Garden of Evil (22 page)

Jim had no idea what to think of this. It was so elaborate, so sadistic, so ritualistic, and yet he couldn't even begin to imagine what kind of a ritual it could be. In all of the research that he had ever done into mystical religions and sacrificial cults and demon-worship, he had never come across anything like this before.

He was still standing there looking up at the ceiling when a warm drop of blood splashed on to his cheek. Ricky opened his eyes and stared down at him as if he couldn't understand where he was or why he was in so much pain.

‘Jim,' he croaked, and more blood dripped out of the side of his mouth. ‘Jim, help me. I'm dying, Jim. Help me.'

‘S
ummer!' Jim shouted. ‘Tell them we need paramedics, too! And firefighters!'

Summer came back into the bedroom, wide-eyed with panic, holding up the phone. ‘Is there a fire?'

‘Ricky's still alive! We need somebody who can get him down from there!'

‘Still alive? My
God
! OK, sure.
Jesus
! Paramedics. Yes, OK.' She was still on the line to the emergency operator so she told her in a gabbly voice that they also needed the fire department to send an ambulance and a rescue team.

‘Hold on, Ricky!' Jim told him. ‘Hold on, man, we have help on the way!'

He climbed on to the bed and tramped across the mattress, raising his left arm so that he could steady himself against the ceiling. Ricky was breathing thick and slow, and blood was still sliding out of the corner of his mouth. His face was completely caked in white paint and his eyes were bloodshot, so that he looked as if he were wearing an Aboriginal mask.

Jim tried to get a grip on the nail that had been driven through the palm of Ricky's right hand, but it was slippery with blood and it had been hammered in far too hard for him to be able to pull it out manually.

Not only that, all of the nails that had been driven through his hands and knees and ankles were L-shaped, so that it would have been impossible to lift him down without prying them out first.

‘You won't be able to do it, Jim,' Ricky whispered. ‘They pinned me up here hard and fast, believe me.'

‘We'll get you down, I promise,' said Jim. ‘Just stay with me, that's all. Keep your eyes open and keep breathing.'

‘Bastards grabbed me just as soon as I stepped out of my front door,' said Ricky. ‘I was high. Drunk. Nothing I could do to stop them.'

‘Just take it easy, Ricky. Save your strength.'

But Ricky twisted his head around and stared at Jim fiercely with his bloodshot eyes. ‘They stripped me bare-ass naked, Jim, and then they beat the living shit out of me. I could feel things bursting inside of me. I could hear my bones breaking. I played dead, but it didn't make no fuckin' difference.'

He coughed more blood, and spat, but then he said, ‘They painted me all over and they carried me up here and did this to me. Hammer and nails. And all these cats, too. And they was screeching, these cats, like all hell let loose.'

‘Who did it, Ricky?' Jim asked him. ‘How in God's name did they get you up here?'

‘Two guys in white. That's who they were. Two guys all dressed in white. Older one, and a younger one. Two guys in white.'

Jim's mouth went dry.
The Reverend John Silence, and Simon Silence. Who else could it have been
?
Two men dressed in white
?
Especially since Ricky had somehow found it impossible to paint anybody but that gray-faced Satanic figure, who appeared wherever the Silences appeared.

‘Did they say anything, these two guys in white?' Jim asked him. ‘Did they call each other by name?'

Ricky shook his head, and more drops of blood were spattered on to the bedcover.

‘Come on, Ricky, stay with me. You have to. Don't give up on me now. How did they do it, Ricky? How the hell did they manage to nail you up here?'

Ricky's eyes closed and he let out a bubbly, snorting noise. Jim felt like shaking him awake but he thought that he would only cause him more pain, and he must already be suffering more than Jim could imagine possible. He couldn't help thinking of that Easter hymn:
We may not know, we cannot tell, what pains he had to bear.

‘Ricky,' he repeated. ‘Come on, Ricky. It won't be long now.'

Even as he said that, he heard the scribbling sound of an ambulance siren in the distance, accompanied by the deep blaring horn of a fire truck.

Ricky opened his eyes again, staring down at the bed as if he had forgotten where he was.

‘Ricky, the paramedics will be here in a minute, and the firefighters to get you down.'

‘Firefighters?' Ricky frowned, and the dry white paint on his forehead cracked into furrows.

‘Just hold on, Ricky. Think about Nadine. What would Nadine do without you?'

Ricky turned his head again, and blinked at him. ‘
They flew
,' he said, in his clogged-up whisper.

‘What? Who did? What are you talking about?'

‘The two guys in white. That's how they nailed me up here.'

‘What? I still don't understand.'

‘They flew, Jim. They fuckin'
flew
.'

He continued to blink at Jim for a few more seconds, with metronomic regularity –
blink, blink, blink
– but then he stopped blinking and his eyes glazed over. His head dropped forward and his lungs let out a long, congested wheeze.

‘Ricky!' Jim shouted at him. ‘Ricky! The paramedics are here! Ricky! Don't give up on me now!'

Summer came back into the bedroom, followed by two paramedics, a man and a woman, both of them African-Americans. The woman stopped as soon as she came through the door and stared up at the ceiling with her mouth open, wide-eyed in disbelief. The man slowly lowered his shoulder bag to the floor and said, ‘Hol-
eee
sh
ee
-it!'

Detective Brennan came into the interview room carrying a cup of coffee and a donut with sprinkles on it.

‘Breakfast,' he said, holding them up. ‘Or maybe lunch.'

Jim was sitting at the plain wooden table in his shirtsleeves. His eyes were swollen from drinking and lack of sleep. He was unshaven and his hair was all messed up.

The interview room was painted pale green, with windows that were covered with security mesh. Through the mesh Jim could see a small sunlit courtyard, where three uniformed police officers were talking and laughing, and a Korean woman was sitting by herself, reading a book and eating a sandwich.

Detective Brennan dragged over a chair and sat down on the opposite side of the table. He was wearing a creased brown shirt and a yellow necktie with catsup stains on it, and crumpled khaki pants.

‘So what's the connection?' he asked, taking the lid off his coffee and blowing on it.

‘I don't know what you mean. What's
what
connection?'

‘Three people get whitewashed and crucified, along with eight white Persian cats each, and every one of those people is connected to you. Your long-lost daughter, your gardener, and now your painter buddy from the same apartment block. Your daughter is discovered in your classroom, your gardener is discovered in the grounds of your college, and your painter buddy is found on the ceiling of your own bedroom.'

‘I had nothing to do with any of those killings. Nothing at all. I've been telling you that for three hours solid.'

‘Well, to be fair, that's what our CSIs said about the first two homicides, your daughter and your gardener. First of all, there was no forensic evidence of any kind to suggest that you might have been involved in either of them. No fingerprints, no footprints, no blood, no fibers, no DNA. Second of all, that you couldn't have nailed them up like that, either of them, without some kind of mechanical assistance like a hydraulic lifting platform, and even then you couldn't have managed it on your own.'

‘This third homicide, Mr Kaminsky . . . it's still too early to say anything for sure. But there's always the possibility that you were copying the other two homicides in order to make it look as if you had nothing to do with killing him, either.'

Jim slowly shook his head from side to side. ‘What possible motive could I have had for nailing Ricky Kaminsky to my bedroom ceiling, especially when I was intending to bring a girl in there?'

Detective Brennan took a large bite of donut and when he spoke his left cheek was bulging. ‘OK – even if
you
didn't have a motive, maybe you can think of somebody else who might have? Maybe it's somebody with a weird kind of a grudge against you – killing your daughter, and then your gardener, and then this artist guy who lived downstairs from you.'

‘That doesn't make any sense at all,' said Jim. ‘I didn't even know I
had
a daughter until Bethany was murdered. I didn't know the gardener personally, not at all, except to say “
buenos dias
” to. And Ricky – sure, I liked him, and we sometimes went out and had a few beers together, but we weren't close friends.'

‘Well, your stories check out. You were drinking at the Cat'n'Fiddle like you say you were, and you went back to West Grove College around two a.m. to collect your cellphone, even though you shouldn't have been driving after so much drinking. Then you came back and asked Ms Summer Parks to come up to your apartment with you.' He paused, and then he added, ‘For whatever reason.'

Jim said nothing. He had lied to Detective Brennan about accidentally leaving his cellphone in his desk, and going back to the college to retrieve it. But he hadn't wanted to say anything about the Silences until he had found out much more about the Church of the Divine Conquest, and their promise to bring back Paradise. In
his
Paradise, Bethany and his father would both come back to life, and he didn't want to jeopardize the possibility of that happening, not before he understood how the Silences were going to do it and what it was going to cost.

Not only that, he hadn't told Detective Brennan that Ricky had described ‘two guys in white'. Nor, especially, that Ricky had claimed that they could fly. He doubted very much that Detective Brennan would treat either claim as anything except the hallucinations of a dying man. Especially a man who had not only been dying but drunk, and high on Peruvian grass.

‘Who else has access to your apartment, other than you?' Detective Brennan asked him. ‘Anybody else hold a key? Old girlfriend, maybe?'

‘Only the rental agency. Maybe the maintenance guy. Nobody else that I know of.'

‘There was no indication of forced entry, Mr Rook. There were no signs of a struggle. And there were no indentations in the carpet which might have indicated that a stepladder or some kind of framework was set up in order to nail the victim and all of those cats to the ceiling.

Detective Brennan pushed the last piece of donut into his mouth and then sat back, fixing Jim distrustfully with those glittery near-together eyes.

‘Let me put it this way, Mr Rook. I'm not a great one for hunches. I'm not like that goddamned
Mentalist
on the TV. But in your case I have this very, very strong feeling that you know a darn sight more about what this all means than you're telling me.'

He stuck up four fingers and then bent one of them back down again. ‘Three ritual homicides. Well, we're assuming that they're ritual homicides but we don't have the first idea what kind of a ritual we're talking about here. People nailed to the ceiling and halfway up trees? Each of them surrounded by eight white cats? I've Googled it, and come up with zilch, except a couple of people who have multiple white moggies to find a home for, because their owner has kicked the bucket.

‘But I'm thinking that maybe
you
have an inkling. After all, you're into all of this supernatural malarkey, aren't you? Lieutenant Harris used to say that you make John Edward look like he wouldn't know a spirit if it gave him a smart kick up the rear end.'

Jim said, ‘I swear to you, Detective, if I had the slightest clue what this nailing up was all about, I'd tell you. I've Googled it, too, and I have dozens of books on magic and religious rituals. But I'm still as baffled as you are.'

‘OK, Mr Rook, let's leave it at that for now. The CSIs tell me they're going to need your apartment for another forty-eight hours at least. Where are you going to stay in the meantime?'

‘Well, Ms Parks has generously offered to let me sleep on her couch for the next couple of days.'

‘I see. Her couch. Very generous. Just make sure you don't go back into your own apartment and contaminate the crime scene. And – Mr Rook . . .'

Jim was already opening the door. He stopped and said, ‘Yes, Detective?'

‘No more DUI, got it? I think we have enough dead people to deal with as it is, without you adding to the sum total.'

Jim arrived at college a few minutes after two p.m. He could hear the noise that Special Class Two were making from the opposite end of the corridor – laughing and shouting and scuffling and singing. He recognized Jesmeka Watson and Rebecca Teitelbaum singing a Rihanna song in screechy harmony; and he could hear Tommy Makovicka honking with laughter like a walrus, while DaJon Johnson was slapping out some grime rhythm on the bench in front of him.

Jim came in through the door and immediately the class quietened down, although there was still a lot of shuffling and whispering and giggling. He went to his desk and put down his briefcase and then he turned to face them. The first thing he noticed was the absence of Simon Silence.

‘OK,' he said, ‘I guess you all know what's happened – why I'm late.'

‘A guy got crucified in your apartment,' volunteered DaJon Johnson. ‘I seen it on the news this morning. That's some freaky shit, man. I mean, sir.'

‘That's right,' said Jim. ‘I found a neighbor of mine nailed up on my bedroom ceiling when I came home early this morning – the same way that unfortunate girl was nailed up in my classroom and my gardener was found nailed up in the cypress tree outside.'