by Harker Moore
“Is this gonna be a long story?”
“Nah.” Meyer brushed off his sarcasm, too wound up in his own bullshit to take offense.
“The little lady wants something safe and comfortable,” he went on. “So what the hell, I show her the Cartier L. She gives it the once-over, don’t even blink at the sticker price. Just asks if she gets something off for cash. I start to explain how cash don’t really matter much the way financing’s done today. But then I just say, ‘Cash? Yeah, I can take maybe a full hundred off.’ And the next thing I know she’s writing out a check that her bank clears in maybe five seconds.”
Meyer stood looking at him with that damn weasel grin, waiting for the explosion.
“Son of a bitch!” he complied. But his heart wasn’t in it. Fuck the stupid commission. There was no way now with that idiot bragging all over the place that the sales manager didn’t know just how late he was. And worse than Barbara in one of her moods was Harris asking too many questions.
The rain had stopped, like skeleton fingers that suddenly cease their tapping. The shades drawn up, the windows stood black and cold, rectangles of blankness in the far wall of the bedroom. From where he stood in the unlit space, the man could see nothing beyond them, as if the city lights had disappeared along with the day’s sun. Whatever illumination existed seemed pebbled and sourceless, an ambient trait of the objects in the room. The small yellow slicker at the foot of the bed, alone in the general dimness, maintained a plastic brilliance, sharp angled and bright.
She slept soundly. Dreamless in the dark. Eyes stilled beneath lids. Lashes like spiders against her flesh. He bent his face close, his mouth grazing her lips, parted as though ready to blow a bubble. Drawing in her breath, he could taste its little-girl hard-candy flavor, taste the faint top note of the gas she’d inhaled. A small jumping of her arm, a sigh now and again.
He pulled back, reaching for her wrist, checking her pulse. Her blood flushed rhythmically through a tapestry of tiny vessels. An endless dance of red. He counted beats against the second hand of his watch. Slower than he thought, but certainly within normal range.
A child was new territory. The injections of potassium didn’t matter, but he would have to be careful with the LSD. A small girl’s brain was different from an adult male’s. Everything depended upon precision and timing. He would wait for her to wake naturally. And like a china doll, he would handle her. She was imminently breakable. And he needed her alive, at least until he wanted her dead.
Father Andrew Kellog did not have nightmares, so the vague apprehension that aroused him from sleep was something unusual. For what seemed like an eternity, but was probably more nearly ten minutes, he drifted in a fog of semiawareness, resisting the intuition that whatever had interrupted his good night’s rest would have to be sooner or later acknowledged.
Still huddled within the precincts of the comforter, he made himself sit up, pulling the cover around him as he reached for his robe. He had worn his socks to bed, and they gave him some protection as he poked his feet free and slid them into leather slippers. For a minute more he hesitated at the side of the bed. Then relinquishing the old down quilt, he wrapped himself in the robe and shuffled to the window to peer outward, realizing, even as he looked, that it was the church that was the center of his fear.
The building appeared all right. Which was to say it looked as it always had to him, sullen and medieval, its slender spires diminished in the growing decay of the neighborhood. For a fleeting moment as he watched, a light seemed to move behind a window. But was it real, or only headlights reflecting from the street?
He went to the closet and put on his overcoat. He didn’t have the patience to put on his boots, but shoes would at least be better than slippers for crossing the yard in the freezing hours before dawn—one more duty to be gotten through in a day.
Outside, it was colder but less damp than inside the rectory. Walking across the yard, his head felt suddenly clear, as if he had decompressed like a diver or an astronaut finally sucking normal air. The light had not appeared again in the window, and he thought of turning back. There was no one in the church. And if there were, what was he going to do about it?
The side door that led to the sacristy was still secure when he reached it, and he wasn’t about to walk around the building to check every entrance. He unlocked the door and went in, groping for the switch. The light came on and he listened. He was alone in the sacristy, could hear nothing but silence from the darkness beyond. But the apprehension that had seemed to disperse in the outside air was returning, seeping back inside him with the chilling dampness of stone.
He would just go in for a minute. Just have a quick look to see if anything appeared disturbed. If someone had broken in with an intention to steal, it was the poor boxes they’d go for first.
He walked across the sacristy, aware of his old man’s wheezing, aware of cold pipes weeping inside walls. The door into the sanctuary was a deeper blackness. The night outside had been city bright, but the narrow arched windows of the chancel and nave allowed little light through heavy leaded panes. A single candle symbolizing the presence of God burned next to the tabernacle on the altar. Votives fluttered in an alcove. Again he listened, again heard nothing. Whispering a hurried prayer, he inched against the wall toward the switch. In the moment that he hit the altar lights, he heard the muffled footstep.
“Oh, my God,” he heard himself say. As, turning, his eyes beheld what hung above the manger, and the naked man in front of him, as startled perhaps as he. In the second when he moved to run, he’d recognized the face. But by then, the blows had started. There was time for submission to the will of his God. Then the floor as cold as ice.
Zoe felt him twist away from her in the same instant the telephone started ringing.
“Yeah,” Johnny’s sleep-rusty voice spoke into the receiver. “Shit.” He jerked up in bed, turned, and began scribbling on a pad. “I’m on my way.” He cradled the phone, staring at it for a few seconds.
“Johnny?” She was leaning over, catching a quick look at the address he’d written down.
“I got to go.” He was out of bed, ripping away the sheet of paper from the tablet, scrunching it into a pocket as he threw clothes on his naked body.
“What’s happened?” She was on her feet, hooking her bra, pulling up her panties.
“We got another one.”
“Another murder?” She was next to him. “Who? Where?”
“For chrissake, Zoe, just go back to bed.” He moved into the bathroom. She could hear him urinating, then flushing.
“Another gay?” she asked over the running water as he brushed his teeth.
He came out of the bath. The tracks of a wet comb ran through his dark hair. He put his arms around her waist and kissed her. “I’ll call you. Lock up when you leave.”
“Who, Johnny?”
He pushed her away. “Is that all you can think about?”
“Johnny …” She reached out.
“Sorry, Zoe. I’m finished talking.” He turned and walked out. The front door of his apartment shut. She closed her eyes and took one long, deep breath.
He hadn’t even noticed that she’d dressed while he’d been in the bathroom. She took a brush out of her purse and ran it through her hair. Her mascara had smudged, leaving her with French bedroom eyes. But lipstick was all she had time for. She glanced out the window to the dark street below. He had scrawled an address in Brooklyn on the phone pad. She’d give him a fifteen-minute head start.
St. Sebastian Catholic Church looked like a movie set. Floodlights had been set up around the perimeter of the frozen zone inside, and technicians and extras were everywhere, police being brought in from outside commands on the orders of Lincoln McCauley.
James Sakura had already had his moments alone with the dead. As head of the investigating unit, he remained in complete charge of the area around the bodies. But tonight’s vicious murders had complicated an already sensitive case. He coul
d feel the rising panic, like the tug of reins in his hands. Things could start to spiral out of control.
He cursed under his breath. He was letting the pressure get to him. Two more people had died tonight, and still they had nothing. Worse than nothing. Because significant patterns, which had seemed their only insight into the killer’s mind, had been broken.
He looked to where Willie stood talking with Detective Johnson. He was glad she was here. He needed her to see this.
“Lieutenant …” Rozelli came toward him past the Nativity scene. His eyes held down.
“Yes, Detective.”
“Sergeant Kelly wanted me to tell you he’s keeping things tight as he can.”
“You interviewed the priest who called it in?” Sakura asked him.
“Father Graff … yes. Talbot is taking him downtown to sign his statement. But bottom line, he didn’t see a thing.”
Sakura had gotten as much from the first officer’s report. The assistant pastor had returned to the rectory sometime after two A.M. and noticed that the pastor wasn’t in his room. A little later, he’d gone to the church to investigate.
One of the CSU techs came over as Rozelli walked away. “The guys are finished with the photos and the sketches, Lieutenant,” he said to Sakura. “We got all the angles you wanted.” Charlie Tannehill was hatchet-faced, the kind of forensic specialist who favored graveyard humor. Tonight he seemed nearly as subdued as the rest of them.
Sakura looked at his watch. “Linsky here?”
“Not yet.”
“Let’s give it some time, Charlie.”
“No problem.”
“Any word on fingerprints?”
“Same old story, Lieutenant. He wore gloves. Nothing on the candlestick. But I think we may have got a partial footprint.”
“Footprint?”
“I think Dearborn’s right that our guy’s doing this without his clothes on and wiping up the floors. This time there was blood, remember. Head wounds bleed a lot. He stepped in the blood, left us part of a heel. It’s not much.”
“No, but I’ll take what I can get…. There’s a sink in the back there.” Sakura nodded toward the sacristy.
Tannehill’s beagle eyes mimicked hurt. “Have a little faith, Lieutenant. We’re working on the drain. Likewise in the bathroom.”
“Sorry, Charlie. I know you know your job.”
Tannehill’s gaze went upward. “No problem, Lieutenant,” he said again. “Just let me know when you’re ready.”
Zoe had the taxi drop her off two blocks away. The area around the church was already being cordoned off. Cop cars were everywhere.
She shoved her scarf farther down over her face, clutched her purse with her camera tucked inside, and walked. It would be tricky, but the church was big, full of nooks and crannies. It cast a wide shadow.
She crossed the street, moving toward a side building, then through a dark breezeway that connected with the left side of the church. The area was deserted. She crouched in some shrubs and waited. Light from inside threw a tangle of color onto the ground as it passed through stained-glass windows.
A side door opened, and she saw a uniform cop coming out. He moved to the rear of St. Sebastian toward another building. A large structure that appeared to be the rectory.
She got up and headed toward the door, hoping it hadn’t locked behind him. She was in luck. The door opened. She took a deep breath and entered.
She was in partial shadow, in a small alcove that led into a side altar. Candles flickered, but the main body of the church exploded with light. She could see Johnny talking to another cop about twenty feet away.
She had to move quickly, do what she had to do, and get out. She crouched low, keeping near the outer wall. She was midway down the side aisle when she slid into a pew. All activity seemed to be centered near the main altar and a side altar where a Christmas crèche had been set up. She eased upward, her eyes level with the back of the pew. At first she thought it was just part of the Christmas decorations, until the horror of what she really saw came crashing through.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” Sakura said as Darius walked up to him in the church.
“Willie called. She said I ought to see this.”
No answer for that. It was not an explanation he’d expected. “So what do you think?” he asked him.
“I think I’m disgusted for thinking what I see up there is a little bit beautiful.”
“I know.”
“You know what? That it’s beautiful? Or that I think it’s beautiful?”
“That you think it’s beautiful.”
Darius pulled his eyes away. “This the pastor?” he asked. He had turned to the dead man.
“Yes. Father Kellog. Apparently, a secondary victim. He must have surprised the killer.”
The priest’s smashed head lay in a browning mess, his glazing eyes locked on an image burned into the retina. Darius stood perfectly still, as if filtering something ephemeral through the coppery stench of blood.
“I told Willie I’d just give this a look.”
“It’s your call.”
Darius turned back to the bludgeoned priest lying near the figure of St. Joseph, looked upward to the body strung midair above the manger. The girl’s tiny head was slumped against one shoulder. She looked as though she had fallen asleep, strands of her short black hair caught in the white feathers. The familiar ash markings stood out darkly beneath breasts that were no more than ripples in the pale chest. Her hairless mons a small flower enfolded between perfect legs.
“I still don’t know if I want to do this, Jimmy,” Darius said, his eyes moving to PENEMUE scribbled across the wall.
They both knew he lied.
Slowly and evenly, against the pull of the weights, the man let his thighs relax and sat up straighter on the padded bench. The exercise area was dim and womb warm. He liked to work out in low light, as close to naked as possible, his concentration centered on the minute workings of his body, the purity of form in motion. But tonight it was a solace that had failed to keep horror at bay.
The images flashed like blades behind his eyes, companions for his memories of the accident. In the gloom of the church, the white oldman face, a death mask turning toward him, its flagging muscles struggling to register the signals firing in the brain. Surprise. Recognition. Terror. The last had stuck. Short-circuited in place by the blows from the candlestick in his hand.
It was pure reaction that had allowed him to so swiftly silence the old man. Collateral damage, in the words of the current catch phrase. Kellog, a priest, neither neutral nor civilian. An enlistee on the enemy’s side. It was the metaphor of Enoch taken too far and he knew it. What was real was that he had killed in cold blood to protect himself from the police. Like that first sin, which had made fugitives of the Fallen, this error, too, would have its karmic price. Of that he had no doubt.
He leaned over, running a hand over the long scar that ran down from his knee, massaging with his fingers the muscle beneath the puckered flesh. There was no denying it, the leg hurt, reinjured tonight in the church when he’d scaled the grappling rope with the deadweight of the girl’s body dragging at his back.
He reached for the towel and dried himself, but the scent of anxiety remained, a base note in the odor of his sweat. He could not escape the acuity of his senses. Even as a child his sense of smell had been remarkable. Since his awakening, the degree of sensitivity could become almost painful as the immediacy of the tunnel experience faded and the body fought to reassert itself. And the truth was, he yet loved this prison of flesh.
The admission brought forth a memory of Marian, of how she had looked that first day she’d modeled for him in his studio. Photography had been the one interest he’d retained from his time in the service, and his first critical success had been with pictures he’d taken in post-war Vietnam. But his photojournalism had been sidetracked when the fashion magazines had called. He’d been surprised at first with the offers, bu
t he admired the work of others in the field, and the money was good. And then it had brought him Marian.
Her coming into his life had seemed like an unearned blessing, a sign that the universe could also be randomly good. Later after the accident, he’d looked back on their meeting as something else. A cruel tease dangled, to be snatched away. And yet he had no regrets. What he and Marian had shared was simple human happiness. That was the irony.
He walked to the bathroom and removed one of the vials and a fresh syringe from the cabinet. Marian was dead. Father Kellog was dead. And so, despite the continued existence of his body, was his human persona. The drug was a reminder. It dissolved the bonds that anchored him in the flesh, made it possible to recover some of what he’d experienced in the tunnel.
He went to his bedroom and lay down, letting the needle bite deep. “Gad-ri-el.” He spoke the syllables, an invocation to himself. Gadriel, he repeated in his mind, over and over, waiting for the drug to take hold, longing for the brief moment of knowing that came before the end, a never-quite-reached memory of the brightness he had been.
This time the programming didn’t work. He couldn’t keep his focus. The room transformed, pulsed with color. Zavebe appeared in human form, as he had last seen her, her happiness an arrow. The colors warped to blackness. Zavebe remained, an image that floated in the abyss. His own body bag was gone. He existed as a burden of loneliness only, as the knowledge of what he had to do.
CHAPTER
13
Zoe felt totally stupid. But she seemed to have no control. She had gone back to the paper, sure. But once there, she’d headed straight to the ladies’ room, where the tears had just come. Not sobs, or heaves, or any of that stuff. Just tears. Buckets of them welling from her eyes as she sat curled on the sofa in the corner of the lounge with a roll of tissue, mopping her eyes.