The Buried Read online

  The room wasn’t large, maybe five feet across and six deep, just big enough for the mattress on the floor and the five-gallon paint bucket in the corner. The source of the smell.

  The room appeared unoccupied. He scanned it again, and then lifted up on his toes to look downward through the hole. This allowed him just enough of an angle to see the sliver of a person’s head. The hair was buzzed short so that barely a quarter inch remained.

  The head shook with fear as the person tried to hide from sight.

  “Hey. Are you okay?” When Quinn received no response, he said, “Just sit tight. Everything’s going to be fine. We’re going to get you out of there.”

  No reaction, not even a flinch.

  He let Ananke take a look. When she pulled back, anger had usurped her usual sardonic façade.

  By silent agreement, they moved to the next cell. The layout was identical but the smell was missing, and as far as Quinn could tell, no one was inside.

  He slid the plate open on cell three, and immediately jerked back. A face was looking out, only inches away on the other side.

  “Please, I’ll, I’ll do whatever you want,” the prisoner said, the voice female. “Just let me go home. Please.”

  “No one’s going to hurt you,” Quinn said. “We’ll get you out in a minute.”

  Her brow creased, and then she took a step away from the door, revealing not only that her hair was cut short but that she wasn’t wearing anything. “Who are you?” She sounded even more scared than she had a moment before. “Where’s Mr. Black? I want to talk to Mr. Black.” She moved deeper into her room, her terror growing. “Where is he?”

  “We’re going to help you,” Quinn said.

  “Where’s Mr. Black?”

  Quinn’s words were doing nothing to calm her, so he moved on.

  “Jesus,” Ananke whispered. “What the hell did he do to them?”

  Cell four held another prisoner, also a woman, shorn and unclothed. But instead of hiding or begging, she sat on her mattress staring at Quinn. While there was a hint of fear in her eyes, she looked mostly defiant.

  He decided not to engage her just yet and moved on to number five. Like cell number two, it was empty.

  The occupant of the final cell was lying on her bed under a blanket. She looked asleep, but intertwined with the ever-present odor of waste was another smell that told Quinn otherwise. Tangy and metallic—blood, and lots of it. If she wasn’t dead yet, she was well on her way.

  He dropped quickly to a knee and examined the lock. It was a specialized piece that required a key that could move through a serpentine set of tumblers. He’d seen a few similar to it and knew it was impossible to pick with the tools they had at hand.

  A bit of explosive would take care of it, but that would risk further injury to the captive.

  “Did you see any keys when you were looking through the lockers?” he asked Ananke.

  “No.”

  He hadn’t, either.

  “Wait here.” He sprinted through the secret basement and up the stairs into the garage.

  “So?” Nate asked. “Any hidden treasure?”

  Quinn said, “Did you see any keys?”

  Nate had worked with Quinn long enough to know when things were serious. “The dresser. Top drawer.”

  Quinn raced up to the second floor and found a ring with a couple dozen keys right where his partner said they’d be. They were all from the same manufacturer of the padlocks on the lockers. None, however, would work on the cell doors.

  He stuffed them in his pocket and hunted through the other drawers, not worrying about the mess he was making, but he found nothing.

  Back downstairs, he ran into the kitchen and was about to shout for Nate to help him search when he noticed the rack next to the garage door. It had vertical slots for mail, and at the bottom a tray with several keys in it.

  He rifled through them, pushing aside keys for the car and the motorcycle and a set he guessed was for the house, until he spotted a key caged in a metal frame. When pushed into the right kind of lock, the key would emerge from the frame in tiny sections so that it could bend through a set of curving tumblers, exactly like the cell locks.

  He snatched it and ran into the garage. As he hurried onto the stairs, he said to Nate, “Come with me. We’re going to need your help.”

  Ananke was looking through the viewing hole of cell number six, but moved out of the way the moment she saw them.

  Quinn unlocked the door, and then used the viewing hole as a handle to swing it out.

  He rushed in, yanked the blanket off the woman, and rolled her onto her back, but he was too late. By an hour, if not more.

  The portion of the mattress she’d been lying on was soaked with blood from two jagged cuts on her wrists. The tool she had used lay near where her right hand had been before they’d moved her. It was an inch-and-a-half-long chunk of concrete sharpened to a dull point. Scratches next to the cuts indicated it had taken the woman several tries to do the job.

  “God, if she could have just waited a little longer,” Ananke said, her voice a pained whisper.

  A million different emotions churned through Quinn, but he kept them all in check and headed out of the cell.

  “Do…do I get the plastic?” Nate asked.

  “No,” Quinn grunted.

  He opened cell one next. The woman inside jumped back, confused and frightened, as the door swung wide.

  Quinn touched Ananke on the arm and motioned with his eyes for her to take the lead.

  “This isn’t my kind of thing,” she whispered.

  “It’s not like it’s ours, either,” Quinn said.

  “I wouldn’t even know what to say.”

  He frowned. “If you’re not going to help, then go into the other room and make sure no one comes down.”

  “Just what I was thinking.” Ananke left the hallway.

  Quinn turned his attention back to the cell. He made a quick examination of the woman for any weapons, but her hands were empty and she was wearing no clothes to hide anything in. “You can come out.”

  The woman pressed herself against the back wall. “You’re the ones who’ve come to take us away, aren’t you? The ones Mr. Black told us about.”

  “Tell me, is Mr. Black a short, skinny guy, losing his hair?” Quinn asked.

  The look in her eyes confirmed that Mr. Black was Edmondson.

  “I don’t work for or with Mr. Black,” he told her. “But I can tell you he’s not going to be bothering you anymore. The only place you’ll be going from here is home.”

  She didn’t move.

  “How about this?” he said. “We’ll leave the door open. Come out when you’re ready. No one’s going to force you to do anything.”

  He nodded for Nate to follow him to cell three.

  As he opened that door, the woman inside rushed out. He braced himself, thinking she would try to tackle him, but instead she dropped to her knees and threw her arms around his waist.

  “Please! I’ll do anything. Please just—”

  He peeled her arms off and pulled her to her feet. “No one’s going to do anything to you. Whatever was going on here is over. You won’t be seeing Mr. Black again.”

  In her eyes, he could see she was having a hard time processing this.

  “Get her some clothes,” he said to Nate.

  “From where?”

  Quinn nodded back toward the large room. “Ask Ananke. She’ll show you where to find them.”

  As Nate escorted the woman into the other room, the captive in cell one yelled, “Don’t listen to them! They’re going to take you away like the others.”

  Quinn headed over to cell four and looked through the window. The prisoner was still sitting on the mattress. Instead of glaring at him, though, she was now staring at the opposite wall. He unlocked the door and opened it.

  Without looking at him, she said, “What do you want?”

  “I don’t want anything. I’m just letti
ng you out.”

  “I heard what you told the others. I know you’re lying. You’re not here to rescue us.”

  Technically, she was right. They were here to deal with Edmondson’s termination, not to act as liberators of the man’s…whatever this was.

  “We have zero interest in harming you,” he said. “We didn’t even know you were here until a few minutes ago.”

  She looked at him and sneered. “So I just follow you out?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “Like I really have a choice.” She pushed to her feet and started to cover her chest, but then dropped her arm as if she wasn’t going to let her nakedness embarrass her.

  She wasn’t like the other two. She still had fight in her. Either she was a new arrival and hadn’t been beaten down yet or was stronger than her prison mates.

  When she reached the door, she held her wrists out, hands clasped together. Quinn didn’t move.

  “No cuffs?” she asked.

  “I told you, we’re here to free you.”

  Another grunt. “All right, then. What now?”

  “Now we get you something to wear.”

  He purposefully went first so that his back was to her, putting her in a position of control and hoping it would gain him a little trust. When they reached the larger room, he saw that the other woman was already wearing a shirt and was pulling on a pair of pants.

  “What size are you?” Quinn asked the woman from cell four.

  She looked over at the open cabinets full of clothes. “I don’t want any of those. I want mine.”

  “I have no idea where yours are.”

  She nodded toward the other end of the room. “In the lockers. Mine’s number seventeen.”

  Quinn pulled out the keys and opened the indicated locker. Inside were a pair of jeans, a long-sleeve dark brown T-shirt, a maroon hoodie, panties, bra, ankle socks, and a pair of sneakers. Sitting at the bottom was an empty messenger bag, the few items that had apparently been inside sealed in a clear plastic bag lying next to it.

  “Yours?” he asked the woman.

  She nodded.

  “Are the other lockers the same?”

  “How should I know?” she said. A pause. “Can I get dressed now? Or are you still enjoying the view?”

  “Sorry.” He’d been lost in thought, wondering about the other lockers.

  He moved to the one next to hers and opened it. A single set of clothes and some personal items. He tried another. Same.

  Like trophy cases, he thought, sickened.

  Twenty-three of the thirty lockers were secured. If four belonged to the women he and Ananke found, that left nineteen unclaimed. He tried not to think what that meant, but failed.

  This was way beyond his contractual obligation.

  Wanting to have as much information as he could before contacting Helen, he took cell four’s wallet from her personal items while she had her back to him, and then hunted through the next few lockers for more intel.

  As he opened another one, the girl from cell three said, “That’s my shirt!”

  Quinn pulled her clothes out and tossed them to her, and then added her ID to the others he’d taken. He had five now and decided that was enough.

  “Please help these ladies with anything they might need,” he said to Nate and Ananke. “I’ll be right back.”

  “What I need is to go home,” the woman from cell three said.

  “That’s what I’m working on,” Quinn told her.

  He went up to the garage and pulled out his phone, but hesitated before dialing. He needed guidance from Helen, but he also needed to let Orlando know what was going on. In fact, it would be best to have her on the line when he talked to their client.

  The phone rang five times before Orlando answered. “What?” she asked in a whisper. He could hear other noises—music and amplified voices.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Hold on,” she said.

  For the next several seconds, he could hear the muffled sound of movement.

  When she spoke again, the music and other voices were gone and she was no longer whispering. “Okay, I can talk now.”

  “Where are you?” he asked again.

  “I’m at the movies.”

  “It’s almost midnight. You should be in bed,” he said.

  “I couldn’t sleep, all right? We need to get a new mattress. Our bed is horrible. I can’t get comfortable.”

  “The mattress is fine.”

  “Well, then, you get fat and sleep on it.”

  “You’re not fat.”

  “You obviously haven’t looked at me in a while. But who could blame you?”

  Pregnancy was getting in the way of Orlando’s usually active life. Thankfully, it would be over soon.

  “Why are you calling?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “You might say that.”

  “Dammit. It was Ananke, wasn’t it? She screwed something up.”

  “The termination went fine. The body’s wrapped and ready to go.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “We, uh, found, I don’t know, a dungeon, I guess.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He described Edmondson’s secret basement and the women they had found down there.

  “Holy crap.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Do you know who they are?”

  “I grabbed a few IDs.” He started to read off the names but Orlando stopped him.

  “Let’s get Helen on the line first. She’s going to love this. Hold on.”

  Thirty seconds later, the night officer at Helen’s office transferred their call to his boss’s home.

  “I’ve got Quinn on with me,” Orlando said when Helen came on.

  “Problems?” their client asked.

  “Yes, but not what you think,” Quinn said.

  He explained how the mission had gone, what they had found, and then read off the names on the IDs: Laurie Wright, Vanessa Holland, Kelly Blackwood, Marsha Venton, and Danielle Chad. The last two were the women from cells three and four, respectively. “I need to know how you want us to handle this,” he said when he finished.

  Helen was silent for a moment before saying, “Give me ten minutes. I’d like to know a little about who you’ve found before making any decision. Can you shoot me photos from the IDs so I can check them against official records?”

  “No problem.”

  “Thanks. I’ll get back to you as quickly as I can,” Helen said and hung up.

  “Copy me on the photos and I’ll see what I can find out on my end,” Orlando said to Quinn. “If Helen calls you back directly, make sure you get me on the line.”

  CHAPTER 5

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  THE MOMENT THE photos arrived, Helen logged into her agency’s system and navigated to the information interface. The module would not only search her group’s database, but also cull information from other US intelligence and law enforcement organizations.

  She typed in the five names Quinn had given her, set the parameters for a basic search so that it would be quicker, and clicked the ENTER button.

  She received the results for the first four women within minutes. Wright, Holland, Blackwood, and Venton all matched the IDs Quinn had obtained. Each had been reported missing within the last month from different locations, all within a three-hundred-mile radius of Seattle.

  None of the cases were getting much attention, however. The four women were recovering addicts of one type or another, and law enforcement officials in charge of each case seemed to think the person they were looking for had probably fallen back into her addiction and would turn up eventually, either stoned or dead. Because of this and the distances between the cases, no connections had been made to reveal a pattern.

  Helen had started to assume Danielle Chad was a similar case that just hadn’t been reported yet when her computer spit out a response:

  DANIELLE CHAD: A&D/Alpha One


  A&D—apprehend and detain, in this case with the highest priority. It had been routed through the NSA, but could have originated from any of a dozen or more other agencies. Usually some basic information about the individual would come with such an order, even an alpha one, but the only other item was a link to a contact. When she clicked on it, she was presented with a screen telling her that remote access to the requested information was restricted.

  She spent several minutes searching other databases for anything she could find about Danielle Chad but came up with nothing.

  It looked like she wouldn’t learn anything until she went into the office.

  But that could wait for now. She was already late getting back to Quinn.

  __________

  THE MOMENT ORLANDO hung up with Quinn, she arranged through an app service for a car to pick her up right away. By the time she reached the street and removed her laptop from her backpack, her ride pulled to the curb. She gave the driver her address and settled into the backseat.

  Using the information from the IDs, she conducted a similar search to the one Helen was doing on the other side of town. Her results for the first four women were basically the same. When it came to Danielle Chad, all her normal sources returned nothing.

  Orlando then did a general search on the woman’s name. She received several hits but none matched the age and description of the woman Quinn had found.

  There was only one other thing she could do. After cropping the woman’s photo out of the ID, she uploaded it into her web-based facial recognition interface and hit START. There was no telling when, or if, it would kick back any results, so she closed her computer and put it away.

  She squirmed in her seat, trying to alleviate some of the aches she was feeling. When that didn’t work, she twisted to the side so she could rub the base of her spine. She couldn’t remember having this much back pain when she’d been pregnant with her son Garrett twelve years before.

  Barely five feet tall, Orlando’s pre-baby weight had always hovered around ninety-four pounds. Her little passenger had added over twenty percent to that, rocketing her to—at last check—what she considered a hefty one hundred and fourteen.