Congregations of the Dead

by Moore, James A. ; Rutledge, Charles R. ;

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I think I would recognize their aura.”

  “Okay,” Griffin said. He opened the nightstand’s single drawer and lifted out a big, silver revolver. “This one’s loaded with some of Decamp’s special bullets. If it is one of those pasty bastards, this will take care of it.”

  Griffin slipped out of the bed and pulled on a pair of gym shorts. He told Charon to stay put, then stepped into the hallway. He moved quickly through the house in a shooter’s crouch, the barrel of the gun pointed down, ready to be brought up into target acquisition. Griffin checked the windows on the house’s single floor one at a time. His night vision was good and the scant light from streetlamps outside gave him enough illumination to avoid turning on any lights.

  The windows and doors were all secure physically, and if Charon was correct, they were all still warded against any supernatural visitors. Once Griffin would have scoffed at the idea of anything beyond the natural world, but he had learned the hard way that there were beings and forces he simply didn’t understand.

  Griffin unlocked the front door and went out fast. He leaped down the front steps and dropped to one knee, gun at the ready. No one tried to shoot him. No pale white forms drifted out of the darkness. Griffin stood and scanned the outside of the house. He didn’t see anyone or anything.

  He walked back up the steps, and just as he was reaching for the doorknob he had a sudden feeling of being watched. Griffin spun, but the feeling was gone just as quickly as it had arrived. He stepped back into the house and locked the door.

  He met Charon coming down the hall. She had pulled on her jeans and she held a leather bag in one hand, which Griffin knew contained some of the tools of her trade. Since she had been training with Decamp, Charon had amassed quite a collection of items supposed to be of use against things that went bump in the night.

  “Coming out to rescue me?” Griffin said.

  “Just in case.”

  Griffin was reminded yet again of one of the reasons he loved Charon. When things went bad she didn’t run away. She gritted her teeth and waded in.

  Griffin tilted Charon’s chin up and kissed her. She said, “What was that for?”

  “For being brave.”

  “Yeah, you can’t see how my knees are knocking.”

  “That’s the definition of being brave. Doing what has to be done even when your knees are knocking.”

  “Do yours ever knock?”

  “No, I’m too tough.”

  “Of course you are. So you didn’t see anything outside?”

  “No, I had a moment where I felt like someone was watching but it was just a moment. How are the wards?”

  “Intact, and nothing’s probing them now.”

  “Can you tell what it was that was testing them?”

  Charon shook her head. “Afraid not. Carter says I’ll be able to one day. He could probably tell by checking them, if he were here.”

  “Maybe you can give him a call come morning.”

  “He’s out of town.”

  “No way to reach him?”

  “Nope. Like some other people I know, out of town means out of touch.”

  Griffin didn’t miss the comparison between him and Carter Decamp. He had often wondered about the nature of Decamp’s out of town trips. The man had an impressive collection of weapons, everything from a Scottish claymore to a US Army M18 claymore mine in his Victorian-era home, along with a vast library of books on the occult. And he often disappeared for days just as Griffin did. Griffin wondered if Decamp, too, was a mercenary. If he was, he wasn’t fighting in petty wars in third world countries.

  “Back to bed then,” Griffin said. When they got back to the bedroom, Griffin retrieved his cell phone from the pants he had hung over a chair.

  “Calling someone?” said Charon.

  “Going to leave Carl a voice message. If it was one of the Moon-Eyes out there, they may be lurking around his place as well.”

  “The wards there haven’t been touched,” Charon said. Griffin’s eyebrows went up.

  “You warded Carl’s house?”

  “I did.”

  “Without telling him or me?”

  Charon’s dark eyes sparkled. “Can’t trust us witches, wild man. We’re just wicked.”

  She was trying to keep things light, but Griffin was willing to bet that Charon was wondering the same thing he was. If it hadn’t been one of the Moon-Eyes looking for a way in, what had it been?

  * * *

  Carl didn’t much like working the graveyard shift but he also believed that now and then he had to know what his people were up to when he was supposed to be asleep. There were some who’d call him a touch paranoid, but that wasn’t it as far as he was concerned. He just liked to know for certain that the people he’d hired – the ones who had been working for a long while and the new hires he’d taken on to replace the deputies who died last October – were ready for anything. Sometimes that meant him coming in and surprising them.

  Also, he couldn’t sleep worth a damn right now. Tammy kept popping into his head. He’d be almost down for the night, drifting down into La-La Land, and the next thing he knew she was filling his mind again, whispering half-remembered conversations in his mental ear and he’d feel his blood rise and his eyes pop open.

  He couldn’t sleep. His people got to suffer the consequences.

  He inspected the offices under the guise of checking his personal office. Then he went back to the holding area, which had been rebuilt very nicely since last October. Currently they were having a busy night. There were seven visitors. Three in regular holding and three in the drunk tank. They could be processed into other rooms or let back into polite society once they were sober enough. In the meantime they got to share the big room with the open drains in the floor to hose down whatever they couldn’t keep in their stomachs.

  One of the teenagers he’d clocked earlier was still in a holding cell. On the street with his friends and hopped up on Meth he’d felt indestructible. Now, off his chemical bravado and all by himself he looked like what he was – a skinny kid who was barely even beginning to shave, and who was currently terrified of what his life was turning into. The odds were he dearly wanted to be back home. His folks couldn’t front the bail. They were still trying to find a way. Until then, as the only under-aged offender currently in the place Daniel Jenkins had the room all to himself. He’d been crying.

  Carl left him alone. The kid’s life was already turning into enough shit without any help from him.

  Back in his actual office Carl booted up his computer and did a bit more research on the little he knew about the Amber Phillips case. The fingerprints from the truck had come back. The rear passenger window handprint did match up with Amber Phillips. Her folks had the common sense to get her picture taken and kept her prints available for any situation where she might end up exactly where she was now, missing. The other fingerprints found in the truck were almost useless. There was one good partial that matched up with a number of other abductions in the northern Georgia area, but the match just meant it had shown up before, it didn’t provide a name this time. Damn it.

  Tammy crept into his head and started dancing around again. He pushed her aside and then got up from his desk. Time to go.

  Restless didn’t even begin to cover it.

  He got a text from Wade warning him about possible lurkers on the home front. He nodded. Not surprising, really. The Blackbournes were not known for their forgiving nature.

  He made a note to himself to check up on the clan and see what they were up to. They meddled in damned near every sort of illegal activity, but he’d never heard about them dealing in child abductions – for sociopaths they had their own unique code of conduct. Just the same he’d look into it.

  There was still something about the Phillips family that bother
ed him. Instead of leaving his office he decided to do a little web-surfing to see what he might run across. Corey Phillips’ business was steady and slowly growing. That was a good thing, of course. What was his wife’s name? He dug a bit until he found it. Sarah Phillips. Sarah had a small record for traffic fines and aside from that was squeaky clean. Corey Phillips had exactly no criminal record. They were, in other words, perfectly normal people.

  It still didn’t sit well. Something about the two of them didn’t feel right. He just hadn’t figured out what it was yet.

  He would. He was nothing if not determined.

  More searching. Criminal records had shown him nothing of importance.

  As he was heading back out of the office Ryan on the desk waved him over and held up a piece of paper. The man was on the phone and talking in a calm, professional voice. Professional enough to let Carl know it was business and decidedly not pleasure.

  The scrap he held up was a scrawled note: Call Bob Stack on his cell.

  Carl looked a question at him: How long ago? Ryan jotted ten minutes ago on the paper. He nodded and headed out.

  As he moved for the truck he called Bob’s cell. The police chief answered immediately. “Stack.”

  “Bob. It’s Carl. What’s up?”

  “Strictly second-hand news, but I’m hearing that Amber Phillips had a couple of teachers who reported her folks to DFACS for possible abuse.”

  “Really?” Carl frowned. “I was just looking at the files on the family and I didn’t see a damned thing about that.”

  “I can’t swear to the validity, Carl. But there’s a woman you could talk to if you wanted. Ellie Campbell. She’s a teacher at the girl’s school. The one who made the report. I haven’t had a chance to talk to her myself. I have another couple of kids who are missing, probably runaways this time, but you know how that goes.”

  “This is starting to get stupid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the damned missing kids. Brennert County isn’t exactly the worst place to live. What’s with all the runaways?”

  “Grass is always greener, bubba.”

  “Yeah.” Carl thought about Tammy and nodded, despite the fact that Bob couldn’t possibly see him do it.

  They said their goodbyes and Carl set his phone down just in time for it to ring. This time it was Ryan. “You ever get tired of seeing me Ryan?”

  “Sorry, Carl. But we’ve got most of the cars tied up and there’s reports of a possible homicide out near the Hollow, on 41. Near mile marker 26.” Carl closed his eyes and flashed for just a second to the body of Jerry Wallace, crucified a mile down the road from where he was now heading.

  “On it. Make sure you keep off the radio on this one. Our local citizens like to wag their jaws too much.”

  “Not my first day at this you know.” Ryan was whining.

  “Won’t be your last either if you give me lip.” He got the rest of the details and headed for the crime scene. It was a good-sized drive, but the roads were nearly empty and his flashing lights kept what little traffic was out and about well away from him.

  A reed thin man standing next to a pickup truck – a Toyota this time – waved as he saw the flashing lights. Carl pulled over and left the lights going. The man moved from foot to foot nervously, and licked his lips roughly a dozen times. Carl grabbed his flashlight and headed in that direction.

  “You here about what I found?”

  Carl looked the man in the eyes. “Probably. What did you find, Mister…?”

  “Ted LeMarrs.” The man nodded nervously. “I found a body. I don’t think he’s been there very long.”

  “Can you show me where?”

  The man nodded and Carl gestured for him to lead the way. They didn’t have far to go.

  The man pointed to where a truck had pulled off the road at an angle. A Ford again. An F-150. Damned if it didn’t seem like someone was out to prove his theory about the state truck. LeMarrs gestured for Carl to look on the other side of the truck and Carl approached carefully, making sure to give consideration for any possible marks on the long, dried out grass that surrounded the truck.

  It was definitely a body and there was no denying that said body was dead and very likely murdered.

  “Well, what the hell.” Carl beamed the light over the body and looked around for possible evidence. There were definite signs of a scuffle.

  The body was of a man in his mid-forties at a guess. Dressed in jeans and a baggy shirt that was now rolled up to his armpits. Hardly in good shape even before the death, but now it looked like someone had folded the body over on itself, backwards. The man’s abdomen was stretched and his stomach was distended. His back folded almost over on itself and the man’s head was resting near one cowboy boot. The other leg was spread away from him.

  Carl managed not to let out a scream. Unsettling as the image was, he’d actually seen worse. Once again, Jerry flashed through his mind for a moment.

  “You been anywhere near the body, Mister LeMarrs?”

  “Hell no!” The man shook his head. “I mean, no sir.”

  “How did you find the body, sir?”

  “Well, I saw some kids running down the road and when they saw me they kind of cut into the woods.”

  “Kids?”

  “You know, teenagers.” He shrugged. “I was heading home from, well, I was on my way home.” He’d been drinking and didn’t want Carl to notice. Too late. But there were larger considerations just now.

  “You had a few beers?”

  “Yessir.” He sounded defeated.

  “You too drunk to drive?”

  “Nossir.”

  “Then we don’t have a problem, not tonight, anyways.” LeMarrs sighed with relief. “So tell me what you saw, okay Mister LeMarrs?”

  “Like I said, I saw them kids. They were teenagers, but they were dressed in nice clothes. Not prom nice, but like they were going out for dinner with the folks. Good suits and proper skirts.”

  Carl nodded and resisted the temptation to tell him to get on with it. While the man was speaking Carl was still checking over the area. It looked like there were several sets of prints out there, but he couldn’t be certain. He’d be calling for a Crime Scene Unit.

  “I saw them running and when I passed them, I saw the truck. I thought maybe they’d been in a wreck or something or someone needed help and then I looked around and when I saw that fella’s leg still twitching, I figured I better call it in.”

  “His leg was still twitching?”

  LeMarrs nodded and licked his lips again. Small wonder he was okay to drive. Either the man was very, very nervous – a distinct possibility – or he was just possibly hopped up on speed of some sort. He was doing an awful lot of nervous twitching, and the way he kept licking his lips was a possible indicator.

  “I can’t say for sure, but the way them kids ran, I figure they must have at least seen him.”

  “Which way did the kids go?”

  LeMarrs pointed away from Crawford’s Hollow. The Hollow was decidedly Blackbourne territory. That might mean nothing in this case, but it might also mean someone running from the clan.

  “Did you see anyone other than the kids and this man?” He pointed toward the body.

  “Nossir.”

  Carl nodded and pulled out his phone, prepared to call for the team to investigate properly and for the coroner.

  “How many kids were there, Mister LeMarrs?”

  “Two girls and one boy. So three.” He seemed inordinately proud of his mad math skills, once again leading Carl to believe the man was probably a good ways from completely sober. That was all right. He’d likely not be going anywhere for a while. The way these things normally ran, LeMarrs would have plenty of time to get sober before he was allowed to go anywhere at all.

  “You know
what age they were?”

  “Not a one of them looked old enough to drive.” He frowned and shook his head. “What are kids that age doing out this late at night, anyways? Don’t folks pay attention to their kids anymore?”

  A damned good question.

  He looked at the body. Either three adolescents had literally folded a man over himself until his spine broke and his internal organs ruptured in the process, or they had just found him that way. In any event it was almost four in the morning and kids had no reason to be out.

  Carl made his phone calls. The air was still and hot and damned sticky. The corpse let out a flatulent noise and LeMarrs squeaked at the unexpected sound.

  Carl sighed and scratched at the back of his neck. This was not going to end well. He could feel it.

  * * *

  Reverend Lazarus Cotton. Griffin typed those words into the search engine and hit enter. Plenty of hits. He switched to the image setting and gazed at dozens of pictures. Cotton behind a pulpit. Cotton lit by firelight with the walls and roof of a great tent behind him. Reproductions of fliers advertising Cotton’s revivals from all over the south. The man got around.

  Griffin switched back to the web search and read a few random articles. Mount Zion wasn’t Cotton’s first church. The reverend had apparently had a good size congregation in Florida at one point. Florida had also been the host to many of the man’s tent revival meetings. Checking the dates on various newspaper articles Griffin saw that there was a gap of several months between the time when Cotton left his church in Florida and when he popped up in Georgia. No mention as to why he had pulled up stakes. Interesting.

  Charon came wandering into Griffin’s home office, putting on a pair of hoop earrings as she walked. She was dressed for a day at the shop. A black skirt. A deep purple t-shirt with a close up image of Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. Charon had the most amazing collection of t-shirts Griffin had ever seen. He had asked her once if t-shirts weren’t a bit casual for a business owner, but she had explained that people expected her to dress funky. It was part of the ambiance of Baba Yaga’s.