Kiss of Evil (9 page)

“Good afternoon,” Paris says. He motions to the waitress.

Mercedes wipes her glasses with a napkin, looks at some of the material on the table. “Santeria, eh?” she asks, rolling the
r
perfectly. She slips into the booth, orders coffee, sunny-side-up eggs and cinnamon toast. She takes out her spiral notebook and pen. “What is your interest in Santeria?”

“Off the record?”

“Off the record,” Mercedes repeats, hand over heart. She drops her pen into her bag.

Paris studies her earnest face for a few moments. He couldn’t give her too many details of the investigation into Willis Walker’s murder but decides he will trust her about the record. “It may be involved in a homicide I’m working on.”

“I see.”

“Are you a . . . um . . .”

“Am I a follower?”

“Okay. Are you?” Paris asks.

Mercedes laughs. “No, far from it. I’m a Catholic girl, detective. Twelve years of nuns at St. Augustine’s, four more with the Jesuits at Marquette. Skirts an inch from the floor when kneeling, confession every Saturday, communion every Sunday.”

Paris smiles with the recollection of his own youth and the dreaded confessional. Father O’Hern and his booming baritone, bellowing Paris’s sins for half the church to hear. “Catholic Youth Organization, too?”

“
Oh
yeah. I was the talent coordinator for CYO dances for three years. Got the Raspberries once.”

“Impressive.”

Mercedes’s food arrives. She begins a ritual of making two half-sandwiches of the cinnamon toast and eggs—including a carefully placed dollop of ketchup on each slice—then meticulously stacking them on top of each other. A fried-egg-ketchup-and-cinnamon club sandwich, Paris thinks. That’s a new one. She tucks into the drippy yellow-and-red concoction like a long-haul trucker after a three-day speed run.

“Anyway,” Mercedes continues, wiping her lips, “with that résumé, I guess I’m about as far from a
santero
as a gal can be, eh?”

A
santero
, Paris had learned no more than a few minutes earlier, is a type of Santerian priest. “I’d say so.”

“But I do know that there is a popular botanica on Fulton Road,” Mercedes says. “Right near St. Rocco’s.”

“A botanica?”

“A botanica is a place to buy charms, herbs, potions. Most of the items are for followers of Santeria, but sometimes I think they get—how shall I say—more
diverse
requests for materials.”

“Such as?”

“I’m not really sure. Like I said, I still carry a St. Christopher medal, okay? That’s how Catholic
I
am. I have a few friends in the old neighborhood who dabble in Santeria. What I’ve told you is about all I know about it.”

“Have you ever heard of Palo Mayombe?”

“No. Sorry.”

Paris thinks for a moment. “So, if somebody was into the darker ends of Santeria, they might frequent this botanica?”

“Or one like it. Like Catholicism, Santeria is full of ceremony. Ceremony needs props. There’s always an ad or two for botanicas in my newspaper.”

Mercedes rummages in her bag, produces a copy of
Mondo Latino
. She opens it to the center, then taps a small display ad in the lower right-hand corner of the page.

Paris takes it from her and—suddenly self-conscious for some reason—puts his glasses on. The ad is for La Botanica Macumba on Fulton Road and trumpets some of the shop’s exotic wares: brimstone, lodestone, black salt, quills, palm oil, rose water. The botanica also offers custom gift baskets that include spirit-calling sticks, dream pillows, magnetic sand, dove’s blood ink. To Paris, two of the stranger-sounding products in the ad are the Fast Luck Bags from Guatemala and something called Four Thieves Vinegar.

“So,” Paris says, “you have no idea what any of this stuff is used for?”

“A little. Most of Santeria is harmless as far as I know. People casting spells for a new job, a new car, a new house. Mostly for a new lover.”

“Of course.”

“Hey, didn’t you ever pray for some girl to like you when you were a teenager?”

Teenager? How about last
week
, Paris thinks. “I guess I did,” he says. “Okay. All the time.”

Mercedes laughs and attacks the last bite of her egg sandwich as Paris’s pager goes off. He excuses himself from the booth. Two minutes later he is back.

“There’s been another murder,” Paris says, grabbing his coat from the booth, slipping it on. “A woman.”

Mercedes covers her mouth for a moment, then checks her watch, makes an entry in her notebook. “Are we going there?”

“Yes. One of the other detectives is the primary on this, but there appears to be evidence that might link this murder to a case I’m working on.”

“You think it may be the same person who did this other killing?” Mercedes asks as she slides out of the booth. “The one involving Santeria?”

“Way too early to tell,” Paris says. “But this one’s a little different already.”

“Different how?”

Paris decides to see what she’s made of. A little severe, perhaps, but necessary. “Well, for one thing, she’s missing the top of her head.”

“Oh my God,” Mercedes says, the color vacating her face. For a moment, it looks as if she just realized what the Homicide Unit actually does.

“And so far,” adds Paris, dropping a tip on the table, “no one’s been able to locate her brain.”

The Reginald Building, at the corner of East Fortieth Street and Central Avenue, is a shabby, six-room structure that still holds on to ruins of its long list of tenants. One side of the building boasts faded Jheri Curl and Posner’s ads; the other side, a hand-painted takeout menu for Weeza’s Corner Café.

When Paris had been a patrolman he had spent many a dinner break parked across the street, partaking of Weeza’s short-rib dinners, washing it all down with RC Cola, the only soft drink Louisa Mac McDaniels would stock. He knew that the owner of the building—one Reginald G. Moncrief, also known in those days as Sugar Pop—had had big plans for the building and its adjacent lot at one time, having even rented out a pair of rooms in the back for a short period, until the housing authority shut him down. Everything, of course, changed the night someone in the men’s room at the Mad Hatter disco parted Reggie Moncrief’s hair about four inches too low with a slug from a .44 Magnum.

The yellow crime-scene tape is wrapped around the entire building and, in spite of the snow, in spite of the cold, a crowd is beginning to gather in front of the vacant lot across East Fortieth Street.

The front doorway to the Reginald Building is busy with SIU activity. Paris and Mercedes are routed to the side door, facing Central Avenue. Paris leaves Mercedes Cruz in the care of a uniformed officer for the time being and steps into the building and is immediately solicited by the smell of death, by the damp perfume of neglect. A quick scan of the room: crack vials, spent condoms, broken glass, fast-food trash. The temporary lighting that had been brought in is throwing more light than the interior of this building has seen for years. Cobwebs hang in thick cascades from every corner; the floor is dotted with dead insects, animal feces, tiny bones. Paris notices a pair of small black mice scurrying along one wall, probably wondering why their home has been so loudly and brightly invaded.

Paris locates Greg Ebersole in this scene. He is standing near the SIU team, talking on his cellphone.

Sergeant Gregory Ebersole is forty-one, spare, and red-haired: a mongoose in an Alfani suit. Paris had seen him get physical with suspects a few times and remembers being surprised and impressed at Greg’s speed and agility. What was scary about guys like Greg Ebersole, Paris had always thought, was not the cards they showed you, but the ones they didn’t. Behind the cool, jade eyes, beneath the freckles and affable exterior, lurks a man capable of all manner of explosive behavior.

But as Paris approaches Greg he sees the sallowness of the man’s skin, the weariness in his eyes. Greg’s six-year-old son Max had recently undergone heart surgery, a fairly routine procedure, it was said, but one that thoroughly exhausted the Ebersoles’ insurance, and then some. Greg had once confided that he would owe tens of thousands of dollars before it was all over. Paris knew of two part-time jobs Greg worked. He suspected there were more. This very evening there is a benefit for Max Ebersole at the Caprice Lounge. Looking at Greg now, Paris wonders if the man is going to make it.

Greg sees Paris, nods in greeting, points toward the body.

Paris acknowledges him and finds the victim in the back room, near the rusted ovens that once prepared bread pudding and the like for customers of Weeza’s Corner Café. The body is covered with a plastic sheet, and next to it stands a very nervous, bespectacled black officer. Paris approaches, mindful of the small areas of chalk-circled evidence on the floor.

“How ya doin’?” Paris says, stepping into the room.

“Just fine, sir,” the officer lies. He is heavyset, clean-shaven, no more than twenty-two years old. Paris locates the man’s name tag: M.C. Johnson.

“What’s your first name, Patrolman Johnson?”

“Marcus, sir.”

“How long have you been on the job, Marcus?” Paris asks, putting on a pair of rubber gloves, recalling that, when he was a young officer, he always appreciated ordinary conversation at moments like these.

Patrolman Marcus Calvin Johnson looks at his watch. “About six hours, sir.”

Six hours, Paris thinks. He remembers his own nerve-racking first day in blue. He was absolutely certain that he and his mentor—a highly decorated street cop named Vincent Stella, a lifer well into his forties at that time—would stumble upon a bank robbery in progress and that Patrolman John Salvatore Paris would shoot his own partner. “Tough assignment right out of the box, eh?”

“
Oh
yeah,” Patrolman Johnson answers at the entrance to a deep breath, one that swells his cheeks for a moment, the kind of breath that generally precedes a roll of the eyes and a quick trip to the linoleum.

“Hang in there, Marcus,” Paris says. “It’s not always this bad.”

“I’ll try, sir.”

Paris tucks his tie into his shirt pocket, nods to the officer, then hunkers down next to the body. Patrolman Johnson pulls back the sheet. Immediately, Paris wants to amend his pearl of wisdom for the rookie cop.

It’s
never
this bad.

Because there is something so very wrong about what Paris is looking at. It is the body of a partially clothed young white woman, lying prone, her face turned to the left. She has very pretty legs, is wearing a short white skirt, white high heels. She is wearing no blouse or bra, and Paris can now see that the same symbol he had seen on Willis Walker’s tongue is carved between her shoulder blades. The primitive-looking bow and arrow. But even the horror of that symbol, at this moment, cannot compare to the hideousness that is to be found just a few inches away.

The victim—a woman who surely had friends and family and coworkers and lovers, a woman who quite possibly had children of her own—simply stops at her forehead. Above it, above her ears, there is nothing.

Air.

Paris forces himself to look at the top of the woman’s head. It is lying next to her right shoulder, a clotted, empty bone-bowl, framed by tendrils of blood-blackened hair that seem to reach for him like Medusa’s snakes.

“Okay,” Paris says to the grateful Patrolman Johnson, who has been staring at the ceiling and hyperventilating. “You can cover her.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Paris walks over to Greg Ebersole, who is standing near the front door; he can see that Greg is pumped and primed for this one: arms crossed, nostrils flaring, fingers beating out a rhythm on his biceps, detective’s eyes re-drawing the crime scene over and over in his mind. Floor, ceiling, wall, door, window. Silent witnesses, all.

And while it is true that homicide detectives have absolutely no power to prevent murders from occurring, whenever something like this happens—an arrogant, vicious killing after which the perpetrator does not even have the decency to turn himself in or kill himself—it is tantamount to saying to the detectives that I, a murderer, am much smarter than you are. And, to some cops, that is almost worse than the murder itself.

Jack Paris is just such a cop. Greg Ebersole, too.

“Who found her?” Paris asks.

“Fifteen-year-old kid and his girlfriend,” Greg says. He flips a page in his notebook. “Shawn Curry and Dionna Whitmore.”

“Any reason to hold them?”

“Nah. We’ve got their statements.” He gestures to the mattress in the corner. “This was just their love shack.”

“How’d they get in?”

“Back door,” Greg replies. He turns another page, holds up his notebook, showing Paris the now familiar bow-and-arrow emblem, a replica Greg had drawn in pencil. “That your symbol?” he asks, staring straight ahead.

“It sure looks like it,” Paris says, then lowers his voice. “Did I hear this right? No one’s found her brain?”

“Nope,” Greg says. “We’ve cleared the building. Nothing.”

“You think this fucker took it
with
him?”

Greg turns, fixes Paris with an adrenaline-charged stare, a look that Paris had seen a thousand times before, the one that says:
We have eleven-year-old hit men in this country, Jack. People who fuck and strangle their own children. We have guys who dress up in clown suits and bury thirty boys under their houses; drug gangs that harvest unborn babies right from the womb. We’ve both seen these things. Shall we now be shocked that someone is making doggie bags of human brains?

“I guess I have my answer,” Paris says.

“I guess you do,” Greg replies, nearly salivating at the prospect of this new chase, this fresh opportunity to catch a murderer and put him on the other side of the bars. Or, preferably, in this case, the other side of the sod. “I guess you
do
.”