He and Doug Brewster quickly marked the scene, eyeing the uneven ground before them through the powerful but inadequate illumination of their MagLites. What they saw turned Bill’s stomach.
As in each of the other deaths, a complete ritual had been performed, down to the remains of candle wax and the wilted crown of herbs. This case differed in one respect—the granite stone carrying the sign of the sigil was not buried, as it had been in the other cases. It was sitting right next to Porter’s head, the candle still seated in it. It seemed to say, “Here he is, do what you will.”
He pulled Doug aside, squatting on his heels next to his truck. “Can you handle this for now? Until one of the guys gets up here with the kleigs and Whelan with the meat wagon, there’s not much to do but contain this. I’m gonna head over to Porter’s house, see what the story is there. I probably should’ve gone there first, but he’s been here for a good hour at least, maybe even since the shift change when Stumpy came on at one.”
Shaking his head, he headed to the truck, leaving Doug in charge of the new scene and the two hysterical kids who’d stumbled upon yet another body and needed to be questioned.
Cashing in every single chip he had with Judge Meecham, he headed to Porter’s home, meeting a sleepy clerk from the county court halfway.
The redwood and glass castle that Dr. Adam Porter had called home was situated about ten miles as the crow flies from their original crime scene. Translated into roundabout, rutted roads, his body was at least thirty minutes from home.
He pulled into the generous driveway, noting that for once, Stumpy had followed directions and stayed in his truck. Pulling up next to the deputy’s vehicle, Bill told him to cover the outside of the dwelling while he served the search warrant he’d so recently obtained. Climbing out of the department Explorer, he scanned the hillside the house was built upon, looking for any obvious signs of disturbance. There was nothing to see.
As he walked from his truck, Bill noted that the bottle green Jaguar the doctor often drove in town was still parked in the carport, but the silver Landcruiser he favored in the winter months was missing.
Paperwork in hand, he ascended the bank of redwood deck stairs to the massive front door, ringing the chimes as he stood, waiting for an answer he was sure would never come.
Bill slipped a pair of latex gloves out of his windbreaker pocket, protecting both himself and any case they may hope to build. As he slipped the gloves on his hands he had an absurd flashback to an X-Files episode where Mulder had looked at Scully and asked quizzically, “prophylactic?” At the time it had cracked him up. Not so now.
Pushing open the door he called out. “Hello. Hello, anyone home?” No surprise there, he thought.
He began a quick but thorough initial sweep of the house, noting the fine furniture and fripperies that a man could collect if his paycheck supported him. Jesus, he thought as he entered the home theater, there had to be at least fifty grand in equipment in the room. He enviously eyed the state-of-the-art DVD player and VCR sitting side by side. In an enormous glass enclosed built-in cabinet to the right of the video equipment were a mind-boggling number of videotapes. The absolute magnitude of the collection defied description. Bill had never seen anything like it. They were labeled by date only, the six digits written on plain white labels in a crisp, neat hand. The dates spanned back more than a decade.
Leaving the multimedia room for the moment, the Sheriff continued his search, stopping long enough to answer his cell phone and find out that Whelan had just finished taking his sixth body from the same spot in less than a year and wasn’t very happy about it. Shit, he harrumphed to himself, like this was the way he wanted to spend the wee hours of the morning.
The ground floor was spacious, a palace in all but name, and certainly too ritzy for the likes of a Mariposite, doctor or no. Adam Porter had obviously liked the finer things in life.
Passing a magnificent grandfather clock, he headed down the hallway, bootheels cracking off the parquet flooring like gunshots. He checked each door as he proceeded down the long corridor, noting that the last one in the procession was slightly ajar. Each door offered nothing new, nothing of particular interest. A powder room here, guest suite there.
He caught a whiff of something, an odor he couldn’t quite put his finger on, a compelling combination of fragrance and smoke. Pushing open the last door he stopped dead in his tracks.
It was a nice room, simple really. Too simple for a house like this. His mind automatically dropped into categorization mode, cataloguing each and every item in the room without ever stepping foot inside. His eyes glanced off of the green walls, ceiling, and bedspread. Darted to the massive row of books directly opposite him. Froze on the screen partially hiding the commode and sink.
There, for God and anyone who knew anything about Wicca to see, was a depiction of the Great Rite. And directly below it, the enigmatic symbol that had haunted his dreams since the first week in July.
He stepped back from the doorway, making a beeline for the front entrance. He stepped through the massive portal, walking a short distance down the deck before pulling open his cell phone and dialing Doug.
“Doug, get your ass over here now.” He blew out a shaky breath. “We’ve got a whole new problem to deal with. Shit, it’s really an old problem. Never mind, just get over here. Who’s there with you? OK, leave Hendricks then. Stumpy’s with me we’re containing the scene here. On your way throw up a roadblock into the Basin. I’m calling Dispatch and getting everyone back out here tonight. We’ll divvy the squadroom up between scenes evenly.”
He disconnected the call, tapping the antenna against his chin as he paced the long porch in front of the house, absently waving Stumpy up from his truck. He knew the next step; he just wasn’t very pleased to be making it. Pulling a card out of his wallet, he took another deep breath.
“Yes, I’d like to speak with or page Special Agent Frank Drebin please. Yes ma’am, I do realize that it’s only eight a.m. Eastern Time. It’s four a.m. here. Please just page him and have him call Sheriff Bill Ashton at this number.” With a sigh he disconnected that call, then started calling his deputies in for their third true crime scene investigation in six months.
* * * *
“Jesus, I don’t believe this,” breathed Bill. He and Doug Brewster were watching the last videotape in the sequence. It had still been in the VCR, and had recorded Adam Porter’s last moments with high-definition clarity.
They’d fast-forwarded through the final, sexual moments of his life, then slowed the playback for the last bit of action on the tape.
Samantha Henning, and there was no doubt it was her, stood before the camera, shimmering with a mystical, primal beauty. Adam Porter lay on the bed behind her, dead of who knew what, but obviously dead. From the unearthly, serene shine beaming out of Samantha Henning’s eyes, Bill wasn’t taking any bets that they would figure it out to his satisfaction. You didn’t have to study Wicca very long before you began to wonder about some of the things the covens claimed they could do. Just as that doubt began to ripple through his mind like an undercurrent, Samantha began to move.
She pointed her index finger to the screen depicting the Great Rite and the sigil and began to walk counter-clockwise until she was back where she started, in front of the camera, her circuit of the room complete.
She stood there, majestic in her nakedness, and spoke directly to the lens.
“The Circle is open but unbroken, the Great Rite complete. The Eight-Fold Path has been traversed. I am Diana. An it harm none, do what ye will.” With that she took a deep breath, closed her eyes for a brief moment, and then opened them. Smiling beatifically, she turned to the recumbent form of Dr. Adam Porter. And picked him up as easily as a child.
* * * *
The pow-wow in session in the rented trailer-turned-conference room was in full swing when Frank Drebin arrived. He was tired and cranky. The Bureau didn’t usually send it’s agents for follow-up like this, but h
e’d made the request and it had been grudgingly granted. Officials much higher up the food chain than he wanted to see just how royally the small-town department had fucked up.
From what he had read in the documents faxed to D.C. before his departure, Dr. Adam Porter fit his profile perfectly. Unfortunately, for the Mariposa County Sheriff’s Department, he was an upstanding community member and a renowned psychologist to boot.
It would be very interesting to see what had been left behind in addition to the videotapes. Surely a mind that methodical, that egocentric would keep his own private records glorifying the hunt, the kill. And that was what he really wanted to see. What drove a mind like that to do what he had done?
Heads swiveled as he entered the stuffy trailer. Though quite large, it seemed tiny, claustrophobic, with piles of videotapes stacked like little towers of Pisa throughout the room.
Bill Ashton sat at the head of the table, right next to the television and VCR. He looked like shit. He held Drebin’s gaze with shell-shocked, red-rimmed eyes. A smoldering cigarette dangled from his fingers. Drebin didn’t remember him smoking before.
“Agent Drebin, please join us. We were just reviewing what our resident “expert” was videotaping while he was helping us profile his victims.” Bitterness and downright weariness coated his voice, making him sound old and washed-out.
“Here.” He tossed a small leatherette binder at Drebin. “This should interest you. It’s his fucking diary. He not only taped them, but took notes. There’s gotta be a hundred of them over in those boxes. Ten years, ten goddamned years he was doing this.” Bill slumped forward in his chair, his hands hanging loosely between his legs, his shoulders drooping in defeat.
“We all marveled at his amazing insight into Kimmie’s mind, the way he could read Samantha so well. Insight my ass.”
“Take a good, long look at me sitting here Drebin, because sure as shit I’ll be unemployed tomorrow.” He sat up a little, then drew deep on the cigarette, coughing a little as he exhaled, grimacing as the burning tobacco left a trail of fire down his throat. “I quit smoking these goddamned things years ago, and now, here I am, back on the stick.” Coughing harshly, he crushed the cigarette out in an overflowing ashtray, then turned to fully face Drebin.
“Arden’s on her way up from L.A. to positively ID Samantha. She should be here any time.” As a prideful man he should have been angry to see the brotherly, understanding compassion in Drebin’s eyes, should have hated the fact that a peer was here to see him when he was at one of the lowest points in his life. But he was too damned tired to be a stupid manly man, so instead he drew on that well of empathy, unconsciously straightening his back.
Here, at last, was someone who might begin to understand the immense pressure he was under, both internal and external. Drebin had been around the block, had stood at the mantle of leadership before, and Bill was so tired of being everything to everyone in Mariposa County. His deputies looked to him to solve the problems of the world, the community looked to him to keep them safe, the politicians looked to him to keep their communities clean and their reelection chances bright and shiny. And then there was Arden.
The one person he should have been able to unburden himself to, the first person he’d truly loved since the death of his grandparents was on her way here to confirm the fact that her sister had disappeared once again.
He wasn’t sure what that would do to the edgy, complicated relationship that had evolved over the past few weeks. By maintaining her distance, staying in L.A., he’d been forced to see Arden as she saw herself, to understand her deep-seated fear of being second best yet again. She wasn’t the only one having an identity crisis. Since her abrupt departure in mid-September he’d been forced to go back to his solitary, bachelor’s existence. He’d forgotten how hard it was to sleep alone, to wake up alone. There was nothing on this earth that he would do to hurt Arden, but as seemed to be the norm in this case, karma was against them.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Drebin’s eyes narrowed as he studied the entries on Kimmie Ross. While all of the other women had been randomly selected, it appeared that Kim Ross had been carefully chosen, even cultivated as she began to express her dissatisfaction with life in a small town. Porter’s notes didn’t make it clear where the two of them had first come into contact, but he’d been drawn to her incandescent youth and vitality from day one.
On Midsummer Eve he sentenced Victoria Rogers to death for her perceived lack of godliness. The next day Kim Ross was his.
From his notes, Kim was the closest he had come to achieving his goals. Drebin still couldn’t quite believe what those goals were. How a well-educated, world traveled man could have embraced such beliefs was beyond him. He knew he was in for an education when he viewed the videotapes, but in themselves Porter’s notes were fascinating reading.
He’d begun his worship as a young man traveling with his parents in the Armed Forces. They’d been stationed at Fort Hood, Texas before the Wiccan religion had undergone its latest resurgence, so his involvement in it had been a closely guarded secret.
Drebin could easily imagine a young, inexperienced boy going into a sexual culture like that and believing that he had found the keys to heaven. Whatever that coven had taught him, he’d left it to follow women’s studies and religion as co-majors at UCLA, then moved onto Johns Hopkins for his Master’s and Doctoral work.
The guy had been incredibly smart, that much was obvious.
Drebin sat there with brown notebooks scattered across the table like the damage trail from a tornado. And damage had been wrought, in more ways than one.
Ashton had been wrong. Porter had been experimenting with ascending to the next plane for over ten years, more like fifteen. He’d only been videotaping his victims for ten.
He moved every one or two years when the local crop of potential goddesses began to run dry. Mariposa had been a virtual smorgasbord, with an endless supply of transient females running the Highway 140 corridor to Yosemite on an annual basis. In his mind, sooner or later he would find his goddess. If it hadn’t been for Samantha, he could have continued almost indefinitely. His role as a rock-solid community member would have overwhelmed any suspicion.
Drebin wearily massaged the bridge of his nose. This had been a cluster from the get go, and even though there was not a damn thing that anyone could do about it, the blame had fallen squarely on one man, and it wasn’t Adam Porter.
He felt sorry for Ashton, knew that the man’s career as an elected official was over with the close of this case, or maybe even before that. Even though procedure had been followed to the letter and all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed, the press was still having a field day. From what he could tell, the county supervisors and mayor weren’t exactly planning a parade either.
Most people, especially city dwellers, would never understand the delicate balance of authority that seesawed between the Sheriff’s Department and the County Supervisors. Both held enormous power, but as the sole law enforcement in a county that was larger than several eastern states, the Sheriff was usually on the receiving end of any press, be it good or bad. Sheriffs in towns like this were either elected to one term, then ousted, or stayed in the position until they retired.
Bill Ashton’s career was over simply because, through no fault of his own, he had let that balance of power shift to the Supervisors. As elected officials, they knew when and where to cut their losses. Knowing Ashton, he would wrap this up as quickly as possible, then exit stage left to get on with his life. It saddened him because besides being a good guy, Ashton was a damned good cop. Too good to waste on ranch life in the sticks.
* * * *
“Hello Arden.” The Bill Ashton that greeted her was reserved, keeping a good distance between them when all she wanted to do was walk straight into his arms and make everything good and right again. She’d thought that by getting to know the man over the telephone, by putting him at a distance, that she would get over the craving she h
ad to see him, to touch him. She had been wrong. She’d thought she needed time and distance to put her thoughts, feelings into perspective. Wrong again. What she felt for Bill Ashton hadn’t diminished one little bit over the course of forty-five days it had only strengthened her desire and outright need to be with him. The fact that he was the investigating officer in her sister’s disappearance had stopped being a factor about twelve hours after she met the man.
And at least once a day she felt guilty about shunting her sister’s disappearance into second place. That lack of loyalty to her sister was totally unlike her, but then again, in reality, Samantha had been missing from her life since she was sixteen years old. With Adam Porter’s help she had come to the realization that when she had begun this quest for her sister, it had been out of familial duty more than anything else. Through those interviews, she felt she’d come to know her sister a little better and maybe even begun to understand the forces that drove a woman like Samantha. Certainly she hadn’t liked seeing what her sister had become in the years since they’d seen each other last, but who was she to throw stones? Particularly since her relationship with the Sheriff now took precedence over even Samantha.
She’d carefully considered everything that had happened since that hot day in June when she rolled into Mariposa. While her life had certainly taken some bizarre twists and turns since then, one of the oddest she’d discovered, in retrospect, was that she’d never felt, deep down in her bones, that Samantha was hurt, or really in danger. Sure, they’d never been close in any sense of the word, but she intuitively knew that had harm come to Samantha, somehow she would have known.
And now all of that wondering and soul searching had come full circle. Arden stood in the bullpen area of the Sheriff’s Department, looking at her lover’s standoffish posture and wondering if her own self-protection measures had been too much for him. If the conversations they’d shared in the last forty-five days had been just that, conversations. Not the growth of the real, lasting relationship she’d been hoping, yearning for.
The Summerland Page 22