Black Angel

by Graham Masterton

  BLACK ANGEL

  Graham Masterton

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  About Black Angel

  A serial killer is on the loose in San Francisco. Only when Lieutenant Larry Foggia is assigned to the case does the true horror of the killer’s motive come to light.

  A ritual killer – nicknamed ‘Satan’ – stalks the city, killing in terrible ways with no apparent motive. Enter Lieutenant Foggia who, assisted by a spiritualist medium, must discover the reason for the slayings. But the truth he unearths is beyond anything he’s encountered in the real world – for the killings are paving the way for a force so powerful that the lives of a few innocents will appear unimportant in comparison...

  Featuring several of Masterton’s favourite themes, such as spiritualism and demonology, Black Angel moves at a fast pace from the stomach-churning opening to the exciting final confrontation between man and demon.

  “I found in Punta Arenas an American sailor, almost 100 years old, who claimed that he was the sole survivor of the sailing vessel Charlotte, which had sunk in a terrible storm off the False Cape Horn, in 1837. He spoke of a strange cargo, the nature of which the ship’s master had been sworn to secrecy. He spoke of terrible screaming in the night, which had frightened some of the crew so direly that three of them had jumped overboard, believing the ship to be possessed. He would say very little more, except that Chilean fisherman had refused to take any of the Charlotte’s crew out of the freezing water, and that he himself had escaped only by a miracle. He said that the beach on which the wreck still lay was spoken of by Chileans as a place of unspeakable evil, and that they called it ‘the Place of Lies’.”

  Randolph Miller, “Travels in South America”, Chapter XII

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About Black Angel

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  About Graham Masterton

  About the Katie Maguire Series

  About the Scarlet Widow Series

  Also by Graham Masterton

  From the Editor of this Book

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  1

  Joe Berry fastidiously wiped up the last circles of spaghetti sauce with a torn-off piece of sourdough and then pushed his plate away, and that was the end of the last meal he would ever eat.

  “Food of the goddamned gods,” he remarked, and took a pack of Merit Menthols out of the pocket of his plaid shirt.

  On the other side of the kitchen, Nina Berry was carefully crimping the pastry around the edge of an apple-and-cinnamon pie, a pie that she would never bake. “Do you want a cup of coffee?” she asked him.

  He lit his cigarette, and shook his head. “I need my sleep. I’m starting that flat in Cow Hollow tomorrow.”

  “I bought some fresh decaff.”

  “Decaff isn’t coffee. Same way lite beer isn’t beer.”

  Along the corridor of the Berry’s two-bedroom Fulton Street condominium, seven-year-old Caroline Berry and five-year-old Joe Berry Junior were both fast asleep in their bunk beds.

  Caroline’s rag-doll Martha lay sprawled on the Navajo rug. Caroline would never again pick Martha up. Joe’s favorite stuffed rabbit Joe Berry Junior-Junior sat propped in the red-painted basketwork chair. Joe Berry Junior-Junior would never be called Joe Berry Junior-Junior again. The next name that Joe Berry Junior-Junior would be called would be “People’s Exhibit H.”

  It was 9:03 on the night of Thursday, August 11, 1988.

  Joe stood up with his cigarette dangling between his lips and carried his plate to the dishwasher.

  “I wish you’d quit,” Nina chided him, taking out the cigarette and kissing him.

  “Two a day, is that smoking?” he appealed.

  “Two too many. I want you to live for ever.”

  There were marginally fewer than eight minutes left to go. Joe said, “I’ll try to cut down to one, okay? But you’ll have to give me time to decide which one. I need the morning one to get me going and the evening one to calm me down.”

  “Oh, decisions, decisions,” Nina teased him.

  Joe took back his cigarette and walked through to the living-room, where the huge Zenith television set was flickering with the sound turned down. Former 49er Dwight Clark was being interviewed about his new restaurant, Clark’s by the Bay. Without turning up the sound, Joe heaved himself down on the couch and propped his thick green socks on the coffee-table.

  He picked up the Examiner. “Did you read here that they’re thinking of scrapping the Mounted Patrol?” he called. “They’ve worked it out that they’re costing the city a million-and-a-half bucks a year, just for a bunch of fancy cops on fancy horses.”

  “I like the Patrol,” Nina replied. “They give the city character.”

  “Oh, sure. And for every thousand dollars spent on character, that’s a thousand dollars less for the poor beleaguered bastards in the combat zone.”

  Nina came through to the living-room, carrying a mug of coffee. “Combat zone! You make it sound as if we’re in a war, or something.”

  “Are you kidding me? Four cops have been killed this year already. If that’s not a war, what is?”

  Six-and-a-half minutes left. Not even enough time for Joe to finish the afternoon paper, or for Nina’s coffee to grow cool enough for her to drink.

  Once, nine years ago, when they were staying the night with friends in Mill Valley, Joe had asked Nina, “If you had a choice, what would be the last thing you would ever do, before you died?”

  She had kissed his ear. The sunlight had dropped through the slatted wooden blinds like freshly culled honey. “Make love, of course,” she had giggled.

  He had kissed her ear.

  Five minutes. Not even enough time for making love.

  Joe was thirty-three years old, lean and wiry, with thinning black hair but a surprisingly boyish face, which his drooping grandad mustache did little to mature. After leaving college, he had trained as a cop, because his father had been a cop; but after eight years of active service on the streets of San Francisco he had suddenly decided not to go to work any more. He had lain in bed, unable to rise. The doctor had diagnosed nervous exhaustion, but Joe had recognized it for what it was. A total drainage of the spirit—an emptiness caused not by shock, not by trauma, not even by seeing his friends shot or old ladies beaten to a purple pulp or swollen bodies bobbing in the Bay, but simply by giving away a little piece of his soul day by day, night by night, to those who needed it.

  He knew why priests drank. He knew why doctors took drugs. He knew why policemen couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. There was such an emotional famine in the world. such a hunger for human spirit, that sooner or later there came a point when you had nothing more to give.

  These days Joe was a skilled joiner, working for Fastiff Interiors in Ross Valley—constructing limed-oak closets and mahogany floors and redwood decks. He loved the peace of joinery, the measured pace, the smell of different woods. He loved the way that carefully cut joints dovetailed into each other. But he still woke up occasionally in the small hours of the night and saw the silent needy faces of all of those people who had stolen his soul, pale as death, pale as a shoal of poisoned fish, floating on the tide.

  Joe didn’t care much for crowds any more. It had been three seasons since he had gone to Candlestick Park. There were just too many faces, mouths open, eyes wide, al
l of them hungry for a piece of his soul.

  Nina didn’t exactly understand what had happened to Joe, although she knew several other police wives whose husbands had suffered what was fashionably called “burn-out”. Some of the more hard-bitten officers called it “cop-out”.

  Nina had remained her gentle, supportive, and slightly bewildered self – skinny and pretty in a dated flower-child kind of way. She had been born in 1962 to the owner of The Red Flag book store on Haight Street, the irrepressible Thad Buford, and a vague college girl named Vanessa Grade (who in 1967 had legally changed her name to Star Lover.)

  Nina had met Joe in 1981, at an Independence Day jazz concert at the Frost Amphitheater at Stanford University. They had just started talking to each other, sitting under a tree, as if they had known each other for years. She hadn’t found out that he was a cop until it was much too late, and she was in love with him.

  It had been almost impossible at first for Nina to persuade her spaced-out friends that Joe wasn’t going to run them in every time they lit up a roach; and at almost every party and weekend get-together, Joe had suffered insults both implied and direct. One of Nina’s friends always called him Himmler. Another called him Berry-My-Heart-At-Wounded-Knee. As time went by, Joe and Nina had lost contact with all of those chatty nutty people who felt uncomfortable in the presence of a pig, no matter how much of a regular guy he could prove himself to be, and their social circle had been reduced (as the social circles of all policemen and their families are inevitably reduced) to other policemen and their families.

  Nina remained friends with at least a dozen policemen’s wives, but didn’t regret that she wasn’t still one of them. Whenever she met them, they were all fudge cake recipes and high-pressure cheerfulness. They all had the same bright brittle way of talking, as if at any second they were going to shatter into a thousand pieces. It was bad enough living on the fault line without living on the edge, too.

  She sipped her coffee. “Did I tell you that Caroline won a Snickers bar for painting today?”

  Four minutes to go. Joe looked up. “They give away candy at school, as prizes? I thought candy was a punishment, not a reward.”

  “Oh, Joe, one small Snickers bar isn’t going to hurt.”

  “Well, I don’t know. It kind of usurps parental discretion, don’t you think? You try to bring up your kids right, take care of their teeth, take care of their weight. It sure doesn’t help when their teacher starts handing out candy.”

  “She did a beautiful painting of the family. She called it ‘We’re The Berrys’.”

  “Did she paint herself with her teeth falling out?”

  “Joe, for goodness’ sake, it was only one candy bar and she brought it home and asked me before she ate it.”

  “And you, of course, said yes?”

  Nina shook her head. “You’re impossible sometimes. You smoke, you eat pasta like there’s some kind of award for it, you drink beer until you’re so full of gas that you practically float away. And then you nag me about one measly Snickers bar that your daughter won because she was so good at painting.”

  Three minutes. Scarcely enough time to play one last record. Certainly not their favorite, Barbra Streisand singing Evergreen (3:23).

  “Okay, okay,” Joe grinned at her. “I surrender. But don’t blame me if she grows up fat and toothless.”

  “Go look at the painting, why don’t you?” Nina suggested. “She’s pinned it up on her bulletin-board. And you can kiss them both goodnight, while you’re at it.”

  Joe sighed, dropped the newspaper back on to the couch, crushed out his cigarette, and stood up, and stretched.

  “I think I’m getting old,” he told Nina. He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. That was the last time he would ever kiss her. “I laid sixteen square yards of oak parquet today, and I feel like Quasimodo.”

  He walked along the corridor to the children’s bedroom, lightly drumming his knuckles on the wallpaper. As usual, the children’s door was about an inch-and-a-half ajar. A flowery ceramic plaque announced that this was Caroline’s and Joe Junior’s Room. Joe eased the door open, and stepped inside, breathing the warmth and mustiness of sleeping children.

  It was too dark for him to see Caroline’s painting clearly. As far as he could make out, she had represented the Berry family as four bright blue packing-cases with startled pigs’ faces and yard-brooms for arms. Why did kids always draw people with about a hundred fingers on each hand? He smiled, and went across to the bunk-bed, and stood watching Caroline sleeping.

  She was blonde and skinny and pretty, just like Nina. He had seen so many families in which the daughter had grown up to look like Dad and the son had grown up to look like Mom. His old sergeant George Swope had produced three daughters who had all looked exactly like him. Thick eyebrows, jutting jaws, and bulbous noses. The guys in the bunko squad had called them “The Sergeant Swope Sisters”.

  But here was Caroline’s thin blue-veined wrist lying on her My Little Pony pillow, and her shining blonde hair spread everywhere, like the gold that Rumpelstiltskin had spun. Her lips were slightly parted, and she was breathing with a slight catch in her throat.

  Down below, almost totally buried in his comforter, so that Joe could see only the back of his dark-brown sticking-up hair, Joe Junior was dreaming of something unguessable. Space, or school, or Kraft cheese-and-boysenberry jelly sandwiches. Joe leaned into the recess of the bunk bed and kissed Joe Junior’s hot little ear. He, too, sounded slightly clogged. Maybe a quick squirt of Dristan room-spray might help them both to breathe more easily.

  One minute, fifty-five seconds. Not even enough time to go find the room-spray. Not even time to think about all of those moments when the Berry family had been truly happy.

  Joe went to the window to tug the drapes straight. He looked down on Fulton Street, almost deserted except for parked cars and two men in hats walking slowly uphill, gesticulating and weaving from one side of the sidewalk to the other, as if they were drunk, and arguing.

  The house itself was unusually quiet. No television from Mrs. Caccamo upstairs, because she had fallen and fractured her ankle, and was spending a week in the hospital. No opera from the Linebargers below.

  The silence made the foggy night seem even more spectral. Joe had always promised himself that one day he would move out of the Bay area, maybe to Napa or Sacramento, where the weather was drier, and the kids wouldn’t keep getting snuffles.

  But he had been born here, and his mother had been born here, and his grandfather had been property-boy at the Chutes, one of the few theaters to survive the great earthquake and fire in 1906, and where else in the world could he possibly live?

  One minute to go. Then less than a minute. Then fifteen seconds. Then ten. Not enough time to say the Lord’s Prayer, even if he had known that he ought to.

  He tugged the drapes. Instantly, he heard a noise like a bomb going off. Garrunchh! – a deep, wrenching, grinding explosion. He cried out, “Jesus!”—because for one ridiculous splinter of a second he thought that he had caused the explosion himself, by tugging the drapes.

  He listened. There was silence.

  “Nina?” he called.

  Silence. Or maybe a faint cry? He couldn’t be sure.

  His life began to fall apart all around him, moment by moment, as if God wasn’t going to be satisfied until he and his family had suffered all the punishments of hell.

  “Nina!” he screamed. (Or did he? Maybe he was incapable of saying anything, he wasn’t sure. As a cop, he had listened to tape-recordings of men under severe stress—hostages, suicides, men trapped in gradually flooding sewer-pipes. These men had all believed that they were speaking calmly and rationally – but all that anyone could hear was an almost alien gibberish, and the huge gasping of hyperventilation.)

  He thought: earthquake? But it hadn’t felt like an earthquake. No queasy sensation beneath his feet. Gas explosion? Maybe the Linebargers had left their gas on when they had gone to see th
eir daughter in Eureka.

  He stepped out into the corridor. Nina? “Nina? Are you okay?”

  The blood in his ears rushed Nina Nina Nina Nina Nina.

  The first thing he saw was that their front door had gone. Not just the door, but the frame, and great lumps of the surrounding brickwork, too.

  Lying in the rubble was a full-sized jack, the kind used by firefighters to break down security-locked doors in burning buildings.

  Nina!

  He didn’t know how he managed to reach the living-room so quickly. It was as if he had simply blinked and thought “living-room”, and he was instantaneously there. It was then that he saw at once what had happened, and it was worse than anything he could have imagined.

  Something inside of his mind said: This is madness. This is too terrible to be true. This is the nightmare that haunts every hardworking taxpaying middle-class man and woman, and it simply doesn’t happen outside of dreams, or movies.

  A huge towering man in a strange and terrifying black horned mask was standing in the middle of the living-room, one booted foot resting on the kicked-over coffee-table. He was gripping Nina tightly by the roots of her hair, and up against her thin bare neck he was pressing the blade of an enormous triangular-bladed butcher knife. Nina was white-lipped, and her eyes were bulging. Her arms dangled limply by her sides, as if she were a life-size marionette of Nina whose strings had been cut. The man was holding the knife-edge so tightly against her larynx that the skin had been broken just enough to make her bleed, and even if she had done nothing more than swallow, her throat would have been sliced open.

  Joe cautiously raised both hands, breathing heavily. His police training told him: hostage situation – don’t go crazy, don’t panic. She may be your wife, but that’s all the more reason to stay in control. Act calm. Act conciliatory.

  The man’s grotesque mask made it impossible for Joe to judge what he looked like, or what age was, or what state of mind he was in. The mask was jet black, glossy, plastic or papier-mâché, like the head of a huge beetle, with antlers rather than horns. The eye-sockets were dead-black, and foxily slanted, and they were as dead as velvet and they gave away nothing at all.