A Quiet Vendetta

Verlaine had listened intently, nodding every once in a while as he tried to digest everything Cipliano was telling him.

‘You get a make on your prints?’

Verlaine shook his head. ‘Gonna go check again now.’

‘Christ, that crew of yours are a lazy bag o’ smashers, eh?’

Verlaine smiled.

‘So you got any smartass questions for me?’

‘Ritual or psycho, whaddya reckon?’

Cipliano hesitated. ‘This is criminal psychology you’re talking here. I’m a coroner, but from what I can see-’ He shook his head. ‘This is not my field. I can’t give you anything other than a hunch.’

Verlaine nodded. ‘So give me a hunch.’

Cipliano shrugged. ‘I’d say you have someone who did this for someone else maybe-’

‘Why for someone else?’

Cipliano was quiet for a moment. ‘There’s a mentality, a thinking pattern, always some sense of motivation back of these things. If they run into a serial there’s always a common thread, and usually it’s not until the third or fourth killing that you find it. Then you look back and see that common factor right the way through, like it’s an embryonic thought, something that grows, like he’s testing something out, putting something there, getting whatever kick he gets out of his own reasoning. He gets a bit adventurous, embellishes the original idea, really makes it obvious, and that’s when it comes to light. That’s when you have the trademark. This one… well, this one’s different. If you had a psycho working for himself he’d have maybe left the vic where he killed him, perhaps cut the body up and distributed it someplace. The psycho thing is all about showing everything for the world. Here he wants the thing seen, but he hides it first. He wants it known, but not immediately… almost like it’s a message to someone perhaps.’

Cipliano scratched the back of his head. ‘The majority of actual psychopaths, serial killers, they have the desire for others to share in what they’ve done, for others to understand, appreciate, sympathize. It’s an explanation. The killing is an explanation for something – guilt, sadness, rejection, desperation, anger, hate, sometimes just as simple as getting mom and dad’s attention. Your man here, he beat the shit out of the vic because he wanted to, but I think the heart was something else entirely. I think the heart was cut out and then left in the chest because he wanted someone to know something. Then you have this shit with the quinine. I mean, what in fuck’s name was all that about?’

Verlaine shook his head.

‘You gotta understand, I don’t really know a thing about this, right?’ Cipliano grinned and winked. ‘All of that I just told you could be complete bullshit and I’m just making out I’m smart. You go check on your prints, and let me know who he was, okay?’

Verlaine nodded. He turned and started towards the door.

‘Hey, John.’

He turned back to Cipliano.

‘Thing to remember, however bad it might get, is it’s never as bad for you as it is for these poor suckers.’

Verlaine smiled. It was a small mercy indeed.

The image of the constellation drawn on the victim’s back haunted Verlaine’s thoughts as he drove back to the Precinct House. It was a twist, perhaps significant in the fact that quinine was used, perhaps in the constellation itself. It would all start to open up with the identification of the body. And, figuratively speaking, that was where it had ended as well.

He pulled into the car lot back of the Precinct and went up the steps into the building. Duty sergeant at the desk told him the captain was away for the rest of the day; also told him there’d been one message left for him.

Verlaine took the piece of paper and turned it over.

Always. A single word printed in the duty sergeant’s neat script.

Verlaine looked at the sergeant.

The sergeant shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘Some guy called up, asked for you, I told him you were out and about someplace. He was quiet for a moment, I asked him if there was any message and he said that. Just one word. “Always”. And then he hung up before I had a chance to ask him who he was.’

‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ Verlaine asked.

‘If you wanna go there that’s your choice, John.’

‘Seems to me I don’t have a choice, right?’

The sergeant shrugged his shoulders again.

‘Can you call Prints and ask if they have a make on my trunk vic?’

The sergeant lifted the receiver and phoned through. He asked if they had an ID, and then nodded and held out the receiver towards Verlaine. ‘They wanna speak to you.’

Verlaine took the handset. ‘Yes?’

He was silent for a moment, and then ‘Okay. Let me know if anything comes up.’

The duty sergeant took the receiver and replaced it in its cradle.

‘Security tagged,’ Verlaine said.

‘Your prints?’

Verlaine nodded. ‘It’s come up as a security tagged print.’

‘No shit! So it’s a cop or somesuch?’

‘Or federal or military or CIA or National Security Agency, who the fuck knows.’

‘Christ, you got yourself into a wild one there, John Verlaine.’

‘Verlaine said nothing. He looked at the sergeant and then turned back towards the rear exit of the building.

‘You gonna head down to Evangeline, gonna go see Always and find out if he knows anything?’

Verlaine slowed and hesitated. He shook his head. ‘Right now seems the only direction to take.’

‘Suit yourself, but take care, eh?’

‘Call me on the cellphone if Prints come back to you with anything more, would you?’

‘Sure John, sure. You figure you should take someone with you?’

‘It’ll be alright,’ Verlaine said. ‘Me an’ Daddy Always haven’t crossed paths for a few years.’

‘Don’t mean he’ll have forgotten you.’

‘Thanks,’ Verlaine said. ‘That’s very reassuring.’ He walked on to the rear door and returned to his car.

The rain came as he pulled away from the car lot. By the time he reached the junction it was flooding down in torrents. Verlaine drew to the edge of the road beneath the overhang of a tree and prepared himself to wait until the worst had passed. Down across the sidewalks, petals of wisteria and magnolia, mimosa and Mexican plum littered the way like confetti, scattered pockets of white and cream, yellow and lilac-blue.

When the rain lessened he began moving again. He took the longest route out of Orleans, left across the south-west limits, noticed a highway sign jutting from the ground – Don’t Take A Curve – At Sixty Per – We Hate To Lose – A Customer – BURMA-SHAVE – an artefact from some bygone age. The further he drove the more the city dissolved away into nothing. The colors were vague and deep, shades of bruising, of bloodshot eyes and wounded flesh. Where he was headed, a small town called Evangeline, was a place to leave, never a place to arrive in or be born into, but to escape from as soon as age and ability permitted. There were dreams, there were nightmares, and somewhere in between was reality, the truly real existence one found not by listening but by looking, by following these strange-colored threads, vague lines that ran from circumstance to coincidence, and from there into the indelible effects of brutal humanity in its most merciless forms. People like the heart-killer were everywhere: standing in stores, waiting for trains, leaving for work, looking no less human, no less real than ourselves, carrying with them the perfect privacy of who they really were, their imaginations running riot with the colors and sounds of death and sacrifice, of some urgent necessity to enact their irrevocable maniac nightmares.

The glades unfolded as Verlaine drove, a demarcation point more of sound and smell than vision, for here the undergrowth began to drift from the verges into the road, the hot-top worn and beaten, here and there broken up and allowing small stripes of vegetation to creep through. The air seemed closer, harder to breathe, and the