Monster Hunter Memoir: Saints

  “So we suspect. I have the writings of the lama which defeated one to the north of Tibet in the first century.”

  “Where did you find the writings of the Most Perfect Lama Thubten?” Pema said eagerly.

  “They are not the writings of the lama. They are words of one of his surviving apprentices. I found them in the library at Oxford. These are only notes.”

  “I would see even the notes of such.” He held out his hand.

  I sat down as the old shaman read through my notes. They were in Tibetan, or at least my version of it. Some of the notes were exact copying of the manuscripts. You couldn’t photocopy something that old and fragile.

  “I would love to see the original,” Father Pema said when he was done reading.

  It was after dark and the cold was starting to get to me. I was wearing a sweater and coat. Father Pema was in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. I wasn’t going to complain.

  “I’ll gladly pay your way to visit Oxford. The scholars there would love to have someone of your knowledge visit.”

  “That would involve traveling by aeroplane and ship, yes? I’ve done that before. I did not like it.”

  “Airplanes have gotten much better since the 1950s.”

  “I don’t even like cars. I like my feet on the ground. What would you know?”

  “What are the unguents and materials used by the Most Perfect Thubten to defeat the Great Worm Mother?”

  “This is knowledge known only to the Most Perfect.” Pema handed the notes back. “I am barely a scraper of the ground compared to the Most Perfect Lamas.”

  A “Most Perfect Lama” was the Tibetan equivalent of a cardinal. There were probably five left on earth and none of those would give me the time of day.

  “Also,” Pema said, “much of this knowledge was lost in the Great Corruption.” That was what they called the Chinese invasion. “I doubt that a Most Perfect Lama would give such information to you and I suspect that none know these arts in this time. They are lost forever.”

  “Were any of them ever written? Perhaps in tomes of medicine or healing? Would I be able to find any hint in such?”

  “If there is a library that has this, such a library may have the original recipes. But…” He took a deep breath. “The mystic unguents of the Most Perfect would have been merely a carrier for the power of the Great Lotus. You simply need the power of strong healing and that which fights the corruption of the earth. It is any material which represents the blessed faith of the good. It need not be Tibetan.”

  “That sounds like…”

  “I hate to say this,” Pema said, getting up, “but you can probably drown it in a few thousand gallons of holy water. Best if it’s blessed by a truly devoted priest, but that’s much easier to get your hands on. Anything else?”

  “No. That’s it.”

  He walked into the house without saying goodbye.

  I got back in my rattletrap rental and headed back to the airport. Maybe the heat in the fleabag motel would be working.

  It wasn’t.

  * * *

  Pueblo was in a region equally as arid as Crestone, but was a typical modern American town. This time I’d called ahead. Admittedly just from the airport. And there was, thank God, an Avis outlet so I had a decent car.

  The door to the two-story home was opened by a teenage girl. I barely recognized her. The last time I’d seen her she’d been two years younger, filthy, covered in sores and terrified. Also strapped to an altar in the middle of a firefight.

  “Chad!” she shouted, throwing her arms around me. “It’s so good to see you!” That was also very loud.

  Mandy Cummings would speak very loudly for the rest of her life. That was my fault. And Milo’s. Explosions wreck your hearing. She also had fine scars on the right side of her face and some sight loss in the right eye. It was all collateral damage, but we had managed to save her life.

  I hugged back. She’d gotten much more squeezable.

  “You’ve grown.”

  “I have you guys to thank for it.” Mandy grinned.

  Her family was gathered in the hallway watching this with bemusement. I wasn’t sure what they’d been told about Mandy’s rescue and I’d have to deal with that carefully. Before MCB Seattle even got to the scene we’d told the girls they couldn’t talk about what actually happened to them. The Doctors Nelson were psychologists by original trade and had helped the girls as best they could. Mandy seemed to have mostly recovered from the ordeal.

  “I’m Chad Gardenier.” I held my hand out to her father.

  “We were sort of surprised when you called.” Arthur Cummings was forties, balding but solid. From what I remembered he worked in construction.

  The rescuees had been from all over the Western United States so we hadn’t ended up meeting any of the families. Some of the girls held in the container were from the Pueblo area. Others who had been captured in the area had been separated out, either not virgins or sold elsewhere. And that was why I was there. Mandy had been at a girls’ night with friends when the ring had attacked the house. The ring had killed the rest of the family and taken all the girls. Two had been rescued by MHI, in Mandy’s case by the thinnest of margins. My information on the cover story was that it was “a Satan-worshipping serial killer ring.” Which was close to the truth.

  “You’re one of the men who rescued Mandy,” the mother said. Clara Cummings was short, plump and blonde. Nice enough looking for being in her forties.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Where are my manners?” She gestured toward the living room. “Please come in.”

  “You’re FBI?” Mr. Cummings said when we were situated. Mrs. Cummings had gone to get snacks.

  “No, sir. My company is hired to handle certain types of cases by the government.” I waved at the various scars on my face. “The types of cases where people end up like this. Sort of bounty hunters. Other than that, it’s classified.”

  “Okay. Mandy’s told us how she wasn’t supposed to talk about certain things, but damn it, people have a right to know!”

  “I agree, sir, and I disagree. Why, in both cases, is not only highly classified, it would take hours and hours to explain. And some of it, frankly, you probably wouldn’t believe. So I’ll leave it at that. Bottom line, I helped saved your daughter’s life, but now I really need your help.”

  “You can pretty much ask for anything,” he said, hugging Mandy to him. “You on the run?”

  “No,” I said, not adding but it’s getting close. “It’s about the people who took Mandy. I need to talk to the parents of girls who…didn’t get them back.”

  “They hardly talk to us,” Mandy said unhappily. And loudly. “They wanted to know what happened and I couldn’t really talk about it. The Hamiltons…was where they took us. They’re all…gone. The Morrisons and the Hawkins divorced. We really only ever see the Simpsons ’cause we still go to the same church. I have a hard time looking Mr. and Mrs. Simpson in the eye. We used to be friends.”

  “Grief changes things. But I really need to talk to as many of the families as I can. I need something from them as well. But I’ll talk to them.”

  “We can tell you where they live,” Mr. Cummings said, shrugging. “Give you some numbers. But like Mandy said, they don’t really talk to us anymore.”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  * * *

  They might not talk to the Cummings anymore, but say “it’s about your missing daughter” and grieving parents will tell you anything.

  The Simpsons’ house was practically identical to the Cummings. US suburb, one each. It was also right around the corner.

  Irene and Warren Simpson had four children. Their middle daughter, Marcella, had gone over to a friend’s one night and never returned. The Hamilton house had been burned to the ground. At first they’d thought their daughter had died in a fire. Then came the word that none of the bodies of the girls had been found. Then it was suspected one of the girls had started the fi
re. Then the FBI showed up and they found out it matched a string of disappearances.

  They’d called their local police department for information. They’d called the FBI. They’d put up fliers. They’d gone on local television. But their daughter had disappeared into the night. They were willing to talk to anyone who might give them some closure. They just wanted to know if she was alive or dead. Anything.

  I knew there would never be closure. Their daughter was positively identified as having been sacrificed by the Seattle Lich. And the way the lich got rid of the bodies was to feed them, bones and all, to his pet ghouls. There wasn’t so much as a scrap of hair left of their daughter. Since MCB wasn’t about to let that out, the parents would die waiting for word of their daughter’s fate.

  Frankly, I wasn’t going to tell them that, even if it wouldn’t put me in more trouble with the MCB. I wasn’t going to look them in the eye and say “Your daughter’s soul was torn out with her heart and used to power an undead being, one that is still on the loose so until it’s killed, her soul is trapped between worlds, and her body was eaten by ghouls. Sorry.”

  Yeah. Wasn’t going there.

  “I was one of the people who rescued Mandy Cummings,” was what I said to the two parents. “My company is also involved in looking for news of other victims, including your daughter, Marcella.”

  “Is there anything you can tell us?” Mr. Simpson asked, holding his wife’s hand.

  “Not really. You got word that this was a ring, right?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Simpson said. “Satan worshippers! How in God’s name can something like that go on in this day and age?”

  “Not in God’s name, ma’am, that I can tell you for sure. I won’t tell you that we’re going to get your daughter back like we did Mandy. I tell you that as sort of an expert in this area, she’s most certainly gone. You understand that?”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Simpson teared up. There was a box of Kleenex on the table and I pulled one out and handed it to her. They were used to these sorts of conversations and prepared.

  “There is a new scientific way to identify remains,” I said carefully. “I don’t know if you know this, but bodies are found all over the US all the time. What we’re trying to do is sort out some of those unidentified remains, Jane Does, ones that match the general description of your daughter and other potential victims.”

  “Why are they unidentifiable?” her sister Robyn asked.

  “I’d really rather not get into that, just…when some hunters find a body in the woods that’s been there for…a while. Sometimes they don’t even realize it’s a human body.”

  “Oh.” Robyn got pale.

  “Wasn’t there any word on Marcella when you found Mandy and Risa?” Mr. Simpson asked.

  “Not that I can get into. This is an ongoing investigation. I know you want some information—anything. But if the people who took your daughter, who are continuing to take other people’s daughters, get word of details of the investigation, it can make them change their patterns, making it harder to find them. And it’s hard enough as it is. Also, if any information leaks out from the investigation, it can compromise the trial. I’m pretty sure you don’t want your daughter’s kidnappers released on a technicality. That’s why the FBI is so close to the vest with information and I have to be as well. What I need, though, is fairly simple. I just need a few hairs.”

  “Hairs?” Mrs. Simpson demanded. “You’re not one of those damned psychics are you?”

  “No,” I said, not adding: But I know a few. “The reason is the identification method. You’ve heard of DNA? It’s found in every living cell. It’s what’s passed down from you to your children, and it’s as unique as a fingerprint for an individual. We’ll take the hairs and run what’s called a DNA profile. Then compare it to potential…remains that might be Marcella. At the very least, it may give you some closure if we can find her body.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Mr. Simpson said.

  “Do you have her hairbrush? One that only she used?”

  “We do,” Mrs. Simpson said, tearing up again.

  I handed her more tissues.

  I’d wanted to kill these assholes before, but now this was feeling really personal.

  * * *

  Dealing with all the families was painful. It was one of the reasons I never could have been a cop. I preferred killing monsters to handing over tissues. It wasn’t that I was bad at detective work. Being a detective was about figuring out patterns, and I was really good at pattern recognition. But crying families was not my thing.

  I also had to track down the Morrisons and then the Hawkins. The mothers had kept mementos of their daughters. In both cases the girls were their only children and between the grief, the silences, the wondering, the couples had divorced.

  It turned out all the families had kept keepsakes. I had four hair samples from the victims for Madam Courtney to use.

  I was glad as hell to head back to New Orleans, heat and all. I was ready to kill me some monsters. Preferably the monsters who were taking these girls but anything would do.

  CHAPTER 8

  I really should get back to monster killing but this is a memoir about the job. And part of the job, when you get past dumb-grunt me monster killer, is finding out about the monsters. Tracking them down. Figuring out how to kill them. So you’re going to have to bear with me.

  When I got back to New Orleans nothing much had changed. MCB was still riding our asses. We’d gotten in a replacement for Evans and with the loup-garou infestation under control, New Orleans was only mildly impossible to manage. My first week back, besides the meeting with Madam Courtney and trying to track the mava paṇauvaā, we had some calls, but it was all the usual shit. Nothing terribly interesting.

  Milo was a bomb-in-pig-stuffing, kifo-killing machine. He’d baited every single eruption site and gotten another hit. There hadn’t been any more new attacks since we’d gone on the offensive.

  So the second day I was back I took the hair samples to Madam Courtney’s residence. Despite the fact that I knew the door was probably unlocked, you don’t barge into a hoodoo woman’s house. So I waited for her to let me in. Strangely enough, her house wasn’t nearly as decorated with charms and trinkets as her office, so a lot of those were probably just for show.

  “Them the girls?” she asked as I pulled out the baggies with hair samples.

  Pro-tip: Carry rubber gloves and ziploc bags with you at all times. There are things you don’t want to touch with your hands and you have to take tissue samples for Confirmation of Kill.

  In this case I had four plastic baggies with the names written on them. Tracey Morrison, Meghan Hawkins, Marcella Simpson, and Sherri Harvey. Two blondes, a strawberry blonde, and a bottle blonde with brown roots. Those and memories were about all that remained of those four girls. Morrison, Hawkins and Simpson were all positively identified as being sacrificed. Harvey had been separated off from the other girls and presumably sold to some other bastard who wanted a virgin sacrifice.

  “Yes, ma’am.” I handed over the baggies.

  We’d moved to the small kitchen table in the room for this and she pulled out each one carefully and laid them out on a white cloth. Then she closed her eyes and appeared to go to sleep with her hands held out over the hairs. She stayed like that, head down for a bit, then her eyes flashed open.

  “This one is alive,” she said, holding up the strands of bottle-blonde hair from Sherri Harvey. “The loas can’t find her, she’s warded, but she still lives. The rest is gone. Two is in heaven. One, this one,” she said, holding up Marcella Simpson’s hairs, “her soul be held in a vessel of the unclean. But this one be alive here to earth.”

  “That’s…odd. Given what this ring does I’d have thought she’d be heart-ripped by now.”

  “The loas say she wasn’t totally without sin.” Madam Courtney ran the hairs through her hands, eyes closed. “She was a wild one, this one. Hard life. Sad. But still alive. Worse, n
ow. She’s gone evil, this one.”

  “Joined the group?”

  “Can’t rightly tell. But she gone to the Black, can tell that. The loas see a darkness clinging to her. Now to try and figure out why the G-man thinks you have something to do with it.”

  She started by casting the bones, looking for more information on the girls or those who had held them. On the ones who were dead, there was little information. But when she cast upon Sherri Harvey, the one still alive, she got more and asked for one of my hairs. I was shaved bald so I had to clip a fingernail. Then she cast them together, holding the strands of hair and a fingernail in her hands, eyes closed.

  “It is true,” she said in a deep voice, eyes now open and unseeing. “You are the alpha and omega of this taking. You were the one who started this. And you shall be the one to finish it.”

  “Madam Courtney, that makes no sense!”

  “You are bound to your brother. Cain and Abel. Yin and yang. You brought this to the world through that binding. You are the source of this taking. You shall be its end.” Her eyes closed and she shuddered and lay back in the wooden chair, exhausted.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. The White loas are angry. Fearsome anger! But not at you. You may have somehow caused this, but not maliciously. You are not the true culprit. That I’m sure of now. The loas are not mad at you, but they’re angry as hell at your brother, though.”

  I didn’t know how it made me feel to have it confirmed that Thornton was behind this. Certainly not surprised.

  “He is an instrument of evil as sure as you were chosen for good.” Madam Courtney paused to take a big gulp of rum. “You’re the beginning and end but he’s the whole middle. These sins are his doing. The loas was clear on that.”

  “Then I get the Cain and Abel reference, because the minute I find him I’m going to go full on Cain.”

  “That would appear to be your calling.” My real estate lady heartily agreed with my murder plans.

  “Can you find him?”

  “Doubt it. Even with a hair or such. Sure he’s warded as well. What I might be able to find is this one,” she added, picking up Tracey Morrison’s hair. “This one is the power for an unclean vessel. I can feel the vessel. Ain’t far off. Not New Orleans near, but it moves.”