Burnt Black

by Ed Kovacs

  But now, as I walked the perimeter of Drake’s property, looking for signs that a killer might have escaped by running out the back door and into the woods, all of the high strangeness around this case that was only a few hours old hounded me like a thirsty drunk who’d spotted a mark.

  Just how tough am I? Truth is, I’ve always been gun-shy toward the occult. Voodoo and the like kind of spook me. I have no problem with opponents in a physical confrontation, but what if the confrontation is nonphysical? I’m not one to discount the power of shamans and sorcerers, and because I have no skills or knowledge in those arenas, it makes me feel vulnerable now.

  Many people opt to take the simple position that witchcraft or sorcery or whatever general, generic umbrella term one chooses to use for the arts of the occultist is just a sham practiced by charlatans. And New Orleans, historically, has had no shortage of charlatans, including those who operated in the past as voodoo priests and priestesses.

  But I’d seen some monks do things when I studied martial arts in China that were … unexplainable. So I remained open-minded on the subject and strongly suspected there was something to what some call the “manipulation of energy.” Personally, I had chosen to ignore those disciplines, to distance myself from them, because they made me uncomfortable. I was—and am—an outsider to such worlds and have chosen to stay that way.

  I hadn’t been kidding with Honey; I’d never move into a haunted house. Just being in Drake’s house was creepy enough. What kind of coward did that make me out to be?

  Then a wave of icy chill enveloped me and I almost jumped. I turned to look and saw that a massive cold front had blown in fast from the north and blocked out the sun. The temperature dropped like a stone, and the beautiful blue sunny day of the morning was swallowed by an amorphous mass of angry gray afternoon weather that looked like it had an agenda.

  * * *

  I moved briskly to finish my circuit of the property, searched the shed Honey asked me to check, then made my way back to the front driveway, now choked with CSI vans, the coroner’s car, several Fourth District unmarked units, and various and sundry LE—law enforcement—vehicles. How ironic that a couple of misfits like Honey and me were now running a show like this.

  One thing I’d learned was to be thorough at a fresh crime scene, to go slowly, get it right, and not jump to conclusions.

  As I stood smoking a Partagas mini cigarillo outside Professor Drake’s house, I was joined for a confab by Honey and Senior Homicide Detectives Mackie and Kruger, who informed me that conclusions were already being jumped to.

  “Coroner confirmed there were no obvious signs of foul play. And there’s no evidence of any solvents or chemicals that they used in their construction work that could have caused this. He’s speculating the victims were about to have some kinky sex. But overdosed,” said Honey. “Even though we didn’t find any dope.”

  “Remember that guy in the news who took some hybrid type of LSD? He stripped naked in a park and ate some chick’s face,” said Kruger, who was tall and lean and had a permanent look of wariness about him.

  “Bad PCP has also made plenty of people take off their clothes,” added Honey.

  “Toxicology reports will take forever,” I said. “And the department won’t pop for any elaborate testing.”

  “The crime lab would probably screw it up anyway,” said Kruger.

  “So far there’s no sign they had sex with each other, even though each of them apparently had an orgasm shortly before death,” said Honey.

  “So it was, what? A circle jerk?” asked Kruger.

  “That’s unclear right now,” responded Honey.

  Kruger shook his head.

  “Some of the district-level homicide guys here to do the MORF think it was a double suicide,” said Mackie, a short man in his late fifties with a flat head. Mackie was solid as a wall. You might jump over him but you couldn’t go through him.

  MORF stood for Major Offense Reporting Form. The DIU, District Investigative Unit, was here for that. Honey had put some of them to work helping CSI techs dig up the many small, shallow graves in the backyard that Kruger had discovered. Preliminary exhumations revealed what appeared to be pet remains, but the sheer number of graves boggled the mind.

  I consciously shifted my weight onto the balls of my feet as I watched a couple of the Fourth District guys carefully going over the cab of the Mexican victims’ pickup truck.

  “If it’s a double suicide,” I said, “how did they time their deaths to happen right after they shot their wad? And if it was an accidental overdose, same question. There had to be a third person involved. How else to explain Mr. Jackson’s account of three gunshots? I peg him as credible,” I added.

  “The CSI folks found no evidence in the marbled room. Or anywhere else in the house. Of bullets bouncing around,” countered Honey.

  “Since the UPS driver says he heard gunshots, I’m thinking there were gunshots,” said Mackie. “He did twenty in the Marines, offered to be printed, gave us a DNA sample, let us swab him for nitrate residue. And he’ll take a lie detector test if we want.”

  “Maybe there were shots, but they came from outside, from out back,” said Kruger.

  I suspected that Mackie and Kruger, partners for longer than anyone could remember, smelled a rat, and so did I. Honey, well, I couldn’t read her yet. I didn’t know which way she was leaning, but maybe toward the overdose scenario.

  “The way I see it,” I said, “the UPS guy interrupted something. The people inside weren’t expecting the doorbell to ring.”

  Mackie and Kruger nodded slightly.

  “There are all kinds of nasty poisons that a voodoo practitioner could get his hands on,” I pointed out. “Could be these guys were in a lot of pain. That’s why the expressions on their faces.” I liked this line of logic. The brainstorming session was grounding me to facts and analysis that had nothing to do with spirits.

  “The killer then busts a few caps to scare away whoever is at the front door, so he or she can escape out the back. We all know how hard it can be to find a bullet hole when you don’t know where to look.”

  Mackie and Kruger nodded again. The bizarre nature of Professor Drake’s home begged the suggestion that something other than suicide had been at play.

  As the four of us stood there, I felt thankful that the Homicide Section had been beefed up with more detectives than ever, so officers had fewer cases to handle. The bad news was that overtime had been cut to eight hours a week maximum. That handcuffed a lead investigator like Honey, who could easily put in forty-eight hours of work in the first three days after a murder, meaning she would then have to sit at home for the next four days. I had a strong feeling this was no suicide but the kind of case that would require a lot more than a forty-eight-hour workweek to solve.

  “All right. What else do we have right now?” asked Honey. She wasn’t showing her hand either way. Good for her.

  “I think I figured out who stuffed all the animal heads in the house,” I said. “Drake is an amateur taxidermist. He’s got the whole setup in the shed out back. As far as I can tell, all the special knives and tools are all there.”

  “Unusual hobby,” said Kruger, lighting a cigarette. “Basically you’re taking an animal that someone has killed and then restoring it to a lifelike trophy. It tells me Drake likes to get his hands on and in a dead carcass.”

  “What about the grounds?” Honey asked.

  “I walked the whole perimeter,” I said. “There’s an asphalt track running along the property line that has to be Drake’s own private jogging path. I didn’t spot anything unusual, but how about if we bring that Fish and Game warden in, the lady who’s so good at reading sign? She could check the fence line, see if anything looks disturbed or maybe pick up a trail. The woods are pretty dense right up against his property on two sides.”

  Honey nodded. “And K-9s,” she said. “We can use Drake’s clothes from the house, see if they pick up his scent.”
r />   “So why is our professor’s car here but not him?” asked Mackie.

  “We got his cell number from the Tulane Anthropology Department. But he’s not answering,” said Honey.

  “Imagine that,” I said, exhaling bluish smoke from the petite Cuban stick.

  “We got about three-quarters of the graves out back dug up. They all contain what looks like cat skeletons,” said Kruger.

  “How many graves total?” asked Honey.

  “Fifty-eight. Some are fresh, but it appears Drake has been burying them for years. And here’s the kicker: They’re all missing a front left leg.”

  Honey’s face hardened. She loved animals and loved busting those who abused them. And I doubt she cared much for taxidermists.

  “That cat thing, I’m not exactly sure, but that sounds like black magic,” I said. “I know the voodoo people here in NOLA used to sacrifice black cats and even ate their bones.” I had read a few books on voodoo about ten years ago, when I’d first moved to the city and studied its history.

  We all exchanged quick, concerned looks, then the meeting broke up and we went back to our individual tasks. I walked over to the pickup, ignoring the Fourth District guys in the cab, and climbed into the truck bed. As I reached for the latex gloves that I always kept in a cargo pocket, I saw Chief Pointer’s car turn into the long driveway. Pointer wouldn’t show up at a crime scene unless the media were present, and sure enough, I looked over and saw a couple of TV vans being held back on River Road by uniforms.

  NOPD Chief Pointer, my old nemesis, had brought me back to the department as a homicide detective under an unusual stipulation: I wasn’t to be in the regular rotation, taking on your garden-variety murder cases. Instead, I only worked the Five Alarm cases—high-profile murders—and for those I exclusively partnered with Honey. Since Five Alarm cases didn’t happen every day, in order to put in a forty-hour week I’d taken to assisting the other detectives with paperwork and reports. I worked alone, often late at night. To me, a guy accustomed to working eighteen-hour-days, the forty-hour workweek was like a part-time job.

  Thankfully, the arrangement I’d created with my homicide peers mitigated what resentment my special status had created. Reports were still typed on typewriters, if one could believe it (and if one could find green typing paper for the “green reports”; I bought my own, since the department was too cheap to provide us with even basic office supplies), so my volunteering to do a lot of other detectives’ drudgery went over well. I didn’t really mind, because I’m a fast typist, good at writing reports, and the clerical work taught me the strengths and weaknesses of the other detectives in the Homicide Section. I was up-to-date on all of the cases and could offer suggestions for follow-ups or missed leads. Oh, and I’d learned a thing or two about homicide investigation in the process. And politics. Why did major resources get assigned to one investigation but not another? Politics.

  I knew no one better at politics than the man whose car pulled up right next to where I stood in the pickup truck bed.

  The chief’s two huge bodyguards, nattily dressed black men who could intimidate a sumo wrestler, got out of the car. I smiled and nodded hello. The whole department referred to these guys as Heckle and Jeckle, but I liked them. Their boss, Pointer, mumbled into his BlackBerry as he emerged from the backseat.

  The chief and I had once been bitter enemies, but we now tolerated each other. Perhaps the millions he’d absconded with from the evidence warehouse a few months ago—money I’d seized and logged into evidence control—tempered his dislike for me. Still, he scowled after glancing my way, then cut off his call.

  “Saint James, can’t you take a day off?”

  “We were literally right next door, Chief.”

  “I’m told this doesn’t look like a double homicide, so I don’t think we’ll need you on this. Where’s Detective Baybee, inside?”

  I nodded and Pointer strutted off, flanked by Heckle and Jeckle. The chief had packed on the pounds in the last year and had to be topping 250 now; who needs to work out when you’ve got two bruisers opening doors for you?

  He hadn’t officially ordered me to stand down, so I snapped on the latex gloves and turned back to the truck bed. I rooted through pieces of black marble, cans of grout, tubes of caulking, trowels, an electric polisher/sander. A toolbox contained the usual items. I picked up a fifty-pound bag of cement that had been lying on top of a dusty, scratched-up plastic ice chest. I popped open the ice chest and instinctively jumped back.

  The decapitated heads of two Hispanic males and one female, probably in their thirties and nicely preserved thanks to some dry ice, told me that both Honey and myself would probably be surpassing our eight-hour overtime limit this week.

  Before I could call anyone over, I noticed a man in his fifties, wearing a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows, walk right through the front door of the house, escorted by a uniform.

  Professor Drake had shown up to join the party, as if he had appeared out of thin air.

  For a moment I was as speechless as my three new friends in the ice chest.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Kruger was trying to take a statement from Professor Drake in the front room as I entered the house. The professor appeared greatly perturbed to have so many people trampling all over his personal domain.

  I ignored him for now and found Honey and Chief Pointer in quiet counsel in Drake’s study.

  “Saint James, I was just telling Detective Baybee what a good job you both did in responding so quickly, but that I’ve decided to…”

  “Wouldn’t it be great if we could just call this an overdose or suicide and leave it at that?” I asked. “Sorry to interrupt, Chief, but I’m sure you’ll want to know that I just found three human heads in an ice chest in the victims’ pickup truck.”

  Honey’s eyes widened a bit. I extended my cell phone, and the chief grabbed it like he didn’t believe a word I’d said. As he looked at the phone snaps I’d taken of the heads, I gave Honey a slight, assuring nod. We weren’t getting dumped from this case anytime soon.

  “Allow me to suggest not releasing this to the press yet, sir,” I said. “Or the fact that the victims were naked. On an altar, an altar built like it was designed for human sacrifice.” Time to seize the initiative. “The unusual nature of this crime is not good PR for the city, Chief. If you’ll assign resources to us, Detective Baybee and I will go balls to the wall and wrap this up fast, on the QT.”

  With the rug pulled out from under him, a scowl formed on Pointer’s lips. “‘Fast’ being the operative word,” he said, slapping the cell phone into my hand. “All right, you’re still on the case, even though I’m not convinced the two victims were murdered. The heads might be completely unrelated to the deaths, but find out ASAP.”

  As he started to leave, he turned back and said, “By the book, detectives.”

  A moment after he was gone I said to Honey, “That was directed at me.”

  “No kidding.”

  Honey nodded for me to follow her, and we walked off to confront the professor.

  * * *

  “Human bones are perfectly legal to own, especially for someone like me,” Drake said to Honey. “Please show me the statute to the contrary. I’m a skeletal biologist, for God’s sake. I’m a doctor of biological anthropology and a board member of the Society for American Archaeology!”

  Drake had a ten-dollar title and acted like a guy who was being inconvenienced. Life would soon be a lot less convenient once we got him downtown and people who didn’t give a damn that he has a Ph.D. asked him the same question about fifty times.

  “So you can explain where each of these bones came from?” asked Kruger.

  “Most definitely,” he said, brushing some unseen lint from his tweed jacket. I could see now it was a herringbone pattern, and he looked pretty sharp in it. Crisp chinos, light brown suede shoes, pressed blue denim shirt under the jacket. Black wire-rim glasses, the stubble of a goatee, salt-and-pepper
hair over his ears, a Diesel chronograph on his left wrist. It was a cultivated look, the modern anthropologist: urbane and chic yet still a workingman. He was a fairly trim five feet ten, and his hands actually looked like they’d done a bit of manual labor.

  “Skeletal biologist means you’re a bone specialist, right?” I asked.

  “Amongst other things, yes. I used to be an expert witness for the state police lab.”

  “So you were a guy people like us would use to make a case?”

  “That’s correct, but that was only a small part of my life’s work. My CV is over fifty pages.”

  “That’s impressive. I think my résumé is about half a page,” I said, turning to Honey and winking. Drake wasn’t sure if I was mocking him, and before he could figure that out, I asked, “So you stuffed the animal heads?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Now that is a skill. But, doc, why a javelina? They are just butt-ugly.”

  “A trophy of the hunt.”

  “Yeah? Gee, I always thought killing javelinas was like shooting fish in a barrel.”

  Drake bristled but didn’t respond. We’d already confirmed that his iPhone battery was indeed dead, which is why he said he didn’t get our calls. He’d explained his sudden appearance by claiming that a lady friend had picked him up earlier in the day and just dropped him off, unable to drive up to the house due to the police presence.

  “What was the name of your lady friend again?” I asked.

  “I’ve already answered that question,” he snapped.