by Joe McKinney
Certainly Rachel had thought so. She had dismissed it outright, not in so many words, or in any words at all in fact, but through her silence. For her, it was a non-occurrence, a hole that could be smoothed over by ignoring it. He told her everything, and she rejected it. Her silence was painful and confusing, but it was muted now by this new thing, this camaraderie, this feeling of belonging to something good. Football had never made him feel this way. His home life with his father was certainly never this good. The only thing that had ever made him feel better was loving Rachel, and the fact that he could equate the two in his heart both scared and thrilled him.
But it wasn’t to last. Something big was waiting for him, and like so many big things in life, it started as something small.
***
“44-70.”
Paul answered the radio this time. “Go ahead, 44-70.”
“44-70, make 642 Utley Street, 642 Utley for a disturbance. Complainant states her neighbor is fighting with her.”
Utley, Paul thought. On the fringes of heroin town, closer to the eastern edge of their district, over by the Morgan Rollins Iron Works.
“44-70, 10-4. We’re on the way.”
Mike turned left on Crowder, one of the four major surface streets that ran north to south through their district, and headed south. They turned left again onto Banks and headed east to Utley.
Paul had figured the location almost exactly, he realized. They were close to the Morgan Rollins Iron Works. He could see the tops of its smokestacks peeking out above the trees behind Utley.
As they drove, Mike told him about houses in the area to watch out for. The family at 756 Utley sold heroin. The shemale prostitute at 714 was HIV positive. The kid at 651 was a car burglar and known to deal in stolen guns. There were a handful of vacant houses scattered up and down the street, all of them known shooting galleries.
Mike was in the middle of telling him a story about the schizophrenic woman that lived at 634 when he suddenly broke off mid-sentence. His eyes grew wide and he said, “Oh shit!”
Paul followed Mike’s gaze to the houses on the driver’s side of the car. A dark-haired Hispanic woman in her late forties was running right for them. She was waving her arms and screaming and she was covered from head to foot in what looked like blood.
Paul and Mike jumped from the car at the same time, both of them with their guns drawn.
Mike was faster. He got to the front of the car and yelled at the woman to stop. Paul took a few steps that way, following Mike’s lead. He had no idea if the blood-covered woman was running to them for help, or running at them because she had just done something horrible and was still in a frenzy. From the way her eyes were rolling wildly from the houses behind her to the cops in front of her, Paul thought it was equal odds either way.
“Stop!” Mike yelled. His voice split the night with absolute authority. He had his pistol in the low ready stance, not pointed at the woman, but only a flick of the wrist away from being in position to put her down if he needed to. “Stop right there,” he said.
The woman skidded on her heels in the street. As she did, the wild look in her eyes cleared a little, and anger took its place.
“She did this to me,” the woman said. Her voice was a mix of rage and self-pity and contempt. Blood dripped from her matted hair. “Look at me,” she said. “Look at what she did to me.”
“Are you hurt?” Mike asked, lowering his weapon.
“She did this to me.” The woman started to bounce up and down on her toes, and from her face Paul could tell the thought of being covered in blood was making the woman’s skin crawl. “She did this to me.”
“Are you bleeding?” Mike asked.
Paul glanced at Mike. What a weird question to ask somebody covered in blood.
“She threw this on me,” the woman said. “It’s all over me.”
“Why did she throw blood on you?” Paul asked.
The woman wheeled around on him, like she had only just realized he was standing there.
“Because she’s a fucking witch,” the woman screamed. “She cursed me. Oh Jesus, what am I gonna do?”
“She’s a what?” Paul asked.
But the woman didn’t answer. She stood in the street and shivered, her arms around her chest and her eyes on the pavement. The temperature was in the high nineties, and she was shivering.
“Paul,” Mike said.
Paul glanced at Mike, who pointed back at the house where the woman had come from with his chin. Paul looked at the house. It was a lot like every other house on the block: small, falling into the dust, paint peeling like dead skin. A waist-high hurricane fence ran around the perimeter of the yard, and the section of fence that separated the woman’s yard from the house to the left of hers was lined with brightly guttering votive candles and draped with what appeared to be dried chicken bones. There was trash all over the woman’s yard, and her front door and most of her porch were covered with blood.
“Where’s this other woman at?” Mike asked the still shivering, blood-stained woman.
But she didn’t answer. She didn’t get the chance. Before she could say anything, the screen door of the house to the left of hers flew open and another woman came running out.
All at once the vision Paul had experienced of his father in Mexico came crashing back in on his mind. The crazed Mexican woman running at them from the next house over was older and heavier and grayer than the young girl who had led his father out of his hotel room and carried him out behind her grandmother’s shack to piss among the goats, but she was unmistakably the same woman. She was Paul’s past and his visions and his present all crashed together.
“That’s her,” the blood-stained woman said. She ran behind Paul for cover. “She did this to me.”
“You’re damn right I did,” the second woman said.
Paul found himself in the middle of the two women, and the distance was closing fast. They were screaming at each other in Spanish now, and Paul couldn’t understand a word of what was said. He only knew that things were about to get violent.
Paul pushed away from the blood-covered woman and said, “You stay there! Don’t you move.” Then he turned to the woman from his father’s past and said, “Stay where you’re at! I’ll come talk to you in a second.”
But the woman didn’t stop. She kept on coming, her hands raised, fingers spread out like they were claws and she meant to dig the other woman’s eyes out of her skull.
“Stop!” Paul ordered her, trying to copy Mike’s tone of absolute authority.
It didn’t work. The woman ran right over him, slicing at his face with her fingernails, clawing her way over top of him to get to the blood-covered woman. Paul grabbed her by the arm and slung her back into her yard. Then he grabbed her again and pulled her hands behind her back.
The woman kicked and spit and screamed that she was being raped. Paul couldn’t understand much of her rapid-fire Spanish, but he definitely heard the word rape.
He was so shocked he let her go.
She faced him long enough to spit on him and then ran for the blood-covered woman again.
But before he could chase after her, Mike stepped in front of her and punched her in the solar plexus, the bundle of nerves at the base of the sternum, with the heel of his palm. She flew backwards, landing on her knees, and leaned forward and nearly vomited. Mike didn’t give her a chance to get back on his feet. He grabbed her by one arm and threw her face down into the dirt. Then he put one knee into the small of her back and handcuffed her hands behind her back with all the ease of a rodeo calf roper. She had been screaming at Paul, and she was still screaming, but now those screams were coming through mouthfuls of dirt.
He had her on her feet again by the time Paul got to him. With an expression that was more annoyed than angry he handed her to Paul and said, “What the fuck’s wrong with you? You put your hands on somebody you better make damn sure you don’t let go until the job’s finished. I don’t care if it’s a woman
, a kid, whoever. You put your hands on them, you make damn sure they’re secure.”
Paul nodded.
Mike pushed her towards the car. “Here, take her. Put her in the car and get her information. We’re booking her for assault.”
Humbled, Paul did what he was told. He led the woman to their patrol car and stuffed her into the backseat despite her screaming. Then he got into the front passenger seat, took his metal clipboard down from the dashboard, and took out the yellow page, the arrested person supplement to the offense report they were going to be writing.
He checked off the blanks for Hispanic, female, black hair, and heavy built. Then he took a deep, nervous breath, and looked at the woman in the sun-visor’s vanity mirror. She wasn’t screaming now that the door was closed and they were alone. She was looking right at him, her eyes unblinking as she pushed dirt and grass out of her mouth with her tongue.
“I know who you are,” she said.
Paul felt the blood run out of his face. He swallowed the walnut-sized lump that had suddenly formed in his throat and tried to sound like he hadn’t heard her.
“What’s your name?” he said.
“Magdalena Chavarria. But you already know that, don’t you?”
“How tall are you, Ms. Chavarria?”
“I was with your father when he got a mark like the one you bear on your forehead. I was there when my Abuela put a goat’s heart into your father’s chest.”
Paul put the clipboard down on the dash and slowly turned around. He was looking at her over his shoulder now, through the plexiglass prisoner cage, but he had the feeling that it was she who was looking at him, that he was the bug under the glass. He felt small and scared and confused.
“Your father made me help him,” she said. “I needed to see you. I needed to tell you what kind of danger you’re in. Do you understand what your father has done?”
Paul shook his head.
“Your father is very powerful, Paul. Stronger even than my Abuela. She could not have returned from the dead the way your father has. And she would not have wanted to.”
“I don’t understand,” Paul said.
“Your father is evil,” Magdalena said. “What he is doing, it is not what my Abuela taught him. It is an abomination. It is a sin. He has made me raise the dead, and he means to do it again. Have you seen those visions? Do you know what he has planned for you?”
“No,” Paul said, full of disbelief, and yet also of a sense that what this woman was saying was true.
“Paul, it is very bad. You must fight against him. I believe that you are stronger even than your father. If he is able to corrupt you it will be very bad.”
It was too much for Paul. He wanted to throw up, and he scrambled from the car. When the hot night air hit him he gasped. Then he stood there trying to catch his breath. Inside the car, Magdalena Chavarria slowly turned her gaze toward him and stared without expression.
“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Mike said.
“What?” Paul said.
Mike squinted at him. “You all right?”
Paul nodded. “Yeah. Fine.”
“You don’t look fine.” Mike crossed into the street and opened the driver’s side door. He seemed to regard Paul for a second before deciding it wasn’t important enough to worry about. “Get in,” he said. “Let’s get the fuck out of here. We can do her paperwork downtown.”
Paul glanced at the backseat again. Magdalena nodded to him, and Paul was sure he was going to throw up. He felt it rising in his throat.
“Hey,” Mike said. “You coming?”
Paul closed his eyes and forced it down. Master it. Master it, he ordered himself. Then he opened his eyes and climbed into the car.
He caught her gaze in the vanity mirror as he slammed it back into its upright position, and in that fraction of a second, he almost came undone.
Chapter 14
Keith Anderson stood under the colonnade of the Oak Meadows Church of God, cursing the heat and the harsh blue glare of the South Texas sky. Anderson had never been one for wearing sunglasses, but he would have killed for them now.
He stared up at the ceiling, where a row of thirty immense columns rose into the shadows sixty feet above him. It was an absurdly huge church, four stories of red brick and polished white concrete treated to look like fine European marble. Maybe it was meant to be imposing, even awe-inspiring, the way medieval cathedrals were to the peasants, but to Anderson it just looked gaudy. It seemed to put into architectural reality all that was distasteful and pompous and hypocritically commercial about fundamentalist Christianity in America.
Marked patrol cars from all over Texas filled the parking lot in front of him. On his way in, he’d even seen a few honor guard detachments from places outside the state, like Oklahoma and Tennessee and Alabama. He’d heard one of the Traffic sergeants say there were a thousand patrol cars out there, and more were showing up every minute.
At the near edge of the parking lot was a circular drive that curled around an island of grass, and in the middle of that island was a pair of flagpoles, the US and Texas flags both flying at half-mast. Closer in still was an emerald-green lawn big enough to host a baseball game.
Everywhere he looked, Anderson saw officers in their dress blues walking in small, sober groups with their wives and girlfriends. His own uniform felt tight and uncomfortable, the gun belt digging into the small of his back and reminding him why he had been so thankful to leave Patrol all those years ago. The long-sleeved black cotton blouse was hot, and even though he didn’t wear body armor like most of the younger officers and detectives did, he still felt a strong impulse to tug at the neckline and let out some of the trapped heat that massed next to his chest.
A police whistle split the somber tone of the morning and Anderson looked down at the circular drive to see Traffic officers in their white hats and black gloves clearing the way for a line of shiny black Crown Victorias. The Fords pulled up to the walkway that split the lawn and led directly to the imposing flight of white concrete steps at Anderson’s feet.
Okay, he thought, here comes Allen.
He scanned the command staff as they exited their vehicles until he found Deputy Chief Allen. Allen cut an imposing figure in his dark blue, thigh-length great coat. His shoulders and chest gleamed in the sun with reflected brass, and around his neck was the San Antonio Police Department’s Medal of Valor, which he had won as a lieutenant fifteen years earlier for pulling a family of four out of a burning restaurant. His hair was a perfect gray helmet, every strand in place. He was smiling, but the smile was solemn and sincere, like a politician at a wreath-laying ceremony.
Anderson watched him walk forward to the lead car, put a hand on the chief’s shoulder and say something that brought a nod from the chief. Then Allen was walking across the lawn and towards the steps. Coming up them now, almost trotting, not even noticing the climb that had left Anderson winded when he made it.
Allen nodded at the officers he passed on his way up, calling most by their first names. And then he was standing in front of Anderson, extending his hand.
“How are you, Keith?”
“I’m good, sir. You?”
“Okay.”
Anderson nodded, though he secretly wished he had some of Allen’s reserves. The man had to be working on absolutely no sleep, and yet he still managed to look fresh and rested.
“I’ve only got a minute or two, Keith,” Allen said. “Tell me what you found out from Comal County.”
Anderson told him. He laid it all out in order, right down to Paul’s father working for a time at the Morgan Rollins Iron Works.
“And so you still hold with the idea that we’re dealing with some kind of cult?”
“I do, yes sir.”
“Why?”
“Well, it’s the logistics of the thing, really. One man couldn’t have killed all those people at Morgan Rollins, not even if they were all browned out at the time. And someone had to get Everett out
of his holding cell at the clinic and drive him all the way across town. And then there are the bodies. One man, hell, even two or three men wouldn’t be able to move forty plus bodies up two flights of stairs and onto a truck in less than an hour. Well, maybe they could do that, but when you put the bodies together with everything else we’ve seen, a cult is about all that makes sense.”
“Hmmm,” Allen said. “Okay, I can buy that. The thing is though; all you really got is a guess. I mean, are we talking some kind of religious cult, or something like the Manson Family?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Have you checked any federal resources yet? I know the Bureau of Justice has got the National Criminal Intelligence Resource Center. Maybe they’ve got something on similar crimes.”
“Yes sir, I checked them. I also checked Law Enforcement Online and the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime and VICAP and the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Nobody’s seen anything like this.”
Allen stared down the steps towards the line of black Crown Victorias waiting in queue. A pair of lieutenants walked by with their wives and Allen nodded to them.
When they were gone he said, “So basically you’ve got nothing?”
“That’s about the size of it,” Anderson said.
“What about Paul Henninger? Give me your honest opinion. Is he involved? I don’t want this guy in uniform for one second more if you think he is. I mean it. I’ll have his ass on administrative leave if you’ve got any reservations at all.”
“You want my opinion?”
“Well, you don’t have any facts, so that’s about all I can hope for at the moment, isn’t it?”
Anderson flinched. “Yes sir. I guess so.” He watched the flags resting against the flag poles. They looked limp, like dead bats hanging from a pole. “Well, if you want my opinion,” he said, “then no, I don’t think he’s involved. I mean it sure is tempting to connect him, and maybe he is connected somehow, but I don’t think he knows what’s going on. When I talked to him that night at the train yard, I could tell he saw something that shook him real bad. Whatever it was he saw, it made an impression. But I could tell that whatever it was, he hadn’t expected to see it.”
