Primal Fear

  “You would’ve been proud of me, Doc, I didn’t miss a trick. I came out just after dinner. Sneaked down and got a bunch of towels from the doc’s operating room and the gas can Hiram Melvin kept on his tractor. I knew they were gonna do it that night. Took us almost an hour to walk up there. The ground was good ’n’ hard so I wasn’t worried about the sheriff finding any footprints around. After a while, here they came. He hadn’t set the brakes good than they were in the back seat.”

  He stopped and opened his eyes, as if he were trying to focus on something beyond the room. He spoke more slowly, savoring every word.

  “Ten minutes. Ten minutes, the inside of the car looked like a fog settled in there. I sneaked down to the car, looked in the window. They were just getting started good. He had her sweater pulled up and I could see those big boobs of hers. His hand was up under her skirt and she was squirming around and moaning … a bomb coulda gone off, they wouldn’t of heard it.”

  He sat up and started acting out the story as he told it, his eyes transfixed. “I stuffed the towels real tight in the crack in the window and waited. After a while, I could hear him, grunting like a hog. They were breathing real heavy.” He stopped and laughed. “Using up that oxygen. She starts whimpering, then yelling.” He stopped for a moment.

  “Quite a show. A half hour passed. They’d stopped talkin’. Finally I took a quick peek. She was on top of him and they were both sound asleep, naked as they was born.

  “I opened the door real easy, the towels fell right in my hand.” He started acting out his narrative again. “I roll up the window, I turn off the radio so it don’t burn out the battery …” He revolved his hand and twisted the imaginary knob. He pushed an imaginary door closed with both hands. “I close the door and we go over and sit on a stump and stare at the car, listening to the engine humming. ’Seventy-one Chevy, that bastard Sam spent half his life tinkerin’ with it. Finally I got cold so I put two more gallons of gas in the tank from the can, just to make sure it wouldn’t stall out, and we went back down into the valley, ditched the towels and the can and went home. We were in bed when he came back out. Didn’t know shit until the sheriff came by in the morning.” He stopped still, staring at some point in infinity. “It was beautiful.”

  He abruptly jerked out of his almost trancelike state, his whispered voice suddenly laced with anger. “Except they made up that fucking story so nobody’d know what really happened.”

  “Made you mad, didn’t it?” Molly said sympathetically.

  “Everybody shoulda known.”

  “So you made sure that never happened again, didn’t you?” Molly said.

  “That’s right. Fuckin’-A. Fuckin’-A, Doc.”

  “Were Billy and Peter going to tell what was going on with the bishop?” she asked.

  “Billy and Peter! Shit.” His tone became derisive. “They woulda kept on doing it right up until he got him some new altar boys, which would’ve been soon because they were all too old anyways. He already had a new girl lined up. They would’ve clammed up. Or worse, like that freak Alex. Robin the Boy Wonder, my ass, the little fag, he woulda been next if Sonny hadn’t fucked up so bad.”

  “Aaron doesn’t want to talk about it either, isn’t that why you really came out the first time?”

  “He woulda jacked you around forever, Doc. Same as with Rebecca. He’ll never admit that.”

  “Why not?” Vail asked.

  “Because he liked it. Because he knew it was wrong but he liked it. Right or wrong, he fuckin’ liked it.”

  “Did you come out when he was making love to Rebecca?”

  “No such luck. I told you, he liked it. It screwed up his head but he handled it by himself. That’s why he won’t talk about it.” Then he unexpectedly changed the subject. “Is old Clarence Darrow here always gonna be along for the ride?”

  “Would you be more comfortable if Martin left?”

  “More comfortable … shiit. On this cot? Hell, I don’t mind if he’s here. He’s gonna watch the tape anyway—right, Clarence?”

  “Not unless you give me permission,” Vail said. “The tape is privileged information between you and Dr. Arrington.”

  “So why’d you watch the last one?”

  “She had to explain about you. Were you offended that I watched it?”

  “Nah. What the hell’s the dif? Don’t you have any questions, Clarence?”

  “Call me Martin. Or Marty.”

  “No sense of humor, huh?”

  “Sure. Tell me a joke and I’ll laugh.”

  Roy cackled at that. “You’re okay, Marty. No hard feelin’s.”

  “I do have a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “What happened to Billy and Peter?”

  He chuckled. “Jesus, you jump right past the main event, doncha?”

  “I figure you’ll tell us about it when you feel like it.”

  “I didn’t do nothin’ with them. I left them there. Nobody’ll find them for another week or two.”

  “How come?”

  “Place is closed. Always closes until late April. Even the caretaker’s off.” He turned on the cot and looked back at them. “Know what? I don’t think you think I did it. A mile past the diner, right on the lake,” he said. “When you find them, come back, we’ll talk some more.”

  “How did you get there?” Vail quickly asked.

  “The church pickup. They let us, use it all the time, never thought nothin’ about it. That’s all. Night, night.”

  He closed his eyes and his body suddenly sagged. A moment later his eyes fluttered open. He lay there staring at the ceiling for a moment, then said, “Yes ma’am, I know that one. It air one of my fayvrits. It’s from The Scarlet Letter.”

  “That’s very good, Aaron.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The town of Burgess was forty-five miles northwest of the city, a quaint lakeside resort town that bustled during the months between May and November, then settled into a quiet, lazy village during the winter months. Its four hotels and three lodges were shuttered from December through early April, except for an occasional party. Although sequestered just inside the King’s County line, Burgess paid little attention to county politics, set its own rules, and relied on the wisdom of three city councilmen and a curmudgeon of a mayor to maintain its autonomy. It was a clean, unstructured community whose eccentrically undefinable architecture contributed to its charm and whose twenty-five-hundred permanent residents were radically independent, politically conservative, gossipy by nature and cozily upper-middle-class, thanks to the upscale tourists who provided enough seasonal income to keep the town prosperous and comfortable year-round.

  The political seat of Burgess was the Lakeside Diner (a misnomer, since the lake was a half mile to the east), on the northern edge of town, which was owned by Hiram Brash, the mayor. In the off-season it was open from six A.M. until ten P.M., seven days a week. The city council met every Wednesday morning at ten A.M. in one of the back booths—anybody interested could crowd around.

  It was at just such a meeting that the town had agreed to permit the Rushman Foundation to purchase the old Wingate Lodge and turn it into a camp for the residents of Savior House. There was some grumbling about having “juvenile delinquents and druggies wandering all over the county,” but a letter from Archbishop Rushman had assured the locals that there would be no problems and indeed there had been none. Thus Wingate Lodge had become Wingate Shelter.

  It had taken Naomi Chance three days of calls to the American Hotel Association, travel agents, and other sources, checking out lakeside hotels and inns in the state that were closed during the months of February and March, before she had remembered the shelter. A call to the Burgess Chamber of Commerce had confirmed that there was, indeed, a diner in the town and that Wingate Shelter was “down the road and off to the right, next to the lake.” It fit Roy’s description: “A mile past the diner, right on the lake.” If Billy and Peter were to be found, it seemed as good a
place as any to start looking.

  Vail and Goodman arrived in the town a little after dark and stopped at the diner. Brash, a short, chubby, red-faced man in his early sixties with wisps of white hair decorating his florid scalp, put cups of coffee in front of them both.

  “Passing through?” he asked pleasantly.

  “How did you guess?” Goodman asked.

  “Been mayor of this town for eighteen years. My son’s chief of police. I know everybody in this end of the county, son. And since the hotels are all closed for the season and the motel’s full, you’re either visiting or passing through.”

  “That’s very astute,” Vail said with a smile.

  “Where you headed?”

  “Actually we’re heading back to the city,” said Goodman. “We’ve already been.”

  “I see. Are you eating this evening?”

  “Nope, just coffee to get us back to town.”

  “How come you’re not driving the interstate?”

  “More trouble than it’s worth this time of night,” said Goodman. “I don’t like driving bumper-to-bumper.”

  “You got a point there.”

  “Actually I used to come up here when I was a kid,” Goodman lied. “My family stayed at a lodge down by the lake. Uh, Winston Lodge, Winthrop Lodge …”

  “That’s the old Wingate place, right down the road here,” Brash said.

  “That’s it, Wingate. My dad used to hunt up around here. I was just a kid then.”

  “Yeah, that’d be twenty years ago,” the mayor said. “Hasn’t been a deer or bear around here for fifteen years. Price of progress.”

  “Where is that old lodge, anyway?” Goodman asked. “I remember it was a big place down by the lake.”

  “That’s right. About a mile down the road here. There’s stone posts on both sides of the road where you turn in. But it’s closed up right now. And Benny Hofstader, the caretaker, he’s down in Florida fishing. Won’t be back till next week.”

  “Is it really as big as I remember?” Goodman said, still fishing for information.

  “Hell, it’s bigger now. Place can sleep about thirty. Got a living room big as a stadium. After the Catholics took it over they fixed up the basement, too. Game room, TV room.” He leaned over and winked. “Pretty fancy for a bunch of runaway teenage dope fiends, you ask me.”

  “Well, maybe next time I come up I’ll run out there and take a look.”

  “Come back in the summer and spend a little time with us,” Brash said with a smile. “We love your money.”

  “Fair enough.”

  The road was an unlighted two-lane blacktop bordered by thick pine trees, so dark it seemed to swallow up the headlights. They would have missed the entrance to Wingate except that a full moon, just rising through the trees, etched the stone posts in gray. As Goodman turned up between them the headlights picked up a brass plaque that read:

  WINGATE SHELTER

  FOUNDED 1977

  BY THE RUSHMAN FOUNDATION

  The dirt road wound through a heavy forest for half a mile before they saw the dark, ominous, sprawling two-story structure framed by the moon’s reflection rippling on the lake.

  “Hell, they didn’t even leave a night-light on the place,” Goodman said.

  They parked near the front entrance and swept the place with their flashlights. A broad wooden deck surrounded the first floor of the big resort with a wide wooden staircase leading up to it. Beneath the deck, narrow windows opened into the basement. Large casement windows and French doors faced the lake and led from the deck into the first floor of the structure. They held their flashlights against windowpanes and peered inside. Fingers of light probed an enormous great room with a sweeping fireplace at one end.

  “Christ, you could burn a whole pine tree in that fireplace,” Goodman said.

  “And probably heat most of Burgess,” Vail agreed. “I’ll check all the windows and doors on this level. You check the basement windows.”

  “We could break a window,” Goodman suggested. “Wonder what you get in Burgess for B&E.”

  “If Roy’s been here, about twenty years,” Vail answered.

  Goodman went around the side of the building. The beam of his flashlight picked up a basement window. It was half-open. A tremor of apprehension swept through him, a moment of anxiety. The first clue that perhaps this was the place Roy was talking about and that Billy Jordan and Peter were inside.

  “Marty,” he called out. “You better come back here.”

  Their flashlights explored the basement. Slender shafts of light revealed a large room with old-fashioned desk-tables and two large television sets on a shelf at one end of the room. A large see-through fireplace separated the TV room from the adjacent game room. Except for cold, gray ashes and firewood remnants in the fireplace, it all seemed spotless. They scrambled over the sill and dropped down into the room.

  “It’s colder in here than it is outside,” Goodman said, his breath condensing in little swirls as he spoke.

  “It’s that cold wind blowing in off the lake,” said Vail. “Windchill’s probably below freezing. Comes straight in the window and settles down here.”

  Goodman walked through the television room and entered the game room through an arched doorway. As he did, something soft brushed against his leg and across his foot.

  “Shit!” he yelped, and fell back against the wall, his heart beating in his throat, his light searching the floor. A large raccoon ran past Vail and scampered up the stairs to the first floor. Goodman sighed.

  “I’m glad I don’t do this for a living,” he said. “I still don’t know why we didn’t let the cops handle this.”

  “What if it’s a false alarm?” Vail said. “How the hell would we explain it?”

  Goodman went into the game room. His light reflecting off the light walls cast an eerie glow in the large room. The rats came next. Flushed by the light, they came squealing from behind a sofa and dashed about seeking the darker comers of the room.

  “Jesus, it’s like a zoo down here!” Goodman cried.

  Vail did not answer immediately. He was immobilized. His eyes stared unblinking down the thin beam of his flashlight. It was focused on a hand which rose up from behind the sofa, its fingers bent as if clawing the air. The flesh was dark blue, almost black. He took a few steps closer to the couch and as he did he saw the rest of the arm, a petrified limb stretched straight up. Then the ray picked up the naked, bloated torso to which it was connected and then the face, or what was left of the face. Swollen beyond recognition, the eyes mere sockets; the cheeks, lips and jaw gnawed and torn by furry predators of the night; the gaping mouth a dark tunnel in what was an obscene facsimile of a once human visage. The throat was sliced from side to side, a gaping wound further mutilated by the creatures that had feasted upon it. He moved the light down the torso, past the stabs, cuts and incisions, past the vast sea of petrified blood, now black as tar, in which it lay, to the butchered groin. The fossilized corpse beside it was a smaller version of the same. Coffee surged into his throat and he had to swallow several times to get it back down.

  “Tommy,” Vail said hoarsely.

  “Yeah?” Goodman answered from across the room.

  “Naomi guessed right. This is the place.”

  It was nine o’clock when Abel Stenner got to the diner. He came in followed by Lou Turner, who took a seat at the counter near the door. Stenner walked back to the booth where Tommy and Martin were finishing dinner.

  “What’s the matter with Lou, is he feeling antisocial?” Vail said.

  “You said you wanted to have a private talk,” Stenner answered, staring at Goodman.

  “Hell, I just didn’t want you to show up with the National Guard,” Vail said, waving Turner back to the booth. The black sergeant joined them.

  “I can recommend the coffee,” Goodman said. “It was made sometime this year.”

  “I don’t have time for coffee.”

  “You may need it,”
Vail said.

  “What am I doing here, Vail?” Stenner asked. “This is way off my beat.”

  “You’re still in the county.”

  “I work for the city,” Stenner said.

  “Maybe the county’ll forgive you,” Vail said, lighting a cigarette.

  “Can we get to the point?” said Stenner. “The sign in front says they close in an hour. And do you mind not smoking, gives me a headache.”

  “I may have a bigger one for you,” said Vail, snuffing it out in a tin ashtray.

  Stenner leaned back in the booth and appraised him. He took off his wire-rim glasses and cleaned them with a paper napkin.

  “Okay, I’m listening,” he said.

  “This is just a guess, but I think you may be looking for a couple of Rushman’s altar boys—Billy Jordan and Peter, who doesn’t have a last name as far as we know.”

  “Why would I be interested in them?”

  “According to the bishop’s datebook, they had a meeting the night he was killed. Aaron was one of them.” Vail shrugged. “You don’t miss stuff like that, Abel.”

  “Peter’s name is Holloway,” Turner said. “He’s from Kansas City.”

  “Good homework,” said Goodman.

  “We went through his things at Savior House,” Stenner said. “Found a high school yearbook in the bottom of his footlocker. His foster parents couldn’t care less about him.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Vail.

  “You wouldn’t know about a kid named Alex, would you?” Turner asked.

  “We might,” said Vail.

  “We here to play twenty questions?” Stenner said stiffly.

  “Alex flew the coop,” Vail said. “Probably pearl diving someplace in Alaska about now.”

  “How about the girl?”

  “The girl’s out of the circuit. She doesn’t know anything about Rushman’s killing anyway.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She came to see me. But I have no idea where she is now.”