Apocalypse Island (10 page)

“He’s talking about ghosts, Rick.”

“He was just telling us what he saw.”

“I don’t need you lecturing me, Rick. I’ve been around way too long for that.”

“Then act like it. Myers is right. Your trash talk is inappropriate and I don’t want to hear any more of it out of your mouth.”

Jennings released his hold on the Detective’s shirt. Cavanaugh stumbled back almost falling. “This is his first body, Frank, and it’s not a very pretty one. You remember
your
first?”

“I remember I wasn’t blubbering like a fucking baby.”

“Sounds like you’re due for a nice little vacation, old buddy.”

“Nine out of ten of these young guys coming onto the force today have this idiotic, romantic notion about what this job’s all about,” Cavanaugh said. “We’re nothing but garbage collectors! That’s reality.”

“It may be your reality,” Myers said, wiping dusty tears from his face with the back of his hand. “Not mine.”

“Will you grow up, for Christ’s sake,” Cavanaugh said. “Look at you. Sniveling like some snot-nosed little fuck.”

“You know something, Frank?” Jennings said. “You are one cold-hearted son of a bitch.”

Cavanaugh smiled but there wasn’t an ounce of mirth in it.

“You like being an asshole, don’t you, Frank?”

“Oh yeah, Rick, I’m just having a fucking vacation here.”

“Let me tell you something,” Jennings said, pointing an unsteady finger at the detective. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but as long as the city’s issuing your paycheck and as long as I’m your supervisor you’d better clean up your attitude. No one around here is exempt from the rules, not even you. When the day comes you don’t think you can handle the job—”

“It’s not me who can’t handle the job.”

“Enough!” Jennings said with cold finality.

Cavanaugh glared at him.

“Okay,” Jennings said. “Listen up. We’re wasting time. I want you guys to spread out and comb the area. I don’t know what we’re looking for. There’s a lot of junk out there, but if you find anything even remotely suspicious leave it alone and mark the site. Take your time. When in doubt, assume it’s a clue. I’ll stay here and wait for the crime lab. Now let’s get going.” The three uniformed officers trudged off toward the landfill.

“You too, Frank.”

Cavanaugh glared at Jennings before turning away and following the other three officers.

Chapter 21

Jennings leaned against the car and lit a cigarette with hands that shook. The first drag caused a spasm of uncontrollable coughing that began in his solar plexus and moved up through his lungs, nearly bending him over with pain. When it was over he eyed the cigarette with disdain before flicking it away. He knew he had to quit. He just didn’t know when that day would come.

Maybe when you’re dead of cancer,
this nagging little voice said.
First the booze now the butts. Next it’ll be steak and potatoes. A fine fucking how-do-you-do.

He pushed the voice aside and thought about Cavanaugh, about the way he had acted. The son-of-a-bitch. He was his friend, had been for a lot of years, but he was one of the most stone-hearted bastards Jennings had ever known. He was more than likely having trouble with Kate again. Every time the man had a fight with his wife he came to work wearing an ugly suit. The fucker had a real problem controlling his anger and always ended up taking it out on somebody.

But Jennings couldn’t think about that now. He needed to focus on these murders. His thoughts went to the dead woman in the pool of stagnant water. How undignified she would feel if she could indeed feel. Ah, but she was beyond feeling or caring, wasn’t she? He wondered, not for the first time, about death. When you were a homicide detective you spent a lot of time thinking about death. How incredibly easy it was to die, how when you were least expecting it, death had a way of coming out of nowhere and snatching the life right out of you. He supposed that this was as good a place as any for death to happen. A place where people discarded things they no longer needed or cared for. But even as he was thinking these thoughts he knew that leaving her in a pool of stagnant water hadn’t been the killer’s intention. No, Jennings knew instinctively that the killer had intended to hang the victim from that pole over there like some crucified Christ thing. But if the killer was acting alone then he would have to be very strong to do something like that.
Maybe he wasn’t acting alone.
The thought sent a chill through him.

Jennings left his place against the side of his car and slowly covered the distance between the body and the telegraph pole. There were tire tracks and human tracks everywhere. And junk. So much junk.

He looked down. In the dry soil there was one set of impressions that intrigued him. They were obviously made during or just after that hard rain several nights before because they were sunk deeply into the soil. Now they were dry and ridged. He got down and inspected them.
No, impossible,
he thought. He could tell they were made with some sort of rubber or synthetic sole because of the small wavy, yet worn pattern. But that’s not what bothered him. What bothered him was their size. They were the biggest feet he’d ever seen. Perhaps a size sixteen, maybe larger. The feet of a giant. There were very few people with a shoe size that large. Again he remembered a cold case from five years ago and his blood ran cold.

He followed the impressions. There were quite a few of them, back and forth, almost to the pole and then back toward the body, and then back toward the pole again. He followed them beyond the pole until he came to the wide ditch where the railroad tracks ran. Beyond the ditch there was a field of tall, yellow swale grass, now blowing in the breeze looking like a carefully executed impressionist painting. It was at least two hundred yards across the field to the main road where cars sped and trucks roared.

He decided not to cover the distance himself. He did not want to leave the body. Forensics could handle it. He came to a stop. At his feet there were three distinct coils of what appeared to be nylon rope. They’d been walked on by the giant footprints and were partially pushed into the dry soil.
Could it be?
Although they were coiled, they looked to be about the right length. Maybe three or four feet in length each. Just the right size to strap a person’s arms and legs to a pole. Unlike all the other junk around, the rope looked relatively new.

Jennings did not touch it. Instead he went back to his car, leaned against the door and waited. 

He thought of what Myers had said about the ghost woman, and a shudder worked through him.
Unfinished business.
Yes, that’s what Myers had said. And that’s exactly the way he, Jennings had felt at the first crime scene when he’d seen essentially the same sort of phenomenon Myers had described. He had not mentioned it to anybody, basically because he had refused to believe his own eyes. Now he wasn’t so sure. This was turning out to be the most surreal case he had ever worked on. He watched his men comb the landfill in the distance where above and around them seagulls shrieked as they glided on the chill morning air.

Chapter 22

The hackles rose on the back of his neck. He felt static run in the hairs on his arms as something flickered across his vision. One minute it was there, gauzy, shimmering, and in the next it was gone. A feeling of dread washed through him. Whatever he’d felt, or seen, it was not good.

Jennings blinked then shook his head, feeling slightly off kilter. A twist of wind scooted past him and the air filled with dust. He held his breath. The dust swirled around him. He squeezed his eyes almost closed, but did not dare shut the world out completely.

Then he saw her over near the body. The same apparition he’d seen at the last crime scene, and what would appear to be the exact same apparition Myers had described moments ago. She was beautiful; a tall, slim woman in a clinging white gown with dark hair. Her eyes were black and staring. Looking into them made Jennings’s heart ache.

“Who are you?” he asked, his voice a soft murmur. “Why are you here? What are you trying to tell me?” Her expression turned cold and afraid, the terror on her face palpable. He saw her mouth open as if to scream but no sound came out.

“Please.” he said. “If you know something about this, tell me.” The apparition did not answer him. He took a couple of tentative steps toward her. A strong gust of wind fragmented her image. “No” he said. “Don’t go away.” But it was too late. She was gone.

He stood frozen in place as a single sheet of paper, swept up by the insufflation came to a stop against his left shoe. He stooped, picked it up, and read. It was an advertisement flier for a local rock band known as
Bad Medicine.
Jennings’ blood turned cold as he stared at the flier. The photograph showed the four band members standing against an old wall of soiled bricks, their indifferent expressions typical for a group of serious rock ’n rollers. But the most striking thing about the band’s trademark image was the giant and jagged cross painted in red on the wall behind them as though it was an open and suppurating wound in the flesh of some gigantic creature.

Jennings recognized the young man at the center of the photo. His name was Danny Wolf. He’d had a run in with the law five years back and had spent time in the state penitentiary.

“Are you involved in this?” whispered Jennings as he stared almost trancelike at Wolf’s image. He could not pull his gaze away. Wolf’s eyes seemed to change, to darken as though the image in the photograph was alive. Jennings grunted in revulsion and dropped the flier. The wind gusted and carried it away. He looked back to where he’d seen the ghost of the young woman. “Did you put this here?” he asked the now empty space. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

Just your imagination,
he thought, but did not believe it for a moment. His hands were cold and shaking. He put them in his pockets to warm them. Jennings liked Wolf, had even stepped out a few times to see the kid play. He was pretty good, too, if you could stand the night scene these days. There seemed to be a new sub-culture in town. Portland’s night scene had become a haven for what they were calling night-people or club goths. They were just kids, of course, searching for their own identities. They dressed up in these dark costumes and wore a lot of heavy black makeup. Some of them even painted what looked like blood on their mouths and dark circles around their eyes. Just like the dead girl in the pool over there. Christ, they all looked like fucking zombies or vampires or dead people. What was the attraction with death? What was this world coming to? No wonder they were being targeted. The typical goth—either guy or girl—usually sported a lot of metal piercings, tattoos and weird haircuts. Some even wore vials of real blood on chains around their necks. God knows what they used it for. Jennings didn’t want to think about that.

The girls wore black lingerie that was almost always sexually revealing in some way. Lingerie was becoming the outerwear of the new century. Jennings knew that the internet had a lot to do with this strange new sub-culture that was sweeping the country, hell, probably the world. The internet was filled with sites that celebrated everything from witchcraft to vampirism. These impressionable kids were perfect prey for anyone smart enough or sick enough to take advantage of their experimentations. The thought sent a shiver up his spine. With the rapid erosion of organized religion in recent years he couldn’t help but think that young people today were lost and searching. And they were so impressionable, so vulnerable. He guessed everybody was searching for something. Part of being human, he supposed.

A sudden and strong gust of wind came up and the air was filled with flying sheets of paper, all of them the same advertisement for the same band,
Bad Medicine.
A half dozen of them landed at Jennings’s feet in a neat little stack. He watched mystified as the wind picked them up one by one, sorted them, and scaled them into the dunes, leaving just one flapping against his pant leg. Jennings bent down and picked it up, folded it and dropped it in his pocket.

The gust of wind died.

Stillness reclaimed the morning.

Jennings breathed shallowly.

Something was happening. He sensed that the strange apparition, the wind, and all of the band circulars had some malevolent and ominous meaning. Irrationally he was sure that someone or something was still watching him. He looked up and down the landfill, at the bleakness of wind-blown sand dunes, at the dank pools of polluted water, at the giant mounds of rotting trash with seagulls floating on the wind above them.

There’s nothing to fear here,
he told himself, even as some foreign species of terror washed through him like a cold tide. He realized that he was holding his breath. He let it out with a harsh rasp.

Then it was over.

Something had passed near him, he was sure of it. Something that felt very much like evil; he’d felt its iciness, its emptiness, its eternity. And he’d seen something he could not explain, and now he had evidence that another police officer had seen the same thing. Perhaps he wasn’t crazy after all. He continued to scan the landfill but saw only his men doing as they’d been told to do, obediently searching for the clues to death.

“Was it you?” he asked the corpse. “Were you trying to tell me something? Who did this to you? I wish you could talk to me.”

Chapter 23

It was early afternoon by the time the crime scene investigators finished their work. The air had warmed slightly, but the wind had picked up to nearly gale force and the western sky was marbled with purple and black clouds. The smell of rain was in the air.

The body had been moved to the downtown morgue where there would be a more thorough examination and the medical examiner could perform an autopsy. Impressions had been taken of the oversized footprints. The trail had been followed all the way out through the swale of deep yellow grass to the main road where it had vanished. It was assumed that the person was either picked up by a car or walked along the blacktop, because the trail ended there.