Riverwatch

Chapter Seventeen: Riverwatch

Damon spent his first twenty minutes on the scene interviewing Jake and Katelynn. After telling them he’d be in contact shortly to follow up, he let them go home and turned his attention to the scene itself. He had a lurking suspicion for the last several days that they’d missed something at the first two crime scenes, something special, something that would provide that one important clue he so desperately needed. This time he intended to take no chances.

If it’s here, he thought with grim determination, we’ll find it.

He ordered the officers to take up watch at the gates to the estate with the command that they admit no one but the coroner and the state police forensic squad. Officers searched the house thoroughly looking for any sign of the owner, to no avail. Hudson Blake was quickly put at the top of the Sheriff’s suspect list and an APB was put out on him with a "wanted for questioning" alert.

It wasn’t long before Strickland arrived, alerted personally as he’d been by Damon via radio just after the call came in. Ed came up the drive in a hurried walk, his black doctor’s bag in one hand and his crime scene kit in the other.

Damon turned toward the house and matched his stride, filling Ed in on the details as they went in.

On the second floor they stopped at the entrance of the room before entering, letting initial impressions sink in. Roughly forty square feet, the room looked to have once been a study. A desk was pushed flat against the wall off to the right, next to a small table. Bookshelves partially lined two of the other walls. A glass shelved display case stood between the bookshelves, filled with medieval weaponry. The fourth wall, directly opposite the door in which they were standing, was split in the center by a set of open French doors.

In the middle of the room a large circle had been drawn on the polished wood floor with some kind of white powder or sand. In the center of that circle, a second design had been similarly laid out. A bejeweled sword was thrust point first into the floor inside the latter. A dark stain coated the blade’s surface and a section of the floor several feet wide surrounding the tip of the blade. The light from the morning sun coming in through the open balcony doors glistened off the precious stones set in the weapon’s hilt and cast a long, cross-shaped shadow across the floor in their direction.

Beside him, Damon heard Strickland whisper, "What in the name of God…?"

Once Damon tore his gaze from the strange tableau in the center of the room, he noticed what had sparked Strickland’s outburst.

Small amounts of blood were splashed in odd places throughout the rest of the room: on the spines of a book, on the front of the desk, on the gossamer-like curtains that blew in the slight breeze coming through the open doors. The headless corpse of a small animal, possibly a cat, lay in one corner as if carelessly tossed there. A small gilded cage stood incongruously on the desktop beside a revolver.

A man’s lower leg jutted out from behind one of the open balcony doors.

Thinking of the other recent crime scenes, Damon found himself hoping there was a body attached to that leg.

"Ed," he said aloud, pointing out the limb to his companion, who was still staring in amazement at the condition of the room. The two men made their way to the balcony, being careful not to disturb anything as they crossed the room.

On the balcony they discovered the mutilated body of a middle-aged man. Like the Cummings, large chunks of flesh were missing from the corpse. However, this time the killer had added a new twist. Several weapons, obviously taken from the weapons case in the next room, had been thrust violently into the body and left there, reminding Damon of pins in a pincushion. One corner of Damon’s mind began absently cataloguing the weapons; that’s a broadsword, and an epee, and a dirk?. He shut the voice off quickly.

"Recognize him?" Strickland asked.

"No, but we’ve got a positive ID."

The man’s face was twisted in a savage expression of fear and pain, partially splashed with blood. Damon told Strickland that Jake had provided a confirmation that the man was Charles Turner, Blake’s butler.

Strickland set his bags down on a clean section of the balcony and opened one up. Withdrawing a pair of thick rubber gloves, he pulled them on and then knelt next to the body to begin his examination.

Damon gave him a few moments to do the prelim, and then asked, "What do you think?"

"No question it’s the same killer. Exterior soft organs gone; eyes, tongue, etc. Chest cavity penetrated, probably find a few organs missing from there as well once I open him up on the table. What I can’t figure are these weapons."

"Pre or post?" Damon asked, referring to whether or not the weapons had been used while the victim was still alive.

Ed gave it some thought. "At a guess I’d have to say he was still alive when they were used. There’s some evidence of bleeding around the wounds themselves, though it is hard to be sure. From his facial expression there is no question the poor bastard suffered." Ed shook his head in frustration. "Then again, they could all be post-mortem. Wounds of that type should have bled one heck of a lot, yet the floor beneath him is practically blood-free." He looked up at Damon. "I can’t say either way until I open him up."

When Ed bent again over the body, Damon left him to his task and walked back into the room. He surveyed the damage and then headed over to the dark stain in the center of the room. As he got closer to it, several details became clear.

The stain was obviously blood; that was immediately apparent. And though partially obscured by the blood, Damon could see that the design laid out on the floor was actually a pentagram enclosed by a circle. The material with which it had been created was probably salt or colored sand, he guessed. It reminded him of the Hopi sand paintings he’d seen once on a trip out West.

The symbolism troubled him. A pentagram inside of a circle was not all that common. He didn’t like the implications. Back in Chicago he’d encountered the symbol once before, during a rash of cult-related homicides. The killer had been deep into the occult, the murders took place as sacrifices in the midst of a black mass. Is that what happened here? Damon wondered. Was Turner the sacrificial victim in some occult ceremony? Had his death taken place here, inside the room, and his body dragged out onto the porch once it was no longer needed? If so, why? Damon gritted his teeth in frustration. This one was like all the others; too many questions and not enough answers. Starting to be the story of my life, he thought.

Being careful to avoid disturbing anything, Damon moved closer to get a better look at the sword. The blade was roughly three feet in length, most of which was stained with blood. The weapon’s hilt was covered with what looked to Damon to be precious stones, though they might have been fake; he certainly wasn’t one to tell the difference.

All in all, it was an impressive weapon. As were the others in the room. Blake must be quite a collector, Damon found himself thinking.

The thought froze him in place.

Damon stood and moved over to the display case. Some weapons were still in their proper places, but the majority lay in a reckless heap on the floor in front of the case. He looked them over carefully, taking his time, examining the set-up. He counted those he could see, then did his best to mentally place them in their proper places with the help of the identification tags inside the case and his own knowledge of ancient weapons. He did this three times, each time arriving at the same result. If he included the sword in the center of the room and those still in the corpse outside, he came up one short. Another sword of approximately the same length as the one in the center of the room was missing.

Had the killer taken it with him?

Damon moved around the room, bending to look beneath the furniture and the bookshelves, making certain he hadn’t simply overlooked it. Beneath the shelves closest to the display case something glinted in the light from his flashlight. Something red.

Damon withdrew an extendible pointer from his breast pocket and used it to fish the object out into the light.

It was a necklace. A gold necklace on which hung a ruby-red stone of considerable size. The chain itself was broken and stained with more dried blood. Damon guessed that it must have been torn off and flung aside during a struggle, and wondered whose it was. Blake’s? Turner’s? The murderer’s?

He used the pointer to push the necklace into a clear plastic evidence bag he withdrew from another pocket, and marked with his pen, noting the date, time, and location he found it.

At that point Strickland came back in from the balcony. "Okay. Here’s what we’ve got. Turner’s wounds are definitely consistent with the other killings. Rigor has set in, but hasn’t left yet, so we know that his death took place sometime in the last twenty-four hours. There’s no sign of post-mortem lividity on the body. A full autopsy should provide more answers, but for now my guess is that he was killed in this room and moved out to the balcony afterward."

The sound of Damon’s radio interrupted him.

"Wilson here."

"Nelson, sir. The CSC team is here. And, uh, so is the press."

Shit.

"Send up the team. Hold the press at the gate, do not, I repeat, do not let any of them onto the property. We’ve got a crime scene to protect here. Tell them I’ll be right down to talk to them personally."

He replaced the radio on his belt and looked over at Ed.

The coroner nodded, a grim smile playing across his face. "Have fun."

"Yeah," Damon responded dryly, and went downstairs to face the music.