The Law Of Three: A Rowan Gant Investigation (4 page)

Behind us, a loud and very wet sounding
splatter tore our attention away from the scene as a patrol officer
involuntarily launched the contents of his own stomach onto the
pavement.

I looked back over my shoulder in response to
the sound and then glanced over at Felicity. She was clutching my
arm tightly and staring upward while absently chewing at her lower
lip. She had been to a few crime scenes before but had not been
subjected to anywhere near as much of this grisly scenery as I had.
Still, she looked stable for the moment, so I returned my stare to
the three-dimensional horror show that was playing out in front of
me. I swallowed hard, because to be honest, I was only a half step
away from heaving myself.

“Ya’know, Doc Sanders told me once that the
average adult has about thirty feet of intestines.” Ben paused for
a moment after reciting the fact. “Man, I’ve seen a lotta crap in
autopsies, but I never really expected to see anybody’s guts
stretched out like that.”

“Disembowelment was not uncommon during the
Inquisition.” I spoke quietly, struggling to keep my voice even.
“Actually, it was a favored form of punishment and torture.”

“You mean he did that to ‘im while he was
still alive?” Ben asked with a thin strain of disbelief in his
voice.

“Oh, yes,” I nodded as I spoke, then
swallowed hard again. “Probably rather slowly…”

As I’d known it would, my headache was
starting to get worse. The stark chill of fear climbed up my
vertebrae and began clawing at the base of my neck. There was
something unseen here that was begging my attention, and I wasn’t
entirely sure I wanted to give it.

“Jeezus…” He shook his head. “Guess I shoulda
suspected that, considering…”

I knew full well what his unspoken words
implied. Eldon Porter made a habit of torturing his victims
mercilessly before finally bringing about their end. During his
last spree, he had even burned two of them alive.

I allowed my gaze to fall away from the
corpse as I turned my head, but I didn’t have to let it fall far. I
was of average height, but I still had to crane my neck back to
look up at Ben’s face; average in stature he definitely was not.
His particular pencil mark on the doorjamb had hit six feet when he
was in junior high school, and he had still proceeded to grow
another six inches after that. He was no stranger to the weight
room either, and the rest of his physique made a perfect match for
his elevated height.

Formidable was a word that came to mind at
first glance; when he had still been a uniformed officer, just
plain scary tended to be the more accurate description.

He was looking back at me with dark,
questioning eyes that peered out of angularly defined features and
natural reddish-tanned skin—unmistakable visual evidence of his
full-blooded Native American heritage. His large hand was tucked
beneath a shank of collar length, jet-black hair, and he was slowly
massaging the back of his neck. This was a common mannerism of his,
and it told me that his mind was doing far more behind those eyes
than simply waiting for me to say something.

I said something anyway. “Was there a
Bible?”

While an outside observer might have found
the question somewhat odd, it was something I was certain he had
expected me to ask.

“Yeah, that’s what they said when they
called,” he told me, giving a short nod to the affirmative as he
spoke. “Bookmarked and highlighted.”

“Passage?”

My friend stopped massaging his neck long
enough to thumb through a small notebook then read his shorthand
back to me, “At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses,
shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth
of one witness he shall not be put to death. Deuteronomy seventeen,
six.”

“He’s working from his list again…” I
muttered. “When you ID this guy, he’ll be someone that one of the
original victims knew.”

“Yeah,” Ben agreed. “That’s kinda what we
figured.”

The “he” I referred to was, of course, Eldon
Andrew Porter. The list was exactly that, a list. It comprised the
names of Witches, Wiccans, and various other Pagan individuals
living in the Saint Louis metropolitan area. It was, of course, by
no means a comprehensive census of persons engaging in what is
often collectively referred to as alternative spirituality;
however, the odds were that it wasn’t terribly short either. Porter
had compiled it himself by way of various sadistic tortures, such
as the one displayed above us now.

A bookmarked Bible was his calling card and
the highlighted passage, a message. What we were being told was the
reason this particular victim had been chosen. His crime was that
of being a Witch. We’d been here before, so that much was a given.
And, just like the Bible verse said, he had been accused by more
than one witness. There was never much reading between the lines
necessary, for Eldon was nothing if not precise about the messages
he left behind.

Basically, Porter was a single-minded killer.
What made him unique was his highly particular criterion for
committing murder. Put very simply, he executed Witches.

That was the short answer. The long answer
went something like this: Porter was a highly suggestible sociopath
with a mild paranoid psychosis. Several years ago he committed a
crime, was caught, convicted, and sent to prison. That should have
been the end of the story, but society simply wasn’t that lucky.
While incarcerated he had been deeply affected by a
fire-and-brimstone prison ministry. Something called a “God Pod.”
Unfortunately, he completely missed the allegorical sense of
biblical text and took much of it literally. In the end, what
should have been a tool for rehabilitation had, in his case,
created a serial spree killer.

The man literally came to view himself
as a modern day equivalent to the inquisitors of fifteenth century
Europe, and just two months shy of one year ago, he had started his
own series of Witch trials here in Saint Louis, Missouri. Far
removed from medieval Europe in a geographical sense, yes, but he’d
gone to great lengths to adhere to the tortures and execution
methods of that long ago era as prescribed in the
Malleus Maleficarum
.

Roughly translated from the original
Latin,
Malleus Maleficarum
meant the
Hammer of the
Witches.
In fact, the “hammer” was a book—an
instructional manual written by a pair of inquisitors by the names
of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. In its day, it had been the
one true and official guidebook for the persecution of accused
Witches and heretics.

The language did not matter, however. Whether
scribed in Latin or English, the tome was most definitely not my
favorite piece of literature.

At the time of Porter’s original killing
binge, I’d been asked by Ben to consult on the case because of a
symbol found carved into the flesh of the first victim. My own
spiritual path and studies of various religious practices had
helped my best friend solve a crime before, so I guess I had seemed
like a natural choice at the time.

The truth is that unbeknownst to me, I was
already being sucked into it by an ethereal beckoning. Once I
became directly involved on this plane, those forces came to bear
with a vicious intensity. After that, it had all been downhill for
me.

Much to Ben’s horror, I had even ended up
becoming one of Porter’s prey; on a very foggy night, on a
pedestrian bridge spanning the Mississippi River, February last,
the self-proclaimed “Hand of God” had almost succeeded in making me
his seventh victim.

“Yo, white man, you okay?” Ben asked.

It took a moment for the words to register,
and I realized that I was just staring at him. “Yeah, I’m
fine.”

“You don’t look fine. You were kinda zoned
there for a minute.”

“Have you looked in a mirror?” I asked in
retort.

“Yeah. Funny. Ya’know, I’m still not all that
keen on you bein’ here, Row,” was his answer. “Felicity
either.”

“Yeah, you’ve told me that several times
already.”

“I’m serious,” he added.

“I know you are.”

“For one thing, it’s only been a coupl’a
weeks.”

“I know.” I nodded assent as I spoke.

The pair of weeks he was referring to
amounted to the period of time it had been since I had played a
fairly significant role in the capture of a serial rapist. In and
of itself a good thing, except that due to various factors in the
investigation—both seen and unseen—I hadn’t been coming across as
particularly stable lately. Of course, considering my gift—or
curse, depending upon how you viewed it—it was the unseen that
really caused the problems.

“And then there’s…” he began, but seemed to
purposely allow his voice to die away on the wind. I noticed then
that he was staring past me and at Felicity.

What he left unsaid was the fact that the
rapist had come after her, actually managing to effect a kidnapping
if for only a few short hours. Even though we’d stopped him before
he could go any further, in her case, it made it only slightly less
traumatic. In light of those events, I could certainly understand
his concern.

I looked over at my wife and saw that she was
still staring upward, oblivious to our exchange. “I know, Ben.
Believe me, I know.”

“You know, Rowan, we set you two up in that
apartment for a reason.”

The point he was trying to make was simple:
Porter was going to be after me, no two ways about it, and my
friend didn’t want me out in the open.

Of course, if your aim is to kill Witches,
you might as well go after the real thing, and I definitely made no
bones about being just that. Considering everything that had gone
on in my life over the past couple of years, I was just about as
far “out of the broom closet,” so to speak, as one could be.
Therefore, I was not very hard to accuse. I had already admitted it
in public—which, by the way, Porter had been sure to remind me of
as he pronounced my condemnation and attempted to throw me over the
side of a bridge with a noose around my neck.

Thankfully, much of that night had now become
a blur. I still had nightmares about it and probably always would,
but they were finally starting to fade into two-dimensional
representatives of what they had once been. Dulled and flattened,
they were much easier to take than the full-blown, Technicolor
reenactments. Still, I was looking forward to a future when they
would be visited upon me with less frequency.

I knew that day wouldn’t come as long as
Porter was free.

Of the things I recalled clearly from that
night, I knew that in my bid to escape I had shot him. I definitely
remembered pulling the trigger, and there was even a blood spatter
at the scene that provided physical evidence that I’d hit him.
Nevertheless, when the police arrived, there was no body to be
found.

No lifeless remains.

No hard and fast proof of his demise.

I had blacked out at almost the same instant
the handgun had discharged, so I was no help in the eyewitness
department. At the time, Ben had been convinced that Porter had
fallen from the bridge to a certain death in the icy river below.
The other members of the Major Case Squad on the scene
concurred.

For them, it was all over but the
paperwork—one of my friend’s favorite clichés and one that I’d
heard him quip several times before.

But for me… Well, I was the proverbial odd
man out. I held the one dissenting opinion in their clutch of
optimism. Something in the back of my head told me that Porter was
still alive, that the wound I’d inflicted was not so grievous as to
take his life, and that he had disappeared into the fog—not the
water. That inkling had eventually become an issue of extreme
contention between Ben and me—to the point where I finally just
kept my nagging intuition to myself.

Well, for the most part anyway.

Unfortunately, when all was said and done, I
was the one with the correct answer to the sixty-four thousand
dollar question: Eldon Andrew Porter was alive and still just as
demented—if not more so—than before. It had merely taken him ten
months to come out of hiding.

Now that he had surfaced, I found myself
wishing that I had been a better shot.

* * * * *

“It’s a bit of a climb,” the patrol officer
ahead of us said over his shoulder. “We have to go up to the fourth
floor, then over to the roof access.”

My eyes were still adjusting to the darkness
inside the building as we climbed the debris-strewn concrete
stairs. The faint nasal bite of urine, both stale and fresh, joined
in a pungent reek with feces and rotting trash to foul the gelid
air.

“Careful there,” he warned, directing the
beam of his flashlight on a crumbling step.

We picked our way around the hazard, single
file—Felicity in front of me and Ben bringing up the rear.

“There’re a lot of homeless that crash here,
what with the ministry across the street handing out free lunches
and all,” the officer continued, offering up an explanation for the
background stench. “Actually smells quite a bit worse over at the
freight elevator shaft.”

“Any of ‘em in here when you arrived?” Ben
asked.

“No, not when I got here,” he answered.
“Stockton was first on the scene though.”

“He up there?”

“No, he’s the green one downstairs tossing
his cookies.”

“Friggin’ wunnerful,” Ben spat with more than
just a note of sarcasm. “He say if he saw anyone?”

“Just the dead guy.”

Ben grunted his displeasure before moving on
to his next question, “Who’s runnin’ the scene?”

“That would be Lieutenant Albright.”

“Whoa.” Ben all but halted on the stairs.
“Not Barbara Albright… Tell me you’re not talkin’ about ‘Bible
Barb.’”