Shawnee County, Kansas
Friday, October 12, 2007
“Dr. Hughes!” Sabrina waved a pink piece of paper around when she saw Lisa come into the office and open one of the file cabinets. “There was a message for you.”
Dr. Hughes took the slip from Sabrina and looked at it. She pressed at her temples with her thumb and fourth finger and shook her head. “Did he leave a phone number?”
“Just the cell number. Said he had some car trouble in Washington and wasn’t going to be able to make it back here by Monday morning. He has to reschedule for the twenty-second, the next Monday.”
“What the hell is he doing that’s so important?” Dr. Hughes wondered.
“If the voice in the background was any indication, he’s doing some kind of local movie marathon, or maybe something with television.” Sabrina shrugged helplessly. “Heard another man talking about werewolves. But they weren’t in London; they were in Washington State.”
“Mr. Summers is the most reckless man I have ever met in my life! Movies?”
“What about that guy Richie that you have all those college stories about?” Geraldine asked, looking up briefly her from the computer screen.
“Okay. Second most reckless man.”
“That’s two consecutive cancellations, though,” Sabrina pointed out. “We can drop him from the clinic now, paid fees or not.”
“I don’t think so, Sabrina. Not this time. Make sure my schedule is free all day on Monday the twenty-second.”
“Up through lunch?”
“Better make it the entire day, just to be safe. We’ll stay open later the rest of the week to make up for it, so you can make appointments up through five o’clock instead of three-thirty. And I promise whichever one of you stays will get time and a half for the extra hours.”
Sabrina nodded and started to type, but her fingers moved over only a few keys before she stopped. “You know… you can lose your license for this. Technically, you’re working out of the stipulations of your current surgical certificates. Your general surgery certifications expired in 2005.”
“No, they didn’t. As of September twenty-eighth, they’re good for another two years.”
“How did you do that?” Sabrina gasped. “Did you take night classes? I couldn’t do it. I hardly get any sleep taking two classes at night and working just forty hours a week.”
“I, well, I had a little bit of help from a friend of the patient and a copy shop. Don’t look at me like that, Sabrina. There isn’t another doctor in the state who would take this case without plastering it all over the front page of the newspaper. If it would make you feel better, I did take two extra courses this summer. And those certificates didn’t come from Kinko’s.” Dr. Hughes smiled flatly, then nodded at the silence and turned her attention back to the file cabinet.
Sabrina quietly updated the appointment records.
10 miles from Arkadelphia, Arkansas
Friday, October 19, 2007
John ducked under the yellow crime scene tape that ringed the double-wide trailer. Normally, after hearing about a murder that might or might not have anything to do with the supernatural, he would have called one of his sons and had them handle it. But he hadn’t spoken to either Dean or Sam since May, and he didn’t plan on going back on what he said. Every now and then he wondered if maybe he’d reacted too strongly; maybe they had been affected by the power of the ghost-spirit-wraith-whatever that they’d found, and weren’t entirely to blame.
But he said he wasn’t going to talk to them again, and he wasn’t about to change his mind. Now his only two choices were to pass up the job or pause for an hour or two and poke around.
It wasn’t so much that there was no physical explanation for what happened as it was that the physical explanation didn’t make any sense. There was no good reason for Angela Moser to suddenly snap and murder her husband, mother-in-law, and mother-in-law’s father. Even if she did have some kind of undiagnosed psychosis, it didn’t seem likely that a hundred-pound woman would be able to overpower all three of them the way she was alleged to have. The elderly man, maybe; her mother-in-law, less likely, but still possible, especially if caught alone. However, Steven Moser was more than twice her size, and, from the photos in the newspaper, quite fit. There was a strong possibility that something more was going on than an so-called ordinary triple murder.
The blinking lights on the EMF meter proved his suspicions. Something went into the trailer and killed everybody inside. And it either wasn’t Angela or it was something possessing her.
The three bodies were gone, replaced by chalk outlines where they lay in death. Eugene Townsend, an 89-year-old man who had suffered two strokes in the last three years, had been drowned with his head submerged in a bucket of water. Susan Moser, his widowed daughter, died of knife wounds “ the blood was still splattered all over the small dining room, over the floor, parts of the walls, and two of the chairs. It had pooled onto the old carpet and John stepped carefully around the nearly-dried stain.
The kitchen “ the kitchen was worse. Steven and the iron that killed him were both gone, one at the coroner’s and the other in police custody. But John still saw what looked like a gallon of rust-brown paint thrown haphazardy over the counters and floor, dried in drips and droplets. The smell of sour copper filled his nostrils and his eyes watered from the stench. At the place where the droplets were the most concentrated, he found tufts of brown hair and pulverized soft matter, which already quivered and writhed with fly larvae.
He looked up at the wall above the rotten flesh. There, the blood was smeared into a circle with an 18-pointed star drawn inside of it, the lines joining the points merged and stylized. The cult is back, he thought. John Winchester had seen that symbol before; it was the mark of the Sisterhood of the Night God, women who pledged themselves to what they thought was Satan, but was really only a demon claiming to be him, in return for a small measure of magical powers and, if they completed enough human sacrifices, power even in death. He knew enough about it to recognize the symbol and understand the basics, although he hadn’t had time “ or any reason “ to investigate it more closely. If Angela had joined the cult, then it was very possible that she could have become strong enough to kill three adults, even one more physically capable than she was.
Except that the cult was only flourishing, if a dozen practitioners could be called flourishing, in the 1930s and 1940s before disappearing by 1955. Maybe someone did find information on it and revive it. Or maybe what was at work was something else entirely.
Arkadelphia, Arkansas
Saturday, October 20, 2007
“The suspect won’t talk to us,” said Officer Seymour. “I really don’t think she’ll talk to you, Detective.”
“Give me five minutes and she’ll be saying something,” said John. “Won’t even have to touch her.”
Officer Seymour shrugged and took a sip from his Styrofoam coffee cup. “Be my guest.”
Angela Moser looked like she hadn’t slept or showered in a long time; she had dark circles under her eyes and her hair was greasy and limp. She wore plain powder blue pants and a shirt, and her bare feet were chained together with a chain just long enough to allow her to walk with tiny steps, inches by inches. She sat down across from John at a long, plain table in a room surrounded by reinforced glass while the officers waited outside.
“Angela,” John said.
She gave no response.
“Look, I know that you know something about what happened at your husband’s grandfather’s house. The sooner we get to the bottom of it, the better. Now tell me what happened.”
Now Angela shook her head and closed her eyes, then let her chin drop to her chest.
“All right. I’m going to show you a picture, and you tell me what you know about it. Okay?”
John opened his notebook and unlatched the rings that held the pages together. He pulled out one of the papers, the one with the 18-pointed-star on it, and placed it on the table between them, just out of her reach. “Tell me if you’ve seen this symbol before.”
When she saw the picture, her brown eyes opened wide and she drew up her knees to her chest, shrinking back into the chair and folding herself up. She pressed her face against her legs and nodded.
“Who else showed it to you?”
Shaking head, rocking back and forth. Something whispered.
“What was that? I couldn’t hear you.”
“Her,” was all Angela would say. But it was a word. It was a start.
“Susan would have been, at most, four years old when the last member of the cult died,” said John. “You’re not telling me that it was Susan, are you? Because I wouldn’t believe that. And the police report strongly suggests that she was the second to die.”
“I can’t tell you,” said Angela, quietly. “She said she’d kill me if I told anyone.”
John, unfazed, leaned back in his chair and glanced down at another sheet of paper, an ink-smeared printout from his wireless printer. If his gut instinct was right, then the odds that the woman was born in the second decade of the twentieth century “ or possibly the third “ were extremely high, and in that era, parents weren’t quite as creative with names of daughters as they might be nearly a century later. He’d printed off the hundred most popular names for girls born between 1910 and 1919 “ most of them overlapping with 1920 to 1929 “ from a site called Behind the Name. “I have a list of suspects other than you,” he said, “and I’m just going to read off their first names. You tell me when we get to one you recognize, okay?”
Angela shook her head and averted her eyes.
“Mary?” John asked, hoping that Angela wouldn’t react. There was virtually no chance that his late wife was involved, even in the tiniest way, but it was still a relief when Angela sat still and made no sound. “Or maybe you saw Helen.” Still nothing. “Of course, there has been a bit of trouble from Dorothy.”
Several minutes later, John was beginning to think his guess was wrong. That was a good thing; if the killer wasn’t part of the original cult, then she might be less dangerous and easier to find. “Nellie. You ever heard of Nellie?”
Angela was silent.
“What about Mabel?”
Nothing.
“Laura?”
Angela’s high-pitched squeak and instinctive glance over her shoulder told him what he needed to know. John was about to keep going down the list, so that Angela could think her secret was still a secret, when the timeline and the names clicked into place.
A man also named Eugene “ Dean had never told John what Eugene’s last name was “ had a wife named Laura, who disappeared sixty years ago. In ten and a half days, it would be exactly sixty years. If this was the same case as the one involving the wishing well, then Dean and Sam must have been getting close to finishing the job, and Laura-in-the-well was getting very agitated. Agitated enough to start killing to protect herself, instead of only killing those who came to her as sacrifices, or as required to fulfill the supplicants’ requests.
He continued with four more names before putting the paper away. “I’ll put Vera at the top of the suspect list,” he said. “I have another idea. Were there any visitors to the trailer? In the past, say, five months?”
“I don’t know,” Angela said slowly. She appeared to have relaxed a little when John mentioned investigating “Vera.” “Maybe a few. I was in Louisiana for awhile with… with Steven.”
“Did Susan or Eugene ever talk about any of them?”
“Talked about two boys,” said Angela. “But they were just college kids.”
“Really? Tell me what you heard about them.”
“That they were exchange students from Spain doin’ research of a kind. Real handsome-like, tanned, but my husband’s momma said they were short and they ought to have eaten more vegetables when they were little.”
“Those the only ones?” Dean and Sam could pull of a tan, and maybe enough broken textbook Spanish to fool a few people, but neither, and especially not Sam, could have been described as short.
“There was the two that got Sue all upset, but I was out of the state,” said Angela. “I only got back at the end of July. Said the one was the rudest fellow who ever darkened the doorstep. Grandpa just told her to shut up. But he was always like that. Told everybody to shut up when he was watching Martin Kane.”
“That doesn’t give me much to go on, Angela.”
“Well, I don’t remember anything else. Grandpa said cut him some slack and then Sue started bitching about the youngins in the old car that looked just like Henry’s first car. ‘Cept Henry’s was gold and this one was black.”
“Do you remember what kind of car it was?”
“I told you, I wasn’t there.”
John frowned, the only outward sign of anxiety and frustration. “Not the visitors’ car. Your father-in-law’s.”
“Well, he drove a big old Ford truck. Got it when he started working at the silos ten years ago.”
“His first car, Angela, not the truck!”
“Oh.” She bit her lip and thought about that. “I don’t remember.”
“It wouldn’t be a 1967 Chevy Impala, by any chance, would it?”
“Yeah, that’s what they called it, but I don’t know if it was sixty-seven. He was only eighteen then. Might have been sixty-eight.”
“Thank you, Angela. You’ve been very helpful and I’ll try to get you out of here as soon as possible.” He motioned towards the officers outside, signaling that the interview was over, and the guards returned to take Angela back to her cell.
“I’m pretty sure she didn’t do it,” John said to Officer Seymour. He watched Angela leave, but before she turned the corner out of his line of sight, she put out two fingers. Then she retracted one, and bounced her hand to mean another one. 211. John filed the number away in his memory and turned back to the police officer. “There’s no way she could have bashed Steven’s head in. There are signs of a struggle, but he had no knife wounds “ no bullet holes “ no obvious signs of being drugged. She couldn’t overpower him without another weapon and her being able to surprise him with the iron after two murders in the same trailer stretches the limits of sense.”
“We’ll get with forensics and have them look over the evidence again,” said Officer Seymour.
“You do that. I’m going to call it a night, boys.”
*
“The Sisterhood of the Night God believed that they were granted special powers upon attainment of symbolic numbers of human sacrifices. Although the number of murders committed by Charlotte Goodman, for instance, was far above the third-tier limit, many of them were not deaths of those who had first asked her for assistance, and thus in the eyes of the Sisterhood were not fit for counting towards their totals. At six deaths, the acolyte reached the first tier became a full member of the Sisterhood. According to legend, at thirty-six “ six times six “ she ascended to the second tier and received the power to transcend the grave and continue her work even after her physical life ended, provided that her remains were not burned. It is for this reason that Goodman was cremated upon her death in 1942. At two hundred sixteen “ six times six times six “ the Sister would reach the third tier and become immortal, though bound to her Master in Hell and unable to leave that domain, ruling over her own minions on Earth from afar. She could then also claim a single soul of her choosing and take it with her, enslaving it and twisting it to her own will to unleash at any time she wished.”
John printed off the webpage and continued running searches while drinking a cup of strong black coffee. He wasn’t going to get any sleep that night.
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