Medusa (3 page)

“That’s it? No letter?”
 

“That’s it.”
 

“Pretty bizarre. What’s the girl’s name?” I was sure that Broom was getting out his notebook.
 

“Danielle LeGrandville. She’s eleven years old.”
 

“I had a hunch there was more to that call you told me about at lunch, than just some prank. I’ll tell you what. Let me do a little checking through official channels. I’ll see what I can turn up. I’ll give you a shout when I find out what’s going on, down in the Big Easy.”
 

“Great, Les. Thanks.”
 

“No problem.”
 

I hung up. I looked again at the scrap of newspaper. I now noticed that someone, very lightly, had underlined the words police now suspect foul play. My mind raced with questions. What was the sender trying to tell me? And, more importantly, why? There was the possible motive that they wanted me involved, but why a private detective from Birmingham, hundreds of miles away? There was more to it than that, obviously. I had the feeling that this was not the last message that I’d receive.
 

The phone rang again, startling me. I realized I’d been almost hypnotized by the newsprint in my hand.
 

“Hello?”
 

It was Broom, calling back already. “Roland, they’ve got a big problem down there.”
 

“What kind of problem?”
 

“The worst kind. Some sicko down there is preying on kids, little girls in particular. So far they have four missing. No bodies have turned up. And Roland?”
 

“Yes?”
 

“What’s really strange about these cases, the little girls all disappeared from within their homes, one of them during her birthday party.” Broom said those last words with a deliberate significance.
 

I felt like someone had sucker-punched me. Horrors from the past dredged up. I remembered the name of a child killer, a very dangerous man who had almost killed me, a man I had caught, but who had escaped to kill again. For a long few seconds, I was silent, then, I finally managed to speak. When I did, the killer’s name came to my lips.
 

“Samson Fain. The Magician,” I said, using the nickname that the media had given Fain, the psychopath that I, with help, had miraculously captured a long time after he had committed a terrible crime. In the end, he was only in police custody for a while. He had escaped from the hospital where he had been under guard and vanished without a trace. A month later he had sent me a card with a one-word inscription: abracadabra.
 

It had been a one-word gloat, a simple reminder that all my efforts to run him to ground had been in vain.
 

I sank down onto the couch. I remembered tracking him down the first time. I’d traced Fain across the country five years before. He was a special kind of predator, spending weeks gaining the confidence of his young victims before spiriting them away. They were, without exception, never to be heard from again. Few of his victims’ bodies were ever found. In my mind I saw the face of Georgia Champion, a girl who had disappeared eight years before; and I saw the face of Samson Fain, the strange, psychopathic giant I had hunted into the depths of the Arizona desert.
 

Georgia Champion was the daughter and only child of Horace Champion. Champion was a member of Birmingham’s smallest and most exclusive club. He was a billionaire, having made his money by inheriting tens of millions from his late father, and having good enough business sense to make his fortunes grow larger still. The source of his immense wealth was a huge construction firm, which he had also inherited. His daughter’s abduction had caused a media sensation, because the misfortunes of the rich turn seem to turn reporters on more than the sufferings of the poor.
 

The lurid story came rushing back to me. It had been the proverbial tabloid circus that everyone in the world heard about, whether they wanted to or not. The yellow journalists had stoked the flames of the public interest, and the story had run the lurid circuit, as such sad stories do. Theories, realistic and otherwise, were thrown around. Then, one day, the story had become an old topic. The public got bored with the lack of new developments, and so the jackals had run away to focus on some other human tragedy. In the end, the girl’s abduction had become the butt of jokes, and finally, it had been forgotten.
 

Georgia Champion, The Poor Little Rich Girl, as so many headlines and magazine covers had called her. I was sure that there were still old tabloids in my outer office, with her picture and those very words emblazoned across their fading covers. Most of them featured crazed headlines, blaming the girl’s disappearance on everything from Satanist death cults, to aliens from outer space. The headlines had grown increasingly bizarre as time had gone by. No real suspects had ever been announced, and Georgia was never found, dead or alive. Eventually, most people just lost interest.
 

Georgia Champion’s disappearance would never have attracted so much attention, of course, had her parents not been so wealthy. They were the Mountain Brook Champions, after all. Her father was a well-known construction magnate. That fact alone had kept the story in the news for a year. It had lingered in the tabloids six months more.
 

For all the media hoopla, though, the crime itself had been a genuine conundrum. The girl had disappeared from her parent’s estate, an opulent 19th Century manor with a ten-foot privacy fence, as well as its own security force. She had been just nine years old. A lot of good minds had tried to crack the mechanics of just how the girl had been abducted, with no success.
 

With only a single, slender, and rather unlikely clue, I had tracked Samson Fain deep into the Arizona desert, and there we had fought a titanic battle in an isolated ghost town, a place where circuses wintered and restocked for the next season. Fain had the strength of an enraged bull. He had nearly killed me, as well as Birmingham Detective Amos Tiller, who had accompanied me on my quest to find Fain. With the help of others, we had been subdued Fain in an epic battle that had almost destroyed the entire town.
 

A few days after his capture, however, the seemingly invulnerable Fain disappeared from a hospital filled with police, by using the same weird talents he used to abduct his victims from their presumably safe homes.
 

“You think this is a letter from Fain?” Broom asked me.
 

“That’s not likely. He got away, and managed to hide himself, and stay hidden. He’ll kill anyone he has to, now, to stay that way. No, I think this letter is from someone else, maybe someone who has cause to believe that Fain’s in Louisiana, and remembered my name from when I caught him the first time. With a lot of help, I might add.”
 

Broom grunted. “Well, maybe all of this is so, Roland, but why the intrigue? Why doesn’t this person just call you up and tell you what they know?”
 

“That’s a very good question.”
 

“I admit it looks likely, but the world is full of freaks, these days. It might be Samson Fain down there, but you and I know better than to jump to such conclusions. There are plenty of other crazy bastards out there doing the same thing. I know you, though. You’ve probably already got a plan. So tell me, just what are you going to do?”
 

I thought for a second. “Well, maybe I’m not Hercule Poirot, after all. I felt brilliant, until a few minutes ago. To tell you the truth, now I’m at a loss. Yes, I’ll look into it. But if you want a game plan, I can’t give it to you. I can’t because I don’t know what to do, at this moment.”
 

“Well, partner, whatever you decide, don’t keep me in the dark. If you’re right, don’t forget, this guy is on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. If you get any more of these strange messages, keep me posted. Always remember, I can help.”
 

“Thanks, Les. I promise that I’ll let you know.”
 

I hung up, but I already knew what I was going to do. In all likelihood, Broom knew, too. I was going to Louisiana, and I was going to find Samson Fain again, because I had to. I owed that to little girls long dead, and, most of all, little girls who are alive now and who have never met a monster like Samson Fain. I would like to make sure they never would.

Chapter 3

I drove across town to Red Lane, a narrow street in north Ensley that was dominated by the East Precinct building, a stately deep brown granite structure. It had been called the New Building for years because the Old Precinct had still been used as a police administrative building after its construction, with operations slowly shifting over to the more modern facility as time went by. Finally, the newer building had developed a persona of its own, and the old home of the East Birmingham police had been renovated into a municipal court facility. Things change.
 

Birmingham is an old town, one that has seen many ups and downs in just over its seven generations of human existence. She was built around industry by interested parties in the years after the Civil War, as had many cities in the South during the so-called Reconstruction period. Many enterprising young robber barons had migrated south and made their money by building a plant, and planning a town around it, along with others of like mind. Shotgun houses, company store, and little else were the beginnings of many Southern cities. The cities they had built had gone on to booms, busts, recession, depression, and for some of them, rebound. Others had disappeared completely. But a few—a very few—grew and became something special in the age that followed. Birmingham was one of the grandest of the cities that had sprung into being during that time.
 

She had been the epicenter of the Civil Rights struggle, a hundred years after the end of the Civil War. I was a little too young to remember the Civil Rights movement, but as a black man living in Birmingham, its history was everywhere for me. It was on the lips of my mother, who had marched to Selma with Martin Luther King. It was in the proud bearing of my grandparents, who smiled with pride whenever their grandson came home from the University of Alabama, where I was a linebacker on the football team of what had once been the most segregated university in the South. Things change. A mighty big chapter in the nation’s history had played out in Birmingham and surrounding points.
 

My own personal history was woven into the city, too. I could see it in almost every building that I passed. My route took me past rows of closed businesses on 3rd Avenue north, and past the lovely, abandoned yellow limestone shoulders of the Cabana Hotel. Like Birmingham itself, the old hotel was a testament to a bygone era. I winced. A very, very bad man had killed some people there, just a couple of months before, and in the ensuing struggle he had also wounded me before he had been killed by an innocent bystander. I shook my head at the memory. This city was full of ghosts for me, now.
 

But I had to put that from my mind. What I needed was the insight of my old friend, Detective Amos Tiller. And more importantly, I needed his help.
 

Tiller had assisted me with my first search for Samson Fain. I thought again about the murky message on the answering machine, speaking through a wall of static from some place that seemed awfully dark, from across that invisible connection of the telephone line. I had the newspaper clipping with me. I believed—no, I knew, somehow—that I was right.
 

Samson Fain had surfaced again. But I thought now about how tenuous my evidence seemed, and I wondered how Tiller would react.

* * *

“You have to be kidding me.” Detective Amos Tiller peered closely at the newspaper clipping that I had photocopied for him. Broom, across town at Police Headquarters, was having the original subjected to intense scrutiny by the Birmingham Police crime lab. I hoped against hope that he would turn up something.
 

Here at the East Precinct, Detective Amos “Dead Letter” Tiller was in charge of cold cases, since he had shown an aptitude for solving crimes long since filed away as unsolvable. He had a unique approach to police work, and it involved his steady, rational mind, and superhuman patience. He also had a bloodhound’s nose, especially when it came to the esoteric leads that others often overlooked.
 

Some of his fellow officers had looked upon his appointment to the cold-case room as semi-retirement. That is, they had until Tiller started solving those often long-forgotten crimes. Now, everybody in the precinct regarded him with quiet respect, if not a little awe. His formidable intellect was known and respected. “Cold Case” Tiller, they called him, but not to his face, for the squat, forty-something detective was also known to be pretty cranky at times, and a downright curmudgeon at others. Right now, the needle on Tiller’s dial was edging toward curmudgeon.
 

I was sitting across from Tiller in The Dungeon, as Tiller referred to his dark little office, which was situated in the basement of the Birmingham Police Department’s East Precinct. He shared the basement space with evidence and equipment rooms, an ever-humming mainframe computer, and hundreds of file cabinets, his “Cold Case library” as he liked to call them.