It had been right in front of him all along.
The register.
Twitching fingers opened the tattered binder, the old glue crackling. A bloodstained fingertip lightly tracked down the column of names that were scrawled along the left side of the page. Handwritten in the style of old-fashioned roadside inns, the register contained a virtual cornucopia of lonely transients—many of whom, at that moment, were slumbering in the squalid units flanking the lobby . . .
. . . each of them unconscious, dreaming banal dreams, waiting to be sacrificed.
12
A Secret Wrapped in Secrets
Father Carrigan’s eyes flared with anger, the teacup trembling in his palsied hand, its contents sloshing over the rim. “Go look in the Vatican library, if you don’t believe me, it’s all there,” he told the table, his feeble voice straining to be heard over the gathering noise in the coffee shop. “These precious discoveries of yours, they’ve stirred up forces that are best left undisturbed, and it’s only because of hubris, pure hubris, that these poor souls keep getting dug up.” The padre paused for a moment, as though exhausted by the sheer emotion coursing through him. Then he looked across the table at each of the distinguished professors sitting there. “Tell me, Professor de Lourde . . . why would you come all this way for so little remuneration? Why would all these renowned archaeologists travel halfway around the world at the drop of a hat to attend such an obscure meeting?”
Professor Moses de Lourde was about to take a bite out of a small triangle of toast when he paused, the toast poised in midair in front of his mouth, a faint, little, ironic smirk crossing his elegant face. “I suppose, Father,” he replied finally, “the reason is good old-fashioned ego. For a room full of archaeologists, a feature article in a national science publication is akin to waving a slab of raw meat in front of a pack of wild dogs.”
Knowing smiles passed among the professors, and even Maura found it difficult to suppress a grin.
The table grew silent for a moment, as Grove sat in front of a plate of cold scrambled eggs and tried to get a reading on the priest, tried to size him up, tried to figure out if he was crazy. The others deferentially stared into their laps, or absently sipped their coffee and picked at their breakfasts, not wanting to agitate the priest any more than necessary. The restaurant, which was a long, narrow assemblage of round tables nestled in the middle of an atrium lobby, was already filling up with early morning traffic. Wait staff bustled. Cappuccino machines hissed and sputtered. Silverware clanked. Grove noticed some of the other patrons shooting glances this way. He could only imagine what this table of eccentrics looked and sounded like to the uninitiated.
So far Grove had gleaned several things. First, it was becoming apparent that the phenomenon of unearthing ancient murder victims with similar pathologies was no secret to much of the world. Factions of historians and scientists had formed around different theories, most of them concluding, as Okuda had, that the killings were ritual based. Second, most experts agreed with Okuda that these victims, in most cases, were probably shamans or healers. They each carried their own version of the “medicine bundle” found on the Mount Cairn Iceman. But what had ignited such a vigorous dialogue at the breakfast table was Father Carrigan’s assertion that malevolent events followed the discovery of each mummy, that something metaphysical was released as a result of each excavation.
Professor de Lourde dabbed the corners of his mouth with a cloth napkin. “May I ask the good father what exactly he did during his tenure in Vatican City?”
The old man puckered his liver-colored lips, then raised the teacup with trembling hands, daintily slurping at the brown liquid. His wrinkled visage had turned scarlet in the heat of the discussion, and now his face looked mottled and hectic with burst capillaries. “I was a bureaucrat, a committeeman,” he replied at last. “But you would not recognize the committee if I told you its name.”
“Try me, Father.”
Gray eyes flashed. “Consilium de Miraculum. You see? The name would not mean much to any of you.”
Professor Endecott spoke up, gazing over the tops of her reading glasses. She had been taking notes on a small spiral-bound pad. “May I ask why you’re so certain none of us would know of this group?”
The old man scowled at her. “Have you heard of the committee . . . Professor . . . ?”
“Endecott. Edith Endecott. Actually no. I haven’t heard of it.”
“That’s because the committee did not exist.”
“Pardon?”
The priest took a haggard breath as though he were crossing a laborious rubicon by explaining such a thing. “The committee did not exist, because it was a secret, but then again everything under the Vatican banner was secret, so this was a secret wrapped in secrets.”
Grove broke in. “My Latin’s not great, but it sounds like, what, ‘Committee on Miracles’?”
The priest nodded. “It was a group of clergy, anthropologists, scholars, and antiquarians—all dedicated to investigating and authenticating miracles.”
An exchange of glances around the table. Maura County did not look amused. Sitting in front of a half-eaten bowl of granola, she looked at Grove from across the table, and Grove tried to read the expression on the journalist’s face. It was an odd mixture of fascination and repulsion, as though all the enthusiasm had drained out of her—the prospects for a juicy article long ago replaced by a gathering dread. Next to her, stirring a packet of sweetener into his iced tea, his cowboy hat sitting on the table next to him, Terry Zorn looked as though he might burst out laughing at any minute. He obviously wasn’t buying much of this. Grove, on the other hand, was ambivalent. He felt as though he were on a train that had inadvertently snapped a cable.
Grove looked at the deeply lined face of the priest. “And what kind of miracles are we talking about here, Father?”
Father Carrigan sighed. “Miracles are not always happy ones, Agent Grove. Miracles are not always benign and friendly to mankind. The beneficial miracle is a New Testament concept.”
A pause. Grove told him to go on.
“On at least three different occasions, the committee was called upon to investigate the similarities between mummified remains found in the late 1950s in Italy. And later—in the early 1970s, I believe it was—at various locations around Eastern Europe. And finally North America.”
Another pause. Professor Armatraj, his eyes gleaming with interest as he daintily sipped his tea, spoke up then: “And your conclusions were . . . what exactly?”
The priest swallowed hard, as though the mere subject matter was draining him. “At first we had no inkling what we were dealing with. We couldn’t make heads or tails out of the tattoos and markings that seemed to be common among the mummies. But we immediately saw a connection between the pose—the way the arms were raised—and the gesture of summoning.”
Armatraj said he wasn’t following.
The elderly priest raised one arm with great effort, the palsy making his brittle tendons twitch. “In the ancient rites of the Church,” he croaked, “the practitioner lifts his hand like so. The supplicant does the same. It’s a gesture of absorption.”
“Define absorption, please,” Armatraj said.
The priest dropped his arm, looking exhausted. “Absorption in the sense of a summoning.”
Grove studied the old man. “A summoning of what, Father?”
Carrigan looked at Grove as though the profiler had just asked the color of the grass or why there is gravity. “A spirit, of course,” he said, sounding a bit impatient.
Grove asked him to elaborate.
“I’m referring to the summoning of a spirit into one’s earthly body,” the old man explained, his eyes fierce within the folds of his drooping lids. “It’s a very powerful gesture. We saw it in every instance, and we came to believe there was a connection . . . between the summoning and the horrible events that were occurring in the aftermath of each discovery.”
Now Maura chi
med in: “Can you tell us about these events? You’ve mentioned in passing these horrible things that have happened.”
The priest gave her a grave look. “My dear, for centuries the Consilium de Miraculum was a virtual seismograph for spiritual activity—both good and evil. In the years immediately following each of these discoveries, the reports of human misery virtually pinned the needle. Especially in the areas around the discoveries. Death and mayhem, even reports of what Agent Grove might call ‘copycat’ murders. Believe me when I tell you, Miss County, we had our hands full. I’ll admit that opinions differed among church authorities . . . but I believed then, as I still do to this day . . . there was a connection to the unearthing of these wretched souls.”
Maura thought about it for a moment, then said, “So what happened?”
The priest looked confused.
Maura clarified: “After you came to believe there was a connection—what did you do about it?”
A shrug from the old man. “World politics made it impossible for the church to conduct any official investigations, or to come to any conclusions. People were too busy arguing over who owned the mummies. Everything was done in secret, Miss County, and local authorities were very stubborn, very reluctant to even talk with representatives of the church. The fact is, even my colleagues at the Vatican eventually placed their attentions elsewhere.”
The old priest looked down then, fondling the burnished handle of his cane, which stood next to him, propped against the table.
“In time,” he went on, “they managed to get rid of me and my crackpot theories. They discredited me, treated me like a senile old man. Eventually they sent me to my beloved South American gulag.”
Another pause, and Grove started to ask something else, when all at once he fell silent, noticing something strange across the table. Professor de Lourde, normally jovial and sanguine, had lost all his color. The fashionable southerner sat bolt upright against his chair, his eyes wide, his lips pressed together tightly. It was clear that de Lourde had realized something disturbing.
“You okay, Professor?” Grove asked de Lourde.
“Uh . . . yes,” he softly intoned, his voice barely above a whisper.
“Something the matter?”
All eyes were on the southerner now. Face drained, his gaze suddenly haunted and fixed on the middle distance, de Lourde tried to speak, but had difficulty putting what he was thinking into words. Grove felt a cold prickling sensation at the base of his neck. To see the affable, genteel de Lourde like that—suddenly at a loss for words—somehow disturbed Grove more than anything else that had occurred all morning.
“I apologize,” he said at last. “It’s just that . . . I just had the most diabolical realization.”
That’s weird, Olivia Mendoza thought as she turned off her rust-bucket Chevy Geo and sat for a moment in the Regal Motel parking lot, staring through the rain-streaked windshield at the entrance to the front office. A plump little Latina with a peroxide-blond flip and rusty brown skin, Olivia wore the trademark baby-blue pinafore of the Mighty Maids Company under her tattered down coat.
It looked as though old Pete Bowden had mistakenly put the CLOSED sign up on the door again. The old bastard had probably been dipping into that “secret” bottle of J&B he kept hidden behind the file cabinet in the back office, the bottle that nobody was supposed to know about. Olivia had stumbled upon early morning remnants of the innkeeper’s little “secret” many times before. One time a couple of years ago the maid had arrived for her shift only to find a pair of women’s panties hanging from the Mr. Coffee in the front room. Another time she arrived to find Pete Bowden passed out on the floor of the lobby, half naked, his underwear bunched around his ankles. That time it took all of Olivia Mendoza’s willpower not to just bust out laughing at the size of Pete’s shriveled little pecker.
But this time, the old coot had gone too far. Not only was the CLOSED sign facing out but the blinds were shut as well. And the lights were off. The place looked boarded up, condemned, gone out of business. Which wouldn’t be a half-bad idea, Olivia thought with a sideways grin, if I could only find another housekeeping gig in Portland.
The maid let out a sigh and reached for her umbrella, which sat on the passenger-side floor, buried beneath a pile of Adkins bar wrappers. The rains had let up a little, but still were coming down hard enough to warrant an umbrella. The Geo’s backseat was littered with cleaning products and empty cans of Slim-Fast. Olivia Mendoza had tried every fad diet known to man, and her latest fixations were the low-carbohydrate trips, which so far had only served to make her grouchy rather than thin. She grabbed the umbrella, climbed out of the car, wrestled it open, went around to her trunk, rooted out her little plastic caddy full of cleaning products, then trundled through the mist to the office entrance.
At first she thought the door was locked, but then realized it was simply stuck—or maybe stuck was the wrong word. It gave a little bit as she tried it, crackling as though something had dried and crusted along the bottom edge. She remembered when her youngest, Ramon, was just a toddler, and the kitchen door of their shotgun flat would get like that—sticky with egg and juice and stewed prunes.
The door finally gave, and Olivia entered the dark lobby.
Immediately she smelled something unusual that she had never smelled in the place before—and if there was one thing Olivia Mendoza was well versed in, it was odor. It was a harsh, mineral smell, and it seemed to hang in the airless lobby as Olivia gazed around the shadows. She shook the rain from her umbrella and put it down. The place was a mess, of course, streaked with ink or vomit or God-knew-what-else spattered across the walls and carpet in great smudged streaks. The old fart’s done it this time, Olivia thought as she looked around the dim room and heard that crackling sound again beneath her. She looked down and her heart started beating faster.
Blood.
That’s what was sticking to the bottom of the door, and that’s what was currently sticking to the bottom of her white crepe-soled shoes, making delicate crackling noises as she shifted her weight. Blood, for God’s sake! Olivia’s mind raced for a moment. Pete Bowden must have gone and gotten himself so drunk last night he took a fall and knocked his teeth out, or maybe he got violent and finally took out his sick frustrations on Evelyn with a paring knife, or maybe there was a fight, yeah, that must be it, but God, that’s a lot of blood even for a barroom brawl, and look at the walls, and the floor! Maybe kosher salt and club soda would get that out—maybe—but good Lord, look at the streaks on the carpet—ohmyGod, look at the carpet!
Olivia dropped the plastic caddy, and cans of disinfectant rolled across the floor.
Something made the housekeeper freeze. There was a cry stuck in her throat, and her mouth was as dry as bonemeal, but she stayed planted on those sticky tiles by the door for a moment, gawking at that blood-ravaged lobby, trying to get a breath into her lungs. She made her legs move. She willed her legs to start toward the front desk, across the room, maybe twelve feet away. Slowly, convulsively, she followed the drag marks around the edge of the counter.
The bodies were neatly tucked behind the desk, laid against the baseboard.
Olivia’s hand shot up to her mouth and trembled there as she stared at the pair of corpses—the thin man and the heavy woman—carefully arranged in identical poses, arms raised, ashen faces contorted, gray flesh marbled with blood the color of tar. The backs of their heads were cemented to the floor in puddles of black, glassy, hardened spoor.
Olivia Mendoza screamed then, but oddly enough, very little noise came out of her other than a hoarse, mucusy mewl that sounded like an injured bird in its death throes, as her trembling hand reached out blindly toward the countertop.
Her fingers found the telephone and fumbled for the receiver, knocking it off the cradle.
In the days and weeks to come, much would be made of the speed—or more specifically the lack of it—with which the official investigation of the Regal Motel massacre got under
way that morning. Normally the Portland PD would be dispatched to handle such a serious violent crime in one of the city’s outlying areas. But the motel was located just across the state line, in Washington, so all the jurisdictional complications immediately ensued.
Vancouver, ten miles to the north, was the closest town with any kind of homicide squad, but the crime scene lab had to come from Olympia, nearly a hundred miles away. Initially this caused a significant delay between the time the first patrolman—a fairly green deputy from the county sheriff’s department—showed up at the scene, and the point at which the CSI unit from Olympia finally arrived.
Official records placed the deputy arriving at the motel at ten minutes after seven o’clock. He found the maid huddling in her car outside the office, nearly catatonic with terror, unable to utter even the simplest reply to any of the deputy’s questions. At twelve minutes after seven o’clock, the deputy drew his sidearm and entered the premises, finding the bodies of the motel owner, Peter Bowden (fifty-three), and his wife, Evelyn Bowden (forty-nine), on the floor behind the front desk. They appeared—to the deputy, at least—to have been dead for several hours.
The deputy immediately called in the apparent “187” to dispatch, and the Vancouver squad was called. The next thirty minutes would become particularly problematic throughout subsequent inquiries for both the sheriff’s department as well as the Vancouver PD. For reasons known only to the deputy and the first-on-the-scene detectives, no one thought to check on the motel’s guests until sometime after 7:40. Perhaps the problem was the lack of activity anywhere on the property. For the two minutes the deputy was talking to the maid, as well as the five minutes or so he was investigating the blood-spattered lobby—and even after the first unmarked squad car had arrived from Vancouver—nobody stirred in any of the rooms. No faces in the windows, nobody peering out of any of doors. Maybe the investigators simply figured the place was empty. But regardless of the reasons, the first knock on a guest room door didn’t occur until exactly 7:42 that morning.
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