Kiss the Girls

“I
do
think it’s time we packed up and left,” he said.
    That was when we heard screams!
    Women’s voices were coming from
under the ground.
    The screams were muffled, but we could hear them clearly all the same. They were to the north of us and even farther into the thick bramble, but closer to the open meadow beyond the old tobacco fields.
    A tightly wound ball of tension hit me with tremendous force at the sound of the voices under the ground. My head slumped involuntarily toward my chest.
    Sampson took out his Glock and squeezed off two quick shots, more signals for the trapped women, for whoever was screaming under the ground.
    The muffled screams were getting louder, rising as if from the tenth circle of hell.
    “Sweet Baby Jesus,” I whispered. “We found them, John. We found the house of horror.”

Chapter 106

    S AMPSON AND I got down on our hands and knees. We searched frantically for the hidden entryway into the underground house, running our fingers and palms over the undergrowth until they were cut and bleeding. I looked down and my hands were shaking.
    I fired off several more gunshots, so the women trapped below would know we’d heard them, and that we were still up here. After I fired the shots, I quickly reloaded.
    “We’re up here!” I yelled, with my head close to the ground. The weeds and grass were scratching my face. “We’re police!”
    “Here we go, Alex,” Sampson called to me. “The door’s over here. There’s some kind of door, anyway.”
    Running through the high thick weeds was like wading in water. The trapdoor was hidden in honeysuckle and waist-high grass, where Sampson had been searching. The door had been covered over with an extra layer of sod and a thick blanket of pine needles. The door wasn’t likely to be found by a search party, or anyone else hiking through the woods.
    “I’ll go down first,” I told Sampson. Blood roared and echoed in my ears. Usually he would have argued. Not this time.
    I hurried, rumbling down a steep, narrow wooden stairway that looked as if it had been there for a hundred years. Sampson followed close behind. The
good
twins.
    Stop!
I told myself.
Slow it down.
At the bottom of the stairs, there was a second doorway. The heavy oak plank door looked new, as if it had been installed recently, possibly in the past year or two. I slowly turned the handle. The door was locked.
    “I’m coming in,” I shouted to anyone who might be behind the door. Then I fired two rounds into the lock and it disintegrated. The wooden door heaved open with a hard shove from my shoulder.
    I was finally inside the house of horror. What I saw made me retch. A woman’s body was laid out on a couch in what appeared to be a well-appointed living room. The corpse had begun to decompose. The features were unrecognizable. Maggots were swarming all over the victim.
    Move,
I had to tell myself.
Go! Go now.
    “I’m right behind you,” Sampson whispered in his deep, homicide-scene voice. “Watch yourself now, Alex.”
    “This is the police!” I called out. My voice was shaky and getting hoarse. I was afraid of what else we might find in the hideaway. Was Naomi still here? Was she alive?
    “We’re down here!” a woman called out. “Can anybody hear me?”
    “We hear you! We’re coming!” I shouted again.
    “Please help us!” A second voice sounded farther away in the underground house. “Be careful. He’s tricky.”
    “See. He’s tricky,” Sampson whispered. Never at a loss.
    “He’s in the house!
He’s in here now!
” one of the women shouted a warning to us.
    Sampson was still standing behind me, keeping close. “You want to keep the point, partner? Walk on the ridge line?”
    “I want to be the one to find her,” I told him. “I have to find Scootchie.”
    He didn’t argue. “You think loverboy is down here someplace? Casanova?” he whispered.
    “That’s the rumor going around,” I said and moved forward slowly. Both of us had our guns drawn and ready. We had no idea what to expect next. Was loverboy waiting for us?
    Move! Move! Move those legs!
    I led the way out of the deserted living room. There were high-tech lamps in the ceiling of the adjoining hallway. How was he able to get electricity in here? A transformer? A generator? What should that tell me? That he was handy? That he had connections with the local electric company?
    How long had it taken to get the underground cellar in this condition? I wondered. To fix it up