Unspeakably violent murders went back at least eleven years.
Our two best suspects had been murdered.
Someone had put effigies in their bedroom.
I went down to the cellar, then into the tunnels that spidered out in several directions from the main area. New Orleans is about eight feet below sea level, and the cellar and tunnels were probably always damp. The walls sweat.
I heard a scraping noise and stopped. Something was walking around. I reached into my shoulder holster, took out my Glock.
I listened closely. Nothing. Then more scraping.
Miceor rats, I thought. Probably all it is. Probably. Almost definitely.
I had to go and look further, though. That was my problem, wasn't it? I had to go look, had to investigate, couldn't just walk away. What was I trying to prove to myself? That I had no fears? That I wasn't like my father, who had quit on just about everything in life, including his kids and himself?
I inched forward slowly and quietly — and I listened to the house.
I could hear water dripping somewhere in the dank tunnels.
I used my old Zippo to light a few torches hung on the tunnel walls. There were really bad images in my head. The bite wounds on the bodies I'd seen. The way Daniel and Charles had been attacked. The poisonous bites I'd suffered in Charlotte. You're one of us now.
The anger, the rage connected to the murders were present in so many cities.
What were the killers angry about?
Where were they right now? I never heard them coming, never saw a movement.
I was hit — twice. The attackers had come swiftly out of the darkness. One went for my head and neck. The other hit around my knees. They were a team. Efficient.
I went down hard, and it took the wind right out of me. But I fell on the attacker who was wrapped around my legs. I heard a loud crack, maybe a bone breaking. Then a scream. He let me go.
I got up, but the second assailant was attached to my back. He bit me! Oh Jesus, no!
I cursed and slammed him into the wall. I did it again. Who the hell were these fantastic madmen? Who was the leech riding my back?
He finally let go, the son of a bitch! I spun around at him. I clipped the side of his head with my gun. I hit him again with a solid left hook. He went down like a sack.
I was breathing hard, still full of fight, though. Neither of the assailants was moving much now. I kept the gun on them while I lit another candle on the wall. That was better; light always helps.
I saw a male and female, probably no more than sixteen or seventeen. Their eyes were like dark holes. The male must have been six foot six or more.
He had on a dingy white T-shirt with "Marlboro Racing First to Finish" printed on it and baggy, scungy black jeans.
The girl was around five two, with wide hips, wide everything. Her black hair was stringy and greasy, with reddish highlights.
I touched my neck and was surprised that the skin wasn't broken. There was no blood on my hand.
"You're under arrest," I yelled at the two of them. "You goddamn bloodsuckers."
Chapter 77
Vampires? If that's what these twisted creeps were?
Assassins? Murderers?
Their names were Anne Elo and John "Jack" Masterson, and they had attended Catholic high school in Baton Rouge until about six months ago, when they had dropped out and run away from home. They were both seventeen years old. They were just kids.
I spent three hours attempting to question the suspects that night, then another four hours the following morning. Elo and Masterson wouldn't talk to me or anyone else — not a word. They wouldn't say what they were doing inside the mansion in the Garden District. Why they had attacked me. Whether or not they had placed the sinister effigies in the closet of the dead men.
The teens simply glared across the plain wooden table in one or another of the interrogation rooms at police headquarters. The parents were notified and brought in, but Elo and Masterson wouldn't speak to them either. At one point, Anne Elo finally addressed her father with two words: "Blow me." I wondered how the cult of the vampires had satisfied her needs, her incredible anger.
In the meantime, there were lots of others from the fetish ball to talk to. The commonality among most of them was that they held "straight jobs" in New Orleans. They were bartenders and waitresses, hotel desk clerks, computer analysts, actors, and even teachers. Most were afraid to have their alternative lifestyle come out at work, so they eventually talked to us. Unfortunately, no one told us anything revealing about Daniel and Charles, or their murderers.
It was an extraordinarily busy night at the precinct house. More than two dozen homicide detectives and FBI agents conducted reinterviews. We exchanged notes and bios with highlighted inconsistencies. We went hard at the most obvious liars in the group. We also kept a list of the witnesses who seemed most likely to break under pressure. We switched interviewers on them; sent them to their cells, then summoned them back before they could sleep; we doubled up on them.
"All we need is a few rubber hoses," one of the New Orleans detectives said while we were waiting for Anne Elo to be fetched from her cell for the sixth time that night. His name was Mitchell Sams, and he was around fifty, a black man, hugely overweight, tough, effective, cynical as hell.
When Anne Elo was brought back into the interrogation room, she looked like a sleepwalker. Or a zombie. Her eye sockets were incredibly deep and dark. Her lips were chapped and caked with dried blood.
Sams went at her. "Good morning, glory. It's nice to see your pasty-white face again. You look like total shit, babe. I'm being kind. Several of your friends, including your pathetic boyfriend, have broken down already tonight."
The girl turned her vacant eyes toward a brick wall. "You must be mistaking me for somebody who gives a shit," she said.
I decided to try an idea that had been weaving through my mind for the past hour or so. I had used it on a few of the others. "We know about the new Sire," I told Anne Elo. "He's gone back to California. He isn't here for you. He can't help you, or hurt you."
Her face remained blank and unresponsive, but she folded her arms. She sagged a few inches in her chair. Her lips were bleeding again, possibly because she'd bitten into them. "Who gives a shit? Not me."
Just then, a bleary-eyed NOPD detective hurried into the interrogation room where Mitchell Sams and I were working on Elo. The detective had dark sweat stains under both arms of his pale blue sport shirt. Heavy stubble covered his chin and cheeks. He looked about as exhausted as I felt.
"There's been another murder," he told Sams. "Another hanging murder."
Anne Elo slowly, rhythmically clapped her hands. "That's great," she said.
Chapter 78
I drove to the crime scene alone, feeling increasingly more distant and unreal. The wheels in my head were turning slowly and methodically. Where did we go from here? I had no goddamn idea. Jesus, I was beat.
The house was an outbuilding for one of the Garden District's historic homes, a small carriage house with a second-story balcony. It looked like it could have been a cute, cozy B&B. Magnolia and banana trees surrounded it. So did an intricate wrought-iron fence, the kind I had seen everywhere in the French Quarter.
About half of the New Orleans Police Department was already at the scene. So were a couple of EMS trucks, their roof lights spinning and blazing. The press was beginning to arrive as we did — the late shift.