Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Nevada Barr

  One floor up was a fat man with a headache or dead. At her feet was a bloody woman. If they lived, either of them, they would be recovering consciousness, hollering for help. She could kill them both and drag the bodies out of sight. That would give her and Clare more time to look for Dana and Vee, but Anna'd lost her killing rage. Necessary as it might be, she couldn't bring herself to put anyone to death at the moment.

  Since she wasn't going to turn butcher any time soon, it behooved her to move. The time she and Clare had before they were found out was short. Given the secrecy, moneyed backing, and security of the operation--and that its managers had no qualms about murdering children when they were of no more use--Anna doubted house security would have any qualms about killing her and Clare. Nor would any of the patrons raise a finger to stop it or, once it was done, report it to law enforcement. Anna would simply go missing. Clare was already missing.

  Paul would never know what happened to her.

  Anna had never lost anyone close to her--some had died, but never had anyone gone missing. Reading the ordeals of parents with missing children or brothers and sisters that simply disappeared one day, she always thought that would be infinitely harder to cope with than death. The dreams alone would be devastating: the good dreams of finding the beloved, only to wake up to the truth and the nightmares of where they might be that one would never wake from.

  She could call Paul. Then Paul would call in the cavalry. And what was the problem with that? The more the merrier, the bigger the guns the better; Clare had found what she was looking for, if not whom. The police would look at her differently because of it.

  For a long and miserable second, Anna couldn't remember where she'd left her cell phone. Then it came back to her: She'd given it to Jordan to carry because there were no pockets in the dress Star lent her. Moving quickly, she frisked the governess. No cell, but a radio. Anna doubted it called out--or if it did it wouldn't be to anyone she could consider a friend. It would be for internal use.

  Taking it with her, she ran to the next door and threw it open. A man was sitting splayfooted on the edge of a pouf. A tiny girl was stroking his cock and singing the alphabet song. Holding firmly to the doorjamb so she'd not strike the man down with the heaviest object she could find, Anna said, "Girl, come with me. Now!" The child turned at the sound of her voice, the dark brown eyes as lifeless as two buttons sewn onto a Raggedy Ann's face.

  "What the hell are you thinking, coming in here like this?" Pants around his knees, abusing a little girl, the man had the gall to be affronted. Anna held more tightly to the jamb.

  "Herpes," she said succinctly. "She's got it. Come." With those words, she stepped into the room, grabbed the child by the hand, and led her out. "I'll send you a clean one," she said over her shoulder. "Don't lose your place."

  The door to the Chance had locked behind them. The only way out was through the courtyard Tyrone had mentioned, either through the parking garage or the port door. Between here and there would be whatever thugs the Chance paid for and a bunch of "good decent family men" who didn't need publicity.

  Bridges burned, the only way was forward. Towing the child, Anna walked purposefully to the next room and snatched open the door. A naked boy about eight was bent over a bed. "God damn it!" Anna roared at a partially dressed man who shared the room. Then, "AIDS, that boy's infected." Before the man could react, Anna grabbed the dazed boy and left the room; two children now.

  Their only chance was to create as much confusion as possible. In the next room she yelled, "Fire, evacuate!" The man snuggling with a tiny Hispanic girl dumped her from his lap and ran without a backward glance.

  "Buddy system," Anna said to the three children, wondering if they had ever heard of it, wondering if they spoke English. The naked boy evidently had. He took the little girl's hand. The four of them went on.

  The next door Anna thrust open, she cried, "Police raid. Run!" The pedophile ran downstairs without pants or shoes, the white costume shirt flapping over his flabby buttocks. Two more children joined Anna's forces, twins, African American and no older than seven. The radio she'd shoved down the front of the gray dress began to bleat. "Paula, what the hell is going on?" came a man's voice from somewhere around her sternum. The bouncers or guards were beginning to notice that all was not right. Clients were streaming down with conflicting stories.

  "Come on, kids. Let's run." Anna scooped up the nearest child and ran down the hall, her bare feet making no sound on the carpet. Every door they came to she threw open. The men she sent running. One of the children panicked and followed her abuser. One man, perhaps one rung higher on the evolutionary ladder than his cowardly fellows, carried the child he was molesting with him when Anna yelled, "Fire!"

  After that she stuck to "Police raid."

  The last door she pulled open was where she'd first begun. The fat man had come around and managed to pull on his trousers. Forgoing the fun of bashing him on the head again, she yelled, "Police raid! Run!"

  He didn't run. He didn't even look particularly alarmed. "Who the fuck are you?" he demanded. He reached toward the hat stand where he'd draped his jacket and shirt. Behind the coat was a shoulder holster with the butt of an old-fashioned wheel gun sticking out of it.

  It was then that Anna recognized him. He was the man in Candy's picture, the man who had gone on to become New Orleans's chief of police. He knew the police raid was a farce because he didn't call it. For a fat man he moved faster than a striking snake. The gun was in his hand before Anna could divest herself of the child she carried and pull shut the door.

  "You," the chief snarled at one of the twins, "come over here. Now." Scared not to, the child ran to him. He grabbed her slender arm and moved the gun from Anna to the child's temple.

  "Now," he said to Anna, "who the fuck are you?"

  THIRTY-NINE

  Dropping her head between her knees, Clare forced the darkness to recede. Futilely she wished she'd smoked less and eaten and slept more. When she felt she could stand without passing out, she rose. The girls who were playing with their dolls on the bench when she collapsed had stopped their game and were staring at her. Here in the fancy house falling-down men were surely a greater danger than those who remained sober. The children hadn't run away. Probably because they would be punished if they did. So they waited for whatever horror might come to them and their dollies.

  "It's okay," she managed with a shaky smile. "I won't hurt you."

  The eyes got wider, the dollies clutched tighter. They'd heard that before, and it was never true. The only kindness Clare could offer was her absence. Before she left she asked, "Do you know any little girls named Dana or Vee?" and, as an afterthought, "Or Aisha?"

  They shook their heads.

  "Thank you," Clare said mechanically. Thinking was so hard. She wondered where Jordan was and cursed him for going AWOL. Progressing on legs growing shakier with every move, she stumbled from room to room.

  Jordan had abandoned her. The pigeon ranger was missing. Maybe she'd seen the governess and gone back upstairs. Or she'd been taken or killed. Mackie was gone, maybe to sleep in a corner, maybe thrown out to be run over in the street. Clare couldn't care. All that mattered now--all that had ever mattered--was Dana and Vee.

  In corners behind potted plants, in niches with half-drawn curtains, in front of a small audience gathered around a divan, two of the three smoking cigars and sipping booze with the show, she found children being used.

  After several more children and their captors, she wanted to go blind, to gouge out her eyes like a character in a Greek tragedy, but the need to see the faces of her daughters forced her to take in each miserable picture, knowing it would be burned on the back of her eyes until she closed them for the last time on earth. Probably longer.

  The men perpetrating this basest of evil faded and blurred until they were as shadows; she could scarcely believe that they were real, that they existed. The period costumes, the low hum of conversation, the palms, and the
strains of piano music--it all made them seem like something from an old black-and-white movie.

  All her adult life she had worn costumes, played roles. Clare loved acting, loved bringing a character to life with her skill. Was that what these men were doing? Cloaking their sickness in a kind of glamour? Creating a world of wealth and grace where their criminal perversions were as acceptable as having a glass of wine on a summer afternoon?

  Skirting the baby grand, averting her eyes so she would not see who played the piano in hell, she entered the courtyard. The fancy house and grounds took up half of a city block. Even with the house there remained space for a courtyard large enough to hide a myriad of sins. Bricks formed the walls up to about twenty feet. Gas lanterns, low enough for privacy but bright enough for enjoying the scene, were affixed at shoulder height every few yards. From the top of the brick up, the gray of more prosaic building material took over. Climbing fig greened the walls. Bougainvillea in hot pink, lavender, gold, and red showered through the lamplight in waterfalls of color. Night-blooming jasmine and gardenia filled the still air with perfume. The garden had grown up over the years until many of the trees and shrubs were taller than the walls, leaving winding paths and darkened nooks throughout. The sound of water came from many directions as fountains joined together to make soothing music in a place where children found no solace.

  Because she knew what happened in the garden, the beauty came to Clare stinking with debasement: Shadows were too dark, colors too opulent, foliage threatening and laden with ugly memories. The scent of flowers was fetid in her nostrils as she remembered Candy's description of the fancy house, the singing and the thumping and the smell of flowers. Insupportable weight pressed on her eyes and the back of her neck. Piano music clogged her ears. The odor of gardenias was filling her lungs till air could not penetrate.

  Unless Anna had found the girls upstairs, but for this small maze there was no place else to look for her children. Her steps slowed. Thoughts ran from her skull like the pattering of fountains. Finally she stopped, still as death, in a darkened turn and was nothing: not awake or asleep, afraid or hopeful, alive or dead.

  Into this trance came a hushed voice counting, "One, two, three. Like pin the tail on the donkey." This was followed by men laughing and then a child's cry, short and sharp, and more laughter.

  One more.

  Here in the garden was one more child being taunted, raped, molested, made drunk, or beaten. Clare could not let herself sink into the void until she had witnessed one last horrific act, taken on the pain of one last lost child. She owed her daughters that.

  The six or seven feet she had to force a body that was shutting down from starvation, exhaustion, and stress to reach the laughter seemed an endless push through a darkling jungle. Then she was at the end of the brick path. Ahead, tucked into a corner of the wall, was a lion head fountain, water trickling from the beast's mouth into a triangular basin. Benches angled out from it in an ell. On each bench sat a man, both startling in their complete unremarkableness, one nearly bald, the other with hair thinning in two runs up from his eyebrows. They could have been a middle-aged grocer gossiping with the driver of the bread truck or a stockbroker trading stories with his Realtor. The bald man wore a wedding ring. Both wore glasses.

  Between them on the minute stage floored in brick and lighted by the gas lamps was a dark-haired child wearing a blindfold. One of the men was turning her gently around and around as one might in a child's game of hide-and-seek to render the one designated as "it" dizzy.

  The child was naked but for the blindfold and button-up boots. Her dress was crumpled on the bench near the man who spun her. The powdered wig she'd been wearing lay like a dead cat half under the other man's foot. The spinner lifted his hands from the child's shoulders, and she staggered several steps, and then righted herself, hands outstretched in a macabre game of blindman's bluff.

  The man who'd watched the proceedings thus far reached out a fine, long-fingered hand and tweaked the child's nipple hard enough that she cried out. Both laughed. The other man, not to be outdone, goosed the child in the bottom with the toe of his shoe.

  The child was Dana.

  "Stop," Clare whispered as her mind screamed incoherently. Intent on their game, the men hadn't noticed her silent arrival, hadn't seen her standing in the shadows. Now they did. "Stop," she said again, and again it came out as a mere breath of sound.

  "Why don't you mind your own business, buddy?" said the man who'd spun Dana.

  "She is my business," Clare said, and she fell to her knees, hitting the brick so hard that the pain flapped black wings in her mind. When had she gotten so weak? So sick.

  Dana tentatively raised a hand, lifted one corner of the blindfold, and shot a quick glance at her captors to see if they'd noticed she was breaking their rules.

  "Honey," Clare croaked and held out her arms.

  Dana pulled the blindfold down again. She didn't recognize her mother. "Have I changed so much?" Clare murmured, but she knew she had. This brittle, black-haired man of bones and cigarette smoke was just another client come to join the game to Dana, and one she didn't want to see.

  "Look, pal, why don't you bug off?" the bald man said and stood. Clare flashed on the annual Halloween show Seattle Rep toured to the grade schools; Ichabod Crane, his hideous skeletal length unfolding to the horror of the children.

  Clare tried to stand and managed to get one foot on the ground so she knelt like a suitor about to propose marriage. Her head swam. She couldn't see the man for looking at her daughter, afraid that if she looked away for even a second Dana would vanish.

  "This is my child," she managed.

  "No, asshole, this is our kid for the evening. We paid triple for a virgin, so fuck off," the second man said, and he, too, stood. Ichabod turned to his cohort. "You think we should call security? One of those rent-a-cops?"

  Instead of answering, the shorter man lifted his foot and kicked Clare in the face. She didn't even have time to raise her hands to deflect the blow. The heel of his boot struck her forehead, opening a cut near the hairline. Blood poured into her eyes. Ichabod reached down with one long mechanical arm and lifted Dana into the air.

  Clare grabbed his leg, clawing up his body to get to her child. "Dana, it's Mommy."

  "Doggone it," Ichabod said, shaking his leg as if to free it from an aggressive Chihuahua.

  "Going long," the man who had kicked Clare said and jogged backward a few steps. Ichabod threw him the blindfolded child. Dana screamed. Freed from his burden, Ichabod backhanded Clare, and she fell the few feet she'd gained. Crawling, blinded with weakness and her own blood, she crossed the bricks to the man holding Dana.

  "Please," she said. "She's my little girl."

  "And a pass down the field," Ichabod cried, getting into the spirit. The kicker held Dana above his head and danced away from where Clare begged at his feet. Dana was old enough it took two hands to hold her, and he threw hard. Her arms and legs windmilled in terror.

  "Punt," he said and kicked Clare again. The boot struck her shoulder, and she fell hard, the side of her head cracking against the brick. Midnight flowed from the edges of the world until all she could see was a narrow bit of brick, red and close, in front of her.

  "Jordan!" she screamed.

  "What the hell?" someone said.

  White-hot rage, the anger of failure and cruelty and life on the run, the fury of the gutter punk, poured into Clare, and, as her consciousness receded, Jordan came to his hands and knees. A booted foot flashed toward his face. He raised one hand and shoved it aside. Clenching his fist in the trouser cuff, he roared to his feet, snarling. The man he'd caught stumbled backward and sat down hard on the rim of the fountain. Jordan let go of the cuff, grabbed him by the ears, and smashed his own forehead into the man's face. Blood splattered: Jordan's, the pervert's. Jordan reveled in it.

  Sputtering, the pervert fell back, butt sinking into the shallow catchbasin.

  "You hurt me!" he cri
ed out in shock and outrage. "You broke my nose! I'll sue you for everything you've got!"

  "Sue this," Jordan growled. He jerked the man out the water by his shirtfront, head-butted him again, and let him fall back.

  Snarling like a rabid dog, Jordan spun around to catch Ichabod watching the scene in dumb shock. "You bastards can deal it out but can't fucking take it." Jordan spit out the words. With a feral growl, he sprang at the tall, bony frame, striking the man in the chest with knees and elbows. Hands around the skinny throat, he bore the second man to the ground. A brick had come loose where the edge of the walk met with the soil of the planter, and Jordan prized it up.

  "Don't kill me!" Ichabod cried.

  "Why not?" Jordan said and brought the brick down hard.

  FORTY

  Instinctively, Anna started forward. The chief rapped the barrel of his revolver sharply against the little girl's skull, causing her to cry out. Anna stopped. The child's twin sister moaned as if the blow had hurt her as well. The children pressed closer, clinging to Anna's hands and skirts, hobbling her as effectively as the pistol pointing at the girl's temple.

  Several men rousted by Anna's intrusions paused in their exodus to stare at the odd gathering.

  "We've an intruder," the chief said calmly. "It's being taken care of. I suggest you gentlemen take your leave."

  Two of them raised their hands to shield their faces in the way of politicians being walked to jail before banks of avid photographers and sidled by. Anna heard one murmur, "Excuse me."

  When they'd gone, the chief jerked the girl up against his chest and nestled the gun under her full skirts, where it was obscenely concealed. "Who sent you?" he demanded.

  "Paula's mother died," Anna said. "I'm going to be the new governess until she can get her father settled in an extended care facility. This is on-the-job training."