City of Sins. Daniel Blake

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ