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“He … he came out of nowhere,” the detective said, bewildered. “How did you get him off me?”
“Kicked him in the balls,” Sampson said.
He was on his knees now, folding the rest of his shirt into a large pad that he pressed across the left side of her face. “Hold that.”
Aaliyah held her hand up and pressed it to her skin, trying to ignore the sharp throbbing pain there. But she couldn’t get away from the agony in her right arm. “I think he broke my arm.”
“Hold tight a second,” Sampson said as he wrapped and tied the longer strips around the makeshift pad.
Five minutes later, he helped her to her feet. Her arm was in a sling he’d fashioned from his jacket and her shoulder holster.
“Okay,” Sampson said. “We’re gonna walk right out of here and get you to a hospital where they can give you some painkillers, clean you up, and take a look at that arm. Maybe treat you for rabies too. Who knows if that dog ever got his shots.”
“Not yet,” she said, even though she felt dizzy and sick. “What about that smell?”
“It’ll wait,” he said.
“You’ve stopped the bleeding,” she said. “Ten minutes more won’t kill me.”
Sampson hesitated, and then smiled. “You’re a tough one. You remind me of my wife. Billie’s like that too.”
Aaliyah tried to smile, but it hurt too much. She asked him for her Maglite, which was still in the mud. Sampson got it for her, cleaned it off, and once again they started to probe the barn, looking for the source of that smell.
They found it under a bench in a galvanized bucket with a perforated lid: seven inches of coagulated blood. Was it human or animal? And where had it come from?
Sampson pointed to a ZipSnip cordless cutting tool hanging above the bench that looked like it had blood on the blade, but neither of them touched it. The throbbing in her cheek and forehead turned fiery, and she resigned herself to leaving the place to the Allegheny County detectives and a full forensics team. Or, better yet, the FBI. They had jurisdiction. This was an interstate kidnap/murder case after all.
As they walked back through the woodworking machines, Aaliyah tried to figure out where the dog had come from and why she hadn’t seen him until he was in full attack mode. Remembering the angle at which the Rottweiler appeared, she went toward the horse stalls filled with lumber.
Aaliyah soon spotted a gap of about fifteen inches between the lumber pile and the far wall of the first stall. She shone her light into it.
A broken slat in the barn wall provided an opening big enough for a dog to get through. There was a filthy, ragged blanket on the floor, the dog’s bed, she supposed, and what at first glance looked like the rawhide pieces people give dogs so they’ll chew on those instead of the furniture. But then Sampson lit up a rear wall with a ledge on the top, and Aaliyah felt nauseated all over again.
Those weren’t rawhide strips in the dog’s bed or on that shelf right there in stacks, like Pringles chips without the can. They were curling ovals of black human flesh in various stages of drying.
CHAPTER
41
AT THREE IN THE morning, I set the GoPro camera and the harness on a picnic bench beside a deserted gravel parking lot lit by high-pressure sodium lights. Across the lot, there was a long, low yellow-and-silver prefabricated metal building that put me in mind of the commercial pig barn where Preston Elliot’s bones had been found.
Aiming the high-definition camera at myself and turning it on, I felt a weight descend on my shoulders. I glanced angrily at the camera and tugged on latex gloves, saying, “I’m doing what you wanted, Mulch. When I’m done, you let someone go.”
Then I drew the Colt, bowed my head, and prayed God would forgive me for what I was about to do. I’d had to kill men before, several of them, as a matter of fact. But in those terrible moments when I’d had to turn a gun or some other weapon on a fellow human, it had always been in self-defense, situations where there’d been only the instinct to survive and all moral conduct had been nullified by my right to live.
This was different. I was about to kill for no reason other than that I had decided one life was worth less than another. The weight of that was like no other I have ever felt or imagined—crushing, disintegrating, and wretched at its core. I wondered whether Mulch would see the agony of my predicament crippling my posture, worming through my mind, and gnawing at my skin like some flesh-eating bacteria.
Would he feed on it?
Is this what he wanted to see?
Was I his entertainment?
For much of the night leading up to that moment, I’d been thinking hard about Mulch, about what could possibly be driving him. Atticus Jones thought that Mulch had simply fallen in love with murder and with getting away with murder. Forcing me to kill for his amusement was just a twisted next step.
So be it, I thought numbly. I’m dooming my soul to save the ones I love. Feeling the torture of that, I set the pistol on the picnic table, picked up the GoPro, brought it close to my face, and whispered in a wavering voice, “This is how you want to see it, isn’t it? From my point of view?”
Then I turned the camera away slowly, took the harness hanging from the bottom, and fit it and the camera on my head. After adjusting the camera so it could pick up the gun if my arm was extended to shoot, I set off toward the building.
