DISCLAIMER: The Sentinel and its characters are the property of Paramount Studios and Pet Fly Productions. These stories are offered for the enjoyment of the fans. No money has exchanged hands.
Timor Vita, Part Two by Kim Heggen
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The Next Afternoon
"Whew." Blair paused on the front step of the little house, wiped the accumulated sweat from his brow. "You have just officially run my feet off."
Ann-Marie grinned, and reached her arms overhead in a stretch that revealed dark patches of sweat under her own arms. "I should have warned you. I ran cross-country at Oregon my first three years. Too busy my senior year, though." She punched him lightly in one shoulder. "You kept up pretty well for an old guy."
Blair snorted. "Thanks. I think." He reached for the doorknob and turned it. "After you."
As he followed the dark-haired girl into the main room of the house, he noticed immediately that he could smell incense. Vanilla, I think. He smiled. Too much time with Jim; I'm starting to automatically catalogue things.
Matt sat on the couch, surrounded by a couple of small piles of papers, in the exact same position Blair had been in the day before. A half-burned incense wand smoked lazily in front of him. A glowing shaft of late-afternoon sun angled through the window, outlining the juniper tree that stood in front of the large window. The student looked up as they entered.
"Hey, how was the run?" His face lost its frown of concentration as the lines melted into his usual smile.
Ann-Marie plopped down onto the other end of the couch and began removing her sneakers. "Fantastic. You should have joined us."
"No way. You're too fast for me. I'd have been eating your dirt."
"The altitude doesn't help either." Blair sat down in the overstuffed orange armchair and began to work at his own shoelaces. "What are we at, here? Three thousand feet?"
"Something like that." Ann-Marie finished kicking off her sneakers and stood up. "I need a shower. Are we still all going into town for pizza?"
"If everyone's still up to it, yeah." Blair leaned back and wiggled his toes as his shoes came off. "Where's Joe?"
"He's asleep. Says he was up late last night reading." Matt looked at his watch. "He should be stirring soon."
"I'll save you some hot water, Blair." Ann-Marie disappeared down the short hallway.
Blair curled up in the big chair, cross-legged with his sweaty socks underneath him. "How goes the studying? You look sort of frazzled."
"I keep getting sidetracked." Matt smiled wanly. "I'm still trying to read all of the background information on the Northwest tribes that Dr. Stoddard wanted us to read before we even got here. But I keep going off on tangents with my thoughts, and before I realize it thirty minutes have gone by and I haven't turned a page."
Blair laughed. "I remember those days. It gets easier, Matt. After a while, you settle down a bit, and realize that you've got plenty of time to learn it all."
"I'll try to remember that." Matt shifted his paper pile and stood up. "Let's go throw some cold water on Joe. I'm hungry."
Act II
As Jim entered the bullpen, Henri waved at him.
"Jim, Sandburg just called looking for you." Henri waved a piece of paper at him. "I wrote down the number. He sounded pretty bored. Where's he at, anyway?"
"Someplace boring. And safe." Jim snatched the slip of paper away from Henri with a brief nod of thanks, and headed for his own desk to dial the number. The phone was picked up on the second ring.
"Hello?" This time it was Blair's voice.
"Hey, Chief. I heard you called."
"Just checking in, like you told me. Henri said you were out on a case."
"A false alarm, actually. A suspected kidnapping that turned out to just be a bachelor party prank."
Blair chuckled. "Did you straighten them out?"
"I managed to convince them that it wasn't too good an idea for them to put a pillowcase over their buddy's head and stuff him into the trunk of a car in front of hysterical witnesses."
"Wish I could have been there. Hey, Jim, uh, what do you hear about the search?"
Jim paused for a moment. "We think he's somewhere in the mountains," he said finally. "The searchers have found some evidence that he's passed through up near Ellensburg."
"Nowhere near here, anyway." Traces of relief were evident in Blair's voice.
"I still want you to be careful, Sandburg. We don't know what kind of connections he might have. It took some planning for him to break out, after all."
"Yeah, yeah, Jim, I'll be the soul of caution, I promise." Jim could clearly hear the note of sarcasm in his friend's comment.
"How goes the research?" Jim asked in an attempt to change the subject.
"Okay. I think I've got a topic, sort of. Just need to massage it a little more, but it should let me use more of my police experience over the last few years." Jim could almost hear Sandburg grinning. "I've been on the outside and I've been on the inside. Who else can say that?"
"Can't wait to read it, Chief."
"I need to go, Jim. We're all going into town for pizza. I'll call you tomorrow."
"Eat some for me, kid. And be careful. Spencer hates me, but he vowed revenge on you. Remember that."
This late on a Sunday evening, the pizza parlor was only about half full. A few couples, one of whom Blair remembered seeing at the reservation's large grocery store, sat around the tables along with their chattering children. Teenagers occupied the video games, and a couple of older men nursed a pitcher of beer and their last few pieces of pizza while they spoke in low tones.
The four young people placed their order and staked out a table off in one corner. Ann-Marie bounced back up. "We forgot to get anything to drink. What do you guys want?"
Blair looked up at the counter, and smiled wryly at the neon "Bud" and "Michelob" signs. "I don't think they're exactly into gourmet microbrew here."
"Whatever looks good, Ann-Marie. Here's a couple of dollars." Matt pulled some bills from his wallet.
The young woman collected cash from the others and went back up to the counter.
Matt pointed to the center of the room, where a fire crackled in a sort of open-sided wood stove. "There's your roaring fire, Blair, and here's your cozy room."
Blair raised his eyebrows, puzzled. "Uh, Matt, I don't follow."
"The story you started to tell me. Your case." Matt looked away. "I'm sorry. You probably don't want to tell us about it if it was that bad."
"No, but," Blair paused, thinking. "Maybe it would be a good thing. I have to admit," he laughed a nervous little laugh, immediately hating the way it sounded, "that it might be a good idea to tell you guys."
Ann-Marie came back bearing a tray with four glasses and a pitcher of some dark liquid. "Hey, they had Full Sail Ale! What do you know?" She began to briskly distribute glasses. "Tell us about what, Blair?"
Blair took a deep breath. "After we eat. This one is a little graphic."
About Seven Months Earlier
Blair put his hand on his weapon as he slid along the stucco wall. C'mon, Jim, where are you? You have to have gotten my message by now. I know you were over visiting your dad, so you shouldn't be that far away.
Pure chance had led him to the dilapidated little house, alone on this wooded property. He'd come out along the Fulton road just following his nose, looking for a particularly ancient cemetery he'd seen once a couple of years ago. With crumbling headstones and trailing ivy, and a small park adjacent to it, he'd thought it might be a good spot for a picnic some day. When Jamie had proposed that they pack a basket of goodies and find a place to get away tomorrow afternoon for a Sunday picnic, he'd decided to drive out this way and see if he could still find the place.
Blair looked at the old stepladder leaning up against the wall. Okay, I need to see in, and that window's just a little too high up. If I can see what's going on in there, I'll have a better idea if I can keep this guy penned inside until Jim gets here with some backup. With infinite care, he shifted the stepladder and opened it up, trying to make no sound at all. If Jim comes up that road, he's going to hear my heart pounding from half a mile away.
He hadn't had the faintest notion of looking for the serial killer. They were no longer even the primary investigators on the case since the FBI had been called in. But when he pulled over to look at his map, he'd happened to look up just at the right time. Just in time to see the pickup truck go by, with its two mismatched occupants -- and just in time to jump back into the Volvo and follow the pickup at a discreet distance.
Now, trying desperately to be silent, Blair climbed about halfway up the ladder. Leaning forward a little, he was able to peer into the window between the mini-blind slats. By some stroke of unlooked-for luck, it was the right window.
There they are. Oh, God, it's him, it's got to be. Look at that little girl. Look at her hair.
Swallowing hard, Blair stretched himself a little higher. Yes, that was the same stubble-headed ugly man he'd seen driving the pickup. And the little girl, a child of perhaps ten years old, with bright red hair, clearly had her hands bound behind her at an uncomfortable angle.
"He was abducting redheaded kids?" Matt frowned and picked up another piece of pizza.
"Yeah, you moron," Joe said. "Didn't you watch the news last year? This creep killed, what, five kids? Six?"
"I was in North Carolina last year," Matt said. "How'd you know it was them, Blair?"
Blair toyed with the olives on his current slice of pizza. "I'd seen her picture. We called in the FBI, then she disappeared the day before they showed up. Because of her hair color, we presumed that Spencer was involved, and we included an enlargement of her school photograph in the packet that we gave to the FBI. Jim and I spent a while staring at her picture."
"So you saw them go by, and you followed them?"
He nodded. "For about five miles, then up a gravel road. I called Jim to let him know, but couldn't get a hold of him at home. Then I remembered he was out visiting his dad. So I talked to the dispatcher and asked for some backup, fast, and to have them call Jim on his cell phone. I couldn't take the chance of losing them, and I was afraid he was getting ready to kill her..."
Blair pressed his nose up against the glass, and his heart sank. The man was armed with some kind of handgun, although from this angle he couldn't tell exactly what type. Worse, the man had taken a large, wicked-looking hunting knife from a sheath and was running its edge along the long red locks of the girl's hair. The child was shaking, whimpering in terror through the green bandana that gagged her.
I can't just burst in there. Way too dangerous; he could kill her right now.
From what Blair could see, and from what he knew of the previous victims, the child had a little time before her abductor would actually begin to harm her. The five children who had disappeared in earlier months, and whose bodies -- all but one -- had eventually been found abandoned in dumpsters around town, had all undergone a succession of mutilations. First the hair, then... Oh God, what am I going to do if he starts in on her? He gulped, his throat suddenly dry. On a low table in front of the man and the child lay several pairs of pliers.
If I rush him, she'll die. If Jim or the others don't get here in time, she'll be mutilated, tortured. Sure, I'll see what happens, and I've already seen enough to put this guy away for the rest of his life, but what is that worth if I can't save this kid?
"Pliers?" Ann-Marie drew her eyebrows together in a puzzled frown.
"The other victims..." Blair trailed off, suddenly reluctant to reveal the graphic details to his new young friends. "We, and the FBI, had found four of the five victims before I caught up to Spencer that day. A least, we'd found what was left of them. They'd had their fingernails and toenails ripped off. The coroner was pretty sure that the kids were still alive when it happened." And that's not the worst of it.
Joe swallowed audibly. "Their fingernails. Blair, that's monstrous."
"I remember reading about the case in the paper." Ann-Marie's voice was shaky. "They just said that the kids were mutilated."
Blair nodded. "A lot of details were kept out of the papers. If you can keep a few crucial points from ending up in the hands of the press, then you have some questions you can use in a polygraph test." He toyed with his glass of beer, running his finger through the condensation on the outside of the glass. "There's no easy way to tell the rest of it. The other kids, they were all executed -- in a very ancient, horribly cruel way."
"How?" Joe asked softly, his face gone eerily pale in the dim light of the pizza parlor.
"They were drawn and quartered."
Up on the stepladder, Blair could feel his legs began to shake with the strain of holding still to look in the window. After a few more minutes spent watching the perpetrator as he slowly cut off bits of the little girl's bright hair, he carefully lowered himself back down the ladder until he was standing on the ground. Then he backed away a couple of yards, into the underbrush surrounding the driveway.
Pulling out his cell phone, he prayed that he was in range. He breathed a barely-audible sigh of relief when he saw that he had service. Quickly, he dialed the dispatcher's number.
"This is Detective Blair Sandburg. I'm now out on..." He craned his neck to see the battered mailbox. "3877 Turner Road. I need that backup, fast! I've got a kidnapper here who looks as if he's going to start cutting on his victim any moment now!"
The answer came back laced with static, but understandable. "Affirmative. Detective Ellison is about a mile from your position now, and we have three patrol cars on the way. You've got backup coming from the county too."
"Thank God," Blair breathed into the phone. "Call Detective Ellison. Tell him to go around the back of the house to find me. Sandburg out." He put the phone away and crept back toward the house.
He put one hand on the ladder, and frowned. Off to the left of the house, half-buried in the overgrown blackberry bushes, sat a tiny shed. The entire structure listed at a precarious angle, and Blair could see that the door hung slightly ajar. I'd better have a look in there too. We don't want any surprises, like an accomplice waiting in the wings. He paced as silently as possible over to the little shed, weapon drawn, and slowly pushed aside the door.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the semi-darkness. He could see old, rusting gardening implements and various tools stacked haphazardly in the corners. There was no hint of movement, so Blair stepped inside a bit farther. He froze when he caught sight of the garishly flowered bedspread wadded into a heap on the floor, its pink and yellow tones overlaid by dark, red-brown splotches.
Blood. That's blood.
He stepped closer still, and crouched down. With one shaking hand he peeled back a corner of the crumpled spread. He stepped back in horror as bile rose in his throat. Oh my God. The fifth victim. This is why we haven't found the body yet. It's still here. The mutilation made the little corpse almost unrecognizable as a person, but Blair could see enough to realize that the child hadn't been dead for very long. The blood was still faintly tacky, and no flies buzzed around in the chilly air of the shed.
Blair swallowed hard, and let the edge of the bedspread drop. You bastard. You murdering bastard. I promise, I'll do everything in my power to stop you. And may God help you if I get my hands on you.
He slipped back out of the shed, blinking a little in the bright daylight, and moved urgently back to the main house and the ladder that still leaned against the back wall. Fear for the child who crouched inside the house lent a new speed to his movements as he climbed back up the ladder. He put his nose to the cold glass of the window again and let his eyes adjust to the dim interior.
On the floor surrounding the little girl lay a semicircle of her bright red hair, shorn roughly by the hunting knife. The abductor was tugging on one last lock near her right ear, cutting it short against the scalp. Watching helplessly, Blair felt acid rise in his throat.
He's concentrating pretty hard on the kid. If I had a rifle, I could take him out. But I'm just not sure I could get him with my weapon, and I'd only get one chance.
As the last piece of hair fell away, the man moved the hunting knife toward the child's neck. Blair stiffened. No! He's going to kill her! He brought his gun up to the window with shaking hands, and was ready to fire into the dim room when he saw the blade of the knife slip under the gag and cut it off in one smooth motion. The abductor tossed the knife and the bandana away. Blair lowered his gun, his heart thudding even more painfully in his chest.
C'mon, Jim, she said a mile. You should be here soon.
He cringed anew when the stubble-headed man picked up the pliers and moved even closer to the child.
Blair could see shock on all of the students' faces. They're all bright, well-read kids. They know what I'm talking about. And they wish they didn't.
Back when the body of the very first victim had been discovered, Blair had been the first one at Major Crime to realize the historical significance of what had been done to the corpse. Reviewing the autopsy report with Dan, he'd sat in stunned disbelief as the pathologist had described the findings: the belly slit open, the internal organs removed while the victim still lived, then the pathetic little body cut into four pieces with a large instrument, probably an axe. The head and face had been left intact, and identification had been made easily. But Dan and the shaken detectives had agreed to only let the grieving family see the dead little face. The horrific details of the murder had been kept from the press, both in hopes of keeping some information secret for polygraphs and out of respect for the family. Only the little boy's father had been told, and he had no wish for the rest of his family to know the details.
"Blair." Ann-Marie had tears in her eyes. "Why? Why did this guy do this? Was he crazy?"
"The motive, if you can call it one, didn't really come out until the trial." Blair took another gulp of beer. "And I still don't understand it all. No, he wasn't crazy in the legal sense; Spencer knew that what he was doing was against the laws of society. He knew that he was murdering those kids. In one sense, he was nuts, though. He thought that little children with red hair were telepathic, that they were a higher life form or something. He had this entire belief system that involved taking over the world someday. But first he had to get rid of all the people he thought would stand in his way. So he was killing these kids."
"But why the torture?" Joe looked sick.
"He also thought that they were some kind of immortal creature, that unless he destroyed the bodies thoroughly and in a ritualistic manner, they would rise again and tell the story of their deaths." Blair shuddered involuntarily. "So, you can see I was pretty scared for this kid. I knew what was going to happen to her if I didn't do something soon."
Gravel crunched in the driveway. Relief flooded Blair's chest as he recognized the familiar form of his partner, moving rapidly but stealthily toward the house. Jim covered the distance between them in a matter of seconds. Blair climbed shakily down to the ground.
Jim put out a hand to steady him. "What's the situation?"
"We've got a fortyish white male, armed with an unidentified handgun as well as a hunting knife. He's got a child hostage, tied up. Jim -- she's got red hair. And he just finished cutting it all off." He couldn't keep his voice from shaking. "He's going to torture her, Jim, he's got the pliers out."
Loud enough even for Blair to hear, an ear-splitting scream came from the confines of the house.
Involuntarily, Blair started to run toward the front of the house. Jim caught his elbow. "We do this by the numbers, Chief. Careful and steady."
Together, they crept around the corners of the building until they stood in front of the sagging front porch. Jim put his head close to Blair's. "It'll take him both hands to hold those pliers and the kid, Chief. This is our chance." They crept silently up the porch stairs and took positions on either side of the door. Jim kicked it in with a resounding crash.
The three students had long ago stopped even pretending to eat any of the pizza, and were clearly hanging on Blair's every word. Ann-Marie was biting her nails, and Joe was methodically shredding a paper napkin.
"Did you get there in time?" asked Matt finally.
"Just barely." Blair cleared his throat. "He did have the pliers and was working on her foot. She lost one toenail, the poor kid, but the guy was so intent on what he was doing that he never knew what hit him. Jim broke the door down, and I got the girl away from him. Then we subdued him and cuffed him." Which is sort of an oversimplification, but that's enough for these guys.
"How's the little girl now?" Ann-Marie reached for another piece of pizza as if her appetite had suddenly returned with the conclusion of the story.
"Doing okay, I think. I saw her at the trial. She's in counseling, of course, but her mother seems to think she'll be okay." And her grandfather, God rest his soul, was so grateful to have his little girl back safe and sound that he got me sent back to school.
Suddenly reluctant to discuss the topic any further, Blair looked at the sober faces around the table, then at the remaining pizza. "Somebody want to go get a box to take this home? It's probably time we got back."
Sitting alone at the kitchen table, Blair tried to concentrate on the article he was reading. He'd tried to sleep, but had given up and headed out to the kitchen for a cup of tea. The glaring white overhead light and the kitschy, avocado-green appliances were comforting in an odd sort of way. If I can't sleep, I can at least study, and the light's a lot better out here.
The soft sound of stockinged feet on linoleum made him look up. Joe walked into the room, blinking sleepily, wrapped in a blue flannel bathrobe.
"Blair, it's almost one-thirty. What are you doing still up?"
Blair grinned sheepishly. "Couldn't sleep. Thought I might at least get some studying done." He'd noticed a marked difference in Joe's attitude toward him since he recounted the story of Harley Spencer. The touchiness, the snide remarks, the knowing looks -- all of it had vanished, replaced by something new. Respect, mixed with no small amount of concern, now showed in Joe's eyes.
Joe turned to the stove. "Kettle still hot?"
"Should be."
Joe flicked the switch to re-light the burner under the teakettle, and clanked around in the cupboards until he came up with a lurid pink mug and a box of chamomile tea. After setting them on the counter next to the stove, he came to the table and sat down on one of the vinyl-covered chairs.
"Thanks for telling us that story tonight," he said quietly. "I could tell it wasn't a very easy tale for you to tell."
Blair ran his fingers along the edge of his spiral notebook. "That was probably one of the ugliest cases I've been involved with. It really shook me up."
"You sound like you did everything right. I mean, wasn't it just dumb luck that you were there in the first place? You kept your head and didn't do anything rash."
"No, I didn't exactly do anything rash, but..." Blair put his elbows on the table, rested his head in his hands. "At the end, when we burst in and caught him, I guess I went a little berserk. We'd surprised him pretty thoroughly; he was so wrapped up in his twisted little ritual that he didn't know we were there until we were right on top of him."
"What happened?"
"I got the girl from him, and Jim clobbered the guy like a runaway truck. That much went more or less according to plan. Then I put Kayla down in a corner and went to hold my gun on Spencer while Jim cuffed him."
"That sounds pretty standard to me." Joe got up to tend to the now-whistling kettle, pouring the boiling water into the improbable pink mug.
"I was furious," Blair said quietly. "All I could think of was that little body I'd found in the shed. I told Spencer that I was going to kill him." He laughed briefly, a humorless and bitter sound. "I had the gun practically in his face while I was telling him this. I wanted him to be just as frightened as his poor little victims were."
Joe's eyes widened as he sat back down at the table. "But you didn't. Shoot him, I mean."
"Jim could tell that I wasn't exactly in my right mind, I guess. He took my gun away from me, which must have taken some guts." Blair shuddered. "That's what scares me the most about the whole incident. Was I so angry that I would have hurt Jim, just to see justice done to Spencer? But Jim was too fast for me, anyway; he had the situation back under control before I realized that my gun was gone." He took a gulp of the cooling tea. "We never really talked about it. He just took over, made me go back outside and sit down and wait for the backup. And I don't think Jim made any mention of it in his report."
Joe was silent for a while, swirling the liquid around in his mug. When he spoke, his voice sounded uncertain.
"Blair, I want to apologize," he said finally. "I haven't exactly been very nice to you."
Blair grimaced. "You were at Rainier during that whole fiasco about my dissertation. I didn't really expect you to welcome me with open arms."
"I'm sorry, though. I shouldn't have judged you. I was just surprised that they let you come back."
"Not half as surprised as I was, Joe." Blair grinned.
"Blair, you've obviously become a good detective," Joe said, the curiosity evident in his voice. "Why did you want to quit just to become another grad student? Will you go back, when you're done?"
"Maybe. Probably. I don't know," Blair answered. He glanced up at the kitchen clock. "It's time for bed. Now, I think I can sleep."
Next Day, in Cascade
The clerk looked up as she sensed the physical presence of someone looming above her.
"Can I help you?"
"This is the registrar's office, isn't it?" The man who had approached her counter was stocky, with hair cut so close that he seemed almost bald. He seemed unsure of himself.
"Yes. They took the sign off the door two days ago for painting, and no one's put it back up yet." She smiled. "What can I help you with?"
"I'm trying to find someone. I think he's a grad student here."
The clerk frowned slightly. "We can only give out limited information on our students. May I inquire as to the reason for your search?"
"His name is Blair Sandburg. He went to high school with my little brother, and was one of his best friends." The man's face seemed to sag. "Patrick died a couple of weeks ago, in Arizona. He was ill for a long time, and he wanted me to find his old friends and give them letters."
"Oh." The clerk felt her attitude softening somewhat. "That's awfully nice of you. I'm not sure I'll be able to help, though. I seem to recall that Mr. Sandburg left us and went to work with the police."
"No, he's not there anymore. He's here." The stranger spoke with a note of finality.
"Just let me check." Her brow furrowed in concentration as she brought up the search screen of the University's student database. "Sandburg, Blair," she murmured as she hit the appropriate keys. She waited a few seconds while the computer searched, and sat back in surprise. "Here he is. He's listed as being re-enrolled as a Ph.D. candidate with the Department of Anthropology." She shook her head. "I guess I'm the last to know everything."
"Anthropology. Hmmm, sounds like Blair. Where would I find him?"
"Well, he could be anywhere. Home, or studying, or out in the field somewhere. But the Anthro department is over in Hargrove Hall." She handed the man a paper map of the campus. "Here's where we are. Go past the library, then down this road. Hargrove is right here," she stabbed at the paper with her index finger, "behind this fountain. Someone there should be able to help you leave a message for him, at least."
The stranger took the map. "Thank you."
"Good luck finding him. I'm sorry about your brother."
"Sandburg will be sorry, too." He turned and left abruptly.
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