Blood Rites (30 page)

By the time they arrived there, Carrera had calmed enough that Volpe thought he’d be ready for the rest of the news. “The package came from Toni Domaro,” he said in a whisper only Carrera could hear. Carrera, who prided himself on being a family man, had made his lover a well-kept secret. Toni was private, not about business after all.

Russ had left before the affair had begun. Halli hadn’t known. But if Halli’s murderer knew about Toni, he could know about anything. Carrera looked at the men around him for reassurance, at the bars he’d had installed on his windows, at the gun resting beside his hand. He ordered everyone but Volpe from the room, then said, “Spread the word around, if anyone hears from Lowell, they should tell him I want to talk to him the next time eight at night rolls around. He can call me at the spaghetti place. He’ll know what I mean. In the meantime, send a couple of guys over to my house and try to find out how Halli died.”

Volpe closed the box containing the urn and what remained of Halli. “That won’t be easy.”

“We got someone in the coroner’s office. What the hell do we pay him for! Call him now!”

II

Will Bowen, an assistant medical examiner for Cuyahoga County, met Angelo Volpe at midnight in Bowen’s garage. Volpe had warned him this was not a recent death and Bowen, who lived with his mother, did not want her becoming suspicious by Volpe’s arrival or the ensuing smell.

But the decomposition really wasn’t so bad and a head by itself was nothing like the torso. Volpe’s fastidiousness amazed Bowen. The pudgy, greying man looked less like a gangster than a desk-bound accountant. Bowen often wondered if Volpe fainted at the sight of blood.

The expression on Halli’s face was troubling. Bowen stared at what was left of the corpse, recalling where he’d seen corpses with expressions before. “When a man dies, his muscles go slack,” Bowen explained to Volpe. “In this case, though, the pain before he died stayed etched on his face. Where did you get this?”

Volpe, keeping details vague, explained while Bowen slipped on his oilcloth apron and went to work.

A quick examination of the neck wound led him to believe the head had been cut off after Halli died. Bowen examined the wound, probing it with his fingers, magnifying the cuts, then called Volpe over to show him what he’d discovered. He pointed to a darker piece of flesh on the stump of the neck. “He was cut just below here, not very deep, before he died.”

“A knife?”

“I can’t tell without seeing the wound but the dark blotch was caused by blood loss through the cut, understandable since the wound appears to have been deep enough to reach the artery.”

Volpe went back to his chair some feet from the table and lit a cigarette before asking, “Could that have killed him?”

“It might have. Afterward, I would guess the person who decapitated him used a curved, blunt instrument to rip through the tendons as well as the flesh. When he’d finished, he bent back the head, cracked the spine, and ripped it off. You want me to show you?”

Volpe, compulsively concentrating on watching his cigarette smoke rise, shook his head. “What about his expression. What do you make of that?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. I’d say the killer is sending Domie a message.”

“Yeah. Don’t fuck with me. Anything else?”

Bowen noted the coloring of the eyes, then cut a thin slice of the darkened tissue from the neck. Placing it between two glass plates, he examined it under the microscope. He wished he could consult with Dr. Corey on this. Cor was the expert, not him. But even on his own, Bowen had good reason to believe that he was right about the cause of Halli’s death. “I want to do some checking around at work. Call me at the office tomorrow around one, OK?”

“What about Halli?”

“I’m done with him.” Bowen rewrapped the head, fit it into the urn, and thrust it into Volpe’s hand. “Nice of your killer to send a coffin. Throw a wild funeral.”

After Volpe left, Bowen went into the house, sat in the darkness of his mother’s lace-covered living room, and thought about corpses with expressions. He’d only seen one before and that when he’d just started working for Corey. The girl had been young. She’d been smiling. He hadn’t thought anything of it then. In the ensuing three years, his job had exposed him to hundreds of bodies; his position as chief examiner on the night shift to the most brutal murders. Now he knew how unique those faces had been.

The next morning, he went to the library and paged through old issues of the Cleveland papers. The photograph of the victim and the sketchy details of her murder brought back his own memory of the killing and other similar ones that he had not worked on. Dick Wells had been chief investigator. Judy Preuss had covered the crimes for her local paper. For a while the news was full of lurid details, then nothing. Since then Judy Preuss had become Mrs. Dick Wells and the cases had never been solved.

Now he’d heard rumors that Dick Wells and his family were in hiding and Carrera their hunter. The tie was too close to ignore.

Bowen, who had no reason to be at work before three, waited until Corey would be at lunch before going to the office. There, undisturbed, he compared the slide to photos of damaged tissue taken from bleeders. The similarities were obvious. Halli’s blood had not clotted.

Enough. When Volpe called, Bowen asked one question, “Was Halli after Dick Wells when he was killed?” Volpe didn’t answer and Bowen pressed him, “You want to know how he died? You tell me why he died and maybe I can answer.”

“All right,” Volpe replied carefully. “We have reason to believe he had gone after Wells.”

And if I ever get subpoenaed, you fat old bastard, I ‘II be sure to quote you exactly
, Bowen thought. Concealing his disgust, he said, “Then I can tell you that Halli died from loss of blood, definitely caused by a puncture in his neck.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Three other cases that were similar.” Bowen gave what details he recalled, noted the Wells connection to the previous murders, and concluded, “The rumors at the time were that the killer wasn’t human.”

Bowen enjoyed the long pause that followed his revelation. “Not human?” Volpe repeated.

“Talk to your cops. They’ll tell you how hard they laughed. Corey didn’t. I remember he was damn tight-lipped about the whole matter.”

“Was the murder ever solved?”

“Officially? A pimp committed the first one. The other two were never solved. Off the record? The cases were dropped, forgotten like they never happened. Go. Talk to the cops like I said. They know more than I do.”

Volpe did. When he’d heard enough, he took the news to Carrera. He found his boss studying the report that had arrived from Russ in the morning mail. Carrera didn’t take Volpe’s news well, but his anger was directed at Russ. “The bastard must of known something was wrong but he sends me these and when he calls the office this morning he just repeats his note. ‘Read them,’ he says. So I’m reading.” He held up both reports, then tossed Volpe the older of the two. “Here, you read too.”

Volpe sat on Carrera’s couch and stretched out his legs.

“Take off the shoes, Ang. That’s real leather,” Carrera reprimanded. Raymond Carrera hadn’t parted with a dime without a fight, a trait somewhat diminished, but still present in Dominic.

Unlike Carrera, Volpe was in the business of collecting information and he immediately saw how difficult some of this must have been to come by. “I could be wrong,” he began tentatively, realizing he was treading on unfamiliar ground. “But I think the stuff on our atomic research is secret.”

“The company has spies?”

“Yeah, it looks that way.”

Carrera tossed a pad and pen to Volpe. “Keep reading. Write down where you think they might have got this stuff.”

By the time Volpe had finished the second report, he’d made quite a list. “Maybe FBI, NSC, British Intelligence.”

“No KGB?” Carrera asked, his lips curled into an expression somewhere between a scowl and a mocking grin. What the hell would Volpe know about the NSC let alone the KGB?

“I can’t tell,” Volpe said as if Carrera had asked the question seriously. “They got a list of their businesses at the back of the report. None of them operate in communist countries so maybe they don’t bother to worry about those. Or maybe they’re reds. I can’t figure them.”

Carrera had made some calls on the owners of AustraGlass. The family wasn’t openly involved in politics, and like any smart group of powerful men, it kept a low profile. He’d scanned the list of recommendations and saw them as less political than sound business decisions. If he had access to this kind of information, his family would be ten times richer than it was. “I got some information on their American firms,” he told Volpe. “The research company in California is working with silicon chips whatever in the hell those are. A losing operation as far as I can tell. But Stoddard Design in New York City—there’s big money in that operation.” Carrera pointed to the painting on the wall facing his desk. “That was bought from a studio in a Stoddard building. Before he died, my father told me La Paz was the classiest address in New York City. Stoddard owns it.” He leaned back in his chair, satisfaction evident on his face. “I checked him out with some people here. Stoddard also has the building contract for the AEC nuclear research plant in Arizona. They start the second phase of construction in May. You and me, we know construction. How much money do you think they got tied up in that?”

Volpe kept his expression rigid. He didn’t want to give any praise to Lowell and he wasn’t entirely sure what Carrera meant. “Millions,” he responded.

“And Stoddard Design could be a security risk. Maybe even a bigger catch for the FBI than me. What do you think?”

“Could be,” Volpe responded carefully, thinking Lowell would be the best trade of all. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Wait. We have time. In the last call we got from Halli, he talked about how Russ had gone crazy. The next things we get are these reports and Halli’s head. I can’t wait to have a talk with that crazy man.“

Carrera noted with satisfaction how Volpe’s eyes narrowed. There was no love lost between him and Russ. “Listen, Ang,” Carrera practically crooned the words, lightening the veiled threat. “If I could of found someone else with the skill to shoot me, Russ would be standing in your place.”

“What I think of him isn’t important, Domie. After what he did, you can’t trust him with business. Hell, you can’t even admit you know where he is.”

The deaths had started well before Russ went west but Ang was right. If the press got wind that he’d kept in touch with Russ, any sympathy the public had for the Carrera family would vanish. “Listen, Ang, when this is over, we’ll figure out what to do about him. In the meantime, don’t tell anybody anything they don’t already know—nothing about the report, nothing about how Halli died, none of it. I’m in enough trouble without people thinking I lost my marbles out of grief.”

Though Volpe still scowled, he nodded and Carrera had no doubt that the order would be obeyed. He waited until Volpe had gone before looking down at the reports on his desk, thinking about Halli’s death.

Could the thing that killed Halli be some mindless brute that didn’t have the common sense to hide? Carrera didn’t think so. No, the killer must be so powerful that he did not need to hide. He thought of the beautiful face he’d seen in the restaurant, the enticing words curling softly through his brain, and he whispered softly, as if afraid to admit his fear even to himself, “Jesus. What in the hell did you send me, Russell?”

I

During the two-day drive across Canada, Helen often sensed the presence of Russ and the children but had been close to true consciousness only twice. The first had been when Russ had taken the milk that was rightfully her son’s, the second when he’d used the knife on Patrick. She’d longed to attack him then and had even managed to throw off her lethargy for a moment. But when she tensed, straining to break the bonds and stop him, she discovered she was far too weak, the ropes and handcuffs too strong. Though she attempted to rearrange herself exactly as she had been, the blanket had fallen off her legs and she’d had no way to pull it back before she’d slipped into sleep once more.

Helen didn’t wake again until she felt the point of Russ’s knife against her skin. Even then, she did not fear him. The last time she’d felt any real fear was when he shot Hillary, her last human response the tears she had shed over the girl’s body.

Though her human flesh would not obey her will, she had expected her mind to sharpen during the ordeal. Austra blood—hers and Patrick’s—in Russ should have made him easy to touch but outside of making him sleep more deeply, focus on her or away from her, and occasionally reading his thoughts, she could do nothing to control him. For the most part, he had stayed close to her, occasionally leaving the warehouse but always wise enough to return so quickly that she never had a chance to extend and call for help. Helen sensed that he had more money than on the drive and an appointment of some sort but every attempt to pull details from his mind proved unsuccessful. Each time she failed, she grew more despondent until her powers, like her confidence, seemed to fade altogether.

Through her helplessness, a different kind of anger began to grow. Except for Philippe and Hillary who had been willing to let her share life, she had never been alone with a human victim. Instead Stephen had accompanied her, and what had seemed then like justifiable concern for her safety, now appeared to be covert support. Stephen had lied about her powers, building her confidence, never teaching her what she truly needed to survive.

She focused on this as she hung slowly healing, listening to Russ Lowell moving around her, making plans she could never quite discern, talking to her as if he knew she could hear him. In the last few hours, he had often fixed his entire attention on her, lashing out with violent explosions of nervous energy that must have unnerved his human victims. Now, he sat silently at her feet, chain-smoking, running his eyes over her body. With deliberate precision, he pressed a lit cigarette to the back of her knee until a thin line of blood rolled down her leg. Russ watched it fall, his expression blank, his thoughts as passive. Then, satisfied that she was not yet conscious, he left the warehouse again.