Screaming wasn't unusual on a Friday Night at Club Sang Freud in Cambridge, it was required. Sang Freud was, after all, Boston's most edgy alternative club operating within the two am liquor licensing purview. Gays, Lesbians, Transgenders, Bisexuals, Goth, Ecstasy Ravers—even the cult of secret online S&M roleplay addicts all had at least a night to themselves and sometimes two at Sang Freud. Lumping it all under the rubric of “Alternative” gave the club an excuse to go after any niche crowd in a haphazard, desperately advertised trial-and-error fashion. Making Sang Freud New England's only legal above-board and above-ground kinky sex club had worked. Everybody had a night.
The S&M crowd, known as stand and model at the Freud, had their Fetish Friday, a mix of Goth kids, trannies, suburban swinger burnouts, over-the-hill online chat-sexers, and curious tourists longing for kinky sex, or at least the satisfying illusion of it. They all crowded in at ten bucks a pop. This Friday was no different.
They all sought the elusive debauched moment in time.
The trick of that moment, though, is that sometimes it finds you first.
The moment came, and by the time someone noticed, it was too late.
It was a hot night, lots of bodies in vinyl, leather, latex, pleather, black muslin, hot pink taffeta, mock stage sex in chains and fetish inexpertly mimed, a busty somewhat chubby ex-gamine using two floggers in each hand—“Florentine” style—applied to the back of a shirtless be-capped tourist boy as his on-looking friends howled, Gothic industrial cranked so high the ceiling beams and floor joists vibrated, and all three bar stations of the main room squirmed with impatient patrons like a brood of restless fallow seeking the teat of a sow. And there was screaming at a volume even above that of the pounding music.
More screaming came out of the front room by the gate, where old spray-painted, sparkle-pasted furniture looked comfortable but wasn't—all show and no go—and a tall black queen in a cheesy tiara and glowing golden sequin camisole hosted yet another bar speed station mixing Kamikazes and Impalers with supreme abandon. The queen stopped dead for a second as the screaming reached him. It wasn't right. This screaming was different. Somehow it broke up into a distortion that only distorted further the more you tried to make out its meaning.
It was when the wave of screaming crested high in the front room and crashed through into the next that its meaning became clear. The queen was already tossed about unconscious above it, blood streaked and serene.
Saturday morning came particularly early with EMS Ambulances, patrol cars, the chump wagon, a gang of uniforms and a handful of plainclothes, displaced patrons gaping dumbly in an unwanted, illegal congregation of dejected revelers on Brookline Street. Kay Boyd was there, and she deeply didn't want to be, pulled as she was out of a sound sleep by the beeper, the call, the impatient command of a pissed off Deputy Superintendent Phil LaCuna.
Dawn hadn't yet broken and wouldn't for an hour or so, but already the news trucks were there at the minimum distance and with maximum focus. She had a good idea of what she was in for, braced herself and covered her face with a handkerchief when the uniforms who switched off with the black jump-suited bouncers at the gate let her pass through.
She expected a charnal house and was relieved to be wrong, at first. It was after passing the register at the gate and getting to the other side of the death's head belly dancing mural on the plywood drywall divider, that the weight of why she had come descended.
It was a bad scene, and not just in the sense of the aftermath of cheap rock club sweat, vomit and cigarette burned dance-sex detritus.
It was a bad crime scene.
The dim, dire, mysteriously shadowed club looked sad and tacky under the full glow of every lighting fixture powered on, revealing the spotty paint job, exposed wires, half-covered building antiquity of damage and seepage. The whole place looked like a vast stage set about to be struck, replete with prop bodies strewn about waiting to be collected up. Boyd knew the problem right away even before Homicide detective Byron Wurdalaka put his hand on her shoulder.
They weren't props.
“Jesus Christ,” said Boyd into her handkerchief and coughed. “How many?”
“Six,” said Wurdalaka.
“I meant dead.”
“So did I.”
Boyd hit tilt for a few seconds.
For a small city like Cambridge, let alone Boston, this was a watershed crime—a full-scale massacre bound to swallow both the headlines and the attention of the politicos for at least the next year. No wonder Boston personnel were already on the scene. Cambridge PD knew they couldn't handle it. Worst of all, there was no real available suspect. She could read this in Wurdalaka's face even before he gave her the rundown.
He started in, clear and decisive, and Boyd's brain went skipping off on holiday, frantically asserting its right to be elsewhere. She had a moment of REM fantasy, running naked on a warm, sunny beach in Barbados, before Wurdalaka gave her a shove.
“You got all that?”
She shoved him back.
“Fuck you, Byron. Why the hell am I even here?”
“Everybody's gonna be here when it gets light, LT, you can bank on that. I caught the first round, but you can be sure I'm not gonna stay primary on this for very long.”
“This is a clusterfuck beyond my comprehension,” Boyd said, and lit a crumpled Pall Mall 100. “But I don't do homicides, even big ones—I'm an administrator of a task force, not a major crimes investigator. “
“You're whatever you have to be, LT, and that's the truth. And right now you're OC liaison on a sextuple homicide in some kind of crowd control incident run amok.”
“From what I see, it's not really a homicide, it's certainly not OC—I mean this is more a licensing, public safety thing, negligence and code conditions resulting in a tragedy, not directed criminal conduct. This has to be manslaughter, probably involuntary.”
Yonah Shimmel gave Kay a wave from where he was kneeling over a young, skinny male corpse made up to look like a corpse in grisly redundancy. Caked rusty blood got lost in red rouge, fire-engine red Karo syrup rivulets, bruises mixed with charcoal duplicated ersatz cyanosis. The boy's neck had been broken and one side of his face had been dented in, his cheekbones crushed. Shimmel ran point on a group of criminalists combing through the debris, refuse, lost items, fallen bodies, straggling witnesses and other detainees, scooping up and bagging anything at all that might point to reason for the riot that trampled and killed six ecstasy revelers. “They'll prosecute it as murder, anyway, politics must be served, LT. There are careers here to enhance and advance.”
“Where's the owner?”
“Flying in from Miami—he sounded coked up.”
“Looks like he'll be our poster child.”
“He fits the bill. Greedy party-boy sex club runner indifferent to the safety and protection of his patrons. With this guy's history, he makes a nifty target for the bible thumpers and decency campaigners looking for leverage. He even gave Andrew Kunanin safe harbor before they nailed him on the houseboat. You know: the guy the mob hired to wax Versace and make it look like a serial job?”
“Our boy sent him packing there?”
“So the record says.”
“You're telling me he's mobbed up and that's somehow connected to this rioting?”
“Bingo-bango, LT. No flies on you.”
“I'll have Andromeda work it. Now, I'm gonna take my leave before I get into something here I shouldn't.”
“Way too late for that LT. Before you make your no comment to the haircuts outside, I have a witness needs to share something with you.”
“He coherent.”
“Not really. But you'll get the gist when he starts babbling.”
“You're such a fucking joy, Byron.”
Shimmel's criminalists nearly knocked into them as they stepped carefully into the main room of the club where the stage was. It looked more like a battle staging area, a warehouse of medical triage and cheap theater effects exposed in all their tawdriness and cheap construction under the glare of huge brute spotlights in opposite corners of the room. Gangs of EMTs were applying dressings and packing wounds. There was a good deal of moaning and groaning underscoring gruff murmuring and the squawks of walkie-talkies, the chatter and canned music of cell phones.
Candy and silver gum wrappers littered the floor everywhere, glinting gemlike in the strong, uneven light.
“What the fuck happened here, Byron?”
“It was a melee, LT, a real melee.” Wurdalaka gestured over to a group of uniforms and two of them swaggered over, carrying between them a tall, weedy, shaven-headed piratical type, his face an abused gathering of blood clots from where piercings had evidently been ripped out of his face. “Whether you know it or not, LT, we are right now standing in the eye of a shitstorm, a hurricane of fucking shit.” The man they held sweated profusely, trembling, his eyes glazed and bugging, the edges of his mouth twitching. He looked like he was still rolling on ecstasy.
“You mean a monsoon of shit.”
“You might be right. But you're gonna see why when Poindexter here blows. Tell the Lieutenant your little story, Mr. Sejanus. Tell her all about your little girlfriend.”
Sejanus struggled dumbly just for show against the grip of the two uniforms and the Peerless standard cuffs around his wrists and looked as if he was about to start hollering and babbling, which he didn't. Instead, he spoke conversationally and reasonably at a rapid clip and interrupted by his own bursts of laughter.
“Red. You know, it was red. Really, how it started—it was with the wave, the cresting, crashing wave of red. You couldn't get away from it, man, you just couldn't. Beautiful and terrible and you just had to surf it. You just had to!”
“Is there a point to this, Byron?” Boyd glared.
Wurdalaka knocked him hard with his elbow. “Get to the point, Poindexter.”
“There is no point, there was never any point, there was just what the wave brought when it came thundering through my brain—this was some awesome shit! The red wave. It came when we all got maxed on snappers. We were maxin' on snappers and the wave came hard, washed over us all, sucked us under and bobbed us all over, spat us up above again. I drowned and died in the wave, man, when it got onto me, all of them—the wave, running over me.”
“This has nothing to do with OC.”
“You don't think so, but Poindexter here didn't get to the climax. Go to it, Sejanus.”
“What, you're talking about the slut in pink, the flamingo?”
“That's what we want to know.”
“She swam the wave, owned it—had some fucking moves.” Now he shouted: “Serious-serious-serious moves!”
“What fucking moves?!” screamed Wurdalaka.
Sejanus paused, collected himself. Looking composed for a moment, he craned his bald head forward with a leering smile as if to whisper to Wurdalaka and instead bit a small chunk out of his clean-shaven cheek. The detective made a sort of breathless, awkward yawping like a seagull, spun on his heel and instantly crammed his fist straight into the raver's already bloodied mouth.
“Book that fuck on assault and resisting!”
Boyd stepped in front of him.
“This is a gruesome, grisly, fucked up episode, Byron, and you're welcome to it. If the OC task force can spare any people, you'll be sure to get them. But as far as I can see, this case has got zip to do with me.”
Wurdalaka cracked a smile, watching Sejanus struggle and kick up helplessly with his skinny, stove-pipe jean bedizened legs and gladiator boots.
“You're gonna be a guest of the Commonwealth for a while, shit wit. Wanna improve your stay, tell us all about the pink lady.”
Sejanus went slack, lolled his bald, bloodied head, laughing. “You piece of pig shit, you don't get it. The wave is fucking coming. You're gonna ride it hard, pigfucker. She's gonna do to you what she did to boyfriend over there. That's right, detective fuckstick!” He jerked his head toward a cluster of criminalists hovering over a body by the center bar speed station. Boyd left them and went over to it, pulled Yonah's senior assistant toward her and asked: “What happened to that one? Or do I have to ask your boss?”
The short, somewhat chubby forensics assistant with the youthfully cherubic face removed his wire-rimmed glasses and wiped his brow, pouting. “No, need, Lieutenant. You can tell with just a glance.”
The criminalists parted and then she saw it.
It made her knees buckle so she had to fight to stand for a moment.
Some things you never get used to. Some things.
Wurdalaka went up next to her to steady her—he could see she was going over.
Boyd gave him a violent push back.
“It's the same girl, isn't it?”
“'Fraid so, LT. From Poindexter's description, from corroborating descriptions of a few coherency-challenged patrons—”
“This is the same girl who tore hell out of the throat of Malek the Mallet's chief accountant?”
“In the pink.”
“So, it's mine, isn't it?”
“Politics included.”
She snapped open her cell phone, barked at Andromeda on the other end to assemble the crew and get them down to Sang Freud, that they'd just inherited a huge and glorious mess. Then she roused Community Relations Officer Newt Imbroglio out of his suburban slumber in Andover and told him that if he didn't get a PR spokesperson sanctified to comment by Queen Kathleen herself, that she'd start shooting from the hip to the newsies in the street. Newt screamed bloody murder on the other end in a voice audible to all. Boyd snapped the cell phone closed.
She scanned the room, her stomach plummeting like an elevator with a severed cable.
“What the fuck were they on?” she asked half-anguished, the injury, death, blood, and scent of human fluid-soaked despair crashing through the fog of weariness.
“I think I know,” said a small, reedy remarkably self-assured voice from the entrance to the front room. Yonah Shimmel. “It's everywhere, if you look.”
They stared at him, the thrumming of transformers for the lights and all the ancillary noises of triage and evidence gathering flooding into the void
“It's gum.”
“You're a weird little fucking guy, Shimmel, and no question. But this is a weird situation.”
“Fuckin' A it is, detective,” Shimmel shot back at him tremulously. “Everybody here—100% of the ones on the ground—they were all doing it.”
“Doing what, for Christ's sake?”
The senior forensic criminalist held up a gleaming silver stick between his thumb and forefinger so they could see it. “Chewing gum,” he replied.