The Devil in Gray

They searched the rest of the house, but after an hour

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Decker concluded that they weren't going to find anything else of any interest. He stood in the Maitlands' bedroom while the last light of the day gradually faded, and thought that there was nothing so sad as a once-happy house where people had been violently killed. Even Alison Maitland's pink satin nightdress was still there, neatly folded on her pillow.

"Come on, Hicks," he said. "Only ghosts here now."

They went out and closed the front door behind them. Hicks stood on the porch, held onto the railings, and took in three deep breaths. "That smell . . . I don't think I'll ever get used to it."

Decker slapped him on the back. "The day you get used to it is the day you're ready to quit."

On the way home, Decker called in to see Eunice and San­dra Plummer. They lived downtown on Twenty-seventh Street, at the top of a shabby old brown-brick apartment block that was scheduled for redevelopment. Inside the lobby the building smelled strongly of wax polish and dead flowers. The elevator clanked and rattled like a medieval in­strument of torture.

Eunice let him in. "Thank you for stopping by, Lieutenant," she said, tightly, although it was clear that she wasn't very pleased to see him. "Sandra's having her supper right now."

She led him through to the living room, which was crowded with antique furniture. The mustard-colored wall­paper was fading, and the rugs were worn through to the strings, but the apartment had high ceilings and original cast-iron fireplaces and there was a view over the neighbor­ing rooftops toward the sparkling lights along the water­front. The window was ajar so that Decker could hear the traffic and the chugging of a tugboat.

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Sandra was in the kitchen in a pink robe and slippers, eating cereal. Decker gave her a finger wave through the open door and she waved back at him and flushed in embar­rassment.

"How is she?" Decker asked Eunice.

"She's fine. She didn't see anything, thank God, and she didn't realize that poor man was killed."

"I came to apologize for involving her, and you too. Be­lieve me, if I'd had any idea what was going to happen—"

"Well, fortunately no harm was done. But don't expect us to help you again. Sandra is far too precious to me."

"There's no question of it," Decker reassured her. "I've arranged to have your close protection reinstated. I just hope it won't be necessary for very much longer."

"Do you think you're going to be able to catch this man?" "I don't know. I hope so. This is the first time I've ever gone looking for somebody I couldn't see."

"He does have a physical presence, though, doesn't he?"

"Oh, you bet. He threw Gerald Maitland out of the win­dow, and I felt him myself when he pushed me over. And if he has physical presence, that means we can restrain him. Theoretically, anyhow."

"It's a trick, isn't it? Like conjurors do."

"Yes, I think it is. All we have to do now is find out what kind of a trick."

Sandra called out from the kitchen and Eunice said, "Ex­cuse me, Lieutenant," and went to see what she wanted. Decker looked around the room, picking up a silver-framed photograph of Sandra when she was a baby, and another pho­tograph of a brown-haired man with a rather baffled-looking George W. Bush–type squint. Sandra's father, maybe.

Seven or eight of Sandra's sketches and watercolors were arranged on either side of the fireplace. Decker found her work unexpectedly moving—every drawing done with

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such atmosphere, and such attention to detail—and what a sadness it was that she probably wouldn't live beyond her twenties. Her most striking picture was a fine colored-crayon drawing of Main Street Station, with its Beaux Arts balconies, its orange roof tiles and its fairy-tale dormer windows.

Oddly, though, Sandra had drawn a heavily shaded cloud over its clock tower, more like a mass of writhing black ser­pents than a cloud.

"Interesting picture," he remarked, as Eunice came back into the living room.

"Yes. For some reason she calls it the Fun House."

"The Fun House, huh? What's that cloud hanging over it?" "I'm not sure. I remember her drawing it and the weather

was perfect."

"Strange, isn't it? Very, very good. But definitely strange."

127

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The next morning Decker drove the ninety miles south­eastward to Fort Monroe, headquarters of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, where Major Drewry had served in the military history section. It was a sunny day, but a fine warm rain was falling, so that the Mercury's wind­shield glittered and its tires sizzled on the highway.

Fort Monroe was situated on a spit of land in Chesapeake Bay. When Decker opened his car window to show his badge to the sentry at the gate, he could smell the ocean, like freshly opened oysters.

"I have a twelve o'clock meeting with Captain Tony Morello. Want to tell me where I can find him?"

"That's Toni with an i, sir. She's over in archives, right across there."

Decker parked his car in the visitors' space and walked across the parade ground. A squad of pink-faced cadets in full dress uniform were practicing formation marching, their shiny boots splashing in the puddles. Decker climbed

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the steps, pushed his way through the double swing doors and followed the signs that said OFFICE OF THE COMMAND

HISTORIAN.

He found Captain Morello in the library, leaning over a desk with a computer in front of her. She was almost as tall as he was, with short black hair that was slashed straight back from her forehead. When she turned around, Decker saw that she was also strikingly attractive, in a 1960s Italian-actress way, with a heart-shaped face and vixenish eyes. Her immaculately pressed uniform only emphasized her very full breasts, and even in a midlength skirt her legs looked unnervingly long.

"Lieutenant Martin," Decker said, showing his badge. "But, you know, don't let's stand on ceremony. All my friends call me Decker."

"Captain Morello," Toni Morello said, with a tight little smile. "All my friends call me sir."

Decker looked around at the floor-to-ceiling shelving. Each shelf was filled with hundreds of gray-backed files, and each file was identified by a neat white label—Armored Ma­neuvers in Italy, Spring 1945; Airborne Assault Forces in Cam­bodia, 1971; Logistical Operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1994. The library was more than 150 feet long, with a yellow-tinted clerestory window to filter the sunlight.

"Hell of a library," Decker remarked, although he was re­ally thinking, Hell of a librarian.

"I won't keep you a moment, Lieutenant." Toni Morello tapped out a few more lines on her computer and then switched it off. "I understand you wanted to talk to me about Major Drewry. We were all deeply distressed about that."

"Well, yes. It was a pretty goddamned horrible way to go. I'm going to be talking to Mrs. Drewry again, but I don't want to upset her more than I have to and I was wondering if you could help me at all."

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"I'll do my best."

"What I need to know is, were any of Major Drewry's an­cestors connected with the army?"

"Oh yes. George was very proud of his family history. His great-great-grandfather fought with Robert E. Lee, and his grandfather was out in the Philippines with Teddy Roose­velt. He was always bitterly sorry that he never saw active service himself."

"Would you have any information here about his great-great-grandfather?"

"Of course. George used our archives to research his fam­ily tree, and he managed to find a whole lot more original material besides. Diaries, letters, that kind of thing. I don't think he'd even gotten around to cataloguing everything. Do you want to take a look?"

Decker followed her along the lines of shelving. She had a fluid way of walking that reminded him of a wildlife docu­mentary that he had been watching on television that morning, nyala gazelles loping across the African bush. They reached a section at the far end of the library marked ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA, 1861-1865, and Toni Morello took out a box file with a label that said Battle of the Wilderness, May 5–May 7, 1864: Maj. Gen. Maitland's brigade.

She carried the file over to a reading table and opened it. Inside it was packed with original letters, dispatches, maps, and photographs. "Here," she said. "This is a picture of Ma­jor General Maitland's brigade at dawn on the morning of May sixth, just before they were sent up the Orange Plank Road to attack the advancing Federal army."

The photograph was remarkably similar to the one that Decker had taken from 4140 Davis Street. About a dozen bearded men in slouch hats and képis, some of them in tu­nics and others in nothing more than dirty shirts and mud‑

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died pants. A typed caption underneath identified the third mounted officer on the left as Lieutenant Colonel Henry Drewry.

Toni Morello was about to tuck the photograph back in the file when Decker said, "Wait up a moment. Let me look at that again."

He took off his glasses and studied the group as closely as he could. At the back of the group stood three men, well apart from the rest, and although they were deep in shadow, Decker could see that at least two of them were wearing greatcoats. All three of them had slouch hats, and their hats were all decorated with black ragged plumes.

"Have you ever heard of the Devil's Brigade?" he asked.

"I've heard it mentioned, of course. It was a myth, as far as I know. Propaganda, put out by the Federal generals to excuse themselves for being driven back by an army that had forty thousand fewer men than they did—not to men­tion being much more tired and hungry and very short on ammunition."

"Do you have any records about it?"

"I don't know offhand, but I could check for you." Decker put his glasses back on. "I'd really appreciate it. Meanwhile—what time do you break for lunch?"

As he drove back toward Richmond with the steering wheel in one hand and a double cheeseburger in the other, his cell phone rang.

"Lieutenant? Hicks here. It looks like we've got ourselves another one."

131

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

He turned into Sixth Street and was waved through the crowds of sightseers. The entire front window of Jimmy the Rib's Soul Food Restaurant had been smashed and the side­walk was strewn with sun-glittering glass. Seven squad cars were parked higgledy-piggledy across the street with flash­ing lights, as well as an ambulance and two khaki station wagons from the coroner's department.

As he pushed his way past the crowd, Decker saw some­body he recognized—a lanky young man with a straight-nosed profile like a pharaoh from one of the pyramids. He wore a jazzy red and white shirt and huge hoop earrings and a sharks' tooth necklace, as well as a floppy red crochet beret that was decorated with feathers and antique keys and fishing flies.

"Hi, Jonah. What's happening?"

"Deck-ah! How should I know, man? I only just got here." "Junior Abraham's been wasted, that's what I hear."

"Had it coming, man. Junior Abraham was a liar and a

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blowhard and if anybody needs financial reimbursement for the bullet they bought to give him a premature funeral, then all they have to do is pass the hat around and I'll be the first to contribute."

"You have any idea who did it?"

"Uh-huh."

"Come on, Jonah, give me a clue. You know this termites' nest better than anybody."

"Deck-ah, even if I knew something I wouldn't tell you."

"What? This is African-American omerta, is it?"

"No, this is Jonah Jones thinking about his self-preservation. Whoever whacked a heavy-duty dude like Ju­nior Abraham wouldn't have no compunction about swatting a mosquito like me. I'll tell you something, Deck­ah, even if I knew for sure who done this deed, which I don't, I wouldn't tell you who done it even if you rubbed my nuts with marrowbone and let two hungry Dobermans loose in the room."

Decker rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers, as if he were thinking seriously. "You know something, Jonah? There's an idea."

Decker crunched across the shattered glass into the restau­rant, already crowded with scene-of-crime investigators and photographers and uniformed officers and bewildered look­ing witnesses. The interior was pungent with soul-food spices and fried chicken, and the walls were covered with sepia photographs of slave cabins and cotton fields and dozens of framed photographs of famous people of color, everybody from Maggie L. Walker, the first woman in America to found a bank, to Denzel Washington and Arthur Ashe Jr.

Cab and Hicks were talking to witnesses. Decker went to join them. Plastic grapevines hung down from the ceilings

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in such profusion that he had to push them away from his face. "Jesus," he said, "it's a jungle in here."

Cab said, "It sure is. Take a look at this."

Decker followed him to a booth at the very back of the restaurant, partly enclosed by a carved mahogany screen. In the corner hung a slanty-eyed African voodoo mask with an electric lightbulb shining through its eyes. Underneath the mask sat a skinny man in a shiny black satin shirt and shiny black satin pants, and black alligator moccasins with no socks. Above the man's collar, all that remained was his lower jaw, like a dental cast. The rest of his head was sprayed up the wall in an ever-widening fan shape of dark red blood and pink glistening lumps. Even as Decker was examining him, one of the lumps started to creep its way surreptitiously down the wallpaper like a garden slug.

"Heck—he was right in the middle of eating," Hicks said, in disgust. "If you look into his neck, you can still see chewed-up ham and potatoes. Didn't even have time to swallow them."

"I'll take your word for it, sport," Decker said. "What went down here, Cab? This doesn't look anything at all like the other two killings."

"It doesn't but it does. The story is that Junior Abraham comes here for lunch every Monday regular at one o'clock. Always sits at the same table and always orders the same thing, ham hocks and mixed greens, with candied sweet po­tatoes. He's sitting in the first booth right here with his brother Treasure and two of his heavies. A guy in a waiter's apron comes out of the kitchen door carrying a tray with four bowls of fish chowder."

Cab took out his handkerchief and slapped it open. "We got nine eyewitnesses, would you believe? They all say that the waiter guy goes up to the booth and throws the chowder

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into Junior's lap. Junior jumps up, hands clutching his crotch, natural reaction, and that's when the waiter guy pulls out a pump-action shotgun from under his apron and blows a respectable part of Junior's head off. There's an­other of Junior's heavies on the door but the waiter guy doesn't bother to exit via the door—he simply shoots out the window."

"Anybody recognize this waiter guy?"

"Nobody says they do. What do you expect? They all want to keep their heads intact."

"So it was a hit. What makes it anything like the other two killings?"

"The waiter guy was out here, right? In the restaurant. But—and this is the weird bit—he was never in the kitchen."

Decker blinked. "What do you mean he was never in the kitchen?"

Hicks said, "All the eyewitnesses in the restaurant say that he came out of the kitchen door, but the cooks insist that he was never in there. He just, like, appeared."

"Ah, come on. The cooks weren't concentrating, that's all. They were cooking, they were filling out orders, they were stacking plates. They weren't going to notice some guy in a waiter's apron."

"I'm telling you, Lieutenant. They all swear blind there was nobody there."

"Blind is probably the right word. Listen—I'll talk to the cooks in a minute, but I want to have a word with Treasure first. He still here?"

"There—over in the corner," Hicks said. "But I took a statement already . . . he doesn't know from squat."

Decker went over to a chunky young man with dread­locks and a sweat-stained Michael Jordan T-shirt. He kept

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sniffing and blinking and jerking his head, as if he needed a snort of something.

"Hi, Treasure. Sorry about your brother."

"Yeah," Treasure said.

"Did you recognize the guy who did it?"

Treasure sniffed and blinked and shook his head. "Never saw him before."

"Want to tell me what he looked like?"

"I just told the other guy," Treasure said, jerking his head toward Tim.

"Well, do me a favor, and tell me, too."

"He was a brother."

"I see. How tall was he?"

"Kind of like normal height."

"I see. What about weight?"

"Not too skinny, not too fat."

Decker nodded. "Any distinguishing marks? Hair? Scars? Moustache? False nose?"

"Nothing. It all happened so quick. Sploosh with the soup, then bang."

"I see. Sploosh with the soup and then bang."

"Listen, man," Treasure said, with a thumping sniff. "If I knew who it was, I'd personally kill him myself."

Decker turned back to Cab. "Black, average build and height. That sure narrows it down."

"Yeah, we could hold an identity parade twenty-three miles long."

Decker pushed his way through the swing door to the kitchen, with Hicks right behind him. Standing by the stove were two anxious cooks and a dim-looking dishwasher with long red rubber gloves and his cap on sideways. The burners were crowded with huge simmering pots of corn chowder and crawfish stew and thick brown gravy going blibble-blobble like a swamp. The senior cook was even fatter

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than Cab, with a red bandana around his sweat-beaded forehead.

"I'm Lieutenant Martin," Decker said.

"Louis," the senior cook said, wiping his hand on a dish­cloth and holding it out. "This here is Roy and this here is Toussaint."

"My partner tells me you didn't see anybody in the kitchen immediately prior to the shooting."

"That's perfectly correct, sir. There was only us and no­body else. Anyhow there's only two servers, Gina and May, and Gina and May is both women."

"Really? Gina and May? Women?" Decker circled the kitchen, picking up spoons and spatulas and frowning at them as if he thought they might be circumstantial evi­dence. "You didn't see the door open? I mean, nine people saw this guy come out of the kitchen door with a tray of soup. How did he get the soup out of the kitchen if he didn't open the door? Where'd he get the soup from?"

"I don't know, sir. I truly can't say. But I can testify to you on my mother's life there was no waiter in here."

The other two men nodded in furious agreement. Decker lifted the lid of one of the pots and sniffed the ham hocks that were nestling in it. "Smells pretty damn good." Then he looked up and said, "You're not saying this just to protect your ass, are you, Louis? Because this is a homicide inquiry, and anybody who obstructs such an inquiry by professing, for instance, that nobody was there when they were there—well, they're almost equally as guilty as whoever pulled the trigger. Junior Abraham's brains are spattered all over his hands, too."

Louis quickly looked down at his hands and gave them another wipe with his twisted cloth. "It's the truth, sir. The absolute truth. There was nobody here in this here kitchen but us."

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"So how do you think he did it? Come out of a door that he hadn't gone into?"

Louis hesitated for a moment, and then he said, very em­phatically, "It was a spell."

"A spell?" Decker's eyebrows went up.

"A magic spell, sir. I can't think of no other explanation." "I see. A spell. But that shotgun shell sure wasn't a spell, was it?"

"Ah, no. But that was a message. Okana obbara." "Okana obbara? What does that mean?"

"That means, like, don't lose your head just because you're going to die."

"Pretty sick sense of humor in that case."

"No other explanation, sir."

"This is all to do with Santeria, right? All this magic spells and obba-wobbas?"

Louis crossed himself. "Yes, sir. Santeria, sir."

"Well, who knows? You may be right. Listen—stick around, will you, Louis? And you, Roy. You too, Toussaint. We may have to talk to you again."

"Yes, sir."

Decker pushed his way back out through to the restau­rant. Hicks said, "You really think this could have had something to do with Santeria?"

"Too soon to say. But it wouldn't surprise me. Some of the major gangs here are Santerians, especially the Egun. They think it gives them supernatural power, you know, and protects them from their enemies. Apart from that, it's very secretive, close-knit. Keeps the outsiders out and the insid­ers in."

"Rhoda's grandmother was all into that. You know, the herbs and the eggs and the seashells. I didn't think many people practiced it anymore. I mean, not these days."

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"Oh, you'd be surprised what we have here in Rich­mond. Santeria, voodoo, hoodoo. We even have some Episcopalians."

"You don't seriously believe that this waiter guy appeared

by magic?"

"I don't seriously believe anything just yet. But I've heard stories about santeros who can materialize out of thin air. Don't ask me how they do it, but who knows? It might have happened here. Maybe Cab's right, and it happened in the Maitland case and the Drewry case, too or something sim­ilar. Mass hypnotism, a trick of the light. What you might scientifically define as a spell."

Cab was talking to the two waitresses. One was plump and plain, with bunches, but the other was small and curvy with a lick of a fringe and a criminally short black skirt. "Which one are you?" Decker asked her. "Gina or May?"

"I'm May. This is Gina."

"Did you see the waiter guy in the kitchen, May?" "I surely didn't."

"You ever see him before, ever?"

"I never did."

"Okay ... look, why don't you give me your phone num­ber? I might have to ask you some more questions later."

When the girls had gone, Cab said, "You are seriously in­corrigible, Decker. I know what kind of questions you want to ask her."

"You misjudge me, Captain."

"Oh yeah? So how come you didn't ask the homely one?" "You want me to enjoy my work or not?"

Cab sniffed, and then violently sneezed. "Goddam hay fever. How did you get on with the cooks?"

"They wouldn't qualify for Mensa, but the funny thing is I think I believe them."

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"So where did the waiter guy come from?"

"The cook thinks it's a Santeria spell."

"You're pulling my leg."

"Waiter guy apparently appears from nowhere at all. How else did he do it?"

"Oh, shit, Santeria. You know what this means."

"Let me have one inspired guess, Captain. Queen Aché."

Cab nodded and wiped his nose at the same time. "Funny, though. I thought Junior was running most of Queen Aché's dope business, through the docks."

"Maybe Junior was helping himself to some unauthorized commission."

"Well, Martin, I know how much you like to get it on with Queen Aché."

"Uh-huh. No way. This one's for somebody else. Give it to Rudisill. Or better yet, Watkins. At least he's black."

"Martin, I don't have any choice. Who else has your ex­perience? You know these people."

"Oh, sure. And look what happened the last time I got myself involved with Queen Aché."

Cab laid his hand on Decker's shoulder. "I'm aware of that, Martin. But it was never proved that Queen Aché was connected with Cathy being killed, and you're simply the best man I've got for the job."

"I'm not happy with this, Captain. You'd be much better off sending Watkins."

"Come on. Queen Aché likes honkies."

"Sure, with barbecue sauce and a side order of curly fries."

"Be a man, Decker. Besides, it's high time that young Hicks here met Richmond's most distinguished Afro-American citizen."

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Queen Aché lived in the Jackson Ward, in a fancy red-painted town house with white cast-iron balconies and elaborate white cast-iron railings. The house used to belong to Booker Morrison, the famous turn-of-the-century preacher, who said that "those who are bondsmen on earth will have eternal freedom in heaven; and those who en­slaved them will themselves suffer slavery for ever and a day." For that observation, he was kidnapped by Klansmen, hung up by his heels from a lamppost on the corner of Franklin and Fifth Streets, soaked in paraffin, and set alight.

It was a grillingly hot afternoon, with only a few mares' tails streaked across a dark blue sky. Two bodyguards were standing on the redbrick sidewalk outside Queen Aché's front steps, both of them wearing jazzy African shirts, capa­cious shorts, knee-length socks, and mirror sunglasses. Decker parked directly outside and climbed out of his car, squinting up at the house as if he were interested in buying it.

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"Hi, George. Hi, Newton. How's it going in the heavy business?"

"We generally axes folks not to park in that particular spot, Lieutenant, on account of security."

"Quite right, too. Is Her Ladyship at home?"

"She expecting you?"

"Oh, I should think so. You know that Junior Abraham has left the building."

"Junior Abraham? Didn't hear nothing about that, Lieutenant."

"Didn't think you would have, what with this deaf-and blind epidemic going around. Now, how about telling Madame that I'd like to ask her a couple of questions?"

Newton took out his cell phone. "Mikey? We got Martin out here. Lieutenant Martin. He says he wants to talk to Queen Ache."

He waited, and then eventually he said, "Okay," and dropped his cell phone back into his shirt pocket.

"Well?" Decker asked.

"Queen Ache says the ase isn't favorable today."

"The ase? The ase my ass. Get back onto her. Tell her this is a multiple homicide investigation and if she doesn't want to answer questions here I can arrange for her to come down to Madison and Grace and inspect our nice new shiny headquarters."

Newton took out his cell phone again. "Mikey? Martin says he needs to talk to Queen Ache about Junior Abraham getting creamed. Yes. That's right. Okay. That's right."

He dropped his cell phone back in his pocket. "Queen Ache says okay but don't blame her if something seriously untoward happens."

Newton led Decker and Hicks up the front steps and the door was opened by a loose-jointed young man with pro­truding ears and an incipient black moustache. Before he

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went inside, Decker turned back and called, "George! There's a buck in it if nobody steals my hubcaps!" George flapped his fat hand in disgust.

The young man took them across a wide hallway with gilt antique mirrors and a dark mahogany floor. In the back of the house somebody was playing a Charles Mingus im­provization, badly.

"Hey—you're not Michael, are you?" Decker asked the young man. "Queen Ache's youngest kid?"

The young man nodded.

"I don't believe it. You were only knee high to a high knee the last time I saw you. What have they been feeding you on? Giraffe food?"

"I'm fifteen," Michael said, defensively.

"Fifteen? How about that? Fifteen. God . . . I was fifteen when I was your age, too. Can you imagine it?"

Decker and Hicks followed Michael through an archway into the living room. Most of the white wooden blinds were closed, so that the sunlight was very subdued in here, and the room was filled with lazy loops of marijuana smoke.

Queen Ache seriously regarded herself as royalty, and this was her throne room. The drapes were crimson velvet, with swags and ties and gilded tassels. The chairs and couches were all gilded and upholstered in the same fabric, and a sparkling cut-glass chandelier hung from the ceiling. Yet the room wasn't all Versailles. On the walls hung dark oil paintings of mythical African beasts, and jungles; and inscrutable ebony figures stood guard on either side of the fireplace, with spears, and attenuated faces like praying mantises. In the far corner of the room there was an elabo­rate Santeria shrine, crowded with statuettes and lighted candles and cowrie shells and painted masks and chicken feathers.

Three men were sprawled in armchairs, all of them wear‑

143

ing black shirts and flappy black Armani pants and carrying half of Schwarzschild's Jewelry Store around their wrists. Queen Ache herself was reclining next to them on a golden-striped divan. She was smoking a small ivory pipe with a face carved on it.

"What do you expect me to say to you?" she demanded, as Decker and Hicks approached her. "The ase isn't favor­able . . . how do you expect me to have good aba?"

"It's up to you. Maybe you'd have better aba downtown."

"Hey," warned one of the men, and began to stand up, but Queen Ache waved her hand at him and he sat down again.

She was a remarkable-looking woman. Decker had known her father, King Special, and like King Special she was very tall, over six feet three inches, with long arms and long legs and wide shoulders. But there was no doubt that she had inherited the beauty of her Cuban mother. A high forehead, wide-apart eyes, and a look of sleepy aloofness. Her skin was almost pale enough to pass as white, but her hair was braided and beaded, and she spoke with African-American intonations.

She was wearing a filmy dress of white linen, through which Decker thought he could almost see the heavy curves of her breasts, and dozens of thin gold bangles. Her feet were bare, and she had gold rings on her toes, too.

"So what is all this you say about Junior Abraham?" she asked.

"Well . . . I was kind of hoping that you knew more about that than I do."

She shook her beaded hair. "This is the first I've heard of it. I'm very sorry. Junior wasn't such a bad man. A boaster, maybe. And not to be trusted. But he didn't deserve to die a violent death."

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"Maybe you found out that poor old Junior wasn't being entirely honest with you. You know, like dipping his hand in the cash register."

"Why must we complain that the moon is slanting?" Queen Ache said. "Can't anyone reach the skies to straighten it?"

"Well, I don't know about the moon, but somebody sure straightened Junior."

Queen Ache smiled. Decker thought she really did have the most erotic smile. It made you think that something very sexy and very dangerous was going to happen next. But all Queen Ache said was, "He who has a head has no cap to wear on it; and he who has a cap has no head to wear it on."

"You said it, Your Majesty."

She kept on smiling. "There is nothing I can help you with, Lieutenant. If Junior was cheating me, I didn't know about it, and if I had found out about it, I would have made him pay me back, no more than that."

"You expect me to believe that? If there's one thing I know about you, it's that you don't forgive anybody any­thing, ever."

Queen Ache drew on her pipe and blew out a long thin stream of smoke. "You know nothing about me at all, Lieu­tenant. To you my soul is a closed book. And you have no evidence whatsoever that I was involved in any way in the killing of Junior Abraham."

"Oh, really? This was a little bit more than a straightfor­ward hit. It happened in Jimmy the Rib's, in case you're in­terested, which you don't seem to be, because you probably knew that already. The killer came out of the kitchen and blew Junior's head off, which seems to happen to everybody who gets in your way. But the interesting thing is that no­body saw the killer in the kitchen beforehand."

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"I don't understand why that should be any concern of mine."

"Well . . . there are only two possible explanations," Decker said. "One is that the kitchen staff simply failed to notice him."

"And the other?"

"It was a Santerfa spell. And who is the only person in town who would arrange for a hit using a Santerfa spell?"

"I might make an ebbó, to protect me from my enemies, but nothing more than that."

"An ebbó?"

"An ebbó is more of a sacrifice than a spell, Lieutenant. An offering to our orishas so that they will give us the things we crave the most. Love, for instance, or money, or good luck; or protection from evil spirits."

"How about being invisible? What's the ebbó for that?"

Queen Ache shook her head and again her beads made a soft rattling sound. "There is no such ebbó and no such spell. All that one would ask is that one's misdeeds went unnoticed."

Hicks said, "That would be quite a request, though, wouldn't it? Like, even more all-inclusive than just being invisible."

"What do you mean?" Queen Ache asked, without look­ing at him.

"Well, if your misdeeds went unnoticed, nobody would ever know that it was you, whether you were invisible or not. Like, you might leave evidence, but nobody would ever be able to see it."

Queen Ache said nothing, but slowly turned her head and gave Hicks a hair-raising look, with slightly narrowed eyes, as if she were trying to remember not only his face, but his soul, too.

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Decker said, "I want to ask you one more question, Queen Ache. Do you know of any reason why anybody should have wanted to kill Junior Abraham?"

"No. Absolutely not."

"Well, thank you for your time. When I've had the chance to check out Junior's bank account, I may ask to take a look at some of your books. You know, for compari­son. It would be very educational to know how much he was taking you for."

"If I hadn't noticed, it couldn't have been very much. You know how careful I am with my business affairs." "Oh yes."

"Still, one can't know everything. Some great scholars of Ifa cannot tell the way to Ofa. Others know the way to Ofa, but not one line of Ifa."

"Some detectives don't know who shot Junior Abraham, but they never fail to recognize bullshit, even when it's metaphorical bullshit."

"Good-bye, Lieutenant. Michael will show you out."

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

They worked until 8:15 P.M., and then Decker took off his glasses and dry-washed his face with his hands. "That's it, let's call it a night."

Hicks came over and dropped a list of names on his desk. "Those are all the known members of the Eguns who could have been in the vicinity of Jimmy the Rib's at lunchtime today. I'll start tracking them down tomorrow and checking their alibis."

Decker picked up the list, scanned it quickly, and sniffed. "You can forget about Wendell Brown. The Strutters cut his balls off last February for messing with one of their women. And made him eat them. Otherwise—fine. You're doing good work."

Hicks checked his watch. "Listen, I know we were all sup­posed to be going out for a Mexican meal, but why don't you come round to our place for supper tonight? Rhoda always makes plenty."

"Ahh, I wouldn't want to put her to any trouble. Besides,

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don't you want to leave your work behind you for a few hours?"

"No, I'd really appreciate it if you'd come. Maybe you can give Rhoda some idea of how important this is. How much the city needs us, you know—people like us."

"She's still hankering for Fredericksburg, huh?"

"If you could maybe just talk to her."

"All right, then," Decker agreed. He stood up and shrugged on his coat. "So long as you bear in mind that I'm not a marriage guidance counselor. My whole life has been one dysfunctional relationship after another, with a lot of floozies in between."

"Except for Cathy," Hicks said.

Decker glanced down at the photograph of Cathy in her straw hat and then he looked back at Hicks. "I think you're speaking out of turn," he said, coldly.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"

Decker closed his eyes for a moment and then he said, "No. I know. I'm the one who should be saying sorry. It's just that—I've been feeling her presence lately, very close. Al­most like she's still alive."

Hicks looked embarrassed, so Decker patted him reassur­ingly on the back and the two of them left the office.

In the elevator they met Detective Bill Watkins, a broad-shouldered shaven-headed man with a broken nose. He looked like a linebacker for the Richmond Speed.

"Hear you talked to Queen Ache today, Lieutenant."

"Yeah, for what it was worth."

"She didn't admit to nothing, then? That woman . . . whewf, if she wasn't so evil, she'd be bad. Give me twelve hours and a king-size bed and I'd have her confessing to anything."

"She'd eat you alive, Detective, and then she'd suck your bones."

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* * *

Hicks opened the front door. "Where the elite meet to eat." He grinned. The house was small, with a narrow hallway and a steep flight of stairs. Decker could smell frying chicken in the kitchen, and he suddenly realized how hun­gry he was. He hadn't eaten anything since Captain Morello had courteously but very firmly turned down his lunch invitation and he had been forced to resort to that soggy double cheeseburger.

"Tim, is that you?" Rhoda called. She came out of the kitchen in her apron, her hair tied up in a scarf, and imme­diately flushed in embarrassment.

Hicks said, "Hey—I know I should have called, but I thought I'd surprise you."

"Lieutenant, I'm so sorry . . . I must really look a mess." Decker smiled and held out his hand. "You look great. I

told Tim to ask you but he was afraid you'd say no."

Rhoda wiped her hand on her apron. "Of course I

wouldn't have said no. This is an honor."

"Let me take your coat," Hicks said. "How about a beer?"

"Do you want a hand in the kitchen?" Decker asked Rhoda. "I make a chili-tomato salad dressing that some peo­ple would sell their kidneys for."

"No, no, I'm fine. Go into the living room, take the weight off."

Rhoda went back into the kitchen and Decker could hear her arguing with Hicks. "—could have let me know, I would have cooked something special—"

He went into the living room. It was wallpapered with a pale brown bamboo pattern, and furnished with big beige leather chairs. A crowd of Barbie dolls sat in one corner of the couch, where Hicks's daughter had obviously been play­ing before she went to bed. On top of the huge wide-screen

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television were at least a dozen family photographs, as well as a vase of artificial lilies in artificial water, a china church, and a painted-plaster figure of Jesus with His hands covering His eyes.

Hicks came in with two cans of Budweiser and a plate of - tortilla chips. "Rhoda okay about this?" Decker asked him. "Sure, you know what women are like."

"I'm beginning to wonder."

They sat down and Hicks eased his shoes off. "That Queen Ache's something, isn't she?"

"Oh, for sure. She's a very astute lady. If there's any racket in Richmond that she doesn't have some kind of a finger in, I'd like to know what it is. She calls her organiz­ation the Eguns, which is the Santeria word for ancestors. Santeros worship their ancestors and she always wor­shiped her father. I mean, anybody who dares to insult King Special's sacred memory is lucky to end up with no teeth. But she's outdone her old man a hundred times over."

He popped the top of his beer can. "King Special started out as a fire-raiser . . . he burned down businesses when their owners were going bankrupt so that they could claim the in­surance. Then it occurred to him that if he lifted some of their stock before he torched the place, he could use the stolen stock to set up his own businesses and burn them down himself.

"After that he got into extortion, money lending, dope dealing, property scams, you name it. His real name was Ru­fus Douglas but nobody ever called him anything but King Special."

"When did he die?"

"About three years ago. Liver cancer. I'll tell you, the fu­neral cortege stretched along Second Street from Jackson

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to Cary, eight blocks. Forty-eight Cadillacs, covered in flowers."

"And Queen Ache took over?"

"Not only took over but expanded—and expanded fast. King Special might have had a reputation for crushing any­body who crossed him, but believe me, he was nothing com­pared to his daughter. A guy from D.C. tried to muscle in on her dope trade. Charles Noone, his name was, and he always wore a yellow Derby hat, that was his trademark, that yellow Derby hat. Usually Queen Ache arranges for her victims to have their heads blown off, that's part of the Santeria thing, so they can't be recognized when they try to be reunited with their ancestors. But when Queen Ache had Charles Noone offed, she had it done the other way around. A street cleaner found his severed head right in the middle of Main Street, still with his yellow Derby hat on. Never found the rest of him."

"Shit. I seem to remember reading about that."

Decker helped himself to a tortilla chip and dipped it into a saucer of homemade salsa. "I just want you to realize what we're up against when we're dealing with Queen Ache. She has everybody around here under her thumb, one hundred percent. She does it partly by violence but mostly by Santeria. She uses their secret rituals to discour­age her people from betraying her . . . if you betray Queen Ache, that's the same as betraying your religion. And she controls all the most powerful santeros. Everybody knows that if you offend Queen Ache, even a little, some santero is going to be casting a very nasty spell on you, and you're go­ing to get the stomachache, or your hair's going to fall out, or your goldfish are all going to die."

"In that case, I'll remember to keep on her good side." Decker said, "I think we ought to look into this Santeria

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thing a little deeper. Like, we have three homicides in less than a week and in each homicide the perpetrator is invisi­ble or partly invisible? What you said to Queen Ache about evidence going unnoticed, Hicks—that was very sharp thinking. I think the evidence is right in front of our noses but for some reason we just can't focus on it. Like Sherlock Holmes said, we're looking, but we can't see."

"Supper's on the table!" Rhoda called.

Rhoda had brushed her hair into shiny flick-ups and put on some bright red lip color. She looked almost too young to be a wife and a mother, with a round face and a little bobbed nose. She had spread the kitchen table with a red-checkered cloth, and served up fried chicken, sweet corn, flowering broccoli, candied potatoes and gravy, with a salad on the side.

"It's pretty simple Monday-night eating, I'm afraid," she apologized.

"It looks great to me. I keep planning on cooking myself all these fancy meals like polio a la vinagreta and the trouble is I'm always too tired to get around to it. And even when I do get around to it, I'm too tired to eat it."

He sat down and unfolded his napkin. He was suddenly aware that Rhoda was staring at him.

"Is everything all right?" he asked her. "I don't have salsa on my chin, do I?"

"No, no, everything's fine." Although she still looked as if she had seen something that disturbed her.

"I could eat an elephant," Hicks said, rubbing his hands in relish.

Rhoda said, "Would you like to say grace, Lieutenant?" "Hey, please. Call me Decker."

Rhoda gave him the tightest of smiles. "Decker," she re­peated.

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"Are you sure everything's okay?" he asked her. She defi­nitely looked uneasy.

"Yes. Great. I've had a busy day with Daisy, that's all."

Decker clasped his hands together and closed his eyes. He hesitated for a moment and then he said, "Oh, Lord, thank You for this food, and thank You for bringing us together to share it. We pray for Your guidance and Your protection, and most of all we pray that You open our eyes so that we can see our way to bring justice to those who cry out for it."

"Amen," Hicks said, looking at him in surprise.

"What?" Decker said.

"It was just that—well, that was quite some prayer."

Decker helped himself to a chicken thigh. "I'm not em­barrassed to call on the Almighty for extra assistance. Just like I'm not embarrassed to call on the FBI."

"Wine?" Hicks asked. "It's only Wal-Mart Red, I'm afraid."

"Sure, why not? This chicken is great, Rhoda. Just like my mother can't make. She can never get the fried to stay on the chicken."

They ate and drank in silence for a while. Decker noticed that Rhoda didn't seem to have much of an appetite. She prodded at her potatoes but never actually ate any of them.

"Not hungry?" he asked her.

She looked up and said, "How's it going? This investiga­tion?"

"Well, I don't usually like to talk shop at the supper table, but we're following up one or two interesting leads. Hicks here—Tim—he's had some very creative ideas."

Rhoda put down her fork. "It's just that—ever since Tim came home last week and said that you'd been assigned to the Maitland homicide, I've had a really strange feeling."

"Rhoda?" Hicks said, with his mouth full. "You never told me nothing about this."

"I didn't want to upset you, that's all."

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"I know you've been under the weather, but I thought that was just because you were homesick."

"What kind of a feeling?" Decker asked.

"Maybe it's stupid, but I keep thinking that something re­ally terrible is going to happen."

"Something terrible like what?" Hicks asked her, frowning.

"It's hard to describe. I've had a feeling that lots more people are going to die, and that Tim's in danger. I didn't want to tell him, because I know it's his job and I didn't want him to be looking over his shoulder all the time just because of me and some fool premonition."

Hicks said, "Honey . . . you should have said something. Nothing's going to happen to me, you know that."

"I keep trying to tell myself that, but the feeling won't go away. It's like—I don't know—it's like when you're lying in the dark and you think there's something in the room with you. Something that wants to do you harm."

Decker took hold of her hand. "Rhoda—these homicides we're investigating, they're very unusual and they're very scary. You're bound to feel frightened, it's only natural. You think that I'm not frightened? But we're well trained and we're well armed and we believe that we could be making some progress. Tim and me, we're going to catch this guy, whoever he is, and then you won't have anything more to be frightened about."

Rhoda shook her head. "It's not like any feeling I've ever had before. It's like a real dread. And when we sat down to­night I had it again, only much, much stronger, and I still have it now. I can't ignore it, Lieutenant. It's like a kind of darkness, all around us, and I'm scared."

"When you say darkness—"

"It's real. I can see it. It isn't my imagination. I can see it now, all around us, and it's especially dark around you. It's like there's a shadow falling across you."

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Hicks put down the chicken leg he had been eating and sat back in his chair. He said, as if he were admitting that there was hereditary weak-mindedness in the family, "Rhoda's grandmother, Rhoda's mother, Rhoda . . . they all claim to be sensitives."

"Sensitives? You mean like mediums?"

"Kind of like that, yes. They say they can sense a storm coming, or when somebody's going to die. They say they can hear voices from the spirit world."

"And this is what you're feeling now?" Decker asked her.

Rhoda nodded. "It's so strong it's like standing in the ocean when the tide's pulling out and you think that you're going to get dragged away."

"Do you have any idea what could be causing it?"

"I don't know. But I started to feel it on the day that Ali­son Maitland was killed. I felt it even before Tim came home and told me about it."

She hesitated, twisting her napkin, and then she said, "I heard a noise in the nursery and I went up to make sure that Daisy was okay. There's a long mirror on the landing and as I came up the stairs I saw somebody. Only for a split second. But it was like the mirror was an open doorway instead of a mirror and somebody walked across it, so quick that I couldn't see who it was."

Hicks said, "Honey . . . the lieutenant's right. This is a re­ally gruesome case and you're letting your imagination run away with you."

"But this happened before I even knew about it."

"Come on, honey, what you saw in the mirror, it was a trick of the light." Hicks stood up and put his arm around her. "There was nobody there, was there?"

"I saw somebody, I swear it."

"And how about this darkness that's falling on me?" Decker asked. "Can you still see that?"

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"It's not just the Maitland case. It's something that hap­pened to you a long time ago. Something that you never al­low yourself to remember."

"What, specifically? Do you have any idea?"

"I'm not sure. I'd have to do a reading to find that out." "Oh, come on," Hicks protested. "The lieutenant came here for supper, not for mumbo jumbo."

"No, I'm interested," Decker said. "What kind of a reading ?"

"I can use an okuele."

"An okuele?"

"Jesus," Hicks said, burying his head in his hands.

Rhoda got up from the table and went across to a small side table. She took out a carefully wrapped package of pur­ple tissue paper. She laid it on the table and opened it up. Inside lay what looked like a necklace, eight tortoiseshell medallions connected together by a dull metal chain.

"My grandmother taught me to use it. It's like the tarot except that it explains the past as well as the future, and it's much more personal than the tarot. Through the okuele, the spirits prompt you to tell them what's troubling you, in­stead of the other way around."

Hicks sat down and stared at his half-eaten supper. "I don't believe this. All I wanted was fried chicken and what do I get? Ghostbusters."

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CHAPTER TWENTY

Rhoda cleared the table and spread a plain white cloth on it. Hicks stood on the opposite side of the kitchen with his arms folded, looking deeply unhappy. Decker said, "I'm sorry . . . I didn't mean to spoil your supper. I'm not sure that I believe in this dark shadow any more than you do, but there must be some reason that Rhoda feels so strongly about it."

"I guess."

"There's another thing . . . Sandra said she had a premo­nition, too. She said she really believed that something bad's about to happen."

Hicks watched as Rhoda placed a silver-plated candle­stick in the center of the table, with a tall white candle, and lit it, and arranged a sheet of paper and a pencil beside her chair. "I really don't like this, Lieutenant. I don't like Rhoda getting involved in my work. Especially when we're dealing with some kind of total freaking psychopath."

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"If she's got some kind of intuitive feeling about it, sport, I think we need to know what it is."

Rhoda said, "You can sit down now. This is only a very simple reading, so that we can find out why Decker is walk­ing in darkness."

Rhoda switched off all the lights so that the only illumi­nation came from the candle, and then they sat down. "Do we have to hold hands or anything?" Decker asked.

"No. It's enough that we're sitting here together."

Rhoda closed her eyes and said nothing for what seemed like forever, although it was probably no more than two or three minutes. Hicks glanced at Decker in discomfort, but neither of them spoke in case they disturbed Rhoda's con­centration. There was no draft in the room, and the candle flame burned steady and bright, without wavering.

At last, Rhoda tossed the okuele onto the table. Some of the medallions fell with their shiny side upward, others with their dull side upward. All of the medallions were marked on their shiny side with the sign of the cross. Rhoda picked up her pencil and marked a line of crosses and zeroes.

She picked up the okuele and threw it again, and again she marked down the way that the medallions had fallen. She repeated this process four times.

At last she said, "Something terrible happened and you won't allow yourself to remember it. Your mind has closed its eyes and it refuses to open them."

Decker said nothing. He didn't know what she meant. What had he ever refused to remember?

Rhoda hesitated a moment more, and then she said, "It's raining, and you're standing outside a black door. Do you re­member that?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. I mean, I must have stood outside hundreds of black doors."

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"It's dark. The number on the black door has two fours and a seven."

Decker uneasily sat back. "I remember, 1447 Duval Street, five years ago. We were on a drug bust."

"You're not alone. You have a partner with you."

"That's right. Jim Stuart. Just made detective first grade." Rhoda touched her fingertips to her ears. "You say some‑

thing about the back of the house."

" 'Cover the back of the house. Anyone runs out into the alley, shoot first and worry about who it is afterward.'"

Decker recited the words as if he were giving evidence. He looked at Hicks and Hicks was staring at him apprehen­sively, as if he were seeing a side of Decker's personality that he had never been aware of before.

Rhoda said, "You open the black door. You walk into the hallway. It's very dark inside the house."

"I can't see my hand in front of my face, that's how dark it is."

"You feel a door handle on your left. You open it."

Decker didn't say anything. He could remember opening that door because he had opened it time and time again, and wished that he hadn't.

"You enter the room. It's just as dark in here. You can smell people sleeping. You raise your gun in your right hand and your flashlight in your left. Just as you switch on your flashlight, you hear the click of a gun being cocked, right behind you. You turn round. You fire."

"It was dark," Decker said, hoarsely. "I told him to cover the back of the house. 'Anybody runs out into the alley, shoot first and worry about who it is afterward.' I specifically told him not to come inside. Specifically. A specific order."

Rhoda closed her eyes again and picked up the okuele, passing it through her fingers like a rosary, and gently rub­bing every one of its tortoiseshell medallions.

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When she spoke, her voice was unnervingly whispery, as if she were making a guilty confession to a priest. She didn't even sound like Rhoda. "Saint Barbara knows what you saw."

"Saint Barbara? What are you talking about?"

"Saint Barbara is the shadow who is following you every­where. She knows everything about you. She knows who your father's father was, and what sign you were born under, because she wants her revenge. She knows every bone in your body and she knows what you saw when you shot Jim Stuart."

"What do you know about Saint Barbara? Hicks—did you ever tell Rhoda about Saint Barbara, that thing on my wall?"

Hicks shook his head. "Come on, Rhoda. Enough of this shit."

But Rhoda stared at Decker and whispered, "Saint Bar­bara wants you, Decker. She knows what you saw when you shot Jim Stuart. She knows everything about you."

For a fraction of a second, Decker saw his flashlight jump across Jim Stuart's startled face. Wide-eyed, because of the dark. A little blondish moustache. But his finger had already pulled the trigger and it was bang! and Jim Stuart went down.

"It was dark. I couldn't see who it was. He had a specific order not to enter the house."

Another long silence. Rhoda's eyes were open, but it looked to Decker as if she were focusing right past him, and listening to somebody else, because she gave occasional nods of her head.

"Saint Barbara can see right into your soul," she whis­pered, and then, in her own voice, "Not yet." Then she turned directly to Decker and said, "There's a spirit here . . a spirit who's trying to warn you."

Decker became aware that the kitchen was gradually

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growing colder, and he had the strangest sensation that the floor was slowly sinking beneath them, and the walls stretching, like the elevator in the haunted house in Disney World. Hicks must have experienced it, too, because he looked up toward the ceiling and then down at the floor, and then back up at the ceiling again.

"I wish to speak to you," Rhoda said. "I need you to tell me more about Saint Barbara."

The kitchen was now so cold that Decker could see his own breath. He could faintly hear a high-pitched sound, like a steel wire being drawn across the back of a saw. It grew louder and louder and higher and higher, until he could feel it in the fillings in his teeth, and his saliva started to taste salty.

"Was it you?" Rhoda asked.

The candle flame burned brighter. It began to burn so in­tensely that it hissed, and wax begun to run down it faster and faster, pouring over the candlestick and onto the table­cloth.

"Was it you?" Rhoda repeated.

The flame widened, and swelled out, and right in front of Decker's eyes it formed itself into a fiery face, with hollow eyes and a mouth that was open in a silent scream.

"Jesus," Hicks said.

"Speak to me," Rhoda said. "Tell me what you want to say."

The face said nothing, even though its mouth was stretched wide open. But as it burned brighter, it increased in definition, so that Decker could begin to see that it was a young woman, with furiously waving hair.

"Speak to me," Rhoda encouraged her. "Tell me more about Saint Barbara."

At that instant, the young woman's eyes opened, and she stared directly at Decker with a look of utter wildness and

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agony. It was Cathy. Her face was made of fire but there was no doubt about it at all. It was Cathy, and she was screaming at him soundlessly from the other side of sudden death.

"Tell me about Saint Barbara," Rhoda insisted.

But then—with a soft whoomph—the face flared up into a fireball, and rolled up to the ceiling, and was gone. Decker and Rhoda and Hicks were left facing each other with only a small flickering stub of a candle between them, the shad­ows moving on their faces as if they were alternately smiling and scowling.

Hicks switched on the light. "What the hell was that?" he wanted to know. "Static? St. Elmo's fire? What?"

Decker said, "I take it back . . . about not believing in ghosts. Or spirits, or whatever. That was my girlfriend Cathy." "You mean—"

"Yes. My dead girlfriend, Cathy."

Rhoda said, "She couldn't say any more. It was like she was suffering too much to speak."

"She spoke to me the other night," Decker said. "She warned me about Saint Barbara. Somebody painted the words Saint Barbara on my wall, too, the other night, in hu­man blood. It wouldn't surprise me if it was her. Or her ghost. Or whatever that was."

"She's dead, Lieutenant," Hicks put in.

"That makes no difference," Rhoda said, gently. "Our spirit lives on, even after we die. Sometimes, if someone died a vi­olent death, that makes their spirit even stronger ... even more determined to protect the loved ones that they left be­hind. Your Cathy, Lieutenant, is trying very hard to warn you of a coming danger. That is why you carry the shadow with you. You've been marked already, for some kind of revenge, and Cathy knows it."

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"Rhoda," Hicks protested, "this is my superior officer. You can't go telling him he's doomed or nothing."

"I'm sorry, but I have to. Would you stand by and say nothing if you saw that a man was going to be hit by a car?"

Decker said, "You don't have any idea what this 'coming danger' might be?"

"Your Cathy started to appear to you when you took on the Maitland homicide, so I guess it must be connected in some way. She senses that something very bad is going to happen to you, but I don't think that it's an accident or ill­ness or anything like that. I think she believes that some­thing terrible is after you, something that goes by the name of Saint Barbara."

"Santeria," Decker said.

"What?" Hicks said.

"A saint's name, Saint Barbara. That's the whole thing about Santeria, isn't it? When the slaves were brought over from Africa, the slave owners wouldn't allow them to wor­ship their own gods, so they disguised what they were doing by calling their gods by the names of Catholic saints."

"That's right," Rhoda said. " 'Saint Barbara' may not be Saint Barbara at all, but some god worshiped by the San­terians."

"Santeria?" Hicks said. "That could mean Queen Ache."

"Makes sense," Decker agreed. "We definitely need to in­vestigate that lady a whole lot closer. Although I don't see why she should have been interested in killing the Mait­lands, or Major Drewry. What the hell did they ever do to upset her?"

"I'll check if either of them had any business dealings with the Eguns. Gerald Maitland was into real estate, wasn't he? It's possible that he might have done some property deal that ruffled Queen Ache's feathers."

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"Okay. Look, it's getting late. Tim—Rhoda—A feel really bad for messing up your meal."

Rhoda said, "Don't. I couldn't let you sit there with that shadow on you, and not say a word. Would you like some coffee before you go?"

"No, thanks. I think me and my shadow will just take ourselves home. See you tomorrow, Tim."

That night, Decker was back in the blazing bushes, his face and his feet lacerated, and even more exhausted than be­fore. He knew that the tall dark figure was very close behind him. He could hear him surging through the underbrush in his ankle-length greatcoat. But the heat and the smoke were searing his throat and his clothes were snarled by bri­ars at every step and he was almost past caring.

"Muster at the plank road, boys! Muster at the plank road!"

He thought that he must have almost reached the plank road by now. Over the crackling and the popping of burning branches he could hear men shouting and screaming for help, and every now and then there was a brisk rattle of ri­fle fire. Minié balls came moaning and snapping through the scrub, and from a mile or so in the distance came the distinctive thudding of artillery.

He turned around to see how close the tall dark figure was, but he couldn't see it, only the fiery latticework of burning briars. Then, however, he heard a heavy rustling sound off to his left, and saw a shadowy shape moving swiftly behind the trees. The figure was outflanking him, and that meant that it would reach the plank road before he did, and cut off any hope of escape. Not only that, God alone knew what it would do to his friends and his fellows.

"It's coming!" he shouted out, even though his throat was raw. "Keep away from the road! It's coming!"

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The figure stopped, and listened, and then it turned to­ward him. Oh, Christ, he thought. It's heading straight for me. It'll have my guts. He tore his tunic free from the thorns, and tried to run in the opposite direction, but already he could hear the figure coming closer and closer.

He twisted around, spraining his ankle. As he did so, the figure was on top of him, tangling him up in knobbly bones and suffocating cloth. "Can't breathe!" he screamed. "Can't breathe!"

He jolted upright. Jesus. He switched on the light and he could see himself in the mirror on the opposite side of the bedroom, his hair sticking up and his T-shirt dark with sweat.

He eased himself out of bed. His feet were scratched and bleeding, like before, and when he tried to stand up he found that his ankle was swollen. He hobbled into the bath­room, stripped off his T-shirt, and splashed his face with cold water.

He no longer believed that he was hallucinating, or suf­fering from stress. Rhoda had shown him Cathy's fiery face, and for Decker that was proof enough that something malevolent was after him, and that Cathy was trying to pro­tect him from it. He had a pee and flushed the toilet, and then he went back into the bedroom to take a fresh white T-shirt out of the drawer.

As he pulled the T-shirt over his head, he suddenly real­ized that his top bedsheet was missing. He ducked down and looked on the floor. He looked around the other side of the bed, but the sheet was definitely gone. "The hell," he said, and stood perplexed in the middle of the room, trying to work out what could have happened to it.

Keep calm, he told himself. Maybe you never had a top sheet.

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He went to the linen closet to take out another sheet. As he did so, however, he heard somebody chanting in the liv­ing area. Somebody was singing in a high, breathless voice, like Cathy's—up, down, up, down, plangently, yet he didn't recognize the song. It certainly wasn't Bob Dylan, or Joan Armatrading, or any of those other singers that Cathy used to like. He limped to the bedroom door and pressed his ear against it.

"—ko gbamu mi re oro niglati wa obinu ki kigbo ni na orin oti gbogbo—"

He listened for a moment, and then he opened the door.

"Cathy?" he called, and his heart was thumping hard against his ribs. "Cathy? Is that you?" The living area was to­tally dark. All he could hear now was the sound of traffic in the street below, and the faint whirring of the air conditioner.

"Cathy, if that's you, let me see you. I love you, sweet­heart, and I know that you're trying to help me."

There was no answer. But as Decker's eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, he thought he could see a whitish figure standing close to the kitchen archway. He said, "Cathy?" and he was sure that he saw the figure sway from side to side. He edged across to the nearest wall, winc­ing on his twisted ankle, and reached for the light switches and flicked them on.

He said, "Ah!" out loud.

The figure was draped in his bedsheet, at least five and a half feet tall, with its arms outspread. Its hands were as white as alabaster, and so were its feet, and it appeared to be floating about a half inch above the floor.

Decker was so frightened by this apparition that he didn't know what to do. He stood by the light switches, rubbing his right arm, feeling terrified and miserable and helpless. This might be Cathy, covered by a sheet, but what if it

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wasn't? What if it was something terrible? How could it be Cathy? She was dead, with her head blown apart.

"Listen," he said, and his voice was very dry, as if he really had been running through burning scrub. "I need to know what you want. I need to know who you actually are."

The sheet-covered figure swayed a little more, but re­mained silent.

"If I was to drag that sheet off of you—I mean, who would you be underneath?"

Still the figure didn't respond.

Decker thought, Shit, what am I going to do? I'm not dream­ing, am I? I know I'm not drunk. He took one step toward the figure and then another.

"I'm scared of you, right? Hiding under that sheet like that. But I'll bet you're scared of me, too. Otherwise, why don't you show yourself?"

"Saint Barbara," the figure whispered, although its voice seemed to come from behind him, and he wasn't at all sure it was Cathy's voice. "Saint Barbara wants her revenge."

Decker said, "Saint Barbara is a saint, that's all. A good saint, from what I've been told. She protects people from fire and explosions and stuff like that. Why should she want to hurt me?"

"Come closer," the apparition said.

"I don't think so," Decker said. "Not until I know who you are."

"Come closer, my darling."

Decker didn't know what to do. He was frightened that this figure wasn't Cathy, but in a way he was even more frightened that it was. He looked over at the hat stand, where his Colt Anaconda was hanging in its holster, and wished that he had learned the lesson and taken it into the bedroom with him.

"Are you Cathy?" he asked the sheeted figure.

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"Don't you trust me?" it whispered, and it sounded as if it were speaking down a hollow pipe.

"I don't know. Aren't you going to show me who you are?" "I am many things. I have many different faces." "Are you trying to warn me about something bad?" "Something bad is happening to you already."

Decker circled cautiously around the figure toward the hat stand. It didn't turn around to follow him, but stayed where it was, with its arms outspread, more like a statue than a human being, a statue that was waiting to be un­veiled. Decker's throat was so dry that he had to cough, and cough again, but still the figure didn't move.

"Tell me about Saint Barbara," Decker said, without tak­ing his eyes off it. He reached up for his holster and unfas­tened the clasp.

"Saint Barbara wants her revenge for what you did. For what you all did."

"Was it something that happened in the Wilderness? The Devil's Brigade?"

"Promises were made and promises were broken." "What promises?"

"Promises of honor. Promises of war. Promises of just rewards."

Decker eased his revolver out of its holster and cocked it. He approached the figure until he was almost close enough to reach out his hand and touch it. He could see the indis­tinct outline of a face under the sheet, and the cotton was being drawn in and out, in and out, as if the figure were breathing.

"Are you afraid of me?" the figure whispered.

"Should I be?"

"Are you afraid of Saint Barbara?"

"I don't know. Are we really talking about Saint Barbara, or are we talking about somebody else?"

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"Oche ofun," the figure said. "The saints rescue you from the dead."

Decker took hold of the edge of the sheet, close to the figure's wrist. His blood was pounding in his ears and he couldn't remember ever having felt as terrified as this, not in all of his years of police work.

"Are you sure you want to know what I am?" the figure asked him.

Decker didn't answer, but grasped the edge of the sheet even more firmly, in his fist. He was just about to drag it off the figure's head, however, when the figure let out a piercing screech—a screech of rage and pain and frustration, as if five voices were all screaming at once.

The screech went on and on, and Decker let go of the sheet and stepped awkwardly away, his revolver raised, not knowing what to do. But then there was a dull, wet thud! and the top of the sheet ballooned outward, and was drenched in blood. Instantly, it collapsed onto the floor.

Decker stood staring at it, panting for breath. It lay crum­pled in front of the kitchen archway, massively soaked in blood, but it was obvious that there was nobody underneath it. After a while he kicked it sideways, and he could see that it was nothing but a sheet.

"Christ," he breathed.

Still holding his revolver, he went over to the drinks table and one-handedly poured himself a shot glass of Her­radura Silver. He tipped it back in one, and then he poured himself another.

He glanced back at the bloodstained sheet. Now he knew For sure that this investigation wasn't just about facts and evidence and tracking down a perpetrator. This was about religion, and beliefs, and acts of betrayal. This was spiritual, and not only that, it was personal.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

He found Jonah in back of the Mask Bar on Second and Main, talking to two of his friends. The Mask Bar was dark and smoky and the walls were decorated with scores of African masks, some of them ebony, some of them beaten out of copper, some of them fashioned from dry reeds. Bata drum music was tapping in the background.

Jonah's friends looked up uneasily as Decker came in. One of them was thin as a rail, with tiny dark sunglasses and a black beret. The other was enormous, wearing a billowing brown caftan with zigzag patterns on it, and a brown fez with a tassel.

"Talk to you for a minute?" Decker asked.

"About what, man?" Jonah was being aggressive for the sake of his friends.

"I don't know. This and that."

"I don't know nothing more about Junior Abraham, if that's what you're excavating for."

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"I wanted to catch up on the local gossip, that's all."

"You want local gossip, go to the mother-and-baby club on Clay Street. They'll even give you recipes for black bean chili, too."

"Not that kind of gossip. I was more interested in Queen Aché."

Jonah looked at his friends and eventually the fat one shrugged, as if to say, anything that was bad news for Queen Aché was good news for him. Decker didn't know him, but he recognized the man in the beret as one of the Strutters, a petty drug dealer who called himself Dr. Welcome. There was no love lost between the Strutters and the Eguns, so he guessed that Dr. Welcome wouldn't object if Jonah an­swered a few questions, either.

"All right, then," Jonah said. "Five minutes, and that's it. But I don't know nothing, man. Nothing about nothing."

They went and sat at a table in the corner, underneath a scowling green mask with a mouth that was smothered in glistening red varnish, to represent blood.

"I need to talk to a santero," Decker said.

"Listen, Deck-ah," Jonah interrupted, leaning forward and speaking in a hoarse whisper. "I like you and you like me. You done me some prime favors. But you can't just come trucking in here and act like we best friends or noth­ing. Those two brothers, they're cool, but I don't need the whole of Jackson Ward to find out that I'm exchanging so­cial pleasantries with the man."

"This is serious, Jonah. I need to talk to a santero and I need to do it now."

"What's in it for me?"

"My undying gratitude, of course."

"How about your undying gratitude and two hundred bucks?"

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Decker took out his billfold and peeled off a hundred dol­lars. "I'll give you the rest when you do your stuff."

Jonah made the bill disappear as if he were performing a conjuring trick. Then he said, "Most of the santeros are tied up with Queen Aché. You don't want to go talking to those dudes, because the next thing you know they'll be putting the hex on you and your dick'll drop off or something. But there's one who might help you, if you ask him real respect­ful. His name's Moses Adebolu. He used to be a close friend of Junior Abraham, and I know he's pretty sore that Junior got offed."

"Can you take me to him?"

"Okay, but we have to go by way of the Afro market." "What the hell for?"

"You have to bring Moses a live rooster and some cigars and maybe a bottle of rum. Also some rompe zaraguey root if you can find it, or some okra."

Decker said, "I'm conducting a homicide investigation here, not a shopping trip."

"You have to bring those things, Deck-ah. They're part of the ebbó, the sacrifice. Otherwise Moses won't help you a-tall."

A little before noon, Decker parked outside a scabby, narrow-shouldered house under the shadow of Route 95. He and Jonah climbed out, and they had to shout to each other because the noise of the overhead traffic was deafening. The morning was hot, with 85 percent humidity, and the air was blurred with exhaust fumes.

Decker opened the trunk and took out a wicker basket with a querulous, brassy-plumed rooster inside it. Jonah lifted out a brown paper sack containing two bottles of Mount Gay rum, a box of King Edward cigars, and an as‑

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sortment of sugarcane, palm oil, cinnamon sticks, and toasted corn.

"This had better be worth it!" Decker yelled in Jonah's ear.

"I don't know, man! I can't guarantee nothing! These santeros, they can be highly uppity if they don't like the smell of you!"

They climbed the steps in front of the house where three young boys were playing a game of pick-up-sticks with what looked like rats' bones.

"Moses at home?" Jonah asked.

The rooster flapped and clucked inside its basket. The oldest boy frowned and said, "What's that you bringing him?"

Decker opened up the lid so that he could see. "Takeout. Kentucky Unfried Chicken."

They pushed open the peeling, brown-painted door and stepped into the hallway. The floor was covered with cracked, curled-up linoleum and the stair carpet was so worn out that it was impossible to tell what color it might have been. The whole house was pervaded by an eye-watering smell of frying garlic and cinnamon, and some­body was listlessly playing the bongo drums. At the top of the stairs was a stained-glass window showing a man in white robes standing next to a river, John the Baptist maybe, but the top part of the window had been broken so that he had no head, only plain glass.

"Second story," Jonah said, and up they trudged. They crossed the creaking landing, and Jonah knocked at a door that was decorated in lurid reds and blues and maroons, with a staring yellow eye painted on each of its panels. "Let's hope Moses is feeling amenable. Not stoned or got a sudden attack of unreasonable racial prejudice or nothing."

He knocked again, and a hoarse voice said, "Don't be so

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impatient, my friend, I hear you, I hear you." The door was opened by a big-bellied, gray-haired man with enormous spectacles that looked like the screens of two 1960s TVs. He was wearing a black short-sleeved shirt and black pants and sandals, and around his neck hung necklaces of col­ored beads and silver chains and brightly dyed guinea-hen feathers.

"Jonah, ain't seen you in a while, what you want, man?" "I brung you some stuff, man."

Moses squinted suspiciously at Decker. "Looks like you brung me some trouble, too."

Decker lifted up his basket. "One live rooster. I just wanted to talk to you, that's all."

"Talk about what? I'm a busy man, friend. Got to do this, got to do that."

"Decker's the man, man," Jonah explained. "He's trying to find out who offed Junior Abraham."

"How should I know who offed him? And even if I did I wouldn't tell the man. What you say your name was?" "Decker—Decker Martin."

"That's kind of a slave-owning name, ain't it?"

"I wish. I don't even have a cleaner."

The rooster skittered impatiently, and Moses said, "All right then, guess you'd better come along in. What you got there, Jonah? Cigars, is that? And rum?"

"One hundred twenty proof, just the way you like it."

Moses shuffled ahead of them into a gloomy, airless living room. The room was permeated with an extraordinary smell, bitter and yet fragrant, which somehow gave Decker the feeling that he had stepped out of the real world and into another. It was crowded with heavy 1950s-style furni­ture—two immense armchairs and a couch, all upholstered in brown brocade, with antimacassars draped over the back.

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The drapes were thick and brown and dusty and looked as if they hadn't been taken down and cleaned since the first run of I Love Lucy. A huge television dominated one corner of the room, while the other was taken up by a Santeria shrine—less glittery than Queen Aché's, but crowded with coconuts, red and green beads, candles, flowers, pictures of saints, and a scowling head made of cement, with cowrie shells for eyes.

Moses eased himself down into one of the armchairs and said, "Don't know what I can do to help you, my friend. The rumor was going around that Junior Abraham was doing some sly business on the side when he was supposed to be working for Queen Ache, but that was only a rumor. He had some fancy new threads and a fancy new SUV, but that don't prove nothing."

Decker sat opposite him and set down the rooster's basket on the matted brown rug. "I need to know some more about Santeria," he said. "In particular I need to know how a man can make himself unseen."

"Unseen? You're talking a seriously serious spell here. Only a very prestigious santero can work a spell like that, maybe even a babalawo. A babalawo is a high priest, in case you wasn't aware of it . . . somebody who conducts the sac­rifices whenever santeros get theirselves initiated."

Decker said, "The guy who killed Junior Abraham made himself unseen . . . at least for long enough to walk right up to him and blow his head off at point-blank range. And I'm dealing with three other cases, too, where the perpetrator has somehow managed to remain invisible."

Moses nodded. "Well, this is interesting, friend. I haven't heard of magic as strong as this for many years. These days, very few priests have the total faith that you would need to walk amongst other folks unseen. You want tea?"

Behind Moses' back, Jonah nodded a frantic yes, to indi‑

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cate that this was a matter of essential courtesy. Decker said, "Tea? Sure, I'd like that."

Moses reached over to a side table and rang a small brass bell. Almost immediately, a young woman in a red and green turban and a red and green sari came into the room. She was twenty-three or twenty-four, with high cheekbones and a long, almost Masai face. She was wearing a sweet musky perfume that Decker didn't recognize.

"My daughter, Aluya," Moses said. "Aluya takes care of me, don't you, Aluya? Bring us some tea, yes, Aluya? And some of them honey-nut cookies."

Decker looked up at Aluya, grinned, and said, "Hi," but Aluya bashfully turned her face away. Moses said, with undisguised satisfaction, "Aluya will have plenty of time for socializing with men when I'm gone off to associate with my ancestors. Right now she has enough on her plate, cooking my dinners and washing my drawers."

"Sounds like she has her hands full."

After Aluya had gone back to the kitchen, Moses leaned forward in his chair. "Listen—to understand the power it takes for a man to make himself invisible to other people, you have to know about more than the na­ture of one particular spell. You have to know what San­teria is."

Decker said, "All I really know about it is that it's an African religion,. and that it was brought to America by slaves. I know that the slaves changed the names of their gods to the names of Catholic saints, but that's about it."

"Well, pretty much right so far as it goes. Santeria is the name we give to two belief systems that got themselves, like, all tangled up with each other. Its roots was in south­western Nigeria, in all of the myths and the magic rituals of the Yoruba people, but when the Yorubas came to the New World, and they had to hide what they were doing, they

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borrowed a whole lot of fancy trappings from the Roman Catholic church.

"The Yorubas was very smart and they was very cultured. Back in Africa they had theirselves a very sophisticated so­cial structure, and they created all kinds of amazing art in wood and bronze and ivory. They had kingdoms, like Benin, and they built the holy city of Ile-Ife, which is the place where everything that exists comes from. They also wor­shipped many gods. Orishas, they called them. That's the Yoruba name for a god. Orisha.

"Trouble was, round about sixteen hundred and some­thing, Yorubaland was invaded by the Ewe tribes from the north, and the Yorubas was forced to migrate down to the Nigerian coast. That was why so many of them was cap­tured by slave traders and shipped to America.

"Like you said, they carried on worshipping their old gods, but they gave them the names of Catholic saints. So when their owners thought that they was praying to Saint Anthony, they was actually paying their respects to Eleggua, the owner of the crossroads and the messenger of the or-ishas. Oggun, the god of metals, he became Saint Peter, and Orunla, who knows all the mysteries of the universe, was honored as Saint Francis of Assisi. We still give a sacrifice to Orunla on October the fourth, which is Saint Francis of As­sisi Day for the Roman Catholics.

"Santeria is an earth religion, if you understand what I mean. It's all about nature and the forces of nature, like the Native American beliefs. Chango is the god of fire, thunder, and lightning. Oshun is the god of river waters, and also of love, and marriage, and fertility. Oya is the wind, and the keeper of the cemetery, the watcher of the doorway be­tween life and death. She ain't death itself, but she's the knowledge that we all have to die."

Aluya came in with a tray of teacups and a plate of cook‑

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ies. As she handed Decker his tea she raised her eyes just a fraction and gave him a barely perceptible smile. So she didn't have time for men? thought Decker. He sipped his tea and it was completely tasteless—scalding water with little green fragments of twigs in it.

Moses took a cookie and pushed it into his mouth, and before he had finished chewing it, another, and then an­other. When he carried on talking he sprayed crumbs on his pants and he had to keep brushing them with his hand.

"There are two kinds of orishas—the white orishas and the dark orishas. The white orishas have the power to heal, and give life, like Obatalá and Oshun. and Osain, the god of herbs. The dark orishas are hot and their strength is greatest in wars and battles. These are Chang& Oyá, and Babalu-Ayé.

"Santeria has two basic concepts, right? The first concept is ache, which means divine power, the power that was used to create the universe. Then there's the concept of ebbó, which means sacrifice.

"In Santeria we make sacrifices to the orishas and we pro­pitiate them because we want them to give us ache. With ache, we can sort out anything that's bugging us, we can screw our enemies, we can find pretty women and happiness and money. Ache also means authority, which is why Queen Aché calls herself by that particular name."

"I see," Decker said. "So ebbo—sacrifice—will bring you ache—power?" He hesitated for a moment, and then he said, "What kind of a sacrifice would somebody have to make if he wanted the power to be invisible?"

"Unseen more than invisible," Moses corrected him, help­ing himself to another cookie. "An ebbó like that—well, that would call for blood. We never shed blood lightly, not even the blood of a chicken, because blood is the essence of life. Usually we offer fruit or flowers or candles or whatever

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the orisha likes to eat. But if somebody wanted the power to walk through the world without being seen—yes, blood, my friend. Possibly maybe human blood."

"Is there any way in which you could make a kind of a counter-ebbo?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, could I ask the orishas to give me the ache so that I could see this invisible person?"

Moses thought about that, and then he shook his head. "I can't honestly say I know the answer to that. One spell can be cast to break another. It depends who cast it, and how strong it is. I heard of a man who asked a santero to cast a spell on his older brother to bring him ill luck, and the spell worked. In only two or three months, his brother's wife ran off with one of his best friends, his business went bankrupt, and he caught a skin rash all over his body."

"That's not just ill luck," Jonah said. "That's shit luck."

"Oh yes. But the older brother went to a babalawo, a high priest, and the babalawo realized at once that somebody had put a curse on him. The babalawo made a sacrifice to the ajo­gun, who are the opposite of the orishas. The ajogun are the evil forces in the world—arun, which is disease; ofo, which is loss; egba, which is paralysis; and iku, which is death.

"The babalawo cast a spell that every bad thing the older brother had suffered should happen to the person who had cursed him, only a hundred times worse. That same evening all of the younger brother's family were killed in car crash, including his newborn son. Within a week his furniture business had burned down, and he was badly burned trying to get out of the building. In the hospital, before his burns were healed, he was diagnosed with incurable leukemia. It was only then that he confessed to his older brother that he had arranged for a bad-luck spell, and his older brother dis­covered who it was that he had cursed in return."

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He took the last cookie and bit into it. "A true story," he said. Then—realizing that he had emptied the plate all by himself—he held out the half-eaten cookie to Decker and said, "Want one?"

"No, thanks. I just need the ability to be able to see this guy. I also need to see the evidence he leaves behind him. I know the evidence is there. Fingerprints, fibers, DNA. It must be there. But in some way he's made it invisible. I need eyes, Mr. Alebodu. Eyes that can see through magic."

"Well ... I'll have to give this some sober thinking."

"Okay . . . I really appreciate your talking to me. If you come up with any ideas, maybe you can give me a call on this number."

"You've forgotten something," Moses said, quietly, as Decker stood up. Decker looked around and saw his teacup, still full.

"Oh . . . I'm more of a coffee kind of guy. Sorry." "There's another question in your mind, my friend, and you don't know how to put it into words."

Jonah looked across at Decker and made a face that meant "don't ask me."

Decker said, "How do you know that?"

"Because an unspoken question, what's that like? It's like a bird sitting on a wall. It won't fly away until you clap your hands."

"It's not important."

"I think it cuts close to your heart, and this is why you de­cided not to ask it."

"Forget it, it doesn't matter."

"I think it do matter. Because what would a police detec­tive with a slave-owning name want to know from a santero? Let's ask ourselves that."

"All right," Decker said. "What about Saint Barbara? Were any of the orishas named for her?"

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"And you ask me that because . . ."

"I ask because I've been having bad dreams. I've been hearing my girlfriend, who was killed two years ago. I hear her talking to me, in my sleep. Or maybe not in my sleep, I don't know. Maybe she's really there."

"And she talks to you about Saint Barbara?"

"That's right. She says that Saint Barbara wants her re­venge. A couple of days ago, when I got home, I found the name Saint Barbara written on my wall, in human blood."

"And . . ."

"I saw her again, last night. She was standing in my apart­ment, covered in a sheet, like she was playing ghosts."

Moses took off his glasses. His eyes were bulgy and unfo­cused, but somehow Decker felt that he could see him better without them.

"Sit down," Moses said. "Let me tell you this. Saint Bar­bara is the name that we gave to Changó, who is the mighty and terrible orisha of fire, thunder, lightning, and war. The cult of Change:, came from the city of Oyo-Ile, the ancient capital of the Oyo kingdom. Changó reigned over the city for seven years, but he was always interested in magic and he had great magical power.

"One day Changó caused a great thunderstorm that de­stroyed his palace and killed many of his wives and chil­dren. He was so remorseful that he hanged himself. His enemies rejoiced, but soon afterward a hundred thunder­storms destroyed most of the city of Oyo-Ile, along with Changó's enemies. Changó's followers made sacrifices in his honor and declared that he was an orisha, a god. Oba ko so,' they sang. 'The king did not hang himself.'

"Changó is the most powerful and popular of all the or­ishas. He has millions of followers all around the world. His priests keep his power in ^`thunderstones'—which are the bricks of buildings that have been struck by lightning, and

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kept in a wooden bowl. You can see that I have one over there, on my shrine. If you wish to make a sacrifice to Changó, to propitiate him, you have to wash the bowl in herbs and palm oil, and then sacrifice a rooster and sprinkle its blood over the thunderstones. This is one of the oldest ceremonies in Santeria, and goes right back hundreds of years to Africa.

"You can also give Changó chicken meat and bananas, although his favorite food is a freshly killed ram."

"Chicken meat and bananas?" Decker suddenly thought of the face that he had seen in his kitchen.

"That means something to you?" Moses asked.

Decker told him. Moses listened, and nodded, seemingly unsurprised. "I think your dead girlfriend is doing every­thing she can to protect you."

"From what? From Changó? What have I ever done to

Changó?"

"I don't know . . . but it's pretty clear to me that he's look­ing for revenge. And when Changó looks for revenge, he makes double sure that he gets it. I hate to tell you this, my friend, but you in acute trouble."

Jonah asked, "Is there any way to find out what this Changó's so mad about?"

"I'm not sure. But I could help you to make an ebbó to Changó, which might make him forgive you. Right now, the only thing that's standing between you and some very horri­ble consequence is the spirit of your girlfriend, and she's putting herself in very serious danger by daring to mess with such a seriously powerful orisha. Every time she appears to you, she's going to have to suffer the moment of her death over again, and if she upsets Changó too often, he'll give her to Oyá, the watcher of the doorway between life and death, so that she spends the whole of eternity trapped in that moment, and never being free."

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In his mind's eye, Decker saw Cathy's head exploding, again and again, and the thought that she would have to ex­perience that forever was more than he could bear. He had seen enough and heard enough to believe now that there was an afterlife, and that the spirits of the dead were still among us, even if they only made their presence known in times of crisis.

"This ebbó," he said. "Tell me what I have to do."

"You have to be cleansed. I sacrifice this rooster you brought me to Chanel. Then tomorrow you must come back and I will give you a bowl with the rooster's blood in it, mixed with an omiero for Chango."

^"An omiero?"

"An omiero is a sacred elixir, my friend, which we use for bathing and also for drinking. Changó's omiero is a mixture of blood, rompe zaraguey, zarza parilla, and paraiso. You will have to take the omiero home and bathe yourself with it. Then take a second bath to wash off the blood mixture. Into this second bath you will have to stir some alamo and some prodigiosa, some holy water and some honey. I will give you all of these things. While you are bathing, ask Chango for his forgiveness for whatever you have done to offend him, and ask for his protection."

"And you think that could work?"

"You will have to believe that it is going to work, or else it won't. You have to have faith. You still love your dead girl­friend, don't you? Think of her, and what you are doing to save her from Changó's anger."

He tinkled his bell again, and Aluya reappeared. Moses said, "Bring me my cuchillo and a white bowl. And maybe some more of those cookies."

"That's some perfume she's wearing," Decker remarked, as Aluya went to do what she had been asked.

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"Esencia Pompeya, one of the three sacred perfumes of Santeria."

Aluya reappeared with a white bowl, a white cloth, and a long sharp knife, as well as a brown paper bag of cookies. Moses stood up and indicated with a wave of his hand that Decker and Jonah should do the same. "I will be invoking Changó. We must show respect. Aluya, the candles."

He spread the cloth on the coffee table in front of him and placed the bowl in the center of it. Then he held up the knife and kissed its blade.

Aluya brought over two white candles in silver candle­sticks and lit them. Moses then waved at her to leave the room. He stood in front of the candles for a while, with his eyes closed and his head tilted back. Then he began to chant. "Babamo Changó ikawo ilemu fumi alaya tilanchani ni­tosi ki ko gbamu mi re oro niglati wa obinu ki kigbo ni na Orin oti gbogbo omo nijin gbogbo . . . "

After a while, he opened his eyes and said, "Please give me the rooster."

Decker pointed at himself. "Me?"

"Yes, you. You are the one who is seeking forgiveness from Changó."

Hesitantly, Decker knelt down and unfastened the catch on the lid of the basket. As soon as he opened it, the rooster exploded into feathery fury, flapping and squawking and pecking at him. He managed to grab one its legs, even though it was scratching him with its claws. Jonah came over and seized its wings and at last he got hold of the other leg, so that he could lift it upside down into the air, still struggling and clucking.

"This chicken sure ain't a chicken chicken," Jonah said. "Hold him up good and high," Moses instructed. Decker did as he was told, and Moses took hold of the bird's head

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and stretched its neck. "Changó, kabio kabio site," he in­toned, and the cockerel gave one convulsive shudder and then remained strangely still, as if it knew what was going to happen next, and was prepared to accept it.

Moses sliced its throat with his knife and its dark blood dripped quickly into the bowl. He then took the bird's legs from Decker, and began to circle it around in the air. "Changó alamu oba layo ni na ile ogbomi ," he breathed. "Kabio kabio site."

When the bowl was almost filled with blood, he laid the cockerel down between the candles. "The words kabio kabio site mean welcome to my house," he explained. "I was in­voking Changó so that he knows that you are seeking his forgiveness and that you wish to wash away your transgres­sion, whatever it is."

He looked slowly around the living room. "Do you feel anything?" he asked.

"Like what?"

"Like the presence of a great power."

Decker looked around, too. He couldn't be sure that it wasn't just the humidity, and the strange smell of herbs, but he thought he could detect a tension in the air, as if a thun­derstorm were brewing. And Changó, after all, was the god of thunderstorms.

"Changó hears me," Moses said. "Changó speaks in my ear."

"What does he say?"

"He says he has been waiting many seasons."

"What for? To come looking for me?"

"You are only one among many."

"Can you ask him why he's so mad at me?"

"Changó answers no questions. There is only one way to tell what his wishes are."

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He rang his bell again and Aluya came back in. "Aluya, bring me the coconut shells."

While they waited for her, Moses stood with his eyes closed and his hands pressed together as if he were praying. Jonah kept looking uneasily around the room as if he, too, could sense the presence of something dark and powerful.

Aluya returned with a red and green silk scarf. She waited patiently until Moses had opened his eyes again and then she handed it to him without a word. He took hold of one corner of the scarf and whipped it in the air. Four quar­ters of coconut shell fell out and scattered on the floor.

Moses said, "I was afraid of this."

"What is it?" Decker asked. "What's wrong?"

"You see how all four pieces of coconut have fallen with their brown side upward? This is one of five patterns. When two pieces fall with the brown side upward and two with the white side upward, this is a good sign, and means yes. But when all the pieces fall with the brown side upward, like this, this means no and predicts death."

"So what can I do?"

"You can only cleanse yourself, my friend, and pray that Chango decides that you are truly sorry for whatever it is that you have done. Come back tomorrow, and I will give you the blood and the omiero."

With that, he helped himself to another cookie and stood chewing it thoughtfully, staring at Decker with his bulgy eyes as if he had already given him up for dead.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

That afternoon Decker drove around to see Maggie. He parked around the block from Cab's house, as he always did, and walked the rest of the way. Cab and Maggie lived in a single-story three-bedroom house on the south side of the river, opposite Forest Hill Park. It had an orange-tiled roof and a bright yellow door, and elaborately-tied-up nets at the windows. Maggie had a taste in interior décor that reminded Decker of the early editions of The Cosby Show.

The summer heat was still stifling and the sky was so dark that Decker took off his sunglasses. His shirt clung to his back and if he hadn't been wearing his shoulder holster he would have taken off his black linen coat.

Maggie was waiting for him and opened the door as he walked up the driveway. Her hair was braided and beaded and she was wearing a loose, flowing dress in diagonal stripes of purple and pink.

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She glanced up and down the street and then she put her arms around his neck and gave him a kiss. "I missed you, [over man."

"Yeah, me too. Any chance of a beer?"

She closed the door and led him through to the kitchen. 'Cab called and said that he may have to stay in Char­lottesville until tomorrow . . . so, if you're interested in some all-night moving . . ."

He took off his coat and his holster while she took a bot­de of Heineken out of the icebox, and opened it. "I don't know. We're pretty tied up with these homicides. proba­bly have to go back to headquarters later."

She came up close to him and pressed the cold bottle of beer against his cheek. "You look tired. Maybe you should take off those clothes and come to bed."

"I'm bushed, as a matter of fact."

"Not too bushed, I hope?"

"These killings, I think they're beginning to get to me. Every time I think we've got a handle on them, it turns out to be the handle on something so goddamned weird I can't even understand what we're supposed to be looking for, or who, or why."

"Cab was saying that Queen Aché might have something to do with them. Now, that's one evil woman."

"Queen Aché was probably involved in Junior Abraham getting whacked, but as for the other two . . . who knows? We don't have any evidence to connect one with the other, because we don't have any evidence."

Maggie kissed him. "You should come to bed. Ease your troubled mind. Exercise your booty."

"You're some red-hot lady, you know that? You're going to wear me out."

She took hold of his hand and tugged him toward the

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bedroom. "You know what's on the menu today? The four-course special, with extra gravy."

She unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it off, kissing and nipping his nipples with her teeth. Then she unbuckled his belt and pushed him back into a sitting position on the side of the bed. "Let's get those shoes and socks off. Ain't noth­ing look more stupider than a bare-ass man in nothing but his shoes and his socks."

Decker swigged his beer. A large-framed photograph of Cab stood on the dressing table opposite him, smiling cheerily, and for the first time since he and Maggie had started fooling around together he felt guilty. He hadn't felt guilt in a long time, ever since Cathy was killed, and it came as a sour, unpleasant surprise, like the sudden taste of cop­per pennies in his mouth.

Maggie peeled off his socks. "Least your socks don't smell. Cab—whew!—you could use his socks to carry out the death penalty."

"Maggie—"

"You just relax, lover man. This is my time to take care of you. Hey—what happened to your feet? They're scratched all over."

"Oh, it's nothing. I was helping a friend clear some briars at the back of his property and I was stupid enough not to wear any shoes."

"They look sore," she said, giving them a flurry of lip-sticky kisses.

"I'll live. Teach me to wear shoes next time."

Maggie tugged down his zipper and wrestled off his pants. Maggie took hold of him through his blue-and-white striped shorts and gave him a hard squeeze. "And what do we have in here? Don't tell me we'll be having boudin blanc for starters?"

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"Maggie—" he said, but she pressed her fingers to her lips.

"You hush up. I'm the one giving the orders today."

She took the bottle of beer out of his hand and set it down on the nightstand. Then she hooked her finger into the elastic of his shorts and pulled them down at the front so that his erection was exposed.

"You need refreshment, my man, that's what you need."

She poured cold beer over the swollen plum of his penis so that it ran down between his legs. He jolted upward and said, "Shit, Maggie!" but she laughed that famously dirty laugh and leaned over him and sucked it. Cold one second, hot the next.

Climbing onto the bed beside him, she crossed her arms and lifted her dress over her head. Her breasts were huge, and she had a rounded belly and thighs like an Olympic shot-putter. And then there were all the gold and silver beads that she had woven into her pubic hair, so that she looked as if she were wearing a glittering thong.

She sat astride him and pushed his shoulders down onto the bed. She swung her breasts from side to side so that her prune-black nipples grazed his chest. "I'm going to make you so excited you're going to forget what day of the week it is."

He tried to smile at her, but somehow his heart wasn't in it. He kept thinking of Cathy draped in that sheet, and the sudden burst of blood. He kept thinking of George Drewry, with his intestines piled up in front of him in heaps. He kept thinking of Jerry Maitland, swinging from the hospital window like a grisly parody of a bungee jumper.

"You got to switch yourself off, lover man," Maggie told him. "You got to think about nothing but me, and this bed, and this moment. I know you're off wandering inside your head, but I want you here and now."

Without another word, she took hold of his penis and

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guided it inside her. She was very juicy, but all the same he could feel her vaginal muscles rhythmically gripping him, as firmly as fingers. She lifted herself slowly up and down on top of him, sometimes rising so high that he was right on the very edge of slipping out of her, but then lowering her hips again so that he felt as if he were penetrating her soul as well as her body.

She began to hum, as she often did when she was aroused. It was a low, hypnotic humming, like a spiritual, and Decker found that he was gradually calming down. Maggie was dreamily smiling and her breasts were dancing their own slow merengue and there was that persistent lascivious shlup, shlup, shlup as she rose up and down on top of him.

"Nobody knows . . . the feeling you give me. . . . Oh, Lord, nobody knows . . . how deep you go . ."

Then something flickered across the room, just behind her. It was so fast that Decker couldn't see what it was. It was like a ripple in the air, momentarily distorting the pat­tern on the wallpaper. He gripped Maggie's thighs to stop her riding up and down, and lifted his head up.

"What's the matter, lover? What's wrong?"

"There's nobody else in the house, is there?"

"Why do you say that? Of course not. It's just me and you and your uncle Willy."

"I thought I saw something, that's all."

"Oh, come on, you're tired and you're stressed. All you need is some good home cooking."

With that, she slowly rotated her hips, around and around, and squashed her breasts in her hands as if she were weighing them and testing them for ripeness.

Decker tried to get back into the mood but he began to shrink. After a few minutes Maggie had to climb off him. She took hold of him and flopped him from side to side.

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"What's this?" she demanded, playfully but obviously frus­trated. "I didn't order no eel."

Decker didn't say anything but rolled off the bed and walked naked through to the kitchen where he had left his shoulder holster hanging on the back of a chair. He pulled out the Colt and went straight to the back door. He jiggled the handle but it was locked.

Maggie came out of the bedroom. "Decker, what's wrong with you, lover? There's nobody here but us adulterers."

He walked past her into the living room, with its white leather couch and its gilded coffee table and its enormous reproduction painting of an orange sunset. Nobody there. Nobody visible, anyhow.

"Come on," Maggie coaxed him. "Come back to bed and let's do some real loving."

Decker reluctantly followed her back to the bedroom. The house was silent, but he was sure that he could hear the faintest of prickling sounds, as if somebody or something were moving from room to room, disturbing the molecules in the air. He opened the doors to the second and third bed­rooms, and the cleaning closet, too, but there was nobody there, either.

Nobody visible.

They climbed back onto the rumpled bed, and this time Maggie lay on her back. She took hold of Decker's penis and pulled it between her bosoms, stretching it as if it were saltwater taffy. Then she pressed her cleavage tightly to­gether, and said, "Second course. Stuffed breasts of quail," and gave that deep, dirty laugh.

Decker moved up and down on her, and he began to stiffen again. Maggie looked up at him with that sexually luminous smile on her face, and counterrotated her breasts with her hands so that she was massaging him with warm, sweaty flesh.

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"You are the lover of the century, Decker. No question. The feelings you give me."

Decker began to feel the clock spring tightening between his legs. Maggie lifted her head and every time his penis bobbed up between her breasts she stuck out her long red tongue and licked it. Decker went faster and faster and his thigh muscles quivered with effort. Maggie let out little squeals and gasps, but Decker could do nothing but pant. At last he could feel his climax rising, and with a sound that was halfway between a snort and a cough he ejaculated over her collarbone, decorating her with a glistening necklace of white pearls.

"Ohhh, Decker, you're so bad. . . ."

But at that moment Decker opened his eyes, and in the dressing-table mirror he glimpsed a dark gray triangular shape, which was instantly gone. It looked like part of a coat, or a cape, but it disappeared so quickly that it was im­possible for him to tell. He scrambled off the bed, picked up his revolver, and ran back into the living room.

Again, nobody there. Not only that, all the doors were locked from the inside and all the windows were closed. Maggie came after him and stood watching as he ducked down to check under the couch, and under the beds in the two spare bedrooms.

"You don't have to worry, Decker," she said, as he opened the closet in the second bedroom. There was something in her voice that made him turn and frown at her. She didn't sound like Maggie at all. None of that throatiness. None of that suggestive banter.

He closed the closet doors. "I don't have to worry about what?"

"I'll protect you, I promise. I won't let Saint Barbara harm you."

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He went up close to her. "What do you know about Saint Barbara?"

"I know that Saint Barbara is looking for revenge." "Don't you mean Changó?"

She gave a small, evasive smile. "You can call a god by any name you like. It's still a god."

He stared at her intently. It was then that he realized that her irises were yellow, rather than brown—yellow like a rep­tile's. Or maybe gold. His mother had once told him that all angels have golden eyes.

"Cathy?" he said.

"You have to find Saint Barbara, Decker, before Saint Barbara finds you. He knows who you are now. He knows where you live. It's only a matter of time."

"Was it Changó who killed the Maitlands? Was it Changó who killed George Drewry?"

"Find Saint Barbara before Saint Barbara finds you." Decker took hold of her arm. "Cathy, if there's any way that you can—"

Without warning, half of Maggie's head exploded, leav­ing her with only one eye and only half a face, and plaster­ing Decker in blood and brains.

"No!" he screamed. But then her head exploded again, and she twisted around and collapsed onto the carpet. Decker was left with flesh and mucus all over his face, and fragments of bone stuck to his lips.

You bastard!" he shouted, pushing his way back into the living room. "Show yourself, you son of a bitch, where are you?"

He went back to the kitchen and the master bedroom but there was still nobody there. "I'm coming to get you!" he yelled. "I'm coming to get you and you're going to suffer for this!"

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It was then that he saw himself in the mirror, naked, with his gun in his hand, but not bloodied at all. He looked at himself for a moment, and he was just about to go back to the second bedroom when Maggie reappeared, intact, un­harmed, and still wearing his rapidly drying necklace.

"Decker," she said. She went up to him and put her arms around him and held him close. "I don't know what's wrong, Decker, but I think you need some help."

"I'm fine, I'm okay. I'm stressed, that's all."

She shushed him by kissing her fingertips and touching his lips. "This is not the right time for us, lover man. Maybe it never was. This is the time to say that it was fun while it lasted."

He looked into her eyes and they were darkest brown. "Yes," he admitted. "Maybe you're right. It was fun while it lasted."

She sat and watched him as he dressed, and then unloaded his revolver and kissed each of the bullets. "There's some kind of fire burning inside you, Decker Martin," she said. "I hope you find a way to put it out."

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CHAPTER TWENTY‑

THREE

The storm broke just after eleven o'clock. Lightning walked up the James River like the Martian tripods in The War of the Worlds. Thunder bellowed all the way across the city from Mechanicsville to Bon Air, and the rain crashed down in such torrents that the storm drains all along Canal Street and Dock Street were gushing water and the Rich­mond Fire Department was called to pump out basements and cellars all along the waterfront.

John Mason left Appleby's Restaurant on East Main Street just two minutes shy of midnight, and it was still raining hard. He hadn't brought an umbrella to work that afternoon but he had looked in the lost-property closet and borrowed a ladies' umbrella with splashy red poppies on it and three broken spokes. It didn't do much to keep him dry. The rain was clattering down so fiercely that it bounced off the sidewalk and soaked the bottom of his pants.

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John had celebrated his thirtieth birthday last week and the rest of the staff at Appleby's had arranged for a Strip-A­Gram. In the photographs, with a half-naked redhead perched on his knee, John looked as if he had just been electrocuted, his thin mousy hair standing up on end and his teeth clenched. The red eyes hadn't helped, either.

John liked girls, but he had always found it difficult to talk to them. Edmundo, who worked in the kitchens with him, had a gorgeous black-haired girlfriend called Rita, and the way Edmundo spoke to Rita always amazed him. Do this, Rita, do that, Rita, bring me this, bring me that, shut up your face, you za-za. And yet Rita adored Edmundo and was always nuzzling him and kissing him. John was sure that if he spoke to a girl like that he would have his face slapped, twice, once in each direction.

All the same, he was fixed to go on a date tomorrow with a girl called Stephanie, to the TheatreVirginia on Grove Avenue to see I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change. In ac­tual fact Stephanie was a friend of his sister Paula and the only reason he had been invited was to make a foursome with Paula's boyfriend, Carl. John hated Carl. He was a six­foot-four-inch loudmouth who sold paneling and who was forever slapping John on the back and calling him "chief." But he liked Stephanie. She was quiet, with large glasses, and lank brown hair, and she enjoyed walking and reading and all the other solitary activities that John did.

He hailed a taxi and it pulled into the curb and drenched him in filthy rainwater up to his knees. The cabbie looked like the late Scatman Crothers, from The Shining. "Hell of a night," he said, as John climbed into the backseat, strug­gling to fold his broken umbrella.

"Sure is. May Street, please. Corner of Grove."

As the cabbie drove off, John sniffed and realized that there was a strong acidic smell in the back of the taxi. What

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was more, the seat of his pants was soaked. He rubbed his hand on the vinyl seat and then he sniffed his fingers. Somebody had vomited in the taxi and he had sat in it.

"Stop!" he shouted, rapping on the partition.

The cabbie said, "What?"

"I said stop! Somebody's puked on the seat!"

"Somebody's what?"

At last the cabbie pulled into the curbside again. John climbed out and said, "Somebody's puked on the seat. For Pete's sake, look at my pants."

"Shit," the cabbie said. "Just started my shift, too. Why don't folks keep their previously enjoyed food to themselves?"

John had to walk the rest of the way home. The umbrella refused to open and in any case he didn't really care if he got any wetter than he already was. Every time he breathed in he caught the sharp smell of vomit—alcohol and seafood and tomatoes.

Home was a second-story apartment he shared with his widowed mother on May Street, at the back of an ugly, squarish, brown-brick building that had been built in the 1900s as a hostel for disturbed children. John let himself in and trudged up the steep dark stairs. He had to feel his way because the lightbulb on the landing had gone again. The building's super was a shriveled monkey of a man and prob­ably the most argumentative person that John had ever known. He would refuse to change lightbulbs because the sun was going to come up in only a few hours, and they wouldn't be needed anymore.

John opened the door to his mother's apartment. The liv­ing room was gloomy and smelled of dead-flower water. The kitchen door was a few inches ajar and as usual John's mother had left the portable television flickering with the sound turned off. He took off his soaking-wet shoes and left them on the welcome mat behind the door. Then he tippy‑

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toed across the carpet to the kitchen. His mother had left a plate of chocolate-chip cookies on the table and a note say­ing Please take my yellow dress to the cleaners tomorrow.

On the TV screen, Vincent Price was desperately trying to escape the fire in House of Wax. John switched it off and went along the corridor toward the bathroom.

"Johnsy?" his mother called. "You're home late." "I couldn't get a cab."

"You're not wet, are you?"

He opened the door to his mother's bedroom. She was sit­ting up in bed with a white scarf on her head so that she looked as if she had been having chemotherapy. She was a very thin woman, with an almond-pale face and smudges of grief under her eyes. She always gave the impression that if anybody touched her they would cause her actual physical pain.

"You're drenched," she said. "Get out of those clothes and run yourself a nice hot bath."

Lightning flashed behind the brown floral drapes, and then almost immediately the house was shaken by deafen­ing thunder, as if somebody had tipped a mahogany wardrobe down the stairs.

"Some storm, huh?" John said. "The whole of Dock Street was flooded."

"What did you have to eat tonight? You ate, didn't you?" "Sure, I had fried chicken."

"You and your fried chicken. Your father loved his fried chicken, too."

"Right—I'd better take a bath." His pants were sticking to him and he didn't want to get into one of those long rem­iniscences about his father. He had only been seven when his father was killed, and he could barely remember him. He knew what he looked like, of course: There were photo­graphs everywhere. But what he had felt like, and smelled

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like, and what his voice had actually sounded like, he couldn't bring to mind. His father didn't even visit him in dreams.

He always wore his father's Marine Corps ring, but it had never imparted any feeling of what kind of man his father had been.

"Can I bring you anything?" he asked his mother.

She smiled and shook her head. "I've taken my tablets al­ready. You get yourself to bed."

John went to the bathroom and disgustedly pulled down his pants. The rain had washed off most of the half-digested food, but there were still flecks of crab and fragments of tomato on them and he put them in the basin and sluiced them in tepid water. At the same time he turned on the old-fashioned brass faucets to run a bath. He would have pre­ferred a shower, but the washer had worn out and the super hadn't gotten around to fixing it. "You think washers grow on trees?"

While the bath was running, he went into his bedroom. It was a long, narrow room, with a single sawed-oak bed with a dark brown candlewick throw and his pajamas neatly folded on the pillow. All along the wall beside the bed were photographs of classic automobiles—Hudson Hornets and Chevrolet Bel Airs and Packard Hawks—as well as pennants for Richmond's soccer team, the Kickers. John had once stuck up a picture of Pamela Anderson in a wet T-shirt, but his mother had looked at it with such a disappointed expres­sion that he had taken it down.

He looked out of the window. Rainwater was spouting from a broken gutter into the darkened yard below. There was a dazzling flash of lightning and another crash of thun­der. It felt as if the storm were right above his head.

He went back into the bathroom and climbed cautiously into the bathtub. Apart from having to walk most of the

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way home he had worked a double shift today and he felt bone-tired. He lay back and stared at the ceiling. What would his father have thought of him, if he could see him now? A chef in a family diner, instead of a captain in the marines. Pecan pie instead of semper fi.

He soaped his hair and plunged himself under the water to rinse it, his eyes screwed tight shut and his fingers in his ears. As he came up for air, he saw that the bathroom door was wide open.

Odd, he thought. He never left the bathroom door open. His mother wasn't the kind of woman who would sit on the toilet talking to him while he had a bath. In fact she ap­peared to find sex and nudity not just embarrassing but deeply distasteful. She called it "that sort of thing." John occasionally wondered how he had managed to be con­ceived at all.

"Mom?" he called out, but there was no answer. She al­ways took two Seconals when she went to bed, so she was probably dead to the world by now.

He stood up in the bath and reached over to the door to close it. But as he did so he was suddenly taken by the feel­ing that there was somebody standing in the doorway. He couldn't see anybody, but he thought he could hear steady, slightly harsh breathing. It was difficult to be sure, because the bathwater was still slopping from side to side, and thun­der was still rumbling over the rooftop, but he could sense a tension in the air, a nearness.

He lowered his left hand to cover himself. "Who's there?" he said, half expecting his mother to appear.

No answer. But the sensation that somebody was stand­ing very close to him was even stronger now. He moved his hand toward the door, waving it from side to side as if he were feeling his way in the dark.

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There was an immense explosion of thunder, and at the same time something sharp and pointed jabbed him in the right eye, bursting his eyeball. He let out a high-pitched scream and fell backward into the bath with a loud slap of water, knocking his head against the tiles. He grabbed the handrail and tried to sit up, his hand cupping his eye, and he felt a large blob of optic jelly slither between his fingers and slide down his cheek. The pain was unbearable—as if somebody had stuck a red-hot poker into his eye socket.

"God-oh-God-oh-God-oh-God," he babbled, trying to climb out of the bath. "Mom! Mom! Help me! My eye!"

He managed to twist himself around and get himself up on one knee, but then he was roughly pushed back down again, and he actually felt hands gripping him, hands in coarse leather gloves.

"Get off me!" he screamed. "Jesus, get off me!"

But one of the hands gripped his hair and his head was forced under the bathwater. He could hear the watery clonking of his knees against the side of the tub as he strug­gled to get free, and the crackling of his hair being wrenched out by the roots, but the hand wouldn't let him go. His whole head felt as if it were caving in.

Just when he thought he couldn't hold his breath for a second longer, the hand pulled him up again. He gasped and spluttered and opened his remaining eye, expecting to see who was trying to drown him, but there was still nobody there.

"Let me go, let me go, let me go!" he begged, and there was a moment's pause. He tried again to sit up, but then some­thing sharp stuck into his left eye, too, and everything went black.

"I'm blind!" he screamed. "You've blinded me!"

He thrashed in the bath from side to side, kicking and

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yammering and letting out whoops of agony. He clawed at the air, trying to find his assailant, trying to climb out, but every time he found the handrail his fingers were pried away from it and he was pushed back into the water.

"What do you want?" he gibbered, and then whooped again because his eyes hurt so much.

There was no answer. He tried one more time to get out of the bath, but when he was forced back yet again, he cow­ered in the water with his hands over his face and just prayed that this was all a nightmare and that he hadn't been blinded after all and that he would soon wake up and it would be morning.

He thought the water felt hotter than it had before, but that was probably because his injuries had made him more sensitive. Soon, however, he realized that it actually was hotter. Not only that, it was increasing in heat as quickly as the water in a kettle. He sat up and reached blindly for the faucets, but when he found them they were both turned off. The water was heating up spontaneously, and it was already scalding his buttocks and his legs.

"What are you doing to me?" he screeched. "Let me get out, let me get out!"

Again he struggled and kicked, but again he was pushed back into the water. It was so hot now that he felt as if his entire body was burning, and he could hear a deep, thick bubbling noise as it rapidly rose to boiling point.

His agony lasted for less than a minute, but during that minute he discovered hell. He went into total shock, his legs and his arms quivering, his fists gripped tight. He had never thought that pain like this was possible.

The bathwater came to a rolling boil and for the final few seconds of his life he was cooking alive.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-

FOUR

When Decker walked into his office the next morning, gripping a fifteen-slice pastrami sandwich between his teeth and carrying a cup of espresso and three thick folders under his arm, Sandra and Eunice Plummer were already waiting for him. Sandra was wearing a flowery green dress and a medicine-pink cardigan. Sitting in the corner in a triangle of bright sunlight, she looked simple but saintly. Eunice was wearing a beige pantsuit and a look of irritation.

Decker said, "Mmm, mmm," and jerked his head to indi­cate that they should follow him over to his desk. He took the sandwich out of his mouth and laid it on top of Erin Malkman's autopsy report on George Drewry. "Good to see you again, Sandra. How can I help?"

"I asked her not to come," Eunice said, her brown vinyl purse clutched firmly in her lap. "But she stamped her foot and said she was going to see you whether I liked it or not."

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"I saw him again," Sandra said. "The So-Scary Man." "You did? Where?"

"I saw him at the station. He was going through the door."

"You mean Main Street Station?"

"That's right," Eunice said. "She says he crossed East Main Street and walked straight across the sidewalk and into the entrance."

"Do you think he might have seen you?"

Sandra shook her head. "I don't think so. He looked like he was in a big hurry."

"What time was this?"

"About 4:45 yesterday afternoon," Eunice said. "Sandra wanted to call you right away but I tried to persuade her not to. I'm sorry, maybe I'm wrong, but I really don't want her to get mixed up in this."

Decker sat down and pried the lid off his coffee. "I don't blame you, Ms. Plummer. But this kind of information could be really helpful. It means that whoever he is—whatever he is—he's still in the downtown area. If we can work out his behavior patterns . . . well, maybe we can find him, and find out how he manages to make himself unnoticed."

Sandra nodded enthusiastically and said, "We should go look for him."

"No you shouldn't," Eunice said. "You should go back home and finish your schoolwork. You've told Lieutenant Martin what you wanted to tell him, and now we should leave him in peace."

"I think your mom's right," Decker told her. "This is a city with nearly a quarter of a million people living in it. Where are we going to start looking?"

"The station," Sandra insisted.

"Just because you saw him at the station yesterday that

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doesn't mean he's going to be there now. And what would he be doing there? It's all building work and renovations. There wouldn't be any place for him to stay."

"That's where he comes from," Sandra insisted. "I just know."

Decker suddenly remembered the drawing of Main Street Station hanging by the fireplace in Eunice Plummer's apart­ment. The dark cloud over it, which looked more like tan­gled black snakes. And what had Eunice told him? "She calls it the Fun House."

"How do you know?" he asked her.

Sandra touched her fingertips to her forehead. "I can see it. I can see him going up the stairs."

"You did a drawing of the station, didn't you? A very

good one. But it had some kind of a cloud hanging over it." "I saw it. Only it wasn't a cloud. It was a bad thing." "A bad thing? What do you mean by that?"

"When people do wrong. When people hate people. That's what it's like."

Eunice said, "I'm sorry, Lieutenant. I really think that this is enough."

"You wouldn't consider letting me take Sandra down to the station for a look around?"

"You've said yourself that this man could be vengeful, es­pecially if he knows that Sandra can see him, and identify him."

"Well, you're right, of course. And the last thing I want to do is expose Sandra to any danger."

"I want to look for him," Sandra said, drumming her heels on the floor. "It would be like hide-and-go-seek."

Decker shook his head. "I'm sorry, Sandra. If Mom says no, then it's no. But I'll go check the station myself, and if I find anything I'll tell you."

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* * *

Decker and Hicks climbed the dark stone stairway from East Main Street to the second-floor lobby of Main Street Sta­tion, deafened at every step by weird, distorted banging and hammering.

They reached the lobby itself, where workers in hard hats were digging up the flooring and chipping the walls back to the bare brick. In spite of the noise and the dust and the snaking hydraulic hoses, the lobby was still awesome, with its tall columns and its high arched windows and its coffered ceiling. From here, Virginia's soldiers had departed for two world wars and Vietnam, and vacationers boarded for Buck-roe Beach, as well as students bound for northern colleges and salesmen heading to new territory out West.

A short sandy man in blue overalls came over to greet them, carrying two red hard hats. "Lieutenant Martin? How do you do. Mike Verdant, I'm the project engineer. Have to ask you to put these on, I'm afraid."

"Thanks," Decker said. "Quite an operation you've got going here."

"It's going pretty good. We should have trains running by December on the eastern side, on the old Chesapeake and Ohio tracks, and then we can open up the Seaboard Line."

"History, huh?"

"Oh, for sure. Amtrak closed this station down in 1975 and shifted all of their rail operations out to the suburbs, be­cause they thought that the interstate was going to kill off rail travel. But . . . here we are again. Opening it all up. Here, let me show you something."

He led them across the echoing lobby to the western side of the station, where workmen in white overalls were drilling up the floor. He picked up a piece of flooring and crumbled it between finger and thumb.

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"You see this flooring? Black cinder ash, from the old coal-burning locomotives. You add water and it holds up pretty well."

Decker sniffed and looked around. "Any place here that somebody could hide?"

Michael Verdant stood up, dusting his hands. "Not sure what you mean. We've had a couple of down-and-outs in here lately."

"No, I mean any place that somebody could actually live in."

"I don't see how. There's too much work going on. During the day we're renovating the walls and the flooring. Over there—you see over there?—we took down all of the terra­cotta sculptures and we're having them molded and recast. Then we're stripping out all of the asbestos, we have to do that during the night, because of safety regulations. Nobody could set up camp here, wouldn't be possible."

Decker breathed in the smell of old plaster and pulverized brick. The lobby echoed with hammer drills and pickaxes, but he was sure he could sense something else here too. The Old South, which had depended on tobacco and cotton and slavery and free opinion, breathing its defiant last.

Richmond had once been the Secessionist capital. Now it was a tourist attraction, with antique stores and teddy-bear shops and plantation cruises on riverboats, lunch and din­ner included, and the only men in gray were the guides at the National Battlefield Park.

Michael Verdant said, "Come on, follow me." He led them upstairs, to the fourth and fifth levels, through sheets of dusty plastic and sanded-down doors, until they came to a metal ladder in the corner. He climbed it as swiftly as a big sandy ape, and Decker and Hicks followed. They found themselves out on the balcony of the clock tower, their hair blown by the warm midday wind. Below them, traffic

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streamed along the interstate, which curved beneath the station only twenty feet away. But off to their right, they could see all the way down the Shockoe Valley, where the James River glittered, and ships were moored, and the woody hills were hazed with summer blue.

"Finest view of the city there is."

Decker turned around. Above him the four clock faces were creeping closer to noon, and he could hear the stealthy creeping of their automated movement.

"How about the lower levels?" he asked. "Any chance that somebody could be hiding themselves there?"

Michael Verdant led them back down to the gloomy, echoing train shed, 530 feet long, the size of a zeppelin hangar, with a gable roof. "This is where the Greyhound buses are going to be coming in. Not sure about the second level, though. It's like three football fields put together."

They went back down the stairway to the East Main Street entrance, and Michael Verdant unclipped a flashlight from his belt and showed them a deep excavation of rubble and old brickwork. "We're putting in a ramp here, for wheelchair users, and people who lug their bags on wheels. We found this old brick foundation when we started to ex­cavate, and at first we thought it could be a wharf, because the old Shockoe Creek used to come in here."

"You're kidding me."

"No, it used to be deep enough for fishing boats. But this wall is probably later than that, 1920s or thereabouts. A whole lot of different building work has gone on here, over the years, levels on top of levels. It's like opening up Tu­tankhamen's tomb."

Decker peered into the darkness. "Is that a basement?"

"No, there's no basement. I guess the original planners were too worried about floods, this close to the river. There's a crawl space, but that's it."

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"You think anybody could hide in there?"

"Pretty unlikely. It's damp and it's dark and it's suffocat­ing. And you never know when the tide's going to come pouring in."

"Okay," Decker said. "Thanks for showing us around."

Michael Verdant gave him a dry, strong handshake. "Glad I could help. Make sure you come back when we're open for business. You won't believe this place, I can prom­ise you."

As they walked back to Decker's car, Hicks said, "You want to tell me why we came here?"

"I don't know. I was given a tip-off, that's all. I just wanted to check."

"What tip-off?"

Decker turned around and looked up at the clock tower and the dormer windows with their red terra-cotta tiles. The station looked more like a palace out of Grimm's Fairy Tales than a twentieth-century railroad terminus.

"Do you get any vibrations out of that place?" he asked. "Vibrations? You mean apart from jackhammering? Like what?"

"Like—I don't know. Like something very bad is hiding there."

Hicks shook his head. "You should ask Rhoda. She's the one who's into vibrations. Me—well, you know me, Lieu­tenant. I prefer procedure to witchcraft, any day."

"In that case, you definitely won't be happy about where we're going next."

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

He parked outside Moses Adebolu's building and shouted, "Come on, Hicks! You should find this very instructive. It'll take you back to your ethnic roots."

"What ethnic roots? I was born in Fairview Beach."

The same kids were playing with rat bones on the steps. Decker took out a pack of fresh-mint gum and gave them a stick each. "Watch my car, okay?"

"So who's this we're going to see?" Hicks asked, dubiously.

They climbed up the creaking stairs. Somebody on the floor above was having a shouting match, and there was a clatter like saucepans being thrown.

Decker said, "You're going to meet Moses. He's a santero. One of the best, according to Jonah. Yesterday we sacrificed a rooster and today he's going to give me my omiero."

"What the hell is an omiero?"

"It's my magic antidemon potion. Rooster blood and herbs. I have to take a bath in it and then the great god

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Changó might forgive me for whatever it is I've done to piss him off."

They had reached the second-story landing, under the headless image of John the Baptist. Hicks stopped and said, "Wait up a second, Lieutenant. Are you serious about this?"

"Never more so. You saw that image of Cathy that Rhoda conjured up. Whatever's happening here, it's supernatural, whether we like it or not. Or at the very least it involves some pretty weird influences. So it's no good trying to hunt it down with procedure. It's Santeria magic, and that means we're going to have to use Santeria magic to find it."

"Have you talked to the captain about this?"

"Cab? Uh-huh. It'll only make him sneeze."

"Well . . . I know what I saw when Rhoda did that séance, and I'll agree with you that it was something ex- tremely strange. But what are we really talking about here?"

Decker laid a hand on his shoulder. "If we can safely be­lieve Moses Adebolu, which from all the evidence I believe we can, then all we are up against is the single most venge­ful god in the whole of the Santeria religion."

"And that's his name? Changó?"

"You got it."

"All right," Hicks said. "Supposing I go along with this. Supposing it's true. What's this goddamned god so god­damned vengeful about?"

"I have no idea, specifically. But the nightmares I've been having ... and the way that the victims were killed . . . I think it has something to do with the Civil War, and with the Battle of the Wilderness in particular."

"You're talking about the Devil's Brigade?"

Decker nodded.

"But all that happened in 1864. Over 140 years ago."

"I know. But gods don't die, do they? Not so long as people

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go on believing in them. Maybe they don't die even if people don't go on believing them. They're not fairies, after all. They're part of the earth, part of the sky, part of everything."

"I don't want to step out of line, Lieutenant, but you're beginning to sound, well—this is kind of Lord of the Rings here."

"Come talk to Moses, see if he doesn't change your mind."

Decker knocked on Moses Adebolu's multicolored door. He waited patiently, turning to Hicks and lifting his eye­brows. "You wait till you meet this guy. He's a character. And you should see his daughter. That's if she is his daugh­ter, which I seriously question."

He knocked again. "All right," Moses called. "I can hear you, my friend. I just have to pull up my pants."

They could hear him shuffling toward the door. As the handle turned, however, there was an extraordinary warping sensation in the air, as if the whole of perception had been twisted. This was instantly followed by a sharp, intense sucking sound, like a high wind, which Decker instantly recognized—oxygen being dragged violently into Moses' apartment through every crack and crevice around the door.

"Down!" he shouted at Hicks, and football-tackled him across the landing.

Hicks, sprawling, said, "What? What is it?"

"Down! Get downstairs!"

He shoved Hicks square in the back and Hicks lost his balance and went tumbling and bumping down to the hall­way. Decker himself seized hold of the banister rails and swung himself down, six stairs at a time, like an acrobat.

As they reached the front door, there was a shattering ex­plosion, and the whole building seemed to jump sideways.

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Chunks of plaster dropped from the ceiling, rails were ripped up like railroad tracks, and what was left of the John the Baptist window burst apart in a million sparkling fragments.

Hicks stared at Decker and his face was white with plas­ter dust and shock.

"Was that a bomb?"

Decker was busy jabbing out the fire department number on his cell phone. "God knows. Come on."

Up above them, doors were opening and people were shouting and screaming. A large section of the third-story staircase had collapsed, and lumps of plaster were still falling down the stairwell. Decker shouted, "Police! Don't panic! We're going to get you out of here!"

He approached Moses' door. All the paint on it was al­ready blistered, and only one painted eye remained, staring at him with the serene knowledge that all things must pass. He cautiously touched the door handle but it was too hot for him to try turning it. There was no smoke coming out from underneath the door. Instead, the air from the landing was still being steadily sucked inward, with a soft whistling sound, which told him that the interior of the apartment must be incandescent.

"Hicks, come on, sport—let's get these people out of here. This building doesn't have long."

A woman with dreadlocks and a black leather minidress was leaning over from the landing above, screaming, "I got to get my clothes! I got to get my DVDs!"

"Lady, no chance. This house is going to be ashes in two minutes flat."

Hicks and Decker stood at the foot of the third-story stairs and helped the residents to jump over the gap. The woman with the dreadlocks; an elderly woman in a holey bathrobe, carrying a cat; a young man with a shaven head

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and muscles; a middle-aged woman with a head scarf and dangly earrings.

When the last of them was clambering down the stairs to safety, Hicks turned to Decker and nodded toward Moses' door. "What about him?"

"Don't even think about it. Whatever happened in there, he's toast. We try to get in there, we're toast, too. Let's go."

They followed the residents down to the hallway. Decker was only halfway down, however, when Moses' door burst open. A huge fireball roared out of it, and flames rolled across the ceiling, setting fire to the hanging lampshade and the banister. Decker felt the heat blasting against his face and he clamped his hand on top of his head to prevent his hair from being singed.

Moses Adebolu appeared at the top of the stairs, stagger­ing like a zombie, and he was blazing from head to foot. His clothes had been burned off him and his skin was shrivel­ing. The heat from the blast had been so intense that his glasses were welded to his face, and the TV-like lenses had turned milky white.

"Changó!" he screamed. "Changó!" His voice sounded as if it had been wrenched out of his lungs with red-hot pincers.

"Fire extinguisher!" Decker told Hicks, and Hicks jumped down the front steps and crossed the road to the car. Decker took off his coat and climbed the stairs again, hold­ing the coat up in front of him to shield himself from the heat.

Moses swayed, and then he toppled down the stairs, still blazing. Decker had to jump out of the way as his burning body cartwheeled past him, all fiery arms and legs. He fell all the way down to the hallway where he lay with flames flickering down his back, more like a black, crunched-up in­sect than a man. Hicks came back with the fire extinguisher

216

and squirted foam all over him, but it was obvious that he was dead.

Decker went back upstairs to see if there was any chance of saving Aluya, but Moses' apartment was so fiercely ablaze that he couldn't even make it up to the landing. The fire was actually bellowing, as if it were furiously angry. Decker went back outside and made sure that everybody was standing well back. A crowd was gathering and every time another win­dow shattered they let out a strange, long-drawn-out moan.

"My DVDs," wailed the woman with the dreadlocks.

"Any sign of the girl?" Hicks asked.

Decker wiped the sweat and smudges from his face. "Couldn't get close enough. If she is in there, she wouldn't have stood a chance."

They watched the flames waving from the second-story window. One of the drapes blew out and flew off into the morning sky, like a burning ghost.

"Think it was a natural gas explosion?" Hicks asked. "Who knows? Moses had all kinds of herbs and potions

and stuff. Maybe he had something inflammable."

The first fire truck arrived, its siren wailing and its horn

blasting. Then another, and another.

As the firefighters unrolled their hoses, Decker looked behind him, underneath the shadow of 1-95. Aluya was standing there, in an orange Indian-style silk pantsuit, with an orange silk scarf on her head. She was holding a woven shopping bag filled with celery and other vegetables.

Decker went over to her. "I'm sorry . . . there was some kind of explosion. Your father didn't make it."

She stared at him with her huge brown eyes as if she couldn't understand what he was talking about.

"Is there any place you can go?" he coaxed her. "Any relatives?"

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"My father is dead?"

"I'm really sorry. The whole place went up, just like that. Where have you been, shopping? You were lucky you weren't inside."

"It was Changó."

"What?"

"It was Changó. I told him not to defy Changó."

"I don't think that he was defying him. It was more like he was trying to appease him."

"Changó wants his revenge on you. If Changó wants his revenge, he will never rest until he has it. Owani irosun, the greatest vengeance. My father thought that he could be greater than Changó, and this was the price. Changó warned him, with the coconut shells, but he didn't listen."

"I'm sorry," Decker said. Behind him, he heard the fire pumps starting up. "What are you going to do now?"

"I will stay with my sister."

"Okay . . . but if there's anything I can do . . ."

She looked at him for a long time without saying any­thing. Then she turned and began to walk away.

"I'll need to get in touch with you!" Decker called after her. "I have to ask you some questions, and we'll probably need you to identify your father's body!"

"You will find me when you need me," Aluya called back. Decker caught up with her and took hold of her arm. "Listen," he said.

She shook her head. "You're not the man you once were, Lieutenant. Changó has put his mark on you, and there is no more time for you to do the things you once did. You will scarcely have time to panic."

"Well, that's honest, even if it's not exactly reassuring."

"My father also used to read the cowrie shells, Lieu­tenant, a^s well as the coconuts. He read his own shells last night, and no matter how they fell, the pattern always

218

brought ossogbo, which is not good. The last pattern was og­gunda oche, which means that the dead are angry."

"I still need to know how to get in touch with you."

"No, you don't. You need to find Changó and discover what it is that he wants from you. Otherwise you will not live longer than two goings-down of the sun."

With that, she walked away, with her shopping bag swinging. Hicks came up to Decker and said, "What was that all about?"

"You want it in words of one syllable? I'm in shitsville." "That's two syllables."

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Soon after they returned to headquarters, Sergeant Novick came up to Decker's office with a large yellow enve­lope. Novick was tall and hesitant, with a chestnut cowlick and spectacles that you could have used to start a campfire, but he was one of the best photographic experts on the force.

"I had a piece of luck with this one, Lieutenant," he said, taking out a glossy black-and-white print.

"Jesus, I could use some luck. Tell me."

Novick laid the print down in front of him. It was a blown-up detail of the photograph that Decker had taken from the Maitland home: a Confederate soldier in a slouch hat decorated with black rags and a long gray greatcoat. It was surprisingly sharp and clear, and Decker could see that the man had a long, stern face with angular cheekbones and deep-set eyes. His nose was hooked as if it had been broken, and he was heavily bearded.

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Novick said, "The image was not only out of focus, because this man was standing in the background, but it was blurred, too, because he'd moved during the exposure. But what I did was to make a digital image of the original photograph, and enlarge the pixels so that I could examine the picture in minute detail. Then I could filter out the blurred pixels and crisp up the image by making a computerized analysis of what the guy would have_. looked like if he'd kept still."

"What's it like to be incomprehensible, Novick? Does it interfere with your social life or anything?"

"I'll tell you something, Lieutenant, I'm proud of this piece of work. And I'm even prouder because I've found out who he is."

"You're not serious?"

"Oh yes." Novick rummaged in his envelope again and produced another print. "I went to the library this morning and looked through The Confederate Army in Photographs. All I was looking for were more pictures by the same pho­tographer, but look what I found."

It was unmistakably the same man, photographed in a studio, with a painted landscape of trees and cliffs in the background. He was wearing a slouch hat, but without the rags, and a neatly buttoned tunic. He was thickly bearded, but his beard was much trimmer than it was in the photo­graph taken during the Battle of the Wilderness.

Underneath, the caption read CAPTAIN JOSEPH SHROUD,

OF KERSHAW^'S DIVISION OF THE FIRST ARMY CORPS, OCTOBER

1₇, 1863.

Decker opened his drawer and took out a copy of Sandra's drawing. "Look at this. Sandra's So-Scary Man. No doubt about it. It's the same guy."

Novick leaned over his shoulder and pointed to Shroud's hat. "You see these . . . they're not rags at all, even though

221

they look like them. I blew them up even more and they're feathers."

"So the So-Scary Man was one of the Devil's Brigade," Hicks said. "And it looks like Maitland's great-great­grandfather was too."

Decker said, "We need to know more about this. Some­thing happened during the Battle of the Wilderness—something so bad that it refuses to go away. I think I need to go back down to Fort Monroe—see if I can't dig something out of the archives."

Cab came into the office, with his necktie loose, looking sweaty and harassed, and holding up a dispatch note. "Hi, Captain. How was Charlottesville?"

"Forget Charlottesville. Uniform just called in another homicide, 1881 May Street."

"Can't you give it to Rudisill? I think we've got ourselves a hook on the Maitland case."

"This could be connected to the Maitland case. The apartment was locked on the inside. Nobody saw nobody enter and nobody saw nobody leave. Besides that, the method of killing was bizarre, to say the least. The guy had his eyes poked out, and apparently he was scalded."

Decker stood up and put on his coat. "In that case, I think we'd better go take a look. Hicks?"

Erin Malkman was already there when they arrived, snap­ping on her latex gloves.

"We can't go on meeting like this," Decker said.

Erin gave him a humorless grimace. "You're going to have fun with this one."

Decker and Hicks went through to the bathroom. John Mason was still floating in the bathtub, facedown. His skin was lobster red and he was grossly swollen. Erin rolled him over so that Decker could see his bloodied eye sockets.

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"What's that smell?"

Erin stirred the bathwater. "Meat stock, to put it bluntly. This man was boiled for at least twenty minutes."

"Boiled? How could he be boiled?"

"Whoever did this to him found a way to raise the water temperature to one hundred degrees Celsius and keep it there."

"How is that possible?"

"1 have no idea. Maybe he had some kind of portable heating element with him, like an immersion heater." "This gets crazier."

A uniform came in with a notebook. "Victim's name is John Ledger Mason, aged thirty. Single, domiciled here with his widowed mother, Ivy Mason."

"His mother didn't see anything?"

"She takes sleeping pills. In fact she couldn't sleep too well during the night so she took two more than usual, which totally knocked her out."

"When did she last see her son?"

"Late yesterday evening. He works as a chef at Appleby's Family Restaurant on East Main Street. He told her good night and went to take a bath. As I say, she woke up at about three in the morning and took more sleeping pills, and she eventually woke up well past eleven o'clock.

"She called the victim and when he didn't answer she looked into his bedroom. His bed was made and the drapes were open, so she assumed that he had gone out. She didn't go into the bathroom until nearly one o'clock, because she wanted to change the towels."

"Where is she now?"

"One of the neighbors is taking care of her. Apartment eight."

"Anybody else see anything?"

"Nope. No sign of forced entry, either. The victim's bed‑

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room window was open a couple of inches, but there's no possible access from outside."

Erin said, "You notice the bruising on his shoulders? It looks as if somebody was holding him down."

Decker and Hicks went across to apartment 8, where John's mother was sitting at her neighbor's kitchen table, looking even more pallid than usual, especially since she was wear­ing a bright red dress. Her neighbor was a fat woman with greasy gray hair and slippers that made a flapping noise as she walked around the kitchen.

Decker showed his badge. "The officer downstairs tells me you didn't see anything or hear anything?"

"That's right," she whispered.

"Well, maybe God was taking care of you, ma'am. Who­ever killed your son was a very ruthless individual indeed. Who knows what he might have done to you?"

"John was always such a gentle boy. Why would anybody want to kill anyone so gentle?"

"We're going to do our best to find that out. You can't think of anybody who might have harbored a grudge against him? Anybody who might have wanted to do him harm?"

"He always kept to himself. He never argued with any­one, even if they upset him. He always used to say 'grin and bear it.' "

"Mrs. Mason . . . I gather you're a widow. What did your late husband do?"

"He was a printer. He used to work for CadmusMack." "His family didn't have any military connections?"

She frowned at him, and then she shook her head. "Not

that I know of. Why?"

"You don't happen to have a Mason family tree, do you?" "What would that have to do with somebody killing John?"

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"I'm not sure. But it would help me if I knew something about your late husband's antecedents. Especially his great-great-grandfather."

"I'm sorry, I don't think I can help you. Bill didn't get on with his family at all well, especially his father."

"Was he a Richmond man?"

"Born in Petersburg. But his family moved to Richmond when he was very young."

"All right, then. Thanks anyhow."

On the way downstairs, Decker said to Hicks, "We need to check the Mason family history, right back to the Civil War. I want to know if any of John Mason's forefathers was assigned to the Devil's Brigade."

Hicks said, "Okay, Lieutenant, but—"

"But what? But you have a better idea? A guy just got poached to death back there and you have some procedural explanation?"

"I just think that we shouldn't lose sight of the possibility that there could be a logical, nonsupernatural solution to this."

"Don't try to get all Sherlock Holmesy on me, Hicks. Sherlock Holmes wasn't always right. All those things that happened to Jerry Maitland and George Drewry and this poor bastard weren't just improbable, they were impossible, but the only way we're going to crack this case is if we start believing that sometimes impossible things can actually happen. Things that seem to be impossible, anyhow."

"Like a Santeria god, taking his revenge?"

"Why not? Millions of people all over the world believe in Santeria. People in Africa and Haiti and Cuba and all across America. Maybe they believe in it because their gods really exist, and their gods answer their prayers, and reward them when they're good, and punish them when they're bad."

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"I don't know," Hicks said. "It all sounds so ethnic." "You're not ashamed of who you are, are you? You're not ashamed of being colored?"

Hicks looked away. When he turned back, there was an expression on his face that Decker had never seen before.

They were nearly back at Madison and Grace when Decker's cell phone played the opening bars of "The House of the Rising Sun."

"You changed it," Hicks said.

"Didn't want you to think that I wasn't responsive to crit­icism. Yes? Martin here, who is this?"

"Hi, Decker. Dan Carvey, from the fire department." "How are you doing, Dan? Haven't seen you since you burned all those burgers at the charity cookout."

"I have a preliminary finding on that fire of yours." "Any sign of arson?"

"No. There were a couple dozen bottles of 120-proof rum on the premises, some of them broken, but I couldn't detect any accelerant."

"So what caused it? Natural gas?"

"Gas pipes were all intact. Stove was turned off. No—all the early indications are that it was lightning."

"Lightning? There was no lightning around."

"Well, it can come out of a clear sky sometimes. The way the humidity's been building up lately. But there's all the signs. Scorch marks on the wallpaper, electrical appliances all blown out."

"You're sure about this?"

"I'll stake my reputation."

Decker turned right, down the ramp into the police park­ing lot. Hicks said, "What?"

"The fire department thinks that Moses' apartment was hit by lightning. His daughter said that she warned him not

226

to mess with Changó. Chang& in Santeria mythology, is the god of fire and thunder and lightning. So what do we conclude from that?"

He pulled into his parking space and killed the motor. He turned and looked at Hicks and he expected an answer.

Hicks said, "I don't know. You make me feel cornered."

"I make you feel cornered, do I? How do you think I feel, with this Changó breathing down my neck? You don't be­lieve in it? You don't want to believe in any of this? You're a police officer, Hicks, you have to believe in it. Just because you want to deny your ethnicity, don't let that distort your judgment."

"I'm not denying my ethnicity. I just don't like all of this African magic stuff. It's primitive, and it's demeaning." "And?"

"And nothing. I just don't like it, that's all."

"Then why do I get the feeling there's something more personal here?"

Hicks didn't answer. "I'll get on to that Mason family tree."

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CHAPTER TWENTY‑

S EVEN

Cab held a media conference at 4:15 that afternoon. The press room was crowded and noisy and electronic flash flick­ered like summer lightning.

"All I can tell you so far is that John. Mason was the vic­tim of a suspicious drowning incident. We have some con­structive leads and we'll report any developments . . . well, as soon as any developments develop."

Leo Waters from WRVA News Radio raised his pencil and asked, "I talked to the super at John Mason's building He said that the victim was deliberately blinded and then scalded to death. Is there any substance in that?"

"The super was not an eyewitness to the incident." "With respect, Captain, that doesn't exactly answer the question."

Cab paused for a moment and then he said, heavily,

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"There were some unusual circumstances attached to this incident, yes."

"So you're admitting it's true? The guy was blinded and drowned in boiling water?"

"Yes."

Decker heard the news bulletin as he drove back to his apartment. "A cook was himself cooked last night. Thirty­year-old John Mason was boiled to death in his bathtub at his apartment on the edge of the Fan District. An unknown assailant blinded him with a sharp instrument and then somehow raised the temperature of his bathwater until he was literally poached to death."

Decker said, "Shit," and switched the radio off. The last thing he needed right now was hysterical pressure from the media. He had a feeling that the killings were somehow connected to the Devil's Brigade, but no clear idea how, or why, and no hard evidence at all. Having the media chasing him around was only going to make these investigations ten times more difficult.

He went home and took his ritual shot of Herradura Sil­ver. Then he took a hot shower and changed into a baggy pair of gray drawstring pants and a white T-shirt. He felt hungry but he didn't know what he felt like eating. He opened the icebox and stared into it for a long time before closing it again. He would have done anything for one of Cathy's spicy pork and guacamole burgers.

The phone rang. To Decker's surprise, it was Father Thomas, from the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart.

"Decker, I tried to call you at headquarters, but they told me you'd gone home."

"Even us detectives get a few hours off. How can I help you?"

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"I'm not sure, but I think that I may be able to be of some assistance to you. I heard about this latest homicide on the radio this afternoon, while I was out pruning my roses."

"Sick business, Father. Very sick."

"The thing that struck me was the way in which he was killed. Blinded, and then boiled in a bath of hot water."

"Not a pretty way to die, was it? But I guess you can't ac­cuse the perp of not being original."

"Actually, I can. I think his method was highly derivative." "Derivative? What do you mean?"

"That was the exact same way in which Saint Cecilia was martyred by the Romans in 265. Her eyes were put out. Then she was seated in a bath of scalding water and boiled."

"Go on."

"It was then that I got to thinking about your other vic­tims. Mrs. Maitland was beheaded, and her unborn child was killed. This happened to Saint Anne of Ephesus, who was supposed to have been pregnant with a virgin birth. Major Drewry had his stomach cut open, like Saint Cyril. Mr. Maitland was disemboweled, and this was very similar to the martyrdom of Saint Erasmus in the fifth century . . . a hole was pierced in his stomach and his intestines were wound out of him by means of a winch. There's a very fa­mous altar piece of it by Nicolas Poussin in the Pinacoteca Vaticana."

"So what are you saying? All of these people were killed in the same way that saints were martyred?"

"I may be jumping to conclusions, but you have four very unusual homicides on your hands, don't you? And it does seem that there might be some kind of pattern emerging. You see, I discovered something else: your victims were killed in the same sequence as their saints' days, starting with Saint Anne on December fourth, Saint Cyril on Janu­ary twelfth, and so on. Saint Cecilia's day is March ninth."

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"What about Junior Abraham? He had his head blown off."

"It's difficult to tell if Junior Abraham fits into this pat­tern, because so many saints had their heads removed, in one way or another. You should read your Foxe's Book of Martyrs. One poor soul was tied to the tail of a mad bull, so that he was dragged down the temple steps and had his brains knocked out."

"Jesus. Gives me a migraine to think about it."

"Oh, there were far worse tortures than that. Some Chris­tian converts had their stomachs cut open and filled with corn, so that pigs could be brought to feed off it and devour their intestines at the same time."

"Terrific. I'm glad I haven't eaten yet. But thanks, Father. This could be a very useful line of inquiry. We're pretty sure that these homicides are something to do with Santeria, so maybe you're right, and there is a connection with saints."

"Santeria? I'd advise you to be extremely cautious, in that case. The santeros guard their secrecy with great zeal."

"Thanks for the warning, Father, but I think I already have a good idea of what I'm up against."

"God be with you, Decker."

"You too, Father."

That night, he was struggling his way through the under­growth again. He knew it was only midafternoon, but the smoke from the burning scrub was so thick that the sun ap­peared only as a pallid disk, paler than the moon. The crackling of the fire was deafening, and he could hear terri­ble screaming somewhere off to his left. Men were being burned alive.

He lurched down into an overgrown hollow, where his face was lashed by crisscross briars. For a few moments he thought he was going to be hopelessly entangled, but then

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he managed to break free and climb up a short, steep slope. The next thing he knew he was standing on the plank road, and he could see troops gathering up about a hundred yards ahead of him, both cavalry and infantry, their bridles clink­ing, their swords and bayonets shining in the smoky gloom.

He slowed down now and walked more steadily, feeling the rough-sawed boards beneath his lacerated feet. Some­body was shouting, "Muster together, boys! We have them on the run now! Make for the railroad track, we can out­flank them!"

He was only thirty yards away from the assembly of troops when he came across a blackened shape sitting on the edge of the plank road. At first he couldn't think what it was, but as he came closer he realized it was a man, almost completely charred, yet obviously still alive, because he was trembling and uttering grunts of pain. Smoke was still trail­ing from his hair, and his ears were burned to tiny cinders.

"What's your name, fellow?" Decker asked him.

The figure didn't answer.

"What division are you with? Anderson's? Wofford's?"

At last the figure turned its head and stared at him. "Han-cock's," he croaked. "We were all set afire."

Decker unscrewed his water bottle and poured some into the palm of his hand, touching it against the man's lips. They felt dry and crisp, like burned bacon rinds. The man managed to suck up a little before he started coughing, and when he coughed he sprayed shreds of bloodied lung into Decker's hand.

"Tell me your name," Decker repeated. "You may be a Yankee, but I'll get word to your family, if I can."

The man shook his head. He couldn't stop coughing and he couldn't find the breath to speak.

Decker was still kneeling next to him when he felt the

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plank road shaking, as if horses were approaching. He turned around and he could see the tall dark figure storming toward him, its coattails flapping like wings. It was less than fifty yards away, and it seemed to rumble as it approached, more like a thunderstorm than a man.

Decker stood up and tried to run—an exhausted, sore-footed canter. He knew that it was probably hopeless, trying to escape. If this creature had set fire to whole divisions, God knows what it was going to do to him. But he kept stumbling forward, gasping with effort, waving every now and again to see if he could attract the attention of the troops up ahead of him.

"Hi! Hi there! Help me!"

But then he turned to see how close the creature was, and it was right on top of him. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the curtains of its coat, and again he found himself trapped in a knobbly cage of bones, unable to twist himself free, un­able to breathe.

He shouted out, and sat up, and switched on the bedside light.

And Cathy was there.

She was standing beside the bed, quite still. She was dressed in one of her plain white nightdresses, and there were green leaves and purple herbs entwined around her wrists, like bracelets. Her face was intensely white, almost fluorescent, and her eyes were blurry, as if they were filled with tears, or as if she were blinking as fast as a humming­bird's wing.

He started to say, "Cathy—" but then his throat choked up. He simply couldn't find the words. He had tried to talk to her so many times through mediums and clairvoyants. He had searched for any trace that she hadn't left him forever, that her spirit was still somewhere close by. He had heard

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nothing, felt nothing, found nothing. No perfumes, no whispers, no shadows. But now she was here, unbidden, looking as real as if she were still alive.

"This will be the last time," she said. Her voice sounded high and resonant, like a tuning fork. "If I try to come again, Saint Barbara will have me trapped by Oyá for all eternity in the split second between life and death—dying and dying and dying forever."

Decker smeared the tears from his eyes. "I, ah—I know that you have to go, sweetheart. But I know what you've done for me, too. How much you've been protecting me. I know who Saint Barbara really is, too."

"I can't keep her away from you any longer. She wants her revenge, and it has to be your time next."

"You don't know how much I miss you. If it's my time next, then maybe that's something I can look forward to. We can be together again."

Cathy gave him a wan smile. "The afterlife is not what you think it is, my darling. It's lonely and silent. The dead grieve for their loved ones as much as the living. They grieve for their lost lives, too."

"So this is it, then? The very last good-bye."

"I've come to tell you more than good-bye. You can still save yourself from Saint Barbara. But you will have to make an ally of the one person you hate more than any other."

"I don't understand you."

"I saw who killed me, Decker."

"What?"

"I saw who shot me. I was asleep and I felt somebody shake my shoulder. I opened my eyes and then she appeared, out of thin air. She was smiling. She had come to kill me, and she was smiling."

"A woman shot you?" Decker said, dumbfounded. "She was very tall and she had beads in her hair."

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"Jesus. I don't believe this. Queen Aché shot you herself?" "Nobody saw her but me. She said, `Irosun oche,' and then she fired."

"I'll kill her. I swear to God I'll tear her head off." "You need her help, my darling."

"Her help? All I want to do is blow her brains out, the same she did to you."

"Saint Barbara wants your blood, Decker, and it's your time next. Queen Ache is the only one who has the power to save you."

"Why should she? She hates me as much as I hate her. Why do you think she shot you? To warn me off. To keep me from breaking her drug racket. And she was clever, wasn't she? She killed a cop without actually killing a cop."

"She will help you if she has to."

"I don't get it."

"She came close up to me to shoot me, so close that she pressed the gun against my forehead. I seized her hair, and pulled it, and some of her hair and some of her beads came out in my hand. They're still there now, under the bed.

"I was the only witness to my own killing, but those beads will give you proof of who did it. Then there's Junior Abra­ham. When Queen Aché shot him, there were many wit­nesses. They don't think that they saw her. They think that they saw somebody else. But they did see her, and if you can find a way to open their eyes, you will have all the evidence you need."

"Cathy—"

"I have to go now, Decker. I can't do any more." "Can I touch you?"

"Of course."

He stood up and cautiously approached her. She looked up at him and he saw in her yellow eyes all of the years they

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could have had together, all of the summers and the winters and the walks along the waterfront, where the Confederate army lay dead, and where she lay dead, too.

He took her in his arms and closed his eyes and there was nothing there, no substance at all, only the briefest of chills.

"Good-bye," she whispered, inside his head. He opened his eyes and she was gone.

He knelt down and peered under the bed, but he couldn't see any beads. He knew that the forensic people had gone over the apartment after Cathy was shot, and if there had been any beads there, or pulled-out hair, surely they would have discovered them.

He took the flashlight out of the nightstand and flicked it around, but he still couldn't see anything. In the end, he heaved the bed to the other side of the room.

They really took some finding, but there they were. Three small ivory beads, almost the same color as the car­pet, in the gap between the edge of the carpet and the skirt­ing board. Decker went to the kitchen for a polythene food bag, carefully picking up each bead with tweezers and drop­ping it inside. When he inspected them closely, he saw that two of them had wisps of hair in them.

"Got you, Your Majesty," he breathed.

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CHAPTER TWENTY‑

EIGHT

Back at headquarters, Decker found that Hicks had left a scribbled note for him.

I checked the historical records at City Hall. John Mason's great-great-grandfather was Hiram P. Mason, who was manager out on Cudahy's tobacco plantation out near Tuckahoe. He served as a captain in Heth's division in the First Army Corps during the Civil War, November 1863–May 1864.

Decker went over to the window and looked down at Grace Street. It was only a few minutes past noon and—un­like him—nobody had a shadow. The street looked bright and unreal, like a scene from The Bodysnatchers. For all he knew, the So-Scary Man was down there, too, walking right through the crowds, unseen, unnoticed, on his way to mur‑

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der another victim. On his way to murder him, if Cathy was right.

He was driving slowly along St. James Street when he saw Junior Abraham's brother Treasure walking toward him, with three other young men and a girl with cornrow hair and the tightest white jeans that he had ever seen. She looked as if she were naked and her legs had simply been painted white. He pulled into the curb and put down the window.

"Hi, Treasure," he said, without taking his eyes off the girl. "How about you and me having a little friendly conversation?"

Treasure sniffed and jerked his head. He was wearing sloppy brown cargo pants and a green T-shirt with The Big Gig printed on it in red letters. "Kind of busy right now, Lieutenant."

"Listen . . . I'm working my butt off trying to find out who killed your brother. You can spare me a couple of minutes, can't you?"

"I don't know. Maybe it's better if we kind of forget about it, you know? People like that ... you don't want to go up­setting people like that."

"People like what?"

"I don't know, man. People who come up to you when you're eating your lunch and blow your fucking head off."

Decker reached across and opened the passenger door. "Ten minutes tops. Come on. Junior deserves that much, doesn't he?"

The girl winked at Decker and said, "Go on, Treasure. Go talk to the nice policeman. You can catch up with us later."

Treasure reluctantly heaved himself into the car. Decker immediately pulled away from the curb with a brisk squeal of tires and headed north.

"Where are we going, man?" Treasure asked, after they had driven six blocks. "I thought you just wanted to talk."

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"I do. But I want you to meet a friend of mine. Somebody who can help you remember what happened."

"Hey . . . you're not going to pull out my toenails or nothing?"

"Of course not. We want to have a little relaxing chin music, that's all."

"I told you . . . I don't remember what the guy looked like. He was just kind of, like, normal. Not too tall, not too short."

"We'll see." He picked up his cell phone and punched out Hicks's home number.

He drove out to Valley Road and parked in front of the Hicks house. As they climbed out, Rhoda opened the front door, wearing a flowery yellow sundress. "Tim not with you?" she asked, looking around.

"No, poor guy. He had a whole heap of paperwork to fin­ish off. This is Treasure, the young man I was telling you about on the phone. Treasure, meet Rhoda."

Treasure sniffed and wiped his hands on his pants. "Come along in," Rhoda said. "Do you want coffee or anything? Maybe a soda?"

"No, we're fine, thanks, Rhoda. I promised not to take up too much of Treasure's time."

"Treasure, that's an unusual name."

"My mom always used to call me Mama's Little Treasure. It stuck even when I grew big."

"That's so sweet."

"You think so? I think it's wholly embarrassing."

Rhoda had already spread a neatly pressed white table­cloth on the kitchen table and set up two white candles. She drew the blinds and lit the candles, and then she sat down, her hands pressed together as if she were praying. Treasure looked at Decker and said, "What?"

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Rhoda said, "All you have to do is sit down and try to relax."

"Go on," Decker urged him, and so he dragged out a chair and sat down, sniffing again and jerking his head.

Rhoda took hold of his hand. "What we're trying to do today, Treasure, is to talk to Junior."

"Say what? Junior had his nut blown off. Junior can't talk."

"Junior's dead, for sure. He doesn't have a physical pres­ence anymore. But his spirit lives on, and always will, just as all of our spirits live on. God creates us, Treasure, and you don't think that God would ever allow His precious cre­ations to die?"

"Listen, Lieutenant, I thought you and me was going to talk. I didn't think you was bringing me to no prayer meeting."

"This isn't a prayer meeting, Treasure. This is to help you remember."

"I told you. How many times did I told you? I can't ex­actly remember what the guy looked like. It all happened so fast, it was like I couldn't focus my eyes."

Rhoda turned her head abruptly to the left and said, "Ju­nior! Junior Abraham! Your brother Treasure's here."

Treasure bobbed up out of his seat and looked around, wide-eyed. When he realized that Junior wasn't standing right behind him, he blew out his cheeks and said, "Shit, you scared me then. You really scared me."

Rhoda closed her eyes. "Junior Abraham, your brother's here. Your brother wants you to tell him what happened to you."

Treasure said, "Come on, this is seriously nuts. I went to Junior's funeral, I laid a rose on top of his casket. He can't talk to me."

Decker pressed his finger to his lips. "Give it a chance, Treasure. I've seen this myself, and it works."

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"Maybe I don't want to talk to Junior. I mean, maybe I'm crapping my pants here."

"Your brother wouldn't do anything to harm you. Besides, he deserves justice, doesn't he?"

"I don't know. I guess."

Treasure stayed quiet, but he still couldn't stop himself from twitching and flinching. Rhoda took out her okuele and dropped it onto the table. She made a note of how the medallions had fallen, and then she said, "Junior, listen to me. Your brother's here. He wants to know who hurt you."

Treasure looked more and more unhappy, but Rhoda kept on calling Junior, her voice curiously flat, as if she were speaking from another room.

"Junior, you haven't gone far, I know that. You're still very close to us. Speak to us, Junior."

She cast the okuele three more times. More than ten min­utes had gone by, and even Decker was beginning to feel that this wasn't going to work. But then he began to notice that the kitchen appeared to be growing darker, as if clouds were sliding over the sun. One of the candle flames gave a nervous jump, and then the other, and then they both be­gan to burn brighter.

"I can feel you, Junior. I know you're here. Talk to your brother, ask him to remember what really happened."

The candle flames rose higher and higher, and they began to burn so fiercely that they hissed, like oxyacetylene torches. The light was so dazzling that Treasure had to shield his eyes with his hand. In the very center of the light, Decker thought that he could make out a face, but it was so intense that it was impossible to say for sure.

It was only when Rhoda began to speak that he knew that she had contacted Junior Abraham, wherever he was, in heaven or hell, or some place in between. Her voice was

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very harsh and low, and it made Decker feel as if his scalp were being pricked by dozens of sewing needles.

"We was sitting together, man, and we was talking about the Down Home Family Reunion."

Treasure stared at Rhoda openmouthed.

"You was saying that we ought to be giving protection to the folks who run the food and the craft stalls, you know, in case their stalls got accidentally knocked over or set on fire or something or some kid threw dog shit into their pork'n'beans."

"That's Junior," Treasure said, in disbelief, turning to Decker with his hand still raised to shield his eyes. "That's Junior talking. That's her talking but that's Junior talking. How does she do that?"

"You think now, Treasure. You think good. We was sitting there talking about the Down Home Family Reunion and somebody comes walking right up to the table carrying a tray."

"I remember," Treasure said, wildly nodding his head. "I remember it exactly."

"Try to vis-alize it in your mind's eye. You see the tray, yes? You see them four bowls of soup?"

"I see them. I see them."

"Now I want you to look up. I want you to raise your eyes, brother, and look directly in the face of the person who's carrying the tray."

Treasure said, "I can't, Junior. It's like it's all blurry. I just can't see who it is."

"Yes, you can. It ain't going to be easy, because that par­ticular memory has a spell on it. Like a kind of a trick, man, to stop you remembering what you really saw. But you can do it, Treasure. Come on, brother. Show me that you're not as dumb as people say you are."

"Hey—who says I'm dumb?"

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"You ain't dumb, man. You can raise your eyes and tell me who's carrying that tray."

"I don't know, Junior. My eyes won't go up that far."

"You remember that tray flying in the air and the bowls of soup flying in the air and then what?"

"Bang! that's all. Bang, and your head got blown off."

"Think of that very instant when the gun went off. Think hard, Treasure. Who was holding that gun?"

Treasure squeezed his eyes tight shut and gritted his teeth in concentration. The candles hissed hotter and hotter and the wax was pouring down the candlesticks and onto the tablecloth.

Suddenly Treasure opened his eyes and stared at Rhoda with his mouth open. "Shee-it!" he exclaimed. "Shee-it, it weren't no waiter guy at all! Shee-it!"

"Who was it, Treasure? I want to hear you say the name."

"It was her. That Queen Aché ho, that's who it was! I seen her! I seen her as clear as daytime! She come up to the table and she throw the soup all over us and bang! I turn around and say, 'Junior, you been hurt?' but Junior ain't got no head no more. Queen Aché, shee-it. I'm going to kill that ho, I swear to God! I'm going to kill her!"

Almost at once, the hissing died down and the candle flames began to gutter. Rhoda stood up and leaned over the table and blew them out. Amidst the curls of acrid smoke, she reached over and took hold of Treasure's hand, and squeezed it, and smiled at him.

"Now you remember who killed your brother, don't you?" "Absolutely. I can't understand how I couldn't remember it before."

"You couldn't remember it before because Queen Aché cast a Santeria spell on everybody in the restaurant, includ­ing you. It was very powerful earth-magic. There's hardly

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anybody who can work that kind of spell these days, even a babalawo."

"But why did she have to do that?" Treasure asked. "She could have whacked him some place private, couldn't she? She didn't need no spell."

Decker shook his head. "That was Queen Aché all over. She wanted people to know that if you try to double-cross her, you can't escape from her anywhere, even in a public restaurant."

"I'm going to waste her, man, I swear to God."

"No, you're not. But you're going to go into court and tes­tify against her. You and all the other witnesses, when I can get them to remember what you just remembered." They heard the key in the front door, and Daisy, from the living room, calling out, "Daddy! Daddy!"

Rhoda stood up and put up the blind. Hicks came into the kitchen, toting Daisy on his arm, but when he saw Decker and Treasure his smile immediately vanished.

"What's happening?" he demanded. "What's he doing here?"

Decker coughed and said, "Ah—I can explain."

Rhoda turned to Decker in bewilderment. "You mean to say that Tim didn't know you were coming here?" she asked him. "That's not what you told me on the phone."

"Actually, to be fair, I didn't tell you that he knew and I didn't tell you that he didn't know."

"You lied to me, Lieutenant. There's nothing fair about that!"

"Well, I truly apologize if you got the wrong impression, Rhoda. But to be honest I don't think that Tim would have been very happy about your holding another séance, do you? Especially with Treasure here."

"I ain't done nothing," Treasure said. "I just came along because I was axed."

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Hicks put Daisy down on the floor. "Can I talk to you in private, please, Lieutenant?"

"Tim—" Rhoda said.

"Let me handle this, honey. I'm not going to say anything out of line."

"Too right you're not," Decker told him. "This is a multi­ple homicide investigation and I'm in charge of it and it was my decision that we needed Rhoda's assistance."

"Rhoda's my wife, Lieutenant."

"She's also the only person I know who could help Trea­sure to remember who killed his brother. And she has. He's remembered."

"If I'd known you were going to pull a stunt like this—" "Exactly, that's why I didn't tell you."

"I'm going to have to make a formal complaint about this. You realize what you've done here? You've put my fam­ily in jeopardy."

"Don't overreact. Nobody has to know about this."

"Oh no? What are you going to say to the district attor­ney when he asks you how Treasure suddenly managed to remember what he saw?"

"I'm sure as hell not going to say that his dead brother told him, during a séance."

"I can't believe this. I can't believe you did this." "It was Queen Aché herself," Decker said.

"What?"

"There was no waiter. Queen Aché used a Santeria spell and shot Junior Abraham herself."

"Well, that makes me feel a whole lot better. My wife has been duped into providing incriminating evidence against the single most ruthless racketeer in Richmond. For Pete's sake, Lieutenant, think what happened to your Cathy!"

"Your family's going to be safe, Tim, I promise you. Think about it: We're never going to have any chance of catching

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our invisible killer unless we have somebody on our side who can see him, and knows what it takes to corner him." "What are you saying?"

"We can use Treasure's evidence as a way of persuading Queen Aché to help us."

"You're prepared to do that? You're really prepared to do that? I thought you suspected that Queen Aché had your Cathy killed."

"I don't just suspect it, sport. I know it for certain. But there are times in this job when you have to work with peo­ple you would happily see dead, because that's the only way you're going to get a result. This guy has already killed four people and I'm pretty sure that he's going to kill a whole lot more. What do you suggest we do? Shrug our shoulders and let him carry on with it?"

Hicks put his arm around Rhoda and held her close. He was obviously finding it difficult to contain his anger, but Rhoda reached up and touched his lips with her fingertips to keep him silent.

Decker stood up. "I'm going to take Treasure back to the city. I'll see you back at headquarters."

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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

He dropped off Treasure on Clay Street. "Listen—when Queen Aché finds out that we have eyewitnesses you're go­ing to be in real jeopardy, you understand that?"

"You think I give a flying fuck about that? That woman blew my brother's head off."

"Is there some place you can go, somewhere safe? If not, I can arrange some protection for you."

"I got cousins in Chester."

"Okay, then. So long as you let me know where you are." Treasure twitched his head. "That was something else,

wasn't it? Junior talking to me just like he's still alive?"

"It surely was. Here's my number. Call me as soon as you

get to Chester."

He watched Treasure lope off bandy-legged along the sidewalk, and as he did his cell phone rang.

"Lieutenant? This is Captain Toni Morello from the Of­fice of the Command Historian. I've found something that I think will really interest you."

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"You want me to come down to Fort Monroe? I can be with you by . . . say, five o'clock if that's okay."