SEVENTEEN

PHOENIX, ARIZONA. 20 JUNE 2011. 7 P.M.

Retired homicide detective Hank Sweeney rested arms like fire logs covered in mouse fur on his polished desktop. A gold watch with a thick bracelet glinted in the thickets of white hair grown to the top of his freckled hands. He’d worn a centenary tie for the interview, upon which Dan had clipped a microphone. On the wall behind the shiny block of pink flesh and stubborn square features that formed the detective’s head and thick neck, there were four framed commendations, three medals, two photographs of him wearing US Airborne Cavalry uniform as a younger man, and three separate pictures featuring him in a police dress uniform receiving medals. On the surrounding walls, there were two antique Winchester rifles, a holed and faded regimental flag, and crossed cavalry sabres.

The cool, bright house around his vast study had the dimensions of a palace. Outside, sprinklers misted an impossibly green lawn, shorn as close and perfect as the retired cop’s hair when he was in uniform. Flowers burst into explosions of red, pink and purple excitement under the trellised walls and broad windows. Two cars, a Lexus and a black SUV, were parked on a driveway of bleached pink stone. Kyle left their rental in the street.

Somewhere inside the enormous ranch house a television murmured. Out back, they glimpsed a round swimming pool shimmering cobalt blue. Sweeney’s thick-haired wife looked like a story-book grandmother in a pink trouser suit. She made a plate of sandwiches an army could have marched on for a month. A water butt of homemade lemonade complemented the snack.

‘Ready when you are, sir,’ Kyle said, from where he stood to the left of Dan before Sweeney’s desk. Behind the camera, Dan grinned at Kyle’s awkward use of ‘sir’.

Hank Sweeney cleared his throat, stared at the camera deadpan, making Kyle grateful he’d never sat across a table from Detective Sweeney in an interview room.

‘There were four principal detectives working under me on the Copper Mine Murders. Though up to ten in total worked the case in the first three months, it was primarily me running Detectives Hernandez, Riley and Salazar at the time of the murders, and thereafter.

‘And we were thorough. I don’t want you to imply, or give the impression, that we were a bunch of shit-kickers who made a cluster-fuck of the whole investigation.’

Dan coughed back a snigger and Kyle threw him a dark look.

‘Plenty have said as much in the past. And it would be a woeful inaccuracy to suggest the same all over again.’ Sweeney held up one thick furry forearm to mute Kyle, who tried to interject. ‘Now I thought I was done with the whole Last Days business, and have pretty much told anyone the same thing who’s done a retrospective of the case. But I owe Max. He flew out and built a pretty good picture of the Temple for us back in seventy-five. He started the whole goddamn thing out in England, so his testimony counted for a lot in our case.’

Kyle exchanged glances with Dan. Then clamped down at the flare of irritation at Max’s omission to mention his involvement in the original police investigation. An involvement that must have been discreet, because even the scurrilous Irvine Levine had never been downwind of it. As omissions go, it was unforgivable.

‘Sir, I can assure you my editorial stance is not to emboss a direction on your narration, but to capture your point of view as it stands. There is no agenda here from our side.’

‘That may well be, but when these interviews get cut about, and God knows what else, you movie fellas could make a fool out of Jesus Christ Almighty himself. So I’m going to trust you boys on this, on account of what I owe Max. So I want you to take a few things into consideration in your movie.’ Sweeney slapped a long finger into the palm of a hand to emphasize each of his points. ‘The First Homicide Investigation Progress Report ran to sixty-six pages. They had half that on the Manson La Bianca murders in LA for Christ sakes, and most of those boys down there in sixty-nine were good. And we all came from the ranks up here in Phoenix. All vets. We had experience. We knew what was what.’

Sweeney paused and lapped at the rim of his glass. ‘Me and Riley stayed around all night on July 10th. We were the ones who covered the bodies with the blankets we found in the back of the temple building when the coroner gave us the all-clear. We were in that investigation shit-deep from the get-go.

‘When the specialists arrived, on what was essentially our show by three a.m., the Latent Prints Section began dusting the mine. Took them four days to finish. Covered the whole place. Take out the superimposes and smudged prints from four hundred lifts and they only got thirty-four clear prints. Twenty-nine of them were accounted for by either the deceased or the survivors found at the mine on the night of 10 July 1975.

‘We then fingerprinted every interviewee we had extradited from California and New Mexico. Also ran the clean prints from the mine against fifteen thousand suspects in the State. All negative. We ran polygraphs on fifteen of the most recent runaways, who all bailed the Last Days in seventy-four. We ran MOs through the state CII. We looked real hard at the backgrounds of the victims. Even checked out the crackpot theories. Everything went into that report.’

‘Mr Sweeney. Can you tell us about the suspects you interviewed?’

‘You got till Christmas? I don’t. Folks were coming and going all the time in the early days. Seventy-three to seventy-four. Word spread right up to San Francisco about the Last Days. And we interviewed a shade over one hundred people in the first three months of the investigation. We had a bunch of runaways, and drifters, lot of mixed-up kids who’d passed through that mine, one time or another, since seventy-three. College drop-outs looking for a good time, drugs, pussy, or both. Hippies, bikers, petty criminals, parolees, you name it. We interviewed plenty of Hollywood types too, who hung out with Sister Katherine at her place in California. Musicians, actors. We called them down from LA.’

‘What impression did they give you about the cult at this stage, about life at the mine in 1974, the people you interviewed, the runaways?’

‘It didn’t suit most tastes once they got down there to see it for themselves. And those that weren’t plain crazy, pretty much told us the same thing. That Sister Katherine was running the show when they were there, but as an absentee. Most people at the mine who we interviewed never laid eyes on her, outside of the picture they hung up in every building. She was using all kinds and means of intimidation to get her way, and controlled through a kind of hierarchy she ran from her place out west. Through this group of nutjobs who called themselves The Seven. Was the same deal in France, and England, for those who cared to look. And we did. We were thorough.’ Sweeney paused again to sip his lemonade.

‘Numbers were going down at the mine in the summer of seventy-four. Lot of people didn’t fancy handing over their money and possessions any more. Others found the Bible-thumping too much. Plenty got freaked out by the members who got into it in a heavier way. Like this Seven. Towards the end in seventy-five, it pretty much came down to a hardcore of members getting into a very bad scene. Moloch, Baal, Chemos, Erebus and Belial being the biggest pinheads. Everyone else still living out there was pretty much a prisoner. Some of the girls had kids there and wouldn’t leave them behind. So they stuck it out.’

‘What about the last months of 1975? What was your impression of the group preceding the Night of Ascent?’

‘Around twenty people were in place at the mine in the final months. Taking it to “the next level” as Brother Belial put it. Sister Katherine was losing control in the last year too. Someone said they heard Sister Katherine was like a little girl anyway by the end. Her brain was basically mush. I mean, Christ, she even ordered Belial to kill her. Paranoid as hell about a police raid, the FBI, the CIA. There’d been a libel case against the journalist, Levine, which she’d lost. And she’d been sending funds everywhere: Switzerland, Costa Rica, South Africa. In case she needed to make a run for it. Though she needn’t have worried. She wasn’t on any kind of radar. But she was an addict. Her psychosis was full-blown by the final year. And a real shit-storm was gathering that we knew nothing about.

‘People were leaving every month or so, right through the beginning of seventy-five. When they could. Before they built the fence. That rancher next door used to drive the runaways into Yuma, to the bus station. And the only members we ever interviewed, who were at the mine closest to the time of the murders, escaped about two months before the night of July 10th. Two girls and their babies.’

‘Martha Lake and Bridgette Clover.’

‘That’s them. Pin-ups for the newsmen. And the closest thing we had to star witnesses in the case had there ever been a trial. They came back to Arizona, scared for their lives, under police protection, and they pretty much confirmed that there were around twenty people left at the mine the night they lit out. We took fifteen out of that mine. Nine dead, and six living. The living accounted for the five kids and Brother Belial. What happened to the other five members Blake and Clover remembered being out there, we never traced. Brother Adonis, Brother Ariel, Sister Urania, Sister Hannah, and Sister Priscilla. They must have escaped and vanished or been killed and buried in the desert like Martha Lake always claimed. Almost all the interviews we took from the other hundred interviewees were discarded or forgotten about soon after.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Well for one thing it was a bunch of hippy B.S. about voices in their heads and the sort of evil-spirit baloney you’d expect from a bunch of wackos and junkies and shitbirds. People claimed they were possessed. Others said they could fly or some crap and look down on their bodies from the air. Some said their souls had been taken to hell and back.’

If there had been a wall nearby, Kyle would have leaned against it.

‘And we had the killer, we had the weapons. A confession from Belial, more or less, and we pieced together the rest from the ballistic and forensic evidence. We had a good partial picture of what went down that night pretty quickly. After about a week, in fact. Our main suspects were The Seven. Four of them were found dead inside the temple. Called themselves Moloch, Baal, Chemos and Erebus. And there was Belial. Two more of The Seven were in San Francisco the night of the murders, and both had solid alibis. They were female: Sister Gehenna and Sister Bellona. Claimed they was setting up a business for Sister Katherine.’

Kyle frowned, and worded his question carefully: the question Max was very keen to have him ask in the production notes. ‘There’s always been some conjecture that Belial, Moloch and Baal did not commit the murders alone. Particularly on the bodies that were found grouped together at the fence.’

‘For sure. But the other two shooters were dead. Belial killed them. So we couldn’t ask them squat. We took prints off the other two hunting rifles that were used to immobilize or kill the four runners by the fence. They matched Brother Moloch and Brother Baal, who were found deceased at the first murder scene, in the temple building. It was all in the first coroner’s report. As to any evidence of any other suspects in the murders, we had nothing. Well, let me put it this way, the First Investigation Report was sixty-six pages long. The First Progress Report on further suspects was one page long, and there was still a lot of white space on it, if you get my drift.’

‘But did you ever have a hunch that others were involved in the murders on the Night of Ascent?’

‘We never got a single useful lead on the “biters” as we called them. And we never found the weapon we suspected Belial, Moloch and Baal used after shooting the escapees who tried to get over the fence.’

‘The bodies. What kind of clues did the bodies give you about how the four people died by the fence?’

‘When the autopsy was done on the victims in Phoenix, there were four deputy coroners in that room. Two medical examiners from out of state were drafted in too. Took ’em three days to complete the examinations. They were thorough. Fluoroscopy identified more slugs and fragments in the legs of two victims out by the wire that corresponded with the picture of Belial, Moloch and Baal shooting them as they tried to escape. The ballistics matched the three rifles used that night. Evidence was watertight.

‘And we knew from the autopsy that all of the victims had ingested large amounts of drugs. MDA. Forensic chemist with SID took blood samples out at the mine, four hours after the patrolmen arrived. They ran the Ouchterlony Test up in Phoenix to see what was animal, what was human in the bloodstains, because of the dogs that had been running around. Most of it had dried out by the time SID was there, so it was damn-near impossible to determine subtype. But the chemist took over a hundred samples. All human. And all we had, that we could use, matched the blood types of the deceased at the mine exactly.’

‘What about the wounds consistent with claw and teeth marks on the victims by the fence?’

Sweeney cleared his throat. ‘I was coming to that.’

‘Sorry. Please go on.’

‘We had three tooth fragments, real dirty, extracted by the medical examiner on two victims, and one fingernail in a third victim. We ran tests on them and they were human, not canine or feline. The press claimed the dogs out there were trained as attack dogs. And that the victims who got cold feet and ran for the fence were shot, before the dogs then went in and finished the job. To be honest, that was such a loose end we were mostly happy for people to just believe that, because we had nothing better.’

‘The police stated such in an early press conference.’

‘Because, in the first week, we were sure that’s what happened. There was a lot of public pressure on us to make arrests. To bring in new suspects. No one believed Belial could have killed them all. Or that the five in the temple had just kneeled down and gone out willingly in the way they actually did. Folks had gone into lockdown all over the state, and in LA, New Mexico. Terrified there was a crazy cult of devil-worshippers out for more blood. But a medical examiner ran some more tests after the press conference and speculated that the teeth fragments found in the deceased were from dead human teeth, like they’d come from human remains. Not from a living mouth. Same for the nail fragments. Must have been some kind of weapon made from bones. Which ruled out any other suspects being involved in the killing, then getting away. ’Cus dead men don’t walk.

‘The five members from Lake and Clover’s testimony, who were never traced, were also ruled out as suspects: Brother Adonis, Brother Ariel, Sister Urania, Sister Hannah and Sister Priscilla. We never made the missing five as even being at the mine that night. We concluded they were all gone before 10 July.

‘So we sent the “dead” teeth and nail fragments down to the university in New Mexico for corroboration. An archaeologist dated them as being five hundred years old from the tests he ran. Which was pretty crazy, and started a lot of speculation on the job. So we concluded that the fragments originated from something Belial, Moloch and Baal had used to finish the deceased off with. Something we never found. And you ask me the same question in seventy-five and today, and I’ll tell you the same thing. Belial, Moloch and Baal shot the four victims at the fence, and then killed those who were still alive with some kind of relic, made of teeth and bone extracted from old but preserved human remains. Part of a ritual.’

‘Weapon? What kind of weapon fits that description though?’

‘The Last Days had other materials out there that should have been in a museum. We found other fragments at the scene that were dated to being five hundred years old. Fragments of clothing they must have brought out from France with them in seventy-two. Used like holy relics or something. We had part of a bishop’s hat. Can you believe that? And some kind of vestment, or smock. One shoe that was made in Holland during The Wars of Religion. And all in that room where we found Sister Katherine, beheaded. Best thing ever happened to that woman, you ask me.’

‘Brother Belial. You questioned him a number of times.’

‘Belial was shit-house crazy. Don’t be fooled into thinking otherwise. When we questioned him about the night of July 10th, over and over again, he only ever said the same thing. That the teeth and the nail and the cloth fragments belonged to the “old friends” or “Blood Friends”. When we asked him who they were, he would say, “They’re with us,” and he would look up like he could see someone on the ceiling of the interview room. He’d keep asking us to “turn out the lights and to open our eyes”. Usual gibberish that man was famous for.’

Kyle swallowed to get his voice together. ‘Levine ran some of the Belial interviews in his book, and his polygraph too, that were made available after the coroner’s inquest. Most people thought Levine faked them.’

‘He didn’t.’

‘But the murder weapon. The one that would have been made from teeth? Who could have removed it from the scene of the crime when Belial was the only adult found alive?’

‘I always had a hunch it was the dogs. That one of the dogs we never traced ran off with the missing murder weapon. Took it into the desert. The blood on it would have attracted scavengers, insects, you name it. Probably still out there. Be covered up by sand in no time. So, at the final press conference in September, we offered Belial as the sole living killer of the five deceased in the communal chapel, for which he would stand trial. Before their willing execution at his hands, Moloch and Baal assisted Belial in mortally wounding the four victims found by the fence with gun shots, before Belial, Moloch and Baal committed a final execution involving an unknown handheld weapon. Then Belial killed his confederates, Moloch and Baal, at their request, along with Katherine and the two others found at the first murder site: Brother Chemos and Brother Erebus. Belial never denied his participation. He claimed he was chosen for the honour by Sister Katherine for “a feast of old Friends”.’

Again the repetition of friends unnerved Kyle to the point of the muscles in his left leg going into involuntary quivers. ‘But the dogs? And the children? The mural? The mist? What did you make of it all?’

‘Unrelated to the actual murders as evidence, but part of the whole, excuse me, fucked-up picture we had to put together after the fact. The dogs just fled scared, and kept on running. They were wild anyway. And the noise of heavy gunfire would have sent them off into the desert. Patrolmen who first arrived at the scene, and the neighbour at the ranch, both confirmed they heard dogs in the distance after the gunfire.’

‘The pictures, drawings on the walls?’

‘The amount of drugs they were ingesting explained the twisted murals on the walls of the chapel.’

‘But the smoke . . . in the air . . . the atmosphere changed.’

‘Maybe they had been burning something on that fire pit too, like sulphur, to produce the tainted smoke. The murders were part of a ritual after all. But we never investigated the smoke. What could it possibly show us? It was smoke, from a fire or flare.’

‘What about motive? To commit suicide. On this scale. In this way.’

‘Beggars belief, don’t it? But as to motive we had various scenarios that all fit the profile of the case. So the right motive was one of those we had, or maybe bits of them all. Who could we ask? Belial was crazy up until the day he died, and only one of them kids we pulled out of there ever spoke again as far as I know. The only one who wasn’t a mute. The “clean kid” as we called him. He never spent much time at the mine. We know from eyewitnesses close to Sister Katherine’s mansion in California, that she and the “clean kid” mostly lived at the mansion up until two nights before the murders. She kinda adopted him. Or, more precisely, stole him from his mother, Priscilla, who we never traced. The other kids we found had also been separated from their parents out at that mine. Sister Katherine’s whole schtick was to break up families, couples, friends, you name it, right from the beginning of the organization. Max told us. No one in that cult could have any attachment to anyone but the leader, Katherine. Not even an itty-bitty baby. Was how she kept control. Divide and rule. If you can’t love me you will fear me. Textbook.

‘So we concluded that Sister Katherine and her merry band were killed by each other. Either as a result of infighting, drug psychosis, or a suicide pact. Maybe a bit of all three, you ask me. Papers called it a satanic ritual involving human sacrifice once it reached a critical point. They said the same thing about the Manson killings in the early days. Times were different back then. Changing for the worse, but most of the country was a whole lot more innocent than it is now. Another writer claimed it was ‘a contest for leadership that went wrong’. Sweeney shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘Could have been. Only thing we can be thankful for is that they had enough humanity left over to spare the lives of the children. They all went into the system, into care. They were fucked up. Four of them couldn’t even speak.’

‘Which leaves me, and anyone else still familiar with the details of the case, with one final mystery.’

‘And I bet I know what you’re going to ask.’

Kyle managed a smile, but kept silent.

‘Footprints?’

Kyle only nodded. If he spoke he knew his voice would be hoarse and quivery.

Sweeney winked at Kyle. ‘Far as I’m concerned, that’s one of only two features of the case we never satisfactorily resolved. Fifteen years later, I went back over the case. They got a whole room in Phoenix just for the files on the Blue Oak Copper Mine case. Took me a year to get through it again. But I still have no explanation for the footprints. We found them in two areas of the crime scene. Around the murder victims in both locations. Three sets of prints by the fence, one inside the temple building. Most of the prints were ruined by the ruckus up there when the police arrived at the scene. I reckon you had eighty pairs of feet up there at one point, running through the sand and blood in the dark. So maybe someone had something on the soles of their shoes that made those mystery footprints look like there was no flesh on them. Who can say?’

Kyle cleared his throat. ‘You said there were two features of the case you never resolved. What was the second?’

‘Blood spatter at the scene was more alarming than the footprints, you ask me. There was plenty of blood there, in that temple building and out by the wire. But not enough. Part of me even wondered if the victims in the chapel were killed elsewhere and brought back to the mine afterwards, because of the lack of blood at the scene. Every victim lost a lot of blood. Nearly every drop. Autopsy proved it. Me and my partners reckoned it was still inside the victims’ bodies once the hearts stopped pumping it out, or it had run between the floorboards of the temple. Coroner and medical examiners looked at jugular veins cut through. Looked at a body with no head. They guessed they’d all bled out at the crime scene. And we never put our heads together at the time of the medical examinations and autopsies. Why would we?’

‘So where was the blood?’

‘Some splatter pattern was found on the roof of the temple building, at the end of the first week of the active crime scene. No one had thought to look up there before. Arterial spray it looked like. But if it was, how’d it get up there? From one angle it looked to me like someone was slaughtered in the air. Which is out of the question. That would have been impossible. Belial never actually told us where anyone was killed, or how. But that maniac was covered in their blood. Looking back, I wonder if he drank some of it. Maybe even a lot of it after he cut their throats.’ Sweeney paused.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘They’d done it before. Eaten one of their own. To keep them among the Brothers and Sisters. Lake and Clover confirmed it, though they never took part. Someone known as Sister Fina died of natural causes out there in late seventy-four, and The Seven ate bits of her from the neck down. Cooked her and passed her out on bread. So Belial ha d form. He was no stranger to ingesting what he called “the mana of his people”. When Belial was killed in the State Prison Complex up in Florence, someone chewed into his throat and wrists too.’

‘They never found his killer though. Levine suggested the guards let the other inmates kill him.’

‘Horseshit. They had him up there as a category five prisoner. Highest security. Because they had a lethal injection and a gas chamber waiting for him if he’d ever gone to trial. He was all cut up around the wrists and neck when they found him after a riot in a power cut. But there were no defence wounds on his body. Ask me, he ran his mouth off to some of the other lunatics up at Florence about drinking blood. Then some of them thought it seemed like a good idea and probably did to him what he did to his hippy friends out at that mine. He was killed in the rec room. Just let himself get rubbed out.

‘And remember the evidence. It was already pretty much an open and shut case. We had the murder weapons, or all of them but one, and we had the killers: Belial, Moloch and Baal. We had enough for a conviction. There were still plenty of anomalies, and there wasn’t a man on that case who didn’t believe for a long time that someone else was involved. Some still do. But we had nothing to prove that. No witnesses, no clues beside some crazy footprints, a missing weapon made from bones the dogs almost certainly ran off with, and a lack of blood.’

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