A Peek Behind The Veil (c)
Chapter Four
By Fiction Writer #13
(nosex, paranormal)

I was always the kind of kid who impulsively opened his presents before 
reading the card.  That tendency carried into my adult life, provided one 
can consider a raving alkie like myself an adult, that is.  I tend to handle 
investigative cases in much the same way I did childhood presents, 
looking at the physical evidence before reading any files that might be 
attached.  Being at a crime scene, holding a murder weapon, seeing 
photographs or security camera tapes, it just puts me right in the middle 
of the mystery, and makes me a part of it.  I get all caught up in a kind of 
thrill, much like a child given a gift.

That's why my hand went straight into my pocket the second the door of 
the Pub hammered shut behind me.  The folded piece of paper went 
untouched for the moment.  I was completely absorbed with the cross 
that had been placed in my care.  The brief glimpse of it in the darkened 
bar had only fueled my mushrooming curiosity.  Feeling it in my pocket, 
and not being able to look more closely, had me chomping at the bit.

"Shit!"

I cursed the sunlight once the little cross came out in the open. Coming 
from the cool darkness of the bar into the blazing brightness of a late 
spring afternoon, had my booze ravaged eyes stinging.  Until my pupils 
contracted to the right size, I was forced to get my first impressions of 
the object by touch alone.

Heavy, for such a small thing; I remember how heavy it felt the first time 
I truly held one.  Cold too, especially for something that had been in my 
pocket just seconds before.  Right away I could tell that it had been 
carved out of stone, and by someone with talent for such work; A 
smooth, polished, flawless surface, like glass.

It wasn't a Christian cross, at least not like those representative of the 
crucifixion.  Each arm stretched outward at equal lengths of half an inch 
from its center.  The ends of each arm were flared, like that of the Iron 
Cross used by Germany during World War I, only more subtle.

I became very familiar with that particular symbol as a child.  My dad, the 
grounded fly boy, continued a hobby long past his own childhood to 
compensate him in his disappointment.  That hobby was the meticulous 
building of model planes.  He built all kinds.  But, his favorites were of 
the first designs ever flown in war.  The true dog fighters, he called them.  
I grew up hearing tales of Baron Von Richthofen, the Red Baron for 
those of you who didn't have an obsessed father.  Pap told dozens of 
stories over and over of the Baron's deft piloting in battles high above 
the clouds.  A crimson triplane adorned with a black Iron Cross.

This cross, however, was of a more unique and detailed design.  The 
juncture of the four arms united at a small disk, the center of which had a 
hole bored through from one side to the other.

I blinked a few times, helping my eyes readjust to the light, and finally 
got a look at the object I'd been fingering.  The tactile image I created in 
my mind proved to be fairly accurate, but details were missing.

Details such as the thin silver ring that passed through all four arms, 
bisecting them at an equal distance from the center.  This ring was so 
thin, maybe the width of a hair, that it almost disappeared from sight 
altogether.  If it hadn't been for the bright sunlight that I'd just been 
cursing, I would have missed the slight glimmering completely.

Pinching the cross between my thumb and finger, I held it up to the sun 
to get a look at the hole through the center.  Five silver clips lined the 
inner perimeter.  A setting, now empty, that once held something in 
place, perhaps a gemstone that had been pried free.

All in all the craftsmanship was top notch.  Mind you, I'm no expert when 
it comes to jewelry, but I can tell the good stuff from the crap.  Years of 
dealing with robberies had helped me hone that skill.  People tend to 
exaggerate the value of items stolen from them.

I can understand their reasons, though.  Theft is a violation.  It hurts 
when you realize that something you've worked hard for has been taken.  
My guess, and this is just a guess, is that by inflating the value of the 
stolen goods, they hope to increase the punishment doled out on the 
thief.

Then again, it's probably just for the insurance money.  People don't 
value things as much as they used to.  Now days, it's all about the price 
tag attached.

A cross like the one I held on that fateful day would go unnoticed in a 
jewelry store.  Not enough "Bling" for today's tastes.  Something about it 
made me feel uneasy, queasy even.  At the time, I just chalked it up to 
the lingering effects of Jack, even though that bastard had been 
curiously quiet for quite some time.

BEEEEEEEEEEEP!

The blaring of a car horn saved my life, giving me just enough time to 
jump out of the way of a speeding cab.  Traffic buzzed past me in all 
directions.  Horns screeched and drivers cursed as I tried desperately to 
get to the sidewalk without getting killed.  I made it, barely, and 
collapsed on the concrete safe haven, puffing and sweating like I had 
just run a marathon.

"Jesus Christ," I panted, as the crowd of people who had gathered 
hoping morbidly to see if I would make it or not slowly dispersed.  I felt 
dizzy, and inexplicably lost; Quite an odd feeling even for me.  Surreal.  
Unreal, like I'd been drugged.  It took me a few minutes just to regain my 
bearings.  What the hell?

The entire time I held that cross up to the light I had been walking, my 
mind concentrating on the object and not on the world around me.  
Somehow, I ended up twelve blocks from the pub and standing in the 
middle of Canal Street staring at the sun through the cross.

"Smooth, Nicky... ", Jack chimed in, "... real smooth.  Maybe now you'll 
take that drink, huh?"

"Piss off, you little shit!"

I spoke out loud, drawing the attention of some of the stragglers who 
had remained behind to see if I needed some help.  My little outburst 
confirmed to them that I was mentally ill.

"Hey buddy, you okay?  You need a doctor?" I looked up to find a tall, 
thin guy dressed in a blue suit looming over me, with a look on his face 
bordering on both concern for me, and concern for his own safety.

"Na, I just..." My mouth felt dry. "I've had the flu, the medicine I took is 
wacking me out." Hey, why come up with a new lie if the old one has 
been working so well?

He reached down and helped me up on my wobbly feet. "Yeah, well, ya 
almost got yerself killed out there," he said, while pointing out to the 
middle of traffic. "You shouldn't be out walking around like a damned 
zombie."

"You're right." I steadied myself against a no parking sign. "I think I'll take 
a cab home."

"Good idea, buddy." He put his fingers to his lips and whistled that high 
pitched tune synonymous with hailing taxis.  Almost instantly one 
stopped, and he helped me into the back seat. "No more playing in traffic 
today.  Go home and sleep it off, alright buddy?"

"Yeah, I'll do just that," I gasped, and slumped into the seat as he closed 
the door for me.  I turned and thanked him for his help through the open 
window. "Thanks, man."

"No problem.  You just get better, okay Nicky?" and the cab took off 
down the street, taking me away.  It was only after telling the driver 
where to go that I suddenly snapped out of my trance.

"How did he know my name?"

"What?" the driver asked.

"Nothing." I shook my head. "Just talking to myself."

The cab got me back to my building a little before six.  My little journey 
from the Pub to Canal Street had taken a longer than I thought, hours 
longer, in fact.  Missing time.  I had experienced it before.  All heavy 
drinkers do at some point, but this seemed eerily different.  I hadn't 
touched a drop of Jack since the night before.  Ah hell, I guess some 
things linger long after the soothing burn of your last swig.

Past the eye opening scent of the first floor coffee shop, and the musty 
smell of the used bookstore on the second, up the stairs I trudged to find 
the safety of my office.  It wasn't until I twisted the knob on my door that I 
realized that I could actually smell again.  Well, not that I had lost my 
sense of smell or anything like that, but I'd begun to notice scents again.  
Drinking befuddles your mind, you tend not to notice little things like 
odors, especially not your own.  Now that I was sobering up the acrid 
tang of my sweat as it oozed from my pores, carrying the remaining 
alcohol from my system, stung my sinuses.

If I thought I stunk, I was totally unprepared for what awaited me once I 
had my door opened.  A wave of horrid, nostrils burning, eye watering, 
and stomach churning rancid odors greeted me.

"Oh God!"

I choked back the bile rising in my throat and took a step back from the 
doorway.

"How in the hell did I live in there?"

"You didn't!" Jack made his own retching sound, mimicking mine. "That's 
where you rotted."

Holding my nose, I forced myself to breach the threshold.

"Where do I start?"

"I don't know, but I think you should have a drink first.  No sense in 
suffering through this without some help."

Good ole' Jack; Always a wealth of suggestions. "Not going to happen, 
so you might as well crawl back to whatever part of my mind you came 
out of."

"What, and miss all of this?"

"Miss what?" I asked him, as I began to pull out long untouched cleaning 
supplies.

"You're making a fool of yourself.  What are you going to do, huh?  
Clean up the office?  Clean up yourself?  Get your life back in order?"

He chuckled.

"It'll never happen, Nick.  Just admit it, you're a loser.  You always were 
a loser, and you will always be a loser.  Give it up now before you fail 
again."

He kept that sort of rant up the entire time I cleaned.  Some friend!  What 
ever had made me fall into his clutches in the first place?  As I emptied 
my fridge of the decaying remains of Lo-Mein and Pizza, he prated on 
about how my lifelong dream of being a PI was nothing more than a 
child's fantasy.  As I gathered up the empty liquor and beer bottles 
littered about the place, he told me I would never know the touch of a 
woman again, because none would have me.

"Rub salt in an open wound, Jack.  Fuck you very much."

The bathroom was the worst part of the ordeal.  As I scrubbed out the 
blackened ring of body soil that had formed around the basin, he asked 
if I was really going to help Erin, or just give up on her like I had my 
sister.  Jack always knew how to twist that knife to cause the most 
effective pain.

On top of all that melodrama, my hands began shaking again when I 
cleaned up my desk for the first time in two years.  Heaped further upon 
that unwelcome distraction, Jack's voice was like nails on a chalkboard, 
or biting into tin foil with a filling in your teeth.  He almost had me, and he 
knew it.  That's why, when I pulled open my bottom drawer, I wasn't at 
all surprised to find him sitting there.

His clear glass glittered in the fading sunlight.  The classy black and 
white label proudly displayed his name and family tradition.  The deep 
amber color of his charcoal-mellowed body sloshed gently inside, 
promising warmth, comfort, and that pleasing, tickling, burn as he 
slipped past my lips and traveled down into my gullet.

"I'll always be here for you, Nicky," he cooed softly to me, "Always."

I could see my hand reach down and grab hold of that skinny neck.  It 
was like a nightmare, or watching a horror movie.  My body was acting 
against my own wishes.  I was nothing more than a puppet, or a slave.  
The cap twisted off easily, the aroma heady liquid inside freed from its 
glass cage.

"Not today, Jack," I said as I flushed my toilet while the liquor poured 
with a glug-glug-glug out of the bottle into the swirling bowl, until only 
drops plinked on the surface of the freshened aqua blue water.  With 
another more assured flush and resulting whirl, the very last vestiges of 
my temptation went down the same drain that my old reputation had 
gone down under it's influence.

"Never again."

I took a deep breath and stepped back out of the cramped, but now at 
least clean, bathroom.  My office, my dream, was once again my own.  
Where once it reeked of death, it now smelt of lemons and pine trees.

I tied up the last of the garbage bags and left it by my door with the other 
three that I had filled.  They would have to wait there until I took them 
down to the alley behind the building, a place I never liked going.  Not 
out of any fear, mind you, I just hate pigeon shit.  The rear of the building 
was apparently ground zero for those feather covered rats.  Everything 
back there resembled a later monochromatic Jackson Pollock painting... 
a hellhole in mishmashed black and white.  Such disgusting creatures!

With a deep sigh of satisfaction, I sat heavily on my chair.  The 
squeaking of the metal springs brought a smile to my face.  I'd oil those 
later.  There was more work to be done now.  For the first time in ages, I 
had a real case to solve.

I fished around in my pocket and pulled out the cross, the folded paper, 
the refused twenty-dollar bill, and laid them out on the now empty 
looking desk before me.  The cross drew my attention once again.  
Something about the smooth stone made me uneasy, but I couldn't put 
my finger on it.  It was difficult, but I managed to shake off whatever 
pulled at me, putting the cross aside for the moment and focusing 
instead on the time worn paper.

I had to take my time opening it.  The folded edges were so thin that 
moving too fast would have torn them.  Apparently this had been a 
problem for Ben as well.  Yellowed bands of Scotch tape crisscrossed 
the page, reinforcing and holding the paper fibers together where they 
had been split.  The page was a standard type used in offices, eight and 
a half by eleven.  In this case was nothing more than a matte for several 
old newspaper clippings.

The clippings, black ink on graying paper, were just as faded and worn 
as the paper they were mounted on.  The ink had been smudged in 
some places, with fingerprints left behind.  There were two pictures 
accompanying the four articles, one of which drew my eyes before any 
of the words could be read.  Even the headlines took a back seat to this 
image.

It was a head shot of a young girl with dark curly hair, big brown eyes, 
and a beaming smile.  A high school graduation picture, the mortar 
board she wore tilted off to the side, with a tassel dangling making that 
obvious.  Below this image, in an italic small font, a brief description 
read:

Twenty year old Katie Dominic still missing.

A quick scan gave me the date that it had been written: May 14, 1975.  I 
looked to my own calendar.  After flipping the pages to show the proper 
month, a chill ran up my spine.  Twenty-one years ago, to the very day.

The story attached to the picture, one I've memorized word for word 
since then, only added to my uneasiness:

New York, NY-

Fourteen days after twenty year old Katie Dominic was reported 
missing, and police still have no clues as to her whereabouts.  
Katie, an undergraduate student at NYU, was first reported missing 
by her roommate after she failed to return home from working a 
late shift at the Elgin diner.

"It's not like her (Katie)," stated her roommate, Marcia Dolans (19). 
"She always came straight home after working late.  She doesn't 
drink, or do drugs.  She doesn't even hang out with anyone besides 
me and her cat."

Police have interviewed both her co-workers at the diner as well as 
its patrons on the night in question.  All agreed that Katie left her 
shift at the normal time and did not seem to be in any distress.  The 
manager of the Elgin, Mark Shamburg (67), is quoted as stating, 
"It's as if she (Katie) just dropped off the face of the earth once she 
passed through the doors of the diner."

Katie's parents, Mary (48) and Greg (50) Dominic, have posted a 
reward of ten thousand dollars for any information regarding their 
daughter's whereabouts.  Both are convinced that this is a 
kidnapping and not a runaway situation, despite the view of the 
investigating officers. "Our Katie wouldn't do this," Greg 
announced at a press conference outside of his law offices. "She 
would never purposefully make her parents worry.  She's a good 
girl.  She's not like most kids today."

The NYPD have taken a different opinion regarding young Katie's 
disappearance. "Every year, dozens of kids Katie's age go missing.  
Most turn out to be runaways who have gotten mixed up with the 
underground drug culture," declared Det. Morgan who heads the 
investigation. "I'm not saying that is, or is not the case with Katie, 
but I am going to say that I sincerely doubt that the Press would be 
so interested in this case if her father wasn't who he is."

When asked how the investigation was going, Det. Morgan declined 
to comment.

Well, the similarities were certainly there, but I couldn't believe that a 
case from over twenty years ago had any bearing on my current 
investigation.  That was, until I read the second article.  This one was 
much older, even more worn and faded.  Much of the original text was 
lost to time and smudged ink, but what mattered was still intact.

That second picture, damn.  It could have been the same girl from 1975, 
only... this girl went missing in 1954.  Forty-two years ago, almost to the 
day; Twenty-one years between each case.

New York, NY -

The nude body of twenty-one year old Patricia Heart was 
discovered today by officers patrolling Central Park, twenty-one 
days after she was first reported missing by her fiance George 
Ballard.  Initially the police had determined Miss Heart to be a 
runaway, leaving her family and friends behind to avoid a rapidly 
approaching wedding date in June.  Today's discovery largely 
disproves that theory.

In a strange twist of fate, her lifeless form, found bloodied and 
bruised from a possible sexual assault, was discovered today, May 
21, 1954, by a relative.  Miss Heart's uncle, officer James Heart, was 
the first on the scene and had this to say to our reporter: "It's 
disgusting what is happening to our country.  I fought in the war so 
that things like this wouldn't happen here.  I hoped that the horrors 
that I've seen would be left in France when I came home.  After this 
morning, after finding my poor niece, after seeing what has been 
done to her, it just makes me sick.  Today should have been a 
happy one for our family.  It's Patty's birthday."

The coincidences were starting to add up, but aside from the dates and 
ages of the girls, I still hadn't made a concrete connection to my case.  
The next two articles were small, just a few lines each.  Both were 
obituaries.

Katelyn Rivers Dominic

May 21, 1954 - May 21, 1975

Beloved daughter of Gregory and Mary Dominic.  May she find the 
peace in heaven that was not present here on earth.

Patricia Emilia Heart

May 21, 1933 - May 21, 1954

The rest of Patricia's obit was too faded to read, but what surprised me 
was that, even though I couldn't read it, it was obviously much longer 
than Katie's.  I would have thought the death of a lawyer's daughter 
would have garnered more attention than that two-line eulogy.  Perhaps 
the circumstances of her death had been scandalous, and her family just 
wanted the story to fade away.

Of course that wasn't the only oddity I gleaned.  Patty dies, Katie is born.  
Katie dies... and Erin is born.  Twenty-one years between life and death.  
Twenty-one years of life for each girl.  Twenty-one days from abduction 
to death.  Twenty-one, twenty-one, twenty-one.

Erin went missing fourteen days ago.  If these cases had anything to do 
with my case, then I only had seven days left to find her.  Seven days 
until her twenty-first birthday.  Seven days until she was murdered.  
Seven days left to save her.

"Six days," Jack chittered in my head. "It's midnight."



Continued in Chapter Five....


You can find more of my stories at:
https://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/Moments_In_My_Mind/www/Index.html

Join my forum and I'll send you an email notification
of when I update my stories:
http://fw13.suddenlaunch3.com/index.cgi

Read what I've been up to on my Blog:
http://fictionwriter13.blogspot.com

Feedback, Questions or Comments can be sent here:
FictionWriter13@msn.com


  
Veil4