Genesis of Evil (12 page)

The rest of the damage consisted of scrapes, bruises and torn clothing as everybody in the path of the marauding couple did their best to dig themselves into either a wall or the floor.

It took the better part of four hours to cart off the Hornfelters, patch up the injured, collect statements from the witnesses and clear the mall of everybody else.

Gerhart returned home feeling as if somebody had dropped a bank vault full of high-strength concrete on his head. Virginia, who rarely paid any attention to what her husband did for a living, had been engaged the entire afternoon in planning a dinner for the cancer fundraiser. She greeted him as she always did when he appeared after work.

“Well,” she said, looking up from a list of caterers, “how was your day?”

Gerhart broke with tradition and told her.

They sat at the kitchen table and disposed of the last of the iced tea and some angel food cake. Virginia had been silent all through dinner as Gerhart told her about the Hornfelters and their insane spree. For once, she seemed to be paying attention to him. When he finished they sat in silence for a few minutes. Then Virginia sighed.

“What in the world gets into people like that?”

Gerhart rubbed a hand across his face and tossed off the last of his tea. “I don’t have a clue. I’m beginning to think the mall is jinxed. There’s the body we found before the place was finished. Then all these dumb accidents, and now this shooting business. It makes me wonder what else has happened that I haven’t heard about. Now I’m worried about what’s going to happen next.” He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, then sat straight up and stared at his wife. “Listen, Virginia, stay out of there for a while. At least until we find out what’s going on. Okay?”

Virginia raised an eyebrow. “You don’t believe all of this is anything but coincidence, do you? Come on, Gerhart, get real. Everything that’s happened here has already happened somewhere else at least a hundred times a day. You know that.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t all happen in the same place, and that close together in time. I’ve been a cop too long to believe in coincidences like that. Humor me, Virginia. Stay away for a while. Go to Perry. Shop in Tallahassee. Whatever. Just stay out of that mall.”

She stood and walked toward the living room. “All right, if you want me to. But I think you’re overreacting.”

“I know, you always do,” Gerhart said.

Then he turned his head and stared through the window into the darkness that hung over the Gulf.

Chapter Eleven

October 2, 2004

After six lucrative years Francesca deVouziers decided that enough was enough. There was plenty of money in the bank, a lot of clients willing to wait, wonderful summer weather and a gray BMW convertible in the garage with only 9,338 miles on the clock. Francesca hung a sign on the door stating that the establishment would be closed for the next three weeks, pulled all the drapes together, stripped off her clothes and sat down on the couch with a pitcher of martinis and a stack of travel magazines. Three days later she packed a small suitcase, set the alarm system and drove the BMW south out of Birmingham on I-65. She wanted to find the real Florida. If it still existed.

Francesca drove serenely along the Gulf coast on two-lane blacktop roads and ignored the clock completely. She stopped, ate and slept as the spirit moved her. Two days after leaving Birmingham, she hit the edge of Trinidad just before the noon rush and was in the middle of a nice fresh shrimp salad when she felt a familiar cramp and realized she had brought no tampons with her. The girl at the cash register pointed Francesca toward the mall, smiled and told her to have a nice day.

As Francesca drew closer to the mall, a strange feeling stole over her. So far, her holiday was exactly what she needed. But she wondered if she was cheating herself of something and thought her clients might be taking advantage of her. She pulled the BMW into a parking spot, grabbed her shoulder bag from the seat next to her and strode purposefully through the glass doors into the mall.

Something gripped her mind with fingers of steel and tried to rip it from her skull. Francesca fell to her hands and knees as if poleaxed, her face within inches of the floor as she gasped for breath through a rapidly constricting throat. The world spun violently and threatened to throw her off into freezing space. She tried in vain to grab something, retched and vomited violently as shoppers stepped around her wondering if her malady was contagious. Francesca was barely able to drag herself away from the mess she had made and crawl through the door before collapsing on the sidewalk outside the entry. She was still laying face down on the concrete when the ambulance screamed to a stop next to her.

The escape of Francesca deVouziers from the Cabrini Green housing project on the south side of Chicago was no less a miracle than the Phoenix rising from its own ashes in the Arabian desert. Her father had disappeared forever some five minutes after impregnating an unmarried Jasmine deVouziers next to a trashcan in the alley behind Jasmine’s mother’s apartment building. Jasmine’s mother, Geraldine, came within a half inch of tossing Jasmine out into the street upon hearing of the pregnancy. But then she relented, remembering in time that Jasmine had been conceived in much the same way. So Francesca was raised by her mother, her grandmother or nobody in particular depending on who happened to be in the apartment at the time.

The lot of the deVouziers family was unfortunate at the best of times. There had been one, if not several, Frenchmen in the woodpile in St. Louis at the turn of the century, the result being that the majority of the family members were nearly white in complexion or, as they were called in the 40s, high yellow. At Cabrini Green, high yellow was not in vogue. The older Francesca became, the more she was determined to get out of the rut her family was in, or die in the attempt.

Her mother beat her to it. Jasmine was gunned down in a drive-by along with a youth named Thelonius Jackson who had fallen out of favor with the rest of his gang. Francesca was two days short of her eighteenth birthday. Francesca and Geraldine grieved long and loud, but since Geraldine was the only one in the family with a job the end result of Jasmine’s death was primarily financial. There was more money to go around.

When Francesca graduated from high school she found a job waiting tables and started to squirrel money away. At the end of two years and six jobs, she had amassed enough to load what little she owned into an old suitcase, kiss her grandmother goodbye and climb on a bus that took her out to Park Forest, in the south suburbs. There she rented a room, found another minimum wage job and applied for a grant to attend Governer’s University. Four years later, Francesca emerged from the school with a 3.9 grade point average and a degree in liberal arts. The Kroger store where she worked shifted her to full time. As she dragged various grocer items across the scanner she wondered what to do next.

That autumn she was invited to a Halloween party at the home of the Produce Manager. There were fourteen or fifteen of her co-workers there, and it was a lively, if ordinary, party until somebody suggested a séance. It was, after all, Halloween. The kitchen table was lugged into the family room—the kitchen was too small to hold everybody—then most of the chairs in the house were crammed together around the table. The partygoers scrambled for seats while their host turned down the lights. Francesca figured the worst that could happen was that she would be groped once more by the young butcher who had shown an active, if perverted, interest in her. He managed to get the chair on her left. Their host, the Produce Manager, shushed the crowd and took charge.

“Okay, folks, here’s how it works,” he said, looking around the table in the gloom. “We all hold hands and mentally try to call up someone from,” he cleared his throat loudly and assumed a deeper tone, “the other side. Don’t talk out loud unless you contact a spirit. Then say something quietly. Ready? Let’s do it.”

He sat down and they all took the hand of the person next to them. Francesca decided to get into the spirit of the occasion, no pun intended she told herself, closed her eyes and concentrated on her mother. She mentally called her name and tried to picture her on the backdrop of her memory. As she focused her concentration, the quiet shuffles and giggles in the dark room faded, leaving Francesca totally absorbed in her mother’s memory.

“Hello, baby,” a female voice said. “How you been?

Francesca’s eyes popped wide open and she looked up at the point above the table from where the voice emanated. Jasmine deVouziers’ face floated lazily near the ceiling and smiled down on her daughter.

“My Lord, Mama, it’s really you, isn’t it?” Francesca whispered.

The meat cutter glanced over at Francesca. Then he turned his head to see what the girl was staring at. When he saw the face drifting gently to and fro some four feet above him he gurgled deep in his throat, dropped the hands he was holding and bolted from the room. Thirty seconds later the vision of Jasmine was gone and Francesca was alone in the room trying to determine if she had really summoned up her departed mother or somehow only imagined it strongly enough to convince the rest of the crowd. The phrase mass hysteria came to mind.

By the time she had collected herself the guests were gone. Some had been too shaken to discuss the event. Most of the others were convinced that the Produce Manager had played some sort of hi-tech practical joke on them. He, of course, knew otherwise and tried to talk to Francesca about the appearance, but she was too confused to try. She mumbled a thanks for being invited and went home to ponder.

Over the course of the next several months, Francesca visited eight mediums. Five of them were unrepentant frauds, but the other three, after hearing Francesca’s story, were kind enough to attempt explaining the gift of second sight, as they understood it, which wasn’t very clearly at all. In fact, they were all careful to explain that, although there were so-called experts in the field, even those experts didn’t really know what the hell was going on. After working with Francesca, each individually agreed that she had the strongest gift they had ever seen. Francesca went away wondering if there could be any benefit to having this power. She soon learned that there was.

In her spare time she started making, as she called it, house calls. She found that it took very little effort to call up, not a spirit exactly, but for want of a better word, the essence of the deceased person. She held séances and was able to convince her clients that she was a genuine clairvoyant as, indeed, she was. It took almost a year for the word to spread. Then she gave up her day job, moved to a better part of town and got comfortable with her gift.

The more she practiced the stronger she became. Finally she was forced to make an effort to close off the rest of the world when she merely wanted to go out and see a movie, or have lunch. But by and large, Francesca came to see herself as a genuine professional who was happy to give comfort to those who wondered if their dead relatives were satisfied wherever they had landed.

Then she stepped into the Trinidad Mall and experienced the most powerful and malevolent evil she had ever felt.

Francesca spent three hours in the emergency room despite her efforts to convince the doctor that she was fine, really, and needed nothing in the way of medication or testing. Ultimately, she broke free when they learned that her hospitalization didn’t cover emergency treatment. On her way out of the hospital she stopped at the reception desk and asked the way to the police station.

Gerhart looked up from the annual battle of the budget when Christine Peters, his reception cop, stuck her head in the door of his office.

“Chief, there’s somebody to see you. I can’t get her to state her business but I can’t seem to get rid of her.”

Gerhart raised his eyebrows and said, “Why would you want to?”

“Well, I always sort of thought it was my job to screen visitors. I figure folks who won’t say what they want need screening. Want me to throw her out?”

Gerhart thought that was funny. Christine Peters stood five feet tall and weighed all of 95 pounds. He couldn’t picture her throwing a Chihuahua puppy out of the station, much less a full-grown human adult. He tossed the pencil on the desk and leaned back in his swivel chair. “Nah. Bring her in, Pete. It’s been a boring day.”
 

Francesca deVouziers had already raised most of the eyebrows in the station before she stepped into Gerhart’s office. He was no exception. He thought she was one of the most striking women he had ever seen, regardless of race, religion or country of national origin. He placed her at five feet seven and about 130 pounds. She moved across the floor with the grace of a panther, stopped in front of the desk, favored him with a warm smile and held out a white business card. Gerhart stood, smiled in return—it was hard not to—and took it. The card said simply “Francesca deVouziers” and listed a telephone number. The number, Gerhart noted, was not in Florida. He waved at the chair in front of the desk.

“Please, Ms. DeVouziers, have a seat and tell me what I can do for you.”

She sat down, let the smile fade and stared earnestly at Gerhart for a moment. Then she took a deep breath.

“Chief, you may not believe me, but there is something extremely evil in your shopping mall.”

Chapter Twelve

October 5, 2004