"Just tell him to be cool," Underwood said. "We'll find her."
87
Kevin Byrne stood in front of the boarded-up retail space. He was alone. The storefront looked as if it had housed a variety of enterprises over the years. The windows were painted black. There was no sign over the front door, but there were years of names and sentiments carved into the wood-framed entrance.
A narrow alleyway cut between the store and the row house to its right. Byrne drew his weapon, walked down the alley. There was a barred window halfway down. He listened at the window. Silence. He continued forward, emerging into a small courtyard at the back, a courtyard bounded on the three sides by a high wooden fence.
The back door was not covered in plywood, nor padlocked from the outside. There was a rusted dead bolt. Byrne pushed on the door. Locked tight.
Byrne knew he had to focus. Many times in his career, someone's life had hung in the balance, someone's very existence riding on his judgment. Each and every time he had felt the enormity of the responsibility, the weight of his duty.
But it was never like this. It wasn't supposed to be like this. In fact, he was surprised that Ike Buchanan hadn't called him in. If he had, though, Byrne would have thrown his badge on the desk and gotten right back out on the street.
Byrne took off his tie, undid the top button of his shirt. The heat in the confines of the courtyard was stifling. Sweat laced his neck and shoulders.
He bulled open the door with his shoulder, entered, weapon held high. Colleen was close. He knew it. Felt it. He pitched his head to the sounds of the old building. Water clanging through rusted pipes. The creak of long-dried joists.
He stepped into the small entrance room. Ahead was a door, closed. To the right was a wall of dusty shelves.
He touched the door and the images slammed into his mind…
… Colleen against the wall… the man in the red monk's robe… help, Dad, oh help hurry, Dad, helpShe was here. In this building. He had found her.
Byrne knew he should call for backup, but he did not know what he would do when he found the Actor. If the Actor was in one of these rooms, and he had to draw down on him, he would pull the trigger. No hesitation. If it was not a clean shoot, he didn't want to put his fellow detectives on the line. He would not draw Jessica into this. He would handle this alone.
He pulled the earpiece from his ear, turned off the phone, and stepped through the door.
88
Jessica stood outside the store. She looked up and down the street. She had never seen so many police officers on one detail. There had to be twenty sector cars. Then there were the unmarked vehicles, the tech vans, and the ever-growing crowd. Men and women in uniforms, men and women in suits, their badges glinting in the gold sunlight. To many of the people in the crowd, this was just another siege of their world by the police. If they only knew. What if it was their son or daughter?
Byrne was nowhere in sight. Had they cleared this address? There was a narrow alleyway between the store and the row house. She walked down the alley, stopping for a moment to listen at a barred window. She heard nothing. She continued on until she arrived in a small courtyard behind the shop. The back door was slightly open.
Had he entered without telling her? It certainly was possible. She thought for a moment about getting backup to enter the building with her, then thought better of it.
Kevin Byrne was her partner. It may have been a department operation, but it was his show. It was his daughter.
She made her way back to the street, looked both ways. Detectives and uniformed officers and FBI agents were at either end. She walked back down the alley, drew her weapon, and stepped through the door.
89
He moved through a lair of small rooms. What had once been an interior space designed for retail commerce had many years ago been remodeled into a maze of nooks and alcoves and cubbyholes.
Designed just for this purpose? Byrne wondered.
Down the narrow confines of a tight hallway, gun waist-high. He felt a larger space open before him, the temperature dropping a degree or two.
The main room of the retail space was dark, crowded with broken furniture, retail fixtures, a pair of dusty air compressors. There was no light streaming through the windows. They were painted with thick black enamel. As Byrne ran his Maglite around the large space he saw that the once brightly colored boxes that were stacked in the corners held a decade of mildew. The air-what air there was-was fat with a stagnant, bitter heat that clung to the walls, to his clothes, his skin. The smell of mold and mice and sugar was dense.
Byrne clicked off his flashlight, tried to adjust to the dim light. To his right were a series of glass retail counters. He could see brightly colored paper inside. Shiny red paper. He had seen it before. He closed his eyes, touched the wall. There had been happiness here. The laughter of children. All of that stopped years earlier when an ugliness entered, a morbid soul that devoured the joy. He opened his eyes.
Ahead was another hallway, another door, its jamb chipped and splintered years earlier. Byrne looked more closely. Fresh wood. Someone had recently brought something large through the doorway, damaging the jamb. Lighting equipment? he thought.
He put his ear to the door, listened. Silence. This was the room. He felt it. He felt it in a place that did not know his heart or his mind. He slowly pushed open the door. And saw his daughter. She was tied to a bed. His heart shattered into a million pieces. My sweet little girl, what have I done to you?
Then: Movement. Fast. A flash of red before him. The sound of fabric snapping in the still, hot air. Then the sound was gone.
Before he could react, before he could bring his weapon up, he felt a presence to his left. Then the back of his head exploded.
90
With dark-adapted eyes, Jessica edged her way down the long hallway, moving deeper into the center of the building. Soon she came upon a makeshift control room. There were two VHS editing decks, their green and red lights glowing cataracts in the gloom. This was where the Actor had dubbed the tapes. There was also a television. On it was the website image she had seen at the Roundhouse. The light was dim. There was no sound.
Suddenly, on screen, there was movement. She saw the monk in the red robe move across the frame. Shadows on the wall. The camera lurched to the right. Colleen was strapped to the bed in the background. More shadows, darting and scurrying over the walls.
Then a figure approached the camera. Too quickly. Jessica couldn't see who it was. In a second the screen went to static, then to blue.
Jessica tore the rover from her belt. Radio silence no longer mattered. She turned up the volume, keyed it, listened. Silence. She banged the rover against her palm. Listened. Nothing.
The rover was dead.
Son of a bitch.
She wanted to fling it against the wall, but thought better of it. There would be plenty of time for rage very soon.
She flattened her back against the wall. She felt the rumble of a truck pass by. She was on an outside wall. She was six to eight inches away from daylight. She was miles from safety.
She followed the cables coming out of the back of the monitor. They snaked up to the ceiling, down the hallway to her left.
Of all the uncertainties of the next few minutes, of all the unknowns lurking in the darkness around her, one thing was clear. For the foreseeable future, she was on her own.
91
He was dressed like one of the extras they had seen at the train station-red monk's robe, black mask.