Devil Red

  “We’re listening,” Marvin said.

  “Wouldn’t you be mad someone killed someone you loved, and the batch of them got off by tattling?” Brett said.

  “They got off because they turned evidence on Godzilla, who did the actual killing,” Marvin said. “She was the one stabbed the kid, sucked his blood. I’m not saying they’re pure as the driven snow, but they didn’t do the stabbing.”

  “I know,” Brett said, “but if someone killed Hap, I wouldn’t be satisfied if the one person most responsible went to jail and didn’t even get the death penalty. That deal would suck, especially since the others got to go free and weren’t even told their breath stinks. If I was the frat boy’s family, maybe I would have a serious grudge. Now that I think about it, I’ve never heard any of you even mention the dead boy’s name.”

  We looked at one another.

  “I guess we been thinking it had more to do with Godzilla or Mini or Ted,” I said.

  “You got your notes, Hap?” Marvin asked.

  I got them.

  Marvin opened them. “Kid’s name was Jason Kincaid. His parents are divorced, and the mother is dead. Cancer. The father is a sixty-year-old accountant in Houston. Had one other child, a girl, Florence, died of a drug overdose. Has some wealthy clients, and therefore is pretty wealthy himself. His name is Howard Kincaid. He was looked at by the cops some years ago. They came up with zip. He hasn’t been high on our list, because they caught the one who killed his kid. Godzilla.”

  “Maybe Kincaid could get another look,” I said.

  “It’s worth a shot,” Marvin said. “I could send you boys to meet him, or we could get someone good.”

  “That is some amusing shit you got going there,” Leonard said. “That is funny, how you cut us down, and may really mean it.”

  Marvin grinned. “I suggest we talk to Cason Statler. He’s friends with Mrs. Christopher, and he used to work in Houston. Probably has some contacts you could talk to. And, of course, you can talk to the kid’s father. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything to it—no offense, Brett—as it’s been looked into. I’d think the cops would have sensed something being there, even if they are the worst cops since Keystone. But they didn’t note a thing. I think it has to do with Mini. I think she’s the key, and I think it maybe has to do with Ted. The others are connected, of course, but I think the chain starts with her and has to do with something she or Ted knew or something they did. I think Godzilla may just be unlucky, and that Mom was a bad driver and a drunk. But Kincaid, I don’t see it.”

  “I like my idea,” Brett said, “because it’s mine.”

  “May I have my hat back now?” Leonard said.

  Brett gave him the hat.

  “Jim Bob is from the Houston area,” I said. “We know him. We’ve worked with him. Maybe he’d do better than Cason.”

  “We’d have to pay him out of our money,” Marvin said.

  No one said anything for a moment. Then Leonard said, “Yeah, you’re right, let’s get Cason, and we can work on his loyalty to Mrs. Christopher, and just have to buy him lunch or somethin’.”

  36

  After Leonard and Marvin left, I set the door back in place, but it was beyond fixing. I didn’t have any boards to nail over it, so I put a chair under the doorknob. A kitten with anger issues could probably have pushed it over, but it was something.

  Me and Brett locked ourselves in the upstairs bedroom just in case our two cast-wearing vigilantes escaped the long arm of the law and came after us.

  I said, “What you said about the father, Kincaid, that was solid thinking, baby. We’ve been so certain it was someone who just hated these people for their weirdness, or was one of them, that it didn’t occur to us. We should have considered it, but we didn’t, and that’s why Leonard and I do odd jobs and are not professors of physics.”

  “That’s the truth,” Brett said.

  “I give you a compliment, and you wound me? You are one mean woman.”

  “What about Marvin?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m not saying you’re definitively right and he’s wrong, but he thinks of himself as a detective, and on some level, having been a cop, I think he wants to generally believe they know what they’re talking about. And usually, truth is, they do. But sometimes, a person standing back from it all can point out the obvious.”

  She snuggled close. “What made me think of the father, Kincaid, really wasn’t obvious thinking.”

  “No?”

  “No. It was those two jackasses that broke into our house. Here are two guys that had their hand, a knee, and a rib broke. A couple of bully types, the sort they always tell you if you stand up to them they won’t fight back. But they did.”

  “Most of those little schoolyard homilies prove to be false. Bullies are not always cowards, but they are always bullies,” I said. “And they had guns. That helps make you braver, just in case you’re lacking in the courage department.”

  “They went to the trouble of figuring out who you two were, and coming here. They wanted revenge. I thought Kincaid might feel the same way. And it turns out he has the money to make it happen.”

  “It was good thinking,” I said. “I was thinking the law got Godzilla, so what’s for Kincaid to do? It was taken care of. But it wasn’t my son. Had it been, I might not be so easily satisfied.”

  “I’m going to change the subject.”

  “Okay.”

  She ran her hand down my side. “Want to make love?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m no idiot.”

  “No mouse ears and Leonard took his hat back.”

  “We’ll just pretend.”

  “I can squeak like a mouse.”

  “Baby, you say the sweetest things.”

  We made love and fell into an uneasy sleep. Or at least my sleep was uneasy. Within seconds, Brett was sawing logs. Me, I lay there for a while and wondered what would have happened had Leonard not been there with me tonight.

  The answer was obvious.

  37

  Next morning, early, I went to a hardware store and bought the stuff I needed and brought it home. Brett and I replaced the doorjamb and lock, with her doing the precision work. Stuff like that for me is like trying to write cursive on a notepad with my toes while taking verbal directions from a monkey. But with us working together, it was a fair job. It still needed painting, and I had forgotten the paint.

  After Brett left for an afternoon shift, I called Leonard, invited him over for lunch. He passed, said he was having lunch with Cason.

  I tucked a sandwich away, went to town, and bought some paint. When I got back, Leonard’s car was parked in the drive. He had let himself in and was watching the downstairs television, some show about the life of Willie Nelson. Leonard was a bear for all things related to country music.

  While I painted the doorjamb and he lounged, I asked him:

  “What about Cason?”

  “He’s in. A couple of tacos and I had him on the job.”

  “When do we go?”

  “He’s waiting on a call.”

  Cason had us meet him at the newspaper office, and then took us downstairs to meet Mercury, the man who collected facts. He told us Mercury had been with the paper a long time, and all he did was fact-check and catalog the morgue. He was seldom seen, and his work was rarely questioned. In fact, Cason told us that unless you needed something from downstairs, in what he called the dungeon, you stayed out of there. Mercury liked it that way.

  Downstairs was like a hole in the floor with steps and it was crowded with more crap than a junkyard: boxes and files and desks and tables with stacks of papers. It was poorly lit down there.

  Mercury had a desk in one corner, and the desk, unlike the rest of the room, was well lit by a gooseneck lamp. He was sitting in front of the desk in a wheeled, wooden chair with his legs crossed. He looked in his thirties, blond hair, blue eyes. A nice-looking guy with a real set of shoulders on him and a face that need
ed some sun.

  He didn’t get up as we got closer. We went to him and shook hands.

  Cason took a position on the edge of the desk, said, “So, Jack, you find anything?”

  “The actual case you’re working on, not much. Thing interested me was the devil head at the scene of the murders. I ran it through the computer, and came up with some similar things, but most of it was not similar enough. Except for these.”

  He turned in his roller chair and picked up the file and spun back around and gave it to me. I opened it. It was a thin file. But there were some crime photos in it. Some may have been suicides, some murders. There were separate photos of little red devil head drawings.

  “You got these off the computer?”

  “I got some information off the computers, but these photos I got through contacts and through Mrs. Christopher spreading some money around. You can thank her, my government friends, and FedEx for these. The devil head was at the scene of these crimes. Each crime took place miles apart. Let me see the file.”

  I gave it back to him.

  “There was … Oh, here’s one in Louisiana. Took place not long after the hurricane. The one there was a mobster. The devil head was made really obvious, was drawn on a mirror with the man’s blood. The others, they’re less obvious. There’s Oregon … Here’s one in New York.”

  “You’re saying these killings have a connection?” Leonard said.

  “I’m saying that there’s a devil head drawn in blood at these death sites. You want me to do your work for you?”

  “That would be nice,” I said.

  “Here’s what I can tell you. Those drawings are either connected, or someone knows about them and copied them for the murders you’re investigating. The drawings and the murders, or what look to be suicides—all of them suspicious—took place over five years. There could be more devil heads and more murders that are just not known. Or maybe the killer didn’t always do the devil head thing. No one like me has sat down and tracked this stuff, or had the connections to see how many of these devil heads are out there. Me, I like doing this sort of work. You start to see patterns in stuff like this. I’m big on patterns.”

  “So, is there one person doing all this?” Leonard asked.

  “Hell, it could be two, three, a copycat, or a weird coincidence. But it would be one hell of a weird coincidence, and since someone like me would have to put together the fact that there’s something to copy, I think a copycat is unlikely as well. Another thing. I checked out any so-called vampire connections to the devil head. Nothing. All of the murders seem unconnected, except for the ones that took place in the East Texas area.”

  “So what we got is a serial killer?” I said.

  Mercury paused. “You know, I’m not so sure. There doesn’t seem to be any sexual obsession. There is the devil head, a kind of signature, but maybe our killer just likes to sign his work. It’s missing the qualities one usually thinks of when using the term ‘serial killer’ to mean someone who kills due to some sort of sexual obsession.”

  “Bert had his tongue cut out,” Leonard said. “His penis cut up.”

  “Torture can be sexual, but I think this was punishment. I think the killers just consider it business. They wanted him to tell them something, and whatever they wanted, he told them. I can promise you that, truth or not.”

  “Didn’t the Son of Sam just shoot people?” I said. “He was a serial killer that didn’t mess with the bodies. It was about power. That’s what serial killers are really after.”

  “Yeah,” Mercury said. “It could be just like that. I’m not saying I know. I’m saying my experience looking at this kind of stuff for years tells me it may be something else. But, hey, when it comes right down to it, your guess is as good as mine.”

  38

  We went to the hospital and I told Brett we were leaving for Houston. She gave me a kiss and we tried not to make too much of it, me going off only a short time after she had come home, but the feelings were there.

  I left her and we drove to my place, and then Leonard’s, packed a few overnight things. I saw that Leonard packed the deerstalker. He was swift about it, but I saw it done. At least it was packed and not on his head.

  We tooled back to Camp Rapture to get Cason. He had needed time to settle some work details and go home and do his packing.

  On the way over, Leonard said, “This is like being in a mystery novel with no detectives.”

  “Nailed it,” I said, and we bumped fists.

  We picked up Cason at the address he gave us. It was an apartment complex on the far side of town. Nice place. He told us he had just moved there. We didn’t give a shit, but he told us anyway.

  Driving along, Cason entertained us with some amusing stories that mostly involved the misfortune of others, which, of course, is what most humor is about, and then explained we would be staying with a friend of his over Houston way, out near the airport. A former police officer.

  What he didn’t tell us was the former police officer was a hot late-twenties blonde named Constance and she lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a cat named Yo-Yo. She put Leonard and me in the living room, him on the couch, me on a blow-up mattress. We lay there listening to Cason and Constance all night long. For all I knew, maybe Yo-Yo was involved. There was a banging of heads on the bedstead, a whimpering of delight, a cry of servitude, a yelp of triumph, and a smacking of genitals that sounded like someone snapping a leather strap across bucket seats. After a few hours it ceased, then near morning it started up again, loud enough to wake us. Once I thought a siren had gone off, but it was just Constance.

  Early morning someone let Yo-Yo out of the bedroom. Listening to that all night, even Yo-Yo’s pert little ass made me horny. But Yo-Yo the cat didn’t swing that way. To compound matters, it didn’t help any that Constance came out of the bedroom adorned in a thin white T-shirt that showed she had very pert nipples and more ass than shirt.

  She said excuse me and went to the bathroom and came out wearing dark sweat pants with the T-shirt. The ass was protected, but the nipples still looked like .45 slugs.

  Constance offered us some breakfast, and while she was in the kitchen, Cason came out in sweatpants and a wifebeater, scratching his nuts.

  I said so Constance couldn’t hear, “I had the impression you had a girlfriend at home.”

  “We aren’t connecting like we used to,” he said.

  “You seem to have been connecting with Constance last night.”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Well, since it sounded like you were screwing next to my air mattress, you made it more of my business than I expected. There were a couple moments when I thought I ought to be wearing some kind of contraceptive. Leonard had morning sickness.”

  Leonard, who was sitting on the couch in his shorts, nodded. “I’m going out later to buy a bassinet and a baby stroller. Do you have a color preference?”

  Cason smiled a smile so thin no teeth were visible, said, “You can both go fuck yourself.”

  “I’ve tried,” Leonard said. “Doesn’t work.”

  We ate breakfast, and then Cason made some calls on his cell while Constance got ready for work. Turned out she was now working for a private investigation agency. A cooler more successful one than Marvin’s. Fifteen agents worked there, and unlike us, they were most likely real detectives, and one of the real detectives was a hot blonde who could screw all night and work all day and had a cat named Yo-Yo.

  Constance exited the bathroom, looking professional in a black suit with a frilly white shirt. Her hair was brushed and glossy as a show horse’s mane. She sat on the couch and put on her shoes. I noticed her toenails were painted pink and had little silver stars in the middle of them.

  I asked her, “Do you know a private investigator from Houston named Jim Bob Luke? Know it’s a long shot, but I was just wondering.”

  “That conceited asshole,” she said, giving me a hard look. “Yeah, I know him. He a fri
end of yours?”

  “No,” I said. “Leonard knows him.”

  39

  Cason, with his boyish phone charm, got us a meeting with Howard Kincaid.

  Driving over there, me at the wheel, I said to Cason, “No problem with him talking with us?”

  “I told him we were investigating his son’s death, looking for new connections. I didn’t have to say much else.”

  Howard Kincaid had his office in one of the supertall buildings downtown. It seemed to be made completely of glass and metal and the only stone about it was the wide steps in front, and that stone was polished. In the sunlight the building was as shiny as the snot under a kid’s nose. There were people moving about on the street and cars crowding mine as I drove. I was glad I was visiting Houston, not living there. Three days in a place like this I might have a screaming fit. Of course, that couldn’t be any worse than sitting in a chair and crapping on myself.

  We found a parking place in an underground garage and took an elevator up to the floor we wanted. When the elevator opened, the floor was so freshly buffed it gave off a shimmer like a heat wave in the desert, not quite as bright as the building outside, but bright enough. There was a large opening at one end of the hall, and in it were a lot of plants. It also had brightly colored birds in cages, and the birds were trilling. I hate seeing birds in cages. I had an urge to open the cages and let them out.

  We cruised through the jungle of plants without being attacked by tigers, and into an even wider foyer. There was a desk there. There was a young black woman behind it. She appeared fresh and professional and very nice-looking. Her dark brown eyes were as smooth and cool as refrigerated chocolates. She smiled at us as we walked up. She gave Cason an extra smile, and I thought she showed him more teeth than she showed us. They were nice teeth, by the way.