Apocalypse Island

by Hall, Mark Edward

  She saw the handcuffs hanging from the bedpost with the wrist end open and shook her head in amazement. The key lay on the bedside stand. She began looking around the room for something, anything. Clothes were scattered. Wolf wasn’t the neatest person in the world. The place wasn’t filthy but it certainly wasn’t the tidiest place she’d seen. There was an electric guitar and a practice amp in the corner along with a music stand and several notebooks. She picked up one of the notebooks, opened it and began to read. It appeared to be lyrics to a song, which immediately captured her heart with its poignancy. She read the next one and her eyes filled with tears. Its simple beauty made her ache. Wolf had the heart of a poet. His writings were like open wounds in his soul. Feeling self conscious she put the notebook back down, careful to make sure everything looked as it had when she’d entered the room.

  Next she searched the small combination living room and kitchen. Nothing jumped out at her that would prove Wolf a monster. Everything seemed surprisingly normal. There was a small television in the corner, an easy chair with a stand that contained a bottle of booze and an empty glass; a stack of daily newspapers beside the chair; a small bookcase against one wall with volumes of classic fiction, books on music and the music business, a well thumbed dictionary, a bible.

  Laura moved through the small apartment taking in everything with a trained eye. The kitchen counter was cluttered with dirty glasses and a few plates. Silverware lay in a dishpan half full of cold water. The drawers contained nothing unusual. The bathroom was clean. He might not have been the neatest guy in the world, but he wasn’t a complete slob. The medicine cabinet contained nothing out of the ordinary. No heavy drugs or medications. One thing was clear; this wasn’t the home of a demented serial killer.

  Back in the bedroom she opened the closet door. It contained shirts and trousers on hangers, a few jackets. Shoes and sneakers on the floor. Painfully normal stuff. There was no incriminating evidence hidden here.

  She went to the bed and put her hand between the mattress and box spring, feeling around, not sure what she was searching for. Illegal drugs perhaps. What she found surprised her. Cold metal. She gripped it and extracted the nine millimeter. Staring at the weapon she noticed that her hands were shaking. The safety was off. She partially pulled back the bolt and saw a live round in the firing chamber. She let the bolt slide back into position, laid it on the bed and took a snapshot of it. The weapon did not contain a serial number. She put the gun back under the mattress. Christ, what was he doing with an illegal weapon? He was a convicted felon. Possession would land him immediately back in prison. Then it struck her like cold water in the face. He didn’t care. The little bastard was contemplating suicide. No fucking way was she going to allow him to do it. But how the hell was she going to approach him about it without him knowing she’d been in his apartment? Ah well, she guessed he’d know soon enough anyway.

  She moved away from the bed and guiltily went through the drawers of the single bureau, found a stash of money and some keepsakes, a stack of letters held together with a rubber band. Laura carefully removed the rubber band and leafed through them. They were all addressed to Daniel Wolf, 22 Sparrow Street, Portland, Maine. Several had Warren State Prison return addresses and they all appeared to be written in the same hand. One letter was from a Kaleigh Jarvis of Rockport, Maine. It was dated two weeks earlier and there was no doubt that it was written by the same hand as the prison letters. Laura carefully removed the rubber band and opened the envelope.

  How’s it going, Danny boy? The letter began. It’s your friendly prison guard, Kaleigh Jarvis again. I hope everything is going well for you and I doubly hope I’m not bothering you. I just wanted to let you know that I’m planning on being in Portland on Thursday the twenty-eighth and thought I’d stop by the Cavern Club to check out your new band. Read about you guys in one of the local music rags and heard your new single on the radio. I was quite impressed. You haven’t answered any of my other letters so I hope I got the address right. Checked the directory and couldn’t find a phone listed for you. Guess you don’t have one. And I suppose you’re not yet in the computer age. No Facebook for Danny boy. Got this address from old man Starkey. God, that man is a total asshole. Hope you don’t mind me getting in touch with you. I’ll be there on Thursday the twenty-eighth so hope to see you then. Can’t wait to hear the band.

  I really miss you, Danny.

  Best,

  Kaleigh

  P.S.

  Heard something interesting about your shrink Hardwick, the other day. It seems he no longer has a relationship with the prison. Too many inmates claim he was fucking with their heads. Anyway, just thought you might like to know that. Hope to see you on the twenty-eighth.

  Laura felt a sharp stab of jealousy at the prospect of a female prison guard, someone who’d obviously taken a liking to Wolf, maybe someone who’d had a relationship with Wolf, coming to see him perform. What was it about the little bastard that made women wet? His sad, beautiful eyes? His complex mind? She thought of a phrase from a Sarah McLachlan song, “Beautiful fucked up man,” and it made her ache inside.

  But Thursday the twenty-eighth had come and gone. Actually it had been last night. Laura had been at the club and she’d watched Danny all night long and hadn’t seen him speaking to another woman. Actually he’d been distant and edgy, and if she herself hadn’t bullied him into it he wouldn’t have talked to her. She wondered if Kaleigh Jarvis had actually shown up. Wolf hadn’t mentioned anything about it. But why would he have? She’d only known him less than a day and she was already acting like a jealous bitch. She knew nothing about him or his life. Christ, what a sap. Laura folded the letter back up and put it in the envelope, meaning to look at some of the other letters. But a sound at the front door made her pulse quicken. She looked at her watch and realized that she’d lost track of the time. She’d been here for more than half an hour. Another sound, metal on metal, like a key in a lock, moved her into action. The apartment had been strangely silent and these noises in amongst the silence were almost deafening. She quickly replaced the elastic band and put the stack of letters back where she’d found them, closed the drawer and moved stealthily toward the window. She put one leg through and shifted her body out onto the landing. From within she heard the clatter of the lock and the squeak of old hinges, wondering if the noises were actually coming from Wolf’s front door or a neighboring apartment. No matter, she couldn’t be seen here. She closed the window as silently as possible and moved quickly down the fire escape.

  As she was exiting the alley, the killer moved out from behind the dumpster and followed her.

  Chapter 67

  Within an hour of Laura leaving Jennings’s office a patrol located the building Wolf had claimed to see in his dream. They were ordered to stand down and wait for backup. Twenty minutes later Jennings arrived at the site. Several patrols were already in place, waiting at a distance.

  He instructed four of the officers to approach the building from the back, two from the left flank, while he and Patrolman Myers took the right flank, taking care to use the cover of the woods at the edge of the open field. They approached the building, weapons drawn. October had been brutal and the forest was bare, overcast low, the color of gunmetal, and everything had a bleakness to it, as though the world was being shot through a black & white camera lens. Fucking depressing, Jennings thought as he pulled his trench coat around him and shivered. He could see that the house was uninhabitable. Most of the front section was missing and the interior was strewn with rubble. He carefully stepped over the rubble and made his way toward the interior of the building. Myers followed. The other six officers had been strategically placed around the outside of the building.

  Immediately Jennings knew something was wrong. He didn’t know how he knew it, he just did. His skin began to crawl.

  “Over here,” he whispered. He’d located the staircase that led to the basement. Weapons drawn, he and Patrolman Myers made their way down t
he creaking stairs. At the bottom they located a door in the floor, pulled it up and saw the ladder leading down into darkness. Although the air outside was cold, warm air, mixed with the stench of old dirt, came rushing up out of the bowels of the earth like a tide, dizzying in its intensity. And there was something else beneath all that, some underlying pall, nearly crushing in its intensity. Jennings felt its weight, and he briefly wondered if Myers did. There was no time to ponder any of this, however. Myers produced a flashlight and was preparing to climb onto the ladder.

  “Wait a minute!” Jennings whispered, not entirely certain why he was hesitating.

  “What?” Myers’s eyes were as big as saucers.

  “I don’t know. Just a feeling.”

  Myers looked down into the dark and licked his lips. “What do you want me to do?”

  Jennings was a little surprised at Myers’s eagerness to go rushing blindly into harm’s way after his display of emotion at the city landfill two weeks ago. Maybe he was trying to prove something to Jennings or to himself. Jennings knew there was a fine line between a courageous police officer and a foolish one. Myers was relatively new to the force. Jennings guessed he’d find out soon enough which category Myers fit into.

  Jennings gave him the nod.

  “Police!” Myers yelled, as he made his way down the ladder. “We’re armed and we’re coming down.” No response. Jennings hadn’t really expected one. He followed Myers down the ladder.

  At the bottom the naked young woman was tied up like a crucifixion. She’d been brutally stabbed and a large cross had been carved on her torso. Scrawled in blood on the wall beside her were the words,

  Cross my heart and hope to die.

  Bastard wanted us to find this place, Jennings thought. His breathing was difficult and he felt a little dizzy. He put his head down and concentrated on breathing normally. His heart thumped sluggishly in his chest. He raised his eyes and closely examined the body. She was like a wraith, white, as though she’d been bleached. The orbits of her eyes were smeared with dark makeup. She looked like a vampire.

  With hands that shook, Jennings pried the light from Officer Myers’s hand and flashed it around the interior of the room. That creepy feeling hung with him. In fact, now it seemed to engulf him, oppressive, suffocating, making his sweat clammy and gooseflesh crawl over him like an insect infestation. There was a four-drawer chest with women’s garments sticking out of partially opened drawers. He noticed a stack of books with a fire-blackened bible atop it, a large Christian cross emblazoned on its cover. An antique iron-frame bed rested against the far wall. There was blood on the mattress and on the floor beneath the body. But not as much as there should be if she was killed here. Jennings felt a sudden sense of nearly overwhelming despair, a waking nightmare, as though something evil had passed through the shell of his body and entered his soul.

  No way Wolf could have described this place so accurately to Laura and written it off as a dream. The little bastard must have been here. Jennings had never had that detailed a dream in his life.

  He could not forget how he’d felt at both previous crime scenes, and realized that this was worse. There was something very wrong here besides the death and the message on the wall, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Myers felt it too. Jennings could tell by the officer’s pasty skin and sick expression.

  “You okay, Myers?”

  Myers breathed shallowly. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “You sure?”

  Myers nodded, staring at Jennings with glazed eyes. “Just makes me sad, that’s all. I can’t understand how anyone could do this. What must this poor woman have felt?”

  Jennings shined the light back on the body without answering the officer’s question. He did not want to venture into such a dark place. He moved the light across the room taking in everything; the books, the chest of drawers, the bed, the writing on the wall. Something was wrong. But what was it, damn it? “Someone wanted us to find this place,” Jennings said. “He led us right to it.”

  “Who?”

  “Maybe Danny Wolf,” Jennings muttered under his breath.

  “Danny who?”

  “Never mind. I was just thinking out loud.”

  “You think this guy’s playing a game?”

  “He’s playing a game all right,” Jennings said, still unable to shake the feeling that something was totally out of whack. The information about this place had come directly from his number one suspect, delivered to him on a silver platter by the young woman he cared more about than anyone else in the world. The young woman he’d purposely put in harm’s way.

  Why had he done such a thing?

  He could not adequately answer that question. All his years in police work and answers to the toughest questions were still the most elusive. Sometimes you just worked with instinct. Sometimes it was enough.

  And sometimes it wasn’t.

  Yet that feeling of something evil persisted. It had to be in his mind. There could be no other explanation. And yet he knew that it wasn’t.

  He shined the light back on the bible with its burned and blackened edges, the emblazoned cross glaring up at him like an admonition. He opened the cover and written in longhand on the first page were these words:

  Orphanage Bible, Apocalypse Island, June 1981. God save our children.

  And beneath that, scrawled in red ink in a different hand than the first message:

  Judgment day. I have risen from the ashes and vengeance will be mine. Cross my heart and hope to die.

  This inscription seemed to be much newer than the first one. The writing was crisp and clear.

  Jesus, Jennings thought. Laura was right. Apocalypse Island is at the center of this case.

  But he couldn’t think about that right now. Something was wrong here and all he could think about was getting away from it. He looked around at the ladder, claustrophobia putting a chokehold on him.

  “Who do you think it is?” Myers said, gesturing at the dead woman.

  “Christ, I don’t know.”

  “You okay, lieutenant?”

  “Yeah,” he lied, feeling his pulse quicken and his stomach churn. His heart was sloshing sluggishly in his ears. He pulled his phone out and went around the room frantically snapping pictures. The body, the message, the bed, the books. Normally this would be a job for forensics, but he couldn’t help himself, something was eating him, driving him onward.

  “Should I look around?” Myers asked.

  “You bet, but take it real easy. We don’t want to piss off the crime lab.” He handed Myers the flashlight.

  Myers got down on his hands and knees and flashed the light under the bed. “Nothing,” he said. He got back up and carefully pulled out the top drawer of the bureau, looking a little sheepish as he extracted a woman’s purse and a stack of papers from the colorful softness of feminine undergarments.

  Jennings glanced at the top paper and wasn’t surprised when he saw that it was an advertisement circular for a local rock band known as Bad Medicine. He imagined the entire stack was the same. The four members stood stoically against a sooty brick wall on which a large red cross had been emblazoned.

  And beneath the cross, slashed in red ink and covering the band member’s faces: Cross my Heart and Hope to Die.

  Jennings put the fliers down and opened the purse. Inside he found a wallet. He saw the drivers’ license and the ID card. “Christ, she’s one of ours.”

  “A cop?”

  “Close enough. Prison guard over in Warren. Name’s Kaleigh Jarvis.”

  “Good god, but how…?”

  “I don’t know. Listen, I need to call this in.” He tried dialing the number but there was no tone. “Doesn’t work down here,” he said, feeling an immense sense of relief. “I’m going up.” He took the purse and all its contents with him. And as an afterthought, he grabbed the bible and the band fliers. “Finish going through the drawers, but carefully. I don’t want the crime lab thinking we’re after their jobs. I
’ll be back in a minute with more light. You okay down here alone?”

  Myers gazed at the crucified body. “Yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “Okay,” Jennings said but he wasn’t as convinced as Myers seemed to be. “Back in a flash.” Jennings climbed the ladder, stopped at the top, resting his bulk against a support post, blood pressure up, breathing difficult. He couldn’t shake the creepy feeling. Something was wrong. God damn it, he just couldn’t put his finger on it. It felt like he was being set up, like that whole scene down there was choreographed. He got his feet moving again and climbed the stairs to the first floor. But instead of feeling good, the cool air topside felt like a violation, chilling his sweat and making him shiver. Finally he got moving and went outside, breathing deeply. He made the call before instructing his men to do a thorough search of the surrounding property, woods, field, abandoned autos.

  There were a couple of battery-powered Halogen lamps in the trunk of his car. He was on his way over to retrieve them when it struck him. Jesus, that’s where the first two women were killed, no doubt about it. Both victims had been taken from there after they’d been murdered and put on display elsewhere. But the killer had purposely left this one at the murder scene. Not only that, he’d put her on display. He knew she’d be found. He wanted her to be found.

  He led us right to her. Wolf led us right to her.