by Jeremiah Allsman
Linden
Ross lived alone in an abandoned pigeon house in Ohio. He was an
elderly man who as a writer had made quite a living for himself in
his day. But, as he would say, times had changed and what was popular
twenty years ago was not so any longer. It seemed rather foolish
to people that Linden had made nearly a billion dollars in his work, yet
he lived in a pigeon house. It made him look destitute, but if anyone
asked why he chose to live that way, he'd respond quite strongly, "I'd
rather die a cruel long death, than be one of those rich sons-of-bitches
that just as soon spit on your grave than buy flowers for you when you're
sick." He lived very peacefully in his odd shaped house.
One of the things that I
still wonder about, is why anyone would want to kill him. There were
rumors about this and that, but it was all purely speculation.
Some folks said that he buried his money in the ground and someone killed
him to find the treasure map. Others said that he performed satanic
rituals to contact the souls of those who had passed on. But again,
it was all speculation.
Chris Krane, an investigator
and expert on things in the occult and other strange phenomenon, was working
the case. He had worked with strange cases dozens of times before,
but the case of Mr. Linden Ross was different, perhaps because there weren't
any leads. He had to start fresh. First was the task of exploring
the murder site. The pigeon house was disorganized. There were
bloodstained clothes hanging from hooks in the walls. The top of
the house was rusting and falling apart. The ground was covered with
the bones of deceased birds and rats; upon them and on
the ground was of course pigeon dung.
"Shit," Chris said
as he stepped in a fairly large clump of it. Terry Gand was Chris'
new partner and he had an inharmonious attitude.
"You can't tell me that
there's no shit in Ohio," Terry said as he pitched his cigarette.
Chris ignored him and climbed a rusty ladder to the top of the pigeon house.
A bird flew swiftly past him, causing him to fall back on the steel grating.
Terry chuckled but came to a stop when Chris pulled his gun on him.
"This is going to run smoothly
whether I have to shoot you or not," he said, "I can't think on an
empty stomach. Let's eat somewhere." He climbed down and walked
toward an officer. "See to it that no one gets near this place,"
he said as he and Terry sat down in his car.
Inside a nearby restaurant,
they sat down to eat a sandwich. Terry lifted his to his mouth and
took a giant bite from it. "So how long have you worked the X-files?"
Chris asked. Terry held up a finger as if to tell Chris to wait a
moment so he could finish chewing his sandwich. Once he swallowed
he answered.
"About three weeks,"
he said, "I'm new to the circuit. How about you?"
"Two and a half years.
How long have you been a cop?"
"As long as I can remember."
"Family man?"
"Nope. Don't even
have a wife."
"I've got a boy and a girl."
"They must be sick of moving
so much," Terry said.
"Yeah, was Ross wearing
something red when he was found?"
"No, it was green and perfectly
clean, a robe if I'm not mistaken. Why?"
"I found this, a red flannel
piece of fabric." He said as he held it up in Terry's view.
"It could be our killer."
"It could be a fuckin mailman's
for all we know." He took a bite.
"Not unless a mailman climbs
on top of pigeon houses for exercise.. I found it on top."
"I'll send it to forensics."
He said as he finished his sandwich.
"All right, in the meantime,
I want to get a close look at the inside of our murder victim's house."
They gathered their garbage, put it in the trash bins, and walked out of
the restaurant.
Chris climbed in a dark,
thin window at the base of the house and onto a broken wooden ladder to
the solid concrete floor. The large room was full of barrels, wound
wire hanging from the ceiling, broken cinder blocks, cobwebs, and pallets
sitting upright in the back. As he walked in further, he could make
out specific objects, which he noted on the tape recorder he held to his
mouth.
"…Some sort of steel desk
measuring about three feet by five feet," he said as he dodged a cobweb
stretching from corner to corner above a cracked wooden pillar, "…broken
broomstick, steel, rusted bolts in it."
He cocked his head in the direction of a snow shovel, with a jagged
edge on it. He bent over to have a closer look at the shovel.
It had water spots on it and in a narrow crevice was a thick, soiled, grimy,
liquid. He collected a sample in a bag and stood up to look about
the room again. It was dark, but there were sharp, light beams shooting
from holes in the walls that made it easier to see.
He climbed out of the bottom
of the house and brushed off his knees. His gray suit had taken a
hit from a nail on the way out, but otherwise, he was all right.
He had started toward the other side, when he noticed a boarded-up staircase
leading down into the ground. He pushed the boards aside and started
down. There were boards across the stairs themselves that made moving
down difficult. He inched down to a narrow tunnel extending eight
feet to the east and almost six feet to the west. Inside to the west,
water covered the ground and there was tumbleweed at the end. To
the north, there was a type of generator. There was some sort fuse
box connected to another box and below that were pulleys connected with
rubber straps and cords. Also to the west was an opening more narrow
than the one he had climbed through to get to the base of the building.
He turned around and made an escape from the tunnel. Once at the
surface, he covered the stairwell once again and trekked to the northwest
side of the house.
There was a cylindrical
cement platform that measured a diameter of six feet. There was a
hole in it filled with the same dark liquid that he had found on the shovel
in the basement. "What the hell?" He said to himself as he
bent before the pit of grimy liquid and dipped his fingers into it.
Then he lifted his fingers toward his nose and mouth. He smelled
it and coughed at its disgusting odor. "It smells like shit."
He said into the recorder. He thought about it, but decided that
he wouldn't touch his fingers to his tongue. "God knows if it smells
bad, it probably won't taste the best," he thought as he pulled out a handkerchief
from his pocket and wiped the liquid from his hands. Out of the corner
of his eye, he noticed a human finger jutting out from the muck.
He immediately reached in fishing around until a body rose to the surface.
"A body!" he said through his recorder.
*
Back at the morgue, Doctor
Harrington was completing his autopsy. "Victim's been identified
as Tracey Morboss. She was raped and then shot in the chest."
"Well, he didn't do a very
good job hiding her," Terry said.
"No, you're wrong.
He tried harder than you think. See those bruises and cuts around
her ankles. She was chained to something heavy. My speculation,
a cinder block. She was still alive when he dropped her under and
she was kicking to break free."
"Can I have a moment alone
with Detective Gand, Doctor?" Chris asked.
"Hey, you're the cop, do
whatever you want." Terry and Chris stepped into the hallway.
"Forensics tested the blood
on the wall below that piece of fabric I found. It matches Linden.
However, there was blood from a second party, as yet unidentified, on a
rusty tailpipe sticking out from the wall."
Terry's eyes narrowed.
"You thinking what I am?"
"The killer wasn't from
Winchester. He wasn't familiar with the town. He thought he
had taken this girl to an abandoned pigeon house free from any witnesses.
He rapes her and then kills her. Linden witnesses the whole thing
from inside. He doesn't have a phone, so he can't call the cops.
The killer sees the old man, they struggle against that wall. The
killer stabs Linden twice in the chest and once in the throat, but catches
himself on the side of the tailpipe, leaving his blood trail. He
runs way."
"Sounds good, but, this
guy doesn't just kill and rape some poor girl and stop there. I think
there's another body." They walk back into the coroner's room.
"Thank you doctor, I have
a feeling, we'll be seeing each other again real soon." Chris said
as he left to check out the site again.
Back at the murder site,
after extensive searching, the two unearth nothing. "I just don't
understand it. Why just kill one girl and an on looking witness?"
Chris said to himself as his eyes noticed a boarded up tunnel underneath
the foundation. "Hey, what's this?" he asked as he quickly
began to pull the boards off and looked inside to see the body of a young
teenage girl. "I knew it! You were right Gand, another body!"
But Terry didn't respond. Instead he stood behind Chris with a gun.
"….and another on looking
witness," Terry said icily. But before he could fire, Chris
had already done so, behind his back. Chris' bullet had hit Terry
in the hand and then as he tried to run, he was struck in both knees.
After reading Terry his rights, Chris climbed into his car and drove back
to his hometown of Salem, Massachusetts, leaving the whole case closed.
The End
