Demons Read online

  DEMONS

  MIKE BAROM

  ibooks

  new york www.ibooks.net

  DISTRIBUTED BY SIMON ft SCHUSTER, INC.

  PROLOGUE

  TThaddeus Bachman’s antique shop was the crown jewel of Worth Street, a renovated and gentrified slice of the Village dedicated to separating the upscale from their money. Bachman’s famed brownstone rubbed elbows with Lubitsch Rare and Hard To Find Books on the west and The Estelle Galleiy-featuring “Outstanding Western and Wildlife Art’’-on the east. Bachman’s four-story brownstone had been built in 1898 by a shipping heir, and had been equipped with a ballroom on the top floor. Bachman renovated the joint stem to stem, turning the first floor into his main showroom.

  Four broad steps led to his generous red granite stoop, a double wrought-iron gate protecting his Italian hand-carved oak doors from the depredations of the hoi polloi. At ten a.m. on a Tuesday morning, those gates should have been open, allowing ingress to Bachman’s loyal customers, who included several members of the House of Saud as well as a Baldwin or two.

  In particular, they should have been opened to admit Robert Hotchkiss, Esq., an investment banker facing a messy divorce. Hotchkiss was 5’ 11”, thin on top and round in the middle. He had one of those bland middle-aged faces that gets less memorable as it ages, marching toward anonymity. He wore a black Fedora to hide his bald spot. He glanced impatiently at his Tag Heuer and cursed his soon-to-be ex-wife for putting him in this

  position-forcing him to sell a Japanese sword she didn’t know he owned-to pay his lawyer.

  Where was Bachman? Worth Street was chock-a-block with cabs, delivery vehicles, tourists, bike messengers, and immigrants with portable stands hawking everything from fake Rolexes to Viagra. Hotchkiss leaned on the bell. Inside, he could hear a faint trilling. He went down the steps and stood on the sidewalk, trying to see in through the large display window on which the words Thaddeus Bachman Antiques was written in Gothic gold-leaf script, with black accents. In the comer was the blue-and-white rectangle of Panther Security Systems. Behind the glass were two Ming Dynasty vases, a jade dragon, a freestanding silk screen, and an immense, hand-carved mahogany Balinese wedding scene that must have weighed a ton, complete with dancers, firewalkers, and elephants. Bachman specialized in Eastern art, had perked right up when Hotchkiss told him about the sword. The banker’s father had smuggled the sword home from Iwo Jima after World War II.

  “Hang on to this Bob. You never know. It might be worth big bucks someday.”

  A frisson of panic crawled down Hotchkiss’ spine. He was hanging by a thread at the Bloare Agency, the investment house where he worked. If he missed the 11:30 meeting, it would only give his boss the excuse he needed to give Hotchkiss the sack. It was a warm June morning and as usual, Hotchkiss was overdressed in his wool worsted suit and London Fog overcoat. A bead of sweat crept out from under his hat.

  He returned to the stoop. The nerve of the man! In frustration, the banker grabbed Bachman’s elegant wrought-iron gate handles and shook them. The handles swiveled freely. The gate opened.

  Peculiar.

  Hotchkiss folded back the gate, which swung silently on oiled hinges. He tried the heavy brass latch on the split Italian doors. It swiveled, too, and the door swung inward.

  “Bachman?” he said. Investment bankers didn’t bellow. “You in there?” The darkened foyer beckoned.

  Hotchkiss ventured further, searching for a light. He found one. He stood on a parquet floor beneath a domed twelve-foot ceiling from which hung a Tiffany chandelier. On his left was a glass case featuring Bachman’s announcements, an intercom system, and an alcove holding a jasmine-scented candle in a jade bowl. Directly ahead was the closet-sized elevator. To Hotchkiss’ right was the heavy door leading to the shop itself.

  Hotchkiss turned the knob. If the place were unlocked, he would leave Bachman a note. It didn’t occur to him that something was amiss. His primary emotion was irritation that the famed Bachman had stood him up. The door to the shop swung inward, revealing utter blackness, and emitting a peculiar coppery smell. He stepped through the door and felt along the wall for a light switch. His hand swept something small, which fell to the floor with a tinkling sound.

  “Crap,” he muttered, venturing further into the cluttered room. He was assailed with the comforting odors of antiquity, all our yesterdays stacked and polished with lemon wax... and something else. Something metallic and dangerous. Hotchkiss recalled that Bachman kept a goose-necked lamp on the counter opposite the door. He took one step toward the counter.

  His feet shot out from under him, as if he’d stepped on ice.

  Hotchkiss went down, instinctively shoving out his hands to break his fall. He slipped on something slick and sprawled on the floor, feeling ridiculous for one nanosecond-until his reptile brain clicked that all was not normal in the antique shop.

  The strange smell, the sticky slickness added up to animal panic. Demons lurked in the shadows. Gasping, Hotchkiss scrambled to his feet, hanging on to a hand-carved Indonesian table, spilling expensive doodads to the floor, where they landed with a muted clatter. He scraped, bumped, and turned into the heavy drape separating the display window from the shop. Like Jerry Lewis flubbing an entrance, he twisted in the drapes, admitting sunlight into the shop. He looked down. He was standing in a sea of crimson. He stared at his blood-soaked hands and found himself sobbing. He began to shake.

  His first thought was to call the police. He hesitated. His soon-to-be ex-wife knew nothing about the sword, or certain other assets he’d kept hidden. If her vampiric lawyer learned about this attempted sale, it wouid go even harder on him, if that were possible.

  Breathing in little shrieks, Hotchkiss decided to let himself out the rear. If he hurried, he would just have time to stop at his condo, shower, and change. He looked toward the front of the store. The height of the floor and the forest of objects insured that no one in the street could see in.

  Shambling toward the rear, Hotchkiss glanced once behind the counter.

  He immediately wished he hadn’t.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  P

  1 ezzini!” Lieutenant Joe Siry yelled from his redoubt at the end of the detectives’ bullpen, on the second floor of the Eleventh Precinct.

  Detective First Grade Sara Pezzini paused at her keyboard. Since discovering she could type seventy-five words a minute, Lt. Siry had found no end of work for her.

  “What?” she yelled back. No intercoms in the Nineteenth. It was a miracle they even had computers, and what few they had had been purchased with forfeiture money from a drug kingpin Sara had helped bring down.

  “Would you come in here please,” Siiy shouted back without a trace of self-consciousness. He’d been bom screaming, and he hadn't stopped since.

  Sighing, Sara saved her work and stood, tucking her gray cotton sleeveless turtleneck into her Versace jeans. “Like a hog-calling contest around here,” she muttered as she strolled toward the lute’s office, aware of but not intimidated by the sex-hungiy eyes of two male detectives.

  Sara looked like some coke-crazed casting director’s dream of a detective. At thirty-three and 105 pounds, she looked ten years younger. But no one would ever mistake her for a pushover. Not with that swagger. Her auburn hair hung straight down her back. She wore her detective’s badge on her belt.

  One detective hummed the theme from The Twilight Zone, in reference to Sara’s caseload. Even before acquiring the Witchblade, she’d been the go-to guy on weird. Every bizarre killing or ritualistic murder fell in her lap. Initially, this was because the overwhelmingly male hierarchy got a kick out of watching this perfect “10” get down and dirty with the guys, just to see if she could do it. Being a woman in the police force was a lot l
ike being gay or a Quaker, in that she was constantly being called upon to prove herself. No matter how many cases she closed or perps she brought in, there would always be a gaggle of cops standing around saying, “Yeah, but what have you done for me lately?”

  Baltazar, the cop who was humming, even looked like Rod Serling. He had the dark good looks and the voice. Baltazar was a Portugese-American. Cops spent more time studying each other’s genealogies than hagiogra-phers for the House of Windsor. If it were up to New York cops, there would be no plain Americans, only hyphenated-Americans. Actually, Sara mused, if cops were free to speak their minds, many hyphenated Americans would become politically incorrect. The police force drew its recruits overwhelmingly from blue-collar strata, from tribes clinging fiercely to their tribal identities. You had your Sons of Hibernia. You had your Black Police Officers Coalition. You had your Puerto Rican cops, who did not necessarily groove with the Cuban-American cops.

  “Submitted for your approval,” Baltazar said, dropping each word like a perfectly formed platinum billet. “Sara

  Pezzini, mild-mannered homicide detective for the Nineteenth Precinct, innocently answering her lieutenant’s come-hither..

  Sara had to smile. It really was a perfect Rod Serling. “That’s great, Manny. Leave your number with the secretary, would ya? We’ll call you.”

  She went into the lieutenant’s office, shut the door, and planted herself in the middle of a deluxe office chair. It was adjustable for rake, lumbar, height, and castor-more fruit of the confiscatory tree. The chair slid six inches on its balls.

  "What’s up, Joe?”

  “Decapitation in the East Village. Big-shot antiques dealer named Thaddeus Bachman. Anonymous informant over the phone. I got two greenies guarding the place. Here’s the address.”

  “Come on, Joe. I’m up to my eyeballs, my partner is on vacation...”

  “Shift your caseload to Baltazar. If he gives you any grief, tell him to talk to me.”

  Sara took the slip of paper. “Does this mean I don’t have to continue typing your report to the Equal Opportunities Commission?”

  “Come on, don’t bust my chops. Murder investigations take priority over chicken scratch. Get your butt down there before the Daily News beats you to it.”

  Breathing a sigh of relief, Sara left the office, snagged her jacket, crime kit and open-face Arai helmet off the coat tree, and headed out the open door of the detectives’ bullpen. Behind her, Baltazar’s words echoed faintly, “... a mission that will take her... to The Twilight Zone..He wasn’t bad, actually. Kind of cute. And at least he had all his hair and no gut. But if Sara were look-mg for romance, and she wasn’t, she wouldn’t look in the detectives’ bullpen. She’d learned the hard way not to find romance on the job.

  Toting her helmet like a bowling bag, she took the rear stairs to ground level, exiting into the fenced-in motor pool, a tiny lot that, because of its location and the plethora of police vehicles, was jammed tighter than a bus at rush hour. It only held a dozen vehicles, fitted together like parts of a puzzle; to get one out, you had to move at least two others.

  Not Sara. Her Yamaha RZ1 took up little more space than a ten-speed bicycle. She kept it snugged tight against the building in an odd little enclosure protected from cars by huge concrete posts, designed to keep trucks from careening into the rear door. There were two bikes in the enclosure, hers and a spanking new silver and copper Hayabusa. Whose was it? Another biker cop? Only cops were permitted to park personal transportation in here. She paused to admire the Hayabusa, a sleek Suzuki with a thirteen hundred cubic centimeter engine, and allegedly, the fastest stock production motorcycle you could buy. One ninety, as if any sane person would ever go that fast on two wheels. The owner had glued a pair of Powerpujf Girls decals to the miniscule instrument display. Charming.

  Sara pulled on her red Joe Rocket jacket, her backpack, then the silver Arai. Straddling the Yamaha, she turned the key, thumbed the ignition, and the four-cylinder engine hummed smoothly to life. The Yamaha only weighed four hundred and thirty pounds, less than her Buell. Brave cops, who wouldn’t hesitate to run into a darkened alley after an armed assailant, blanched in terror at the thought of riding a motorcycle in Manhattan. What they didn’t realize was the unbelievable mobility it gave her. She could be anywhere in the city in literally one-half to one-third the time it took others to get there by more conventional methods. If she ran into gridlock, she could roll right down the dotted line between stalled lanes. If anybody gave her any grief, she flashed her badge.

  Given an opening, she could accelerate from a dead stop to one hundred miles an hour in eight seconds. Worth Street was a mile southeast of the station house. As she cruised down Center Street, the gaping hole in the sky that used to be the World Trade Center stared at her like a baleful god. She would never get used to it. It was like losing a leg, but the nerve endings remained alive, constantly reminding her that there used to be a living thing from which those phantom feelings spring. The One-One had lost eleven men and women on September 11. Had Sara not been involved in a hot investigation at the time, she may veiy well have been among them. There were a lot of new faces around the precinct, which would account for the Hayabusa.

  Worth Street was virtually impassable most weekdays. No one noticed the two Crown Vies double-parked in front of Bachman’s. Yellow police tape sealed off the entrance, and a uniformed kid with the cafe latte complexion and brown wool hair of mixed parentage stood nervously behind the tape, sipping from a Styrofoam cup. Sara swerved onto the sidewalk at a service entrance, rolled the bike in front of Bachman’s, and set the sidestand beneath the display window. She removed her helmet, locked it to the bike, took off the jacket, and draped it over the seat.

  Ducking under the tape, she went up the steps. “Patrolman Sosa,” she said, reading, the kid’s tag, “I’m Detective Pezzini. What have you got?”

  “Some sick stuff, Detective. Someone cut the owner’s head clean off.”

  “You positively ID the vie?”

  “We’re trying to locate next-of-kin now. It’s hard to tell. I mean, Jesus! You wouldn't think so, but when you cut a guy’s head off, it changes his looks. The face goes all saggy and stuff.” He grimaced. “Sorry.”

  Sara batted the kid in the arm. “Hang in there.” She entered through the propped-open front door, hung a right in the foyer, and stopped short. The floor was a stinking, sticky mess of blood, smeared and marked with hand and footprints. Someone had taken a pratfall.

  “Yeah,” said the cop standing at the end of the counter. “Watch where you step. If you circle around the perimeter of the room clockwise, you can get over here without stepping in anything. Put some bags on, willya?” Sara recognized the cop. “Hi, Leary. Great way to start the day, huh?” She took a pair of clear plastic baggies out of her backpack, pulled them on over her black leather Nikes, and fixed them in place with rubber bands.

  “I’m glad I had breakfast two hours ago. That’s all I’m gonna say.”

  Picking her way carefully around the crowded showroom, Sara noted where someone had knocked over several small tables, spilling expensive gee-gaws across the hardwood floor. She reached Leary, who stepped back, permitting her to stand in a dry spot and look. The antique dealer’s body lay on the floor, a dark lake of blood extending from the surgically cut neck. The white spine protruded like the wire in a meat cable. She looked up. The head sat on the lower part of the counter, staring at them over a crimson clutch of leaves. On closer inspection, she saw they were invoices. The killer had mounted the head on the bills spindle. Blood completely covered the part of the counter not visible from the entrance. Bachman had had a lot of blood.

  Sara swung out of her backpack, laying it carefully on the seat of a wicker chair. “You touch anything?”

  “Come on, Detective. You know me better than that.”

  “You call the coroner?”

  “Ain’t had time. I’ll do that right now. You okay in here?”

&nbs
p; “I’ll scream if I need you.”

  Digging in her backpack, she found a pair of latex gloves and slipped them on. Balancing precariously on a patch of dry floor, she hunkered down next to the headless corpse and shone a penlight on the cut. The vertebrae had been severed cleanly, leaving a faint wave pattern in the bone. The crime techs might be able to suggest the type of instrument the killer had used. Carefully, plucking at the dealer’s white cotton cuff, she raised his left hand from where it had fallen. At first it did not want to come loose from the floor, to which it had been glued with dried blood. Rigor had set in, making the whole body feel like badly set plaster-of-Paris. Sara succeeded in prying the arm loose; it made a dry sucking sound. She examined the palms and fingernails for signs of struggle. Nothing. She carefully lowered the arm back into place.

  A number of flies had found their way into the feast and were skating across the sticky, black sea of blood. Breathing shallowly through her mouth, Sara rose and forced herself to get up close and personal with Thaddeus Bachman. The antiquarian had an expression of surprise on his face. At least it was quick. But what kind of assassin lops a man’s head off with a single blow? She was reminded of Zatoichi, the fictional blind swordsman of Japanese films. Well, a samurai, of course.

  It was then that she noticed the empty sword display on the credenza behind the counter. Bachman specialized in Oriental antiquities. His head had been removed with a single blow. Here was a pair of missing swords. Sara did the math in her head. Someone had been after some swords. And if they had been given so prominent a display, surely there had to be some recent paper record of their existence.

  Which brought her back to the red salad poking out from under the severed neck. If the record were among the invoices on the spindle, she would not be able to touch it. The crime lab would get those papers, and it would be their job to provide her with a complete account—by which time, the killer would be on the French Riviera.

  Gingerly, standing on tiptoes so as not to dip her shoes in the blood, she picked up the sword display stand. It was made of black-lacquered wood, and resembled a pair of antlers. It had been mass-produced in China. No help there.