Burn (Michael Bennett 7) (23 page)

“Or your next
New York Magazine
photo shoot is going to go overtime when they have to try to figure out how to shoot around your badly broken nose.”

“Are you kidding me? This is unreal. You really are threatening me, aren’t you?”

I leaned in until we were almost chest to chest.

“Look in my eyes. What do you think?”

“This is outrageous. You can’t do this. Who the hell are you?”

“My name is the Ghost of Your Ass-Kicking Yet to Come, Schlack. If you don’t get your company’s shit together,” I said, turning and walking back toward the elevator.

A horn sounded far below down between the metal grates as I pressed the elevator button. When I looked up, Schlack was suddenly beside me, his sneering, haughty look back. It seemed to be his natural resting expression.

“What are your name and badge number? I want them now,” Schlack said, squinting at me.

“Oh, my badge number. Sure,” I said, reaching into my pocket. I wrapped my fist around my shield and then held my closed fist up in front of his face.

“You’ll have to guess, Max. I’ll even give you a hint. The first number is a six. You know, the same percentage scumbags like you make in commission when you flip a slum house.”

Even I could hardly believe where I was taking this, how angry I was, how much I wanted to start trading punches with this guy. I usually didn’t go around threatening to kick people’s asses or throw them off buildings. Even punks like this one.

Was it all the stress I’d been under since coming back home? All my cases? The fact that Mary Catherine had left? Was I projecting all my troubles onto Max here, I wondered?

I couldn’t decide. Or care. Instead, I stood there and waited, staring at him.

“Guess you didn’t want it that bad, huh?” I said as the elevator finally arrived. “You didn’t even guess.”

CHAPTER
76

AFTER MY FAIRLY UNHINGED
and completely fruitless freakout near Carnegie Hall, I drove back up to Harlem to check in with Robertson. He thought he might have found something connected to Naomi’s murder and he wanted to show me in person.

As I came through the squad office door, I watched as Noah immediately spun around in his cubicle. He knocked over one of the precarious stacks of printouts covering his desk as he frantically waved me over.

“I think I’ve found a lead on the cannibal angle, Mike,” he said as he brought up a website on his computer. “It’s beyond bizarre, but I really think this might be the break we’ve been waiting for.”

Noah clicked through some pages and then showed me what looked like a classified ad.

PECCATUM KITCHEN PRESENTS
CANDLELIGHT AND DARKNESS
FINE WINE AND FABULOUS TABOOS
YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE
DINNER—MONDAY NIGHT
11
ISH
WHERE—SOMEWHERE IN NYC (BELOW 96TH) TO BE ANNOUNCED FOR OBVIOUS REASONS
COST—$2000 PER COUPLE
RESERVATIONS AND REFERENCES A MUSTY MUST—
AS ALWAYS

“This is from Craigslist,” Noah explained. “It’s a screen shot. I found it about an hour ago when I called you. It stayed on for five minutes, then disappeared. I just lucked on it.”

“Well, let’s see.
Peccatum
means ‘sin’ in Latin, I know,” I said offhandedly as I read it over again.

“How did you know that?” Noah said, surprised. “I had to look it up.”

“Freshman Latin at Regis High,” I said. “This ad sure sounds pretty weird, but how does this relate to Naomi’s murder? Do you think this is some sort of cannibal dinner or something?”

Noah nodded as he restacked the papers that had fallen. Beside the printouts, I noticed a copy of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
open to a picture of Hansel and Gretel sitting in a cage while the witch stirred the pot.

“For the last week or so, I’ve been really delving into cannibalism research,” Noah said. “Especially the cannibalism subculture on the web. For obvious reasons, I concentrated my searches on Deepnet sites.”

“Which sites?” I said.

“Deepnet. It’s Internet stuff that doesn’t register on surface search sites like Google. A bunch of underground sites use this thing called the Tor network, which is basically a bunch of connected random volunteer servers that pass data back and forth in an elaborate routing system with multiple levels of encryption to maintain secrecy.”

“Sounds like the seedy underbelly of the Internet,” I said.

“Exactly,” Noah said. “It’s unregulated and filled with open communication about black-market commerce and hacking and criminal activity. It contains a lot of really, really sick and spooky stuff.”

“So it’s true that cannibalism is an actual subculture now?” I said.

“Shockingly, yes,” Noah said, blinking at me. “I found four sites that had open forums about it. Dozens of people on threads going on and on about killing and eating people. Most of it seemed like sick fantasy stuff, except for this one site that seems to be based in the NYC area.

“These creeps who were exchanging Hannibal Lecter–style recipes kept giving references to the initials
PK
. ‘When is PK going to happen again?’ and ‘Have you heard about the next PK?’ One of the weirdos said he had heard something was going to be posted on Craigslist soon, so I kept an eye out.

“And then an hour ago, voilà! I was trolling through the bowels of Craigslist NYC and found this. PK must be Peccatum Kitchen. Has to be. And it’s happening tonight.”

“Great job, Robertson. This does seem like a lead,” I said, smiling. “Especially the two grand for dinner part. Both witnesses described what definitely seems like some sort of bizarre upscale underground supper club. How do you contact for reservations?”

“That cell number there in the upper left-hand corner,” Noah said, tapping the screen. “I already had the phone company trace it, Mike. No luck on a name. It’s a temp cell phone bought with cash from a Radio Shack in Times Square.”

“We definitely need to check this thing out,” I said. “Sign us up. Two of us will go to the dinner undercover, and the rest of the team will be backup.”

“Where are we going to come up with the two grand?” Noah said.

“The squad has about eighteen hundred dollars in the petty cash account, and we’ll pass around the hat for the rest,” I said. “Everyone wants to bring justice to Naomi and her family.”

“And references?” Noah said.

I stared at a photograph of Noah and what looked like his twin sister pinned to his cubicle wall as I thought about it.

“Get the phone company to give you every number that calls that cell number,” I finally said. “Then back-trace for a name to use as a reference.”

“Brilliant,” Noah said excitedly. “So that’s it? Just like that, we’re going to go undercover?”

“Bon appétit,”
I said grimly, nodding at the screen.

CHAPTER
77

“WOW, MIKE. NICE SUIT.
You scrub up pretty fine. I could almost eat you up. Metaphorically speaking, of course,” Brooklyn Kale said, laughing, as we walked down a cruddy section of West Twenty-Seventh Street that night around ten-thirty.

“Sorry,” said my young, attractive, black-cocktail-dress-wearing, six-foot-three “date” as we continued to walk east near the border of the Koreatown and Chelsea neighborhoods. “I’m just nervous. I’ll shut up now.”

Noah had done it. He’d tracked down a recommendation and scored an invite for tonight’s freakish underground dinner. Brooklyn and I had drawn the short straws to attend the event, while Arturo and Doyle and Robertson were parked around the corner of Seventh Avenue in an unmarked car in case we needed backup.

The street was mostly dingy office buildings and Korean wholesale stores and nail salons, but the address on the invite turned out to be a beautiful two-story Spanish mission–style town house with a terra-cotta roof and a tall black wrought-iron fence that looked like it was from the early 1900s.

The short old woman who answered the arched wood-and-iron front door looked like she was from the early 1900s as well. She wore a faded old green housedress with a brown paisley head scarf and looked easily eighty.

Looking at the witchlike woman, I suddenly remembered the
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
on Robertson’s desk. I also suddenly wondered how good this undercover idea really was. I definitely didn’t want Brooklyn and me to end up like Hansel and Gretel.

“What do you want?” the woman said with some kind of Eastern European accent.

“We’re here for the dinner,” I said, handing her the invite.

Or are we the dinner?
I thought.

The old lady assessed the paper and then both of us carefully with her little black eyes.

“Money,” she said, holding out her hand.

As the cash-filled envelope touched her palm, she opened the door fully and smiled, showing hard little brown-and-yellow teeth that reminded me sickeningly of corn kernels.

This probably wasn’t going to be the last time I felt nauseous before this night was through, I thought as I took a breath and followed Brooklyn through the door.

CHAPTER
78

THE HAUNTED-GINGERBREAD-COTTAGE
feeling continued as we were led through the house’s interior, past unlit and dusty empty rooms. The stove in the kitchen looked an awful lot like the falling one that had almost killed Doyle that morning.

Nothing was cooking on it, I noticed, which was weird. Wasn’t this supposed to be a dinner?

We suddenly heard classical music when the spooky old lady opened the set of French doors at the back of the kitchen. Through the doorway off a back deck was a wide-open courtyard with a huge garden and trees strung with garlands of soft white lights.

A pristine white tent stood in the garden’s center, and beneath it about twenty people were standing around, chatting casually with drinks in their hands as if they were at a fancy wedding reception. There were several Japanese men and women, I noticed straight off the bat, and several gay male couples.

Was one of them Naomi’s killer? I wondered. Were all of them?

No one seemed to notice us except for a black-clad waiter who stepped up and took our drink orders. After five minutes, two strikingly tall platinum-blond women in matching silver sequin dresses came over to us. In their high heels, they were both six and a half feet tall or more. They were both shapely, nice-looking ladies, but from the width and squareness of their shoulders and jaws, you could tell they were transgender.

Brooklyn shot a now-there’s-something-you-don’t-see every-day look at me as they clomped up to us.

They introduced themselves as Lucy and Barbara.

“Don’t I know you?” Lucy said to me between sips of her whiskey sour. “San Diego two years ago? You were at Christian Gazenove’s birthday with that snotty fashion photographer. The one that ended up in the hospital?”

“Wasn’t me. Sorry,” I said, shaking my head slowly at whatever the hell it was she had just said.

“Hey, brown sugar. You hungry? You look hungry,” Barbara said to Brooklyn with an irritating little smirk.

“Excuse me! If everyone would—Excuse me!” called a voice from behind us before Brooklyn could reply.

We all turned toward a man now standing on the deck. He was a pudgy but neat and pleasant-looking sixty-something dude in a beautifully tailored dove-gray suit. He didn’t look like a cannibal. With the white goatee he was sporting, I thought he looked very much like that nice old guy who sang “Frosty the Snowman” in that vintage children’s Christmas special.

“Thank you,” the genteel holly-jolly fat man said with a smile. “To those who have been here before, welcome back, and to our first-timers, how do you do? My name is Dale Roanoke, and I have the pleasure of being your culinary guide this evening. Any questions about any of tonight’s courses, do not hesitate to ask me. Now, without further ado, if you would follow me, culinary adventurers. Our chariot awaits.”

CHAPTER
79

OUR CHARIOT, NOW PARKED
out front on Twenty-Seventh, turned out to be an antique London double-decker bus transformed into a beautiful two-level polished-brass-railed bar on wheels.

I’d seen a picture of it once in a
Vanity Fair
article about fancy parties out in the Hamptons. Cannibals were moving up in the world, apparently.

We decided to chill at the back of the bar on the top deck. The bus made a left on Sixth Avenue and then another quick left and then went all the way to the West Side Highway. At first, I got nervous that we were losing our backup until I spotted Arturo and the boys off the back of the bus following two cars back.

About fifteen minutes later, the bus pulled into the parking lot of a marina on the Hudson near Battery Park. It stopped alongside a dock where a hundred-foot white yacht was tied.

“As you see, our ship has come in,” came the voice of the Frosty the Snowman guy over the bus’s speaker.

“Mike, what about backup? Are we actually going to get on the boat?” Brooklyn said as the bus began to empty.

“You still have your Glock in your clutch?” I said.

“Of course,” she said.

“Well, I have mine on my ankle. That’s our new backup,” I said.

We got on the rumbling boat and were led into a dining room. The vessel was OK, I guess, but much more Circle Line than
QE2
. Definitely less upscale than the bus. It also had a sour cafeteria-like smell to it. It was sort of chintzy, actually.

A jazz quartet in the corner of the room started up as more waiters hustled out for even more drink orders.
Why all the drinking?
I wondered. Could one only consume human flesh while pie-eyed or something?

A waiter brought us two more Amstel Lights as a perfectly normal-looking couple of fine young cannibals stepped up and introduced themselves.