Avengers of Blood

by Gae-Lynn Woods

  Instead, his memory was seared with the sensations of losing Angel. The sun blistering his nearly bald head because, as usual, he’d forgotten to grab his hat when he and Angel left for the beach. Friendly jostling as they waited with the crowds in line for ice cream, wrapped in the mouth-watering scent of baking waffle cones. Her beautiful face furrowed in concentration as she struggled to choose between vanilla and chocolate. The feel of her tiny left hand in his right.

  Precious everyday sensations, a dulling prelude to the coming horror, that moment, that fraction of a second: his right hand releasing hers and reaching into his back pocket for his wallet and passing it to his left hand. His right hand reaching for hers again and finding only air.

  Hand.

  No hand.

  Hand.

  No hand.

  Angel.

  No Angel.

  The sun, the smells, the pressure of her soft hand in his, the vacant space where her hand should be, they bored through his brain like a movie stuck in perpetual replay. With a background track that repeated “if only”. If only Gabrielle had taken Angel for ice cream. If only Munk had used his left hand to fish for his wallet. If only he’d kept an eye on his daughter. If only. Munk threw his head back and fought the foul stream of bile that burned his throat at the agonizing truth of how he had lost his daughter. Their daughter.

  The waking memories were a noxious cocktail of anger, guilt, and regret. But the nightmares were worse. In them, he couldn’t control where his subconscious would take him. Or Angel.

  Gabrielle, Munk’s normally fastidious wife, insisted they stay at The Sapphire Starfish Inn every year, in the same room, regardless of how much the place had deteriorated since their last visit. And for those two weeks Gaby let all the emotions held so tightly in check during the other fifty weeks have their head. Munk adored his wife, loved her with a power that frightened him at times. Perhaps because he had failed her so desperately when he lost their only child. So he listened with patience as she explained her sad logic concerning this ghastly old motel – that if Angel were able, this is the one place in Galveston she would come to find her mommy and daddy. And for moments, Munk would stop the self-flagellation and allow himself to sip from the same waters, imagining his daughter as she would look at age eleven, picturing her smile as he opened the motel room’s door at her soft knock.

  Many of their friends wondered how much longer they could perform this charade. How long they could grasp the fraying thread of hope that allowed them to believe that Angel was alive and well. Given the depths of his love for his wife and daughter, Munk knew he would come here every year until he and Gaby were no longer physically able. He’d lost Angel once; abandoning her again was not a possibility. With that return of purpose, he sucked in a breath of tepid air and forced his mind to the present.

  Munk peeled himself from the sticky bedspread and dressed in shorts and running shoes and tugged on the same t-shirt he was wearing when Angel disappeared. Once a brilliant school bus yellow, it was now a threadbare shade of watery sunlight that barely stretched over his belly, distorting the advertisement for Forney County’s annual balloon race. He wore it every day they were in Galveston, washing it each night in the bathroom’s chipped basin and hanging it on the crumbling patio. The shirt was stiff this morning from drying too fast in Galveston’s oppressive heat, and it scratched as he pulled it on.

  His heart leapt at a knock on the door, and he opened it to find one of Gaby’s young nieces looking up at him, an open cell phone in her hand. “Hey Alicia,” he said softly, fighting the lump of disappointment in his throat as he squatted on protesting knees. Munk reached out and tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear. Tears stung his eyes at the smell of baby shampoo. “What’s up?”

  She pecked him on the cheek and held out the phone. “It’s your sister, Miss Evelyn. Tia Gaby said to take the dirty clothes with you and stop by the breakfast buffet before you leave.”

  “Where am I going?” he asked, but Alicia had swirled and was headed down the sidewalk toward her father, who waited at the corner of the motel’s main building. Her flip flops smacked the cracked concrete as she ran, her swimsuit cover-up flapping around her knobby knees. Munk watched her go, fear overriding the regret burbling in his gut. He raised the phone to his ear. “Evelyn? What’s wrong?”

  CHAPTER 35

  THE HOUSE WAS UTTERLY still when Detective Martinez stepped over the front door’s threshold and into Calvin Whitehead’s living room. Already he perceived abandonment. It amazed him how the houses of the dead sensed that their owner’s absence was permanent and responded with a commensurate drop in the creaks and groans that made them seem to live.

  He moved through the rooms, his footsteps echoing hollowly on the floor supported by the old pier and beam structure. The small frame house showed no sign of disturbance, indicating that robbery was not a motive for Whitehead’s killers. Martinez then went through each space more slowly, absorbing the personality of the man who called this sparsely furnished place home.

  Calvin Whitehead was fastidious. The few items of furniture he owned were functional and well-maintained. A shotgun leaned against the wall behind the front door. The walls were bare except for the space over the mantle, which was adorned with a large cross made from – Martinez stepped closer – two pieces of charred wood fixed together with baling wire. He sniffed, surprised to inhale the relatively fresh scent of burned wood. Odd.

  Other than the living room, the house had only one bath, two bedrooms, and a kitchen with space for a small dining table. Both the front and back porches were covered and screened. Martinez had spotted a metal storage building behind the house when he drove up and he noted several keys hanging from a hook in the kitchen. A .22 rifle rested in brackets above the door to the back porch, and Martinez spotted a 9 mm semi-automatic in its holster taped beneath the kitchen table. The cabinets contained mismatched dinnerware for two, an assortment of aged cooking equipment, and enough ammunition to eradicate the entire population of raccoons, squirrels, and possums roaming Texas.

  Whitehead’s bedroom closet housed work clothes: jeans, overalls, and shirts for both summer and winter. Several coats, their pockets empty, hung from the rail. Martinez also found three pairs of black polyester / cotton blend trousers and three white dress shirts, ‘The Whitehead Store’ embroidered over a pocket on each. Worn work and cowboy boots were arranged on the floor. The shelf above the clothes rail was packed with neatly stacked boxes of 12-gauge shotgun shells, .22-long cartridges, 9 mm ammunition, and .38 caliber rounds. He wondered where Whitehead kept the .38 and mentally added armadillos, deer, and hogs to the list of creatures Whitehead could stamp out.

  The top drawers of the dresser held briefs and socks. The bottom drawers contained undershirts, pajamas, and sweaters. Martinez peered under the bed and lifted the mattress. Nothing. Not even dust bunnies. A Bible rested on the bedside table, along with a well-thumbed copy of Stephen King’s The Stand. The narrow top drawer contained a box of tissues, a tube of hand lotion, a tidy stack of Barely Legal magazines, and there it was, a loaded .38 revolver.

  Calvin Whitehead used the second bedroom as an office for both his personal business and that of the store. A metal desk and file cabinet occupied one wall. The desk surface contained only an old rotary phone. Its drawers housed precisely labeled files for the current year’s bills: personal in the right-hand drawers, store in the left. The filing cabinet held paperwork covering the last seven years. Martinez was a high-energy man, and he considered plowing through paperwork – preparing or reviewing the stuff – worse punishment than processing the bloody scene of a knife fight. At least Whitehead only kept seven years worth of information.

  “I have been a very good boy lately, haven’t I?” the detective said to the silent house.

  Two other walls were covered with shelves holding books on a wide variety of topics. Martinez looked closer at their spines. Fiction, astronomy, philosophy, business, and gardening. Many
on religion and the occult. Two books lay face-up on a shelf: romances of the bodice-ripping variety, to judge by the covers.

  Closet doors were closed over most of the fourth wall. Martinez opened them. The clothes rail and shelf were gone. Instead, the space was packed with cardboard boxes. He lifted one lid and groaned. “Maybe I haven’t been as good as I thought.”

  CHAPTER 36

  BERNIE WINTERBOTTOM STRAIGHTENED AS the door to the autopsy room opened. Instead of his customary khaki safari outfit, the Englishman was swathed in a pair of turquoise scrubs. Two huge eyes stared at Cass, the headband magnifier strapped over his unruly blond hair making the gold flecks in his green irises more pronounced. He pushed the visor back, stripped off the gloves, and reached for her. “Cass, my dear. How good to see you.”

  She caught her breath at the smell of charred flesh and strained to hear him over the death-rattle of the autopsy room’s extractor fan. She hugged him, surprised at the surge of affection his English accent brought. “Hey Bernie. How have you been?”

  “Very well, thank you. Grey tells me that you’re on his payroll now. Although I understand that your appointment is only temporary.”

  “Unfortunately,” Cass said, dipping her finger into an open jar of Vick’s and smearing the translucent substance under her nose. “I expect it to last until Sheriff Hoffner gets back today. Then he’ll probably fire me and try to fire Grey.”

  “Shame on the sheriff for putting you and Grey in this position. He has wasted your talent and the taxpayer’s money by failing to return you to duty as soon as those gun people cleared the shooting. As I knew they would.” He pottered to the table where Grey was stitching Donna Moore’s Y-incision closed and peered at her brain where it rested on a small cart. “In the meantime, enjoy the dead. They’re ever so much easier to work with than the living, my dear.”

  “That depends,” Grey stated, pointing a scalpel at the burned corpse on Bernie’s metal table. “Calvin Whitehead isn’t an easy customer.”

  “True enough, although I am slowly teasing his secrets free.” He leaned over to look at Moore’s empty skull and the fragments of bone resting near her head. “Quite a bit of damage. The killer used a high-powered firearm?”

  “Kado pulled a .308 slug from the wall behind her bed,” Cass said.

  Grey tied a knot and snipped a bit of twine. “Does it match the bullets used on the Franklins?”

  “He’s comparing them now. Did you find anything unusual in Moore’s autopsy?”

  “No. She was a healthy woman in her late forties. Had years of life left.” Grey looked over his shoulder at the x-rays on the light box. “The bullet’s exit shattered the skull. I took photos. Need anything else?”

  “That should do.”

  “Her personal effects are on the counter.”

  Cass opened the paper bag. Moore’s blue cotton nightgown was neatly folded. Her jewelry was in a plastic bag: diamond stud earrings and a necklace bearing a small gold cross. “Where did she go to church?”

  “I wondered that, too,” Grey said as he scooped Moore’s intestines into a plastic bag.

  Cass pointed to the extractor fan. “If that’s for Whitehead, it’s not working.”

  “It needs replacing, but there’s no budget for it. Whitehead’s smelling stronger today, but we’re also autopsying the three dead men from this morning’s explosion in Watuga County.”

  “Why doesn’t their ME handle them?”

  Grey shrugged. “He’s been off sick for a couple of weeks now and we’re helping out. It hasn’t been bad until today.”

  “What came up in Calvin Whitehead’s autopsy?”

  Grey glanced at the forensic anthropologist, who had pulled on fresh gloves and was once again bent over the blackened body. “Ask Bernie. He’s been muttering to himself all morning.”

  Cass reached for the Vick’s again, refreshing the smear beneath her nose. “How do you stand the smell, Bernie?”

  “It is vastly underrated, the olfactory system. One never knows what one might detect if the sense of smell is left unfettered.”

  “Has it detected anything related to Calvin Whitehead?”

  Bernie straightened and scratched his nose with his forearm. “Not yet. But I have drawn some conclusions that might be useful.” He indicated the burned section of Whitehead’s head. “Notice anything?”

  Cass leaned closer. “Goober said the zombie’s mouth was on fire when he found the body, and the area around the mouth is significantly more burned than the rest of the face.”

  “Very good. Grey’s autopsy found charring in the esophagus and lungs.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He drank an accelerant, probably gasoline, or had it forced down his throat,” Grey answered quietly. He joined them and studied the man’s torso. “It wasn’t a lot, maybe a cup or so. The damage to his throat and lungs means that he was alive when he was set alight.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “And that means that this was a brutal killing,” Bernie said. “Designed to inflict maximum pain. These burns are third degree.” He indicated sections of the arms and torso where blackened skin had peeled away or split, revealing the underlying fat and muscle. “The damage to his legs is second.”

  Cass cleared her throat. “It makes sense that the fire was started after he was hanging, correct?”

  “I suspect so. A burning body would be difficult to manipulate.”

  “If he was breathing when the fire started, the hanging didn’t kill him.”

  “Correct.” Bernie pointed to a narrow length of charred rope. “Kado will need to examine it, of course, but we don’t believe that a hangman’s noose was used.”

  “That matters?” Cass asked.

  “It can,” Grey answered. “Death by hanging can occur due to fracture of the upper cervical spine and damage to the spinal cord. For this type of injury to occur, great stress must be placed on the neck, as in falling or dropping from a reasonable height. A correctly tied hangman’s noose is designed to add to the stress, snapping the neck.”

  “As in hanging for judicial purposes?”

  “Yes. Another cause of death in hangings is cerebral hypoxia, which occurs when the supply of oxygen to the brain is reduced for an extended period of time.”

  “Similar to death by strangulation, right?”

  Grey nodded. “In Whitehead’s case, the spine itself shows little sign of trauma. Presumably, the noose was loose enough around his neck to allow him to dig his fingers beneath the rope and breathe for a short period of time, permitting the accelerant in his throat and lungs to ignite.” He motioned to the corpse’s burned hands, which were curled into claws.

  “So he didn’t fall when they hung him,” Cass stated. “Or he didn’t fall far enough to break his neck.”

  “Or,” Bernie added, “his executioners hung him gently to ensure that he would be alive at the end of the rope long enough to experience the agony of being set alight.”

  Cass blinked. “Torture.”

  “If you also consider the swastika that was carved into his chest before he hung, yes, it would appear so.”

  “This was a calculated murder,” she stated. “It wasn’t driven by rage.”

  “A cold rage, perhaps, my dear,” Bernie said, looking again at Calvin Whitehead’s scorched scream. “Very, very cold.”

  CHAPTER 37

  THE BREAKFAST CROWD WAS long gone and the lunch folks had yet to arrive when Joseph Franklin pushed open The Golden Gate Café’s door, Moses’ laptop in its original box tucked under his arm. He chose a booth with an electrical outlet nearby, sat facing the door, and rested in the stillness of the little diner. He recognized the sounds of The Kinks harmonizing on “Lola” coming from a jukebox in the corner, and Joseph could hear the soft sounds of silverware jangling from the kitchen. Each was surprisingly soothing after his visit to the funeral home.

  In his wildest dreams Joseph had never imagined that he would make burial arrangemen
ts for his mother and brother. He’d maintained his composure while discussing details with the undertaker, gratefully accepting the public servant’s discount on the cost of the caskets as he realized he had only the slightest idea about his mother and brother’s finances. His own were in ruins. It was only when the other man had deftly nudged a box of tissues that Joseph realized his cheeks were wet. The undertaker stood, placing a cool, bony hand on his shoulder before leaving the room. Joseph had cried then, great tears sliding down his cheeks as he mashed his lips together and swallowed the sobs struggling to break free. Control eventually returned, and he found the men’s room and splashed water on his face before driving back into town and finding a location with Wi-Fi.

  If he wanted to impersonate Moses effectively, Joseph should have chosen to eat at The Coffee Shop, on the other side of the square. Moses ate breakfast there almost every morning; early if he was working the day shift, or a bit later if he was finishing a night shift. But Joseph needed the free internet access offered by The Golden Gate. Joseph glanced up as a woman stopped at his booth, order pad in hand. She was tall and attractive in a small-town sort of way.

  She raised her eyes and began to speak, then slapped a hand over her open mouth and took a step back.

  “Ma’am?” he asked, trying to remember that he was Moses Franklin, a Forney County police officer who would be polite and helpful, rather than offended that a white person was terrified by a black man.

  “I - I’m sorry,” she answered, face pale. “You were, I mean, I thought I saw your photo in the paper this morning.”

  “Me?”

  Without breaking eye contact, she leaned into to the next booth and snagged a copy of the Forney Cater, holding it out to him. His mother and Moses stared up at him and Joseph caught his breath, then touched each face. They were good photographs, probably taken for the last edition of the church directory. He should’ve realized that the press would print the story today. “This is my brother, Joseph,” he explained. “We’re twins.”