Unspoken Fear

by Hunter Morgan

  "Me too," he murmured watching her, thinking. "Weird we'd both be having strange dreams, huh?"

  "Yeah."

  "Talk later, maybe?"

  She gave a slight nod. "Maybe." Her attention shifted to Mallory, seated in her booster, eating the last spoonfuls of cereal from her bowl. "Finish up, because you're going back upstairs to change, Missy."

  Mattie sat beside her, methodically spooning cereal into his mouth, staring at the box in front of him as if he could read it.

  "So what are we wearing today?" Noah stood between the sink and the table, trying to keep things light.

  "Snow pants," Rachel said dryly.

  Noah almost choked on his coffee. "Snow pants?" He leaned over, tilting his head to see under the table. Sure enough, Mallory was wearing hot pink snow pants and flip-flops. Her shirt was an ordinary lavender T-shirt with an orange butterfly appliqué at the neckline.

  "I wike them," Mallory declared defiantly.

  "Mal, hon, I told you, they're too hot."

  "I'm not hot." Mallory picked up her bowl and drank the milk left in the bottom.

  "And snow pants are not appropriate for Sunday School."

  "I wore them to Sunday School when we had the big snow."

  "Yes, you did." Rachel exhaled. "You wore them to church in February when we had the big snow. Because it was cold. Because it had snowed. And you were wearing pants underneath so you could take them off once we got to church, remember?"

  Mallory pushed back from the table, the chair legs scraping on the wood floor. She climbed out of her booster seat and reached up to retrieve her bowl and spoon and carry them to the sink, snow pants making a swooshing, crunching sound as she walked. "It's too hot for pants under. Just panties." She walked past Noah and her mother and dropped the plastic bowl into the sink. The spoon clattered as it hit the stainless steel.

  Rachel surprised Noah by turning to him and gesturing with one hand as if to say, "Do something with her, because I can't."

  Noah hesitated, debating whether or not further discussion was necessary. He understood the purpose of talking with kids, even if he'd never been a father longer than a few months. He also understood that kids needed structure and that, ultimately, someone needed to be in charge, that someone being the parent rather than the child.

  "Mallory," he said firmly, but not unkindly, "your mother asked you to change out of the snow pants into something more appropriate for church. When you get home, you may certainly put the snow pants back on, but I would suggest you get up those stairs and change, and do it quickly or there will be consequences."

  She came to stand in front of Noah, and it was all he could do not to smile. The little, blond ponytailed girl in a T-shirt, flip-flops, and snow pants was almost more than he could stand.

  "What's con-see-quences?"

  "Consequences for disobeying your mother are probably something along the lines of no DVD movies or Wiggles on TV for a few days."

  "No mggwles!"

  She looked so shocked that Noah really had to fight to keep from laughing out loud. "Hurry," he whispered to her.

  She turned and ran, hot pink marshmallow legs pumping.

  Rachel turned to him the minute her daughter was out of sight and smiled. "Thanks."

  He smiled back. "No problem. See you after church." He walked out onto the front porch, still barefoot, and took a deep breath, thinking that despite his restless, nightmare-filled night, the day had a promising start. Very promising.

  * * *

  Snowden was standing on a stepladder at his mother's house, changing a light bulb at the top of the stairs, when his cell phone went off. She was just telling him how ridiculous it was that he thought he needed to change her light bulbs. She'd been changing them for fifty years on her own just fine. She thought that the fact that last year she had fallen off the ladder, halfway down the stairs and dislocated her shoulder, resulting in three months of physical therapy, was irrelevant.

  He almost welcomed the call, though from the display screen on the phone, he could see it was the station. "Chief Calloway," he said into the phone, handing his mother the dead light bulb as he stepped off the ladder.

  She immediately lifted the bulb to her ear to shake it as if not believing him when he said the reason the light wouldn't come on was because the bulb was out. "I bought the three-year kind," she said indignantly.

  "Chief, Johnson here," the voice on the other end of the line said. "Sorry to call you on a Sunday, but it looks like we got us another one."

  Snowden turned his back to his mother, cradling the phone on his shoulder as he began to fold up the ladder. He fought the eerie chill that snaked up his spine. "Another what, Johnson?"

  "Murder, Chief. Another ugly one."

  For a moment Snowden didn't respond he was so shocked. He released the ladder, leaving it to stand at the top of the stairs as he walked away, circling in the hallway. He had so completely convinced himself that whoever had killed Leager and Rehak had done it for personal reasons that it really hadn't occurred to him that the rest of the town's residents might not be safe.

  "Chief?"

  Snowden found his voice, resting his hand on the top of the stepladder. "Who?"

  "Skeeter Newton."

  Snowden knew the victim. He was a real bum, into drugs and alcohol, and he got into fistfights in bars. He dabbled in criminal activity, mostly in other towns, but nothing big. Nothing they could ever pin on him. Snowden had seen his name go by his desk recently when his driver's license had been revoked for a DUI.

  "Bled to death at the kitchen table in his apartment," Johnson continued. "Hand cut right off at the wrist. Mother found him when she and her husband came home from church."

  "Something wrong?" Snowden's mother asked, still holding the light bulb.

  "You sure he didn't kill himself?" Snowden felt a glimmer of hope. Maybe Skeeter had gotten drunk or high and tried to commit suicide. Or maybe he'd been high or drunk and tried to do something stupid like open a can of beans with a pocketknife. He'd seen stranger accidents.

  "Both hands, Chief," Johnson said dully. "Cut right off, laying there on the table in front of him. Mrs. Newton was hysterical when she called 911. They had a hell of a time figuring out what she was saying."

  "OK, OK." Snowden cradled the phone on his shoulder again and grabbed the ladder, folding it as he went down the stairs.

  Tillie hustled after him. "Someone else has been murdered, haven't they?"

  "I'll be there in five minutes," Snowden said into the phone. "At the parents' residence, right?" They lived only two streets over, in an older house very similar to his mother's, though larger and nicer.

  "Yeah. He was livin' over his parents' garage, the parasite."

  "I want the parents out of there." Snowden entered his mother's laundry room. "And no one else at the scene except those who have to be there."

  "Right. EMTs are on their way, of course. Gotta send them and an ambulance no matter how dead the poor sucker is. I've got two cars in route, the third on its way as soon as Billings finishes writing a speeding ticket, but I knew you'd want me to call you."

  Snowden slid the stepladder into its proper place between the wall and his mother's ancient washing machine. "You did the right thing, Johnson. I'm on my way."

  Snowden hung up the phone as he went out his mother's back door. He was wearing a pair of gym shorts, a gray Rutgers University T-shirt, and sneakers, but he didn't want to take the time to run home and change into his uniform. "I've got a problem, Mom. I've got to go."

  "You said less than five minutes." She followed him out the door. "It's one of my neighbors, isn't it? Who's been murdered?"

  "Mom, you know I can't say." He hurried to his police car. "I'll call you later."

  Snowden started up the black and white Crown Victoria and shifted it into reverse, ignoring his mother, who remained in the driveway, the bad light bulb still in her hand. Only once he was out on the street, seat belt fastened, car in drive,
did he reach for his cell and call Delilah.

  * * *

  "Jeez Louise, that's a lot of blood," Delilah breathed. "A man this size has around five liters," EMT Jason Cline told her, looking on with interest.

  She took care not to step in the large pool of congealed blood on the floor around the cheap kitchen table as she studied Skeeter. Remarkably, he was still sitting in the chair, slumped forward, bloody wrist stumps on each side of his head. He was wearing cutoff jean shorts and a Harley Davidson T-shirt with the sleeves torn off. His thinning brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, but wisps of hair partially covered his face. The waxen hands, sprinkled with dark hair on the backs, fingers slightly flexed, lay on the table, appearing to Delilah to be exactly where they had come to lie when they'd been cut off. His skin was the color of white wax, so inhuman looking that she almost had to remind herself this was a real body and not a mannequin posed for some cheap horror film kids were making in their parents' garage.

  "Five liters, huh?" Delilah asked. "It looks like we've got close to that on the table and on the floor."

  "Nah, probably only half that. It takes a few minutes to bleed out from the wrists. Blood coagulates," remarked Jason, dressed in the paramedic's uniform of a navy blue jumpsuit and stethoscope. "Most people don't realize that. You want to kill yourself, there are a lot smarter places to cut like the jugular or femoral artery." He demonstrated with the blade of his index finger across his neck, then his inner thigh.

  She stood on the other side of the table, looking down on the victim. "Something tells me Skeeter here didn't do this himself."

  Delilah had had the pleasure, or the displeasure in this case, of knowing Delbert "Skeeter" Newton. She'd met him the first week on the job here in Stephen Kill when she'd been called to a domestic disturbance. Turned out Skeeter had gotten pissed at his mother over her not allowing him to take her car keys and borrow her car, and he'd given her "a couple of little pushes" according to the drunken Skeeter. It was Mr. Newton who'd called the police when he'd gotten scared. In the end, Mrs. Newton had refused to agree to press charges, and Delilah and Lopez had ended up escorting him upstairs to the apartment over the garage where she stood now. She couldn't say she was too sorry to see the punk dead, but her heart went out to the parents downstairs, sitting on their front stoop, arms around each other, sobbing uncontrollably.

  Jason walked around the table to stand beside Delilah. "So," he said quietly, "what do you think? You wanna maybe go out or something sometime, Sergeant Swift?"

  She studied the angles of Skeeter's wrists and detached hands, only half listening to Jason. He was nice enough, cute enough, but she just wasn't interested. It was almost as if he paled in comparison to someone else she found herself thinking about way too often. She almost laughed aloud at the morbid phrasing that had gone through her head. "I... I don't think so, Jason. Thanks, I appreciate the offer, but I'm kind of seeing someone right now."

  Someone cleared his throat, and Delilah looked up to see Snowden standing there. He'd been downstairs talking with the Newtons when she arrived and sent her up to start collecting evidence.

  "Well." Jason clapped his hands together, moving back around the table toward the door of the filthy apartment. "Guess I'll be waiting downstairs. Give a holler if you need me, Chief."

  Snowden muttered something under his breath, and Delilah had to fight to resist a smile. Snowden intimidated Jason. Shoot, he intimidated everyone in this town.

  "So what's your initial take on this, Swift?" Snowden asked, all business and attitude.

  If she hadn't known better, she'd have thought he was annoyed by Jason's flirtation. But Delilah didn't have time to think about such nonsense right now. She had a dead man sitting in front of her at his kitchen table with his hands cut off, lying right there in front of him.

  "Obviously a homicide, Chief."

  He grunted an affirmation.

  "No weapon on the scene. I've got men beating the bushes around the property, but they're not going to find anything."

  "What makes you say that?"

  "The club, bat, whatever it was that was used to kill Rehak wasn't left at the scene."

  "And you're assuming that this murder is connected with Rehak's?"

  She pulled a pair of disposable gloves from the back pocket of her jean shorts. She'd been shopping at the Wal-Mart on Route I when Snowden had called. She'd left her cart right where it stood, half-full of cleaning supplies, chips, and an assortment of frozen breakfast items. It had still taken her, in Sunday traffic through Rehoboth, almost half an hour to make it to the Newton residence.

  Gloves on, she gingerly reached across the table and picked up the piece of ordinary white typing paper from under the empty bottle of cheap vodka. The sheet had two Bible verses—cut from an actual Bible by the look of the almost transparent paper they were on—taped to it. "Thou shall not steal," she read aloud. "And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell."

  She looked up at Snowden. "The verses accuse him of a sin, just like the verses left behind at Rehak's and Leager's accused them of a sin. Killer goes a step further here by offering the form of punishment."

  "Thou shall not steal is one of the Ten Commandments, right out of the Old Testament," Snowden thought aloud, studying the page she held in her hand. "But the other verse comes from the New Testament, one of the Gospels, I'm pretty sure. It doesn't refer to a thief, though. It's been taken out of context."

  She looked up at him again. "Snowden, the killer is obviously a nut job. Bright, sane Christians take verses out of context all the time. Why would we expect an insane murderer not to?"

  He scowled. He knew she was right, whether he'd admit it to her face or not.

  "The note is different than the others." It was a statement more than an argument against her theory that the other murders had been isolated incidences.

  "So he's on a learning curve." She shrugged, carefully setting the note down outside the pool of blood on the table so that she could bag it in a minute. "First time, note is handwritten. Maybe an impulse thing," she theorized aloud. "Second time, the plan is better laid out. Killer tears the page from a Bible before going to commit the murder. This time, the killer likes two verses but they're not together in the Bible. Inconvenient. So, he does what's logical—cuts them out and tapes them on a piece of paper."

  "Plain old printer paper," Snowden said. "Plain old Scotch tape."

  "Could have come from any household or office in the United States," she murmured. Her gaze shifted upward to meet his again. "Could have come from my house or yours."

  "Ah, hell," Snowden murmured, running his hand over the top of his head, over his closely shorn, dark hair.

  It was the first time Delilah had ever heard him swear. "Yeah, ah hell," she agreed. "At the risk of sounding paranoid or overly dramatic, Chief, I think we've got us a serial killer right here in little ole Stephen Kill, Delaware." She took a breath, her gaze shifting to the dead man sitting in the kitchen chair, dismembered. "May God save his sorry soul," she said solemnly. "Save us all."

  To her surprise, Snowden reached out and caught her hand, giving it a squeeze before he let it go. "All right," he called, walking away. "Get the evidence bagged, the photos taken, and let's get Skeeter out of here."

  * * *

  Sunday afternoon, Noah entered the small den that had become an office years ago, when his parents had decided to turn the old farm into a vineyard. It was still much the way it had appeared in his childhood—walls painted white, an accordion shade on the single window, but no curtains, only a valance. Sometime in the late eighties, his mother had added a wallpaper border along the top of the walls—yellow with white daisies and dancing yellow and black bumblebees. The paper was faded and peeling in a couple of places and completely missing in one corner where Rachel had mentioned she'd had a leak through the ceiling f
our years ago. There in the corner, the ceiling had been patched and painted, though the entire ceiling had not been repainted so it stood out, stark white against yellow.

  The furniture consisted of a giant oak desk and old wooden chair behind it, a round oak table that had once stood in one of his grandmother's kitchens, a wall of bookcases filled with books, stacks of yellowed paper, and various bits of junk that probably needed to be tossed. As he passed them, headed toward the new metal file cabinets on either side of the windows, a can roped in colorful yarn caught his eye. He had made the pencil can for his mother in elementary school, though what grade he could no longer remember. The pencil can made him a little sad, sad to think of the potential he once had and what he had done with it. But it also made him happy inside as he recalled the life he had led growing up here, the only child of Joanne and Mark Gibson. He had been loved, cherished. A lump rose in his throat as an image of his parents riding in that Jeep in Nicaragua crossed his mind. He couldn't help but wonder if they had been afraid in the last moments of their lives, if his mother had cried.

  Usually, these thoughts took him down a road of despair and to a burning desire for a drink, but today they didn't. Today, he felt a strange, overwhelming sense of peace.

  Caught a little off-balance by his feelings, Noah walked to the file cabinets and pulled open the top drawer of the first one he came to. He was looking for information on the warranty of the stainless steel tanks his parents had used to regulate the temperature of the wine in the primary fermentation stage. His father had been meticulous about keeping files, but in the years since he'd passed away and Rachel had found herself responsible for the entire operation, she had admitted to Noah, over tuna sandwiches at lunch, that she had allowed the order of the office to disintegrate. However, she swore to him that if his father had kept the warranty information, it was somewhere in one of these file cabinets. After the leak, she'd replaced his father's stacked cardboard file boxes with real filing cabinets.

  Noah began to flip through the papers in the top drawer, some in hanging files, some in file folders, others just tucked inside. As he dug deeper, he couldn't resist a smile. His ex-wife was not quite the neat, controlled woman she liked everyone to believe she was. Inside the drawer he found envelopes with old bills in them, napkins with notes, user's manuals for appliances, and a myriad of other junk. He found the same in the second drawer, although mixed with manuals for a breast pump, a DVD player, and the directions on putting a purple tricycle together, he discovered notes and receipts in his father's handwriting. The same in the third drawer. He moved to the next filing cabinet. Apparently, when Rachel had moved the papers from the damp boxes, she'd made no attempt to file in any sort of order that would allow her to find anything later.