Blood Angel

by Bernard Schaffer

  He tried the front door. The doorknob turned in his hand and the door came open.

  Kenderdine pushed it inward a few inches. “Police department. Anyone home?”

  He saw a dress folded along the back of a dining room chair. He saw her shoes kicked off behind the door. He saw the post office bin on the kitchen counter. Her purse and keys were set down nearby. He kept calling out to her, and announcing his presence, as he made his way deeper into the house.

  It was important to make a lot of noise in those situations.

  The last thing he wanted to do was sneak around some woman’s house as she came strolling down the hallway buck-ass naked. Or worse, for her to hear someone in her house and not know it’s a cop trying to check on her, so she grabs a gun and comes out shooting. “Police department!” he said.

  He made his way up the stairs to the second floor. He stopped on the landing and listened. No shower was running. No hair dryer. “Doctor? Are you home?”

  There was a bathroom and two bedrooms upstairs. One bedroom door was open and the other was shut. He looked in the first room. It had been converted into a home office. Books and a computer and large desk. Framed diplomas and awards all over the walls. Nobody in there.

  He went to the second door, the closed one, to the large master bedroom, and knocked. He called out her name and then he opened the door.

  “County radio to Sgt. Kenderdine, checking your status?” the radio mic squawked.

  After a few minutes with no response, they called him again. “Status check, Sarge. You ten-four?”

  In the days to come, Kenderdine wouldn’t remember them calling him over the radio. Not the first time, or the second. He wouldn’t remember responding. Someone eventually played the recording of his transmission from the house that day and he didn’t recognize the man’s voice on the police radio. It was too high-pitched. Unintelligible. All the man in the recording was doing was screaming.

  * * *

  Harv Bender had sweated through his suit coat. Dark black stains were splattered across his back. His pale blue shirt’s collar was translucent from sweat. Carrie could see the length of his dark tie wrapped around his neck below it. There were cops at the front door, and they weren’t moving. They weren’t even saying anything. That never happens, Carrie thought.

  No matter how bad a job was, someone was always making a joke to help everyone else get through it. These guys just stood there now, staring at the house.

  Sal Vigoda reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a tin of thin cigars. He cracked it open and asked, “Does it stink in there?”

  “No,” Bender mumbled. “I don’t think so. I didn’t notice.”

  “Better to be safe than sorry.” Sal snapped one of the cigars in half and stuffed the broken ends up his nostrils. He sniffed a few times and loose tobacco flew out of his nose.

  Carrie scowled in disgust. “What are you doing?”

  “What? You never heard of this? It’s an old detective trick.” He pushed the cigar end even farther into his nose, until it was almost hidden. “Some guys used to put Vicks VapoRub under their noses thinking it would block the smell of a dead body. All that does is open your sinuses up more to it. This is the only thing that works.” He pulled another cigar out and held it out toward her. “Here, you try.”

  “I’ll pass,” Carrie said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  “What are we doing about Tucker Pennington, Chief?” Carrie asked.

  Bender’s eyes were glazed. “When I got the call, I sent two guys over there to sit on him until we figure this out.”

  “Good call,” Carrie said.

  Bender wiped sweat from his face with the palm of his hand. “I want you two in there before the crime scene unit and coroner go in. We’ll send everyone in separate to get different perspectives on this. Jesus H. Christ, I’m sweating. I need some water. Okay? You both okay?”

  “We’re okay, boss,” Carrie said.

  “All right. I’ll get you some water for when you come out. There’s a bathroom up there. Directly behind you when you’re looking at it.”

  They watched Bender walk back toward the row of police cars parked on the street. There were local cars from different jurisdictions who’d come to assist. Even a state trooper had responded. Yellow tape was strung at Linda Shelley’s property lines, from corner to corner, and a line of uniformed cops prevented anyone from approaching too closely.

  “All the time I knew Harv Bender, I never seen him like this,” Sal said. “It must be pretty bad in there.”

  Carrie stopped at the entrance, inspecting the front door. “You see that?”

  “What, the paint?”

  “That’s not paint,” Carrie said. “It’s the sign of the lamb. From Passover.”

  “What, this Dr. Shelley chick was Jewish?”

  Carrie got close to the smears to inspect them. “It’s from the Old Testament, when God told the Jews to paint their doors with lamb’s blood. Above the threshold and on either side so they’d be spared the slaughter.”

  “Apparently God didn’t get the message this time,” Sal said.

  The officer standing nearest the door passed them both a pair of black gloves. Carrie and Sal slid them on and Sal stopped to adjust the cigar pieces stuffed in his nose to make sure they wouldn’t fall out. Carrie opened the door and went inside. She inspected the lock and the door frame and metal piece that houses the bolt and the keyhole itself. No toolmarks or damage whatsoever. Whoever had done this had not needed to force their way in.

  The letter from The Master was on the kitchen counter, where Bender had said it was. She glanced at it before she headed toward the staircase.

  She went up the steps. Her eyes were fixed on the bedroom door. It was open.

  Black spray paint covered the walls. Upside down pentagrams and crosses and the numbers 666. Intricate symbols she did not understand. On the wall to her left was written, The Master Summons the Beast. On the wall above the bed were the words, Behold, A Blood Angel.

  Sal was directly behind her as they approached the room. She heard him cough and turned in time so see him grab his mouth with both hands. Chunks of wet cigar spilled out in pieces from his nose, splattering his fingers, and he clenched his eyes shut. He gagged and whirled away from the door, diving for the bathroom behind them.

  Carrie’s eyes were wide. It was something that could not be seen all at once, and yet could not ever be unseen. She stared in wonder at it. It was stunning in its horror.

  Linda Shelley was kneeling in the center of her bed, turned away from them. Both of her arms were tied to the knobs of the headboard in front of her, keeping her upper torso suspended and upright.

  The center of Linda Shelley’s back was split open, from the nape of her neck to the tip of her waist. Her backbone was bare and denuded of any connecting bones, left to be nothing but a pale white column of exposed, knotted, bone.

  Each of her ribs had been pried out of her spine by some tool. A knife or a screwdriver. Carrie could hear the horrific popping noise each rib would make as it was ripped free. Would Linda have heard it too? How much of this had she been alive to endure?

  One by one, Linda’s ribs had been wrenched backward over her sides, prying her open.

  Her lungs were pulled out through the open wound and left to dangle against her lower back. Two useless sacks, shriveled and depleted.

  Linda’s back was now nothing but an empty cavity, surrounded by a gaping maw of bone. A hideous wide-open mouth formed by her own ribs.

  Sal Vigoda was retching in the bathroom behind her. The sound and smell of it was enough to make the acids in her own stomach swirl and threaten to burst up through her throat.

  Behold, A Blood Angel.

  My God, Carrie thought. He’s given her wings.

  11

  The toilet across the hall from the bedroom flushed. Carrie leaned against the doorway. “Sal? You okay, buddy?”

  She heard him run the sink faucet an
d spit and wash his hands. He came out of the bathroom wiping his mouth. “I’m fine. I’m sorry about that.”

  “No problem. Listen, somebody was calling for you downstairs. They need you outside for something.”

  “Did they say what?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  His face turned hangdog. She was lying and he knew it. He looked past her into the room. “I’m supposed to be in there with you.”

  “I’m good for now,” Carrie said.

  There were dark circles under his eyes that hung heavy and low. “I’ll come back to check on you.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Carrie went back in the room. It would be easier to work by herself anyway. She stayed near the door, as far back from the bed as she could, and looked around the entire room like she was seeing it for the first time. Trying to find any details she had missed.

  It was daylight outside, but the bedroom’s curtains were thick. No one had turned the lights on, for fear of disturbing any trace evidence. Carrie reached in her coat for her flashlight and turned it on, aiming the beam directly into the cavity of Linda Shelley’s back.

  There were tool marks etched into Linda’s spine. Scrapes and divots in the bone where he’d pried the ribs loose. They could take impressions of those marks and the state police lab would be able to match those impressions to the knife or screwdriver or whatever else Tucker had used, once they found it.

  As she looked, she saw light reflecting off the headboard in front of Linda’s body and stopped. She moved the flashlight to either side of the large wound and realized it was shining through the injury itself. Christ, he cut her open all the way through to the other side, she thought.

  Carrie went around the side of the bed and bent forward with her flashlight. There, in the center of Linda’s chest, just beneath her breastbone, was a deep stab wound, with a puddle of thick coagulated blood pooled on the bed between Linda’s knees. It had soaked through the mattress and box spring and gone through to the floor.

  Carrie ran her flashlight around Linda’s back and saw very little blood leaking down from the wound there. She ran the flashlight across Linda’s shoulders and outstretched arms, seeing purplish bruising on her flesh. She went back around Linda’s front and inspected her breasts and belly and the underside of her arms and saw no discoloration there at all.

  Blood settles to the lowest point in the human body at the moment of death. Sometimes it can’t been seen for a few hours, but it always does, and it’s always true. If Linda had died sitting up, bent facedown over her lap, there would be no lividity on her back.

  Linda’s eyes were closed. Her mouth was open and had filled with the spongy foam or whatever her body had coughed up from her throat at the moment she died. Some of it had come up through her nose as well, but her eyes were closed.

  Son of a bitch, Carrie thought. He stabbed her through the chest while she was asleep. He posed her and did all this shit afterward. So how did he get in the house?

  She looked around the rest of the bedroom. It was cleaner that her own bedroom, that was certain. There was no dust on the dresser. No hairbrushes with ridiculous amounts of loose hair bedded down in its bristles. No empty water bottles on the nightstand.

  All she saw was a tall mirror on one side of the room and an open closet door on the other.

  The closet looked immaculate. Perfectly organized. There was a section for work clothes, a section for dresses, and a section for everything else. The shelves above the closet were stacked with boxes. There was a two-tiered rack along the bottom of the closet with all of Linda’s shoes. Carrie poked her head in and looked to see how far the closet went, when she realized everything on the far side of it was in disarray. Shoes had been knocked over. Dresses had been pulled down from their hangers. Two of the boxes on the shelf overhead had been moved aside and out of the way, allowing someone to stand upright in that corner without touching them.

  From that position, Carrie turned and looked at the rest of the room. She shut the closet door and saw that one of the horizontal slats in the door’s surface had been moved, ever so slightly, out of place.

  Carrie backed up alongside the closet to where it ended and bent down to the level of where the slat was moved and she realized that the killer had been watching Linda from inside her own bedroom the entire time. He’d been able to use the mirror along the far wall to see everything. There was no sign of forced entry, because the killer was already there.

  She moved around the rest of the room, focusing on the details. Horror and shock were weapons used by the killer. He wanted anyone who saw what he’d done to be overwhelmed by his evil. It had worked, in some ways. But not on her, she thought. She would not allow it to.

  Carrie inspected the strange symbols painted on the wall.

  The first was two intersecting triangles, set at inverted angles. One faced down and the other faced up, so that all the points formed into a type of hexagram. In the center, the killer had painted some kind of flower.

  The second symbol was a large circle surrounding a triangle. Within the triangle was a lowercase h. Groups of dots were sprayed on either side of the h. It looked like there were supposed to be three in each group, but the paint had run and they’d bled together and Carrie could not accurately count them.

  The last symbol was larger than the others. It was the most demonic thing Carrie had ever seen. A goat’s head, drawn on top of an inverted pentagram. The letters T-O-L were written across the top of the symbol.

  She knew each symbol had been laid there with purpose. Linda’s body had been desecrated in that specific way with purpose. All of it formed arrows pointing toward the killer’s unique methodology, but Carrie was helpless to understand what they were.

  She needed help. And she knew who to ask.

  * * *

  “No,” Harv Bender said. “Absolutely not.”

  Sal Vigoda was sitting under an apple tree in the front yard, pressed up against it with his back. His suit coat was off, despite the chill weather. His elbows were propped against his knees, and his head was resting on it.

  “I need him in there, boss. There’s nobody else,” Carrie said.

  “I assigned Sal to work it with you.”

  Sal raised his head at the sound of his name. “What’s that, Chief ?”

  “How come you aren’t up in the room with Detective Santero?”

  “I quit,” Sal said.

  “When did you quit?”

  “Right now. The second I saw that. I don’t need to see that. I quit. I’m going home.”

  “Shut up, you idiot. You’re not allowed to quit and you’re not going home,” Bender said. “You have five minutes to get yourself together and get back in there.”

  Sal lowered his head again.

  “He’ll be fine in five minutes,” Bender said.

  Carrie folded her arms across her chest and swung her foot against the grass, swiping it back and forth. “I just hate to think what happens when Quantico gets wind of this,” Carrie said.

  Bender raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

  Carrie cocked her head at the state trooper standing near the crime scene tape, keeping people away. He was drinking a coffee and talking to the other cops. “You know the state troopers work with the Feds all the time,” she said, keeping her voice low. “The Feds will wet their pants when they hear what we’ve got. Pretty soon, the entire Behavioral Sciences Unit will show up here and turn this into the Famous But Ineffective freakshow. We’ll have occultists and profilers falling out of our asses. Hell, you’ll be lucky if they even let you stand next to them at the press conference.”

  “They can’t do that,” Bender said. “This is my case.”

  “Not after they get involved,” Carrie said. “I’ve met those guys and they do not share credit. That’s why I think it makes sense for you to bring in someone local. Someone who has experience with highly-stylized, ritual homicides.”

  “I’m not rehiring him as a cou
nty detective. Not over my dead body.”

  “I’m not asking you to do that. Use him as a consultant. His name won’t even be on any of my paperwork. We keep this in-house, right where we can control it. It’s that, or we wait for the black helicopters to show up.”

  Bender squeezed the sides of his cheeks and puffed out his lips while he thought. When he pulled it away, he said, “Listen to me, real, real, clear. He touches nothing. He tells no one that he was ever here. He goes in, he sees what he needs to see, gives you his opinion, and he leaves. You are responsible for him. Anything crazy he does. Any trouble he gets into. It’s all on you. Understood?”

  “Understood,” Carrie said. She looked around the front yard, seeing nothing but trees and cops and curious neighbors. She turned to look up and down the street, then just stood there, frowning.

  “Well?” Bender said. “Aren’t you going to call him or something?”

  “That’s the thing. He doesn’t have a phone. I kind of thought he’d show up here on his own.”

  Bender turned and looked up and down the street. He caught himself and said, “This is ridiculous. I’m sending the crime scene people in there now so they can get started. If you’re not back in there with Rein before they get finished, I’m letting the coroner’s office take that poor woman to the morgue.”

  “I’ll go pick him up, boss,” Carrie said. “He has to be around here somewhere.”

  * * *

  There was an unmarked police car sitting on the street in front of Tucker Pennington’s parents’ estate. The Pennington house sat a hundred yards back from the road, surrounded by rolling hills of lush green grass. There was a fountain in the center of the driveway in front of the house, and it spurted water twenty feet into the air.

  The nearest houses on either side were half a mile away, and there was nothing across the street but dense woods.

  Carrie pulled up alongside the unmarked car. “Anything?”