Helmet Head (16 page)

CHAPTER 37
Downstairs, Upstairs, In My Lady’s Chamber

Fagan circumnavigated the house. The front door faced west. One lit window in the back punctuated the otherwise featureless south-facing wall. There was a slanted storm cellar door to the east, probably used to deliver coal. The ground reared up thirty feet beyond revealing limestone gums. The fireplace backed up against the north wall. The exposed stone chimney was flanked on either side by mullioned windows and had an eerie facial quality. There was a term for people who saw faces everywhere. Maybe he had it.

The only light came from the first floor back. After circling the house Fagan crept up to the back door and peered in through the kitchen window. He saw the narrow hall leading to the front, the shut basement door. He returned to the front, entered through the open front door and inhaled deeply of what smelled like roast pork, steeling himself against what he might find. He went into the living room searching for the photograph. Doc had left it on the table. Fagan picked it up, experiencing a visceral revulsion at the sight of the uniformed Nazi. No one had to teach him this—whether his birth parents were Jews or not didn’t matter. He’d always felt it. Maybe it was part of the ancient lizard brain, an image of horror as natural as night terrors.

Maybe that’s why the Nazis used it.

Maybe that’s why he’d been obsessed with it. The nature of evil, one of the mysteries of life. Like a moth he circled and circled trying to understand without being consumed.

The figure was tall and lean with the silver piping of a colonel. Fagan turned the frame over and pried away the tin constraints. He slid the photograph out from between the glass and the backing board and turned it over. Written in old-fashioned script with a nib pen was, “
Standartenfueher Heinrich R. Von Mulverstedt, Doctor of Medicine, Wahlberg Konzentrationslager, Gdaz, Poland, 1945
.”

Fagan looked from the photo in his hand to the photo on the mantle. Helmut Von Mulverstedt, kendo champion. There was an undeniable resemblance. The Nazi was probably Von Mulverstedt’s grandfather. Why else would he have such a thing? How did people who came from evil live with that? As an orphan it was one of many mysteries he’d pondered in adjusting his attitude to his own fate.

Now that Fagan had a name he thought of Helmet Head as Von Mulverstedt. It made him seem less a force of nature and more a common criminal. But he was obviously no common criminal if, in fact, he had been cutting the heads off bikers for fifteen years. He was in fact a bizarrely successful serial killer.

Fagan stared at the head model with the leather mask. It bothered him. He placed his pistol on the mantle and carefully undid the Velcro straps affixing the mask to the head. Beneath lay a skull with leathery skin, a series of blue stars inked across the cheekbones, an inked blue tear at the corner of the left eye. The mummified head’s eyes had been replaced with goat’s glass eyes from a taxidermist mounted to stare in different directions. One of them stared at the cop. The pupils were gold and shaped like elongated hourglasses. The teeth thrust nightmarishly from the shrunken lips and cheeks. Maybe they could identify him from dental records.

Fagan inhaled and let it out slowly, extending his hearing throughout the house. He heard the wind whistling through the trees, the creaking of the foundation as it continued to settle, the sudden report of a beam snapping in the defunct barn, the distant rumble of thunder.

There was a scrape from above. Fagan snatched up the pistol and moved silently to the base of the pyramidal stairs which had been shoehorned into a tight space and rose at a ridiculous fifty degrees with a rope banister. Gripping the shotgun in one hand, he shoved the pistol in his belt and grabbed the rope to pull himself up stepping next to the wall on the balls of his feet so as to minimize the noise. He rose silently. As his head cleared the top floor he saw a pair of red eyes regarding him from eight feet away and a foot above the worn and scratched wood.

The raccoon squeaked, scuttled around a corner and disappeared. Fagan slowly lowered the shotgun and his heart from his throat. Must have got in through the ceiling or something. He paused listening, letting his eyes accustom to the gloom. On his left were two doors, probably to bedrooms. At the end of the short corridor was the bathroom. On his right was the windowless wall. Pale rectangles indicated where pictures had once hung.

Macy could be in either room, incapacitated, unconscious. The silence disturbed him. That monster had to weigh two-fifty—his every step would signal throughout the house with creaks and groans. Fagan leaned forward from three steps down and peered through the half inch gap between the bottom of the door and the floor.

He saw faint gloom, furniture legs, dust bunnies. He laid the shotgun down below the top step. Pistol in right hand he reached for the doorknob, turned it silently and swung the door inward.

Nothing happened. Fagan waited. He slowly straightened and entered the room behind his nine. It was a den or a storeroom with institutional green file cabinets and stacks of cardboard boxes, many of them sealed. Some of the boxes were marked
Fassnacht Pharma
. Some were marked
Bayer
,
Neuer Aftrag
,
Rallopharm
or
Exodus
.

The room smelled of dust, patchouli oil and some faint medicine.

To his left some kind of shrine. A ceramic Buddha on a hand-carved teak-wood table with inlaid mother-of-pearl, lit by a tiny purple spotlight affixed to the stand casting an eerie reflection on the walls and boxes. Three Nazi medals laid out on the teak stand: Order of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, Order of the German Cross with eight points and swastika, and the Knight’s Cross of War Merit with both swastika and Maltese cross.

The colonel’s.

Below that a black lacquered rack containing a long sword and a short sword in their ceremonial binders. Before that a teak box on top of which sat a broad and deep ceramic bowl, marked with Japanese characters, half full of grayish water and a series of stone pumice blocks, one mounted in a wooden box at an angle. One of those odd Swedish “chairs” where you balance on your knees and buttocks was pushed to one side.

It was, Fagan realized, Helmet Head’s polishing station. Here he worshiped his strange gods and sharpened his lethal blade. But if Helmet Head kept his sword with him, what were these?

Fagan rolled the seat into place and crouched before the shrine. There was a white scroll on the wall with Japanese calligraphy. Carefully, he reached for the long sword on the lower rungs. A
katana
, he thought. In Iraq there had been endless talk about knives, blades, who made the best, who fought the best. Everybody was an expert. Carefully, he drew forth the blade far enough to see the intricate scroll work, the polished steel. He could feel that it was old. It seemed to generate its own low wattage. He slid the blade back and replaced it in the rack.

A cheap garage sale desk hunkered between towers of files and boxes beneath a small window. A large leather ledger was open on the desk. Fagan flipped it open.

It was written in German and filled with mathematical and chemical equations, disturbing drawings of the human nervous system. Here, too, dozens of newspaper and magazine articles had been clipped and stuck to the file cabinets with magnets. These dealt with both animal and human cloning, stem cell research, the regeneration of organs in lab animals and humans. An old cover of
Wired
showing an improbably smooth androgynous person over the headline, IS THIS THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY?

The bile rose from Fagan’s stomach as a wave of revulsion rose within him. He choked it down, leaned forward and brushed the heavy ledger aside. Beneath it was a black patent leather photo album, six by seven inches, embossed with the gold
Reichsführer
symbol and in gold script:
Gruppenführer Heinrich R. Von Mulverstedt.

Fagan stared at it as if it were a venomous snake. He feared to touch it yet he knew he must. With trembling hand he unsnapped the clasp and opened it at random to two facing black and white pictures. He reeled back as if struck by a baseball bat. The black and white images were at once clinical and obscene. A naked androgynous subject strapped to a gurney, face contorted in agony as a serious-looking Von Mulverstedt in white lab coat and stethoscope prepared a syringe. Von Mulverstedt’s hair was greased and combed straight back like that of some matinee idol. A tube connected to a clear plastic bag filled with dark liquid went into one of the subject’s eyes.

The other was worse.

Fagan closed the album. He listened to the old house creak. The faintest rumble of thunder. The storm was moving off.

He pulled open the file drawer on his left. Hanging files in alphabetical order in German. Fagan found receipts for everything from medical supplies to canned peaches, all delivered to a private post office box in Paducah. Smart. Von Mulverstedt could visit at any hour of the day or night avoiding scrutiny.

Fagan found accounts in Germany and the Cayman Islands, receipts for a Gold Visa in the name of Helmut Von Mulverstedt.

Hiding in plain sight. A phantom. The First Bank of Cayman paid the utility and credit card bills electronically. Von Mulverstedt appeared to be tech savvy but there was no computer. Maybe somewhere else.

Fagan pushed himself away from the desk with a scrape and went to the next room. Standing to one side he used his left hand to turn the knob and push the door inward. There was no response. Fagan stepped through pistol first and swept the room.

Heartbreak.

The monastic cot, the thrift store nightstand, the photo on the bureau. It was a color photo of a smiling, handsome man holding his beautiful wife, a dead ringer for Janet, wearing a red dress with the two smiling kids in front. It looked like it had been taken somewhere in the country, perhaps after they’d embarked on their American journey in their rental car.

Helmut had been a good-looking dude, a Marlboro man, a rangy matinee idol, a German Eastwood. She was a stunner. They could have been Hollywood royalty or a Norman Rockwell painting.

The only wall decoration was a cheaply framed Doctorate of Microbiology from the
Medizinische Fakultut, Friedrich-Alexander
. It was badly torn and a little burned. The bed bore a slight indentation—not the monster’s. The closet door stood open revealing the four grotesque leather suits and helmets.

Where’d he get the money?

Fagan opened the bureau drawer.

A Walther P38 lay in its well-oiled holster. Fagan picked it up, undid the clasp and withdrew it. There were swastikas on the grip. He replaced the pistol. There was a box of Wolf ammo and a dozen pair identical white gym socks.

He went through the other drawers. A dozen pair black short-sleeved cotton tees, size XXL. A dozen black jockey shorts.

Satisfied Macy wasn’t on the second floor Fagan slung the shotgun over his shoulder and descended with his pistol in one hand. The roast pork aroma was tantalizing and sickening. Fagan circled through the living room and tiny dining area into the kitchen. The light over the stove was on, the black roasting pot shoved to the back.

He pulled the pot toward him. It was warm but not hot. He lifted the lid, slammed it back and shoved the pot to the back of the stove.

Some terrible Teutonic ritual. Von Mulverstedt was a scientist! Why would he eat the head
?

Fagan listened. The stove clicked as it cooled. The house cracked as it settled. Thunder rumbled a long ways off. Fagan plucked the newspaper clipping off the counter and read with disbelief about the tragic ending to the Von Mulverstedt family vacation.

How could Fullerton not know this?!

Where did the paralyzed Von Mulverstedt recuperate? How did he regain use of his limbs? His story had earthshaking ramifications for the world of medicine. What if he had regenerated his entire nervous system? The monster in black leather was fast as a cat and strong as a horse.

Fagan instantly deduced that the Von Mulverstedts had been run off the road by bikers. What other possible motive was there? The man was consumed with hatred. His interest in Macy was obvious—she was a dead ringer for Von Mulverstedt’s late wife.

Fagan scanned the news clippings looking for a name. Ingrid.

Von Mulverstedt loved his wife so perhaps Macy was not in immediate danger.

That left only one area unexplored.

***