Deadline (16 page)

“Hey,” she said, groggy. “You bored with me already?”

Colin chuckled and kissed her arm. “Sorry. Did I wake you?”

“Nope,” Janice yawned. “Anytime I have more than half a bottle of wine, I snap awake again at 3:30 in the morning. It’s some weird physiological thing. I’m sure it has something to do with the depressive effect of the alcohol wearing off and my nervous system suddenly whirring back into overdrive, but either way, it’s a pain in the ass. What are you looking at?”

“Well,” Colin said. “I had a thought.”

“Cool,” Janice said. “That happens to me sometimes, too.”

Colin ignored the sarcasm. “If we’re looking for a cult that’s been torturing and killing people for almost a thousand years, then, chances are, Shalene and Devane aren’t the first time they’ve put in an appearance on this side of the Atlantic.”

“Right,” Janice agreed.

“Unfortunately, when you search for religious-themed cult murders, you get almost as many results as you would if you looked for naked pictures of a Kardashian. Not that I have done any such thing.”

“Of course.”

“I found a few possibilities, but there weren’t enough details to be conclusive. At the opposite end of the spectrum were the sites that were like YouTube for serial killers. People actually upload purported snuff films that other people sit and watch.”

“Ugh,” Janice said. “The first time I heard about those was that guy who supposedly killed that exchange student and then flew to Germany. He posted the whole thing online. They interviewed the guy who ran the site. He said he was providing a valuable public service because it made it easier for the police to catch some of these weirdoes. It made me want to throw up.”

“Me too,” Colin said. “So I switched tack. That was when I found this.”

He moved the laptop around so that Janice could see the screen more easily. It was a headline from a news story: ‘Children Removed From “Chamber of Horrors”‘.

The picture showed two police cars and an ambulance parked in front of what looked like a small stone church building. Police and an EMT were leading a group of about half a dozen kids out the front door towards the vehicles. The children appeared to range in age from five to their late teens. Some of the younger ones had blankets over their heads to hide their identities, but the older ones stared back at the camera with something approaching defiance.

Janice tried to read the article, but the text was small and her eyes were still adjusting. “So what happened?”

“Well,” Colin said. “CAS and the cops swooped in to remove these kids from the custody of their father and found what they described as an ‘improvised torture chamber’ in the basement. They’d already been alerted to the fact that all was not right with these kids because of some unusual interactions they’d had with other kids in the town. One store security guard apparently reported an instance where he’d caught two of them trying to saw the right hand off a kid they believed was guilty of shoplifting in the alley behind the store.”

“Jesus,” Janice said.

“I guess that was the idea,” Colin said. “Anyway, the father ran the church and home schooled the kids.”

“I bet.”

“He refused all demands for an on-site interview and inspection of the home. When they showed up to raid the place, he had disappeared and none of the kids would say where he had gone. The kids became provincial wards and police started combing through the place. They found traces of about 14 different samples of human DNA in the basement, two of which could be traced to open homicide investigations, both involving local women who had previously been arrested on prostitution charges.”

Janice pulled out a chair and sat down. The wood was a cold reminder that she wasn’t wearing pants.

“The church wasn’t your standard-issue Sunday establishment with an open-door policy, either,” Colin said. “In fact, the family appeared to be the only members. Take a look at the name.” He zoomed in on the photo and swung the laptop around so Janice could look at it more closely. She leaned forward and saw a small sign on the open front door. It was faded and grainy with magnification, but still legible: Church of the Holy Thorn. Beneath it was a drawing of a cross inside a ring.

“Holy shit,” she said. “What happened to the father?”

“That’s the best part,” Colin said, moving in next to her and zooming back out from the photo. “He disappeared. They issued an arrest warrant, but, as far as I can tell, they never caught him. There’s a picture of him at the bottom. Check out the name.”

Janice watched as Colin scrolled to the bottom of the screen to reveal a picture of a severe-looking man in his mid-forties or early fifties. He had thick black hair that looked like it had been self-cut with something other than scissors. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw the name underneath the picture.

Ezekiel Crowley
.

“H
oly shit!” Janice said, jumping out of her seat. “How did you find this?”

“We got a bit lucky,” Colin said. “That article was originally published 12 years ago. The newspaper was bought and sold a couple of times. One of the buyers digitized the back catalogue in the hopes of putting a paywall in place to charge for premium content. Didn’t work out, but the stories are still there.”

“Where did this happen?” Janice asked.

“Newansett,” Colin said. “It’s a little smaller than Westhill. About four hours northeast of here.”

“Twelve years ago,” Janice said. “That would mean those kids would all be adults by now.”

“Not quite,” Colin said. “The oldest was 14 and the youngest was only three. Those numbers are estimates because none of the kids appeared to have an actual birth certificate. That would mean we’re looking at a range of about 15 to 26.”

“What about the mother?”

“I don’t know,” Colin said. “The article doesn’t say anything about her. The article doesn’t mention any other family.”

“So if all those kids became wards and there was no other family to go to, they must have gone to an orphanage or something.”

Colin nodded. “Or foster homes. I think they usually try to keep families together, but there were eight of them. Chances are there weren’t too many people with enough room to take in eight kids at once.”

“So they were probably separated,” Janice said.

“Most likely,” Colin said. “In that event, they could have gone almost anywhere.”

Janice pointed at the picture of Crowley. “He’d be what? Fifty or 60 by now? Do you think he could be the one doing all this?”

“Maybe,” Colin said, thinking. “The guy I chased through the basement of the rec centre seemed pretty light on his feet for a senior citizen, but it’s possible.”

“Maybe it’s one of the kids,” Janice said, pacing. “You said they were home schooled. He’s probably indoctrinated all of them in the practices of the order since they were old enough to walk.”

“Maybe it’s all of them,” Colin speculated. “Maybe Crowley managed to track down all the kids. Or maybe they ran away and found their way back to him. He could have trained them on what to do in the event they were separated. We might not be dealing with just one killer. We could be dealing with the whole damn family.”

“I wonder if any of those kids ended up around here,” Janice said.

“No way to know,” Colin said. “Those records would be sealed.”

“There’s no way in hell I’m gonna sleep now,” Janice said. “I’m too keyed up.”

“Well, if you’re excited and half naked, I can offer a couple of suggestions.”

Janice gave him a twisted smile. “Not that kind of excited. Somebody somewhere must know more than there is in that article.”

“It’s worth checking out,” Colin agreed. “You up for another road trip?”

N
ewansett was a one-time manufacturing centre that was awkwardly trying to turn itself into a tech hub. From what Colin could see, the transformation wasn’t exactly working out.

Almost half the buildings in the downtown area were empty. The ones that were occupied were taken up by fading mom-and-pop operations—greasy diners, used bookstores (that seemed to sell more DVDs and video games than anything else), consignment clothing outlets—whose best days appeared to be long behind them.

The two big factories in town were a battery plant and a tire manufacturer. The battery plant was surrounded by eight feet of fencing because the ground around it had been rendered toxic from 40 years of illegally dumped chemical runoff. The company that had owned the plant had sold it for a dollar to a group of squatters who were loosely affiliated with the Occupy movement and had been fighting the city for right to stay there. The city wasn’t fighting too hard: the cost of cleaning up the site was estimated to be in the $20-30 million range and it didn’t want to get stuck with the bill.

The tire plant had been renovated. Half of it was the headquarters of a private technical college offering Microsoft certifications. The other half was zoned for a downtown luxury loft development. According to the banners, the first units would be ready for occupancy three years ago. As far as Colin could see, none of them were occupied.

They’d started with Crowley’s house and makeshift “church”, but that had been knocked down to make room for a new school. Colin thought it was a little strange that they had decided to build a kindergarten playground on top of what had once been a torture chamber, but he could understand the city’s desire to get rid of all reminders of the previous occupants.

The newspaper was their next stop. The reporter who had originally covered the story had quit journalism shortly after the Crowley story and moved to Australia to study law with his new wife. The only other reporter who was in the newsroom when they called was just out of college and couldn’t offer any more detail than what was in the original story. He wasn’t from Newansett and had never even heard of Crowley. Colin had only been in the town for a few hours, but he was getting the impression that it wasn’t the kind of place people came to because they wanted to. Newansett seemed to be like Alaska: the only people who came there were either on the run or had nowhere else to go.

The police station was next. The cop who had been the lead investigator on the Crowley case was still there, but because Crowley had never been caught, it was still technically an open investigation and he refused to discuss any details. He was able to confirm that the two victims who had been identified were both local women with multiple run-ins on prostitution-related charges, but all attempts to identify the others had come to naught. Some of the samples had become contaminated as a result of an error by an evidence tech, so there was uncertainty about how many other victims there may have been.

The known victims were Maude Cheney, age 22, and Cyrilla Dwyer, who had been 17. Both of them were known to have a connection to a local dealer and part-time pimp named Dwayne Usher. Police had tried to track him down for questioning to establish a timeline of each girl’s last-known movements, but his house on Union Street had been deserted. Police believed that Usher had cleared out with his inventory as soon as the bodies were found because he thought he might be implicated. Colin thought it was more likely that Usher had ended up as one on the many unidentified victims, but kept this opinion to himself.

Colin switched tack and asked more questions about Crowley, but not a lot was known about him, either. He had arrived in town five years before the raid and paid for the house in cash. The source of that cash was unknown. He didn’t have any bank records that they could find, had no credit cards, no social insurance number and no licence to operate a motor vehicle. If he had a wife, she had not come with him and no marriage was registered. Same thing with the eight kids, who had no birth certificates and whose ages could only be estimated. They didn’t even know if they were actually his kids, although none of them matched any existing missing persons file.

The house had not been located in a residential neighbourhood. It was on the end of a street filled mostly with small industrial operations like auto body shops and car rental outlets, so there weren’t many neighbours to canvass. Crowley and his brood kept very much to themselves. The owner of a detailing business across the street said he thought he had heard some noises coming from the basement of the building late one night, but it was no secret that the Crowley house was pretty decrepit, so he’d just figured the guy was doing some renovations. Nothing suspicious in that.

The hunt for Crowley was still active, but there hadn’t been any leads in a long time. The guy seemed to have appeared out of nowhere and disappeared right back there again. The kids, meanwhile, had been taken into protective custody and that was all he knew about that.

He asked why they were so interested in the case. Colin said they were writing a historical feature piece as an assignment for their magazine class and asked if there was anyone else they might talk to. He thought about it for a while before shaking his head.

“Not really,” he said. “Most people don’t like to talk about it. The town’s had so much bad news over the last few years they prefer to think it never happened.”

His opinion was generally confirmed at the rest of the places they tried: the public archives, the other names mentioned in the article, and even the real estate agent who had handled the sale of the Crowley property. Most said they had never heard of the case. The ones who had just shook their heads, muttered something about it being a “terrible business” and then found an expedient reason to be somewhere else.

“Well, that was pretty much a total bust,” Janice said when they got back to their hotel room later that evening. They had picked a chain place just off the highway because the one closer to town looked uncomfortably like the Bates motel, complete with the taxidermied birds in the lobby. “We didn’t learn anything we didn’t already know from that article you found.”

“Not quite,” Colin said, sitting down on the end of the bed and taking off his shoes. “We know Crowley bought the place with cash that came from an account registered to a numbered company with two registered directors—Augustine Levant and Conrad Clairvaux—neither of whom seem to have existed.”