Voodoo Moon

Part 1
ONE

Way up here, at certain times of year, you can sometimes hear them screaming, more than twenty people who died in the asylum fire over thirty years ago.

At least, that's what some of the locals tell you, about the screaming, I mean.

I thought about that as I steered my rental Chevrolet through the countryside that graceful, warm autumn morning. It was weather so gorgeous, it made you a little crazy. You didn't quite know what to do with yourself, it was so exhilarating. Green rolling hills, trees still full and furious with color, black and white dairy cows, green John Deere harvesters, and lazy silver creeks winding past small, white, tidy farmhouses and clean red barns. Hard to imagine the screams of the dying up in these smoky hills on such a day.

The fire-gutted Sterling Psychiatric Hospital wasn't difficult to find. It sat on top of a very high hill. And it had a TV production van from Dubuque parked in front of it. Tandy West was already at work.

You probably know the name. The waif on Mind Power, cable TV's second most popular show a few years back, as the publicists had been eager to tell you then. They weren't so eager to tell you that now, since the show had slipped to the mid-twenties in the ratings and was facing cancellation.

Five years ago, a year after my wife died, I was asked by a law firm to investigate the murder of which their very wealthy client had been accused by an exceedingly ambitious county attorney. Said wealthy client wanted a bona fide FBI psychological profiler to work for him, which was me, or at least was me when I worked for the bureau; he also wanted a psychic who'd worked successfully with police departments before, which was Tandy West, who was twenty-one years old at the time. That's how Tandy and I met.

She'd phoned me last night in Cedar Rapids and asked, somewhat desperately, I thought, if I could fly up in the morning and "help out." She wouldn't say any more. I had some time off coming at the law firm where I worked as a legal investigator, and she'd given me a perfect excuse to take my ancient and beloved biplane to the northern part of the state. So why not? It wasn't as if the fetching Tandy had ever quite left my memory. There'd been a sweetness about her that had comforted me even more than the gentle sex she'd had to offer.

I was curious about seeing her. See if she'd gained any self-confidence. She was the opposite of her beautiful, brilliant, and brittle older sister Laura. Timid, anxious, and self-deprecating. That was Tandy. The first time I'd ever slipped her bra off, she'd said, "Don't look at them, Robert. They're too small. If they were fishes, I'd throw them back in." That had been only the beginning, I was to learn. By dawn, she had commented that her feet were too big, her ribs too bony, her nose too pugged, her eyes too big, and her bottom like a middle-aged woman's. I'd returned the favor by saying I wished my nose weren't so big, my penis so small, my ears not quite so jugged. To which she'd said: "Your nose is fine, your penis is average-sized, and your ears aren't jugged at all. You're just trying to make me feel better. But unfortunately, it didn't take. I just wish I looked like Laura. No, I wish I was Laura." I was glad she wasn't. Laura the Invincible could've given Benito Mussolini a few lessons in arrogance. I liked Tandy. She was cute and sexy in a teenage sort of way, and she was fun as hell in the sack.

So I'd set off at dawn this morning, rented a car on landing, and now here I was.

Laura West said, "I hate using local crews. They're never very good. But Chicago didn't want to pay the freight to send out a crew of our own."

Mind Power was produced by a Chicago cable network that did a lot of infomercials and some of the wilder religious programs. One of their more popular pastors always proclaimed that there was nothing wrong with smiting sin. Toward this end, he packed a.357 Magnum, which he kept on his pulpit right next to his Bible. You know, the way Jesus did.

"Well, this is a pretty easy shoot, I guess," Laura said, trying to reassure herself. "I mean, we just need a couple of establishing shots of the asylum and then an interview with the kid."

"The kid?"

She smiled. She was tall, regal, slender, shapely, beautiful in an icy blond way, and utterly without humility or humor. She was in all likelihood the forerunner of a master race that would someday seize all the skyscrapers in all the countries that mattered and take over the human species. Even her tampons were probably Armani. She'd never liked me, and I'd never liked her right back. Maybe it was her Phi Beta Kappa key. She and Tandy had grown up in one of those Walt Disney Iowa Mississippi river towns where you can easily imagine the steamships churning upriver in all their ostentatious glory, and where they'd been cheerleaders and fun dates and B+ students and good daughters.

Tandy had secretly grown up with a headful of talents that scared both herself and her parents. Even as a five-year-old, she could "find" things that neighborhood people had lost, including a little girl who had fallen down a sewer. She could also occasion-ally "picture" the person who had robbed the local 7-Eleven, or snatched an old woman's purse, or, when she was twelve, the man who had murdered the town's one and only professional streetwalker. She often crudely sketched out the pictures she saw. The local gendarmes and her parents agreed to keep Tandy their secret. The folks didn't want her exploited; the cops didn't want their enviable arrest record attributed to a little girl. Then, when she joined her sister at the University of Iowa, Tandy "pictured" the rapist who had been terrifying the campus. He was arrested, and confessed. Tandy was a secret no more. It was at that point that Laura became Tandy's official protector: if you wanted anything with Tandy, you had to go through Laura first. And going through Laura was oftentimes hard on both mind and soul. Two years later, the rich man the ambitious county attorney was after hired both Tandy and me to prove him innocent.

"Oh, shit, that guy is an idiot. We got to town here two days ago and he was the only one we could turn up."

Laura was watching the small monitor sitting on top of the large, black metal trunk the video equipment was stored in.

The setup was simple. Tandy, with a hand mike, walked around the ash-gray remains of the psychiatric hospital, telling her viewers what had happened here. All the camera needed to do was follow her. Stay wide enough to keep her in focus with the asylum clearly in the background. TV Cinematography 101. For some reason, though, the cameraman had elected to stay very tight on Tandy's face. Lovely as it was, we also needed to see the burned hulk for reference to what Tandy was talking about.

"I'll be right back," Laura said.

There were a number of ways Laura could have handled the situation diplomatically. She declined to use any of them.

The camera operator was one of those lumbering, shaggy, overgrown boy-men with a face of twenty and a belly of forty. He wore Elvis sideburns and a Marilyn Manson T-shirt. He undoubtedly considered himself a part of showbiz. He looked sad and put-upon and utterly incompetent. He also looked scared as hell of Laura, and I didn't blame him.

I saw all this in pantomime: her angrily wagging her finger at him; him hangdog defending himself with slow useless words and downcast defeated eyes; him reluctantly taking the camera clamp off his shoulder; him handing over the camera like a disgraced pitcher handing the ball to the manager who has just pulled him out of the game; and her expertly mounting the camera on her own shoulder and then going over to talk to Tandy.

He shambled over to the van where I was standing. He looked embarrassed. I felt sorry for him.

"Cal won't like this," he said.

"Who's Cal?"

"The boss. Tri-State Video. The deal is, nobody's supposed to touch the equipment except us. He's gonna kick my ass, I tell him what she did."

"Maybe you shouldn't tell him."

"Cal's got this way of finding stuff out."

The blue van with TRI-STATE VIDEO painted red-white-and-blue on the driver's door had a sliding back door that was partly opened. He dug into a cold chest and retrieved an ice-dripping can of Diet Pepsi. He held it out to me. "Want one?"

"No, thanks."

We leaned against the front of the truck watching them work. He worked on his Diet Pepsi.

Laura had set the camera down. She was blocking out the shot. Rehearsing words in relation to action.

The kid said, "Just because you live in Chicago doesn't necessarily mean you know more than somebody who lives in Iowa."

"Right."

"Cal, he shot this kung fu movie with this guy who's really big in Taiwan. It's been on cable and everything. I bet Cal's got a lot more credentials than she does. And I got to shoot the governor of Missouri when he was here one time. He said I did a real good job." Then, "You know her?"

"A little bit."

"She always like this?"

"She's under a lot of pressure." I looked over at him. He was still embarrassed. "It's nothing to get upset about. Nobody needs to know what happened. I'll ask her not to say anything to Cal."

He looked relieved. "Hey, really?"

"Really."

"'Cause Cal might fire my ass, she makes a big deal of it. And I'm supposed to get married in the spring. And there just aren't that many video jobs around. I'd have to go back to Best Buy. You know, on the floor. I worked there four years."

"I'll talk to her."

He gunned the rest of his pop and said, "Mother Nature's calling me. I'm gonna take a pee in the woods over there."

I went up the incline to where the asylum had once stood. Judging by the width and length of the foundation, it had been a large wooden building. The charred chimney indicated that it had been three stories tall. The place had the air of ancient ruin, a tumbledown monastery in the south of France, perhaps. Until you looked at the ground, anyway. Gold Miller beer cans and red Trojan condom wrappers and crumpled Camel cigarettes told of some very modern teenagers. A crow was perched on the top of the chimney, gleaming sleek and black. He did not seem unduly impressed with the human activity going on beneath him.

Laura and Tandy continued their blocking. The camera sat atop a small boulder. Tandy saw me and waved. Her fiery hair was made even more fiery by the sunlight, fierce red Irish hair that marked women capable of magic in ancient Celtic warrior tribes. In her blue turtleneck and fawn-colored suede jeans, she was as elegant and elegiac as always-elegiac because, like all women possessed of magic, there was an air of sorrow about her that never quite faded. I could see it-even feel it-even from this distance.

I sat next to the camera. Watched them. Laura was doing a much better job than the kid had done. I understood now why she'd been so unhappy.

"Let's try one," she said.

She came over to get the camera.

"Hi, Robert!" Tandy called to me and waved again. I waved back. Laura hefted the camera. Got it ready to shoot.

"I told the kid you wouldn't say anything to his boss."

"He's an idiot, Robert."

I shrugged. "Maybe he'd be an idiot in Chicago. But out here he's probably just fine."

She laughed coldly. "You should be a union representative, Robert. They always say things like that."

"He's getting married in the spring."

"Isn't that just ducky?" She smiled sarcastically.

"You're a hard woman." I tried to kid the line but we both knew I was serious.

"I know I am, Robert. And I intend to stay that way in order to protect my sister." She paused. "I don't know why the hell she called you, anyway. Nothing personal."

"Of course not."

"She's the star now. She doesn't need to share the spotlight anymore. And anyway, things are going just fine."

"I can see that."

"Except for that incompetent fucking cameraman. And I am going to tell his boss."

Then she went to work.

"Over thirty years ago, on this ground where I'm standing, was an experimental, cutting-edge psychiatric hospital called the Sterling Institute, named after its founder, a psychiatrist named J. K. Sterling.

"The hospital treated many of the most violent criminals in America, studying them, trying to quantify them as to types of psychological disorders. Sterling was cited here and in Europe as one of the most important medical men of his time. He was regarded as the Freud of criminology.

"Here is what's left of his hospital. A burned-out hulk over which crows and coyotes and the occasional wolf now have domain. His career came to a violent end one day over a quarter a century ago when a patient named Renard-a sadomasochistic rapist and murderer-slashed Sterling's throat and then doused much of the first floor with gasoline and set it ablaze. More than twenty patients and staff perished in the fire.

"A manhunt found Paul Renard the next day, hiding in a cave. But he managed to elude them once again. He was never found. There were rumors he made it to Europe; rumors he's now living in South America; even rumors that he's living in Brenner again. In disguise, of course. Most officials seem to think he's dead.

"The land around the remains of the asylum seems barren compared to other land nearby. It even seems several degrees cooler-a clammy kind of chill-when you stand near the charred foundation-like that of Poe's description in 'The Fall of the House of Usher.'

"I'm here at the request of a local teenage boy who is about to go on trial for first-degree murder in the death of his girlfriend. The boy, Rick Hennessy, claims to be possessed by the spirit of the killer Paul Renard. He claims he explained this many times to a counselor his parents had sent him to but that the counselor refused to take him seriously.

"The Hennessys have asked Mind Power to come here to this small Iowa town and talk with Rick Hennessy and see if we can help him in any way. We thought we'd give you a look at the notorious asylum from which Paul Renard escaped nearly thirty-five years ago, leaving twenty people dead in his wake.

"Now, we go into town and talk to the Hennessy boy."

"Cut!" Laura said. "Great, Tandy! Let me check it on playback. But I think we've got it."

Tandy brought her microphone over to Laura and then turned and looked at me. Her smile was a heartbreaker.