The Mephisto Club

body?”

She nodded. “Last night.”

“Do you think we’re dealing with the same killer?”

“What’s with this word we?” Jane cut in. “I wasn’t aware you worked in law enforcement, Mr. Sansone.”

Unruffled, he turned to face her. “I won’t get in your way.”

“This is a crime scene. You shouldn’t even be here.”

“I don’t believe Chenango County is in your jurisdiction. This is up to Detective Jurevich.”

Jane looked at Jurevich. “You’re giving him access?”

Jurevich gave a shrug. “Our crime scene unit’s already processed this house. There’s no reason he can’t walk through it with us.”

“So now it’s a public tour.”

“This has been cleared through the sheriff’s office, by special request.”

“Whose request?”

Jurevich glanced at Sansone, whose face revealed nothing.

“We’re wasting time out here,” said Sansone. “I’m sure we’d all like to get out of this wind.”

“Detective?” pressed Jane.

“If you have any objections,” said Jurevich, clearly unhappy at being caught in the middle, “you can take it up with the Department of Justice. Now, why don’t we get inside before we all freeze?” He climbed the steps to the porch, with Sansone right behind him.

Jane stared after them and said softly, “What’s his pull, anyway?”

“Maybe you should just ask him,” said Maura, and she started up the steps. Jurevich had already unlocked the front door, and she followed the men into the house. Inside, she found it scarcely warmer, but at least they were now sheltered from the wind. Jane came in behind her and closed the door. After the glare of the snow, it took a moment for Maura’s eyes to adjust to the interior gloom. Looking through a doorway into the front parlor, she saw sheet-draped furniture and the dull gleam of wood floors. Pale winter light shone in through the windows, casting the room in shades of gray.

Jurevich pointed to the bottom of the stairs. “You can’t see them, but Luminol turned up lots of bloody smears on these steps and in this foyer. Looks like he wiped up after himself as he left the house, so any footwear evidence is pretty indistinct.”

“You went over the whole house with Luminol?” asked Jane.

“Luminol, UV, alternate light source. We checked every room. There’s a kitchen and dining room through that doorway. And a study beyond the parlor. Except for the shoe prints here in the foyer, nothing very interesting turned up on the first floor.” He faced the stairway. “All the action took place upstairs.”

“You said this house was vacant,” said Sansone. “How did the killer get in? Was there any sign of forced entry?”

“No, sir. Windows were shut tight. And the realtor swears she always locks the front door when she leaves.”

“Who has a key?”

“Well, she does. And she says it never leaves her office.”

“How old is the lock?”

“Ah, geez, I don’t know. It’s probably twenty years old.”

“I assume the owner has a key, too.”

“She hasn’t been back to Purity in years. I hear she’s living somewhere in Europe. We haven’t been able to reach her.” Jurevich nodded at the sheet-draped furniture. “There’s a thick layer of dust on everything. You can see no one’s lived here for a while. Damn shame, too. A house this solidly built was meant to last a century, and this one just sits here empty. The caretaker comes up once a month to check on it. That’s how he found the body. He saw Sarah Parmley’s rental car parked out front, and then he found the front door unlocked.”

“Have you checked out the caretaker?” asked Jane.

“He’s not a suspect.”

“Why not?”

“Well, to start off with, he’s seventy-one years old. And he just got out of the hospital three weeks ago. Prostate surgery.” Jurevich looked at Sansone. “See what men have to look forward to?”

“So we’ve got a number of unanswered questions,” said Sansone. “Who unlocked the front door? Why did the victim drive up here in the first place?”

“The house is for sale,” said Maura. “Maybe she saw the realty sign. Maybe she drove up out of curiosity.”

“Look, it’s all speculation,” said Jurevich. “We’ve talked and talked about this, and we just don’t know why she came up here.”

“Tell us more about Sarah Parmley,” said Sansone.

“She grew up in Purity. Graduated from the local high school. But like too many other kids, she couldn’t find anything to keep her here, so she moved out to California and stayed. The only reason she came back to town was because her aunt died.”

“From what?” asked Sansone.

“Oh, it was an accident. Took a tumble down the stairs and broke her neck. So Sarah flew back for the memorial service. She stayed at a motel near town and checked out the day after the funeral. And that’s the last time anyone saw her. Until Saturday, when the caretaker found her car here.” He looked up at the stairs. “I’ll show you the room.”

Jurevich led the way. Halfway up the stairs, he halted and pointed to the wall. “This is the first one we noticed,” he said. “This cross, here. It’s the same symbol he cut all over her body. Looks like it’s drawn in some kind of red chalk.”

Maura stared at the symbol and her fingers went numb inside her gloves. “This cross is upside down.”

“There are more of them upstairs,” said Jurevich. “A lot more.” As they continued toward the second-floor landing, other crosses appeared on the wall. At first it was just a sparse scattering of them. Then, in the gloomy upstairs hallway, the crosses multiplied like an angry infestation massing along the corridor, swarming toward a doorway.

“In here, it gets bad,” said Jurevich.

His warning made Maura hesitate outside the room. Even after the others had walked through, she paused on the threshold, bracing herself for whatever awaited her on the other side of the doorway.

She stepped through, into a chamber of horrors.

It was not the dried lake of blood on the floor that captured her gaze; it was the handprints covering every wall, as though a multitude of lost souls had left their bloody testament as they’d passed through this room.

“These prints were all made with the same hand,” said Jurevich. “Identical palm prints and ridge lines. I don’t think our killer was stupid enough to leave his own.” He looked at Jane. “I’m willing to bet these were all made with Sarah Parmley’s severed hand. The one that turned up at your crime scene.”

“Jesus,” murmured Jane. “He used her hand like some kind of rubber stamp.”

With blood as his ink, thought Maura, her gaze traveling the walls. How many hours did he spend in this room, dipping the hand in that pool of blood, pressing it to the wall like a child with a stamp kit? Then her gaze focused on the nearest wall, on writing that had been obscured by the overlying handprints. She moved closer, staring at the words that tracked across the wall. It was Latin, and the same three words were repeated again and again. She followed the text as it circled the room in an unbroken line, continuing through corners, like a serpent coiling ever more tightly around them.

Abyssus abyssum invocat abyssus abyssum invocat abyssus abyssum invocat…

Their meaning suddenly dawned on her and she took a step back, chilled to the marrow.

“Hell calls to Hell,” Sansone murmured. She had not noticed that he’d moved right beside her.

“Is that what it means?” asked Jane.

“That’s the literal meaning. It also has another.”

“Hell calls to Hell sounds ominous enough.”