The Night Dahlia Page 16

  As we were leaving the city, headed out to the 111, Nico began to tell me about the girl. “Imperial County sheriff’s department found her a little after two,” he said. He pulled out a pack of unfiltered Chesterfields, lit one up, and offered them to me.

  “How long you going to keep doing that?” I said. “I don’t smoke anymore, okay?” Nico laughed and put them away.

  “Right, right,” he said. “You fucking jog now, right?”

  I shook my head as he laughed again.

  “I run. Those things are going to kill you, man,” I said.

  “When Charles Bronson fucking quits, I’ll quit,” Nico said, invoking his patron saint. “Okay, so this girl, she’s a Jane Doe at this point. Basket Cayce gave the Maven the tip that the death was our kind of case.” “Basket Cayce” was a very powerful divinator, a homeless man who wandered the streets of L.A. living off garbage and handouts. He had foreseen otherworldly threats to the world that no one else would have ever seen coming, and he had saved the world more times than you could count. The prevailing theory was that his mind was a fulcrum point, a prism upon which countless alternate realities balanced and tipped. He was hopelessly insane from living with that, but at his core was a decent, selfless person who fought the madness to help the Nightwise. I saw him as a noble figure. Nico pitied him and had told me he wondered why the poor, suffering bastard hadn’t offed himself a long time ago. Nico saw the world in such dark tones, it often worried me, but I knew the man under all that scar tissue, and he was a good man, an honorable man, one of the best I’d ever known.

  “Your girlfriend wants us to check out the crime scene,” Nico continued. “It’s a section of Bombay Beach, hard as hell to get to, apparently.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call the Maven that,” I said. “It’s disrespectful.” Nico laughed. It was a rare, raucous sound, but it was infectious. “You jerk,” I added.

  “Hey, she practically creamed herself when you agreed to join the order,” he said, checking the notes he’d taken as to the exact location of the section of beach. He reached back behind the seat and pulled out a large ADC map book and dropped it in my lap. I clicked on the dome light and flipped pages. “All the rumors and shit about you, kid.” Nico raised his voice to a falsetto in a feeble attempt to sound like the Maven. “Ballard raised the dead, Ballard saved a family from the Goatman of Beltsville, Ballard sealed the gate to Hell in the house of four hundred demons in Iowa … Ballard actually made me feel sensation below my waist for the first time since 1963…” He guffawed.

  “Watch your mouth,” I said. “The Maven’s a great lady and a hell of a wizard. She hear you saying any of that, and she’s liable to spot-weld your mouth shut. You know most of that stuff about me is crap anyway.” I told Nico to slow and pull off the road about three hundred yards up. Nico grunted an affirmative. I clicked off the overhead light and put the map book away.

  The Maven was named Gida Templeton, and she was one of the most powerful mages in the world. She commanded the resources and agents of the Order of Nightwise for the entire western seaboard of the U.S. She had met me during some bad business in San Francisco back in 1982 and had finally convinced me to join the order last year. She was a beautiful woman, and I had fantasized about being with her many times since I met her, but I couldn’t imagine that ever happening. She was completely out of my league and about twenty years my senior.

  “Laytham,” he said, “at the end of the day, the Maven is just like the rest of us, a human being. She gets paid just like we do, by the Builders, to do a job. Wash away all the fancy titles and reputation and stories, and she’s a cop, like you and me.”

  “Maybe like me,” I said with a grin. Nico muttered something nasty in Spanish and casually flipped me off. We pulled off the road, gravel crunching, as we parked beside the guard rail. This strip of 111 was dark. You could hear the waves crashing far below. The spring sky and the Beltane moon were masked by clouds. Nico kept the Z’s headlights on, and we climbed out. We walked down to the exact spot the Maven had given Nico, making sure to scan the ground with our flashlights for any evidence that might help. On the other side of the guardrail was a steep, hilly, rocky slope that led down to a narrow scar of equally rocky beach.

  “How did they get her down there?” I asked. “Throw her from up here?”

  Nico shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “The body was placed ritually. It wasn’t just pull over and toss her down. Plus, no tire tracks or footprints up here. The sheriff’s department’s crime scene guys worked the scene. Nothing like that.”

  “Obscurement spell?” I offered. I reached out with my senses and felt the fabric of this place, trying to sense any trace of it recently being altered with magic. I extended my perception farther down the cliff over the narrow beach. I sensed nothing. “Scene’s clean, no magic.”

  “That was one nasty-ass crude-as-hell bit of magic you just did,” Nico said, flicking his cigarette butt over the cliff. “Boy, you can’t just get by on muscle. You have got to start working on refinement, visualizations, mantra, something.”

  “Why?” I asked. I’ve always been able to get done what I want to get done with just power. Workings are a waste of time.” I looked over at the dark, choppy ocean; the waves looked angry. “Bottom line, if it ain’t broke don’t try to fix it. They didn’t do anything that left a trace here.”

  Nico shook his head. “I guarantee every time you’ve done anything tricky, anything that took some finesse, or some serious heavy lifting, you did some kind of working. I’d put money on it. You’re a mutt, Laytham. You didn’t get brought up in one style or philosophy. Your granny started you on her path, as a Wisdom, but you’ve learned as you’ve gone, and you’ll keep doing that until you find the things, the ways, that work best for you.” Nico raised one of his bead necklaces to his lips and kissed it. He then whispered what I knew was a prayer to the Orisha it represented. He stood at the edge of the rail and began his spell: “Bendita madre, padre bendito, levantar las escamas de mis ojos. Mostrarme todo lo que está oculto, me habla en el lenguaje del silencio y secretos.” I was still learning Spanish, but I had to admit there was a poetry to the working. Nico kissed his beads and turned back to me. “They brought her here by boat,” he said. “There is a little magical residue from the ritual. It was done down there. It wasn’t a summoning. I fucking hate climbing. I’m too old for that shit.” As he walked by me, wearing an insufferable grin on his face, he slapped my cheek good-naturedly. “A sledgehammer won’t do shit for you if you need a microscope, boy wonder.”

  We walked back to the car. A delivery truck rolled by us on 111. It was daylight now. The sky above the slate waves was flint. We got back in the Z. Nico yawned and lit a cigarette. He riffled through his case of cassette tapes, popping out Van Halen and replacing it in the case before slipping a new cassette into the deck.

  “If it wasn’t a summoning, what was it?” I asked.

  “It was faint magic, subtle,” Nico said. “Its lattice is already crumbling, and it’s only been about six hours. I think the magic was a means, not an end.”

  I rubbed my face and watched the sky beyond the water. A flock of seagulls glided and dove toward the water. Their voices were taunting.

  “To what end?” I asked. Nico shrugged.

  We pulled away from the side of the road in a spray of gravel. “Saved by Zero” by the Fixx began to play through the speakers.

  “I got us rooms at a little no-tell motel a little ways down the road. In a few hours we meet up with Rosaleen over at the county coroner’s and take a look at the body.”

  “Rosaleen,” I said. “Good, she’s the best.” Nico gave me a sidelong glance, nodded, and laughed around the cigarette. “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” Nico said. “She’s here with us tonight at the motel. Maybe you two could go out, have a drink.”

  “We’re working a homicide, Nico,” I said, shaking my head. “For god’s sake, don’t try to match-m
ake; it’s disturbing.”

  “Nothing like looking at death to remind you why life beats the hell out of it,” Nico said. “You’re too fucking young to be this uptight, kid.” He paused for a second and winced like he had been wounded. “Young, shit, I forgot. Sorry, man. How was your birthday, Beltane boy?”

  “It was good,” I lied.

  “You do anything special? Get drunk, get high, pick someone up?”

  “I ran the beach,” I said. “Pushed a couple of extra miles out. And I got a few chapters read in that book I was telling you about, The Hevajra Tantra.”

  “On your eighteenth birthday? You read a book and you jogged?”

  “Ran, and yeah,” I said. “Can we drop this and go back to the dead person, please?”

  “Son, you have got to learn how to live, while you got some living left in you,” Nico said. “Right now is the perfect time to be wild, to have fun, and make bad choices.”

  “So you want me to tone down my magic and blow up my private life,” I said. “Got it. Thanks for the life advice. You’re like the dad on Family Ties.”

  “Ain’t adulthood fucking great?” Nico said.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve made enough bad choices already to last a lifetime.”

  * * *

  We checked into the rooms at the motel about ten miles down 111 from Bombay Beach and then drove into Niland. Niland was the closest town, about twenty miles from the ghost town that was the beach. Compared to the minuscule population of Bombay, Niland was a thriving metropolis with around a thousand souls living in the community. We found a coffee shop to have breakfast and wait for the coroner’s office to open. Nico had a huge plate of scrambled eggs with peppers and onions, bacon, home fries, and coffee. I had coffee.

  “You do all that jogging, you should be able to eat like you got some hair on your balls,” Nico said around a mouthful of food.

  “Because that’s a life goal,” I said. The waitress walked up. Her name tag said PATTY. She refilled our coffee.

  “Go on, ask her,” Nico said. Patty smiled and looked at me, a little confused.

  “Were you this annoying to your other partners?” I asked.

  “They came to appreciate me like a fine wine,” he said, “or a stinky cheese. Speaking of wine, go on, you haven’t tried here before.”

  “Um, ma’am,” I said, my West Virginia showing, “do y’all carry Cheerwine?” Patty looked puzzled, like she was trying to decipher the language I was speaking. I got this a lot in L.A. My country would slip out no matter how hard I tried to blend in. Nico loved to give me crap about it, and he loved my never-ending quest for my favorite soda.

  “Is that soda, hun?” Patty asked. “’Cause, like, we can’t carry any wine or beer here, y’know…”

  “It’s soda,” I said and sighed. “Thanks anyway.” Patty gave me a smile with perhaps a little pity in it. She placed the check on the table and went on her way.

  “Another county heard from,” Nico said. “You sure they don’t make that shit in a still?”

  “I’m glad I amuse you so much,” I said.

  “Me too,” Nico said, grabbing the check. “God knows, I need a little laughter in my life.”

  * * *

  The Imperial County Coroner’s Office was, like most coroner’s offices, in the basement of the government building. When Nico and I arrived a little after nine, Rosaleen was waiting for us, sitting on a long, wooden bench in the hallway outside the office door, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Rosaleen Goossens-Main was five foot three and slight. She had a youthful appearance that made it hard to peg her age, but I figured her for being in her late twenties. She wore her long, thick, brown hair straight, in defiance of the trend of “big hair,” and it fell almost to her hips. Her ears were prominent, and she tucked her hair behind them. She dressed a bit like a hippie, in a tie-dyed T-shirt and bell-bottoms that hugged her body in a way that was hard to ignore. An old, brown, suede coat over her shirt completed the image of someone wandering the Haight circa 1972. Her brown eyes peeked out behind wire-rimmed glasses. She stood and pushed her glasses back on her nose as we approached.

  “Hiya Rosie,” Nico said, and shook her hand. She smiled; her teeth were a little bucked but were white, and her smile made her look more like a mischievous Elf than a forensic savant. She tried not to smile much at work, but it was hard not to smile around Nico.

  “Mr. Flores, Mr. Ballard,” Rosaleen said in her clipped Australian accent. She had come to the States to work for the Maven. She was supposedly related to an infamous Australian witch and a disgraced English composer who was into the occult. “Good morning. I trust your examination of the crime scene was productive?”

  Nico shrugged.

  “A little,” he said. “We’re the right folks to be looking into this. So who are we today, Rosie?”

  Rosaleen removed a slim leather ID case from her jacket. “Feds,” she replied. I found my badge wallet in my jeans pocket that identified me as F.B.I. Special Agent Laytham Ballard. Nico didn’t bother digging his out. He had the role down to a science. “Part of an occult crime taskforce,” she added.

  “Trendy,” I said. Rosaleen smiled.

  We walked into the office like we owned it. The coroner’s assistant was a gangly man with tufts of white hair on a liver-spotted pate. His rubbery lips were an odd color that made me think of squid tentacles. We caught him in mid breakfast, egg biscuit and coffee, so we already had him off balance. Nico did most of the talking, big surprise there. After a few phone calls to check our bona fides, the assistant took us down to the cold room and we got to meet our Jane Doe.

  Rosaleen had her kit with her, a large, square, forensic field kit slung over her shoulder. The kit had all the standard stuff and few things most forensic scientists wouldn’t carry. The tech clicked on the lights in the lab and pulled the victim out of her steel drawer, an impersonal filing cabinet of loss. She was covered by a sheet with an unzipped black plastic body bag under her. He rolled her over to the examination table, and then he and Rosaleen slid her over onto the table.

  About this time, the county coroner arrived. He was a stocky man in a suit straight out of JCPenney. He had steel-gray hair in a high and tight, and he talked and acted more like a politician than a doctor. He wanted to chat us up and make sure we knew he and his office had cooperated. Nico gave him the right amount of glad-handing and then shooed him and the assistant off with a bunch of talk about reports, deadlines, and bosses chewing up his ass. They laughed and left us alone with the girl. Rosaleen slid back the sheet, and I was introduced, face to face, with “Jane Doe.” I audibly gasped. I thought I was more jaded, tougher than that. I wasn’t. Nico whispered, “Santa Madre,” crossed himself, and then kissed his beads.

  Jane was about seventeen, maybe eighteen, my age. Her hair was shoulder-length, sandy blond, and layered around her bangs and face. It had been curled and cut professionally not too long ago. Her face was narrow, and she was beautiful. She looked a little cocaine-thin in her features and the rest of her body, but her face was flawless, not a scratch, not a bruise to mar her features.

  The rest of her body was a nightmare. Her skin was mottled with bruises of blue, black, green, yellow, and purple, like a savage topographical map of alien continents. She had been cut, narrow incisions with razors and scalpels and deep, ugly gashes with heavy, cruder blades. Some of the wounds were fresh, others days, weeks old. Scar echoes, souvenirs of distant pain, crisscrossed her body. She had track marks, also of different ages, chronicling her use. The oldest spots were in her arms, newer ones were in her feet and between her toes. The exceptions were a few ugly, bruised marks on her inner forearms near the junction of veins in the wrist. She’d had IVs in both of her arms recently. The slender wrists had some of the oldest scars—white, pale crossroads of choices made when it felt like there were no more options. They mirrored my own wrists.

  She had been whipped, brutally and recently. Her back, buttocks, and breasts were
dull red ribbons of split flesh. Again, raised scar tissue spoke that this was not a new experience for Jane. There were signs of trauma and traces of seminal fluid in the wounds where her nipples had been before they were torn off. Her genitals and rectum were also savaged, torn, cut, bitten, and penetrated. She had been burned with brands, most likely a fireplace poker, and with electricity. An odd-shaped brand appeared on her left thigh. It was an old wound.

  The perfect, almost angelic head resting on the desecrated altar of her body somehow made it all the more obscene, all the more mad.

  Rosaleen spoke evenly and professionally into a small handheld cassette tape recorder as she documented the minutia of each atrocity. She took photographs, Polaroids, 35 mm, and videotaped the examination. Only once did I see her resolve falter for just a second. There was a catch in her voice, and I saw her eyes flutter; I thought she might cry, but she didn’t, and she continued through all the physical examinations, all the tests and the analysis, undaunted. I could never do the job Rosaleen does.

  Six hours later, she clicked off the recorder, pulled off her stained rubber gloves, and rested against an empty steel table. She look haggard. I handed Rosaleen a Pepsi Nico and I had retrieved from a row of machines near the elevators. She took it and I saw gratitude in her eyes for the simple act, behind the weariness. “She’s had multiple children and several abortions,” she said. “She shows signs of long-term alcohol and opiate abuse among other drugs and physical abuse stretching back a long time, badly healed broken bones, radial fractures. It’s all evil, but nothing specifically occult or ritual in the manner of her death,” she said. “How about in the placement of her body at the scene?”