Apocalypse Island (20 page)

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Jennings said. “But you’re the one who called me, remember?”

“You got anything for me on the ‘Cross My Heart’ killings, Rick?”

Jennings sighed. “No, I’m afraid I don’t. Not yet anyway. But you’ll be the first to know when I do.”

“I bet I will.”

“I’m a little confused about something,” Jennings said.

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“How did you know that two of those nuns worked at St. Francis? And do you think it’s relevant?”

“It just might be.”

“How so?”

“I’m not sure yet. I’m still working on it. That good enough?”

“Oh I get it,” Jennings said. “You’re interested in a quid pro quo.”

“I figure what I gave you is worth something.”

“Just what do you know about Apocalypse Island?” Jennings asked.

After a short moment of silence Wilder said, “Listen, Rick, I’m taking a huge risk here. The part about Apocalypse Island won’t be in the piece.”

“Why not?”

“My editor won’t allow it.
He
says it’s not relevant.”

“So why are we talking?”

“I’m a little nervous,” she said, her voice catching in her throat as if she was choking back emotion. “I wanted you to know. Just in case...”

“Are you okay, Ms. Wilder?”

“Call me Seph.”

“Okay...Seph. Tell me what’s going on.”

“It’s just a feeling.”

“Like maybe you’re getting too close to something?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Does your editor know who your source is?”

“I told him the same thing I told you and he went ballistic.”

“Are you sure about the information?”

“As sure as I can be. When it comes to that island, truth is hard to come by.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” Jennings said. “Maybe we should get together and talk face to face.”

“I’d like that,” Wilder said. “Tell you what, give me a day or so and I’ll see what else I can dig up. Maybe by then you’ll have something for me and we can do some dealing. How’s that sound?”

“Be careful, Seph,” Jennings said as he hung up the phone.

Chapter 42

He couldn’t stop thinking about Seph Wilder, about the way her voice had caught in her throat when she’d told him she was nervous about the information she’d received. He tried to put it aside so that he could concentrate on the night ahead, but he wasn’t having much success.

Laura showed up at his apartment at quarter to eight. Spooky, Jennings’s elderly black cat lounged on the back of an easy chair. Laura went over and gave the cat some special attention, Spooky responding by arching her back, whipping her tail about and purring loudly. Jennings had rescued Spooky from the downtown shelter a few months after Molly’s death and he had never once regretted the decision. She’d provided company and comfort when Jennings had needed it most, in those dark days and endless nights when the despair had threatened to drag him to hell.

The wire was a simple but effective device that was easily concealed beneath Laura’s little black dress. Thank God for modern technology. Jennings put the earpiece in his ear and tested the device. It worked well. He told her how beautiful she looked, warned her to be extra cautious and sent her on her way.

He knew she was a good cop, nevertheless, he felt increasingly uneasy about asking her to do a job he didn’t trust anyone in his own department to do.

After she left she spoke to him occasionally to confirm that the device was still working. If he stopped hearing her he was supposed to call her cell phone.

Even so, Jennings was increasingly uneasy.

He spent a few moments petting Spooky while staring at his locked liquor cabinet, gazing at the bottles of booze behind the glass, knowing that keeping them there in the open was the best possible thing he could do for his addiction. More than once he’d been accused of being a sadist, the way he constantly tested his own resolve. It had been like this since his downward spiral following Molly’s death. But he’d known from day one that it was the only way. AA would never work for a guy like him. He hated the whole idea of it. They were a bunch of sorry whiners who took themselves and their silly pledges way too seriously. Most went back to the booze eventually anyway. So what the hell was the point? He’d never attended an AA meeting and he never would.

So he suffered alone. And sometimes, when things got tough, like they were now, it took everything he had to not unlock that door.

He went to his desk and sat down in front of the computer. He entered his private pass key and pulled up everything there was on the killings, including the grisly photographs of Janet Owen strapped to a cross-shaped tombstone and Amy Salinger lying in a pool of filthy water at the city landfill. He looked at autopsy photos, crime scene photos, reports from the crime lab and the coroner. He reread statements from friends, family and acquaintances, interviews with tattoo artists, club owners, bouncers and musicians. He studied everything about the victims, the symbolism, the similarities and differences, the fact that neither seemed to have been sexually assaulted, and then he studied them some more. And he thought about what he’d seen—or what he thought he’d seen—at both crime scenes.

What he came up with was the stuff he already knew, that the only known common thread was Danny Wolf, who’d had a sexual relationship with both victims. But there was absolutely no forensic evidence linking Wolf to either crime.

The thing that struck him most, above everything else, was that the murders seemed unnaturally contrived, as if the killer wanted the world to know he was out there and open for business. These weren’t crimes meant to be hidden away or buried in a deep grave never to be uncovered. Just the opposite, actually. These killings were blatant and open. The killer was saying “look at me. I’m smart and thorough and there’s a reason for what I’m doing. I dare you to figure out what it is. I dare you to catch me.”

Jennings groaned. Next he went back five years to the woman found on the walking trail at Falmouth Park.

The revelation that Wolf had probably known her, or at least knew who she was, had been a real shocker. But he couldn’t talk about that, could he? He couldn’t even consider it in the investigation, because officially the woman hadn’t been murdered, she’d died of a heart attack. It killed him that no one would ever face justice for murdering her.

Her death didn’t even warrant front page news, just a small mention on the obit page. Yet, he and others on the force knew beyond a doubt that she had been brutally murdered. Killed in exactly the same way as these two latest victims. Had the killer wanted that one to be put on public display as well? Jennings thought that he probably had, but some twist of fate had caused members of a clandestine government agency to intervene and bury the truth.

Why? What actually had gone down that night? And was Wolf really at the heart of this whole mess?

It was bugging the shit out of him that he didn’t know. And it was killing him that he had never been allowed to carry out a proper investigation of that woman’s death. What did Robeson know? What did Cavanaugh know? What did the local Catholic archdiocese know? Who else knew? And why were they hiding evidence that could bring a killer to justice? The implications of these questions sent chills down his spine.

And now he wasn’t sure if the murdered nuns in Peaks Mills had simplified the case or complicated it. Instinct told him that there was a connection between those murders and the murders here in the city. Somehow it all led back to Apocalypse Island. But instinct wasn’t enough, was it? He needed some solid evidence.

Jennings sent out a couple of email inquiries and went back to searching the web.

Chapter 43

Bad Medicine,
Danny Wolf’s band, played that night in a dark and sprawling cellar in the Old Port section of Portland’s waterfront district—a place known simply as The Cavern Club, a name that harked back to the early sixties Hamburg, Germany and a then little-known pop group that would change the world.

In an era when heavily synthesized dance pop music with its speaker shattering low-end pulses dominated the club scene everywhere it was rare that a traditional band could draw in such a crowd and generate so much excitement.

As usual, The Cavern Club was packed with a variety of offbeat patrons that ran the gamut from purple-haired, seventies-style punks to more than its share of darkly attired club goths, vamps and Marilyn Manson wannabes.

Danny Wolf was on stage going through the motions but his heart wasn’t really with the program. The combination of heavy drinking and sleepless nights had caused his body to lose some weight in recent weeks, and along with the weight he’d begun to lose the power in his singing voice and the sharp conviction that was the unique signature of his rhythm guitar playing. All he could think about were the dead girls and the horrifying possibilities their deaths posed.

It seemed that most of the crowd did not know or care about Wolf’s fears or inadequacies. They were here simply for the celebration and the eclectic energy that was a part of Portland’s burgeoning night-scene.

For the last song of the second set the band tore into
Can’t Stop the Music,
an original Danny Wolf song, a scorching pop/blues number that had recently been recorded.  It was getting a fair amount of airplay on local radio and had gone viral across the internet. The snare drum, hammered precisely on the back-beat, was making a sound like an ax splitting firewood. The bass guitar’s low, dissonant notes blended so closely with the hypnotic thumping of the kick drum that one got the feeling they were the same pulsing instrument. In the opening lines the lead guitar slashed through the rhythm section like audible lasers, Mike Stilton’s nimble fingers gliding effortlessly up and down the fingerboard of his sunburst Fender Telecaster.

In the two-plus months since Danny Wolf had replaced Johnny Redman as
Bad Medicine’s
front man, the band’s following had grown dramatically. The bars they played were packed every night. Part of it was Wolf’s songwriting abilities, but the biggest reason for this resurgence in popularity—everybody connected with the band knew—was Wolf’s good looks and charismatic stage presence coupled with his infectious singing voice. He was a natural tenor with a powerful voice that was smooth as glass, yet amiably gravely. Sort of Don Henley meets Ryan Adams.

“When the feeling’s right and the band’s real tight, can’t stop the muuussic,”
Wolf sang in his soaring and infectious tenor. Out in front of the stage a huge crowd of revelers swayed and clapped along to the driving beat and the contagious melody.
“When the night is long and the emotion’s strong, can’t stop the muuussic,

There’ll be one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, but can’t stop the muuussi—”
And then the music did stop. Wolf’s hands dropped from the neck of his blonde Stratocaster as if they’d been slapped out of the way by an invisible force, and his voice faltered, mid-sentence. Jay Morse,
Bad Medicine’s
drummer, Rudy Dunn, the bass player and Mike Stilton, the lead guitarist all looked at each other with panic on their faces, and then they too began to falter. The crowd watching the stage was also looking slightly bewildered.

Wolf, on the lead microphone, noticed none of this. At the back of the room, through the haze of dim lighting and the pressing crowd, a woman with flowing black hair dressed in a gauzy white gown walked toward the stage, the crowd parting in her wake as if for a deity. She was the manifestation of Wolf’s darkest dreams, the stuff of his most absurd nightmares; she stopped and stood in the center of the dance floor staring at him with deep, dark eyes that had the power to wrench a gasp from his throat. The woman raised her hands in a gesture of appeal. Her presence was so strikingly real that Wolf was momentarily frozen on the stage. It seemed that Siri Donovan had once again come back from wherever she’d gone to haunt and taunt him. Wolf closed his eyes and then reopened them and in that moment the crowd closed back in around her and she was no longer visible.

No fucking way,
Wolf thought.
You weren’t really there. It was all in my sick mind.

But then he caught another glimpse of her, at the back of the room, walking away from the stage, her gauzy gown trailing behind her, her sinuous movements stirring deep and primal emotions within him.

“Siri!”
he called out over the band’s PA system, but she kept on walking.
“Siri, is that you?”

When she didn’t answer or turn back Wolf pulled the Stratocaster over his head and dropped it to the floor with a loud discordant jangle. He bolted from the stage and pressed through the crowd toward the back of the room.

“A little pause for the cause,” Mike Stilton told the crowd in a tentative voice. “Stick around.” The other three band members left the stage.

Wolf was searching through the throngs for a woman—a ghost woman—who could not possibly be real. The cold realization that he would never find her struck him like a lance through the heart. She was a phantom, a ghost, perhaps she’d never been real to begin with, but someone conjured from his deepest darkest yearnings.

Chapter 44

An angry hand roughly grabbed his shoulder. He spun sharply. Mike Stilton stared at him, and Wolf could clearly see just how pissed off he was. “Danny, if you ever pull a stunt like that again, so help me God I’ll—”

“What, Mike? You gonna fire me?” Wolf said defiantly. Mike was the founder of the band and its undisputed leader, but Wolf knew that Mike wasn’t the one responsible for packing the clubs every night. He knew that he alone was the reason for the band’s new surge of popularity and he was also sure that firing him would be like cutting off their noses to spite their faces.