Chapter 4: Refresher Course
With our boss’ comment about MS-13, I could see our entire day mapped out. It would eventually end at Bellevue, but that was the last stop.
The first stop was to go up the street to Creedmoor mental hospital, meaning that our day was going to be bracketed by insanity on both ends. Though in the case of Creedmoor, I wasn’t going to visit an inmate, but one of the ones running the asylum, Father Richard Freeman, OP. He was in his late-forties, skinny, with just a touch of gray at the temples. He wore his black shirt and white collar with a lab coat over it. He was a bit nebbishy, but he had the three PhDs to back it up.
Freeman came to meet me at the front door, trying to make the creepy mental hospital more welcoming than the setting of a horror movie. “We have to stop meeting like this.”
I chuckled. “No kidding. You remember my partner, Alex Packard?”
Freeman gave a little nod. “Come up. I’m guessing we’re back to business as usual.”
Alex scoffed. “If this becomes usual, I’m retiring.”
Freeman’s office was a walk-in closet, only packed with a desk, three file cabinets, a bookcase, and two chairs. Both chairs were wooden, rickety, and hard to get comfortable in. Even the desk had little room, with a monstrous late-80s computer and monitor on it—I’d offered to buy him a new monitor, but they apparently didn’t work with the computer. The shelves were filled with books and papers. He only had two crosses on the shelves.
If he was unhappy with the setup, he never showed it.
This was “the OP Center,” suitable for the Order of Preachers, the official name of the Dominican Family—and yes, some are on the Caribbean islands if you Google “Dominican.”
Freeman leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his chest. “What’s up this time? I’d heard that Glen Oaks won’t have you back now.”
I smiled as I sat. “One gunfight too many.”
Alex remained standing and barked a laugh. “Probably four.”
Freeman frowned. “Understood. What can I help you with?”
Both Alex and I pulled out our phones. Alex showed him a photo of the first tattoo that we saw, of the Aztec heart-carving ritual. I showed Freeman the other pictures that Sinead Holland had sent me after she got all the bodies back to the morgue. They were all of the symbols drawn by Christopher Curran at the murder scenes that he had created while possessed. Some were of the bull-headed demon Moloch, some were eyes within a pyramid, within a six-pointed star;.
Freeman’s eyes narrowed. “This isn’t good.”
“I thought you could give us both a quick refresher on the subject matter,” I said. “Especially since Alex wasn’t here last time.”
Alex scoffed. “I’m not sure I want to know.”
Freeman sighed. “Probably not.” He tapped my phone. “Moloch, the Carthaginian deity of money. They worshiped him by giving their biggest drain on their wallets into the fire pits—their children.” He flipped over to the star, eye, and pyramid. “A symbol of Aleister Crowley, occultist and cult leader. A hundred years dead. Big on summoning demons.”
Alex frowned. “This isn’t going to get any better, is it?”
Freeman sighed. “Not until it gets worse, I suspect. You know the Aztec connection?”
Alex gave a little shrug. “I have some of the highlights. Cannibals. Wore human skins. Ripped people’s hearts out to keep the sun working or something.”
Freeman looked from Alex to me and back again. “Are we thinking that this is part of a cult?”
“That’s my best bet,” I answered. “The demon had some parting words for me when I confronted it in Rikers. It had been summoned. All of them had been summoned.” I held up the phone. “These guys seem like the most likely suspects.”
“I concur. It’s a good thing you’re moving. You need better security.”
I arched a brow. “I was across the street from the village security office. It didn’t stop them. Heck, we don’t even know how these guys got in, or how they managed to get that close without me smelling them.”
“Yes, I can see that would be a problem. Are you certain that you still have that ability?”
I couldn’t honestly tell him what I was. Before I ran into the demon, I’d never noted the smell of evil before. Outside of Rene Ormeno, one of the leaders of MS-13, I’d never had a run-in with someone similar.
“No idea. But then, I don’t run into too many people who are pure evil.”
Freeman nodded. “How is your phone doing, by the way?”
“Working fine since Rikers Island.”
Alex scoffed. “Please. Can we all skip the part of this where we treat the last few months as perfectly rational? We fought a demonic plague on the city, and you’re a saint.”
“Wonderworker,” Freeman and I corrected him.
“Dude, by my count, you fly—”
“It could have been a long jump,” I hedged.
“—heal, smell evil, bi-locate, cast out demons—”
“That could have been the exorcism outside,” I corrected.
“—and I don’t even know what else you do,” Alex finished.
I shrugged. “It’s not really that big a deal. I don’t do it that often. In fact, I haven’t done anything that interesting since I came back from Rikers. It’s not like the scars healed or anything.”
It was Freeman and Alex’s turn to go into stereo. “Scars?”
“I have some scars from Rikers that I need to stretch out.”
Alex pursed his lips a moment. “Can I see them?”
“You’ll have to buy me dinner and flowers first,” I deadpanned.
Freeman held up a hand to signal us to stop. “Please, if we can continue?”
Alex and I shrugged.
“One of the things we haven’t discussed is that if the demon was raised by this cult, we at least know something we didn’t have last time: motive.”
I narrowed my eyes at Freeman, then cocked my head. “He told me that his motive was to force me to lose my faith by destroying everything around me.” I frowned. “But that really only explains killing little Carol Whelan and Erin. But he wanted me to arrest him and throw him into Rikers. He wanted to stay there and work his way into possessing the prison population. That was the cult’s goal.”
Freeman nodded. “The motive of the demon is that of those who raised it. And the cult has now turned its attention to you, like the demon had.”
“They’re probably annoyed that you stopped their attack fiend,” Alex added. “But here’s what I don’t get: Where do we find a death cult kicking around?”
Freeman rolled his eyes. “You want to talk about Moloch and death cults? Here, let me give you a list of examples. Where would you like to start?” He turned in his chair and grabbed a book off of the shelf. The title was Culture of Death. “Would you like to start with how Oregon health insurance won’t pay for a heart transplant, but they will pay for your doctor to help you kill yourself.”
“Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg said not too far back that abortion was ‘For people we don’t want any more of.’”
Freeman’s topic jumped at random again. “Here’s a great one. Doctors tell a newborn baby’s parents that the baby is going to die in a few years, so the doctors were going to let him die now. Because.”
I shrugged. “Don’t forget when the UK decided that a little boy had to stay in Britain so he could be starved to death and taken off of life support, because he would have survived if he went to Italy—and survival ‘wasn’t in the boy’s best interest,’ so the parents were deemed a flight risk while they watched their son die in front of them.”
Packard shrugged. “Okay, fine then. So why not start with President LaBitch again? Curran was one of her creatures. If we gotta start somewhere, why not her? What’s the worst she could do? Blow up our car again?”