The Thief of All Light

by Bernard Schaffer

  “It matches the background in the picture. Farm’s up for sale. Abandoned. This is the one,” Rein said.

  “Did you start looking yet?”

  “No. I wanted to wait for you. Bill, you’ll need a crime scene unit. Someone good.”

  “You’re sure about this? Absolutely sure we have a body there?”

  “I wouldn’t let her look, but something is dead here. Lots of crows in the area, and it has the right smell.”

  “Shit.” Waylon sighed. “How’s Carrie?”

  “Freaking out. We found a crate in the back part of the barn, piled over with rotten hay. A lot of insect activity around whatever’s inside there. That’s where we need to start. There’s death in here, Bill. I knew it the second we walked inside. Pretty sure she knows it too.”

  “God-fucking-damn it! What about the baby?”

  “Not sure. There’s always a chance he buried the child with the mother, but I doubt it. He’s reenacting famous killers, Bill. Trying on their methodologies to see how they feel before he finds his own. He won’t give up that child, not yet.”

  “Why not?” Waylon asked. But even as did so, the image of a dead child bound in chains flashed before his eyes, a dark basement with bloody pieces of a little girl’s dress. The screams he’d been trying to forget for all those years. “Disregard,” Waylon said. “I understand.”

  “Can you get Eddie Schikel up here?”

  “I can call him.”

  “Tell him to hurry.”

  * * *

  Waylon could see Carrie’s car parked near the barn and the two of them circling around the entrance. Rein barred Carrie’s way, looking like the free safety on a football team, moving as Carrie moved, cutting off her plan of attack. Her fists were clenched as she glared at the barn, looking for any excuse to run in there and tear the place to pieces. Rein was talking her down, saying, “If it’s true, we will need all the evidence we can find. Use your head, Carrie.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Look,” he said, pointing toward the Waylon’s car. “Bill is here.”

  She looked over her shoulder, eyes red and broken by thick veins. They’d been searching barns all night until they’d found this one. She was fueled by pure rage, huffing like a wild beast, eyes fixed on Waylon but not actually seeing him as he parked the car and got out.

  “I don’t care!” she shouted. “Get out of my way.”

  “Hang on,” Waylon said. “What’s going on here?”

  “She’s in there, Bill!” Carrie snapped. “She’s in that goddamn crate and this motherfucker won’t let me see her.”

  “If she is, you don’t want to, kiddo,” Waylon said.

  “No, Bill. That’s my fucking right, you understand?” Her voice broke, cracking high like a piece of dry timber. “It is my right.”

  “You’re not going in there,” he said.

  “Who the fuck are you to say that to me?”

  He leapt forward. “Officer Santero! I am the chief of police in this jurisdiction and I’m declaring this a crime scene. You will stand down or you will be removed, am I clear?”

  Carrie’s jaw quivered. “Sir, yes, sir,” she said, jaw clenched.

  “Secure the outer perimeter and begin a crime scene log,” he said, looking at his watch. “Oh eight fifteen hundred hours, Chief Waylon arrived on scene. No one in or out unless I authorize it, is that clear?”

  He waited for her to remove her notepad and begin to write, then headed back to his car, popping the trunk from the key fob in his pocket. He grabbed a camera and a box of gloves, carrying both over to where Rein was standing and dropping them at his feet. “Glove up, and get me pictures of the scene before we go in,” he said.

  “Sir, yes, sir,” Rein repeated as he reached for the gloves.

  “Don’t give me that look. She needed that.”

  Rein tugged the gloves over his fingers, glancing back at Carrie, who was now pacing. “Is that what she needed?”

  “You ever deal with military people when you were on the street? They’d be ready to fight you over nothing, but the second you bark at them all they see is a drill sergeant. It’s a mental realignment.”

  “She’s going through something neither of us ever went through,” Rein said as he raised the camera and peered through the eyehole. “You can’t realign that.”

  “Well, I need her to be a cop right now, not a basket case.”

  Rein snapped off a series of pictures and said, “This must be something only bosses know about, Bill. How to mindfuck your people in ten easy steps.”

  “You don’t talk this way around her, do you? Is that where she picked up all this cussing all of a sudden?”

  “You’re not her father, Bill. Stop coddling her. It isn’t helping.”

  Waylon checked to make sure Carrie was not standing nearby and leaned close to Rein. “Like you’re one to talk. I’ve watched you mindfuck more people than I can count. If there’s a mind-fucking hall of fame, you’re the all-time champion.”

  “Only the bad people, Bill.” Rein set the camera down and said, “Well, and bosses, too. But I guess that’s kind of redundant.”

  Waylon headed for the barn, then stopped and waved for him to follow. “Well? What are you waiting for?”

  “How are you going to justify taking a civilian in there? A convicted felon.”

  “By not giving a damn what anyone else thinks. You coming or not?”

  Light poured through the torn-down slats of the barn, a shambling wreck of rotted wood and loosely assembled beams. The door hung sideways on bent, rusted hinges, and it screeched as Waylon pulled it open. Rein leaned inside the door and snapped several more pictures, all directed toward the crate and the pile of hay in the rear corner.

  The barn’s floor was nothing more than rows of disjointed beams, and most of the far wall had broken away, leaving a clear view of the green fields beyond. The girl had been standing right there in the picture, Waylon thought. This is the place.

  A cloud of flies filled the space between the floor and the exposed beams, the sections of sky covered by black, buzzing insects.

  Both men moved toward the crate.

  They cleared away the blackened hay straw piled higher than their waists on top of the crate, grabbing it with both hands and tossing it onto the floor. Both of them squirmed and clenched their eyes as they invaded the vortex of flies, waving them out of the way with their hands. In the straw gathered around the crate and going up the sides of the crate, dozens of maggots quivered. Rein pointed down at them and looked at Waylon, both of them knowing what it meant.

  The crate had no lid. It was just straw piled on top of straw as they worked to clear it, knocking it away, getting closer and closer to the crate beneath. Waylon’s hand brushed against something cold and stiff and he stopped. It was the unmistakable feel of dead flesh.

  He looked down between the straw and saw the length of a young woman’s leg, her skin blue, dotted with tiny hair follicles. He swept away the straw covering her legs, exposing her high-heeled shoes, and looked up at Rein, making sure he saw.

  Rein paused over the head of the crate and brushed aside the remaining wet straw, uncovering the strands of long blond hair and the bloated face of the young woman below. They recognized her from the photograph.

  Waylon lowered his head. “God-fucking-damn it.”

  Molly’s eyes were wide and swollen. The deeply imprinted rings around her throat were molded into her skin. Rein bent close to the body, running the tip of his finger along the grooves in the ligature marks, feeling for any signs of the instrument of strangulation.

  “Anything?” Waylon asked.

  Rein shook his head. The skin was too deteriorated to tell if the killer had used a belt or rope or wire. All that remained were the ringed grooves around her neck. He plied her stiff fingers up to check under her nails, hoping to see dried blood beneath them, that maybe she’d managed to scratch and claw her killer before he took her life. He saw nothing but dir
t and tiny maggot eggs there.

  Where was the child when her mother was dying, Rein wondered. Did the killer keep her in his car, telling her they’d be right back? Did he have her tied up in his house? Did he make the little girl stand there and watch her mother die?

  Waylon tapped him on the arm and waved him toward the door, telling him to come on. Rein let go of Molly’s hands and followed him, waiting until they were clear of the flies. “She’s been here at least a few days. The cold weather kept her preserved pretty well, but he killed her right after he took the picture.”

  “Eddie Schikel should be here any minute. I want him to work the scene as best he can. No need to disturb anything else,” Waylon said.

  They could see Carrie standing on the opposite side of the barn, staring at them through the broken boards, barely restraining herself from running in after them.

  “So much for epiphanies,” Rein muttered. “Do you want me to talk to her? You were always terrible at death notifications.”

  “I’ll do it,” Waylon said, making his way for the barn door. “About time I stopped coddling her, right?”

  Rein unsnapped the gloves from his hands as Waylon pushed the door open, filling the barn with the sound of creaking hinges. He turned around and looked at the open crate, seeing the dead young woman inside, her arms and legs constricted to make her fit inside the box. The killer had not posed her, or mutilated her remains, or taken any sexual indulgences with the body afterward. He’d simply dumped her where no one would see her and covered her with rotting straw.

  Waylon had both his hands on Carrie’s shoulders then, telling her what they’d found. She collapsed on her knees in the grass, face buried in her hands, and Waylon moved to drape his arm around her shoulders, staying close. Carrie’s face emerged purple with fury as she raised it to the skies and screamed and screamed until there was nothing else but the sound of her screaming.

  But the silence of the heavens is infinite and absolute.

  III

  THE HOT GATES

  23

  THE SKY WAS DARK, EACH CLOUD SWOLLEN AND HEAVY. THEIR OMINOUS shapes hung low on the horizon like an invading armada, big enough to consume the crops and livestock and people. All the people, Rein thought. It was late in the afternoon. He’d wanted to wait until the last faint flickers of orange and red vanished over the tree line before getting out, but the darkness had set in too quickly.

  Rein stroked the daisies resting on his lap as he sat in his car, running his thumb through their soft white petals but careful not to break any off. The cemetery had emptied out for fear of rain. Gone now were the joggers and women pushing baby carriages throughout its winding lanes, ignoring the piles of bones rotting nearby under their dull brass markers.

  In the rear of the cemetery stood the mausoleums, most of them crumbling, monuments erected long ago to people no one remembered. He strummed the daisies, pondering the hubris of it all. Families wealthy enough to hire expert masons, instructing them to build a tall, solid structure worthy of the dead person’s memory. Something that would last. Well, now it was just an old building, he thought. The person inside had long ago turned to dust and their descendants, if they hadn’t been wiped out by flood or famine or disease, had gone from this place.

  Time moves on, he thought. That’s what it does. It’s a river, flowing from beginning to end with such force that it will take you under in seconds and pop you back up someplace completely different if you let it. Time the merciless. Time the nonnegotiable.

  He bent forward over his steering wheel, searching for signs of movement, seeing none, but deciding to give it a few more minutes. For each of us, he thought, each of them, even all the ones buried under the ground, our brief moment in time is a fixed position. Our entire concept of reality is rooted in petty conflicts and loves and disappointments that matter less than a pile of earthworms when you go into the ground. Emperors, striving to conquer more and more pieces of dirt and stone. Kings, looking to use one tribe of hairless apes to conquer another. Corporate executives wasting their fleeting lives by grabbing as much of the meaningless and futile as they can. All of them destined for the same fate as the poorest degenerate or hopeless drug addict.

  The cemetery had been founded in the 1800s, and life was still much the same as it was then. For all our technology, the world is still run by the barbaric and the wealthy, and everyone else gets ground up as food for the machine. It’s probably been that way since the first organisms squiggled their way out of earth’s muddy puddles. One struggled. One lived in constant fear of being eaten, or murdered, or left behind by the tribe, until one of those things eventually happened. All individual life was fleeting, futile, and then it was over. The only good thing about it, he thought, at least once you were finished with it, you never had to do it again.

  All of our good, all of our bad, it all winds up deep in the ground as food for the worms.

  He got out of the car, holding the flowers close to his chest as he looked around once more, checking the trails and valleys around him. Nothing but dried leaves scraping against the stones and wind on the grass.

  The path toward her grave was well worn. Many feet had scaled the hill from the road leading up to that grave, leaving the grass flat and smooth and bare. Rein looked around again, making sure he was alone as he approached the brass marker. He dropped to one knee and laid the flowers under her nameplate, running his fingers over its letters, and closed his eyes. He had never seen her in life. Not even at the accident scene. He’d been taken away by the police before the rescue team could cut her out of the car.

  He’d seen pictures of her, though. Multiple pictures in the newspapers next to his photograph, sometimes from the Krissing hearings, sometimes his arrest mugshot. All of it tied together, as if she was just another victim of just another monster. She was not just another victim, though, and he knew it. She was a living, laughing, bright, and beautiful child who deserved more.

  His first thought, long before he was found guilty, was of killing himself. He was going to walk out into the woods and stick the barrel into his mouth and pull the trigger. To trade his life for hers. But he knew that was the coward’s way. He knew everyone would say he’d chosen an easy death over going to prison and living with what he’d done. They would have been right. So, prison then. He pled guilty and refused to even let his defense attorneys enter his police service record into the proceedings.

  “I go in tomorrow,” he told the grass and the brass placard and to the tiny coffin far below filled with the corpse of a child, none of which could hear him, he knew, but said it aloud anyway. “I just wanted to stop by one last time.”

  A man’s voice shot out from across the hill, so loud and angry it startled him, “Hey! Hey, get the hell away from her!”

  Rein looked up at the two figures coming toward him fast. He could see only their outlines in the dark—a man and a woman—but he knew immediately who they were. He stumbled back from the grave.

  “You get the hell away from her, you son of a bitch!”

  “I wasn’t—” Rein tried to say.

  The woman shouted at him then, her voice constricted like someone was clenching her throat. “You do not have the right to see her. Do you understand me?”

  The man’s fists were balled as if he meant to fight. Rein backed away even farther, saying, “I didn’t mean to cause any problems. I understand.”

  Spittle flew through her clenched teeth. “You do not ever come back here. Ever!”

  “All right.” Rein swallowed anything else he had to say and turned away from the grave, starting back for his car.

  He heard the whisper of flower petals soft against the brass engraving of a little girl’s name, and the rustle of wind as the bouquet came hurling after him. “Stop coming here, Rein,” the man shouted after him. “Stop bringing her flowers. You think she needs your flowers now? You think they mean anything?”

  Rein scooped up the flowers and kept moving, his gain stiff and awk
ward. His hands dripped wet from the crushed stems, and the parents were still shouting at him, telling him to get away from there, to never disgrace that sacred place again.

  He ran for his car door, desperate to get away. His hands trembled as he fumbled with his keys at the lock, trying to get in. The father was running down the path, chasing after him, his face filled with open rage as Rein struggled to get the key into the lock, but it was closed up tight. The slot was gone, leaving nothing but solid metal. He slammed the key against it again and again, trying to force it into the slot. When he looked up, he saw the father was not alone.

  The little girl was coming down the hill now, covered in dirt, spilling worms and bugs as she staggered toward his car. “No,” Rein moaned. “Please, no.”

  He felt the car rock and looked up to see that the dead were surrounding him on all sides. They’d filled in the road on both sides, a horde of dead children and murdered housewives and men he’d accused of crimes who shot themselves before going to jail. He spun around in horror as they came for him, calling his name.

  * * *

  “Rein?”

  His head jerked around as he searched for the approaching figures, seeing nothing in the darkness except the dim numbers on the cable box. He let out a deep breath and leaned back against Carrie’s couch, feeling the fabric behind him, damp with sweat. He’d slept for four hours after being awake for almost two days straight. He could have worked longer, but Waylon ordered Carrie to leave the crime scene and not return until eight the next morning. She’d told him to go fuck himself.

  “You both found the body,” Waylon had said. “That’s all anyone could have expected from you. Me and Eddie will process the scene.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” she’d said.

  “Carrie, do you really want to see her like this?” Rein had said. “If you do this, you’re going to regret it. You have memories of her where she is happy and smiling, and those are going to be the things you cling to for a long time to come. She wouldn’t want you to remember her like this.”

  What about Nubs? A thousand questions died in her throat. Things she couldn’t bring herself to say. Is Nubs buried in there too? Or somewhere nearby? Why did he take her? What is he doing to her? Why didn’t I believe Molly? Why did this happen? Oh my God. How the hell did something like this happen and I didn’t even believe her?