The Dying Hour (20 page)

Excerpt from
Reflections on the Ritual

In the year of Our Lord,
A.D.
1557

Somewhere in Europe

The mother’s pleas for her daughters enthralled the crowd.

It was a spectacle surpassing the theater of the stage to see the woman wrenching her hair, tugging at the robes of those who could, with the flick of a wrist, commute a sentence and grant mercy. But commutation at this late time would tempt violent revolt. For the magistrates, all wily politicians, it was wise to maintain a mask of arrogant detachment to the hysterical sobs of a farmer’s ignorant widow, who lived in abject poverty with her three illiterate daughters.

After all, her condemned children, the elder sixteen, the other fifteen, had been generously afforded lawyers and the patience of the court.

Their crimes were not in dispute. They had commerce with Lucifer, having been witnessed cavorting naked at a woodland pool by a passing delegation of clergy from the Vatican, en route to Lisbon on papal business.

They were practicing witchcraft.

Exposed while in communion with the Father of Lies.

Of that they were guilty. For such an act there is no absolution. They had been mercifully presented with the charity of time to reconcile their souls before their sentences were carried out.

The young women were dressed in white nightshirts dusted with sulphur. Their heads shorn, they stared hollow-eyed from their mule-drawn cart at the large figure trailing behind.

Their executioner.

He was wearing black boots, black pants, black gloves, and a full-length black robe. He also wore a large black hood concealing his identity. He embodied the infallibility of the deity. God, and the holy relic he wore, protected him from forces dispatched from hell. He was a soldier of light, charged to destroy any evil that threatened the Church. Even uneducated, young country girls who, lacking a tub, bathed in a forest pond.

During the procession the executioner observed the anguished mother, gripping the hand of her third daughter, her youngest.

She was ten.

Brilliant white orbs glowed from the girl’s head in testament to her blindness. A defect at birth. She was also bereft of speech. Understandably, among simple common people, her strange presence was unsettling. No one had sufficient will to ever look directly upon her, for fear of a curse.

Except the executioner.

From the black holes of his hood, he stared at her vacant white eyes with intense curiosity, until the procession stopped at the appointed place of the final penalty. The heretics were removed from the cart and bound to the poles. Reading from a scroll, the clerk of the court recited with official intonation their crimes and sentence. Priests and their acolytes proceeded with exorcising the young women while crucifixes were waved about. The crowd began taunting the girls to confess.

Command the devil to save you now!

They cried out for mercy, their young voices begging for compassion. They loved God, they rejected Lucifer. The chief magistrate ordered silence, warning all that their pleas were only a sorcerer’s tactic to beguile the men of God. In praising God, they were truly swearing allegiance to Satan.

The time had come for the sentence to be carried out, the magistrate extended his hand with its golden rings toward the executioner.

Begin.

The black-clad figure bowed respectfully to the Church, the court and assembled officials.

He crouched at his kindling fire, meticulously stoking it amid spectacular bursts of sparks until he withdrew a long, metal rod, its tip bearing lettering, radiating red and white.

As if gripping the sword of righteousness, he thrust it victoriously to the sky, holding it high, an exhilarating gesture, as he stepped to the first witch where he brought it within an inch of her young, terrified face.

It thrilled the crowd, spectators chanted for a confession.

The girl sobbed. She turned toward her older sister, then searched a sea of bloodlust for her mother’s face as the executioner tore her shirt, exposing her pure white skin.

A hush fell over the square as he slowly pressed the hot iron into her flesh over her heart. Those near could hear the sizzle of her flesh while it cooked, as her shrieks rose beyond the square, and the forests beyond the city, startling birds to take flight in fear. The spectators with the sharpest vision could see the lettering left by the executioner:

VOV

The cryptic mark of Xavier Veenza.

The spectators spread the word, speculating as they always did on its meaning, while the executioner re-heated the iron, moved on to the older sister, and repeated the act, branding her. The crowd howled, chanted louder in unison for the girls to confess as the executioner then took up a torch, held it ceremoniously high, then lit the fringe of the pyres surrounding each of the women.

Confess!

Slowly the flames began consuming the edges, smoke rising, swirling carrying ash and sparks. The crowd murmuring with approving pleasure as the fire came to life. As the flames neared, the girls’cries for mercy blended with the rising intensity of the fire. Their mother fell to her knees, her blind daughter clutching at her, mouth agape, her head weaving rhythmically left and right, straining against the death cries of her older sisters.

Soon they were engulfed by roaring walls of flame, and billowing clouds of smoke followed by the liquidy sputter of organs frying, the gurgle of blood boiling, the near-pleasant smell of meat broiling, like a wild boar roasting on the spit during festival time.

In short time, the screams ended.

But the fire raged, accompanied by the hum of satisfied spectators and the soft intonations of the priests.

Broken with sorrow, the mother collapsed to the earth, driving her fingers deep into it while a gentle wind carried a funereal haze toward an indifferent heaven.

A
s his Falcon rolled west along the edge of the Snoqualmie National Forest and the Wenatchee Mountains, Jason was certain that piece by piece something was emerging. But he didn’t know if Gideon Cull was part of it.

He’d gone online to pursue the bookmark’s angle and had searched the terms “Twist” and “Books.” It was futile. All he got, over and over, were discussions, descriptions and reviews about books with plot twists.

He chewed on things until he could no longer think straight. He listened to Hendrix’s
Band of Gypsies
and was hungry by the time he’d reached Seattle’s outskirts. In Fremont, he stopped at Johnny Pearl’s for takeout. Some rice and chicken. Man, it felt as if he’d been gone a week. The only things waiting for him at his apartment were his fish and two messages on his machine. He listened while he ate. The first was from his old man.

“Jay, give me a call when you can. I’d like to see you, Son.”

Later, Dad,
he thought, biting into an egg roll as the second message started.

“Jason, it’s Ron Nestor at the paper. Call me when you get this.”

He dialed Nestor’s number, then checked the time. Early evening. He was likely gone. Jason left a message on his voice mail, finished eating, then showered. The hot water cleared his head so he could go back to thinking about Cull, his assault against his wife, the old sexual harassment complaint from his college student. Then Roxanne Palmer’s ritual killing in the hills. Karen Harding’s disappearance. His feeling that Luke Terrell hadn’t told him the truth early on, and everything else.

Was it all linked?

Maybe.

Jason toweled off, pulled on fresh jeans, a T-shirt. Fed his fish. Then he fired up his laptop, created a file, opened his notebook, and began entering all of his notes, taking pains not to miss anything.

It had grown dark by the time he began shaping a story, profiling Gideon Cull and how he figured in Karen Harding’s disappearance and the other incidents. All of the story’s threads came back to Cull.

Cull knew Bonnie Stillerman, knew Karen Harding. Cull knew Spokane, where Roxanne was last seen alive. He had a violent past, was investigated for assaulting his wife. He was a clergyman and a Seattle college teacher of religious history whose street work was once recognized by the governor.

In Olympia, he was a saint. On campus, he was Professor Creepy.

Jason’s skin prickled at what he was writing.

This was wild, accusatory stuff. He stopped typing and considered it while he cleaned up his place. He came to Valerie’s bracelet, pondering it before returning to his notes and files to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. The bookmark fell out, the one he’d found at Hanna Larssen’s property. He studied it. Tapped it against his palm. Was this another piece in the puzzle? Was it connected to something else he’d seen? It gnawed at him until his phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Jason, it’s Nestor at the
Mirror.
I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“I was out of town. I just got in.”

“We’d like you back at the paper. Are you ready to come back?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Drop by my office early tomorrow.”

By 8:30 a.m., Jason was in the
Mirror
newsroom, standing at Nestor’s open door.

Nestor was wrapping up a call and waved him in to sit. A minute later, he hung up, then dropped a half-inch stack of paper on the table. An alligator clip held it together.
Wade
was scrawled in pen over the title:
Seattle’s Most Dangerous Intersections: Traffic Research Bureau. Confidential Draft Report.

“I want you back on the night cop desk tonight.”

Jason nodded.

“And I want you to start a series on each of the top ten most dangerous traffic spots. Give me five or six hundred words on each one. You’ve got a couple of weeks. Quote this study, call up traffic experts, community leaders, insurance people. We’ll run it as a tenpart series.”

Jason’s heart sank. This was page-filler. Inside stuff. It was punishment. The paper was reining him in. The silence that passed between them confirmed it. After several moments, Nestor said, “I had trouble reaching you. What did you do when you were off?”

“I poked around on my own on the Harding story and Gideon Cull.”

“Her college professor?”

Jason nodded.

“Jesus, Jason. You went right back and did the thing that got you into trouble in the first place.”

“I did it as a freelancer. On my own time and my own dime.”

“You were enterprising without informing me, your supervisor, as to what you were doing while representing this newspaper. And now you’re freelancing in competition with us?”

Jason said nothing.

“What the hell did you do?”

“I went to Spokane. I did some investigating on Cull’s background with a guy from the
Review
who owed me a favor. Cull has a connection to Spokane. The Benton County murder is connected to Spokane and Cull is connected to Karen Harding.”

“That’s a lot of connecting. Did you try to talk to Cull again?”

“No.”

“So what were you hoping to accomplish?”

“I’m working on a profile of Cull.”

“A profile? What sort of profile?”

“I think he’s emerging as a prime suspect in all of this.”

“Christ.” Nestor dragged his hand across his face, looked through the glass walls of his office at the newsroom, then released a sigh as if deciding what to do with Jason.

“Cull hit his wife with a baseball bat but was never convicted,” Jason said. “And he has an unsubstantiated sexual harassment complaint by a student when he taught at a Spokane college. Tumbler River, a few years back.”

Nestor’s focus snapped back to Jason.

“And did you know,” Jason said, “that privately, female students at Cull’s college here call him Professor Creepy?”

“You have all of this confirmed? On paper? Named sources? On the record?”

“No. Not yet. But I’m working on it,” he said.

“You’re working on it. Have police confirmed Cull’s a suspect?”

“No, but investigators from several jurisdictions met the other day in Benton County on the Roxanne Palmer case.”

“We heard about that. I had Astrid check it out.”

“Astrid?”

“She said it was a routine clearinghouse meeting. Nothing significant came out of it.”

Jason didn’t believe that for a second, because he knew Astrid hated crime stories and would do nothing more than make a cursory check. But he said nothing.

“Look.” Nestor folded his arms across his chest, then stroked his moustache. “The fact you enterprise relentlessly is one of your strongest assets. You’re a digger. We like that about you.”

Jason said nothing.

“We’re deeply interested in Karen Harding’s story, but you can’t go around pointing fingers at people without rock-solid facts to back you up. You can’t go out and collect a few pieces of unsubstantiated hearsay, stitch them together into an accusation, and call it journalism. What you have are hunches, the genesis of investigative reporting. But hunches have to be confirmed with documents or people who go on the record.”

Nestor paused to ensure that his words were sinking in before continuing.

“Unless something changes, the Benton County murder story is by and large a Spokane story. For us, it’s a state story. Karen Harding’s disappearance is a Seattle story. Ours. We can do features, updates, we can monitor the investigation with aggressive police checks. Try to get a scoop, that sort of thing. But until something breaks, there’s not a heck of a lot more we can do on it at the moment.”

Jason thumbed the pages of the traffic study, noticing one of the intersections was near the brewery where his old man worked. How ironic.

“Now, having said that, I don’t want to discourage you, Jason. I don’t want to dismiss what you may have dug up on Cull. So I’m going to make a proposal.”

Jason stopped thumbing the study and looked at Nestor.

“You work on the traffic feature. In your downtime, write up what you have on Cull. But it’s for my eyes only. Understand? Just write what you have.
Not for publication.
You do not call Cull without my say-so. I’ll go through your draft, then decide how, or if, we’ll proceed. If there’s nothing to it, well, you will have had your shot. If I think you’ve hit on something, I give you my word we’ll jump all over the story. Fair enough?”

Jason’s pulse quickened.

“Fair enough.”