Yes, Virginia, there is a BOB

It was twilight and I was more than a little creeped out. After I finished my conversation with the medical examiner I called the Sheriff then left my office in a daze, telling Joyce that I would be gone the rest of the day. An hour later I picked up the house keys from the Deputy assigned to the case and, with frequent stops to check the map, arrived at the house around sundown.

Yellow police tape was stretched across the front door, and the prime suspect in Adelle’s death was still on the loose. I circled the house looking for any signs of forced entry or exit. I was not playing CSI, I was taking inventory. I was now responsible for, well, everything and I wanted to do it right. A deserted house, especially one that the cops have sealed off, is like a magnet to neighborhood punks and other lowlife looking for a quick score. After all, if the lady of the house is dead and the cops have left, who is there to say “don’t take that”?

Adelle had been one of my best hires, one of the good choices I learned to make after the Mary Kay fiasco. Adelle was born and raised in Europe; she married a member of the U.S. armed services, moved with him to the land of the free and bore him a son. Sometime after their return to the U.S. it became apparent that this man’s love for the bottle outweighed all other loves. Adelle despised weakness and my guess is that the existence of this weakness, more than the drunkenness and philandering, doomed the marriage.

She was a single mom, and single moms make great employees. Couple that with her ambition and Teutonic heritage and you get a real workhorse. She drove everyone around her crazy because she held them to the same impossibly high standard to which she held herself. Of course, she did not hold me to that standard, because I was the boss and could do no wrong. People like that you don’t need to manage; you just give them a little course correction now and again. And listen to everyone else complain. But the work got done, it was done well and on time and I and my little fiefdom looked great to my superiors. All that seemed like yesterday as I broke the yellow tape and slid the key into the front door lock.

I took a breath and pushed the door open. It was the smell of death hanging in the air but, since I had never smelled death before all I could think of was rotten meat. Like when you accidentally cut the power to your fridge before leaving on vacation. The place was a shambles – food, garbage and the detritus of suburban life lay everywhere. In the bedroom, where the brutal act took place, little strings hung from every blood spatter trying to make sense of the trajectory of each blow and shot. The mattress was saturated, oozing with blood. I had a bad feeling or, more accurately, a feeling that something bad was there with me. I gave “it” the name BOB, a nod to the evil demon of Twin Peaks. Beware of Bob. It occurs to me only now that Christians, who have allied themselves with the purest of good, should be acutely sensitive to the purest of evil, especially when it has shed its angel of light costume. This was really bad. I had never before sensed anything so malevolent.