CrimeSeen2014.06.09

by Michaelbrent Collings

  At the front of the nave was the sanctuary and altar. An organ and choir loft to one side, the pulpit where the priest would deliver sermons opposite.

  Red votive candles flickered, casting everything in dim tones that made Evan think of the crime scenes he had investigated over the years. The murders. The blood.

  Listings moved beside him. She dipped the fingers of her right hand in a small marble font filled with water. Then she knelt quickly and genuflected.

  Of all that had happened in the last day or so, this might be the thing that surprised Evan the most.

  Listings didn’t look up as she said, “What? A girl can’t kick ass and still believe?” Then she crossed herself again and said, “Sorry about the ass comment, God.” She flicked a wicked grin in Evan’s direction. “A girl like me needs church: I’ve probably got more to repent about than most. Some of it has to do with you.”

  Evan felt a blush crawl up the back of his neck. He wasn’t a particularly believing person, but his parents had both been church-goers. His aunt had been a devout Catholic, in fact, which was why the setup of this place was so familiar to him. And having Listings make half-veiled single entendres in a house of God made him feel like apologizing to someone.

  Evan looked away from her and checked out the pews. No mass was being held, so there were only a few people – mostly devout-looking older women dressed in dark tones – sitting in the wood seats.

  The one exception was easy to find. A rainbow off to the left.

  “Come on,” said Evan.

  He and Listings walked up the center aisle, then moved to the side. He sat next to Tuyen and Listings took up position behind the Vietnamese woman. She was praying, her head down, silent and still.

  Evan waited a moment, then said. “I didn’t peg you for a Catholic.”

  “I’m lots of things,” said Tuyen. She didn’t open her eyes. “Vietnam has been invaded many times. We learn to adapt.” She crossed herself and stood.

  Listings half-stood as well. “Whoa, where you going, Lady Gaga?”

  Tuyen looked at Listings, and Evan could tell that there was an immediate and very mutual dislike between the two women. “Somewhere safer,” said Tuyen.

  She walked to the front of the nave. Around the side of the altar and up a ramp that led behind it to an open door at the very back of the building.

  Evan followed, looking at Listings to see if she was as surprised as he was. Tuyen didn’t seem like the kind of person a priest would let just go into the church sacristy at will, but apparently she could. No one made a sound as she went through the doorway.

  Evan went after her, Listings close behind. He barely heard his partner, their footsteps muffled on the thick carpet that blanketed the area around the altar.

  The sacristy was the priests’ chambers. Vestments hung from the walls, silver candle holders and other objects that would be used in the mass were carefully stacked on a table. A desk lamp was the only illumination.

  Tuyen stood before another open door, a dark hole that allowed sight only of a few steps going down.

  Evan felt strange moving into this place. Believer or not, his upbringing demanded that he respect it as a private spot if not a sanctified one.

  “Are we supposed to be here?” he said.

  Tuyen nodded. “Father John is a friend. He won’t mind.” She turned and walked down into the darkness below the sacristy.

  Evan looked at Listings again. She stared at him through eyes that seemed less hard-bitten than usual. She was nervous. Scared.

  Evan had never thought he would encounter something that would truly scare her.

  He turned away before the sight killed his ability to move. He followed Tuyen down into darkness.

  Names

  When Tuyen saw the man’s outline through the shop window, she worried.

  When she saw her offerings defiled, she feared.

  When the policeman called, she understood.

  And that… that was the worst of all.

  Now she stood, arms crossed, her back against the cold marble of the crypt below the sacristy. It was a burial place for important members of the congregation, dating back over two hundred years, to the time when St. Mary’s had first been erected. The church itself had been lost to fire, rebuilt, torn down and rebuilt again.

  But the crypt had remained.

  It was nothing grotesque, nothing out of a horror film or a nightmare. It was comforting. Cool marble, with inscriptions and age-darkened plaques along some of the walls. No one had been interred here in decades – modern regulations wouldn’t permit it – but the righteous dead of old were here. That made Tuyen feel better. And, she hoped, it afforded a measure of protection.

  Detective White came down first. He looked around, clearly understanding what the place was, just as clearly shocked to see it. But he didn’t say anything. Tuyen liked him. He seemed like a good man.

  The woman came next. Tuyen did not like her. She looked around, too, and Tuyen could see fear in her eyes. The woman didn’t know what was happening. Or maybe she did know, at least a little. Either way, she was scared. And fear mixed with something in lady cop’s past and came out as anger.

  “Why was your name in his wife’s planner?” she demanded, pointing at Detective White.

  “I cleaned for her.”

  The lady frowned. “I thought you worked at the hoodoo shop.”

  Irritation whittled away some of the sharp edges of Tuyen’s fear. “Not everyone can afford to survive on one job, lady. And it’s not voodoo.”

  The woman took a step toward her, like she was going to scold her or maybe just beat her to death.

  Detective White stopped her. “How come I never saw you at my house?” he said in a quiet voice.

  He was listening. More than that, he was ready to believe. Tuyen would talk to him. She had learned long ago that it was useless to try to convince people of anything. The more important something was to them, the less likely they were to change their ideas.

  But if they came to you. If they asked for your help, and trusted your answers… then truth could be given.

  She thought how to answer him, deciding finally that being kind would take too long. She didn’t know how much time they all had. “You never saw me for the same reason you never saw your wife’s boyfriend.”

  She saw him wince. Maybe that was too far. “Sorry,” she said. “I’ve been coming for a long time. Cleaning a few times a week, just an hour or two here and there. One day I came early, and… I found them. I had never seen you in person, but I knew she was married. She threatened me.” Tuyen frowned. She remembered the day, the cold woman speaking to her as though she were a child to be bullied. “I didn’t like that. So next time I saw them together….”

  She let the words hang. Detective White understood. “You were the one who called me home that day. Not my wife, you sent that message!”

  Tuyen nodded. She looked away. “I wanted to get her back. And besides, it was wrong what she was doing.”

  “Did you kill Val?” asked the lady cop. She looked at Tuyen intensely, then at Detective White, and Tuyen realized how much he must have been wondering the same thing.

  “Listings –“ began Detective White.

  “No!” Tuyen almost shouted it. “Two policemen came and asked me about that already. I had an alibi. I was working at the shop, at Mystix.” She stepped a bit closer to Detective White. It was important that he understand the truth. That he believe her. “You know who did it,” she said.

  Detective White stood still. He looked like he was having a fight with himself, a terrible struggle going on inside. Tuyen couldn’t fault him for that: it was terrible to have to admit that the unreal is real, that the things we have been taught are wrong and that our nightmares have become flesh.

  “The guy from the bar,” said the lady cop.

  Tuyen nodded. “I’ve seen him, too. He’s been following me. Been in my house, took some of my charms.”

  �
�How?” demanded the lady cop. Listings. “How is he doing all this.”

  Tuyen didn’t bother answering her. She wasn’t ready to believe yet, and Tuyen wasn’t going to waste breath trying to convince her.

  Listings drew her own conclusions from Tuyen’s silence. She shook her head. “Come on, Pink. I need more than vague –“

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?” said Detective White.

  Tuyen nodded.

  Listings’ jaw dropped open so far Tuyen expected it to bounce off her boobs. It would have been funny if it wasn’t all so terrible. “What?” she said to Detective White. “Have you and Katy Perry here lost your minds?”

  Detective White ignored her, which made Tuyen like him more. “So shouldn’t he be….” He gestured around them. The names of the pious on the walls. “An angel or something?”

  Tuyen shook her head. She heard Gramma’s words in her mind, almost as though the old woman had come back to tell her what to say. “Death doesn’t grant wings to the wicked.” She looked at the two cops, hoping to see the strength they would all need. And realizing that whether it was there or not, they were the people who would have to fight this fight.

  “My grandmother was from the old country,” she said. “She taught me there are three kinds of bong ma. Of ghosts.” She held out a finger for each, counting down to the most dangerous. “First are ghosts who have unfinished business. Those are the ones you most hear about. They’re afraid to go beyond the veil without seeing their work done.” Another finger went out. “The saddest are the ones who are stuck in a loop, replaying the last scenes of their lives over and over, never able to influence the world, never quite understanding what’s going on.” She paused, then the third finger speared out. “Worst are the vengeful spirits. People who should have gone to Hell, but whose anger keeps them anchored to the earth.” She looked at her fingers. Dropping all but the third. “Guess which one we’ve got.”

  Silence.

  Finally, Detective White said, “How do we stop him?”

  Listings repeated her jaw-drop. “Seriously?” The cop looked like she couldn’t decide whom to yell at, finally turning on her partner. “White, this guy is just some nut. He’s clever, he’s got some new tricks, but he’s flesh and blood and we can catch him.” Her voice started to lose strength at the end of her tirade, and Tuyen still saw the fear that lay over her spirit like a blanket of snow.

  Tuyen had always had the sight. Sometimes she didn’t want it. Sometimes she saw wrong. But she always saw.

  Detective White must have seen it, too. “Really?” he said. “Then explain to me what’s happening. Geist. The evidence room. Televisions that turn on and off on their own. A guy who takes a chest full of bullets without bleeding and then disappears into thin air!”

  His voice got louder where hers had softened. Listings almost shrank before him. Sometimes truth did that. It was part of what made seeing things so dangerous. Truth was heavy, and could crush some people out of existence.

  Detective White turned to Tuyen. “What do we do?”

  Tuyen leaned back against the wall again. Clutching herself so tightly that she could feel her own fingers drawing bruises up against the skin of her arms. “Not many places are safe,” she said. “Here, with the souls of the saved. Maybe at the shop.”

  Detective White slashed through the air with the flat of his hand. “I don’t care about safe. How do we fight him? How do we kill him?”

  Listings, watching them both as they spoke, retreated from fear back to anger again like a child running home. “You go ahead and keep on chatting with Rainbow Brite,” she said to Detective White. “I’ll be upstairs with the living and the sane.”

  She turned away.

  “You believe,” said Tuyen.

  Listings stopped. “What?”

  “I saw you when you came in the church. You believe.”

  “Not in this.”

  “Why not?”

  For a moment Tuyen thought she had reached the lady cop. That she hadn’t just wasted her breath. Listings turned around and Tuyen thought she saw the real person under the woman’s armored gaze. She looked suddenly like a little girl.

  “Why believe in one miracle and not in another?” said Tuyen.

  “Because one gives me hope,” said the little girl version of the lady cop. “And the other scares the hell out of me.”

  Then she ran out of the crypt, disappearing up the stairs.

  Tuyen pushed away from the wall. She didn’t like the lady, but she understood suffering. She understood having your world turn upside down, having the things you loved stripped from you.

  Detective White shook his head. “Let her go. You have to let her work through it when she’s like this, or the only thing that happens is you end up with fewer teeth.” He sighed, the sound of someone grappling with emotions he couldn’t quite control.

  “Is there a way to stop this guy? Or thing, or whatever he is?” he finally said.

  Tuyen nodded. “Ghosts have names. Speaking the name of a ghost is the only way to stop them, to hurt or even touch them if they don’t want to be touched.” She caressed one of the names on the wall, an inscription so faded with the many lingering traces of loved ones’ hands that the letters had nearly been wiped away. “To be a ghost is to be locked in a lie, and only truths have power over them.”

  “Do you know this one’s name?”

  The marble hadn’t changed under Tuyen’s fingers, the air around her was the same. But she felt cold.

  “Do you think I’d be cowering down here if I did?”

  The letters under her fingers were gone. She couldn’t read them. The air was cold. Death surrounded them.

  And she could not see if it had come to protect, or take them.

  She shivered.

  Lies

  Listings had lied.

  When the others were talking about ghosts and death giving wings to the wicked, Listings said it wasn’t true. That they were insane.

  But it was true. And it was the world that was insane.

  She knew it was true, and probably had known for a while. Had known since the day her father died: after all, if a demon could come into her house and kill her angel, then it made sense that others would walk the darkness. Not just muggers and rapists and murderers, but things of pure evil. Things that converted the world into a cage, a place where humanity had been thrown not as children to play, but as meat for the beast.

  She ran from it. Ran from it, and from her lies.

  So many lies.

  Too many.

  She ran up the steps, but the lies followed her. And it wasn’t just her denials in the crypt. It was all the lies. All of them.

  She ran into the sacristy. She hoped it might offer her comfort, being in the private places of the priests, the spots where final prayers were uttered before masses were offered and sermons given.

  She found no comfort. Instead, she found hands.

  They snatched at her, encircled her throat.

  She tried to scream, but the air was utterly cut off. She had seen so many movies where people choked each other, offering out tiny croaks, little noises that summoned others. It was crap. If you were being choked – really choked – no noise came. None at all.

  Just like now.

  She looked at the man choking her. The brown hair and brown eyes that seemed so normal, until you looked a bit deeper. Until you saw the fires behind them, the flames that had burned away his sanity.

  And as darkness closed around her vision, folded over her and covered her, she realized that the flames weren’t madness. They were truth.

  The killer wasn’t one of those who had gone crazy to hide from reality. He had gone mad because of the truths he had seen.

  Listings thought about her lies.

  She wondered for an instant if they had protected her.

  She felt a hand leave her throat.

  Something sharp pierced her.

  The lies flowed out of her.

&nb
sp; The darkness came in.

  Preparations

  “So… we don’t know his name, so we’re screwed? We just let him knock us off or do whatever it is he’s going to do?”

  Tuyen didn’t answer Evan’s question right away, and he started to wonder if he hadn’t spoken loudly enough. Not normally something he worried about, but since everything else was so wrong, so confused, it wouldn’t surprise him to be struck deaf, dumb, and blind.

  He wasn’t even sure he would mind. He was already running around in the dark, so it wouldn’t be much of a change.

  “There are things. Dangerous things.” Tuyen didn’t turn to him, but he heard fear digging hooks into her voice, peeling it back, flaying her soul.

  She looked at Evan, one hand still on the marble of the crypt wall as if to maintain contact with something she could believe in, could find comfort in. “I’ll meet you at the shop. Midnight.”

  Evan shook his head. “Why midnight? Why not now? We need to get this guy.”

  Tuyen looked away. “I need to prepare.” Her voice was muffled now, and Evan had the strange sensation that if he grabbed her and swung her around he would find no face, only a fleshy expanse of skin unbroken by mouth or eyes. Speech without speaking, sight without seeing.

  He swallowed. His mouth was so dry it felt like gravel scraping down his throat. “How?” he said.

  Tuyen didn’t speak. She put her other hand on the wall, leaning against it like a perp about to get frisked.

  The lights in the crypt flickered. For a moment, the fraction of an instant between light and dark, Evan thought he saw blood on her shirt, blood on the white floor at her feet.

  Then the lights came on again.

  Tuyen knelt down. Hands still on the wall, she began to pray.

  Evan watched her for long enough to realize that this was it, this was what she was going to do until midnight. She was going to pray.

  God help him, he was going to hinge his hopes on someone whose big plan was to pray for the next few hours.