House Infernal by Edward Lee (15 page)

Now she was leaning against the wall, arms crossed
under pert breasts. Jesus. This woman's body is killing
me.... Berns had to force himself not to stare. "So you're
the one who gave him the tattoo?"

"Yeah, about a year ago, I think. He was a nice guy, too,
and that's a little troubling."

Berns pulled his eyes away from her trim abdomen.
"Troubling? Why?"

She looked at~him, astonished. "Well, you're from the
violent crimes unit, and you just told me he was arrested,
so I don't have to be a brain surgeon to assume that he
was arrested for a violent crime," she said very quickly.
"And don't tell me what the crime was because I don't
want to know! I don't want any negativity in my parlor."

Berns was grateful he didn't have to explain about the
murders. "I see. But what did you mean when you said
you never got any of their names?"

It was weird. It was obvious they were all friends, but
they came in a week apart, almost like they didn't want to
be seen together. The three of them, I mean."

"Johnson and another man, and a woman?"

"You already know!"

The woman's energy level was knocking him off center,
but above all he couldn't have been more encouraged. My
first real lead... "Something Freddie told me himself
when I questioned him. But he didn't tell me who these
other two people were-"

"Oh, that's too bad because, well, like I said, I didn't get
their names, and I never saw them much."

"The other guy was younger, right?"

..Y ..
ep.

"And the woman was slim and kind of a..."

"Beat-down weathered bar-tramp," she said blankfaced, then laughed after his pause.

"Took the words right out of my mouth. Could you pick
them out of a lineup, or if I showed you mug shots?"

"Oh, I'm sure I could," she said, seeming eager.

Berns thought, Eureka! In less than a day he could have
someone from the county records department print out
photos of anyone in the area with priors who matched the
descriptions.

She continued, talking quickly, her hands moving with
her lips. "The first week, the blond guy came in. Then a
week later, the other guy, and-"

"Then the woman, a week apart?"

"Right."

"But you figure they're all friends because they came in
asking for the same tattoo," Berns supposed.

"Uh-huh, and they wouldn't let me stencil the design.
They all insisted I ink it by sight."

Berns didn't know much about the art of tattooing but
her comment raised a technical question. "So they brought
their own copy of the design?"

"Same copy each time."

"What? Something from a book? It would be great if
you could remember the name of the book."

"No, no, it wasn't a book. It was just a sheet of that
lined, yellow writing paper. And I'm sure it was the same
sheet of paper each week when the next person brought it
in to copy."

Curious. "How can you be sure?"

"It had a lot of writing on it, scribble, really. I'm very interested in words, it's sort of my hobby."

"Words are your-"

"I love words!" she emphasized. "New words, different
words. I belong to four different word-of-the-day Web
sites."

What the hell is she talking about?

She grinned, aiming a finger. "You probably don't
know what I'm talking about, huh? They have these Web
sites that send you a new word every day so you can enrich your vocabulary, and they're cool words, like desultory and parsimonious and inviolate, you know?"

';Uh...

She rushed off to her desk, a sylphlike blur, and returned a moment later with her business card. "On the
back I wrote the Web address--check it out, it's free!"

"I'll ... be sure to do that."

"But anyway, I just like words. And that's why I took a
special notice of this sheet of yellow paper these people
brought in. It had the diagram on it, for the tattoo, pretty
much in scribble but there were also words all over the
sheet, too. And they were words I've never seen beforethat's why it caught my eye. Some foreign language."

Berns fiddled with his goatee, contemplating. A foreign
language. If they really are in some kind of cult, Johnson was
clearly the leader, and Johnson's grade-A white trash. What's
white trash doing with foreign words scribbled on a piece of paper? "Foreign words," he muttered to himself.

"Creepy words, too-even though I couldn't read
them," she said. The lithe body seemed to squirm around
in the barely existing bikini. "What I mean is there was
just something creepy about the way all that writing
looked, along with that"-she shot a finger to the photo
on the wall-"creepy diagram."

Berns thought further. "Do you know if they all lived in
Wammsport? Freddie did up until last March, but I don't
know about the others."

"I'm not positive, but I think I saw the girl somewhere
once, the grocery store maybe."

More paydirt. Berns couldn't believe it. He was accomplishing something. "And what about Freddie? His landlord told us he lived in Wammsport most of last year."

"Oh, yeah. I'd see him a lot" Her slender, jubilantly
decorated arm pointed out the window. "I'd see Iim
working the docks quite a bit."

Berns nodded. "So it was only Johnson and his two
friends you've done this tattoo for? No one else?"

"No one else, Officer."

For some reason, hearing this sleek women call him
"Officer" made him feel silly. "Are you open year-round?
I don't know anything about the tattoo business."

"I'm open six days a week all year long. Business is
great, or-here's a good word! Business is copious! Isn't
that a cool word? It was yesterday's word of the day."

Berns chuckled under his breath. "Uh, yes, it's a.'
cool
word, and I'm delighted that your business is ... copious."

"It sure is," she bubbled. She grabbed a bottle of
Windex and began spraying the front window. "Oh, don't
mind me, I multitask. And, yeah, you might not think a
little eye-blink town like this would generate a solid tattoo clientele but it really does."

"All the watermen-"

"Exactly. Crabbers, clammers, lobstermen, oystermen.
They move up and down the coast just like all those migrant illegals who pick seasonal vegetables. And they all
want tattoos every time. There are guys out here even in
the middle of winter dredging steamer clams and oysters.
They're tough boys-and redneck to the max." Her body
was almost a blur as she wiped the big window down,
talking at the same time. "Every new port city means a
new girlfriend, and that means a new tattoo. I had a guy
in here once who had over two hundred hearts inked on
him, and a name for each."

"That's what I call true love," Berns thought to say, staring at the compact rump hustling in the tiny bottoms.

Berns was becoming aroused. Yeah, that's real professional.... "I can't thank you enough for your time, miss.
Hope you have a great day."

"Oh, you too." Now she was standing on the windowsill, her slender legs V'd and calves flexed, as she
meticulously cleaned the upper casement. "And don't forget to check out the word of the day. Today's word, by the
way, is 'providential'. Bet'cha don't know what it means."

Berns' eyes shamelessly slid up the back of her perfect
thighs. "That's an insurance company, isn't it?"

Her high laughter filled the shop like a burst of finches.
"It's something that happens as if through divine intervention or good fortune."

"I could use a little of that," he said, preparing to drag
his eyes off her unknowing rump. Then a final question
kindled in his head. "And one last thing before I take
off."

"Uh-huh?" she said, the rag making squeegee sounds.

"Do you have any idea what that design actually is?"

The woman stopped on the sill as if frozen, hands
poised. "Oh, oh! That's right!" and then she jumped down
and faced him, her eyes huge with some kind of recollection. "They called it something!"

"The design?"

"Yes, they had a name for it and now that I think of it, it
was a really cool word...."

"Please tell me you remember the word," Berns said,
almost a whisper.

She quickly sat down on the sill, foot tapping. Her elbow was on her bare knee, her chin in her hand as she
clamped her eyes closed to think. Tap-tap-tap, the flip-flop
went. The primal man in Berns' psyche could not be
thwarted from looking down at the vulnerable pose. The
cups of her bikini top hung down enough for most of her
perfect lemon-breasts to be revealed, and their pert pink
nipples.

I really am a shitty police officer, Berns admited to himself.

"Oh, that pisses me off! It was such a cool word, and I
know I wrote it down."

"Where?" he practically pleaded.

"I can't remember-fuck!"

There was something blatantly erotic about hearing her
use the expletive. "Well, just think. You'll remember-"

"Evolution, revolution-that's what it sounded like
but-damn, it wasn't either of them, they're too common."

Berns shot some wild guesses that might connect. "Institution, electrocution ..."

"No, no, but that same sound. Locution? Damn, no,
that means style of speech. Fuck!" she said again.

Of all the information she's given me so far, F need this the
most, Berns thought.

"See, that's why I wrote it down, because it was such a
cool word!"

"A cool word, right. But, just ... What's the most natural place for you to have written it down?"

Then she shrieked and jumped up so fast Berns almost
stumbled backward.

"It's been right here the whole time! How could I forget!" Her body spun in a blue and flesh-tone blur, back to
the partition with the photos. She removed a pushpin and
took down the photo of Freddie Johnson's tattoo. She
handed it to Berns faceup, beaming at him.

"What ..."

"Turn it over," she instructed.

He flipped the photo, and on the back in beautiful feminine handwriting was the word: Involution.

She sighed as if letting out a long-held breath. "Now I
remember."

"I have no idea what this word means," Berns said,
completely duped.

"Well, it's one of those words that has a bunch of meanings. It can refer to anything that's complex or involved,
or it can mean an act of involvement, or an overly involved grammatical structure-"

Berns burned in disappointment. "How can that possibly-"

She shot out a silencing finger, standing on her tiptoes.
"Ooooor, it can refer to a mathematical structure of raising
a number to its own power."

Berns winced. I should've knoum it wouldn't make any
sense. "I still don't see what that could possibly have to do
with that screwy diagram-"

She shot out her finger again. "Ooooor, the last
definition-from geometry, a curve that spirals inward."

Hmm, he thought, looking back at the face of the photo.
Just like the design itself. "A curve that spirals inward, huh?"

"Like the number six," she added.

The unfaltering heat inside the prior house made Venetia
feel prickly, and it only soured her mood after speaking to
Dan Holden. Unpacking addled her nerves; she caught
herself looking around the bedroom every few minutes
and wondering exactly where the nun had been murdered. Patricia Stevenson, she recalled. Venetia's eyes
locked down on the sparse metal-railed bed. I hope she
wasn't murdered on the same bed I have to sleep on! At least
some of her unease lifted when she left the bedroom.

It just infuriated her. Father Driscoll ... Why didn't he tell
me? A pair of recent murders wasn't easy to overlook. She
busied herself in the atrium, changing the bags on several
vacuum cleaners; then she began applying masking tape
to some of the windows that she could tell hadn't been
painted yet.

"Oh, I was just about to get to that myself," Father
Driscoll said, appearing from an office doorway. Dust
and plaster scuffs besmirched his black shirt. "We've still
got a few minutes before dinner."

Venetia turned briskly. "What's this all about?"

"Pardon me?"

"You told me the previous staff retired. Now I hear
they were murdered. That's an interesting definition for
retirement."

He tried to deflect a wince. "Don't believe everything
you hear."

"Oh, so Dan made it up?"

"Ah, the king of gossip. I should've known." Driscoll
unreeled some masking tape. "Actually only half of the
staff was murdered. Two women-the other two left."

"Oh, only half the staff," Venetia replied as sarcastically
as possible. "And what about Father Whitewood? You
told me he retired too, but Dan says he disappeared."

"Disappeared ..." The dusty priest shrugged. "Ibat's a
bit melodramatic. He was old, Venetia. The murders traumatized him. He had a nervous breakdown, so he ran
away."

Venetia studied him. She couldn't believe she was being
this brusque with a priest. "So you're admitting that you
lied to me?"

"Lie ..." He winked. "That's a bit melodramatic, too. I
merely left out some details that weren't pertinent-"

"Weren't pertinent!" Venetia almost laughed.

"And, yes, I'll admit that those details didn't serve my
needs. So I ... skirted the truth, for the good of the
Church." He seemed totally calm as he applied more tape
around the window trim. "If I'd told you everything, you
might not have come, and I really need help here. Half a
dozen other students signed up initially, but they all canceled when-"

"When they found out there'd been murders here,"
Venetia cut in.

"Yes," he said. "It's a terrible tragedy, but don't overreact."

Is he trying to piss me off? "Well, I'm sorry, Father
Driscoll, but I don't think anybody would be overreacting
to learn that a nun was murdered in her bedroom."

Driscoll picked up a Red Devil razor knife to cut off
some tape. "Murders happen all the time, Venetia. Women
get murdered all the time. It's part of the world's evil. It
was a random incident. The police think some drug addicts broke into the prior house looking for things to
steal. They stumbled onto some of the staff and got
scared."