In Death 05 - Ceremony in Death

desk."
    "Give me some incentive, Louis. I've got a full plate here."
    "I think -- I think I saw a murder. Just you, Eve. I won't talk to anyone else. Make sure you're not followed. Hurry."
    Eve pursed her lips at the blank screen. "Well, that's incentive. I think we've caught a break, Peabody. See if you can sweet-talk Feeney into giving you an extra pair of hands from EDD."
    "You're not going to meet him alone," Peabody protested as Eve grabbed her bag.
    "I can handle one scared lawyer." Eve bent down, checked the clinch piece strapped to her ankle. "We've got a man outside the club in any case. And I'm leaving my communicator on. Monitor."
    "Yes, sir. Watch your back."
    The fifth floor of the Luxury Club held twenty private suites for the members' use. Meetings of a professional or private nature could be held there. Each suite was individually decorated to depict its own era, and each contained a complete communication and entertainment center.
    Parties could be held there, of the large or the intimate nature. The catering department was unsurpassed in a city often preoccupied with food and drink. Licensed companions were available through the concierge for a small additional service charge.
    Louis always booked Suite 5-C. He enjoyed the opulence of the eighteenth-century French style with its emphasis on the decorative. The rich fabrics of the upholstery on curved-backed chairs and velvet settees appealed to his love of texture. He enjoyed the thick, dark draperies, the gold tassels, the gleam of gilt on pier glass mirrors. He had entertained his wife, as well as an assortment of lovers, in the wide, high, canopy bed.
    He considered this period to have embodied hedonism, self-indulgence, and a devotion to earthly pleasures.
    Royalty had ruled and had done as it pleased. And hadn't art flourished? If peasants had starved outside the privileged walls, that was simply a societal mirror of nature's natural selection. The chosen few had lived life to the hilt.
    And here, in midtown Manhattan, three hundred years later, he could enjoy the fruits of their indulgence.
    But he wasn't enjoying them now. He paced, drinking unblended scotch in quick, jerky gulps. Terror was a dew on his brow that refused to be wiped away. His stomach roiled, his heart rabbitted in his chest.
    He'd seen murder. He was nearly sure of it. It was all so hazy, all so surreal, like a virtual reality program with elements missing.
    The secret room, the smoke, voices -- his own among them -- lifted in chant. The taste, lingering on the tongue, of warm, tainted wine.
    Those were all so familiar, a part of his life now for three years. He'd joined the cult because he believed in its basic principles of pleasure, and he'd enjoyed the rituals: the robes, the masks, the words repeated and repeated while candles guttered into pools of black wax.
    And the sex had been incredible.
    But something was happening. He found himself obsessing about meetings, desperately craving that first deep gulp of ceremonial wine. And then there were the blackouts, holes in his memory. He'd be logy and slow to focus the morning after a rite.
    Recently, he'd found blood dried under his nails and couldn't remember how it had gotten there.
    But he was starting to. The crime scene photos Eve had shown him had clicked something open in his mind. And had filled that opening with shock and horror. Images swirled behind his eyes. Smoke swirling, voices chanting. Flesh gleaming from sex, the moans and grunts of vicious mating. Dank black hair swaying, bony hips pumping.
    Then the spray of blood, the gush of it, spurting out like that final cry of sexual release.
    Selina with her feral, feline smile, the knife dripping in her hand. Lobar -- God it had been Lobar -- sliding from the altar, his throat gaping wide like a screaming mouth.
    Murder. Nervously, he twitched the heavy drapes open a fraction, let his frightened eyes search the street below. He'd seen a blood sacrifice, and not of a goat. Of a man.
    Had he dipped his fingers into that open throat? Had he slipped them between his lips to taste the fresh blood? Had he done something so abhorrent?
    My God, dear God, had there been others? Other nights, other sacrifices? Could he have witnessed and blanked it from his mind?
    He was a civilized man, Louis told himself as he jerked the draperies back into place. He was a husband and a father. He was a respected attorney. He wasn't an accessory to murder. He couldn't be.
    With his