Thief of Souls

by Ann Benson

  But words that must escape will; Jean de Malestroit took my hand in his and brought me to a stop. “I have had a message from Captain Labbé,” he said quietly. “They will arrive before morn. He will try to position their arrival so it will fall in the dead of night.”

  “Wisely,” I said, in a voice I myself could barely hear.

  “The capture went quietly,” he said. “As did the journey from Machecoul—there were no difficulties. Labbé says that Milord gave himself into their hands with a pitiable lack of resistance, as did Prelati, Poitou, and Henriet.”

  So it was with the intent of watching the arrival in quiet privacy that I climbed the twisted staircase to the north tower of the abbey in the smallest hours of the morning. A torch flickered above me, held high by my aching arm, which had reached one too many times for apples in the past few days and now complained by trembling. I needed the light more than ever; the stones were worn from many centuries of footfalls, and there were only occasional slit windows to let in the moonlight. Round and round I went, slowly; it was a fair number of minutes before I reached the top and the parapet from which I would observe Gilles de Rais’s shameful reentry into Nantes.

  I stepped out onto the small landing and was amazed by the moonlight, which illuminated the night sky with visible shafts of gossamer gray through the intermittent clouds. Countless stars blazed above me, and for one brief moment I was transported away from my travails.

  I set the torch into a crack I found in an ornamental stone beast whose vile expression seemed even more menacing in the flame glow. Below me was the city square, through which Labbé’s entourage would have to pass to reach the Bishop’s palace. It was a long way down, perhaps fifty meters, and as I looked over the edge, my gorge rose. I leaned back to recover.

  Where would I find the sleep to replace that which I would sacrifice to watching this macabre parade? I wished for a hot cup of the sublime thé that Sister Claire had so graciously served me in Bourgneuf, or some energizing tonic from the chemist. Minutes passed, then half an hour, then an hour; the moon slipped lower in the sky and its light began to falter. Yet below me there was more light than I expected, for one by one, torches began to show themselves in the square.

  They seemed to come out of nowhere, to slip in through the shadows. Their light shone down on the heads of those who held them up, and as the glow increased I could see that the people who were beginning to assemble there were clad in the garb of ordinary folk, not nobles or soldiers. The arrival of more and more of them captivated me so deeply that I did not hear the footfalls behind me. It was when someone called out my name that I knew I was no longer alone.

  At first I did not recognize the voice, for the echoes of the passageway distorted all sound. Jean de Malestroit stepped out into the diminishing light, hatless and in a simple robe.

  “You are not attired properly to greet a great lord,” I observed.

  He smiled. “I shall not be greeting him. Captain Labbé will take him directly into the palace. Rooms have been prepared for his accommodation.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Rooms. By which you mean the dungeon.”

  “He is yet a man of the nobility, Guillemette; he will not lack for comfort, of that you may be certain.”

  I turned outward again to watch the gathering crowd. “It seems that news will not be contained.”

  “Not news of this sort.”

  Jean de Malestroit stood behind me for several minutes, and then I felt a hand upon my shoulder.

  “I am sorry,” he whispered.

  “I know, Jean,” I said.

  We stood thus for the remainder of the time we were there, saying not one word to each other. Long before we saw the cart that bore Gilles de Rais and his accomplices we heard the distant creaking of the wheels. The crowd below—now perhaps a hundred strong—began to stir. From our perch above we saw their torches swirl about in a nervous rhythm, the tempo of which increased as the sound of the wheels grew louder. When horses began to appear in the square, the torches moved toward them in a wave of light. We heard the scrape of swords against their scabbards and watched Labbé’s soldiers pressing the crowd back with sharp tips.

  Somehow order was maintained, until the cart itself came into view, at which point the throng rushed it madly. Shouts and jeers rose up in an angry chorus; torches danced ghoulishly below us as if it were All Hallow’s Eve, prompting soldiers to break out of formation to try to press the light-bearers back. In the glare that was cast upon the cart, I could just make out Gilles de Rais, who had slipped in between his accomplices and was using them as protection. The young men who had been taken prisoner with him were shields against the grasping hands of the crowd. We watched as this eerie scene unfolded below us, like some great dramatic tragedy, the ending of which would break my heart.

  Henriet later spoke of their arrival in Nantes:

  I am almost at a loss to describe my condition as they took us away. I should have run, but there seemed nowhere to go—how I wish that I had had the foresight of de Sille and de Briqueville. Milord Gilles would not respond to my entreaties—none of us could reach him, so deep was his self-containment. I have seen him thus before, but usually when these silences come upon him it is in truth a reverie, an enjoyment of something inside himself. He answered none of our frantic questions of what might become of us, but only stared outside the bars of the cart as it bumped along, muttering prayers for forgiveness, assurances of devotion to God, and vows of eternal penance, and yet more promises to travel to the Holy Land. I could not imagine that God was listening to him in that moment, else He would have shown some sign to comfort us. Milord’s face was taut and tearful, and he looked very much afraid. And if God would not hear a great lord in his hour of greatest need, how could I, merely a page to that lord and guilty of many of the same crimes, expect that my own pleas would be heard? What hope I had of any salvation was joined firmly to that of Milord by a cord of undeniable complicity.

  In that moment, had I a knife, I would have slit my own throat. But they had wisely taken all of our weapons from us, so I was forced to remain alive and face my fate, which could only be terrible.

  chapter 18

  The twelve-year-old victim, Earl Jackson, was found at one corner of the parking lot in a complex of abandoned warehouses not too far from LAX. The scene was within the Los Angeles city limits, but not by much.

  Erkinnen was still with me as I pulled up alongside the yellow tape. Four units surrounded the cordoned-off area, all with their lights flashing. Overkill—the nearest traffic was at least a hundred yards away. But procedures are procedures.

  It wasn’t at all what I’d imagined from an illusionist—no props or sets or accoutrements of torture. “I don’t know about this,” I said as we pulled up. “This doesn’t seem to fit.”

  “Weren’t you saying something about practice grabs?”

  “All he could practice was the pickup itself.”

  “Well, he probably has the rest of it perfected. The pickup is probably his most vulnerable point. Everything else is completely under his control.”

  There seemed little point in arguing. “Have you ever seen a dead child before?”

  “No.”

  “It might be gruesome.”

  “I don’t doubt for one minute that you’re right.”

  Funny thing is, I was the one who puked.

  There’s always a bottle of water in my car, and I was glad, because I could rinse the bile out of my mouth before getting down to the business of the scene. No one would fault me for that momentary show of emotion. When I finally took a serious look I saw that Earl, like the rest of the missing boys, was slightly built and young-looking for his age. He was left propped up against a Dumpster with his legs out in front of him. Both arms were behind his torso and were probably tied, though we wouldn’t be able to determine that until we rolled him over. We were still a ways from that point. From the waist down, he was naked. His scrawny calves and thighs showed none of the incr
eased musculature that comes after puberty. His genitals were partly tucked between his thighs and were only half-visible but appeared on first glance to be intact. The lower three buttons of a short-sleeved denim shirt were undone, as if the killer were planning to remove it.

  But there were no signs of abrupt disrobing, such as missing buttons or ripped seams. “He was taking that shirt off pretty carefully,” I said to Erkinnen.

  “Ritualistically. Very organized.”

  A flow of dried brownish blood ran from somewhere under the shirt to the crotch area. I gloved my right hand and lifted the edge of the shirt. There was a clean-edged knife wound centered on his belly, from which a small section of entrails were beginning to protrude, similar to a hernia.

  I was concentrating on the body, until I heard Doc’s quiet voice. “Look at his face,” he said.

  Of course that would be where he would look first, the place where emotions show. I let the shirt hem fall and glanced at Earl Jackson’s unblemished visage. On it I saw what had probably been his last emotion: terror. Stark, undisguised horror.

  I could not comprehend being a twelve-year-old boy, propped against a Dumpster, with a knife about to enter my belly. No wonder he looked so tortured. “God, can you imagine . . .”

  “No,” Doc said, “I can’t.”

  I let my eyes drift away from his face to his neck area, which broke the grip of grief and moved me back toward outrage, a far more productive state of mind. The tissue under his chin was swollen and bruised.

  “Looks like strangulation,” I said. “The knife wound isn’t that bad.”

  “His mouth is open,” I heard Erkinnen say. “Wide and round. He was screaming. It was bad enough to cause that look.”

  “Well, yeah, it probably hurt like hell. But it didn’t kill him.”

  “He was screaming. I can see it on his face.”

  It didn’t matter. Only two people knew what Earl’s last utterance might have been—he himself, and the person who killed him.

  I stood up and walked over to one of the patrols. As I snapped off my latex gloves, I asked, “Who found him?”

  “I did.” The cop who answered me looked very young. From the ashen look on his face, I assumed that this was his first real body.

  “How did you happen to find him?”

  “I was just doing a routine check,” he said. “If I’m not out on another call, I’m supposed to do this lot twice a day. I missed the morning run today because of a domestic,” he said, lowering his head. “Jeez, I hope this didn’t happen then. . . .”

  “Probably not,” I said. “The blood’s pretty dry. He’s probably been dead all night.” It was only a guess; the coroner would be able to say better. “When was your last pass through here before this one?”

  “Last night. I did a switch with one of the other guys for the evening shift. I went through here about 2230.”

  “See anything untoward?”

  “No. It was quiet. But I did a real quick scan because there was a lot going on. Usually I’m a little more thorough.” He sighed heavily; he would carry this what if with him for a long time.

  I took the name off his tag and wrote it in my notebook. “I’ll be in touch to get your statement,” I told him. He nodded gravely.

  The coroner determined later that the time of death had been late evening of the previous day.

  “Ten-thirty or eleven,” he told me. “And that stab wound was not a violent thrust of the blade. It was very clean and very clinical.”

  “What about the entrails? That doesn’t seem too clean to me.”

  “I think the killer was in the process of pulling them out. There are signs that the wound was spread open. It was probably made quite slowly and precisely.”

  “Would you say surgically?”

  “Yes, you could say the wound was surgical in nature. But I wouldn’t want this surgeon cutting me open.”

  The patrol car’s approach had probably interrupted the act in progress. I wondered if it would have been any consolation to the young cop to know that his arrival had probably hastened Earl’s inevitable death, thereby saving him an immense amount of pain.

  He hadn’t looked as if it would.

  Fred arrived. If he told me to haul in all the known eviscerators in the Los Angeles area, I would punch him out. But he didn’t. He took one look at what remained of Earl Jackson and quietly shook his head.

  “Keep me posted,” he said to me. Then he got back into the car without another word and escaped.

  I thought once I had a body it would make Fred see things my way. But he didn’t believe there was a connection, precisely because there was a body. It made the Jackson case different in his mind.

  I had to admit that I had my own doubts, despite Erkinnen’s apparent certainty that this was either a mistake or an escalation. In the end, I had little more to go on than what I’d had before the body was found. You’d think if the killer was interrupted, there would have been more evidence at the scene, that he would have had to beat it so fast that he’d leave things behind in his haste to escape. But there were no screaming tire tracks that any of us could find, no hairs or fibers. The surrounding cracked pavement was not conducive to picking up the longed-for shoeprint. No witnesses came forward to say they’d seen something related to the case. The only blood at the scene was Earl Jackson’s.

  It was my case, but I began to view it as something of a distraction from my real case, even though all I had was the name given to me by the museum director. I dove into an investigation of Wilbur Durand as if it were my last hope.

  A talent of Hitchcockian magnitude in the horror genre. This hyperbolic rave was plastered across the opening page of a Web site that dealt extensively with horror films. A list of familiar classics was posted, all of which he’d had some hand in creating, unbeknownst to me. At the bottom of the list was his most recent oeuvre—Wilbur Durand was the writer, producer, and director of They Eat Small Children There.

  It wasn’t being promoted in conjunction with his name. According to the editor of this site (who was, I had to remind myself, promoting his own point of view and not necessarily that of his subject), Small Children was some kind of big deal to Durand personally, because he had complete creative and financial control over the project. Had Durand made statements to that effect in an interview? If so, I couldn’t find it, at least not on the Web. There was plenty of information on his body of work, which was quite extensive. It wasn’t at all difficult to get basic information on the projects he’d touched.

  But his personal life was a complete blank. People, Us, and Entertainment Weekly had apparently all been unsuccessful in getting him to cooperate in feature articles. He was a shadowy recluse of the highest magnitude. Photos of the man were like hen’s teeth; in the few I could find, he was wearing dark glasses and looked like an evil, twisted reincarnation of my hallowed angel Roy Orbison. Was he married? Did he like dogs, eat ice cream? No one knew. I looked on the OUT/LOUD Web site, but he wasn’t mentioned on their annual list of Hollywood prominentes who were closet homosexuals, though that didn’t mean that he wasn’t, just that they hadn’t fingered him yet, the bastards. My own gay detectors were picking up something, just from the photographs.

  If he engaged in philanthropy like some other notable Hollywood whiz kids, he kept it very quiet.

  We had our weekly division update meeting at lunch that day; they brought in pizza this time, which seems to have a peculiar tongue-loosening effect in our groups. When everyone else was finished talking about their cases, I gave a brief synopsis of the Jackson murder. I wasn’t ready just yet to mention Durand—he was still too vague in my mind—but I did talk about the museum visit and let everyone know that I would be pursuing the subsequent leads with great vigor. Fred Vuska looked very uncomfortable when the others unexpectedly began to ask a lot of questions.

  As soon as Fred left the room, Escobar and Frazee approached me together.

  “Want some help?” Spence asked.
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  To my troubled look, Escobar said, “Fred doesn’t have to know.”

  I glanced back and forth between the two of them. “You got time?”

  In unison, they nodded—eagerly.

  “You guys are terrific,” I said. “I’m right in the middle of figuring out where to focus next, but I should be able to get with you both no later than tomorrow morning.”

  I had some visiting to do first.

  Durand’s house was in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, goal of that infamous slow-speed chase that made it onto the all-time where were you when lists, but higher on the hillside than the Rockingham estate. Up there in the stratosphere the houses and yards are bigger, the fences heavier and higher, the aura of do not enter more oppressive. Durand’s house—really an estate—was set fairly well back from the street on a heavily treed corner lot.

  I couldn’t see much in my first drive-by. There was a locked security gate in front, with a rectangular intercom mounted squarely in the middle. I turned the car around about a block down and parked it about thirty yards east of the gate. I took a long, slow walk along the front boundary and the adjacent side. A hungry-looking black-and-tan Rottweiler showed up about a minute into my stroll and paralleled me roughly ten feet in from the fence. He never barked once, never even snarled, but he let me know with a few well-timed chop licks that I looked tasty. I put my hand on the fence, and he curled his lip. That was enough for me.

  The side of the garage was the closest edifice to my position on the perimeter. An extension that looked to be some kind of guest or servants’ quarters was attached to the back of the garage, maybe a studio if this guy was such a creative genius. It was separate and set well back from the main house. There was another sixty or seventy feet of yard area between the attachment and the next property line—it must be nice to be so rich that you can have that kind of land right in L.A. I would have been growing something edible on it. Tomatoes and eggplant. Or lots of herbs.