Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Nevada Barr

  Anna took the first watch, squatting on the edge of the mattress, wishing her dress covered more of her behind, keeping an eye on the doors adjacent to the torture chamber. Couples came and went in the swing. Clothes became scarcer as the night wore on. Groups became more common. The level of hilarity rose with the blood alcohol content.

  The doors with the electronic combination locks stayed closed.

  Every twenty minutes she and Jordan switched off, more to have something to do than because they needed to stay alert for this particular assignment. Though there had been long hours and less sleep--at least on Jordan's part--than was ideal, neither of them felt any inclination to rest.

  Several times revelers wanted to "join their party," and several times they were invited to join others. As far as Anna was concerned, these were not temptations but interruptions.

  Finally, near three in the morning, the door nearest the torture chamber opened. Jordan was on watch and hissed at Anna to join him. A woman squeezed through the door and closed it carefully behind her. She was dressed in an ankle-length gray dress of muslin or linen and wearing black boots. The dress's neckline was high and finished in a Peter Pan collar. The sleeves came down to her knuckles. Her hair was pulled back into a neat bun. Juxtaposed with the rest of the denizens of the Chance, she looked like a nun.

  The gray sister didn't come any farther into the club than necessary but turned immediately to the second door, punched in the code, and slipped through, disappearing from sight.

  "What do you suppose that was about?" Jordan asked when they'd returned to their alcove.

  "The outfit?"

  "The whole thing."

  Anna didn't know. Shoulder to shoulder with him on the mattress, she mulled the uneventful arrival and departure over in her tired mind. "The clothes--could be the governess Candy described. Remember? A lady that didn't get pretty clothes?"

  "Could be," Jordan said.

  No, Anna thought. It was Clare, or partly Clare. A hysterical edge was cutting through Jordan's armor. Mackie whined and rose from where he'd lain collapsed for the better part of the night to walk over and drop his chin on his mistress's knee.

  They sat like that, man/woman, woman and dog, until the second of the two locked doors opened and the governess reappeared, this time with an armload of paper towels. Juggling the loose rolls, she began punching numbers into the keypad by the door from which she had first emerged.

  Before Anna could make any decisions, Jordan was on his feet, Mackie spilling unceremoniously onto the floor, and through the locker room. Scrambling up as quickly as she could in four-inch heels, Anna followed, afraid he--or Clare--was about to get them thrown out, if not arrested.

  It was Clare, she was sure; Jordan wasn't as good an actor as his hostess. "Allow me," Anna heard Clare murmur with just a trace of highly educated drawl in her voice. "Looks like you've got yourself an armful." Such was the graciousness the actor had pulled around her, Anna would have sworn the chosen costume of Jordan became quite debonair, a kind oil man from central Texas out of his league in Sin City.

  Anna hung back, poised uncomfortably between a very large, very naked woman in the leather swing and the grunting little man, naked but for a porkpie hat, between her ample thighs. The lady in the swing opened her eyes, cupped a breast in one hand, and, offering it to Anna, said, "Care to join in?"

  "No thanks," Anna said distractedly. "I've already eaten."

  Smiling, laden with paper towel rolls, the governess was thanking Jordan and backing awkwardly through the door he held for her. Then she was gone, and Jordan still had the toe of his shoe between door and jamb. He jerked his chin at Anna, and, before she had a chance to weigh in on the advisability of rushing unarmed and ignorant into a black stairwell leading to Dougie's lair, he was gone as well, and the door was swinging shut. Running, she grabbed it and slipped through, Mackie, dragging Jordan's belt, at her heels.

  After the strange dark opulence of the sex club, the utter utility of the stairwell had the effect of a cool breeze on a hot day. The single most stultifying thing about the club had been its sheer banality. The desultory sexual gluttony had had about it a tedium that made the revelers--if such they could be called--seem to be merely naked people so weighed down with ennui that even the forbidden was a chore.

  The metal and concrete of industrial stairs, with work lights in metal cages, seemed positively life-affirming in contrast. Anna breathed deeply, but she didn't move. Jordan, despite his rush in, was still as well. Metal treads were wonderful instruments for making noise. Both in leather-soled shoes, and Anna in heels, the timpani of their descent would have alerted the governess.

  Jordan picked up Mackie, lest his claws clack on the tread, and they waited until they heard the door at the bottom open and shut. Then they waited another minute to make sure the governess had cleared the area--in hopes the governess had cleared the area.

  Jordan, still holding the dog, started to descend.

  "Shoes," Anna said. Both removed their shoes. For Anna it was a blessing as well as a precaution. She didn't bother to try to talk Jordan--or Clare, or whoever was driving the exhausted malnourished body at the moment--into waiting to make this assault until they were better prepared. She wouldn't be heard, and she wasn't interested in wasting breath she might need in the near future.

  In bare and stockinged feet they descended. There were no windows and no doors. The stairs ended less than a flight down at a plain gray metal door like that above. Jordan grabbed the knob as if he were about to storm whatever battlements lay beyond.

  "Stop!" Anna murmured. His hand twitched and his shoulder muscles spasmed, but he managed to keep himself in check. "Let me," she suggested and shouldered by before he could change his mind and barge in.

  As she turned the knob slowly, she heard him setting the dog down. "Not locked," she whispered and eased the door open a crack. Mackie put his nose to it and Anna her eye. What she could see of the room was clear of human occupants. Opening the door wider, she slipped in. Mack and Jordan followed. The door clicked closed behind them. Like those upstairs, it had a combination pad to one side. "Did it lock?" Anna demanded.

  Jordan tried it. "Locked."

  "Well, that's just peachy," Anna fumed and turned to look at the room they must now deal with. It was long and narrow. At one end were racks of clothing; at the other, mirrors and hat stands with a collection of top hats and cloth caps. All of it was for men, and all of it looked as if it had been fashionable in the Victorian era. The hats were tall and flared slightly at the top, the coats and trousers and vests were dark and staid-looking, the white shirts had detached collars, and there was a rack of cravats by the mirrors with pins of various kinds in them.

  "It's a theatrical dressing room," Clare said. Anna turned to look at her. It was definitely Clare. As uncanny as it was--or as canny an actor as Clare Sullivan was--it was as if she and Jordan were, in fact, two different individuals, and only a fool or a blind man would mistake one for the other.

  "Storage room?" Anna asked. "Mardi Gras costumes? This is a big costume town."

  "No. Nothing is protected, no plastic, no mothballs. These are being used. Look." Clare crossed to the dressing table and held up a brush with hairs in it. She opened the top drawer, and there were perhaps a dozen more brushes, each wrapped in plastic so the next user wouldn't have to worry about hygiene.

  "The photograph," Anna remembered aloud.

  "That's what I'm thinking," Clare said. "The man whose lap Candy was sitting on, the man who's now chief of police, was dressed in an outfit like these." Mackie had moved to the door in the far wall of the room and was sniffing at the frame. He scratched once, whined softly, and looked back over his furry shoulder at Clare.

  The blood drained from her face so quickly she swayed and might have fallen had Anna not steadied her. "He smells the girls," Clare gasped. "I know it. He knows they're here." Yanking free of Anna's fingers, she started for the door. Anna wrapped her arms around the o
ther woman's chest and arms.

  Clare fought back, trying to kick Anna's legs or force her arms from around her. Lack of food and care had made her so weak that Anna found it no harder than holding a small child. "Stop it," Anna growled.

  Clare landed a heel on Anna's instep, and Anna bit off a shriek, then sank her teeth into the other woman's shoulder. The pain got Clare's attention.

  "We don't know what's out there," Anna said insistently into the ear that was closest. "We don't know what the dog smells. We'll do it, but let's do it right."

  Since they'd gotten off on the wrong high-heel-shod foot, there really was no right way, but there had to be something righter than charging headlong through doors that could open onto any damn thing.

  "If this is the fancy house--"

  "It is!" snapped Clare, but she didn't start struggling again.

  "Then it's going to have security. Men with guns. Bouncers, thugs. If the chief of police is involved, you can bet there's a few off-duty cops doing his dirty work for a cut of the money." Clare felt a bit more compliant, so Anna let her loose.

  Clare didn't turn around. In a voice as flat and heavy as a manhole cover she said, "Go if you want. I'm not leaving." There was no doubt in Anna's mind what she meant. Clare would find her children or she would die, and it would be done tonight. Through the door they faced was the proverbial lady or the tiger, and it didn't sound as if Clare even knew anymore which she preferred.

  "The door locked behind us, so it looks like I'm staying," Anna said. "I'd rather like to survive this next bit, so can we do it my way? Slow, careful, with great stealth and cunning? Ready to run away should the situation call for it?"

  Clare, evidently beyond speech, managed to nod her head, once up, once down, like a poorly lubricated robot.

  Leaving the detested high heels on the floor of the dressing room, Anna slipped around Clare and the dog, turned this second knob silently, opened the door a crack, and looked out into an unpeopled hallway, dimly lit with wall sconces reminiscent of those in the Chance, with doors opening to either side. The walls were papered in flocked maroon on red, classic-cartoon whorehouse. Given that cartoons had to be derived from something, perhaps it was authentic to the Victorian era.

  Anna stepped through. Mackie started to dart ahead of her, and she stepped on the end of the belt-leash, jerking him to a halt. "Maybe we should leave the little guy here, in the dressing room," she suggested.

  Clare took the makeshift leash from her fingers. "No. He smells his girls."

  Anna let it go. In operations as ill begotten as this, having a fluffy little dog in the mix probably wouldn't alter the outcome.

  Moving quickly, knowing Clare couldn't bear any undue delay, Anna padded quietly to the first door, listened, opened a crack, and then looked inside. Clare did the same on the opposite side of the hall, only with less stealth. Fortunately the floor they were on was apparently deserted.

  The first two rooms were dormitories, with small wooden bunk beds, eight to one room and six to the other. Each bed was neatly made. The bedspreads were all the same, but on the bunks were the things children loved: stuffed animals and dolls. A couple had picture books.

  "Boys' dorm on the other side," said Clare. Clearly, little boys were of no interest to her at this juncture.

  "Girls' here, I think," Anna said as she stepped into the room. The charm of the scatter of childhood paraphernalia lulled her. For a moment she dared hope there'd been a mix-up and the children Daoud Suliman transported illegally into the country were being adopted into good homes by a caring institution. Then she caught sight of one of the "children's" books on the nearest bed. It was hardcore child pornography.

  A gift from an admirer.

  A short, sharp intake of breath brought Anna's attention back to Clare. The woman's face was screwed up as if she might cry, but her mouth was held in a hard oval, lips pulled back freakishly from the teeth. It put Anna in mind of Edvard Munch's The Scream. It wasn't the crude picture that had undone her--Anna had seen photos as horrific on the walls of Clare's apartment--but that Clare now saw her daughters in the pose, in the beds, on the laps of the men who put on anachronistic suits for an age-old perversion.

  Mack pulled loose from his mistress's nerveless fingers and trotted from bed to bed, finally stopping at one, reaching up the short ladder to the top bunk, and whining.

  The Munch scream looked about to become audible.

  Anna laid a hand on Clare's arm. "Let's go. The bunk is empty. It doesn't matter whether Mackie smells Dana or Vee or a Hostess Twinkie." Anna pulled Clare out of the dorm room, leaving Mack to come or not as his black button nose told him to. After another whine, he followed.

  The next room looked to be the governess's quarters. There was a queen-sized bed, a television, an armoire, a full bath, and a walk-in closet. A pair of jeans, two tops, and a handful of scarves were scattered across the bed, shoes littered the floor, and the closet door stood open. Inside were the clothes one would expect to find in a thirty-something's closet and two pegs with the dreary ankle-length gray gowns of the stereotypical nineteenth-century governess.

  "Watch the door," Anna said and whipped the gossamer confection Star had kindly lent her over her head. The governess's dress fit well enough; the skirt was a bit long, but it would serve to hide Anna's bare feet. In the bathroom, she found the hairpins she knew would have to be there, given the no-nonsense bun the woman had worn. In less than a minute, she'd coiled her hair tight at the nape of her neck and secured it there.

  Stepping out of the bathroom, she said, "I can't say that I feel less obvious, but I probably am. Go back and put on a costume jacket," she ordered Clare. "Maybe we'll get out of this in one piece after all." She said it to try to make the white around Clare's pupils shrink, to calm her enough that she wouldn't get them caught or killed. What she believed was that the protective coloration would probably only serve to get them deeper into the hornets' nest before they were found out.

  Clare jogged back to the men's dressing room. Anna opened the next door. A large-bellied man, wearing vest, shirt, and cravat, a half-smoked cigar in his sausage-like fingers, was reclining on a fainting couch upholstered in green velvet. The walls picked up the green of the fabric and chased it through with turquoise and gold that complemented an ornate mirror above a cold fireplace and heavy drapes pulled over what Anna suspected was a blank wall.

  The man wore no pants. A small African American boy, dressed in loincloth and turban, complete with jewel and feather at the brow, knelt between the barrel-sized thighs. Both looked up, startled, when Anna opened the door. The man blinked with slight annoyance. The child kowtowed, forehead to floor, rump in the air, as he had no doubt been taught to do when he was made a slave. The half-naked man put his foot to the boy's rump and pushed hard enough to knock him over. "Mind your master, boy," he said and winked at Anna as if she were in on the joke.

  "Pardon me," Anna managed and closed the door with difficulty. The hinges were oiled to the gliding point of silence, and the door moved easily. The difficulty was in turning her back on a child being abused when every instinct demanded she rush in swinging. If she and Clare were to find Clare's daughters, now was not the time to start the war.

  "Fuck it," she said and jerked the door open again.

  "What the hell?" the fat man growled, not amused to be caught with his pants down a second time.

  "No smoking," Anna said. "Fire codes." She marched purposefully across the room and picked up the heavy glass ashtray he'd been using. Before he had time to think, she brought it down on his skull hard enough to kill him.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Clare could not control her brain as her body went through the familiar motions of donning yet another character. Disassociation, she thought as she watched her hands sort rapidly through the clothing racks, pull out jacket, shirt, and trousers, and then, like creatures from a horror movie, strip her of her garments and put on the others.

  Not only did she feel her
hands were alien, but she no longer inhabited her body. It was as if she watched it being dressed from a corner near the ceiling. Jordan had gone, and she stared down on Clare Sullivan, poor broken, hopeless, useless Clare. The bunks where Mackie thought Dana or Vee or Aisha might have slept should have given her strength, but they had destroyed the last of it. Her children had been tortured; that thought burned through mind and body in an acid tide. It was all she could do to focus on the body following the pigeon ranger's orders.

  As she watched, Jordan's rich pervert was converted to an Edwardian dandy, the illusion completed with the speed of someone used to quick changes in the dark backstage. The dandy moved through the door of the dressing room, and Clare followed, floating, ghostly, as the body that had once housed both her and Jordan walked quickly down the hall. The clothes had changed the stance, and the Edwardian gentleman moved with grace, spine straight, shoulders back, a slight swing as if he were accustomed to carrying a walking stick or umbrella.

  He stopped before an open door and looked in. With nauseating familiarity Clare felt herself slamming back into her corporeal form at the sight of a little boy, forehead to floor, hands outstretched before him, in front of a half-naked man murdered on the sofa.

  "Up you come," Ranger Pigeon said not unkindly and lifted the boy by the arm. "What's your name?" she asked.

  Clare's mind scrabbled over mountains of emotion in search of coherent thought. Part of her wanted to gather up this child, protect him against all evil, hold him and love him and, in him, all children. An equal part was thinking coldly, Not Dana, not Vee; dump the little bastard and get a move on.

  "Simba, milady," the boy told Anna Pigeon, not daring to raise his eyes from where they were fixed on the carpet two inches from his toes.

  "No. Your real name," Anna said. "Your before-here name."

  "We're wasting time," somebody said, and Clare realized the words had come from her mouth. Anna shot her a look that should have shamed her, but she was beyond such paltry agonies.