Mr. 8 Read online

  According to his summary, there had been no eights. Nothing had been written on the walls. There was no clear number of organs on the ground. They were decayed and splattered into pieces on the dirt floor.

  His notation on the bull sculpture read: “Four feet high, about one foot wide, crudely carved, one horn pointy, one blunt, with what appears to be kidneys nailed to each eye.”

  It had sat on an altar, which was made out of four old crates covered in shiny black tar paper. Also on the altar were three other items: a vodka bottle containing a dark liquid, likely blood; a child’s action figure; and a crucifix made from bones, tied with a black ribbon.

  On the next page, he had the notes he made later at home. These were in a steadier hand and reading through them, he remembered the progression of his investigation.

  “The building demonstrates resourcefulness but lack of skill. The carving also shows no skill,” the first line read. These were straightforward facts. The shack was too makeshift to indicate any experience with construction or carpentry. But there was no easy access to the site. Most of the pieces would have had to have been transported there over trails.

  The statue also hinted that the person was not familiar with woodworking. It was most probably a log that was found and hacked at until it bore a passing resemblance to a bull.

  The next few lines were about the action figure. Denton had spent hours researching it on the internet. He had finally identified it as the hero of a popular science-fiction movie from eight years earlier. It was a toy likely owned by a boy, who would presently be a teenager. But initially there was no indication that the original owner was the same one who had placed it there.

  He had speculated that the bones that formed the cross were from a bird. Considering the size, he had guessed a chicken. The black ribbon had confounded him. In one rambling bit, he had written: “Nothing was placed there randomly. Is black for evil or maybe death? A black ribbon might be worn during mourning. Why grieve over a bird? Or do the bones represent something else?”

  At first, he had dismissed the bottle of blood as a food offering. He had theorized that the organs and the blood were offered up as nourishment to the god, or spirit, or demon, or whatever it was that the subject thought he was worshipping. Denton was vaguely aware some cultures offered food to the dead at altars and it appeared that a similar ritual was going on in that shack.

  A smile grew on his face while he remembered the moment when he had made the connection—the epiphany that unlocked the riddle of the three objects.

  He had been reading about cults and pagan practices on the Web. There was almost too much information to sort through. Out of frustration, he had gone to his bookshelves to look for his antiquated volume of Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

  Might as well start at the beginning.

  As he scanned over the spines, the dull golden cross of his Bible had caught his eye. While he had stared at its leather binding, the answer floated out of his subconscious: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

  The vodka bottle wasn’t important for the blood it contained. The bottle of spirits was a literal representation of the Holy Ghost. The toy was for a child and represented the Son. But so should the crucifix. How could it be the Father?

  He had brooded on that question for days, as he filled in the other details. Such a literal mind suggested an immature psyche. This began to point to the likelihood that whoever built that altar was young. A picture of the perpetrator had begun to form.

  It wasn’t until he had stopped thinking about it as bones wrapped in a ribbon, and started looking at it as a religious symbol and a ribbon, that he worked out why they represented the Father.

  In the report Denton had given to Bill, he had told him that the person he was looking for was male, in his mid to late teens, with a deceased father. The father had been a highly religious Christian, perhaps even a member of the clergy. The suspect lived in the area, with easy access to the State Forest.

  When he handed over the document, his stomach fluttered nervously. He was no longer sure whether its content was scientific or just a bunch of educated guesses, or worse, wild stabs in the dark. The skeptical look on Bill’s face, as he skimmed through it, didn’t help ease his doubt either.

  “Okay, thanks Dent. We’ll check it out,” was all he said at the time.

  A few days later, Denton got a call from Bill. They’d made an arrest. It was on the news the next day, but because the accused was a minor they didn’t release any details about him. It was only on the weekend that Bill confided in him that he had been dead on.

  The boy that they’d picked up was seventeen years old. He and his mother lived in an old neighborhood near Westfield. Not far from their home was a bike trail that led into the park. His father had committed suicide eight years before and had been the reverend at the local Methodist church. In the tool shed, they found a backpack filled with bloody clothes and knives.

  Bill Stahl had been impressed.

  Much later, Denton had learned that there had never been a trial. Instead, the boy’s mother had agreed to commit him to an asylum out of state.

  He had planned to write the whole thing up as an article for publication. He would use it to publicly vindicate his theories. But without access to the psychological assessment done on the boy, there was a huge hole in his conclusion.

  There had been no eights, he thought to himself again for reassurance, as he put the notebook away and locked the desk drawer. The two cases weren’t linked; it had just been a feverish dream.

  Denton walked through the quiet house to the kitchen and started preparing a bowl of cereal.

  There was still something tugging at his thoughts. He couldn’t help feeling there was some connection. Something about the two cases were similar.

  He poured the milk and thought about the altar and the strange acts of devotion carried out there. Then the train bridge came back to him, with the giant red eight. The man called Ray sat in front of it and stared at it day after day, before he was killed.

  The answer came to him: just like the bull head, the eights were a symbol of worship.

  Chapter 10

  December 13th

  LINDA ORDERED THE BRAISED SHORT RIB SPECIAL. Denton asked for the steak frites. When the waiter stepped away, they went back to their conversation. Linda was forced to strain her voice over the din of the restaurant. 7th and Market was packed. The holidays were less than two weeks away, and everyone was getting out and celebrating. An office Christmas party took over the back corner, and sudden cheers and bursts of laughter erupted from them like erratic gunfire.

  The town wasn’t just getting into the holiday spirit, it was also blowing off steam—drinking a little too much, talking a little too loud, as they whistled past the graveyard.

  With the help of a controversial land deal and allegations of corruption at city hall, the disappearances had finally started to slip from the front page. Since the news of Maggie Biscamp’s kidnapping broke, there had been another fourteen Milton students reported missing and half a dozen residents.

  Denton had finally got a chance to talk to Bill on the weekend. He caught up with him, while he was hanging garland on his front gallery.

  “Bill, I was beginning to think you didn’t live here anymore,” he said, walking up the path.

  “So did Helen. I’m glad she didn’t decide to re-marry.”

  Bill struggled one handed with the strand of the artificial pine decoration, but finally got it into the place he wanted. He used a staple gun in his other hand to attach it to the wooden post. Then he cautiously released it, almost expecting it to fall back down. The swag of lights and fir needles swayed but held.

  “This is the first real break I’ve had since Monday.” Bill fired in four more staples for good measure. “I’m beat. They’ve had me going twelve to sixteen hours a day. And how do I spend my d
ay off? Decorating the damn house. You got yours up, I saw.”

  They discussed the holidays and the hassles of burned out bulbs for a while, but eventually Denton brought the conversation around to the case.

  “I really can’t tell you much,” Bill said.

  “Look, I know its police business, but—”

  “It’s not that. There just isn’t much to tell. We’re at a loss. It’s like she just fell off of the Earth. And now with all these other reports, we’re getting buried taking statements and doing paperwork. All these false reports are crippling our chances of finding the girl.”

  “Look, I’ve come up with a few things,” Denton pressed on. “And I think it might be a good idea if I looked over the other victim’s file. Can I come by the station sometime?”

  “Sure thing.” Bill got down from the stepladder and picking up another length of the garland. “But let’s just wait until we find this Biscamp girl first, okay?”

  “But it’s the same guy. We catch the killer, we find the girl.”

  “That’s not how the Lieutenant sees it. He doesn’t believe there’s any link between the murders and the kidnapping.” Bill dragged the ladder a few feet down the gallery, before climbing back up. “Gotta say, I’m beginning to think he’s right. Can’t find anything substantial connecting them.”

  “So you’re saying, it’s just a coincidence that there’s a string of disappearances right after there are three murders? In Bexhill?”

  “There is only one confirmed disappearance,” he said definitively. “They just found that McElroy kid. His girlfriend broke up with him, so he went home to Scranton. And those two hikers in yesterday’s news were home by dinner. People are just being hysterical. The only real case is the girl and that isn’t at all the same M.O. as the homicides.”

  “What about the eights?”

  “What about them?” Bill said it casually, but there was a weariness in his words. He was growing tired of the conversation.

  “I think I know what they mean. The victims use them as a religious symbol like a crucifix.”

  “And what religion would that be then?”

  “I don’t know.” Denton added, “Yet.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And I think I found a connection between the victims. Reynolds shopped where Meyers worked. Well, Meyers worked on a truck, but it was for the same store where Ray bought his spray-paint.” God, were his big revelations really that flimsy sounding.

  “Look, I know you mean well, but just drop it, Dent.” There was something in his voice that made it clear there was nothing else to talk about. “It’s not your fight.”

  Bill was only partially right about the rash of disappearances being hysteria. Aside from Jason McElroy, who was with his family in Pennsylvania, five of the students reported missing turned out to be pranks; three more turned up before the end of the weekend; and another was located in a hospital in Boston, recovering from a burst appendix she suffered while visiting friends.

  It was a similar story with the locals: after a day or two, half of them came home wondering why people were in such a panic.

  But in the end, there were still eight people whose whereabouts were unknown, including Maggie.

  On Monday night, the Bexhill PD was forced to hold a town meeting at the high school, to answer questions from the concerned populace. Denton didn’t attend, but he read about it the next day. It seemed to be little more than a chance for residents to vent and for the police spokesperson to come up with various ways of saying, “Stay calm. Everything is being done to locate the missing people and to apprehend the culprit.”

  Somehow, Mr. 8 was kept out of the news. Denton searched the internet for the nickname and came across only two instances of it on some small local blogs. Officially, he was always referred to in vague terms, like culprit, perpetrator, or party. And usually it was qualified by a possible plural, such as: “We are compiling a list of suspects and we are confident that we will soon bring the party or parties to justice.”

  There had been a vigil for the missing on Tuesday. It started at eight o’clock at Milton’s quad and ended at the church at the top of Market Square. People carried candles and some brought signs and pictures. Maggie Biscamp’s graduation photo was carried in many people’s hands that night. Most of them had never heard of the girl before the media made her a household name.

  Then after that: nothing. No news.

  There was still a madman on the loose, but people were willing themselves to forget. The vigil had not just been a show of support, it had been therapeutic. The town finally let itself put their fear to bed that night. And when the crimes stopped making headlines, they tried to move on with their lives.

  Denton started to relax after that, as well. He got home and decided to take Bill Stahl’s advice. The police would have to solve this case without the help of a college professor who had barely been outside of a classroom for the last ten years.

  There may have been some lingering guilt about stepping away, but he was the better man for it. He was beginning to feel more himself again: more present in class, more in tune with Linda, and less absorbed with fear and death.

  Although, once the case was pushed out of his mind, it didn’t take long for other, more every day, stresses to start bothering him. Denton attempted to ease the tension headache forming in the base of his skull with the help of his martini. His glass stood empty before Linda had hardly made a dent in hers.

  The last hour of his day had been spent, in his office, listening to Cole Radnor’s latest conspiracy theory. The crank now believed that Foley was covertly monitoring his computer, checking his internet history and reading his e-mail.

  “Look, I have nothing to hide,” he had assured Denton. “I use it strictly for work and my research. There’s absolutely nothing he can find that’s incriminating.”

  His defensiveness made Denton far more suspicious of the man’s internet usage than if he had said nothing. But in truth, he’d rather not know what Cole Radnor trolled the Web for.

  Denton had tried to put his colleague’s mind at ease by explaining to him that their chair wasn’t technologically savvy enough to even think of monitoring his PC.

  “The man needs his assistant to help him turn on his desk lamp,” he had told Cole, but there had been no dissuading him from the belief that he was being spied on. And there had been no convincing him to shut up and go away, until he had finally talked himself out.

  Perhaps this was why Denton didn’t cry foul when Linda started telling him about the crazy day she had. Normally, he would have cut her short with the single word work, just like she always did, when he brought up school on a Friday night. But he was happy to have her talk and distract him from his irritation. Not to mention, she was so excited that he would have felt guilty interrupting her.

  Moss Hollow had been a zoo. Christmas shopping had kicked into high gear that morning. Her day had been filled with countless annoyances and crises. She had been run ragged but seemed more exhilarated then exhausted.

  “You should see the place now. It got even busier when the offices started letting out,” she said. “I feel so bad for Bernadette. At least, Carla stayed and Janet will be there at seven. The pottery section has been practically cleared out. The shelves are bare. And this one guy came in and bought up almost every single painting we had from that New Age artist—you know, the one that died last month.”

  She plucked the first of the three olives off of the plastic pick with her teeth. As she ate it, she let the rest slip back into her glass.

  “And here’s the good part,” she said with a smug smile and a dramatic wiggle in her chair. “They sold one of mine.”

  “Really? That’s fantastic.”

  “It was the one I did of Market Square. You know the one.”

  He did. It was a semi-abstract scene of a busy summer Saturd
ay. When she had finished it, he had told her it reminded him of a Chagall. She had rolled her eyes in that way of hers that made him feel as if he were hopelessly ignorant about art.

  “Anyway, this woman bought it right around four o’clock. I was with another customer, so I didn’t see her but…” her voice drifted off. There was no other point to make; she just would have liked to keep talking about it. She was ecstatic.

  “Geez,” Denton said. “You should have said something earlier. We could have ordered a better bottle of wine, to celebrate.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Linda said. “I’m going to celebrate with some dessert.”

  “Or we could skip dessert and head home and celebrate there.” He used his best seductive voice, which unfortunately bordered on the comical. He hoped that he at least earned a few points for being endearing.

  “Hmm, I think I still want some chocolate, but after that…”

  Later, when they were finished with dinner, they took a walk around the Square. With the morning’s snow on the ground, it was much more festive than it had been on Tuesday. The candlelight vigil had been held on a damp, dreary night. And, even though the park had been packed with people, gloom filled the air.

  Linda had insisted they go. On the surface, it had seemed to be another one of her efforts to be a part of the close-knit community. But Denton suspected the real reason was that the thought of a string of abductions happening in the small town horrified her. She had refused to admit it, but he had seen the subtle signs of her agitation: the dark circles under her eyes from lack of sleep; the constant checking of the locks on the doors; and the way that a talk radio station replaced the top-forty station as her listening preference.

  Three nights later, there were a lot fewer people in the Square, but instead of the solemn crowd, there were couples and families out enjoying the mild winter night. The shops were still open and were bustling with activity. There was a sense of life radiating from every street corner.