Brides Of The Impaler (13 page)

“I’m sure he won’t.”

Britt grabbed a crystal snifter. “You want some?”

Cristina’s stomach lurched. “After last night? I’ll probably never drink again.”

Britt shrugged and took a sip of the clear liquor.

Cristina wrapped the robe tighter, as if chilled. Something nagged at her psyche, an idea that had only just occurred to her. But how could she voice it without sounding paranoid?
I’ve put Britt through enough for one day
…

“Okay,” Britt demanded. “What’s wrong
now?
”

Cristina could never hide a thing from her. “I don’t remember drawing on myself, Britt.”

“You were sloshed.”

“Yeah, but why would I do that, even that drunk? I’m starting to think that maybe I
didn’t
draw on myself.”

Britt’s eyes snapped to Cristina’s. “Come on. Paul?”

“No. He was asleep upstairs.”

“Cristina, what are you saying?”

“I’m not sure.” She fidgeted. “But maybe…someone else was in the house.”

Britt slumped. “What? A burglar? Paul’s got a Fort Knox– style alarm system in this place. Jess told me.”

Cristina’s thoughts seemed to drip. “Not necessarily a burglar, but…Yesterday I met the priest who used to look after this house—Father Rollin. He told me squatters would sometimes sneak into the house at night.”

Britt looked as though her brandy had soured. “
Squatters?
”

“Homeless people, addicts.”

“Street crazies, huh? You’re nuts.”

Cristina struggled to voice the rest of her fear. “I keep seeing these homeless women mulling around the area.”

“They mull around
every
area in the city, Cristina.”

“Yeah, I know, but there’s more. Yesterday I was in a store and I saw some of them, these homeless girls. And one of them shoplifted some stuff. Guess what they shoplifted?”

Britt set the rest of her drink aside, wearied. “What?”

“Magic markers.”

“I’ll say it again. You’re nuts—”

“Why?” Cristina whined back. “It’s pretty uncanny, isn’t it?”

“Homeless women break into your basement just so they can draw on you with magic markers? Listen to yourself!”

“Then how do you explain it?”

“I already have,” Britt snapped. “You got loaded last night and pulled a moronic move. Alcohol does that to people, especially people who don’t have much tolerance. Christ, one time in college I got so hammered on tequila at a sorority party that I threw up on a whole couch full of people—”

“Yuck…”

“In fact, I drank so much that I was
still
drunk the rest of the next day. You’re probably suffering borderline alcohol poisoning.” Britt stood up, glaring. “Now stop with all this dumb talk—it makes you sound ridiculous. I have to go.”

Cristina wilted. She could tell Britt had reached her limit.
I can’t do this to her; I have to be more stable than this.
She’s got to listen to women’s problems all day long at her job—
and those are women with REAL problems. An extra headache
from me is the last thing she needs
. Cristina caught Britt at the door, and hugged her. “I’m sorry. You’re right, I’m just overreacting.”

Britt’s forgiveness was plain when her frown turned to a smile. “You’re a nut, Cristina, but you’re my nut.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without you. Sometimes I feel so weak and scared.”

“But each day you’re getting stronger…just like me. You’ve probably still got a bunch of booze in your bloodstream so just sleep the rest of it off, then go for a walk and get some fresh air. You’ll feel a hundred times better tomorrow
and you’ll be laughing at yourself. I have to go now, so…just do as I say, all right?”

Cristina nodded. “ ’Bye.”

She looked out the window and saw Britt shaking her head as she got in her car.
I really am a pain in the ass
.

When Britt raced off in the white Mercedes, a movement caught Cristina’s eye. It was so sudden and slight that at first she didn’t even know where it came from, but then…

Now that Britt’s car was gone, Cristina saw two homeless females sitting beneath one of the windows in the church. It looked like they were sucking the contents from ketchup packets. After a few moments, they got up and began to walk away.

One of them looked right over at the window from which Cristina peered, and smiled.

“Gemser?” Laura Eastman asked. Her Detex clock swayed like a cumbersome purse when she turned toward her departing coworker. They’d both worked for the security company that had the contract for this closed-down Banana Republic. The twelve-hour shifts were a hassle, and they only let you work three of them per week so you wouldn’t qualify as full-time; that way, the company didn’t have to offer a group health plan. But the work was easy and that suited Laura just fine. Rounds every hour, punch a few key stations, and fill out an hourly report was about it. She liked all the walking (the building was four floors), which kept her lissome physique even more lissome.
You
got a race horse bod
, Gemser had commented once, after which she’d ridden
him
like a horse. She knew she possessed a stunning kind of beauty, her dark complexion and part-European, part-Polynesian features gave her an exotic
air and, somehow, those features coupled with the security uniform made her even more enticing. Just about every male guard in the company had put the make on her—even the married ones. Laura was the kind of girl who liked attention.

But now this.

“Yeah?” George Gemser asked bruskly. He’d been just about to go off-shift, without so much as a good-bye.

“What is wrong with you lately?” she snapped behind the security desk. “You’re acting real shitty to me all of a sudden.”

“Aside from you standing me up the other night, nothing’s
wrong
,” the large, bearded man informed.

Oh, so that’s it
. “For shit’s sake, Gemser. Don’t be such a baby. I told you, I was sick.” But, lo, this was a lie. She hadn’t been sick at all; she’d been detained by a last-minute offer to dinner by an ad exec who drove a Porsche.

“I don’t play those games,” Gemser said. “Some girls like to jerk guys around but I’m not into that.”

“Oh, give me a break!”

“Hey, you do your thing, I’ll do mine. All I’m in this for is to do my job, get my paycheck, and go home. I’m not into all this hot-cold, teasy grab-ass stuff, one minute you want me the next minute you don’t. Not my thing. We see each other every day, we say hello, say good-bye, and that’s it.”

GodDAMN!
Laura thought. Usually playing hard to get worked but it was backfiring here. You had to keep them humble, after all, otherwise they shit all over you. “That’s pretty damn harsh, isn’t it? I thought we had a little something going on, you know?”

“No,” Gemser corrected. “All we had ‘going on’ was ‘sport-fucking,’ to use
your
term.”

Well, it
had
been her line; meanwhile, Gemser was already heading for the front glass doors.

“Jesus, Gemser!” Laura suddenly shed a few surprise tears. “At least let’s talk!”

“We’ll just be friends,” the sturdy guard said but his eyes were unrelenting in their lack of forgiveness. “It makes it easier ’cos we do have to work together.”

Laura was beginning to do something she
never
did: yield. “Damn. I’m sorry, okay?” Her eyes fluttered. “I’ve always liked you.”

“Fine. See ya tomorrow.” He turned and walked out.

She ran out after him, ponytail flying. “Hey!”

He turned at the bus stop.

“You know, you can always come in an hour early, I mean, if you want to.” She winked at him.

Gemser offered the slightest smile, then hoppd on the bus.

At least I finally got a smile out of him
. Time would tell. If he showed up an hour before her shift was over, then she’d know she still had a hook in.
And I’ll make it worth his while
, she vowed.

She locked the front doors behind her and officially began her shift.

Most of the first floor was the old display floor, empty save for bare metal garment racks. Much of her shift was spent locked inside, and she had Mace, a Mag-Lite, and a cell phone for emergencies, not that she’d ever had any. Four times a shift she had to make a foot patrol around the building’s exterior, to check the alley out back. A couple times she’d caught some homeless girls loitering back there but they always dispersed when she whipped out her phone. The building had been a department store for decades, then the Banana Republic for several years until a developer bought it. Upper West Side meant low-key—nothing ever happened. Laura got plenty of sleep between rounds.

Upstairs were storerooms and offices; Laura had to make a door-check every hour, and at the beginning of each shift had to enter each room and check its status. Easy but monotonous. She got tired of hearing her own footfalls on
the tile flooring. Downstairs, behind the display floor, were more offices and the old loading dock whose door was chained shut. One of the rooms was an employee lounge and the couch was still in it. Laura had had some on-duty fun with Gemser more than once on said couch.

I hope he comes by
…

Boxes lined the back wall, all empty. When Laura went to the punch-key, she accidentally bumped a stack, moving them several inches from their place.

Strange
…

She pushed the boxes away, revealing a steel door.
I’ve
been working here all these months and never even knew this
door was here
. She tried the metal knob but found it locked.

Laura peered at the door.
What the hell is behind there?

She strode back to the security desk and retrieved the account manual, flipped back to the site map and blueprints. The map detailing each foot patrol showed no evidence of another door existing in the old lounge, but the blueprints…

How do you like that?

The blueprints showed another room behind that door. BOILER ROOM - INACTIVE, it read.

She noted the discovery on her shift log, then strode back to the room, keys jingling.
Must be leftover from the
old department store
, she supposed.

Laura tried every key on her ring but none of them would open the door.

“It’s abominable,” the woman told Vernon. Her name was Ms. Lancre, a fortysomething woman in a conservative knee skirt and a blouse that seemed the tiniest bit too tight to comfortably accommodate her bosom. Brown hair back
in a bun, which added a severity to her face, or perhaps—Vernon considered—it was the sudden upset of her discovery. This was the first time in his career that Vernon had ever responded to a “church desecration,” which he supposed this was. Her churchly anachronism shattered when her cell phone rang. “Excuse me, gentlemen.”

“Of course,” Vernon said.

Her frumpish flat-soled shoes snapped as she stepped out the pointed doors.

“Is she a nun?” Slouch asked, eyeing her exit.

“I guess she’s just a teacher, or the headmistress or whatever.”

“Some rack, huh?”

“Shut up, Slouch.”

Vernon turned back to the scene, officially a Signal 40 on the code sheet: vandalism. He and Slouch now stood in the middle of the chapel supporting a Catholic girls school called The Sisters of the Heavenly Spring—so perhaps the woman was a nun after all.

“I didn’t even know this place was here,” Slouch mentioned.

“Me, either. I guess that means we’re apathetic cops.” He was looking at the chapel’s modest altar now, whose white cloth had been besmirched by magic marker: wavy streaks running up and down, black, green, and red.

“This is so fucked-up it’s almost funny,” Slouch said of the lines.

“We probably shouldn’t cuss here, but…you’re right.” He walked behind the altar to the tapestry that backed the great crucifix. The perpetrators, in the same marker colors, had crudely scrawled the words:
ME ENAMOURER AD
INFINITUM.

“It looks Latin,” Slouch observed.

“No duh.” Vernon wrote the words down in his notebook. “But if our girls are what we think they are, how could they know any Latin?”

“The bums? They all had childhoods, probably very traumatized childhoods, and some of ’em may have gone to church. Childhood impressions, you know? They say a lot of a kid’s religious background leaks out later in life, once the schizophrenia sets in. Now they’re crazy and they’re remembering stuff.”

Vernon shrugged.

“It’s a solid connection, though. The magic marker jive.” Slouch seemed delighted by the desecration, just as any atheist cop would be. It was a
lead
.

“Yeah, but it’s still shit—”

Slouch grinned. “We probably shouldn’t cuss here.”

“And it doesn’t matter how solid a connection we’ve got, Downtown will question the expense of having Technical Services come out here for a workup. So that’s why we’re not going to ask.”

“Why not?”

Vernon whispered, “Because we’ll be laughingstocks, ordering a latent crew and photographer to a minor case of vandalism. Way they see it, those costs should be doled out for the serious stuff.”

“Yeah, like the murder we had yesterday, and ten to one it was the same magic markers used on the fuckin’ junkie chick.” Slouch bit his lip at the expletive.

“We’ll do a little workup ourselves,” Vernon said, “then they won’t be calling us the Two Stooges at Headquarters.” His eyes turned critical. “You’re not very observant, are you?”

Slouch ground his teeth. “If there’s hot chicks around, sure. And you know, you can say what you want but I think the headmistress or what ever she is is hot.”

Vernon lifted the hem of the altar cloth up with the tip of his shoe.

“Well how do you like that?” Slouch said.

“Bag it and mark it.”

Recessed there lay one green magic marker. Slouch
turned an evidence bag inside out over his hand and picked it up. “Sounds like Bouncing Betty’s coming back.”

Ms. Lancre’s footfalls grew louder as she re-approached. Her lips seemed pursed in a manner that denoted satisfaction. “An interesting phone call, Inspector.”