Whatever Catherine was planning, she evidently needed complete darkness for it. She didn’t want to be seen.
That didn’t seem very promising from
my
perspective.
The moonless, starless sky was a raging sea of thunder and lightning. The noise stampeded through my aching head, and the flashing light was disorienting, making me dizzy as I was carried backward and at an uncomfortable angle up to the forgotten nineteenth-century watchtower atop this steep, isolated hill in the middle of Harlem.
We were in Manhattan, a densely populated borough! Surely I should be able to get
someone’s
attention.
As soon as we reached the comparative safety of the broad stone plaza, I made my move. My hands had been tied in front of me, rather than behind. Now I lifted them to remove the gag from my mouth, and I screamed as loudly as I could. Then my heart sank as I realized that no one would hear me over the noise of the thunder. There was no one else in this park, and the surrounding houses and apartments were all too far away. Even
without
the competition of the thunder, I doubted anyone would hear me.
Nonetheless, I screamed again.
“Would you
stop
that?” Catherine’s voice snapped at me. “I told them to gag you! What h
app
—oh, for God’s sake!”
I was roughly yanked out of the zombies’ cold hands and thrown down to the stone pavement. The ground was wet. I remembered that it had been raining hard when I was knocked out by a bokor with a poppet. My tiny vinyl skirt rode up to my waist, the push-up bra stabbed me, and I felt the fishnet stockings tear. If I had known I was going to be kidnapped, I would certainly have worn something else this evening.
Catherine towered above me, wearing a long robe of red silk. I was surprised, because her fashion sense had really seemed more subdued and classic than that.
She kicked me in irritation. “After what happened with Frank Johnson, I told them to tie your legs. But I forgot to specify that your hands should be tied
behind
you so that you couldn’t remove your own gag!” She made a guttural sound of frustration. “Take my word for it, don’t work with zombies!”
I rolled away from her. Venting her frustration, she followed after me, kicking me again. I grunted in pain.
“It’s like working with children!” she raged. “
Delinquent
children! That goddamn
snake
was smarter than these creatures are!”
“So get rid of them,” I snapped. “Why keep them around?”
She shrugged. “They do the heavy lifting. I’ve got brains, not brawn.”
“They’ve got to be hard to keep hidden,” I said rubbing my aching ribs where she had kicked me. “Where
do
you hide them?”
“Sometimes in the basement. Sometimes in the woods on this hill. One of the few
good
things about a zombie is that it’ll sit in total silence and stillness—not even breathing, obviously—for days at a time. So they’re easier to conceal than you’d suppose.”
While she talked, I looked around the plaza. There was a small bonfire in the spot where I had previously noticed charring and ashes. And in its dim glow, I could see several vévés drawn in red on the paving stones.
Now I remembered—it was in those books Puma had given me. Red was the color of a Petro ritual.
Catherine, the bokor, was invoking dark gods on this isolated hilltop, beneath the thundering, lightning-streaked sky.
This could only be a
bad
thing. So I needed to stall her. No, it wasn’t much of a plan, but it might give me time to think of a better one.
And the best way to stall her was to keep her talking. One of the first things I’d noticed about this woman was how much she
loved
the sound of her own voice.
“Raising zombies from the grave sure couldn’t have been easy,” I said, struggling surreptitiously with the bonds on my wrists. “That’s some major mojo. Plus a lot of logistical problems. Sneaking in and out of grave-yards, digging all that dirt, getting them from the cemetery back to Harlem. You put a lot of talent and hard work into creating these, um, lads.”
“You have no
idea.
”
“But you failed with the first one, didn’t you?” Yes, I rubbed it in a little. There didn’t seem to be much point anymore in trying not to offend her.
“It was my first experiment. I was new to raising the dead.” She sounded a little defensive. “And I made some mistakes. So that one was unpredictable. Too hard to control. I
had
to get rid of it. Darius was desperately afraid that we’d be exposed because of that one.”
“So he was in on it with you?” I was wriggling my ankles, trying to loosen the bonds.
She made a little waggling gesture with her elegant hand. “Sort of.”
It hit me suddenly. The poppets. The handsome man whom Jeff and Biko had been sure was gay. What Puma had told us about love spells.
“Oh, my God!” I said. “You seduced Darius with voodoo! You made a poppet of him and—ugh!—rubbed bodily fluids into it! Didn’t you?”
“It’s not as easy as they tell you,” she said. “Saliva doesn’t work. Neither does sweat. For a man, it’s got to be semen.”
Tired of talking to her from my prone position, and also afraid she’d kick me again, I sat up. “You used his semen? Okay, that’s too much information.”
“I could make you a poppet like that to secure the detective, in exchange for your silence.” She added, even as I was opening my mouth to pretend to agree to this proposition, “But you don’t need one for him, do you? That was obvious even before you walked into my office in that digusting condition today. Did he do that to you all in one evening? He’s really
not
the altar boy he pretends to be, is he?”
“Er, back to the part about letting me go in exchange for my silence,” I said.
“Pardon? Oh! No, that was just a flight of fancy,” she said dismissively. “I know several languages and dialects, and I have so many esoteric and secret skills, that sometimes I just wish I could use them more often. But you don’t need any sort of potion or poppet or charm, of course, because you’re going to be dead shortly. So what’s the point?”
“How shortly?” I asked with more than casual interest.
She looked up at the churning black sky, where low clouds were gathering directly overhead, flashing with ravenous heat and light. “Very shortly. It’s almost time for the ritual to begin.”
“Who inflicted the white darkness on Nelli?” I said, desperate to distract her from her purpose. “Was that you?”
“No, it was Celeste. The dog had attacked her snake, it deserved to be punished. She could also incapacitate you and Dr. Zadok at the same time. And so on and so forth.”
“Incapacitate?” I repeated. “If Max and I had been one split-second slower to escape, we’d be dead.”
“And that would certainly have been a bonus. I really wasn’t paying that much attention. Frankly, I rather agreed with you that the snake was dangerous and unattractive. But . . .” She sighed and shrugged. “Did I mention that good help is hard to find? I needed a disenchanted Vodou mambo to assist me, so I made compromises. One does so in all things, you know, not just with men.”
“Compromises like enchanting a gay man to sleep with you so you’d have a lover?”
“Have you seen his photo? He was very handsome. And athletic. And—oh!—the
stamina.
” Her tongue came out of her mouth for a moment, as if she were licking the memory.
I looked away. “What about your husband? Rumor has it that he had, er, stamina.”
“Stamina was not what he had,” she said irritably, gazing up at the clouds again. “I looked the other way through a lot of philandering.”
“Why?” When I saw the expression on her face, I said, “Oh, right. Because he was a billionaire.”
She shook her head. “Men like Martin—well, all men, really—fool themselves into believing a beautiful woman twenty years his junior wants him for himself alone. That was convenient for me, so I let him believe it.”
“So it was all about the money?”
“Money and power,” she said. “It’s
always
about money and power. Or are you still too young to know that, Esther?”
“Max always says that evil is voracious.”
“How quaint.”
“I still don’t understand why you killed Martin, though.” There was an obvious reason it had never even occurred to me that she had done so. “You were better off with him alive. Everyone knows you only got a modest amount of money when he died.”
“I’ll have to give up the penthouse if I don’t get more money!”
“Whoops, I guess I touched a sore spot,” I said. “So did you not know about the will?”
“I knew, but I didn’t think challenging it in court would be so fruitless! Especially not when I made sure he seemed out of his mind in the final days of his life. It should have been easy to convince a judge that he’d been losing his mind for a while. But that board of directors at the foundation . . .” She gave nasty snarl. “It’s the old boy system. Every one of them is pals with half a dozen judges. I hadn’t counted on that.”
“You should have just put up with the philandering.”
“I did! But then Martin decided to divorce me!”
“Really? Gosh! Who can fathom the ways of the heart?”
“And two expensive divorces had taught him the value of having his third wife sign an iron-clad pre-nup. So I’d have gotten
nothing
if he’d left me. Nothing!”
“Lopez knows,” I said suddenly. “He knows you killed Martin. And that you killed your first husband, too—to attract Martin as a grieving, available, younger widow I suppose? And Lopez knows you killed Darius!”
“Yes, I’m aware of that.” She was openly amused at my crestfallen expression. “But it doesn’t matter what he knows, Esther, since he can’t prove anything. More to the point, he’ll be dead by morning, anyhow.”
“What?” Forgetting about my furtive attempts to loosen my bonds, I hopped awkwardly to my feet.
“What?”
“I’ve administered a topical poison, one that seeps through the skin and induces death by slow paralysis.”
“What?
When?
Where is he?”
“He’s lying on the floor of the Petro ritual room at the foundation, next to the corpses of Mambo Celeste and Napoleon—neither of whom, I must confess, I expect to miss.”
I flung myself against her, wild with rage and anguish. “No!
No!
What have you
done?
You murdering bitch! I’ll kill you myself! Noooo!”
She was shouting in Creole. I realized as I felt strong, cold, lifeless hands grabbing me that she had issued instructions to the zombies. They seized me, put my gag back in my mouth, and dragged me—kicking, squirming, struggling, weeping, and howling with rage behind my gag—toward the tower.
Catherine rose, came toward me, and slapped me sharply across the face. As I stared at her with mute, venomous hatred, she straightened her red robe.
“This is
your
doing,” she said. “You have no one to blame but yourself. I’m not a fool. I don’t actually
want
to kill an NYPD detective. That’s far more trouble than it’s worth!” She pointed a finger accusingly at me. “But he burst into the foundation after dark looking for
you.
He was uttering insults and threats, and he would have torn the place apart with his bare hands if I hadn’t stopped him.”
She smoothed her red robe over her summer dress. “I administered what’s known as an ordeal poison. Frankly, it’s a nasty way to die. But under the circumstances and with such short notice, it was the only reasonable choice open to me.”
I growled in rage and lunged for her again. The grip of the zombies holding me was firm, though; I barely moved two inches.
“Be honest with yourself, Esther,” Catherine said. “Would he be lying in agonized paralysis awaiting his death now if not for
you?
”
Tears streamed down my face as I realized Lopez would never have gotten involved in this case in the first place if it hadn’t been for me. If only I hadn’t called on him for help the night I was arrested!
Using the tight grasp of the zombies as leverage, I raised both my legs off the ground, swung from their grip, and kicked out at Catherine as hard as I could. But being bound and held captive made me slow and clumsy. She saw it coming and easily evaded the blow.
“Baron Samedi is coming for your lover!” she said with unholy glee. “The Lord of Death is dancing around him even now, waiting to escort him to the cemetery!”
She said something in Creole. In response, the zombies started to shift me. I seized the opportunity to tear off my gag again.
“And
your
lover?” I shouted over the rising thunder. “The one you had to hex to get him into your bed? Why did Baron Samedi come for him, you murdering bitch?”
She leaned closer to me and smiled maliciously. “Because Darius balked at what we were going to do with Shondolyn. Which was that same thing that, after she was gone, I planned to do with Puma.” Her breath brushed my face as she said, “Since you’re the one who stole them both from my grasp, it’s fitting that you should take over that role tonight.”