Intimate Relations, Rebecca Forster [best ereader for manga .txt] 📗

"I... She..." The woman tried to speak but seemed to have lost the ability. Her body started to shake.

"She's dead because of what I've done." The man found his voice and it was hollow.

"Enver." His wife whimpered. His name could have been a warning to say no more, or encouragement to bring this to an end.

"Who? Who is dead?" Finn asked.

The man shook his head. "I don't know."

"Where is she?" he demanded.

Finn swooped down and took the man by the shoulders. The woman fell away from her husband, uttering a small cry.

"Where?"

Finn was prepared to do what he must, but there would be no fight. The woman put one hand over Finn's. It was the soft touch of surrender.

"Upstairs. She is upstairs."

5

Officer Douglas was taking a statement from a lady who now wore a tuxedo jacket wrapped around her nakedness. Her legs were very long, her heels very high. Without her mask she seemed less a temptress than a tired, frightened  young woman.

The jacketless man who had been chivalrous enough to cover her caught Finn's eye as the detective went by. The fancy man raised his chin. Finn would have laughed at the mano-a-mano gesture of solidarity had it not been so vile. He understood what that look meant.

We are men of the world. We both know that this is easily swept under the rug. He understood Finn was doing his job, but...

Finn gave him no more than a glance, thinking him a fool. Spreading tail feathers and chucking chins meant nothing to him. He was the most powerful man in the world at that moment. If this fellow needed to be taken down, Finn would be happy to oblige. But if it came to that, it would be done for cause and not ego. Nothing, though, was going to be done any time soon. Upon leaving the grand room where everything could be seen in one look, Finn and Cori found themselves in a Rubik’s Cube of a building, a place that rightly gave Officer Douglas reason for concern.

This house would be a perfect place to stage an ambush with its jagged architecture and unlit passageways. As a working brewery the layout might have some rhyme or reason, but now the outcroppings of concrete, the ledges, the strange hardware embedded in the walls seemed to have no purpose. Most of all, the twists and turns of the corridors and the narrow stairways made Finn wary.

There was little room for one person going up the first flight of stairs much less two-way traffic. Lighting was minimal. Tight spaces were dark and open spaces shadowy. The steps were metal and constructed with a rise and angle that made climbing them difficult. The miserly depth kept Finn's booted feet from getting solid purchase, but at least they were tightly affixed to the wall. They could be climbed quietly if one were careful. Finn counted twenty-three steps to the first landing. That space was deep, but a wall on the left made it impossible to see everything.

Finn glanced at Cori. When she gave him a nod he stepped onto the landing, swung himself around the wall, and found himself in a space no bigger than a large closet. No one lay in wait. There was no blood. There was no body. He was looking at three walls and a door cut out of the one he was facing. Mincing his steps, he put one hand on the knob, aware that Cori was on watch, hugging the wall where it met the stairs.

"Okay?" she whispered.

Finn nodded once, licked his lips, and reached for the closet door. It didn't shame him that his heart skipped a beat when he found it locked. He had no love of surprise, especially in a space this small.

"'Tis clear."

He stepped away. They started up the next flight of stairs. Slivers of window reminiscent of the castles Finn had climbed as a boy in Ireland gave him a glimpse of the compound below. No one on the ground could have seen through the narrow glass.

Finn ducked his head, and Cori did the same. The ceilings lowered for a few feet before rising again over the next landing. There they soared over a square turret-like structure. Above them was a latticework of copper pipes. It was cold here, cold like a tomb.

This landing was twice the size of the one below, but there were no doors only two small spaces tunneled out at the bottom of one wall. They measured three-by-three by Finn's guess. He put his hand to one and felt air, confirming that it connected to the outside.  A small man or a slight woman might squeeze through, but not without causing a commotion below. Near the ceiling, metal plates were screwed high into the wall. The screws were rusted, so there was no cause for concern. Finn started off with Cori a half a step behind. When they reached the end of the hall, the detectives pulled up short. Cori let out a low whistle.

"Sure it seems we've found God's workroom," Finn said.

"No God that I know," Cori whispered.

Finn went ahead while Cori looked for signs that there was a living person in the room.   When Finn turned his head one way, Cori's eyes went the other. When he looked up, she looked down. When her partner paused to touch one of the things hanging from the ceiling, a chill ran through her. When he stopped to face one of the bodies propped upright, Cori wanted to look away.  When Finn motioned her to follow, Cori complied with care.

Human body parts clogged the long, narrow room.  Legs and arms hung from the ceiling like Spanish moss, others had been packed in crates on the floor. Full-size dolls were skewered from the small of their backs to their shoulder blades with metal rods that kept them upright. All the dolls were female, naked, and anatomically correct. They leaned