“Christ,” I said, “I hope not.”
Seventeen skinned teenagers. ‘Hope’ was a pretty vain luxury.
“What have you gotten yourself into?”
“I’m not sure, doc. I’m still blundering my way through it.” I paused. “Tell me something, though…are there any modern cults of Moloch? Does anyone still believe this sort of thing?”
She was a long time answering. “Back when I first began studying anthropology I would have said no unreservedly.”
“But now?”
“Now I’m not so sure. The more I get out of the office and into the field so I can see what people are actually out there doing, and practicing…I’m not so sure. Especially lately.”
“Why lately?”
“It’s the world, Sam. There’s no peace anywhere. Wars everywhere, the economy falling apart, such extreme political divisiveness, even the return of class wars. People are scared, they’re angry and they’re desperate.” She paused again. “These days people are looking for something to change the way things are going. They’re looking for an edge to help them get through all of this upheaval and carnage.”
“Geez,” I said with a small laugh, “so much for the detached scientist.”
She laughed, too, but it was thin and false. “Objectivity is taking as serious a beating as idealism these days.”
I saw my exit coming up and drifted off of I-95.
“Sam…what are you into?”
“As of right now, Jonatha,” I said, “it beats the shit out of me. I’ve got too much of the wrong information and not nearly enough of the right kind.”
“Sam…,” she said hesitantly, “that wasn’t tempura paint in that picture, was it?”
I drummed my fingers on the knobbed arc of the steering wheel as I waited for the light at the end of the exit ramp to turn from red to green.
“Thanks for the info, doc,” I said. “I owe you a steak dinner.”
Before she could reply to that I hung up.
The light turned green and I drove on.
Moloch. Melchom.
An ancient cult that involves sacrifices of flesh to an ancient god. Or demon. Or fallen angel. Or whatever the fuck he was.
A sacrifice of the flesh.
How in the big yellow fuck did that make any kind of sense? This wasn’t ancient Israel. This wasn’t medieval Europe. This was Phila-damn-delphia.
Then I thought about the stockbroker. Daniel Meyers. He was almost certainly a college graduate. I wondered how old he was, and if he used to belong to a fraternity. I worked some frat hazing cases before. Some of those clowns went way over the line. Branding each other, lots of ritual behavior, beatings. Even rape.
Could a group of frat brothers have crossed a harder line? Was this some kind of brotherhood thing? A Skull and Bones thing, or something worse?
That felt both wrong and right at the same time.
Either way, I was still shooting in the dark.
Club Dante was a big block nothing of a building from the outside. Tall, stuccoed walls, a pitched roof covered in faux terra cotta tiles, and massive wooden doors that would have looked better on the front of a medieval castle. Twelve feet high, wrapped in bands of black wrought-iron, and lined with chunky studded bolt-heads. The parking lot was behind a fence and a pair of armed guards worked the entrance. I parked across the street and studied them through the telephoto lens of a digital camera. The guards had that thin-lipped, lantern-jawed, unsmiling look of ex-military and possibly ex-special forces. Tough men, and from the way they moved and worked it was pretty clear that they were too good for the job they were doing. You don’t hire guys like that to check cars into a strip club parking lot, not even a very expensive strip club parking lot.
Hmm.
The cars were interesting, though. Nothing that looked more than two years old, and nothing that had a sticker price under fifty g’s. Some of them were way above that mark, too. Lots of sports cars. That made a certain kind of statement. The kind of guys who over-paid to come to a place like this were the kind who wanted everyone to know — or think — they had a big dick. Expensive clothes, ten-thousand-dollar wristwatches, hand-sewn shoes, nothing that was ever off the rack, and cars that cost more than my education were all ways of saying look at me and bow to my dick. It was the equivalent of attaching a fire hose to a tank of testosterone and hosing down everyone around them.
And because they made so damn much money, and money really is power in almost every way that matters in this world, everyone with less money dropped down and kissed their privileged asses.
For a whole lot of reasons I am less inclined to kowtow to assholes like that.
Maybe that’s why I’m always broke. I won’t play those kinds of games and I’ve never felt any urge to stand in a crowd of moneyed jackasses and pass around a golden ruler while we all measured our johnsons.
I drove slowly around the building, studying the fence from all sides. It was a tall chain-link affair with coils of stainless-steel razor wire along the top. Very inviting. There was no back gate and, as far as I could tell, only a single locked and alarmed red fire door. Odd for a building that size. Couldn’t possibly have passed code, which suggested that the owners were greasing the right palms.
There was movement among the parked cars and I saw another armed guard on foot patrol, walking a brute of a Doberman on a leash. Ninety pounds of sinew, muscle and attitude. Black and brown, with a bobbed tail and devil ears. As my car drifted past, the Doberman came suddenly to point and focused all of its senses on me. He couldn’t see me through the smoked windows of my car, but he knew that I was there, just as he knew that I wasn’t right.
Dogs always react to me. The ones who aren’t alphas tuck their tails between their legs and want to lick my hand. People always smile and tell me that I’m a real dog person.
Yeah, in a way.
The alphas are always instantly wary of me. The ones who are alphas but haven’t been trained for combat or patrol will keep their distance and watch me with wary eyes. If I push it I can get them to roll to me, but I seldom want to do that because some of them don’t reclaim their mojo afterward. I like dogs, so breaking their will isn’t high on my to-do list.
Alphas with guard dog training are a different matter. We’ve had some issues in the past. Their training is sometimes so intense that they will make choices they wouldn’t make in the wild. I’m one-seventy, which means that when I do the change, the wolf is one-seventy, too. That’s a lot of wolf. Even the biggest gray wolf is only about a hundred pounds. I’m closer to a dire wolf, the old prehistoric species. Their top range was one seventy. My grandmother thinks that we have dire wolf genes. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get that checked one day, if I can figure out how to get a DNA lab to do it without freaking them too much, or outing myself.
When I’m face to face with a trained attack dog, there’s usually trouble. I hate to kill a dog. I’ll play slice and dice with a person before I’ll open up a dog. Yeah, I know, a psychologist could really have fun with that, but there it is.
That Doberman had the kind of focused, barely suppressed aggression that let me know that it wouldn’t turn belly-up for me. If I wolfed out, then he’d make a run at me. And I’d have to kill him for it.
Club Dante wasn’t filling me with feelings of joy and puppies. Way too much security, the presence of a certain kind of money, and a definite connection to the missing girl. None of that added up to comforting math.
On the other hand it didn’t necessarily add up to involvement in seventeen brutal murders. It was, however, the only lead I had.
And in a way that was only semi-rational it smelled right.
When I stopped at the light I fished in my pocket for the red membership card. I sniffed it, but all I smelled was that guy Gunther. It was possible that by now he’d called to say that I’d taken the card from him. Was that the reason for the heavy security?