Presently, he was several feet away from us with the virtually omnipresent fedora pushed up high on his forehead as he carefully studied the room. At his side, he held tight to a bag that might have been a sack lunch. I didn’t ask.
“K-A-S-P-R-Z-Y-K-O-W-S-K-I.” The older county detective offered the string of letters from memory. “You pronounce it, kasper-kush-kee.”
I mentally aligned the letters and then silently repeated the name back to myself, placing the proper “ksh” emphasis on the ZYK combination and allowing the W to remain silent. “Slavic, obviously,” I said aloud.
“Yeah,” Deckert agreed. “It’s Polish. Means something like ‘the place of Kasper’s son.’”
“You get that from the next of kin?” Ben asked.
“Still haven’t found any yet,” Deckert told him with a shake of his head.
“Nobody?”
“Nope. Not so far.”
“So, what’s up with you and the genealogy lesson? You been eatin’ a bunch of kielbasa or somethin’?”
“My babcia was originally from Poland.”
“Your what?” Ben asked.
“Grandmother,” he explained. “She was a first generation immigrant.” He then gave his head a quick tilt to the side before adding, “But since you brought it up, she did make a pretty mean kielbasa and kraw.”
“What’s a ‘kraw’?”
“Sauerkraut.”
“Oh, okay. I love that stuff, but it kills me every time I eat it.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Hey, she make those pierogie things too?”
“Yeah.” Deckert nodded. “Pierogies, kluski, golabki, krupnik, you name it. Babcia was a hell of a cook.”
“That what’s in the bag?”
“I wish.”
“Too bad. Jeez, I guess we better stop talkin’ about food,” Ben said. “I just realized I haven’t had anything to eat since dinner last night.”
“Hey,” I interjected. “Is this really the appropriate time and place for this discussion?”
I suppose there was some level of disdain in my voice that was readily apparent because both of them looked at me with somewhat apologetic expressions on their faces.
“Coppers do this shit, Row,” my friend told me. “You know that. It’s how we keep from goin’ nuts.”
“Yeah, I know,” I replied. “Sorry… I’m just… I don’t know.”
“It’s okay, Rowan,” Deckert offered.
Ben shifted the subject back to what had originally led down the culinary path. “So why were you askin’ about his name anyway, white man?”
“Curiosity I guess,” I told him. “Trying to make sense of everything.”
“Well I hate to sound crass.” Ben tossed in his two cents, “But his name could be Smith. Doesn’t really matter. He’s dead.”
“You’re right,” I returned. “But he was alive once.”
“Uh-huh. ‘Bout two weeks ago,” Deckert offered and then explained. “According to the M.E., he’d been deceased for approximately a week when he was found, and that was a week ago itself.”
I nodded. “So I’ve heard.”
The wholly unmistakable funk of death still lingered on the gelid air, and the lag time between death and discovery Deckert just mentioned explained it. Fortunately, it was faint as there had been some time for the place to air out; which also explained why every time I spoke I could see my words as well as hear them. Still, it was nowhere near as bad as it could have been.
I let my eyes roam and slowly scanned the area around me, getting a visual feel for the place. We were actually standing in the partially finished basement of a house that sat just inside the municipality of Wood Dell. Recently hung sheet rock formed a wall to our right and was marred at intervals by wide vertical swaths of joint compound. Bare studs to our rear formed a half-wall return that separated one section from the next. At the far end of the room, a doorway led deeper into the basement and presumably the ongoing remodeling project.
My gaze eventually came to rest on the centerpiece we’d surrounded—a set of well-seasoned sawhorses, age-greyed and paint-spattered, that were occupying the middle of the room. A hardwood one-by-ten was stretched across them with the beginning of a decorative edge routed into one side. The smoothly tapered cut ran for approximately ten inches then suddenly degraded as the careful craftsmanship vanished into an arcing gouge that hop-scotched across the surface of the wood.
On the bare, plywood sub-floor beneath, a chalked outline stood out against the sawdust and construction detritus. At a bulbous point in the scribed profile that was obviously where the man’s head had been, dried blood stained the wood a rusty brown. It had pooled in a haphazard pattern that in a bizarre sense resembled a fuzzy map of Italy, morbid as that observation was. Additional stains spread outward from what had probably been the early stages of purging and putrefaction.
The coppery scent of the old blood blended with the nasal bite of sappy lumber, adding themselves to the potpourri of odors. Even as faint as it was, in the back of my mind I wondered if I would ever be able to forget the sharpness of this smell.
My friend took notice of where my focused stare had fallen, and he cleared his throat.
“You slippin’ into la-la land?” he asked.
“No,” I returned, breaking my intense gaze away from the outline and turning to Ben. “Just thinking.”
“Coroner’s report says he bled out,” Deckert told me as if he felt a need to explain the bloodstain. “Looks like the wacko came in while the guy was working, picked up a hammer, and jacked him in the head. Poor bastard just laid there and bled to death. Of course, he probably would’ve ended up being a vegetable if he hadn’t.”
“Lesser of two evils,” I muttered.
“Something like that,” he agreed, then continued. “Anyway, from what we found it looks like the asshole might have lived here for at least a couple of days after he killed him. Maybe a week.”
“So Porter’s been in town for at least two weeks?”
“Yeah,” Deckert answered. “Looks that way.”
“I still don’t understand why you didn’t tell me about it until now,” I contended.
“Albright was already running things, Row,” Ben spoke. “She made it pretty clear that you weren’t to be involved.”
“But you called me this morning about Randy, and that was before you even knew who the victim was.”
“Yeah, and I got my ass chewed for it too.”
“Earlier you said there were reasons I wasn’t told,” I continued. “Reasons means more than one.”
“Yeah, it does.”
“Would you like to expand on that?”
“You won’t like it.”
“So what’s new about that?”
Ben paused and stared at me for a moment. “Truth?”
“I would hope.”
“It wasn’t just Albright. Deck, Mandalay, and I recommended that you be left out of it so we could keep your sorry ass from showing up here unescorted.”
“That seems to be a theme with you lately,” I returned.
“So sue me,” he answered.
“Maybe later,” I told him for lack of anything better to say.
My friend circled back to the original topic once again. “Well anyway, considerin’ the name and the evidence, I’m bettin’ this guy wasn’t a Witch.”
“You can’t base it on his name, Ben. WitchCraft crosses several ethnic boundaries, and there is such a thing as Slavic Paganism,” I answered then gave him a nod. “But you’re right. I don’t think that this victim was Pagan, and that’s what bothers me.”
Quiet fell in the room while I stood pondering the unheralded death of a man I never knew. I could feel my face hardening into a frown as I mulled over the facts I’d been given.
“Whatcha’ thinkin’ about now, Row?” my friend finally prodded.
“Why would Porter do that?” I asked aloud, talking to myself as much as to him.
&nb
sp; “Do what?” Ben asked.
“Deliberately kill a non-Pagan individual.”
“Hell, Rowan, who knows?” Deckert shrugged and shook his head. “Covering his tracks probably.”
“But it just doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Porter’s thing has always been killing Witches. The last time around he even had a crisis of faith when he accidentally killed a non-Pagan.”
“As I recall,” Ben offered, “he ended up blaming you for that.”
“That’s how he came to terms with it, yes,” I assented.
“Yeah, well, I think Porter’s made it clear that it’s not just about killin’ Witches anymore, Row. He’s got it in for YOU.”
“Yeah, I know,” I replied. “So why am I here?”
I knew my words sounded more like a demand than a question the moment I heard my own voice, but I couldn’t help it. The dam had finally broken on my headache, and it was ramping up at an ever increasing rate. On top of that, I had an anxious feeling slithering around inside me that I just couldn’t shake. I didn’t know if it was fear, nerves, or something ethereal. I couldn’t even pinpoint if it had to do with me or someone else. All I could say for a fact was that I didn’t feel right, and this excursion was beginning to come across as an exercise in futility.
“Whaddaya mean?”
“I mean exactly that. What am I doing here? What does Albright want me to look at?” I waved my arm in a semicircle to indicate the scene before us. “Surely not this.”
“Well, there’s more in the back,” Deckert offered then held up the brown paper bag. “But she also said she wanted you to see this.”
“So that isn’t your lunch?” I asked, fighting to keep the sarcasm out of my voice and only partially succeeding.
Fortunately, Carl ignored it.
“Hell no,” he replied as he set the bag on the end of the board that was resting across the two-by-fours and then proceeded to unfold the top. “I don’t know what it is.”
Deckert reached into the now open bag, and when he withdrew his hand, he was holding a somewhat old-looking and dirt-smeared mason jar. From where I stood, I could see that the ring holding the lid on was rusted and weathered. A winding or two of black electrical tape encircled the rim and neck of the glass vessel. It appeared to be approximately half full with various shapes; some large, some small, some dark, some light, and some were even shiny. Pale liquid made up the remaining volume to within a pair of inches from the sealed top.
“Where did you find that?” I asked.
“Flowerbed next to the front porch,” Deckert replied. “One of the Crime Scene guys noticed that the mulch had been disturbed. He found this buried about a foot or so down.”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “That would be about right.”
“So you sound like you know what it is?” he half-stated, half-asked.
Ben had reached out and taken the container from Deckert and was holding it up in the dim light. He inspected it intensely, holding it close to his face as he twisted it then announced, “There’s nails and fishhooks and razor blades and all kinds of other shit in here.”
“Probably some screws, broken glass, pins, needles, and anything else sharp you can think of too,” I added. “That’s a Witch jar.”
“THIS is a Witch jar?” Ben asked.
“What’s a Witch jar?” Deckert wedged in his question.
“It’s a protective talisman from a long line of folklore.” I offered the same general explanation I’d given Ben earlier. “They are used to repel Witches and especially magick. Sometimes they’re called Witch bottles. Porter probably made it and buried it out front in order to protect himself from me.”
“So when you mentioned these things earlier, I asked you if it was something I needed to know about,” Ben said, still inspecting the container.
“Actually you asked me if you WANTED to know about them,” I replied.
“Same difference,” he shot back.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” I apologized with a somewhat defensive tone in my voice. “I was just speculating at the time. I didn’t know that he’d actually leave a Witch jar somewhere.”
“Yeah, I know, but what I’m sayin’ is that you made out like it was something weird and all. I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s just a bunch of nails and shit in a jar of water.”
“That’s not water, Ben,” I told him. “It’s urine.”
He sat the jar back onto the board in a quick flurry of motion and then began wiping his hand on his pants leg as he screwed up his face in disgust. “What the fuck?! You mean he pissed in it?”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “That’s how you make a Witch jar.”
“Jeezus, white man. That’s just gross.”
“Hey.” I shrugged. “I told you that you probably didn’t want to know.”
“Well hell, I can see why they would work,” Ben, announced. “I’m repelled by the damn thing myself.”
“That’s not exactly the intended use, Ben,” I told him. “It’s not the ‘disgust factor’ that does it; besides, now that it’s no longer buried it’s pretty much useless.”
“It has to be buried?”
I canted my head in a quick nod. “In order to work, yes.”
“So it’s just a jar of piss?” he asked.
“Pretty much.” I nodded. “With sharp objects in it.”
“So was it like some kinda magic or spell or somethin’?”
“More or less.”
“Well, there’s a WHY for you. If Porter is so dead set on killin’ Witches then why would he do something like this?”
“For the very same reason he wants to kill Witches,” I explained. “Superstition. Like I said, a Witch jar is something drawn from folklore.”
“So if it’s just a superstition then how can it work?”
“Have you ever heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy?”
“You mean like when you get yourself so worked up worrying about something that you actually make it happen?” Deckert asked.
I nodded my head. “Exactly. It’s the same concept. That’s the thing about magick. If you believe in it enough, you can make it real.”
“Okay, but this thing is still gross.”
“I’m not going to debate that with you,” I replied as I motioned to the vessel. “But, now you know what a Witch jar is.”
“Wunnerful,” he muttered. “I feel sufficiently educated now.”
“So, Carl, you said there was something in the back?” I ignored my friend’s sardonic tone and directed my question to Detective Deckert.
“Yeah.” He pointed to the doorway at the other end of the divided room. “He got a little artistic on the walls back there.”
“Monogram of Christ?” I mentioned the wreath-encircled X bisected by a P because it had been one of Porter’s calling cards the last time he had gone on a killing spree. I had even been on the receiving end of a series of ethereal stigmata of the same shape each time he claimed a victim. Unconsciously I reached my right hand over to massage my left forearm, as it had been the canvas for the bloody signs. Fortunately, there were no indications of a repeat performance at the moment.
“Yeah, there’s a couple of those.” He nodded affirmation as he spoke. “But there’s some other stuff. Star kinda things. Not sure what they’re s’posed to be. You’ll just have to look at ‘em.”
I shuddered for a moment and looked around as the hairs on the back of my neck rose painfully to attention. The tickle of gooseflesh serpentined down my spine and spread out from there, making me tense my muscles in pure reflex.
“You okay, white man?” Ben asked.
“I’m not sure,” I replied without looking at him. “I feel…”
I allowed my voice to trail off very simply because I couldn’t find words to describe the feeling that had come over me.
“You feel what?” my friend pressed after a moment of expectant silence.
The tingle that was prancing about on my skin oozed down my arms and welled in my h
ands, making them feel as though circulation was only now returning after an extended absence. Painful pricking sensations needled my fingers in a rapid-fire assault. I looked down at my hands and rubbed my thumbs against my fingertips. The pain intensified with each pass, and my hands began to burn as if they were on fire.
I’ve never been a big fan of Shakespeare, so I don’t quite know why I picked his work to quote other than the fact that it seemed to fit. I looked up at them, and the line of prose exited my mouth before I could even think. “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.”
CHAPTER 15:
“That’s Shakespeare, ain’t it?” Ben asked.
“Macbeth,” Deckert offered. “Act four, scene one.”
Ben looked over at him and raised an eyebrow.
“Gimme a break, Mona’s a high school English teacher.” Deckert shrugged as he referred to his wife. “I’ve seen the play a few hundred times.”
Ben turned back to me. “So is this some kinda Twilight Zone thing, Row?”
“Yeah,” I said as I nodded. “You could say that.”
“Okay.” He gave me a questioning gaze to match his tone. “What’s it mean?”
“How many times do I have to tell you…” I began.
“Hold on,” Deckert interrupted and motioned for us both to be quiet. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Ben asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “It sounded like it was coming from upstairs.”
Ben shook his head. “I didn’t hear anything.”
We stood in relative silence, gazing up at the drop ceiling over our heads and listening intently. Detective Deckert still held his hand up, frozen in place as we waited.
“Listen.” His eyes grew wide as the noise filtered down to us. “There it is again.”
To me, it sounded akin to a screaming hiss, coupled with a dull roar, and occasionally punctuated by a popping sizzle. It was muffled by the walls and ceiling above us, but it was definitely growing louder by the second. There was something frighteningly familiar about the sound, and I was searching my memories as fast as I could, trying to place a cause with the effect.
Before I managed to make the connection, my friend spoke up. “Hear something hell, I can smell it.”
The Law Of Three: A Rowan Gant Investigation Page 13