by Rex Burns
“Dorcas, stop it! That’s not true—you know it’s not true! You didn’t do anything like that—you know it!”
But she wouldn’t stop. Margaret couldn’t make her stop, now. The words tumbled and spewed incoherently as she fought between crying and breathing and nothing Margaret could say would make her daughter shut up.
Finally she screamed at Dorcas, “You didn’t sacrifice him—stop saying that word! I forbid you to say that word!”
Dorcas, wet mouth open and eyes and nose red, stared at her mother as if suddenly aware she was not alone.
“Dorcas, stop saying things like that. People—some people—may believe you.”
“A sacrifice, Mother. David was a sacrifice to Ninib, to the Zonei and the Seal of the Seventh Gate. And I helped—I helped kill him.”
“Stop, do you hear me?” It was from fear that she slapped the girl, not from hatred or rejection. Fear. Dorcas was raving, tipping into some kind of insanity brought on by the shock and her always overactive imagination. And all that anyone who overheard would have to do would be to call the police—an anonymous tip, rumor, and Dorcas’s life would be ruined forever. It was those movies the girl had gone to—those Gothic things with ghosts and devils and special effects that brought terrified giggles and screams. Dori used to laugh about them, but obviously they’d done their damage—subconsciously burrowing into her imagination until now, faced with the trauma of a real death, the engraved images surfaced to confound reality with movie lies.
“A murder, Mother.” Dori’s voice had steadied and her eyes were intent now. The white flash of her hand on her daughter’s cheek was turning to an angry red, but the girl didn’t rub at it or cry or even seem to notice. Instead she stared at Margaret with a fierceness that made her eyes look a little insane as she whispered, “A sacrificial murder!”
“No—you didn’t do anything like that! You’re sick, Dori. That’s what’s wrong. This whole affair has unbalanced you and you need help. And your father and I will get it for you. Now take these pills—they’ll help you sleep. You need sleep and rest; the doctor said so. And for God’s sake don’t say one more word about sacrifice or … or murder. People wouldn’t understand, Dori.”
The next morning, her daughter had run away.
I picked through the disjointed phrases, the convoluted sentences, fragments that had no clear subject. The woman’s slurred words wove back and forth over the nightmare that had haunted her for so long, and gradually the phrases and ragged pieces of conversation began to build into a picture. Even as I watched, she seemed to slide back from the present into that time when the world’s orderly foundation had changed for her. And she had discovered she lacked any strength to compensate for that loss. Then, increasingly, she had sought an alcoholic refuge where nothing could bring more harm.
“Does Henry know about this?”
“Henry? … Henry? …” She lurched to her feet and waved an exhausted arm against my chest. “Sleep. I’m tired. I need sleep.”
CHAPTER 13
KIMBERLEY OVERSTREET’S MARRIED name was Goddard, I remembered. I checked the number Henry had given me against the listing in the telephone book. Then I took Nautilus Street inland past the La Jolla High School and up Soledad Mountain to a small lane that wound into a canyon. The pretentiousness of the homes in this pocket challenged those overlooking the sea, but they hadn’t shouldered that pretension for as many decades. They were stark, shoehorned onto smaller lots, and their landscaping accentuated facades rather than complemented them. A curving drive led to the front of a gray and white colonial. Three-story columns rose up from a semicircular porch and hinted of the White House. A heavyset Latin woman in the black nylon uniform of a maid answered my ring. Her voice had the singsong inflection of memorized English phrases.
“Come in, please. I will see if Mrs. Goddard is at home.”
The foyer where I was asked to wait was floored in large brown tiles. Beyond, a light-filled living room stressed natural colors and materials and a furniture whose fabric emphasized pleats. I stared at the large still-life that faced the dressing mirror and coat rack on the other wall of the foyer. It was a harshly colored, semiabstract painting of fruit in a basket. The artist’s black signature filled the lower left corner and rivaled his subject in prominence. The squeak of rubber soles on slate brought a young woman wearing a white tennis suit. She dabbed irritably at perspiring temples with a monogrammed hand towel. “Yes? Who are you and what do you want?”
“Sorry to interrupt you, Mrs. Goddard.” I smiled and told her who I was and that I wanted to talk about Dorcas Wilcox and the time in high school when she ran away from home.
She did not smile back and she was not pleased. “All that happened a long time ago, Mr. Steele. Like I told you on the phone, we don’t see each other anymore, and I don’t know where she is.”
“You also told me you didn’t know anyone named Dwayne. But Dwayne Vengley ran around with the Four Femmes in your senior year.”
She didn’t show fear at the name, just more irritation. “I didn’t remember that Dwayne. And I haven’t seen him since high school. Which is why I didn’t remember him.”
“What about Shirley Ellman? Do you remember her?”
“Sure. But I heard she died in a car accident three or four years ago.”
“I see.” From somewhere beyond the windows, a woman’s voice said something in Spanish and a man’s Spanish answered. “Mrs. Goddard—may I call you Kimberly?—when you were in high school, did you and your friends play any kind of ritualistic games? Dungeons and Dragons, for example?”
“No.”
“Or perhaps dabble in the occult?”
“No, I didn’t. And I really don’t see what any of this has to do with finding Dori now.”
“She apparently had an interest in metaphysical questions. She majored in philosophy in college.”
“Well, I majored in communications.”
“And she seems to have corresponded with some kind of Eastern religious group.”
“That’s her problem, isn’t it? I mean, that kind of stuff really is juvenile, isn’t it?”
I agreed. “But it can lead to very adult crimes.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Some people might get their thrills with a ritual sacrifice. Of an animal. Of a human.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s possible that Dori’s caught up in some kind of cult.”
“Oh. Well, like I said, that’s her problem.”
“When you did happen to meet, did she ever mention any cults or talk to you about any religious movement she was interested in?”
The woman dabbed again with the small towel. “She did say a few things now and then—you know, talking about est or TM. And for a while she was hung up on Tibetan prayer wheels or crystals or something.”
“Did she ever mention Vengley’s name when she talked about these things?”
“Not that I remember.” Her shrug said none of it was worth talking about. “I’m just not into that kind of stuff.”
“And never have been?”
Her defenses came up again. “No.”
“Not even with David Gates, Kimberly?”
“No! That was an accident—a tragic accident that I’ve been trying very hard to forget. And it was a long time ago, too, and nobody can say one thing different. Now you listen, Mr. Steele or whatever your name is, I don’t have to put up with this. My husband is an attorney-at-law and if I tell him you’ve been harassing me you will be in deep shit!”
“I’m just trying to find a missing girl who’s a friend of yours.”
“She’s not a friend anymore—I haven’t seen her in a long time and I’ve got other friends now. Important ones! I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but you’re bothering me and you’re in my home. Now get out. Now!”
I did, thanking her politely for her time. She slammed the door on my gratitude.
In my c
ar, I let the steering wheel guide itself back down the mountain. Kimberly was right about one thing—she didn’t know what I was trying to do because I wasn’t all that sure myself. Cults and ritual sacrifice—thrill murders and mumbo-jumbo. I was going by guess and by God, and more the latter than the former. What I groped through were not facts so much—there weren’t many of those—as feelings and intimations. And the feeling that kept returning had to do with Dorcas’s relationship to Vengley. As well as the feeling of shadowy ties between Vengley and several of the people I’d talked to in the last couple of days.
Steven Glover and Shelley Aguirre, for instance. There was something there. Probably to do with Jerry Hawley’s suicide. Certainly there was a parallel between that and David Gates’s death. As well as between the defensiveness of Kimberly Goddard and Stacey Briggs, and that of Glover and Aguirre. Patterns. You looked for patterns and then you used your reason and worked with the probabilities. In many ways, I had occasionally thought, my work for the last twenty years had been a lot like the skin-diving trips we went on as kids: short-lived plunges into alien waters looking for patterns. The coastal rocks Tom and I and the others would dive around had no patterns. There was only the swirl and tangle of currents, the chaos of fallen rock, sandy lanes of seabed. When you saw a pattern it meant something: the sinuous parallel lines of a moray, the spidery fan of a langouste’s legs, the mossy half dome of a clamped abalone shell. In the chaos of life’s events, too, you looked for patterns: repeated methods of operation, similar occurrences, familiar behaviors. Such as Dorcas’s running away following each death. Such as deaths whose causes were unnatural. Even the time of the year. And you had faith that out of the matrix of chaos, patterns would emerge that, with care, would lead to meaning.
But what of the larger chaos? The cosmic meaninglessness that Dorcas apparently struggled to define? Job had stopped asking for meaning and submitted to faith. The aged Ben Franklin said he expected to soon find out about questions of faith. Not as safe a response as Job’s in an Age of Faith, but practical and appropriate for the Age of Reason. But in a different age, one where faith was ill-defined and reason was suspect, how did one answer? Some wanted a return to blind faith as the only alternative to fallen reason. Others answered that life’s absurdity in the universe left no room for reason, faith, or any other god. Yet belief in absurdity, like belief in reason, was an act of faith itself. Monsignor Kaufmann’s response to Sartre, perhaps drawn from Kierkegaard: all humans are condemned to live by faith whether we want to or not. So Kaufmann chose that which promised best and which people far wiser than himself had chosen: belief in Christ. Others—perhaps like Dorcas—might accept any meaning to the cosmos instead of the emptiness of no meaning at all. But perhaps for her, traditional religion and cultural values no longer held conviction. Perhaps she sought meaning in beliefs that came from different roots—Hindu, Zoroastrian, Loa, Baha’i. Perhaps she and others explored ideas that challenged traditional Judeo-Christian prohibitions: Hare Krishna, Jamatkhana Agakhan, Higher Harmony, Ridway, Ramawhosis. There were also those, reluctant to go too far from tradition, who would follow charismatic leaders, who would devote labor and savings to their glory: Jim Jones and the People’s Temple, the PTL Club, Oral Roberts, Swaggert, Tammy and Jimmy, Guru Ma. The names went on and on. For an age that was supposed to be faithless, there were a lot of people so hungry for it that all reason was lost. And there was an unending number of charlatans to offer spiritual security. For a fee.
The search for spiritual meaning had long been combined with different kinds of sacrifice. Children offered to Baal, burnt offerings to Yaweh, sacrificial lambs. “This is the body and blood of Christ. …” Sacrifice as a symbol of transcending the restrictions of the flesh. Sacrifice as an actual transcendence. Either way, sacrifice was an ancient means of intensifying emotion and hallowing ritual. And religious intensity had been bred into America from the beginning: witchcraft trials, the Great Awakening, Millerites, nineteenth-century revivalism, Shakers, camp meetings. Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Father Divine, the Pentecostals, Hasidim, Allah. …
I pulled the car into my garage and sat a few minutes before going into the house. Why should that search for intensity of religious experience cease now? Obviously, it hadn’t—a flip through the television channels showed that. I could even remember one of my field trips for a Stanford class on comparative religion over twenty years ago: an isolated and run-down farm in the wet and rugged hills up near San Gregorio. The leader called it a religious commune, and himself the Master of Souls. Chubby, bearded, rumpled, he looked like the town drunk. And the man’s grin was a mixture of leer at the visiting coeds and surprise at being taken seriously by a university professor and his class. But the four or five silent, middle-aged women who worked the farm and obeyed his commands took him seriously enough to call themselves his wives. And even, I recalled, resented the intrusion of outsiders into the world they had created with their faith. Yet if those women truly believed, it was because they willfully stopped their noses to the odor of deceit and mendacity.
What else was it that now stirred in memory … ? Several years back … talking with someone … a bar—an officer’s club bar. Okinawa—that was it! The air force base at Kadena. One of the flights from Atsugi to Honolulu that had been interrupted by an overheated engine. A twelve-hour delay, and killing time listening to a Protestant chaplain drink mai-tais and bitch indignantly about the U.S. Army’s recognition of the Church of Satan. It had recently become an official religion. Its military adherents now had the same rights to holy days and ceremonies as Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. The chaplain was a short, soft-faced man with rimless glasses and almost colorless pale hair. He’d talked about The Satanic Bible’s popularity among young people. All they wanted, he said, was approval to pursue the sins of the flesh. And they hypocritically called that filth a religion. “Turning from the Word of God to the word of Satan—that’s not what the Founding Fathers meant by ‘freedom of religion.’ ”
Tommy Jenkins was able to help again. “The cult and ritual murder people. That’s who you want to talk with, Jack.”
“The what?”
“I read in the paper a few months back. SDPD, like a lot of other PDs, they set up this special team to study cults and rituals. Cattle mutilations, chicken heads, crap like that. You know these random killings? They think some of them are tied to Satanists and witches. Christ knows, I believe it; I mean it’s California, what else can you expect? If it’s going to be anywhere, it’s going to be here. Give Tony a call—he’ll tell you who to get in touch with.”
I did. Lieutenant Broadbeck was cautiously reserved until he found it wasn’t his time I was asking for again. “Detective Sergeant Shaughnessy is the man you want to talk to. He took the FBI course in cults and rituals. Wait a minute, I’ll get his extension for you.”
The man was on the street. I left name and number with the officer who answered the telephone, but it wasn’t until almost five that the sergeant called back. I told him what it was about.
“Does this have to do with any particular case?”
“A missing girl.” I added, “Maybe a couple deaths a few years back, but that’s only hypothetical.” It sounded pretty farfetched as I told it, and I apologized. “I really don’t have any evidence; it’s just a vague possibility that I’m checking out.”
“Yeah?” Shaughnessy was interested—anything to do with occult crime interested him, he told me. And the possibility of ritual murder interested him more. It was an area the police were only now mapping out. The more he dug into it, the less surprised he was at what he found. In fact, a lot of what turned up came from informants who weren’t really sure of what they were reporting, only that they felt something was wrong, or they’d heard a rumor, or somebody had bragged about something. “Maybe I can help you.”
I asked, “Buy you an early dinner?”
“Hey, why not?”
Detective Sergeant Shaughnessy was a few years you
nger than me and about three inches taller. He had a flattened nose, a long, square jaw that looked as if it could handle a hard punch, and, over blue eyes, a little scar tissue that said it had. “Ninib? That’s what she said?”
“That’s what it sounded like. She also said something about a sacrifice to open the Seal of the Seventh Gate. There were some other phrases, but I couldn’t make them out. It—ah—sounds like a lot of pretentious crap to me.”
Shaughnessy wasn’t interested in my opinion of it. “It could be The Book of Entrance. From the Necronomicon. A lot of kids have been reading that.” He leaned against the back of the captain’s chair the fish restaurant provided and stared at the harbor. Outside the plate-glass window and past the private boats rubbing their moorings, points of restless sunlight sparkled on the water. “A lot of those conjurations and rites call for blood and flesh offerings.”
“Human?”
“The book doesn’t say it has to be. But with some of these people, who knows?” Frowning, he twisted a wad of pasta on his fork and jabbed at a shrimp. “My guess is, human sacrifice happens.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Halloween movies, late shows on television, all the lighting effects of a smoky devil worship were there for anyone who could push a button or turn a dial. But that was Hollywood. “That’s hard to accept, Sergeant.”
Shaughnessy shrugged. “A lot of cops who should know better don’t accept it, either. But my experience tells me any weird shit somebody can think of sooner or later shows up on the street.” He shrugged again. “But a lot of times, bones from a grave will do, and we get a whole slew of grave robberies every Halloween. I haven’t had a case of human sacrifice yet, but I do think it could happen.”
“Who might be a lucky candidate?”
“It would vary with the ritual. But usually you want somebody whose soul hasn’t been corrupted by the world.”