The red room a dark web.., p.1
The Red Room: A Dark Web Thriller, page 1
ALSO BY BRANDON HUGHES
The Hero Rule: Is it Justice or Murder
The 4th Prisoner: When Evil Escapes
TensionBooks.com
Copyright © 2024 by Brandon Hughes
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Trade Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9879233-6-8
eBook ISBN: 979-8-9879233-5-1
Published by Tension Books
For my mother, Mary Lou.
For everything.
CONTENTS
I. Tess
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
II. Kayla
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
III. Amanda
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Thank You for reading
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About the Author
The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but, at the same time, the most intellectually resisted fact.
MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE
PART ONE
TESS
ONE
It was just after 9:00 PM, and Marvin Swiderski of Waupaca, Wisconsin, was part of a rowdy pack of adults making the four-minute walk from The Capital Grille in downtown Milwaukee to the Hilton City Center, where they were all staying. The amoeba-like group was making its way down the sidewalk, sounding and walking as expected, following three hours of eating and drinking at the elegant steakhouse on the company’s dime. Then, with a growing swell of support, someone in the group, Marvin thought it sounded like Barbara from Eu Claire, suggested keeping the party going at a dueling piano bar she had seen online while surfing her phone during the day’s meetings. She assured the group, “It’s around here somewhere.”
It was a Thursday night in late July, and Nowak Power and Tractor, the largest tractor dealer in Wisconsin with five locations across the state, was hosting its annual conference. The dealership’s locations were all in and around small cities and towns, so meeting in a large city such as Milwaukee with its restaurants, bars, entertainment, and Major League Baseball’s Brewers was a treat for its employees.
As it was, Marvin appeared to be the only one of the dozen or so employees ready to call it a night and head back to his hotel room. He knew better than to voice this decision because doing so would only result in everyone else’s drunken beggings and pleadings. The consequence of which would likely be peer pressure tinged with guilt carrying him along to listen to two obnoxious but talented piano players play their schtick for the drunkards. He had drank only water at the restaurant until his bone-in ribeye came—Pittsburgh rare—then he enjoyed a single glass of Cabernet. It was the last night of the conference, and the last thing he wanted was to drive home in the morning with a hangover.
The group passed the main entrance to the Hilton, and Marvin, who was on the far side of the group and closest to the street, stopped walking until the group passed and made his way toward the entrance.
“Marv!” Marvin stopped—it was Barbara. He looked back and noticed the crowd had also stopped, save for two people who continued ahead, oblivious. “What’re you doing? Didn’t you hear what I said about the piano bar?”
Marvin, who had planned for this contingency—he was the head of logistics for all of Nowak, so he prepared for everything—opted for the Irish goodbye.
“Gotta call the wife real quick,” he said.
Barbara countered, “Just call her on your—”
She didn’t get a chance to finish because Marvin, ever the planner, unclipped the smartphone from his hip, held it up, waggled it, and said, “Battery’s about dead. I want to get a good charge on it in case we need an Uber later.”
Barbara nodded a wobbly nod. “Just don’t be too long, Marv. I got a fiver for the piano guy to play the Wisconsin fight song for you when you get there. Text me when you’re on the way, and I’ll get ’em to play it as you walk in.”
Marv said, “Thanks,” but Barbara didn’t hear him as she and the party had already started moving down the sidewalk. He was entering the revolving door entrance when he heard Barbara once more yelling at the pair that had gotten too far ahead, telling them they had missed the turn.
A hotel employee greeted him with a Good evening, sir as he entered the expansive lobby cast in brown marble and gold with crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. He pressed the elevator button and briefly thought he should have joined the group taking in the Brewers game against the Cubs. However, if Marvin were being truly honest, the steak and the company solidified his choice. Sure, the group he found himself with every year was loud, but they were good people and had been his clique at these conferences for over twenty years.
The elevator arrived, and he stepped aside to allow four young men dressed for a night out on the town to exit. He wondered if they would bump into Barbara and the gang at some point, but he quickly dismissed the idea—they didn’t look like the dueling piano types. Instead, he figured them for a place far more trendy with electronic music, flashing lights, overpriced cocktails…and women who didn’t look like Barbara.
He got off at the fourteenth floor when his phone buzzed. Ignoring it, he retrieved his wallet, found his room key, and let himself in. He stepped immediately into the bathroom and peed. After washing his hands, he emptied his pocket detritus on the dresser before checking his phone. It was a text message from his wife.
TWO
Almost fourteen hours earlier, Tess Swiderski sat drinking her morning coffee and reading her Kindle. She had read the same page three times when she realized her mind was wandering. She and Marvin’s youngest child, their only son, had joined the Navy after high school graduation, and she was struggling with empty nest syndrome. They had long ago decided what was best for the children and the family was for her to stay home and care for them. Tess, an accountant by trade, quickly discovered that she found her true calling as a stay-at-home mom. The time she spent with her children and volunteering for all things school-related gave her tremendous joy.
Never totally abandoning her career in numbers, she found the odd accounting job that allowed her to work from home, giving her a sense of purpose outside her responsibilities as a mother and wife. As the date approached when she and Marvin knew the last of their four children would no longer be living at home, they discussed what she would do with all the extra time on her hands. There were projects around the house that she wanted to tackle, but she wanted something more substantial. Even though she was still taking on the occasional accounting project, she longed for the collegial adult contact of working in an office setting. Unfortunately, a town the size of Waupaca (population 5,916) didn’t offer much opportunity for a fiftysomething stay-at-home mom who had been largely out of the game for over two decades. Marvin worked forty-five minutes away in Appleton, and they had discussed her looking for a job there and commuting together during the week, but the few resumes she sent out had not garnered so much as a phone call or email.
Her thoughts drifted back a couple of days ago to when Marvin was packing for his conference. He suggested she go with him, but like always, she declined. As a girl raised in a small town of less than six thousand, she had never taken a liking to the hustle and bustle of the big city, and up until now, she had the children at home that she could use as an excuse for not attending with her husband. But Marvin knew the real reason. He had tried to plan vacations for just the two of them, but her idea of a vacation was getting the kids settled somewhere for the weekend so she and her husband could spend a couple of days alone, being lazy and watching movies.
Marvin knew his wife of thirty-two years well enough to know she wasn’t happy. With children no longer in the house, she felt an emptiness, a lack of purpose. Combined with the lack of interest from prospective employers, he was worried she was spiraling into a mild depression. She had always been so good about keeping a positive outlook even in the face of the most difficult challenges that he knew things weren’t good, and he was genuinely concerned. So much so that he offered to stay home, but she convinced him that as a su pervisor in the company, he needed to attend the annual event.
“It just won’t look right if you’re not there,” she told him. “I’m sure there are other employees who may not want to go but feel they have to, and to see someone in a leadership position skipping out won’t do well for morale.”
She was right, of course, because she usually was. Her uncanny ability to see things Marvin could not, even in his own business, made him even angrier that his wife had not gotten a job interview. Before he left for the two-hour drive to Milwaukee, he had a thought.
“Why don’t you start painting again?” he suggested. “You’re such a talented artist, and you used to paint all the time before the children.”
“Oh God,” she said, embarrassed but laughing.
“I’m serious.” She was still shaking her head, smiling as she blew on her hot coffee. Then, he said, “You could paint something for the house or paint something and see if you can sell it.” She rolled her eyes as she took a tentative sip. “What’s that website? Itsy? You know where you can make stuff and sell it?”
“Etsy. The website is called Etsy, and I wouldn’t even know where to begin. It’d probably take a while to get back up to speed; it’s been so long.”
“Well, start getting up to speed, then. Pour yourself a glass of wine, turn on some music, and see what comes from your brush.”
She took another sip of coffee, but she was no longer laughing or dismissing the idea. “Maybe I will,” she said with an air of finality.
“Good. Now, have something done for when I get back. You have three days.” They both laughed as she followed him out to his truck. Marvin put his suitcase in the backseat and kissed his wife goodbye before getting in and driving off.
Tess blinked and realized her mind had wandered; she set her Kindle down and reached for her laptop. She pulled up Etsy, clicked on the Art and Collectibles tab, and began perusing. She saw someone offering to paint a watercolor of your home, and another person was selling family portraits done in oil. Tess enjoyed creating abstracts in mixed media. As she looked and saw some of the prices these paintings were fetching—paintings she deemed inferior to what she was capable of—her interest grew. Tess had never painted for money; only joy and passion had driven her. Perhaps starting a business selling her paintings was just what she needed—marrying her creative side with her keen business sense was appealing. But, first, she needed to see where she stood after her long hiatus from the canvas.
She began to make a list of supplies she’d need to get started. She was doing a mental inventory of what she already had when it dawned on her that she had left all her old supplies—easels, brushes, palettes, palette knives, and the like—at her parent’s cabin at Shawano Lake. She always felt most productive painting from the deck overlooking the lake up there, so that’s where she had kept everything. Even though she painted abstracts, she took inspiration from nature to create her work. Unfortunately, her next thought was the realization that they had sold the cabin some months ago.
After both of her parents died, she inherited the cabin. It had been in an advanced state of disrepair, given her elderly father’s inability to keep it up, so it had been years since they had spent a significant amount of time there. She and Marvin initially opted to hold onto the cabin, figuring they would fix it up at some point, but that never happened. Upon realizing the land was worth far more than the dilapidated cabin that occupied it and considering the time and expense of fixing it up how they wanted and given that they could use the money for the student loans their children had taken out to attend college, they sold the place. Before listing it with an agent, they made the hour and fifteen-minute drive to Shawano Lake to inventory the cabin and opted to sell the property as-is lock, stock, and barrel. As it was only ever used as a fishing cabin by her father, there wasn’t anything in the way of personal items there save for old, worn-out fishing gear…except, she now realized, her art supplies stored in the basement.
She was searching the internet, getting an idea of how much it would cost to replace everything, and the total was quickly spiraling upwards. She thought of the paint-stained easel her father had built for her, the collection of brushes she had accumulated over the years, and the paint palette also made by her father. She now regretted how callously she tossed those things away. A thought struck her, and immediately, she knew it was crazy. She considered the idea that her paint supplies may still be there. She never met the buyers, having run everything through a realtor and, given the distance, was able to sign the closing documents in Waupaca. Since the place was sold last fall, she didn’t think they had enough time to renovate, something she assumed they would surely do. Perhaps if they had decided to wait until spring, then maybe, just maybe…
That’s when she decided she’d drive up to the cabin.
What the hell, she thought. There was no phone service to the cabin—at least not when they had owned it—and the opportunity to see what the new owners had done to the property was enough to convince her the potentially futile drive was worth making. Thinking of the fresh lake air only sweetened the deal. She hoped that was just the thing to get her out of her funk. However, she had a dilemma of sorts. She had a phone call scheduled for 4:30 that afternoon with a client she was doing some accounting work for, which would put her on the road much later than she would have liked. She could wait until tomorrow, but Marvin was due home then, and she wanted everything set up for when he arrived. Then it struck her that the cabin could be—probably was—empty; it wasn’t exactly a family getaway spot. But then again, maybe the new owners had remedied that.
What the hell, she thought again. “You’ve got nothing else to do,” she said to the empty house. Tess made her decision: she would leave after the work call. There were a few hours to kill until the scheduled call, so she used the time to rearrange a few things in their FROG—Family Room Over the Garage. The FROG had served as their children’s den for years but soon contained a makeshift art studio. She took a photo from the doorway of the FROG and was about to text it to her husband when she decided she’d rather wait until she had her easel and other art supplies to fill the space. Again, she thought this was a long shot, but she was bored and needed something to take her mind off the empty house.
The phone call with her client resulted in more work to be completed before she left for the lake, so it wasn’t until after 7:00 that she finally got on the road. She almost bailed on her lake plans but decided to press on before the buzz about returning to the canvas had a chance to wane.
Tess glimpsed the last vestiges of daylight to the west as she turned onto the road that led to the cabin. As she neared the cabin, she was awestruck at the development in the area. Countless cabins and cottages had been razed, and large, modern lake houses now stood in their places. Seeing the new builds and the ongoing construction caused her to wonder if they had perhaps sold the cabin too soon or for too little. However, she quickly brushed those thoughts aside as excitement grew as she thought of seeing what the new owners had done with the place.
She guided the car slowly down the rutted dirt path that served as the cabin’s driveway. She wound through the thickly wooded area that provided her parent’s place with what so few of their neighbors had: privacy. The meager daylight Tess had observed just a few minutes before was now wholly swallowed up by the canopy of cedar, ash, and pine trees, with the occasional fir tree fighting for space.
