The Tattooed Heart (Messenger of Fear 2)

Messenger said, “His name is Oliver Benbury.”

Oliver now poked the needle into the delicate skin of Graciella’s inner arm.

A look of surprise, followed by shock and then utter, profound bliss, transformed Graciella’s face.

“See?” the pimp said. “Doesn’t that feel great? That high will last until you’re all done with your work tonight. And who knows, the old dudes may have other stuff for you. Maybe some coke. Booze for sure.”

Graciella smiled and lay back, relaxed and careless, on the couch.

“Bring the van around,” Oliver said with a knowing look at the two boys. “You know where they’re going.”

14

TO MY SURPRISE, MESSENGER MADE NO MOVE TO follow Graciella, nor to advance in her time line. Instead, we waited, watched, unseen, as the boy who had answered the door and the three girls departed, none walking too steadily.

When they were gone so was the pimp’s mellow act. He stood up and snapped, “Clean this up, Tony. Like we were never here. Find me another squat. Text me when you have it. I’m going home.”

It was Oliver we followed, out of the ramshackle building, and two blocks away to a covered pay parking garage where he slid behind the wheel of a very new Mercedes.

Rather than follow him on his drive, Messenger took us to his destination. I suppose the house should not have shocked me, not after seeing the car. I don’t know what the exact definition is of a mansion, but the house was set way off the road, down a long paved driveway. It was two stories, brick and stone, with expensively dressed windows pouring buttery light across a manicured lawn big enough for a game of field hockey.

What did we see when we followed Oliver inside? Nothing in particular. His parents were both at home. His mother was doing some sort of paperwork that involved piles of documents and envelopes spread all over the dining room table. When Oliver came in she smiled, asked him about his day and about the study group where she’d thought he was. She offered him a snack. He declined.

/> It was all very average, very normal.

Oliver’s father was in an easy chair in front of the TV. He had dozed off and woke only when Oliver patted him on the shoulder.

“Hey. Oh. Hey, Oll. Did I fall asleep?”

“Nah, you were snoring while you were awake,” Oliver teased.

They had a five minute sports conversation and then Oliver went up to his bedroom, quickly blew through some homework, grabbed a bowl of ice cream from downstairs, brushed his teeth, and fell asleep.

There was no demon. There was no evidence that this was anything but a normal, loving home. Oliver had just recruited an underage girl for his prostitution ring, and in order to ensure his grip on her, he had started her on the road to heroin addiction. There was no obvious explanation for his moral blindness that I could see in this home.

“I want to see more of his past,” I said.

I’m not quite sure when I had started to have an opinion about what we should see next. I’d always just followed along with Messenger. But there was something about this case, this girl, Graciella, and the cold-blooded way she’d been destroyed by Nicolet and by Oliver that got under my skin. Maybe it was guilt over my earlier arrogant dismissal of her as a loser. Maybe now that I had seen what she endured, and seen my own callousness exposed, I felt an obligation to her.

Or maybe she reminded me of an earlier guilt, of Samantha Early, the talented young writer that I—yes, I—had cruelly driven to suicide. Maybe I saw too much of myself in Nicolet and Oliver both.

“You are looking for an excuse?” Haarm asked. “For this drug-dealing pimp?” He sounded incredulous.

Messenger answered, “We are the eyes of Isthil. We must understand, so that she understands.”

It was the first time he’d said that and I was a little surprised. I had not thought of myself in those terms. It suggested that Isthil, or some arcane mechanism involving Isthil, decided the outcome. But it was the Master of the Game who created the contest, and the mind of the guilty one that supplied the punishment.

We spent some time figuratively leafing through Oliver’s life, searching for the precipitating event, the abuse, the parental neglect, the addiction, the brain injury, whatever, whatever excuse might possibly explain Oliver’s descent into evil.

But there was no easy explanation. Oliver had had a good life. He had once been a seemingly good kid. Then, for reasons I could not uncover, he had started down the path of arrogance, of contempt for everyone around him, of indifference to right and wrong, blindness to the pain of others.

What had been his excuse for ruining the life of an innocent girl?

What had been mine?

I felt sick inside, disgusted by the Trents and Olivers and Nicolets of the world, hating them for what they did. What people like them did. What people like me did.

“There’s nothing,” I said at last. “He’s just rotten. A rotten human being. He doesn’t even need the money.”