Caitlin Kittredge - Devil's Business

“I don’t think it’s just your accent,” Jack told her. Pete stopped smiling.

“You have anything to add? Anything you thought of?”

“I think this is all bullshit and that there’s nothing spooky going on,” Jack said. He tilted his head back and shut his eyes against the sun. “I’m just along for the ride, luv. Go where you will.”

The hot wind was back, reaching right down his throat and clawing away all the good air. Replacing it bit by bit with tinders and ash. What he’d taken to be the howling of the air was in fact screams, his own and others. Screams as the vast plain before them shifted and changed, the red sands shifting and forming faces, which stared at him with lidless eyes before vanishing under the next gust.

He tried to shut his eyes and shut out the grit, close his mouth and gulp down a breath, but his eyes and lips were pinned back, fine hooks through his flesh. His blood turned to crystal the moment it hit the air, and all he could do was scream until he suffocated.

This was the first part of his time in Hell, the torture before the demon who’d pulled him into the Pit got down to the real business.

He was dead, and in Hell, and never going free.

“Jack.” Something poked him hard in his biceps. “I swear, you could sleep through a missile raid,” Pete muttered. The Fury sat at the foot of a driveway that snaked up a landscaped hill and ended at a small imitation castle.

“We here?” Jack stretched and consciously did not run his hands over his face. His old face, needing a shave, broken bottle–induced scar down his cheek, no flayed flesh or flowing blood.

“No, I liked the view and thought I’d sit a while.” Pete withered him with a glance and got out, slamming the door. Jack took his time.

If he was starting to remember Hell, that would just be one more fuck you from the Morrigan. One more bit of shit to heap onto his psyche. Well, he already had a mountain of it. What were a few more bad dreams?

That’s all they were. Dreams or, at the worst, faded memories he couldn’t be sure were ever real, or had happened at all.

Pete had made it halfway up the drive, and he followed. The house was, up close, even more of a horror. They were up in the hills now, looking down at the bowl of smog shot through with the tops of skyscrapers populating downtown LA. Plaster gargoyles glared down at Jack from every available flat surface, and the door had been made to look like the entrance to a particularly upscale sex dungeon. The knocker was a demon head, and you grabbed the tongue to shove the door to and fro.

A flash black car, the kind favored by plainclothes policemen, was parked in the circle drive, nose pointing toward the hillside. The demon door opened, and the selfsame policeman stepped out. His suit was cheap and his eyes were hard as the rock that made up the facade of the fake Gothic mansion.

“Ms. Caldecott?” he said.

“One and the same,” Pete told him, accepting his handshake.

“Detective Shavers,” he said. “Ben’s partner. Well. Used to be.”

He ignored Jack, and Jack mentally subtracted good detective from his mental checklist of Shavers. If he were a copper, he’d be all over shifty gits like himself.

“So Ben’s told you about his pet serial killer theory?” Shavers asked.

“He certainly has,” Pete said. “With visual aids and everything.”

Shavers flinched. “Sorry about that. You know, I don’t normally allow civilians to just wander around an active crime scene, but I want to make something clear to you, Ms. Caldecott.” He stood aside and gestured them inside.

The front hall was done in black tile, inlaid with the head of Bahopmet. The goat’s heads, except for horns, had been covered with a cheery rug, and paintings and photographs covered the burgundy walls, in stark contrast to the aggressively dark décor. Evil Chic, Jack thought. Early Gothic Trying Too Hard.

“House belonged to some cult rocker in the 80s,” Shavers said. “Been a rental since, with the condition that nobody change the decoration. They shoot movies in here sometimes—that’s a real good way to make some cash in this town.”

“Never would have guessed,” Pete said, but Shavers didn’t pick up on her attitude. “What did you want to make clear to me?”

“That Ben is retired for a reason,” Shavers said. “That there’s nothing to this case to connect it to his old murders. Yes, they’re similar. But that’s it.”

“They’re a little more than similar, if Mayhew’s photos are to be believed,” Pete told him.

Jack caught sight of a stairway leading to an upper level, a loft ringed in ornate iron railings. He slid down the hall, Shaver’s and Pete’s voices echoing off the two-story cathedral ceiling. His sight screamed the moment he mounted the stairs, vibrating and red-rimmed. Shavers was giving Pete the brush off, but there had, at the very least, been a real murder here.

“Listen,” Shavers was saying. “You have to understand something about this town—it’s almost as obsessed with death as it is with movie stars doing each other up the ass. You know how much James Dean’s Ferrari wreckage went for at auction? Point is, every tabloid and sleazy blog has sources in the ME’s office and in the LAPD. The details could’ve gotten out through a dozen pinholes. At worst, we’ve got a very dedicated copycat. But not a serial. Not ten years apart, with no activity anywhere in VICAP in between.”

“You seem very sure,” Pete said.

“I am sure,” Shavers rumbled. “I’m sorry you came all this way, but this is just going to be another cold case. Only difference is it’s in my file instead of Ben’s this time, and I’m a lot better at letting things go.”

“I understand, believe me,” Pete said. “I used to be on the job. Can you just walk me through the scene, so I can tell Ben something ?”

“Yeah, sure,” Shavers said. “Not like I got anything better to do, like pursue cases I can actually close, right?”

Jack pushed open the first door, keeping his ear tuned to Shavers and Pete. An office, done in bloodred wallpaper and black carpet, a layer of dust thick enough to draw in over it all. Not here.

“There was no forced entry,” Shavers said. “But we didn’t think too much of it at the time. Rental properties, the gate code never changes and a dozen staff have it, plus the family that lived here. The Herreras,” he added. “Mom, dad, son, and unborn daughter. Just in town for a few months while he produced a film.”

Jack tried the next door. A kid’s room, baseball memorabilia pasted up over the rock ’n’ roll walls, toys scattered across the floor.

“They killed the boy first.” Shaver’s voice echoed. “I say they, because we decided there had to be at least two. One to subdue the parents and one to go after the kid.”

The tile floor of the bedroom was stained, old blood trickling along the grout like vines breaking through stone.

“Cut his throat,” said Shavers. “Quick and clean. He bled out in a matter of minutes.”

“And the parents?” Pete’s boots clacked on the tile.

The last door was really just an iron lattice with more of the demon head motif. The pulse of his sight got worse when he pushed it open, and Jack ground his teeth against the sensation of a spike being driven through his skull sideways.

“They killed and mutilated the father in their bed,” Shavers said. “Knocked the mother over the head and dragged her down here.”

The mattress was bare, and marks of a crime scene team were still in place. There was much more blood this time—almost all the blood that a person’s body held, Jack wagered.