“Fax me the police report.” Barry sighed. “I’ll be over in the morning. Meanwhile, don’t let Rose talk to anyone. Let’s not have a repeat of what happened last time.”
“Agreed.” Rafferty hung up, thinking about the ’89 murders, Salem’s most famous cold case. Rose Whelan had always been unofficially blamed for the killings, despite what he’d heard was an overwhelming lack of hard evidence. What they did have was “no truth, only speculation,” which, as he’d seen with Actor Bob tonight, was dramatized and exaggerated by the locals for the tourist dollars. The facts were different and even more inconclusive: Three young women had been killed. It had been a bloodbath; the women’s throats were slit, and they quickly bled out. One of the women, an albino, had hair and some skin taken from her body. A child and Rose herself had been the only survivors. It had all happened almost five years before Rafferty came to Salem. He’d wanted to reopen the case, but there had always been something more pressing to take care of in this city: drugs, street crime, domestic violence, all real and current. And then there was Halloween, which lasted longer and longer each year.
“Strange things happen here on Halloween,” his predecessor, Tom Dayle, had told him as he handed him a few of the cold-case folders. The one they called the “Goddess Murders” had been at the bottom of the pile.
Rafferty had already heard the rumors about Dayle. Four years away from a full pension, the detective had suffered a mental breakdown, which had put him on medical leave for more than four years. The cops were whispering that it was the unsolved case that had sent him over the edge.
“The rest of the evidence is in storage,” Dayle told him. “I wouldn’t bother. There’s nothing there.” After reviewing current cases with Rafferty for one afternoon, he took disability retirement. Not for the breakdown, officially, but for “severe arthritis in his knees.” Same money, better story.
Rafferty had heard a lot of stories around town about the case, random details that piqued his interest. Even now, twenty-five years after it happened, people were still talking about it, especially when it came to Rose Whelan. Now, twenty years into his own tenure, Rafferty would have to take a closer look. He threw out the rest of the Hershey’s bar, got himself a fresh cup of coffee, and tried to recall what he knew about the case.
He’d never understood why the town believed Rose Whelan was the perpetrator and not another victim. He’d gotten to know her over the years, thinking, at first, that she was one of Towner’s “strays.” But Rose Whelan was far more than that. She had been a scholar, with specialties in both mythology and colonial history, particularly the Salem witch trials. When he’d questioned her once about the juxtaposition of two such seeming opposites, she’d dismissed him as if the connection was obvious. “To understand what happened with the Puritans in Salem, you must first understand the Pagan religions they so feared. To the Puritans, the Catholic acceptance of established Pagan feasts and holidays was just like summoning the devil.”
But everything had changed for Rose with the murders of the three young women in 1989. She had been severely traumatized by the event, and because of her mental state and her presence on the hill that night, suspicions had begun to point in her direction. After all, the young women lived at her home. According to what Rafferty had heard, Rose had disapproved of their behavior and given them several chances to change it, then finally asked them to leave. He’d heard the ritual they had been performing the night they were killed was a last gathering, fulfilling some kind of promise the women had made to Rose, some condition of their living arrangements with her.
When they had died so mysteriously and brutally, accusations had begun to fly in Rose’s direction. A grand jury had been convened, but—not surprisingly, in his opinion—it hadn’t found sufficient evidence to indict Rose. All anyone could agree on was that Rose Whelan, once a respected local historian and authority on the witch trials, had not been in her right mind since that awful night on Proctor’s Ledge. Rafferty believed in Rose’s innocence. Besides Rose, there had been one witness to the crime; well, a witness of a sort, the other survivor, the five-year-old daughter of one of the victims. This child steadfastly insisted that Rose Whelan had helped her hide “from the bad thing” and then had gone back to try to save the others.
At the end of the day, instead of going to jail, Rose had been sent to a series of state mental hospitals. And after a full year of remaining mute, she’d regained her voice and begun to tell a wild story about what had happened to the three slain women, who by then had been dubbed “Goddesses” by the media and everyone in town. This was the reason Barry Marcus didn’t want Rose to talk to Rafferty without an attorney present: Years ago, after prolonged questioning, Rose had alleged that the young women had been killed by a banshee. Rafferty knew of the banshee from his own grandmother’s stories of Ireland: a banshee was a mythological female spirit whose mournful cries were considered omens of death. His grandmother had always claimed that Rafferty’s family had a banshee that had predicted every death for generations.
But he’d never heard of a banshee actually doing the killing. Rose had claimed that, after the murders were committed, this banshee had jumped into her and that she was keeping the creature trapped inside herself to stop her from killing again. If she’d had a lawyer, she would have been advised against telling this tale to anyone, least of all the police.
Rafferty knew Rose well enough to know that she had fallen on hard times—she’d lost her home, for God’s sake—but she was no killer. His cop’s instincts had always been good; he’d stake them against the best out there.
“You want to tell me what happened?” Rafferty sat across from the two boys in the interrogation room. He drank the last of his coffee and stared at them. He’d seen them before, had a few run-ins with them during the last year. There was no lawyer present, but the two had had an extended phone consultation with someone before agreeing to proceed. No parent or guardian had yet come to the station.