“Hang on,” I told him.
I crossed over for a closer look.
There were several war poses, the kind of pictures we’d become all too familiar with, of battle-weary soldiers smiling to the camera, flashing V signs with their fingers in a stark desert setting. One of them showed the chopped-up biker and a couple of other grunts standing proud against an apocalyptic background of tanks gutted by depleted uranium shells and burning oil fields. It was obviously Iraq, which means they were either out there in the early nineties or a couple of years after 9/11. Next to the vet gallery were about a dozen similar shots laid out in two rows. Each shot was a black-and-white eight-by-ten mug shot of what I assumed were the club’s full-patch members.
I immediately recognized several of them: the one who’d just been Bobbitted; the guy who shot Michelle and who I crushed in half; Flamehead; Soulpatch was also up there, all brooding and defiant. Like the others, he was grudgingly holding up a black tablet that displayed his booking number and where he’d been arrested—in this case, the La Mesa Police Department. It was a local arrest, so if he wasn’t already on the club’s ATF file that was now sitting on Villaverde’s smartphone, getting his name wasn’t going to be an issue.
“These are the guys who were tailing me,” I called out to Villaverde, tapping the frame with the back of my fingers.
Villaverde joined me for a look.
“This is the one the security guard shot,” I said, indicating Flamehead. “And this is the guy who ran off.”
“Okay, let’s get a name and put an APB out on him.” He pulled up his ATF file and called over one of the cops to get the alert out.
I had mixed feelings about what we’d walked into. On the one hand, the entire club seemed to have been wiped out. At least, all the full-patch holders. Six dead here, Michelle’s killer, the one she’d stabbed, Flamehead, and Soulpatch. Ten in total. There were twelve portraits on the wall, but the missing two could have been long-dead members who still had their faces on the wall for posterity. If these were the guys who’d kidnapped the scientists from the research center and come after Michelle, they were no longer a threat to anyone. However, an even more savage group seemed to have taken their place, and they were still out there. And with the bikers dead, we were back where we started in terms of figuring out who we were dealing with.
Unless we could find Soulpatch.
Before they did.
“Ricky Torres,” Villaverde announced, “road name Scrape.” He showed me the image on his phone. It was a different mug shot from the one that was up on the wall, but it was the same guy, no question.
I nodded, and he gave the uniform the go-ahead to spread the word. As the deputy headed off, Villaverde flicked a nod toward the side door and told me, “Over here.”
He led me through the door and down a narrow staircase to a basement. It was one big, messy, windowless room. All kinds of crates and boxes were lying around it, and the air was stale with dust and rot.
“Check this out,” Villaverde said, pointing at some pipes that ran along the bottom of one of the walls, by a far corner of the room.
There were nylon cuffs on the ground by the pipes. They’d been cut open. Two of them. The corner was also littered with empty fast food wrappers and soft drink cups. I leaned in for a closer look. They looked and smelled relatively fresh.
Whoever had been tied up down here hadn’t been gone long.
I stared at the plasticuffs. “Maybe this is where they brought the two scientists.”
“Maybe. But I can’t see them keeping them here for months.”
“Maybe this is where they hold them before handing them over. Which means they might have grabbed someone else more recently.” I turned to Villaverde. “We need to look at missing persons reports. Maybe another chemist.”
I glanced around again, and something by one pair of cuffs glinted in the light and caught my eye. I edged closer to it. It was a contact lens.
I pointed it out to Villaverde, and—given that he had gloves—he collected it and slipped into an evidence bag.
I thought about the timing, and despite the fact that whoever was tied up down here could well turn out to have nothing to do with Michelle or the kidnapped scientists or the shoot-out upstairs and that they could all be separate deals that the bikers were involved in, the timing was troubling me. These guys seemed to have too many balls in the air for these events not to be connected. I found myself wondering if the massacre upstairs didn’t have something to do with whoever had been living off the cheap burgers down here, and, if so, how it could possibly relate to Michelle. There were still too many unknowns, which was frustrating me. The key was figuring out who had hired the bikers. Which got me thinking about who else might know that.
“You said this was the mother chapter of the club?” I asked Villaverde as we made our way back upstairs.
“Yeah, why?”
“So there are other chapters?”
“A few,” he said, scrolling through the ATF file again. “Here we go. The club has three other chapters scattered across the state and, weirdly enough”—he looked up—“one in Holland. As in Holland, Europe.”
“We need to talk to the nearest ones, the ones they might be closest to. They might know who these guys were working for.”
Villaverde’s brow furrowed with skepticism. “Sure, but club business like this—it’s usually compartmentalized. I doubt other charters would be in on what these guys were up to. And even if they were, they wouldn’t talk to us about it.”
“Maybe after what just happened here . . .”
Villaverde still seemed doubtful. “It’s not in their DNA.”
I nodded in the direction of the bike shop. “What about the prospects? Even if they weren’t in the circle of trust yet, one of them could have heard something. And one of them might know who was being kept down here.”
“Absolutely. They seem pretty shaken up as it is, so it should give us a leg up into scaring any leads out of them.”
As we got back to the main room, I saw the bloody corpses again and it made me think about Soulpatch/Scrape. I was getting a bad feeling about him, and an uncomfortable urgency was goosing the hairs on the back of my neck.
“We need to find Scrape,” I told Villaverde.
“His jacket’s got his last known address, last known girlfriend, parents. We’ll have something soon.”
I thought about the bullet hole in his shoulder. “He would have called in to give these guys a heads-up on what happened at the terminal. Which means the psychos that did this might know about him. They might even know where he’s headed. If they wiped these guys out, they might have the same thing in mind for him. We need to move fast.”
I felt a mounting frustration. We needed to find him, like, now. There was a solid chance he’d be able to tell us what we needed to know about what this was all about—and who these new players were.
Just then, I heard some commotion outside the clubhouse’s entrance.
“No, ma’am,” a man was insisting with a raised voice. “I said you can’t—”
“Don’t tell me what the hell I can and can’t do,” a woman cut him off forcefully. “This is my husband’s place and I want to see him.”
Two uniforms appeared in the doorway, visibly trying—and failing—to stop a woman who was pushing and shoving her way past them. She slipped through and barged into the room. She looked like she was in her early forties. She was curvy and had auburn hair that was streaked with highlights, and she was in low-cut jeans, snakeskin boots, and a denim shirt that was tied in a knot around her midriff. She wasn’t someone you’d describe as pretty, but she had something else going, a kind of raw, savage appeal that was hard to ignore.