a terrible beauty Page 10

  “No gunshot wounds on her that I saw. Was it her gun?” Sara asked, knowing already that it wasn’t.

  Dickey shook his head. “No, and probably no. From footprints in the area it looks like she had a companion. Male. He may have fired the shots. CSU is looking for slugs, but...”

  Dickey gestured. Sara knew what he meant. The cemetery was wide open. There were no convenient walls to stop a bullet soon after it’d been fired. If they’d missed their intended target they might have hit a nearby tree, they might have plowed into the ground. Or they might have traveled hundreds of yards in any direction. It was an almost impossible trail to follow, but if anyone could do it, CSU could. In the meantime, Sara had something more important to consider.

  “This companion,” Sara said with a slight catch to her words. “Any trace of him. Or his body?”

  “Not yet,” Dickey said. “But we’ve got men out looking.” He gazed around the cemeteiy grounds, not looking very happy. “It’s like a damn primeval forest out there. It’ll take days to search it properly.”

  “Yet the killer didn’t bother to hide the body,” Sara said hopefully. "

  “This killer,” Dickey said with some deliberation, “is nuts. Who knows what’s motivating him?”

  I do, Sara told herself. And it’s all my fault.

  But she couldn’t tell Dickey that Guillaume Sam had had Jake snatched so she’d back off the investigation. He’d think she was as nuts as the Machete Murderer himself. Maybe he’d be right, too. It was only a theory, but it fit the facts as she knew them, it fit the warning Guillaume Sam had given her the night before. It was somewhere to start, but how in the world could she follow up on it with Dickey on her tail?

  “We got a place of residence and a place of employment from the vic’s ID,” Dickey said. “Where do you want to start?”

  For once Sara agreed with the voices as they told her to watch out, to move carefully as far as Dickey was concerned. They didn’t want other people to know of them and the Witchblade. She didn’t want Dickey to know that Jake had been with the girl last night. She couldn’t say why with any degree of certainty, except she was coming around to the feeling that the less people who knew the details of this case, the better.

  “Let’s see the address,” she said, and Dickey handed over his notebook. Sara nodded. “Maybe we’d better split up. If her companion’s not lying dead somewhere in the cemetery-” Please, God, no, Sara thought to herself “—maybe he’s been taken hostage, for whatever weird reason. Time may be of the essence.”

  Dickey nodded agreeably.

  “I remember this shop from my last trip to Fulton

  Street,” Sara said. “I’ll check that out. You can go to her home address.” *

  “I don’t like to deal with grieving families,” Dickey said.

  “It’s part of the job,” Sara replied, trying to sound sympathetic.

  “Never said it wasn’t,’’-"Dickey said, taking his notebook back from Sara and returning it to his jacket pocket. %

  Fulton Street was just waking up. Coffeeshops and lunch counters were opening for breakfast. Bakeries and some of the small food stores were opening their doors as well. Lotions and Potions was still closed, of course. The sign on the door said it opened at nine. Sara looked into Paul Narcisse’s bookstore as she went past, but it, too, was dark.

  She stopped at the walk-up window of a hole-in-the-wall coffeeshop and ordered a large black coffee and, not to be stereotypical, a danish. She wasn’t hungry at all, but she knew she had to eat something. She needed the calories and caffeine for energy. A long day stretched ahead of her and she felt as if she were already running on empty.

  She ate and drank as she walked. The coffee was hot and strong and fragrant. Any other day she would have enjoyed it immensely. Now it just burned a hole in her gut that the danish did little to fill. She had to, she thought, take better care of herself.

  The voices agreed sternly, but fell silent again as she reached her destination.

  People were walking down the path that led to St. Casimir’s, alone and in groups of two or three. The first of the daily masses had ended. Father Baltazar, she thought, was on the job as early as she was.

  She went into the church where the priest was talking to a little old man who seemed as ancient as the Papa Legba of her dream. The language they used seemed to consist of niostly consonants, and the conversation ended with the old man hobbling out into the autumn morning on his two wooden canes.

  “He reminds me of someone I met last night,” Sara said, “I think.”

  “You think he reminds you of somebody, or you think you met somebody?” Father Baltazar asked with a smile.

  “Depends if you count dreams,” Sara said, and told him what had happened, and how it had ended with the phonecall waking her up. She completed her story with the discovery of the body in the cemetery and her theory of what had happened to Jake.

  The priest justified her trust. She could see that he believed her, immediately and implicitly. “You’re probably right about Guillaume Sam kidnapping your partner. He’s more than capable of such an act. As we’ve seen—he’s done worse.” He looked seriously at Sara. “There’s no shame if you back out of this. Though you’re brave and clearly seem to have more experience with such... odd... occurrences than most people, you’re out of your depth here. Guillaume Sam is like nothing you’ve ever faced before.”

  “Yes, he is,” Sara said flatly. “He’s a criminal. He’s a killer. Maybe not by his own hands, but certainly by his orders. It’s my job to put scum like him away so he can’t hurt anyone any more. Besides.” She frowned, feeding on the anger building up in her mind. “He’s made it personal.”

  “All right,” Father Baltazar said gravely. “Just so you understand. This isn’t something you can solve with a pistol. Or even the weight of the law.”

  “What can we do then?” Sara asked.

  “We face the devil with our courage, our knowledge, and our faith,” he said quietly. “First, though, we must rescue your friend. With him under Guillaume Sam’s control, our hands are tied. We dare not make a move against the bokor." >'■>

  “Do you have any idea where he might be keeping Jake?”

  Father Baltazar shook his head. “There are several possibilities, but we have no room to guess. If we guess wrong, then Guillaume Sam will know you’ve completely rejected his offer, and . . The priest paused, as if gauging his words. “And he will kill your partner. You can depend on that.”

  “Then we must be certain when we strike,” Sara said. She looked at Father Baltazar. “How can I get in touch with Papa Legba?”

  The day seemed to go on forever. Sara tried to immerse herself in the routine of police work, but the minute hands on her wristwatch dragged like hours. It didn’t much help that she was chained to Carl Dickey. He seemed like a decent man and a good cop. He was thorough in his investigation and respectful of Sara and her capabilities, but she couldn’t confide in him. She couldn’t trust him with her knowledge and her suspicions, so basically they spent the day spinning their wheels as they tracked down background information on Juliette LeMaye.

  Dickey was curious about Jake’s continuing absence, but Sara made a plausible excuse for him, saying that he was investigating the death of Agent Jackson of Immigration and Naturalization and trying to define how it related to the case.

  It was night before she managed to shake him off, saying that she was going home to get some sleep. Instead she doubled back : to Fulton Street and The Serpent and the Rainbow, where Paul Narcisse and Father Baltazar were waiting for her. Beth looked solemn. Both were clearly deadly serious.

  “This isn’t a frivolous step,” Paul Narcisse said. “It may have repercussions regarding your career—your entire life.”

  “I’m prepared for that,” Sara said.

  “Father Baltazar has told me that you’ve had... unusual ... dreams of Guinee. That you also seem to have or.know something you’ve chosen so far to ke
ep to yourself that may have a bearing on all this—”

  "Believe me,” Sara said sincerely, “if it was something I felt I could share ...” She paused as the angiy murmur of the voices swept over her. “I would... but I can’t. Now. Don’t ask me to explain. I simply can’t.”

  “You ask much of us, Detective Pezzini,” Paul Narcisse said. “You ask us to reveal our secrets, yet keep yours hidden.” He regarded her silently for a moment. “But very well. It seems as if that’s the way it has to be. For now.” He looked at Father Baltazar, and nodded. “Let’s go.” They went out the bookstore’s back door, locking it behind them. The priest, Sara noted, was wearing civilian clothes, not his usual clerical garb. Paul Narcisse was dressed in white, white pants, neat and sharply pressed, and a white shirt of soft linen. They went up a dark alley, traveling north from Fulton Street, up a couple of residential blocks to the area less densely settled than the streets around the business district. The houses here were single-family dwellings instead 6f attached townhouses. They sat on then own plots of land with taller trees, more expansive lawns, and fewer streetlights. It all looked somewhat familiar. She thought she knew where they were headed, f

  They walked in silence, though right at the start of their journey Paul Narcisse had looked at her and asked, “What’s in the bag?” gesturing at the small white paper bag that Sara carried.

  More because she felt somewhat foolish than because she felt any need to be mysterious, Sara simply said, “A present for someone.”

  “I see,” Paul Narcisse said, leaving it at that.

  Though they were approaching it from a different an-,gle and via a different street, Sara knew that they were headed in the direction of the Cypress Hills National Cemetery. And they weren’t the only ones. Single pedestrians, as well as small groups of two or three, were silently walking along with them in the darkness, all headed for a common destination.

  She wanted to confirm her feeling with Paul Narcisse or Father Baltazar, but the night through which they moved was permeated by a deep silence that Sara was loathe to break. It was almost unbelievable that they were within the boundaries of New York City. Only occasionally did a city noise, the sound of a car horn, the sudden squeal of brakes, penetrate the quiet night through which they moved. It was almost as if they’d been transported to another place or time where there was no city around them, only the quiet solitude of an empty countryside.

  Within minutes they arrived at the cemetery’s open gate. They followed those who had arrived before them, acknowledging others with a nod or a glance, but never a murmur, never even a single word passed anyone’s lips. If the others thought Sara’s presence strange or unusual, they never said so, nor even indicated such a feeling with an expression or gesture. The fact that she was with Paul Narcisse and Father Baltazafr seemed to confirm an instant acceptance.

  They went deep into the cemeteiy, deeper than Sara had gone when she’d followed Gene the previous day. At one point they approached what looked like an impenetrable thicket, but to Sara’s surprise once they reached the veritable wall of bushes, shrubs, small trees, and entwining vines, she discovered several paths. Reaching the beginnings of the paths involved a lot of stooping and twisting and pushing through the living barrier that protected them, but once past the initial camouflage the foliage opened up so that the going became as easy as a stroll through the park.

  They came upon a sheltered hollow surrounded by a dense stand of trees. The trees were thick with scores of pigeons and doves. They cooed quietly and incessantly like a continuous, wordless chorus. Open torches blazed in the night and Sara felt as if she’d stepped back into another century. The voices murmured to her, uncertain. She didn’t like that. She didn’t want to be bothered by them now. But then, she never wanted to be bothered by them.

  An odd structure stood in the center of the sheltered hollow, with perhaps a hundred people standing quietly around it. More were joining the crowd as Sara and her guides approached, but it seemed that they were among a final trickle of newcomers. Most of those attending the night’s ceremony were already present.

  Paul Narcisse turned to Sara. “I have to leave you here. I have many duties to perform this evening.”

  “You’ll put me in touch with Papa Legba?” Sara asked. “Is that what all of this is about?” Her gestures included the sheltered hollow, the structure, and the assembled crowd. '' "■*

  Paul Narcisse shook his head. “I am but a vessel. It is impossible to predict who will fill me.” He glanced at Father Baltazar. “My brother seems to think that you have the favor of at least some of the loa. Sometimes they have their own reasons for doing things, and they chose certain people as their champions. We shall just have to see how it all works out.”

  Paul Narcisse and Father Baltazar exchanged nods and he walked off through the crowd, exchanging murmured greetings with many as he went to the wooden structure beyond.

  “What is this place?” Sara asked.

  “It is the hounfort," Father Baltazar said quietly. “The temple, if you will, of this particular parish.”

  “Why here, in this graveyard?”

  The priest shrugged. “Why not? It’s consecrated ground, a holy place already. It’s hidden. Few except the believers know of it. Others who might know a little look away and let the people worship as they will.”

  “Don’t you have a problem with any of this?” Sara asked. “You’re a priest. A Catholic priest.”

  “I’m a believer. I have faith in God and his creations. I have seen things here ...” A sudden faraway look came into Father Baltazar’s eyes. For a moment he looked up at the heavens, and when he looked back at Sara there was something of knowledge in his gaze.

  “You of all people should know that the universe is a mysterious place. Man has only skimmed away the topmost portion of its secrets.”

  Sara nodded. He had her there.

  “Besides,” the priest continued, “over the centuries voudon and Catholicism have grown together in many ways. The saints are identified with loa and worshiped as, such.” He shrugged. “Who knows which guise they may'' prefer? The Father in Rome may say one thing, but he’s in Rome and I’m here. I have seen things ...”

  “What exactly is going to happen?” Sara asked as Father Baltazar’s voice faded away. He seemed to be watching the reminiscences playing in his mind.

  He shrugged. “Paul will call upon the loa through music and dance. One can never be certain what will happen or exactly who will answer the summons. If all goes well Papa Legba will come forth first. He’s the gatekeeper. He opens the way for the other loa to enter the world.”

  The hounfort, Sara saw, had two main parts. In the back of the structure were a series of small rooms built of stone. Father Baltazar called them the caille mysteres, or the sanctuary. He explained that they contained altars to various loa, along with supplies and equipment needed for the ceremonies that took place in the front of the hounfort, which was called the peristyle.

  The peristyle consisted of a corrugated tin roof held up by a number of poles painted brilliant shades of red and green and orange and blue. The central pole, called the poteau-mitan (or, naturally enough, the center post), was the pivot around which the dances would flow. Also, according to the priest, it was the ladder by which the loa descended to the earth. Instead of being a single solid color like the other posts, it was decorated with tightly wound spirals of various bright, complimentary colors, so that it looked like a big, multi-flavored candy stick. A circular pediment ran around the base of the poteau-mitan, about four feet high and two feet thick. Sara watched people approach this ledge, put items on it, bow respectfully, and then rejoin the waiting crowd. She couldn’t tell exactly what they were leaving behind. Some of the items were bottles, some were bowls, some were so swathed in wrappings they were complete mysteries.

  “What’s going on there?” she asked Father Baltazar. “The initiates are leaving offerings for the loa," he explained. “Food, drink, perhaps sma
ll bottles of perfume, or other items associated with specific loa. They hope that the loa, if called, will find favor with them because of their gifts.”

  Sara nodded. “Excuse me for a moment.”

  She made her way through the crowd. Though she was a stranger, no one spoke to her or tried to hinder her. They watched as she approached the concrete altar around the base of the pillar, and placed the small paper bag she carried among the plates of chicken, bowls of rice and egg, and small bottles of soda or spirits, then rejoined Father Baltazar.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “My own little sacrifice,” Sara said with a smile. She nudged the priest and pointed. “What’s happening now?” “Ah,” Father Baltazar said, “Paul is ‘drawing’ the veve for tonight’s ceremony with flour.”

  He had come out of one of the caille mysteres, accompanied by three other men. Taking handfuls of white flour from the burlap sacks they carried, they carefully sifted it onto the dirt floor around the poteau-mitan, drawing, as Father Baltazar put it, a complicated pattern.

  “Pretend that I know nothing about voudon,” Sara suggested, “and tell me what’s going on.”

  “All right,” he said. “I don’t want to come off like a stuffy university lecturer, but if you’re interested-”

  Tm interested,” Sara said. “I’ve got to understand this stuff if we’re goiiig to find Jake and stop the killer.”

  And, she added to herself silently, to see if any of this could help with me owkrpredicament. At that, the voices roiled quietly, almost amusedly. They had been rather quiet so far, as if they too were observing everything around them. Perhaps they were learning about voudon themselves, and were leery of its power and uncertain of its efficacy.

  “Each loa,” the priest explained, “has its own symbol, called a veve. It’s like a... wave pattern that draws a symbolic picture of the loa’s characteristics. For example, that of Erzulie Freda Dahomey, the goddess of love, dreams, and romance is basically, a checkered heart surrounded by lace. However, that of her sister, Erzulie je Rouge, her left-handed incarnation, is that of a heart with a dagger plunged through it. Red Erzulie’s love is jealous and angry. Those possessed by her throw tantrums. The muscles of their bodies tighten in uncontrollable spasms, their fists clench in rage.”