City of Sins. Daniel Blake

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СКАЧАТЬ was past eleven by the time Patrese got home; home being, for the moment at least, a two-bedroom bungalow hard up against the London Avenue Canal in the mixed-race, largely middle-class suburb of Gentilly.

      He’d inherited it from another Bureau guy who’d been transferred to Sacramento. When the lease was up in the fall he’d probably move somewhere nearer the Quarter – where else would a single guy want to be, not just in New Orleans but very possibly the entire world? – but it was fine until then.

      He’d been on the go for sixteen hours, nonstop. It was all he could do to make it to his bedroom without falling over.

      As he brushed his teeth, he thought of what Selma had said about Luther; about the trust she’d put in him, about the standards she set for those she loved, and about the terrible impact when it all failed.

      She liked to come across as a hardass, but she wasn’t really, not deep down. She’d been brave enough to let Luther get in close, properly close.

      Patrese knew it was more than he’d ever done with anyone.

      Friday, July 8th

      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, СКАЧАТЬ