The Wizard Murders (13 page)

"I don't know. There aren't any lights on." The house appears to be an old split level, and from what Pitt can tell, it's one of the few homes in the area without a lot of trees.
Makes for an unobstructed view of the sky,
he thinks.

"Okay, tell you what. Stay here. Lock the doors and do not try to follow me or turn the headlights back on." He takes the flashlight from her and- for the first time in recent memory- pats his holster, reassuring himself that his sidearm is there.

"Are you crazy? I'm not going in there!" That comes out a lot angrier than what Denise has intended to say. "I'm sorry. I'm just really freaked out right now." She starts rubbing one of her arms and she's honestly not sure if it's because she's tense or cold or both.

"Just stay here, and you'll be okay," Pitt reemphasizes, steeling himself. He opens the driver's side car and gets out, tapping down the door's lock before he shuts it.

At first Pitt uses the flashlight as he starts walking the twenty yards or so that's he parked from the house, but then instinctively he clicks it off, thinking to himself,
Look to the sky. That's what this is about. Look to the sky.
His untrained eyes blink and search for the Northern Cross-
God, am I even sure that's the Northern Cross? What if I've got it wrong?
He comes to a stop, and decides it's as good a time as any to pull out his revolver.

Coming closer to the darkened house, there's a chimney chute protruding from the right rear portion of the building. He cringes a bit as the gravel under his shoes starts to make a crunching sound.
This is insane, what the hell am I doing out here? What would Clarence be saying right about now? He'd been saying, what if this is an ambush?
He stops and in fact totally freezes for a moment, straining to hear; the only sound is the engine of the Rambler a few yards away, and maybe there's the sound of a TV coming from a house behind him and across the street, but that's it.

Okay, it's September 17th, you asshole,
Pitt thinks to himself, angry sweat starting to irritate his eye
s. You've got me out here on Winesap- son of a bitch, Winesap! 10404 Winesap, what the hell do you want me to do now.
A little gust of evening wind comes along, and Pitt finds it oddly reassuring; there's a brief whistling sound as the breeze goes through some nearby pine trees, followed by a few random rings from what must be wind chimes somewhere on the property. He takes a moment to breathe, looking up at what he's hoping is the Northern Cross, his eyes also straining to see if there's anything unusual about the house.

Looking left to right, he traces the silhouette of the house's roof as best he can, all the way to the chimney on the far right and back again. Nothing.
Should I knock on the damn door or what?
He shoots a glance back over his right shoulder, trying to see if he can make out Denise sitting in the passenger seat of the Rambler, but it's too dark and far away.
What is she thinking right about now? She's right, this is crazy.

He looks back up at the house, and as another little gust of wind comes up, he senses motion around the chimney.
What? The chimney? What was that, smoke?
He sniffs the air strenuously with his nose, but he doesn't detect any sort of wood burning smell. He's not even too sure of what he's seen, and he stands on his toes for a moment, thinking,
Maybe that's a tree or something in the backyard, just moving behind it, maybe just a tree branch swinging in the breeze. And yet... there it is again! What is that, just a leaf or something stuck up there?
Whatever it is, it flaps so quickly that Pitt can't make out what it is against the starry summer night sky.

He turns his attention back to the house, and makes a snap decision to turn his flashlight back on. It quickly becomes apparent that the curtains have been drawn, at least on all the windows out in front. Pitt, feeling that he's just taken an unnecessary risk, quickly shuts it back off.

Now what?
He sighs, his breath a combination of weariness and stress.
At some point I've probably got to go in there. I can't just leave Denise back in the car, I've got to move a lot faster.
The evening breeze kicks up again, rattling a few wind chimes that sound like they're hanging on the backside of the house- and once again, looking up, there's that weird little motion up by the chimney. Frustrated, he clicks the flashlight on and tries to illuminate what's up there, but if anything what he'd like to see is apparently obscured by any light coming from the front. He shuts it off again, still watching up there, and something indeed flaps again, noiselessly. He finds himself rooting for a stronger gust of breeze-
c'mon, what's up there?!
After about a minute, he gets his wish- a burst of wind- and there it is, something blowing against the night sky.
What is it, string? What is it, it's almost like hair, or fur from an animal... hair?

He gazes, unmoving. The chimney stands sentinel in the sky. Another breeze comes along... more movement. It looks like stringy hair. Stringy, human hair.

Pitt backs up for a moment- takes three steps backwards, to be precise- and then with great speed lunges for the front door. He slams his fist. "Beaumont Police! Open up, right now, Beaumont Police!"

Back in the car, Denise hears him shouting and even with the engine rolling and the window rolled up, she senses his urgency and holds her head in her hands. "Oh my God, no."

"Beaumont Police!"
he bellows again, letting about five seconds pass by until he decides to kick in the door. Pitt- who is not a small man- hauls off and manages to smash the door open in about three kicks. Stepping inside, Pitt finds a hallway with a brown slate floor. Also immediately in front of him are three black poles that support a beamless ceiling. Shining his flashlight, he can make out a darkish blue-green shag rug, or at least pieces of one that appear to pulled up, torn out of the floor, and rolled back. As his eyes adjust, a monstrous smell hits his nose, and he begins to absorb what he's seeing.

It's an enormous amount of blood. Clumps, lumps and piles of blood that..."Oh dear God," Pitt exclaims, his flashlight unveiling a ghastly tableau.

What appears to have been the living room carpet has been torn up. On the floor, on the scarred cement that lay under the rug, is blood, flesh, entrails... and a crude depiction of the all-too familiar wizard's circle stare up from the floor at him, his eyes and his robe and his beard all sculpted out of intestines and blood. Pitt's flashlight drifts upward, to an enormous stone fireplace that rests against the back wall of the room, and it's obvious that even more entrails are dangling down the chimney and onto the ashes of a fire that must have been burned before the attack occurred. In time, police will locate and remove 23-year-old Drew Smith's head from the chimney top.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Pitt has decided he won't fly to Maine. He'll actually go by train. A nice, prolonged trip to make the anticipation last, a chance to really see America and avoid the whole "fly-over country" mentality.

It's October 2nd. Despite tearful and impassioned protests from both Denise and Clarence (and, not surprisingly, a totally nonplussed reaction by J.C.), Pitt has decided more or less to pack up and leave- a target date at the end of the month.
Halloween,
Pitt chuckles to himself, ruefully.
That's appropriate. Wonder if anyone's gonna actually feel like putting their jack o' lanterns out this year.

Meanwhile, more turmoil has surfaced. The morning after Pitt discovered the fourth victim came the phone call from the City Manager that he'd been dreading: Chief Stevens's cancer is a fast-moving one and he will not be able to return. Pitt feels a tremendous amount of guilt in not having gone to Loma Linda to visit him,
But what am I gonna do?
Pitt thinks to himself.
Walk into his room and say 'Hi Geoff, are you still dying? Oh, okay, then. Goodbye.'

Pitt gives it more thought, and finally decides he should at least try to reach out to him. He calls Loma Linda and is eventually patched into Stevens's room.

The voice on the phone- which comes after several seconds of the sound of fumbling and dropping the receiver- is weak. "Hello?"

"Chief! Chief Stevens! It's me, Pitt." There's only the sound of labored breathing. "Andy. Andy Pitt."

Stevens finally responds but is clearly out of it. "Hi, how are you?"

"Oh, I'm... fair to middling. Are they gonna let you get out of that horrible place?" Pitt cringes.

"If somebody doesn't get me out of here soon, I'm gonna start knotting sheets together. Although I am on the sixth floor, so that's gonna take a lot of sheets."

Pitt forces a chuckle. "Well, maybe they need to move you closer to the door, then."

"Yeah, well..." Stevens groans a little and it sounds like he might be on oxygen. "Well, you keep things going on down there... ummm..." and the phone is clumsily set down; Pitt can only make out the sound of things rattling, along with a few muffled voices. Pitt sighs, and then taps his forehead with his phone.
He's there, but he's not REALLY there,
he thinks.

He drops the receiver back into its cradle, and for a moment he ponders the faint, dull ring that comes from it. Pitt is seated in his office- the same room, the same desk, though probably not the same chair that he's had to work with for twenty years. He glances up at one of his shelves, scattered with plastic cups full of pens and a few souvenirs- the Aerial Tramway can, a cow-shaped container for milk from the North Star Motel in Boothbay, and even a little golden pig- a tie tack given to him as a joke by a nephew. He'd never gotten around to wearing it around the office as a gag. He's torn between getting a cardboard box together now or later- there's not that much to pack up here, but it needs to be taken care of eventually. He's also got reports on his desk that need to be tended to.

The coroner's best guess was the last victim had actually been killed about twenty-four hours before the young man's dismembered body was discovered by Pitt, and had probably been ripped apart by the same rug cutter or box cutter blade that was used to tear up the carpet. Drew Smith, the fourth victim, had just gotten home from his new job- working the soda fountain at Rexall's Drugstore on Beaumont Avenue. It was apparent that the killer had tried to create his "sculpture" on the rug first, judging from the blood stains, but then tore up the carpet so that he'd have a better, clean canvas to work with.
So disgusting,
Pitt thinks.
That damn smell is still in my nose weeks later and every time I close my eyes all I can see is that damn fireplace...

Well, fine. The FBI can take it from here. I'm too old for this sort of thing. All I know is I'm done and I want out now. I'm not playing games with some sicko, running around looking for his sick little clues. That's what they've got profilers for. Well-paid, snotty little federal criminal profilers. They want to sit around and play armchair psychologist and figure out what sort of person does this and why, sitting around a table like it's a damn parlor game. Well, it's not a game, it's got real crimes with real murders and buckets of blood. Have at it, guys. Knock yourselves out.
He crumples up a sheet of paper that had a few scribbles on it- a half-hearted attempt at notes he'd taken while being debriefed by the feds- and tosses it with emphasis into a wastepaper basket.

He then turns his eyes to a small stack of four file folders on his desk, each with the initial notes that he'd taken an all four victims. He picks them up, ponders the number and the weight of the files as they rest in his hands.
And this is how it all ends,
he thinks,
your whole life ends up in one of these things.

He starts to absent-mindedly thumb through them, and stops to check and see if these files are in chronological order- if he's got them stacked in the order that they died. As he flips through the tabs, his eyes fall into that zone of concentration he recognizes from whenever he starts a crossword puzzle. He looks at the first letter of one name. Then another. Then another. And then the most recent one.