower stalls.
I found keys hanging in the kitchen and went outside and searched Esta’s car. Nothing but a sweater and an empty plastic bag. In the rear of the house I found a root cellar, the dank musty air filling my nostrils as I left Clyde up top and descended a rotted ladder into the dark. My flashlight picked out only empty bottles and spiderwebs. But the image of Esta and her tortured body haunted me, and I realized I was whispering Lucy’s name under my breath, like a prayer.
Phillips and the new deputy, Armstrong, met us at the front door. The ambulance was fifteen minutes out, Phillips said. While they began a more thorough search of the ground floor for any indication of Roman’s identity or where he might be, Clyde and I returned upstairs. We looked into Esta’s room, but the old woman appeared to be asleep.
Mac joined me in the hall.
“We’re searching every database we’ve got for Roman Quinn,” she said. “So far nothing. Maybe this asshole has lived so far off the grid that nothing would have landed him in a database. Or maybe Esta is just crazy. We’ll keep digging, and once we have fingerprints from the crime scene guys, hopefully something will pop.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose where a headache threatened. “If Hiram’s the father, maybe that was why she was so determined to win his love. She wanted a father for her son.”
“It would also give him a motive for killing her,” Mac said. “It’s one thing for a wife to forgive an affair. A child is more difficult. And it would give Roman, if he knew, a reason to destroy Hiram’s family.”
The house creaked around us while outside, wind rattled the trees. I rubbed my arms. “Maybe the answer is here.”