Sacrificial Ground fc-1

by Thomas H. Cook

  “No, I only knew that I had seen her before at such places. She was always dressed differently, but when you are that beautiful, dress cannot hide it.”

  “You said the galleries were ‘out of the way’?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that they’re not among those on the Northside, the more prestigious galleries,” Miss Castle said. “They are smaller places, with cheaper rents, that sort of thing.”

  “Places like the Knife Point Gallery?” Frank asked.

  “Yes, that’s the sort of gallery I mean.”

  “And you saw Angelica at places like the Knife Point from time to time?”

  “Yes,” Miss Castle said. “I had no idea who she was. And she was always dressed somewhat differently. But she was very beautiful. Quite striking. If you saw her once, you weren’t likely to forget it.”

  “Did you see her often?”

  “Not often, but on occasion.”

  “How many times?”

  “I didn’t make a note of it.”

  “Give me your best guess, then.”

  “Five, maybe six.”

  “Over how long a period?”

  “I started running into her about four months ago,” Miss Castle said.

  “Was she always alone?”

  “Yes, and that struck me as very strange. After all, she is, as I’ve said, very beautiful, and that sort of girl is rarely alone. It would have been natural for her to have had some sort of escort.”

  “But she never had one?”

  “Not as I recall.”

  Frank wrote it down. When he looked back up, he saw that Miss Castle had been eyeing him cautiously.

  “I have a confession to make, Mr. Clemons,” she said.

  “Confession?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid that I had an ulterior motive for asking you up here this evening.”

  “Which was?”

  “To find out about Derek,” Miss Castle said. “Beyond that, I must tell you that I know practically nothing about your young girl. I never spoke to her or had anything at all to do with her.”

  “I understand,” Frank said, “but you did at least see her from time to time, and that’s important.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes,” Frank said. “Now, about these places where you met Angelica, these galleries, where are they?”

  “Actually, I never saw her at the Knife Point,” Miss Castle said. “No, she was always somewhere else.” She thought about it for a moment. “Yes, I remember now. She was always at one of those galleries on the Southside. There’s a street of them. Not too far from Grant Park.”

  “Grant Park?”

  “Yes, there’s a street of them. Three or four in a row. It’s all pretty run-down for the most part, but once in a while I’ve been able to find some interesting work.”

  “These galleries,” Frank said. “What are their names?”

  Miss Castle ticked them off one by one, as Frank wrote them down in his notebook.

  “And you said they’re all on one street?” he asked.

  “Yes. Hugo Street,” Miss Castle said.

  Frank wrote the street name under the names of the galleries and underlined it.

  “This girl,” Miss Castle said after a moment. “Was she in love with Derek?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Where did they meet?”

  “The Knife Point,” Frank said, “then she dropped by his house.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “As far as I know.”

  Miss Castle smiled. “Old as I am, still jealous.” She laughed sadly. “And of a woman, of all things.”

  Frank walked over to her, and for a moment the two of them watched a small flotilla of ducks as it skirted effortlessly across the placid surface of the lake.

  “I still find life quite mysterious, Mr. Clemons,” Miss Castle said at last. She looked at him. “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled, and drew a long thin strand of Spanish moss from one of the limbs that hung low above her. “This particular species always looks dead,” she said. “It’s always gray and dusty.” She laughed faintly. “My father used to take me to the window at night. He’d point to this moss and he’d say, ‘Look, Miriam, there in the moonlight, the ghosts are hanging in the trees tonight.’” She coiled the strand delicately around her finger. “How long does Derek have?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does he look … frail?”

  “You haven’t seen him?”

  “No, not for a few weeks.”

  “But the flowers.”

  “He finally gave me a time when I could bring them and he wouldn’t be there,” Miss Castle said. “He doesn’t want me to see him.”

  She began to walk slowly along the edge of the lake. “I’ve seen others, of course. They look dead before they die.” She turned abruptly to Frank. “Does he?”

  “He looks thin, that’s all,” Frank said. “He doesn’t really look like he’s dying.”

  “He had so much energy,” Miss Castle said.

  “He still does.”

  She looked surprised. “Does he?”

  “Yes,” Frank told her.

  She shook her head. “Such a stubborn man. I’ve offered him all sorts of help. I’ve done that for forty years. It wouldn’t only have been him. I’m a patron, as they say, of the arts. I buy their works, and sometimes I get them jobs that won’t destroy them. Restorations, touch-ups, museum work, that sort of thing. I could have done that for Derek.” She laughed. “God knows I’ve done it for artists far less gifted than he is.” She shook her head despairingly. “But he would never take anything. He would never even sell me one of his paintings. He would give me one from time to time, but money never passed between us.” She stopped again, her eyes drifting over to the lake. The water was turning red in the twilight. “So, you see, I wouldn’t have found it unusual if that girl had loved Derek.”

  “When you saw her in those galleries, did you have an impression at all?” Frank asked.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What was it?”

  “That she was a seductress,” Miss Castle said. “It was the way she might slink from one room to another, or stand in a corner somewhere, sucking a fingernail.”

  “Did you ever see her talk to anyone?”

  “No. Never. I saw people approach her from time to time, but she would always turn them away. That’s why I found it so odd that she was at Derek’s house that day.”

  “Why odd?”

  “Because she was obviously using her beauty as blatantly as she could,” Miss Castle said. “And, as you must have guessed, for Derek, a woman’s beauty remains pretty much a matter of abstraction. I don’t think he’s capable of feeling anything beyond that.”

  “Are you saying that Angelica was a tease, Miss Castle?” Frank asked.

  “That would be the vulgar term, yes,” she replied. She turned toward him and touched the large, purplish circle beneath his eye. “Does that still hurt?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She drew her hand away. “Beauty is not always a soothing thing, Mr. Clemons.”

  “And what about Angelica’s beauty?”

  “Not soothing. Not soothing at all. At least, she didn’t seem to use it in that way. Just the opposite, in fact.”

  “Which would be?”

  “Well, to inflame people, if you’re looking for the most dramatic term.”

  “And you think she liked to do that on purpose?”

  “Yes,” Miss Castle said firmly. “That was my impression. And the fact that she is dead does not surprise me.” She stared at Frank pointedly. “There’s a danger to inspiring too much flame. You may become engulfed by it.”

  Frank had seen that happen before, but in every case, the rage had been obvious in what it left behind, bodies mauled beyond recognition, flayed open or beaten flat, sprawled across rumpled beds, or still dangling fr
om the ropes that had been used to restrain them while the rage swept over them again and again until they couldn’t feel it anymore.

  “Did you notice anyone who might have felt that way about Angelica?” he asked.

  “No,” Miss Castle admitted. “But then it wouldn’t always be obvious, would it?”

  “No.”

  “It might build slowly, day by day. And while it built, it might be invisible.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what Derek says? He says that we are ‘junglehearts.’ Do you know what he means by that?”

  “No.”

  “That we react to things, rather than create them,” Miss Castle explained. “Do you think that’s true?”

  “Sometimes,” Frank said.

  “It would work like this,” Miss Castle added. “A group of cells arrange themselves into a body that is beautiful. That would be Angelica Devereaux. This creature would then create certain reactions in the other creatures it encountered. One reaction might be to adore her, one might be to love her, one might be to hate her, and one might be …”

  “To kill her,” Frank said.

  “Yes,” Miss Castle said. A single white eyebrow arched upward suddenly. “And now you, Mr. Clemons, are called upon to react to that.” She drew her collar more tightly around her neck, as if to ward off a sudden chill. “We are all hopeless. You, me, Angelica. All of us. We don’t know what we are. We don’t know what we do. And we can’t even begin to calculate the effects of what we do.” She smiled very briefly, then offered him her hand.

  “And so good-bye, Mr. Clemons,” she said. “Let us part gracefully, one stranger to another.”

  She turned briskly and headed back toward the great house. Its immense white facade seemed to stare down at her with a sightless eye.

  22

  During the long ride back to Atlanta, Frank tried to bring all the details he had discovered into some kind of order. The portrait of Angelica Devereaux had now changed radically, but it was no less confused. The remote, private, obsessively solitary girl who slept in a room full of dolls had become something else entirely, a girl who dressed in different clothes, wandered through seedy art galleries, and, in her own way, tried to attract as much attention as she could.

  But even this was too simple, Frank thought, as he continued to consider it. For this was the same girl who’d suddenly approached an old man with what appeared to be genuine affection, the same girl who, a few weeks later, had driven a boy she hardly knew to a littered alleyway and taken him angrily in the cramped space of a red BMW. It was as if she had lived many lives, or wanted to, and that none of them had ever satisfied her.

  It was already past nine at night when Frank made it back to headquarters. Most of the detectives had cleared out long ago, with only the sullen graveyard shift to occupy the empty desks of the bullpen. They sat around, staring vacantly at newspapers and magazines or roaming idly from one desk to another as if still searching wearily for the final key to things.

  Only Gibbons retained his energy, and as he sat down at his desk, Frank could see him scrambling through the last stack of memos from the FBI. It was a sad, despairing sight, but Frank could not figure out exactly why it struck him that way. It was as if something were missing in Gibbons, missing in the way he hunted down his prey with that relentless, deadly professionalism that had served him so well. His busts were always clean. He lived by the letter of the law, and left its spirit as shallow and untended as an abandoned grave.

  “Hello, Frank,” Caleb said as he walked up to the desk. “Eyeing the competition?”

  “What?”

  “I saw Brickman talking to our friend Gibbons this afternoon,” Caleb said. “Thought they might have shifted the case over to him.”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Good,” Caleb said. He pulled a chair over to the desk and sat down. “Score one for our side. “ He leaned back leisurely and pulled out his pipe. “By the way, where you been? Alvin’s been worrying about you.”

  “La Grange.”

  “For the sights?”

  “I got a lead, someone who’s seen Angelica in various places.”

  “What places?”

  “A few galleries,” Frank told him. “There’s a street of them near Grant Park.”

  “Grant Park again,” Caleb said thoughtfully.

  “Yeah.”

  “You know, Frank, I’ve been thinking she was maybe a hooker.”

  “Who was also a virgin?” Frank replied doubtfully.

  “That kid might not know the difference, Frank,” Caleb said. “What I was thinking is, you’ve got a bored rich kid who has a taste for slumming. Things get stranger and stranger. She ends up taking a few bucks. The idea appeals to her. She does it a few more times, and then she picks up this john and before she can even think about it, she’s dead.”

  Frank shook his head. “I don’t think so, Caleb.”

  “It’s happened more than once.”

  “Yeah, I know. Tell me, Caleb, how many cases of murdered prostitutes have you handled?”

  “More than I can remember.”

  “How’d they look after it was over?”

  “Like hell.”

  “Like Angelica?”

  “Bummed up more.”

  “Exactly,” Frank said. “If you want to kill a whore, you use a gun or a knife or a hammer.”

  Caleb thought about it for a moment. “All right, I could be wrong. But how do you make it, Frank?”

  “I don’t know,” Frank said. He stood up. “Want to go for a ride?”

  “Where?”

  “Around the park.”

  Caleb pulled himself wearily to his feet. “You driving?”

  They walked down to the garage together, then drove directly through midtown until they reached Cherokee Avenue and the northern end of Grant Park.

  “According to the kid,” Frank said, “Angelica took him around the park a few times.” He pulled over to the curb and stared out into the park. The lights had been turned on, and they gave off a silvery haze.

  “Like she was looking for somebody,” Caleb said.

  “Right.”

  “But not a connection.”

  “Not if what you found out is true,” Frank said, “that she was off drugs.”

  “But what about action, Frank?” Caleb said. “What if she was just out cruising for a little action?”

  “With Stanford Doyle, Junior, sitting right next to her?” Frank asked.

  “Maybe she wanted to shock him,” Caleb said. “Maybe that was part of the thrill.”

  Frank shook his head.

  “Why not?” Caleb asked. “The fact is, Frank, we don’t know what was going through that girl’s mind. She was young, real young, and you must remember what that was like.” He smiled knowingly. “Young blood, Frank. It craves action. For God’s sake, you know what I’m talking about.”

  For a moment, Frank remembered his own young blood, how it too had craved action, how it still leaped toward something raw and immediate, how, even now, so much of life seemed like a lazy doze compared to what his blood desired.

  “I remember it,” Caleb said quietly. “I remember it real well. And you know what? When I saw that girl all laid out in that goddamn lot, I thought to myself, ‘I know your story, darling.’”

  “What do you think her story is, Caleb?” Frank asked very seriously.

  Caleb considered it for a moment, as if trying to find the right words. “That she bit down too hard on life. She wouldn’t be the first, you know.” His eyes seemed to withdraw into their sockets. “Sometimes you pay a price, when you want too much, too fast. That’s what I figure happened to Angelica Devereaux. She wanted what we all want in our hearts, Frank, something interesting, something that’s got a fever to it.”

  Frank nodded. “Yeah.”

  Caleb’s eyes drifted over to the park. The silvery light appeared to thicken as the night deepened around them, turning into a summer fog.
>
  “It always was a shithole, Grant Park,” he said, in a tone that struck Frank as oddly sad and even a little bitter. “Used to be whiskey more than dope. Used to be fucking more than killing. But it was always rough. And it was always interesting.” He looked over at Frank. “Know why? Because it was always full of life.” He scratched the side of his face with a huge hand. “Maybe that’s what she came for. Just life. The real thing.” He smiled knowingly. “And if that’s true, then busting dopers and pimps won’t get us anywhere.”

  “Maybe not,” Frank said.

  “You came over here to roust the park, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Turn it upside down, screw it around, see what drops. Am I right?”

  Frank nodded. “The only thing I’ve been able to figure out about Angelica is that she hung around this area, that she knew something about it.” He looked out into the distance. The haze seemed to tumble in the heated summer air. “This is where she brought the kid that night. And she was spotted in a few of the galleries around here.”

  “And the galleries are closed for the night,” Caleb said.

  “That’s right.”

  “So that just leaves the park.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” Caleb said reluctantly, “but you’d better watch yourself. “ He nodded gloomily toward the park. “There’s nothing out there this time of night that don’t already have a problem.” He pulled on the door latch and swung open the door. “You ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  The thick haze seemed to hold greedily to the day’s exhausted heat, and by the time Frank had walked only a few yards into the park, he could feel his shirt becoming soaked in the armpits and down the back. Great droplets of sweat poured down Caleb’s face as he walked beside him, and in the odd, diffused light of the street-lamps, they appeared to glisten like flecks of ice.

  “Keep an eye to what’s behind you,” Caleb said softly as they continued through the stifling haze, “and an ear to what’s on either side.”

  Within a few minutes, they were deep into the park. Far away they could hear the low moan of creatures in the zoo, lost and plaintive, bewailing their odd imprisonment. The light faded more and more around them until, after a while, it simply died away and they were covered in the deep summer darkness.