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  Uninvited

  By B.G. Thomas

  When a hot tip leads Kansas City reporter Taylor Dunton to a series of grisly murders, his investigation points to Myles Parry and his vodou shop. Myles wants nothing more than to practice his religion in peace, and he hopes Taylor can help him show the community they have nothing to fear. The problem is all the clues point to Myles as the suspect and only Taylor can help him prove his innocence. However, this case has also caught the attention of the vodou spirits of the Lwa… and they’ve taken an interest in Taylor as well.

  Originally published as part of Bones (Gothika #2).

  IT WAS bad. It was really bad. It made me wish the cop had ignored my press badge (like they often did) and refused to let me go in.

  He’d grinned at me—“Ah, what the hell. Go on.”—and motioned me past.

  That’s weird, I thought.

  That’s when I saw why.

  Fuck! I looked away, felt my Egg McMuffin try to return to the open air, and I forced it to stay down. I would have been a laughing stock—the cops would never forget it.

  Remember the Hindenburg, I said to myself. Remember the Hindenburg. My mantra.

  I took a deep breath, stepped closer to the nightmare. An officer moved to block my way—

  “It’s okay,” said the first cop to his buddy.

  —and I raised my cell phone and took a picture. Took several. I wasn’t much of a photographer and had to make sure I had some good ones.

  Good ones! Ha!

  I shuddered and turned away. That was when I saw the words, written in blood, on one white wall. “TO SERVE BARON MANGE KEY,” it said in big, bold capital letters. Fuck!

  The victim had been laid out over some kind of large, low table, his limbs tied to the legs. His face had been painted with a skull and his chest cut open from throat to navel. I knew because the dude was naked. There was… something on the man’s penis. I hadn’t wanted to look too close. The blood had been enough. There was a lot of it. Everywhere.

  “Jesus,” I muttered and once more ordered my breakfast sandwich to stay put. Remember the Hindenburg, followed immediately by the thought, Thanks loads for the tip, Brookhart. Brookhart being the cop who had called me and told me to get my “cute butt down to the Meridian Hotel right now!” It was okay for her to say that because she’s a lesbian and I’m gay—part of the reason we’d connected about a year before. I’d been bashed, and she and her partner had shown up, and I’d gotten far more sympathy than a friend of mine who had once had the same thing happen. Luckily, I hadn’t had to go to the hospital.

  “Taylor! There you are.”

  I jumped as if I’d been goosed, spun around, and looked up, and up, to see Dt. Brookhart looking down at me with those big dark eyes of hers. She was tall at, well, any height compared to my five five. “You’re letting your hair grow, Daphne.”

  She reached up and touched her short, natural waves as if surprised they were there. “Not really.” They weren’t much longer than a few inches.

  “Where’s Detective Asshole?” I asked.

  She gave me an amused smile and an arch of one of her wondrous brows. She swore she didn’t pluck them. I didn’t believe it. “He’s looking for something.” She pointed at the body. “Nice, huh?”

  I shook my head and saw the open chest in my mind’s eye. The McMuffin gave me a cheery wave and let me know it would still be glad to let me taste it again. Just as good the second time, it told me.

  Stay! I ordered. “No,” I told her. “Not nice at all.”

  She smirked.

  “What’s it about?”

  Brookhart shrugged, always sure not to commit. I was a reporter, after all. Sort of.

  “Not for me to say. But if I were asked off record….”

  I rolled my eyes. “Off record.”

  “Then I would say it looks like a ritual killing of some kind. Witches, Satanists, I don’t fucking know. Did you see the chicken head?”

  “Chicken head?” Chicken head?

  “Tied to his willy.”

  Willy. Oh my God. The something on the man’s penis.

  “Rooster head, actually,” she replied matter-of-factly, like it was an everyday occurrence. “Cock on a cock.”

  “Cute,” I said.

  “I don’t ever think they’re cute. But hey, what do I know?”

  “What can you tell me about the vic?” I asked, trying to sound cool and televisiony.

  Brookhart turned and looked back at the bloody disaster. “His ID says he’s Douglas Brightwell—don’t use his name.”

  “Daph!”

  Those lovely brows of hers came together in a dark slash. She hated it when I called her “Daph.”

  “Daph is too cute,” she had told me more than once. She wasn’t “cute.”

  I thought she was okay, but hey, what did I know?

  “No name!”

  I sighed. “Fine.”

  She nodded. “Married, father of three. He’s in town for a business convention. Or he was. Six two, two hundred fifty pounds, more or less, most of that muscle. Whoever cut him open was determined.”

  God, I thought, looking away. That was an image.

  “And they cut out his heart.”

  “Heart?” I snapped my eyes back in her direction.

  She nodded, expression totally neutral. “Yup. We haven’t found it yet either. But there’s a lot of other shit. Feathers everywhere. Chicken bones. Bottle of rum, most of it gone.”

  “Drunk killer?”

  She shrugged again. “Oh. And there’s a bucket. Full. Of blood.”

  “With blood?” I actually felt my own draining from my face.

  “Like in Carrie, but they left it behind. No prom queens need worry.”

  “Funny,” I said. God. Chicken bones. Bucket of blood. Missing heart. “Why did you call me?”

  “Are you tired of covering pet parades and gay pride, or not?”

  “Yeah.” I sighed, then nodded. “Tired.”

  “Then I suggest you get another couple of pictures before the chief gets here—which should be in about thirty seconds—and get the story to your boss before Chadrick or Rockower get a whiff of this.” She cocked a thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the corpse.

  Chadrick and Rockower were two of the Chronicle’s “star reporters.” And they would get a “whiff” of this soon—and try to steal the story. My story, if I had any say. I nodded, swallowed hard, and darted back to the body to take more pictures. There was a coroner there now, peering down at the man’s face. And Brookhart’s partner, Dt. Asshole, was there as well, arms crossed over his chest, the scowl on his ugly face making him even less attractive than usual.

  “Well fuck me,” the coroner said suddenly.

  “What?” said Dt. Asshole (aka Townsend).

  “There’s a statue in this guy’s mouth.”

  “A statue?”

  “It’s a goddamned Virgin Mary,” the man said, apparently totally unaware of the blasphemy in his choice of words.

  I gulped and keyed that info and a few more sentences into my phone, attached the pictures, and hit the send button.

  Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in my boss’s office.

  LOOKING AT my pictures on Mencken’s computer wasn’t quite as bad as seeing the real thing. That’s when me and the boss saw that, yes indeed, there was a rooster’s head tied to the man’s impressive genitalia—

  “Not that that’s going to do him any good any longer,” Mencken said and took a gulp from his mug of coffee.
r />   —and that yes, there was a bucket filled to overflowing with what appeared to be blood.

  “Never assume anything,” the boss liked to say, and then he’d finish the cliché with, “It makes an ass out of you and me.”

  “You” in this case meaning the reporter, and “Me” meaning the Chronicle. Making the Kansas City Chronicle look asinine was verboten.

  Besides the chicken head and the blood, there were feathers—lots of them—more blood—even more of that—and more Catholic statues—a Saint Francis and a couple I didn’t recognize, having grown up in a household where my mother told me that all Catholics were going to hell for “worshipping idols.” I knew that wasn’t true because I dated a guy briefly who liked to describe himself as a “recovering Catholic.” He was a sexy Irish guy who assured me that “Nah. We don’t worship Mary. Really.”

  Speaking of the Virgin Mother: “And you say there was a Mary statue in his mouth? I’m just trying to picture that. Since there is no effing picture.” The word “effing” was Mencken’s way of not swearing. He was a big man who looked a lot like Lou Grant, except not quite as heavy, and he had a full head of dark, badly styled hair. His tie had been pulled loose, and one of the duties of his secretary was to remind him to tighten it whenever he had to meet with someone important. Apparently I wasn’t important.

  “Look, I was lucky to get the pictures I did,” I told him. “The chief came in just as I was leaving, and the coroner wasn’t letting me any closer than I already was.”

  Mencken made a raspberry. “It couldn’t have been very goddamned big, then. I mean. In his mouth?” He was toggling back and forth between two of the better—read: focused and bloody—pictures.

  “Well… it was….” The image came to mind again, and I was thinking that, if I was lucky, my breakfast was well past being able to make a personal appearance. “It was lodged down his throat.” And when the guy pulled it out, it made the most horrible squelching noise. “It was about six inches long.”

  “They measured it or something?” Mencken asked, giving me the eye.

  “I know six inches,” I said before I could stop myself.

  Mencken’s brows shot up, and then he shook his head and let out a half laugh. “I suppose you might.” He looked at the pictures once more. Shook his head again. “I guess you think I should give you the story.”

  “I think you should,” I said. “It was my contact that got me those pictures. Does anyone else have them?”

  “I don’t know if we’re going to be able to effing use them! I mean, can you see this on the front page?” he asked, pointing to the rooster and dick photograph.

  I shrugged. That was his decision to make.

  “I’ll give you till tomorrow morning to come up with something good. Otherwise, you turn over all you got to Chadrick.”

  No. He was not giving my story—my first real story ever—to fucking Chadrick! “You’ll have something.”

  “Something good.” Mencken slapped his coffee mug down on his desk, and coffee swilled out. He didn’t seem to notice.

  I jumped up and headed for the door.

  “Dunton!”

  I spun around.

  Mencken was leaning forward onto his desk with an intent look on his face.

  “Yeah?” I managed.

  “I know you can do this. You can write. You’ve waited for your chance. This is it. Let’s see if you can write murder instead of bake sales.”

  I nodded and ran out the door.

  WHICH IS why it made no sense that I met Gay for cocktails later that afternoon. Hey, I could stay up all night if I needed to, I reasoned. And martinis helped me write. As long as I stopped at two, three at the most, that is. Four is where I always forgot the end of the evening.

  And yes, “Gay” is her real name. We laugh about that sometimes.

  We met at The Corner Bistro, which was about ten blocks east of The Male Box, my usual hangout. It’s not that Gay didn’t like The Male Box—au contraire, she liked it a lot, and if it was karaoke night, her competition fled the bar. Or at least the stage. She was that good. But The Male Box was always one of two ways: dead and boring or loud and packed. There seemed to be no in-between. The Corner Bistro, on the other hand, was Kansas City’s answer to a classy gay bar. And it was. Classy. Quieter. The waiters even had matching shirts, and ain’t that special? The drinks were good too. They even had food—chichi stuff like calamari and crab cakes and stuffed artichokes. A little pricey, but always good. Gay was in the mood for chichi.

  To my surprise she beat me there. Gay almost never beat me anywhere. It takes time to look fabulous, after all, and she was looking fabulous that afternoon, as usual.

  Gay could have been anywhere from forty to sixty—it was impossible to tell. Her skin was all but flawless, there were only the tiniest lines around her eyes, and to look at her would put her on the younger end of that age range. But she would say things, mention events in her life, that would place her on the other end.

  She was wearing a black-and-gray Chanel sweater dress that fell to just above her knees and a huge black hat with a white band that was straight out of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She wore black-and-white pumps, and, of course, there was her jewelry. When was Gay ever without her jewelry? Today it was gray freshwater pearls. Two long strings around her neck and matching bracelets and earrings. And then a huge crystal doorknob ring. Ostentatious, and yet she always got away with it. I asked her once why she wore such large stones, and she said, “Well, because most people are afraid of them, and I’m not at all. The bigger, the better.” She wagged her eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you agree, Taylor?”

  She smiled her huge, perfect, white smile the minute I walked in the door, and her big brown eyes went wide, as if she wouldn’t or couldn’t be happier if I were Matthew McConaughey or Bradley Cooper instead of plain old short Taylor Dunton.

  If I were a woman, she is the woman I would want to be. What’s more, even though I’m not flashy like she is, she says I’m the man she would want to be. Not sure why, but she always says it’s so.

  “Hey, darlin’,” she said without a trace of a drawl.

  I went to her table, where she was perched on a high stool as if modeling for a magazine ad. I kissed her cheek. “You look gorgeous.”

  “Oh stop,” she said with a girlish smile and a tone that meant she didn’t want me to stop at all.

  “Let me see that ring,” I said and held out my hand.

  She placed hers in mine. “You mean this old thing?” She giggled.

  The stone wasn’t quite the size of a doorknob, but it looked just like those old-fashioned ones my grandmother had in her house in West Virginia. It had to be the size of a golf ball cut in half.

  “Damn, girl.” It was all I could think to say.

  She dropped her head back, exposing a lovely white throat, and let out a long and delightful laugh. Heads turned. She laughed loudly, and there was nothing she could do about it. Gay was who she was.

  A waiter arrived like quicksilver. “Good afternoon,” he said with a flamboyant hand gesture.

  He was very cute and very gay—he could not have passed for straight for love or money. Not that he needed to. I was just generally more attracted to men who were a little more, well, masculine. Please note I did not say “straight acting.” God, I hate that. Straight acting. What bullshit.

  “I’m Dart,” said our waiter, “and I’ll be serving you today. May I interest you in a cocktail? Something to eat?”

  Gay’s eyes flashed. “Martinis?” she asked me.

  “Of course.”

  She turned to the waiter. “Why, yes, Dart. You may interest us in cocktails. We’ll have two martinis, very clean, three olives.”

  “Gin or vodka?” Dart asked.

  Gay rolled her eyes. “Please. We want real martinis. Gin.” She looked at me. “Tanqueray? Bombay? Do you have a preference?”

  I raised my hands. “Whatever Gay wants.”

  “Gay wants lots of ju
niper.” She turned back to the waiter. “Bombay Sapphire, please. And don’t do more than wave the bottle of vermouth in the general direction of the glasses.”

  “Ah… okay,” our cutie replied, and I could tell by the expression on his adorable face that he had missed the Winston Churchill reference completely.

  She opened the little menu and pointed. “We’ll have the hummus b’tahini as well and”—she glanced at me—“the steamed mussels?”

  “Ummm, not today,” I said. Not on a stomach that had been witness to what I’d seen. “How about their vegetarian spring rolls.” Something without meat.

  Gay sighed dramatically and nodded, and the waiter scurried off.

  “Did he really say his name is Dart?” Gay asked. “Really?”

  We laughed and then we talked. About life and jobs and her husband and my lack of one. We talked about the waiter’s ass and how round it was and about the bartender who made our cocktails and what a hunk he was.

  “I wouldn’t kick him out of bed,” Gay said and giggled.

  “Not even if I had to listen to country and western,” I added.

  I waited for the second round of martinis before bringing up the dead body. We needed a bracer for that.

  Gay’s eyes went wide and wild. It was hard to tell if she’d gone pale—that’s how creamy-white her complexion is. “Gee whiz,” she said, never taking her Lord’s name in vain. “How did you do it?”

  “I remembered the Hindenburg,” I said, and took a healthy swallow of gin with more gin.

  “Ah,” she said with a nod. She knew the reference and partook of a generous amount of her martini as well.

  On May 6th, 1937, Herbert “Herb” Morrison was the reporter who covered the famous Hindenburg disaster. Everyone’s heard it—or at least a version—at one time or another. “It burst into flames!”—“It’s crashing terrible!”—“This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world.” And of course him signing off the air because of “the humanity” of it all.

  As the story goes, Herb was fired that day. Never go off the air!

  Turns out, it’s an urban legend. Herb left WLS on his own a year or so later and pursued a long and distinguished career. But the point is still there nonetheless. Cover the news. As a reporter for the Chronicle, it’s my job to observe and report and not to look away. Of course, I had looked away, hadn’t I? I guess pet parades and gay pride events hadn’t prepared me for the sight of that man cut open from stem to stern. Could anything have prepared me for that?