She slipped out the side door, and as she did, she said, “You'll never see me again."
Only as I mulled over the words, I realized she hadn't said “see,” she had said “find.” You'll never find me again.
Then, in the transitionless magic of dreams, I stood in the foyer of the Moorhead house. The place smelled of weeks-old blood and voided bowels. Beneath those smells was that of rotted flesh.
As I stood there, I existed on two levels: the woman standing in the foyer, and the woman who knew every inch of that house, the one who had cleaned it all and who would, if she wasn't careful, become obsessed with it.
The walls in the upstairs bedroom had a spatter pattern that looked like a post-modernist painting. I knew that it was spray—a knife or something sharp pierced an artery, and the blood sprayed before the dying man? woman? child? turned so that the rest of the blood would shoot against a different wall.
Then the dream changed. The waiter stared at me with those cold blue eyes. I'd seen them before. Not at a party where he was curiously out of place but at the trial.
He sat in the second row from the back, and watched my every move. His face wasn't ruddy then, but he was thinner, sadder, and his eyes had fear in them.
I couldn't look at him as I testified. He made me nervous.
That day, everyone made me nervous.
I thought nothing of it.
You'll never find me again.
Then the scene changed once more. My mother's kitchen, without her body lying in the middle of the floor, looked like a happy place—painted yellow, spotlessly clean. Only a chair had moved, tilted away from the table, as if its occupant left suddenly.
Add the body to the picture, sprawled along the tile, arms thrown backward, fluids staining the clothes, and the moved chair was ominous. Had she stood because she felt ill? Or had she simply been crossing to the refrigerator when her body gave out?
Or had she been lying there, helpless, only able to slide a chair a little toward her, thinking maybe it would help her up, but the experiment didn't work, and she remained—alone—on her back, until she breathed her last.
I sat up, not sure exactly when I woke, when the dream ended and the thinking began.
We could guess about the bodies in the Moorhead house, but we didn't know. We didn't know if the ritual items—the desecrated religious symbols, the black candles, the knives—had been added later to throw us off. Because they had been removed as evidence before I arrived, I didn't even know if they'd been covered with spatter, proving they'd been in position before the family died.
I did know that they left no impression wherever they'd been. There were no knife-sized holes in the spatter pattern, no black candle wax on the side tables.
Only the blood and the stink and the sense that something horrible had happened here.
I turned on my too-large television. One of the get-rich-quick real-estate gurus hawked his no-money-down method. As house after house flashed on the screen, I wondered what secrets those houses held.
Over time, the secrets faded.
All bodies disappeared, forgotten, lost.
Did the people who owned my mother's house now enjoy their kitchen? Did they walk easily over the spot where she had spent her last hours? Did they wonder how long her body had been there, waiting for someone to find her?
More importantly, did they care?
And that's when my stomach turned, when the crazy food I had eaten backed up into my throat.
No one had cared at the Moorhead house party. If the murders were mentioned, it was with a salacious edge, as if the deaths were part of a setting, added for the partygoers’ enjoyment.
Five people were missing, presumed dead—presumed because no one lost that much blood and lived.
But the police hadn't tested every drop. Only a few to make DNA comparisons, enough to build a case without a body—one of the toughest murder cases to bring. The cult—arrested, charged, and pulled off the street for life—had continually maintained their innocence.
I hadn't been able to look at them either when I testified—malnourished, scared twenty-somethings who'd used too many drugs and lived too close to the crime scene.
People had seen them in the house, but no one had seen them on the night of the murders.
No one had seen anything that night, even though the house dominated that hillside.
Even though the house dominated the entire town.
* * * *
The next morning, we had a fire-clean. Mostly smoke and water damage. The apartment, on the lower floor of a large complex, had lost its kitchen, and the rest was ruined. But the upper floors were still livable if we could get the stench out, which we could.
The apartments had been evacuated, but they still held the stuff of people's lives—dolls scattered on a bedroom floor, slippers kicked aside in someone's haste to escape, a half-eaten pizza on a scarred coffee table.
I surveyed the damage, realized the cleaning would be one of our easier jobs, and called in a junior team. Then I went back to the office and pulled the Moorhead files.
The image of my mother's kitchen chair, fresh from my dream, haunted me. We had approached the Moorhead scene with a single assumption: that the family had been slaughtered there in a ritualistic way, and the bodies had then been moved.
But what if there had been no ritual? What if this had been a crime of passion? Blood was everywhere in that house, except the kitchen, an oddity explained at the time by the ritualistic nature of the deaths.
I didn't have crime-scene photos, but I did have my photos of the scene. It was the early days of my business; I did before-and-after photos for prospective clients.
The before photos were vicious and dark, grimmer than I remembered. But the blood spatter, the filth left from violent death, was much as my memory held it—a long, continuous spray, followed by real spatter, arcing as the blood pulsed from someone's body.
In one photo, my hand pressed on the rug, releasing the blood contained within. In another, the rivulets of blood went down the stairs, drops alongside heading away from the scene.
What had the police tested? What had they ignored?
I thumbed through until I found the bathrooms. They, like the bedrooms, were thick with blood. The toilet, the bathtub, and the sinks had light spray, but nothing inside the porcelain basins, suggesting that no one had cleaned up there.
No one had cleaned in the kitchen either.
I stared at the images, trying to recall the lesson of the dream. Take away my expectations, and what did I see?
A charnel house.
A place where blood was allowed to flow freely and for some time.
I closed the file and leaned on it, my stomach as queasy as it had been the night before. I rubbed my eyes, sighed heavily, and picked up the phone.
* * * *
I had a lot of contacts at the police department. Early on, they had considered me part of the brotherhood, mostly because of my EMT and fire training, and they handed out my cards to grieving widows and distraught adult children.
Over time, several officers would call me before the city did, letting me know I had a job on the way, and preparing me so that I could put the proper team on it. If the case was sensitive, I often did the work myself. That way, if I found overlooked or lost evidence, I knew that it would be handled correctly. Mostly, I would leave it alone, and place a call on my cell. The forensic teams would arrive quickly because, I'd learned, it was me. My assistants often didn't get the same kind of respect.
Still, asking to see files in a case that had been closed for years was a sensitive thing. It irked all of us involved that we hadn't found the bodies, but, we had consoled ourselves, we had found the killers. I had taken this case as personally as the detectives who had worked it, and we all confessed late one night in the local cop bar that this was the case that haunted us.
Detective Jeffrey Foreno was the only one who had ever expressed doubts about the case. He had openly
questioned whether the cult had done the killings. After all, he said, no blood was found in their hidey hole. No knives, no black candles. And nothing suggested they had been on the property that night. It had all been supposition and circumstance, fear and small-town politics.
He had been shushed pretty quickly.
So he was the one I went to that morning.
He was approaching retirement. The lines in his face were deep and grooved, accented by the white stubble he'd forgotten to shave off before coming to work. The rest of his hair was black and thick, in need of a cut. His eyes, once sharp and alert, were bloodshot, and when he saw me, he sighed.
"I knew someone would want to resurrect the dead.” He leaned back in his chair, his hands folded over his stomach. “Just didn't expect it to be you."
I'd told him once I dreamed about cleaning the house, about the way the blood came back, as if the walls never wanted to give it up. He'd told me that he dreamed of the case too—of the Christmas tree that hadn't existed even though the outside of the house had been exquisitely decorated, of the lack of food in the kitchen, of the empty pet bowls, cleaned and stored in a dusty pantry.
"Why did you think someone would bring up the case?” I asked, sitting across from him.
He gave me one of those sideways looks that always made me nervous. Even with bloodshot eyes, Jeffrey Foreno had a way of looking all the way to your soul.
"The party,” I said.
He pointed at me, which, in Jeff language, meant You got it in one.
"How come you didn't go?” I asked.
"It felt like dancing on someone's grave.” Then he gave me that look again and his lips thinned. “You went."
I nodded. “Figured I had to. It had been my job to make sure no one noticed what had happened there."
He didn't move, nor did his expression change. “Did it work?"
I shrugged. “I think Louise was using the murders to give the place ambience."
"The power of rubbernecking,” he said.
"Yeah.” I wouldn't have put it so crassly, but he was right. Maybe that was why I hadn't gone upstairs, why I refused to look at the rooms where the police had assumed most of the killings had taken place. Downstairs, the tree, the presents, the food, masked the prurience that went into the planning. Upstairs, the unvarnished truth—the naked interest of people more fortunate than the dwellers of the Moorhead place—would have been readily apparent.
"Did it open old wounds?” he asked.
I shook my head quickly, not sure I wanted to examine my answer to that question too closely.
"So you just came today out of curiosity,” he said as if he didn't believe it.
"I came because I saw someone.” I told him about the waiter, the way the man had looked at me, both at the party and at the courthouse.
Foreno shrugged. “Maybe he was one of the rubberneckers. Some people make certain murder cases into their hobby."
"I know,” I said. “But sometimes there's more to it."
He frowned at me.
"Remember anyone involved in the case who looked like that?"
"Like a perfect World War Two German? Can't say as I do."
Put that way, I wouldn't have recognized him either. “I'd like to look through the file."
"Be my guest,” Foreno said. “It's not going to bother anyone. Unless you find something."
We grinned at each other. Then he led me to Records, got me the case files, and signed off so that I could work.
* * * *
The Moorhead file took up five boxes, most of them police and evidence reports. I gave the evidence reports a cursory glance, and saw exactly what I suspected: The assumptions began with the murder of the family and went from there. Most of the blood evidence was scraped from the wall of the bedroom—the crime-scene tech's reasoning was simple: He didn't want to deal with the inevitable carpet fibers in the blood pool. Although, to his credit, he did cut carpet swatches as well, and stored them in one of the refrigeration units at the crime lab. Unless someone needed the space, the evidence might still be there.
I searched through the boxes until I found what I was looking for. Pictures. Not of the house, but of the family.
Five members—husband, wife, three children, the oldest being fifteen, the youngest twelve. Speculation by the investigating officer was that one or all of the children had had contact with the cult.
I stared at the father. His face was bony and Aryan too, almost but not quite the same as the waiter I had seen. The eldest son, fourteen, looked like his father or might have if he'd lived. That heavy bone structure was unusual, at least in these parts. I thumbed through the documents to see if there were other family members in the vicinity.
No one had located any. Pages and pages of police interviews, with neighbors, coworkers, friends, did not include anyone from the family.
Then I looked at the mug shots of the cult members. I remembered those faces from the trial as well. Young, confused, ravaged, they made me wonder whether those kids were vulnerable because they were following the wrong leader or whether they had followed the wrong leader because they were vulnerable.
I closed the boxes, feeling more uncertain than I had before I started. I put them back, and went upstairs to say goodbye to Foreno.
"Find anything?” he asked.
I shook my head.
"Let it rest.” Then he gave me that look. “You're not going to, are you?"
"Who inherited the house?” I asked.
"No one,” he said. “The state ended up with it."
"No family,” I said.
"None that we could find.” He tapped a pen against the top of his desk. “And before you ask, let me tell you I remember this because it seemed so damn odd. Two middle-aged parents with no family at all. No one remembered any grandparents or aunts and uncles visiting the kids. These people were an island."
"Their money went to the state, too?"
"Eventually,” he said. “Not that there was much of it."
"In a house like that?"
"Mortgaged and credit cards. The furniture wasn't even worth anything. The appearance of money, but no real money."
"Don't you find that strange?"
"Always have,” he said.
"The guy I saw,” I said, “looks a lot like the father."
Foreno cursed, then leaned back in his chair. “You sure?"
"It's not him,” I said. “There're differences."
"Family differences?"
"I'd've thought they were brothers or cousins,” I said.
Foreno frowned. Then he reached to the left and opened his bottom desk drawer. From my vantage, standing, I could see a dozen accordion files, all filled with manila folders. He thumbed through the files, then pulled out one folder.
He slid it to me, and stood.
"You want some lunch?” he asked. “I'm buying."
I looked at him with surprise.
He nodded toward a chair in the corner. “It'll take you awhile to go through that."
"A sandwich would be nice,” I said.
He grabbed his suit coat, then headed out the door. As he left, he pulled the door closed, so that someone passing by wouldn't be able to see me.
I found that curious, but not as curious as the file. It was thick with newspaper clippings and computer printouts, some more than a decade old.
Cult killings, ritual murders, and bodiless cases. This was Foreno's comparison file. He was right: It took me quite a bit of time to read it. He managed to return with the sandwiches and we ate in silence while I read about beheadings and disembowlings, about corpses left in pieces all over property, about candles and black magic and pagan ceremonies.
In each, the bodies remained.
"You don't think they did it,” I said as I tossed my sandwich wrapper into the nearby trash.
"The cult?” He shook his head. “No, I don't think so."
"But the evidence points to them."
"Rather neatly,” he
said.
"So why didn't you speak up?"
"Because I had no other theory of the case,” he said.
"Do you now?” I asked.
"Does your friend work for the catering firm?” And I realized he meant the man with the angular face.
"I think so."
"I'll see if I can track him down."
"And if you do?"
Foreno shrugged. “I'll see what happens next."
* * * *
I went back to work, thinking about all that blood, all those trails. The carpets were saturated, yet there were no footprints on the hardwood floors, no evidence of someone leaving through the front or back doors. The floors had been well-scrubbed with bleach, and one of the things I testified about was the way that bleach hid all evidence, one of the few things that masked even the goriest scene.
Why, the defense attorney had wanted to know, would someone remove the footprints, but leave the blood droplets? Why leave the drag marks on the carpet uncleaned?
I had shrugged. People aren't that thorough. They clean only what they believe needs cleaning.
Blood is blood, isn't it? he had asked, implying that someone who cleaned footprints on the hardwood would clean it all.
It's not that simple, I said. I've had employees who missed spatter on their first few jobs because the scene was too overwhelming.
Do you think the killer would be overwhelmed? the defense attorney had asked, but the prosecutor had objected to the question. I never got to answer.
Would the killer have been overwhelmed? I considered the question now, at the safety of my desk. Probably not. After all, he created the scene.
Three saturated carpets. Five dead humans. Six quarts of blood per body. That house was soaked, the scene an example—the prosecutor had said—of overkill.
We see what we want to see.
I went back to my notes and, for the first time, did the math.
* * * *
There was too much blood. None of us had realized it. At least twice the amount that should have been in that house. Twice the deaths? Or had someone taken buckets of blood and poured it on the carpets, letting the liquid soak in after he had expertly sprayed the walls.
EQMM, January 2008 Page 15
