Within three minutes, Evangelina has the chicken plucked and the white feathers scattered about the altar.

Mercedes emerges from the house, walks over to the driver’s door of her car, gets in. Paris sits in the passenger seat, a little rattled by what he has just seen.

As soon as the ceremony was over, Paris had thanked Evangelina Cruz and quickly made his way out the side door, the smell of sour smoke and chicken blood filling his sinuses. The cold air had done wonders. He had agreed to meet with the old woman at Mercedes’s request, hoping to further his knowledge of Santeria. And although he could honestly say that he knows more about it now than he did yesterday, he isn’t entirely certain how this newly acquired wisdom is going to help.

Paris asks, “So . . . what did she say?”

Mercedes buckles her seat belt, starts the car. “She said you seem like a very nice young man.”

“Young?” Paris says. “I think your ’buela may need a new ’scrip for those glasses.”

“She also said that the man you are looking for is not a real brujo. He is an impostor.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means he was not ordained into brujería or Palo Mayombe or Santeria itself. He is just using these things to frighten people. He is like a pimp she says. A cardboard bully.”

“Those dead bodies are not cardboard, Mercedes.”

“I know. I told her that. She says that the man you are looking for will crumble when you close your hands around him. Like paper. It’s kind of tough to translate, okay?”

“Okay.”

“But she says that if you want to know him, if you want to catch him, you have to know what breaks his heart.”

Paris’s mind races around the evidence, trying to plug all this into a reality socket. “She really thinks the Santeria angle is just window dressing?”

“Yes.”

“How can she be sure?”

Mercedes looks out the side window for a moment, then back at Paris. “This is going to sound a lot worse than it is.”

“It already does. Just spit it out.”

Mercedes fumbles with the settings for the car’s heater, stalling. “She says that if he were the real thing, he would have sacrificed a child by now.”

Paris goes cold for a moment, remembering Melissa in the hands of a psychopath. “Please. No. Don’t tell me that—”

“No,” Mercedes says as she looks both ways, then backs out onto Babbitt Road. “She really doubts that he will do that. She thinks this guy is a player. A hustler. No more a brujo than you. She says he has an angle, a reason for doing this that is of this earth. Nothing more mystical than that.”

Paris is silent for a few moments. “And what did she say about that spell she cast?”

Mercedes smiles broadly as she puts the Saturn in gear and heads toward the Shoreway. “She said you will have your killer within twenty-four hours.”

52

The little girl tries to lift the ball of tightly packed snow; her short arms are wrapped only halfway around the circumference. It is the snowman’s head she hoists, the third and final level of the rather portly, misshapen fellow that is already taller than she is.

She tightens her grip. Up, up, up, up . . . no. Not this time.

The snowman’s head falls to the ground and rolls a few inches.

The little girl circles the ball of snow, her face a twist of concentration. And it is such a beautiful face. Big eyes, raven hair, loose curls beneath her tam-o’-shanter—dark, springy ringlets that frame a face of such angelic power and purity and innocence.

She will try again. But not before consulting her almost life-size playmate, the huge bundled-up doll that is sitting on a nearby snowbank, blankly observing. The little girl whispers into the big doll’s ear, sharing little-girl strategy, little-girl tactics. She then walks back over to the snowman’s head, bends over, wraps her arms as far around as she can.

One, two, three.

Boom.

She falls facedown in the snow.

I count the seconds until the first tear appears but am amazed that they don’t come. She gets up, brushes the snow from the front of her navy blue wool coat. She stamps her right foot in disgust and walks away for a few moments.

But sheds no tears.

I would love to jump in and help her, but that, of course, would make all hell break loose.

An old woman sits on the porch, a cup of steaming coffee or tea in her hands. Quiet street, old ethnics. Nothing could possibly go wrong in bright daylight.

I am fascinated by the false sense of security people have over their domain, with their deadbolts and lamp timers and Rottweilers and phony security company signs.

I am more fascinated by the feeling I get when I watch the little girl romp in the snow—trying to dominate all within her little-girl horizon—and how very much like her mother she looks.

Global Security Systems the sign on the side of the van proclaims in sleek euro-style letters. The two men working on the locks to the front doors of the Cain Manor apartments hardly look like global systems analysts, but, nonetheless, I have to figure them capable at the very least.

New locks. A problem. My key to Cain Manor came from a duplicate I had cut from a wax pressing, a pressing I made while helping an elderly lady with her groceries a year or so ago.

But why new locks today?

Might it have something to do with a body being discovered in Cain Park?

Regardless, I do not have time to press a new key. I pull the Yellow Pages from the backseat. Cleveland Retail Supply on Chester Avenue. Problem solved.

I will pay them a visit today on my way to Jack Paris’s apartment.

Earlier this morning, before Paris had met up with the reporter and driven out to Babbitt Road, while I was well within range of his car and my wireless transmitter, he had been on the phone with his commanding officer and was kind enough to give me his precise itinerary for the day.

It seems we both have much to do.

I swing the car onto Euclid Heights Boulevard and head for the city. Later, after making my purchase at the retail supply house, I believe I’ll make a brief stop at Ronnie’s Famous Louisiana Fry Cakes on Hough Avenue.

I hear the beignets are very good.

53

In his career on the street, Arthur Galt was known as a man without fear. A cop who would push other cops out of the way to get to the door, a First District legend who never took a dime and, in spite of a dozen incidents in his twenty-odd years with the CPD, never had a bad shoot.

But now, over the phone at least, he sounds like a man who has settled quite comfortably into the baronial life of country constable. Arthur Galt is the very popular, very connected chief of police in Russell Township.

The two men get their pleasantries out of the way and get to business.

“This is ongoing, Jack,” Galt says, a chief’s cautionary tone lying right on the surface.

“I understand,” Paris says.

“We’ve got a couple of witnesses who now say they saw Sarah Weiss at the Gamekeeper’s Taverne earlier that evening.”

“Alone?”

“No. These two guys who work at the treatment plant in Chagrin Falls say that they both did their duty by hitting on Sarah Weiss early in the evening, but were shined on. They said later in the night, she gave some time to a corporate type in a dark business suit, who left after a half hour or so. But even later in the evening, they said, she spent at least a couple hours talking to a woman. A real looker they said. Redhead, although, according to these guys, it looked like a wig. She says the two women left together.”

“Who reported the yellow car on the hill?”

“A woman named Marilyn Prescott. Her house is about a hundred feet from a clearing that looks right onto the hill. She said it was a full moon that night and she could clearly see the two cars parked there around eleven-thirty. She said she then went to bed, woke up an hour later when she heard the gas tank explode. I’ve already checked to see if the moon really was full that night.”