Burnt Black

by Ed Kovacs

  “The name of his little group is the Crimson Throne. Sounds devilish,” I said, quickly reading. “Alleged antiquities smuggling, alleged drug dealing…”

  “Drug dealing?” asked Honey.

  “Psychotropic plants, mushrooms, peyote…”

  “That’s stuff shamans use.”

  I rifled through several folders quickly, barely scratching the surface. “You were right. It’ll take a week to go through all of the material here.”

  “Let’s meet with Fournier and have him give us the bullet points,” said Honey, closing a file. “Seems like if Drake had been guilty of even half of this? He would have got busted.”

  “Get this. Fournier has tied the disappearance of dozens of transients to Drake. People who had attended at least one of Drake’s classes, then disappeared.”

  “Interesting, given what we saw today. But New Orleans is full of transients. They disappear all the time—usually to go back home.”

  “That’s true.” I closed a file. It was late, and I suddenly didn’t feel like tackling the mountain of material any more than Honey did. I grabbed her keys from the table. “I left my smokes in your vehicle. Be right back.”

  I bounced out to the street and caught sight of the usual long line of people waiting on the sidewalk to get into Coops, a joint with great bar food, then noticed something that stopped me in my tracks.

  A strange symbol was freshly painted on the exterior wall, probably by using a stencil and spray paint, right next to Pravda’s front door.

  It hadn’t been there just a few minutes ago when Honey and I walked in. I took a quick cell phone snap, and then scanned the street. The Quarter was jumping tonight; there were easily a hundred people on this block of Decatur in various states of sobriety. Trying to spot any possible surveillance wouldn’t be easy.

  I stepped back into Pravda’s doorway and waved for Honey and Michelle, the twentysomething Goth chick owner, to come join me.

  “What do you ladies make of this?” I said, showing them the vandalism.

  “It’s a sigil,” said Michelle, unhappily. She frowned and tugged on an earlobe that had been pierced about twelve times. Her brown eyes stared out intently from circles of heavy, dark eye makeup on her pale white skin as she studied the symbol.

  “A sigil?” asked Honey.

  “A sigil is any glyph or symbol with a magical or mystical root or intent. They are used in all different types of magic to represent a specific resolve, such as, ‘My will is to be rich,’ or they can be used to summon demons and so on.”

  “This is voodoo?” asked Honey.

  “To my knowledge, this is not a voodoo sigil. It looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t place it. I’m sure as hell not thrilled somebody put it on my bar.”

  Honey instinctively did the same thing I had done and scanned the street.

  “It wasn’t here ten minutes ago when we came in. Sorry to tell you, Michelle, but it might be directed at us. Due to a case we’re working.”

  “I’ll have one of the guys use rubbing compound to remove this, then I’ll join you for a drink.”

  * * *

  “I see sigils around the French Quarter all the time, but not this type. It looks like some medieval symbol or even a partial ancient symbol, like maybe a piece from one of the seals of the Lesser Keys of Solomon.”

  I knew Michelle lived an alternative lifestyle and I wasn’t too surprised she knew a little something about the occult. Maybe more than a little something.

  “You mean King Solomon of the Bible?” asked Honey.

  “Exactly. He was quite a black magician with a powerful grimoire.”

  Before we could ask, Michelle continued, “A grimoire is like a how-to book—how to make talismans, how to cast a spell, how to summon a spirit. Solomon used magical symbols quite effectively, if you believe the Old Testament. Moses used magic, too, and had his own book of spells and probably his own grimoire.”

  “I saw something today next to the door of a suspect’s house.” I quickly sketched out the unusual glyph I’d seen when I first paused at Drake’s front door.

  “That looks like a typical self-generated sigil, maybe something that came from chaos magic.”

  “Chaos magic sounds modern. Is that a more recent type of magic?” I asked.

  “Exactly. It evolved out of England in the 1970s. To use a bad example of chaos magic, let’s say your intent is ‘My will is to marry a millionaire.’” As she spoke, Michelle picked up a pen and wrote on a cocktail napkin MY WILL IS TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE. “After you write your intent, remove the vowels.” She wrote M WLL S T MRR MLLNR. “Then remove any repeating consonants.” This time she wrote MWLSTRN.”

  “So this kind of a sigil is really just compressed writing?”

  “Exactly. From this last group of letters, it’s up to you to arrange them into a single cohesive symbol. After you do that, there is an elaborate process one has to go through to energize or charge the sigil.”

  “So the sigil on Drake’s house could mean anything,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a statement of protection of some sort.”

  “That sounds harmless,” said Honey.

  “Like any tool,” said Michelle, nodding, “sigils can be used positively or negatively.”

  “We need to figure out what this means,” I said, referring to the sigil left at Pravda’s front door.

  “What it means is somebody is trying to spook us. No pun intended,” said Honey.

  After getting Michelle’s promise of discretion, I filled her in on what had transpired in the last twelve hours, leaving out only the part about the human heads, since those details were not going public yet.

  “It might be helpful to find Drake’s journal of his workings. Most serious practitioners of magic keep a very detailed account of what they did and of the results,” said Michelle, finishing off the last of her Ketel One martini.

  “That might be what was in his safe,” said Honey.

  “Or in his laptop or maybe stashed at his curio shop,” I speculated, again tempting myself with the notion of a black-bag job.

  Honey must have read my mind and looked me in the eyes. “Please avoid stopping at the curio shop. Okay? Just get a good night’s sleep.”

  I lifted my glass toward Honey. “Yes ma’am.”

  The last sip of scotch went down easy. I damn sure felt exhausted but had a feeling I wouldn’t be sleeping well at all.

  * * *

  Honey declined my invite to spend the night. It hadn’t escaped my attention that she’d been somewhat of a contrarian all day, since we first spoke of haunted houses this morning. I guess the whole business just rubbed her the wrong way, but it felt odd to be slightly out of tune with my partner. So she wasn’t with me when I discovered the sigil painted on the wall next to my front door, the same as the one we found at Pravda.

  I lived in a former warehouse just up from Ernst Café in the Warehouse/Arts District, so there were still pedestrians noodling around on my street and no one appeared out of place. What really bothered me was how the vandal got my address. And he or she got it fast. My name wasn’t released to the media as being connected to the investigation.

  Who did I deal with today who might have a reason to intimidate me? Robert Drake, Kate Townsend, Gina Sanchez? It would be difficult for someone to get this address, since one of my corporations had purchased the old building and my utilities were also in the name of a corporation. The IRS and the Feds, the DMV, my bank, the credit-card companies—almost no entity or person knew my actual home address. I have made plenty of bad-guy enemies so I take my privacy very seriously.

  An elaborate alarm system confirmed my loft was secure, but still, based on some past bad experiences, I logged on to the Internet using my smartphone and accessed my security system remotely. I wouldn’t enter until I checked the CCTV security video of my front door. Footage clearly showed a person wearing a long, dark cape and the “Anonymous” Guy Fawkes mask ma
de famous by a graphic novel. The disguised figure approached my door and then used a stencil to spray-paint the symbol on the brick wall; it took 3.5 seconds. I checked my roof-mounted cameras and watched the suspect walk up South Peters Street and go left and disappear on Girod Street. The time stamp told me the deed had been done about ten minutes before Honey and I had gone to Pravda.

  I entered and climbed the stairs to the living area. Even though two Russian assassins had been shot dead in my loft a few months ago, I really liked the place. All of my stuff was now unpacked and neatly arranged to best showcase the masculine features of supple brown leather furniture, exposed red brick, and polished oak flooring.

  Ignoring Honey’s admonition to get some sleep, I brewed up a pot of Pakxong Bolovens Gold Lao coffee, grown in the mountains outside of Vientiane. I dialed up Miles Davis’s 1970 Bitches Brew double LP on my music player and set about downloading onto my e-reader half a dozen e-books on the occult. I spent the next several hours closely reading select files Fournier had assembled on Drake or skimming chapters of the e-books.

  I dragged myself to bed around 3 A.M. and, as per usual, within fifteen seconds of hitting the sheets had a hypnagogic jerk—an involuntary myoclonic twitch—as I fell into a light sleep.

  The next thing I knew, I was fighting for my life.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The hypnopompic state, which I was now trapped in, is a fancy name for a person’s state of consciousness when he or she is emerging from sleep. I had no clue what time it was or how long I had slept, but I desperately tried to wake up and prevent something terrible from happening to me. For I was about to be sexually violated by some unknown female form who didn’t have my best interests in mind.

  So it was a dream but it wasn’t. It felt strange to be able to control my mental faculties but not my physical self. It occurred to me that depressed frontal lobe activity in the hypnopompic condition causes slowed reaction time—sleep inertia—whereby one can feel frozen, perhaps from fear. This kind of waking can be an emotional, confused experience, especially if you are coming directly out of REM sleep. I knew all of this intellectually, but it didn’t help me in the here and now.

  I couldn’t say what my condition truly was; I simply flashed on the term “succubus” and felt without question that if I allowed sexual union to transpire in this bizarre, delusional experience, I was a dead man. That made no sense, but I knew it to be true.

  An erection strained at my boxers, which were drenched in sweat. How can that be? It was a cold night, but I kept the thermostat set at seventy-two degrees. And yet an unmistakable wave of stifling heat enveloped me as if trying to melt my will.

  What a messed-up dream. It occurred to me I could just surrender and have the orgasm, and so what? But then a different thought muscled that aside and reaffirmed I was doing battle here and there was no surrender, no prisoners taken, no quarter given or asked.

  I strained with every muscle to pivot my hips away from the descending beauty who seemed to be in a slow-motion downward float to mate. I tried to form a scream but couldn’t, wanted to slap her but couldn’t. She smiled, although her features were unclear, and cooed a lulling melody, softly urging me to come, come into her sweet caress.

  I flashed angry on how hunters sometimes use a similar technique to lure prey.

  Somehow that anger exploded, instead of my lust, and it propelled me up and out of bed. I now stood wide awake, panting, sweat literally dripping from my brow. The room felt unbearably hot, and I scrambled over to the thermostat and saw that it was still set at seventy-two but that the actual temperature was over ninety degrees. Out of habit or fear, I retrieved my Glock, which I always put on my nightstand before going to sleep, and pounced into the front room, keeping the lights off. The large room felt twenty degrees cooler. Street lighting shone through the tall front windows, giving me more than enough illumination to confirm the place was empty.

  I padded over to the windows and looked out. A lone figure stood on the street corner staring up at me, a figure wearing a long, dark cape and the Anonymous mask. I bolted for the staircase barefoot and in my underwear, bounded down the stairs, and hurtled through my first-floor door, past the sigil, and into the middle of a deserted South Peters Street. The sprint had taken no more than twenty-five seconds, but the dark figure was nowhere to be seen.

  * * *

  I called the Eighth District station at 5:13 A.M. and reported the vandalism and stalking. Patrol units would now pay extra attention to my immediate neighborhood, and anyone seen wearing an Anonymous mask was going to get some unfriendly attention.

  Pent-up adrenaline continued coursing through my system, so I biked up Magazine Street in the dark to Audubon Park on my Cervélo R3 racing bike, locked the expensive bike to a lamppost, and then started one of my thrice-weekly five-mile runs on the asphalt track.

  While I ran, Honey texted me that she had to meet with the chief this morning, and could I go out to Tulane alone and meet with Drake’s boss, the chair of the Anthropology Department? The fact that Honey sent a text and didn’t call me was itself strange. And why wasn’t she sending me to interview any of Drake’s students? That would have been my call for our next move, not background stuff at Tulane. Was she giving the plums to Mackie and Kruger and relegating me to second string?

  The Zen of my running regime always helped me to get organized mentally and prepare for productive analysis. My first mental item was Drake’s curio shop. If Honey hadn’t ordered me to stay away from the curio shop, I would have absolutely done a bit of B&E—breaking and entering—just to satisfy my curiosity. Regardless, it was a moot point now: Honey was always lead investigator when we worked murder cases, and since she wasn’t even convinced this was a murder case, I’d just have to keep my trap shut, do what she asked, and hope I could bring her around, with hard proof, of my suspicions.

  The vandalism, stalking, and mad-dog attack I put aside to focus on Kate Townsend. She lied about the human heads. Did she have some on her premises? Was she selling them to special clients? She wielded the same kind of smugness as Drake did, and when the interrogation took a turn against her, she retreated to the business about being a victim. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’d seen the guilty do the exact same thing. Somehow I knew that the “witch” Gina Sanchez had referred to was Townsend.

  Feeling great in spite of lack of sleep and the terrifying dream, I finished the run strong and raced the bike back to the loft, where I took my usual hot/cold shower as a placating salve for my many injuries collected over the years. After dressing quickly, the remnants of last night’s coffee tasted just fine as I threw them back.

  First thing on the agenda was to beat feet to the Eighth District cop shop and pull all the recent FICs and MICs—Field Interrogation Cards and Miscellaneous Incident Cards—for my neighborhood, checking to see if there might be a connection between the stalker and any suspicious persons who got jacked up by a patrol unit. I desperately wanted to know who was shadowing me, but the FICs/MICs didn’t help.

  Following Honey’s orders, by 10 A.M. I stood in front of Dinwiddie Hall, a handsome pale-stone four-story building right off St. Charles Avenue on the Tulane campus. Donna, the smiling secretary and only person present in the anthropology office, perked up when I introduced myself. I pegged her for forty-five, lonely, and bored to tears.

  “Dr. Sharte, the department chair, is running a little late. Would you like some coffee, detective?”

  “No, but can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “How long have you worked here?”

  “Forever and a day. I’m retiring next year.”

  “So you probably know how this place runs better than anybody. In fact, you probably run the place. Just like in the military, it’s the sergeants—the noncommissioned officers—who really get things done, not the ego-heavy generals. Or ego-heavy professors.”

  She smiled even bigger. “Flattery like that can get you all kinds
of things,” she said coyly. She leaned in closer, her voice lower. “I saw it on TV. Professor Drake is in a lot of trouble, isn’t he? And you want some inside poop.”

  “I’m not asking you to rat anyone out, but some serious crimes have been committed. If Drake is clean he won’t have any problems. I’d prefer to get some real background information and not the brochure version that the department chair will try to give me. I understand about protecting the integrity of Tulane, providing cover for a colleague and all that, but I don’t have time for it. So what kind of dirt can you dish me on Drake?”

  “You get right to the point, don’t you?”

  “Life is short and then we die.”

  “Maybe I could tell you over a drink?”

  “We can have that drink after I close the case. Then it won’t be rushed,” I said, winking unintentionally. I could be a shameless flirt and sometimes used it as a tool.

  She smiled like the cat who swallowed the canary, then looked around to make sure we were alone. “Drake puts on a good front, but after I got to know him, he started to creep me out.”

  “Why?”

  “His weird hobbies like taxidermy, collecting human bones. Jokes he would make about dead bodies. But believe it or not, he’s a very successful ladies’ man. Tries to sleep with just about every straight female student he has. About five years ago he had a pretty young girlfriend who was one of his graduate assistants. She got pregnant, but he cheated on her like crazy. She went ballistic up in one of the second-floor research labs. But I heard they stayed together.”

  “Remember her name?”

  “Kate Townsend.”

  I nodded. Kate, my new best friend.

  “Did she have the child?”

  “She dropped out of the program, but Drake never spoke of a baby, and it would be rude to bring it up. Anyway, rumors are that any girl who accepts an invitation to go to his house understands she is going for some sort of sex party.”

  “Sounds like the professor is a bad boy. You haven’t been to his place, have you?”