Last Days (26 page)

out from his sleeves. So me and my partner reckon, at around the exact same time, that this here mumbling fool was probably the killer. Which he was.

‘And in there with him, right in front of his knees we see a long knife. And it was so gummed up with blood, we were pretty sure it was the murder weapon too. Real old-looking knife. First I thought it was a machete. Mexican drug dealers use ’em, so we’d seen plenty of those. But when I looked closer, I saw that it was too long. And too thin for a machete.

And behind him we found an automatic rifle with scopes.

Could have killed us both. But he didn’t. All these years gone by I asked myself why.’

‘Why do you think he spared you?

‘I guess he’d finished his work for one night.’

Conway walked away from the cabin. ‘We cuffed the suspect, wrists and ankles, and laid him on the ground first.

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Right here. In the open so we could see him.’ Conway creased the dust with his shoe. ‘And right around that point we split up. Changed it up, so we could work quicker, and ’cus we had the suspect. And I went and checked the other three buildings to the west of the mine and Jiminez goes over that way, east side to the other three cabins.

‘In that cabin I found the armoury.’ Conway pointed at a dilapidated structure of patched brick with no roof. ‘It was padlocked, but I bust in there and they had enough guns inside to fight a war. Those two cabins yonder, to the side of it, was full of books.
The Book of One Hundred Chapters
it was called, all stacked in boxes like they was headed for a bookstore.

‘Other side of the mine, Jiminez found stores with meds and food inside. And the narcotics. Twenty grams of cocaine.

About the same again of marijuana, and a big box of capsules. They was MDA we found out later, which was a Hollywood drug back then. Didn’t come from round here.’

Conway walked slowly back to the dirt patch he’d marked with his shoe, beside the building in which he’d discovered the killer. ‘I go back and check on the suspect, and he’s still lying there hollerin’ about “old friends” and I don’t know what else. And as I check on him, Jiminez starts calling me from the north side of the mine. I look over and through the buildings I can see his flashlight.’

As Conway walked ahead of Dan and Kyle, he stared straight ahead, replaying the scene in his memory. ‘So I get down there, and as I’m running past where they had the drugs yonder, Jiminez calls, “We got four dead. Out by the fence.”

‘Split-rail fence down there weren’t broken back in seventy-five. It was twice as high and they’d put razor wire on 230

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the top. Stop folks getting out, like them four fools we saw on the ground before it. Looked like they’d been trying to climb out. Hands was all cut up from the wire. That’s what we thought right off anyway. All been shot in the back and legs too. Weird thing was, the main gate was open when we drove up, so once the suspect was done with killing his brothers and sisters he must have unlocked the mine gates, then gone and shut himself inside the cabin. Why’d he do that? To let the dogs out that we never found? No other reason I ever been able to think of.’

Conway came to a stop twenty feet from the remains of the old split-rail fence. Wiped his face with a handkerchief.

‘Jeez. The four bodies here. They was in a bad way. Been shot up pretty bad as they was runnin’, but that only killed one of them right away. Medical examiner pulled slugs out of them all. One girl had three in her back. All come from that rifle we found in the hut with the killer, and two more automatic rifles been thrown down near the first murder site. We found them later. But what me and Jiminez also saw on the victims here, was wounds consistent with bite marks. On their faces. On their necks. Shoulders ripped open. Dogs we figured. It was like they’d been shot down to disable them before they was finished off by the dogs.’

Conway stood in silence and stared at the broken fence, still turning over the evidence two young patrolmen had discovered thirty-six years before.

Conway sat on the porch of the main building, the murder site. The camera was back on the tripod for the second static shoot after the walk-through. Behind the settlement, the desert sky was ablaze. The sun set over the distant mountains 231

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and coloured the sky with pink and blue striations between the scarlet. Tinges of night pulled at the horizon line and would soon darken the earth. Beyond the perimeter fence, the Saguaro cacti were becoming black spongy silhouettes, a backdrop to a Roadrunner cartoon or Hollywood western.

Dan had lit up the stoop with the last of the batteries.

‘By the time we called in the rest of what we found, and put the suspect in the patrol car, more officers arrived. Three sergeants, two lieutenants. Reporters showed up about the same time. They’d heard the police radio bands. And they overheard a lot of things the officers were saying at the crime scene, which accounts for them crazy stories in the press.

Speculation. As well as the pictures everyone seen of the bodies out by the wire, and the one of Brother Belial in the back of the car talkin’ to hisself.

‘By morning there was sixty officers at the scene. Three of them were sick after they been out by the wire.’ Wearily, Conway shook his head. ‘Oh, it was chaos. Lot of evidence got destroyed, corrupted. Leads got missed. You had cops from Phoenix here, all of us up from Yuma. Site was not protected. This was a bigger deal than we were used to. People got excited.

‘But two homicide detectives come in the night from Phoenix. County coroner too. That settled things down. Preserved the rest of the crime scene. And when they was here, they confirmed what me and Jiminez knew right off: no sign of struggle on all five victims in the main building. Temple they called it. The homicide cops tied plastic bags over all the victims’ hands to preserve the shit that gets under fingernails. And we heard nothing more about cause of death till the autopsy in Phoenix.

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‘The four bodies out by the wire were shot in the back with three different rifles as they ran. So Belial wasn’t the only shooter. We only found that out later too, from the medical examiners. Two of them with the throats cut at the first murder site had also shot these poor fools down. Brother Moloch and Brother Baal were the other shooters. Their prints was taken off the second and third rifles. So Moloch and Baal musta shot them four by the wire then juss sat right down to git their throats cut by Belial.

‘Victims by the fence all had defensive wounds across both hands. They said that about a week later too. We thought it was on account of the razor wire, but we were wrong. None of them got that high. They got their hands cut up on the ground, like they was fighting off whatever was biting at them. And it weren’t dogs. Or desert cougar. They was human teeth marks on their hands and faces and throats. An’ they just bled out. But the detectives never did find who did the biting, or what was used to make them marks if they weren’t bites. Homicide reckoned it was a weapon made from bones that the dogs run off with. I ain’t so sure.’

Conway had reached one of his natural pauses and took again to staring intently at the dead Ironwood trees. Kyle cleared his throat. ‘You must have seen a lot of unpleasant things in the line of duty, Mr Conway. You became a detective later in your career. You must have worked some cases that didn’t make sense. That were never solved. Inexplicable cases. But after forty years in law enforcement, and that’s a lot of experience, what were your instincts about what really happened here?’

‘Same as I told the others who been askin’ the same question over the years. But few want to hear it. They want some 233

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kind of supernatural mystery. UFOs, or some kind of witch-craft B.S. Something spectacular. But let me tell you something about police work, son. Police deal with the worst kind. In humanity. Make no mistake about that. Day in, day out. That’s what we do. And out here was a bunch of assholes. Crazy as hell. With some drugs and Bibles and guns and God only knows. And they was living in their own world.

Not the one you or me, or most anyone sane would care for.

No respect for any laws, but the ones their leader figured out to suit herself. All them poor fools got themselves killed just for knowin’ her. Sister Katherine turned this bunch of hippies around with all her lyin’ and cheatin’ and manipulation.

They got high, they got paranoid, they were cut off. That Sister Katherine was the most indecent individual I ever heard of. You hear me? Indecent. Not a word I think I’ve ever used for anyone else. As bad to the bone as they come. And she had them living like savages out here. Throwing the hump into each other, losing their minds and living right next to a whole heap of firearms. What happened was inevitable. Cops in LA saw it before with old Charlie Manson. Cops some-place else will see it again. You don’t need no FBI or profiler to tell you different. They left the road, son, and they got chewed up.’

Off camera Kyle nodded. ‘But what about the mist that you and your partner saw. And the sound of the dogs?’

Conway shook his head. ‘Hell, they’s always loose ends, son. Desert can play tricks on your mind. Acoustics. Atmospherics. Lived out here all my life and this place is still full of surprises.’

Conway nodded to himself for a while, with his eyes screwed up so tightly they disappeared inside his fleshy 234

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sockets. ‘Footprints was more difficult to explain. Most got destroyed by patrolman boots. Me and Jiminez’s too. But that couldn’t be helped. You had so many men up here, running around, the footprint evidence mostly got wrecked. But the ones they found in the blood, SID photographed. Same out by the wire. And they was long. All bone.’

Kyle swallowed the lump in his throat to calm his voice.

‘The bite marks . . . on the victims? You said you didn’t believe they were made by a weapon.’

‘Or them claw marks on the shoulders of the dead. Then there was the smell of bad meat. And them pictures they found on the walls. We never figured it out. SID took photos of the wall of that building where me and Jiminez found the bodies. Never took much notice of the walls when I was up here that night, but I seen the photos once afterwards. Gone now. Sun and wind been on the wall near forty years. Musta faded them pictures away.’

Kyle’s temperature plummeted. His voice came out thin and high and strained; beside him, Dan’s shoulders stiffened.

‘Pictures? They were pictures, not symbols?’ Levine had not mentioned anything other than the daubing of occult and satanic symbols upon the walls of what was known as the temple, or the first murder scene. And the only pictures of the crime scene in Levine’s
Last Days
, and only in the third 1978 edition at that, featured aerial shots of the mine, the blood-stained planks of the temple building, the lumpen bodies out by the split-rail fence, and the haunted expression on Brother Belial’s gaunt, bearded face in the back of a police car, taken by an opportunistic press photographer on the night of the murders.

‘Hippies done drawings of something with no skin on it.

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Weren’t no trial so the photos are still in the police files.

Never wanted to see them again myself. Twisted shit you ask me. Course, the press had been saying for a year the whole thing was a satanic ritual. With human sacrifice mixed in, once it reached “a critical point of frenzy”. Most folks still believe it went down that way.’ Conway winked. ‘But I reckon’ a whole bunch of them assholes got clean away.

Belial, Moloch and Baal done some of the killing for sure.

But they weren’t alone on that account. No, sir. Some more of them crackers musta lit out. Done some bitin’ and then split. World went mad out here a long time before me and Jiminez rolled up. That’s for sure.’

Dan looked out to the desert, where Conway and Kyle now stared. And together, they all felt the chill of twilight begin to prickle against their sun-baked arms and upon their tight faces.

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FIFTEEN

route 66 bar and grill, yuma, arizona.

19 june 2011. 10 p.m.

Since saying goodbye to Conway, Kyle’s anxious swings between belief and disbelief accelerated towards panic. The volume of the music sped up his thoughts when they needed to slow down. He felt nauseous and tense from smoking too much during the heat of the day, was dehydrated and his head was on spin cycle. He felt a temptation to hold onto the table.

It just wasn’t possible, any of it; just wasn’t possible that

‘beings’ and ‘presences’ were part of The Last Gathering and The Temple of the Last Days menagerie. But there it was: on the walls in Normandy, in Caen, in London, including his own, and now a copper mine in Arizona. Kyle closed his eyes and tried to regulate his breathing. He desperately wanted the answers to two questions: what the fuck was going on?

And were they in danger?

‘Dude, you’re missing this.’

Kyle glanced up from the tabletop. ‘What?’ Behind Dan’s bulk, the bar-room returned to focus. A place half lit with subdued orange lamps, shielded behind scallop shades, tinting the entire space the hue of beer held up to a light. On 237

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the panelled walls, sports pennants and photographs fought for space with hockey and baseball memorabilia. A jukebox flashed. Strip lights hovered over a pool table in the back.

Dan’s mouth and chin shone with grease from devouring the heap of chicken wings in a wooden basket that had not long been placed before him. A deep slug of Samuel Adams draught made his eyes water. ‘Man, this is so cold. My hand’s stuck to the glass.’ Dan looked at the ceiling and smiled.

‘George Thoroughgood and the Destroyers. Haven’t heard this since we were at college. Before that, they played the Georgia Satellites. You’d never get that in a pub back home.

Oh, oh, what’s this? I know this . . . Motley Crue. “Home Sweet Home”.’

Kyle attempted a smile to complement Dan’s enthusiasm; Dan had never been out West in the States before, only New York. Everything fascinated his friend: the road signs, the food, the motel, the cars, the advertisements beside the highways, the strip malls and street lights, the buildings, the mountains; and he’d never seen a desert before. He was like an overstimulated child. ‘You’ll sleep well tonight.’