Kiss of Evil
Page 1
Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright
About the Author
Praise for Richard Montanari
Also by Richard Montanari
Dedication
Kiss of Evil
Part One: Altar
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Two: Spell
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Part Three: Brujo
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Epilogue
Other books of this author
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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Epub ISBN 9781409035930
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Reissued by Arrow Books 2009
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Copyright © Richard Montanari, 2001
Richard Montanari has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
First published in 2001 by HarperCollins Publishers
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ISBN 9780099524847
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About the Author
Richard Montanari is the Top Ten Sunday Times bestselling author of The Devil’s Garden, Play Dead, The Rosary Girls, The Skin Gods and Broken Angels, as well as the internationally acclaimed thrillers The Violet Hour and Deviant Way. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
Praise for Richard Montanari
‘A relentlessly suspenseful, soul-chilling thriller that hooks you instantly.’ Tess Gerritsen
‘Readers of this terrifying page-turner are in the hands of a master storyteller. Be prepared to stay up all night.’ James Ellroy
‘A specialist in serial killer tales . . . a wonderfully evocative writer’ Publishers Weekly
‘A no-holds-barred thriller that thrusts the reader into the black soul of the killer . . . those with a taste for Thomas Harris will look forward to the sure-to-follow sequel’ Library Journal
‘Montanari’s superior thriller . . . [is] a welcome change from the gore typical of the serial killer subgenre. Likewise, Byrne and Balzano possess a psychological depth all too rare in such fiction.’ Publishers Weekly
‘One of the most terrifyingly evil stories I have read. Yet, with all its violence, it is balanced by much compassion and beauty. I just couldn’t put it down. This could be the book of the year.’
Norman Goldman, Barnes & Noble
Also available by Richard Montanari
Deviant Way
The Violet Hour
The Rosary Girls
The Skin Gods
Broken Angels
Play Dead
The Devil’s Garden
For my mother,
who first gave me a spoon.
Kes lusigaga alustab, see kulbiga lobetab,
Kes kulbiga alustab, see lusigaga lobetab.
—ESTONIAN PROVERB
If there be demons, there must be demonesses.
—VOLTAIRE
TWO YEARS AGO . . .
Michael Ryan sits in a gray leatherette swivel chair, in a dimly lit hotel room, tapping his right foot to some unheard song from the nineties, thinking: This is so much better than sex, it doesn’t even show up on the radar; thinking:
This moment, this lunatic moment, is why he became a cop in the first place.
His pulse rages.
The Glock 9 holstered under his left arm feels as long as a cannon and twice as heavy.
The young woman sitting on the edge of the bed in front of him is a tall, graceful beauty, uptown in a manner of fashion and speech and poise that had always driven Mike Ryan around the bend, even when he was just a cocksure, working-class kid from the wrong side of the Cuyahoga. Tonight the woman is wearing a teal blue dress, sexy heels, diamond earrings. Try as he had, he had not been able to evict her from his thoughts for more than fifteen minutes during the past two weeks, had seen her face in every mo
vie, every magazine, every catalog.
She is not a classic beauty, but to Michael Ryan she is perfect: long, shapely legs; porcelain skin; dusky, almost-Asian eyes. It had taken four meetings to get her and this amount of money in the same room, and at each of those meetings she had looked better — sweats to jeans to slacks to this damned dress.
In the back of Michael’s mind, Dolores Alessio Ryan, his Sicilian-tempered wife of fifteen years, threatens castration. This woman had gotten way under his skin.
He wants this over.
“I’m happy,” Michael says. “You?”
“Yes,” she replies, softly.
He had just handed her the envelope. She, in turn, had just handed him the four stacks of cash. Ten thousand dollars, small bills, well worn. Invisible. Except for the twenty-dollar bill on top of one of the stacks. The twenty on top had some kind of red mark on it, a strange little drawing of a bow and arrow.
After handing him the money, she had grabbed the slender sterling flask that had been sitting on the nightstand between them, smiled, unscrewed the top, brought it to her lips. She had handed the flask to Michael and Michael had known—known as fully and completely as any lesson he had learned in his forty-six years—that he shouldn’t. But he did anyway. Two big swallows to steady his hands. It was Cuban rum, top-shelf. It warmed him.
And now it is showtime.
In the instant before Michael can make his move, the woman stands, reaches into her big leather bag. Michael is sure that, when she withdraws her hand, it will be holding a pistol. This is a certainty. He freezes, the breath catching in his throat, his muscles tightening.
It is not a gun.
It is instead . . . a Montecristo? Yes. Michael goes cool for a moment, dimpled with relief. He can smell the sweet tobacco, even from five feet away. “What’s this?” he asks, his face risking a half-smile.
The woman doesn’t answer but rather begins to wordlessly perform the cigar smoker’s ritual—sniffing, rolling, end-cutting, gently spinning the cigar as it is being lit with a wooden kitchen match. After a few puffs, she kneels in front of him, rests her hands on his knees. Her touch electrifies him. Michael, a two-pack-a-day man, doesn’t cough, isn’t bothered by the smoke in the least.
It’s just . . . weird, right?
A woman like this smoking a Cristo?
Then, for the first time since they’d met, through the silvery haze of smoke made blue by the muted hotel TV, through the sudden, heady fog of her perfume, Michael notices the pristine blackness of this woman’s eyes, the cruelty that lives there, and he is frightened.
Something is wrong.
He tries to stand, but whatever hallucinogenic drug was in the rum seizes his world and makes it stutter and weave and lurch in front of him. He reaches for his gun. Gone, somehow. His heart races to burst, his legs feel thick and useless. He falls back into the chair.
“Here comes the dark, officer,” the woman says, jacking a round into the Glock’s firing chamber. “Here comes the night.”
Before the darkness, in a breathtaking panorama behind his eyes, Detective First Grade Michael Patrick Ryan of the Cleveland Police Department observes a thousand dazzling visions at once. Some are so brutal in their majesty, so radiant, that tears come to his eyes. Most are terribly sad: Carrie, his young daughter, forever waiting for him on the front porch, her wheelchair gleaming in the late-afternoon sun. Dolores, mad as hell. Dolores’s father had died in the line of duty, you see. Every morning, for fifteen years, Michael had promised her he would not die in the line of duty.
But this isn’t really duty, is it, Mike?
Michael Ryan glances up at the barrel of his own weapon, at the delicate white finger on the trigger, the bloodred fingernail. He closes his eyes one last time, thinking:
It was all for my girls.
All of it.
And no one will ever know.
One
∼
Altar
1
I step into the white room at precisely eleven o’clock. White walls, thick white carpeting, white stippled ceiling. The lights are on and it is very bright, very warm. Aside from the blue-screened LCD monitor on the desk in the corner, the only color in the room is the plum velvet wing chair, dead center, facing the computer’s small video camera, facing the lights.
I am dressed in charcoal trousers, pleated, and a powder blue shirt with French cuffs. I am also wearing a pair of black Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses. I am barefoot and the shirt is open at the top.
I received the e-mail from Dante at eight-thirty and that gave me just enough time to get to the dry cleaner, just enough time to flirt with a waitress and pick up some dinner at Guarino’s. I can still taste the garlic from the veal piccata and feel like I might be cheating this woman, even though she is going to be light-years away, figuratively speaking. But I understand what compels the person on the other side of the session to call, to arrange, to pay. I respect that.
So I take out my Binaca and freshen my breath.
I sit down.
At eleven-ten the computer speakers sizzle with static, the small window in the upper right of the monitor flickers once, twice, but does not yield an image. I do not expect it to. Although the connection allows for two-way video transmission, I have yet to see anyone appear in that frame. Watchers watch.
Soon, from the speakers, there comes a synthesized voice, robotic, yet unmistakably female.
“Hello,” the voice says.
“Hello,” I answer, knowing she can see me now.
“Are you the police officer?”
The game. Eternally the game. First the game, then the guilt. But always, in the middle, the come. “Yes.”
“Just home from a tough day at work?”
“Just walked through the door,” I say. “Just kicked off my shoes.”
“Shoot anyone today?”
“Not today.”
“Arrest anyone?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Just a girl. A very wicked girl.”
She laughs, pauses for a few moments, then says: “Fix yourself a drink.”
I stand, walk out of the frame. There is no bar in this room, but there is a desk with some of the items I anticipated needing. She cannot see these things, these props I will use to produce this chimera for her. Nor, of course, can she see the cauldron, the long-rusted hooks.
Those are in the black room.
As I pick up the tumbler containing a few inches of rum, I hear an increase in the pace of the woman’s electronic breathing. Watchers like to anticipate, too. Watchers like it even when they can’t see.
I play her for a few moments, then reenter the frame and sit down.
“Drink,” she says, a little breathless now.
I drink. The liquid is pleasant amber fire in my stomach.
“Stand up.”
A strong, authoritative command. I obey.
“Now . . .” the voice continues, “I want you to take your shirt off. Slowly.”
I turn my right wrist, look again at my silver cuff links, at the ancient symbol engraved into the smooth matte surface. I take the cuff links out with great drama, then unbutton my shirt slowly, one mother-of-pearl button at a time, and let it slip over my shoulders to the floor.
“Good,” says the voice. “Very good. You are a very beautiful young man.”
“Thank you.”
“Now your trousers. Belt first, then the button, then the zipper.”
I do as I am told. Soon I am naked. I sit down on the chair. My penis looks thick and heavily veined against the purple velvet.
“Do you know who I am?” asks the voice.
I do not. I say so.
“Do you want to know who I am?”
I remain silent.
“I can’t tell you anyway,” the voice says. “But I do know what I want you to do now.”
“What is that?”
“I want you to think about the woman you saw today. At the who
rehouse.”
“Okay.”
“Do you remember her?”
“Yes. I haven’t been able to forget her.”
The voice continues, a little faster. “The woman you saw on the top floor. Did you like her?”
“Yes,” I say, my erection growing. This was the easy part. “Very much.”
“Did it turn you on to watch her?”
“Yes.” Up a few more degrees. Then a few more.
“That was me, you know. I was the whore.”
“I see.”
“Do you like to watch me do that to other men?”
“Yes. I love it.”
“Spread your legs,” she says, the transmission breaking up a bit.
“Like this?”
A few more moments of static, then: “Meet me.”
“No.”
“Meet me tonight.”
It is a plea, now. The power has shifted, as it always does. “No,” I reply.
“Meet me and fuck me.”
I wait a few beats. My heart begins to race. Is she going to be the one? “If I say yes, what will you do for me?”
“I . . . I’ll pay you,” she says. “I have cash.”
“I don’t want your money.”
“Then what do you want?”
I pause. For effect. “Obedience.”
“Obedience?”
“If we meet, you will do as I say?”
“Yes.”
“You will do exactly as I say?”
“I . . . yes . . . please.”
“Are you alone now?”
“Yes.”
“Then listen to me carefully, because I will tell you this once.”
She remains silent. I shift in the chair, continue.
“There is an abandoned building on the southeast corner of East Fortieth and Central,” I say. “There is a doorway on the East Fortieth side. I want you to stand there, facing the door. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Do you truly have the courage to go there? To do this?”
The slightest hesitation, then: “Yes.”
“Do you understand that I am going to fuck you in that doorway? Do you understand that I am going to walk up behind you and fuck you in that filthy doorway?”
“I . . . God. Yes.”
“You will wear a short white skirt.”
“Yes.”
“You will wear nothing underneath it.”