Final Sins (6 page)

It took Abby a good half hour to cool off after her encounter with Wyatt. Probably he did have a legitimate beef about her casual attitude toward their relationship. On the other hand, she’d never promised him a rose garden, in the immortal words of Lynn Anderson. He’d known what he was getting into.

And his reaction to Faust—it had been over the top. At least, she thought so. Unless he was right, and her judgment was faulty. More likely he was just itching for a fight, and Faust was a convenient excuse. That was how Wyatt had been lately—edgy, moody, resentful. A man preoccupied. A man with something on his mind.

She was still agitated when she parked the Miata in the underground garage beneath the Wilshire Royal, the condominium high-rise in Westwood where she’d lived for the past ten years.

Near her reserved parking space was a second slot where she kept a beat-up old Hyundai Excel, the latest in a series of used cars she’d bought for undercover work. The Miata was too flashy to be a good surveillance vehicle, and its registration was in her real name, making it a poor choice of wheels when she was on assignment. The Hyundai was junky enough to pass unnoticed in most environments, and it was registered to a dummy corporation with the safely meaningless name of Consolidated Commercial Exchange.

From the Miata, she removed her purse and Faust’s memoir, which she’d checked out of the library after discovering, to her surprise, that she actually had a library card that was still valid. It wasn’t exactly the sort of book she liked to curl up with at bedtime, but she found herself wanting to know more about her latest client. No particular reason, just that Boy Scout motto again: Be prepared.

In the lobby, she waved hello to Vince and Gerry, the two guards who had manned the big mahogany desk roughly since the La Brea Tar Pits had been sucking down saber-toothed tigers. The doorman. Alec, was chatting with them. Unlike the guards, he was a new arrival, on the job for only three months. Abby hadn’t warmed up to him. She didn’t like the way he looked at her whenever she passed by. There was a reptilian quality to his gaze, a kind of cold, patient hunger, which wasn’t masked by his artificial smile and cheerful bonhomie.

That smile and that stare were both on display as he turned to her.

“Hey, Ms. Sinclair. Got some reading matter, I see.”

This was embarrassingly close to the winner of the World’s Lamest Pickup Line Contest:
Whatcha
readin
’
? She wedged the book more tightly under her arm. The cover was hidden from anyone’s view—a precaution she’d taken without conscious thought.

“Alec,” she said coolly. She greeted Vince and Gerry in a warmer voice. “How are you guys doing?”

“Hanging in there,” Vince said.

“Not that we have a choice,” Gerry added.

Variations on this exchange had been played out almost daily over the last decade. The rote predictability of it pleased Abby. She liked to have some things in her life that were utterly dependable. There would always be traffic on the 405, there would always be
Law & Order
reruns on cable, and Vince and Gerry would always be stationed at their desk.

And Wyatt would always be there for her when she needed him—and
only
when she needed him.

Damn. That subject again. Her frown returned as she rode the elevator to the tenth floor and unlocked the door to unit 1015, the extravagantly overpriced one-bedroom cubbyhole she called home.

She opened the curtain over the glass door to the balcony, exposing her view of Wilshire Boulevard and letting in a cascade of afternoon sun. Then she sat in her overstuffed armchair and took another look at Faust’s memoirs. The slim hardcover volume had Faust’s face on the cover, below the title in jagged red italics:
Tasting Blood
. As far as she knew, Faust had not actually tasted Emily Wallace’s blood; the title no doubt had been chosen to reinforce his image as the Werewolf, the nickname bestowed on him after his arrest.

According to the cover,
Tasting Blood
had been “Newly Updated, with a New Chapter by the Author.” She glanced at the copyright page and found that the updated edition had been issued just last year.

Idly she flipped through the book and came across a photo section in the middle. Black-and-white photos—apparently the publisher hadn’t wanted to spring for color. Or maybe the somber monochrome was more appropriate to Faust’s subject matter.

The first photos were of Peter Faust as a baby, looking as innocent as any infant, then as a young boy and a teenager. By the time his picture had been snapped on the streets of Hamburg, he was playing the role of an itinerant artist, dressed for the part in a joyless black ensemble. His face, no longer boyish, had hardened into a cold mask. That face aged slightly in subsequent photos, taken during his arrest, at his trial, and upon his release from the psychiatric hospital, but in its fundamental quality of icy ruthlessness, it had not changed.

There was a photo of Emily Wallace, too, lifted from her high school yearbook when she was a graduating senior. That would have been only one year before Faust killed her. She was blond and pretty and looked impossibly young. Juxtaposed with the yearbook picture was a shot of Wiesbaden Army Airfield, where she had worked as a civilian employee. Abby didn’t know how or why the girl had ended up in Germany, and she doubted Faust would explain it in his book. To him, Emily Wallace was not a person, but only an item to be used and disposed of.

She turned the page, and the next photo, shocking in its abruptness, was Emily’s dead body on an autopsy table. No head, no hands—but those items had been found in Faust’s apartment and were displayed on the facing page. Emily’s eyes were open, her face purplish and bloated. The back of her left hand bore the mark of Faust’s branding iron—a backward Z with a short horizontal line slashed through the middle. A caption identified the symbol as a
wolfsangel
, meaning “wolf’s hook.”

Abby put down the book, switched her desktop PC out of suspend mode, and
Googled
wolfsangel
. The mark, she discovered, was sometimes said to be an ancient rune, though actually it was first described in 1902 by a German mystic who saw it in a vision. The basic design was similar to that of a medieval snare used against wolves. The iron snare’s top hook, corresponding to the upper arm of the backward Z, was pounded into a tree trunk, and a hunk of meat was pinned on the lower hook. Any wolf that leaped up to take the bait would be impaled.

The Nazis adopted the symbol as part of their arsenal of
neopagan
lore. Members of certain SS units wore it on their collars. It was also associated with Hitler’s “werewolves,” a guerrilla force assembled in the closing days of the war.

She returned to her armchair and Faust’s book. At least now she understood his nickname.

Police evidence photos showed the leather strap that had strangled Emily, and the branding iron that had seared the back of her left hand. Abby wondered where Faust had obtained a brand like that, or if he’d made it himself, perhaps in a metalworking shop. The book might tell her. It was the kind of detail he would be happy to relate.

After photos of Faust’s trial came a shot of the hospital in Berlin where he had been institutionalized for less than three years. The sentence seemed preposterously short, but the German penal system was notorious for its lenience. The man who’d stabbed Monica Seles on a German tennis court had received only a two-year suspended sentence. More recently a German cannibal who killed and ate a houseguest was convicted only of manslaughter. With good behavior he would serve no more time than Faust had.

Faust had been a celebrity ever since his arrest, and his fame had only increased as a result of his flamboyant behavior at his trial. He was defiant and unapologetic, and on the witness stand he delivered contemptuous, haranguing monologues in response to the simplest questions. He styled himself as a rebel, a man who despised and flouted all social rules, who cared nothing for morality, who refused even to distinguish between good and evil—“those twin chimeras, those modern myths,” as one caption quoted him.

For all this he won a following. A wide-angle photo of one of his public appearances gave a fair idea of what kind of following it was. Almost all his fans were young. Males outnumbered females, but not by as large a margin as Abby might have expected. Roughly half the crowd wore the black outfits and heavy mascara typical of the Goth movement. Many of the rest had chosen Nazi-like garb—knee-high boots,
pseudomilitary
jackets, runic symbols worn like insignia of rank. It was a merging of Goths and skinheads, and it gave Abby a cold feeling in her gut.

In the background of the shot, spotlighted before the crowd, stood Peter Faust.

The photo section ended. She flipped to the back of the book and found the newly included chapter, which recounted Faust’s more recent accomplishments. Skimming the paragraphs, she saw no mention of Elise, even though the girl said she’d been with Faust for three years. Apparently she didn’t qualify as a major development in his life.

Then she stopped, her attention caught by a name she knew.

Tess McCallum.

What the hell was
Tess
doing in Faust’s book?

She backtracked to an earlier page and located the start of the story. It was the case Wyatt told her about—the murdered girl, Roberta Kessler. Three years ago. Abby hadn’t known Tess back then, so even if she’d seen her name in connection with the story, it wouldn’t have stuck with her.