Criss Cross

Chapter 46

The abandoned processing plant had been mostly stripped for salvage by then and was awaiting demolition.

“Oates work here as a child?” I asked.

“Where he learned the trade. From nine to fifteen, I think.”

“It’s close enough,” I said, following him as he jumped over a channel cut in the floor that Peaks said had been used to sluice out blood and animal offal.

You’d think a place like that would still stink. But it didn’t. It was just dusty and dirty, and it made me feel more than a little claustrophobic.

We reached an old metal staircase, and the winds outside seemed to ebb. As we climbed, I caught the sound of something humming that I attributed to a change in wind direction because it was quickly smothered by new gusts that shook the walls.

I imagined the place as a teeming operation and I tried to see Oates in it based on what I’d read in the disturbing files Peaks had shown me.

As soon as Tanner Oates was born, he’d been abandoned in an alley in Galveston.

It would be a gross understatement to say the Texas foster-care system let Oates down. When his speech did not develop past grunting and whining, his first foster father, sick of the noises, began to beat him.

In turn, the boy began to lash out like a raging wild animal, which only provoked more abuse.

It wasn’t until he was nearly nine that he was finally diagnosed as profoundly hard of hearing. He wore bilateral hearing aids from that point forward and was eventually transferred to the care of the King family, who taught him to speak and read. His IQ, it turned out, was near genius level.

“This is it,” Peaks said now.

We’d reached the landing, and he pushed open the door to a large empty office. He gestured toward the corner.

“Mr. King’s body was there in a pool of blood. His wife’s corpse was laid perpendicular to him. Both headless. The heads are still missing.”

“Like all the rest of them,” I said. “They’re his trophies.”

“Skulls by now,” Peaks said.

“You said we could look at the Kings’ old house.”

“I said I’d ask.”

The Ranger pulled out his cell phone, looked at it. “No bars. Let me try outside.”

“Where the tornado’s coming,” I said, following him out.

“True enough,” he said, and he dropped down the stairs.

I paused to take it all in, tried to imagine what Oates could have experienced there that caused him to saw off the heads of the only people who’d ever been good and kind to him. I failed.

By the time I reached the bottom of the staircase, Peaks was stepping outside. I half expected to see the door torn away by the gusts, but then, as before, the wind died down.

And I heard that humming noise again. I realized it was coming from the other side of the wall where I was standing. I flashed the light around and saw another door, right below the one upstairs.

I went over to it as the gusting rose again and tried the knob. It turned.

I pushed it open, went inside, and saw the source of the hum: a Honda generator pushed up against a hole that had been cut in the back of the building to vent the machine’s exhaust. A heavy-duty extension cord ran from the generator and into a jumble of old boxes, trash, and debris left behind by the salvagers. I followed the cord to a large, dark windowless room also crammed with junk.

I flashed my light around into the shadows and then back along the electric line that ran to a large, filthy white box. I crossed to it, kicking aside cans and other trash, and realized I was looking at an old lift-top freezer.

I raised the lid and a powerful strobe light went on, blinding me. But not before I’d seen at least a dozen frozen human heads stacked inside the cold locker.

I staggered backward, dropping the lid, and threw up my arms to block the light, which seemed to be coming from the wall right behind the freezer.

Over the wind, I thought I heard something a split second before someone very powerful grabbed me around the neck from behind.