Текст книги "Kiss of Evil"

Автор книги: Richard Montanari

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

70

Paris checks the door, the stench from the cauldron a thick, fetid fog that invades every cubic inch of air in the room. The door has an ordinary interior door lock, reversed. The door itself is solid core. The lock would go first. He feels along the ink black wall, finds the heavy plywood over the window, the black-painted heads of the lag bolts. Solid, too.

He surveys the small room, made smaller by the blackness. The cauldron, dead center. A sturdy wing chair. And, across from the chair, a small table with a computer and keyboard.

Not his father.

The computer is on, but the screen is deep blue, blank. Paris sits in the chair, tries to clear his head. He checks the magazine in his weapon. One bullet. The son of a bitch had left him with one bullet. He returns the magazine, jacks the round, clicks on the safety.

He checks his pockets. Right pocket. Twenty or thirty dollars in a paper clip. A packet of relish or ketchup from Subway. Left pocket. Empty.

One bullet, with condiments and hallucinations to go, Paris thinks.

Great.

71

The man is tall and thin, red-haired. He wears a cheap overcoat, sturdy black lace-up shoes. In the stale light thrown from the caged bulb on the wall in the underground service tunnel linking the Cain Manor and Cain Towers apartments, he looks tired and wan and deeply etched with worry. A man running on coffee, sugar, animal fat, liquor.

A cop.

“Evening,” I say, the barrel of the twenty-two up against Mary’s back. We stop walking. We are now about ten feet from the man.

“Evening,” the red-haired man replies.

I feel Mary tense, about to bolt. “What’s the weather like out there?”

“Getting pretty bad,” the man says, turning his body slightly away from me, the sort of move a left-hander would make if he were going to unsnap the holster of a gun on his left hip, a weapon hiding beneath his coat. His voice echoes slightly in the concrete tunnel. Above us, a water pipe clangs.

“Looks like we’re in for the evening,” I say. “Wife’s a little under the weather. Had to leave the party next door. Thank God for this walk-through, eh?”

“Oh yeah.” The cop takes a step forward. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

“Like I said, she’s a little nauseous. Bad shrimp or something, you know? Can’t trust those bargain basement caterers.”

“If you don’t mind sir, I’d like to hear it from her. Now, ma’am, are you—”

Suddenly, the crackle of two-way radio traffic bursts from inside the red-haired man’s coat.

Our eyes meet again. And we are linked forever.

Before he can make his move I step behind Mary, lock an arm around her throat, put the barrel of the gun to her temple. The redheaded cop freezes.

I say: “Put your hands behind your head and interlace your fingers. Officer.”

Slowly, reluctantly, he does. But he does not take his eyes from mine. His eyes are a deep green, unreadable, stoic in their calm. I know that this man can do me great harm.

“You have your handcuffs with you?” I ask.

The cop just stares.

I say: “Cuff yourself to the drainpipe.”

“No.”

I cock my weapon. Mary goes rigid beneath my hand. “Beg your pardon?”

“I’m not going to do it.”

“And why is that?”

The cop looks at me with a weariness I have never before seen in a man his age. A resignation of soul. “Because I’m a beat-up cop, pal. You hear me? A used-up old flatfoot. Letting you handcuff me is a nightmare far worse than anything you could do with that gun. Believe this.”

“Do you think I won’t kill her?”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” the cop says. “I think you’re going to kill her. I think you’re going to kill me, too. You’re just not going to do it to me while I’m cuffed to a drainpipe. I’m leaving my son more than that. Sorry.”

I do not want to hear anymore of this.

I shoot him three times.

He stumbles backward and goes down, hard, flat on his back.

Mary shrieks. I cover her mouth. I put the gun to her head until the reality of her own death becomes apparent in her eyes. I lead her to the service elevator, then hit the button with my elbow. The car soon arrives.

I hear fire engines in the distance.

As we step inside I can also hear the traffic on the cop’s radio. The elevator doors close just as a woman’s voice says:

“Greg . . . Greg . . . you’d better get out . . . all hell is starting to break loose out here . . . Bobby’s down . . . repeat . . . Bobby’s down . . .”

72

He looks so ordinary, Paris thinks. Better than average looks, he had thought when the man had played the part of Julian Cruz. Charming and easygoing.

He had shaken hands with a monster and not known it.

But now, seeing him sitting in a chair on the computer screen, in the upper-right-hand frame of four, he looks ordinary. In the upper-left-hand frame, Paris sees himself, sitting on the chair, live, courtesy of the small digital camera clipped to the monitor and the track lights overhead. In the lower right is the old video of himself on the steps of the Justice Center.

“Mr. del Blanco,” Paris says.

“Christian, please, detective,” the man says.

“Call this off.”

“Did you enjoy your hot dog? Tasty?”

“Call this off.”

“Too late for that.”

“Let me ask you something,” Paris says, trying to sound a lot more in control than he really is. The magic mushroom is still making his mind take wing in a thousand directions. “I understand why you’re after me. I even understand why you went after Mike Ryan. But why the Levertovs?”

Christian reaches off camera. He brings back a trio of photographs. To Paris, they look like pictures of Christian coming and going from La Botanica Macumba. “Can you believe these? Clandestine pictures of me.” He laughs, holds them closer to the camera. “Turns out old Ike wasn’t just selling kosher hot dogs on that corner, detective. He was one of these block-watch people. I’d seen him around the corner a few times, passed the time of day with him, even met his wife. But about the fifth time I visited the botanica, he started to become suspicious, it seems, began taking pictures. Guess I wasn’t the right breed. Believe me, the minute a voodoo murder and a sketch of the suspect showed up in the press he would have been on the phone. I needed time. Old Ike just meddled in the wrong man’s business. Edith made the mistake of loving him.” Christian puts the photos aside, leans forward, adds: “The important question is, how did you feel?”

“What do you mean?”

“To be a suspect. Even for a minute. How did it feel when people, people you’ve known for years, looked you straight in the eye and thought you were a fiend? Did the shame of it all make you want to kill yourself? Make you want to get drunk and set yourself afire? Hmm? Show the world that Paris is, indeed, burning?”

In his mind’s eye Paris sees Bobby’s face, and how only ninety-nine percent of it believed him. “I know who my friends are. They know the truth.”

“Truth,” Christian says, wistfully. He reaches out of frame, returns with a sterling flask, sips from it. “Amanita muscaria. Very potent. Have you ever tried it?”

Paris remains silent.

“Where did it take you on its brief, exhilarating voyage?”

Dad, Paris thinks. “You wouldn’t begin to understand.”

“Oh, I bet I would. The Hinchi Indians say it invokes ancient memories. What are your ancient memories, detective?” Christian leans forward, taps a few keys. Instantly, in the lower-right-hand frame, a picture appears. A picture of Frank Paris. A picture that was in the newspaper next to his father’s obituary. The anger rises in Paris’s chest. His training pushes it back. Barely. He now knows what triggered his hallucination.

Christian says, “The first thing you should know is that I am in the very next room.” On-screen, Paris sees Christian walk out of frame. Then, faintly: “Hear this?”

Paris hears a muffled pounding from behind him. “Yes.”

Christian walks back into frame. “As I’m sure you know by now, you have only one bullet. In your life, right now, that bullet is currency. How will you spend it? The lock on the door? You could shoot it off, but then your gun would be empty and I would kill you.”

Before Paris can stop himself, he looks back at the picture of his father, thinks about the photograph in this butcher’s hands. He says: “Fuck you.”

Christian stares into the camera, motionless, as if a DVD had been put on freeze frame. Then, in a smear, he bolts out of frame, and, for twenty seconds the screen is a gray, out-of-focus blur. Then, the point of view changes to a longer shot, and Paris can now see that, in the bright white room next door there is an altar not unlike the chantry in Evangelina Cruz’s basement. But this one is larger, covered in a huge, brilliant white cloth. There seem to be candles everywhere, starring up the lens of the digital camera. On the steps of the altar Paris sees dried animal claws outlined against the cloud white sheet. He sees earthen cruets bearing ancient symbols. He sees a half-dozen brass plates bearing cones of incense, stacks of copper coins.

But it is what Jack Paris sees behind the altar that terrifies him.

There, against the white wall, behind the shimmering candles and mysterious pottery and vaporous urns, is a huge white crucifix. And on it hangs a figure.

A familiar figure.

The figure of Rebecca D’Angelo.

73

I remove my shirt, pants, underwear, shoes, and socks. I slip the long white caftan over my head, my skin now electric with the feel of the rayon. I have never felt more the brujo, so full of power.

I undress my madrina on the crucifix. Her skin looks soft, sepulchral, white. I take out my big claw hammer. “Have you ever witnessed a real sacrifice, detective?”

“Listen to me,” Paris says. “If she’s dead, there isn’t a rock big enough to hide under. Hear me?”

“She’s not dead.”

“Kill yourself. Now.”

“She is tied there,” I say. “But, if you don’t do exactly what I say, it can get worse.” I hold up the silver spikes, sharpened to a razor point. “Much worse.”

74

He has to keep the man talking. “How do we end this, Christian? Stop what you’re doing and let’s talk.”

“I want you to draw your weapon.”

Paris obeys. “Now what?”

“Put your bullet in the chamber.”

“It’s already loaded.”

“Of course,” Christian says. “Safety off?”

“Safety’s off.”

On-screen, in one of the four frames, is now a local news break-in. Paris can see a pair of Cleveland Heights zone cars in a Dairy Barn lot and thinks:

We are in the Cain Towers apartments.

Christian says: “You will now place the barrel of the weapon against your forehead and pull the trigger.”

“What?”

“If you do this within, let’s see, four minutes, I’ll let her go. If not, I am going to drive nails into her hands and feet. Which do you think our viewers would prefer? You or her?”

Viewers? Paris thinks. This is being broadcast? “What are you talking about?”

“You’re the main attraction on Cable99 right now. Dare I say, soon, worldwide.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Perhaps. But seeing as you’re really not that much of a detective, I doubt seriously that you are qualified to make such a damning diagnosis. No offense.”

The lower-right-hand frame flickers with still pictures now. Christian, in front of a rusty old Bonneville. Christian and his sister at Cedar Point.

You’ve got to know what breaks his heart.

“She didn’t kill herself,” Paris says, knowing now that the real Sarah Weiss is dead. The woman in his apartment had been an impostor. “It wasn’t suicide.”

Christian freezes, his face contorting with rage. “Shut up.”

“It’s true. They’re reopening the case. They’re treating it as a homicide.”

“Shut up!”

“I know you blame me for prosecuting her, but I was doing my job. The evidence was there. But now there is evidence that she was not driven to suicide. It is much worse.”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“Don’t you want to see whoever did this to your sister pay for it? Isn’t that what all this has been about?”

Christian steps away from the crucifix.

Yes, Paris thinks.

Stall him.

“So, I can walk away from this?” Christian asks. “You and me’ll hit the trail and round up the bad guys, sheriff? Please.”

“Of course not. But you can get help. And I can see that justice is done for you.”

“Shut up,” Christian says. “Not a word.” He holds up a pair of spikes. In the other hand, he holds a crown of razor wire. “If you say—”

“No!”

“What did I just tell you?” Christian screams. “You killed her, you asshole.”

“Wait!”

Christian does not wait. He crosses the room, walking right up to the camera. In an instant, Paris’s computer screen goes blue again.

But Paris can still hear. Christian has left the microphone on. Christian screams: “The whole world is watching you!”

Paris hears Christian’s footsteps storming around the room. He hears the music, which had been a faint, scratchy noise in the background, suddenly jump in volume.

“Christian!”

“Save her life!” Christian says.

“Stop!”

But he does not stop. Paris hears the ugly, hateful sound. The icy clank of hammer on steel.

Then come the screams.

75

Furnell Braxton is bathed in sweat. For a single, crazy instant, he sees himself on stage in a huge ballroom at the Marriott picking up a local Emmy. He checks his levels. The audio level is dead center; the video, although lagging slightly, sometimes producing a series of still images, is clear. There are now four separate feeds. The lunatic in the white room with the girl. The looping video of all the old pictures. The cop in the black room with the gun. And the NBC live-news cam.

Furnell had taken the live network feed and inserted it into his cablecast like Harry Blackstone dovetailing two halves of a bridge deck. He hadn’t the slightest idea if he had any right whatsoever to grab the feed, but on the other hand, at the moment, he simply didn’t care.

This is Emmy time.

On-screen, in the upper-right-hand frame, the lunatic is poised, ready to slam home a nail he had begun to pound into the nude woman’s left hand. The nude woman is tied to a cross. The lunatic is watching his monitor, his hand over the woman’s mouth.

In the lower-left frame, now, a medium shot of the Cain Towers apartment shot from across the street. Cop cars everywhere. You can hear a helicopter, too.

The lower-right-hand frame is a video feed showing an old crime scene photo, a kitchen floor covered in blood.

But it is the frame in the upper left that has Furnell, and everyone else, watching, spellbound. In that frame sits the police officer, on the verge of suicide. He has a 9 mm pistol reversed in his hands, the barrel against the center of his forehead, his thumb is on the trigger, his face is corded with fear. At exactly midnight he says:

“I know you will see this one day, Missy. I hope you won’t, but I know you will.” His voice breaks. “I love you and your mother with all my heart.”

He pulls the trigger.

The sound is more of a muffled clap than a bang, but the body bucks and shakes, then Furnell sees the hole, dead center on the man’s forehead. The cop slumps into the chair, still and silent.

In the upper-right-hand frame the man in the white caftan steps away from the woman on the cross. He walks up to the camera, stares. He is looking at his monitor in disbelief. Then, he begins to laugh, high and loud and long, spinning in a circle, shouting in tongues.

Death, Furnell Braxton thinks as he turns and deposits his Tony Roma’s dinner all over the control panel, his acceptance speech on hold for the moment.

He had broadcast death.

Live.

76

The Amanita Muscaria is in full, adolescent blossom in my brain, my muscles, my blood. I feel primally fit, cunning.

Jack Paris is dead.

The world might think he sacrificed himself to save the woman, that he is some kind of noble savage, but we know the real reason:

Guilt.

My very first spell.

My madrina screams but I can barely hear her over the mad rumbling, the swelling chorus of the music. I select the machete, comforted by its heft, its balance.

I will behead her with one stroke of steel.

I look directly into the camera lens as the floor beneath me begins to quake and shudder, to shake the very foundation of the building.

To this world I say: “This is for Sarafina. Mi hermana.”

“And this is for Fayette Martin.”

The voice comes from right behind me. Inches away. I spin.

It is Paris. He has big hands, like my dad’s. For the first time in my life, everything goes quiet.

I spring.

Dad fires.

77

VOODOO KILLER PLEADS GUILTY

BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 12:31 PM

Cleveland (ap)—The man who killed his victims then mutilated their bodies with Santerian symbols pleaded guilty today to seven counts of aggravated murder, admitting that he had killed one victim by chopping off the top of her head; another, by castration.

The plea bargain promises Christian del Blanco, 30, a life sentence without the possibility of parole. He would have faced the death penalty if he had been convicted of first-degree murder on any of the counts.

After his arrest early New Year’s Day, Mr. del Blanco confessed to murdering Fayette M. Martin, 30, last December after luring her to an abandoned inner-city building, as well as Willis James Walker, 48. It is unclear as to how Mr. del Blanco knew Mr. Walker, or what drew the two men to the Dream-A-Dream Motel, a motel on Cleveland’s east side.

The other victims, Isaac C. Levertov, 79, and his wife Edith R., 81, were apparently victims of a sacrificial killing.

Another victim, Edward Moriceau, 60, was the proprietor of an herb shop that specializes in Santerian artifacts.

As he entered his plea, Mr. del Blanco shocked the prosecutors and his court-appointed defense attorney by mentioning two other victims. One, a female accomplice named Celeste L. Conroy, 26. Police found Ms. Conroy’s body in the basement of a building on East Eighty-fifth Street and Carnegie Avenue where they say she was strangled. The other, a shooting victim found in Cain Park in Cleveland Heights, a victim only recently identified as Jeremiah D. Cross, 29, a Cleveland Heights attorney who once represented the defendant’s sister on a murder charge of her own.

Due to injuries sustained during his arrest, Mr. del Blanco appeared in court in a wheelchair. Before being returned to his cell, he apologized to the victims’ families in fluent Spanish.

Sentencing is set for January 15.

78

The fallout from any case the size and weight of the Ochosi murders is always far-reaching. There are two books in progress. A four-part series is under way in the Plain Dealer.

Bobby Dietricht had suffered first-degree burns on his right arm and leg that night, as well as a fractured ulna in his left arm. Greg had taken three .22 caliber bullets to the left side of his vest, breaking two ribs. Both are scheduled to be back on the job within a few weeks.

After murdering Jeremiah Cross, Christian knew that eventually the Sarah Weiss connection would be made. It was then that Christian must have taken a few of his extra trinkets and set up a makeshift altar on the second floor of Jeremiah Cross’s house, rigging some plastique to a mercury switch.

Just in case.

Records at the Veterans Administration showed that a man named Jeremiah Cross had requested a file on Demetrius Salters around a week after Jeremiah Cross had been murdered. It explains where Jeremiah Cross’s ID had gone after he was killed, as well as the fact that Christian del Blanco was moving in on the old cop.

Ronnie Boudreaux had called Paris on New Year’s Day. After having been sapped in the back of the head by Christian del Blanco the night before, Ronnie proclaimed that, although he was grateful unto the Lord that Christian del Blanco had spared his life, he and Paris are finally égal—that all debts have officially been paid.

As far as Paris could piece together, courtesy of the thick packet of letters they had found in Christian’s apartment, Christian and Sarafina del Blanco—who signed all of her letters “Fina”—had split up after the murder of their father. Christian went first to San Diego, then into Mexico where he spent the next dozen or so years of his life. Sarafina had worked as an escort and a model, mostly trade shows, traveling the country under a variety of names. Delia White, Bianca del Gato, Sarah Weiss. Her past had turned up very little when she had stood trial. The letters from Sarafina to her brother also kept tabs on Michael Ryan, the man they blamed for letting their father get away with what they felt was murder.

When Michael Ryan moved to San Diego, it became an unexpected opportunity for Christian to sneak across from Tijuana and take a shot at him. But Michael Ryan was not that easy a target in San Diego. He had been a patrolman in a heavily armed zone car.

Carrie Ryan was a different story. A beat-up old Bonneville was seen tearing around a corner, leaving the girl’s small, ruined body behind. Descriptions of the driver were given, but the teenager was never caught.

By the time Michael had moved back to Ohio, Sarafina and Christian had reunited in Cleveland, even though Christian was still wanted for questioning in his father’s murder.

They knew that Michael needed money for his daughter’s care. And they knew that Michael had something they wanted.

Sarafina met Michael, gained his confidence, struck a deal. She offered him ten thousand dollars to steal the murder investigation file of Anthony del Blanco, the disappearance of which would all but eliminate any chance of Christian’s future arrest.

That night at the Renaissance Hotel they got everything they wanted.

Including Michael Ryan’s life.

When Sarafina committed suicide, Christian was distraught. He had worked as a prostitute in Mexico, and gained a reputation as a skilled lover, especially among the S & M and voyeur/exhibitionist crowd in Acapulco. He signed on with NeTrix, knowing he would meet the right woman for his “spell,” if he could draw her in with his charms. Thus, Fayette Martin’s fate had become sealed.

How Christian came to meet Mary is the mystery. In her statement, Mary had said they met in front of her building and it was after that he blackmailed her into helping him, threatening her daughter’s life, a story the prosecutor’s office seems very willing to buy.

Christian isn’t talking.

Although Michael Ryan was posthumously cleared by Internal Affairs, anyone who looks closely at the evidence would never believe anything but the obvious.

Mike Ryan died in a pair of twenty-five-dollar shoes.

The money was never for him.

At the end of the first week in January, as Paris begins to box up the Ochosi files at his desk, it occurs to him how close it had all come to him once again, how close to Beth and Melissa. The man he had seen with Beth at Shaker Square—the guy with the shoulders—really was a guy Beth had met on eharmony. The man’s religious leanings, however, had not yet assuaged Paris’s jealousy.

But Christian del Blanco did have his sights set on Beth. Paris has no doubt about that. Christian had found her e-mail address, had sent her the self-launching computer file of the velvet wing chair. Perhaps he meant to put her in it before it was all over. He just ran out of time.

As Paris marches the box of files to the elevator, it is that image that chills him more deeply than the winter storm raging outside.

Her hand is still in a splint. The doctors say she will, in time, regain most of its use, but the thick mound of scar tissue where the spike had penetrated will always remain.

She is being released from the hospital within the hour.

Paris stands at the foot of the bed. Mary sits, hands in her lap, a small suitcase at her feet. The only sounds are the hush of the heat register, the pellets of freezing rain on the window. Paris looks out at the confetti of ice-slicked cars in the University Hospital lot. He waits for the proper amount of silence to pass, then says: “Do you know why I’m here?”

Mary draws a deep breath. “Well, I’ve got it down to two things,” she says, her voice shaky, hesitant. “I’m leaving here in either a cab or a police car. I’ve been up all night bouncing between the two.”

“I came here to tell you that there won’t be any charges filed against you,” Paris says in a dry, emotionless monotone. He waits. Behind him, Mary begins to cry, softly. He doesn’t look. He isn’t interested in her tears.

After a few moments she says: “Thank you.”

“I had nothing to do with it. Believe me.”

“I am so sorry.”

Paris turns around, surprised at how much older she looks. “What are you sorry about again?”

“Everything. For making it personal for you. For putting you in danger.”

“I’m in danger by my second cup of coffee every day. You made a fool of me.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Look, if the prosecutor’s office didn’t consider you a victim in all this, they might think you were trying to frame me for a capital crime. Maybe they need a little prodding in that direction. A little character reference.” He drops a pair of black-and-white photos on the bed. Blurry photos of a woman running from the Dream-A-Dream Motel. “Maybe these would help.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I understand plenty. I understand there’s an active file in Robbery called the Kissing Bandit file. Romantic, huh? I understand how your prints led me right to a partial print in that file, a series of robberies about which no detective can ever seem to get a victim to stay on the record. It’s all about a woman who dumps a couple roofies in the Cuervo and shakes down horny middle-aged businessmen.”

Mary is silent for a moment, her heart quickening. “Everything I did, I did for my daughter. You have a little girl. Draw the line for me. What wouldn’t you do?”

Paris has no answer to this question.

But it is just one of many he is certain will never be answered, especially about the Ochosi murders. And he knows why. The fact that such a high-profile monster as Christian del Blanco is now behind bars, and the fact that the Comeback City can now begin to pave over the nightmare, means that a lot of the loose ends are never going to be tied up.

Paris buttons his coat, pulls on his gloves.

“Is this where you tell me to leave town?” she asks, her eyes riveted on the photos on the bed.

Paris walks to the door. He glances at the picture of the beautiful, dark-haired little girl on the nightstand. “If you were anyone else, I’d probably have to.”

“I understand.”

Paris holds her gaze, recalling the last time he had looked so deeply into her eyes. He told himself he wouldn’t, but does anyway. “Let me ask you something.”

“Anything.”

“None of it was real, right?”

Her face softens. She is young again. “All of it was real. We just met in hell.”

Paris doesn’t bother to respond.

Mary stands, takes a tentative step toward him, stops. “How do I prove it to you?”

Paris lingers for a moment, burnishing her silhouette deep into his memory, then turns and walks down the hall.

The packed courtroom is suffused with a jungle silence. Judge Eileen J. Corrigan presides. She finishes her decree. “You are to serve these terms consecutively, without the possibility of parole.”

In the demeaning light of a room where justice is done, Christian del Blanco looks broken, small. Although Paris had aimed dead-center at his chest, fully prepared to blast him to hell, when Christian had leapt up from the floor the bullet tore into his right hip instead. The unfortunate prognosis is that he will one day walk again.

“Is there anything you wish to say to the court at this time?” Judge Corrigan asks.

“No, your honor,” Christian says, head down, the perfect penitent.

“May God have mercy on your soul.” Judge Corrigan bangs her gavel. She pauses, briefly, then exits in a flurry of polished black cotton, an air of shunted revulsion.

Amid the melee of reporters leaving the courtroom, Jack Paris and Carla Davis wind their way to the defense table. Paris glances down at Christian del Blanco sitting in his wheelchair. He studies the man’s sharp hewn looks, thinking: He’s going to have a great time in prison.

Suddenly, Christian looks up, acknowledging Paris’s presence. The sheer blackness of his eyes chills Paris’s blood. Paris had looked into these eyes once before.

Except, that time, they belonged to Sarah Weiss.

Christian says: “I have to know.”

“Know?” Paris replies. “Know what?”

“How?”

Paris understands what Christian is talking about, just as he realizes that something like this would eat at a person like him. Christian the trickster, the man who had recruited a woman named Celeste Conroy to do his dirty work; Celeste who looked so much like Sarah Weiss that Paris had no trouble believing it really was her that night in his apartment. The magic mushroom helped a little, of course.

“You mean my little misdirection with the computer camera?” Paris asks.

“Yes.”

Paris leans forward, close enough to see the humiliation and defeat in the man’s eyes. “Well, the blood on my forehead and the door locks were the easy parts.” Paris reaches into his pocket, drops a packet of ketchup and a paper clip on the table. “Old magician tricks.”

Christian absently touches a finger to his own forehead.

Paris opens his briefcase. “The hard part, at least for someone like me, was learning about the video lag. That I got out of a book. A hell of a good book. I think even you might get something out of it.” Paris reaches into his briefcase, drops a thin, soft cover book on the table in front of Christian.

Web Cam for Dummies.

Paris leans close to Christian’s ear, and adds: “No offense.”