Black Princess Mystery (2 page)

This is gross
, she remembered thinking at that
precise moment.

Tasheka
snapped out of her reverie and shook her head in disgust. She started walking
again with Kie toward the end of the village. As she approached St. Timothy’s
Church, her heart pounded so violently that she felt like the murderer in Poe’s
tale, except that the heart she heard was her own, not the heart of the man she
had just killed. At that moment Father Tim Murphy walked out the door of the
rectory. Tasheka hid behind some bushes, intently watching him. They had to
talk. She had to tell him what she had done. She couldn’t tell her mother. No,
that was out of the question. She had to tell the priest. Only he, of all the
people in the world, could be counted on never to reveal it.

Father Tim
was standing sideways to her and looking at the church. He did not see her, but
she stared at him. To her surprise, he limped across the deck and scooped up
the newspaper. He stood up straight with his back to her and looked at the
front page.

“I need to
get this off my chest,” Tasheka whispered to herself, staring at the young
priest with unwavering eyes. “I can’t keep it inside any longer.”

Jake
Thompson, a burly man of about fifty, slowly drove around the corner in his old
black pickup truck. He stared up the driveway at the church, and when he
noticed Father Tim, his head snapped to the right. He became so energized that
Tasheka thought he was literally going to jump out of his seat and bang his
head. His eyes were crazed, he was almost frothing at the mouth, and the look
of hatred cut into his features was so uninhibited that Tasheka felt a chill
run up her spine. But then Jake noticed her and Kie for the first time. He was
obviously startled and she could tell he was wondering how long she had been
watching him. Tasheka waved and crooked a false smile. Jake partially regained
his composure and nodded slightly, then sped up and left the scene.

“Evil
eye,” Tasheka muttered to Kie, instinctively kneeling down to pat him, as if he
needed reassurance. “Did you see it, Kie? Did you see the demon eye?” Tasheka
turned and watched Father Tim limp back into the rectory, closing the door
behind him. She looked down at her dog. “There’s a foul spirit in Lakeside,
Kie. I can smell it.”

Kie looked
at her, tilting his head back and forth.

Tasheka
smiled at him. “It must be nice to live in a dog world. Food and shelter and
two walks a day. I wish it was that simple for me.” She turned to the door
through which Father Tim had just entered. “Let’s get it over with. They say
confession is good for the soul.”

She did
not look convinced.

Kie stared
at her as if awaiting instructions, but Tasheka, though eager to proceed, found
herself motionless, like a prisoner hesitating on his way to the pole in front
of a firing squad. Even the condemned eventually accept their fate, however,
and she started walking up the driveway. Several times she seemed on the verge
of turning around, but each time she eased forward. At Father Tim’s car she
paused, noticing the rosary entwined around the rear view mirror, and a large
governmental booklet called
Stop Drug
Abuse
.

The
walkway was full of snow. Tasheka found that odd, knowing the priest’s
obsession with keeping a clear path for anyone wishing to pray in the church,
but she attributed it to his apparent injury. When she stopped at the bottom of
the steps, she gazed up at the landing as if eying Mount Everest. In her
features there was less an expression of trepidation than a look of downright
dread. For almost a minute she did not stir. She hardly blinked or even took a
full breath, looking like a mannequin to which a dog had been secured. Kie
stared at her in confusion, eager for her to do something, but Tasheka smiled
back unnaturally, apparently incapable of moving.

She
finally muttered something and then climbed the six steps with Kie in tow. The
two of them walked forward and Tasheka gazed through the storm door into the
dimly lit porch. Numerous coats were suspended from hooks, including an
unfamiliar white parka with pink stripes on the sleeves. By its style and
color, she could tell it was a woman’s coat. But Tasheka could discern only one
set of tracks in the snow, and she knew they belonged to the paper boy because
she could clearly see where he had stopped at the bottom of the stairs and
thrown the newspaper up on the landing.

“If
there’s a woman here, she must have stayed all night,” Tasheka said quietly to
Kie. “But that makes no sense.” She continued observing her surroundings in a
clinical, deliberate and thorough manner, making a mental note of everything
she saw. On the floor was a garbage bag slightly opened at the top, a grey
rubber mat with several pairs of boots on it, none belonging to a woman, and a
red ax. Next to the ax was a piece of blue paper on which was scrawled some
kind of message. Tasheka tilted her head and focused, mumbling what she read:
“M-Bexter-Nat.”

Kie looked
up at her as if she was talking to him, but she shook her head and lightly bit
her bottom lip.

“M-Bexter-Nat?”
she said again, her mind fully engaged. “What’s that mean?” She pondered for
several minutes.

Someone
switched on the upstairs bathroom light and Tasheka heard the exhaust fan. She
assumed Father Tim was going to take a shower, so she looked at the note one
more time and then walked down the stairs. They retraced their steps to the
Lakeside Road and continued along their way. The whole time, Tasheka kept thinking
about that message, putting all the letters together and scrambling them into
different combinations, but nothing made any sense.

A couple
minutes later she came to the Lakeside Garage and saw the mechanic wiping his
hands. He was her age, had a medium build and red hair, and wore dirty, ragged
clothes, the thighs of his jeans black with grease and grime. He waved to the
driver of a flatbed truck who was hauling away half a dozen old cars, then
noticed Tasheka, instantly smiled and hurried to greet her.

“Hi,
Matt,” she said with genuine warmth.

“Nice to
see you, Tasheka,” he returned, again vainly trying to wipe grease from his
hands, as if, like Macbeth, he could not get the blood off no matter how hard
he tried. “I didn’t know you were home.”

“I got back
last night, but I was so tired I went right to bed.”

“How you
doing, Kie?”

The
exuberant young dog put his front paws on Matt’s leg, his tongue out and tail
wagging.

“He’s a
good boy,” Tasheka said, kneeling down to restrain him. “Mom’s been taking him
for walks, but he remembers me, don’t you, Kie?”

An old
burgundy station wagon puttered down the road, its rusty exhaust pipe dragging
on the pavement and making sparks. Behind the wheel was a dark-haired,
full-figured woman in her mid-thirties. She pulled the car up to the garage
doors and opened her window. “Here?” she asked Matt.

“Yeah,
leave it right there, Henrietta.”

She turned
off the car and walked up to them. “Hey, stranger,” she said to Tasheka.

“Hi,
Henrietta,” Tasheka said. “Long time no see.”

“How’s
life at Penn?”

“Good,
thank you.”

“This is
your last year, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“What do
you plan on doing?”

“Well,”
Tasheka said, crooking an eyebrow, “I’ve had an interesting development. The
FBI has offered me a job.”

“Really?”
said Matt, obviously greatly impressed. “You always were the best student.” He
turned to Henrietta. “I was in the same class as Tasheka from elementary school
through high school and she was always hands down the top of the class.”

“It
probably doesn’t hurt that you’re black,” Henrietta said spitefully. “I’m sure
the FBI is as interested in affirmative action as anyone else.”

Tasheka
was embarrassed.

“She’s
fluent in Russian, too,” Matt noted with a scowl, “and she’s getting her Master
of Science in Criminology degree. That ain’t chopped liver, Henrietta.”

Henrietta
looked completely humorless. “And she was fortunate enough to attend a
university in the Ivy League. That didn’t hurt.”

Matt waved
her off and turned to Tasheka. “Now that it’s almost over, how did you like
it?”

“I liked
it,” Tasheka replied, “but lately I got so wrapped up in a term paper that I
lost all track of time. Six days until Santa comes and I haven’t bought a
single present yet.”

“Join the
club,” Henrietta said, her tone heavy with resentment. “I ain’t got two cents
to rub together.”

Tasheka
felt self-conscious. “Will Baxter be home for Christmas?”

“He’s
supposed to be back on the twenty-third,” she said, glancing at Matt. “Long
hauling is a demanding job, but hubby never complains.” She shrugged. “I suppose
there’s no use bitchin’ about it. You got to eat.”

Tasheka
forced a smile.

“What was
your term paper about?” Matt queried.

“Well,
these last few weeks I’ve been doing a project on female serial killers.”

“Sounds
fascinating,” Matt said with great interest.

Tasheka
laughed awkwardly. “It is, actually. When you think of serial killers, men
almost always come to mind, but there have been lots of female serial killers.
In some cases they’re even more prolific than men. Jane Toppan is believed to
have killed up to one hundred people.”

“Better
not fool with the likes of me,” Henrietta said, making a face and trying to
look scary. “I just may be a serial killer. Maybe I kill men for fun.”

“Do you?”
Matt asked in a tone so serious that it struck Tasheka.

“A woman
should never reveal her secrets.” She laughed dismissively. “Really, I just
can’t imagine anyone taking female serial killers seriously. They just don’t
inspire the same sense of danger.”

“Maybe
that’s why they’re so effective,” Matt offered drily. “No one suspects them.”

“Women can
be very dangerous,” Tasheka insisted. “Erzsebet Bathory murdered hundreds of
young women.”

Matt
crooked an eyebrow. “Er-ze who?”

“Erzsebet
Bathory,” Tasheka repeated solemnly. “She was also known as Elizabeth Bathory.
Some people believe she’s the person Dracula is based on.”

“Really?”
Henrietta said skeptically. “And she killed hundreds of people?”

Tasheka
nodded. “Some estimate as many as six hundred young women.”

“When did
this happen?” Matt asked, stunned.

“The
murders started in the late fifteen-hundreds,” Tasheka informed them, “and
continued for twenty-five years.”

“Are you
serious?” Henrietta challenged, as if Tasheka was making up the story. “Six
hundred women?”

“Some
estimate six hundred women, but it’s agreed by all that there were at least
hundreds for sure.”

“Now why
would any woman want to kill hundreds of young women?” Henrietta asked. “I can
see some psycho man doing it, but a woman?”

“Who knows
what goes on in the human mind,” Tasheka proposed. “Both genders have committed
terrible atrocities, and Erzsebet Bathory tortured and killed hundreds of
women, many of them little more than girls.”

“What kind
of torture?” Henrietta asked, apparently fascinated in a macabre kind of way.

“She beat
them to death, froze them to death, she used starvation, she bit their flesh
off. She burned and mutilated their genitalia, hands and faces.”

“Holy
fuck!” Henrietta exclaimed, looking aghast.

Tasheka
nodded. “Legend has it that she liked to bathe in the blood of virgins because
she believed it kept her young. That’s the Dracula connection.”

“A regular
Miss Congeniality,” Matt said.

Tasheka
laughed at his dry tone.

“Mutilation
of bodies must indicate something, Tasheka,” Henrietta said with a strange
level of intensity. “What does it mean?”

“Specifically
mutilation,” she asked, “or torture in general?”

“Mutilation.
What in someone’s head would make them want to cut off another person’s hand,
face or sex organs?”

“A trophy
for some, and for others it’s a final gesture of ultimate control.”

“Trophy?”
Henrietta asked. “Did Ms. Dracula keep the body parts?”

“In her
case, it’s hard to say. I’ll have to look into it some more. But I have found,
in a general way, that men are more prone to keep trophies from their victims.
Driver’s licenses, jewelry, even underwear. By keeping the objects, they are
able to bring them out at will and relive the experience of killing over and
over again. I also think the trophy is a physical manifestation of their
success. They see a woman’s nylons or earrings the way a normal person might
view her diploma on the wall. It’s a source of pride in a sick kind of way,
quite literally a trophy.”

“But women
don’t keep trophies?” Henrietta asked.

“It’s
certainly not as commonplace. Women will often kill for money or out of
passion, but they don’t seem to have the same psychological need to relive the
act of violence.”