Never Burn A Witch: A Rowan Gant Investigation (13 page)

While sitting alone in the break room,
choking down the dry candy bar, I had been subjected to only
slightly muted versions of the earlier pains brought about by the
procedure going on in the autopsy suite. Physically, I could
neither see nor hear what was happening in that room. Mentally, I
was being treated to—or more accurately, tortured by—a first hand
view through a dead woman’s eyes. Before long I was left with no
choice other than to seek safe haven by placing even more distance
between the corpse and myself. Constrained by the hazardous travel
conditions and my only avenue for refuge being outdoors, I had
ventured out into the snowy night. The added distance served to
blunt a good deal of the pain; however, even the frozen darkness
couldn’t remove it entirely.

I had continued to feel the spirit of Kendra
Miller cry out in protest at what was being done to her earthly
remains. I was unable to escape her wailing lament at what she
could only view as more torture.

I crumpled the empty paper cup and stuffed it
into my coat pocket then turned my back to the frigid wind, seeking
what shelter I could alongside the glassed-in foyer that jutted
from the front of the building. With cold-numbed hands, I slipped
the cellophane from a Cruz Real #2 and neatly guillotined the end.
A thick swoosh sounded behind me as the sluggish metal-framed door
was forced open, and I heard heavy footsteps squeakily crunching in
the snow.

“Still hooked on those Mexicans, eh?” Ben’s
voice met my ears, the words making a weary jab at my choice of
cigar brands.

The match I held cupped in my hands flared to
life, and I touched its fire to the cigar clenched between my
teeth. Staring into it, I felt myself becoming mesmerized by the
tiny flame. A hot knife dragged down my spine, and I closed my eyes
tightly, forcibly willing away the vibrant Technicolor flashes of
my recent vision.

“I guess you could say that,” I answered as I
turned and shook out the nearly spent wooden match.

He had just finished paring the end from his
own smoke and now tucked it into the corner of his mouth before
burying his hands into his pockets. “One good thing ‘bout this
freakin’ blizzard,” he mumbled, “the bastard’s prob’ly snowed in
just like the rest of us.”

“Probably, but I wouldn’t count on that
stopping him for long.”

“Yeah. Great. Bust my bubble why
don’tcha.”

We stood in silence, listening to the
relentless pattering of the falling snow. Ben shielded the end of
his cigar with large hands and lit it purposefully, taking time to
remove it from between his lips and inspect the glowing tip once he
had extinguished the lighter. Satisfied, he placed it back in his
mouth and gazed out across the white-blanketed parking area. Of the
three vehicles on the lot, his van was the least buried. The other
two seemed to be no more than huge shimmering dunes cast in soft
blue shadows.

Directly across the street, the backside of
the building that housed City Hall was a dim, hulking shadow in the
night. Catty-cornered from where we stood, a small coffee shop was
all but obscured by the downward streaming curtain of ice crystals.
A short distance behind it, the lights of the indoor ice arena that
was home to the Saint Louis Blues hockey team cast an upward
glowing halo. No sound was issuing from the nearby highway, and it
seemed that even the police headquarters, which dominated most of
the block, had fallen silent and still.

“So, Red Squaw was pretty upset, huh?” he
finally asked.

“Yeah, she was. Scared mostly, but she’s okay
now,” I replied. “What about you?”

“Whaddaya mean? I’m fine.”

“Yeah. Right,” I returned, sarcasm flowing
through my words. “You put up a good front, Ben, but you aren’t
fooling me. I know for a fact that what happened in there scared
you. I could feel it then and I can feel it right now.”

A nervous laugh emitted from between my
friend’s clenched teeth. “Yeah, well, you’re wrong. I wasn’t
scared. I was more like fuckin’ terrified if you wanna know the
truth. When ya’ went all
Twilight
Zone
in there, I just kept thinkin’ about that whole
deal last time... Last summer... Ya’know what I’m
sayin’?”

I allowed my mind to wander for a moment,
recalling the incident to which he referred. In an almost reckless
attempt to identify a sadistic killer, I had channeled the last
living moments of his second victim, a young woman named Karen
Barnes. I could still feel the same tortuous pain she had felt when
the killer physically ripped her beating heart from her chest. My
own heart had gone still that day, and had it not been for the
actions of Felicity, it would have remained that way.

I shuddered inwardly and pushed back the
horrific remembrance. “Yeah, Ben, I know what you’re saying. I was
a little on the ‘fucking terrified’ side myself.”

“I didn’t hit ya’ too hard, did I? I mean...
Well I wasn’t quite sure about what ta’ do.”

“No. No, you didn’t,” I replied and then
added, “But remind me never to make you angry.”

We both let out a light chuckle, and the sea
of tension ebbed, if only for a brief moment.

“You can still feel ‘er or whatever, can’t
you?” He asked, glancing sideways in my direction and squinting
against the wind.

“Yes,” I admitted. “That’s why I came out
here.”

“And it ain’t just her, is it? You pick up
all kinds of shit the rest of us can’t see, don’tcha’?”

I nodded. “It happens.”

“All the time?”

“No, not all the time, fortunately.” I puffed
on my cigar as I paused. “But enough.”

“Jeezus, white man...” He shook his head.
“How do ya’ stand it? It’s gotta drive ya’ nuts.”

“How do
you
stand the things you see every day as a cop,
Ben?” I asked rhetorically. “Just like you, I’ve learned to tune it
out. But sometimes...”

An awkward pause rushed in behind my words to
fill the void once more. Held fast by the chilled darkness
surrounding us, it was cemented securely in place by our own fears
of what we were facing. A thin streak of light danced hesitantly
through the distant sky, spreading spidery tendrils and bringing an
orange glow to the flat underbelly of the low-hanging clouds.
Languid seconds flowed by, and finally a throaty rumble of thunder
echoed in from the west, announcing the storm’s relentless
advance.

When the wind blows from the
West, departed souls will have no rest.
The line of
poetry drifted through my mind yet again.

“So what did Doctor Sanders find out?” I
asked, forcing a minor redirection of the subject.

“She found soot and blistering in her
trachea,” Ben answered. “That pretty much confirms she was alive
when she was torched. Her shoulders were dislocated like you
described. She had several torn ligaments and stress fractures. It
was all just like ya’ said... Only other obvious thing was a few
deep puncture wounds on ‘er back. She was only able ta’ find those
because a portion of ‘er back was shielded from the fire by what
she was chained to... Other than that, we’ll hafta wait on the lab
stuff.”

“They called that
pricking
,” I sighed. “Witches aren’t supposed to
bleed or feel pain, so it was believed that by stabbing them, the
accusation could be proven.”

“That must not’ve been too effective,” he
ventured. “Ya’ stick somebody, they’re gonna bleed.”

“They often used stilettos with retractable
blades. Like a magician’s trick knife. That way there was no wound
and therefore no blood and no pain.”

“They’d rig the test?”

“Of course. It wouldn’t do for them to be
proven wrong after making a public accusation of heresy.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t rig this,” he protested.
“She actually had wounds. Deep ones. Doc says she prob’ly woulda’
died from the internal injuries if he hadn’t torched ‘er first. She
definitely bled an’ I’ll guarantee ya’ she had ta’ have screamed. I
sure as hell would’ve.”

“He probably just assumed the blood wasn’t
real and that it was an illusion. A spell cast by a consort of the
devil. Any cries of pain were more than likely attributed to an
attempt to trick him as well.”

“So even when this asswipe disproves his
accusations with his own tests, he just changes the rules?”

“Correct,” I answered. “Once he accuses
someone of heresy and WitchCraft, there is no reprieve. We’ll end
up with a body.”

“Shit,” he muttered.

“You know, Ben,” I volunteered, “I hate to
bring it up, but there is a relatively large and outspoken Pagan
community in Saint Louis. Especially Witches and Wiccans. He isn’t
going to have to look very hard for victims.”

He puffed quietly on his cigar then let out a
long, frosty sigh before replying, “Yeah. Don’t remind me.”

B
right sun shone down from
a deep blue sky, decorated here and there with only the barest
trails of wispy cirrus clouds. Though no longer pristine and
unblemished, a deep blanket of snow still covered the city. Wide
swaths of trampled footprints from children at play cut paths
through otherwise smooth, white, rolling lawns. Across the street a
stocking cap adorned snowman stood sentry outside the entrance of a
carefully constructed snow fort. Armed with a broomstick, he stood
rigidly at attention, executing his assigned duty like a frozen
Marine.

Dirty grey mounds replete with grime, cinders
and chemical additives were heaped alongside curbs, courtesy of
County maintenance crews, resting exactly where they had been
placed by the passing street department plows. They lined the
avenues like the ornamental walls of a fairy tale winter wonderland
estate. Each passing hour of warmth from the radiant sunlight
slowly and painstakingly sculpted the piles into smaller versions
of themselves, sometimes gouging Swiss cheese holes through areas
of lesser density.

Later, when the temperature would again dip
well below the freezing point, the process would switch gears,
grinding mid-motion into reverse, and they would once again harden
with crusty layers of glistening ice.

Iridescent stalactites flowed downward from
the edge of our roof—several of them refracting the sun as Mother
Nature’s slender prisms. Electric-hued primary colors danced
through their conical, transparent shafts seeming to undulate
slowly as the frozen water hovered just the other side of liquid
fluidity. Shimmering droplets rolled steadfastly downward and
gathered purposefully at the tips. Each drip growing and bulging
ever larger until its weight combined with gravity to send it
plummeting toward the earth below, only to be followed momentarily
by yet another, and another...

I took a sip from my steaming oversized mug
of hazelnut coffee as I watched the scene through the picture
window of our living room. A little more than a week had passed
since the great midwestern blizzard had all but completely buried
Saint Louis and most of the bi-state region for that matter. It had
taken a full two days for the city to dig itself out, and talk had
already begun about the ability of the metropolitan sewer system to
handle the impending run-off. Twenty-three inches of snow—all in
one fell swoop—wasn’t exactly normal for the area, and winter still
had a good month left to go. There was even panicked speculation
that we could be in for a spring that would make the flood of ‘93
look like a minor mishap with a backed up kitchen sink.

As devastating as a flood would be, it was
the least of my concerns at this particular instant. Fear had
stalked me every moment, asleep or awake, since my becoming
involved in this investigation. Each day that passed without
another body turning up allowed me to relax a little more. But I
knew deep down that it was only a temporary reprieve. This killer
would be passing judgment on someone else and carrying out an
execution based on his warped interpretation of an equally warped
manuscript. Of this, there was no doubt in my mind. My only
question was “When?”

Absently, I reached over and tended to a
tickling itch on my forearm. Entirely unlike the burning pain that
had once occupied that spot, the sensation was merely that of new
skin growing as my body repaired itself. The wound had healed
almost as quickly as it had appeared, lending even more credence to
my feeling that it was an ethereal sign meant solely to gain my
attention. With its mission accomplished, there was no longer a
need for it to remain. The symbol was now visible as nothing more
than a faint pink scar. With luck, that too would soon fade.

The savory smell of Felicity’s family recipe
corned beef hash wafted throughout the house, riding piggyback
along the sweet scent of freshly baked sourdough bread. My mouth
watered slightly, and the mixture of aroma’s sparked a low grumble
from my empty stomach.

“Honey,” her singsong voice called from the
kitchen. “How many eggs do you want?”

“Two would be fine, thanks,” I answered over
my shoulder.

“Over easy?”

“Always.”

“Toast?”

“Please.”

Upon returning home I kept my promise—as if I
had a choice—and recounted for her the details of the day I had
spent with Ben as well as the night sequestered in the city morgue.
Doing so had been like re-living a nightmare for me. Fortunately,
at the same time, it had been necessary and unquestionably
therapeutic—an overall catharsis that allowed me to expunge at
least some of the horror.

I could talk about my visions and my feelings
with Ben, or anyone else for that matter. I could even make them
believe. Then I could prove incontrovertibly that what I witnessed
by ethereal means was in fact ultimately true and painfully
accurate in the physical realm. Still, no matter how much I talked
to the uninitiated, for me it remained a dark and lonely ache; for
even my best friend could never truly understand the
experience.