by Kay Hooper
It was a scene of utter carnage.
The normally comfortable and pleasant living room of this nice family home on the outskirts of Prosperity would never be the same again. The Gardner family had consisted of two parents and three children. There were four bodies sprawled around the room, very still, very silent, and very dead.
Blood was everywhere, the acrid, metallic smell of it hanging in the air like smoke.
Ed Gardner, thirty-five, was stretched out on the floor just inside the living room, his head in a large pool of blood, his eyes wide open as if in total shock. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. Three of the fingers on his left hand had been chopped off but left there as if the killer had been interrupted or had just decided it was no fun to chop off body parts if the victim was dead.
Lying closest to her father on one end of a big sectional couch that was unfortunately made of a once light-colored fabric was eleven-year-old Suzy Gardner, the eldest of the three Gardner children. Her eyes were closed, so perhaps she had been rendered unconscious or even dead before the dismembering of her slight body had commenced.
Jesus Christ, I hope she was already dead when that was done. Or out at least. Not aware of what was happening. Drugged, maybe. Or even a blow to the head. Just . . . let it be something like that. Let it be that she was dead before she knew what was being done to her. And who was doing it . . .
But Archer was afraid she had been alive, even if unconscious, because there was a lot of blood soaked into the couch. Blood soaked around her arms, dismembered at the shoulders. Blood soaked around her legs, dismembered at the hips.
Dismembered . . . by a hacksaw. And an axe.
And her limbs lay where they belonged, more or less, as though some demented dollmaker stood ready to sew them back on.
At the other end of the sectional sprawled Bobby Gardner, eight, whose small body had been opened from breastbone to crotch. Blood was everywhere. Too much of what had been inside his body had been pulled out to lie on the couch near him or to . . . dangle . . . toward the floor. And his eyes were open.
Archer turned his horrified gaze with more reluctance than he could have expressed to the fourth and final victim of this slaughter, on the carpeted floor, nearly hidden between the big coffee table and that section of the couch.
Five-year-old Luke Gardner, not yet in school, had probably been the first victim, he guessed, because the blood on his small body appeared closer to being dried than what was on and around the others, and what lay around him on the pale carpet of the living room had dulled and . . . congealed.
His head was horribly misshapen, some number of blows with a heavy object having caved in his skull in several places. His ears had been sliced off. Each of his fingers had been chopped off with an axe and, even more unnervingly, were nowhere to be seen. His feet had been chopped off at the ankles and stood bizarrely upright in blood-soaked bedroom slippers with the floppy ears of a rabbit.
Most bizarrely of all, on the big coffee table lay a wooden kitchen cutting board, blood-soaked and bearing the deep imprints of an axe. It had clearly been slid under the children so that the axe had been able to chop more effectively.
Archer tore his gaze away and half turned to look at the chair closest to the front door. It were where Leslie Gardner had been found, curled up in apparently peaceful sleep, her hands covered in blood, her face spattered, clots of blood matting her blond hair. Her jeans and blouse had been literally soaked with blood and all the instruments and objects she had used to slaughter her family lay on the carpet near the chair in a neat semicircle. A huge kitchen butcher knife. An axe. A hacksaw. The heavy bronze figurine of a woman holding a child.
They were all covered with blood.
It doesn’t make any sense. It just doesn’t . . .
“Jack?”
Katie was informal only rarely while they were working, but just as the morning’s inexplicable suicide had shaken her, this horrifically inexplicable mass murder had also shaken her. Badly.
Archer turned to face his chief deputy, noting that she had come only far enough to address him, clearly trying not to look down at the body of Ed Gardner, which was closest to her since she stood in the doorway to the entrance hall. And looking Archer square in the eye out of the equally clear determination to not allow her gaze to stray to the other horrors.
Not again, at least.
“Any word from the hospital?” he asked, functioning on automatic in a situation he had never been trained to handle, his tone queerly detached.
“Yeah, but no real news. Nothing we didn’t know, nothing we couldn’t see for ourselves. Gabby says Leslie Gardner is still asleep—and the doctors say she is asleep even though they haven’t been able to wake her, not faking, not unconscious or in any way injured—and not drugged.”
Gabby Morgan was Archer’s second most experienced deputy, sent to the hospital with EMS and Leslie Gardner, with orders to stick close, follow procedure as far as she was able, and report everything. And not to leave Leslie’s side for a moment.
“They’re sure she wasn’t drugged?” It had been a vain hope, he’d known it even as he’d hoped, struggling to find something that might make sense in a situation that was madness.
“The doctors are sure. They’re conducting more tests on her blood just in case, tests they don’t usually do in . . . normal situations . . . but so far they haven’t found a single sign that she was acting under the influence of anything at all. Except maybe a psychotic break, which they can’t know until she’s awake and shrinks can talk to her. And even if it was something like that, they say there would have been signs people around her would have noticed. Long before it got so bad that something like this could happen.”
Katie drew a deep breath. “Everything was photographed at the hospital, her clothing removed and bagged for us. Or for whatever technicians or lab we send it to. Gabby’s hanging on to that to preserve the chain of evidence. The doctors and nurses checked Leslie Gardner’s body head to toe; there aren’t even any bruises, or the . . . normal . . . cuts we’d expect where the knife might have slipped, should have slipped when it got slippery with blood. The blood was all . . . theirs. All belonged to her husband and kids. She didn’t have a single wound or cut or even a scratch. I don’t have to be a medical examiner or crime scene tech to know that that’s weird.”
She glanced back over her shoulder, noting that deputies Cody Greene and Matt Spencer, still gray with shock since they had responded to the initial call from a worried neighbor, were standing out on the front porch on the other side of the clear storm door. Neither had ventured any farther into the room than where Katie stood now. They had called the station, horrified and bewildered, and it had been the sheriff and his chief deputy who had discovered Leslie Gardner to be very much alive but weirdly unconscious and summoned paramedics.
Before they’d arrived, Katie had silently taken pictures with her cell phone, focusing on Leslie Gardner and the area around her before she could be moved.
Katie wasn’t even sure why she’d done it. And all she knew now was that she couldn’t keep silent any longer.
“Jack . . . first that apparent suicide that didn’t make sense, that doesn’t make sense this morning, and now this. The youngest boy was probably killed hours ago, maybe before the other kids were up, maybe even while we were three streets over trying to figure out why Sam Bowers would have killed himself.”
“Yeah,” Archer responded, his voice sounding hollow.
“There’s absolutely no sign anyone else was involved in this. Nobody broke in. None of the doors or windows have been forced or damaged in any way. Nothing appears to be missing. Everything upstairs looks like—like a Wednesday morning with kids in the house. Beds unmade. Used towels on the bathroom floor. It’s clear everybody had breakfast, dishes not yet put into the dishwasher. Clear the two older kids had their backpacks ready, their l
unches inside.
“The neighbor who called in said Suzy and Bobby Gardner went out to catch the bus just like usual, like her kids did, but then for some reason came back in here before the bus came. She said it looked like someone had called them, or they’d heard something from inside the house. But they didn’t come back out, and the bus came and went. Then she noticed that Ed Gardner’s car was still here, and she assumed he was going to take the kids to school.”
Archer nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I got that.”
Katie kept her voice even. “But when she looked out again, around lunchtime, his car was still parked out in the driveway. That was odd, she thought, because he never came home for lunch. She tried the house phone and got voice mail. Tried Leslie Gardner’s cell, and it went straight to voice mail. She even called Ed Gardner’s work, and they told her he hadn’t been in and hadn’t called. She knew then something was very wrong over here.”
“Wonder why she didn’t come over,” Archer mused, but absently, as if the question barely touched his mind.
“She was afraid. Word had already gotten out by then about Sam Bowers, and the news was garbled; nobody was sure it was suicide, maybe murder. And she was scared. Too scared to come over here and find . . . horrors. So she called us.”
“Yeah.”
“Jack . . . this is too much for us. None of us has the training or experience to figure all this out.”
“Sam Bowers killed himself,” Archer said. “Leslie Gardner killed her husband and kids. That’s what happened.”
“Maybe. Probably. But Sam Bowers shouldn’t have killed himself. And if Leslie Gardner slaughtered her entire family, why did she just curl up bloody on that chair and go to sleep? And why can’t the doctors wake her up?”
“What are you saying?” he asked slowly.
“I’m saying we need help. Everything that’s happened today was . . . unnatural. Even unreal. Inexplicable. It’s not just a suicide and a multiple murder. It’s not something ordinary cops can figure out. I feel that, and I know you do too, because we’ve both been trained to handle crimes and these . . . these are something different. There’s something else going on here, Jack. I don’t know what it is, but I know the longer it takes us to figure it out, the more people are going to die.”
He blinked, stared at her. Finally saw her. “What?”
Softly, she said, “This isn’t natural. What happened to these people, what happened to Sam Bowers, it’s not natural. Something . . . outside themselves made these things happen, made them do these things. Something stronger than they were. Something dark. Something we can’t see. And it’s still here, in Prosperity. It isn’t finished yet. I can feel that. You have to feel it. Can’t you feel it?”
“All I feel is horror,” he said. “And . . . helplessness. I’ve never felt that before. Not like this.”
“Neither have I.”
He frowned at her. “I think you know more than I do, Katie. Don’t you?”
Katie drew a breath and tried hard to make her voice steady and matter-of-fact. “What I know is that we’re in trouble. What I know is that we need help. Not just crime scene technicians and a medical examiner, though we do need those. We need someone able to figure out what’s going on here. Someone who knows how to deal with . . . unnatural deaths. Unnatural things. Someone who can see what’s happening here.”
His short laugh was a rusty, almost broken sound. He cleared his throat before speaking again. “I just . . . I get the feeling you know more than you’re saying about this.”
Katie shook her head. “What I know is that it’s too much for us. And I think I know who to call. But I need to call now. Before things get even worse. And before this scene, before any of . . . this . . . is disturbed.”
“Call,” Archer said.
THE DARKNESS
It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one’s steps to the upper air—there’s the rub, the task.
—VIRGIL
It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.
—BUDDHA
“‘Come,’ he said, ‘come, we must see and act. Devils or no devils, or all the devils at once, it matters not; we fight him all the same.’”
—BRAM STOKER, DRACULA
SEVEN
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 8
It was a winding road, a two-lane blacktop like so many in the scenic mountains, with very little shoulder but the occasional overlook where tourists could pull safely off the road and look at the view.
Their black SUV was just approaching one such overlook when Hollis said suddenly, “Hey, Reese, pull over up ahead.”
The valley below them was already partially shadowed, the late-afternoon sun beginning to sink behind the western mountains, but DeMarco didn’t hesitate to pull the SUV off the road and onto the wide overlook. No other vehicles were there.
He parked and shut off the engine, looking at his partner. “I can feel it too,” he said.
She looked at him, nodded, then opened her door. “I want to see if it’s visible.”
DeMarco got out as well, following her to the waist-high rock wall that looked natural but had clearly been built to prevent a careless tourist from taking a deadly fall down the mountain while admiring a truly stunning view of a lovely valley far below.
The mountain slopes below the overlook were unusually sheer here for the Appalachians; the very old mountains shouldering up against one another tended to be given more to gentle, rolling hills and rounded peaks blunted by time. For the most part, the only raw, jagged features were due to the activities of man, the blasting of slopes and tunnels to provide for roads.
But what DeMarco saw appeared natural rather than carved by man. And the first thing he noticed when he joined Hollis at the wall and really looked around was that the same thing appeared to be true all around the big valley sprawling below them. None of the mountains he could see almost completely enclosing the valley ended near the valley floor in gentle undulations, tumbles of grass, or tree-covered hills, as was usual.
As much as he could see of the valley, wherever the mountains met the flatland, there were what looked like granite cliffs, sheer and towering.
DeMarco was about to comment on the weirdness of that when his easy connection with Hollis told him she was seeing or sensing something even weirder. He looked at her, recognizing the narrow-eyed, intense gaze of utter concentration as her striking blue eyes roamed slowly over the valley.
Even so, almost absently, she said, “I wonder if one day we’ll go into a case and not find yet another very strange and new thing almost right off the bat.”
“From the sound of what Bishop got from the sheriff and his deputy down there, we’ll be seeing plenty of strange. Plenty of crazy.”
“Uh-huh.” She turned her head and frowned at him. “You see anything strange?”
“Other than sheer cliffs rising above as much of the valley floor as I can see from here, no. What do you see?”
Her brows lifted slightly in question. “There weren’t any bad things on the island for us to use in practicing, so no way to know if it’ll still work with something I think is very bad. You game?”
“Of course,” he replied without hesitating.
Hollis smiled, then reached for his hand, their fingers twining instantly, and returned her gaze to the valley below. “Look again. You see what I see now?”
It took a moment during which his vision seemed to waver just a bit, but only that long before DeMarco did see what she saw.
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. I’m thinking that’s in no way natural.”
The entire valley appeared to be almost encased in a kind of . . . dome. Even though it was not close and they
were still well above it, he could see it was high and curved, and that it . . . flashed here and there faintly, close on the underside of the dome-like shape, tiny sparks from this distance but what could easily have been like shimmering patterns of lightning lacing across the sky and hissing high above the town. High above the whole valley.
“Like an aura,” he said slowly, frowning. “Is it?”
“Damned if I know. Never seen one cover an entire town, much less an entire valley. The only thing I’m sure of is that it’s energy. A hell of a lot of energy.”
“Positive or negative?”
“If I had to guess,” she replied slowly, frowning, “and I do, I’d say it’s both.”
“Why does that sound bad?” DeMarco wondered, just as slowly.
“I dunno, but it does, doesn’t it? At least more . . . worrying, somehow. Maybe because dark energy is easier to sense, and almost always drives or enhances negative acts. An absolute. Something we’ve faced and fought before.”
“What about the positive energy?”
“If it’s had any reaction at all it’s helped most of us, usually. But . . . if positive and negative energy is caught down there, trapped together, I have no idea what effect it’s having on the people in the town, in the valley. Or what effect it’ll have on us. If what’s happened down there today is because of the energy, then it really is unlike anything we’ve ever faced before.”
“Hence the summons?”
“I’d guess yes. Though not knowing what actually did the summoning is still bothering me.”
“And me.” DeMarco stared at what Hollis’s abilities were showing him a bit longer, his gaze roving, then said, “Am I wrong, or is the outer edge of it more sharp and delineated than a normal aura? Almost like an actual dome made of glass or something.”
“You’re not wrong. It really does look like a glass dome. Like it’s holding the energy in, trapping it. Maybe just that, to keep it here. To keep it more contained. To keep it more powerful, more focused.” She shook her head. “I’ve only seen something similar with the auras of psychics who were fighting off attacking energy. And in those cases, I could see the energy battering at their shields. I don’t see anything outside this . . . dome. Just the energy inside it.”