The People vs. Alex Cross (Alex Cross 25)

CHAPTER

98

TWO HOURS AND forty-five minutes later, Sampson had gotten off I-95 and was driving us north on Front Street, which parallels the freeway and the Delaware River as they pass through Philadelphia. The weather was changing. Dark clouds boiled on the western horizon.

“Chalabi sounds like a first-class creep,” Sampson said.

“He won’t be the first to achieve film success that way,” I said. We went over the high points of Rodriguez’s confession for the fourth or fifth time.

A childhood friend of Lourdes Rodriguez, Casey Chalabi, had always wanted to be a movie director.

“He ended up making porn films under the name Dirk Wallace,” Rodriguez told us. “It’s all S-and-M, bondage, the hard stuff.”

She said Chalabi put aside money from the porn shoots to fund production of a horror film he’d written.

“Horror’s cheap to film,” she’d said. “Casey said you can do them for under a million. James Wan did Saw for a little over five hundred thousand, and it made, like, fifty-five million. Casey’s trying to model himself on Wan.”

Rodriguez claimed that even with the porn money, Casey’s horror flick was being shot on a shoestring. When he learned she was going to inherit her great-uncle’s fortune, he was immediately after Rodriguez to help fund his film.

“I gave him some, and I didn’t even have the inheritance yet,” she said. “I took it from my savings. Five thousand. And then another five. Then Casey wanted the van, my van at Dish. He said even with the money I’d given him, he couldn’t afford to buy or rent one, and mine was perfect. He wanted me to just lend it to him for the night.”

“What’d you say?”

“I said no. No way. But Casey can be a vindictive a-hole.”

Sampson raised his eyebrows. “You saying Chalabi stole your van?”

“I’d put money on it. And that blood you found inside? Was it human?”

“We don’t know yet,” I said.

“It’s probably pig’s blood. He uses lots of pig’s blood in the big slasher scenes in Blade.”

I thought about that for several moments. “So he steals your van, uses it in a killing scene in his movie. I’m still having trouble seeing how this connects to those newspaper articles we found at Feiffer’s.”

Rodriguez swallowed hard. “I haven’t spoken with Casey since my van was stolen, but I read his script a long time ago. It’s about these four sisters who inherit an abandoned factory and this old Victorian house. Then it’s pretty much like every other horror flick you see. Except the sisters. They’re all ethereal and blond. Every one of them. And they get killed, one by one.”

Which was enough for us to drive to Philadelphia to talk to Mr. Chalabi face-to-face.

Rodriguez had given us the last address she had for Chalabi. She said she thought it was where he shot the porn movies. We found the address, a rehabbed old school called the Emerson that had been turned into lofts and work spaces down the street from the Theatre of Living Arts.

Rodriguez couldn’t remember the exact name of Chalabi’s company, but we found C. C. PRODUCTIONS listed on a board at the entrance to the Emerson. It was on the second floor, unit 2, the address Rodriguez had given us.

We took the staircase and walked down a long hallway past the open doors of artists’ studios and the closed doors of others in the arts and entertainment fields. The place smelled nice. There was music playing.

It had a good vibe, all in all, and that bothered me as we walked up to the closed door of C. C. Productions. I couldn’t see the management letting him shoot porn or slasher flicks on the premises.

Sampson knocked, turned the knob, and opened the door. I took one look inside and swore to myself.

C. C. Productions was an animation company. There were framed cartoon stills on the wall above the workstation of an Indian American woman in her twenties who looked up and smiled.

“Can I help you?” she said.

Sampson said, “We’re looking for Casey Chalabi.”

“I’m Cassandra Chalabi,” she said.

“Of course you are,” I said, furious. “Sorry to bother you.”