The Reaper's Game: A Dominic Grey Novella (The Dominic Grey Series)

by Layton Green

  The Harrowing. SGichaud 12-24-14.

  “Christ’s descent into hell,” Viktor said, his gaze lingering on the painting. “Hieronymus Bosch completed a similar work.”

  “Creepy, isn’t it?” Clayton muttered.

  Their host left the room. Grey helped Viktor sort through Sebastian’s personal effects. A few of the larger boxes contained paintings covered in bubble wrap, along with a slew of statuettes and jewelry made of clay, ceramic, and other media. Some looked quite old, like cultural artifacts.

  Viktor lingered over a collection of crosses, both Christian and pagan, before picking up an amulet Grey recognized as a representation of Osiris. Viktor set it down, then murmured names as he ran his hands over a group of statuettes. “Tammuz, Lemminkäinen, Ganesh, Quetzalcoatl, Mithras, Lazarus, Attis.”

  “Any significance?” Grey asked.

  Viktor put his hand to his chin instead of responding, then started in on the other boxes. They were full of clothes and books. Grey helped Viktor sort through the titles, noticing a focus on religions from around the globe, as well as an abundance of New Age works.

  Viktor looked back and forth among the books, the painting above the bed, and the collection of iconic figurines. “Sebastian had an obsession,” he said finally.

  “With death?” Grey asked.

  Viktor turned, and Grey saw that he was holding a slim volume titled Reaching the Deceased Through Transcendental Meditation.

  “More specifically,” Viktor said, “with figures throughout history who have been resurrected or in some way cheated death.”

  “Sebastian was trying to reach his mother.”

  Viktor nodded slowly. “That, or he was trying to help her return.”

  – 7 –

  The call came in from area code 225, West Feliciana Parish, the stultified heart of the middle of nowhere. To Melungeon “Scarecrow” Redbone, and to all hardcore Louisiana ex-cons, the area code meant one thing alone.

  Angola.

  The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, also known as the Farm, had long been considered one of the worst maximum-security prisons in the country. A former slave plantation, inmates still performed manual labor in brutal conditions, and things once got so bad that a group of prisoners slashed their own Achilles heels in protest.

  Incarceration of any sort was an abomination to a gypsy soul like Scarecrow, but he had made the most of his time. After all, prison was nothing if not a gathering of like-minded people.

  An opportunity to network.

  Scarecrow stepped outside to take the call. His concrete balcony was strewn with cigarette butts and listing to one side, as if the decrepit building that supported it was sinking back into the swamp.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s me. He had some visitors.”

  Lynda Harringdon. Scarecrow’s most useful informant inside Angola. Her needs were simple: she enjoyed her weekly deliveries of Leidenheimer po’ boy bread almost as much as the steroids, blow, and prostitutes.

  “Oh yeah? Who dat?”

  “Some professor and a skinny guy,” she said, her slow speech pattern sounding to the fast-talking Scarecrow like a cow chewing its cud. “The professor’s as big as a mountain.”

  Scarecrow spat out the toothpick he was chewing on. The same two out-of-towners from Snake and Jake’s. Apparently the incident at the Charnel House hadn’t warned them off. “Yeah, I know dem. What dey want?”

  “They met with Sebastian.”

  “Was you in the room?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Was Sebastian . . . .”

  “Still crazy as a shithouse rat? Yep.”

  Scarecrow cradled the phone with his shoulder, lit a cigarette, and took a long drag. He knew Sebastian was unstable, but not in his wildest dreams had he expected him to buy in for so long.

  He didn’t know what he had expected from that insanity.

  “They watched the execution, too,” she said.

  “That boy still die?”

  Lynda’s chuckle was deep and rough.

  “They ask you anything?” he said.

  “Why would they?”

  His voice hardened. “And if they ever do?”

  “You know I’d never roll,” she said, uncomfortable.

  “Tha’s good,” he said, softening his voice but drawing out the words in an unmistakable cadence of warning. “Tha’s real good.”

  He hung up before she could reply, then dialed another number, someone on the opposite end of the criminal justice ladder from Lynda. Someone, in fact, who had ascended to the very top rung, at least in Orleans Parish.

  A male receptionist answered. “D.A.’s Office.”

  “Judge Baxter here.”

  “Oh, yes, Your Honor. I didn’t recognize the number. Hold for one second, please.”

  “I always do.”

  A click and a short pause, and then: “Jarrod Trufant.”

  “Scarecrow Redbone.”

  Click.

  Scarecrow let his cell ring four times, then picked up. “Where yat, Jarrod?”

  The D.A. was seething. “You know better than to call the office. Impersonating a judge?”

  “You know better than to lie to me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Those same two boys went to the Farm, checking up on Sebastian. Dey had backstage access. Not telling me everything ain’t a fulfillment of our bargain.”

  “I didn’t arrange that visit. Interpol creds, remember?”

  Scarecrow took two long drags and didn’t answer.

  “Listen,” Jarrod said, “I told you I’d let you know if anyone started poking around about Samuelson, and I did. I see no reason to discuss this further.”

  “Who are dey?”

  “The professor’s kooky, investigates weird shit around the world, but he’s got world-class creds. He helped NOPD pin a ritual murder on a voodoo priest a decade back.”

  “The other one?”

  “No idea. The muscle, I guess.”

  “A little scrawny for that.”

  “So are you.”

  Scarecrow rasped a chuckle and pushed a lank ringlet out of his face. “I got people for dat now. I’m behind the scenes, yeah, subtle as a gator’s glide.”

  “Subtle like at Snake and Jake’s? With me in the damn room? You ever pull a stunt like that again and we’re through.”

  “I just wanted to say hello,” Scarecrow said.

  “Save it for the ladies. Look, is there something I need to know about Sebastian?”

  “You’re the one said you didn’t want to have no knowledge.”

  “Just tell me if there’s anything out there that could affect the trial. I don’t want any surprises.”

  Scarecrow wheezed another chuckle as he pinched the cigarette for his final puff. “Your trial’s fine. That boy swung the scythe. And that’s all you need to know.”

  Scarecrow hung up again. He flicked his butt into the parking lot and walked the length of the second-story balcony, grinning at the laissez-faire vice he glimpsed through torn blinds and half-cracked shutters. His people, his tribe. The forgotten scum of the earth, half-breed swamp-rat gypsy Creoles, freer than their ancestors had ever dreamed of being.

  As he knocked on the last door on the left, behind which resided his muscle, Scarecrow reached for a pocket and dug out a business card for a private car company. He grinned to himself, remembering how the card had migrated from that giant professor’s wallet to his own.

  – 8 –

  LSU coffee mug in hand, Detective Sergeant Lionel Boudreaux met Grey and Viktor in the parking lot of the NOPD Central Evidence and Property section. The building was stuck in a Mid-City district full of cheap motels and tired government offices.

  After a curt greeting, Sergeant Boudreaux signed them in and led Grey and Viktor into a central warehouse that housed a cornucopia of tagged items, everything from bicycles to laptops to a bullet-riddled pirogue.

  “I underst
and you still have Samuelson’s effects?” Viktor asked. “And the evidence collected for trial?” The only thing Grey and Viktor had learned at the D.A.’s office was that anything of interest would be in Central Evidence.

  Sergeant Boudreaux was a square-shouldered man with premature white hair, an unforgiving mouth, and intense, deep-set blue eyes. He looked straight ahead as he walked them through the warehouse. “All material evidence, yeah.”

  “Even after an execution?” Grey said, looking at the mounds of junk.

  “Trust me, we’d love to start a bonfire, but everyone’s afraid to wipe their ass in death penalty cases without asking the ACLU.” The sergeant’s level gaze made clear that he lumped Grey and Viktor, along with anyone else who sought to interfere with a conviction, in the same boat as the ACLU.

  They exited through a steel door, traversed a narrow hallway, and approached a counter window overlooking a room full of metal shelving bulging with crates and boxes. An older, uniformed African-American officer nodded with respect to the sergeant, then pushed a ledger forward.

  The sergeant signed off. The desk officer read the request with raised eyebrows, unlocked a cage door, and led them down one of the long aisles dividing the evidence room. Near the end of the aisle, he stopped to sweep a hand across the shelving. “From here to the end.”

  “Appreciate ya, Bill,” the sergeant said. The uniformed officer returned to his post.

  Grey counted fifteen boxes labeled John Cowell Samuelson. The detective sergeant pulled out a file folder stuck between two of the boxes. “Here’s my report on that sick son of a bitch. Don’t know why the captain asked me to hold your hand, but I’ve got live cases to deal with. So if you’re gonna ask, ask.”

  Viktor remained expressionless. “Is there anything in particular we should know? Something not in the file?”

  “It’s all in the file.” His face darkened. “Look, I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, but that bastard killed half a dozen people in cold blood. For no reason.”

  “We’re not here to exonerate him. I can assure you of that.”

  “He wrote his victim’s names on his calendar, for Christ’s sake,” Detective Boudreaux muttered. The sergeant’s heels slapped against the concrete floor as he walked away. “Don’t take anything out of the plastic,” he called back. “Leave everything how you found it.”

  Squinting in the dim fluorescent lighting, Grey and Viktor perused the file. Most of what the police knew came from the Halloween Killer’s mother, May Jean Samuelson, still alive at the time of the police report.

  Samuelson was born in Memphis in 1963. His father, a hard-drinking traveling salesman, was shot and killed in a bar fight in Kansas City when John Samuelson was ten years old. Left penniless, his mother returned to her hometown of Chalmette, Louisiana to live in a trailer with one of her brothers. No sign of abuse. A neighbor remembered a few stray cats in the trailer park had been burned alive during the time period, but no allegations were ever made.

  John Samuelson spent his boyhood barefoot and poor; his teenage years a statistic in a rundown county school; his first few years after graduation working at a filling station. When he was twenty-two, he met a plumber at a local pool hall and became his apprentice.

  Mary Jean claimed Johnnie had been a happy boy who knew his station in life and didn’t complain about it. Rarely talked back, no sign of violence except for boyhood scuffles and a fistfight with his uncle over ‘talkin’ back to his momma.’

  Grey glanced at her photo. Tall and reedy with nicotine-stained teeth and a braid of wispy gray hair, Mary Jean Samuelson claimed that Johnnie ‘wasn’t ever buyin’ no BMW,’ but he put food on the table and paid the rent. Never talked about his father’s death. Never serious with a girl. He loved shooting pool, Johnny Cash, fishing for channel cats in the Delta, hand-rolled cigarettes, his momma’s jambalaya, and Dixie beer—at least until damage from Katrina forced the local brewery to close.

  According to the report, Mary Jean couldn’t believe what Johnnie had done. Said she couldn’t believe it even more when the police found a room full of philosophy books in his one-bedroom shack on the bayou. She claimed she went to his house all the time—though not for about a year—and had ‘never seen nothing but basin wrenches, pizza boxes, and fishin’ tackle.’

  Surprisingly, an enterprising officer had compiled a list of the philosophy books. Viktor set it aside. They read the rest of the report and discovered nothing else of import. The police had found no connection among any of the victims. No commonality to the method of the crimes other than the Death costumes and apparent randomness. Psychiatric evaluations of Samuelson had turned up negative, except for the delusion that Death told him who to kill.

  A delusion, the state psychiatrist had claimed, with no accompanying signs of paranoia.

  Grey looked over Viktor’s shoulder while he scanned the list of books. Grey read philosophy from time to time, but most of the titles were unfamiliar.

  “This list is quite remarkable,” Viktor said. “Many of the works are rare or out of print. Some are not even translated.”

  “Any rhyme or reason to the list?”

  Viktor looked up. “Yes, in fact. The collection is focused on being and non-being, consciousness, the transcendental state.”

  “Similar to our kid?”

  “Sebastian collected books that sought to circumvent death. John Samuelson’s collection is focused on understanding it.” Viktor set the list down. “Explaining what it means, whether it really exists.”

  “Whether it exists?”

  “I won’t bore you with the theories.”

  Something was bothering Grey, tugging at the corners of his mind. He thought harder and figured it out. “Didn’t you think what his mother said was strange? About the books?”

  Viktor looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “She said she hadn’t been to his house for a year before the murders. And that Johnnie didn’t have any books. If he really thought he had encountered Death Incarnate, wouldn’t you expect that to occur after he read up on it? Planting the notion in his mind?”

  Viktor pursed his lips. “It’s an astute observation. Though the books could have been kept elsewhere.”

  “A collection like that, for a plumber? I don’t think he had a beach house.”

  Viktor went through the rest of the boxes, mostly sealed physical evidence pertaining to the victims. He paused when they found the costumes the Halloween Killer had used.

  “I recognize the Grim Reaper, Baron Samedi, and Anubis,” Grey said. “Remind me of the other two?”

  Viktor carefully lifted out a black trench coat with six pairs of silver wings sewn into the back. “The Angel of Death in Judaic lore. Its chosen victims were killed by spewing a drop of deadly gall into their mouths. John Samuelson substituted poison.”

  Viktor replaced the coat and pulled out a rubber mask with black eyes and a leering grin that stretched literally from ear to ear. “A dullahan. In Irish folklore, a creature who would stop in front of the house of someone ordained to die, and kill him by calling out his name.”

  “I don’t remember reading that Samuelson killed anyone by shouting.”

  “He was creative with this one.” Viktor pulled out a leather whip topped with fishhooks. “Legend holds that if anyone laid eyes on the dullahan, the creature would whip out their eyes and toss a basin of blood on them. A sign they were next to die.”

  Grey looked at the whip, his face tight. “He killed one of the victims by drowning them in a bathtub of blood. He whipped them first with that.”

  “A consummate gentleman, our Halloween Killer.”

  Another box contained Samuelson’s personal effects: wallet, keys, a Jack Daniels belt buckle, a childhood Bible with his name inscribed on it. Viktor pulled a stack of black spiral notebooks out of the box. “The calendars the sergeant mentioned.”

  The first journal contained meticulous daily entries in small block letters, everything from Samue
lson’s professional appointments to fishing notes to grocery lists. Viktor flipped to the date of the first murder. From the police report, Grey knew the victim was a dietician named Charlotte Smith-Jackson.

  No mention of her name in the entry. Viktor flipped back a day, and Grey felt a chill creep down his spine.

  Death has spoken. Tomorrow Charlotte Smith-Jackson must die.

  It was the only entry. They checked the other days previous to the murders, and found similar notations.

  Mouth grim, Viktor pored through the journals while Grey replaced the boxes and then waited for Viktor to finish.

  “There,” Viktor said, with a tone of satisfaction. “As I suspected.”

  “What?”

  Viktor looked up. “Judging by what we’ve seen, it’s clear that both Sebastian Gichaud and John Samuelson wanted the world to believe their souls had transferred in the days before the execution. Is such a thing exceedingly strange? Of course. Is it random? No.”

  After a moment, Grey said, “You think they planned it together.”

  “What is certain is that one of them got the idea from somewhere. At first I suspected Sebastian, but I saw no evidence of a ritualistic tome in his collection.” The professor opened the spiral notebook he was holding and pointed out an entry from November in the same year as the first murder.

  Grey leaned in. The appointment was set for eight p.m., with someone listed as Genevieve Fontaine, Eckancar High Initiate.

  “Eckancar is a relatively modern, and obscure, New Age religious movement,” Viktor said. “Not something of which the police would be aware. Eckancar places particular value on cultivating spiritual experiences, including reincarnation, dreams, and soul travel.”

  “Soul travel?”

  “One of Eckancar’s central tenets is that the true self, or Soul, can separate from the physical body and travel freely. Their higher-level initiates claim to be able to accomplish such a feat.”

  “You think Samuelson went to Genevieve looking for help with a ritual?”