No alarm.
Weapon and flashlight in hand, Hunter pulled the door open and finally entered the house.
Sixty-Six
Hunter had been right – the glass-panel door led into a large but relatively empty utilities room. From outside the house, before stepping into the room, Hunter checked the ceiling corners for motion monitors – there were none. He quickly crossed the room to get to the door on the other side, just past a stack of empty cardboard boxes. This new door was made of solid wood – no glass panels. Hunter put his ear against the door and listened for a moment – no sound. He tried the handle – unlocked.
The next room along was the kitchen, which was impressively large, with an asymmetrically designed, black-and-white-checkered floor and plenty of cupboards, both high and low. Once again, before stepping into the room, Hunter checked the ceiling corners for motion monitors and, once again, he found none. The kitchen smelled clean. There was no smell of cooked food, or anything gone out of date.
On the dish rack, Hunter could see only one plate, one glass and one set of cutlery.
The door at the other end of the kitchen was already open – no light beyond it. Hunter got to it and paused, listening from its edge for any sounds coming from the next room, or from deeper inside the house. He got nothing but stillness and silence. No motion monitors again.
The door led into a dining room, with a small four-seater table,a tall, glass-door display unit, an empty drinks cart and not much else. The window on its west wall was one of the two windows at the front of the house. Once again, Hunter cleared the room quickly to get to the next door, to the right of the drinks cart. This door was closed. He placed his ear against it and listened for several long seconds. He couldn’t hear a sound. He tried the handle – unlocked.
The dining room linked directly to a sparsely furnished living room, which made the room seem even larger than it already was.
No motion monitors either.
Hunter stepped into the room and allowed his eyes to carefully sweep the space… the shadows… the corners… the hiding spots… for signs of someone else there. He found none. On the east wall, just behind a three-seater sofa, there was a set of French doors that opened onto the back garden and the pool area. The pool was completely empty of water and there didn’t seem to be a pool house, or a utilities shed, anywhere. From the sofa, looking back into the room, Hunter could see three doors. The one to his left was the door that he had come in through from the dining room. The door in front of him was already open and he could see that it would take him to the house’s entry lobby and give him access to the staircase, leading to the top floor. The door to his right was closed. He tried that one next.
Ear to the door – not a peep.
Door handle – unlocked.
Ceiling corners – no motion monitors.
Hunter stepped into a comfortable office/study room, with a desk that faced a window on the south wall. On the desk, Hunter could see an impressive computer setup, with a triple-monitor.
Hunter walked up to the computer on the desk and pressed down on the space-bar key. All three monitors came alive, displaying different graphics and stock charts – not CCTV camera footage – which was what Hunter was hoping for.
The window on the west wall was the second front-of-the-house window. The other two walls were lined from top to bottom with books in computer programming, economics and trading, and medicine.
Hunter was about to move back into the living room and go try his luck upstairs when he paused… something about that house didn’t feel quite right.
Murderers who abducted their victims so they could torture them for days before taking their lives needed a place to do exactly that – keep their victims captive while torturing them for days – and Hunter knew from experience that those types of murderers didn’t do that in their bedrooms, regardless of them living alone or not. This killer had probably been taking victims into captivity for years, maybe even decades. From what they’d gathered so far, he was organized and meticulous. Someone like that would have at least a secure room… a room from which his victims would have no chance of escaping… a room in which he could torture them to his heart’s content and no one would be able to hear a sound. Such rooms were almost always created either underground or on the ground floor. They rarely existed on higher levels due to logistics.
Sure, Hunter also knew that in the majority of cases where such rooms were found, they existed in remote locations – a cabin in the woods, a hut high on the mountains, a bunker hidden in a forest, a disused warehouse on the outskirts of a town… somewhere isolated enough to give the perp some peace of mind based solely on location. And of course Hunter knew that that could be where this killer was keeping Garcia. But Hunter had to work with what he had, and what he had was the photo in Garcia’s cellphone – the black Dodge RAM 3500 that was parked in the garage just outside.
The logical assumption was that that had been the same pickup truck that the perp had used to transport Garcia from the schoolparking lot, where he was rendered unconscious, to wherever he was being held captive. If Garcia was being held at any other isolated location, how come the 3500 pickup truck was parked in the garage?
Hunterhadto work with what he had, and what he had was a horrible gut feeling that he was missing something, and whatever it was that he was missing wouldn’t be upstairs. So, in his mind, that left him with only one option – a secret room somewhere.
Since there was no pool house or utilities shed in the house’s backyard, Hunter figured that if that house hid a secret room, it would be inside – either behind a wall, or under it – not outside.
Two of the walls in the room that he was in had windows, so they were automatically discarded. The other two were lined from top to bottom with books – very possible – but the east wall, the one with the smaller of the two bookcases, also had the door that he had come in through from the living room. There was no secret room behind that wall. That, once again, left Hunter with only one possibility – the bookcase against the north wall. He approached it and immediately saw a problem – the bookcase wasn’t built into the wall. It was built from wooden modules – the build-it-yourself type – probably purchased from some flat-pack, DIY store. Those weren’t the type of bookshelves that could hide a Murphy door.
That was when it dawned on Hunter.
The oddly designed kitchen floor.
The kitchen floor resembled a typical, old-style, Italian, black-and-white checkered floor, but its squares were asymmetric – not only in size, but in orientation as well – creating an almost psychedelic effect. Why would anyone want a psychedelic floor in their kitchen?
To hide a trapdoor.That was the first answer that came to Hunter’s mind.
He quickly made his way back through the house and into the kitchen.
In there, he stood still for a long while, listening as carefully as he could, while his eyes attentively followed the beam of his flashlight on the floor, slowly moving around like a spotlight following a solo ballerina on stage.
