Burnt Black

by Ed Kovacs

  “I know that, sir. And I know their deputies have to accompany us when we serve the warrant.”

  “So why did you come to me with a few bottles of expensive bourbon when it wasn’t necessary to do so?”

  He was a smart bastard, so there was no point in being anything but truthful.

  “I was hoping to invest in our future relationship, Your Honor. I know you can make a call to the courthouse in Saint John’s to help pave the way. Anyway, if I only came to you with problematic requests, it would be insulting to you, sir.”

  “You want me in your pocket, is what you’re saying, detective. Well, you’re off to a good start.”

  And that was that.

  * * *

  Our first stop was the parking lot off Chartres, where Anastasia had told me she parked her Lexus. The vehicle looked clean, but we impounded it so CSI techs could go over it with a fine-tooth comb.

  Next on the agenda was LaPlace. Tony Fournier remained at large while we raided his house, accompanied by St. John’s sheriff’s detectives. Not that Tony was a wanted man, although we had plenty to ask him.

  “I’ve got the shoes,” called Kruger from a room, as detectives and CSI folks swarmed the house.

  “RUN DMC edition Adidas?” asked Honey.

  “Just like on the video,” said Kruger. “We’ll get this to the lab for prints right now.”

  The killer’s sneakers were something distinctive that we’d spotted when we enlarged the security video taken outside Becky Valencia’s house. The killer wore a special-edition Adidas pair with RUN DMC on the back panel. Only three hundred were made, though there were probably knockoffs floating around.

  The veteran detective already had put the sneakers into plastic evidence bags, and Honey and I hurried into a spare bedroom. A quick look inside the closet revealed it to be full of women’s clothes.

  “You’ll want to see this,” said Mackie from the doorway. He held a receipt in his hand. “Anastasia Fournier rented a storage space here in LaPlace three months ago.”

  I took the receipt. “Well, well. What would she need storage for?”

  * * *

  The storage facility was a large fenced-in lot operated by an adjoining junkyard. RVs, boats, trailers, and cargo containers stood lined up in rows behind chain-link fencing topped with concertina wire. A guard dog sat chained, but there was no security camera setup or watchman. Renters were given a key to the padlock at the front gate, but there was no on-site manager. We had to get Mal Galusha, the junkyard owner, to open the gate and show us the twenty-foot container Anastasia had rented.

  “I remember Miss Fournier, all right. We don’t get too many customers who look like fashion models,” said Galusha.

  “You remember what she put into the container?” I asked.

  “Didn’t put anything in the day she rented it. Not that I recall.”

  “What about the other times she came in?” asked Honey.

  “How would I know about that? When a renter comes in, I don’t usually see it. Renters have their own key to the gate. I stay pretty busy in the junkyard.”

  “Can you open her container?”

  “Nope. Customers provide their own locks.”

  On that note, Mackie used bolt cutters and snipped off the Master Lock padlock.

  There wasn’t much to see in the container. Except damning evidence.

  I immediately spotted the skeleton and other items stolen from Hans Vermack’s shop. A cardboard box contained the silver baskets made by Becky Valencia’s father, which had been stolen from the acupuncture office waiting room.

  “I got cash here,” said Honey. She was squatting next to a paper grocery sack and held up a wad of cash for me to see. “Look at the small black sigils. On every bill. These look the same to you?”

  I examined some bills. “Yeah, this looks like the mark on the five-dollar bill Gina Sanchez gave to me the day Felix was killed. I logged it into evidence control.”

  If we find Anastasia’s prints on any of this, and I’m guessing we will,” said Kruger, “she’s going down. We got a wrap.”

  “I’m calling the chief,” said Honey. “Give him the good news.”

  “What a waste,” said Kruger. “She had a messed-up childhood and was already a hardened juvenile offender by the time she was fifteen. Then that sonofabitch Tony Fournier married her to use as a tool against Drake. The gang rape screwed her up even more and screwed up Tony’s agenda. He lost control of his operative, to say the least.”

  “Some kind of liquid in unmarked jars over here,” said Mackie. “Could be our poison.”

  I crossed over to him and nodded, eying the small, dark brown jars. My eyes darted around the container and I scowled.

  “What’s with you, Saint James?” asked Mackie. “You look like a monkey took a piss in your coffee.”

  “I’m wondering why these items are here, but not everything else. Where’s the black cape, the white biohazard suit, the Anonymous mask? Those are items we could get DNA from.”

  “The biohazard suit might have had Vermack’s blood on it, so she tossed it or burned it. Ditto the mask,” said Kruger.

  “And do we really need DNA?” asked Honey, joining the debate after ringing off with Chief Pointer.

  “So where’s the stencil for the sigils? The spray paint?”

  “Think about it,” said Mackie. “She took precious things from the people who raped her. Maybe as trophies, maybe like counting coup. That’s what we have here, along with the poison, which she would have to keep in a secure place.”

  “It all feels a little too convenient,” I said.

  “Convenient? Holy shit, we’ve worked our nuts off to get this far,” said Mackie.

  “We caught the big break. Why rain on it?” asked Kruger.

  “Could Drake have planted all this?” I asked.

  Silence, as Honey, Mackie, and Kruger all looked at me as if I’d lost my marbles. But then they hadn’t been nearly dissolved in acid courtesy of killers sent by Professor Robert Drake.

  “Drake is the guy with the master plan,” I stated. “And he’s not a forgiving fellow, much like his buddies the Skulls. Anastasia Fournier, aka Georgia Paris, publicly accused him of rape, almost costing him his professorship. So as I think about it, I can see Townsend and the others letting her back into the Crimson Throne because she was a hot, sexy young chick begging for forgiveness and asking for just one more chance to provide them free sexual services. But would Drake go for it? Really? Or would he incorporate her into his plan, with the end result being Anastasia gets death row?”

  “You’re suggesting that Drake knew she was working for Tony.”

  “All he needed to do was have her followed for a few days. The Skulls could have easily done that. And Tony Fournier was Drake’s old nemesis. If Drake found out they were married, maybe he thinks Tony loved her and wasn’t just using her. So by setting up Anastasia he gets even with both of them.”

  “Are you saying Anastasia is innocent? We pull her off a plane, in disguise, using a phony name, after fleeing a murder scene. We find items connecting her to all four murders—in a storage container she rented. Which brings me to the question: Why did she rent the container? In your theory, I guess Drake asked her to do it,” said Honey, exasperated and maybe a little angry.

  “I haven’t named any murderer during this investigation. I float theories based on the facts at hand. The facts right now suggest Anastasia is our killer. Maybe she is. But something is telling me to keep digging. Remember how abruptly she changed her tune when I showed her the video from outside Valencia’s house?”

  “So? She knew we had her.”

  “How did that give her to us? I’ve watched that video. I couldn’t see anything that told me it was Anastasia Fournier. We didn’t show her the blown-up version that identified the special sneakers. And in case you forgot, Robert Drake and Gina Sanchez did flee the country using phony names. Why do that if you’re innocent?”

  “Dra
ke’s lawyer probably told him he could get ten years for mutilating all of those cats we found buried in his backyard,” said Honey.

  Mackie and Kruger both nodded. “He was facing a felony arson investigation. We could connect him to local members of a murderous drug cartel through the cell-phone calls. We threatened to resurrect the rape charges. E-mail forensics might reveal he trafficked illegally in body parts, because while it’s legal for him to possess them if he purchased them properly, it’s not legal for him to sell them or obtain them from Mexican drug dealers. He had plenty to run from,” said Mackie.

  I was losing this discussion but kept at it. “One thing we haven’t had time or resources to properly examine is the disappearance of all those transients over the years. Tony Fournier didn’t become obsessed with a guy who he suspected might be guilty. He became obsessed because he was convinced Drake was a killer who was getting away scot-free,” I said.

  “Drake’s a probable felon. I’ll give you that. But there is no hard evidence that Drake killed transients,” said Honey. “I’m charging Anastasia with four counts of murder.”

  I could tell that Mackie and Kruger agreed with that pronouncement.

  “I understand.”

  “I’ll let the chief know you disagree.”

  “Okay. And as to why Anastasia rented the storage container, let’s go ask her.”

  * * *

  Being intimately familiar with the criminal justice system, Anastasia would not speak to us and referred all questions to her public defender, who also would not speak to us. So I could get no answer to my curiosity about the storage container. I’d seen enough perps behind the eight ball during my law-enforcement career to see through most of them, but I could not read her at all.

  It didn’t take long to confirm Anastasia’s prints were found on the sneakers, the jars thought to contain poison, the paper sack that held Felix’s cash, and on a cardboard box. A conviction looked fairly certain.

  Tony Fournier walked into the Homicide Section right after the news of the print match came back to us. He stumbled in drunk, insisting that Robert Drake had set up his wife, Anastasia, and swearing that she was innocent. There was no evidence linking Tony as an accessory to the murders or to any other crimes, so he was let go. The conventional wisdom was he was a three-time loser, a broken man whose desperate machinations had backfired.

  A ton of forensics testing and lab reports were still pending, but my part in the case was finished. Still, I reviewed the security footage again and again showing the killer approach Becky Valencia’s house. My eyes watered, my sinuses dripped, my lower back ached. On about the fiftieth viewing, I saw something that—in my mind, anyway—confirmed to me that Anastasia was innocent. I kept this information to myself, since it wasn’t strong enough to clear her.

  I had four days off, but instead of checking in with a doctor, I checked in with the chief on a few issues and then flew to Mexico to catch the lecture “Sexual Politics of Human Sacrifice” from a guy protected by the most ruthless drug cartel on the planet.

  The date of the event was December 21, the winter solstice, a pagan holy day and witches’ Sabbath known as the Yule to occultists like Robert Drake.

  I was traveling as a private citizen with no authority, just unfinished business.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The ancient Maya city of Chichén Itzá is a UNESCO World Heritage site that draws more than a million visitors a year. Like at the pyramids at Giza in Egypt, a sound and light show wows the tourists every night, meaning the tour buses arrive all day long like ants to spilled sugar. Vendors throughout the park sell everything under the sun; it’s the Maya version of Disneyland.

  In spite of the commercialization, a closed area of the site still functions as a working archaeological dig, and important conferences relating to Mesoamerican culture are held there on a regular basis. And to those in the know, like Professor Robert Drake, ancient ceremonies are still practiced in temples surrounded by jungle, as they were a thousand years ago.

  At least he hinted that was the case during his presentation under the stars on the large stone platform that held the ancient, decaying observatory structure that had once been cylindrical—El Caracol, located in a more-isolated southern finger of the park. About one hundred people sat on folding chairs upon the smooth gray limestone listening raptly. A cool white ground-hugging fog had crept in unannounced, creating the illusion that we sat perched on mounts of the gods above the clouds.

  Maybe only ninety-nine people were listening raptly, since I barely heard a word Drake said. I sat in a rear row and wore a fake blond beard, horn-rimmed glasses, and a boonie hat pulled low over my face.

  I surreptitiously kept scanning the crowd and support staff looking for gangster-types, or anything that didn’t seem right, but the attendees looked like an academic/student crowd of archaeologists and wannabes. Gina Sanchez sat beaming in the front row, not an obvious care in the world. If she was some heavyweight sorceress, why didn’t she know I was there?

  The sound and light show for the tourists had already finished before Drake’s lecture had begun, sending the hordes scurrying to their plush tourist buses. So the grounds were largely empty and mostly dark. The most striking structure, the magnificent pyramid, El Castillo, Temple of Kukulkan, dominated the inky horizon like the dream of a lost city emerging from a netherworld, or in the case of the Maya, Xibalba.

  Drake must have some real juice to get permission for such a late-night event, but that didn’t surprise me. I’d gotten lucky earlier in the day and located his residence in Valladolid on my second day in the country by posing as a rich archaeology buff/dilettante bearing gifts. But Drake and Sanchez weren’t staying at his house in Valladolid or at his work site El Bruja.

  So tonight would be my first opportunity to act.

  I’d acquired a couple of handguns my first night in the country by mugging two drunken thugs outside of a Cancún whorehouse. I’d handled them easily enough, but the physical exertion cost me, since I was still recovering from my run-in with the Skulls. I knew I needed rest, but that would have to wait. The pistols I’d taken from the thugs now both nestled snuggly in my waistband. However, if cartel bigwig Tico Rodriguez showed up with an entourage, two pistols would not be nearly enough.

  * * *

  The post-presentation chatter at El Caracol seemed to go on forever. Most attendees had already wandered along a two-hundred-yard stretch of jungle clearing directly behind the observatory toward the warm glow of hotel and café lights. I’d learned Drake was hosting cocktails on the veranda of the Mayaland Hotel, meaning he and Sanchez must have a room there, meaning they’d have uninvited company later, namely, me.

  But I didn’t want to let them out of my sight, so I worked the fringes, and since part of my cover was that I was filthy rich, I found myself welcomed.

  A final cluster of about twenty of us descended the twenty-odd steps of the platform to soft earth and waist-high fog.

  “Cocktails and marquesitas are waiting on the hotel veranda,” called out Drake congenially to the group. “I’ve been informed by an oracle of wisdom—namely, the weather app on my smartphone—that a storm cell is moving in, so please make haste. Gina and I will join you all in a few minutes.” He took her hand, and they hurried off toward the path leading north to the main body of the park.

  I stooped down pretending to tie my shoe, and within moments the sound of the chattering group faded into the black night. I quickly moved off to follow Drake and Sanchez, scanning with a night-vision monocular as I walked.

  I picked them up skirting Casa Colorada and quietly followed as an approaching thunderstorm rocked the jungle with a growling rumble suggestive of imminent trouble. They moved quickly and with purpose past the pyramid Ossario, the Temple of the High Priest, and up the path to central Chichén, as lightning flashes stabbed closer at the primeval city, like an errant laser attempting to lock on a target.

  Without hesitation they made a beeline to th
e great pyramid, El Castillo, the Temple of Kukulkan, adorned with carvings of the feathered serpent god, an extremely important deity that spawned a cultlike following throughout Mesoamerica and was known to the Aztecs and Toltecs as Quetzalcoatl.

  It was too risky to follow them up the ninety-one steps they were taking on the south side of the pyramid, so I darted to the west and started to mount the steep, narrow, crumbling stone stairs. Visitors had been prohibited from climbing the structure since a number of tourists had fallen to their deaths during the treacherous climb, but there was no one present to stop us now.

  Kukulkan is not a complete pyramid but is flat on top, where a square high temple about twenty feet tall sits, so it looks like a pyramid that’s had its top cut off and a box dropped on top of it. I’d studied the literature about the site and knew that the main entrance to this inner temple atop the pyramid faced north. Since Drake and Sanchez had climbed from the south, would they move toward the main entrance to the inner temple? If so, they would move around to the north side, but which way would they go to get there, east or west? If they went west, they would run right into me if I climbed onto the somewhat narrow walkway surrounding the high temple.

  The climb caused my lungs to burn. Pain stabbed my lower back where the Skulls had beaten me with the steel pipe. I managed to ease into a low crouch, clinging to the stone stairs below the top in muted darkness. The lightning flashes to the east now pierced the night with the frequency of a strobe in a low-end Bangkok go-go bar.

  I froze when slow footsteps sounded mere feet from me, just beyond the crest of the stairway. They were silently circling west, and my prey would have run right into me if I’d continued upward. I’d caught no glimmer of a flashlight beam, telling me Drake didn’t want to risk being spotted by a caretaker or security guard.

  I waited for a twenty count; the footsteps had faded. I slithered on my belly to the top of the pyramid, swept in both directions with my monocular, and then silently made my way toward the north entrance to the inner temple, whose smooth stone walls stood mere feet from me.