The Pressure of Darkness (7 page)

"If it isn't in the police report I will find out."

Nicole reached into her pocket and slid a set of keys across the bar. Burke let them sit on the polished wood. He arched an eyebrow. "The keys to his house and home office," Nicole said. "The police were far more concerned about the crime scene and said they'd get there tomorrow. I doubt you will have any trouble going through his things tonight."

"Okay."

"Search all you want." Nicole Stryker seemed weary. "Remember that this was a man who loved scary stories and secret passageways, so be vigilant. You may find books, women's clothing, religious artifacts, and all manner of strangeness, Mr. Burke. Do not be distracted from your primary purpose. I want to know what really happened up in that hotel suite. And why."

SIX

The premium coffee shop was furnished in forest green colors with silver metal bars and extended from the outer wall of a large-chain bookstore like some stark, metastasized growth. Jack Burke was seated at a corner table with a long yellow note pad, a sharpened pencil, and a stack of paperback books written by Peter Stryker. Burke was a speed-reader, and some college girls at a nearby table watch in awe as his eyes and practiced fingers raced through the pages.

"You take lessons to do that?"

"Huh?" He shook his head. There were two of them. One was a lanky blonde in cut-off jeans and a red halter top, the other a plump and slightly busty brunette in a blue pants suit. They were likely students at nearby Cal State Northridge or one of the other colleges. Burke wondered, not for the first time, why pretty girls always seemed to have another, less attractive female along for company. Perhaps so they could have an audience as they exercised their power. The blonde was trying to flirt.

"The reading thing?" She coaxed him with body language, leaning forward so her breasts were accentuated.

Burke allowed her a thin smile. "I was in the service for a while. I always read a lot, but they had a course in speed-reading and I took it twice."

The blonde widened her eyes, batted those lashes. "Oh, I do love uniforms." Scarlet O'Hara came to mind. Her friend seemed embarrassed.

"That so?"

"I'm serious." She extended her hand like a princess. "My name is Tiffany."

But of course it is,
Burke thought.
And this is 'mysterious older man day.'
He took her hand. "Kevin O'Brien." He gave the name of a long-dead cousin.

The girl moved in for the kill. She edged her chair closer. Her friend sought shelter in a make-up mirror and doodled in the foam of a latte. To her credit, she appeared mortified. Meanwhile, the blonde purred. "And what did you do in the service, Kevin?"

Burke's eyes were slate, face leaden. "Oh, I killed people, Tiff," he said. "Sometimes civilians. Quite a few, in fact."

Her smile froze and soon wavered. She eased away from him, mouth working furiously, like an anal retentive housewife who just found a roach in her broth. Her friend snorted and leapt to her feet. A man at a nearby table struggled not to laugh. Burke looked down and resumed reading. He did not give the girl another thought.

Burke found
Passageway
a pile of crap. It was easy material to speed through. He could see the so-called scary moments coming a mile away. Stryker's first novel was flat and derivative, although the author did have a decent flair for language. Burke finished the book in a few minutes, put a few reminder notes and page numbers on the pad, and started on the next book. It was marginally better, but junk nonetheless. The author tried to write about Native American rituals but got many of his facts wrong. The characters were almost laughably cardboard, the ending cinematic in the worst sense of the word. As Burke read, the real world faded away.

He was on his third coffee when he started the next-to-last novel. It had more depth of characterization and a lighter writing style, and something had begun to resonate deeply within the structure. It was existential angst, something with which Burke was quite familiar. The author had a macabre preoccupation with concepts like the existence of random chance, and the fact that life may have no intrinsic meaning. Even speeding through these pages, Burke found them disconcerting. Not only did the lead character confront an utter pointlessness to his life and the failure of feeble attempts to be moral and courageous, but evil forces won out at the conclusion. The book was well done, and profoundly disturbing.

As Jack Burke put the book down, he was suddenly cloaked in a gray, weighted melancholy. Peter Stryker may have started out a hack, but he ended his life as a novelist of considerable talent.

Burke had one book to go, the latest and last novel. He turned the book over in his hands. The title was
A Taste for Flesh
. He studied the needlessly inflammatory copy on the back, which described TERROR UNLEASHED and a DEPRAVITY BEYOND DESCRIPTION. The print size and color seemed reasonably restrained, but the jacket hyperbole reminded him of a B movie poster from the 1950s. Despite that, Burke knew that this book was likely to be far better than it appeared.

"Sir?"

The coffee shop was crowded. Burke set the book on the table. A pimple-faced kid in an apron festooned with dancing coffee beans was doing his best to be assertive. "Sir, you've been sitting here for a long time, and there are others waiting for a table."

After a brief flash of irritation, Burke sighed and got to his feet. To his dismay, the kid was spooked by his size and backpedaled rapidly, bumping into a pair of customers still standing in line. Embarrassed, Burke took the final novel but left the others on the table. He walked away.

"Sir, you forgot your books?" The kid was so frightened he made a statement of fact a question, the sentence rising in pitch at the end.

"Thanks. You can keep them."

Burke strolled down the crowded Ventura Boulevard, mildly surprised to find the day coming to a close. He found a parking ticket on his vehicle. He tore up and tossed it away. The car would change owners several times before the city had registered the existence of the citation, might even be out of the state. Tony Monteleone would take care of it.

Burke drove down Ventura to Hazeltine and turned north. He left his car in the lot of the Trader Joe's store and jogged over to the park around the corner. Hispanic children were laughing and throwing water balloons at a nearby birthday party. Their lips were red or purple from cheap snow cones. Other children hung from the bars of the jungle gym. The sun would soon be setting, but Burke figured he had just enough time. He scribbled notes on the yellow pad, brief thoughts on the tone of the previous work, more to have something to do than from necessity.

He sat beneath the canopy of a sickly elm and opened Stryker's magnum opus. The main character in
A Taste for Flesh
was a middle-aged loner whose life was fading fast. He was being passed over for promotions. His wife had left him for another, much younger man. The beaten-down protagonist elected to take a long vacation in Europe. He wandered east, into the former Soviet satellites. Although he loved the art and culture, the protagonist found the economic and social circumstances depressing. Soon he was drinking too much and seriously contemplating suicide. Burke was pleasantly surprised. The novel had proven to be far more literate than pulp, at least to this point. Indeed, it was well conceived and deftly written. Burke had momentarily forgotten the author's reputation and found himself absorbed by both the telling and the tale.

And that's when Stryker went for the throat, quite literally: the protagonist was bitten by a wolf. His story turned on a dime and became a lurid tale of the mythical and the lycanthropic, the hero as a troubled werewolf. Yet Burke still found the novel compelling, for while the man descended into madness, he also began to re-discover his archetypal masculine power. The man becomes the wolf as the wolf becomes the man. To be sure, both did murder in a plethora of crimson ways. The violence was blunt, to the point, and decidedly messy, but as Burke himself knew all too well, so was violence in real life. It was the subtext that was most gripping; a hint of Nietzsche, lightly seasoned with Joseph Campbell.

He read on. Much weight was given to the ramifications of anthropophagy, the devouring of human flesh, and its varied implications. The protagonist, as the novel progressed, slowly moved from an attitude of revulsion to one of spiritual reverence. This odd concoction was then half-baked in recycled Stephen King imagery, but worked nonetheless. At the end of the novel, the protagonist had become something of a God to the peasants in the countryside and a hero to himself again. His inevitable physical death, therefore, was of very little consequence because his spirit lived on.

The acknowledgments made reference to a Dr. Theodore Merriman. Burke decided on the spot to pay the man a visit.

He lowered the book and rubbed his weary eyes. The park was flooding with long, cool shadows and most of the picnicking families had gone home. He watched three males of indeterminate age as they tossed a football in a long, triangulated pattern. Their voices, shrill with enthusiasm and ribald humor, stroked his weary brain. He envied them their laughter.

Later, Burke stopped at a nearly empty restaurant for a plain chicken breast and a salad. He sat alone at a table near the front window, listening to Vivaldi with half an ear, weary eyes on the rush hour traffic, a sea of headlights, tail lights, street lamps all reflecting and refracting light. Meanwhile a gentle mist of rain, unseasonable but welcome, stroked moist ribbons of color down the clear glass. Burke paid for the meal in cash. He needed no receipt. Over a double espresso, he examined his notes one last time, then left and drove home.

The rain stopped. As Burke pulled into his driveway and got out of the car, he noted the damp, erotic odor of satiated plants. A motion detector flipped on the porch light. He let himself in, double-locked the door behind him and set the alarm for the night. He went into the Spartan bedroom and stripped to his shorts, then took his laundry to the garage. He started the washing machine, grabbed a glass of soda water from the kitchen, and moved into his office.

This was a room possessed, overflowing with books of all shapes and sizes. In contrast to the rest of the pristine house, Burke's office was an ever-evolving chaos where yellow Post-its with scribbled notes lay randomly and crookedly tacked to cork bulletin boards or taped to the lips of crowded shelves. A row of blue plastic tubs contained obese files, facts garnered from random readings, reference papers unlikely to be read again. Burke fired up his computer. He scanned the papers Nicole Stryker had given him, the list of potential enemies and suspects, and e-mailed them to his office with a note:
Gina, check these folks out for alibis
. If anyone could make sense of such a complicated assignment, it would be his partner.

WEREWOLVES. The name in the search engine brought over two million hits. Some of the first hundred were useful, including one that assembled data from medieval times. Another contained an entire translation of
The Book of Werewolves
by Sabine Baring-Gold, first published in 1865. There were websites clearly created by mental cases, people claiming to know or actually be werewolves, people just looking to have sex with some. Burke was an old hand at research. He tried the word LYCANTHROPY. He printed out whatever seemed useful, grabbed another soda, and studied the printer as it grunted away. Next, LOUP-GAROU. Half a million hits. A few more selections at random.

When he had nearly two hundred pages of reference material, Burke returned to the living room. He parked on the plain brown couch, flicked on the bronze lamp, began to read. He scanned the pages, fingertips moving rapidly, and absorbed as much information as possible. Burke had no idea what he was looking for. He was merely following what he presumed to be a trail similar to the one blazed by the author of that last novel. He wanted to see what Peter Stryker had seen, go where he had been, in the hopes that path would eventually lead him to the truth.

Finally, Burke turned out the light and sat alone in the darkness. He had learned nothing of import. For a few uneasy moments, he pondered his time in combat: the taste of fear, sight of fresh blood, the split, pulsing flesh of the wounded. He tried to fathom a genuine craving for the taste of raw, human meat, but couldn't manage it. And yet the conceit of the novel had seemed fully plausible to him, unusually compelling. Was Peter Stryker simply an author of true talent, or did his final obsession have something to do with his ugly, agonizing death?

After a time Burke assumed the cross-legged, lotus position. He started to breathe slowly and deeply. He observed the vague sound of traffic outside, released it. Burke observed first his body, then stray thoughts, fall away. He entered a fugue state. Burke knew that the area of his brain that regulated the position of the physical self to other objects was slowly fading into gray, as if controlled by a dimmer switch. The powerful sense of "oneness" was soon palpable. Burke savored it, even as it began to recede and the external world returned. He rose refreshed, tossed the stack of papers into his messy office, and got dressed for the night.

SEVEN

Jack Burke drove the misty streets with no radio playing, windows up and mind closed. His body knew the route. He sat in his car in the nearly deserted parking lot and prayed for several long minutes, then entered the plain, antiseptic building. Visiting always made him think about death, and death made him feel too achingly alone for words. Burke signed in and walked alone down the corridor; hesitant footsteps booming, quick breath harsh and thin as sandpaper. He slid into the room, moved the chair to the window. He rubbed his eyes and sat back.

"Hello."

Burke closed his eyes and after a long, weighted moment offered a disconnected, whispered response. "I love you."

"I love you, too."

A rubbery, elongated section of silence followed. "I got a new job," Burke said, finally. "It pays very well."