“He can talk to my middle finger,” Jack remarked.
“I told him you’d been kidnaped by aliens with Elvis tattoos and were presently indisposed.”
“Outstanding,” Jack approved, and started for the Mr. Coffee.
“And don’t look at the newspapers if you’re in a bad mood.”
Asking first would’ve been redundant. His frown spread as he glanced at each paper. The front page of the Sun blared: “Ritual Slayings Plague Historic District.” The state section of the Post: “Satanic Cult Kills Three So Far in Bay Area. And the Capital: County Captain Fumbles Ritual Murder Spree, Three Dead in a Week.”
Jack didn’t bother outbursting: he’d done enough of that in Olsher’s office. Instead, he sat down with Faye, and sighed.
“You forgot to shave,” she observed.
“I didn’t forget. I remembered not to. Why should I shave — I’ve been relieved of active duty. Shaving’s a big pain in the ass. Women have no idea.”
“Tell that to our legs and armpits. And what’s this?”
She was holding up the $25,000 receipt Stewie got from the two guys who’d picked up Veronica’s painting. “Stewie thought I might be able to get a line on where Veronica was by running the signature. Can’t make out the name, though. It looks like Philip something.”
“Philippe,” she corrected, pronouncing it fee-leep.
“Can you make out the last name?”
“Faux,” she said. Fo. “It’s French. And a little bit odd. Faux means false or fake. Some name.”
Jack lit up and popped a brow. Philippe Fake, he thought. “Stewie thinks he works for the guy who invited Veronica to the retreat.”
“What happens if you can’t locate her?”
“It’ll mean bad news for her career. Stewie’s got a bunch of galleries wanting to do shows of her work. If you jerk those kinds of people around you get a bad name for yourself. Stewie’s afraid her credibility will be damaged if he can’t confirm the shows, and he can’t confirm the shows until he talks to her. And the funny thing is the phone number on the invitation was a transfer through a message service to a portable phone.”
“That doesn’t make much sense, does it? Why wouldn’t this rich guy just use his home number?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Jack admitted. He glanced at his watch; it was going on ten. “You’re going to LOC at noon? Let’s get something to eat, then you can come to the courthouse with me.”
“What do you need there?”
To see how far my lack of ethics goes, he thought.
It was only a two-minute walk to the City Dock. Jack got his usual cop’s breakfast: a big foil of fried chicken livers. Faye got a hot dog. They sat on the dock and ate, watching the boats.
He tried to look at her without being obvious. The morning lit up her nearly waist-long hair. She was pretty in her silence and faded jeans. Randy had told him she was in her early twenties, but just then, with the sun on her face, she looked like a precocious teenager. He remembered how beautiful she was nude, how soft her skin felt, how warm she was.
“The aorists were very methodized murderers,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Everything they did they did for a specific reason. Not like all this satanist stuff today, mostly disgruntled kids looking for a sense of identity. The aorists believed that faith was strength. Murder was a gesture of faith. They believed that the more severely they disserviced God, the more powerful they’d become in recompense from Satan.”
“But I thought you said they worshiped lower demons.”
“Yes, apostate demons is the term. Satan’s brethren, Satan’s sons. They were like antithetical patron saints. It was all oblatory.”
Jack ate a liver. “Faye, I don’t know what oblatory means.”
“It means that everything they did was a homage to the apostate demons, which, transitively, was a homage to Satan.”
Transitively, Jack thought.
“They were big on acts of offering is what I mean. Lots of the sects, particularly the ones that worshiped Baalzephon, were fixated on the idea of transposition. It means one thing trading places with another. Transposition was the basis of their offering. Murder for grace. Atrocity for power. They were also big on incarnation. Flesh for spirit.”
All these big words and inferences made Jack’s head spin. Apostates. Oblatory. Transposition. Jesus. “I’m a cop, Faye, you know, scrambled eggs for brains? Could you put all this in police terms?”
“Sure. The aorists were hardcore motherfuckers.”
“Ah, now, that I can relate to.”
“The leaders of the sects were called ‘prelates.’ They supposedly had psychic and necromantic powers. You want talk about hardcore? These guys would think nothing of hanging a priest upside down by a meat hook through the rectum and gutting him alive. They’d force deacons to have sex with prostitutes, or sodomize each other on the altar, stuff like that. These prelate guys meant business. In fact, their final initiation was a self-mutilatory act.”
“A what?”
“They cut off their own penises as an offering to be apostate,” Faye said, and bit into her hot dog.
Jack tossed his livers in the waste can. “Come on,” he muttered. He didn’t need to hear any more of this.
They cut through Fleet Street to the State House, and went to the basement. “Office of Land Records,” the milky sign read. When property was owned under a company name, you could sometimes find out if the company was legit by running the name through IRS. Jack’s first big tip on the Henry Longford case, in fact, had come from this office. Longford had bought land as a business expense; the business had turned out to be a wash. The guy who appeared at the counter looked almost proverbiaclass="underline" heavy, elderly, balding, and he wore one of those banker visors. Jack could tell by looking at him that he might not be averse to a little grease.
“You the recorder of deeds?”
“That’s me,” the guy said. “Whadaya want?”
I like him already. “I’m trying to locate the taxpayer on a piece of land.”
“You gotta give me a liber number or a folio. That’s the only way I can get the plat number of the individual plot.”
“How about the address?”
The recorder gave him the eye. “This a sham? If you got the address, whadaya need me for?”
“Actually I thought there might be a phone number in the file. There’s a dwelling on the plot. It’s a friend of mine I need to get ahold of. Can you help me out?”
“Look it up in the reverse directory.”
“I already did. It’s unlisted.”
“If ya got the address, why don’t ya just drive to the house?”
“This is easier. And besides, have you ever heard of the Freedom of Information Act?”
“Sure, son. Write me up a standard request and I’ll process it. Takes a month, sometimes longer if you piss off the recorder.”
“Come on, man. Help me out.”
“Can’t do it for ya, son.”
Jack frowned. Too many ballbreakers in this world. This was public information. “You think you could do it for Ulysses S. Grant?”
The old man got the picture straight off. “No, but I might be able to do it for Benjamin Franklin.”
“That’s a big piece of paper, pal.”
“So’s a FOIA request. Your choice, son.”
Jack gave the recorder a hundred-dollar bill and Khoronos’ address.