Voodoo Moon

by Ed Gorman

  Leaving me with Rick Hennessy.

  I used FBI data and I used the reports Susan Charles had given me and I set to serious work on my profile.

  "Tuna fish?"

  I looked up. Susan Charles smiled down at me. The café had a counter, six booths, and a jukebox loaded with twang.

  "Uh-huh," I said. "I like tuna fish."

  "In a red-meat state like Iowa?"

  "I'll make up for it later. I'll eat an entire side of beef by myself."

  "That's more like it."

  "You could always sit down."

  "I don't want to bother you."

  "I'd like the company."

  "Will it bother you if I smoke?"

  "Smoking, no. But I have to tell you, I draw the line at chewing tobacco."

  Chief Susan Charles smiled and sat down in the booth across from me. "Funny running across you in here."

  "Why?"

  "You don't look like the type who'd eat in greasy spoons."

  "Oh, what do I look like?"

  "More upscale."

  "I'll take that as a compliment."

  "I meant it as a compliment."

  "Now, I'll return the favor. You don't look like the type who'd be a police chief in a small town like this."

  "I don't?"

  "Huh-uh."

  "Where should I be, then?"

  "Big city. Chicago. Homicide detective, maybe."

  "Too depressing. There's a small lake in my backyard. And the hills around my place are filled with pine trees. Hard to get that in Chicago." She caught me looking at her scar again. "Knife."

  "Knife?"

  "College boyfriend. If he couldn't have me, he didn't want anybody to have me. I got pregnant. I wanted to keep the baby. He said no. He was on his way to being an important surgeon. Baby would just get in our way. I was enough of a Catholic, I didn't want to have an abortion. But he finally convinced me that was the only way. The funny thing was, I warned him. I said, if I get this abortion I'll never feel the same way about you again. He said I was being stupid. He said that a lot, actually. So I had the abortion and then I broke up with him. I had no feelings left for him. He went berserk like our friend Rick Hennessy. Wouldn't leave me alone for months. Then one night he got me in a parking garage and cut me up."

  "God, I'm sorry."

  "Maybe it was good for me."

  She was about to go on but the waitress came. She ordered a salad and coffee. When the waitress left, she said, "I used to be a real bitch. My father was a judge and we came from a lot of inherited money. And I was always the best-looking girl in the room. I was very arrogant. My scar changed all that. People focus on the scar now, not my looks. And it's taught me humility. I see what a lot of people—people with limps and lisps and lost limbs and things like that—go through. Now when people stare at me it isn't because I'm such a babe. It's the scar." She smiled. "They're always curious how I got it, of course. I'm the same way with other people who have facial scars. I've been thinking about printing up little fliers that give the whole story. Then I could just hand them out and they could read them. I went from a princess to a whole different perspective. So I guess I should thank him for that. I'm a real person now. When I think back to what a spoiled, selfish bitch I was, I shudder. Literally."

  "So how did you become a cop?"

  "Well, during the trial and everything—my boyfriend came from a wealthy family too, so the trial went on for more than a month—I started getting interested in police work and things like that. I finished up college and went to the police academy in Des Moines. Then I came back here and started out in a patrol car."

  "You must like it."

  "Love it."

  While we ate, we talked mostly about the disadvantages of small-town life. I told her about my place outside Cedar Rapids, and how the loneliness was good sometimes, and not so good at other times. I told her about my wife.

  "You still love her," she said.

  "I suppose I do."

  "I can hear it in your voice."

  "You don't ever forget somebody like her."

  "I envy both of you. A relationship like that."

  "You're not married?"

  "Came close once a few years ago. But it went south, as the saying goes." She paused. "He was a lawyer and he got involved with a woman whose divorce he was handling. A lot of lawsuits and litigation. The woman sued him and so did her husband. I figured if he couldn't be faithful while we were engaged, he'd never make it while we were married. Even when I was a spoiled bitch, I was faithful. Adultery is something I can't abide. My aunt was unfaithful to my uncle, and it destroyed him. I was very young when it happened. It made a terrible impression on me. I never forget it."

  "You don't sound like any chief of police I've ever talked to."

  She grinned. "More like Oprah, huh?"

  "A little. But I like it."

  While chewing the last of a forkful of celery, she said, "He's guilty."

  "Rick?"

  She nodded.

  "Not according to Dr. Williams."

  "Dr. Williams can't afford to believe he's guilty."

  "Why not?"

  "All the publicity he got for 'curing' Rick. No drugs. Quits stalking his girlfriend. Becomes the same good little boy he used to be. And then he suddenly starts taking meth again and stalking her and ultimately killing her. Dr. Williams was hoping to get a big book contract. One of his nurses even told me he was speculating who'd play him in the TV movie."

  "Wow. A modest man."

  "But if Rick's found guilty, all that's gone."

  "I take it Dr. Williams isn't your favorite guy."

  "I don't have much faith in psychiatry. And I feel the same way about the hired guns who work for the state. They mostly play word games and puff themselves up. My understanding is that most of Freud has been discredited anyway."

  "So I hear."

  She shrugged. "To be fair, we've all got our angles. I was the one who arrested Rick, so I want to see him convicted. So does Sandy's dad, because he knows all the terrible things Rick did to his daughter—even before he killed her. Dr. Williams and Rick's folks don't want to see him convicted because they've convinced themselves he's innocent, and because it will reflect badly on them if he's found guilty. They saw the wild kid he became but they couldn't do anything about it. A lot of people in a town like this always blame the parents."

  "You don't see any possibility that it's somebody else?"

  "Not really."

  "And being a dutiful chief of police, you've considered other possibilities?"

  "I know the rap."

  "The rap?"

  "That we make up our minds who did it and then never investigate anybody else."

  "It happens."

  "Did Dr. Williams tell you Rick was seen leaving the boathouse where the body was found?"

  "No."

  "Did he tell you that DNA tests showed Rick had her blood all over his hands?"

  "No."

  "Did he tell you that her bra—with her blood on it—was found in Rick's car?"

  "Wow."

  "Wow is right. How'd you like to be the attorney who has to argue against that kind of evidence?"

  "Who is his attorney, by the way?"

  "Woman named Iris Rutledge. Two blocks down and around the corner. Upstairs. She's young and smart and good. But she's not going to win this one."

  "More coffee?" the waitress asked. We both said yes, please. She filled our cups.

  She said, "Do you bowl?"

  I smiled. "Not so's you'd notice."

  "Good. How about going bowling with me tonight?"

  "Really?

  "I usually go with a friend but she's got a cold. I need somebody to bowl with."

  "Boy," I said. "Bowling."

  "And afterward we can walk down to the DQ."

  "Dairy Queen?"

  "Right."

  "Life in the fast lane."

  "You know you want to go, Payne. You're just trying to be
this big-city sophisticate."

  "How do you know I want to go?"

  "The way you're looking at me."

  "Maybe I'm looking at your scar."

  "Huh-uh. You're past that point. Now, you're looking at me. And I appreciate it. I guess I've still got some vanity left after all. Pathetic as it is." For the first time, I sensed her self-consciousness about the scar. And maybe a little bit of the pain.

  I laughed. "My pleasure. You're still a good-looking woman. So do I pick you up or what?"

  "I'll just meet you there. It's on the east edge of town. Night Owl Lanes."

  "I don't have a bowling shirt."

  "They'll probably let you in anyway."

  She stood up. Picked up both checks.

  "Hey."

  "I'm also on the chamber of commerce board, Payne. I'm supposed to pick up checks like this." Then, "See you about eight o'clock."

  Iris Rutledge's office was on the top floor of what had once been a grocery store. In the first-floor windows, you could still see some of the produce stalls and two of the aisles. Dust to dust. Rats roamed the place now. They left their little turds everywhere. Another era come and gone. It was sad somehow, and scary. Someday my era would come and go, too, my whole generation vanished utterly.

  I walked up the outside steps to the second floor. They creaked and wobbled. I wondered if she did personal injury law. The stairs seemed on the verge of collapse. She might end up defending her-self someday.

  There was a sign that read COURTHOUSE. BACK AT 3.

  I went back down the stairs, and that was when I saw him. He hadn't been there before. Heavyset balding guy in a nondescript, forest-green, Ford four-door sedan. Illinois plates. White button-down shirt. Dark glasses. Motor running. He was intently writing something in a small black notebook. Then he abruptly pulled away. The bands in the automatic transmission sounded a little loose for such a new car. Down to the end of the block. Turned right. Gone.

  I was just walking back to my own car when a girl pulled up on her racing bicycle. She wore black leather riding gloves, black latex racing shorts, and a white T-shirt inside of which bobbed merry little braless breasts. She was somewhere around eighteen, pretty in a freckled, prairie way. "You Mr. Woodson?"

  "Afraid not."

  "Oh. You work with Iris?"

  "No. But I was looking for her."

  "Me, too." She frowned. She had nice, long legs planted on either side of the bike on the cracked sidewalk. "I finally work myself up to telling her the truth and then she isn't even here when I stop by." She held out a gloved hand. We shook. "I'm Emily Cunningham, Sandy's cousin."

  "Robert Payne. I am in town trying to find the truth about your cousin's death, though."

  "Really?"

  "Yes. I'm a psychological profiler."

  "Oh. Silence of the Lambs."

  "Something like that."

  "'I had an old friend for dinner.' I love that line."

  "That's a good one, all right." I wasn't sure if it was exactly verbatim but it didn't matter.

  There was a breeze, carrying on it the heady smell of burning leaves. I thought of high school and football games and sitting in the stands with the girl who'd become my wife. All that sweet frantic necking in the backseat of the car later on, and a wolfed-down midnight pizza at Pizza Hut. Then more necking before she finally went in for the night. It was painful to confront my loss this way; and yet it was pain lined with pleasure.

  "Are there really cannibals?"

  "I'm afraid there are."

  "You ever meet one?"

  "Once. When I was with the FBI."

  "Wow. You were with the FBI?"

  I nodded.

  "So how many people did he eat, the cannibal, I mean?"

  I smiled. "Well, I don't think he ate whole people. Just little bits and pieces of them."

  "You ever meet anybody who ate an entire person?"

  "Not that I can think of."

  She was a great kid. Cute and smart and curious, even if her curiosity did take a macabre turn here and there.

  I said, "You think he did it?"

  "Who?"

  "Rick."

  "Killed Sandy, you mean?"

  "Uh-huh."

  She looked at me. "Maybe."

  I guess I was surprised she hadn't simply said yes. His history with Sandy. The blood on his hands.

  "You think of anybody else who might've done it?"

  "That's what Iris wants me to talk about."

  "Somebody else you suspect, you mean?"

  I could see her tense up. "You were really with the FBI?"

  "Yes."

  "How long?"

  "Eleven years."

  She watched me some more. "I still probably ought not to tell you anything."

  "'Why not?"

  "'Cause Iris'd get mad. She's got a terrible temper."

  "She does, huh?"

  "She got kicked out of court one day because she told the judge he was stupid." She checked her watch. "Well, I guess I'll ride over to Wal-Mart. I need to get some stuff. Then I'll stop back here."

  "She left a note. She's supposed to be back in half an hour."

  "Well, if you see her first, just tell her Emily Cunningham stopped by."

  "Any other message?"

  She smiled. "You just want to know what I want to tell her, don't you?"

  "I sure do."

  "We'll have to talk some more about cannibals sometime."

  "I can't wait."

  She looked at me and said, "Tell her I want to talk to her about Sandy's dad. And that baby picture. She'll know what I mean." Then she was gone.

  I spent two hours in the library reading about Paul Renard and the asylum fire. The librarian, a sweet-faced woman with a slow, sad smile, said that this was the most exciting story in all of Brenner's history. She said she could remember seeing Paul Renard when she was a young girl and that he'd been quite handsome. She then gave me what she referred to as the "Renard File."

  Renard had been a local boy of great means. He'd gone east to school and graduated from Princeton, then returned here to run his father's bank. His parties were famous. He'd once brought a string quartet in from Chicago. On another occasion, he got Robert Frost, who'd been doing a reading at the University of Iowa, to have dinner at his estate. Renard was cultured, smart, generous, and a heartbreaker. He flew women in from as far away as Los Angeles and New York for some of his three-day weekends. His manse had a pool, a tennis court, and a beautiful view of the Iowa River, complete with natural dam.

  It was believed he killed his first woman when he was thirtyone. This was never proven—or at least, the local police didn't try very hard to prove it and he killed his second when he was thirty-three. Both were hitchhikers. Both took months to identify. He had buried them in deep pits. During all this time, he continued to run his bank and have his parties. There were those who believed he belonged in prison; and there were those who believed he was completely innocent, and that his accusers were merely jealous of his lifestyle. He was an awfully charming man, apparently, and a lot of people liked him. Six months after the discovery of the second body, an assistant county attorney went to the town council—behind his boss's back—and gave a rambling and melodramatic speech, the point of which being that Paul Renard should be indicted on two counts of murder. When his boss did find out about it, he fired the young man, who left town shortly thereafter.

  The quirk in the story had to do with a third murder. A local waitress was found strangled to death in her house trailer. Paul Renard could not possibly have committed this murder. He was in New Jersey at the Princeton homecoming. But the feeling of the town's three or four most powerful civic leaders was that violence was getting out of hand—three murders in five years in a town that hadn't seen a murder in the previous two decades—and while they were resolving the waitress's murder (her boyfriend, a redneck drifter with ties to the KKK, had already been indicted), they might as well deal with Paul Renard as well.


  They gave him his choice. He could face indictment and trial or he could agree to voluntary incarceration in the local psychiatric hospital. He offered a third option. He would go away and never return. They said no. They were decent people; why inflict a sociopath on another community? There was no doubt about his guilt. He'd lost a wristwatch at one of the death scenes. They kept reminding him of this. They kept reminding him that after the second death, the local police had secretly searched his manse and found bloody clothes. The blood on his shirt and trousers matched the type of the dead girl.

  Paul Renard was incarcerated. The story went that he'd suffered a complete nervous breakdown. Apparently, those parties weren't as easy to stage as they might appear to the untutored eye. They had taken their toll on the poor dear.

  One year into his stay at the psychiatric hospital, Renard began to cause trouble. He'd discovered voodoo, a belief system which fascinated him. He had his little cult of followers. He was their absolute master. He began by sacrificing rats and cats and stray dogs. A nurse, in love with him, even allowed herself to have sex with all of the men in the cult as Renard watched. The cult grew. The staff did everything it could to turn his followers against him. They were always pointing out how he abused and degraded them in his "authentic" rituals, and how said rituals were really nothing more than excuses for Renard to have sex. The two hospital administrators in charge were reluctant to call for outside help because the publicity would shut them down. Who wanted to send a troubled loved one to a mental hospital where voodoo was practiced in the patient rooms?

  And then the fire.

  More than thirty years ago.

  Twenty people dead.

  And Paul Renard on the run.

  It was commonly believed that nobody could survive a fall into the rapids. Not even Renard. Two of the deputies who followed him to the edge of the cliff swore they saw his head being smashed against the jagged rocks in the churning waters. One even said that he saw blood spray from Renard's skull when Renard hit the rapids and then the dam. He assured the press that nobody, however wealthy, however elegant, however cunning, could possibly have escaped those rapids. And then being hurtled over the dam itself.