by Gene Lazuta
And now…
“One of my eyes sees what I see.”
Norris closed his hand over the little, cup-shaped piece that was all he had left of his brother.
“And the other sees what Dad missed.”
What the hell could Daddy-O possibly have missed?
* * *
When the motel room door opened, Norris shoved the eye back into his pocket and looked toward the wall to hide his guilty expression. Without a word, Mike Cooper stepped inside, closed the door, and settled himself on a chair near the foot of the bed.
Norris waited a long time before he finally asked, “Why?” without turning his head or moving his hand.
In his pocket, Woodie’s eye felt warm.
“Because we’ve got a real blue-ribbon winner here, Bob,” Cooper responded in what Norris had come to identify as his “official” voice.
That voice was meant to create a distance between the cop and his subject; to establish a relationship in which Cooper asked the questions, and the subject answered, because it wasn’t just a man looking for information, but the symbolic weight of authority.
“And because it’s standard procedure: brother killed? Suspect the brother. Cain and Abel.”
“I thought I knew you,” Norris said, disgusted by the official voice, and almighty pissed that his friend had chosen to use it.
“Woodie called me yesterday afternoon,” Cooper countered, his tone softening. “He was scared, vague and virtually incoherent. He was in a gas station off Route 36, just north of Columbus, in the Killibrook Valley Reservoir area. He said he was heading out of Harpersville, and that I should meet him in Akron…if he made it out alive.”
Norris heard a door open and sat up. Accepting the coffee handed to him by the deputy who had just walked in, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and put his elbows on his knees so that he faced away from Cooper, who started talking again as soon as the deputy was gone.
“Woodie wasn’t calling me as a friend, Bob,” he said, noisily slurping his own coffee. “He was calling me as a cop. He talked about you, mostly. There were some things on his mind. Mostly about you. He said that he’d found things out about you that would bring the ‘beasts from the woods’—those were his exact words.”
Norris heard the pages of a notebook being flipped.
“Let’s see…yeah, here. ‘From the past’s settling dust, I’ve unearthed a truth so terrible that it’ll bring the beasts from the woods to my door.’
“I wrote it down, Bob. I never heard him talk like that before, so I wrote it down. Then I went and waited where he said he’d meet me: the McDonald’s off I-77, just south of Akron, at midnight. That’s when he said he’d get there. I went. But before I did I measured it on a map. And you know what I found?”
Norris frowned.
“It’s roughly ninety miles from where he said he was to where he said he was going to be. Now, on a highway, ninety miles is what, an hour and a half? Two hours, max? But Woodie wanted me to wait seven. He called at five, scared, almost panicky. He was alone, and apparently on the run. But he didn’t go to the local cops, and he didn’t want to meet me for a full seven hours.
“Now, you and him pretty much grew up down here, Bob. What was he doing? Where would he go?”
Norris steadied himself before saying, “Fuck you, Mike. I want a lawyer.”
“Why?” Cooper asked, his voice sounding genuinely confused.
“Cain and Abel,” Norris said, standing and turning to face Cooper for the first time since their interview had begun.
What he found was startling.
Cooper was a short, heavyset man in his mid-thirties, with dark hair that was perpetually cut in an almost military fashion, closely set eyes that were usually moistly pink around the edges, and bushy brows that nearly met over his nose. His personal appearance was a source of pride to him, and he was meticulous about keeping himself neat and organized.
At least he had been until this morning.
What Norris found when he turned to confront his friend was a Mike Cooper unlike any he had ever seen. His face looked pouchy and bruised. His back sagged. And around his mouth, the deep wrinkles that some people called laugh lines were emphasized to absurd prominence by his coarse morning’s worth of unshaved stubble.
He didn’t shave! Norris thought. That’s impossible. It’s like the Pope taking a leak in the Fountain at Lourdes!
Cooper’s shoes were thickly encrusted with fresh mud. His hair was dirty and uncombed. And the overcoat he was wearing—some kind of tweed thing that looked as if it had been dragged through a corn field—was buttoned right up to his neck. If Norris didn’t know better, he would have sworn that Cooper wasn’t wearing a shirt under that coat. He couldn’t see the tips of a collar, and Cooper always—absolutely always—wore stiff white shirts with button-down collars.
“Whatever killed Woodie bit the walls, Bob,” Cooper said. “What would bite the fucking walls?”
“You don’t get it, Mike,” Norris replied, not allowing the shock of seeing his friend in such a disheveled state disrupt his train of thought. “I’m not answering any questions without a lawyer in the room. I’m not letting you set me up again.”
“Jesus,” Cooper returned, placing his coffee on the TV tray next to him. “You’re the one that doesn’t get it. I ‘set you up’ to save your ass. Even though I was looking for Woodie all up and down Route 36, these good-old-boys found him before I did. You saw ‘em when you got here, didn’t you? They guys with the tan shirts and sunglasses—at night! Woodie had a notebook in his car, Bob. And your name’s in it. I pulled you in as a favor, old chum.”
“You knew I wouldn’t handle it,” Norris said, softly.
“I knew you’d puke. Shit. So would I…I mean, if it was my brother, for Christ’s sake.”
“And they were there taking pictures…”
“Of you pukin’ your guts out.”
Norris was silent.
“Now, as far as these guys are concerned, you’re a candy-ass Roger Ranger without an ounce of balls who couldn’t possibly have anything to do with violent murder. Or at least I hope that’s pretty close to how you’re going to start out with most of ‘em. But they aren’t dumb, so you’re gonna have to watch yourself. Keep as much distance between them and you as you can the whole time you’re down here.”
“The whole time I’m down where?” Norris asked, feeling a sinking sensation settling on his stomach.
“Do you want to know who killed your brother?” Cooper asked back.
Norris nodded.
“So do I,” the detective said. “Now, sit down. You just got recruited.”
“Into what?”
“Into the Church.”
Norris didn’t even breathe. With his left hand, he searched behind himself for the edge of the bed, found it, and settled his weight down on the squeaking mattress.
He was still in shock, and he knew it…he had to be.
Cooper apparently knew it too, so he went slow.
“I’ve never explained the department to you because it wasn’t any of your business,” he said, his face registering Norris’ every move as tiny flinches in the muscles around his cobalt-blue eyes. “Officially, we’re called the Division of Behavioral Comparison. But we spend so much time praying that the Church joke stuck. We do the bad ones. The ones nobody else wants.”
Norris swallowed.
“We started in 1984 after an eleven-year-old girl was snatched and dismembered in this same Killibrook Valley,” Cooper continued, lifting a briefcase from the floor and laying it across his knees. “They finally nailed the asshole who did it—and yeah, I called him the asshole, not the unsub, or perpetrator, or any of that shit…since I hate these guys…I hate them with all my heart. Anyway…they finally caught up with him in Minnesota, but only after he got three more kids.
“So, as a way to try to prevent such a thing from happening in Ohio again, our illustrious governor set up the Church to
identify and track unsolved, violent pattern crimes nationwide. We’re supposed to spot known creeps when they wander into the state, and warn the local cops involved. We don’t have any real jurisdiction to make arrests, so no one has to listen to us. Which means that what usually happens is that the local cops just let us lay out what we know and then tell us to get lost; like a certain county sheriff named Conway did to me this morning in no uncertain terms…what a bastard.”
From the briefcase, Cooper withdrew a sheet of newspaper and held it up. On the page, streaks of charcoal lightly defined a grey oval into which a darker, more sinister pattern was tattooed.
“Now, the Killibrook Valley’s been pretty prominent in the Church’s history so far. We were first organized because of a murder that happened here, and we’ve been back God knows how many times since.
“On the surface, that might not sound so strange. Any wooded area’s bound to be a tempting spot for an asshole to dump a victim. And every state park in the country’s got the same problem. But the Killibrook Valley’s got it worse. And what’s more, it’s got this.”
Norris felt a bead of sweat crawl down his spine as he mentally estimated the length of the imprint as...
“Two feet?” he gasped. “This thing’s huge!”
Cooper nodded. “That bite was seven feet off the floor.”
“There’s nothing in Ohio…there’s nothing in the country this big!” Norris said, “I don’t think a grizzly bear’s jaws span two feet open. And a bear’s jaw wouldn’t open like that even if they were. Those look…unhinged…like a snake…though snakes don’t really unhinge their jaws. They have…well…”
“Your animal background’s just one of the reasons I called you in this morning,” Cooper said, his eyes narrowing. “Your experience with Woodie’s the other. When he called me yesterday, it was only the last in a series of calls that started about six weeks ago.”
“You make that sound suspicious,” Norris interjected with a frown.
“It is.”
“Are you telling me that Woodie knew something about this,” Norris said, indicating the rubbing in his hand, “and that he came down here anyway?”
Cooper nodded.
There was a terrible pressure building up in the room that Norris was hesitant to disturb. If its subject would have been anyone other than Woodie, he might have just gotten up and walked away. But it was his brother’s life they were discussing, and ruefully he was compelled to say, “Let’s just have it, Mike. No more dramatics. Just lay it out.”
Cooper seemed to understand.
Taking a deep breath, he released it slowly before saying, “Woodie told me that you were going to kill him.”
Norris blinked.
Cooper’s expression was relentless.
“It started in Cleveland. In a place called the Institute of Metaphysical Research.”
Norris sighed.
And Cooper spelled it out…
18.
“Woodie was into drugs.”
That’s how the detective began, and this came as no great surprise to Robert Norris. He already knew what his brother was like: he was into drugs, and booze, and losing sleep. He was into dreams, and ESP, and just about anything else that offered him a chance to “glimpse that weird section of reality that lurks in the corner of our perception.” He believed that for everything the natural world presented, there was another, deeper meaning that was hidden so long as the observer was limited to a single, stable reference point. By altering the way a person saw things, he reasoned, it was possible to discover the true nature of the world.
That was Woodie.
He was nuts.
He was so nuts that Norris wasn’t really able to communicate with him. After college, they had drifted apart, their contact with one another growing more infrequent as Bob pursued his forestry career, and Woodie followed the urgings of his persistent inner voice. Finally they didn’t see each other at all anymore. From what Norris heard from mutual acquaintances, his brother had found a group of people who shared his way of looking at things, and from that moment, about a month from the time of his murder, he had disappeared, lost to anyone but his friends at the Institute of Metaphysical Research.
“I ran down that Institute of his pretty carefully,” Cooper said. “I was worried about him. You know…I wanted to see what he was getting himself wrapped up in. What I found was that the place was run by a man named Green. That’s all: just Mr. Green. He paid cash for an old titty bar in the Heights part of town and started what he called a learning center.
“He used advertisements in newspapers and magazines to invite the curious to free public lectures on shit from out-of-body projection to the prophecies of Nostradamus. At first attendance was sparse. But after every meeting there were always a few people intrigued enough to stick around and talk to him personally. Pretty soon, the Institute had twenty-some paying members, and private, invitation-only, Friday night meetings were added to the public, Sunday afternoon lectures.
“On Fridays they discussed phenomena,” Cooper said with a disapproving frown. “Woodie would go there and discuss these phenomena until he could hardly talk and had to go home to sleep it off.
“Peyote’s what they did. It’s a hallucinogen often used by Native Americans in magic rituals, and Mr. Green always had plenty. Woodie said that when he ate these peyote buttons, he experienced the most profound intellectual insights he’d ever had. And he wanted me to come and see for myself. We smoked a little shit together in college…”
This was a lingering sore spot between Norris and the detective.
“So my being a cop didn’t prevent him from inviting me along. I guess he must have thought that I missed getting stoned or something. I didn’t go, or course, but I did check out Mr. Green more carefully after hearing about his little parties.”
Spurred on by his personal interest in the matter, Cooper described how he went all out in his investigations: Social Security numbers, credit check, police record, the whole nine yards. But every avenue he explored came up empty. Zero. Mr. Green was a blank, not so much as a library card. Becoming worried that there was more to the man than his happy bullshit sessions, with a little weed thrown in for his friends, he went to Woodie’s apartment early one Saturday morning.
And what he found was frightening.
“He really looked like hell,” he said, readjusting himself on his seat. “Really. I mean it. Like, bad. He’d lost a lot of weight, and the place looked like a dorm room: dirty clothes all over, dishes piled in the sink, crap everywhere. But his eyes were the worst. They were wild, like he was looking for something, searching, all the time. His real eye was red…and, I swear, his glass eye looked like it was red too…like it wasn’t artificial anymore. Like it was a part of him, somehow…it was weird.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” Norris asked.
“Because you’d have beaten the shit out of him,” Cooper responded.
Which was probably true.
What both men knew so well that neither had felt the need to mention it was that Woodie was the only person in the world that Robert Norris loved strongly enough to physically injure. He was notoriously straight-laced when it came to drugs, and he’d often beaten his brother bloody trying to straighten him out. In college, when these beatings failed, he went after the people supplying his brother’s bad habits, so that, in the last year that Woodie was on campus, not one dealer would sell to him for fear of his brother’s wrath. It was this great love that finally drove Norris from Woodie’s company. He couldn’t bear to see him killing himself, so, in defeat, he gave up and left him alone.
“I know you meant well,” Cooper said. “But Woodie didn’t need an ass-kicking. If I thought one would have helped, I’d have given it to him myself.”
Norris half smiled. He knew Cooper was telling the truth—the detective loved his brother almost as much as he did.
“What he needed was help,” Cooper continued. “Something was affecting his
mind. Not just the drugs. Peyote’s like pot. It gives you a sense of expanse, makes you feel like you’re perceiving things on some deeper level. I knew that was just the kind of thing Woodie was looking for. But it wasn’t enough to change him like that. No. There was something else happening to him. Something heavy.”
Slowly, Cooper described the lethargic frenzy in which Woodie had let him into his apartment. The young man was jittery, and hardly able to contain his excitement. Forgetting any polite preliminaries, he explained that he looked the way he did because something “amazing” had happened to him the previous evening, something that was still happening, but which he couldn’t yet explain.
They sat down, Woodie in an armchair and Cooper on the couch. A cluttered coffee table separated them, and in the air hung the heavy sweetness of old incense. Without prompting, Woodie had started talking about Mr. Green.
The man was awesome, he said. He was the most formidable personality he had ever come across. At first, he’d just thought that he was a typical crackpot, screwing around with psychic bullshit for the fun of it. But he was wrong. Mr. Green was the genuine article, and he’d taken a personal interest in Woodie after learning that the Norris family lived in the Killibrook Valley.
It seemed that the Valley was Mr. Green’s major preoccupation. There was something about it, he said, something very important. As a matter of fact, he’d started the Institute with the very intention of assembling a first-rate investigative team that he could use to discover the secret hidden in those impenetrable trees. With Woodie on the team, there would be no stopping them. Together, they’d flush out the “evil forces” at work in the darkest recesses of the Valley’s soul.
Hearing Woodie talk like this had frightened Cooper even more than the look in his eyes, and he sat rigidly silent as an intricately woven system of what he took to be delusions spewed from the young man’s mouth.
“We need your help,” Woodie had said, finally, fidgeting in his seat, hardly able to stay still. “We need you to use the Church’s computers to chart the incidents of animal-related violence that have happened down home over the years.”