R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning (11 page)

He said, and I quote:

“If a man was on that bus, he made the greatest escape of all time.”

Spence Grant was never there. No one could say they’d actually seen him firsthand. He claimed he was calling from inside the bus, but he could have been anywhere. The news footage did not show the inside of the bus; windows and doors were closed and the Colorado sunshine hid the interior as well as if the windows had been tinted.

Shackleford and the rest could clearly not imagine how the bus driver—a woman driving for the school district for twenty-seven years, no police record, no traffic stops, and a devout Mormon, could have been convinced to carry out such a horrific act.

But I knew.

And now so did Manny.

If he believed it.

I STOOD in the JDK3 Task Force war room. It was still a couple of hours before the rest of the team would arrive and the day begin. We all had our “day jobs”, though we worked them as second priority and in the off hours. It was quite the orchestration, bringing so many law enforcement personnel from myriad agencies, departments, and jurisdictions together for just
one
meeting, much less three to five a week, depending on developments. And we’d most certainly had a “development” with the appearance of Spence Grant after all these years. It was my briefing this morning and all I could think about was how much or how little to tell.

Not unlike the forever battle in my mind—or rather, between my mind and soul—my mind being the source of reason and logic and the known world; the things we can touch and smell and taste; the things that made the world what it was to us, made some kind of reason out of a predicament the human race had really never fully understood.

The soul, of course, being the source of love and dreams and, in many cases, beliefs, even when the mind and the ways of our known universe implied otherwise. I remembered something Father West—my cousin; a Macaulay—told me years ago when I was struggling mightily to grasp the meaning of what we’d seen, done, been witness to—and let me be clear about something: seeing a thing and being witness to it were two entirely separate things and not open to semantic interpretation. Seeing is a physical act; we observe the thing—the happening—and perhaps, depending on various elements such as the level of shock, vantage point, and yes, even belief system, we retain, at some basal level, a recording or remembrance of the circumstance.

Witnessing an event implies something much deeper and completely different. Witnessing does not happen with the eyes; it is not a physical thing but a metaphysical or, if you prefer, a spiritual one. It occurs within the realm of ourselves that we refer to as a soul, an un-seeable, untouchable, un-examinable (at least with modern instruments) organ but nonetheless the most palpable one we have as sentient human beings. We do not weigh it—cannot—but it weighs us.

Manny was the most recent to hear my story. I’d only ever shared it with a handful of people, most of them—scratch that, all—because they had to know; because whatever moment of a case or an investigation or, most important of all, the saving of lives, depended on them hearing it. After hearing it rather than seeing it firsthand, they and they only were capable of bearing witness and measuring, searching inside, grappling with the inconceivable, and coming out the other side with a personal level of belief and understanding on their own.

I was always careful to make clear we were not talking about anything that had not been part of human history as long as it had been recorded; I was not speaking of witches, warlocks, werewolves, vampires, ghouls, ghosts, or zombies. I headed off the natural reaction of dismissing the telling as if a ghost story. I believed the mind’s reaction to the telling craved a way to somehow de-legitimize the reality of what was being shared.

For millennia the story—my story—had been told, and not in fairytale books or around campfires but in churches and synagogues and temples all around the world by every cogent religion since nearly the beginning of time.

God and the Devil.

Good versus Evil.

A great preponderance of people on the planet would not call these things paranormal—beyond the normal—at all. In fact they would argue emphatically that these “stories” were not the background noise of the universe but the very stage upon which humanity played out its meek and unfinished existence; a play with (at least for us) an unknown ending.

And was it so hard to believe that I was part of a lineage whose sacred duty had been—for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years—tasked with waging a battle on the side of Good; a war against the sometimes unbelievable and inexplicable elements of Evil?

It was for me. I was a detective, first and foremost. Our entire process depended on empirical evidence. The touchable. The seeable. The tangible.
Evidence
.

Then again, any good cop would tell you that half of what he or she did—particularly the successful half—was due to intuition. Call it what you would: gut feeling, instinct, intuition, hairs standing at attention on the arms and necks, goose pimples, little devils and angels on the shoulder.

The
para
normal. Beyond physical or instrumental explanation. But there wasn’t a decent investigator alive or dead that would tell you, if they could, that such un-seeable, un-measurable, unsubstantiated elements were not only key to solving cases but perhaps central and most important of all.

I stared at the evidence board—the summation of all we’d seen, done, found, and yes, witnessed (although I might be the only one in the room, other than my best friend, who believed we’d witnessed anything at all—particularly by my definitions).

So many young women—girls, most. Underage by every definition of the word. So brutally their lives were snuffed from existence. Did they believe it in the end—what they’d
witnessed
? Did they believe in the existential reality of Good and Evil—God and the Devil? Had they seen the demons as I had?

The irony was that we humans use the term all the time. Battling our demons. The return of our demons. The word was practically universally codified in the handbooks for addicts all over the planet.

But to tell—to even imply—one had seen a demon, much less a horde of them? Well, at that point we were normally talking white coat time. Psych lockup. As if we humans had it all figured out. We’d been here on this planet for perhaps a fraction of an eye blink next to the age of the Universe itself yet we were arrogant enough to think we knew all the answers.

Never mind that those “answers” changed almost daily; never mind that what we knew yesteryear (the Earth was flat; we were the center of the universe; there was no cure for Polio; there were x number of planets in this solar system or that); never mind the theories (and discoveries) of wormholes and Quantum Physics and the fact that science itself—the most elephantine skeptic in the room—literally thrived on the next
unknown
discovery around the corner.

Since the beginning of the killings and my participation in their investigation I had felt the palpability of my involvement. Not physically on the team or even my selection to it. That was logical. No, I had sensed more. A lot more. Yes, I had missed the Spence Grant connection but, A) That was more than likely as preordained as it was poor detective work; and, B) It really didn’t change much in terms of the why, where, and when for the next victim.

It gave us a name. Perhaps another path; another starting point into an abyss of the unknown. But it did not give us any of the answers for which we searched. However, it pulled on me—it had my insides firing on every piston. I was excited; I felt as if I was but an inch from knowing the why, where, when and from catching that son of a bitch.

But then I also knew that finding him—discovering the “master plan”—was in all likelihood only the beginning. “Beginning” being as stretching and warming up was to the “beginning” of the twenty-six mile run, one-mile swim, and one hundred mile bike ride of an Iron Man Triathlon.

Yet I needed desperately to cover that last inch so that we could finally, after all these months and all these deaths, truly begin the race.

I was still staring at the pictures on our investigation board when Bum Garvey walked into the room, himself still over an hour early for the meeting.

“Figurin’ on changing anything by starin’ long enough at them pictures or were you just tryin’ to divine some new leads through some kind of Jedi mind meld?”

I smiled and shook my head slowly. Bum always made me feel better. He was the Hardy to my Laurel; a great man who had been in service to his country since I was learning to watch Dick run and Spot take a dump. “It’s just all so overwhelming,” I said.

“That it is,” he said. “But that’s not why you are here hours before the sun is up and with a look of worry on that face that could discourage the Dali Lama himself.”

“There are new developments,” I told him. “The problem is, with these developments comes a lot of baggage. And not the kind that’s easy to explain or defend.”

“Last I looked, the charter of this team was to find the killer, not explain or defend how we do it.”

“You’re right. But these developments—these people and the elemental beliefs that fall into question when discussing them—well, it is never easy to talk law enforcement personnel into much that falls outside the empirical, if you know what I mean.”

“Devils and demons and such?” Garvey said.

“Among other things.”

“You know why you were picked for this unit, right?” Garvey said, standing up to walk toward starting the coffee pot in the corner. “I mean beyond being one of the goddamned finest detectives I’ve ever known.”

“Guess I thought that was why.”

“You ever been on one of these task forces before?”

“No,” I said. “I never have.”

“And suddenly you’re on this one,” Bum said. “Kinda begs a question or two, don’t it?”

“What’re you poking around at, Bum?”

“Stories fly around law enforcement circles faster’n anywhere I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Some people wanted you on this team
because
of the developments, elements, whatever, of which you speak, partner.”

“Some people?”

“Yep.”

“Maybe just one?”

Garvey poured the water in the coffeemaker and looked up, his bushy moustache and leathered face as emotionless as paper, or air. “Maybe. What difference does it make? Here’s what you do this day, Mac: you say what needs sayin’. You tell these people what happened. They’re good people and good cops and not one of them didn’t want you on this team. Not one. So they’ll listen to ya, too. They will.”

“Thanks, Bum.”

“You can thank me down at the pub after you get your ass laughed outta this conference room.”

“And you can remind me again why the hell I listen to you,” I said.

“Because of my genius, good looks, and inestimable charm. Plus when I drink I end up buying all the rounds.”

“Most truthful thing you’ve said today.”

“They trust you, Mac. But you gotta
let
‘em.”