The Confluence

The Confluence Part IV

IV

When Detective Adrian Stein drove up to the house on Edwards St. in Kennedy, Oregon, it wasn't quite what he expected. But in his particular line of work, the unexpected had become quite commonplace. He was a detective on loan from Portland, relatively new to the job, but had already solved quite a few cases for a rookie. Not many of his fellow detectives knew quite what had happened in those cases, and all the higher ups placed Adrian's case files under a plethora of red tape and secrecy. There was already one squad car there, along with the coroner's vehicle. He pulled to a stop by the squad car, it's strobes flashing, painting the rain red and blue. Adrian flipped the collar of his coat, and walked over to the officer on duty outside the house. They had already lined the property with police tape. Adrian had seen some pretty desolate places in Portland, but this house took the cake. The awful, rotted cake that it was. When his eyes fell on its ghastly form, goosebumps ran up and down his arms, and the wind blew freezing specks of rain against his cheek. He had a sinking gut feeling worm it's way through his body, squirming and writhing through him. There was only one place he could recall making him feel like that; a place he had chased a suspect into. The suspect, whose name was Gregory Lyell, had been kidnapping people off the sides of country roads in the woods outside of Portland. Adrian had been driving through the area he had last been seen, and by dumb luck, turned a corner and saw Gregory lifting the unconscious body of a twenty seven year old woman into the bed of his truck. The truck had been painted jet black, and was a model from the 1950's. In the flare of Adrian's headlights Gregory, his bald head shining in the headlights, had just thrown a limp woman, gagged with a stained white t-shirt, duct tape wrapped around her ankles and wrists in the back of his truck, slamming into the metal with a fleshy thud. Adrian had stamped hard on his brakes, tires howling to a halt. He had thrown the door open as Gregory whirled around, his green eyes shining in the headlights. Using the open door as cover, Adrian pulled out his M1911, racking the slide, and then laid his arms across the top of the open door for stability. "Lyell! Get on the ground now you sick son of a bitch!" Recovering from the sudden appearance of a detective, Gregory turned tail and got inside of the truck. "Fuck!" Adrian growled, and then got back into his car, and had his foot on the gas pedal by the time the old black truck ahead of him started rolling away. As he was remembering this scene, a police officer was waving at him. Adrian chased the memory away as he walked up.

The officer stepped towards him, arm up in a halting gesture. "Sir..." He began saying, before Adrian interrupted him. "It's all right, officer. I'm Detective Stein. He said as he reached inside his coat and pulled out his badge and ID. As he held it up, he took a glance at the officer's name badge. "What's the situation inside, Walker?"

The officer looked surprised for a second, then quickly glanced down at his name badge.

Jesus, he forgot he even had his goddamn name on his chest. They really do need my help out here. Thought Adrian. The officer was young, barely looked old enough to shave. His baby blues still had the touch of innocence, the light that for far too many people had gone out for good. "Well, when my partner and I went in to check it out, everything was pretty on the level with what the callers had said. One dead John Doe, along with some pretty nasty rats, which I'm sure made Harrison's job more of a drag than it usually is."

"Did you bring the callers in for questioning?" Adrian said as he strode towards the house, Officer Walker trying to keep up with his much shorter legs and heavier body. "Yeah, we got them. They're in the car right now."

"Alright, keep them there, I'm gonna want to question them later." He walked by the car, skimming over the two teens in the car. "Christ Walker, while you're at it, try to alert their parents. What are they, sixteen?" Walker nodded, and said he'd get right on that as Adrian left him behind in the rain. He approached the front door, saw that it had been kicked in. "Hey Walker! Was this door damaged by you guys, and not the kids?" Walker nodded at him. "Yeah, they said they used the back door!" He hollered at him. Adrian sighed, and pushed the door open. The stench of the place hit him like a wave. "Ugh, fuck!" Adrian grunted. Holding his nose, he ventured further in.

The house was a shit hole, alright. He made a mental note of the piles of refuse and the old mattress. Looks like a heroin den, or several generations of squatters. He thought to himself. As he walked through the trash, he heard floorboards creaking and muffled voices above him. Must be the coroner and the sheriff. He wound his way around the house, looking for the stairs. The house seemed much larger inside than how it looked on the outside. He eventually found the stairwell, and began making his way up the stairs, each one groaning under his weight. He turned right on the landing and looked up at the trapdoor. "Okay, that's real fucking weird." He muttered. He saw the board that had held the trapdoor closed. He tried shrugging it off, like some meaningless detail, but it was like trying to shrug off being damp. He continued up the stairs, and finally saw what awaited him. The sheriff was standing by the circular window that looked out on the street. Even in the bad light, Adrian could see how green he looked. The coroner was squatting by the corpse, making notes. Adrian tapped the door to announce himself. The sheriff spun around, looked at him, and smiled, relieved to not look at the street or the corpse. "Detective Stein, you made it! I'm Saul Anderson, the sheriff of this here burg." He strode forward, making a point to swerve carefully around the grotesque corpse. He stuck out his hand and gave Adrian a limp handshake. "And this is Bill Harrison, the county's coroner."

Harrison looked at him up and down, gave a quiet greeting, then turned back to his work. The corpse itself was bad, chewed and gnawed on by rats, with fecal matter and urine stains around it, but the face was the worst. The lower jaw was almost torn completely off , hanging by a few strands of muscle and meat. The eyes had been pulled out, dangling on the corpses cheeks like white grapes. Under the eyes was a few inches of unblemished skin, before you got to the red ruin that was the lower half of his face. All his teeth are missing... Adrian thought. He turned to the coroner, and asked "So, Harrison. What have we got?"

Harrison shifted to face him. "Well, from one standpoint, this looks like some messy revenge killing. Reasoning in all the disfigurement, especially on the face. As well as signs of torture. And," he said, gesturing with his pen, waving it at the barbed wire his legs and hands were wrapped with, "All that macabre nonsense. However detective, if you actually take a second and look around, the scene itself tells you that this is everything but something as simple as revenge. You noticed the absence of the teeth, yes?" Adrian nodded. "Look up." Harrison gestured with his pen. Adrian's eyes drifted upward. The teeth were strung up onto the ceiling with wire, and they were arranged in a nonsensical scatter. Some formed these large spirals, and others were arranged into these half outlines. "Okay... That's different." Adrian muttered. Lyell lurched back into his memory, of that horrific night he chased him into his cabin in the woods. Harrison nodded, and then gestured to the floor. "The same patterns, if you'd go as far to call them that, appear in the bloodstains."

Adrian sighed and rubbed his eyes. This case was already getting worse than he had anticipated. Just looking at the cadaver gave him a headache. He understood what Harrison was telling him though. This wasn't normal; this was ritualistic, but with no discernable connotations to what it was about other than the sheer brutality of it. "Sheriff Anderson, what do you think about this?" Adrian turned towards Anderson. He jumped a bit, startled. "Oh! Uh, my best guess would be satanists. Maybe some sort of initiation type thing. We've always heard some strange rumors about the woods by the mountain, satanic cults being among them."

"Have you actually investigated any of these rumors?"

Anderson looked at his feet. "Well, um, no. They're really just urban legends, used to scare kids from wandering too far outta town."

Adrian frowned. "Urban legends don't tear people apart. We need a search team in a day, and we'll take a look out there. And I want to look at any newspaper articles. This could be a copycat killer, so we need all the info we can get."

Anderson's eyes widened. He started blustering, " The only bad thing that happened out here was a couple missing kids, but that was almost 90 years ago. There's barely anybody left alive who even remembers that."

Adrian looked at him sharply. "Even more reason to start searching. See if anything was recovered or seen that even remotely resembles that." He jabbed a finger at the corpse. Anderson's muddy brown eyes slowly shifted the corpse, and immediately shot back to meet Adrian's eyes.

"Now then," Adrian grunted, "Let's get those kids back to the station, and start getting answers."