Burn: (Michael Bennett 7)

by James Patterson

  I couldn’t decide. Or care. Instead, I stood there and waited, staring at him.

  “Guess you didn’t want it that bad, huh?” I said as the elevator finally arrived. “You didn’t even guess.”

  CHAPTER 76

  AFTER MY FAIRLY UNHINGED and completely fruitless freakout near Carnegie Hall, I drove back up to Harlem to check in with Robertson. He thought he might have found something connected to Naomi’s murder and he wanted to show me in person.

  As I came through the squad office door, I watched as Noah immediately spun around in his cubicle. He knocked over one of the precarious stacks of printouts covering his desk as he frantically waved me over.

  “I think I’ve found a lead on the cannibal angle, Mike,” he said as he brought up a website on his computer. “It’s beyond bizarre, but I really think this might be the break we’ve been waiting for.”

  Noah clicked through some pages and then showed me what looked like a classified ad.

  PECCATUM KITCHEN PRESENTS

  CANDLELIGHT AND DARKNESS

  FINE WINE AND FABULOUS TABOOS

  YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE

  DINNER—MONDAY NIGHT 11ISH

  WHERE—SOMEWHERE IN NYC (BELOW 96TH) TO BE ANNOUNCED FOR OBVIOUS REASONS

  COST—$2000 PER COUPLE

  RESERVATIONS AND REFERENCES A MUSTY MUST—

  AS ALWAYS

  “This is from Craigslist,” Noah explained. “It’s a screen shot. I found it about an hour ago when I called you. It stayed on for five minutes, then disappeared. I just lucked on it.”

  “Well, let’s see. Peccatum means ‘sin’ in Latin, I know,” I said offhandedly as I read it over again.

  “How did you know that?” Noah said, surprised. “I had to look it up.”

  “Freshman Latin at Regis High,” I said. “This ad sure sounds pretty weird, but how does this relate to Naomi’s murder? Do you think this is some sort of cannibal dinner or something?”

  Noah nodded as he restacked the papers that had fallen. Beside the printouts, I noticed a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales open to a picture of Hansel and Gretel sitting in a cage while the witch stirred the pot.

  “For the last week or so, I’ve been really delving into cannibalism research,” Noah said. “Especially the cannibalism subculture on the web. For obvious reasons, I concentrated my searches on Deepnet sites.”

  “Which sites?” I said.

  “Deepnet. It’s Internet stuff that doesn’t register on surface search sites like Google. A bunch of underground sites use this thing called the Tor network, which is basically a bunch of connected random volunteer servers that pass data back and forth in an elaborate routing system with multiple levels of encryption to maintain secrecy.”

  “Sounds like the seedy underbelly of the Internet,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Noah said. “It’s unregulated and filled with open communication about black-market commerce and hacking and criminal activity. It contains a lot of really, really sick and spooky stuff.”

  “So it’s true that cannibalism is an actual subculture now?” I said.

  “Shockingly, yes,” Noah said, blinking at me. “I found four sites that had open forums about it. Dozens of people on threads going on and on about killing and eating people. Most of it seemed like sick fantasy stuff, except for this one site that seems to be based in the NYC area.

  “These creeps who were exchanging Hannibal Lecter–style recipes kept giving references to the initials PK. ‘When is PK going to happen again?’ and ‘Have you heard about the next PK?’ One of the weirdos said he had heard something was going to be posted on Craigslist soon, so I kept an eye out.

  “And then an hour ago, voilà! I was trolling through the bowels of Craigslist NYC and found this. PK must be Peccatum Kitchen. Has to be. And it’s happening tonight.”

  “Great job, Robertson. This does seem like a lead,” I said, smiling. “Especially the two grand for dinner part. Both witnesses described what definitely seems like some sort of bizarre upscale underground supper club. How do you contact for reservations?”

  “That cell number there in the upper left-hand corner,” Noah said, tapping the screen. “I already had the phone company trace it, Mike. No luck on a name. It’s a temp cell phone bought with cash from a Radio Shack in Times Square.”

  “We definitely need to check this thing out,” I said. “Sign us up. Two of us will go to the dinner undercover, and the rest of the team will be backup.”

  “Where are we going to come up with the two grand?” Noah said.

  “The squad has about eighteen hundred dollars in the petty cash account, and we’ll pass around the hat for the rest,” I said. “Everyone wants to bring justice to Naomi and her family.”

  “And references?” Noah said.

  I stared at a photograph of Noah and what looked like his twin sister pinned to his cubicle wall as I thought about it.

  “Get the phone company to give you every number that calls that cell number,” I finally said. “Then back-trace for a name to use as a reference.”

  “Brilliant,” Noah said excitedly. “So that’s it? Just like that, we’re going to go undercover?”

  “Bon appétit,” I said grimly, nodding at the screen.

  CHAPTER 77

  “WOW, MIKE. NICE SUIT. You scrub up pretty fine. I could almost eat you up. Metaphorically speaking, of course,” Brooklyn Kale said, laughing, as we walked down a cruddy section of West Twenty-Seventh Street that night around ten-thirty.

  “Sorry,” said my young, attractive, black-cocktail-dress-wearing, six-foot-three “date” as we continued to walk east near the border of the Koreatown and Chelsea neighborhoods. “I’m just nervous. I’ll shut up now.”

  Noah had done it. He’d tracked down a recommendation and scored an invite for tonight’s freakish underground dinner. Brooklyn and I had drawn the short straws to attend the event, while Arturo and Doyle and Robertson were parked around the corner of Seventh Avenue in an unmarked car in case we needed backup.

  The street was mostly dingy office buildings and Korean wholesale stores and nail salons, but the address on the invite turned out to be a beautiful two-story Spanish mission–style town house with a terra-cotta roof and a tall black wrought-iron fence that looked like it was from the early 1900s.

  The short old woman who answered the arched wood-and-iron front door looked like she was from the early 1900s as well. She wore a faded old green housedress with a brown paisley head scarf and looked easily eighty.

  Looking at the witchlike woman, I suddenly remembered the Grimm’s Fairy Tales on Robertson’s desk. I also suddenly wondered how good this undercover idea really was. I definitely didn’t want Brooklyn and me to end up like Hansel and Gretel.

  “What do you want?” the woman said with some kind of Eastern European accent.

  “We’re here for the dinner,” I said, handing her the invite.

  Or are we the dinner? I thought.

  The old lady assessed the paper and then both of us carefully with her little black eyes.

  “Money,” she said, holding out her hand.

  As the cash-filled envelope touched her palm, she opened the door fully and smiled, showing hard little brown-and-yellow teeth that reminded me sickeningly of corn kernels.

  This probably wasn’t going to be the last time I felt nauseous before this night was through, I thought as I took a breath and followed Brooklyn through the door.

  CHAPTER 78

  THE HAUNTED-GINGERBREAD-COTTAGE feeling continued as we were led through the house’s interior, past unlit and dusty empty rooms. The stove in the kitchen looked an awful lot like the falling one that had almost killed Doyle that morning.

  Nothing was cooking on it, I noticed, which was weird. Wasn’t this supposed to be a dinner?

  We suddenly heard classical music when the spooky old lady opened the set of French doors at the back of the kitchen. Through the doorway off a back deck was a wide-open courtyard
with a huge garden and trees strung with garlands of soft white lights.

  A pristine white tent stood in the garden’s center, and beneath it about twenty people were standing around, chatting casually with drinks in their hands as if they were at a fancy wedding reception. There were several Japanese men and women, I noticed straight off the bat, and several gay male couples.

  Was one of them Naomi’s killer? I wondered. Were all of them?

  No one seemed to notice us except for a black-clad waiter who stepped up and took our drink orders. After five minutes, two strikingly tall platinum-blond women in matching silver sequin dresses came over to us. In their high heels, they were both six and a half feet tall or more. They were both shapely, nice-looking ladies, but from the width and squareness of their shoulders and jaws, you could tell they were transgender.

  Brooklyn shot a now-there’s-something-you-don’t-see every-day look at me as they clomped up to us.

  They introduced themselves as Lucy and Barbara.

  “Don’t I know you?” Lucy said to me between sips of her whiskey sour. “San Diego two years ago? You were at Christian Gazenove’s birthday with that snotty fashion photographer. The one that ended up in the hospital?”

  “Wasn’t me. Sorry,” I said, shaking my head slowly at whatever the hell it was she had just said.

  “Hey, brown sugar. You hungry? You look hungry,” Barbara said to Brooklyn with an irritating little smirk.

  “Excuse me! If everyone would—Excuse me!” called a voice from behind us before Brooklyn could reply.

  We all turned toward a man now standing on the deck. He was a pudgy but neat and pleasant-looking sixty-something dude in a beautifully tailored dove-gray suit. He didn’t look like a cannibal. With the white goatee he was sporting, I thought he looked very much like that nice old guy who sang “Frosty the Snowman” in that vintage children’s Christmas special.

  “Thank you,” the genteel holly-jolly fat man said with a smile. “To those who have been here before, welcome back, and to our first-timers, how do you do? My name is Dale Roanoke, and I have the pleasure of being your culinary guide this evening. Any questions about any of tonight’s courses, do not hesitate to ask me. Now, without further ado, if you would follow me, culinary adventurers. Our chariot awaits.”

  CHAPTER 79

  OUR CHARIOT, NOW PARKED out front on Twenty-Seventh, turned out to be an antique London double-decker bus transformed into a beautiful two-level polished-brass-railed bar on wheels.

  I’d seen a picture of it once in a Vanity Fair article about fancy parties out in the Hamptons. Cannibals were moving up in the world, apparently.

  We decided to chill at the back of the bar on the top deck. The bus made a left on Sixth Avenue and then another quick left and then went all the way to the West Side Highway. At first, I got nervous that we were losing our backup until I spotted Arturo and the boys off the back of the bus following two cars back.

  About fifteen minutes later, the bus pulled into the parking lot of a marina on the Hudson near Battery Park. It stopped alongside a dock where a hundred-foot white yacht was tied.

  “As you see, our ship has come in,” came the voice of the Frosty the Snowman guy over the bus’s speaker.

  “Mike, what about backup? Are we actually going to get on the boat?” Brooklyn said as the bus began to empty.

  “You still have your Glock in your clutch?” I said.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Well, I have mine on my ankle. That’s our new backup,” I said.

  We got on the rumbling boat and were led into a dining room. The vessel was OK, I guess, but much more Circle Line than QE2. Definitely less upscale than the bus. It also had a sour cafeteria-like smell to it. It was sort of chintzy, actually.

  A jazz quartet in the corner of the room started up as more waiters hustled out for even more drink orders. Why all the drinking? I wondered. Could one only consume human flesh while pie-eyed or something?

  A waiter brought us two more Amstel Lights as a perfectly normal-looking couple of fine young cannibals stepped up and introduced themselves.

  “Hi, I’m Steve,” said the guy with a Texas accent. “This is Gail, my baby. We just got married three weeks ago.”

  Handsome and drunk in a suit with an undone tie, Steve looked like a Wall Street guy after a long day. Tall, brunette Gail baby was also good-looking and very drunk. She hummed to herself loudly as she took out her phone and started texting. Real charming couple.

  “It’s my first time. Is it like they say?” Steve said to me. “Does it really taste like chicken?”

  “I have no idea,” I said truthfully. “It’s my first time, too.”

  “I call the penis,” Gail said with a giggle, without looking up.

  “Oh my God! Do you think they’ll actually serve that?” Steve said in horror. Then he took out his own phone and started typing. Googling about it, perhaps.

  I looked at the idiotic young couple in awe. I’d been doing OK up to that point, but as I stood there, I really started to become angry. This couple was actually going to eat another person. Why? So they could write about it on their Facebook wall? For nothing, I realized. For kicks.

  How had they and Lucy and Barbara and the rest of the folks here become such amoral, mixed-up, disgusting, animalistic excuses for human beings? I wondered. I mean, Stone Age savages ate people because they were Stone Age savages. Or in the case of the Donner Party, it was in order to survive. That a modern person, or in this case a busload of modern people, would actually pay two grand to experience what eating another person was like was starting to piss me off like you would not believe.

  There was prearranged seating, and Brooklyn and I took our places at a table with half a dozen polite middle-aged Asian cannibals as the boat pulled out. We headed south for the harbor. I could see the Statue of Liberty lit up outside the window off to my right.

  It was about five minutes later when the lights dimmed and then a spotlight hit a black curtain beside the jazz quartet. I remembered what the witness to the murder in Harlem had said about a woman being bound like a leg of lamb. If that actually happened, if they actually brought someone out like that, I was going to take out my undercover Glock and start either arresting or shooting people.

  Because I was sick of these freaks, just sick to my stomach.

  But instead of a bound woman, a line of waiters suddenly appeared from between the parted curtain, bearing covered silver platters. As one of the platters was set down in front of me, I wondered if I was about to see a head under the silver dome like John the Baptist’s.

  My head swam as I started sweating. There better not be, I thought. Or someone was seriously getting hurt.

  There was a drumroll, and then all at once, the waiters pulled up the domes. Underneath on a white plate was a nouvelle-cuisine-looking dish with raspberry-colored sauce over what looked like pork.

  As I stared at it, suddenly all of it, the whole night, the old woman, the sway of the boat, and especially the sight of the mystery meat on my plate, hit me like a sledgehammer.

  I screeched my chair back just in time to puke my three light beers between my shoes.

  CHAPTER 80

  THE ASIAN CULINARY ADVENTURERS at my table started complaining loudly in a language that wasn’t English as I sat there bent over, dry heaving.

  “Are you OK, Mike?” Brooklyn said at my back.

  “Not even a little,” I said as I stood, wiping my mouth.

  When I turned around, Frosty was at the front of the room holding a microphone.

  “The wine for our first course—” he began as I grabbed the tablecloth in front of me and pulled like a magician. But I guess I was no David Blaine, because instead of just pulling out the tablecloth, I sent everybody’s dinner sailing. There was an enormous clatter as plates and silver went into laps and across the dance floor.

  The jazz quartet honked to a dead-silent stop as everybody stared at me. I took out my gun and my shiel
d as I stepped forward.

  “NYPD! Nobody move!” I said.

  “Hands on tables now!” Brooklyn cried as she followed me.

  “What in the hell are you doing?” the evil Frosty wanted to know.

  I shoved him down into his seat.

  “You’re under arrest, scumbag,” I informed him.

  “I know my rights! This is not illegal!” he shrieked, red-faced. “Cannibalism is not illegal!”

  What he said was shockingly true. Noah had told me that though there were laws against the desecration of bodies, as of yet cannibalism wasn’t technically illegal. Though after tonight, I was definitely going to write my congressman.

  “Are you listening to me?” brayed the pudgy sap. “No crime is being committed here. What’s the charge?”

  “I’ll think of something,” I said as I lifted him up, no mean feat, and hauled him out the dining room door to the outside deck. The cool, fresh air off the water was wonderful after the humid cafeteria stench of the dining room. I immediately felt a thousand times better.

  “You have no idea who you’re talking to, do you?” Frosty screamed in a high voice. “Ever hear of PRG Trucking? Maybe not. My family’s firm is not the biggest trucking company in the country, it’s just the third biggest! When my army of lawyers is done suing you and your department, you’re going to wish you’d never been born!”

  “I already wish it after tonight’s festivities, you roly-poly sack of puke. Now, who killed her? Was it you?”

  I shoved him against the side of the boat.

  “You feel like going for a swim?”

  Frosty fell to his knees and started blubbering.

  “No, no, no. You’re wrong. It’s a mistake. The meat we have is from a cadaver, someone who donated their body to science. We bought it off a lab rat at a car company. They use bodies for crash dummies. We’re epicurean cannibals, not sexual sadists or serial killers. This is just the final frontier of culinary experimentation. We didn’t kill anybody. I swear to you!”