Vince knew what was coming. “They were swept up in a witch hunt.”
“Right. They were forced to confess and recanted their confessions during the trial. But the prosecution had them. Here they were, long-haired, rock and roller kids and they were the perfect scapegoats. The prosecution successfully branded these young men as Satanists and claimed that the crimes were ritual murders, despite the fact that the evidence said otherwise. The community this happened in is very conservative, and the jury bought it. The prosecution fed on the jury’s fear that these kids were ruthless devil worshippers and that they must be stopped. So they’re currently on death row.”
“And your deputy didn’t want you to react in the same way?” Vince ventured.
“Correct,” Tom Hoffman said. “But here’s where the similarities in both cases end. While the men convicted in the Arkansas case definitely had the sophistication to make the murder appear cult related if they wanted, there was no cult related evidence left at the scene to present such a theory. Steve Anderson, on the other hand, has no knowledge or understanding of cults, much less religion in general, and wouldn’t know a pentagram from a hole in his head.” Tom Hoffman paused, eyeing Vince gravely. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“For God’s sake, yes!” Vince exclaimed.
“This murder is a cult,” Tom Hoffman said.
The words hung in the air with their grave clarity. Vince looked at Tom Hoffman with a sense of puzzlement. “What do you mean?”
“You sure you won’t be squeamish?” Tom Hoffman cut off Vince’s impending question.
“No.” He was more curious now than ever before, yet he could feel his stomach grow heavy with dread.
Tom Hoffman regarded him warily. Then he turned toward the rear of the house. “Okay, follow me.”
Vince followed Tom down the short hallway toward his mother’s bedroom. The door to the bedroom was closed, and Tom paused to cast one more look at Vince as if to say, are you ready for this? Are you sure you can handle this? Vince’s expression told Tom that he was ready. Tom nodded, gripped the door knob with his left hand and opened the door.
Vince followed Tom into his mother’s bedroom, the crime scene where she met her untimely demise. The drapes over the windows were drawn, making the room shroud-like, the shadows the furniture cast even darker and longer. Tom reached for the light and chased the shadows away with a flick of the switch. Vince blinked and almost stepped back in horror from the scene in front of him.
The double bed his mother had kept as far back as he could remember was missing, along with the small bureaus that flanked both sides. There was a dried pool of blood on the floor where the bed would have sat, and a spray of blood on the wall where the headboard of the bed would have rested. Toward Vince’s right was a large bureau with a mirror over it. Toward his left was a small chest where he knew she kept her embroidery and crocheting equipment. There was a small closet next to the chest.
On the wall where the headboard would have rested, directly beneath the spray of blood, was a series of symbols in maroon. There were six of them, drawn in a straight line. To Vince’s eye they were archaic and meaningless.
“Homicide removed the bed and the bureaus for testing,” Tom Hoffman said, as Vince looked at the room in growing shock. “They’re still running tests on it. The rest of the room and its belongings have already been swept by homicide for evidence.”
Vince got over the initial shock and took a deep breath. For some reason he expected it to look worse than it was. While he was expecting it to be bloody, Tom Hoffman had built up such a drama around his theory that it was a cult-related murder that he was expecting something… more grotesque. Ghoulish perhaps. With the exception of the strange symbols written in what was obviously his mother’s blood on the wall above her bed, there was nothing else unusual about the scene. His mother had been stabbed to death in what was probably a home invasion robbery, and naturally there was a lot of blood. So what?
“To tell you the truth, Mr. Hoffman, those symbols mean nothing,” Vince began, choosing his words carefully and speaking softly. “Some doped up kid could have done it in emulation of something he read in a book or something.”
Tom Hoffman looked at Vince seriously. “You weren’t here when we found the body.”
“No.”
“I also didn’t tell you… everything.”
“Then perhaps you’d better.” Vince was getting tired of this beating-around-the-bush behavior.
“I will, now that you’ve pretty much proved that you can handle it.” Tom Hoffman gestured at the bloody scene in front of them. “First, tell me if you notice anything out of the ordinary about this room besides that bloody mess on the floor.”
Vince looked at the room. It had been fourteen years since he’d been home. He wouldn’t know if his mother had made slight decorations to the room. But from the placement of the furniture, and the way the room looked, it appeared that nothing much had changed. He looked at the room, trying to remember what it looked like from the last time he was here. The bed was in the same position he remembered, the bureaus, likewise, were where they’d always rested. The wall was bare now, but—
“There used to be a crucifix hanging over her bed,” he said, motioning toward the bloody wall. He remembered that clearly now. For not being Catholic, his mother sure had a fetish for graven images. “It’s not there, and I don’t see it anywhere else.”
Tom Hoffman nodded. “What I’m going to relate to you about the state of your mother’s body when we found it is pretty graphic. I realize that your comments about those symbols are true; they could have been done by some stupid kid who was robbing the place. But the condition we found your mother’s body in is my firm conviction that this wasn’t just a robbery.”
“Okay,” Vince said. If this was going to be bad, let’s get it over with.
“When we found your mother’s body—or, rather I should say, when John Van Zant found your mother’s body—it was lying in a normal position, feet toward the foot of the bed, head resting on the pillow. Her eyes had been gouged out and her chest was ripped open. Whoever did it appeared to know what they were doing. The coroner said the cuts were precise and were executed with surgical skill.” He looked at Vince. “Are you okay?”
Vince nodded. He felt a little light-headed, but he was okay. “Yeah. Just… the initial shock of hearing that did me in there for a minute. I’m okay. Go on.”
“You sure now?” Tom Hoffman looked concerned.
“Yes, please.” Vince swallowed a lump in his throat, bracing himself for the rest. Laura’s death had been horrible, but this… this was madness.
Tom Hoffman regarded him for a moment before going on, as if checking to be sure Vince had the stamina to hear the rest. “The killer, or killers, cut out her heart and her eyeballs. We haven’t found them. Whoever killed her took them with him.” He appeared to hesitate again. “They also shoved the crucifix into her vagina.”
Vince closed his eyes, trying to cast the image away. “Jesus,” he breathed.
“Somebody bent on a simple robbery who encounters the homeowner does not go through the extreme… cruelty that your mother went through. Nor do they invest in the time it takes to do something like this.” Tom Hoffman spoke slowly, as if he were teaching a course on the fine arts of homicide investigation. “The coroner estimates that whoever did this tortured her first—post mortem evidence suggests your mother may have been tortured for probably fifteen minutes before she was killed. They most certainly violated her with the crucifix before she died. The coroner says she would have died eventually from those wounds, but they spared her the pain and horror of that. They slashed her throat. Then they performed the eviscerations. To perform such surgery takes time and precision. They weren’t interested in robbing your mother. They had motives far more sinister than that.”