Divine Evil (3 page)

She would look. Her decision made, she moved to the desk to turn off the lamp. More glass crunched under her feet. It was odd, she thought. If the bottle had been broken by the door, how could there be so much glass here, behind the desk? Under the window?

Slowly, she looked up from the jagged shards at her feet to the tall, narrow window behind her father's desk. It was not open, but broken. Vicious slices of glass still clung to the frame. With watery legs she took a step forward, then another. And looked down to where her father lay faceup on the flagstone patio, impaled through the chest by the round of garden stakes he had set there that same afternoon.

She remembered running. The scream locked in her chest. Stumbling on the stairs, falling, scrambling up and running again, down the long hall, slamming into the swinging door at the kitchen, through the screen that led outside.

He was bleeding, broken, his mouth open as if he were about to speak. Or scream. Through his chest the sharp-ended stakes sliced, soaked with blood and gore.

His eyes stared at her, but he didn't see. She shook him, shouted, tried to drag him up. She pleaded and begged and promised, but he only stared at her. She could smell the blood, his blood, and the heavy scent of summer roses he loved.

Then she screamed. She kept screaming until the neighbors found them.

C
AMERON RAFFERTY HATED CEMETERIES.
It wasn't superstition. He wasn't the kind of man who avoided black cats or knocked on wood. It was the confrontation with his own mortality he abhorred. He knew he couldn't live forever-as a cop he was aware he took more risks with death than most. That was a job, just as life was a job and death was its retirement.

But he was damned if he liked to be reminded of it by granite headstones and bunches of withered flowers.

He had come to look at a grave, however, and most graves tended to draw in company and turn into cemeteries. This one was attached to Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church and was set on a rambling slope of land in the shadow of the old belfry. The stone church was small but sturdy, having survived weather and sin for a hundred and twenty-three years. The plot of land reserved for Catholics gone to glory was hugged by a wrought-iron fence. Most of the spikes were rusted, and many were missing. Nobody much noticed.

These days, most of the townspeople were split between
the nondenominational Church of God on Main and the First Lutheran just around the corner on Poplar, with some holdouts for the Wayside Church of the Brethren on the south side of town and the Catholics-the Brethren having the edge.

Since the membership had fallen off in the seventies, Our Lady of Mercy had dropped back to one Sunday mass. The priests of St. Anne's in Hagerstown were on an informal rotation, and one of them popped down for religion classes and the nine o'clock mass that followed them. Otherwise, Our Lady didn't do a lot of business, except around Easter and Christmas. And, of course, weddings and funerals. No matter how far her faithful strayed, they came back to Our Lady to be planted.

It wasn't a thought that gave Cam, who'd been baptized at the font, right in front of the tall, serene statue of the Virgin, any comfort.

It was a pretty night, a little chill, a little breezy, but the sky was diamond clear. He would have preferred to have been sitting on his deck with a cold bottle of Rolling Rock, looking at the stars through his telescope. The truth was, he would have preferred to have been chasing a homicidal junkie down a dark alley. When you were chasing down possible death with a gun in your hand, the adrenaline pumped fast and kept you from dwelling on the reality. But picking your way over decomposing bodies kind of knocked you over the head with your own ultimate destiny.

An owl hooted, causing Deputy Bud Hewitt, who walked beside Cam, to jolt. The deputy grinned sheepishly and cleared his throat.

“Spooky place, huh, Sheriff?”

Cam gave a noncommittal grunt. At thirty, he was only three years Bud's senior and had grown up on the same
stretch of Dog Run Road. He'd dated Bud's sister, Sarah, for a wild and rocky three months during his senior year at Emmitsboro High and had been present when Bud had thrown up his first six-pack of beer. But he knew Bud got a charge out of calling him sheriff.

“Don't think too much of it during the day,” Bud went on. He had a young, simple face, all curves and rosy skin. His hair was the color of straw and stuck up at odd angles no matter how often he wet his comb and fought it down. “But at night it makes you think about all those vampire movies.”

“These people aren't undead, they're just dead.” “Right.” But Bud wished he had a silver bullet instead of regulation .38 slugs in his revolver. “It's over here, Sheriff.”

The two teenagers who had chosen the cemetery to neck in gestured him along. They'd been spooked when they'd come squealing up his lane and banging on his door, but now they were running on panicked excitement. And loving it.

“Right here.” The boy, seventeen and sporting a denim jacket and scuffed Air Jordans, pointed. He wore a small gold stud in his left ear-a sign of stupidity or bravery in a town like Emmitsboro. At his side the girl, a cuddly cheerleader with doe brown eyes, gave a little shudder. They both knew they'd be the stars of Emmitsboro High on Monday.

Cam shined his light on the overturned marker. The grave was that of John Robert Hardy, 1881-1882, an infant who had lived one brief year and been dead more than a hundred. Below the fallen marker, the grave yawned wide, a dark, empty pit.

“See? It's just like we told you.” The boy swallowed
audibly. The whites of his eyes gleamed in the shadowed light. “Somebody dug it up.”

“I can see that, Josh.” Cam stooped down to shine his light into the hole. There was nothing there but dirt and the smell of old death.

“You think it was grave robbers, Sheriff?” Excitement throbbed in Josh's voice. He was ashamed of the fact that he'd scrambled and bolted like a rabbit after he and Sally had all but tumbled into the yawning grave while rolling on the wild grass. He preferred to remember that he'd had his hand up her shirt. He wanted her to remember it too, so he spoke with authority. “I read about how they dig up graves looking for jewelry and body parts. They sell the body parts for experiments and stuff.”

“I don't think they'd have found much here.” Cam straightened. Though he considered himself a sensible man, peering into the open grave gave him the willies. “You run along, see Sally home. We'll take it from here.”

Sally looked up at him with huge eyes. She had a secret crush on Sheriff Rafferty. She'd heard her mother gossiping about him with a neighbor, chattering about his wild days as a teenager in Emmitsboro when he'd worn a leather jacket and driven a motorcycle and busted up Clyde's Tavern in a fight over a girl.

He still had a motorcycle and looked to her as if he could still be wild if he wanted. He was six two with a ready, wiry build. He didn't wear a dumb khaki uniform like Bud Hewitt, but snug jeans and a cotton shirt rolled up to the elbows. His hair was jet black and curled over his ears and the collar of his shirt. His face was long and lean, and now the moonlight accented the fascinating shadows under his cheekbones and made her seventeen-year-old heart flutter. In Sally's opinion, he had the sexiest blue eyes-dark and deep and a little broody.

“Are you going to call in the FBI?” she asked him.

“We'll take it under advisement.” God, to be seventeen again, he thought, then immediately: Unh-uh, no thanks. “Thanks for your help. The next time you want to make out, go someplace else.”

Sally blushed prettily. The night wind ruffled her hair around her guileless face. “We were only talking, Sheriff.”

And heifers jump over the moon.
“Whatever. You go on home now.”

He watched them walk away, among the headstones and markers, over plots of soft, sunken dirt and clumps of wild grass. Hip to hip, they were already talking in excited whispers. Sally let out a squeal and giggle, and glanced over her shoulder once to get a last look at Cam. Kids, he thought with a shake of his head as the wind flapped a loose shingle of the roof of the old church. Don't know a damn thing about ambience.

“I'm going to want some pictures of this, Bud. Tonight. And we'd best rope it off and post a sign or two. Come morning, everyone in town will have heard about it.”

“Can't see grave robbers in Emmitsboro.” Bud squinted his eyes and tried to look official. The graveyard was a pretty creepy place, but on the other hand, this was the most excitement they'd had since Billy Reardon had hotwired his father's pickup and gone joyriding around the county with that big-breasted Gladhill girl and a six-pack of Miller. “Vandals, more like. Bunch of kids with a sick sense of humor.”

“More than likely,” Cam murmured, but he crouched by the grave again as Bud walked to the cruiser to get the camera. It didn't feel like vandals. Where was the graffiti, the senseless destruction?

The grave had been neatly-systematically, he
thought-dug up. The surrounding headstones hadn't been disturbed. It was only this one small grave that had been touched.

And where the hell was the dirt? There were no piles of it around the hole. That meant it had been carted away. What in God's name would anyone want with a couple of wheelbarrow loads of dirt from an old grave?

The owl hooted again, then spread his wings and glided over the churchyard. Cam shuddered as the shadow passed over his back.

The next morning being Saturday, Cam drove into town and parked outside of Martha's, a diner and long-standing gathering place in Emmitsboro. It had become his habit, since returning to his hometown as sheriff, to while away a Saturday morning there, over pancakes and coffee.

Work rarely interfered with the ritual. Most Saturdays he could linger from eight to ten with a second or third cup of coffee. He could chat with the waitresses and the regulars, listen to Loretta Lynn or Randy Travis on the tinny jukebox in the corner, scan the headlines on the
Herald Mail
, and dig into the sports section. There was the comforting scent of sausage and bacon frying, the clatter of dishes, the murmuring drone of old men at the counter talking baseball and brooding over the economy.

Life moved slow and calm in Emmitsboro, Maryland. That's why he had come back.

The town had grown some since his youth. With a population of nearly two thousand, counting the outlying farms and mountain homes, they had added on to the elementary school and five years before had converted from septic tanks to a sewage treatment plant. Such things were still big news in Emmitsboro, where the park off the
square at Main and Poplar flew the flag from sunup to sunset daily.

It was a quiet, tidy little town that had been settled in 1782 by Samuel Q. Emmit. Tucked in a valley, it was ringed by sedate mountains and rolling farmland. On three of its four sides, it was flanked by fields of hay and alfalfa and corn. On the fourth was Dopper's Woods, so named because it adjoined the Dopper farm. The woods were deep, more than two hundred acres. On a crisp November day in 1958, Jerome Dopper's oldest son, Junior, had skipped school and headed into those woods with his 30-30 over his shoulder, hoping for a six-point buck.

They'd found him the next morning near the slippery banks of the creek. Most of his head was missing. It looked as though Junior had been careless with the safety, had slid on the slick carpet and blown himself, instead of that buck, to kingdom come.

Since then, kids had enjoyed scaring themselves over campfires with stories of Junior Dopper's ghost, headless and shambling, hunting forever in Dopper's Woods.

The Antietam Creek cut through the Doppers′ south pasture, slashed through the woods, where Junior had taken that final slide, and meandered into town. After a good rain, it bubbled noisily under the stone bridge on Gopher Hole Lane.

A half mile out of town it widened, cutting a rough circle out of rock and trees. There the water moved slow and easy and let the sunlight dance on it through the shelter of leaves in the summer. A man could find himself a comfortable rock and sink a line, and if he wasn't too drunk or stupid, take home trout for supper.

Beyond the fishing hole, the land started its jagged upward climb. There was a limestone quarry on the second ridge where Cam had worked for two sweaty, backbreaking
summers. On hot nights kids would ride up there, mostly high on beer or pot, and dive off the rocks into the deep, still water below. In seventy-eight, after three kids had drowned, the quarry was fenced off and posted. Kids still dived into the quarry on hot summer nights. They just climbed the fence first.

Emmitsboro was too far from the interstate for much traffic, and being a two-hour drive from D.C., it had never qualified as one of the city's bedroom communities. The changes that took place were few and far between, which suited the residents just fine.

It boasted a hardware store, four churches, an American Legion post, and a clutch of antique shops. There was a market that had been run by the same family for four generations and a service station that had changed hands more times than Cam could count. A branch of the county library stood at the square and was open two afternoons a week and Saturday mornings. They had their own sheriff, two deputies, a mayor, and a town council.

In the summer the trees were leafy, and if you strolled in the shade, you smelled fresh-cut grass rather than exhaust. People took pride in their homes, and flower and kitchen gardens were in evidence in even the tiniest yards.

Come autumn, the surrounding mountains went wild with color, and the scent of woodsmoke and wet leaves filtered along the streets.

In the winter it was a postcard, a scene from
It's a Wonderful Life
, with snow banking the stone walls and Christmas lights burning for weeks.

From a cop's point of view, it was a cakewalk. The occasional vandalism-kids soaping windows or breaking them-traffic violations, the weekly drunk-and-disorderly or domestic dispute. In the years he had been back, Cam had dealt with one assault-and-battery, some petty theft, a
half dozen malicious mischiefs, occasional bar fights, and a handful of DWI's.

Not even enough to fill one good night of work in Washington, D.C., where he'd been a cop for more than seven years.

When he'd made the decision to resign in D.C. and return to Emmitsboro, his associates had told him he'd be back in six months, screaming with boredom. He had a reputation for being a real street cop, by turns icy and explosive, accustomed, even acclimated, to facing down junkies and dealers.

And he'd liked it, liked the feeling of walking on the edge, cruising the streets, sweeping up bits and pieces of human garbage. He'd made detective, an ambition he'd held secret inside him since the day he joined the force. And he'd stayed on the streets because he felt at home there, because he felt right.

But then, one dripping summer afternoon, he and his partner had chased a twenty-year-old petty dealer and his screaming hostage into a crumbling building in South East.

Everything had changed.

“Cameron?” A hand on Cam's shoulder broke him out of his reverie. He looked up at Emmitsboro's mayor.

“Mr. Atherton.”

“Mind if I join you?” With a quick smile, James Atherton settled his long, thin body into the vinyl seat opposite Cam. He was a man of angles, with a bony, slightly melancholy face and pale blue eyes-an Ichabod Crane of a man-white, freckled skin, sandy hair, long neck, long limbs.