Of Blood and Water: Campground Murders (Virgil McLendon Thrillers Book 1)

by catt dahman

“He tidied the world of messes. My father kept a clean home. And I have tried to keep a clean home. My house is beautiful, and it deserves to be always neat and shiny. It’s respect to my family home,” he blithered nonsense.

  Joey kicked him in the ribs and asked, “Where is my wife?”

  “Janice?” asked David as he smiled.

  “You’re just jabbering anyway. The house isn’t part of this. You like hurting little girls and young women,” Tina accused David.

  “I do,” David admitted, “I really do.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s in my blood. My family. It’s what my family does. There is blood, and there is the water. Always the water.”

  “Give me my wife.”

  “I would never harm her,” said David as he laughed. “She’s in the barn. That is if she can leave the others behind. I started a fire in there; Tina and I tossed Janice a key to her locks. It only fits hers, and if she runs out, she won’t die of smoke inhalation, but if she stays, trying to rescue the rest, she’ll die.”

  “She’s pregnant,” Joey moaned, “have some mercy.”

  “Recently pregnant?”

  “A month. Why does it matter?” Joey kicked him again for even speaking of Janice’s condition and asking questions.

  “She can’t get out the door. I locked it. There’s no way out really, so she’ll burn up. The key with the red wire on it is in my shirt pocket. Take the key, and hurry. It may be too late; hurry to the door in the back of the barn. Go!”

  “Watch him. Kurt, Joey, come on.” Tina ran back to the barn, and from a far wall, smoke curled out from the edges of what looked to be a door. “When we open it, there will be a blaze, so be ready.” She unlocked the door with the key David had given her; she expected it to be another trick.

  “Stand back,” Tina said as she yanked the door open. The fire whooshed out, singeing their hair.

  A body on fire bolted out of the blaze, and Kurt threw his jacket around the person as Joey and Tina beat out flames with their hands, burning them.

  “Hello?” Tina called into the blaze, but no one responded.

  “It’s Janice,” Joey yelled, “oh, Jani… Jani….”

  Her clothing was charred and flaked away; the skin underneath was covered in big blisters but was not burned as badly as they feared. Her hands were burned worse, and her face was bright red with a few blisters. Most of her pretty hair was singed away, but Janice still managed a smile that caused a blister to pop. “Joey, you found me.”

  “You’re going to be fine. I hear the ambulance, Honey. Let me get you out of here.” He picked her up because the barn was burning so strongly. He allowed the ambulance crew to take her and lay her on a gurney and start an IV solution.

  The paramedic gave Janice something for pain and began an antibiotic drip immediately before getting her any farther than the ambulance door.

  Janice spoke softly, coughing a lot. “I couldn’t get them out. I ran….”

  “You did the right thing, Janice, or you would have died, too. Who was down there? Can you tell us before you get sleepy?”

  “Two hookers: Dana and Susan. Dana wasn’t too bad. Nina, the missing little one and Jillian Berger were there. We found Jillian.” She began to cry, thinking of the torture they suffered. “They burned up.” Joey climbed in to sit with her, and said he was going with his wife.

  “Vivian got out,” Tina said, “and she’s okay. She ran though.”

  “To the bridge?” Janice’s eyes grew heavy.

  “Ummm…yeah she did go that way…yeah.”

  “She’s going to get Charlene and Christy. They’re safe.”

  Tina sighed with the first happy news of the night.

  Two fire trucks rolled in to help put out the barn fire.

  David looked up, “I’m glad she’s safe.”

  “Why? You didn’t care about anyone else?”

  “Some are water, just trickling along, thin, unimportant, and some are blood. I have always cared about blood…my blood. Some are born to your blood, and some are adopted to be blood ties. For better or worse and for some reason we may not yet know, Lucy, Ronnie, and Stan became my blood.”

  This time, Kurt kicked him.

  “You just don’t get it. You have family in the department, and the department itself is a family. You are blood to one another. To me, you’re all water,” said David as he laughed until Kurt kicked him in the mouth and knocked several teeth loose or out.

  “So your great grandfather and grandfather and father and you…back to a long time ago….”

  “1868. One hundred and six years. Blood.”

  Tina kept turning the words over in her mind.

  Ed Brewster and Dan Smith yanked David Gather to his feet and dragged him over to their car. All at once, the night split with the sounds of a 12-gauge shotgun going off four times; that was Brewster’s Ithaca 37 and Smith’s Colt M1911 firing eight times.

  “What the hail?” Kurt asked. One ambulance was rushing away, and another was coming, but neither stopped their business for the gunshots. Tina, Joey, and Kurt ran to the FBI agent’s car. David Gaither was on the ground, dead, and leaking red everywhere.

  “Dan Smith shrugged and said, “He started fighting back and resisting arrest.”

  “He was attempting to escape,” Ed Brewster added.

  “I was in fear for my life as the threat was imminent.”

  “He reached like he had a weapon we might have missed.”

  “You searched him,” Tina said. She felt sick. Ronnie Estell was one thing, but David Gaither had all the answers they needed.

  “Well, he reached, and I felt fully threatened. He...ummm…slipped his cuffs, see, and we were in fear for our lives,” Smith finished.

  “Slipped them, huh?”

  “Well, you cuffed him, and maybe he flexed, they went loose, and then he slipped them,” Brewster suggested.

  “Nu-uh. You are not gonna hang this on me,” Tina said. She slapped Smith across the arm. “Now you better come up with a better story than that one and before Virgil gets back so you can try it on him. You killed someone we needed.”

  “Let me stand here and think on it.

  Tina wanted to shoot the Federal officers.

  The second ambulance took David, after pronouncing the deadest son of a bitch they had seen in a while. The other ambulance attendant claimed that Ronnie Estell was far deader than David, but they debated that.

  “Okay, we’re rolling, Officer Tina; we’ll get them taken care of down at the morgue. The Medical Examiner and Ambulance One should be back soon for those who died in the fire.”

  “Thank, Bernie.”

  Ed took her arm. “We haven’t checked that woman with the pitch fork in her yet, Miss Tina.”

  Tina glowered, “Let’s do that then. She’s dead. It was over, but Vivian sure got her with the pitchfork, huh?”

  “That was something. She was like some Amazon warrior when she did it.”

  “No, I was just really pissed off,” Vivian came up beside them and looked down at Lucy. “I guess she and the other two moved in here with David Gaither, and they decided to hunt together. They kept some of the girls down in the barn basement. That’s where we were.”

  “Why did you run off, and why’re you wet?”

  Vivian sniffed and said, “I was running to catch Christy and Charlene, and when I got to the river, Christy was screaming.” She explained that in the dark, they were confused, and Charlene fell into the water. Without a second’s thought, Vivian jumped in and pulled the little girl from the river.

  “And then Virgil and Nick found you?” Tina asked.

  “Yep. We got back after all the action was finished.”

  “You really got her, didn’t you?” Tina nudged Lucy’s body with a boot.

  “I guess I did. It was for Nina and the rest. I don’t think she would have ever told us much. She was blood. We’re water.”

  “David Gaither said that.”

  “
Yeah. He said a lot of things.” Her hair was wet, and she wore only Virgil’s shirt and her own boots. Nick walked shirtless in the chilly night, carrying Charlene who was wrapped in his shirt. Christy stayed close and refused to let go of Vivian’s good, uninjured hand. They looked at Lucy.

  “I’m glad she’s dead,” Christy said.

  Vivian squeezed her hand.

  Dan and Ed brought thick, woolen blankets from the police cars and wrapped Charlene first and set her in the warm car, and then they wrapped Christy and set her in the back seat with the other two. Vivian had to coax Christy to let go of her hand.

  Virgil held Vivian close. “She’s still scared, and she thinks you are her savior. You did save her, Charlene, and Janice.”

  “Not the rest though. There wasn’t a lot left of them to save, but I wish they had had a chance to try,” said Vivian as she leaned into Virgil, soaking him with her tears as her legs went to jelly. He had to pick her up and carry her to the car.

  “You did it, Boss,” Tina said.

  “No, We did it. But it doesn’t feel done, does it?”

  Tina looked at Lucy again, turning her head sideways. “Nope. It feels like a puzzle that has been put together, but then you look down, and there’s an extra piece. There’s no empty place for it to go, but there it is. Just a left over piece.”

  Chapter Thirteen: Details

  It was a long time before the barn’s remains were cool enough to remove the bodies. Tina Rant told the Bergers that Jillian was found but had died. She sat with them a while, eyes dry now, but compassionately answering as many questions as she could. She fibbed a lot about Jillian’s demise, saying she hadn’t suffered in the barn as she died; it was a lie she could live with since it gave the Bergers a little peace.

  Nina’s parents were spared as well, but her mother committed suicide less than a year later, swallowing rat poison one afternoon when she was alone in her kitchen, thinking and remembering her little girl.

  “Do you think houses can be haunted?”

  “Ghosts?”

  “No, I mean do they keep the evil that resided there?” Virgil asked Vivian and Tina. “The town is taking the Gaither’s land and house. It’s worth a million easily, but they’re almost giving it away because of what happened. It’s cheap, but I can’t afford it.”

  “Oh,” Vivian said. She loved the house. It was beautiful, and whatever happened there was over; it only needed to be cleaned and to have the last of the bad spirits chased away.

  “It’s way too big anyway for a couple, but Nick and Joey are family, and the three of us can afford it. It’s plenty big enough.”

  Vivian threw her arms around Virgil and said, “Yes, yes, I want the house, and yes, I’ll marry you.”

  Tina laughed, and Virgil looked surprised and said, “I haven’t asked you, yet.”

  “Well, life is short, and we might as well get going on living it.”

  A month later, Virgil and Vivian walked into the dream house as husband and wife; Nick walked into the house alone for now, but he would marry in time, and Joey laughingly carried Janice over the threshold. They were family, and they had a home.

  The basement room, hidden behind a sliding shelf and where bones yellowed over years, would never be found. That was for the best.

  “Charlie? Come on, Honey. This is home.”

  Charlene tentatively walked inside. Vivian already had showed her the pretty house, a better place than the barn. She knew where her room was: next to Vivian and Virgil’s room, and it was pretty in violet and blue. She had her own bathroom.

  “Can we have a kitten?”

  Vivian nodded, “Sure.”

  Virgil scooped her up, “Come on, Charlie, let’s decide where we’ll put the cat’s bed.”

  Tobias was no better and was transferred to a hospital close to his parents. They refused to take Charlene in light of the information that came out, saying something about bad blood and blood calling to blood and Gaither-blood.

  Debbie’s parents were dead, and no one would take the child. Virgil and Vivian didn’t think for more than a few seconds before asking to adopt her. “Tobias would want us to do it, and if he were okay and able, he would be raising her; he loves her, no matter what.” Virgil thought Charlene was the greatest eight-year-old in the world, anyway.

  “And the litter box,” Vivian called. She walked into the kitchen, wondering at this beautiful house that was theirs. Well, it wasn’t theirs, exactly. Even though between the brothers, they could afford it, it belonged to Charlene as her birthright. One day, when Charlene was old enough, they would explain it all to her.

  “Where is Charlie? I thought you were looking for a spot for a cat bed?”

  Virgil kissed Vivian, “Her uncle Nick grabbed her and ran off to explore the house again. He’s worse than a kid.”

  “Is this the right thing?”

  “Yes. It is. There are no ghosts, and no matter what, that stopped with David. He was the last male Gaither, and none of the females went bad, remember?”

  “I know.”

  Vivian watched as Virgil ran to join Nick and Charlene in a game of chase through the house. She sat in the cozy den, thinking that she wanted all the furniture moved around and a lot of items tossed away, but most of all, she wanted everything cleaned so they could have a fresh start.

  Everything was fine.

  No ghosts.

  “He went that way,” said Vivian to Charlie as she pointed to where Nick had run. Charlie went running after her new uncle, giggling wildly.

  Vivian sighed, thinking about how things had changed. Every few days, new FBI agents came to speak to Virgil, and although they invited him to Quantico to work, he was willing only to visit and to teach the agents his methods; they were planning a special behavioral section to the FBI soon and were going to use Virgil’s ideas as a basis. He accepted only a few speaking engagements so that he could be home instead of traveling.

  In fact, an FBI agent, turned author, was writing a book about Virgil and his ways of solving the case.

  Janice’s burns were almost healed, and she had only a few scars from her ordeal, her hair was growing back under the scarf she wore, and her scrapes and cuts were gone; she was lucky David Gaither let her out alive. There was only one reason he spared her.

  The night they were shackled in the basement, David told them who Charlene was: his daughter, unclaimed by Debbie. That was why David targeted her family for the brutality.

  After sharing the truth about Charlene, David made Janice weep with humiliation and shame when he told another story, one about a beautiful woman who camped in the area, who had gone into town alone to buy groceries one evening, and who stopped by the local bar for a drink.

  David Gaither said he seldom went to the town’s watering hole, maybe twice a year at the most, but he was there that evening, and by chance, he fell into a conversation with the pretty woman. In an hour, he and the woman were in his truck, parked on a dead end road, naked, and clawing at one another like minks as they had sweaty, rough, passionate sex. He said she was insatiable, having missed this sort of lovemaking for over a year.

  That was Janice. She had done well but slipped and had a terrible indiscretion. Janice had sex with David Gaither, the mass murderer. When she had the baby and if it were a grey-eyed baby, then Vivian would have to decide what to do: tell Virgil or watch the child for signs and wait to see if the child carried the bad blood. If the baby were a boy and showed any signs, Vivian would have to take actions and do what was right for the world.

  It made her faintly ill, but she would keep Janice’s secret.

  But she was strong, strong enough to skewer a woman with a rusty pitchfork.

  Nick, Charlie, and Virgil came huffing and puffing to Vivian, saying they were dying of thirst. Laughing at them, she went into the kitchen again, took three glasses from the cupboard, and filled them at the faucet. It was well water that flowed into the house, ice cold and mineral rich.

  They dr
ained their glasses and asked for more. Joey came in, got a glass, and filled it.

  “Joey has given up sodas since he has been coming over here to work on the house,” Janice said.

  They had used the past week to wash linens and clothing and then put all of the clean laundry and some personal items into plastic bags for their families; other items that were no longer useful were tossed in the rubbish pile.

  The water was low on hard metals, free of iron, neutral in PH levels, and was delicious as a cold drink or for coffee, soups, or anything else culinary. “Let’s get dinner going, and then, Miss Charlie, it’s bath time and bedtime. We have a lot to do tomorrow when the movers get here with our furniture from back home.”

  “Okay, Vivian. Can we have spaghetti? Please?”

  “You bet. It sounds like a good plan,” She said as she ran a big pot of the well water to boil spaghetti.

  Vivian didn’t recall what David had said.

  But he had said, “It’s in my blood. My family. It’s what my family does. There is blood, and then there is the water.”

  Vivian laughed at Joey, “More water? You’re going to pee in the bed.”

  “It’s good. Hey, I want to institute a dinnertime tradition: I think we need a set time, every evening. Six o’clock and not a minute later, okay?”

  “Whatever you want,” Vivian said, kissing Virgil as he walked past, wiping a smudge from a counter.

  As David Gaither said. “Blood. And always the water.”

  Always.

  (Fort Worth 2013)

  Afterwards:

  All of the characters in the book are fictional; however, the author did read endlessly about an abduction and murders in Montana in the early 1970s as well as about the murders of several girl scouts in Oklahoma during the same time period. In the first case, a suspect died before going to trial, and in the second case, a suspect was acquitted, and the case remains unsolved.

  Of Blood and Water is purely fictional and resembles only those cases as far as tents being cut open at night. However, Virgil describes profiling criminals, and approximately in 1974, the FBI started setting up the first Behavioral Analysis Unit for profiling criminals and using learned information to describe possible suspects.