The Killing Vision (11 page)

Though his eyes searched the dusty beams above him,
his mind was on yesterday.  On the group.  The sensitives.  He wondered what
kind of work some of them did.  It was difficult to imagine any of them in a
factory or teaching school; some of them, like Barry and Joseph he was fairly
sure, had no jobs at all. 

He headed for the corner of the basement where he
thought the cable entrance should be, playing the light at the mass of wires
and cables tacked onto the crossbeams.  Just as he found it, the toe of his
shoe caught against the leg of an old kitchen chair, and the pile of newspaper
clippings on its seat spilled into the floor.  Spitting out a curse, he knelt
and began picking them up. 

Then he saw it.  Just below a window encrusted with
dust, out of his line of sight when he had been standing, was a break in the
drywall where pulsing light was spilling through.  There was a door built into
the wall; he could see the hinges.  Curious, he stepped over to it and felt
around until he got a grip on an edge, then pulled it open.

Behind the door was a small room, about eight feet
square, no more than a closet, really.  Its walls, floor, and ceiling were
upholstered in red vinyl.  Light came from four strategically placed recessed
strobe fixtures that illuminated the only other object in the room:  a sort of
leather sling that was suspended from above by shiny chrome chains.  The
strobes pulsed slowly and monotonously, like the flash of some insane phantom
photographer.

He stared, dumbfounded.  He had an idea, of course,
what the sling was for, and a smile played at the corner of his mouth.  He
tried to picture the mayor’s wife strung up in here like a slab of meat, naked
and sweating. 
Give it to me, Larry!
   A dry laugh escaped his lips.  Without
thinking he brushed his fingertips against the sling.

Instantly a flood of visions and emotions crossed
before him and was gone.  He reeled a bit, looking at the thing.  Then he
reached out and grabbed it.

What he saw was a mass of writhing, tangled bodies
locked together in sexual bliss beneath the flashing lights.  Images swam on
top of images, dark indistinguishable faces dissolving from one to another. 
Voices moaned and screamed—some in pleasure, some in pain, most a combination
of both.  Once he saw Larry Carver’s face vividly, his features pinched and
distorted in ecstasy.

But it was the thrill shooting through him that
would not allow him to let go of the sling.  The sexual energy pounding in his
chest, his loins.  He had never felt anything like it.  It felt so strong, like
a jolt of electricity.  Wave after wave flowing through him.  An orgasmic spark
that began in his groin and spread through his limbs like a shock of
lightning.  It was sheer, undiluted lust of a magnitude he never knew could
exist. 

Only the sudden weakness in his legs made him let
go, and he steadied himself against the vinyl wall.  His breath was heaving,
and a viscous sweat had broken out on his forehead.  Then he realized something
else:  he had an erection.  The first one he’d had in ten years.

Trembling, he stepped out of the room and shut the
wall behind him.  He wondered about the faceless, nameless people he had
envisioned, some in the sling, some writhing on the floor.  He wondered what
the governor would have thought of Mayor Larry Carver if he’d been able to see
what Joel just experienced.  Probably would have strangled him with that blue
ribbon.  But then, who knew?  Maybe the governor had been a guest here.  Maybe
the governor had even been in the sling.  Maybe the governor had liked it.

Joel bent down to grab the newspapers he had
scattered over the floor and began stacking them.  He stopped.  All of the
papers had to do with Sarah Jo McElvoy.  He looked at a front-page story from
April: 
Girl Still Missing
.  Sarah Jo smiled up at him from the color
picture—a school portrait most likely—that accompanied the article, and Joel
felt a chill up his spine. The stories started with her disappearance and went
right up through finding her body last week.  He shuffled through the pile. 
There were dozens of them, all stories from the Cedar Hill
Post-Dispatch
,
from front-page articles to small stories buried farther in the paper.

Suddenly, the red room didn’t seem quite so sexy. 
He began to wonder exactly what had happened in there.

Was the mayor involved in this?  Had the mayor taken
that girl?  If so, what had he done with her? 
To
her?

He wondered if he had missed something in those
visions, if there was some small part that had gotten by him while he was lost
in the flood of ecstasy.  But he didn’t think so.  He could try it again, grab
the sling and search his feelings again, but the visions before were so murky—more
physical than visual, and nothing really clear except Larry Carver’s moaning
face.

And besides, now he was afraid.  If there
were
something to all this, if the mayor were somehow involved in the girl’s death,
Joel wasn’t sure he wanted to find out this way.  Not in a dank, musty basement
surrounded by dark shadows and a pulsing strobe light.

He looked again at the clipped articles in his hand,
wondering if he should go to the police, doubting that he ever could, knowing
he would never be able to convince them of anything.  What would he say to
them?  There was no way he would ever tell them about his ability, and even if
he did they would never believe him.

Perhaps he could just tell them about the room,
about the articles.  Maybe it would throw some suspicion this way.  He debated
taking a few of the articles to show the police, but then decided against it. 
Anyone could cut things out of the paper; that certainly didn’t make a
murderer.  But he had to admit it was still strange.

He finished stacking up the newspapers and moved on
to his real work, his fingers trembling.

Not surprisingly, his erection was gone.

* * *

1:40 PM

Halloran and Chapman stood at the edge of the
cemetery with Chief Pettus, watching the mourners file back to their cars from the
green tent set presumptuously amid the gray headstones.  Today, Sarah Jo
McElvoy was finally being laid to rest in Our Lady of Peace Gardens.  Halloran
got just a glimpse of Sarah Jo’s mother; she was wearing dark glasses against
the intense summer sun and had a fresh cigarette between her lips.  A lady in a
navy blue suit—who was probably Mrs. McElvoy’s age but looked much younger—was
helping her toward the funeral home limo. A couple of news reporters were
shouting questions at them, holding microphones as far over the caution tape as
their arms would stretch.  Mrs. McElvoy and her friend in the blue suit sailed
past them without stopping, almost like jaded Hollywood celebrities.

The whole thing looked like a circus.  Television
cameras and newspaper reporters were everywhere, and Halloran was grateful
Pettus had stretched out the yellow tape as a boundary for the media.  Since
Carmelita Santos’s disappearance had been made public, Cedar Hill had become a
national news story.  All three networks had converged on the town, and not to
be outdone, CNN and Fox News had also set up shop.  Several patrolmen were
stationed around the scene, just in case anything got out of hand. 

All three men surveyed the crowd of mourners,
looking for anyone who seemed out of place or suspicious, but it was hard to
tell.  There were so many people, and most he felt sure were friends or
family.  There were quite a few children as well, most likely Sarah Jo’s
classmates, all huddled together in a somber group, some of them crying. Even
the mayor had been here; he had given a small speech before the service (some
drivel that had been captured for posterity by the news cameras) before being
escorted to his car and whisked back downtown.

Chapman loosened his tie and blew out a breath.  His
freckled forehead was glistening in the heat.  “See anything unusual?”

Halloran shook his head.  “Other than the fact that
we’ve got the TV news covering a Cedar Hill funeral, no.”  He looked over the
crowd, wondering if, as he had suspected, Sarah Jo’s killer might be mingling
with the mourners, passing himself off as just another grieving friend. 

“This is crazy,” Pettus said.  “I’ve spent my whole
life in this area.  I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Chapman stared straight ahead, not looking at him. 
“I’ll be honest with you,” he said.  “This scares me.”

Halloran glanced at him, then went back to studying
the crowd.  Chapman wasn’t the only one who was scared.  Halloran was more than
a little uneasy himself.  Hell, Cedar Hill hadn’t had a murder in over ten
years, back when he was still patrolling the streets.  That was the Bollinger
murder—the kid that had stabbed his grandmother to death before school one
morning.  Shane Bollinger.  That was the kid’s name.  He’d been tried as an
adult, but his attorney had skirted the death penalty by having him plead
insanity.  Now the kid (shit, he must be about thirty by now) was rotting away
in some prison somewhere. 

But that had been a family squabble.  This was
something else entirely, and if his instincts were correct, Carmelita Santos
was already victim number two.

They had gone over all the possibilities with the
Santos couple and the other people living in the house with them.  Everyone’s
whereabouts could be accounted for during the time Carmelita had disappeared. 
And no one else in the neighborhood reported seeing anything or anyone usual. 
Chapman had raised the question of looking at the other migrant workers in the
area, especially anyone who might have suddenly disappeared and grabbed the opportunity
to take a pretty little Mexican girl with him.  But so far, visits to local
farm owners concluded that all their summer help was accounted for.  There were
absolutely no leads at all.

“What’re you thinking about?” Chapman asked.

“Carmelita Santos.”

Chapman nodded.  “Me, too.”

“Time’s running out.”

“Yep.”

Halloran watched the news people scrambling about. 
He thought he recognized a couple of the reporters from TV, and he realized
that none were from the local station over in Springfield.  “This is turning
into something big,” he told Chapman.  “One murdered girl is one thing, but now
that another one is missing, I think the people of this town are going to
demand some action.  And they’re going to want it real quick.”

Halloran looked at his watch.  A press conference
was scheduled in front of the city hall for 3:00.  Police Chief Pettus and
Halloran would be detailing the efforts of the investigations so far, and Mayor
Carver would be there for public reassurance.  He hated these things, and
luckily he had had to do very few over the years.  But they were important, and
sometimes they led to some very promising leads.  He had to admit, though, that
scheduling this conference was one of the few good things Pettus had done; he
seemed to understand now the depth of what was going on, the magnitude of it. 
And that was surely good.

Halloran blew out a breath.  “Guess we’d better get
downtown and get set up,” he said.

* * *

6:02 PM

All day Joel had been obsessing over his experience
in the mayor’s basement.  And while he had to admit to being both alarmed and
turned on by the red room with its suspended sling, he was mostly still
wondering about the newspaper clippings and what they might mean. Could the
mayor somehow be involved?  Could he actually have killed Sarah Jo McElvoy? 
Why else would he have kept those articles?

Wade hadn’t seemed to notice that Joel was
preoccupied all afternoon, even though Joel failed to respond to Wade’s inane
conversation a couple of times.  More than likely, Wade was too concerned with
whatever he had been doing all weekend to worry over whether Joel was paying
attention to him.  Joel was fairly sure that Wade had probably been out with
another woman; he didn’t need to touch him to know that.  And Marla knew as
well; you didn’t need to be psychic to know when your spouse was sleeping
around.

Joel had microwaved a Hungry Man dinner, and he
parked himself in the recliner with a TV tray and a beer, settling in to watch
the news and eat his supper the way he did every night.  He had just flipped on
the television and scooped up a big forkful of mashed potatoes when the image
blazed on the screen and he nearly knocked his tray over.

The mayor was on TV.  He was standing behind a
podium beneath a green tent, surrounded by flowers and men in dark suits.  “I
want to pledge to the people of Cedar Hill, and especially the McElvoy family,
that justice will be served.  The sanctity of our city’s children has been
violated, and we will take action.”  The tape cut back to a long shot, and Joel
realized the mayor had been speaking at Sarah Jo McElvoy’s graveside service. 
A chill went through him.  The son of a bitch might have killed her, and here
he was trying to bolster the public.  The station cut back to the studio, and
the female anchor began giving the story of another girl, Carmelita Santos, who
had been missing since Saturday.  There was another tape, this time a press
conference on the steps of City Hall.  The mayor was speaking again, and Joel
could only stare at him, entranced by his wagging beard and his stone-dead
eyes, wondering if he were looking at the face of a monster.