It made only slightly more sense when you considered who the victim was.
Gabriela Maria Abrino Zuada.
Normally, Callahan didn’t know a pop star from a New Jersey car salesman. Her musical tastes leaned toward indie rock and euro-punk with a side of alternative jazz. And her interest in bubble-gum-smacking, coke-snorting, drunk-driving, party-loving, viral-video-making, IQCHALLENGED, Twitter-happy twentysomething pop icons had reached its peak somewhere south of the Britney Spears head shave.
But Gabriela Maria Abrino Zuada-or simply Gabriela to her fans-was something altogether different. At twenty-three years old, the Brazilian native had established herself as a worldwide phenomenon, the highest charting no-apologies Christian pop diva in the known universe. And even Callahan, who had long ago shed her Irish Catholic roots, knew who she was.
The announcement of Gabriela’s death-which was wisely being delayed as long as humanly possible-would undoubtedly send a tsunamisize shockwave around the world, a la Michael Jackson. But as far as Callahan knew, nobody in the president’s inner circle had sent a black ops emissary to check out Jackson’s corpse.
So what exactly was going on here?
Callahan had no idea. And she hated like hell being kept in the dark.
She also had to wonder why her talents weren’t being utilized more productively. Thanks to a tanking economy and a series of natural and not-so-natural disasters that had plagued the U.S. and the world of late, the international mood was about as sour as moldy rice. The world seemed to be going to hell in a hand basket and nobody knew quite what to do about it. People from all walks of life were scared and frustrated.
And, as always, the power brokers used that fear as a tool. Hysterical politicians were shouting fire at every opportunity, and those who shouted the loudest seemed to be getting most of the votes.
Countries that were normally fairly docile threatened aggression against their nearest neighbors and those who wanted a slice of the ever-shrinking economic pie-which, of course, was everyone-were starting to make Armageddon-like noises.
Such noises were what prompted the fearful to flock to people like Gabriela. Rather than look for real solutions to their problems they simply wrapped themselves in the cloak of faith and abdicated all responsibility for their actions to false prophets and the Great Holy Whoever.
To each his own. None of that much mattered to Callahan.
All she cared about was the job.
But to her mind, she should be out in the field helping hunt down terrorists and the frighteningly high number of missing nuclear warheads that were floating around out there.
Instead, she was stuck on a plane headed to Sao Paulo, staring at a dossier on a dead pop star.
Which made no sense at all.
At the moment, however, she was too fried to try to figure it all out. She was only four hours into her flight and all she wanted was to forget about pop divas and politics and -078 file codes, and simply sleep for a while.
She had tried closing her eyes a few times at the beginning of the flight, had managed to doze once or twice, had even thought she’d made it all the way home for a moment there. But then a baby started crying back in the economy compartment, and Callahan had bolted awake as if she’d been slapped squarely across the face.
Before boarding the plane, she had taken a moment to Google sleep deprivation, and the news wasn’t good. Not only did lack of sleep cause a myriad of health problems, including hypertension, heart disease and slower reaction times, severe deprivation could often lead to death.
Looking up from her smartphone, Callahan held out a hand again and checked for the tremor. Not only was it still there, it had gotten worse.
The guy on the seat next to hers was passed out, snoring slightly, a small bubble of spit in the corner of his mouth.
Callahan envied him. Spit and all.
The crime-scene photos were pretty grisly, even on the smartphone’s screen. The pop star looked like a crispy piece of bacon. She had been found in an empty storage room by her manager and bodyguards after the manager had smelled gasoline and heard her screaming.
Unfortunately, they’d found her too late.
It looked to Callahan like a case of self-immolation, and judging by the condition of the body, the victim had used a lot of gas to do the job.
But this bothered Callahan.
Self-immolation wasn’t unheard of in Brazil, but it wasn’t exactly commonplace either. Had Gabriela been an abused wife in Afghanistan, the scenario might make more sense. Afghan burn hospitals were full of such victims.
But given Gabriela’s profile, this particular method of suicide raised a big red flag.
An even bigger one, however, had nothing to do with the victim at all.
These photos could only tell Callahan half the story, and she’d have to take a look at the room and body herself before coming to any definitive conclusions-assuming she ever could.
But what she saw here was strange.
Very strange.
There seemed to be a complete lack of damage to the walls and floor surrounding the body. They were untouched by the flames. As if the victim had been burned somewhere else, then placed on the floor of this room.
Was this a murder?
Judging by the witness statements, that didn’t make any sense either. And as strange as all this was, it still didn’t tell Callahan why Section was interested in the case.
Her mandate was to “aid and assist the Sao Paulo Civil Police in conducting their investigation” and report her findings. An easy enough task on the face of it, but Callahan had a sinking feeling this assignment wouldn’t be easy at all.
It was times like this that she regretted ever allowing herself to be recruited for the job. She should have stayed in graduate school and actually done something with this brain she’d been blessed with.
Or maybe she should have disappeared to some lighthouse somewhere and cut herself off from the world, blissfully ignorant of the growing turmoil around her. And every night, the moment her head touched the pillow, she would be whisked away to the Land of Nod and the pleasant dreams it promised.
So much for that idea.
7
HARRISON, LOUISIANA
Edith Stillwater’s last few words had stuck with Batty for the rest of the afternoon and most of the night.
She was right. The absence of God notwithstanding, Batty was a pitiful soul. Stranded in self-imposed purgatory here in this house, his only companions were the thick, earthy smell of the swamp and a humidity that wrapped itself around him like a warm wet blanket. No friends, no loved ones. Nothing but the Louisiana sky.
“It’s hotter than the Devil’s drawers,” his mother used to say on nights like this.
She would sit on this very porch, fanning herself, her deck of blue Bikes spread out before her, her face scrunched up in concentration as she stared down at the array she’d laid out on the table. More often than not, there was a client sitting across from her, eyeing her anxiously, waiting for her to finish her reading, wondering if she’d be able to pull at least one small splinter of hope from those cards.
His mother tended to give it to them, even if she had to lie. She was a woman prone to sympathy, cared too much about other people, a trait she carried with her until the day she died.
She’d been gone now for a good fifteen years and this house was the only thing that Batty had left of her. A big old Southern monstrosity with columns and balconies and a fairly advanced case of swamp rot.
The place had been in his family for generations, and Batty was born here, in one of the bedrooms upstairs, his wizened old mamere playing midwife as his mother pushed him out into the world in what everyone in the family agreed was probably the most difficult delivery of the latter twentieth century.
Batty was born with an attitude, an eight-pound ten-ounce bundle of XY chromosomes, who, according to Gramma Jean, looked just like his daddy. He was never sure if this was supposed to be a compli
ment or an insult, or who it might be aimed at, but since Winston LaLaurie had spent most of his life in and out of jail, Batty had a feeling she wasn’t trying to be kind.
Nowadays he was doing a pretty good job of living up to his heritage. Not the jail part, of course. Not yet, at least. But now that he was without a day job to go to-the one thing that had given him at least a semblance of legitimacy-he had officially become the most useless human being on the face of the planet.
A pitiful soul, indeed.
There’s nothing worse than a man who can’t hold on to a simple job. And nothing more disgusting than one who sits around feeling sorry for himself.
But then he had his reasons, didn’t he?
He may have been born with an attitude, but he’d had it beat right out of him the night Rebecca died.
From the time Batty was three years old, he’d sit on the front porch while his mother read the cards for friends and neighbors and strangers who sometimes came down from New Orleans or as far away as Baton Rouge, rich and poor alike.
Everyone in Terrebonne Parish knew Patsy LaLaurie had The Vision and they all wanted to see what she saw. Batty had been proud to watch her work, knowing that half of what she did was designed only to make these people feel good. Not in a calculating way, not simply as a means to make money (although she never refused a donation), but because she didn’t want a single one of them to walk away with fear in their hearts.
What good could it possibly do them?
“I can only feel what’s coming,” she’d once said to Batty. “I can’t change it. So why make another human being suffer if they don’t have to?”
Batty understood. Mostly because he could already feel what she felt. The thing his mother and grandmother called The Vision had been passed on to him. Nothing more, really, than a heightened sense of awareness. He felt things, smelled things, dreamed things and sometimes saw things that others couldn’t. And he knew that there was enough darkness out there to scare the living daylights out of even the toughest old fart.
He remembered seeing Landry LeBlanc, a big, oafish bully of a man, cry like a baby when Mother broke from her usual routine and told him he had cancer. She did it, she later said to Batty, because she wanted the old fool to get his butt to the doctor in hopes he might at least slow down the inevitable, make his last days tolerable.
“Idiot spends most of his time winding his ass, scratching his watch and telling everybody it’s daybreak when the sun’s going down. But that don’t mean he deserves to be in pain.”
Batty missed his mother. Always would. And if that made him some kind of mama’s boy-as the kids in school had so often reminded him-then so be it.
Setting his glass on the porch rail, he picked up the bottle of Tullamore he’d been nursing and poured himself another couple fingers of liquid. The irony of his preferred method of emotional medication was that he didn’t really like booze. Not the taste of it, at least, which was something akin to kerosene mixed with rubbing alcohol.
But then he didn’t drink for pleasure. And he had very serious doubts that there was anyone alive who actually did, no matter what they might claim. Alcohol-especially whiskey-was anesthesia, pure and simple. Designed only to kill the effects of the knife when it cut too deep.
And for Batty that knife was hitting bone right now.
“You take life too damn hard,” his mother had always told him. Usually after he came home from school, covered in cuts and bruises. He’d never made it a secret that he had The Vision, too, and that made most of the kids afraid of him. He’d had to learn to use his fists to defend himself and had endured his share of verbal taunts.
That was where his nickname was born. The schoolyard. For the first few years of his life, most of the kids had called him Seb. But because Sebastian LaLaurie was the crazy kid with the crazy mom, a punk named Harley Wilks had started calling him Batty and it stuck.
He had resisted at first. Threatened to pummel anyone who repeated the name. But that only egged the other kids on, and over the years, he finally grew to accept it. Even thought of it as a badge of honor.
Yes, he was the crazy kid with the crazy mom.
So what are you gonna do about it?
But Batty really came to love the name when he met Rebecca. The way it rolled off her tongue with that sweet, subtle accent of hers. She was a Baton Rouge girl who showed up on the steps of Nassau Hall, ready to prove to these Princeton know-it-alls that even a late starter like her could kick some serious academic ass.
She stole Batty’s heart the moment he met her. The moment she repeated his name back to him, those dark eyes smiling as she said it.
It didn’t hurt that she’d had The Vision, too-although she’d been light years ahead of Batty on that account. Light years ahead of his mother, for that matter.
And he sometimes wondered if she’d known even back then the dark road she was destined to travel.
Batty sighed, knocked back his drink and set the glass on the rail, staring out at the warm Louisiana night, thinking he’d better get to bed before he turned into a blubbering old fool like Landry LeBlanc.
He didn’t have cancer, but what he did have could be just as debilitating. And despite this current, rather sickening display of self-absorption, he wasn’t about to go down easy.
He still had some fight left in him.
He just hoped it was enough.
Batty’s bedroom was on the second floor.
Properly anesthetized, he stumbled to the bed and plopped onto his stomach, tucking his arms under the pillow as he lay his cheek against it.
He was about to pass out when he felt something digging into his left forearm. Something hard and pointy, about the size of a pepper corn.
He fumbled for it, got it between his fingers, then reached to the nightstand and turned on the light. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, and when they did he saw that what he was holding was a diamond earring.
But this wasn’t just any old piece of jewelry. It belonged to the woman he’d met at Bayou Bill’s last week. The one who had walked into the bar looking as if she’d just stepped out of a movie or a magazine. A redheaded, translucent-skinned wonder who had sent a stuttering spike of electricity through just about every man in the room. And Batty may well have heard angel trumpets the moment he saw her.
He’d met his share of beautiful women over the years-Rebecca foremost among them-but none of them had prepared him for the pure sexuality that had emanated from this one. She was the kind who instantly made your groin stir and your gut ache, with a body so taut and perfectly proportioned that it should have been declared illegal in at least thirty of the fifty states.
Batty was by no means a letch, not even close. Was not the type to sit around with the guys remarking about women’s physical attributes, pro or con. But this woman managed to bring out the beast in him the moment she walked into that bar. And he couldn’t help thinking about laying her across his bed, or on the living room couch, or atop the dining room table-hell, he didn’t care where, as long as it was sometime very soon.
For the first time in as long as he could remember, he’d actually been able to relegate his grief over Rebecca to another part of his mind. The spell this redhead had cast was so strong that the animal came forth, begging him to take action.
And to Batty’s surprise, he did, right here in this very house. The redhead had turned out to be more amazing than anything he could have imagined, a woman so free of inhibition, so willing to give him carte blanche to her limber little body, that he had almost felt guilty about making love to her.
Almost.
She was, he later realized, his anesthesia that night. An escape from the darkness that haunted him.
Unlike the whiskey, however, she didn’t dull the senses. She heightened them. And she had returned his aggression in kind, doing things to him with her teeth and tongue and fingers that defied description. She was the most sexually adventurous creature he had ever encountered, and as he move
d inside her, feeling her grip on him, her feverish flesh against his, he didn’t want her to ever let go.
But then, when they were done, both of them slick with sweat, she surprised him even more. Had turned out to be so much more than just a willing body.
They had spent the rest of the night talking politics and religion and history-all the things that Batty had once felt passionate about, all the things that he and Rebecca would often argue about, right here in this very bed. The conversation took so many twists and turns that he could barely remember it with any specificity now. And, unlike his brain-dead students, the redhead had listened to him with an open mind.
And, it seemed, an open heart.
But it was what she hadn’t done that got to him the most. When she saw the angry red scars on his wrists, the ones Edith couldn’t help staring at, the ones he refused to hide, she didn’t flinch, didn’t ask about them, didn’t judge him in any way. And later, she simply kissed them, very gently, one after the other, then climbed atop him and made love to him again.
As he looked up at her, he felt tears dampening his eyes. And for one brief, blissful moment, he thought he saw Rebecca there, smiling down at him the way she always had, her angelic face filled with a love that was meant only for him.
The next morning the redhead was gone.
No note. No good-byes.
He had been back to the bar several nights since, waiting for her, hoping to see her again, but she hadn’t returned. And by the fourth night, Batty had wondered if he had dreamed it all. Had merely conjured up the fantasy in a drunken haze.
But, no.
This little diamond earring confirmed it.
She had been here. In this bed.
And the oddest thing about the whole experience, he realized, was that she had never told him her name.
8
SAO PAULO, BRAZIL
Callahan hadn’t been to Brazil in more than five years.
Her last trip to Sao Paulo had been an overnight job, a quick and dirty snatch of a weapons manufacturer’s laptop that hadn’t given her time to fully appreciate the city’s finer points. She had always hoped to come back here one day, but her gut told her that this trip wouldn’t be much different from the last.
The Paradise Prophecy Page 5