The lock turned with a sharp click and I shoved the sliding door open. I unholstered my service weapon.
The inside of the house was very warm and as dry as a desert. I felt the hot air on my face as I entered the room. Someone had cranked up the thermostat. I could hear the furnace murmuring in the basement. I crouched over the stained carpet. It was unmistakably a splatter of congealing blood.
I glanced up, unsure what to do or where to go. “Police!” I shouted. “Professor Westergaard?”
The only answer was the ominous hum of the furnace.
A hallway receded ahead of me, a long Persian carpet disappearing into the shadows. I followed it past a guest room with a stripped mattress and white sheets draped like shrouds over the bureaus. The door of the first-floor bathroom stood ajar, but the room was empty.
In the kitchen, I saw granite countertops and sinks, pots and pans hanging from hooks. Reflected light bounced back at me from the brushed aluminum face of the refrigerator. My eyes searched for clues.
Atop a stone island in the center of the room was the knife block. A knife was missing.
Charley called after me, down the hall, “Mike?”
Steps led up to the second floor. The hall light was burning. “Upstairs!”
I sprang up the stairs, taking two at a time. Behind me came a pulse of light as Charley found a switch on the kitchen wall.
The house was huge. There were so many doors. I pushed open one after another before I reached the master bedroom. I turned the knob and swung the door into the room. Before me was another bare mattress. But this one was splattered with blood. I circled the bed, aiming my weapon at the center of the flashlight beam.
On the floor reposed a naked woman. She lay on her side, with her arms bound together behind her, not with rope but with sailor’s rigging tape. She was very small. Black hair almost completely masked her face, but I could see her chin was painted with blood and her neck was covered with purple spots. Her body was white except where a knife had cut bloody letters into the skin.
The overhead light snapped on as Charley entered the room. I heard the old pilot gasp out loud.
I slid my SIG back into its paddle holster and knelt beside the dead woman. Rigging tape was wrapped over her nose and mouth. I brushed the hair out of her eyes. They were open, lifeless. On the woman’s cheek was a small S. Between her breasts was a larger L. The word continued down her torso, a bloody signature that ended above the dark triangle of pubic hair.
“Don’t touch her!” said Charley.
He yanked me away, but not before I had pushed the dead girl onto her back. By then, I knew the inscription the killer had carved into the body of Ashley Kim.
SLUT, it said.
10
As a child, I had a fierce and powerful faith. My mother instilled in me a deep connection to the Catholic Church, taking me to Mass each Sunday morning while my father lay hungover on the couch.
I was baptized and received my First Communion at the Church of Saint Sebastian in the gritty papermaking town of Madison. I said my first penance there, too, whispering through a screen to a priest whose role in this arcane ritual I didn’t comprehend. I had known Father Landry all my young life, but I was now supposed to believe that he wasn’t actually present in the confessional. The heavyset man who seemed to glide down the aisle during Mass had been transformed into God’s earpiece. At age eight, I couldn’t figure out why the Lord needed a surrogate, especially since my previous conversations with Him in prayer had been so direct. But I surrendered myself to the sacrament, promising not to trespass again and saying the ten Hail Marys that Father Landry gave me as punishment for my childish sins.
I emerged from the confessional, unsure of what had taken place. The unsatisfying ceremony made me feel more distant from Him, rather than less. Still, I continued in my Catholic faith, taking my father’s name, John, in confirmation.
It was only many years later, when I had real sins to confess, that I began to wonder where God was hiding. One of us had gone missing, but I couldn’t have told you which.
By the time of my father’s rampage, I had parted ways with the supernatural. In the weeks following my return from Rum Pond, when the Warden Service chaplain, Deborah Davies, first came to see me, I remembered feeling vaguely sorry for her. She seemed like a kindhearted person, and I was glad that she derived comfort from her beliefs. But when she asked me if I’d spoken to my parish priest recently, it was all I could do to keep from rolling on the floor.
I did not believe in ESP. I did not believe in ghosts or crystal balls or future events foretold in tea leaves. If she had asked me, I would have told her that the prophets of the Old Testament were schizophrenics and that the voices that spoke to them out of the desert were electrochemical misfires in the brain. Human beings are not transmitters of their intentions, I would have said. Angels do not whisper in our ears. Predestination is a fairy tale, a bedtime story for adults scared of meaningless death. Those were the articles of my adult faith.
So how could I explain the deep foreboding that preceded my discovery of Ashley Kim?
When I arrived at Hans Westergaard’s house, I didn’t suspect the woman was dead or fear she was dead. I knew she was dead. The certainty had been with me for hours-like an animal lurking beyond the campfire light-but I hadn’t recognized the premonition for what it was. Maybe I didn’t want to admit to myself the meaning of the portent. I didn’t want to open the confessional door after so many years and find God present once again, but in a shape I no longer recognized.
With a grip like eagle talons, Charley pulled me from the Westergaards’ bedroom. He guided me back down the stairs, his voice soft in my ears, encouraging me to retrace my original footprints, until we were once again standing beside my truck in the driveway.
“It’s a crime scene now,” my friend said. “We don’t want to muck it up any more than we have.”
In the sharp, cold air, my senses returned. I found my cell phone in my jacket pocket. I started to key in the direct number for the Knox County dispatcher, when I heard a car coming down the drive behind us. Flashing blue lights made hallucinatory patterns in the trees. Then a blinding spotlight snapped on, pinning us both in place. An electronically amplified voice boomed out, “Don’t move.”
Charley and I exchanged befuddled looks. How had a cop gotten here so fast, before we’d even called in the homicide?
A car door slammed and I heard a familiar voice. “Bowditch?”
Trooper Curt Hutchins came striding toward us out of the light. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“There’s a dead woman inside,” I said, as if that were any explanation.
“What?”
“We came over here looking for a missing woman whose car struck a deer last night,” said Charley in an even tone. “We had reason to think she might be inside this home. We found her body upstairs. She seems to have been sexually assaulted before she was killed.”
“It’s Ashley Kim,” I said.
“You need to get an evidence team over here, sonny,” said Charley.
“Who are you?” Hutchins asked.
“Charley Stevens, Maine Warden Service, retired.”
The big state trooper had positioned himself so that we couldn’t see his expression; he was just a silhouette against a wall of light. “I know you-you’re that daredevil pilot.”
I squinted to see his expression. “How the hell did you get here so fast, Hutchins?”
“You triggered the silent alarm. What were you doing, breaking down the goddamned door?”
“I looked in the windows and saw signs of a struggle,” I replied. “I was justified. Blood was in plain view.”
“But what we’re you doing here in the first place?”