Devil's Cape

by Rob Rogers

  The Behemoth laughed. He held the squirrel up to his lips and kissed it.

  Nick relaxed in Costas’s grip. He dropped his hand.

  The Robber Baron raised a finger. The drama didn’t seem to interest him. Instead, he turned around in his chair and looked at the Behemoth. “Twain?” he asked.

  “Nah,” the Behemoth said, pulling the squirrel away and staring into its eyes as though fascinated. “Faulkner.” Then he bent forward and bit off the squirrel’s head. Blood gushed onto his naked chest, dripping down to the thick carpet. He tossed the squirrel’s body into a wastebasket and crunched on the skull. It sounded he was chewing ice cubes.

  Osprey rolled her eyes.

  Kraken laughed quietly to himself.

  The Werewolf sniffed the air. He leaned forward, body angled toward the wastebasket, then stopped himself and leaned back.

  Gork seemed finally to notice the blood trickling down his own neck. He brushed at it with scarred fingers, then wiped them on his jeans.

  Hector Hell shook his head gently and clucked his tongue.

  The Robber Baron just smiled wistfully. “Faulkner,” he repeated. He turned back to Costas. “Hector will be taking over Tony’s organization,” he said. “Perhaps you and Nick should sit down. We have a number of things to discuss.”

  * * * * *

  “They’re like animals,” Nick said, back in the car. Costas had asked him to drive.

  “Yes,” Costas said.

  “They’re fucking freaks,” Nick said.

  “They were playing it up,” Costas said. “They’re showmen. It’s what they do. They wanted us off guard and intimidated.”

  “Did you see that with the squirrel?”

  “He used to bite the heads off chickens in the carnival. It was an act.”

  Nick pounded the steering wheel as he gunned the car down the streets of Doubloon Ward. “The Robber Baron was eating it up.”

  “Yes,” Costas said. “He wanted me intimidated, too.”

  “Us,” Nick said.

  “Us,” Costas agreed.

  “You’ve been working for him since before I was born,” Nick said. “Why does he want to intimidate us now?”

  Because I’m getting old, Costas thought. Because he’s getting old. Because he knows Scion—Julian—is loyal to me, and he doesn’t like the idea of me having access to that much power. Because he knows I arranged for Lorenzo Ferazzoli to get killed against his wishes. Because he likes to shake things up.

  “I have no idea,” he said to his son.

  “Those freaks are the problem, Dad,” Nick said. “We need to do something about those freaks.”

  Costas shook his head. “No,” he said. “They’re a symptom.” The Robber Baron was the problem.

  Costas reached under the passenger seat and pulled out a small blue phone. It was disposable and untraceable, only to be used once. He pushed a button. Somewhere on the other side of the city, an identical phone rang.

  “Bad meeting?” Julian’s voice was calm, maybe a little amused.

  “Yeah,” Costas said.

  He couldn’t send Julian against the Robber Baron, not directly. It would be too easy to trace back, too messy. The Cirque d’Obscurité complicated things. They were too powerful. Julian was tough, but not that tough. They needed a different angle.

  “So?” Julian said.

  “That plan we discussed?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Time to pull the trigger,” Costas said.

  “Okay.”

  Yes, then. Use the money for nurses and alienists. Help our children, but bring in others, too, and help them. But do this for me: Concentrate on the ones no one else wants. The truly mad, the violent, the hopeless. There are other places for rummies and eccentrics, poets and crybabies. Let Holingbroke stand for the true rejects of this world. My brother and I know quite a bit about those.

  — Excerpted from a letter written by Janus Holingbroke to the caretakers of his children and nephew, 1912

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Devil’s Cape, Louisiana

  Three days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders

  11 a.m.

  Cain Ducett awoke to the sound of someone knocking at his office door. Disoriented, he lifted his head from his arms and his desk, blinking at finding himself asleep there. “Hang on a second,” he said, his voice hoarse. He stared down at his desk. The tabloid with “the Devil Baby of Dubai” story was still there, dotted with his blood. He traced it with his fingertips. “Not a hallucination,” he whispered. What the hell did that mean?

  He glanced at his watch. He’d slept for perhaps three hours. He stared back at the newspaper.

  “Dr. Ducett?” It was Jin Chen, the administrative assistant for the doctors in Cain’s wing. Even through his thick oak door, he smelled a hint of jasmine. Her voice had an odd timbre. She was upset about something.

  “Give me just a minute, Jin,” he said. He walked into the bathroom, checked himself in the mirror. He was still streaked with blood, his clothes a mess. “Jin,” he called out, “can it wait a few minutes? I cut myself and I look pretty bad.” No sense beating around the bush. She’d see the cuts soon enough.

  Jin paused for a moment, and he could hear her breathing nervously, almost a pant.

  He shouldn’t have been able to hear her through the door like that, but his senses seemed particularly acute. Unless he was hallucinating again. His eyes moved back to the newspaper on his desk.

  “I don’t think it can wait,” Jin said after a moment.

  Sighing, Cain walked to the door and opened it, saying, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  In her early thirties, Jin was just a hair over five feet, slender and no-nonsense. Born in Tianjin, raised in San Francisco. Her eyes went wide at the sight of him. “Your face,” she said. “I thought you meant you’d cut yourself shaving? Are you . . . ?”

  He waved it off. “It looks worse than it is. My car window broke and cut me a bit.” She looked like she was about to ask more questions, so he waved those off, too. “What’s the emergency, Jin?” he asked.

  “It’s about Rusalka.”

  “Her name is Olena Zhdanov,” he corrected, his voice mildly reproving. “Calling her Rusalka just reinforces her dissociation.” Any mention of the woman under any name was unsettling, though. Olena Zhdanov was responsible for at least seven deaths. She claimed to be responsible for even more than that, and Cain had little reason to doubt her.

  Born in Irkutsk, Russia, Zhdanov had come to the United States three years earlier, ostensibly on a work visa, but actually, she had told Cain in one of their first sessions, because she hoped to marry a rich American. Zhdanov was a strikingly attractive woman, with bold Slavic features and searing intensity. Within weeks of her arrival, she was engaged to a Devil’s Cape oilman named Todd Eisenberg, who made millions through offshore drilling.

  But some pivotal event, one Cain had never succeeded in getting Zhdanov to reveal in more than hints, had changed her aspirations and her life. On a clear December evening, the Devil’s Cape police were summoned to the Eisenberg home, where Zhdanov had taken up residence. A deliveryman had discovered Todd Eisenberg’s corpse, as well as those of his maid and gardener, slumped underneath the house’s fresh-cut Christmas tree, its ornaments half-hung, the lights twinkling. Their bodies were withered, desiccated. Cain had seen photographs of the scene and the corpses reminded him of mummified remains of ancient Egyptians and Incans he’d seen in museums. Eisenberg wore a silk robe open at the chest, his skin stretched as taut as old paper across his bones.

  All three of the deceased had been seen earlier that morning, healthy and hearty.

  A police detective had discovered Zhdanov in Eisenberg’s master bath, soaking in bubbles in the Jacuzzi, weeping. They’d spoken for a few moments and then the detective had reached out a hand to help the distraught woman from the tub. He’d collapsed to the ground, withering, his arteries and veins shriveling so rapidly that his heart b
urst open.

  Zhdanov’s tears had turned briefly to laughter then, hysterical, desperate. Another police officer died before she was subdued, and then, months later, a Holingbroke orderly and a fellow patient. However she managed it, Zhdanov was able to—to use unscientific language—“leech the life” from other creatures with a touch. And she did so with a manic pleasure.

  “What about her?” Cain asked quietly.

  Jin sighed. “She’s escaped.”

  * * * * *

  Cain stepped into Olena Zhdanov’s sparsely furnished room. A double bed with a flat sealed-seam mattress sat against one wall, a pressed-wood desk and matching chair against another. A small throw rug managed to cover half of the tile floor, and a trunk sat at the end of her bed. The walls were barren. A small row of books stretched across her desktop. She spoke excellent English, but preferred to read in Russian. Her selections, though, weren’t by Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, or even Chkhartishvili. Instead, she read translations of Danielle Steele and Rosamunde Pilcher. A framed picture of her dead fiancé decorated a wooden chest of drawers.

  Out of necessity, she’d had a private bathroom, but it was small, too; she’d had barely enough room to shower.

  The small size of her room made the corpse lying on its side in the hallway seem even more jarring.

  The victim, Thomas Dickerson, had been an orderly at the Holingbroke Psychological Institute for eight months. A heavyset black Creole who played piano at his church, Dickerson had been trained on security precautions in dealing with Olena Zhdanov. He’d been informed of the death of another orderly a few months after Zhdanov had arrived. At Cain’s insistence as a precaution for all employees coming into contact with Zhdanov, Dickerson had even been shown photographs of the other orderly’s corpse. Yet here he lay.

  Cain, who had taken ten minutes to clean himself up, change, and stuff the yellowed tabloid into a desk drawer before coming up to Zhdanov’s room, squatted beside Dickerson’s body, careful to touch nothing, and stared at the withered features. Dickerson had weighed perhaps 260 pounds. He’d been in his late twenties, and his skin had been smooth and youthful. Were it not for his clothing and his distinctive oiled goatee, Dickerson’s corpse would have been unrecognizable. The body was gaunt and shriveled, the skin horribly wrinkled and even torn in places. Blood vessels had popped throughout his body in tiny eruptions, but the blood, too, had dried out rapidly, leaving him with starbursts of scabs underneath the skin. His shrunken eyes hung loosely in their sockets. His lips had drawn back from the rapid desiccation until they looked almost as though they were smiling. The skin was pulled against the bones in wrinkled lumps, and Cain guessed that the body that remained weighed less than 150 pounds.

  No one knew exactly how Zhdanov’s “power” worked. She touched someone and that person withered, quickly dying and becoming something like this, like a mummified corpse, if she did not let go. A visiting biologist, less of a serious scientist than Cain had been led to believe, had speculated that she drained the victim’s “life force,” though Cain thought that that was ridiculous. He himself had wondered if her power didn’t involve somehow removing the moisture from the target’s body; one of the witnesses to the last orderly’s death had said he’d seen steam coming out of Zhdanov’s eyes and mouth while she touched him. In addition, Zhdanov had been reported to exhibit great feats of strength and stamina after inflicting her terrible damage on another person.

  The police had secured the scene and had allowed Cain, as head of the department and Zhdanov’s psychiatrist, into the area in order to verify Dickerson’s identity and to point out anything out of place in Zhdanov’s small room. A crime scene photographer was snapping various shots of the area with a digital camera.

  The detective in charge was named Cynthia Daigle. Rail-thin and acne-scarred, with straight, graying brown hair that reached her shoulders, she had shockingly blue eyes and a deep Cajun accent. “You think she just got him to open the door for her?” she asked, her hands in the pockets of a blue and white pinstriped seersucker jacket that surely had been tailored for a man fifty pounds heavier than she was. She smelled of Camel cigarettes and perfume. Intuition from Estee Lauder—he’d bought a bottle for a woman he’d dated once. She’d eyed his cuts when she’d first seen him, but hadn’t commented on them.

  “No,” Cain answered. “He was trained not to do that. He knew how dangerous she is.”

  Detective Daigle shrugged, squatting down by Dickerson, twisting her head and peering at him with curiosity. “She’s an attractive woman, you say?”

  “Even so,” he answered. He gestured at Dickerson. “He was shown pictures of the last orderly she killed. He looked like this, too.”

  “Even so,” she echoed. “An attractive woman, a soft word . . . maybe she convinced him she really needed him to unlock her door.”

  “No,” he said flatly. “There are protocols involved, even in an emergency if he thought that she were dying or something.” He peered at Dickerson. “Besides,” he added. “I don’t see her as the one who clubbed him in the back of the head. With that angle, with the difference in their heights, it had to be somebody taller, and besides, what would be the point? All she’d need to do is touch him, not club him.”

  She looked at him curiously. “What do you mean, ‘clubbed him in the back of the head’?”

  He blinked, then pointed at the spot at the top of Dickerson’s head where the hair was flattened and splayed out, a dark purple at the scalp subtly different from the other markings left by Zhdanov’s touch. “Here,” he said.

  Daigle bent over Dickerson, shining a flashlight at his head and using a magnifying glass. “I’ll be damned,” she said. “I wonder what he was hit with?”

  Cain’s eyes cast around the hallway for about half a second, then he pointed. “There,” he said, indicating a fire extinguisher at the end of the hallway, neatly placed back in its designated spot. “The shape of the extinguisher’s base matches the mark on Dickerson’s skull and there’s one of his hairs stuck to the bottom.”

  She turned and stared at him. “You’re telling me you can spot a hair from this distance?” The fire extinguisher was about fifty feet down the hall.

  Cain blinked again. She was right, of course. There should have been no way for him to spot the hair, but he could see it clearly from where he was standing, could tell even that it curved like Dickerson’s hair, that a bit of skin clung to the end of the bulb of the hair, meaning that it could be DNA-matched to him if need be. He saw old fingerprints on the extinguisher, probably from whoever had manufactured it in the first place, but with newer smudges across them, as though whoever had used it to club Dickerson had been wearing gloves. Under the scent of Daigle’s perfume and tobacco, he could detect a whiff of men’s aftershave in the hallway. He didn’t recognize the brand, but he could place some of its constituents—orange blossom, coriander, cedar. Traces of it wafted past through the air. Did the scent belong to the person who had hit Dickerson? Cain could hear the mumbling of other inmates of Holingbroke’s wing for its most violent and self-destructive patients, confined to their rooms, agitated by the police activity outside. What the hell was happening here? His senses were more acute than they’d ever been, acute beyond all reason—he was even hearing whispering from several rooms and several reinforced walls away, the phrasing distinct. Could he be hallucinating again? Could the Thorazine be having this effect on him?

  No, he thought. No, it was something else.

  “Dr. Ducett? You spotting more hairs with your telescopic vision?”

  He turned to the detective, a pleasant smile on his face hiding his churning thoughts. “Of course not,” he lied. “I walked around here a bit while you were studying the room. I apologize. I figured you’d probably already noticed those things.”

  Her eyes on him were wary. “We’ll check into your suggestions,” she said.

  He could hear that her heart rate had risen. He’d made her nervous. Suspicious.

  “We
will, of course, offer the police any assistance we can,” he said.

  “You do that,” she said. She appeared to turn her attention back to the corpse, but her eyes were on Cain.

  As he walked back down the corridor, he could feel—literally feel—her head lift as she gazed after him.

  Dr. Cain Ducett didn’t know why his senses were behaving this way. But he did know that he’d just blundered into making himself a suspect in Olena Zhdanov’s escape. He didn’t doubt that he could eventually prove his innocence, but any delays that the police experienced while investigating him—and his extremely difficult-to-explain behavior over the last few hours—would give Zhdanov time to get farther away, to kill more people. Cain scratched at one of the cuts on his face. Dried blood crumbled away. When he touched his fingertips to the cut, he could tell that the wound was entirely gone.

  What in the hell was happening to him? And what was he going to do about it?

  Better pull on your sweaters tonight, folks. We’re going to drop from our high of 96 this afternoon to a bracing 87 degrees tonight, with humidity at 80 percent. Seriously, crank up the AC if you have it, and lock your doors and windows if you can stand to. It’s likely to be another wild night in Pirate Town.

  — From a WTDC weather report

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Devil’s Cape, Louisiana

  Four days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders

  11 p.m.

  Joe Gaines had been running with the Concrete Executioners for three years, since he was eleven years old. Even before that, he’d looked up to the CEs. They walked tall in his neighborhood. Other people, even teachers at his school, even his dad, lowered their eyes when the CEs came near. Even the younger CEs wore real gold chains. They had good shoes. They strutted. The chief of the CEs, the Troll, could kick the ass of anyone on the planet.