SHOW OF EVIL
by William Diehl
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt
But, being season'd with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil?
- THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, ACT 3, SCENE 2
PROLOGUE
The town of Gideon, Illinois, biblical of name and temperament, squats near the juncture of Kentucky and Indiana at the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A trickle of a river called the Wahoo forms the western boundary of the town, while Appalachian foothills etch its southern and eastern parameters. It was founded in the mid 1800s by a handful of farmers driven south by encroaching midwestern cities, by railroads, and by brutal winters. They were followed soon afterwards by a fire-eyed reader of the Church of Latter-Day Saints named Abraham Gideon, who had split from Brigham Young and led a small troop of followers towards the southern mountains. They had blundered onto the fledgling village, liked what they'd seen, and settled down there. It was Gideon who gave the town its name and a strict moral code that has persisted for nearly one hundred and fifty years.
Inhabited by two thousand and some citizens, most of them hardworking conservatives and many of Mormon descent, it is a town that takes care of itself and minds its own business. Its architecture is stern and simple; its streets paved only when necessity demands; its town core a collection of indispensable businesses without frills or fancies; its town meetings held at the Baptist church, the largest building in town.
The only car dealer sells Fords and farm equipment. A foreign car in Gideon is as improbable as Grandma Moses rising from the grave and running naked through the streets on Sunday morning.
The city council, a collection of dour curmudgeons, runs the town with a kind of evangelical fervour, enduring its handful of bars and taverns but drawing the line at sex, having chased away Gideon's one topless bar during the late Eighties and railing against R-rated movies so vociferously that most of the citizens watch them on cable rather than venture forth to the town's twin theatres and thereby risk the scorn of the five old men who set both the tone and moral temper of the town. The young people, who silently revolt against its anachronisms, usually spend their weekends driving to nearby towns that have shopping malls and multiplex theatres, where they can buy a six-pack of beer without being recognized. For the most part, Gideons are friendly, concerned, protective people who help their townsfolk when they are in trouble and who practice a kind of archaic combination of do-unto-others and love-thy-neighbour. And as long as its citizens sequester their more shocking vices behind closed doors and shuttered windows, nobody really gives a hoot. In short, it is a place that time, distance, and desire have cloistered from the rest of the world.
Gideons like it that way. They do not take kindly to others snooping in their business and they solve their problems without the intrusion of outsiders like state politicians or federal people or snoopy, big-time newspaper reporters.
On a Tuesday morning in October 1993, a few days before Hallowe'en, a single shocking act of violence was to change all that.
Suddenly, trust was placed by suspicion, ennui by fear, complacency by scorn. People began to lock their doors and windows during the daytime and porch lights glowed all night. And casual neighbours, who once waved friendly hellos in passing, were suddenly as cautious as strangers.
Yet like a protective family, Gideon kept this scandal behind locked doors and whispered of it only in rumours. The horrifying act itself was kept from the rest of the world - for a while, at least.
On that autumn morning, Linda Balfour prepared her husband's customary lunch: tuna fish sandwiches with mayo on white bread, a wedge of apple pie she had made the night before, potato chips, orange juice in his thermos. She had also polished his bright orange hard hat before fixing a breakfast of poached eggs, crisp bacon, well-done toast, and strong black coffee, and the hat and lunch box were sitting beside his plate with the morning edition of the St Louis Post-Dispatch when he came down.
George Balfour was a bulky man in his early forties with a cherubic smile that hinted of a gentle and appreciative nature. A life-long resident of Gideon, he had married Linda late in his thirties after a brief courtship and regarded both his twenty-six-year-old wife and their year-old son, Adam, as gifts from God, having lived a solitary and somewhat lonely life before meeting her at a company seminar in Decatur three years earlier.
Their two-storey house was seventy years old, a spartan, white-frame place near the centre of town with a wraparound porch and a large front lawn and an old-fashioned kitchen with both a wood-burning stove and a gas range. It was George Balfour's only legacy. He had lived in the house all his life, both of his parents having died in the bedroom that Balfour now shared with his wife.
He loved coming down in the morning to those smells he remembered from his youth: coffee and burned oak slivers from the wood-burning stove, and bacon and, in the summer, the luscious odour of freshly cut cantaloupe. The TV would be set on the Today show. His paper would be waiting.
He was wearing what he always wore: khaki trousers, starched and pressed with a razor crease, a white T-shirt smelling of Downy, heavy, polished brogans, his cherished orange wind-breaker with SOUTHERN ILLINOIS POWER AND LIGHT COMPANY stencilled across the back and the word SUPERINTENDENT printed where the left breast pocket would normally be. Everything about his dress, his home, and his family bespoke a man who lived by order and routine. Balfour was not a man who liked surprises or change.
He kissed his son good morning, wiping a trace of pabulum from the boy's chin before giving Linda a loving peck on the back of her neck. She smiled up at him, a slightly plump woman with premature wrinkles around her eyes and mouth and auburn hair pulled back and tied in a bun. The wrinkles, George often said, were because his wife laughed a lot.
Nothing about George Balfour's life was inchoate.
'Saints finally got beat yesterday,' she said as he sat down.
'Bout time,' he answered, scanning the front page of the paper. 'By the way, I gotta run up to Carbondale after lunch. They got a main transformer out. May be a little late for dinner.'
'Okay. Six-thirty? Seven?'
'Oh, I should be home by six-thirty.'
At seven-fifteen, he was standing on the porch when Lewis Holliwell pulled up in the pickup. He kissed Linda and Adam goodbye, then waved at them from the truck as Lewis drove away from the white-frame house. They turned the corner and suddenly the street was empty except for old Mrs Aiken, who waved good morning as she scampered in robe and slippers off her porch to pick up the paper, and a solitary utility man carrying a toolbox who was trudging down the alley behind the house. A bright sun was just peeking over the hills to the east, promising a day of cloudless splendour.
Thirty minutes later the Balfours' next-door neighbour, Miriam Perrone, noticed that the Balfours' back door was standing open. Odd, she thought, It's a bit chilly this morning. A little later she looked out of her dining room window and the door was still open. She went out the back door and walked across her yard to the Balfours'.
'Linda?' she called out.
No answer. She walked to the door.
'Linda?' Still no answer. She rapped on the door frame. 'Linda, it's Miriam. Did you know your back door's open?'
No answer. A feeling of uneasiness swept over her as she cautiously entered the kitchen, for she did not wish to intrude.
'Linda?'
Suddenly, she was seized with an inexplicable sense of dread. It choked her and her mouth went dry. She could hear the television, but neither Linda nor the baby was making a sound. She walked towards the door to the living room. As she approached the door, she saw the empty playpen and a second later Adam lying on his side on the carpet with his back towards her.
And then, as she stepped through the doorway, she stopped. Her lips trembled for what seemed like eternity before a low moan rose to a horrified shriek.
A few feet from the crib, Linda Balfour's butchered body was crumpled against the wall, her glazed eyes frozen in terror, her mouth gaping, a widening pond of her own blood spreading around her, while Katie Couric and Willard Scott joked about the weather in the bloodstained television set nearby.
That was how it started.
THE CITY
FOUR MONTHS LATER
One
Fog swirled around powerful spotlights in the darkest hours before dawn. Perched atop tall steel poles, they cast harsh beams out across a rancid, steaming wasteland, etching in shadow and light the buttes, knolls, and slopes of trash and refuse, of abandoned plastic bottles, Styro-foam dishes, cardboard fast-food wrappers, old newspapers, abandoned clothing, and maggot-ridden mounds of uneaten food. Like fetid foothills pointing towards the glittering skyscrapers miles away, the city's garbage formed a stunted mountain range of waste. Stinking vapours swirled up from the bacteria-generated heat of the vast landfill, while small, grey scavengers zigzagged frantically ahead of a growling bulldozer that pushed and shoved the heaps of filth into a manageably level plain.
The dozer operator, huddled deep inside layers of clothing, looked like an interplanetary alien: long Johns, a flannel shirt, a thick wool sweater, a bulky jacket that might have challenged the Arctic wastelands, a wool cap pulled down over his ears, fur-lined leather and canvas gloves, a surgical mask protecting his mouth from the freezing cold and his nose from the choking odours, skier's goggles covering his eyes. Gloria Estefan's Mi Tierra thundered through the earphones of the Walkman in his pocket, drowning out the grinding din of the big machine.
Another hour, Jesus Suarino, who was known as Gaucho on his block, was thinking. One more hour and I'm outa here.
He worked the controls. Twisting the dozer in place, he lowered the blade and attacked a fresh mound of waste. The dozer tracks ground under him, spewing refuse behind the tractor as they gripped the soggy base and lurched forward. Through his misted goggles, Suarino watched the blade slice into the top of the mound, showering it into a shallow chasm just beyond. Suarino backed the machine up, dropped the blade a little lower, took off another layer of rubble. As it chopped into the pile, Suarino saw something through his smeared goggles.
He snatched the throttle back, heard the lumbering giant of a machine choke back as it slowed down and its exhaust gasp in the cold wind that swept across the range of rubble. He squinted his eyes and leaned forward, then wiped one lens with the palm of his glove.
What he saw jarred him upright. A figure rose up out of the clutter as the blade cut under it. Suarino stared at a skeletal head with eyeless sockets and strings of blonde hair streaked with grease and dirt hanging from an almost skinless skull. The head of the corpse wobbled back and forth, then toppled forward until its jaw rested on an exposed rib cage.
'Yeeeeoowww! he shrieked, his scream of terror trapped by the mask. He tore the goggles off and leaned forward, looking out over the engine. The corpse fell sideways, exposing an arm that swung out and then fell across the torso, the fleshless fingers of the hand pointing at him.
Suarino cut off the engine and swung out of the driver's seat, dropping into the sludge and sinking almost to his knees. Ripping off the mask, he was still screaming as he struggled towards the office at the edge of the dump.
Martin Vail hated telephones. Telephones represented intrusions. Invasions of his privacy. Interruptions. But duty dictated that the city's chief prosecutor and assistant DA never be without one.
They were everywhere: three different lines in his apartment - one a hotline, the number known only to his top aide, Abel Stenner, and his executive secretary, Naomi Chance - all with portable handsets and answering machines attached; a cellular phone in his briefcase; two more lines in his car. The only place he could escape from the dreaded devices was in the shower. He particularly hated the phone in the dead of night, and although he had all the ringers set so they rang softly and with a pleasant melodic tone, they were persistent and ultimately would drag him from the deepest sleep.
When the hotline rang, it was never good news, and the hotline had been ringing for a full minute when Vail finally rolled over onto his back and groped in the dark until he located the right instrument.
'What time is it,' he growled into the mouthpiece.
'Almost five,' Stenner's calm voice answered.
'What's that mean?'
'I'm parked outside.'
'You're a sadist, Major Stenner. I'll bet you put toothpicks under the fingernails of small children and light them. I bet you laugh at them when they scream.'
'Better wear old clothes.'
'Where are we going?'
'Twenty minutes?'
'What's going on, Abel?'
'I'll ring you from the car.'
And he hung up.
Vail verbally assaulted the phone for half a minute, then turned on the night light so he would not fall back to sleep. He stretched, kicked off the covers, and lay flat on his back in the cold room, arms outstretched, until he was fully awake.
Four-twenty in the damn morning. He got up, threw on a robe, and went to the kitchen, then ground up some Jamaican blue, poured cold water into the coffee machine, and headed for the shower. Fifteen minutes later he was dressed in corduroy slacks, a wool sweater, and hiking boots. He doctored two large mugs of coffee, dumped several files from his desk into his briefcase, and when the phone rang he was ready to roll.
He snatched up the phone and said. 'This better be good,' and hung up. Throwing on a thick sheepskin car coat, he headed for the lobby ten floors below.
Major Abel Stenner sat ramrod straight behind the wheel. He was impeccably dressed in a grey pin-striped suit. When Stenner had accepted the job of Vail's chief investigator, Vail had promoted him to major, a rank rarely used except in the state police. It was a diabolical act on Vail's part - Stenner now outranked everyone in the city police but the chief. Vail handed him a mug of coffee.
'Thanks,' Stenner said.
'I thought you said to wear old clothes. You look like you're on your way to deliver a eulogy.'
'I was already dressed,' he answered as he pulled away from the kerb.
Stenner, a precise and deliberate man whose stoic expression and hard brown eyes shielded even a hint of emotion, was not only the best cop the city had ever produced, he was the most penurious with words, a man who rarely smiled and who spoke in short, direct, unflourished sentences.
'Where the hell are we going?'
'You'll see.'
Vail crunched down in the seat and sipped his coffee.
'Don't you ever sleep, Abel?'
'You ask me that once a week.'
'You never answer.'
'Why start?'
More silence. That they had become close friends was a miracle. Ten years ago, when Vail had been the top defence attorney in the state and had worked against the state instead of for it, they had been deadly adversaries. Stenner was the one cop who always had it right, who knew what it took to make a good case, who wouldn't bite at the trick question and could see through the setup, and who had been broken on the stand only once - by Vail during the Aaron Stampler trial. When Vail took the job of chief prosecutor, one of his first official duties was to steal Stenner away from Police Chief Eric Eckling. He had fully expected Stenner to turn him down, their animosity had been that profound, and he had been shocked when Stenner accepted the job.
'You're on my side now,' Stenner had explained with a shrug. 'Besides, Eckling is incompetent.'
Ten years. In those years, Stenner had actually begun to loosen up. He had been known to smile on occasion and there was a myth around the DA's office, unconfirmed, that he had once cracked a joke - although it was impossible to find anyone who actually had heard it.
Vail was half asleep, his coffee mug clutched between bo
th hands to keep it from spilling, when Stenner turned off the highway and headed down the back tar road leading to the sprawling county landfill. His head wobbled back and forth. Then he was aware of a kaleidoscope of lights dancing on his eyelids.
He opened them, sat up in his seat, and saw, against a small mountain of refuse, flashing yellow, red, and blue reflections against the dark, steamy night. A moment later Stenner rounded the mound and the entire scene was suddenly spread out before them. There were a dozen cars of various descriptions - ambulances, police cars, the forensics van - all parked hard against the edge of the landfill. Beyond them, like men on the moon, yellow-garbed cops and firemen struggled over the steamy landscape, piercing the looming piles of garbage with long poles. The acrid smell of the burning garbage, rotten food, and wet paper permeated the air. For a moment it reminded Vail of the last time he had gone home, to a place ironically called Rainbow Flats, which had been savaged by polluters who repaid the community for enduring them by poisoning the land, water, and air. First one came, then another, attracted to the place like hyenas to carrion, until it was a vast island of death surrounded by forests they had yet to destroy. He had gone home to bury his grandmother thirteen years earlier and never returned. A momentary flash of the Rainbow Flats Industrial Park supplanted the scene before him. It streaked through his mind and was gone. It had always angered him that they had had the gall to call it a park.
Three tall poles with yellow flags snapping in the harsh wind seemed to establish the parameters of the search. They were bunched in a cluster, a circle perhaps fifty yards in circumference. The sickening sour-sweet odour of death intruded on the wind and occasionally overpowered the smell of decay. Four men came over a ridge of the dump hefting a green body bag among them.
'That's three,' Stenner said.
'Bodies?'
'Where the flags are.' He nodded.
Show of Evil Page 1