Princess of Wands

by John Ringo

  “And I was planning on going to the State game on Saturday! Who’s going to drive me home?”

  Barbara tried not to sigh or mention that that was part of her reason for wanting to get away. If the day went to form, Mark would be far too drunk to drive before the game even started.

  “Catch a ride,” she snapped. “I’m sorry, Mark, but I have to get away.” She took a deep breath and counted to ten mentally. When that didn’t work she repeated it. In Japanese.

  “Okay,” Mark sighed as the show resumed. “Where are you going?”

  “Gulfport, probably,” Barb answered. “I’ll get a cheap hotel room and just… read I think.”

  “Whatever,” Mark said, watching Jennifer Aniston bounce across the screen to the couch.

  “And you’ll need to get the kids to school on Monday,” she said.

  “Okay,” he replied, clearly not listening.

  She stood up and walked to the bedroom, got undressed, cleaned off her makeup, climbed into bed and picked up her latest trashy novel. Another day down. Just one more until she had a break. She could use a nice relaxing weekend.

  * * *

  Augustus Germaine held the scale up with a pair of tweezers and rotated it against the light, shaking his head.

  “I thought that Almadu was dispelled, what, seventy years ago?” Assistant Director Grosskopf said.

  “All are not dead that sleeping lie,” Germaine answered, continuing to examine the scale. “What once was can be again. And, clearly, is. The thorium traces are distinct, as is the patterning of the scale. Someone has been very naughty.” He set the scale down on the laboratory bench and looked over at Dr. Mattes. “Concur?”

  “Oh, yes,” Vonnia Mattes, Ph.D., replied, shrugging. “And the construct DNA, of course.”

  “So it’s a manifestation of Almadu for sure?” Grosskopf asked, pointedly. “That’s a full avatar manifestation. I can’t exactly send my agents in on that!”

  “No, it’s clearly Special Circumstances,” Germaine said with a sigh. “I’ll find someone to attach to your investigation. The usual covers.” He frowned and bit his lip, wincing. “But for a full manifestation… I don’t really have any agents, available agents, that are up to dispelling one of those. Not to mention their followers. This is likely to get… noticeable.”

  “Five dead hookers are already noticeable,” Grosskopf pointed out.

  “Noticeable as in explosions, weird lights, people going insane and lots of dead bodies,” Germaine snapped. “This is not going to be an easy take-down. The last cult involved depth charges, torpedoes and a full cover-up. And even then that beastly writer got ahold of some of it!”

  “Whatever,” Grosskopf replied. “Just get it shut down. Fast. Before somebody outside the organization stumbles on it.”

  “Well,” Germaine said, shrugging, “if they do, I don’t think they’ll live long enough to tell anyone about it.”

  * * *

  Blessed peace.

  Barbara enjoyed driving, especially when she was by herself. She loved her children and her husband, but it just wasn’t the same. A reasonably open road and good car meant time to think, time to pray, time to dream without constant interruption. As she pulled onto the Natchez Trace she pushed a CD into the player and felt the ethereal strains of Evanescence wash over her, rinsing out her soul in music. She’d been told that Evanescence was first classified as a Christian rock band despite its Goth look. She didn’t know if it was true or not but it was probable. Surely only God would have a hand in such glorious music and most of the songs could be interpreted that way. Certainly “Tourniquet” was a direct call to God although “Haunted” always made her wonder.

  The radar detector remained quiet all the way to the outskirts of Jackson where the traffic started to pick up anyway and she had to slow down below eighty. She weaved expertly in and out of the traffic for as long as she could, never being aggressive, never getting angry even at the idiots that clogged up the left-hand lane. She didn’t know where she got the ability to sense what other drivers were going to do, sometimes even before they seemed to know. But when a car cut into her lane suddenly she’d know it before the first move. Sudden braking rarely caught her unawares even though she was in an alpha state of road daze. She just handled it until the traffic got so heavy she couldn’t maneuver, then settled in the middle lane and rode the flow into Jackson.

  She was planning on picking up 49 in Jackson and taking it over to Hattiesburg then down to Gulfport but at the last minute she changed her mind, picking up I-55 instead and heading for Louisiana. She didn’t know why, but for once she could just follow her feelings. She had a sudden craving for Cajun food, real Cajun food from down in the bayou and decided to go with it. Besides, she’d been to Gulfport every summer for the last five years. She wanted something new.

  When she was growing up, all she’d wanted was to settle in one place. Just some stability and not having to wonder what country you’d woken up in. Sometimes she’d wondered if she’d fallen for Mark simply because he represented that stability. Mark was from Oxford, which wasn’t all that far from Tupelo, and when she’d met him the farthest he’d ever traveled was to Daytona Beach for spring break.

  Since being married, and never traveling any farther than Daytona, Barbara had started to notice how much she missed it. When the kids were young it was one thing; she was occupied full time taking care of them. But since they’d become more or less self functional for day-to-day activities, she’d started to crave something new. Which meant not going to Gulfport again.

  Besides, U.S. 49 was a crawl from Jackson to Gulfport, especially on a Friday.

  The traffic on I-55 was heavy with weekend travelers and she was reduced to a relative crawl of high seventies. She continued on 55 nonetheless, following it all the way down to I-10 and then striking out into the unknown. She followed U.S. 90 for a while and then took a side-road, heading into bayou country and trying as hard as she could to get lost. She had a GPS and checked that it was tracking, so no matter where she ended up she could find her way back.

  However, the meandering on side roads with their sudden turns to avoid going into a swamp got wearying after a while. She’d had so much to do she hadn’t gotten on the road until around three and it had been a long nine-hour drive to the bayou country. So as midnight approached she started looking for sign of a hotel.

  The road she was on wasn’t even mapped on the GPS and the very few stores and filling stations she passed were mostly closed. But, finally, she saw a Shell station with its lights still on and pulled in gratefully. She filled her tank and then went into the crumbling cinder-block building, wrinkling her nose at the smell of dead minnows and less identifiable things.

  There was a slovenly looking fat woman with greasy black hair and a dirty smock behind the counter. People who were overweight didn’t bother Barb, Lord alone knew she had to fight to stay in any sort of shape, but dirt did. There was no reason in this day and age that a person couldn’t take at least a weekly bath and throw their clothes in the washing machine from time to time. But they were all God’s children so Barbara smiled in as friendly a manner as she could muster.

  “I’m looking for a hotel,” she said, smiling pleasantly. “Is there one around?”

  The woman looked at her for a long time without speaking, then nodded, frowning.

  “Im de parsh set been Thibaw Een,” the woman said, pointing in the direction Barb had been traveling. “Bein closin soon.”

  Barbara smiled again and nodded, blinking in incomprehension. It was the thickest Cajun accent she had ever heard in her life. Back home the locals sometimes put on a thicker than normal southern drawl to confuse visiting Yankees and people from Atlanta. If you talked like your mouth was full of marbles it made you virtually incomprehensible. She wondered if the woman was doing that to her but was too polite to ask for a translation. So she nodded again and walked back out to her car.

  Apparently somewhere down the road wa
s the “parish seat,” which would be the center of the local county government. Where, hopefully, she could find something called the Thibaw Inn or similar.

  Even in road daze she never really went to condition white: totally unaware of her surroundings. She had been raised by a father who was marginally insane from a paranoia perspective and he’d spent hours teaching her to keep her guard up to the point that it was old hat. But she hadn’t really examined her surroundings and when she did she considered turning around and heading back to bright lights and the big city. The road was flanked on either side by bayou and the arching cypress overhung it, draped with gray Spanish moss, some of the longest she’d ever seen. The bromeliads were waving gently in the light night wind and combined with the croaking of the frogs in the bayou and the call of a night bird they gave the scene an eerie feel.

  With the exception of the station, which was shutting down as she stood there, there was not a light in sight. There was a glow back over her shoulder, probably New Orleans, but for all that she could have been standing there in a primordial forest. A splash off in the bayou was probably from an alligator slipping into the tannic water, but it could just as well have been some prehistoric monster.

  She shivered a bit and got in the car, starting it and then pausing. Turn around and head back to New Orleans or Baton Rouge? Or go on?

  On the other hand, the news out of New Orleans made a black night in the bayou seem positively friendly. And it was a long darned way around to get to Baton Rouge.

  On was, presumably, closer and it had been a long day. She put the car in gear and headed west. Somewhere around here there had to be a hotel.

  * * *

  Kelly had started off his detective career in vice and New Orleans’ French Quarter was as close as he could call anything to home. So he walked along Chartres Street with an air of ownership, dodging the occasional group of tourists and looking for familiar faces.

  Familiar faces were few and far between, though; the ladies seemed to be running shy of the street. There were a few around, though, some of whom recognized him from previous busts and for once seemed glad to see him. He wandered over to Dolores as she waved to a passing car.

  “Hey, Dolores,” he said, grinning. “How’s tricks?”

  “Short, small and too slow, like usual,” the hooker replied. “I am, of course, simply a young lady who enjoys dates with generous gentlemen and sex has nothing to do with it, nor does money.”

  Dolores Grantville, age thirty-seven, hometown somewhere in Arkansas. Five foot eight, willowy, mostly from a coke habit, dishwater blonde. Six previous convictions for prostitution, one drug arrest, nol pros when she burned her dealer. Blue eyes, face worn far beyond her years. And scared. Really scared.

  “You heard about Marsha, right?” Kelly asked.

  “Probably before you did, Kel,” the hooker replied, smiling tiredly as a passing tourist beeped his horn. Her face twitched and she watched the street scene, avoiding the detective’s eyes. “You got any leads?”

  “If I did, would I be here?” Kelly asked. “What do you hear?”

  “Nothing,” Dolores said. “They’re just up and disappearing, Kelly. I mean, Marsha was a young one, they’ve all been young ones. But she was streetwise, you know? She’d been turning since she was fourteen or so. If somebody can pick her, they can pick anybody. Probably some regular trick, but nobody can put a finger on one or we’d all be telling you, okay?”

  “Okay,” Kelly agreed. “When’d you see Marsha last?”

  “Saturday,” Dolores said. “She was talking with Carlane. Be in the evening, don’t know what time. Earlyish. Nobody’s seen her since. Well… not until the papers.”

  “She used to hang with Evie, right?” Kelly asked, considering the information. Carlane Lancereau was a pimp, a long time one. Pretty heavy-handed, but that came with the territory. And he’d been around for years; there was no reason to think he’d suddenly gone nuts and started ripping up hookers. “The one that calls herself Fantasy?”

  “Evie did a runner two weeks ago,” Dolores replied. “Lots of the girls have. New Orleans don’t seem like a good place to be right now. I don’t know where she went, maybe Baton Rouge, maybe St. Louis.”

  “Nobody saw Marsha after she was talking with Carlane?” Kelly asked.

  “You think it’s Carlane?” Dolores responded, eyes wide. “He’s been around since before I got here.”

  “No,” Kelly said. “That’s not what I said. I’m just getting old and trying to cut down on the walking. Since I’m looking for the last person she was known to have talked to, which is never the murderer, I’m just trying to figure out who that was. If it wasn’t Carlane, who was it?”

  “Christy said she saw her late evening, maybe after midnight,” Dolores replied, frowning in thought. “Up Dumaine Street, off her regular beat. Looked like she was heading somewhere. But last time I saw her was talking to Carlane and she ain’t been seen since Saturday night.”

  “Okay,” Kelly said, sighing. “You see Carlane, tell him I’m looking for him, like him to give me a call. Just a friendly conversation. Or I can go find him, or have the black and whites go find him, and it won’t be so friendly.”

  “I’ll pass it on,” Dolores said. “You be careful.”

  “Always,” Kelly replied, walking off into the crowded night.

  Chapter Three

  You get anything talking to the girls?” Lieutenant Chimot asked.

  They were going over the daily take on the case. The department had set up a task force with Chimot, who was one of the three lieutenants in Homicide, in charge. It was late, but nobody was getting much sleep as long as the investigation was going on. There were five other sergeant detectives working the case but Kelly sort of figured if anybody was going to find the perp it would be him. The other detectives were straight-arrow homicide dicks; in other words they could just about see lightning and hear thunder.

  Most homicides were pretty straightforward investigations. There was a dead body on the floor and a person, usually a spouse, standing over it mumbling about whatever had set them off. File the paperwork, go to court, walk the jury through the chain of evidence and you were done. Then there were the gang shootings, which usually came down to somebody boasting and squeezing the name out of a singer.

  Serial killers were different. They usually worked alone and they were generally smart, often very smart. They covered their tracks. Talk about profiles all you wanted, they didn’t fit in happy little categories. They could be black, white, Hispanic or more mixed than Tiger Woods. They could be single or married. They might frequent hookers or avoid them like the plague. No two were ever exactly the same, whatever profilers tried to say. They were not all, or even mostly, single white males with a “loner” personality. The Green River killer had been a married white male who was referred to as “exuberant.” The Atlanta killings perp was a single black male. The Los Rios killer had been a married Hispanic.

  And this case was right off the charts. Very rarely did serial killings involve multiple individuals. There had been one series in California that involved two killers and a case in Charlotte that had involved six or seven. But in the latter case, one of the killers turned evidence before they’d killed more than one girl. The last case he could think of that had involved high multiples perps and multiple killings was the Manson case.

  The one near constant was that they tended to start with hookers and eventually worked their way to… tastier game. Nobody wanted a gutted corpse, but by the same token there was a much higher interest in missing schoolgirls than in hookers. Kelly liked the streetgirls for all they could be a pain in the ass. But they chose their jobs and they knew the risks. He didn’t want to be there when a black bag got slit open to show some junior high girl who had been snatched walking home from the bus. Or some oblivious college girl who had just been trying to have a good time on Bourbon Street.

  “Dolores saw her talking to Carlane sometime Saturday night,”
Kelly said, glancing at his notes. “And she was seen later, alone, on Dumaine Street. I’m going to talk to Carlane but I’d say it’s a dead-end.”

  “Who’s Carlane?” Detective Weller asked.

  “Pimp,” Chimot answered. “Been around for at least twenty years. Bastard to his girls, but…”

  “But why would he all of a sudden start offing them, right?” Kelly said. “And none of the girls were from his string; they were all independents.”

  “Trying to increase his take?” Chimot said. “Not really his MO, though, is it?”

  “No,” Kelly agreed. “But I’ll talk to him. Right now, it’s the only lead we’ve got.”

  * * *

  The town couldn’t be called a one-horse town because there wasn’t enough grass for a horse to eat. It was basically a slightly wider, slightly drier spot in the swamp. There was a dilapidated courthouse, a small Piggly Wiggly, a closed gas station and an old mansion that had a sign out front that said “Thibideau House.” Since there was a “Vacant” sign next to it, she had to assume it was the town’s lone hotel and there was a light on that revealed a large, covered front porch.

  She parked around the side and went to the front, hoping that the light meant somebody was still awake. The door was open so she pushed on it and listened to the creak with a slight sense of humor. You don’t get good creaks like that every day. They need either real artistry to create or just years of neglect. It was more than the hinges, the whole wall seemed to creak as the door swung open.

  She poked her head through the open door and looked inside curiously. The ornate foyer was in as bad condition as the exterior. The house had clearly once been a prime residence to someone addicted to gilt and red velvet. Time and the elements had worked their way on the foyer, however, to an even greater extent than on the door. She cat walked across the floor, just to make sure none of the flooring was going to give way. But there appeared to be no one in sight.