“I saw him heading this way,” she said. “Lost him in the dark.”
“What's going on?” Old Knockle. The reserve was coming around the far side of the house, shining his flashlight into the backyard. Right on us.
“Turn off your light!” It snapped off. “Stay there, and make sure nobody circles around to the front of the house,” I yelled to him. “Play your light out toward the trees.”
He did. Nothing, of course. No movement. No sound.
“Borman might be hurt,” said Hester.
She was right. And he had a walkie-talkie. We were going to need reinforcements before we started to go after anybody in those woods. This was definitely not Toby or his ilk.
She and I both went cautiously back toward Borman, keeping in shadow as much as possible.
“It's us,” I said. “Don't shoot.” You can't be too careful.
“Right,” he said. “Right.”
When we got back to him, I could see he had a scrape on his cheekbone, his shirt was torn near the right shoulder, and there was an enormous slash right across his chest, through his shirt, and slitting the underlying Kevlar bullet-proof vest.
“Holy shit,” I said. “He had a knife?”
Borman looked down at his chest. “Yeah, he did, I think. It was so fast.”
“You sure you're all right?” I asked.
He nodded. “I looked. No cut or anything.” He patted his ruined vest. “Close, though.”
“No shit,” I said, impressed by the damage.
“What happened?” asked Hester as I gently reached over and pulled Borman's walkie-talkie from his belt.
“Hell,” said Borman, “I was just standing at that door, and I heard a commotion that sounded like it came from upstairs, and then the door busted open and hit me in the face and knocked me against the back door, and then this asshole came through and”-he gasped for breath-“I thought he just shoved me in the chest, you know, and then”-another breath-“I could see it was a fuckin' knife, and he was heading past me and to the yard.”
“That's when you shot?” asked Hester.
“Yeah,” said Borman. “Yeah.”
As I made sure the walkie-talkie was on the right channel, I asked, “Think you might have hit him?”
He just shook his head.
I pressed the transmit button on the walkie. “Comm, Three. Ten-thirty-three.”
You announce an emergency, right out of the blue, you get some pretty good attention.
“Three?”
“Ten-thirty-three, Comm. Up at the search location.
Armed suspect, officer slightly injured, suspect fled the scene on foot. Get us as much backup as you can ffnd.”
“Ten-four, Three. Comm, all Nation County cars, we have-” I turned the volume down so I could talk to Borman for a second.
“So, you don't think you hit him?”
“I'm positive,” he said.
“Got a description?” asked Hester.
“Dark gray shirt,” he said. “Dark pants. I think. Yeah, maybe black or dark blue. Kinda tall, maybe dark hair.”
“Happens really fast, doesn't it?” said Hester.
“Damn,” I said, mostly to myself. “Sure you might not have hit him? Make ffndin' him a lot easier.”
“I couldn't have,” said Borman. “I shot up in the air.”
Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. “Up in the air? Like, you… you fired warning shots? ”
“Yeah.”
“He slashed your chest with a knife, and you shot up in the air?” Hester gave me a “shut up he's got enough trouble right now” look. I ignored it. “He tried to do you, and you fired warning shots?”
Borman looked like he could crawl in a hole, but defended himself. “He didn't kill me… ”
“Of course not, you idiot,” I said evenly. “If he'd killed you, I wouldn't expect you to fucking shoot at all!”
“Carl,” said Hester. “Cool it for a minute.”
“Yeah. Jesus H. Christ.” I looked at Borman. “He was running away from you, then?”
“I dunno,” said Borman, embarrassed. “No, I guess not. Not right then. He was kind of in front of me, but he was starting to move, I think. I think he might have been surprised to find me at the bottom of the stair. And I think he thought he got me, you know? I just… I got my gun out real fast. I, well, I'm not comfortable with taking human life without good reason.”
I just didn't understand. “Well, somebody around here sure as hell isn't worried about it! He may have tried to get you with the same fuckin' knife he used on her! You listening to me?”
“Houseman,” said Hester, “just lay off for a minute.”
“Yeah.” Thoroughly disgusted, I put the walkietalkie in front of my face, and called Dispatch again. “Three, go ahead.” “Yeah, Comm, have a couple of cars search the base of this bluff, down by the highway. We're looking for a white male, tall, gray shirt, black or blue pants, dark hair. Armed with a knife. Use caution.”
“Ten-four, Three.”
“And get hold of One, and tell him we need at least four or five more officers up here on the top of the hill, to search going down. Then get Freiberg PD stopped before he gets here, and have him go back and look up Kevin Stemmer.” I paused. “Just check location for now, and if he can't find him, let us know right away.”
“Ten-four, Three. Ten-fifty-two has been dispatched.” An ambulance. A good idea, as I thought Borman should be checked out. Mostly, I thought, for a suspected injury to his common sense. But it was really a very good idea.
“Ten-four.” I put the walkie-talkie down, and talked directly to Hester. “I want that Stemmer dude located, mainly to make sure it isn't him.”
“I don't think it is,” said Borman.
I took a deep breath. “Okay. That'll help. Look, we'll go over our deadly force procedures later. You did okay.” I don't think I was too convincing. “You get checked out, make sure you're all right. Then, if you can, I want you to sit down and describe every detail of this guy you can remember. Everything. Take your time, and don't rush. You got all night.”
“Right.”
“Let's get you back inside,” said Hester, and sort of gently pushed Borman back up the stairs and into the kitchen. “Where you can sit down.”
As Borman entered the house, Hester turned to me. “Our man Peel?”
I nodded. “I think it sure as hell could be. Alive and well, unfortunately. Well, we're just gonna have to work a little harder to find out, I guess.”
She smiled. “See? You can adjust, after all.”
“Hmmm.”
Lamar pulled out all the stops with the assistance. He'd contacted state patrol, as well as the boys across the river in Conception County, Wisconsin. Adjoining counties in Iowa, too, judging from the sudden surge in radio traffic. It began to appear very unlikely that Peel, or whoever it was, was going to be able to get off the bluff. Within minutes, we had two squad cars sitting at the base of the bluff face, right at the only possible path down from the house. We had officers in the woods shortly after that, accompanied by the Conception County K-9 unit. Their black Labrador appeared to pick up a trail right at the back door of the Mansion, and pulled his trainer toward the woods in hot pursuit, then seemed to pause about ten yards from the back door, and started “casting about,” as they say. Looked like he was earning his keep to me.
The radio informed me that Lamar was on his way, as well, and that he had two DNR Fish and Game officers putting their boats in up at Freiberg. They'd be on the river in our area within a few minutes.
All in all, it looked like whoever had come thundering out of the third floor was going to be in our custody fairly soon.
Unfortunately, Jessica Hunley and company had fled the house when the shots were ffred. Reasonable, I suppose, and certainly justifiable in court, but we'd lost the threat of a search to hold them in the house.
Hester and I decided to let them take off, with the promise that they'd
be available in the morning for “a few more questions.” We offered to put up Jessica and Tatiana in a local motel for the night.
“I won't hear of it,” said Junkel. “They're more than welcome to stay with us.”
I expressed the gratitude of the taxpayers.
As they left, they met Lamar at the Mansion end of the long drive. He pulled halfway into the trees to let them by, and then came to where Hester and I were standing near the front steps.
“That's a nice car, there,” he said, as he got out of his four-wheel-drive pickup. “Who belongs to that?”
“That'd be Jessica Hunley,” I said. “Owns the house, too.”
“How's Borman?”
Well, I told him. And, since warning shots had been ffred, and since I was the supervising officer at the scene, I told him about that, too.
“You talk to him about that?” he asked.
“Yeah. You could say that.”
“Okay, Carl. No need for me to say anything, then.”
That, it seemed, was to be the end of that.
Lamar decided that, since the small army of officers that were in the woods could handle the search, Hester and I should join the rest of the search team, and get the business in the Mansion conducted and behind us.
“Before hell freezes over,” he said. “Be really nice if you could do that.”
SIXTEEN
Sunday, October 8, 2000
20:12
The longest warranted search of my career resumed on the third floor of the Mansion, duly logged in at 20:12. Participants were recorded as me, Hester, Grothler, and Barnes. Hester, by virtue of already having been there, however briefly, went first.
The third floor was divided into two equal segments. One half was a well-furnished apartment, in a loft style, and furnished with very modern furniture, in complete contrast to the rest of the Victorian-style house.
The only separate area in the apartment half was the bath. The rest, kitchen, living area, and bed were separated by kind of artfully arranged furniture. Hester stood just inside the main door.
“Didn't get much of a look as I came through,” she said. “Nice.” She had her gun in her hand, as did I. We were taking no chances that there was a second suspect who'd decided not to run with the first. “This stuff is just about all IKEA,” she said. “Wow.”
“Oh.” I assumed that was either a brand name or a designer's name. Or, maybe a style? I didn't want to embarrass myself by asking.
Outside, we could hear some officer calling over his PA system. “Peel, we know you're out there! You might as well give up.”
I looked at Hester. “Who gave out the Peel name?”
“Not me.”
“Had to be Borman or Lamar,” I said. It was too late to hold it back now, regardless of who had released it. Considering how Borman's night was going, I hoped for his sake it hadn't been him.
The lighting, which we'd accessed via the main switch panel by the entrance, was muted but very thorough. Track lights, free-standing lamps, lights built in to the kitchen cabinets, all came on with the master switch. Made it really easy to check it all out.
The bed was what I'd describe as “king-size plus,” and was in the far corner. Solid all the way to the floor, with cabinets underneath. Nice, indeed. The most interesting thing about the bed was the tripod with video camera positioned to cover about a three-quarter view of the bed and its sometime occupants. Two halogen lights, on their independent stands, were set to light the area covered by the camera.
There was a huge black and white photo, framed and lit with two special ceiling lights, on the wall above the bed. Being a WWII buff, I thought at first it was a photo of an anti-aircraft emplacement in Normandy. A closer look showed it was a series of sunken concrete entrances, very much like church doors. They were arranged in a circular shape, with a large hub in the center that also had doors, with names chiseled on the lintels. What had made me think of WWII was the abundance of undergrowth. There was a small label in the lower right corner. “Circle of Lebanon.” Interesting.
The kitchen was all built-in stuff, including a dishwasher and a really nice combination microwave and gas stove setup. Nice hood. My dream kitchen.
I looked at Hester. “This is the kind of place I'd kind of hoped to get to when I died.”
“Yeah.”
I noticed the computer, of course. I do that. Nice Dell outfit, with one of the new two-inch-thick monitors… flat panel displays like that ran about $2,500. Nice. An ergonomic keyboard. The whole unit had its own IKEA desk, with matching executive chair. The thing that struck me most about it, though, was that the thing was so uncluttered.
There were some extra boxes attached to the computer. I looked more closely at them, and saw a note entitled “Suggested Replacement for SOHO Server.” I knew just enough to know that SOHO stood for “Small Office/Home Office.” I knew what a server was; it connected several computers, and also connected them to the Internet. The list included things like Emulator, 300 W power supply, motherboard, 2 PIII CPU, 256 MB SDRAM DIMM minimum, floppy drive, DVD-ROM drive, PCI adapter, Ethernet adapter, networking card, keyboard and mouse, two 60 GB HD, and the like. Hmmm.
“Hey, Hester, when you get a minute… ”
She took one look at the note and said, “Apparently they're thinking of upgrading the SOHO server.”
“Yep,” I said. I kept my eyes moving about the place, just in case our Mr. Peel had had a guest.
“And,” she added, “they may not have decided yet, because there are no brand names attached to the descriptors.”
Ah.
“And I hope they're running ME.” She said that mostly to herself, her eyes, too, constantly moving about the vast room.
“Mmm.” Noncommittally, I hoped. I didn't have the faintest idea why she hoped that, and didn't want to seem uninformed enough to have to ask.
“Every bedroom we searched,” she said as she passed me, moving toward the center of the third-floor apartment, “had a computer. None of them even close to this beast. I think the residents bring their own, and then link to the net through this stuff. Nice system.” As she spoke, she darted her hand inside the doorway of the bathroom, and flicked on the light. She stepped in as I covered her. “Nothing,” she said, reappearing a moment later. We continued to move about.
There was a very strange structure dividing the third floor neatly in half. It looked like a small, peaked-roof house, about eight feet high, with sash windows on all four sides. The windows on the long sides were offset, on the near side to accommodate a glazed door, and on the far side to accommodate the corner of the huge main chimney. Inside the structure was a large, flat-topped skylight leading via wooden ducting to the six bedrooms below. Above the structure was the peak of the main roof, with glazed skylights that corresponded to glazed areas in the peaked roof of the little house. There was little, if any, room inside the little place for anything but a narrow foot purchase for somebody who might clean the glass.
“What the hell do you call this?” I asked Hester.
She looked at it for a few seconds. “Thingy, I think,” she said.
“Nobody inside,” I said, looking through the window on my side of the structure. I could see Hester through the glass, on the other side.
“Right.”
On the opposite side of the newly identified “thingy” was a room that ran uninterrupted the full length of the house, about a hundred feet, and was some eighteen feet wide. We entered swiftly, me first this time, and Hester right behind, going left and hitting the light switch. After a moment's flickering, the fluorescent lights came to life.
It was a dance studio with a polished wooden floor, and a multiple-mirrored interior wall. A wooden rail in front of the mirrors, attached with large brass fittings, and large stereo outfit at the near end, with some folding chairs, a bench, and a clock on the wall at the far end. Suspended fluorescent lights in standard gray shades. Austere. I took it in in about two seconds. Nobody there,
nor could there be without being seen immediately.
“She takes her dancing seriously,” said Hester.
The security sweep completed, we holstered our weapons and got to work looking for evidence.
“She's got to pay for those cars somehow,” I said.
Hester shook her head. “Not by dancing.”
We took our time, and did a very thorough search, beginning with photographing both rooms. Then the place was divided up among us, working in teams of two. Grothler and I got the “living area,” which was fine with us. It was all so neat and organized, and so modern in contrast to the rest of the house, there wasn't much of a place to conceal anything. Nooks and crannies were at a premium, thank God. That's why, I guess, I found myself photographing the bookshelf, and then looking behind the books. Well, you could hide things back there.
There were some interesting books, so interesting that I got my zoom lens out of my camera bag, and used it to photograph readable sections of the shelves.
Gray's Anatomy, Chaos by Gleick, and Hawking's A Brief History of Time were books I had at home, and lent a familiar aspect to the shelf. Then, though, there were several volumes that I'd never heard of. First, Treatise on Vampires and Revenants: The Phantom World, apparently translated by one Harry Christmas. I sure didn't have that one at home. Neither did I have Death, Burial, and the Individual in Early Modern England by Clare Gittings, although I have to admit it did look interesting. The Vampire: His Kith and Kin by Montague Summers, struck me as sounding like good reading for a stormy night. Reflections on Dracula and Shade and Shadow by Dr. Elizabeth Miller looked to be the sort of thing I'd pick up for myself. I was beginning to think I'd found the source for Toby's vampire tale.
There was a very nice photo volume entitled High-gate Cemetery, Victorian Valhalla, photographed by John Gay and introduced by Felix Barker. I opened it up, and thumbed through the black and white photos of the famous cemetery in London. As I did, a slip of notepaper fell out. On it was written “Beware David R. Farrant, British Occult Society,” with “Egyptian Avenue amp; the Circle of Lebanon,” written at a slant, and the whole thing had a smiley face under it with the word “Isadora.” On the open page was a smaller version of the huge photo on the wall. I checked in the list of photos in the back of the book, and discovered that the Circle of Lebanon was a wheel of crypts in Highgate Cemetery in London. Strange. I copied the note onto my log sheet, along with the name of the book, and Isadora. Just for future reference.
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