Legacy of the Wolf

The Great Clockmaker

Sam was still trying to make sense of everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton. She had nearly nodded off during roll call but somehow managed to make it through.

Later in the morning, she had sat in her cruiser just down the block from Mama Kaiser's Bakery. She tried to work up the courage to go in, to pretend that everything was normal... but there was no way in hell she could actually do that. After fifteen minutes she had finally left without getting her morning coffee.

While patrolling, her foster mom called three times, but Sam wasn't ready to talk to her yet. She listened carefully to the radio, convinced that at any moment a call would come through that something had been discovered at the Myers property, something that would implicate her in Nina's disappearance... or worse, that Nina's body would be found at the lake.

Close to noon, Sam was called out to a crime scene in Hard Knox, on Langenkamp Lane, two streets away from the church where the John Doe had been found. Three other uniformed officers were already at the location when Sam arrived at the address—it was a rub and tug massage parlor up until a month ago when the place was busted for prostitution.

Barnes' SUV was there. No crime scene tape had been put up yet and CSI hadn't arrived. Sam exited her vehicle, said hello to the officers and walked inside, through the waiting room and into a hall with rooms on either side. Barnes was standing near the end of the passage, writing notes on a small pad. Sam walked toward him, glancing inside the rooms as she passed, doing her best to maintain composure.

In each room the ceiling had been knocked out, opened up to expose the beams above. From those beams hung chains and at the ends of the chains, manacles. Blood stains painted the walls and dark patches had pooled on the floors. The carnage was the same for all rooms, six in total.

What the hell happened here?

Barnes looked up as she drew near. "Oh hey."

"What is all this?" Sam asked.

"Good question. Lots of blood in each room. Some arterial spray, some gravitational droplets, puddles..."

Sam looked to her feet, then back down the hall.

"But hardly any blood in the hall."

"Yeah, weird huh? Gorsky still thinks it's some Satan-worshipping cult. By the way, thought you might want to know a couple things: first off, the lab confirmed the bullets from that rifle recovered at the Rest-In to be silver. The rifle itself was untraceable."

Barnes fell silent and jotted another note in his pad.

"And the second thing?" Sam asked.

"Hm? Oh yeah, Jacob Foster, the rifleman who was killed at the Rest-In, I told you he worked at Swayze's Roadhouse, right? Well anyway I talked to the staff there. One waitress..." Barnes checked his notes, "a Tina Gray, said Foster was on his break in the back and she went out there to grab a smoke. She saw Jacob talking to some other guy. When Foster and the other guy saw her, the other guy left in a hurry. Suspicious, right? I'm thinking maybe the other guy was his partner, the one who got away."

Sam's throat tightened. "Did she recognize the other guy?"

Still absorbed in his notepad, Barnes didn't answer right away. Sam waited anxiously until Barnes said, "Yeah, oh yeah. She said it was that mechanic guy... Elias, I think the name was."

Sam stood at Elias's window, looking out for any signs of surveillance, just to be sure. "Barnes said you're a person of interest. I'd expect him to stop by tomorrow."