Incubi

Chapter 2

The phone sounded like a woman screaming.

I’m dead, he thought.

That’s how he felt when he woke. The room’s darkness smothered him. He felt entombed. Buried in black.

Veronica, he thought.

The phone screamed on.

“Cordesman. What is it?”

The voice on the other end wavered, as if in reluctance or dread. “Jack, it’s me. We’ve got a bad one.”

Me was Randy Eliot, Jack’s partner. A “bad one” meant only one thing in shop talk.

“Where?” Jack asked.

“Bayview Landing…I mean, it’s really bad, Jack.”

“I heard you. How bad?”

“It looks like something ritual. I don’t know what to do.”

I’m still half drunk, Jack realized. “Call evidence, call the M. E. Seal the unit and don’t let any newspaper people near the place.”

Randy sounded drained. It must be bad, because ordinarily the guy didn’t flinch at the tough stuff. The last time they pulled up a floater, Randy was munching chicken gizzards from the Market. He chucked when the floater burst and spilled fresh maggots onto the pier.

“I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Just sit tight,” Jack said. “I’m on my way.”

He hauled on old clothes, grabbed his Smith, and popped six aspirin. He refused to look in the mirror; he knew what he would see. Bloodshot eyes. Pale, thin face and paler body. He’d stopped working out years ago. His hair hung in strings to his shoulders. He drank too much and smoked too much and cared too little. He hadn’t always been like that. Was it the job? Or did he simply think too little of himself to cope?

Veronica, he thought.

Jack Cordesman was thirty-three years old. He’d been a county cop since twenty-two, and a homicide detective since twenty-eight. He’d been shot once, decorated four times, and had the highest conviction rate of any homicide investigator in the state. There was a time when he was considered the best cop on the department.

They paid him $46,000 per year to wade in the despair of the world. To protect the good guys and lock the criminals up. By now, though, after so many years, he didn’t even know which was which. Crime rates soared while correctional budgets were slashed. These days they were paroling guys for parole violation. One night, Jack delivered a baby in a parking lot. An hour later he gunned down a man who’d raped a thirteen-year-old girl at gunpoint. The baby died three days later in an incubator. The rapist had lived, gotten five years, and was out now on parole. Good behavior.

The truth of what he was condemned him to himself; Jack Cordesman was part of the system, and the system didn’t work.

A bad one, he recalled Randy’s words. He drove his county unmarked through the city’s stillness. They got about half of the city’s homicides because the city cops were too bogged down by rapos and crack gangs. He’d seen bad ones before; most were drug-related. Snitches chopped up like cold cuts, dealers machine-gunned for moving on the wrong turf. These crack people didn’t fool around. Once they’d firebombed an entire apartment project just to make a point.

Then there was always the ghost of the Longford case. Jack had watched the tapes he bagged as evidence. He thought he’d seen it all until the day he stared at that screen and watched grown men ejaculate into children’s faces. One of the scumbags had been chuckling as he rubbed a scoop of Vaseline between a little blond girl’s legs. And Longford himself, a millionaire, an esteemed member of the community, sodomizing a five-year-old boy…

Jack fired up a Camel and pushed it all out of his head. What was the use? If you didn’t shrug, you went nuts. If you let yourself care, you were finished. Those were the rules.

Then the thought crept back: Veronica.

It wouldn’t leave him alone. Loss? Rejection? He didn’t know what it was. He tried to be mad about it, because that seemed the macho way to be. Sad was pitiful. There’d been tears in his eyes on the way home that night. Yeah, real macho, he thought. Just a big crying pussy.

She was the only girl he’d ever loved.

They’d been friends for nearly a year first. It was almost formality; they’d meet at the Undercroft several times a week, they’d drink, shoot the shit, joke around, talk about their problems, like that. Jack had needed to talk — this was right after the Longford case — and Veronica was always there to listen. He doubted he’d ever have gotten over it without her. But he liked listening to her too. He liked hearing about the joys in her life, the sorrows, the quagmires and triumphs, the ups and downs. Her art isolated her; she’d never been in love, she’d said. She even talked about her scant sex life, which made him secretly jealous. “Nobody understands me,” she’d said so many times, her face wan in confusion. I understand you, he’d thought as many times. The fact was this: they were both misfits. That was their bond. Jack the reclusive long-haired homicide cop, and Veronica the desolate artist. Their friendship was perfect in its mutuality, but after so many months, Jack realized it was more than friendship. He realized he loved her.

That’s when the weeks had begun to pass in slow masochism. His love continued to grow, but so did his certainty that he could never tell her that. If he told her, he might lose it all. “Stewie’s always saying that you and I should be lovers,” she often joked. Jack didn’t laugh. First off, he couldn’t stand Stewie (“a silly, stuck-up, fairy-clothes-wearing asshole,” he’d once called him) and second, he agreed. Now she was talking about her disgruntled romantic life. “Guys think I’m weird,” she’d complained. “They never call me back.” What could he say? “There must be something wrong with me,” she’d say. “Maybe I’m not attractive. Am I attractive?” Jack assured her she was attractive. But how could he tell her the truth, that she didn’t fit into the regular world for the same reasons he didn’t? Each night she’d recount her latest broken quest for love, and each night Jack wilted a little more behind his Fiddich and rocks.

And just as he thought his turmoil would tear him apart, the moment exploded. He remembered it very vividly. She’d been sitting there at the bar, right next to him as usual, and out of the blue she’d said, “You know something? All this time I’ve been looking for something, and it’s been sitting right next to me all along.” “What?” Jack said. “I love you,” she said.

Jack had nearly fallen off his barstool.

It had been a wonderful beginning.

Now it’s the end, he thought. His despair hollowed him out as he drove the unmarked down Duke of Gloucester Street. He’d dated more than his share of women in his life; none of them had been anything. Only her. Only Veronica. Her weird uniqueness, her spontaneous passion, her love. All gone now. Had it been all his fault? Had he pressured her? Had he moved too fast? Craig had often suggested that he wasn’t giving her enough room to live her life. “She’s an artist. Artists are weird.” Bartenders knew people better than anyone. Jack wished he’d listened a little harder now.

And now this retreat thing. What the hell was that? Some candy-ass hippy rap session. Let’s drink wine and pooh-pooh about art. A retreat, for God’s sake. She hadn’t even said where it was. And now this guy, this… What had she said his name was?

Khoronos.

More barkeep philosophy. Long ago, Craig had told him, “No matter how much you love a girl, and no matter how much she loves you, there’ll always be some other guy.”

Khoronos, Jack thought.

The throbbing lights afar caught his eye. Red and blue. Don’t think about it anymore, he pleaded with himself. Just…don’t…think about it.

The high-rises stood like an arrangement of gravestones. In the center lot a pair of county cruisers sat nose-to-nose. One cop stood smoking, staring off. Another was down on one knee with forehead in hand. The red light on an EMT truck throbbed like a heartbeat.

“Put the fucking butt out and put it in your pocket,” Jack said. “This is a crime scene. And tuck in your shirt.”

“Yes, sir,” the cop said. His eyes looked flat.

“Evidence here yet?”

“Upstairs and out back. We’re still waiting on the M.E.”

Jack pointed to the cop on one knee. “What’s his problem?”

“See for yourself. Fifth floor. Lieutenant Eliot’s there.”

“Any press people show up, tell them it’s a domestic. And get yourselves squared away. You’re cops, not garbage men.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jack stalked toward the high-rise. He was one to talk: long hair, ragman clothes, unshaven. Uniforms hated brass. You usually had to be a prick to get anything out of them. But these two guys looked like they just seen a ghost. Maybe they have, Jack thought. He stepped off the elevator onto the fifth floor and headed down the hall.

The familiar scent touched him at once. Faint. Cloying.

Fresh blood.

Randy Eliot leaned off the wall. He always wore good clothes, like a TV detective. But tonight the face didn’t match the fine, tailored suit. Randy Eliot’s face looked cracked.

“You’ve never seen anything like it,” was all he said.

“Who reported it?” Jack inquired.

“Old guy in the next unit. Said he heard whining, and some ruckus. The super unlocked the door for us.”

Jack looked at the doorframe. The safety chain was broken.

“That’s right,” Randy confirmed. “Locked from the inside. We broke it to get in. The perp went out the back slider.”

Jack eyed the chain, then Randy. “But we’re five stories up.”

“The perp must’ve rappelled down. He left through the slider, over the balcony. That’s all I know.”

The apartment was quaint, uncluttered. It made him think of Veronica and then he knew why. Framed pictures hung all over the walls — pastels and watercolors, originals. An artist, Jack realized. A lot of the pictures looked first-rate.

Flashes popped down the short hall. A tech was fuming the handle of the slider, squinting over a Sirchie UV light. He said nothing as Jack stepped onto the balcony.

Five goddamn stories, he thought, peering over the rail. Two more techs mounted field spots below, to check for impressions in the wet ground. It had rained all afternoon. The perp had either worked his way down terrace to terrace or had used a rope and somehow unhooked it afterward. Jack tried to visualize this but drew only shifting blanks.

Randy took him back through the unit. The place had “the feel.” Any bad 64 had it, the mystic backwash of atmosphere projected into the investigator’s perceptions. Its tightness rose in Jack’s gut; he felt something like static on his skin. He knew it before he even saw it. The feel was all over the place.

“In there,” Randy said. “I’ll wait if you don’t mind.”

Another stone-faced tech in red overalls was shooting the bedroom with a modified Nikon F. The flash snapped like lightning. New blood swam in the air, and a strangely clean redolence. Death in here, the feel itched in Jack’s head. Come on in.

Jack stepped into the bedroom.

“Aw, Christ,” he croaked.

He felt nailed to the wall. The blood shouted at him, bellowed in his face. It was everywhere. He blinked with each pop of the tech’s flash, and the image seemed to lurch closer. The bed looked drenched, sodden as a sponge in a pail of red paint. This was more than murder, it was a fête. Red shapes, like slashes, adorned the clean white walls. Some looked like words, others like symbols.

Above the headboard, four words stood out:

Love, Jack mused. In slow horror, his eyes moved to the bed.

White rope fastened her wrists and ankles to the posts. She was blindfolded with tape, and gagged — of course, the whining heard by the neighbor. Again, Jack tried to picture the killer, but his instincts, oddly, did not show him a psychopath. Jack could tell the victim had been pretty. The perp had very tenderly gutted her; he’d taken his time. Organs had been teased, caressed, reveled in for their warmth. Ropes of entrails had been reeled out of her sliced gut and adorned about the body like garlands. Her cheeks had been kissed by scarlet lips. Scarlet handprints lingered on her breasts. The epitaph proved the truth: This was not murder. It was an act of love.

Jack swallowed something hard. “Any prints?”

“Plenty,” the tech said. “The guy didn’t wear gloves. Lots of ridges on her hooters, and in the stuff he wrote on the walls.”

“Anything else?”

“Some pubes, definitely not hers. We’ll know more once Beck signs her off and gets her into the shop.”

Randy stood at the door, looking away. “She was single, lived alone. Cash in her wallet, bunch of jewelry in the drawers, all untouched. The guy next door says he thinks he heard them enter, three-fifteen or so. The whining sopped about three-thirty.”

“That’s it?”

“’Fraid so for now. Might as well let TSD take it from here.”

Jack nodded. He felt dizzy and sick. In his mind all he could see was the girl twitching against her bonds as the blade divided her abdominal wall. He saw the red hands on her breasts, the red lips kissing her.

Randy pointed to the back wall. “Check that shit out.”

Jack hadn’t even noticed it, too caught up in what lay on the drenched bed. More strange writing emblazoned the white wall, and another design.

“What the fuck is it?”

It was a triangle painted in blood, with a scarlet star drawn at each of its three points.

Written below the design was a single word:

AORISTA