NOT EDITED
A brief treck through the treeline around the lake had revealed no obvious signs of a corpse, so Bo had called Dallas for a ride to their killer’s house. Though he still believed it made the most sense to keep the soon-to-be-revived body near the scene of the final steps of the ritual, Bo felt as though he were maybe expecting a bit too much of a logical conclusion to the plan of someone who was undeniably and utterly crazed.
Now, with Dallas’s rental car parked behind the crime scene tape two of the deputies had set up over an hour ago, Bo climbed out of the passenger side and adjusted the strap of his camera bag. Even with the distance between him and the house, he could already make out some of Jeff’s blood on the driveway, but the closer he got, the more he couldn’t believe the man had survived. Standing at the end of the drive, he let his eyes trace the path of the pooling trail of blood all the way up to the garage door and back down to where it seeped past the slanted end of the drive and onto the road, slowly spreading to seek out the nearest storm drain.
“Jesus,” Dallas mumbled from behind him. “Bridget’s tree might just be superhuman.”
“Adrenaline does… insane things to a person,” Bo said after a moment. “Sometimes, that insane thing is allowing the person to survive absolute devastation to their blood supply.”
After photographing the drive, including laying the ruler down to blood footprints that he assumed belonged to Bridget and the crew that had transported Jeff, Bo moved to the garage. The door was wide open, as it had been left when Gerry backed out Bonnie’s car and left Jeff to die. It was more than a bit disappointing that Gerry wouldn’t get to discover Jeff hadn’t died in this driveway, despite Gerry’s best efforts.
Though the garage didn’t seem to contain anything relevant to the case, Bo still took his photos and his measurements. He dutifully searched every nook and cranny for something that appeared even mildly important, but he came up empty at every turn. The search of the main floor of the house resulted in much of the same. No journal, no notebook, no strange books on necromancy or ways to otherwise raised the dead, no books on sacrifice, no manifesto.
The house was decorated but not necessarily lived in. The bed was tightly made, the mattress seemingly untouched with any hint of wear. The sinks and shower were all clean and dry. No sign of rust or limescale. Not even a measly little water stain blemishing the steel.
The power strip the TV was plugged into was turned off, and attempt to flip it on revealed it either didn’t work or the breaker that controlled it was off. There were no dents or scrapes across the carpeting anywhere in the house to insinuate furniture had recently been moved or that the floors had even been vacuumed.
“God, this place is just all kinds of heeby and jeeby,” Dallas said as Bo walked into the kitchen. Again.
“Disturbing,” Bo said after a moment. “Everything perfectly in its place and untouched. I’ve seen display homes look more lived-in than this place.”
“Same,” Dallas admitted. “So maybe he wasn’t really staying here.”
“He had to be for the majority of the time Bonnie was here, right? The read through of your notes in the car insinuated that she could hear him walking around most of the time?” Bo asked.
“Mostly,” Dallas said, drawing the word out over several beats. “You okay?”
“I am.”
“You’re not. You doing that thing where you’re… a bit more robotic than usual?” Dallas suggested. “Not in a bad way, just in a…. not quite Bo way.”
Bo blew out a harsh breath, using one gloved hand to pull open the refrigerator again, just in case he’d somehow missed something the first time. “I’m admittedly still quite… perturbed that Baker stole my notes and leaked pertinent information to the press. She rushed his timeline. She put Bonnie in danger for nothing more than trying to kick me around and prove she’s some sort of force to be reckoned with. If she hadn’t leaked that information, we may have gotten to him before he kidnapped Logan, before Rick tried to sacrifice himself in front of the kids, before the bastard killed the second guy. WE could’ve…”
“What? Put him in prison to sit on death row for the next forty years?” Dallas asked. “He’s dead. That’s what matters. And Baker’s a bitch, and she’s sure as fuck on one hell of an acid trip if she thinks she’s got anything on you. Quality, merit, loyalty—she’s got nothing on you, Bo. You know that.”
Bo only shook his head. “I do not know that.”
“Don’t let the bitch fuck with your head. If she was so great, Pitman woulda sent her here, not you.”
“Rick didn’t want her here.”
“So? Like what someone wants has stopped Pitman before?”
“I… suppose that’s fair,” Bo said after a moment. “But if he’d sent her, maybe things would have gone differently. Maybe Logan wouldn’t have to be traumatized too, and maybe Rick and Heidi wouldn’t have to spend the rest of their lives worrying about their son being kidnapped again, and maybe Jeff wouldn’t—”
“And maybe it all would have happened anyway, and because you wouldn’t have been here working with her, maybe they’d all be dead and he would have gotten away,” Dallas said.
Bo allowed himself to sit with that for a moment, closing the refrigerator door. “Yes,” he finally settled on, “maybe.”
“So—”
“She could hear him walking around,” Bo said, more to himself than to Dallas.
But Dallas nodded anyway. “Yeah, most of the time.”
“It there a door that would lead to a room above Bonnie’s location in the basement that we… haven’t opened?”
Dallas turned to scan the portion of the house he could see from the kitchen before shaking his head. “Highly doubt it. Not unless it’s some sort of hidden door.”
Bo pulled his phone from his pocket. “I’m going to the basement, and I’m going to call you.”
“Okay.”
In the basement, Bo positioned himself at the pole Bonnie had been tied to. He slid to the floor next to it, eyes on the blood across the room. A quick test of that on his phone had matched it to Carol Jameson, which aligned well with Bonnie’s recollection of Gerry tossing the head down the stairs at her.
Bo set his camera aside and dialed Dallas number before pressing his phone to his ear.
“Hey,” Dallas greeted.
“Walk around.”
“Just… anywhere?”
“Anywhere you can walk,” Bo said.
“Mm. Can do.” Dallas’s steps above his head were incredibly far away. Bonnie would have been able to hear them, sure, but Dallas’s ‘feeling’ part of his notes—the part he only jotted down for Bo on any given case—had indicated that she’d been able to hear them rather loudly. “You gettin’ anything useful from me stomping around up here?” Dallas asked.
“You’re hardly stomping. But… maybe you should try. I didn’t really get to meet the man in his, uh… lively state, but I can only assume you move much lighter on your feet than him.”
“Probably.”
“So, you know… stomp?” Bo suggested. He heard Dallas sigh, but the slight increase in the volume of his steps indicated he’d done as told. Bo tilted his head back toward the ceiling as the steps grew closer. “There. Where are you?”
“Near the bedroom, I guess.”
“Can you walk north?” Bo listened to Dallas’s steps retreat. He shook his head to himself. “That’s south. North.”
Dallas chuckled. “Sorry. I can’t get directional bearings inside a house.” He cleared his throat. “Okay, well, if that was south, then north is directly into the bedroom, through the door. You want me to go in?”
“Yes, and keep walking north.” Bo heard the door open, the slightest little creak. Dallas’s footsteps drew closer and then further away again. “Stop. Take a couple steps back.”
“Okay.”
“Where… are you standing now?”
“Near the closet.”
“Walk toward it.”
“Okay.”
“That’s closer,” Bo mumbled.
“What?”
“Are you stopped by the closet?”
“Yeah, unless you want me to morph through it.”
“I want you to move the clothes and knock on the wall behind them.”
“Because… I still found too far away?” Dallas asked.
“If we’re to believe your…”
“Spidey sense?”
“I prefer not to call it that.”
“I don’t got anything I like to call it,” Dallas said.
“The voice,” Bo said after a moment. “If we’re to believe… the voice, then yes, your footsteps are still too far away. Your notes said directly above, so much so that if the wood were older, sawdust would rain down upon her.”
“Well, I didn’t quite write it like that, nerd.”
Once corner of Bo’s mouth lifted as he closed his eyes. “Knock on the wall for me. Different places. Work your way toward the ground.”
Dallas did as told, and before Bo could note the hollow knock, Dallas muttered a brief and astonished, “Holy shit.”
“Holy shit, indeed. That’s a door, Detective.”
“Yeah, it looks like—Hold on.” Bo heard a rustle over the phone. Dallas must have set it down or tucked it back into his pocket. The sounds were a little muffled then, so pocket seemed likely. “Holy fucking shit, Bo.”
Bo was upstairs and at his side in the closet—which admittedly was not a phrase of strange irony that was lost on him—almost before he finished the statement. Dallas moved back a step, holding the clothes back enough for Bo to easily duck through the small doorway and into the secret room.
Shrine. The secret shrine was far, far more accurate.
Articles about the Decapitator were pasted all over the walls, covering so much of it that they practically served as wallpaper. Pictures of the victims, pictures of the killer, pictures of the crime scenes—many of them pictures Bo himself had taken at the original scene.
About halfway through the room, things became less… organized. The wallpaper of newspaper were covered haphazardly by information about the people Gerry intended to seek revenge upon. The officers, the reporters. Rick. Jamal. Bo.
Red lines of yarn stretched between photos and articles. Pictures of their homes, their floor plans, their daily schedules and activities. Pictures of their corpses, printed off screenshots from videos he must have taken of their murders, of their subsequent beheading. Open spaces with names written above them like some sort of hunter’s trophy wall. Many of the open spaces had been filled with photos. The three labeled for Rick, Jamal, and Bo had not.
Frankly, it was almost… impressive if it weren’t so batshit insane. Impressive if it didn’t make Bo’s stomach flip around uncomfortably in his abdomen.
Impressive if it weren’t for the embalmed corpse of the Decapitator laid out nude on the table against the furthest wall, words and symbols from a language Bo couldn’t immediately identify scrawled on the wall above him. Candles surrounded him on his red velvet blanket, the flame of each one lit and eventually self-extinguished hours ago.
Bo hadn’t realized quite how harshly he’d been snapping his rubber band against the underside of his wrist until Dallas slipped two fingers beneath it to stop the impact. With the distraction interrupted and ended, his wrist burned like a thousand bee stings.
Dallas carefully flipped Bo’s hand over in his, thumb resting beneath the growing welt. “Jesus, Bo.”
Bo swallowed roughly, reminding himself for the millionth time that that touch was nothing more than Dallas trying to analyze just how much damage his helpless friend had done to himself. “Y-your… your spidey senses didn’t sense any of this?” Bo asked, unable to force anything more than a whisper past the lump in his throat.
“I thought you didn’t like calling it that,” Dallas whispered back.
Bo pulled his wrist from Dallas’s grip and wrapped a hand around it, both to prevent the resumption of the rubber band snapping and to hide the damage from Dallas. “I don’t, but using ‘voice’ felt as though it were going to sound odd.”
Dallas nodded. “It would have. And… no, I had… no fucking idea,” he mumbled, blue eyes scanning the room. “Jesus,” he whispered again as his eyes settled on the trophy blanks dedicated to the hopeful arrival of Rick, Jamal, and Bo’s heads. “Jesus.”
“I… would appreciate it if you could call Jamal and ask him to send someone else to finish with this,” Bo said, his words slow. Deliberate. “Given my… presence on the wall, now that we have discovered the room, I am not certain that it’s best for me to be the one to continue the CSI… aspect of this.”
“Yeah,” Dallas said after a moment. “Yeah, I can do that.”
Bo nodded, ducking away from Dallas’s hand as he reached out to squeeze his shoulder. The furrow of his brow was minute and didn’t last long, but Bo was certain he’d seen it. “I will be in the car.”
“Bo, if you need—”
“I… will be in the car,” Bo repeated.
“Okay,” Dallas whispered with a little nod. “Okay. I’ll be out in a few.”
Bo offered a thumbs-up, free hand still wrapped around his wrist, and turned to leave the room. He had seen some incredibly surprising and disturbing things in his day, but that… had certainly been near the top.
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