The Murder House Read online

“I…pl-please…” Just a whisper now. Her arms give out and she falls prone on the blanket, the music dropping to a low point. Lots of highs and lows with this cello music. Like a roller coaster. Like his stomach feels sometimes.

  Her lips are quivering and her eyes move frantically about. That’s going to be the extent of her physical movements until the drug wears off. By then, it will be too late.

  He puts himself over her, lowers his face to hers. “Don’t be afraid,” he whispers, his voice feeling stronger now. “You can’t…move, but…you’ll still feel.”

  Her trembling lips try to form a word.

  “You’ll feel…everything,” he says.

  54

  HE RESTS his cheek against the concrete wall, sniffing the faint smell of bleach. The chamber is all concrete—floor, walls, ceiling. The acoustics are poor and the lighting is dim; there is no electricity in here and zero sunlight, so he makes do with three kerosene lanterns he has placed strategically. The effect is haunting, the light constantly changing as the small torches flicker inside their containers.

  Is this what it used to look like? He imagines it is. The walls were probably padded in some way back then, and of course there were a cage and a long chain—but otherwise, this seems right.

  “Let me go, mister…I promise I won’t say anything.…”

  Sally: straining in a backward position, suspended in the air like a roasting pig over a fire. Her back arched painfully, her hands cuffed behind her back, her legs bound together likewise, then the hands and feet joined together by yet a third set of cuffs, attached to the chain that loops through a hook in the ceiling and runs to the crank attached to the wall. A crude pulley system. Not so crude, really, in fact quite well constructed and in fair working order, despite decades of nonuse. They don’t make ’em like they used to.

  The metal pole, built into the floor, protruding upward five feet with a steel tip, only two or three feet below Sally’s straining, suspended body, lined up almost precisely with the lowest point of her body, near her belly button, her intestines, allowing gravity to do its work when the time comes.

  He turns the crank one full rotation. Sally’s body free-falls downward a foot or so, the chain shaking but holding. Her head bobs from the impact, but her body hardly moves, bound up as tightly as it is. She lets out a squeal, more animal than human.

  He walks over to her to measure things up, her terrified eyes, in the flickering light, like something primeval. She is so beautiful. Fear is so raw, so pure.

  She tries to wiggle free. Admirable, but useless. She is basically hog-tied in midair, and even if she were somehow able to free herself of the various steel handcuffs—to pull a stunt beyond even Houdini—it would only mean a quicker and more violent death on the spear.

  Maybe that’s what she wants now. Maybe she’s given up. Dede and Annie didn’t. They fought. The prostitute, Barbie, though—she gave up. That was the best, watching her eyes surrender all hope, waiting, praying for the end to come.

  He touches Sally’s face and she snaps her head away violently.

  That wasn’t very nice.

  “Let me down from here, mister, please! I have money!”

  He can’t let her go. He realizes that now.

  I can no longer resist it, any more than I can resist my very existence.

  Shaken, he returns to the wall and grabs hold of the crank.

  There is a monster inside me. It can sleep for days, for months.

  He turns the crank another full rotation.

  But it will never go away.

  It will feast on me, prey on me, until the day I die.

  Book V

  Bridgehampton, 2012

  55

  “YOU SHOULDN’T be doing this,” I say as I walk along the side of the road down Ocean Drive toward the Atlantic, the wind calm and the sun beating down on us.

  “Roger that,” says Ricketts, my rookie companion.

  “I’m a dead-ender,” I tell her. “You know what that is?”

  “I think so. Your career’s hit a wall?”

  “Roger that.” Without realizing it, I find that my stride has slowed as I near the end of the road, as I approach 7 Ocean Drive.

  “Point being, I’ve got nothing to lose,” I explain. “Chief’s going to stick me in one dead end after another until I quit. So I figure I might as well solve a crime or two in my free time. But you, Ricketts? You’ve got a whole career ahead of you.”

  Ricketts is wearing a Red Sox T-shirt with running shorts and Nikes. She has the same build as me, lean and hard, but she gets it from genetics, not from working out like I do. “Dad always said I had an attitude problem.”

  “The Red Sox shirt being one example,” I note.

  I feel my heartbeat escalate, a banging drum against my chest. My breathing tightens up as well.

  “Are you okay, Murphy?”

  I stop and take a breath. Something about this damn house, every time I get close to it. Like my nightmares, only while awake. Put claustrophobia and panic in a bowl and stir for two minutes.

  “I’m fine. Let’s go.” I trudge forward on shaky legs, not eager to share my sob story of scary dreams and panic attacks with the rookie.

  “Why are we going to the house?” she asks me, a welcome question, allowing me to focus on the case, and not on this feeling overcoming me.

  “The hooker, Brittany Halsted,” I say. “He stuck a corkscrew so far inside her it almost came out the other side. Sally Pfiester, that backpacker? He used some kind of spear and drove it almost all the way through her midsection, right?”

  “And somehow managed to drain all the blood out of her body,” Ricketts says. “By the time they found her on an East Hampton beach, she was white as a bedsheet.”

  “Right. And last year, the other prostitute, Bonnie Stamos—impaled on a tree stump. And then my uncle Lang…”

  I can’t bring myself to finish the sentence, but she gets it. The killer drove a heated poker through Lang’s kidney and into the kitchen floor.

  “He likes to do more than just cut them,” says Ricketts. “He likes to stick it in deep. You think maybe this is a sexual thing with him?”

  We stop at the grand wrought-iron gates of 7 Ocean Drive. All at once, it’s like the temperature has been turned up, the loss of breath, the pressure on my chest. I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

  “Jesus, Murphy, are you having a heart attack or something?”

  Something. I shake it off, slide between the gates, and look back at her through the bars. “Nobody invited us here,” I say. “And we’re cops.”

  “Right,” she says.

  “As in, we’re not supposed to do this.”

  “Roger that.”

  “You can turn back now, Ricketts.”

  “I could.”

  “You should turn back now.”

  “I probably should.” She slips through the small space between the gates, joining me on the other side. “But I’m not. I’m going where you’re going. Tell me why we’re at the Murder House.”

  I nod, take another breath, and move up the driveway until it curves off toward the carriage house up the hill. At that point, I take the stone path that, after a healthy hike, will lead to the front door of this grandiose monstrosity of a house.

  “This place always gives me the creeps,” says Ricketts. “It’s like a multiheaded monster. All the different-color limestone, the different rooflines, all those gargoyles and ornamental spears pointed up at the sky.”

  “Yeah, it’s a real fun place.” I divert from the stone path onto the enormous expanse of grass before the slope upward toward the mansion. I stop at the stone fountain with the monument bearing the family crest and inscription. “This is why we’re here,” I say.

  “Because of a fountain?”

  I point at the small stone tablet, the crest featuring the bird with the hooked beak and long tail feather, the circle of tiny daggers surrounding it. “That,” I say. “That fucking bird.”
r />   She doesn’t get the context. She doesn’t know that this miserable little winged creature has been haunting my dreams.

  “Looks like an ordinary bird,” she says, moving closer. “An ugly one. But it looks harmless. Why would you have a little bird like this on your family crest? You’d think it would be a falcon or an eagle or some scary, majestic bird.”

  I’ve spent the last two days researching that animal, trying to identify it among hundreds of species of birds in a catalog. When I matched it up, some things started to make more sense.

  “It’s a shrike,” I say. “A small bird, yes. No large talons, no great wingspan. Not what you’d think of as a bird of prey. You’re right, it looks harmless. But guess how it kills its food?”

  Ricketts looks upward, thinking. “I’m going to use my powers of deductive reasoning and say…it spears them somehow.”

  “Close,” I say. “It impales them.”

  She draws back. “Really?”

  “Really. It scoops up insects, rodents, whatever, and carries them to the nearest sharp point—a thorn, the spikes of a barbed-wire fence, whatever it can find—and shish-kebabs them. Then it tears at them with that hooked beak.”

  Ricketts slowly nods. “Most of our victims suffered some version of impalement.”

  I wag my finger at that monument, the crest and the shrike. “This isn’t a coincidence. Our psychopath has a real hard-on for this family, maybe for this house,” I say. “So I want you to find out everything you can about 7 Ocean Drive. And this note under the crest—Cecilia, O Cecilia / Life was death disguised—find out what that means, too.”

  “I will,” she says, not hiding her excitement. “Right away.”

  “Great. Now it’s time for you to go home, Ricketts.”

  “Why? What are you gonna do?”

  I nod toward the house. “I’m going inside.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No.” I shake my head. “Walking into the yard is one thing. Breaking into the house is another. I don’t want to be responsible for you.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “Get lost—that’s an order,” I say. “Besides, you have a lot of work to do.”

  56

  I HOLD my breath and push open the front door. When I walk in, I immediately feel a weight pressing down on me, my movements slowing, an impossible wave of heat spreading through me.

  Fight through it. You have work to do. So do it!

  I stagger forward, feeling disoriented, light-headed, as if drugged.

  So, so hot, like a fireplace inside my chest.

  The dramatic Old Testament frescoes on the ceiling. The gold-framed portraits of men in formal eighteenth-century dress, mocking me.

  Feeling my oxygen depleting, taking shallow breaths and keeping my chin up, my wits about me, as the childish cackling and taunting echo through my ears.

  Please, don’t make me go there

  Please, don’t do this

  I wanna go home

  The anteroom angling sideways, the lighting in front of me spotty, but I’m not turning back, there’s got to be something here and I’m going to find it—

  Into the foyer, the staircase to the second floor before me, a parlor of some kind to my right, antique furniture and custom molding and chandeliers, an ornate fireplace. I turn toward the parlor but can’t move toward it, as if a gravitational pull is drawing me in the opposite direction, and suddenly I’m staggering to my left instead, nearly losing my balance—

  The dining room. Elaborate carvings on the walls, tall windows with fancy trim, a chandelier hanging over a pentagonal oak table with high-backed chairs. I reach for one of the chairs and grip it as if holding on for my life.

  “I can’t do this,” I whisper, the childish taunts still banging between my ears, drowning out even my own voice. I need to be here, but I can’t be here.

  I push myself off the chair and start across the dining room, headed toward what must be the kitchen, my nerves scattered about, my vision unfocused, oxygen coming as if I’m taking breaths through a straw.

  I draw my sidearm, for no reason that makes sense.

  Get out of here

  Stay and investigate

  My legs finally give out, and I fall to my knees as if in prayer.

  Let me go

  Don’t make me do this

  Someone please help me

  Let me out of here

  I put my hand on the windowsill for support, push myself up with my free hand, my Glock held forward with the other hand, trembling.

  Then I look down.

  On the windowsill, jagged letters carved into the wood.

  DP + AC

  Black spots before my eyes, my body turning, my legs like gelatin, moving in slow motion, like my feet are wading through thick sand, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe—

  Let me out of here

  Bam-bam-bam

  Let me out of here

  Bam-bam-bam

  The ornate patterned tile floor, then my hand on the door, pushing it, pushing it, why won’t it—then turning the handle and pulling, fresh air on my face, sunlight—

  I take a deep, greedy breath of fresh air and slam the door behind me.

  I fall to a knee on the porch and gather myself. I don’t know what just happened, why it always happens, why I’m having these dreams, why it all seems to be getting worse, and suddenly tears are falling off my cheeks, my body is trembling uncontrollably, my breath seizing, and I don’t understand any of this, I don’t know why something inside me seems to be breaking and I don’t know how to stop it.

  I only know one thing I didn’t know before.

  “They were here,” I say to nobody.

  Dede Paris and Annie Church were in this house.

  57

  THE MOTORCYCLE takes a left off the turnpike onto the gravel drive, and I keep driving north, but the first chance I get, I turn left into a side street, do a quick U-turn, and head south. I pull into the parking lot a few minutes later, my car bouncing over the uneven gravel.

  When I push the door open and walk into Tasty’s, Noah Walker is at a corner table, just getting started on a beer. He’s halfway to raising the bottle to his lips when he sees me. I see the hunky, clean-cut owner, Justin Rivers, behind the counter. He gives me a soldier’s salute—kind of dorky; he’s a looker but sort of a nerd—and I nod back.

  “If it isn’t Bridgehampton’s finest,” Noah says, taking a swig as I approach. He wears the grunge look well—T-shirt, cargo shorts, and sandals. Since his hair was cut tight while he was at Sing Sing, he looks less like Matthew McConaughey and more like a muscle-head weight lifter. A thick vein runs along his rippled biceps as he lowers the beer bottle to the table.

  Not that I’m looking at his rippled biceps.

  I stand near his table in the near-empty shack of a restaurant, hands on my hips. “Y’know something, Walker, I can’t decide if you’re the smartest criminal I’ve ever met, or a guy with a lot of really bad luck.”

  He sets down the bottle and finishes his swallow. “Good evening to you, too, Detective.”

  I look around the place. Only two other customers this time of night, past the dinner rush, and they’re at the other end of the shack.

  I drop two photographs on the table, next to his beer. “You know those women?”

  Noah looks at the photos casually at first, then with what looks to me like a glint of recognition in his eyes, and he lifts the photos, peering at them. His eyes drift off them, like he’s recalling something. After a long moment, he looks at me.

  “Why?”

  “It’s a simple question, Noah. If you have nothing to hide, why shouldn’t matter.”

  “They look familiar, but I don’t know why.” He drops the photos back on the table. “Okay?”

  “You’ve worked for years at 7 Ocean Drive,” I say.

  He shakes his head, bemused. “That house again? Yeah, I think everyone in the world knows by now that I did
work on that house.”

  “Those two girls,” I say, “were staying in that house in 2007. They went missing afterward. They were Yale undergrads who came to the Hamptons and were never seen again. Nobody was even looking for them in Bridgehampton, and definitely not in that house. But now we know they were there. So that’s two couples who stayed in that house, two couples dead—”

  “So now you’re accusing me of that, too?” He gets up from his chair, kicking it back violently. “You know something, Detective? I can’t figure you out, either. First you ruin my life by lying on the witness stand and sending me to prison. Then you tell the judge I was framed, and I start to think you might be a human being. And now you’re back accusing me of everything that’s ever happened in this town. I mean, I can’t even have dinner…”

  I narrow my eyes, appraising him. The same read as always—I’m not getting killer from his vibe. I’m not sure what I’m getting.

  He keeps his eyes on me, challenging me, a twinkle of a dare in his eyes. The smell of his sweat coming off him.

  “There’s a lot of coincidences involving you, Noah.” I back away from the table. “But for now, I’ll leave you to your dinner.”

  The other diners in the restaurant, getting a good eyeful, return to their meals as I pass them. I wave to Justin on my way out.

  “Hey,” Noah says as I’m ready to push through the door.

  I turn, and he’s walking up to me.

  He looks me over, works his unshaven jaw.

  Heat across my chest.

  “Lemme ask you something,” he says. “You’re an experienced cop, right? You’ve stared down all sorts of bad people, cold-blooded killers?”

  “I’ve seen my share.”

  “Do I really seem like a killer to you?” He opens his arms, as if to give me a clear view. The thick scarring on his palms, from the crucifixion at Sing Sing.

  That’s been my problem all along. Even when certain evidence points to him, when the facts line up against him—every time I look him in the eye, I just don’t see it. There is anger behind his eyes, and he’s lived rough, no doubt. But is there rage? The capacity for horrific sadism? That mental switch that flips on and allows him to turn into a monster?