Down These Strange Streets (George R.R. Martin) (Kitty Norville 6.50)

“That’s all right. There are other boxes down here, though.”

“Yeah. Crap storage.”

Scarrey went down on his hands and knees, fishing the white cardboard out into the room. Old clothes in wads. A book on how to pick up girls. A stack of pornographic magazines. Two old bricks. A pile of yellowing paperbacks held together with a wide rubber band. A collection of DVDs teaching magic, juggling, unicycle riding. Scarrey ran his fingers over everything like he was flipping pages in a book. He paused, eyes narrowing.

“Missing,” he said.

“What?”

“The circus training disks. One’s missing,” Scarrey said. He picked up the one on juggling. On the box, a guy in clown-face makeup was grinning, a cartoon circle of blue dots and streaks standing in for actual juggling balls. Scarrey read through the text on the back, his lips moving. He made a satisfied grunt.

“Something?”

“Nothing unexpected,” he said. “Contortion.”

Scarrey dropped the disk back into the box and picked up the pile of paperbacks.

“Contortion?” Mason said.

“Bending,” Scarrey said. “It’s when someone—”

“Yeah, I know what it is.”

“More to the point, it’s the one he lost. Or got rid of. I don’t know whether he intentionally removed it, or if it was just something he had out often enough to misplace, but it hardly matters. And these, ah look. From a church library. Chariot of the Gods. Releasing Your Inner Light. Satan Among Us. Ah! Look. The True Meaning of the New Testament, by Reverend J. Linklesser. As if there were only one meaning! But . . .”

The rubber band came off with a snap, and Scarrey let the book fall open. Mason saw underlined passages flicker by.

“Aramaic?” Mason said.

“If English was good enough for our Lord and Savior . . . except, of course, it wasn’t.”

“It’s crap then,” Mason said. “All that shit Sobinski’s pulling. He’s not possessed.”

Scarrey looked up from the floor, baffled.

“Of course not. I mean, I had to check the site of the sacrifice to be totally certain, but really. John Zombie?” Scarrey grimaced and shook his head. “Semitic languages like Aramaic are Afro-Asiatic, not Afro-Caribbean. And Mait Carrefour and Marinette are very specific loa, neither one associated particularly with Jacob’s Ladder. You were quite right about the man, he really isn?

??t very good. Not that he’s evil. I mean he is evil, he killed that poor girl, but he isn’t very good at what he does.”

“Wait a minute, you knew he wasn’t possessed?”

“Of course.”

“Then, excuse my saying it, but what the fuck are we doing here?”

“Oh,” Scarrey said. “I’m sorry, Detective. I’m not here to find whether he’s possessed. I’m here to find why he’s pretending to be.”

“Insanity plea,” Mason said.

“No, that won’t do. For one thing, in practice that defense never works. Even if it did, life in prison isn’t appreciably different from indefinite detention in a mental institution, except that the prison is more pleasant. Now, given how badly he’s done everything else, your man Sobinski might not have realized that.”

“Straight-up insanity.”

“He could have had some kind of psychotic break. Not to the degree that he couldn’t plan and carry out a complex crime. And he didn’t seem to have any signs of Beleth the King of Hell before he was arrested. Possibly being caught induced psychosis as a way to distance himself from responsibility, but . . .”

“But?”

“Well, there are some problems with it,” Scarrey said, softly. “I have a hard time saying that a man who did what he did is well, mentally, but I think, I think, I know what he was looking for.”