Thief of Souls

by Ann Benson

  A man named André Barbé spoke of the disappearance of Madame le Barbier’s son.

  “I saw him behind Rondeau’s house picking apples, and I have not seen him since. . . . Gone are many more as well: the sons of Guillaume Jeudon, Alexander Chastelier, and Guillaume Hilairet. . . . We would have come forward sooner, but none of us dared speak for fear of the rogues in Lord de Rais’s chapel, or others who followed him, for they threatened us with imprisonment, or injury, or other ill-treatment should our suspicions be reported to the Magistrate, and the Magistrate himself seemed hardened to what we said when one of us found the courage to come forward.”

  Then, to my surprise, Madame le Barbier herself rose. “Your honor, if you please,” she said, “there is something more I would add to the words of my good neighbor.”

  Displeasure and hesitancy were all over de Touscheronde’s face. “Very well,” he demurred, “but be brief, please.”

  She shocked us all by moving past the witness’s stand and approaching the table where the judges were seated. Guards stiffened to readiness as Madame extended a clenched fist in front of her and began to shake it rhythmically. She seemed to be pumping determination and courage straight out of the air. “I curse Lord Gilles de Rais for all eternity,” she said. “May his soul descend to the depths of hell for what he has done to me and these other good people. May the demon claim him for his own and chain him to a burning stake for all time.”

  Shouts and cheers of accord rose up. Jean de Malestroit stood partway up at the table and called out loudly for order, but it did no good: Inspired by her curses, the crowd would have its say. Mixed in with the excited sounds of triumph were wails of anguish from those who had suffered, and then more curses were hurled out. In the presence of a bishop it was a scandalous, nearly heretical thing to denounce one’s sovereign. And though it seemed fair enough to me that those whom Milord had wronged ought to have a say in whatever pronouncement was eventually made against him, the shouts and jeers were little more than a gesture: The final word would be God’s, spoken through His servant Jean de Malestroit.

  Surrounded by guards, Madame stood her ground and stared accusingly at Jean de Malestroit, the man who had tried to spurn her initial complaint; her look seemed to say, I curse you similarly for ignoring my plea, and all the saints know that you well deserve it.

  He became like a stone, expressionless and plain, as if there were no thoughts within. When the guards tried to close in, he motioned them away. He cleared his throat lightly and said, “You may step back, Madame, if you have said your piece.”

  Her eyes still locked onto him, Madame le Barbier picked up her skirt and stepped backward. As she blended into the assembly of witnesses, the room suddenly and without apparent cause grew hotter, as if all the fresh air had been sucked out by some giant creature who had just emerged from the depths of a lake. Men began to loosen their collars; women fanned themselves to ward off swoons. Jean de Malestroit rose halfway up from his judge’s chair and gestured emphatically for the window to be opened. Metal hinges screamed in protest as the seldom-used window was pulled inward by the bailiff.

  In rushed a cold wind, every bit as extreme as the oppressive heat. Before Madame had the chance to resume her seat, a large blue-black crow fluttered through the opening and hovered over the assembly. He stared down malevolently with his tiny yellow eyes and flapped his wings wide. A great cry of alarm went up in the room. One woman stood in a panic, then slumped back in a complete faint against her companion. The confused bird headed for the highest perch, which at that moment was Madame le Barbier’s head. He clutched with sharp claws at her hair in a frantic attempt to gain purchase.

  She screamed and reeled around, her arms flailing as she tried to pull the talons out of her hair. People shrank away in terror. One man stood up and shook an accusing finger at the black interloper, crying, “It is the devil himself.”

  It was then that the true wailing began. People rose to escape but were trapped within the clamoring mass. Fully standing now, his Eminence pounded on the table with his stout gavel again and again in an attempt to regain control of the proceedings.

  I stood and ran forward to help my suffering cohort. With my face inclined away from the black feathery mess, I reached in and began to pull the bird upward. He went at my hand with his sharp beak—blood poured forth in a flood from the gash he tore in me. Others finally rushed in to give assistance, and we managed to untangle the bird from his screaming victim. Freed at last, the bird whooshed up to the heights of the chapel, where he flurried around in a state of wicked agitation. En masse, we cowered in fear as the black devil swooped low again, his claws outstretched and searching. It seemed an eternity before the wails of the people frightened it through the opening, back to the freedom of the sky.

  De Touscheronde nearly hurtled to the window and shoved it against the frame with such thunderous, clanging force that I thought surely it would disintegrate, but somehow the iron framing held, and all the colored glass—so artfully joined with molten lead—remained intact.

  How my mother would have wept to see the delicate white handkerchief soaked red in her daughter’s blood. I clutched at my wounded hand as people all around me moaned aloud and embraced one another for comfort. Men and women alike prayed and crossed themselves, some quite furiously, to purge the evil spirit that flew in on those dark wings.

  Had Lord de Rais sent this demon to torment Madame le Barbier and, along with her, the rest of us? Or was its sudden appearance only a coincidental event? We were not, any of us, certain of the truth.

  But we were, all of us, terrified.

  The crow was long gone, but the uproar continued, negating any possibility of moving forward—Madame le Barbier would be the last witness of the afternoon. His Eminence brought the day’s business to a close with the shrieking of a few authoritative Latin declarations over the noise of the crowd, and the scribes hastened to put the words to parchment. Jean de Malestroit then nodded to the captain of the court guard, who gave a quick signal to those who served under him. As one, they began to pound the ends of their spears on the stone floor, but rather than lessening, the turmoil began to increase both in tempo and intensity. Soon the shouts were accompanied by clapping of the hands, which slipped into synchrony with the pounding of spears.

  It was madness and mayhem. I saw Jean de Malestroit give another signal to his captain, who bade his guards cease their pounding. Then those spears were turned to the task of prodding the citizenry out of the chapel. The rhythmic noise finally began to dissipate as people grumbled their way out of the room toward the stairway.

  The protests from those who had yet to be heard were strident and loud, as if each petitioner had the notion that his own tale would convince the judges of Milord’s guilt. I felt great sympathy for these disappointed ones, though I could not fathom how one more recitation would make a difference in view of what had already been revealed.

  I looked in Jean de Malestroit’s direction; he questioned me with a quick glance on the severity of my injury, to which I responded with a small shrug. It would pain me on the morrow, but as yet it did not. That worry settled, the expression on his face became one of complete exasperation. Within his heart, he would be chastising himself for allowing this disruption to occur, though it was clearly God’s work, or the devil’s. Certainly he was not to blame. But blame himself he would nonetheless. I watched as he departed through a side door, his robes billowing out behind him in the haste of his exit.

  Frère Demien and I exited with the rest of those who had been in the chapel. We moved along at a good pace; among the witnesses there seemed a great eagerness to reach the square, for there was news to be told. The throng that awaited all of us looked to have nearly doubled again since our last respite. Already a dark tale of sorcery—borne on the wings of a crow—was being thrown about, and I could hear exaggerations as it was passed from person to person.

  His wings were as wide as a stork’s.

  The
eyes—they were so human!

  When he opened his beak, he spoke in tongues!

  The embellishments would continue until the crow became a winged dragon with bloody talons, green scales, and demonic yellow eyes that could pierce the very soul with just one glance. It would be said that he bore some blood on his beak, which I knew to be my own. That usurper bird flew off with more than that—he took with him all of my hope that the trial and eventual punishment of Gilles de Rais might be accomplished in a smooth and orderly fashion and that we might all be spared the mayhem that threatened to cloud it. But there was too much of the devil in it now for godliness or sanity to prevail.

  chapter 26

  Carl Thorsen was a gorgeous blond angel, like most of his predecessors. Carl was not a small kid—he had some height to him, but he was slender and fine-boned. I had one advantage in assessing him that I hadn’t had before: I got to see his live movements. Photos just don’t cut it and even videos are weak when it comes to conveying a complete sense of the victim. Carl was athletic and a lot more graceful than you’d have expected; certainly he moved a lot less jerkily than most young boys of his age, my own included. He became an instant icon to me, an amalgam of all the lost boys. I watched him interact with those around him, in particular his mother. Of the others, I had nothing more than the hope-stained recollections their loved ones were willing to provide to help me understand the essence of the kid. Not so with Carl and his mother—they engaged in an exquisite little dance of familial intimacy. He floated back and forth between child closeness and adolescent diffidence. She was choked with anger at first, an emotion that she hid pretty well until it finally transformed itself into profound relief.

  We’d put them in the best interview room, the one we generally reserve for nonviolent, cooperative witnesses or victims in distress. The chairs are cushioned and the lighting is soft. I let them get settled, and when they both seemed reasonably calm, we talked for a little while, mostly about how lucky Carl was to have escaped. Escobar came in—we’d prearranged a “casual” entry—and began to focus his attentions on Carl. As soon as he had the boy engaged in conversation, I took the mother aside and asked her if she’d be willing to step out of the room for a few minutes so I could ask her a few housekeeping-type questions to complete some paperwork. What I really wanted was to get Jake and Carl alone in the same room, to see how Carl reacted to his mother’s friend without her influence.

  He ran forward and leaped into the man’s arms, repeating his name over and over again.

  I knew it wasn’t you, Jake, I just knew you wouldn’t try to hurt me.

  The whole scene really disturbed me. All these kids, wherever they might be and in whatever condition, had had their faith in a trusted adult shattered—that crushes a kid like you can’t believe—and then they were assaulted by a stranger.

  I brought the mother back into the room after just a few minutes. With Jake’s reassuring arm around his shoulder, Carl Thorsen relaxed enough to start to crash; he’d probably been running on adrenaline, but the shock was catching up with him. He stopped every now and then to compose himself as he told his story again, but this time, with more detail.

  “I could hear the car when it pulled around the corner. I turned my head to the left and sort of glanced over my shoulder. It looked a little like Jake’s car, but his is a lot like a bunch of other cars, light color, not an SUV. But after a couple of seconds I heard it slow down; you know how you can hear tires crunching more slowly over the stuff on the street. I could hear that. It made me a little nervous.

  “The car pulled up right next to the sidewalk so the wheels were almost touching and slowed so it was going the same speed as I was. Then it pulled a few feet ahead of me. The passenger door opened—the guy must have reached across the seat and opened it with his other hand. I stepped back a little. He called my name—but the voice wasn’t familiar. When I looked in the car I saw a guy who I thought was Jake, so I went closer. I asked what was wrong with his voice, and he cleared his throat real loud and said he had a cold. Then the guy said that I should get into the car because my mom needed me to come home right now.

  “I figured something must be wrong at home and I almost got in the car. But I just didn’t believe it was Jake. The guy must have figured out what I was thinking because he grabbed my arm. I pulled it away. He yanked the car door closed really hard—I was afraid he caught my shirt in it and I was gonna get dragged. But he didn’t. He took off really fast and just left me there. I started to cry.”

  Which is precisely what he did in the interview room as he neared the end of his account. I thought that was a good thing. He might as well get all this stuff out in a place where he knew he wouldn’t be hurt.

  I was heading out the door to get the boy a Coke and his mother some coffee when Spence came flying down the hallway with a very bad look on his face.

  “There’s been another one. Also failed.”

  “Looks like your one guy turned out to be twins,” Vuska snarled.

  Shouting was the only way to be heard, so I did, though I hated the sound of my own voice at that moment. “It could still be only one perp doing this,” I shrieked over the chaos.

  Frazee and Escobar were quiet and stayed off to one side.

  “Wait a minute, think about this,” I pleaded to everyone. “He hasn’t failed before this that we know of. He’s gotten pretty much every kid he decided to get. He let these two kids go to throw us off track. Don’t you see? He’s dicking us around.”

  Dicks do not like to be dicked around. But it was plain that perps don’t like it much either—at least Wil Durand did not. It was as if we’d turned on the electricity in Frankenstein’s laboratory when we began to look into him openly. “We have to stay on this guy right now because he’s really giving us the opportunity, and we may not get it again,” I put forth. “Up to now, he’s been almost invisible. He’s letting us see him, getting in our faces. Challenging us, because this son of a bitch thinks he’s smarter than we are.”

  My head began to pound and my palms were sweating. But I could see a shift in attitude as the briefing disbanded.

  Carl Thorsen and his mother were still in the interview room. I corralled one of the PSAs and said, “Would you go tell them that I’m going to be detained for a short while because of another case?”

  Through a look of annoyance, the PSA nodded.

  “Tell them I’ll be back as soon as possible. Get them some dinner from one of the authorized menus if they want it, and if there isn’t enough petty cash, I’ll pay for it myself.”

  I went back to my desk, knowing that I was about to start another round of Durand madness, feeling completely exhausted. The eyes of my fellow detectives were all on me. Fred and a few brass were back in his office, knocking the new development around, when the next call came in.

  He’d done it again, not an hour after the last time.

  No one knew what to say or what to do, least of all our supposed superiors.

  “It’s a message,” I pleaded. No one seemed to be listening except Spence and Escobar.

  “He’s saying, Catch me if you can.”

  Which was just what I planned to do, with or without help. If I was still a detective.

  Although I had Errol Erkinnen’s pager number, I’d never used it before. But this was an emergency. He responded to my page almost instantly.

  “I have three kids who got away from this guy, all here at division right now.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said, as if he’d misheard me. “They all got away?”

  “Yeah. All three of them, believe it or not.”

  “This is a real escalation in his behavior—he’s playing with you, making a statement.”

  It was so sweet to have someone’s faith. “I get that, but no one else seems to. I’m beginning to think that this whole deal has turned into something between him and me. It’s not about the boys anymore.”

  “You’re probably right. He’s gone out of pattern
and he’s communicating with you through that variation. It’s a pretty sure bet that he wants you to respond.”

  “And I will, trust me. But right now I have to interview these kids. I want to talk to all three of them together because I think if they talk to each other they’ll open up and reveal more than they would otherwise. I need your help because the lieutenant wants me to have ‘someone medical’ present.”

  “I’m not medical.”

  “They call you Doc, don’t they? That’s good enough for these purposes.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be right there. But don’t allow yourself to be sidetracked by this little deviation of his. You know he’s going to do it for real again, and probably soon.”

  “I’m gonna have him in jail before then.”

  “You think so.”

  “I know so.”

  True to his word, Doc arrived about fifteen minutes later.

  We had each of the three groups in a separate holding room. The PSAs were complaining about having to bring in drinks and food for the kids and their family members, which I, the insensitive detective, had brazenly offered for their comfort. The place is turning into a damned Holiday Inn, I overheard one of them say.

  What if it had been her son?

  Before we went into the individual rooms, Doc took me aside. “They should be as comfortable as possible when we do this,” he said. “Do any of them need to be cleaned up?”

  I didn’t understand.

  “Did any of them have a physical reaction to the abduction attempt, like soiling or wetting himself?”