According to Denton, Saberhagen had been eviling up Missouri since it was still part of Louisiana Territory. He had to have left a trace somewhere.
The first thing I learned was that Saberhagen was a more popular name than you’d think. I got over half a million hits on Google. Even combining it with his known first names (Paul, Peter, and Pieter), I still failed to reach a workable number of web sites.
By adding Columbia, Missouri to the search, I reduced my options to less than one hundred. After a frustrating twenty minutes, I found exactly one legitimate reference to my Saberhagen. A Mr. Perry Saberhagen of Missouri had apparently donated a lot of money in an attempt to block passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Other than that, nothing.
Searching Northern Synod brought up thousands of Lutheran Churches in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Occult Missouri got me a site featuring photos that were either the result of UFO activity or smeared camera lenses. Irontown Cemetery brought up nothing relevant. Rutabaga Monkey Purple Genuflect got 72 hits.
I recalled the odd symbol on Saberhagen’s grave: the sideways E and the X. Searching ‘E X’ in conjunction with Saberhagen, Missouri, or occult didn’t turn up anything of note. Only when I combined it with Northern Synod did I find something.
Just one hit, but it was enough. The site was poorly designed. Nothing but page after page of small-type print, someone’s abortive effort to write a history of Columbia churches. I had to use the ‘find’ function to locate the bit I wanted.
Also founded in 1933 were The Campus Lutheran House, located at 1550 Cherry Street, First Church of the Nazarene, located at 200 9th Street (relocated to 301 College Avenue in 1935), and The Northern Synod Headquarters Building at 4 Ciego Drive (sometimes known as the ‘EX’ building, due to an unusual logo or design over the transom).
Northern Synod. The name and the time period were right, and the logo over the door seemed to match the one on Saberhagen’s grave. But 1933? There’s no way the building would still be standing. Ciego Drive might not even exist anymore.
Then again, Columbia had dozens of buildings that dated back to the mid nineteenth century. Half the buildings on campus were probably built before 1900. But even if the Synod headquarters was still around, it’d probably been partitioned off into offices or student apartments in the past hundred years. Another dead end. And yet…
L.J. walked in. He seemed surprised to see me. We quickly broke eye contact. He picked up his guitar and played a few chords. I typed gibberish into my computer. It was like we were two coworkers, the Monday after a drunken hookup.
“Sherman?”
I didn’t answer. He’d want to know who was chasing us the other day, and I couldn’t tell him.
“Sherman?”
I ignored him. Suddenly, a rough hand slammed my laptop closed. L.J. then shut the door with his elbow.
I attempted to smile. “Would you believe me if I said you’re better off not knowing?”
“A guy died. You know who it was. Tell me.” L.J.’s usual geniality was long gone.
“Forget about it. It never happened.”
“Bullshit. I’ll call the cops. I swear to God, I will.”
Part of me wanted to grab my roommate by the collar, slam him into the wall and threaten to bust his face in if he didn’t shut up. At the same time I wanted to collapse sobbing on my bed, begging him to help me.
“L.J., remember that boring guy who moved in with you last week? The guy who gave you the big lecture on responsibility?”
He half-smiled. “Yeah.”
“Well, let’s say this guy was a journalist. And he dug a little too deep and discovered a rather nasty secret about someone. Like maybe a prominent citizen had some rather unsavory connections?”
L.J.’s eyes widened. “You mean with the Mafia?”
“More or less. Remember when I got beat up at the pool hall? That was a personal warning for me to back off.”
“I don’t get it. So why is he still…oh, Jesus, you didn’t.”
I managed to smile. “Yep. I got cocksure and kept researching. So he decided to shut me up permanently the other night. I’m sorry I got you involved there.”
He rapidly shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. But you have to go to the police now. Those mobster guys don’t screw up more than once.”
I fingered the business card that had come in the mail. “I talk, he goes after my father.”
“Dear God!” L.J was up and pacing now. I wondered if talking to him had been a huge blunder. “Well, maybe you should just lay low and keep quiet. Hope he’ll back off.”
“He won’t. He’s decided I know too much.”
He wiped some sweat from his forehead. “Well, then do the opposite. Tell the world what you know! Blog it, post it on the net, write letters to the editor, tell everyone you see, everywhere. He won’t be able to touch you then, it’ll look too suspicious.”
I remembered poor Denton, locked up in the loony bin because of what he knew. “It won’t work. This guy…he doesn’t scare.”
L.J. sat down again. “Maybe you should leave town for a while. Spend some time in Mexico.”
That had almost worked. “This guy’s everywhere. He’d find me. Maybe not for a while, but one day…” I mimicked a pistol at the side of my head.
We sat silently for a while. It was good to finally talk about this with someone, even if L.J. didn’t know half the awful truth.
“Here’s an idea, Sherman.” He continued to stare at the wall.
“Yeah?”
He pulled at his longish hair. “Okay. Now this guy who’s after you…what’s his name?”
“Saberhagen…I mean…shit.” No wonder he wanted me dead, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
“Right, well he sends a professional out to kill you.” He spoke the last two words as if he still couldn’t believe it had actually happened. “Only that guy ends up dead instead of you.”
“So now he’s even angrier.”
“Maybe. But now he’s down a man. Advantage: you. Plus the cops are involved, so he’ll have to think twice before trying something like that again.”
“So where does that leave me?”
“Well…maybe you could offer a truce. Go up to him, tell him that you’ve stopped doing whatever it is that pissed him off, and you expect him to call off his ghouls.”
I remembered what I’d seen last night. Ghouls indeed. “Why would he listen to me?”
“You said yourself, he wants to be left alone. And you’ve proven yourself a tough nut to crack. Maybe if he truly believes that trying to take you out will be more trouble than it’s worth, he’ll accept a treaty.”
In spite of everything, the plan had kind of a classy, Hollywood feel to it. I pictured myself in an Italian restaurant, across from Mr. Saberhagen and Dan. “I’ve called off my people, now call off yours. Unless you’d like a repeat of the other night.” Suddenly, my mental picture of Saberhagen changed from Marlon Brando to the beast from the grave. I shivered.
“It won’t work, L.J. I don’t know how to find him.”
“I thought you had the dirt on this guy.”
“Well, I know who he is. Just not where. His operations are mostly, um, underground.”
L.J. wouldn’t give up. “You don’t have any leads? No clues at all?”
I remembered that his headquarters used to be here in town. I did have one address, but it was decades out of date.
“Ever hear of Ciego Drive?”
I was shocked that L.J. was willing to get in a car with me after being shot at the other night, but he readily agreed. Maybe the idea of adventure inspired him. We picked up his car from the parking garage and drove off in search of Ciego Drive.
We searched for nearly an hour. It’s not enough to know an address, you also must know how to get there. Yahoo! had insisted that #4 Ciego Drive did not exist. Mapquest was slightly more helpful, providing we were willing to drive 2,000 miles to Reno, Nevada. Finally, a call to Domino’s Pizza had put in us in contact with a driver who vaguely remembered a Ciego Drive in this particular area.
Columbia was too small to have a neighborhood so bad that it was a ‘no go’ area, but this sure as hell came close. Scores of rotting trailers pockmarked the area, occasionally interrupted by a convenience store with barred windows or some ugly blocks of tract housing.
“Hang on,” said L.J., glancing up from his printed directions. “There it is.”
Ciego Drive proved to be little more than an industrial access road. One lane, it threaded its way between a burnt-out building and a none-too-prosperous looking plastics plant.
Number four was a lot, though it wasn’t vacant. In the acre or so of land, dozens and dozens of bodies lay, end to end. Crumpled and mutilated, they stared at us with blank, accusing headlights.
“Are you sure this is the right address?” I asked.
L.J. gestured to a mailbox in front of the tiny booth that served as the scrap yard’s office. Columbia Salvage, #4, Ciego Drive.
I was a little disappointed. After all I’d been through, I was expecting Castle Dracula, or at least 1313 Mockingbird Lane. Columbia Salvage lacked even the one frightening aspect of the city junkyard: it wasn’t fenced in, so there were no dogs. As for signs of the Northern Synod headquarters, I couldn’t even see the remains of a building.
“Wanna have a look?” asked my roommate.
I shrugged. This was obviously a dead end. The original headquarters was long gone, or else it was miles from here, now located at an entirely different address. “We might as well see what there is to see,” I responded, glumly. The sun was starting do go down, and I didn’t want be out at night.
There’s a certain beauty when a car dies after many years of use. I could almost see a benevolent Mr. Goodwrench beckoning to the soul of a rusty Ford. ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’
A car that reaches a violent end, however, leaves a loss that no insurance settlement can fully succor. As we poked around the lot, I realized that was what all these vehicles had in common. They’d all been wrecked, and rather spectacularly at that.
Each car told the story of a violent end. Cars that had been on fire. Cars that had been underwater. Cars that had been upside down.
I read in the automotive scars the exact manner of their last mile. Here, the shorn-off cab of a pickup told of passing under a semi-trailer. The stoved-in face of a Saturn implied collision with a tree. A horseshoe-shaped Honda recalled a high speed T-boning. Without exception, each of these cars had died violently. Assumedly, so had some of the drivers. I was almost surprised that a certain black sedan wasn’t among the heaps.
L.J. was examining a frighteningly evocative hole in the driver’s side windshield of an SUV. “So what’s the story? Is this Jagermeister guy going into the auto repair business?”
“Saberhagen. And I doubt it.” Flattened tires and a Nader 2000 bumper sticker led me to believe this was a final resting place. With my luck, the ghost of Saberhagen’s car would soon pop out of its grave.
I was about to suggest we leave when I noticed something odd. Though the lot was mostly gravel or bare earth, there was a single concrete slab near the center. On it stood a Chevy Silverado pickup with one door and no glass. Why did that strike me as strange?
The tires were aired up, for one. And though it had suffered significant body damage, it still looked like it might run. That made it unique among the rusted wrecks. I moved closer.
I was right, the truck had been driven recently. Faint muddy tracks on the cement confirmed it. There was something else there as well.
L.J. had knelt to see what I was looking at. It was some sort of drawing, some outline that covered the entire slab.
“What’s that look like to you?” I asked.
“It’s a pentagram,” he replied.
“Are you sure?” If he was right about that, then maybe this hadn’t been a wild goose chase.
“I’m sure. I used to have a girlfriend, Janine, who was into all this.” He smiled for a moment, at a memory that probably had nothing to do with the occult. “She told me that when a pentagram points upward, it represents the human body. White magic. She drew one on my bedroom floor once, when we…” L.J. stopped short and chuckled.
“So what’s it mean if it’s pointing down?”
He kicked the pickup’s tire, as if debating if he wanted to take a test drive. “Then it’s a goat skull. You can guess what that stands for.”
I couldn’t make out which way the scribblings on the concrete faced. “Which is this?”
He shook his head. “Couldn’t tell you.”
I stuck my head under the vehicle and tried to get a closer look. Then I jumped to my feet. “Let’s get out of here before we get busted for trespassing.”
As we drove back home, I pondered what I’d seen under the truck. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t tell L.J. about the trapdoor set in the cement pad. Probably just an old maintenance shaft. But I wasn’t going to wait around, just in case something was waiting for nightfall to reveal itself.