The Witch's Ladder (26 page)

Thinking about Leona reminded me that I needed to question Valerie as to her whereabouts. Leona still represented the only person not questioned in the murders of Doctor Lieberman and the others. I also wanted to know if Leona still had her rosary beads and if they were intact. Deep inside, I truly hoped they were. Whatever evil had possessed the others to partake in murder; I desperately wanted to believe it had not taken hold of her as well. As it stood, her mysterious disappearance seemed to point to only one of two possibilities, either she partook in the murders and had gone into hiding, or like the twins, she had already met her demise. Whatever the case, it seemed far too unlikely that Valerie didn’t have a clue as to which of the two applied. With the help of the witch’s ladder, I hoped to find out.

We caught up with Valerie by the pool, lounging in a teakwood reclining deck chair. With her dark sunglasses, floppy hat and yellow one-piece swimsuit, she hardly looked as though she had much to worry about, except for possibly getting ticketed by the fashion police for impersonating a wayward Miami Beach tourist.

In her left hand was a frozen margarita, garnished with a little umbrella and a long plastic straw sticking out the top. I imagined the iPad-looking device in her right hand was probably the controller she used to open the front door.

“
Good morning, Detectives,” she cooed, her voice drawling with exaggeration. She sounded unusually relaxed, almost sedated. I suspected her margarita may not have been the first of the day.

I tipped my hat and smiled. “Morning to you, Ms. Spencer.”

“
Well, aren’t you going to introduce me to your handsome friend, Detective?”

I stepped back and allowed Carlos to move in closer for a handshake and a proper introduction. “Of course.” I splayed my hand in a presentational gesture. “Ms. Spencer, Detective Carlos Rodriguez. Detective, Ms. Valerie Spencer.”

“
Pleasure, Ma’am,” said Carlos.

Valerie placed the electronic device by her side and offered her right hand to Carlos. “No, the pleasure is all mine, Detective, I assure you.”

She seemed genuinely intrigued by Carlos, the essence of his mannerisms and the subtleties of his ruggedly good looks. Carlos smiled, took her hand and kissed it softly in that Cuban-gentleman sort of way. Valerie pulled her hand back, grinning as goose bumps flowered up and down her arm.

“
Aren’t you sweet,” she said, passing the margarita to her right hand and offering her left for another kiss.

Her preoccupation with Carlos allowed me to steal a glimpse of the notepad-sized device on the ground. It seemed smaller at second glance. I saw it contained several rows of buttons like a TV remote, but with an LED screen as well. I imagined she used to it view images from the security cameras all around the house. When Carlos noticed me checking out the device, he broke away and strolled off in the opposite direction, distracting Valerie further. He meandered along the edge of the pool at a leisurely pace, taking conspicuous interest in the house and the beautiful grounds surrounding the patio.

“
This is really some place you have here, Ms. Spencer,” he said.

“
Please, Detectives, call me Valerie.”

“
Of course. Valerie is such a beautiful name.”

“
Thank you.”

“
Ms. Spencer,” I said. “I wonder if we might ask you some questions.”

Valerie sipped her margarita with indifference, lending a deaf ear to my question. Her eyes gleamed with fixation, engaging Carlos as he continued not so unsuspecting along the edge of the pool.

“
Did you hear what I said, Ms. Spencer?”

“
Yes, Detective. You have questions. I talked to Lilith and she told me to expect that you might come around asking questions about the twins, Doctor Lieberman and some silly bag Jean showed us out in the parking lot.”

“
Oh, she did? Then why don’t we start there? Would you mind telling me what you saw in the bag?”

“
Not at all. I saw cookies, chocolate chip as a fatter of mact.”

“
What?”

“
I mean, matter of fact.”

“
Cookies?”

“
Yes. Why? What did Lilith tell you?”

“
She said cookies, too.”

“
But you didn’t believe her?”

“
Should I?”

“
I don’t see why not. She’s a good witch you know.”

“
Yes, but good witches can lie too, can’t they?”

“
Are you calling me a liar?”

“
No. I’m not saying that. I’m saying Lilith can lie, also. She could be a good witch, but she could lie—too.”

“
Yes, well it still sounds a bit insulting. I’m not sure how I should take that. Did you say if your friend over there is single?”

“
Carlos?”

“
Yes, Carlos, Carrr-los. You have to roll the R, you know.”

“
I know. I can never do that.”

“
Then you can never learn Spanish. Maybe that’s why I don’t like you.”

“
You don’t have to like me, Ms. Spencer, but I would like you more if you answered my questions without giving me a hard time.”

“
I’m not giving you a hard time. You’re giving me a hard time, accusing me of lying and such.”

“
I didn’t accuse you of lying.”

“
But that’s how I took it.”

“
Then take it as you wish, but it wasn’t meant that way.”

“
I’ll tell you, Detective, you should learn to employ a little more charm around women, say like your handsome partner over there. He’s a real gentleman, I can tell you that, and ladies like gentlemen. It’s true what they say. You get a lot more flies with honey.”

“
Flies?”

“
It’s an expression.”

“
Yes, Ms. Spencer. I understand. Honey is sweet and flies like sweets. But if flies are answers, then I can tell you I’ve found my share of them around things that are rotten, too.”

“
So you go from accusations to insinuations, Detective. Is that it?”

I rolled my eyes up and away. I could see that Valerie obviously wanted to play the hostile witness, but I was in no mood to engage her in a verbal joust. I took a deep breath and panned the deck for Carlos, who had strolled clear around to the other side of the pool. Valerie’s gaze locked onto him as well, providing a diversion as I fished the witch’s ladder from my pocket. I loosened the next knot, and just as I had done with Lilith and Jean, I untied it and surprised Valerie with my question.

“
Ms. Spencer. I want you to tell me about the bloody towels inside the paper bag the other night.”

For all intent, Valerie knew I had come to her house to ask exactly that question. She even knew I would try to employ the witch’s ladder to elicit a visual image of the bloody towels. Unfortunately for her, she didn’t expect me to come to the house with Carlos Rodriquez. That tactic proved exceptionally beneficial to me. As far as Valerie was concerned, Carlos was a bundle of TNT. His natural charm and boyish smile coupled with an undeniably Cuban-sized dose of sexual magnetism, made for a combination too impossible to resist. When questioned, she found herself thrown completely off guard. My timing and her preoccupation with Carlos led her unwittingly down the path of vivid recollection.

Her mind instantly flashed back to the moment she first held the towels in her hand that night at the gazebo. She recalled how quickly she embraced the sinister secrets the monogrammed linen surrendered through psychometry. Three words came to mind: attraction of blood. The recurring vision was powerful, and the more she tried to stop it, the faster it came. It delivered shocking and grotesque images of a killer scurrying off with the liver of his latest victim wrapped neatly inside the bloodstained cloth.

Valerie tried diverting her attention to a more benign subject before the images of what else happened that night came to mind; images of her and her fellow accomplices performing the unspeakable act of human mutilation on the still breathing Doctor Lieberman.

On the far side of the pool, Carlos recoiled sharply; daunted by the sudden crash of glass after Valerie dropped her margarita to the pavement. Hastened by instincts, he reached for his holster, drew his Glock 10 and aimed it at her. I stepped forward, placing my body between Carlos and his target, my hands flagging to wave off the assault. Valerie leapt from her chair and dashed into the house, leaving behind her sunglasses, floppy hat and the peculiar remote control device with its LED screen. In her wake lay a trail of blood drops leading from the slivers of broken glass to the patio doors which she disappeared behind.

“
What did you do to her?” Carlos asked, after sprinting back to meet me.

“
Nothing. I only asked her a question. The next thing I knew, a flood of images came to me.”

“
Images of what?”

“
Somebody running off with body parts wrapped up inside the towels I told you about.”

“
You mean like what you saw at Lilith’s?”

I nodded and held up the witch’s ladder. “I told you it works. For a moment, I could read her every thought. And what’s more, she knew I was doing it.”

Wanting to believe, though not wanting to admit it, Carlos pressed me for more details. He listened with intrigue as I explained how Valerie had seen the Surgeon Stalker wrapping his victims’ liver up and carrying it off in the monogrammed towels.

“
Carrying them off for what?”

“
I don’t know. But I believe it has something to do with the phrase, attraction of blood.”

Carlos grimaced. “What’s that mean?”

I turned back and glanced toward the second-floor window overlooking the pool. I saw Valerie peering out discreetly through a small break in the blinds. “I don’t know, Carlos. Though as curious as I am to find out, I hesitate to use another knot in the ladder to see.”

He smiled teasingly, and the raised brow over his right eye indicated that he either questioned my reluctance to untie the knot, or my sanity for suggesting that the knot might actually yield the answer. I suspected the latter. I looked down at the little black device that Valerie left behind and noticed something unusual. I picked it up and studied the image on the screen, hardly believing my eyes.

“
Whoa. Did you see that?”

He grabbed the device, prying it from my hands in hopes of seeing what had excited me so. Instead of a candid shot of bedroom voyeurism, which he probably expected and perhaps preferred, he saw only the image of a small white kitten scampering about playfully.

“
It’s just a kitten, Tony.”

“
No, Carlos. That’s Lilith. I saw her. I swear.”

He looked again at the screen. His face grew long with worry. The hours, the exposure to all the stories about witches and ladders and psycho-voodoo, he had to believe they were taking their toll on me.

“
Tony, maybe you should take a couple of days off from this investigation. It’s been a busy week for you.”

I grabbed the device and began randomly pushing buttons, causing the image on the screen to go static. “Carlos, I’m telling you, I saw her. I saw Lilith standing in one of the bedrooms, and then right before my eyes she turned into a kitten, the same little white kitten I saw at her house.”

“
Oh, so Lilith is a kitten now?”

“
Yes. I know it sounds crazy, but I’ telling you….”

We both glanced again at the screen, me for validation and Carlos for another glimpse into Valerie’s bedroom.

Static.

“
A white kitten?”

“
Carlos, I know what I saw.”

“
So you say, but don’t witches turn into black cats?”

“
Oh, and if she turned into a black cat then you would believe me?”

“
I didn’t say that, exactly. I suppose it would make more sense though. I mean if a witch could turn into a cat, wouldn’t it be a black cat so that she could prowl the night in stealth?”

“
Who says witches prowl the night?”

“
Of course they do. They prowl at night, make potions by day, and the rest of the time they fly around on broomsticks.”

“
See, now you’re just pissing me off. You think you’re funny?”

He shrugged.

“
Okay smart aleck, I’ll show you.”

I pulled the witch’s ladder out, turned my back to the window and untied another knot.

“
What are you doing?” Carlos’ eyes relayed nervously between the window and the witch’s ladder.

“
I’m going to find out what she’s thinking. Keep an eye out for tornadoes, locusts, or anything strange like that.”