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  “Too bad about Christopher,” The driver thought. “I don’t know why he wouldn’t listen to what I was trying to tell him. Now look at him; a heap at the bottom of the stairs. Killed by a stick from a Bic. I told him to keep his eye on Marty, but I never thought he would take me that literally!” Amused, a smile came and disappeared quickly in the darkened cab of the van as the vehicle rose and fell, the front suspension reacting to the first few feet of a narrow, wooden bridge crossing over the Blackstone River.

  “I’m actually surprised something like this didn’t happen sooner.” The driver continued to think. “Being dead is better than being in custody. He probably would have spilled his guts at the first sign of pressure during the interrogation, leaving me exposed and next in line for the electric chair. They’d probably use lethal injection in our case just to get even with us for the girls.” A smug expression overtook the driver’s face because he knew, that inside of his body there was not a shred of caring anywhere to be found. He truly did not give a shit about anyone or anything. There was no room for fear or indecision. Both were signs of weakness. This heart was composed of hatred. This nervous system, hardened due to years of systematic brutality.

  “I bet even God himself would hesitate to interact with me, or try to save my soul. After all, it does say in the Good Book that He is all knowing, and He knows just how black and soulless I really am. How do you save something that doesn’t exist?” Another facial change, as his expression went from being smug to being sarcastic and fatalistic.

  “Even the ole Satan-bird himself better give me wide birth, because I will even rattle his cage if he pisses me off.” The driver listened to Sam Cooke singing his 1963 blues song, “Mean Old World.” The irony struck the driver as being funny, and an eruption of loud laughter filled the inside of the van. The cargo still sleeping quietly on the floor in the back of the van, was unaware her situation was deteriorating swiftly the closer the van got to the safe house.

  “Mean ole World.” the thought lingered in the driver’s mind while the van continued its journey through the wintery, night-time shadows.

  51

  Our team spent two hours looking through the Baker Building after finding Christopher Bradford’s broken, dead body at the bottom of the cellar stairs. An APB had been issued by the state police for the van, and an Amber alert for Marty. As Ken and I were inspecting the stainless steel surgical table and associated carts and cutting implements in a large, mirrored room where Christopher undoubtedly disfigured and murdered the girls from the pond, I had two additional cruisers searching for Marty within the town limits. This mirrored room, used for many years to hold weekly ballroom dances, had become Christopher’s adoption chamber where he committed gruesome anatomical destruction, no more twirling dance gowns. Each implement, surgical cart and table was spotless and meticulously cleaned just like Christine Sawyer’s car when it was found in the state park after her disappearance. We were beginning to form some consensus about what had transpired just before our arrival as we continued examining the room. Ken and I agreed Marty was the person who stuck the ballpoint pen through Christopher’s eyeball into his brain. This type of assault would have been improvised on the spur of the moment, not like the use of a handgun where you planned to take someone out. Marty probably surprised him as she reached the top of the stairway before Christopher could make any adjustments to her assault. It was obvious to us that after the attack Marty would have been alone in the hallway and quite able to run toward the front door, open it, and gain her freedom. There would be nothing nor anyone in the hall to stop her. If she knew there was another person helping Christopher, she would not have killed him while still being in the presence of the other killer. No, she thought she was free as soon as Christopher took his fall from grace. Therefore, the only logical conclusion was that the other person must have surprised Marty, overpowered her, and abducted her a second time. We believed Marty was still alive. We reasoned the second killer would not have carried off a dead girl’s body when he could leave her in this mirrored room on display for someone to find. Another disfigured girl lying on a surgical table would offer much more gratification for the killer than dragging her dead body around the countryside. At least that is what Ken and I thought. We might be way off base with our hypotheses, but sometimes hunches play out better than physical evidence. In this case, hunches were all we had to go on.

  Located on one of the carts were three bottles, each containing one of the chemicals used for the lethal injection procedure. Hypodermic needles were covered on the same tray by white, surgical towels. I could only imagine the heightened ecstasy Christopher or his partner must have felt while performing their Marquis De Sade acts with the mirrored walls illuminating and magnifying their unrestrained, torturous sickness.

  “More than evil,” I thought. “Much, much, more than evil. There aren’t any words in the English language to describe how sick these bastards truly are,” I said out loud shaking my head in disgust.

  One of the mirrored panels moved inward as Kim entered the room.

  “Chief, the coroner is here to take Bradford away. Is it okay to let him go?” she asked, looking at the instruments and implements precisely placed next to each other on the portable carts.

  “Yeah, Kim, it’s okay. Doctor Faldwell from the ME’s office came by and let us know his initial exam of Bradford was done,” I said without looking away from the bottle of Pancuronium on the cart. “I need you to come right back after talking with the guys from the coroner’s office. We need to start thinking about tracking down this second person or people who have taken Marty.” Kim nodded, and left the room, the mirrored partition closed with a thud behind her leaving the walls once again reflective all the way around the room.

  “Ken, I would like to have one of my officer’s team up with one of your officers to research and create a historical timeline on Bradford. We don’t know much about his personal life or history. Place of birth, mother and father’s names, current whereabouts of each, siblings, schools he attended, military service, marriages or ex-wives, DMV information and credit report for starters. What do you think?”

  “Do you have anyone you can send over to Auburn? We’re better equipped for collecting that data and have better access to NCIC than you do in Sutton.”

  As we stood talking, Kim opened the panel. We brought her up to date on what we were doing regarding the investigative team for Bradford’s history and I instructed her to get Todd involved right away.

  “Kim, even if you have to physically drag Todd out of bed by his ankles yourself, I need him on this right away.”

  Kim, smiling at my weak attempt to be dramatic, said that she was sure Todd’s wife would have something to say about that, but that she would impress upon Todd the urgency of my request.

  “Have him go right over to the Auburn facility and meet up with…” I looked to Ken for a completion to my sentence.

  “Oh!” Ken responded a little embarrassed having been a million miles away in thought. “What was it you were saying, Ron?”

  “Who do you want our guy to meet up with at your facility so we can get going on Bradford’s information?”

  “Have him see the desk sergeant. I’ll leave instructions with him.

  We had no idea if the person, or people who took Marty, knew about our arrival or had seen our vehicles converging on the building. Assuming the worst condition, that our presence was known, would increase Marty’s chances for survival. Her abductor would probably want to keep her alive for use as a hostage should we catch a whiff of his trail and locate his hiding place. I hoped, as we left the Baker Building, that this was the case. Marty needed all the help she could get. I had no way of knowing, as I walked out of the building, that my assumptions regarding Marty’s captor were so far from the truth.

  52

  Marty immediately recalled waking up like this a few days before. The foggy cloud in her head
was difficult to penetrate with clear thoughts. Some thoughts seemed to begin clearly only to vaporize within seconds of their inception. She kept reaching mentally for reality, but it was always a fingertip away – elusive, but there to tease her waking mind.

  In her dreams, Marty could see Christopher’s bloody face falling backward down the stairs -- the ballpoint pen protruding from his eyeball just where she left it after striking her blow for freedom. But what then? What had happened just after she entered the room with the jars?

  “THE JARS!” she thought, remembering them placed side by side on the table just before everything went dark. “Some of the jars were looking at me!” another thought dulled and distorted by the drug used to put Marty into an unconscious stupor. “Eyes. Lips. Ears. In the jars. In the fucking jars! I must be dreaming. This must be a nightmare! In those fucking jars!” she repeated, as her eyes slowly began to open bringing her closer to her new horror.

  She realized her legs and wrists were bound once again. However, this time she was also gagged. She could breathe through her nose, but her mouth was trussed with cloth and duct tape preventing any breathing or speaking.

  “Where the hell am I?” she thought. What the hell is going on? What happened to me back there?”

  The clearer Marty’s thoughts became, the more memories of those last minutes flooded to the forefront of her mind. She knew that the jars scared her to death when she saw eyeballs looking out at her suspended in their formaldehyde solution. But just as she was about to scream, something…no…someone put a hand over her face.

  After that everything went black.

  “Someone else was there!” she thought with renewed panic running through her body. “Someone else has me now! Who? Why the fuck are they doing this to me? For Christ’s sake, what the FUCK is happening?”

  As these new realizations settled into her mind, Marty tried to focus on the room in which she was now being held captive. Unlike the room Christopher built for her, this room was nothing more than plain, drab, gray, concrete blocks and mortar. There were no windows and only one gray, metal door in or out of the room. She was lying on an old, metal, military bed with a three inch mattress. There were no blankets or pillows or anything else in the room. One very bright, bulb hung from the center of the ceiling illuminating the room. The room was about twelve feet by twelve feet with one small air vent sticking out from one of the concrete blocks about two inches from the ceiling. Marty knew that whoever was keeping her here was not concerned about her being comfortable. Remembrances of home were a thing of the past. This room represented the true meaning of the words “total isolation”.

  Hearing the door opening, Marty looked over to see a person walking into the room holding a plastic bucket. The person, presumably a man, wore black slacks, black shoes, a black sweatshirt, and a black mask covering his entire face. The mask looked to be plastic which was sewn to a cloth hood hiding the entire head. The person walked over to the corner of the room furthest from Marty’s bed, pulled a roll of toilet paper out of the bucket, and set both on the floor. Two plastic water bottles and a few packages of peanut butter crackers were also in the bucket. These the person haphazardly tossed over to Marty, not caring if they landed on the bed or on the floor. Still maintaining complete silence, the person walked back over to the door leaving the room. The only sound Marty heard after the person left the room was that of the lock being engaged from the other side.

  “I don’t know what good the bottled water and crackers will do me with my mouth taped up like this.” she thought to herself. “A lot of good a friggin’ bucket is going to do if I can’t get my slacks down to take a leak. What does this asshole want me to do, sit over the bucket, piss my pants and let it drain through? What the hell!”

  As she was contemplating the situation regarding her bodily functions and the bucket, the door opened again. Raising the index finger of his right hand in front of his mouth, signaling Marty to be quiet, he closed the door re-entering the room. The man stood and stared at Marty lying on the bed. The room filled with his silence making Marty afraid for her life as she waited for this stranger’s next move. After five minutes of silence, the man walked over to the bed, bent over, grabbed a corner of the duct tape covering Marty’s mouth and forcefully ripped it away. The duct tape burned as its adhesive fought to hold onto her flesh before letting go, allowing the rolled up cloth to fall out of her mouth onto the mattress. Before the cloth hit the mattress Marty began to speak.

  “Wha…” was all she was able to say before a black-gloved backhand smashed into the side of her face, sending her head against the cinder block wall. Remaining silent, the man walked to the door, turned one more time to look back at Marty trying to recover from the blow. He shook his head and gave a low chuckle as he closed the door.

  Marty’s head was reeling from the impact of the blow, saliva beginning to fill her mouth in response to the sudden jolt. She had learned a very quick and valuable lesson: do not speak unless asked to do so. Whoever this person was, he would hurt her without hesitation - he was no Christopher!

  53

  The abandoned State Hospital in Westborough was the perfect place to occupy a hidden facility for unnatural activities. Over three thousand acres of rolling inclines and crisscrossing pathways, covered mostly with trees and overgrown brush made it easy to use one of the outbuildings on the back side of the property without being detected. The hospital began closing its doors in 2009 leaving only a few mental health programs active within the main structure until its final closure in 2010. Due to state, budgetary cut-backs, grounds care was almost non-existent at this particular site, making it easy to choose an outbuilding located at the far rear of the property completely hidden from any main roads. There was only one dirt access road to the building that came in off a single lane road the town very seldom maintained. Access at almost any time of the day or night held minimal chance of being observed.

  The building where Marty was being held was built into the side of a hill. It had a large, manual, spring-loaded, overhead, garage door and one man-door visible from the dirt road. Grass, weeds and nature’s debris littered the area in front of the doors. If you did not already know this building existed, you could easily walk past and never notice it. Even in the winter months, the leafless scrub and brush camouflaged the building within the hill.

  Splicing into a nearby power feed running through the property supplied ample electricity. The garage kept the vehicles out of sight. No one ever came to check on the building. Video monitors do not lie, and there were half a dozen cameras set up in the area surrounding the hideaway to verify that fact. If someone did happen upon this hideaway, alarms would sound and a tunnel running three quarters of a mile underground to another utility building offered the perfect escape route.

  Originally this site was going to be home base for the abductees and their adoption processes. It was thought the vast size of the property would lend itself to secretive areas where remains could be buried and never found – a large cemetery without stones. But, after Christopher found the Baker Building and became obsessed with the mirrored room, plans changed. His constant whining finally drove his partner to relent and the Baker Building was purchased, becoming their prime location. Although the risk of discovery was higher at the Baker Building, one had to admit the adrenaline rush performing the procedure in front of all those mirrors, right in the middle of a town, was indescribably titillating. Until tonight, this building served as a secret place where they could hide for an unlimited amount of time if need be. Under the present conditions, it looked as though their theory was going to be proven out. With Christopher’s death, Marty’s kidnapping and the intense search sure to follow, it might be a very long time before the current tenants would see the light of day. Not only was there an ample supply of food, water and personal items, Marty had been brought along to supply the entertainment!

  “It felt good to give that bitch a
good crack in the head. I wanted to hit her again on the other side just to even things up,” his thought, provoking a feeling of complete power and control. “She may have played those mind fuck games on Christopher, but, the only thing she will play in my world is a harp at the pearly gates!” His words echoed within the concrete chamber.

  “Baby… you got a one way ticket to paradise…” he sang. He took a cold beer from the refrigerator, turned on the police scanner and sat to relax in his recliner. “All the comforts of home, my friend, all the comforts of home.”

  54

  By the time we concluded the follow up meeting with the teams from the Baker Building event and I arrived home for a much needed shower, Peggy was already fast asleep. I mixed myself a Captain and coke, with only a few ice cubes, to enjoy while I sat and processed the events of the day for about the thirtieth time since leaving the police station after the meeting ended. Although we still did not have any concrete proof there was a second person involved with this whole mess, with the exception of the missing white van, my flags were standing straight up and I knew we were dealing with someone just as evil as Christopher Bradford.