A Cup Full of Midnight (27 page)

I peered inside and saw him sitting up in bed, eyes focused on the corner of the room opposite the Christmas tree. There was no one else in the room.

I stepped inside and leaned against the doorframe. “Who are you talking to?”

He looked up. Saw me. “Just that damn Marine. He comes here all the time.”

“Really.”

“Today, he’s supposed to have inspection and then a five-mile run. But he came here instead.”

“He say why?”

Dylan laughed. “He’s hot for me is the real reason. But he says he’s here to help me on my way. Earlier this morning, he even brought a friend. A lot more solid than most of my hallucinations.”

The hairs on my arms stood up. “What did he look like? This friend?”

“Big. A little scary. He had a scar.” He traced a line from the corner of his mouth to his jawline.

“Did he say anything?”

“No, he waited over by the barn.” Dylan’s bony fingers plucked at the blanket. “I like it better when the children come. I like to see them play.”

I kept my voice neutral. “They come here a lot?”

“Not so often.” He chuckled. “It’s all right, Straight. I know they’re not real. It’s just that I can
see
them. I’d heard about the hallucinations, but no one ever told me what a hoot they can be.”

My mouth felt dry. “It’s good you can appreciate them.”

He picked at a scab on his ear. “You’re stuck with them either way, right? Might as well enjoy them.”

“Good point.”

“I didn’t used to be so philosophical, but what the hell, right? Dying kinda puts things in perspective.” His gaze drifted to the beta. “I named him Straight. After you.”

“I’m honored.”

He smiled. “Before you go, would you tell that Marine to get on home? I don’t have time to fool with him.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Good.” He lay back and closed his eyes. “He’s not bad looking. But he’s really not my type.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

F
rom Dylan’s window, it was easy to see where the hallucination must have stood. I crunched my way across the frozen grass to a small depression near the corner of the barn. A few shreds of tobacco and a smattering of ash had been ground into a partial heel print. Someone, probably Elgin, had field stripped a cigarette here.

Dylan’s Marine might be a hallucination, but his guest this morning had been all too real.

A slow burn started low in my stomach. The son of a bitch had been in my yard. He’d seen Elisha’s car and probably taken note of her license plate. Then he’d skulked away like the ghost he claimed to be. But he’d left a trace of himself behind. The carelessness was uncharacteristic, and I wondered if he’d left the tobacco and ash on purpose as a message or a warning.
I can get to you at any time.

I sent Elisha home and made Jay practice with the Glock again. Then I called to update Frank and Harry. Frank was heading up the surveillance on Barnabus’s place and seemed almost chipper.

“We’ve got uniforms outside,” Frank said. “No sign of the girlfriend, and Collins looks scared.”

“Malone brought you in on this?” I said.

He chuckled. “Harry brought me in. Malone’s pretending not to know.”

It was a start.

Billy’s search for Absinthe had been fruitless. “We looked everywhere you said, man,” he told me when I picked him up. He sounded as bummed as I felt. “No luck. ’Course, it’s a big city.”

I nodded. “Too big, sometimes.”

It was probably overkill, but Billy and I started over, from Dark Knight’s duplex to Barnabus’s house, to Absinthe’s. At sunset, we tried the Underground and the Masquerade, then prowled downtown until our eyes were red with cold and our fingers and toes were numb.

No luck.

A little before midnight, I turned to him and said, “I have an idea.”

“Good. If it doesn’t work, can we go home and get some sleep?”

“I have to make a phone call.”

I punched in a number, woke Heath Parker out of a sound sleep, and told him I needed the key to his brother’s apartment and why I needed it.

“Sure, man,” he said, proving that blood is not destiny. Billy and I made a detour to Heath’s apartment to pick up the key, and thirty minutes later, we pulled Billy’s van, the one with the painting of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” on the sides, into Razor’s driveway.

“You want to go around back?” I asked Billy. “I’ll take the front.”

He nodded and ambled around the corner of the house. He was a big man, fifty extra pounds of weight around the middle, but you could still see the Special Forces in him when he moved.

I opened the front door and stepped into Razor’s living room.

It was much as I remembered it, decorated in late
Dark Shadows
, early
Addams Family
. It had a certain morbid elegance, from the deep purple velvet draperies to the red satin throw pillows on the black velour sofa. In front of the sofa was a smoked glass coffee table with a crack in it, and to the right of that was a black acrylic curio cabinet, shelves full of occult knick-knacks. Tarot cards, a crystal ball, a gold goblet shaped like a dragon’s claw, a jar full of colored crystals, a shrunken head.

On the mantel, two gold candelabras flanked a leering human skull. It looked real, but a tap with a fingernail said it was fiberglass.

Since I’d been there last, he’d added a print of a crucified Jesus and attached a Groucho Marx nose and mustache to the face.

I was no saint, but it pissed me off anyway.

The room had been awash in blood. The stains were still visible, Rorschach blossoms on the pale carpet. Across the walls, dark, angry splashes bled long vertical drip marks. In front of the stairs, the bloody imprint of Razor’s body lay across a pentagram the color of rust.

The Parkers hadn’t hired a cleaning crew yet. I wondered why. Apathetic brother, mom in denial?

I closed the door behind me and stepped in, careful to avoid the dried pools of blood. “Absinthe? It’s Jared McKean.”

No answer.

I made my way through the house, turning on lights as I went and turning them off as I finished with each room. In the kitchen sink, someone had left a spoon and a cereal bowl with a trace of milk still in the bottom. The milk was still fresh.

In the upstairs bathroom, a 2X Guns N’ Roses T-shirt hung over the curtain rod. It was damp.

The bedroom window was open. I leaned out and called again.

No answer. I combed the house again, just to be sure she wasn’t hiding in a closet or under a bed. Then I went around to the back and called again. “Billy? Where the hell are you?”

Finally, Billy trotted out of the shadows in the backyard, breathing hard. “Lost her,” he said. “She dropped out of that tree there beside the house and took off like a scared rabbit. Fast little sucker, ain’t she? For a fat kid.”

“Probably went out the bedroom window as soon as she saw the van.”

“Least we know she’s close.”

I nodded. “Tell you what. You take the van and see if you can spot her on the street. I’ll cut through the yards and try to catch her on foot.”

We spent the next four hours searching Razor’s neighborhood, but there was no sign of the missing girl.

Like Elgin Mayers, she was a ghost.

Finally, Billy drove me back to the shelter to pick up my truck, and I promptly drove it back to Razor’s.

I mean, why waste a perfectly good key?

This time, I took my time.

The footprints Frank had described were between the curio cabinet and the glass-topped coffee table. They had been smeared beyond recognition and more blood splashed over them. A crescent-shaped stain indicated where the killer had dropped the knife.

Razor had probably been killed here. The rest of the scene—pentagram, blood splashes, charred heart—were all designed to obscure that fact. But between the crime scene photos and the pattern of stains, a decent investigator could pretty much read the story of Razor’s death.

His killer had been standing beside the curio. The first slash, the one to the throat, had caught Razor by surprise. He’d jerked away from his attacker, widening the gash, and thrown up his hands to protect himself. Arterial blood spurted from his neck, drenching himself and his attacker. Spraying the white carpet with red.

The knife wrenched free, sliced through the webbing between his ring and middle fingers, cut downward across the palm, and bounced across the forearm, leaving the defensive cuts we’d seen in the photos.

Razor stumbled backward and tripped over the coffee table. He’d fallen into it, leaving a hairline crack in the glass.

He would have died quickly after that.

I stepped over the pentagram and went upstairs to the bathroom. Byron’s chin-up bar, where Razor had been hung to bleed out, stretched across the door. It would have taken a long time, during which the killer had probably gone back downstairs to smear the footprints and use the vacuum.

The anxiety must have been unbearable.

What if a neighbor had wanted to borrow a cup of sugar? What if someone had come by selling Girl Scout cookies or collecting for UNICEF?

The bathtub looked pristine, but I knew that under the right light, I would see traces of glowing violet.

I went back downstairs to look at the pentagram.

It had been drawn inside a six-foot diameter circle. The edges were straight and the angles symmetrical. Either a measuring device had been used or someone had a good eye for geometry. Like draining the body, this had taken some time.

The killer, or killers, must have spent hours in the house after Razor’s death.

The body had been placed on the pentagram and eviscerated, the heart burned, and the blood splashed around the room.

Why?

If they’d left the scene the way it was, there was a good chance it would have gone down as a drug-related crime or a burglary gone bad. That told me that the killers had left clues—or thought they had.

I was still thinking of two separate killers. Killer One, who had initiated the spontaneous and clearly disorganized attack, and Killer Two, who had painstakingly analyzed and staged the scene.

Had Killer One acted on his own impulse, snatching up the athame as a weapon of opportunity? Or had Killer Two somehow choreographed it?

Too many questions. Not enough answers. I pushed Razor’s murder to the back of my mind and called Absinthe’s name again.

Why had she come here? Because it was empty and familiar? How had she felt, passing the pentagram every time she crossed the living room? And who had frightened her away from home?

They’re here,
she’d said. But who were “they”? Elgin and Hewitt? Byron and Keating?

Barnabus and Medea?

I’d beaten the police to Barnabus, and yet he’d shown no surprise that Dark Knight was dead.

Because he’d already known? Followed Absinthe to the Knights’ and seen the bodies then?

But why go after Absinthe in the first place?

I shook my head. I had nothing but conjecture, and it was getting me nowhere.

I started in the kitchen and went through the house, searching it much as I’d searched Absinthe’s room. The police had already covered this ground. The drugs had been confiscated, and the black residue of fingerprint powder clung to shelves and countertops and lingered in the crevices around the doorknobs.

In Razor’s walk-in closet, I rifled through rows of leather pants studded with silver, long silk shirts with puffy sleeves, vests and evening jackets made of velvet and velour. There were condoms in some of the pockets, and I didn’t like thinking about who he’d planned to be with when he used them.

The floor was lined with polished boots, mostly calf-length, some with buckles or chains. On the top shelf was a row of books.
The Prince
by Machiavelli, a collection of works by the Marquis de Sade, several treatises on psychology and the workings of the human mind.

I reached up and pushed on the ceiling panel with my fingertips. It tilted under the pressure, and I extracted it easily. Behind the false ceiling was another shelf that ran the length of the closet. I ran my fingers around the edge and into the corners, but there was nothing there.

Probably where he’d stashed his dope. By now, the police would have impounded it.

I put everything back the way I’d found it and left the house, locking the door behind me.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

I
was sure Frank already knew about Razor’s secret hiding place, but I called him in the morning anyway.

“You searched the house,” he said. Disapproving.

“Brother Heath gave me a key.”

“Right.” I heard him shift the phone to the other ear. “And he gave you permission to toss the place.”

“He didn’t tell me not to.”

“Right,” he said again. “You’re gonna give me ulcers.”

“So, what was in it?”

“What? The hidey hole?” He was quiet for a moment, as if trying to decide whether or not to tell me. Then he said, “Nothing. It was empty.”

“The drugs?”

“Underwear drawer, coat pockets, bedside table. Pretty much everywhere
but
there.”

“Any chance he didn’t realize it was there?”

“I wouldn’t think so. It seemed new, not like it came with the house.”

So Razor had a secret compartment built into his closet and then forgot to stash anything in it.

Frank’s gravelly baritone broke into my thoughts. “We found the girl.”

“Absinthe?”

“The other one. The older one. Medina Neel.”

I heard it in his voice. “Medea. Is she—”

“Single slash to the throat. Very clean.” He wasn’t referring to the scene. There would have been a lot of blood. “Found her car in one of those pay-by-the-day parking garages downtown. Security guard noticed a bad smell coming from the trunk. When he got close, he saw a blanket draped over the front seat, but there was blood on the floor and around the dashboard. Lotta blood. Looks like the killer was waiting in the backseat of her car. Killed her quick. Put her in the trunk. Covered the bloody seat with the blanket.”

I shook my head. A quick glance in the back before she got in the car, and Medea might have survived. I thought about reaping and sowing, about the Rule of Three. “Witnesses?”