My stomach folded in on itself as we passed down the row of desks. A young, sandy-haired man at a computer had been disemboweled. The women in the next two cubicles looked like they’d tried to run. One had fallen on her front, but her head was twisted all the way around so her sightless eyes stared up at the ceiling in frozen horror.
We turned the corner and found the conference room. The blood had turned it into a grotesque modern art painting.
The men and women seated around the conference table had been older, well-dressed corporate types. All except one were tied to their chairs, cloth gags choking their corpses, the lone exception a middle-aged man with a .22-inch diameter hole in his forehead. He’d had a better fate than the rest. The mathematics arranged itself in brilliant arcing lines of red, the spatter patterns showing me exactly how they had all suffered.
I’m not squeamish, but I closed my eyes briefly.
“Here,” said Tresting’s voice, and he handed me a pair of latex gloves he pulled from a pocket. He’d found some plastic bags in a bin somewhere, too; he shook bits of shredded paper off them and put them over his boots, handing two more to me. “Forensics are good. Rather not go down for this.”
I tucked the plastic mechanically into the tops of my boots, and we cautiously approached the scene. I tried to deduce something useful from the carnage, but my mind drew a blank; I could only see parabolas of blood fountaining to end in gruesome trigonometry, infinite repetition from too many points of convergence—angles of impact, speed of slashes, over and over and over again…
I could see everything. It meant nothing.
Tresting hooked a Bluetooth over his ear. It wasn’t hard to figure out whom he was calling. He succinctly described the scene and started carefully pulling wallets from those around the conference table, reading off their IDs.
I forced myself to detach, to observe, running my eyes over the unhappy victims and trying like hell to ignore the mathematical replay, but nothing could make this scene better. I saw limbs bent in unholy directions, shallow cuts carving lurid designs in skin…one woman had been partially flayed. The stench in the heavy air clogged my nostrils, gagging me.
The brute horror here wouldn’t tell me anything useful. I escaped back into the outer offices, doing my best to avoid looking at the bodies, and attacked the cubicles, dragging open desk drawers and filing cabinets.
I needn’t have bothered. Cabinet after cabinet revealed rows of hanging file folders, telling me some paper trail had been here, but every one of them swung empty—even the paper tabs labeling the folders had been pulled. The desk drawers mocked me with more of the same. I tried the computers next—when the first one refused to start, I crawled around to the back to find the hard drive missing, the connectors still dangling. I took the time to check around the back of every computer in the place, but they were all gutted. The private offices showed much the same story except sans corpses; apparently everyone important had been in the conference room.
Bits of paper from a shredder littered the floor here and there as I moved through the suite. I eventually found the shredder in question, an industrial-strength behemoth, but the bin beneath it had been cleared out. I figured out why when I found the office kitchen.
A large metal filing cabinet had been turned on its side against the doorway, with plastic garbage bags duct taped across it to create a seal, and the impromptu levee held back a pulpy white goop that drowned the entire kitchenette to the level of my waist. The caustic odor of chemicals assaulted my senses, and I coughed and hugged one arm across my nose, blinking watering eyes. Though the tap was no longer running, rags in the sink drain showed how the place had been so easily flooded, and then some sort of mad chemical mixture had been thrown in along with…shredded paper.
Someone had wanted to be very, very, very sure no one reconstituted the data from this office. Hell, it wasn’t like most people could piece back together shredded documents in the first place; certainly no one could do it easily—except me, that is, but it seemed both egotistical and too coincidental to assume this destruction was for my benefit. Why would anyone go to so much extra trouble?
“Hey, Russell,” Tresting called.
I carefully avoided the corpses in the outer office and wound my way back to the torture chamber of a conference room. Tresting stood at the far end, examining an empty chair. “Look at this,” he said, and I stepped around to oblige him. Sprays of blood crossed the edges of the chair in multiple places, but the seat and back were clean.
“Someone was sitting here,” I said.
“Haven’t seen Dawna Polk anywhere. Could be her?”
I narrowed my eyes at the chair seat, trying to remember the measurements of Dawna’s hips. I hadn’t been paying too much attention, but I estimated, measuring in my memory. “No. This is too wide. I’m guessing a man. Or a large woman.” I squinted at the blood spatter surrounding the empty chair, the numbers spiraling to find their sources in midair, a person-shaped outline of shimmering red. “Whoever it was got tortured, too.”
“How can you tell?”
“The spray,” I answered, not wanting to go into it.
“Think our perps turned kidnappers,” said Tresting. “They wanted information—forced the vics to talk, most like while their coworkers got tortured or killed.” He reached over to the nearest woman and lifted the side of the cloth gag with a gloved finger. “Take a look.”
He was right. Blood stained the skin underneath the cloth, and nowhere near any of her own wounds. The smearing made it harder to judge, but from the angle I guessed it had come from the man across from her.
Maybe this investigative stuff was worth something after all.
I told Tresting what I’d found in the rest of the office suite. “Unless they have data on an outside server somewhere, it’s cleaned out.”
“Think we better head, then,” he said grimly. “We can keep an eye on the police investigation.”
“When do you think they’ll find it?”
“Right after we leave, when I call in a tip.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Can it, Russell,” Tresting growled. “This is too big.”
He had a point. Of course, considering what we knew of Pithica, this was probably too big for the cops, too.
Chapter 12
We drove in silence almost all the way back. When Tresting found a space on the street a few blocks away from his office, he yanked the truck over into it, shifting gears so hard my teeth rattled. As he turned off the engine I reached for the door handle, but Tresting’s voice stopped me.
“Russell.”
“Yeah?”
He made no move to get out. “Been thinking. This wasn’t Pithica. Not their style. And they wouldn’t do this to their own.”
“New player, then?” I thought of Anton’s garage, of the men in dark suits at Courtney’s place. I saw the massacre in the office building again, my mind skittering away from the details. Maybe this mess had reached the point where I should throw in with Tresting for real, share everything. I opened my mouth.
Tresting slammed the heels of his hands against the steering wheel. “Dammit, Russell!”
I bit back on my other intel. “What?”
The look he shot me was positively poisonous, for no reason I could fathom.
“What?” I repeated.
“You told him, didn’t you.”
“Told what to whom?” Where did Tresting get off thinking he had a say in my business? It wasn’t as if I had a whole lot of friends to blab information to anyway; the only person I’d been in touch with at all was—oh. Oh. “Wait—you think Rio did this?”