Claire jumped up and trailed Nancy back into the autopsy room. Nancy pulled over the armed and lighted magnifying glass and positioned it down close to the inside of the victim's left wrist. “See it? You tell me what that looks like.”
Claire stared at the tiny blue marks. “It's the same symbol the killer drew in the cornmeal at the crime scene. Zee called it a Veve.”
They stared at each other for a moment. Claire said, “She was caught up in something, all right. What? A voodoo cult or some kind of black magic?”
“Oh, yeah, that's what I'd say.”
“Oh, boy, this case is gonna get messy.”
“I'm going to finish and then close her up, okay? Anything you want to see?”
Claire shook her head, and when she heard the fax machine click on, she headed back to Nancy's desk. It was Rene's reports. Madonna Christien's mug shots were on the first page. She wore a tank top, low cut and provocative, but she had been a pretty girl. Small and pixie-ish with waist-length dark hair and a scattering of brown freckles across her nose that made her look really young.
Wanting plenty of ammunition for the next afternoon, Claire turned to Nancy's computer and Googled Jack Holliday's name. About a zillion hits popped up. She clicked on the first site, and it showed his head shot, in which he was grinning confidently. The article gave his stats as six feet eight inches tall and two hundred and thirty pounds. Whoa, he definitely could throw just about anybody up against a wall, and it wouldn't take long to wrap those giant hands around a little woman's throat and squeeze the life out of her.
Even though Jack Holliday had been out of the game, there were all kinds of stats about yards rushed in his Tulane heyday and his short stint with the Saints some time ago, and other stuff like that, but very little about his personal background. She found another site, one run by fans, that had an unauthorized biography of him. She skimmed through all the gossipy stuff, mainly about celebrities that he'd either dated or been photographed with, of which there were plenty. Then she found what she was looking for.
According to the website, he had been born in Colorado, a suburb of Denver called Arvada. Had played high school football there and been given a full scholarship to Tulane University. Had gotten a first-round draft pick with the Saints and led them to a Super Bowl victory before he blew out his knee in the big game. After that, his bio got real sketchy, except for his sports agent status.
For the next thirty minutes, Claire found out with some difficulty that he had no living family, but one fan site said he had an unnamed grandmother somewhere. Not much else. Most bios included his prior prowess at throwing the football and/or sleeping with beautiful women.
Not as much info on him as Claire would have liked to have before an interview, but probably enough to catch him if he fed her a bunch of lies or avoided her questions. Tired and ready to crash and get some sleep, Claire gave Zee a call and told him to pick her up at her house tomorrow and they'd go interview Holliday. He reacted with unbridled, hero-worshipping joy. She knocked on the window and waved good-bye to Nancy, who was now doing her thing with internal organs and placing slivers of tissue on glass slides.
Outside, she stood and breathed in the cool night air. Her cell phone sang, and she opened it quickly, hoping it was Black this time. It was, and she picked up quickly. “Well, I thought you'd forgotten about me.”
“Yeah? You're just about all I think about anymore.”
Yes, that was pretty damn sappy, true, but she liked it, not that she'd ever admit it. “So how are your patients tonight? Sleeping peacefully or on a hatchet rampage?”
“All's calm. I'll be home before you know it. I miss you.”
“Same here, so hurry up. Jules Verne and I get lost in that huge bed.”
He laughed softly. “I'll find you, don't worry. How is that little pooch? Still cooling off in the courtyard fountain?”
Black loved the little poodle he'd brought Claire from Paris almost as much as she did. But Jules was good company at night when Black took off on his business trips. “Oh, yeah, he likes to wade around in it while he gets his drink. But he keeps me company.”
“Good. Hey, I've got a surprise for you. It's all arranged so you can't say no.”
That was Black. He always had a surprise for her, sometimes very, very good, and sometimes not so hot. “So, what is it?”
“I've got a crew of carpenters lined up to rebuild that old house you like down on the bayou. I'm going to totally remodel it and put in a security system so you can stay there any time you're too tired to drive home. Luc LeFevres already gave me permission to do anything I want with it. He said he'd deed the thing over to you if you want it. They're just letting it fall into ruin.”
Uh-oh. Any other time, she'd like that surprise a lot, but not right now. And she didn't want to tell him what was going on, or he might go bananas. She waited a second longer but couldn't think of any other good reason to call off the carpenters. “Uh, Black, maybe you should hold off on that for a while.”
“Why?”
She frowned and heaved in a bracing breath. “Because it's a crime scene at the moment.”
Dead silence. “What the hell does that mean? Are you okay? Are you involved in something bad?”
Ah, the guy knew her well. “Yes, a case, but I'm fine. We found a body in the house and we're investigating it as a homicide now. Looks like some kind of voodoo thing, maybe.”
“Voodoo thing? Are you serious? What kind of voodoo thing?”
Being a New Orleanian by birth, Black sounded almost as spooked as Zee and Nancy. “Surely you're not scared of voodoo stuff, Black.”
“I'm not scared, but I know they take their rituals seriously and don't like people messing with them. I'm just glad you haven't been staying out there. Maybe I'll nix those carpenters for good. I don't want you anywhere near that place if that kind of stuff's going on.”
Uh-oh, again. “Well, not to worry. I'll be at our house with Jules tonight, all by our lonesome in that big empty bed.”
As she suspected, that got his mind fixated on something else. He had been sleeping alone for more than a week, after all. At least, she hoped he had. His next words reassured her.
“Better expect to spend a lot of time in that bed on Tuesday. I'll meet you there for dinner and then you can show me how much you missed me.”
Claire smile was anticipatory, too. “Sounds pretty good to me. Getting reacquainted is gonna take a while, so you better not show up with jet lag.”
“Not a chance. I'll sleep on the flight.”
“Well, get some sleep now, too. What time is it over there anyway? It's got to be late.”
There was a momentary pause. She frowned. “Black? You still there?”
“Yeah. It's well after midnight, I guess.”
“Well, sleep well, and I'll see you on Tuesday.”
“You be careful. Wish you were here.”
“I've wished the same thing a time or two this week.”
“Well, stay away from that boat and take off Wednesday, all day Wednesday.”
Claire laughed and they hung up. Okay, she had fudged a bit to Black, and he wasn't going to like it when he found out the truth, especially the part about the voodoo doll. But he'd get over it. Right now, she needed to hit the sack. It had been a very long day, and she had the drive back to New Orleans ahead of her. What she wanted now was something good to eat, a good night's rest, and a list of pertinent questions designed to make Jack Holliday squirm like a worm on a barbed hook.
What she really wanted, of course, was Black back home and waiting for her in that aforementioned big soft bed with a tray of coconut shrimp and Pepsi on crushed ice, but that wasn't going to happen until Tuesday, so a quick stop at McDonald's for a Big Mac and fries to share with Jules would have to suffice at the moment. One thing for sure, she dreaded going to sleep because she had a bad feeling that her dreams were going to be filled with voodoo zombies and stitched-up eyes and lips and faces painted like skeletons and her face pinned to a voodoo doll.
A Very Scary Man
After Malice killed his girlfriend, he had to keep a low profile. But he found that he was quite an actor, too. He wept at the funeral, even sitting alongside Betsy's grieving, sobbing family. Her mother kept patting his knee and telling him to be brave. It was really pretty fun. He had even gotten all teary-eyed when he thought about how pretty Betsy had looked on Valentine's Day when he'd given her a little gold necklace with a heart on it that he'd stolen from JC Penney. She wore it around her neck in the casket, and he thought that was a sweet gesture of her mother but a real loss of good jewelry.
For months he didn't scare a single soul. He was watching his p's and q's, all right. Even his mother noticed his quiet demeanor and worried about him mourning so long and hard for his poor murdered little girlfriend who had died so young. So, he bided his time, and surreptitiously gathered all sorts of weapons to use when he became an assassin. He broke into houses on weekends and stole handguns and shotguns and filched hatchets and knives from his mom and aunts and killed dogs and cats for practice. It was all pretty easy. When he read in the newspaper about a garrote used in a particularly gruesome Mob-related murder, he fashioned one for himself out of wire and wood dowels. His problem was that he had no privacy and had to hide his stuff out in the woods behind his house. His little sister was sneaky now, a real brat, and was watching his every move so he had to be careful. She wasn't going to tell on him, though, because he'd told her that he'd kill her if she ever told on him. She believed him, and kept her mouth shut. He would, too. Just let her try to get him in trouble, and Mandy would just mysteriously disappear, never to be found again, just like their neighbor's black Lab.
Once he got some books that told about World War II death camps and prison camps and all the cruel stuff that had been done to the prisoners locked up inside them, and he spent long hours upstairs in his room poring over them. He still practiced football and was a star quarterback, and all that, but the terrible things that had been done to people in those books fed his hunger for inflicting pain and fear. He read other books, too. Some were set in the olden days of England when they used to draw and quarter people and had put their severed heads on spikes and impaled them with sharp sticks.
He read about the Spanish Inquisition, too, and what had been done to the people who they had thought to be witches. They had all kinds of torture devices back then, but the worst one had been called the Iron Maiden. It had been a hinged iron box with razor-sharp spikes inside. They had put the accused witches inside and slammed it shut so that all the spikes stabbed into their bodies. He'd never read anything so cool. And he particularly loved one book that he'd found in an old bookstore downtown. It told the true story of some crazy lunatic guy that had put his victims in a maze of dark rooms and hallways and then jumped out and hacked them to pieces with a machete. That book had given him cold chills the first time he read it, but he still loved how the victims screamed and ran and were chased around and finally shot in the back of their heads.
That was when he decided he needed to build a Maze of Terror of his own, a place of horrors where no one could ever, ever escape, where he could chase people all day long and watch them through hidden peepholes and trapdoors. It was exciting to think about that and plan for the future. And he knew exactly where he would build it. Way out in the deepest, darkest part of the swamp where nobody ever went, on an island, where only alligators and snakes and nutria rats lived. Yeah, that would be a perfect place. So he began to search the bayous and find secret routes in and out of the swamp from every direction, just in case he ever got caught playing his games and had to run for his life.
It was fun when he stole off by himself. He wondered sometimes if his friends on the team would like to help him, if they, too, had the urge to hurt people and scare the shit out of them. But he was too careful to involve others. He acted the carefree senior in high school, winning games with his friends, dating popular and pretty girls, making his grades, learning to weld and to build houses at his uncle's construction company, and all the while he was building his own house of horrors, way out in the swamp with the materials he stole from what was left over at his uncle's building sites. He designed it himself, and it was as complicated and evil as hell, but that's what he liked about it.
After he won the football scholarship, he perpetuated his dream, all the while building and planning and scaring people. He began to spend his weekends in the swamp, honing all the scary things, just so. It was during this time that he discovered voodoo and all its creepy rituals. He found the altar by accident, just happened to see the flash of a crucifix, where it was hanging in a tree and swinging in the wind. It was daytime and deserted, and he had never seen a single person within miles of this part of the swamp. It was too dark, too dangerous, and too alligator infested. But he'd heard the beat of drums a couple of times, late at night, and that had spooked him a little.
He nosed his boat onto dry land and waded out toward where he'd seen the glint of silver. There he found the crucifix and lots of other stuff. The altar was fresh. There were all kinds of candles and jars of strange-looking things. Some looked a lot like human body parts. Intrigued, excited, and a little frightened, he held them up to the sunlight filtering down through the cypress trees. One was a human ear in a jelly jar, cut off with ragged edges that fanned out in the formaldehyde when he shook it. Creepy as hell. There was a big bowl of blood, some not yet congealed, and human skulls were sitting all over the place. Many had candles set inside of them, and there were framed pictures of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ and angels surrounded by clouds and trumpets.
There were little bottles hanging off the trees with unknown liquids in them, but he knew it was probably bodily fluids. Fascinated, he wandered there among the symbols of death and destruction. He stole some of the skulls and other stuff and later read everything he could find about voodoo rituals. He learned about voodoo queens who tortured and killed and caused people to turn into zombies. He saw gruesome photos of a body that had been dug up and had body parts removed. He found stories of people who had been cursed and died horrible deaths and disappeared into the swamps never to be found again. Wow, he didn't think he'd ever been so excited. This was it. This was his destiny. He would become a voodoo doctor, and he would use spells and terrifying rituals to scare his victims. And he would do it out in the swamp, where it was dark and sluggish with hanging veils of gray moss and alligators sliding into the water and gliding around. The alligators would be his garbage disposal units, after he'd gotten all the fun he needed out of his victims. It was perfect. It would be his perfect little Garden of Evil.