Shudder (26 page)

David lay on the thick carpet on the floor of Anton's living room and listened to the rain. It wasn't pelting yet, only flicking away at the windowpane, but it felt like it was getting stronger.

The detective picked at his nose and brooded.

Alone.

Anton was at work in his office, while he, David was lying low in Anton's home. Lying very low. He felt at his lowest ebb in years. How had everything gotten out of hand so suddenly? In one day he lost everything.

It wasn't like he was one of the bad guys. He was one of the good guys. Yet...he felt as if the wrath of God had fallen in his direction, showering destruction left and right, missing him by inches.

For now.

David picked himself up and sent himself to the kitchen for another sandwich. Fortunately, although considerably older, Anton had very similar bachelor habits and foods.

David spread some unhealthy margarine on a piece of unhealthy white bread and put a slice of unhealthy processed cheese on it. As an afterthought, he rinsed a carrot and bit off an inch.

Gotta take in some vitamins
, he told himself.
Can't let the body go without any real nourishment, especially in a crisis like this.

Plate with sandwich in hand, Dave returned to the hall and sat on the carpet with legs crossed.

A crisis. The understatement of the century. More like a catastrophe.

One minute—a normal guy leading a normal life, even helping catch criminals, making the world a better place, all that, and suddenly—a cornered rat with no options. It's good to have friends when you are out of options.

Dave felt his stomach knot a little. At the back of his mind was the gnawing doubt that the danger that was casting its shadow on him was now breathing down both his and Anton's necks. He had probably put his one remaining close friend in mortal danger.

Anton is an old dog. He knows what he is playing with.
Dave tried to stave off the guilt attack.

There was a twisted logic when unknown evil forces manipulate events to get rid of undesirable elements, and him being one of those undesirable elements, to seek help and shelter from a government employed stoner albino from the Amazon jungles.

With a puff Dave got up again, went to the bathroom and washed his face to kick his thinking into gear. He looked at his deflated reflection and blinked a few times.

Time to pull myself together,
he thought.
Time to act.

While he lurked in Anton's apartment, and dared not show his nose outside, there are not a lot of useful things he could do. But there are some. With such reasoning, he plopped into a wooden chair, and switched on Anton's rickety old computer.

He typed in the password written on a note stuck to the monitor. After some deliberation Dave made a folder on the desktop, called it ‘Evil Cabal'. He uploaded the information taken from his office computer into it.

Five minutes, thirty seconds. Eighteen minutes, fifteen seconds. Seven minutes. One minute. Three minutes. How strangely time flies with old computers.

He laced his fingers behind his head and indulged in the habit of chewing on his lip.

All these accidents which happened to him and to poor Andy reminded him very much of the fate of the detectives who tried their hands at the Season Girls case.

Perhaps he thought so merely because he learned of the season girl curse just days ago. Why kill the people who could possibly help catch the shit-strangler?

Unless junior he was being protected by Daddy, but surely Daddy wasn't the season killer? Was there some sort of connection which escaped him?

Absurd combinations of factors floated in his mind.
The descendant of the original killer stalking detectives? The evil cabal covering up for the shit-strangler? In the name of what?

Anton did not have a printer in his home but he did have a scanner. Dave scanned the city maps and started working with them in a ‘paint' program.

Nineteen eighty-four. He marked the points in which the bodies were found. He saved the file.

Nineteen eighty-five. He marked the points in which the bodies were found. He saved the file.

So it went.

It was monotonous, uninspiring work, but at least it filled up an hour, which otherwise would have been spent fretting. At the end of the hour, he stood up, stretched his arms, and looked out of the window again.

The rain was continuing, tiny short-lived circles dotted the puddles by the entrance of the building. A number of wet, open umbrellas hovered to and fro above the pavements.

Pedestrians in hoodies and with jackets pulled over their heads walked briskly. One youth walked slowly and defiantly, his hair plastered with rainwater.

Dave breathed for a minute, with an unfocused gaze, trying to let his mind relax, to think not of his predicament and not of the Season Girls, but of the patter of the falling raindrops.

Then he dropped to the floor and did some push-ups. Then it was time to do something useful again.

This time Dave made a copy of each file and in these copies he again connected the four dots. At the end of this exercise he had a folder filled with maps with dots and a folder filled with maps with crosses. He still felt he was getting nowhere, but at least he felt busy doing it.

After finishing with the ‘cross maps', he wondered what possible good they could be. He decided to look at them in chronological order. He pressed ‘slideshow'.

The nineteen eighty-four cross appeared superimposed over the city, the lines uniting the points in which the corpses were found. The nineteen eighty-five cross appeared. Then nineteen eighty-six cross appeared. Then it was nineteen eighty-seven.

Dave felt the hair on the nape of his neck stand on end. He upped the speed of the slideshow to two pictures a second.

After fifteen more seconds, he could no longer control himself.

First his shoulders shook, then his stomach contracted. Finally, his lips parted and a sickly sound escaped them, reverberated around the room.

His shook with malicious laughter as he watched the cross on the screen revolve, revolve and revolve as if it were a crude animation.

Counterclockwise.

David opened his eyes with a start. He had dozed off on Anton's sofa.

“Hey, Detective. How's life?” Anton boomed as he entered the room.

Dave rubbed his face and blinked a few times, his mouth set in a crooked grin, “Life is increasingly interesting by leap and bounds. I wish it wouldn't keep doing that. How was it at your end?”

Anton had already shrugged off his coat. He slipped into his bachelor slippers and lit a cigarette as he approached the coffee table by the window.

Some of the beads of rain oozing down the windowpane glinted for a moment as his lighter flashed. He blew out a jet of smoke, sat down, and tapped his cigarette through the open window. As always, the air currents brought the flakes of ash back into the room and onto his sleeve.

“Same old, same old. I warned everyone that I'll be taking a few days off again soon. It's good to be the king.” Anton grinned. “I also heard from my old buddy Deus. He's already broken through part of the protection of the pedo site, and about thirty customers have just been nabbed.”

“Right on.” Dave brightened up and moved to the other end of the sofa, closer to the coffee table and the albino.

“Yeah,” Anton winked indulgently at the weary detective, “and now he said that this evening, probably as we speak, he will fiddle more with the problem and hopefully break through the whole protection.”

“Well, everything's going well with your stuff,” commented Dave sulkily.

Here was Anton, whose job description was nowhere near that of a detective, helping track down sex offenders, while he, the great detective, dozes off on sofas while shivering for his hide.

“Hey, don't worry, Dave,” Anton said giving him a ‘hey, don't worry, Dave' look. “We'll figure this out. We'll get the little bastard and his Daddy, and this will be all over.”

“Thanks, man, I really appreciate this,” Dave said his part and a small silence ensued, broken only by the tapping of the raindrops.

“Look what I can do,” he said, abruptly unfolding out of the sofa and striding over to the computer.

Anton followed him hands in pockets, the cigarette hanging from the left corner of his mouth. He felt that Dave was on edge, but he also thought he saw the glimmer of something useful behind the detective's near hysteric demeanor.

Dave opened a file from the first folder, “See, these are the four bodies found in nineteen eighty-four. And this—” He opened a file from the second folder. “…is the four places connected.”

“Oh, a cross,” Anton said. “Neat. Very classical, in a way.”

“A different cross every year. See what happens when I put all the years on a high speed slideshow.”

Anton watched for a few seconds, before his eyebrows started climbing towards the ceiling. Then he turned to his friend and slapped him heartily on the shoulder, “Genius, Dave; pure genius. You've had this tendency to throw a curve on me with your unexpected insights since you were a kid.”

Dave smiled deprecatingly, “What's the big deal? This spinning cross is a cool trick but it doesn't get me anywhere.”

“No, no,” Anton disagreed. “This is something very significant. Something important. I can feel it. We just have to figure out what it is.”

For Anton to ‘figure this out' always meant, circumstances permitting, ‘let's smoke some dope'. In this case, he also took out his legal buzz, ‘to loosen up the thoughts, y'know?' After inhaling deeply, he passed the joint to the detective.

There they sat, in milky a cloud which never dissipated, due to its regular maintenance by Anton's cigarettes, looking at the endless repetition of the cross turning over the city.

As the buzz hit them, the significance of what they watched increased progressively.

Of course, the significance of Dave's socks increased as well.

The rain gathered more intensity and rattled at the windowpane. Lightning flashed somewhere far away. Exactly thirteen seconds later the rolling thunder growled in the evening sky. As if reacting to a signal, Anton got up and went to the toilet.

A minute later he returned with a mischievous grin. Some of his best ideas came when taking a wheedle.

“You got the details of the cases where?”

“Here,” answered Dave and patted the computer monitor. “What do you want to know?”

“Let's see how exactly the bodies were left in any random year.”

“Okay,” Dave said and pressed ‘pause'. The cross of nineteen ninety-eight was on the screen.

“This year suit you?” he asked Anton.

“Totally.”

Dave opened the file of that year. “Okay, let's see—” his right hand handled the mouse with professional automatism. “Spring victim, Katherine Gunderman, twenty- three. Body laying straight on its back, arms tucked in to the sides of her body. Naked...”

“Yes, yes,” interrupted the albino. “Which way was her head pointing?”

“Uh, let's see...doesn't say.”

“Damn.”

“What's on your mind, anyway?”

“Just, just look at the summer victim. Maybe someone was conscientious enough.”

“Okay, here we go. Andrea Bentham, nineteen, body straight, blah-blah, ah—” Dave darted a grin at Anton. “This time the police did their jobs thoroughly. Her head was pointing to the south.”

“Good, good, now we're getting somewhere.” Anton rubbed his hands. “Where is she on the map?”

“Here,” Dave said, pointing at the tip of the right-hand beam of the cross.

“Let's check out the others.”

It turned out, that of the four Season Girls, one was pointing south, and one—east. The positioning of the other two was not recorded.

“Now,” Anton said with a vaguely amused look of expectancy, “add little arrows at the end of the two beams of the cross.”

“What? How?”

“A small arrow pointing down, as in ‘south', on the right-hand one, and a small arrow pointing to the right, as in ‘east', on the top beam.”

“Okey doke; here you go.”

They both looked.

“So, what does it look like to you now?” Anton said.

Dave shrugged. “It looks like half a swastika, man.”

“Right,” Anton said with an undertone of triumph, “exactly. Now, let's see two more years to establish that we are correct.”

They had in fact to see five more years, before gathering enough data to be certain. When the points in which the bodies were dumped were connected, a cross appeared. When the position of the bodies was represented by small arrows pointing into the relevant directions, the cross turned into a swastika.

A revolving swastika.

“A revolving swastika,” Dave said thoughtfully.

“Actually, a swavastika.”

“Come again?”

“It's a swastika when it revolves clockwise,” clarified Anton, “it's called a ‘swavastika', when it revolves counterclockwise.”

“What does that mean? For us, now.”

“I don't know.” Anton looked at the ceiling and then at Dave. “You can't deny that it feels like we are making some progress here.”

“Yeah, but where to?”

Instead of replying, Anton ducked into the kitchen and soon the sound of water about to boil could be heard. Then it boiled. After some clanking, clinking, splashing and slurping, Anton reappeared with two steaming cups of coffee in his hands.

“Thanks,” Dave said, took his cup and blew at the dark liquid inside.

“You know, I was thinking,” Anton said, “what about the points were the swavastikas intersect?”

“Ah, I've thought of that too,” Dave said, “but it's not one point. It keeps changing.”

“Yes, it would, wouldn't it? That swavastika isn't stable; its spins all over the place.”

Anton thought some more. He filled his cheeks with air, let it out with a funny noise, and then he studied his pinky and nibbled it. “Let's not dismiss anything,” he said finally. “Show me how it moves. Mark the center of the swastikas with a big red dot, so we can follow it's movement clearly.”

Anton smoked five more cigarettes while Dave was doing that. Then, with a glance at Anton, to show that all is ready, he pressed the slideshow button again. As the swastika spun, the red dot also danced.

“See,” Anton said, “it's not random. The center also spins in a tiny circle.”

“Yes, I see that now.” Dave looked at Anton, “You're wasting yourself at your psycho job. Come be a detective. A man's job. See the world. Go to exotic places. Be hunted like a rabid giraffe.”

“No thank you,” smiled Anton politely. He sipped the last of his coffee, “Right, zoom in the map and let's see again over which parts of town exactly the red spot moves.”

Dave obliged and they watched the whole process again, but this time only looking at the little circle made by the revolving center of the swavastika.

Anton gave a triumphant laugh, “See? See?.” He looked at Dave with a camaraderie as if they were two chemists who had finally managed to achieve a specific reaction. “The red spot actually lands on buildings in the center. Just eight buildings.”

Anton brought his cup to his lips, saw in the last second that it was empty and lowered it again. Then he said, “Every eight years the cycle starts from the beginning.”

Dave agreed with a silent nod.

Another lightning flashed outside the smoke-filled room. This time the thunder rolled after a mere eight seconds. The storm was nearing.

Suddenly the room seemed bereft of air. Dave strode over to the window and flung it wide open, breathing in the wet air with quite pleasure, letting the rain batter his face.

He heard Anton move about in the room behind him and a few seconds later the sound of soft jazz mixed with the sound of hard rain.

Somehow this made the heavy smell of tobacco seem quite natural.