Devils in Dark Houses

by B. E. Scully

  His son rolled over and looked at him with still-sleepy eyes. “Dad? Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay. It’s okay. Go back to bed.”

  He never told anyone about what happened, not even Brenda. He patched the hole in the ceiling, but he never did trace down where the bullet had ended up. For all he knew, it was still lodged in the house somewhere and would stay that way until they tore it down.

  Gordon never loaded a weapon inside again. He became even more obsessive about gun safety than before. He knew he’d been lucky. But one stupid slip-up on his part wasn’t going to suddenly make him afraid of guns. Hell, guns were the one thing that kept him from being afraid—the one thing keeping Scotty Mears at bay.

  At bay, but never gone. The silent companion that had been following Gordon Parker around since childhood cast a very long shadow.

  Gordon tried not to let that shadow fall across his family. He didn’t want to raise fearful, paranoid kids too afraid to step outside their own front door. But every now and then the fear would rise up like a rabid animal and bite him in the balls, refusing to let go. Once, when his oldest son Jacob was five, maybe six years old, he wandered away from the rest of the family during an afternoon at the beach. While Brenda went to get the lifeguard, Gordon ran around checking every kid even remotely the same age and size as Jacob. But none of the kids looked like him. Instead, every single one of them had the face of Scotty Mears.

  By the time Brenda came back from the lifeguard stand with a wailing, red-faced Jacob in tow, Gordon was kneeling in the sand by their blanket, trying to catch his breath and stop from fainting.

  There were other incidents, like the time he called the cops after his daughter failed to come home after band practice one day. It turned out that she and a bunch of other kids had gone to a pizza place near the school after their practice had run late, and she almost “died of embarrassment” when their frantic band teacher came racing down the street looking for her with an irritated policeman trailing along. Then there was the time Gordon had come home to find the front door unlocked and Brenda and the kids in the backyard, the grill smoking and the radio blaring. He’d lectured all four of them so long the burgers turned to lumps of blackened char. Years later, the question, “What if I’d have been an armed intruder?” could still illicit groans from the entire family.

  The night terrors were the worst, though. Every now and then Gordon would wake up in the middle of the night in the dead-certain terror that all of his family had been slaughtered in their beds, that some crazed killer had entered the house and murdered them all while he’d been sleeping. He’d reach over and put his hand against Brenda’s back, waiting to feel the regular rhythm of her breathing. Then he’d creep through the house and check on the kids before double-checking all the doors and windows. Sometimes he’d even get one of his guns and do a perimeter check of the yard, the bewildered family dog trotting along beside his unexpected reinforcement.

  And yet despite the night terrors and worst-case scenarios, for the most part Gordon kept Scotty Mears beneath the surface, in the lightless depths where he belonged.

  After the police showed up on his doorstep telling Gordon Parker that his youngest child was dead, it took a while to realize Scotty Mears was missing. The shock came first, then the disbelief, the rage—all the usual “stages of grief” bullshit, only for Gordon they hadn’t come in some neat order one after the other, but rapid-fire, all mixed up like a whirlpool dragging him down deeper and deeper. Only Scotty Mears wasn’t there waiting for him anymore. When the numbness started giving way a little, Gordon realized that for the first time in over thirty-five years, the shadow was gone.

  For the first time in over thirty-five years, Gordon Parker wasn’t afraid. In fact, he’d never need to be afraid again, because the worst thing he could ever imagine happening had already happened. Now it was his kid’s dead body lying in a weed-choked field. Now it was his home with the blinds drawn down in tomb-like silence. He hadn’t been one of those people in the true account stories in his magazine. He hadn’t saved his family from an armed intruder or shot dead a deranged assailant. He hadn’t been able to prevent James’s murder. In fact, in a way he’d caused it.

  No! Those sick bastard psychos had caused it!

  Maybe. But that didn’t change the fact that he hadn’t been able to stop it.

  If he hadn’t been able to save his son from a bad, bad world full of bad, bad people (You’ve got to protect yourself and your loved ones at all costs, you hear?), then at least he could give him some justice (you go and get that gun any time you think there’s trouble!).

  Gordon Parker stood up and went to the living room window. He pulled back the blinds and let the sunlight in for the first time in eight days, fourteen hours, and three minutes.

  The reporters were still out there, waiting.

  This time around, Gordon Parker was ready to talk.

  This time around, he was ready.

  2

  The vein was throbbing so hard it looked like an alien slug trying to burst free from the lieutenant’s forehead. In the three years Dan Mickelson had been in charge of homicide, Detective Cassie Shirdon had only heard him raise his voice maybe half a dozen times. It wasn’t for nothing that Mickelson’s nickname around the station was “Iceberg.” He was just as slow and steady, and like his namesake, Shirdon suspected the tip of Mickelson’s iceberg concealed a vast hidden mass below the icy waters. But whenever all hell broke loose, Mickelson’s stress, at least, broke the surface to gather in that one vein on the left side of his forehead.

  And if they didn’t soon get a break in the Parker murder, Mickelson’s alien slug wasn’t going to be the only thing to blow up all over the city.

  Shirdon glanced over at her partner. Monte Martinez was pulling at the ends of his mustache, a nervous tick that had only gotten worse since his vow to quit smoking two weeks ago, “this time for good.” Good intentions, bad timing. Right now every cop in the city was on edge, waiting for the onslaught of retribution-style copycat crimes the press kept gleefully predicting. Everyone was waiting for “Nostri” to make some kind of demand or public statement, or at the very least take credit for the crime. But so far, nothing.

  At the height of summer vacation season, Mickelson had cancelled leave for the entire homicide department, and anyone in the precinct with a minute to spare had been put to work on the Parker case. Soon they’d even have the janitors out canvassing for witnesses, because so far, nobody else had turned up a damn thing.

  The lieutenant folded his hands together and lowered his head in Zen-like concentration. Martinez gave his mustache a tug and leaned toward Shirdon. “This briefing better be over soon or my stomach is going to start eating itself.”

  Shirdon resisted the obvious wise-crack about how in that case, there’d be plenty to go around. But any hopes of lunch were dashed when Mickelson looked up and said, “Let’s go over the list of suspects one more time. Shirdon and Martinez, what do you have so far?”

  Shirdon wished she had more to say than “not much.” Their first round of interviews had focused on people close to the victim and, even more important, his high-profile father. Despite the note pinned to James Parker’s body, they couldn’t assume the murder was connected to the first two “Nostri” incidents. It was a big jump from relatively harmless publicity stunts to execution-style murder. The note might have been the perfect decoy to not only throw the investigation off, but to turn it into a media circus. And yet they couldn’t assume the three cases weren’t related, either.

  From what they’d found out so far, James Parker had been an ordinary kid with no jealous rivals, drug connections, or any of the other usual suspects in high school homicides. His father, though, was a different story altogether.

  If the last six months were any indication, Gordon “Gord” Parker got about a dozen hate emails a day. After a mass shooting or high-profile gun death, that number jumped to the hundreds. Most of them were along the dist
urbing but not deadly lines of “Guns don’t kill people, gun-loving psychos who sell them to other gun-loving psychos do,” or “I hope the ghosts of all those dead babies HAUNT YOUR NIGHTMARES, YOU BASTARD!” The messages that included death threats were the ones the police were interested in, and there was no shortage of those, either. Some were quite detailed about how and when they were going to kill Gordon Parker and his entire family, even listing names and addresses. Two weeks before James Parker’s murder, Janet Parker opened an overnight delivery package and found the plastic-wrapped remains of a mutilated animal inside. The note with it said, “More blood on your gun-carrying hands.”

  Apparently such incidents weren’t uncommon in the Parker household.

  Gordon Parker had a long list of enemies in both legitimate political arenas and the online world of armchair activists and plain old psychopaths. Added to that were his gun auctions, which like any business generated a fair share of unhappy customers. A team of detectives pulling fourteen-hour shifts had narrowed the long list of potential suspects to four people with the golden combination of strong motivation and lack of an alibi. But so far there wasn’t a shred of evidence on any of them.

  For his part, Gordon Parker hadn’t been reluctant to help the police, but he hadn’t been exactly eager, either. He’d answered their questions and provided them with lists of names and access to his computer, but it was half-hearted, as if he’d given up on the investigation before it had even gotten started.

  At this point, Shirdon was beginning to wonder if he’d had the right idea all along.

  Despite the team of cops assigned to go door-to-door in every neighborhood within walking distance of the meadow where James Parker’s body had been found, so far they hadn’t found any witnesses who’d noticed anything or anyone unusual on the morning of the murder. Forensics hadn’t turned up much, either, which was no surprise given the method and location of the killing. The only evidence they had was one strand of hair stuck to the plastic sheet protector containing the note that had been pinned to James Parker’s body. The lab analysis indicated the hair was human and Negroid in origin. Forensics had been able to pull a small sample of DNA, but the databases hadn’t turned up a match.

  If the hair had come from one of the killers, he or she wasn’t in the system.

  The murder weapon was a Smith & Wesson .22 rimfire pistol, one of the most common firearms in the country. Three spent shell casings had been found in the weeds around the victim’s body, but they’d proven useless in terms of prints. The note with the body, the plastic protector, and the safety pin used to attach it to James Parker’s shirt didn’t have so much as a partial thumb smudge to offer. Everything had been wiped clean, and the message had been typed and printed on the kind of computer equipment found in just about every household in the city.

  The case was turning out to be a classic example of one of Martinez’s favorite grumbles: “Damn true crime TV shows. Our job was a hell of a lot easier before everyone knew exactly what we’re looking for.”

  Even though they’d been hoping for a suspect with a connection to the victim, Shirdon had always suspected they’d end up back with “Nostri.” By now she’d learned how to spot the kinds of cases where the most logical, obvious answers went right out the window and the improbable, impractical, or even downright impossible strolled through the door to take their place.

  Right from the start, the James Parker murder had been one of those cases.

  A team of investigators had collated the details from the first two “Nostri” incidents, combing through witness statements and police reports for matches that might lead to a suspect. In the Michelle Maynard baby case, there was almost nothing to go on. The police report included a description of the note that had been tucked into the baby’s blanket, but the original was long gone.

  Martinez and Shirdon had spent an entire afternoon at the Social Services building while a clearly exasperated clerk combed through the wreckage of paperwork masquerading as a case file. But the note was nowhere to be found.

  “Can you believe it?” Martinez raged. “Since they hadn’t yet graduated to premeditated murder, they probably weren’t being all that careful yet. That note might have had fingerprints all over it. At the very least we’d have a writing sample. And some half-asleep pension-pusher just tossed all that evidence into the recycling bin.”

  “Hey, give your fellow over-worked, under-paid civil servants a break,” Shirdon said. “Why should’ve they kept the note anyway? No criminal charges were filed, and social services have even less of a budget than we do.”

  “Yeah, same old story—pay to punish crime, not prevent it. But you know how irritating it is when someone insists on talking sense when you’re trying to rant?”

  In her statement to the police, the birth mother had admitted to leaving the baby in a dumpster behind a laundromat on 6th Street. Thanks to the detail-oriented cop who had written the original report, they knew that the note left with the baby had been hand-written on a ten-by-eight-inch piece of lined paper torn from a spiral notebook.

  “Just like the kind kids carry around in school,” Shirdon said. “And look how many calls come in about kids messing around behind stores and digging through dumpsters, especially in summer.”

  “Yeah, but that also describes half the city’s homeless population. Which is also a connection to the second incident. Besides, there’s the whole ‘Seneca’ thing to factor in. I don’t know too many kids who read philosophy for kicks.”

  Shirdon shrugged. “Depends on the kid. And even that part of it feels like something a young person would come up with. The whole ‘Nostri’ thing. ‘Our people’ and all that.”

  Martinez frowned, sensing one of his partner’s diversions coming on. Shirdon was one hell of a good cop. Martinez trusted her instincts as much as his own—even more, in certain cases. But those cases always tended to be what Martinez thought of as the “weirdos”—the ones that didn’t add up quite right, even after they were supposedly “solved.” When it came to those kinds of cases, Shirdon tended to go in even deeper than usual. Too deep, Martinez sometimes thought. Deep enough to go under and drown, if she wasn’t careful.

  “What do you mean, Cass?”

  “Remember being a freshman in college and all of a sudden getting all serious about things like literature and philosophy? And then being so impressed with yourself about it, like you were the first person in the world to discover Nietzsche?”

  Martinez snorted. “I’m still trying to work out that thing about Schrödinger and the cat.”

  “At least you don’t have to worry about whether it’s alive or not.”

  “What?”

  “The cat. Look, my point is that this whole Seneca thing feels like first year philosophy class, when you go crazy for the big ideas, but you don’t have enough real life behind you yet to know what to do with them.”

  When Martinez still didn’t look convinced, Shirdon tried again. “Okay, think about when you were young and you wanted to do something that you knew was stupid or dangerous. It made it a lot more cool, not to mention justifiable later on, to think of it in terms of some big, important idea. It’s not shop-lifting, it’s fighting the corporate system. It’s not flunking out of school, it’s pursuing your own creative path. It’s not chaos, it’s a cause. Think about it—every revolution starts with a combination of high-minded ideals and low-minded acts.”

  “Like trapping a poor cat in a box and calling it philosophy?”

  “Monte, don’t worry. There is no cat.” Shirdon reached into her bag and pulled out a thin red book. “I’ve been doing a little summer reading myself lately.” She held up the cover for Martinez to see. “‘Anger, Mercy, Revenge,’ by Lucius Annaeus Seneca. With over fifty pages of scholarly notes included for your reading pleasure.”

  “Listen, Cass, it might not have worked out with you and my poor broken-hearted cousin, but you’ve got to start getting out more.” Martinez went over and put his arm a
longside hers. It was as pale and thin as his was dark and beefy. “Look at that. Your arms look like two sticks of chalk.”

  Shirdon pointed to the mass of frizzy curls that carried on a riotous life of their own on top of her head. “You see that? Redheads don’t go in the sun. We perish in the sun. We’re like vampires, only without any of the benefits. Besides, there’s actually some good stuff in here.” She flipped open the book to one of the many marked pages. “Listen to this. It says here that Seneca believed that ‘clemency exercises freedom of judgment—it makes its determination not according to a set formula but according to what is fair and good.’ That’s a far cry from our current system of mandatory sentencing laws and zero-tolerance policies that expel kids from school for having a butter knife in their lunch box.”

  Martinez gave another snort. “Too much of a good thing is still too much, even so-called ‘freedom of judgment.’” Do you know that at the dinner table the other day, my son starts debating with Jen about what’s for dinner, talking about ‘everyone should have an equal say’ and how we’re not ‘valuing his input.’ Can you believe it? His input! The kid’s eleven-freakin’-years-old! He doesn’t have any ‘input’! Turns out at his school, though, everyone has input. Everyone gets a say, everyone gets things hand-tailored to his or her own special needs. You know they don’t even call teachers ‘teacher’ anymore. It’s ‘facilitator.’ Facilitator, my ass! Sit down, shut up, and do your work. That’s my form of facilitation.”

  He sounded so much like her own father that Shirdon couldn’t help laughing. “And I’m sure you just loved that approach when you were in school!”

  “But that’s just the point! Kids aren’t supposed to love school! Your teachers and your parents aren’t supposed to be freakin’ ‘facilitators!’ Kids these days are so damn facilitated it’s going to be one hell of a dark day when they grow up and actually have to start facilitating someone else for a change.”