The Storm Murders (32 page)

“Is he trained?” he asked.

“Merlin?” Cinq-Mars replied. “He has his tricks. Farm life demands it. If one of us is unresponsive, say from a horse kick or a heart attack, he knows to run to get the other. If no one else is about he’ll charge off to the next farm. That’s his best trick. And, you know, I lived the life of a cop with enemies. Sandra was often alone on the farm. So she keeps a weapon and, yes, even in his old age, Merlin will refuse entry to an intruder and defend San if given the command. He’s a sweet old dog, but his bark and growl are still impressive. I heard him giving it to a racoon up a tree not so long ago.”

The agent had a silly grin on his face, and had forgotten his original question. He raised his right arm over his head and pronounced, “I am not a man with any great capacity for alcohol. Although I do enjoy it. I have a theory, namely that my parents never drank. Somehow my body developed little tolerance. Nonetheless, I have enough sense left in me to know that I will not be driving home tonight, or anywhere else—where would I go?—and so your kind invitation, your so kind, really so kind invitation, is accepted. With whatever flourish I can muster. Now if I may put bring to a close what is possibly an endless string of embarrassments, I believe that the hour has arrived for me to retire for the evening.”

Sandra showed him to his room, having to endure more babble despite his vow otherwise. Returning downstairs, she found
É
mile sipping Scotch again. He was hovering a little off the ground, but seemed under control.

“How can you drink that stuff?” he asked, indicating the last wine bottle, still half full.

“Not me. It’s all down Agent Dreher’s throat.
É
mile, I saw something in the basement.”

“Mice? Not a rat.”

“I was reading your flip chart.”

“Oh that. I’m under the impression that I don’t remember things as well as I used to. No big deal. So I’m keeping a record that’s easy to reference. I know, I know, please don’t start, I should be using a computer by now.”

“
É
mile, I saw descriptions of two men. If I understood your notes properly, they were associated with the Lumens. Is that right?”

Cinq-Mars lingered over another sip. “If you were on that page, yes. Description is overstating what the local farmers told me. A bald guy with biggish ears and a short-haired man with a stout build and maybe a touch of rosacea only narrows it down to, oh, I don’t know, half the general population in that age group.”

He seemed to be interested in his own thoughts, and Sandra waited, until he noticed her.

“What?” Cinq-Mars asked.

“A bald guy with biggish ears and a short-haired man with rosacea doesn’t narrow it down, unless they show up in each other’s company a second time.”

“Meaning?”

“
É
mile, for heaven’s sake. You should write
everything
down.”

“I’m trying. Why?”

“Those two descriptions, as vague and as general as they may be, also fit two of the men from New Orleans.”

“What two men?” Then he went wholly attentive. “You don’t mean—?”

“The ones who abducted me, yes.”

He looked at her and then his right hand rose to his forehead. He left it there as if holding a cap in place.

“I don’t recall you mentioning rosacea.”

“Ruddy-cheeked, I think I said.”

Now he remembered her phrase. In a moment, his hand traveled over the top of his head and down the back of his neck before returning to the tabletop. He gripped his glass of whiskey. Sipped. Gazed at Sandra again, and smiled.

“My God,” he said. “Good work.”

She laughed a little. “Yeah. Work. These dishes, this mess—”

“I can take care of it.”

“I know you can, and you may. But not tonight, Detective. We’re leaving it all until the morning. You’re coming to bed.”

He was not disinclined to go. As they went through the lower floor turning out lights, Merlin padding along behind them, they did so arm-in-arm and bound together. Even though the fit was tight, they maintained close contact on up the stairs where they turned off the last pair of overheads.

TWENTY THREE

She could arouse a eunuch before breakfast. Cause a neutered dog to moan. Play spin-the-bottle with an octogenarian on life-support and, between wheezing and pleading for his oxygen mask, watch him grow playful again. A dying man might wink.

All tomfoolery, she knew, but still, if she was not the first woman a man might notice in a bar she’d be the last one he forgot. She’d make a point of it. This one didn’t think he was God’s gift exactly, he was humble enough in his way and a kindly sort, nonetheless he initially gave off an air that he was doing her a favor. With half his scrotum in her right fist and her left thumb down his throat and words more enticingly whispered in his ear than he could bear, he was half-bent backward and groaning and crying out and they’d barely gotten started. She even spoke her mind. “Doing me a favor there, bud? Think so? By the time I’m done, there won’t be much left of you.” Maybe so, but he was up for the challenge, and she wouldn’t have to do all the work either. She let him rummage around and did a little writhing and gasping of her own. Whatever spot he neglected she attended to herself, so that it felt at times that a dozen wanton hands were on her flesh at once and six slippery tongues. The man had game that surprised her.

Vira Sivak wanted men to abdicate thrones, if not for her than for the sex she provided them. She made it a point of pride. She wanted to return married men to their lairs feeling disinterred, vampire-like, scoured, and replenished, glad to inhabit the sanctity of their own rooms once more, too petrified to ever emerge at night again. She fixed them. She wanted to vanquish the wannabe Lotharios, cause them to feel the absence of their own skins, their nerve-endings denuded. For the scarce, genuine hot-to-trot testosterone-macho blood-rush studs out there, oh God bless them, the tender ones especially, let the walls fall down when they collided with her, both of them having gleefully met their match.

This guy was working out for her. Limited in his gymnastics, but she got to relax and just enjoy herself at times, too. Perfect for her mood.

A decent enough guy that he attended to her gratification before his own.

After they were done, and the return to a steady heartbeat was gradual and sweet, she accepted his compliments and dished out a few of her own. He was honorably depleted, she could tell, but he didn’t seem intent on sleep right away and perhaps was seeking an elegant way out the door.

“I have a decent Irish whiskey in the car,” he proposed. Surprising her.

The offer told her that he had his doubts at the outset, otherwise he’d have brought the bottle up with him when they first arrived, she in her rental, he in his.

“Jameson?” She named a whiskey, but had to think twice to remember his. Blake, something? The sex had been good enough for her mind to still be fuzzy.

“Tyrconnell,” he corrected her. “My choice of poison on the road. Something I started years ago, just stuck with it.”

“So you’re in sales.”

“Somebody has to make the world go ’round. The sun won’t come up in the morning without somebody somewhere making a pitch.”

“I prefer my whiskey on ice. Would you mind taking the bucket with you? The machine’s straight below us, between the outer stairs and the office.”

He didn’t mind and snatched up the plastic bucket after dressing. Would he be back? She didn’t know and clothed herself in loungewear. Either way she’d be awake for some time before retiring. Having taken the trouble to put his clothes on, she assumed that his easy exit was to enjoy a nightcap and then be gone. Vira Sivak was fine with that. She lured the animal out of him, and now he was a gentlemen. Could she ask for better on a stormy night in Alabama?

She admitted to herself though that, when he knocked, she was pleased. Perhaps he’d be up for a quieter second round.

Out of habit she checked the keyhole first. He held the ice bucket in view. She opened up.

The bucket and ice struck her face with the force of a sledgehammer and Vira Sivak reeled backward, struck the jamb to the bathroom door, and landed hard on the floor. By the time she yelped for the first time the door to her room was already shut and her assailant was twisting her around and—
no! damnit!
—taping her mouth. She had never done well with her self-defense training, and her wrists were buckled behind her back before she could even see what method he was using. The bindings bit into her skin and by now she was kicking, furiously kicking, but the man in the room didn’t seem to mind.

She looked at him and he looked back at her. He was not the man with whom she just made love. Perhaps that man—
Blake!
—would return. Perhaps he would save her yet. She needed to buy time. To depend on him. She had to hope that more animal was left in him. She kicked again, but this time her assailant objected. He pulled out a pistol and so she stopped. She was breathing heavily, and trying to quell her panic. He leered over her.

“Do what you’re told,” he ordered. He aimed the barrel of the gun just to the left of her eyeball and she nodded in compliance. “Good,” he said.

He hauled her up so aggressively her loungewear tore and he dropped her into the chair that served the small writing desk. She heard the tape pulled sharply free of its roll and momentarily her arms were bound to the chair. He put the gun down. For good measure he wrapped the sticky tape around her body and around the chair and then he held her chin in his hands and made her look up at him.

The fire in her eyes amused him.

“Do I need to wrap up your legs, too? Seriously. Do I?”

She couldn’t believe the question, but she understood it. She shook her head. She calmed down again.

He ripped her thin lounging frock further to expose her breasts and thighs. She did not know why. He did not look at her after that, nor did he touch her.

“Settle down,” he told her. “Be a good girl. There’s something I want to show you.”

Not for the first time she wanted to scream,
What? What?
But nothing she intended to say sounded any different than a muted groan.

The man was barrel-chested, not tall but weighing well over two hundred pounds with excess weight around the middle, but his arms, she’d found out, were like steel and he could snap her, she knew, with just one hand. The man wore a sports jacket wet from the rain, and he was reaching into a side pocket and pulling out something from a brown bag that was wrapped as well in cellophane. She started pushing herself away from him as the wrappings were undone, and she hit back against the bed, able to push herself no further. The last of the cellophane was removed, and she tried to turn her head away, as much from the consequences now as from the horror of the thing itself.

“Recognize it?” the man taunted her. She didn’t like his voice, the onion smell of him, the garlicky breath, the venomous tone. She tried to keep her eyes steered off him but he made her look. “Your lover’s,” he said. “Bet it was just inside you. Was it? Hey? Was it?”

Her evening lover’s ring finger. Well bloodied. He had been a married man. The ring still on it.

Her attacker carefully wrapped the finger up again and placed it in the bag and the bag in his pocket.

“I’m sure you’re wondering how the rest of him is. Well, that depends. Do you believe in life after death? For his sake, I hope so and I hope you’re right, because that’s all he’s got going for him now.” The man started a low staccato laughter, as if his pleasure was a craven secret. “I stuffed him in a laundry hamper. Ha! Unless somebody goes looking for dirty sheets, nobody finds him before dawn. Maybe not ’til he starts to stink. So, you know, we got all night.”

She tasted blood on the inside of her upper lip from the smash of the ice, and she had bitten her tongue also. She was vitally scared now, worried about choking, asphyxiation. What he yet might do hadn’t yet occurred to her, or she was pushing it out of her mind.

“Calm down. Take it easy. We have to get through the hard part first. I’m not going to drag this out. Then it’ll all be over.”

He extracted the knife from under his jacket at his back, and her eyes rolled at the sight of it and she started kicking again and kicked some more and then she directed her kicks at him, but, shoeless, she was nothing to him, a mere flea he smacked once, hard, across the top of her head, and she ceased her paroxysm. Then he spun her around in the chair on wheels, and now she knew his intentions and did not know if this depravity or what was yet to come frightened her more, but she was screaming into her gag now even before the knife was wedged against her left hand ring finger and he isolated the finger next and cut it off. Only it dangled, still attached, and she bucked in her chair and he had to put a foot right on her naked lap to stop her thrashing and wiggling. Leaning over awkwardly balancing on one foot, he seized the finger out of the fountain of blood and at first tried to rip it the rest of the way off, but when he failed, he hacked at it, cutting up the rest of her hand in the process until the bone and tendons and tissue gave way and he had his second prize for the evening.

Blood was pumping from her hand. He was swearing angrily. She groaned and battled her restraints, and he went into the washroom to clean himself up. When he came back, still wiping his hands he said, “I don’t get this part, do you? Why does he want a finger? Fuck’s sake, what kind of sick puppy needs that? Makes a mess, too. Guess you did some dirty shit to him. He must want you to suffer.”

The man returned to the washroom to package his trophy, then he returned and her eyes now were sinking into her brain and he could tell that she knew. She had no hope left in her, and they both knew that. Now was the time, and they both knew that also. Vira was convinced that what was coming was coming, and he had never seen anyone lose all hope like that before, which he supposed meant that she was intelligent, and he said, as if in sympathy, “Okay. Okay? I’ll make it easy on you. We’ll do this real fast.” He didn’t like that she didn’t seem to care, as if she’d already left the room. She just seemed gone. Or maybe the blood loss or the shock was dropping her into an abyss, but whatever it was made him inexplicably angry, so that he killed her in a fury, ending her life with a deep rough stroke across her throat. Blood sprouted across the bed and carpet.