Joe Lansdale - Mucho Mojo

The other boy was a nice-looking kid with a couple of front teeth missing. I looked at those photographs hard. I wanted those kids to be real, not just reflections on colored paper. I thought about the other kids. No photographs available. While they were living, no one had bothered. It was as if their existence was of no importance, no need for a matter of record.

We studied the material for a while. There was a lot of it, but it didn’t say much. There were notes from the cops and detectives. Hanson had a few notes of his own. The obvious thing was that one child a year had come up missing from the East Side for the past eight years and had not been accounted for.

I said, “See any patterns?”

“All boys,” Leonard said. “All about nine or ten. All of them noted as not having the best of home life, and in some cases, not being reported missing until some time after their initial disappearance. Part of that might have been the parents, and part of it may have been the sorry attitude of the police force.”

“What about when they were killed?”

Leonard studied the contents of the folder. After a while he said, “I’ll be damned. Every one but one came up missing in August. Corey Williams was reported last September.”

“Before you woke up, I did some figuring on that,” I said. “Taking in the fact a lot of the reports came in late, they were probably all kidnapped sometime in the early part of the last week of August. Personally, I think that’s a little too big a coincidence.”

“This is August,” Leonard said.

“Yep. And week after next is the last week of the month.”

“So what’s with the last week of August?”

“I don’t know. It sounds like a pattern, but I also got to thinking about the smell that was in that grave. That’s fresh, or seems to be. So maybe all this late-August stuff is just coincidence and he got started a little early this year, but I don’t think so. Stink could be due to slow disintegration. Soil like that, sometimes it happens, something gets buried just right.

“Another thing that jumps out at me is all the children were illegitimate. No fathers. The mothers were all teenagers. Couple of the kids had been shuffled around to foster homes, had been in some kind of trouble almost before they were out of diapers. Little robberies. Drugs. Stuff kids ought not to even be thinking about. See the pattern?”

“I don’t know that’s a pattern,” Leonard said. “Not the way you mean, anyway. Just shows they’re the type of kids to be at risk.”

“Well, we’ve already got our good Reverend in mind here, due to the church connections, coupons, recycling – which explains all those goddamn newspapers Uncle Chester had. And if you remember, Fitzgerald really had a hard-on for illegitimate children. Do you recall anything he said that stuck with you?”

“It all stuck with me… Yeah, when he was talking about the mothers of illegitimate children, he said the mothers had produced baby boys. He didn’t say girls, or children. He said baby boys without fathers. Something like that.”

“It didn’t mean anything to me then,” I said, “not really, but I caught it. What I think is, we got a religious nut serial killer. He’s somehow tied his religion in with his sex and power urges. I don’t know, maybe something that happened to him in his childhood.”

“Shit, Hap, I don’t give a damn what happened to him in his childhood. I mean, he got fucked by his next-door neighbor who was a scout leader, I’m sorry for the kid he was, but for the man he is, I don’t give a shit. He made his own choice.”

“I don’t know some people have a choice, if certain things happen to them.”

“Cancer does what it does because it’s got no choice, but I get a cancer, I’m not going to psychoanalyze the little bastard. I want it cut out. This guy’s a cancer.”

“Even so, if we understand what drives him, we got a better chance of nailing his ass. Obviously, he doesn’t care for illegitimacy. Gets him worked up.”

“OK, Hap, I’ll play. He’s got a thing for boys, so he was maybe nine, ten, when he was raped by a man. Good guess?”

“Probably a person of authority.”

“A preacher like himself? That what you’re driving at? Something that links God, religion, sex, and abuse together.”

“If Fitzgerald was illegitimate, I wonder if he knew who his father was and what his father did for a living? Preach, maybe? And think about the position Fitzgerald’s in. It’s perfect. He’s trusted. He has access to children. He has all these youth programs. Kids like the ones in this file, neglected, probably not wanted, they’d be raw meat for this wolf. And I think this guy’s a psychotic, not a sociopath. Or he’s both. He gets off on the power of controlling the kids, and he thinks he’s doing God’s will. He controls them to some extent through positive services. Baseball, soccer, what have you, but-”

“It’s not enough.”

“For certain illegitimate children, it isn’t enough. The ones that maybe remind him of himself at that age. If he can control them, destroy them, he can control his past, destroy it. At least for a year at a time.”

“But why a year? We’re talking a pretty perfect pattern here.”

“I don’t know.”

“OK, Hap. When he was nine or ten, he was raped by a man, his father maybe, who was a preacher. Or he was raped by a preacher. If not a preacher, someone in authority he trusted. It warped him. And he’s a religious nut. That your track?”

“Yep.”

“OK. He’s tied fanaticism in with his deviance. That’s why there’s a page of Psalms stuck in each of the porno mags we found. The two are linked with him. Or maybe a part of him knows what he’s doing is evil, and somehow the Psalms consecrate it in his mind. Say he’s a psychotic. That he’s killing for God. Any of that’s true, it doesn’t take us one whit closer to nailing the bastard. Let’s just try and put together the hard evidence, and you can play Freud on your own time. Come on. What have we got?”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “I don’t know it’s such hard evidence. But here’s what I think we’ve got, and what I speculate. Your Uncle Chester and Illium were friends, Illium worked with the church. That’s why Uncle Chester’s poor addled mind thought the coupons were important. He was trying to point a finger at the church. The painting led us to the Hampstead place, and what’s under it. We’ve already established what the book’s connection was.”

“Illium,” Leonard said. “And maybe with the title of the book, he was trying to give us the nature of our criminal. Dracula ain’t nothing compared to this guy.”

“I think your uncle and Illium, probably because of something Illium saw at the church, got onto Fitzgerald. Perhaps the way he dealt with the boys in the programs there, the illegitimate ones especially. And somehow Chester and Illium connected him to the Hampstead place. Could be the good Reverend makes a pilgrimage up there to worship the water stain or something, Illium followed, watched from hiding. Fitzgerald went home to memorize his sermon, and Uncle Chester and Illium poked around and found the bodies. Six of them anyway. I bet the other two are up there.”

“So my uncle took one of the bodies and hid it here while he and Illium did their own investigation. Probably in case the old boy moved the remains.”

“That’s where they screwed up. They should have gone to the cops.”

“Yeah,” Leonard said, “and by not going, the body being found here, it just helped give the Reverend a way out.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Your uncle loses his memory, dies, so he’s out of the picture. Add Illium into the equation, dead at the bottom of his pond with porno mags and kid’s clothes on the couch, and the Reverend isn’t going to look as ripe for the part as he might have back then. So we have a lot of circumstantial evidence. Is it enough?”