“After everything that’s happened, you think it’s safe for you here?”
Not really. It was a terrifying prospect to be sure, but running back home to a self-made prison of motion detectors and surveillance cameras wasn’t any better. “I’ve made myself a target. Who’s to say that won’t follow me home?”
“If you’re going to stay, then you’re staying with me. That’s the deal. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
Fair was fair—though she wondered how literal a deal this was. Would Trish welcome Melanie into her home with open arms on the off chance that Nate got some down time one of these days?
Brady patted her shoulder and left his hand lingering just a moment too long for it to be meaningless.
Dispatch buzzed the office phone and Nate put it on speaker. “Chief, I just got a call from the sheriff’s office. Some of the guys crawling the forest stopped off at Henny Yurick’s place and found signs of a struggle…some broken furniture and recently dried blood hidden beneath a throw rug.”
Brady’s jaw tightened.
“Come with me,” he said and headed for the parking lot.
“Where are we going?”
“I think I know who our killer is.”
***
She escaped.
Again.
Last night he had waited beneath Melanie’s bed, imagining the sound of her peaceful breaths. At some point, she would come back and slip beneath the sheets and he would hear them. He wanted to listen for hours. Until her sleep was deep, and danger the furthest thing from her mind.
Only then would it have been time to plunge his blade into her neckline.
The uproar started before Melanie ever got back. A young policeman made his way into her room. He did things to her clothes. Sick things. In his younger days, the one they called Elder might’ve cautioned against them.
But he never paid those teachings much mind—mainly because he couldn’t ever understand them.
The policeman raided Melanie’s belongings, sniffing her underwear while calling her names through gritted teeth. It went on for a while and Hoyt did nothing except watch—both fascinated and confused.
When Melanie returned, the unwanted intruder pulled a mask down over his face and put a coat over his uniform before leaving, breathing heavy as he went.
This was a problem. No one else was allowed to take the woman—especially not after all this time. His remaining eye demanded the privilege of watching the life escape from hers.
Hoyt managed brief pursuit, blood coursing through his veins. He felt invincible and determined while rushing down those stairs, surprised that invasive feelings of protectiveness were propelling him: she had to live long enough to die by him.
And then that pervert policeman garroted one of his own, slicing his neck wide open. Hoyt saw it from the second story landing and picked up his pace in an effort to kill Melanie before she could get outside. But she was faster than ever and all he could do was watch from the shadows. He felt—helpless. A feeling he did not much care for.
It was strange rooting for her to fend off the unwanted competition.
When it was done, there was no choice but to follow the policeman. This kind of thing could never happen again and it was up to him to prevent it. He followed him through the forest to his own personal vehicle, slinking into the backseat while the injured man changed outfits, bandaging his wounds with a pathetic whimper.
Hoyt hugged the floor and waited for an opportunity to strike.
An opportunity that took longer to arrive than expected. The policeman had thrown his bloodied mask into the empty seat and sped off for home, but he didn’t stay there long. Before Hoyt could seize the moment, the policeman washed and sprinted out to his patrol car.
Hoyt watched him leave and stayed behind to plan his murder.
The situation wasn’t ideal. Suburbia made him feel out of his element. The forest afforded more stealth and protection than these rows of prying neighbors and playful children—not at all concerned with property boundaries. There was no way of knowing if this policeman lived alone, though a quick check of living conditions said it was probably the case. He just needed to wait for him to come back.
And he finally did.
He drove his patrol car into the back yard and popped the trunk. Then he pulled open the basement bulkhead and dragged a dead body into the basement. The policeman looked disheveled and desperate.
Then there was a racket beneath Hoyt’s boots. He glanced down at the floor and waited for the fuss to subside.
At long last there were ascending footsteps on the cellar stairs.
Here was an enemy whose actions were impossible to predict. Hoyt knew enough to assume the washroom would be one of his first stops, though. He had slipped inside the closet opposite the toilet bowl and pulled the knife from his belt, rubbing the balled-edge of the hilt as he listened and waited.
More grumblings about “killing that whore” came from the hall. What had Melanie done to deserve this behavior? It troubled him the more he thought about it. He was not used to the competition and did not savor the feeling.
Then came the sound of a shower and Hoyt listened for the rip of the curtain to indicate his prey was inside.
He excused himself from the closet’s anonymity and pushed through the ghostly steam. No need to prolong this because he wasn’t enjoying any of it. Killing the helpless was much more fun—especially women. The way they felt and how they died.
He took the curtain in his fist and jerked it off the rod. A naked man jumped back, startled, with blood running from his hairline. Hoyt took him by the neck. With a growl, he slammed the policeman against the white tiles and buried the knife low in his stomach, slicing upward in anger.
The cop tried to fight, but the more he struggled the worse it got. Jerky movements caused his guts to spill out, plopping into the tub like meat on a cutting board.
Hoyt realized he didn’t have to do any more than that. It was over.
He didn’t even bother to clean up, choosing instead to leave the water running and the lifeless corpse bleeding out in the tub.
***
Brady slipped his Glock from his holster and started up the incline to Alex Johnson’s front lawn.
What an idiot I’ve been.
He told Melanie to stay in the car and wait for the back-up, which was en route. Donnelley and Galeberg had come in off the manhunt and were munching on crullers in the HQ canteen tent when Brady ordered them back into town, A.S.A.P.
Dammit, though, he should’ve seen it. When Melanie was at the camp, swearing up and down that someone was in the cabin with her, it must’ve been Johnson. Who, either before or after, had killed the only man who could refute his story—old hermit and local scavenger Henny Yurick.
Brady thought back to Johnson’s claim that he had scolded the hoarder for grabbing a few knives out of the cabin. He didn’t think anything of it, because Johnson had worked under Sleighton for a few years. He assumed this guy, and the rest of his department, were on the up and up.
Johnson lived in a neighborhood of impeccable lawns and cultivated flower gardens. Brady moved across the fresh-clipped glass, hoping he was completely wrong about this.
His boots landed on the doorstep with more of a thud than he would’ve liked, side-stepping the doorframe in case Johnson had seen him coming.
Never knew what a desperate man would do once he was cornered, and Brady regretted bringing Melanie for that very reason.
He slipped the gun behind his back and knocked.
No bustle.
Brady stepped onto the lawn and went to the front windows, peering into a sparsely decorated living space that looked like a furniture showroom. Johnson never had the guys over, not for Sunday barbecue or an after work beer, and definitely not for poker night. He wondered if any of the guys had ever been here.
Melanie looked on from the car. He wanted to keep her in sight until backup got here. Then again, wasn’t that a muffl
ed voice inside calling for help?
It’s going in the report that way.
He kicked the Schlage lock. On the fourth try, the jamb exploded and the door opened.
Johnson’s minimalism wasn’t confined to the living room. The kitchen was bare. Only basic appliances—a coffee maker and can opener—sat atop naked counters. Not even a half bag of sandwich bread littered the shelf space. The dining area served as storage. No table or chairs, just boxes stuffed into a corner. Not so unusual for a bachelor’s pad. The house must’ve been at least 1200 square feet—more living space than a single guy needed.
Shower steam seeped beneath the bathroom door. Brady tensed as he took the knob in his hand and pulled it. Even from here, the bloody mess was staggering. Innards were plopped across the tile floor, marinating in a perfect circle of blood. Johnson’s corpse was face-down, his guts spilled across the tiling.
Brady screamed “officer down” into his two-way and swept the house. In the distance, sirens cut a swath through the last remaining strands of small town tranquility. The grove was falling apart at the seams.
Once the first floor was clear, he found the basement. A smell akin to putrid meat smacked him on the way down, buzzing flies growing louder with every step. A light bulb chain brushed against his shoulder and his fingers found it, giving it a tug that revealed a stone slab cellar.
A wet trail of blood stretched from the outside bulkhead steps to the far corner. A body was splayed out on its back at the base of a stainless steel tank. Stacked against the wall were containers of lye.
Brady froze, realizing what these components meant.
“Son of a bitch,” he said and approached the body with recognition.
One of the men responsible for giving Cyrus Hoyt a clean bill of death: retired county examiner Samuel Valeri was a fresh kill. He’d been shot six times in the chest, bullet holes that looked like little craters spread across his upper torso. His face was frozen in a wide and terrified expression that suggested the old man hadn’t been ready to meet his maker.
He was going to be boiled and then dissolved in lye solution. The gigantic steel tank was quiet and Brady expected to find the liquefied remains of someone inside. He guessed it would be the Audi driver and his two friends.
Alex Johnson was the grove’s youngest cop. He was twenty-six and had four years in the Marine Corps. under his belt. The guy didn’t lack for community contributions, either. Tireless work with local charities, multiple hats at the summer fair and, when he wasn’t working on Sundays, he offered the elderly rides to church.
Brady glanced around the wide-open cellar, and saw that Johnson used this space for his darkest hobby. Near the bulkhead was a line of implements displayed on rows of hooks. Everyday tools—an innocuous sight in any other basement. But the hatchet, pitchfork, and machete gave him a sick feeling in his stomach.
The industrial-sized tank and lye surplus troubled him more. It suggested that Johnson was settling in to do this for the long haul. This chemical vat might’ve been at home in a mortuary, but it looked positively creepy in a residential cellar. Brady wasn’t familiar with the process but he knew the gist: the body slides into the tank with some lye solution and nearly a hundred gallons of water. From there the mixture boils, bathing the corpse in increasingly scalding water and chemical mixture. At 300 degrees, chemicals break the body down, reducing it to a dark and oily liquid with remnants of bone fragments.
All you had to do then was dump the sludge down a drain.
Brady headed back upstairs, careful not to disturb the crime scene as he went. Donnelley and Galeberg were walking across the front lawn with Melanie in tow as he stepped into the dusky evening.
“Johnson’s dead,” he said to no one in particular, “and there’s a body in the basement. Possibly more.”
The officers exchanged confused glances and went in to see for themselves.
“If I knew what to say at a time like this,” Melanie said.
“Didn’t know him long enough to be outright shocked, but…well, to see the kind of things he was up to down there…it makes you question everything.”
“He fooled Sleighton too, right?”
“Speaking of that,” he grabbed for his two-way and called dispatch. “Tell Sleighton to get over to Johnson’s place. The sheriff, too.”
He went back inside and Melanie followed. The officers came up from the cellar and their faces were pale.
“We need to get county forensics back here.” Brady tapped Donnelley on the shoulder and motioned for the front door. “Get on the horn.”
Brady gave the rest of the house a once-over. With a gloved hand, he flipped the light switch in the bedroom. Johnson slept on a mattress without a frame, and the air in here was crisp—like it was cleaned often and never used. Against the wall, a series of votive candles arced out in a semi-circle like some kind of altar.
A battered version of the holy bible sat in the center with two felt pens beside it.
“The Church of the Obviate?” Melanie said, peering over his shoulder. Was she right on, or was her mind connecting dots where there weren’t any?
“We don’t know what this means.” His tone didn’t sell his words, because he didn’t believe in coincidences. He went into the room and knelt beside the bible. Three polaroids dropped to the floor when he lifted it.
Brady turned the first one over and looked up at Melanie. It was a picture of her in jogging shorts, taken downtown at some point over the last few days. He grabbed for the other two photos expecting them to be the same.
They weren’t.
The next was of his wife during her hospital stay. She looked peeked—her skin ghostlier than usual, with all kinds of monitoring wires hooked up to her. He stared at it, struggling to comprehend why Johnson would have done this. Then he remembered there was one more photo to overturn.
The last picture was of him.
There was no processing this. The three of them had nothing in common and the photos made Brady feel more lost than ever. Melanie’s words weren’t helping. Her logic was one hell of a stretch, but a connection between her story and this bloodbath was ready to be made.
He went through the rest of the house and pulled a stack of pre-paid cell phones out of the hallway closet, making it fairly easy to discern the identity of Melanie’s texter, though there was nothing else of interest. A gathering of neighbors collected at the foot of the driveway, and Galeberg was already running interference while they waited for support.
“He killed Samuel Valeri to keep something from me,” Brady said. “God knows why he took out those kids, but he probably would’ve taken you and Maylam back here too if you hadn’t fought him off.”
Melanie’s bright blue eyes shimmied. “Johnson attacked me last night. Whoever was upstairs in the bed and breakfast is your second killer. Someone whose body isn’t in the ground at the Eternal Walk Cemetery.”
“Are you smiling?”
“No. It’s just that this…well, it tells me that I haven’t been losing my mind.”
“For all we know, Hoyt’s body was turned to soup downstairs long ago. I don’t know if this is a break, or a hard reset back to square one.”
“What if it’s Tullus Abblon? I find an invoice that references some kind of religious organization, and you find paraphernalia implying at least a tangential connection.”
She was right, and that bothered him for a dozen reasons. Johnson had gone right for Valeri, which supplemented the theory that there was a larger picture to worry about here.
But they were at a dead end.
Except for one place.
He glanced at Melanie. “You think you’re up for a road trip?” he asked.
***
The sheriff’s guys were tearing apart Johnson’s house by the time Sleighton got there. The street looked like a circus: groups of spectators lined it, filling in all available gaps between police and fire vehicles.
He knew what this was about and it was hopeless.
He’d been trying to discern ‘their’ identities ever since a family was driven out of town in a modern day tar and feathering. Brady was exactly where he’d been then—nowhere.
Sleighton touched the handgun that was holstered around his waist, realizing that this was as far as he could go by truck. No way of knowing how many of ‘them’ stood between him and his destination. Johnson’s house wasn’t even visible from here and the gathering on the street looked like Paul Simon was playing Central Park.
He rolled his truck onto the sidewalk and hoofed it a half mile past the throngs of commotion, leaving his weapon unclipped in case he needed fast access to it.
Brady was waiting on the sidewalk in front of the house. He threw a pair of rubber gloves at him and asked where he was parked.
“Back that way.”
“Let’s go.”
They talked on the way back, and Brady told him everything they had been able to discern. Once they were inside the cab, Brady had him put on the gloves. Then Brady tossed an evidence bag in his lap.
“What’s this?”
“Johnson’s attempt at keeping a journal.”
Sleighton struggled to keep his hands steady as he fished the book from the plastic wrap. He leafed across mostly empty pages before finding a few scribbles in the very front. It was gibberish, but that didn’t prevent the urge to vomit. After all this time, at least one of his guys was part of this.
Sleighton read the scribbles over and shrugged. “What’s it mean?”
“You don’t know?”
He glanced through the pages again, thumbing back and forth between them. No doubt, it was Johnson’s handwriting. He’d read enough of the guy’s reports to recognize his chicken scratch. But the content was so vague he doubted anyone could make sense of it. It showed Johnson had a few screws loose, but that was already a foregone conclusion in the wake of tonight’s discovery.
No matter what I do, the whispers find me. Inside or outside, they remain. They know me better than I know myself. Used to think I was going crazy. Now I know it’s my purpose. Because others hear it, too.
Under The Blade Page 19
