by Naomi Clark
Yeah, sounds like a real fun time. I moved the car into a patch of shade under an oak tree, wound the windows down for Mutt, and headed for the church. All the way up the dark gravel drive, the Voice fought me, urged me to turn back, and threatened foul deeds upon me. My new best friend was freaking out. Kinda makes me feel better about things.
I still hesitated in the doorway, waiting for the lightning bolt and heavenly chorus. All I got was the creak of the door swinging, and cool air swirling around inside the church. Fuck, if they had air conditioning, I was there.
I stepped inside, ignoring the Voice’s cries of protest, and sighed in relief. The air con was cranked up, drying the sticky beads of sweat on my forehead. Huh. It wasn’t a typical church on the inside, either. I saw no heavy gold crucifixes dangling from the ceiling, or wall paintings of angels chopping up lions, or whatever angels did. The seats were pale wood with red velvet padding, none of the old scarred, chipped oaken pews you always saw in churches on TV. The stained glass windows didn’t have any martyred saints or bleeding Christ figures either, just abstract patterns in purple, gold, and green. It looked nice, slick, modern, and kinda weird. I expected hellfire and brimstone and I got this bland sort of anti-church. Not that the lack of Christian knickknacks made the Voice any happier.
“This place is vile,” it spat. “Take me back to the dead hookers and miserable humans. I need to feed.”
The Voice’s hunger hit me hard, sending images of dead, pale Rhian Ellis spinning before my eyes. I wet my lips, trying to fight down the nasty mix of lust and disgust it filled me with. I wasn’t the Voice. I didn’t need to suck up every bit of despair and horror I found, even if I might want to.
While I struggled to ignore the Voice, a narrow-faced guy about my age appeared, pushing his wire-rimmed glasses up his long nose and frowning at me. I wondered if I’d been muttering to myself, or dribbling pea soup or something.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Yeah. I’m looking for a priest.”
He beamed at me. “You’ve found one. I’m Father Crane—Daniel.” He hurried over to shake my hand. “How can I help you, son?”
“You’re in charge?” He looked way too young to be calling me “son”.
“As far as the Lord lets me be.”
‘Right.’ I scratched the back of my neck, my words stuck in my throat. Do I just come right out and ask for an exorcism? Or do I have to make a confession first or something?
I guess Crane picked up on my internal hand-flapping, because he smiled at me and gestured to the seats. “Sit down, please. How about we talk about what brought you here?”
“Sure.” I sat down, shifting my weight on the creaking chair. Despite the padding, it felt pretty uncomfortable. I guess they didn’t want the parishioners getting too cozy, lest they forget that Jesus died for their sins.
“Jesus was nothing but a charlatan and a con artist! Nothing and nobody can absolve you from damnation if you are to be damned,” the Voice informed me.
Crane’s smile faltered. “I’m sorry?”
Shit. There I went with the crazy man routine again. “I said...” I realized there was nothing remotely plausible I could say, so I abandoned the attempt and plunged straight into the heavy stuff. “Never mind. Listen, do you believe in demons?”
“I believe in the evil forces that tempt us in our daily lives,” Crane replied seriously. “Drugs, gambling—”
“No, not that. I’m not talking about abstract concepts or personal temptation or any of that shit,” I cut in. “I’m talking demons. Horns, pointy tails, pitchforks. Demons.”
The Voice bristled at my cartoonish vision of a demon, but Crane suddenly looked worried instead of serious. I could see him mentally fitting me with a straitjacket as he replied.
“Do you believe in demons, Mr. Banning?”
I weighed my answer carefully. I knew I sounded crazy. I remembered how sure I’d been that Stoker was crazy when she sat me down in her kitchen and explained to me about the undead mafia running Shoregrave. That happened after I’d fought a vampire and watched Stoker turn into mist. I didn’t want to spook Crane, but I didn’t want him to dismiss me as a kook off his medication either. I wanted him to take me seriously, and think seriously about what I told him. If after that he still decided I was a few chips shy of the cookie, fair enough.
“Look,” I said. “I know how this sounds, okay? I know you’re looking at me wondering when I’m going to start drooling and ranting about the leprechauns who tell me to start fires, but bear with me. Because, yeah, I do believe in demons. I’ve been up close and personal with them, and now I’ve got one...inside me. Riding around with me. I want it gone.”
I wasn’t one of life’s great orators. Another reason I became a private dick—I got to spend a lot of time alone talking to myself, and when I did talk to other people the dialogue was pretty limited. Once I figured out the key phrases—“How much will you pay me?” and “I knew this dame would be trouble”—I was pretty much set. I didn’t have to spend a lot of time being eloquent or persuasive. So I didn’t expect Crane to be bowled over and convinced by my little speech. I just wanted him to listen to it.
And I think he actually did. Instead of laughing me out of the building, Crane leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands under his chin. He studied me over the rims of his glasses, pursing his lips. “How did you acquire this demon?” he asked me finally.
Judging by his inflection on the last word, he still thought I was talking about some tangible vice rather than monsters from the pit. I sighed. “It jumped down my throat. I don’t really remember much of the actual event, which I’m grateful for, as I’m sure I’d be traumatized by it. It didn’t last long—the demon got...taken out of me. Mostly, I guess. It left part of itself behind, and now I’ve got this voice in my head, feeding off misery and anger, all the shitty parts of life. I want to get rid of it.”
“You’re asking me to perform an exorcism,” Crane said.
I blinked. “You believe me?”
Crane rubbed his nose. “Whether I believe you or not is immaterial, I think. You believe you.”
I didn’t agree, but I didn’t push it. “So you can do it, then? You can exorcise me?”
“It’s not a ritual I’m very familiar with,” Crane said. “I was actually trained as a Pentecostal priest, but switched to Methodism last year. Only ordained clergymen can perform exorcisms, with the dispensation of our district superintendent.”
“So you can’t do it?” I didn’t care if he’d trained to be a human cannonball. If he couldn’t do the exorcism, I wasn’t going to sit through his lecture on the church structure.
“Well, I am an ordained minister,” Crane said brightly. “I’ve never done an exorcism before, but I can certainly consult the superintendent for his opinion.” He seemed keen, now he’d warmed to the idea. Maybe he did believe me after all. Either that or he thought it was the quickest way to get rid of me.
“Okay.” I drummed my fingers on my knees. “How long will that take?”
“Perhaps you could come back tomorrow?” he suggested. “I’ll need time to read up on the ritual, and you should take the time to prepare yourself. It isn’t a quick or easy thing.”
We left it at that, shaking hands and agreeing to reconvene tomorrow afternoon. I left the Overture Church feeling...not hopeful. The Voice wouldn’t let me feel hopeful, but I felt like I’d achieved something.
I went back to the car, where Mutt had chewed his lamb chop to pieces. “You won’t get another one,” I warned him. He thumped his tail and lolled his tongue at me. I wished I was so easily entertained.
I sat in the front seat and rolled myself a cigarette, plotting my next move. I needed to get to Hush and start working on the Ellis-Baxter case, but the strip joint didn’t open until nine.
The Voice poked and prodded at me, whispering that it was hungry and needed...something. Violence, bloodshed, suffering, and whatever else I could give it.
I couldn’t deal with the Voice if I had nothing to distract me. That was why night time was so bad. If it was just me and my thoughts, the Voice was impossible to ignore. I had nothing to do between now and nine o’clock except give Mutt a bath in his medicated shampoo. That wasn’t going to cut it. If I wanted any peace, I’d have to man up and feed the Voice. With a sigh, I put the car into gear and headed away from the clean, shiny church toward Mayberry Street, where the porn stores were.
Chapter Four
Incidentally, or not, Mayberry Street was just a block away from the mysterious Tamsin Searle’s flat, where Rhian had died. It was on the bad side of town in other words, the part where people drove with the windows rolled up and the doors locked. Although in this sweltering heat, I didn’t stick to the windows-up policy. Mutt and me liked our oxygen.
Mayberry Street boasted a whole ton of dirty-looking porn stores and seedy-looking strip clubs. Hush, where Rhian had worked, was a classy joint in comparison to these shady, rundown establishments with their grimy windows and lurid, pink neon signs. I wondered if Baxter would be pleased to know his fiancée had picked a nice strip club to work in.
I pulled the car up to the curb outside a shop called, redundantly, Sex, and left Mutt panting and drooling on the back seat, while I slunk inside. I felt like I should pull my collar up and duck my chin to avoid attracting attention. Then I remembered I was in a fucking porn shop and decided there was no point being coy about it.
The most enormous dildos I’d ever seen lined the walls, and I paused for a second to gape at them. If I ever met a girl who could fit one of those up her quivering passage, I wasn’t fucking her. I was putting her out of her misery.
They displayed the generic, light bondage section in the corner: nipple clamps, handcuffs, and whips. The smell of fake leather just about masked the smell of dust and mildew hanging around the store. I wandered past the bondage gear to the counter, where a skinny boy arranged tubes of lubricant by color. He glanced up at me with massive apathy.
I slapped my wallet down on the counter. “I need the sickest porn you’ve got,” I told him. “Anything along the lines of Two Girls, One Cup will do fine.”
The apathy melted away. “Planning a big night in, huh?” He leered, moving out from behind the counter to lead me to the DVDs.
“Yeah, I’m gonna masturbate till my cock drops off.” Inside my head, the Voice squealed in glee at the thought.
* * * *
An hour later, I was watching Japanese girls fuck each other with dead Koi carps, while a man dressed as a bunny rabbit shoved one of those enormous dildos up one of the girls’ ass. According to my friendly neighborhood porn salesman, this was the tamest of the stack of DVDs he’d sold me.
The Voice loved it—both the twisted nature of the film and my reaction to it. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a man. I like sex, from what I remember of it. I like porn. I just like my porn to be a little less...freaky. Watching this shit, I was pretty sure I’d never get a hard-on again, and my stomach-lurching nausea pleased the Voice to no end. It soaked up my disgust, feeding on it as happily as it had fed on the sight of Rhian’s corpse. Since I didn’t plan to go around finding dead bodies for the Voice to giggle over, the porn was a good enough substitute, at least until the exorcism.
“You won’t get rid of me,” the Voice said confidently. “I’ll be with you until the bitter end. Drink, suicide, gun in the mouth... However you choose to go, I’ll be there, watching.”
“Watch your porn and shut up,” I told it. Mutt, sprawled on the floor at my feet, glanced up with a whine. “You too,” I told him.
I’d moved onto a daddy-daughter-horse incest fest when my phone rang. I jumped, and Mutt barked. I flipped open the cell to see Anna’s name flashing on the screen. Shit. I’d said I’d call her after speaking to Baxter. I answered with a sigh. “Hey, Detective Radcliffe. How’s life?’”
“It’s been better,” she said. “How are you, Banning?”
“I’m sitting watching horse porn at four in the afternoon. How do you think I am?”
“I don’t want to know.” She sniffed. “Did you speak to your client yet?”
“Yeah. He’s asked me to look further into Rhian’s case, find out how she ended up at Hush.” I paused the DVD, freezing on an especially nasty image to keep the Voice quiet. “He gave me the go-ahead to talk to you, too, so I guess we should get together.”
“Great,” she said, sounding a lot more relieved than I expected. “I’m actually going down to Hush tonight to interview the manager. You can come with me.”
“Is this a date, detective?”
“Would you really take me to a sleazy strip club for a date, Banning?”
“Sure. I like to show a girl what I expect from her.” I glanced at my TV screen and rethought that comment. “What time are you getting there?”
“The manager’s meeting me at eight-thirty, before they open. We’ll meet at seven, go over your notes on the Ellis girl, and then go meet Walker Moss at Hush.”
“You know that’s a fake name, right?”
“Of course I know,” she said impatiently. “I already checked, but he’s clean so it doesn’t matter. Meet me at Espresso Express, okay?”
Anna was a caffeine fiend. I didn’t hold it against her, given my bad habits. I did wish she’d pick cheaper coffee houses to meet in. A cup of black coffee at the Express would probably cost more than the stack of nasty porn did. “Gotcha. See you later.”
We said our goodbyes and I hung up, slinging the phone across the sofa to disappear under a cushion. I slumped back on the sofa, patting it so Mutt jumped up beside me and settled his head on my lap. “So,” I said to him. “Walker Moss. Wonder what he can tell us about the late Rhian Ellis?”
I’d spoken to Moss over the phone when I first started the Ellis case, to get his okay to question some of the girls at Hush. We hadn’t met in person, even though I’d tried to fix a meeting. Obviously, Anna’s detective badge impressed him more than my PI license.
I reached down the side of the sofa for my case notes. I don’t have an office; I prefer a more free-range filing system. The brown manila folder held everything I’d gathered about Rhian since Baxter first asked me to track her down, photos, school reports, and a couple of parking tickets, the usual stuff. I also had a print-out of emails she’d sent the month prior to her disappearance. Apparently Baxter was devoted enough to his fiancée to read her private emails. That was true love, right?
I hadn’t found anything of interest in the emails, but Anna would want to see them anyway. I combed through them again now, idly scanning the pages for anything I might have missed. Nothing jumped out at me, so I shoved them back in the folder and pulled out the stash of photos Baxter had given me.
They mostly showed the couple together, smiling at weddings, barbeques, on the beach, and in Paris... Rhian looked like a different person in the photos. Well, she was alive, for one thing, but she also looked...purer. She wore the barest trace of make-up, coupled with conservative, sensible clothes. Was it a cliché to think the soul of a sex-crazed nymph lurked beneath the librarian façade? Probably, but the evidence points that way.
Initially, I suspected drugs when I found out Rhian had gotten into stripping and hooking. Baxter was pretty adamant that his precious butterfly didn’t even know what mainlining meant, but she could have lied to him. The girl I’d seen in the bathtub full of ice clearly fell a long way.
I plucked out one photo of Rhian posing with a bunch of other girls. Baxter told me it had been taken at a friend’s birthday party just a month before she went missing. She hugged another girl, tall and dark-haired, with the sort of smoldering come-hither stare I liked to imagine Anna gave me be
hind my back. The brunette was all curves and cleavage, and made pretty, elegant Rhian look almost plain in comparison.
I stared at the photo for a while, trying to figure out why it had caught my attention. I flipped it over. Someone had scrawled everyone’s initials on the back, from left to right. I found the brunette’s. TS. Not too much of a stretch to mark her as Tamsin Searle, owner of the apartment where Rhian died.
Irritated at myself for not noticing the photo before, I retrieved my phone and called Baxter. “You know someone called Tamsin Searle?” I asked.
“I...vaguely. She’s a friend of a friend of a friend.” He sounded tired and confused. “Is this something to do with Rhian?”
“Yeah. You got a contact number for Tamsin?”
“I can get one, I guess. I’ll call you back.”
I tossed the phone away again and shoved the photos back in the folder. Scratching Mutt’s ears, I put together scenarios in my head, trying to figure out the connection between Rhian and Tamsin. Obviously, from the close-bodied hug in the photo, the two were friends, but Baxter hadn’t known her, hadn’t mentioned her at all.
Rhian died in Tamsin’s apartment. I’d had no luck tracking Tamsin down, found no friends or family who might explain why Rhian was dead in her bathtub. I hadn’t pursued it too much during the first round of investigations, because then my job had just been to find Rhian. Now it was different. Tamsin Searle was worth talking to now.
* * * *
Espresso Express was all tan leather and ethnic artwork, and full of students frowning at their laptops. Anna looked right at home there, stretched out in a chocolate-colored armchair. A steaming cup of hazelnut coffee sat in front of her. She was dressed in street clothes, no sharp suits or professional ponytail today. Her blonde hair hung loose, her jeans had holes at the knees, and she smelled like honeysuckle. I really wished I hadn’t spent the afternoon watching girls getting fucked with dental equipment so I could appreciate Anna’s natural charms a bit more.
