The Guardian at the Gate
Book I
Wander, IN
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Chapter 1 - Kody
There were still temporary spots on his eyes where the
lighter just a
few seconds ago had light up the night. He slowly eased his right
hand back into his jacket and put the black Zippo into his left breast
pocket. He pulled his hand back out, just as slowly, and then using
his left hand again, he zipped his jacket back up, while he held his
cigarette in the left corner of his mouth.
He wondered what the wind chill was right now. He actually
never
really understood wind chill. What he did understand was when there
was a wind chill it was colder. So what was the wind chill right now.
He didn't know. What he did know it was cold tonight. Not as
cold
as it would be over the next few months, but still cold. It was
colder than he was accustoming to after so many years in sunny
California. He chuckled to himself at that. Anyone who that San
Francisco was part of sunny California either had never been there or
if they had, got extremely lucky to see a gorgeous day there. What was
it Marc Twain had once said "The coldest winter I have ever spent was
a summer in San Francisco?" Was that it or had he botched it.
He did
not know.
He laughed again at the thought of thinking this October
night was
cold. Thinking about how he had become Californized. How many times
had he sworn he'd never move back? How he couldn't because he'd been
Californized. How it was just too damn cold back in good ole Indiana
for this Californian. However, here he was standing outside on a brisk
night in Indiana. How long had he been back? Had it really been six
months? He thought about it. Again he did not know. Time, no
matter
how much you try to fight it, moves only in one
direction, and that is
forward.
He took another drag of his Camel Light and he felt the
burn run down
his throat. Was it the cigarette or the cold fall air, or some
combination? After taking another drag he looked at the object he
held between the index and middle finger of his left hand and sighed.
How many times had he quit? How many times had he sworn that it was
for good? To many to count he knew that much as well.
Under normal circumstances, he never wanted to smoke, even
on the
occasional night when he got on the Makers Mark, he did not want too.
Sure sometimes he craved it. Sometimes he yearned for the comfort
that a Camel Light in his hand gave him. He loved the taste of the smoke. He
loved the feel of the smoke as it filled his lungs. However those
cravings and wants went against what he wanted. However they were
there as much a part of him as the hand that held the cigarette.
However, no matter how long it had been since the last
time he quit,
he always seemed to find himself smoking again. The real shame of it
was that he knew when it would begin and end. He knew it all to well.
It always started with a call over the radio in the patrol car or one
directly to his cell phone. Some one would be on the other end.
Some
one who sounded like they had news they did not want to tell. Some
one who tried to sound unaffected by the burden they had to tell. No
matter how many times they had said, or how many times he had heard
it, death was not never and easy topic for anyone to talk about.
The calls came though. Morning, noon, or night, they came. They
came
from men, they came from women, from rookies who where so excited they
where about to shoot their rocks off, and salty veterans who where so
tired of passing on this type of news it made them sick.
However it
came, from whomever it came, it always came to him, and no matter how
hard he tried to not care, just to take it as business as usual, he
couldn't.
He had been born into this world with
a heart. Perhaps the thing
worse than having a heart was that he had been born with a conscious.
You see the calls didn't come when a cancer patient finally lost
there fight with the blight. The calls didn't come when an old man or
women went to sleep one night, and decided to stay in the dream
forever. No, the calls came when a bar fight went wrong, and one
fighter beat the other one to death. The calls came when a domestic
disturbance went wrong. The calls came when someone's finger or foot
was found in a garbage bag at the dump. The calls came when a
nineteen year old girl was found in the woods just off of I-46, with
bite marks covering a decomposing body. In every one of those
situations he felt empathy; in every one he felt responsibility. For
every body there was a sad story, and ever sad story made his heart
break a little bit more. How long had death been his business?
Since leaving Quantico, since
deciding he should join the Violent Crimes Division. How long ago had
that been ten years? Fifteen? He didn't want to remember, he didn't
want to remember. What he remembered like his own face
was the stories. The stories of
each victim, both who had some how lived through the story and those
who had died during the telling. Those who had suffered from violent
crimes through out the Pacific Northwest, and now the state of
Indiana. Some times he wondered. Who was luckier the ones who had
survived the violent crimes or those who had succumb to them. At
least the ones who had succumb to them, wouldn't have to live with thestories. The stories he knew, that stories that
came to him in his
sleep, the ones that visited him from time to when he closed his eyes.
He took a long pull off his cigarette and looked out into
the
Indiana night.
He had seen too much in his time on the job. He
always referred to
his work at the bureau as the job. He wondered why that was. Wasn't
what he did now a job? Ya, but it was different. He did not know
why, but it was different. Part of his reasons for leaving San
Francisco, and the job behind was in hopes that he would get out of
the death business. However, all he knew was law enforcement and
so
here he was doing another version of the job, it was just that the
lights weren't so bright and the stage wasn't so big. With all the
differences between Wander and San Francisco, one thing was the same.
People in Wander, just like people in California did awful things to
other people. Murder is murder no matter where it is committed. He
just did not realize there would be so much of it in Wander.
He pulled another smoke out and lit it using the other
cigarette as a
lighter and with that he found himself shaking his head. Had his life
really been that sheltered for him not to realize that murder had
always taken place in Wander? It wasn't a new phenomenon. He'd done
his research since returning, and with a pull off his smoke and a
frown he realized. Yes, his life had been that sheltered once.
However, now that his eyes had been opened, he wondered if they could
ever be closed? He supposed he did not want them to be.
As he stood outside and smoke his thoughts drifted to the
county
morgue. To his buddy Dirty Steve, no, not Dirty Steve anymore but Dr.
Steve. Wow, that still took some getting used too. Where Dr. SteveCovey was about to begin the autopsy. In these
situations even know
the cause of death was pretty apparent, they still did the autopsy.
It might provide some clues; it might not, just the nature of the
business.
His thoughts weren't so much on Steve but on the girl he
would be
performing his work on. He supposed she had been a young woman,
hadn't she been? No, he guessed not, she was a girl. One that still
lived with mommy and daddy, while trying to get her grades at the
local community college, so she could transfer to West Lafayette or to
Bloomington. She hadn't been quit sure yet, and well now, she never
would be he guessed.
He blew the smoke out his nose and stared up at the stars.
He ran
his right hand across his mouth and it was met with sharp bristles.
How long had it been since he shaved? Three maybe four days ago he
last ran a blade along his face. He thought about growing a beard and
then dismissed the thought with a smile.
He couldn't think about trivial details like personal
grooming when
there were so many other things on his mind. So once again his
thoughts went back to the girl, Janine. Found in the weeds off I-46
by an out work mother and her two little daughters.
Kody Ransom had expected to see a lot of things in the
weeds when he
took the call and was first on scene. He expected one of the usual
suspects: a bullet whole, some strangulation marks, or maybe a knife
wound. He saw none of these. What he saw was bite marks.
"Fucking
bite marks" He said to himself.
What was even more bizarre was the state of the body.
Besides some
blood in the hair and around the wounds the body was clean. "Fucking
bite marks" he said to himself again. It some one had taken
thetime to scrub the goddamn body from head to toe. She was
cleaner out
there naked in the woods than she probably had been in her whole life.
There were scrap marks under the fingernails, which where perfectly
trimmed. He'd have to look out for scratch marks, even know it
appeared there was nothing under any of her nails.
"Fucking bite marks!" he said again to himself
shaking his head. He
knew too, that those bite marks weren't made by any animal or at least
any animal that lived in the wood near Wander, IN, that he knew of,
some fucked up shit happened in Wander, Indiana from time to time,
after all it was Wander?
Plus no animal would have stopped to wash the body with
saline
solution to make sure that his or her paw marks weren't picked up in a
scan. He couldn't get over the fact that more than anything the body
smelled of a cleansing solution from a hospital or a morgue.
Defiantly not the Palmolive he kept sitting on the sink.
No those bite marks were human. He had seen bite
marks before on
victims. Usually in crimes of passion or in one of the numerous
serials he had tracked down over the years. However, those marks were
some how cleaner neater. These bite marks appeared random and
repeated. He had no doubt that assailant had bitten her enough and
ripped enough flesh away to allow her to bleed to death. Probably
while the sick fuck sat there and watched.
"God!" he said to himself, "Please don't
let this be a serial." He
wasn't ready for another serial killer. Wander wasn't ready for one.
He hoped beyond all else this wasn't a serial crime and it wasn't the
beginning of a hunt. He just wasn't ready for that. Not yet, maybe
never again.
That led his thought back to the Wander Sheriff's
Depot-Office. Theone on the corner of US 41 and Honey Bee Lane, not the
main office
downtown Wander near the courthouse. It made him think of the small
cell with the silver stool. One Dean Johnson was currently occupying
on a disorderly conduct charge that violated his probation. This
latest offense had taken place most likely a day or two after Janine
was bleed.
Dean Johnson was a …
"Kody Ransom!" her voice started to jerk him out
of his thoughts. "I see you managed to slip away from the scene again
without giving interviews?” The voice
that now not only jerked him from his thoughts but rather grabbed him and
yanked him out of his private thoughts.
He started
momentarily out into the black Indiana sky.
Would she simply go away if he did not acknowledge her? No, hadn’t he tried that before and it not
worked. Then maybe he could hope to the
gods above that he was hearing things, that he was not being interrupted by
anything else than a rustling of the wind.
Perhaps this was nothing more than refuse of an over active
imagination? Did he always have an over
active imagine nation. Perhaps it could
be a ghost. Maybe a hallucination, if he
were lucky? Maybe he misheard the
voice. Perhaps it was really just
another officer or Dean Johnson’s public defender. When he turned his head slightly to the right
out of the corner of his eyes he saw the shoulder length brown hair out lining
that narrow face, that was perfectly accentuated by high check bones, and of
course those big brown eyes that felt like they could boar into your soul. No, he was not alone, or seeing a ghost, or
lucky. Just to his right she stood next
to him. With that determined look on her
face, the one that hide that inviting smile.
The one that said she meant to get what she wanted from you whether you
would give it willingly or not. How many
times had he bared witness to it over the last six months? Like so many things, to many. Just too damn many. With that he took a long pull off his Camel
Light and turned towards her.
He met her
glare eye to eye, which wasn’t hard, considering she was of a height with
him. Or was she a little taller? Didn’t really matter, did it? No, it was a draw, and even though he wished
at this moment she was a head shorter than he, he settled for the eye to eye.
Once he was
face to face with her, he exhaled a plume of smoke right into her face and
smiled to himself as she began to cough and swipe her hand hurriedly in front
of her face. In between muffled coughs. Sad that something so simple and crude could
make him smile.
“You, son
of a bitch” She choked “You know I am allergic to cigarette smoke”
Kody said
nothing. He just stood there watching
the choking women waive her hand in the air at smoke that had long since
dissipated. Those brown eyes weren’t so
determined when she was flustered. After
a few more coughs, most which he thought must have been fake. She straightened and glared at him.
“Officer
Ransom, I am glad to see you are handling yourself so professionally these
days.”
Kody was
already dragging in another cloud of smoke into his lungs, and gave the women a
look that said, keep talking and we can do this all day. This time when Kody exhaled he spit the smoke
out of the right corner of his mouth, barely moving his lips at all, just
enough to let the smoke push out.
Her eyes
fixed hard on him, and she began to speak when Kody began to. “Go home, there is no story here. I don’t mind you wasting your time, but I do
have an issue of you wasting the time of the hard working officers of this
department. So, do us all a favor and go
home.”
“No story
here? “ Her eyes began to gain some
composer and stared to drill into him.
“There is murder to be investigated by a heinous act of bru…”
“There is a
dead girl, at the morgue. Who appears to
have some type of bit marks on her neck?
We do live in a rural part of Indiana, and it is very possible that her
death, though tragic, was nothing more than an animal attack.” Lies came so easy.
“Then why
did you take Dean Johnson into custody.
Sort of strange that you took her boyfriend into custody the same day
that you found her body.” The eyes
intent.
“Like I
told you this afternoon Johnson has been brought in for questioning on another
matter. It is mere coincidence, that we found
her body and took him in on the same day.
How many times do I have to tell you that?”
“Until you
can tell it to me and you actually believe.”
Those eyes burning him, damn he hated when she new he was lying.
“Look, go
home. There is nothing to discuss. There is no murder case being investigated at
this time. The body is with Dr. Covey
awaiting autopsy.”
“By your
statement yesterday it seemed pretty clear what the cause of death was?”
Kody pulled
on cigarette as it hung between his lips and then took his left hand and
flipped it onto the ground, he was now looking at the ground shaking his
head. “For you it must have, I read that
trashy little article you call news. It
has always amazed me how you can take bits and peaces of a conversation and
twist into some conspiracy theory. I
told you to leave it alone. I don’t want
to have this crap flashed all over the paper for your sick pleasure.”
She took a
step back. Kody moved right on top of
her. “I told you to stay out of my way,
and I meant it. If you get in my way of
this or any other investigation, you will regret it.”
There was
silence for a moment, and then it was broken by with a yell from the direction
of the station. “Kody, what is wrong,
what the hell you yelling about.”
He looked
over the women’s shoulder towards the station and said, nothing, I will be
right there. He fixed his eyes back on
the women “I promise you, you will regret it if you fuck my work up for you god
damn tabloid.”
“It is...”
she started.
“It is about
as much newspaper as Wander is a Mecca of culture. It just aint so. That paper hasn’t had a shred of respect
since the old owner passed on.”
She took
another step back, and sort of reeled a little bit from that, her eyes went
form confident and whole boring to wide, to blank and empty.
“Kody?” the
voice from the station called.
“Coming.” And with that he moved around the women and
began to walk.
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