Apocalypse Island

by Hall, Mark Edward

  Jennings recognized the young man at the center of the photo. His name was Danny Wolf. He’d had a run in with the law five years back and had spent time in the state penitentiary.

  “Are you involved in this?” whispered Jennings as he stared almost trancelike at Wolf’s image. He could not pull his gaze away. Wolf’s eyes seemed to change, to darken as though the image in the photograph was alive. Jennings grunted in revulsion and dropped the flier. The wind gusted and carried it away. He looked back to where he’d seen the ghost of the young woman. “Did you put this here?” he asked the now empty space. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  Just your imagination, he thought, but did not believe it for a moment. His hands were cold and shaking. He put them in his pockets to warm them. Jennings liked Wolf, had even stepped out a few times to see the kid play. He was pretty good, too, if you could stand the night scene these days. There seemed to be a new sub-culture in town. Portland’s night scene had become a haven for what they were calling night-people or club goths. They were just kids, of course, searching for their own identities. They dressed up in these dark costumes and wore a lot of heavy black makeup. Some of them even painted what looked like blood on their mouths and dark circles around their eyes. Just like the dead girl in the pool over there. Christ, they all looked like fucking zombies or vampires or dead people. What was the attraction with death? What was this world coming to? No wonder they were being targeted. The typical goth—either guy or girl—usually sported a lot of metal piercings, tattoos and weird haircuts. Some even wore vials of real blood on chains around their necks. God knows what they used it for. Jennings didn’t want to think about that.

  The girls wore black lingerie that was almost always sexually revealing in some way. Lingerie was becoming the outerwear of the new century. Jennings knew that the internet had a lot to do with this strange new sub-culture that was sweeping the country, hell, probably the world. The internet was filled with sites that celebrated everything from witchcraft to vampirism. These impressionable kids were perfect prey for anyone smart enough or sick enough to take advantage of their experimentations. The thought sent a shiver up his spine. With the rapid erosion of organized religion in recent years he couldn’t help but think that young people today were lost and searching. And they were so impressionable, so vulnerable. He guessed everybody was searching for something. Part of being human, he supposed.

  A sudden and strong gust of wind came up and the air was filled with flying sheets of paper, all of them the same advertisement for the same band, Bad Medicine. A half dozen of them landed at Jennings’s feet in a neat little stack. He watched mystified as the wind picked them up one by one, sorted them, and scaled them into the dunes, leaving just one flapping against his pant leg. Jennings bent down and picked it up, folded it and dropped it in his pocket.

  The gust of wind died.

  Stillness reclaimed the morning.

  Jennings breathed shallowly.

  Something was happening. He sensed that the strange apparition, the wind, and all of the band circulars had some malevolent and ominous meaning. Irrationally he was sure that someone or something was still watching him. He looked up and down the landfill, at the bleakness of wind-blown sand dunes, at the dank pools of polluted water, at the giant mounds of rotting trash with seagulls floating on the wind above them.

  There’s nothing to fear here, he told himself, even as some foreign species of terror washed through him like a cold tide. He realized that he was holding his breath. He let it out with a harsh rasp.

  Then it was over.

  Something had passed near him, he was sure of it. Something that felt very much like evil; he’d felt its iciness, its emptiness, its eternity. And he’d seen something he could not explain, and now he had evidence that another police officer had seen the same thing. Perhaps he wasn’t crazy after all. He continued to scan the landfill but saw only his men doing as they’d been told to do, obediently searching for the clues to death.

  “Was it you?” he asked the corpse. “Were you trying to tell me something? Who did this to you? I wish you could talk to me.”

  Chapter 23

  It was early afternoon by the time the crime scene investigators finished their work. The air had warmed slightly, but the wind had picked up to nearly gale force and the western sky was marbled with purple and black clouds. The smell of rain was in the air.

  The body had been moved to the downtown morgue where there would be a more thorough examination and the medical examiner could perform an autopsy. Impressions had been taken of the oversized footprints. The trail had been followed all the way out through the swale of deep yellow grass to the main road where it had vanished. It was assumed that the person was either picked up by a car or walked along the blacktop, because the trail ended there.

  The three squares of dried mud that contained the coils of rope had been removed from the road surface intact and taken back to the lab so that forensic tests could be performed on them.

  Jennings’s men had returned from their search of the landfill and the uniformed officers had since left to conduct what was left of the day’s business. Earlier in the day the crime scene had been roped off with yellow tape, but the tape would soon be removed. The crime lab had already extracted all the evidence there was. Press vans lined up on the main road for several hours where two patrol cars waited, keeping them at bay. They would soon have to take the barriers down and let them through. Then would come the inevitable questions, and of course accusations of concealing evidence from the public. Jennings didn’t much give a damn. He had better things to do than worry about the press.

  In the sky above them, a news helicopter circled.

  “I wonder if that bitch is out there?” said Cavanaugh, glaring toward the main road.

  Jennings knew that the ‘bitch’ to whom Cavanaugh was referring was Persephone Wilder, an aggressive reporter for the Portland Examiner. She didn’t have much use for Cavanaugh and Jennings supposed she had good reason.

  “Carrion eaters,” said Cavanaugh, commenting bitterly on the press. “All the bastards do is pounce and devour.”

  “It’s their job,” Jennings said with a shrug. “What do you expect?”

  “They make our jobs a lot harder than they already are. Digging into shit they have no right to dig into.”

  “You’re talking about Jack Higgins,” Jennings said.

  “Fucking right I am.”

  Jennings leveled his gaze at the detective. “She was just trying to get at the truth,” he said. “Something we all wanted, right?”

  Cavanaugh gazed over toward the road and did not respond.

  There were things about Jack Higgins’s death that Jennings had no knowledge of, things the city had covered up and that Cavanaugh had never been allowed to talk about. Wilder had written a series of articles that talked of a conspiracy between the feds, the local police, and the Catholic Church, but the articles had been cut off in mid-stream, squelched by her boss at the city desk after a visit from Robeson and the district attorney. At least that was the rumor. And rumors around the force were a dime a dozen.

  Wilder was a good reporter and Jennings had always felt that she was onto something, but alas, anyone who knew anything about the real circumstances surrounding Jack Higgins’s death had been silenced. Including the press. And since then, Persephone Wilder had gone out of her way to screw with the force. She had taken a particular delight in going after Cavanaugh. When he’d been arrested for assaulting his wife Wilder went after him like a rabid animal. Secretly, Jennings felt that Cavanaugh deserved at least some of what he got.

  Jack Higgins and Jennings had been best friends, buddies since their academy days, and Jennings had always ached to know the real circumstances surrounding his death. Just the same, he understood that there were always things that needed to be kept from the public. He’d been a cop long enough to know that if cops didn’t protect their own then nobody else was going to do it. It didn’t
make it any easier knowing that he’d lost his best friend and partner and that others high up in the force had covered something up.

  “I can’t stand the bitch,” Cavanaugh said. “You know she tried to smear my name when Kate and I were having problems.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “She tried to get me fired.”

  “I know that too,” Jennings said. He was thinking that Cavanaugh was lucky as shit he didn’t lose his job. Luckier still that he’d stayed out of jail.

  Jennings picked up his radio handset and told the boys out by the road to let the vultures in. Not a minute later the first news van in line rumbled down the road and stopped squarely in front of them. The first figure out of the van was none other than Persephone Wilder. Jennings wasn’t surprised. Wilder had an almost supernatural nose for news and she was on the forefront of these new killings. She wobbled her way toward them in heels, a short skirt and a tailored jacket. Jennings couldn’t take his eyes off her. Wilder could have been straight off the set of some Hollywood movie. She was tall and gorgeous and built like a brick shithouse. Despite the force’s mutual hate for the woman, Jennings liked her, and he got the feeling she liked him, although their relationship had always been purely professional. Jennings would never have voiced any feelings one way or another for the woman. She was twenty years his junior, a stunning beauty, and he was a middle-aged cop with a booze problem, thinning hair and a bad attitude.

  “Afternoon, lieutenant,” she said to Jennings. She didn’t even look in Cavanaugh’s direction.

  “Afternoon, Ms. Wilder,” Jennings replied. “I’m afraid you’re too late.”

  Wilder gave him a sweet smile. “No thanks to the Portland P.D. But that’s okay; we got a shot inside the ambulance at the intersection.” She motioned to the photographer who was snapping shots of the scene. “Looked a lot like that one last week. Think we’ve got ourselves a serial killer?”

  “Those are your words,” Jennings said. “And I’d be careful about using them too loosely.”

  “Looks like the same perp if you ask me.”

  “No one’s asking you,” Cavanaugh said.

  “Go to hell, wife beater!” Wilder said, her dark eyes flaming.

  Cavanaugh grinned cruelly. “How come they send a fucking cheerleader to do a reporter’s job?” he said.

  Wilder ignored the insult. Without missing a beat, she said, “Does the vic have a name yet?”

  Jennings shook his head. “You want information, you’ll have to wait like everyone else.”

  She looked idly at the photographer, who was snapping shots of the pool of polluted water and the drag marks where the crime scene guys had pulled the body out. “Come on, Rick, throw me a bone.”

  Jennings shrugged. “She wasn’t killed here. The body was dumped.”

  Wilder nodded, waiting.

  “That’s all I have,” Jennings said.

  “Mind if we hang out and take a look around?” Wilder asked.

  “It’s a free country,” Jennings said. “But you won’t find anything.”

  “Well, you never know,” Wilder said showing Jennings a row of perfect teeth. Several other news vans were now making their way along the dusty road and the news chopper was circling lower looking for a place to land.

  “Nice seeing you again,” Jennings said, getting in his car.

  “Yeah, Rick, same to you,” Wilder replied.

  On the way out Cavanaugh said, “What the hell was that about?”

  Jennings glanced over at his partner. “What?”

  “Nice seeing you again?”

  “I don’t have the same kinds of issues with her as you do,” Jennings said.

  “No, I guess not,” Cavanaugh said. He drew into himself, turned away from Jennings and stared out over the city landfill. Bruise-colored clouds were approaching swiftly from the west. The rain wasn’t far off now.

  After a long moment Jennings said, “What’s with the attitude, Frank?”

  It took the detective a long time to respond. He seemed to contemplate Jennings’s question as if it was the greatest conundrum ever posed. Finally he turned and said, “Kate left me yesterday.”

  Jennings heaved a weary sigh but remained silent. He wasn’t surprised.

  “When I got home from work she was gone and there was a note.”

  “A note?”

  “Yeah, the details aren’t important, suffice it to say I don’t think she intends to come back this time.”

  “You’re not planning anything, are you?”

  “Me? Nah.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Frank.”

  The detective sighed. “She’s wanted out for a long time. You know that. This time I’m just gonna let her go.”

  Jennings knew Cavanaugh well enough to know that letting Kate go would not be as easy as he professed. Just the same, he hoped, for her sake, and his, that he was being honest with himself.

  Chapter 24

  Putting Cavanaugh’s problems aside, Jennings mulled the murder over in his mind. He pretty much figured the woman had been killed elsewhere and the body dumped at the landfill. This was the second victim and both had been handled in essentially the same manner. Although the locations had been vastly different he had no doubt that it was the same killer. Both victims had been brutally stabbed to death, a large cross had been carved on their upper torsos, and some sort of greasy kohl had been smeared around their eyes. And they’d both been decorated with tattoos. The first victim had not been sexually assaulted. Jennings would bet that this one hadn’t been either. Whatever the motive, it didn’t seem to be sex, but definitely the work of an extremely sick individual. Strange when one took into consideration that about ninety-five percent of all serial murders were based on sexual repression, and the victims were almost always sexually assaulted in some way. The killer seemed to be twisted up with some sort of religious pathos. To him these women were whores, Jennings surmised. They walked the streets, engaged in indiscriminate sex and decorated their bodies with sacrilegious artwork. It just seemed to fit. He put himself above them morally. It’s why he didn’t sexually molest them. He was above all that.

  Something else baffled Jennings about these crimes; he’d seen a strange apparition at both scenes. In his twenty-five plus years on the force he’d never seen anything quite like it. He could have dismissed the first one as the work of his imagination, he’d nearly convinced himself that’s what it had been, until this morning when Officer Myers had described seeing the same thing at this scene. That changed everything. And there was one more detail he could not explain; advertisement fliers for a local rock band known as Bad Medicine had been found in the vicinity of both victims. They had seemed to appear out of nowhere, as if some malevolent force had produced them for his eyes only. On both occasions he was the one who had found the fliers, and inconceivably, he had kept the information to himself. He kept telling himself it was because he wanted to make sure there was a connection between the murders and the fliers before he brought them to the attention of higher-ups in the force. But down deep he knew his reasons were more complex than that. He was very confused about the whole situation, and Jennings was not used to being confused about anything.

  Had it been the killer who’d left the fliers at each of the crime scenes, or someone else, or perhaps something more...intangible?

  Jennings simply did not know. What he did know was there had to be a logical explanation for it.

  At the moment the investigation was centered on the downtown night scene. Local law enforcement was in the process of doing a city-wide sweep of bars, tattoo parlors, piercing joints, illegal brothels, drug houses, you name it. So far they had turned up nothing. And perhaps the strangest thing of all, no foreign DNA had been found on the first victim. The killer was very thorough.

  The whole town was spooked and now the mayor and city council were putting pressure on the chief, who was in turn putting pressure on Jennings and his men, to solve this thing promptly. Portland w
as a tourist town, and for each day that passed without some sort of resolution, potential consumers were being frightened away to other towns up and down the coast. At least this was the theory politicians liked to espouse. Fucking assholes. All they cared about was money and image.

  Jennings turned his thoughts back to his partner. He had known Frank Cavanaugh for almost fifteen years, and though he called him friend—had actually been his friend at one point in their lives—he realized that you made friends in police work the same way soldiers in battle made friends. It was a mutual dependency thing. Your partner was your friend because he was your lifeline; one day, when your life depended on it, that friendship might just save your ass.

  Up until that incident ten years ago with Jack Higgins, Jennings thought he’d known Cavanaugh as well as any man could know another. But Jack was dead and Cavanaugh had at first been implicated and subsequently cleared of any wrongdoing by an internal investigation. Something about the whole incident smelled bad to Jennings, however, and since then he and Cavanaugh had constructed this wall between them. They were partners, yes. Close, no. Now he wasn’t sure he even knew the man. Did one person ever really know another?

  He knew Cavanaugh had a dark side, but lately it had gotten out of hand. His shitty moods and verbal abuse of some of the lower ranking officers was downright disturbing. Now Jennings understood what was going on. And he wasn’t surprised that Kate had finally left him. At one time in the past Cavanaugh’s wife Kate had an extra-marital affair. When Cavanaugh found out about it he’d gone nuts and beat Kate nearly to death. She’d ended up in the hospital and subsequently filed charges against her husband. It was all over the news, and Wilder was the one who’d run with it, making Cavanaugh look like a scumbag. Cavanaugh had been put on administrative leave and forced to undergo psychiatric counseling which had really pissed him off. But Jennings knew he had been lucky to get off that easily. Only because it was a force thing and the force protected their own did Cavanaugh survive it. Eventually Cavanaugh and his wife had come to some sort of resolution. But evidently it hadn’t lasted. Now Kate was gone. Jennings wondered if maybe she’d been fucking around on him again and had left for another man. If so, God help her. Despite what he’d said earlier, Jennings knew that Frank Cavanaugh was a mean and unforgiving bastard and he would not let this go with a whimper.