“He must have fled in a rush to have left this here,” Maddocks said, watching by her side.
“Or he just uploaded all of this to a cloud from where he could download it and watch it somewhere else at leisure.” She wiped her sleeve across her mouth, the depravity suddenly getting to her. “If what Norton-Wells told us was legit, this Spencer Addams guy was summoned by his bosses right after this happened, to get rid of Hocking’s body. Once he’d dumped her on Thetisby Island, he returned to theAmanda Rose, presumably via smaller boat, and as he was leaving the marina, he saw Raddison and Norton-Wells up in that parking lot, and he worked the opportunity that presented itself. He secured the Lexus, with which he later abducted Drummond. Then, when Hocking’s body finally surfaced, with evidence of her mutilation getting into the press, linking her to Drummond’s abduction and mutilation, hecouldn’tcome back.” She met Maddocks’s eyes in the tiny space. “Because his employers would know by that point that it would have had to be him who’d mutilated Hocking postmortem. They were the ones who’d entrusted him to properly dispose of her body, but he didn’t.”
Maddocks turned to the SWAT guy waiting right outside the door. “Have this room sealed off. We’ll get the crime scene techs in here as a priority.” He reached for his phone and called Fitz.
“We need a residential address, stat,” he said into his phone, his gaze locked on Angie’s. “Spencer Addams. He’s our guy. James Bay. Apparently lives with his mother. We’re heading toward the subdivision now, will be on standby for the address and for backup.”
CHAPTER 71
The second tactical team had come quietly, no sirens. The James Bay house had been in darkness. The ERT guys had broken in the door, but Spencer Addams and his mother were gone. The forensics ident unit was en route.
Receiving the all-clear, Angie and Maddocks entered slowly through the garage, which fronted the quiet, quaint street of period houses and white picket fences and neat little flower beds. It was dark and windy out, the waxing moon shining silvery on the slumbering neighborhood. A black bank of cloud was building in the distance. The homes in this area were all within walking distance from the sea, and from the pier where Angie had met Merry Winston, and from the legislature buildings and inner harbor—the bustling core of the city. The location was made all the more stark and horrific by the notion that a violent sex killer had been raised right here, nurtured in their midst, gone to school and lurked and festered, growing ever more sick and sadistic over time.
Angie nodded to the faint oil stain on the concrete garage floor where a vehicle had been parked. The interior of the garage felt warm, and the faint scent of exhaust and hot engine lingered on the stale air, as if the occupants had only very recently departed the house by vehicle. Metal shelving units lined the walls. Plastic boxes containing gardening tools, household cleaning equipment, and other supplies rested upon the shelves. From a corkboard affixed to the wall, tools hung from hooks in symmetrical rows.
“He’s a neat freak,” said Maddocks as they moved toward the door at the rear of the garage. It opened onto a stone path that led to the main house.
Angie stalled. “Wait, over here,” she said. “Gun safe.”
The door to the safe hung open. It was designed to hold long guns but was empty. An overturned ammunition box rested on the counter. Also empty. “Twenty-two caliber,” she said, reading the box. “He’s out there, and he’s armed with a rifle.”
They exited the rear door, made their way up the small path to the white, gabled house with stained glass detail above the windows. The exterior lights had been put on, and they revealed a well-kept lawn, shrubs neatly trimmed.
While they’d waited for backup, Vedder had started techs running searches and checks on the name “Spencer Addams.” His middle name was John. He had no criminal record. His DNA and prints were not in any database. His mother’s name was Beulah Lee Addams, née Cartwright. And this house was in her name. Spencer had been raised here. His father, John Addams, had been reported missing when Spencer was five years old. That case had eventually gone cold—the father was never found. Spencer had thereafter been raised by a single mother, had attended local schools, worked as a carpenter’s apprentice. Beulah appeared to have a long history of active engagement with Catholic-based charities and had been a member of Father Simon’s parish. And that was as much as the guys back at the station had managed to unearth so far.
The forensics unit was pulling up outside as Maddocks and Angie entered the house wearing crime scene booties and gloves. It was warm inside, and it looked as though the occupants had definitely left in a hurry, because the television was still on, playing a recorded episode ofCoronation Street. Embers glowed orange in the old fireplace, and a menthol cigarette had been left burning, its long column of intact ash resting on an ashtray full of butts, all stained with bright-red lipstick. Beside the ashtray was a box of blue latex gloves and a shopping bag with a logo that saidDRUGGIEMART. They’d passed that store on the corner down the street on their way in.
Coats hung on hooks by the door. A woman’s flower-patterned umbrella rested in a stand alongside a pair of men’s Salomon running shoes and a smaller pair of women’s Rockport walking shoes. The air was laden with the acrid, minty stink of the menthol cigarettes.
Angie’s heart raced softly as she took it all in.
While crime scene techs would comb carefully through this place, she and Maddocks had a more immediate goal—go through the house quickly, looking for any sign that might tell them where the occupants had gone. The clock was still ticking. Their subject was on the run and armed. He could be feeling cornered, and thus dangerous. Whether his mother had gone voluntarily with her son remained a key question.
Maddocks and Angie moved down the hallway and entered a small bathroom on the left. Angie caught her breath.
Pasted down the side of a mirror above a white basin were photos of a naked Gracie Drummond engaged in sex acts with various men. Across the top of the mirror, scrawled large in bright-red lipstick, were the wordsSave the Girls. Right beside the lipstick scrawl, a red arrow pointed down to an image of another naked young woman engaging in intercourse with a bearded male who looked to be in his late fifties.
“Lara Pennington,” said Angie.
Under the image of Pennington and the male, smaller text had been scrawled:Next. To be baptized in the name of the Lord. Save them all. Out with Satan.
Her pulse quickened. “They’re stills,” she said, leaning closer. “Taken from his recordings on the yacht. Addams watched Drummond, Hocking, and Pennington, along with other women working at the club—that’s what fixated him on these girls. He went after Drummond, perhaps, after tasting his thrill with Hocking’s body.”
“He wanted a live one,” Maddocks said softly.
“And Pennington is next,” Angie said, her gaze dropping to a pair of exfoliating bath mitts lying inside the basin. With gloved fingers, Maddocks lifted one. The fingers of the mitt were crumpled and stuck together with a dried substance.
“Semen?” he said.
Along the rim of the basin lay a selection of open safety pins, a razor. A tube of cream called Icy-Hot—for muscle pain relief. And what looked like some blood.
Maddocks’s attention went from the mitt, to the pins, and the razor, then back up to the images of fornication. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
She inhaled, a dark sense of foreboding, of worse to come, filling her mouth. “Looks like he jacked off here, using those pictures of Drummond and Pennington with other men as stimulation. If he did it wearing those gloves, and if he also used that cream on his private parts, it would have burned like all hell.”
“And there’s the pins and razor,” he said. “Pain gets this bastard off. Wonder what his mother thought of these photos on the mirror. If they were living together, she had to have seen them.”
“Maybe she was a part of it,” Angie said, nodding toward the red scrawl. “That looks like her lipstick—same color as the lip prints on those menthol cigarettes. And she’s vanished with him.”
