The Devil in Gray (31 page)

She read again from Lieutenant General Longstreet's diaries.

“
That night, the casket was hurried by gun carriage to Richmond, and at midnight put aboard the frigate
Nathan Cooper
to be taken as far out toward Chesapeake Bay as was possible, having regard to the Union blockade, and dropped at the greatest possible depth
.

“
Unfortunately, the Richmond waterfront suffered that night a heavy barrage from the enemy's naval guns, and before she could even be untied from the dock at Shockoe Creek, the
Nathan Cooper
was struck amidships by a cannonball which sank her immediately, along with eighteen of her crew. I am sad for their unfortunate demise, but at least I am safe now in the knowledge that Major Shroud will be incarcerated in his casket forever underwater, and will never again represent a threat to humankind
.

“
I myself am overwhelmed with remorse for my misjudgment, and for having been tempted to take the wrong path, because it is only through the will of the Lord God Almighty that righteousness may prevail; and if the Lord God Almighty considers that I was gravely mistaken in appealing to a heathen religion for assistance in our time of extreme trouble, then I can only beg Him for forgiveness, and hope that He will understand that I was looking only to save the Confederacy, and its commitment to glory, and to honor, and to God
.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

The telephone warbled right next to his ear and made him jerk. He was hunched on the couch with his coat over his shoulders. He had started off the night in bed, but as soon as he had fallen asleep he was overwhelmed by nightmares of fire and screaming and men made of nothing but bones, and so he had camped the night in the living room, with the lights on.

“Lieutenant?”

Decker stiffly sat up and rubbed the back of his neck. “Hicks? What the hell time is it?”

“Seven-twenty. I'm haven't left home yet, but I've been checking my e-mail.”

“What do you want? A citation?”

“I had a message from public records in Charlottesville. Alison Maitland's maiden name was Alison Bell, but her mother was the great-granddaughter of Lieutenant Henry Stannard, of the Second Company, Richmond Howitzers.”

Decker reached over to the coffee table and picked up the transcript of Lieutenant General Longstreet's private diary. “Bingo. Lieutenant H.N. Stannard was one of the Devil's Brigade, too. He was possessed by Oyá, who was syncretized with Saint Anne of Ephesus. Father Thomas guessed right. Saint Anne was supposed to have been a virgin, but she became pregnant with a child whom she claimed was ‘a gift from God.' Her child was killed in the womb and then she was beheaded.

“This is what our perpetrator is doing, sport, beyond any shadow of a doubt. For some reason he's taking his revenge on the descendants of every man who served in the Devil's Brigade, and he's killing them in the same way that their syncretized saints were martyred. Saint Anne, stabbed and beheaded; Saint Erasmus, disemboweled; and so on. And he's doing it in the same order as their saints' days.”

“So what was your great-great-grandfather's saint, Lieutenant?”

“Hold on … here it is. He was Osun, the messenger of immediate danger, whatever that means. He was worshiped in Santería under the name of Saint James Intercisus.”

“So whatever happened to Saint James what's-his-face … the same thing's going to happen to you?”

“I guess so. The trouble is, I don't know what happened to him.”

“I'm still on the Internet … I can check it out for you. Want to give me that name again?”

“In-ter-cis-us. Listen, I'm urgently in need of some coffee. I'll see you at nine, okay? If Ayula Adebolu is right, Changó wants this to be my last day on earth. I'm just going to make damn sure that it isn't.”

“Okay, Lieutenant. Be cool.”

Decker took a shower. Then he brewed himself a double-strength espresso. He dressed in a dark gray shirt with a maroon silk necktie and black pants. As he flicked up his hair into his usual pompadour, he suddenly stopped and stared at himself. There were damson-colored circles under his eyes that matched his necktie, and the lines in his cheeks looked as if they had been engraved in his skin. What if this
was
his last day on earth? What if his visions and nightmares were all going to come true? There was no evidence yet that Moses Adebolu had been killed by anything other than a freak lightning strike, but supposing he
had
been incinerated by Changó, because Changó was angry at him for offering Decker his help?

Aluya had seemed to believe that was what had happened to him; and Cathy had warned him again and again, even at the risk of suffering her killing over and over again, for all eternity.

Up until now, in spite of everything he had witnessed, he hadn't been able to believe that he was in any real danger. Ghosts and visions were frightening, but after all they were only ghosts and visions. But he thought about Lieutenant General Longstreet's account of men being “shoveled wholesale into the fires of hell” and for the first time in his career he felt genuinely unsettled. He had coped in his career with attacks with broken bottles, knives, and shotguns. Once a half-ton block of concrete had been dropped onto the roof of his car. But there nothing so disturbing as knowing that somebody evil and angry was coming for him, somebody he might not even be able to
see
, and that he was helpless to stop him.

He walked back through to the living room to read through Toni Morello's transcript again, and to finish his coffee. As he did so, the long net curtains along the window appeared to ripple, as if they had been stirred by an early-morning breeze. The strange thing was, though, that all of the windows were closed.

He stared at the curtains for a while, but they didn't move again. For some reason he had the distinct feeling that he wasn't alone, that there was somebody else in his apartment, hiding. He didn't know why. He put down his coffee mug and went across to the kitchen. Nobody there. The front door was still locked and chained, although he knew from the way in which Cathy had manifested herself that spirits weren't deterred by walls or locked doors.

He took down his shoulder holster from the hat stand and buckled it on. Then he crossed the living room and went back into the bedroom.

“Anybody there?”

This was insane. Yet Jerry Maitland must have thought that he was insane, too, when his arms started to bleed all down his new wallpaper, and when his pregnant wife was stabbed and her head cut off in front of his eyes. And Major Drewry must have thought he had lost his reason, when he was gutted in the shower. And John Mason, too, when he was blinded and boiled.

There was somebody here, or some
thing
. Some deeply malevolent force, a force that wanted to do him serious harm. It had warned him right from the very beginning, on Alison Maitland's 911 call, and it had warned him in his dreams. It wasn't quite ready to take him yet, but time was hurrying away and it was very close.

He listened and listened but he couldn't hear anything. But that was what disturbed him so much. The interior of his apartment was utterly silent. No traffic from I-95; no steamboats hooting; no airplanes flying overhead from Richmond International. He felt as if the entire apartment had been swaddled in thick insulation, or his ears had been packed with cotton.

He took one step across the room, and then another. He stopped and turned around. For an instant, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he glimpsed a shadow flitting across his bedroom mirror, but
inside
it, as if it were another room.

He hefted out his gun and approached the mirror very slowly. He reached out and touched the glass with his fingertips. The man in the mirror stared back at him as if he had lost his way and didn't know where to turn next.

Hicks had his feet propped up on his desk and his mouth was full of apple donut.

“Oh, hi, Lieutenant. The captain was looking for you.”

Decker went to his desk and quickly rifled through his memos and notes and letters. He sniffed and said, “Any idea what he wanted?”

“Uh-huh. But if you want to know what kind of a mood he was in, I would say ‘warpath' just about sums it up.”

Oh, God
, thought Decker,
don't say that Maggie has had a fit of conscience, and confessed everything
. If Cab had found out about
that
, he wouldn't have to worry about Changó. His last day on earth would be over before lunch.

“By the way,” Hicks added. “I found out all about this Saint James Intercisus dude.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Oh yeah … and if that's what's going to happen to
you
, well, if I were in your shoes I'd be booking myself a plane ticket to some place very, very,
very
far away.”

“Go on.”

Hicks produced a printout from the Catholic Patron Saints Web site. “Says here that Saint James Intercisus was a military adviser and a courtier to King Yezdigerd the First of Persia, back in the fifth century. Seems like he was converted to Christianity, but he made the mistake of confessing his conversion to King Yezdigerd's successor, King Bahram. Apparently King Bahram really liked him, and didn't want to do nothing to hurt him, but, you know, he couldn't have people worshiping God when they were supposed to be worshiping him. King Bahram asked Saint James to give up on God, but when he wouldn't, he ordered him hung up from a wooden frame and subjected to the Nine Deaths.”

“The Nine Deaths? Not too sure I like the sound of that.”

“It means chopping bits off of you, one at a time, until you say uncle. First of all they cut off Saint James's fingers and thumbs, that was the First Death, but all he said was, ‘Lord, I may not have any fingers to write my prayers, but I still worship you.' Then they cut off his toes, the Second Death, but he still wouldn't renounce God.

“The Third and Fourth Deaths meant cutting off his hands and the Fifth and Sixth Deaths meant cutting off his feet, but he still refused to deny God. They cut off his ears, the Seventh Death, and then they cut off his nose.

“He was given one last chance to recant, but all he said was, ‘I am like a ruined house, but God still lives in me.' So that didn't leave King Bahram a whole lot of choice. He ordered his guards to whop Saint James's head off.

“All in all, they cut him into twenty-eight separate pieces, which is why they call him Intercisus, which I guess is Latin for ‘cut up into twenty-eight separate pieces.'”

Decker sat staring at Hicks for a long time with his mouth open. Then he said, “Hicks, I think you just seriously spoiled my day.”

“Only telling you what it says on the Web site, Lieutenant. By the way, Saint James Intercisus is the patron saint of torture victims and also of lost vocations.”

“Lost vocations? That's me all right. I always wanted to be a country-and-western singer.”

Cab's door was open but Decker knocked on it just the same. Cab was on the phone and he pointed to the chair on the other side of his desk. When he had finished talking he took out his handkerchief and loudly trumpeted his nose.

“I've had a complaint,” he said.

“Sorry to hear it. Sounds like you still do.”

“I don't mean
that
kind of a complaint, I mean I've had a complaint about the way that you're investigating these homicides. Ms. Honey Blackwell from the city council says your homicide team has been unjustifiably discriminating against people of color, especially those of the Santería religion. These
santeros
, they're very sensitive people. They don't like being rousted.”

Decker lifted both hands in a gesture of innocence. “Captain—I'm not discriminating against anybody. I just happen to have a strong suspicion that the motive for
all
of these homicides is linked to Santería.”

“Junior Abraham's okay. But the other victims were four white middle-class people. What makes you think that
they
could have any connection at all with Santería? Where's your evidence?”

“Ah. Well, it's only circumstantial, at the moment. More theoretical, really, than circumstantial.”

“All right, then, tell me what your theoretical evidence is, so that I can get Ms. Blackwell off my tail.”

“If it's all the same to you, I'd really like to wait until I can firm things up a little.”

“Decker, I'm your superior officer and as such I am ultimately responsible for the progress of this investigation, which so far seems to be achieving nothing whatsoever, except to cause major irritation to the Afro-American community, whose trust and confidence it has taken me the best part of seven years to build up.”

“With all respect, sir, Honey Blackwell isn't the Afro-American community. Honey Blackwell is a racially motivated political opportunist, and a fat one, at that.”

“Nutritionally challenged, I'll admit. But we still need her support. I've also had the interim chief on my tail, wanting to know what we can report to the media.”

“You can tell them that we're very close to a major breakthrough. We have a prime suspect and we should be making an arrest within a matter of days.”

“We have a prime suspect? Why the hell didn't you tell me? Who?”

“I don't want to go off at half-cock on this, sir. The prime suspect isn't aware that he's a prime suspect, so my strategy is to keep him believing that we're still floundering around in the dark.”

“You still haven't told me who he is.”

“No, sir. You're right. I haven't.”

Cab was about to say something when his phone rang. He picked it up and demanded, “What the hell now? Oh, sorry, ma'am.”

It was the interim chief again. While Cab flustered and blustered, Decker idly looked out of his open office door. He looked, and then he looked again, frowning. He couldn't be sure, but the wall of the corridor outside appeared to be slightly distorted, as if he were seeing it through a sheet of flawed glass. He moved his head from side to side, and as he did so, the distortion shifted and altered.