Before I could talk myself out of it, I lifted the lid and swallowed back the scream of fright that tried to escape. Sure enough, the man from the photos upstairs stared up at me with dead eyes from a decapitated head.
"I think I'm going to need therapy after this," I admitted in a soft voice. After the boys had taken a look, I dropped the lid back down, then wiped my hands off on my jeans. Like I could somehow wipe away the crawling sensation all over my skin.
"Steele, go check the cages," Kody prompted his friend, nudging him towards the area in question. The one closest to us seemed to be the source of the smell, and a small horde of flies were circling the lumpy contents of it. Yeah, that was on the boys. I’d opened the freezer; my part was done.
"No fucking way," Steele replied. "You check the damn cages."
I rolled my eyes. "Both of you do it," I told them with a thread of impatience. "I wanna get the fuck out of here. Fast. Let's just get this over with and then... I don't even know what we do with this mess. Call the cops? Or clean it up ourselves?"
Steele wrinkled his nose, his mouth twisting in disgust. "Cops are a waste of fucking time. We need to just set fire to this whole fucking house and scrub it of evidence."
Kody nodded his agreement. "We can do that. Easily done."
"Just make sure the neighbors are out of their houses," I warned them. "I don't want any collateral damage."
"Any more collateral damage, you mean." Kody nodded to the freezer, and I cringed. I was going to guess the decaying corpse in the cage would turn out to be that man's pretty, blonde wife.
I heaved a sigh. "Stop stalling. Check the damn cages."
The two of them smirked at my authoritative tone, but reluctantly did as they were told. Steele checked the first cage, the one with the flies, and gagged again.
"Yep. Dead body," he confirmed. "No idea who; her face is all messed up. But... she's got pink hair."
What the fuck?
Just when I thought it couldn't possibly get more fucked up, Dave proved me wrong from the damn grave.
"Guys!" Kody exclaimed, a sharp note of panic in his voice. "Guys, this one's alive!"
"What?" I squeaked, rushing over to where he crouched in front of an open cage.
The woman inside was barely alive, but he was right. Her eyelids fluttered, and her chest moved as she breathed shallow, gasping breaths.
Steele was already on the phone calling for an ambulance, and Kody ever so carefully lifted the emaciated woman from the cage. Her hair was stringy and dirty, but clearly dyed pink.
Fucking hell.
I could do nothing but watch in abject horror as Kody carried the woman up the stairs in long strides, and Steele nudged me to follow. He was speaking to the EMTs on the phone in low tones, detailing the woman's condition from what we could see. I heard him mention starvation and lack of water for countless days, and I wanted to break down and cry.
What kind of sick bastard could do this to another human being? And how many people had he tortured, abused, or killed before her? Before the dead woman still in the cages or the decapitated man in the freezer?
Kody carried the woman all the way out to the front lawn, holding onto her for a few minutes until an ambulance came tearing down the street and into the driveway.
Seeing her handed over to the EMTs was surreal and such a relief that my knees buckled and I sank to my ass on the lawn. Steele said nothing, just sat down beside me and tucked his arm around me in comfort.
Kody stayed with the EMTs—one of whom I recognized from the night before—and talked to them as they set the woman up in a bed and inserted an IV line. No doubt she was badly in need of fluids. Who knew when Dave had last fed or watered his captives? No fucking wonder the other woman was dead.
"Do you want to wait in the car while we finish this?" Steele's tone was soft. His lips pressed a kiss to the side of my head, just below my bullet graze.
Normally, I'd have sucked it up and stuck it out because we were a team. All for one and one for all. But something about finding a live victim had rattled me so much harder than all the death I'd witnessed in the last few months. So I nodded silently and let him escort me over to the car where we'd left it in the street.
"Here," he said as I slid into the passenger seat. He handed me his phone. "Hold onto this; call Kody's phone if you need us for anything, okay? We'll try and make this quick."
I nodded, promising I'd be fine, then locked the doors as he jogged back to Dave's house. Or his victim's house, anyway.
Anxiety and impatience started setting in only a few minutes later, and I found myself shifting around in my seat like I had ants in my pants. In an attempt to calm my nerves, I turned on Steele's phone and pulled up an internet browser.
My stomach knotted painfully as I typed in the address of the house and added the surname I'd seen on an envelope in the kitchen. It only took a minute of browsing results to find what I was looking for.
The pretty blonde from the pictures was Samantha Clarke, a twenty-nine-year-old seamstress. Her husband, forty-one-year-old David Clarke, was a former FBI agent who'd retired several years ago after a knee injury that’d left him with walking difficulties.
I chewed at my lip, wondering if Samantha was the woman who'd lived or the one who'd died.
It took another hour before the boys were done. They returned to the car looking grim and exhausted. None of us spoke on the drive home, but as we passed through our front gates I cracked.
"What will happen now?" I asked in a hollow voice.
Steele glanced over at me from the driver's seat. "We documented everything we found. The neighbors have been informed that there's been a gas leak in their street and not to come home tonight. Sampson will take care of the rest. By morning, there won't be a shred of DNA or evidence left."
"Sampson's still alive?" I asked, genuinely relieved. I had been so worried about Archer the night before that I hadn't given a second thought to what had happened to the rest of our security team.
Kody snorted a laugh. "He's basically indestructible, babe. If it weren’t for him and Gill, as well as James and Steinwick, I doubt we'd have all made it out of that ambush alive last night."
"Gotcha," I murmured. "What about the woman? Is she going to be okay?"
Steele gave a shrug. "Only time will tell. She was in pretty rough shape; it'll be awhile before we can speak with her, I'd think."
I nodded my understanding. What more could I really expect? Besides... what would I even say to her, given the chance? Sorry my psychopathic serial-killer, stalker uncle held you captive and...
Yeah. Maybe not.
But at least she was alive. That was something, wasn't it? We'd saved one of his victims. Yet all I could think about was how many more we'd failed for taking so long to stop him—how many other women he might have killed in the years he'd stalked me and my mom.
How the hell was I ever going to get past this?
The woman we'd saved was, in fact, Samantha Clarke. A week later she'd recovered enough to speak with Kody—posing as a police officer—and she filled in the remaining blanks.
The dead woman was her sister, Janette, who'd come over to check on her and been taken by Dave. He'd done horrific, nightmare-inducing things to both of them over the course of the last year, but he'd stopped feeding them a few weeks ago. Samantha told how they'd been thrown occasional scraps and given water, but then all of that had dried up about five days before we found them. Dave hadn't returned, and her sister had died two days before we found the house.