"So, do you want me to meet you?"

"For what?"

"To go to this crime scene?"

"No, actually. I was just calling to make sure you were okay."The meaning behind his words was quickly apparent to me. For a number of reasons, I was most likely at the top of Porter's hit list; not the least of which was the fact that I had shot him. Of course, he was trying to kill me at the time, so I didn't have much choice. However, since he had already tried once, we had every reason to believe that he would do it again.

This was exactly why Felicity and I had spent the past two weeks residing in a tiny, unfamiliar apartment in a secure building instead of our own home. We were in hiding, and it was starting to get on my nerves.

"So, the victim is male?" I asked "That's what they said. I just got the call a few minutes ago."

"So where is the scene?" I pressed again.

"No way. Stay put, Row. Let us handle this."

"You know I can't do that, Ben."

"You don't have a hell of a lotta choice now do ya?" he shot back.

"I'll just show up," I told him calmly. "I can find out where the scene is without your help."

"And I'll fuckin' arrest your sorry ass if you do."

"Ben..." I just allowed my voice to trail off.

"You know, Rowan, we ain't just a bunch of bumblin' idiots. Cops solve murders all the time without your help."

"I know, Ben, but this is different."

"Yeah, I know you think it is, but it's not. Why can't you just stay put where I know you're safe, and let me handle this?"

"Because I want my life back, Ben."

"Gettin' yourself killed would kinda defeat the purpose now wouldn't it?"

"We've had this discussion before, Ben."

"And I don't recall bein' convinced that time either."

"I need to do this," I appealed.

He huffed out a heavy sigh after an extended silence. "Fine. Jeez. Okay. At least if you're with me I can keep an eye on ya'. I'll swing by and pick you up. But listen, Row, you'd damn well better tell Felicity before I get there. I don't have time for an argument like last time."

"Don't worry. She'll be coming with us."

"Both of you?" he groaned. "Sheesh. Lucky me."

"Hey, it's not my idea."

"Are you willin' to stay home and let me handle this?" he queried flatly."I thought we'd already established that as a no," I replied, somewhat confused by the question.

"Then quit tryin' to blame her. It IS your fuckin' idea," he huffed. "Meet me in the lobby. I'll be there in fifteen."

Chapter 2:.

"This is fucked..." Ben spat, shaking his head in a display of disbelief and looking upward as he spoke. "This S.O.B is just plain sick."

It was just after four A.M. by the time we arrived, and we found ourselves standing in the middle of Locust Street downtown. We had signed in on the scene log with Felicity and me listed as consultants and allowed in only by Ben's graces.

Stepping onto the active participant side of the bright yellow strip of barrier tape that cordoned off the street was akin to entering another world. I glanced around, feeling both out of place and right at home in the same instant. In the past two years, I'd visited more active homicide crime scenes than many cops see in their entire careers; and I didn't even have a badge. Something seemed very wrong about that, but it was a fact I simply could not change. I didn't find it reassuring at all that I was becoming so accustomed to it.

Cold wind sliced in a linear gust down the thoroughfare, flaring the band of plastic tape as if to highlight the repeated imprint of block letters along its length. Bold strokes formed words that had become all too familiar to me-CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS. The temperature was settled for the moment at an even thirty-six degrees, but the computed wind chill pushed the overall feeling downward into the range of the mid-twenties.

There were a half dozen crime scene technicians milling about on the ground, while another handful could occasionally be spotted working on the roof of the building that was before us. The medical examiner's hearse had already arrived, and the area was illuminated by the visual insanity of flickering light bars on idling emergency vehicles.

When the street level scene was taken as a whole, my friend's candid observation simply became a commentary that mirrored my own feelings. Unfortunately, he was talking about something far worse, for what was taking place on the tableau of the cold asphalt was only a supporting backdrop for the spectacle above.

My gaze followed Ben's, coming to rest between the second and third floor windows of the four-story brick building. There, carefully directed spotlights illuminated the centerpiece of this nightmare. Garish shadows molded themselves in a shroud about the nude and blood streaked corpse of a man. Suspended by a ropetied about his ankles, he was hanging upside down. His head was obscured by an executioner's hood and his arms were splayed out to the sides, perpendicular to the rest of his body, as if to form an inverted cross. The appendages were held stiffly in place by what looked like a two-by-four across his shoulders. At this distance, I couldn't be positive, but the piece of wood appeared to be held fast by something encircling his wrists and neck.

This, in and of itself, was macabre enough to make anyone believe that it could only be a Hollywood "slasher flick" in the making. If only that were true, for it didn't end there. From the victim's groin, downward to a point in his mid-torso, his abdomen was split open. There, protruding from the ragged tear like a grey-white serpent, his intestines cascaded across his chest to hang in a pendulum-like loop several feet beneath. Each time the wind would pick up, the sash of organ tissue would move with the breeze, undulating like heavy drapes next to an air vent. Blood still dripped at protracted intervals from the exposed viscera to plop wetly onto the dark stain that now graced the sidewalk below.

Behind us, a loud and very wet sounding splatter tore our attention away from the scene as a patrol officer involuntarily launched the contents of his own stomach onto the pavement.

I looked back over my shoulder in response to the sound and then glanced over at Felicity. She was clutching my arm tightly and staring upward while absently chewing at her lower lip. She had been to a few crime scenes before but had not been subjected to anywhere near as much of this grisly scenery as I had. Still, she looked stable for the moment, so I returned my stare to the three-dimensional horror show that was playing out in front of me. I swallowed hard, because to be honest, I was only a half step away from heaving myself.

"Ya'know, Doc Sanders told me once that the average adult has about thirty feet of intestines." Ben paused for a moment after reciting the fact. "Man, I've seen a lotta crap in autopsies, but I never really expected to see anybody's guts stretched out like that."

"Disembowelment was not uncommon during the Inquisition." I spoke quietly, struggling to keep my voice even. "Actually, it was a favored form of punishment and torture."

"You mean he did that to 'im while he was still alive?" Ben asked with a thin strain of disbelief in his voice.

"Oh, yes," I nodded as I spoke then swallowed hard again. "Probably rather slowly..."

As I'd known it would, my headache was starting to get worse. The stark chill of fear climbed up my vertebrae and began clawing at the base of my neck. There was something unseen here that was begging my attention, and I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to give it.

"Jeezus..." He shook his head. "Guess I shoulda suspected that, considering..."

I knew full well what his unspoken words implied. Eldon Porter made a habit oftorturing his victims mercilessly before finally bringing about their end. During his last spree, he had even burned two of them alive.

I allowed my gaze to fall away from the corpse as I turned my head, but I didn't have to let it fall far. I was of average height, but I still had to crane my neck back to look up at Ben's face; average in stature he definitely was not. His particular pencil mark on the doorjamb had hit six feet when he was in junior high school, and he had still proceeded to grow another six inches after that. He was no stranger to the weight room either, and the rest of his physique made a perfect match for his elevated height.

Formidable was a word that came to mind at first glance; when he had still been a uniformed officer, just plain scary tended to be the more accurate description.

He was looking back at me with dark, questioning eyes that peered out of angularly defined features and natural reddish-tanned skin-unmistakable visual evidence of his full-blooded Native American heritage. His large hand was tucked beneath a shank of collar length, jet-black hair, and he was slowly massaging the back of his neck. This was a common mannerism of his, and it told me that his mind was doing far more behind those eyes than simply waiting for me to say something.

I said something anyway. "Was there a Bible?"

While an outside observer might have found the question somewhat odd, it was something I was certain he had expected me to ask.

"Yeah, that's what they said when they called," he told me, giving a short nod to the affirmative as he spoke. "Bookmarked and highlighted."

"Passage?"

My friend stopped massaging his neck long enough to thumb through a small notebook then read his shorthand back to me, "At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death. Deuteronomy seventeen, six."

"He's working from his list again..." I muttered. "When you ID this guy he'll be someone that one of the original victims knew."

"Yeah," Ben agreed. "That's kinda what we figured."

The "he" I referred to was, of course, Eldon Andrew Porter. The list was exactly that, a list. It comprised the names of Witches, Wiccans, and various other Pagan individuals living in the Saint Louis metropolitan area. It was, of course, by no means a comprehensive census of persons engaging in what is often collectively referred to as alternative spirituality; however, the odds were that it wasn't terribly short either.

Porter had compiled it himself by way of various sadistic tortures, such as the one displayed above us now.

A bookmarked Bible was his calling card and the highlighted passage, a message.

What we were being told was the reason this particular victim had been chosen. His crime was that of being a Witch.We'd been here before, so that much was a given. And, just like the Bible verse said, he had been accused by more than one witness. There was never much reading between the lines necessary, for Eldon was nothing if not precise about the messages he left behind.

Basically, Porter was a single-minded killer. What made him unique was his highly particular criterion for committing murder. Put very simply, he executed Witches.

That was the short answer. The long answer went something like this: Porter was a highly suggestible sociopath with a mild paranoid psychosis. Several years ago he committed a crime, was caught, convicted, and sent to prison. That should have been the end of the story, but society simply wasn't that lucky. While incarcerated he had been deeply affected by a fire and brimstone prison ministry. Something called a "God Pod." Unfortunately, he completely missed the allegorical sense of biblical text and took much of it literally. In the end, what should have been a tool for rehabilitation had, in his case, created a serial spree killer.

The man literally came to view himself as a modern day equivalent to the inquisitors of fifteenth century Europe, and just two months shy of one year ago, he had started his own series of Witch trials here in Saint Louis, Missouri. Far removed from medieval Europe in a geographical sense, yes, but he'd gone to great lengths to adhere to the tortures and execution methods of that long ago era as prescribed in the Malleus Maleficarum.

Roughly translated from the original Latin, Malleus Maleficarum meant the Hammer of the Witches. In fact, the "hammer" was a book-an instructional manual written by a pair of inquisitors by the names of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. In its day, it had been the one true and official guidebook for the persecution of accused Witches and heretics.

The language did not matter, however. Whether scribed in Latin or English, the tome was most definitely not my favorite piece of literature.

At the time of Porter's original killing binge, I'd been asked by Ben to consult on the case because of a symbol found carved into the flesh of the first victim. My own spiritual path and studies of various religious practices had helped my best friend solve a crime before, so I guess I had seemed like a natural choice at the time.

The truth is that unbeknownst to me, I was already being sucked into it by an ethereal beckoning. Once I became directly involved on this plane, those forces came to bear with a vicious intensity. After that, it had all been downhill for me.

Much to Ben's horror, I had even ended up becoming one of Porter's prey; and on a very foggy night, on a pedestrian bridge spanning the Mississippi River, February last, the self-proclaimed "Hand of God" had almost succeeded in making me his seventh victim.

"Yo, white man, you okay?" Ben asked.

It took a moment for the words to register, and I realized that I was just staring at him. "Yeah, I'm fine.""You don't look fine. You were kinda zoned there for a minute."

"Have you looked in a mirror?" I asked in retort.

"Yeah. Funny. Ya'know, I'm still not all that keen on you bein' here, Row" was his answer. "Felicity either."

"Yeah, you've told me that several times already."

"I'm serious," he added.

"I know you are."

"For one thing, it's only been a coupl'a' weeks."

"I know." I nodded assent as I spoke.

The pair of weeks he was referring to amounted to the period of time it had been since I had played a fairly significant role in the capture of a serial rapist. In and of itself a good thing, except that due to various factors in the investigation-both seen and unseen-I hadn't been coming across as particularly stable lately. Of course, considering my gift-or curse, depending upon how you viewed it-it was the unseen that really caused the problems.

"And then there's..." he began, but seemed to purposely allow his voice to die away on the wind. I noticed then that he was staring past me and at Felicity.

What he left unsaid was the fact that the rapist had come after her, actually managing to effect a kidnapping if for only a few short hours.

Even though we'd stopped him before he could go any further in her case, it made it only slightly less traumatic. In light of those events, I could certainly understand his concern.

I looked over at my wife and saw that she was still staring upward, oblivious to our exchange. "I know, Ben. Believe me, I know."

"You know, Rowan, we set you two up in that apartment for a reason."

The point he was trying to make was simple: Porter was going to be after me, no two ways about it, and my friend didn't want me out in the open.

Of course, if your aim is to kill Witches, you might as well go after the real thing, and I definitely made no bones about being just that. Considering everything that had gone on in my life over the past couple of years, I was just about as far "out of the broom closet," so to speak, as one could be. Therefore, I was not very hard to accuse. I had already admitted it in public-which, by the way, Porter had been sure to remind me of as he pronounced my condemnation and attempted to throw me over the side of a bridge with a noose around my neck.

Thankfully, much of that night had now become a blur. I still had nightmares about it and probably always would, but they were finally starting to fade into two-dimensional representatives of what they had once been. Dulled and flattened, they were much easier to take than the full-blown Technicolor reenactments. Still, I was looking forward to a future when they would be visited upon me with lessfrequency.

I knew that day wouldn't come as long as Porter was free.

Of the things I recalled clearly from that night, I knew that in my bid to escape I had shot him. I definitely remembered pulling the trigger, and there was even a blood spatter at the scene that provided physical evidence that I'd hit him. Nevertheless, when the police arrived, there was no body to be found.

No lifeless remains.

No hard and fast proof of his demise.

I had blacked out at almost the same instant the handgun had discharged, so I was no help in the eyewitness department. At the time, Ben had been convinced that Porter had fallen from the bridge to a certain death in the icy river below. The other members of the Major Case Squad on the scene concurred.

For them, it was all over but the paperwork; one of my friend's favorite cliches and one that I'd heard him quip several times before.

But for me... Well, I was the proverbial odd man out. I held the one dissenting opinion in their clutch of optimism. Something in the back of my head told me that Porter was still alive; that the wound I'd inflicted was not so grievous as to take his life, and that he had disappeared into the fog-not the water. That inkling had eventually become an issue of extreme contention between Ben and me-to the point where I finally just kept my nagging intuition to myself.

Well, for the most part anyway.

Unfortunately, when all was said and done, I was the one with the correct answer to the sixty-four thousand dollar question: Eldon Andrew Porter was alive and still just as demented-if not more so-than before. It had merely taken him ten months to come out of hiding.

Now that he had surfaced, I found myself wishing that I had been a better shot.

"It's a bit of a climb," the patrol officer ahead of us said over his shoulder. "We have to go up to the fourth floor, then over to the roof access."

My eyes were still adjusting to the darkness inside the building as we climbed the debris-strewn concrete stairs. The faint nasal bite of urine, both stale and fresh, joined in a pungent reek with feces and rotting trash to foul the gelid air.