by Rebecca York
Lieutenant Devine was waiting in a cluttered little office near the end of the second-floor hall. He was a chunky man, Jessica observed, with an overhanging belly that hid the buckle of his pants.
“This is my associate, Miss Duval,” Michael introduced her.
“Glad to meet you. Have a seat.” The lieutenant gestured toward two metal armchairs.
To Jessica’s relief, Michael had been playing straight this time. The busy detective seemed unaware of her involvement in the Bay Street incident and wasn’t particularly interested in why Michael had brought her into the case.
“As I told Rome,” he explained, “the lab couldn’t do much with what we were able to scrounge up at the murder site. But we did find this rather nasty little artifact.” Reaching into his desk, he pulled out the white legal-size envelope and dumped the contents onto the desk blotter.
Jessica stared intently at the pecan-size blob of resin with its attached feathers and whiskers. It smelled faintly of pine and decaying organic matter. She hadn’t seen anything like this since the summer she and Simone had been fooling around with voodoo. They’d made some concoctions of their own. But her friend had wanted something authentic and had gone down to the old crone who lived in a shack at the edge of the swamp. She’d come back with a charm guaranteed to make them both irresistible to boys. It had smelled so offensive they’d had to throw it away.
“Do you happen to know what it is?” Michael questioned.
“A voodoo charm.”
Michael’s brow wrinkled. “A voodoo charm? What’s it supposed to do?”
Jessica eyed the artifact with distaste. “I don’t know. But I don’t like the way it looks.”
“Do you think—” Michael started to ask and then glanced at Devine. “We don’t want to use up any more of your time. Would you mind if we took this into one of the interrogation rooms so Miss Duval could have a closer look?”
The detective shrugged. “There’s an empty office right across the hall. Will that do?”
“Fine.”
Michael slid the talisman back into the envelope and led her across the hall.
Jessica waited until he’d closed the door. “I suppose you want to see if my special talents can tell me anything about the charm,” she observed.
“It can’t hurt. Maybe if you hold it, you’ll be able to tell me who made it, the way you got a picture of Harley’s Pub from the napkin.”
She stared up at him, wondering if she caught a note of sarcasm in his voice. “Is this an admission that you’ve become a believer?”
“I told you. I’m open to any possibility that can give me another lead.” His tone implied that he wasn’t expecting much so he wasn’t going to be disappointed if nothing happened.
Sitting down again, Jessica looked at the long white envelope. Her hand reached out toward it and then stopped as if there were some sort of invisible force field sealing it off. She could almost feel the resistance against her fingertips. The napkin from Harley’s was one thing. This was quite another. Touching it meant getting deeper into the kind of experiences she’d been avoiding for so long—the experiences Michael had forced her to relive.
“What are you waiting for?” he prompted.
She looked into his challenging gray eyes. He thought she wasn’t up to this or that she couldn’t tell him anything. With a grimace she plunged her hand into the envelope. It felt as if she’d punched through a window, a thousand shards of glass digging into her skin. She tried to scream but the sound never passed her lips. Only the instant dilation of her eyes gave any indication of her terror. She tried to counter the spell with all her strength, but her hand was pulled toward the charm with a force she couldn’t control. As soon as her fingers closed around the feathers, another pain—this time white hot—seared her skin and shot up her arm to her shoulder. She gasped and was finally able to jerk her hand away.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s evil,” she whispered.
“How? What do you mean?”
She shook her head, still trembling from the shock. “I had the strong impression that I shouldn’t touch it. As soon as I did, I felt as if I’d been branded.”
“That’s crazy.” Michael reached for the envelope.
“Michael, don’t!”
He ignored the warning and pulled out the charm, holding it in his open palm. “See, it’s not doing a damned thing to me.”
Silently she turned her own hand over. Where her fingers had come into contact with the feathers, angry red blisters had formed.
He stared down at the injury, hardly able to believe the evidence of his own eyes. “How the hell did that happen?”
“I tried to tell you. It burned me.” Her voice was thready.
Gingerly he set the artifact down on the desk blotter. His gaze flicked from it to the welts on Jessica’s fingers and back again, as if they were the paraphernalia of a magician’s trick. What had just happened was totally outside his area of experience. His own skin was unaffected, yet he had seen how Jessica’s flesh had been damaged by a much more tentative contact. Had her own fear conjured up the affliction? Or did the injury come from some necromancer’s power within the charm? He couldn’t say, but he did know he had pushed her into touching it, and he could see that both the pain and the welts were very real.
“Cold water is the best first aid for a burn,” he said, helping her up and leading her out into the hall. At the end of the corridor was a water fountain. Michael stepped on the pedal and thrust Jessica’s hand under the cold flow, his strong fingers gentle but firm as they cradled hers.
The icy water was numbing to his own flesh, but he didn’t let go of her. They both watched as the swelling subsided slightly and became less vivid in color.
“Better?”
“Some.”
He was still holding her hand. Unbidden, a memory of their steamy night together flashed into his mind once more. Michael, why don’t you want to make love to me? He remembered the passion in her hazel eyes and his own weakness in not being able to resist what she had offered him. His gaze collided with hers and held. He didn’t need to be a psychic to know that her mind was on the same dangerous wavelength.
A passing patrolman gave them a curious stare, making them both vividly aware that they were standing in the middle of a public hallway. Michael dropped her hand.
“I’m sorry.” It could have been an apology for precipitating her injury. She knew it was more.
Perhaps it was better to bring it right out into the open and dismiss it. “I can pretend that night never happened, if you can,” she said, knowing it was a lie.
“Under the circumstances, that’s probably best.” He cleared his throat. “Let’s go back to that empty office.”
“All right.”
After closing the door, he waited until she had resumed her seat, giving them both time to get the focus of the discussion back onto the charm. “Has anything like that ever happened to you?” he asked, gesturing toward her hand.
“No.” She paused, wondering how he would react to any attempted explanation on her part. “It probably doesn’t make sense to you, but when I touched that thing, along with the pain, I had an overwhelming impression of malevolence.”
He nodded thoughtfully, his gaze shifting to the bizarre-looking talisman. As far as he could tell, it was simply a collection of junk that could have been stuck together by a preschooler in arts and crafts class. What could have infused it with the power to scorch a woman’s skin?
He looked up to see that she was trying to read his face. “Jessica, despite what you may think, sometimes I do play hunches. Let’s just say that in this case, your intuition is operating on a lot stronger level than mine.”
She relaxed slightly. “All right.”
Michael slapped his fist into the palm of his hand. “I wouldn’t have thought there was anything to this voodoo stuff. But every trail in this case keeps leading back to it.”
She shrugged. “Vood
oo’s roots go all the way back to Africa. But here in Louisiana it developed its own traditions and practices. This may be the twentieth century, yet superstition is still a strong element in the local culture. Down in the bayou country a lot of people believe in gris-gris.”
“Gris-gris?”
“Voodoo spells and charms.”
“Do you believe in them?” he persisted.
She hesitated. “I don’t even know why I seem to be ’blessed’ with psychic powers. There’s a lot I don’t understand about the relationship between the physical world and what we can’t see or touch. That means I can’t help keeping my mind open to all sorts of phenomena. The only concrete thing I can tell you about this charm is that it does have a profound effect on me.”
“So you really don’t know much about how this particular talisman works?”
“No. Remember, I spent years trying not to think about things like that.” Her brow wrinkled. “But my friend Simone might.”
“You mentioned her before. Is she from around here?”
“Her folks lived out by my Aunt Edna. I visited there every summer, and we became best friends. As teenagers we were really into the occult—even some voodoo spells. I have the feeling she kept up the interest.”
“Why do you think so?”
“She has a shop on Royal Street where she sells love potions and stuff like that.”
“Then she might know who in the city could have made such a thing, and why.”
“Maybe.”
Michael slipped the envelope with the charm into his pocket. “Well, I assume Lieutenant Devine will let us borrow this long enough to take it down to your friend Simone for a second opinion.”
* * *
WITH GREAT EFFORT, like a mountain climber pulling himself hand over hand up the side of a precipice, Jed Prentiss fought his way slowly back to consciousness. Then he fervently wished he hadn’t made the effort.
His first perception was of searing pain in his chest every time he took a breath. The sensation convinced him that he was alive. Nothing else did. Fear of the unknown clawed at his insides. He could not see, or hear, or smell, or taste, or move. The isolation brought a feeling of panic that echoed in the inner chamber of his mind like a silent scream.
He realized he was injured and vulnerable. But he couldn’t quite remember what had happened. And he certainly didn’t know where in the hell he was now. Or if anyone was going to help him.
He dozed off and woke, slept and woke again. Still his only physical tie to the world was the pain in his ribs. It might have been minutes or hours later that he sensed the presence of someone else in the room with him and struggled to open his eyes. But his body would not obey his brain.
A gentle finger pulled up his left eyelid. He had a blurry impression of a dark female face and a white nurse’s cap before she let go and the lid slipped shut again.
“I believe the patient is finally awake, sir,” a soft island voice reported.
Island voice...Royale Verde. I came to Royale Verde on a mission for the Falcon.
“Good, I was beginning to wonder about the dose of phenodryl he received.” The man’s voice was deep and cultured. “Can you hear me, Mr. Prentiss? Jed?” he asked.
Jed struggled to give some indication that he could. None of his muscles responded to orders from his brain.
“I’m Dr. Talifero,” the man continued. “You’ve had a cerebral accident. In laymen’s terms, a stroke. You were brought to our clinic.”
Cerebral accident? What the hell was that supposed to mean?
“It’s not unusual, in this sort of case, to suffer from massive paralysis. It will be twenty-four to forty-eight hours before we know the extent of the damage. You also seem to have fallen and badly bruised some ribs, although they should mend satisfactorily. Other than that, I’m afraid I can’t make any predictions about your prognosis. But I want you to know that we’re going to do the best we can for you.”
What was this guy talking about? The last thing he remembered was sneaking up on a place called the Blackstone Clinic run by a Dr. Talifero.
He struggled to remember precisely what had happened to him. He had rented a boat. That much was clear. He could recall waiting off-shore pretending to fish until nightfall. But the effort to continue piecing together the evening’s activities made his head begin to throb. A stroke, the doctor had said. Was his brain damaged? Fear churned in his stomach, pressed upward against his esophagus.
“Cases like yours are often accompanied by mental confusion and even delusions,” Talifero went on. “I’m afraid you may not have a clear picture of how you got here. But we’ll talk about that when you’re functioning a little better.”
Could that be right? It seemed impossible. But would the doctor be making it all up? It was crazy. Yet the strong taint of doubt was like the taste of copper in his mouth. Some instinct toward self-preservation warned him not to trust this man despite his smooth, professional words.
On the other hand, the man had called him Jed Prentiss. Was that proof of something—or nothing?
Jed’s lip trembled as he struggled to speak.
“Just relax, Mr. Prentiss,” the nurse soothed. “You need to rest.”
Rest, no. He needed answers. He needed to get out of this place, to get in touch with the Falcon. Or was there really an intelligence control who used that code name? For now there was simply no way to verify his memories.
Wait, don’t leave. Help me. For God’s sake, help me. If I can’t trust my own mind, what can I trust? he tried to scream. But the words remained locked inside his skull.
He heard a light being switched off, a door closing. He was alone again, more alone than he had ever been or ever imagined that he could be. But somehow he was afraid that wasn’t the worst part. A doctor named Talifero was his lifeline to reality. And that might well be his greatest danger.
Chapter Nine
As he slid behind the wheel of the car, Michael turned to Jessica. “Would you mind if we stop by my hotel room on the way to Royal Street?”
Her eyebrows arched.
“Besides the voodoo charm, the Xavier letters are the first piece of concrete evidence I have in this case. I want to send a fax of them to headquarters.”
“You can send a fax from your hotel room?”
“Yeah. It’s amazing what the boys in R and D can put together for the road show.”
“All right, then.”
He was staying at an old mansion on Esplanade that had been turned into an elegant bed and breakfast. Jessica might have elected to wait in the car, but she was curious about the accommodations he had chosen. As it turned out, he had one of the best rooms in the place—a suite on the top floor furnished entirely with Victorian antiques.
“I guess I’d pictured you at the Holiday Inn or something like that,” Jessica observed, sitting down on a walnut-and-brocade sofa in the living room. Beyond partially closed French doors she could see an ornate canopy bed.
“I’ve lived in too many cookie-cutter Holiday Inns, thanks. When I get the chance, I look for something with a bit more individuality.” The statement was made with the conviction of a man who didn’t stay anywhere long enough to put down roots.
“Do you have a permanent address?”
He laughed. “I guess I sound like a real gypsy. But I do have a little ranch in Texas that I’ve put a downpayment on.”
She could see that he had a lot more than money invested in the place. “So you’re fixing it up, then?”
“Yeah, although I don’t get there more than twice a year. But some day when I’m too old for fieldwork, I’m going to retire there and raise horses.”
“Horses?”
“Uh-huh. My old man was on the rodeo circuit. I guess that’s when traveling got into my blood.” While he was talking, he unlocked an armoire and pulled out a briefcase. “Have you ever seen one of these before?” he asked, adroitly changing the subject as he opened the case.
“It looks like
a personal computer to me.”
“That’s right. But this model has a built-in modem for connecting it to the phone lines, an onboard printer, and a fax.” It also had a sophisticated encryption algorithm that ensured the security of his communiques to the Falcon.
After sending the transmission and locking the computer in the armoire again, he took out a tweed sport jacket and slipped the envelope with the charm into one of the pockets. Then he shrugged into the garment. “Come on, let’s go see if we can catch your friend Simone before dinner.”
Simone’s shop, This Is the Place, turned out to be a small but well-appointed boutique situated between two expensive antique shops on Royal Street. The window display featured glass-and-brass etageres on which were arranged handcrafted ceramic and fabric dolls along with soaps and potions wrapped in elegant foil paper and tied with slender velvet ribbons. Like Simone, the effect was distinctive and polished.
When Michael pushed open the shop door, the proprietor was just about to hang up the closed sign. But she laid it on the counter when she saw her old friend.
“Jessica,” she declared, her face registering surprise. It was not lost on Michael even though it was quickly replaced by a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I didn’t expect a visit from you so soon. Come in and let me show off my domain.” As she gestured toward the interior of the store, the full sleeve of her burgundy caftan rippled gracefully.
“I’d like to see it,” Jessica said before turning and beckoning toward her companion. “But let me introduce the two of you first. Michael Rome, this is one of my oldest friends, Simone Villard. Michael’s, uh, helping me with the Aubrey thing.”
“This isn’t a social call, I take it.”
Jessica shook her head.
Simone’s attention shifted to the tall, hard-edged man at Jessica’s side, giving him a careful inspection. “Are you a cop?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Don’t kid me,” the black woman insisted, folding her arms across her chest.
