San Francisco Night (5 page)
Read San Francisco Night Online
Authors: Stephen Leather
“All the way by the sound of it, but anyway she started on TV. That Blood Network show. How does someone that famous get involved in shit like that?”
“Perhaps it’s getting involved in shit that brought the fame?” said Nightingale. “Why did you get in touch with Joshua?”
“Because I realized I wanted out and I figured I couldn’t just walk away,” said Mitchell.
“You knew they were going to sacrifice people, right?”
Mitchell’s face screwed up as if he was about to cry. “I knew, but I didn’t know,” he said. “It’s like I got sucked in and the more I got sucked in the less horrific it was. But when they killed the nun…”
“You wanted out?”
Mitchell nodded.
“Do you know who they wanted you to sacrifice?”
“They were going to get the victim for me. Two of the Apostles are experts at abductions. Don’t ask me how, but they can abduct people to order, pretty much. All they told me was that I would have to saw the victim into pieces while they were alive.”
“Did Abaddon tell you how many sacrifices are left?”
Mitchell shook his head.
“But I was told these sacrifices are just the beginning. A way to store up power inside their circle, and bind each of them to this leader, Abaddon. But it’s all building up to something much bigger, and that’s coming up real soon. When they first started, the Sabbats were on the full moon. But they’re coming quicker now. Every week. And they’re building to something big. Something really big.”
“What and when?”
“They wouldn’t tell me,” said Mitchell. “They said I’d find out once I was initiated.”
“What about the leader? Abaddon? What can you tell me about her?”
“Just a name to me,” said Mitchell. “She gave the orders, but I never saw her without the mask. The masks muffle the voice, so I don’t even know what she sounds like, but I do know she’s pretty damned powerful. I’ve seen her grant favors to her followers, call down power for them, bring them success in what they want. It was what I was hoping she’d do for me. Look, time’s running out for me. A black SUV turned up at my house. That’s when I ran. I have to get away from San Francisco, chances are I’m being overlooked right now, they’ll catch up with me soon.”
“Overlooked?” said Nightingale.
“Yeah, a powerful Satanist can do that, go up to the Astral and follow someone from there. Abaddon’s more powerful than you’d believe.” His whole body was shaking and he had trouble getting the cigarette to his lips. “I won’t be safe until I’m out of the country with a new name and a new identity,” said Mitchell.
“Almost there,” said Nightingale. “Come back with me to my motel and we’ll wait there. I’m at the La Luna Inn on 101.”
Mitchell shook his head. “No, I’ve been safe enough over the last couple of days on my own. Let’s keep it that way until Joshua gets back.”
“That’s crazy,” said Nightingale. “I can protect you.”
“Against Abaddon? I don’t think so. I’ll go back to the mainland, you stay here. Watch my back. If you see anyone get onto the ferry who looks like they’re following me, phone me or text. Then when Joshua lands, I’ll come to you.”
“What are you doing for money?”
“I’ve got some.”
Nightingale took out his wallet and gave him a handful of bills and a credit card. “Use this if you need more cash, but not in a store,” he said, and gave him the
Mitchell nodded. He pocketed the notes and card. “You see anything, call me while I’m on the ferry. Otherwise I’ll see you at your motel once Joshua gets here.”
He turned to go but Nightingale put a hand on his shoulder.
“Be careful, Lee,” he said.
Mitchell nodded, flicked away the remains of his cigarette, and headed down towards the ferry. Nightingale watched him go. He wasn’t happy about Mitchell staying out in the cold, but it was his call. There was nothing Nightingale could do to force Mitchell to go with him. And besides, it was only one more day.
Mitchell walked down the gangplank, pulled his hood even further forward and headed off down Fisherman’s Wharf. He kept his head down and didn’t notice the two uniformed police officers blocking his way until he almost bumped into them. He moved to walk around them but one of them put a hand on his arm. “Lee Mitchell?” he asked.
Mitchell shook his head. “No,” he said, and tried to push his way by. The officer tightened his grip on the arm. The second officer moved to Mitchell’s other side. “What is this?” he said. He felt a sudden stab of pain in his left arm and almost immediately his legs buckled.
The two officers grabbed his arms and dragged him to the cruiser, his shoes scraping across the sidewalk.
“Looks like you’ve had too much to drink, Sir,” said one of the officers for the benefit of anyone walking by but no one paid them any attention, those that weren’t looking at their smartphones were caught up in their own thoughts. The officers pushed Mitchell into the back of the cruiser and drove off, followed by a black SUV.
Nightingale caught the next ferry back to the mainland and took a cab to the motel. He collected his SUV and drove to the Mission Street library, a square gray building on a corner lot. He parked the SUV, went inside and found a free computer. He Googled Kent Speckman and Lucille Carr. There was plenty of online information about them both, though nothing that connected them. He got home addresses for them and pictures of their houses. He then spent the next hour looking for Christians who had been abducted over the past six months, but Googling “Missing Christians” didn’t help. He tried Googling missing nuns, priests, monks, church-going spinsters, choristers. Then he narrowed down the list by focusing on disappearances that had occurred the week before a full moon. That gave him several possibilities.
A seventeen year old boy from Santa Clara hadn’t been seen for five days. Morton Steele, a straight-A student, though something of a loner, hadn’t come home from school that day. He was a regular church-goer, and an altar server at St Anthony’s. The photo showed a pale, chubby face, ginger hair and round metal-framed glasses with thick lenses.
A church organist had gone missing in Oakland, Caroline Shaw, described as a “devout Christian” had failed to show up to play at a service six months before, and had apparently not been seen since.
An unmarried woman of seventy from Nob Hill had been reported missing by neighbors. Shirley Davenport, had last been seen after she’d been to St Michael’s church to arrange flowers on a Friday night, and her car had not been found. The accompanying photo showed a thin-faced old woman with round glasses and thinning gray hair. Probably a lovely personality though, thought Nightingale, but he did have the good grace to feel guilty about it afterward.
One more seemed to fit. A monk had gone missing from Our Lady Of Spring Bank Cistercian Monastery out near Santa Teresa. Brother Gregory West had last been seen working in the monastery vineyards nine months ago, but had not come in for evening service. The monastery grounds had been searched extensively, but no trace of him had ever been found. Police had appealed for witnesses, especially anyone who might have been driving along the main road that passed the bottom end of the vineyard, but there had been no sightings.
Nightingale printed out the details of the four new cases along with all the information he had on Speckman and Carr, collected the sheets from the desk, paid and left.
Back in the SUV, he tapped in Kent Speckman’s address and followed the Satnav’s directions for twenty minutes to a large modern house, the type often disparagingly called a McMansion, churned out to order like cheeseburgers. He climbed out and lit a Marlboro as he stared through the twelve-feet high wrought iron gates. The mansion was set back from the road, red brick with a brown slate roof, and a triple garage to the left. The high wall that ran around the boundary was free of spikes or barbed wire but well covered with CCTV cameras and two more cameras covered the gate. There were signs on the wall saying that the house was under the armed protection of a local security company. As he turned back to his SUV an SFPD cruiser pulled up and a female officer climbed out, short and dumpy with hair so uniformly chestnut that it could only have been dyed.
“Good afternoon, sir. Is this your car?”
“It’s a rental,” said Nightingale.
“License and registration, please?”
Nightingale went back to the car, opened the glove compartment and gave her the rental agreement before fishing his driver’s license out of his wallet.
She checked the documents and handed them back. “Thank you, sir. Why are you waiting here?”
Nightingale had learned over many years that cops never responded well to sarcasm so he played it straight. “My wife’s thinking of moving up here officer, so I was looking at houses, trying to get a feel for the area. I needed a cigarette, and I don’t like smoking when I’m driving.”
“You’re Australian?”
“British.”
“But you have a US license?”
“I’ve lived here for a while.”
“Green card?”
Nightingale nodded. “My wife’s American.”
The officer nodded. “This is a residential area, sir, and people get a little nervous if they see strange cars parked here. Maybe you could find a mall car park to smoke in. That’s generally what I do.”
“I’ll do that, thank you.”
“No problem, sir. Enjoy your day.”
She went back to the cruiser, but was obviously waiting for him to leave first. He reset the Satnav with the location of the Rite Aid on Hillsdale Boulevard where Mitchell had left his Porsche and drove away while she watched. He had no idea whether the cruiser had been on patrol, or whether someone had noticed a strange car and called it in. Either way, a surveillance job outside Speckman’s house wasn’t going to be possible. The officer would have logged his license and the car registration. He checked his mirror, just in time to watch a white Humvee drive out of Speckman´s gates and head in the opposite direction.
He followed the ice blonde’s curt instructions but even with light traffic it took more than forty minutes to get to the Rite Aid. That ruled out the Speckman mansion as being the place where the nun was killed, but Nightingale had expected that. Finding the mansion where the killings were taking place was going to require more detective work. And probably a decent helping of luck.
The little middle-aged woman was talking. Her voice was soft but persistent, like a teacher twittering away at her young pupils, filling every moment of potential silence with inconsequential noise. “Ah, you’re awake, Mr. Mitchell,” she said. “I am sorry about the inconvenience. I’ll try not to keep you too long, I’m sure you have a thousand things to do. You’ve probably got quite the headache and aren’t feeling at your best. It’s a nasty little drug that, but very quick acting, you probably didn’t even feel the little prick.”
Mitchell shook his head, and instantly regretted the decision - the left side of his face was on fire. He tried to raise his hand to it, but couldn’t move it. He dropped his gaze and saw the duct tape that held his wrists firmly to the arms of the chair. His ankles were bound to the chair legs. Something had been stuffed in his mouth and he couldn’t speak. He was naked. All his clothes lay, neatly folded, in a pile on the floor in front of him. The woman stood in front of him, her green tweed jacket on the sofa, her crisply-starched white blouse with the loose black bow at the throat reinforcing the image of the schoolmistress. Her graying brown hair was wrapped in a tight bun, and she wore black leather gloves.
He moved his eyes, rather than his head, to look around. It was a large garage, though there was no car, just the sofa, a teak sideboard and the chair on which he was sitting. The chair was bolted to metal brackets, which were firmly fastened to the floor. Plastic sheeting covered the floor. In one corner stood a mop and bucket. The woman twittered on. “As I said, I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience, but I do have some questions for you.”
Mitchell struggled to speak, but she put a cautioning finger to his lips.
“Not yet, Mr. Mitchell. There’ll be time enough for you to speak later.”
She walked across to the teak sideboard, picked up a small brass plate and held it in front of him. There was a blood-stained piece of flesh, placed exactly in the middle. Mitchell gazed at it in horror, and strained against the duct tape. Neither his wrists nor his ankles moved an inch.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a bit of a cliché this business of tying you to a chair, isn’t it. I do hope you won’t chide me for it. If I were on...er...home territory, so to speak, I’m sure I could have come up with something more imaginative which you might have appreciated a little more, but I’ve just borrowed this place for an hour or two. Now, let me show you these.”
She held up a large pair of shears.
“Quite beautiful these. Cost much more than you might imagine. Fabric shears. For cutting cloth you know. Chrome vanadium steel, apparently, and ever so sharp. Though it does depend on the strength of one’s hand, you see. Now my grip is a lot stronger than you might imagine, and I have managed to cut off a finger or two from time to time. No, no, keep still now. If I were at home, I’d much prefer to use bolt cutters for that, but a lady can hardly carry bolt cutters through the streets, can she. Whereas these, a roll of tape and one or two other useful little things fit nicely into my large reticule. I suppose if anyone asked, I could say I used them for dressmaking. Still, I’m hardly likely to be stopped by the police.”
Mitchell continued to strain against the tape, with no success. The woman’s voice was gentle, kind, almost reassuring, like a mother trying to soothe her child to sleep. But the words, the words were the seeds of nightmare.
“I don’t really like to use it to cut bone, it seems a little crude, like using an artist’s paintbrush on the outside wall of a house. Besides, there are so many soft parts to the human body. I like to start on the unimportant ones. Do you recognize this, Mr. Mitchell?”
She raised the brass plate with its grizzly contents into his line of sight. He strained upwards and grunted.
“Yes, that’s right, it’s your earlobe, the left one. Now, shall we even things up on the right-hand side?”
Mitchell shook his head violently and desperately strained to speak.
“No? I’m sure it would look much more symmetrical. Still, it’s entirely your choice, at the moment.”
She dropped her voice to a whisper, and gave him a conspiratorial wink.
“I tell you what we’ll do...why don’t I take that nasty gag out of your mouth and then you can tell me one or two things I’d like to know. Just a few easy little questions, and then you can be running along. But no noise now, and no fibs. We’re all alone here, nobody about to hear you scream, and there’s some awfully good soundproofing too. I can easily put the gag back in if you get tiresome, and after that it might not be up to you to decide which little bits you stay attached to.”
She gave his groin a gentle pat and Mitchell practically had a seizure. He nodded his head frantically.
“Oh good. I’m sure we won’t have any misunderstandings. Remember now, no noise, and no fibs.”
Again he nodded, and the woman gently removed the gag.
“Now then, Mr. Mitchell. I’d like you to tell me what you did this morning.”
“Nothing,” he said. “I’d been sleeping on the streets and was heading for the Amtrak station.”
The woman gave him a disapproving look and shook her head.
“Tut, tut. I do believe that’s a fib,” she said
She hummed a little tune to herself and lifted the shears to his right ear. She gave him a kindly smile, then snipped off the lobe. Mitchell screamed and strained against the tightly wound duct-tape. Blood poured down his cheek and onto his shoulder.
“OK, OK,” he shouted. “I went to Alcatraz and met someone. He was going to help me.”
“And the name of this obliging gentleman?” she asked
“Jack.”
She tilted her head to one side, pushed her lips out and frowned.
“I think I’d prefer his full name, if you’d be so kind.”
She placed the shears over his left nipple and squeezed the handle gently.
“No, no. That’s the name he gave me. I don’t know any more than that. Jack. That’s all he said. I swear.”
Again he roared in pain as the blades closed. She moved over to the right nipple. He babbled at her.
“I swear, no please, I swear, that’s all he said, he was going to get me out, he wanted me to go with him but I said no.”
“Go where?”
“His motel. La Luna Inn. It’s on 101.”
“Do you have a telephone number for this Jack?”
“In my phone.”
The phone lay on the pile of clothes, she picked it up and checked the contacts log. “That’s a good boy,” she said. She put the phone down again and walked to stand in front of him. She stroked his cheek. “Now I want you to tell me everything that you told this Jack. Everything. Don’t leave anything out.”
“Then you’ll let me go?”
She patted his cheek gently. “Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it, shall we?”