In The Bleak Midwinter: A Special Agent Constance Mandalay Novel (20 page)

She turned toward the sheriff. “That wasn’t
in the file. I assume that owner was investigated?”

“Much as need be,” he replied. “Ida Smith.
She was eighty-nine, and when she found the...well...what she
found... Anyway, it didn’t do her heart much good, as you can
imagine. She never was the same after that. Kinda went downhill
fast, then she passed away about eight months later. Place has been
empty ever since.”

“Well, that definitely rules her out.”

“Yeah, I’d say so.”

“Who owns it now?”

“Hulis, pretty much. Ida didn’t have any
family left to speak of. Town took it over. Tried to sell it, but
after the second body showed up, there wasn’t much interest, as you
can guess. So, they just boarded it up.”

“Why haven’t they just torn it down?”

He snorted. “Beats the hell outta me. But
I’ve got nothin’ to say about it. That’s all the town council.”

“Well, it actually looks like it’s in decent
shape for sitting vacant as long as it has,” Constance
observed.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” he sighed.
“Could use some work, but it’s still standin’. Sometimes when I
drive by here it seems like the place is just mocking all of us. I
know that sounds kinda crazy. It’s just a damned old house.”

“With a seriously
damned
history,” she
offered.

“Yeah...it’s got one of those all right. But
it’s still an inanimate object.”

“What happened to it being haunted?”
Constance asked. “I thought I was the skeptic in this crowd?”

“You mean the skeptic who’s ‘seen stranger
things’?” he quipped, tossing her comment from the night before
back at her.

“Seeing isn’t necessarily believing,” she
replied. “Not always, anyway.”

He fell silent for a moment, then huffed,
“Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, what I said yesterday about the house
being haunted… That was just talk. I don’t really buy into any of
that supernatural crap.”

Constance thought back to some of the cases
she’d worked in the past. She wasn’t going to admit it—especially
now—but her skepticism was as much a hopeful optimism as anything
else. Like he had just reminded her, she’d seen some pretty strange
things, and there were a few she still had to take purely on
faith.

Without realizing it, she muttered quietly to
herself, “I guess you just never know…”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” she answered, shaking her head.
“Just thinking out loud.”

“Yeah. I’ve got a daughter does that. Makes
me nuts.”

Constance nudged the conversation back to the
particulars of the case. “Is there a back entrance to the
house?”

“Yeah, right off the kitchen. Locked up
tight. Never been any sign of forced entry.”

“Maybe the killer somehow has a key?”

“Locks have been changed four times. Three of
‘em I did myself. Finally just gave up. So, unless the killer is
me…”

“Are you?” she asked.

He snorted. “Do you think I’d tell you if I
was?”

“With you, Skip, I’m not so sure…” Constance
wasn’t usually one for gallows humor, but Ben had rubbed off on her
through the years, and sometimes it would leak out
unexpectedly.

Skip turned and played the flashlight up just
far enough to illuminate the smirk on her face. He snorted again.
“I see that coffee is starting to kick in.”

“Sorry,” she apologized.

“Don’t be. It comes with the job.”

She returned to the subject at hand. “Any
other ingress or egress?”

“Windows would be about it, but they’ve never
been disturbed that we can tell,” he told her.

“The killer has to get in and out
somehow.”

“Yeah, can’t argue there,” he grunted,
playing the flashlight around in the darkness. A moment later he
quipped, “When you figure it out, tell me, okay? Because this’n has
me stumped.”

“With you that’s hard to imagine.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. There was no hubris
in his voice, just sincere confusion at why he didn’t see the
answer to this riddle the same way he saw everything else.

“Well, that’s why I’m here,” she replied.

“Yeah, well no offense, but you’re the fifth
Fed to tell me that.”

“So...” Constance said, allowing the flat
commentary to go without rebuttal. “As I understand it, the bodies
are always found in the basement, correct?”

“Yeah, what’s left of them anyway,” Sheriff
Carmichael replied, panning the flashlight to the right side of the
archway. “Stairs are just over there.”

C
HAPTER
15

HOLLOW
echoes came a half-beat behind
each footstep that fell upon the wooden plank treads of the
basement staircase. The dull sounds resonated from the concrete
walls below, each lonely thud fading away to make room for the
next. The rhythmic noise was an audible indicator of the emptiness
contained within the subterranean room.

Armed with a flashlight, Sheriff Carmichael
had led the way for a change, with Special Agent Mandalay close
behind. A small amount of the dim light from the still open front
door was filtering into the stairwell behind her. The muted
illumination wasn’t at all obvious while she kept her gaze forward
as they descended. In fact, she didn’t even notice it until a gust
of wind caught the loose screen door outside and knocked it hard
against the side of the house, prompting her to stop midway down
the steep staircase and glance back up over her shoulder. The
basement doorway above her was filled with dull light, appearing as
a dim, rectangular panel of gray floating in a black void. When she
exhaled, the frosty cloud of her breath bloomed in its faint glow,
briefly hovering before her like a translucent apparition, only to
disappear in less than a blink.

With a quick shudder, she turned and
continued downward, following the bobbing pool of brightness from
the flashlight in Sheriff Carmichael’s hand. Her running shoes
thumped a significantly lighter beat against the stairs than his
harder-soled clomps. Constance heard him let out a heavy grunt,
which was then followed by the sound of his shoes against concrete,
as he arrived at the bottom and stepped down to the floor
below.

“Watch yourself,” he told her, moving off to
the side, but keeping the flashlight aimed at the last stair for
her. “That one’s a bit to the high side.”

She heeded his warning and held onto the
loose handrail as she stepped down from the last tread. He hadn’t
been exaggerating. If anything, he’d been conservative in his
assessment. The final step was akin to taking two at once. She felt
his hand on her upper arm as she pitched forward, her foot
searching for the floor. She appreciated the help.

“Thanks,” she said.

“It can be an unwelcome surprise if you don’t
know it’s there,” he replied.

“Spoken from experience?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

Once he was certain she was on even footing,
Skip swung the flashlight around the large, squarish room to get
his bearings.

By now, Constance’s eyes had mostly adjusted
to the muted darkness. She could make out the coarse shapes of what
little remained in the abandoned basement.

As she glanced around, she could see that
there were small, glass block windows at the top edges of the
walls, spaced at roughly even intervals. A small amount of the gray
daylight was leaking through them, but not as much as one would
expect. She had noticed the rusted upper lips of the galvanized
window-wells protruding just above the ground when they first
approached the house, but she had not looked down into them. Now
that they were inside she could see that they must be filled with
leaves and other debris. A by-product of Mother Nature combined
with the past seven years of cyclical neglect visited upon the
property.

From their position at the bottom of the
stairs, to the left she spied the squat hulk of an antiquated
furnace lurking in the darkness. It appeared as though a
maintenance panel was missing, which left a contrasting rectangular
hole on its front. In a peculiar sense, it looked much like a huge,
gaping mouth at the bottom of an oblong face. Shadowy round metal
ductwork branched out from the side of the unit, like fat arms
extending upward until they disappeared into the rafters above.
Once a source of heat, viewed at this angle it was now a cold,
basement-dwelling monster, reaching for the upper floors in order
to drag the unsuspecting into its hungry mouth.

Whether it was the exhaustion or something
else entirely, Constance wasn’t sure, but for some reason this
house had a bizarre way of becoming anthropomorphized visions in
her brain. She shook her head and blinked as a gut response to the
hallucination being produced by her uncharacteristically rampant
imagination. But, was it just her imagination? The shiver along her
spine made her wonder. If anything, it was just as bad now as it
had been the previous evening, maybe even worse.

Sheriff Carmichael noticed the motion and
brought the flashlight up in her direction. “You okay?”

She nodded and lied. “Just a cobweb, I
think.”

“Yeah. Plenty of those down here, that’s for
sure.”

He swung the flashlight back down and
adjusted the beam on as wide as it would go and still be effective,
then played it slowly around the basement to reveal those things
that were still hiding in shadows. Just beyond the furnace—that now
looked like nothing more than what it really was—stood a
dilapidated water heater in the middle of a large rust stain that
spread outward from it on the floor. Along the walls, seeping
cracks flanked by dark mold became immediately evident in the
illuminated swath. Those certainly accounted for the damp, musty
smell that permeated the cold air.

“Old coal chute,” Skip said, directing the
light at a single point for a moment. The highlighted area was
covered in the same peeling, off-white paint as the rest of the
walls, but a pattern of bricks and mortar seams were evident
beneath. “It was bricked up even back in seventy-five, so no way in
through there.”

He began panning again and the beam of light
eventually fell across a vertical column rising upward from the
centerline of the basement to bear the load of the structure above.
Several feet to the right, directly in front of them and against
the side of the staircase Constance could see the shadow of its
twin.

Skip finished the slow arc and then waved the
beam back toward the center of the room and mused aloud in a sad
tone, “Hasn’t changed…”

“Stands to reason,” Constance offered. “If
the house has been vacant for seven years.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. His voice still seemed
strained. “But I mean it hasn’t changed since seventy-five.”

She didn’t respond to the explanation. She
really didn’t know how.

After a moment he tilted the beam downward
and began walking slowly forward on a direct line between the
support columns. She followed.

“Right over here,” he finally said, playing
the light across the floor in front of them.

The yellow swath of illumination revealed an
oblong outline chalked on the concrete. A foot or so away was a
much smaller outline, roughly perpendicular to the first. Dark
stains colored portions of the floor within the two shapes,
spreading outward in haphazard flows, as if randomly spilled with
no regard for the lines themselves. Similar dark splotches were
heavily splattered on the wall nearby.

“And over there,” the sheriff offered,
sliding the light to the corner a few feet away, where a
basketball-sized circle was drawn. It too, bore a dark stain
beneath.

“And over there,” he continued, again aiming
the beam toward a location apart from the others. This one looked
like the outline of a giant, disproportionate boomerang.

“Torso and upper right arm,” Carmichael
announced, panning the light back to the first location. Moving it
rapidly to the second spot he added, “Head.” Aiming at the third he
said, “Left calf and most of the thigh.” Waving the light slowly
around to reveal other outlines, he hesitated for a moment at each
and named them off one by one, “Left arm and hand; right forearm;
right calf, thigh, and foot; left foot; right hand. And…well…that’s
pretty much it.”

“And the body parts are dumped exactly the
same way, every year?” Constance remarked as much as asked.

He played the beam slowly over the
blood-stained wall. “They aren’t just dumped. It happens right
here.”

“Yet the killer gets away?”

“That’s the mystery,” Sheriff Carmichael
replied. He swung the flashlight back and forth again, rapidly
illuminating each of the spots in succession. “But to answer your
first question: yep. Exactly the same every year. All seven victims
dismembered the same way, left in exactly the same position, every
single time. We don’t even bother to clean up the outlines
anymore.”

“Don’t you mean eight victims?” Constance
asked.

He grumbled his response. “Not yet. Not until
Christmas Day anyway.”

“I mean John Horace Colson,” she explained.
“Aren’t the seven recent victims positioned in exactly the same way
he was found dismembered in nineteen seventy-five?”

“Yes, they are, Special Agent Mandalay,” he
spat, adopting the formal tone he’d used before when he wanted to
stress a point. “But you need to bear in mind that John Colson was
a monster. Merrie Callahan was the victim, not him.”

“I agree, Merrie was definitely a victim.
But, whether you and I think it’s right or not, legally, Colson was
too.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s really just semantics.”

“Well, you can keep your semantics.” The
words came as a growl. He had moved a step beyond cold formality
and was now toeing a line called anger.

Unfortunately, his growing flare was igniting
hers as well, and it was clear in her voice as she mimicked his
sudden conventionalism. “Semantics aside, Sheriff Carmichael, I
think we can agree the connection between the murders is more than
obvious.”