Free Season of the Witch by Timothy C. Phillips Page B

you become a detective?” she asked with surprising enthusiasm.
    “That’s sort of a long story.” I couldn’t help but return her smile.
    “Are you afraid it’s too long, or too scary?”
    “Too scary.”
    “I was a uniform cop for five years,” I began, “And everybody I knew wanted to get into the Detective Division. The trouble was, most of the time it’s based on seniority. It can take a long time. My patrol route was out in Mountain Brook. One night, I happened to be in the right place, but like the old song says, it was the wrong time.”
    “Why was it the wrong time?” Lena inched closer to me on the sofa.
    “I was too late.”
    I paused for a second, thinking about what I was going to say. “The neighborhoods there are settled and quiet, long time residents who all know each other. I happened to see an open rear window and stopped to investigate. It struck me as odd since the weather had been fairly cold. Also, it was early evening, maybe nine o’clock, and there were no lights on inside the house. I radioed it in and went through the back yard, up to the open window. With no flashlight, I peered inside.
    There’d been quite a struggle in there. The window afforded me a view of the kitchen; it looked as though someone had been disturbed while in the process of making dinner. I could see lettuce and cutlery and various spices strewn across the floor in what appeared to be an otherwise spotless kitchen. The window was wide open, and low enough so that I was able to step inside. I stuck my fingertips in liquid that pooled beneath the counter.
    Blood.
    I heard a dripping sound coming from somewhere in the front of the house. Gun in hand, I had crept up that carpeted hallway, lined with cozy family portraits and engraved bible verses. Each of the brown wooden doors represented potential sudden death. I kicked them open, one by one, moving toward the living room where a muted television show displayed beautiful young people laughing happily on a beach.
    It was at the last door that I heard the noise. I flattened along the thin wall of the hallway and eyed the door. It was closed and there was no light coming from beneath it. The blood roared through my ears; I could feel my heart beat in my temples and in my throat. I yelled, ‘POLICE!’ and kicked open the door, and went in, gun first.
    She had been trying to call out.
    The woman was probably thirty, maybe a little younger. It was hard to tell. She sat shivering in a bathrobe, curled in a ball on the floor. She was soaked in blood, and it was coming from her face. One eye peered at me wildly from a mass of shredded flesh. The other had been slashed open, along with the rest of her features. I could see her teeth, glinting in the darkness, through where her cheeks had been.
    The thing that I always think about is how she had already been driven mad. Just sitting there in the darkness feeling her face falling off in strips had sent her over the edge. I couldn’t make her understand that I was a police officer, that I was there to help, that things were going to be okay. She had gone somewhere beyond all that.
    I had heard about the others, but I hadn’t seen them. The woman I found had been number three. There would be more. In all, ten women would suffer the same fate in varying degrees. On her, he had done the most damage. No surgery could correct what he had done to her. He had cut out their tongues. And he always wore a hood.
    Finding the man who was capable of doing such things became an obsession with me. I visited her a couple of times, trying to get information from her, but she was so . . . distraught, they wouldn’t let her talk to police anymore. She had to be institutionalized because she became incapable of caring for herself. Her total mental collapse made me that much more resolute. I would find him, and I would make him pay.
    Through the fall and winter, he struck again and again. The only leads he left were psychological ones. He raped