Edward Lee - Incubi

Nearly half of Shanna Barrington’s address book had been interviewed. Randy put tails on the few weirdos in the bunch, but Jack knew these were strikeouts too. He could tell by looking at them: they were weirdos, but they weren’t murderers.

“Those things’ll kill you,” Randy said when Jack lit a Camel.

“Are you my mother?” Jack’s mother, by the way, had died of oat-cell lung cancer. “Cigarettes help me think,” he said.

“Great. I’ll ask you what you’re thinking on the respirator.”

On the wall hung a layout of the Bayview complex, and blowups of Shanna Barrington’s walls. The bizarre red glyphs seemed three-dimensional, the star-pointed triangle seemed to hover in space, with its proclamation in blood.

“The Triangle case is going nowhere fast,” Randy concluded. A sip of Jack’s coffee made his lips pucker.

“I already told you, the only way we’re going to nail this guy is by taking apart his M.O. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

“You’re right. It took fifteen hundred years, and I don’t think Olsher plans on giving us that much time.”

“We know plenty more than we did yesterday.” Jack was trying to sound confident, and failing, he supposed. “We know his blood group, gait, approximate height and weight, probable hair color. We know he’s hung, and we know he wears a wig. And Beck thinks he’s a foreigner, Slavic or East European.”

“How’d she get that?”

“She indexed the scale count of his pubic hair. And that jibes with what Panzram suggested. He’s probably from abroad, a mover.”

“What about this researcher?”

“She’s green, but she seems pretty squared away.” Jack glanced at his watch. “And she’s late. Maybe that’s a good sign.”

“Rumor has it she’s staying at your place.”

Jack quickly smirked. Fucking grapevine . “I offered her one of my spare rooms to cut down on her drive time. And I’m not—”

“I know you’re not,” Randy said. “It just might not look too cool — a thirty-three-year-old captain and a twenty-two-year-old state employee.”

“She’s only twenty-two?”

“That’s what Olsher said. Graduated early, got a double major in library science and Latin. Anyway, she’s young, and she’s been subcontracted from the state. The C.E.’s office might not like the idea of her staying at a county captain’s place.”

“Bugger them,” Jack said. He knew what Randy meant, though. The people upstairs were axmen. Don’t give them a reason to chop off your head.

A few minutes later, Faye Rowland straggled in, briefcase in tow. She looked disheveled and tired. Jack introduced her to Randy, then cleared room for her at his desk. “Well?” he said, and put a cup of coffee in her hand.

She took one sip and pushed it away. “I identified the term aorista and its applications to the occult. It took all day.”

“Is that good or bad?” Jack asked.

“Let’s just say your killer is into something very authentic.”

“You identified the ritual?” Randy asked.

“Aorista denotes a process that doesn’t end?” Then she said to Jack, “You were right to apply the term directly to the ritual, you were exactly right. The word is a general reference to a type of sect, cult, or schismatic religious unit that practices a specific ritual in a manner that is philosophically indefinite. Just think of it as a general term — an aorist sect. They were big in the Middle Ages; in those days the ruling classes were unduly influenced by the Catholic Church, so if you weren’t in the Church, and if you weren’t nobility, you were a peasant. Witchcraft and demon worship grew out of a rebellion to organized Christianity. Devil worship was the social counterculture of the times, the poor man’s way of striking back against his oppressors, and the aorist sects were the most extreme mode of this rebellion. While the average peasant was saying Black Mass, the aorists were killing priests, burning churches, and sacrificing children. They were the transitive component of a belief that was largely intransitive.”

“Action instead of words,” Jack speculated.

“Right. The aorist sects were to satanism what the Jesuits are to the Catholics.”

Randy loosened his tie. “What about the sacrifice angle?”

“Mankind has been making sacrifices for the last thirty thousand years. The only way I can identify this specific ritual is if I’m lucky enough to match its protocol to your crime scene.”

“What do you figure your chances are?” Jack asked.

“Not good,” Faye Rowland admitted. “The fund of information is too obscure. There aren’t any reference books I can just whip open and identify our sect. It’s like a needle in a haystack.”

Jack crushed out his Camel and lit another. He was thinking, thumbing his eyebrows. “Protocol… Ritual… Our forensic tech determined that the knife used on Shanna Barrington was made of some kind of brittle stone. Flint maybe, or obsidian.”

Faye looked at him baldly. “Many civilizations, once they’d begun to develop organized religious systems, believed that fire was a gift from the gods. Flint sparks, so they used flint for their sacrificial implements. The Toltecs are the best example, and the Seleucids of Asia Minor. And a lot of the aorist sects used knives chipped out of volcanic glass—”

“Obsidian,” Jack muttered.

“—for a similar symbolic reason. They worshiped demons, which they believed lived deep in the earth, so they crafted their tools out of materials that came from the same place. They were using what they’d been given to exalt the giver. Gifts of the devil to people of the devil.”

Jack felt a weird chill run up his back, the same chill he felt anytime he asked himself how far madness could go. Madness could have order, couldn’t it? It was a creepy thought.

“They were called dolches ,” Faye added. “Not knives. Dolches.”

Randy looked disgruntled. “We were hoping it was just some crackpot or a random nutcase who’s into the occult.”

“Oh, no,” she assured. “Whatever your killer is into, it’s not something he read in some paperback occult manual. It’s very deep and very intricate. The aorist sects were the ultimate form of religious sedition in the Middle Ages. They butchered babies, roasted virgins on solstice feasts, gutted priests like deer.”

“Great,” Jack sputtered.

The pale lamplight made black punch holes of Faye Rowland’s tired eyes. “This guy’s no crackpot, Captain. He’s the real McCoy.”

Becky reread the lines she’d scribbled in her book:

Evil kisses, or angelic sendings?

I want to be in a bed of beginnings,

Not endings.

She turned her nose up at it. Here was the next one:

THE GHOST

Remnants never vanish

but give spawn to loss

and banish all I care for

on the earth. Does this

last ghost give birth to a

new me, or another

impassioned catastrophe?

The things I do to make things

rhyme-Jesus! — what a crime to

time and art and the cooling ashes

of the broken heart. But it should

be fun at least to see what

midnight passion beckons me next

to the next caress of faith.

Becky knew her poetry wasn’t very good, not from a poet’s standpoint anyway. She didn’t care, though. She wrote poetry for herself. She’d picked up a guy last week who wanted to know about it. This was unusual because guys generally didn’t care about aspects of her that didn’t involve coitus. “You should try to get it published,” he’d said. “That would be unthinkable,” she’d returned. “Why write it if other people can’t read it?” “Because it’s not for other people. It’s for me. Poetry is how I define myself.” What a moron. He hadn’t even come close to understanding. At least he understood how to put his penis into her. That’s all she’d wanted him for in the first place.