Chapter 2

The morning after the Golden Eagle Youth Camp shoot, Sarah and Ken were dispatched to an isolated farmhouse a few miles south of town to report on a particularly gruesome discovery.

A body had been found by a telephone technician sent to check on an open phone line. As he approached the house, he knew from the smell that something was dead inside. He banged on the front door first, then peered into an open kitchen window. That’s when he saw the bloated, maggot-infested body slumped in a kitchen chair.

A deputy sheriff who was the first responder to the scene somehow missed the caved-in skull on the woman and assumed it was a natural death until he found two more bodies in the basement. Police had been on the scene for a couple of hours by the time Sarah and Ken arrived.

Since it was now an obvious crime scene and crawling with forensics technicians, the news team wasn’t allowed inside, but Ken was able to sneak a few shots through the open door and through some windows. All they could get from Sergeant Jerry Haldeman, the lead detective assigned to the case, was that it appeared to be three members of a family, two in the basement and the one female in the kitchen. The female in the basement appeared to have been confined in a room behind a steel door with bolts on the outside. The male corpse was found lying outside that door.

The medical examiner would have to determine actual cause of death, but it appeared the female in the kitchen and the male near the basement door had suffered blunt trauma to the head. The probable weapon was a length of blood-smeared inch and a half steel pipe found in the weeds outside the back door.

There was no obvious cause of death for the female inside the room. Judging from her apparent height, she might have been a girl in her early teens, but it was hard to tell in her advanced state of decomposition. The M.E. would have to make that determination at autopsy. His best guess was that they had been dead for a couple of weeks, and the preliminary assessment was that it was a multiple murder perpetrated by a person or persons unknown.

Sarah and Ken hurried back to the station to put together their story for the one o’clock news. They would be assigned to follow up on the story for at least the next few days or until the crime was solved. Interviews with neighbors, the nearest of which lived a quarter of a mile away, turned up nothing because nobody really knew anything about the family. They were generally assumed to be a couple preferring to live isolated and out of the mainstream.

Sarah checked back with Detective Haldeman twice more through the day for updates on the murder case. There was nothing new, so she got back to working on her documentary and spoke to the receptionist at Dr. Wideners’s home for emotionally disturbed children. Ostensibly, she was trying to coordinate a meeting with the doctor, but in reality she was doing her best to learn when Widener would not be in the building, hoping to show up during that time and try to weasel her way around the receptionist to make contact with the John Doe kid.

Since he didn’t speak, she wasn’t too sure what she’d do if she was successful, but one never knew what might crop up by pure chance. She figured at the very least she and Ken could get enough footage of him to begin building some kind of narrative.

Her chance came the day after the kids returned from camp. She and Ken needed to fill the last couple of air minutes, so they were given permission to film the kids as they attended classes as well as a few shots of their living quarters. Dr. Widener was out of town at a conference, but she left specific instructions with her staff about what the TV news crew could and could not have access to. They were specifically not given access to John Doe.

They arrived at the facility while the kids were having their breakfast and were shown to the classrooms to await the beginning of the day’s activities. If Sarah had any hopes of poking around on her own, they were frustrated by the counselor who stuck to them like glue.

It was obvious they weren’t going to get any time alone with John Doe, so Sarah tried squeezing their escort for information. “Um, does the kid who doesn’t speak attend classes with the rest of them?”

The counselor considered the question before answering, wanting to be certain she wasn’t divulging anything privileged. “Not at this point. Since he doesn’t interact with them or the teachers, a classroom setting would probably be just one more added stressor for him and an unnecessary distraction to the other kids. Today, he’ll be under observation.”

“For what?”

“I can’t talk about that.”

Sarah went into her in-your-face act that got a warning scowl from Ken. She asked rather sharply, “Well, what does he do then, just sit alone in a room somewhere like a caged animal?”

Ken glared at her and shook his head, again trying to warn her off, but she ignored him.

The counselor, a stout woman in her forties, smiled at him and said, “That’s okay, Mr. Early. Dr. Widener warned us that Ms. Bernstein would be aggressive with her inquiries. We’re trained to not respond to insults or threats from the press.”

Sarah, irritated at being called out, shot back, “So Dr. Widener sets all the rules and you all just fall in line like good little boys and girls, right?”

The counselor actually laughed. “Yup, I guess that’s about the size of it. You still want to get some shots of the kids rooms, or were you just here to corner John?”

Reluctantly, Sarah backed off and accepted her defeat. “Okay, okay! Look, I apologize for being so pushy. It usually gets me something but you’re too good. So, um, I guess you have John Doe isolated somewhere in the building.”

“No comment.”

Ken shot about ten minutes of the kids in their classrooms, then he and Sarah were shown upstairs to get some footage of the boy’s living quarters. The girls and the boys were housed in separate wings of the building with locked doors between them. Sarah wondered how much of a concern for possible hanky-panky there might be with kids this age. Of course many of them were post-puberty, so she supposed there was at least some likelihood that attempts would be made to satisfy one of nature’s prime biological imperatives.

While Ken was shooting some of the dorm room interiors, Sarah stood out in the hallway chatting with the counselor. When a janitor came down the hall pushing a dust mop ahead of him, Sarah’s keen inquiring eye took note that he was Hispanic and damned good-looking, in his late twenties or early thirties, and he wasn’t wearing a wedding band — all that at a glance. Her devious mind began to hatch a plan.

She turned to the counselor and asked, “Uh, would it be okay if I asked the custodian a couple of questions about working around these kids? I won’t ask him anything specific, just his general impression of them.”

Again, the counselor considered the question carefully. “Mmm, I guess it would be alright since Raul doesn’t have any knowledge of the kid’s histories, but try to keep it short and general, okay?”

“Thanks, I’ll just be a couple of minutes.”

She walked down the hall and caught him just as he was turning to head the other way. “Raul, is it?”

He turned and smiled. “Si, how is it that I can help you?” His English wasn’t broken but his accent was strong, like he hadn’t been in the country all that long, and that gave her the in she was looking for.

Sarah assumed her seductive voice and said, “Tengo un par de preguntas,” (I have a couple of questions.)

His smile broadened at her excellent pronunciation.

“Qué te gustaría saber?” (What would you like to know?)

Sarah handed him one of her cards and asked, “Puedes reunirte conmigo mas tarde durante el dia de hoy?” (Can you meet with me later in the day?)

Raul took the card and tucked it into his shirt pocket without making even a pretense of moving his appreciative stare away from the pretty lady’s very nice tits. He obviously liked what he saw and his smile was her answer. “Si, I can do that.”

She touched his hand and said, “Llámame.” To Raul, the gesture was as good as a promise.

Sarah walked away swishing her shapely ass seductively, fully expecting a call from him that very afternoon.

For the second day in a row, Anton was taken to a room full of all sorts of things that might capture his imagination and stimulate some level of response. The day before, he’d spent two three-hour sessions alone in the room being observed through a one-way mirror. At first, he just walked around touching things, glancing at the mirror from time to time, clearly suspecting there was someone on the other side. Once he’d taken note of everything in the room, he pulled a paperback book out of the side pocket of his cargo shorts, flopped into the blue plastic beanbag chair and read. He was half way through the second book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Today there were two new items in the room; a spinet piano and a classical guitar. Sarah’s observation to Dr. Widener that the boy seemed to be playing a piano, at least in his mind, got the psychologist to wondering if music might be a valid line of communication. The only thing in his possession when he was dropped at the hospital was an iPod, ear buds and a charging cord, all stuffed into the front pocket of his baggy, over-sized trousers. Anton refused to hand over the iPod so its contents could be determined, so rather than upsetting him by insisting, one night as he slept, one of the counselors crept into his room and borrowed it. There was nothing on it but music that covered several genres, predominantly classical. There was no question that the iPod was his most prized possession, so it was returned undisturbed.

He entered the room and closed the door behind him, tossed his paperback book on the beanbag and moved immediately toward the piano. He studied it, rubbed his fingertips over the beautiful mahogany finish, and pressed the middle C key. He turned and looked at the mirror before pulling the bench out and sitting in front of the keyboard.

Over the course of the next few hours, the two observers, Widener’s psychology intern and one of the counselors, couldn’t be certain if what they were witnessing was John Doe playing them, or the workings of a true musical genius. He began by playing every single key from left to right, seeming to listen carefully to every single note. He looked down at the pedals and stepped on them one at a time as he played several random notes to learn what they did. Then he worked out some two-note chords, three-note chords and four-note chords with his right hand, repeating the process with his left. Anton’s elegantly long fingers seemed designed for the keyboard. He experimented with chord variations for about an hour, not playing any kind of music, but listening to how they worked together, how one or two chords might logically lead to another, and how the mood of a chord could shift completely by changing one finger’s position.

Two hours into the session, he got up and walked around with his hands in his pockets, looking intently at the instrument. Then he sat down and picked out the melody of a very recognizable piece with one finger. He did it twice, then sat silently for a few minutes with his eyes closed and his head cocked as if he were listening and imagining how it was supposed to sound.

When he had fixed whatever he was thinking in his mind, to the astonishment of the observers, over the remainder of the day Anton taught himself how to play Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”. All the way through! And beautifully!

At lunchtime, a staff member brought in a plate with a sandwich and some raw vegetables, a glass of milk and two cookies for his lunch. He took no notice of it, working non-stop on the music until a counselor insisted he go to the dining room for his dinner at six o’clock.

The next day, he worked out Beethoven’s “Für Elise”.

All this was done without a note of written music in front of him. It was all from his memory of music he’d been listening to on his iPod.

“My god,” wondered the intern. “Is that even humanly possible?”

At the TV station, Sarah called Detective Haldeman again for an update on the murders. Autopsies showed the older man and woman, the ones who had been bludgeoned, were probably in their late forties, consistent with ID’s found at the scene. The other body was determined to be that of a young female, probably thirteen or fourteen years of age. A forensic entomologist determined from the insect larvae inhabiting her body that she had been dead for probably two or three days longer than the older victims. Tissue analysis showed that she might well have died of malnutrition.