Diehl, William - Show of Evil

The town of Gideon, Illinois, biblical of name and temperament,
squats near the juncture of Kentucky and Indiana at the edge of the
Blue Ridge Mountains. A trickle of a river called the Wahoo forms the
western boundary of the town, while Appalachian foothills etch its
southern and eastern parameters. It was founded in the mid 1800s by a
handful of farmers driven south by encroaching midwestern cities, by
railroads, and by brutal winters. They were followed soon afterwards by
a fire-eyed reader of the Church of Latter-Day Saints named Abraham
Gideon, who had split from Brigham Young and led a small troop of
followers towards the southern mountains. They had blundered onto the
fledgling village, liked what they'd seen, and settled down there. It
was Gideon who gave the town its name and a strict moral code that has
persisted for nearly one hundred and fifty years.

Inhabited by two thousand and some citizens, most of them
hardworking conservatives and many of Mormon descent, it is a town that
takes care of itself and minds its own business. Its architecture is
stern and simple; its streets paved only when necessity demands; its
town core a collection of indispensable businesses without frills or
fancies; its town meetings held at the Baptist church, the largest
building in town.

The only car dealer sells Fords and farm equipment. A foreign car in
Gideon is as improbable as Grandma Moses rising from the grave and
running naked through the streets on Sunday morning.

The city council, a collection of dour curmudgeons, runs the town
with a kind of evangelical fervour, enduring its handful of bars and
taverns but drawing the line at sex, having chased away Gideon's one
topless bar during the late Eighties and railing against R-rated movies
so vociferously that most of the citizens watch them on cable rather
than venture forth to the town's twin theatres and thereby risk the
scorn of the five old men who set both the tone and moral temper of the
town. The young people, who silently revolt against its anachronisms,
usually spend their weekends driving to nearby towns that have shopping
malls and multiplex theatres, where they can buy a six-pack of beer
without being recognized. For the most part, Gideons are friendly,
concerned, protective people who help their townsfolk when they are in
trouble and who practice a kind of archaic combination of
do-unto-others and love-thy-neighbour. And as long as its citizens
sequester their more shocking vices behind closed doors and shuttered
windows, nobody really gives a hoot. In short, it is a place that time,
distance, and desire have cloistered from the rest of the world.

Gideons like it that way. They do not take kindly to others snooping
in their business and they solve their problems without the intrusion
of outsiders like state politicians or federal people or snoopy,
big-time newspaper reporters.

On a Tuesday morning in October 1993, a few days before Hallowe'en,
a single shocking act of violence was to change all that.

Suddenly, trust was placed by suspicion, ennui by fear, complacency
by scorn. People began to lock their doors and windows during the
daytime and porch lights glowed all night. And casual neighbours, who
once waved friendly hellos in passing, were suddenly as cautious as
strangers.

Yet like a protective family, Gideon kept this scandal behind locked
doors and whispered of it only in rumours. The horrifying act itself
was kept from the rest of the world - for a while, at least.

On that autumn morning, Linda Balfour prepared her husband's
customary lunch: tuna fish sandwiches with mayo on white bread, a wedge
of apple pie she had made the night before, potato chips, orange juice
in his thermos. She had also polished his bright orange hard hat before
fixing a breakfast of poached eggs, crisp bacon, well-done toast, and
strong black coffee, and the hat and lunch box were sitting beside his
plate with the morning edition of the
St Louis Post-Dispatch
when he came down.

George Balfour was a bulky man in his early forties with a cherubic
smile that hinted of a gentle and appreciative nature. A life-long
resident of Gideon, he had married Linda late in his thirties after a
brief courtship and regarded both his twenty-six-year-old wife and
their year-old son, Adam, as gifts from God, having lived a solitary
and somewhat lonely life before meeting her at a company seminar in
Decatur three years earlier.

Their two-storey house was seventy years old, a spartan, white-frame
place near the centre of town with a wraparound porch and a large front
lawn and an old-fashioned kitchen with both a wood-burning stove and a
gas range. It was George Balfour's only legacy. He had lived in the
house all his life, both of his parents having died in the bedroom that
Balfour now shared with his wife.

He loved coming down in the morning to those smells he remembered
from his youth: coffee and burned oak slivers from the wood-burning
stove, and bacon and, in the summer, the luscious odour of freshly cut
cantaloupe. The TV would be set on the
Today
show. His paper
would be waiting.

He was wearing what he always wore: khaki trousers, starched and
pressed with a razor crease, a white T-shirt smelling of Downy, heavy,
polished brogans, his cherished orange wind-breaker with SOUTHERN
ILLINOIS POWER AND LIGHT COMPANY stencilled across the back and the
word SUPERINTENDENT printed where the left breast pocket would normally
be. Everything about his dress, his home, and his family bespoke a man
who lived by order and routine. Balfour was not a man who liked
surprises or change.

He kissed his son good morning, wiping a trace of pabulum from the
boy's chin before giving Linda a loving peck on the back of her
neck. She smiled up at him, a slightly plump woman with premature
wrinkles around her eyes and mouth and auburn hair pulled back and tied
in a bun. The wrinkles, George often said, were because his wife
laughed a lot.

Nothing about George Balfour's life was inchoate.

'Saints finally got beat yesterday,' she said as he sat down.

'Bout time,' he answered, scanning the front page of the paper. 'By
the way, I gotta run up to Carbondale after lunch. They got a main
transformer out. May be a little late for dinner.'

'Okay. Six-thirty? Seven?'

'Oh, I should be home by six-thirty.'

At seven-fifteen, he was standing on the porch when Lewis Holliwell
pulled up in the pickup. He kissed Linda and Adam goodbye, then waved
at them from the truck as Lewis drove away from the white-frame house.
They turned the corner and suddenly the street was empty except for old
Mrs Aiken, who waved good morning as she scampered in robe and slippers
off her porch to pick up the paper, and a solitary utility man carrying
a toolbox who was trudging down the alley behind the house. A bright
sun was just peeking over the hills to the east, promising a day of
cloudless splendour.

Thirty minutes later the Balfours' next-door neighbour, Miriam
Perrone, noticed that the Balfours' back door was standing open.
Odd
,
she thought,
It's a bit chilly this morning
. A little later
she looked out of her dining room window and the door was still open.
She went out the back door and walked across her yard to the Balfours'.

'Linda?' she called out.

No answer. She walked to the door.

'Linda?' Still no answer. She rapped on the door frame. 'Linda, it's
Miriam. Did you know your back door's open?'

No answer. A feeling of uneasiness swept over her as
s
he
cautiously entered the kitchen, for she did not wish to intrude.

'Linda?'

Suddenly, she was seized with an inexplicable sense of dread. It
choked her and her mouth went dry. She could hear the television, but
neither Linda nor the baby was making a sound. She walked towards the
door to the living room. As she approached the door, she saw the empty
playpen and a second later Adam lying on his side on the carpet with
his back towards her.

And then, as she stepped through the doorway, she stopped. Her lips
trembled for what seemed like eternity before a low moan rose to a
horrified shriek.

A few feet from the crib, Linda Balfour's butchered body was
crumpled against the wall, her glazed eyes frozen in terror, her mouth
gaping, a widening pond of her own blood spreading around her, while
Katie Couric and Willard Scott joked about the weather in the
bloodstained television set nearby.

That was how it started.

Fog swirled around powerful spotlights in the darkest hours before
dawn. Perched atop tall steel poles, they cast harsh beams out across a
rancid, steaming wasteland, etching in shadow and light the buttes,
knolls, and slopes of trash and refuse, of abandoned plastic bottles,
Styro-foam dishes, cardboard fast-food wrappers, old newspapers,
abandoned clothing, and maggot-ridden mounds of uneaten food. Like
fetid foothills pointing towards the glittering skyscrapers miles away,
the city's garbage formed a stunted mountain range of waste. Stinking
vapours swirled up from the bacteria-generated heat of the vast
landfill, while small, grey scavengers zigzagged frantically ahead of a
growling bulldozer that pushed and shoved the heaps of filth into a
manageably level plain.

The dozer operator, huddled deep inside layers of clothing, looked
like an interplanetary alien: long Johns, a flannel shirt, a thick wool
sweater, a bulky jacket that might have challenged the Arctic
wastelands, a wool cap pulled down over his ears, fur-lined leather and
canvas gloves, a surgical mask protecting his mouth from the freezing
cold and his nose from the choking odours, skier's goggles covering his
eyes. Gloria Estefan's
Mi Tierra
thundered through the
earphones of the Walkman in his pocket, drowning out the grinding din
of the big machine.

Another hour
, Jesus Suarino, who was known as Gaucho on his
block, was thinking.
One more hour and I'm outa here
.

He worked the controls. Twisting the dozer in place, he lowered the
blade and attacked a fresh mound of waste. The dozer tracks ground
under him, spewing refuse behind the tractor as they gripped the soggy
base and lurched forward. Through his misted goggles, Suarino watched
the blade slice into the top of the mound, showering it into a shallow
chasm just beyond. Suarino backed the machine up, dropped the blade a
little lower, took off another layer of rubble. As it chopped into the
pile, Suarino saw something through his smeared goggles.

He snatched the throttle back, heard the lumbering giant of a
machine choke back as it slowed down and its exhaust gasp in the cold
wind that swept across the range of rubble. He squinted his eyes and
leaned forward, then wiped one lens with the palm of his glove.

What he saw jarred him upright. A figure rose up out of the clutter
as the blade cut under it. Suarino stared at a skeletal head with
eyeless sockets and strings of blonde hair streaked with grease and
dirt hanging from an almost skinless skull. The head of the corpse
wobbled back and forth, then toppled forward until its jaw rested on an
exposed rib cage.

'Yeeeeoowww! he shrieked, his scream of terror trapped by the mask.
He tore the goggles off and leaned forward, looking out over the
engine. The corpse fell sideways, exposing an arm that swung out and
then fell across the torso, the fleshless fingers of the hand pointing
at him.

Suarino cut off the engine and swung out of the driver's seat,
dropping into the sludge and sinking almost to his knees. Ripping off
the mask, he was still screaming as he struggled towards the office at
the edge of the dump.

Martin Vail hated telephones. Telephones represented intrusions.
Invasions of his privacy. Interruptions. But duty dictated that the
city's chief prosecutor and assistant DA never be without one.

They were everywhere: three different lines in his apartment - one a
hotline, the number known only to his top aide, Abel Stenner, and his
executive secretary, Naomi Chance - all with portable handsets and
answering machines attached;
a cellular phone in his briefcase; two more lines in his car. The only
place he could escape from the dreaded devices was in the shower. He
particularly hated the phone in the dead of night, and although he had
all the ringers set so they rang softly and with a pleasant melodic
tone, they were persistent and ultimately would drag him from the
deepest sleep.

When the hotline rang, it was never good news, and the hotline had
been ringing for a full minute when Vail finally rolled over onto his
back and groped in the dark until he located the right instrument.

'What time is it,' he growled into the mouthpiece.

'Almost five,' Stenner's calm voice answered.

'What's that mean?'

'I'm parked outside.'

'You're a sadist, Major Stenner. I'll bet you put toothpicks under
the fingernails of small children and light them. I bet you laugh at
them when they scream.'

'Better wear old clothes.'

'Where are we going?'

'Twenty minutes?'

'What's going on, Abel?'

'I'll ring you from the car.'

And he hung up.

Vail verbally assaulted the phone for half a minute, then turned on
the night light so he would not fall back to sleep. He stretched,
kicked off the covers, and lay flat on his back in the cold room, arms
outstretched, until he was fully awake.

Four-twenty in the damn morning. He got up, threw on a robe, and
went to the kitchen, then ground up some Jamaican blue, poured cold
water into the coffee machine, and headed for the shower. Fifteen
minutes later he was dressed in corduroy slacks, a wool sweater, and
hiking boots. He doctored two large mugs of coffee, dumped several
files from his desk into his briefcase, and when the phone rang he was
ready to roll.