Eventually a sheriff was sent out to cruise around, smell for smoke, and look for a pile of coals from the house. He didn’t find anything.
By noon the local cops had heard the story enough that they had started to believe it, but had very little to go on in their own parish. On the other hand, if the kids’ story was true, they had been kidnapped from New Orleans Parish, by a resident of that parish. The obvious thing to do was send them back to the city to file another report there.
They were even nice enough to give them a ride all the way to the police station in the French Quarter.
Sunday February 16th
8:00 a.m.
It was all Lawrence Block’s fault, at least as far as Harper was concerned. If Harper hadn’t picked up a copy of Burglars Can’t Be Choosers while he was going through his divorce, he probably would have borrowed the money to buy another truck, and stayed in the trucking business. At the time, though, he felt like everything happening was a sign he was supposed to change his life around. So he moved back to his hometown of Valentine, Louisiana and become a burglar.
Harper thought about things like that whenever he felt like he was in danger of going to jail. He had definitely taken too many chances in the last few hours. He had broken most of his own rules. He had gotten greedy and chosen a job because of the profit factor instead of the safety factor. He had stolen a car, though he hadn’t intended to keep it – he just needed it for the job. He had spent hours lounging around the rich person’s house, instead of minutes. And picking up those kids had just put him in a world of danger. Even though he had gotten out of the parking lot, he knew the cops would be curious about who had dropped two mostly naked, blood-covered kids off at the ER. They would have questions he wouldn’t want to answer, such as, “Who are you?” or “Why are you driving a stolen car?”
So he drove about two miles from the hospital, parked the car in the back corner of an apartment building parking lot, and pulled his bicycle out of the trunk. It was a nice bike, a Cannondale mountain bike. It was his preferred method of transportation when he was working. He could take the bike into a house with him and, if need be, ride it out the door and down the steps. He could easily lose any cop on foot, and he could go places that cops in cars couldn’t. The only thing he really had to worry about was bicycle cops.
He took off the flannel shirt he was wearing, leaving him in a plain black t-shirt. He tucked the flannel in his backpack on top of his recently stolen goods. He briefly considered leaving the stuff in the car so if things turned bad he would have nothing stolen on him, but then decided that if things turned bad, they’d be able to connect him to the car, and it would still count against him. If he was in danger anyway, he might as well have something to show for it if he did get away.
Sheesh, five years ago he thought he was happily married. How had he gotten to the point where he was playing hide and seek with the law? He supposed that when your wife leaves you for another woman it does tend to shake up your life a little. Probably a lot more when you are the one who introduced your wife to the other woman. Some kind of karma going on there – try to get your wife to try something different and interesting and she might like it more than the same old and boring.
So there he was, risking jail time for what? A laptop computer he didn’t know how to use, a digital camera he didn’t know how to use, a few of pieces of jewelry that wouldn’t fit him or look good on him, and a little more than a hundred bucks in cash. At least he knew how to use the cash.
It was time to pedal. Though he was a large man – the term ‘big boned’ definitely applied to him – he was quite fit. Even though his belly was nowhere near big enough, he had stopped wearing red when he cycled because he had gotten too many Santa Claus jokes.
He shut the trunk and pedaled out of the parking lot. He vaguely wondered how long it would take anyone to notice the car. He hadn’t seen any signs about towing, and it was the sort of apartment complex where a mid-eighties piece of junk sedan with different colored doors fit right in.
His own car was on the other side of town so he pedaled hard. He figured that once he was in his own car, headed back to his own town, the odds of them finding him were pretty small. They’d find the car and know it had been stolen, and they would think it was weird that he would have picked up a couple of kids in the middle of nowhere and taken them to town, but they probably would not connect it to the burglary he had done earlier in the night. He had gotten a little lost while he was leaving that rich guy’s house and had just gotten his bearings when he saw the kids, so he was miles away from the scene of his crime when he picked them up.
He made it to his car without encountering any trouble. The backpack went in the trunk, the bike went on the bike rack, and fifteen minutes later he was out of town.
Sunday February 16th
9:00 a.m.
Dexter had not slept well; he couldn’t stop wondering about Boaz Pendleton. His nightmare of the night before had been replaced by a sense of dread that he hadn’t fully shaken. He had risen early and made himself crêpes for breakfast.
He read the newspaper more thoroughly than usual, even paying attention to the classified ads. As usual, there was almost nothing but bad news. (Including the classified ads. Isn’t every help wanted ad another way of saying that someone had lost a job?) It didn’t surprise Dexter that there was nothing but bad news. People are fascinated with the bad stuff and they always have been. Whether it is history, where times of prosperity are generally footnotes, or strictly personal (how many times has anybody ever called a buddy to talk about how great things are going with his wife?), or the front page of the paper – news is almost always bad. Today was no exception. There had been two ghastly murders, a doctor and a tourist, that the police think might be related to another pair of grisly murders, a couple of tourists in a B&B. All of them had been killed in the same way, though the police were withholding the exact method as part of their investigation. Dexter sighed. People had been killing each other ever since Cain. Why couldn’t it stop?
The paper did little to distract Dexter from his quandary over the documents. It kept his hands and eyes busy for a while, but his mind kept fixating on the mysterious papers.
Sometime around nine o’clock he realized he was stalling. He didn’t know what to do with the Boaz Pendleton documents, but he felt he needed to do something. He went upstairs to his study. The documents were still on his desk. This didn’t surprise him, but it also wouldn’t have surprised him if they had been gone. They came into his house under their own power; why couldn’t they leave the same way?
He started with the phone book. There was no Boaz Pendleton listed. He went back to the documents. He looked at the deed. He considered driving to the address, but then he realized it was in a different parish. He called information, and found there was a number for Boaz Pendleton in that parish.
Feeling like he was getting some place, he dialed the number. It rang three times and then he heard a familiar voice saying, “We’re not in right now, but if you leave your name and number we’ll get back to you.” He hung up. It was a generic message, but something bothered him about it. It was the voice, why had it been familiar? It took him a moment to recognize the voice, and once he did his feeling of dread intensified to a feeling of outright terror.
The reason the voice on the machine was familiar but hard to identify was because the voice on the machine was his own. Someone had recorded his outgoing message, but erased the part that said, “Hello, you have reached the Cornelius residence …” Why? Why would anyone use his voice? Why would anyone plant papers in his house?
The answer came to him suddenly: it was like some sort of a reverse identity theft. Someone was setting things up so that it would look like he was living a secret life. But who? Why?
What did someone want it to look like he was doing? Entering the realm of fantasy, he asked himself: if he were living a secret life
what would be his secret? Sex. If he was going to have a secret life it would involve women. Could somebody be setting it up to look like he was having an affair? Why would they do that?
To make Amy leave him. Anybody that knew her would know that infidelity was the one thing that would make her leave. So some stalker has a crush on Amy and wants her free of marital entanglement. So they bought some property, and a car, which just happened to be the same model car that someone had stolen.
No. That whole line of thought was crazy. Crazy. The whole thing was crazy. Dexter decided he needed to think about something else for a while. Clear his brain. He turned on the television. He couldn’t find anything that interested him. He turned off the television.
The television couldn’t take his mind off his problem. Dexter could be flighty at times, but once he got going, his mind was a lot like a locomotive: very powerful, but not able to change direction quickly. He couldn’t stop thinking about the documents. He tried staring at them for a while. That provided no insights.
He wondered if he should tell Amy about them. Then it hit him – maybe she already knew? Three people lived in the house, and he knew he had nothing to do with the papers, yet somebody had obviously hidden them. Why not Amy or Jenni?
Because they were hidden in his stuff. Why would they hide documents there? Because they thought that he might search theirs. But why would he search their belongings? Parents had been known to snoop in their kids’ rooms … maybe Jenni had something to hide. Maybe she was doing something, and knew she might get caught and if she got caught then one thing might lead to another and so it would be better to risk having her documents found by chance than found tucked into one of her stuffed animals? Okay, so that line of reasoning was getting even crazier than the first.
Dexter decided it was about time for a snack, maybe some fruit. He went downstairs to the kitchen. He selected a cantaloupe and went to the counter to slice it. He reached for the right sized knife, and found it was still missing. The loss of the knife still annoyed him. There were so many strange things happening. The loss of the knife, Boaz Pendleton’s documents – could they be related?
Linking the unexplained events made a certain sense to him. If nothing else, they shared the category of ‘unexplained,’ and the more he thought about it, the more both fit the broad category of things that made him nervous.
He used a different knife to slice the cantaloupe, then washed, dried and replaced the knife in the knife block. The bulk of the melon went into the fridge. He sat at the table to eat, and managed to lose himself in the process of eating for a few moments, but only for a few moments. He quickly found himself back with the same questions.
He had no answers, but he found himself wanting to get rid of the documents. No matter how he turned it over in his mind, they were trouble, and he wanted them gone. He also wanted his knife back.
He came to the conclusion that it was time to go for a walk. He grabbed a jacket, tucked the documents into the inner breast pocket, and stepped out into the world.
Sunday February 16th
Noon
By the time Sarah and Jeremy arrived at the police station in the French Quarter, the cops were reaching a fevered pace. The parish officers had called ahead with their story, which received significantly more attention than the already significant amount a kidnapping would normally warrant. A psycho had committed two pairs of murders in the last week, so when a psycho kidnapped and attempted to murder another couple, the New Orleans Police Department took the very small leap to the conclusion it must be the same psycho and became a very attentive audience.
The manhunt for Aldous had begun while Sarah and Jeremy were still talking to the parish officers – few things made an investigation easier than the victims knowing their assailant. From a police standpoint though, there were some significant and troubling differences between their story and the murders. Sarah and Jeremy had been transported while the previous victims had been killed wherever they were. The other crimes had been committed by someone who had left a signature pile of cereal, but Jeremy’s house was clean. The other victims had been stabbed, but Aldous had attempted to kill Jeremy with glue. Sarah’s description of the knife at the scene did not match the type of knife used in the killings. The police didn’t know if there had been glue involved in the murders, but they hoped to find that out once they found the victim’s heads.
Despite the differences, it seemed likely that Jeremy and Sarah’s ordeal was an evolution of the killer’s pattern. It seemed unlikely that two unrelated psychotic killers had suddenly started operating in the same area at the same time. The police couldn’t rule out the possibility of two independent killers, or the chance that there might be more than one sick person working together, but those possibilities were terrifying. If Aldous wasn’t the cereal killer, then the situation was worse than they wanted to contemplate.
The doctor and tourist had been found just in time to meet the deadline for the newspapers. This was a mixed blessing for the investigation. The good news was that they had all sorts of tips coming in. The bad news was that most of them were useless – any time there was a killing that made the news, someone would try to hang it on their ex-husband.
Amongst the dreck, useful information was filtering in. A neighbor had reported a late sixties/early seventies muscle car parked in the doctor’s driveway, the same sort of car Sarah and Jeremy had been abducted in. Several people had apparently been a little alarmed by a man in a wig and a cloak dragging an unmoving woman down Bourbon Street. Something about the couple had been unnerving enough to be memorable, but not quite enough to raise an alarm at the time.
A lot of the threads started to come together about two o’clock, when the GTO was found in a drainage ditch. In that parish the search for a missing trooper became more urgent, as shots had been fired out through the driver’s door and there was a rather large bloodstain on the road near some shell casings, a quarter mile from where the car had been found. Of more interest in New Orleans was the fact that there was a body in the trunk, apparently killed with the same knife as the others, though she retained her head. As a matter of fact, that body had two spare heads in the trunk with it. The heads matched the descriptions of the dead doctor and college student. Of even greater interest was the fact that records searches linked two names to the car. The VIN belonged to a car that had been reported stolen from one Dexter Cornelius, a resident of New Orleans, but the plates belonged to one Boaz Pendleton, whose only known address was in the same parish where the kids turned up. Within half an hour a parish cop had confirmed a house-sized pile of embers on the Pendleton property. A half hour after that the same officer found the two skulls from the turkey cooker. As near as he could tell, when the cooker’s propane tank exploded, it launched the steel pot and skulls a good fifty yards away.
Eventually they let Sarah and Jeremy go home. They were both too shaken up to want to be alone, and neither wanted to go back to Jeremy’s place, so they ended up back at Sarah’s. Each had slept less than two hours in the previous forty-eight. After the cops dropped them off, all they wanted was a hot shower, a decent meal and sleep. They ordered pizza before they showered. Much to his amusement, the only clothes she had that fit him were baggy sweats and a T-shirt.
Sunday February 16th
Noon
Once he left the house, the first place Dexter went was a nice little gourmet shop that was only a couple of blocks away, still in the Garden District. He bought a knife to replace the one that was missing. It irked him to have to pay for something he already owned, but it was worse to have an empty spot in his knife block.
Leaving the knife shop, he walked around behind the store, looking for a dumpster. All he found was a lowly garbage can, but it seemed good enough for his task: getting rid of the troublesome Pendleton documents. He lifted the lid and put the documents in, but did not let go of them. He was suddenly seized with doubt. What if the do
cuments were important? What if someone watched him leave them here? He put the papers back in his jacket pocket. He would find some place more private and farther from home to get rid of them.
Dexter started walking. Without thinking about it, he had started walking toward the French Quarter, the same route he took to work when he didn’t ride the streetcar. Why not? There was a lot of garbage in the French Quarter. Why not add a couple of pieces?
The familiarity of the routine of walking toward work was some comfort. For the first time since his dream, Dexter’s mind actually started wandering, so much so that when he passed a liquor store on Canal Street, it came to him that he hadn’t talked to Marie for a while. When being superstitious, it made sense to Dexter to follow intuition. Seeing the liquor store, Dexter felt very strongly that it was time to visit the dead voodoo queen and thank her for keeping him safe for the last week or so.
Dexter hadn’t really felt safe for the last week, and he had a pretty badly injured hand to show as proof of his lack of safety, but when the inspiration struck him to thank Marie, he didn’t question it. There was a time to be intuitive, and this was it. He bought a bottle of rum and set out for the cemetery.
When giving tours, Dexter emphasized what a great businesswoman Marie Laveau was. He would tell stories with rational explanations for all her notorious feats. She knew things about everybody because she had a network of paid informants. She could be seen performing rituals in more than one place at a time because her daughter could have passed for her twin. Everything she was famous for had a rational explanation. Yet she had a legion of believers, even now, significantly more than a century after her death. Dexter was a believer. He had been born a Catholic and still was, but he was also a child of the sixties; the amalgamation of religions that was voodoo appealed to him.
The Whisper Garden Page 16