“Will we be, like, in handcuffs or something?” Jack asked.
“No handcuffs,” Tom said, “and you will not be in custody, because I’m a man of my word. If my officers find evidence that later suggests there was some connection between you and the victim, then all bets are off. Should that happen—should you become an actual suspect—that’s when investigators will be required to read you your rights. In the meantime your mother is correct. Nothing you have said in this office today and nothing you say in a car tomorrow can be used against you in a court of law. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But if you renege on your part of the deal and don’t take my investigators back to the place where you found this—”
“Believe me,” June Carver interrupted. “Jack will keep his end of the bargain. I’ll see to it.”
“I’m sure you will,” Tom Hadlock replied.
That’s what the acting sheriff said aloud, but his thoughts were elsewhere. It occurred to him that if Jack Carver ever did make it into the military, basic training would be a breeze. The poor kid had been raised by a drill sergeant and didn’t even know it.
Chapter 5
LATISHA MARCUM AWAKENED TO DARKNESS AND TO THE BLESSING of absolute silence. Even in her sleep, she had been haunted by the quiet thumping that she’d at first mistaken as the sound of an approaching thunderstorm and by the faint scratchings that she had assumed to be the plague of a new generation of rats. It wasn’t until the next day that she learned the awful truth.
The day before, the Boss had come downstairs and selected Amelia as his current choice of amusement. While he used the key from his pocket to unlock the chain around the girl’s thin ankle, Latisha had lain on her own filthy mattress, fully awake under her blanket but feigning sleep and all the while uttering a silent prayer of gratitude that he’d chosen Amelia instead of her.
Latisha had gone upstairs on numerous occasions, and she knew exactly what went on. First she heard the water running in the old claw-foot bathtub overhead. When he took one of the girls upstairs with him, that’s what he always demanded first—that she bathe. He wanted them to be clean. Afterward they were required to do whatever he wanted. If they did well, they were rewarded by being brought back downstairs and clamped back into their chains. On occasion, presumably when they didn’t do well, they didn’t return.
So when Latisha heard the water running, she knew what that felt like—wanting desperately to be clean instead of filthy but knowing that the price of that bath was what would come later. It was what Lyle, her stepfather, would have called “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
To her surprise, however, while the water was still running in the bathroom upstairs, the basement door banged open, the bare bulb came back on again, and planks of the stairway groaned under the weight of the Boss’s lumbering tread. Thinking he was coming for her, too, Latisha shrank beneath her blanket. When she didn’t feel his hand on her ankle, she peered out from under the edge.
He seemed to be doing something at the bottom of the stairway. She heard a rustling sound and a series of thuds, as if something heavy were falling against something else. At last the lid of the freezer slammed shut. Moments later he slung two bulky and seemingly weighty garbage bags over his shoulder and marched back upstairs.
It seemed like an odd time to decide to empty a freezer. The old appliance had been there all along. Often, in the long silences of the night, the sound of the freezer compressor switching on and switching off was the only thing to be heard in the darkened dungeon. But until now the Boss had never taken anything out of it, at least not to Latisha’s knowledge.
After a while the awful sounds resumed upstairs. The bath was over now, and Latisha knew what came next. It was all a game to him, starting slowly enough before escalating into the frenzied sounds of bare fists hammering on yielding flesh. There would be shouts of unspeakable demands followed by first cries and later whimpers of pain. Finally the unmistakable squealing of the box springs of the old double bed in one corner of the room and the thudding as the iron bed frame pounded the wall would indicate that the session was at last coming to its soul-shattering conclusion.
To keep from listening, Latisha threw off her single blanket and rose from her filthy mattress. Then, taking her tin drinking cup with her, she limped her way through the gloom, as far as her chain would stretch, to the concrete slab in the back corner where the surprisingly modern toilet had been installed. A row of three thick glass blocks near the top of the outside wall just over the toilet allowed a tiny bit of light into this one section of the basement during daytime hours. Now, though, as the sun set outside, the gloom inside the dungeon was thickening. Soon the basement prison would once again be cloaked in total darkness.
Latisha knew she was weak and getting weaker. It took all her strength to pry the lid off the flushing tank so she could fill her cup with water. She set the lid on top of the toilet and somehow managed to keep it balanced there while she gulped down three cups of water. Early on she had asked the other two prisoners in the room why they couldn’t just leave the lid off to begin with. Wouldn’t that be easier?
“We tried that once,” Sandra had explained. “The next day there was a drowned rat floating in the flushing tank.”
Latisha hadn’t wanted to drink the water at all after that, but by then the dead rat was long gone, and besides, she didn’t have a choice. It was either drink the water from the tank or die of thirst.
Still trying to shut out whatever was happening upstairs, Latisha limped back to her mattress. The clamp around her ankle was too tight, and the flesh underneath had been rubbed raw. She used some of the precious water from her cup to try to clean the wound. She didn’t want to develop some kind of terrible infection and die, because Latisha Marcum didn’t want to die. She wanted to live.
Once again in her corner of the room, she sank down onto the mattress. It was full-on dark now. She felt around blindly until she located the covered plastic storage container that held her food. Back home her mother had always kept the fridge stocked with Ziploc containers, all of them full of leftovers. Here the covered dishes were necessary for the same reason the toilet tank had to be closed—to keep the rats out.
Latisha pried off the plastic lid, plucked out a single piece of kibble, and put it into her mouth. Even now she had to fight back the impulse to gag. Dog kibble wasn’t supposed to be suitable for humans. It tasted horrible. Eating it often left Latisha with agonizing stomach cramps and painfully difficult bowel movements, to say nothing of at least one broken tooth, one that ached constantly now and made it impossible for her to chew on the right side of her mouth. All that aside, though, there was enough nourishment in the dog food to keep her alive, and that was what Latisha had decided. No matter what, she would live. Somehow she would live.
She’d been sitting there slowly chewing on a piece of kibble when, after a period of relative quiet, things upstairs had suddenly gotten much worse. First she heard a dull thud, as though someone had fallen to the floor. Then, without warning, the door at the top of the stairs opened once more. As the single bare bulb dangling in the middle of the room flashed on, Latisha did the same thing Sadie and Sandy had done. She covered her face with her blanket and lay there waiting to hear the sound of the clamp being fastened around Amelia’s ankle—waiting for him to leave.