Cajun Gothic (Blood Haven) (11 page)

A brief thunderstorm turned the air cooler, sweeping
away some of the grit and stink of failure coating my soul. Washington Park
beckoned in the early evening shadows, dog walkers and lovers out for a stroll,
old men, boys on skateboards, a few hardy tourists lining up for the night tour.

It was too dim now for the chess players, the
slatted green bench seats spaced evenly around the curving pebbled retaining
wall, mostly empty. An elderly black man in a deep blue baseball cap stared at
the checkerboard squares, black and white, eyes darting like pinballs as he
mentally replayed a game or plotted a strategy for his next opponent. He looked
up briefly, expectantly.

I nodded and sat across from him. He removed a
hinged box from his lap. It was inlaid with the same checkerboard pattern. He set
out each piece precisely and with care. I adjusted the knight an eighth turn.
He smiled and nodded approval.

He made the first move, pawn to C4. A hand, bent and
arthritic, the knuckles barely discernible in the knobby flesh, hovered over
the timer. At his silent question, I shrugged, not caring one way or the other.
Time was no pressure for me. After sixteen years, I’d learned a thing about
time… it was my enemy, never my friend.

He depressed the plunger…

****

O’Hearn sat on the stoop smoking a cigarette. It looked
like things were going from bad to worse with his domestic problems, or the job
was getting to him. The last time Julie kicked him out, he’d gone to two packs
a day.

“Been waiting long?” Stupid question, the ground was
littered with butts.

“Not really.”

“Liar.”

He rose with difficulty, unsteady on his feet.
Speaking with the deliberateness of the fully inebriated, he said, “I could use
that couch again.”

“Where’s your stuff?” He waved to the unmarked car
and mumbled, “S’open,” so I retrieved his duffel bag and led him up the three
flights, going slow and pausing to let him catch his wind.

Keying us in, I flipped on the overhead and did a
quick visual. Nothing looked disturbed but I knew looks could be deceiving.
Whoever’d been in the place knew what they were doing.

After dumping Tom’s duffel on the bed, I said, “You
sleep in there tonight. I need to work.”

“Don’t wanna put…”

“You’re not.”

“Got anything to drink?”

I was pretty sure the grocery and liquor store fairy
hadn’t made a run on my behalf. I had whatever I’d had the night before, but
less of it.

By the time I changed into sweats, made a run to the
bathroom and back, Tom was slumped in the chair fingering a cigarette but not
lighting up. I preferred he didn’t smoke, but I usually didn’t say no. For some
reason, that was one of the few bad habits I’d never embraced.

Yay, me.

The man’s eyes were red-rimmed and burdened with a
weariness I couldn’t even begin to imagine. I’d never seen him cry, not even
when his old man’d beat him within an inch of his life. For a woman to bring
him to this state, especially one as selfish and manipulative as his wife,
really surprised me. For all we’d been through growing up, he’d remained the
steadiest, and most level-headed, of the lot of us. A straight arrow in a bent
world.

He caught me staring when he shrugged out of his
rumpled suit coat. He was missing his shoulder holster, the gun, and the badge.

At my quizzical expression, he muttered,
“Suspended.”

I busied myself with making a pot of coffee, letting
Tom collect his thoughts. When it was ready I poured two mugs, black, handed
him one and sat on the couch.

“Tell me.”

“She came in this morning, while I was out pursuing
a lead on the St. Vartan’s murder.” He sipped and grimaced at the bitter
flavor. “Talked to Cap, he said she might press charges.”

“You mean Julie?” He nodded yes. “Charges, what kind
of charges?”

He stared at the ceiling, letting me connect the
dots.

Finally I had to ask, “Did you… hit her?” Given his
upbringing he’d been a prime candidate for history repeating itself. God knew,
I was the poster child for acting out.

Tom set the mug on the coffee table, leaned over,
elbows on his knees, head braced with palms gouging his eyes, rubbing for all
he was worth.

“Christ, I wanted to, Micah. It was all I had not to
slap the bitch into next week, after the things she accused me of…”

I listened, letting him get it all out, all the
perversions, all the sick crap that even on my worst day I’d never be guilty
of. I had to know where that was coming from.

“She said someone left a padded envelope. Dates,
times, some photos. Enough to make even me believe the lies.”

“I’m no Einstein, but that smacks of a set-up.”

“You think?”

“Did you explain it to the captain? I know he’s new
to the department but fuck, he can’t possibly believe you’d be involved in shit
like that.” Then it occurred to me to wonder about Julie and who might have
gotten to her.

“Your captain isn’t stupid, Tom. What did Julie show
him to prove you’d done what she said?”

He blanched, an uh-oh moment for me.

“I, uh… I might have lost my temper. Threw some
stuff. She took a pic with the phone. It looked bad.” He fixed me with a
resolute stare and said, “But I never touched her, I swear on my mother’s
grave, Micah, I never touched her.”

Grunting, “I know,” might put
his
mind at
ease but mine flew into overdrive.

I got up and went to the counter to look over the
stack of folders. Something niggled at the back of my brain—all the
co-incidences, persons of interest, evidence that couldn’t possibly exist in
the real, or even the imagined, world.

“Are you working any other cases… other than the
hookers?”

“No, it was jacked to Priority-One with the fifth
victim. Why?”

Waving him over, I spread the timeline I’d drawn and
the supporting documents along the length of the counter. Rehashing what I knew
took a half hour. He poured more coffee for both of us, paying careful
attention, but there was little more he could add. I did give him an
abbreviated recap of my encounter with Ivan the Terrible and confirmed the
suspicion we’d all picked up tails.

That reminded me, “You said you were out chasing a
lead. What was that about?”

“The last one, in the park… well, a witness came
forth, said he saw an odd-looking woman leaving that area around two in the
morning. Older man, retired, said he couldn’t sleep. No reason to doubt him.”

“So did you get a description?”

Tom swiveled his neck from side-to-side, working out
the kinks as he went into his mind’s eye, capturing the details. When he did
that, it was like instant replay.

“Tall, nearly six foot, dressed in black leather…
pants, lots of belly showing, maybe a piercing but he couldn’t be sure. Black
hair, straight, shoulder length. Pale like she’d been sick a long time. Odd
eyes and mouth.”

“Odd. How so?”

“Well, he thought maybe she’d been hit, her mouth
was puffy and bleeding.” Tom picked up a pencil and drew a quick map of the end
of the park where we’d found the body, x-ing in the overhead lights spaced at
irregular intervals along the walk. He pointed to a position about fifty yards
east of the benches. “He was here, on the down side of the lights, partially in
shadow. The woman came from the trees,” he tapped the eraser end at the top of
the picture, “heading south.”

“What about her eyes?”

“Oh yeah, that was the really weird part. He said
they glowed in the dark, red, like a demon or a devil.”

Bingo. That described the mystery Goth chick who’d
sucked me into my own private Idaho Saturday night, kick-starting a trip down
memory lane that got more bizarre with each passing second.

Tom looked at me suspiciously. “Why, do you know
her?”

The answer to that was yes, and the logical
conclusion had to be she was the one responsible for all the murders, both here
and down in the Big Easy. Find her, and this serial murder case would be all
sorted.

However, I also knew in my gut that wasn’t the whole
story. Feeding on me had been a pleasure for her, for both of us. The act had
been ritualistic, sensuous, corrupting and addictive. It’d been a… reminder.

The other drainings, they’d been feedings pure and
simple—mindless, vicious, serving no purpose other than sating a need and
sending a message. Finding the perp would bring us no closer to finding the
instigator. That was why Maxwell wanted me to dig deeper, trace the chain of
command, and find out what or who was rotten in his little corporate empire.

Restless, Tom pressed for an answer, “Micah? Do you
know her?”

“Uh, yeah, sorry. I was trying to remember. It’s
been a long day.” Sketching quickly, I drew a likeness in my notebook and spun
it around for him to look at. “She was at Haven, I’m sure of it.”

“Did you speak with her at all?”

“No, not a word. All I know is she was there. But
then I left to go home. I was too wasted by that time to notice much of
anything.”

Thank God he never pressed me for details, like how
I managed to get home in that condition, or how I ended up in Spanish Harlem in
the early morning hours.

He wanted to believe me, because that’s what friends
were for. Unfortunately O’Hearn, the cop, said otherwise.

To get his attention off me, I asked about Chen’s
findings.

“Nothing we didn’t already know. But in answer to
your question about some kind of device being used to drain them? Non-starter.
Chen didn’t know of anything short of medical equipment, which isn’t something
you carry around in a fanny pack. And the bruising was consistent with the kind
of pressure exerted from a mouth.” Looking rueful he said, “She called it a
hickey.”

I snorted, having had more than my fair share complements
of Trina and some of my later trysts with the freakazoids at Haven and the
other clubs.

While restacking the piles, a thought occurred.

“Listen, my flight leaves at two-fifteen from Newark
tomorrow. I’ll be gone three, four days, maybe longer. Stay here if you like.”

He made the usual noises about not imposing, but I
waved them off. “I’ll call Annie in the morning. She can restock the larder for
you. But I need for you to do something for me.”

“What do you need?” Relief etched his face.

I pulled the sheaf of papers out of the envelope
Maxwell’d given me and made a few notes, then handed the papers to Tom.

“I need for you to find out everything you can about
these four people. I want name, rank and serial number, their genealogy back
three generations, what they eat for breakfast, who they fuck and how often.
Financials would be nice. Overseas accounts, that kind of thing. Use my laptop,
you know the password or can figure it out.”

“Jesus, you don’t want much.” Running a finger down
the list, he frowned then looked up with a puzzled expression. “Coupla these
look familiar, but I’m not sure why.”

“Same here. They’re one of the reasons I’m flying
down there, but I need to go in knowing a hell of a lot more than I do right
now, and I’m too beat to try and do it tonight.”

“There’s more to this than just the hookers, am I
right?”

Yawning, I didn’t bother to reply but turned my
attention to restacking the piles and mumbling about needing sleep. Tom’s eyes
were already at half-mast, so I got no argument from him. He pushed away from
the counter and walked relatively steadily to the bathroom to get ready to
crash.

The folded sheets sat on the floor next to the
chair. I made up the couch and flopped down, convinced I’d be up most of what remained
of the night working through the molasses clogging my brain. As soon as my head
hit the pillow, I was out like a light.

I woke up, once, for no particular reason, imaging a
sound, a smell, someone breathing close to my ear. The kind of phantom sensations
you get when dreams invade conscious thought like cinema vérité. A few yards
away, Tom snored loudly, the sound bouncing around the short hall. After a while,
it wasn’t enough to keep me awake.

We slept in late enough to make me anxious about
having time to pack and catch the bus from the Port Authority Terminal over to
Newark Liberty International. Since I couldn’t take the Sig with me, I
entrusted it to Tom’s care. He offered to drive me, but I already had the bus ticket
and besides, I needed that information as soon as possible so I could hit the
ground running when I landed. Driving me there and getting back to my place
would eat up much of what was left of the day.

When I checked in at the airport, I found out I’d
been bumped to first class. My friend Talon and his cronies at the paper were
too cheap to swing for that. I silently thanked Maxwell for the thoughtfulness.
Or perhaps it had been Madeline…