Dark Places (22 page)

Home, I thought, snuggling into his arms. Me, who rarely had snuggled anywhere for any reason my whole life long. Black was eyeing my tree.

“I see you have a tree. I guess that's a tree, right?”

“I thought you'd help me decorate it.”

“Claire, that is undoubtedly the most pathetic excuse for a Christmas tree I've ever seen. It's almost embarrassing to look at it.”

“It'll look better when I get the lights on.”

“I sincerely hope so.”

“Quit being so critical. You hungry?”

“Yes. But I didn't want to stop long enough to pick up anything.”

“I have the whole works right over there in my refrigerator.”

“Let's eat.”

I set out the spread and he pretended like it hadn't come from Kroger's. We ate together, then decorated the tree, and it did look better once we'd finished. I went up to the bedroom and brought down his gift.

He said, “For me? You shouldn't have. This is for you.”

It was a tiny blue velvet box. Oh God, I hope he wasn't going to ruin everything with a engagement ring. “You already gave me my gift, remember? All this.” I swept my arm around the room.

“It's not much. Open it.”

It wasn't wrapped so I flipped up the lid. Inside lay a silver medallion on a long, slender chain. I was distinctly relieved. I liked him but engagements were against my religion.

“It's a Saint Michael's medal. He's the patron saint of police officers. I figured you could use some protection. I bought it at Notre Dame Cathedral. Actually I got myself one, too. Figured I'd need some help if I kept hanging around with you.”

“You're probably right.”

He smiled and lifted the chain out of the box and fastened it around my neck. I picked it up and looked at it. It was fairly heavy, bigger than most religious medals, solid silver. “It's beautiful.”

“Promise me you won't take it off.”

“You're getting superstitious.”

“Promise me.”

“Okay, I promise.”

That satisfied him. He said, “Here's a souvenir from Paris.”

I opened the shopping bag and pulled out a black cashmere shawl. It was lined with fine embroidered silk with long silky fringe hanging off the bottom.

“It's Hermès,” he said.

I didn't know what the hell Hermès was, but it was pretty and probably expensive. I wondered if I'd ever wear it. Maybe I could use it as a couch cover-up on the rare occasions I got to watch Oprah.

“I brought you some Parisian perfume, too, and a wicker picnic basket full of French cheese and chocolates and baguettes. Figured Bud and the guys could help you eat them.”

“Yeah, good idea. Maybe I'll throw in some BBQ Doritos and keep it in the backseat for Bud to eat from during our next stakeout.”

Black laughed.

Sheepish and feeling like a pauper exchanging gifts with a prince, I handed him his pathetic little present. “It's not much. I mean it. I mean, well, you're hard to buy for, Black. What do you give somebody who has everything?”

“I don't have everything, just most things I really, really want.” He eyed me in a complimentary fashion.

I laughed as he lifted my pitiful little snowman sack by the handles. He pulled out the book and looked at it. “My God, how in the world did you manage this?”

“I called and hired the best photographer in New Orleans, or at least he said he was. I told him to go out to the bayous and take pictures, then have them bound into a book.” I shrugged. “You know, I remembered how you said you thought the bayous were beautiful when we were down there.” He was still staring down at the book, slowly turning the pages. “It's not much, though, not like all this stuff you got for me.”

Black looked at me, his eyes shining with pleasure. When he smiled, the dimples bracketing his mouth deepened in just the way that turned me on. “I love it. It's one of the best, most thoughtful gifts I've ever been given.”

That made me more happy than it even should have.

“There's a picture of your friend, Aldus Hebert, in there, too.” I smiled, as he turned the pages one by one.

He said, “I think Lafourche Parish is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It brings back lots of memories of when I was a young boy. Thank you.”

He leaned over and kissed me, but I pulled away before we reached the point of no return. “I got you a stocking. Here.”

“That's funny, I bought you one, too.”

He dug the one he'd bought for me out of a shiny gold shopping bag. It was red velvet with hand-sewn ornaments on it that looked like real diamonds and rubies and came out of a blue Tiffany box. The one I got for him was red and white felt and came out of a blue plastic Wal-Mart bag. Crap. I just could not compete with this guy's buying power. I might as well quit trying.

I discovered that mine held Chanel No. 5 from Coco Chanel's own original boutique and a crystal Christmas ornament in the shape of the Eiffel Tower made by Tiffany.

“Jeez, Black, my gifts look downright silly next to yours.”

“I should've gotten you an Uzi.”

“Nah, Charlie won't let us use submachine guns. I do like all of this a lot, I really do.”

He reached inside his stocking and pulled out the small gold frame that I'd gotten on sale for 60 percent off at Dillard's. But it was pretty expensive originally. It held a picture of the two of us. We were having dinner with some tall candles in front of us. We were smiling at each other. He looked happy. I had my arm in a sling.

He smiled at me. “Bermuda. Last fall.”

“Harve took it one night. Remember, the three of us were having dinner outside on the patio. I don't know, there's just something about it that I like. I had one made for me, too.” I shrugged, feeling stupid again.

“By God, Morgan, you're sentimental.”

I frowned. “No, I'm not.”

“Yes, you are. Who would've thought that?”

“I'm not sentimental, damn it, and quit saying I am.”

He laughed, then sobered. “I love it, and I love you.”

His face was serious now, a lot more serious than I wanted it to be. I didn't want to tell him I loved him. I didn't know if I loved him, maybe, probably, but it was Christmas and I was one happy gal that he was home. He was used to me not wanting to say the words, he was a psychiatrist, he could probably tell me exactly why I wasn't saying it. But he wasn't pushy about me telling him how I felt, thank goodness.

“Really? Then show me how much,” I said in challenge, and boy, did he ever.

Many years passed, and everything went along very well. Uriel became fascinated with American Indians after watching a rented video of Kevin Costner in
Dancing with Wolves
. He loved to run through the woods and pretend to be an Osage Indian, the tribe that Gabriel said inhabited these woods in the old days. They played together out there, wearing breechcloths and moccasins and painting their bodies like the Indians used to.

Gabriel bought two old bows with money he made cleaning up in the operating room, and they practiced on animals they caught and tied to stakes. In one of his books, Gabriel learned about some tiny frogs called poison dart frogs that lived in tropical rainforests in Colombia, down in South America. It said the natives there used the frogs' poison on their arrows and blowgun darts when they hunted prey, so Gabriel ordered some poisonous frogs to breed, and when they had enough to spare, he taught Uriel how to make them secrete their poison.

“Now watch, Uriel. See here, this's how the Indians do it. Remember, never, ever touch these frogs with your hands.” He got out a long glass vial with a frog down in the bottom. “You keep them in here and feed them.” He snapped on some rubber gloves and dumped out the red frog that was about three inches long with yellow spots on its back. It had very large black eyes.

“When you want the poison, you take this sharp stick and push it down its throat and out one of its legs. Like this.”

Uriel leaned closer and watched.

“See, the pain makes the frog sweat. See that white foamy stuff coming out on its back? That's the most powerful poison.”

Gabriel picked up an arrow. “You have to roll the tip of the arrow in this white stuff and the poison'll last a whole year. Can you believe that? Hand me the rest of those arrows. It says one frog'll poison about fifty arrows.”

“Man, Gabriel, that's really cool.”

For a long time, they tried to figure out how to shoot a human and send him to heaven, but all they could catch in the pits they dug in the woods were small mammals, except for once when a deer fell in and broke its hind leg. They practiced on it, and it died very quickly. And then one day, at last, when they were out playing Indians, they heard a man yelling for help.

Gabriel and Uriel looked at each other and grinned in triumph. They followed the cries to one of their pits. A bow hunter had fallen through the branches and leaves disguising the deep hole in the ground. He was dressed in camouflage clothing, head to toe. When he fell, his bow had caught on a root near the top of the pit. One of the sharp spikes they'd angled up at the bottom of the hole had pierced his thigh. He could not move without excruciating pain.

“Oh, thank God, you found me,” he said through clenched teeth.

The pain was going to get a lot worse, Uriel thought, because Gabriel had coated the stakes with frog poison after they'd hammered them into the ground.

“I'm hurt bad. You boys gotta get me an ambulance out here quick!”

Gabriel said, “You shouldn't of been hunting out here on our land, mister. It's posted. You had to've climbed over a barbed wire fence to get in here.”

“Yeah. Sorry. I wounded a buck and was following the blood trail. Listen, get to a phone. Call the county and tell them where I am. I'm feeling real sick.”

Then Gabriel said, “Hey mister, know what? You're in luck. We're angels come to help you.”

The hunter frowned. His gaze moved to the war paint on their faces and bare chests. Then he said, “Please, just call me an ambulance. I've lost a lot of blood.”

Uriel laughed. “Hey, we ain't angels of mercy, man, we're angels of death.”

The man struggled to pull his leg off the stake but couldn't, and then he shouted angrily, “You little shits, quit playin' around and get me some goddamn help.”

Gabriel turned to Uriel and said, “Did you hear that? He took the Lord's name in vain. I think he should be sent on up to heaven, don't you?”

“You bet. He's being rude, and he really shouldn't be cussing at us like that.”

“Go ahead, Uriel, it's your turn. You take the first shot.”

“What? What are you doing? You gotta help me. . . .”

Uriel carefully notched a poisonous arrow on his drawstring, aimed down at the hunter, pulled back as far as he could, and let the arrow fly. It hit the man's torso, cutting deep into his chest close to the heart. The man screamed and writhed helplessly on the stake.

Gabriel notched his arrow and sent it zinging into the man's right shoulder.

“You're better than me with the bow, Uriel. I need to practice some more.”

It was Uriel's turn and he let fly another arrow hard into the man's chest, very close to the first one. It must've collapsed the lungs, because the man's shrieks changed into strange, breathless gurgles. Gabriel prepared his next arrow.

“Please, please, let me go,” the hunter sputtered out, crying now, bleeding heavily, his breaths so labored they could barely understand him. He was a big man, over six foot, too meaty for them to propel an arrow with enough force to pierce completely through his body.

They took turns until their quivers were empty, a dozen poison-tipped arrows each, but the trespassing hunter was dead long before they ran out of shafts. Then they looped a rope around his neck, pulled him off the stakes, and hoisted him high up in a tree where the buzzards could pick his bones clean. No one would find him, not out here on Uriel's grandma's land. They could do whatever they wanted there, whenever they wanted, so they built a fire under the corpse and roasted wieners on it for supper.

I awoke in the misty shades of dawn with a warm tongue in my ear. I mumbled, “Black, please, enough already.”

When Black whined like a dog, I turned my head and got another wet kiss on the nose. Yes, it was my new Christmas poodle that we'd christened Jules Verne.

“Hey, you, cut that out.” The tiny beast climbed onto my chest and stood at attention, wagging its tail to beat the band. Okay, so the dog is cute, maybe even adorable to some women who didn't happen to be homicide detectives, but I'd never used the word adorable in my life, not even about cuddly babies, and I wasn't going to start now.

The clock on the bedside table said six o'clock, that's a.m., mind you. Obviously the dog was still on Paris potty time. He would have to get over jet lag if he wanted to live at my house. Black obviously was still in French time zones, too. Dead to the world pretty much described him. A pillow over his head. Arm holding it in place, warning Jules Verne and me not to lick him awake. Black had had enough Christmas cheer, I suspected. Potty duty was left to me.

Jules Verne made a real theatrical production of pacing back and forth at the foot of the bed, as if he was working up the nerve to jump into the Grand Canyon. He finally took the leap, landing with a soft thud, then clicking across the hardwood floor to the carpeted steps. He was whining softly. He had to go bad. Then I heard him scampering across the kitchen floor, with lots of clicking nails and whining yips. Jeez, Black had forgotten to get me a doggy door.

Rolling out of the warm bed with enthusiasm that almost came up to zero on my want-to scale, I poked my arms into the sleeves of my red fleece robe and shoved my feet into the huge plush house shoes made like blue dolphins that my Aunt Helen had sent me for Christmas.

Now Jules was sitting in front of the single French door that led out back. He watched me shuffle toward him with a haughty, what-the-hell's-taking-you-so-long-lady look on his little shaved face. So I ask you, who's the trained one, him or me?

“Get ready, dog, you're going to let your hair grow out starting today. No little poufs on the end of the tail of any dog I hang around with. You look ridiculous. And that dumb sequined collar's got to go, too. You need spikes. Look tough, Jules, and Rottweilers will run like hell.”

He wagged his pouf, then shot outside the minute the door opened. Then all I could see was his pouf moving slowly above sixteen inches of hitherto undisturbed snow. “Good luck, pup. Welcome to the North Pole.”

It was snowing yet again. Lake of the Ozarks was giving new meaning to white Christmas this year. Somebody up there needed to flip the switch and stomp on the brakes.

While Jules Verne did his urgent business—hey, maybe I ought to shorten that to J. V.—I turned and picked up the remote and hit the button for fire logs. Yes, the gas logs were fast becoming my favorite gift from Black. I fired the coffeepot and waited for it to perk and fill my kitchen with that superb, one-of-a-kind, early morning Folgers smell I loved. Outside, Jules was still trying to find a nice bathroom spot that he could climb out of once he did his business. I laughed to myself when he began a sort of hop-for-your-life return to the kitchen door.

The puppy came in, all shivering and shaking with snow crusted on his nearly naked body. Hell, he needed a sweater or something. Didn't it ever snow in France? Maybe he was born on the French Riviera and spent bathroom breaks on the beach. He jumped up and braced his front paws on my legs. He looked up at me like, “please, please, I'm freezing my pouf off.” So I picked him up, wrapped him in a kitchen towel, and held him close. He felt like some kind of ice-cold, wiggly rat.

Glancing up at the quiet loft, I found my favorite transatlantic Santa still wasn't stirring. I had a feeling I'd seen the last of him for a while. That's okay. We'd done a pretty good job of getting to know each other again for most of the night, and I needed to do some work, anyway. I'd dreamed I was in that red trunk with Christie Foxworthy and the scorpions, and she'd kept saying over and over, “But what'd I do? What'd I do?”

I shivered, just thinking about it and wondered myself what she did to deserve that terrible fate. I watched the coffee drip. It could've been Rowland. Maybe she wouldn't agree to end the relationship, kept stalking him and his wife. But if that were true, he was one helluva good actor. And why would he flag down that off-duty police officer to check out his house? It could have been a clever ruse to throw us off, but Rowland didn't appear to be made of Einstein material. Not in my book, anyway.

When the coffee was finally ready, I was, too. I poured some into my extra-large white mug, sat down at the table, and picked up the three files full of paperwork I'd gathered on the Classon and Foxworthy murders. I spread them out across the table and hit the light switch on the wall. Black's new black-shaded chandelier flared to life and spotlighted some very grisly autopsy photos. Simon's wounds were a little too graphic this early in the a.m. Never liked oozing pus and putrefying skin with my coffee. Christie's eyes disturbed me even more. Buckeye had determined that she'd been bludgeoned in the head before being stuffed in the trunk and he had figured out the number of bites she suffered, but the one by the Egyptian scorpion was deadly all by itself and was what had killed her.

I started on Harve's reports, and it didn't take long to see the pattern emerging inside his yellow-highlighted timelines. At least a dozen spider bites were reported annually at the lake, about a third serious enough to hospitalize the victims. The serious cases involved brown recluses and black widows, usually encountered where they were hiding in old shoes or stored stuff down in basements. Other victims were usually campers and kids at summer camp.

Harve had circled one newspaper article with red ink. Dated over a decade earlier, about the time Joe McKay got expelled. The headline read
THE DOME OF THE CAVE ACADEMY INFESTED WITH BROWN RECLUSE SPIDERS, STUDENTS EVACUATED.
I skimmed the two-column report. Exterminators were called in after a kid was bitten, had gotten sick, then was rushed to a hospital. At that point the girl was stable but in serious condition. A follow-up story dated several days later was attached. The photo showed the fourteen-year-old girl sitting in a hospital bed holding her bare arm out toward the camera and showing the deep, purple hole eating away her flesh. It wasn't as deep as Classon's, but just as ugly. Coincidence? I think not. Somebody connected to the academy for years and years was breeding killer spiders for his vengeful urges. We needed to determine who had been there at that time. One thing I did know. Joe McKay had been. According to the article, Director Johnstone had been there, too. Wonder if either one of them had any attachment to this girl. I jotted down her name. Jennifer Blocker. Maybe she was an old girlfriend who'd dumped our psychic master. Or maybe she had preferred ambitious Jesus wannabes.

I flipped through the rest of Harve's research linking the academy to spiders and found nothing significant. I picked up the thick stack of college articles Librarian Man, Morton DeClive, had printed out for me. Lots of poorly written news releases from the academy itself, effusively touting its innovations and excellence in education. Yeah, right. Lots of pictures of students who'd won this award and that certificate, none wearing red devil masks or sporting oozing wounds. Everyone was posed with the director when he was all decked out in his tropical white suit and a thousand-watt grin. The self-aggrandizing director puttin' it on for the camera.

I paused when Black's picture showed up at some fund-raiser, grinning and gripping hands with white-suited Jesus while donating a cool hundred thousand dollars to go toward a new gymnasium for the academy. No wonder everybody around the lake kowtowed to the guy. Surely Black could find a better school to support than one that offered paganism that might or might not include devil worshipping. That creep, Johnstone, probably pocketed most of the donations, anyway. I decided to set Harve loose on a background search of the dear director and see if he could dig up a well-hidden rap sheet. Maybe he should do background on everybody at the academy. They were all freaks out there. I jotted down some names.

My interest perked considerably when I ran across the name Wilma Harte. She was the female custodian who'd disappeared. I stared hard at the woman's picture, wondering about her, wondering if she'd killed herself or if she'd turn up someday. More interesting was why she took off in the first place. My instincts were bristling all over. Something told me that Wilma Harte was connected to Simon Classon, some way, somehow. It sounded like she was his primary butt of cruel jokes. Maybe she hated him enough to kill him. A long shot but it bore checking out. I made a note to put Harve on finding out if she'd surfaced anywhere. I would like to interview that girl, believe you me.

I read over some of the papers I'd printed out about spiders, their habitat and habits. No reported spider-bite homicides. Until now. Then again, that crime would be easy to pass off as an accident. Unless the victim was in a trash bag containing the eight-legged monsters, bound and gagged and hanging from a tree limb. No coincidence, that. But hey, maybe Classon wasn't meant to be found. Ever. Maybe if Stuart Rowland hadn't run off the road and called a wrecker, the killer would have gotten away clean. Maybe the perp planned to cut Classon down and dispose of the body at his convenience.

I got up, dribbled more coffee into my mug. It seemed absurd that this guy was a serial who used arachnids to kill. But now there were two murders with unpleasant little critters sporting lots of little legs and deadly poisons, and a killer who put a lot of thought into how to torture and off people with great gusto but leaving no clues. Maybe he'd had a lot of practice we hadn't found out about yet.

Jules Verne was growling fiercely somewhere. He sounded about ten times bigger than he was. Eager to see how a sissy dog looked when seriously pissed off, I stood up. “Okay, Jules, what's the problem now?”

I couldn't see him but his claws were scratching like crazy on the tiles around the fireplace. He was jumping at something, then running off and circling back. Then he started up with the shrillest yapping in the history of caninekind.

“Shut it, dog. Your buddy Black's trying to get some sleep.”

I rounded the couch to pick him up and then I saw what was agitating him. The back of my neck crawled. The biggest spider I'd ever seen was cornered against the fireplace. It was big and black and hairy. A tarantula. Six inches across. Two of its legs were off the floor and waving around like some kind of rearing stallion, ready to fight Jules Verne to the death.

I snatched the puppy up and backed away as if the spider was a crouching tiger. Shudders shook me, and I felt sick for a couple of seconds. Then I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I wasn't afraid of spiders. Hell no, I could step on them, couldn't I? This one might take industrialized slippers, however, so I refrained. Okay. Tarantulas aren't deadly, I think. They just looked like it. Some people kept them as pets and let them crawl up their arms and stuff. They were morons, of course, but there you go.

The hairy monster started tiptoeing its eight legs toward the couch. It couldn't get away or I wouldn't know where it was. And I definitely wanted to know where it was. That got me going. I grabbed my glass cookie jar, dumped out the Oreo crumbs, then edged cautiously around to the other side. Now it was back against the wall, watching me, I feared. Poisonous or not, it was revoltingly ugly. Fighting a serious case of the creeps, I grit my teeth and quickly turned the jar on its side, scooped the spider inside, then set it upright. I left it on the hearth and shivered for about thirty seconds while it tried unsuccessfully to climb up the curved sides of the glass.

It occurred to me then that it might have bitten Jules Verne. I pinned the wriggling pup down on the kitchen counter and checked him out for bites. He licked my hands and kicked against my exploring fingers with all four paws. I didn't see any puncture wounds, and he hadn't yelped in pain so I was fairly confident he was okay.

“What the hell are you doing to that dog?”

Black was looking down over the balcony. He was bare chested and tousled and frowning.

“Looking for a tarantula bite.” I put the dog down and watched him scramble helter-skelter up the stairs to Black. “I just trapped the biggest tarantula I've ever seen in my life inside my cookie jar.”

“Come again?”

“You heard right.”

“Well, I guess I'll pass on Oreos from now on.”

“I'm serious.”

“Really? A tarantula? Did you smash it?”

“God, no. I want to know what kind it is and if it's poisonous. I have a feeling it's not from around here. Maybe even as far away as Egypt.”

“Why Egypt?”

“Because that's where the perp's killer scorpion hailed from.”

Black came down the steps a minute later in his black flannel robe and slippers, and Jules Verne cupped in one open palm. The dog's tail looked like a metronome gone berserk.

“Where is it?”

“On the hearth.”

“Do you think it's poisonous?”

“I'd rather it wouldn't be.”

Black looked somber, which told me that he was thinking the same unsettling thoughts I was. “Do you see a lot of spiders out here?”

“Not giant, icky, woolly tarantulas. Not in the dead of winter. Hey, maybe Santa brought it.” I'd tried for humor but neither of us smiled.

I watched him squat down beside the glass jar. “Good God, it's a tarantula, all right. It looks like the kind that's indigenous to the lake. I've seen them on the roads at Cedar Point, especially in the fall. Is this the only one you've ever seen in the house?”