Reliquary (8 page)

The dry chuckle rose again from the hole in the cinder block. “That is you, is it not? William Smithback, scriblerian?”

“Yes, but--”

“For a journalist, you are ill read. Study Pope’s
The Dunciad
before we speak again.”

It began to dawn on Smithback that there was more to this person than he had originally supposed. “Who are you, really?” he asked. “I mean, what’s your real name?”

There was another silence. “I left that, along with everything else, upstairs,” the disembodied voice hissed. “Now I am Mephisto. Never ask me, or anyone, that question again.”

Smithback swallowed. “Sorry,” he said.

Mephisto seemed to have grown angry. His tone became sharper, cutting through the darkness. “You were brought here for a reason.”

“The Wisher murder?” asked Smithback eagerly.

“Your articles have described her, and the other corpse, as being headless. I am here to tell you that being headless is the least of it.” His voice broke into a rasping, mirthless laugh.

“What do you mean?” Smithback asked. “You know who did it?”

“They are the same that have been preying on my people,” Mephisto hissed. “The Wrinklers.”

“Wrinklers?” Smithback said. “I don’t understand--”

“Then be silent and mark me, scriblerian! I have said my community is a safe haven. And so it has always been, until one year ago. Now, we are under attack. Those who venture beyond the safe areas disappear or are murdered. Murdered in the most horrific ways. Our people have grown afraid. My runners have tried time and again to bring this matter to the police. The police!” There was an angry spitting sound, then the voice rose in pitch. “The corrupt watchdogs of a society grown morally bankrupt. To them, we are filth to be beaten and rousted. Our lives mean nothing! How many of our people have died or disappeared? Fat Boy, Hector, Dark Annie, Master Sergeant, others. But one shiny thing in silks gets her head torn off, and the entire city grows enraged!”

Smithback licked his lips. He was beginning to wonder just what information this Mephisto had. “What do you mean exactly, under attack?” he asked.

There was a silence. “From outside,” came the whispered answer at last.

“Outside?” Smithback asked. “What do you mean? Outside, meaning out here?” He looked around the blackness wildly.

“No. Outside Route 666. Outside the Blockhouse,” came the answer. “There is another place. A shunned place. Twelve months ago, rumors began to emerge, rumors that this place had become occupied. Then the killings began. Our people began disappearing. At first, we sent out search parties. Most of the victims were never found. But those we did find had their flesh eaten, their heads ripped from their bodies.”

“Wait a minute,” Smithback said. “Their flesh
eaten
? You mean there is a group of cannibals down here, murdering people and stealing their heads?” Perhaps Mephisto was nuts, after all. Once again, Smithback began to wonder how he would return to the surface.

“I do not appreciate the doubting tone in your voice, scriblerian,” Mephisto replied. “That is
exactly
what I mean. Tail Gunner?”

“Yes?” said a voice in Smithback’s ear. The journalist jumped to one side, neighing in surprise and fright.

“How did he get back here?” Smithback gasped.

“There are many ways through my kingdom,” came the voice of Mephisto. “And living here, in lovely darkness, our night vision becomes acute.”

Smithback swallowed. “Look,” he said, “it isn’t that I don’t believe you. I just--”

“Be silent!” Mephisto warned. “We have spoken long enough. Tail Gunner, return him to the surface.”

“But what about the reward?” Smithback asked, surprised. “Isn’t that why you brought me here?”

“Have you heard nothing I told you?” came the hiss. “Your money is useless to me. It is the safety of my people I care about. Return to your world, write your article. Tell those on the surface what I have told you. Tell them that whatever killed Pamela Wisher is also killing my people. And the killings must stop.” The disembodied voice seemed farther away now, echoing through the dark corridors beneath Smithback’s feet. “Otherwise,” he added with a fearful intensity, “we will find
other
ways to make our voices heard.”

“But I need--” Smithback began.

A hand closed around his elbow. “Mephisto has gone,” came the voice of Tail Gunner beside him. “I’ll take you topside.”

= 7 =

Lieutenant D’Agosta sat in his cramped, glass-sided office, fingering the cigar in his breast pocket and eyeing a stack of reports about the Humboldt Kill dive. Instead of closing one case, he now had two cases, both wide open. As usual, nobody knew nothing, nobody saw nothing. The boyfriend was prostrate with grief and useless as an eyewitness. The father was long dead. The mother was as uncommunicative and remote as an ice goddess. He frowned; the whole Pamela Wisher business felt like nitroglycerine to him.

His eye traveled from the stack of reports to the
NO SMOKING
sign outside his door, and the frown deepened. It and a dozen like it had gone up around the precinct station just the week before.

He slid the cigar out of his pocket and removed its plastic wrapping. No law against chewing on the thing, at any rate. He rolled it lovingly between thumb and index finger for a moment, examining the wrapper with a critical eye. Then he placed it in his mouth.

He sat for a moment, motionless. Then, with a curse, he jerked open the top drawer of his desk, hunted around until he located a kitchen match, and lit it on the sole of his shoe. He applied the flame to the end of the cigar and sat back with a sigh, listening to the faint crackle of tobacco as he drew in the smoke and bled it slowly out his nose.

The internal phone rang shrilly.

“Yes?” D’Agosta answered. Couldn’t be a complaint already. He’d just lit up.

“Lieutenant?” came the voice of the departmental secretary. “There’s a Sergeant Hayward here to see you.”

D’Agosta grunted and sat up in his chair. “Who?”

“Sergeant Hayward. Says it’s by your request.”

“I didn’t ask for any Sergeant Hayward--”

A uniformed woman appeared in the open doorway. Almost instinctively, D’Agosta took in the salient features: petite, thin, heavy breasts, jet black hair against pale skin.

“Lieutenant D’Agosta?” she asked.

D’Agosta couldn’t believe such a deep contralto could come from such a small frame. “Take a seat,” he said, and watched as the Sergeant settled herself in a chair. She seemed to be unconscious of anything irregular, as if it was standard procedure for a sergeant to burst in on a superior anytime he--or she--felt like it.

“I don’t recall asking for you, Sergeant,” D’Agosta finally said.

“You didn’t,” Hayward answered. “But I knew you’d want to see me anyway.”

D’Agosta sat back, drawing slowly on his cigar. He’d let the Sergeant say her piece, then chew her out. D’Agosta wasn’t a stickler for process, but approaching a senior officer like this was way out of line. He wondered if perhaps one of his men had come on to her in some filing room or something. Just what he needed, a sexual harassment suit on his hands.

“Those corpses you found in the Cloaca,” Hayward began.

“What about them?” D’Agosta snapped, suddenly suspicious. A security lid was supposed to be clamped down over the details of that business.

“Before the merger, I used to be with the Transit Police.” Hayward nodded, as if that explained everything. “I still do the West Side duty, clearing the homeless out of Penn Station, Hell’s Kitchen, the railyards, under the--”

“Wait a minute,” D’Agosta interrupted. “You? A rouster?”

Immediately, he knew he’d said the wrong thing. Hayward tensed in the chair, her eyebrows contracting at the obvious disbelief in his voice. There was a moment of awkward silence.

“We don’t like that term, Lieutenant,” she said at last.

D’Agosta decided he had enough to worry about without humoring this uninvited guest. “It’s my office,” he said, shrugging.

Hayward looked at him a moment, and in those brown eyes D’Agosta could almost see her good opinion of him falling away. “Okay,” she said. “If that’s how you want to play it.” She took a deep breath. “When I heard about these skeletons of yours, they rang a bell. Reminded me of some recent homicides among the moles.”

“Moles?”

“Tunnel people, of course,” she said with a condescending look D’Agosta found irritating. “Underground homeless. Anyway, then I read that article in today’s
Post
. The one about Mephisto.”

D’Agosta grimaced. Trust that scandal-hound Bill Smithback to whip readers into a frenzy, make a bad situation worse. The two of them had been friends--after a fashion--but now that Smithback was a homicide reporter, he’d grown almost intolerable. And D’Agosta knew better than to give him the slightest speck of the inside information he was always demanding.

“The life expectancy of a homeless person is very short,” Hayward said. “It’s even worse for the moles. But that journalist was right. Lately, some of the killings have been unusually nasty. Heads missing, bodies ripped up. I thought I’d better come to you about it.” She shifted in her seat and gazed at D’Agosta with her clear brown eyes. “Maybe I should have saved my breath.”

D’Agosta let that pass. “So how many recent homicides we talking about, Hayward?” he asked. “Two? Three?”

Hayward paused. “More like half a dozen,” she said at last.

D’Agosta looked at her, cigar halfway to mouth. “Half a
dozen
?”

“That’s what I said. Before coming up here, I looked through the files. Seven murders among the moles in the last four months match this MO.”

D’Agosta lowered the cigar. “Sergeant, let me get this straight. You got some kind of underground Jack the Ripper here, and nobody’s on top of it?”

“Look, it was just a hunch on my part, okay?” Hayward said defensively. “Back off me. These aren’t my homicides.”

“So why didn’t you go through channels and report this to your superior? Why are you coming to me?”

“I
did
go to my boss. Captain Waxie. Know him?”

Everyone knew Jack Waxie. The fattest, laziest Precinct Captain in the city. A man who had reached his position by doing nothing and offending nobody. A year earlier, D’Agosta had been up for promotion to captain himself, thanks to a grateful mayor. Then there was the election, Mayor Harper was thrown out of office, and a new mayor rode into City Hall on promises of tax cuts and reduced spending. In the resulting fallout at One Police Plaza, Waxie got a captainship and a precinct, but D’Agosta was passed over. Some world.

Hayward crossed one leg over the other. “Mole homicides aren’t like homicides on the surface. Most of the corpses we don’t even find. And when we do, the rats and dogs have usually found them long before. Many are John Does, can’t be ID’d even in good condition. And the other moles sure as hell won’t talk.”

“And Jack Waxie just files everything away.”

Hayward frowned again. “He doesn’t give a shit about those people.”

D’Agosta looked at her for a minute, wondering why an old-school chauvinist like Waxie would have taken a five-foot-three female rouster onto his staff. Then his eyes lighted once again on her narrow waist, pale skin, and brown eyes, and he knew the answer. “Okay, Sergeant,” he said at last. “I’ll bite. You got locations?”

“Locations is about all I’ve got.”

D’Agosta’s cigar had gone out, and he fumbled through his drawer for another match. “So where were they found?” he asked.

“Here and there.” Hayward dug a computer printout out of a pocket, unfolded it, and slid it across the desk.

D’Agosta glanced at the sheet as he lit up. “First one was found April 30, at 624 West Fifty-eighth Street.”

“Boiler room in the basement. There’s an old access to a railway turnabout there, which is why it was TA jurisdiction.”

D’Agosta nodded and glanced at the sheet. “Next one was found May 7 beneath the Columbus Circle IRT station. The third one was found May 20, RR Stem B4, track 22, milepost 1.2. Where the hell is that?”

“Closed freight tunnel that used to connect to the West Side railyard. The moles break through the walls to get into some of those tunnels.”

D’Agosta listened, enjoying his cigar. A year earlier, after hearing about the promised promotion, he’d switched from Garcia y Vegas to Dunhills. Though the promotion had never materialized, D’Agosta hadn’t been able to convince himself to switch back. He glanced again at Hayward, still looking back at him impassively. She wasn’t very good at respecting superior officers. But despite her small frame, she carried an air of natural self-confidence and authority. It had taken initiative, coming to him like this. Guts, too. For a moment he regretted starting off on the wrong foot with her.

“This isn’t exactly departmental procedure, your coming to see me like this,” he said. “Still, I appreciate your taking the time.”

Hayward nodded almost imperceptibly, as if acknowledging his compliment without accepting it.

“I don’t want to bust in on Captain Waxie’s jurisdiction,” D’Agosta continued. “But I can’t pass this up, just in case there’s a connection. I guess you figured that out already. So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to forget you came to see me.”

Hayward nodded again.

“And I’m gonna call up Waxie like I got these reports on my own, and then we’ll do a little sight-seeing.”

“He isn’t going to like that. The only sight he likes is the view out the precinct window.”

“Oh, he’ll come along. It wouldn’t look too good if a lieutenant did his job for him while he sat there on his ass. Especially if this turns out to be big. A serial killer among the homeless--that could be politically explosive. So we’ll take a little stroll, just the three of us. No use getting the brass stirred up.”

Immediately, Hayward frowned. “Not smart,” she said. “Lieutenant, it’s dangerous down there. It’s not our turf; it’s theirs. And it’s not what you think, either. These aren’t just a handful of burnt-out mainliners. There’re some pretty radicalized people down there, whole communities, Vietnam vets, ex-cons, hardcore SDS remnants, parole violators. There’s nothing they hate more than cops. We’ll need at least a squad.”