Ed Gorman - Voodoo Moon

Rick, and your reputation , I thought. It won't look real good if the kid you "saved" is convicted of murder . Like the time Norman Mailer, among others, helped free a convicted murderer who then killed some poor young man who was working as a waiter. There were good reasons ordinary people distrusted the psychiatric profession.

I walked out with him.

In the reception area, he said, "Excuse me, Mr. Payne. I need to hurry down the hall."

"That's fine."

I was just leaving the building when a voice behind me said, "Mr. Payne."

She was a pleasant-looking, gray-haired woman in a blue suit and a frilly white blouse. "I just wanted to tell you something I forgot to tell the detectives." When she reached me, she said, "My name's Myrna Haines. Dr. Williams has two offices-the administrative office and his personal office. He oversees a lot of the electroshock and things like that, so he needs an office close by. Anyway, I'm the secretary for his personal office."

"I see."

"Are you headed out?"

"Yes."

"Good. I could use some fresh air."

We stood on the front steps. The day made me feel twenty and immortal.

"The man they found in your room, Mr. Kibbe?"

"Yes?"

"One afternoon I found him going through my desk. He'd been in to see Dr. Williams earlier in the day, so I recognized him, of course."

"Did he take anything?"

She nodded. "I saw him stick two envelopes and a very small paperweight and a couple of pieces of paper in a briefcase. What would he want with things like that?"

"Did you confront him?"

"Yes. He pretended not to know what I was talking about. Then he just pushed past me and left."

"You told Dr. Williams."

"Of course. He called Chief Charles right away. She came out and talked to us and then said she'd try and find Kibbe. But she called later and said he wasn't registered at any of the motels in town."

"Did you ever figure out which envelopes and papers he took?"

"Yes. And they were nothing important at all. Just routine correspondence I'd typed up to two different HMOs. They're always trying to talk us into accepting less of a payment." She smiled bitterly. "I can remember when we thought HMOs would save the entire medical profession."

"When was this?"

"Two days ago. I know you're trying to help Rick. He can be pretty obnoxious, but I agree with Dr. Williams. I don't think he killed that girl."

"You have any suspicions about who might have?"

"Not really."

"Well, thanks for telling me about the papers and the envelope."

"And the paperweight. About the size of a poker chip, with Dr. Williams's initials on it."

"That is strange."

She inhaled deeply. "God, I hate to go back inside. I wish a butterfly would just carry me off."

It was a nice little Ray Bradbury image, and it stayed with me for most of the afternoon.

Noah Chandler was waiting for me.

I wasn't supposed to know he was waiting for me, of course. But as I came down the steep hill leading away from the hospital, I had a wide view of the road below. His TV private-eye profile was hard to mistake.

I turned left, toward town, pretending not to see him. He came right after me. He kept a proper distance, but on an empty county gravel road, he wasn't real difficult to spot. A couple of times he talked on his cell phone. I was naturally curious about who he was talking to, and what about.

As soon as we hit the town limits sign, he fell away, turned left into a strip mall.

Ihad an address for Frank Caine, Sandy's father, so I drove out there. He collected cars. Or rather, parts of cars. The front lawn of the small white bungalow was strewn with transmissions, radiators, steering columns, windshields, doors, and bumpers. A sign, red letters on white, announced: FRANK T. CAINE, AUTOMOTIVE. A loud, portable radio playing heavy metal blasted from a sagging white barn.

I pulled into a rutted dirt driveway covered by chickens. They paced like cartoon fathers in maternity wards. I'd read that slaughter animals know when their time comes. For no reason apparent to scientists, the blood pressure and brain waves become agitated. Somehow, they know. And these birds looked as if they knew, too, the frantic way they moved up and down the rutted drive.

Frank Caine turned out to be a tall, balding man in a white, oil-stained T-shirt. The way his long arm muscles moved, he had to spend some frequent time with weights. He stood with unmistakable insolence in front of an ancient white barn where he'd apparently been working on a red Plymouth with the hood raised. He held a long greasy wrench in one hand and kept slapping it against the open palm of the other. Frank planned to be a gangsta when he grew up.

The barn-garage looked interesting, actually. Inside there would probably be yellowing newspapers going back to the forties or maybe even the thirties (Iowa farmers are savers, which is why so many antiquers ask farmers if they can look through their attics and barns and garages). There would be the odd cheap child's toy (my wife being an antiquer, I'd learned what some of that species is constantly looking for: a Captain Midnight Big Little Book about fighting the Japanese during WW II; a Davy Crockett figure from the mid-fifties, maybe; a Frank Sinatra album; a Monkees lunch box even; and magazines, rat-nibbled and time-faded, depicting an era when the sexiest thing in prim Mom's life was her new appliance or dressing up for hubby when he got home for dinner).

I parked and got out of my car and immediately saw the largest canine God had ever created.

Dogs have replaced guns as the preferred macho toy. I'm not talking about man's best friend, the sloppy, sweet, faithful clown of a family dog we grew up loving and will remember to the end of our days. No, I'm not talking about the killing machines that the macho boys keep telling us are necessary in such a violent society. Tell that to the two-year-old ripped and killed by such a beast, or the mailman whose leg was shredded and ultimately amputated.

They aren't dogs, they're monsters. And while it isn't their fault-and objectively I feel a real sorrow for them-I take no chances. The Roman legions used such dogs, and there are many historians of antiquity who wrote about watching the savage canines turn first on the enemy, and then on their masters. The dogs are the same today. Their owners have the dogs so overwrought, they can't even control them. So what chance would I have of controlling them?

This one was a patchwork gray mutant combination of Saint Bernard and greyhound. It came trotting out of the barn with an insolence equal to that of its master. It crouched next to him. Even from here I could smell it, an animal that gorged on other animals during the night. No Puppy Chow for this one. It had been cursed with mindless, relentless fury, a miserable life for an animal that could have been a loving and valued part of a family, or a guide for a little blind girl.

Frank Caine smirked and stroked the dog's head. He was proud of his work.

The dog growled at me and the earth rumbled.

"I do believe Henry here doesn't like you," Frank Caine said.

"Gee, and I was hoping he'd go to the prom with me."

"Henry doesn't like sarcasm."

"Henry is awfully sensitive. For a dog, I mean."

"Henry's a lot more than a dog, mister." Slapping the long wrench into his palm. "Some people around here think he's some sort of supernatural being."

That, I didn't have any trouble believing.

"We got him from this priest. Not that I'm a Catholic. I'm Lutheran. Anyway, we got him from this here priest. He said he found this strange little puppy in the church one night. It was about midnight and the priest was asleep and he heard all this noise in the church. So he rushed over there and there was this here puppy. He said the puppy really spooked him. The eyes, he said, at night they kind of glow. And they still do. Give me goose bumps myself sometimes, they way they kind of have this amber light inside them. Anyway, this here puppy had destroyed the altar. Knocked everything over and smashed it. The priest said that there was a good chance that the puppy was evil. He said he didn't usually believe in stuff like that. But he just felt this dog was really dangerous."