“Got ’em all?”
“All of them except one member, a John Zurcher, aka Mystic Fog, who’s in prison at Fort Madison.”
“Damn.”
“Hal and I got to get movin’, ’cause we’re going to do a search warrant at Traer’s house in Cedar Rapids as soon as we can get there and get things started. I called Dickman at the CR office, and he’s getting the stuff together right now, including a surveillance of the house.”
“Progress is a wonderful thing.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
We rejoined Mike and Sally in the back room.
“You know, though,” said Hester, “we’ve got one big problem left.”
“I know,” I said. “We still have an unsolved quadruple homicide.”
“That’s right. And Rachel is still the only key I’m aware of.”
“So,” asked Mike, “where’s Rachel?”
“The question of the week,” said Hester.
“Can I ask a question?” said Sally.
“Sure.”
“Well, from what I’ve overheard tonight, this Traer is the head of the group, right?”
“Yes.”
“And he’s powerful—I mean it, I can feel the waves he gives off. Maybe you can, too,” she said to Hester, “being female.”
Hester smiled. “I can’t say that I can, but I’ve been distracted.”
“Yeah,” said Sally. “So, anyway, if I was Rachel, and if I was a witness, like you say, and all the victims were members of my little religious group, I’d go to Traer for protection.”
“Yeah …”
“So don’t you think that this Rachel would be at his place? For her own safety?”
Of course we did. All of a sudden.
Hester called CRPD and told them to make sure that nobody entered or left the Traer home. They agreed, but said that their marked car who was the first one at the scene had reported a female leaving the residence, in a small gray car registered to Traer.
“What time?” She tossed her hair, a signal of frustration or exasperation I was beginning to recognize.
She wrote on a scratch pad, pushed it to me across the desk.
“Check his phone call time,” it said. I did. 05:17. I wrote it down and passed it back to her. She looked at it and shook her head. Hester thanked CRPD and hung up the phone.
“Female left the residence at 05:26. Nine minutes after he made the call. Nine fuckin’ minutes.”
“Rachel?”
“Probably. CRPD says the asshole isn’t married.”
“Son of a bitch.”
I turned to Sally. “Thanks, though.”
She smiled, and raised her cup. Point well taken.
Art and Hal came in, carrying bags full of items from the search. Including several notebooks and an address book.
Saperstein, who’d pretty much stayed in the background all night, glommed onto the books immediately. He was making Xerox copies of them before they were even out of Art’s hands.
Hester brought them up to date, and they were as dismayed as we were about Rachel.
It turned out that they’d had to cool their heels for over an hour, waiting for us to tell them to come on up, and that they had passed their time reading some of Elizabeth Mills’s writing.
“Apparently,” said Hal, “quite a shock wave went through the group when the murders went down. She doesn’t know who did it, but good old Darkness apparently does. He was supposed to reveal the perp’s identity at the next meeting. Tomorrow night.”
“Well,” said Mike, “who gets to lean on Darkness?”
“We’d better go slow with that one,” said Hester. “He’s pretty sharp.”
Just then Lamar walked in the room.
“What the hell you guys been doing?”
It turned out that Art had called him about the search. That Hal had called him when they discovered the identity of Darkness, and knew he was on the way up. That Mike had called him when Darkness was being booked. That Art had called the county attorney about Traer, who in turn had called Lamar. The question, it seemed, was rhetorical.
Hal told him about Rachel, and the arrests that were going to go down within the next few hours. To be made outside our county, which was a relief for Lamar.
“God damn,” said Lamar. “I got three general executions for today, and a farm sale at eleven, and you keep me up all night with a simple little murder.”
I grinned at him. “Life is a bitch.”
“Yeah.”
“But,” said Art, “we thought you’d want to know.”
“Fuck it,” said Lamar, “I’m buying breakfast. Let’s go downtown.”
You never pass up an offer like that.
We hit Sheffert’s restaurant en masse: Lamar, Art, me, Mike, Hal, Hester, Sally, and Dan from the Maitland PD. The radio traffic was a little confusing.
“Comm, one.”
“One, go ahead.”
“One, two, three, five, twenty-five, I-28, I-388, and Sally are 10–7 Sheffert’s.”
“Checking, one, that’s one, two, three, five, twenty-five, I-28, and I-388?”
“And Sally,” said one. “And Detective Saperstein, too.”
“Sally and Saperstein?”
“10–4.”
Deb sounded a little miffed, and jealous. She obviously didn’t like the fact that Sally was along.
Sally, who was riding with me, grinned and giggled like a schoolgirl. “She’s jealous,” she said.
“True.”
“Well, what the hell.”
“That’s right. You earned it last night.”
We all trooped to the rear, past about thirty other patrons, about evenly divided between local businesspeople and local farmers. Plus about five or six people I didn’t know.
We all sat at three tables, pushed together to make one. Art was going back up as soon as breakfast was over, to begin inventorying the seized property. Hal and Hester were leaving for Cedar Rapids. I was feeling a little smug, thinking I could go home and get eight solid hours of sleep. Wrong.
“Carl,” said Hal, “could you get ahold of Helen today? She still hasn’t heard that tape, and she should get a good look at Traer. She said that he had a beard, and he doesn’t now.”
There went the afternoon. “Sure.”
“And,” he went on, “Judd Norman from the fire marshal’s office is going to be back out at McGuire’s place today, going into the debris, if it’s cool enough. Could you, or maybe Mike, go with him?”
“Hey, Mike?”
“Yeah!”
“Hal, here, wants a favor.”
We were having a pretty good time, tired but happy, when a small man in an enormous blue down-filled jacket came to the table.
“Excuse me, but would one of you be Sheriff Ridgeway?”
“I am,” said Lamar. “What can I do for you?”
“My name is Ross Foreman, with the Des Moines Register. I’d like to talk to you about some arrests I hear you made last night …”
You can’t even eat in privacy.
25
Sunday, April 28
07:33 hours
I got home in time to see Sue rolling out of bed. She was concerned, as she properly should have been, about my not getting enough sleep. I should have been, too, but I was excited and too close to events to be entirely rational about it.
“I’ll be all right.”
“You are supposed to work nights, not nights and days.”
“This is a little unusual, right now.”
Hard to argue with that.
I called the office and left a wake-up call for 14:00. Didn’t need breakfast, thanks to Lamar, so I went right to bed. Couldn’t sleep. Of course.
I was worried about the Cynthia Larsen case. We really didn’t have a lot, and we had just arrested an attorney who seemed likely to be a Satanic high priest. Sort of man you really didn’t want to piss off. Especially if you couldn’t make it stick.
I mean, I’d
always jokingly considered attorneys in general as works of the devil. But now, for the first time in my life, I had one who actually could be. Tiger by the tail, and all that.
Then, too, I began to think about the main investigation, our four murders. Whoever had done that was still on the loose, unless it had been a member of the local cult, and I doubted that very much.
Our people who covered the funeral must not have seen anybody interesting … there had been no news from them at all, as far as I knew. Just a shot you had to take.
Traer knows, I thought. Especially since it looks like Rachel has been staying with him. He knows, but I wonder, if he’ll ever tell …
Only if it were to benefit him.
A plea bargain, of course. God, I hated to see that happen, and hoped that it wouldn’t. Being the probable high priest, he’d quite likely been the one to actually kill the baby. Which got me thinking about that … and I shouldn’t have.
I was still awake at 09:30 or so, so I went back downstairs and had a glass of orange juice.
I think I got to sleep at about 10:15.
The office called right at 14:00 and woke me. I had intended to talk to Helen Bockman about 15:00, but decided to let it wait till later, and went back to bed.
I got up on my own at 16:15. Put on some coffee, let good old Fred out, and called the Bockmans’. No answer. Good. I wasn’t awake yet, anyway.
The first cup didn’t seem to do the trick. I was about halfway through the second, and on my fourth cigarette, when I heard Fred barking in the yard. I went out to let him in and discovered Lamar petting him.
“Hey, how’re things?”
“Pretty good.” He stood up, with Fred jumping for his hand.
“Knock it off, Fred!” I grabbed him and scooped him in the house. “You want a cup of coffee?”
“Sure.”
“What’s up?”
“I thought I’d stop by and let you know it looks like we found the baby.”
“You did?”
“Yep. The McGuire house. Fire marshall found it. In the mess, in the basement.”
That figured, somehow. Finding it in the basement. Nobody was looking for a small body when we did the scene. I remembered the basement. It really wasn’t very big, but it was pretty much unfinished, with more clutter than you could believe, including garbage bags full of old feed sacks, paint cans, fertilizer bags … and then, of course, all the debris from the house would have collapsed into it during the fire.
“Well, now we have the body.”
“Yeah. At least I think we do.”
“What condition was it in?”
“Not too bad, really. It’s been cooked pretty well by the fire, but the debris from the upper floors kept it from being burned too bad. Didn’t have a head, though. Saperstein thinks maybe somebody kept it.”
“God.”
“Theo’s on the way to Des Moines with the remains, takin’ ’em to the state medical examiner. Now all we got to do is find this Rachel and then find out who killed everybody.”
“Still just about at square one, aren’t we?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, Traer knows who did it, I think. All we got to do is squeeze him hard enough.”
“I hope so,” said Lamar. “But I got a feeling that he’s gonna be able to bond out pretty soon.”
“No kidding?”
“Yeah, he’s been making phone calls all day. Bond is five hundred thousand, but I think he can make it. He’s been talking to somebody in real estate in Cedar Rapids … says he’s willing to sell the house.”
“Speaking of his house, how did Hal and Hester make out?”
“Okay, I guess. They say that they’ll be back here after supper sometime.”
“How about the other arrests?”
“Pretty good so far. Got everybody but this Vernon woman, and they think she’ll be home today or Monday.”
I poured him a second cup of coffee.
“Media’s been all over my ass today,” he said. “They want to know everything. They asked to speak to the folks in jail, and I told them they have to wait till regular visiting hours.”
“That’s this afternoon, isn’t it?”
“It was, but I was out of the office. So was everybody else.” He grinned.
“Isn’t that a little dangerous?”
“Yeah. I told ’em to come back tonight after supper. I want Hal and Hester to talk to me first. So does the county attorney.”
We sat in silence for a minute. We were both washed-out.
“You know,” I said, “Traer is going to split, if he gets out.”
“Probably.”
“And even if he doesn’t, he’s going to be pretty hard to squeeze, since he’s got what we want, and his case isn’t far enough down the road yet so that we can pressure him with an assured prison sentence.”
“Yep.”
“We need Rachel.”
Lamar left a few minutes later. Sue came home and told me that I looked like I was dead. I agreed.
I broke a rule of mine and sat her down and told her just about everything in the case. It took over an hour, and when I was done she didn’t look much better than I did.
The rumors going around school apparently had it that we’d solved the case and were wrapping it up. Three arrests, four bodies. Figured. I wished they were right.
“So you don’t think that this attorney did it?”
“The four, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“But who else would have?”
“That, my dear,” I said, in my best imitation of W. C. Fields, “is the essential question. And we don’t know. Saperstein and Hester agree with me that it was, maybe, a revenge killing. Maybe by somebody with a Satanic background, maybe not. The best suspect would normally be Rachel, since they killed her baby. But she was apparently almost a victim herself.”
“Well, who was the father of the baby?”
The things you tend to overlook.…
After supper, Hester called. They had a lot of stuff from Traer’s house. The real things were still at their Cedar Rapids office, but they had Xeroxed some seized documents and had brought them back. And copies of several audiotapes and one videotape.
They’d taken Saperstein with them, and he had insisted they make copies and bring them back to show us. We were all supposed to meet at the office at 19:00.
No problem, I had to go to work at 20:00, anyway.
We were all crammed into the back office. It was possible for prisoners to hear conversations from the kitchen, and since we had Traer and the Millses in the jail, we couldn’t use the only room that would accommodate us properly.
“Gentlemen,” said Saperstein. “What you are about to see is a so-called Black Mass. You will also see all four of our murder victims, very much alive, and very much involved. You will see Mr. Oswald Traer in the leading role.”
Black and white horizontal lines on the screen, then a little bit of color, and then there they were.
The first few seconds were taken outside. The camera operator was obviously walking toward a barn, preceded by several figures in colored robes. There was apparently only one light accompanying the camera, so almost everything was in either complete darkness or washed-out light. It was at night.
There was sound, but the initial stuff was just about as blurred as the video. Some sort of song or chant.
They reached the barn, and the cameraman turned around, pointing the camera back along his path. Facing a residence that, although dim, looked a lot like McGuire’s place. There was a figure approaching.
“That’s McGuire’s, isn’t it?” asked Mike.
“Yeah,” said Art.
The approaching figure was more discernible, since the camera was steady. Black robe, with the hood pushed back. As it approached, the face of a man with a full beard was very plain.
“Darkness approaches,” said a voice offscreen. Muffled but understandable. Shit, it was
almost funny.
“That’s Traer. The high priest,” said Saperstein. “You get to see a lot of him.”
Traer walked past the camera, too close, as his image blurred and washed out. The camera followed him inside.
It was dark in the barn, at least to the video camera. Virtually no detail at all, with several lines of parallel streaks as the camera moved toward a bright area that turned out to be sort of an altar. A black cloth draped over something, maybe an old table. Candles on both ends, with a kind of candelabra in the middle. A benchlike thing in front of it. Big pentagram hanging behind the altar, looked like a dyed and painted bed sheet. Pretty well done, as far as you could tell in the miserable light. The candles were all black, or purple.
Traer stopped in front of the altar and said something I couldn’t understand. The camera turned, and panned the area to the side of the altar and back toward the door.
The parallel lights, it turned out, were candles being held by the rest of the group. The camera panned slowly, and we had our first view of people we could identify. Phyllis, in red. Sirken in red, as were Keller and Elizabeth Mills.
They were saying something. Couldn’t tell what.
Sudden static, and we were now looking at the altar from about fifteen feet. The operator had shut the camera off to put it on a tripod and then restarted it. The lighting was much better, so the tripod must have had a flood attached.
Saperstein backed up the tape.
“You may have noticed that the sound quality is poor—well, it’s not as bad as you think, because they are saying things backward. The main chant is ‘Natas,’ which is ‘Satan’ pronounced or read backward.” He paused. “We can ID most of the people for sure. Some of you might have recognized Sirken and Herkaman. The woman beside Herkaman is Keller. Three of our four victims. You’ll see a lot more of Herkaman later on. In the background we have people we have tentatively ID’d as both Millses and Hedda Zeiss. Possible on Todd Glutzman and Martha Vernon. There is a figure in a red robe you will see in a moment. Not too good, but we believe that’s Rachel.”
He reran the portion we had just seen, and stopped at a frame near the end.
“There,” he said. “The one to Herkaman’s left, sort of hidden behind Sirken in the red robe. We think that’s her.”
Eleven Days Page 19
