“Yeah,” Archer responded, his voice sounding hollow.
“There’s absolutely no sign anyone else was involved in this. Nobody broke in. None of the doors or windows have been forced or damaged in any way. Nothing appears to be missing. Everything upstairs looks like—like a Wednesday morning with kids in the house. Beds unmade. Used towels on the bathroom floor. It’s clear everybody had breakfast, dishes not yet put into the dishwasher. Clear the two older kids had their backpacks ready, their lunches inside.
“The neighbor who called in said Suzy and Bobby Gardner went out to catch the bus just like usual, like her kids did, but then for some reason came back in here before the bus came. She said it looked like someone had called them, or they’d heard something from inside the house. But they didn’t come back out, and the bus came and went. Then she noticed that Ed Gardner’s car was still here, and she assumed he was going to take the kids to school.”
Archer nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I got that.”
Katie kept her voice even. “But when she looked out again, around lunchtime, his car was still parked out in the driveway. That was odd, she thought, because he never came home for lunch. She tried the house phone and got voice mail. Tried Leslie Gardner’s cell, and it went straight to voice mail. She even called Ed Gardner’s work, and they told her he hadn’t been in and hadn’t called. She knew then something was very wrong over here.”
“Wonder why she didn’t come over,” Archer mused, but absently, as if the question barely touched his mind.
“She was afraid. Word had already gotten out by then about Sam Bowers, and the news was garbled; nobody was sure it was suicide, maybe murder. And she was scared. Too scared to come over here and find . . . horrors. So she called us.”
“Yeah.”
“Jack . . . this is too much for us. None of us has the training or experience to figure all this out.”
“Sam Bowers killed himself,” Archer said. “Leslie Gardner killed her husband and kids. That’s what happened.”
“Maybe. Probably. But Sam Bowers shouldn’t have killed himself. And if Leslie Gardner slaughtered her entire family, why did she just curl up bloody on that chair and go to sleep? And why can’t the doctors wake her up?”
“What are you saying?” he asked slowly.
“I’m saying we need help. Everything that’s happened today was . . . unnatural. Even unreal. Inexplicable. It’s not just a suicide and a multiple murder. It’s not something ordinary cops can figure out. I feel that, and I know you do too, because we’ve both been trained to handle crimes and these . . . these are something different. There’s something else going on here, Jack. I don’t know what it is, but I know the longer it takes us to figure it out, the more people are going to die.”
He blinked, stared at her. Finally saw her. “What?”
Softly, she said, “This isn’t natural. What happened to these people, what happened to Sam Bowers, it’s not natural. Something . . . outside themselves made these things happen, made them do these things. Something stronger than they were. Something dark. Something we can’t see. And it’s still here, in Prosperity. It isn’t finished yet. I can feel that. You have to feel it. Can’t you feel it?”
“All I feel is horror,” he said. “And . . . helplessness. I’ve never felt that before. Not like this.”
“Neither have I.”
He frowned at her. “I think you know more than I do, Katie. Don’t you?”
Katie drew a breath and tried hard to make her voice steady and matter-of-fact. “What I know is that we’re in trouble. What I know is that we need help. Not just crime scene technicians and a medical examiner, though we do need those. We need someone able to figure out what’s going on here. Someone who knows how to deal with . . . unnatural deaths. Unnatural things. Someone who can see what’s happening here.”
His short laugh was a rusty, almost broken sound. He cleared his throat before speaking again. “I just . . . I get the feeling you know more than you’re saying about this.”
Katie shook her head. “What I know is that it’s too much for us. And I think I know who to call. But I need to call now. Before things get even worse. And before this scene, before any of . . . this . . . is disturbed.”
“Call,” Archer said.
THE DARKNESS
It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one’s steps to the upper air—there’s the rub, the task.
—VIRGIL
It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.
—BUDDHA
“‘Come,’ he said, ‘come, we must see and act. Devils or no devils, or all the devils at once, it matters not; we fight him all the same.’”
—BRAM STOKER, DRACULA
SEVEN
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 8
It was a winding road, a two-lane blacktop like so many in the scenic mountains, with very little shoulder but the occasional overlook where tourists could pull safely off the road and look at the view.
Their black SUV was just approaching one such overlook when Hollis said suddenly, “Hey, Reese, pull over up ahead.”
The valley below them was already partially shadowed, the late-afternoon sun beginning to sink behind the western mountains, but DeMarco didn’t hesitate to pull the SUV off the road and onto the wide overlook. No other vehicles were there.
He parked and shut off the engine, looking at his partner. “I can feel it too,” he said.
She looked at him, nodded, then opened her door. “I want to see if it’s visible.”
DeMarco got out as well, following her to the waist-high rock wall that looked natural but had clearly been built to prevent a careless tourist from taking a deadly fall down the mountain while admiring a truly stunning view of a lovely valley far below.
The mountain slopes below the overlook were unusually sheer here for the Appalachians; the very old mountains shouldering up against one another tended to be given more to gentle, rolling hills and rounded peaks blunted by time. For the most part, the only raw, jagged features were due to the activities of man, the blasting of slopes and tunnels to provide for roads.
But what DeMarco saw appeared natural rather than carved by man. And the first thing he noticed when he joined Hollis at the wall and really looked around was that the same thing appeared to be true all around the big valley sprawling below them. None of the mountains he could see almost completely enclosing the valley ended near the valley floor in gentle undulations, tumbles of grass, or tree-covered hills, as was usual.
As much as he could see of the valley, wherever the mountains met the flatland, there were what looked like granite cliffs, sheer and towering.
DeMarco was about to comment on the weirdness of that when his easy connection with Hollis told him she was seeing or sensing something even weirder. He looked at her, recognizing the narrow-eyed, intense gaze of utter concentration as her striking blue eyes roamed slowly over the valley.
Even so, almost absently, she said, “I wonder if one day we’ll go into a case and not find yet another very strange and new thing almost right off the bat.”
“From the sound of what Bishop got from the sheriff and his deputy down there, we’ll be seeing plenty of strange. Plenty of crazy.”
“Uh-huh.” She turned her head and frowned at him. “You see anything strange?”
“Other than sheer cliffs rising above as much of the valley floor as I can see from here, no. What do you see?”
Her brows lifted slightly in question. “There weren’t any bad things on the island for us to use in practicing, so no way to know if it’ll still work with something I think is very bad. You game?”
“Of course,” he replied without hesitating.