Baltimore 03 - Did You Miss Me?

webcam.
    ‘Not for long.’
    ‘But you were unconscious. No telling what he did while you were out.’
    Beckett went to his dresser, searching for clothing. All of the drawers were empty, as Mitch had known they would be after seeing all of Beckett’s clothes in the cab of the truck. Ford was pretty damn clever.
    ‘Sonofabitch,’ Beckett growled, yanking open the door to the basement. ‘Stay here. I’ll be back.’ Stiffly the old man descended the stairs.
    Beckett’s basement was a thing of beauty. Not nearly as historically cool as Aunt Betty’s bomb shelter, it was a lot more functional. The front half, accessible from the cabin stairs, was home to a washer/dryer and Beckett’s man-cave with its sixty-inch television illegally connected to every cable station on the planet through the satellite on the back exterior wall.
    It was also how Beckett got his Internet, which the man used almost exclusively to download porn and play online poker. Mitch had tapped into it to get a signal to the webcams he’d planted.
    The back half of the basement was Beckett’s very dirty secret, one that Beckett had no idea Mitch knew about. One that Mitch never would have dreamed to look for had it not been for his stepfather’s obsession file. One that still left him shaking his head in disbelief. He’d been to prison. He’d thought he’d seen depravity. He’d been wrong.
    Beckett . . . well, the man was one sick bastard.
    Mitch remembered the day he’d first crept down there, having waited for one of the rare times Beckett took his day-trip across two states for his supplies. Mitch hadn’t expected much – it had been almost thirty years since the incident detailed in the obsession file. At the most he thought he might find some forgotten shard of evidence that two girls had been kept here. He never expected what he’d found.
    The shock almost had him backing away from his entire plan. Until he remembered cleaning his mother’s blood and brains from the bomb shelter. Until he remembered the years of nightmares that tormented Cole because he’d found her. Until he’d re-read his mother’s diary and restoked his own hate.
    With the exception of its location, none of what he’d seen had been documented in the obsession file. Mitch knew what he knew only because Beckett had created his own record, one the old pervert thought was for his own eyes only.
    Accessible only by a trapdoor in the garage floor, the back half of the basement housed Beckett’s . . . hobby. The hobby changed over time. Sometimes it was blonde, sometimes brunette. Occasionally the hobby would be a redhead.
    The back half of the basement was a single room that contained a bed and a nightstand, a sink and a toilet. Nothing else.
    Beckett’s current ‘hobby’ was a brunette named Heather. He’d had her for six months and would probably keep her another six. Or until she died. Hobbies tended to die by their own hand, driven mad by Beckett’s perversion. When Beckett grew weary of them, he’d cut off their food and water and leave a bottle of pills on the nightstand by the hobby’s bed. Inevitably they took that way out. If not, Beckett shot them.
    Or so Beckett had told Heather when he’d first installed her in his little chamber of horrors. It had been one of the few times Mitch had regretted the placement of a webcam. The image of Beckett taunting the girl with what would happen to her had been hard to watch.
    But Heather wasn’t his responsibility. None of Beckett’s hobbies were.
    However they died, Beckett would capture the moment with a photograph. One which he framed and mounted on the wall of the back half of the basement so that the new hobby would know exactly what her future held.
    Because Wilson Beckett was a real sonofabitch. But a smart one. After a bumpy beginning, he’d had smooth sailing for nearly three decades. It nearly wasn’t so, though. Because his earliest hobby got away.
    That the escapee hadn’t revealed Beckett’s location or his scheme was a testament to his ability to scare little girls completely out of their minds.
    The day Mitch had first descended into Beckett’s little hell, the girl on the bed had been the hobby before Heather and she’d been in very bad shape. If Mitch hadn’t needed Beckett, he would have anonymously called the cops that day and walked away. But he had needed Beckett, so he’d forced the pills he’d found on the nightstand down the girl’s throat.
    It seemed more