Eleven Days (24 page)

The office called right at 14:00 and woke me. I had intended to talk to Helen Bockman about 15:00, but decided to let it wait till later, and went back to bed.

I got up on my own at 16:15. Put on some coffee, let good old Fred out, and called the Bockmans’. No answer. Good. I wasn’t awake yet, anyway.

The first cup didn’t seem to do the trick. I was about halfway through the second, and on my fourth cigarette, when I heard Fred barking in the yard. I went out to let him in and discovered Lamar petting him.

“Hey, how’re things?”

“Pretty good.” He stood up, with Fred jumping for his hand.

“Knock it off, Fred!” I grabbed him and scooped him in the house. “You want a cup of coffee?”

“Sure.”

“What’s up?”

“I thought I’d stop by and let you know it looks like we found the baby.”

“You did?”

“Yep. The McGuire house. Fire marshall found it. In the mess, in the basement.”

That figured, somehow. Finding it in the basement. Nobody was looking for a small body when we did the scene. I remembered the basement. It really wasn’t very big, but it was pretty much unfinished, with more clutter than you could believe, including garbage bags full of old feed sacks, paint cans, fertilizer bags … and then, of course, all the debris from the house would have collapsed into it during the fire.

“Well, now we have the body.”

“Yeah. At least I think we do.”

“What condition was it in?”

“Not too bad, really. It’s been cooked pretty well by the fire, but the debris from the upper floors kept it from being burned too bad. Didn’t have a head, though. Saperstein thinks maybe somebody kept it.”

“God.”

“Theo’s on the way to Des Moines with the remains, takin’ ’em to the state medical examiner. Now all we got to do is find this Rachel and then find out who killed everybody.”

“Still just about at square one, aren’t we?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, Traer knows who did it, I think. All we got to do is squeeze him hard enough.”

“I hope so,” said Lamar. “But I got a feeling that he’s gonna be able to bond out pretty soon.”

“No kidding?”

“Yeah, he’s been making phone calls all day. Bond is
five hundred thousand, but I think he can make it. He’s been talking to somebody in real estate in Cedar Rapids … says he’s willing to sell the house.”

“Speaking of his house, how did Hal and Hester make out?”

“Okay, I guess. They say that they’ll be back here after supper sometime.”

“How about the other arrests?”

“Pretty good so far. Got everybody but this Vernon woman, and they think she’ll be home today or Monday.”

I poured him a second cup of coffee.

“Media’s been all over my ass today,” he said. “They want to know everything. They asked to speak to the folks in jail, and I told them they have to wait till regular visiting hours.”

“That’s this afternoon, isn’t it?”

“It was, but I was out of the office. So was everybody else.” He grinned.

“Isn’t that a little dangerous?”

“Yeah. I told ’em to come back tonight after supper. I want Hal and Hester to talk to me first. So does the county attorney.”

We sat in silence for a minute. We were both washed-out.

“You know,” I said, “Traer is going to split, if he gets out.”

“Probably.”

“And even if he doesn’t, he’s going to be pretty hard to squeeze, since he’s got what we want, and his case isn’t far enough down the road yet so that we can pressure him with an assured prison sentence.”

“Yep.”

“We need Rachel.”

Lamar left a few minutes later. Sue came home and told me that I looked like I was dead. I agreed.

I broke a rule of mine and sat her down and told her
just about everything in the case. It took over an hour, and when I was done she didn’t look much better than I did.

The rumors going around school apparently had it that we’d solved the case and were wrapping it up. Three arrests, four bodies. Figured. I wished they were right.

“So you don’t think that this attorney did it?”

“The four, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“But who else would have?”

“That, my dear,” I said, in my best imitation of W. C. Fields, “is the essential question. And we don’t know. Saperstein and Hester agree with me that it was, maybe, a revenge killing. Maybe by somebody with a Satanic background, maybe not. The best suspect would normally be Rachel, since they killed her baby. But she was apparently almost a victim herself.”

“Well, who was the father of the baby?”

The things you tend to overlook.…

After supper, Hester called. They had a lot of stuff from Traer’s house. The real things were still at their Cedar Rapids office, but they had Xeroxed some seized documents and had brought them back. And copies of several audiotapes and one videotape.

They’d taken Saperstein with them, and he had insisted they make copies and bring them back to show us. We were all supposed to meet at the office at 19:00.

No problem, I had to go to work at 20:00, anyway.

We were all crammed into the back office. It was possible for prisoners to hear conversations from the kitchen, and since we had Traer and the Millses in the jail, we couldn’t use the only room that would accommodate us properly.

“Gentlemen,” said Saperstein. “What you are about to see is a so-called Black Mass. You will also see all four of our murder victims, very much alive, and very much involved.
You will see Mr. Oswald Traer in the leading role.”

Black and white horizontal lines on the screen, then a little bit of color, and then there they were.

The first few seconds were taken outside. The camera operator was obviously walking toward a barn, preceded by several figures in colored robes. There was apparently only one light accompanying the camera, so almost everything was in either complete darkness or washed-out light. It was at night.

There was sound, but the initial stuff was just about as blurred as the video. Some sort of song or chant.

They reached the barn, and the cameraman turned around, pointing the camera back along his path. Facing a residence that, although dim, looked a lot like McGuire’s place. There was a figure approaching.

“That’s McGuire’s, isn’t it?” asked Mike.

“Yeah,” said Art.

The approaching figure was more discernible, since the camera was steady. Black robe, with the hood pushed back. As it approached, the face of a man with a full beard was very plain.

“Darkness approaches,” said a voice offscreen. Muffled but understandable. Shit, it was almost funny.

“That’s Traer. The high priest,” said Saperstein. “You get to see a lot of him.”

Traer walked past the camera, too close, as his image blurred and washed out. The camera followed him inside.

It was dark in the barn, at least to the video camera. Virtually no detail at all, with several lines of parallel streaks as the camera moved toward a bright area that turned out to be sort of an altar. A black cloth draped over something, maybe an old table. Candles on both ends, with a kind of candelabra in the middle. A benchlike thing in front of it. Big pentagram hanging behind the altar, looked like a dyed and painted bed sheet. Pretty well
done, as far as you could tell in the miserable light. The candles were all black, or purple.

Traer stopped in front of the altar and said something I couldn’t understand. The camera turned, and panned the area to the side of the altar and back toward the door.

The parallel lights, it turned out, were candles being held by the rest of the group. The camera panned slowly, and we had our first view of people we could identify. Phyllis, in red. Sirken in red, as were Keller and Elizabeth Mills.

They were saying something. Couldn’t tell what.

Sudden static, and we were now looking at the altar from about fifteen feet. The operator had shut the camera off to put it on a tripod and then restarted it. The lighting was much better, so the tripod must have had a flood attached.

Saperstein backed up the tape.

“You may have noticed that the sound quality is poor—well, it’s not as bad as you think, because they are saying things backward. The main chant is ‘Natas,’ which is ‘Satan’ pronounced or read backward.” He paused. “We can ID most of the people for sure. Some of you might have recognized Sirken and Herkaman. The woman beside Herkaman is Keller. Three of our four victims. You’ll see a lot more of Herkaman later on. In the background we have people we have tentatively ID’d as both Millses and Hedda Zeiss. Possible on Todd Glutzman and Martha Vernon. There is a figure in a red robe you will see in a moment. Not too good, but we believe that’s Rachel.”

He reran the portion we had just seen, and stopped at a frame near the end.

“There,” he said. “The one to Herkaman’s left, sort of hidden behind Sirken in the red robe. We think that’s her.”

A small, thin face, with eyes set fairly close together. Not too clear, but I was struck by a resemblance to the dormouse in
Alice in Wonderland
.

He let the tape run for a couple of minutes.

“The reason it’s all so hard to understand,” he said, “is that our Mr. Traer is reciting the Roman Catholic mass backward. In Latin. The most important thing to notice is that book on the altar. You’ll hardly ever see him look down at it, but he turns the pages automatically.”

We watched. The quality was about that of a normal home video—poor. But you could see what he meant.

“He’s got it memorized, just like a priest has the mass memorized.”

“Now, that’s dedication,” said Art.

A few moments later, a naked woman appeared from offstage left and approached the altar. Traer said something, she knelt and then lay down on the table before it.

“The naked woman is Phyllis Herkaman. She is playing the role of the so-called living altar. The rest of the ceremony will be conducted on her, as it were.”

It was. She was difficult to recognize most of the time. Her face was just a little too far from the camera to be truly recognizable.

Saperstein fast-forwarded all of a sudden, wrenching me back from the mass and into the crowded room.

“Most of it is like that, with the people in the background sometimes coming forward to do some little chore … and, okay, here,” he said, resuming normal speed. “Here we have the members of the cult having sexual relations with Phyllis … the formal end to the ceremony.”

Despite our better impulses, we were riveted.

“You’ll notice that Traer gets first shot—rank has its privileges.”

Traer seemed to be devoting as much energy to this part of the program as he had all the rest.

“Now,” said Saperstein, “this is interesting. Watch who’s next.”

A woman approached Phyllis.

“This is unusual, the women normally come last.” Saperstein
chuckled. “No pun. This woman’s different. This one is our guest, Elizabeth Mills.”

Elizabeth placed her head between Phyllis’s legs.

“Now, watch Phyllis here,” said Saperstein. “She was pretty properly religious with Traer …”

Phyllis, who had been lying quietly, suddenly jerked, and almost fell off the table.

“Lost her concentration, there.”

Elizabeth stood, and backed off-camera.

“Now, this is Sirken … and from here on out, it’s all pretty much perfunctory … Just a second …” and he fast-forwarded it again.

“Here,” he said, “this is Kenneth Mills. He’s the next man, and watch this.”

There appeared to be much fumbling on-screen, lasting for almost a minute. Then Kenneth Mills turned his back to the camera and moved off into the darkness.

Saperstein chuckled. “Old Kenny apparently couldn’t get it up.”

“After my wife had done such a good job,” said Hal, “I’m not sure I could, either.”

“Hard act to follow,” I said.

“The rest of it is just normal stuff,” said Saperstein quickly. “Whoever was responsible for the camera forgot it at the end, because we have three or four minutes of the empty altar.”

He began rewinding the tape, and the lights came back on.

“Now,” said Saperstein, “this tape tells us a lot about the group. For instance, it’s plain that Traer is the high priest. It’s also apparent that Elizabeth Mills is rather high in the organization, and I would think she would fall just behind Phyllis, or maybe just ahead of her. Kenneth Mills seems to lack commitment.”

There was some appreciative laughter.

“Sirken,” he continued, “seems to rank just behind Elizabeth and was probably the number two male. In their
order, then came McGuire, then Todd Glutzman, or at least, we think it’s Glutzman. Hard to tell. Then the other women, with Rachel being last. You can’t tell because of the robe, but the note on the tape says that it was made on October 14th. A Saturday. If that is the correct approximate date, Rachel was about eight months along, and may have been last because of that.

“I think,” said Saperstein, “that Kenneth Mills is our weak link in the group. I think that he can be ‘approached.’ ”

“We wanted to show you this tape,” said Hester, “just so that you realize what we’re dealing with. These people are serious. They’re fanatic. They probably ‘sacrificed’ a baby in a ceremony similar to the one you just saw. We’d like you to think about that.”

We were thinking.

“These people,” said Saperstein, “are at the upper level of Satanic activities. Philosophically, morally, politically. They’re totally committed, and will do anything they have to, to protect the group.”

“If you think of the term ‘fanatic,’ ” said Hal, “you’re just scratching the surface. And they will obey Traer to the bitter end. Literally.”

“Kind of like Charlie Manson?” I asked.

“Exactly,” said Saperstein.

“Great.”

“Whoever killed the four,” he said, “is also that committed, and that fanatic. For what reason, we don’t know yet. But I don’t think he’ll be satisfied with just four of them. I would, think that whoever it is, is going to want Traer. At least.”

Hester stood up, and looked around the group.