“It doesn’t matter whether he would approve,” Lavelle said impatiently.
“I suspect that’s because it isn’t really revenge that motivates you. Not deep down.”
Again, Lavelle was silent.
Pushing, probing for the truth, Jack said, “So if your brother wouldn’t approve of murder being done in his name, then why are you—”
“I’m not exterminating these vermin in my brother’s name,” Lavelle said sharply, furiously. “I’m doing it in my own name. Mine and no one else’s. That must be understood. I never claimed otherwise. These deaths accrue to my credit, not to my brother’s.”
“Credit? Since when is murder a credit, a character reference, a matter of pride? That’s insane.”
“It isn’t insane,” Lavelle said heatedly. The madness boiled up in him. “It is the reasoning of the ancient ones, the gods of Pétro and Congo. No one can take the life of a Bocor’s brother and go unpunished. The murder of my brother is an insult to me. It diminishes me. It mocks me. I cannot tolerate that. I will not! My power as a Bocor would be weakened forever if I were to forego revenge. The ancient ones would lose respect for me, turn away from me, withdraw their support and power.” He was ranting now, losing his cool. “Blood must flow. The floodgates of death must be opened. Oceans of pain must sweep them away, all who mocked me by touching my brother. Even if I despised Gregory, he was of my family; no one can spill the blood of a Bocor’s family and go unpunished. If I fail to take adequate revenge, the ancient ones will never permit me to call upon them again; they will not enforce my curses and spells any more. I must repay the murder of my brother with at least a score of murders of my own if I am to keep the respect and patronage of the gods of Pétro and Congo.”
Jack had probed to the roots of the man’s true motivation, but he had gained nothing for his efforts. The true motivation made no sense to him; it seemed just one more aspect of Lavelle’s madness.
“You really believe this, don’t you?” Jack asked.
“It’s the truth.”
“It’s crazy.”
“Eventually, you will learn otherwise.”
“Crazy,” Jack repeated.
“One more piece of advice,” Lavelle said.
“You’re the only suspect I’ve ever known to be so brimming over with advice. A regular Ann Landers.”
Ignoring him, Lavelle said, “Remove yourself from this case.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Get out of it.”
“Impossible.”
“Ask to be relieved.”
“No.”
“You’ll do it if you know what’s good for you.”
“You’re an arrogant bastard.”
“I know.”
“I’m a cop, for God’s sake! You can’t make me back down by threatening me. Threats just make me all the more interested in finding you. Cops in Haiti must be the same. It can’t be that much different. Besides, what good would it do you if I did ask to be relieved? Someone else would replace me. They’d still continue to look for you.”
“Yes, but whoever replaced you wouldn’t be broad-minded enough to explore the possibility of voodoo’s effectiveness. He’d stick to the usual police procedure, and I have no fear of that.”
Jack was startled. “You mean my open-mindedness alone is a threat to you?”
Lavelle didn’t answer the question. He said, “All right. If you won’t step out of the picture, then at least stop your research into voodoo. Handle this as Rebecca Chandler wants to handle it—as if it were an ordinary homicide investigation.”
“I don’t believe your gall,” Jack said.
“Your mind is open, if only a narrow crack, to the possibility of a supernatural explanation. Don’t pursue that line of inquiry. That’s all I ask.”
“Oh, that’s all, is it?”
“Satisfy yourself with fingerprint kits, lab technicians, your usual experts, the standard tools. Question all the witnesses you wish to question—”
“Thanks so much for the permission.”
“—I don’t care about those things,” Lavelle continued, as if Jack hadn’t interrupted. “You’ll never find me that way. I’ll be finished with Carramazza and on my way back to the islands before you’ve got a single lead. Just forget about the voodoo angle.”
Astonished by the man’s chutzpa, Jack said, “And if I don’t forget about it?”
The open telephone line hissed, and Jack was reminded of the black serpent of which Carver Hampton had spoken, and he wondered if Lavelle could somehow send a serpent over the telephone line, out of the earpiece, to bite him on the ear and head, or out of the mouthpiece, to bite him on the lips and on the nose and in the eyes.... He held the receiver away from himself, looked at it warily, then felt foolish, and brought it back to his face.
Lavelle said, “If you insist on learning more about voodoo, if you continue to pursue that avenue of investigation ... then I will have your son and daughter torn to pieces.”
Finally, one of Lavelle’s threats affected Jack. His stomach twisted, knotted.
Lavelle said, “Do you remember what Dominick Carramazza and his bodyguards looked like—”
And then they were both talking at once, Jack shouting, Lavelle maintaining his cool and measured tone of voice:
“Listen, you creepy son of a bitch—”
“—back there in the hotel, old Dominick, all ripped up—”
“—you stay away from—”
“—eyes torn out, all bloody?”
“—my kids, or I’ll—”
“When I’m finished with Davey and Penny—”
“—blow your fuckin’ head off!”
“—they’ll be nothing but dead meat—”
“I’m warning you—”
“—dog meat, garbage—”
“—I’ll find you—”
“—and maybe I’ll even rape the girl—”
“—you stinking scumbag!”
“—’cause she’s really a tender, juicy little piece. I like them tender sometimes, very young and tender, innocent. The thrill is in the corruption, you see.”
“You threaten my kids, you asshole, you just threw away whatever chance you had. Who do you think you are? My God, where do you think you are? This is America, you dumb shit. You can’t get away with that kind of stuff here, threatening my kids.”
“I’ll give you the rest of the day to think it over. Then, if you don’t back off, I’ll take Davey and Penny. And I’ll make it very painful for them.”
Lavelle hung up.
“Wait!” Jack shouted.
He rattled the disconnect lever, trying to reestablish contact, trying to bring Lavelle back. Of course, it didn’t work.
He was gripping the receiver so hard that his hand ached and his muscles were bunched up all the way to the shoulder. He slammed the receiver down almost hard enough to crack the earpiece.
He was breathing like a bull that, for some time, had been taunted by the movement of a red cape. He was aware of his own pulse throbbing in his temples, and he could feel the heat in his flushed face. The knots in his stomach had drawn painfully tight.
After a moment, he turned away from the phone. He was shaking with rage. He stood in the falling snow, gradually getting a grip on himself.
Everything would be all right. Nothing to worry about. Penny and Davey were safe at school, where there were plenty of people to watch over them. It was a good, reliable school, with first-rate security. And Faye would pick them up at three o’clock and take them to her place; Lavelle couldn’t know about that. If he did decide to hurt the kids this evening, he’d expect to find them at the apartment; when he discovered they weren’t at home, he wouldn’t know where to look for them. In spite of what Carver Hampton had said, Lavelle couldn’t know all and see all. Could he? Of course not. He wasn’t God. He might be a Bocor, a priest with real power, a genuine sorcerer. But he wasn’t God. So the kids would be safe with Faye and Keith
. In fact, maybe it would be a good idea for them to stay at the Jamison apartment overnight. Or even for the next few days, until Lavelle was apprehended. Faye and Keith wouldn’t mind; they’d welcome the visit, the opportunity to spoil their only niece and nephew. Might even be wise to keep Penny and Davey out of school until this was all over. And he’d talk to Captain Gresham about getting some protection for them, a uniformed officer to stay in the Jamison apartment when Jack wasn’t able to be there. Not much chance Lavelle would track the kids down. Highly unlikely. But just in case.... And if Gresham didn’t take the threat seriously, if he thought an around-the-clock guard was an unjustified use of manpower, then something could be arranged with the guys, the other detectives; they’d help him, just as he’d help them if anything like this ever fell in their direction; each of them would give up a few hours of off-duty time, take a shift at the Jamisons’; anything for a buddy whose family was marked; it was part of the code. Okay. Fine. Everything would be all right.
The world, which had strangely receded when the telephone had begun to ring, now rushed back. Jack was aware of sound, first: a bleating automobile horn, laughter farther along the street, the clatter-clank of tire chains on the snowy pavement, the howling wind. The buildings crowded in around him. A pedestrian scurried past, bent into the wind; and here came three black teenagers, laughing, throwing snowballs at one another as they ran. The mist was gone, and he didn’t feel dizzy or disoriented any longer. He wondered if there actually had been any mist in the first place, and he decided the eerie fog had existed only in his mind, a figment of his imagination. What must have happened was... he must have had an attack of some kind; yeah, sure, nothing more than that.
But exactly what kind of attack? And why had he been stricken by it? What had brought it on? He wasn’t an epileptic. He didn’t have low blood pressure. No other physical maladies, as far as he was aware. He had never experienced a fainting spell in his life; nothing remotely like that. He was in perfect health. So why?
And how had he known the phone call was for him?
He stood there for a while, thinking about it, as thousands of snowflakes fluttered like moths around him.
Eventually he realized he ought to call Faye and explain the situation to her, warn her to be certain that she wasn’t followed when she picked up the kids at Wellton School. He turned to the pay phone, paused. No. He wouldn’t make the call here. Not on the very phone Lavelle had used. It seemed ridiculous to suppose that the man could have a tap on a public phone—but it also seemed foolish to test the possibility.
Calmer—still furious but less frightened than he had been—he headed back toward the patrol car that was waiting for him.
Three-quarters of an inch of snow lay on the ground. The storm was turning into a full-fledged blizzard.
The wind had icy teeth. It bit.
6
Lavelle returned to the corrugated metal shed at the rear of his property. Outside, winter raged; inside, fierce dry heat made sweat pop out of Lavelle’s ebony skin and stream down his face, and shimmering orange light cast odd leaping shadows on the ribbed walls. From the pit in the center of the floor, a sound arose, a chilling susurration, as of thousands of distant voices, angry whisperings.
He had brought two photographs with him: one of Davey Dawson, the other of Penny Dawson. He had taken both photographs himself, yesterday afternoon, on the street in front of Wellton School. He had been in his van, parked almost a block away, and he had used a 35-mm Pentax with a telephoto lens. He had processed the film in his own closet-size darkroom.
In order to put a curse on someone and be absolutely certain that it would bring about the desired calamity, a Bocor required an icon of the intended victim. Traditionally, the priest prepared a doll, sewed it together from scraps of cotton cloth and filled it with sawdust or sand, then did the best he could to make the doll’s face resemble the face of the victim; that done, the ritual was performed with the doll as a surrogate for the real person.
But that was a tedious chore made even more difficult by the fact that the average Bocor—lacking the talent and skills of an artist—found it virtually impossible to make a cotton face look sufficiently like anyone’s real countenance. Therefore, the need always arose to embellish the doll with a lock of hair or a nail clipping or a drop of blood from the victim. Obtaining any one of those items wasn’t easy. You couldn’t just hang around the victim’s barbershop or beauty salon, week after week, waiting for him or her to come in and get a hair-cut. You couldn’t very well ask him to save a few nail clippings for you the next time he gave himself a manicure. And about the only way to obtain a sample of the would-be victim’s blood was to assault him and risk apprehension by the police, which was the very thing you were trying to avoid by striking at him with magic rather than with fists or a knife or a gun.
All of those difficulties could be circumvented by the use of a good photograph instead of a doll. As far as Lavelle knew, he was the only Bocor who had ever applied this bit of modern technology to the practice of voodoo. The first time he’d tried it, he hadn’t expected it to work; however, six hours after the ritual was completed, the intended victim was dead, crushed under the wheels of a runaway truck. Since then, Lavelle had employed photographs in every ceremony that ordinarily would have called for a doll. Evidently, he possessed some of his brother Gregory’s machine-age sensibility and faith in progress.
Now, kneeling on the earthen floor of the shed, beside the pit, he used a ballpoint pen to punch a hole in the top of each of the eight-by-ten glossies. Then he strung both photographs on a length of slender cord. Two wooden stakes had been driven into the dirt floor, near the brink of the pit, directly opposite each other, with the void between them. Lavelle tied one end of the cord to one of the wooden stakes, stretched it across the pit, and fastened the other end to the second stake. The pictures of the Dawson children dangled over the center of the hole, bathed in the unearthly orange glow that shone up from the mysterious, shifting bottom of it.
Soon, he would have to kill the children. He was giving Jack Dawson a few hours yet, one last opportunity to back down, but he was fairly sure that Dawson would not relent.
He didn’t mind killing children. He looked forward to it. There was a special exhilaration in the murder of the very young.
He licked his lips.
The sound issuing from the pit—the distant susurration that seemed to be composed of tens of thousands of hissing, whispering voices—grew slightly louder when the photographs were suspended where Lavelle wanted them. And there was a new, disquieting tone to the whispers, as well: not merely anger; not just a note of menace; it was an elusive quality that, somehow, spoke of monstrous needs, of a hideous voracity, of blood and perversion, the sound of a dark and insatiable hunger.
Lavelle stripped out of his clothes.
Fondling his genitals, he recited a short prayer.
He was ready to begin.
To the left of the shed door stood five large copper bowls. Each contained a different substance: white flour, corn meal, red brick powder, powdered charcoal, and powdered tannis root. Scooping up a handful of the red brick powder, allowing it to dribble in a measured flow from one end of his cupped hand, Lavelle began to draw an intricate design on the floor along the northern flank of the pit.
This design was called a vèvè, and it represented the figure and power of an astral force. There were hundreds of vèvès that a Houngon or a Bocor must know. Through the drawing of several appropriate vèvès prior to the start of a ritual, the priest was forcing the attention of the gods to the Oumphor, the temple, where the rites were to be conducted. The vèvè had to be drawn freehand, without the assistance of a stencil and most certainly without the guidance of a preliminary sketch scratched in the earth; nevertheless, though done freehand, the vèvè had to be symmetrical and properly proportioned if it were to have any effect. The creation of the vèvès required much practice, a sensitive and agile hand, and a keen eye.
Lavelle scooped up a second handful of red brick powder and continued his work. In a few minutes he had drawn the vèvè that represented Simbi Y-An-Kitha, one of the dark gods of Pétro:
He scrubbed his hand on a clean dry towel, ridding himself of most of the brick dust. He scooped up a handful of flour and began to draw another vèvè along the southern flank of the pit. This pattern was much different from the first.
In all, he drew four intricate designs, one on each side of the pit. The third was rendered in charcoal powder. The fourth was done with powdered tannis root.
Then, careful not to disturb the vèvès, he crouched, naked, at the edge of the pit.
He stared down.
Down...
The floor of the pit shifted, boiled, changed, swirled, oozed, drew close, pulsed, receded. Lavelle had placed no fire or light of any kind inside the hole, yet it glowed and flickered. At first the floor of the pit was only three feet away, just as he had made it. But the longer he stared, the deeper it seemed to become. Now thirty feet instead of three. Now three hundred. Now three miles deep. Now as deep as the center of the earth itself. And deeper, still deeper, deeper than the distance to the moon, the stars, deeper than the distance to the edge of the universe.
When the bottom of the pit had receded to infinity, Lavelle stood up. He broke into a five-note song, a repetitive chant of destruction and death, and he began the ritual by urinating on the photographs that he had strung on the cord.
7
In the squad car.
The hiss and crackle of the police-band radio.
Headed downtown. Toward the office.
Chain-rigged tires singing on the pavement.
Snowflakes colliding soundlessly with the windshield. The wipers thumping with metronomic monotony.
Nick Iervolino, the uniformed officer behind the wheel, startled Jack out of a near-trance: “You don’t have to worry about my driving, Lieutenant.”