twin beds set atop a different nappy carpet; and a utility room with linoleum flooring and plasterboard walls. Clegg and I searched the family room and bedroom thoroughly but came up empty. Nasty clothes, unclean rooms, and mold might get unsanitary marks from Good Housekeeping, but it wasn’t going to inspire a judge to sign a search warrant order.
Clegg went upstairs, while I explored the utility room some more. My flashlight beam gleamed off the yellowing linoleum floor as I scanned the baseboard perimeter, looking for whatever, something useful, all the while surprised that my heart rate kept to a steady and even rhythm. Here I was, breaking into somebody’s house, calm as if the owners had given me the key. The Fiend’s game had trained me for this moment—transformed me into a pro’s pro of the criminal variety.
I found a box of electronics, old cell phones, wires, speaker cables, and such, and was rummaging through that when Clegg called, “John! Come here! Come quick!”
I found Clegg in a carpeted hallway, standing beside an unfolded stairwell, which I presumed led up to an attic space. He had a grin on his face that made me think of the clichéd cat having eaten a certain yellow bird.
“You’ve got to see what’s up here to believe what’s up here, amigo,” he said.
CHAPTER 50
My first thought: How many computers does this guy own? My second thought: What the hell is all this crap? I stood upright on a carpeted floor in the middle of a stuffy, airless attic.
Clegg found a switch that turned on a bank of overhead lights. A long particleboard desk ran parallel to the sloping ceiling. The desk was jam-packed with computers, four monitors, two laptops, and a couple printers, nice ones, too. Underneath the desk I found a jumble of wires, hubs, and Internet routers—a typical computer nerd setup with all the accoutrements associated with digital know-how.
But it was the other wall that had me all sorts of freaked out. Neatly arranged on pegs and shelving units was—and I knew this only from bad cable movies—a wide variety of BDSM equipment, an acronym made up of the interchangeable words bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism.
Clegg took out his flashlight and shone it on one particular item hanging close to my head. “Does that look like the kind of gag SHS used?”
I looked at the big black ball secured to a leather strap containing silver locking buckles and thought of Dr. Lisa Adams. I remembered her so clearly—tied to a heavy oak chair, a naked bulb dangling above her head, a ball gag that could have very well been this one stuffed into her mouth.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice carrying softly on the stream of unpleasant memories. “It could be this one.”
I didn’t know what a lot of this stuff was, but Clegg seemed to have a good idea.
“I used to work SVU,” he said. “We learned these things. Over here, you’ve got your basic bondage mittens,” he said, shining a light on pouch-like coverings that could be secured around the wrists.
“I’m impressed that anybody could make a mitten creepy,” I said.
“And here we’ve got a nice assortment of rings, not for your fingers, and here we’ve got your classic humbler.”
“What’s a humbler?” I asked.
Clegg paused, holding his flashlight steady on the apparatus with a cuff and a clasp mounted to a concave bar. The device could easily fit around the back of a person’s legs. “Let’s just say it’s nasty, and leave it at that,” Clegg said.
Some of the items I could figure out on my own—something to spread the legs apart, a straitjacket, ropes, shackles, black leather masks, hoods, restraints of one variety or another. What I didn’t see were any masks of Super Mario with cutout eyeholes or even a black ski mask with red stitching around the mouth and eyes.
Clegg walked by me, headed to the other side of the attic, where a shuttered door offered the promise of a needed discovery—something that would make this cache of the ultra-creepy a slam dunk from a warrant perspective. Maybe the incriminating masks would be stashed in there. Perhaps we’d find videotapes of Dr. Adams’s and Winnie’s kidnapping and torture sessions. Maybe we’d even find the bloody pruning shears used to sever the fingers of the Fiend’s four known victims. I wondered, too, about those computers. What did they have on them? Deranged pornography probably, the stuff that made use of all that equipment hanging on the