Rough Country: A gripping crime thriller

by T. J. Brearton

  “Original sin,” he said.

  “But caused by a virus, I guess.”

  “Does it say where the virus is supposed to come from?”

  “I haven’t seen that yet.”

  Reed asked, “Are we looking for a killer who thinks he’s doing the work of God? Ridding people of selfishness? Or one killer who thought that, then a copycat?”

  She was quiet, maybe letting him think about it. Maybe allowing him to catch up with where she was. Or where his gut was, and had been, since Daryl Snow’s suicide. To think about monsters, lurking in the depths. The subconscious things made manifest.

  But the funny thing about intuition – you couldn’t let it lead. Otherwise, you wound up seeking evidence to fit your bias. Better to follow the evidence objectively.

  And if the evidence brought you back around to your intuition, so be it.

  What would you have done differently?

  Reed?

  The desire of the flesh…

  He asked her, “So how did you find this out?”

  “The symbol shows up in a couple of different places. Native American folklore, but also some New Age stuff. I plan to keep digging. But here’s the thing – this is the internet age. People grab onto anything they want. Someone could have co-opted this for their own purposes.”

  “What you’re saying is…”

  “The symbol shows up in Iroquois folklore. You’re the investigator, but my gut is, this stuff has nothing to do with them.”

  “How about this,” he said. “What does the stuff on the wetiko thing have to say about sex? Anything?”

  “Well, maybe nothing. But it could, if you bent it a little. Part of the idea is that wetiko causes humans to desire to have power over another.”

  “So maybe domination… Submission…”

  “I don’t know, exactly. There are some books on this, a few lectures. Like I said, I’ll keep digging – but you want me up there, right? I have to get ready.”

  “Right,” he said. “Sorry.”

  A killer in 1998 and a copycat killer now. Maybe. Or bigger than that. More people…

  “One last question – does it relate to mushrooms in any way? Psilocybin?”

  “I saw one lecture where the speaker talked about those types of powerful drugs sometimes used in cleansing ceremonies.”

  “Cleansing ceremonies…” He jotted it down. “All right. I’m headed to Hume.”

  “Good luck.”

  14

  countryside

  Reed first made a call to the Warren County Sheriff’s Office. It was customary, when going into another jurisdiction, to notify the local cop shop and get the chief’s blessing, so to speak. After getting that, he drove down a hill into the hamlet and made a right turn at the crossroads.

  “Possible signs of Satanism,” Inside Edition had opined of the 1998 murder.

  Reed thought about it and watched the small colonial-style houses going past. Were they homes to dark rituals? Séances and necromancy?

  He knew better. If you wanted to understand Satanists, you only had to imagine people who never got over Halloween. They didn’t typically organize into functioning cults, but liked to dress up and strive for a little shock value. Watch me put this live bat into my mouth!

  He stopped at a tiny grocery store for some gum, then resumed.

  But that didn’t mean there weren’t some organized people out there with fucked-up ideas. They were everywhere, really.

  He watched the scenery: A long lake slipped past, still and silver; across from it, the houses looked new and unoccupied. Beyond the “town,” houses grew old and weathered; then he was in the countryside again, big pastures bordered by lines of maple trees with large rolls of hay resembling giant toasted marshmallows. He slowed in front of the Hollander place.

  Quite a spread. Four Quonset-style greenhouses made of plastic sheets, a couple of horses and heifers enclosed in a fence near a small brown barn. The main house was white with black shutters and a wraparound porch. A dog was tethered to a porch post. It barked at him as it strained against the leash, flashing teeth.

  A man came out, white-haired and pushing seventy, and yelled at the dog. He took the animal off the leash and said, “Get in there – git!” and sent the dog scampering inside. Dressed in overalls and a dingy T-shirt, the man dusted off his hands and stepped from the porch onto the dirt driveway.

  As he headed toward Reed: “Help you?”

  Reed moved around to the front of the van and stayed there as he introduced himself. “We spoke on the phone about an hour ago?”

  The man stopped a few yards away, sizing him up. “That was you?”

  “Yes, sir. Thanks for making the time, Mr. Hollander. Would you like to talk here, or maybe on the porch?”

  Hollander glanced back at the house. The dog’s barks were muffled but constant. “Ah. If we sit up there, then Sadie won’t quit. Maybe we just talk here… this going to take long?”

  “It shouldn’t,” Reed said. He leaned against the van and put his hands in his pockets.

  Hollander stayed where he was, then checked the sky. “S’posed to rain by noon,” he said. “Which is fine by me – we need it. But I gotta get some more seeds in the ground before that happens.”

  “You got a nice place here,” Reed said, looking past the mounds of junk and broken-down equipment to the greenhouses and small cornfield beyond. Seeing it for the farming potential.

  Hollander shrugged. “It’s a living, I suppose. So…”

  “So, your daughter…”

  “Melanie. Grew up here, with her brothers and sisters. She was the one right in the middle. She was sixteen when they found her. A life cut short.” He spoke with the brevity of a man who’d grown accustomed to the tragedy.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Reed said. “You’ve probably heard about what’s happened up in Elliston?”

  “Oh yeah. Course. Been all over the papers and the news…” Hollander got squinty-eyed with suspicion. “You sure you’re a cop?”

  “You mean my Devil-may-care grooming?”

  Hollander just blinked, like he didn’t get it or wasn’t the humorous type.

  Reed pulled out his badge. Hollander looked from a distance but appeared satisfied. Then he asked, “You relating the two? What happened in Elliston with Melanie’s murder? I saw the press conference. I saw that image. That same thing was carved into my Melanie.”

  Reed took out his gum, offered some to Hollander, who waved no thanks. Reed loaded a piece into his mouth. “Any chance you know what it means?”

  “No. Never did. Police had no idea.” Hollander took a couple of steps closer. “Do you?”

  “I can’t answer that right now. But what I’d hope is to get some answers from you about Melanie. Was she involved in anything? A group or organization outside of school?”

  Hollander straightened his back a little, as if with pride. “Melanie was very popular. So much so we had kids over here all the time – everyone wanted to be her friend. It got so I couldn’t tell which one was mine and which one was someone else’s.”

  “Anything strange going on? Anything you noticed? Any concerns?”

  “Not that I can think of. She was a normal girl. Beautiful. Very beautiful.”

  “Did she seem down, morose, distant or anything like that?”

  Hollander’s white eyebrows pushed upward. “Teenage girl? In a house of eight people, growing up here in the boonies? Was she bored or lonely? She had boys fawning all over her, of that I’m sure.”

  “But she didn’t have a steady boyfriend. From what I understand, the police never had a primary suspect. Or suspects.”

  “Back then, that was Jerry Swain – the sheriff, I mean. County police handled it, if I’m remembering. He’s dead and so is, ah, the detective there, the one who come round a few times. Gilchrist. But no, like you say, no boyfriend. No prime suspect.”

  Reed said, “They interviewed a lot of people, they ran tests on a few.
Despite her sexual assault, they weren’t able to collect much in the way of evidence. And what they had, what DNA they were able to get, didn’t have a match. They interviewed a lot of students, people both in the system and not in the system. Everyone seemed to have an alibi.”

  Hollander was nodding along, remembering.

  “Did she date, though?”

  “I don’t know if you’d call it dating. Melanie went out with her friends, sometimes there’d be boys around, I suppose. But never anyone come to the house to pick her up. They didn’t really do things like that. In my day, you courted. In Melanie’s day, it was different.” Hollander sniffed, then plunged his hands into his pockets. “Anyway.”

  “Her case got a lot of attention,” Reed said.

  “That it did. That it did.”

  Sensing it coming, Reed let the man talk.

  Hollander said, “We’ve had every kind of reporter and TV person out here, asking questions. They even did a show, what was it, the one there… Inside Edition. But that was way back then. People lost interest soon after that, stopped coming by. Thing about Melanie, she was beautiful, like I say. Blonde hair, big blue eyes… but she was poor. Like this.” He took a hand out and swept it through the air to indicate his lot in life. “She wasn’t rich or fancy, so they lost interest pretty quick. The only reason they were nosing around in the first place was because of that mark they gave her. The one they carved into her. Branded her like cattle. So I figure that’s why you’re here – that’s the big similarity.”

  “It’s definitely one of them.”

  Hollander considered it. “Maybe it was somebody who seen that episode of Inside Edition. They showed the mark in that show. The actual picture of her body. Well, it was very close-up – you didn’t know it was her backside – but we tried to sue them anyway. Problem was, I hadn’t read the fine print. They paid us, and I had signed something – didn’t realize I’d signed the release for her autopsy pictures.” He pronounced it pitchers.

  “Yeah, they’re pretty ruthless,” Reed said.

  “But you’re thinking about that? About a copycat?”

  “We haven’t ruled anything out.”

  Hollander nodded, then turned his head, looking off into the distance. “Only that show aired – what? More than twenty years ago? Long time for someone to go around with a copycat idea and not act on it.”

  Hollander didn’t know about the website, then. Probably for the best.

  Reed prompted him. “I’m wondering which is more likely, to have been involved in the first murder, or to have just seen the show and copycatted it?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Then there’s the geographic proximity – Hume and Elliston are just under fifty miles apart.”

  “Which means what?” Hollander asked. He showed a touch of defensiveness.

  “Could suggest it’s someone who lives around here. Otherwise it’s coincidence. And for two people who have no connection to each other…”

  “You’re saying it’s a bit too much for two different people to both be that low,” Hollander said.

  “Well, now that you mention it, I’d like to give you some names and you tell me if they mean anything to you. See if maybe there’s a connection between down here and up there, so to speak. Because as the saying goes, there are no coincidences in criminal law.”

  The dog stopped barking. Hollander gave the porch a glance, then scratched the back of his neck. “You want to give me names?”

  “Yeah. Just run a few by you.”

  Hollander looked increasingly uncomfortable. “Hope we could make it fairly quick.”

  “I’ll be quick as I can be,” Reed said. “Okay, how about the Mosier family?”

  “Mosier? Can’t say I heard of them.”

  “They have a funeral home in Elliston.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “The Stevenses you’ve probably heard of now because of the name of the victim.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How about the Hetfields?”

  “No, sir.”

  “The Wheelers?”

  Hollander twitched at the mention of the Wheelers. “The boy who burned the house down…”

  “Yes. Right.”

  Then he said, “Don’t really know them.”

  “But you know them a little?”

  “I just mean that they’re involved in this thing up in Elliston…”

  Hmm. “How about your own family, sir? You go back a long ways?”

  Hollander smiled. The way his skin folded down over the tops of his eyes a bit, it made their shine that much more interesting. Reed got a weird feeling – he’d have to think on it further, later – that Roy Hollander was more intelligent than he let on to people, cleverer than his aw-shucks dialect conveyed.

  “Oh yeah,” Hollander said. “My family go back to before the damn Revolutionary War. All the way to the Mayflower. Dutch. My triple great-grandfather – or maybe it’s quadruple great – fought at Fort Ticonderoga, not fifteen miles from here. Now I got my own acres here to see to and a wife who has the dementia and no kids around to help – they’re all off, scattered to the winds. I hire a little help for the sowing and the harvest if I need it, and sometimes a guy come from Speculator to shoe the horses. That’s it.”

  “I know it’s impolite and I’m sorry, but I have to ask – what’s your religion?”

  Hollander got another peculiar look, then took out the handkerchief and wiped his nose, keeping his eyes on Reed the whole time. “I’m sure you got all this – all this on my daughter, on my family – in a big file that’s stacked with statements and depositions and medical reports. Am I right?”

  “There’s a file, yes, sir.”

  “You came down here to check me out. And that’s all right. But I’m not going to sit here and discuss my faith, young man, if that’s what you’re hunting for. I’m no Satanist, I will say that. You ought to maybe take a look in your own mirror – what happened to traditional values? You don’t need to look no further than the decadence of the world to find out what happened to these young girls.”

  Hollander didn’t move for a moment, as if waiting for a challenge, then turned again and started for the house. Reed thought to call after him, but the curve of the man’s back, the hunch to him as he walked a slow cowboy walk and wiped his nose again, something told him to let it be. For today. Let it be and return if needed.

  Reed got back in the van and watched until Roy Hollander went in the front door. Then he took out his phone to call Kruse, but there was no signal.

  Damn. Even with their own state police satellites to keep near constant coverage, this place was too off the beaten bath.

  A little world unto itself.

  Roy Hollander closed the door behind him, and Lois yelled from the kitchen, “What did he want?”

  “I told you what he wanted when he called up,” Roy yelled back. He checked his boots for clods of dirt and decided it’d been too dusty out there to worry about tracking in the house. They needed rain.

  He moved into the kitchen, slow because of his knees. Lois was at the table with a coffee mug in both hands. She drank the stuff until afternoon. If he had one sip past ten o’clock in the morning, he’d be up all night.

  “Well, I know you told me,” she said, her voice lower now that he was in the room. “But what did he say?”

  Roy got a glass down from the cupboard and went to the tap. “You want to know what the man wanted, that’s what you said. You didn’t ask what he said.”

  “Now… you’re telling me they ain’t the same thing?”

  He flipped on the faucet and filled the glass, then drank it all in one go, feeling the muscles in his neck and throat. Dry as a stick out there. He put down the empty glass and took a breath, keeping his side turned to his wife as he looked out the window to the driveway, the road, the grass getting high in the lot on the other side despite the lack of rain. “He asked me questions about people up in Elliston. If I knew an
ybody.”

  “And?”

  “I said no.”

  “He say anything about Zach?”

  Hollander turned to face her. She was wearing her Walt Disney World T-shirt, the one with Mickey Mouse. Her thin gray hair curled around her ears, just neck length. The mole at the outside corner of her left eye seemed darker, thicker. He told her, “I didn’t say nothing about that.”

  “I asked if he asked,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Not about Freedom Mission? Nothing.”

  “He did not.”

  She looked back at him, and the darkness collected in her eyes, enough that he had to turn away from it. But when she spoke a few seconds later, her voice was smooth as milk. “Well, all right then. No need to get all up in your britches. They ain’t going to find anything. They never do.”

  “Right,” he said.

  But he’d looked at the young fella – he’d looked into his eyes. That one might not quit.

  Lois suddenly laughed. She had a smoker’s cackle even though she’d never smoked. Just prone to bronchial problems was what she told people, ever since she was a girl and had pneumonia that almost killed her. Left her with her trademark scratchy voice, like grit blown against hard wood.

  “What?” he asked her.

  Her laughter tapered to a chuckle and she mumbled to herself.

  Roy waved a hand – it didn’t matter. He rinsed the glass and put it in the strainer beside the sink, lest he catch hell for it. Then: “He did ask about religion, though. In general.”

  Lois grew quiet, thinking. “And?”

  “I told him I’m a man who works this land and takes care of his lot in life. People don’t know what it’s like, six kids, all this property to handle.”

  When he dared look at his wife after this little bout of whining and complaining, he was surprised to see how soft she was, how her eyebrows knitted together, and her lips stuck out a little. “Well, I know that, Roy. Everybody knows that. And you do have a lot.” She took a sip of her coffee.

  He wanted out of the kitchen. Away from her. Sun on his face, dirt in his hands.