“Thanks.” Frank picked up his duffel bag and headed toward the bathroom.
Vince headed upstairs to his bedroom. He closed the door and picked up the phone, still dreading the call and wondering how he was going to broach the subject. Mike and Frank had been pretty adamant last night when they made the decision that they weren’t to say a word to anybody what they were doing. They’d told Vince to let his people at the office know that he simply had to take more time off to deal with his mother’s affairs. They didn’t need to know anything else. Vince agreed, but even last night he was dreading the calls he would have to make. Brian would be curious and would want to know what was going on—hell, the man was his best friend and he would know something was up. Likewise, Tracy would want to know what was happening. They’d made plans to spend the upcoming weekend together at her place, and she would be shocked to hear that Vince was suddenly breaking those plans to jet back to Pennsylvania to deal with his mother’s affairs.
Might as well get to it, he thought as he dialed Brian’s number.
The line on Brian’s end rang three times then went into voice mail. Vince relaxed. Now he wouldn’t be faced with actually talking to Brian himself. “Hey, Brian, it’s me,” Vince said, letting his thoughts spill out in his message. “Hey, listen, I’m going to have to take some more time off. I can’t really explain it to you now, but…um…some things have come up regarding my mother and her estate and everything, and they have to be dealt with now. So…um, I’m hoping you can cover for me and explain things to Jim for me when he gets back from vacation. I’m probably leaving this afternoon for Philly and don’t really know when I’ll be back. I’m guessing right now that I’ll need two weeks. Plus, considering what happened Sunday at the airport, it might be a good idea for me to get out of town for a while. If this looks like it’s going to drag on for longer, I’ll call back within the week. I’ll let Glenda know what’s going on too, so she can head Jim off at the pass.” Beat. “Um…I guess that’s it. I’ll be here till two I guess if you want to call me. See ya.” He hit the hang-up button, released it to get an open line, then dialed Glenda’s number and gave her a similar message on her voice mail. When he was finished he hung up and sat on the bed for a moment, finger still pressed on the hang-up button, debating on what to tell Tracy.
You’ve got to tell her, he thought, as he flipped through his phone book for her number. Might as well catch her at the office. At this time, she’s probably already in the office and taking calls. Besides, wouldn’t it be nice to hear her voice before you leave?
Yes, it would. He smiled, relaxing a little as he started dialing her number.
There was a knock on his bedroom door and then it opened. Frank stood in the hall, peering in at him questioning. “You need towels? They’re in the linen closet right at the head of the stairs.”
“Who you calling?”
“My girlfriend.”
“Uh uh.” Frank shook his head and walked in the bedroom as if he owned the place. He looked displeased. He reached out and took the receiver from Vince’s hand. “Sorry, buddy. No calls to girlfriends.”
Vince looked up at Mark, flabbergasted. “I thought you guys were a trifle paranoid, but I didn’t realize that—”
“Yeah, we’re paranoid all right.” Frank set the receiver down on the cradle. “And until this thing is over, we’re playing it safe.”
“But…shouldn’t Tracy know what’s going on? I mean, she was there when that guy tried to kill me! She could’ve been shot herself!”
“I know, but we gotta play by the rules,” Frank said. “The less she knows, the better.”
For a minute Vince didn’t think he would be able to speak. Finally he sputtered, “Doesn’t she know enough after what happened? All I’m going to do is tell her I’m leaving town for the weekend. Why keep anything further from her? “
“For the reasons I told you yesterday, and what Mike and I told you last night at dinner.” Frank sighed wearily. “Look, Vince, I don’t like playing the crazy conspiracy theorist. I really don’t. But until this thing is over, we need to keep a close knit on this thing. You don’t want to endanger Tracy further, do you?”
“No.” Vince saw Frank’s logic, but he still didn’t understand the paranoia. If Tracy wasn’t one of them, what was the harm in telling her he wasn’t going to be able to see her this weekend? He voiced this to Frank. “We already made plans,” he said.
Frank appeared to struggle with this, and then relented. “All right,” he said. “But quickly. Tell her your flight is leaving in an hour and you have to head to the airport.”
Vince picked up the phone and started dialing Tracy’s work number again, wondering if Frank was going to give him privacy. Frank stood beside him, waiting. Vince listened to the phone ring on Tracy’s end, trying not to let his displeasure toward Frank’s eavesdropping show.
“Tracy Harris.”
“Tracy, it’s Vince.”
“Vince!” Her voice brightened instantly and Vince’s heart warmed at the sound of it. Yes, he was definitely beginning to develop feelings for her. “You coming in today?”
“No, I’m not,” he said, feeling the pressure of Frank standing over him, listening to every word that was being said begin to intrude on him. “In fact, I won’t be in for probably the next two weeks. I’m leaving for Philly in about an hour, and I just wanted to let you know. I’m sorry that spoils our weekend, and I’m sorry I can’t explain more, but—” He detected a faint nod of disapproval from Frank and continued on. “—I’ve got more stuff to take care of regarding my mother. I’m sorry.”
Tracy was silent for a moment. Vince could picture her in her cubicle, holding the receiver to her ear, looking stunned at this sudden news. “That’s okay, Vince,” she said. It was evident from her tone of voice that she was shocked at the sudden news. “I know you…have to get through all that’s happened with your mother and…what happened Sunday, but… I just…wish you would have told me sooner.”
“I wish I did, too,” Vince said. “But then all this has happened so suddenly.” He detected movement out of the corner of his eye and looked up at Frank, who was making a slashing motion across his throat. Time to cut this conversation off now. Vince nodded. “I’m sorry about the suddenness of all this and I promise to make it up to you. I’ll call you when I get back, okay?”
“Okay.” Her voice still sounded surprised; he didn’t know her well enough yet to detect whether there was a trace of hurt feelings, but he supposed that under the circumstances there was. “When will you call me?”
“As soon as I can,” Vince said, and now Frank was making the cut-off gestures more frantically now. “I gotta go honey, my shuttle is here. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Tracy said, and then Vince hung up.
He sat on the bed for a moment, still stunned at how sudden and awkward the conversation had been. Frank sighed. “I’m sorry I had to be so abrupt with you, Vince, but I hope you understand.”
“I hope someday I do understand,” Vince said as he stood up and, not looking at Frank, headed to the master bathroom for his shower.
Lititz, Pennsylvania
REVEREND HANK POWELL carried his Colt Python with him everywhere he went now.
Even when he was in the house.
Especially when he was in the house.
If they could only see me now, Reverend Powell thought to himself as he trudged warily down the stairs to his finished basement. While he was dressed in his usual attire—a pair of clean, fresh jeans, a short-sleeved cotton shirt, blue tennis shoes—he hadn’t shaved or showered in three days. His thinning hair was heavy with grease and dandruff. His stubble was thickening, and Hank paused occasionally to scratch his itchy cheeks. Most prominent were his eyes, which were red-rimmed and haunted, dark circles and bags prominent under them. What little sleep Hank Powell had been able to get had been in fits and starts, in two hour snatches.
He always had the Colt within easy reach, e
ven when sleeping. Most of the time he fell asleep with it clutched in his hand.
Reverend Powell’s finished basement had been built into a very comfortable living space. The stairs to the basement led to a comfortable den with a plush sofa and easy chair and a twenty-seven-inch Minolta TV on a polished oak stand. To the right of the den was a separate room that Reverend Powell had converted to a guestroom. Beyond the den was a recreation room flanked by a bar. Three barstools at the bar, and the glass shelving behind it housed an impressive liquor cabinet. An impressive looking pool table took up most of the space in the recreation room, and perched on the far wall was the head and shoulders of a buck he’d taken down ten years ago in Berks County. He headed past the pool table to a door that led to a small storeroom, the only space in the basement that wasn’t completely finished.
He opened the door and turned on the light from the string that hung down from the bare sixty-watt bulb in the ceiling. The room was small, twelve by fifteen feet perhaps, with wood shelving and a concrete floor. Reverend Powell kept what few tools he had and various odds and ends down here; old books, photo albums, things he couldn’t bear to throw away. He stepped further into the room and reached into a shelf space and felt around the bare concrete wall to a spot that was a natural cubby-hole, his groping fingers brushing against what he’d stashed in there three days ago since finding it. Now he brought it out with shaking hands, wondering why he was looking at it again when he knew it was just going to make him more afraid and paranoid.
He found the box the day Vince left for California. He’d headed over to Maggie Walter’s place that evening very late, hoping to avoid the curious speculations of the few neighbors who lived in the area. He’d parked his truck behind her home, and headed to the backyard where he sat on her porch for awhile, letting his eyes get adjusted to the dark. It had been a clear night, with a half-moon riding high in the sky providing all the illumination he would need. He’d looked out at the backyard, noticing a few of the marks in the ground he’d dug then covered up, not giving a damn if it would attract the attention of the authorities if they decided to come poking around again. He decided it wouldn’t matter. If anybody decided to ask him he would suggest that it was probably animals digging around in her backyard.
The first time he’d come to the yard in that first futile attempt at locating the box he counted off the ten paces just as Lillian had told him. That first dig yielded nothing, so he tried to the immediate left and right of that first attempt. Then he’d tried a foot ahead, again to the left and right. He’d left that evening, not wanting to arouse too much suspicion.
The next trip had proven to be a charm, though. He counted ten steps again, this time taking to mind Maggie’s smaller stature. He wound up two steps behind his original ten from his first attempt and started digging. Five minutes later he hit pay dirt.
He’d brushed the dirt off the box, covered up the hole, then climbed in his Explorer and driven home. The key he’d lifted from Lillian’s home on the day she died was in his bedroom drawer. He’d gotten it, then opened the little silver lock that held the box closed.
He carried the box into the basement den, trembling as he sat down and fitted the key in the lock again. He remembered how nervous he’d been the first time he’d unlocked the box, and he was just as nervous now as he opened it again. He supposed he would get this feeling no matter how many times he opened the box and poked through its contents. But sifting through it also had its benefits. It was helping him to understand Maggie Walters and the events that had transpired in the past week. It was helping him to build his armor up for the battle against Satan.
He opened the box. He’d left the items as he found them, and as he lifted them out he looked through each again, one by one. The first things were the birth certificates. One for Margaret Harris, born in Sacramento in June of 1946. The second was for Andrew Harris, a boy, born June 5, 1966, in Los Angeles, California.
Margaret Harris…Maggie Walters…Andrew Harris…Vince Walters.
The items that followed helped to make that identification. There were old photographs of Maggie as a young woman and there were baby photos of Vince. There was a small photo album also, with handwritten captions making identification easier. The woman he knew as Maggie Walters was identified in the photographs depicting a young Maggie as Margaret Swanson, while those of the young boy were identified as Andrew Swanson. The resemblance between the boy identified as Andrew Harris and the young man named Vince who’d introduced himself as Maggie’s son were unmistakable.
Most of the photos in the album were the depictions of normalcy in the 60s: mother and son playing together, what looked like family gatherings, trips to the park, the zoo. There were a section of photos that looked like they were taken in San Francisco. And as the years went by in the collage of photos, so did the dress and hair change with the times. Maggie began to look more hippie-like, as did the other people in the photographs. And even though they all looked to be smiling and happy, there was something about them, some underlying presence that bothered Reverend Hank Powell.
When he first came across this photo album and the birth certificates, his first impression was what he’d told Lillian Withers that day ten years ago. The box contained nothing but mementos of her former life as a sinner. When he saw the birth certificates and made the connection with the photos, he’d thought it was a bit drastic to change your name and identity just to escape from a former life of sin. But as he dug deeper into the box he’d uncovered the reasons for why Maggie Walters had taken such drastic measures.
He took a deep breath and composed himself as he brought those items out now. Thank God there were no photos. Newspaper clippings were bad enough.
It was the newspaper accounts that had disturbed him deeply; they still disturbed him. They were arranged in chronological order, the first dated June 1968. They were brief clippings cut from newspapers in San Jose, Santa Cruz, and Los Gatos, all concerning the discovery of canines skinned and drained of blood in various parts of the city. There had been no known motives for the crimes.
There were similar clippings from August of 1968, then in November of that year there was a single news clipping from the San Francisco Chronicle. It concerned the disappearance of a local teenager, a sixteen-year old boy with a history of drug abuse. The boy had apparently disappeared on his way home from school, and it was assumed he’d simply run away.
Reverend Hank Powell believed otherwise.
Starting in April of 1969, newspaper clippings from the Los Angeles area—The Herald Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register—began appearing with the Bay Area newspapers. They detailed more of the same; brief, four paragraph news items on the discovery of mutilated animals, primarily dogs, and news briefs on missing persons, most of them teenagers.
In August of 1969 the clippings got bigger. The minute Reverend Powell saw the headline his mind went back to when he first saw those headlines: Five Slain in Los Angeles Home of Film Director Roman Polanski…Actress Sharon Tate among those dead. When Reverend Powell saw those headlines again among the other clippings his first thought was this couldn’t be. Surely Maggie couldn’t have had anything to do with the Manson case. As he flipped through further clippings of the case—the discovery of the LaBiancas, the capture and arrest of Charles Manson and his ‘Family,’ the pre-trial hearings, the convictions and interspersed with those, more of those same four paragraph clippings, now coming from other states, all dealing with dogs found skinned and drained of blood.
Reverend Powell had flipped through the rest of the clippings with bated breath, coming across the other cases of atrocities and murder, already panicking. But then last night he caught something that he missed that first time, and it was this, which had made him proceed with more caution. He’d given a quick prayer to the Lord for letting him see this, because it not only gave him more insight to what he was dealing with, it made him less likely to panic the next time he came across some other sho
cking bit of news.
The item he’d missed was on the first headline of the Manson case, the discovery of Sharon Tate and the five other people found butchered in Topanga Canyon. The headline was circled in blue ballpoint pen with a question mark scribbled over it. The words, “Did Sam order this?” written in a script the Reverend recognized as Maggie’s was so faint that it was easy to miss. He’d found similar markings in the faint script on other newspaper clippings on the Manson case. Most of them bore that faint question mark. One article, regarding the murder of Hollywood stunt-man “Shorty” Shea, had an inscription that said, “This sounds like it could be the work of the group—not sure.” The clippings on the Manson case were not the only ones that bore such little notes and jottings.
There were other clippings equally ominous. One from 1970 regarded the capture of a man named Stanley Baker, who’d killed a businessman in Montana and confessed to eating his victim’s heart. There was vague speculation that he’d committed murders on the command of a cult, but there’d been no information forthcoming. Smaller clippings followed the Stanley Baker case until October of 1974, when a young Stanford University student named Arlis Perry was found murdered. She’d been found in the campus chapel, nude from the waist down, beaten and choked unconscious. She’d been killed with an ice pick, which had been driven into her brain behind her left ear.
The last newspaper clippings had come from the Toronto Sun, dated July 1977, regarding the capture of David Berkowitz in the Son of Sam killings, and from the Orange County Register from October 1988 regarding the capture of serial killer Edwin Groose. Like the Manson clippings, Maggie had stored newspaper accounts of the Berkowitz and Groose case until their conviction.
Interspersed with the newspaper accounts of the two well-known murder trials and the smaller, lesser-known crimes, were clips from various business journals. Some were from the Wall Street Journal, others were from magazines like the Business Weekly. At first Reverend Powell wasn’t sure of the significance of these clippings, but upon going through them a second time a few nights ago he began to see some sort of thread. All of the clippings had to do with the business activities of one man, Samuel F. Garrison. All of the clippings depicted Samuel Garrison’s slow but steady rise to power in the business world.
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