Corpse Whisperer Sworn

by H. R. Boldwood

  Vinny didn’t have clearance to attend our meeting, so we deposited him in the visitor’s lobby on the first floor. He said he wanted to watch TV, but knowing him, the only thing he’d be watching was the sweet young receptionist who had smiled at him as we’d walked through the door.

  We arrived almost ten minutes early and found Boudreaux waiting in the conference room. Agents Mouton and Fairchild scurried in behind us and took seats, just as Boudreaux closed the door. The dour look on his face didn’t bode well.

  “Agent Mouton, what did you find on your property search of St. Bernard Parish?”

  Philip sat a little taller and cleared his throat. “Since our intel suggested Le Clerc purchased the property a year or so ago, I requested records for the past three years, just to be safe.”

  “And?”

  “Apparently requisitions is a bit backed up. I’m still waiting.”

  “Don’t let them put you off too long. If you need me to light a fire, let me know. What about the warehouse investigation?”

  “Forensics is still working the scene. Since the biters we found were newly turned, they’re going to print them, and run them through AFIS. I told them to leave the room with the lab equipment alone, until Agent Stanton has a chance to check it out.”

  “Excellent.” Boudreaux glanced across the table. “Anybody have a theory as to the identity of the Bob Marley-lookalike from the warehouse?” He paused, waiting for a response that didn’t come. “Well then, maybe sooner or later he’ll turn up in a missing persons report. If we’re lucky, Mr. Sacca will be able to give us an ID off the picture. Agent Mouton, why don’t you and Fairchild run down the missing persons leads?”

  Ricco loosened his collar and leaned forward. “Marley is dead. We have an active missing person case to work. A kidnapped victim who is hopefully still alive. Why don’t we focus on her?”

  Boudreaux sighed and leaned back in his chair. “What would you like us to do, Officer De Palma? Reassign all our agents to Ms. Chen’s case?”

  “She might still be alive, is all I’m saying. Let’s start with her and worry about the dead guy later.”

  “I understand you and Ms. Chen are close,” Boudreaux said. “Talk about complicated waters. I empathize. I truly do. But please don’t mistake my empathy for weakness. I run this show, Detective. Not you. The best way to find Ms. Chen is to chase down every lead, every ghost, and every fucking breadcrumb, no matter how insignificant they may seem at first blush. You let me worry about who follows up on what and when. We clear on that?”

  Rico’s eyes grew taut, but he settled back in his chair. “Yes, sir.”

  Boudreaux turned his eyes to me. “Speaking of complicated relationships, Ms. Nighthawk, what’s this about you killing Toussaint’s wife—and him raising your dad from the dead?”

  And just like that, the spotlight was on me. There was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. This would be the first time in my life that I would share the story of me and Toussaint Le Clerc. Where to begin? I poured a glass of water, settled into my chair, and collected my thoughts.

  “Better buckle up and keep an open mind,” I said, glancing around the table. “I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.”

  22

  Talk About Toxic

  “I met Toussaint the day I came to live with Mama. He was eighteen. Mama told me later that she had taken him in when he was twelve. He’d been living on the streets, picking food out of garbage cans and wearing the same set of rags every day. She started leaving plates of food out for him. At first, he’d eat what she’d left and run away. Eventually, Mama began to watch for him and walk out to the porch with a plate of dessert, so they could chat. Toussaint warmed up over time.”

  The room was hanging on my every word, so I pushed on. “One day, Mama stood in the doorway and watched him pick up a dead sparrow that had fallen from its nest. He cradled it in his hands and breathed on it. The bird flapped and fluttered, then glided away. Mama said she’d always known Toussaint had the gift, but until that moment, she’d never known if he knew he had it. She took him in and trained him—taught him how to use the gift properly. All she asked in return was that he help her around the restaurant when she needed it. That’s how Toussaint came to live with Mama.”

  I sipped my water and let those memories flood back.

  “Toussaint had been there longer than me, so he knew a lot more about using the gift, and things like root working, and hoodoo in general. He was kind and patient, like a big brother, more or less. But by the time I’d turned seventeen, we’d…gotten involved.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to look at Ferris or Rico.

  “Mama discouraged it,” I said. “She thought Toussaint was too old for me, too much a man, and that I was barely more than a child. I argued with her, telling her that anyone with the powers we had, anyone who had to make the choices we’d had to make, were never children to begin with. Looking back, I wondered if Mama sensed that Toussaint was changing and didn’t want me to be influenced by him.”

  I picked at the arm of my chair and stared at the floor. “It was little things at first. Toussaint started studying black magick, and experimenting with spells. He met a root worker named Sabine and began hanging with a different crowd. The more he dabbled with it, and her, the less our rules seemed to mean to him. I didn’t want to see it. I made excuses for him, even lied for him. But the day I saw him kill a dog, and then try to conjure it back to life using roots and incantations, was the day I knew he’d gone too far—and that he had no intention of coming back.”

  The room had grown still. I glanced up and found a table filled with people who wouldn’t be satisfied until they’d heard every sordid detail, so I continued.

  “Even then, I knew we were on a collision course, and that one day, we’d fight a battle only one of us would walk away from. That was the day I left New Orleans. I was twenty and had no intention of ever coming back. I loved Mama too much to kill her boy. It was easier to leave, to just…run away.”

  Rico cleared his throat. “What does that have to do with you killing his wife? Or him raising your dad?”

  “A couple of years later, I got a call from a root worker in New Orleans who’d been friends with both Toussaint and me. He said Toussaint had married Sabine shortly after I’d left, and that she and Toussaint were performing experiments on rotters. One of them bit Sabine. She contracted the Z-virus. Toussaint tried everything he’d learned over the years to keep her from turning, but he couldn’t stop the disease. Instead of putting her down like he should have, he chained her up. He said he loved her too much to put her down.”

  My heart began to pound, and my breathing got shallow. The memories I was sharing belonged to a history I’d done my best to forget. But how could they understand my unshakeable tie to Toussaint if I didn’t spill everything that had happened? No matter how much that hurt.

  “He kept her alive by feeding her people. Live people. Hell, what choice did I have? I came back to New Orleans, busted into Toussaint’s place, and confronted him in his lab. Sabine was there, chained to the wall, skin sliding off her bones, the sickening stench of death rolling off her in waves. I tried to reason with him, to get him to see how…immoral that was. Sabine needed to be put to rest. He told me to get the hell out or he’d kill me. Oh, I got out, all right. Right after I put a nine-millimeter between Sabine’s eyes.”

  Ferris raised his brows. “And he just let you leave?”

  “He was out of his mind with grief. He knelt beside her and cradled her body, telling me that my life would be a living hell, and that I would never be finished paying for what I had done. I left New Orleans and struck out cross country, trying to get my head straight, and keeping a low profile.

  “Eleven months later, my dad died. I went back to Cincinnati for his funeral, but I didn’t stick around. I didn’t belong in New Orleans, but I didn’t belong in Cincinnati, either. So, I took off again, working odd jobs and keeping my ‘gift’ under wraps. Until I r
an out of money. Dad had left his house to me and it was vacant. I had to go home. It was my only play.”

  Hot tears welled in my eyes. “Toussaint knew my dad had died, but he took his time, and waited until I’d come home to stay to make good on his promise. He raised my father from his grave and turned him into a fucking rotter. Then he called in a fake rotter sighting, so that I would be the one—the one who had to look my dad in the eye and put him down.”

  The room fell instantly silent. I couldn’t tell whether that was due to the story of me putting a round through my father’s head, or to the sight of Director Dickhead, as he burst into the room with the bioterrorism specialist, Agent Eli Stanton.

  “Assistant Director William Horton,” Dickhead said, shaking hands with Boudreaux.

  “I didn’t realize you were coming, sir.”

  “It is my taskforce, Agent.”

  The flat smile on Boudreaux’s face suggested that he wasn’t impressed. Dickhead introduced Stanton to the group and instantly tried to hijack the meeting.

  “Ms. Nighthawk, I understand you had Le Clerc in your fingertips last night and let him get away. How did that happen?”

  The fucking douche-meister.

  “We were negotiating a hostage rescue and the suspect double-crossed us.”

  “Do you usually trust the bad guys?”

  “I don’t even trust you, sir.”

  Boudreaux coughed. “Agent McMillen, you’re our profiler. You’ve studied the case file and heard Ms. Nighthawk’s brief but candid summary of Le Clerc’s youth. It’s not much to go on, but if you had to venture an opinion, what are we dealing with here?”

  Babs clasped her hands in front of her and looked down her nose. “Le Clerc is a malignant narcissist. He’s brilliant, manipulative, methodical, and highly motivated by revenge against Ms. Nighthawk. He’s also antisocial and sadistic. Control is of the utmost importance to him, even at the subconscious level. He is a master at metaphysics—”

  Dickhead snorted. “Metaphysics?”

  “The study of abstract concepts—”

  “I know what it is, Agent. It’s a load of horseshit.”

  Babs’ eyes narrowed. “If Le Clerc’s obsession with Ms. Nighthawk can be exploited, we might push him into making an uncharacteristic error.”

  Rico pushed away from the table. “Enough. We’ve talked about everything except our missing hostage, Jade Chen. We’re wasting valuable time—”

  “Detective De Palma.” Boudreaux rose from his chair slowly. “We had this discussion mere moments ago. Shall I recap it for you?”

  Rico turned to Dickhead. “Sir, we aren’t getting any closer to finding Ms. Chen sitting in this room. It’s your taskforce. With all due respect, sir, run it.”

  Whoa, bad move, buddy.

  Dickhead’s eyes blazed. “You’ll cooperate with this investigation and do as you are directed, Detective, or you will be removed from the task force. Have I made myself understood?”

  Rico’s face flamed. He took a long, deep breath and pulled himself together, before nodding to Dickhead. “Yes, sir.”

  Dickhead fixed his gaze on me, and Little Allie cringed. “Whatever happened to the tissue samples from the Abruzzi case that you sent to Dr. Christian?”

  I’d been wondering about the results of those tests myself, but the backlog at the ECPDC rivaled that of the CPDC.

  “I haven’t heard back. But it’s only been a couple of months, give or take.” I looked at my watch. Ten a.m. here equaled four p.m. in Sweden. With any luck, we might catch the good doctor. I pulled out my phone and called him. “Let’s see if the doctor is in.”

  His secretary, Ilse, picked up, and my stomach lurched. Before working for Dr. Christian, Ilse had worked for Sandoval Latka, the world’s foremost expert on the Z-virus. He was mysteriously murdered and injected with the Z-virus. Ilse had taken it hard. Sweet, sweet lady. She wanted to chat, but I hurried her along and asked if the doctor was available for a conference call. She put him on the line and I put my phone on speaker.

  “Ms. Nighthawk,” Christian said. “It’s good to hear from you. We’re not finished testing yet, but I do have a remarkable bit of information for you.”

  “Do tell?”

  “It seems we’ve been, as you Americans say, barking up the wrong tree. We’ve operated under the assumption that your suspect has been manipulating the actual Z-virus. In a sense, that’s true, but the original virus remains unaltered. These tissue samples show a new, chemically manufactured virus which mimics the effects of the organic Z-virus.”

  “In English, Doc.”

  “There are now two viruses—one organic, one synthetic.”

  The room went silent.

  “That’s better news than you think,” Christian finally said.

  “Really? How so?”

  “It means that the original virus hasn’t mutated. The sudden, aberrant behaviors of the Z population—their ability to see in the daylight, capacity to follow directions, and willingness to group, are all functions of the new, synthetic virus. Victims of the synthetic virus haven’t actually died and been risen. They’ve merely been injected, so theoretically, in time, that synthetic virus could be reverse-engineered to create an antidote—maybe even a vaccine.”

  “But the victims who were injected died before they turned,” Director Dickhead said.

  “Yes, that’s right. The synthetic virus contains paralytic agents strong enough to stop a person’s heart. As the synthetic virus is assimilated, the corpse turns into a zombie.”

  “This is Agent Ferris, Dr. Christian. What exactly is in this synthetic virus?”

  “It’s fascinating, really. So far, we’ve identified traces of tetraodontidae, bufo marinus and osteopilus dominidensis.”

  What the hell?

  Boudreaux rubbed his chin. “Can you dumb that down a notch, Doc?”

  “Simply put, the virus contains pufferfish, a marine species known to produce tetrodotoxin, a deadly neurotoxin, as well as members of the marine toad and hyla tree frog species, which also produce toxic substances.”

  Zombie powder. So, Toussaint’s knowledge of root working played into the development of the synthetic virus. The pieces of the puzzle were starting to come together.

  “Anything else you can tell us?” I asked.

  “That’s all for now.”

  I glanced around the table. “Any other questions?”

  “Special Agent Boudreaux here, Doctor. The behavioral changes in biters that you mentioned—their seeing during the daytime, grouping, strategizing, et cetera—manifested over time, not all at once. What does that suggest?”

  Christian balked. “If I were to hypothesize, your suspect may have engineered multiple versions of the virus, tested each batch for efficacy, and cataloged the outcomes.”

  “Dr. Christian, this is Detective De Palma. How long until you can come up with an antidote?”

  “Finding an antidote using the tissue samples requires a tremendous amount of trial and error. I wouldn’t even hazard a guess. If we had a sample of the actual synthetic virus, the reverse engineering process would move much faster.”

  “How much faster?”

  “That’s impossible to say, Detective. But your best bet is to get me a sample of the virus.”

  Rico’s shoulders slumped. I didn’t need to be a mind reader to know that he was consumed by thoughts of Jade, whose life hung in the balance.

  Little Allie asked how we were going to get our hands on a vial of the synthetic virus.

  As if I had a clue.

  23

  The Flaming Arrows of Evil

  Boudreaux scribbled some notes in his file and darted his eyes toward Mouton. “How’s that missing persons report coming?”

  “It’s running now. We’ll have names, dates, last known location, and pics when it’s finished.”

  “Why don’t you take Dr. Stanton to the warehouse so he can get a look at the lab equipment? And call in a sketch artist to dra
w the...Bob Marley guy...for Mr. Sacca to I.D.”

  Boudreaux closed his file and stood up, signaling the meeting had come to an end. Babs left to collect Vinny and resume her post as his watchdog.

  I pulled Ferris and Rico aside, as we stepped back into the hallway. “We need to visit Mama and have a chat about zombie powder.”

  “Zombie powder?” The disdain in Rico’s voice was hard to miss.

  I’d had about enough of his piss-poor attitude. “The toxins Stanton mentioned are all found in zombie powder. I don’t remember the exact proportions in the formula, but Mama will.”

  Rico’s eyes flashed. “You’re wasting time we don’t have. We need to be out searching for Jade.”

  “Where?” Ferris snapped, staring out the window at the city of New Orleans. “It’s a big-ass city. Do you have any idea where to look? Give the missing persons report a chance to gel.”

  “Suppose you do find her,” I asked. “What are you going to do if she’s been injected? Mama could save Jade’s life. Is that a waste of time? You tell me. She’s your girlfriend.”

  The second those words tumbled over my tongue, I knew I’d gone too far. Once again, the brain bitch had gone AWOL, leaving me at the mercy of my own mouth. That’s almost never a good idea.

  There was a fire in Rico’s eyes I’d never seen before. “Fine,” he said. “You and Mama conjure up some eye of newt and wing of bat. I’ll find Jade myself.”

  He spun on his heel and headed back the way we’d come. Ferris shrugged, strolled to the elevator, and silently pressed the call button. I waited in the hallway, watching as Rico knocked on Boudreaux’s door. We were a team, damn it. He shouldn’t be out on his own—especially in this city, in these streets, where the magick is real, whether you believe in it or not.