The Messenger (2011 reformat) (24 page)

"Out of
her..." Jane winced as she tried to picture the scene. But she didn't get
it. "You mean somebody cut her throat."

"I mean
somebody decapitated her. They arranged the body like that so it'd be the first
thing we saw when we went in: a headless body...and all that blood."

Jane's
curiosity just grew more morbid against her will. She didn't want to know but
she had to know. "Where was the..."

"In the
kitchen. It was sitting upright on the counter, right next to the phone-again,
on purpose. He'd left it there like that deliberately. It looked like the head
was looking at us, like it was waiting for us." Steve sighed, an anxious
frustration. "Some kind of facial rigor had set in, I guess. The eyes were
open. She was smiling at us."

"Good
Lord," Jane whispered.

"And then
the rest."

"There's
more?" she asked, alarmed.

"Jane,
that was just the beginning of the day. That was just the first house."

"What?"

"It was
impossible, it was insane. What we walked into that day, each house after that?
It was like nothing we could ever imagine. We found two other bodies there, two
kids. Butchered. Just like what?"

"Marlene
Troy did," Jane finished. "I can't believe this. An identical crime,
but twenty years ago?"

"Yeah-well,
sort of. See, the wife didn't do it. She was a victim just like the kids.
Somebody else did it. They did it and left. When they left, they went to the
next house, then they killed everybody there and went to the next house. Then
the next house and the  next house. Like that."

Jane gasped.

"That was
the real nightmare. When me and my partner walked out of that first house,
everything went crazy. Cops from every department within ten miles were
responding because we simply didn't have enough units. City cops, Clearwater,
Largo, county sheriff's department were all tearing down the road. Me and my
partner were standing on the lawn of the first house and we looked up the
street. All those other units, all those other cops, were pulling up in front
of every house on the street."

"What
happened next?"

"We were
both half in shock, I guess. We just turned into robots and went to assist. One
house after another, every house on the street, and every occupant of each
house butchered in place. By the time we got to the last house on the street,
we'd counted over twenty dead bodies, most of them like the woman in the first
house. Turns out that the killer had actually started at the other end of the
street. First victim was like most of the others, a housewife. It was her kid
who found her body and called the police. He told us who the killer was."

"Who!"
Jane blurted.

"It
wasn't hard tracking him down. It was a postal employee walking a delivery
route, only he didn't deliver anything-he just killed everybody. He just went from
one house to the next-no one survived except for the kid. He's the only one who
saw him. This guy took out an entire street. And then..."

Jane squeezed
his hand.

"We
tracked the guy back to the main post office, but... too late. When the guy
finished killing everyone on his mail route, he went straight back to the post office
and murdered every one there too. Just like what Marlene did, only worse. This
guy used a meat cleaver, hacked them all up into pieces."

He paused for
a few moments. The darkness seemed to tick around them, with their hearts.

"He
wasn't quite finished by the time we arrived. My partner went back to the car
to call for backup. I was standing in front, near the clerk stations, and
that's when I heard someone in back scream, so I drew my gun and ran. There
were bodies lying everywhere, all down the halls, all around in the sorting and
handling areas and the loading dock. Chopped down. Hacked up. Couple times I
slipped and fell-all the blood on the floor. By then, though, the screaming had
stopped. I could tell it had been a woman, and then I saw one. Another
employee. She was convulsing on the floor; the guy'd just hacked her head half
off in one swipe with the cleaver. It was my first look at him-the first time
I'd ever seen a murderer, for that matter. Normal looking guy, mid-thirties, I
guess, normal build. But when I looked in his eyes, he wasn't normal anymore. It
was something worse than insanity looking back at me. That's when I put my
sight on him. What you have to understand is that I was so focused, plus in
shock, so I wasn't noticing details at first. The guy's shirt was open and
there was blood all over him. Hell, I thought it was the blood from all the
people he'd killed, but it wasn't. It was his blood. The bay door was open and
he was standing at the edge of the dock, and then I noticed something else.
There was something around his neck. A rope, I figured. It went from his neck
to the overhead rail of the bay door. I yelled at him to put his hands up or
I'd shoot, something like that. And you know what he did?"

"What?"
Jane asked, but she thought she already knew.

"He just
grinned at me. For a second his face didn't even look human. It looked all
ridged. His head looked warped. His eyes looked as big as cue balls. Then he said,
'Behold the Messenger. The arrival of the Messenger is at hand.' Then he jumped
off the edge of the loading dock and hanged himself."

"My
God."

"And it
wasn't rope he'd done it with. He'd cut his own belly open, Jane. He cut out a
length of his own intestines... and that's what he used to hang himself
with."

Jane lay
rigid, trembling. "That's impossible. It's just like Carlton."

"Yeah,
just like Carlton. But even that's not all. You asked about that symbol, the
bell-shaped design we found written in blood at Marlene's house and at the
girls' school. Well, we found it here too. Everywhere. The killer had written
on the walls, on the delivery trucks, even on some of the bodies."

"The same
symbol," Jane repeated. "Twenty years ago."

"Exactly."

They lay silent
for a while. Jane hoped he'd fall asleep, and she tried to herself, but his
recital of those events left her wide awake in distress. How must it have been
for him? To see all that, all in one day? "My God, Steve. That long ago?
You couldn't have been much more than a kid back then."

"I was a
greenhorn, a total rookie. I'd just got out of the academy at the beginning of
that summer. I'd been on the force all of two months when this happened."

"And all
those people-murdered for no reason."

"Murdered
by a postal worker, Jane. Like Marlene, like Carlton. Same MO, same details and
implications, but it was all two decades ago."

Jane looked
for some way to dismiss it as coincidence, but that was impossible. "I
guess there's no denying it. There's a direct connection between what Marlene
and Carlton did this week, to what this guy did twenty years ago. There's no
way that that's not the case."

"I agree.
Marlene and Carlton worked for the post office, and so did this guy. The bell
symbol was found on the crime scenes this week and the crime scenes twenty
years ago. Christ, the guy committed suicide the exact same way Carlton did,
and Carlton didn't even live here twenty years ago. I checked his records. He
lived in North Carolina, for God's sake, so how could he have known about the
guy killing himself that way so long ago?"

Jane had no
response.

"And to
top it all off, Carlton, Marlene, and the killer back then even worked at the
same post office."

Jane's train
of thought stopped. "Wait a minute. I thought you said this guy from
twenty years ago worked at the main post office. Carlton and Marlene worked at
my post office, the west branch, which is brand-new."

Steve paused,
looking at her in the dark. "That's where you're wrong, Jane. The PO you
just opened last week? It's the same post office from twenty years ago. The same
building."

"But...I
don't understand."

"Jane,
twenty years ago, Danelleton was a lot smaller, it was a blossoming little
suburban community. The town council members put a lid on those murders as fast
as they could, and the first thing they did was close the post office, shut it
down for good. They couldn't afford the notoriety. A mass murder like that? Not
the kind of thing that's gonna do wonders for real estate values. So they built
a new post office, what's now the main branch on the other side of town. Time
went by and-believe it or not-everyone forgot about it. Most of the people who lived
here then aren't even here anymore. No one on the town council is the same.
None of the postal workers are the same. Hell, there aren't even any Danelle ton
cops who were here back then. I'm the only one. About the only good thing about
those murders is how fast people forgot."

Jane could see
what he was driving at. "But now Danelleton has grown so large that one
post office wasn't enough to handle the influx of new residents."

"Right.
Now the town needed an auxiliary post office to handle the extra mail load.
They talked about building a second office but they figured why bother? We
still got the old place sitting there. It's been closed for twenty years, and
no one remembers. So instead of spending a ton of money building a new place,
they refurbished the old place."

"My post
office," Jane muttered.

"Yep. The
west branch that you're running is the same place where the murderer worked
twenty years ago. And the same week the place gets reopened, two of your
employees go out and do the same thing. This has been gnawing at me since the
thing with Marlene. I'm the only one who knows, the only one who remembers. I
just kept thinking, it's impossible. No coincidence like that could ever
happen. The chances aren't even one in a million, they're one in a
billion."

"You're
right. It is impossible. It's uncanny."

"And that
damned symbol is the link," Steve went on. "I'm not sure how, but
it's got to be. All that stuff I was saying before, about satanic cults-the
stuff you didn't believe. It's got to be true. That's the only way that the
connection can exist."

Jane tried to
think of a way to deny it. She tried to find a hole in the logic. But couldn't.

"That guy
we saw on TV tonight? Yeah, I know who he is. His name's Alexander Dhevic. He
claims to be some sort of demonology scholar. Every now and then I'll see him
interviewed on those hokey documentaries about the occult. He used to go around
the country on these talk shows, spieling about the upsurge of cult activity in
recent years. Satanism, these teen groups that practice Black Mass and animal
sacrifice, hype like that. But when all this went down twenty years ago, Dhevic
was snooping around in Danelleton. So he's another link."

"Dhevic,"
Jane whispered the strange name.

"I don't
know his story, but there's something really fishy about the guy. There he was
then, and here he still is now. We tried to question him twenty years ago, but
he slipped

out of town,
like fast."

"Why
would he do that?"

"Wish I
knew. But that's why I figure the symbol is demonic-Dhevic's a so-called
demonologist, and that's why I was asking if you thought Carlton and Marlene
could've been involved in some kind of cult."

"And
maybe Dhevic."

"Right.
Maybe this crackpot Dhevic is more than just a demonologist. Maybe he practices
all this crap too."

Jane shivered.
Like everything else this week, this was too much information to deal with all
at the same time. Murders, past and present. Identical crimes twenty years
apart. Symbols and suicides. Links to satanism. Links to Jane's post office.
And now this man named Dhevic. It's just...too much, she thought. She hugged
Steve tighter. "It makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. It's
hard to believe this sort of thing could ever happen here."

"Let's
not talk about it anymore," Steve whispered. All that stress in his
voice-when he'd been telling what had happened-was gone. He was himself again, which
was what Jane wanted, what she needed. He was hugging her back now. "Just
forget about it ..." And then he was kissing her again.

Jane fell back
into the oblivion she yearned for. Her desires were surging again, and that's
all she cared about. In a moment they were consuming each other with their
kisses, their bodies cringing for the touch of the other. Jane's bliss returned
and swept her away. This time their lovemaking was even more frenetic than
before-they knew each other well now, they knew each other's bodies. Jane
simply let herself go, let herself be taken by this man.

She had no
idea how much time had passed when they were done. What am I going to do? she
asked herself, exhausted yet again, happily worn out. I can't be falling in
love with this guy, can I? It can't happen that fast.

A little while
later, Steve got up. "I better go now," he said regretfully.
"I'd like to stay but-"

Jane didn't
want him to go but she knew he had to. It was very difficult for her to say,
"I know. It's too soon. Let's not rush this." She was determined to
not get emotional or make a fuss. Don't be a pain in the ass, Jane, she ordered
herself. That's the last thing he needs. She watched him get dressed, her eyes
straying over his lean body. Oh, God, came the drifting thought. No, I cannot
let myself screw this up...