“And if he’d asked you?”
Cathy laughed. “I’d be gone like a shot.”
Anna laughed with her. Leaning back in her chair, she stretched out her legs where they wouldn’t get tromped on by a particularly romantic pair of dancers too caught up with the business at hand to watch where they put their feet. She drank some of her own beer.
She was a small attractive woman of twenty-eight with a dark complexion and medium-length black hair cut in long bangs that she was constantly brushing back from her eyes. She worked hard, taking contract proofreading jobs and working for a temporary secretary service, but mostly she liked to spend her time making things. She’d tried her hand at everything from weaving to painting to carpentry. Her current project was sculpting with fabric maché. She was working on a series of life-size old men and women. The sculptures, in various states of completion, were threatening to fill the back porch where she worked. The only thing she liked better than making things was singing, but somehow she could never find the time to make the commitment a band needed from its members. The only singing she did, besides serenading her sculptures, was some backup work in the local studios and occasionally onstage with the Midnight Hour.
“I’m glad he chose Janice,” Cathy said.
“Why’s that?”
“Oh, you know how she’s been since she broke up with Tom. The guy ended up being a total jerk, but they were together for how long? Three years?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, you get used to being a couple. She hasn’t been seeing anybody since.”
“Not like you,” Anna teased.
“Don’t I wish. But I tell you, Anna, if there’s a weirdo in the house, you can bet he’ll hit on me. I swear—it’s like I draw them out of the woodwork or something.”
“It’s that hair.”
“Hair, nothing. It’s short skirts and tight jeans.”
“Not to mention no bra.”
“Not to mention.”
“So tell our viewers, Ms. Cole,” Anna asked, holding a beer bottle up to Cathy as though it were a microphone. “To what do you owe your tartish behavior?”
“Strict parents, natch, but of course society’s to blame.”
The waitress came by to take their order. Since Janice had remained on the dance floor for the next number as well, they ordered another round just for themselves.
“Are you still seeing Kevin?” Cathy asked when the waitress was gone.
“When he’s got the time. Mind you, I’ve been pretty busy working on that set design for Charlie’s play.”
“And baby-sitting your roommate.”
Anna frowned. “That’s not very nice, Cathy. If you’d been through half of what she has—”
Cathy held up her hands. “I know, I know. And I like Beth, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t think it’s healthy the way she hangs on to you like you’re some kind of lifeline.”
“I am her lifeline,” Anna said. “I’m all she’s got right now.”
Cathy gave her a long, considering look, then nodded. She wanted to say something about how she also didn’t think it was healthy for Anna to be putting as much as she was into helping Beth. Sure, people like Beth needed help, but they never seemed to want to help themselves. It was all take, no give. They were like leeches. Psychic vampires.
Cathy didn’t like seeing what it was doing to her friend. It was closing down Anna’s own chances for a lot of happiness. She was always staying in with Beth, except for the few occasions that Beth could be coaxed out of the house. Cathy was surprised that Beth had stuck out her latest job as long as she had. Going on two weeks now. But this wasn’t the time to get into any of that. At least Anna was out tonight.
“Want to see Janice freak?” she said suddenly.
“Cathy, don’t. Whatever it is you’re planning . . .”
“I’m just going to cut in, that’s all. Guys do it all the time.”
Anna caught up with her before she reached Janice. “Dance with me,” she said.
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll bop you one.”
Cathy gave her a look of mock fear. “Okay, okay. I’m dancing, already.”
4
THE STAIRS GOING down into the basement were wider than usual for a house this old. In fact, Ned thought as he led the way down, the whole place had the look of renovation about it, from the oversize living room that had engulfed what must once have been the dining room, to the kitchen, which appeared to have been widened by an addition on the back of the house.
The burning smell grew stronger as they descended.
“I’m surprised no one’s called in the fire department,” Grier said from behind him.
Ned grunted a meaningless reply. There was something in the air—more than just the stink—that had the flesh crawling up his back. It was like walking into an old, low-rent tenement when you just knew someone was waiting in the dark for you, shotgun trained at your gut.
Benny Dwyer met them at the bottom of the stairs.
“Whatever kind of fire they had here,” he said, “it’s long out now.”
Dwyer was in his late thirties, a bulky man with too much stomach and an ever-increasing bald spot on the crown of his head. He gave Ned a considering glance.
“You feel it too?”
Ned nodded.
“Feel what?” Grier asked.
Dwyer shrugged. “There’s a . . . I don’t know . . . lost feeling about this place.” He looked embarrassed at having opened up that much. “Guess there’s a good reason. The bodies are in here.”
Two doors led off from the small hall at the bottom of the stairs. Through the open door on the right the detectives could see a furnace room and the usual accumulation of junk that was in any basement. Dwyer led them through the door on the left.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Ned breathed.
The initial impression was too much to take in all at once. There were the banks of recording equipment, slagged and blackened. Broken glass was everywhere, some of it embedded right in the walls. There were the speakers, woofer cones burned out, tweeters half melted. Ned’s gaze went to the corpse on the floor, took in the state it was in, slid away, returned again. The man’s head and one hand were burned away to the bone. Staring at the corpse, trying to figure out just what the hell could have done that kind of localized damage, a strange sense of dislocation came over him.
For a moment it felt like his view of the room was doing a slow strobe. He saw the mess of the recording equipment, the dead man.
Flicker.
Now he saw some vast, empty wasteland that stretched in all directions for long, desolate miles.
Flicker.
The room was back again.
“Ned?” Grier asked. “You okay?”
Ned leaned against the doorjamb and nodded.
Grier stepped around him. “What the fuck went down here, anyway?”
“This isn’t the worst,” Dwyer said. He pointed toward a hole in the wall that had once been a window.
The detectives moved toward it, Grier first, Ned bringing up the rear. Ned shot a quick look at the other side of the control room where the recording and drum booths lay beyond another glassless window.
Flicker.
Those bleak plains were back. He turned his head.
Flicker.
They were gone. He looked over Grier’s shoulder and the contents of his stomach did a heave.
He’d been on the scenes of a lot of bad accidents, pulled a body from the river that had been in the water for a couple of weeks, but he’d never seen anything like this. It wasn’t a human being. It was just a lump of red meat in the shape of a human lying there on the table. Except it still had hair. And eyes . . .
“Skinned,” Dwyer said from behind them, his voice hushed. “The fucker skinned her.”
Flicker.
Now Ned saw the body in that other place, lying on a flat gray stone, the sickly yellow skies above. . . . And there was
something in the air, a sound, some kind of moaning that was like music. . . .
Flicker.
Beside him, Grier staggered. “What the hell . . . ?”
They were all feeling it, Ned realized. All of them seeing . . . something. . . .
Grier reached out a hand to catch his balance and cut himself on a piece of glass still embedded in the frame. Seeing the fresh blood well up from his partner’s hand was just what Ned needed to start making some sense out of all of this.
“Out,” he said. “Everybody out of here.”
He caught hold of Grier’s shoulder and steered him toward the door.
“What. . . ?”
“There’s a gas leak or something in here.”
Ned waited until both Dwyer and Grier were out in the hall before he closed the door to the control room. As the door slammed shut, Ned had the sudden feeling that he’d closed in something more than just the carnage.
“Let’s get that hand looked at,” he said, ushering the two men up the stairs ahead of him.
Grier looked down at the blood seeping from the cut as though he were seeing it for the first time. Ned didn’t relax until all three of them were out on the front porch again. He drew the night air into his lungs as though it were a drug. One deep breath after another.
“I had the weirdest feeling in there,” Grier said. “It was like I was . . . somewhere else. Just for a moment.”
“Lost,” Dwyer said. “It’s like you could just get lost. . .”
We’re all spooked, Ned thought.
“It’s got to be some kind of gas,” he said firmly, trying to bring things into perspective.
Gas. Right. But that didn’t explain the condition of either of the bodies.
“I don’t want anybody else going down there without a gas mask on,” he added.
He saw that the IDent van had arrived, the ID unit unloading their gear. A little up the street, Inspector Fournier was getting out of a cruiser. There were more uniforms, another pair of plainclothes. Bystanders were arriving. They would need to put up barricades and seal the site.
Flicker.
The street was gone. Empty reaches stretched for as far as the eye could see, endlessly gray under smoggy skies.
Flicker.
He rubbed a hand across his temples. Jesus.
“Nobody down there without a mask,” he repeated to Dwyer. “Ernie, why don’t you fill Fournier in on what we know while you’re getting that hand bandaged.”
Grier shot him a worried look. “You’re not going back down there, are you?”
Ned shook his head. He glanced over to the right where a dark-haired figure still slouched in the back of the patrol car.
“No,” he said. “What I’m going to do is have a little talk with Jack and see if I can’t find out just what the hell’s going on around here.”
5
DETECTIVE SERGEANT GREG “Hardass” Boucher arrived on the crime scene with Inspector Fournier. He’d just started his shift when the first reports about what was going down at the Baker residence came in. Bored, he’d tagged along with the inspector under the pretext of lending a helping hand. Truth was, he just wanted a look at the mess in that basement.
He was a fifteen-year veteran of the force—part of the old-boys’ brigade that didn’t approve of pussyfooting around with the perps he picked up. He’d recently been transferred from the Sexual Assault/Child Abuse unit to General Assignment. There wasn’t much speculation around the station as to why the beefy detective had been transferred—it was common knowledge that he liked to lean on women, and he especially liked to lean on teenage girls.
The Children’s Aid Society got involved in his last case with his old unit; they were brought in after a fifteen-year-old rape victim complained about harassment. Turned out she wasn’t the hooker Hardass had thought she was. The case didn’t get far— the girl couldn’t substantiate her complaint—but the subsequent inquiry brought enough bad press that the chief had had to do something. With Hardass’s connections to the old-guard brass, all that entailed was a slap on the wrist and a transfer.
“Fried to the bone, huh?” he asked as Grier gave his report to the inspector.
Grier nodded.
“Be something to see,” Hardass said.
The medic working on Grier shot Hardass a quick glance, then looked away. “Got a problem?” was perpetually written in the set of the big man’s features. Anyone working the police beat picked up on Hardass’s rep real quick. If you messed him around, he didn’t do anything right away. But he didn’t forget. One night you might meet him in a bar somewhere, or out on an empty street, someplace where it was just the two of you, and he was happy to settle any wrongs done to him then—real or imagined.
Hardass grinned, enjoying the momentary rush of psyching the medic out.
“Back off,” Fournier said, not even looking at him. “What about the other victim?” he asked Grier.
Hardass wandered off, bored again. He didn’t want secondhand reports. He wanted to see the meat. A guy fried. Some kid skinned. It was just the kind of weird shit that gave him a buzz. Made him feel a little sick, sure, but it fascinated him at the same time. Once he’d overheard a rookie at a bad traffic accident call him a ghoul. He’d turned to the kid and laid it out for him.
“Everybody’s interested in this kinda stuff,” he’d told the kid, “but it doesn’t look good, so they’re real serious about reports and stats and shit while they’re getting an eyeful. Me, I’m just honest about my interest. I like to see what’s going down. Better them than me—you know?”
Rookie or not, the kid had enough smarts to keep his mouth shut after that.
Hardass drifted up the walkway. When he got to the door of the house, Constable Dwyer stopped him.
“Ned says we’ve got to wait for gas masks.”
Hardass sniffed the air near the doorway. “You smell gas?”
“No, but—”
“You let me worry about my own health, okay?”
Dwyer hesitated, then moved aside as Hardass pushed forward.
Fucking wimps, Hardass thought as he headed down the hall. ‘Course that’s what you got when you lowered your standards. Used to be you had to be a man to get on the force. You had to have some meat on your bones, some backbone. Now they were letting anybody join. Women, blacks—a goddamned chink, for chrissake! Next thing you knew, fag haircuts and pink suits were going to be regulation uniform.
He registered the stink in the air as he headed down the basement stairs. Burned plastic and metal. A faint underlying odor of cooked meat.
He looked at the body of the burned man. Je-sus. Now this was a mess.
His stomach did a little flip, but he ignored the queasiness he was feeling and deliberately bent closer to the corpse’s bared skull. Whoever’d wasted this sucker had fried him good. Cooked his brains until all there was left was gumbo.
He stood slowly as a slight dizziness touched him. He smelled the air again, nervous, but there was no gassy odor. Just the acrid sting of the plastic and wiring. And the cooked meat. . .
The other half of the basement called to him.
Stepping carefully across the mess on the floor, he peered into the room at the body on the table in there. His eyes widened as his gaze settled on the second corpse.
Now this was bona fide sicko—no question about it. Christ, you could see every muscle just lying out—
Flicker.
And the room was gone.
He was standing on a wide, desolate plain. A wind came up, filling his nostrils with the smell of dust and decay. As far as he could see, there was nothing but an unending bleak vista, broken only by the haunted ghosts of dead trees.
What the fu—
Flicker.
And that wasteland was gone.
Hardass rubbed a hand against his sweaty brow and backed quickly out of the basement. Meehan hadn’t been shitting them, after all. There really was some kind of gas leak down here, something th
at made you see things that just weren’t there.
That couldn’t be there.
He paused in the doorway, the stairs at his back.
Flicker.
The wasteland returned.
He turned slowly, but there was nothing behind him anymore. No stairs leading up out of the basement. He put his hand out to where the doorjamb should have been. No frigging basement.
He could hear a faint sound on the wind now. It was like singing. Or maybe screaming. It was too distant really to make out, but it put a knot in his stomach and made him grind his teeth together.
He got the sudden feeling that there was something out there in the wasteland, something that wanted him. . . .
“Okay,” he said, his voice echoing emptily in the dead air. “Enough of this bullshit.”
As he squeezed his eyes shut he could feel the—
Flicker.
He opened his eyes to find the basement back. Before the strobing effect could return, he was up the stairs and out of the building, so fast that his pulse was drumming by the time he reached the outside porch where Dwyer was still standing watch. The constable gave him an odd look, and Hardass knew just what he was thinking.
Hardass Boucher’s finally been grossed out.
Well, fuck him. Fuck ’em all.
It wasn’t the bodies. Christ, he’d seen worse. He’d just never had that feeling of being . . . nowhere before. Nowhere, yeah, but with something out there in the middle of it, looking for him. . . .
It was just craziness, he told himself. Brought on by the gas leak.
But he could feel something different inside himself. It took him a long moment to figure out just what it was: Fear.
No way. No way he was some chickenshit rookie, freaking at the first sight of some psycho’s handiwork.
Oh, yeah? Then why was it that he knew he didn’t want to go back down in that basement—didn’t matter what someone’d pay him? If he closed his eyes, he knew he’d see that desolate landscape once more, hear that weird crying sound on the wind. . . .
He just couldn’t face going down those stairs again.
“You okay, Hardass?” Dwyer asked.
No, he thought. No way I’m okay. But he had a rep. Right now the only person to know what he was feeling was himself, and that was just the way he was going to keep it.
Angel of Darkness Page 3
