Chapter 39
Holmes lies on her side trying to breathe like if she was sleeping. Hawk has been awake for some time and she was wondering if he would be awake until morning. When she is sure he is asleep she carefully gets out of bed and tiptoes out into the living room. Standing by the sofa, she tries to remember where she put her purse.
The house is quiet, and there is no sound from outside either. When she becomes used to the darkness she sees her purse on the floor by the door. She carefully crosses to it and picks it up. She locates her phone among makeup, keys, a packet of gum and some other items. She scrolls through the directory and when she finds the number she is looking for she presses SEND.
The signal travels through the roof and up into the sky where it bounces of a satellite and then continues down to earth, heading for a small village in the Amazon basin.
"Father O'Brian, speaking."
"Hi Uncle O'Brian, how are you?"
"Sandy! How wonderful to hear your voice, I'm fine and how are you?"
She walks into the bathroom and locks the door behind her, and then turns on the faucet and the running water drowns the sound of her voice.
"Fine, thank you. Listen, I have found Kerry, but there is a problem?"
"What problem?"
"He looks seems so innocent and there is nothing on him. The local Chief of Police and I went out to his cabin yesterday and we found nothing."
"Listen carefully Sandy, that man is evil. I know it now as I knew it the first, and thank god, the only time I met him. You can’t give up."
"We will try to get him to leave town, and then go back and do a better search of his place."
"Sounds good, remember what I told you; Kerry will try to blend in, he will do anything to make everyone think he is normal, but he is not. He is damaged beyond repair."
Sandy sighs, her uncle always becomes too melodramatic when he talks about Kerry.
"OK. Uncle O'Brian, I will call you as soon as I have any news. Take care."
"You too my dear, and remember, be careful."
Holmes clicks off the phone and turns off the water. When she opens the door Hawk is standing outside.
"Who is Uncle O'Brian?"
He is in his boxer shorts, and he looks sleepy. His hair is a mess and he yawns while scratching his face.
"Oh, he is my uncle."
"Yeah, that much I figured, but why are you calling him at 5A.M. in the morning to talk about Kerry."
She tries to walk past him, but he puts a hand on her arm and stops her.
"I might be old and an alcoholic, but that doesn't make me stupid, and I don't appreciate you trying to make me look like a fool. Now, let's sit down and you can tell me all about Uncle O'Brian."
He leads her to the sofa and she sits down while he goes into the kitchen. When he comes back, he has two bottles of water in his hands. He tosses one to Holmes, who catches it one-handed and after opening it drinks half of it. Hawk is sipping his while watching her.
"Go on, I'm waiting," says Hawk, waving his bottle at her.
"First of all I don't want you to think I tried to deceive you or your staff, I do need your help."
"Uh-huh, continue."
"Well, Uncle O'Brian is my uncle from my mother's side. He is a priest and for the last eight years he has been working in the Amazon, as a missionary."
"Great, you have a priest in the family. Get to the part where you tell me why you two talked about Kerry."
"My uncle met Kerry."
Hawk leans forward and places the water bottle carefully on the table and asks, "he met him where?"
"In the Amazon, he works in the village close to where Kerry was found, and he attended him afterwards, before he was brought to Manaus."
"OK, your uncle is a hero priest, involved in saving a man's life."
Holmes shakes her head slowly, now comes the hard part. Uncle O'Brian had tried to explain it to the local police with no luck. He had tried to contact the FBI and they didn't even respond to his letters.
"Uncle O'Brian insists on Kerry being an evil man capable of horrible acts of violence."
"What proof does he have?"
"A tattoo, well a kind of tattoo anyway."
"What do you mean?"
"When they found Kerry, he had several body paintings and one of them scared my uncle. When he asked Kerry about it, he said it was just a painting the Indians who he stayed with had given him, it was nothing important."
"Yes?" Hawk sits back again thinking that the uncle has been in the jungle too long, and has made a believer out of his poor niece as well.
"Well, a few months later my uncle was doing his rounds among the other villages and on the last day he arrived at the village farthest away from where he is stationed. It's almost three days by boat up river and the Indians living there are very difficult to work with because of their distrust of the white man. Anyway, in that village an elder, a man named Tuki and him were talking and my uncle mentioned the man they had found."
Holmes clears her throat and asks, "could I have some more water please?"
Hawk gets up and when he comes back with a new bottle, she says, "Tuki told my uncle that he remembered a man that fit the description, but he was much fatter when he met him and he had two younger people with him."
Hawk yawns and says, "so far I haven't heard anything that would make Kerry a maniac."
Holmes ignores his sarcastic comment and continues, "Tuki called to another man and when he arrived, my uncle was told this was the person who had guided Kerry and his companions through the jungle. He had gone hunting early one morning, and when he came back to their camp they were gone. He waited until the sun began to set and went back to the village. At least that’s the story he told his tribe."
Hawk can see how the day grows lighter outside and he takes a quick look at his watch, almost 6A.M.
"Do you mind if we continue this over breakfast, I'm hungry?"
They move into the kitchen and when Holmes has a cup of coffee in front of her, she says, "when my uncle asked about the tattoo he had seen on Kerry, Tuki took him to the Shaman. There my uncle drew it in the soil and when the Shaman saw it he went ballistic according to my uncle. He got up and started to dance around uttering what seemed like curses. It got so bad that Tuki had to have some of the men take the old man inside his hut and they returned to the village. Later Tuki explained that the Shaman had put a curse on everyone who was there at the time to protect them from the Skin People."
Hawk is cooking scrambled eggs and the aroma is making him even hungrier. He turns around and says, "some local boogie man scares the crap out of an old Shaman. Again, what does it have to do with Kerry?"
"It's here the story becomes interesting. Tuki told my uncle Kerry and his people were looking for a missing tribe. They had with them an old letter which described a town that supposedly had sunk during an earthquake several hundred years ago, and in this town lived a tribe called the Skin People."
"C'mon Holmes, you are an intelligent woman, educated and so on. You can't seriously believe this. What? Kerry and his companions met these Skin People and were abducted by them?"
Holmes begins eating as soon as Hawk puts a plate in front of her, and after a while she says, "no, what my uncle believes is that either Kerry killed his companions and ended up living with a tribe who continue with these cruel customs, or they all got snatched and for one reason or another Kerry didn't get killed."
"What customs are we talking about here?"
"Well, according to the old stories these people got their name because they flayed their victims as a sacrifice to their god."
"Flay, as in peeling the skin of them?"
"Yes, exactly like that."
Hawk is quiet for a while. He finishes his eggs and his coffee. Then he just stares out the window.
"What are you thinking?" asks Holmes, pushing her plate away.
He looks back at her and says, "I don't know what I think. Do I think it's possible a man who
was in the jungle for three years and wrote a best-selling book about the friendly tribe who took care of him can turn into a serial killer specializing in flaying his victims? No, I don't, I'm sorry Holmes. This is just too much."
"My uncle read his book, and he says there is not a single tribe in that part of the Amazon that fits what Kerry describes. He says it's an amalgam of several different tribes. He made them up."
"Why would he do that?"
She is quiet and sipping her coffee, and then says, " I have no idea, but I want to find out."
"Uh-huh, one last thing before you do. How come you came here, to Green Tree?"
"My uncle told me Kerry's name, and I spent considerable time looking for him. By accident I found his book on the internet while searching for him."
"So, all this about doing a thesis is bullshit?"
She smiles at him and says, "no, imagine if I'm right and Kerry is a serial killer, that would make one hell of a thesis, don't you think?"