Ch. 13 / Pt. 4 : When They Wear the Mask

After the gruesome murder of a wanted murderer, Oceanrest’s Mayor had called Virgil LeDuff at four in the morning to review what to say at the press conference. At six in the morning, Virgil LeDuff had called John Bowman Booker to get his input. Booker had blearily provided some limited notes before hanging up and returning to sleep.

At nine o’clock, Booker barely made it to the precinct in time to sprint to the front steps and stand behind Virgil LeDuff for the conference. Virgil LeDuff assured the Oceanrest citizenry that none of the crimes committed seemed to have political motivations or angles. He assured the Oceanrest citizenry that the heightened curfew had nothing to do with political motivations, either, but a legitimate concern for safety while Robert Robertson, Jr., remained uncaught. He took no questions. Clapping Booker on the shoulder, Virgil requested the man wait outside his office while he handled a few conversations. Booker had agreed.

Alejandra Castellanos joined Booker at his desk at ten fifteen Sunday morning. She brought a new puzzle with her. This one looked like a silver, elliptical orb dotted by multi-colored, crystalline beads. As Castellanos’ steel toed boots tapped the hallway toward him, he watched her move one of the dozen-or-so beads along a narrow track carved in the orb’s surface. As one bead moved, all the others did, too, in different directions and at different velocities.

“How you feeling?” he’d asked.

“Sober.” She’d shrugged. “Day two, take twenty.”

He hadn’t known how to respond.

Luckily, at ten thirty, Virgil LeDuff called them into his office to deliver the latest in the never-ending stream of bad news.

“I need you and your guys to turn something up in Squatter City,” Virgil had said, making eye contact but never holding it. “Today. Tomorrow afternoon at the latest. Otherwise…otherwise, I’ll have to send everyone.”

“You know what’ll happen if you send that many cops up there, right?” Castellanos had asked.

“I do,” Virgil had replied, voice low and solemn. “I do. So, please…don’t let me down.”

And by eleven, John Bowman Booker and Alejandra Castellanos had found their way back up to Squatter City. Them and four cops hand-picked by Castellanos, the last line of defense between the disenfranchised of Squatter City and the brutal batons of the law. They split up, the four uniforms taking the tent city while Booker and Castellanos checked the condemned and foreclosed houses along the southern and eastern swathes of the region.

They knocked for hours. Few faces met them; fewer answers.

Time marched cruelly forward.

As afternoon melted toward evening, Booker found himself and Castellanos crossing Lafayette and Old Main for the third time that day. Passing one of the few still-operable payphone banks in the Oceanrest metro area, he stopped walking.

“What’s up?” Castellanos asked, turning back toward him.

“That’s not the pay phone he used to call in the wellness check, is it?”

“No. That one’s in Baldwin.”

Still, something about the thing seemed off to him.

He sighed through it.

Even as Castellanos spoke, she watched the beads move around her puzzle orb. “I’ll stay out here all night. I don’t have any plans.” She glanced between the different crystals, measuring how they interacted.

“The two of us against a serial killer? In the dark?”

Still staring at her puzzle, she shrugged. “You’d rather Virgil send in the real bulls?”

Booker pursed his lips. Kicked a piece of loose rubble down the sidewalk. “Shit,” he muttered.

Castellanos brought her gaze to his. “All we need is the right person saying the right thing.”

“You think there’s someone we missed on the last three loops?”

“Maybe there’s something we missed.”

Booker rubbed his forehead. Somewhere in Squatter City’s indigent population of just over three hundred people, a serial killer had buried himself tick-deep. How had none of the other squatters seen him? Or why would they hide a known murderer from the police? Or…

“I think there’s another street down there,” Castellanos said. She gestured with her puzzle orb toward a flattened disruption of overgrowth at the far end of Lafayette, barely visible.

Booker’s new medical mask allegedly changed the airflow around his nose and mouth to avoid fogging his glasses. As another sigh singed its way out of him without blurring his vision, he had to admit it worked well enough. “Guess we don’t have anything better to do.”

Hoofing the suburban distance to the corner, they discovered a curl of ratty, cracked asphalt rolling northward. A torn-down street sign read ‘Bl__k W_t__ H___’ between finger-thick ropes of brush and vine. Most of the houses looked uninhabitable, half-collapsed or listing over, representing some of the longest derelictions in the area.

“Deja vu,” Castellanos muttered.

“Huh?”

“Nothing. I think maybe I dreamed about this place, before…”

Booker peered along the crumbling span. “Must have been a bad dream.”

Castellanos reached down and slipped her orb into her hip-slung satchel. “You can live in this place your whole life and never get used to it.”

Booker’s brow trenched. He’d gotten used to Alejandra Castellanos’ sudden tonal shifts over their years as partners, but not so used to them as to have a prepared response. “Get used to what?”

Though her facemask covered her mouth, Castellanos grinned with her eyes. “I don’t know if you figured this out yet, John, but Oceanrest is weird.”

“Oh. That.” He chuckled. “Yeah. Everyone’s noticed that.”

No answer came from knocking on the first house’s door. The second house had no door. Letting themselves in, they navigated what small square footage of the building remained navigable. They called out and received only echoes in answer. They couldn’t find a way to enter the third house, the various sagging and collapsed architectures leaving no visible ingress. Stepping into the absolute ruin of the fourth house, they smelled rancid rot. In an unzipped tent in the building’s basement, Booker and Castellanos found a man’s corpse.

He hadn’t died long ago, some time in the past few days judging from the reek and bloat of him, but enough time had passed for the flies to find him and seed the meat with maggots.

Booker and Castellanos called in the corpse for disposal.

Clutching a handkerchief over his mask, Booker swallowed against an aftertaste of decay that wouldn’t leave his throat. 

As sunset darkened to purple twilight, they considered calling it a day. Few streetlights operated in Squatter City; the darkness glowered more intensely there than in Oceanrest proper. And something about finding a man dead, caused by pandemic or overdose or injury or exposure, felt heavier than attending a crime scene. In a murder investigation, a perpetrator awaited apprehension. When a squatter died in a squat amid a plague for which he could afford no treatment, there was nobody to catch.

Was that, itself, a sign? A portent?

Of what?

“Hey, hold up,” he said, reaching for Castellanos as she turned back the way they’d come. “Look up there.”

At the end of the street, a house stood in full repair. Someone had rebuild and reshingled part of the roof. No sign of collapse or structural decay presented itself—at least not on the exterior.

“Someone definitely lives there,” Castellanos confirmed.

Booker noticed the figure, first. Small and perched on the steps leading up to the front porch, it switched a short, ragged tail from one side of its body to the other. Not just an animal, a pet; not just sitting, waiting. He pointed it out to Castellanos and they crouched as they approached it. A sable coat cloaked the feline; a white half-mask swirled up one side of its face. Of its two eyes, only one functioned. A milky cataract scarred the other.

“Hey, buddy,” Booker cooed, creeping close. “Who you waiting for out here?”

The cat regarded him coolly. A sound rattled in its throat.

“You got a friend who lives in that house?” he asked.

The cat made no reply except to stop twitching its tail.

“I don’t think it’s rabid,” Castellanos said, behind him. 

“Seems fine to me,” Booker confirmed.

The feline strangled a snarl. It narrowed its gaze at them.

“She doesn’t like you,” Castellanos said.

“Looks neutered,” Booker replied, kneeling only feet away from the cat, hand extended.

Castellanos stood from her crouch, joining him at the steps. “Someone out here takes their stray to the vet.”

Booker stood, too, and the two detectives climbed up to the porch proper. The cat swatted at his pantleg and hissed as he passed but he ignored it. After a few more warning swipes and snarls, the animal chose retreat instead of attack. It leapt between the wooden dowels of the railed porch fence and rushed into the overgrown yard. Chuckling, Booker walked up to the door and rang the doorbell. He blinked. The doorbell worked.

“We’ve got to tell Virgil about this,” he muttered.

“How didn’t we know about this house?” Castellanos asked nobody, echoing his thoughts.

Nobody responded to the bell. He knocked.

He stepped back.

The door was dense. Even rapping his knuckles against it, he’d felt heft behind it. Weight. Gripping the knob, he slowly eased his shoulder against it. Bracing, he pressed his bodyweight into the wood. His muscles strained before the door did. It didn’t feel wise to put any velocity behind the attempt.

“There’s definitely something going on in there,” Booker observed.

Castellanos had her right hand inside her hip-slung satchel. Booker could see the bulge where she held the puzzle orb in her palm. She’d backed up off the porch to stare at the face of the house, scanning. “Something strange…”

“You okay, Al?” he asked. “You’re acting…weird. Even for you.”

As twilight painted the sky in purple and navy, insects began their nightsongs.

“Yeah,” she answered, seconds later. “I’m fine, I just didn’t expect it to…” she trailed off. “I think I need something to eat.”

“Yeah. It’s about that time.”

He joined her back in the yard and the two of them started the walk back to the car.

Between the corpse and the strange house, Booker felt a sense of ominous meaning about the day. Signs and portents, maybe. Omens. The gravity of the feeling simultaneously filled and emptied his mind.

It shocked him when Castellanos froze mid-stride, spun toward the treeline following the rubbled western half of the street, and yanked free her sidearm and flashlight. “Who the fuck is there!?” she yelled, flashlight under barrel, beam lighting up against a rustling curtain of forested dark. Booker jerked around to follow, just a second out of sync. He noticed the silhouette only after Castellanos had already identified it. “Freeze!” she yelled. “Robert Robertson, you are under arrest.”

Robert Robertson, Jr., looked like a ghost in the brightness of her flashlight. He took a wide-eyed breath, only seeming to notice her at the same time Booker noticed him, and dove into the woods.

Despite the evening dim’s descent to night-time dark, despite the bodies indifferently piled up in Robertson’s wake, and despite the strict set of procedures Virgil had set out for everyone in the department—Booker and Castellanos immediately pursued.

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