Page 44 of Secrets Beneath the Waves

He turned back to Swanson. “So you got yourself a private collection? Congratulations, you’re a sociopath.”

“I’d love to explain to you how much people pay to come for viewing or what I charge for entry to one of my parties. But I wouldn’t want you to lose control of yourself.”

“So, it’s all about the money?”

Swanson’s lips curled up. “That is decidedly a perk. But it’s not the reason why I did this. It’s art. I would have thought that would be obvious, but we don’t exactly run in the same circles. People come and go. DNA is discovered, and we move on. So sad, but loose ends always need to be tied off.”

Ramon’s hands curled into fists by his sides.

“That firefighter would probably thank you for saving him fromme.” Swanson smirked. “Gentlemen, take Mr. Santiago for a walk.”

The men passed Swanson, and he turned away, walking out of the room. Ramon backed up, but they grabbed him. One squeezed the back of his neck. “Don’t even think about it.”

“If you’re going to kill me, just do it here.”

The guy laughed. “Nice try, but we wouldn’t want to make a mess on the floor.”

He shoved Ramon forward.

“Get moving.”

CHAPTER

NINETEEN

Another shove.Ramon might say he was used to it now. They’d walked him nearly all the way across the base—or what was left of it.

He couldn’t figure out if these guys were military or some kind of mercenary unit. Maybe they came from all over. Disgraced soldiers, former cops, and anyone willing to be trained to blindly follow orders so that rich people could gawk at displays of preserved dead bodies. Young women taken from their lives and destroyed for others’ amusement.

The toe of his shoe caught on a crack in the concrete. He could hear the breeze swaying the trees, but no traffic or signs of human life this far out of town. They really were in the middle of nowhere.

As they passed the next building, a Quonset hut, Ramon saw a deer hanging by its back legs, suspended above a blue kiddie swimming pool about six inches deep. Blood dripped from the deer into the pool.

“Keep moving.” The guy behind him shoved the barrel of that M4 into the back of Ramon’s shoulder.

“Excuse me if I’m not in a hurry to walk to my death.”

“Don’t blame you.” The guy sniffed. “We have furnaces back here, though. It’s where we put all the trash.”

“Don’t worry,” one of the others said, laughing. “I’m sure it won’t hurt a bit.”

The other three chuckled.

Ramon pressed his lips together, trying to figure out how to get out of this, but his brain couldn’t come up with any immediate solution. At least, not outside of a tactical team suddenly bursting through the gates and descending in helicopters. Too bad that hadn’t happened yet.

He glanced up at the sky and saw nothing.

There was no way to get himself out of this or to tell anyone what he’d seen before he died. The truth of what was going on here would die with him, and it would take who knew how long for the police, or someone else from Banbury Investigations, to figure out what had happened to Zeyla and Ramon.

He still couldn’t believe that Doctor Swanson, of all people, was behind this. The Count of Shadows. Swanson was the one who arranged for those girls to be taken and then displayed them like that. He probably needed new victims all the time because the shelf life on those displays couldn’t be long. A body began to decay the moment after death, and even the best preservation methods couldn’t mimic healthy tissue for long.

It made him sick to his stomach, so bad he could taste it in his mouth. But he could do nothing about it.

The secrets he held, like his past, would die with him. The fact that the things he’d done would be ended when his life ended was a relief because he felt like he’d been carrying all that around like a weighted vest for years. He wanted to get the word out about what was happening here, though. Somehow. But the idea that he could finally be free of the things he’d been carrying held an allure.

His friends would miss him.

But Ramon couldn’t say he had much to regret about the way his life had gone in the last couple of years. He’d been given a second chance to feel free and experience what it was like to be a good person. At least for a while.