A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  “Your last name?” Jayme asked.

  “Mahood.” She gave it up like she was surrendering the car keys to a parent: petulantly.

  “Do you know where we can find Dr. Gillespie right now?”

  The girl stood motionless for a few seconds, then said, “I’ll see if I can reach him.”

  She closed the door, softly, without engaging the latch.

  Jayme turned to DeMarco and whispered, “Did she seem a little spooked to you?”

  “She’s a child,” he said. “They spook easily.”

  “You mind if I turn up the heat a little?”

  “I thought you wanted me to turn the burner down.”

  “Don’t you think she was dressed a bit too casually to be in her professor’s house for a study hour?”

  “I have no idea,” he said. “She looks like a little Daisy Mae to me. Farm fresh.”

  “Daisy Mae?”

  “You know, from Li’l Abner.”

  “You really do need to update your analogies.”

  The door came open, and the girl stood there with cell phone in hand. “He’s out walking at Mill Creek this afternoon. Around the lake.”

  “Cohasset?” DeMarco asked.

  “Actually it’s the Lily Pond. He usually does the loop four times.”

  “When did he start?” DeMarco asked.

  “He’s on his second lap.”

  “Tell him to keep walking,” DeMarco said. “We’ll meet him there. Thanks for your time.”

  He gave Jayme a nod, then walked away from the door, expecting her to follow. But she remained facing the girl. DeMarco stopped walking but kept his back to Jayme.

  “Is Mrs. Gillespie home?” Jayme asked.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Kaitlin said. “Seeing as how she lives in Columbus.”

  “They’re divorced?”

  “More or less.”

  Jayme smiled. Nodded. “Dr. Gillespie is an older man, correct? In his sixties or so?”

  “Hardly even fifty,” Kaitlin said. By now the insincere smile was fading from her mouth.

  “And you’re comfortable dressing like that around him?”

  “Dressing like what?”

  “No bra. Butt cheeks hanging out. It looks more like you’re here for a slumber party than a study hour.”

  The girl’s face flushed scarlet. She reached for the door. “He’s not even here now.”

  “So you brought a change of clothes for when he does show up?”

  The girl said nothing. Began to ease the door shut. Seemed ready to slam it but knew she shouldn’t.

  “The girl from campus who was murdered,” Jayme said. “Samantha Lewis. Did you know her?”

  A pause. Too long, Jayme thought.

  “I might have seen her around a couple of times. I wouldn’t say I actually knew her.”

  Jayme nodded. Let her own smile fade. Gave the girl a steely look. “A study hour, huh? You’re not fooling anybody, you know.”

  “Like I care,” the girl said, and brought the door closed. She pushed it into the frame. Slid the dead bolt, hard.

  Out on the sidewalk, DeMarco looked up at the sky, and smiled. Then started walking again.

  They did not speak until they were both inside the car. “She’s still standing behind the door,” Jayme said.

  “Frightened little bunny. I think you ruined her afternoon.”

  “Better than ruining her life.”

  “Of course she might have been telling the truth.”

  “Summer classes ended five days ago.”

  “You looked it up?”

  She lifted her bottle of water from the cup holder, took a drink, then gave him a smile.

  “Aren’t you clever?” He pulled his seat belt into place and started the engine. A few minutes later, he felt her lingering gaze on the side of his face.

  “What?” he finally said.

  “Daisy Mae?” she asked, and laughed. “Li’l Abner? Farm fresh? You kill me sometimes, DeMarco.”

  He looked in the mirror, saw the wrinkles around his eyes. He was getting old. She wasn’t. And she wanted to have a baby? Problem was…maybe he did too.

  Twenty-Six

  “That’s him,” DeMarco said as he drove toward a wooden sign and information board posted near the shore of the Lily Pond. A tall, broad man wearing a floppy-brimmed Aussie bush hat and holding a six-foot walking stick was doing stretches near the sign. A quarter-mile trail circled the pond, some of it boardwalk, some hard-packed earth, all surrounded by trees thick with summer foliage, the reflection of which painted the water with a bright-green surface.

  “Where are the water lilies?” Jayme asked. “It should be called Goose Pond.”

  Not a single water lily was in sight, but at least a hundred black-necked Canadian geese, plus mallards and a solitary great blue heron, floated or waded along the water’s edge. Perhaps a dozen people, singles and couples and a few children, lingered close to the water or continued their strolls around the shore.

  Jayme squinted into the glare on the windshield at the large man stretching, rather theatrically, near the information board. “What makes you so sure that’s him?” she asked. “The hat?”

  “Walking stick.”

  “Maybe he’s going off trail.”

  “Not a chance,” DeMarco said as he eased the car to a stop. By the time he had parked and they both climbed out, the man was striding back and forth in front of the sign.

  “Sandals,” DeMarco said. “Earphones. And you see how he struts around like he owns the place? What do you bet he’s listening to Vivaldi? Not because he likes it, but just in case somebody asks.”

  She chuckled. “You’re probably right.”

  “And the way he walks. How would you describe that walk?”

  She studied him for a few moments. His strides were long and deliberate, shoulders back, chin high, arms cocked at his sides, as if he were strolling down the center of Broadway during a one-man parade. “Sort of a sashay?”

  “Funny walk for a religious scholar.”

  “How would you expect a religious scholar to walk?”

  “A little more religiously, I guess. Aren’t religious men supposed to be humble?”

  She watched him awhile longer, then said, “He’s a professor of religion. That doesn’t mean he’s religious.”

  DeMarco took a quick look around the parking lot. Five other vehicles—one coupe, a sedan, a pickup truck, and two SUVs. A man Gillespie’s size would not enjoy lowering himself into and out of a sedan or coupe, and DeMarco could not picture him in a truck. “Be right back,” he said, and hustled over to the charcoal gray Volvo Momentum. An HYC faculty parking permit hung from the rearview mirror.

  He jogged back to Jayme. “The man has a $50K ride. Just in case you’re looking for a sugar daddy.”

  “Keep it up,” she told him, “and I might be.”

  Gillespie was not a small man, and grew larger as they drew closer. Six three, DeMarco guessed. Two hundred fifty pounds or more on a wide frame. Not quite fat, but not at all muscular. He was wearing neon-blue bicycle shorts so tight that his body from navel to midthigh seemed carved for a smaller, fitter man, and pushed the flesh out both ends so that it bunched up atop the waistband and below the leg openings. Thick, hairy legs led down to a pair of fat-soled hiking sandals. On his pumpkin head sat the bush hat and a pair of aviator sunglasses, and over a faded black Bowie 1972 world tour T-shirt he wore an unbuttoned cream-colored safari shirt with the sleeves rolled to his beefy elbows.

  DeMarco, hoping his smile did not appear too mirthful, walked up to the professor, whom he was already thinking of as a show dog with a nasty habit of licking its own butt.

  Gillespie smiled in greeting, pulled the earbud from his left ear, and said. “The detectives have arrived!”<
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  DeMarco said, “You must have been, what, ten years old when you bought that T-shirt?”

  “My father bought it, actually. My only inheritance. Shall we continue the peregrination? I’ve been maintaining my heart rate with stationary exercise.”

  DeMarco smiled. “Smashing idea,” he said.

  Because of the narrowness of the path, Jayme and Gillespie walked side by side, DeMarco close behind. It was not an arrangement DeMarco liked; he preferred to sit or stand facing his subject. Body language could be very revealing. Also facial gestures, tics, eyes that darted from side to side. But walking tended to absorb the energy that might have been directed into fidgeting or finger tapping, especially when the walking speed was dictated by the subject. Gillespie’s legs were thick and long but he walked like a model on a runway.

  DeMarco had seen the type before. Arrogant and supercilious. Blind to his own faults. The kind of guy some people hate without ever talking to. His smile oozed something invisible. Something you didn’t want to inhale or light a match close to.

  “I take it you’re familiar with the unfortunate incidents of the past month,” DeMarco said.

  “Acutely,” said Gillespie. The tip of his walking stick struck the trampled earth with every second slap of his left sandal, a regularity that soon became irritating to DeMarco.

  Jayme asked, “Did you know any of the victims?”

  “Fortunately, no.”

  “Why fortunately?” she said.

  “Intimacy,” the professor said. “The pain, the fear, the anger. It would all be so much more intimate were I to know the victims personally. Anguish is troubling enough in an amorphous state, but when it afflicts us personally—utterly debilitating.”

  “Brenner graduated from HYC,” Jayme said. “And Lewis was a student at the time of the murder.”

  Gillespie nodded. “Indeed.”

  “Neither one of them a student of yours?”

  They walked for two clicks of the walking stick. Gillespie said, “My classes are large, very popular. Faces I usually remember, but names too often elude me.”

  Another click. “I could look it up online,” he added. “I should do that.”

  DeMarco leaned forward just enough to shoot a glance at Jayme. She responded with a tiny nod.

  “What do you make of the murderer’s…style of execution?” DeMarco asked.

  “Ah!” Gillespie said, and gazed briefly at the sky. “The modus operandi.”

  He enunciated the phrase as if it were a mystical incantation. DeMarco resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

  “You suspect a religious undertone,” Gillespie said. “And that is why you have sought me out.”

  “Do you detect a religious undertone?” Jayme asked.

  “One might call the decapitation ritualistic,” Gillespie said. “But fragmentary at best. No pun intended.” And now he turned his head toward Jayme and offered a beaming smile. “You’ve heard of my theory, I take it.”

  “Bits and pieces,” Jayme lied. “I would love to hear it in full.”

  “Well then,” Gillespie said. Another click of the walking stick. “It wasn’t until the death of the girl that I began to wonder of a correlation. Are you familiar with Hypatia?”

  “I’m sorry, no,” Jayme said.

  Gillespie turned to DeMarco. “And you, sir?”

  “Sounds like a nasty scalp condition.”

  Gillespie chuckled. “Hypatia may have been the first of the Gnostikoi martyrs.”

  “Gnostikoi?” Jayme said.

  “From the Greek. Those who have gnosis. Knowledge of the truth.”

  DeMarco asked, “And what truth are we talking about here?”

  “You should sign up for one of my classes,” Gillespie said. “Law enforcement so seldom considers the underlying cultural influences on the criminal mind-set.”

  Too busy putting the criminals in jail, DeMarco thought.

  Gillespie continued. “The Gnostics were, and remain, very difficult to pin down. Other than the Nag Hammadi scrolls, all we know of them is what their critics wrote. Their critics being overwhelmingly Christian.”

  “Any chance you could boil it down for us?” DeMarco said.

  “Any summary account runs the risk of being misleading,” Gillespie told him, “but suffice it to say that the Gnostics, and their predecessors the Pagans, rejected the divinity of the Old Testament God, Jehovah. Also known as Yahweh or Yaldabaoth. To the Gnostics he was an inferior god, wholly demented, a personage not to be obeyed but actively disobeyed. As such they also rejected the Christian doctrine of salvation through faith alone. Enlightenment, they believed, could be achieved only through experiential knowledge, a personal experience with the divine.”

  They walked for a few moments in silence but for the click of the walking stick, the buzz of insects, and the chirp of birds. Then Jayme asked, “And Hypatia was martyred because of her beliefs?”

  Gillespie nodded. “Near the end of the fourth century AD, a mob of Christians torched a temple dedicated to the god Serapis and burned it to the ground. At the time, Hypatia was quite probably a student of the Mysteries, as they were called, though initiates are often also referred to as Pagans—erroneously, in the modern sense—so this might have been her first exposure to the violence of the Christians. Three years later, Pagan rituals were outlawed by the state. In due time, Hypatia became a revered teacher of the Mysteries. By all accounts she was an exceptional woman of legendary beauty and intelligence. She even drove her own chariot!”

  “You go, girl,” Jayme said.

  “Precisely!” said Gillespie. “Which made her an obvious target for the Christians, which, as I’m sure you know, is in every way a patriarchal religion. Unfortunately, one day Hypatia entered a public square filled with a gathering of Christians. She was pulled from her chariot, stripped of her robes, and beaten to death. Some accounts also have her being raped. The mob not only tore her limbs from her body, but used oyster shells to scrape the flesh from her bones. As a final display of their mindless fury, they burned her bones to ashes.”

  “Oh my God,” Jayme said.

  Gillespie smiled. “And so the near-total suppression of the Pagans, the Gnostics, and the Mystery schools began in earnest. The rest, young lady, is Christian history.”

  DeMarco said, “And this has what to do with the death of Samantha Lewis and the others?”

  “My theory,” said Gillespie, “is that much contemporary criminal behavior is the result of a collective social and cultural memory.”

  “Cultural memory,” DeMarco repeated.

  “And in many cases, a subconscious one. Writ upon our DNA, if you will. Which prompts in those individuals lacking in the necessary intellect and strength of will to resist the urge to reenact or continue crimes of the otherwise forgotten past.”

  “Interesting,” DeMarco said. “Let me see if I understand this. You’re saying that the murders we’re investigating were all committed by someone subconsciously influenced by events that happened thousands of years ago?”

  “The phenomenon is called ‘the intergenerational transmission of collective trauma.’ We already know that profound trauma in a previous generation can be passed along to subsequent generations via the genetic material. The gene marker, to be exact, rather than the gene itself. The term for that is ‘epigenetic change.’ As in Holocaust survivors and their descendants, for example. We can also point to the intergenerational trauma suffered by Native Americans. African Americans. Asian Americans. Virtually every ethnicity unlucky enough to encounter those of the Caucasoid persuasion. Most especially, the Christianized version.”

  “So your theory,” Jayme said, “is that our three recent murders—”

  “Plus the 1988 murders,” Gillespie said, “and the Cleveland murders, and innumerable previous atrocities.”

  �
�—were all subconscious reactions to historical traumas perpetrated by white Christians?”

  “No, no, no,” Gillespie said. “A continuation of these traumas. It stands to reason, don’t you see? If trauma can be written on the DNA, so can the hatred that engenders trauma. Hufford was a Black man, Lewis a female, Brenner a Jew. Although it is true that Talarico, from 1988, was Catholic, his lawyer was an avowed atheist, and probably the real target.”

  “And the Torso Murders?” Jayme said.

  “The dregs of society. Drunkards, whores, you name it. All despised by Christians.”

  DeMarco said, “I thought Christians were compassionate and forgiving.”

  “Ha!” said Gillespie, impassioned by his own words. “Look at their history, my friend. Christian terrorism is part and parcel of the religion, from the days of Moses onward. ‘Do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you.’ Deuteronomy 20:16–17. Just one of many such commands.”

  “Whew,” Jayme said.

  Gillespie turned to her and smiled. “It does take one’s breath away, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s a bit of a broad sweep,” said DeMarco.

  “But a wonderfully probable explanation,” Gillespie answered. “You must concede that.”

  “Probable or possible?” DeMarco asked.

  “Trust me,” Gillespie said. “I have researched this subject front and back. Earlier this month I made a very well-received presentation at the annual True Crime Conference in Cleveland. Very well-received. I have a videotape if you would care to watch it. I’m sure you would find it enlightening.”

  “Any chance you could email it to me?” Jayme said.

  “Of course. Just text me your email account.”

  DeMarco said, “Send the video to the Mahoning County Sheriff. You can find the email address online. Any chance you could do that today?”

  “The minute I return home.”

  They were coming to the end of the loop around the pond, approaching the parking lot again. DeMarco took two long steps forward, squeezing past Jayme, then made an abrupt turn, so that Gillespie had to pull up short and stop as well. DeMarco said, “I understand that you’re divorced, Professor?”