The Demon Hunters

by Linda Welch

  The gravel driveway wound between tall poplar and clumps of pink peony, purple and white hydrangea, and pink rhododendron. You might expect the landscape to open up to a huge immaculate lawn fronting a plantation style mansion, but instead come abruptly to a tiny square of grass and the family’s modest, two-story brick home. Six such homes once occupied the block, but the Labiosa took possession of them twenty years ago, razed them and built their private compound. I’m sure the former owners were suitably compensated. There again, I doubt they had a choice.

  To look at Gerarco and Margot Labiosa’s house, you would not know they have the wealth to live in a considerably nicer neighborhood. Gerarco does not look like he wields power akin to a Mafia don.

  Gerarco sat in a wood rocking chair on the porch of their house, wearing a starched white shirt with the sleeves rolled up in homage to the warm temperature, black braces supporting his baggy dark-brown pants. In his eighties, he held a black kerchief in one hand with which to mop his bald, gleaming head. Piercing green eyes watched my approach over the top of tiny round spectacles. “Mama, she is here,” he called over his shoulder.

  Margot bustled out the front door as I walked up the path, looking like a traditional Old-World Spanish grandma, wiping floury hands on her yellow and white floral apron. The hose beneath her black skirt wrinkled around her ankles and flour dotted the wrinkled skin above the neck of her black blouse. A half-dozen jeweled pins were stuck porcupine fashion through gray hair pulled back in a tight bun.

  Three years ago this sweet, motherly lady stood in front of forty-year-old Gilberto Fuentes, who knelt at her feet with his hands tied behind his back. She put the barrel of a Glock G17 9mm pistol to his forehead and pulled the trigger. I bet she wore an apron then, too. He killed her ten-year-old granddaughter. I gave her his name.

  Senora Labiosa came to my house one evening in midwinter. She said the spirits guided her to me, but I think it more likely the Labiosa family have a friend at Clarion PD who told them about the consultant who tracks down killers. I knew a little girl died and the police investigation had stalled. I thought Mike would call me anyway if they didn’t get a lead soon. I would get a head start.

  Talking to a dead child is painful. I reminded myself her family needed closure. They needed justice.

  When I told Margot who killed Flora, and I would take it to Lieutenant Mike Warren, the conversation went in a direction which chilled my blood.

  Margot thanked me profusely and assured me Fuentes would never molest another little girl. She stressed how grateful she was, the Labiosa family was indebted to me, and this was between just we two, wasn’t it. She spoke at length and I didn’t catch half of it, because at some point, from a subtle word here and there, I realized I’d been warned to keep my mouth shut.

  I asked around, and discovered more than I really wanted to about the Labiosa.

  Three days after I spoke to Margot, two teens looking for a place to make out drove to a semi-derelict farmhouse in Mantua. They found Gilberto Fuentes body. Mike called me in on the case two weeks later, so I got to talk to Fuentes personally. He told me who killed him, and how. But I came out of there and told Mike I didn’t get anything from the crime scene. When Mike took me to the scene of Flora’s murder that same week, I didn’t tell him I already communicated with the child. I just shook my head to indicate I got nothing, and walked away.

  You see, I’d weighed the pros and cons, and there were no pros. I know that sounds cold, clinical, but believe me it wasn’t. If the family had an informer in the police department, they would soon know I talked. Would I survive long enough for Mike to find evidence linking the two murders, evidence which proved the Labiosa killed Fuentes? Whether he did or not, even if Gerarco and Margot Labiosa went to trial and were convicted - which I sincerely doubted - I’d be on the run for the rest of my life, however long it lasted. In the end I chose to keep my mouth shut. I’m generally a law-abiding person, but I’m not an idiot.

  Does a weight of guilt bow down my shoulders, for handing a man over for execution? It did for a while. Although I didn’t know at the time, I marked that man for death. I should have checked out the Labiosa before agreeing to help them. I should have found evidence and gone to Clarion PD. Fuentes deserved to die, but it should have happened in the penitentiary, not a back room of an abandoned house.

  But, God forgive me, when I think of that little girl, I’m glad Fuentes is dead. Don’t judge me unless you saw that sweet child lying naked at your feet, unless you talked to her, and saw the terror in her eyes.

  So the Labiosa family owes me and considers it a lifelong debt. If you’re smart, you don’t collect from the Labiosa family unless you really need their help, but I figured this was a good enough reason. Borrego was one of their own.

  Gerarco got up from his rocker and both of them ushered me in the house. We went directly to the living room, a small and cluttered place with plaster Virgin Mary and crucifix on walls, atop the mantle and on miscellaneous pieces of furniture. Some truly hideous paintings of a religious theme, done on black velvet, hung here and there. Doilies lay all over the place as if they got together and bred like rabbits. There were so many tasseled cushions on the couch and chairs, sitting without letting on you feel smothered would be an act of diplomacy.

  I perched on the edge of an overstuffed chair and gave Margot the gift I took along: a small gold rosary inlaid with seed pearls, an inexpensive but pretty antique. She was delighted.

  Closed drapes muted the sunlight in the dim room, but it felt stuffy, and still warm enough to make my pale skin flush. Margo bustled out, leaving me with Gerarco, and we politely pretended not to see each other. The Labiosa were grateful for my help, but Gerarco wasn’t inclined to small talk. However, the formalities must be observed, and Margo returned with coffee in tiny cups and a plate of biscochitos, little Mexican cookies. Then she politely inquired of my health, commented on the heat while waving one hand at her bosom, and I sipped harsh coffee and nibbled on an over-sweet cookie, replying politely and trying not to wriggle with impatience. That took up all of ten minutes. The business part of our meeting took less than two.

  “And how may we help you?” Margot asked as she placed her cup in the saucer.

  I put my cup, saucer and tea plate on the coffee table. “A young man has gone missing and his . . . friends . . . are concerned. I’m trying to find him.”

  “Ah. You speak of Rio Borrego.”

  No hedging, no puzzlement, no questions. They already knew why I went to them, and they approved.

  I nodded and leaned over my knees, caught the edge of Gerarco’s frown and straightened up again. Thou shalt not slouch in front of formidable old men who could off you with a gesture. “My partner and I have little to go on. We’re looking at every angle. A year or so ago, Rio was engaged in a fracas with some local boys.”

  A fracas. Not a turf war, not a gang fight, not a vendetta. A noisy but fairly harmless set-to. Just local lads having a disagreement. Right.

  Gerarco’s right eyebrow rose and his chin nodded almost imperceptibly in agreement with my choice of words. Yeah, I can be diplomatic when I have to.

  “My partner and I wondered if Rio and these young boys met again.”

  I didn’t have to add anything. They knew what I did not say. I waited, bolt upright, starting to sweat in an unfeminine way, as some kind of unspoken communication passed between Margot and Gerarco.

  Margot got to her feet and I rose to mine. “We know these boys. We will talk to them,” she said.

  I turned to Gerarco. “Thank you, Senor.”

  He nodded.

  I turned back to Margot. “The coffee and biscochitos were delicious.”

  Margo’s hand went to the crucifix which now hung around her neck and she smiled slightly. She walked behind me as I went through the house and out the front door. I didn’t look back as I went along the path.

  Chapter Eight

  I munched on a donut, but that reminded me of R
oyal. He has this cop ability to eat a powdered donut and not get a speck of sugar on himself. I get it everywhere.

  I sighed as I looked at the monitor. I had hacked into the Utah DMV, but couldn’t track down a black Mercedes-Benz. I’d browsed some more, and didn’t find anything I didn’t already know about Gia Sabato or Daven Clare. Just to be thorough, I took a look at the Bugle’s archives. Our local newspaper is just that, local, so I didn’t expect to find anything.

  And there it was in black and white. Daven Clare’s house on Bella Vista burned to the ground three weeks ago.

  Staring at the monitor, I leaned back in the chair. If Gia and Daven wanted my help, why withhold possibly significant information? Rio attacked by a rival gang a year ago was trivial? The fire department said the fire at Daven’s house was deliberately set - arson wasn’t worth mentioning? What else weren’t they telling me?

  “What is going on?”

  “Maybe they know it had nothing to do with this Rio’s disappearance, so why say anything?” Jack said.

  I started, and I don’t usually when voices came at me out of thin air. Not in my house, anyway, because I know who they belong to.

  “God, you’re jumpy,” Mel said.

  I rattled my fingernails on the edge of the keyboard. “Yeah. This case is getting to me.” I swung my chair. “They’re getting to me.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Mel said. “The woman is unnatural.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  I held up a warning hand as Mel opened her mouth. “I did not mean it literally.”

  “What about my idea?” Jack asked.

  I rubbed my hand over my mouth, squeezed my chin with my fingers. “Perhaps they don’t see any relevance. Perhaps they do, but it’d take me places they don’t want me to go. But, hey, they hired me. I’m an investigator, I’m gonna investigate. I’m gonna take a look at Clare’s house.”

  I closed down the PC and went to my closet to get a pair of heavy shoes. Although the fire happened three weeks ago, the site could still be messy. I hoped Daven hadn’t started cleaning up the property.

  I trotted downstairs and through the hall, pausing to turn on the AC so the house would be cool when I got back. Mel and Jack watched me go through the door like a mom and dad seeing their kid off to school.

  I all but gasped at the heat inside my car, but I have to keep the windows closed in summer when it’s parked, unless I want to drive with hornets, bees and a hundred other bugs in there with me. Nothing liked driving off and finding unexpected company in your car. My air-conditioning didn’t work, so I opened the windows once I pulled out the driveway, though the wind tugged at my hair and threatened my braid.

  Instead of heading west to downtown Clarion, I took the old White Basin road, the only road to the White Basin ski resort until John Hammond built a fancy new road for the expected horde of visitors to the 2002 Olympics. Now only residents use the old road, but it’s still well-maintained, resurfaced in places in summer and the snow plowed in winter. It’s the scenic route and a nice drive in spring, summer and fall.

  I smelled the scent of flowering alder and wild flowers on the air. Fat silvered cloud masses dotted a deep-blue sky. I could hear nothing above the noise of the engine, not even the ever-present grasshoppers. The air cooled as I climbed the winding road, feeling oh-so-good on my skin, and I put my arm out the window to channel it inside. A doe and her fawn raised their heads from the grass as I passed a mountain meadow, ears perking forward, nostrils flaring.

  Bella Vista is a ten-mile, unpaved, winding mountain road. The area is ultra-private with the houses set way back, the driveways gated. You can’t just drive in. But the gates belonging to 1582 North Bella Vista stood wide open and I drove right through and on down the asphalt driveway. The burned-out shell of the house sat below me in a large hollow in the mountainside. A good location for privacy, although not the best when the spring thaw came, but the French ditch around the house would divert snowmelt away from the foundations and down a gully.

  Not much of the house still stood and the remaining blackened and crumbling brick walls gave me no idea of the original layout. The smell of charred brick and burnt timber still lingered. I parked the car, got out and walked down to the house.

  By the look of it, the fire must have been fierce. According to the newspaper article, Daven wasn’t home at the time and the fire went unnoticed as the evening winds blew the smoke up a narrow ravine, where it dispersed among the pine. A neighbor saw the flames as she returned home in the dusk of evening. Unchecked, the fire could have taken out the entire mountainside.

  I was sorely tempted to call one of my old contacts at Clarion PD. The newspaper article said the Fire Marshall ruled arson, but what did the arsonists use? This place looked like it had been bombed.

  Vehicles had driven over the lot after the fire department soaked it down, creating deep ruts now dried hard as rock. There was an empty feeling to the area, a desolate silence. The birds and animals would not return while the fire stink tainted the air.

  Sometimes curiosity takes me to a place. Sometimes it’s a hunch. Whatever took me to Daven’s ruined house, it was worth the effort.

  I heard voices, two men talking in hoarse whispers. I looked up at the road.

  “Someone’s here.”

  “Yeah, so what? More nosey locals.”

  “Yeah, probably. So, what we gonna do tonight?”

  “Me, I was thinking of hanging around this burned house. You?”

  “What a coincidence. Just what I had in mind. Shall we?”

  Bemused, I looked over at two men who appeared on the road above the house. Neither had a regional accent I could identify, which can be the case when a person spends their life moving from town to town, state to state. Shabby, they wore long grubby overcoats which had seen far better days, and worn boots. The taller one wore a black stocking-cap over his long, straggling gray hair. He stood stiff and upright, a military bearing. The other guy’s blond hair was shaved almost to the scalp. And both carried swords.

  I’d never seen anything like those swords. With an unadorned steel guard and grip long enough to accommodate two hands, the double-edged blade was a thirty-inch monstrosity. Although smooth for the first and last ten inches, jagged serrations deeply notched both edges of the middle section. I didn’t need a whole lot of imagination to think of how they could be used, what they could do to flesh and bone.

  Each man held his sword one-handed, the tall one with the blade casually on his shoulder, the other held his out to one side.

  I walked away from the house and back up to the road, my boots crunching on cinder. The tall guy’s expression was neutral; the other guy frowned as he looked down at me. Their heads sat strangely on their necks, kind of tilted to one side.

  They moved toward the roaring flames which engulfed the house. The killer came at them fast. Too fast to be surprised. Too fast to be astonished. Too fast to defend themselves. Around behind them, an arm wrapped around the top of the head, the other hand on the chin, so terribly, incredibly strong. A fast, hard jerk. A snap. First one, then the other.

  I stood still until the vision passed and my racing pulse stabilized, then walked the rest of the way to the road.

  I would not normally accost two strangers out in the middle of nowhere, but I felt safe with these two. I stopped six or seven feet away. “What’s with the swords?”

  Both looked behind them, back at me. “Yes, you,” I said.

  The taller man pushed the fingers of his free hand under his cap and scratched his head. “She ain’t talking to us, is she, Ronald?” He waved the sword, making me take a step back. Although I knew the weapon - as insubstantial as the man who wielded it - couldn’t hurt me, instinct kicks in when someone waves a long, shining length of sharp steel around.

  His companion stared hard at me. “Can’t be.”

  “So he’s Ronald. What’s your name?”

  Ronald bristled. “This ain’t - ”

&
nbsp; His friend broke in. “Don’t you know we’re dead?” He glanced at Ronald. “We’re still dead, ain’t we, Ron?”

  Ronald looked down at himself, then put splayed fingers to his neck. “Oh, we’re definitely dead, John.”

  Ronald and John. I didn’t remember reports of their deaths in the newspaper. I looked at Ronald. “That’s the point, I do know you’re dead.”

  “How about that,” John said. “What are you, one of those ghost whisperers?”

  “That’s television. I’m the real thing.”

  “Why d’they call them that anyhow?” John asked Ronald.

  “It’s like horse whisperers, ain’t it,” said Ronald.

  “Horse whisperers tame wild horses,” John said.

  “Yeah, and ghost whisperers tame ghosts to stop them haunting.” Ronald guffawed. “Whadya know, John, we’re wild ghosts.”

  “Don’t be stupid all your life, Ron.” John took a step nearer me, stopped, stuck his sword point down in the ground as if he braced himself on it. “You gonna send us onward, ‘cause we been here a time and it’s getting old.”

  I looked about. These guys would rarely see another person, except maybe a few locals hiking the area. But they had each other, and in summer the mountainside was beautiful. In winter, below-zero temperatures and deep snow would not impact these two. But it did have a desolate air.

  I folded my arms. “You want to tell me what happened to you?”

  Ronald looked up at John lopsidedly.

  I saw men like Ronald and John in Clarion every day. They were down-and-outs; they probably spent their nights in a homeless shelter, or under the Twenty-Fourth Street viaduct near the river in summer. The cops kept clearing out the makeshift camps, but the homeless just came back again. They panhandled, or stood with others of their ilk on a particular street corner, hoping a local farmer or contractor would come along and hire them. All strictly illegal of course. They were paid out-of-pocket and the government never got any taxes out of them.