sweep or mop or stock shelves stopped what they were doing to stare, open mouthed, at him as he walked towards the sliding doors at the front of the store. He could feel their eyes on his back clear out into the parking lot as he headed across the sand covered ice that covered the lot towards the Cherokee.
Popping open the trunk, he laid the gun on the carpeted floor, setting the bag beside them. Hurrying around the side of the car, he hopped into the driver’s seat and pinned the pedal to the floor as he turned the key. The engine roared as he dropped the gear into reverse, the tires spinning on the sand as they tossed a cloud of the minuscule grains into the air. He backed from the parking place, pausing long enough to throw it into drive, and headed out of the enormous parking lot towards the flashing red lights of the street beyond.
Heading back towards the highway, his mind couldn’t help but revert back to the one thing that was bothering him more than anything else. Sure, the one thing that bothered him more than anything was the fact that everyone he knew was dying at the hands of a former friend who appeared to be more of an unnatural apparition than a man. But taking it at face value, there was a part of the story that seemed to be missing. Everything that he had learned from pouring through that dead nun’s diary, and everything that they had read and reread in the faded yellow trappings, pointed to the number two hundred as the number of deaths associated with the coming of the bloodspawn. And in every single one of those cases, all of the deaths had happened at once, not spread out one by one over a great number of days as these had been so far.
The killings were lacking the same MO.
Perhaps the nuns had been wrong from the start and what they had found here wasn’t the scenario that that thought it was. Maybe, and while this most definitely had something of a supernatural undertone, it wasn’t the maturation of the bloodspawn as they thought it would be. But then explain the child Harry rescued from the nuns before they killed it. Explain the presence of the dark figure that had shredded the forest with his mere will, shattering the trunks of so many trees as though they had been made of glass. All of the secondary signs seemed to be there. Could that all have just been coincidence?
Scott pulled into the driveway and pressed the garage door opener. A grip of long icicles fell from where they dangled from the roof, shattering in front of the door on the snow covered concrete as it rolled up against the ceiling of the garage. Rolling in slowly, he parked next to the mass of unpacked boxes and killed the engine. Leaning back over his shoulder, he stared at the two shotguns as they lay on the floor in the trunk. Their mere presence inspired power as he knew that with a single shot from one of the black metal and wood creations and a spray of the tiny steel bb’s, he could snuff out a life in a heartbeat. That seemed of little comfort as he had watched Matt do the same with his bare hands in as little time.
Shaking his head and sighing loudly, the sudden weight of the daunting task ahead settling into the knotted muscles of his shoulders. He shoved the keys into his pockets and closed the car door, walking around the back of the car and walking past the boxes to the garage door. Pressing the buttons, he climbed up the pair of cement stairs and into the house.
“Harry,” he called from the family room as he crossed the plush carpeting and bounded up the stairs.
“In here,” Harry’s voice echoed from the vaulted ceiling in the living room.
Crossing the tile floor and stepping into the living room, Scott leaned over Harry’s shoulder staring down at the massive pile of newspaper clippings that had been arranged chronologically on his work desk.
“Anything new?” Scott asked, but Harry’s response was cut off before it even passed his lips by the ringing phone.
“Just a sec,” Scott said as he walked through the living room and into the kitchen.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Ramsey?”
It was a deep male voice, and sounded vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place it right off.
“Yes…”
“This is Bob Goode with the People Network again.”
“Oh.”
“I just wanted to call to let you know that we’ve found a great lead on the location project that you requested.”
“Thanks, but I think I’ve got this one figured out by now.”
“Regardless, Mr. Ramsey, you’ve already paid for our services and we guarantee results. Do you have a fax number so that I can fax you the information as soon as I get it?”
“Yeah,” Scott said. “But really, I don’t think it’s necessary…”
“How so?”
“I’m fairly confident I’ve already figured out the child’s identity.”
“Who?” the man asked, suddenly quite intrigued.
“A childhood friend of mine, Matt Parker.”
“Well,” the man said, pausing as he took Scott’s answer as something of a challenge, to see if he could prove him wrong. “We’ll just have to see if the information that I found supports your assumption. Now, the fax number?”
“Area code 719, 590, 2644.”
“Thank you very much. You should have the information that you requested faxed to you within, most likely, the next twenty four hours, but I guarantee it within forty- eight. And once again, Mr. Ramsey, on behalf of the People Network I would like to thank you for choosing our service and hope that we will be able to help you again in the future.”
There was a click on the other end of the line and suddenly Scott wished that he had not chosen the People Network. The man had grown too pushy and it was quite obvious that he wanted nothing more than to prove to him, and the entire world for that matter, that there was no greater detective when it came to doing what he did in the entire world. But, in his eagerness to see if Harry had found anything new while he was gone, he pushed the conversation to the back of his mind and it was only a matter of time before he forgot about it completely.
“Who was that?” Harry asked as Scott entered the living room.
“Oh, that was that guy I told you about that I hired over the Internet to track down the identity of the child.”
“Seems kind of a moot point now, huh?”
“That’s what I told him, but he seems hell bent on doing it. What can you do?”
Harry turned back to the table and grabbed a smaller stack of newspaper clipping from the right side of the table.
“You see,” Harry said, transferring the smaller stack, which could have been no more than three sheets thick, to his left hand as he gestured to the others with his right. “I’ve grouped these according to content. This thick stack on the left here is the actual newspaper clippings detailing the two hundred deaths. We’ve already looked at most of them, but what I found here is quite interesting.”
“Go on.”
“Shuffled in the middle of all of those articles, I found these three. Now granted, they are nothing more than mere blurbs, and really don’t give that much information at all, but listen to this. Do you remember that Article we read about the mass graves in Germany?”
“Sure.”
“Well, listen to this. I found this one folded and stuck to the back of another one of the clippings. I don’t know which paper this is from as the top has been torn from the page, but let me read it to you.”
Scott sat down in the armchair nearest the desk, turning it slightly so that he was looking directly at Harry.
“This is from Schlossberg,” Harry started. “It must be from some American or western European paper as it’s written in English, but I digress. Here we go.
“The third horrible, disheveled body in as many days turned up today on the bank of the Rhine in this war abandoned rural town. State officials have declined comment. Locals fear the killings may have been by some sort of animal as there are no wounds consistent with bullets or stabbings. Local farmers are in the process of combing the heavily vegetated hills in search of what they presume to be a pack of wild dogs.”
“That could be just coincidence. It could have nothing to do with, what was it again, a mass grave?”
