A God in the Shed

by J-F. Dubeau

  Sitting at his desk, he swiveled his chair to stare once more at the corkboard. Almost two decades of investigation stared back at him. Each precious clue had been as useless as the last. Eighteen years of chasing leads, following hunches, and interrogating suspects, only to have the killer trip up like an imbecile.

  Then again, if Finnegan was an imbecile or a cretin or whatever the medical term was for his mental condition, how did he manage to evade capture for all those years? A clumsy idiot with a lopsided grin couldn’t have outsmarted him and his officers for this long, could he?

  “You really think he had an accomplice?”

  Crowley didn’t need to turn around to recognize Randy McKenzie’s voice or the sound of his rotund body settling into one of the other office chairs. Randy knew almost everything about this case that Stephen did. They’d both worked their own sides of the investigation. Two men at the top of their professions, outsmarted by a moron.

  “How else could he have done this? Forget that Finnegan is about a hundred and fifty pounds wet and my son could beat him up on a bad day—”

  “Your son could beat me up on a bad day.”

  “Anyone could beat you up on any day, Randy. What I mean is, how the hell did that old man overpower all these people?”

  Crowley turned back around, wanting to read the answer on the doctor’s face as much as hear it from his lips. A quirk of being an investigator for so long.

  “Same way he kept us in the dark for eighteen years: no one suspects the village idiot. Sam is like our very own Ed Gein, only multiplied by ten.”

  Careful not to disrupt the carefully stacked papers and empty coffee cups, Crowley swung his legs up onto his desk, crossing them while leaning back in his chair. His boots were still crusted with the dirt from the investigation. The cleaning crew would have a depressing amount of work come Wednesday. Between the tracked mud and spilled coffee, the floors of the station were a disaster.

  “I never trusted him.”

  “Ha! C’mon, Stephen. We all trusted him. You said it yourself: the man was harmless. At least we all thought he was.”

  Silence fell between the two men. The witching hour had long passed, and the effects of caffeine were quickly dissipating. Crowley gave a sidelong glance at the empty cups on his desk, victims of his need to stay awake, and considered having another. Or perhaps his friend across the desk could give him something a little more powerful. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d made such a request.

  The inspector could feel the eyes on the corkboard boring into the back of his head. There was Finnegan’s collection, of course, but those didn’t nag at him. It was the others that kept preying on his mind. Drawings they’d found in library books, spray-painted on the sides of buildings, even carvings dug into the bark of trees, all depicting the same image: a stylized eye with a spiral iris.

  For as long as he’d lived in Saint-Ferdinand, these acts of vandalism had been appearing all over town at irregular intervals. Some had been cleaned up, others painted over, but still they cropped up, carved into a park bench or imprinted into the cement of a sidewalk.

  “If not just him, who else?” Randy said, cleaning his glasses.

  “I don’t have a name! But between that cave, those eyes, and this town’s history? You can’t tell me this”—he waved at the board behind him—“is a coincidence.”

  “What? The Craftsmen?”

  The Saint-Ferdinand Craftsmen’s Association. An organization as old as it was defunct, whose symbol had been an eye with a spiral iris. Like a Freemason guild or a chamber of commerce, the Craftsmen had once been the driving force behind most of the village’s business. Their icon used to be on every building, in every farm.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because they’re gone, Stephen!” The rotund medical examiner smiled at the inspector, trying to communicate the mirth in the situation. “Just because their logo was an eye, doesn’t mean there’s a connection.”

  “You don’t know these old geezers like I do, Randy.”

  “You’re insane. Kids are painting those symbols. What are you thinking? That old men are skulking through the night, spray cans hidden in their nightgown pockets?”

  “Keep laughing, asshole. Someone else was working with Sam. I know it.”

  “Fine, but who? Who looks at Sam and thinks, This is the guy who should be the muscle behind a murder spree? Who does Finnegan even associate with?”

  “God dammit, Randy, I don’t know.” Crowley pinched the bridge of his nose, exhausted and frustrated. “Maybe someone was manipulating him into it. Sam’s a suggestible sort of guy, right?”

  Randy leaned on the desk, trying to get a better read on the inspector. His own clothes, pressed brown slacks and a white shirt, were soiled from a day’s work in the field. Only his hands had remained perfectly clean, having been covered by latex gloves most of the time.

  “Stephen? Why do you need there to be an accomplice so bad?”

  “Because.” Crowley wheeled his chair to the side, giving McKenzie a clear view of his corkboard. Old, yellowed photographs and sketches of the symbol joined by new and shiny printouts of the eyes found at the crime scene. Some were still speared to metal rods, while others were putrefied and found in the ground near the cave entrance. “Finnegan wasn’t just randomly doing that thing with the eyes. There’s something in that cave, and it all ties back together.”

  The inspector pointed to the closest image of the spiral iris. That particular photograph had been taken before his son was born. It depicted a barn wall with the same symbol in white paint, covering the majority of the surface.

  “They knew, Randy . . .”

  “So what if they did? They’re gone. You made damn sure of that.”

  Crowley grunted, a mix of dismissal and pride. His eyes returned to the corkboard, his attention shifting slowly from photograph to photograph. The inspector scratched his chin.

  “Could Finnegan have been one of them?”

  The doctor shrugged and leaned back again in his chair. “Maybe. There’s a whole lot we don’t know about the guy, but I doubt anyone stayed behind to pull his strings.”

  “We should have searched the cave,” Crowley mused.

  Behind him, Randy frowned, his jovial and cavalier attitude melting away for a moment. The thought of the cave and its contents tainted his laissez-faire demeanor, curdling it into a forbidding worry. His brow furrowed under the burden of knowledge. “No, Stephen. We should leave that cave alone for as long as possible.”

  CROWLEY

  “WHAT THE HELL is this?”

  Crowley gestured to the boxes that now crowded his desk. Three overflowing containers had replaced the painstakingly accumulated paper cups and piles of paperwork that had lived there for so many weeks.

  Each box was filled with twice as many documents as it could normally fit. Stacks of folders were held together with elastic bands, and brightly colored notes stuck out, indicating their purpose and content.

  Fortunately, the boxes were labeled. The one closest to regurgitating its contents was marked VICTIMS. These would be the autopsy and forensic reports, testimonies, and all related files for each person Finnegan had killed. The box next to it was labeled RECORDS. These documents formed the archives of the investigation. Crowley had committed most of what was within to memory. Hell, he’d written over half of it himself.

  The final box was one he’d requested, and was by far the most manageable of the three. Files only extended about an inch or two beyond its rim. No one had to assemble this box for him. It was a well-known entity in the filing room upstairs. The garbage can where the department threw everything that had to do with the random acts of vandalism attributed to the Craftsmen. It was labeled JUNK in the handwriting of Crowley’s old boss.

  When Stephen had requested these documents, he hadn’t considered the volume they would occupy. He’d also assumed that they would take a little longer to gather and wouldn’t be dropped in the center of h
is desk. Someone would need to get chewed out for that, but now wasn’t the time.

  The inspector had planned on stopping in for just a moment before going home. He wanted to grab a few papers, but those papers were gone now. Probably buried under the boxes, or relocated to wherever the genius who had delivered these boxes thought they belonged.

  With a grunt of both effort and annoyance, the inspector began to pick up the boxes and move them next to the wall. If he could find his papers, he’d be able to get on his way and salvage whatever was left of the evening. Maybe even spend some time with Dan.

  The first and second boxes posed no problem, though it was becoming clear that the papers he had come for were no longer on his desk.

  The final box was so light compared to the other two, Crowley picked it up with one hand. While his arm was strong enough to carry it with ease, the cardboard handle on the box was not. It tore, tilting the box and vomiting piles of carefully ordered folders and files onto the floor.

  “God dammit!” the inspector shouted. The two officers still in the room didn’t even bother to look up.

  Stephen bent down to pick up the mess, hoping the order of the files had been somewhat maintained. He had no time to spare reorganizing old documents.

  Page after page he picked up had the same symbol printed on them. The eye with the spiral iris. It was painted on a sidewalk, drawn on a traffic sign, and etched into an electric pole. All the locations were familiar too. Some were innocuous and had been easy to remove, like a crudely painted version on the door to Bergeron’s Drugstore from a decade ago. Others were more bizarre and permanent and could still be seen today. Like the one expertly carved into Neil McKenzie’s headstone in the cemetery.

  The assumption had long been that the vandalism was started by the Craftsmen as a way to claim the village as their own. They were a group of self-described entrepreneurs and scholars, an old-school gentlemen’s club. When Stephen moved into town, they were already on the decline. Their members were old, and with people like William Bergeron muscling into the area with successful businesses, it left little room for the aging social club. Nowadays, the symbol was little more than local color. It was mostly kids who used it, ignorant of the eye’s original meaning. Or so most people thought.

  Inspector Crowley knew better. The Craftsmen had been more than a social club; they’d been a cult, born from a nefarious purpose. They were students of ancient, forbidden arts, unafraid of the consequences of their acts.

  Not all of them had been bad, though. Without the Craftsmen, Randy McKenzie would have never learned the necromantic rituals he’d mastered. Even Harry Peterson wasn’t a bad egg, but he’d definitely fallen in with the wrong people.

  Fortunately, Stephen Crowley had chased that sort out of town a long time ago.

  His own group was different. They had, he hoped, a much more focused plan for the town’s future. More important, they now had the means of accomplishing their lofty goals.

  The inspector lifted a pile of documents off the floor, but instead of stuffing them back in the “junk” box, he brought the files to his desk. There, he sat and looked down at the assembled reports and photographs.

  Reaching back around the armchair, Stephen dipped his hand into the pocket of his uniform jacket. He pulled out a moss-covered stone, the same one Daniel had threatened to throw in Magog days ago. The inspector stole a glance into the station bullpen. His two employees were still at their desks, filling out paperwork or responding to e-mails.

  Confident he wouldn’t be bothered, Crowley put the stone on his desk next to the papers. He traced the lines of the carving carefully with his thumb, hoping for some sort of epiphany. When none came, he opened the files.

  The Craftsmen and their dumb little symbol. After all these years, Crowley had hoped that the collection of old men was now little more than a footnote in the history of Saint-Ferdinand. That he’d seen the last of them eighteen years ago.

  But what if he hadn’t? What if the old cult was somehow behind Sam Finnegan’s murder spree? The cause of the village’s overpopulated cemetery? That was difficult to swallow.

  So he found a rock with their symbol. So what? These things were all over town, and the stone was clearly of some age. Finnegan had probably found it and kept it near the cave as a souvenir. Or maybe he was the one responsible for the vandalism in the first place, imitating the eye with the spiral iris for whatever sick reason his mind had constructed.

  Or Crowley could follow his gut.

  The inspector looked at the first file photo. The barn with the crudely reproduced icon on its wall.

  Trusting the small voice at the back of his head, Crowley rolled his chair to where the boxes lay on the floor. There, he dug through them, caring little for how badly he was messing up the classification of the documents. Pulling autopsy report after autopsy report, he kept going deeper into the box until, at long last, he got to the bottom.

  Jackson Conroy. The first presumed victim of the Saint-Ferdinand Killer. The man, a local business owner who operated the only pizza restaurant the village had ever known, had gone missing almost nineteen years ago. A week before the first sighting of the eye with the spiral iris.

  Crowley retrieved one of the more recent autopsy reports from the discard pile. Graham Henderson. A large man, his body had barely fit into one of Sam’s refrigerators. In fact, his arms had been broken at the shoulders, his legs bent until the knees cracked in order to get the door closed.

  The autopsy didn’t seem to reveal much. Cause of death: stabbing. Time of death: more difficult to establish, but could be narrowed down to within a few weeks. It didn’t matter; everyone knew when Henderson had vanished. His truck had been found in the woods off the highway last November, the front seat covered in blood. It was presumed that the man had been murdered, and his name was added to the list. The only peculiarity on the report was the presence of long scratches on Graham’s back, along with a few thistles stuck to his clothes.

  Last November. Going through the files on vandalism, Crowley found the closest event, two weeks after Henderson was declared missing and only a couple of days after his car was found. The photograph attached to the report with a paper clip depicted a patch of sidewalk that had recently been redone. Someone had traced an eye with a spiral for an iris while the cement was still wet. Next to the sidewalk, blurry but recognizable, was a clutch of thistle plants.

  His gut lurched.

  It wasn’t a strong connection. Not even something that would normally be worth pursuing. After all, thistles grew almost everywhere in town.

  However, there were two boxes full of autopsy and incident reports, and a full night to connect as many of them as possible. By morning, Crowley would know if the Craftsmen were a relic of the past, or a threat to the present.

  DANIEL

  THE CROWLEY HOUSE wasn’t the most ostentatious in Saint-Ferdinand, but it reflected the status of its owner well. The only undeniable luxury was the two-car garage, which contained a large black Ford Explorer and an expensive array of sports equipment, ranging from skis to golf bags and even a fiberglass kayak.

  In front of the garage stretched a long asphalt driveway that led to the road. The sun beat down on the black surface, creating heat ripples in the air just over the ground. In the middle of this forbidding desert of burning pitch stood a white Honda Civic. Impeccably clean with dazzling chrome hubcaps, its hood yawned open as Dan Crowley, shirtless, leaned over the engine.

  “Nice car!” a voice called out from within a few feet of the Civic.

  Dan pulled himself up from under the hood of his car and, squinting in the sun, took an appraising look at the stranger. How the man could stand wearing a full business suit in this heat was baffling to him.

  “I used to have one of those when I was your age,” the man continued. “Red hatchback. Nowhere near as well maintained as this one, though.”

  “Thanks,” Dan replied. “If you’re looking for my dad, you’re out of luck. H
e’s working today.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” the stranger said. Disappointed, he stuffed his hands into his pockets and leaned against the car.

  “If you tell me who you are, I can let him know you dropped by,” the teenager countered, wiping grease from his hands.

  “Oh! Where are my manners? Chris Hagen, freelance reporter.”

  Chris extended a hand, which Dan accepted with some hesitation. People in Saint-Ferdinand, especially the Crowley boys, were wary of reporters. There was something unsettling about people whose job it was to dig into the lives of others.

  “So my dad’s been dodging you, I gather?”

  “You could say that. Or you could say that the entire village has been avoiding me.” Hagen put on a smile. “Not that I blame them. I wouldn’t want to talk to me either if I’d gone through what you folks have.”

  “We’re a private people around here, Mr. Hagen.”

  “Chris, please.” Hagen wiped nonexistent sweat from his brow. “Look, I’ll level with you, Dan. I would rather not bother a man like your father, but it’s kind of traditional to get the authority’s point of view when it comes to criminal investigations. I’m really trying to be respectful of his position and his community by making sure I get the story straight from the horse’s mouth.”

  “Well, you’re in for an uphill battle then, Chris. My old man is a master at avoiding people, and pretty damned pigheaded to boot.”

  “All right. Who should I be asking then?”

  “Well . . . there is this criminal psychologist who’s been in town. She’s helping out some of the victims’ families. She can probably answer most of your questions.” The teenager suspected that having two people from out of town digging into Saint-Ferdinand’s dirty laundry wouldn’t sit well with his dad. Normally, he’d be first in line to defend his father’s values, but he’d also been brought up to help others whenever he could, and it was a hard habit to break.

  “Interesting. Any idea where I can find this fellow visitor to this lovely village?”