The Dying Hour (27 page)

T
wo boys on skateboards counted seventeen TV satellite trucks among the sixty news vehicles that overflowed the hospital parking lot for the press conference that took place there the next morning.

It was held outdoors in a corner of the lot where nets of cables snaked to humming generators. Karen and Jason were flanked by Canadian and U.S. police officials at a folding table that was heaped with microphones and cassette recorders as they faced TV lights and a shower of flashes from still news cameras.

Karen and Jason answered a few questions.

“I believe in my heart…” Karen paused. “I believe that in the wake of this evil thing that has happened, we cannot accept that these women died in vain.”

As Jason summarized his pursuit of Cull, he saw Phil Tucker and Nate Hodge from the
Mirror,
then Carl McCormick from Spokane, and nodded subtly, signaling that he would talk privately to them later. Then the investigators read prepared statements that revealed little.

The body count had climbed to eighteen.

The conference wound down with the TV networks demanding that police allow news pools to tour the property and lift the restriction on the air above it so they could get aerial news footage.

Mounties were escorting Karen and Jason back into the hospital to be discharged when Jason stopped. He’d spotted his red Falcon in the lot, then his father. The two men embraced each other as cameras jostled to capture the moment.

“Hank Stralla called me,” Jason’s old man said. “I flew up so I could drive you home, Son.”

Jason nodded, then hugged his dad again.

Very tight this time.

As they drove west along I-90, Jason thought his father looked better and stronger than he had in years. They said little during the drive, letting the vistas, the farmland, the rivers, and the rolling countryside serve as balm for Jason as he struggled to understand it all.

At one point, he turned to his old man, looked at him for a long moment, realizing so many parts of his father’s life remained unknown to him.

“What happened to you when you were a rookie cop? Why did you leave the force?”

His old man considered the question for nearly a mile.

“Someday I’ll tell you, but not now.”

Jason turned to the window. Memories of Spokane, Kennewick, and Hanna Larssen’s farm in the Rattlesnake Hills rushed by him before they were eclipsed by images of Garrison, and he revealed his fear about the bracelet and Valerie.

“They still can’t confirm if she was there. I may never know.”

His father listened thoughtfully, offering no opinion until they ascended the Cascade Range and Jason asked for his advice.

“You have to let it go, or it’ll eat you up for years,” he said. “Don’t make the same mistakes I did, Son. Let it go and let time do the rest.”

Jason looked off to the vast forest, thinking maybe he could bury his memories of Valerie and his mother there. He worked on it until they came to Seattle’s outskirts and his mind shot back to when he’d first heard Karen Harding’s name from Hank Stralla. How that night on the cop beat had led to this.

And how he had nearly given up.

It was time for the news. He switched on the radio.

The body count had risen to twenty.

T
he day after he returned to Seattle, Jason Wade decided that the only way he could cope with everything was to keep busy.

It would be therapeutic.

He drove his Falcon to the
Mirror
and accepted Ron Nestor’s job offer. He was welcomed back to the newsroom with attaboys, backslapping, and handshakes from reporters and editors. But he sensed an uneasy reverence beneath their smiles in the way their eyes were drawn to his scars, satisfying their ingrained skepticism to confirm that his ordeal was true.

“There are no words.” Ben Randolph shook his hand. “You’re now an immortal in the business.”

Astrid Grant’s eyes were glistening when she handed him a single red rose.

“Thank God you’re okay, Jason.” She smiled. “My father knows some agents. So, if you’re thinking of writing a book, I could make some calls.”

Jason’s new desk was among those along the glass wall of the newsroom’s west side, overlooking Elliott Bay. The spot where he had dreamed of landing a job with the
Mirror.
Settling in, he was seized with memories of bracelets and the killing ground before letting them go.

“How you holding up?” Nestor asked.

“I think I’ll be all right.”

“Just concentrate on telling me your story. Go as long as you want. Leave nothing out.”

The drone of the newsroom slipped away as Jason summoned up the images and emotions of his experience and for the next several days he worked on what would be a sixteen-thousand-word first-person exclusive.

The story of how a rookie reporter overcame the odds to track a monster who nearly killed him.

Investigators who found letters, diaries, and notebooks told Jason that Ezra Skeel and Gideon Cull were like brothers, two parts of a unified psychological force. They looked alike, thought alike, and shared a pathological hatred of women.

Ezra’s resentment arose from his horrific upbringing. As Ezra’s visiting spiritual adviser at Coyote Ridge, Cull, the intellectual, gave him articles with passages from the old book,
Reflections on the Ritual.
The small text was based on the diary of Xavier Veenza, a deranged monk and notorious executioner during the Inquisition.

Ezra loved it, using it as a how-to-guide to justify his vengeance against women.

Early in their relationship, Cull confided his problem with Bonnie Stillerman to Ezra. Cull had come close to going to prison himself because of a woman: his sinful, cheating ex-wife. He would not risk prison because a young witch named Bonnie Stillerman had failed to understand his sanctified sexual desires.

Upon his release from prison, Ezra conspired with Cull to emulate Veenza’s work by first sentencing Bonnie Stillerman to death for her crime. But after their first kill, Cull grew uneasy and parted ways with Ezra Skeel.

Gideon Cull kept his past hidden behind his mask of respectability. But Ezra’s rampage continued in the years that followed, escalating until it threatened to expose and destroy Cull, who rushed to Garrison to confront him.

Ezra was off the scale, out of control. He’d assumed the role of a reverend while believing he was Xavier Veenza, reincarnated from the days of the Inquisition. He was inspired by the book. It was where he took the mark Veenza burned into his victims: VOV.

Vincit Omnia Veritas.

Latin for Truth Conquers All Things.

For Ezra Skeel, women were in league with the devil and it was his duty to kill them. When he found copies of
Reflections on the Ritual,
he sent one to Cull, hoping he would rekindle “his righteous fire.”

Ezra would at times imitate Cull’s charity work to the point of buying an old RV from one of Cull’s groups and using it to hunt prey. In his journal he wrote that Karen Harding happened to drift into his radar at the Big Timber Truck Stop the night of the storm. He’d noticed her
ichthus
bumper sticker, the fish symbol for Jesus. Ezra decided it was a deception and that Karen Harding was a witch.

Forensic experts probing the Garrison site for human remains now estimated that the body count would exceed thirty. Nine had not yet been identified. No confirmation that Valerie Hewitt was among them, the investigators told Jason.

But a growing fear writhed in his stomach.

His hands froze at the keyboard.

There was one secret about Valerie he could never reveal; could never tell a soul.

Jason hesitated, pushed it away, then moved from Valerie to the other difficult aspects of his article, concentrating on it until he was done.

His feature was syndicated in a six-part series and published in newspapers across the U.S. and around the world. A few days after the series ran, Nestor showed him congratulatory e-mails from friends at the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times,
urging the
Mirror
to submit the story for a Pulitzer Prize.

T
he horror at Garrison remained huge news in Seattle for weeks. From time to time Jason had called Stralla, Karen, and his father to talk. But he never unburdened his conscience.

Instead, he withdrew.

One night as he left the newsroom for his Falcon he heard the gulls on the waterfront. This time their cries floated along the bay breezes like an accusatory chorus. He drove off, taking Denny Way, glancing at the Needle and the skyline, rolling north until he came to the Aurora Avenue Bridge.

He couldn’t take it anymore.

He parked and walked along the bridge. Stopping somewhere in the middle, he stared at the lights of Gas Works Park and the boats navigating the locks. There he confronted his demon, the secret he could never share with anyone. Like his father, he had driven away the woman he had loved.

Valerie.

They had fought because of him.

She had left because of him. He’d forced her out of his life and though he tried to find her, tried to reach her to say he was sorry, he’d always failed. Not knowing where she was had eaten him up inside.

Now he knew and it haunted him.

He looked into the night.

Because of him, Valerie had somehow ended up in the Canadian Rockies like all of those other women.

He felt responsible for what had happened to her.

He struggled to hang on to his sanity as he battled the truth beckoning from the black water below. How could he live with himself? He searched long and hard for an answer that refused to emerge. He didn’t know how much time had passed before he somehow found the will to get back into his Falcon and make his way to his apartment.

The stairs creaked as he trudged to the third floor, unlocked his door, and stepped into his living room. He went to his fridge, reached for the lone beer he kept there, then sat in the dark before his fish tank.

Fate was a cruel mother.

She had given him exactly what he’d wanted. He had ached for a job at the
Mirror.
He got it. He had dreamed of nailing the big story. He got it. He demanded to know what had happened to Valerie.

Now he knew.

And now he was condemned to live alone with his ghosts.

He sat in the dark pondering his beer and the bracelet Valerie had given him. Be careful what you wish for, he warned his fish. The images of his life consumed him and he raised his hand to his face.

Oh, Christ.

He struggled to force them from his mind until he was exhausted. His eyes grew heavy and he let whatever remaining thoughts he had carry him. He stayed that way for as long as he could until he sank into unconsciousness.

Then he heard ringing.

He worked through the awkward process of waking, realizing he had fallen asleep in his living room chair; that his phone was ringing and it was the middle of the goddamned night and who the hell was calling at this hour? He snapped up the receiver.

“What is it?”

“Jason? Jason, is that you?”

Her voice stunned him and he held his breath as long-distance static cracked in the silence. His eyes went around his empty apartment and he squeezed the phone so hard. So happily hard. He was not drunk. He was not dreaming. He knew this voice and the sound of it heaved a great weight from him.

“Valerie?”

“Yes! I read about what happened and oh, Jason, there’s so much I need to tell you. I was so stupid and I miss you so much.”

“Me too, I’m so sorry.”

“I’ve thought about you every day. I’m in Paris, but I’m coming home. I want to come home and…”

They talked through the night as Jason watched his fish swim in the serene blue water.