I assumed that Noah Wolflaw must have murdered them. He’d bought Roseland from the second owner, the reclusive South American mining heir, in 1988, twenty-four years earlier. If this macabre collection had come with the property, Wolflaw would have called the police and would have been eager to have the cadavers removed.
Considering that the riding ring and the exercise yard for horses had been weed-choked for many years, considering that the strangely spotless stables offered no speck of evidence that animals had been kept there in several decades, I believed the bareback rider and her stallion must have been murdered many years before Wolflaw purchased the place. Chef Shilshom had seemed to confirm the long absence of horses from Roseland.
But when the rider’s spirit led me around this crypt to the last of the thirty-four bodies—more likely the first in order of death—it proved to be hers. The condition of the cadaver argued that her spirit must have departed it less than an hour previously. If this was Wolflaw’s work, then there had been at least one stallion stabled in Roseland after he purchased the estate.
Hers was the only body that wasn’t naked, and it wore the long white silk-and-lace nightgown in which her spirit manifested. Of the thirty-four, she alone had not been tortured, which seemed to confirm that she indeed had been the first to be murdered and that her killer had acted on that one occasion in the heat of passion; thereafter, he chose his victims with patient calculation, abusing them sexually and physically in an almost ritual fashion before finally taking their lives.
The shock of this discovery diminished slowly, but the horror grew moment by moment. In my short life, I have seen many detestable things, and I have been called upon to do repugnant things that have for a while broken me. But nothing in my experience had weighed upon me with greater power than the grievous scene in that subcellar of the mausoleum.
For a while, I had to close my eyes to such abundant evidence of evil, as if to look upon it too long would invite infection.
My legs felt weak. I swayed in my self-imposed darkness. Locked my knees. Steadied myself.
A comforting hand on my shoulder had to be that of the spirit rider. I am able to feel the touch of the lingering dead, though usually they don’t attempt to reassure me.
A life of supernatural encounters has put a keener edge on my imagination, which has been sharp since birth. The rider’s hand had been on my shoulder mere seconds when I became convinced that it wasn’t she who touched me but instead someone or something with less sympathetic intentions.
Opening my eyes, I discovered that the hand belonged, after all, to my spirit companion. I held her gaze for a moment and then met the stare of her seated corpse.
I am amazed that there are still nights when I sleep well.
The bullet wounds in the cadaver’s chest were hideous. I didn’t want to dwell on them.
Nevertheless, after a hesitation, I knelt beside the body and touched the gore-stained nightgown to confirm what I suspected. Yes. The blood that had soaked into the fabric was still tacky—and it looked wet and liquid in the wounds, which made no sense.
The murderer had staged the victims in his obscene collection as if they were dolls with which he’d played and which he discarded when he grew bored with them. They sat with their legs splayed, their slender arms limp at their sides, palms turned up as if in supplication.
Except for the woman in the nightgown—which was rucked up past her knees—his other dolls were accessorized with nothing more than the instruments of their destruction. Some had been strangled with neckties, which were still cinched so deeply in the flesh of their throats that the murderer must have been not merely enraged but in the ferocious grip of a sour and festered malignity, implacable rancor. Some had been stabbed two or three times, others much more often, and in each case the knife remained in the last wound administered.
In the case of the thirty-three who were naked, on the floor between their spread legs were hand-printed index cards, evidently to assist the killer’s memory. As a little girl will name her dolls, so each victim in this sick man’s collection was named, although I assumed these were the names with which they had lived.
Reluctantly, I went to one knee before the second corpse, trying not to look at her, to focus only on the index card. The killer had printed TAMMY VANALETTI and beside the name had drawn four neat little stars, which perhaps suggested how much he had enjoyed his time with her.
My revulsion didn’t abate, nor my sadness. But now a dark fog of anger, which doesn’t come easily to me, rose as if from the marrow in my bones and spread through my inner landscape.
Each of these women was someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s friend, perhaps someone’s mother. They weren’t toys. What he’d done to them was not a sport that could be scored with a system of stars. Precious in and of themselves, every one of them might also have been as precious to someone as Stormy had been to me.
Anger is a violent emotion, vindictive, and as dangerous to he who is driven by it as to anyone on whom it is turned. If anger is personal and selfish—and it usually is—it clouds your thinking and therefore puts you at risk. I had to remain clearheaded to deal with what would come next. I needed to keep Stormy Llewellyn out of this, to take this cruelty less personally, to trade anger for righteous indignation, which despises evil acts solely because they are evil. Anger is a red mist through which you see the world, but wrath is clarity. The angry man shoots too often from the hip and misses his target or hits the wrong one, while a wrathful man proceeds without malice but with a thirst for justice.
A date was printed under Tammy Vanaletti’s name. It couldn’t be her birthday because it was only eight years earlier, and she looked to be in her early twenties. The most logical conclusion was that he had murdered her on that date.
Tammy had been stabbed. The blood on the lips of her wounds appeared fresh.
I had no idea how this could be the case more than eight years after her murder. But I sensed that the part of my mind that never slept or rested was, like a loom, weaving all the seemingly disparate threads of Roseland into a fabric.
I went corpse to corpse, reading each card but not touching it. The date of each death was nearer the present than the one before it. Ginger Harkin, the most recent victim, had been killed less than a month earlier.
Of the thirty-three whose death dates were provided, all had been killed in the past eight years. The periodicity of the killer’s murderous urge seemed to be less than three months. Four victims per annum, year after year, with now and then an extra.
This much murder couldn’t be called a homicidal impulse or even a psychotic compulsion. This was the man’s work, his occupation, his calling.
When I turned again to the nameless spirit, I said, “Was it Noah Wolflaw who killed you?”
After a hesitation, she nodded: Yes.
“Were you his lover?”
Another hesitation. Yes.
Before I could ask a third question, she raised one hand to display an engagement ring and wedding band, which of course were not real but only the idea of the nuptial jewelry that she’d once worn in this world.
“His wife?”
Yes.
“You want him brought to justice.”
She nodded vigorously and placed both hands over her heart, as if to say that justice was her fondest desire.
“I’ll bring him down. I’ll see him in jail.”
She shook her head and drew one index finger across her throat in the universal gesture that meant Kill him.
“I’ll probably have to,” I said. “He won’t go easily.”
Twenty-five
THE LINGERING DEAD DON’T ALWAYS PROVIDE HELPFUL information, and even those who want to assist me are hampered by their psychology in death as in life. In fact, because they are lost between this world and the next, their reason is often bent by fear, by confusion, and perhaps by other emotions too complex for me to imagine. As a result, they’re likely at times to behave irr
ationally, hindering me when they mean only to help, turning away from me when they should turn toward.
Eager to get as much from Wolflaw’s murdered wife as I could before she might become less cooperative, I said, “There’s a boy in the house. Just as you suggested.”
She nodded vigorously. Her eyes welled with tears, because even spirits can weep, although their tears do not water anything in this world.
Because the boy had said that he’d been taken from someplace and that he wanted to be taken back, I had assumed he was no relation to Noah Wolflaw and didn’t belong in Roseland. But the woman’s tears forced me to reconsider my assumption.
“Your son.”
Yes.
“Is Noah Wolflaw his father?”
After another hesitation and a look of frustration, she replied in the affirmative. Yes.