Now, though, the place was a wreck.
It looked like a storm had blown through it.
The couch and chair were overturned, cushions slashed, stuffing pulled out, posters torn down, CD players smashed, CD’s crushed underfoot, baseball bat rammed through the TV screen, flowers torn out of pots, cereal boxes torn open and spilled, toaster-oven crashed onto the floor, refrigerator door open and everything pulled out and smeared onto the cheap linoleum and carpet. I moved carefully through the debris, careful not to leave footprints in anything sticky or powdery. There was a short hallway leading off from the living room, with a bathroom door on one side and a bedroom at the end. I peered into the bathroom to see the same kind of destruction. Everything that could be smashed had been, everything that could be cracked or spilled or torn was in ruins. I caught a glimpse of fifty different angry versions of my face in the fragments of the shattered mirror. None of those faces looked happy. This wasn’t wolf face, but it was every bit as dangerous.
The bedroom door was closed, but the smell was coming from there.
For a moment I felt so old and depressed that I wondered if I should leave the door closed, turn around and go home. I wasn’t a homicide cop anymore — not since they asked me to turn in my badge back in the Cities. I was a P.I. with no legal reason to be here, and I couldn’t prove that I hadn’t been the one to kick in the door and trash the place.
If I walked into that room then I would be tampering with a crime scene.
They could and probably would put me in jail for something like this.
Best thing in the world for me to do was get the hell out of there. I had other leads to follow — the stockbroker and Club Dante. It was a better, smarter choice to walk away.
But then if I was a better or smarter guy I wouldn’t be working this job.
I opened the door.
And stood there.
I didn’t enter.
Everything I needed to see I could see from where I was.
Donny Falk was about twenty, maybe five-six, one-thirty. I could tell that much.
George Palakas had said that Donny was black and gay. The posters on the wall were all of good looking men in skimpy outfits, so I could make the case for him being gay. As for black?
You’d need to look at his skin to make that call.
And he didn’t have any.
The whole room was painted in his blood. Not artistically, but from arterial sprays. He seemed to float in the midst of it, but that was an illusion. His arms and legs were spread wide. Someone had driven big iron nails through his wrists and shins. I would like to think they’d done that after the kid was dead, but I don’t think mercy was really any part of this scenario.
I could see why his screams didn’t alert the neighbors. You need a tongue for that. His was nailed to his forehead.
And…the killer had torn open Donny’s chest and removed his heart.
I forced myself to look around the room, but there was no sign of the stolen organ. The killer had taken it with him.
But the killer had left something behind. Something I recognized.
On the wall, drawn with care in Donny’s blood, was a large circle. There was a small symbol in the center, and eighteen spokes radiating out to connect with the big outer circle. Between each circle was another symbol. Each symbol was unique. Each was entirely unknown to me. I removed the Club Dante card from my jacket and held it up at an angle where I could see the hologram.
Same symbol.
If it was astrological, then it was from some philosophy other than the normal one I knew about. Eighteen symbols.
The pattern was strange, alien to me.
Looking at it made my heart hammer and my skin crawl.
Was this killer hunting according to some crazy religious thing? Was this part of some ritual he was acting out? While on the cops I ran into religious maniacs before. Some of them had this view in their heads that they were on the verge of becoming something greater than what they were; that they were about to ascend, and that it only required blood sacrifices and an adherence to specific rituals to open that door.
Is that what I had here? Was Bambi waiting to become a victim to the grand designs of someone who wanted to become God?
“Bambi,’ I murmured. “Denise…Donny…”
I stood there for a long time as a series of weird emotions crawled through my shocked brain.
Donny Falk was not my client. I hadn’t known him, and differences in age and location and profession would probably have prevented us from ever crossing paths, or if we had, we probably wouldn’t have anything to say to one another.
And yet…
He was the friend, perhaps the only friend of Denise Sturbridge. Bambi. She was a lost little girl pretending to be a jaded woman of the stage and streets. Donny was probably the only ‘safe’ man in her world. The only one who didn’t want to plunder her silky loins or sexualize her beyond her years. And maybe she was an equally safe zone for him. Nonjudgmental, a kindred innocent in a corrupt world.
Bambi wasn’t my client any more than Donny was. The unnamed woman from Limbus had hired me to find her. Donny was a side-effect of that search.
And yet…
My brain is wired in a certain way. I know that some of it has to do with my Benandanti heritage — we’re pack animals, and you always protect the pack. But I’d like to think that I would have some approximation of that sensibility even if I was a normal man. The desire to protect the pack, to protect anyone who can’t protect themselves. When I take on a client it’s like they become part of my family, part of my pack. I will do absolutely anything, go to extreme lengths to protect what’s mine.
But Bambi and Donny weren’t mine. They weren’t part of my pack.
Were they? Did the protection I afforded clients extend to people like them? Or was what I was feeling merely the normal outrage a moral person feels in the face of a demonstration of so clearly an immoral act?
Inside my head the wolf howled.
Aloud I said, “No.”
I removed my cell phone and used it to take several photos of the symbol, and immediately forwarded them to a woman I knew at the University of Pennsylvania. An anthropologist who’d helped me on another case involving ritual symbols.
Then I backed out of the room, turned in the hall and leaned my forehead against the wall.
Shit.
Who was this maniac?
I looked down at the Club Dante card in my hand. I removed the business card for the stockbroker, Daniel Meyers.
That place and that man were tied to Bambi.
Somebody was going to give me some answers.
I only hoped those answers led me to the monster who tore the skin from these young people. sixteen girls, one boy. I knew that the girls were all prostitutes, but in my heart they were all children. Innocents. The damaged and discarded ones. A lot of them were victims of abuse at home, or from shattered homes. Drugs was one way out, a way to blunt the jagged edges of the pain and self-loathing. Hooking bought more drugs and it completed the cycle of destruction that often began at home and ended on the streets. When I thought of them as ‘innocent’ I didn’t mean pure. Some of them were willing participants in their own destruction, but I’ve found that few people are truly self-destructive. Usually self-immolation of the moral kind is an end result, a skill learned from others.
For seventeen of those lost souls there was absolutely nothing I could do. Even revenge or managing to get the killer arrested wouldn’t cloth them in their lost skin or breathe life into their empty lungs. Nothing I did would make their hearts beat again or coax a smile onto their dead mouths.
However, Bambi might still be alive.
Out there.
Somewhere.
At Club Dante?