A Cup Full of Midnight

by Jaden Terrell

  “We’ve got uniforms outside,” Frank said. “No sign of the girlfriend, and Collins looks scared.”

  “Malone brought you in on this?” I said.

  He chuckled. “Harry brought me in. Malone’s pretending not to know.”

  It was a start.

  Billy’s search for Absinthe had been fruitless. “We looked everywhere you said, man,” he told me when I picked him up. He sounded as bummed as I felt. “No luck. ’Course, it’s a big city.”

  I nodded. “Too big, sometimes.”

  It was probably overkill, but Billy and I started over, from Dark Knight’s duplex to Barnabus’s house, to Absinthe’s. At sunset, we tried the Underground and the Masquerade, then prowled downtown until our eyes were red with cold and our fingers and toes were numb.

  No luck.

  A little before midnight, I turned to him and said, “I have an idea.”

  “Good. If it doesn’t work, can we go home and get some sleep?”

  “I have to make a phone call.”

  I punched in a number, woke Heath Parker out of a sound sleep, and told him I needed the key to his brother’s apartment and why I needed it.

  “Sure, man,” he said, proving that blood is not destiny. Billy and I made a detour to Heath’s apartment to pick up the key, and thirty minutes later, we pulled Billy’s van, the one with the painting of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” on the sides, into Razor’s driveway.

  “You want to go around back?” I asked Billy. “I’ll take the front.”

  He nodded and ambled around the corner of the house. He was a big man, fifty extra pounds of weight around the middle, but you could still see the Special Forces in him when he moved.

  I opened the front door and stepped into Razor’s living room.

  It was much as I remembered it, decorated in late Dark Shadows, early Addams Family. It had a certain morbid elegance, from the deep purple velvet draperies to the red satin throw pillows on the black velour sofa. In front of the sofa was a smoked glass coffee table with a crack in it, and to the right of that was a black acrylic curio cabinet, shelves full of occult knick-knacks. Tarot cards, a crystal ball, a gold goblet shaped like a dragon’s claw, a jar full of colored crystals, a shrunken head.

  On the mantel, two gold candelabras flanked a leering human skull. It looked real, but a tap with a fingernail said it was fiberglass.

  Since I’d been there last, he’d added a print of a crucified Jesus and attached a Groucho Marx nose and mustache to the face.

  I was no saint, but it pissed me off anyway.

  The room had been awash in blood. The stains were still visible, Rorschach blossoms on the pale carpet. Across the walls, dark, angry splashes bled long vertical drip marks. In front of the stairs, the bloody imprint of Razor’s body lay across a pentagram the color of rust.

  The Parkers hadn’t hired a cleaning crew yet. I wondered why. Apathetic brother, mom in denial?

  I closed the door behind me and stepped in, careful to avoid the dried pools of blood. “Absinthe? It’s Jared McKean.”

  No answer.

  I made my way through the house, turning on lights as I went and turning them off as I finished with each room. In the kitchen sink, someone had left a spoon and a cereal bowl with a trace of milk still in the bottom. The milk was still fresh.

  In the upstairs bathroom, a 2X Guns N’ Roses T-shirt hung over the curtain rod. It was damp.

  The bedroom window was open. I leaned out and called again.

  No answer. I combed the house again, just to be sure she wasn’t hiding in a closet or under a bed. Then I went around to the back and called again. “Billy? Where the hell are you?”

  Finally, Billy trotted out of the shadows in the backyard, breathing hard. “Lost her,” he said. “She dropped out of that tree there beside the house and took off like a scared rabbit. Fast little sucker, ain’t she? For a fat kid.”

  “Probably went out the bedroom window as soon as she saw the van.”

  “Least we know she’s close.”

  I nodded. “Tell you what. You take the van and see if you can spot her on the street. I’ll cut through the yards and try to catch her on foot.”

  We spent the next four hours searching Razor’s neighborhood, but there was no sign of the missing girl.

  Like Elgin Mayers, she was a ghost.

  Finally, Billy drove me back to the shelter to pick up my truck, and I promptly drove it back to Razor’s.

  I mean, why waste a perfectly good key?

  This time, I took my time.

  The footprints Frank had described were between the curio cabinet and the glass-topped coffee table. They had been smeared beyond recognition and more blood splashed over them. A crescent-shaped stain indicated where the killer had dropped the knife.

  Razor had probably been killed here. The rest of the scene—pentagram, blood splashes, charred heart—were all designed to obscure that fact. But between the crime scene photos and the pattern of stains, a decent investigator could pretty much read the story of Razor’s death.

  His killer had been standing beside the curio. The first slash, the one to the throat, had caught Razor by surprise. He’d jerked away from his attacker, widening the gash, and thrown up his hands to protect himself. Arterial blood spurted from his neck, drenching himself and his attacker. Spraying the white carpet with red.

  The knife wrenched free, sliced through the webbing between his ring and middle fingers, cut downward across the palm, and bounced across the forearm, leaving the defensive cuts we’d seen in the photos.

  Razor stumbled backward and tripped over the coffee table. He’d fallen into it, leaving a hairline crack in the glass.

  He would have died quickly after that.

  I stepped over the pentagram and went upstairs to the bathroom. Byron’s chin-up bar, where Razor had been hung to bleed out, stretched across the door. It would have taken a long time, during which the killer had probably gone back downstairs to smear the footprints and use the vacuum.

  The anxiety must have been unbearable.

  What if a neighbor had wanted to borrow a cup of sugar? What if someone had come by selling Girl Scout cookies or collecting for UNICEF?

  The bathtub looked pristine, but I knew that under the right light, I would see traces of glowing violet.

  I went back downstairs to look at the pentagram.

  It had been drawn inside a six-foot diameter circle. The edges were straight and the angles symmetrical. Either a measuring device had been used or someone had a good eye for geometry. Like draining the body, this had taken some time.

  The killer, or killers, must have spent hours in the house after Razor’s death.

  The body had been placed on the pentagram and eviscerated, the heart burned, and the blood splashed around the room.

  Why?

  If they’d left the scene the way it was, there was a good chance it would have gone down as a drug-related crime or a burglary gone bad. That told me that the killers had left clues—or thought they had.

  I was still thinking of two separate killers. Killer One, who had initiated the spontaneous and clearly disorganized attack, and Killer Two, who had painstakingly analyzed and staged the scene.

  Had Killer One acted on his own impulse, snatching up the athame as a weapon of opportunity? Or had Killer Two somehow choreographed it?

  Too many questions. Not enough answers. I pushed Razor’s murder to the back of my mind and called Absinthe’s name again.

  Why had she come here? Because it was empty and familiar? How had she felt, passing the pentagram every time she crossed the living room? And who had frightened her away from home?

  They’re here, she’d said. But who were “they”? Elgin and Hewitt? Byron and Keating?

  Barnabus and Medea?

  I’d beaten the police to Barnabus, and yet he’d shown no surprise that Dark Knight was dead.

  Because he’d already known? Followed Absinthe to the Knights’ and seen the bodies
then?

  But why go after Absinthe in the first place?

  I shook my head. I had nothing but conjecture, and it was getting me nowhere.

  I started in the kitchen and went through the house, searching it much as I’d searched Absinthe’s room. The police had already covered this ground. The drugs had been confiscated, and the black residue of fingerprint powder clung to shelves and countertops and lingered in the crevices around the doorknobs.

  In Razor’s walk-in closet, I rifled through rows of leather pants studded with silver, long silk shirts with puffy sleeves, vests and evening jackets made of velvet and velour. There were condoms in some of the pockets, and I didn’t like thinking about who he’d planned to be with when he used them.

  The floor was lined with polished boots, mostly calf-length, some with buckles or chains. On the top shelf was a row of books. The Prince by Machiavelli, a collection of works by the Marquis de Sade, several treatises on psychology and the workings of the human mind.

  I reached up and pushed on the ceiling panel with my fingertips. It tilted under the pressure, and I extracted it easily. Behind the false ceiling was another shelf that ran the length of the closet. I ran my fingers around the edge and into the corners, but there was nothing there.

  Probably where he’d stashed his dope. By now, the police would have impounded it.

  I put everything back the way I’d found it and left the house, locking the door behind me.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  I was sure Frank already knew about Razor’s secret hiding place, but I called him in the morning anyway.

  “You searched the house,” he said. Disapproving.

  “Brother Heath gave me a key.”

  “Right.” I heard him shift the phone to the other ear. “And he gave you permission to toss the place.”

  “He didn’t tell me not to.”

  “Right,” he said again. “You’re gonna give me ulcers.”

  “So, what was in it?”

  “What? The hidey hole?” He was quiet for a moment, as if trying to decide whether or not to tell me. Then he said, “Nothing. It was empty.”

  “The drugs?”

  “Underwear drawer, coat pockets, bedside table. Pretty much everywhere but there.”

  “Any chance he didn’t realize it was there?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. It seemed new, not like it came with the house.”

  So Razor had a secret compartment built into his closet and then forgot to stash anything in it.

  Frank’s gravelly baritone broke into my thoughts. “We found the girl.”

  “Absinthe?”

  “The other one. The older one. Medina Neel.”

  I heard it in his voice. “Medea. Is she—”

  “Single slash to the throat. Very clean.” He wasn’t referring to the scene. There would have been a lot of blood. “Found her car in one of those pay-by-the-day parking garages downtown. Security guard noticed a bad smell coming from the trunk. When he got close, he saw a blanket draped over the front seat, but there was blood on the floor and around the dashboard. Lotta blood. Looks like the killer was waiting in the backseat of her car. Killed her quick. Put her in the trunk. Covered the bloody seat with the blanket.”

  I shook my head. A quick glance in the back before she got in the car, and Medea might have survived. I thought about reaping and sowing, about the Rule of Three. “Witnesses?”

  “None that we know of.”

  “Prints?”

  “Wiped clean. No hair, no fibers. Guy’s a fucking ghost.”

  “So he says.”

  Frank heaved a sigh. “We’re sitting on Collins now. Piece of work, isn’t he? Scared out of his wits and still talking trash. Says he can take care of himself, we’re cramping his style.”

  “He gave me that same line,” I said. “About being able to take care of himself.”

  “What can I say?” Frank said. “The world is full of stupid people.”

  If Elgin Mayers was a ghost,Absinthe had become mist. Her teachers had no idea where she might have gone. Her classmates knew her only as an odd girl who claimed to be a witch. The Goth kids down on Elliston were no help: she was finding her path, she was following the great wheel, maybe she’d hitchhiked to California.

  I left a trail of business cards around town, all bearing the same message: “Absinthe, call me, 24/7.” By then I was just going through the motions. I only hoped that Elgin Mayers was having no better luck.

  On Thursday morning, while Jay finished the last of his Christmas shopping, I stayed with Dylan. He spent the morning dozing and conversing with his invisible Marine. The two of them seemed to have developed a companionable relationship, and I was glad of it.

  For lunch, he managed to swallow a few mouthfuls of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. Then he turned his head away from the spoon and waved it away with his hand. Two sips of water and he was done.

  “You’re good with kids, aren’t you, Straight?” he asked. “I always wished I’d had some. Too selfish though, I guess.”

  “They’re a big commitment,” I said. “Nothing’s quite the same after you have one, that’s for sure.”

  He smiled and pointed toward the window. “I like that little blonde girl with the ponytail. I see her here a lot.”

  “Do you?” I glanced toward the window as if I might actually see her there.

  “I think they like it here. Lots of light, and Jay’s Christmas tree. Do you think that might be it?”

  “Maybe they just came by to say hello.”

  “Maybe so.” His smile was wistful. “I think they like me, Straight. I can’t imagine why the hell they would. Maybe they just come to see this little guy.” He scratched the pup’s oversized ears. Then he murmured, “I keep forgetting they’re not real.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I tapped a few fish flakes into the fishbowl instead. The beta darted up to the surface after them.

  “Straight?” Dylan said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve got to take a piss.”

  I was rinsing out the urinal when Jay came in. His cheeks were flushed with cold, his arms full of department store bags. Rolls of metallic wrapping paper jutted out of one of them.

  “How is he?” he asked.

  “Seems okay.”

  He nodded toward the urinal. “Sorry you had to do that.”

  “Not a problem.”

  He held up the bags. “This should do it for me. What do you have planned for the rest of the day?”

  “Thought I’d go sit around and watch Barnabus’s place.”

  “Don’t the police have that covered?”

  “Beats asking the same two hundred people if they’ve heard anything from Absinthe.”

  He shook his head. Tsk-tsked. “I’ll leave you some dinner in the fridge if you want it.”

  “Could be a long time. Maybe a couple of days.”

  “I’ll take care of the horses while you’re gone.”

  I thanked him and grabbed my jacket. “Call me if there’s a problem. Anything.”

  As I started out the door, I heard Dylan call out, “Come on, children. It’s time to go home.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Movies notwithstanding, there’s nothing fun about stakeouts. Muscles aching, bladder swollen. Nothing to read. Nothing to do. No heat or air conditioning, because sitting in a parked vehicle with the engine running draws the wrong kind of attention. In fact, sitting in a parked vehicle at all gets to look suspicious after a while, which is why tinted windows are a good thing.

  Trying not to eat or drink, because intake leads to output. I had an empty plastic jug on hand for emergencies, but obviously that wouldn’t cover all contingencies.

  I drove by once, spotted the unmarked across from the house, two plainclothes cops slouched inside sipping coffee and looking bored. Two. So one could watch while the other took a piss.

  Lucky bastards.

  I sighed and parked a few blocks
over. Circled wide through the neighbors’ yards and came around the back. No cops here. It looked sloppy. Since Frank was anything but sloppy, it told me he’d put his men inside the house instead.

  Even at this time of year, Barnabus’s yard was an overgrown tangle that stretched back two hundred yards and ended at the edge of a wooded tract that probably belonged to someone else. I hunted around until I found a deadfall I could sit behind and still see the back of the house without being spotted. Then I hunkered down behind a rotting log, put my phone on vibrate, and burrowed into my parka.

  It wasn’t cold enough for frostbite, but it was cold enough to numb my fingers and toes. I spent a long, unfruitful night. Then in the morning, stiff and cranky, ears burning with cold, I went to a nearby Waffle House for a bite of breakfast and a real restroom. I called Jay at home, but got no answer. On the way back to Barnabus’s, I picked up a few packs of peanut butter crackers and two bottles of water.

  It was past time to give up. Frank had everything under control, and the smartest thing I could do would be to go home and take a long, hot shower. But I’d reached that stubborn stage, where, when nothing is working, you dig in your heels and hang on until something gives.

  Someone had killed Tara and Dennis Knight. Slashed Medea’s throat. With Absinthe in the wind and Josh under wraps, that same someone was coming after Barnabus. Maybe later, maybe sooner, maybe Mayers, maybe someone else, but he was coming. I intended to be there.

  At suppertime, I broke out a pack of peanut butter crackers and took a few sips of water.

  I waited. Took a leak. Checked my phone. No messages. Waited some more.

  Night fell. The lights came on in Barnabus’s windows, and I felt a surge of resentment that the master vampire was inside all warm and cozy, while I was skulking around in the woods pretending to be Supercop.

  It got colder. I lowered myself to the ground, leaned my back against a tree trunk and shivered, tucking my hands under my arms.

  I must have dozed off sometime after midnight, because suddenly my eyes snapped open and I came fully awake. A sharp cry came from inside the house, followed by the crack of a pistol. I scrambled to my feet and felt for the Glock. Moved in closer for a better look.