Ed Gorman - Voodoo Moon

"Afraid not."

"Oh. You work with Iris?"

"No. But I was looking for her."

"Me, too." She frowned. She had nice, long legs planted on either side of the bike on the cracked sidewalk. "I finally work myself up to telling her the truth and then she isn't even here when I stop by." She held out a gloved hand. We shook. "I'm Emily Cunningham, Sandy's cousin."

"Robert Payne. I am in town trying to find the truth about your cousin's death, though."

"Really?"

"Yes. I'm a psychological profiler."

"Oh. Silence of the Lambs ."

"Something like that."

"'I had an old friend for dinner.' I love that line."

"That's a good one, all right." I wasn't sure if it was exactly verbatim but it didn't matter.

There was a breeze, carrying on it the heady smell of burning leaves. I thought of high school and football games and sitting in the stands with the girl who'd become my wife. All that sweet frantic necking in the backseat of the car later on, and a wolfed-down midnight pizza at Pizza Hut. Then more necking before she finally went in for the night. It was painful to confront my loss this way; and yet it was pain lined with pleasure.

"Are there really cannibals?"

"I'm afraid there are."

"You ever meet one?"

"Once. When I was with the FBI."

"Wow. You were with the FBI?"

I nodded.

"So how many people did he eat, the cannibal, I mean?"

I smiled. "Well, I don't think he ate whole people. Just little bits and pieces of them."

"You ever meet anybody who ate an entire person?"

"Not that I can think of."

She was a great kid. Cute and smart and curious, even if her curiosity did take a macabre turn here and there.

I said, "You think he did it?"

"Who?"

"Rick."

"Killed Sandy, you mean?"

"Uh-huh."

She looked at me. "Maybe."

I guess I was surprised she hadn't simply said yes. His history with Sandy. The blood on his hands.

"You think of anybody else who might've done it?"

"That's what Iris wants me to talk about."

"Somebody else you suspect, you mean?"

I could see her tense up. "You were really with the FBI?"

"Yes."

"How long?"

"Eleven years."

She watched me some more. "I still probably ought not to tell you anything."

"'Why not?"

"'Cause Iris'd get mad. She's got a terrible temper."

"She does, huh?"

"She got kicked out of court one day because she told the judge he was stupid." She checked her watch. "Well, I guess I'll ride over to Wal-Mart. I need to get some stuff. Then I'll stop back here."

"She left a note. She's supposed to be back in half an hour."

"Well, if you see her first, just tell her Emily Cunningham stopped by."

"Any other message?"

She smiled. "You just want to know what I want to tell her, don't you?"

"I sure do."

"We'll have to talk some more about cannibals sometime."

"I can't wait."

She looked at me and said, "Tell her I want to talk to her about Sandy's dad. And that baby picture. She'll know what I mean." Then she was gone.

Ispent two hours in the library reading about Paul Renard and the asylum fire. The librarian, a sweet-faced woman with a slow, sad smile, said that this was the most exciting story in all of Brenner's history. She said she could remember seeing Paul Renard when she was a young girl and that he'd been quite handsome. She then gave me what she referred to as the "Renard File."

Renard had been a local boy of great means. He'd gone east to school and graduated from Princeton, then returned here to run his father's bank. His parties were famous. He'd once brought a string quartet in from Chicago. On another occasion, he got Robert Frost, who'd been doing a reading at the University of Iowa, to have dinner at his estate. Renard was cultured, smart, generous, and a heartbreaker. He flew women in from as far away as Los Angeles and New York for some of his three-day weekends. His manse had a pool, a tennis court, and a beautiful view of the Iowa River, complete with natural dam.

It was believed he killed his first woman when he was thirtyone. This was never proven-or at least, the local police didn't try very hard to prove it and he killed his second when he was thirty-three. Both were hitchhikers. Both took months to identify. He had buried them in deep pits. During all this time, he continued to run his bank and have his parties. There were those who believed he belonged in prison; and there were those who believed he was completely innocent, and that his accusers were merely jealous of his lifestyle. He was an awfully charming man, apparently, and a lot of people liked him. Six months after the discovery of the second body, an assistant county attorney went to the town council-behind his boss's back-and gave a rambling and melodramatic speech, the point of which being that Paul Renard should be indicted on two counts of murder. When his boss did find out about it, he fired the young man, who left town shortly thereafter.

The quirk in the story had to do with a third murder. A local waitress was found strangled to death in her house trailer. Paul Renard could not possibly have committed this murder. He was in New Jersey at the Princeton homecoming. But the feeling of the town's three or four most powerful civic leaders was that violence was getting out of hand-three murders in five years in a town that hadn't seen a murder in the previous two decades-and while they were resolving the waitress's murder (her boyfriend, a redneck drifter with ties to the KKK, had already been indicted), they might as well deal with Paul Renard as well.

They gave him his choice. He could face indictment and trial or he could agree to voluntary incarceration in the local psychiatric hospital. He offered a third option. He would go away and never return. They said no. They were decent people; why inflict a sociopath on another community? There was no doubt about his guilt. He'd lost a wristwatch at one of the death scenes. They kept reminding him of this. They kept reminding him that after the second death, the local police had secretly searched his manse and found bloody clothes. The blood on his shirt and trousers matched the type of the dead girl.

Paul Renard was incarcerated. The story went that he'd suffered a complete nervous breakdown. Apparently, those parties weren't as easy to stage as they might appear to the untutored eye. They had taken their toll on the poor dear.

One year into his stay at the psychiatric hospital, Renard began to cause trouble. He'd discovered voodoo, a belief system which fascinated him. He had his little cult of followers. He was their absolute master. He began by sacrificing rats and cats and stray dogs. A nurse, in love with him, even allowed herself to have sex with all of the men in the cult as Renard watched. The cult grew. The staff did everything it could to turn his followers against him. They were always pointing out how he abused and degraded them in his "authentic" rituals, and how said rituals were really nothing more than excuses for Renard to have sex. The two hospital administrators in charge were reluctant to call for outside help because the publicity would shut them down. Who wanted to send a troubled loved one to a mental hospital where voodoo was practiced in the patient rooms?

And then the fire.

More than thirty years ago.

Twenty people dead.

And Paul Renard on the run.

It was commonly believed that nobody could survive a fall into the rapids. Not even Renard. Two of the deputies who followed him to the edge of the cliff swore they saw his head being smashed against the jagged rocks in the churning waters. One even said that he saw blood spray from Renard's skull when Renard hit the rapids and then the dam. He assured the press that nobody, however wealthy, however elegant, however cunning, could possibly have escaped those rapids. And then being hurtled over the dam itself.