by Kiss of Evil
“Anyway,” Mercedes continues, wiping her lips, “with that résumé, I guess I’m about as far from a santero as a gal can be, eh?”
A santero, Paris had learned no more than a few minutes earlier, is a type of Santerian priest. “I’d say so.”
“But I do know that there is a popular botanica on Fulton Road,” Mercedes says. “Right near St. Rocco’s.”
“A botanica?”
“A botanica is a place to buy charms, herbs, potions. Most of the items are for followers of Santeria, but sometimes I think they get—how shall I say—more diverse requests for materials.”
“Such as?”
“I’m not really sure. Like I said, I still carry a St. Christopher medal, okay? That’s how Catholic I am. I have a few friends in the old neighborhood who dabble in Santeria. What I’ve told you is about all I know about it.”
“Have you ever heard of Palo Mayombe?”
“No. Sorry.”
Paris thinks for a moment. “So, if somebody was into the darker ends of Santeria, they might frequent this botanica?”
“Or one like it. Like Catholicism, Santeria is full of ceremony. Ceremony needs props. There’s always an ad or two for botanicas in my newspaper.”
Mercedes rummages in her bag, produces a copy of Mondo Latino. She opens it to the center, then taps a small display ad in the lower right-hand corner of the page.
Paris takes it from her and—suddenly self-conscious for some reason—puts his glasses on. The ad is for La Botanica Macumba on Fulton Road and trumpets some of the shop’s exotic wares: brimstone, lodestone, black salt, quills, palm oil, rose water. The botanica also offers custom gift baskets that include spirit-calling sticks, dream pillows, magnetic sand, dove’s blood ink. To Paris, two of the stranger-sounding products in the ad are the Fast Luck Bags from Guatemala and something called Four Thieves Vinegar.
“So,” Paris says, “you have no idea what any of this stuff is used for?”
“A little. Most of Santeria is harmless as far as I know. People casting spells for a new job, a new car, a new house. Mostly for a new lover.”
“Of course.”
“Hey, didn’t you ever pray for some girl to like you when you were a teenager?”
Teenager? How about last week, Paris thinks. “I guess I did,” he says. “Okay. All the time.”
Mercedes laughs and attacks the last bite of her egg sandwich as Paris’s pager goes off. He excuses himself from the booth. Two minutes later he is back.
“There’s been another murder,” Paris says, grabbing his coat from the booth, slipping it on. “A woman.”
Mercedes covers her mouth for a moment, then checks her watch, makes an entry in her notebook. “Are we going there?”
“Yes. One of the other detectives is the primary on this, but there appears to be evidence that might link this murder to a case I’m working on.”
“You think it may be the same person who did this other killing?” Mercedes asks as she slides out of the booth. “The one involving Santeria?”
“Way too early to tell,” Paris says. “But this one’s a little different already.”
“Different how?”
Paris decides to see what she’s made of. A little severe, perhaps, but necessary. “Well, for one thing, she’s missing the top of her head.”
“Oh my God,” Mercedes says, the color vacating her face. For a moment, it looks as if she just realized what the Homicide Unit actually does.
“And so far,” adds Paris, dropping a tip on the table, “no one’s been able to locate her brain.”
The Reginald Building, at the corner of East Fortieth Street and Central Avenue, is a shabby, six-room structure that still holds on to ruins of its long list of tenants. One side of the building boasts faded Jheri Curl and Posner’s ads; the other side, a hand-painted takeout menu for Weeza’s Corner Café.
When Paris had been a patrolman he had spent many a dinner break parked across the street, partaking of Weeza’s short-rib dinners, washing it all down with RC Cola, the only soft drink Louisa Mac McDaniels would stock. He knew that the owner of the building—one Reginald G. Moncrief, also known in those days as Sugar Pop—had had big plans for the building and its adjacent lot at one time, having even rented out a pair of rooms in the back for a short period, until the housing authority shut him down. Everything, of course, changed the night someone in the men’s room at the Mad Hatter disco parted Reggie Moncrief’s hair about four inches too low with a slug from a .44 Magnum.
The yellow crime-scene tape is wrapped around the entire building and, in spite of the snow, in spite of the cold, a crowd is beginning to gather in front of the vacant lot across East Fortieth Street.
The front doorway to the Reginald Building is busy with SIU activity. Paris and Mercedes are routed to the side door, facing Central Avenue. Paris leaves Mercedes Cruz in the care of a uniformed officer for the time being and steps into the building and is immediately solicited by the smell of death, by the damp perfume of neglect. A quick scan of the room: crack vials, spent condoms, broken glass, fast-food trash. The temporary lighting that had been brought in is throwing more light than the interior of this building has seen for years. Cobwebs hang in thick cascades from every corner; the floor is dotted with dead insects, animal feces, tiny bones. Paris notices a pair of small black mice scurrying along one wall, probably wondering why their home has been so loudly and brightly invaded.
Paris locates Greg Ebersole in this scene. He is standing near the SIU team, talking on his cellphone.
Sergeant Gregory Ebersole is forty-one, spare, and red-haired: a mongoose in an Alfani suit. Paris had seen him get physical with suspects a few times and remembers being surprised and impressed at Greg’s speed and agility. What was scary about guys like Greg Ebersole, Paris had always thought, was not the cards they showed you, but the ones they didn’t. Behind the cool, jade eyes, beneath the freckles and affable exterior, lurks a man capable of all manner of explosive behavior.
But as Paris approaches Greg he sees the sallowness of the man’s skin, the weariness in his eyes. Greg’s six-year-old son Max had recently undergone heart surgery, a fairly routine procedure, it was said, but one that thoroughly exhausted the Ebersoles’ insurance, and then some. Greg had once confided that he would owe tens of thousands of dollars before it was all over. Paris knew of two part-time jobs Greg worked. He suspected there were more. This very evening there is a benefit for Max Ebersole at the Caprice Lounge. Looking at Greg now, Paris wonders if the man is going to make it.
Greg sees Paris, nods in greeting, points toward the body.
Paris acknowledges him and finds the victim in the back room, near the rusted ovens that once prepared bread pudding and the like for customers of Weeza’s Corner Café. The body is covered with a plastic sheet, and next to it stands a very nervous, bespectacled black officer. Paris approaches, mindful of the small areas of chalk-circled evidence on the floor.
“How ya doin’?” Paris says, stepping into the room.
“Just fine, sir,” the officer lies. He is heavyset, clean-shaven, no more than twenty-two years old. Paris locates the man’s name tag: M.C. Johnson.
“What’s your first name, Patrolman Johnson?”
“Marcus, sir.”
“How long have you been on the job, Marcus?” Paris asks, putting on a pair of rubber gloves, recalling that, when he was a young officer, he always appreciated ordinary conversation at moments like these.
Patrolman Marcus Calvin Johnson looks at his watch. “About six hours, sir.”
Six hours, Paris thinks. He remembers his own nerve-racking first day in blue. He was absolutely certain that he and his mentor—a highly decorated street cop named Vincent Stella, a lifer well into his forties at that time—would stumble upon a bank robbery in progress and that Patrolman John Salvatore Paris would shoot his own partner. “Tough assignment right out of the box, eh?”
“Oh yeah,” Patrolman Johnson answers at the entrance t
o a deep breath, one that swells his cheeks for a moment, the kind of breath that generally precedes a roll of the eyes and a quick trip to the linoleum.
“Hang in there, Marcus,” Paris says. “It’s not always this bad.”
“I’ll try, sir.”
Paris tucks his tie into his shirt pocket, nods to the officer, then hunkers down next to the body. Patrolman Johnson pulls back the sheet. Immediately, Paris wants to amend his pearl of wisdom for the rookie cop.
It’s never this bad.
Because there is something so very wrong about what Paris is looking at. It is the body of a partially clothed young white woman, lying prone, her face turned to the left. She has very pretty legs, is wearing a short white skirt, white high heels. She is wearing no blouse or bra, and Paris can now see that the same symbol he had seen on Willis Walker’s tongue is carved between her shoulder blades. The primitive-looking bow and arrow. But even the horror of that symbol, at this moment, cannot compare to the hideousness that is to be found just a few inches away.
The victim—a woman who surely had friends and family and coworkers and lovers, a woman who quite possibly had children of her own—simply stops at her forehead. Above it, above her ears, there is nothing.
Air.
Paris forces himself to look at the top of the woman’s head. It is lying next to her right shoulder, a clotted, empty bone-bowl, framed by tendrils of blood-blackened hair that seem to reach for him like Medusa’s snakes.
Like deadheading a flower . . .
“Okay,” Paris says to the grateful Patrolman Johnson, who has been staring at the ceiling and hyperventilating. “You can cover her.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Paris walks over to Greg Ebersole, who is standing near the front door; he can see that Greg is pumped and primed for this one: arms crossed, nostrils flaring, fingers beating out a rhythm on his biceps, detective’s eyes re-drawing the crime scene over and over in his mind. Floor, ceiling, wall, door, window. Silent witnesses, all.
And while it is true that homicide detectives have absolutely no power to prevent murders from occurring, whenever something like this happens—an arrogant, vicious killing after which the perpetrator does not even have the decency to turn himself in or kill himself—it is tantamount to saying to the detectives that I, a murderer, am much smarter than you are. And, to some cops, that is almost worse than the murder itself.
Jack Paris is just such a cop. Greg Ebersole, too.
“Who found her?” Paris asks.
“Fifteen-year-old kid and his girlfriend,” Greg says. He flips a page in his notebook. “Shawn Curry and Dionna Whitmore.”
“Any reason to hold them?”
“Nah. We’ve got their statements.” He gestures to the mattress in the corner. “This was just their love shack.”
“How’d they get in?”
“Back door,” Greg replies. He turns another page, holds up his notebook, showing Paris the now familiar bow-and-arrow emblem, a replica Greg had drawn in pencil. “That your symbol?” he asks, staring straight ahead.
“It sure looks like it,” Paris says, then lowers his voice. “Did I hear this right? No one’s found her brain?”
“Nope,” Greg says. “We’ve cleared the building. Nothing.”
“You think this fucker took it with him?”
Greg turns, fixes Paris with an adrenaline-charged stare, a look that Paris had seen a thousand times before, the one that says: We have eleven-year-old hit men in this country, Jack. People who fuck and strangle their own children. We have guys who dress up in clown suits and bury thirty boys under their houses; drug gangs that harvest unborn babies right from the womb. We’ve both seen these things. Shall we now be shocked that someone is making doggie bags of human brains?
“I guess I have my answer,” Paris says.
“I guess you do,” Greg replies, nearly salivating at the prospect of this new chase, this fresh opportunity to catch a murderer and put him on the other side of the bars. Or, preferably, in this case, the other side of the sod. “I guess you do.”
11
Murderer.
The word ricochets in her mind, around and around and around, a white-hot billiard ball that won’t find a pocket. Mur-der-er. Three syllables, three cushions. Constant. It used to be a word that she applied to real criminals, gangsters, the people you see in prison documentaries, their fingers wrapped tightly around the bars, their eyes boring through you with hatred and violence. But now the word applied to her. She would be one of those people soon.
“Murderer” is at the top of her résumé now.
How long had it been? One day? Two? She hadn’t slept a minute, of course. The first two pints of Jack Daniel’s had passed through her like perspiration, a thin brown mist that paused neither to calm her nerves nor to salve her Christian soul. Her commandment-shattering, burn-in-hell-for-ever soul.
Remember Mary? Isabella’s mother?
Oh yeah. The killer, right?
That’s her. Hear what happened?
No, what?
Died in a prison riot.
No.
Yep. She killed that black guy and they sent her to the Ohio Reformatory for Women. Died in a small pool of bloody vomit and urine.
The thought makes her crack the seal on the third pint. There is one more bottle after this one. After that . . .
She is sitting on the floor in her kitchen, lights off, save for the steady glow of her cigarettes, each one lit from the last. She is waiting for the knock on the door, the hard rap of a police-issue flashlight that will signal post time at the gates of hell.
Options?
Let’s see. If she leaves town she will never see Isabella again. That’s a lock. If she stays and somehow beats the rap, they will still never give her daughter back to her.
One option left. Take the money. Take her daughter.
And run.
Willis Walker had the right to be mad. No question about it. Given. Nolo contendere, your honor. He even had the right to call the police and have her arrested. After all, she had drugged him and robbed him, right?
Right.
Hell, he probably had the right to punch her in the mouth. The recollection returns her mind, momentarily, to the ache that had settled into the left side of her face.
But Willis Walker did not have the right to kill her. And that’s precisely what she felt he was going to do. He fired actual bullets at her. She had no choice. Put a thousand women in that situation and 998 of them would do exactly the same thing. Bash his fuckin’ brains in.
She takes another deep swallow, this one reaching her nerves, beginning to calm them. She feels one rung better. Then, the facts come into focus.
The woman at Vernelle’s was blond.
She wasn’t blond.
No one saw her at the Dream-A-Dream Motel.
No one saw her when she picked up her car at Vernelle’s. Besides, she was wearing a knit cap and a dark raincoat.
She was all but positive she had wiped down everything in the motel room.
She was fine. She will take her fifty grand—only three thousand or so to go now, she thinks with some twisted measure of accomplishment, thanks to Willis Walker—and leave this horrible life behind her.
She rises, puts the bottle on top of the refrigerator. Enough with the booze, she thinks. Enough with the worry, the guilt. She doesn’t need to apologize to anyone.
What she needs to do is work out.
The night is clear and cold, perfect for jogging, but the four or five packs of cigarettes that she has smoked in the last twenty-four hours had prevented her from achieving any real aerobic benefits from her lackadaisical run around the block.
She slows to a walk as she turns the corner onto Lee Road and sees that there is a man standing in front of her apartment building. The area is well lighted so she isn’t too worried about getting mugged. Besides, she has her pepper spray in her right hand.
But maybe it’s not a mugger, she thinks
.
Maybe it’s worse.
Maybe it’s a cop.
She stops for a moment, gathers her wind, and decides there is no real reason to be concerned. The man in front of her building is probably a tenant, just a guy getting ready for a run himself—stretching, doing a few deep knee-bends. Had she seen him around the building before? She wasn’t sure. But she was absolutely certain that she wouldn’t mind seeing him again. Tall, wavy hair, big shoulders. He is wearing an olive and black Nike jogging suit, the kind with reflective white stripes on the elbows. He also wears black wool gloves and a black waist pack.
He is standing in front of the door, so there will be no avoiding him, no sidestepping a conversation if he chooses to start one. She approaches, unafraid, but still keeping her finger on the pepper spray’s trigger.
“Hi,” the man says.
“Hi.”
“Just starting your run?” he asks. Another knee-bend.
“Just finished,” she says, glancing past him, cringing at her reflection in the glass door. She looks like a wet collie. Of course. “Enough for me tonight.”
“What a pity. What’s your name?”
Her mind whirls. It is a little forward of him, a little too fast for her taste, but that’s not what throws her. What throws her is that she had not anticipated being anyone tonight. “Rachel,” she answers, as if the name were simply the next name up on a never-ending roster of deception. “Rachel Anne O’Malley.”
“You’re Irish.”
“Yes,” she says, telling the lie by rote. “Well, half. I’m Irish on my father’s side. My mother’s Italian.”
“Pretty volatile combination,” the man says, flashing a smile. “Italian and Irish.”
“Constant battle,” she jokes, surprised at her acumen at this after so long, shocked at her growing ease with the events of the last twenty-four hours. “Eat, drink, eat, drink, eat, drink . . .”