Ash Return Of The Beast Part 23

Ravenwood explained about the Soma, the Amanita Muscaria, that Moorehouse had mentioned in one of the diary entries. "Magic mushrooms," she said. "Simple case of a ma.s.sive overdose."

"Figures. All that stuff about the Messenger was obviously nothing but a drug induced hallucination."

"I wouldn't be so sure."

"C'mon. You believe he actually had an encounter with some... some..." He floundered for the right word. "...some sort of a phantom?"

"All I know is that the same drug has been used by shamans for centuries. The claim is that, under the influence of the Soma, they encounter a variety of otherworldly beings."

"Hallucinations."

Ravenwood shrugged. "Maybe." She didn't want to reveal her own personal experiences as a teenager after learning about such things from her mother. She'd never told her mother about the experimentation and she sure as h.e.l.l wasn't going to tell Kane. In any case, the conversation was cut short by the buzz from Kane's desk phone.

He picked up the call and scribbled something in his note pad. "You sure? But... d.a.m.n it!" He slammed the phone down.

Ravenwood sat back and folded her arms. "Let me guess. Number eight?"

He groaned. "Yeah. Either that or we've got a G.o.dd.a.m.ned copycat who just happened to have a Batman coin with the number eight on it. I mean how the h.e.l.l?" He picked up the phone again.

"Who are you calling?"

"The hospital. I want to make sure Cowl didn't wake up and walk out of there like a G.o.dd.a.m.n zombie or something."

The call was short. He hung up the phone with a puzzled look.

"He's still there, yes?"

"Yeah, he's there all right. But apparently something weird happened. He was still unconscious...still is unconscious...but he grabbed the arm of an attending nurse and whispered what she thought was a name."

"A name?"

"Yeah. Lilith."

Ravenwood's eyebrows lifted. She reached into her briefcase and pulled out the drawings of the sigils. She laid the paper on Kane's desk, turned it toward him and pointed to the eighth sigil. "Lilit."

"s.h.i.+t." He ripped a page from his notebook and handed it to her. "Here's the address. You drive."

Mentally and emotionally drained from a tortured and sleepless night, the old pastor stared at the phone. His decision not to pray for Cowl's death was not so much for the sake of Cowl but for the sake of his own soul which, as far as he knew, could already be d.a.m.ned to h.e.l.l anyway. Maybe the forgiveness he believed G.o.d had so mercifully bestowed upon him for his past deeds had been nothing but self-delusion. If it was true that confession is good for the soul then maybejust maybesome sense of relief, some thin hope of undeserved redemption could be gained by telling his son everything. All he had to do now was get up the nerve to make the call.

The address brought Kane and Ravenwood to a low-rent, third-floor apartment in the south end of the city.

Wheeler was at the scene talking with the landlord when they walked in. He waved them over and made the introductions. "This is Mr. Ramos, the landlord."

It was impossible to gauge the age of the balding landlord. Standing there in a rumpled, faded, short-sleeved Hawaiian s.h.i.+rt and baggy khaki trousers with a dried dirt smudge on one knee, he could have been forty or he could have been sixty. Kane shook the man's hand. "You the one who called it in?"

"Yeah. The lady in the apartment next door heard screams and odd noises coming from here and she called me. I came up to find out what was going on and this is what I found." He nodded toward the body that was already bagged and tagged. "Weird s.h.i.+t. You never seen nothin' like it."

"You'd be surprised," Kane said. "What time did this happen? The screams and all."

"Couple hours ago."

Kane looked at his watch and then at Ravenwood. "That would have been about the same time as the incident with Cowl and the nurse at the hospital."

Ravenwood nodded. "And about the same time we were in the shed at Cowl's place. And remember I thought I heard something when we reached the end of the tunnel under the room."

Kane turned back to Ramos. "What can you tell us about this guy? Name? Occupation? He didn't happen to be a preacher did he?"

"A preacher?" Ramos chuckled. "He worked for Lancaster Maintenance. He was a janitor. Name was Bodine. Harlan Bodine."

Kane was confused. "A janitor?"

"Yeah. Or the lead janitor or something like that. He wasn't the lowest guy on the totem pole. But basically, yeah. A janitor."

Kane flipped open his notepad and jotted something down. "Can you hang around here for a few minutes? I might have some more questions."

Ramos looked annoyed. "I've already told the other detective everything I know."

Kane scowled. "You got a fire to go to? A Wedding? A funeral? All of the above?"

"Uh... no."

"Good. Then stay put for a few minutes."

"Lieutenant?" It was Ravenwood's voice coming from one of the bedrooms.

"Check this out," she said as he walked in. "Looks like our vic was planning a vacation."

On the bed was a large suitcase, partially packed. Several items of clothing, haphazardly folded, were lying next to it, apparently waiting to be packed with the others.

Kane called Wheeler into the room. "Did you go through any of this stuff?"

"No, sir. Didn't want to mess things up until you got here."

"Check it out. See if there's a plane ticket, a bus ticket, a brochure. Anything that might tell us where he was planning to go." He turned to Ravenwood but she had vanished.

"Lieutenant?" Ravenwood called from the other bedroom. "You'll want to see this."

Kane joined her in the other bedroom. "What is it?"

She pointed to the wall.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," Kane said, staring at the life-size poster of Rye Cowl tacked to the wall. "Mr. Ramos! Can you come here for a minute?"

Kane nodded toward the poster when Ramos entered the room. "This Bodine fellow, he was a fan of this band?"

Ramos shook his head. "No, but his son was. Every time Mr. Bodine was out, his son would play that c.r.a.p so loud it disturbed the neighbors. I don't how many times I had to come up here and tell him to knock it off."

"He has a son?" Kane asked. "Where is he?"

"Dead."

"What?"

"Yeah. Killed himself."

"When?"

"About a year ago. Shot himself in the head." He glanced toward the poster. "I'd shoot myself in the head, too, if I listened to that c.r.a.p all day long. Kid was a loser, anyway. Always in trouble for something. Too bad, too, 'cause Mr. Bodine seemed like a really nice guy. Went to work. Came home. Quiet type. Never bothered n.o.body."

"Hey Leiutenant!" It was Wheeler.

Kane took a last look at the poster and moved back to the other bedroom. "Find something?"

"Box of ammo." He handed it over to Kane.

Kane looked puzzled. "The h.e.l.l? What kind of gun takes these?" He pa.s.sed them over to Ravenwood.

"Got me," she said. "Never seen anything quite like them."

"Bag 'em," he said to Wheeler. Then he turned to the landlord. "Thanks for your help, Mr. Ramos. You can go."

Ramos left the apartment and Kane couldn't resist having a look at the body even though he had a perfectly clear image in his mind of what he would see. He crouched beside the body bag and unzipped it. He stared at the sigil branded into the man's chest and glanced up at Ravenwood.

She nodded. "Lilit."

Kane zipped up the bag. "Yeah. d.a.m.n. Eight down and one to go. I guess. I mean, he was a janitor. Doesn't fit the pattern." His cell phone buzzed. He stood up and took the call. "Who? What? Why the h.e.l.l are you calling me? What the? Hang on." He looked at Ravenwood.

She had never seen panic in his eyes before. Or was it panic? She wasn't sure. Whatever it was, it wasn't good.

Kane's voice was guarded. "Um...I need to take this outside." He moved quickly into the hall, making sure the door was closed behind him.

He returned ten minutes later, clearly distraught and trying to appear as anything but.

Ravenwood approached him. "Are you okay? What was that all about?"

"Nothing." He spat the word out. "It was... personal. Wheeler, wrap things up here, will you?" He turned to Ravenwood. "Let's get out of here."

In the car, Kane refused to talk about the phone call. Ravenwood could tell there was no point pus.h.i.+ng it and neither of them spoke another word as they headed back to headquarters.

The mysterious phone call was the first time Kane had heard his father's voice in well over a year. Not that he'd missed it. But what his father had told him during those ten h.e.l.lish minutes, out there in the hall, was the last thing he could ever have imagined. His mind was still reeling from the ramifications. His own father was the next victim.

Lieutenant Kane was now wrestling with his own conscience in the most difficult decision he'd ever faced. He could keep Ravenwood in the dark, not tell her anything about any of this and let Cowl kill his father. How many times have I wished the old man dead, myself? Or he could give in to his higher moral sense, arrest Cowl and save his father's life. It seemed so black and white until he suddenly realized it wasn't black and white at all. It was really a horrible, ugly shade of gray. Cowl can't be arrested. He's in a G.o.dd.a.m.n coma, for Christ's sake. Even if he came out of it and was arrested and thrown in jail, what's to say he didn't have the capability of killing the old man, regardless? Apparently, even as Cowl lay unconscious in a hospital bed, he'd somehow managed to perform his magick on Harlan Bodine. If he could do that under those circ.u.mstances what difference would a jail cell make? The only way to save the old man's life would be to kill Cowl. But that would be murder. His sense of morality wouldn't let him do that. No, wait, he thought. Not murder. Justifiable homicide. He'd be defending his father from a deranged killer. He shook his head. Yeah, right. A killer in a coma. Good luck trying to convince a jury of that one.

It was an impossible situation. No matter how he cut it, it came down to one thing: Cowl's life or his father's. Not that his father's life was worth a s.h.i.+t any more than Cowl's as far as he was concerned. Still, the old man is my father and I... But G.o.dd.a.m.n it, no, he isn't. Not really.

Lieutenant Brian Kane was born Brian Beckham. His biological mother and father had been killed in an automobile accident in 1964 when Brian was just four years old. After being shuffled around from one Foster family to another, he was eventually adopted by Pastor Pete Kane and his wife, Patricia, and Brian took the Kane name as his own.

He attended wors.h.i.+p service and Sunday school every week; was made to listen to a reading from the Scriptures every night before bed; was made to say Grace before every meal; was told over and over that G.o.d knew his every thought and watched his every move; was told that his real mother and father must have done something horribly wrong for G.o.d to have taken them in such a terrible way. Then, when Brian was six, the unthinkable happened. He was s.e.xually molested by his adoptive father, the good Pastor Pete Kane.

"Brian," the Pastor said, "this is our very special secret, you know, just between you and me. You can't tell anyone, not even your mother or G.o.d will punish you like he punished your real mother and father."

Brian believed every word of it and the special secret was acted out, periodically, over the next four years until, finally, Brian had had enough.

At the age of ten, he had somehow managed to figure out that none of this was normal. He was beginning to question everything. Maybe there was a G.o.d and maybe there wasn't, but he was going to take his chances anyway. If he didn't have faith in G.o.d at least he had faith in the woman he loved, the woman he'd called 'Mother' for most of his young life. Surely she would see that what he was being forced to endure was not right and she would put a stop to it. It took days to gather up the courage, but the day came and he told her everything.

"Brian Kane! How dare you!" was her angry response. "What kind of filthy... Up to your room, young man. Now!"

His faith in the one person he thought he could count on was shattered in that single moment. The world turned upside down and gave way beneath his feet. He was alone now and didn't know what to believe anymore, save for one thing: there was no G.o.d. He knew that because he'd revealed the 'special secret' and yet he was still alive. No lightening bolts, no h.e.l.lfire and brimstone, nothing had come to destroy him. The only thing destroyed was his faith in Love. But apparently a person could live without that because there he was, alive and breathing in spite of it all.

Angry, despondent and alone, he decided to do what 10-year-olds do. He would run away. It didn't matter to where because, really, nothing mattered.

It was the middle of February, it was cold, the wind was blowing and a biting rain was pelting the city streets with a vengeance. Nevertheless, that night, just after midnightwith a dollar and some change in his pocket, and a paper bag containing a cupcake, a banana and his d.i.c.k Tracy penlighthe crept down the stairs, grabbed his hooded raincoat and set out to make his own life in the world and to h.e.l.l with them all.

His journey ended two hours after leaving the house. A street cop found him huddled and s.h.i.+vering in the doorway of a Safeway store nearly two miles away. The cop called for a patrol car and Brian was promptly returned to his home.

Looking back on it now, that ride in the police car had made more of an impression on him than he'd realized. Police cars were cool and cops were heroes and the two cops on either side of him during that ride were nice men. They even joked with him. He could tell they cared. He felt safe with them. The only thing he didn't like was that they were taking him back to h.e.l.l where the Devil and the Devil's wife would be waiting with fire in their eyes.

He was surprised and confused, however, to find he was welcomed home with loving caresses and some unexpectedly gentle words of parental concern followed by a barrage of heart-felt words of thanks directed at the officers.

Now, as he thought about it, all he could remember of the immediate aftermath of that reunion, after the police left, was an emotional blur and some fragments of images: the pastor going for the special leather belt that hung on a hook in the broom closet... His mother crying and telling him to go up to his room quickly and shut the door before his father got back with the belt... From his bedroom he could hear the m.u.f.fled sounds of arguing, yelling, something metallic cras.h.i.+ng to the floor; more yelling. Anything more than that, he couldn't recall. The fighting must have stopped. He must, somehow, have escaped into sleep.

The next memory, the next truly clear recollection, was of two days later when Pastor Pete called him down from his room, sat him down on the couch, looked at him for several long moments and then told him his mother had died. She'd accidentally fallen down the bas.e.m.e.nt steps.

"I tried my best to revive her," he explained to Brian. "But there was nothing I could do. The good Lord has seen fit to take her up to Heaven." Then, with a strange lack of emotion, he added, "The ambulance is on it's way."

Brian's young eyes welled up as the meaning behind the words began to take hold. His heart rose to his throat as he sank downward into some sort of nightmarish nothingness. But there was something else. Something was missing. He couldn't remember now if he'd noticed it right then or later. Where were the man's tears?

In the days that followed, Brian believed he'd come to know the truth of what really happened. The arguing, the fightingthat night after the police had brought him homemust have been because his mother had finally confronted his father about the abuse. She had believed him after all. His father, afraid that she would betray him, took matters into his own hands. That had to be what happened. She'd navigated those stairs hundreds of times over the years, often with her arms so full of dirty clothes, on her way down to do the laundry, she couldn't even see the stairs. She could have done it blindfolded. It was no accident. She was pushed. The son of a b.i.t.c.h had killed her.

A sudden lurch of the car and a blast from the horn catapulted the Lieutenant back into the present.

Ravenwood shrugged. "Sorry. Idiot pulled right out in front of me."

Kane ran his hands through his hair and sat up. He noticed they were only a few minutes away from the precinct headquarters. His memories of the past evaporated quickly but his present dilemma remained. It was unbearably heavy, unmoving, lying there in his lap like a sleeping mammoth refusing to budge. How could he lift it? How could he make it go away? What sort of corrupt G.o.d could concoct such an unconscionable twist of fate? Oh, that's right. There is no G.o.d.

CHAPTER 42.