Last Days (30 page)

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ADAM NEVILL

Not from a living mouth. Same for the nail fragments. Must have been some kind of weapon made from bones. Which ruled out any other suspects being involved in the killing, then getting away. ’Cus dead men don’t walk.

‘The five members from Lake and Clover’s testimony, who were never traced, were also ruled out as suspects: Brother Adonis, Brother Ariel, Sister Urania, Sister Hannah and Sister Priscilla. We never made the missing five as even being at the mine that night. We concluded they were all gone before 10

July.

‘So we sent the “dead” teeth and nail fragments down to the university in New Mexico for corroboration. An archae-ologist dated them as being five hundred years old from the tests he ran. Which was pretty crazy, and started a lot of speculation on the job. So we concluded that the fragments originated from something Belial, Moloch and Baal had used to finish the deceased off with. Something we never found. And you ask me the same question in seventy-five and today, and I’ll tell you the same thing. Belial, Moloch and Baal shot the four victims at the fence, and then killed those who were still alive with some kind of relic, made of teeth and bone extracted from old but preserved human remains.

Part of a ritual.’

‘Weapon? What kind of weapon fits that description though?’

‘The Last Days had other materials out there that should have been in a museum. We found other fragments at the scene that were dated to being five hundred years old. Fragments of clothing they must have brought out from France with them in seventy-two. Used like holy relics or something.

We had part of a bishop’s hat. Can you believe that? And 266

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some kind of vestment, or smock. One shoe that was made in Holland during The Wars of Religion. And all in that room where we found Sister Katherine, beheaded. Best thing ever happened to that woman, you ask me.’

‘Brother Belial. You questioned him a number of times.’

‘Belial was shit-house crazy. Don’t be fooled into thinking otherwise. When we questioned him about the night of July 10th, over and over again, he only ever said the same thing.

That the teeth and the nail and the cloth fragments belonged to the “old friends” or “Blood Friends”. When we asked him who they were, he would say, “They’re with us,” and he would look up like he could see someone on the ceiling of the interview room. He’d keep asking us to “turn out the lights and to open our eyes”. Usual gibberish that man was famous for.’

Kyle swallowed to get his voice together. ‘Levine ran some of the Belial interviews in his book, and his polygraph too, that were made available after the coroner’s inquest. Most people thought Levine faked them.’

‘He didn’t.’

‘But the murder weapon. The one that would have been made from teeth? Who could have removed it from the scene of the crime when Belial was the only adult found alive?’

‘I always had a hunch it was the dogs. That one of the dogs we never traced ran off with the missing murder weapon. Took it into the desert. The blood on it would have attracted scavengers, insects, you name it. Probably still out there. Be covered up by sand in no time. So, at the final press conference in September, we offered Belial as the sole living killer of the five deceased in the communal chapel, for which he would stand trial. Before their willing execution at his hands, Moloch and Baal assisted Belial in mortally wounding 267

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the four victims found by the fence with gunshots, before Belial, Moloch and Baal committed a final execution in

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volving an unknown handheld weapon. Then Belial killed his confederates, Moloch and Baal, at their request, along with Katherine and the two others found at the first murder site: Brother Chemos and Brother Erebus. Belial never denied his participation. He claimed he was chosen for the honour by Sister Katherine for “a feast of old Friends”.’

Again the repetition of
friends
unnerved Kyle to the point of the muscles in his left leg going into involuntary quivers.

‘But the dogs? And the children? The mural? The mist? What did you make of it all?’

‘Unrelated to the actual murders as evidence, but part of the whole, excuse me, fucked-up picture we had to put together after the fact. The dogs just fled scared, and kept on running. They were wild anyway. And the noise of heavy gunfire would have sent them off into the desert. Patrolmen who first arrived at the scene, and the neighbour at the ranch, both confirmed they heard dogs in the distance after the gunfire.’

‘The pictures, drawings on the walls?’

‘The amount of drugs they were ingesting explained the twisted murals on the walls of the chapel.’

‘But the smoke . . . in the air . . . the atmosphere changed.’

‘Maybe they had been burning something on that fire pit too, like sulphur, to produce the tainted smoke. The murders were part of a ritual after all. But we never investigated the smoke. What could it possibly show us? It was smoke, from a fire or flare.’

‘What about motive? To commit suicide. On this scale. In this way.’

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‘Beggars belief, don’t it? But as to motive we had various scenarios that all fit the profile of the case. So the right motive was one of those we had, or maybe bits of them all. Who could we ask? Belial was crazy up until the day he died, and only one of them kids we pulled out of there ever spoke again as far as I know. The only one who wasn’t a mute. The “clean kid” as we called him. He never spent much time at the mine.

We know from eyewitnesses close to Sister Katherine’s mansion in California, that she and the “clean kid” mostly lived at the mansion up until two nights before the murders. She kinda adopted him. Or, more precisely, stole him from his mother, Priscilla, who we never traced. The other kids we found had also been separated from their parents out at that mine. Sister Katherine’s whole schtick was to break up families, couples, friends, you name it, right from the beginning of the organization. Max told us. No one in that cult could have any attachment to anyone but the leader, Katherine. Not even an itty-bitty baby. Was how she kept control. Divide and rule. If you can’t love me you will fear me. Textbook.

‘So we concluded that Sister Katherine and her merry band were killed by each other. Either as a result of infighting, drug psychosis, or a suicide pact. Maybe a bit of all three, you ask me. Papers called it a satanic ritual involving human sacrifice once it reached a critical point. They said the same thing about the Manson killings in the early days. Times were different back then. Changing for the worse, but most of the country was a whole lot more innocent than it is now.

Another writer claimed it was ‘a contest for leadership that went wrong’. Sweeney shrugged his massive shoulders.

‘Could have been. Only thing we can be thankful for is that they had enough humanity left over to spare the lives of the 269

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children. They all went into the system, into care. They were fucked up. Four of them couldn’t even speak.’

‘Which leaves me, and anyone else still familiar with the details of the case, with one final mystery.’

‘And I bet I know what you’re going to ask.’

Kyle managed a smile, but kept silent.

‘Footprints?’

Kyle only nodded. If he spoke he knew his voice would be hoarse and quivery.

Sweeney winked at Kyle. ‘Far as I’m concerned, that’s one of only two features of the case we never satisfactorily resolved. Fifteen years later, I went back over the case. They got a whole room in Phoenix just for the files on the Blue Oak Copper Mine case. Took me a year to get through it again. But I still have no explanation for the footprints. We found them in two areas of the crime scene. Around the murder victims in both locations. Three sets of prints by the fence, one inside the temple building. Most of the prints were ruined by the ruckus up there when the police arrived at the scene. I reckon you had eighty pairs of feet up there at one point, running through the sand and blood in the dark. So maybe someone had something on the soles of their shoes that made those mystery footprints look like there was no flesh on them. Who can say?’

Kyle cleared his throat. ‘You said there were two features of the case you never resolved. What was the second?’

‘Blood spatter at the scene was more alarming than the footprints, you ask me. There was plenty of blood there, in that temple building and out by the wire. But not enough.

Part of me even wondered if the victims in the chapel were killed elsewhere and brought back to the mine afterwards, 270

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because of the lack of blood at the scene. Every victim lost a lot of blood. Nearly every drop. Autopsy proved it. Me and my partners reckoned it was still inside the victims’ bodies once the hearts stopped pumping it out, or it had run between the floorboards of the temple. Coroner and medical examiners looked at jugular veins cut through. Looked at a body with no head. They guessed they’d all bled out at the crime scene. And we never put our heads together at the time of the medical examinations and autopsies. Why would we?’

‘So where was the blood?’

‘Some splatter pattern was found on the roof of the temple building, at the end of the first week of the active crime scene.

No one had thought to look up there before. Arterial spray it looked like. But if it was, how’d it get up there? From one angle it looked to me like someone was slaughtered in the air. Which is out of the question. That would have been impossible. Belial never actually told us where anyone was killed, or how. But that maniac was covered in their blood.

Looking back, I wonder if he drank some of it. Maybe even a lot of it after he cut their throats.’ Sweeney paused.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘They’d done it before. Eaten one of their own. To keep them among the Brothers and Sisters. Lake and Clover confirmed it, though they never took part. Someone known as Sister Fina died of natural causes out there in late seventy-four, and The Seven ate bits of her from the neck down.

Cooked her and passed her out on bread. So Belial had form.

He was no stranger to ingesting what he called “the mana of his people”. When Belial was killed in the State Prison Complex up in Florence, someone chewed into his throat and wrists too.’

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‘They never found his killer though. Levine suggested the guards let the other inmates kill him.’

‘Horseshit. They had him up there as a category five prisoner. Highest security. Because they had a lethal injection and a gas chamber waiting for him if he’d ever gone to trial. He was all cut up around the wrists and neck when they found him after a riot in a power cut. But there were no defence wounds on his body. Ask me, he ran his mouth off to some of the other lunatics up at Florence about drinking blood.

Then some of them thought it seemed like a good idea and probably did to him what he did to his hippy friends out at that mine. He was killed in the rec room. Just let himself get rubbed out.

‘And remember the evidence. It was already pretty much an open and shut case. We had the murder weapons, or all of them but one, and we had the killers: Belial, Moloch and Baal. We had enough for a conviction. There were still plenty of anomalies, and there wasn’t a man on that case who didn’t believe for a long time that someone else was involved. Some still do. But we had nothing to prove that. No witnesses, no clues beside some crazy footprints, a missing weapon made from bones the dogs almost certainly ran off with, and a lack of blood.’

272

EIGHTEEN

somewhere over california, flight aa102.

21 june 2011. 2 a.m.

In the window seat beside him, Dan snored. He’d fallen asleep minutes after take-off, at the same time Kyle had fired up his laptop to begin assembling a rough cut of the footage they’d shot in Phoenix in the sit-down interview with Detective Sweeney.

Three shoots in three days and Kyle hadn’t slept more than two hours the previous night. They were due to land in Seattle at 5 a.m. and intended to drive straight to Martha Lake’s house from the airport; the plane journey to Seattle being their only chance for any rest now until the US schedule was in the can, sometime early the following afternoon. But sleep was the last thing Kyle would allow himself, even on a plane.

It now felt plausible that he would never sleep again without dreaming of something that might get him sectioned.

He arranged his laptop and the Martha Lake notes on the fold-down tray. Fought with his rucksack until he found Levine’s
Last Days
. Thought hard again on his questions in light of what he had learned from Aguilar and the two cops.

Leafed through Levine’s book and arrived at the plate section, in which the journalist had favoured the most famous 273

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portrait of Martha Lake: the Seattle PD mug shot after she’d been arrested for shoplifting in 1971, one year before her association with the cult.

Martha Lake had been the prettiest of all The Temple of the Last Days girls that Kyle had seen pictures of: Amish wholesome and broad of face, arresting brown eyes, vol -

uptuous lips and perfect American teeth; long hazel hair parted down the centre and tied in bunches either side of the guileless face; a dusting of freckles across a sexy cartoon character’s upturned nose.

There were other pictures of Lake as a younger woman that Kyle had saved to file from a Google Images search.

Most of the photographs online had been uploaded onto cult-obsessed blogs run by amateur enthusiasts. These featured Lake at twenty-three, during her return to Arizona under police escort to give a statement, and to eventually test -

ify against Brother Belial. That was the intention behind her extradition from Canada, though her participation at trial was never required.

In the photographs shot as Lake walked through Phoenix Sky Harbor airport beside her lawyer, Marti Trussconi, and surrounded by a four-man plain-clothes police escort, she had worn a check pinafore over a high-necked blouse; a disarming
Little House on the Prairie
ensemble. Her eyes were hidden by big sunglasses, her hair covered by a wide-brimmed floppy hat: Diane Keaton chic from the chin up.