2 minutes 25 seconds.
The dark cellar drank up the light of the single bulb, leaving most of the basement wrapped in thick shadows. I turned on my flashlight.
The air down here was noticeably cooler than the air in the rest of the house.
It reminded me of a cave.
The heavy support beams buried in the dirt floor had long ago started to sway under the weight of the house, giving the illusion that the entire house might collapse at any moment. The middle of the cellar contained a tumble of cardboard boxes and dead furniture. An old mountain bike, a pair of skis, and a torn backpack leaned against the stack. A workbench sat in the right-hand corner of the cellar under a pegboard covered with screwdrivers, hammers, wrenches, ragged handsaws, and chisels. He might be a carpenter. Or the tools might be for something else. Have those checked for blood. Hair. Prints.
I turned. On my left, a metal bookshelf leaned against the far wall of the cellar. Even in the dim light I could tell it held textbooks on journalism and English composition, long ago relegated to the basement. He’s a journalist, a writer. A lover of words. He can’t part with his old books even if he knows he’ll never read them again.
Above the bookshelf near the ceiling was the small recessed window I’d seen earlier. It was covered with grime. I doubted it had ever been opened.
“Jolene?” I called as gently as I could, hoping not to scare her if she was here and hurt. “Are you here? My name is Patrick. I’m here to help.”
Walking into his lair like this made me uneasy. The house groaned, settling onto its foundation, accepting Ralph’s weight on the floorboards above me. I steadied my gun and swung the flashlight beam around the perimeter of the cellar, passing the circle of light across the wall.
As I moved through the cellar, I realized that there weren’t any spiderwebs lacing across my face even though I noticed spiders skittering across the workbench.
Someone had been down here recently.
“Are you here?” I called. I scanned the walls for evidence of hidden doors or rooms. I listened for a muffled cry, scratching sounds, sobbing, anything to tell me she was here and still alive.
The dirt floor didn’t look disturbed. I scanned the room again, walked the perimeter again. The cellar had been cut out of the mountain, and the walls were built with river rock. I inspected the cracks between them but couldn’t find any sign of a hidden room or passageway.
There’s got to be something here. Something I’m missing. As I looked around, my eyes landed on the workbench.
I walked over to it and trained the flashlight beam on the work space. Pliers. Hammers. Hacksaws. Any of them could be very handy for a sadistic serial killer. Some lay on the workbench, others were hanging from the pegboard, but none of them appeared either bloodstained or freshly cleaned.
Then I noticed an outline on the pegboard where the dust wasn’t as thick.
Something’s missing. Something was hanging there.
I traced the shape with the tip of my finger.
A saw.
Suddenly his words from last night came back to me: “Forget the girl. It’s too late for her… I saw her first…”
He’d actually told me, “I saw her first.”
Dear God, no.
Just then I caught a flutter of movement out of the corner of my eye, and I spun around, leveling my gun. A scraggly cat jumped down from the top of the bookshelf and scurried up the stairs with an annoyed purr. I took a deep breath to calm myself and listened in the wake of the cat’s exit for any sounds, anything at all.
“Jolene?”
As I watched the cat leave, I noticed a woodstove in the corner of the cellar, probably left over from the days when burning wood was the only source of heat for a house out here halfway up a mountainside.
I didn’t want to look inside it, but I knew I had to. Over the years I’d seen lots of ways offenders try to dispose of bodies.
A woodstove was one of them.
I crossed the dingy cellar in half a dozen quick strides and held my hand out to see if the stove was still warm.
It was.
I took a deep breath, nearly choking on the thick, pungent air of Grolin’s cellar.
I slid the gun into my holster and wrapped the tail of my shirt around my hand. Then I grabbed the stove handle and gave it a firm twist. It snapped up with a click, and the stove’s door popped open.
A soft hot glow poured out of the opening. He’d been burning something down here. A pile of embers burst into flame with the sudden rush of air.
Bracing myself for the smell of burnt flesh, I leaned over and peered inside.