by Edward Lee
But he couldn't.
"Go home, Martin," Jane ordered. "I'll let you know when your hearing will be. But you'd make things a lot easier for yourself if you just quit and move on."
Martin couldn't speak. He just kept shaking.
"And I sincerely hope it wasn't you who was peeping in my window last night."
Martin's mouth opened, then closed.
Jane went back upstairs.
"You're a failure, Martin," Sarah said in the silence. "That was your last chance. Why didn't you do it?"
"You should've grabbed her, you shouldn't have let her leave!" Martin babbled.
"Always an excuse, like your entire life."
Martin was getting damn tired of hearing women talk to him like he was a loser. Damn tired.
He pulled out the knife.
"You don't have the nerve."
"Don't I?" he challenged.
"The Messenger has abandoned you. You're not worthy of his grace. You're waste of his time."
Martin lunged with the blade. Sarah swatted it out of his hand and slapped him in the face.
"You're a disgrace."
Next, Martin was grabbed by the hair and dragged across the basement floor. He was crying like a baby. Eventually she dropped him by the wall, in front of what appeared to be an old service crawlway or storage area.
"Look in there, Martin..." Sarah's voice scarcely sounded human anymore. Something was tainting her features, something atrocious. Her slender fingers looked twice as long as they should be, with long nail-like talons. Her eyes were huge and black.
She pointed to the opening of the crawlway.
When Martin looked in, he screamed so hard his heart stopped. Something in the crawlway-something with long, pale arms-grabbed him by the head and pulled him in.
Chapter Thirteen
I
What a day, Jane thought, frustrated at her desk. And what a night.
The latter proved much more pleasurable a thought than the former. All of a sudden it seemed that she had a boyfriend, or a lover-or something. Maybe to him it was just a one-night stand. That was the way of the world these days, especially in Florida. Everything was a fling. Everything was just about having a good time for the moment. Jane hoped that wasn't the case here, but she knew she was very vulnerable right now. Last night, their lovemaking had been so good, she felt guilty. She felt like she'd somehow cheated on Matt even in death. It had been the best sex of her life.
Don't get your hopes up, she told herself. Don't be naive. It would be easy to be naive in this situation.
She hadn't been with another man since the night of Matt's murder. She'd thought about it sometimes, and she thought about what it might be like to date somebody-but the idea always wilted. She wasn't interested. It just seemed too strange and stressful.
But she couldn't turn off last night's memory. Steve had made love to her three times. It was different each time, which made the experience even more exciting. It was almost as if he knew her: He knew exactly how to tend her desires, he knew exactly how she liked to be touched, he knew exactly how she wanted to be taken.
It had been frenetic but gentle, passionate but aggressive. She knew that she shouldn't feel guilty, and she knew that Matt wouldn't want her to. If anything, the sex had been too good.
After the second time, Steve had rolled over, exhausted, his arm around her. The memory was so vivid.
"I feel like lighting a cigarette, but I don't smoke anymore," he said, laughing at the cliché.
"Neither do I. We're both better off for it."
"I know. I don't want to have cigarette breath. Then you wouldn't want to kiss me."
"I'll always want to kiss you," she whispered, but then bit her lip. It was too soon to come on strong, or to take this for granted.
"That was great," he said, still breathing rather hard.
"Tell me about it. That was my first time in...well, I won't tell you how long."
"Same here."
Jane cuddled up right next to him. She felt too good now, better than she had in so long. Contentment and joy and the sweetest exhaustion all wrapped up around her. She could feel his heart beating through her chest as they lay there, pressed to one another, arms draped and legs entangled. Then she tightened her embrace as if to retain something... and she knew what it was.
The feeling.
The feeling in her heart and soul. It was as if she were hanging on to it, a desperate clasp to prevent that sensation from slipping out of her arms, escaping her. She'd do anything to keep from losing that, but then, a moment later, she knew that she would. Other things began to surface in her mind. No, no, just drop it. Don't even mention it. You might ruin it all.
But it wouldn't stop hounding her.
Her eyes were wide in the dark when she said, "There's still a whole lot you're not telling me, isn't there? You keep too much to yourself."
"I know."
Just drop it! But she couldn't. Her curiosity was a curse. "Like this business with the bell-shaped symbol, and the stuff you were saying earlier about cults."
"I know."
"And now that guy on the TV show, the bearded man. You should've seen the look on your face when that came on. Steve, you acted like he meant something to you, some bad memory or something. Your reaction was like you knew him."
"It is a bad memory, a really bad memory. I don't really know him. But I sure as hell know who he is."
"Who? What is he to you?"
Steve didn't answer. Suddenly the darkness seemed smothering, the silence in the bedroom clawing at them.
"Whatever this is all about," Jane said, "it's easy to see how much it's bothering you. I can tell. It's eating you up. Why?"
"It's a really bad subject, Jane."
"The recent murders? I know that's a bad subject. The whole town's still in shock. Everything seems different; it doesn't even feel like Danelleton anymore."
"It's not just that," he said, his voice so low it was nearly inaudible. "Are you sure you want to know?"
"Yes."
"All right. I'll tell you."
He told the strangest story, strange in that it seemed very familiar but it was a different time. "It was just about twenty years ago. There was a disturbance call at a house in the neighborhood, just a few blocks away as a matter of fact. A nice house, new paint, nice yard, a house like most of the houses around here-a house just like yours. It was a ten-twenty-two that came over the radio-it means unknown trouble. You always have to be careful on those because you have no idea what to expect. Could be a cat in a tree or it could be some guy gone nuts holding his wife and kids hostage with a shotgun. You just never know, so you're really on your toes. You've got the snap off your holster so you can draw faster, just in case. The weirdest part was feeling like that in a town like this. A peaceful, quiet little town. Well, it wasn't peaceful and quiet that day. A bunch of us pulled up at the same time, we were all getting out at once, rushing up to the house.
Danelleton was a lot smaller back then. It was the kind of place where your biggest crimes were kids toilet papering the school on Halloween, an occasional drunk driver, nickel-dime stuff like that. But when the ten-twenty-two came through, we all just got a really bad feeling in our guts. Anyway, we surrounded the house, and it was me and my partner who got the order to take the front door. We kicked it open and..."
Jane knew that what was about to be described would be traumatic. She even thought of telling him to stop, to forget it, because it was obviously tearing him up, but she couldn't. She couldn't let go of it. She just squeezed him tighter and said, "Tell me."
"For some reason, everything turned silent. I don't know why that is, but ask any cop. When you walk into a crime scene like that, it's like you're wearing earmuffs. You're so focused on what's suddenly in your face that you don't have any outside attention."
"What... was in the house?" Jane asked.
"Are you sure you want to know?" he repeated.
"Yes."
Now his voice shifted down even more, to a grating monotone. "Blood," he said. "There was blood all over the place. It was the first thing we saw when we kicked open the door. In the foyer at the bottom of the stairs. It looked like a half-inch of blood on the floor. And then the body, a woman. She was lying on her back, on the stairs, her feet pointing upstairs so all the blood would drain out of her neck into the foyer."
"Out of her..." Jane winced as she tried to picture the scene. But she didn't get it. "You mean somebody cut her throat."
"I mean somebody decapitated her. They arranged the body like that so it'd be the first thing we saw when we went in: a headless body...and all that blood."
Jane's curiosity just grew more morbid against her will. She didn't want to know but she had to know. "Where was the..."
"In the kitchen. It was sitting upright on the counter, right next to the phone-again, on purpose. He'd left it there like that deliberately. It looked like the head was looking at us, like it was waiting for us." Steve sighed, an anxious frustration. "Some kind of facial rigor had set in, I guess. The eyes were open. She was smiling at us."
"Good Lord," Jane whispered.
"And then the rest."
"There's more?" she asked, alarmed.
"Jane, that was just the beginning of the day. That was just the first house."
"What?"
"It was impossible, it was insane. What we walked into that day, each house after that? It was like nothing we could ever imagine. We found two other bodies there, two kids. Butchered. Just like what?"
"Marlene Troy did," Jane finished. "I can't believe this. An identical crime, but twenty years ago?"
"Yeah-well, sort of. See, the wife didn't do it. She was a victim just like the kids. Somebody else did it. They did it and left. When they left, they went to the next house, then they killed everybody there and went to the next house. Then the next house and the next house. Like that."
Jane gasped.
"That was the real nightmare. When me and my partner walked out of that first house, everything went crazy. Cops from every department within ten miles were responding because we simply didn't have enough units. City cops, Clearwater, Largo, county sheriff's department were all tearing down the road. Me and my partner were standing on the lawn of the first house and we looked up the street. All those other units, all those other cops, were pulling up in front of every house on the street."
"What happened next?"
"We were both half in shock, I guess. We just turned into robots and went to assist. One house after another, every house on the street, and every occupant of each house butchered in place. By the time we got to the last house on the street, we'd counted over twenty dead bodies, most of them like the woman in the first house. Turns out that the killer had actually started at the other end of the street. First victim was like most of the others, a housewife. It was her kid who found her body and called the police. He told us who the killer was."
"Who!" Jane blurted.
"It wasn't hard tracking him down. It was a postal employee walking a delivery route, only he didn't deliver anything-he just killed everybody. He just went from one house to the next-no one survived except for the kid. He's the only one who saw him. This guy took out an entire street. And then..."
Jane squeezed his hand.
"We tracked the guy back to the main post office, but... too late. When the guy finished killing everyone on his mail route, he went straight back to the post office and murdered every one there too. Just like what Marlene did, only worse. This guy used a meat cleaver, hacked them all up into pieces."
He paused for a few moments. The darkness seemed to tick around them, with their hearts.
"He wasn't quite finished by the time we arrived. My partner went back to the car to call for backup. I was standing in front, near the clerk stations, and that's when I heard someone in back scream, so I drew my gun and ran. There were bodies lying everywhere, all down the halls, all around in the sorting and handling areas and the loading dock. Chopped down. Hacked up. Couple times I slipped and fell-all the blood on the floor. By then, though, the screaming had stopped. I could tell it had been a woman, and then I saw one. Another employee. She was convulsing on the floor; the guy'd just hacked her head half off in one swipe with the cleaver. It was my first look at him-the first time I'd ever seen a murderer, for that matter. Normal looking guy, mid-thirties, I guess, normal build. But when I looked in his eyes, he wasn't normal anymore. It was something worse than insanity looking back at me. That's when I put my sight on him. What you have to understand is that I was so focused, plus in shock, so I wasn't noticing details at first. The guy's shirt was open and there was blood all over him. Hell, I thought it was the blood from all the people he'd killed, but it wasn't. It was his blood. The bay door was open and he was standing at the edge of the dock, and then I noticed something else. There was something around his neck. A rope, I figured. It went from his neck to the overhead rail of the bay door. I yelled at him to put his hands up or I'd shoot, something like that. And you know what he did?"
"What?" Jane asked, but she thought she already knew.
"He just grinned at me. For a second his face didn't even look human. It looked all ridged. His head looked warped. His eyes looked as big as cue balls. Then he said, 'Behold the Messenger. The arrival of the Messenger is at hand.' Then he jumped off the edge of the loading dock and hanged himself."
"My God."
"And it wasn't rope he'd done it with. He'd cut his own belly open, Jane. He cut out a length of his own intestines... and that's what he used to hang himself with."
Jane lay rigid, trembling. "That's impossible. It's just like Carlton."
"Yeah, just like Carlton. But even that's not all. You asked about that symbol, the bell-shaped design we found written in blood at Marlene's house and at the girls' school. Well, we found it here too. Everywhere. The killer had written on the walls, on the delivery trucks, even on some of the bodies."
"The same symbol," Jane repeated. "Twenty years ago."
"Exactly."
They lay silent for a while. Jane hoped he'd fall asleep, and she tried to herself, but his recital of those events left her wide awake in distress. How must it have been for him? To see all that, all in one day? "My God, Steve. That long ago? You couldn't have been much more than a kid back then."
"I was a greenhorn, a total rookie. I'd just got out of the academy at the beginning of that summer. I'd been on the force all of two months when this happened."
"And all those people-murdered for no reason."
"Murdered by a postal worker, Jane. Like Marlene, like Carlton. Same MO, same details and implications, but it was all two decades ago."
Jane looked for some way to dismiss it as coincidence, but that was impossible. "I guess there's no denying it. There's a direct connection between what Marlene and Carlton did this week, to what this guy did twenty years ago. There's no way that that's not the case."
"I agree. Marlene and Carlton worked for the post office, and so did this guy. The bell symbol was found on the crime scenes this week and the crime scenes twenty years ago. Christ, the guy committed suicide the exact same way Carlton did, and Carlton didn't even live here twenty years ago. I checked his records. He lived in North Carolina, for God's sake, so how could he have known about the guy killing himself that way so long ago?"
Jane had no response.
"And to top it all off, Carlton, Marlene, and the killer back then even worked at the same post office."
Jane's train of thought stopped. "Wait a minute. I thought you said this guy from twenty years ago worked at the main post office. Carlton and Marlene worked at my post office, the west branch, which is brand-new."
Steve paused, looking at her in the dark. "That's where you're wrong, Jane. The PO you just opened last week? It's the same post office from twenty years ago. The same building."
"But...I don't understand."
"Jane, twenty years ago, Danelle
ton was a lot smaller, it was a blossoming little suburban community. The town council members put a lid on those murders as fast as they could, and the first thing they did was close the post office, shut it down for good. They couldn't afford the notoriety. A mass murder like that? Not the kind of thing that's gonna do wonders for real estate values. So they built a new post office, what's now the main branch on the other side of town. Time went by and-believe it or not-everyone forgot about it. Most of the people who lived here then aren't even here anymore. No one on the town council is the same. None of the postal workers are the same. Hell, there aren't even any Danelle ton cops who were here back then. I'm the only one. About the only good thing about those murders is how fast people forgot."
Jane could see what he was driving at. "But now Danelleton has grown so large that one post office wasn't enough to handle the influx of new residents."
"Right. Now the town needed an auxiliary post office to handle the extra mail load. They talked about building a second office but they figured why bother? We still got the old place sitting there. It's been closed for twenty years, and no one remembers. So instead of spending a ton of money building a new place, they refurbished the old place."
"My post office," Jane muttered.
"Yep. The west branch that you're running is the same place where the murderer worked twenty years ago. And the same week the place gets reopened, two of your employees go out and do the same thing. This has been gnawing at me since the thing with Marlene. I'm the only one who knows, the only one who remembers. I just kept thinking, it's impossible. No coincidence like that could ever happen. The chances aren't even one in a million, they're one in a billion."
"You're right. It is impossible. It's uncanny."
"And that damned symbol is the link," Steve went on. "I'm not sure how, but it's got to be. All that stuff I was saying before, about satanic cults-the stuff you didn't believe. It's got to be true. That's the only way that the connection can exist."
Jane tried to think of a way to deny it. She tried to find a hole in the logic. But couldn't.
