Die and Stay Dead (7 page)

It was Calliope’s bedroom. I scanned the room quickly, taking in the big, canopied, king-sized bed at the center of the far wall. A pool of blood stained the bedspread and dripped off the sides to the carpet below, where Kali’s red paw prints tentatively circled the gore. A drop of blood fell from above, landing on the surface of the pool. I looked up. My stomach dropped. In my haste, I had mistaken the shape above the bed for a canopy. It wasn’t.

“Oh, God,” Bethany gasped in horror. She was standing behind me in the doorway, clutching Kali to her chest.

Calliope was on the ceiling, held there by long metal spikes that had been hammered through her arms and legs. Her different-colored eyes stared down at us unblinkingly. Her torso had been cut open in a single, long slit. Thick, ropy coils of something gray and glistening had been pulled out of the wound and spiked to the bedroom ceiling all around her, leaving her dangling over the bed in a web of her own innards.

Five

“Damn it, I told you to stay in the other room,” I barked at Bethany.

The tone of my voice startled Kali. The cat squirmed and mewled to be let down. Bethany released her, and the cat jumped to the floor. She ran out of the room as quickly as she could and down the stairs.

“Who would do something like this?” Bethany asked, looking up at the body.

“I don’t know, but this wasn’t random,” I said. “This kind of brutality never is. This is something different.”

“It’s insane,” Bethany said, shaking her head.

I looked up at Calliope’s body again, at the spikes driven through her limbs and into the ceiling. “It takes more than one person to nail a full-grown adult to the ceiling. But there’s no sign of a struggle. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It didn’t have to be more than one person,” Bethany said. “Not if they had magic.”

I turned away from the body. I couldn’t stand the way Calliope’s open eyes were staring at me so accusingly.

“This is my fault,” I said. “She told me someone was following her. She told me she didn’t feel safe in her own home. I should have come back sooner. I meant to.”

“It’s not your fault,” Bethany said. “It’s no one’s fault but whoever did this to her.”

“I’m going to find them,” I said. “I owe Calliope that, at least.”

“
We’re
going to find them,” she corrected me. “You’re not in this alone. You’re going to need help.”

I nodded. Whoever had cut Calliope open and spiked her to the ceiling was a sick bastard. No two ways about it. But they’d been following her before this. Stalking her for a couple of weeks, she’d said. Stalkers rarely chose random victims. They usually focused on people they knew.

I looked at Bethany. “The front door was still locked when we got here.”

“You think she let her killer in?” Bethany asked.

“It’s possible. She kept telling me how she never had social calls. She only saw people by appointment. If she did let him in, he would have to be someone she knew. Someone she trusted.”

“Someone she was expecting,” Bethany said. “You said she made a living as a medium. Maybe it was a disgruntled client.”

“It’s a place to start,” I said, walking back out into the hallway. “If Calliope could afford a place like this, she must have had a lot of clients.”

Bethany followed me into the hall. “She probably kept an appointment book that can tell us who came to see her.”

Where would Calliope keep something like that? Probably in the same place where she met with her clients. Not here on this floor, this was her personal space. Not the parlor floor below, either. The living room was jam-packed with cat furniture and toys; it would put off her clients. But this was a row house. There was one more floor under us, at street level. The garden floor.

We went back downstairs. Under the staircase, we found a door that opened on another staircase that led down into the darkness. Bethany found a light switch and turned it on. A bulb flickered to life above the stairs, and we started down.

The garden floor was a single, large, open room that ran the length of the row house. Positioned in the center of the room was a big, round table covered with a black velvet cloth. In the middle of the table was a perfectly spherical crystal ball on a wooden stand. The walls were draped with more black velvet and decorated with framed prints of spirit photography—old-time pictures of transparent figures standing in abbey windows or walking through churchyards.

“Looks like something out of an old horror movie,” I said.

“It’s all set dressing,” Bethany said. “Necromancers don’t need all these bells and whistles to contact the dead, but her clients probably expected it.”

I could see that. A black tablecloth and crystal ball would certainly draw more clients than a room full of cat toys.

“Most mediums are charlatans,” Bethany said. “But Calliope was the real deal. Maybe that’s why she was so successful. A medium doesn’t live in a house like this without a lot of loyal clients. Loyal, and wealthy.”

I peeked behind one of the black velvet drapes and found windows in the wall that looked out onto the sidewalk. In true New York City fashion, the windows were protected by metal security bars. No one could have broken in that way. More evidence she’d let her killer inside? Maybe. I moved on. Behind another drape, I found a bookshelf crammed full of paperbacks, all with covers featuring pale, voluptuous women in nightgowns surrendering to the embrace of well-built, shirtless vampires. They all had titles with some combination of the words
dark, eternal,
and
seduction.
Vampire romance novels. I wondered what Philip would think of them. I searched the shelves but didn’t find Calliope’s appointment book among them.

“Here!” Bethany called.

She was sitting at the séance table, the cloth pushed back from the edge, and rummaging through a drawer she’d found. She pulled out a small black appointment book. I went over to the table to look at it with her. A foil skull had been stamped on the cover. Bethany opened it. The appointment book was bookmarked to today’s date with a rubber band that bound the preceding pages together in a clump. That was all the proof I needed that she had still been alive last night, maybe even this morning. But the morning slots on today’s page were all empty.

“She didn’t have
any
appointments this morning,” I said.

“No, but she had one tonight. Look at this.” Bethany pointed at the eight p.m. slot, where Calliope had written
Yrouel,
and beneath it, an address:
84A Bayard Street
.

“Bayard Street. That’s in Chinatown,” I said. “Who’s Yrouel?”

“I don’t know, but she was going to see him tonight.” She looked up at me. “Maybe someone didn’t want her to.”

“Or maybe Yrouel came here instead, surprising her,” I said. “She knows him, so she lets him inside. And then…”

“He kills her,” Bethany finished.

I sighed. “It’s a theory, anyway.”

“We’ve got his address. It’s a theory worth pursuing.” Bethany tucked the appointment book into a pocket in her vest and stood up. “But first, I want to take another look at Calliope’s body. We might have missed something.”

We went back upstairs. Bethany continued up to the second floor and Calliope’s bedroom. I told her I’d be up in a moment. In the living room, Calliope’s notebook was back on the coffee table. I walked over to it. Kali peered out at me from inside the carpeted hutch of one of her cat trees and let out a low moan of warning. I ignored her. Somewhere inside that notebook was a drawing of the Ehrlendarr rune from my earliest memory. I picked it up and slid it into the inside pocket of my trench coat. Kali watched me do it, then turned around and disappeared into her hutch.

I went upstairs to Calliope’s bedroom. Bethany had taken her boots off and was standing barefoot on the edge of the bed, careful to avoid the pool of blood on the bedspread. She was looking intently up at Calliope’s body, studying the details. Somehow she managed to remain detached from the brutality of the scene. I couldn’t. I had taken Calliope home from Biddy’s lair. I’d stayed and talked with her until she felt safe again. I’d liked her. She was an odd one, but then, we all were. I’d made a promise to come back and check up on her, only I’d come back too late. I felt accountable. And angry. Very, very angry.

There were two nightstands flanking the bed. The one on the left held an alarm clock and a stack of paperback novels, their well-worn spines offering up names like Poppy Z. Brite, Anne Rice, and Laurell K. Hamilton. The other nightstand was bare except for a glass vase holding dried flowers and a jar full of seashells. I hadn’t seen any photographs in the house, outside of the prints in the séance room. Even the shyest wallflower in the world would have pictures of her family, friends, or lovers
somewhere,
but Calliope didn’t. Either she had a pathological fear of photographs or, more likely, she didn’t have anyone in her life. The second nightstand was unused, purely ornamental. She lived alone. She slept alone. Calliope had died alone in the world.

But one very conspicuous thing was missing from the bedroom. There was no hammer or any other kind of tool here. Whoever had hammered those spikes into the ceiling had left with it. That told me this wasn’t a crime of opportunity. This was planned. Calliope’s killer had come prepared, bringing the spikes and hammer with him and taking the hammer when he was done. He must have also taken the knife he’d used to cut her open.

This wasn’t the work of someone berserk with rage or jealousy. This was methodical.

Bethany stepped down from the bed. “Trent, you’re taller than I am. Come take a closer look at this. I want to know if you see it, too.”

“See what?”

“You tell me,” she said.

I got up on the bed, standing right under Calliope’s body. I wanted to tell her I was sorry this had happened to her, but communicating with the dead was her trick, not mine. She stared through me, both her blue eye and her gold-flecked hazel eye milky and unseeing. The diamond stud in her nose twinkled. There was very little blood on her face. Her sweater and the T-shirt beneath it, however, were soaked in it, both having been torn open by the knife. Her jeans were covered in blood, too. That made sense. She must have been standing when she was first gutted, and the blood had spilled down her body. But her hands, spread far apart on the ceiling, were positively red with gore. That stuck out for some reason. The more it itched at me as peculiar, the more it bothered me. Had she used her hands to try to stop the blood flow? No, she wouldn’t have had time. She would have died within seconds from a wound this grave.

I looked closer. Her right hand had a strangely unbloodied patch, long and rectangular, running from one side of her palm to the other, as if she’d been holding something in her fist when the blood had run over her hand.

“Do you see it?” Bethany asked.

“The clean spot on her hand,” I said. “What was she holding?”

“I don’t know, but it’s gone now,” she said. “It makes me wonder if the killer took something from her.”

“You mean, not just a killer but a thief?” I climbed down off the bed, careful to avoid stepping in the pool of blood under the body. Then I froze. A thief. Of course. How stupid of me. I’d had the answer all along. “I know how they got in the house,” I said. I ran out of the room and up the stairs to the top floor.

Bethany followed behind me. “How? Trent, how do you know?”

At the top of the steps was a closed door. I tried the handle. As I expected, it was unlocked. I burst through into the attic. It was dark inside, the neglected, dust-caked windows filtering the sunlight down to practically nothing. I groped my way into the dark, bumped into the hard, pointy corner of a sheet-covered table, and cursed. I heard Bethany mutter a spell, and a bright light flared to life behind me.

“Slow down, Trent. Tell me what’s going on.” Bethany was holding her small, mirrored charm aloft, using its bright light as a flashlight.

“Over here,” I said, indicating the window at the rear of the attic. I crouched down in front of it. Bethany knelt opposite me. I pointed at the old, corroded window latch. It was snapped in half. “See? It’s broken. This is how they got in. I bet it’s how they got back out again, too. That’s why the front door was still locked.”

She looked at me incredulously. “How did you know about the window?”

“It’s how I used to break into houses like this.”

Her expression changed. She didn’t like being reminded of what I used to do. What I used to be. It reminded her that once upon a time I’d pulled my gun on her. She turned away from me to inspect the latch, though I suspected that wasn’t her entire reason for turning away.

“So Calliope
didn’t
let her killer into the house,” she said.

“They still might have known each other,” I said. “What he did to her, you don’t do that to a stranger. There’s a motive behind that kind of brutality.”

She looked at me again. “But what does it all mean?”

“I don’t know.” I nodded at the appointment book poking out of her vest pocket. “Let’s ask someone who might.”

*   *   *

But there were two things we had to do first.

Bethany refused to leave Kali in the house. She was convinced if we left her, the cat would wind up taken to a pound and put down. While I found that a tempting thought, in the end she persuaded me we should take the little monster with us instead. It didn’t take much effort to coax Kali into the molded plastic carrier we found in one corner of the living room. As soon as she was inside she began mewling, so I threw in a few of her smaller toys to keep her quiet. In the kitchen I found a bag of her kibble, a bag of cat litter, and her food and water bowls. I dumped out her litter box, and then put everything in an oversized blue IKEA shopping bag I found under the sink.

“We’re going to have to find a new home for her,” Bethany said.

“I thought you were taking her.” I held the carrier out toward her.

She put up her hands and shook her head. “I can’t. My landlord doesn’t allow pets.”