Special Agent Mandalay's eyes had almost adjusted to the darkness by the time they reached the bottom of the stairs. There were small windows at the top of the walls, spaced at roughly even intervals. A small amount of the grey daylight was leaking through them. She had noticed the upper lips of the window-wells protruding just above the ground when they first approached the house, but now that they were inside she could see that they must be filled with leaves and other debris. A by-product of mother nature combined with seven years of neglect.
Sheriff Carmichael adjusted the beam on the flashlight as wide as it would go and played it slowly across the walls of the basement. Seeping cracks were evident, which accounted for the damp, musty smell that permeated the cold air.
“Right over here,” he said, panning the beam down to the floor.
The yellow swath of light revealed an oblong outline scribed on the concrete. A foot or so away was a much smaller outline, roughly perpendicular to the first. Dark stains colored in portions of the two shapes, spreading outward in haphazard flows, as if randomly spilled with no regard for the lines. Similar dark splotches were splattered on the wall nearby.
“And there,” the sheriff offered, sliding the light over to the corner, a few feet away, where a basketball-sized circle was drawn, it too with a dark stain beneath.
“And over there,” he continued, again aiming the beam toward a location apart from the others. This one looked like the outline of a giant, disproportionate boomerang.
“Torso and upper right arm,” Carmichael announced, panning the light back to the first location. Moving it rapidly to the second spot he added, “Head.” Aiming at the third he said, “Left calf and most of the thigh.” Waving the light slowly around to reveal other outlines, he hesitated for a moment at each and named them off one by one, “Left arm and hand; right forearm; right calf, thigh, and foot; left foot; right hand. And that's pretty much it.”
“And it's exactly the same, every year?” Constance remarked as much as asked.
Sheriff Carmichael swung the flashlight back and forth again, rapidly illuminating each of the spots in succession. “Yep. Exactly the same every year. All seven victims dismembered the same way, left in the same position, every time. We don't even clean up the outlines anymore.”
“Don't you mean eight?” Constance asked.
“Not yet. Not until Christmas Day anyway.”
“I mean John Horace Colson,” she explained. “Aren't the seven recent victims positioned in exactly the same way he was found dismembered in nineteen seventy-five?”
“Yes, they are, Special Agent Mandalay,” he spat, adopting the formal tone he'd used before when he wanted to stress a point. “But you need to bear in mind that John Colson was a monster. Merrie Callahan was the victim, not him.”
“You aren't looking at this objectively, Sheriff Carmichael,” she told him, mimicking his sudden conventionalism.
“I never claimed to be,” he replied. “You're a smart girl, I thought you'd figured that out by now.”