She smiled broadly as I stepped through the door and I couldn’t help but mirror it. Even before we could speak, she caught me in a hug and held on tight, even when I was ready to let go. She whispered, “You need this, Patrick.”
Maybe I did.
Finally she stepped back. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“No loss.”
She gave me a sidelong glance. “I seem to remember things a little bit differently.”
“You always think the best of everyone.”
“It’s a skill you could acquire.”
“I don’t like being disappointed.”
She slipped an arm around my waist and guided me into the mission. The Fellowship has built out through several warehouses and manufacturing buildings which, save for Martha’s fiery oratory, would have long since been converted into lofts. The city wanted this end of town gentrified and envisioned galleries and bistros. Martha thought buildings should house people and proved convincing when she addressed the City Council.
Things had changed a lot since I’d done my time in the mission. The first hall still served as church and dining facility, but the stacks of mattresses that used to be piled in the corner had moved deeper into the complex. The far wall had been decorated with a huge mural that looked like a detail piece of da Vinci’s Last Supper. Thirteen plates, each with a piece of bread on it; but one was already moldy. The style wasn’t quite right for da Vinci—some of that stuff my mother had forced into my head was creeping back.
Martha smiled. “Our artist is very talented.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Talented? Or talented?”
“She’s a lot like you, Patrick.” Martha just smiled. “You’ll like her.”
“I need to ask you some questions.”
“About Bob Anderson?”
“About all of them.”
She studied my face for a moment, then led me over to a table and pulled out two chairs. She sat facing me and took my hands in hers. “They were all lovely people, every one of them. I know many people said bad things about them; but they had seen the work we do here. They wanted to help. They did things for us. Projects. Fund-raisers. What they gave wasn’t much for them, but it was everything for us.”
I nodded. “When they died, they left the mission money.”
Martha drew back. “What are you suggesting?”
“There are idiots down here who figure that if you start making money, they want a piece. Criminals aren’t bright; and you’re a soft touch.”
“True on both counts.” She smiled. “But your stepfather and Sean Hogan were not stupid. Bequests go into a trust with a board of trustees who vote on capital expenses. I can’t really touch that money. More to the point, no one has tried to extort money.”
“No rivalries? No animosity on the committee?”
Martha smiled. “The meetings were all very pleasant.”
That didn’t surprise me. Martha had talent, though I wasn’t sure she knew it. Somehow her positive nature was infectious. When she gave a sermon, people listened and her words got inside them. She always exhorted folks to be their best selves. It was like a round of applause accompanied by a boot in the ass that left you wanting more of each.
It was her inclination to think the best of folks that had her believing Anderson’s death was a loss. She remembered he’d pulled me out of the Mission and had given me money. She thought I’d been rescued. My mother, having taken to Christianity like a drunk to vodka, had tried to save me a couple times before, especially after my father went away. Martha thought this was another instance of maternal concern.
Truth was Anderson had been fed up. He just wanted me to stop embarrassing my mother. He wanted me gone from the city. By giving me money he hoped I’d crawl into some motel room and die anonymously, pretty much the way he did.
What goes around, comes around.
“Who else was on the committee?”
“No one, per se. They’d lined up a number of people to make donations. Let me get you a list.”
Martha left her chair, then waved a hand at a petite woman with white blonde hair and a pale complexion. She had freckles, but they were barely visible beneath a spattering of paint. “Leah, come here. I want you to meet Patrick Molloy. He used to live here, too.”
Leah smiled at me, all the way up into her blue eyes. I started liking her right then, because a lot of beautiful women would have been mortified to be introduced wearing overalls thick with paint. She wiped her hand on a rag, then offered it to me, bespeckled and smeared. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Molloy.”
“Trick.” She had a firm handshake, warm and dry. My flesh tingled as we touched. It was more than attraction. She truly was talented, but I was liking what I was seeing normally so much that I didn’t look at her through magic. That would have been an invasion of privacy—the last bastion of privacy in the mission.
I nodded toward the mural. “Nice work.”
She smiled and reluctantly released my hand as Martha headed toward her office. “You recognize it as da Vinci, yes?”
“Not his style.”
“True. I interpreted it through vanitas.”
“Uh huh.”
Leah laughed delightfully. “Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painters in Flanders and the Netherlands popularized the style. It’s still-life with decay. It’s supposed to remind us that everything is fleeting and that we’ll die some day. But you knew that.”
It was my turn to laugh. “That’s maybe the one bit of art knowledge that stuck. I was in my nihilistic teen phase when I was forcefed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For?”
“Art is something that everyone should experience because it helps them grow. You got it like you were a veal-calf being fattened up. No wonder you didn’t like it.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“But you don’t go to galleries or museums, do you?” She glanced down. “I used to, all the time. I’d sit and sketch. I’d see the work through the artist’s eyes and then I’d endure watching boorish people troop through, or school kids rushed through with only enough time to look at the back of the kid in front of them. They were walking through beauty and saw none of it. Yet the teachers and the parents all thought the kids were getting culture.”
“They were, it was just the McRembrant version of it.”
She snorted out a little laugh, but didn’t look up. “I kind of lost it. Nervous breakdown. That’s how I ended up here. Martha’s very good at putting puzzles back together.”
I nodded, reached up and parted my hair. “You can’t even see the joints anymore.”
Leah laughed openly, warmly, and looked up again. “She said you could be cold, but I don’t get that. And she said you could be trusted.”
“She’s right on both counts.”
“I’m right? I guess my work here is done.” Martha handed me a print-out of the recent donors to the mission. “The initials after each name indicates the contact.”
“Thanks.” I wasn’t sure what the list would get me, but if the Fellowship was the connection, it was a vector in. “I guess I have to go to work.”
Martha smiled. “You go, but you’re going to come back later. We’ll be having a big crowd tonight, and I need an extra hand on the soup line.”
Leah nodded. “You soup them, I’ll bread them.”
I studied her face, then smiled pretty much against my will. “I think I’d like that.”
Back in the street, my phone rang.
Cate. “4721 Black Oak Road. You want to be here now.”
“Who?”
“E. Theodore Carlson.”
I glanced at the printout. “We have a winner.”
“I’d hate to see what happened to the loser. Hurry, Trick. It’s not pretty, and it isn’t going to get any better with time.”
Cate wasn’t kidding. The corpse was ripe. He’d been dead a couple of days. Carlson had a reputation as a food critic and gourmand who
got himself a cooking show and sold a lot of cookbooks and spices. While he liked exotic stuff, his critics claimed he simplified things for the common man. He took folks living hand to mouth and made them think they were mastering haut cuisine.
All while using hot dogs, ground chuck and catsup, and the secret ingredient.
Food lay all around in the kitchen, on presentation platters, but it had curdled or dried, crumbled or gotten covered in flies. He even had packaged cupcakes arranged on a set of stacked trays looking festive. They were the only things that hadn’t gone bad yet, but that didn’t soften the most gruesome aspect of the scene—aside from the corpse, that is.
On the granite countertop of the island, in a roasting pan surrounded by potatoes and carrots and chopped onions, lay a leg.
A human leg.
Carlson’s leg.
He’d managed to hack it off at the knee, rub some salt on it, add pepper, before he collapsed and bled out on the floor. The butcher’s knife lay half-beneath him, covered in bloody prints. Angle of the cuts and the way the bone was sheered meant he’d taken the leg off with only a couple whacks.
I looked around. “What did Prout say? Carlson slipped?”
Cate shook her head. “He was gone before I got here. Manny said he covered his mouth with a handkerchief, then got that look on his face like he’d gotten an idea.”
Manny, who was taking pictures of the scene, grunted. “I said he looked like he’d just dumped a load in his tighty-whities.”
“Same thing when his brain has movement.” My eyes tightened. “Time of death?”
“Two days, three.”
I glanced at my PDA and the listing of case files. “Killer’s on a tight cycle, and it’s getting faster. Two days between Carlson and Anderson. Someone is going to die in the next twelve hours.”
“No, they won’t.”
I spun. Prout had returned, with handkerchief in place. “We just arrested the murderer.”
“What? Who?”
He lowered the handkerchief so I could see his sneer. “Martha Raines.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Only if you are, Molloy.” His beady eyes never wavered. “You followed the money. So did I. The Fellowship’s made millions on these deaths. You didn’t want to see it because you always were a lousy detective.”
“Arresting Raines solves nothing.”
“You trying to confess to being an accomplice? How much did she pay you?”
I glanced at Prout through magic. He almost looked as bad as the corpse, all mushroom gray and speckled with black. He had no talent—nor talent, for that matter—so one spell, just a tiny one, and his white suit would be sopping up blood as he thrashed on the floor.
Cate grabbed my shoulder. “Don’t.”
Prout gave her a hard stare. “I think you better escort your friend from my crime scene.”
“He’s going. He’s got a friend in jail who could use a visit.” She poked a finger into Prout’s chest, leaving a single bloody fingerprint on his tie. It looked like a bullet hole and I wished to God it was. “But this isn’t your crime scene. It isn’t even a crime until I say it is, Inspector. Right now, my running verdict is that he slipped. Death by misadventure, and unless you want to be doing all the paperwork and having all the hearings to change that, you’ll be letting me finish this one fast.”
Prout snorted. “Take your time.”
Cate shook her head. “I don’t have any. The killer’s next vic will show up in another six hours, so time is not a luxury I enjoy.”
I would have stayed, just to bask in the glory of that sour expression on Prout’s face, but Manny got a shot of it. He gave me a wink. I’d be seeing it again. I wished he had a shot of the sneer too. I wanted it for reference. Next time I saw it I was going to realign the nose and jaw.
Cate had been right. Martha was in jail, and it wasn’t for picketing some city office this time. She needed a friend. I owed her. I didn’t think the bulls down in lockup would want to do her any harm, but they’d have to cage her with the hard cases. Still, a visit could get her out of a holding cell at least for a little bit.
I got down to the jail pretty quick. I only made one stop, at a drive-through liquor store. I bought a bottle of twelve- year-old Irish whisky and took a long pull off it. Recorking it, I slid it under my seat. It burned down my throat and out into my veins. It made me feel more alive, and prepped me to use magic just in case.
I didn’t need it. Hector Sands was working the desk and he’d always believed I’d been framed for bribery. “You want to see Raines? Do you have to?”
“What am I not getting?”
Hector took me through into the holding area. Two big cells separated by a tiled corridor. Usually it was awash in profanity, urine, spittle, blood, and any other bodily fluid or solid that could be squirted, hurled, or expelled. People didn’t like being caged like animals; so they acted like animals in protest.
Not this time, though. Martha Raines sat on a cot, with all the other inmates sitting on the floor, and the people across the corridor hanging onto the bars. And hanging on to her every word. She just spoke in low tones, so quiet I could barely hear her.
Maybe I couldn’t. Maybe I was just remembering her calm voice and soft words. I heard her telling me that drinking myself to death wasn’t going to solve problems. She told me I had something to live for. It really didn’t matter what. I could change things from day to day. They were out there. I owed it to them and myself to straighten out.
“Been like that since we put her in the population. See why I don’t want to take her out?”
“Yeah. You’ll call me if there is trouble?”
Hector nodded. “I have to call Prout, too.” He glanced up at the security cameras. “I wouldn’t, but he wanted to know when you showed up, and he’ll go through the tapes.”
“Got it. Don’t want you jammed up.”
“I’ll wait to the end of my shift, about an hour, to call, you know, if that will help.”
I nodded, even though I didn’t care. He’d call Prout. Prout would call me. I wouldn’t answer. It didn’t matter.
“Thanks.” I left the jail armed with two things. The first was the list. The fact that Martha had given it to me without hesitation spoke against her guilt. If she were killing people, there’s no reason she would hand me a list of her victims.
Unless she wanted to be stopped.
Serial killers feel compelled to kill, which is why they cycle faster and faster, their need pushing aside anything else. I wanted to dismiss the possibility of Martha’s guilt outright, but I didn’t know if she had alibis. I only had her word about how nicely things had gone. What if Anderson and Hogan set up the trusts for another reason, to deny her funding and to oust her? What if they were scheming to move the mission and profit from the location, using that project as some cornerstone to gentrify a swath of the city? Would that be enough to make her snap?
I crossed to a little bistro and ordered coffee. Martha was talented. She sat in that den of lions and made them into lambs. I’d felt it. I knew her power. I’d benefited from it. But that was the good side of it. Was there a dark side? Could she talk someone into hanging himself or chopping off his own leg?
And if she could do that, could she convince a jury—no matter how overwhelming the evidence—to let her go? If she could, there was no way she could ever be brought to justice. While the Fellowship was a noble undertaking, did its preservation justify murder?
Those were bigger questions than I could answer, so I did what I could do with the meager resources at hand. Starting at the top, I called down the donor list. I left messages—mostly with servants since these sorts of folks like that personal touch—or talked to the donors directly. I told them there was a meeting of donors in the Diamond Room at the Ultra hotel at nine. I told everyone to be there. I didn’t so much care that it disrupted their evenings, as much as I hoped it would disrupt the killer’s pattern.
It took
me two hours to go through the list. I spent a lot of time on hold, or listening to bullshit excuses, so I used it to study those case files. Cate was right, I really didn’t want to look at the Preakness photos. There was something there, though, in all of them, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
At the end of those two hours I was no closer to knowing who the next victim would be.
Then it came to me.
Prout.
He’d never called.
I drove to his home as fast as I could. Red lights and a fender-bender let me double-check the full case packages Cate had sent me. I finally saw it. As far as a signature for a serial killer goes, this one was pretty subtle. Maybe there was part of me that didn’t want to see it before, but there was no denying it now.
I rolled to a stop on the darkened street in front of the little house with the white picket fence. Figured. He probably owned a poodle. A sign in an upstairs window told firefighters there were two children in that room. I didn’t even know he was married.
I fished the whiskey from beneath the seat and drank deep. I brought the bottle. Prout wouldn’t have anything there, and if he did, he’d not offer.
That’s okay. I don’t like to impose.
I crossed the street and vaulted the fence. I could have boosted my leap with magic, but there was no reason to waste it.
And it didn’t surprise me that the hand I’d put on the fencepost came away wet with white paint. Had my head not been full of whiskey vapors I’d have smelled it. White footprints led up the steps and across the porch, hurried and urgent. The screen door had shut behind him, but the solid door remained ajar.
Beyond it, darkness and the flickering of candles. That wasn’t right for the house. It should have been brightly lit, all Formica and white vinyl, with plastic couch-condoms covering every stick of furniture. Lace doilies, and white leather-bound editions of the Bible scattered about.
The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told Page 7
