“I really can’t discuss the case,” Manny replied as official-sounding as he could.
“No, I get it. It’s just odd, though. How could the person who did this get the kid out of the house and into the backyard with no one seeing him?”
Something about her was odd. It was human nature to be bizarrely fascinated with death. It was a coping mechanism of sorts. However, this woman had a different sort of look in her eyes. There was more to her question than mere curiosity. Manny decided to play along.
“We’re working on several theories,” Manny said matter-of-factly. “I’ll admit, though, that detail is a tricky one.”
“I’ll bet the FBI will have some good insights,” she said.
Manny thought he caught one of her eyebrows rise mischievously. Was she trying to tweak him? He simply smiled and nodded.
“I can’t imagine the family would want to stay at the house tonight, after everything that’s happened.” She continued to probe.
Manny sat up a bit straighter at that. What was this woman driving at? “No, they’re staying with family for a while.”
It was the truth. The Lowes family was staying with Kristin’s mom and dad for the next few days. He had a PI friend keeping an eye on them. He hadn’t exactly cleared this with the captain and the sheriff, but he didn’t want Tom and the family to skip town on him. And if they did anything suspicious, he wanted to be the first to know.
The woman nodded and paused for a moment before gathering up her hair into a tight ponytail. “It’s just so sad,” she said, almost to herself, “a kid that young having their throat cut like that and burned. It’s almost too gruesome for words.”
Manny had seen and heard everything he needed to. It was time to go. He drained his beer and got up off the stool, reaching into his pocket for his money clip. He pulled a twenty dollar bill out and laid it on the bar.
“I’d better get going,” he said, trying to seem casual. “Big day with the Feds tomorrow. Will this cover my tab?”
She looked down and nodded, slowly taking the money before looking back up and flashing him a smile. “That’s more than enough, thank you. By the way, I didn’t catch your name.” She stuck out her hand for him to shake.
“Manny Benitez,” he said, taking her hand in his. “But, you knew that, didn’t you, Ms. . . . ?”
“Allen,” she laughed, “Maureen Allen. And, yeah, I caught it on the TV, but I just wanted to hear it from you.”
“Well in that case,” he smiled, “it was a pleasure talking to you, Ms. Allen.”
Manny turned and made his way through the bar and out into the night air. He crossed the street to his truck and hopped in. He had no intention, however, of turning the key and driving home.
All evening, he’d sworn that he had seen that woman before. The moment she pulled her hair back, the answer came to him. She was there. After the body of the Lowes boy was loaded into the coroner’s van, he had looked out at the crowd and caught eyes with a female dressed in running attire with honey-blonde hair tied back into a ponytail. At the time, he dismissed her turning and running back the way she came as no more than a neighbor out for a morning run who didn’t wish to be part of the entourage around the house. But as he played out the scene in his mind, he recalled the strange look of horrified recognition on her face. He had no doubt that this was the same woman who had just poured him his beer.
He checked the time. There was still over two hours until the bar closed. Manny settled in for his long wait.
SEVEN
Maureen locked the front door of the bar and stuffed the key into the lock box beside it. It was well after midnight, and she had had a hell of a time getting the last of her regulars out of the bar. Stan was still sauntering off down the street toward home. She could just make out his round-shouldered form swaying in the streetlight at the end of the block.
The rest of the street was still, and only a couple of vehicles were parked. She thought she caught a flash of movement in the cab of an older-looking truck across the street from the bar, but when she looked again, she saw nothing. It seemed that the conversation with the detective had left phantoms in her head. She tried to shake them free, but their continued gnawing was almost impossible to ignore.
Anderson’s bar stood on a side street about a block and a half south of Main Street. It was housed among several other storefronts in a turn-of-the-century building. Todd Anderson, the owner, had bought the building as an investment back in the eighties. Taking the money he earned from the dive bar and the rent from other tenants and adding it to the money he saved by paying his staff a paltry wage meant that he had never needed to find a real day job.
Maureen reached into her pocket and fingered the wad of bills that made up her tip money. Though she received mostly singles, her act with a couple of the regulars and that nice tip from the detective had raised the night’s take to seventy-eight dollars. Thursday nights were usually her best nights, as the odd group of college kids usually stumbled in, looking to get their weekend off to an early start, but taking in over seventy bucks in this little town was rare. She couldn’t help but smile just a little, happy that the cash in her pocket alone should cover the bus ticket. She wouldn’t have to dip into the cash in her duffel bags, which now sat on her bed, packed and waiting for her to snatch them up and be on her way out of this mess. And away from the nightmares.
Maureen let out an unenthusiastic sigh at the prospect of her overnight trek to the bus station. She was more tired than usual after a bar shift despite being, happily, less drunk than she normally was. The weight of her nightmare, combined with the new knowledge that not only was a child dead but the body was also horribly burned, pressed down on her shoulders. No matter how many times she told herself that it wasn’t her fault, seeing the things she saw in these terrible dreams and not being able to control them filled her with an enormous amount of shame. Catholic guilt, she thought to herself.
It was almost funny that she would use those words. The Catholic religion had never been anything but a source of unmitigated pain in her life. It was her mother’s fervor and superstitious beliefs that had driven her to entrust Maureen into the hands of zealots—first at the hospital mere days after her brother’s body was found, then for nearly eight years in that prison that masqueraded as a boarding school. In both places, the cross and rosary were front and center, and when simple prayer didn’t work to drive the evil out of her, the priests and nuns would turn to more medieval practices. Still, the nightmares would come, and she would see into the depraved minds of those that made these places their playground. She would put on their faces in her sleep and wear them like the masks they themselves wore in the light of day, and she would understand how piety and holiness were just a cover for them—a shield to hide behind—while they acted on their deeper desires and lusts. She learned early that when you go head-on against an institution, it is you who suffer while the perpetrators get no justice. To this day, she has never forgotten the sound that a toe makes when it’s broken.
And yet, even as Maureen stood alone on the sidewalk remembering all the lessons learned and the reasons that she tried to stay uninvolved, she felt her mind pull her feet in another direction. This unseen force, driven by the deep recesses of her subconsciousness, dragged her back toward Main Street. A desire to see the crime scene for herself took control of her body, and a subtle voice rang out in her head. What if you’re wrong? What if the nightmare didn’t show you the death of that kid from the news? She had to know. Biting her lip, Maureen looked up and down the dark street, searching for any movement, any set of eyes on her. She saw none. She closed her eyes, let out a deep breath, and began to briskly walk toward Main Street.
She mumbled to herself that this was a bad decision almost as soon as her feet hit the pavement of Main Street, and she moved more and more rapidly as she continued on her way toward the house with the red door. It was
n’t really a snap decision, though, if she was being honest with herself. She thought of it during her conversation with the detective at the bar. It was the reason for her asking if the family was still staying in the house. Breaking into a crime scene was going to be one thing. Breaking into a crime scene with a victimized family still inside was going to be something else.
The crunch of gravel under her feet told Maureen that she was getting closer to the once idyllic subdivision. A pair of headlights appeared in the distance. She moved a few feet off the shoulder into the grass, slowing down as the car passed in the hopes that she would avoid detection. She flinched as another vehicle passed from the rear, going in the opposite direction. She watched the taillights head off down the road, stop several hundred meters away, and disappear. Must have turned down a side street, she thought.
The stone monument that marked the entrance to the subdivision came into view, and in a few moments, she was walking up the same street as that morning. The sound of a car pulling into the subdivision made her head whip back behind her. She saw nothing, though, and chalked it up to nerves. She turned back toward the lights and continued at a slow pace, as if she were dragging a weight behind her.
She came to a stop on the sidewalk just in front of the two-story home. Her eyes were fixed on the red door as she recalled with vivid detail the brief moment of eye contact with the young detective. The buzzing crowd from earlier had given way to the silence of the night, and the only sign that they had been there was the trampled grass of the front lawn and the pile of bouquets and stuffed animals near the front stoop. Maureen stared at the memorial, remembering another she had only been allowed to go to once before she was taken away. These homemade tributes to a dead child hadn’t changed in a quarter of a century.
Out of the side of her eye, Maureen thought she saw a shadow blot out the light halfway down the block. Her head snapped around, trying to find the source of the movement. There was nothing to be seen. She silently cursed herself for allowing paranoia to get the better of her. She decided almost instantly that she was just making up phantoms to put in her path. It would be so easy to pretend she was being observed and to turn away at the last minute. She wanted to, of course, but she was determined to press on. She’d be damned if a shadow was going to be her undoing.
Creeping around the side of the house and heading into the backyard, Maureen had no idea what she would be looking for once she got into the house. Something that would ease her guilt or even prove the nightmare wrong, for sure, but she couldn’t fathom what sort of thing that would be. The lights from the street dimly illuminated the grass, and she could now make out a patch of burned earth surrounded by more yellow tape. Small flags dotted the surrounding ground. She closed her eyes and tried to wish away her recognition of the obvious hallmarks of the crime scene from her dream. She still desperately sought to find something that could prove this wasn’t what it clearly was.
Her hopes were dashed as soon as her eyes met the back of the house. As she approached, the darkness parted to reveal an upside-down horseshoe above the back door. A measured study of the object might have led another person to see it for what it was: a talisman for good luck and protection. To her, it was simply the upside-down U from her nightmare staring her in the face. Maureen felt a tingle run down her spine. She couldn’t pretend any longer that this wasn’t the house she had seen.
The battle within her raged as her mind tugged at her to back away, to not proceed, but the hypnotic allure of the home continued to beckon her closer. She crept to the door and placed her hand on the knob. Locked. Why she thought she would be afforded such easy access to a crime scene almost made her laugh out loud. After all, her vision had never revealed how the assailant had gotten into the house. The ludicrousness of what she was attempting hit her and shook her from her self-imposed trance. There was no need to push any further, and she resolved to turn and leave before she was seen. This resolve, however, only lasted for a moment.
The voice in the back of her mind whispered even more earnestly to her, insisting that there was something inside she had to see. Maureen’s hand went to her scalp and pulled out the two bobby pins that kept the hair out of her face. A strand of her bangs slipped down into her vision as she knelt in front of the door. She brushed it aside, bent both pins, and inserted them into the lock. It had been a few years since she’d opened a door like this, but the muscle memory took over and before she knew it, she felt the familiar click of the door unlocking.
Maureen slowly pushed the door open and felt her stomach turn as she took her first step over the threshold. She closed the door quietly behind her and found herself in the home’s darkened kitchen. She took one cautious step after another, slowly working her way further into the house. If her nightmare had really mapped out the home, somewhere up ahead there would be a staircase. She followed the hallway out of the kitchen. Its photograph-lined walls taunted her, making it more difficult to deny that she, at least in consciousness, had been there before.
She found the staircase exactly where she expected to find it. A sense of inevitability now gripped the majority of her being, yet that voice in the back of her brain rebelled to the end. As she climbed the stairs, her inner voices continued their quarrel, but by the time she reached the top, she was convinced that it was necessary to see it all through.
Maureen took a deep breath and blew it out loudly. The noise seemed to ricochet off the upstairs walls like a clap of thunder. She froze in her tracks and looked wildly around, expecting someone to come darting out of some hidden corner somewhere in response to the sound. Nothing happened, of course, but the sensation that it roused in her forced Maureen’s breath to continue in short, shallow spurts, lest she make any more noise than she had to. She unglued her feet from the carpet and continued to pad along the hallway, her head peering from side to side looking for a certain doorway.
She found it, the second door on her right, covered by police tape. Maureen carefully took the tape down, allowing her to step into the room. The décor—cartoon robots, sports posters, and various other action figures—spoke to the fact that it clearly had been occupied by a young boy.
Maureen inched around the room, her eyes focusing on nothing, but the tips of her fingers lightly brushing along the walls and shelves, as if they knew better than her brain what they were searching for. She closed her eyes and continued to circle, her right hand serving as her only means of sensing. It grazed the shiny plastic of a poster and bounced along the spines of a row of books like a xylophone. She continued forward until her hand felt nothing but air while her legs were stopped by an impediment in her path.
As she opened her eyes, the sight of the child’s bed filled Maureen’s vision. It was a short twin, lying on a plain, wooden frame. The colorful sheets were reduced to hues of white, black, and various deep blues and purples in the dim room, lit only by the ambient light streaming in through the window. She could see that the blanket was still bunched up at the foot of the mattress, in the same position it would have been in after a young boy’s legs had stopped kicking as he lost consciousness.
A brief glint of light next to the bed caught her eye. Maureen turned her head and settled her gaze on a small, round object, half hidden in shadow on the nightstand. She picked it up and, holding it in two hands, raised it close to her face. It was a child’s alarm clock. Despite the darkness, she could pick out the twelve numbers that circled around the white face etched with two semi-circle stitches. The likeness of a baseball. Maureen peered closer to see that the hour hand and minute hand were two different-length bats. As she watched hypnotically, the hands of the clock wound themselves from their original position to reveal the time that it had read when the hands had grabbed the boy. The time that had been buried in her mind until that moment. 2:31.
A flurry of images passed in front of her eyes with blinding speed, yet she saw everything clearly. She could see through the eyes from her nigh
tmare again. She could see the little boy asleep in the bed in front of her. She could feel him wiggle under the force of the hands holding a rag to his mouth. She saw the hallway she had just crept down rushing by in the opposite direction. The woodpile in the backyard. The knife. And finally, the one moment of it all that wasn’t in the nightmare, she saw her own clock radio reading the time. 2:47. Sixteen minutes later.
The horror of the realization spun Maureen’s head in circles, and she threw the clock to the ground with a sharp cry. She finally realized what it was all about. For all these years, she’d accepted that the nightmares showed her what evil people were doing. She had even accepted that, somehow, she was seeing these things from the perspective of the people who were doing them. Now she realized that, all this time, in her sleep, she had been seeing them as they happened. Her heart rate climbed, and sweat broke out on her brow. Why, out of all the people in the world, would something like this happen to her: To see evil being done, but to be cursed to be unable to prevent it? To see through a killer’s eyes, but to be unable to stop their hands? To see a young boy ripped from his bed, to feel his weight in her arms, but at that exact moment, to be miles away, trapped in slumber?
It was all too much. Telling someone never helped; a lesson she’d learned young. She had to get away. There was nothing she could do. She couldn’t identify the killer, and no one would believe her anyway. Run. Don’t think, just run. She still had time. Twenty miles to the bus station wouldn’t be so hard, and it would still be dark for a few hours. What were the chances she’d be seen? She’d be gone, and by tomorrow, she wouldn’t be Maureen Allen anymore. All she had to do was make it back to her apartment without anyone seeing her. She turned to go.
A white light hit her face, and the shadow of a pistol passed in front of it. She was blind to everything beyond the light, but a voice sounded from the doorway.
Unholy Shepherd Page 6