But as Paris approaches Greg he sees the sallowness of the man’s skin, the weariness in his eyes. Greg’s six-year-old son Max had recently undergone heart surgery, a fairly routine procedure, it was said, but one that thoroughly exhausted the Ebersoles’ insurance, and then some. Greg had once confided that he would owe tens of thousands of dollars before it was all over. Paris knew of two part-time jobs Greg worked. He suspected there were more. This very evening there is a benefit for Max Ebersole at the Caprice Lounge. Looking at Greg now, Paris wonders if the man is going to make it.
Greg sees Paris, nods in greeting, points toward the body.
Paris acknowledges him and finds the victim in the back room, near the rusted ovens that once prepared bread pudding and the like for customers of Weeza’s Corner Cafe. The body is covered with a plastic sheet, and next to it stands a very nervous, bespectacled black officer. Paris approaches, mindful of the small areas of chalk-circled evidence on the floor.
“How ya doin’?” Paris says, stepping into the room.
“Just fine, sir,” the officer lies. He is heavyset, clean-shaven, no more than twenty-two years old. Paris locates the man’s name tag: M.C. Johnson.
“What’s your first name, Patrolman Johnson?”
“Marcus, sir.”
“How long have you been on the job, Marcus?” Paris asks, putting on a pair of rubber gloves, recalling that, when he was a young officer, he always appreciated ordinary conversation at moments like these.
Patrolman Marcus Calvin Johnson looks at his watch. “About six hours, sir.”
Six hours, Paris thinks. He remembers his own nerve-racking first day in blue. He was absolutely certain that he and his mentor-a highly decorated street cop named Vincent Stella, a lifer well into his forties at that time-would stumble upon a bank robbery in progress and that Patrolman John Salvatore Paris would shoot his own partner. “Tough assignment right out of the box, eh?”
“Oh yeah,” Patrolman Johnson answers at the entrance to a deep breath, one that swells his cheeks for a moment, the kind of breath that generally precedes a roll of the eyes and a quick trip to the linoleum.
“Hang in there, Marcus,” Paris says. “It’s not always this bad.”
“I’ll try, sir.”
Paris tucks his tie into his shirt pocket, nods to the officer, then hunkers down next to the body. Patrolman Johnson pulls back the sheet. Immediately, Paris wants to amend his pearl of wisdom for the rookie cop.
It’s never this bad.
Because there is something so very wrong about what Paris is looking at. It is the body of a partially clothed young white woman, lying prone, her face turned to the left. She has very pretty legs, is wearing a short white skirt, white high heels. She is wearing no blouse or bra, and Paris can now see that the same symbol he had seen on Willis Walker’s tongue is carved between her shoulder blades. The primitive-looking bow and arrow. But even the horror of that symbol, at this moment, cannot compare to the hideousness that is to be found just a few inches away.
The victim-a woman who surely had friends and family and coworkers and lovers, a woman who quite possibly had children of her own-simply stops at her forehead. Above it, above her ears, there is nothing.
Air.
Paris forces himself to look at the top of the woman’s head. It is lying next to her right shoulder, a clotted, empty bone-bowl, framed by tendrils of blood-blackened hair that seem to reach for him like Medusa’s snakes.
Like deadheading a flower…
“Okay,” Paris says to the grateful Patrolman Johnson, who has been staring at the ceiling and hyperventilating. “You can cover her.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Paris walks over to Greg Ebersole, who is standing near the front door; he can see that Greg is pumped and primed for this one: arms crossed, nostrils flaring, fingers beating out a rhythm on his biceps, detective’s eyes re-drawing the crime scene over and over in his mind. Floor, ceiling, wall, door, window. Silent witnesses, all.
And while it is true that homicide detectives have absolutely no power to prevent murders from occurring, whenever something like this happens-an arrogant, vicious killing after which the perpetrator does not even have the decency to turn himself in or kill himself-it is tantamount to saying to the detectives that I, a murderer, am much smarter than you are. And, to some cops, that is almost worse than the murder itself.
Jack Paris is just such a cop. Greg Ebersole, too.
“Who found her?” Paris asks.
“Fifteen-year-old kid and his girlfriend,” Greg says. He flips a page in his notebook. “Shawn Curry and Dionna Whitmore.”
“Any reason to hold them?”
“Nah. We’ve got their statements.” He gestures to the mattress in the corner. “This was just their love shack.”
“How’d they get in?”
“Back door,” Greg replies. He turns another page, holds up his notebook, showing Paris the now familiar bow-and-arrow emblem, a replica Greg had drawn in pencil. “That your symbol?” he asks, staring straight ahead.
“It sure looks like it,” Paris says, then lowers his voice. “Did I hear this right? No one’s found her brain?”
“Nope,” Greg says. “We’ve cleared the building. Nothing.”
“You think this fucker took it with him?”
Greg turns, fixes Paris with an adrenaline-charged stare, a look that Paris had seen a thousand times before, the one that says: We have eleven-year-old hit men in this country, Jack. People who fuck and strangle their own children. We have guys who dress up in clown suits and bury thirty boys under their houses; drug gangs that harvest unborn babies right from the womb. We’ve both seen these things. Shall we now be shocked that someone is making doggie bags of human brains?
“I guess I have my answer,” Paris says.
“I guess you do,” Greg replies, nearly salivating at the prospect of this new chase, this fresh opportunity to catch a murderer and put him on the other side of the bars. Or, preferably, in this case, the other side of the sod. “I guess you do.”
11
Murderer.
The word ricochets in her mind, around and around and around, a white-hot billiard ball that won’t find a pocket. Mur-der-er. Three syllables, three cushions. Constant. It used to be a word that she applied to real criminals, gangsters, the people you see in prison documentaries, their fingers wrapped tightly around the bars, their eyes boring through you with hatred and violence. But now the word applied to her. She would be one of those people soon.
“Murderer” is at the top of her resume now.
How long had it been? One day? Two? She hadn’t slept a minute, of course. The first two pints of Jack Daniel’s had passed through her like perspiration, a thin brown mist that paused neither to calm her nerves nor to salve her Christian soul. Her commandment-shattering, burn-in-hell-for-ever soul.
Remember Mary? Isabella’s mother?
Oh yeah. The killer, right?
That’s her. Hear what happened?
No, what?
Died in a prison riot.
No.
Yep. She killed that black guy and they sent her to the Ohio Reformatory for Women. Died in a small pool of bloody vomit and urine.
The thought makes her crack the seal on the third pint. There is one more bottle after this one. After that…
She is sitting on the floor in her kitchen, lights off, save for the steady glow of her cigarettes, each one lit from the last. She is waiting for the knock on the door, the hard rap of a police-issue flashlight that will signal post time at the gates of hell.
Options?
Let’s see. If she leaves town she will never see Isabella again. That’s a lock. If she stays and somehow beats the rap, they will still never give her daughter back to her.
One option left. Take the money. Take her daughter.
And run.
Willis Walker had the right to be mad. No question about it. Given. Nolo contendere, your honor. He even had t
he right to call the police and have her arrested. After all, she had drugged him and robbed him, right?
Right.
Hell, he probably had the right to punch her in the mouth. The recollection returns her mind, momentarily, to the ache that had settled into the left side of her face.
But Willis Walker did not have the right to kill her. And that’s precisely what she felt he was going to do. He fired actual bullets at her. She had no choice. Put a thousand women in that situation and 998 of them would do exactly the same thing. Bash his fuckin’ brains in.
She takes another deep swallow, this one reaching her nerves, beginning to calm them. She feels one rung better. Then, the facts come into focus.
The woman at Vernelle’s was blond.
She wasn’t blond.
No one saw her at the Dream-A-Dream Motel.
No one saw her when she picked up her car at Vernelle’s. Besides, she was wearing a knit cap and a dark raincoat.
She was all but positive she had wiped down everything in the motel room.
She was fine. She will take her fifty grand-only three thousand or so to go now, she thinks with some twisted measure of accomplishment, thanks to Willis Walker-and leave this horrible life behind her.
She rises, puts the bottle on top of the refrigerator. Enough with the booze, she thinks. Enough with the worry, the guilt. She doesn’t need to apologize to anyone.
What she needs to do is work out.
The night is clear and cold, perfect for jogging, but the four or five packs of cigarettes that she has smoked in the last twenty-four hours had prevented her from achieving any real aerobic benefits from her lackadaisical run around the block.
She slows to a walk as she turns the corner onto Lee Road and sees that there is a man standing in front of her apartment building. The area is well lighted so she isn’t too worried about getting mugged. Besides, she has her pepper spray in her right hand.
But maybe it’s not a mugger, she thinks.
Maybe it’s worse.
Maybe it’s a cop.
She stops for a moment, gathers her wind, and decides there is no real reason to be concerned. The man in front of her building is probably a tenant, just a guy getting ready for a run himself-stretching, doing a few deep knee-bends. Had she seen him around the building before? She wasn’t sure. But she was absolutely certain that she wouldn’t mind seeing him again. Tall, wavy hair, big shoulders. He is wearing an olive and black Nike jogging suit, the kind with reflective white stripes on the elbows. He also wears black wool gloves and a black waist pack.
He is standing in front of the door, so there will be no avoiding him, no sidestepping a conversation if he chooses to start one. She approaches, unafraid, but still keeping her finger on the pepper spray’s trigger.
“Hi,” the man says.
“Hi.”
“Just starting your run?” he asks. Another knee-bend.
“Just finished,” she says, glancing past him, cringing at her reflection in the glass door. She looks like a wet collie. Of course. “Enough for me tonight.”
“What a pity. What’s your name?”
Her mind whirls. It is a little forward of him, a little too fast for her taste, but that’s not what throws her. What throws her is that she had not anticipated being anyone tonight. “Rachel,” she answers, as if the name were simply the next name up on a never-ending roster of deception. “Rachel Anne O’Malley.”
“You’re Irish.”
“Yes,” she says, telling the lie by rote. “Well, half. I’m Irish on my father’s side. My mother’s Italian.”
“Pretty volatile combination,” the man says, flashing a smile. “Italian and Irish.”
“Constant battle,” she jokes, surprised at her acumen at this after so long, shocked at her growing ease with the events of the last twenty-four hours. “Eat, drink, eat, drink, eat, drink…”
The booze, it appears, had finally kicked in, in spite of her halfhearted run around the block. Rachel Anne O’Malley is a little loaded after all.
He puts his foot on the decorative concrete bench and begins to stretch his leg muscles.
She has an insane thought: Maybe she’d take stud-boy upstairs. Maybe sleeping with a complete stranger will make the specter of Willis Walker go away.
Then, just as suddenly, she comes to her senses. She decides to run a little more, but alone. The last thing she needs is some cock she can’t get rid of, some pretty-boy lover to hang around just long enough to fuck up everything she’s worked for in the past two years.
But it seems that stud-boy, and his cock, are not quite finished with her.
“So, could I interest you in a late supper, maybe?” he asks. “A run and a shower won’t take me more than forty-five minutes.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Anywhere you’d like,” he continues. “Just paid off Visa. I’m golden again.”
“No thanks,” she says, the phrase late supper crazily making her mind return to the late-night breast-feedings in the darkness of her living room, the pleasure and pain of Isabella at her nipple. The sorrow ignites within her. “Some other time. For sure.”
“Okay,” he says, agreeably, adding to his charm. Not the pushy type. “I’ll leave it up to you. I jog around here all the time. Look for me one of these nights. Maybe we can run together.”
“Sure,” she replies. She pulls open the door to her apartment building. She’ll walk through the lobby, down the service hallway and exit on the parking lot side of the building. Maybe have a real run through Cain Park, hope she doesn’t embarrass herself by running into him. “Nice meeting you.”
“The pleasure was all mine, Rachel,” he says, and with that he takes off down the street in long, powerful strides.
She watches him disappear into the night and feels a strange nervousness building inside her. Not necessarily about what just happened. She had handled the advances of a thousand men in her time. But, rather, about what almost just happened.
She’d nearly let someone in.
And she hadn’t even asked his name.
12
I am carved of moonlight.
I follow the jogging figure at a distance of no more than one hundred feet, sliding from shadow to shadow, heading south on Lee Road, waiting for the long stretch of gloom we will both soon enter, the colonnade of darkness leading into Cain Park.
The jogger makes a left, past the squat stone columns, past the huge dedication rock, into the all-but-deserted park. I follow on the access path that winds down the hill.
To the casual observer we might look entirely unconnected, two hardy citizens of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, out for a late-night winter workout, one maintaining a slow jogger’s pace; the other-the one carrying the odd-looking device-an even slower, but still quite graceful, power walk.
And yet we are connected in a way that most casual observers-indeed, most people on the planet-could never imagine nor understand.
The noise flourishes the moment I move within range of the jogger. This time: fat claps of thunder on the inside of my skull, a desperate pummeling of bloodied hands in a sealed coffin.
The jogger stops at the shuttered kiosk near the Alma, the smaller of the park’s two theaters. I approach from the west. In my right hand is a small-caliber pistol, loaded with hollow-point rounds. In my left I carry a four-quart pail, bottomed with a three-inch layer of hard rubber and wire mesh, a handle on its side.
I step to within five feet of the jogger.
The jogger, a handsome young man clad in an expensive-looking olive and black Nike jogging suit and black wool gloves, doesn’t see me. The reflective stripes on the elbows of his jacket made it embarrassingly easy to follow him.
“Hey,” I say.
The man freezes in place. A veteran of the streets, it seems. He doesn’t turn around. “My wallet is in my waist pack,” he says. He spins the nylon belt around his waist, slowly, until the pack faces me.
I step closer, take the
wallet, say: “I have a message for you.”
The man swallows hard but remains very still. “What are you talking about?”
I place the barrel of the gun near his left temple. “She’s mine.” I lift the pail by the handle-as if wielding a giant coffee mug-and position it on the other side of the man’s head. “Mio!”
I pull the trigger.
The puff of smoke is insignificant in the darkness, as is the popping noise, no louder than the sound of a child flicking his thumb out of an empty soda bottle. What is significant is that the pail catches not only the bullet-a feat accomplished without putting a hole in the bottom-but also a good portion of the man’s brain. The police will not find a slug nor a shell casing, nor more than a drop or two of vaporized membrane on the shrubbery.
I look at the figure on the ground, then into the pail, at the pink tissue, the off-white bone, warm and gaseous in the December night air.
For my cauldron, I think. My nganga.
For the spell.
13
His mother sleeps on the couch by the space heater, a Jetson-age-looking Norelco model. The heater, as always, is on full blast and leaning perilously close to the orange and brown Afghan-Cleveland Browns colors.
The small second-floor apartment on Baltic Road has a clock radio in every room, including an old Magnavox on the back of the toilet, just beneath the macrame ballerina toilet-paper cozy. Today, from the kitchen, comes an Italian-language news program.
He kneels next to his mother, brushes a soft strand of white hair from her forehead. She had been Gabriella Russo when his father swept her off her feet nearly fifty years ago, a raven-haired siren of a lounge singer who strung Frank Paris along for two years before giving in to his repeated proposals of marriage.
An only child, Paris had been sixteen when his father died. His mother had worked two jobs to help put him through college, sometimes three. She is an undereducated woman, having finished only high school, but she is, and will always be, the smartest woman he has ever known.
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