Helltown (34 page)

At the summit of Eagle Bluff, Grandview Lane flattened out and continued for another half mile. He passed only two other residences, both impressive country estates with gated drives and three-car garages. Grandview Lane was the most desirable address in all of Summit County, offering sweeping views of Boston Mills Country Club far below.

Spencer’s home sat on two lush acres at the end of the road. It was a modern design made of reinforced concrete and glass, oval in shape, the second floor off-centered from the first in an avant-garde sort of way. He had designed it himself and had collaborated with the architects during the planning phase, then with the builders during the construction phase, making sure no corners were cut. It had been an expensive project, but money had not been an issue. He’d been investing in the local real estate market for nearly twenty years. He had a savvy knack at finding diamonds in the rough, and knowing when to cut his losses. Consequently he’d amassed an impressive portfolio of properties, all of which were occupied with long-lease renters, providing him a substantial cash flow on top of his regular income.

The Volvo’s headlights fell upon a rain-whipped police cruiser parked in the roundabout driveway in front of his home. Lights burned behind the Levolor blinds in several of the first floor windows.

Spencer was so surprised he almost slammed the brakes. His immediate impulse was to turn around and get the hell out of there. He didn’t do this. His headlights might have already been spotted. Moreover, whatever business had brought the police to his home at this late hour couldn’t be related to Mother of Sorrows church. He had set the fire all of ten minutes before. This had to be an unrelated visit—but concerning what?

Had something happened to Lynette?

Yes, that had to be it. She’d had a stroke, or a heart attack.

Spencer wanted to believe this was the case. He wished fervently it were so. Yet he couldn’t convince himself of it. The timing was too coincidental.

Spencer parked behind the black and white—“Sheriff” stenciled next to the police department shield—and cut the engine. He retrieved his briefcase from the passenger seat, climbed out, and hurried through the downpour to the front stoop. He took a moment to collect himself at the door, then swung it open and stepped into the marble foyer. The house was silent. “Hello?” he called.

Alan Humperdinck, the Summit County sheriff, and a young deputy, both wearing gray rain slickers over their uniforms, stepped from a doorway a little ways down the hall. They had been in the living room.

Humperdinck was in his sixties, on the cusp of retirement. He had a sun-weathered face and hard gray eyes, cop’s eyes, suspicious, wary. Spencer had been introduced to him a half dozen times over the years at community gatherings and festivals. However, they’d never exchanged more than passing pleasantries. The deputy couldn’t have been more than twenty. Beneath his wide-brimmed Stetson, his face was gaunt, white, anemic.

“Sheriff Humperdinck,” Spencer said, allowing his genuine confusion to inform his tone. He took a step forward and extended his hand in greeting.

Humperdinck merely looked at it with an expression equal parts surprise and loathing, and right then Spencer knew Lynette was fine. They were here for him. Somehow they knew about the church. It was impossible, but there was no other explanation for the frosty—no, the downright rude—reception.

Spencer lowered his hand and adopted a concerned expression. “What’s happened, Sheriff? Is it Lynette? Is my wife all right?”

“She’s okay,” Humperdinck said tightly. “She called us.”

Spencer frowned. “She called you? Why? What’s happened?”

“Where were you just now, Mr. Pratt?”

“I was at the hospital.”

“At this hour?”

“I often stay late, to catch up on work. Now, Sheriff, I must demand to know what’s happened.”

Humperdinck reached a gnarled, liver-spotted hand into the back pocket of his trousers and withdrew a card. He began to read from it. It took Spencer a moment to realize he was citing a variation of the
Miranda
warning: “You are a suspect in several capital crimes. You will accompany us to the Boston Mills police barracks. You have the right to remain silent—”

“Now hold on a minute, Sheriff—”

“You have the right to legal counsel. If you cannot afford legal counsel, such will be provided for you—”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Spencer interrupted more forcefully. “Not until you tell me what in God’s name is going on.”

“You’re coming with us one way or the other, Mr. Pratt,” Humperdinck said. “If you refuse to come willingly, Deputy Dawson will wake Judge Pardy and get a warrant for your arrest. Given what your wife has shown us, that would be very easy.”

“Lynette? Where is she?” Spencer stepped forward.

The two officers blocked his path.

“Get out of my damn way,” he snapped. “This is my bloody house, isn’t it?”

For a moment Spencer didn’t think Humperdinck was going to concede. His old body seemed to tremble with a barely constrained hostility. But then, reluctantly, he stepped aside. The deputy did so as well, his eyes downcast.

Spencer turned his bullish body sideways to slip between them in the narrow hallway. He stopped at the entrance to the living room, from where they had emerged. Lynette sat on the buffalo-hide chesterfield, staring up at him with wet eyes.

Dozens of Polaroid photographs were spread out on the coffee table before her. Spencer stiffened in surprise. This morphed into panic, then rage. The dumb whore had gone snooping when he was out! She had somehow gotten into his locked study. She had discovered the false top on the ottoman, what he kept
within
the ottoman, and she’d called the police on him.

Spencer’s mind raced, searching for excuses, but there were no excuses to be found, there was no way to explain the photographs, nor his collection of Satanic paraphernalia, which alone would link him to the massacre at Mary of Sorrows church.

“Lynnette?” he said, stepping into the living room, his eyes searching for a weapon. “What’s going on? What are these photographs? Why did you call these gentlemen?”

She didn’t answer.

“Mr. Pratt,” Humperdinck said. He and the deputy had stuck close behind him. “You need to come with us. Now.”

Spencer whirled on him. “Not until you tell me what the bloody hell is going on here, Sheriff! What are these purported capital crimes of which I have been accused?”

“Murder,” Humperdinck said coldly. He moved next to Spencer and pointed at the photographs on the coffee table. “These were discovered in your study.”

“My study?” he repeated, though he was thinking:
A chair? No, too unwieldy. The bronze bookend on the bookshelf? But how did he reach it without drawing suspicion?
“Impossible,” he added. “I’ve never seen these photos before in my life.”

Humperdinck gripped Spencer’s right biceps. “We’ll continue this discussion at the barracks.”

“Just a moment, Sheriff,” Spencer said, reaching into the inside pocket of his blazer. “I need my eyeglasses.”

“He doesn’t wear—” Lynette began.

Spencer’s fingers curled around the gold-plated ballpoint pen in the pocket. He plunged it into Humperdinck’s right eyeball, driving the shaft three inches deep, into the man’s brain. Humperdinck spasmed, almost as if he had been zapped by an electrical shock, then fell to the floor, where he continued to convulse.

Lynette screamed. The deputy cried out and faltered backward.

Already moving, Spencer tore open the buttoned clasp on Humperdinck’s leather holster and withdrew the .357 Magnum. He swung the service revolver toward the deputy, who was fumbling with his own holstered weapon. He squeezed the trigger. The kickback rocked Spencer onto his rear. The hollow-point slug blew straight through the deputy’s chest, punching him backward into the hallway. Spencer fired a second time. The bullet hit the already dying deputy in the gut. The kid slid to his ass, leaving two blood-splattered, plate-sized holes in the wall behind him.

Spencer leapt to his feet, shot Humperdinck in the chest to end his suffering, then aimed the gun at Lynette, who had turned white as a sheet.

“Spencer…” she whispered. “I’m your wife…”

“Not anymore,” he said.

He blew her brains out the back of her skull.

Spencer went to his bedroom on the second floor, tugged his suitcase off the top of his bureau, and tossed it onto the queen bed. He unzipped the main pocket and filled it with his clothes, not bothering to remove the wire hangers. He selected items mostly from his summer wardrobe, shorts and golf shirts, given that the Yucatán Peninsula
 
enjoyed a year-round tropical climate. Next he went to the master bathroom, retrieved his leather travel case from the cupboard beneath the sink, and filled it with toiletries. Back in the bedroom he upended the contents of the studded oak box that sat on the dresser—cufflinks, watches, rings—onto the clothes he had hastily packed. Finally he zipped the bulging suitcase closed and lugged it downstairs. He left it by the front door while he went to the basement gym. He glanced about the room, at all the Life Fitness exercise equipment which he had used every day for much of the last decade. Today his workout would have been chest and triceps and quads.

No matter, he thought. He would choose a hotel when he reached Kentucky tomorrow, or even Tennessee, that featured an exercise room. Perhaps one with a swimming pool as well…and maybe a heated hot tub. Yes, why not? If you’re going to live life on the lam, you may as well do it as comfortably as you could.

Adjacent to the floor-to-ceiling mirror was a glass-and-steel fire ax case. Spencer depressed the two screw heads on the underside of it. The case with its false backing swung away from the wall on hidden hinges, revealing a safe. He swiveled the knob left and right, entering the correct number combination, then opened the thick door. He tugged a black duffel bag out. It dropped to the floor with the heavy thump of two hundred sixty-three thousand dollars.

Contingency plan two.

Spencer returned to the first floor. On the way to the front door he found he had a slight bounce in his step. He had wanted to leave the life he had become a slave to for a long time now: the hospital, Summit County, Lynette. But he always felt he had too much invested to simply pack up and leave. Nevertheless, necessity was not only the mother of invention, but also of motivation. Getting ratted to the cops by his duplicitous wife was, ironically, the best thing that could have happened to him.

He had become untethered, unconditionally free.

In the living room, stepping over the sheriff’s body to retrieve the Polaroids from the coffee table, Spencer’s gaze fell on Lynette. Although slumped backward on the chesterfield, she had remained in an upright position. She could have been knitting, or watching television, except for the fact she was missing her head from her mandible up.

Had he ever loved her? he wondered. Yes, he thought he had. He had been lonely in those early years after being kicked out of the Church of Satan, he had needed companionship, and she had offered it to him. She was never a great conversationalist, and she didn’t have many original ideas of her own, but she was a good listener. And he supposed that’s what he’d wanted. Someone to listen to him, to agree with him, to admire him.

Spencer slipped the photographs into his blazer pocket and went to the front door. He paused on the front porch to watch a magnificent display of lightning, then he carried the suitcase and duffel bag to the Volvo, loading both onto the backseat. He was about to return to the house, to collect the contents of the ottoman from his study—the police might eventually piece together his role in all that happened this evening, but he saw no need to make it easy for them—when a voice said, “Not so fast, Spence.”

Spencer whirled around. Squinting against the onslaught of rain, he made out a shape emerging from the nearby trees. Thunder boomed and lightning flared almost simultaneously, and in the brief heavenly illumination he recognized Cleavon. His brother held a long, thick branch in his hand.

“Cleave…?” Spencer said in disbelief.

How the hell had he gotten free of the church?

“Who blew the whistle on you, Spence?”

“My, er—my wife, Lynette, if you can believe that.”

“So you killed her, did ya?”

Spencer cleared his throat. “There was no other choice.”

“And the sheriff too?”

“Again, there was—”

“No choice.” Cleavon nodded. “Just like there wasn’t no choice but to burn everyone alive in the church, that right?”

“This was your mess, Cleave. Weasel, Jesse—they were your friends. They screwed up, not me. Someone had to take the fall.”

“And Floyd and Earl? They were your
brothers
.”

“It’s…unfortunate, yes… I certainly didn’t want to—”

“And me, Spence? What about me?”

“Christ, Cleave! Don’t—” Thunder drowned out the rest of the sentence. “Don’t get all maudlin on me,” he repeated. “You left me no choice. You would never have agreed to—”