“Should we call the State?”
“No, I don’t think it’s necessary. Just get everyone out here.” Everyone consisted of a total of four police officers.
Cord conducted the crime scene investigation, assisted by the officers. There was five inches of snow on the ground from the night before, but there were no footprints around the billboard, The only thing on the ground were her ripped, shredded clothes, but there was no blood on them that he could see. He used the fire truck ladder to climb up and photograph and dust for prints, and discovered that the body was being held up with stakes driven through her knees.
When it came time to start thinking about getting the body down, he first tied two ropes around her ankles that hung behind the billboard, pulled out the stakes, then had two officers slowly lower her to the ground. She was about halfway down when Johnson slipped in the snow and lost his grip on the rope, causing Tyler to lose his grip under the sudden full weight, and she fell the rest of the way with a sickening thump, her guts flying out in a fan around her.
“Fucking idiots,” Cord murmured, shaking his head.
After the medical examiner took the body to the morgue, he and Johnson drove back to the station with his evidence collection. Tyler would be in charge of notifying the family to come down and identify the body. Cord would afterwards conduct the interview with the family.
He sat at his desk and lit a cigarette, wishing he had a shot of whiskey to go with it. “So what’s the story with this girl? You know her?”
“Not that well. I know her parents a little. Boyfriend is Chris Tompkins, he’s a pretty bad apple around here, gets in all kinds of trouble. Into that occult devil stuff, you know.”
Cord knew who Chris was. Adam’s friend. Shit.
After Cord got the call that the parents had identified their daughter, he drove out to their house. They confirmed that Karen had been out with Chris the night before. He called Adam and asked him if he’d been out with Chris and Karen.
“Yeah, I was with them. Why?” he replied defensively.
“I need you to come down to the station. Do you know where Chris is?”
“Yeah, he’s right beside me in his car.”
“Okay, good. Both of you. I need both of you at the station.”
“Why?” he asked again.
“Just get your ass here as soon as possible.” He snapped the phone shut then dialed Chris’s house. He informed the parents that he would be questioning Chris, and they should be present at the police station.
After questioning Chris and Adam separately, Cord was confident they had no involvement. They were both visibly shaken after hearing of Karen’s death. Their stories matched up, and Chris’s parents confirmed the time they’d heard Chris come home.
“Why didn’t you call the police when you couldn’t find her, Chris?”
“I dunno. I was pretty drunk and stoned, I guess. Went home and passed out. Her parents called me this morning asking if I’d heard from her. I was worried, but thought her parents would report it.”
“All right. Let’s take a trip out to that house, then, before it gets dark.”
Cord swung his flashlight around the basement. “This looks bad for them boys, don’t it?” Johnson said in a low voice so Chris and Adam couldn’t hear him from the kitchen. “They were with her last night.”
“Yeah, it looks bad. But the time of death doesn’t match up. She’d only been dead an hour before you found her.”
“Well, that’s true. But it still looks bad, Chief. People are gonna be real suspicious of them.”
“Not if we find the killer.”
Johnson let out a burp of laughter. “We ain’t gonna find him.” He clamped a hand over his mouth as if he hadn’t meant to say that.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing, Chief, just got the jitters.”
Cord stood in the basement for a moment and rubbed his eyes. What were the odds? All he’d wanted to do was get away from this kind of shit, and now, here it was again. Murder in Mayberry, Barney Fife is on the case and already declared it unsolvable. He laughed and pulled the bottle of whiskey out of his pocket and took a long, hard swig, and felt a little better.
“So what’s the story, Johnson?” Cord sat at his desk drinking coffee and nursing a hangover. He’d spent the early evening before interviewing Karen’s friends and acquaintances, then the rest of the evening interviewing a bottle of whiskey at the local bar. He had nothing so far. Chris’s car had been impounded for a thorough search, but it was just a formality, he told the family, to rule Chris out. He didn’t expect to find anything.
“Huh, what?” Johnson looked up from his paper, perplexed.
“Why’d you say that yesterday, that we’re not going to find the killer? You sounded pretty sure of that, like you know something.”
Johnson fidgeted for a moment and Cord pressed him, “Johnson, I was a detective for 10 years. I can read people real good. There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Chief, it’s just that, well, we’ve had a few murders in this town in the past. Never found out who did it.”
“When? What kind of murders?”
“The last one was some time ago, ‘bout ten years now. We thought it’d stopped, and it had, until now.”
“How many murders are we talking about?”
“Oh, I’d say twenty, thirty over the past 60 years. Most was before my time of course. I don’t know much about it except what I’d read in the papers and what I learned after getting hired on.”
Cord stared at him. “Twenty or thirty? You got to be fucking kidding me. Why didn’t anyone tell me this?”
“Chief, like I said, the last one was ten years ago.”
“But no one was ever convicted?”
“Nope. It’s a real mystery. This town’s got a pretty bad past, you see. Kids gone missing too. Never seen again.”
Cord said nothing. He could see that Johnson was struggling with something and had more to say.
“That house, out in the woods. That’s the old Barclay house. That’s where it started, in the 1930s.”
“Go on Johnson, tell me about it.”
“Elizabeth Barclay lived there. Her and her husband built the house after coming over here from Germany in the early 30s. She was convicted of witchcraft and burned at the stake, and ever since then, we’ve had these murders and kids disappearin’. People here think it’s a curse, that she haunts this town.”
“Wait a minute. She was burned at the stake? In the 30s? For witchcraft?”
“Yes sir. I know it sounds crazy, but she was. They’d suspected her for a while. Some kids had gone missing, bad things happening to people in the town. Elizabeth’s husband had been convicted of raping and murdering a girl and hung some months earlier, and police figured she was bent on revenge. They’d been staking her out up there in the woods with a movie camera, where supposedly she held her rituals. They caught her on film conjurin’ up the devil, and eatin’ the corpse of a baby.”
“Holy christ, Johnson. Are you sure about this?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ve seen the boxes of evidence when we moved them from the old storage house a couple of years ago. Never looked at them much, though. I haven’t seen the film. But it’s all down there. I didn’t believe it either, Chief. I hear there’s also film of her being burned alive, too, in the town square. She’d just had a baby, too. Her husband’s, I suppose, though some people wonder about that.”
“What happened to the kid? Is he still around?”
Johnson looked stricken. “No, Chief. He died about five years ago. Lived here his whole life, though.”
Cord had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Name?”
“Randall. Randall Bergen, your grandfather.”
Cord searched through the boxes at the evidence storage room, soon finding what he was looking for. His grandfather had become very ill about five years before his death. Ten years ago. Until yesterday, ten years since the last mu
rder, according to Johnson. His grandfather was the son of a witch who’d been burned at the stake. His great-grandmother. Great. Just fucking great.
He carried the box marked “Elizabeth Barclay 1934” to the evidence inspection room and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. Inside were several reels of film in their canisters, a large envelope of photographs, and a stack of documents. The papers were in bad shape, but from what he could make out, two men, a detective and a photographer, had staked out an area behind Elizabeth’s house.
Carefully he pulled out the photographs. Mug shots of Elizabeth, staring defiantly into the camera at the police station. She was disheveled, filthy, and wildy beautiful, with long blonde hair and light eyes. It struck him how much Adam resembled her. The old and grainy photos of the crime scene showed a clearing in the woods with a dead bonfire in its center. Closeups of a shallow hole in the ground at the edge. Lying near the fire was what looked like the mangled and chewed up corpse of a very small and very decayed body, and chunks of rotted flesh were scattered around the clearing.
He stared at the reels for a moment and flipped open his phone, dialing a New York number.
“Cord, man how you doing out there in the sticks?” Doug asked cheerfully.
“Nothing a Smith and Wesson couldn’t take care of.”
“That good, huh?”
“Yeah. Doug, what do you know about old film? I got some here that I need to look at, but don’t have a clue what to do with it.”
“How old it is?”
“1930s.”
“That’s pretty old. You’ll need to have it transferred to DVD, so you don’t ruin the film.”
“You know someone that can do that?”
“Yeah I know someone here. What’s the film of?”
“A witch burning.”
“Cool.”
“I can drive it up this weekend. Don’t want to take a chance mailing it. How long does it take?”
“Not sure, shouldn’t take too long, though, but it depends on how much film you got. I’ll give the guy a call and see if he can do it right away.”
“Thanks, man. How are things in New York?”
“Oh, just wonderful. The Monster killed two women night before last. I think he misses you and is lashing out.”
“Yeah, actually I miss him too.”
“What’s up Cord, got some trouble with kids bashing up mailboxes?”
Cord laughed. “Yeah, that too. I’ll talk to you this weekend, okay? I got my own murder to solve.”
“Lovely. So we’ll hang out and get wasted. You can cry on my shoulder and tell me all about it.”
“All right, Doug, see ya.”
That night while lying awake in bed, he heard Adam leave the house around 2 a.m. He wondered where he was going so late as he finally drifted off to sleep.
Over the next few days, unable to sleep, Cord had heard Adam leaving the house every night. One night he stayed awake and heard Adam returning around 4:30. After Adam went upstairs, he got up and walked into the kitchen. There was a stench in the hallway, like rotted meat. What the hell was he doing at night? And what was that goddawful smell?
But Cord simply didn’t have time to worry about it. He had attended the autopsy of Karen, and the Medical Examiner had determined she died of massive organ damage and blood loss. Her bones were covered with gouges. Though a murder weapon could not be determined, the damage to her tissue indicated she’d been torn open by a sharp object. Nothing to indicate how exactly she’d been hoisted onto the top of the billboard. Someone very big and strong. Or more than one person. No rope marks on her, nothing on the ground at all except for her clothes. No footprints, no ladder marks or tire tracks. The woods around the edge were untouched, not a broken limb to be found. All he had to go on was the cross. Simple, find the owner of the cross, and find the murderer. The cross, along with fingernail scrapings, semen, and other samples, had been sent to the county crime lab. The semen could be Chris’s, though. If not, then that would be his biggest break. Chris had voluntarily given a hair sample and turned over his clothing he had worn on the night she was murdered, and was sent to the lab for testing as well.
He also intended to look through the past unsolved cases that Johnson had spoken about, and assigned Tyler to get him a list of all cases of murder and missing persons. There must be old-timers in the town that remembered. All of the police officers had been on the force less than ten years, and the former police chief had died of cancer. Maybe he’d have a talk with old Jasper from the bar, who had to be at least eighty years old. He would surely remember something.
“Don’t waste your time, Chief,” Jasper rattled, then downed the whiskey shot Cord had bought him.
“What do you mean?”
“You ain’t ever gonna find the killer. I can sit here all night and tell you all about it, and I don’t mind that, but it ain’t gonna do you no good. This is a bad town, it’s been that way for a long time, and it’ll always be that way. We’ve pretty much resigned ourselves to it, can’t do nothing about it. The town is cursed, so people think. I don’t know ‘bout that, not much on that superstition stuff, but I know there’s somethin’ rotten here.”
“Did you know my grandparents?”
“Oh yeah, sure, but not too well. They was good, hardworking people. Kept to themselves mostly. Friendly enough, though.”
Cord himself knew little about them. Despite the fact they’d lived only two hours apart, his parents hadn’t taken him to visit that often when he was a kid. They weren’t very close, but he never knew why, and the occasional visits were quiet and a little uneasy. After his parents had died in 1988, he’d had no contact with them at all and they didn’t seem interested in contacting him either. He hadn’t even attended their funerals. Cord was born and raised in New York; his father had left Woodbine to attend college in New York as a kid and never left.
So what the fuck was he doing here now?
“Did my grandfather know about his mother, Elizabeth?”
“Sure, sure. Wasn’t no secret around here. I expect that had a lot to do with him not socializin’ too much. You know how people are, suspicious and stuff, especially back then. He moved into the Barclay house after he married Marge when they were pretty young, till they built the new one, the one you’re livin’ in now.”
“So who owns the Barclay house now?”
“Well, I don’t think he ever sold it that I know of. It’s just an old shack after all. So I expect you do.”
“Do you remember Elizabeth Barclay?”
“I don’t remember too much about her. I was only about ten at the time. No one ever spoke about what happened, don’t expect anyone will now either.”
“But you know what they did to her, how she was executed?”
“I’ve heard the rumors. Don’t know anyone who actually saw it, or would admit to it. None of them’s alive still of course.”
“Of course. What about my grandfather, when he was younger? What was he like?”
“Oh he was quiet then too. But all that had happened to him as a youngster, well it was to be expected, I suppose.”
“What happened to him?”
“You don’t know?”
“No. I don’t know much about him at all.”
“Well, he was put into a foster home. Myrtle Snyder took him in. She lived out there in the woods by herself. Twasn’t nowhere else for him to go, no one wanted anything to do with him. Everyone believed he was the son of the devil. Myrtle thought that too, but she took him in anyway. She used to beat him real bad. No one did anything about it, or turned the other way. After awhiles he stopped going to school and Myrtle claimed she was home schoolin’ him. I guess it got so bad, his mind snapped one day. He was ‘bout eight or nine at the time. Anyways, someone went out there to that house, and found him squatted down next to her. She was dead and had been for some time. Her corpse was burnt. He’d been living off her flesh, eating her. He was in bad shape, too, she’d been beatin’ him real bad.
He was rantin’ and ravin’, something about the devil being inside him, so I heard.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, well. No one really knows what happened out there. Your grandfather was in a bad state, out of his mind. Wouldn’t talk about it afterwards. Wouldn’t talk about anything. He was put into the hospital, in the mental ward. He lived there till he was, oh, about eighteen. Till they saw fit to let him out. He met your grandmother right after, and they married and moved into the old Barclay house. That’s bout all I can tell you about him, Chief.”
“What about all of the murders in this town, Jasper? Can you tell me anything about that?”
Jasper downed another shot and gestured at the bartender for another. “Nope. But I expect you’ll find out soon enough.”
Cord met Doug in New York that weekend and they dropped off the tapes at Doug’s contact. The DVDs would be ready in just a few hours, so they grabbed dinner and then went to a bar to drink.
“So what’s the story, Cord? What’s going on up there in that town?”
“I don’t know. All I know is I’ve walked into something bad, and I’m royally pissed about it. I think that’s why they hired me, to clean up their mess.” He pulled out the crime scene photos and showed them to Doug.
“This is what’s going on. Can you believe it? In that podunk town? Not the first one either. The others were just as bad as this. Bunch of missing kids in the past, too. And these people think the town’s cursed or something, by this witch, who just happens to be my great-grandmother. I just found out also, my grandfather apparently killed his foster mother when he was a kid, and was put in a mental hospital.”
“Nice,” Doug murmured, staring at the photos, then asked in a matter-offact voice, “Is that a cross in her crotch?”
“Yeah.”
“So this is right up your alley then, huh? You think it’s occult related, or a ritual sacrifice?”
“Could be, not sure. But that’s not the weird part. How the hell did he, or they, get her up on that billboard without leaving any tracks? She was killed there. There was nothing on the ground; five inches of snow fresh and untouched.”
“Hmm.”
Vile Things: Extreme Deviations of Horror Page 20