Defenders of the Faith

by Williamson, Chet

  Paul threw the pieces in the kitchen waste can, and treated the thin cuts with an antibiotic. Then, free, he slept until his alarm woke him.

  Chapter 25

  Olivia Feldman had been awakened several hours before, after investigating officers found the two bodies in the cellar shrine of David Compton's store. Rich Zielinski, the most promising homicide detective of the three that served under her, called and told her that this was one she had to see.

  Rich had not understated the situation. This one, she thought as she took it all in, was indeed a real gem. Two people apparently dead from stab wounds, lying in state on a stone altar, a room lit by candlelight, weapons on the victims' breasts, and symbols smeared in blood on the fake turf floor.

  "You're right, Richie," she said. "This is a real winner."

  "You ain't seen nothin' yet." He opened the hidden door. "Check this out."

  Olivia entered the small room, and figured it out in less than a minute. The couple had been running some kind of porno ring out of this cellar. She'd know more when she saw the DVDs. But how did they come to wind up dead?

  She walked back into the large room and examined the bodies again, being careful not to tread on any of the blood that spattered the floor. It was easy to see that they hadn't been killed on the altar. Olivia assumed that the large irregular bloodstain on the floor had come from the male victim's ragged neck wound, while the smaller stain could have come from the hole just below the female victim's breastbone.

  Someone had killed them, possibly in self-defense or in an effort to escape -- they would see whose prints were on the pistol -- and then had positioned them on the altar and drawn symbols on the floor with their blood.

  "Cult thing?" Zielinski asked.

  She thought for a moment. "I'm not sure. It's supposed to look like a cult thing, anyway." She took a deep breath, then looked at Zielinski. "Have you noticed, Richie, that an awful lot of sleazeballs seem to be getting killed around here?" In response to his curious look, she said, "Santiago...these porno freaks..." She didn't mention William Davonier's name, though it was prominent in her mind.

  Zielinski shrugged. "Sleazy people get murdered more often than honest people. Hazards of the trade."

  "I guess," she agreed. But something was weird. Several years before, she'd been to a seminar on cults and criminal activity. There were two sides to the story, and both had been fairly presented. The first, and one that many law enforcement officials subscribed to, was that cults and Satanism were realities, and that many crimes were inspired by occult studies, although there was little evidence beyond hearsay to back up that position.

  The second point of view was that, although there were a few nuts out there, most of the very few crimes charged to Satanists were merely intended to look like cult killings to cover up the real motive -- hatred or revenge or greed. Olivia tended to think that this explanation made more sense than to believe that there were Satanists running all over the country. No, that was the kind of thing that some of these right-wingers said, and it made sense for them. After all, if the devil and his minions are at large, all the more reason to turn to God.

  But after Skip died, Olivia no longer believed in gods or devils. She believed in madness and violence and brutality and all the other things that she saw daily. And she believed in blood and the stories it told.

  "No, this is bullshit," she said now, looking down at the designs on the floor.

  "What is?" said Zielinski.

  "This wasn't any cult thing, no ritual. Hell, look at these drawings -- you've got a spiral, a pentagram, a Star of David, an Omega, I think that's an ankh -- they're just somebody's idea of magical symbols. Was there forcible entry?"

  "Yeah. Back door there."

  "Okay, you know what I think? I think somebody broke in here and these two surprised him. There was a struggle and the perp got lucky. We'll know more when we know whose gun that is. But if it was the perp's, he probably would've taken it. So he tries to make it look like a ceremonial killing, does an especially shitty job of it, and leaves."

  "And calls 911," Zielinski said.

  Olivia's eyes narrowed. "911?"

  "Yep. Medic-5 and a patrolman got here at the same time. Then they called me."

  "The perp called 911..." she said to herself.

  "Don't know who else it would've been," Zielinski said. "Wasn't a soul around when they first got here. And people in the nearby apartments say they didn't hear a thing."

  "Called 911." Olivia still couldn't get over it. She gave a short laugh of disbelief. "That was a Christian thing to do..."

  Her smile faded, and she felt poised over a precipice, as though she were just about to make a leap. But she pulled herself back. It was dangerous and foolish to jump to conclusions too soon, no matter how elegantly they seemed to present themselves. Still, she could not help but wish that the victims had been shot instead of stabbed, and with .38 wadcutter bullets.

  Chapter 26

  It worked nearly as well as Paul Blair had hoped it would.

  The newspapers mentioned the videos, the bizarre mode of death, and the fact that Samuel Aston, alias David Compton, had been sought in three other states for such diverse crimes as pandering, lewd and indecent behavior, forgery, and possession and sale of illegal materials. What those materials were, was not mentioned, but with the other details about the video recordings and the secret camera, anyone with even a limited imagination could guess their content.

  Sheila Bronson, his companion, had had three outstanding charges of prostitution in Massachusetts and New York. The police stated that they were following several leads in the murders, but had no suspects. There was no mention of Satanism as an element in the deaths. The police never contacted Paul.

  During the next few weeks, Paul often dreamed of Sheila Bronson and Holly Good and Susan Darnell. Occasionally the dreams induced a nocturnal emission that awakened him and made him groan with mixed pleasure and pain and anger at his weakness as he held himself, unable to call back the jets of fluid, all the more forceful for their infrequency. Though he had masturbated once or twice a month before the incident at the bookstore, he no longer did so, and desire built in his loins as in an engine with no valve to slowly release the steam, so that climaxes, when dreams finally set them free, were explosive and almost painful.

  There should be pain, he thought, as he lay in the darkness, damp and aching. Sin and the guilt of sin should bring pain. And he rolled over and buried his face in the pillow and said Evey's name in the night.

  ~ * ~

  And to expiate his sins, he watched over his children all the more. He knew unconditionally that God was behind him. Had He not kept him free from capture and harm? So he watched his children diligently, and with the eyes of love.

  It was through such affectionate surveillance that he became aware of the change in the status of Kevin Greene. Ever since Kevin had been little, he had been one of the happiest children Paul had ever known. Though not a particularly brilliant boy, his sense of humor was always quick and contagious, too much so, at times, for the relative solemnity of church and Sunday School. He was a notorious practical joker, and, although occasionally his jokes were cruel, there was never the slightest indication that their intent was anything worse than hilarity. When he saw that they stung too deeply, he was always remorseful, but it was a remorse that winked its eye as it soothed its victim, who always found it impossible to stay mad at his congenial tormentor.

  As he grew older, his tact increased, but so did his enthusiasm for life. He was a sporadic attendee at Sunday school, and never came to Youth Fellowship, but Paul often saw him at the mall with friends. He always greeted Paul cheerily, and asked him how he was. A nice boy, Paul thought, and continued to think so even after he found out about the depth of Kevin's involvement with Robert and Doris Tucker.

  Paul's knowledge began innocently enough. One afternoon in late August, Paul stopped at Steve's Sounds, a small store in downtown Buchanan that fough
t a good fight against online music and the chain stores by offering lower prices and special orders. Paul was going in to pick up a new opera that he had ordered, when he met Kevin Greene coming out with a bag full of CDs. He greeted Paul with his usual friendliness, and walked on.

  "Hey, Paul, how's my best customer today?" Steve, a mustachioed man in his early thirties, plucked the small box containing the CD's from the cluttered shelf behind the counter.

  "Second best, I would think," Paul said, nodding toward the door through which Kevin had just passed.

  "Oh yeah. That's the second time he's been in this week. Just loves hip-hop. Bought almost as much last time. I ask him why he doesn’t just buy the stuff on iTunes, and he tells me he likes it old school. You believe it, old school! Wish I'd had that kind of money when I was his age."

  "Where does he get it?" Paul pondered aloud. The Greene family was well-off, but not to the point where Kevin could buy twelve-dollar CDs by the bagful.

  "That's what I asked him. Told me he got a summer job at the Fourth Ward Rescue Mission."

  Paul nodded, but said nothing. He had heard of the mission. It was a privately funded organization that received some United Way money, and was also supported by several churches, although Paul's was not one of them. The mission took old and used items, repaired them, sold them, and used the money to house the homeless, feed the hungry, and get addicts and alcoholics into drug rehabilitation programs.

  Robert and Doris Tucker, the middle-aged couple who ran the mission, had received the Buchanan Award from the Buchanan Independent a few years before, for service to the community. At that time, they had spoken at a Rotary luncheon meeting, and Paul had been impressed by their self-effacing manner.

  Still, he was surprised that they would hire teens to work at the mission when there were so many adults out of work. And how could they afford to pay enough to let a kid buy several hundred dollars worth of music a week?

  Paul smiled at the thought as he left the store with his new opera. Buying a multitude of CDs was precisely the kind of thing that Kevin Greene would do. Money would quickly burn a hole in that carelessly irresponsible pocket of his. It was better that he spend it on music then, no matter how obnoxious and abrasive, than on drugs or beer, the way other teenagers might.

  But the thought kept nagging at him as to where Kevin got the money, and he decided to pay a visit to the Fourth Ward Rescue Mission.

  However, the week was busy, and he didn't get around to it until it was too late, after Kevin Greene was dead. It was something for which he would never stop blaming himself.

  The boy's death occurred at 2:00 on a Tuesday morning. Philadelphia police attempted to stop Kevin Greene for speeding in the southbound lane of the Schuylkill Expressway. Instead of pulling over, Kevin floored his parents' minivan until he reached a speed of eighty-five miles per hour, when he lost control on a wide curve, rolling the van so that it turned over three times before coming to rest on its side. He had not been wearing a seat belt, and died five minutes before the ambulance arrived.

  The back of the van was packed solid with unboxed electronic equipment, including five iPod docks, three amplifiers, eight DVD players, five wide-screen TV's, and four laptop computers. Serial numbers revealed that all of the items had been stolen from Buchanan residents in burglaries that had taken place over the past several months.

  When Kevin's grieving parents were questioned, they told the police that they had no idea Kevin was sneaking out at night, and that they did not know anyone in Philadelphia to whom Kevin might be taking what they had to admit were stolen goods. When the police suggested that Kevin could have actually committed the burglaries, the boy's father scoffed as much as his sorrow allowed him, and told them that as much as he had loved his son, Kevin had possessed neither the skill nor the stealth to perpetrate such crimes.

  Paul Blair either read all of these details in the newspaper, or heard them from people involved. What he was most interested in, however, was questioning Robert Tucker, Kevin's employer at the time of his death.

  Tucker told the police that there was no way that Kevin Greene could have taken the stolen goods from the Fourth Ward Rescue Mission, since the mission did not accept electronics equipment as donations because of the expense and difficulty in repairing such items. As for Kevin's duties at the mission, they had consisted of furniture repair, maintenance, and custodial work. Tucker and his wife both expressed sorrow and surprise that the boy was involved, if not in burglary, then at least the transport of stolen goods.

  "He would have been the last person I'd have expected to do something like that," Tucker was quoted as saying. "I don't think I've ever met as friendly and outgoing a boy. It's a real tragedy. I just hope that if he was part of some sort of ring, that the other guilty parties will be found."

  Paul Blair felt exactly the same way. Only he suspected that he knew exactly who those parties were.

  Paul did not enter the Fourth Ward Rescue Mission until a month after Kevin Greene's funeral, which he attended wearing remorse, grief, and a guilt that weighed him down like iron. Other things had been too important, and now Kevin, a boy he had sworn before God to protect, was dead, having died, if not in sin, at least during a crime, and would have to stand before God alone and sullied.

  But perhaps, Paul thought and hoped, Kevin had been as innocent as he had seemed. Maybe the Tuckers asked him to deliver the goods secretly, and he didn't know they were stolen.

  But why in the middle of the night? And why did he not tell his parents he was taking their van?

  Everywhere he looked Paul saw darkness. Perhaps the Tuckers could illuminate it enough so that he could see Kevin Greene's face, even in dim, gray shadows.

  It was on a Monday in mid-September when he entered the mission store for the first time. He dressed shabbily, in an old jacket the color of dried blood that he used for the dirtiest yard work, brown baggy pants, and a fishing hat that had once been white, but was now an ancient and exhausted tan.

  Doris Tucker was behind the cash register when he entered, and he mumbled a hello and walked toward the back of the store, toward a large alcove which held an assortment of bookshelves. There, a window overlooked the alley below. Paul began to browse, waiting for something to happen, for someone to come in who didn't look like they belonged.

  He learned that such a description was an oxymoron. There was no one, no matter of how low a station, who would not have belonged at the mission store. During the half hour that he browsed, whites, blacks, and Hispanics all came in, buying mostly second-hand clothing and the occasional piece of kitchenware. An extremely thin young man bought what looked like a homemade set of shelves for ten dollars, and a mother bought several used Fisher-Price toys for the pre-schooler who clung to her jacket hem. What bound them all were the tired postures and the worn elbows of the poor.

  Paul bought two paperback westerns for a dollar, and left the store, putting himself into his character far enough to envision his reading the two books in two days, then returning for more. As scripted, he came back on Wednesday and offered to trade his two books, but was told by Doris Tucker, not unkindly, that they neither bought nor traded, but operated solely by donations.

  "Well then," Paul replied, "guess I'll make you a donation. Worth half a buck to read a good book."

  She smiled and remarked that it was the most inexpensive entertainment she could think of, and accepted the books with thanks. Paul returned to his vantage point, scanned the shelves, and watched the people who came into the store, waiting for someone to carry in something that they did not want to place in the outdoor collection boxes.

  It took two weeks of book browsing before Paul saw what he wanted. Near closing time on a chilly October Friday, a black youth dressed in gleaming white high-tops and a colorful leather jacket came into the mission store with a sealed Gretna Glen Spring Water box that Paul guessed didn't contain the customary six pack of gallon jugs. And when the boy said a few low words to Doris Tucker
, and she went downstairs to the workshop to get her husband, Paul was sure of it.

  He focused his attention on the bookshelves, taking a paperback off the shelf and pretending to be immersed in it, while looking out of the corner of his eye and over the top of his glasses at the counter thirty feet away. He saw Robert Tucker appear and say a few words to the boy, who nodded, turned, and walked out the door, while Tucker vanished behind the curtain that led to the basement.

  Outside the front of the store was only the street, and outside the back was a basement level alley. So Paul moved deeper into the alcove and looked out the back window at the alley below. In less than a minute Robert Tucker had moved into his field of view, and walked across and down the alley fifty feet to what looked like a garage. He unlocked the ankle-high handle, turned it, and raised the door just high enough to duck under. The black youth appeared shortly, and dipped under it as well, still carrying his box.

  Paul saw nothing for several minutes, and then the two reappeared, both empty-handed, and Tucker pulled down and locked the door. Without another word, they separated, Tucker walking back toward the mission building, the youth down the alley the way he had come.

  That was it then, Paul thought. A garage no one knew about. A mini-warehouse used to store stolen goods Tucker would later fence in Philadelphia. Kevin and Tucker had loaded the goods here, and Kevin had been on his way to deliver the goods to whoever bought them in the city, when the police tried to stop him.

  What had Tucker promised him, given him? Money, certainly. That much was evident. But would Kevin have broken the law for money alone? There had to be more to it than that. The boy wasn't very bright, for all his good humor. Maybe Tucker had lied to him, told him that what he was doing was legal, made up some complex story to dazzle the boy.