Devils in Dark Houses

by B. E. Scully

  On their first day on the job together, Falten told Mickelson that his all-time hero was Theodore Roosevelt, that iconic U.S. president as famous for his flamboyant, larger than life personality as for his progressive politics. In addition to his service weapon, Falten carried a pistol with a gold-plated handle inscribed with the words “Rough Rider,” a tribute to the volunteer Calvary regiment of roughnecks, adventurers, and cowboys that Roosevelt led in the Battle of San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War of 1898.

  But it was Roosevelt’s iron will and even more iron ability to act on that will that Falten most admired. Mickelson had heard one of Falten’s favorite Roosevelt quotes so many times over the years that he could still recite it in his sleep—“Knowing what’s right doesn’t mean much unless you do what’s right.”

  Falten even had his own Roosevelt inspired original: “It’s better to fail in the pursuit of greatness than succeed in the safety of mediocrity.”

  To say that being partnered with Falten was an intimidating assignment was an understatement. Even though he was only two years older than Mickelson, Falten had risen through the ranks of the department like a meteor. When Mickelson came on the job, Falten had just finished heading up a multiagency task force that nabbed a serial killer who had been preying on the city’s homeless population for years. One of his first investigations as a homicide cop had been solving a rape and murder case that had mystified his predecessors for over ten years. His record boasted more arrests and closed cases than any other officer in homicide, and he had a drawer full of commendations, medals, and awards to prove it. Legend had it that he’d once shot a pistol right out of a suspect’s hand.

  It was a guarantee that Falten would be in charge of homicide before he turned fifty, with Chief of Police not far behind. Powerful people made no secret of the fact that they wanted Falten to enter politics someday. There was no telling how high his star might rise—maybe all the way to the White House, like his hero.

  But none of that had happened. Dan Mickelson, the junior officer who had trailed behind Falten for almost six years like a kid brother trying to keep up, was head of homicide instead. And even though he’d never admit it, the taste of being Chief himself someday had been in his mouth for a long time now. For eleven years, to be exact.

  His calf muscles were going to punish him thoroughly for this tomorrow morning. The steepest part of the trail was just ahead. Mickelson was struggling now to keep control of both himself and the bike. He rounded the last bend in the path before it flattened out into the meadow, and a spatter of mud hit his face. He pumped his legs even harder, gripping the handlebars. He felt surer now, steady, flying over the ditches and stones like a bird.

  The grin should have been a warning sign. Mickelson himself wasn’t much of a smiler, but he didn’t mind people who were. Morris Falten’s smile, though, was more than the usual friendly kind. First of all, it showed up far too frequently, even in situations where no ordinary person would want to be smiled at. Mickelson still remembered sitting in front of his first murder victim’s family, delivering the worst news they’d ever receive. Falten made it all the way to the end, and then right as they were donning their coats and giving their final condolences, damn if Falten didn’t flash that grin, all squared-off horse teeth and glistening pink gums. And that was the second thing—Falten’s smile was downright creepy, primarily because it was always the same. Most people have different smiles for different emotions, but Falten’s was always that same wide-stretched, rigid grin, almost like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  Or a skeleton. No wonder Sean Packard called him the Bone Man.

  Despite the rictus grin and self-aggrandizing manner, the first real sign of trouble didn’t come until almost the end of their first year together. They’d been on the scene of a deadly force shooting where a young rookie cop had pulled over a car for driving without plates and discovered the driver was a wanted felon. According to the cop, when he’d pulled his gun and ordered the man out of the car, the suspect had lunged and made a grab for his weapon. It seemed like a clean kill, but the rookie cop was of course shaken up and scared.

  Mickelson and Falten just happened to be five minutes away when the call came in, and they were the first ones on the scene. Before anyone else arrived, Falten asked for the cop’s gun in order to bag it for evidence. He told the kid to go take a breather, walk around a bit and work it off. Then, without even trying to conceal what he was doing to his partner, Falten took the gun, wrapped the dead man’s hand around the grip, and then bagged it.

  “D.N.A. evidence,” he said. “Can’t argue with that in either the court of law or the court of public opinion. And believe me, one’s just as powerful as the other, if not more, and guess which one that is?”

  After an internal review, no charges were filed against the cop. He’s now a decorated senior officer whose daughter just won a national debate contest.

  It would have been easier if Falten would have been out for money or even eventual political glory. But Falten’s corruption was the worst kind—the righteous kind that’s never wrong and always justified. Mickelson later realized that the incident with the cop’s gun had been a test—if he had said so much as one word against what Falten did, or even questioned it, things might have been different.

  But he hadn’t. Mickelson and Falten’s first big case together involved a small time drug dealer believed to have ordered a hit on a vice cop to keep him from testifying against him in court. After three months, they didn’t have a single lead or piece of solid evidence. But none of that mattered when the drug dealer turned up dead of an overdose from a “bad batch” of heroin. For some reason, he’d taken the time to write a confession of his role in the vice cop’s murder, including the name of the hit man and detailed information about the crime, before taking the lethal dose.

  The hit man and all three of his accomplices were arrested and confessed to the crime. At the press conference, Falten stood next to the chief of police and the mayor, grinning like a madman, the camera lights catching the gleam of his skull beneath its thin cover of pale hair.

  If there were whispers about the fact that Falten worked a little too closely with an informant name Jarred “J.J.” Wroe, who had a nasty drug habit and a willingness to do and say whatever it took to feed it, well, who could complain about four cop killers behind bars? When no other reported deaths turned up from the so-called “bad batch” of heroin, that wasn’t of much concern, either.

  But trouble continued to pop up—accusations of forced confessions; questionable evidence turning up at just the right time in just the right place, even if it had been “missed” by forensics the first time around; the fact that Falten could always be counted on to provide whatever testimony supported the prosecution, even if it contradicted his own original reports. For the first few years, a tight fist of fear formed in Mickelson’s stomach every time he stepped through the station doors. Falten had to get caught eventually; someone had to notice something, make the connections.

  But the only person in the department who saw through Falten’s golden sheen was an old cop named Mickey Klein. Klein had been partnered with Falten for less than a year before Mickelson got the assignment, and the higher Falten rose, the farther Klein seemed to fall. He was an alcoholic who’d had numerous infractions for things like filing reports late or failing to appear when and where he was supposed to. By all accounts he’d been a good, honest cop for most of his career, but then either the years or the booze or both had taken their inevitable toll. Reports of sloppy fieldwork and suspicious dealings with suspects began to crop up.

  One night after too many highballs at the Slammer, Klein had told Mickelson, “Suspects learn to never threaten suicide around Falten, ‘cause he won’t hesitate to help them out.”

  The two men were like a pair of well-trained dogs nonetheless ready to lunge at each other the moment the leashes were off. But a worn-out cop like Mickey Klein was no match for Morris Falten.

  L
ong after most detectives had ditched the traditional suit and tie look for something more casual, Falten came to work every day in a three-piece suit. He knew the names of everyone in the department, from the top dogs all the way down to the janitors who cleaned the building at night. His extraordinary confidence in not only himself, but in everything he did, won people over to his side. After all, who doesn’t want to back a winner?

  And Morris Falten was a winner. The stench of bad evidence and questionable methods that sometimes gathered around him was always blown clear by the bracing breeze of success. In the majority of the cases Falten rigged or manipulated, the suspects proved guilty as hell once all of the evidence came out at trial. But not always. Falten had once harassed a suspect in a brutal child murder for three weeks, sitting outside the guy’s house even on his off-duty hours, showing up to question him at work in front of his clients and colleagues, interrogating the hell out of his panicked wife and bewildered friends.

  The very first time Falten brought the guy in for questioning, he told him, “We’re going to make your life hell. Then when we’re finished, we’re going to make your brother’s life hell, your mother’s life hell, and your daughter’s life hell.”

  And they did. Until the D.N.A. evidence came back implicating an entirely different guy. Mickelson had no doubt that there were people sitting in prison right now primarily because Morris Falten had decided they were guilty before they’d even been charged. And yet there were plenty more who might have had years of killing ahead of them if Morris Falten hadn’t.

  “A good cop always knows when he has his man, even if everyone else is saying different,” Falten once told him. “It’s a combination of instinct, hard work, and the most important part of all, the will to act on what you know. And that’s what our job is all about.”

  It made it easier that in most ways, Falten was a smart, decent guy. He never forgot a slain officer’s family, and had started a successful charity fund to pay for their kids’ tuition to college or trade schools. Mickelson had seen him chase an entire gang of teenagers down the street after he’d come across them harassing an autistic classmate in a city park. He’d once knocked a cop straight off his stool at the Slammer after the guy made a racist joke about another cop. Falten was the first person to mess with Mickelson’s long held belief that most people were either fundamentally good or bad. Morris Falten had shown him up close and personal that it’s entirely possible to be both.

  It also made it easier that Falten never directly involved Mickelson in his dirty work. All he required was silence and complicity—the two easiest, and therefore most dangerous, requirements to meet.

  It might have gone on until Falten rose all the way to the top, or he might have eventually slipped up and ended his career in disgrace, or even prison. But neither scenario had the chance to play out either way. One day Mickey Klein turned up dead in an alleyway, shot to death by none other than Jarred “J.J.” Wroe, Falten’s favorite informant. If that coincidence didn’t catch anyone’s attention, the fact that Wroe was then shot dead in the same alleyway by an unknown suspect without a speck of evidence might have. But then Falten went missing, and whatever connection there might have been between Klein and Wroe’s mysterious deaths and Falten’s even more mysterious disappearance went with him.

  The sucker hole was still overhead. Mickelson breezed past the murdered boy’s memorial and shot out of the park and into the tree-lined streets and tidy houses of the neighborhood bordering the park. He rode a few more blocks and stopped in front of the Falten household. The curtains in the front windows were open, but the house seemed empty, silent and still. Of course, it had seemed that way for eleven years, ever since the head of the household had gone out for a bike ride and never returned.

  Mickelson stared at the yellow house, willing the door to open. If either Falten’s widow or his son came out the door, Mickelson would go talk to either of them. But the door stayed as closed and silent as the rest of the house.

  If Mickelson lived for his work, then Morris Falten was his work, which is why everyone was surprised when he turned up one day with a wedding band on his finger. Everyone knew Falten would marry someday—“A big, happy family is man’s greatest reward,” he’d often say—not to mention a boost to any future political career. But it was his choice of spouse that really set the department whispering—eighteen years younger than him and as shy and silent as he was boisterous and bold, Jackie “Jax” Falten seemed as unlikely a future president’s wife as anyone could imagine.

  She’d come from a hard-scrabble background on a ranch in the high desert country of eastern Oregon, and met Morris Falten when he was investigating a shooting death that had occurred at the restaurant where she worked. They’d married less than two months later. Despite Falten’s desire for a large family, their first and only child was born six months after the wedding, a boy they named Theodore and called Teddy, just like Falten’s idol.

  Teddy had been only five years old when his father disappeared. Even after Falten was officially declared dead, Jackie never remarried. For years afterward, Mickelson came by the house every weekend to toss a ball around with Teddy or talk over how things were going at school—little things, but better than nothing. He’d helped out with money, too, until Jackie got on her feet with the well-paid job at City Hall that Mickelson had made sure she’d get. But he knew Jackie didn’t really want him around—didn’t want any reminders of her husband except the carefully constructed memories represented by the photos and awards that filled an entire shelf in the living room. Eventually, the weekend visits dwindled to once a month, then once every few months, then eventually less than that. As Teddy got older and his time was increasingly taken up by girls and after-school jobs and all those other sixteen-year-old boy pursuits, the visits stopped altogether. Mickelson realized with a start that he hadn’t spoken to either Teddy or Jackie in over four years.

  Something at the window caught his eye. One of the curtains in what Mickelson remembered as the kitchen fluttered open and then fell closed just as suddenly. He thought he saw a shadow behind the curtain—a woman looking out at him, looking in at her—but then the sky darkened, and the shadow was gone.

  For six years, Mickelson had told himself that if Morris Falten sometimes bent the law, he never did it for profit or self-protection, like a lot of dirty cops. As long as Falten never crossed some vague, increasingly flexible line, Mickelson kept going along. And why lie to himself now? He’d wanted to justify it, wanted to be a part of Falten’s dazzling meteor shower. He’d stood beside Detective Morris Falten as they’d put one murderer after another behind bars, and probably would have kept standing there until Falten moved up and on.

  But then Morris Falten had become a murderer himself.

  Dan Mickelson got on his bike and rode fast, as fast as his aching legs would take him, through the puddle-pocked streets of Morris and Jackie Falten’s neighborhood. But he’d waited too late. The sucker hole closed, and the rain came sheeting down.

  2

  In the dream, the Hound was back in the alleyway. It had been a bad winter—the snow not only came but stayed, and not even the rain could make it go. Too cold for the lumberyard or the forest, where in summer the Hound could tuck among the ferns and moss and sleep just like a king. No, that winter the Hound needed shelter—real shelter, the brick and concrete, steel sides of dumpsters kind. That’s where he’d been when they came—tucked behind a green dumpster, green like the moss and the ferns, only steel. Hard steel. Two voices, one skittery, whispery, like sand across cement, the other clear and almost bubbly—a bubbly brook. But right away the Hound didn’t trust the brook voice.

  “One of the first ways to tell a Great White Alien,” he mumbled in his sleep. “Fake voices. Trying too hard to sound human.”

  The bus Carrie Bradley had shown him outside the clinic had taken the Hound all the way out to the lumberyard. He’d dug up the metal box with the pistol in it and fallen straight to sleep.
He never had slept well inside.

  Dream-Hound, though, was in the alleyway watching the two men standing less than ten feet away from him. They were opposites, these two. One of them was tall and skinny and the other was short and thick. The skinny one was as thin and pale as a walking set of bones—the Bone Man. He was all dressed up in a suit, like he was going to a fancy restaurant. The short one was dressed casually, in jeans and the kind of heavy wool coat a fisherman might wear. The Hound could see tendrils of swirling black ink creeping up the collar of the short man’s coat. He pictured the ink writhing all the way around the man’s torso and limbs.

  “Like ivy,” the Hound whispered. “Ivy Man.”

  He stuffed one dirty-gloved hand into his mouth to keep from talking out loud. The men didn’t know he was there, and the Hound would have liked to run away. But the alleyway was a dead-end, and he’d never make it all the way to the street.

  Ivy Man was agitated about something. “Look, Klein’s got it over on me this time, Falten. He’s been gunning for you for years, which means he’s been gunning for me, too. And now that freakin’ meth head cousin of mine had to get me wrapped up in a murder that Klein just so happens to have dried out enough to actually solve. I need a way out of this one, man, and either you give it to me, or Klein gives it to me. But I’m not going away for thirty freakin’ years for something I didn’t even do. No way.”

  The Bone Man was as calm and collected as his friend was not. In fact, he was smiling, but it wasn’t the good, friendly kind of smile. It was a skeleton’s smile. An alien’s smile.

  “Disguise smile,” the Hound whispered into his glove.

  “Keep hold of yourself, J.J.,” Bone Man said. “How many years have we known each other now? Seven years, it must be. And have I ever let you down?”

  “No, but—”

  “No ‘buts’ about it. You take care of me, I take care of you. That’s how a man’s word works.”