The Shepherd (11 page)

For him, losing Kathleen wasn’t the worst part. He had dealt with death every day and knew that losing a loved one didn’t require the intervention of a serial killer. Disease, a fall down the stairs, a car accident; all were constant possibilities.

But the hardest thing to stomach was the fact that he had killed her, that his work had been the catalyst to her demise. Even worse than that was the realization that he hadn’t appreciated her while she was still alive.

He stumbled into the stairwell that led down to the kitchen and slumped against the sidewall. He thought of Kathleen. He thought of Ackerman. Then, he thought of Marcus. He straightened, wiped away the tears, and collected himself. He had a job to do.

~~*~~

Marcus laid out the story in detail. The Sheriff listened, letting it unfold in its entirety. Now and again, the Sheriff would ask a question, in order to clarify some small detail, but then ask him to continue. The Sheriff’s chief deputy, Lewis Foster, also listened, taking notes on a small pad of paper.

Foster was a young man, late twenties or early thirties. The deputy wore a snug fitting, tan uniform, and Marcus could see that the man spent too much time in the weight room. Foster watched with accusing eyes. He could tell that the deputy’s preferred method of questioning was a thick phone book and a locked room. He knew the type—the scrawny kid who got bullied before discovering steroids. Then, Foster became the bully.

Unlike Foster, the Sheriff exuded confidence and competence, and the man’s face showed no accusatory expressions or doubt.

“Quite a story,” Foster said with an edge to his voice.

“Yes, a senseless tragedy,” the Sheriff said. “Before I forget, Marcus, we’re gonna need to borrow your shoes.”

“My shoes?”

“Yes, we’ll need to get a casting and a sample to compare with any footprints that we may find.”

He nodded and removed his shoes. The Sheriff walked them over to a young man who disappeared with them.

The Sheriff returned and said, “So you didn’t actually see anyone in the house or on the property?”

“No, whoever did this was long gone by the time I got here.”

“Or they never left,” Foster said.

The statement caught him off guard, and his eyes narrowed at the deputy. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know. Just seems a little funny to me that a new guy moves in, and within two days, he’s put a couple guys in the hospital and conveniently stumbled upon a homicide. Guess you’re just unlucky, right?”

“I’m sitting here talking to an inbred moron, so things could be better.”

“If it was up to me, we’d be doin’ more than just talking.”

“Sorry. I don’t kiss on the first date.”

“You cocky little—”

“Lewis, that’s enough,” the Sheriff said.

“It’s alright, Sheriff. Let him keep talking. Someday, he’s bound to say something intelligent. Kinda like the deal where they theorize that a bunch of monkeys in a room full of typewriters will eventually write Shakespeare.”

Foster moved closer. “Next time, you’re gonna find yourself all alone with me in a dark room. You won’t be so funny then.”

He cocked his head to the side, cracking his neck. When he spoke, his voice was calm and modulated. “You try that with me, and they’ll take you outta that room on a stretcher.”

“You threatening me?”

“No. I don’t make threats. Just stating facts.”

Foster made a move toward him, but the Sheriff put an arm out and stopped his advance. “Why don’t you go help the boys upstairs, Lewis?”

Foster stared with fire in his eyes for a few seconds before turning and walking away.

Turning back to Marcus, the Sheriff said, “Not very good at making friends, are you?”

“I’m an acquired taste.”

“Maggie told me you used to be a cop, so I would think that you would be able to see things from Lewis’s point of view.”

“I could try, sir. But, honestly, I don’t think that I could get my head that far up my ass.”

The Sheriff stared at him with a blank expression and scratched his goatee. “Listen, kid, I don’t think that you had anything to do with this, but you’re not making very good first impressions around here. And the circumstances do seem pretty suspicious, so you better watch yourself. If you’re gonna stick around, you need to learn a little self-control when it comes to that mouth of yours.”

He nodded. “I’ll try, sir.”

“Good. Now, I want you to go home, get some rest, and put this whole thing out of your mind. I know that it’s easier for me to say that than it is for you to do it, but I think you need to try anyway. This is our responsibility now. The best thing for you to do is to forget this house and everything in it. If you don’t, it’ll eat you up inside. Trust me, son, I know.”

There was truth in the Sheriff’s words, and he knew it. He also knew that he hated sitting on the sidelines, and it wasn’t in his nature to forget. “Do I get my shoes back?”

The Sheriff shook his head. “Yes, you get your damn shoes back. If you think of anything else, here’s my card. My cell number’s on there.”

Marcus stuck the card in his pocket. “There is one other thing that you should keep in mind when you look at this case.”

“And that is?”

He glanced around the room and lowered his voice. “You have a notorious serial killer traveling through the area. It would be a terribly convenient time for anyone who had been planning a murder to execute his or her plans. Think about it. The first thing I thought of when I saw that body was Ackerman. Someone wanting to commit a murder has the perfect opportunity to do so and a completely believable fall guy. Our minds are already tainted with the knowledge that Ackerman might be in the area. I’m just saying that you need to base your investigation on the facts alone—no assumptions.”

The Sheriff seemed to consider his words a moment. “Thanks, kid, but we know how to do our jobs. Put the case out of your mind. We don’t need your help.” The Sheriff started to turn away but looked back. “And Marcus, until this thing is cleared up, stay away from my daughter.”

~~*~~

Marcus sat in the dark and relived his experience in the grandmother’s house. He wished he could forget. He prayed for the ability to put the past behind him and start a new life. He prayed to sleep and be carried off to a dream world filled with happy memories. Instead, he knew that he would be transported to a dark world of pain and suffering. A place with gray skies where the sun never graced the world. A place whose only inhabitants were monsters and their victims. A place where every surface seemed to possess teeth and a ravenous longing to consume his soul. He wondered if his dreams held a glimpse of his own personal hell.

Unlike in his dreams, he was now wide awake and reliving the day’s events on his own volition. He studied every detail of the experience, searching for clues or small details that in the heat of the moment he may have overlooked. He had been blessed with the gift of a powerful photographic memory, and with this ability, he could transform himself into a reasonable facsimile of a human computer. He could store the data gathered in the house and re-access it later from his mental databanks. It wasn’t quite as easy as using a computer terminal, but he often discovered something that he had missed on first glance.

And he knew he had missed something. He could feel it.

His eyes shifted back and forth, as his mind traveled over every minute detail. An observer would have seen a man staring at a wall. In reality, he didn’t even notice the wall. He looked through it, into the past, into his memories.

As he had thought, there was much that he had overlooked, but he still couldn’t make sense of any of it. He needed time, but a killer was on the loose. And he owed it to Maureen Hill to stop him before another suffered as she had.

He thought about Maggie. After taking her statement, her father had sent her home with one of the deputies. He decided to give her a call and see how she was holding up.

He sifted through a few papers lying on his kitchen table. Two items drew his attention. One was Maggie’s number scrawled on a small sheet of paper. The other was a tattered business card that her father had given him after the questioning.

Both Maggie and her father had given him their numbers within the past day. Each number represented a different path, one of love and life and fond memories and one of pain and death. One path offered great happiness, but if he could stop the killer, the other offered great meaning. He knew which path any normal, sane person would choose. He hated to admit it, even to himself, but the path of happiness wasn’t the one that called to him.

Since he had yet to purchase a cell phone that worked in the area, he picked up the handset of an old rotary phone that had come with the house and dialed Maggie’s number. He didn’t need to read it from the sheet of paper. He’d only seen it once, but he had it memorized. Each subsequent ring made his heart sink. For some reason, he had expected her to be sitting by the phone awaiting his call.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi, it’s Marcus. I was beginning to think you weren’t home.”

“I was in the shower. I’ve been in there since I got back to the apartment. I didn’t even go into that house, but somehow I still feel dirty.”

He searched for words that could comfort her. He found none. “I know what you mean.”

“My God, Marcus, that poor woman. She was a wonderful person and definitely didn’t deserve...not that anyone…” Her unfinished words hung in the air, and only silence transmitted over the telephone lines.

Once again, Maggie broke the silence with a question that made him cringe. “Did you ever see anything like that when you were a cop?”

Now I remember. This is why I don’t get into relationships.

“I saw some things that I wish I could forget,” he said.

Silence. She changed the subject. “We didn’t really get a chance to talk at the scene, but I was wondering about what you did after you found the body. Were you in shock?”

He didn’t want to talk about it anymore, but he did anyway. “I stood there, looking into her eyes. It was like she was calling out to me, screaming for help…a silent scream.” Tears rolled down his face. “I felt completely powerless. It was the same feeling as when… Maybe we all have a monster inside. Maybe we all have the same capacity for evil as we do for good. I don’t know. But I do know that my monster lives a little bit closer to the surface, and sometimes I can’t control it.” He forced a laugh. “If that doesn’t scare you off, then I don’t know what will.”

“I’m not scared of you. Go on.”

“When I looked into her eyes, I lost control. I ran through that house, and then I ran to that back door, and I…unlocked it.”

His eyes grew large as his mind fixed upon the one important factor that he had missed. When he had used his memory trick earlier, he had focused on the body and the bedroom. He had yet to think of the rest of the house.

I had to unlock the deadbolt on the back door, and it could only have been locked from the inside or with a key. The killer was gone, and unless he cleaned the blood from his feet and came back in for some reason… Someone else was in that house before me…someone other than the killer.

“I’m gonna have to let you go.”

“Wait. What’s going on? What did—”

He hung up the phone and ran to grab the Sheriff’s business card.

A flood of urgency washed over him. He knew that the first forty-eight hours were the most important in any investigation. He wanted to look at the whole scene with this new information in mind. Maybe there was something else that he had missed, something that could only be seen once you knew that someone else had been in the house?

He spun each digit on the rotary phone, and his annoyance grew with every rotation of the antique device. After a few rings, the Sheriff said, “Hello?”

“This is Marcus, Sheriff. Where are you now?”

“I just left the crime scene. Packed everything up for the night. Why? What’s happened?”

“I need you to meet me back there, as soon as possible.”

“Wait a minute, I—”

“You told me to call if I thought of anything. Well, I thought of something. And it can’t wait.”

Marcus waited in the driveway of Maureen Hill’s beautiful home. Earlier in the day, he had wished to never set foot inside the grandmother’s house again. It was a dark place that he wished he could forget.

Now, however, he needed to get back inside. The urgency to discover the truth overwhelmed him, a feeling that had once been a daily part of his life. He felt like a cop again.

In the distance, he saw headlights approaching. The car pulled into the driveway, and the Sheriff stepped out of the vehicle onto the dusty ground. “What was important enough to drag me away from my supper?”

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what happened here. When I got home today, I kept replaying everything in my mind, searching for something I had missed, something that I overlooked. Finally, it hit me.”

“What hit you?”

“Let me show you.”

He led the Sheriff through the house to the kitchen.

“When I saw her upstairs, her body desecrated like that, I was so angry that I ran through the house like a madman. That’s why, when I went to the back door, I didn’t notice that it was locked from the inside. Which could mean that—”

“Someone else was in the house before you and locked the door behind them,” the Sheriff said. The older man’s face took on a dark, somber expression. “Or it could mean absolutely nothing.”

The Sheriff turned to Marcus and voiced his concerns. “Say that it does mean what you think it means. Who, other than the killer, would have come in this house and not immediately reported the murder? Accomplice of some kind? And whoever it was must have taken great care not to step in any of the blood that the killer left behind. We didn’t find any other sets of footprints, other than the killer’s and yours. Any ideas?”

Marcus shook his head. “I was hoping that maybe this new information might shed light on some other clue. Lead us in the right direction. I don’t know, I just…” He looked out the back window and noticed something strange. He walked to the back door, unlocked it, and stepped outside. The Sheriff followed.