Deus Vult Read online

  “Does he have a choice?” Alex interjected.

  “—is to investigate and find out exactly what happened there.”

  I frowned, thinking over what Pearson just said. It didn’t make any sense. If this was a local crime, shouldn’t we have heard of it? “When did this happen?” I asked.

  Pearson’s lips tightened, unhappy about the events. “Yesterday morning.”

  Mariel still sounded suspicious as she asked, “How come we haven’t heard about this in the local news?”

  Pearson smiled. “Remember when some nutcase shot up a mosque in New Zealand, killed a few dozen, and no one would shut up about it for days?”

  Mariel nodded. “Of course. It was more like weeks. Why?”

  “How much did you hear about the churches bombed in Sri Lanka for Easter 2019?”

  Mariel sighed. “If I hadn’t heard about it from the pulpit, I wouldn’t have heard about it.”

  “Exactly.” It was Pearson’s turn to be unhappy and growl. “That slaughter killed over two hundred people, and if you didn’t get your news from a real world newspaper, you probably didn’t hear about it. Even then, it depended on the newspaper.”

  I looked around the table at my friends and family, then tapped my plate. “Can I at least finish breakfast?” I asked.

  Pearson nodded. “Take your time. It’s not like the crime scene is going anywhere. The bodies have been carted away, but everything else is intact.”

  Alex coughed, chewed some more, and swallowed. “Since I’m the only one who’s legally allowed to carry, you’re not going without me.”

  Sinead sighed. “I should tag along as well. You’re not going to have any local forensics except for me. So I might as well.”

  I looked at Sinead and nodded. “Okay, but you’re going to take your own car. You look at the crime scene, give us your thoughts, and when you’re done, you come straight back here. I don’t want anyone out in the field any longer than necessary. That includes me, but I, at least, have a gun…”

  Mariel gave me an amused look. “You forgot the basement.”

  I didn’t laugh, but she was right. Mariel had brought our collection of guns with her from the house in New York to the safe house in Tennessee. Then she bought more to add to the collection. It’s the primary reason that we drove up to Massachusetts instead of flying.

  “I don’t think we should carry those around the city just yet. Besides, we both know I have a few tricks up my sleeve.”

  Both Mariel and Pearson looked at the ring on my right hand. To all appearances, it looked like a college ring, with a similarly large jewel in the center. Though in this case, the jewel looked like a multi-faceted rose cut diamond, set in a black and silver band. Like a college ring, it had two emblems, one on either side of the jewel. One side was the Crusader Cross of Jerusalem—a cross with four other crosses, one in each quarter of the primary cross. The other emblem was a shield, like a family crest, in front of the crossed keys and papal crown of the Vatican flag. The shield looked like it had an inverted sword on it, forming a cross—the coat of arms for the Swiss Guards. The shield displayed the coat of arms for the current Pope.

  The only difference between this and a college ring is that it held part of the Soul Stone.

  The Soul Stone had been a prehistoric artifact that had nearly left London a smoldering hole in the ground. It had been around before Abraham, before polytheism, when monotheism was a natural, instinctive idea. It had been given to the people of First Dynasty Egypt by … something big, scary, and powerful that would later be misinterpreted as Anubis. The jewel had not been cut off of the Soul Stone, but willed off, by someone with excellent concentration.

  Right now, my faith, my prayers and God powered the Soul Ring.

  That didn’t even count the really interesting armor in the trunk of my car.

  Lena looked at me. “Hussar, are you going to ride to the rescue again?”

  I smiled at her, and her name for me. She insisted on calling me the cavalry. “Let’s hope not.”

  We finished breakfast ten minutes later. I rose from the table, cleared every empty plate, and made certain to kiss Grace on the forehead before I got my overcoat. I kissed and hugged Lena and Jeremy. I told them to listen to Mariel and say their prayers.

  I made certain those were the last words they heard from me on the way out the door … just in case I never came back.

  3 Walking the grid

  As we got in the car, Alex said to Father Pearson, “Tell me again how we’re going to get into the crime scene?”

  “The police are finished with it, so they don’t care if we look around or not.”

  We pulled up to the crime scene a little after ten AM.

  The local Passionist monastery was medieval and pleasant. It looked a little like a castle, only with windows made for air circulation instead of arrows. Looking on the website, the frames had been home to beautiful stained glass windows.

  I had to check the website because every last stained glass window had been smashed out.

  The windows smashed, the crosses ripped off the walls and smashed with a hammer…the outside only hinted at the desecration within. Before I stepped out of the car, I smelled the evil within. It reeked worse than any crime scene I had ever been to. It was often like that with the scent of evil.

  Within the monastery was the worst crime scene I had ever witnessed. Ignore that every religious image had been torn, smashed and stepped on, and then smeared in blood or excrement or both. Ignore that every piece of furniture had been overturned and ripped apart. Ignore the images of Christ ripped off each crucifix and ripped limb from limb.

  Ignore all of that, and it was still a nightmare from a blood-spattered horror film.

  According to the file that Pearson had received from the local police, the Passionist monks had all been stripped naked and dismembered to various degrees. Ten of them had been disemboweled. Five of those had been strung up from the rafters for their guts to hang out of their bodies. Some had been left in poses that were less suggestive and more flat-out pornographic statements. Every monk had had their genitals removed and reinserted elsewhere.

  Even without the bodies, it was horrific. It was nearly impossible to differentiate between the smell of urine, excrement, blood, vomit, and evil.

  Alex led the walkthrough, and I wandered behind him. When circled the area, nodding slowly and cataloging the damage. “Let me see if I got everything. Bloody finger paint on the walls. Desecrated bodies. Desecrated crucifixes. The altar has been burned and struck with hammers. The pews have been torched. The tabernacle has been blasted with a shotgun. Bodily fluids left on the marble—it looks like someone had sex there, but it was only semen in one aisle and only female fluids in another. It’s like the set design for a horror movie if someone used a wood chipper and a full morgue.”

  I held up a hand to stop him. My stomach had finally had enough. “Okay, I have to step out.”

  Alex followed me outside. I went straight for the car… then kept walking across the street. I wanted to run but restrained myself until I could no longer smell the death, decay, and filth from the crime scene. I couldn’t bear it any longer. My tolerance was decreasing over time instead of getting better. As the smell of sin and evil was metaphysical, I couldn’t block it out with something as simple as cotton balls dipped in alcohol to make the smell go away. I couldn’t wear a gas mask. I couldn’t –

  Wait. I don’t have a gas mask, but I do have a faceplate.

  I turned back and went straight for my car’s trunk. Alex ambled out of the monastery and sauntered over. He was used to coming after me when the stench became too much.

  But he wasn’t prepared for this.

  I opened the trunk, and there was a steamer trunk inside. I flipped the locks, and opened it up. Inside was a suit of armor, only it was made of clay. It looked like parts could belong to a terracotta Iron Man. But I only wanted one part—the helmet. It looked like it could have been a Tony St
ark invention, only the face place was blank, giving it an appearance more like a fencing mask. I had decided I didn’t want it to stand out with the telltale markings of a Templar suit of armor. Blank and anonymous were more my speed if I had to wear it in public.

  Let’s see if this works.

  I slid on the helmet, and the face mask swung down of its own accord, sealing into positing.

  Filter the air, I thought at the armor.

  I could suddenly breath clean air.

  Instead of a black void in front of me, the world became brighter and more vivid.

  Then again, that’s what happened when one’s vision was enhanced by the Divine Spark.

  The armor set was created from the remains of several golems, made and created by a Rabbi of Prague. The golems had been smashed by demons, but that didn’t matter. No one had thrown the off switch on the clay automaton. And what God had brought to life, let no demon rend asunder. The pieces and parts of golems had reformed around me as a suit of powered armor. And since the golems had no eyes, just the shallow place for them one might see like the eyes of a department store mannequin, their way of seeing was more akin to sensors or scanning equipment… Holy Radar, if you will.

  In this case, the golem transferred the sensor data to an augmented reality screen before my eyes.

  “What’s with the helmet, Darth Vader?”

  I smiled beneath the mask. “I need something to help me breathe.”

  Alex looked me up and down. “I don’t see any air holes in that thing. How are you breathing now?”

  I patted him on the shoulder and waved him back to the monastery. “I’ll explain on the way.”

  We walked back inside, and I filled him in the trip to Germany. He shook his head. “So you have a magic ring and a magic helmet. When do you get a magic spear and start singing opera?”

  “Hopefully never.”

  I stepped into the monastery again and paused. Suddenly dots of blood were clearly visible. Clear fluid stains were highlighted with colored outlines.

  The golem helmet runs on power from God. It can see everything.

  I thought at the helmet and had it filter out only the smell of evil. After that, I checked off one thing at a time. Urine. Fecal matter. Blood.

  Then I caught something. The smell of burned paper.

  I waved at Alex to follow me as I tracked the scent. It led me down a hall, around a cluster of chalk outlines, (it wasn’t really chalk, just markers for reference points) and into the main office of the monastery’s abbot. I looked around the room, trying to find the source of the burned smell. All of the papers were off the shelves and all over the room. Papers carpeted the floor and everything in it, even the overturned office desk. The only void in the papers was where the bodies had been.

  I pointed to the center of the room, where I smelled the burning. “Help me clean this off. Watch the papers, they may have missed something they wanted to burn.”

  After five minutes of going through every sheet of paper, we had dug down to the overturned desk. Packard and I exchanged a look. That the desk had been left in place did not speak to the efficacy of the Essex police department. We shouldn’t have been the ones to dig through the papers. If the papers had been left in place, that meant that the crime scene had been released to us without sorting and cataloging every piece of paper. It also meant that no one had gone through the abbot’s desk. If I did that at any point in my career, I’d have been fired. Even my first day on the job as a detective, I would have been obsessive over the details, making sure I cataloged everything—it would have also made the evidence room hate me since I would have cataloged items that probably weren’t even evidence.

  Alex placed the last piece of paper on the pile. “You know, I don’t think I ever screwed up a crime scene this bad, even when I was drunk off my ass.”

  I dropped to a crouch and focused on the desk. “No blood, so they didn’t bother,” I told him absently. “Just a guess.”

  “Dumb asses,” he muttered. “Let’s get the desk upright.”

  Alex and I sufficiently gloved up before we grabbed and righted the desk.

  As I figured from the smell, a small pile of ash sat underneath the overturned desk. I dropped down to my haunches and spread the ashes with my finger. The augmented vision of my helmet highlighted three pieces of paper that escaped the fire. The edges looked like they had been torn apart, then burned.

  Should have burned it straight, then sifted through it, I thought.

  I took the three pieces and fit them together. It was the name of a company, Matchett Industrial. “Well, that doesn’t help.”

  “What doesn’t?” Alex asked.

  I tapped the pieces. “Matchett Industrial? Ever heard of it?”

  Alex frowned, thought a moment, and shrugged. “No. Sorry. I’ve heard of Matchett Investments. That one is your basic hedge fund. Is it something?”

  I shrugged, holding the pieces together so I could place it on the desk behind me. “No idea. We’ll see.”

  Pearson stepped in the room. He carried what looked like the remains of a sign-in book. It was clearly burned as well. He looked at me wearing the helmet and said nothing about it. “Hello there. Find anything?”

  I gave another glance around the office to make sure there was nothing more. “Very little. Why? You?”

  Pearson placed the book down on the desk. He flipped it open and slid out five different sheets of paper. “These are all from yesterday. Sign-ins for different times. Different names. And they all signed in a company … though don’t ask me which, there are more holes in it than I know what do to with. Something with a lot of Ts.”

  Alex and I exchange a look.

  Alex smiled. “Well, Pat, I do not want to buy a vowel, but I would like to complete the puzzle. How about Matchett Industries?”

  Pearson looked at him, furrowed his brow, then looked down. He shrugged. “I guess. How did you figure that?”

  “I’m really good at crosswords,” Alex answered.

  I turned to face Pearson squarely. Before I said anything, the helmet highlighted a rectangular object stuck to the side of the desk. It was the same color as the desk, which is why we hadn’t seen it earlier.

  Probably why the killers didn’t notice it either.

  “But you know what this means, right?” Pearson asked. I turned my attention back to him.

  Sinead tapped the door as she stepped in. “What does what mean?” She looked to me. “And what is that on your head?”

  I waved her off. “Later.”

  Pearson tapped the sheets. “The sign-in register. This means that there were multiple people here for multiple exorcisms.”

  Sinead nodded and opened the files with the crime scene photos and held them up as they became relevant. “That fits with what I found. There are least six different weapon types I’ve found, and ten different hand sizes—figure six men, four women. This is the low number. That probably means that there were at least ten killers.”

  Alex held up his hand. “Hold on. No. Hell no. I am not doing this crap again. You’re telling me that we have another situation like Curran, but more of them?”

  I inwardly cringed but kept my face placid. I happened to be in agreement with Alex. Christopher Curran had been a serial killer. There had been dozens of victims to his name. They had all been buried in his basement, in pieces. That was before Curran had been possessed by a demon raised by a death cult. When possessed, he was nigh unstoppable. He had hurled cars with his mind, ever so casually. He was arrested after I had filled his joints full of bullets. Later, it seemed that he had wanted to be caught as part of a grander plan. What finally defeated him had been a combination of trickery and brute force prayer.

  I shook my head. “This time, we know what we’re doing,” I told Alex. “If we knew then what we know now, we’d call in the right backup as part of our confrontation. We have Pearson. We only need to get this right once.”

  Pearson cleared his throat and
raised a finger. “For the record, I feel I must clear up a misapprehension. The typical exorcism isn’t anything like what you see in a movie.”

  Sinead frowned. “I thought the book for The Exorcist was based on a real-life incident.”

  Pearson shrugged. “That case was a more dramatic instance. Demons in possession cases rarely manifest that blatantly. Most cases of demonic possession want to be low-key. The moment the demon is discovered is the moment things go south for it. It’s why it would sooner manifest as depression, or crippling disease, or a host of other symptoms. It’s why the first job of any exorcist is to find a doctor who will both acknowledge demonic possession is a possibility, and will first rule out every other possibility. It’s not that big a problem these days, since the exorcists I know only get a knock on the door after every doctor in existence has written the patient off.”

  Alex sighed and held up both hands, signaling a pause. “Okay. Hold up. I didn’t read the book, but I saw the movie. If that’s not SOP for an exorcism, what is?”

  Pearson shrugged. “It’s more of a process, and the Rite itself is literally only ten percent of the job. Ninety percent of the work must be done on the part of the possessed—be it from a routine of prayer to daily mass and regular confession. It can take years of blessings to fully rid the possessed of a demon. It’s more of a treatment than a cure. And all the while, the demon is fighting back… in many cases, the demon is trying to convince the victim that there is no demon. Demons don’t exist. Obviously, the victim is just crazy.”

  Sinead took a deep breath and slowly let it out. She wasn’t happy. “Anything else?”

  “There can be a relapse. Because if you’re not penitent, it’s going to screw things up a bit. As in there’s very little that can be done if the possessed wants their demon.”

  Alex sighed. “Great. Where does this lead us?”

  I looked back to the rectangle on the desk. I reached down and slowly peeled it off. It was a business card. “How about to a Mister Gerald Downey, of Matchett Industries?”