Inheritance

by Joe McKinney

  “Hey look, man, if you’re drunk you’re gonna have to leave.”

  The sound startled him.

  “What?” Anderson said. The man behind the counter wasn’t Bobby Cantrell anymore. He was just some guy, the guy who had sold him the nearly untouched cup of coffee on the table in front of him.

  “If you’re looking to sleep it off, you’re gonna have to do it someplace else.”

  “I’m not drunk,” Anderson said. He shook himself mentally. “I’m sorry. I...just had kind of a hard day. I’m okay now.”

  The man behind the counter seemed to consider him, then shrugged. “Whatever,” he said, and went back to wiping the counter.

  ***

  He was sitting in his car in the Dunkin Donuts parking lot when his cell phone went off. It was Levy, and for a moment he thought about not answering, but that didn’t last long.

  “Keith, you there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here,” Anderson said into the phone. “What’s going on, Chuck?”

  “Where are you?”

  “The corner of Rigsby and Houston, the Dunkin Donuts.”

  “What are you doing out? It’s three in the morning.”

  “I know what time it is, Chuck.”

  A pause.

  “Well, seeing as you’re already over here, I need you to come by 642 Utley Street.”

  Anderson closed his eyes and sighed. He slid down into the seat and thought of Bobby Cantrell.

  “You there, Keith?”

  “Yeah, I’m here. Where in the hell is Utley Street?”

  “Well, from where I’m standing in the front yard I can see the smokestacks of the Morgan Rollins Iron Works.”

  Anderson sat up straight.

  “What have you got, Chuck?”

  “I thought that’d get your attention. Just come down here. I think we may have gotten a break in this thing.”

  ***

  When Anderson arrived at the scene, he was surprised by how low key the police presence was. There were police cars at either end of the block, turning away the occasional car that tried to turn down the street. Closer in, somebody had run a cordon of yellow crime scene tape around the house and across the street. There were a few patrol cars parked along the curb and an evidence truck just inside the crime scene line and two unmarked Ford fleet cars, one of which belonged to Chuck Levy, but that was it. Usually, a murder scene got a much bigger response than this.

  Even the neighbors had, for the most part, stayed indoors, and that really surprised him. It was nearly four in the morning, but that hardly made a difference when it came to crowds gathering to watch a lurid scene. You could usually count on the streets to flood with people during an incident like this, even in the wee hours of the morning.

  From the car, he scanned the small crowd of about twenty people standing around outside the crime scene tape in their t-shirts and blue jeans and nightgowns and every man he saw was Bobby Cantrell, staring right back at him. “Oh Jesus,” he said, and closed his eyes. Go away. Go away, please. When he opened them again, the crowd was just a crowd again, the occasional woman holding a sleepy-eyed baby wearing nothing but a diaper, the men talking to each other about how the cops were doing it all wrong.

  Anderson turned off the car, got out, and looked around. Mike Garcia was leaning up against the front of his patrol car, his thick arms crossed over his chest, chatting up a pretty young evidence technician. The girl looked to be about twenty-two or twenty-three, right out of college, with shiny black hair, and a figure that looked absolutely amazing, even in the black, BDU-style uniforms of the Evidence Unit. She had the biggest, roundest pair of doe eyes Anderson had ever seen, and the glory of their radiant innocence was pointed straight up at Mike. Her lips were open just a bit, just enough for the tip of her tongue to touch the bottom of her upper lip. She giggled at something Mike said, and Anderson forced himself to turn away, out of decency. The poor thing had the hook in her mouth and didn’t even know it.

  He looked toward the house and saw a simple, humble eyesore huddled in the dark behind a weed patch yard. It was surrounded by a sagging hurricane fence, and the bottom of the fence was lined with unlit votive candles. Stuff that looked like dried dog turds on a string were tied to the tops of the fence, and he thought, Dried herbs and chicken bones. Oh great, a fortune teller.

  Paul Henninger was standing in the shadows of the porch. Even from the street, Anderson could tell how pale he looked. There was something flashing in his hands.

  Anderson walked up to him and said, “Officer Henninger, how are you?”

  Paul looked at him but didn’t respond. He simply stared at Anderson, though Anderson felt more like he was being looked through than at.

  “You want to tell me what you got here?”

  Paul said nothing. He just put the coin—that’s what it was, Anderson realized, a coin—back in his pocket and walked off. Anderson watched him go and didn’t try to stop him. He could have ordered him to stop, of course, but he didn’t. There was something deep inside that man that wanted to get out, that wanted to tell a story, but Anderson knew that this was not the time for it. It would come out, but not just yet.

  He turned back to the street and caught Mike’s eye. He waved, and Mike nodded back. Mike said something that made the pretty young evidence technician giggle, and then he came over to meet Anderson halfway across the yard.

  They shook hands. “I didn’t see you pull up,” Mike said.

  “Yeah, well, you were busy.”

  Mike smiled.

  “Any chance with that one?”

  Mike shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Poor girl has no idea what’s in store for her, does she?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. They all pretend to be innocent, but she knows.”

  Anderson tried to smile. He thought of something he’d once heard a police cadet ask a K9 officer. The cadet clearly loved dogs, the way he was looking at the German shepherd that had just pulled a murder suspect out from under a house. The cadet stroked the dog’s neck behind the ears, then turned to the K9 officer and said, “So how disciplined are these dogs? I mean, I know they’re not neutered. What happens if a female dog in heat comes by?”

  The K9 officer had tugged on the dog’s leash and said, “He’s a policeman, ain’t he? He sees a bitch in heat he’s gonna go fuck it.”

  But not even that memory could call up a full smile. He looked back at the house and said, “Did you at least give her a chance to process the scene before you charmed her out of her panties?”

  “Hey, come on now,” Mike said. “Here on East Dogwatch we like to screw around same as anybody, but we always get the job done first.”

  “Fair enough. You wanna tell me what you got?”

  “Sure,” Mike said.

  He told Anderson they got a call for a found 10-60, a dead body. The neighbor called it in. She said she’d heard something earlier in the evening, just after sunset, like somebody screaming. She’d been trying to look in through the windows ever since, trying to see what was going on inside, but couldn’t. Then, at about two o’clock, she’d gone around back and found the backdoor blasted apart.

  “You got the neighbor somewhere secure?”

  “Yeah, she’s with Sergeant Garwin. He’s consoling her.”

  “Great,” Anderson said.

  “You know Garwin, when the complainant cries, he cries.”

  That did bring a smile to Anderson’s face, in spite of all the crap he had going on in his head. He had never heard Garwin described better. And he still hadn’t forgiven the man for running to Jenny Cantrell with the news that her husband’s body was missing from the morgue.

  “Something you should know about your witness, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  Mike told him about the call he and Paul made a few days before. He told him about the woman running into the street covered in goat’s blood. He told him about the screaming the two women had done back and forth.

&n
bsp; Anderson listened to it all. “It was goat’s blood, you said?”

  “Yep. The lady’s some kind of witch doctor or something.”

  “A curandera?”

  “Could be, I don’t know what the hell that is.”

  “Mexican folk healer. Okay, thanks.”

  Anderson started to walk towards the house, but stopped, looked over his shoulder, and said, “Where’d she get the goat’s blood from, any idea?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact I do know. She’s got a whole bunch of them out back. We’ve already called Animal Control. They’re supposed to be sending somebody as soon as they come on at seven.”

  Anderson nodded.

  “You might want to put on some rubber boots before you go in there,” Mike said. “It’s a bad one. Whoever did her really fucked her up. We found a foot near the front door, part of her leg in the living room, part of her hand next to the couch. You get the idea. There’s blood everywhere. Human blood, this time.”

  “Great,” said Anderson. “Can’t wait.”

  “Oh, and your sergeant’s waiting for you inside. He told me to tell you to contact him as soon as you get here.”

  Anderson nodded. “Okay. Thanks, Mike.”

  “My pleasure.”

  ***

  Chuck Levy was waiting for him just inside the front door. They shook hands, and Levy started to tell him something, but Anderson wasn’t listening. He was too busy looking at the scene.

  It was every bit as gory as Mike described. There were body parts and blood everywhere. Anderson saw three fingers and part of a palm on the floor at his feet. Part of an arm was festooned from an umbrella stand in the entryway. A lower jaw and a long tattered flap of bloody skin that Anderson figured was probably from the front of the victim’s throat was resting under a sideboard table. There was a vast puddle of coagulated blood on the floor, and four sets of twin bare spots around the perimeter. He looked at them, at the way the blood was textured inside the bare spots, like you would see after a paint brush is pressed against a wall and lifted straight away.

  “What are those?” he said, interrupting whatever Levy had been saying. “They look like knee prints.”

  “Probably so,” Levy agreed. “That would fit, right? Four suspects. They’ve got her on the floor right here. They’re on their knees around her, tearing her to pieces, tossing the body parts away like peanut shells.”

  “Like peanut shells?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Anderson sighed. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  He turned away and looked in at the rest of the house. It was steeped in shadows, even though most of the lights were on. He was about to ask if somebody had turned on the lights, or if they’d had the good sense to leave the crime scene intact when Levy brushed past his shoulder and said, “Come with me, Keith. There’s something you need to see in here.”

  Anderson put his questions on hold and followed Levy into the living room. What he saw there staggered him, and it took him a good long minute just to catch his breath. It took him another long minute to absorb it all.

  There was a long smear of blackish red blood on the floor from the entryway to a leg left in the middle of the floor. But that wasn’t what caught his eye. What made him gasp for breath was the collection of stick lattices along the back wall. They were the same as the ones he had found at the train yard and in the circular chamber at the Morgan Rollins Iron Works. And they were the same ones he’d seen in the Comal County crime scene photos of Martin Henninger’s death.

  “My God,” he said.

  “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Levy said. “Go into the kitchen and look at the walls.”

  Anderson drifted toward the grungy kitchen in a haze. What he saw there was writing all over the walls, though he couldn’t read any of it.

  “What language is this supposed to be?” he asked.

  Levy said, “That, my friend, is Hebrew. Or, rather, it looks like Hebrew. A lot of it is kind of archaic looking.”

  “You’re an expert on ancient Hebrew now?” Anderson asked.

  “Hey, I told you, I may not be a practicing Jew, but I had to learn Hebrew same as every other kid who ever had a bar mitzvah.”

  “Yeah, but how can you tell this is ancient Hebrew?”

  “Remember when they tried to teach us to read Chaucer back in high school?”

  “Yeah, my teacher made us memorize the opening lines of the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales.”

  “Exactly. You look at that stuff, and you can tell it’s in English, but it’s obviously old, you know? The words are spelled funny. The syntax is all wrong. It’s the same thing here with this writing.”

  “The syntax?”

  “The way the sentences are put together.”

  Anderson shook his head. “Chuck, you never cease to amaze me, you know that?”

  “Yeah, well, that’s why I make the big bucks.”

  “You have any idea what it says?”

  “Some of it.” He walked over to the stove and pointed at the backsplash behind the burners. “This part here sounds like it’s from the Day of Atonement ritual in Leviticus.”

  “Leviticus? Like in the Old Testament?”

  “You mean the Torah, Keith. We Jews don’t call it the Old Testament.”

  “Whatever you call it it’s over my head. I haven’t been in a church since my wedding day. What’s the Day of Atonement ritual, anyway?”

  “The Day of Atonement is Yom Kippur.”

  Anderson just looked at him, waiting.

  “Keith, are you shitting me? One of your oldest friends is Jewish and you don’t know what our major holidays are?”

  “I’m an insensitive bastard. Does that make you feel any better?”

  “Loads.”

  “Good. So what’s the Day of Atonement and why is it on this woman’s wall?”

  “Well that’s the thing. This isn’t the Day of Atonement passage from Leviticus. Not exactly, anyway. It’s close, but...Look, you’ve heard the word scapegoat, right?”

  “Of course. Hell, Chuck, of course I’ve heard it. I’ve been a policeman for twenty-five years. I’m used to being blamed for other people’s problems.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. Well, the word scapegoat comes from the Day of Atonement ritual in Leviticus. Moses called Aaron and the others together while they were living in tents out in the desert and ordered them to bring him two goats. He put a hand on each goat’s head and prayed. One goat was sacrificed to Yahweh. The other got all of the sins of Israel placed on its head and was led out into the desert and given to Azazel. It’s the goat that escaped, or the ‘scapegoat.’ Get it?”

  “Yeah, I got that. Who in the hell is Azazel?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody does, really. It’s a name, that’s what my rabbi told me. It means something like ‘angry god,’ but nobody really knows for sure.”

  Anderson looked at the writing again. He couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

  “You said all of this is similar to Leviticus?” he asked.

  “Similar, yes. But not exact. You had to memorize Chaucer. In synagogue I had to memorize parts of the Day of Atonement passage. This stuff here changes it around, though. There’s no mention of Moses in here. And it reads Azazel everywhere that the scriptures say Yahweh. And the goat that’s supposed to be sent out into the desert for Azazel is here being told to bring back the souls of the dead.”

  “The souls of the dead?”

  “Yeah, you know, like ghosts. That’s what this looks like it’s saying. I got the evidence technician to do detailed photographs of all this. I figure we could let a rabbi or somebody look at it and hopefully translate it for us. What do you think? Keith?”

  ***

  Anderson was looking out the backdoor. Or where the backdoor had been. Now there were just shattered pieces of wood hanging from the hinges. Paul Henninger was standing out there, looking off toward the Morgan Rollins Iron Works. He had that coin in his hands again, and the goat
s were clustered around him, looking up at him expectantly.

  “Excuse me for a second,” Anderson said to Levy. “I want to go talk to...”

  He trailed off there and walked outside without giving Levy any further explanation. He came up behind Paul and the goats bleated at him irritably before walking off.

  “What do you see when you look up there?” he said to Paul.

  Paul didn’t answer, didn’t even look at him.

  “I’ve seen you work that coin. That’s pretty impressive the way you do those tricks. How’d you learn to do that?”

  The coin vanished, but Paul still didn’t speak.

  “Paul, what does the name Azazel mean to you?”

  At that, Paul turned his head towards Anderson and gave him a hard look, a glare that made Anderson fight the instinctive impulse to take a step back.

  He said, “I guess it means something to you, doesn’t it? You know a whole lot more than you’ve been telling me so far, don’t you?”

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” Paul said.

  “Hmmm, maybe not. Not now, anyway. Pretty soon though, you’re gonna have to talk to me.”

  “Oh yeah? How do you figure that?”

  “Because pretty soon there isn’t going to be anybody else.”

  “Am I supposed to know what that means?”

  “I think you know.”

  Paul went back to watching the night sky slide by the smokestacks over at Morgan Rollins.

  “You mind if I tell you something, Paul?”

  “This another one of your war stories?”

  “No,” said Anderson, “not quite.”

  Paul was quiet. Anderson drew in as deep a breath as he could and said, “I had a son named John who died very young.”

  “I’m sorry,” Paul said.

  “He was fifteen. He was sneaking out a lot, doing drugs, drinking. We yelled at each other constantly. One night he’s out with another kid and they fly off the freeway and into some trees doing over a hundred miles an hour. The Traffic lieutenant who told me about the crash said that he didn’t suffer, that death was instantaneous, but I can’t help but think that he had been suffering for a long time before that.”