A Passing Curse (2011)

1

Reese Tarrant made his way down the corridor, dodging gurneys, harried nurses, and puddles of unknown origin. He hoped she was alive. He willed it.
Hang on. Hang on.

At the nurse’s station, he rapped on bulletproof glass. The nurse finished a pint of milk, smiled, wiped her mouth with a paper towel. She was thick necked with wrestler’s arms. “You ought to have your own office down here, honey.”

It was an old joke between them, but he did not smile. “Melissa Cunningham.”

“Trauma 204,” she said. “The docs had to cut her mouth open.” She shook her head, as if with all she had seen this was still beyond her comprehension.

“Tarrant!” Reese turned and saw Bulow, the sketch man, shoulder high, always hurrying, never enough time to draw the killers’ faces. Bulow had been a real artist once, but after a few bad shows in Malibu, he’d hit the skids. His comeback as police artist seemed tragic. Still, he put the identikits and computer graphics to shame, giving the killers essence and character. A savant some said. A sad drunk others added, possibly psycho. They could have been talking about anyone in homicide.

“204,” Reese told him and kept walking. The nurse buzzed the door open. Bulow ran to keep up. Reese brushed by more gurneys, more nurses, flashes of red, streaks of blue light. Sirens winding down as ambulances backed up to the triple doors. It was orchestrated confusion and not a particularly busy night, Reese thought. The full moon was a week away. Something to look forward to.

Outside Trauma 204, a bulky but competent-looking detective, wearing an impressively un-rumpled suit, sipped coffee.

Hernandez, he knew, and Hernandez sipping coffee meant he was too late. The girl was dead. “Did you get a statement?” Reese asked him. “Anything we can use?”

Before Hernandez could answer, Bulow rushed past breathing hard and went inside 204. Reese thought to stop Bulow, too late for descriptions, but the artist was on a roll. Inside 204 was a flurry of green-clad nurses and doctors, then Bulow looking around, grabbing the nearest bedpan, throwing up. A nurse pushed Bulow to the side and gave him a towel.

Reese turned his back on the scene and asked Hernandez, “Did you talk to her?”

Hernandez was matter-of-fact. “I’m eating when the call came. I’m eating down the street, Rico’s I think. They tell me to wait for you and then go back to what I was doing.”

“Which was eating at Rico’s?”

“Yeah, I think that’s it,” Hernandez said as if he did not want to be pinned down. “It’s down the street, anyway.”

“And did you get a chance to question her?”

“She’s unconscious,” Hernandez said. “She can’t talk. So, I came out for a coffee.”

“She’s unconscious?” He couldn’t believe Hernandez was not with her. “What the hell do you mean, Phil? She’s still alive?”

Hernandez checked his thin gold watch and adjusted his wide yellow tie. “Should be. Still.” Hernandez would not look at him directly.

“I’ll tell them downtown what a good job you did,” Reese said and went inside. A sergeant, this Hernandez, and soon, with Hernandez’s obvious skills, a lieutenant.

Reese scanned the big room’s four beds. A baby, tiny and wrinkled and covered with tubes and wires, surrounded by a team of four or five. Turning blue and someone shouting, “Upstairs. Are they ready upstairs?” In the second bed a thin brown man, very old and recently dead, an intern closing a large incision in the chest using twine that resembled kite string, probably what emptied Bulow’s stomach.

A doctor in a black golf shirt saw him, raised his eyebrows, and pointed to Melissa Cunningham in the third bed. “She’s all yours, old scout.”

Her eyes were still open, but unfocused. He guessed shock. She was conscious and Hernandez should have been here. But why get involved in a murder spree that had gone cold? A surefire career killer, if you had a career to kill.

They had IVs going, whole blood, blood expanders, what else he did not know. A green porthole issued a line of peaks and valleys. Bulow stood off to the side and dabbed at his face with a white hand-towel.

A nurse hurriedly smoothed the covers at Melissa’s feet before moving to the fourth bed and a wild-eyed white man yelling, “Congratulations! Congratulations!”

A dark line circled Melissa’s throat where the rope had been. Gauze and tape covered the hole in her jugular where Reese knew the killer had tapped into the first twelve victims with a number eight needle. After snipping the baling wire that had cinched her lips, the doctors had swabbed around her mouth with purple disinfectant.

Like the first twelve victims, Melissa’s hair was jet black. Unlike the other twelve victims, she had managed to scare off her attacker before he’d removed every drop of her blood. In her case, thirteen was a lucky number.

He kissed her forehead. He was proud of this girl. She had called 911 with a sock pressed to the hole in her neck. She couldn’t talk, only sobs and moans. The operator had used automatic tracing for the address. They had her in the ambulance five minutes after that.

He touched her cheek. Her eyes focused on him. “Help us,” he said. Not a simple request for the near dead. Regressive necrophilia the FBI man had lectured: insertion of inanimate objects. She tried to talk. She licked cracked, swollen lips. Nine or ten holes from the wire. He didn’t know what they had given her. Morphine, he hoped. “You can do it,” he urged. “Talk to me, Melissa.”

Bulow moved in to draw. He held his sketch pad like a shield.

Reese squeezed her shoulders. She closed her eyes as if to relish the comfort. He twisted her earlobe to bring her back. It was the only way.

The doctor in the black golf shirt shrugged and wandered off. An orderly mopped the floor. Someone threw a black body-bag on the old man’s chest. The man in the fourth bed had quit yelling and grinned at him, drinking a can of coke.

“Tell me who did this,” Reese asked.

Her eyes opened slowly. He let go of her ear. She swallowed. Found her voice. “He’s a, a - ” And then stopped, closed her eyes, shutting him out.

He whipped the green curtain shut. He squeezed her hand hard. “Tell me.”

Her eyes rolled open. She forced words. She stuttered. “He’s a-a-a doll.”

“A doll?” Reese asked and glanced at Bulow, his pencil poised above the paper. “Yes, go ahead. Tell us who did this to you. Tell us so we can find him.”

“Round face,” she said, barely a whisper. “Like the moon.”

Bulow began with quick strokes. “Black eyes,” she said through deep breaths. “Thin-thin lips,” she said and faded, a flutter behind closed eyes.

“Did you know him?” Reese urged. “Your husband?”

“Wasn’t married,” Bulow answered for her.

Reese kept pushing, gripping her hand, she was slipping. “Neighbor? Boyfriend? Anyone? Who did this to you? Melissa? Wake up. Talk to me.”

Bulow held up what he had drawn. Reese grabbed her shoulders, shook her. Her eyes opened. Bulow pushed the sketch closer. She focused on what he’d drawn. “Shorter hair. A butch,” she said and took a deep breath. “No one I knew.”

Reese patted her hand, a very brave girl, and kissed her nose. “You are going to be just fine,” he said, but he did not think she believed him. Bulow kept drawing. The line on the heart monitor stuttered, then resumed. Bulow tilted the sketch so she could see.

“Goat eyes,” she said and Bulow erased. The IV dripped blood. Bulow showed her again. She touched the paper to correct him, her voice stronger. “Pig’s ears.”

Bulow drew. Reese smoothed her hair and decided to rub her feet.

2

The village of Villareceau, picturesque and primitive, huddles cramped and godforsaken on the banks of the Petazi river.

The innkeeper woke her before dawn. Rusty Webber heard two hard raps at the door and sat up. She took a deep breath and turned on the flashlight. The attic room was a triangle, pitched tight against the roof. She dropped out of bed fully dressed, including socks, and slipped into freezing boots. The mattress too thin to squeak.

She found the switch box and pulled the handle. Dangling from a knotted wire, the bulb turned dull brown, resisting the wonders of electricity, before crackling and brightening to a dull yellow. Strands of garlic hemmed the one window. Ice webbed the outer glass, a frozen, bleak cloisonne. Romania.

A snap in the corner. She shined her light. A rat, the size of a shoe, whipped back and forth in the iron trap, resolutely still chewing the blood sausage bait. She broke the creature’s neck with her boot, cracking bone. She reset the trap and adjusted the trip plate to fall at a whisper. She arranged the rat on the writing table, hung the Do Not Disturb card on its neck. The card was written in seven languages, including Hindi, which was optimistic, indeed.

She baited the trap with a dollar bill. The nimble maid had already stolen three pairs of socks and a fountain pen. Challenge was good for the soul.

“Reza,” she heard through the door. “Rise.” The innkeeper’s voice was neither cheerful nor sad.

Breakfast. Warm beet porridge fortified with the inn’s famous blood sausage. She hoped the floating specks were pepper. The table was unfinished beech, warped, wisps of bark curling up. The dining room smelled of stale cabbage and smoke. Her pack was beside her, fully loaded. She had left nothing else for her hosts to steal. Her breath fogged the ever cold air.

Her guide stomped in from the freezing snow-covered street, his boots heavy on the cobblestone, and drank the thick coffee with her. Radu was short and dark, complete with gold earring and gypsy headband for the tourists. He’d washed dishes in New York City for three years. “You really going down those stairs we found yesterday?”

She put the spoon down. “Is the jeep ready?”

“Like you said. I loaded the lunch and the shovels. I also got my deer gun in case you - ”

Radu paused and then brought the coffee to his lips. She did not like him acting coy all of a sudden, like she was here on a vacation. “Yes?”

He finished his coffee. “Spook something up.”

Outside, stoves fired for breakfast yellowed the river fog. Radu started the jeep. She placed an extra jacket over the springs poking through her seat. The jeep had a canvas top. The vinyl windows were scratched, nearly opaque. The rear window was long gone.

They drove through narrow cobblestone streets, crowded with gaunt homes rising three stories. Large flakes of plaster had fallen from the homes, giving them a multi-colored, dented look. The dome of a church, onion shaped and trimmed in tarnished gold, crowned a small hill to the west.

At the end of the village, three men loafed around the rusting remains of an orange Volkswagen beetle. They were wrapped in hand-me-downs, black and white rags, apparently unable to afford the colored rags. Their rifles, Kalishnakovs, leaned against the front bumper. One man, his back to her, watered the snow. He turned, saw her, and gave himself three shakes. For Romania, she guessed. His buddies leered. Blue-black stumps for teeth and dirty faces. One pulled a bottle of tuica, plum brandy, from a burlap sack and jerked the rag from the spout.

“Trouble?” she asked Radu as they drove past.

“They are nothing,” Radu said and kept his eyes on the road. “One is Kurash. We had a fight once. A girl.”

She turned and saw them now fighting over the bottle. One fell into the snow and another kicked him. “They’re soldiers?”

“Yes,” Radu said and downshifted for a sharp curve. “They think that they are soldiers. They imitate them, the soldiers.”

After a few miles, they turned down a logger’s road. On the left, light snow and dead grass stretched to the fir-covered Transylvanian Alps.

Radu drove the jeep over a small creek covered with ice. The front wheels slid several feet before breaking through. Radu gunned the engine. The wheels spun. Chunks of ice hit the fenders. The engine threw out steam. Across the creek, he said, “The old women in the village say it is Tedesco.”

“What?”

“Tedesco - evil.” He raised his voice over the grinding transmission. “They say it is bad to be at the ruins, at the castle.”

“Bad?”

“Sure. Bad spirits. Bad things. You know how old women are.” He looked at her as if to make a point, then went back to focusing on his driving.

“I’m learning,” she said. “And what do you say?”

He touched his temple. “I say that old Ajax Rasmussen pays pretty good.”

“Old Ajax pays damn good,” she agreed. Too good, was what she wanted to say. Too good and she had been waiting for the catch, for the other shoe to drop. Beggars can’t be choosers was a line that came to mind. Was this begging now? She saw the encrusted dirt on Radu’s neck. Oh, yeah. And she was lucky to have it.

The jeep bucked along the road. She grabbed the handle welded to the dash. The heater whirred loudly, barely warming her feet.

It had been a week and a half since she’d met Ajax Rasmussen, referred to in Forbes magazine as the world’s first billionaire blood tycoon. And referred to in People magazine as the world’s most eligible bachelor and “darkly” handsome, whatever that meant.

Ajax Rasmussen, owner of Cirrus Industries, world’s largest supplier of whole blood, plasma, albumin, and various blood by-products, had rescued her from the unsure world of unemployed, no, make that unemployable, archaeologists. There was a difference. The gutless university boards and grant directors had buried her after the debacle in Syria, but Ajax had dug her up, a resurrection of sorts.