The girl stiffened. Bjorn heard one of the boys gasp.
“And how could that possibly be any of your fucking business?” the girl snarled. She turned her head to the side and spit on the ground.
“I’m so sorry,” Bjorn said. The smile on his face remained fixed. “I’ve offended you.”
“You’re goddamned right you offended me,” the girl said. “Who do you think you are?”
Bjorn stuck out his hand. He glanced towards the still-empty parking lot, silently wishing that someone else would come along. It remained empty with the exception of his van and the Cavalier.
“My name is Bjorn,” he said. “And this is my wife-”
“I don’t give a fuck what your name is.”
Bjorn was surprised, and a bit frightened, by the girl’s anger. She ignored his outstretched hand, which he quickly retracted. Her eyes were locked onto him, and as he stood looking at her, he suddenly felt cold. He shifted Elias to his other shoulder.
“Please,” Bjorn said. “The last thing I wanted to do was upset you. Perhaps we could go up to a table over there and sit and talk for a little while.”
The girl seemed to relax a bit. She turned and smiled at her companions, then looked back at Bjorn.
“Talk?” she said. “You want to talk to me?”
“I’d love to,” Bjorn said. “We’ll just sit and talk. I’d love to share what I’ve learned about God’s love with you.”
She turned to the young man standing closest to her.
“God’s love,” she said. “He wants to share what he knows about God’s love. That’s nice.”
She stood for a moment, seemingly pondering Bjorn’s proposal. Finally, she said, “Okay, why not? Just let us use the restroom. Go on ahead. We’ll be there in a minute.”
The girl turned and walked into the building that housed the restrooms, followed by the males. Bjorn watched them go, then started back up the hill.
“Do you think this is a good idea?” Anna said. “They frighten me.”
“She seems filled with rage,” Bjorn said. “Maybe I can help her.”
“Bjorn, what about the children? What if something goes wrong? I mean, did you see what they were wearing? Those symbols on their clothes, goat heads and Satan? And all the black. They’re hideous. And I could smell alcohol on the girl’s breath. I think we should go.”
Bjorn took his wife’s hand. “This is a test, Anna. I’m sure of it. It’s God’s way of testing my faith.” He gestured towards the tree line a hundred feet away. “If you don’t feel comfortable, take the children over there and I’ll talk to them alone.”
Bjorn took a seat at a picnic table beneath a maple tree. The sun was just slipping behind a mountain to the west, the shimmering orange light dancing through the poplar and oak leaves. What a magnificent sight, Bjorn thought; what a magnificent day. What a wonderful time to be alive and well in God’s kingdom. It was a pity there weren’t more people around to enjoy it.
Bjorn heard an engine come to life and looked back down towards the restrooms. He saw the green Cavalier back out of the spot near his van and pull away. Just then the two young Goths who had been with the redhead came walking over the hill. Puzzled, he stood and started towards them.
“Is your friend leaving?” he said.
The short, muscular Goth raised his T-shirt and produced a pistol.
“Yeah, she’s leaving,” he said, “and you’re coming with us.”
Sunday, September 14
The voice eased its way through my subconscious and gently brought me out of sleep. I’d been napping on the couch, using the excuse that I’d be starting a new job tomorrow and needed to rest up. When my eyes opened, my wife’s face was smiling down at me. She was offering me something-a telephone.
“It’s Lee Mooney,” Caroline said. “He says it’s urgent.”
Already it had started: the extreme importance of all matters legal, especially all matters criminal. I looked at my watch. Almost nine o’clock. I sat up and took the phone.
“Hey, Lee,” I said to the man who would become my boss in about twelve hours. I hadn’t had a boss in nearly twenty years.
“Sorry about the Sunday call,” Mooney said. “We’ve got a bad one. What would you think about starting a day early?”
“What do you mean?” I felt certain, even in my groggy state of mind, that the district attorney’s office and the courthouses were closed on Sunday.
“It looks like we’ve got an entire family slaughtered out in the county,” Mooney said. “They tell me there are a couple of small children involved. I want to go out there and make sure everything’s done right. Since it’ll be your case, I thought you might want to come with me.”
I processed the information slowly. My mind illuminated the high points-family… slaughtered… in the county… small children. I rubbed my face and tried to focus.
“An entire family?”
“I don’t have many details yet. Do you want me to stop by and pick you up or do you want to meet me out there?”
I didn’t want to be entirely at his mercy, so I told him I’d meet him. He gave me the location, a place with which I was vaguely familiar. I could be there in less than an hour.
I hung up and splashed cold water on my face. I pulled on my jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, and an old pair of hiking boots. I pecked Caroline on the cheek and headed out the door. Rio started whining. He wanted to go. I dropped the tailgate on my pickup and he jumped in.
The place I was going was Marbleton Road, little more than a wide dirt path that intersected with Smalling Road near the mountains at the western edge of Washington County. The intersection was just north of Interstate 81 and just south of nowhere. You could stand at the intersection of Marbleton and Smalling roads and unleash an arrow from a bow in any direction without fear of hitting anything human. The closest house was more than a half mile away.
I got there around ten. As I rounded a curve on Smalling Road, still a quarter mile away, I could see red and blue lights, plenty of them, flashing eerily off of the trees surrounding the intersection. A young deputy stopped me about two hundred yards from Smalling Road and told me I was going to have to turn around. I showed him the brand-new badge identifying me as an assistant district attorney that Lee Mooney had given me a few days earlier, and he waved me through. I spotted Mooney’s SUV parked in a field to my left about a hundred yards south of the flashing lights, and I pulled over next to it and got out.
Rio’s ears were pointed straight up and his nostrils were flared. He was standing in the back of the truck, facing the intersection, and he was growling. The behavior was distinctly uncharacteristic. When I reached up to try to calm him, I noticed the hair on his back was at attention. I grabbed his harness and put him in the cab of the truck. I took a flashlight from the glove compartment, stuffed my hands inside the pocket on the front of my sweatshirt, and walked towards the lights. It suddenly seemed much colder than it was when I left home.
There were several unmarked cars and police cruisers, a crime scene van, and three ambulances, all parked within a couple hundred feet of Marbleton Road. Just past the intersection was another van, this one from a local television station, channel twelve. A bright light illuminated a reporter sticking a microphone into the face of a man I recognized to be the sheriff of Washington County, a shameless publicity hound named Leon Bates. The flashing lights from the emergency vehicles made me dizzy. When I stepped up to the intersection at Marbleton, yellow police tape had been pulled across the road, and yet another young deputy accosted me. I looked at him closely for few seconds as his complexion changed from light blue to light red to light blue to light red.
“Who are you?” he demanded. I knew nearly every cop in the county when I quit practicing law a year ago. I’d already run across two I’d never laid eyes on. The county commission wouldn’t pay them a competitive wage, so a lot of them became disillusioned and moved on.
“Joe Dillard,” I said, reaching for the identification badge again. He looked at me warily.
“This is a crime scene,” he said. “You can’t go stomping around in here.”
“Where’s Lee Mooney? He told me to come.”
The young officer turned and nodded towards the darkness. I could see beams from flashlights through the leaves on the low tree branches. They appeared to be about a hundred yards down the road. I also noticed brighter
