The Devil in Gray (24 page)

“
What are you doing to me?
” he screeched. “
Let me get out, let me get out!
”

Again he struggled and kicked, but again he was pushed back into the water. It was so hot now that he felt as if his entire body was burning, and he could hear a deep, thick bubbling noise as it rapidly rose to boiling point.

His agony lasted for less than a minute, but during that minute he discovered hell. He went into total shock, his legs and his arms quivering, his fists gripped tight. He had never thought that pain like this was possible.

The bathwater came to a rolling boil and for the final few seconds of his life he was cooking alive.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

When Decker walked into his office the next morning, gripping a fifteen-slice pastrami sandwich between his teeth and carrying a cup of espresso and three thick folders under his arm, Sandra and Eunice Plummer were already waiting for him. Sandra was wearing a flowery green dress and a medicine-pink cardigan. Sitting in the corner in a triangle of bright sunlight, she looked simple but saintly. Eunice was wearing a beige pantsuit and a look of irritation.

Decker said, “Mmm, mmm,” and jerked his head to indicate that they should follow him over to his desk. He took the sandwich out of his mouth and laid it on top of Erin Malkman's autopsy report on George Drewry. “Good to see you again, Sandra. How can I help?”

“I asked her not to come,” Eunice said, her brown vinyl purse clutched firmly in her lap. “But she stamped her foot and said she was going to see you whether I liked it or not.”

“I saw him again,” Sandra said. “The So-Scary Man.”

“You did? Where?”

“I saw him at the station. He was going through the door.”

“You mean Main Street Station?”

“That's right,” Eunice said. “She says he crossed East Main Street and walked straight across the sidewalk and into the entrance.”

“Do you think he might have seen
you
?”

Sandra shook her head. “I don't think so. He looked like he was in a big hurry.”

“What time was this?”

“About 4:45 yesterday afternoon,” Eunice said. “Sandra wanted to call you right away but I tried to persuade her not to. I'm sorry, maybe I'm wrong, but I really don't want her to get mixed up in this.”

Decker sat down and pried the lid off his coffee. “I don't blame you, Ms. Plummer. But this kind of information could be really helpful. It means that whoever he is—
whatever
he is—he's still in the downtown area. If we can work out his behavior patterns … well, maybe we can find him, and find out how he manages to make himself unnoticed.”

Sandra nodded enthusiastically and said, “We should go look for him.”

“No you shouldn't,” Eunice said. “You should go back home and finish your schoolwork. You've told Lieutenant Martin what you wanted to tell him, and now we should leave him in peace.”

“I think your mom's right,” Decker told her. “This is a city with nearly a quarter of a million people living in it. Where are we going to start looking?”

“The
station
,” Sandra insisted.

“Just because you saw him at the station yesterday that doesn't mean he's going to be there now. And what would he be doing there? It's all building work and renovations. There wouldn't be any place for him to stay.”

“That's where he comes from,” Sandra insisted. “I just
know
.”

Decker suddenly remembered the drawing of Main Street Station hanging by the fireplace in Eunice Plummer's apartment. The dark cloud over it, which looked more like tangled black snakes. And what had Eunice told him? “She calls it the Fun House.”

“
How
do you know?” he asked her.

Sandra touched her fingertips to her forehead. “I can see it. I can see him going up the stairs.”

“You did a drawing of the station, didn't you? A very good one. But it had some kind of a cloud hanging over it.”

“I saw it. Only it wasn't a cloud. It was a bad thing.”

“A bad thing? What do you mean by that?”

“When people do wrong. When people hate people. That's what it's like.”

Eunice said, “I'm sorry, Lieutenant. I really think that this is enough.”

“You wouldn't consider letting me take Sandra down to the station for a look around?”

“You've said yourself that this man could be vengeful, especially if he knows that Sandra can see him, and identify him.”

“Well, you're right, of course. And the last thing I want to do is expose Sandra to any danger.”

“I
want
to look for him,” Sandra said, drumming her heels on the floor. “It would be like hide-and-go-seek.”

Decker shook his head. “I'm sorry, Sandra. If Mom says no, then it's no. But I'll go check the station myself, and if I find anything I'll tell you.”

Decker and Hicks climbed the dark stone stairway from East Main Street to the second-floor lobby of Main Street Station, deafened at every step by weird, distorted banging and hammering.

They reached the lobby itself, where workers in hard hats were digging up the flooring and chipping the walls back to the bare brick. In spite of the noise and the dust and the snaking hydraulic hoses, the lobby was still awesome, with its tall columns and its high arched windows and its coffered ceiling. From here, Virginia's soldiers had departed for two world wars and Vietnam, and vacationers boarded for Buck-roe Beach, as well as students bound for northern colleges and salesmen heading to new territory out West.

A short sandy man in blue overalls came over to greet them, carrying two red hard hats. “Lieutenant Martin? How do you do. Mike Verdant, I'm the project engineer. Have to ask you to put these on, I'm afraid.”

“Thanks,” Decker said. “Quite an operation you've got going here.”

“It's going pretty good. We should have trains running by December on the eastern side, on the old Chesapeake and Ohio tracks, and then we can open up the Seaboard Line.”

“History, huh?”

“Oh, for sure. Amtrak closed this station down in 1975 and shifted all of their rail operations out to the suburbs, because they thought that the interstate was going to kill off rail travel. But … here we are again. Opening it all up. Here, let me show you something.”

He led them across the echoing lobby to the western side of the station, where workmen in white overalls were drilling up the floor. He picked up a piece of flooring and crumbled it between finger and thumb.

“You see this flooring? Black cinder ash, from the old coal-burning locomotives. You add water and it holds up pretty well.”

Decker sniffed and looked around. “Any place here that somebody could hide?”

Michael Verdant stood up, dusting his hands. “Not sure what you mean. We've had a couple of down-and-outs in here lately.”

“No, I mean any place that somebody could actually
live
in.”

“I don't see how. There's too much work going on. During the day we're renovating the walls and the flooring. Over there—you see over there?—we took down all of the terracotta sculptures and we're having them molded and recast. Then we're stripping out all of the asbestos, we have to do that during the night, because of safety regulations. Nobody could set up camp here, wouldn't be possible.”

Decker breathed in the smell of old plaster and pulverized brick. The lobby echoed with hammer drills and pickaxes, but he was sure he could sense something else here too. The Old South, which had depended on tobacco and cotton and slavery and free opinion, breathing its defiant last.

Richmond had once been the Secessionist capital. Now it was a tourist attraction, with antique stores and teddy-bear shops and plantation cruises on riverboats, lunch and dinner included, and the only men in gray were the guides at the National Battlefield Park.

Michael Verdant said, “Come on, follow me.” He led them upstairs, to the fourth and fifth levels, through sheets of dusty plastic and sanded-down doors, until they came to a metal ladder in the corner. He climbed it as swiftly as a big sandy ape, and Decker and Hicks followed. They found themselves out on the balcony of the clock tower, their hair blown by the warm midday wind. Below them, traffic streamed along the interstate, which curved beneath the station only twenty feet away. But off to their right, they could see all the way down the Shockoe Valley, where the James River glittered, and ships were moored, and the woody hills were hazed with summer blue.

“Finest view of the city there is.”

Decker turned around. Above him the four clock faces were creeping closer to noon, and he could hear the stealthy creeping of their automated movement.

“How about the lower levels?” he asked. “Any chance that somebody could be hiding themselves there?”

Michael Verdant led them back down to the gloomy, echoing train shed, 530 feet long, the size of a zeppelin hangar, with a gable roof. “This is where the Greyhound buses are going to be coming in. Not sure about the second level, though. It's like three football fields put together.”

They went back down the stairway to the East Main Street entrance, and Michael Verdant unclipped a flashlight from his belt and showed them a deep excavation of rubble and old brickwork. “We're putting in a ramp here, for wheelchair users, and people who lug their bags on wheels. We found this old brick foundation when we started to excavate, and at first we thought it could be a wharf, because the old Shockoe Creek used to come in here.”

“You're kidding me.”

“No, it used to be deep enough for fishing boats. But this wall is probably later than that, 1920s or thereabouts. A whole lot of different building work has gone on here, over the years, levels on top of levels. It's like opening up Tutankhamen's tomb.”

Decker peered into the darkness. “Is that a basement?”

“No, there's no basement. I guess the original planners were too worried about floods, this close to the river. There's a crawl space, but that's it.”

“You think anybody could hide in there?”

“Pretty unlikely. It's damp and it's dark and it's suffocating. And you never know when the tide's going to come pouring in.”

“Okay,” Decker said. “Thanks for showing us around.”

Michael Verdant gave him a dry, strong handshake. “Glad I could help. Make sure you come back when we're open for business. You won't believe this place, I can promise you.”

As they walked back to Decker's car, Hicks said, “You want to tell me why we came here?”

“I don't know. I was given a tip-off, that's all. I just wanted to check.”

“What tip-off?”

Decker turned around and looked up at the clock tower and the dormer windows with their red terra-cotta tiles. The station looked more like a palace out of
Grimm's Fairy Tales
than a twentieth-century railroad terminus.

“Do you get any vibrations out of that place?” he asked.

“
Vibrations?
You mean apart from jackhammering? Like what?”

“Like—I don't know. Like something very bad is hiding there.”

Hicks shook his head. “You should ask Rhoda. She's the one who's into vibrations. Me—well, you know me, Lieutenant. I prefer procedure to witchcraft, any day.”

“In that case, you definitely won't be happy about where we're going next.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

He parked outside Moses Adebolu's building and shouted, “Come on, Hicks! You should find this very instructive. It'll take you back to your ethnic roots.”

“What ethnic roots? I was born in Fairview Beach.”

The same kids were playing with rat bones on the steps. Decker took out a pack of fresh-mint gum and gave them a stick each. “Watch my car, okay?”

“So who's this we're going to see?” Hicks asked, dubiously.

They climbed up the creaking stairs. Somebody on the floor above was having a shouting match, and there was a clatter like saucepans being thrown.

Decker said, “You're going to meet Moses. He's a
santero
. One of the best, according to Jonah. Yesterday we sacrificed a rooster and today he's going to give me my
omiero
.”

“What the hell is an
omiero?
”

“It's my magic antidemon potion. Rooster blood and herbs. I have to take a bath in it and then the great god Changó might forgive me for whatever it is I've done to piss him off.”

They had reached the second-story landing, under the headless image of John the Baptist. Hicks stopped and said, “Wait up a second, Lieutenant. Are you
serious
about this?”

“Never more so. You saw that image of Cathy that Rhoda conjured up. Whatever's happening here, it's supernatural, whether we like it or not. Or at the very least it involves some pretty weird influences. So it's no good trying to hunt it down with procedure. It's Santería magic, and that means we're going to have to use Santería magic to find it.”

“Have you talked to the captain about this?”

“Cab? Uh-huh. It'll only make him sneeze.”

“Well … I know what I saw when Rhoda did that séance, and I'll agree with you that it was something extremely strange. But what are we really talking about here?”

Decker laid a hand on his shoulder. “If we can safely believe Moses Adebolu, which from all the evidence I believe we can, then all we are up against is the single most vengeful god in the whole of the Santería religion.”

“And that's his name? Changó?”

“You got it.”

“All right,” Hicks said. “Supposing I go along with this. Supposing it's true. What's this goddamned god so goddamned vengeful about?”

“I have no idea, specifically. But the nightmares I've been having … and the way that the victims were killed … I think it has something to do with the Civil War, and with the Battle of the Wilderness in particular.”