Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги без регистрации txt) 📗

Laura crouched down, looking over to see that both Redbone and Oliver were in position. She caught Oliver’s eye and nodded toward the gun on his hip. He sighed heavily and drew his weapon. Redbone checked the radio to make sure Descartes was stationed at the back door.

The radio crackled. He was in position.

Redbone tested the knob on the door. Locked. He nodded to Oliver, who re-holstered his weapon, retrieved the crowbar, and bashed the lock with repeated blows. The door creaked open a couple of inches.

This time when Oliver threw the crowbar, it nearly took out Laura’s foot. He caught her look and had the grace to look sheepish. He again withdrew his weapon, but held it loosely at his side, pointed down and dangling a little behind his leg.

She thought: I hope his complacency doesn’t catch up with him someday.

She dropped into a crouch. Looked at Oliver again. He assumed a crouching position and raised his gun. Redbone remained standing, aiming his weapon toward the left. Laura shouted, “Police! Search Warrant!” and shoved the door the rest of the way open, swinging back and forth into the dark, her weapon leveled on empty air.

37

The word that came to her was “surreal”. As if she were in the middle of a snow globe, but the snow was the dust motes that floated in the golden light from the open doorway. Glittering snowflakes falling across the jumping beam of her MagLite.

It floated out of the darkness at her, this strange, cluttered room. Too much to assimilate right now. She didn’t have time.

“Clear!” she called as she ducked into the doorway to her left. Another light—Redbone’s—jumped into the darkness, a weak ray. She was in the kitchen. Counter, sink, refrigerator—

“Kitchen is clear!”

Her flashlight swung in the other direction as Laura heard Oliver scrambling toward the doorway on the other side.

“Bedroom is clear!” Oliver shouted.

They went through the house, systematically clearing every room. Laura saw things that she did not expect to see, but it was so dark she would reserve judgment until they could get light on the situation. They returned to the first room, the living room.

Despite her wariness, respiration was beginning to return to normal. They’d checked every closet, every alcove. No one home.

The place smelled stale.

Oliver holstered his weapon and stretched his neck as Andrew Descartes entered through the front door. Jerry Oliver would not be punished for his inattention today.

 “Let’s get some light in here,” Laura said. “Get the rest of that plywood off.”

38

Once the plywood was off, there was enough light to search some of the rooms, but not all. Redbone got on the horn and made arrangements for a gas-powered generator and a pair of 500-watt quartz lamps from the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department.

There was enough light, though, for Laura to think she had stepped inside an old photograph of a Victorian house—something you’d see in a history book.

The front room—the parlor—seemed to press in on her. A stamped tin ceiling, an old-fashioned chandelier, dark furniture, burgundy velvet drapes swagged to reveal immaculate white lace. Everything fringed, shirred, swagged, or flocked. The wallpaper was dark, the floor dominated by a large oriental carpet. Oval portraits on the walls in old, convex glass. Bric-a-brac everywhere: china cabinet, ottoman, settee, footstools—

So much of it.

Ottoman, settee … Words people didn’t use anymore: A room out of the nineteenth century. The operative word here was fussy.

“Good Lord Jesus,” muttered Redbone. “It looks like a museum.”

Laura’s attention was caught by a sewing machine, modern vintage, on a table. Another sewing machine that looked exactly like the first one except smaller—a child’s machine?—sat on a shorter table.

Laura’s throat felt dry as her latexed hand pulled open the many drawers and searched alcoves neatly stacked with patterns, thread spools, bobbins, measuring tapes.

Him and his mom, sewing together in the good old days?

But it still confused her.

This room confused her.

A Bible stand in the corner of the room, old and well-used. On the inside it said, “This Bible belongs to Alene Davis.”

His mother’s maiden name.

This room had a surreal quality, as if all she had to do was close her eyes and when she opened them again she’d see an abandoned house with plywood windows and cracking plaster.

She ran an index finger across an oval rosewood table. Dust. Several layers. But other than that, the place was clean. The dust was the only sign that Lundy had not been here for a long time. Everything was neatly displayed, a tableau.

A shrine?

She bent to look at the underside of the rosewood table: Ethan Allen—the store.

Not an antique then. An approximation of an antique.

She flashed her light on the ceiling. It might have been stamped tin, or plastic made to look like stamped tin.

Watching where she walked, Laura went down the hall.

She looked in on a bedroom. It, too, looked frozen in time. A single bed with lace and eyelet Victorian linens, a down comforter, heaps of satin pillows. A wooden rocking horse. Enormous dry flower arrangements in tall vases. Dolls on a window seat.

A little girl’s room, but Dale Lundy was an only child.

Onward, farther down the hall.

A boy’s room. This one had Darth Vader sheets and posters from the seventies. A hooked rug on polished floorboards. Cowboy-and-Indian wallpaper, cornflower blue.

Dark in here. On an impulse, Laura walked to the window. Carefully, she moved aside the cowboy-and-Indian-patterned drapes with her latexed hands. She was right. Black-out curtains.

He’d used plywood to cover up the windows, but he’d added black-out curtains as well. Why? It was as if this house had to remain a secret. As if it embarrassed him in some way. Maybe the kids at school had called him a mama’s boy.

But he had been home-schooled—isolated from other kids.

Lonely?

At the end of the hall was what Laura assumed was the master bedroom.

She opened the door.

From every wall, Marisa de Seroux stared down at her.

Eight-by-tens, four-by-fives. Posters, blown up and fuzzy. Photo after photo after photo, a collage from floor to ceiling. Mostly black and white. All of the same girl. Most of them candid shots, where the girl wasn’t posing or even looking at the camera. Many of them had been blown up to catch her face. But the majority of them were good, professional quality. Taken with a telephoto lens, pictures of the girl, unaware, going about her life in the small town of Apalachicola. As if she were being followed around by paparazzi.

The photos were cracked in places, as if they had curled up at one point and then been flattened again and again, glued in place.

She called Chief Redbone in.

“What does this look like to you?”

“I’ll be damned. He sure had a thing for her, didn’t he?”

“So this is definitely Marisa de Seroux?”

“Oh, I’d say so. That’s Misty.”

“Misty?”

“That’s what everyone knew her by.”

Laura walked to the first wall. “She didn’t know he was taking them.”

“This makes no sense.”

“Maybe it does. It looks to me like he was obsessed with her." Enough to come back to town and pretend he was a member of her family? She had seen stranger things in her career.

She inhaled. It was musty in here; the place had been closed up for a long time.

“Hey, look at that." Chief Redbone motioned to a shelf crammed with books. “That one on the end. Looks like a scrapbook.”

She walked over to the shelf and gently lifted out the scrapbook. More dust, like a blanket. The scrapbook was a cheap one he must have gotten from a drug store. It had a bright yellow sunflower on the front.