“To force him into committing evil,” Ariel explained. “As soon as his veve is carved into the victim, he obtains an obligation to do the bidding of the mambo who called upon him. You’re right that Papa Legba is a guide—a gatekeeper between worlds, and for that reason he is often a conduit for communication between people of this world and those who dwell in the other worlds. The mambo may wish for him to initiate contact between herself and the gods whom she really wants to address.”
That made sense, at least inasmuch as anything about Voodoo made sense at all to Flynn. “Who would she want Papa Legba to contact for her?” she asked.
Ariel’s eyes clouded and she looked down into the murky depths of her tea, fingers absently caressing the sides of the mug in a way made Flynn wish she were that mug. “If this person is really practising bad Voodoo, then I imagine they might be using Papa Legba as a conduit to the Old Ones.”
Baffled, Flynn repeated, “‘Old Ones’?”
A quick shudder convulsed Ariel’s narrow shoulders. “Yeah, the Old Ones, the older gods, much older than the Loa. They are definitely of a dark nature, unlike the Loa. These gods don’t care for humanity at all. They’re vicious and cruel and greedy, and they will use humans to do their bidding, which is usually something fairly nasty. The gutting of your victim would signify the mambo’s willingness to serve the Old Ones. Although they do reward handsomely for this servitude, so I’ve heard.”
Flynn set down her mug and met Ariel’s piercing green eyes. “What else would be involved in these rituals to call on the Old Ones?”
“Well, Papa Legba alone would not be enough. He can open the conduit of communication but cannot directly intercede with the Old Ones. That would take a more powerful Loa, such as the Baron Samedi, or even Damballah himself. The Loa dwell on what we would call the ‘spirit plane’, but the Old Ones, they inhabit a place far more ancient and inaccessible. Their world—to us—would be like an endless darkness, a great void, complete nothingness. There are mambos who can travel to this world of the Old Ones, but not many of them. For most, the price of servitude to the Old Ones is too great. They demand their payment in blood and discord. Most sane mambos won’t touch them.”
“But for someone who was willing to pay the price?”
“Then the next step would be a second sacrifice, to buy an intercession from either the Baron Samedi or Damballah. Beyond that, Flynn, I don’t know. I’ve never dared to even read about anything darker than this.”
Ariel wore a leather thong with a copper pendant on it, nestled in the cleave of her breasts. On the pendant was etched the veve of Erzulie, the love goddess. It was entirely appropriate that Ariel should wear a symbol of a love goddess, Flynn thought. She noticed Flynn’s eyes go to the necklace, and her smile softened, becoming seductive. “I’m strictly a lover, not a killer, Willie Rae. You know that.”
“Yeah. I guess I do.”
Ariel hesitated. Flynn gave her an expectant look. “What?”
“Human blood is very powerful. At least, that’s the belief of many who practice the Voodoo religion like it used to be. Like I said, I’m not a mambo. I just sell this shit to people. I only know what I’ve read or what I’ve heard, and I heard quite a bit in the slammer about the ancient practices. You get a lot of those women in prison who either are, or become believers in Voodoo. It can—help you to get through the ordeal.”
Flynn felt the veins in the side of her head tighten, and her stomach coil. There were all kinds banged up together in the overcrowded state prison system. Ariel had always talked a tough game, but talk was mostly all it was. She’d only done state time because the court wanted to use her to set an example to others. In whose world was that any more of a ‘fitting punishment’ than Flynn’s assassinating someone for money? Both things were equally morally corrupt—only difference was one had legal sanction.
“You ever heard of anyone who was involved in these dark rituals here in New Orleans?” Flynn asked, shaking off her own outrage before it could distract her from her purpose here.
Ariel shook her head. “I don’t think I’d want to hear about anyone into that shit,” she muttered. Then she added, “I could do some asking around though, or I could look it up on the Internet for you?”
Flynn smiled. “I can do that myself.”
“You could, but then you wouldn’t have an excuse to come back here and see me again.”
“There is that.”
As Flynn made to straighten up from the counter, Ariel surprised her by grabbing her wrist and pulling her back down. “Don’t mess with this stuff, Willie Rae,” she warned again, her tone husky—concerned and yet seductive at once. Flynn breathed in the patchouli and cinnamon scent and she was transported back in time once again by it, to that sultry afternoon of sex.
“I won’t. You know me, too goddamned selfish to stick my neck out that far,” she assured.
But Ariel gave her head a disconsolate shake. “Oh yeah, I do know you, Willie Rae Flynn. That’s the whole problem. You think you’re a tough guy, don’t give a damn for anyone, but you’ve got a soft center.” She stood on tiptoe and leaned right across the countertop, pulling Flynn’s head down and forward to kiss her. Flynn resisted for all of a couple of seconds, and then she kissed back. Ariel Rousseau was all velvet and fire, and she had a mouth could devour you whole. Flynn knew if she just kept up the kiss, they would end up taking it upstairs and what had occurred on that distant summer afternoon, would happen all over again. But instead, Flynn pulled back. She breathed heavily a few times, in and out through her nose, clearing her head of both the heady perfume and her own thoughts. “I can’t do this. Not right now.”
The pink tip of Ariel’s tongue protruded at the left corner of her mouth and she licked the taste of Flynn’s lips from her own. “Some other time?” she asked.
Flynn watched the pink tongue circle back across the full lower lip, thinking about all of the magical things it could do. She nodded. Oh yes, some other time, definitely. Foolish to even imagine she could walk away and not look back at what she was missing. “Yeah,” she said, smiling. “Some other time.”
She left the store better informed about Voodoo and the pantheon of neutral Loa and evil Old Ones, but still none the wiser about who might have sacrificed Jeannette Larue, or to what personal end.
As she walked back to her office, deep in thoughts about gods and human sacrifice and how a middle-class white woman from Kenner might have come to be dumped on Desire Street, Flynn failed to notice the dark blue sedan parked outside of her building, nor the woman who leaned on the hood.
“Flynn!”
She looked up, blinking in the glare of the sunshine as Dana Jordan pushed herself off the hood of the dark sedan and waved. Flynn’s heart tripped—as always. The reporter came scissoring through the pedestrians thronging under the colonnade on Bourbon Street, intercepting Flynn before she reached her office.
“Hi. Can we talk for a moment?”
People flowed around them on the crowded sidewalk. “Maybe we should step out of the street first?” Flynn suggested. She gently guided Dana to the bar a few feet from her office. Not so famous as some of the other blues bars in the French Quarter, Harry Grayson’s was nonetheless the place to go if you were a New Orleans local who enjoyed good blues, perfectly chilled beer, and a friendly atmosphere. And all without tourists in stupid hats. Flynn ordered two bottles of beer at the bar, carried them back to a table where Dana was already seated.
“So how’s life on the crime beat?”
Dana lifted a hand, tilted it palm up. “This is New Orleans. There’s always life in the crime beat.” She took a sheet of fax paper from her pocket, slid it across the tabletop. “What do you know about this?”
Flynn glanced down at a photograph that showed the veve carved into Jeannette Larue’s chest. “Looks like a morgue photo,” she said in neutral tone and Dana twitched an eyebrow.
It was a matter of pride with Louisiana’s legal and government insti
tutions to be corrupt. Ever since Katrina ravaged its regular premises, the Coroners Office had been operating out of a sometime funeral home on Martin Luther King Boulevard, where the staff worked under appalling conditions and with very little funding. Often they were not paid for weeks at a time. Selling a photo, or even a little information to the press was not something Flynn felt they could be blamed for. She drank some more beer as she gazed impassively at the blurry photo.
“Where’d you get this?”
Dana shook her head. “I don’t know, Flynn. Source is Sy Lehane’s. You know what it’s about then?”
“Yes I do. But I shouldn’t be talking to you about it. You know that.”
Dana bit her lower lip, looked away at nothing. When her gaze came back to Flynn, it managed to be both shrewd and guileless at once. “There’s Voodoo involved, you can tell me that much, can’t you?”
Flynn calculated the extent of Boudreau’s wrath for revealing something that would end up in print, and then she nodded anyway. “There’s Voodoo, yeah, or what looks like it. Woman was gutted, had her left hand and right foot hacked off. And that sign carved into her chest? Papa Legba. He’s a Loa guide.”
“Voodoo sacrifice?” Dana frowned. “Do you have any idea if it’s a ruse, or if there’s a genuine believer behind it?”
“It could be a genuine believer, but they’d be a misguided one. Voodoo does involve ritual sacrifice, usually of chickens or goats, but human sacrifice is generally frowned upon.”
Dana gnawed some more on that nice lower lip of hers, Flynn watching her do so and feeling the warm stirrings of desire deep in her abdomen. “I don’t suppose there are too many people would be into messing with that kind of thing, right?” Flynn nodded. Dana laid her index finger on the photograph, tapped it over the ragged wound where Jeannette Larue had been gutted. “Do you know who the victim was?”
“I can’t give you her name, Dana. Sorry, but Boudreau would kill me if I did that. I can tell you that she was a nice, white, middle-class woman from Kenner, and that she had no apparent connections with Voodoo.”
“Okay. So why were you at the crime scene?”
Flynn scratched at her eyebrow, looked toward the door for a moment before bringing her gaze back to the dark eyes that watched her steadily. Sometimes it was hard for her even to look into Dana Jordan’s eyes. “The victim was supposed to come see me about a case,” she admitted.
“What case?”
Flynn shook her head. “Can’t tell you that. It might—or might not be—connected with her death.”
Dana took a slug of her beer. Her dark eyes suddenly glittered with mischief. “I didn’t know that you liked to wear patchouli, Flynn? I wouldn’t have thought it was quite you.”
That Dana had smelled the scent Ariel wore from her, brought a rush of heat up from out of Flynn’s shirt collar which then threatened to bloom into a full blown blush. Dana shook her head. “It’s okay, Flynn, if you’ve been with someone. It’s not like you have to tell me or anything.”
“Good. Because I have no intention of doing so.”
Dana arched an eyebrow. “Although—I wonder—does Pierce know that you’re stepping out behind her back?”
Flynn scowled. “Jesus! Mind your own damn business. I’m sure Pierce will be minding hers.”
“You get around, Flynn, don’t you?”
There was no malice or judgement in the statement. A little bit of resignation maybe. Dana lifted her beer bottle, but she did not drink from it. Instead she began picking the label from the body of the bottle, shredding the damp paper between her fingers and dropping it into the tin ashtray in the middle of the table. Smoking bans had all but passed by the notice of many New Orleans establishments. Avoiding Flynn’s eyes suddenly, Dana added, “So do you want to tell me why it is that you’ve never got around to me? I like you, Flynn, and I know that you like me. What’s the problem then?”
It had been inevitable that one day Dana would ask exactly this question and Flynn had sometimes wondered what she would say when the moment came. What could she say that wouldn’t sound exactly like she was covering up something else?
“I’m the problem,” she said, and that much at least was the truth. “I don’t do well in relationships, and you’re not the sort of gal who’d be happy to be somebody’s fuck buddy.”
A grimace twisted Dana’s mouth. She darted a glance at Flynn. “How’d you know I wouldn’t?”
“Because like you say, I get around. I can read women pretty well, and I read you as someone who wants a proper relationship. Love, romance, the whole nine yards. None of which are my strengths.”
“Well, maybe you’re reading me wrong. Or underestimating yourself.” Dana downed the remainder of her beer, slapped the empty bottle hard down on the table. She stood, pushing her chair back violently enough to make the legs screech on the wood floor. “Anyway, looks like I have a story to write up. I’m sorry if talking to me will mean Boudreau gets on your back.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Flynn told her and the reporter nodded.
She watched as Dana weaved her way quickly through the tables and chairs to the exit, and wished it could be different, that she did not have to push a woman like Dana Jordan away because she were afraid of her own dark past being dragged into the light. But she had spent so much of her life keeping people at arm’s length, never giving anything of herself away to them, that she wondered if she even knew how to live any other way.
CHAPTER SIX
The rest of Boudreau’s day was nasty, brutish, and unfortunately, nowhere near as short as she would’ve liked. Nine o’clock in the evening had come and gone before she was finally able to leave her desk, by which time her eyeballs felt like they were being pulled slowly from her head by fish hooks, and her back and shoulders ached from sitting hunched over at a desk, reading and writing reports.
The Coroners Office had delivered the autopsy report already, showing an alacrity remarkable for a system bogged down in problems. The gist of the report was that Jeannette Larue died as a result of massive physical trauma. No surprise there then. The weapon, according to the coroner, was a large knife with a single-sided sharp blade, eight to ten inches in length. All of the mutilations had occurred post-mortem. Jeannette had been sexually assaulted pre-mortem but there was no usable DNA left in, or on the body. Time of death was placed at between twenty-four to forty-eight hours ago.
Boudreau felt sweaty, grimy, and above all else, irritable. All she wanted to do was shower, have a cold beer and a hot pizza, and watch some mindless trash on TV. Or, she figured, she could go over to Flynn’s place, take a shower there, drink a couple of Flynn’s beers, and have the kind of fun, uncomplicated sex that Flynn was really, really good at. Maybe order pizza afterward.
By eleven-thirty, Boudreau was naked in Flynn’s queen-sized bed, sweating and aching all over once more, but this time as a result of fun, uncomplicated, and energetic sex. The room smelled warmly of sex and the smoky, wet-leaves-burning odor of a joint. Boudreau hooked a leg over Flynn’s thigh as they lay side by side, passing the joint between them. “Y’all want to order us some pizza?”
Flynn nodded. She took a deep drag on the joint, held the sweet smoke in her lungs for several seconds before letting it out in a series of lazy rings. “Ham, onion, peppers, mushrooms, double cheese, hold the pineapple, right? Y’all want some garlic bread to go with it?”
“Nah. But I could use some ice cream for after. Chocolate mint chip.”
Flynn rolled over and swung her legs off the bed. Naked, she stood up and walked to the bedroom door, giving Boudreau a brief but enjoyable view of a small, tight butt and long muscular legs. The hours spent with Flynn were time torn out of Boudreau’s regular life. She accepted this, although sometimes she allowed herself to wonder what her life might be like if she were free to pursue something more than just an affair with Willie Rae Flynn. The PI stuck her head around the doorjamb, interrupting Boudreau’s woolgathering.
“P
izza’s ordered. Should be here in twenty.”
“A whole twenty minutes, huh?” Boudreau drew one leg up, letting the sheet fell away from her. She gave a lazy smile at the way Flynn’s eyes wandered appreciatively up and down her naked body. “Wonder what we could do for a whole twenty minutes? ”
In response, Flynn stalked across the floor and climbed back onto the bed, her long muscular legs straddling Boudreau’s thighs. She bent her head low, kissed Boudreau deeply, first on the mouth, then moving down to her neck, and the deep cleft between her breasts. Boudreau made a sound that was almost a purr, shifted her position a little so that Flynn could slide down the length of her. “Mm, twenty minutes of this, ” she murmured as Flynn’s tongue flicked expertly between her legs. “I could go for that.”
When the pizza arrived they moved from the bedroom to Flynn’s sparsely furnished kitchen where they sat a plain wooden table and ate pizza straight from the box. Once, Boudreau had commented on Flynn’s frugal lifestyle, wondering why the PI didn’t make her living space just a little more comfortable?
“Or even habitable,” she had added wryly.
Flynn tried to explain that all she required were a bed to sleep in, and a fridge in which to keep her beer cool and the leftover takeout fresh. And a microwave in which to reheat the leftovers.
“You’re a Philistine,” Boudreau had said, shaking her head.
Flynn had shrugged. “A Philistine who reads and understands Nietzsche. So, tell me, why does my having no desire to own matching flatware matter so much?”
Boudreau had no answer to that.
Flynn opened up the louver doors in the kitchen to let some air in. The powdery scent of bougainvillea and passion vine draping the verandah drifted inside on the damp air. “So how’s the case going?” she inquired.
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