WHITE NIGHT

 

‘Don’t eat the brains. They’ll make you even crazier.’

Brother Belial, Arizona 1974

Irvine Levine, Last Days

 

FOURTEEN

BLUE OAK COPPER MINE, SONORA DESERT, ARIZONA. 19 JUNE 2011. 2 P.M.

‘I feel like I’m standing on the surface of a distant planet. Everything looks alien out here. The vegetation, the colours of the landscape, the sky, the rocks, even the air. High temperature today was thirty-eight degrees Celsius. The hottest part of the day has passed, but I can still feel the water being sucked out of my body and it’s only foresummer. In summer, temperatures soar to forty-three degrees. Which begs the question: why would anyone choose to live here, in 311,000 square kilometres of desert? One of the biggest deserts in North America. You could fit all of Great Britain inside the Sonoran desert and still have 100,000 square kilometres of sand left over.

‘The desert covers massive areas of Mexico, California, Arizona and New Mexico. It also contains some of the remotest parts of the United States. Places where you can remain unobserved. So it seems logical to assume isolation was Sister Katherine’s motive for relocating The Temple of the Last Days here in early 1973.

‘After five itinerant months in California, she claimed she had received a second vision that featured a new refuge for her Temple: a disused copper mine in a desert. But it is now believed that one of the bikers that the group bought drugs from in LA had told her about the place. An area where organized criminal gangs smuggle more migrants and drugs into North America from Mexico than anywhere else. It’s a borderland—’

Dan looked up from the viewfinder. ‘Dude. Sorry. I’m getting too much glare from the metal roof. Need to move the camera. About six feet stage right, where you are sitting. Let’s get this done quick. Light’s all kinda going reddish now, on that wall behind you, which is very cool. Shift your arse.’

‘Here?’

‘Perfect. Carry on from there with your borderland shit. Then I want to get that sky.’

Kyle went back to his script, laid in the dust beside the DAT sound recorder, and continued with his audio narration while Dan shot close-ups of another of the surviving buildings. ‘Right. OK. It’s a borderland. Where strange cargos and traffic pass through, often undetected, and is pretty unwelcome north of here. It’s also an area where small towns and businesses were regularly abandoned over the last century. Where only their ruins are left behind. Like here: Blue Oak. Thirty kilometres east of Yuma, off the Interstate Highway 8, in the Fortuna Foothills, is an abandoned copper mine. The last miner to leave here worked the mine up until 1946. It remained empty until 1973. But that year it received a new set of tenants. People stranger than anyone could remember seeing in these parts before, and probably since.

‘The advance party of The Temple of the Last Days occupied these dilapidated buildings in the winter of 1973. Only four original members from the European group now remained with Sister Katherine. But over the next few years many others would come and join them and those she recruited in LA. At its peak in early seventy-four, over forty men, women and children would form a permanent community and scratch out an existence in this remote and desolate corner of the world. New arrivals included the ex-convicts Brothers Belial, Moloch and Baal, who became central to the new Seven leadership. Along with their leader, their names would go down in infamy. What happened to the other members remaining here in 1975 finally put Blue Oak on the map.’

‘Dude, you done?’

‘Yeah. I’ll get Lieutenant Conway to walk us through the crime scene. Can you light the temple shack for both cameras? Save time. Rest of it, leave for now.’ There was more light at the mine than at the farm in Normandy, and even though there was a shallow depth of field in most of the buildings with intact walls, as long as there was no movement Dan could shoot with a wide-open aperture and really get the ruins in their own light.

‘Will do. Tripod?’

Kyle winced. ‘I’m actually thinking tripod for stability second time out. Do it first with the Canon on your shoulder. On the walk-through.’ Though they distrusted handheld filming, some moving Steadicam footage would add variety to a visual palette.

Dan nodded his assent and frowned in concentration as he wrestled with the directions from a technical point of view.

‘And, mate,’ Kyle said, quietly, ‘it’s great to have you here. I mean that.’

Dan looked at him and nodded. ‘Just don’t let Conway step on a bloody snake.’ He returned to his camera.

Kyle sucked water from a bottle so hard the plastic crushed in the palm of his hand. He walked across to Lieutenant Conway, who still stood with his back to them, having shown no interest in their shoots of the exteriors of the dilapidated settlement and the establishing shots of the desert. He stood impassively, and alone, to one side; sunglasses off, eyes screwed against what remained of the glare, his attention fixed on a copse of dead trees.

What surprised Kyle most about Conway was why anyone with so fair a complexion would live his entire life in a place where the sun burned the ground to dust. Continents of marmalade-coloured freckles joined up all over his pudgy forearms and face and then darkened, like the marmalade was now burning. In between the freckles and moles his skin was the pink of ham. What was left of his hair, cut neat to the nape of his neck and dark with sweat where it poked beneath an Arizona Diamondbacks baseball cap, must have once been a bright Gaelic orange. His eyelashes were still gingery. Scottish or Irish stock, with skin suited to a wet, cold climate in the Northern hemisphere. And he looked like he was about to have a massive coronary any moment. Wet with sweat front and back, his short-sleeved shirt bulged from a round torso packed inside it; the patterned tie about his bulbous throat looked like it was slowly choking him.

When they first saw the old cop thrust himself out of an enormous Lincoln and waddle across the lot towards the diner in Yuma, Kyle and Dan’s first instinct was to grin. His black pants were pulled up well above his stomach button, leaving a few inches of white sports sock visible on thin ankles above polished black shoes. But when he entered the chilly conditioned atmosphere of the restaurant, the emerald sharpness of the old man’s eyes killed their smiles in a heartbeat. They found themselves taking Lieutenant Conway seriously, very quickly.

Out at the mine, the retired police officer remained inscrutable, his hard eyes stuck in a permanent squint inside their doughy sockets. They neither put Kyle at ease, nor gave away anything on Lieutenant Conway’s mind, besides a grumpy preoccupation with matters unshared. In the journey out to the mine, he’d said little: short perfunctory statements about the landscape, or the weather. All delivered quickly, without emotion, and only when prompted by Kyle’s fruitless attempts at conversation. But Conway said he had liked Tony Blair. ‘Always us, ain’t it. Sortin’ out the world,’ was the closest thing he’d thus far expressed to an opinion. He made Kyle feel diffident, and younger somehow. Dan was just wary of him.

‘Looks like something out of a western,’ Kyle said to Conway and nodded at the thin black trees. But immediately regretted the words the moment they were out of his mouth. The ex-cop never showed any sign of hearing him.

‘Still the same as they was,’ Conway eventually said to himself, or possibly to Kyle.

‘Sorry?’

‘Desert Ironwood.’

‘The trees?’

‘Desert gets a lot of rain. Most people don’t know that. Even in summer. And this one gets more than most. Summer comes, these trees bloom. Like evergreens. We had eight inches so far this year. But these are still deep winter Ironwood.’ The detective turned and walked away from the trees, leaving Kyle stood before the dusty black limbs, so old they were fossils, the branches skeletal, spiky. Much of the tree lay like driftwood on the cement-coloured grit beneath his boots.

‘See here.’

Kyle turned to Conway. The cop pointed a plump hand at some weeds that resembled dead tomato vines in the dirt. ‘Devil’s Claw. Should be flowering. Over yonder, is Fairy Duster. Real pretty in summer. Pink flowers in a bloom. But not here.’ Kyle followed the detective’s directions to a wide swathe of bracken and dead bushes, but saw no flowers. He squinted in mystification at Conway, who cut a hand through the air. ‘Where them Saguaro cactus start? See them out yonder? Mixin’ it with the creosote bush and where the ghost flower starts up agin? And them small yella trees all about is Palo Verde. About sixty feet out. Ya see it?’

‘Right.’ Kyle swallowed his disappointment. He hated the way a camera made people act up, but couldn’t deny his dismay at a total indifference to filming either.

‘That’s where the desert starts agin. Right beyond that fence. Desert’s full of life. Don’t let no one tell you different.’

Kyle looked out at the remnants of the split-rail fence, and beyond it to where some greenery and dots of colour appeared upon the greyish dust. Then frowned at the old man, still not understanding. Sweat dislodged from his brow and ran into his stinging eyes. Outside his temporary blindness, he heard Conway say, ‘But right here where we is standin’ is dead. Nothing growin’. Same as it was in seventy-five.’ Conway licked his thin lips. His deep-set eyes gave nothing away. He tugged his baseball cap off and whisked a hand over his freckled scalp, then slapped the cap back in place. ‘Ain’t nuthin’ grown at this mine since seventy-five. Not a thing.’

Kyle looked at the ground with renewed interest. Then pointed at the longest structure that had once been in the shade of a long line of petrified trees. ‘Those trees are dead too.’

Conway nodded at Kyle’s observation. ‘Mesquite. They was green once.’

‘Hard to believe anyone ever lived here.’

‘They was here two years and they kill’t it.’

Conway walked towards Dan and said, ‘Let’s git this show on the road.’ It was a command.

There were eight buildings still standing at the mine, varying from what looked like a general store with a high flat front, to a collection of smaller cabins, and one longer building about the size of a barn. White adobe walls were dried out and mostly peeled down to red brick on every structure. Where roofs still existed, the corrugated iron was bent out of shape and dark red with rust, or bare black beams were visible, eaten into undulating patterns by insects. Porches sagged into the grey dust and dead grass. Lengths of strip-fencing started and stopped around the perimeter of the settlement, but never failed to lean anywhere but earthwards.

Kyle looked at Dan. ‘You ready?’

Dan’s entire face was wet; his massive chest heaved under the exertion of holding the camera. ‘Light might be too dim in some of the buildings. I’ve put the lights in the first one, like you said. Might have to move them along when we go static.’

‘Perfect.’ Bright light burnished the inside of the longer white building they stood outside. ‘That night, this was the first building you investigated?’ Kyle said to Conway.

‘It was.’

Dan wrestled the camera into a better position on his shoulder. ‘Best if I walk behind Mr Conway. What do you say?’

Kyle agreed with a nod, then turned to the old cop. ‘Mr Conway. We can do this as many times as you want . . .’ He would have continued, but Conway didn’t appear to be listening to his preamble or direction. The old cop just stared into the doorway of the building with the same intensity as he’d stared at the dead trees.

‘Sergeant Matt Conway was the first police officer to arrive at the mining camp on the night of 10 July 1975.’ Kyle spoke from behind Dan’s left shoulder; Dan’s camera pointed at the old cop in profile as he stared towards the settlement in an establishing shot. ‘Mr Conway, can you take us through that night? As much as you can remember.’

Conway looked at Kyle like he was looking at an English halfwit, then looked away. ‘I remember it all. Night like that don’t end.’

Kyle glanced at Dan who grinned into the viewfinder.

‘Call came in at ten fifty to the station at Yuma. Fella at a ranch, five miles west of here heard gunshots. Name was Aguilar. He’s dead. Son has the place now. Owns this land too. Hope you boys all got permission to be filming out here?’

Kyle nodded. Dan suppressed a giggle.

Conway turned his back to the camera and pointed out across the desert ravine, towards the far slope of the valley. ‘Sound goes right through that valley and carries to his ranch. You can hear things down there, like this place is right next door. No phone at the mine. They was cut off up here. But Aguilar said he heard shots. Close together. Knew it was a rifle from the sound. The crack. And when he goes out of his yard and up the hill beside his place, he said he saw some mist over here. Kinda yellow. Aguilar heard dogs too. Whole pack of them real riled. Down here. And he said he heard some other things about them dogs, that sound damn foolish now, but not back then when I was out here, standing right where you is. I heard it too.’

Conway moved a few feet towards the big white bungalow and Dan followed him with the camera. The old policeman sighed, put his hands on his hips. Dan glanced at Kyle and raised his eyebrows; Kyle nodded once to indicate he should keep rolling.

A minute passed.

‘Call come in to my car. Unit 27. So I set out here with my partner, Jiminez, just after eleven. Once we were off the highway, we never set eyes on a single vehicle whole way out. Was no one out here but Aguilar at his ranch and them hippies squatting in here. We get down that off-road a little ways, and we see the smoke too. Like mist with some dirty yellow in it. What was left of it. Like it was dying out. Flare I reckoned. But it was quiet except for the dogs. No frogs from that pond. No Elf Owl. Nothin’. Desert a noisy place at night. But not here. ’Cept for the dogs, coming from far away. In the distance, like they were up high, above us, to the north. Only there are no hills north of here. So I still can’t say where them dogs were. Aguilar said them hippies had a pack of them living with them, roaming wild. But he never saw one of them again after that night. Ask me, I was pretty sure they were above me and Jiminez’s heads. Sounded like they was in the sky, but moving away.’ Conway suffered some kind of self-conscious episode following his conjecture about the position of the dogs. ‘Desert can make a fool out of anyone.

‘Anyways, we pull up and this whole place is in darkness. Not a single light on in any of the buildings. No fires, nothing. They used kerosene lanterns and open fires to light the place at night. Aguilar told me. No electricity here. And you can still see the big pit they used over yonder. But the whole place was lights-out when we pulled up that night. Fire pit was cold.

‘Well, Jiminez walks over, real careful like, towards this building here. It was the closest to us, and the biggest thing here. Door wide open too. An’ I remember him walking through this mist with his flashlight. And he goes right up to that door. And he shined the torch through it once. And then he turned round and he came running back to the car. And I saw his face in the headlights and I knew trouble was right here, jus’ waitin’ on us.

‘And he says to me, “Partner, call paramedics, backup, we got injured, maybe fatalities”. So I make the call. An’ then I get the rifle we keep in the back, and Jiminez gets the shotgun and we go back at the building. We got thirty minutes minimum till backup rolls in, so we’re in no hurry to get ambushed. We go in slow. One from either side, up to that porch.’

Conway stopped speaking and stepped onto the porch of the long white building. He assumed a crouching position beside the empty window frame on the left of the porch. He imitated the holding up of a flashlight, his palm facing the ground. ‘Jiminez is across from me. Other side of that window.’ Conway nodded at the window on the right side of the gaping doorway. ‘And I call out, “Police!” And there is no answer. Not a sound. And we can’t go around the outside of the building to check the back, ’cus we’d get sighted from the other cabins you can see here on either side a’ this one. We got to check this one’s clear first. Do them one at a time. So I shine my flashlight through this window. Like this. Down and inside.’ Conway lowered his hand and touched the splintering wooden frame gently. ‘And I see the bodies inside. I count five, straight off.’

The ex-cop straightened up and stepped inside the room. Dan, then Kyle, carefully followed him through the door. A layer of dirt covered indistinct wooden planking that boomed beneath three pairs of feet. There were crushed beer cans inside, some plastic bags and an instant gust of stale urine. The building was divided by a white wooden wall, with a doorway and open counter hatch, offering darkness in the second half of the structure.

‘In here there was mats. And five of them hippies. They was wearing the robes we all seen them wearing around town. And there was some blood in between them. Two was kneeling up, like they was praying. The others had fallen sideways onto each other. The blood on the floor was dark and getting thick, so they’d been killed a while before we got here. I reckoned maybe an hour, maybe more. And I remember looking for where their bodies started and where they ended, and that’s when I saw a throat. Cut deep. The head was dropped forward and the eyes of the victim were closed, but the laceration went right back to the ear.’

Conway exhaled and shook his head. ‘Lined up, all five of them, in a row. Four of them had beards. And they was facing that wall. Like they’d been arranged this way by whoever killed them. Didn’t look like they resisted getting their throats cut neither. Hands weren’t tied.’

Conway settled into another silence with his little eyes closed. Kyle heard Dan swallow, and suddenly felt a great sympathy for the old man, and also a terrible guilt at what they had forced him to remember in the stinking wreck of a building.

Looking up, composed again, Conway walked towards the dividing wall. ‘They had been living back in there. The second room. There was mattresses in there. Old blankets. Books. Not much else. I remember we was trying not to step in the blood out here, because this was now a crime scene. So we tiptoed real careful around the bodies to this room here, to make sure the whole building was clear. Which it was. No one alive inside the second room. Just five bodies in the first room. And it was back here, when we came on through, heading for the door, that I noticed the smell. It’s like I’d shut my sense of smell off, and was just going on my ears and eyes in the dark as we come in. But when we come back through, I said, “Jimi, you smell that?” And Jiminez nodded. He said “Burst pipe”, but I remember thinking, this place ain’t plumbed. But he was right. Place smelled of sewage, and something been dead longer than them hippies. But it weren’t comin’ from the victims. No, sir.’

They were all glad to get back outside. The curious smell of stagnation and decay had not been mentioned in the Irvine Levine book. And for a few seconds after Conway’s revelation, Kyle couldn’t feel his legs. His sense of self seemed to blow away, into the wide wastes of the desert. He felt terribly vulnerable and frail; a range of emotion he usually twinned with a loss of control. But this time it had nothing to do with his debts or scratching around trying to make a film for twenty quid; this was caused by a recurrence of the matter of his own safety, and of his mental robustness before such coincidence, such a dreadful synchronicity threatened more than implied by Conway’s innocent disclosure. Kyle glanced at the side of Dan’s face and could see that the feeling was mutual.

Conway turned away from the camera again and faced the desert. Dan moved and recorded him from the side. ‘We didn’t know that one of the fatalities was their leader right then. No one knew till later when Homicide rolled in. Sister Katherine. But she was the big one in the middle, who had rolled sideways and knocked two of the others down. I remember thinking later that if she hadn’t fallen, they would have all been kneeling up when we found them. Four with their throats cut, and her in the middle with her head in her lap.’

From the murder scene, in an uncomfortable silence which seemed to suit Conway, they moved to the second building, built at forty-five degrees to the murder site. A rusted iron canopy had collapsed on to the porch; once supported by two thin tilting wooden poles that gave the whole building the impression of falling sideways. White paint or plaster had flaked off the external walls of the main structure, leaving weathered bricks exposed to the air. Peeling upwards like the lid of a sardine tin, the roof had come loose.

‘In here, we found the kids. We stood outside and we shone our torches at the door first, and we could see it was all shut up and bolted from the outside. But we heard movement. Like a shifting sound. Inside. Maybe dogs. We called out and we heard some whimpers and whines and then I was sure it was dogs. I was thinking the killer had locked some of them up because of the ruckus they was causing when he was going about his work. So we decided we’d come back to this building because it was already secure and we didn’t want any dogs running around a crime scene. But right before I was about to head over to the next cabin, Jiminez shone his flashlight through the little window there, on the side.’

Conway walked slowly around to the small window in the side of the building. ‘And Jiminez looked at me, and he was more shocked than he was when we found them dead hippies. And he told me there was kids inside. So I got up and looked inside myself, and there was five kids. Four crouching down by the floor. Real dirty with long hair, but wearing street clothes. And the other one, who was about two I reckoned, was just standing up and staring right back at my flashlight. Two of the dirty kids was real scared and pressing into each other, other two just looked plain crazy in the eyes. But the little blondie was just like an angel. Big blue eyes. And he was clean. Naked, shivering. Which didn’t add up because the others were filthy. But he just stood right there, in the middle of that room and looked back at me. I think he was in shock. I asked them if they was OK, but got no answer.

‘Least they was safe in there, so we moved off to secure the other buildings.’

Conway paused and wiped again at his scalp, this time with a brilliant-white handkerchief.

‘Shall we break here?’ Kyle asked. Conway nodded.

‘In this building we found the killer, Brother Belial, though we didn’t know his name that night.’ It was the smallest of the remaining structures; no bigger than a tool shed. ‘Door was closed, but we could hear a man praying inside. Least it sounded like praying. And he didn’t stop when we challenged him through the door. So Jiminez kicked it in, and shone his torch through. Right onto this face. Which I’ll never forget.

‘This guy was bearded and wearing a dirty robe. Kneeling down. His robes kinda blended with the wood in there, so all we could see clearly was this face. Real wild-looking. Crazy hair all mussed up and these eyes. Just kinda staring through us. Seen the same thing on junkies. And he was just sat there talking to himself. To God, I ain’t sure. Couldn’t get a reaction outta him. Then Jiminez sees his hands. They’re covered in blood. And his wrists too, where they was pokin’ out from his sleeves. So me and my partner reckon, at around the exact same time, that this here mumbling fool was probably the killer. Which he was.

‘And in there with him, right in front of his knees we see a long knife. And it was so gummed up with blood, we were pretty sure it was the murder weapon too. Real old-looking knife. First I thought it was a machete. Mexican drug dealers use ’em, so we’d seen plenty of those. But when I looked closer, I saw that it was too long. And too thin for a machete. And behind him we found an automatic rifle with scopes. Could have killed us both. But he didn’t. All these years gone by I asked myself why.’

‘Why do you think he spared you?

‘I guess he’d finished his work for one night.’

Conway walked away from the cabin. ‘We cuffed the suspect, wrists and ankles, and laid him on the ground first. Right here. In the open so we could see him.’ Conway creased the dust with his shoe. ‘And right around that point we split up. Changed it up, so we could work quicker, and ’cus we had the suspect. And I went and checked the other three buildings to the west of the mine and Jiminez goes over that way, east side to the other three cabins.

‘In that cabin I found the armoury.’ Conway pointed at a dilapidated structure of patched brick with no roof. ‘It was padlocked, but I bust in there and they had enough guns inside to fight a war. Those two cabins yonder, to the side of it, was full of books. The Book of One Hundred Chapters it was called, all stacked in boxes like they was headed for a bookstore.

‘Other side of the mine, Jiminez found stores with meds and food inside. And the narcotics. Twenty grams of cocaine. About the same again of marijuana, and a big box of capsules. They was MDA we found out later, which was a Hollywood drug back then. Didn’t come from round here.’

Conway walked slowly back to the dirt patch he’d marked with his shoe, beside the building in which he’d discovered the killer. ‘I go back and check on the suspect, and he’s still lying there hollerin’ about “old friends” and I don’t know what else. And as I check on him, Jiminez starts calling me from the north side of the mine. I look over and through the buildings I can see his flashlight.’

As Conway walked ahead of Dan and Kyle, he stared straight ahead, replaying the scene in his memory. ‘So I get down there, and as I’m running past where they had the drugs yonder, Jiminez calls, “We got four dead. Out by the fence.”

‘Split-rail fence down there weren’t broken back in seventy-five. It was twice as high and they’d put razor wire on the top. Stop folks getting out, like them four fools we saw on the ground before it. Looked like they’d been trying to climb out. Hands was all cut up from the wire. That’s what we thought right off anyway. All been shot in the back and legs too. Weird thing was, the main gate was open when we drove up, so once the suspect was done with killing his brothers and sisters he must have unlocked the mine gates, then gone and shut himself inside the cabin. Why’d he do that? To let the dogs out that we never found? No other reason I ever been able to think of.’

Conway came to a stop twenty feet from the remains of the old split-rail fence. Wiped his face with a handkerchief. ‘Jeez. The four bodies here. They was in a bad way. Been shot up pretty bad as they was runnin’, but that only killed one of them right away. Medical examiner pulled slugs out of them all. One girl had three in her back. All come from that rifle we found in the hut with the killer, and two more automatic rifles been thrown down near the first murder site. We found them later. But what me and Jiminez also saw on the victims here, was wounds consistent with bite marks. On their faces. On their necks. Shoulders ripped open. Dogs we figured. It was like they’d been shot down to disable them before they was finished off by the dogs.’

Conway stood in silence and stared at the broken fence, still turning over the evidence two young patrolmen had discovered thirty-six years before.

Conway sat on the porch of the main building, the murder site. The camera was back on the tripod for the second static shoot after the walk-through. Behind the settlement, the desert sky was ablaze. The sun set over the distant mountains and coloured the sky with pink and blue striations between the scarlet. Tinges of night pulled at the horizon line and would soon darken the earth. Beyond the perimeter fence, the Saguaro cacti were becoming black spongy silhouettes, a backdrop to a Roadrunner cartoon or Hollywood western. Dan had lit up the stoop with the last of the batteries.

‘By the time we called in the rest of what we found, and put the suspect in the patrol car, more officers arrived. Three sergeants, two lieutenants. Reporters showed up about the same time. They’d heard the police radio bands. And they overheard a lot of things the officers were saying at the crime scene, which accounts for them crazy stories in the press. Speculation. As well as the pictures everyone seen of the bodies out by the wire, and the one of Brother Belial in the back of the car talkin’ to hisself.

‘By morning there was sixty officers at the scene. Three of them were sick after they been out by the wire.’ Wearily, Conway shook his head. ‘Oh, it was chaos. Lot of evidence got destroyed, corrupted. Leads got missed. You had cops from Phoenix here, all of us up from Yuma. Site was not protected. This was a bigger deal than we were used to. People got excited.

‘But two homicide detectives come in the night from Phoenix. County coroner too. That settled things down. Preserved the rest of the crime scene. And when they was here, they confirmed what me and Jiminez knew right off: no sign of struggle on all five victims in the main building. Temple they called it. The homicide cops tied plastic bags over all the victims’ hands to preserve the shit that gets under fingernails. And we heard nothing more about cause of death till the autopsy in Phoenix.

‘The four bodies out by the wire were shot in the back with three different rifles as they ran. So Belial wasn’t the only shooter. We only found that out later too, from the medical examiners. Two of them with the throats cut at the first murder site had also shot these poor fools down. Brother Moloch and Brother Baal were the other shooters. Their prints was taken off the second and third rifles. So Moloch and Baal musta shot them four by the wire then juss sat right down to git their throats cut by Belial.

‘Victims by the fence all had defensive wounds across both hands. They said that about a week later too. We thought it was on account of the razor wire, but we were wrong. None of them got that high. They got their hands cut up on the ground, like they was fighting off whatever was biting at them. And it weren’t dogs. Or desert cougar. They was human teeth marks on their hands and faces and throats. An’ they just bled out. But the detectives never did find who did the biting, or what was used to make them marks if they weren’t bites. Homicide reckoned it was a weapon made from bones that the dogs run off with. I ain’t so sure.’

Conway had reached one of his natural pauses and took again to staring intently at the dead Ironwood trees. Kyle cleared his throat. ‘You must have seen a lot of unpleasant things in the line of duty, Mr Conway. You became a detective later in your career. You must have worked some cases that didn’t make sense. That were never solved. Inexplicable cases. But after forty years in law enforcement, and that’s a lot of experience, what were your instincts about what really happened here?’

‘Same as I told the others who been askin’ the same question over the years. But few want to hear it. They want some kind of supernatural mystery. UFOs, or some kind of witchcraft B.S. Something spectacular. But let me tell you something about police work, son. Police deal with the worst kind. In humanity. Make no mistake about that. Day in, day out. That’s what we do. And out here was a bunch of assholes. Crazy as hell. With some drugs and Bibles and guns and God only knows. And they was living in their own world. Not the one you or me, or most anyone sane would care for. No respect for any laws, but the ones their leader figured out to suit herself. All them poor fools got themselves killed just for knowin’ her. Sister Katherine turned this bunch of hippies around with all her lyin’ and cheatin’ and manipulation. They got high, they got paranoid, they were cut off. That Sister Katherine was the most indecent individual I ever heard of. You hear me? Indecent. Not a word I think I’ve ever used for anyone else. As bad to the bone as they come. And she had them living like savages out here. Throwing the hump into each other, losing their minds and living right next to a whole heap of firearms. What happened was inevitable. Cops in LA saw it before with old Charlie Manson. Cops someplace else will see it again. You don’t need no FBI or profiler to tell you different. They left the road, son, and they got chewed up.’

Off camera Kyle nodded. ‘But what about the mist that you and your partner saw. And the sound of the dogs?’

Conway shook his head. ‘Hell, they’s always loose ends, son. Desert can play tricks on your mind. Acoustics. Atmospherics. Lived out here all my life and this place is still full of surprises.’

Conway nodded to himself for a while, with his eyes screwed up so tightly they disappeared inside his fleshy sockets. ‘Footprints was more difficult to explain. Most got destroyed by patrolman boots. Me and Jiminez’s too. But that couldn’t be helped. You had so many men up here, running around, the footprint evidence mostly got wrecked. But the ones they found in the blood, SID photographed. Same out by the wire. And they was long. All bone.’

Kyle swallowed the lump in his throat to calm his voice. ‘The bite marks . . . on the victims? You said you didn’t believe they were made by a weapon.’

‘Or them claw marks on the shoulders of the dead. Then there was the smell of bad meat. And them pictures they found on the walls. We never figured it out. SID took photos of the wall of that building where me and Jiminez found the bodies. Never took much notice of the walls when I was up here that night, but I seen the photos once afterwards. Gone now. Sun and wind been on the wall near forty years. Musta faded them pictures away.’

Kyle’s temperature plummeted. His voice came out thin and high and strained; beside him, Dan’s shoulders stiffened. ‘Pictures? They were pictures, not symbols?’ Levine had not mentioned anything other than the daubing of occult and satanic symbols upon the walls of what was known as the temple, or the first murder scene. And the only pictures of the crime scene in Levine’s Last Days, and only in the third 1978 edition at that, featured aerial shots of the mine, the blood-stained planks of the temple building, the lumpen bodies out by the split-rail fence, and the haunted expression on Brother Belial’s gaunt, bearded face in the back of a police car, taken by an opportunistic press photographer on the night of the murders.

‘Hippies done drawings of something with no skin on it. Weren’t no trial so the photos are still in the police files. Never wanted to see them again myself. Twisted shit you ask me. Course, the press had been saying for a year the whole thing was a satanic ritual. With human sacrifice mixed in, once it reached “a critical point of frenzy”. Most folks still believe it went down that way.’ Conway winked. ‘But I reckon’ a whole bunch of them assholes got clean away. Belial, Moloch and Baal done some of the killing for sure. But they weren’t alone on that account. No, sir. Some more of them crackers musta lit out. Done some bitin’ and then split. World went mad out here a long time before me and Jiminez rolled up. That’s for sure.’

Dan looked out to the desert, where Conway and Kyle now stared. And together, they all felt the chill of twilight begin to prickle against their sun-baked arms and upon their tight faces.

Отправить