R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 02 - L O S T (3 page)

MY FATHER was a hero. Paddy Macaulay worked for the Denver Fire Department for thirty-seven years. He rose to the level of Lieutenant, largely on the reputation he built as a smart, tactical firefighter who saved lives and was well-liked by his own peers.

Jax and I grew up in our old man’s considerable shadow. There was not always time for the two young Macaulay boys. Paddy’s dedication and first priority was always to his smoke-eater brethren. My brother and I understood. We knew our father loved us. It wasn’t about that. He made the same facts clear to our mother when he married her; he may as well have been born into the fire department. He lived to serve his city and he couldn’t change who he was or what he believed even if he had wanted to.

I always respected him for his honesty, in part because I’d always felt the same desire to serve (though it took me some time to finally understand the nature of that calling). I don’t think Paddy knew anything about the family history—about the legends of the Clan MacAulay. If he did, he never shared it with me. When he got sick, the cancer took its time with him. He went into remission twice. I sat by his hospital bed on more occasions than I could remember. We had many chances to bring up the things that needed to be said between a father and son.

Yet he rarely spoke of our family history, and he didn’t offer any new information before he died. I’ll never know for sure what that means, but he may have been protecting me from my own destiny.

Either way, I missed him. I wanted to talk to him about all that had happened in my life since he died. We certainly could have had some deep discussions about the family genes.

Jax and my father were never very close, and they developed an even more damaged relationship near the end of Paddy’s life. Not long after our mother’s death—which was almost a decade before Paddy learned of his cancer—Jax began to feel differently about our father’s professional estrangement from the family. More specifically, he started to resent the distance the job had put between Paddy and our mother.

I understood his disappointment. There were times I felt the same. Ma never stood up for herself. Rather, she chose to stand behind her husband. She never complained. And she raised us boys to be the same way. She told me once she loved Paddy with all her heart and that people don’t change. She knew who Paddy was when she married him, so she accepted the good and the bad.

Jax began to think he was Ma’s defender, I think, and so he grew more distant from Paddy as the years went on. They never really had a breakdown—only a weakening of the relationship’s structure. When Paddy died, Jax was there with him, too, so I don’t think he harbored any regret.

I understood Paddy more than my brother did because I knew I was like my father in many ways. My relationship with my own son, Cole, had been strained since he reached the teenage years. My wife, Isabel, died of cancer while she was supporting my career. I saw now that her dreams had come in second, usually relegated to the back burner. My job came first to me. Like my father. I think it was in my blood.

It therefore came as no surprise that I fell so hard for Special Agent Amanda Byrne of the FBI. In her I’d found someone who loved the job as much as I did. Two peas in a law enforcement pod. I didn’t have to worry about her cursing my dedication to my career, nor did she have to worry the same about me.

~ ~ ~

Meyer and I had settled into our hotel room in Wilson, Wyoming. The wind moaned through the valley and whipped against the side of the building, sounding as if it might shake the walls until they gave in. I had much on my mind. The girl in the road and my certainty of who she was—or at least what she represented.

“Are you all right, Mac?”

“I’ve been thinking about Cole.”

“It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons,” Meyer said.

“Marcus Aurelius?”

“Friedrich von Schiller.”

“It’s a nice notion,” I said. “But I doubt von Schiller understood the twenty-first century teenager.”

“Good point.”

“I worry about Cole. College should be a fun time. The boy has dealt with more tragedy than he should have.”

“He’s like you, Mac. He’s strong.”

“There’s a difference between being strong and being
forced
to be strong.”

“He’ll be all right. Are you sure this isn’t more about your relationship with your son than it is about his wellbeing?”

Typical Meyer. Cut to the quick.

“Probably,” I said. “We used to be close. Now, after last year—losing his mother
and
Greer…”

“Methinks thou talks more of thyself than the boy,” Meyer said.

“I need to walk,” I told my cousin.

“I need to sleep,” Meyer replied. “Go clear your head; it will do you some good. But please—do walk, don’t drive.”

I nodded and put on a light jacket. Outside the temperature was dropping fast. Thin, smoky clouds veiled the incandescence of the half moon, casting a dull glow on the land surrounding the hotel. I climbed out of the parking lot and toward the tree line, picking my way through the small rocks, twisted scrub, and up the steep grade.

The ground leveled some once I reached the stand of evergreens and I followed an old trail, away from the hotel. There was enough collateral light from the row of hotels along the main road by the interstate that I could see fairly well when my eyes adjusted. The small foot trail stayed parallel to the tree line and hotel row.

A couple of miles into the walk, I stopped to catch my breath. My lungs were attesting to the difference in altitude. I sucked in oxygen through my nose, willing my pulse to drop.

Then just as the pounding inside my ears subsided, I heard a large animal move in the forest to my right, snapping a large limb as it tried to pass. An elk, perhaps. I then heard another. And another. A herd? Unlikely this close to town, though wilderness seemed to encircle us there.

The noises grew more pronounced, less veiled. My stomach sank as I realized whatever was out there was coming for me. Wild creatures were more careful than this. The only animals that made such a racket when approaching were either unaware of the presence of others or they simply did not care. Such indifference normally implied a confidence in numbers, strength, or both. The sounds coming from inside the tree line seemed intentional. Confidently so.

Father Fic Rule stepped from the darkness directly ahead of me, along with half a dozen lesser demons on either side of him. Cruel, misshapen things. Dark as pitch; nearly invisible in the ethereal light.

Rule, who once masqueraded as a priest, believed he was indeed Satan on earth. He looked as evil and terrifying as the first time he appeared to me in my Denver home. His face and hands looked as if he’d survived some kind of terrible fire, most of his flesh having either melted away or melded with the underlying bone structure, giving him a skeletal appearance.

“You aren’t really here,” I said to him, hoping it was true.

“Believe what you must,” the gravelly voice responded. “It matters not what you think. What matters is I am who I am.”

“Have you been working on that opener since the last time we spoke? Because it needs work. More sincerity, maybe.”

“The days of smart talk and complacency draw nigh to a close, cop.”

“Now you’re sounding more like Calypso. Is he out there someplace with you, Rule?”

“They are
all
here with me. Your time is running out.”

“You going to kill me right here, in the middle of Wyoming? That’s not very biblical.”

“I make the times and the places. I make all you see around you. This is not your God’s world, or even your own. It is
mine
.”

“Fine. Do your worst. Dream or no, I’m not afraid of you. You’re a ghost. A specter of imagination. Your power can only go as far as it is given to you.”

“You cannot choose my fate,” he said. “But I shall command yours.”

“Just words,” I said. “Here are my words to you, beast:
go fuck yourself
.”

I turned to walk away, or wake up, whichever was next. Rule was instantaneously in front of me, as if materializing from the dew of night. He blocked my way, leering with those curled, pointed, blackish teeth.

“I could tear your soul from within. Right now. End it.”

I pressed my nose against the gnarled flesh where his nose should have been. It felt tender and cold, like hamburger just pulled from the cooler.

“Then do it,” I said. “I told you. I am not afraid of you.”

Rule raised both his arms and the throng of demons descended all around me as a crowd suddenly swells and traps one of its own. The creatures were indeed hideous, and my courage began to wane.

“With one passing thought I could release their rage; give them what they so desire,” he said, pallid eyes locked with my own. “They wouldn’t leave so much as a splinter of bone.”

“End it, then,” I said.

He lingered there, his hatred of me palpable.

And then, without a breath of sound, the horde retreated into shadow, leaving only Father Rule and me.

“Not here,” he whispered into my ear, wheezing through those mangled holes in the middle of his face. “Not until you’ve mourned the children.”

With that, he vanished, leaving me to shiver against the cold of night.

THE VOICE had been directing Spence Grant’s actions for several months. It was difficult now, remembering when it had first begun to goad him along.

His family didn’t know, though he always suspected Gloria—his wife and sweetheart since the eighth grade—might have wondered a bit about his odd behavior in the days leading up to the murders.

Spence ignored the voice for more than a week. Maybe more than two. At first he honestly believed he was hearing something else. He thought he’d accidentally eavesdropped on one side of a nearby conversation, not unlike a baby monitor that picked up a stray signal. After all, it began as a whisper in the night, slightly more profound than the wind rustling a small scattering of leaves. He’d not understood exactly what was being said until a few nights later.

You know things are not as they seem.

And still he resisted. Only crazy people heard someone speaking who wasn’t there. And anyone who answered—or God forbid acted upon such ephemeral suggestion—was certifiable.

But the voice made sense; that was the rub. A
lot
of sense.

Things are not as they seem.

The world has gone to Hell and no one is going to do anything about it.

YOU need to do something about it, Spence.

When the voice inside called him by name,
that
got his attention. Spence started thinking about what the voice was telling him. He thought about it a lot. And he also started smiling at the oddest moments.

The voice spoke to him throughout the day, off and on, but mostly it serenaded him at night, in the dark, when the stresses of the day had dissipated like smoke in a stiff wind. It waited until his palate was cleansed—his canvas white and willing.

Eventually he came to covet the voice. Depend upon it. Cleave to its wonderful logic. After a time it became clear the voice was one of purpose, one of mettle. It became clear it would dictate his way forward, and Spence wanted that. He
needed
direction.

The first call to action played into Spence’s view of the world about him. It was necessary, the voice told him, to slake the thirst of one’s own needs.

Spence Grant hated someone. A very putrid someone. A woman named Della Gerard. He was not alone in his hatred, he knew. Gerard was a nasty little woman, a crossing guard for the girls’ school in the morning who then directed the pickup of the children in the midafternoons.

Half the township had it in for Della Gerard.

The woman was a fine example of what occurred when a hen-pecked youth grew up and grabbed hold of even a
sliver
of power—a sconce of dominion over others; one that she could wrap her spindly little fingers around and wield like a scythe to all who opposed her.

Spence had said on more than one occasion that she ran the pickup zone like a prison soup kitchen—pointing her baton this way and that, chewing on the parents, most who had just rushed in from one stress-filled job or another and didn’t much appreciate the mousy dictator and her oppressive little fiefdom.

So one night a few weeks before the murders, the voice told Spence a funny anecdote:

Did you hear about the noxious bitch with a chip on her shoulder that got herself run over by a well-meaning parent? Her chip isn’t nearly as big anymore.

Spence found he liked that story. Liked it a lot, in fact. Liked it so much when his brain went to making it more of a
plan
than a funny piece of indulgent fiction, he found he didn’t have much of a problem with the idea at all.

The next midafternoon, when Della Gerard was holding him back with a flat palm and grousing at a parent who’d been parked a few seconds too long in the yellow zone, Spence simply eased off the brake pedal, turned the wheel ever so slightly, and let the right front wheel of his rusted Subaru Forrester run up and over the foot and ankle of his least favorite crossing guard, snapping her tibia and fibula like brittle summer branches in a rainless wood.

At the hospital, Spence apologized emphatically and even managed to produce a few tears when being interviewed by the Chief of Police. The incident was ruled an unfortunate accident, and though Spence’s insurance premiums went through the roof, Della Gerard retired from her policing duties and never walked correctly or without pain again.

~ ~ ~

Killing didn’t come as easy to Spence. Most murderers needed to warm up to the idea. Even serial killers began slowly, sometimes graduating from assault to rape to murder. The voice convinced Spence Grant that he could prey on some of God’s lesser creatures to ease his trepidation.

The voice questioned him relentlessly:

What about medical science?
Labs do heinous things to rats and mice and even guinea pigs, Spence. All under the guise of saving the world from the disease and pestilence brought about by themselves. Why not you? If you aren’t committed to changing the way things are, then…

But Spence
was
ready to learn. Or at least he then believed what had to be done
had to be done
. He just needed some practice. So he bought a dozen mice, four rats, and two gerbils at a pet store in Coeur d’Alene.

Spence hated rodents. He would never be talked into hurting a dog, or even a cat.

The voice was specific about the practice runs.

Look each of them in the EYE, Spence. Taking a life is a personal thing. Look each of them in the eye, and you won’t be afraid. Put YOUR fear into THEM, Spence. Send them on their way.

Spence looked each mouse in the eyes. He knew it would be different with a
person
. The mice had no reasonable sentience. They were terrified, which helped, but they sensed only basic, overarching danger. They could not possibly know what the scalpel held in store for them.

~ ~ ~

Three days before the murders Spence hadn’t heard from the voice in a week, and he was getting edgy. It was clear the voice meant him to graduate to a human being, and the idea of taking the life of one of his own kind had actually become a bit of a fixation. After all, mice were not culpable in the destruction of the world.

Men were.

And women.

His own people.

It was finally time to make a difference. The voice didn’t have far to go in convincing him of that.

Yet Spence still didn’t know who the first victim would be. This had him pacing back and forth in the downstairs study when his wife thought he was working through the family finances. Who would it be?

Then, at three thirty-three in the morning, exactly seventy-two hours before the murders, the voice returned to him to give him the plan.

You must kill THEM
, it said to him.

Who?
Spence asked the voice.

You know who.

He
did
know.

But I want to make a difference
, Spence said. He didn’t want to be a monster; he wanted to rid the world of the bad people.

Not his own
family
.

You cannot rid the world of monsters, Spence. The world will always have them. But you can send good people away from here—far, far away. To a better, monster-less place!

It made sense. The world was no better than a ring of Hell. How many times had he questioned the decision of bringing two young girls into the cesspool of what now passed as “humanity”? He’d never considered such an act of finality in his deliberations, of course. But what a few months before would have been impossible to even imagine, now appeared preordained and positively resplendent.

~ ~ ~

As Spence tucked his two angels away beneath the patchwork covers that night he could hardly contain his excitement for them. His hands were shaking he was so impatient to send them on their journey. What greater thing could a father do than remove his children from a life sentence in Hell?

And his wife. It made him warm inside to think of her going first. She would be waiting for the little ones, and then, finally, for him—when the four of them could transport themselves a billion light years away from all the mess the world had become; they would leave this toilet of a civilization and disappear into cosmic bliss in the wink of an eye.

The act of sharpening the knife was more than symbolic. Great patience was the key. He moved the edge along the rough whetstone, careful not to nick the blade. Over and over he lovingly pulled the blade, honing, perfecting.

He’d purchased the knife a few days earlier, though he’d been looking for the perfect weapon for a long time—nosing in and out of cutlery shops, attending gun shows, frequenting flea markets.

So many wonderful knives; so many choices.

The voice inside assured him he would know the right talisman when he found it. The one. The blade that would draw his family closer to God; closer to Paradise.

And he
did
know it. He found it in a smallish, private shop on a trip across the border to Missoula on business. An old Nez Perce woman ran the store, which exhibited twenty to thirty blades attached to meticulously carved handles made from alabaster, elk horn, and obsidian.

Spence knew the moment he saw the magnificent black handle, the curved deboning blade glinting even in the dull light of the little shack. When he saw it he forgot why he ever drove to Missoula in the first place. Did he not come for this?

Of course you did
, the voice assured him.

“How much,” he asked the wrinkled old woman.

“Two hundred,” she said. “Handmade. Very strong.”

No price seemed too high for the tool he needed. He paid the woman.

The voice was speaking to him again, saying he’d better make sure there were no loose ends. It was, after all, a small shop. And the voice seemed to have a problem with the broken down Indian woman.

 
She is shaman, Spence. A child of the coyote. Seer. Look into her eyes. She already knows. One phone call to the locals and your plan is over—your children struggle through decades of living Hell.

Spence
did
look into the old, wrinkled face. Into those cloudy, ancient orbs, devoid of compassion. The voice was right. It was clear she knew.

A shaman
.

Just his luck. But then again, he thought, where else to find a knife to do God’s work? Not Wal-Mart.

Spence had been palming the knife, admiring it, when the voice told him about the Indian medicine woman. He kept his eyes locked on hers as he reached across the counter, grabbed a fistful of her long, gray-streaked hair, and pulled her toward him. She drew a deep breath, as if to cry out, and Spence deftly plunged the knife into her esophagus, silencing any scream that may have been building.

He remembered his practice. He kept his own eyes locked on the Indian woman’s. He watched as the fight drained from her gaze; he stared as the life went out of her.

There were no cameras. No security personnel. It was a small shop, run by poor, proud people. Spence lowered the old woman, inanimate, down into the pool of her own chocolate-colored blood. The vessel was no longer aware, but Spence smiled knowingly, happy he could send another proud, decent soul onward, away from a world filled with horror and shame.