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Chapter Twenty-Two

“ L et go.” Three struggled against her.

Kenna didn’t back off. “Are you gonna kill him?”

“I should. Freak like that.”

The man in the chair was breathing hard and listening to the conversation.

She said, “You don’t know anything about him or what he’s been through.”

“I’m not gonna let him kill me. I’ll kill him first.”

She dragged Three out of the room, giving him no choice but to come with her. “That man in there can hear you.”

“So?”

Kenna let out an exasperated breath. “Don’t get me started. Go back to your other friends or something. Jax and I don’t need you here.”

He lifted his chin, a defiant expression barely visible on his face. “I’ll go tell them you know this guy.” He practically shoved her away, then ate up the distance to the door with long strides.

Alone in the master bedroom, filled with medical bays, she let out a long breath. Turned to the open closet door and Jax…

Heard something.

“Who’s there?” Kenna froze, listening for movement in the room. No one had come in the door. Was there another panel?

She breathed in, almost silently. Stretching out with her awareness, ready to notice some kind of anomaly. Just the slightest disturbance.

Someone trying to hide.

“We aren’t here to hurt you. We want to help.”

She’d told that to the kids at the medical center. The protective older brother and the little girl with the broken arm. She’d reassured them that the police were there to help.

Lie.

She hadn’t known it at the time. She’d been na?ve, and those kids would never trust her now. They would never believe anything she said.

“Kenna.”

She turned to Jax, and the man still seated on the chair inside the closet.

Jax crouched. “Special Agent Collins?”

“Don’t call me that.” His voice sounded rusty, as if he hadn’t used it in decades.

“I can call you Walter?” Jax kept his tone easy and soft. “I’m Oliver Jaxton. I’m the Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office. My wife is with me. Her name is Kenna. My job is how I know who you are, Walter, and why I know you’ve been missing for decades.”

“I’m not missing. I’m right here.”

Kenna set her hand on Jax’s shoulder, then leaned down and touched Walter’s hand. “Mr. Collins, would you like to leave this closet?”

“Is that where I am?” His fingers shifted under hers. Papery skin, loose with age.

Why wouldn’t he know he was in a closet? “Can you stand?”

“I’m not an invalid, girl.”

She ignored that. “I can help you up. We all have rough days, don’t we?”

Jax held the guy under his elbows.

He straightened, bones cracking and creaking. She turned to Jax and mouthed, How long has he been sitting here?

He shook his head, a considerable amount of disbelief on his face when he mouthed back, Who knows?

“Enough talking.”

Kenna whipped her head around to Walter. “We can help you if that’s what you want.” No reason to overwhelm a captive with freedom he wasn’t ready for, but he had to understand what was possible. “Do you have any injuries we need to know about?”

She should ask if he had weapons in his scrub pants pockets but doubted he did. If he had, it was more likely he’d have used them already.

Jax held one elbow, and she held the other, but Walter seemed to walk okay. His shoes were almost silent on the floor. That might be on purpose so he could move unnoticed through the house.

“Are there any more people like you in this house?”

Walter said, “I’m sure he’ll come out soon enough.”

Kenna winced. That didn’t sound good. She wasn’t helping this guy just because he could provide them valuable intel they might not get otherwise, but that was a big bonus.

They had to convince him to talk to them.

If an ambulance picked him up and took him to a hospital to be assessed, it could be hours or days before they were allowed access to him.

What they needed was for him to talk to them before any of that happened. Calmly and of his own free will. They had to convince Walter to tell them everything he knew.

Jax said, “Let’s go find the others. See what they have.”

She took the first step toward the doors, and at the same time, the doors swung shut and closed. A man stood in the corner, shadowed from view, but dressed in the same clothes as Walter.

“Hey—”

Before she could finish, he smacked his palm on a button on the wall. An alarm rang through the room, maybe through the whole house, stopping only for a robotic-sounding female voice to say, “Containment protocol initiated.”

“Lorin, what have you done?” Walter sighed.

Jax asked, “Lorin Barone?”

“Congratulations, you know who we are.” Walter’s tone remained flat.

“You aren’t keeping us here.” Kenna strode over to Lorin but didn’t get too close. “Open this door and let us leave.”

The man didn’t emerge from the corner, his face in shadow.

“I mean it, you can’t keep us here.” Kenna could contact Maizie, even though there was no phone or internet signal, and they could get help. But if Jax called it in, the full force of the FBI would show up. These guys had no chance against the FBI’s SWAT team.

She tried the handle, but it didn’t budge. “Open this door.”

He said nothing and didn’t move. She grabbed the guy by his shirt and turned him, slamming him back against the door. She gasped, about to launch in with another demand to be set free, when she noticed his mouth.

It looked like Lorin’s eyes.

No lips.

No opening.

Just scar tissue.

Under her hands, she could feel something beneath his shirt. His fingers wrapped around her wrist. No mouth. What she felt under his shirt must be some kind of feeding tube, a way for him to get calories without eating.

He pushed her away.

“Don’t expect an answer from him,” Walter said. “He’s a man of few words.”

Deep in the house, she could hear banging and yelling but couldn’t tell who it was or what they were saying. Kenna slid out her phone, one hand against the mute man’s chest. She dialed Maizie and said to Lorin, “Don’t move.”

He lifted one hand and drew a cross on his chest.

Cross my heart.

Kenna’s breath shuddered out of her. The phone rang once, then cut off. She looked at the screen and saw she had no connection. “I should be able to get through.”

Walter said, “I guess you’re stuck with us.”

Jax shook his head. “If we are, then you can explain what’s going on, why you’re here, and why you’re insisting we remain with you.”

She kept an eye on Lorin, wondering how a mute man and a blind man communicated. They seemed to know each other. Was it because they had been taken together and have since forged a bond in their captivity? “The two of you have been here a long time. More than fifty years.”

Lorin stared at nothing.

“We need to know what you know about Marcus Buzard.”

A gunshot exploded somewhere in the house. A fight, or someone trying to get out of a locked room they had been shut in. Had the alarm and the contamination protocol locked everyone in whatever space they occupied at the time? They could be spread across the house with no way out.

Kenna kept trying. “We need to know what he’s doing here and what he wants.”

Lorin looked at Walter for a long silent moment, then turned and touched a keypad beside the door. Just a flat panel. He pressed his thumb to the pad, and the lock on the door clicked.

“No sudden movements.” Kenna still had her gun within reach.

He looked at her, opened the door, and stepped out.

Jax led Walter by the elbow. As they left the bedroom and headed down the stairs, the sounds grew louder. Someone—or a few people—were trying to get out.

“You are going to set us all free, aren’t you?” Kenna addressed Lorin, not altogether sure why since he couldn’t answer verbally.

Walter said, “We aren’t the captors.”

“If you’re trapped here in this house, why not figure a way out?”

“You think we haven’t tried?” Walter said. “It’s why I’m blind and why the doc took away Lorin’s mouth. Earnest’s ears.”

Kenna’s stomach clenched. She’d seen something on the sides of Earnest’s head, but not what it was. She would certainly never have guessed that it was this. “I’m sorry that happened to you.” She turned back to Walter at the bottom of the stairs. “We can help you, if you let us.”

“No help for us.”

Jax said, “That’s not true. You just need to believe us. Trust that we can get you free of this doctor. He’s ruined too many lives already. Stopping him from hurting anyone else is the reason why we’re here.”

As with Three, it seemed altruism didn’t really ring true as a reason for any of them. Maybe Walter, like the men from the retirement home, didn’t care about other people. He saw no way out for himself. Why would he bother helping others when it wouldn’t do him any favors?

“You take him down,” Walter said. “But it doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

Kenna frowned, wondering how that could be when these guys were here, as part of his operation. Or were they simply a pair of forgotten caretakers of the house? She needed a whole lot more information from them in order to figure this out.

“I’m going to call in the bureau,” Jax said, while they all followed Lorin into another room.

A library with a sitting area of a leather couch and armchair and shelves of books on the walls.

Above a fireplace at the end was a framed image that looked like it had come from a Victorian-era medical book.

“Then you can be certain that it will have to do with you.”

“We are as much his victims as you are.” The voice was robotic and full of static. Lorin turned from a sideboard, a small device in his hands. He typed on it with his thumbs, and the same voice spoke again. “But we will tell you what you want to know.”

Kenna said, “As much as I want to hear everything you have to say, I don’t want you to stay here. We can leave the house and go somewhere else. The hospital. A police station. Even a house or a park. You don’t need to remain in this place. You can leave.”

Lorin’s device said, “We can’t leave.”