The Mather Triad: Series Boxed Set (Chloe Mather Thrillers)

by Lawrence Kelter

  Behind a broad dead tree, he waited. Why? he wondered. Why was he sneaking up on a stream? And then a change in the wind brought her aroma his way. He could not see her, but he knew she was there. Her scent had imprinted upon him back at the lodge. He drew her into his consciousness through his nostrils. She’s here, he decided. Definitely. I can’t see her, but I know she’s here.

  Chapter 71

  We waited yards away while Teller and his men stood outside Sand’s door, waiting for him to open it. I scanned the house in the moonlight, taking the opportunity to familiarize myself with the layout, the position of the windows and their exposures as well as egress out of the windows in case Sand was hiding inside and attempted to flee after we went through the front door. I assessed the drop to the ground from the upstairs windows as well as the distance to the roof. I noted the roofline and the surrounding trees, any detail that might impinge on our ability to apprehend a fleeing suspect.

  Teller had a valid excuse for being where he was. Cabrera and I did not. I was on pins and needles as seconds ticked by. In my gut I felt that Sand was not at home. He’s out there, I speculated. He’s out there stalking his next kill. Almost a full minute had elapsed. Teller turned to me, and I nodded. “Go for it, Chief.” There were trespassers on the property, and Sand was not opening the door. Teller was concerned for Sand’s safety, which gave him probable cause to force entry. We had covered it and rehashed our argument in the car. If challenged in the courts, we felt confident our story would hold up.

  Teller stepped aside and allowed his deputy to force the door. Cabrera and I held back until the house had been cleared, and then we advanced up the steps and through the front door.

  There were six of us, and we moved from room to room, quickly searching the house. Teller and his men worked deftly, looking for incriminating details but leaving no signs of disturbance.

  “So what do you think?” Cabrera asked. “Do we go out after him or not?”

  “I’d love to, but I don’t see how the six of us can cover a hundred plus acres in the dark.”

  Cabrera didn’t utter a response, but his expression said, “Oh, thank God.”

  I felt his eyes on me. “What are you staring at?” Cabrera asked.

  “Odd. This house has two fireplaces but only one chimney.” There was one in the den, where a traditional house would likely have one, and another in the kitchen. I’d noticed that the wood-burning fireplace in the den looked well used and that there were ashes on the floor around it. The one in the kitchen looked brand new, as if it had never been used. I got closer for a better look. “It’s gas. Hey, get the sheriff, would you? Ask him to come in here for a minute.”

  I’m not sure that Cabrera knew what I was getting at, but he waited patiently to see how it played out. I heard him talking to Teller, and then they both hurried into the kitchen.

  “You see something?” Teller asked as he joined me, looking at the kitchen fireplace. He stared at the fireplace for a moment before commenting. “Well?”

  The fireplace was built into an oak column. “It’s a gas fireplace, and it doesn’t look like it’s ever been used.”

  “Maybe it’s new,” Teller offered.

  I peaked my eyebrows. “And maybe not. You think there are gas lines all the way out here?”

  Teller seemed to be given pause. “Come to think of it …”

  “Here, give me a hand.”

  “With what?” Cabrera asked. “You losing it, Mather?”

  “Don’t think so.” I examined the fireplace and the enclosure. It looked solid and immovable until I yanked and it moved away from the wall on a track.

  Cabrera’s eyes grew large, and he hustled over to assist. Behind it was a steel blast-proof door, a portal to the unknown. I looked back at Cabrera and Teller, twisted the latch, and pulled the door open.

  “You’d better let me go first,” Teller volunteered.

  “Not a chance, Chief.” I slapped my small illuminated searchlight against my automatic and followed the stairs into the belly of the beast.

  Chapter 72

  “It’s a bunker,” I said as soon as I flipped the light switch. I knew by the deadened sound of my footsteps on the poured cement stairs. I rapped on the wall with my knuckles. “Solid concrete. We found Sand’s lair, his underground sanctuary,” I exclaimed as I came to a stop on the basement landing. Looking around, the bunker looked familiar. It had that end-of-the-world look, a place to settle into and wait for the world to regroup after Armageddon ended all life as we knew it. There were enough supplies to last a decade: canned goods, dehydrated food, and barrels of water. This is where he’d come if the world came for him. He’d hide away like a rat beneath the ground and wait for the heat to die down.

  “God only knows what we’ll find down here,” Teller said. “It’s a goddamn doomsday shelter.”

  “Sweet Jesus. Look at this,” Cabrera shouted.

  Upon a long table were carved wooden beds, several in a row. Upon each was a naked man with a dire expression chiseled upon his face. Their arms were out to the sides, posed, if you will, like a Jesus upon a horizontal cross. On the chest of each carved man was a bat. There were another four bats on each carving, at the head, the foot, and one on each side. The sound of the adenoid voice on Drade’s death tape came back to me, “And five little bats to drain your life away.” A lump formed in my throat. “My God. It’s him.”

  Teller hollered, “Son of a bitch. You know how many times I’ve seen Sand in town?” He rubbed his weary eyes.

  I examined one of the carvings. The footboard was carved with angular cuts, as a tombstone would be. The name inscribed was Walker Cleveland. Beneath were what I assumed to be the dates of his birth and death. There were several, including some that bore names I didn’t recognize, but Drade, Bloom, Hayes, and Phillip Patrick were there. In all, there were almost twenty, and I understood that Sand had carved a token to represent each of the lives he had taken.

  I felt my body go numb and my ears began to ring. Settle down, Chloe. Take a deep breath. Easy now, in and out, in and out. I was glad that I was still able to control my emotions, and I felt myself rallying after a moment. The ringing in my ears diminished and ultimately stopped so that I could hear clearly again. There was something going on in the background that was barely discernable, but I knew instantly that the source of the sound was human. “Anyone hear that?”

  I watched as Cabrera and Teller stood motionless, listening intently.

  “It’s coming from over here,” Cabrera said. He rushed toward a sealed door and yanked it open. Within, a teen was shackled to the wall. He was gagged securely, which made his screams for help barely audible. There were a few red marks on his neck and face, and his eyes were wide with terror. One by one, each of five bats turned toward us to assess if we were going to challenge them for their food.

  Chapter 73

  Simone rose from the stream and spread her arms like a gorgeous, sprouting black orchid blossoming to welcome a wasp. She was naked except for the ornate raven’s mask and headdress. A thousand droplets of water glistened on her skin like quivering dabs of onyx in the moonlight. She beckoned him with aligned fingers. “Come to me, James Lee. Come claim your prize.”

  The sight of the exquisite woman stunned Blugosh. He lowered the bow he never intended to use and stepped into the stream as if drawn by her will. Cold water flowed over his boots, but it had no impact on him. He was focused on her with an icy stare; predator and prey had finally come eye to eye. The bow dropped from his hand and settled against a rock that protruded above the surface of the water. He discarded his quiver. It fell in the stream, filled with water, and was carried away.

  She craned her neck. Her back was arched in a pose of rapture.

  Nothing can stop me now. His confidence had peaked. In a moment his hands would be on her throat. He could almost feel her skin beneath his fingertips. He’d crush her esophagus and her spine along with it, cracking it as easily as he could snap a
twig. The rest of the world dimmed around him. He could see only her and was blind to all else. He had no sensation of Sand as he crept up behind him, and felt nothing until his blade sliced through his belly. He clutched at the wound as the world opened up around him and then fell backwards into the stream, staring up at the sky. He expected to feel rage, but instead a strange calm settled over him as Simone, Sand, and the other hunters gathered around him. “The torture is over,” he said with relief. His eyes turned soft. “I can finally rest.”

  “Not yet,” Sand said with authority and motioned to the others to remove their masks.

  They were all alike, every one of them like Sand. Even Simone, the sultry siren, was facially deformed. Each one was a mutilated gargoyle. Their disturbing images would haunt him all the days he’d reside in hell.

  Blugosh screamed as the terror of their images pervaded his conscious mind, taunting his ebbing sanity and causing him to question whether he was already in Satan’s realm.

  Chapter 74

  A bloodcurdling scream filled the air. I jumped the moment the violent noise reached my ears. “What the hell was that?”

  We had rescued the young man from his prison and were back in the kitchen.

  One of Teller’s deputies had just returned with a first aid kit. “Call state police for backup,” Teller shouted, “and stay with Duncan.”

  The rest of us filed out of the house in response to the intense, unnerving cry we had just heard.

  Teller confronted us. “I don’t like the idea of a couple of outsiders running around the woods in the dark. Mather, you stick with Olsen over here. Cabrera, stay with Ringler, and try not to get separated. I don’t want this to turn into a full-scale cluster-fuck.” He opened the trunk of his car and handed Cabrera and me full-size searchlights and radios.

  “Will do.” I tapped Olsen on the shoulder. “Let’s go.” Our sidearms were drawn as we ventured into the forest. I moved the searchlight beam up and down repeatedly as we walked, illuminating the ground and then the area in front of me. There had only been one scream, and now in the silent aftermath there was nothing to guide us, no one calling, “This way.”

  The vastness of the woods was truly intimidating. So much area to search in the dark. Without direction … the task seemed hopeless. A verse from one of Robert Frost’s poems ran through my mind, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” Hell, they’re not lovely tonight. “But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.” Amen to that, Mr. Frost. The night was far from over, and the case far from being solved.

  “Hey, watch it!” I saw that Olsen was about to step right next to a copperhead. The snake’s head was erect, a sign that it was alarmed. I grabbed Olsen by the arm and gently guided him away from the poisonous reptile, which carefully watched us until we were gone.

  “Thanks. Some guide I am, huh?”

  Tenzing Norgay he’s not. I would’ve vocalized the quip, but I didn’t want to take the time to explain that Norgay was Sir Edmund Hillary’s Sherpa guide the first time anyone summited Mount Everest. We had bigger fish to fry. “No worries, Olsen. You would’ve done the same for me.”

  We spent the next half hour searching unsuccessfully. There were no signs of Sand or of a possible victim. I radioed Cabrera. He and Ringler had been equally unlucky. Our son of a bitch UNSUB is gone, and there’s a dead man in these woods, I can feel it.

  “Not looking very good,” Olsen said. “And the sun won’t be up for another two hours. Want to keep on going?”

  “Bet your ass I do.” If I wanted an easy gig, I would’ve become a house sitter. “Hey, I hear water.”

  “There’s a stream running through here somewhere—it flows into Lake Cole. I think it’s just ahead.” Olsen started off in the direction he thought we might find the stream.

  I had worn out the Robert Frost poem, but my mind needed something to keep it occupied. A passage from the King James Bible popped into my head, “He leadeth me beside the still waters.” I supposed it was just a silly mind game, but it turned out to be more. We came upon a man’s body lying in the stream. He wore a black commando’s mask and black commando gear. His shirt was sliced through at the abdomen. The fast-running water had washed away all the external blood, but his ruptured flesh was visible through the cut in the fabric. A hunter’s bow was in the water near him, caught up on a protruding rock.

  I removed the victim’s mask and studied his face. If he was like the rest of Sand’s victims, he was a murdering psychopath. What concerned me most was that there was no trace of Sand.

  “Any idea who the vic is?” Olsen asked.

  “Not a clue.”

  “Think we’d better move him out of the stream?” he asked.

  “The current’s not strong, but it’s moving fast. I’d hate to have the body wash downstream and disappear.”

  We were about to drag the body to shore when Olsen’s radio crackled. I recognized Teller’s voice pouring out of the speaker. “Olsen, come in.”

  “Olsen. Go ahead, Max.”

  “You and Mather better come in. The kid’s got something important for us.”

  ~~~

  Behind the tree Sand waited. Dressed in black, he was hidden by the shadow and completely undetectable to the two law enforcement agents who had discovered Blugosh’s body. He was surprised to see a female officer wearing an FBI jacket next to Olsen, the deputy he had met several times before. He took several snapshots of the pair with his smart phone before disappearing into the woods.

  Chapter 75

  Its backhoe raised high, the massive excavator looked like a prehistoric T-Rex with its jaws opened wide to devour another load of Catskill countryside. Duncan Duffy, the teen we had rescued from Sand’s bunker the previous night, had gone to the hospital but not before telling one of the deputies about the circumstances of his abduction and incarceration. He had not seen his captor until he regained consciousness in the bunker, but the description of the monstrous individual who had taken him prisoner gelled—Teller and his deputies confirmed the description. Duffy had described Sand as a large black man with an enormous head, bulbous forehead, and what he called “fish eyes”. Due to his deformity, Sand’s eyes could’ve been widespread, which was a common side effect of methotrexate syndrome. The child whose birth was supposed to have been aborted had grown up to become a cold-blooded killer. The carvings in his underground lair attested to the demises of almost twenty men, all of whom likely deserved to die but not until a legal trial deemed them guilty.

  And there was last night’s victim. His personal effects had been found in a small lodge about a mile from the main house. The newest victim was James Lee Blugosh, a man with a rap sheet a mile long. Like Sand’s other victims, my bet was that Blugosh was a murderer as well. The man Glutt called the Bat Man was not much of a departure from the comic book hero. Other than murdering and torturing the evil instead of turning them over to Commissioner Gordon, the two were the same, vigilantes who hunted the wicked. In my eyes, Sand was not a nemesis, he was a hero, but the law didn’t condone this sentinel’s actions, so he had to be stopped.

  We watched as the tractor backhoe tore out a chunk of earth and dumped it atop a pile of dirt. It hit pay dirt with the next bite as the teeth on the backhoe tore into steel. Duffy had mentioned that his metal detector had gone wild just before he was hit on the back of the head. He knew that he had come across something large like a discarded fuel oil tank or old rusty farm machinery. The lad never suspected that he had stumbled upon a buried car.

  Workers jumped into the partially excavated pit and began shoveling dirt off the top of the car.

  “Would ya look at that,” Cabrera said as he shook his head in dismay.

  “Smart money says that’s Bloom’s car.”

  “And Bloom?”

  “Patience, Watson, the game’s afoot.”

  “You know,” he began his rebuke, “I don’t think that was a Sherlock Holmes quote.”

 
; “No. It’s Shakespearean, but I like the Dr. Watson twist better. I didn’t realize you were so learned.”

  “You underestimate me, Mather. Just because I’m obsessed with baseball doesn’t mean my head is filled with straw.”

  “Of course not, Scarecrow.”

  The buried car was taking shape as the workmen dug around it, careful not to damage any possible evidence. A member of the crew who had been shoveling in front of the bumper raised his hand. We gathered around to see why he had signaled. The remains of a human skeleton were visible. I saw a partial view of the ribcage and the side of a smashed skull.

  “Do you think that’s Bloom?” Cabrera asked.

  I pointed through the windshield. “No, Scarecrow, I think that’s Bloom.” One of the technicians removed the dirt that covered the windshield and brushed the glass with a soft brush. The remains of a man were visible inside the car. At least I assumed it was a man, because the skeleton was wearing a man’s suit and tie.

  Chapter 76

  Sand poured Bob Hinky a glass of ice water and sat down on the other side of a Formica table. For Sand, looking at Bob Hinky was like looking at himself in a fun-house mirror. His nose was longer and his eyes were set unevenly—his face was narrower and his forehead less bulbous, but like Sand, he was tall in stature and every bit as imposing a presence. Hinky was part of Sand’s entourage, a ragtag band of lost souls who had somehow survived the tragedy of failed abortion attempts. They were unwanted children who had somehow survived the curse of childhood torment and grown into adults, carrying their deformities and psychological baggage along with them.

  Sand was their leader because of his sharp mind and strong will. Amongst his peers he was seen as someone bigger than life, someone who commanded attention. Cages lined the wall behind him. They were all filled with vampire bats. Each represented a dormitory, and Sand had assigned five to a cage. The cages rustled relentlessly from the bats’ movements, producing a symphony of squeaking metal.