a terrible beauty Read online

  It was, Sara thought, all a mysteiy. Unfortunately, she wasn’t Sherlock Holmes. Jake wasn’t even Dr. Watson. But she’d figure it all out in the end, somehow. In the meantime, she realized that she’d been awake for over thirty-six hours, and was running on empty.

  She looked around the room to track down Jake. Finally she spotted him and Magdalena Konsavage engaged in what seemed to be earnest conversation. When she made her way over to them she heard them arguing the merits of the Beach Boys versus Nick Cave and the Bad Seed. Jake wasn’t winning, but was obviously willing to give the discussion the good old college try. He paid Sara minimal attention as she said her goodnights.

  Before she left the ballroom she hunted down Paul Narcisse and Father Baltazar. -

  “Thanks for an interesting evening,” she told the pair. “Is your mind still open?” Father Baltazar asked.

  Sara shrugged. “Yeah, but I don’t want it so open that my brain will fall out. Still. A .”

  “Think about what you’ve seen tonight. We’ll talk later.” t'-#

  “That’s a promise,” Sara said. “Right now, though, I need some sleep.”

  Father Baltazar nodded.

  “Pleasant dreams, Detective,” he wished, or perhaps predicted, for her.

  But, unfortunately, he was wrong.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  Sara fell into the bed as if it were the welcoming arms of a long-sought, sorely-missed lover. Her head hit the pillow, her eyes closed. For once it seemed that the voices were as tired as she was. At any rate they didn’t bother her with unnecessaiy chatter as she reviewed the day’s events like she always did when she was on a case. Sometimes as she approached the walls of sleep her subconscious gave her insights that her wide-awake mind missed. Sometimes, she even remembered those insights upon awakening.

  Four bodies were now laid at the hands of the Machete Murderer. One, found in a Manhattan Dumpster minus hands and head, was still unidentified. Two had washed up on the Manhattan side of the East River, also minus heads and hands. Also with no I.D., but tentatively identified as Haitians living in Cypress Hills. One had been a doctor, perhaps a respected citizen, the other a not-so-respected gang member. Both probably had been killed if not together, then at about the same time. Finally, one found in an alley, in the Cypress Hills neighborhood itself. No head, but identified by cards found in his wallet.

  The differences in the last killing bothered Sara. It seemed as if the killer really wanted to hide the identities of the first three victims, but could care less about the fourth. Assuming, of course, that the murderer took Pierre-Pierre’s head for some arcane purpose of his own. Perhaps there was a reason for the decreasing attempts at secrecy. Or perhaps the killer was getting a little more out of control with each slaying. Maybe the Machete Murderer was feeling more invincible after each murder, more contemptuous of the police.

  If that was the case, he would get caught sooner than later. The killer would get sloppier and sloppier and make a critical mistake. At least, Sara fervently hoped that it would be sooner than later.

  In the meantime... meantime... her mind conjured up a pair of eyes, brown and soulful. Father Baltazar looked at her with kindness and understanding. She realized that she was attracted to him ... but he was a priest. Untouchable. Vowed to celibacy. Not like Alek Gervelis. His eyes held understanding, too, understanding of what she wanted, what she needed. They were dark, too, brown ... no ... red ... Red glaring pinpricks that burned with a feverish heat.

  Sara sat up, startled. She was sitting on a thick grassy sward, a clearing in a luxuriant jungle lit only by the light of the full moon. She was wearing the short silken chemise she’d worn to bed, and could feel warm breezes whisper about her face, her bare shoulders, and long, lean legs. Vines entwined about the trees surrounding the clearing and night-blooming flowers were everywhere. They perfumed the warm, caressing breezes with their heady musk.

  “Welcome to Guinee, blanc,” a voice said.

  Sara stood slowly. The voice was soft and pleasingly feminine. Sara couldn’t fear it. In fact, she felt more at peace than she had for months. It took a moment before she realized the voices in her head were utterly silent. It was as if they’d vanished. She searched for them among the corridors of her mind, but if they were still present they were hiding.'That seemed good enough for now.

  Sara turned to see a beautiful black woman who had thick, wavy hair that feM to her waist. She wore heavy eye make-up: mascara and eye-shadow, and probably false eyelashes as well because no natural lashes could be so luxuriantly long. She had large hooped earrings and a shiny necklace of silver and gold, as well as three bands on the ring-finger of her left hand. A crimson and gold orchid was enmeshed in her hair behind her right ear. Her dress was long and flowing with rather more flounces and of a costlier fabric than an ordinary peasant’s shift. She looked like a goddess.

  “Guinee?” Sara repeated. “Where is that?”

  The woman gestured around herself.

  “Guinee is here, where you are. More importantly,” she said, “you should ask what is Guinee?”

  Sara smiled. “All right. What is Guinee?”

  The woman smiled a smile that was the definition of charming. “It is the dream-home of the voodoun loa, the spirits of voudon.”

  “Are you a loa?"

  “I am Erzulie Freda Dahomey, patroness of love and lost dreams. Someone has asked that I watch over you. Come, blanc, walk with me, and we shall talk.”

  Erzulie gestured and Sara fell in step with her as they went down a path Sara hadn’t noticed before, leading out of the clearing.

  “Who set you to watch over me?” Sara asked.

  “Ahhh,” Erzulie said. “That is the mystery, is it not? Who are your friends, who are your enemies?”

  “Can’t you tell me?” Sara asked.

  On a branch above them there was a sudden stirring where moments before there had been only silent darkness. A black shadow leapt down to the ground, and Sara started as she realized that a leopard had landed right next to them. She drew bdCk in fear and surprise, but Erzulie didn’t seem to notice her reaction. She simply put her hand out and the leopard slunk down low, as if bowing, then licked her hand with his long, raspy tongue.

  “Your enemy,” Erzulie said, scratching the leopard on top of its sleek head, “is Guillaume Sam. You know that, even if you don’t quite believe it. He is a malfacteur, a person of the worst sort. He never sacrifices to me, but to my sister Erzulie je Rouge—someone, believe me, you never want to meet. Baron Samedi is his patron.”

  The leopard joined them as they walked down the trail, pacing along calmly by Erzulie’s side.

  “Samedi?” Sara asked. “Who’s he?”

  “He is the head of the Guede Family,” Erzulie told her. “Baron Saturday. The loa of Death, Guardian of the Cemetery, and Protector of Sorcerers. He is very powerful. Though you seem to have your own odd... abilities ... you would never be able to defeat him.”

  “Defeat him?” Sara said. “I don’t want to have anything to do with him. I just want to catch a murderer. I just want to be—“

  Sara abruptly shut up. She was about to say: I just want to be normal again. I’m sick of these voices whispering in my head. I just want to be a cop, go to work, catch the bad guys. Maybe meet somebody someday and fall in love . . .

  Erzulie laughed. “Yes, ma petit, you do not want much, do you? Still-” She shrugged. “People have asked for more than you do. You are not unreasonable.”

  A white dove fluttered down from the branches of one of the trees over-arcing the trail and landed on Erzulie’s shoulder. Erzulie put a soft hand on the bird’s back, caressing it.

  “I must be going. Be sure to thank the houngan for his sacrifice to me, in your name. Think of me sometime. I cannot fight your battles. It is not our way to contend against each other. But I will give you what information I can. For now, a final gift: I am not the only loa who knows you walk in Guinee tonight. Beware Bakul
a-baka.” Sara looked at her, confused. “Houngan? Sacrifice? What are you talking about?”

  , But Erzulie and her leopard were only broken spirals of mist, shimmering on the hot night breeze.

  “What’s a Bakula-baka?”

  “Not what, foolish bland Who!”

  Sara whirled at the unexpected voice coming from behind her to face something out of a madman’s nightmare. It was a huge dark figure, taller than Sara, broader by far. It was human-shaped, but could hardly have been alive. One of his eyes was missing. The empty socket was dark as the mouth to hell. Half of his face was exposed skull, skin and flesh stripped away to the white bone underneath. He was clothed in tom, filthy rags, and Sara could see that other parts of his body were missing flesh as well. White bone gleamed here and there as he moved toward her. He dragged several lengths of thick chain, as if he had been tied down but had burst his bonds. As he approached Sara smelled him on the night breeze. She gagged at the waves of noxious corruption that came off him in waves. He smelled like a recently opened grave. He smelled of death and corruption and black hatred, and in his right hand, half flesh, half naked bone, he carried a machete.

  “I am the least of Samedi’s brothers,” Bakula-baka snarled. “If you dare to oppose him, you must face me first.”

  The part of Sara’s mind that wasn’t cringing in fear wondered how he could speak so clearly with a mouth that was half naked teeth and bone, but she quickly realized this wasn’t the time to worry about such petty things. Bakula-baka was bearing down on her like a riptide. She could see dried blood caked on his machete blade. She thought she knew where the blood had come from.

  The Machete Murderer had taken the lives of four men, but now, she thought, he faced the wielder of the Witchblade. She held her right hand out pointing at the creature, and called silently, imperiously, for the mystic artifact to appear, to sheath her in its invincible armor, to put the razor sharp blade in her hand or blast the charging loa with its sphere of deadly fire.

  She called upon it, but it did not come. The voices remained silent in her head.

  She stood there a moment, stunned, her mind blank. She gestured again, but nothing happened.

  “Jesus!” the word sprung from her lips, prayer or curse she didn’t know, and the thing was upon her.

  Sara took a deep breath, choking on the creature’s char-nal house stench as he loomed above her, machete starting the downward sweep of a death blow, when her subconscious, or perhaps her instinct to live, made her move her feet, twist, and duck away. Bakula-baka’s machete just missed her. She felt the wind of its passing, heard the creature grunt as the force of the blow buried the blade of the machete in the dark jungle soil at their feet.

  The voices are gone, Sara thought, and so is the Witchblade.

  It had refused to come to her before, she thought, but this was not the time for it to-be sulky. She knew full well that wherever this place was, she could die here. Permanently. And without help, having to face Bakula-baka bare-handed, her death seemed pretty likely.

  She sprinted down the path, trying to put some distance between herself and the horrid creature, looking for a weapon, a way out, anything she could turn to her advantage. The loa followed with thundering footsteps. Once she risked a glance backward and to her horror saw that despite his size and awful bulk, he was fast on his feet. He was catching up to her. She was losing the distance she’d put between them when he paused to wrench his blade from the ground.

  He was charging like a deadly tsunami. She could smell his awful stench get stronger and stronger. The flesh between her shoulder blades crawled as she imagined the terrible pain of the machete biting into her back, perhaps cutting through her neck. Bakula-baka growled an inarticulate cry of hate and bloodlust and Sara, heart bursting, tried to put on more speed.

  But she couldn’t.

  Crying out in frustration, she decided to turn and throw herself upon her foe and hope for a miracle, and suddenly there was an imperious ringing sound and she sat up in her bed, drenched in sweat, the Witchblade blossoming around her body as she became a flower enshrouded in thorns.

  Her chemise ripped to shreds. The metallic armor of the Witchblade cupped her soft flesh in its hard, cold grasp as she gasped for breath.' The imperious ringing continued to shrill in her ear. She took two, long shuddering breaths, and reached for the phone that sat on the night table by the side of her bed.

  “Hello?” she gasped. •

  There was a momentary silence, then a familiar voice came over the line.

  “Sara?”

  It was Jake.

  “Yeah, what?” she shuddered out.

  “I, uh, you, uh, alone?”

  “Of course,” she said sharply. And she was. The Witchblade vanished, leaving the shreds of her chemise hanging on her like it had suffered the death of a thousand .cuts. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, uh," Jake said, “you sound all out of breath and all. Like you’ve been running a marathon. Or something.”

  Sara lay backward. Her pillow was soaked with sweat.

  “You woke me out of a dream,” she said. She took a long breath, calming her shuddering lungs. “It was a nightmare.” It was, Sara thought, more than that. It was her death. “Thanks.”

  “Sure. No problem.”

  Sara closed her eyes. She didn’t want to think about what had just happened. She wanted to put it away, and, maybe examine it more closely when the sun was shining, when the stench of Bakula-baka was gone from her nostrils. It still lingered there, more than a mere memory. Meaning, perhaps, that she’d just experienced more than a mere dream ...

  “So what’s up?” she asked her partner.

  “Thought you’d want to know first thing,” Jake said. “The first vic’s been ID’ed.” -

  “And?” Sara prompted.

  “His name was Tom Jackson. He was an agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service-”

  ’’Working out of Cypress.Hills,” Sara interrupted.

  She could almost see Jake nod his blond surfer-boy head.

  “That’s right,” he said. “His office was in Manhattan, but the region he was in charge of included Cypress Hills.”

  It was a nice late September day, warm, slightly breezy. The Mets were in first place. The city was in a good mood, but Sara wasn’t. There was too much on her mind. The case of the Machete Murderer was too hard to fathom, just too damn weird. And now she had to visit the morgue.

  That place always put her in a bad mood, and when she was in a bad mood to begin with it was really a downer. It was never warm enough down there in the basement and the air was always dank. Kilby assured her this wasn't so. They had to keep the humidity low because of—as he put it—their clients. But it always felt clammy on Sara’s skin. The smell didn’t help any, either. It was always antiseptic but not fresh. There were undertones to the morgue’s odor that Sara didn’t like. No matter how hard they scrubbed, they couldn’t rid the place of its aura of loss, sadness, and incipient decay.

  Plus, Kilby was always so damned cheerful. He grinned like a demented cherub. Today was no different as Sara came in, still rather shook up by her experience of the night before.

  “Hello, Detective,” Kilby said, bustling up to her, white lab coat rustling, clipboard clasped to his chest like a shield.

  “Jake said you had some info on the vie from the dumpster.”

  “Right-o. Come this way/

  On the best of days, the morgue was a downer. This wasn’t even close to the best of days.

  “I don’t want the tour,” Sara said. “Just the information.”

  “Right-o,” Kilby said in the same happy tone, incapable of taking offense. He looked at Sara with the eyes of a devoted puppydog, and Sara sighed. “Here we go.”

  He handed Sara the clipboard. She scanned the form on top.

  Thomas Clayton Jackson. 38. Caucasian. Divorced. Two children in the custody of his ex-wife, Mildred Jackson, Forrest City, Queens. Death by physical trauma
(decapitation). Employed by Immigration and Nationalization Services, Manhattan branch.

  “I picked his name out of missing persons,” Kilby said proudly, “and ID’ed him from an old football injury. Compound fracture of the left tibia.”

  Sara glanced at him.

  “Good work,” she said, and he practically wagged his tail.

  “Everything else seemed to fit, so we had the wife come down and ID the, uh, body. It’s him, all right. No doubt about it.”

  “Donuts, anyone?” Jake appeared with a grease-stained paper bag and a couple of cups of coffee.

  “Any cream-filled?” Kilby asked.

  Sara sighed. “Try not to so stereotypical, Jake. Donuts. Would it hurt to eat healthy for a' change? How can I maintain my figure on a diet of sugar and grease?”

  “It looks great to me!” Kilby said gallantly.

  “Hmmm,” she said, non-commitally, but she did take one of the plastic-cups of coffee as Jake and Kilby fought over the cream-filled donuts.

  “The problem,” she said, sipping the cold brew, “is that we have almost too much to look at, but no leads leading anywhere in particular.”

  “Let’s split ’em up,” Jake said around a mouthful of his second donut, “and run ’em down. I’ll take the restaurant guy-”

  ”Uh-uh. I know why you want to take the restaurant guy. Juliette lurks nearby. I’ll take the restaurant guy, the doctor, and the gangbangers. They’re clearly all connected. Maybe. You check out the details on this I.N.S. guy.”

  Jake sniffed. “And I know why you want to go back to Cypress Hills. I saw the way you looked at that priest.”

  “What?” Sara and Kilby said simultaneously.

  Kilby looked at her with hurt in his eyes.