CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
The staircase was made of unfinished wood—the first indication that at least one thing Ayer had told them was correct. The basement was indeed unfinished. There was a single light switch on the door going down to the bottom of the stairs. She flipped it on and could see a concrete floor at the bottom. As she made her way down, she could hear Rascal back at the door, sniffing.
At the bottom of the stairs, she could see where the builders had put down the rudimentary framing of the basement. If Ayer ever wanted to actually finish it, he had the guidelines to go by. There was a single, large room to the back of the basement that had been walled off with nothing more than sheetrock. To her right, there was the wooden framing of a smaller room; the plumbing guides and two pipes coming out of the wall suggested it was supposed to be a bathroom. There was more framing immediately to the left as she came to the end of the stairs. She could see pencil markings along the boards, mostly arrows and numbers left by the builders.
The basement was eerily quiet and easily ten degrees cooler than it had been upstairs. Before advancing forward, Rachel took a moment to study the floor and the sheetrock frame of the one walled-off room. She saw nothing at first, but as she finally took a step forward she did see a slight flaw in the concrete floor.
Or, rather, not a flaw but a smear. It was similar to the cleaned space she’d seen on the door upstairs. Something on the floor had been wiped up. She could now see two places, making an arced path over to the doorway of the room that had been sheetrocked over. Her hand reached down for a gun that wasn’t there and at the same time, she heard a slight commotion from upstairs. There were a series of footsteps, the sound of a slight struggle, and then a loud thumping noise. A few seconds passed and she could then hear a soft mewling noise, like someone beginning to weep. She imagined that Ayer had tried to get up and make a run for it, or to attack Jack. If that were indeed the case, the loud thump was no doubt Ayer hitting the floor. Jack might very well be cuffing him in that very moment.
And if Ayer had taken such a measure, it made her very uneasy about what might be waiting for her in the room in front of her. She walked a bit faster to the room, not wanting to make Jack wait any longer.
The light switch she’d hit on the way down the stairs had not affected the room. It was dark inside, like walking toward the mouth of a cave. When she finally walked through what was intended to one day be a doorway, she found another light switch. This one had simply been installed; there was no cover over it, showing the wiring behind it, snaking up the boards within the wall. She tried it anyway and found that a light did indeed come on—an overhead bulb without a cover.
And when her eyes fell on what waited for her, Rachel flinched and let out a curse under her breath.
A woman lay on a pile of blankets. She was quite pretty—blonde, and maybe twenty-five years of age, dressed in a crop-top and jeans. She was lying on her back and looking up to the unfinished ceiling. She did not move or flinch at all when Rachel turned on the light. And though this told Rachel everything she needed to know, she still couldn’t help but to call out.
“Hey,” she said. “Ma’am, are you…”
She was dead. It became even more apparent the closer Rachel got to her. The basement seemed to go colder as the realization sunk in. The excitement of the potential huge leads dissolved into sadness as Rachel knelt by the pile of blankets and placed her fingers to the woman’s neck. The skin was cold and there was no pulse. She saw that there was a bandage on the other side of the woman’s neck, made up of hastily applied gauze and multiple layers of athletic tape. Little splotches of blood had come through, staining the gauze. That, she supposed, answered what the little cleaned areas on the floor and the door had been. She’d bled on those surfaces and Ayer had done his best to clean it up.
As for the scratches in the doorframe upstairs, those were likely the result of a struggle. Two fingernails on the woman’s right hand were bent backwards, one pulled nearly completely out of the finger.
Rachel stood up and looked down at the body. There wasn’t much discoloration and there was no noticeable odor. Also, the blood stains on the gauze were still rather bright. If she had to guess, this woman had not been dead for any more than three days.
She slowly backed away and headed for the stairs. She wondered which member of the waiting list was currently dead in Dr. Ayer’s basement, which name they could now cross off. Angry, she hurried up the stairs. She opened the door to the hallway so quickly that she nearly slammed it into Rascal, still waiting at the door.
“Who is she, Dr. Ayer?” Rachel asked even before she made it into the living room. When she got there, she saw that her assumption had been correct. Ayer was lying on his chest on the floor, his arms pulled behind him with his wrists cuffed. Jack stood next to him, hands on his hips as Rachel entered the room.
“Who is she?” Rachel asked again, her voice bitter and thin.
Ayer only moaned in agony, as if he’d been the one who was injured and deposited in a basement.
“What am I missing?” Jack asked.
“There’s a dead woman in his basement. Looks to be recent.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Ayer whined. “I thought she was happy, and she just…she changed her mind and I couldn’t. I couldn’t…”
He started to hyperventilate on the floor. Jack reached down and helped him to his feet, repositioning him and placing him on the couch.
“Is she also on the waiting list?” Jack asked him.
But Ayer had no intention of talking. He was too busy weeping and shaking his head. The only thing he managed to get out was “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it.”
As Ayer broke down on the couch, Jack stepped closer over to Rachel. “Can you stay here with him for a second? I can’t let it get out that you were here. Let me check the scene out and I’ll come back up. But I need you to leave, Rachel. You understand that, right?”
She did understand it. It was what was best for both of them in that moment but damn, did it hurt. While she badly wanted to be with Paige, her leaving after such a discovery almost felt like giving up.
“I’ll call for another Uber,” she said.
“Okay. Are you good with him?”
She observed Ayer on the couch, still losing himself in a tide of emotion that seemed to be tearing him apart on the inside.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just go.”
He nodded and rushed over to the hallway as Rascal came into the living room and started sniffing at Ayer. And as Ayer continued to wail and try to get control over himself, Rachel ordered another ride on her app, wondering just how difficult it was going to be to wrap this part of the case without getting either her or Jack into a world of trouble.