Apocalypse Island (30 page)

Jennings gave him the nod.

“Police!” Myers yelled, as he made his way down the ladder. “We’re armed and we’re coming down.” No response. Jennings hadn’t really expected one. He followed Myers down the ladder.

At the bottom the naked young woman was tied up like a crucifixion. She’d been brutally stabbed and a large cross had been carved on her torso. Scrawled in blood on the wall beside her were the words,

Cross my heart and hope to die.

Bastard wanted us to find this place,
Jennings thought. His breathing was difficult and he felt a little dizzy. He put his head down and concentrated on breathing normally. His heart thumped sluggishly in his chest. He raised his eyes and closely examined the body. She was like a wraith, white, as though she’d been bleached. The orbits of her eyes were smeared with dark makeup. She looked like a vampire.

With hands that shook, Jennings pried the light from Officer Myers’s hand and flashed it around the interior of the room. That creepy feeling hung with him. In fact, now it seemed to engulf him, oppressive, suffocating, making his sweat clammy and gooseflesh crawl over him like an insect infestation. There was a four-drawer chest with women’s garments sticking out of partially opened drawers. He noticed a stack of books with a fire-blackened bible atop it, a large Christian cross emblazoned on its cover. An antique iron-frame bed rested against the far wall. There was blood on the mattress and on the floor beneath the body.
But not as much as there should be if she was killed here.
Jennings felt a sudden sense of nearly overwhelming despair, a waking nightmare, as though something evil had passed through the shell of his body and entered his soul.

No way Wolf could have described this place so accurately to Laura and written it off as a dream. The little bastard must have been here. Jennings had never had that detailed a dream in his life.

He could not forget how he’d felt at both previous crime scenes, and realized that this was worse. There was something very wrong here besides the death and the message on the wall, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Myers felt it too. Jennings could tell by the officer’s pasty skin and sick expression.

“You okay, Myers?”

Myers breathed shallowly. “Yeah, I think so.”

“You sure?”

Myers nodded, staring at Jennings with glazed eyes. “Just makes me sad, that’s all. I can’t understand how anyone could do this. What must this poor woman have felt?”

Jennings shined the light back on the body without answering the officer’s question. He did not want to venture into such a dark place. He moved the light across the room taking in everything; the books, the chest of drawers, the bed, the writing on the wall. Something was wrong. But what was it, damn it? “Someone wanted us to find this place,” Jennings said. “He led us right to it.”

“Who?”

“Maybe Danny Wolf,” Jennings muttered under his breath.

“Danny who?”

“Never mind. I was just thinking out loud.”

“You think this guy’s playing a game?”

“He’s playing a game all right,” Jennings said, still unable to shake the feeling that something was totally out of whack. The information about this place had come directly from his number one suspect, delivered to him on a silver platter by the young woman he cared more about than anyone else in the world. The young woman he’d purposely put in harm’s way.

Why had he done such a thing?

He could not adequately answer that question. All his years in police work and answers to the toughest questions were still the most elusive. Sometimes you just worked with instinct. Sometimes it was enough.

And sometimes it wasn’t.

Yet that feeling of something evil persisted. It had to be in his mind. There could be no other explanation. And yet he knew that it wasn’t.

He shined the light back on the bible with its burned and blackened edges, the emblazoned cross glaring up at him like an admonition. He opened the cover and written in longhand on the first page were these words:

Orphanage Bible, Apocalypse Island, June 1981. God save our children.

And beneath that, scrawled in red ink in a different hand than the first message:

Judgment day. I have risen from the ashes and vengeance will be mine. Cross my heart and hope to die.

This inscription seemed to be much newer than the first one. The writing was crisp and clear.

Jesus,
Jennings thought.
Laura was right. Apocalypse Island is at the center of this case.

But he couldn’t think about that right now. Something was wrong here and all he could think about was getting away from it. He looked around at the ladder, claustrophobia putting a chokehold on him.

“Who do you think it is?” Myers said, gesturing at the dead woman.

“Christ, I don’t know.”

“You okay, lieutenant?”

“Yeah,” he lied, feeling his pulse quicken and his stomach churn. His heart was sloshing sluggishly in his ears. He pulled his phone out and went around the room frantically snapping pictures. The body, the message, the bed, the books. Normally this would be a job for forensics, but he couldn’t help himself, something was eating him, driving him onward.

“Should I look around?” Myers asked.

“You bet, but take it real easy. We don’t want to piss off the crime lab.” He handed Myers the flashlight.

Myers got down on his hands and knees and flashed the light under the bed. “Nothing,” he said. He got back up and carefully pulled out the top drawer of the bureau, looking a little sheepish as he extracted a woman’s purse and a stack of papers from the colorful softness of feminine undergarments.

Jennings glanced at the top paper and wasn’t surprised when he saw that it was an advertisement circular for a local rock band known as
Bad Medicine
. He imagined the entire stack was the same. The four members stood stoically against a sooty brick wall on which a large red cross had been emblazoned.

And beneath the cross, slashed in red ink and covering the band member’s faces:
Cross my Heart and Hope to Die.

Jennings put the fliers down and opened the purse. Inside he found a wallet. He saw the drivers’ license and the ID card. “Christ, she’s one of ours.”

“A cop?”

“Close enough. Prison guard over in Warren. Name’s Kaleigh Jarvis.”

“Good god, but how…?”

“I don’t know. Listen, I need to call this in.” He tried dialing the number but there was no tone. “Doesn’t work down here,” he said, feeling an immense sense of relief. “I’m going up.” He took the purse and all its contents with him. And as an afterthought, he grabbed the bible and the band fliers. “Finish going through the drawers, but carefully. I don’t want the crime lab thinking we’re after their jobs. I’ll be back in a minute with more light. You okay down here alone?”

Myers gazed at the crucified body. “Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Okay,” Jennings said but he wasn’t as convinced as Myers seemed to be. “Back in a flash.” Jennings climbed the ladder, stopped at the top, resting his bulk against a support post, blood pressure up, breathing difficult. He couldn’t shake the creepy feeling. Something
was
wrong. God damn it, he just couldn’t put his finger on it. It felt like he was being set up, like that whole scene down there was choreographed. He got his feet moving again and climbed the stairs to the first floor. But instead of feeling good, the cool air topside felt like a violation, chilling his sweat and making him shiver. Finally he got moving and went outside, breathing deeply. He made the call before instructing his men to do a thorough search of the surrounding property, woods, field, abandoned autos.

There were a couple of battery-powered Halogen lamps in the trunk of his car. He was on his way over to retrieve them when it struck him. Jesus, that’s where the first two women were killed, no doubt about it. Both victims had been taken from there after they’d been murdered and put on display elsewhere. But the killer had purposely left this one at the murder scene. Not only that, he’d put her on display. He knew she’d be found. He
wanted
her to be found.

He led us right to her.
Wolf
led us right to her.

Which probably meant he was done with the place.

Jennings’s phone went off.
Christ, what now?
He pulled it out of his pocket and put it to his ear.

“I told you to stay away from this case,” a voice whispered.

“Who the hell is this?” Jennings said.

“Back all the way off. I’m not going to tell you again.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Just remember, you were warned.” Click, the caller hung up.

It hit Jennings like a landslide. He spun around facing the building.
Oh, Christ, I’ve got to get Myers out of there!

He took one well-placed step back in the direction of the abandoned building when the world came apart.

Chapter 68

The vacant lot in which Laura had parked her car was a small sand-covered field in an undeveloped section of Portland’s waterfront district between Congress and Commercial Streets. From the look of it she guessed that it had once been an athletic field. She could still see the dim recesses in the sand that had been paths between bases. Now it was abandoned and neglected, waiting for the recession to end so that it could be developed.

All the way back to her car she kept stealing uneasy glances over her shoulder, sure that she was being followed. But she saw no one. She was pretty sure someone was back there, though, and in her mind it had to be Cavanaugh. Who the hell else could it be? The bastard was watching Wolf, and now he was watching her. She almost hoped it was Cavanaugh. She’d like to get her hands on the slimy prick, find out just what he knew about her father’s death. But each time she looked back she saw nobody she could identify as suspicious. And the farther she walked the fewer people she saw, so by the time she reached the lot she was alone.

The manner in which her father had died had always been somewhat of a mystery to Laura. Not that her mother had never talked about it, on the contrary, she had, on numerous occasions, but each time it had come up, the explanation had seemed vague and confusing. He’d been trapped in a dead end alley after a long suspect chase and the suspect had hidden there and surprised him, killing him with his bare hands. The suspect had never been captured and her father’s partner had originally been sited for negligence in his death but had later been cleared of all wrongdoing. It was the details of the crime that had never been adequately explained to Laura. Why had they not found the killer? What exactly had her father’s partner seen that day? Why had he originally been sited for negligence and then cleared of all wrongdoing? These were things her mother would never speak of and when Laura pressed her for answers she’d been told to let sleeping dogs lie. But to Laura, her father was not a sleeping dog, he was a dead man, a loving father who had been cruelly taken from her.

She’d never known the name of his partner until this very day and it had knocked her socks off to discover that it was Cavanaugh, a man she did not know but one she instinctively did not like or trust.

A cold and biting wind came off the Atlantic Ocean and fluted up through the canyons of the city as Laura approached her car. She removed her keys and pressed the unlock button. The headlights flashed and the security system chirped as the doors unlocked. The sun had gone down behind stark tenements and shadows were lengthening across the deserted lot. Laura stepped up next to the driver’s door, pulled her coat around her and shivered. Stealing a couple of quick glances around her, she felt that creepy sensation again, like she was being watched. But as far as she could see she was the only one in the lot. To the north there were rows of tenements with their fire escapes slanting down to the ground; in the opposite direction stood a sparse stand of leafless and skeletal oak trees like lonely sentinels overlooking Portland’s dark harbor.

A swiftly-moving shape, like a bed sheet blowing in the wind, sped toward Laura. Then it was gone. Her heart rate picked up. She thought of what she’d seen—or what she thought she’d seen—the night before on her walk home from the Cavern Club. Chills ran down her spine. She whirled as the white flash reappeared and came at her again then sped around her in a circle, as if purposely taunting her. And like it had a moment ago, it simply vanished. Laura blinked her eyes thinking that maybe she hadn’t really seen it, then immediately dismissed the thought. No, she wasn’t crazy. There definitely was something there and it left a residue that felt like evil.

She reached to open her car door when a huge and powerful hand holding a chemical-soaked rag clamped tightly over her mouth and nose. She struggled and tried to scream but it was futile, she could not breathe. Her assailant’s other arm encircled her midriff lifting her airborne and nearly squeezing the life out of her. She kicked back furiously, hitting home several times, but it was as if her antagonist was made of iron. The last thing she saw before losing consciousness was hair. Lots of hair, almost completely covering a huge and powerful hand.

Chapter 69

Patrolman Myers was pulling open the bottom drawer of the bureau when he saw the ghost. There was no doubt that she was the same apparition he’d seen at the landfill. She was tall for a woman and she wore a beautiful, nearly transparent white gown, the curves of her fine body a mere suggestion beneath. Her long, black hair fell straight and part of it had fallen over one eye making her look like an actress from the nineteen-forties. She was the most beautiful thing Myers had ever seen. And just like at the landfill, she didn’t do anything, or say anything, she just stared at him, her hands held out before her in a gesture of appeal.

“What do you want?” he asked, but of course she did not reply, even as her dark eyes burned like embers, staring at him with enough intensity to scorch holes through him.