by Eli Easton
Then the hand dropped on my shoulder, and I screamed and spun around….
It was the man with the heart-painted face. The heart was the bright red of the exposed chests of the victims I’d been forced to witness, over a face as black as a crow. In fact, as I watched, a crow landed on his shoulder—a shoulder heaped with a great lion’s mane of dark dreadlocks. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would explode out of my chest. The whites of his eyes were almost glowing in the moonlight, and his dark coat was open, revealing a massive, muscular chest.
That was when he smiled.
His teeth were huge and sharp. Like that horrible little doll in that movie. Like shark’s teeth. I screamed again and…
…woke to the simultaneous buzzing of Myles’s intercom and the ringing of my cell phone. I watched him get out of bed and let out an involuntary sigh. His ass, which was amazing by candlelight, was pure athletic poetry in the morning sunlight that streamed through his bedroom window. This butt was the color of the rest of him, though. No white patches and no worries about sunburn. I’d have to find another reason to rub something on those cheeks. And there was a tattoo across his upper back and shoulders, which had looked like nothing but lines and a heart in the light from the candles last night, and now I could see was definitely a design—familiar but unique. A heart checker-boarded with lines and a knife or sword running through it the way lovers had carved hearts with arrows in the bark of trees all over the world since time out of mind. Was that snakes on either side or tildes, that wonderful little mark on my laptop’s keyboard I loved to use instead of a dash?
Myles pulled on a robe, and I found my phone under the bed, and while I struggled to answer it—shit, it was Brookhart, I saw on the screen. Another killing?—he shrugged into a short robe and left the room.
“What?” I all but screamed into the phone.
“Hey!” Brookhart said. “Easy! I thought you’d want to be the first on site for the third killing. And you can take your time. The chief went to New-fucking-Orleans to track down a lead. Wants his picture in all the papers.”
“I—I was… busy,” I said, trying to remember where my jeans were. They weren’t on the floor with my polo shirt. I reached for it. “Or was hoping to get busy again.” My morning wood was wilting in disappointment.
“Did Taylor-Waylor actually get laid last night?” She chuckled. “Well, well, well.”
Myles appeared in the doorway. The look on his face was awful. Part anger, part panic, part I didn’t know what. “It’s your friends,” he said. “Brookhart and Asshole. They’re coming up.”
“Here?” I did a double take. “Brookhart,” I said into the phone. “You’re here?”
“I don’t know where you’re fucking talking about,” she said, “but I’m about to find out if there is any reason why I shouldn’t arrest the vodou guy for murder.”
“Shit!” I exclaimed and jumped out of bed to find my jeans. I didn’t have to. Myles handed them to me.
While I struggled into them, he almost magically slipped into shorts and a T-shirt. There was a pounding from the other room, but Myles was moving a folding screen from the corner of the room. My eyes widened at the sight of an elaborate but small altar as he picked up a figurine—a black Madonna like the one on his balcony—and kissed it. “Protect me, Ezili Danto,” he whispered. He looked at me. “They like their privacy,” he said, touching the screen. “It’s disrespectful to have sex in front of them.”
“Disrespectful?”
“Would you have sex in front of your grandmother?” And then he left the room.
I remembered him talking about his altar the night before. How he said he’d wait to show me, that he had his reasons. Was this what he meant?
Maybe making love to a man and knowing there was a vodou altar just on the other side of the room could have been a mood-messer-upper…?
I walked into the other room only to find Detective Townsend, known in some circles as Dt. Asshole, slamming Myles against a wall. “All right, motherfucker,” he shouted. “You are under arrest!”
“Hey!” I shouted and saw Brookhart right behind him, reaching for her partner’s shoulder.
“Townsend! Watch it!” That’s when she saw me. Her eyes went wide. Her eyes said, I don’t fucking believe this!
“Stop it,” I said, dashing up to the big cop.
Townsend now had Myles’s arm behind his back. Then, to my surprise—I wasn’t sure if it was Brookhart pulling the detective back or Myles’s strength—Myles yanked himself free and spun around to face his assailant, breathing hard.
“What are you doing?” Myles growled.
Townsend surged forward, and Brookhart pulled him back.
“As if you didn’t fucking know!” Townsend snarled.
“Townsend! Calm down,” Brookhart cried.
He turned to face his partner, his ugly face even uglier. “What? You want us to wait for him to kill someone else?”
She reached out and laid a hand on his forearm. “I think our suspect might have an alibi.” She nodded her head in my direction.
Townsend’s head snapped in my direction. We locked eyes. Then: “Well, fuck me!”
Brookhart stepped between us. “Taylor. Is this who you spent the night with?”
Myles got a surprised look on his face.
“Yea-huh,” I said.
“All night? What time did you two… ah, hook up?”
“Around five yesterday evening,” I told her. “I picked him up and we went for coffee.”
“At?” she asked.
“The Shepherd’s Bean, just around—”
“I know where it is,” she said. “How long were you there?”
I shrugged. “Hour? Less?” I looked past her to Myles.
“Something like that,” Myles said, still breathing hard.
“Then what?” She looked almost like she didn’t want to know.
“We came back here for dinner.”
Townsend snorted. “I’ll bet! Sausage?”
“Lasagna,” I replied. “Really good lasagna. No torn pasta. The secret is—”
“And then?” Brookhart asked.
Myles answered. “Is that really any of your business?”
“It is if it clears you for the third murder,” she said, her voice calm, yet like steel. Townsend was shaking his head, all but snarling.
“Then we went to bed,” I replied and felt myself blush. For some reason that pissed me off. “All night.”
Brookhart nodded. Turned to her partner. “Okay?”
“How do we fucking know he wasn’t in on it?” Dt. Asshole barked, pointing at me.
Brookhart snorted. “Taylor?” She laughed. “He almost threw up on his shoes trying to take some pictures of the bodies. I don’t think cutting people’s hearts out is a part of his repertoire.”
“Goddammit!” Asshole shouted.
“It would still be nice if you two could answer some questions,” she said calmly.
I looked over at Myles. He was still clearly upset. Could I blame him? I was upset. “Myles?”
He sighed and his shoulders fell, tension at least easing a bit. “Fine,” Myles said. “But I’m making coffee.”
“Chicory?” I asked.
“Hell, no,” he said. “They get Taster’s Choice.”
I DIDN’T want to leave, but I knew I had to go get pictures. I didn’t want to get pictures. Far from it. Taking pictures of people with their chests split open was not getting easier. But so far Mencken hadn’t taken my story away, and that was good. Right? He was sprucing them up, or someone was (please don’t let it be Chadrick or Rockower), but not changing the byline. That is good, right?
But as I looked at the grisly remains of the older man, I couldn’t help but feel like a fraud. I found I didn’t want to be here, looking at a dead man. A dead man named Ramon Martínez, aged fifty-five, five eight, one hundred ninety-five pounds, married, father of two, and yes, in town for a convention. A human-resources
convention, and could there be anything much more boring than that? He’d been found at the Just Off Broadway Theatre, which for nearly a century had served as offices for the Parks Department, a barn for the horses for the mounted police of Kansas City, and finally for storage for parks equipment before becoming a theater. I always thought of it as a little lost castle, because that’s what it looked like. Something right out of England that had somehow mysteriously transported itself to Kansas City.
But then, looking at that dead man splayed out, surrounded by candles and dead chickens and face-painted with a skull, I got that shuddering little feeling of familiarity. Like I had seen something like this before. Before a few days ago, that is.
Then something clicked in my head. The murders. Several of them…. Why they reminded me a hell of a lot of that movie The Believers. It was almost like they were inspired by that movie—which wasn’t about vodou to begin with. Could it be…?
And if it were true, that would mean Myles really wasn’t involved at all! Not that I thought that for a moment. At least not any more.
I looked but didn’t find any words in blood about serving “Baron Mange Key.” Of course there really wasn’t anyplace to do that in this case. The big tan stone blocks wouldn’t make a good easel.
So I took my pictures, and I took them fast. I wanted to go to the VIC’s hotel room, and wonderfully, Daph had told me where to go. She was turning into my hero. Turning? Hell. She was my hero! Wasn’t she the one who had caught one of the guys who beat the stuffing out of me the year before?
Stunningly, I was able to do something that showed me miracles do happen. There was a laptop open on a desk in his hotel room, and while the cops milled about, no one paid me the least bit of attention when I checked Mr. Martínez’s recent browser history. I thought it was completely weird—how could they not notice me? But not one to look a gift horse in the mouth (and oh, what did that make me think of?) I checked that damned computer.
And what do you know? Craigslist, M4M. Interesting. While that cat’s away, that cat had been playing. Apparently, playing was the last thing he did. I wasn’t able to open his e-mail, not casually, but I did see the ad he’d answered said, “Sex in a Castle? Blow Me Now!”
Sex in a castle, huh?
I amscrayed and called Brookhart. “Hey, Daph,” I said when she answered.
She growled.
“Any chance the previous VICs might have used Craigslist the night they died?”
There was a long pause. Then: “Yes. How did you know that?”
“I have my ways.”
Another pause. “The first guy”—pause and the sound of shuffling pages—“Brightwell. He apparently placed an ad for hotel sex. I guess that’s pretty common for married men on the down-low? Business man away from the wifey—”
“Where he can get away with all kinds of stuff and not get caught because he doesn’t have to worry about running into them at Walmart when he and said wifey are shopping. Tale as old as time. Why do you think so many conventions are in Las Vegas? And in Martinez’s case, what’s the chance that anyone will recognize him? Especially if he’s far from home? Where was Brightwell from?”
“San Marcos, Texas,” she said after a moment.
“Yeah. See, he doesn’t have to worry that someone will figure out who he is when he’s out of town—and who knows, some married couples even have an it’s-okay-if-you’re-out-of-town rule.”
Brookhart sniffed.
“And the girl. She was from… Nebraska?” I asked.
Shuffling paper. “Weeping Water. She met a guy from a dating service, though.”
“Not a woman.”
“Not a woman,” Brookhart said.
“And this last guy answered an ad for someone who wanted public sex at the Just Off Broadway Theatre.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know that I am thinking anything. Only that these were people who kept their romances on the road and away from home. Anonymous. No way to really track down where they found their love.”
“We’re working on that.”
“You are?” I asked, surprised. Could they do that?
“Most of what you see on TV cop shows is pure bullshit,” she said. “But not all of it.”
“Okay,” I said, and hung up before she could tell me I couldn’t use the information for my next story. I got it to Mencken right away. He hooted and said that was “effing great, kiddo!” I smiled. Maybe I could do this.
Then I headed to Lucky Charms. I wanted to see Myles.
The protestors were back. I started to turn away, then to cut through the crowd, and finally decided to do my job. I went to the preacher, the one who looked like Two Face in that Batman movie, but before the acid bath.
“Do not turn to mediums or necromancers,” he was bellowing. “Do not seek them out, and so make yourselves unclean by them: I am the Lord, your God.”
“Excuse me,” I said, pulling out my press badge. “I’m from the Chronicle. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions, Mister….”
He looked down at me, finger still pointed at the sky. “Reverend,” he barked, and then seeming to be just as surprised that he yelled at me as I was, shook himself and stepped off his folding metal chair.
Couldn’t he find a soap box? I wondered.
“Reverend Doctor Royle Van Young.”
I bit the insides of my mouth to keep from laughing. Royle? Really? “Reverend,” I said instead.
“How may I help you, young man?” he asked, and once more I had to fight not to laugh. Was he maybe ten years older than me? Maybe? And calling me “young man?”
“I was wondering if you might tell me what this is all about?” I waved to indicate the protestors, then gestured to Lucky Charms.
“We are here to drive out the serpent,” he said in a tone that indicated I must be an idiot.
“The serpent?”
“The serpent. The Devil. Satan. Lucifer himself!” Van Young pointed to the ground with a downward thrust finger.
“I see….”
“This place of evil must go. The proprietors of this den of sin—devil worshippers—have brought the fallen angel to Kansas City.”
“Proprietors? I was only aware of one.”
“His partner,” the rev-doc said, and pumped his finger to the storefront of Lucky Charms, “has already fled, gone back to New Orleans from where she rose up—tail between forked feet.”
“Ah,” I managed. “I didn’t know Mr. Parry had a partner.”
“One down and one to go,” the Aaron Eckhart look-alike said.
I nodded in what I hoped looked like sympathy. “And you’re glad she’s gone because they brought Lucifer to town.” Somehow I managed to keep myself from grinning. I thought of open chests and blood and winced. It had the desired effect on the preacher.
“Yes, young man. By driving out this other sorcerer, we can save our children from the Devil’s influence. By marching outside this evil place, we are driving away those who would seek his aid. Aid which the proprietor of this evil place receives from the Prince of Hell!” The reverend pointed once more to Myles’s shop. “‘And he burned his son as an offering and used fortune-telling and omens and dealt with mediums and with necromancers. He did much evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger.’”
“Son?” I asked. Myles had a son?
“Human sacrifice,” Rev Royle said. “Surely you know about this, if you’re a reporter.”
“Well, I know there have been killings,” I replied. “But I don’t know that it was human sacrifice.”
“How can you know it not?”
Know it not? Really?
“Their hearts were cut out! No doubt eaten by he who did it.”
Eaten? “Now that’s a considerable jump in a train of thought, isn’t it?” I asked. “From human sacrifice to eating hearts?” I shuddered. For some reason I thought of the man with the heart painted on his face from my dreams.
&nb
sp; “Leviticus 19:26: ‘You shall not eat any flesh with the blood in it,’” he said. “‘You shall not interpret omens or tell fortunes.’ That man in there tells fortunes.”
“But that doesn’t mean he eats hearts.”
Van Young’s eyes narrowed. “He has already poisoned your mind, hasn’t he, my son? Get down on your knees and pray with me. For as it says in James 4:7, ‘Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.’”
“Look,” I said, stepping back. I had no intention of getting on my knees. Not for Van Young, anyway. “I’m fine, really.”
“That man in there. The beautiful man.” The reverend pointed once more at Lucky Charms. “He has ensorcelled you, hasn’t he? My son! Make no mistake! Vodou is nothing more than witchcraft! It is the summoning of demonic forces! It is the raising of demons to perform evil tasks. These ‘vodouisants’ pretend to help people, to heal, to mend relationships. But they are summoning evil with their words and rituals. They are making a deal with the Enemy, himself! And make no mistake about it, Satan does not do anything for free. He does not do favors in return for cigars and bottles of rum, does not care about sacrificing chickens and pigs! I have seen it! I have the discerning eye. Mr. Parry practices witchcraft!”
It was then that the police arrived. Finally.
It turned out the Reverend Doctor had no permit. He’d been told twice before to get one.
“I’ll be back,” he shouted as he was ushered to his van. “The Lord will not be silenced! Evil will not be permitted to thrive here in this city. It will be driven out!”
Thankfully I didn’t have to listen anymore. I went into Lucky Charms. I went there for a little sanity.
WE HAD dinner at my apartment that night. It wasn’t lasagna, but I had a little hibachi grill, and I cooked hamburgers out on my balcony this time. I liked the fact that almost all the tenants in my building—the Oscar Wilde, and wasn’t that a great name?—were gay and lesbian. Both apartments next to mine belonged to gay men. The couple to the right were nudists and were often right out there naked. We were on the sixth floor, and since there were only houses across the street, no one could see anything. I had to admit the situation and my neighbors had given me the freedom to sit out naked myself.
