Paris gives her a brief rundown.

“That ain’t much,” Carla says.

“I know.”

“Just because you’d like to go upside on this guy doesn’t exactly make him our voodoo mass murderer.”

“You’re right,” Paris says. “Forget I said anything.”

They drop the money on the bar, sign off for what they know will only be a few hours. Paris walks Carla to her car. They assess each other’s ability to drive and give themselves a pass.

Thirty minutes later, as Paris flops into his bed, chilled to the marrow, fully clothed, deprived of any direction in this brutal abattoir he calls a career, he falls instantly into a deep, troubled sleep.

Evil is a breed, Fingers.

An hour later, Paris does not hear the car pull into the parking lot across the street, nor does he see the glow of the cigar ember inside, phosphorescent in the blackness, strobing through the night like a rosary made of fire.

Three

∼

Brujo

49

NEW YEAR’S EVE

CLEVELAND, OHIO

The boy is a man. Thirty years of age this day. In his time, he has broken every law of God, almost every law of man. In his time he has taken the lives of eleven people, including a cholo who once approached him in a Sinaloa café, a foul-breathed wretch with a pedophile’s eyes over slick yellow teeth. He had been so revolted by this man’s repeated advances that he had paid for the man’s drinks well into the night, left with him, then lured him to a dark place and gutted him like a pescado. He had been fifteen. He had fed the man’s insides to some strays.

Another life became his around the time his mother had been walking the streets near East Fifty-fifth Street in Cleveland. One night she had brought home a man who looked and smelled like a hobo, someone who rode the rails. In the morning the boy had seen the man searching the kitchen, looking for cash. The man found the cookie jar that held sixty-one dollars. The boy had dressed, followed the man to a vacant building on Prospect. He watched while the man made an elaborate job of hiding the money in a coffee can. He watched while the man curled up on a stinking mattress.

When the boy was certain the man was sound asleep, he sneaked up on him and, with one powerful blow, pounded a rusty wood chisel into the man’s left ear, deep into his brain, killing him instantly. The boy had been twelve at the time. He and his sister had then dug a hole in the lot behind the building and buried the man. Two weeks later, they stood across the street as the building was torn down, filled in, leveled. A month later it was paved over.

The sixty-one dollars was replaced in the cookie jar before their mother even knew it was gone, as was an additional four dollars and ten cents the boy had found in the dead man’s pockets.

As the clock winds down to a new day, a new year, the man knows his future is uncertain, as unpredictable as death itself. And yet, as he showers and shaves and readies himself for the day, he knows one thing with certainty.

He knows that Detective John Salvatore Paris will die, by his own hand, before this day is out.

50

Mercedes Cruz has taken on the waxy pallor of the newly deceased. All the ghastly visual details of the murders of Fayette Martin, Willis Walker, Isaac Levertov, and Edith Levertov are displayed in front of her in brilliant, living color. Forty-eight photographs in all.

Paris feels for Mercedes. He knows her well enough to know she has a good heart and this is something she had not anticipated.

The task force meeting begins promptly at eight o’clock with every available detective in the Homicide Unit sitting in the room. Four of the eight unit commanders are also in attendance, as are the coroner and deputy coroner.

In addition to the crime-scene photographs of the victims, there are two photographs of the cardboard strips found on Isaac Levertov and Fayette Martin, as well as two photographs of the shoeprints found in the Levertov apartment. Also, a pair of computer-generated composites are tacked on the board. One is of a young blond woman, the woman last seen with Willis Walker. The other is really two composites side by side. The bearded, bespectacled young man at the hot dog cart on the left; and a clean shaven, glassless version of the suspect on the right.

During the past twenty-four hours, the net had widened to include law-enforcement agencies at the county and state levels. Images of the hot dog vendor had been distributed to police and sheriff’s departments all over northeastern Ohio, some already to Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia. The image had also been uploaded to a dozen law-enforcement websites.

The task force had also rerun the digital file taken from Carla’s hidden camera at the party. Poor quality, terrible lighting, absolutely unusable.

In the past few days, the buzz that had flowed through the department regarding the Paris Is Burning evidence had taken on a far more serious tone than if the rumor that a police officer might be targeted by a killer had not been prematurely floated. There are about eighteen hundred men and women on the force and more than once, over the past days, a few more vests than usual had been quietly removed from lockers and strapped into place.

The investigation had also confirmed what they already knew; that DVD rental businesses, including the big ones like Blockbuster, do not rent the original plastic packaging with the movie. In the past forty-eight hours, the factory packaging of all thirty-one rental DVD copies of Paris Is Burning in the greater Cleveland area had been examined and cleared. Not one of them had a missing label.

Greg Ebersole begins. “There were no usable prints from the motel room. Most of the surfaces were wiped down rather thoroughly, but there were traces of Willis Walker’s blood found on the nightstand and the inside door-knob, indicating that the killer wiped the bludgeoning weapon first, which was most likely the toilet tank cover, then proceeded to wipe down the room with the same cloth. A towel with what looks like blood on it was found in a culvert along I-90 last night. Lab’s got it now.

“SIU has also lifted no fewer than fifty prints and partials at the Fayette Martin crime scene. Of the twenty on file, eleven were incarcerated at the time of the murder, three no longer live in the area and have provided work alibis. Two are over seventy, being a pair of pensioners who routinely visit the building looking for aluminum cans. That brings us to one Jaybert Louis Williams, thirty-four, whose sheet begins and ends with a pair of shoplifting charges in North Randall, and one Antoinette Viera, thirteen years of age.”

“Thirteen?” Paris asks. “Why the hell are her prints on file?”

Greg scans his notebook. “She stole some supplies from her junior high school.”

“And she went through the system for that?”

“Computer supplies, Jack. As in four brand-new laptops.”

Everyone in the room absorbs the information, then discards it. There is nothing there.

“Any reason to like the shoplifter?”

Greg holds up the man’s photograph. Jaybert L. Williams is black, no less than three hundred pounds. He is certainly not the hot dog vendor. But it doesn’t rule him out as an accomplice or accessory.

Carla asks, “And what’s his excuse for being on someone else’s property?”

“Actually, he copped right to it. Said he was in there getting a blow job. Said it was so good he had to hang onto the counter.”

A collective sigh skirts the room, buttressed by some boisterous laughter.

Paris asks, “Did he say when this blow job of a lifetime occurred?”

“Last summer,” Greg says. “The lab supports that. It’s an old print.”

Dead end. Elliott turns to Carla.