Let the Devil Out

by Bill Loehfelm

  Maureen frowned. “I do not.”

  At second glance, she realized less of the cemetery was visible to her than she’d thought.

  Magnolia trees rose in various spots, hiding some of the tombs. Live oaks grew on the sidewalks surrounding the cemetery, and their long, gnarled branches reached over the brick wall, hiding the inside edges and corners of the grounds in shadow. Many of the structures stood close together, creating narrow alleyways, invisible to her from where she stood. The cemetery mirrored the neighborhoods she patrolled, Maureen thought. The closer and longer that she looked at them, the more untended and mysterious, and possibly dangerous, spaces she discovered. She would have to get down from her perch and search the cemetery on foot. The longer she looked at it, the larger the cemetery seemed to grow. Searching the corners and shadows and alleyways alone would take a lot longer than she had anticipated.

  “You realize what you’re standing on, right?” Preacher said.

  “What’s that?” The wind was rising again. Maureen thought she heard musical notes. A flute, maybe a toy piano.

  “What you’re standing on,” Preacher said, “is the mausoleum. You know, a big marble-and-concrete filing cabinet, basically, full of two centuries of human remains.”

  Maureen looked down at her feet, transmitting a silent apology to the spirits of the dead. “I’ll let you know when I’ve found our body.”

  She walked to the edge of the shelf. She sat, fighting the wind, letting her legs dangle, and then she dropped to the ground.

  She landed with a thump. A sleeping stray cat shrieked to panicked life right at her feet, darting into the darkness. Maureen shouted and stumbled backward against the mausoleum. Startled by the noise and the commotion, two more cats shot out of the grass, launching themselves in opposite directions, shadows darting among the crypts. Maureen dropped her flashlight. She had her weapon halfway drawn before she stopped herself.

  From the other side of the wall, she could hear Preacher laughing at her. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she might have heard the security guard chuckling as well.

  “I’m fine,” she shouted. That she’d been so quick to draw embarrassed and frightened her. The panic felt out of character. “God, I hate cats.”

  She re-secured her weapon and picked up her flashlight, shined it to the left and then to the right down the path of hard dirt and dead grass. Nothing. No body, no ghouls, and thankfully no more stray cats. The surrounding streetlights shed a pale glow on the grounds. At least she wasn’t fumbling about in the pitch-dark, she thought. The idea occurred to her, looking around, that this whole scenario could be part of some elaborate welcome-back prank. Please, God, she thought, don’t let me shoot one of my coworkers because he jumped out at me wearing a monster mask.

  Her radio crackled. Preacher’s voice, “This was your idea. Get to work.”

  She keyed her mic. “We got nothing as to where the body might be?”

  “Inside the walls, that’s the best we got,” Preacher said.

  “Fuck me.” Should’ve waited for backup, she thought.

  She walked the wide grass path with careful steps, flashlight beam sweeping in front of her from side to side. She was looking for signs of foul play, for signs of a dead body, but it was hard not be distracted by her surroundings. Some of the crypts and tombs were badly neglected, crumbling, ashen, and stained, the angels adorning their peaked rooftops having lost an arm or a wing or a halo, the engraved family names all but worn away by time and weather. Other buildings shone white and new in the beam of her flashlight. Oddly, age had little bearing on condition. On one of the cleanest tombs, the inscription revealed that the most recent inhabitant had been interred more than eighty years ago. Another cold winter gust rushed along the path and Maureen heard the musical notes again. Like someone blowing into the top of an empty bottle.

  Maureen caught herself reading the names and the dates and the titles inscribed on the marble slabs on the faces of the crypts. Who had been married, who had been a parent. So many children; New Orleans had proved a hard place for them. Many of them had lived brief lives, only weeks, sometimes only days. Other people had survived into their seventies and eighties, even in the nineteenth century, having lived and died in New Orleans, she thought, before the first of her starving ancestors had ever boarded a ship in an Irish port. She read many Irish names, more than she’d figured she’d see. She both wanted and didn’t want to see Coughlin on one of the nameplates. Or Fagan, her mother’s maiden name.

  At the foot of each nameplate was a small marble shelf, and on some of the shelves passing mourners had placed gifts and offerings for the recent and long-ago departed. Coins. Paper flowers. Tall glass candles. A warped and browned paperback copy of King Lear. A filthy white teddy bear tucked into an old urn, Mardi Gras beads placed around his neck, the beads as dull and colorless as the ashen marble tombs. Maureen fought the urge to reach out and touch the bear’s little nose, to scratch its frayed ears.

  Even those who were interred under simple headstones lay in graves elevated two or three feet above ground. The graves reminded Maureen—and the thought felt disrespectful but she couldn’t dismiss it—of flower boxes in a garden. Most of them badly neglected flower boxes, she thought, the headstones cracked and crumbling, trash caught in the high grass that surrounded them. Some of the graves were fenced with wrought iron like the gardens and yards of her neighborhood.

  Hanging from a leaning segment of iron fence, Maureen spotted the source of the notes she’d heard in the wind. A set of wind chimes. They were cheap, maybe bought in a card store, or from a stall in the French Market, but they looked new. Whether they’d been placed there as a gift for a lost loved one or as a way to lead her to this particular grave, Maureen had no idea. As she got closer, she started suspecting the latter.

  On the other side of the fence, a dark form lay sprawled atop a grave. Maureen keyed her mic. “Any sign of our man with the key?”

  “Negative,” Preacher said. “You know, I hope dispatch wasn’t thinking we would call him.”

  Maureen let that go. Things were certainly getting back to normal. “I may have something here, stand by.”

  Slowly, she played her flashlight beam along the figure. Cheap blue Keds, bare ankles, cheap jeans, an oversized and misshapen blue-and-white-striped sweater. Not much protection, really, against the cold. The vic was a woman, definitely. There was something familiar to Maureen about the form. Her heart hammered at her sternum. She moved in closer. Blood, a lot of blood, stained the front of the sweater and had run onto the ground, darkening the gravel around the woman’s head. Another throat slash. Maureen’s stomach turned over. It burned. Oh man, she thought. Oh no.

  She shined the light on the victim’s face. Stringy brown hair stuck to the pale cheeks, the cracked lips.

  “Holy. Shit.”

  Into the mic she said, “Preach, I’ve got our body. I think it’s Madison Leary.”

  As if she’d heard Maureen’s voice, the woman’s eyes shot open. One was green, the other was blue. The woman gasped and gurgled. Blood sprayed into the air. Maureen’s hand shook as she held the mic. “It is Madison Leary. And she isn’t dead. Call a fucking ambulance.”

  She had nothing to staunch the bleeding. She sprinted for the nearest exit.

  15

  When Maureen got to the gate, Preacher was already working on prying open the chain and padlock with a tire iron. Over his shoulder, Maureen could see the white-haired man pedaling his way up Washington Avenue. Taking his sweet time with it, too.

  Maureen shouted to him, waving her arms. “Would you please hurry the fuck up?”

  Swearing, Preacher tossed the tire iron on the sidewalk. He was breathing hard. “Fucking finally. This guy.”

  Maureen watched as the man eased his bike to a stop at the curb and climbed off. He walked it to a signpost and began the apparently quite complicated process of locking it to the post. Preacher hurried in his direction. “Listen, guy. Just
leave it there.”

  “No way,” the man said. “I can’t have this bike stolen. The cemetery won’t buy me a new one. And my name is Mr. Shivers, not ‘guy.’”

  Maureen thought she might bite clean through her tongue.

  “There’s two cops right here,” Preacher said. “And there’s about to be a bunch more.”

  “This bike disappears and I’m holding you two responsible.”

  “We have a woman in here bleeding out in the dirt,” Maureen shouted. She shook the gate like it was the door to a cage. “She dies, I’m holding you responsible.” She could hear the ambulance sirens approaching. “Preach, get me gloves and gauze from the car. There’s no time.”

  “Ten-four,” Preacher said, and he headed for the car.

  Shivers waddled toward the gate, fumbling with a large ring of keys. “Step back from the gate, please.” Maureen took a step back. Shivers adjusted his ball cap. “Farther back, Officer. I can’t have you peeking at what key it is.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Coughlin, do it,” Preacher shouted.

  Maureen backed away from the gate. Shivers unlocked the padlock, pulled the chain through the gate. Then he opened the bolt lock and, very slowly, opened up the cemetery gate. Preacher jogged to her, supplies held out in front of him. Maureen grabbed the latex gloves and gauze packets.

  “Down this grass pathway to the left,” she said, “almost to the end.”

  She turned and ran.

  * * *

  Leary had not moved. Her eyes remained open. Maureen pulled on the gloves, knelt beside Leary in the gravel, the stones biting into her knees, examining the wound with her flashlight. Leary had been slashed across the throat, shoulder-to-shoulder, above the collarbone. The wound matched those that Madison Leary had inflicted on her victims.

  Maureen set the light down, ripping open gauze packets one after the other. She wiped at the blood around the wound, searching for a place to apply pressure. She didn’t know where to begin, everything that carried blood, it seemed, had been opened up by the blade. The cruiser’s first aid kit was meant for minor injuries and the small squares of gauze it contained proved useless. In moments, Maureen had succeeded only in smearing the blood along Leary’s collarbones and chin, as if she were trying to wipe up a gallon of spilled paint with too small a cloth. Leary’s throat now leaked blood in a dying trickle.

  That’s gravity bringing that blood out, Maureen thought, not a heartbeat.

  “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon. Don’t you fucking die. Don’t die, don’t die.”

  Fuck, should she try CPR? Why do that, she thought, when the blood you pump will only spill out onto the stones? She heard Preacher hustling along the path, his footsteps heavy, his gun belt jangling, calling her name.

  “HERE,” Maureen shouted. “I’m here,” she whispered to Leary. She tossed aside the gore-soaked gauze. She reached for more. “Fuck.” None left. She’d used what she had, and it seemed there was more blood on Leary’s sweater, on the gravel, on Maureen’s hands, than ever. “But I found you. I finally found you.”

  Never, during any of her searching, had Maureen imagined coming across Leary like this. Wounded. Dying.

  The woman’s eyes remained open but blank, staring up at the indigo sky. She gave no sign she heard Maureen’s words, or was even aware of Maureen at her side. One shallow, rattling breath produced a tiny spray of red mist that settled on the backs of Maureen’s hands. The sirens were right outside the cemetery now. EMS would take over soon, thank God, Maureen thought. They’d have better things. Resources. Supplies. They could help. They could—

  “Coughlin,” Preacher said. “Move away. Slow.”

  Maureen looked into Leary’s eyes. Empty. Dead. The woman was no longer dying; she was dead.

  “There’s nothing left to do, Maureen,” Preacher said. “We have to preserve the scene. Now move away.”

  She stood. Leary’s blood had soaked through the knees of her uniform, and the fabric of Maureen’s pant leg stuck to her skin. Her nose was running. Her hands were too bloody to wipe it. She could hear the heavy footsteps of the EMTs as they hustled up the grassy path.

  Preacher shone his flashlight at her feet.

  “Look at your right foot. There by her hand.”

  Maureen looked down. Shining in the flashlight beam, inches from Leary’s bony fingers, gleaming white against the dark stones of the gravel, lay an ivory-handled straight razor, the blade dark red with blood. Leary’s murder weapon of choice. In the Cooley and Gage murders, and possibly others. Dice had described the razor for her. A wanted killer and her murder weapon, Maureen thought, lying at her side. Not hard to figure out what had happened. The questions: Why now? Why here?

  “Don’t touch it,” Preacher said.

  Maureen stepped down from the edge of the grave, peeling off her latex gloves. She dropped them on the grave. Numbness spread through her insides. She could feel parts of her break away and dissipate into the night like smoke from a cigarette, like a soul leaving a body. Difference was, unlike the dead woman nearby, Maureen knew her parts would re-form and return to her.

  “Leave her there,” she said to the EMTs as they arrived, panting. “She’s dead. This is a crime scene. Sorry to waste your time.”

  One of the EMTs stared at her for long moment. “Maybe you should stop by the ambulance before you leave here.” He nodded at Preacher. “We’ll wait on y’all a little while.”

  “Don’t,” Maureen said.

  “Thanks,” Preacher said. “Give us a minute here.”

  Maureen walked over to Preacher, standing by the iron fence. He was looking at the wind chimes. “Something to help us find her?” Maureen asked.

  “Could be,” Preacher said. “Most of the graves in this place have gifts at them, though. And who knows what they mean. Could be for the deceased lying underneath her.”

  “We should call Atkinson,” Maureen said. “She’ll want to know about this.”

  “Indeed,” Preacher said. “We will. You okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Unless I misrecollect,” Preacher said, “this is the first one you’ve had die on you.”

  “Nonsense,” Maureen said. “I saw Cooley. Shit, I found him when he was two weeks gone. I saw Gage the night he was killed.”

  “They were already dead.”

  “I saw a friend of mine once,” Maureen said. “Well, not a friend, really, a woman I worked with. In a bar. In New York. She’d drowned. I mean, she was drowned. Murdered. I identified her body at the morgue.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Preacher said. “I didn’t know that.” He waited a moment before he continued. “But, again, she was already gone when you saw her. Having them go under your hands, no matter who or what they were, that’s a different thing. Believe me.”

  “She was a killer. Those other bodies I saw here in New Orleans, she’s the reason for them. She and that razor she obviously used on herself. On top of someone else’s grave. A lunatic. A sick thing is what she was. Afraid to answer for what she’d done.”

  Preacher said nothing, looking at the ground. He hitched up his gun belt. “Let’s have a cigarette, you and me, before we get down to business securing this scene. We’ve warned off the EMTs. Leary ain’t going anywhere.”

  “You know what somebody called me once?” Maureen said. She felt light-headed. Preacher went in and out of focus. “A little redheaded angel of death. You believe that? Some people. The things they say.”

  “Let’s go to the ambulance,” Preacher said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I know you are,” Preacher said. “I believe you. But let’s get your hands clean. You’ve got blood up to your elbows.”

  16

  As crime scene techs got to work on the scene under Preacher’s watchful eye, Detective Atkinson and Maureen walked along the main path leading through the heart of the cemetery. Waiting for the detective to speak first, Maureen walked with her hands j
ammed in the pockets of her leather jacket, which was zipped to her chin. She had her NOPD knit cap pulled low on her head. And she was chilled to the bone. Atkinson walked with her big hands clasped behind her back, no hat, her down coat open. Maureen was embarrassed to be struggling with the weather. Here she was the born-and-bred New Yorker zipped up tight while the native New Orleanian strode along comfortably. Maureen knew, though, it was more than Atkinson’s roots that made her the tougher of the two.

  They were flanked by the larger, more ornate tombs and crypts as they walked, the stone structures with columns carved in the marble at their corners, with wreaths and Bible verses carved in their walls and with gorgeous white weeping angels draped across their lintels. Everyone inside those temples—and some of the structures bore plaques with more than a dozen names—everyone inside was as dead as any poor slob buried in a potter’s field, Maureen thought. As dead as Madison Leary. As dead as Tanya from Staten Island. As dead as Sebastian, who had killed Tanya and dumped her in New York Harbor. She wasn’t sure what the display and posturing was for, or supposed to mean. Comfort for the living, she figured, and not the dead. What did the dead care?

  Would she and her mother, she wondered, do anything for her father when the declaration came through? And why would they? Here was an instance where the living didn’t care, either. His death would be a matter of paperwork. A few clicks on a keyboard. Like getting a driver’s license or a new credit card. No real proof the man was dead would exist. No body. No ashes. Certainly no marble temple. Except for me, Maureen thought, there wasn’t much extant physical proof he’d been alive, either. Having him declared dead was about the future, anyway, she thought, not the past. And it’s about my mother, she thought, not me.

  “It’s good to see you back in uniform,” Atkinson said.

  “Not as good as it feels,” Maureen replied. “Thanks for saying that. It was a long six weeks. I’m glad to put them behind me.”

  “So you put the time to good use, then?” Atkinson asked.

  Maureen’s heart stopped for a moment. There was no way Atkinson could know what she’d been doing at night. No, no way. She chewed the inside of her cheek. This is why you don’t do shit like that, running around causing trouble and breaking promises, she thought. A guilty conscience gives everything a double meaning. It eats your insides alive.