Lee turned the page, revealing another of her brother’s annotated anatomical drawings. This one had many more notes on it, and showed more detailed bindings on the body. His sketch of the murder site included eight of the Arabic symbols drawn in sequential order.
“Since this murder happened in my own backyard,” Lee said, “I was able to sneak Lou in while the police and coroner argued over how to move the pieces.” She flipped the page over to another torso diagram, this one of Anna. “There were similarities among the bodies, the types of cut marks, the tools, zombie symbols…The selection of organs removed was always different, as my brother also noted and the police and coroner failed to catch. But this,” she said, flipping the page once more, “was what truly concerned Lou about Anna Bell’s murder. Something he had not been in time to catch at the previous scenes.”
Lee opened the second book, which was the one she’d shown me before with the Jinn references. She pointed to a series of symbols labelled by Lou as incomplete Jinn bindings. I looked back and forth from it to Lou’s sketch of the scene. The third one from the top was identical to the ones found at the site of Anna Bell’s murder.
I glanced up at her. “Whoever killed those women really was trying to make a Jinn.”
“That is what my brother strongly suspected.”
“Lee, you knew—”
“I knew nothing except that the Jinn symbols and the explosion pattern at Marjorie’s were similar to the ones Lou found on these murder victims over a hundred years ago. I did not wish to elicit a panic.” She shook her head and scowled, not at me but at the situation. “With three murders in two days, that now seems unavoidable.”
Marjorie had been killed on Friday night, and Aaron had come to me after my disastrous seance tonight to tell me about the death of the practitioner. None of the victims had been cut up, and two of them were zombies. The only true similarities to the old crimes were the Jinn symbols.
“You had a suspect in mind, didn’t you?” I said.
Lee worded her answer carefully. “I still have a very dangerous suspect in mind, Kincaid. A ghoul, the same one Lou suspected a hundred years ago. Unfortunately, I have not yet pinpointed his whereabouts—”
“Bullshit, Lee. You know where every undead in the underground city is!”
Her eyes narrowed. “That may be true, but finding this one is not a simple task.”
I laughed. “No, you want to keep the fact that a serial killer emerged from the underground city under wraps. In these times especially.”
Lee drew in breath, something she rarely did. “It will take me time to extract him. He is holed up in the third-level docks.”
My anger dissipated. Lee might run the place, but even she stopped short of the caverns on the third level. Everyone with a grain of sanity did, zombies included. Until the early 1930s, the underground docks had held a black market where the paranormal communities had traded with boats coming in from the surface, but that traffic had fallen out of use in favour of more subtle routes. Since that time, they’d become a slum of a sort where the feral zombies and ghouls were sent along with the sane ones who could no longer pay their bills. It was not a safe place.
“I have not been complacent. I’ve had the lower docks quarantined ever since you brought me the details from Marjorie’s. No one has entered or left.”
A few more things clicked into place. “So even if this ghoul is responsible for Marjorie’s murder, he couldn’t have killed the practitioner or your zombie.”
She made a sharp clucking sound in disagreement. “I suspect he has an access route to the surface—”
“Or we’re dealing with an accomplice.”
Lee levelled me with a stare. “That is the only way I see him being able to evade all my agents.” She sighed. “As much as I’d like to keep this private, excluding you and Aaron at this juncture would only hasten the possibility of exposure and failure.”
Translation: leaving me and Aaron in the dark would only help the killer, meaning there was a greater chance more murders would occur and that someone on the surface would put two and two together and make the paranormal connection. If that happened…well, a mob armed with torches from Home Depot, anyone?
“Believe me, Kincaid, neither of us wants a Jinn loose in the city.”
Or under the control of someone who didn’t care how they made one. I needed to see the bodies….
I reached for the books, but Lee put her hands on top of them. “On one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You will be employed and paid by me while working with Aaron, and you will bring me everything and anything you find. A thousand dollars a day until we find the culprit, ten thousand if you apprehend the accomplice.”
This was uncharacteristically generous. “What’s the catch?”
“Under no circumstances are you to try to contact the ghoul.”
“What if the killer strikes again on the surface, and it is your ghoul?” Cameron said.
Lee and I turned to stare at him, Lee in irritation and me in surprise. I’d thought Cameron was still totally zoned out.
“Well? What if Kincaid runs into the ghoul on the surface?” Cameron challenged. “What is she supposed to do? Stand there?”
Lee shook her head. “I do not believe the ghoul will risk the surface, not while I am searching for him. It would be safer for him to use his accomplice.”
“A lot of ifs,” Cameron said. “And not much leeway.”
Lee glared at him, but despite her displeasure, she considered the point he’d made. At last she turned to me. “Fine. If you come across the ghoul in Seattle, be my guest, but my restriction about contacting him still stands. Do I make myself clear?”
I thought it over. “All right. I promise I won’t contact the ghoul.”
Lee ran her finger once more along her brother’s notes. “Be careful, Kincaid. Any person living or dead who is willing to raise a Jinn is not to be trifled with.”
I took the books and nodded to Cameron. He downed the last of his concoction and climbed off his stool. We turned to go.
“Kincaid?”
I glanced over my shoulder at Lee.
“My advice concerning the sorcerer’s ghost? Deliver the message for him and try to determine if he knows anything of Jinn being raised in the city, then forget you ever had the misfortune to hear the name Gideon Lawrence. He has a reputation for offering people things they cannot refuse.”
—
We wound our way along the boardwalk towards the main underground city entrance, weaving between zombies and the odd ghoul. It was 5 a.m. and still dark above ground, so I had no qualms about us crawling out into the alley in Pioneer Square.
I held up the books. “Do you have any idea how much detail is in these?”
Cameron fell into step beside me. “I think she’s holding back. She knows more about the murders than she’s letting on. I know when people are hiding details—I’ve had enough experience at hiding stuff over the years.” He was referring, no doubt, to his attempts to hide his mental illness.
“You already suspected the murderer might be a zombie,” Cameron continued.
“And I was wrong,” I said.
Cameron shrugged. “Same difference. Both are living dead who eat brains.”
“Ah, now that’s where you’re wrong.”
We were passing by the market, which never closed, and I scanned for the right stall….There it was. I spotted the regular pocket of Polish ghouls, one of which specialized in ghoul delicacies. That the ghouls in the city were almost exclusively eastern Europeans wasn’t a surprise. Becoming a ghoul was the preferred method of living past death in that part of the world, despite the gruesome appearance.
I stopped Cameron and pointed towards the stall. “There, that stall with the grey and black things hanging from the rafters.”
Cameron followed my finger, then crinkled his nose. “Are those—? It can’t be.”
“Rotten cuts of meat
of unknown origins? Exactly. Ghoul food.”
One of the ghouls sensed the scrutiny and swivelled his head in our direction. The market gas lamps weren’t nearly as bright as the electric sodium fixtures lighting the boardwalk, but we still got a good look. The ghoul wore a thick leather apron over a sailor’s sweater and black canvas dock pants, as well as a leather hat that matched the texture, if not the colour, of his face. His skin had been cured to a deep brown leather and the flesh drawn taut over his bones. Any stores of fat were long gone, along with most of his nose. Leaving the socket exposed. When he turned his face, I noticed a patch of yellowed, exposed bone on his chin where the skin had worn off. Cameron only partly succeeded in not making a face.
“Most ghouls wear hats: they only keep their hair for a year or two before it starts falling out. The skin goes leathery and wrinkled like that fast. And don’t ask me how they get the meat to rot quite like that without falling apart. Some secrets are best left unknown.”
Cameron couldn’t take his eyes off the ghoul. “Why would anyone—”
“Live like that? It does come with benefits. Zombies like you and Lee can see Otherside, but you can’t warp it. Ghouls can—something about the body still decaying. A lot of people in the paranormal community think it’s a decent trade-off. The older a ghoul gets, the stronger it gets as well.”
As if sensing they were the subject of my impromptu ghoul-versus-zombie lesson, two more ghouls turned and narrowed their eyes at us. Then one yelled our way in Polish.
Cameron stiffened. “What did he say?”
“I’m assuming, ‘What the hell are you looking at?’ I never bothered learning Polish. They don’t exactly like being the centre of—” I shut up as all three ghouls lifted their noses to sniff the air. Shit…
“What are they doing?”
“They’re hard-wired to smell rotting meat.”
The ghouls made a point of sniffing a little longer as they kept their yellow gazes on us. Then one of them grunted something in Polish and they all turned their backs to us.
“Here, Cameron, hold these,” I said, handing him the books.
He took them, looking warily at me.
I lifted his shirt to check the knife wound.
“Hey!” Cameron said as I peeled back the bandage.
The skin around the wound was oozing yellow fluids now tinged with green. It wasn’t healing. I replaced the bandage and pulled his shirt—Aaron’s shirt—back down.
“It’s not good, is it?”
Well, it wasn’t great. “Your wound here got their taste buds going,” I said. “You’re not decaying, but you’re not exactly healing either. You’ve had two packets of brains, three if you count the drink Lee gave you, in the past seven hours—” I was about to tell him my theory about his bindings limiting how much he could heal, but then thought better of it. Instead, I said, “A normal zombie would have healed an hour ago. But you’re not a normal zombie.”
“A one-of-a-kind zombie,” Cameron said. “Somehow that feels like it should be ironic or something.”
“At least you’ve kept your sense of humour.”
When we reached the bottom of the great staircase, Cameron asked, “Where to next?”
“Well, it’s coming up on morning now. I figure it’s high time to swing by your place. I’m hoping we’ll find a clue there as to what Max did to you, or what went wrong.”
He frowned. “Someone is killing zombies, and practitioners are trying to raise an undead myth, and we’re going to rummage around my apartment?”
“I figured, from all those drawings on my desk, you’d want to see your paintings, make sure they were okay.”
Cameron shot me a sideways glance. “No offence, but catching a serial killer strikes me as a higher priority.”
I smiled. “Don’t worry, I’m not leaving you there alone.”
We kept walking in silence until Cameron finally asked, “So you’re really not going to contact the ghoul?”
“Nope.”
Cameron shot me a sideways glance. “I barely know you, and don’t figure you for the type who’d back off from a lead like that.”
“Who said anything about backing off?”
“You just said you weren’t going to contact Lee’s suspect.”
I shot Cameron my best Cheshire cat grin. “Who said anything about contacting the ghoul? I’m contacting his victims.”
CHAPTER 16
YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU
A good view can make just about any city look pretty, even on a rainy morning right before the sun comes up, when the sky is the greyest and ugliest. It’s the shine of the street and car lights, and the fact that there is still enough darkness to cloak the things you don’t want to see. Having said that, the view of Seattle harbour from Cameron’s apartment would blow the postcard pictures away any day, rain or sun.
It turned out that he lived in an exclusive building complete with concierge and front desk. No one had a place here unless they had a lot of money to blow. The concierge had given me a suspicious once-over when we’d entered the building. Apparently Cameron coming home at 6 in the morning with a female companion was not out of the norm, just not one with frizzy hair and clad in leather.
But Cameron’s studio itself was about as pared down as you could get. The walls had been reduced to brick facade, between drywall where his paintings hung. The floors were concrete with a few rugs to soften them. With the exception of a partitioned-off bedroom, it was open plan, with canvases occupying most of the space in lieu of the usual furniture and TV.
I tore my eyes off the city view and headed back to the two books, which I’d left lying open on Cameron’s kitchen table. Though I’d taken a quick nap when we got here, it didn’t feel as though it had put any dent in my Otherside hangover. Thank god Cameron had coffee, and speaking of which…I stifled a yawn and got up to refill my empty mug, stealing a glance at Cameron to see how he was holding up. The trip back here was clearly long overdue: Cameron had been standing in front of the same canvas for more than an hour. I thought more of it was covered in paint now, but it was hard to be sure.
I’d already found Cameron’s address and appointment book and flipped through it. He was one of those people who preferred to keep his agenda on paper. He’d noted three appointments leading up to Thursday, and it was the third one I wanted to broach with Cameron, but not until he finished working on his painting. I figured I’d give him that.
The chapter staring up at me dealt with Ifrit, or Fire Jinn. Compared with the accounts I’d read of King Solomon’s Jinn, Lee’s text lacked storytelling but made up for it with detail. There wasn’t just one set of binding symbols and inscriptions for each type of Jinn, there were many, though all of them were incomplete. As Lou had pointed out in his notes, most were a mash of old pre-Islamic Semitic symbols, a seemingly haphazard mix of Arabic, Aramaic and Canaanite.
I turned another page to confront three more sets of Ifrit bindings, these ones with red Xs as placeholders where the missing symbols might go. Each set of bindings was more convoluted and contradictory than the previous. No wonder a Jinn hadn’t been made in a thousand years: no one could sift through all these bindings.
One of the symbols matched a partial I’d found at Marjorie’s. According to the book, it was ancient Aramaic. I checked my drawings of the other partial symbol from Marjorie’s. I found it on the same page but in a different group. This one was supposedly Canaanite. I marked the page with a sticky note and flipped to the next spread. The two symbols appeared twice more, both in incomplete bindings.
I leaned my head against the back of the chair and closed my eyes. So what the hell did it mean? Did whoever was trying to raise Jinn have an actual set of bindings to work off, or was it trial and error?
Something metal struck the concrete floor behind me. As I turned to see what it was, I knocked my coffee mug over. A paint can rolled by my feet and under the table, leaving a trail of thick pink paint.
I sw
ore and pulled the books out of harm’s way; Lee would kill me if I got coffee on the pages. I glared at Cameron as I took a roll of paper towels to the paint spill.
“Sorry,” he said without moving his eyes from the canvas. Whoever coined the phrase “You can’t take it with you” did so without having met a zombie or a ghost. Taking their shit with them is the first thing the dead try to do.
Case in point: as soon as we’d stepped into the apartment, Cameron had been fixated on his artwork at the expense of everything else. They were done in multiple mediums—pencil, charcoal, watercolour, chalk, oil—and were mostly abstract, though in some there were figures and images hidden beneath the swaths of colour. Were they any good? They had a certain artistic integrity, though I’m the first to admit I wouldn’t know artistic integrity if it bit me.
“Are you done rifling through my personal accounts yet?” Cameron asked.
I’d made him hand over his laptop and cellphone and all the passwords. I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss any clues. When I got fed up with the bindings and murder accounts, I switched to sifting through those, though as of yet I hadn’t turned up anything I didn’t already know or suspect.
“Well?” he said, still not tearing his eyes off his painting.
“Not even close.”
There was another pause, then, “What do you really think happened to me?”
“Honestly?”
At that, he turned to me and I waved him over to the table. I flipped the appointment book around to show him the meeting I’d found—with his drug dealer late Thursday afternoon, right before he’d died. “I think you accidentally overdosed, just like you and Max were afraid you would.”
Cameron stared at the entry. There was no surprise or resistance on his face, just acceptance. “Then why didn’t Max’s binding work the way it should?”
“Well, when I worked for the PD, we had a couple of instances where someone died of an overdose and the drug dealers panicked. They paid hacks to raise the victims so no one could prove time or place of death. If you accidentally died and someone paid a practitioner to raise you, Max’s bindings would have got messed up.” I shrugged. “Or maybe Max didn’t really know what he was doing and your memory tanked just because.”
The Voodoo Killings Page 21
