Home Improvement: Undead Edition (16 page)

“No, no—my home. My real home. It’s a two-bit shotgun house, the other side of Esplanade. I’ve got a computer there. My folks left me the house.”

“They died?”

“They moved to St. Pete.”

DeFeo stared at him as seconds ticked by. If Austin hadn’t killed the girl, it was likely that someone he knew, someone in his association—maybe some other idiot involved in one of the other area vampire/demon/Satan cults—had. Or someone in his realm, at the least. Unless a new whacko had suddenly come to New Orleans, drawn by the legends, voodoo, and the city’s reputation.

But, used the right way—and not set down beneath a brilliantly burning bulb, deprived of water, dying to use the john—Austin Cramer just might have the key to the murder.

“Let’s go,” DeFeo said.

“Oh, my God. You’re not going to regret this. I swear, I will be your willing slave in the future. I will take such good care of that tomb—you’ll never need to do the least bit of maintenance again. I swear, oh, thank you—”

“Stop slobbering on me!” DeFeo said. “Let’s do this!”

Austin Cramer slunk down in the back seat of DeFeo’s car as they wove through the city to a small, ramshackle house in a poorer area of the city. The place still smelled of mold—almost as if someone had decided after the summer of storms to simply abandon it. Maybe that was what his parents had done.

The house had a living room, a kitchen, a dining room, and two bedrooms.

The computer was in what had once been Austin Cramer’s bedroom. There were rock band posters and
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit model pictures taped to the wall. There were books in rickety wooden shelves, and a plethora of old gaming boxes. It was the typical room any nerd might have—any poor, unpopular kid who spent his life in his room.

But the computer, set on a simple desk, was brand-new, and when Austin touched the keyboard, the screen snapped to life, showing a zillion applications.

He pulled up two chairs and DeFeo watched as Austin keyed in one of his word-processing programs, and then slid it over to open a Web page.

“There—there’s the list of the people in my group. Should I pull up their Facebook pages, or something like that? I know how to find out if they have criminal records!” he said proudly.

DeFeo grated his teeth, brought his finger to his lip, and called in to the station. He read off the names and asked the sergeant on desk duty how many of those he had listed had come in. “We’ve got them all, now. Except for Brian—Brian Langley,” the sergeant told him. “They’re all claiming that it was Austin Cramer—he took them to the cemeteries and made them drink human blood and then throw it on the wall.”

Austin could hear the sergeant, despite the fact that DeFeo was pacing with his phone. “It was never human blood!” he said in horror.

“Where the hell are you?” the sergeant’s voice cracked over the phone again. “Montville, the lieutenant brought you in on this, but when you’ve got something, you’re not a cop. You’ve got to keep us in the loop. You’re a PI, man. Not a cop!”

“When I’ve got something, the lieutenant will know. Right now? I’m on a search in the city,” DeFeo said. It was more or less true. He glanced at his watch as he spoke, and he frowned. It was already one A.M. He looked at Austin, feeling his jaw tighten. “Trust me; you’ll be informed. I’m going to find Brian Langley,” he said, and hung up.

“Wait!” the desk sergeant said. “What’s that one girl’s name—Sue. Sorry, I wasn’t looking right. We have Sara, but we don’t have Susan Naughton.”

“So, Brian Langley and Susan Naughton are still missing?” DeFeo asked.

“Of the names you gave me, yeah. Hey, where did you get that list?”

“Just something I’m working on.” DeFeo was growing irritated. “I’ll let you know when I’ve got something and you can tell the lieutenant,” he said, and hung up quickly.

“So—Susan, and Brian Langley. Where would Langley go?” he asked Austin.

DeFeo stared back at him. “Brian? Oh, my God, Brian! Yes, he’s the biggest chump of them all. He used to be a bully, a big football hero—only he flunked out on his college scholarship. He’s always been an asshole who wanted to beat the hell out of everyone.”

Austin was elated, thinking that Brian was the killer.

“Doesn’t sound right,” DeFeo said.

“What do you mean? I told you—he was a bully!”

“Guys who get physical with their fists don’t usually turn into this kind of a murderer.”

“You have to be strong to hack up a girl, right?”

DeFeo shook his head. “You just need to know something about human anatomy—and own a good saw—like a bone saw. I know a few medical pathologists down at the coroner’s office who aren’t all that big or strong, and they can take a body apart pretty damned easily.” He hesitated, thinking about the way the body appeared to have been
chewed
. “Hell, let’s go find Brian. Where would he be?”

Austin was reflective. “I—I don’t know. I made a big deal about our constitutional rights, and the fact that we didn’t need to hide from the pigs—sorry, cops.” Austin offered up a weak, ironic smile. “Sorry, hide from the cops—use
pig’s
blood.”

DeFeo rolled his eyes. “Come on, think. He’s from this area. Where would he hide out? What about his folks?”

“They’re gone, too.”

“So did they move out and leave him their house?”

“No—they actually died. And the state took over the house for back taxes,” Austin said.

“Great,” DeFeo muttered.

“Oh, oh! There’s an old abandoned church down near Magazine Street. He used to go there. He might be hiding out there. Derelicts and prostitutes use it sometimes, too. I don’t think the cops have ever caught on. It’s like a safe house for the street people of the city.”

“Let’s go,” DeFeo said, rising.

They returned to his car. Austin hid in the back.

But they never reached the abandoned church on Magazine.

DeFeo’s phone rang.

It was the desk sergeant.

“You’re not going to believe this—but it’s gotten worse. Found both of those kids you were talking about.”

“What?”

“Susan Naughton and Brian Langley. Can’t be that they’re guilty; they’re chopped up like doll parts. Lieutenant is on his way. They found them in an abandoned-church-turned-nightclub up in Metairie. I’d get there quick if I were you.”

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER,
Austin Cramer sat huddled in the worst misery and despair of his life.

Hell, he’d never expected this. He was
in
the Montville tomb at the cemetery. He’d wanted DeFeo to leave him at his old house, but DeFeo had told him that the cops weren’t stupid, and they owned computers, too. It wouldn’t take long for them to discover that he owned the place, and they’d be looking for him there.

His face was known; there was no safe place in the city for him to hide.

Except for the Montville tomb.

It was very dark and heavily shadowed. Pale light from the full moon made it through the high grate at the rear of the tomb, but it didn’t do much to alleviate the darkness inside.

The thing that was weird about the place was that it wasn’t dusty; the marble that covered the shelves of caskets was entirely free from cobwebs, and the floor had been well swept, if not polished as well. DeFeo really had a thing for his old family tomb. It was spotless. It was really beautiful, in an odd sort of way. The heat in New Orleans was so intense that a body was naturally cremated in about a year; in fact, for a tomb to be “reused” or for a recently deceased family member to be interred with others, the rule was “a year and a day.” That way the fragments of the body that remained could be swept to a holding area just beyond the length of the individual tomb, and another dead family member could join those who had gone before in this final resting place.

Austin sat in silent torment for a while and then nearly jumped sky high, feeling movement near him.

Then he heard a soft buzzing sound. It was his phone. He answered it with a quavering voice.

“Who else?” DeFeo’s voice barked to him. “Both Susan Naughton and Brian Langley are dead. Who else should we be looking for?”

“Who else? No one! I gave you every name—you saw my file!” Austin said. He felt small, beaten, and almost numb. He’d given the man everything.

No, he hadn’t. And it seemed that members of his cult were being killed right and left.

“Oh! Wait. There’s Adriana Morgan. That’s why I couldn’t have killed anyone and you know it. I was in this cemetery tonight, initiating her. You saw me—you saw me washing the blood off!”

“The first victim was murdered about an hour before you would have been there,” DeFeo told him dryly over the phone. “Plenty of time to play with
human
blood as well. Where is this Adriana Morgan now?”

“She’s a nurse; she works at the hospital. She had to leave fast because she’s on duty tonight. You’ve got to get to her. DeFeo, you’ve got to get to her quick. This bastard is killing people around me—he’s killing my entire cult.”

“Stay where you are—don’t even think about looking for your girl. I’ll get someone to pick her up,” DeFeo said.

“I won’t move!” Austin swore.

He hung up. He did move. He had to shift his weight. No matter how nicely the tomb had been kept, it was a tomb, dark and stifling, and the floor was hard.

He sat there, shivering in the dark shadows, staring at the grating, and watching as the moon, glowing full, seemed to fill the night sky.

Time crept by. Then he nearly jumped again. He heard something, something that seemed to be rustling in the tomb.

“THE KILLINGS ARE
being done by someone from the city, someone who knows the city like the back of his hand,” DeFeo told Lieutenant Anderson. They both stood on the sidewalk, just outside the building that had begun its existence as a church and then been turned into Bats! Bats! had apparently been an alternative bar before going down. The décor had made use of the arrangement of the old church, with dusty bats in various sizes adorning the walls and hanging from the pulpit. And, of course, there were bats in the belfry as well.

“Yeah, that freak cult asshole—that Austin Cramer. We’ve got to find him, DeFeo. This isn’t the beginning of a serial killer’s vision—this is a spree murderer out in a vengeance.” Anderson looked back at the church-turned-nightclub. “Gotta love New Orleans,” he muttered.

“The youth of America,” DeFeo said. “They have places like this in New York, L.A., San Francisco, you name it. Kids like the occult.”

“The occult has gotten damned ugly—we have to find this nut,” Anderson said. “Quickly. Tonight. Who knows how many will die next?”

The bodies of Susan Naughton and Brian Langley had been posed one after the other in what had been the church aisle. They’d been placed in the same pattern. Heads and limbs detached, arranged so that they were a foot or so away from the torso, where each limb and head should have been. And the edges of the torso and limbs were ragged.

Chewed?
DeFeo wondered again.

They had been killed less than an hour before.

That left Austin Cramer in the clear.

“Did you get someone to go find the nurse at the hospital—that Adriana Morgan?” he asked Anderson.

“Sent them as soon as you gave me the name,” Anderson told him. “Where the hell did you get those names, DeFeo?”

“I’m a computer whiz,” DeFeo lied. “I’m going to start moving.”

“I hope you have a plan. I was having all the cemeteries staked out—but now, now we’ve found these two new bodies. . . .”

Another one of the detectives, Brad Raintree, walked out to the sidewalk. He headed straight to the edge, leaned over, and vomited. He glanced up. “Sorry, guys. I was doing all right, and then . . .” He looked at DeFeo, who looked back at him with sympathy.

“Hey, you wouldn’t be human, right?” DeFeo asked.

“You’re doing all right,” Brad commented. “Jeez, I was doing all right until the pathologist told me that . . . he wasn’t so sure the limbs had been sawed off. He said that they’d been
chewed
off.”

“I thought that’s what it looked like; you didn’t?” DeFeo asked.

Brad looked like he was going to be sick again.

“Sorry,” DeFeo said quickly.

“I’ve never seen anything like this at all,” Brad told him. “Bullet holes, decayed flesh, knifings. Nothing like this.”

An uneasy feeling settled into DeFeo’s gut.

“It’s hard for all of us,” he said. He turned to the lieutenant. “I know the city. Leave it to me,” DeFeo said. He started to walk away. He vaguely heard Anderson’s phone and wasn’t paying attention—
hell, limbs chewed off?
—until the lieutenant called him back.

“Hey! DeFeo!” he called.

DeFeo stopped, turning back.

“You got one wrong. There is no nurse at the hospital by the name of Adriana Morgan. She doesn’t exist, according to their records.”

THE NOISE WASN’T
coming from inside the tomb—it was coming from outside.

As he listened, Austin could hear footsteps—light footsteps—on the gravel that surrounded the tomb. He listened hard. Cops. Cops had probably come to stake out the place.

He just had to remain really quiet.

Whoever it was crunched on the gravel again. The person was trying to be stealthy, as if certain someone else was in the cemetery.

And they were looking for that someone.
Stalking them.

Austin caught his breath. Yes, another
crunch
. And
another
.

He tried to shrivel into himself. He couldn’t be seen; he was in the Montville tomb. DeFeo hadn’t locked him in, but it surely appeared that the gate was locked. Whoever it was would go away.

But they didn’t.

Crunch, crunch, crunch
, soft, and yet there, and all around the tomb.

“Come out, come out, come out—wherever you are!” came a voice.

It was a quiet voice, a teasing voice.

A feminine and sensual voice.