You Fit the Pattern

by Jane Haseldine

  “You got nothing to hide? Why are you running then?” Navarro asked. He pinned Wilson against the fence, patted him down, and then handcuffed his hands behind his back.

  Navarro spun Wilson around as Russell appeared from the other side of the trailer.

  “Wow, dirtbag. What’s that stench on you? Marijuana and patchouli oil?” Russell asked.

  “You’re slow, old man,” Wilson said. He offered up a nasty, sharp-toothed grin to Russell and then spit in his face.

  “Oh, friggin’ disgusting,” Russell said, and ran his hand over his cheeks, trying to wipe off Wilson’s stream of saliva.

  “Screw you, man. You’re violating my rights.”

  “You spit on me again, I’ll be violating a lot more than your rights.”

  “Walk,” Navarro said. “We’re going into your trailer for a little talk.”

  “I don’t have to say shit. You just want to get me out of sight so you can beat on me. That’s how all you cops work.”

  “Your choice. I’ve got your probation officer’s number on my cell. One call about how you tried to run from two Detroit PD officers, your life is going to get even worse than it is,” Navarro said.

  “Fine. You guys are assholes. I’m going to make up a real good satanic curse for you.”

  Wilson began to chant something, but Navarro stopped him short with a hard shove.

  “Keep moving. The only curse coming anyone’s way is yours when I send you back to Carson City Correctional.”

  “You believe in the Devil?” Wilson asked. His voice seemed to deepen as he plodded forward along the side of his trailer.

  “The Devil was an angel who was kicked out of heaven because he was weak. He let his pride get to him. Big mistake,” Navarro said.

  “You’re one of the weak ones.”

  “The way I see it, you’re the guy with the handcuffs on.”

  “The Devil knows who you are,” Wilson said. “If he doesn’t, I’ll make sure of it.”

  “The Devil doesn’t scare me, and you, little man, surely don’t, either,” Navarro said.

  Navarro motioned to Russell and then to Wilson’s back pocket and the set of keys that was poking out from his jeans.

  Russell grabbed the key chain, which had a black circle and Pagan stitched in cheap gold thread across it.

  “Which key to open the door?” Navarro asked.

  “The biggest one of the chain.”

  Russell worked the key in the lock. As soon as the door to the trailer opened, a rancid combination of mildew, dead air, and marijuana slipped out. Navarro pushed Wilson forward to a scuffed metal table in the middle of his kitchen. On the table was an ashtray jammed to capacity with spent Camel cigarette butts.

  “Stand still,” Navarro instructed, and removed the cuffs from Wilson’s wrists.

  “Now sit.”

  “I’m not a dog,” Wilson said. He sat, sighing heavily over the effort, and pushed the long sleeves of his plaid shirt up, exposing a giant tattoo of a man’s bearded face that was made up of a maze of connected leaves and vines.

  “What’s your tat, the boogeyman?” Russell asked.

  “No, the green man. It’s a pagan symbol. The green man is tied to the earth. The girl I cut up and raped in the circle in the woods, her blood was a sacrifice to him,” Wilson said.

  “The green man isn’t real,” Navarro said. “The heinous stuff you did to that girl is.”

  Wilson shrugged. “It’s not like I killed her.”

  “You mind if I look around while you and my partner have a little chat?” Russell asked.

  “Not if you don’t have a warrant,” Wilson answered.

  “Let me ask you something,” Navarro said. “You’re obviously a planner. The girl you tortured and raped, you planned the whole thing out patiently ahead of time, didn’t you?”

  “I already did my time for that one, but yeah, so what.”

  “You went to the Dunkin’ Donuts where she worked and got coffee there once a week for a month. You got to know her schedule, her patterns, and then you forced her into that shit-kicking car you got in the front of your property,” Navarro said.

  “The car belongs to my ex-wife,” Wilson answered.

  “I bet you two had a wonderful marriage,” Russell said.

  “The two joggers who were killed, we know that was you,” Navarro said.

  “What are you talking about, man? I don’t know nothin’ about no dead joggers.”

  “Sure you do. I did the math,” Navarro said. “The first woman you killed, you picked her up on the RiverWalk Trail a month after you got popped loose from prison. You must have been pissed off in jail, serving all that time, pent-up, going crazy. It pushed you over the edge and you went looking for another victim as soon as you got out.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  Navarro bent down and got in Wilson’s face, giving the ex-con an intimidating stare-down.

  “You like to cut women. You slit her throat,” Navarro said, and pushed a picture of April Young across the beat-up table.

  Wilson took a two-second, disinterested glance at the image and shrugged. “Never seen her before.”

  Navarro pulled out a second picture from inside his leather jacket.

  “How about her?” Navarro asked, and held a picture of Heather Burns in front of Wilson’s face.

  “If I was going to sacrifice another woman, and I say, ‘if,’ these chicks aren’t my type. They’re basic. They’re real nice-looking, but I don’t get any energy vibe off them. That’s what I care about. You can have the hottest chick, buck naked and begging me to give her some, but if she doesn’t have good energy, I’m not interested. Maybe I don’t get a read on those two women in the pictures because they’re dead. The girl I took from Dunkin’ Donuts, her aura glowed bright yellow. It was beautiful. I had to take it from her.”

  “You say one more sick thing, I promise, I won’t hold back,” Navarro warned, and slammed his fist down on the table, causing Wilson to jump back in his chair. “We know about your phone call last night.”

  “I called plenty of people last night. What are you talking about?”

  Navarro pulled out his cell phone and found the picture of Julia he wanted. He had taken the shot of Julia in the blue dress when she accompanied him to the police awards banquet.

  “You killed those two female joggers as some twisted sacrifice to her,” Navarro said, and held up his phone for Wilson to see. “Then you made them put on that blue dress, the same one in the picture.”

  Wilson took his time looking at the picture of Julia and reached his hand out to touch it, but Navarro pulled his phone out of Wilson’s reach.

  “You do know her,” Navarro said. He had trained himself years ago to keep his cool, to not let his anger make him get physical when he was working a suspect, even being tested on many occasions when the case involved a child. Intimidation was one thing, but actually hitting a suspect crossed a line you could never recover from. But right now, Navarro had to dig deep not to give in to his baser instincts and beat Wilson into a bloody stump. “Answer me.”

  “I’d remember her. This one, she’s got interesting energy, it’s bright green and blue, almost turquoise, but there’s something dark around her aura trying to get in,” Wilson said. “Blue eyes like the sky, black hair like midnight.”

  “Your poetry sucks,” Russell said.

  “I’d like to cut her.”

  Navarro spun around and slammed his motorcycle boot against Wilson’s chair, which flipped over on its side with Wilson in it.

  “Easy there, Ray,” Russell said.

  Wilson scrambled back up on his feet and took a nervous glance at the door, but Navarro pulled up the chair and planted Wilson back into the seat.

  “You’re never going to cut anyone ever again. We know you killed those women.”

  “No way, man. You better back off. I don’t know anything about that. I’ve been working straight doing construction since I got out. I got to
, for probation and all. I get to work at six-thirty every morning.”

  “You’re lying. It’s nine o’clock, and you’re just hauling yourself out of the house,” Russell said.

  “It was supposed to be my day off. The foreman called me a half hour ago. He said one of his guys went home sick and asked if I wanted to pick up a shift. You call him and he’ll vouch for me. I was working on the mornings those women were taken on the jogging trails.”

  “How did you know the victims were picked up in the morning?” Navarro asked.

  “I saw it in the news. I’ve been watching that shit nonstop. They’re calling the guy the Magic Man Killer. That’s freakin’ cool.”

  “Get up. We’re taking you in. I’d rather grill you at the station. You know why?” Navarro asked.

  “I don’t care.”

  “Because I don’t know if I’ll be able to hold back from hitting you if I stay here much longer. Those two women who were killed, they had kids. They were innocent. They didn’t deserve what happened to them,” Navarro said.

  “Ray. Over here,” Russell said. He was looking at something inside a dark jar on the kitchen shelf.

  “Hey, that’s my stuff!” Wilson said, and jumped up from the chair.

  “Stay where you are,” Navarro warned. He went into the narrow kitchen and looked where Russell was pointing. Inside the jar was a bag of weed and a crack pipe that was lined with brown residue inside its bowl.

  “This looks fresh. Better call Stoner Boy’s probation officer now. Time to go to the station, loser,” Russell said.

  “Okay, okay, hold on. Listen, I didn’t do nothin’ to those two joggers. I’m telling you the truth. You call my foreman. He’ll vouch for me. You keep this between us, I’ll give you something.”

  “I’m not agreeing to anything. What’ve you got?” Navarro said.

  “I met a guy who was deep in Satanism and the black arts. He could be the one who killed those chicks.”

  “You don’t get to slide by offering up one of those weekend pagan warriors who draw circles in a field and dance around naked with flowers in their hair,” Russell said.

  “No. Not an amateur,” Wilson said. “I know a couple of people who were into some real dark shit like me.”

  “Who are they? You got names?” Navarro asked.

  “Billy Lincoln, but he died of a meth overdose about a year ago. And Randy Thomas, he went real dark. But Randy met some chick and she turned him on to Christianity. The dude teaches Sunday-school classes down at Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids now. When he turned like he did, I stopped talking to him. That was a year ago, so I don’t know what he’s up to these days.”

  Navarro pulled out a notebook from his leather jacket and wrote down Randy Thomas’s name. “You got a number for him?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Wilson said. He reached for his phone and showed Navarro the number from his contacts’ page.

  “That’s all you got? You don’t know how to deal very well,” Russell said.

  “Come on, man,” Wilson said, and stroked his hand down the length of his braided beard. “Okay, I got one more thing, but I didn’t know the guy personally. He was a friend of Billy’s. He’s the one who was real deep into the dark stuff I mentioned. I met him just one time. We all got together at a property that had some real nice woods at a place Billy knew in Dearborn Heights. The guy Billy brought, he was a freak. He started talking about books and stuff. Everyone got stoned except for him. He said he needed clarity to do his work.”

  “Books? What kind are we talking here?” Navarro asked.

  “Horror, true crime, occult shit. I don’t read if I don’t have to, but the stuff he was talking about sounded kind of cool. He mentioned some story about a carnival run by a demon. This guy, he was real smart. I thought he might’ve been a nerd with the books. But then he brought out a big old snake from his backpack and it started wrapping around his arm. He ran his tongue down its belly. That was some freaky shit. I thought it was his pet or something, but then he cut off the snake’s head. He slices what’s left of it down the middle and lets a couple of drops of the snake’s blood drip on his face.”

  “Lovely,” Russell said.

  “So then the guy, he throws what’s left of the snake into the bonfire we built, and, I swear, the flames rose like ten feet or something and turned crimson. I saw the Devil’s face in the flames. It was beautiful, man.”

  “People see strange things when they’re high. You got a name for this person?” Navarro asked.

  “Just his nickname. Billy referred to him as the Voodoo King, but he was into way more than that. Black magic, Satanism, Wiccan, it was all mixed up, the stuff he believed. Usually, people go one way or the other, they fixate on just one practice. Billy, though, he acted like this dude was a legend or something, that he could tap into the dark power like no one else he’d ever met.”

  “The Voodoo King, huh?” Russell asked. “What did he look like?”

  “I couldn’t tell you. It was dark and I was real high. I don’t remember. We had candles around the circle we made and we had the bonfire going, but the guy had a hoodie on.”

  “Did he say anything else to you, maybe where he’s from?” Navarro asked.

  “We got into a conversation, and he said something about the place where he came from originally, he could do some real fine work there, better than in Michigan, I guess. He talked about voodoo in Louisiana, stuff he learned there, so I took it he might have spent some time down in the South.”

  “Did he have a Southern accent?” Navarro asked.

  “No. I’d remember that. Southerners sound dumb as shit. This guy, his voice sounded regular.”

  “You got anything else on him?” Navarro asked.

  “Look, I was stoned pretty bad, but I got the feeling he might be in the military or something. He had that kind of disciplined intensity. He could’ve been law enforcement. It was just a vibe, you know. I study people’s energy. He was focused, man.”

  “You’re telling me you think this guy’s a cop?” Navarro asked.

  “Yeah, could’ve been.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Julia circled the Delta Arrivals Terminal and tried to spot her former source, NOLA sergeant Doug Prejean, amidst the crowd. Prejean was older than Julia, early forties, but when she met him for lunch in Detroit a few months prior, Julia realized Prejean had hardly aged since she first met him fifteen years earlier.

  At the time, Julia was just twenty-two, overly ambitious, but still green with inexperience during her first days on the job at the Times-Picayune. Prejean had taken pity on her. He and his wife, Claudette, had her over for dinner a few Sundays during her first month in New Orleans to help her feel at home in her new city. Julia had wondered if Prejean’s generosity would turn into a sexual play, but he never once hit on her, and Julia chalked his kindness up to Southern hospitality and simply being a good guy.

  Julia had been keenly aware that the majority of female reporters at her former paper nursed major crushes on Prejean, most of them swooning over the fact that he looked like a young Kevin Costner. But Julia never thought a thing about him in a romantic sense. Prejean was a source, a relationship line she refused to cross, until she met Navarro and couldn’t help herself. But more important, Prejean was married. For Julia, a couple’s union had always been sacred ground.

  An airport bus pulled away from the curb, giving Julia a tight opening that she wasn’t going to lose. She swerved her SUV in front of an outgoing taxi and snagged a spot next to Prejean, who was standing underneath the ARRIVALS sign.

  The New Orleans officer was tall and trim, with sandy-blond hair. His skin was tan with a residual bronze glow from the hot Deep South sun, and he had the makings of a mustache and goatee that were new since Julia last saw him. Prejean wore a pair of khaki pants, a dark brown, distressed, leather bomber jacket, and aviator sunglasses, looking Southern cool and effortlessly easy against a backdrop of a gray sky in “hustle for everything you’ve got
” Detroit.

  The cab driver Julia cut off blared his horn and pulled up in a hurry next to Julia, ready for a fight. Prejean moved in to take care of the situation, but Julia had it under control. She offered up a sharp, conciliatory wave, making zero eye contact, and then popped the trunk for Prejean’s suitcase.

  “I see your driving style hasn’t changed. How you doing, Julia?” Prejean asked, and gave her a hug. “You want me to drive? I know Detroit pretty well.”

  “Thanks. But there’s no way I’m letting you or anyone else drive my car in my city,” Julia said.

  “I see you haven’t changed either.”

  Prejean slid into the passenger-side seat. As soon as he clicked his seat belt in place, Julia hit the gas pedal hard.

  “Where’s the first stop?” Prejean asked. “You better watch your speed, girl. I’m not sure my badge can work its magic in Detroit.”

  “Sorry, I’m in a hurry. I can drop you off at the station or you can go with me. The killer called me last night. He’s playing games, trying to give me clues about the identity of his next victim. I’m going to meet someone a source hooked me up with who could have information.”

  “Then I’m riding with you. Tell me what you’ve got.”

  Julia took the I-94 East exit toward the city and debriefed Prejean about her call with the Magic Man Killer.

  “Did his voice sound familiar?” Prejean asked.

  “No. I recorded the call and replayed the tape over a million times. His voice sounded flat, but then he got theatrical at one point, like he was putting on a show. I’m sure I haven’t spoken to him before.”

  “He could’ve used a voice changer. We do that all the time. There are plenty of apps and gadgets out there that can change a person’s voice. Or he could’ve disguised it without technology if he knew how. I have a Southern accent, right?”

  “Are you kidding me? A wicked one,” Julia answered.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. But listen up. I’m going to change my voice. Ready?”

  “If you want to set yourself up to fail, go ahead.”