Written in Blood

by Layton Green

  A look that spoke volumes.

  “Oh, and guys, one more thing.” She handed them each a plastic pumpkin from a bag beside her desk. The pumpkins were filled with candy and a gift card from the local bakery. Preach realized he had forgotten the date.

  “Creekville Elementary thanks you for your service,” she said. “Happy Halloween.”

  Rance Crowley swung by to help Preach scour Farley’s hard drive, Kirby handled the phone records, and Preach enlisted Terry and another patrol officer to sift through the deleted emails. The afternoon came and went, but they had nothing to show for their efforts except a pile of grease-stained Chinese take-out boxes.

  By six p.m., the POs were off duty, and Kirby had left to take his sister’s kids trick or treating. Frustrated with the lack of progress, Preach rose for a cup of coffee. Outside the station window, he could see costumed revelers cavorting around downtown, children swinging their containers of loot as they tried to outdistance their parents. Across the street, a food truck decorated to look like a giant hearse was serving Piña Ghouladas and gourmet Halloween cookies.

  “Detective!” Rance called out, a note of excitement in his voice.

  Preach rushed over to find the IT expert holding Farley’s cell phone, grinning at a photo of Damian entwined with two Asian teenagers, a boy and a girl, on a four-poster bed with silk netting. All three were naked.

  “That looks like a fun game of Twister,” Rance said. His wispy goatee and weak chin gave his face a rat-like appearance. “We have a few more of these.” he flipped through more photos of the same three people in flagrante delicto. “Five, to be exact.”

  The phone was attached to a laptop with a USB cord; Rance was running recovery software to restore the deleted files.

  Preach felt a growing excitement that the pieces of the puzzle might be fitting together. “Can you tell when these were taken?”

  “Six months ago, buried in a pile of random shots. Something else: there’s a lack of metadata from a single day, about six weeks ago.”

  The time period rang like a fire alarm in Preach’s head. That was the same time communications had ceased between Farley and Damian. “Scrubbed?”

  “Yep. My guess is he downloaded a file shredder. Pretty simple stuff, even for a muggle.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he chirped a laugh. “Sorry—even for someone with no tech background.”

  Farley must have made hard copies of whatever he was using to blackmail Damian, Preach thought, and then deleted the images.

  “Great work,” Preach said. “Can you run this photo through facial recognition software?”

  “Easy-peasy.”

  Preach paced the room as Rance did his thing, hurrying back over when he called out. “Got a hit,” Rance said, pointing at the mug shots onscreen. “Tram and Kim Vu, eighteen- and nineteen–year-old siblings, both with rap sheets for drugs and prostitution.”

  “Of age,” Preach murmured. Still, the fact that they were prostitutes strengthened the case against Damian. But were the photos enough, he wondered, for the author to pay money to keep them hidden and orchestrate a murder? Or was there something worse out there?

  One thing was certain: it was enough to bring Damian in for questioning.

  Preach knew the author was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at another writing conference, two days away, this time in Los Angeles. Damian would probably fly out in the morning, if he hadn’t left already.

  He texted Kirby.

  -I found something. On my way to pick up Damian. I know you’re with family but let me know if you want to ride along-

  Kirby’s reply hit before Preach could pocket his phone.

  -wait on me-

  18

  Preach and Kirby flew past the old Southern homes on Hillsdale. The oaks were festooned with hanging skeletons and battalions of orange and black lights. As they left town and hit the back roads, the Halloween decorations grew sparser and more sinister. Zombie scarecrows standing sentinel over cornfields, porch stoops lit by candles glowing inside rotting pumpkins, ragdoll witches propped up in the scraggly front yards of country shacks.

  “You think Damian will bolt?” Kirby asked.

  “Not from us. I think he’s praying he gets out of town before we circumvent his lawyer.”

  “You use big words sometimes.”

  “That’s only three syllables. Try exegesis, or anthropomorphic, or amillennialism.”

  “Do those have anything to do with this case?” Kirby asked.

  “No.”

  “Then shut up.”

  Preach was grinning in the darkness, eager to arrest the author, pleased that Kirby felt comfortable enough to banter with him. “I am a detective, you know. A sergeant.”

  “Then why haven’t you detected what that key fits? I’ve tried all the banks in town, local storage units, the post office, and shipping companies. A locksmith told me his best guess is a padlock or some kind of locker. Which could be anywhere.”

  “Anywhere in the vic’s world, yes. I have a feeling we may need whatever that key opens. We’ve got enough to bring Damian in, but not to convict.”

  “You think it’s really him, huh?”

  “He’s smart, he was being blackmailed, and the literary angle fits. I don’t think he’s a stone-cold killer, but maybe he’s a warm cheese dip one. Someone who’d pay Mac and his boys to get their hands dirty.”

  “They’re the same in my book.”

  “Mine, too.”

  They pulled onto Damian’s long drive, the trunks of the hundred-foot pines hedging them in like the bars of some giant prison. They parked beside Damian’s BMW X5. The faux spider webs stretched between the oaks on the front lawn glistened eerily in the moonlight, and a pair of life-sized grim reapers had been added to the front porch. As Kirby climbed onto the first step, the reapers raised their scythes and cackled, a red glow flashing from their eye sockets.

  Kirby jerked back, almost falling off the porch. “Dammit,” he muttered.

  Preach stopped moving and held up a finger. “What don’t you hear?”

  “Huh?”

  Preach waited in the near silence. Only crickets broke the spell. After a few moments, he said, “No dogs.”

  Kirby gave the front door an uneasy glance, then followed Preach’s lead by easing his handgun out of its holster. Preach rang the doorbell.

  No reply.

  “Maybe he left town early and boarded them,” Kirby said.

  “Maybe.”

  Preach rang the bell a few more times. He could hear it, so he knew it was working. He tried the doorknob.

  Unlocked.

  “That’s just weird,” Kirby said, glancing around nervously.

  Preach placed both hands on his gun and raised it to chest level, then eased the door open with his foot. It swung silently inward. “Mr. Black! Are you home?”

  Still no response. Creekville was a friendly place, but not friendly enough to leave one’s door unlocked at night.

  The two suits of armor stood sentinel in the foyer, and there was a faint smell of booze as Preach crept down the horror-poster lined hallway and into the parlor, where the smell was much stronger, probably due to the dozens of liquor bottles that had been smashed on the floor. He drew a sharp breath as he scanned the destruction with his firearm raised.

  It wasn’t just the bottles: the crystal candelabra had crash-landed atop the baby grand, and glass from the shattered cases of horror memorabilia glittered on the moss-green carpet. The child mummy, the Siamese-twin skeletons, and the other grotesqueries were strewn about the room, the splayed limbs making them look even more sinister, as if they had acquired a spark of life and leapt to the floor.

  “Preach,” Kirby said, his voice grim and a touch hoarse. “The fireplace.”

  The detective’s gaze shifted to the enormous stone hearth heaped with ash. Buried head down in the gray flakes, the rest of the body angling upward into the fireplace, was the corpse of Damian Black.

  Enough of t
he face was visible to make an ID. The deceased author was still clad in his velvet smoking jacket, his face and clothes smeared with blood.

  Preach stepped over an upturned leather chair to reach the body, landing on a shriveled hand that crunched underfoot like a desiccated tarantula. At the base of the fireplace, he found an odd arrangement of objects: three large silver spoons and three whitish, smaller ones; a topaz earring; four plastic gold coins that looked like they had come from a toy pirate chest; and two canvas bags full of the same coins.

  Next to the hearth, placed upright in the armchair like an evil puppet master in charge of the other bizarre objects scattered about the room, was a bloodstained straight razor.

  Preach leaned down to examine the corpse. Bruises covered the writer’s face and neck. After reporting the crime to headquarters, Preach hovered over his phone and searched Google for “hearth corpse upside down bloodstained straight razor.” He had to scratch an uncomfortable itch that was growing inside his head.

  He scanned the results.

  Nothing.

  He added “silver spoons” to the field. Three results down, a Shmoop article told him that these search terms all appeared in The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe.

  He pulled up the article and, once convinced it was a fit, he stared at the corpse of Damian Black stuffed upside down in the fireplace, a pocket of coldness spreading and then settling inside his chest.

  19

  Police sirens whined in the distance as Preach showed Kirby the article he had found.

  Kirby gave the Google results a disbelieving stare. “What the hell?”

  “Yeah.” Preach ran a hand through his hair as he eyed the glass case full of rare novels, noting uneasily that it was the only untouched item of value in the room.

  As the evidence team dissected the parlor, Preach and Kirby explored the white country kitchen, the wainscoted dining room, and then a living room with judges paneling and built-in bookshelves. They found the two Akitas slumped by a fireplace in the den. Preach radioed for someone to call a vet, then leaned down to check the dogs’ vitals. “Pulse is slow but steady. Probably a tranquilizer.”

  “Have to be a good shot to get ’em both,” Kirby said.

  “Maybe there was an accomplice. Or a poisoned piece of meat. Let the drug go to work on the dogs, and then deal with Damian.”

  “Implying the perp was in the house before the murder.”

  “Did you see any signs of forced entry? I didn’t. Which, unless we’re missing something, greatly narrows the suspect pool.”

  “To someone who knew both Damian and Farley,” Kirby said.

  Preach’s answer was a set of pursed lips.

  The master and guest bedrooms comprised the second story. Preach and Kirby gave it a thorough search and found nothing unusual. A spiral staircase wound upward into the tower, where they found Damian’s writing studio overlooking the dense woods behind the house—though the studio looked more like a stage set for a Vincent Price flick.

  Carved in the likeness of a black widow, Damian’s desk had eight grasping legs and a glossy onyx writing surface with a red hourglass in the center. The chair was a throne-like contraption with an assortment of actual bones worked into the high-backed frame. Built-in bookcases climbed the walls, and a wooden sarcophagus stood upright in the corner.

  Preach gave the chair of bones an uneasy glance. The whole setup would have been laughable except for the quality of the materials and the craftsmanship. Instead of coming off as cartoonish, the room possessed an eerie, lifelike feel.

  Just like a good horror novel.

  “White people,” Kirby muttered.

  “Detective!” Terry’s voice called out from below. “You need to see this.”

  Preach and Kirby descended to find Officer Haskins waving them toward the living room, where a flokati rug had been moved aside to reveal a trap door. The door was hinged open. Preach climbed down a folding ladder and into a spacious, open basement with leopard-print carpet covering the floors and three of the walls. The ceiling was a giant mirror, and the fourth wall was given over to a collection of erotic artwork depicting half-human, half-animal figures engaged in a variety of sex acts.

  A giant four-poster bed with silk netting, which Preach recognized from the photos on Farley’s cell phone, dominated the center. A number of BDSM contraptions dotted the rest of the room: swings, harnesses, bondage racks, a human-sized cage suspended from the ceiling, and something that looked like a giant X with cuffs attached.

  Even before they had found Farley’s photos and Damian’s hidden dungeon, Preach had thought of the author as someone who wasn’t what he seemed. Looking back on it, Preach should have known better. The author had been too agitated, too obviously distressed, to be the killer. Had Damian’s anxiety stemmed from the blackmail and the secret life he knew an investigation would uncover?

  Or was it something else?

  Two forensic techs scurried about the room like a pair of curious ferrets. The place must be a petri dish of DNA, Preach thought.

  Kirby was staring at a painting of a satyr erotically entwined with a mermaid. “Whatever this was about, it must be something big, to off someone famous like that.”

  “You think fame and fortune affords you some kind of immunity? The statistics say otherwise. The bigger they are . . .”

  Kirby started toward the bed, but Preach put a hand on his elbow. “Prepare yourself.”

  “For what?” Kirby asked, and Preach read his confused expression to mean, how could it get any worse than what we found inside this house?

  If you only but knew, Preach thought. “For what happens after a second victim is found,” he said.

  20

  Preach woke bleary-eyed the next morning. They had processed Damian’s house until four a.m., finding nothing else of interest. Local reporters had eventually swarmed the scene, and while the chief decided not to release details, the connections between Farley and Damian were easy to make. Speculation of a common murderer would soon follow.

  He stumbled into his kitchen and made enough coffee to safely operate a motor vehicle. After picking up a copy of The Complete Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe at the Wandering Muse—Ari wasn’t in that morning—he took the book to Jimmy’s Corner Store, holed up in a corner, and turned to the beginning of The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

  After giving the thirty-page classic a careful read, he reread the passage that paralleled Damian Black’s murder:

  The apartment was in the wildest disorder—the furniture broken and thrown about in all directions . . . on the chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood . . . upon the floor were found four Napoleans, an earring of topaz, three large silver spoons, three smaller of metal d’Alger, and two bags, containing nearly four thousand francs in gold . . . an unusual quality of soot being observed in the fireplace, a search was made in the chimney, and (horrible to relate!) the corpse of the daughter, head downward, was dragged therefrom.

  He browsed through a few online critiques on his phone, got a third cup of coffee to go, tried to visit Wade in the hospital but was told to get the hell out, and then headed into work.

  “Maybe we should release the details,” Kirby said, after Preach told everyone about the Poe reference. “You know, see if some mad genius out there can figure this out.”

  Preach and his partner were sitting in a bland conference room with Chief Higgins, Officer Haskins, and Officer Wright. Terry Haskins was married with two young kids. Officer Bill Wright was an unmarried older officer, but he had transferred in from a sleepy hamlet near the coast. No homicide experience. He had cropped white hair and a beer gut, and Preach knew he was counting the days to retirement.

  Chief Higgins folded her forearms on the table. “What’s more likely to happen is that the crazies will come out of the woodwork, weigh us down with false leads, and stall the investigation. We’ll become ground zero for every journalist and half-baked online news outlet in the country. Which is wh
at you want, isn’t it, Kirby?”

  “Nah, Chief, I just thought—”

  She pointed a finger at him. “No leaks. I mean it.”

  Kirby lowered his eyes and slid his morning smoothie closer to his chest.

  “You’re right,” Preach said to Chief Higgins, “but so is Kirby. Something like this is bound to get out. Better to be in front of the storm than behind it.”

  The other two officers hadn’t said a word. They were staring with deer-in-the-headlights eyes at Preach and at the reporters clamoring in the street outside the window.

  “So what’s your suggestion?” the chief asked.

  “Give us some rope for a week or so,” Preach replied. “I’ve got an expert lined up. I doubt the average literature professor can help us, but you never know. If there’s no progress, I suggest we start thinking about a public statement.”

  The chief rapped her knuckles on the table and bobbed her head like a chicken in slow motion. “Have you talked to the coroner?”

  “The cause of death on Damian was strangulation,” Preach said. “Bruises all along the neck, fractured hyoid.”

  She drew back in surprise. “What about the razor?”

  “It was used to make a few cuts, nothing more.” Preach’s mouth tightened. “Just like in the story.”

  The chief took an angry sip of her chai, as if the beverage had offended her.

  “No bruises on the body, no skin under the fingernails,” Preach continued, “which is strange with such a close-quarter kill. Damian was a grown man. He would have put up a fight. Toxicology isn’t back yet, but I’m wondering if our author didn’t unwillingly partake—”

  “Big words again,” Kirby muttered, and Preach knew he was just trying to deal with the gravity of the moment. The other two officers worked hard not to snicker. Chief Higgins gave them a look that would have cowed Vladimir Putin.

  “Of the same incapacitating substance that put the dogs to sleep,” Preach finished. “Terry and Bill are searching for common acquaintances between the victims. Especially other authors signed by Pen Oak Press. Kirby and I will continue investigating the main suspects.”