I walked to the garage, avoiding the puddles along the way. It effectively formed the back wall of the property. The thick hedge at either side of the yard came to an end where the garage began, and tendrils of it had already begun to seek purchase on the walls. The two cars inside were relatively new, or at least I could see how they might yield parts of value, but the truck was a wreck. Its windshield was gone and its side windows were broken. The hood was raised, most of the exposed engine was rusted, and most of what wasn’t rusted was absent entirely. The truck had a dented cap back, and was parked so that the rear was flush with the garage wall.
And yet its tires were inflated, and there were marks on the concrete where it had recently been moved.
The garage might once have been used to house animals, for the three vehicles were separated by wooden walls, although the pens looked too wide even for cattle. I searched for indications on the back wall where pens had been removed to create the wider spaces, but could find none. I slid along the side of the truck, my jacket catching on rusted metal and splintered wood. Even before I reached the back wall, I could see that it was newer than the rest of the building. At some point it had been repaired or replaced. I went back outside and tried to gauge the distance between the inner wall and the outer walls. The angle made it hard to judge, but it seemed to me that they didn’t quite match. There was a space behind the new wall. It was narrow, probably barely wide enough for a man to turn around inside, but it was there.
I took a closer look at the truck and saw that the hand brake had been set. I was opening the door to release it when something pink caught my eye on the floor behind the front left wheel. It was a small piece of fiberglass insulation batt, used between interior walls and floors for noise control and to prevent heat from escaping. I took my little Maglite from my pocket and shined it on the floor, and then inside the cap. There were more of the batts here, still in their packaging, and all with a high R-value indicating their resistance to heat flow. The higher the R-value, the greater the insulating power, and this stuff had an R-value in the thirties, almost as high as one could go.
I released the hand brake and pushed the truck forward. It was heavy, but it moved easily on its tires. When I had pushed it about six feet, I reapplied the brake and returned to the back wall. A painted square steel door, three feet to the side, had been expertly fitted into the brickwork at the point where the back of the truck had met the wall, its lines almost as difficult to distinguish as the separation between the old and new grass on the front lawn. A smaller panel was inset midway down the left side of the door. It lifted up to reveal a handle. There was no key. There didn’t have to be. After all, who was going to move a dilapidated truck in a run-down shed for no good reason?
The first thing I saw when I opened the door was a ladder. It lay against the interior wall, and beside it was a trapdoor, similar in size to the first, but this time set into the ground. It was secured, but only with a heavy lock and hasp. Beyond it I could see a pair of small air vents. A larger vent in the roof let in sunlight and air.
‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Can anybody hear me?’
After a couple of seconds, a girl’s voice sounded faintly beneath my feet.
‘I can hear you. Please help me! Please!’
I knelt beside the first vent. ‘Anna?’
‘Yes, I’m Anna! I’m Anna!’
‘My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private detective. I’m going to get you out, okay?’
‘Okay. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.’
‘I won’t, but I have to find something to break the lock. I’m not going to go without you, I promise. I just need a minute.’
‘Hurry, just hurry!’
I went back into the garage and found a crowbar, then set to work on the lock. It took a couple of minutes, but eventually it broke and I opened the trapdoor.
The cell was about six feet deep and roughly square. Anna Kore was chained to the eastern wall. There was clear plastic sheeting on the ground beneath her, and a slop bucket in the corner. She wore sneakers, oversized jeans, and a man’s sweater, and had wrapped her upper body in a blanket to ward off the cold and damp, despite the layers of insulation that had been laid into the walls and on the ground under the sheeting. She had a small battery-powered lamp for illumination, and there were magazines and paperback books scattered around her. She raised her arms to me.
‘Get me out!’
I turned to get the ladder, and heard a sound from outside. It was a vehicle approaching, and then the engine died and all was quiet again.
‘What is it?’ called the girl. ‘Why aren’t you coming to get me?’
I went back to the edge of the trapdoor. ‘Anna, you have to stay quiet. I think they’re here.’
She gave out a little mew of fear. ‘No, don’t go. Get the ladder. It will only take a minute. Please! If you go, you won’t come back, and I’ll be left here.’
I couldn’t stay. They were coming. As I moved away, Anna Kore began screaming, the noise carrying up from below and echoing off the walls, and I did something that broke my heart: I closed the trapdoor upon her. Her cries grew muffled, and when I climbed back into the garage I could not hear them at all. The breeze had picked up, and the sheets billowed and snapped, obscuring my view of the yard beyond. I had hoped that the return of either Mrs. Shaye or her son was a coincidence, but as I was climbing through the connecting door I spotted the little wireless sensor beside the lower hinge. I had broken the circuit by opening the door. It had probably sent a message to one or both of their cell phones, and so they had known that someone was on their property.
I had just reached the hood of the truck when the first shot came, blowing a hole through one of the sheets and blasting the wall to my left with shotgun pellets. The second shot struck the hood and knocked away the supporting rod. I saw a figure in overalls moving between the sheets, and caught a glimpse of Pat Shaye’s face as he pumped the shotgun and took aim for a third time. I threw myself to the ground and started shooting.
The bullet took Shaye in the right thigh. He stumbled into one of the sheets, and I saw the form of his body pressed against it. I fired again, and this time a roseate stain bloomed against the white. The third shot brought him to his knees and he dragged the sheet down with him, gathering it around him like a shroud as he fell. The shotgun lay in a puddle beside him as he struggled weakly against the material, the blood and oily water spreading across the whiteness of it.
I heard a woman scream. Mrs. Shaye appeared from the side of the house, and then was lost to me in the billowing of the sheets. Like a movie projected with damaged frames, I saw her move through flickers of white from the corner to the center of the yard, pause for a second as she took in the sight of her son wriggling in his cocoon, then – another white flash, another moment lost – make for the shotgun. I gave her no warning. The bullet struck the house behind her, but when I tried to fire again the gun jammed, and she was almost at the shotgun. I was already looking for cover when Gordon Walsh appeared from the side of the house, his gun raised.