The Damerow house.
Melissa edged toward the open door, firearm ready.
She came out from behind her car and navigated the path from the driveway to the house like a predatory cat on the hunt.
It’s your duty, she told herself, but guessed that any other officer would’ve labeled her insane for entering a situation with so many unknowns. After her bizarre phone incident earlier, she wondered if they’d be wrong.
With her back to the outside frame, she paused in the doorway.
Had the prowler remained in the house, or had he already snuck outside?
She glanced toward the vast front yard and frowned at how little she could see of it. Verdant trees lined the far borders of the property, decorative boulders clustered near the walk, and terraced flowerbeds broke up the land’s level surface, totaling dozens of places for someone to hide.
Cursing, she turned away from the night and pivoted in through the entry.
On a good note, the foyer’s design worked to her advantage. A half-wall partition separated the greeting area from the living room, permitting her a fair view of the home’s open forward rooms while providing some protection.
No lights shone in this part of the house, but a vaulted ceiling allowed for the front-facing windows to reach two stories high. The ambient light from outside illuminated a great deal of the room, reflecting off white leather furniture and glass tables like moonlight on freshly fallen snow. In that pallid gloom, Melissa spotted the much darker, two-foot wide discoloration of dried blood that covered one of the couch cushions and part of the floor. Her gaze traced a trail of crimson splashes that led out of the room, toward a hallway entrance on her side of the dining room archway.
She didn’t move to follow the gory trail right off, however. Instead, she remained statue-still, listening for the sound of someone treading across the carpet or releasing a breath from around a corner. She didn’t know how many people could be in the house, or even if the one person she’d seen had stayed in the basement, and she didn’t like the idea of putting her back to an adversary while investigating where the blood went.
Something clattered to the floor in another room. Something metal. Downstairs.
Melissa froze. The prowler was still in the basement.
She moved from her crouched position and hurried to the hallway, crossing the distance with her back against the wall. She peeked around the corner, finding a hallway short enough to see into the four open doors it contained. She spotted a bedroom, a bathroom, a den, and a staircase.
The basement. She knew that’s where she needed to go, but leaving two unchecked floors above her had the same appeal of playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded revolver.
The faint squeak of a hinge issued from below, there and gone, like a swooping bat.
The window, she thought.
With no time to debate, she dodged across the basement entry and flattened herself against the wall, checking the steps with a quick glance. Finding the steps clear, she began her descent with the stealthy grace of a shadow, gun poised for action.
The smell of minerals hung in the air, earthy scents from the concrete walls of the house’s foundation mixed with the odors of bleach and laundry detergent. From where she stood, she spotted a washer and dryer opposite the unlit landing, flanked by clothesbaskets and a double basin scrub sink. A stack of uncompleted wash lay on the floor, but darkness obscured the rest of the room.
She reached the bottom.
Steeling herself, Melissa flipped on a trio of switches she located at the landing and fluorescent light flooded the room.
“Police officer,” she shouted.
She stepped forward with her gun leading the way.
Checking left and right, she discovered the basement encircled the stairwell, making the room all the more advantageous for anyone lurking near the back.
She went left and crept along the lengthy foundation, passing a workbench, boxed belongings, empty picture frames, and an old coffee table due for refinishing. Soon, she found herself standing amongst the heap of defrosted food before the freezer. The machine itself was positioned with its back to a cinderblock foundation wall on the underside of the steps.
On the opposite wall, she spotted the narrow window through which she’d first spotted the hideous face.
It stood open.
She remembered the squeaking-hinge sound. Shit.
Moving faster, she checked the rest of the room to verify it was empty, only finding stacked items patiently awaiting a garage sale. She returned to the freezer area and peered out the open window, guessing it had become the prowler’s escape after he opened the front door to find her at her car.
Melissa glanced to the ceiling, thinking of the other unseen rooms she had yet to inspect. Then she looked at the box freezer.
Someone had fitted the cover with an additional metal fastener, having screwed it in place over the seam of the container’s lid and body. A medium-size padlock dangled from the latch.
In her mind she saw the corpse-like face gazing at her through the window, mouth slack, eyes glazed over.
She knew that tampering with the freezer could destroy valuable evidence. But the bloody handprint not six inches from the lock provoked her into picking up a pry-bar from the workbench and motivated her into breaking it free.
The metal cracked. The door flew open.
And she found her corpse.
Melissa stared at the grisly contents lying inside the box freezer, alternating her gaze between the two bodies in the main storage compartment and the familiar double K symbol drawn in blood on the cover’s inner paneling.
She resisted the desire to close her eyes.
The killer had stacked the Damerow woman on top of what must’ve been her husband, turning the freezer into a frost-lined casket built for two. The fluorescent lighting caused crystalline flakes on her bluish-gray skin to shimmer and take on a luminescent quality. The rigor mortis of her facial features matched the expression Melissa had seen in the window.
Her killer had been here. And gotten away.
“Dammit,” she cried.
She pushed away to run for her car when the lights flickered.
Melissa tensed.
The effect had been minor at first, but when it happened again. This time the whole basement became awash in deep two-dimensional waves of light and darkness. The overhead bulbs didn’t just flicker, they flashed on and off like the emergency strobes of a squad car blinking out of sequence.
Melissa leveled her weapon. She edged to the right, looking to the opposite end of the room.
Where a figure stood by the stairs.
“Freeze,” she shouted, transforming her cry of surprise into a demand. She put the person in her gun sight. “I’m a police officer and I’m armed. Put your hands above your head.”
The lights continued to flash in erratic bursts, shrouding the person in the pulsing display. She couldn’t tell if he—the shape looked like a man—had a weapon or not, but now that she looked for his hands, she noticed his arms hung at his sides, unmoving.
So, who’s working the lights?
The bulbs over the suspect burst, hailing sparks and shards of glass. The suspect instantly vanished in the darkness.
Melissa flinched, her eyes wide.
More bulbs exploded: two went out over the garage sale boxes, three others ruptured from behind her.
She opened her mouth to shout a warning at the person when the sound of crackling glass emanated to her left. She pivoted toward the noise, and two powerful hands clamped down on her shoulders. They pushed her away, shoving her off her feet and into a metal storage shelf.
The impact jarred her to the bone. She spilled to the floor with half the items on the shelves, hearing dozens of things clatter and break.
She slumped to her knees, only to be seized by her clothing and hauled upward again. Her attacker spun her around, hurling her with unimaginable strength into the cinderblock wall opposite the freezer. She hit shoulder-first, saving her from a skull fracture. Bright fairies of light capered across her vision.
She fired her weapon blind, having somehow held onto it, but only wounded the floor.
Something flew out of the flickering darkness and clubbed her arm, striking the gun out of her grasp. She tried to stand and defend herself, but another blow caught her jaw and whirled her back into the wall. Hands of ice clamped down on the back of her neck and the waist of her pants. A frantic scream escaped from her throat, then choked off to a gasp when the attacker lifted her off her feet and over his head, ramming her into the lights. Glass shattered. Jagged metal corners tore through her clothes, raking flesh. Then down she went, body-slammed face-first onto something hard and cold. An icy chill molested her body.
Oh, God. The freezer!
She struggled to get up before another assault caught her in the back. Revulsion gave her the strength to ignore the pain in her limbs and push away from the frozen cadaver, but as she did, the barrel of a gun pressed against the base of her skull.
She went rigid, not moving a muscle. She clenched her eyes shut, saving herself from having to stare into the face of a corpse.
The attacker remained silent and slowly pushed her head down with the gun.
“Don’t do this,” Melissa finally said. Her voice cracked from lack of saliva. When no reprisal followed her remark, she added, “Like I said, I’m a cop. If you let me, I can help you. You’re only making things worse for yourself by doing this.”
“Need you,” a voice replied.
The sound of it spilled into her ears like poison from an assassin’s flask. Her body went rigid, paralyzed with the comprehension that her future now lay in the hands of someone who’d patterned their life after the atrocities of a madman.
“Y-yes,” she answered, choking on her aversion. “I can help—”
But before she could finish, the gun withdrew and the freezer’s lid slammed down over her head, covering her in absolute darkness.
She pushed off the shoulders of the frozen body beneath her, trying to force the freezer’s top open with her back.
The cover wouldn’t budge.
A grating sound penetrated the compartment, first at her feet, then again, closer to her head. It sounded like a power drill… or a screw gun.
He’s sealing me in!
She pushed up again and again, straining every muscle, but the cover wouldn’t give.
Silence enveloped her, broken only by her labored breathing.
She had to stop, had to calm down before she used up all her air.
Her mind hunted for a way to break free, but the more she thought about it, the worse her predicament appeared. She didn’t have her gun, so she couldn’t shoot an air hole through the cover. How long would the air last: ten, fifteen minutes? Sandwiched atop the dead body, with the freezer door at her back, she obviously didn’t have enough leverage to break whatever appliance her attacker had sealed her in with. Her only other hope, her phone, had died. No one would even know she was missing until she failed to show up for work the next morning.
The deepening cold embraced her, triggering a shiver, and she bit down on her lower lip to keep from screaming.
She couldn’t afford to waste the air.