The Killing House

83

As Fletcher crept up the stairwell of dimming light, listening for sounds and watching for shadows, his mind kept replaying the odd white flashes and sparks he’d seen before the fire had started. The answer drifted away, came back: a thermite reaction. The sand-like particles covering his hands, his hair and clothing, were either iron oxide or copper oxide.

When he saw the heavy steel door crashing down and sealing off the room, he knew: the basement chamber had been turned into a crematorium. Gasoline alone couldn’t turn human bones into dry fragments: it could reach a maximum temperature of only 560?°F. Destroying human bones required a temperature of between 1,400?°F and 1,800?°F. Gasoline mixed with a metal powder and a metal oxide, like the one covering his clothing and skin, created extremely high temperatures upwards of 2,500?°F. Such a temperature would also melt most of the medical equipment.

At the moment it was contained — had to be, in order to effectively destroy evidence. Someone intelligent and clever enough to create a home-made crematorium would know that large bones like the femur and thick, dense joints supporting the hip wouldn’t burn away. All the bones needed to be pulverized into ash or they would be discovered. Someone this intelligent would have installed the proper mechanism to ensure no evidence of what had occurred here would ever be found.

Alexander Borgia and the disfigured man, Brandon Arkoff, were dead. That left Marie Clouzot. She had blown up Theresa Herrera’s Colorado home in order to destroy evidence; it stood to reason the same measures had been taken here.

The stairs ended. The teenager bumped up against his back. Fletcher could feel the boy trembling.

Tall windows bordered a large, rectangular-shaped room, and they were dimly lit from the outside streetlights. The windows were cracked and broken and each one was barred with heavy steel grilles. There was enough light for him to make out his surroundings.

To his right, a long, cavernous space that had once been the site for some sort of manufacturing; ancient machinery shrouded in shadows and covered haphazardly with cloth tarps was scattered among waist-high work stations made of wood. Plastic crates were stacked in corners, strewn across the floor. Everywhere he looked Fletcher saw steel drums and wooden pallets used for shipping.

To his left was a half-opened door. There was light beyond it. He opened the door and saw a small passageway leading to a landing that overlooked a garage wide enough to accommodate delivery trucks. Fletcher was moving down the passageway, the teenager clutching his hand, when the garage door started to open.

He reached the landing. Two vehicles were parked in the bay — a vintage black Mercedes and a dark Lincoln Town Car, the one that he had tailed in Baltimore.

Marie Clouzot was running for the Mercedes. She wore the same fur coat he’d seen in Colorado. She was barefoot and clutching a laptop computer.

Fletcher fired.

The first shot hit her high in the shoulder. She dropped the laptop and her car keys as he fired again, a double-tap into the centre of the woman’s back. Marie collapsed face down against the garage floor.

The teenager was shaking violently; he had trouble standing, and he had gone into shock. Fletcher helped him down the steps, reassuring the young man that he was safe. A cold wind inside the garage, and there was still light in the sky.

Fletcher placed the teenager in the back of the Mercedes. He shut the door as Marie Clouzot rolled on to her back. She hadn’t buttoned her coat and, oddly, wore nothing except a pair of white panties. Her long fingers with their dark-painted nails traced the visible scars along her chest and ribs, the tight skin over her breast implants. The scars were thick and wormy, all shapes, sizes and lengths. He knew they had been caused by knives, and by fire. He saw the marred areas where she had been branded with something hot, like a fireplace poker.

The fingers didn’t touch the network of scars along the belly above her penis.

Her eyes were huge and white. ‘They pulled me into alleys and beat me, men like you,’ she croaked. ‘When I fought back, when I kicked them to the ground and made them bleed, men like you arrested me. Men like you judged me.’

Fletcher scooped up the car keys from the floor.

‘Men like you sent me to a psychiatric hospital and injected me with poison because I was different. They tried to kill me and they raped me and I survived it. No matter what men like you did, I survived.’

Fletcher grabbed the laptop and moved to the car.

‘I watched them suffer, every last one,’ she said. ‘I regret nothing. Nothing.’

As Fletcher backed out of the garage, he saw Marie Clouzot pulling something out of her jacket pocket — an ornate gold necklace adorned with jewels of various sizes and colours.