She sipped her beer slowly. “Unlike somebody else at this table.”
“Unlike two somebodies at this table,” I corrected her, and we both laughed.
Jamilla glanced at the stage. “What’s the holdup? Where are they? Should we start stamping our feet for them to come out and show us some magic? Show us what they’ve got?”
We didn’t have to. A moment later one of the magicians walked out onto the stage.
It was Charles, and he looked like a killer.
Chapter 61
CHARLES WAS wearing a skintight black bodysuit and thigh-high patent-leather boots. He had a simple diamond earring and a gold nose stud. He stared contemptuously at the audience. He did this for several uncomfortable moments, his eyes full of hatred and disdain for every case he encountered.
At least twice, I thought that he looked directly at Jamilla and me. So did she.
“Yeah, we’re watching you too, asshole,” she said, raising her beer in mock salute. “You think those two pitiful creeps know we’re here?”
“Who knows? They’re good at this. They haven’t been caught yet.”
“I hear you. Hopefully, they both have stomach cancer and will die slowly and painfully over the next several months. Cheers.” She raised her bottle again.
Charles leaned down and spoke to a college-age couple at a table near the stage. He was miked.
“What are you two airheads staring at? Watch out, or I’ll turn you into a couple of toads. Upgrade you on the food chain.” He laughed, and it was deep and throaty. To my ear, it was also unnecessarily unpleasant, way over the top. The kids in the audience laughed and cheered him on. Civility seems to be dead at the moment. Nasty is chic; nasty is so cool and real.
I looked over at Jamilla. “He sees them as food. Interesting how his twisted mind works.”
The second magician sauntered out onto the stage a couple of minutes later. No magic gimmicks to announce the entrance, which surprised me. I had heard this was a real light-and-sound show, but not tonight. Why the style change? Was this for us? Did they know who we were?
“For the uninitiated, I’m Daniel. Charles and I have been doing magic shows since we were twelve years old and living in San Diego, California. We’re very good at magic. We can do the ‘Vanishing Performer’—Houdini’s personal favorite; the ‘Sword Cabinet’; Carl Hertz’s ‘Merry Widow’; DeKolta’s ‘Cocoon.’ I can catch a bullet fired from a Colt Magnum in my teeth. So can Charles. Aren’t we special? Don’t you wish you were us?”
The crowd howled and cheered. The rock music from the speakers had been lowered. Only the beat droned on.
“The illusion you are about to witness is the same one Harry Houdini used to close his show in Paris and New York. We’re using it to open our show. Need I say more?”
The lights suddenly flashed off. The stage was in total darkness. A few women in the audience screeched loudly. Mock fear. Mostly there was laughter, some of it nervous. What were these two really up to?
Jamilla nudged me with an elbow. “Don’t be scared. I’m right here. I’ll protect you.”
“I’ll remember that.”
Then tiny pinpricks of light appeared everywhere on the stage. The main spots came on again. Nothing happened for the next minute or so.
Then Daniel, riding a spirited, prancing white stallion, came out onto the stage. He was dressed in royal blue glitter from head to toe. He wore a matching top hat, and he tipped it to the cheering audience.
“I must admit this is pretty cool,” Jamilla said. “Quite the stunt. So visual. Now what?”
Daniel was followed onstage by eight men and women in crisp white palace uniforms. And two white tigers. It was a pretty amazing spectacle. Two female performers held up a huge oriental fan in front of Daniel and his high-stepping horse. My eyes were glued to the stage.
“Jesus,” Jamilla muttered. “What the hell is this?”
“They’re ripping off Harry Houdini, like the man said. And they’re doing it well.”
When the two women slowly pulled the fan away, Daniel was gone. Now Charles was seated on the white horse.
“Once again—Jesus,” said Jam. “How do they do that?”
Somehow, Charles had changed into black trash and glitter. The smirk on his face was totally, incredibly arrogant. It showed utter disdain for the audience, but they seemed to love it, to love him. A puff of smoke, and the audience gasped as one.
Somehow, Daniel was back onstage, standing alongside Charles and the beautiful horse. The illusion was masterful. Everyone in the audience jumped up and clapped wildly. The screams and piercing whistles hurt my ears.
“And that,” Daniel announced, “is only the beginning! You ain’t seen nothing yet!”
Jamilla looked at me and her mouth sagged. “Alex, these guys are very good, and I’ve seen Siegfried and Roy. Why are they playing at these little clubs? Why are they wasting their time here?”
“Because they want to,” I told her. “This is where they look for prey.”
Chapter 62
JAMILLA AND I watched both magic shows that night. We were amazed by the calmness and the confidence exuded by Daniel and Charles. Following the second show, the magicians went home. The agents on surveillance there said it appeared the two were home for the night. I didn’t get it, and neither did Jamilla.
Eventually, around three in the morning, she and I returned to the Dauphine. Two FBI teams would stay near Daniel and Charles’s place until morning. We were becoming frustrated and confused. We had a lot of manpower working their butts off.
I wanted to ask Jamilla up for a beer, but I didn’t. Too complicated for right now. Or maybe I was just getting chickenshit as I got older. Maybe I was even a little wiser. Nah.
I was up again at six, making notes in my hotel room. I was learning some things I didn’t want to know, and not just about magic tricks. I now knew that in the vampire underworld, the area surrounding the main home of a sire, regent, or elder was known as the domain. The FBI and the New Orleans police had staked out the neighborhood in the Garden District where Daniel Erickson and Charles Defoe lived.
The house was located on LaSalle near Sixth. It was grey-stone and probably had as many as twenty rooms. The house sat on a hill, with a high, reinforced stone outer wall similar to the outer curtain of a castle. It also had a large, deep cellar, which wouldn’t have been possible in the swampy, sea-level terrain without the elevation of the hill. No one on the task force would admit that they believed in vampires, but everyone knew that a series of brutal murders had been committed and that Daniel and Charles were the likely killers.
Jamilla and I spent the next two days surveilling the house, the domain. We worked double shifts, and nothing could relieve the tedium. A scene that sometimes comes to mind when I’m on stakeouts is the one in The French Connection, Gene Hackman standing out in the cold while the French drug dealers eat an elaborate dinner in a New York restaurant. It’s like that, just like that, sometimes for sixteen or eighteen hours at a stretch.
At least LaSalle Street and the Garden District were pretty to watch. The sugar and cotton barons of the mid-nineteenth century had originally called this home. Most of the hundred- and two-hundred-year-old mansions were beautifully preserved. The majority were kept white, but a few were painted in Mediterranean pastels. Placards informing the frequent “walking tours” about the esteemed residents were affixed to intricate wrought-iron fences.
But it was still surveillance, even sitting side by side with Jamilla Hughes.
Chapter 63
DURING THE stakeout on LaSalle Street, she and I found that we could talk about almost anything. That’s what we did through the long hours. The topics ranged from funny cop stories to investments, movies, Gothic architecture, politics, then on to more personal subjects, like her father, who had run out on her when she was six. I told Jamilla that my mother and father had both died young from a lethal combination of alcoholism and lung cancer—probably depressio
n and hopelessness too.
“I worked for two years as a psychologist. Hung out a shingle,” I told her. “At the time, not too many people in my neighborhood in D.C. could afford treatment. I couldn’t afford to give it away. Most white people didn’t want to see a black shrink. So I took a job as a cop. Just temporary. I didn’t expect to like it, but once I started I got hooked. Bad.”
“What hooked you about being a detective?” she wanted to know. She was a good listener, interested. “Do you remember an incident, any one thing in particular?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. Two men had been shot down in Southeast, which is where I live in Washington, where I grew up. The deaths were written off as ‘drug related,’ which meant not much time would be spent investigating them. At the time, that was SOP in D.C. Still is, actually.”
Jamilla nodded. “I’m afraid that it is in parts of San Francisco too. We like to think of our city as enlightened, and it can be. But people out there are good at looking the other way. Makes me sick sometimes.”
“Anyway, I knew these two men, and I was almost certain they weren’t involved in selling drugs. They both had jobs at a small local music store. Maybe they smoked a little weed, but nothing worse than that.”
“I know the types you’re talking about.”
“So I investigated the murder case on my own. A detective friend named John Sampson helped. I learned to follow my gut. Found out that one of the men had been dating a woman who a local dealer thought he owned. I kept digging, following my instincts, digging a little deeper. Turns out the dealer had murdered the two men. Once I solved that case, it was all over for me. I knew I was good at it, maybe because of all the psych training I’d had, and I liked making things right. Or maybe I just liked being right.”
“Sounds like you have some balance in your life, though. The kids, your grandmother, friends,” she said.
We let it go at that, didn’t pursue the obvious—that Jamilla and I were both single and unattached. It had nothing to do with our jobs. If only it were that simple.
Chapter 64
ONE COMFORTING reality of police work is that you rarely come up against a murder situation that you’ve never seen or heard about before. These killings were different: seemingly random, vicious, ongoing for more than eleven years, varying modi operandi. What made the case particularly difficult was the possibility that there were several killers.
I met with Kyle the following morning to talk about the case. He was in a foul mood, and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. We shared our pet theories and whiny complaints, then I rejoined Jamilla Hughes on the stakeout in the Garden District.
I brought a box of Krispy Kremes, which got major chuckles from her, and also from the FBI agents watching the house. Everybody clamored for the tasty, air-shot doughnuts, though. The entire box was gone in a matter of minutes.
“Turns out, they’re real homebodies,” she said as she munched on a glazed.
“It’s still daylight. They’re probably in their coffins,” I said.
She grinned and shook her head. Her dark eyes sparkled. “Not exactly. The shorter one, Charles, was working in the garden out back all morning. He’s certainly not afraid of the sun.”
“So maybe Daniel is the real vampire. The Sire. He’s supposed to be the force behind the magicians’ act.”
“Charles has been on the phone a lot. He’s setting up a party at the house. You’ll love this—it’s a fetish ball. Wear your favorite kinky things: leather, rubber, Goth, Victorian, whatever you’re into. What are you into?” she asked.
I laughed, thought about it. “Mostly denim, corduroy, a little black leather. I have a leather car coat. It’s a little beat up, but it’s nasty looking.”
She laughed. “I think you’d look dashing as a Gothic prince.”
“How about you? Any fetishes we should know about?”
“Well . . . I’ll admit to owning a couple of leather jackets, pants, one pair of long boots that I’m still paying for. I am from San Francisco, you know. A girl has to keep up with the times.”
“Same for us boys.”
It was another long day of surveillance. We continued to watch the house until dark. Around nine o’clock, a pair of FBI agents dropped by to relieve us. “Let’s get a bite,” I said to Jamilla.
“Bad choice of words, Alex.” We both laughed a little too hard.
We didn’t want to venture too far from the magicians’ house, so we settled on the Camellia Grill on South Carrollton Avenue at the River Bend. The Camellia looked like a small plantation home on the outside. Inside, it was a neat diner, with a long counter and stools screwed to the floor. A waiter in a crisp white jacket and black tie served us. We ordered coffee and omelettes, which were light and fluffy, and about the size of rolled-up newspapers. Jamilla had a side order of red beans and rice. When in the Big Easy . . .
The food was good, the coffee even better. The company was nice too. She and I got along well, maybe even better than that. Even the lulls in our conversation weren’t too uncomfortable, and they were infrequent. A friend of mine once defined love as finding someone you can talk to late into the night. Pretty good.
“Nothing on the beeper,” she said while we loitered over our coffee after the meal. I had heard there were lines outside the Camellia during lunch and dinner, but we had caught a slow time.
“I wonder what the two of them do inside that big, eerie house, Alex? What do psycho murderers do in their spare time?”
I had studied enough of them. There was no set pattern. “Some are married, even happily if you ask the spouses. Gary Soneji had a little girl. Geoffrey Shafer had three children. That’s probably the scariest thing I can imagine—when a husband, or the person next door, or a dad turns out to be a stone-cold killer. It happens. I’ve seen it.”
She sipped her coffee refill. “The neighbors seem to like Daniel and Charles. They consider them eccentric but pleasant and, I love this, civic minded. Daniel owns the house. He inherited it from his father, who was also eccentric—a portrait painter. Rumor has it that the magicians are gay, but they’re often seen in the company of young, attractive women.”
“Vampires aren’t restricted by gender. I learned that from Peter Westin,” I said. “These two are equal-opportunity killers, males and females. Something still isn’t matching up for me, though. There’s a logic hole I keep trying to fill. A few of them, actually.”
“Their magical mystery tour sure matches up with a lot of the murders, Alex,” she said.
“I know. I can’t dispute the evidence we’ve collected so far.”
“But you have one of your famous feelings.”
“I don’t know about famous, but something feels wrong to me. This thing isn’t tracking right. The other shoe hasn’t dropped. That’s what worries me. Why did they get sloppy all of a sudden? They went undetected for years, and now several dozen FBI agents are watching their house.”
We drank our coffee and lingered in the restaurant, which was only half full but would be humming again when the bars closed. Nobody pressured us to leave, and we weren’t in a hurry to get back to the boredom of the stakeout.
Jamilla was interesting to me for a lot of reasons, but the main one was probably that I saw so much of my own experience in hers. We were both committed to police work. We had full lives—friends and family—and yet, in a way, we were loners. Why was that?
“You okay?” she asked. Her eyes communicated concern. I usually can intuit good people, and she was one of them. No doubt about it.
“I just went away for a minute,” I said. “I’m back now.”
“Where do you go when you take these little mind excursions?”
“Florence,” I said. “It’s probably the most beautiful city on earth. My favorite, anyway.”
“And you were just in Florence, Italy?”
“Actually, I was thinking about some of the similarities in our lives.”
She nodded. “I’ve thought about it
too. What the heck is to become of us, Alex? Are we both doomed to repeat the same mistakes?”
“Well, hopefully we’re going to catch two real bad killers here in New Orleans. How’s that?”
Jamilla reached over and patted my cheek, then she said ruefully, “That’s what I think too. We are doomed.”
Chapter 65
THE MASTERMIND watched Alex Cross get out of the car. He had him in his sights.
Cross and the lovely Inspector Jamilla Hughes had returned from a dinner break and were back on surveillance duty. Were they getting closer? Would Alex and Jamilla become lovers in New Orleans? That was an obvious flaw in Cross’s character; he needed to be loved, didn’t he?
But now Cross was out of the car again.
Something is bothering the great Cross. Maybe he needs to walk a little after the meal. Or maybe he needs to think about the case some more and wants to be alone. He is a loner, just like I am.
This was amazing; this was no good.
He followed Cross down a dark side street filled with modest homes of two styles—the double shotgun and the Creole cottage; both were staples in this part of New Orleans.
The fragrance of honeysuckle, jasmine, and gardenias was heavy in the air. He sucked in a breath. Pleasant. A hundred years before, the scents had masked the odors of the nearby slaughterhouses. The Mastermind knew his history, knew lots about most things, and the facts flowed easily through his mind as he continued to follow Cross at a safe distance. He retained information and knew how to use it.
He could hear the rattle and hum of the St. Charles Avenue streetcar as it raced along its tracks a few blocks away. It helped to cover any slight sound of his own footsteps.
He was enjoying this walk with Cross immensely, and he thought that maybe this would be the night. Just the idea sent adrenaline pumping through him.
He continued to move closer to Cross. Yes, this was it. Right here, right now.