Authors: Ed Gorman

New Title 1 (27 page)

I drove up the driveway to the reverend's house. My car smelled of dampness now. The rain was falling so hard, it sounded as if hail were being mixed in.

I was still trying to make some kind of visceral sense out of what Kenny Deihl had just told me. It's all very well to watch Oprah and Geraldo and Phil interview transsexuals but it's another matter to realize that you actually met one. My first instinct, of course, was Kenny's. Why would you willingly submit to having your pee-pee removed? You worked hard all your life to keep it from getting injured or damaged in any way—the little thing was pretty vulnerable when you came right down to it—and now here comes a guy who opens up his flasher coat and says, Take me I'm yours.

Of course, the reason I couldn't understand that was because I didn't have any sense of why transsexuals do what they do. Homosexuality is at least imaginable in many respects—you keep your born-with sexual identity, which means that you prefer lovers of similar identities. Not very mysterious, when you come right down to it. But transsexualism . . .

Both bays of the garage were open. Only one Lincoln was there. The garage was attached to the house so I parked inside the empty bay, then walked up to a veranda filled with colorful lawn furniture that looked like children forced to stay inside because of the rain. The veranda smelled of gin and cigarette smoke.

I knocked on the door several times but got no answer so I tried the knob, which was unlocked, and went inside.

The kitchen was what they call farm-style: wide-open spaces with lots of shiny pots and pans and cooking utensils dangling from a wooden contraption on the ceiling, large butcher-block table in the center of the big room and gleaming white refrigerator and stove and dishwasher tucked neatly into the east corner.

"Hello."

But nobody answered.

"Hello."

Again no answer.

I walked into the dining room. Like the living room and den, which I saw shortly after, it looked like a tribute to an interior decorator rather than a place where real human beings actually lived and laughed and sweated and snored and kissed. A little too-too, if you know what I'm talking about, from a very elegant but obviously uncomfortable Barrymore sofa to an antique china buffet that had to have cost at least half my annual income. But who would dare risk opening it up? I was as intimidated here as I was in a museum, a little boy's fear of bumping or nudging or backing into some pricey work of art and watching it tumble to the floor and shatter.

I looked for foot tracks that a man might make who'd been running through the woods tonight but didn't see any.

The noise was faint but had a regular rhythm. Opening and closing; opening and closing . . . opening and closing drawers, I finally realized.

The house was carpeted throughout so it didn't take any great stealth on my part to quietly reach the door of the master bedroom and put my ear to it.

Drawers being opened and closed. Definitely.

I reached inside my jacket pocket, took out my Ruger with my left hand and eased the door open with my right. He was packing, getting ready to flee.

When he turned and saw me and saw the Ruger, he said, "What are you doing in here? I could have you arrested."

He was still every bit the suave TV minister, from the carefully moussed hair to the suitably purposeful gray pin-striped suit to the brilliantly shined cordovan loafers. And he looked right standing in a room like this, with its canopied double bed and huge, curtained window. But despite his bluster, his poise was gone.

I took the photo I'd found earlier this morning. I walked over to him and tossed it on top of the bureau.

"Pick it up."

"Why should I?"

I raised the Ruger and aimed it right at his forehead. "Pick it up."

He picked it up. Looked at it. His mouth twitched unpleasantly.

He tossed the photo back on the bureau. "That doesn't have anything to do with me."

"I've got two witnesses who saw one of your white Lincolns pull up to an old closed-up shop in Cedar Rapids. And I'll be glad to take you down there and show you the video equipment, and the blood from where the girls were beaten doing some bondage tricks."

He shook his head. "It's them."

"Them who?"

"Them," he said, sounding miserable. "I told them they were going to get in trouble. And now they have."

"I still don't know who 'them' is."

"My wife and Mindy, who else?"

"What are you talking about? Why would Mindy and your wife get together?"

He smirked. "I spent a few nights with Mindy myself—before I learned that she'd once been a man. But it wasn't me Mindy wanted, anyway. It was my wife. And it was their idea for the porno movies. All I did was sell them while I went around the midwest with my religious program."

"I suppose that makes you clean?"

"No, it doesn't. But at least I didn't exploit those little girls myself."

I startled both of us by hitting him hard across the mouth with my Ruger.

He sank to his knees, blood bubbling through his fingers.

He was crying, and somehow the idea of him crying sickened me, and so, again startling myself, I kicked him hard in the ribs.

He fell over on his side and got into a fetal position.

"Why does everybody go out to the old Brindle farm?" I said, standing over him.

He made the mistake of not answering.

My foot sliced into two more of his ribs.

He started blubbering, blood pouring through his fingers again. He was crying again, too. "That's where they set up the new studio."

"So McNally and Lodge were blackmailing Mindy and your wife?"

He shook his head. "Don't know anything about blackmail." He groaned, holding his ribs.

I remembered the two black men saying that they hadn't seen the white Lincoln in a long time. "A trapdoor in the barn floor." He looked up at me and said, "Don't hurt me anymore, all right? I really can't take pain. I really can't."

But I didn't believe him. I raised my foot and kicked him again, this time in the chest.

But I guess he was right after all, the way he started sobbing. He really couldn't take pain. He really couldn't.

I left him there and walked back through the house and out the side door to my car.

I drove down past the church, past Kenny Deihl's pagan guitar licks, and out into the country.

It was time for me to visit the old Brindle farm.

Fog wrapped round and round the old brindle farmhouse, a snake squeezing its victim to death, and glowed silver and opaque in my headlights as I glided down the gravel driveway. Distant and unseen, animals on the neighboring farm bayed and cried, like children calling out for help in the blind and smoky night.

I cut the lights when I pulled even with the farmhouse, and coasted several more feet before shutting off the engine, my tires making the gravel crunch and pop loudly in the oppressive and spooky silence.

Fog had swallowed up everything; I couldn't even see the ornament on the hood of my car.

I did a check of my tools—Ruger, flashlight, knife. The rest would stay behind.

I got out of the car, closing the door softly, almost afraid of another sharp noise in the gloom, as if I might awaken some lurking monster.

In the fog, the shape of the near barn was virtually impossible to see, only the gambrel roof having any real form to it.

I stopped, listened.

I'd heard something, or thought I had.

I was sweating again, and trembling. I kept thinking of how vicious I'd been with Roberts. Unlike me, usually; and not a side of myself I wanted to see.

I listened intently. Nothing.

Shoes scuffing gravel, I walked down to the east door of the barn and let myself in.

Barns retain their odors for decades, all the milk and waste and hay and mud and rotting wood like wraiths on the deserted air.

I shone my light around. There was a bullpen and two wide stalls on the west end; and several narrow cow stalls on the east end. On the walls hung old bridles, the leather coarse and cracked; and rusted pitchforks and shovels and rakes; and half a rusty Schwinn bike that had probably been fine and shiny and new about the time John Kennedy was becoming president, the front wheel missing.

I found a wobbly ladder angled against the upper floor and climbed it, splashing my light around on the hayloft above. Except for a rotting bundle of hay, the loft was empty, stray pieces of the stuff shining like fool's gold in the gleam of my flash.

Downstairs again, I found a small room that had probably been used for storing feed, and a milkhouse just outside the back door.

Rain fell through the holes in the roof and made hollow pocking sounds as they struck the floor far below.

It took me twenty minutes to find the trapdoor, concealed as it was beneath several boards in one of the narrower stalls.

I thought of what Joanna Lodge had told me about how people in this part of Iowa had dug subbasements and root cellars to hide runaway slaves.

I got down on my knees, set the boards aside, wrapped my hand around the ringbolt and gave it a yank. It was three feet by three feet, plenty wide enough for carrying things down. I remembered what Peary had said about the killer suddenly disposing of the bodies differently—and about what the FBI had told me about the Brooklyn man who'd started burying his victims.

Cold and fetid air, the air of the grave, rose from the room below, and I was rocked back on my haunches. I sat still a long moment in the dark and damp barn, letting the gaseous odors subside.

I angled the beam of my flashlight down into the room below. A ladder that looked much sturdier than the one leading to the hay loft stretched down into shadow.

I started climbing down.

The air grew colder, the smell more fetid, as I descended the ladder. Just from the air currents, I could tell that this was a much larger room than I had expected. A few times the ladder rocked, threatening to dump me off, but for the most part, I had no trouble.

I reached the floor of hard-packed earth and turned around.

The room was at least ten yards long and at least as wide. On the end where I stood, the wall had been clumsily bricked over. But at the opposite end, some trouble had been taken setting up wallboard and pouring a good stretch of concrete floor.

I walked down there, still shuddering from the chill, still trying not to take the unclean odors too deeply into my lungs.

On the far end was where the videos were filmed.

My light played over a bulky black portable generator that would be adequate to run a few lights and a camera. In this same corner was a bed, now mussed. I found streaks of blood on the white satin sheets and splattered across the wall. A pair of handcuffs hung from the brass bedpost. Blood had turned one of the cuffs dark. I touched it. The blood was dry, old.

For Mindy Lane and Betty Roberts, this subterranean room would be much safer than a rented store in Cedar Rapids. There would be nobody here to note the comings and goings of your white Lincoln.

And then I heard it, or thought I did, that faint mewling that had stopped me a few minutes ago when I was walking down to the barn.

What was it? And where was it coming from?

I took a last look around at the room, trying to imagine what it was like for little girls of eight or nine to be dragged down here and forced to perform sex acts. It would scar them, spiritually if not physically.

I went up the ladder, glad to be climbing out of this place.

Up top, I closed everything up, carefully replacing the boards, so that no stray cat or dog would hurt herself by falling down the rabbit hole to the very perverted Wonderland lying below.

And just as I was finishing up, my flashlight lying atop a stall ledge and giving me sufficient light, I heard it again.

Even above the chill rain and the cold soughing wind—that faint cry that I could only liken to the sound of a young animal crying for help. The fog made the sound even fainter.

I took my flashlight and went back outside to see if I could locate the source of the sound.

I got drenched for my trouble, rain even filling my shoes.

Where was it? What was it?

This time, when the tattered solemn plea came again, I turned back and realized that the cry was coming from the barn. Not the main barn I'd just been in but the much smaller and older barn to the east.

I walked down there, stumbling once through the fog on the foundation of some long-gone silo. They were ideal for tripping dumb human beings who didn't take extra care in the fog.

The closer I got, the clearer the sound was, and by now I could recognize it for what it was: a woman screaming and screaming and screaming.

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