Tess Gerritsen - The Mephisto Club

“No, sir. Windows were shut tight. And the realtor swears she always locks the front door when she leaves.”

“Who has a key?”

“Well, she does. And she says it never leaves her office.”

“How old is the lock?”

“Ah, geez, I don’t know. It’s probably twenty years old.”

“I assume the owner has a key, too.”

“She hasn’t been back to Purity in years. I hear she’s living somewhere in Europe. We haven’t been able to reach her.” Jurevich nodded at the sheet-draped furniture. “There’s a thick layer of dust on everything. You can see no one’s lived here for a while. Damn shame, too. A house this solidly built was meant to last a century, and this one just sits here empty. The caretaker comes up once a month to check on it. That’s how he found the body. He saw Sarah Parmley’s rental car parked out front, and then he found the front door unlocked.”

“Have you checked out the caretaker?” asked Jane.

“He’s not a suspect.”

“Why not?”

“Well, to start off with, he’s seventy-one years old. And he just got out of the hospital three weeks ago. Prostate surgery.” Jurevich looked at Sansone. “See what men have to look forward to?”

“So we’ve got a number of unanswered questions,” said Sansone. “Who unlocked the front door? Why did the victim drive up here in the first place?”

“The house is for sale,” said Maura. “Maybe she saw the realty sign. Maybe she drove up out of curiosity.”

“Look, it’s all speculation,” said Jurevich. “We’ve talked and talked about this, and we just don’t know why she came up here.”

“Tell us more about Sarah Parmley,” said Sansone.

“She grew up in Purity. Graduated from the local high school. But like too many other kids, she couldn’t find anything to keep her here, so she moved out to California and stayed. The only reason she came back to town was because her aunt died.”

“From what?” asked Sansone.

“Oh, it was an accident. Took a tumble down the stairs and broke her neck. So Sarah flew back for the memorial service. She stayed at a motel near town and checked out the day after the funeral. And that’s the last time anyone saw her. Until Saturday, when the caretaker found her car here.” He looked up at the stairs. “I’ll show you the room.”

Jurevich led the way. Halfway up the stairs, he halted and pointed to the wall. “This is the first one we noticed,” he said. “This cross, here. It’s the same symbol he cut all over her body. Looks like it’s drawn in some kind of red chalk.”

Maura stared at the symbol and her fingers went numb inside her gloves. “This cross is upside down.”

“There are more of them upstairs,” said Jurevich. “A lot more.” As they continued toward the second-floor landing, other crosses appeared on the wall. At first it was just a sparse scattering of them. Then, in the gloomy upstairs hallway, the crosses multiplied like an angry infestation massing along the corridor, swarming toward a doorway.

“In here, it gets bad,” said Jurevich.

His warning made Maura hesitate outside the room. Even after the others had walked through, she paused on the threshold, bracing herself for whatever awaited her on the other side of the doorway.

She stepped through, into a chamber of horrors.

It was not the dried lake of blood on the floor that captured her gaze; it was the handprints covering every wall, as though a multitude of lost souls had left their bloody testament as they’d passed through this room.

“These prints were all made with the same hand,” said Jurevich. “Identical palm prints and ridge lines. I don’t think our killer was stupid enough to leave his own.” He looked at Jane. “I’m willing to bet these were all made with Sarah Parmley’s severed hand. The one that turned up at your crime scene.”

“Jesus,” murmured Jane. “He used her hand like some kind of rubber stamp.”

With blood as his ink, thought Maura, her gaze traveling the walls. How many hours did he spend in this room, dipping the hand in that pool of blood, pressing it to the wall like a child with a stamp kit? Then her gaze focused on the nearest wall, on writing that had been obscured by the overlying handprints. She moved closer, staring at the words that tracked across the wall. It was Latin, and the same three words were repeated again and again. She followed the text as it circled the room in an unbroken line, continuing through corners, like a serpent coiling ever more tightly around them.

Abyssus abyssum invocat abyssus abyssum invocat abyssus abyssum invocat…

Their meaning suddenly dawned on her and she took a step back, chilled to the marrow.

“ Hell calls to Hell, ” Sansone murmured. She had not noticed that he’d moved right beside her.

“Is that what it means?” asked Jane.

“That’s the literal meaning. It also has another.”

“ Hell calls to Hell sounds ominous enough.”

“ Abyssus abyssum invocat is a saying that dates back at least a thousand years. It means, ‘ One evil deed leads to another .’”

Maura stared at the words. “He’s telling us this is only the beginning. He’s just getting started.”

“And these crosses”-Sansone pointed to a hornet’s nest of them, clustered on one wall, as though massing for attack-“they’re all upside down. It’s a mockery of Christianity, a rejection of the church.”

“Yeah. We’ve been told it’s a satanic symbol,” said Jurevich.

“These words and crosses were written here first,” said Maura, her gaze on the rivulets of blood that had trickled down the wall, partly obscuring the stream of Latin. She read the splatters, saw the arcing droplets left by arterial spray. “Before he killed her, before he slashed her neck, he took the time to decorate these walls.”

“The question is,” said Jurevich, “did he write these words while she was lying here, waiting to die? Or was the room already prepared as a killing place before the victim even arrived?”

“And then he lured her here?”

“There’s clearly evidence of preparation.” Jurevich pointed to the wooden floor, where blood had dried in a frozen pool. “You see the nails there? He came equipped with a hammer and nylon cord. That’s how he immobilized her. He tied the cord around her wrists and ankles. Nailed the knots to the floor. Once she was restrained, he could have taken his time.”

Maura thought of what had been carved into Sarah Parmley’s flesh. Then she looked up at the same symbols drawn on the walls in red ocher. A crucifix, turned upside down. Lucifer’s cross.

Sansone said, “But how would he lure her up here? What could possibly have drawn her to this house?”

“We know that a call came in, to her motel room,” said Jurevich. “It was the day she checked out. The motel desk clerk transferred it to her room.”

“You didn’t mention that,” said Jane.

“Because we’re not sure it’s significant. I mean, Sarah Parmley grew up in this town. She probably knew a lot of people here, people who’d call her after her aunt’s funeral.”

“Was it a local call?”

“Gas station pay phone, in Binghamton.”

“That’s a few hours away.”

“Right. Which is one reason we discount it as coming from the killer.”

“Is there another reason?”

“Yes. The caller was a woman.”

“The motel clerk’s sure about that? It was two weeks ago.”

“She doesn’t budge. We’ve asked her several times.”

Sansone said, “Evil has no gender.”

“And what are the chances that a woman did this?” said Jane, pointing to the wall, to the bloody handprints.