Bad Moon Rising (3 page)

J.D. parked the classic 1966 fire-engine red Mustang
convertible in the shade of the three-hundred-year-old oak trees, collected the
red and blue balloons by their dangling strings, and exited the car.

No matter how hot the temperature soared, the air was
always cool here; no traffic noise, screaming sirens, or rap music blasting
from jacked-up pickup trucks driven by the newest generation of juvenile
delinquents.

Here, the air was still and fragranced by jasmine, the
grass glossy green under the sunlight and emerald black beneath the wide,
spreading limbs of the ancient oaks. As he walked down the manicured, winding
path, the only sound was the gentle
bump bump
of the balloons dancing above his head. A pair of
squirrels dashed across this path, scratched their way up a tree, and chattered
at him from their perch overhead. An egret lifted from a lily-pad-covered pond,
wings popping before it glided in a circle above the trees and settled
somewhere over the line of mausoleums in the distance.

Would this ever get any easier?

He didn’t think so.

There were three graves side by side—smoke gray
granite, highly polished, their bases surrounded by sprays of iris and
daffodils. They weren’t blooming at the moment—only during spring—but the
tall, green growths were well tended, as was the lush, broad-blade Saint Augustine grass.

J.D. sat on a bench, propped his elbows on his knees,
and looked from one name to the other.

William Damascus 1992-1999

Laura Damascus 1966-1999

Lisa Damascus 1994-1999

He tried to take a breath. It wouldn’t come.

“Hi, funny face.” He smiled at Lisa’s headstone. “Sorry
I didn’t make it out yesterday. I was” —
drunk and contemplating suicide
— “busy. Aunt Beverly sends
her love. She sent balloons. It was Amber’s birthday today. Cute kid. Looks
just like you, pigtails and all.”

He straightened and closed his burning eyes. His
throat convulsed and his stomach responded with a hot spear of pain that made a
groan swell in his chest. The heat of the day pressed down on him, making his
body break out in sweat. Christ, he was going to be sick.

The tremors were there, crawling along his arms and
stinging like fire ants. No point in willing them away. Since the dawn of
August 10, 1999, they had become as natural to him as breathing, surging up
from the pit of his stomach twice a day, first thing in the morning and last
thing at night before he fell into his waiting nightmares. They came, too, when
he visited Mother of Grace Cemetery, only here, the tremors enlisted not just
overwhelming grief but fury—cold, mind-obsessing hate. The kind that whispered
revenge. The sort that impelled a normally rational man to empty a loaded
semiautomatic into the chest of a murderer, which he fully intended to do.

The day would come. Oh yeah. Because no matter that
his ex-best friend. Jerry Costos. former District Attorney, had convinced a
jury that Angel Gonzalez was a coldblooded serial killer, J.D. didn’t buy it.
He was going to find the son of a bitch who’d slaughtered his children, and his
wife, and he was going to blow his head off, and then—

The cell phone on his belt began to twitter, wrenching
him from thoughts of vigilante murder and suicide. He fumbled for the phone,
and swallowed twice to ensure his voice was steady enough to answer.

“Where the hell have you been?” shouted May Kraft in
his ear. May was a sixty-year-old black woman with two perforated eardrums that
made her mostly deaf. She’d worked as his secretary for the last two years,
initially to work off her attorney’s fees for a contested divorce. But she had
made herself indispensable and stayed on, lending a minimal amount of sanity
and structure to his floundering law practice, such as it was, according to
Jack Strong.

“May, you’re shouting again.” He held the phone away
from his ear. “You’re deaf, not me. Remember?”

“I done tracked down your nine o’clock no-show. Cherry
what’s-her-name.”

“Brown,” he reminded her.

“Whatever. I done found her.”

“Yeah? What’s her excuse this time?”

“She’s dead.”

The police had barricaded the premises around
Cherry Brown’s apartment
located in the deep black heart of New Orleans’s red-light district, which
flanked the Mississippi River: one square mile of honky tonks, strip bars, and
old warehouses that had, some thirty years before, been renovated into sleazy
dance clubs, illegal backroom gambling establishments, and cheap apartments.
Here, hookers sold their assets by the hour, and business was good. Not just
for the girls, but for scumbag lawyers like himself.

J.D. was forced to park his Mustang a half block away,
behind the string of patrol cars and an EMT unit, lights still flashing. The
team of medics smoked as the ambulance radio squawked with conversation and
static.

Uniformed cops lined up along the walls, conversing
while they waited for the crime scene unit to do their thing. As J.D. ducked
under the yellow tape, they made a move toward him, then stopped, their initial
concern turning into recognition. He knew them all from his days as New Orleans’s top assistant district attorney—destined to replace Jerry Costos when he
aspired to higher governmental ambitions. Too many times he had worked the
crime scenes with them, dogging them for evidence. They had cursed him and
revered him.

While they would have tackled any other intruder to
the ground, they relaxed, Officer Michaels flashing him a grin as he said, “You
can take the D.A. out of the office, but you can’t take the office out of the
man, right, Damascus?”

“Right,” he said, wading through beer cans, cigarette
butts, and discarded condoms.

Inside the apartment, the initial walk-through to examine
the scene for potential evidence had been completed, as well as the photo snaps.
The forensic investigators were already at work, the technicians carefully
isolating and securing possible evidence by bagging each individual item so it
would not be contaminated or lost on the way to the laboratory.

The coroner stood back, arms crossed over his chest,
sharing what J.D. assumed, from his ear-to-ear grin, was a humorous
conversation with one of the detectives assigned to the case. Though the
detective’s back was to him, J.D. would have recognized that bald head and bulldog
neck anywhere: Detective Enoch P. Mallory.

J.D. turned his back to the conversing duo, slipped
around a technician who was intent on logging in his evidence, and stopped
short upon the sight of Cherry Brown’s body. Or what was left of it. Good
Christ.

“Damascus!”

J.D. turned away from the corpse, vomit crawling up
his throat, and came face-to-face with Mallory. He wasn’t certain which was
more stomach-turning: the bloody massacre on the bed or the investigator’s
pan-faced, double-chinned countenance thrusting into his own face so closely
the smell of Mallory’s breath, tainted with garlic and cigarettes, rushed over
him in a noxious wave.

“Mind telling me what the hell you’re doing in here?”
Mallory growled.

“My client,” he managed.

“Was your client. In case you ain’t noticed, she’s
dead and you’re trespassing on a crime scene. Need I remind you that you’re not
an A.D.A. anymore?”

He couldn’t argue the point, so he said nothing, not
that he could if he wanted to.

Mallory looked away and planted his fists on his hips.
The action distorted his suit coat, exposing his big belly and the .38 he had
tucked into his shoulder holster. Massive sweat stains splotched his shirt and
coat beneath his armpits. As he regarded Cherry Brown, his mouth worked from
side to side.

“Offers a new meaning to giving head, don’t it?”

“You’re an ass, Mallory.” J.D. blinked the sweat from
his eyes and moved for the door. He needed air. Fast.

The alley offered little respite. The fumes of sour
beer and urine only exacerbated his need to puke. He made it as far as a
garbage Dumpster before losing it. He heaved up the coffee he’d purchased on
his way to Cherry’s. It was tinged with blood.

“I see your ulcers aren’t any better,” Mallory said behind
him. “I had an ulcer once. As they eat into the muscles of the stomach or
duodenal wall, blood vessels are damaged, which causes bleeding. Over a long
period of time, a person may become anemic and feel weak, dizzy, or tired. You
look damned anemic to me.”

J.D. fell back against the wall, face sweating. His
gut felt as if it would incinerate at any moment. He dug into his pocket for
his new supply of Tums.

“When did this happen?” he said between his teeth.

“Between midnight and eight this morning.”

“Who found her?”

“A friend. Calls herself Honey. Cherry was supposed to
meet her for breakfast. She didn’t show and the gal came ‘round to check on
her.”

“Where’s the friend?”

“With Stakouski. You know the drill. She’s pretty upset.”

“I want to talk to her.”

Mallory glanced over his shoulder, then moved in closer.
“Look, I can appreciate how this might look—”

“Save it. I don’t want to hear anymore of the pat
bullshit I’ve been hearing for the last four years.”

“Leave it alone, J.D. The force doesn’t need any more
crap out of you about Angel Gonzalez. I’m warning you—”

“The force can kiss my ass. Angel Gonzalez didn’t
butcher my family or those prostitutes. The state fried the wrong man and we
both know it. He was convicted on circumstantial evidence and had any judge
besides Shanks been presiding, it would never have been allowed to happen.”

“You’re just pissed at Shanks because he screwed your
case with DiAngelo. Get over it. This homicide is nothing more than a copycat
killing. It happens. If there weren’t maniacs roaming the streets, we’d be out
of business.”

“Yeah?” J.D. gave a short, dry laugh that caused a
fresh spear of pain to cut through him. “I guess we’ll see soon enough, won’t
we?” He shoved by Mallory and moved up the alley.

“Get some help for those ulcers!” Mallory shouted.

Although the sweltering night air was rife with
fear and tension—not to
mention suspicion over every sex-starved male who cruised slowly by in search
of companionship—J.D. had no problem locating Honey. Most of the hookers
prowling the district at midnight had been his clients at one time or another,
and they were fairly certain he wasn’t capable of decapitating and eviscerating
a woman whether he approved of her morals or not.

Honey occupied an apartment on the second floor of a
renovated warehouse that had, at the turn of the twentieth century, been the
Jamieson Cottonseed Oil Mill. However, a devastating fire on June 23, 1925, had
consumed one-half of the warehouse district along the river, and the extent of
rebuilding the Jamieson Mill had extended only to its redbrick walls when the
owner declared bankruptcy and left the warehouse to fall back into decay.

Marcus DiAngelo’s father, Mitchell, had purchased the
properties and rebuilt. Marcus had inherited it all upon his father’s untimely
death, which had shown evidence of a mob hit. But that, too, had been swept
under the city’s ever-spreading carpet of See No Evil.

Honey had greasy platinum-blond hair with black roots,
breast implants that must have set her pimp back a bundle, and tattoos over her
arms and down the outside of her legs. Her nails were painted black, the polish
peeling off in chips. Each ear was studded with five dangling bobs and on each
finger was a silver ring, the kind the tourists bought at a booth in the
market. They were staining her skin green.

She looked fifty, but J.D. suspected she was more like
thirty. The business was hard on the girls
...
so were the drugs she was apparently shooting. The insides of her arms were
scarred with tracks, and her nose looked as if it had been scoured with sand
paper. However, at the moment, she appeared to be semilucid, if not totally
traumatized over Cherry’s demise. She paced her apartment, pulling at her hair
one minute and crying the next.

As a defense attorney, J.D. knew from experience that
before he could hope to secure the kind of information that he needed, a
relationship of trust had to be developed. Patience was necessary. Except he
wasn’t feeling very patient at the moment. What little patience he held on to
these days had vaporized the instant he’d seen a headless Cherry Brown laid
open like a gutted pig.

“I already told the cops all this. I don’t want to
talk about it again.”

“I understand.”

“It was horrible.” She covered her face and whimpered.

“I understand.”

“He cut off her head!”

She was losing it. Time to back off a little. Think
sympathy.

He walked to her and took her in his arms. “It’s okay.
Calm down, sweetheart.” She shook against him and he stroked her hair. Her
tears bled through his T-shirt, warm against his skin. “Take a breath and try
to relax.”

She gulped several deep breaths and sagged against
him.

“We’ll talk when you’re ready.” He scoped the apartment,
noting the many voodoo emblems hanging from the walls—gris-gris against evil.

“Cherry was a really sweet girl, you know? I mean, she
didn’t deserve this.”

“No one does.”

“She was only twenty-one. And special. Real special.”

“Have you any idea who her midnight john was?”

She pulled away and began pacing again. “That’s the
thing. She wasn’t supposed to work last night. She hadn’t worked all week.” Wringing
her hands, she turned to face him. Black mascara had melted around her brown
eyes and streaked her right cheek. “She wanted out of the business. Wanted to
move home, back to California. The man was really pissed about it.”

She needn’t explain who “the man” was to J.D. The
simple thought of Tyron Johnson encouraged fresh pain to coil in his gut, along
with hatred, not to mention suspicion that made his heart slam against his
ribs.

Tyron controlled girls in three states, but made his
home in New Orleans. He lived in the penthouse suite of the Lucky Lady
Casino—ten thousand a month including all the champagne he could drink and all
the caviar he could eat. He had a nuclear temper and his girls paid the price
big-time for crossing him.

During his four years with the District Attorney’s office,
J.D. had attempted to bury him in prison several times for assault with deadly
intent and drug-related charges. In each case, the girl he had carved up during
one of his tantrums had refused to testify, or he’d gotten off on some
technicality. Case closed. Again and again and again. The last time they had
met, that being on the courthouse steps on a beautiful June morning, 1999, Tyron
had declared in front of eight witnesses that J.D. was going to live to regret
his harassment. Two months later, his wife and children had been murdered.

Tyron had had an alibi for the time of the murders.
Marcus DiAngelo.

“It’s starting again,” Honey said. “Just like before.
They were wrong, weren’t they? About that Gonzalez creep. He wasn’t the killer
at all.”

“It’s too early to jump to those conclusions.” Christ,
old habits were hard to break. He was sounding like Mallory, but no point in
exacerbating the woman’s panic. Not yet. “Could be some freak copycat. One
murder is a long way from a serial killing.”

She stopped pacing and turned to face him. “She’s not
the first.”

“What the hell are you saying?”

“You wouldn’t have heard about it. The state don’t
want the public to know it put an innocent man to death.”

*     *     *

Patrick Damascus, sixteen and a half, going on
thirty, or so his mother
declared, sat at his desk crowded with schoolbooks and assignment sheets that
he had not so much as glanced at, though the hour was growing late. He hated
the “alternative school year” that came with the private school his mother had
insisted he attend. It was supposed to provide him a better education, because
he was “gifted” and public schools couldn’t afford him the opportunity to
utilize his genius.

That was a lot of crappola. She simply didn’t want him
hanging with normal kids because, according to her, they were a bad influence.
That, too, was a lot of crappola. The kids attending St. Elizabeth’s Boys’
School were the worst. Those who weren’t geeks were freaks, but there wasn’t
any reasoning with her. Once she set her mind to something, there was no
changing it.