Читать книгу City of Sins - Daniel Blake - Страница 15

Patrese slept fitfully, and gave up even trying shortly after dawn.

He made himself a coffee – proper stuff, from a French press, nothing instant – and cradled the mug with both hands as he sat on his stoop.

This was the only time of day when the city was cool and quiet. The night owls had staggered home to bed; the day shifters were yet to start in earnest. The dew sat heavy on the grass in Patrese’s front yard.

New Orleans, just for a moment, felt as though it were on pause. He savored it.

He drove through early morning streets, the traffic still light; across the London Avenue Canal and Bayou St John, two of the five fingers which the lake stretched deep into the heart of the city. Water was everywhere, topography’s definitive marker.

His cell phone rang while he was waiting at stop lights in City Park.

‘Patrese.’

‘Franco, it’s Rafer.’ Rafer Lippincott was one of the tech guys in the Bureau office.

‘Hey, Rafer. What’s up?’

‘You know those parameters we put into VICAP yesterday? Snake, ax, all that.’

‘Yeah.’

‘We got a hit.’

‘The system takes that long? It came back yesterday with nothing.’

‘The system’s real time. We got a hit ’cos someone else – a local cop, by the look of it – just entered exactly the same keywords.’

‘This cop; where is he?’

‘Natchez. Natchez, Mississippi.’

On a good day, with light traffic, Natchez was three hours from New Orleans. Today was a good day. Patrese was there just before ten.

The victim, Dennis Richards, had been staying at the Best Western on Grand Soleil Boulevard, a few yards from the Mississippi River. One of the local detectives took Patrese aside and briefed him.

Dennis had been found at about four a.m. by an early-morning street-cleaning crew, though the pathologist reckoned he’d already been dead a couple of hours by then. His body had been sited a block or so away, round the back of the hotel, half-hidden under trees near the junction of October and Bluff streets. He looked to have been in his mid-fifties, skinny with long, matted dreadlocks, and he was black.

Patrese raised his eyebrows. Different sex, different race: very unusual. Serial killers usually stuck to one gender, and rarely crossed racial lines.

Check this, the detective said: the address on Dennis’ hotel registration card was a New Orleans one. Ursulines Street; did Patrese know it?

Patrese did indeed. Ursulines was in the Tremé neighborhood, heart and soul of the city’s music scene. But he wasn’t thinking about that, nor that this whole thing was clearly shot through with New Orleans, one way or the other. Patrese was thinking that a murder in Louisiana and one in Mississippi made it an interstate case, and interstate cases belonged to the FBI. This was his baby now.

He turned his attention back to the detective. What had Dennis been doing in Natchez?

They were still trying to find that out, but maybe the room was a clue.

The room? Dennis had been found on the street.

The detective led Patrese inside.

Dennis had certainly done a good job of disguising the Best Western corporate blandness. Dark red drapes hung from the walls, heavy and still in the warm air. Against the far wall stood a table laid with a white tablecloth.

Patrese let his gaze travel slowly over the table, registering each object in turn. A pile of stones. Two candles: one white, the other black, both held in miniature metal skulls. Midway between the candles, a glass of water. A candle snuffer. An incense burner. A pestle and mortar, next to a small pyramid of crushed herbs. A switchblade. A pair of scales. Two sheets of parchment. Four nails, each about five inches long.

Despite the heat, Patrese shivered. He didn’t know for sure, but he could take a pretty good guess as to what this was – especially when a man from New Orleans was involved.

A voodoo altar.

There was a video camera on a chair in the corner. Not a tourist one, either: a proper TV camera with shoulder stock, attached microphone and integrated Betacam tape. The kind of kit that news crews and documentary makers use.

One of the Natchez crime-scene officers hooked it up to the TV in the hotel room, and began to play the tape.

It started with Dennis himself standing on a street in the French Quarter, talking to the camera.

‘I’m a self-taught voodoo priest, a houngan. Everybody know me as Rooster, ’cos they say that during a ceremony one time, I put a live rooster in a trance, bit its head off, drank its blood using the neck as a straw, ripped the breast open and ate it raw. As for whether that’s true, I ain’t sayin’. Don’t seem to have done my rep no harm, though.’ He cackled as the camera panned back, revealing the shopfront behind him: Rooster’s Voodoo Emporium.

Patrese recognized it. There were several places like that in the Quarter, all dolls, potions, charms and paraphernalia. They claimed to be serious voodoo places, but most of their customers were tourists.

As if on cue, the footage cut to Rooster leading a conga line of out-of-towners through the streets. He was wearing a black top hat over his dreadlocks, carrying a long staff crowned with a plastic human hand and a monkey skull, and busy spinning improbable yarns about curses and spells. The camera panned over the faces of his audience. They were loving it.

A couple of seconds of screen snowstorm, and then Rooster was back, this time bare-chested and in a field somewhere. He ate some glass, lit a firestick and swallowed the flames. Looked at the camera again. ‘I’m a seeker. I want to find things. Voodoo explained things to me better than anything else I ever come across. I like the ecstasy in voodoo, the acceptance of your true being, whoever you are. I’m gay. In voodoo, no problem. Voodoo takes your sexuality as just part of the way God made you. Ain’t too many other religions do that, hey?’

Twilight. Fires blazing by the water’s edge. The steady, hypnotic pulse of drums. A crowd; two, three hundred, perhaps, standing in concentric circles. In the middle were two people wearing robes. One was Rooster. The other was wearing a mask, but from her physique and gait, she was clearly a woman.

There was a box on the ground in front of them, about the size of a coffin. The masked woman, the priestess, raised her hands to heaven and began to chant, always staring at the box.

A slow, rhythmic shuffling in the crowd as the music began to seep into them.

The priestess bent down and lifted the lid from the box. She was saying one word over and over again, and it was a moment or two before Patrese caught it.

Zombie.

No way, Patrese thought. Zombies were the stuff of cheap horror flicks. They didn’t exist in real life, surely? Even in New Orleans.

The box was the size of a coffin. Human sacrifice.

The priestess was chanting again, and now the crowd was taking it up.

Eh, eh, they sang. Bomba hen hen.

Shuffling round in their circles, they began to dance. Jerky, spasmodic; an arm flung out here, a leg kicked there.

Eh, eh. Bomba hen hen.

Rooster was leading the chant, Patrese saw. The priestess seemed almost to be in a trance; her head was rolling on her shoulders as though her neck was broken.

The crowd joined hands, spreading the current like electricity. The chant rose and fell in crashing waves as their dance became increasingly frenzied. Sweat flying in the firelight; glistening bodies strobed against leaping flames.

Rooster was a dervish in the middle. Infected.

Eh, eh. Bomba hen hen.

The priestess reached down into the box. With a yell audible even above the chanting and the drums, she pulled out what was inside and thrust it skyward.

A snake.

She wrapped it round herself. It looked too big to be a rattler – more like a python or boa – but Patrese couldn’t be certain. He thought of what Kat South had said about adults teaching children to fear snakes.

The priestess suddenly ripped off her mask and looked straight at the camera. Patrese recognized her instantly: how could he not have? She’d been all over the news for the past couple of weeks.

It was Marie Laveau.

The footage cut back to Rooster right here, in this very hotel room.

‘The voodoo I do is good voodoo.’ He laughed. ‘Try sayin’ that after you had a few daiquiris. Most voodoo folks do good, whatever people think. But, like any place, there’s always some bad apples around too. And I been hearing things on the vine, you know? That’s why I come here to Natchez. I’m lookin’ for a man named Toomey Tegge, who was last heard of as being round here, though some folks also say he’s in New Orleans. Anyhows, I live in New Orleans, and I ain’t seen him there yet. Tegge’s a doctor, far as I can tell, but somewhere along the line he musta crossed over, ’cos I heard he got all mixed up with some bad men.’

Rooster’s face had turned serious, Patrese saw. No more showboating.

‘Even today in Africa,’ Rooster continued, ‘there are people who put on animal skins and think they possessed by whichever animal they wearing. Leopardmen, owlmen, pythonmen, serpentmen, elephantmen, crocodilemen, wolfmen, lionmen. You name it, they out there, and they do some bad shit. The darkest, nastiest side of voodoo. Here in the South, I believe there are folks like that too. They call themselves the Red Sect, Secte Rouge, and they’re a cult.

‘A human sacrifice cult.’

Natchez was antebellum mansions and tree-dappled streets. A nice place to live, Patrese thought. Perhaps not such a great place to die, but then again, nowhere was.

Police headquarters was a short hop across town from the Best Western. The local cops gave Patrese a room and brought him everything they had on Rooster’s murder. For obvious reasons – resources and expertise – smaller towns like Natchez tended to be a lot more co-operative with the Bureau than big city police departments did.

The crime-scene photos showed beyond doubt that it was the same killer. Leg, rattlesnake, ax, mirror; they were all there, just as they’d been with Cindy. He’d had the photos from Cindy’s scene e-mailed over and printed off, and there was no doubt. Same killer.

Witness reports weren’t as helpful, principally because there weren’t any. No one had seen or heard a thing. The door of Rooster’s hotel room hadn’t been forced, which suggested that Rooster had known the killer, or at the very least had felt sufficiently comfortable to open the door to him. Yes, the killer could have ambushed Rooster outside, at the spot where he’d been killed; but why would Rooster have been out there in the first place, at that time of night? Some sort of voodoo ritual? There wasn’t anything else to do round there, not on a small-town back street past midnight. There was a casino across the way from the hotel, but the route from one to the other didn’t go anywhere near the spot where Rooster’s body had been found.

The autopsy was being carried out. They’d e-mail it to Patrese the moment it was done, they said, if he wanted to go back to New Orleans. Did he want a few Natchez detectives on loan for a couple of days? If so, that could be arranged.

I bet it could, Patrese thought. A couple of days helping out with the investigation, a couple more partying their butts off in the Quarter. If I was a Natchez ’tec, I’d be halfway down the interstate already.

He rang Phelps and told him what he’d found; the body, the voodoo.

‘Heck, Franco,’ Phelps said. ‘What the hell is this?’

‘It’s our case now, for starters.’

‘Yes. Yes, it is. I’m behind you all the way on this one.’

‘Then can you ask Thorndike to reinstate Selma?’

‘Why do you want to do that?’

‘Because she’s a good cop, a good detective, and Thorndike has it in for her.’

‘But Luther’s still a suspect, right?’

‘I haven’t talked to him today. If you mean, could he have got from New Orleans to Natchez last night after being released, and killed Rooster in the timeframe the cops here are working around, then yes, he could. He may have an alibi.’

‘Then shouldn’t we wait till we confirm that? Conflict of interest, her and him?’

‘There’s only a conflict of interest if she’s leading the investigation, and can sit on things or twist things to take the focus away from him.’

‘Or pin things on him that aren’t there.’

‘True. But she’s not leading the investigation any more. I am. If Luther’s involved, then she knows him well, she can be of help. If he’s not, no problem.’

‘Thorndike won’t like it.’

‘That seems a very good reason to do it.’

Phelps laughed. ‘How to win friends and influence people, huh?’

‘You got it. I’ll be back in a few hours.’

‘Gotcha. Good work, Franco.’

Patrese hung up. A young uniform poked his head round the door.

‘Agent Patrese, there’s someone in the lobby who wants to see you.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Says her name’s Marie Laveau.’

Plenty of people in his position, Patrese figured, would have refused to see Marie. It never occurred to him to do so. Whatever she wanted, whatever she had to offer, she’d come all the way from New Orleans for it. That alone meant something.

The riot of colors on Marie’s kaftan would have seared the retinas of a blind man, and she flashed teeth and eyes at Patrese as though he were the only man in the world.

‘Agent Patrese,’ she said, sitting down opposite him without being asked. ‘You know who I am, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘This is a terrible thing. Anything I can do to help, just say. I ain’t no fan of the Bureau, but I’m even less of a fan of people who kill my friends.’

‘News travels fast.’

‘Don’t insult me. I didn’t get where I am now by not having my finger on the pulse. News does travel. Faster than you’ll ever know.’

This at least was true. In Patrese’s experience police departments leaked like sieves; police chatter was picked up on scanners every second of the day. Someone like Marie probably knew what cops were doing before they did.

‘Anything I can do to help,’ she repeated.

Am I being played? How much should I tell her? Risk nothing, gain nothing.

He took the plunge. ‘We found a tape in Rooster’s room. Footage of you and him at a ceremony. And then him talking about a human sacrifice cult. The Secte Rouge.’

‘The Secte Rouge don’t exist.’

‘You sure?’

‘It’s a myth. Rooster was obsessed with it. Making a damn documentary about it. I told him not to waste his time.’

‘On the tape, you’re chanting something about a zombie.’

Marie laughed; a touch condescendingly, Patrese couldn’t help but feel. ‘Li grand zombi. It’s the name of the snake.’

Patrese again wondered whether to stick or twist; and again figured that the only way was forward.

‘Rooster was murdered in a way that appears … ritual. And he wasn’t the first. A young lady was killed two days before in just the same way. I’d like to show you some pictures of their bodies, and you tell me if you think … if you think that what the killer’s done to them is voodoo. Or even could be voodoo.’

Marie looked at him, unblinking. Exactly like a snake, in fact.

Patrese bit down on the temptation to fill the silence.

A beat, perhaps two; then she nodded, as if he’d passed some sort of test.

‘OK,’ she said.

Patrese handed over a thick brown envelope. ‘They’re pretty shocking.’

‘I’m a big girl, Agent Patrese. I’m sure I’ve seen worse.’

Maybe she had done. She didn’t flinch or wince as she went through the photos; not once. Examined them properly, too; didn’t flick through like many people did. Went all the way through them twice, in fact, before putting them back down on the table and looking at Patrese again.

‘You asked if they could be voodoo,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Then yes, they could.’

The snake is very important in voodoo, Marie said. Voodoo gods are called loa …

Patrese didn’t stop her, but he was thinking furiously. Loa. The last word Cindy had said to him at Varden’s house had been ‘Noah.’ At least, that’s what he’d thought she’d said; it had been a little indistinct, what with her being drunk and slurry.

But what if it hadn’t been ‘Noah’? What if it had been ‘loa’?

Loa, and sacrificing people?…voodoo gods are called loa, and the father of them all is Damballah, the primordial serpent deity of new life and fertility who created the world. When the first man and woman came into the world blind, it was Damballah who, as the snake, gave them sight. Another snake loa is Simbi, the water snake. Loa of rainfall and fresh water, he oversees the making of charms, and speckled roosters are sacrificed to him.

In voodoo, snakes are not seen as symbols of evil as in the story of Adam and Eve; rather, they are a symbol of man, and women often dance with snakes to represent the spiritual balance between the genders, as Marie had been doing in the ceremony on Rooster’s footage.

The snake also represents fusion and transformation; as the snake sheds its skin, so man can leave his corporeal self and transcend into light and knowledge. From the snake flows wisdom and power, making an oracle of those who channel its spirit. That too was what Marie had been doing; a snake dance to celebrate her link to the ancient knowledge.

The snake transmits that which is known intuitively. It is the beginning and the end, alpha and omega. It stretches itself out as a bridge across the various levels of consciousness, allowing man to travel freely to the realm of his ancestors, and to the astral plane.

This travel is also the role of the mirror, one of the symbols of the loa Legba. Beyond the mirror in voodoo is the place between what has been, what is, and what will come. Two magicians can use a mirror like a telephone, transmitting information to each other.

Marie began to sing. Salue’ Legba, Ai-zan vie, vie, vie Legba, Creoles sonde miroi Legba, Legba vie’ vie’, Creoles sonde miroi Ati Bon Legba.

She translated for Patrese: Salute Legba, Ai-zan, old one, old one, old Legba, Creoles sound Legba’s mirror, Legba old one old one, Creoles sound Ati Bon Legba’s mirror.

The axhead is a symbol of the loa Chango. In voodoo myth, Chango hurls bolts of lightning at those chosen to be his followers, leaving behind imprints of a stone ax blade on the Earth’s crust. Altars to Chango often contain a carved figure of a woman holding a gift to the god with a double-bladed ax sticking up from her head. The ax symbolizes that this devotee is possessed by Chango, and the woman’s expression is always calm and cool, expressing the qualities she has gained through her faith.

That Rooster’s body had been found near a crossroads was also significant. In voodoo, the crossroads is where the earth and spirit world meet. Virtually all voodoo acts begin with the acknowledgment of the crossroads. A murderer can evade capture if he goes to a crossroads and takes nine steps backward down the road opposite to that which he intends to travel along. The law will take the wrong road from the murderer, and their investigations will lead in directions other than his.

There are four main reasons why voodoo practitioners offer sacrifices: to pacify or appease loa; to prevent disaster or misfortune; to purify an individual; or to offer a substitute for what the loa really desires.

But the sacrificial objects are always inanimate. New Orleans voodooistes don’t even sacrifice animals any more, whatever Rooster liked to have claimed about the source of his nickname, and they certainly don’t sacrifice humans.

The killer wasn’t a proper voodooiste, in other words; which meant he wasn’t anyone in Marie’s congregation. If he was working to a version of voodoo, it was a very warped and misguided one. Voodoo was a positive religion. It wasn’t one which encouraged serial killers.

‘Until now,’ Patrese said.

Now the Bureau was in charge, the case incident room was moved from New Orleans police headquarters to the Bureau building on Leon C. Simon, up near the lake. By the time Patrese got back there, it was mid-afternoon. Phelps, Thorndike and Selma were waiting for him. He told them what Marie had said.

‘You trust a single word that woman says, you’re dumber than a bag of wet mice,’ Selma said.

As a way of showing her thanks to him for getting her back on the case, Patrese thought, it was unconventional, to say the least.

‘It all sounded sensible enough to me.’

‘Don’t matter what the specifics are. She’s mendacious and manipulative. She lies as easily as she breathes.’

‘She was co-operative. More so than I’d have been if I were her.’

‘Exactly. Exactly. Why would she be like that, except to yank our chain? Make us think she’s being helpful, when in fact she’s doing just the opposite?’

‘And why would she do that?’

‘To keep us from a truth she knows. Or maybe just ’cos it amuses her.’

‘You think this theory, this … voodoo is plausible?’ Thorndike said.

Patrese heard the skepticism in Thorndike’s voice, and he couldn’t blame him. In the Bureau building’s utilitarian flatness, voodoo seemed to come not so much from another culture as another planet entirely.

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘Then let’s go back to the start,’ Phelps said. ‘Cindy said something to you about sacrificing people.’

‘That’s right.’

‘What words did she use? What exactly did she say?’

Patrese thought for a moment, careful to get his recall precise. Even a trained agent found it easy to confuse what he’d heard with what he thought he’d heard, or what he’d wanted to hear.

‘She said there was – is – something terrible going on. She said she needed to tell someone about it. That someone was me, because I wasn’t tainted.’

‘Tainted?’

‘Everyone here knows everyone, she said. Tell one of them, you tell the whole lot. But I didn’t know anyone, not properly. Which was why she chose me. She said that thing about sacrificing people – those were her exact words; “Sacrifice … Sacrificing people” – and then something which sounded like “Noah” but which I guess could have been “loa”.’

‘You’re sure about all that?’

‘Positive.’

‘No indication as to who “everyone” might be?’

‘No. But I assume – and I know you should never assume, because of what it makes – but still, I assume she meant the kind of people who were at the party. You know: movers and shakers.’

Phelps gestured at himself and Thorndike. ‘Including people like us?’

Patrese shrugged. ‘I’ve asked myself that before, and I’m still not sure. On one hand, she said “everyone”. But if she wanted to tell me, she must have known I’d have told you. So maybe not.’

‘Fair point.’

‘And you thought it was something to do with Varden?’

‘It was at his house. She said she had documents, evidence, that kind of thing. How would she have got those, unless it was something to do with Varden?’

‘And now?’

‘Now, we have to consider the alternative. What if it wasn’t Varden Cindy wanted to tell me about? What if it was something else entirely, and what it is, how she knew about it, has nothing whatsoever to do with Varden? What if it’s just coincidence she worked there?’

‘You want to give up on the Varden angle?’

‘Not at all. We’ve hardly started looking into him. We’re still working on getting warrants for her computers.’

‘By the time we get hold of them, they’ll have been wiped cleaner than Fatty Arbuckle’s plate,’ Selma said.

‘There are ways of retrieving deleted files,’ Phelps said.

‘And there are ways of deleting them so they’re never found again. Who do you think has got the better tech guys: us, or them?’

Frenzy in the incident room: a Chinese parliament of men barking down phones, tapping information into computers, stonewalling reporters, swilling coffee, and shouting at each other.

Sound and fury, and nothing. A perverse mixture of adrenalin and frustration: adrenalin that they had so much information to chase up, frustration that none of it was yet translating into solid, useful leads.

They needed a connection between the two victims. There had to be one, or else how would the killer have chosen them? Some killers went for a certain type of person: short blondes, for example. If so, the pattern was clear even when the victims otherwise had nothing in common.

But that wasn’t the case here. Cindy had been a white woman, Rooster a black man. The connection would therefore be more subtle. Marie had spoken of balancing the genders. Did that go for races too?

There was a large whiteboard on the main wall, and Patrese had written a list of everything they needed to check.

Did Cindy and Rooster have any friends in common?

Did any of the customers at the voodoo emporium where Rooster worked have anything to do with Cindy?

Were Cindy and Rooster on the same company mailing lists?

Did they hang out at the same bars or nightclubs?

Had they dealt with the same realtors?

Did they get their cars serviced at the same place?

Did they use the same utilities companies?

Workmen? Electricians? Plumbers? Builders?

And drug dealers, of course. Forensics may still have been analyzing all the evidence they’d found at Rooster’s house on Ursulines, but they didn’t need a microscope to tell them that the small plastic bag they’d found in one of his kitchen cupboards contained half an ounce of Acapulco Gold.

And if they were looking for dealers, where better to start than with Luther Marcq?

Thorndike might have released him, but he hadn’t banned Patrese and Selma from getting in touch with him again. Patrese suggested they pay Luther a visit later. Selma didn’t volunteer what she felt about this, and Patrese didn’t ask.

The snake, mirror and axhead found at Rooster’s house were being compared to those from Cindy’s apartment, which were themselves still in the process of being matched to manufacturers, mailing lists, customs records and so on.

When would they get a hit? Hours, days, weeks … take your pick. And even if they did get a manufacturer’s name, and a production code, that guaranteed nothing. Anything mass-produced would be sold in such volume as to make tracing the killer that way near on impossible.

The media hadn’t yet made the connection, and long might it stay that way. A white woman had been killed in Louisiana, a black man in Mississippi. Even though that man was from New Orleans, the connection was still far from obvious: in fact, the very things that were making this case such a bitch were the ones that would hopefully keep the press at bay for a while yet.

And sadly, murders in New Orleans were so commonplace that most of the time they were hardly news at all.

Patrese was pondering all this when Thorndike rang.

‘You and Selma, get your butts over to the courthouse. We got a judge who’s going to give you a warrant for Varden.’

The courthouse was right across the road from both police headquarters and Orleans Parish Prison; a geographical arrangement that was either admirably practical or depressingly cynical, depending on which way you looked at it.

Judge Katash, who the previous week had been as astonished as everyone else when the jury had found Marie Laveau not guilty, had now considered Selma’s application for a warrant to impound Cindy’s computers.

Katash knew that three other judges had already turned down this application, and he was sure that they’d had good reason to do so – ‘reason’ in this instance meaning ‘patronage’, of course, though he wasn’t vulgar enough to say so out loud – but things had changed since then. Specifically, there’d been another murder. Cindy’s death was therefore no longer an isolated tragedy; it was, Katash had to assume, connected to the ‘something terrible’ which she’d told Patrese about, and which had also clearly been responsible for taking Rooster’s life.

In the circumstances, Katash understood that law enforcement needed all the information they could get, and therefore he had no hesitation in issuing the warrant, to cover not just Cindy’s computers but all her other work effects as well.

Selma clutched it as though it were the winning ticket in the state lottery.

‘Let’s see how high and mighty Mr Varden is now,’ she said.

Badges and warrant held high like talismans, they went into Varden’s office without waiting to be admitted, leaving sentinel security guards and scrambling secretaries in their wake.

Varden was on the phone. ‘Remember what Joe Zee said,’ he was saying; and that was all Patrese caught before Varden turned toward them in astonishment.

‘I presume this is urgent,’ Varden said, ‘else you would have had the courtesy to knock first, no?’

Patrese handed him the warrant. ‘You said we could come back when we had a warrant. Well, we do. So we have.’

‘I’ll call you back,’ Varden said into the phone. He replaced the receiver and scanned the text of the warrant. ‘Yes. That all seems in order. Cindy’s computers are outside, in the anteroom. I had them boxed up, to save you the trouble.’

‘And her personal items? The warrant covers them too.’

‘They’re there as well. Like I told you before: I have the highest regard for the law enforcement community. It’s my duty, and my pleasure, to give you all the assistance I can.’

Patrese almost smiled. Varden had had plenty of time to wipe the disks and weed out anything incriminating from Cindy’s possessions. His elaborate courtesy was the magnanimity of the victor. Patrese and Selma knew that, and he knew they knew; but still he dared them to call him out on it. The old boy had some style, Patrese thought; but two could play that game.

‘And we appreciate your civic-mindedness, sir,’ Patrese said. ‘It’s an honor to protect and serve such illustrious citizens as yourself.’

Varden acknowledged the comeback with a nod. He was enjoying this.

‘Do let me know if you find anything germane to your inquiries,’ he said. ‘You need any help, call on me, day or night. And I wish you the happiest of weekends.’

Patrese’s cell phone rang when they were still in the elevator on the way down.

It was one of the detectives on loan from Natchez, and they’d found something. That guy Rooster had mentioned in his tape, the doctor gone bad, Toomey Tegge; well, they’d got some stuff on him. He’d had a medical license from the state of Mississippi, but he’d been disbarred a few months back. Not because of anything he’d done in Mississippi; because of something he’d done in Iraq.

Iraq?

Tegge had been a reservist. He’d been called up, done his tour. Cut a long story short, he’d ended up at Abu Ghraib. After the whole prisoner abuse thing had come out, he’d been court-martialed. Failure to provide the expected standards of care to the prisoners. Collusion with the soldiers responsible for the abuse. Covering up the crimes while under direct investigation.

Tegge had received a dishonorable discharge. He’d come back to Natchez, but then skipped town after being disbarred. No one had seen him since.

Patrese ended the call and turned to Selma.

‘Let’s go see Luther.’

It was less than three miles, as the crow flies, from Varden’s office to Luther’s house, but it might as well have been three thousand. Somewhere between the two places, First World seemed to slip into Third.

They were on Lizardi, in the Lower Ninth. Marie Laveau’s turf. Luther’s place was a shotgun house well past its best, if indeed it had ever had one. The old Chevy on bricks in the front yard seemed to have fused itself with the undergrowth.

Patrese and Selma got out of the car. ‘No point locking the doors,’ Patrese said. ‘If someone wants to break in, they’ll break in. Locking the doors is only going to piss them off.’

‘You being serious?’

‘Sort of.’

Patrese rang the bell. A shuffling from inside, and Luther appeared at the door. He was wearing a purple-and-yellow Louisiana State singlet and khaki shorts which looked as they could do with a more frequent washing machine interface than was currently the case.

‘I thought y’all would come back,’ he said, looking neither particularly surprised nor particularly pleased to see them again. ‘What y’all want?’

‘We want to talk to you.’

‘Then talk.’

Three young men were sitting on the bonnet of an orange Camaro a couple of doors down, watching them. That Patrese and Selma were law enforcement was obvious even to a moron.

‘Y’all in trouble again, Luther?’ shouted one of the youths.

‘Either that, or I just won a free cruise,’ Luther shouted back.

The young men laughed. Luther turned back to Selma and Patrese. ‘Maybe you better come inside.’

They followed him in, Luther checking himself in the mirror as he walked past. Patrese didn’t know why Luther bothered; he wasn’t exactly giving Denzel Washington a run for his money right now.

The place stank of beer, pizza, sweat and feet, in no particular order. All the girls who’d ever complained about Patrese’s bachelor habits, he should have brought them here. Luther made Patrese look practically Swiss.

Selma wrinkled her nose. ‘Luther, what the heck happened to you?’

‘We ain’t married no more. So don’t you start naggin’ me, you hear? Ask me what you wanna ask me, then leave me the hell alone.’

‘You ever know a guy called Rooster?’ Patrese asked.

‘Never heard of him.’

‘You didn’t even think about it.’

‘You know someone, or you don’t. I don’t need to think about it.’

‘He was killed last night, maybe early hours of this morning. Killed the same way as Cindy Rojciewicz.’

‘What you want me to say? I didn’t kill Cindy. I didn’t even know she was dead, else I wouldn’t have been enough of a dumbass to come over when you texted me. Now this Rooster guy’s dead too. I didn’t kill him either. We got pretty much the highest murder rate in the nation, or ain’t you noticed?’

‘He wasn’t killed here. He was killed in Natchez.’

The tiniest, briefest alarm behind Luther’s eyes as he shrugged again. ‘What the hell’s this gotta do with me?’

‘Rooster was in Natchez because he was looking for Toomey Tegge.’

No more shrugging. No more nonchalance.

‘I ain’t seen Toomey for a long while,’ Luther said eventually.

‘Not since Abu Ghraib?’

‘Not since Abu Ghraib.’

‘What did he do there?’

‘He got hung out to dry, same as I did.’

‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

‘He did his best.’

‘He ever abuse anyone?’

‘Shit no, man. He tried to help. That guy Faraj, the one I… you know … he got gangrene from his wounds. Toomey saved his life.’

‘How did he do that?’

‘Took his leg off.’

Patrese and Selma looked at each other. Patrese looked back at Luther.

‘As in, amputation?’

‘That’s right. Saved his life.’

‘Luther, we really need to talk to Toomey Tegge.’

‘Like I said, I ain’t seen him since Abu Ghraib.’

‘You’re certain of this?’

‘Shit, man. We don’t have reunions every fuckin’ summer. It wasn’t high school. It’s not some place we’re real fond of, you know?’

‘And you didn’t go to Natchez last night?’

‘No, man. I came back here. The fuck would I be doing in Natchez?’

‘Anyone able to confirm you were here?’

‘I was alone. If I knew I’d need an alibi, I’d have found one.’

No way to prove it either way right now, Patrese thought. See what Forensics came up with. Move on.

‘Do you know Marie Laveau?’

‘Sort of question is that?’

‘Pretty simple one. You know her? Yes or no?’

Luther gestured toward the window. ‘It’s the Lower Ninth. Everyone knows her.’

‘You run drugs for her?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘What do you mean, you’ve no idea?’

‘You think someone like Marie hands the stash out herself, like she’s paying wages on a Friday? Get real. She lives in her big old house on the waterfront, she has control of hundreds of people. She don’t get her own hands dirty.’

‘You ever meet her?’

He shrugged. ‘Coupla times.’

‘But you don’t know her well?’

‘No.’

‘What do people think of her round here?’

‘Honestly?’

‘Honestly.’

‘They love her. Fuckin’ love her, man.’

‘How? Do they know what she does?’

‘Yes they do, and let me tell you something: the Lower Ninth don’t have much, but what it does have is down to her. Schools, day-care centers, libraries, street parties; you name it, it’s her that funds it.’

‘Sure. From drug money.’

‘You think folks round here care ’bout that? Shit, they’d take money from bin Laden if it went to good use. Where else the money gonna come from? City Hall? Uh-uh. Not round here. No big shots come here to see how public funds being spent, so no public funds get spent here. Voodoo economics, 101. Marie Laveau puts her hand in her pocket and her money where her mouth is. There was a mayor of the Lower Ninth, she’d win by a damn street.’

‘Voodoo.’

‘What?’

‘You said “voodoo”. Economics. You ever been to Marie’s voodoo ceremonies?’

Luther snorted. ‘Please. I don’t have no truck with all that mumbo jumbo.’

‘You come across any voodoo stuff at all?’

‘Tourist shops in the Quarter.’

‘Apart from that?’

‘No.’

Selma looked at Patrese. He shook his head: no more questions.

Luther walked them to the door, checking himself in the mirror again on the way.

‘Ask you something?’ Luther said to Patrese, as they stepped on to the porch.

‘Sure.’

‘You ballin’ her?’

Selma’s hand came up so fast that Patrese heard the smack first, right on the fleshy part of Luther’s cheek. Luther pressed his palm against it.

‘That’s assaulting a witness,’ he said to Selma.

‘No. It’s an asshole reminding me why we’re not married any more.’