“That,” said Jack, “is an excellent fucking question.”
“I still think he’s got something with these dead folks,” Pete said. “Assuming he didn’t just make it up out of whole cloth.”
Jack shrugged. “Easy enough to find out. We can go ask somebody who’s not arse-deep in black magic, for a start.”
“So you’re staying?” Pete said.
Also an excellent question. Pete didn’t want his help, and Mayhew sure as shit didn’t want him around. He practically puffed his chest out like a frog whenever Jack was within ten feet. He should do exactly as Pete expected—go hide somewhere until it was safe to go home. But separating made them both vulnerable. He’d stay—and keep up the line that he was only there until the kid was out, which Pete seemed to have no problem believing. She could take care of herself, then, and the baby, and he wouldn’t be a danger to anyone except himself.
“Yeah,” Jack said aloud. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
CHAPTER 6
In the morning, Jack found Pete and Mayhew drinking orange juice on his small balcony. Mayhew offered him a glass. “Sorry, man. Pete said to let you sleep. Jet lag and all that.”
Jack ignored his offer and pulled up a chair. “Got any food?”
“Yeah, I called out for some breakfast,” Mayhew said. “Didn’t think Pete here would feel like going out.”
He brought Jack a bowl of cereal, sickly sweet with bits of pink marshmallow floating in milk that had just turned. Jack ignored the civilized bachelor’s version of a Fuck You and took the time to size up Mayhew while the detective chattered at Pete about what an absolutely tip-top sort of place Venice was.
If Mayhew was a practitioner, he wasn’t much of one. His talent was barely a flutter, and he didn’t seem to realize that a mage could size him up and ferret out his demon-soaked aura like smelling a dead mouse in your vents.
Aside from his questionable grasp on magic, Mayhew was a sad sight. He’d probably been a big, strong man around ten years ago, but now his ridiculous Hawaiian shirt was taxed to capacity with a round stomach, and his hair was starting to get more salt than pepper, like dirty snow covering dirtier ground. His jowls hung heavy, and when he talked to Pete he stared at her intently with his slightly too-small eyes, a look that Jack recognized well enough. Most straight men looked at Pete that way.
Altogether, Mayhew didn’t inspire any more confidence in Jack that he wasn’t out to bugger them thoroughly and completely, without the benefit of Astroglide.
“My buddy called and said you can pick up your car,” Mayhew told Pete. “Any ideas about the case?”
Pete shoved back from the table. “None I’d care to share. Come on, Jack.”
Mayhew blinked, clearly having expected that their little duo of Bogart and Bacall would continue for as long as he kept grinning and pouring orange juice. “But you’ll need a ride.”
“You said it was nearby,” Pete said. “We’ll manage. People in London walk.”
“Nobody walks in LA,” Mayhew said, and then barked a laugh at his own questionable cleverness in quoting an old-as-the-hills pop song.
Jack followed Pete. “You should try it sometime,” he said. “Your shirt landscape might get a little less hilly.”
“I wish you’d stop that,” Pete said, when they were walking up the hill away from the beach, the address of Mayhew’s mechanic friend tucked into Pete’s pocket.
“What?” He was shit at playing innocent, but he could always try.
“Your life would be much easier if you just quit taking the piss for no good reason,” Pete told him.
“I have a good reason,” Jack said. “Mayhew’s a slimy git. If that’s not a reason I don’t know what is.”
The mechanic’s shop was tucked into a side street a few blocks beyond the top of the hill. Here, the ocean was a sound, not a sight, and the glaring green-yellow sunlight was even more revealing, giving unfavorable clarity to the faded boards and the sad, sagging sign proclaiming SAL’S AUTO R PAIR.
The garage door was open to emit exhaust fumes, Black Sabbath playing on a tinny radio propped on top of a toolbox, and the shriek of metal on metal. Sal was bent over a fender, sanding off blue paint to reveal the primer beneath.
Jack didn’t care much about cars—they got you from point A to point B and beyond that, blokes used them as a way to extend their cocks, or to fuss over them incessantly, the way people more in line with his way of thinking obsessed over original pressings of the Sex Pistols’ EMI release.
“Oi!” he shouted, and Sal shut off the sander, raising his goggles.
“Hey,” he said. “You Benji’s buddy?”
“Wouldn’t go that far,” Jack said. Sal grinned. His teeth were even and startlingly white, considering how ugly the rest of his face was. Sal looked as if his features had been dumped into a sack, and then his maker had slammed the sack sharply against a cement wall a few times before letting things settle. His nose was a monument to how not to take a punch, and his cheekbones were uneven. A slick black pompadour, dented by the band of his goggles, topped off the look and added a touch of absurdity.
“Benji doesn’t have a lot of interpersonal skills,” Sal said. “Probably why he’s shit broke most of the time.” He winked at Pete. “Only giving you the car because he did me a favor a few months back. Some fuck rented one of my gals and returned her with the grill and bumper banged all to hell. Come to find out, asshole was in a hit and run out on Hollywood Boulevard, put some wannabe actress slash hooker in the hospital, all kinds of crap. I could’ve been liable.”
“Sounds like he’s a veritable superhero,” Pete said.
Sal’s grin widened until it was practically pornographic. “Love your accent, doll.” The grin abruptly ceased. “You do know what side of the road we drive on in the USA, right?”
“I’ll manage, although being a woman, the very idea of a combustion-operated vehicle frightens and confuses me,” Pete said. Sal laughed, and then coughed, and then pulled a Marlboro from a pack and lit it.
Jack took it out of his mouth. “Not in front of the lady,” he said. Sal sized him up for a second, and Jack stared right back. Sal considered for a minute longer, then shrugged.
“Sorry. Anyway, she’s out back.”
He led them down a narrow hall lit by a single bulb, and back into the hard-hitting sun, which now gleamed on a host of finned, chromed, detailed beasts that looked like nothing so much as a flight of especially decorative UFOs.
“Wow,” Pete said. Jack had to admit, the collection was impressive. Cherry red, powder blue, wasp yellow, the cars were all perfect, and all different. He recognized a few that aped famous sorts from films—James Bond’s Aston Martin, Steve McQueen’s Mustang, and the white Challenger from Vanishing Point, which was one of his friend Lawrence’s favorite films.
“I was going to sling you into whatever I didn’t have rented out today,” Sal said. “Paramount is eating up most of the fleet for this period movie they’re shooting over by the boardwalk. But you two need something special.” He considered, tapping one sausage finger against his troll jaw. His hands could have easily palmed Jack’s head, and Jack was glad he hadn’t pressed the cigarette issue. Too early in the day to get his face broken. You needed to at least have lunch and a proper drink first.
Sal led them between the rows until he came to the far back corner of the lot. “This one’s my baby,” he said. “Great gal, she’ll do whatever you need her to do. She’s famous, too—she was in Christine.”
“Great,” Jack said to Pete. “Fucking demon car to find a nonexistent demon spree killer.” That sounded about right.
Sal handed Pete a keyring with a grinning Dia de Los Muertos skull for a fob. “Be nice to her, and she’ll be nice to you,” he told Pete.
Jack looked at the crimson Plymouth Fury. “Fuck me,” he muttered, sliding into the leather bench seat.
Pete took it slowly until they were headed away from the beach. “It’s not so bad,” she sai
d. “Handles nicely. It’s not the Mini Cooper but it’ll do.” Jack saw the huge grin on her face, and even though the windows were open and the LA air made him even more short of breath than inhaling an actual lungful of smoke, he had to return it.
“So, what’s your mad plan?” he said.
“Mayhew’s old partner from the LAPD agreed to meet with me and show me the crime scene,” Pete said. Jack whistled.
“How’d you manage that?”
“I think it’s my accent,” Pete said. “People around here listen to it and practically fall over their own feet.”
“I don’t think it’s just your accent,” Jack told her. Pete stopped smiling.
“You have anything to add? Anything you thought of?”
“I think this is all bullshit and that there’s nothing spooky going on,” Jack said. He tilted his head back and shut his eyes against the sun. “I’m just along for the ride, luv. Go where you will.”
CHAPTER 7
The hot wind was back, reaching right down his throat and clawing away all the good air. Replacing it bit by bit with tinders and ash. What he’d taken to be the howling of the air was in fact screams, his own and others. Screams as the vast plain before them shifted and changed, the red sands shifting and forming faces, which stared at him with lidless eyes before vanishing under the next gust.
He tried to shut his eyes and shut out the grit, close his mouth and gulp down a breath, but his eyes and lips were pinned back, fine hooks through his flesh. His blood turned to crystal the moment it hit the air, and all he could do was scream until he suffocated.
This was the first part of his time in Hell, the torture before the demon who’d pulled him into the Pit got down to the real business.
He was dead, and in Hell, and never going free.
“Jack.” Something poked him hard in his biceps. “I swear, you could sleep through a missile raid,” Pete muttered. The Fury sat at the foot of a driveway that snaked up a landscaped hill and ended at a small imitation castle.
“We here?” Jack stretched and consciously did not run his hands over his face. His old face, needing a shave, broken bottle–induced scar down his cheek, no flayed flesh or flowing blood.
“No, I liked the view and thought I’d sit a while.” Pete withered him with a glance and got out, slamming the door. Jack took his time.
If he was starting to remember Hell, that would just be one more fuck you from the Morrigan. One more bit of shit to heap onto his psyche. Well, he already had a mountain of it. What were a few more bad dreams?
That’s all they were. Dreams or, at the worst, faded memories he couldn’t be sure were ever real, or had happened at all.
Pete had made it halfway up the drive, and he followed. The house was, up close, even more of a horror. They were up in the hills now, looking down at the bowl of smog shot through with the tops of skyscrapers populating downtown LA. Plaster gargoyles glared down at Jack from every available flat surface, and the door had been made to look like the entrance to a particularly upscale sex dungeon. The knocker was a demon head, and you grabbed the tongue to shove the door to and fro.
A flash black car, the kind favored by plainclothes policemen, was parked in the circle drive, nose pointing toward the hillside. The demon door opened, and the selfsame policeman stepped out. His suit was cheap and his eyes were hard as the rock that made up the facade of the fake Gothic mansion.
“Ms. Caldecott?” he said.
“One and the same,” Pete told him, accepting his handshake.
“Detective Shavers,” he said. “Ben’s partner. Well. Used to be.”
He ignored Jack, and Jack mentally subtracted good detective from his mental checklist of Shavers. If he were a copper, he’d be all over shifty gits like himself.
“So Ben’s told you about his pet serial killer theory?” Shavers asked.
“He certainly has,” Pete said. “With visual aids and everything.”
Shavers flinched. “Sorry about that. You know, I don’t normally allow civilians to just wander around an active crime scene, but I want to make something clear to you, Ms. Caldecott.” He stood aside and gestured them inside.
The front hall was done in black tile, inlaid with the head of Bahopmet. The goat’s heads, except for horns, had been covered with a cheery rug, and paintings and photographs covered the burgundy walls, in stark contrast to the aggressively dark décor. Evil Chic, Jack thought. Early Gothic Trying Too Hard.
“House belonged to some cult rocker in the 80s,” Shavers said. “Been a rental since, with the condition that nobody change the decoration. They shoot movies in here sometimes—that’s a real good way to make some cash in this town.”
“Never would have guessed,” Pete said, but Shavers didn’t pick up on her attitude. “What did you want to make clear to me?”
“That Ben is retired for a reason,” Shavers said. “That there’s nothing to this case to connect it to his old murders. Yes, they’re similar. But that’s it.”
“They’re a little more than similar, if Mayhew’s photos are to be believed,” Pete told him.
Jack caught sight of a stairway leading to an upper level, a loft ringed in ornate iron railings. He slid down the hall, Shaver’s and Pete’s voices echoing off the two-story cathedral ceiling. His sight screamed the moment he mounted the stairs, vibrating and red-rimmed. Shavers was giving Pete the brush off, but there had, at the very least, been a real murder here.
“Listen,” Shavers was saying. “You have to understand something about this town—it’s almost as obsessed with death as it is with movie stars doing each other up the ass. You know how much James Dean’s Ferrari wreckage went for at auction? Point is, every tabloid and sleazy blog has sources in the ME’s office and in the LAPD. The details could’ve gotten out through a dozen pinholes. At worst, we’ve got a very dedicated copycat. But not a serial. Not ten years apart, with no activity anywhere in VICAP in between.”
“You seem very sure,” Pete said.
“I am sure,” Shavers rumbled. “I’m sorry you came all this way, but this is just going to be another cold case. Only difference is it’s in my file instead of Ben’s this time, and I’m a lot better at letting things go.”
“I understand, believe me,” Pete said. “I used to be on the job. Can you just walk me through the scene, so I can tell Ben something?”
“Yeah, sure,” Shavers said. “Not like I got anything better to do, like pursue cases I can actually close, right?”
Jack pushed open the first door, keeping his ear tuned to Shavers and Pete. An office, done in bloodred wallpaper and black carpet, a layer of dust thick enough to draw in over it all. Not here.
“There was no forced entry,” Shavers said. “But we didn’t think too much of it at the time. Rental properties, the gate code never changes and a dozen staff have it, plus the family that lived here. The Herreras,” he added. “Mom, dad, son, and unborn daughter. Just in town for a few months while he produced a film.”
Jack tried the next door. A kid’s room, baseball memorabilia pasted up over the rock ’n’ roll walls, toys scattered across the floor.
“They killed the boy first.” Shaver’s voice echoed. “I say they, because we decided there had to be at least two. One to subdue the parents and one to go after the kid.”
The tile floor of the bedroom was stained, old blood trickling along the grout like vines breaking through stone.
“Cut his throat,” said Shavers. “Quick and clean. He bled out in a matter of minutes.”
“And the parents?” Pete’s boots clacked on the tile.
The last door was really just an iron lattice with more of the demon head motif. The pulse of his sight got worse when he pushed it open, and Jack ground his teeth against the sensation of a spike being driven through his skull sideways.
“They killed and mutilated the father in their bed,” Shavers said. “Knocked the mother over the head and dragged her down here.”
The mattress was
bare, and marks of a crime scene team were still in place. There was much more blood this time—almost all the blood that a person’s body held, Jack wagered.
The psychic feedback was strong and bloody, but it wasn’t anything unusual for a murder scene. He backed out and looked down at the top of Shaver’s bald head as he bent over the Bahopmet rug. “She was here. They, uh … they did the final mutilation here on the tiles.”
“And the fact that her unborn baby was cut out of her on an image that’s been widely co-opted by Satanists the world over didn’t trigger any alarms?” Pete said.
“Come on, Ms. Caldecott,” Shavers said. “You were on the job. You know the shadowy Satanic cabal is just a myth fundamentalists and shrinks looking to make a buck conjured up to amuse themselves. Satanic Panic in this country is not something the LAPD is ever going to buy into.”
“Yeah, fine, the Satanist angle is bollocks,” Pete said. “But there was no sign of the child?”
“No,” Shavers said. “The baby was gone, along with whoever did this.”
“And nothing about two unborn babies being stolen, ten years apart, strikes you as a little strange?” Pete said.
Jack looked down at the bloody tiles. It was almost too trite to be believed. Home invasion mutilation inside a house that would give any weekend Satanist a hard-on, missing baby, all the hallmarks of a ritual murder—if all you knew about ritual murder came from television.
“Strange?” Shavers said. “No. Depraved, yeah. But not that strange. People are capable of sick shit, Ms. Caldecott. We get copycat murders all the time.” He opened the front door. “Now if you don’t mind, please ask your buddy to come downstairs, and go on back to England. There’s nothing for you here.”
“I think Ben would be a lot more willing to let it go if I could take a look around myself,” Pete said.
Shavers threw up his hands. “Fine. You got five minutes, and then I have real police work to get back to.”
Pete joined Jack on the landing. “This is weird, yeah?” she murmured. Shaver’s mobile rang, and he stepped outside.
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