A Short, Sick Life : BURIED SECRETS, <i> By Edward Humes (W. P. Dutton: $19.95; 416 pp.)</i>

In 1983, inside a sweltering aluminum toolshed tucked in the backyard of a Miami wizard, Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo eagerly underwent the ritual that would make him a padrino , a professional practitioner of Palo Mayombe, an Afro-Caribbean religion that demands animal sacrifice to appease a pantheon of gods and godlets.

“My soul is dead. I have no god,” intoned the blindfolded Constanzo, 21, before a live chicken was rubbed over his body, drawing out impurities and making him a fit receptacle for the spirits of the dead. After the chicken’s throat was slashed, the wizard took a heated knife and sliced the mandatory cuts on Constanzo’s shoulders. At ceremony’s end, he presented Constanzo with a kisengue , the scepter wielded by priests of the religion. It was no jeweled ornament but, in fact, a polished human tibia, probably supplied by Miami’s entrepreneurial grave robbers.

This crucial passage in Edward Humes’ “Buried Secrets” explains much of what happened later in Constanzo’s short, violent life of black magic and drug smuggling. It foreshadows Constanzo’s descent into human sacrifice as he sought to protect himself and his followers from the eyes and guns of police in Mexico and the United States. It brings to an ordained conclusion a childhood and early youth in Puerto Rico and Miami that might give even a Hollywood horror/slasher producer moral qualms.

Constanzo’s Cuban mother turned each house and apartment occupied by the family into a stinking mess, floors dotted with human excrement, walls splashed with the blood of animal sacrifices. Animals that hadn’t yet been served up to the spirits wandered amid detritus.

Constanzo himself was garbage, of course, a potential human being twisted by deprivation, abuse and superstition into a factotum of evil. But Humes makes him compelling garbage as he spins through the events that led to the discovery of Constanzo’s personality cult in April, 1989, and his death at the hands of one of his own followers a few weeks later in Mexico City.

Constanzo and his band of occultist drug runners became notorious overnight when the world learned that they were responsible for the death of American college student Mark Kilroy. The missing student’s dismembered body was recovered from a hastily dug grave on a ranch near Matamoros, Mex. Kilroy’s brain had been removed and was found in a loathsome cabalistic stew in a nearby shack. Soon police found a dozen other bodies buried at the ranch, most bearing marks of ritual sacrifice, including ripped-out hearts.

As Humes describes it, this grim scene had a humorous tint. Mexican police who headed up the search--clothed in combat camouflage, armed with the latest assault rifles and documenting everything with a video camera--brought along their own medicine man to drive off evil spirits.

Constanzo’s story could hardly be more lurid, even in this jaded age when serial killers have to work overtime to make a tabloid splash. Some readers may ask if the world needs or wants another book about another diseased nobody who buys his 15 minutes of fame with blood. In the case of “Buried Secrets” the answer is “yes.”

Humes, a Pulitzer Prize-winner who works for the Orange County Register, has crafted a book that reaches beyond Constanzo’s demented circle to explore the dimensions of modern superstition, its importance in the changing demographics of the Sun Belt and its appeal to criminals. Humes covers interesting ground, writing expertly about the varieties of paganism that now flourish in the United States, while cautioning against ham-handed lumping under the generic title of “satanism.”

As a guidebook to the underworld’s nether world, “Buried Secrets” is a fascinating trip.