Show of Evil

'Maybe tourists. Conventioneers. Or assume for a minute that they were killed out of town and brought here.'

'You're reaching on this one, Harve.'

'Humour me, son. I know it's a long shot. What if they ain't local? Think about it. What if they were involved in something outside the city? A bank heist, a dope deal, some cult thing. And suppose it went sour and these John and Jane Does were killed because of this deal and they got dropped in the dump. Hell, somebody dumped those people out there, they didn't fall out of the sky.'

'It's a wild-goose chase.'

'Maybe,' the old-timer said, throwing his empty coffee cup into a wastebasket. He leaned back in his chair, tucked a fresh pinch of snuff in his cheek, and interlocked his pudgy fingers over his stomach. 'I'm remembering a time five, six years ago. The Seattle police turned up two white males in a common grave just outside the city. They couldn't ID the victims. Six months go by, they've about written the case off, and one day they get a call from a police chief in Arizona. A thousand miles away! Turns out the Arizona cops nabbed a guy for passing a hot fifty-dollar bill that was lifted six months before in a bank heist. The guy breaks down and not only confesses to the bank job, he says there were three of them involved and they drove up to Seattle to hide out and started squabbling and he takes them both down and buries them out in the woods and drifts back down to Phoenix. The story checks out. The Seattle police solves its case. The Arizona PD solves its bank robbery.'

'And everybody's smilin' but the guy that did the trick,' said Meyer.

'Right. The last place the Seattle PD would've expected to get a line on their John Does was in Arizona. So you never know. We're looking to see if anything strikes our fancy, okay?'

Meyer was back staring at the big computer screen, watching it scroll through case descriptions. Suddenly he stopped it.

'How about Satanism, Harve? Does that strike your fancy?'

'Satanism?'

'Here's a little town called Gideon down in the southern corner of the state, probably hasn't had a major homicide in twenty years. The local PD thinks Satanists killed a housewife down there.'

'Gideon? There's a nice biblical name,' St Claire said. 'Seems an unlikely place for Satanists to rear their ugly heads.'

The chief of police refused to supply any crime reports. Didn't even call in the state forensics lab - which is required by law in a case like this. According to the cover sheet, it's a small, religious community. They think it involves Satanism and they don't want any publicity about it.'

He ripped a computer printout of the cover report from the printer and read it aloud:

'UNREPORTED HOMICIDE, 7/12/93: Murder of Gideon Housewife. Gideon is a religious community of Mormons. The population is approximately 2,000. Al Braselton, an agent with the state Bureau of Investigation, learned of the event while on an an unrelated investigation in Shelby, 12 miles north of Gideon. The Gideon police chief, Hiram Young, reluctantly turned over to Agent Braselton some photographs and the sketchy homicide report. This is all the information the Bureau has on this crime at this time. According to Chief Young, the town didn't want a lot of outsiders coming there…'

Meyer exclaimed, 'And this in quotes, Harve, ' 'Because of the Satanism angle'! The homicide is still unresolved.'

'There's an angle I never thought about,' said St Claire. 'Satanism.' He laughed at the thought. 'My God, look at these photos,' Meyer said. Six photographs had popped up on the computer monitor. Like all graphic police studies of violence, they depicted the stark climate of the crime without art or composition. Pornographic in detail, they appeared on the fifty-inch TV screen in two rows, three photos in each row. The three on the top were full, medium, and close-up shots of a once pleasant-looking, slightly overweight woman in her mid to late twenties. She had been stabbed and cut dozens of times. The long, establishing shot captured the nauseating milieu of the crime scene. The victim lay in a corner of the room, her head cocked crazily against the wall. Her mouth bulged open. Her eyes were frozen in a horrified stare. Blood had splattered the walls, the TV set, the floors, everything.

The medium shot was even more graphic. The woman's nipples had been cut off and her throat was slit to the bone.

But the close-up of her head was the most chilling of all.

The woman's nipples were stuffed in her mouth.

'Good lord,' St Claire said with revulsion.

'I'm glad we haven't had lunch yet,' Meyer said, swallowing hard.