Chapter Seventy-Seven
Vampires? Is that what these twisted creeps were? Assassins? Murderers? Their names were Anne Elo and John 'Jack' Masterson and they had attended Catholic high school in Baton Rouge until about four months ago, when they had dropped out and run away from home. Each was seventeen years old. They were just kids. I spent three hours attempting to question the suspects that night, then another four hours the following morning. Elo and Masterson wouldn't talk to me or anyone else - not a word. They wouldn't say what they were doing inside the mansion in the Garden District. Why they had attacked me. Whether or not they had placed the sinister effigies in the closet of the dead men. The teens simply glared across the plain wooden table in one or another of the interrogation rooms at police headquarters. The parents were notified and brought in, but Elo and Masterson wouldn't speak to them either. At one point, Anne Elo finally addressed her father with two words - 'blow me.' I wondered how the cult of the vampire had satisfied her needs, her incredible anger. In the meantime, there were still lots of others to talk to from the Fetish Ball. The commonality among most of them was that they held 'straight jobs' in New Orleans: they were bartenders and waitresses, hotel desk clerks, computer analysts, actors, and even teachers. Most were afraid to have their alternative lifestyles come out at work, so they eventually talked to us. Unfortunately, no one told us anything revealing about Daniel and Charles, or their murderers.
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VIOLETS ARE BLUE
It was an extraordinarily busy night at the precinct house. More than two dozen homicide detectives and FBI agents conducted reinterviews. We exchanged notes and bios of the suspects with highlighted inconsistencies. We went hard at the most obvious liars in the group. We also kept a list of the witnesses who seemed the most likely to break under pressure. We switched interviewers on them, sent them to the cells, then summoned them back before they could sleep; we doubled up on them. 'All we need is a few rubber hoses,' one of the New Orleans detectives said while we were waiting for Anne Elo to be fetched from her cell for the sixth time that night. His name was Mitchell Sams, and he was around fifty, a black man, hugely overweight, tough, effective, cynical as hell. When Anne Elo was brought back into the interrogation room, she looked like a sleepwalker. Or a zombie. Her eye sockets were incredibly deep and dark. Her lips were chapped and caked with dried blood. Sams went at her. 'Good morning, glory. It's nice to see your pasty-white face again. You look like total shit, babe. I'm being kind. Several of your friends, including your pathetic boyfriend, have broken down already tonight.' The girl turned her vacant eyes toward a brick wall. 'You must be mistaking me for somebody who gives a shit,' she said. I decided to try an idea that had been weaving through my mind for the past hour or so. I had used it on a few of the others.'We know about the new Sire,'I told Anne Elo.'He's gone back to California. He isn't here for you. He can't help you, or hurt you.' Her face remained blank and unresponsive, but she folded her arms. She sagged a few inches in her chair. Her lips were bleeding again, possibly because she'd bitten into them. 'Who gives a shit. Not me.' Just then, a bleary-eyed NOPD detective opened the door to the interrogation room where Mitchell Sams and I were working on Elo, and beckoned us out. The detective had dark sweat stains under both arms of his pale blue sport shirt. Heavy stubble covered his chin and cheeks. He looked about as exhausted as I felt.
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JAA/IES PATTERSOIS
'There's been another murder,' he told Sams. 'Another hanging murder.' Anne Elo appeared at the open door, and slowly, rhythmically clapped her hands. 'That's great,' she said.
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