You’re as paranoid as your old man! For God’s sake, the guy behind you was just running like mad to get out of this miserable weather. There’s nothing scary about that. Get over yourself!
For a second she thought the guy might have been Brian—his build was about right—but then why wouldn’t Brian try to catch up with her? Why would he turn away and head into the shadows? No, that didn’t make any sense.
And where was Brian anyway, she wondered, more than a little irritated. Pushing open the door, she tried not to be angry. There was probably a perfectly good reason why he hadn’t returned her phone calls.
“Jerk,” she muttered under her breath.
Running up two flights of steps, she swabbed the rain from her face, then yanked her cell phone from her pocket. She flipped it open. Nope. No one had called, not since her dad had phoned to tell her he was running late.
Great.
The door to her room was open and Lucretia was lying on her bottom bunk, flipping through a new copy of Modern Bride. Kristi recognized the magazine and wanted to puke. All Lucretia ever did was study and dream of graduating so she could get married. Rather than make a nasty comment, Kristi bit her tongue and began peeling off her wet jacket and jeans. “Anyone call?” she asked, squeezing the water from her ponytail as she searched her microcloset for something dry to put on.
“Yeah. Jay.” Lucretia was sipping a Diet Coke and munching on Cheetos as she eyed a page displaying several different elaborately decorated cakes.
Kristi cringed.
“He wants to know when you’re getting home.”
“You talked to him?” Kristi asked, catching sight of her reflection in the mirror. Her skin was red from the cold, her hair starting to frizz. “Why didn’t you let him leave a message?
“I didn’t think, just picked up the phone without checking caller ID.” At Kristi’s sour expression, Lucretia rolled her eyes. “Sorry. But he still thinks he’s your boyfriend, you know. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal.” She lifted a dismissive shoulder as she crunched another Cheeto. “He wants you to call him back.”
“I think I’ll wait until I get home.”
“Whatever.” Disinterested, Lucretia licked the cheese from her lips.
“Anyone else?”
“Nope.” Lucretia looked up with that smug expression that really got under Kristi’s skin. “No one. Not even Brian.”
Kristi didn’t comment, but she couldn’t wait to go home and get away from her holier-than-thou roommate. Lucretia didn’t smoke, drink, do drugs, or even listen to any music other than some Christian station. Just dreamed of being a wife and mother. BO-ring. Checking her watch Kristi wondered when the hell her dad would show up.
Bentz parked on the outside of the gate. As he climbed out of his Jeep, he flashed his badge at a deputy from the Sheriff’s Department who was standing guard. Beyond the sagging old fence was an abandoned grist mill.
Montoya had been talking to other officers. He “broke away from the cluster standing in the rain, and waved Bentz in.
“What’ve we got?” Bentz asked.
“Two Jane Does. Both dead.” Montoya was sucking hard on a cigarette. His jacket was shiny with rainwater, his features stretched taut in the gathering darkness. Twilight had descended rapidly in this farming community an hour out of the city. The rain didn’t let up, just kept pummeling the ground and running off the bill of Bentz’s Saints’ cap. “I got a call from a friend of mine in the Sheriff’s Department and drove over,” Montoya said, “A couple of kids found the bodies.” He motioned to two boys huddled with an officer and an older woman.
“What were they doin’ here?”
“Huntin', though that was behind their mother’s back.” Montoya blew out a stream of smoke. “They got more than they bargained for.”
Bentz glared at the mill. The building looked like something straight out of an old horror flick. The windows were boarded over, the cement walls blacked with age. Vines and brambles crawled toward the roof while moss dripped over what remained of the eaves. Part of an old mill wheel sat unmoving in a stream that angled into the darkness.
“Who’s the owner?” Bentz asked.
“We’re still digging, but the sheriff thinks the mill’s owner lives out of state.”
“He got a name?”
“We’re still checking. Locals refer to this place as ‘The Old Kay1er Place.’ Someone named Kayler with roots in the Civil War owned the land a hundred and fifty years ago. The name stuck. The mill came along later but hasn’t been operational for a generation or two, probably closed up around World War II sometime. The nearest neighbors are half a mile away.”
“Convenient.”
“And not as dangerous as the shotgun house off of Esplanade.”
“Or an apartment in the Garden District.”
Bentz swept his gaze over the exterior again. The place was already crawling with law enforcement personnel. Klieg lights trained bluish illumination on the crumbling walls. Beams from hand-held flashlights bobbed and cut through the shadows as officers, searching every inch of wet, soggy ground, moved slowly through the tall grass, scrub oaks, and brush.
“Did you question the kids?” Bentz asked, sending a glance at the boys.
“Yeah. They don’t know much.”
“I’ll want to talk to them once I’ve gone inside.” Bentz looked back at the mill. Yellow tape surrounded the building. “The scene’s been preserved?”
“Best as they could.”
“No ID on the victims.” It wasn’t a question.
“Never that easy,” Montoya said. “At least not with this killer. We’ll take prints and pictures, blood, and we’ve always got dental records.”
Bentz hiked his collar against the rain. “Let’s see what’s inside.”
“It ain’t pretty.” Montoya ground out his smoke, picked up the butt, and stuffed it in his pocket.
Bentz braced himself as he walked past two detectives who were searching the muddy lane for tire tracks. Another was sweeping the area with a harsh, intense light.
“You’re pretty sure it’s our guy?” Bentz asked.
“No doubt.” They walked through a sagging doorway and the stench of death hit Bentz as hard as a fist to the gut. Fetid and rank, the smell was overlaid by another strong odor, the metallic scent of fresh blood.
Inside, rats scurried out of their path and Bentz clenched his teeth as he got his first view of the scene. His stomach tried to revolt, just as it always did. He fought the urge to vomit and forced himself to study the area.
In the center of a large room the murder had taken place. A woman’s nude, decapitated body was still strapped to a grotesque, spiked wheel. Blood covered the dirty floor and atop a long workbench, posed upon an overturned, rusted bucket, was her head. Her eyes were closed, a piece of bloody hair missing. “Jesus,” Bentz whispered as he spied a chain encircling the stump that had once been her neck. The thin chain draped over the pail. A medal dangled from the fragile links.
“Let me guess. St. Catherine of Alexandria.”
“Yep.”
Bentz’s back teeth ground. “Hell.”
“Our man is one sick, sick bastard,” Montoya said over the hum of a vacuum that was being wielded by a member of the crime scene and was used to suck up and trap potential evidence. A photographer snapped still shots of the body and surrounding area from all angles. Another photographer used a video camera. Flashes of light strobed, offering glimpses of musty interior walls veined by black rivulets, stains from years of rainwater and filth seeping through the roof.
“Homey, huh?” Montoya mocked, his own gaze traveling over the scene. “You think he could pick anyplace more macabre?”
“Not if he tried, which, I think he does.”
Montoya was squatting now, staring at the plywood wheel. “Someone had to make this gizmo,” he said. “It’s nothing you can pick up at the local five-and-dime.”
“Or on ebay.”
&nbs
p; “So either our killer has a workshop and a truck to haul this thing, or he built it here, or he bought it from someone who has a talent for creating instruments of torture.” Montoya leaned farther down and rotated his head, shining the beam of his flashlight on the underside of the wheel.
“I’m betting he built it here. It’s isolated. He cut some thick plywood, drilled a few holes, put in the biggest spikes he could find, and mounted the whole damned thing on a revolving turret of some kind.”
“It looks like an old wheel balancer, you know the kind they use in garages when they’re putting on tires.”
“So you just give it a push and it starts spinning.” Bentz joined Montoya as the younger cop illuminated the underpinnings, which included an axle screwed into a concrete block. Metal arms supported the blood-stained plywood. Bentz’s jaw tightened. “So he’s a handyman.”
“How do you know about this kind of thing?”
“Because I built one that was similar. Instead of spikes, mine had pegs and was used for a school carnival when Kristi was about ten. The kids spun the wheel to try and win some kind of cheap prize, you know whistles, balloons, toy trucks, and all that useless crap.”
“Like on The Price is Right.”
“Well, yeah, but it was called The Wheel of Fortune. ”
“Vanna would be proud.”
“If you say so,” Bentz said, not cracking a smile. “But here we’ve got the goddamned Wheel of Pain.”
“Built by a handyman priest.”
“Who can get his hands on old garage parts as easily as saints’ medals.” Bentz straightened and noticed a large mirror hung on the far wall. The glass was smooth and unbroken, without much dust on the surface. Unlike every other surface in the room. Everything else was covered in a thick, grainy layer of grime. “What’s with this?” he asked, but as the words left his mouth, he knew. “Our boy likes to watch himself while he’s working.”
“Shit.” Montoya scoped out the scene. “You’re right. He’s a damned egomaniac.”
“Or Narcissus. Has it been dusted for prints?”
“Of course,” a woman officer said, her feathers ruffling a bit as if Bentz had indicated she and the rest of the team were lax. Wearing latex gloves, she was carefully going over every surface. “Everything has.” She muttered something under her breath about “big-city cops” and went about her business.
Bentz didn’t let her get to him. “Let’s try to find out who manufactured the mirror,” he said to Montoya. “Maybe we can come up with someone who purchased something like this in the last month or so—same with the parts on the wheel over there and with the medals. Some of the saints are pretty common, but where would a guy get a St. Catherine of Alexandria medal?”
“Over the Internet or in one of those stores that sells religious crap, probably.” Montoya rubbed his goatee. “And the wheel mount. Maybe a garage is missing one. But it looks old, not like the ones that are hooked to computers that they’ve got today.”
“Not every garage in Louisiana is computer friendly. Unless it’s been filed off, that piece of equipment should have some serial numbers we can trace.”
Bentz scanned the scene once more and noticed a thick pool of blood beneath the wheel, one where there was more blood splattered than around the rest of the perimeter. Obviously the victim had been at that spot in her rotation, right in front of the mirror, when the killer had sliced off her head. Just so the sick bastard could watch himself as he slashed down with his blade. He probably got off on the image.
Again Bentz felt the urge to toss his dinner, but swallowed hard. “Any sign of a weapon?”
“Not that we’ve found so far.” Montoya was still sweeping the mirror with the beam of his flashlight, its bright glare reflected harshly in the glass.
“You said there was another victim.”
“Oh, yeah …” Using the bright beam to point to a doorway, Montoya led Bentz through a short, dark hallway to another much smaller silo-like room, originally, Bentz guessed, used for storage.
“Jesus!” he whispered as he spied the victim.
Chained to one chipped wall were the remains of a woman, no doubt the woman who had been sacrificed last summer on the feast day of St. Philomena, though her body was so decomposed no one would be able to visually ID her. What parts of her the rats and other scavengers hadn’t eaten or dragged away, the heat and maggots had taken care of. Bentz held a handkerchief to his face. This was the crypt Olivia had seen, the tomb.
Once again the victim’s head had been severed and it, like the head in the other room, rested atop a rusted bucket. A tiny chain with a medal dangling from what had been her neck glittered in the beam of the flashlight.
The cornerless room was just as Olivia had described, the writing on the wall in big block letters: LUMENA PAXTE CUM FI. Around the letters were the symbols that his brother had explained, the arrows, palm, lilies, anchor, fire, and a scourge.
“Peace be to you, Philomena,” Bentz muttered.
“Hardly,” Montoya said, scratching his goatee. “The letters are written in what looks like blood, rather than the red paint that was described in the book on saints that I read. My guess? The victim’s blood. If what Olivia Benchet says is true, that our man kept the victim here for a long period, then he had to cut her and get blood from her body in order to write his message and fill that.” He pointed to a small pottery vial left on the floor.
Bentz had to agree.
“And get this, the head’s been messed with.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s been moved. We’re working on the theory that it fell or was dragged off the bucket, probably by some animal. There’s a disturbance in the dust on the table, some blood and hairs and pieces of dried flesh, but it looks like the head was returned to its original resting spot on the pail. Probably by the killer. He must’ve come back here to build his wheel or drag the latest victim here and checked on his earlier work.Then put things back the way he wanted them.”
“The way he wanted us to find them,” Bentz added.
“Exactly. This prick is proud of his work. Thinks he’s a damned artist.”
Bentz didn’t like it. Didn’t like it at all. It was as if the killer were mocking them, taunting them. “Hell.” He glanced around the room, searching for the mirror. It didn’t take long, but in this case he found not one, but five narrow full-length panels mounted on one curved wall. “Someone took his time. Look. The spaces between the mirrors are precise, the alignment perfect.”
“The guy wants things just so.”
“And to see himself in 3D.”
On the wall directly opposing the mirrors the victim’s chains had been bolted into a thick wooden post. “This is why Olivia only saw fragments,” Bentz said. “I thought it was because she was in and out of Louisiana, because she was so far away, but her images were split.”
“Because of the curvature of the wall. He couldn’t get a big panel that would fit.”
“Son of a bitch.” Bentz eyed the thin strips of reflective glass. “Let’s check with the manufacturer and distributor, then any outlet in the state or over the Internet. It would be odd for an individual to buy five identical mirrors. We’ll go back to summer. Before August eleventh. Maybe we’ll get lucky,” he thought aloud, for the first time sensing there might be a way to track this guy down. “We’ll cross-check anyone who bought mirrors, saints’ medals, priest vestments, ski wear, tools, and weapons.”
“That’ll be easy,” Montoya remarked.
“Maybe easier than you think,” Bentz said as they made their way through the short hallway and larger room to the outside. The rain was sheeting, glistening in the beams of the klieg lights and headlights from the surrounding vehicles. “The FBI should be able to help.” He glanced at Montoya. “Where the hell are they?”
“On their way.”
Bentz strode to the cruiser where the kids who’d found the bodies and a woman pushing forty were huddled beneath a couple of u
mbrellas. In hooded sweatshirts, jeans, and hiking boots, the boys looked scared to death. “Kenny and Donny Sawtell,” Montoya introduced, “and their mother, Linda. This is Detective Bentz.” Montoya motioned to the older of the two brothers. “Why don’t you tell Detective Bentz what happened?”
The boys, around eleven and twelve, were white as sheets. They seemed as worried about talking to the cops as they were scared by the gruesome scenes they’d viewed. The older one, Kenny, did most of the talking, but Donny backed him up, for the most part nodding. The story was simple. The boys, who lived about three miles down the main road, had been out hunting behind their mother’s back. Packing twenty-twos and following Roscoe, the family’s dog, they’d tracked a deer through the woods to the old mill, where they’d ignored the “No Trespassing” sign and slipped through a hole in the fence. Roscoe had smelled something, so they’d broken into the building, thinking it would make a “cool” fort or hideout. Then they’d been scared out of their wits. They’d run home, told their mom, and Linda had called the local authorities.
“You’ve been here before?” Bentz asked and both boys shook their heads vigorously. Despite the umbrella and hoods, rain dripped down their noses.
“We never crossed the road before,” Kenny asserted and Donny nodded his agreement. “Not up here anyways….”
“Never poked around the old mill?”
“No, sir.”
“So you’ve never seen anyone else around here, cars or trucks, maybe ones you don’t recognize, or maybe some you did?” Again, in unison, the boys shook their heads. Bentz lifted his eyebrows. “What about you?” he asked the mother.
“Never. I rarely come down this way. It’s not on any of the routes I take to work or to the boys’ school.” Her hair was beginning to frizz in the rain and she had an arm around each of her son’s shoulders. As if she were afraid he was going to haul them both into jail for trespassing. “I’m usually going east or south. Not north. And even if I take the main road, I don’t go by here.”
Bentz believed her. The turnoff to the mill had to be a quarter-mile off a country road that angled away from the main highway. The mill was so far off the beaten track, probably no one but the old-timers in the local populace knew about it.