Kiss of Evil

by Kiss of Evil

  “Sometimes, the monster is real, people,” the man says. “Sometimes, the monster has a pretty face and a perfectly ordinary name. This time, the monster is called Sarah Weiss.”

  58

  Ronnie’s Famous is fully lighted, empty. Paris had called Ronnie earlier in the day and asked him to put together two dozen doughnuts and coffee for the stakeout team. And damned if there aren’t a pair of bulging white bags on the counter, right next to the register, right next to a tray of large white foam cups and one of Paris’s Thermoses. Even on New Year’s Eve. Paris had said he would be by at nine-thirty, and he is right on time.

  Paris makes a U-turn, parks in front of the shop, grabs his empty Thermos, steps inside, his mind afloat on the increasingly bizarre facts of a case that is starting to look like it began twenty-six years ago when a woman named Lydia del Blanco got beaten nearly to death by her ex-husband, a man who once lived at Fortieth and Central.

  Is this why Fayette Martin was lured to the Reginald Building?

  Is this why Michael Ryan was murdered?

  If God is doling out luck this New Year’s Eve, he will begin to get some of these answers in the next few hours. One way or another.

  Paris looks around Ronnie’s. No customers at the short counter. No one behind the glass. Paris can hear the whine of a vacuum cleaner in the back, the sound of a television.

  “Ronnie?” Paris yells.

  Nothing.

  “Ronnie?”

  Just the mewl of a motor and some kind of sitcom. Paris grabs everything on the counter, drops a twenty, then turns to leave before Ronnie Boudreaux can come out of the back room and object.

  “Happy New Year, Ronnie!” Paris yells, but he is certain the drone of the vacuum has drowned him out.

  As Paris approaches his apartment building he sees two men standing by the front door. Two familiar shapes. Bobby Dietricht and Greg Ebersole. At his apartment.

  A first.

  Something must be going down. Why hadn’t they called?

  Paris parks on East Eighty-fifth Street, grabs his Thermos. “Hey guys,” he says, climbing the steps, letting the surprise register on his face. “What’s up? We have a name?”

  “Hey,” Bobby Dietricht says, reading the surprise, ignoring the question.

  The three men step inside the lobby of Paris’s building as an icy gust wraps around the building. “What’s goin’ on?” Paris asks, checking his watch. He is due at the Westwood stakeout in thirty-five minutes. “We starting a doo-wop group?”

  Greg laughs a little too hard. Although he is on the task force, he is not part of the raid team. Early that evening, amid Greg’s violent protests, Captain Elliott had taken one look at him and ordered him off duty.

  Bobby Dietricht reaches into his overcoat and pulls out a manila envelope. “Full lab reports are in.”

  “What?” Paris says. “Why the hell didn’t someone call me?”

  “This is it, Jack,” Bobby says. “This is the call. I just got the report ten minutes ago.”

  “What’s Elliott’s take?” Paris asks.

  “He hasn’t seen them yet.”

  Wrong answer, Paris thinks. Wrong, wrong answer. Why not? “Talk to me, Bobby.”

  “We’ve got matches. All over the fuckin’ map. Blood, prints.”

  “No shit.”

  “None. Most of the blood is Fayette Martin’s. But there was also trace evidence of Willis Walker’s blood, too.”

  “What about the prints?”

  A look passes between Greg and Bobby. “Yeah. We’ve got a match. And we’ve got it a half-dozen times.”

  “Do we like someone? Please tell me we like someone.”

  “Yes and no,” Bobby says. “Mostly no.”

  “What the hell are you saying? We have a hit on the prints or not?”

  Bobby nods.

  “Great,” Paris says, his stomach starting to centrifuge with tiny needles that soon work their way down to his groin, where the real fear lives. And he knows why. “We’ve got the connection.”

  “Not so great,” Greg says, a look of distilled heartbreak on his face.

  “The prints,” Bobby says, cop-stare locked in place, cold and unnerving. Paris had never been on this side of it.

  “What about them?” Paris asks.

  Bobby: “They’re yours.”

  59

  The fifth time she texts Jesse Ray she stops, halfway, defeated, her tears no longer an enemy. No one is going to save her. No one is going to wave a magic wand and keep her out of prison. This had gotten so bad, so fast, that everything she had worked for in the past two years seemed to be slipping away. If she had just been able to get the money into a trust for Bella, to show her father that the little girl’s future was secured, she might have had a life.

  Jean Luc had told her to call no one, to stay inside her apartment until he came for her.

  But she knows that if she can just get to her car, she will find the courage to drive down to the Justice Center, walk inside and start talking before she can stop herself.

  She puts on her navy wool parka. In her right pocket she slips her Buck knife. In her left pocket is her pepper spray.

  Keeping the lights off, she crosses the apartment, tiptoes through the small foyer, sidles up to the door. She checks that the security chain is on, the deadbolt turned. She looks through the peephole: just the fish-eye view of the hall, exactly the way it looks every time she gets paranoid and peers through it. Quiet, empty, monastic. She puts her ear to the door, listens. Nothing. Not even the hum of the elevators. She looks through the peephole again, then takes a step back, turns her deadbolt to the left and silently rotates the knob, opening the door an inch.

  She is alone.

  She steps through the door, locks it, eases her way to the stairwell, cringing at the sound of the squeaky hinge. A few moments later she steps into the small, deserted Cain Manor apartment lobby. Earlier, she had come home to find a pair of men working on the front doors. They told her that, due to the recent murder in Cain Park, they were putting in new, high security locks. The thought had made her feel a little better, but only a very little.

  Now it no longer matters.

  She glances around the empty lobby, then floats silently down the corridor and out into the rear parking lot.

  The first thing she notices is the deep lavender moonlight on the snow. As she approaches her parking space, the light on her car returns a greenish cast to her eye, a color that makes her pause for a moment, disoriented, thinking it may not be her car. A glance at the license plate. It is her yellow Honda. Right where it is supposed to be. Then why is—

  She stops in the middle of the thought, her mind tripping over an image that her heart doesn’t seem to want to process. She cannot understand why someone is sitting in the passenger seat of her car. She cannot understand why this person looks so familiar.

  She cannot understand why Isabella is sitting in the passenger seat of her car.

  It is Bella’s tam-o’-shanter, her round face, her dark curly hair. Yet, although most of her daughter’s face is obscured by shadow, one thing is clear to Mary, and that is this:

  Her daughter is not moving.

  “Bella!”

  Mary sprints to the car, slipping on the ice, fumbling with the keys, a spike of raw terror in her heart. It seems like a full minute before she can get the key in the frozen lock, the frosted window now clouding with her breath, concealing her daughter’s tiny form.

  She whips open the door and grabs her child from the front seat. Too hard, too light, not a child not a child not Isabella not Isabella—

  The world stops. Relief washes over her in a huge hot wave, taking her legs out from under her. She falls to her knees.

  It is not her daughter.

  It is Astrid, her daughter’s big doll, the one she herself had sent by UPS for Isabella’s last birthday. Astrid wearing Isabella’s old clothes.

  Release, first. Then confusion.

  Then, a r
eprise of her fear.

  Because there, in the plum-colored moonlight, pinned to the doll’s coat, is a directive that Mary has no trouble at all understanding, a square of white paper bearing a simple message:

  Go back.

  60

  The blue Saturn turns the corner for the third time. It has the look of a car well maintained, the imperious sheen of a vehicle that is the very first automobile ever purchased off a showroom floor after a series of beaters. And, although things like road salt, cinders, slush, and goopy carbon by-products abound on such a winter night, as the blue Saturn passes I can see the occasional streetlamp reflected off its smooth, muscular lines in starry patterns.

  The woman at the wheel looks left and right, left and right, searching for a parking space, a block or so south of Carnegie on East Eighty-fifth Street. She finds one, squeezes the Saturn in expertly, then exits the car, moves to the trunk, opens it. As I approach I see her reach inside and remove a camera case. She is wearing a long double-breasted coat, a knitted red scarf.

  She has courage. I will give her that. By the way she is skulking around, I can tell she isn’t supposed to be here. I guarantee that Jack Paris has told her not to come to his apartment.

  I have no hatred for her, but she will certainly get in my way.

  At the last second, the crunch of snow beneath my feet alerts her to my presence. She spins around, looks into my eyes. And remembers.

  Just like a reporter.

  “Hola, chica!” I say. “Buy you a fruity cocktail?”

  61

  As soon as Bobby said the word midnight, Paris knew that it was not going to be enough time. He also knew that it was a favor he would probably never be able to repay, one for which he had not even presumed to ask. Bobby Dietricht and Greg Ebersole are both in possession of conclusive forensic evidence in a capital murder case and are willfully delaying the submission of these facts to their superior officer. This is obstruction of justice at the very least, not to mention the violation of a truckload of other laws.

  Serious jail time.

  At midnight, Bobby Dietricht will have no choice but to place the file on Randall Elliott’s desk. And at that time, Captain Elliott will have no choice but to issue a warrant for the arrest of John Salvatore Paris.

  “You all right with this?” Paris asks.

  “Wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t,” Bobby Dietricht says. Greg just nods.

  Paris had told them everything. Rebecca. Mike Ryan. Jeremiah Cross. Demetrius Salters. It had come out in a steady stream, the tension with it. He could deal with someone setting him up.

  But, by midnight?

  The problem is that they could not get a search warrant for Rebecca’s apartment without cause, and cause could not be established until the lab reports were submitted. Besides, there is nothing physical tying her to the jacket. To search Rebecca’s apartment, legally, would be to implicate Paris.

  Bobby Dietricht and Greg Ebersole will work Rebecca D’Angelo’s apartment on their own time. Starting right now.

  Bobby adds: “Besides, I’m married, Jack. I ain’t fuckin’ dead. I saw her at the Cleveland League party. You don’t have to explain a damn thing.”

  “You don’t think I—”

  Bobby holds up his gloved hand, stopping him. “I don’t know a cop in this city who would.”

  Paris immediately regrets every negative thought he’d ever had about Detective Robert Dietricht. “I don’t know how to thank you two.”

  “Three,” Greg says.

  “Three?”

  “Yeah,” Greg says with a wink. “I guarantee you Mike Ryan’s working this detail.”

  Paris heads upstairs, opens his apartment door, sees a FedEx envelope on the floor. “Do Not Bend: Photos” a label says on the outside. The photographs Mercedes’s brother took. Paris is not exactly in the mood to look at himself. He tosses the envelope on the table, pours himself coffee, gulps a cup. Twenty minutes until he has to be at the Westwood Road house. Bobby and Greg are off to the Heights.

  How could he have been so fucking stupid? How could he have thought, even for a minute, that a woman like Rebecca—or whatever the hell her name is—would be the slightest bit interested in him?

  She is good though, he thinks. Jesus Christ she is good.

  But why is she doing this? Could he have been that wrong when he looked into her eyes? Or does the killer have something on her?

  Regardless, he does not relish the idea of her on a witness stand. He grabs his keys, his Kevlar vest from the dining room table. Manny perks for a moment, but soon senses he isn’t involved. He rolls over on the couch.

  Paris is almost out the door when the phone rings.

  “Paris.”

  “Jack, Tonya Grimes.”

  “What do you have?”

  “I have half. I have a listing of a homicide victim named Anthony C. del Blanco. The funny thing is, that’s all I have.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, all I have is a stat. There’s no paper.”

  Paris’s heart sinks.

  Mikey.

  No.

  “Nothing at all?” Paris asks.

  “Not a shred. No interviews, no photos, no autopsy reports. Zip. I looked under other spellings, just in case it was misfiled, but nothing turned up. Just a computer entry listing him as a vic. Weird, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Paris says, absently. “Thanks, Tonya.”

  “Listen, I’m getting a fax right now. It may be about this Jeremiah Cross. Let me call you right back.”

  “Okay.” Paris hangs up the phone, his mind beginning to connect the dots between Mike Ryan and Sarah Weiss. It is then that he notices the blinking message light on his answering machine. He pours a half-cup of coffee from his Thermos, glances at his watch. He has time. He hits Playback.

  “Hi . . . it’s Mercedes . . . ’bout nine-thirty . . . I was wondering . . . what’s the penalty for killing a little brother in Ohio? . . . can’t be much . . . probably like a fine or something, right? . . . anyway . . . I know you’re not there . . . you’re off to the big raid I’m not allowed to attend and all . . . kidding . . . anyway . . . I just talked to my brother Julian and, after enduring much threat, he confessed that he never showed up to take your picture, so whoever you met that day was definitely not my brother . . . anyway, seeing as he’s only fifteen and can’t exactly drive over there tonight, especially with my foot up his ass, I’m going to get in my car right now and drive over myself and wait for you . . . sorry again . . . you can’t trust Puerto Rican/Irish people . . . what can I tell you . . . good luck . . . okay . . . bye . . . happy new year . . . bye.”

  Fifteen, Paris thinks. What the hell is she talking about? Her brother Julian is only fifteen? Who the fuck was it at the Justice Center that day, then? And who the fuck was it in the parking lot at the Cleveland League party?

  It hits him.

  What was it that Mercedes had said the day she called him from Deadlines, the day she had told him that her brother might show up to take pictures?

  “Well, at the moment, there is a fabulously handsome, ethnically diverse male sitting right next to me, trying to ply me with fruity cocktails. . . .”

  Paris dives for the dining room table and the FedEx envelope that contains the photographs. He tears it open to find an eight by ten of himself standing by the window in the Justice Center lobby, a bright red hole drawn in the center of his forehead.

  He has seen his face.

  Before he can pick up the phone to call in the description, he notices something hanging from the inside of his apartment door. He tries to move toward it, cannot.

  As the Amanita muscaria begins to rocket through his veins, he understands.

  He understands why no one came out of the back room at Ronnie’s. He understands that every single move he has made in the past week or so has been watched, observed, noted. He understands that the psychopath the entire department is looking for had known he was heading to Ronnie’s for
coffee and had made sure that Jack Paris had gotten a special brew, a brew of whatever was in Mike Ryan’s bloodstream the day he died, a brew intended for the entire stakeout team, and Jack Paris suddenly knows that, if the feeling beginning to surge through him now is any indication of where he is going, it will surely end in a dread that is deeper, and colder, than any he has ever known.

  62

  The boys are ten and eleven. They are supposed to be watching television in their grandmother’s basement, but, instead, they are standing at the corner of Fulton Road and Newark Avenue, across from the St. Rocco’s rectory, passing a Winston Light back and forth, cupping it in hand as they had seen the older kids do.

  At a few minutes after ten they see a cop car trolling Fulton, so they work their way down the alley that runs behind the strip of stores that begins with Aldonsa’s Tailors and ends with that heebie-jeebie voodoo place on the corner.

  The younger boy looks around the Dumpster for a piece of foil in which to wrap the sacred remains of their last smoke. There is foil all over the place, courtesy of the takeout, but it all seems to be covered in barbecue sauce or spilled Pepsi.

  Too short to see inside the Dumpster, the younger boy reaches over the rim, feels around the debris, and feels something wet. Something thick and viscous and sticky.

  More barbecue sauce?

  “Shit,” the boy says, pulling back his hand. And realizes immediately that it doesn’t smell like barbecue sauce at all. In fact, it smells like shit. Actual shit.

  The two boys hoist themselves up to the rim of the Dumpster.

  The corpse inside was, at one time, a man. This much is obvious, due to the fact that the man is naked. But there is also a huge hole where the man’s middle used to be. The area from his throat to his groin is cut into a long, flayed crescent, the fat and skin and muscle pulled to the sides in a surprised rictus of a smile, the contents glistening beneath the overhead vapor lights like maroon slabs of liver at the West Side Market.

  The boy had reached directly into the man’s lower intestine, into fully digested arroz con pollo.