Edward Lee - Incubi

Jack ate a liver. “Faye, I don’t know what oblatory means.”

“It means that everything they did was a homage to the apostate demons, which, transitively, was a homage to Satan.”

Transitively , Jack thought.

“They were big on acts of offering is what I mean. Lots of the sects, particularly the ones that worshiped Baalzephon, were fixated on the idea of transposition. It means one thing trading places with another. Transposition was the basis of their offering. Murder for grace. Atrocity for power. They were also big on incarnation. Flesh for spirit.”

All these big words and inferences made Jack’s head spin. Apostates. Oblatory. Transposition. Jesus. “I’m a cop, Faye, you know, scrambled eggs for brains? Could you put all this in police terms?”

“Sure. The aorists were hardcore motherfuckers.”

“Ah, now, that I can relate to.”

“The leaders of the sects were called ‘prelates.’ They supposedly had psychic and necromantic powers. You want talk about hardcore? These guys would think nothing of hanging a priest upside down by a meat hook through the rectum and gutting him alive. They’d force deacons to have sex with prostitutes, or sodomize each other on the altar, stuff like that. These prelate guys meant business. In fact, their final initiation was a self-mutilatory act.”

“A what?”

“They cut off their own penises as an offering to be apostate,” Faye said, and bit into her hot dog.

Jack tossed his livers in the waste can. “Come on,” he muttered. He didn’t need to hear any more of this.

They cut through Fleet Street to the State House, and went to the basement. “Office of Land Records,” the milky sign read. When property was owned under a company name, you could sometimes find out if the company was legit by running the name through IRS. Jack’s first big tip on the Henry Longford case, in fact, had come from this office. Longford had bought land as a business expense; the business had turned out to be a wash. The guy who appeared at the counter looked almost proverbial: heavy, elderly, balding, and he wore one of those banker visors. Jack could tell by looking at him that he might not be averse to a little grease.

“You the recorder of deeds?”

“That’s me,” the guy said. “Whadaya want?”

I like him already. “I’m trying to locate the taxpayer on a piece of land.”

“You gotta give me a liber number or a folio. That’s the only way I can get the plat number of the individual plot.”

“How about the address?”

The recorder gave him the eye. “This a sham? If you got the address, whadaya need me for?”

“Actually I thought there might be a phone number in the file. There’s a dwelling on the plot. It’s a friend of mine I need to get ahold of. Can you help me out?”

“Look it up in the reverse directory.”

“I already did. It’s unlisted.”

“If ya got the address, why don’t ya just drive to the house?”

“This is easier. And besides, have you ever heard of the Freedom of Information Act?”

“Sure, son. Write me up a standard request and I’ll process it. Takes a month, sometimes longer if you piss off the recorder.”

“Come on, man. Help me out.”

“Can’t do it for ya, son.”

Jack frowned. Too many ballbreakers in this world . This was public information. “You think you could do it for Ulysses S. Grant?”

The old man got the picture straight off. “No, but I might be able to do it for Benjamin Franklin.”

“That’s a big piece of paper, pal.”

“So’s a FOIA request. Your choice, son.”

Jack gave the recorder a hundred-dollar bill and Khoronos’ address.

“Course, there’s no guarantee there’ll be a phone number in the file. Might just be names and tax dates. And there’s no refunds here.” The old man held up the bill, brows raised. “Yes or no?”

“Just get the file,” Jack said.

“What are you doing!” Faye whispered when the man went in back.

“Lubing a palm to cut through some red tape. Every plot of land in the state is filed here, along with the name of whoever pays the property tax. If there’s a dwelling, there’s usually a phone number too.”

“You’re bribing a public employee, Jack. Aren’t you in enough trouble as it is?”

Baby, there’s never enough trouble , Jack felt like saying.

The recorder returned from the stacks. “Tough luck, son. Like I said, no refunds.”

“There’s no phone number in the file?” Jack asked.

“No phone number. Just the taxpayer’s name.”

“I already know his name. It’s Khor—”

“Herren,” the recorder said.

“What?” Jack said.

“Fraus Herren, Line 2.” The recorder scanned the open file. “Funny, though. You say there’s a dwelling on the plot?”

“Of course. They don’t put addresses on vacant lots.”

“I know that. But there’s no construction date. Date of the building license should be here, and the closing date, tax dates. When you put a house on a piece of land, the prop tax goes up. All that should be here, but it ain’t. Someone forgot to amend the file.”

“Fraus Herren, you say?”

The recorder showed him the file. “Fraus Herren. Sounds kraut. Lotta German developers buying up the waterfront around here.”

Who the hell is Fraus Herren? Jack wondered. Why isn’t the deed in Khoronos’ name? “Thanks for your time,” he grumbled.

“Don’t thank me, thank Ben Franklin.”

Yeah . He took Faye back out. “I just paid a ball note for goddamn nothing,” he complained.

But Faye was looking at him funny, shaking her head.

“What’s the matter?”

“Jack, someone’s really pulling your leg here,” she said. “First you got a guy named Philippe Faux, and now you’ve got another named Fraus Herren.”

“Yeah? So?”

“I already told you. Faux , in French, means false. Fraus Herren, that’s German. You know what it means in German?”

“What?” Jack asked.

“It means false man.”

False man , Jack thought. He got out of his unmarked and headed into the city district station. Philippe Faux. Fraus Herren. Both mean fake. It was almost like a deliberate joke, and the joke was on Jack.

Faye had left for LOC already. Jack thought he’d stop by the office and see how Randy was doing. He also wanted a little more time to decide what to do about Khoronos. Should I go there myself, or just give Stewie the address and forget about it?

Randy was hanging up the phone when Jack walked in the office. “This place hasn’t collapsed without me?” he said.

“I miss the lingering aroma of Camel smoke,” Randy told him. “Really. We’ve been grilling Susan Lynn’s boyfriends all morning. Not a weirdo in the bunch, and they all had alibis that washed. Jan Beck came in earlier with the TSD workup.”

“What’s she got?”

“First place, the pubes. We got two different kinds of pubes. Unusually long, she said.”

“Just like the first two,” Jack added.

“Not like. They were the first two. The hairs matched and the semen matched. They also wrote the word — Aorista — twice this time.”

“In their own blood, right? Not hers?”

“You got it. And the subtypes matched the first two 64s. In other words, one guy did Shanna Barrington, the other guy did Rebecca Black, and they both did Susan Lynn.”

Jack poured coffee, contemplating this.

“And they really did the job this time,” Randy went on. “It takes a lot to turn Jan Beck’s stomach, but this did it. Says she never found so much jizz in a 64 in her life. Her whole repro tract was ruptured with it. Says the whole bed was a wetspot, and they gave it to her up the ass too. Beck was talking cc’s; she said she pulled the equivalent of eight nuts just out of her tail. These guys left more wax than a twenty-man gang bang.”