A Fragment Too Far

by Dudley Lynch

  I struck my hand through the opening closest to the lock and ran my fingers along the opposite side. I felt what I was expecting to feel. You’d need to navigate the same setup — a lock and a touchscreen — to get out.

  I shined my light beam on Assistant Fire Marshal Burrows’s face. “You’ve already seen the door?”

  “That was my first clue. I saw that and started wondering if this might be more than a remodeled warehouse where Nevermore’s Metal Works was planning to make cattle guards and windmills — like the sign out front says.”

  “Pretty bizarre, I agree. But then I’ve seen arrangements like this on prisoner transporters, for example.”

  “Like I say, the real peach pits in the pudding are upstairs.”

  “And we get up there how?”

  “There’s an elevator, but the power’s off. So we’ll have to take the stairs. Circular and a bit steep. Goes through a hole in the ceiling at the back of the garage.”

  “You made your way up there with this place still full of smoke?”

  “The building had been cleared. The ladder crew always does that in a building this big, even with a small blaze. You don’t want fire sneaking up walls or getting into the attic. So they’ll pull down some ceiling tiles, go up on the roof, maybe cut a hole. Got something to show you there too.”

  He asked for a minute. Said he wanted to get some bigger torches.

  “Some of the things you’re about to see, you’ll need more light to get the full impact.”

  He returned with standard-issue firehouse lanterns. One for each of us.

  * * *

  We followed our light beams up the circular staircase and found another of those stainless-steel-barred entrances, similar to the one in the bus. The assistant fire marshal gave the door a slight nudge and watched it swing open with the precision of a fine watch movement. It stopped about two-thirds of the way open. He nudged it again, sending it wide open. Since he was in front, he walked through first.

  He stopped after a few steps. Then, he switched his light from diffused to focus and sent the beam penetrating straight down the lengthy hallway like the headlights on a car. More steel-barred openings. Maybe a dozen on each side. Placed at identical intervals so that each one had a matching partner across the hall.

  The effect was like the infinite reflections you get from facing mirrors. Do they ever stop? Physicists and philosophers say they never start, that it’s all an optical illusion. My younger colleague and I knew the barred doors didn’t go on forever, but the way our torches played with them, it seemed like they could.

  Burrows noted as much. Said it looked like turtles all the way down.

  I agreed with him. “You’ve been in the rooms?”

  “Nope. Doors locked.”

  “But can we —”

  “Yep, we can see in. They don’t change that much. What you see in one, you pretty much see in the rest of them. For a while.”

  “For how long?”

  “First four on each side. One door to a room for those. Then the rooms get bigger. Each one gets two doors. And the contents inside change.”

  We both pressed up against the bars in the first door and flooded the cubicle with light.

  I asked him what he’d noticed first.

  Don’t think he’d been expecting the question and had to think about it. “Uh . . . the pull-down bed.”

  “How can you tell it’s a bed?”

  “Maybe not a bed — but it’s got a thick pad on it. Could be an examining table, I suppose. Couple of interesting things about it.”

  Burrows did it again. Stopped dead in the middle of an explanation. But I was learning to read him; he was thinking, so I waited.

  “See, you can adjust the height. Those two tracks on the wall? That has to be what they’re there for.”

  “And the other thing?”

  “I think they restrain people on it. Look at where the cinch-strap buckles are.”

  I’d noticed the short Velcro-equipped contraptions. One at each corner of the long cushion and one in the middle on each side lengthwise. Each of the ends opposite the buckle appeared to be riveted to the shelf frame, if that’s what it was.

  I felt a little chagrined that I’d not yet made the connection. Of course, they’re restraints.

  “What else?”

  “The flooring.”

  “What about the flooring?”

  “It’s seamless. Edges curve up the wall. Extremely easy cleanup. I know about this stuff because we study how it burns. Made to keep bacteria from getting underneath it. Through it too. I’m pretty sure the floors were designed at the factory and delivered in one piece.”

  “That would be expensive.”

  “Sure would be. But then this whole place is expensive.”

  “Why worry about bacteria?”

  “Maybe it’s not just that. Maybe it’s something else they want to keep control of. Clean up easily.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like DNA.”

  Chapter 38

  There wasn’t a whisper of air movement, and my protective clothing had never felt so icky, so we gave the remaining rooms only a cursory look.

  The control room was behind the fifth set of barred doors on the right side of the hallway.

  Simple enough setup. And yet, elaborate.

  Two rows of four surveillance monitors on each of two long walls, and two rows of three surveillance monitors on the far wall.

  Behind another set of bars were crew quarters. Had a small kitchen, an eating area, a lounging area, a wall lined with bunk beds for four persons, and a door I assumed led to a toilet and showers.

  Then came areas that were a total puzzle to me. Burrows didn’t seem to have any ideas either. Or if he did, he kept them to himself.

  One had placards of all the letters of the alphabet strung along two of the walls at eye level. A collage of the numbers from one to ten was arranged inside a large black frame running along the third wall. The rug had square designs, each overprinted with a single simple English word — the or and or go or get. None of the words was more than three letters long. And none was repeated.

  Another room looked like a research laboratory on one side and a hospital operating room on the other. The effect was so morbid, I had to suppress a shudder. If we’d been investigating a Nazi concentration camp, I’d have thought we stumbled across Josef Mengele’s personal torture and experimentation chamber.

  The room was even weirder. The tables and chairs were ordinary enough. Had there been nothing else in the room, I’d have dismissed it as a classroom. But plopped all around the room — sometimes on chairs, sometimes lying flat on a table, sometimes stacked atop each other in a corner — were . . . what? Mannequins? Stuffed dummies? Maybe half the size of the average adult.

  I couldn’t tell much more, since I couldn’t get close to any of them. From what I could see, they all had arms, legs, and a head shape where arms, legs, and head shapes should go. But no eyes, noses, mouths, fingers, or toes.

  To his credit, Assistant Fire Marshal Burrows understood my growing impatience and discomfort. “Got time for one more bit of weirdness?”

  “We’ve come this far —”

  “It’s on the roof.”

  “Wouldn’t you know it?”

  “Follow me.”

  Two short stair flights later, we were standing on the roof of the old Cromwell Company warehouse.

  Burrows tugged a heavy canvas cover off something flat and circular and at least fifteen or twenty feet across.

  It looked to me like a heliport. A landing pad for helicopters. That wasn’t what stunned me. The design painted on the pad did that.

  I’d seen it before.

  It was a carbon copy, on a smaller scale, of the layout in the clearing that Judson Mayes III had discovered
.

  Delbert Burrows hadn’t recognized it, but he’d assumed its meanings were sinister. “What do you think this is?”

  He wasn’t referring only to the chopper pad, if that’s what it was. He meant all the bizarreness we’d been observing for the better part of the past hour.

  I didn’t need to think about how to answer.

  “Something unspeakably perverse. I think last night somebody threw a Molotov cocktail into a facility tailor-made for torture and mass murder.”

  The look on his face had many parts. But satisfaction was foremost among them. “So, I was right?”

  “Yes, it seems so.”

  * * *

  Surreal?

  When you surveyed everything that had happened in Abbot County in the past nine days, that was one word for it. Surreal, and getting more so by the hour. First, ten deaths — almost certain to be homicides — at Professor Huntgardner’s old house, far out in the county’s western boonies. An abandoned house whose insides had been ripped apart like a lion savoring a wildebeest. Next, the discovery of a baffling shrine or piece of land art a few miles to the west that seemed to be hiding, or being prepared to hide, its own secrets.

  Then, the disappearance of the professor himself. Followed by an attempt to blow the local sheriff’s car — and the sheriff — to smithereens. A chance observation by a homeless person that pointed to all the corpses at the Huntgardner house belonging to physicists. An arsonist’s attack on a remodeled downtown warehouse owned by one of those physicists that may have concealed something beyond belief — an assembly-line torture and murder chamber in the middle of downtown Flagler.

  I had questions. I had puzzles. I had suspicions. I had unspeakable possibilities to consider, rule out, or act on.

  And I had very little to go on.

  Because, at the moment, no illegal actors were in law enforcement’s crosshairs, and there was a desperate need to put some there.

  My phone buzzed.

  The text message was from Angie. She’d arrived in the nation’s capital. She hoped to return by late Tuesday night. Said I should keep an eye peeled for crowing cocks. She’d added in parentheses: “No smiley face intended — serious.”

  Angie was gone.

  So should I gather my most trusted deputies and do a brain dump? They’d be supportive. Mirror my mood. Suggest things they hoped would be helpful. Offer their own ideas on a game plan. Offer to work extra time on the case.

  But that would be disruptive. And unfair. Each was already dealing with a piece of the puzzle. Or several pieces. They’d been focused on one or another of Abbot County’s mysteries for days.

  Not a good idea, Sheriff.

  I was still the go-to guy on this one. So where do I start?

  Goaded by my analytical left brain, my loosey-goosey right brain lost no time providing an answer.

  Cadaver dog.

  Chapter 39

  I wanted a cadaver dog because I didn’t want to make another serious misjudgment. The first error had been confirmed not long after Delbert Burrows and I exited the warehouse.

  There was no damage to the front end of the big dual rear wheeled pickup truck parked in the warehouse to the side of the creepy bus. Or anywhere else. None to the trailer or the machinery on it, either.

  I lost no time running the two license plates.

  I’d expected both to be registered to one Worley Meersman of Flagler. The Worley Meersman, PhD, we were assuming to be one of our ten bodies at the professor’s house. The missing physics professor and the owner of the remodeled warehouse. And who I was now suspecting might be a serial killer. One of a well-heeled pack of serial killers, all of whom had ties to one of Flagler’s church colleges.

  But the truck and trailer were not registered to the late Dr. Meersman. They were registered to one Judson Thomas Mayes II. Jude the Dude’s father. The physician. The professor’s personal doctor. Who was supposed to be on Galveston Bay this weekend, bending his fishing rod. I strongly suspected he wasn’t.

  I wanted the cadaver dog because of what I already knew about the secret society or whatever it was — sect, cult, fraternal organization, organized crime syndicate? — of physicists in Flagler. My growing fear? That they had been burying murder victims within the circle of aristocrat pear trees north of Professor Huntgardner’s house.

  The nearest cadaver-sniffing dog I knew about was in Austin, 225 miles to the southeast.

  His name was Reverend. He was called that because of a habit. When he made a “find,” he would cram both paws together and position his head atop them so it looked like he was praying. Or begging. And a cute beggar, or supplicant, he was. I’d been around Reverend a couple of times when he was working. Friendly. Eager. Smart. The sandy-haired, long-legged golden retriever seemed to like me.

  It could have been because I got along so well with his partner.

  Most search and rescue types I knew were rough-edged. The kind of personalities that enjoyed traipsing through the brambles more than chatting about the world’s great unsolved mysteries.

  I recalled some of my discussions with the head of Texas Volunteer Searchers of Austin. Topics such as why more woolly mammoth skeletons hadn’t been found in Texas. Or why the human sense of direction is so much less precise than that of many animals. Or what the benefits to oral health would have been if dental floss had been invented sooner. Or why prime numbers are so weird. I’d learned a lot on a variety of subjects from listening to Reverend’s partner. Lady luck would be smiling on me if Bronson “Boots” Blakley and Reverend could respond on such short notice.

  Boots answered on the second ring. He and Reverend could leave in thirty minutes. The drive would take four hours.

  That would give us three hours of daylight. How could you ask more of Lady Luck than that?

  Chapter 40

  I’d expected to see Reverend riding loose in his handler’s SUV. After all, he wasn’t a police dog, trained to attack on command. He was a cadaver dog, trained to sniff out human remains. But he arrived in a stout cage, peering at me through the metal slats that allowed him to see out but advance no farther.

  “Thought you’d let Reverend ride up front.”

  My friend, Boots, reached out to shake my hand. “Wish I could. But if he got excited, he could tear up my ride. And if we rolled up on another dog working — game’s over.”

  I’d never heard this before. “He could hurt himself?”

  “The other dog too. And, maybe, hurt me.”

  “So he can get mean?”

  “Not in a vicious sense. He gets so excited. These are high-drive animals, you know.”

  We had a time-consuming ride ahead. Some of it on a bumpy dirt road. Some of it on the bare prairie. And not a lot of daylight left. I put a backpack with a flashlight, two bottles of water, three energy bars, and a pair of binoculars next to Reverend’s cage. Three minutes later, we were gone.

  Boots steered with his left hand and played with his bushy mahogany beard with the other.

  And listened.

  I cycled through the litany of woes that had rained down on my county in a little more than a week. The only question he asked came at the end was “What, exactly, makes you think a bunch of bodies may be buried where we’re headed?”

  “Most of all, the helipad we found on top of the remodeled warehouse. It has symbols painted on it.”

  “And you say they’re the same as what you saw in this clearing where we’re headed?”

  “To a T.”

  “Tell me again what it looks like.”

  “It’s not complicated. Two big ovals and two Latin phrases. One of the phrases is ‘unus mundus.’ It means ‘one world.’ It goes all the way back to the thirteenth century. The other phrase is ‘e tenebris.’ It means ‘out of the dark.’”

  I stopped to see if my listener wanted to respond, but he
stayed silent. He did dip his chin a couple of times, so I took that as a sign to keep going. “Everything, including the ovals and the Latin words, has been shaped with white pebbles.”

  He looked puzzled.

  “Stones — like you’d use to decorate your yard. I’m guessing they made forms and filled them with rock. Went to a lot of trouble.”

  His silence got heavy. I’d seen slow traffic lights change quicker. But he’d say something soon. And did.

  “Don’t know about the Latin phrases. Leave that to you. But the ovals? Hermes Trismegistus.”

  I had to think about who that was. “The learned ancient?”

  “That’s the one. He said God is a circle. Center’s everywhere and circumference is nowhere. And you’ve got a circle.”

  “I know. The trees.”

  “Yep. And then there’s the matter of the eyes.”

  “You think that’s what the ovals are meant to signify — eyes?”

  “Could be. Very popular symbol down through the ages. The all-seeing eye.”

  I’d already flipped my pocket notebook open to the drawing I’d made in the Piper Cub. “Okay, let’s say they’re meant to be eyes. We’ve got two of them. But they’re positioned funny.” I held up my drawing. “Like this. One sits on top of the other. Not like a face. On a face, they’d be — you know — side by side. These ovals aren’t.”

  Another pause. “I’ve been thinking about that. What if we have two all-seeing symbolic eyes, not two human eyes? What could that say?”

  “To whom?”

  Boots drummed a hand on the steering wheel. “Well, whoever’s looking. You’ve got some sort of signaling going on here, don’t you think?”

  “Signaling to whom?”

  He glanced at me then back at the road. “By the way you tell it, anyone looking down.”

  “Looking down from where?”

  “Well, in your case, from an aircraft.”