M Sellars: The Law Of Three

The man literally came to view himself as a modern day equivalent to the inquisitors of fifteenth century Europe, and just two months shy of one year ago, he had started his own series of Witch trials here in Saint Louis, Missouri. Far removed from medieval Europe in a geographical sense, yes, but he’d gone to great lengths to adhere to the tortures and execution methods of that long ago era as prescribed in the Malleus Maleficarum.

Roughly translated from the original Latin, Malleus Maleficarum meant the Hammer of the Witches. In fact, the “hammer” was a book-an instructional manual written by a pair of inquisitors by the names of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. In its day, it had been the one true and official guidebook for the persecution of accused Witches and heretics.

The language did not matter, however. Whether scribed in Latin or English, the tome was most definitely not my favorite piece of literature.

At the time of Porter’s original killing binge, I’d been asked by Ben to consult on the case because of a symbol found carved into the flesh of the first victim. My own spiritual path and studies of various religious practices had helped my best friend solve a crime before, so I guess I had seemed like a natural choice at the time.

The truth is that unbeknownst to me, I was already being sucked into it by an ethereal beckoning. Once I became directly involved on this plane, those forces came to bear with a vicious intensity. After that, it had all been downhill for me.

Much to Ben’s horror, I had even ended up becoming one of Porter’s prey; on a very foggy night, on a pedestrian bridge spanning the Mississippi River, February last, the self-proclaimed “Hand of God” had almost succeeded in making me his seventh victim.

“Yo, white man, you okay?” Ben asked.

It took a moment for the words to register, and I realized that I was just staring at him. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine. You were kinda zoned there for a minute.”

“Have you looked in a mirror?” I asked in retort.

“Yeah. Funny. Ya’know, I’m still not all that keen on you bein’ here, Row,” was his answer. “Felicity either.”

“Yeah, you’ve told me that several times already.”

“I’m serious,” he added.

“I know you are.”

“For one thing, it’s only been a coupl’a weeks.”

“I know.” I nodded assent as I spoke.

The pair of weeks he was referring to amounted to the period of time it had been since I had played a fairly significant role in the capture of a serial rapist. In and of itself a good thing, except that due to various factors in the investigation-both seen and unseen-I hadn’t been coming across as particularly stable lately. Of course, considering my gift-or curse, depending upon how you viewed it-it was the unseen that really caused the problems.

“And then there’s…” he began, but seemed to purposely allow his voice to die away on the wind. I noticed then that he was staring past me and at Felicity.

What he left unsaid was the fact that the rapist had come after her, actually managing to effect a kidnapping if for only a few short hours. Even though we’d stopped him before he could go any further, in her case, it made it only slightly less traumatic. In light of those events, I could certainly understand his concern.

I looked over at my wife and saw that she was still staring upward, oblivious to our exchange. “I know, Ben. Believe me, I know.”

“You know, Rowan, we set you two up in that apartment for a reason.”

The point he was trying to make was simple: Porter was going to be after me, no two ways about it, and my friend didn’t want me out in the open.

Of course, if your aim is to kill Witches, you might as well go after the real thing, and I definitely made no bones about being just that. Considering everything that had gone on in my life over the past couple of years, I was just about as far “out of the broom closet,” so to speak, as one could be. Therefore, I was not very hard to accuse. I had already admitted it in public-which, by the way, Porter had been sure to remind me of as he pronounced my condemnation and attempted to throw me over the side of a bridge with a noose around my neck.

Thankfully, much of that night had now become a blur. I still had nightmares about it and probably always would, but they were finally starting to fade into two-dimensional representatives of what they had once been. Dulled and flattened, they were much easier to take than the full-blown, Technicolor reenactments. Still, I was looking forward to a future when they would be visited upon me with less frequency.

I knew that day wouldn’t come as long as Porter was free.

Of the things I recalled clearly from that night, I knew that in my bid to escape I had shot him. I definitely remembered pulling the trigger, and there was even a blood spatter at the scene that provided physical evidence that I’d hit him. Nevertheless, when the police arrived, there was no body to be found.

No lifeless remains.

No hard and fast proof of his demise.

I had blacked out at almost the same instant the handgun had discharged, so I was no help in the eyewitness department. At the time, Ben had been convinced that Porter had fallen from the bridge to a certain death in the icy river below. The other members of the Major Case Squad on the scene concurred.

For them, it was all over but the paperwork-one of my friend’s favorite cliches and one that I’d heard him quip several times before.

But for me… Well, I was the proverbial odd man out. I held the one dissenting opinion in their clutch of optimism. Something in the back of my head told me that Porter was still alive, that the wound I’d inflicted was not so grievous as to take his life, and that he had disappeared into the fog-not the water. That inkling had eventually become an issue of extreme contention between Ben and me-to the point where I finally just kept my nagging intuition to myself.

Well, for the most part anyway.

Unfortunately, when all was said and done, I was the one with the correct answer to the sixty-four thousand dollar question: Eldon Andrew Porter was alive and still just as demented-if not more so-than before. It had merely taken him ten months to come out of hiding.

Now that he had surfaced, I found myself wishing that I had been a better shot.

“It’s a bit of a climb,” the patrol officer ahead of us said over his shoulder. “We have to go up to the fourth floor, then over to the roof access.”

My eyes were still adjusting to the darkness inside the building as we climbed the debris-strewn concrete stairs. The faint nasal bite of urine, both stale and fresh, joined in a pungent reek with feces and rotting trash to foul the gelid air.

“Careful there,” he warned, directing the beam of his flashlight on a crumbling step.

We picked our way around the hazard, single file-Felicity in front of me and Ben bringing up the rear.

“There’re a lot of homeless that crash here, what with the ministry across the street handing out free lunches and all,” the officer continued, offering up an explanation for the background stench. “Actually smells quite a bit worse over at the freight elevator shaft.”

“Any of ‘em in here when you arrived?” Ben asked.

“No, not when I got here,” he answered. “Stockton was first on the scene though.”

“He up there?”

“No, he’s the green one downstairs tossing his cookies.”

“Friggin’ wunnerful,” Ben spat with more than just a note of sarcasm. “He say if he saw anyone?”

“Just the dead guy.”

Ben grunted his displeasure before moving on to his next question, “Who’s runnin’ the scene?”