The next playhouse was in Squantum, a bedroom community by the sea, an inlet on the bay. A subset of the town of Quincy well-enough off to have an industrialized waterfront and boasting more than its fair share of clean beaches, redolent of Massachusetts nautical history boasting a seaside and shipping feel. The house was a nice, white two-story Federalist type—a clapboard deal never meant to become as exorbitant as skewed and ruined real-estate demand had made it. The place wasn’t well maintained, was in dire need of a paint job and the grass in the front yard was wildly overgrown. Boyd noticed the exterior drabness of the house like a warning sign to stay away: No one is wanted here.
The gulls were crying and the smell of the salt air in the cold of the late winter day was keen. It should have been spring, but anyone who lived in Boston and environs knew the season for the region was strictly a myth. Winter often lingered on right into May; sometimes through it. Boyd hitched up her black pleather jacket and used the salt-spotted, corroded brass knocker on the weather-beaten door with some force. There was no answer. She had to kick the door a couple of times before somebody answered.
“What do you want?” asked a slightly stooped older man with white hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He wasn’t welcoming.
“Detective Lieutenant Kay Boyd, Boston P.D.” She flipped him the badge in its leather wallet and he grabbed it hard, which made Boyd want to punch him in the face, but she refrained. She yanked it back and pocketed it.
“I suppose you’ll be wanting to come in then.”
“If you don’t mind, Mr. Eldritch.”
“Do it then.” He shrugged and drew back from the doorway, leading her into the kitchen through a musty, dust-ridden den that hadn’t seen daylight in years walking in a hunch. He led Boyd through the living room, where light had obviously been blocked by heavy dust- and cobweb-clotted maroon drapes for years to a kitchen brightly lit by the light struggling in from bare, albeit dirty windows. Eldritch had already sat himself down at the classic gold-speckled Formica table as if he expected something. Boyd continued standing, despite his gesture for her to sit.
“You have kids. Where are they?”
“They’re playing in the back.”
“They are? I didn’t hear a sound when I knocked on your door.”
“My wife and I have taught ‘em how to behave quietly. They wouldn’t be disobedient.”
“They wouldn’t? And why wouldn’t they?”
“They know discipline. It’s important for children to respect their elders, know their place, to know discipline.”
“I see,” said Boyd, sizing Eldritch up. Sizing up the house in the bargain and getting nowhere. “You made them afraid.”
“Sure, fear is good for children. Teaches them respect. You don’t respect what you don’t fear. And they respect me and my wife. Totally.”
“I can see that.”
“You can’t see shit. Tell me what you want and get the fuck out. In fact, I didn’t have to invite you in at all. I could’ve just slammed the door in your face and there’d be nothing to be done about it. I’m getting stupid in my old age.”
“That’s true. But you invited me in, and since that happened, I can look around.”
“You can, but you can only use what you find in plain sight. And you can’t go upstairs—no, no you’d need a warrant for that and obviously you ain’t got one. So, take a look at what’s available to ya on the first floor, which ain’t gonna be nothin’, and then go screw yourself.”
“I don’t need to take a look around here, Mr. Eldritch. I already know what you and your wife Mildred are doing. I assume all the outfitting, the props, the cameras, and the hard drugs are all on the second floor?”
“Don’t matter what’s up there, missy, ‘cause you ain’t goin’.”
“You do know why I’m here, don’t you?”
“Haven’t a clue.”
“Let me clue you in, then. You and your wife and your four foster kids are streaming live hardcore kiddie porn over the dark web from the upstairs bedroom. Some bondage and light S-and-M play for the niche market. I’m sure you have floggers and ball gags and paddles and all the accoutrements we could confiscate. And even an actual cage, I understand.” She seemed bored and unconcerned. She wasn’t.
“Fuck what you understand. You can’t touch a thing. I’m calling my lawyer. Maybe he can get you to leave.”
“Oh, I’ll be going, alright. Don’t worry.”
“You’re not going to arrest me?”
“Well, that was the plan.”
Eldritch’s face went slack with perplexity; gray wattles, long deep creases dragged down to the Formica table, distorting him like a cartoon. “That was your plan? And you were going to arrest me off what? No warrant, no evidence, no back up? Tell me how the fuck you planned to arrest me!”
“Well, not just you. Mildred too. And then we’d be getting the kids out of here into some sort of residential therapy. We have an accomplished social worker on our side who does some pretty amazing things.”
“Miracles, to be sure.” He removed a mostly empty half pint bottle of Jim Beam from the side pocket of his khakis. “So how do you think this will go down? Just how are you intending to arrest us?” He slammed the empty bottle down on the table with a delighted gasp.
“I thought you and Mildred would just confess and let me take you in, after arranging for a sitter first, of course, until DYS gets here.”
“Are you blind high on molly or something? No shit, Detective Boyd, but you are off your bloody fucking rocker!” He cackled at her in a superior way, proving that someone could actually do that convincingly. Eldritch was ready to make short work of Boyd.
Boyd shook her head. “Stone cold sober. Unlike you.”
“Ain’t a crime to take a taste in your own goddamn house, is it?”
“No, not at all.”
“I’m not confessing to any of your bullshit and neither is Mildred, who’s upstairs napping, by the way. And I’m not even going to wake her to tell her you were here. My confessing and your arresting me is a pipedream, and you can shove that pipe right up your ass.”
“No, Eldritch. If you don’t leave here with me in cuffs and your wife too, all of it will be shoved right up both your withered asses!” Her temper was rising.
“Take your best shot, you smug, fat little bitch!”
“Fat? Really?” Boyd felt her torso with her hands theatrically over her pleather jacket. “This is Boston, and we all wear bulky clothes this time of year.”
“Yeah, well, Quincy ain’t Boston, so, don’t let the door hit you in your fat ass on the way out, bitch!” Eldritch belched.
Boyd smacked him hard with an open hand hard across his weathered face, so it turned pink quickly. Eldritch cradled his cheek and moaned like a wounded calf.
“Listen up, you stupid pervert. It plays this way: Either I place you under arrest and you and your wife confess, or some dreadful fucker much, much worse than you is going to pay you and your wife a visit and torture you both to death.”
“What the fuck?”
“You haven’t heard about all the deaths of all your perverted little cohorts down at Hebe Group being murdered? I know it hasn’t made the papers, because nobody but me has made the kiddie porn connection between all these new torture murders—about forty of them, I’d say. Mutilated corpses. But I bet your nifty paychecks or Bitcoin blockchains from Hebe Group have been suffering some miscalculation and delay lately, no?”
Eldritch turned even more white than before and then went ashen. “How the fuck did you know that? It’s like nobody’s running the show over there, for Christ’s sake.”
“So, you’re confessing?”
“I never said anything of the kind. Besides, if you know this bozo is coming, you have to protect me. You’re a goddamn policewoman.”
“But I don’t know that’s true, Mr. Eldritch, at least not officially. No one’s investigating this torture killer. And those who know about it don’t give a rat’s ass because he’s preying exclusively on scumbags just like you.”
“Well, if that’s so detective fat-ass, why don’t you protect me? Post a detail outside the shanty and prevent this boogieman from causing me and mine bodily harm! Christ almighty!”
“Can’t do that, Eldritch. There’s no investigation open on the torture murderer. Could be he’s just a folk myth, an urban legend. But I heard tell he sent some cam-corded messages distributed to assholes like you. Didn’t you get the memo? Links to the streaming video?”
“I don’t always read my emails. Usually nothing but junk. I open the ones that talk about payment and that’s about it.”
“You should go back a few days and read some. Might clear your head.”
Eldritch slammed a flat hand on the table. “If you know some jamoke is coming here to do us harm, you’re obligated to prevent it.” He screwed up his face and raised one eyebrow over one open eye, the other frozen in a wink. “You’re fucking law enforcement, ain’t ya, bitch?”
“Sure. But we enforce the law after it’s been broken, not before. All I have here involving you is an unconfirmed suspicion of child abuse, rape and kiddie porn distribution. I got nothing on any attempted murder on you and wifey. Nada. I’m offering you a chance at cooperation, so I can arrest you.”
“So, you’ll do nothing then?”
“Come on, Eldritch, be an adult. When have you ever known of any policemen to actually prevent a crime? Like never. We don’t prevent anything. We execute law enforcement after the crime is committed, not before.”
“But me and my wife may need protection!”
“Well, I can protect you once I arrest you. Otherwise, no.”
“Fuck off then. We’ll take our chances. I think your talk about a torture killer boogieman, whatever, is a good goddamned fairy story.”
Boyd sighed, put her hands in her pockets. “Alrighty then, I’ll just go. You have a nice day, Mr. Eldritch. Enjoy it, because it’s going to be your last.”
“Ah, bullshit!” Eldritch didn’t get up to escort her out.
As Boyd made her way through the dim, dusty living room toward the front door, she turned and called back to him: “You had your chance, Mr. Eldritch. Good luck to you.”
“You stupid cow! You think confessing to felonies and getting arrested by you is any kind of a chance? Blow it out your generous ass, why don’t you!” He laughed a harsh, dry and mirthless laugh.
“You’d think it wouldn’t be, and normally you’d be right on the money, but in this situation, it really was your last, best hope and now it’s gone. Just like me.”
“Good riddance then!”
“You’re right, Eldritch. I’ll be saying that myself pretty soon.”
“In a pig’s eye!”
Boyd shrugged and let both the hard and weathered wood door with the corroded knocker on it and the bent, spotted aluminum storm door in front of it slam tight behind her with a high-pitched bang. She gave a crisp little nod of satisfaction to herself and walked briskly back to her car, mindful of the cold.
* * *
They were in full swing.
The Eldritches using the disciplined foster children—everyone naked. Mildred dancing around her breasts flopping about, a ten-year-old sandy-haired boy hands behind his back tied to a sawhorse taking blows from her multi-tressed flogger in the well-carpeted expanse of the second floor of the house in Squantum; Eldritch coupling with a 7-year-old girl with a bright orange ball gag in her mouth, making muffled noises. Screams, pleas, sobs and whimpers, muffled. The boy’s back was welted to bleeding. Eldritch whooping loud and hard. A digital camera on a tripod recording. Cameras set in each corner of the ceiling narrow-casted the scene on the dark web to a new Hebe Group server. Two other children, a boy and a girl, both redheads, were tied and gagged and stashed in a back corner, presumably waiting their turn. Old rock music from the sixties played loud and distorted.
“Inna Gadda Da Vida” was screaming.
Null crashed in through the center bay window that had a blanket tacked over it. He landed on the floor on his back amid shards of glass and splinters of wood. He had swung in on a corded nylon tether anchored to the roof, freed himself quickly with a panic snap. When he got up, a screaming nude Mildred wearing harlequin glasses faced him with a shotgun. She couldn’t be heard over the music.
“This stops now!” shouted Null, barely audible.
“This will go on forever!” countered Mildred, shrieking, and resolutely pumped both barrels into Null’s chest, putting him back on his back on the plush rug, flopping about.
She strode away and hit a button on a wall console that killed the music.
“Fred!” she screamed, as if the music was still on. “Look what I caught!”
Genitals glistening, Eldritch approached Null, who was struggling and coughing flat on his back. He was flopping pathetically like a goldfish whose bowl had been smashed.
Eldritch was beside himself with glee.
“Well, lookee here! We got the goddamned boogie man that fucking police cunt threatened us with. Ain’t that somethin’. I am so scared!”
He produced an excited laugh that sounded like “ee-hee-hee.”
“We’ll bury him out back in the yard—nobody’s going to miss this fucker.” Mildred chuckled and blew on the empty holes of both barrels of the shotgun by her side for emphasis.
“What the fuck was he thinking?”
“I don’t know what kind of game they were runnin’, but pretty much it was a stupid one. Probably nothin’ to do with the law, fake badge and all.”
The children were quiet, all but the girl with the ball gag in her mouth, who had sat down in the middle of carpet, weeping so furiously that the sound could be discerned clearly for what it was in spite of the gag. It was both sloppy and frustrated.
“Even if it was the legitimate law, they couldn’t do shit. They need warrants and subpoenas up the wazoo we could always beat. We’re on the good list with Norfolk County judges. Not that the real cops would ever even suspect a nice foster family like us.”
“Then how’d these freaks know?”
“Maybe they got lucky.”
“Maybe we got careless.”
“Doesn’t matter for right now. Be a doll and get me two more rounds from the nightstand by the bed, would you? I need to finish this fucker off.”
“Okay. I’ll get to cleanin’ up the blood in the morning. First, we’ll have to take him out back, bury the bastard.”
The sobbing of the young girl was a keening muffle. The sound was like that of a dying gull.
Then another sound startled them both.
They heard the click.
They froze, rattled.
Null was standing there in front of them, breathing hard.
He spoke evenly, seemingly unaffected by having taken two full shotgun blasts in the chest.
“You didn’t get lucky, and you didn’t get careless. You were targeted. By me.” Null glowered before them, the Heckler drawn and cocked.
“How the fuck—?” clucked Eldritch.
“Flak jacket,” replied Null softly. “I thought, in view of the last playhouse I visited, that it would be prudent to wear one. Forewarned is forearmed, although I think I may have broken a rib. Maybe two.” He blinked.
Mildred, holding the now empty shotgun, decided to turn on the charm. “I can fix that for you, handsome, if you let me.”
Null’s response was four quick rounds from the Heckler, two in each of their stomachs.
Both Eldritches collapsed to the rug, moaning and wailing simultaneously.
“Yes,” said Null approvingly. “It hurts like hell, but it won’t kill you right away. I have no intention of letting you die quickly. No, not at all.”
“Listen!” gasped Eldritch in sincere remorse. “Get the Boyd bitch on the blower for me. Tell her we’ll take the deal she offered. We’ll confess, take the arrest. We’ll even name names for you, you fucking son-of-a-bitch!”
“No need. I have all the names that are necessary. And as you can see, I already had yours.”
Null walked about surveying the room, eying the children, trying to decide whether to untie them or leave them as they were until he was finished. There was sobbing and a breathy child’s plea to a nonexistent god.
Both Eldritches began to make considerable noise. He went over to them again and fired one more round each in the belly, then knelt down and explained himself in a gentle seeming tone. “That’s right, you won’t be going anywhere, but go ahead and try to get out of this. Crawl in your own blood, making for an escape. Slither if you have to. I salute your tenacity. You can go. But you won’t get far—you’ll just bleed out all the faster. Or stay in one place and slow down the inevitable, if you like. Either way, I’ll get back to you. Either way, we’re going to have a little talk about the importance and value of children in the world, and how they should be treated.”
“We know how the little bastards should be treated!” coughed Eldritch defiantly.
“They earn their keep!” spat Mildred.
“And now you’ll earn yours. If you don’t know how children should be treated, you’ll die trying to know. In fact, I guarantee, you’ll die anyway.”
He left them there, struggling and bleeding, casually adding, “Ignorance is no excuse.”
Null went to the small naked girl now lying on the rug, her hands zip-tied and the ball gag still in her mouth. He released her, lifted her up, smoothed her hair. He took a tissue from his pocket, dabbed away tears.
The girl was shaking, having trouble standing. Null steadied her.
“It’s going to be okay, kid. I know it doesn’t quite look that way now, but it will. What’s your name?
“I’m Robin,” she said in a rasping whisper and burrowed into Null’s coat for safety.
“‘A robin redbreast in a cage. Puts all heaven in a rage.’”
“What?”
Null took her gently by her shoulders, put his face close to hers. “Okay, kid. I’m going to need you to be a very big girl and help me. Can you find everybody’s clothes while I get them untied? Can you do that for me?”
“Yeah,” Robin said in a small voice. “Sure.”
“You go get dressed and get their clothes on them and I’ll take care of everything else. You’re okay, aren’t you? You’re a big girl—you can do it.”
Robin sniffled. “Yeah. I’m okay. I can do it.” She broke away from Null with surprising energy and turned to look at him as he cut her brother’s zip ties with a buck knife. “Mister, are you gonna kill ma and pa?”
Null looked at her analytically.
“You know they’re not really your ma and pa, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I do. Are you gonna kill ‘em?
“Well, do you think I should?”
Robin cast her eyes to the rug and mumbled to herself, but perceptibly enough to be heard: “Yeah. I think you oughtta.”
“Well,” said Null, “you and I are two minds that are very much alike.”
“We are?”
“Yeah, because I think so too.”