The Occupied

by Craig Parshall

  “He was reaching out to you. With his hand. Smiling.”

  “What was I doing?”

  “You were just standing there with a look on your face—not reaching out, though, but looking like a man who had to decide something deadly serious. Like a matter of life and death.”

  “I’m not sure what to make of it. Maybe it’s positive. My memories of my father are good ones.”

  Elijah took his time before he added, “All I know is when I woke up from the dream I was drenched. In a cold sweat. With all due respect to soul brother James Brown, of course.”

  I laughed out loud at that.

  “Well,” he said. “For what it’s worth, I didn’t have a very good feeling about it. Take that any way you will.”

  There was a call-waiting blip on my cell, so I said my good-byes to Elijah and took it.

  It was Ashley Linderman. “We have the surveillance footage from the security camera across the road from Henry Franklin’s place. It’s been posted online to a restricted law enforcement cloud site, so other detectives around the country can view it and can weigh in with additional data about the vehicles or the drivers.”

  That’s where she stopped.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You can’t bring me into the loop.”

  “Right. At least it can’t come from me. You’re persona non grata. And who knows what my future looks like. But I did happen to reach out with a voice mail to this detective I know in New York, who handled a related homicide case. He has the passcode now to get into the site. You may know him.”

  Nice end run, Ashley. “You’re brilliant.”

  “Say hello to Dick Valentine for me.”

  “Have you seen the footage?”

  “I have. Valentine can give you access to view it. Then just look at it, that’s all. You’ll see for yourself.”

  Dick Valentine gave me the passcode immediately. “I’m not under any dumb directives that stop me from talking to you,” he said, then added, “Unlike another law enforcement agency in Wisconsin, which shall remain nameless.”

  “I wish you could have been helping out more during this investigation.”

  “Naw,” he shot back, “as far as the Bobby Budleigh homicide goes, you’re better off going with your instincts. Or whatever you call that sixth sense of yours.”

  “Stay in touch, Dick. And I hope I can return the favor someday.”

  “You already have,” he said. “My wife’s got me going back to church regularly. When Momma’s happy, everybody’s happy. I think you had something to do with it.”

  I grinned, picturing Dick Valentine trying to sing hymns. “That is good news. But I hope it’s not just about placating the missus.”

  “Don’t worry, preacher. I’m the proverbial iceberg. Plenty under the surface.” Then he made a hard left turn in the subject matter. “You know, in recent months, no more of those murders with hearts being ripped out. At least not here. They stopped when you left New York.”

  “Like it’s all following me,” I suggested.

  Dick didn’t reply.

  I wanted to get real with him. “I’m prepared to do whatever it takes. And with God’s help, to stop it. It’s vile. It has to end.”

  “Don’t do anything reckless.”

  “Too late.”

  It was good to have my friend on the line. I trusted him. So I let him inside. “This thing, this evil force, is coming after me. I can feel it, and it’s getting closer. Things have turned. Wondering if I’m the hunter or the prey.”

  “Any idea who’s behind it?”

  “Not yet. But it’s as if this thing has an obsession with me. Which means I have to get there first. Reach into the darkness. Trusting God to turn on the light so I can stop the monster. Kill it. Ram a stake through it.”

  “So, enlighten me. Who’s the obsessed one?” Dick sounded stone-cold serious.

  He ended the call by saying that he was about to send me a text message listing the vehicle registrations on the cars heading into Henry Franklin’s trailer park.

  I booted up my laptop, accessed the site on the cloud, and entered the passcode. A minute later the screen went black, then lit up with a banner that said, “Manitou Sheriff’s Department, Manitou, Wisconsin—Secure Site—Security Surveillance Camera Footage from Able Storage Facility, Highway 59,” followed by the date, which was the day before Wendell Quarlet set himself on fire at the incinerator.

  I touched the arrow icon on the screen, ready to find out who had been partying with Henry Franklin at his weird fire pit.

  The opening shot on the surveillance video showed the intersection of Highway 59 and Shore Road. After several minutes, a car passed down Highway 59, and a few minutes later, in the opposite direction, another.

  Then nothing. I waited, staring at an empty intersection in rural Wisconsin. Then something important happened.

  First, a Mercedes-Benz slowed down and pulled onto Shore Road. The footage stopped, showing the rear of the Benz. On the screen, in the upper corner, was the banner “Forensic Enlargement.” Ashley had arranged to have the state forensic guys do an enhancement of the license plate. I jotted down the license number.

  Ten minutes later another vehicle pulled up and slowly turned onto Shore Road.

  I said out loud, “You’re kidding, is that a Bentley?” Once again the footage stopped with the same banner in the upper corner of the screen. I wrote down that license plate too. But there was something interesting about the Bentley. It had tinted windows, so dark that I wondered if they were legal.

  Then the footage sped up, with the digital time indicator showing that two hours and ten minutes later, the Benz and the Bentley both left Franklin’s trailer park.

  I heard my cell ding. I checked the text message. It was from Dick Valentine. No personal tidings. Just the facts. The listing of the two cars and their registered owners: Mercedes-Benz—Wisconsin registration: Jeffery Opperdill. Bentley (Flying Spur)—Wisconsin registration: Wendell Quarlet.

  My mind raced. I stared at the information about the second vehicle and wondered how Wendell Quarlet, an employee at the Exotica shop with Augie, could afford a Bentley. Also inexplicable was the fact that the following day, Wendell would steal Augie’s Chevy Blazer and drive it to the incinerator where he would kill himself.

  It was intriguing. And screwy.

  I stood up and stretched, walked to the window to get a perfect view of the sidewalk outside the hotel lobby and the street. Nothing going on there. I strode around the room, trying to figure out the Henry Franklin–Jeffery Opperdill–Wendell Quarlet connection.

  Then a knock on the door. I looked through the tiny, circular view window in my door, but saw no face outside. I waited.

  I grabbed my room key, not a plastic card but an actual key, one of those long, metal, old-fashioned skeleton key–looking things with a plastic tag attached with my room number on it. I slid the safety chain off the door and opened it, stepping out into the empty hall. Halfway down the corridor, the elevator doors were closing. I sprinted in that direction, trying to catch a glimpse of the occupants. But I was too late. The doors had closed and the elevator was already heading down. I watched until I saw on the screen above the elevator doors that the car had made it all the way to the lobby, where it had stopped.

  As I stepped back, I felt someone standing behind me. But there was another sense too, and it told me instantly that I was in for trouble. There was that noxious, smoky scent of burning death. Out of my peripheral vision I caught the sight of a hulking figure behind me.

  Before I could respond there was a deep, guttural voice, powerful enough to resonate in my chest.

  “You were warned.”

  A large hand tightened around my neck, choking me from behind and hoisting me off the ground, while the other reached past me for the closed elevator doors and began to pry them open single-handedly.

  Still locked in a choke hold and held six inches off the ground, my room key in my hand, I was swung of
f to the side as if I were a kid’s stuffed animal. My assailant’s right foot was lodged into the space that he had created between the elevator doors with his hand. The doors were banged open wider, and even wider, with his foot and his hand. Wide enough so that—Oh no, I screamed silently in my head, he is going to toss me . . .

  And he did. Throwing me through the opening. My key dropped from my hand as I fell into the darkness of the elevator shaft. My hands grappled wildly until they landed on the vertical elevator cables, and I clutched the cables for dear life, dangling there, several stories up. But my hands were beginning to slip on the cables. Inch by inch, I was sliding down.

  Where was the elevator door to my floor? I looked up. I was hanging below it now, too far to reach. The doors were banging open, then closed, and then open again, against my room key, which was lodged in the floor track of the doors.

  “Oh, God, help me!” I yelled, and it echoed through the shaft. I tried to pull myself up, but my hands were sweaty, and the cables were greased. It was only a matter of seconds before I would slip off the cables entirely and then begin tumbling through the air and down to my death.

  I wish I could describe my cool, calm demeanor, my heroism in the face of destruction. But I’d be lying. I was in an imminent-death panic.

  Then a metallic groaning sound. The shaft shuddered as the cables moved, now bringing the elevator from the lobby, rising upward, and me with it. My hands were still slipping, but I hung on as tight as I could, being lifted upward until the elevator doors of my floor, banging open, were within reach. My rescue, engineered by the upward dynamic of a power accomplishing what I could not.

  With my left hand I reached out to the space between the banging elevator doors and laid hold of the threshold, then released my slippery grip on the cables with my right. I swung against the wall of the shaft, hanging on with both hands, and pulled myself upward until I could see the color of the carpet in the hallway and feel the blast of hotel air against my face.

  Squeezing myself frantically into the space between the doors, first on my belly, then on my knees, I finally stumbled to my feet, safely in the hallway. At the end of the corridor, an elderly man was standing at the door of his room, transfixed at the sight of someone climbing out of the elevator shaft.

  Less than ten minutes later I was standing at the lobby desk, still in my gym shorts, with my overnight bag and laptop, checking out.

  The clerk tried to be cordial. “How was your stay?”

  “Exciting.”

  The cordial expression disappeared. “Do you have your room key, sir? They are antiques, the old-fashioned kind.”

  “Which I’m really glad about.” I beamed.

  “Do you have it with you?”

  I told him, with regrets, that my big metal key was jammed in the floor track for the elevator door and that they’d have to call their maintenance crew.

  “Was there a problem with your key, sir?” he asked as I turned to stride out of the lobby.

  I yelled back, “No. It was a lifesaver.”

  54

  The call to my cell caught me just as I was climbing into the Ford Fairlane.

  “Trevor Black?”

  “Yes.”

  “Detective Colin Jennings here. I need you to come down to the sheriff’s department.”

  I quickly deduced that he had been placed back in charge of the investigation into Bobby’s death, and that Ashley was out. Before getting to his office, I stopped at a gas station to change into some pants and a shirt.

  At the sheriff’s office I was seated, without explanation, in front of a one-way pane of glass that looked into an interrogation room with a table and a few chairs.

  Then, through the glass, I saw Henry Franklin being escorted into the room and seated by Detective Colin Jennings, who sat next to him and began to ask questions. He spent the first ten or fifteen minutes diving into Franklin’s business relationship with Opperdill and his working for Opperdill as an independent contractor and foreman on various real estate ventures.

  Then things got really interesting.

  “Tell me, Mr. Franklin, about a group called ‘the Club’ that you are involved in.”

  Franklin started out cagey, using a dodge that was the equivalent of “it depends on what the definition of is is.” But after some persistent drilling, Jennings got him to admit that there really was such a group. “We have drinks around the fire pit. At my trailer park. That kind of thing.”

  Franklin hemmed and hawed at first about Opperdill. Jennings pushed, reminding him that failure to cooperate would go very badly for him. So, was Opperdill part of the Club, or wasn’t he?

  Finally Franklin fessed up that Jeffery Opperdill was in the group.

  “And you told Jeffery Opperdill about your encounter with Bobby Budleigh?”

  Franklin’s eyes darted, but he couldn’t see any trap in the truth. “Yes, I informed Mr. Opperdill. Bobby Budleigh said he was checking into environmental things.”

  The detective looked away casually. “Was Jeffery Opperdill concerned about the EPA?”

  “I couldn’t tell you what was in Mr. Opperdill’s mind,” Franklin retorted.

  Jennings tried it another way. “Okay, so did Opperdill look happy, sad, or mad about Bobby Budleigh’s research in Manitou?”

  “He didn’t look bothered. Just real interested. Asked me a bunch of questions about the guy. You know, about whether he was that Manitou kid from years before who had grown up here. Whether he was ‘that Bobby Budleigh.’ That’s the way Opperdill put it.”

  Jennings switched gears again. “Who is the person in the Club known as the Chief?”

  Franklin balked. Jennings pushed harder and then suggested a name. “Was Wendell Quarlet the Chief? The leader of this club?”

  Franklin scoffed at that. “You kidding? That punk? Don’t mean any disrespect, of course, his being deceased. But, hey, he couldn’t be the Chief.”

  Jennings followed up. “Then who?”

  Franklin pulled the plug. “Okay. I’ve done all the talking I’m going to do till I call my lawyer.”

  Jennings smiled, read him his Miranda rights, and said he was free to call his lawyer. But he added that Franklin was no longer free to leave the office and that he was now in custody for possible complicity in the death of Bobby Budleigh.

  Even through the one-way glass, I could tell that the color drained from Franklin’s face like he had just seen a ghost.

  Then Jennings asked him again if he was willing to share the identity of the Chief. I knew, and I’m sure Jennings also knew, that whatever Henry Franklin answered at that point couldn’t be used against him in court under Miranda. But it didn’t matter.

  Franklin shook his head furiously. “Nope,” he said. “Not telling you anything about this Chief stuff. No way.”

  Henry Franklin apparently was more frightened of the Chief than being charged with murder. More than seeing a ghost.

  55

  After the interrogation, Detective Jennings swooped back into the debriefing room where I was sitting and wanted to know my reaction to Henry Franklin’s comments. I told him that there was little new in what Franklin had said, except for his comment about Wendell Quarlet. “Wendell was a pawn,” I explained.

  “Go on,” Jennings said.

  “Based on Franklin’s comments. You heard it too. Of course I saw the newspaper clippings that were kept in a back room at Exotica. So I know something about his interests.”

  “Us too,” Jennings added. “We checked out his workplace after his death. I saw the newspaper collage on the wall. Not cute. Augie Bedders made a point of showing it to us and telling us how and when Wendell put it there. Your thoughts on this Club that Franklin and Opperdill were part of?”

  “No Boy Scout jamboree. They were majoring in the occult.”

  “Based on?”

  “My trip to their meeting place. Franklin’s haunted Halloween trailer park. A fire pit full of melted candle wax, a nasty animal s
acrifice, and some very un-nice people who gather there. And yes, I have seen the surveillance video, complete with license plates. And no, Detective Ashley Linderman did not supply it to me. I’ve got other contacts.”

  “Any other thoughts?” Jennings asked.

  “Something very otherworldly is going down. Call it what you want, but I call it demonic activity. The kind of thing that detectives like you joke about when guys like me aren’t in the room.”

  “Not true,” Jennings barked back with a crooked smile. “We joke about it even when guys like you are in the room.” Then he added, “Me, personally? I have this thing that I quote.”

  “Which is?”

  “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”

  I was impressed. A sheriff’s detective who quoted Hamlet?

  We parted ways, with no orders given about my not leaving town. As I climbed into the Fairlane, I was thinking about new lodgings. There was a motel in the city that I hadn’t tried yet. One where I could get to my room by a stairwell. No elevators for a while, thank you very much. I took a shortcut through a residential area that was thick with trees. I was beginning to recognize some of the houses, and they looked as if they had been frozen in time. I was suddenly struck with the fact that I was only two blocks from my boyhood home. I had driven past it only once since coming to Manitou, and then I had just breezed by quickly.

  I knew I would regret it if I didn’t swing by 207 Wilson Street this one last time.

  The two-story tan brick house where I grew up hadn’t changed much. The trim was now white rather than gray, and the landscaping was tidy, with some bushes that I didn’t remember. I cruised past it, then headed down the block toward the intersection with West Avenue.

  But there was another house on that block, and I slowed to see it. A big red mansion built in a Spanish motif. The former home of Mason Krim. My last memory was the overgrowth from the trees and bushes and the unmowed lawn. But now it looked different. Flowers had been planted everywhere in bright colored pots, the lawn was cut like a golf course, and there were two children’s bicycles in the driveway. Life had been breathed into the place, it seemed. That was a good thing. A restoration.