Limbus, Inc. Read online

  “Bambi,’ I murmured. “Denise…Donny…”

  I stood there for a long time as a series of weird emotions crawled through my shocked brain.

  Donny Falk was not my client. I hadn’t known him, and differences in age and location and profession would probably have prevented us from ever crossing paths, or if we had, we probably wouldn’t have anything to say to one another.

  And yet…

  He was the friend, perhaps the only friend of Denise Sturbridge. Bambi. She was a lost little girl pretending to be a jaded woman of the stage and streets. Donny was probably the only ‘safe’ man in her world. The only one who didn’t want to plunder her silky loins or sexualize her beyond her years. And maybe she was an equally safe zone for him. Nonjudgmental, a kindred innocent in a corrupt world.

  Bambi wasn’t my client any more than Donny was. The unnamed woman from Limbus had hired me to find her. Donny was a side-effect of that search.

  And yet…

  My brain is wired in a certain way. I know that some of it has to do with my Benandanti heritage—we’re pack animals, and you always protect the pack. But I’d like to think that I would have some approximation of that sensibility even if I was a normal man. The desire to protect the pack, to protect anyone who can’t protect themselves. When I take on a client it’s like they become part of my family, part of my pack. I will do absolutely anything, go to extreme lengths to protect what’s mine.

  But Bambi and Donny weren’t mine. They weren’t part of my pack.

  Were they? Did the protection I afforded clients extend to people like them? Or was what I was feeling merely the normal outrage a moral person feels in the face of a demonstration of so clearly an immoral act?

  Inside my head the wolf howled.

  Aloud I said, “No.”

  I removed my cell phone and used it to take several photos of the symbol, and immediately forwarded them to a woman I knew at the University of Pennsylvania. An anthropologist who’d helped me on another case involving ritual symbols.

  Then I backed out of the room, turned in the hall and leaned my forehead against the wall.

  Shit.

  Who was this maniac?

  I looked down at the Club Dante card in my hand. I removed the business card for the stockbroker, Daniel Meyers.

  That place and that man were tied to Bambi.

  Somebody was going to give me some answers.

  I only hoped those answers led me to the monster who tore the skin from these young people. sixteen girls, one boy. I knew that the girls were all prostitutes, but in my heart they were all children. Innocents. The damaged and discarded ones. A lot of them were victims of abuse at home, or from shattered homes. Drugs was one way out, a way to blunt the jagged edges of the pain and self-loathing. Hooking bought more drugs and it completed the cycle of destruction that often began at home and ended on the streets. When I thought of them as ‘innocent’ I didn’t mean pure. Some of them were willing participants in their own destruction, but I’ve found that few people are truly self-destructive. Usually self-immolation of the moral kind is an end result, a skill learned from others.

  For seventeen of those lost souls there was absolutely nothing I could do. Even revenge or managing to get the killer arrested wouldn’t cloth them in their lost skin or breathe life into their empty lungs. Nothing I did would make their hearts beat again or coax a smile onto their dead mouths.

  However, Bambi might still be alive.

  Out there.

  Somewhere.

  At Club Dante?

  I was going to have to find out.

  Donny Falk hung on the wall and I couldn’t take him down. Maybe the cops could find some evidence in all that gore. I couldn’t risk disturbing that process. But there was something I could do.

  I closed my eyes and drew in all of the scents of this place. Identifying Donny’s, filing it away. Separating out Bambi’s. Discarding all of the neutral smells—food, clothing, all of that. Then picking through the commingled animal smells.

  Donny didn’t have any pets.

  The only animal smells had been left by people.

  There were two smells that were stronger than the others. Fresh and pungent. Male smells. Not Big and Tall. Other male scents.

  I catalogued them the way my grandmother taught me. If I smelled them again, even months from now, I’d know them.

  Not one scent, but two.

  Two killers?

  Those smells were both in the killing room.

  Two killers.

  There was nothing else to learn here, so I wiped off the wall where I’d leaned my head, smudged any footprints I’d left on the floor, pulled the door shut as I left, and wiped the doorknob.

  I walked down the fire stairs with every outward appearance of calm.

  Appearances are so incredibly deceptive.

  *

  The offices of Dunwoody-Kraus-Vitalli were in Center City, but by the time I got down there it was after five. I stood at the receptionist’s desk and tried to look affable, upscale and charming. In the parking garage I’d changed out of my oversized Vikings jacket and put on a three-button Polo shirt. Like most working P.I.’s, I have all sorts of clothes in my trunk. I combed my hair and tucked a pair of Wayfarers into the vee of the shirt.

  The receptionist was a snooty brunette with too much eye-makeup and too little warmth.

  “Mr. Meyers has left for the day,” she said.

  “Ah, damn,” I said mildly and started to turn away, then paused, snapping my fingers. “Hey, did Mike say he was going to the club tonight?”

  The receptionist lifted one eyebrow about a quarter of an inch. My attitude and apparent familiarity with Meyers, along with the reference to a club, was at war with the fact that she didn’t know me from a can of paint.

  “I…think he said something,” she said evasively.

  It was enough.

  “Cool,” I said. “I’ll catch him there.”

  “He may call in. I’ll tell him you stopped by, Mister … ?”

  I grinned. “Wolf,” I said.

  “Very well, Mr. Wolf.”

  I gave her a smile and a wink and headed for the elevators.

  Wolf.

  Sometimes I crack myself up.

  *

  Two calls came in while I was on my way south to Club Dante.

  The first was Jonatha Corbiel-Newton, the anthropologist at University of Pennsylvania.

  “Hey, doc,” I said. “Thanks for getting back to me so fast.”

  “No problem. You caught me in my office grading papers.”

  “You get the images?”

  “I did. Where did you take them?”

  “They’re attached to a case. Something I’m working on right now.”

  “Are these from a crime scene?”

  I was careful to make sure that Donny wasn’t in the shots I’d forwarded. “What makes you ask?”

  “Well…it rather looks like the medium used to paint the symbol is blood.”

  “Pretty sure it’s paint,” I lied.

  “It’s very dark and viscous-looking.”

  “Red poster paint. That tempura stuff.”

  “Uh huh.” She clearly didn’t believe me, but then again I hadn’t contacted her because she was an idiot.

  Even so, I sidestepped the topic. “Is that an astrological symbol?”

  She took a moment before answering. “Not precisely. It has cosmological connections, but it isn’t a chart for any of the common astrologies. It’s not the zodiac or the Chinese astrological grouping. It doesn’t represent planets, animals or aspects of the natural world.”

  “Okay, but—.”

  “However I do recognize it.”

  “Ah.”

  “It’s a symbol used by a group who call themselves the Order of Melchom.”

  “The who of who?”

  “Order of Melchom. There are several versions of the group, some new and some very old. The new groups vary between covens o
f modern neo-pagans and RPG-ers.”

  “Who?’

  “Role playing gamers. Like Dungeons and Dragons. Those groups have adopted thousands of names and symbols from various arcane sources and used them as backstory for their games. It’s all over the Net.”

  “I’m pretty sure this wasn’t posted by geeks playing games,” I said. “You said the others were neo-pagans? Do you mean witches?”

  “Well, wiccan, of one kind or another. Not the white-energy wiccans, though. This symbol is tied to dark energy.”

  “You mean evil?”

  “Evil is relative. Most modern pagans view the universal forces as white and black, light and dark, or positive and negative.”

  It wasn’t quite the way I saw things, but I kept that to myself.

  “You said there was another reference,” I said. “Something older? What’s that?”

  “In Biblical terms, Melchom is often cited as a variation of a god worshipped by the Ammonites, Phoenicians and Canaanites. The more common name is Moloch, which is itself another name for ‘king’, The worship of Moloch was brutal.”

  “In what way?”

  “In sacrificial ways,” said Jonatha. “Devotees practiced a particular kind of propitiatory child sacrifice in which parents gave up their children.”

  I had to clear my throat before I asked, “What kind of sacrifice?”

  “The biblical and historical records vary. Most likely the children were burned alive. There’s a reference to that in the Book of Leviticus, but other texts include plenty of references to various kinds of mutilation that include a ‘sacrifice of the flesh’.”

  “Which is what?” I asked, though I thought I already knew.

  “The sacrificed children were very carefully skinned so that they would be ‘unclothed to the soul’ and still alive when given up to Moloch.”

  The day outside was bright and there were puffy white clouds in the gorgeous blue sky. All of that didn’t belong in a world, in any world, in which this conversation was a part. I told myself that, but the bright clouds and the flawless sky mocked me for my naiveté. Lovely skies have looked down upon every despicable thing we humans have done. What’s truly naïve is to think that horrors are always hidden away in shadows.

  “This Moloch sounds like a charmer,” I said.

  “He is. He’s nasty and he’s fierce. The ancients considered him one of the greatest warriors of the fallen angels.” I heard her rustling book pages. “John Milton wrote this about him in Paradise Lost…

  “…MOLOCH, horrid King besmear’d with blood

  Of human sacrifice, and parents tears,

  Though, for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud,

  Their children’s cries unheard that passed through fire

  To his grim Idol.”

  “Nice.”

  “There’s more,” she said. “Milton listed him among the chief of Satan’s angels, and he gives a speech at the Parliament of Hell to argue for war against God.”

  “He’s an angel?”

  “Depending on which source you read,” she said, “he’s either a fallen angel, a god, or a demon. In his aspect as Melchom, he’s the accountant for hell. He holds the purse strings to all of the Devil’s gold, and he inspires men to strive for wealth, often by any means necessary. He’s a monster in all of his aspects, really.”

  And that fast something went skittering across my brain. A demon worshipped by men striving for money.

  “Sam—?” asked Jonatha Corbiel-Newton. “You still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is any of this useful to you?”

  “Christ,” I said, “I hope not.”

  Seventeen skinned teenagers. ‘Hope’ was a pretty vain luxury.

  “What have you gotten yourself into?”

  “I’m not sure, doc. I’m still blundering my way through it.” I paused. “Tell me something, though…are there any modern cults of Moloch? Does anyone still believe this sort of thing?”

  She was a long time answering. “Back when I first began studying anthropology I would have said no unreservedly.”

  “But now?”

  “Now I’m not so sure. The more I get out of the office and into the field so I can see what people are actually out there doing, and practicing…I’m not so sure. Especially lately.”

  “Why lately?”

  “It’s the world, Sam. There’s no peace anywhere. Wars everywhere, the economy falling apart, such extreme political divisiveness, even the return of class wars. People are scared, they’re angry and they’re desperate.” She paused again. “These days people are looking for something to change the way things are going. They’re looking for an edge to help them get through all of this upheaval and carnage.”

  “Geez,” I said with a small laugh, “so much for the detached scientist.”

  She laughed, too, but it was thin and false. “Objectivity is taking as serious a beating as idealism these days.”

  I saw my exit coming up and drifted off of I-95.

  “Sam…what are you into?”

  “As of right now, Jonatha,” I said, “it beats the shit out of me. I’ve got too much of the wrong information and not nearly enough of the right kind.”

  “Sam…,” she said hesitantly, “that wasn’t tempura paint in that picture, was it?”

  I drummed my fingers on the knobbed arc of the steering wheel as I waited for the light at the end of the exit ramp to turn from red to green.

  “Thanks for the info, doc,” I said. “I owe you a steak dinner.”

  Before she could reply to that I hung up.

  The light turned green and I drove on.

  Moloch. Melchom.

  An ancient cult that involves sacrifices of flesh to an ancient god. Or demon. Or fallen angel. Or whatever the fuck he was.

  A sacrifice of the flesh.

  How in the big yellow fuck did that make any kind of sense? This wasn’t ancient Israel. This wasn’t medieval Europe. This was Phila-damn-delphia.

  Then I thought about the stockbroker. Daniel Meyers. He was almost certainly a college graduate. I wondered how old he was, and if he used to belong to a fraternity. I worked some frat hazing cases before. Some of those clowns went way over the line. Branding each other, lots of ritual behavior, beatings. Even rape.

  Could a group of frat brothers have crossed a harder line? Was this some kind of brotherhood thing? A Skull and Bones thing, or something worse?

  That felt both wrong and right at the same time.

  Either way, I was still shooting in the dark.

  *

  Club Dante was a big block nothing of a building from the outside. Tall, stuccoed walls, a pitched roof covered in faux terra cotta tiles, and massive wooden doors that would have looked better on the front of a medieval castle. Twelve feet high, wrapped in bands of black wrought-iron, and lined with chunky studded bolt-heads. The parking lot was behind a fence and a pair of armed guards worked the entrance. I parked across the street and studied them through the telephoto lens of a digital camera. The guards had that thin-lipped, lantern-jawed, unsmiling look of ex-military and possibly ex-special forces. Tough men, and from the way they moved and worked it was pretty clear that they were too good for the job they were doing. You don’t hire guys like that to check cars into a strip club parking lot, not even a very expensive strip club parking lot.

  Hmm.

  The cars were interesting, though. Nothing that looked more than two years old, and nothing that had a sticker price under fifty g’s. Some of them were way above that mark, too. Lots of sports cars. That made a certain kind of statement. The kind of guys who over-paid to come to a place like this were the kind who wanted everyone to know—or think—they had a big dick. Expensive clothes, ten-thousand-dollar wristwatches, hand-sewn shoes, nothing that was ever off the rack, and cars that cost more than my education were all ways of saying look at me and bow to my dick. It was the equivalent of attaching a fire hose to a tank of testosterone and hosing down
everyone around them.

  And because they made so damn much money, and money really is power in almost every way that matters in this world, everyone with less money dropped down and kissed their privileged asses.

  For a whole lot of reasons I am less inclined to kowtow to assholes like that.

  Maybe that’s why I’m always broke. I won’t play those kinds of games and I’ve never felt any urge to stand in a crowd of moneyed jackasses and pass around a golden ruler while we all measured our johnsons.

  I drove slowly around the building, studying the fence from all sides. It was a tall chainlink affair with coils of stainless-steel razor wire along the top. Very inviting. There was no back gate and, as far as I could tell, only a single locked and alarmed red fire door. Odd for a building that size. Couldn’t possibly have passed code, which suggested that the owners were greasing the right palms.

  There was movement among the parked cars and I saw another armed guard on foot patrol, walking a brute of a Doberman on a leash. Ninety pounds of sinew, muscle and attitude. Black and brown, with a bobbed tail and devil ears. As my car drifted past, the Doberman came suddenly to point and focused all of its senses on me. He couldn’t see me through the smoked windows of my car, but he knew that I was there, just as he knew that I wasn’t right.

  Dogs always react to me. The ones who aren’t alphas tuck their tails between their legs and want to lick my hand. People always smile and tell me that I’m a real dog person.

  Yeah, in a way.

  The alphas are always instantly wary of me. The ones who are alphas but haven’t been trained for combat or patrol will keep their distance and watch me with wary eyes. If I push it I can get them to roll to me, but I seldom want to do that because some of them don’t reclaim their mojo afterward. I like dogs, so breaking their will isn’t high on my to-do list.

  Alphas with guard dog training are a different matter. We’ve had some issues in the past. Their training is sometimes so intense that they will make choices they wouldn’t make in the wild. I’m one-seventy, which means that when I do the change, the wolf is one-seventy, too. That’s a lot of wolf. Even the biggest gray wolf is only about a hundred pounds. I’m closer to a dire wolf, the old prehistoric species. Their top range was one seventy. My grandmother thinks that we have dire wolf genes. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get that checked one day, if I can figure out how to get a DNA lab to do it without freaking them too much, or outing myself.