The Lazarus Heart (27 page)

The sixth note promised Frank that it would be the last. It has led him to this derelict hulk of a factory near the river, a towering edifice of stones laid before the turn of the century and abandoned now to rats and the homeless, to furry brown bats and the elements. He parks on a vast expanse of weed-fractured concrete, flooded now like everything else, a submerged forest of dandelions, thistles, and polk salad on the edge of the factory ruins.

Frank has to fight to get the door of the car open, wrestling against the zealous wind, and then he has to wrestle it closed again. For a moment the storm holds him at bay, pressed helplessly against the car, just another bit of debris at the mercy of the hurricane. He shades his eyes from the stinging rain and all the shit being hurled through the air and stares up at the corpse of industry sprawled out before him, its crumbling masonry and towering brick smokestacks silhouetted against the Erector-set framework of the Greater New Orleans Bridge and, farther on, the blue-black wall of the storm's turbulent heart. The sight of such a terrible majesty bearing down upon the city is almost enough to make him forget himself and whatever's waiting for him inside the old factory. Almost. A man could go mad, he thinks, staring into the faceless countenance of such a thing, forced to acknowledge such a power. Something sails through the air and grazes his left cheek, slices a deep furrow and is gone, and the wind is lapping greedily at Frank's bleeding face.

He pulls himself along the rain-slick side of the car. Tiny wavelets crash against

his pants legs. A sheet of corrugated tin whirls past overhead, a rusty guillotine spinning end over razor-sharp end, and Frank gets the message:
Stay out here a little longer and you're a dead man.
So he grits his teeth like a good cop and keeps going.

It's less than twenty yards to the closest door into the factory, but the storm knocks him down again and again, and once he gashes the palm of his right hand on a broken wine bottle hiding like shark teeth just beneath the water. Finally he reaches the building, solid brick and mortar to support him. A peeling metal door hangs crooked on its hinges, ready to be torn loose at any moment and sucked into the maelstrom.

Frank manages to pull it open a crack and immediately the wind rips the handle from his hands, slams the door back against the wall. He crosses the threshold and the storm lets him go, confident that the shelter of the factory can last only so long.

Frank stops just inside, faced with a darkness so absolute that the premature twilight framed in the doorway behind him seems brilliant by comparison. He's still standing in several inches of cold water, but at least he's protected from the wind and driving rain, and the noise of the storm is muffled by the thick walls to a dull and constant roar.

He reaches into his dripping jacket and draws his Beretta 92-F from its shoulder holster. The gash in his hand hurts bad and is bleeding like a son of a bitch, but there's nothing to be done for it now. Of course it
had
to be his fucking right hand, no way he could have fallen on his left. He takes a Kel-light flashlight from one back pocket, not expecting it to work, expecting it to be full of water and the batteries drowned. But when he switches it on, a weak beam shines across the dark puddle of the floor. He aims it a little higher and there's a brick archway only a few feet to one side where the

floor slants upward to drier ground.

"You better be here somewhere, motherfucker," he says. His voice sounds very small in the vast tomb of the building.

He steps through the arch. There is more light on the other side, velvet-soft shades of gray only a few degrees from actual black, but it's an improvement. There are tall rows of windows along the southern side of the building, the side facing the river and the oncoming storm, the last dregs of daylight filtering down to the floor through air thickened by its time inside the factory. Frank shines the Kel-light along the wall near the arch and sees a rickety-looking iron staircase bolted into the brick, leading up into the gloom, toward the second story of the building.

"Hey!" he shouts. There is a sudden, riotous flutter of wings from high above him; only pigeons or maybe swallows nesting in the rafters, but he can't help remembering the big black crow the guy in the mask had with him. A couple of charcoal feathers spiral lazily down, passing through the beam of his flashlight on their way to the concrete floor. When the birds are quiet again, Frank listens for any indication that he's not alone, that Joseph Lethe is waiting for him in the gloom.

"Listen, asshole! I'm tired of playing hide-and-go-seek with your dumb ass!"

But there's no response, no human response, only the incessant whistling drone of the storm outside and the subtler noises of the old factory.

"Jesus," he whispers. Keeping the flashlight aimed just in front of his feet and the Beretta's rubber grip squeezed tightly in his aching, bloody right hand, Frank Gray begins to climb the stairs.

There's a small landing at the top, a square platform of plate steel and cement that sags alarmingly to one side, and guardrails that have all but rusted away. As he steps onto it Frank realizes he is standing at least fifty or sixty feet above the factory floor. The tall windows waver on the opposite side of what seems like a bottomless void.

Through the filthy, broken panes, he can see the roofs of lower buildings along the northern shore of the Mississippi and the swollen river itself like some impossibly giant cottonmouth moccasin, the rough white-capped water for scales. But he looks away; there's already enough shit to deal with without worrying about what's going to happen when the river comes across the levee.

There's a steel fire door set into the wall. When he pushes against it the door creaks loudly and swings open. What he sees through the doorway almost sends him screaming back down the precarious stairs: a floodlight clamped to a sawhorse, its glare revealing a mutilated body suspended by its wrists from a steel hook. The corpse's bloodless legs are spread out in a wide inverted V, each ankle bound with white nylon cord that has been tied securely through iron eyes in the floor. The body has been completely eviscerated, slit from the genitals all the way up to the chin, and the blood- drenched floor beneath it is scattered with discarded organs and entrails, bluish loops of intestine and darker, meaty lumps he can't identify. The abdominal cavity is empty, a hollowed-out shell of muscle and cartilage and bone. There are literally buckets of clotting blood on the floor, plastic mop pails filled almost to overflowing, and, behind the floodlight, a small table covered with surgical instruments and stray strips of skin and meat. Where the body isn't smeared with blood and gore, its skin is the powdery color of chalk dust. But at least he can't see the face. Its head has lolled back, away from him, and the dead eyes, if they've even been left in its skull, stare toward the ceiling somewhere high overhead. It's impossible for him to tell if the corpse is male or female.

Frank swallows hard and wipes his sweating forehead on the back of the hand holding his flashlight. He didn't puke at the mess in the fountain in Audubon Park and he sure as hell isn't going to puke now.

"Lethe?" he asks. When there's no reply, he says, "I know you're still here."

There's movement to his left, then something fast he only barely glimpses from the corner of one eye. Frank doesn't take time to check his target or aim. He's acting purely on fear and adrenaline as he squeezes off three rounds from the Beretta. The nine- millimeter shells hit nothing but solid brick and the gunshots leave his ears ringing.

"Fuck,"
he mutters, and there are footsteps coming up fast behind him and hard, cold metal pressed to his temple before he can turn around.

"It's over, Detective. I win." Frank recognizes the voice from the phone call. "Drop your gun and take one step backward."

"If I drop my gun I'm dead."

"You're already dead, Detective, just as soon I want you that way. Now drop your fucking gun
and
the flashlight and do exactly what I said. One step back."

Frank lets the Beretta slip from his bleeding hand and it clatters noisily to the floor, drops the Kel-light and its lens shatters. He takes one step backward. The pistol muzzle pressed to his skull moves with him.

"Now turn and look at it," the voice says.

"What is the fucking point of this?" Franks asks. "Do you just want to see me scared? Is that it? 'Cause if that's all you want, you already got it, okay?"

"I want to see you
dead,
faggot," the voice says, the purring, effeminate voice speaking directly into his ear now. "I want to see you dead and condemned for your crimes against your own masculinity. Turn and look at it, Frank Gray."

So Frank turns, slowly, to face the madman's butchery.

"This doesn't even make
sense,
Lethe," he says, trying not let the fear show in his voice. There might still be a chance to get out of this alive if he can stay calm, if he can stay cool.

"I'm Jordan now," the man says, and he steps around to stand in front of Frank but the barrel of his gun doesn't move an inch. There's nothing remarkable about him, a man younger than Frank expected and almost handsome in a gaunt, heroin-addled sort of way. Probably not the perfect match for an FBI serial-killer profile.

"But you are the same man I spoke with on the phone, the one who left the messages leading me here, right? The man who said he was tired and wanted this to stop?"

"Yes," the man says softly.

"So, what? Were you just lying to get me out here?"

"There's nothing here that you need to understand, Detective. Nothing at all. You are not an innocent."

And the man who has become Jordan pulls the trigger and for Frank Gray the world ends quickly in the cracking sound of thunder.

Jordan kneels beside the detective's still body and presses two gloved fingers to the throat, feeling for a pulse that he already knows isn't there. Then he examines the dark powder burns at the temple, lifts a loose flap of scalp and hair already matted with blood, and stares at the bullet hole a moment. He's never before killed anyone who didn't exhibit at least the behavioral symptoms of gender transgression.

And I still haven't,
he thinks after a moment of quiet deliberation.
This man had sex with other men, and isn't that a violation of gender?

Jordan nods, reassured. He places his gun in Frank Gray's right hand, folds the detective's palm around the butt of the pistol and carefully threads an index finger through the trigger guard. He uses the dead man's left hand to add a few additional fingerprints to the stainless steel barrel, and then he picks up the Beretta and steps away from the body. He glances from the gutted transsexual to the prostrate form of the cop like a sculptor admiring a finished piece. And it really isn't so different, he tells himself, the painstaking orchestration of matter into an arrangement that better suits his needs.

What the police will find here will suit his needs too, as perfectly as the body of Benjamin DuBois once did, as perfectly as the evidence he left in Jared Poe's apartment a year ago: a fingerprint lifted from a spoon with a strip of Scotch tape, a couple of pages of poetry. And this is so much more damning, so much more elaborate. He feels a staggering pride that he has actually managed to pull it off.

But it isn't truly finished, not yet. There's one small touch left to add for consistency's sake

Jordan sits down in the space between the soles of the detective's shoes and the sticky, wet patch beneath the remains of the second DuBois twin and takes a black Sharpie marker from one shirt pocket. He's committed the whole poem to memory by now, all 108 lines of it, and that's something else to be proud of as he leans over the spot on the floor that he swept clean with a whiskbroom earlier in the day. He prints the lines as neatly as he can.

Stern Despair returned, instead of the sweet hope he dared abjure
-
That sad answer, "Nevermore
!
"

When he's finished, Jordan goes back to Frank Gray's body and places the pen in his left hand, folds those fingers tightly closed around it.

Two birds with one stone,
he thinks, and the thought makes him smile. It's good to be such a clever man. They'll all lose his trail now. Even if the cops believe that Jared Poe was guilty, he knows that they've begun looking for a second killer to explain the murders fitting the Ripper MO since Poe's one-way trip up to Angola. And a dead faggot cop is the perfect fall guy. Shortly before he reached the apartment on Ursulines, Jordan dropped a letter to the
Times-Picayune
into a mailbox, Frank Gray's confession to sodomy and the killings.

And the assassin bird sent into his dreams and visions by the others-it will lose him as well now that its link to this world has been severed. He saw the scar clearly enough on the transsexual's bare back. Without a living conduit the creature will lose his

scent and be forced to return to Them empty-handed. But, just to be safe, hell move on. There's a road map of the Southeast in his glove compartment, and he's circled Memphis and Dallas, Atlanta and Birmingham. All his calculations aren't complete, but

at least one of these cities will be right for his work. By the time They realize what's happened, just how badly They've underestimated again, he'll be miles and miles away, hidden by the walls of a different city and the syllables of a different name.

Jordan looks back at the gutted corpse again and remembers what he told the thing before he killed it. It truly was a pity that he did not have more time. There was so much it might have revealed to him if only there had been the time to employ more subtle techniques. But then he thinks of those other cities again, those other cities on other rivers. He lets his eyes wander higher, up above the body and the white-hot nimbus of the floodlight. High above the abattoir this room has become, there are windows that have been painted over, windows painted black decades ago.