Ed Gorman - Voodoo Moon

"You think he did it?"

"Of course he did it. Who else did it?" Then, pointing to his boots, "That's great about me being the shooter. You be sure and tell Laura that."

Then he was gone, basking in the sunshine of showbiz history.

Iwas just getting in my car when I saw Susan Charles talking to an older couple on the corner.

I walked over to them.

She smiled. "I was hoping I'd see you again. This is Mr. and Mrs. Giles. They were just telling me that I should throw all you showbiz people out of town."

Mrs. Giles had been pretty at one time. Very pretty. But there was a sense of loss and anxiety about her that made her seem fragile and unpleasant.

Mrs. Giles said, "We've got a petition up is what I was telling the chief here. Us and some others got a petition up to get you folks out of here. Nobody wants to start thinking about Renard again."

"Mrs. Giles and her daughter, Claire, were both nurses at the time of the fire?" Susan explained. "Her daughter barely got out alive."

"Where's your daughter now?"

"At home," said Mr. Giles. "She never got over it. She stays at home because she's had a couple of breakdowns."

He was the sort of would-be dapper older man you see on the dance floor. The old-fashioned leisure suit. The two pinkie rings. The dyed red hair. The cheap dentures. And a pair of white plastic loafers with gold rings across the top.

"You people been botherin' us since you got here," he said. "First that Laura broad, and then Noah Chandler. Questions about the fire; questions about Renard. Just questions questionsquestions. Tryin' to make some connection between that mess and this Hennessy kid killing his girlfriend. It's just all crazy bullshit, excuse my French, Chief."

Mrs. Giles said, "You know what McDonald's is like if we get there late. Especially when they're running coupons. We better hurry."

"Sam Masterson's going to see you about that petition," Giles said.

"He's already set up an appointment."

"A lot of us don't want these folks here. No offense, Mr. Payne."

"None taken. I understand."

When they were gone, she said, "They're actually decent people."

"I'm sure they are."

She checked her watch. "Got to drop into the county attorney's office. Nice seeing you again."

Back in my motel room, I fired up my computer and started working on my general profile. I inputted the data I had and then started punching up articles about teenagers who were into the occult and Satanism.

There seemed to be a consensus that three types of teenagers got involved in such activities:

— the psychopathic delinquent

— the angry misfit

— the pseudo-intellectual

Rick didn't strike me as an intellectual, pseudo or otherwise. While I hadn't seen the psychiatric report of his state-appointed shrink, he seemed, at least superficially, to favor the angry misfit more than the psychopathic delinquent. The background Susan Charles had given me showed no prior arrest record.

He'd also maintained a C+ average throughout high school and hadn't been in any school trouble worth writing down.

As for the satanic movement itself, there was great debate. Those psychologists who tended to believe in repressed memory syndrome spoke confidently of a worldwide movement that "brainwashed" children and frequently sacrificed human life to appease its dark Master. The leading proponent of this theory was a man whose name I recognized. He'd recently been sued by several of his patients, women and men alike, for sexual abuse. An equal-opportunity exploiter. He'd also been sued by two women for planting false memories in their minds through the use of drugs and hypnosis. None of the charges necessarily meant that his satanic theories were wrong, but they didn't inspire confidence, either.

The opposing forces insisted that the so-called satanic movement was, essentially, a bunch of bored perverts and gangsters who wanted an excuse to have group sex, run around naked a lot, and justify any excess or crime with the old joke "The devil made me do it." It insisted that many, many police studies had been done on Satanism, and particularly teenage Satanism, and that the studies had found Satanism to be largely bogus-something teenagers talked about but rarely practiced in any serious way.

As evidence, they offered up profiles of three teenage "satanic" murderers and demonstrated that none of the murderers, for all their dark bragging about their Master, held any real belief in Lucifer or his alleged "laws." They were just punks taking too many drugs and feeling a deep need-for a variety of domestic reasons-to visit the ultimate violence upon unsuspecting victims.

The most interesting report dealt with a New Hampshire murder trial in which the guilty teenager said that he had been "possessed" by the spirit of a man who had chopped up three teenage girls in a woods one night. His parents testified that two years previously, the local newspaper had run an article about a killer who'd been put to death in the electric chair thirty years earlier. Their son had been so fascinated with the man that he'd begun to read everything he could find about him. He'd even found old photos of the man and begun to imitate him physically. The killer had had a limp; now, so did the teenager. The killer had worn a crew cut; so did the son. The killer had been attached to the jazz music of Dave Brubeck; so was the son. The defense was obviously trying to depict the boy as mentally ill. They cited an earlier fascination-when the boy was eleven-with Satanism. Between the "dark magic," as the defense attorney called it, and the influence of the killer on his psyche, no wonder the boy, whose mental health had never been very stable, according to the shrink the defense had hired, had killed the girls. He'd used an ax.

Leaving me with Rick Hennessy.

I used FBI data and I used the reports Susan Charles had given me and I set to serious work on my profile.

"Tuna fish?"

I looked up. Susan Charles smiled down at me. The caf é had a counter, six booths, and a jukebox loaded with twang.

"Uh-huh," I said. "I like tuna fish."

"In a red-meat state like Iowa?"

"I'll make up for it later. I'll eat an entire side of beef by myself."

"That's more like it."

"You could always sit down."

"I don't want to bother you."

"I'd like the company."

"Will it bother you if I smoke?"

"Smoking, no. But I have to tell you, I draw the line at chewing tobacco."

Chief Susan Charles smiled and sat down in the booth across from me. "Funny running across you in here."

"Why?"

"You don't look like the type who'd eat in greasy spoons."

"Oh, what do I look like?"

"More upscale."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"I meant it as a compliment."

"Now, I'll return the favor. You don't look like the type who'd be a police chief in a small town like this."

"I don't?"

"Huh-uh."

"Where should I be, then?"

"Big city. Chicago. Homicide detective, maybe."

"Too depressing. There's a small lake in my backyard. And the hills around my place are filled with pine trees. Hard to get that in Chicago." She caught me looking at her scar again. "Knife."

"Knife?"

"College boyfriend. If he couldn't have me, he didn't want anybody to have me. I got pregnant. I wanted to keep the baby. He said no. He was on his way to being an important surgeon. Baby would just get in our way. I was enough of a Catholic, I didn't want to have an abortion. But he finally convinced me that was the only way. The funny thing was, I warned him. I said, if I get this abortion I'll never feel the same way about you again. He said I was being stupid. He said that a lot, actually. So I had the abortion and then I broke up with him. I had no feelings left for him. He went berserk like our friend Rick Hennessy. Wouldn't leave me alone for months. Then one night he got me in a parking garage and cut me up."