Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (17 page)

    
Raszer
glanced down. The sack had upended, disgorging its contents onto his groin. He
squinted in the dying firelight, then howled in protest and leapt to his feet
as the last knot was undone. The old man cackled and pranced about in his new
coat.

Raszer strode into Aquino’s office and set the
blue velvet sack, its contents restored, on his desk. The cop gave it a
once-over and then looked up at Raszer, not without fraternal concern.

    
“You
don’t look so good, Mr. Raszer,” he said, and sniffed. “You don’t smell so
good, either. What happened to that nice coat of yours?”

    
“I
traded it,” Raszer said, indicating the sack. “For that.”

    
Raszer
felt no better than he looked. He was still chilled to the bone, having limped
back down the Cattle Canyon road wet, aching, and with nothing but a T-shirt to
cover his torso, then descended Highway 39 with his windows fully open in order
to dispel the lingering odor of J.Z.’s visit to his car and the
Egyptian-mortuary aroma of the sack. He’d made the stop only to get the sack
into evidence and out of his possession.

    
Detective
Aquino fingered the sack warily, then turned it with the tip of his pencil,
observing its embroidery.

    
“Looks
like we missed something up there,” he said, without affect.

    
“A few
things,” Raszer said. “It happens when the locals and the feds are working the
same turf. Something always slips through that big jurisdictional crack.”

    
“I guess
that leaves room for the freelancers,” said the cop. He toyed with the
drawstring like a kitten. “It’s not gonna jump out at me, is it?” he asked.

    
“Not
now,” said Raszer, and pulled out a chair. “I found it tucked into one of those
Japanese lanterns Johnny had hanging around the back of his trailer. The cord
was dangling down. In plain view, but . . . well, the light had to hit it
right.”

    
“Uh-huh,”
said Aquino. “So what the hell’s in there? A tarantula?”

    
“Nope,”
said Raszer. “I wish. If I’m not mistaken, Detective, it’s Henry Lee’s
testicles, gift wrapped and embalmed in oils by whoever did the job.”

    
“
Madre de Dios
,” Aquino said, crossing
himself.

    
“You
said it.”

    
Aquino
drew open the sack and poked gingerly at the contents with the eraser end of
the pencil. “Man,” he said, pushing the sack aside, “what a stink. I’m giving
this to the lab guys. If it is what it looks like, it’s a new one for me. ”

    
He
punched a comm line and barked a name into the speakerphone. A moment later, a
young duty officer came in. “Jimmy,” Aquino said, handing over the sack, “bag
this and get it to the lab. Mark it for the Endicott-Coronado case. I wanna
know if those are human testicles inside, and I wanna check them against Henry
Lee’s DNA.” The officer took the bag between two fingers. “Don’t peek,” said
Aquino, and smiled.

    
“So,
what else did you come across up there?” he asked, regarding Raszer with thinly
concealed chagrin.Absently, he parked the pencil on his lower lip and began to
chew the eraser.

    
“I found
the calling card of the DJ who did Johnny’s rave.”

    
“No
kidding,” Aquino said. “Are you going to share the wealth?”

    
“After
I’ve talked to him,” Raszer replied .

    
“Anything
else?”

    
“Yeah,”
said Raszer, wiping mud from his brow. “There was. I flushed out an old
squatter who lives in one of the outbuildings at the Coronado. Had to take a
lump on the head for his company. And hock my coat to get my stuff back. But
it’s possible he may have seen something. Somebody cut his tongue out.”

    
Aquino
leaned forward, now engaged enough to pocket his wounded pride. “Testicles,
tongues . . . I pray God we don’t find Katy Endicott’s head somewhere. Any
connection, Mr. Raszer?”

    
“I don’t
know. The old man is so far gone, I can’t be certain he didn’t do it to
himself. He appeared to have done his own stitches. But somebody put the fear
of God in him. Either Johnny and his boys or the killers. In any case, he’s not
talking.”

    
Aquino
chuckled darkly. “I guess not. I don’t suppose you got anything out of him,
then . . . other than a whack on the head.”

    
Raszer
bounced an unformed sentence about the Syrian coin on the tip of his tongue,
then swallowed it. A connection between the coin and Katy’s kidnappers was a
wild hunch, at best, but giving voice to it would likely bring the feds and the
whole counterterrorism establishment stumbling back into the case with their
own agendas, and whatever tightrope Katy Endicott was walking might snap.

    
“No,” he
said. “But things don’t generally fall together this way unless there’s an
attractor at the center. My read on him is that he saw the murders happen.”

    
Aquino
nodded for a bit too long, and Raszer knew he was being mapped.

    
“I’ve
heard mixed reports about you, Mr. Raszer,” said the cop. “Some guys aren’t
sure which end you’re playing. Especially after that gameboy case . . . ”

    
“Scotty
Darrell,” said Raszer, knowing what was coming.

    
“Right.
Where you could probably have prevented a shooting if you’d showed your hand to
the police.”

    
“Or
caused a suicide. Sometimes you’re damned either way.”

    
“I know
that,” said Aquino. “Listen, I’m no Joe Friday. I play off intuition, too. I
prefer Tony Hillerman’s stuff to police procedurals. But I have to ask you,
because my chief is going to ask me . . . you’re not one of those ‘psychic
detectives,’ are you?”

    
Raszer
lowered his eyes and smiled to himself.

    
“I guess
you’re going to have to decide that for yourself, Detective Aquino,” he
replied. “I don’t put it on my business card, if that’s what you mean. I use
the eyes I was given.” He pushed back the chair and stood up. “It’s been a long
day. I need a bath and a drink. I’ll call you tomorrow. I’d like to see the
evidence taken from the trailer and the lodge. And I’d like to speak to the
Parrish boy as soon as possible.”

    
Aquino
got up. “All right, Mr. Raszer.
Buenas
noches
. And, uh, thanks for bringing in the
cojones.”
He paused.
“It’s a funny thing. I was
up there
.
I checked those Japanese lanterns. Forensics covered the site. It just doesn’t
make sense that we wouldn’t have found that bag.”

    
“I don’t
need to tell you,” said Raszer. “You have to be
looking
for it.
Buenas noches
,
Detective.
”

Raszer lit a cigarette and rolled down his
windows. The fetid odor of the old squatter, not to mention the smell of
perfumed morbidity, remained in the upholstery and in his nostrils. They were
both very hard smells to lose, but the tobacco helped.

    
Was it
possible that the little sack
hadn’t
been
there when Aquino and his CSIs had scoured the scene? Was it possible that a
survivor of that night’s horror had sought to dump an unwanted legacy? Or was
it a plant, a lure, an invitation? Raszer parked the thought and left it. It
was nearly seven o’clock. There were other will-o’-the-wisps to chase before he
lost them, and instructions to relay to Monica before she checked out for the
day. He speed-dialed his private office number from the hands-free car phone.

    
“Yeah,
Raszer,” she answered. “Don’t you know a girl gets lonely?”

    
“Sorry,
Moneypenny,” he said. “I’ve been wrestling bears.”

    
“Right.
Don’t call me Moneypenny. It’s patronizing. Besides, she was old.”

    
“Yeah,
but she had a great ass.”

    
“S’you
survived Azusa? No mountain men with banjos tried to sodomize you?”

    
“You
don’t know how close you are. I’ve got a two-inch gash in my skull, my bad
ankle’s back, and I had to swap my grandfather’s duster for a piece of
evidence.”

    
“Aw,
Raszer . . . I feel your pain. What can I do?”

    
“Are you
good for an hour of OT?”

    
“It’s
not like I’ve got Clive Owen lined up for tonight.”

    
“You’re
too good for him anyway. Okay. I want you to pull everything you can from the
library on castration as a ritual or religious sacrament, particularly as it
relates to Sumerian goddess cults or Islamic heresies that might still be
active in some crypto form. Plot an epicenter at Karbala in Iraq. That’s old
Babylon. Link me to anything on the web that’s not junk, and set up a
hypertext. We’ve already got a Cybele connection by way of the moon rocks.
Let’s find out how far south her cult got.”

    
“Can I
ask where this is coming from?”

    
“One of
the murdered boys, a kid named Henry Lee, was gelded. He had a knife tattooed
on his chest with the words ‘She Made Me Do It.’ He did a stint in Karbala and
came home a sorcerer. And I found his balls in a velvet bag with Islamic
stitching.”

    
There
was silence on the other end of the line.

    
“What a
difference a day makes,” she said. “Okay. Ritual castration. What else?”

    
“You
remember that breakdown we did of the book of Revelation?”

    
“How
could I forget?” she replied. “That was your first big case. I learned
every-thing I know about computers and the Apocalypse doing that.”

    
“Pull it
up from the archives. I’d like you to do a text search for any references to
the 144,000 who go to heaven in the Rapture. It’s a central tenet of the
Witnesses’ belief system. I remember something, but I need to confirm it.”

    
Nearly
six years earlier, Monica and Raszer had deconstructed and indexed the text of
the The Revelation of St. John the Divine, the final chapter in the New
Testament and the master script for every end-time scenario envisaged by
Western man over the last two millennia. The prophecies of John of Patmos had
dogged Western civilization like a bad dream, and Raszer hadn’t been able to
think of a better way to orient himself to the mindset of fanatics than to do
his own cybernetic midrash on Revelation. You could reject any man’s
interpretation, but you couldn’t dismiss the power of the vision any more than
you could turn away from a wreck on the highway.

    
“All
right, Raszer,” said Monica. “It’ll be on your laptop. On the bar.”

    
“Have I
told you lately that you’re a goddess?”

    
“Just
yesterday, but I got my period today, so it helps.”

    
“Speaking
of the bar, would you mind opening a bottle for me?”

    
“Done.”

    
“And,
uh, would you pour me a scalding bath? I’m cold, I’m filthy, and I need to go
out tonight and see a DJ—assuming I can track him down.”

    
“A bath!
Oh, now you’re pushing it,” she said. “The goddess can be wrathful when pressed
into servitude.”

    
“I’ve
learned today that we must all be faithful slaves.”

    
“Will
you rub my feet tomorrow?”

    
“Deal.”

    
“See
ya.”

    
“See
ya.”

    
Raszer
ended the call, tossed his cigarette out the window, and smiled. When all other
graces in the world were gone, there would still be Monica.

He pulled into his driveway at eight fifty-six,
the Friday freeway traffic having stretched a fifty-minute journey to nearly
twice that long. There were people going home to little plots in the Antelope
Valley and dusty retreats in Canyon Country who wouldn’t see dinner until
almost ten. These were the wages of survival in the world’s biggest suburb. In
the rain-scrubbed northeastern sky, a few stars had come out amid the patchy
clouds. The hint of desert on the breeze suggested that the clouds would be out
to sea by morning, and that the storm season was over. It came to him—for no
apparent reason—that it would be Easter in less than two weeks, and he thought
of Brigit.