“What’s that?”
“Nothing,” she answered, shaking her head. “Just thinking out loud.”
“Yeah. I’ve got a daughter does that. Makes me nuts.”
Constance nudged the conversation back to the particulars of the case. “Is there a back entrance to the house?”
“Yeah, right off the kitchen. Locked up tight. Never been any sign of forced entry.”
“Maybe the killer somehow has a key?”
“Locks have been changed four times. Three of ‘em I did myself. Finally just gave up. So, unless the killer is me…”
“Are you?” she asked.
He snorted. “Do you think I’d tell you if I was?”
“With you, Skip, I’m not so sure…” Constance wasn’t usually one for gallows humor, but Ben had rubbed off on her through the years, and sometimes it would leak out unexpectedly.
Skip turned and played the flashlight up just far enough to illuminate the smirk on her face. He snorted again. “I see that coffee is starting to kick in.”
“Sorry,” she apologized.
“Don’t be. It comes with the job.”
She returned to the subject at hand. “Any other ingress or egress?”
“Windows would be about it, but they’ve never been disturbed that we can tell,” he told her.
“The killer has to get in and out somehow.”
“Yeah, can’t argue there,” he grunted, playing the flashlight around in the darkness. A moment later he quipped, “When you figure it out, tell me, okay? Because this’n has me stumped.”
“With you that’s hard to imagine.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. There was no hubris in his voice, just sincere confusion at why he didn’t see the answer to this riddle the same way he saw everything else.
“Well, that’s why I’m here,” she replied.
“Yeah, well no offense, but you’re the fifth Fed to tell me that.”
“So...” Constance said, allowing the flat commentary to go without rebuttal. “As I understand it, the bodies are always found in the basement, correct?”
“Yeah, what’s left of them anyway,” Sheriff Carmichael replied, panning the flashlight to the right side of the archway. “Stairs are just over there.”
CHAPTER 15
HOLLOW echoes came a half-beat behind each footstep that fell upon the wooden plank treads of the basement staircase. The dull sounds resonated from the concrete walls below, each lonely thud fading away to make room for the next. The rhythmic noise was an audible indicator of the emptiness contained within the subterranean room.
Armed with a flashlight, Sheriff Carmichael had led the way for a change, with Special Agent Mandalay close behind. A small amount of the dim light from the still open front door was filtering into the stairwell behind her. The muted illumination wasn’t at all obvious while she kept her gaze forward as they descended. In fact, she didn’t even notice it until a gust of wind caught the loose screen door outside and knocked it hard against the side of the house, prompting her to stop midway down the steep staircase and glance back up over her shoulder. The basement doorway above her was filled with dull light, appearing as a dim, rectangular panel of gray floating in a black void. When she exhaled, the frosty cloud of her breath bloomed in its faint glow, briefly hovering before her like a translucent apparition, only to disappear in less than a blink.
With a quick shudder, she turned and continued downward, following the bobbing pool of brightness from the flashlight in Sheriff Carmichael’s hand. Her running shoes thumped a significantly lighter beat against the stairs than his harder-soled clomps. Constance heard him let out a heavy grunt, which was then followed by the sound of his shoes against concrete, as he arrived at the bottom and stepped down to the floor below.
“Watch yourself,” he told her, moving off to the side, but keeping the flashlight aimed at the last stair for her. “That one’s a bit to the high side.”
She heeded his warning and held onto the loose handrail as she stepped down from the last tread. He hadn’t been exaggerating. If anything, he’d been conservative in his assessment. The final step was akin to taking two at once. She felt his hand on her upper arm as she pitched forward, her foot searching for the floor. She appreciated the help.
“Thanks,” she said.
“It can be an unwelcome surprise if you don’t know it’s there,” he replied.
“Spoken from experience?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Once he was certain she was on even footing, Skip swung the flashlight around the large, squarish room to get his bearings.
By now, Constance’s eyes had mostly adjusted to the muted darkness. She could make out the coarse shapes of what little remained in the abandoned basement.
As she glanced around, she could see that there were small, glass block windows at the top edges of the walls, spaced at roughly even intervals. A small amount of the gray daylight was leaking through them, but not as much as one would expect. She had noticed the rusted upper lips of the galvanized window-wells protruding just above the ground when they first approached the house, but she had not looked down into them. Now that they were inside she could see that they must be filled with leaves and other debris. A by-product of Mother Nature combined with the past seven years of cyclical neglect visited upon the property.
From their position at the bottom of the stairs, to the left she spied the squat hulk of an antiquated furnace lurking in the darkness. It appeared as though a maintenance panel was missing, which left a contrasting rectangular hole on its front. In a peculiar sense, it looked much like a huge, gaping mouth at the bottom of an oblong face. Shadowy round metal ductwork branched out from the side of the unit, like fat arms extending upward until they disappeared into the rafters above. Once a source of heat, viewed at this angle it was now a cold, basement-dwelling monster, reaching for the upper floors in order to drag the unsuspecting into its hungry mouth.
Whether it was the exhaustion or something else entirely, Constance wasn’t sure, but for some reason this house had a bizarre way of becoming anthropomorphized visions in her brain. She shook her head and blinked as a gut response to the hallucination being produced by her uncharacteristically rampant imagination. But, was it just her imagination? The shiver along her spine made her wonder. If anything, it was just as bad now as it had been the previous evening, maybe even worse.
Sheriff Carmichael noticed the motion and brought the flashlight up in her direction. “You okay?”
She nodded and lied. “Just a cobweb, I think.”
“Yeah. Plenty of those down here, that’s for sure.”
He swung the flashlight back down and adjusted the beam on as wide as it would go and still be effective, then played it slowly around the basement to reveal those things that were still hiding in shadows. Just beyond the furnace—that now looked like nothing more than what it really was—stood a dilapidated water heater in the middle of a large rust stain that spread outward from it on the floor. Along the walls, seeping cracks flanked by dark mold became immediately evident in the illuminated swath. Those certainly accounted for the damp, musty smell that permeated the cold air.
“Old coal chute,” Skip said, directing the light at a single point for a moment. The highlighted area was covered in the same peeling, off-white paint as the rest of the walls, but a pattern of bricks and mortar seams were evident beneath. “It was bricked up even back in seventy-five, so no way in through there.”
He began panning again and the beam of light eventually fell across a vertical column rising upward from the centerline of the basement to bear the load of the structure above. Several feet to the right, directly in front of them and against the side of the staircase Constance could see the shadow of its twin.
Skip finished the slow arc and then waved the beam back toward the center of the room and mused aloud in a sad tone, “Hasn’t changed…”
“Stands to reason,” Constance offered. “If the house has
been vacant for seven years.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. His voice still seemed strained. “But I mean it hasn’t changed since seventy-five.”
She didn’t respond to the explanation. She really didn’t know how.
After a moment he tilted the beam downward and began walking slowly forward on a direct line between the support columns. She followed.
“Right over here,” he finally said, playing the light across the floor in front of them.
The yellow swath of illumination revealed an oblong outline chalked on the concrete. A foot or so away was a much smaller outline, roughly perpendicular to the first. Dark stains colored portions of the floor within the two shapes, spreading outward in haphazard flows, as if randomly spilled with no regard for the lines themselves. Similar dark splotches were heavily splattered on the wall nearby.
“And over there,” the sheriff offered, sliding the light to the corner a few feet away, where a basketball-sized circle was drawn. It too, bore a dark stain beneath.
“And over there,” he continued, again aiming the beam toward a location apart from the others. This one looked like the outline of a giant, disproportionate boomerang.
“Torso and upper right arm,” Carmichael announced, panning the light back to the first location. Moving it rapidly to the second spot he added, “Head.” Aiming at the third he said, “Left calf and most of the thigh.” Waving the light slowly around to reveal other outlines, he hesitated for a moment at each and named them off one by one, “Left arm and hand; right forearm; right calf, thigh, and foot; left foot; right hand. And…well…that’s pretty much it.”
“And the body parts are dumped exactly the same way, every year?” Constance remarked as much as asked.
He played the beam slowly over the blood-stained wall. “They aren’t just dumped. It happens right here.”
“Yet the killer gets away?”
“That’s the mystery,” Sheriff Carmichael replied. He swung the flashlight back and forth again, rapidly illuminating each of the spots in succession. “But to answer your first question: yep. Exactly the same every year. All seven victims dismembered the same way, left in exactly the same position, every single time. We don’t even bother to clean up the outlines anymore.”
“Don’t you mean eight victims?” Constance asked.
He grumbled his response. “Not yet. Not until Christmas Day anyway.”
“I mean John Horace Colson,” she explained. “Aren’t the seven recent victims positioned in exactly the same way he was found dismembered in nineteen seventy-five?”
“Yes, they are, Special Agent Mandalay,” he spat, adopting the formal tone he’d used before when he wanted to stress a point. “But you need to bear in mind that John Colson was a monster. Merrie Callahan was the victim, not him.”
“I agree, Merrie was definitely a victim. But, whether you and I think it’s right or not, legally, Colson was too.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s really just semantics.”
“Well, you can keep your semantics.” The words came as a growl. He had moved a step beyond cold formality and was now toeing a line called anger.
Unfortunately, his growing flare was igniting hers as well, and it was clear in her voice as she mimicked his sudden conventionalism. “Semantics aside, Sheriff Carmichael, I think we can agree the connection between the murders is more than obvious.”
“I’m not a rookie, Special Agent. What’s your point?”
“My point is that you aren’t looking at this crime objectively.”
“I never claimed to be,” he replied, his voice even sharper than before. “You’re a smart girl; I thought you’d figured that out by now.”
Constance felt herself bristle at the condescending remark and immediately opened her mouth to fire back a rebuttal. However, before she released the volley, her training kicked in to override her emotions. She didn’t know what had sparked this sudden escalation of tempers between them, but she knew it wasn’t productive, and it needed to end right now.
She drew in a deep breath, then forced her tone to remain calm and even. “Skip…” she began. “I’m not trying to be adversarial here. I’m just–”
“You sure as hell could’ve fooled me,” he snapped, truncating her sentence before she could finish. His voice rose as he launched into a short-lived tirade, “Goddammed know-it-all Feds. You’re all the same… Coming in here uninvited and placing blame where it doesn’t belong… Screw the whole lot of ya’…”
Constance felt heat radiate from her cheeks as her face flushed, but she continued to bite back her temper and held her tongue. Conflict resolution wasn’t an easy task in the first place, even when you were the detached outsider. It was much harder when you were firmly entrenched in your own side of the argument.
“Have you seen enough?” Carmichael demanded on the heels of his outburst. “Are we done here?”
“Yes,” Constance replied as calmly as she could manage. “I think we are.”
He turned and started for the stairs. “Come on then. I’ll drop you off back at the Greenleaf.”
“Actually, why don’t we just go to your office,” she said as she turned to follow. “I’d like to have a look at the original case file. If you still have it, that is.”
Skip didn’t answer. He simply kept walking, then stomped up the stairs, flashlight in hand, leaving her to negotiate the uneven bottom double-step alone and in the dark.
CONSTANCE glanced over the top edge of the thirty-five-year-old police report as a hand slid an unmarked, cardboard burger carton across the break room table and brought it to rest in front of her. The carton was soon followed by a plastic fork and then by a thick-walled, stoneware mug that had wisps of steam wafting slowly up from the coffee it contained.
In the seconds following the appearance of the items, there ensued a balloon of silence that was slowly expanding to fill the room. It finally popped when Skip cleared his throat and said, “Hope you like cranberry-mince pie. It’s all they had over there this morning.”
“Peace offering?” She asked without looking up from the file.
“Works with my daughters,” he grunted. “Not so much with my wife, but with the girls it does…most of the time, anyway. And, since you remind me a lot of my oldest, I figure I might have a fifty-fifty shot…”
Constance gave in and laid the open file on the table, then looked up at him with a curious expression. “Why just fifty-fifty?”
“Because my oldest takes after her mother.”
“I see… But pie? For breakfast?”
“Think of it as a doughnut you have to eat with a fork.”
She arched her eyebrows and nodded. “Never thought of it that way.”
“So…” he said after a measured pause. “Is it working?”
She chuckled as she quipped in return, “I guess that all depends on how good the pie is.”
“Yeah. You’re definitely a lot like my oldest,” Skip replied. He dropped a second carton on the table, then pulled up a chair and parked himself across from her. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I know I was kind of a jackass back there.”
“Kind of?”
“Okay, I was a complete jackass,” he replied.
“Apology accepted,” she said with a quick nod. “And I should say that I’m sorry if I offended you with my observations on this case. I realize that what happened with Merrie is a touchy subject for you and everyone else in this town for that matter. I truly wasn’t trying to be insensitive to that fact.”
“I know you weren’t. You’re just following the leads like you’re supposed to. Truth is, I should’ve warned you up front.”
“About?”
“Me… That house…” he huffed, then paused, leaving a pregnant question mark hanging in the air. He thumbed the tab on his box and opened the hinged lid to reveal a wide slice of homemade pie that had been accessorized with a huge dollop of whipped cream. He stared at it for a moment, then picked up his own
fork; but instead of digging in, he waved the utensil through the air and proceeded to fill in the blank he had left. “This sort of thing has happened before. More than once. You can ask your Fed buddies about it. I just don’t do well in that house. Too many bad memories, I guess… And just more gettin’ made.”
“I think I can understand that. Between the painful memories and the frustration you must feel with this case, I’m sure it can’t be easy on you.”
He bobbed his head in agreement. “Not so much, that’s the truth. Most memories dull with time. Eventually they fade enough that they get easier to deal with…but not this one. It just gets harder for me every year. Still, that was no cause for me to take it out on you.”
“Would it help if I confessed something?” Constance asked.
“What’s that?”
“Being in that house was getting to me too. I know that might sound crazy, especially since I don’t have the history with it that you have.” She paused, then shrugged and added, “To be honest, I was actually even a little spooked by it yesterday. I hate to admit it, but I was sort of relieved when your flashlight didn’t work.”
“Hard for me to imagine you being spooked by much of anything,” he replied, then puckered his lips into a thoughtful frown and offered, “I guess I was too wrapped up in myself to notice. Sorry.”
“What was that you said earlier? ‘Now we’re even’?”
“How’s that?”
“It’s hard for me to imagine you not noticing something.”
“It happens,” he replied, a half chuckle following the words. “As a matter of fact, that’s when I usually end up buying somebody a piece of pie. Oh…how’s your shin, by the way?”
Obviously he hadn’t missed the fact that she’d stumbled over that bottom stair when he stormed off and left her standing in the dark.
“Sore,” she answered. “And I’m sure there’s a bruise on the way, so I doubt I’ll be winning any sexy legs contests in the near future.”
“Maybe not, but from the language I heard coming up the stairs I’d sure put money on you to win a cussin’ contest.”
In The Bleak Midwinter: A Special Agent Constance Mandalay Novel Page 15
