The only power Satan wields is our belief in his lies.
Diamondback, Louisiana At dusk, Sunday October 1, 2000
The squad car ran silent, no lights flashing nor siren roaring, the entire feel of the climax of Medical Examiner John Thorpe's search for Tattoo Man's roots coming to a “Blue Bayou” ending in this remote comer of the universe. Dry potato dust sand, kicked up under and around the squad car, heralded their arrival at what once was Tattoo Man's home, as all leads had brought Thorpe to this place.
“There ain't no way the family's gonna have known anything about this tragedy,” moaned Deputy Sheriff Luther Whitney Frizzell, who continued to whine in an irritatingly nasally voice for which Thorpe thought he ought to apologize. “Kate, that po' woman; she's just a spiritless woman, older'n her years. Sanocre done that to her. Story is he'd lock her up, tied up, all night in their damned root cellar if she looked cross-eyed at him, but damned if she ever pressed a single charge, and ain't nothin' our office can do if the wife don't press no charge, Doctor. Well, you know that. But as for their knowin' he come to a bad end in New England-”
“New Jersey,” Thorpe gently corrected the man. “Yeah, New Jersey
… ain't New Jersey kinda in New England?”
“Not technically speaking, no. Mid-Atlantic states.”
“Gotcha, right. Anyhow, I don't think you're gonna find none a them clues you're lookin' for here if he was kilt way up there.”
“But we can put to rest who he is, Deputy Frizzell, and that's a good portion of the battle won. We can have Sanocre shipped back here for burial, return the body to the family. That way, he won't be buried-”
“At taxpayers' expense,” Frizzell finished for J. T.
“-in, I was going to say, a potter's field full of John and Jane Does. This way he can be buried at the local churchyard or wherever the family wants.”
“Can't 'magine any church 'round here'd want his carcass stinkin' up the ground, not even the pet cemetery'd take him'd be my guess.” He chuckled at his little joke.
“He was hated that much?”
“Hate ain't narry a strong enough word for what folks thought of Sanocre. He was Satan walkin', that man. I thought a killin' 'im myself once or twice, if you want the God's honest truth.. J. T. suspected that Frizzell had often wanted to make good on his thoughts. The lawman's sense of legality or fear or both likely held “Whitey” in check. He dared not ask the man with the guns, but he did ask, “Was there any saving grace, any trace of good in the man you might point to?”
“None by me. Certainly none by his family. Tell you what, Dr. Thorpe, when no one in your own family can stand the sight of you, maybe you ought to go off and get yourself killed up in New England, ahhh, Jersey.”
“So you think my bringing news to these people about Max Sanocre's death and possible murder is a mistake?”
The deputy had been bitching, moaning, complaining, and whining the entire way out to the house in the cypress wood, the deputy's car now rounding a tight bend in the dirt road, red-rimmed and clay-colored, giving way to sand, loose and pulling. He whined about too much rain, the flooding in the bottom land, crop failures, something about a bovine disease and scrawny hogs this year, went on about too much humidity, not enough wind, the condition of Fords, that Chevys had gone “commie” and foreign trade would one day destroy all that America ever stood for. He bitched about the squeak in his right rear tire, the distances he had to cover in his work, the long hours, short pay, lack of help and understanding from the sheriff to his wife, and that he feared his wife hated being married to a cop. He bemoaned the fact he hadn't ever seen New Jersey or New York or none of them New places up North until he finally, winding up with an enormous sigh, wound down like a clock gone dead, his entire, hefty chest deflating in balloon fashion with a few remnant words: “Well, here we are. The Sanocre place.”
Medical Examiner John Thorpe, riding in the passenger seat, had squirmed into the small Nissan and felt jammed next to the officer's thirty-ought shotgun, which the deputy nervously and often fondled. J. T. looked up now at the Sanocre house, a shack really. One could hardly call the place a house. Weathered clapboards put together like so many cards in the wind, it leaned to one side as if more fatigued than any living thing on earth.
Pecan trees intermingled with willows and cypress; Spanish moss tossed about like salad leavings everywhere, including the front porch and yard. A pastoral place for a lovely home if one were to build here, he thought. As J. T. climbed from the patrol car, he found himself out of his time, staring at the old shack of a home on cinder blocks and yes, about to topple, and then there were the Snuffy Smith characters arrayed on its peeling, cracking porch. FBI Agent and Medical Examiner John Thorpe wondered if he'd stepped out of the legal boundaries of the United States of America. Somewhere along the line of his trek to discover the truth about Tattoo Man, the flight he'd taken from New Orleans International airport on a private carrier, had landed in Gator Head Bayou-Home of Snoutnose, The Largest Alligator in captivity in America. All the cliches and nightmares J. T. had ever heard about or entertained regarding Louisiana proved true in this patch of place. From the single strip, dirt airport, they had taken the long, winding car ride into the interior of Diamondback, Louisiana. And wasn't Diamondback in America? Wouldn't a postage stamp cost the same here as anywhere? Sure-he silently answered his own thoughts-if you could locate a stamp machine in Diamondback. While J. T. amused himself with his own musings. Deputy Sheriff Frizzell continued the touchy-feely with his shotgun, his fingers displaying indecision on whether he should or should not unfasten the lock and take the hefty and quite visible weapon with him to the front doorstep of this place.
J. T. felt bemused by the local color, from the deputy down to the hanging vines, the huge cypress knolls and the gnarled and bubbled, toiled and troubled roots of trees here which he guessed the obvious residences of gnomes. J. T. had asked on local law-enforcement authorities in New Orleans to pave his way. Frizzell had been waiting for him at the local airport. For all Frizzell knew, the people here at the Sanocre home might well be harboring a murderer.
J. T. had made clear his suspicion that someone who knew Max Sanocre had had a hand in his death, someone who also knew dogs, and from the moment they pulled up to the front yard of this place, dogs appeared and approached, some on four legs, some on three, some inching forward, some crawling on their bellies, some straight up and fast, while others held back in the shadows. It gave J. T. a strange feeling, as if the dogs lived here and ran this place, and the people on the porch were being held hostage by man's best friend.
Dog attacks being on the rise all across America, J. T. hesitated at the side of the car undl Deputy Frizzell finally came out on his side, deciding to leave the shotgun, while unbuckled, on its pedestal between driver and passenger seat. J. T. noticed that the deputy had also unfastened his. 38 where it rested on his hip.
“Are you expecting trouble?” J. T. asked.
“Always prepare with these kinda folk for any possibility. You learn that when you've been here for long.”
“Then you're not originally from around here?” J. T. asked.
“Didn't saya that.” The deputy pulled up his pants and started to part the dogs, a few of them growling, and Frizzell in turn barked like a madman at the dogs, laughing at their cowed response. He then told J. T. to follow him up to the porch.
“I 'spect one or more of them that's living in Max's old shack here's done him in. Is that what you boys in Quantico wanna hear?”
“No, we don't wanna hear anything.”
“What you think, I mean. Is-at what ya think?”
“Yeah, some of us suspect family involvement in the murder, but first I just want a family member to ID the corpse from photos.”
“If he had no identification on him, how'd you trace him back to here?” asked the deputy, his nasally twang reaching to the family on the porch, all engaged in watermelon and lemonade, it appeared.
Some children waved madly at the deputy, shouting that they wanted to hear the siren blast. J. T. heard the children shout at the deputy as “Uncle Whitey.”
“You're related to the family?”
“I am. Something of a cousin to 'em. Kids I know from after-school programs, fund-raiser and like that.”
J. T. felt suddenly vulnerable. If the entire town knew that Maxwell Sanocre had disappeared one night, then tacidy covered it up, and the helpful law agent is part of that conspiracy against the hated Sanocre, then what might they do to a stranger from “New England” to shut him up? A cover-up of a cover-up, the family secret growing ever deeper with J. T. six feet deep?
As if reading J. T.'s visage and understanding his thoughts, Deputy Frizzell quickly and firmly assured him, “I don't condone what happened to that animal Max Sanocre, but like I tol' ya, there come times I wanted to murder that low-life sonofabitch, I tell you. If someone was drove to it-and I'm not saying they were-well, I understand it. The man was the vilest thing walked on two legs in my experience.”
The tallest, oldest looking man on the porch stepped toward them, waving in a friendly gesture, asking them if he could help the pair, nodding to his cousin the officer, and adding, “Some reason you're out this way, Whitey?”
“Got some news, folks,” announced Frizzell in calmer tones than Houston's command control during a satellite launch, J. T. thought.
Everyone on the porch stared hard at the stranger-John Thorpe. The deputy hastily introduced J. T. as “A card-carrying G-man in search of a killer, maybe two, maybe three.” There were three adults in and around the porch, all standing and staring now like their small army of dogs. They all looked like they wanted J. T's blood.
J. T., through a thorough trek about the world of tattoo art-and gaining an education in the process-had convinced first one man to help him and then another until he learned of the signature artwork of Deltrace D'lazetti, and he'd had to travel to Missouri to meet D'lazetti who, after long searching in his files and mind, came up with “a guy more crude than Andrew Dice Clay and Howard Stem rolled into one who treated women like… like g'damn meat loaf.” This identification led to Louisiana.
“Sure, I can clearly recall the artwork. Hell, man, it won me my first major prize,” D'lazetti had told J. T.
“Really?”
“At the state fair. Ever since, I've been highlighted in every major tattoo publication in the country. You kidding?”
“M.E.'s seldom kid around,” replied J. T., “and when we do chide, you'll know it.”
D'lazetti had grimaced, asking, “Chide?”
J. T. pushed on, replying with his own question, asking, “What more can you tell me about this man.”
“Such as?”
Man, this guy's stoned, J. T. recalled telling himself, wondering if it were a prerequisite of the artistic life to do drugs, or an affectation since Edgar Allan Poe's day. “Such as… such as his name,” replied J. T. “Right now he's a John Doe, and will be buried as such if we can't learn more about him in the next twenty-four hours. His time on the taxpayers' dole has run out, you see, and as such-”
“Dog or Maddog or Mean's Hell or Tough as Bison or something like 'at is all I can rightly recall outta my head, because I do remember this guy was an ass, a real creep. Mean as hell, and he made my skin crawl, and ain't too many can make my skin crawl, you know, but he was the best thing ever happened to me when I showed him at the fair.”
“Showed him?” J. T. flashed a mental image of the man's body art being displayed at a sideshow carnival.
“Well, not him, not really him, closeups of the art, man.”
“You have photos?”
“ 'Sat what they call irre-irrefusable evidence, man?”
J. T. stifled a laugh at the pothead. “Does his name and the date appear on the photos?”
“Name, date, dme, you name it.”
“We've got to find those pictures then.”
“Be my guest.” He pointed at sixteen shelves of photo records of his work. “Sony, been in the business a long dme. Started when I was just a kid, and I'm a damn sight older than I look. I think it's the small frame and height. People think I'm Michael J. Fox, you know, the actor? Hardly looks like he ages.”
“This could take a while,” J. T. said, staring at the books of tattoo artwork representing an obviously disordered life. There appeared no dates on the booklets.
'Take all the time you want.”
“I could use your help. Your country needs you.”
“My country? Hmmm. Never ever thought of it as my country. Strange world we live in, Dr. Thorpe.”
“Strange indeed.”
“Strange, strange world… Are you telling me that this guy's name is, you know, like a matter of like, you know, national security, something like that? This guy plotting some sort of McVeigh thing against the government or something?”
“Yeah, something like that.” J. T. hated to lie, but he saw no alternative. Already, the stoned artist had dismissed the fact J. T. had told him the man was deceased, a John Doe. Or perhaps the artist understood the term John Doe as little as he did the word chide.
Deltrace D'lazzeti metaphorically rolled up his sleeves like a farmer at this point, saying, “OK, let's have at it. But be forewarned, dude, records like CDs I can put my hands on, but records for business, I don't keep so good, so it could take a while.” J. T. offered to order a pizza and a jug of wine, if it would help. The artist liked the idea, and so they rolled up their sleeves and dug in.
They whittled it down to the approximate last time he'd done body art on “Horace” and the tattoo artist said, “That'd be the work I did on his ass. Can't be stoned when you're doing precision work, 'specially round the geni-till-ya area.”
“Now you're telling me more than I want to know,” J. T. replied, holding up a hand. “What exactly do you remember about him?”
“Disgust. Rock-bottom disgust, man. Guy disgusted me the entire way, man, and that's what I was thinking at the fair when I stood up to get the award, disgust.”
J. T. could not help but smile. He wanted to laugh.
D'lazetti continued, saying, “But, but, the dude paid in bread, real green, not like I get usual…”
“Drugs?” suggested J. T., wondering why in God's creation people allowed this guy anywhere near their bodies with a hot needle and ink while he was on PCP or some other potent drug.
“Sometimes drugs, yeah, but more oft than not, it's a damned Pomeranian puppy or a lousy canned ham somebody ripped off, a bottle of scotch, somebody's unused toys like once I got a fish tank for doing a big job.”
“So, you do remember this man?” J. T. held up the photos of Horace on the slab, and the close-ups of the artwork.
“The face, the ass, the art, the disgust… sure, but not the name.”
J. T. gnashed his teeth.
“It'll take the record to jog that back.”
The artist, typical of his peripheral world, managed, stoned, to hold himself together long enough to locate a billing file buried beneath a stack of newspapers and magazines-US, FAME, People, Fangoria, Scream Factory, USA Today. D'lazetti did this during the time that J. T. had begun on the photo collection. This collection of data he recalled after pizza and Pepsi. In the manner of an embarrassed teen, he showed the index cards to J. T. and said, “I think I found a shortcut. I try to keep the names and numbers of all my clients in here. If I filled out a card on him, it should take you right to the number of the book and the page where his photos are, if…”
The cards saved J. T. hours, and they did lead circuitously to the photo shoot and photos. On the billing card came the name, phone number, and address of Horace the Tattoo Man, which read Maxwell Sanocre, Rt. 4, Diamondback, Louisiana. On the card, the middle nickname didn't read Dog or Maddog or Maniac, but “Abominable.”
“Abominable” Max Sanocre. Actually the nickname was far from any of those proffered by the spongy-headed D'lazetri. But J. T. felt good, a sense of closure coming with this news, for finally, John Doe had an identity, such as it was.
QuesUoning of friends and neighbors in the small town of Diamondback had netted J. T. little information. The police stadon prided itself on the fact it was hardly needed and hardly the size of a pair of telephone booths stood side-by-side, and about as public. J. T. decided he wouldn't hold out too much hope of help here in Diamondback. The actual county sheriffs office lay some twenty-nine tarmac miles to the north, at the county seat.
However, J. T. puzzled together a broken picture of Sanocre's having “moved to Utah in search of open territory.” The story was told and retold by anyone J. T. or Deputy Frizzell had asked. J. T. gained the impression that even the local schoolchildren had been tutored in the same story about “Abominable” Maxwell Sanocre who, it appeared, had terrorized this hamlet from the day he was bom.
And so now, here they stood, Deputy Frizzell, his thumbs in his waistband, buried below his protruding stomach, and J. T., looking out of place from his Ralph Lauren glasses to his expensive leather shoes, marking him as a visitor from Mars, standing before the platform porch of the place where Abominable practiced being abominable the most-on his own family.
Now more young people, large burly men and boys, spilled from the doorways of the house, over the porch and into the yard, all wanting to know why their deputy cousin and uncle had come in the company of this obvious outlander. What had happened and what was going on telegraphed from every hang-mouth face.
Deputy Frizzell explained the situation bluntly and without fanfare. The news garnered no tears, but it did get a pair of whoops and yahoos and curses. One of the boys said, “Damned glad to hear it, Dr. Thorpe. Thank you.” The implication being, “You can go now,” J. T. thought.
Another of the sons asked, “But why'd you come all this way to tell us about it when you coulda' just phoned it in?”
“Did he ever make it to Utah? That where he died?” asked another of the younger boys who'd missed the earlier conversation about the mysterious death in New Jersey that had led J. T. to their doorstep.
One of the older siblings, a girl holding firm to a baby, brought her little brother up-to-date with a few choice words: “Don't be stupid, Kyle.”
J. T. added, “You see, the body went unidentified, and it took a great deal of detective work, using his tattoo art, to trace it-your father-”
“Gran-pap,” corrected the younger boy.
“Yes, of course, pardon.”
“You think he was murdered up there in New Jersey?” asked the young woman with the child in her arms as she stepped forward, the baby cooing mam-mam-mam! in her ear.
“Matter of fact, yes.”
“How was he kilt?” asked the older woman who hadn't budged from her porch chair.
“Are you Mrs. Sanocre?” J.T. asked.
“That'd be me.”
“We need to talk.”
“About?”
“Arrangements, return of Mr. Sanocre's remains.”
“We don't want his cussed remains here,” said one of the youngest boys.
“He were the Devil,” said the young girl with the babe in her arms. “Ever'body knows-sit!”
J. T. saw it flicker in her eyes, the hatred, yes, but also the truth. “You killed him, yourself, didn't you, young lady. I read you like a book.” She done nothing of the kind!” defended one strong-armed fellow instantly at her side who didn't have the same coloring or hair shade as the others.
“Your husband, Miss Sanocre?” asked J. T. of the man. “Yes.” 'Tell me, son. You own any of these dogs?” asked J.T.
“What's going on?” asked Mrs. Sanocre from the porch chair.
“That bastard broke my mama's legs, both of 'em, just outta meanness and evil. If he got killed, it was God put him dead, not us,” said the young girl.
“Do you have access to a rabies venom, sir?” J. T. asked the man at her side.
“All right… All right, I did it. I killed that Devil, and I did it on my own. None of these folks here had anythin' to do with it.”
“No, no, July!” shouted the daughter. “I ain't allowin' you take this on your head alone!”
“Shut up, Cassie! You know I done it alone, all on my own!”
The others were abuzz, some of them clearly confused, and the old woman shouted, “What're you all talkin' about?”
The daughter went to her maltreated, malnourished mother to comfort her, cooing that everything would be put right. The mother accepted her daughter's words as if they'd been spoken by an angel or God.
Deputy Frizzell said, “Cassie, July, I think we have a long night of talkin' to do down in Diamondback at the jailhouse. Come on.”
Cassie handed off her child without a misstep or a tear, and she and July voluntarily found the rear of the squad car. Their deputy cousin did not handcuff them. Others in the family gave out threatening gestures, lifted voices, and banged on the car, but they did allow Deputy Frizzell to pull off with Cassie and July in custody.
Deputy Frizzell began to read the pair their rights.
It came off as simple as that. All they needed to see was an FBI expert in their front yard telling them that he knew they had done it, and the entire elaborate scheme fell away like a house of flimsy cards.
When the full story came to light, three others in the family, two of whom had raced off to become fugitives, were implicated in the conspiracy to kill Maxwell Sanocre, all of them his children, all full-grown adults. They had conspired to murder him in New Jersey where they sent him on a supposed reunion with his high school buddies. Before he ever got to the “reunion,” however, he was fooled into visiting the junkyard for “great used Harley parts.” There he was murdered by the rabid dogs which his daughter, married to a veterinary apprentice, had masterminded. “The beauty part,” Cassie at one point in the interrogation said in chilling matter-of-fact manner, “was that we used his own damned, vicious pit bulls to get him. He made them dogs evil, same as he wanted to make all his children evil. Somebody had to put an end to him and his dogs. The rabies was for the dogs as much as him, and we figured since he was wanted in New Jersey, he'd die before he took hisself to a doctor, even if he could get over that junkyard fence. He was the Devil his-self. No matter what you think, Dr. Thorpe, we done the right thing…”One son, a daughter, and a son-in-law, each of whom passionately hated the old man, were held over for trial, while two others remained at large. Clearly, Sanocre's wife, with little sense left, did not understand this sudden disintegration of her family, but she clearly laid it at her dead husband's feet. Perhaps, if the jury found any sympathetic thread in all this so as to understand the terrorizing and traumatizing abuse that even to J. T., an outsider, appeared rampant, then daughter and sons might find some mercy with the court.
J. T. wanted out of Diamondback as quickly as possible, and so he flew back to New Orleans, where he took some time to relax, see the sights and recoup before even thinking of flying on to Quantico, Virginia. From New Orleans, he dialed London, in hope of reaching Jessica to tell her that he'd wrapped up the case of the Missing Person known to them as Horace the Tattoo Man.
Proud of himself, pleased at his handling of the case, bursting to tell Jessica the news, he called the York Hotel only to find her not in, and in converting the time, he wondered where she might be at 6 p.m. British dme, for when he tried Scotland Yard, she could not be found there, either. He couldn't opt to leave her E-mail because his terminal awaited his return to Quandco. He hated being out of touch, and gave some thought to that laptop he'd been thinking of purchasing.
His next call caught Eriq Santiva between meetings. Santiva gave him great praise at having so efficiently worked the case. “And all on your own,” the chief added. “Enjoy New Orleans! Take whatever time you like.”
They spoke briefly about Jessica's case in London, neither of them having heard from Jessica in some time now. Each promised to keep the other informed should they hear from Coran in London.
Sunday Evening, October 1, Scotland Yard
Jessica and Sharpe, skirting the peripheral corridors of Scotland Yard, found their way into the bowels of the building where Sharpe introduced Jessica to Ralph Crider, telling her that Crider knew more about film and film enhancement than anyone on the planet. Jessica left her film with Crider, who promised to have it developed and blown up to enlarge the map and scale models she'd taken pictures of at the RIBA. She lamented having had no time to take “normal pictures” here in London.
They carried on, as Richard called it, now past the computer archives to an archive predating the computer age, where hard-copy materials and microfiche remained housed in boxes and on shelves.
Still struck by the strangeness of the two “orphaned” twins named Houghton, Jessica insisted on searching the Yard's data banks on them, to see what might turn up. She again said to Richard, “I just know I recall something about a case dealing with a pair of twins from Gloucester.”
They gained entry to the file rooms using Sharpe's identification. Soon their eyes marked the speeding trail of a microfiche tape machine, as the dates she was most interested in, the years between 1950 and 1960, sped by in a newspaper history on the microfiche. The whining of the machine sounded like a miniature siren wail as the tape sped past their eyes.
Searching the index for the Houghton name in relation to any crime or victimization, Jessica found several. She scrolled first to one and then to another. On the third scroll, they found the Houghton twins.
On the fiche a registration number told them where to look for the police report, but here, staring back at them, was a London Times article and pictures of the twins and their parents. Details of the case, while sketchy, came clearer and clearer for Jessica as she read on, as they did for Richard, who suddenly gasped, saying, “Of course! I now remember the case well. Tragic, horrifying really. A real curler.”
For Jessica, the veil had also been lifted, and she found it strangely coincidental that the shocked, traumatized twins as children were now hanging about St. Albans, getting spiritual advice from Father Strand and Father Luc Sante. While she scanned from photo to photo display, Jessica thought of how little play the case had gotten in America. At least in public America. But in police circles, the Houghton case had caused quite a ripple and wave, especially among forensics people. It had been a case in which the killers, mother and father to the twins, almost escaped a just execution over a botched forensics trail of evidence, not unlike the O. J. Simpson case in America in this regard.
Records clearly detailed the British case from 1954. Sharpe began paraphrasing and reading aloud in her ear, saying, “The father hailed from Gloucester, England… name of Frederick Houghton… finally caught while burying a thirteenth victim.”
“Literally caught in the act,” she replied.
“Fifty-two-year-old Houghton confessed to over twelve additional murders, all of which his wife knew of and nine of which she'd helped him to commit.”
“Look here,” she added, pointing at a buried paragraph and saying, “the last victim's remains were located in someplace called Finger Post Field.”
“Some ten miles outside Gloucester, near the remains of Houghton's first wife, his first victim,” Richard read on.
Now, her memory jogged, Jessica recalled having read the details in Press Association, Britain's domestic news agency. Asa Holcraft had received the British news that way for as long as she'd known him. “Rosemary Houghton, the second wife, forty years of age,” mused Jessica aloud now. “She had been charged with killing nine women, including her husband's own sixteen-year-old daughter, Heather.”
Richard shook his head as though the gesture might ease the words he read aloud. “Houghton, a construction trade builder, was charged with killing the same nine women- Heather, a daughter from his first marriage and Heather's mother, his first wife.”
Jessica read on in silence, Richard doing likewise over her shoulder, following her finger down the page.
Nine of the bodies were found below the Houghtons' house on Cromwell Street in Gloucester, some 110 miles west of London. Heather Houghton's body was discovered under the house of a former place of residence nearby. The eleventh body, that of the original Mrs. Houghton, Catherine Costello, had been located in a field in a place called Kempley, beside another victim, a former baby-sitter to the family who'd mysteriously disappeared some twenty years before.
“Amazing story, but where's the information on the twins?” she wondered aloud. “I remember twin little girls who lived in the house while all this was going on. There were other children in the house, too, but I particularly recall the twins for some reason.”
“Read on,” suggested Richard.
The thirteenth and final victim was yet another young baby-sitter, but in her case, the disappearance caused an uproar in the entire village. A search for her had gone on for weeks when Houghton, under pressure from his accomplice wife to rid the house of the “hot” body, found himself spodighted by authorities, who had begun to watch him on tips from neighbors about strange goings-on in the Gloucester home where the girl had baby-sat from time to time.
Something about the case which Jessica couldn't let go of: The total devotion the killers had instilled in their children to keeping the family secrets, as grisly and as gruesome as they were. It harkened back to what Luc Sante had said about the group mind, the power of authority figures and peer pressure, the sort of brainwashing and conditioning, which in her estimation, never completely left a person, whether the conditioning was to the lifestyle of a survivalist, a KKK member, a prisoner of war, a wrestling fan, or a child taught that murder, under the right circumstances, was all right; this mentality or some remnant of guilt stayed with a person forever. She pushed on with the article, reading:
There were five children living under the same roof with Mr. and Mrs. Houghton besides Heather. When Heather disappeared and next the baby-sitter, too many unanswered questions went wanting. The additional five children, two of them young twin girls, were all taken into custody and placed in the care of authorities.
Jessica assumed these Houghton children had all been placed in child welfare and protective agencies, and later found homes. The two Houghton twins she'd met earlier, according to Father Luc Sante, were nowadays devoted to helping others in the cause of Jesus Christ, but each of the sisters lived behind big, onyx glass eyes, glazed over at that. They appeared drugged, at least on a mild sedative, she believed. Perhaps, even now, they must continue on a regimen of psychoactive drugs to hold back the horrors of their childhood, in order to not live a life condemning their own parents who, out of a core evil that included abuse, murder, incest, and forced sodomy on their own children as final insult.
Once again, Jessica must face Luc Sante as a possible suspect in the crucifixion murders. Obviously, he had access to various drugs and would know how to use Brevital. Jessica could not help but wonder just how traumatized the two grown children of parental abuse must still be, and just how long Dr. Luc Sante, as a psychotherapist had had them under his care and treatment. She further wondered just how far the two bug-eyed creatures might go to further their cause in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
She shared these fears with Richard, somehow relaxing them by putting words to her fears and sharing with another person.
The name Gloucester, too, sounded familiar, and a quick check of the birthplace of Theodore “Burtie” Burton came up Gloucester. Another simple coincidence? Britain was, after all, an island nation, and life popped full with synchronicity and coincidence every day here. Still, Jessica could hardly help questioning these two hounds, coming as they did on one another's heels, yipping away at one another.
Good Inspector Sharpe, too, had difficulty simply swallowing these two examples of chance at play in the fields of murder in one generation so unkind and cruel, and the crucifixion murders in this generation.
“What do we do with this information?” she asked.
“It all remains relatively circumstantial.”
“Agreed. I've lost cases on more evidence.”
They fell silent, each locked in thought for some time before Jessica blurted out, “I think it's time we got a search warrant for St. Albans.”
“St. Albans? A church? You want a sanctuary for evil tooops! — sorry, a Freudian, I suppose. Do you really expect that a sanctuary for any and all in peril-such as the Houghton twins-to be served with a search warrant? In London?”
“I realize this isn't the South Bronx or West Queens, but we are dealing with a radical situation here, and the timetable on the body count has risen and will only continue to rise if we don't do something.”
“I tell you, getting a court order to raid a Catholic church in London, or anywhere in Great Britain, will not do. I'm afraid we've not progressed too far in that area since Henry the Eighth. But what we could do is approach from the bridgethe canal, the end of that labyrinthine tunnel we saw on the map. That's public domain.”
“Are you suggesting we go it alone?”
“Everyone else is concentrating efforts elsewhere, looking in the wrong place, I fear. Convinced by Boulte and company that surveillancing the waterways is our best effort. It appears Chief Inspector Boulte has everyone out in force doing so. So, I'm afraid we're on our own.”
“That could be damned risky. I don't have a desire to find myself spread-eagle on a resurrection cross, Richard.”
“Do not tempt me. It presents a fairly juicy picture to this person, love.”
“Stop that.”
“I will not,” he teased further.
“All right, as soon as we have the maps in hand, we go,” she agreed.
Sharpe had not exaggerated Crider's gift for magic with film. The maps were sharp and clear and easily read. They took them in hand at 8:26 p.m. and left the Yard without anyone but Crider having known they'd been in the archives.
Sharpe made a detour along the route back to the Marylebone district, stopping off at the RIBA in search of someone familiar with the locks and canals of London. Someone who had the right know-how and tools to open a locked grate covering an ancient canal below the city, someone who knew a clapper bridge when confronted with one.
As luck would have it, Donald Wentworth Tatham turned out to be the ready “soldier” on the spot, as Sharpe referred to him. Together, Sharpe, Jessica, and Tatham traveled toward the far northern border of Marylebone, at the terminus of a canal no longer in use, serving only as a drainage ditch and locked away from the sight of men for some forty-eight-odd years.
Sharpe dug out large, powerful flashlights from the boot of his car, along with the Wellington boots he'd scavenged for the three of them. “The Wellingtons,” he told Jessica, “are the same as used by veterinarians when mucking about pigstys and cow sheds. You'll be glad you have them.” Now they approached the silent, sealed grate which had grown over with vines, weeds, and vegetation for birds to build nests in. It took a good ten minutes for Tatham to locate the lock in order to insert the key, and even unlocked, the grate, sealed now with layers of rust and tightly bound by tenacious, stalky clinging vines, refused them entry.
“Bloody 'ell,” moaned Sharpe. “It'll be dark before we're a foot through.”
The three of them, using their combined weight and strength struggled for some time, standing in the drainage ditch, to pry the grate open far enough that they could squeeze through. Skittering eels played about them here in the water.
“Well done,” gasped Richard. Turning to Tatham, he added, “Your job is done then. Off with you, Dr. Tatham.”
“You'll be lost inside an hour and never find your way back without me,” Tatham firmly declared. “Don't be a fool, Sharpe. I think I should accompany you and Dr. Coran to your destination… Which would be…?”
“Where's the map?”
Jessica, who held the map out of the water, said, “Here you go, Richard.”
“We want to come out below St. Albans, the church, somewhere about here, I should think.”
“The church, really? You suspect the church somehow involved in the murders?” asked Tatham.
“Not the church, but perhaps a churchman?”
“Never. You can't seriously suggest that Father Luc Sante of St. Albans the Crucifier!”
“More likely his soon-to-be replacement, but again it's all speculation until we find some concrete evidence.”
Tatham remained incredulous. “Such as?”
“Such as a resurrection cross, some large spikes, an altar of sacrifice perhaps, whatever we might find,” Jessica impatiendy filled Tatham in.
Tatham's eyes lit up like a Boy Scout's when he said, “Quite the expedition then, really.”
Sharpe leaned into Jessica and whispered, “I rather wish Coppers was with us.”
She couldn't agree more, and nodding, her flash indicating her movement, as it bounced off the ancient, cobbled walls, blackened by shadow and age. The trickle of water, moving with their swaying step, reminded them all of where they stood. “Well, Guv', let's shove off then, shall we?” Jessica suggested in her best attempt at a Cockney accent. “Dr. Tatham, lead the way.”