A dream.
It had all been a dream, a fricking nightmare.
Harry collapsed against the wall, sliding down to the floor—when he again thought of the ants and quickly shot back to his feet. He switched on the light. Grabbing the bedside flashlight he directed it about him—the bed, the sheets, the floor. His body. Satisfied there really were no ants (he even apprehensively poked around inside his shorts), he let himself again collapse bedside, allowing the flashlight to fall away from his hands and roll to a stop against the wall.
“Good Lord,” he panted, glancing at the clock on the nightstand, and closed his eyes. One-twelve a.m. was far too early to get up...
4
Kacey stared at her laptop in disbelief. Even loaded on caffeine, nothing about this crime made sense... a group of who-knew-how-many persons, from—what Jack had told her—all walks of life, just wandered on into the first retirement community that struck their fancy and begin hacking and slashing their way through its residents? What made all these people go crazy enough to kill off an entire retirement community? Why not any of the other handful of retirement communities surrounding it? Why this one—why was the killing entirely confined to only this one place?
Kacey hit the print button and sat back, taking another swig of coffee. She glanced at the clock. Had to get moving before any of the pro’s got in before her. She grabbed her pocketbook and keys, already disconnecting her laptop from her printer, and the last sheet it printed. She gave the article a quick once over, stuffed her notebooks and laptop into its case, and made for the door.
* * *
Kacey rushed into the Sunset Harbor Gazette building like she knew the place—which she kinda did. Knew of. She’d been trying to get on as a stringer for the past three months. No openings, they said, try again later. Thank you! So she’d go on down the road to Charlotte. Same thing. Punta Gorda, Venice... everywhere, the same response. No matter where she went, there were no Kacey Miller openings. She wrote great copy... okay, maybe not great, but pretty-darned-good-for-not-being-a-professional copy... pretty-darned-good-to-get-her-foot-in-the-door copy, to get a job and then, then she could really prove herself. This was exactly what she needed. This would be her big break. No one had this story yet, no one. They couldn’t turn her away.
Before Kacey got within ten feet of the editor’s office, Connie Belleview, Sunset Harbor Gazette’s editor-in-chief, saw her coming and smiled. Kacey strode confidently into her office.
“Well, good morning,” Connie greeted, still smiling, “What have you for me today?”
Kacey entered the office and slammed her piece down on Connie’s desk. Connie didn’t move; just looked to the article.
“And this is—”
Connie read the headline and slowly picked up the article.
Entire Retirement Community Slaughtered.
“No one—no one—has this yet. Guar-un-teed. I am the first. None of your folks will ever get as close as I did. Hire me, dammit.” Kacey sat down, confidently crossing her legs and settling in.
Connie looked between Kacey and the article. “Is this true? How’d you get this?”
“Does it matter? I was there. I got it all.”
Kacey leaned forward.
“C’mon, Connie, you have to hire me—part time even, anything, on spec—this is hot and you know it. Give me a chance... that’s all I need, just give me the chance.”
Connie got to her feet still reading the article; walked around to the front of her desk. “This is... incredible.” Connie looked back to Kacey. “You have the softcopy?”
Kacey danced the CD out before her, all smiles.
“How’d you get there so fast?” she asked, leaning back against the front of her desk.
“Let’s just say I was in the neighborhood.”
“And the marine and his wife?”
“Right place, right time.”
“Okay. I’ll tell ya what... since you did hit this one first—I’ll take ya on—but on one condition.”
“Anything.”
“Find out who did it, why, and could it happen again. Where’d they come from? Why’d they kill everyone—that kind of thing.” Connie glanced back to the article then back up. “Is this right? Everyone?”
Kacey nodded. “Except for the marine and his wife. That’s—that’s what I heard. They were still pulling out bodies when I wrote the story,” she said, careful to not add that’s what the cop told me. Fisher had made himself abundantly clear on that point.
Connie nodded. “Okay. Stay on this. Find out if anything like this has ever happened before, anywhere else—and...” Connie said, going back to her chair, “if you could interview a suspect or two, anyone with anything to do with this crime,” she said, pensively tapping her nose and eyeing her.
“You got it.”
Connie nodded, smiling.
Kacey got up, also smiling, and grabbed her gear. She turned to leave, when she again addressed her new boss, this time in a more appreciative tone.
“Thank you, ma’am. I really do appreciate being given this opportunity. I won’t let you down.”
Connie had already hit the intercom, nodding. “I know you won’t.”
5
Harry Gordon had spent the rest of the night sleeping on the couch, and when he finally got up for good, switched on the local news. What he heard screeched to a halt any morning rituals faster than a cold shower.
Upwards of seventy people murdered last night at a local retirement community...
Harry rushed back into the living room and sat on the edge of the coffee table, intently focused on the newscast. The commentator, local anchor, Hillary Brown, recapped:
“Sometime between midnight and two this morning what appears to have been a senseless, cult-like mass murder took place at the Safe Harbor Retirement Community—a small community composed of less than a hundred residents, on Tamiami Trail Boulevard. Details are sketchy, but police have arrested over thirty suspects allegedly involved in the murders...”
Harry’s jaw dropped.
“... officials aren’t saying much, but say they aren’t yet discounting any cult or gang-related activity, though all suspects appear unrelated, which further baffles authorities....”
Harry’s phone rang. “I’ll bet,” he mumbled as he picked up the cordless.
“Yeah?” he asked, still watching TV.
“Harry? You watching this?” Simon Stansfield asked, one of Florida’s Sarasota Circuit Court prosecutors.
“If you’re talking about the killings at Safe Harbor, I have the news on right now.”
“That’s the one. It’s gonna be big.”
“No doubt. We have anything on it?”
“Nope. But you can bet everyone’s pretty upset about it. Especially the retirement community.”
“Oh—yeah—now there’s a surprise.”
“I think because of the extreme nature of this case, they’re going to wanna push to get this resolved ASAP, not to mention a change of venue. I mean, shit, it’s pretty grisly.”
Harry nodded. “Every person over the age of sixty is no doubt pissed or scared shitless. We’d be lucky to find a useable jury. Move to Tampa or Orlando? Fort Meyers?”
“Yup.”
Harry again nodded. “Where are you?”
“On the way to the Sunset Harbor cop shop. I gotta see these people firsthand. I’m told they’re everyday folk, Harry, just like you and me. People with lives. Can’t figure it. Something in the water? Government experiment? Don’t know, so I’m heading on over to see for myself.”
“Great. Well, I’m gonna get going—”
“Yeah, and that’s the other reason I called—sleeping in, again?”
Harry chuckled. “Yes and no. Had a killer nightmare last ni—”
“Same one?”
“Yeah.”
“I told you you’d better get your head checked out—”
“Yeah, but you always tell me that. No, I don’t need any shri
nks to tell me I’m stressed. Xanax be my friend.”
“I think it’s a little more than that, buddy—but hey, it’s no brain shoveled off my sidewalk—I just pulled into the parking lot. Gotta go!”
Harry recradled the phone.
Simon was right, but what Simon hadn’t known was the extent of the dreams—the nightmares—he’d been having “lately.” He’d been having them as long as he could remember, about horses and sand, wind and sea—combinations of each—but in the past month or so these dreams had been turning up virtually every night... and they’d grown in intensity. Were becoming more real. The other night he even knew he was dreaming while in the dream, and was still powerless to stop it. Initially it had only been something like going-out-to-eat-a-hamburger dream, but it’s in the desert instead of the local drive-through, and he had to chase down his meal on the wind-swept plains of a deserted dreamscape. Or he’s eating horse, rather than hamburger. But in the past month he’d had the ones like last night—not every night, but a couple times a week—in which a particularly nasty murder is committed. In this—and most of the others—he knew, or felt something bad was coming his way, but was always powerless to stop it. He knew something wasn’t right in the dream, but couldn’t control it, change it, and was always condemned into participating on the track the dream was headed. It was wearing him out. Normally an early riser, he’d taken to coming in later and later, depending on how much he was particularly affected by the current night’s lack of sleep. Tonight’s was the most real one he’d had so far. And they’d been growing increasingly angry and more violent as the weeks progressed. And as he began about the task of getting ready for work, he wondered, just wondered... had his dream foretold the crime that had just been committed in that retirement community?
And what the hell was chin gas?!
Chapter Four
1
Detective Fisher ducked under the yellow-and-black tape that stretched across the screened-in patio entrance, then stepped up the two steps to the sliding glass patio door that he slid open to enter the once-theoretically-happy, now-violated, home. This home’s crime scene investigation was as complete as possible, his forensic army now gone on to one of the other fifty homes of this little community that was still under construction. The retirement business was good down here, despite all the increased hurricane activity a couple years ago. He examined the frame around the patio doors as he passed through it.
This town—all of Florida, no doubt—had never before seen anything of this magnitude. What had drawn people from all walks of life to stroll into this town, to this specific patch of earth, and begin to systematically, brutally, kill off all its residents? In each of the handful of homes he’d visited, he found nearly identical MOs—or groups of MOs—and one of the oddest things he found were that any guests—any visitors who didn’t actually live in the park—had been totally, and unequivocally, spared.
Untouched.
Not one of them had even been awoken during the attacks.
Except for the Hockers, each of the survivors interviewed said they were either relatives or friends, and though some had had disturbing nightmares, not one person remembered hearing a thing during their slumber. Several of the survivors had even been sleeping in their host’s master bedrooms while their hosts slept elsewhere, and had still remained untouched. This was an extremely deliberate, calculated, act. What could have possibly brought on such selective slaughter, and how could it have possibly been carried out so perfectly?
Fisher made his way down the short corridor toward the bedroom, and nudged open the partially opened door with a toe.
Why were so many of the bodies rolled up in carpets or other material, while others had been dismembered or otherwise left where they lay? And those in the carpets and tarps had all been placed atop tables, benches, and refrigerators.
What did rolling up victims in carpets signify?
In nearly all of the homes like this one, the vics had been “carpeted,” as he’d come to call it. However and whenever they were actually dispatched would be determined by forensics, but the basic end-all was the roll-up into some kind of on-hand blanketing material. One person had been found rolled up in Saran wrap and tin foil. Others had plastic bags fastened over their heads while they’d been rolled up into their tarps or carpets. Many appeared to have been beaten while in their wraps. In one home, broken posts from a bed frame had been employed. The anger and strength that had been used to rip apart those posts was most disquieting. He’d seen whacked out perps on drugs, but there was something more to all this. The carpeted murders definitely fit under the heading of symbolic, or ritual, killings, but, once you got past the initial “why carpeted,” then the flip-side reared its ugly head:
Why not all of them?
A mass murder of an entire community, but only some of which were ritualistic? Had the killers been rushed? Forgetful, once lost in the frenzied mêlée of murder? Or were some simply neat freaks?
Fisher walked over to the window where this residence’s victim had been found. Stared at the floor where the rolled-up carpet had been shoved against the wall—atop a dresser—a bent golf club (a number 2 “wood”) nearby. Others had been drowned in sinks, toilets—and there were two, perhaps the most bizarre of all, who’d been boiled in their own bathtubs. He’d never seen anything like it. Two tubs man-handled outside, leaving deep and ragged drag marks across the otherwise heavily manicured lawn. That had been some power. Some rage. Two couples actually boiled alive, fires packed underneath and around the base of their tubs—the only two homes with detached, “claw-foot” style tubs.
Jesus.
Others had been strangled with electrical cords or macramé. Socks. Some had been brutally thrown about and beaten to death, while another handful had been “pressed” to death by cinder blocks and refrigerators thrown atop them... and given their age and osteoporosis—well, that was still a brutal way to go. And there were, of course, those dispatched by the more traditional methods involving guns and knives.
Fisher’d grown up in Sunset Harbor, done a few years of Miami homicide, then returned for—what he’d hoped to be, but had now been summarily dashed—a more relaxed environment. Safe Harbor was a retirement community—a safe harbor, essentially—for these who’d come here to enjoy the breezy Gulf coast lifestyle and sea food, and live out the rest of their lives in as much peace and comfort as possible. To take it easy. He knew not everyone’d lived chaste, choir-boy-or-girl existences, but whatever they might have done, they were trying to make up for it, now, most of them, anyway, he liked to think. The rest were probably just trying to sneak out of this existence without getting caught, enjoying the home stretch. Apparently that just wasn’t meant to be for this group.
But no matter the intermediary murderous actions, the usual, final act was that of being carpeted. Tarped. Tin foiled. You name it. Then placed atop some structure as if in offering to some deity.
It was stupefying.
But, more so, another thought nagged: how did the assailants get in without breaking a single door or window? Not one door nor window had been jimmied or smashed.
And how had they managed to kill only residents?
It looked as if everyone had just waltzed right on in, no locked doors to hinder their passage, and surgically exterminated specific targets, bystanders—except for the gate guard—totally untouched or awoken. The entire community might as well have hung out a sign that said, Come on in, folks, we’re all asleep, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble taking us out!
And how was it that all seventy-two residents had had their doors unlocked? How was that even possible? The elderly were typically more habitual about this area of home security than anyone else.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...
Fisher turned away from the window, glanced at the spatter stains on the head board and wall behind it, and left the room.
Once again in the living room, he looked to the entranceway
and patio door. Damn—not a touch of a screwdriver or crowbar.
And what had brought all these people of diverse backgrounds and ways and means together for the common purpose of murder? Suspects who looked as if they had had families of their own and had never hurt a fly in their entire lives.
Good, God, how was any of this possible?
2
Tiger awoke groggily to a room full of white and machinery, tubes stuck in his arms, and an annoying beep-beeping somewhere around him. Images he couldn’t quite make out pounded away in his head like a deep, throbbing, pulsing, migraine... screams, and cries... blood...
He couldn’t move.
This one thing, above all else, terrified him most.
What had he done... where was he?
In a coma?
Is this what death was like?
No... he’d just opened his eyes... they were closed now, but he’d distinctly remembered opening them... seeing all the brightness and white... it was much better with them closed. He liked the dark... it was comforting... but what was... where was he? All that beeping... the white... the sheets hanging from above...
Tiger tried to raise an arm, but only managed a feeble, uninspired, twitch.
Ants.
Ants?
Ants!
Yelling, Tiger immediately attempted to bolt upright, but found that despite his best efforts, he was entirely restrained. His behavior, however, immediately elicited the response of a uniformed police officer, nightstick removed from his belt, and also sent that calmed beep-beeping around him into an electronic frenzy.
“What the hell?” the officer exclaimed, quickly forcing Tiger back down into the bed, nightstick pressed against Tiger’s upper chest. Right behind him piled in a handful of men and women in white coats. An older lady, in graying sandy hair, came bedside and checked his restraints, while the officer kept Tiger pinned to his bed.
“Well, it appears you’ve had quite a nightmare, John Doe,” the sandy-haired doctor said. “As well you should, considering what you’re accused of.” The doctor looked to the cop. “He’s okay.”
The Uninvited Page 5
