You Fit the Pattern

by Jane Haseldine

  “Crystal. Jesus, you’re worse than the cops.”

  “Thanks for the compliment. Have a nice night.”

  Julia left the bartender to shake another cocktail and began to methodically comb through the space, eyeing each of the tables and patrons and finished her loop by doing a sweep of the ladies’ and men’s rooms before she decided the bar was a dead end.

  Julia exited through the kitchen again, gave a small wave to the chef, and headed to her car, where she tried Charlotte’s phone one more time.

  When the call went directly to voice mail, Julia returned to the apartment, parking across from Navarro’s high-rise. She looked at her watch. It was ten-thirty PM and Charlotte had already been missing for two hours.

  Julia took a quick look over her shoulder as she ran across the street, buzzed herself inside the glass security door, and headed to the elevators when her cell phone rang.

  “Where the hell are you?” Navarro asked.

  “I’m on the way back up to the apartment. The patrol officer is still there with Helen and the boys.”

  “I know. I just called him. He said you slipped out when he was in the bathroom. What are you doing, Julia? The killer could be following you.”

  “No, MMK is with Charlotte. I know he’s got her, Ray, and it’s my fault. I led her to him when I took her on that trail. If anything happens to Charlotte, it’s on me. My judgment sucks.”

  “Yeah, it’s sucking right now, too. Don’t go anywhere else by yourself. Got it? Stay on the line with me until you get inside the apartment.”

  “I went to the Sugar House. The bartender said he hadn’t seen Charlotte there tonight.”

  “I know. The chief called the county parks commissioner to track down the name and number of her friend she was supposed to meet. It took longer than I thought, because that Sophiah you told me about, isn’t her real name. We were finally able to track her by the name of her son, Jared Carpenter, from the roster of Logan’s basketball team you gave me. Sophiah’s real name is Margaret Needleman. She lives in Palmer Woods. We gave her a call and she said she and Charlotte were supposed to meet up at a different bar, the Standby, but when she got there, Charlotte was nowhere to be found.”

  “I’m going to the Standby now.”

  “No, you aren’t. Russell and I were just there. None of the staff remember seeing her. But Russell and I spoke to a customer who thinks he might’ve seen Charlotte standing outside the club around eight-thirty. The witness said she was alone. Russell is working to get the credit card receipts to check names, in case the killer was inside before he grabbed her.”

  “The bartender at the Sugar House said Charlotte was there a few nights ago talking to a man. The bartender didn’t get the man’s name, but he said the man had a pager. Hardly anyone uses pagers anymore.”

  “A few companies still make their employees have pagers. And paramedics and physicians use them, too.”

  Julia slipped the key into the lock of the apartment door and let herself inside, where she saw a young, grim-faced patrol officer sitting on a chair in the hallway.

  “I’m in for the night. I didn’t mean to get you in trouble,” Julia said to the officer.

  “He lets you out of his sight again, he’ll know what trouble is. Give our officer a break and get some sleep.”

  “You should look at Alex Tillerman. There’s no guarantee the man Charlotte met at the Sugar House was him, but Tillerman is a doctor, so he might use a pager. At the very least, we need to rule him out, like you said. I’m going to call him.”

  “Like hell you will. Stay put, Gooden, and don’t you dare move.”

  CHAPTER 24

  The Magic Man Killer watched the pieces of dust drift slowly down like dirty snowflakes in the dim, yellow light of his grandmother’s old Victorian in the Woodbridge neighborhood of Detroit. He and his grandma Leticia first moved into the house with the pink-and-brown exterior after the two fled Louisiana, because, as she said the day they packed up and left, “Son, we better get your ass high and dry out of this town before someone finds out what you did.”

  The family, his uncles and his grandma, had circled tightly, protecting the peculiar boy who had grown into a nineteen-year-old man. The family Sunoco station in Plaquemine was sold to buy the Victorian, which was a few streets away from one of Leticia’s older sisters who had moved to Michigan years earlier.

  The Victorian had become their landing spot in their new city. He transferred colleges, and his grandma found their new place of worship, Ste. Anne de Detroit Catholic Church. Leticia was hesitant at first to share her voodoo with her grandson, because of what he had done to the girl in Plaquemine. But being alone and without many folks who shared their common, burning-bright, beautiful practice, she eventually drew him into the circle.

  And the old Victorian had become their safe haven. Still, Leticia warned, even back then, you never practiced voodoo or black magic in the place where you lived.

  “Too close to home.”

  The killer sat on the floor in the front parlor on a worn Oriental carpet amidst the filmy yellowed covers that he had placed over the furniture when his grandmother went into the nursing home a year earlier.

  He remembered when they first moved into the house, his grandma held his face in both her hands in that very spot, and told him with a look of love and repulsion, “Family do everything for family. But whatever dark business you got in your mind, don’t you be bringing it around my house, boy.”

  Her words turned into a perverse daisy chain of reminders that latched one on top of the other after each of his kills. He could do his planning and research in the shed of his own house, but murder must not be done on your own soil.

  It would be like not honoring the Sabbath.

  The broken rhythm of two short raps from a weakened fist sounded a floor below him, and he wished the thing he stuffed in the storage container in the basement would just die so she’d stop reminding him of his failure.

  His second botched masterpiece this week.

  The killer reached into his grandma’s china cabinet and found Leticia’s secret stash. Six black candles, a Virgin Mary and St. Peter prayer card, and a pink-and-turquoise heart he had handcrafted himself as a young teenager, the little sculpture a veve to Erzulie that looked crude but potent in his hand. He pulled out the final item, a powerful satchel of herbs his grandma had made up for a moment such as this.

  He opened the bag and the mixed aroma from the herbs wafted out, emitting a strange combination of licorice, wet bark, citrus, and a bitter medicinal smell.

  He carefully plucked out the herbs he wanted and studied them in the muddy light: calamus root to grant him control and domination over Julia or anyone who got in his way; aniseed, to increase his power; lemon verbena, to cause discord between Julia and her policeman lover.

  And finally vervain and wormwood, two herbs he personally selected and added to the stash after his grandmother was institutionalized, because Leticia would never have allowed it. Vervain was used to conjure up evil spirits, demons, and even Satan himself. And wormwood, the most powerful of all to him, opened the door to make a pact with the Devil.

  He formed a perfect circle with the candles and lit each one, letting the match burn down until it glowed bright at his fingertips. He didn’t feel the pain when the flame reached his skin. Feeling to him in an otherwise suspended state was almost like catching a glimpse of a spirit from another world.

  He got to work then, burning the incense, but more important, reestablishing a semblance of order that was recently lost. All the planning, all the painstaking research he had done, hadn’t paid off in the long run in his last two attempts at a perfect sacrifice.

  Julia had snatched away his hunting grounds of the parks, and now the police would undoubtedly continue to search for him there, as he had personally witnessed. That’s why he had to deviate from his previous playground, but the spirits had made him creative, and it flowed like semen in his blood, a seed ready
to give life to the ordinary.

  He looked down at the candles and picked apart the mistakes that happened with Charlotte Fisher.

  It was riskier this time, but it should’ve gone off perfectly. He had discovered Charlotte would be at the Standby after Sophiah plastered the change of venue on all her social media accounts, including the stupid Facebook group the vapid girls belonged to, and the dutiful Charlotte reposted the update. So he went to the blond bitch friend’s house and slashed her tire while she primped inside. He needed to be sure Charlotte would be alone.

  He had scouted out the alley where he left the car ahead of time and arrived at the bar with just a few minutes to spare. It had to be a fast in and out. He couldn’t risk being in the place long enough for anyone to notice, but the few minutes gave him enough time to be sure no familiar faces were inside. And as soon as he walked out, he had found her waiting outside, all alone and vulnerable. His new plan wasn’t without risks. But it worked perfectly, and there was a certain thrill, almost a sexual satisfaction, of knowing he might get caught.

  And then Charlotte acquiesced so easily, just like he knew she would.

  The girl he had been stalking for weeks had absolutely no backbone.

  The killer blew out the first candle and chanted a prayer offering to Erzulie. He knew the next part was going to be hard. It always was. But he knew rewards didn’t come without pain.

  He pulled out the green-and-black knife from his pocket, the one he had planned to use on Charlotte. But he had to abort his mission with her when he saw a cop car parked in front of the abandoned church, St. Ruth Holy Science Temple, in Hyde Park, the spot where he was going to work on Charlotte. He had taken a slow and steady right turn in his wife’s sedan before he reached the church, so as not to draw attention to himself, and kept his eyes steady ahead on the road as he tried to figure out what to do now that his perfect plan had been completely upended.

  So he had found himself here, where it all had started for him in Detroit. He had parked his wife’s car in the garage that connected to the Victorian.

  It all should’ve been so easy from there.

  He had made Charlotte put on the dress and the silky black wig, and she didn’t even fuss that much when he began to dance with her in front of his grandma’s fireplace. But then his grandma’s words had come back as if she were standing right in front of him, her spirit wagging a judgmental, disapproving finger in front of his face.

  “Don’t you be bringing it around my house, boy.”

  He was too close to home.

  So he locked Charlotte into a musty old storage container that had been filled with sour-smelling clothes, batches of yellowed and curling photographs, and old copies of the Times-Picayune his grandma held on to from the Wednesday cooking section of the paper.

  He took the tip of his knife then, stared deeply into the five remaining candles that burned on the floor, and jammed the blade into the center of his right palm. He heard a guttural moan come out of his chest as the pain registered, but then he fixed his concentration on the three drops of blood that oozed out of his fresh, throbbing cut. He held his hand out, palm down over the flames, as his blood dripped into the fire.

  His crucifixion, his stigmata, his sacrifice, his practice for the final scene. All for clarity, and to receive a sign to show him what he should do next.

  Another weak tap, tap, tap sounded from the basement, where the thing in the container was trying to make her presence known. But besides the spirits, it was just the two of them alone in the house. And he surely wasn’t going to let Charlotte Fisher out until he got a sign of what he was supposed to do with her.

  He closed his eyes and waited for the images to come, the bright spots of light, to flash in his head like exploding camera bulbs in a pitch-black room. For a second, he thought he saw a boy coming in and out of the folds of darkness. The boy was angry and shaking his fist as a warning. The child had dark eyes and a red shirt. The boy stared back at him, looking intense and powerful for a child that size. Before the boy disappeared, the killer thought he looked like Julia Gooden’s son Logan.

  He had taken care of the Ben boy, Julia’s dead brother, with the mojo bag he had left on his gravestone. Regardless, no child’s spirit, whether diluted or not, could be a match for him.

  He closed his eyes tighter and saw the image of his first kill next. She was floating like a bloated white corpse in the bayou in Iberville Parish, where his uncles had dropped her with a large rock anchored around her waist with a rope.

  He kept going, further down into the tunnel of his subconscious, a place that terrified but enthralled him, until he saw what was at the bottom.

  What he was supposed to do next.

  And there she was, Julia Gooden, in the blue dress, smiling at him, beckoning him to come down and join her.

  Julia would be his next kill.

  Sometimes the problems that seemed the hardest were actually the easiest to solve. People just made things difficult.

  Despite his upended beautiful plans, sacrificing the woman in the basement at this point would pollute all that he had done. She was no longer pure.

  He would just leave the thing in the container until she ran out of air.

  From inside his duffel bag, the Magic Man Killer grabbed a piece of white gauze and wrapped a long strip of it around his self-inflicted wound. It throbbed and ached, but ultimately made him feel alive.

  He grabbed the keys to his wife’s car and turned off the light.

  Julia Gooden was waiting for him.

  CHAPTER 25

  Julia woke with a start, still in her clothes from the night before. She found herself on the edge of the bed in the sterile master bedroom of the temporary apartment. Both of Will’s knees were jammed against her back, and Logan was lying lengthwise across the mattress, with his pillow wedged against her feet at the bottom of the bed.

  She walked softly out of the bedroom, but then beat a fast path down the hallway to the kitchen, where Navarro sat at a tall round table with a cup of coffee in front of him.

  “I can’t believe I fell asleep. Please tell me you have something,” Julia said.

  “We haven’t found Charlotte yet. But one of our units found her purse in an alleyway a couple blocks off Library Street.”

  “If something happens to her, Ray, it’s because of me.”

  “Don’t start thinking the worst yet. Washington has our patrol guys doing a sweep of all the abandoned churches in the city, and her body hasn’t been recovered.”

  “Maybe he’s keeping her this time. He’s changing his pattern because he almost got caught in Royal Oak. The killer knows Charlotte’s routine and found out she was going to be at the bar last night, so he scoops her up there and plans to sacrifice her at a church he preselected, but when he gets there, he gets spooked because he sees a cop car,” Julia said. “What did you find on Alex Tillerman?”

  “One domestic battery arrest, but his soon-to-be ex-wife dropped the charges. Otherwise, he’s clean. It looks like he spent a few years living down in Florida. We stopped by his house, but no one was there. The hospital said he’s off today. He’s worth questioning and I may need your help.”

  “Tillerman told me he’s staying at a hotel. I can find him.”

  “Not without me there. I want you to stay put today. Russell and I are heading over to talk to Sophiah, or Margaret, or whatever she wants to call herself, and Prejean is going to tag along. I’ll wait until the officer on the first shift shows up before I leave. After we meet up with Sophiah, depending on where that takes us, I want you to call Tillerman.”

  “What’s Sophiah’s address?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “I’m not going to be waiting inside this apartment if there’s even a remote possibility Charlotte is still alive. No cop is going to keep me in here. They can keep watch over Helen and the boys. And if you’re worried about my safety, I’ll be with you. Come on, Ray. If I have to beg, I will. Washington agreed I coul
d be embedded in the investigation, as long as I fed her what I got from the killer.”

  Navarro sighed in frustration. “The address is 523 Gloucester Drive. She lives in Palmer Woods. At least I’ll be able to keep my eye on you there.”

  * * *

  Margaret, aka Sophiah with a silent h at the end, Needleman’s house was a modest Tudor-style home complete with a cream-colored Cadillac Escalade parked in the driveway, with a brand-new tire on its left back wheel.

  Julia pulled behind Navarro’s Tahoe as Prejean, who was in the passenger seat, reached for her hand.

  “This isn’t your fault. I was with the Detroit cops in the park the entire morning yesterday. Unless the killer’s a complete idiot, which I don’t believe he is, he wouldn’t go back to a place where he almost got caught. Which means he had his eye on Charlotte long before you took her running in Royal Oak.”

  “Then he knows Charlotte through me some other way,” Julia said.

  “Maybe. You know Charlotte, but you didn’t know the other three women, April Young, Heather Burns, and Christy King.”

  “There’s a common denominator that connects us. It’s right there in front of me, but I can’t see it.”

  Julia and Prejean caught up to Russell and Navarro, who were hovering around the Escalade in the driveway. Russell bent over to inspect the tire and then put his hand on the hood of the vehicle.

  “The engine’s still warm. Unless she went out for an early-morning coffee, Ms. Needleman just got home for the night.”

  Navarro led the group to the house and rapped hard with his knuckles three times on the front door as the sound of a small dog yipping frenetically echoed inside.

  Sophiah opened up, wearing a full face of makeup, a pair of high heels, and a low-cut, loose-fitting dress that fell a few inches above her knees. She held the terrier Julia had previously seen housed in her purse. The dog let out a squeaky territorial growl from its throat when it saw the strangers on the front porch.