Adoption Page 18

  48

  Marty did not hear the cellar door unlock or open. The CD player’s earphones were solidly inserted into her ears keeping all outside sounds at bay. Christopher walked sullenly down the hallway toward Marty’s room. He did not enjoy being chastised so harshly. Why wasn’t his opinion ever good enough? It was never good enough when his “mother” was still alive either. Just once he wished his opinion would carry some weight, or at least be considered. But no, once again he was the dummy, the dunce. In his heart he did not want to consummate Marty’s adoption in the usual manner. Instead, he wanted to open up his home to her and introduce her to his children. He believed Marty not only genuinely wanted to become one of his children, but actually wanted to take on the role of the big sister, caretaking for the other children.

  He stood in the doorway to Marty’s room watching her for a few minutes. Her foot still tapped out the beat to the music while lying on her bed unaware of his presence. Upstairs, in another part of the Baker Building the adoption room was prepped and ready for the consummation procedure.

  “I don’t want to do this!” Christopher thought to himself clenching both hands into fists by his side to maintain control. Knowing that he did not have a choice, he took a deep breath and walked up to the side of Marty’s bed. She was startled at first to see him standing there, but regained her composure very quickly.

  “Hi. Christopher,” she said lightly, following with a smile.

  “She always looks right into my eyes.” he thought before responding, “Hello Marty. I have given you a lot of thought in the last hour or so. I’ve decided I am going to take a chance and bring you upstairs to meet the rest of my family. Although I will not bind your feet, I will have to bind your wrists. I am the one taking the chance and do not want you trying to escape. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Christopher. I understand completely. It’s okay, really. I won’t try to escape, but, can I ask you one little favor before we go upstairs?”

  “Of course, Marty, go ahead and ask.” he said feeling defeated and powerless to prevent the adoption.

  “Would you mind if I take my diary upstairs with us? If I’m going upstairs to meet the other kids, I’m assuming I will be staying upstairs with them in another room.”

  “You are absolutely right, Marty. You will be staying in another area upstairs. In fact, you will be right alongside the other kids watching over them for me. Yes, go ahead, get your diary and then I will tie up your wrists.”

  Marty stood up, walked over to the bureau and opened the drawer that held her diary. Holding the diary in one hand, she held her wrists together allowing Christopher to slip the plastic electrical tie in place, securing her wrists.

  “I’m sorry, Marty, but I just can’t take the chance right now. Perhaps, after a little time, you will have earned the privilege and I will remove the tie again. Walk ahead of me down the hallway to the door leading to the upstairs.”

  Marty did as she was asked, stepping out of her prison into the hallway for the last time. She was relieved to be going upstairs to meet the other kids. At least she would have someone to talk with for a change. Her room in the cellar was starting to drive her crazy. You can only listen to so many CD’s and go to the bathroom so many times in a day.

  Marty stood at the door leading to the upstairs waiting for Christopher to unlock it so they could proceed up the stairs. She was getting very curious to see what the upstairs looked like and hoped to get a glimpse of the outside. She might recognize something out of a window giving her clues as to where Christopher was holding her prisoner. Marty was not overconfident, but her level of hope was rising with every step she took closer to the top of the cellar stairway. She knew she would have to be quick if the opportunity for escape arose, and she was prepared in her mind to act swiftly if it did. Family or no family, she would seize whatever opportunity presented itself over the next few minutes. Escape was still at the top of her agenda.

  Christopher reached around her right side and inserted the key into the door lock. He turned the doorknob and the door swung open. Marty looked up the stairs and was disheartened when she realized the upstairs was very dark. “He must have all of the window shades pulled,” she thought, walking up the stairs to the first floor of the building. However, as soon as Marty reached the top step she spotted the hallway to the front door. Positioning the diary in her left hand, the binding of the diary was exposed to her right hand. On the dimly lit stairway, Christopher, two steps behind Marty, did not see her maneuvering the diary into position. He also could not have anticipated what followed as Marty reached the top of the stairs.

  Because Christopher was a couple of steps behind Marty, he was a foot lower than she was standing on the top step. Although Christopher was used to the darkness of the upstairs, he too was coming up the stairs from the bright room where Marty was held captive. His eyes were adjusting to the darker upstairs as he stood for just a second waiting for Marty to continue walking into the hallway. When he saw Marty’s body swiftly turning toward him, he instinctively knew he had misjudged her intensions. Marty’s hateful, fiery look seemed to burn through his eyes into his head and, in that same instant, Christopher knew it was too late for him to react as the ball point pen hidden in the binding of Marty’s diary entered his left eye socket piercing his brain.

  Marty watched Christopher’s body go limp, crumpling and falling backward down the cellar stairs, blood gushing from the eye where the pen was firmly impaled. Christopher, not making a sound, was dead before his body hit the bottom of the stairs with a dull thud. His arms and legs, twisted and broken, jutted out in unnatural directions. His head, twisted and contorted, was almost facing backward like a ventriloquists dummy lying on a table at a side show waiting to be picked up and brought to life. Marty stood watching for a few moments, hoping Christopher was dead, but half expecting to see him come back to life and charge up the stairs.

  “Could he be playing dead?” she thought, watching for the slightest movement of his motionless form. No, he seemed to be dead. She could not believe her luck, hitting her mark on the first attempt. She knew the risk she took, but also knew her fate if she did not take it. Looking one final time at Christopher’s lifeless body, Marty turned and started walking toward the front door of the building. Having taken only a few steps, she thought about the other children. They were hidden in this building somewhere, and, with Christopher being dead, they would need her help to escape. Stopping in the middle of the hallway, Marty began looking for doors to rooms where the kids might be kept. Seeing two doors on opposite sides of the hallway, Marty moved the closest and tried turning the knob. The door opened easily into a medium-sized room where she saw the monitor Christopher mentioned during their earlier conversation.

  “This is where he sat watching me,” she thought. “No wonder he knew everything I was doing when I was doing it.”

  Turning to inspect the rest of the room, Marty noticed the glass jars placed next to each other on a table against the wall. In the dim light, she could not tell what the jars contained and took a few steps closer to her newest surprise.

  “What the…?” Marty started to say out loud, but before she could get the entire thought translated into words, an ether-soaked cloth was pressed onto her mouth and nose from behind sending the room spinning and then fading away into darkness.

  49

  Police work is sometimes more about waiting than it is about doing. Within forty-five minutes after speaking with Cindy Littleton, our task force of 14 officers, Ken Garber and myself, were parked a few blocks from the Baker Building waiting for the search warrant to arrive. One of our officers dressed in street clothes used his private vehicle to drive by the building to determine if any lights were on and in what areas of the building. He would also see if any vehicles were parked in the vicinity of the building, radioing the information to the team. It was a very low risk maneuver in order to ascertain the probabilit
y of running into someone when we finally entered the building. The drive-by was negative in that there seemed to be no lights on in the structure what-so-ever. No lights usually meant no people. This was a good sign for us once we gained entry. There were no vehicles parked in front of the building, either, which meant no quick getaway for our suspect if he was in the building. So far, everything seemed to be in our favor. In this type of operation you needed all the favors you can get!

  We waited half an hour before I began getting nervous about our search warrant. What if the judge decided we didn’t have enough information or legal grounds to issue one? My frustration was beginning to show when I finally saw headlights pulling up behind our convoy parked along the sidewalk on Rivulet Street. I watched Cindy Littleton get out of her BMW and approach my Explorer. She had a disgruntled look on her face as she reached my driver’s side window.

  “Chief Kosciak, you will never know what I had to go through to get this search warrant. The first judge was away for a few days of fishing in Maine; the second judge did not answer his telephone, and the third judge was watching a reality T.. shows and didn’t see that I had called until about thirty minutes ago! Jesus H. Christ almighty! Sometimes I wish I was a real estate lawyer. The most they have to worry about are a few percentage points on the interest rate and whether or not the toilet flushes properly.”

  “Cindy thanks for hand-delivering this. Makes the job much easier for us. You’re going to stay around while we do this, right?” I asked, mostly out of professional courtesy, but also knowing that having the assistant district attorney present while we executed the warrant would solidify our case if it came to trial in the months ahead if Christopher Bradford was our killer. Cindy would be our judicial eyes and ears to help us keep this operation “by the book.”

  Having the warrant in hand, I gave the signal to Ken and the others to move out. We would approach the building from four directions to cover all sides of the building. This would minimize the opportunity for anyone to escape unseen as we approached and entered the building. Just because we saw no lights on in any of the building’s rooms did not mean the building was empty. In fact, the one person I wanted to find in the building was Marty McMaster. My hopes were flying high as our vehicles stopped at their predetermined areas. The teams dispersed, each team approaching the structure from their designated route. Ken Garber would take team number two in thru the back entrance to the building. Teams three and four each took a side entry position but remained outside of the building. I would take team number one in through the front entrance.

  Kim would be first to enter the building with me close behind. Derek Larson and another officer would follow up the rear. Each officer carried a .40-caliber, Glock22 handgun. Each team was also armed with one Remington, 870-shotgun, and either a Heckler & Koch, MP5 assault weapon or a Ruger, Mini-14 tactical carbine. Night vision eyewear was being used by everyone on all four teams. Body armor and helmets would protect each of us from most ammunition fired our way. Most, not all.

  Holding her Glock with outstretched arms poised to fire, Kim entered the doorway first. The door gave little resistance to the battering ram, breaking away from the door-jam immediately after the first hit. Kim slanted off to the side wall of the hallway crouching down onto one knee while visually surveying the darkened environment for any movement or possible booby-traps. Seeing none, she signaled the rest of us to enter. Once we were inside, I signaled Ken Garber on my tow-way that our team was inside the building and for his team to enter from the rear.

  We quickly searched the outer office and massage parlor finding nothing out of the ordinary. Moving to the back of the office through a locked door, which we persuaded to open in the same fashion as the front doors, we found ourselves back in the darkened hallway with two doors on alternating sides and a third door at the end of the hall. Looking back over my shoulder, I could see the front doors where the moonlight reflected off of the flooring dimly lighting the hallway. There was a small amount of light coming from the other side of the door at the end of the hall but not enough to illuminate the length of the hallway. Kim and I took the first door to the left while Derek and his partner took the door on the opposite side. Each team entered their respective rooms simultaneously without any resistance. Entering our room, the first item I noticed was the monitor sitting on the desk top. There was obviously a camera positioned somewhere observing someone being kept in the room where the lens was located. Looking closer at the monitor, the room looked to be a girl’s bedroom. I could feel the sweat beading up on my neck and forehead realizing there was no one in the room. The room was empty. Had this room been Marty’s prison since her abduction? Was she already dead?

  “Where the hell is this room? We have to find it quickly,” I thought signaling to Kim that we needed to move right away to begin looking for the room. Making a visual sweep of the room we currently occupied, there did not seem to be anything else out of the ordinary: a sitting chair by the desk, a small sofa and a long wooden table against the far wall with nothing on it.

  Derek’s team was already waiting in the hallway when Kim and I came out of our room. They had not found anyhing of importance. Their search found a storage room filled with items Christopher used for his massage and tanning business placed on shelves and put away in totes stacked on the floor. They found no traces of anything illegal hidden away.

  The only door left was the door at the end of the hallway. This door was ajar allowing a small amount of light to filter in from the other side. I took the lead, and the four of us quietly and cautiously approached the door with all weapons trained on the opening. I slowly pulled the door open exposing the cellar stairway.

  Kim again assumed a crouching position while I trained my Glock straight down the stairs from a standing position. We both spotted Christopher’s distorted body at the bottom of the stairs. My first impulse was to rush down the stairs to see if he was still alive.

  “Dummy” I thought to myself looking at Kim, giving her the signal to proceed.

  Kim slowly went down to the body and checked the carotid artery for any sign of a pulse. She looked up at me shaking her head left to right. There was no sign of life. Kim lifted her night vision goggles to look further into the brightly lit cellar area. She motioned the all clear sign, and the rest of us proceeded down to the cellar finding ourselves in yet another hallway. At the bottom of the stairs, I saw the pen sticking out of Christopher’s eye. “A unique and unpredictable method,” I thought. “Someone knows how to improvise.”

  Lifting out night-vision goggles to see more clearly, out team passed a small bathroom on our left. Moving a little further down the cellar hallway, we entered the doorway to the room being watched on the monitor upstairs. I noted that the bed was unmade and rumpled. There was a CD player and earphones on the bed linen, and I knew I had been in this room before. As I was thinking about my déjà vu moment, Kim looked at me and whispered, “This is Marty McMaster’s room. Remember the day we met with her parents, they let us into to her bedroom to look around? Chief, she was here. Marty was here..

  While the four of us were inspecting the room we heard footsteps in the hallway. Our team separated creating more distance between each of us, two taking low aiming positions and two of us aiming chest level -- all toward the doorway. Before anyone entered, we heard Ken Garber call out.

  “This is Captain Ken Garber of the State Police. Whoever is in that room, I want you face down on the floor right now. I will not ask a second time. Assume the position on the floor now!”

  “Ken. It’s us. This is Kosciak. We’ve found Marty’s prison cell.”

  Ken entered the room leaving the rest of his team in the hall to protect our backs. “Kosciak, you’re a real dumb ass tonight.” I thought, mentally scolding myself. “Why didn’t you leave one or two of your team out there to cover your backs?”

  “Ron, we didn’t find anything coming in the back door. The ga
rage is empty and there doesn’t seem to be anyone anywhere in the rest of the building. I checked with the teams outside and everything is quiet. No one has even walked by the building since we entered. Except for our dead boy back there with the pen sticking out of his head, this place is empty.”

  “Well, I think our mystery just got bigger and more confusing.” I said to everyone in the room. “We know Marty was being held here. We know this is a very close replica to her bedroom at her home. We know Christopher Bradford owns this place and therefore most likely is Marty’s kidnapper. However, what we don’t have is any connection between Marty’s abduction and the murders of the five girls! What we also do not have is Marty McMaster! Her abductor is lying dead in a pile of broken pieces at the bottom of the cellar stairs with his head twisted one hundred and eighty degrees out of place, and there is no sign of her anywhere? It doesn’t make any freakin sense! No sense at all! If she had escaped, we would have heard something from someone. Her parents would have called it in to the station or someone else would have found her. Having escaped from here she would have been free to go anywhere for help. She would only have to go a few hundred feet in any direction to find help. What the Christ am I missing here folks?”

  Kim looked at me and simply said, “Bradford was not alone. There must be more than one killer, or perhaps an accomplice”

  50

  The white van drove over the back roads of Sutton and Auburn keeping within the speed limits trying not to attract any unwanted attention. The driver knew most of the Sutton police force was standing inside the Baker Building right at that instant scratching their collective heads wondering just what the hell was going on. Having missed the police teams by only a minute, the driver watched their vehicles converge on the Baker Building in the rear view mirror as the van turned the corner at the end of the street. There would be limited time to reach the cover of the safe house before they put out an APB on the van. However, the driver still felt very confident the trip would be concluded in plenty of time before police actually started cordoning off the roadways. The drive to the safe house would only take about a half to three-quarters of an hour keeping the vehicle within the speed limits, including all of the stop lights and stop signs along the way. After retracing this route a hundred times over the last three years, the driver was very familiar with every foot of blacktop and every pot hole waiting to bruise an unsuspecting tire. With his cargo securely bound and sleeping soundly, the drive was at least quiet and pleasant while the radio played R&B hits from the 60’s and 70’s.