Copyright

Copyright © 2012 by Devon Marshall. All rights reserved worldwide.

No part of this publication may be replicated, redistributed, or given away in any form without the prior written consent of the author/publisher or the terms relayed to you herein.

About The Author

Devon Marshall is the author of ‘The Vampires of Hollywood’ series, Book 1 of which, ‘Dante’s Awakening’, is published by Untreed Reads; and of ‘The Lives and Loves of The Modern Goddess’, available on Amazon Kindle.

Find out more at http://devonmarshallwrites.weebly.com

This book is a revised edition of my novel originally entitled ‘That Old Voodoo Thing’. It has undergone an extensive rewrite and several edits, and it is, I think, a much better book for all that. This is a work of fiction, hence it is populated by fictional characters. Sorry, but any resemblance of those to real people is in your imagination only. All and any mistakes in this book are probably someone else’s fault ( kidding! - they’re definitely mine ).

Thanks to Amanda, and to Tara, for being there; also a big thanks to GeeGee Curtained for pimping my books and for loving her Butterflies!

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Cover Image ãsweet_caramel - Fotolia.com

Voodoo Woman

Seduction and murder in the city of New Orleans.

Once a killer for hire, Willie Rae Flynn turned her back on this profession and now makes her living as a private investigator in the city where the good times always roll. For Flynn, the need to keep her past secret means that she must live a solitary existence in which she denies herself anything but the most fleeting contact with other women.

Then a client is made the victim of a brutal ritual murder and Flynn is drawn into the investigation. Finding herself exploring the dark underbelly of Voodoo that few know exist and which demands that the good times be paid for in blood, Flynn is forced, by the actions of a crazed mambo who thinks she can control the old gods through human sacrifice, to enter into a pact with an FBI agent who hunts her, in order to save the life of the woman she loves but is afraid to have a relationship with.

Table of Contents

Copyright

About The Author

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

EPILOGUE

AFTERWORD

PROLOGUE

New Orleans. August, 2005

A long time ago Willie Rae Flynn had learned that the first rule of life is: shit always happens.

Flynn drove through the watery, darkened streets of the city, a shrieking wind sucking at her Pontiac Trans Am; rain spattered the windshield like handfuls of watery grit thrown by a malicious child. Teeth gritted, knuckles bone-white on the steering wheel, she rocketed the car through the deserted intersection of two streets as a garish pink umbrella flew over the hood and scooted away through the opposite side of the intersection.

“ Come on, come on,” she muttered, ducking her head over the steering wheel and twisting it this way and that, peering through the rain-smeared windshield for the house she sought. The hurricane had taken out much of the power in this part of the city, making Flynn’s task that much more difficult. She brought the vehicle to a lurching halt at the curb, grabbed a cat transporter and a heavy-duty flashlight from the passenger seat, and forced the driver’s door open against the screaming wind that wanted to both rip it from her grasp and slam it back on her all at once.

On the street, the wind sucked the breath from her lungs and flattened the clothing against her skin. Needles of slat- and mud-tasting rain whipped into her face. A plastic garbage can went bumping across a lawn, chased by the torn-down signage from a corner store; it seemed like everything was in fucking motion tonight.

Many houses in the projects had strange esoteric designs painted on the doors: veves. Signs used to call for assistance from the Loa, the gods of the Voodoo pantheon. Flynn glanced at these crude drawings as she jogged up the sidewalk, and shivered involuntarily. Her knowledge of Voodoo and the Loa was not extensive by any means, but she could recognize the more common veves that she saw on many of the doors. There was Baron Samedi, the keeper of cemeteries and protector of the dead; and Papa Legba, the chief Loa guide who interceded with the rest of the pantheon for favors.

The logical place for a scared cat to hide out would be beneath the porch, Flynn reasoned, and she veered across the front yard of her friends’ home, hunkering down in front of the latticed sides of the porch and switching on the flashlight. As the powerful beam pierced the darkness underneath the porch, something small and boneless squirted away from the intrusion of the light, reminding Flynn that scared cats were not the only creatures liked to hide out beneath porches. She gritted her teeth; the very last thing she needed was to get snake-bit whilst trying to rescue this damned moggy.

“ Here, kitty. Here, Charlie. Come to Flynn. There’s a nice pussy.”

‘Charlie’ was kind of a stupid name for a cat, in Flynn’s opinion. But it wasn’t her cat, and therefore none of her business what its name was. She called on the cat again, this time rewarded with a faint “ Meow!” that she only just heard above the demented howl of the wind. A pair of yellow eyes glinted in the flashlight’s beam.

“ That’s it,” Flynn coaxed the scared feline. “ Come on, kitty. Come to Flynn. I won’t hurt you. Gonna take you back to your family. They miss you.”

The cat approached one cautious step at a time until it caught a whiff of the open can of cat food Flynn had placed inside the transporter, and then it shot the rest of the way forward, dived inside the plastic crate. Food trumped fear every time. Flynn slapped the metal gate shut. Charlie looked out at her through the bars, his mouth crammed with tasty, meaty chunks.  “ Okay, you little fucker, let’s get you reunited with your family,” Flynn told him.  “ Then maybe I can get my own dumb-ass self to higher ground.” She ran back to the Trans Am, slid the transporter containing Charlie onto the rear seat, and hurried around to the driver’s side. Somewhere nearby glass shattered and metal squealed as the wind hurled something large through a window.

Flynn had driven less than a block from her friends’ home when she saw a car stopped at the side of the road. A telephone pole had fallen across the hood, pinning the vehicle. From amidst the twisted wreckage of metal and wood, steam belched out of a broken radiator. A woman in a yellow rain slicker and gumboots was lifting stuff out of the open trunk. She turned as Flynn drew to a halt alongside and wound down her window.

“ Help y’all?”

The woman narrowed a look at her. Even in the midst of the worst hurricane to hit New Orleans in decades, people still treated a Good Samaritan with suspicion. It made Flynn a little sad, but she also realized it was a realistic survival mechanism; not everybody was such a good Samaritan.

The woman seemed to decide that Flynn intended her no harm. She gestured toward the row of shotgun houses on the same side of the street. “ My friends - I heard they were stranded and came to see what I could do. Some help, eh?” Her cheeks pinked inside of the slicker hood.

“ If y’all need a ride, I got room,” Flynn offered. She smiled. “ So long as you don’t mind sharing with a cat.”

The woman hesitated, but only for a moment, before nodding gratefully. “ Thanks. Let me just get this stuff -” and she bent once more into the open trunk.

Flynn got out, telling Charlie to ‘stay put’, like the cat had a choice. She stepped up to the open trunk as the woman in the slicker hefted a camera bag and a laptop case from inside.

“ Let me take that for you.”

The woman glanced around at her. Flynn saw large dark eyes, and a wide, sensuous mouth. Even windswept and soaked, dressed in the unflattering slicker, she was breathtakingly attractive.

“ I won’t steal ’em,” Flynn promised. She cocked a curious look at the camera bag. “ I never was much use with cameras anyway. And I got my own laptop.”

That earned her a laugh. The woman also handed both camera bag and laptop case to her before following Flynn to the Trans Am. She didn’t bother to close the trunk of her own vehicle. That would have been like shutting the barn door after the horses - and all the cattle, too - had bolted. “ I’m a reporter,” she explained as Flynn popped the rear door. “ With the Orleans Weekly. Dana Jordan, by the way.”

“ Flynn. I read your paper a lot. I like the reporting.”

“ You and the other three people then. Flynn? Is that a first name or a second name?”

“ It’s Willie Rae Flynn. People just call me Flynn.”

“ Ah. And your cat, does he have a name?” 

“ Charlie. But he isn’t mine. I came to rescue him for some friends.”

Dana Jordan’s eyebrows rose. “ That’s noble of you.”

Flynn shrugged. “ They’re good friends.”

As she started to close the door, Flynn noticed Charlie move to the back of his transporter and crouch low, ears flattening to his head, yellow eyes wide and bright. A low hissing emanated from his throat.

“ I don’t think he likes sharing his space with my gear,” Dana Jordan remarked with a smile.

Flynn stared at the cat.

Every human being has a ‘lizard brain’, a remnant of the species’ origins. It is the part of the brain where the primal instincts still reside, albeit buried beneath the many civilizing layers of cerebral cortex which humans have evolved, and as such it is the part of the brain where the deepest, most primal instincts lie. As Flynn stared into the alarmed eyes of the cat, her own lizard-brain began to scream a warning at her. Uncertain why, knowing only that she was agitated and instinctively aware that speed was suddenly of the essence, she slammed the door and turned to the reporter. “ We need to get out of here.”

“ What’s wrong?”

Flynn started to say “ I’m not sure - ” but a sound like an explosion ripping through the night drowned her words, and dried the saliva up in her throat.

Dana jerked a look at her. “ What was that?” Charlie began to yowl like a thing possessed and the reporter‘s frightened gaze pin-balled momentarily between the rear window of the car and Flynn’s clenched expression.

“ Get in the car. Now.”

Every fiber in Flynn’s body felt as though it were vibrating with an invisible electrical current; a pulse beat in back of her dry throat. She jerked her chin in the direction of the levee that followed the snaking course of the Mississippi. “ The levee is breaching. It’s happening - everything the government was warned about.”

Dana’s face became impossibly pale. “ Christ, I thought that was just - talk.”

A second explosion boomed through the night.

“ We need to go,” Flynn insisted.

Without another word, they both dived into the car and Flynn stepped on the gas, her gaze rising automatically to the rearview mirror as they shot forward. Hot, tight patches of fear blossomed beneath her eyes as she saw a wall of water bearing down on them from the top of the street.

“ Shit always happens,” she muttered.

CHAPTER ONE

New Orleans. April, 2010

One morning Willie Rae Flynn woke up and simply realized that killing people was no longer how she wanted to make her living, that it was time for her to get out of the hired assassin game.

Unlike other professions, where retirement meant a golden handshake and an embarrassing party thrown by one’s soon-to-be erstwhile colleagues, one did not simply walk away from being a hired assassin: there was a protocol had to be followed. Flynn contacted certain people to this end, and with their assistance she set about erasing all trace of her life as a hired killer and creating a new personal history for herself. She left New York where she had been based for over a decade, and headed to New Orleans, the city in which she was born and raised. In New Orleans she purchased an office and an apartment in the French Quarter. It seemed a fitting spot for Flynn to work and reside; the existence of the French Quarter was based in as much fakery and artifice as Flynn’s own. The architecture wasn’t French, it was Spanish, and although many of the buildings had the appearance of great antiquity, none had been constructed later than the latter half of the eighteenth century. New Orleans in general, and the Vieux Carré in particular, were a triumph of smoke and mirrors. Flynn could well appreciate the irony in that.

She applied for a private investigator’s license and a permit to carry a concealed weapon, both of which required a police check. Flynn was not unduly concerned. The New Orleans Police Department, pre-Katrina, were notoriously lax and open to looking the other way for the right amount of cash pressed into the proper hands. Someone whose previous profession had been, to all intents and purposes, a ‘security consultant’, someone who had cash to spare, was a shoo-in to get both her PI’s license and all of the necessary gun permits in such a city.

Then, just a few months later, the wrath of a hell-bat named Hurricane Katrina visited itself upon the Gulf coast. Flynn stayed on in New Orleans throughout the hurricane and the catastrophic levee breaches, and when the shock died down afterwards and people began looking to rebuild, work suddenly was pouring her way from over-stretched insurance companies. It was often the aim of these companies to deprive their clients of a few dollars in compensation. People whose homes and livelihoods, and in many cases, their loved ones, had been lost or destroyed in the hurricane, found themselves locked in interminable, petty legal battles with insurance companies unwilling to pay out. Flynn, disinterested in helping the insurance companies to screw their clients, worked instead with the people to get their pay outs.

At times she would pause to ask herself whether this desire to help improve the lives of underdogs were not symptomatic of a deeper and more complex desire to atone for those lives she had snuffed out in her previous profession?

During one of her first non-insurance cases, Flynn made contact with an NOPD detective named Pierce Boudreau. An attractive woman with skin the color of café au lait and dark, flashing eyes, Boudreau was born and raised in the tough, hardscrabble Lower Ninth Ward, giving her that much in common with Flynn, whose origins lay in the equally tough Irish Channel. That Boudreau was black did not make her a minority in the NOPD: that she was a woman made her a minority there. At least until Katrina changed the game. With the NOPD down to forty percent of its ideal working capacity in the wake of the hurricane, the brass were forced to reassess hiring policies and to start promoting more female officers through the ranks. Boudreau had made detective in 2004, pre-Katrina, but she still caught a little of her male colleagues’ resentment now and then. The attraction was instant between them.

“ I know there’s something about you isn’t quite right, Flynn,” Boudreau said at the beginning of their acquaintance. “ But it’s okay. I’m not going to ask you to explain anything to me. Not yet anyway. Maybe some other time.”

“ What makes you so sure that I’ll answer your questions honestly if you do ask them?” Flynn wanted to know.

Boudreau considered that, then simply shrugged. “ I don’t know. I’ll just have to trust that you will, I guess.”

Possibly because Boudreau had a steady girlfriend and no apparent desire to screw that relationship up, Flynn found spending time with her to be the kind of fun and uncomplicated that she handled best. She preferred to avoid those deeply intimate, personal situations where the other person thought they had the right to know everything about you.

On a mild, wet spring day five years since Flynn had arrived in New Orleans, she sat in her office awaiting a client, idly tossing wadded up balls of paper at the ceiling, her mind drifting from thoughts of Pierce Boudreau to thoughts about Dana Jordan. Ever since their first meeting had almost been their last when the London Avenue levee breached and a murderous wall of water chased them for nearly six blocks before they made it to safety on higher ground, Flynn and the reporter had enjoyed a flirtatious friendship. There might have been something more than just friendship developed, had Flynn allowed it. Every time she was around the reporter Flynn would start to feel all rucked up inside and dangerous notions would enter her head. For five years she had resisted acting upon those notions because she was afraid that the strength of her own feelings would override even the ingrained caution of keeping people at arm’s length, lest they discover her past. But it wasn’t getting any easier.

With a sigh, she glanced at her wrist watch, wondering how much longer she ought to give this client before she called it a day. The woman had telephoned three days ago, in something of a tizzy, pleading with Flynn to find her daughter, missing for just over one week. The police had been of very little help, inclining to the belief that the girl had run away from home. Flynn agreed to meet with the distraught mother, although she didn’t expect to be able to do much. It did seem likely that the girl had run away of her own volition, however much her mother wanted to believe otherwise.

Flynn had just decided to chalk the client up as a no-show and was preparing to head out to grab a coffee and a beignet, when the telephone on her desk rang. She leaned over the desk and snatched up the receiver.

“ It’s me,” Detective Pierce Boudreau said. “ Y’all might want to come see something.”

“ Where are you?” Flynn asked.

“ I’m at a vacant lot corner of Law and Desire. And I’m not alone. There’s a woman with me. Unfortunately she’s dead.”

“ I’m sorry to hear that. What’d you know about how she got that way?”

“ Not a whole lot as yet. We found her pocketbook discarded in a Dumpster nearby. There was a slip of paper in it has your name and address on it.”

A bad feeling took hold of Flynn. She tried to rein it in, to tell herself it was a coincidence, but then Boudreau spoiled that by adding, “  Her driver’s license was in the pocketbook too. Name on it is Jeannette Larue. That mean anything to you?”

“ Yeah - ” Flynn sighed. “ She’s a client - was a client, I guess. She was supposed to come see me today. I just figured her for a no-show.”

“ She was coming to see you about her missing daughter?”

“ Ah, you know about that.”

“ Yes I do. I’ll see you here soon then, Flynn, shall I?”

“ I’m on my way.” Flynn hung up, blew her cheeks out in another sigh. It wasn’t a common occurrence for her clients to turn up dead when they should’ve been in her office, and Flynn didn’t much like that it had happened now.

 Charlie the cat leaped onto the desk and sprawled in front of her, purring softly for attention. Flynn gave him a scratch behind the ears. She had inherited the cat when his owners left the city after Katrina. “ Y’all will have to amuse yourself for a while,” she told him. He pressed his head into her palm and purred again in response. “ Your adopted momma has to go out. Seems that my client went and got herself murdered. It’s like I keep saying, Charlie - shit always happens.”

Charlie said  “ Miaow!”  but whether he was agreeing with her or not, Flynn couldn’t tell.

CHAPTER TWO

Desire Street never had been what even the most unscrupulous realtor would chance to describe as a ‘des res’. Since Katrina had ripped through the city, Desire had been turned into a weed- and rubble-infested ruin. The narrow roadways were buckled and cracked, empty lots punctuating the rows of dilapidated shotgun houses and FEMA trailers. Everywhere was knee-high grass and weeds, strewn with garbage and clotted with dried river mud. The corner lot of Desire and Law was the perfect place to dump a body. 

Flynn pulled up behind an NOPD cruiser and the gray unmarked Coroners Office van. In spite of the inclemency of the weather, a knot of looky-loos had gathered behind the crime-scene tape, to exchange misinformation and to sneer at the efforts of the cops. Trust in authority was often in short supply here. Detective Boudreau and her partner, Detective Waylon Murray, stood inside the tape, in conversation with the Coroner’s assistants. The detectives wore dark-colored plastic rain ponchos with NOPD stenciled on the backs in white lettering. The sour expression on Boudreau’s face, and the little trails of water running down her forehead and nose, suggested that the ponchos were not doing an effective enough job of keeping the wet out. Flynn flipped up the hood of her own waterproof jacket and jogged across the lot to join the detectives.

Boudreau greeted her with a dour nod. Waylon lifted his upper lip in a gesture that could have been a sneer or an attempt at a smile - with Waylon it was often hard to tell the difference. Flynn ignored him, concentrating on Boudreau who made a much more pleasant something to concentrate upon.

“ Thanks for coming out, Flynn. Y’all haven’t eaten lately, I hope?”

Flynn twitched a humorless smile. “ Not so lately that it’ll be a problem.”

The body had been left laying out in the open, amidst some high weeds. Rain and depredation by small animals had probably destroyed any forensic evidence, at least on the outside of the body. Flynn had seen her share of death and bloody violence, had dealt out much of it, but she still had to steel herself to look at the ruin of the human being at her feet. Jeannette Larue’s left hand had been hacked off at the wrist, her right foot just above the ankle, ragged edges of white bone standing out starkly against the greenish marbled flesh. She also had been gutted, everything inside pulled out.

“ Dear God,” Flynn muttered, pressing the back of one hand against her mouth.

Boudreau gave a grim little shake of her head. The dreadlocks that she kept her hair done in clicked together beneath the loose hood of her poncho. “ I don’t think He made a whole lot to do with this. Forensic is a bust, obviously. This wasn’t the kill site either - too clean. Coroner isn’t saying anything definite yet, but he was willing to estimate that she’s been dead for between twelve to twenty-four hours. Y’all see this?”

Flynn looked to where Boudreau was pointing, noticed the crudely fashioned symbol carved into the dead woman’s flesh just above the rise of her left breast. She looked up at Boudreau in surprise and consternation. “ It’s a veve,” she said and the detective nodded. The cutting was crude, the edges of the wound ragged and bloated, discolored with putrefaction, so that Flynn had difficulty discerning which Loa the veve belonged to. “ Papa Legba,” she guessed.

Boudreau nodded again. “ That’d be my take, yeah.”

“ But what the hell is his sign doing on - on this?” Flynn asked.

Boudreau pooched out her lips, shrugged. “ Someone either is using bad ju-ju, or that’s what they want us to think. When did she contact you?”

“ Three days ago. The way she told it to me, her daughter isn’t the sort of girl would just up and vanish for even a day, let alone over a week. Her concern seemed genuine, so I told her I‘d hear her out. Who found the body?”

“ Couple kids out hunting for scrap. They don’t know shit about how it got here though.” Boudreau gave Flynn a sour-eyed look. “ Little creeps think it’s cool that they found a naked, fucked-up dead woman. You believe that shit?”

Flynn shrugged. Yeah, she believed it. And not just of kids today either. They would have been hyped themselves, if they had found a body when they were kids. 

Boudreau sucked in her lower lip, frowned briefly into middle distance. “ We’ll recheck the missing person report Mrs Larue filed, of course. Maybe we missed something.”

Flynn nodded. She stepped aside as the Coroner’s assistants began loading the victim into a black plastic body bag.

“ Y’all want to accompany me to the dead woman’s home?” Boudreau asked, diverting her attention.

“ I’m kind of in this whether I want to be or not.”

Boudreau tilted her a wry look. “ That you are.”

In life Jeannette Larue had resided in Kenner, one of the small cities which satellite New Orleans, making up the greater Orleans Parish. Boudreau called ahead to the Kenner PD to have one of their detectives meet with them at the Larue house. 

“ What in the world was a white middle-class woman from Kenner doing all the way over on Desire?”

Flynn shook her head as she made a right turn at an intersection onto a street lined with ancient live oaks. Leafy branches met and intertwined above the centre of the road to form a short tunnel, sunlight shining through the rain-spackled leaves turned a brief glassy green. Outside of the Larue home, a Kenner PD cruiser was parked at the curb, and a tall, rangy guy in his mid-fifties leaned on the hood, smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone. He put both away when Flynn and Boudreau pulled up.

“ Detective Boudreau?” He looked at Flynn.

She shook her head, jerked a thumb at Boudreau. Malone extended his hand to Boudreau first, then to Flynn, introducing himself as he did so. “ Sam Malone. So the body you found…it really is Jeannette Larue then?”

Boudreau nodded at the same time as she shook the detective’s hand. “ I’m afraid so. Pierce Boudreau. This here’s Willie Rae Flynn. She’s a PI. Mrs Larue was scheduled to meet with her today about her daughter.”

The Kenner detective eyed Flynn. “ Anthea, yeah. Been gone for a week,” he said and Flynn nodded. Malone added, “ Missing daughter and dead mother. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m getting a bad feeling about this.”

The Larue house was a camelback shotgun that looked as though it had been recently given a new coat of powder-blue paint. Malone proceeded Boudreau and Flynn to the front door, used a lock-picking tool to open that up.

“ Did you know Mrs Larue and her daughter, Detective?” Boudreau inquired.

Malone shook his head. “ Not personally, no. I did talk to the neighbors, to some of Anthea’s school friends, and to the folks they both went to church with. Everyone had the same good stuff to say about both women. All I’ve heard about Anthea is what a good girl she was, how into school and church she was. But you know, sometimes it’s the quiet ones you gotta watch, eh?”

“ Teenage girls. Nothing more unpredictable,” Boudreau agreed.

Inside, the house held that over-warm, just-going-stale smell indicated it had not been aired out for at least a day or two. As with all traditional shotgun houses, the front door opened directly into the living room, with each successive room placed directly behind the other, all connected by a series of doors and narrow hallways. A second floor had been added at the rear to afford two more bedrooms and a second bathroom.

“ So, y’all have any idea of what you’re looking for here?” Malone inquired.

Boudreau grimaced. “ Anything that might connect these two God-fearing women to Voodoo.”

Malone’s eyebrows did a quick jig up and down his forehead. “ Well, have at it then,” he invited them, and he took a seat on the couch, picked up a magazine from the coffee table.

The rooms on the first floor yielded very little of interest. Jeannette Larue appeared to have been a proud housekeeper - there was hardly a speck of dust and nothing out of place.

“ I’d go mad living in this kind of perfection,” Flynn muttered as she opened drawers in the kitchen. Boudreau, her head and shoulders poked inside the refrigerator, grunted in response.

“ It’s too neat, if you ask me,” the detective added darkly. Flynn gave her an arch look and Boudreau shrugged. “ I mean, who lives in a place as neat and tidy as this - it makes me itchy just to look at it. Don’t tell me y’all think this is natural?”

Flynn laughed, shrugging as she followed Boudreau into the bathroom. “ To each their own, Pierce.”

The contents of people’s medicine cabinets often revealed a surprising amount about them, but the most exciting thing in the Larue medicine cabinet was a tube of antiseptic gel.

Anthea’s bedroom on the second floor was also astonishingly neat, prompting Boudreau to further complaint. “ What fucking teenage girl keeps her bedroom as neat as this?”

“ The God-fearing, church-going, good girl that everyone says Anthea is?” Flynn suggested.

There was nothing at all to be found in the Larue home that suggested a Voodoo connection, and Flynn and Boudreau returned to the living room with no further insight into the death of Jeannette Larue. Malone glanced up from his reading as they entered.

“ So did y’all find what you were looking for - roosters ready for blood sacrifice or whatever?”

Boudreau snorted, shook her head. “ Y’all mentioned that Mrs Larue and her daughter are churchgoers?”

Malone nodded. “ They attend the church over on Oklahoma Avenue. George Petersen is the reverend there.”

“ How about a Mr Larue - ?” Boudreau worked her eyebrows. “ I don’t see any signs of a man’s presence around this house. There’re no dirty socks lying on the floor and the toilet lid is down.”

Even Malone had to smile at that. Closing the magazine and dropping it back on the table, he shook his head. “ Far as I know there hasn’t been a Mr Larue since 1999. Anthea’s father died in a car accident in June of that year.”

“ Uh huh. Any mention of boyfriends, either Mrs Larue’s or Anthea’s?”

Malone shook his head again. “ Mrs Larue told us that her daughter was too busy with school to be bothered with boys. That’s why she was convinced Anthea hadn’t just run off to be with some boyfriend.”

Boudreau’s phone rang and she excused herself to talk on the front porch. Flynn leaned up against the wall by the window, arms loosely folded across her chest, and picked a spot in middle distance to stare at. Detective Malone made no effort to talk to her, and she returned the favor by ignoring him, too. It wasn’t that hard. A few moments later, Boudreau poked her head into the house. “ That was Waylon. Seems the boneheads who took Mrs Larue’s initial missing person report were so damn convinced that Anthea bugged out to be with her boyfriend that they only did the most cursory of investigations.”

“ And people think the NOPD don’t care,” Flynn said wonderingly.

Boudreau gave her a filthy look but didn’t offer any argument. Instead she sighed and said, “ I guess we’re just going to have to do what the boneheads didn’t do, and we can start by talking to Reverend Petersen.” 

Reverend George Petersen met with Boudreau and Flynn in the tiny rectory of his church where they found him going over some ledgers. He gave them an easy, friendly smile as he invited them to sit down. 

“ How can I help you, Detectives?”

Boudreau pointed to herself. “ I’m Detective Boudreau. NOPD. This is Willie Rae Flynn. She’s not a detective.”

The reverend’s gaze flicked between them. Then he said, “ New Orleans? I rather assumed you were with Kenner PD?”

Boudreau shook her head. “ I’m sorry, I should’ve said that we’re investigating a homicide occurred in New Orleans. The victim was from here in Kenner.”

The reverend began to look worried, leaning forward with his hands flat upon the blotter on his desk, his gaze intent upon Boudreau. “ Someone from my congregation.” He made it a statement, not a question but Boudreau nodded in the affirmative anyway.

“ The victim was a Mrs Jeannette Larue. Are you familiar with her?”

Reverend Petersen’s expression collapsed and took on that stunned, hammered quality of incredible shock. His mouth worked a few times soundlessly before he managed to speak again. “ Of course, yes, I know Jeannette. She’s a member of my congregation. Oh my - ” his fingers clenched on the blotter, their tips turning bloodless white, and for a moment he squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again, tears glistened at the corners. “ Jeannette, oh no….No. But how could she…please, Detective, tell me what happened to her?”

“ When was the last time you saw Mrs Larue?” Boudreau asked, ignoring Reverend Petersen’s question for the moment. He stared at her.

“ Uh, I would say maybe three or four days ago. Detective, please - tell me what happened to her?”

Boudreau gave him the bare facts, leaving out the details, and not just because they were grisly; until they had reason to believe otherwise, everyone was a suspect in Jeannette Larue’s murder, including the Reverend Petersen. His face became an ashy grey color as Boudreau spoke, and he moved his right hand to a simple silver cross that he wore on a chain around his neck, fingering it tightly.

“ Oh Lord, how terrible. Oh dear - ” suddenly he frowned. “ What about Anthea? Jeannette’s daughter - has she been found yet? Does she know about her mother?”

“ Anthea Larue’s whereabouts have not yet been ascertained.” Boudreau let Reverend Petersen have a moment or two to digest this news before she tilted a questioning look at him. “ We were wondering if you might have any ideas about Anthea’s disappearance?”

He shook his head. “ No. I’m sorry, I don’t. I was shocked when Jeannette told me that Anthea had lied about going to visit with friends. Anthea is also a member of our church. She started coming to our Sunday School when she was four years old - ” he made a wistful smile. “ But that isn’t what you want to know, Detective, is it? I’m sorry. Anthea is such a nice, polite, well brought up young lady. A credit to her mama. She’s never been in any trouble that I know about. That’s why I was so stunned when Jeannette told me she’d lied - it just did not seem like something that the Anthea I know would do.”

“ I see.” Boudreau did not sound as though she saw at all. “ Do you know if Anthea had a boyfriend ? Maybe someone she met here at church?”

Reverend Petersen gave a rueful smile. “ Detective, Anthea is a very goal-directed girl. She has set her sights on doing well in school and going to college. She wants to become a nurse. I don’t think she feels that she has time for boyfriends at the moment.”

“ But you wouldn’t know for sure if she was seeing anyone?”

“ No, Detective, I suppose I would not…” Petersen hesitated, reconsidered for a moment before adding, “ She certainly wasn’t seeing anyone from this church or neighborhood anyway. That I would know. Otherwise, well, maybe I don’t know as much as I think.”

Boudreau asked then if Reverend Petersen knew whether Jeannette Larue had ever been involved with Voodoo, or had any problems with anyone who had connections to Voodoo. He looked shocked at the mere suggestion.

“ I have never heard Jeannette speak of Voodoo, not ever at all,” he declared. His watery gaze darted between the women, lingering for a moment on Flynn, his lips parting a little way and then closing tight again, as though he had been about to say something only to change his mind at the last moment. He let his gaze switch back to Boudreau as she spoke to him again.

“ Reverend, do you know of any reason that Jeannette Larue would be in the area of Desire Street?”

“ Desire Street?” he echoed. Surprise widened his eyes. Reverend Petersen was having a day full of surprises, not one of them good. “ I can’t imagine what would take Jeannette there, no. I’m sure she didn’t know anyone from that area either.”

Boudreau nodded. She started to rise from her seat, and Flynn followed suit. “ I think that will be all for now. Thank you for your time, Reverend,” she said.

“ Yes. Yes, of course…anything else I can do - ”

“ We’ll be sure to let y’all know, sir.”

They were almost to the door when he spoke up again. “ Detective, I should tell you that Jeannette has no family other than her daughter.”

Boudreau and Flynn hesitated as Reverend Petersen gave them both a sad little smile. “ I should like to be the one to claim the body - if that could be arranged? The poor woman ought to have a decent burial, and I doubt Anthea will be able to cope on her own.”

Assuming they ever found Anthea Larue. Or if they did, that she was still alive. Neither Boudreau nor Flynn voiced these doubts to the reverend, however. Boudreau simply nodded to his request. “ I’ll see that the relevant people are made aware, sir, and have someone call to let you know when the body can be collected.”

In the car, Boudreau huffed out a long breath. “ We need to talk to those friends again, see if they can’t shed some light on what good little girl Anthea was really up to. Goal-directed…since when did teenagers become goal-directed, huh?”

Flynn gave her a sideways smirk. “ What? Y’all weren’t directed by your goals when you were a teenager, Pierce?”

“ Directed by my hormones maybe. So, what about you, Willie Rae, were you a goal-directed sort of teenager?”

The smirk vanished from Flynn’s lips. She felt her mouth tighten instead into a hard line. “ I don’t reckon I had goals, no. Some well developed survival instincts, but nothing you’d be likely to call a goal.”

Boudreau let the subject drop. “ The good Reverend Petersen was keeping something back,” she stated instead. Flynn shrugged, not agreeing, just acknowledging Boudreau’s right to her opinion. “ I’m telling you that he was holding back. I hate it when people keep things back. It means I have to get all tough on their asses.”

“ Oh, and like you don’t enjoy a single moment of that?”

Boudreau shrugged. “ Yeah, okay. Maybe I enjoy it a little.”

CHAPTER THREE

The Loa were with her. They entered her fleshly body, took possession of it as they also took possession of her soul. Their voices whispered inside her head, telling her things that no ordinary human being should ever know. But she was not ordinary, not anymore, because she had been chosen to do the bidding of the Old Ones.

The thick, sweet smell of incense hung in the air, mingled with the acrid scent of burning herbs and roots. A series of flambeaux attached to the walls illuminated in an eerie red glow detailed paintings of rituals. Oily smoke drifted through the flames, casting hugely deformed shadows upon the walls. The heat from the torches combined with the heat generated by the mambo’s naked, writhing body to create an atmosphere of wet, abandoned, animal sensuality.

Skin slick with sweat and glistening red in the torchlight, the mambo danced, her eyes flashing and her hair a whirling tangle around her head. As she danced, she cried out to the Loa, “ Tell me, oh Ogun! Erzulie! Papa Legba!! Tell me what it is that the Old Ones wish me to do?”

In voices harsh and guttural, they spoke to her, and she listened to them. Their presences swirled through her body and soul, making her dance and contort herself into ferocious shapes. They encouraged her to touch herself in a lewd manner, and to sing in a language she had never learned.

Ogun was in an especially frisky mood tonight. A blood sacrifice had been made, and Ogun, as a warrior, reveled in bloodshed. He showed his appreciation in the only way that he knew how - by making violently passionate love to the mambo. His ardor left her dazed and shaken, but also delightfully satiated. Then Erzulie, the Loa of sensual love and femininity, and Ogun’s occasional companion, demanded her turn at the human vessel and so the sensual dance began all over again.

Afterward, the mambo dropped to her knees, flung back her head until the muscles and veins in her neck stood out as cords, and she cried, “ Yes! It will be done!”

And then it was over. The Loa departed, their message delivered, their purpose served. The mambo’s followers were ushered from the temple by her trusted acolytes and the mambo herself retired to rest.

Most Voodoo practitioners were never so privileged as to make contact with the ancient gods. They were too afraid to do what was necessary to open up the gateways of communication. But the mambo had long ago overcome her fears and aversions to what the Loa asked of her, and for this unswerving desire to serve she expected to be rewarded with such riches and power as could only be dreamed of by most people.

The Old Ones awaited the next sacrifice.

CHAPTER FOUR

Anthea Larue’s friends - Danielle O’Connor and Mae Fouchette - were typical giggling, whispering, eye-rolling high school girls, both of whom were fond of uttering “ What-evah!” at any opportunity. They were also fascinated to talk to a real-life detective and a private investigator, although neither had much of use to add to the investigation.

No, they had no clue that Anthea intended to lie to her mama about coming to New Orleans to visit with them.

“ If we had, we’d have, like, told her it was bad deal,” Danielle declared, wide-eyed.

No, they didn’t think Anthea had a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend, Mae added, and both girls giggled. But she had mentioned a boy whom she was interested in.

“ He goes to our school. She never told us his name though. Her mama is, like super-strict and kind of religious, and she wouldn’t have liked Anthea being into boys,” Mae added, also wide-eyed. She blinked at Flynn. “ So, like, do you get to carry a gun?”

“ No. I’m an expert with Ninja stars,” Flynn told her deadpan.

As they walked back to Flynn’s car, Boudreau rolled her eyes in imitation of the teenage girls. “ So sorry we didn’t have, like, Brad Pitt and Jake Gyllenhall for them.”

Flynn snickered. “ You’re showing your age there, Pierce. Isn’t Brad Pitt kind of yesterday’s news since he’s been hanging with Angelina?”

“ What-evah,” Boudreau mimicked.

Flynn dropped the detective back at the police station. Getting out of the car, Boudreau inquired if she and Flynn might get together later? “ Carol’s mama is sick again, so she’s taken leave from work to go stay with her in Baton Rouge.”

Carol was Boudreau’s steady girlfriend. Carol worked in a bank, cried at romantic comedies, and on weekends she liked to jog on Lakeshore Drive with her friends. Boudreau, on the other hand, listened to Jellyroll Morton and thought rom-coms were for brain-dead teenage girls. They were opposites, which sometimes made Boudreau wonder what in hell they were doing together at all. It would have made Flynn wonder, too, had she given a damn.

“ Are y’all lonely?” Flynn smirked.

The detective sighed, shook her head as she reared out of the car. “ Fuck you, Flynn,” she said.

“ Call me when you get off duty!” Flynn shouted after her.

The door may have slammed on Boudreau’s response, but Flynn could easily guess what it was. She gunned the engine and pulled away fast, still laughing.

The best decision Dana Jordan had ever made was to leave the Times-Picayune and go to work on the Orleans Weekly. She loved the personal feel of the smaller paper, the camaraderie that was often missing from a big paper where everybody competed for the by-line might win them the next Pulitzer. Her editor on the Weekly was Sy Lehane, a newspaper veteran who’d spent nearly forty years in the business. Starting out as a floor-sweeper in the printing room of a Louisiana daily, he’d moved up through the ranks from cub reporter to become a two-time Pulitzer winner with the Times-Picayune. Sy was smart, worldly, funny, and he had a nose for the best stories and the people who would make the best reporters. And just in case anyone got the idea he was too perfect, he dressed everyday like the only place he shopped was the Goodwill store.

Today, the editor’s sartorial ensemble included an elderly knitted sweater in a shade of shit-brown, and a pair of saggy-assed, faded tan corduroy pants, which put together made him look like an animated feedbag. After lunch, he strolled into Dana’s little cubicle on the main floor of the downtown Weekly office, mug of chicory coffee in one hand, Marlboro cigarette in the other spilling ash onto his sweater, and helped himself to a perch on her desk. Chicory coffee was one Southern habit that Dana had never been able to acquire. She’d just about got used to the smell of it.

“ Hey, cher. How’s my best reporter?”

Dana leaned back in her chair and tilted her head to eye the sheet of fax paper stuck beneath the editor’s arm. “ I’m good, Sy. What’cha got there?”

Sy handed the sheet to her. “ Got this from a source in the coroner’s office. They have an interesting body. Woman. Murdered. Found over on Desire.”

Desire was a bad area. Dead bodies washed up there with a depressing frequency. Dealers shot each other. Addicts knifed each other for a fix and then they OD’d on the same. Prostitutes were tossed away like so much human garbage by johns who had gotten a little too rough with them. Since Katrina there had been increasing gang activity on Desire, too. Dana turned the sheet over, looked at it, and grimaced. It was a morgue shot, taken as part of the official documentation of the body, and it showed the torso of a woman who had been badly cut up. This was an unusual level of violence - even for Desire, Dana thought.

“ Has she been - gutted?”

Sy nodded. “ Gutted like a fish, my source says. Had some strange Voodoo shit carved on her chest too. One of those things, signs, whaddya call ’em?”

“ Veves,” Dana supplied, letting one eyebrow twitch upwards. Sy pointed his cigarette at her.

“ Uh huh. That’s it.”

The carving on the woman’s chest could just about be made out in the grainy black-and-white shot. Dana, whose knowledge of Voodoo was not extensive, squinted and frowned, turning the sheet this way and that in an attempt to make sense of what she was seeing. “ People just never quit coming up with god-awful things to do to one another, do they?” Dana looked up at Sy again. “ Who’s the detective in charge?”

“ Pierce Boudreau,” he replied.

Dana and Detective Pierce Boudreau had a history between them - not a particularly friendly history. They had clashed once over Dana’s coverage of a case back in her Times-Picayune days. Not being one for forgiving and forgetting, Boudreau had since gone out of her way to be uncooperative with the reporter. Her animosity was made all that much worse by Dana’s friendship with Willie Rae Flynn. Boudreau and Flynn were involved in an affair which Dana suspected the detective took more seriously than did Flynn.

Not that Willie Rae Flynn seemed to take their relationship as anything other than friendship, despite Dana’s certainty that the PI liked her - a lot. Tall and rangy,  Flynn had the most intriguing eyes that Dana had ever seen - they were a slate-steel color with a glimmer of blue, like the deep-ocean water of the Artic with a hard winter sun glinting on it. But there was also something dark and potentially dangerous that lurked in Flynn’s eyes.

“ But that isn’t even the really interesting part,” Sy added, and his eyes twinkled behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. “ It seems that your friend was down at the crime scene. The private investigator.”

“ You mean Flynn?” Dana asked, surprised.

“ Unless y’all got another private investigator friend who’d be likely to hang out with Pierce Boudreau?” 

“ That’s hardly standard procedure - a PI at a crime scene,” Dana murmured and Sy nodded agreement.

“ You think you could get her to talk to you?” he asked.

Dana was pretty sure that she could’ve asked her for a lot of things, but even Flynn might draw the line at sharing this sort of information. “ I can give it a shot,” she conceded.

Sy winked at her. “ That’s my girl.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Voodoo Realty had nothing to do with real estate, and everything to do with Voodoo. The owner of the store was an old friend of Flynn’s. Ariel Rousseau had gone into the supply of ‘religious paraphernalia’ after her last enterprise, dealing drugs, earned her time in the women’s state prison facility. Flynn pushed open the door, heard a bell jangle unmusically above her head. The store was packed floor to ceiling with everything you would ever need to practice the ancient religion of Voodoo. A host of books, pamphlets, and painted plaster statues of various Loa and Catholic saints, adorned shelves along three walls. Hanging from the same shelves were multiple ropes of the colored shell necklaces that the Loa adored. The mingled musty aromas of dried herbs and roots caused Flynn a brief lightheadedness.

At the sound of the jangling bell, a small, raven-haired woman had appeared through a beaded curtain behind a glass-enclosed counter laden with paraphernalia. Ariel Rousseau broke into a wide smile when she saw her visitor.

“ Why, Willie Rae Flynn, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes!”

Flynn gestured around herself. “ So you’re into Voodoo now, huh? You do remember that you’re white, don’t you?”

Ariel cocked an eyebrow, the simple gesture sending a shiver arcing up and down Flynn’s spine that gave rise to a memory of one cannabis-fuelled summer afternoon, and the kind of dirty, sweaty, low-down sex that you never dreamed you ever would have, and then never forgot once you did. She looked Ariel over. The shoulder-length raven hair and startling green eyes, and the body that time in the joint had done nothing to knock out of shape, Ariel still had it.

“ How’s the PI business treating y’all?”

Flynn breathed in a scent of patchouli oil and cinnamon, and got a little lightheaded again. “ I’m getting by.” After a couple moments of Ariel’s unnerving scrutiny, Flynn tilted an eyebrow and demanded gruffly, “ You trying to read my goddamned mind there or something? Here. See if y’all can grab hold of this thought …”

Ariel batted Flynn’s chest with the back of one hand. “ Bad, bad Flynn,” she scolded archly.

Flynn gave a lascivious smirk. “ So how y’all doing since they let you out?”

“ Just fine.” The smaller woman stepped back, encompassed the store and its smelly, strange contents with an expansive shrugging gesture. “ You come by my new store just to inquire after my welfare, Willie Rae, or did you come for a little something sweeter?”

“ Mm, tempting - ” Flynn cocked an eyebrow. “ What, I’d get my very own Voodoo Woman?”

Ariel swatted her again. Flynn shook her head, but not without a little regret. She would have liked to give it another shot, sure, but she was afraid it would never be as good again.

Waiting a beat just to make sure of Flynn’s intent, Ariel finally nodded and backed up behind the counter where she leaned on the glass top with her elbows, chin cupped in her palms. The loose material of her peasant blouse gaped in front, allowing Flynn to see that she was not wearing a bra. “ So…to what do I owe the pleasure, Willie Rae?”  

“ I need to know about Voodoo. About the bad kinda Voodoo.”

That drove Ariel’s eyebrows up into her hairline. “ There’s no such thing as good or bad Voodoo. There’s just Voodoo gets used either for good or bad purposes. Who told you otherwise?”

“ Okay - pardon me all over the place.” Flynn raised a hand and pawed the air with it. “ Let’s say then that someone wants to use Voodoo for bad purposes. How would they go about it?”

Ariel frowned. “ It isn’t anything you want to mess around with, you know.”

“ I’m not the one who’s messing with it. I’m just asking the questions.”

Ariel turned away, moved to a hotplate behind the counter where a kettle simmered. She poured water from the kettle into a mug, and stirred, bending a look over her shoulder as she did so. “ Would you like some tea?”

Flynn grimaced. “ Stuff smells like camel dung.”

“ It tastes better than it smells. Try some. You might be surprised. As for Voodoo, it’s been getting such a bad rap over the years that practitioners have been trying to make it more acceptable to the general public. The Voodoo you hear about today is absolutely nothing like the kind Marie Laveau would have known and practiced.”

Ariel brought a steaming mug of tea to Flynn, who sniffed at it with deep suspicion. “ Just try it,” Ariel sighed.

Reluctantly, Flynn lifted the mug to her lips and sipped at the vile-smelling contents. To her surprise, it tasted sweet - like raspberries, with a hint of cinnamon. Ariel smirked. “ See? New experiences are good for the soul. This Voodoo, what makes you certain it’s bad?” Ariel leaned on the countertop, her own mug held between her palms, the rising steam bringing a pretty blush to her pale features.

“ Because they used a woman as a sacrifice,” Flynn told her.

Ariel jerked upright, the sudden movement causing her to spill tea onto the glass countertop where the liquid pooled dark and oily, forming an irregular pattern on the glass. Ariel shook her head. “ Human sacrifice,” she echoed unhappily.

“ Woman was gutted, had her left hand and right foot cut off. And there was a veve carved into her flesh - Papa Legba. He’s like a guide, isn’t he? Intercedes with the other Loa, carries messages to them. I thought he was a good Loa?”

Ariel’s shoulders rose in a shrug. “ The hand and foot, that’s a sign whoever performed the sacrifice wishes to travel to someplace, and to make some kind of exchange with someone there. As for the Loa - just like Voodoo itself - they are neither good nor bad. They are tools in the hands of the human mambo or houngan, that’s all. By themselves they cannot do anything. They have to be used like any tools do.”

A mambo was a priestess in Voodoo, the houngan her male equivalent. Unlike many of the mainstream religions, Voodoo was equal opportunities, not caring whether practitioners were male, female, gay, straight, black, white. It was all good with the Loa.

“ The Loa serve the will of the mambo or the houngan,” Ariel went on.  “ All of this good-Loa, bad-Loa crap - it is just crap, designed to make Voodoo more palatable to the non-believers. And that, of course, means the tourists who buy paraphernalia by the truckload in New Orleans.”

Flynn nodded. If asked, those same tourists would never admit to having even the slightest faith in High John the Conqueror root to make them more attractive to the opposite sex, but privately? That was a different matter. Regardless of their own faiths, beliefs, or rationales, many people still held a little bit of superstition close to their breast and Voodoo was just superstition writ very large indeed. Flynn sipped at the sweet-tasting tea. “ So, the reason for carving Papa Legba’s personal call sign into a sacrificial victim would be - what?”

“ To force him into committing evil,” Ariel explained. “ As soon as his veve is carved into the victim, he obtains an obligation to do the bidding of the mambo who called upon him. You’re right that Papa Legba is a guide - a gatekeeper between worlds, and for that reason he is often a conduit for communication between people of this world and those who dwell in the other worlds. The mambo may wish for him to initiate contact between herself and the gods whom she really wants to address.”

That made sense, at least inasmuch as anything about Voodoo made sense at all to Flynn. “ Who would she want Papa Legba to contact for her?” she asked.

Ariel’s eyes clouded and she looked down into the murky depths of her tea, fingers absently caressing the sides of the mug in a way made Flynn wish she were that mug. “ If this person is really practising bad Voodoo, then I imagine they might be using Papa Legba as a conduit to the Old Ones.”

Baffled, Flynn repeated, “ ‘Old Ones’?” 

A quick shudder convulsed Ariel’s narrow shoulders. “ Yeah, the Old Ones, the older gods, much older than the Loa. They are definitely of a dark nature, unlike the Loa. These gods don’t care for humanity at all. They’re vicious and cruel and greedy, and they will use humans to do their bidding, which is usually something fairly nasty. The gutting of your victim would signify the mambo’s willingness to serve the Old Ones. Although they do reward handsomely for this servitude, so I’ve heard.”

Flynn set down her mug and met Ariel’s piercing green eyes. “ What else would be involved in these rituals to call on the Old Ones?”

“ Well, Papa Legba alone would not be enough. He can open the conduit of communication but cannot directly intercede with the Old Ones. That would take a more powerful Loa, such as the Baron Samedi, or even Damballah himself. The Loa dwell on what we would call the ‘spirit plane’, but the Old Ones, they inhabit a place far more ancient and inaccessible. Their world - to us - would be like an endless darkness, a great void, complete nothingness. There are mambos who can travel to this world of the Old Ones, but not many of them. For most, the price of servitude to the Old Ones is too great. They demand their payment in blood and discord. Most sane mambos won’t touch them.”

 “ But for someone who was willing to pay the price?”

“ Then the next step would be a second sacrifice, to buy an intercession from either the Baron Samedi or Damballah. Beyond that, Flynn, I don’t know. I’ve never dared to even read about anything darker than this.”

Ariel wore a leather thong with a copper pendant on it, nestled in the cleave of her breasts. On the pendant was etched the veve of Erzulie, the love goddess. It was entirely appropriate that Ariel should wear a symbol of a love goddess, Flynn thought. She noticed Flynn’s eyes go to the necklace, and her smile softened, becoming seductive. “ I’m strictly a lover, not a killer, Willie Rae. You know that.”

“ Yeah. I guess I do.”

Ariel hesitated. Flynn gave her an expectant look. “ What?”

“ Human blood is very powerful. At least, that’s the belief of many who practice the Voodoo religion like it used to be. Like I said, I’m not a mambo. I just sell this shit to people. I only know what I’ve read or what I’ve heard, and I heard quite a bit in the slammer about the ancient practices. You get a lot of those women in prison who either are, or become believers in Voodoo. It can - help you to get through the ordeal.”

Flynn felt the veins in the side of her head tighten, and her stomach coil. There were all kinds banged up together in the overcrowded state prison system. Ariel had always talked a tough game, but talk was mostly all it was. She’d only done state time because the court wanted to use her to set an example to others. In whose world was that any more of a ‘fitting punishment’ than Flynn’s assassinating someone for money? Both things were equally morally corrupt - only difference was one had legal sanction.

“ You ever heard of anyone who was involved in these dark rituals here in New Orleans?” Flynn asked, shaking off her own outrage before it could distract her from her purpose here.

Ariel shook her head. “ I don’t think I’d want to hear about anyone into that shit,” she muttered. Then she added, “ I could do some asking around though, or I could look it up on the Internet for you?”

Flynn smiled. “ I can do that myself.”

“ You could, but then you wouldn’t have an excuse to come back here and see me again.”

“ There is that.”

As Flynn made to straighten up from the counter, Ariel surprised her by grabbing her wrist and pulling her back down. “ Don’t mess with this stuff, Willie Rae,” she warned again, her tone husky - concerned and yet seductive at once. Flynn breathed in the patchouli and cinnamon scent and she was transported back in time once again by it, to that sultry afternoon of sex.

“ I won’t. You know me, too goddamned selfish to stick my neck out that far,” she assured.

But Ariel gave her head a disconsolate shake. “ Oh yeah, I do know you, Willie Rae Flynn. That’s the whole problem. You think you’re a tough guy, don’t give a damn for anyone, but you’ve got a soft center.” She stood on tiptoe and leaned right across the countertop, pulling Flynn’s head down and forward to kiss her. Flynn resisted for all of a couple of seconds, and then she kissed back. Ariel Rousseau was all velvet and fire, and she had a mouth could devour you whole. Flynn knew if she just kept up the kiss, they would end up taking it upstairs and what had occurred on that distant summer afternoon, would happen all over again. But instead, Flynn pulled back. She breathed heavily a few times, in and out through her nose, clearing her head of both the heady perfume and her own thoughts. “ I can’t do this. Not right now.”

The pink tip of Ariel’s tongue protruded at the left corner of her mouth and she licked the taste of Flynn’s lips from her own. “ Some other time?” she asked.

Flynn watched the pink tongue circle back across the full lower lip, thinking about all of the magical things it could do. She nodded. Oh yes, some other time, definitely. Foolish to even imagine she could walk away and not look back at what she was missing. “ Yeah,” she said, smiling. “ Some other time.”

She left the store better informed about Voodoo and the pantheon of neutral Loa and evil Old Ones, but still none the wiser about who might have sacrificed Jeannette Larue, or to what personal end.

As she walked back to her office, deep in thoughts about gods and human sacrifice and how a middle-class white woman from Kenner might have come to be dumped on Desire Street, Flynn failed to notice the dark blue sedan parked outside of her building, nor the woman who leaned on the hood.

“ Flynn!”

She looked up, blinking in the glare of the sunshine as Dana Jordan pushed herself off the hood of the dark sedan and waved. Flynn’s heart tripped - as always. The reporter came scissoring through the pedestrians thronging under the colonnade on Bourbon Street, intercepting Flynn before she reached her office.

“ Hi. Can we talk for a moment?”  

People flowed around them on the crowded sidewalk. “ Maybe we should step out of the street first?” Flynn suggested. She gently guided Dana to the bar a few feet from her office. Not so famous as some of the other blues bars in the French Quarter, Harry Grayson’s was nonetheless the place to go if you were a New Orleans local who enjoyed good blues, perfectly chilled beer, and a friendly atmosphere. And all without tourists in stupid hats. Flynn ordered two bottles of beer at the bar, carried them back to a table where Dana was already seated.

“ So how’s life on the crime beat?”

Dana lifted a hand, tilted it palm up. “ This is New Orleans. There’s always life in the crime beat.” She took a sheet of fax paper from her pocket, slid it across the tabletop. “ What do you know about this?”

Flynn glanced down at a photograph that showed the veve carved into Jeannette Larue’s chest. “ Looks like a morgue photo,” she said in neutral tone and Dana twitched an eyebrow.

It was a matter of pride with Louisiana’s legal and government institutions to be corrupt. Ever since Katrina ravaged its regular premises, the Coroners Office had been operating out of a sometime funeral home on Martin Luther King Boulevard, where the staff worked under appalling conditions and with very little funding. Often they were not paid for weeks at a time. Selling a photo, or even a little information to the press was not something Flynn felt they could be blamed for. She drank some more beer as she gazed impassively at the blurry photo.

“ Where’d you get this?”

Dana shook her head. “ I don’t know, Flynn. Source is Sy Lehane’s. You know what it’s about then?”

“ Yes I do. But I shouldn’t be talking to you about it. You know that.”

Dana bit her lower lip, looked away at nothing. When her gaze came back to Flynn, it managed to be both shrewd and guileless at once. “ There’s Voodoo involved, you can tell me that much, can’t you?” 

Flynn calculated the extent of Boudreau’s wrath for revealing something that would end up in print, and then she nodded anyway. “ There’s Voodoo, yeah, or what looks like it. Woman was gutted, had her left hand and right foot hacked off. And that sign carved into her chest? Papa Legba. He’s a Loa guide.”

“ Voodoo sacrifice?” Dana frowned. “ Do you have any idea if it’s a ruse, or if there’s a genuine believer behind it?”

“ It could be a genuine believer, but they’d be a misguided one. Voodoo does involve ritual sacrifice, usually of chickens or goats, but human sacrifice is generally frowned upon.”

 Dana gnawed some more on that nice lower lip of hers, Flynn watching her do so and feeling the warm stirrings of desire deep in her abdomen. “ I don’t suppose there are too many people would be into messing with that kind of thing, right?” Flynn nodded. Dana laid her index finger on the photograph, tapped it over the ragged wound where Jeannette Larue had been gutted. “ Do you know who the victim was?”

“ I can’t give you her name, Dana. Sorry, but Boudreau would kill me if I did that. I can tell you that she was a nice, white, middle-class woman from Kenner, and that she had no apparent connections with Voodoo.”

“ Okay. So why were you at the crime scene?”

Flynn scratched at her eyebrow, looked toward the door for a moment before bringing her gaze back to the dark eyes that watched her steadily. Sometimes it was hard for her even to look into Dana Jordan’s eyes. “ The victim was supposed to come see me about a case,” she admitted.

“ What case?”

Flynn shook her head. “ Can’t tell you that. It might - or might not be - connected with her death.”

Dana took a slug of her beer. Her dark eyes suddenly glittered with mischief. “ I didn’t know that you liked to wear patchouli, Flynn? I wouldn’t have thought it was quite you.”

That Dana had smelled the scent Ariel wore from her, brought a rush of heat up from out of Flynn’s shirt collar which then threatened to bloom into a full blown blush. Dana shook her head. “ It’s okay, Flynn, if you’ve been with someone. It’s not like you have to tell me or anything.”

“ Good. Because I have no intention of doing so.”

Dana arched an eyebrow. “ Although - I wonder - does Pierce know that you’re stepping out behind her back?”

Flynn scowled. “ Jesus! Mind your own damn business. I’m sure Pierce will be minding hers.”

“ You get around, Flynn, don’t you?”

There was no malice or judgement in the statement. A little bit of resignation maybe. Dana lifted her beer bottle, but she did not drink from it. Instead she began picking the label from the body of the bottle, shredding the damp paper between her fingers and dropping it into the tin ashtray in the middle of the table. Smoking bans had all but passed by the notice of many New Orleans establishments. Avoiding Flynn’s eyes suddenly, Dana added, “ So do you want to tell me why it is that you’ve never got around to me? I like you, Flynn, and I know that you like me. What’s the problem then?”

It had been inevitable that one day Dana would ask exactly this question and Flynn had sometimes wondered what she would say when the moment came. What could she say that wouldn’t sound exactly like she was covering up something else?

“ I’m the problem,” she said, and that much at least was the truth. “ I don’t do well in relationships, and you’re not the sort of gal who’d be happy to be somebody’s fuck buddy.”

A grimace twisted Dana’s mouth. She darted a glance at Flynn. “ How’d you know I wouldn’t?”

“ Because like you say, I get around. I can read women pretty well, and I read you as someone who wants a proper relationship. Love, romance, the whole nine yards. None of which are my strengths.”

“ Well, maybe you’re reading me wrong. Or underestimating yourself.” Dana downed the remainder of her beer, slapped the empty bottle hard down on the table. She stood, pushing her chair back violently enough to make the legs screech on the wood floor. “ Anyway, looks like I have a story to write up. I’m sorry if talking to me will mean Boudreau gets on your back.”

“ Don’t sweat it,” Flynn told her and the reporter nodded.

She watched as Dana weaved her way quickly through the tables and chairs to the exit, and wished it could be different, that she did not have to push a woman like Dana Jordan away because she were afraid of her own dark past being dragged into the light. But she had spent so much of her life keeping people at arm’s length, never giving anything of herself away to them, that she wondered if she even knew how to live any other way.

CHAPTER SIX

The rest of Boudreau’s day was nasty, brutish, and unfortunately, nowhere near as short as she would’ve liked. Nine o’clock in the evening had come and gone before she was finally able to leave her desk, by which time her eyeballs felt like they were being pulled slowly from her head by fish hooks, and her back and shoulders ached from sitting hunched over at a desk, reading and writing reports. 

The Coroners Office had delivered the autopsy report already, showing an alacrity remarkable for a system bogged down in problems. The gist of the report was that Jeannette Larue died as a result of massive physical trauma. No surprise there then. The weapon, according to the coroner, was a large knife with a single-sided sharp blade, eight to ten inches in length. All of the mutilations had occurred post-mortem. Jeannette had been sexually assaulted pre-mortem but there was no usable DNA left in, or on the body. Time of death was placed at between twenty-four to forty-eight hours ago.

Boudreau felt sweaty, grimy, and above all else, irritable. All she wanted to do was shower, have a cold beer and a hot pizza, and watch some mindless trash on TV. Or, she figured, she could go over to Flynn’s place, take a shower there, drink a couple of Flynn’s beers, and have the kind of fun, uncomplicated sex that Flynn was really, really good at. Maybe order pizza afterward.

By eleven-thirty, Boudreau was naked in Flynn’s queen-sized bed, sweating and aching all over once more, but this time as a result of fun, uncomplicated, and energetic sex. The room smelled warmly of sex and the smoky, wet-leaves-burning odor of a joint. Boudreau hooked a leg over Flynn’s thigh as they lay side by side, passing the joint between them. “ Y’all want to order us some pizza?”

Flynn nodded. She took a deep drag on the joint, held the sweet smoke in her lungs for several seconds before letting it out in a series of lazy rings. “ Ham, onion, peppers, mushrooms, double cheese, hold the pineapple, right? Y’all want some garlic bread to go with it?”

“ Nah. But I could use some ice cream for after. Chocolate mint chip.”

Flynn rolled over and swung her legs off the bed. Naked, she stood up and walked to the bedroom door, giving Boudreau a brief but enjoyable view of a small, tight butt and long muscular legs. The hours spent with Flynn were time torn out of Boudreau’s regular life. She accepted this, although sometimes she allowed herself to wonder what her life might be like if she were free to pursue something more than just an affair with Willie Rae Flynn. The PI stuck her head around the doorjamb, interrupting Boudreau’s woolgathering.

“ Pizza’s ordered. Should be here in twenty.”

“ A whole twenty minutes, huh?” Boudreau drew one leg up, letting the sheet fell away from her. She gave a lazy smile at the way Flynn’s eyes wandered appreciatively up and down her naked body. “ Wonder what we could do for a whole twenty minutes? ”

In response, Flynn stalked across the floor and climbed back onto the bed, her long muscular legs straddling Boudreau’s thighs. She bent her head low, kissed Boudreau deeply, first on the mouth, then moving down to her neck, and the deep cleft between her breasts. Boudreau made a sound that was almost a purr, shifted her position a little so that Flynn could slide down the length of her. “ Mm, twenty minutes of this, ” she murmured as Flynn’s tongue flicked expertly between her legs. “ I could go for that.”

When the pizza arrived they moved from the bedroom to Flynn’s sparsely furnished kitchen where they sat a plain wooden table and ate pizza straight from the box. Once, Boudreau had commented on Flynn’s frugal lifestyle, wondering why the PI didn’t make her living space just a little more comfortable?

“ Or even habitable,” she had added wryly.

Flynn tried to explain that all she required were a bed to sleep in, and a fridge in which to keep her beer cool and the leftover takeout fresh. And a microwave in which to reheat the leftovers.

“ You’re a Philistine,” Boudreau had said, shaking her head.

Flynn had shrugged. “ A Philistine who reads and understands Nietzsche. So, tell me, why does my having no desire to own matching flatware matter so much?”

Boudreau had no answer to that.

Flynn opened up the louver doors in the kitchen to let some air in. The powdery scent of bougainvillea and passion vine draping the verandah drifted inside on the damp air. “ So how’s the case going?” she inquired.

Boudreau complained about the hours she had wasted trying to dredge up any kind of anything might relate Jeannette Larue’s life in middle-class Kenner to Voodoo and Desire Street. “ Not a fucking thing. The damn woman was Mrs Respectable Member of the Community.” She scowled at the slice of pizza in her hand that dripped strings of cheese onto the tabletop. “ Not so much as a goddamn parking ticket in forty plus years of life. It doesn’t seem natural to me.”

“ You feel that everybody should have at least one nasty little secret somewhere in their lives? Makes them - what - more human?” Flynn smiled.

Boudreau thought about that for a moment, then she nodded. “ Ain’t nobody in this bad old world can be that good.”

“ Yeah, well, I talked to someone in the Voodoo community,” Flynn confessed.

Boudreau gave her a sharp look. “ Shit. Flynn, please tell me that y’all don’t mean Ariel Rousseau? And don’t look so fucking surprised either. Of course I’ve been keeping tabs on that green-eyed bitch. Never have trusted her.”

Flynn sighed. “ She’s reformed, Pierce. And she was helpful.” She relayed the information that Ariel had given her.

“ Yeah, okay, it’s all information,” Boudreau admitted grudgingly. She wagged a finger smeared in tomato paste and cheese. “ Just don’t be getting into any pillow talk with her, y’hear? And that reverend guy - ” Boudreau scowled. “ If he wasn’t lyin, then I’m definitely flyin.”

“ He was holding back,” Flynn agreed with caution. “ Not sure that’s the same thing as lying.”

Boudreau gave her a look meant to convey that as far as she was concerned holding back and lying were exactly the same thing. Her cell phone burst into life, blaring rock music, and Flynn snickered.

“ Journey? Seriously, Pierce? Y’all have Journey as your ring tone?”

“ Oh, shut up. I was fucking with the ring tones and I got stuck with this. I’ll have Waylon fix it for me.” Boudreau grabbed the phone and flipped it open. Journey died mid-warble. “ Boudreau,” she answered tersely. “ Detective Watkins…no, that’s okay, I wasn’t doing anything.” Boudreau smirked at Flynn’s raised eyebrows. She listened to the voice on the other end of the line for several moments and then said, “ I’ll be there in ten. Don’t let the uniforms fuck anything up.”

She closed the phone, stuffed a last piece of pizza into her mouth, chewing fast and washing it down with a swig of Coke. “ There’s been a homicide on Lee Circle,” she explained to Flynn. “ Detective on scene thinks the victim might be Anthea Larue.”

Lee Circle - part of a gentrified area on the edges of the fast up-and-coming Warehouse District - had lots of new and pricey condos going up, and a couple of high-end hotels. New Orleans, however, was a city where riches and poverty frequently rubbed shoulders close enough for the rich to catch head lice from the poor, and you did not have to go more than a block from Lee Circle to find rundown homes and jacked-up shells of vehicles. The status symbols of poverty in cities around the world.

“ Okay. Anthea Larue being on Lee Circle is almost as unexpected as her mother being on Desire Street,” Flynn remarked.

Boudreau twitched an eyebrow. “ I hear that. Listen…” as she spoke, Boudreau padded through to the bedroom where she’d left her jacket and shoes. “ Since I don’t know what I’m heading into, y’all shouldn’t bother to wait up for me.”

“ I wasn’t going to,” Flynn assured her.

When Boudreau arrived on Lee Circle the whole place was awash in lights. From the grassy center piece of the square, with its vibrant flowerbeds and statue of General Robert E Lee, streetlights in the shape of old gas lamps beamed sodium brightness, and the throbbing, ever-changing colored lights of the Hotel Le Cirque played across the façade, bright and gaudy enough to induce migraines. The cherry lights of a swarm of police cruisers on scene washed red and blue light over the faces of the inevitable looky-loos. Overlaying this carnival of lights was the heady smell of night-blooming jasmine, tinged with the mud-and-salt smell of the river that remained present throughout New Orleans day and night, no matter where you went. Boudreau walked toward a four-storey condo where the city’s latest murder victim had been found, thinking as she passed the cruisers that if this had been a street in the Lower Ninth Ward, there would have been a single cruiser present and a couple bored cops sitting on the hood of the cruiser, yukking it up whilst they waited for the meat wagon to cart the remains off.

“ Two classes in this world…always has been, always will fucking be,” she muttered to herself.

Detective Heather Watkins waited in the lobby. Watkins would be the primary investigator until positive identification of the victim as Anthea Larue dictated otherwise. “ Sorry to ruin your night,” she said as Boudreau walked up.

Boudreau shrugged. “ Wasn’t much to ruin,” she lied. She followed the other detective into a lobby fitted out in finely-polished green-veined marble and cherry wood floors. A concierge’s desk stood to the left of the entrance. Everything about the building screamed new money!

“ Concierge got anything helpful to say?” Boudreau asked.

Watkins shook her head. “ Not really. He certainly didn’t see anyone getting murdered.”

They boarded the elevator together, Watkins thumbing the third floor button. As the doors slid soundlessly closed, she explained the layout of the condo complex to Boudreau. “ There are fifteen living units in the complex. I had a quick look online at the realtor’s listings. You know you can’t get one of these units for less than 400K? I nearly swallowed my own fucking teeth when I read that. I doubt I’ll ever see that much money in my whole lifetime.”

Boudreau grunted. “ The rich are a different breed from the rest of us.”

“ I hear that,” Watkins sighed in agreement.

According to the first officers on scene, the building super had found the body after the next-door occupants made a late-night return from vacation and complained to him about a smell coming from Apartment 3C. He had initially tried to raise the occupant of 3C but - getting no joy and concerned about the smell himself by then - he decided to use his master key to enter the apartment. He’d gotten out again soon as he saw the dead girl, claiming now that he did so without ever touching anything other than the door and a couple light switches. He’d been printed anyway, for elimination purposes.

Apartment 3C, Watkins explained, was owned by one Antoine Camber, a hedge fund manager. Camber was described as being Caucasian, thirty-six, six-four, black hair, brown eyes. “ He is one scary-ass-looking white dude,” Watkins added and handed Boudreau her phone to view the DMV mug shot for herself.

Boudreau gave a grim smile as she looked at the mug shot. Antoine Camber was a scary-ass-looking dude.

The door to Apartment 3C remained propped open to allow the crime scene techs and coroner’s assistants access. Under the door of each neighboring apartment, thin lines of electric light glowed, indicating that the neighbors were up and about, disturbed by all the commotion. Boudreau and Watkins signed into the scene, then spent a few moments in the hallway, slipping protective bootees over their shoes and pulling on latex gloves.

“ It ain’t pretty in there,” Watkins warned.

Boudreau nodded. Crime scenes were rarely pretty. “ Neighbors have anything useful to add to their complaining?”

Watkins gave her head a quick shake. “ The units are all well-soundproofed - part of what you pay the 400K for - so no one heard anything out of the ordinary. General consensus seems to be that the last time anyone saw Camber was three days ago. I have his vehicle listed as a silver two year-old Lexus. It’s missing from the parking garage…surprise.”

Once inside the apartment Boudreau immediately noticed the starkness of the décor and the smell of death that hung in the air.

If people thought that the longer a body had been dead, the less it would smell, they would be wrong. The initial smells of death were predominantly human waste as the bodily functions all came to an abrupt halt, bowels and bladder evacuating involuntarily. There might also be the coppery-sweet smell of blood, if there were any blood shed at the time of death. However, as putrefaction set in, noxious gases gathered in the body and those were released slowly via the various orifices. That smell was the worst. Boudreau tried breathing shallowly through her mouth instead of her nose until she remembered reading about how smell was caused by tiny particles whooshing up your nose and hitting the little hairy receptors in your nostrils. In effect, you were breathing in bits of the dead body itself. Then she switched to breathing through her nose again, figuring she’d rather have those kinds of particles trapped by the fine hairs in her nostrils and filtered out, than to have them go rushing straight into her lungs.

The flooring throughout the apartment was the same polished cherry wood as the lobby, the walls natural brick-facing and hung with generic art prints that looked as though they might have come with the apartment. In complete contrast, the furniture had obviously come from a high-end catalogue, all chrome and buttery cream-colored leather. Floor to ceiling windows were covered by black Levelor blinds. Mounted on the wall above a fake brick fireplace in the main living area was a 70-inch plasma-screen TV that made up part of an impressive home cinema and sound system. Boudreau spent a moment looking at that with a certain longing.

“ Trappings of the lifestyle, huh?” Watkins said at her side.

Boudreau grunted. A ‘safe path’ had been laid out by the crime scene techs, and she followed it to view the nude, face-up body of a young Caucasian woman. One arm extended above her head. One leg bent at an angle. In that position, her body formed almost a Swastika shape. Her head was turned to one side, a curtain of dark hair covering part of her face and one eye. The visible eye was milky-white in death, with a ring of blue still visible around the outer edge of the iris.

“ Think it’s your missing girl?” Watkins asked.

“ Hard to say for definite - ” Boudreau bit her lower lip, stared at the dead woman. She gave a reluctant nod to the other detective. “ But yeah, I’d go out on a limb and say this is Anthea Larue. What did the coroner have to say about time of death?”

“ At least three days ago, maybe four. The body has been moved, too. She wasn’t killed here.”

“ No shit. Place is squeaky clean. But who the hell dumps a body in their own apartment?”

Watkins made a shrugging motion with one shoulder as Boudreau walked around the body and hunkered down so that she was looking straight between the victim’s splayed legs. It should’ve felt creepy, but Boudreau forced herself to depersonalize the scene, to view it as simply a body and a forensic dump. “ Genitalia has been mutilated,” she remarked.

“ Uh huh. Coroner noted that, too. He also said there might be something carved into the flesh just above her pubic bone, but he won’t be sure until he gets her cleaned up.”

If a Voodoo sign had been carved into Anthea Larue, then the chances of her killer and her mother’s killer being one and the same person, had just increased greatly.

“ You think Camber is the doer?” Watkins asked.

“ He dumped the body in his own apartment and fled the scene - ” Boudreau gave her shoulders a grim little twitch as she stood up. “ Unless someone is going to elaborate lengths to frame our missing hedge fund manager, I’d say it’s likely. He’s our primary suspect for now anyway.”

A mini army of white-suited and bootee-ed techs busily swabbed surfaces around the apartment, dusting for fingerprints, and vacuuming for all of the microscopic evidence which inevitably will accumulate at a crime scene as a result of the immutable law that no two entities can interact without leaving traces of themselves upon one another. Boudreau swept her gaze around the scene. “ A hedge fund manager doesn’t strike me as the type to be mixed up in Voodoo,” she remarked to Watkins. “ Nothing about this fucking case is making any sense.”

“ You want murder to make sense?” Watkins raised a skeptical eyebrow and Boudreau grunted in agreement. Then Watkins tilted a look at her. “ I hope you don’t mind, Pierce, but if you’re happy that this is your missing person, I’d really like to hand the lead over to you? I’ve got a ton of work still waiting for me at the station and I’d like to get home before my kid gets up for school in the morning.”

Boudreau nodded. “ Sure. No problem, Heather. Y’all go on.” 

“ Thanks. And good luck, Pierce.”

Watkins left Boudreau performing a walk-through of the condo on her own. The entire unit was built to an open plan that Boudreau knew would’ve driven her stark raving nuts. She believed bedrooms ought to have doors. For 400K she would have expected doors, and walls, too. She went up to the mezzanine floor where the sleeping area was located and poked around there. She found a couple skin mags in a shoebox in the walk-in closet, but strictly garden-variety porn, none of the violent or kinky stuff often found in the possession of serial killers. She poked her head into the bathroom - the only room which did have walls and a door. The medicine cabinet was a treasure trove of pills and potions, over-the-counter and prescription. Boudreau read the labels on the latter. It appeared that Antoine Camber had a close acquaintance with the Pams: clonazepam; diazepam; and lorazepam. She counted four different prescribing doctors, noting down each of the names for follow-up. How, she wondered, did a health system get so screwed up that someone could be prescribed drugs from four different doctors, none of whom were probably even aware of each other? No wonder Antoine Camber was running around murdering people - he was probably suffering from some kind of psychosis, high as a kite on meds intended to keep him under control.

“ It’s a fucked up world we live in, Pierce,” Boudreau muttered to herself as she clattered downstairs again to find a tech to bag everything from the bathroom cabinet.  

Two coroner’s assistants were busy loading the body into a black plastic bag, manhandling it onto a gurney, as Boudreau stepped into the living area. She told one of the assistants to let the coroner know she was primary on this case now, and that she would like the autopsy reports ASAP. Then she walked through the living area once more, looking for anything might give her a clue as to where Camber might have run after leaving the condo. As she walked by the couch, her eye caught something tucked beneath one corner and she hunkered down, using two fingers to tug the flat plastic object free. Sitting back on her heels, she held it up to the light to examine.

Anthea Larue’s student ID card. A bloody fingerprint smeared part of the photograph of the smiling teen.

Boudreau’s pulse raced. She stood up, hollered to one of the crime scene techs to bring her an evidence baggie. “ Have that print run immediately,” she instructed.

The tech nodded. “ I’ll see to it myself, Detective.”

One final discovery was made before Boudreau took her leave of the condo - a plastic bag full of a reddish-brown, flaky substance secreted in an empty Sara Lee cheesecake box in back of the icebox. A tech brought it to Boudreau, who opened the bag to sniff the contents.

“ Doesn’t smell like marijuana,” she opined. She resealed the bag, handed it back to the tech. “ Test it. Our boy has a medicine cabinet full of prescription drugs, and I’d bet whatever this is, it’d give you a high of some kind. People don’t hide their green tea in Sara Lee cheesecake boxes.”

As Boudreau rode the elevator back to the lobby, she called Flynn. “ Coroner will have to confirm, but I’m ninety-eight percent certain the vic is Anthea. Same killer, too, by the looks of it. There’s a veve carved on her body.”

Flynn blew a soft whistle. “ Mother and daughter, eh? That’s freaky even for New Orleans.”

“ Yeah. I’m thinking the killer must’ve known both women. It’s too big a coincidence.” The elevator doors made a soft ping as they slid apart and Boudreau stepped out into the marbled lobby. “ I’m going to head back to the station. I have a couple things to check out there. Tomorrow I’m gonna run back out to Kenner, go through the Larue house again, see if I can’t find anything that’d point me to someone familiar with both women who would kill them in a sick fucking twisted Voodoo ritual. I might talk to that Reverend Petersen again, too.”

Flynn snorted. “ Y’all really have it in for him, don’t you? Okay, Pierce, it’s pretty much your case now. My part is done.”

“ I’ll keep you in the loop.” Outside on Lee Circle, Boudreau turned her face up to the sky and breathed in a lungful of damp, fresh air in a futile attempt to flush the stench of death from her nostrils. The smell would linger for days, even if it was just in her own imagination. “ I’ll drop by tomorrow, too, if that’s okay, Flynn?”

“ Sure. Give me a call. I have a couple other cases to tie up, but I should be free by afternoon. And Pierce - ?” Flynn chuckled. “ Don’t ride the reverend too hard. He is a man of God. Y’all never know when you might need his services.”

“ Jeez, that’s sweet of you to say,” Boudreau grumbled and hung up on Flynn’s laughter.

CHAPTER SEVEN

After Boudreau called, Flynn made a halfhearted attempt to sleep, but between the weed that buzzed through her system and the development in the Larue case that occupied her thoughts, she remained stubbornly awake and, finally giving up the attempt altogether, she got up, dressed, and drove the short distance from her apartment to a club in the Fauburg Marigny.

The Green Door Club, located on a narrow street bordered with cracked, buckled sidewalks encrusted with moss and weed palms, lined with dilapidated shotgun houses, rundown cafes and bars, catered strictly for locals and regulars. The low throb of music leaked out from behind the green-painted door that gave the club its name, reverberating against the uneven sidewalk, rippling there like a heat shimmer. It became a solid wall of sound that slammed into Flynn’s chest as soon as she stepped inside the gloomy interior where the air reeked of spilled beer, cigarettes, marijuana, and various brands of cologne and perfume, all mingled into one sickly sweet scent that clung to you like a second skin. Shutting out both noise and smells, Flynn made her way through the smoky, overheated atmosphere to a low-lit horseshoe-shaped bar, and ordered a beer. Amidst the pretty boys gyrating on the dance floor, Flynn spied a blonde girl, indecently clad in a few shreds of fabric intended to be clothing, dancing with a male friend in partial drag, and watched the two until her beer arrived.

“ You seen Harvey tonight?” Flynn yelled at the bar tender.

He had to lean right in to hear her above the boom-crash of disco music. “ Usual table,” he hollered back.

Flynn took her beer and worked her way to an alcove in back of the dance floor where Harvey Destrehan held court amidst a throng of young and handsome admirers, regaling these acolytes with tales of sexual derring-do undertaken in his heyday, most of which were lies. Harvey Destrehan hailed from a family of attorneys, born and bred in New Orleans. The Destrehans had worked their way up the unique Louisiana food chain to respectable upper middle-classdom in the mid-twentieth century.

Harvey also happened to be the best source of gossip in all of New Orleans. If someone were doing something morally or legally dubious, at any time, anywhere in the city, Harvey would likely know something about it.

He spotted Flynn approaching and his eyes narrowed, his smile thinning out. It would’ve been an overstatement to say they were ‘friends. Rather, they were associates who merely tolerated each other on a personal level. Harvey dismissed his adoring acolytes with an imperious flick of his hand as Flynn took a seat uninvited at the table. It was littered with glasses filled with crushed ice, fruit, and multi-colored alcoholic cocktail mixes that Flynn didn’t even recognize. 

“ Flynn. How very not nice to see you.”

“ Need to know what you know about Voodoo and mambos, Harvey.”

“ Voodoo?” Harvey echoed, staring at her from beneath the droopy lids of his brown eyes. His fleshy lips made a purse. “ Not my thing, dearie.”

Flynn gave him a thin smile. “ Fine, because I didn’t ask if it was your thing or not, Harvey. I want to know whose thing it might be.”

He thought this over. “ There is a mambo that I’ve heard about. She’s supposed to be able to summon things beyond the Loa, and to make these things do her bidding. But it’s all just rumor and third hand tales, of course. Nothing concrete.” He waved a dismissive paw in the air to indicate how airy-fairy these stories were. When he realized that Flynn still wanted to know what he knew, his piggy eyes glittered. “ And what would be in it for me, dearie?”

This was how it went. Harvey would trade information to Flynn in return for her giving him leads on new clients. It wasn’t that Harvey needed the business - or the money - he just liked to collect clients. Flynn assumed he extracted favors from these referred clients, but she never asked because she didn’t want to know. She gave the fat lawyer the name of someone for whom she had recently done some work, and he filed the name away in his steel trap mind before telling her about Johnny Cakes.

“ He’s a two-bit hustler goes by the name of Johnny Cakes…” Harvey rolled his eyes. “ I suppose it’s better than John Wilson, which is his real name. Anyway, he’s a punk. Hangs out around the cemetery on Basin…in the Tremé. But the word is that he does some procurement for this mambo from time to time.”

“ What sort of things does he ‘procure’ for her?” Flynn asked.

Harvey shrugged. “ I really don’t know, dearie. Maybe goats. Maybe drugs. Who gives a flying fuck? It’s all superstitious nonsense.”

Flynn couldn’t argue with that.

“ So how is business?” Harvey asked her.

“ I’m getting by,” Flynn told him and Harvey smirked.

“ You must be…if the NOPD are consulting with you?” The lawyer arched one eyebrow at her and Flynn smiled, shook her head.

“ Y’all know I won’t talk about that, Harvey.”

He waved this off as easily as he had the mambo rumors. “ MJ says hello, by the way,” he added in an equally arch tone.

Flynn ignored that. Harvey made a wet chuckling sound and slurped some of his garishly colored drink, eyeing her over the rim. “ She likes you, you know.”

“ Yeah. She’d like my head on her wall even better.”

The Johnny Cakes information was not a whole lot to go on, but it was more than Flynn had started out with tonight. She figured she could work with it to turn it into something more. Strictly, the case was no longer her concern - it belonged to the NOPD now - but she had nothing else on her plate, and besides, she felt some responsibility toward Jeannette and Anthea Larue.

“ Thanks for the info,” she said, rising from her seat.

Harvey pretended disappointment. “ Y’all aren’t staying?”

“ Don’t want to cramp your style,” Flynn told him.

Before she headed out to find Johnny Cakes, Flynn returned to the bar to have another beer and to watch the pretty people dancing, including the blonde with the lithe hips. This time their eyes met and the blonde smiled. Flynn inclined her head in a come-here gesture and Blondie detached herself from her gay-boy friends, sauntered over to the bar.

“ Hi.”

Flynn checked her out. Nice teeth and full lips, green eyes and button nose. Expensive, preppy-style clothes - what little there were of them. Maybe nineteen or twenty years of age. Flynn smiled. “ Aren’t you out a wee bit late on a school night?”

Blondie laughed. “ I’m way past twenty-one. And I doubt there’s anything school could teach me now that I don’t know already.”

Flynn would bet Blondie came from money, too, the kind of money that bought a prep-school private education and excellent orthodontic care. Still, even the most respectable money could get dirty given the right circumstances. “ What’s your name?” Flynn asked.

“ Jennifer,” Blondie replied.

“ Would y’all like something to drink, Jennifer?”

“ Long Island Iced Tea. Please.”

“ Never seen you in here before. First time?”

Jennifer shook her head. “ I come around now and then.” She accepted the drink with a little upward-and-sideways glance, and a smile that sent a pleasant shiver through Flynn.

“ Must’ve been times when I wasn’t coming around. That’s a pity.”

Jennifer’s flirty smile widened, her pupils growing large in the centre of the green irises.

“ You live in the city?” Flynn asked.

Jennifer bobbed her head. “ Garden District,” she said. “ Upper Garden District, of course.”

Flynn smirked, tilted an inquisitive look Preppy Jennifer’s way. “ Are you here with anybody?”

She received a frank stare right back. “ I figured I was with you.”

Flynn nodded. “ Right answer.”

They left their drinks unfinished and went outside, where Flynn led Jennifer around back of the club to a dimly-lit service alley.

“ I get the feeling this isn’t your first time doing this either,” Jennifer teased.

Flynn responded by turning the girl around to face the wall and pushing her against the roughcast brick. She held Jennifer there with one hand flat between her shoulder blades and, with the other hand, she reached under Jennifer’s skimpy skirt. The girl let out a gasp as Flynn’s fingers touched her between her legs, stroked her through the silky material of her panties. With a low, guttural moan, Jennifer pressed herself into Flynn’s hand.

“ Fuck me,” she begged.

Flynn found the edge of Jennifer’s silky panties and yanked them down to her knees. Her own clitoris throbbed against the seam of her jeans. She took her hand from Jennifer’s back and wrapped it around the girl’s middle, pulling her back into a tight embrace and growling into her ear, “ Spread your legs!”

Leaning into Flynn’s body for support, Jennifer obediently parted her thighs as far as the panties would allow. Flynn slipped two fingers into the warm wetness between the girl’s legs, found the hard bud of clitoris and began to work it slowly. Jennifer panted, bucked against the rough pressure on her sex. No longer needing to balance herself against the wall, she reached around and grabbed Flynn’s ass in both hands, dug her fingers in hard there. “ Jesus, yes -!” she gasped.  “ Fuck me now!”

“ They teach you to talk like that at your fancy prep school?” Flynn was breathing heavily herself as she felt the pressure build between her own legs, bearing down with the need for release.

Jennifer managed to stutter a laugh. She shook her head. “ They taught me a lot of things but…oh shit - !” She groaned and shuddered as Flynn’s thumb rolled over the ball of her clitoris. “ But not that, no. Sister Mary Margaret would be shocked!”

“ Yeah? That’s not what I’ve heard about Catholic girls’ schools.”

Flynn brought the girl to orgasm. Jennifer’s release prompted her own, but it happened in a vaguely unsatisfying way. Flynn took a step back from the girl, all of her own desire had draining away in an instant, replaced by a sense of angry dissatisfaction that she knew could easily spill over into a violent outburst. She shoved her hands, trembling slightly, deep into her pockets and looked away whilst Jennifer tugged her underwear back into place. When she took a step toward Flynn, reaching for her, a warning shake of the head stopped her. She looked at Flynn with an expression equal parts hurt and puzzled.

“ This is the way it is,” Flynn told her.

Jennifer cocked one hip, planted her fist there, scowled. “ Oh, that’s your thing, is it?” she spat. “ Treat a woman like a fucking prostitute? Not even a fucking kiss?”

Flynn sighed. Sometimes they reacted badly when they realized what they’d got themselves into, and then she’d have to fix with smooth words the dent she’d made in their fragile little egos. Tonight, however, she didn’t feel like explaining herself. She just wanted to get the fuck out of there. It had been a mistake to do this. Without taking her eyes off Jennifer’s face, Flynn tugged her own right jeans leg up, just high enough to reveal the holster at her ankle and the .32 snug inside it. Jennifer’s eyes went wide and saucer-like and her mouth dropped open.

“ Just fuck off and pretend you never met me,” Flynn sighed. She dropped the jeans leg back into place, fished her cigarettes out of her jacket, and lit one without enthusiasm.

Jennifer stared at her for a moment, then shook her head - just the once, but hard - to convey her disbelief. She turned and stamped away, Flynn hearing the girl’s heels receding down the alleyway and wincing with every step. When Jennifer had retreated far enough to figure that she was out of danger, she yelled back at Flynn, “ Fuck you! I’m not a goddamned hooker!”

Flynn sighed. “ Never said you were -” she rolled her eyes. “ And I didn’t hear you complaining either.”

She leaned back against the wall where she had pushed Jennifer, smoked the rest of the cigarette as she stared morosely up at the dark sky where the lightning of a spring storm flickered through the ink-blot clouds, veining them in bluish silver, charging the air with cordite. Soon it would rain and the air - brassy scented with the impending storm - would cool down a few degrees. An anticipatory shiver wound its way through Flynn. She zippered up her jacket, wondering if the sudden chill had more to do with how she felt than with the weather?

These casual encounters were something onto which she held from her days as a hired killer when - because she could not risk allowing anyone to get close to her and maybe find out what she did - she would pick up some random girl whenever she felt the need and fuck her. Flynn never had taken them to her own place, never gave them her real name, and she never saw them again. She never allowed them to touch her during sex; sometimes, she didn’t even want them to look at her. Sex was one time when you were open and vulnerable, when your guard was all the way down, and Flynn had spent so long being unable to afford that kind of emotional openness in her life that when confronted with it, she was unnerved.

With Pierce Boudreau and Ariel, it was different. Sex was always a two-way street, and it had less of the discomfort and irrational anger Flynn usually associated with the act. But those two were the exceptions to the rule.

It was also another reason why she was reluctant to allow Dana Jordan to get too close to her. She would want to be unguarded with the reporter, and that was just too damned dangerous as far as Flynn was concerned.

She walked back alone to where she had left her car, her mood well and truly soured, and slumped behind the wheel. She wrenched the key around in the ignition, and squealed away from the curb hard enough to leave rubber marks in the asphalt.

Although Tremé was not a bad place - certainly not the worst New Orleans had to offer - neither was it advisable to find yourself there after dark, alone without wheels or a weapon. Everywhere you looked was poor lighting, empty lots, boarded-up businesses, and beaters parked on the street. Music blared from nearly every open apartment window, and the smell of marijuana, beer, and fried food lay heavy in the air. Flynn drove to St Louis Cemetery No. 2 in search Johnny Cakes. The hustler was easy to spot. Harvey’s description of him - “ Small, skinny white asshole with bad teeth and a simply horrible dress sense” - was on the button. Johnny hung with a dozen or so younger boys, all of them attired in droopy jeans and hooded sweatshirts, none of them looking particularly street-tough to Flynn. Johnny himself stood at around five-feet-five, and he would have weighed maybe ninety pounds soaking wet. He wore skin-tight red denims that made his legs look like two cut-down pipe cleaners, and a pimp-style coat with a fur collar turned up around his ears. His hair was as red as his jeans and stuck up all over his head in gelled spikes. Apparently Johnny did not have a girlfriend. She certainly would have never allowed him out of the house dressed like that. Or a mama who cared either.

Flynn pulled up at the curb, watched in amusement as the collective hands of Johnny’s posse went to imaginary guns in their waistbands. Flynn shook her head. Those little wannabes no more had guns than she had a pair of gossamer angel’s wings tucked under her jacket. She rolled her window down, ignoring the hangers-on as she zeroed in on Johnny. “ Y’all must be Johnny Cakes.”

Harvey had claimed the hustler was twenty-five. He looked twelve. Effecting a scowl that Flynn assumed was meant to intimidate her but which just made her want to laugh again, Johnny hitched his red jeans on his skinny hips and put a swagger in his voice. “ I might be him. Would ’pend on who it is axin? Y’all got nice wheels, lady.”

The pimp act was hilarious, or it would have been had Flynn been in the mood for comedy. “ You’re either Johnny Cakes or you aren’t, and then I’m wasting my time talking to the wrong guy?” She held Johnny’s lewd stare.

He faltered, unsure how to deal with a woman challenging him in front of his homeboys, and then he spat, “ Fuck you, bitch!”

Flynn sighed. “ Guess I got the wrong shit-kicker after all.”

The hustler’s curiosity got the better of him, much as Flynn had hoped it would, and he stepped forward, hands patting the air in front of him. “ Hey, hey there! Lady wit the cool wheels - ” he chided. “ I am Johnny Cakes. I am your man!”

Flynn leaned with her elbow on the rubber edge of the driver’s window. As Johnny preened and puffed, satisfied that he had her attention, she cut a quick glance at his ragged bunch of homeboys circling uneasily behind him. “ How about you get rid of the choir, Johnny, and you and me sing us a duet?” 

He liked that, waving the posse away immediately. “ Shoo, flies! Go! Git outta here. Y’all heard the lady - me an’ her got us some bidness to attend to!”

They shuffled away, feet dragging, hands shoved into the pockets of their low-riding jeans, muttering amongst themselves and drawing Johnny’s visitor evil looks.

Flynn jerked her chin toward the dark end of street. “ What say y’all walk on down to that empty lot there, Johnny, and I’ll circle around?”

After a moment’s consideration, Johnny nodded agreement. Flynn drove around the block, scanning both sides of the street for any unwelcome company. A dealer and his bodyguards drove by in a tricked-out Caddy, slowing to give her curious looks. A hard-eyed stare made them forget her business and get back to minding their own.

Johnny arrived, ambling and whistling out of the darkness, oblivious to danger. Flynn shook her head in disbelief. Did this idiot want to get killed? She waited until Johnny was two feet from the Trans Am, and then she raised the .32, the click of the safety disengaging loud in the darkness of the lot. It brought him to an abrupt halt, the jaunty whistle dying in his throat as he called out to her. “ Hey there! That you, Cool Wheels? Take it easy.”

“ Take your hands outta your pockets, Johnny. Slowly. Put ‘em where I can see ‘em.”

Johnny obediently removed his hands from his pockets, raised them to shoulder height, turning the palms outward. He’d been through this drill before.

“ You carrying a weapon, Johnny?”

He paused, licked his lips. Flynn sighed with impatience. “ I’ll know if you’re lying to me.”

“ Yeah. Yeah, I gots a knife in my pocket.”

“ Then take it out slowly - use your left hand - and toss it over here.”

Johnny removed a Swiss Army knife from his back pocket using only his thumb and forefinger, and tossed it to the ground. Flynn heard the weapon clatter to the concrete.

“ That’s it? That’s all you’re carrying?”

“ Yes, ma’am. Thass it.”

A Swiss Army knife…damn, but this boy was a whole new kind of stupid. “ Okay, Johnny,” Flynn said, “ walk to the car and get in.”

Johnny started to walk forward, and then abruptly halted. “ Hey, you a cop, lady?” he demanded. He tried to sound tough, managed panicky.

“ Y’all think I look like a fucking cop, Johnny?” Flynn demanded. “ No, I ain’t a cop. And that makes me even more dangerous to you, ‘cos I can shoot you down right here, right now, like a dog in the street, then I can drive off and ain’t nobody going to know shit from chocolate cake about what happened here. You feeling me, Johnny?” 

His head bobbed in a vigorous nod. He was feeling her alright. 

“ Good. Now, get in the goddamned car before my patience wears out.”

Johnny stumbled the rest of the way, fumbled the passenger door open, and all but fell into the car. He was shaking with nerves. Up close, with the dubious benefit of illumination, Johnny’s face showed the ravages of adolescent acne and early crack usage. He stared at the 32. Flynn had pointed at his abdomen, his eyes wide, his face slack. His mouth tried to quirk itself into an ingratiating smile that fit badly. “ Hey, lady, I don’t even know your name, and you holdin a gun on me?”

“ My name is of no consequence to you, Johnny. What I want from you is some information, and if you give me what I want, I won’t kill you. How does that sound?”

“ That’s it?” Johnny croaked. “ Y’all want - information? That’s all?”

Flynn nodded. “ Yep, that’s all. I like to keep things simple. Whaddya say, Johnny?”

“ Okay. Sure. I can do that. What do you wanna know?”

“ I’m told you’re the man to ask about a certain mambo. A mambo who can make the Loa do her bidding - and who might be using them to help her dabble in some very bad ju-ju.”

Johnny’s face lost what precious little color it had. He shook his head. Fast. His hands flew up in front of him and flapped about like great white birds. “ Uh uh! No way! Uh uh. No. I can’t talk about that,” he gabbled.

Flynn shrugged. “ Your call, Johnny. So, do you want me to gut-shoot you? That way, you might have a chance to live if some kind soul calls for an ambulance and it actually gets here in time…although I wouldn’t be prepared to bet on that. Or would you prefer I shot you in the head? That’d be pretty final, but it’d be all over quick.”

Johnny made a horrible piglet-like squealing sound. Tears sprang into his eyes. Flynn almost felt sorry for him. If he caved this easily every time he was threatened, he wasn’t going to make it on the street to twenty-six. How he had even made it this far, she wasn’t at all sure.

“ Man, I talk to anyone about her - she gonna kill me!” he insisted.

Flynn shrugged again. That wasn’t her problem. She raised the gun. A flock of expletives flew from Johnny’s mouth.  “ Hey, hey -!” he pleaded, hands frantically patting the air between them, eyes riveted to the gun. “ Let’s not be hasty here, huh? Maybe - maybe - I can tell you a little about her.”

Flynn shook her head. “ I’m an all-or-nothing kind of gal, Johnny. Sorry.”

Johnny was breathing so heavily he was practically panting. He shook his head again, spluttered out a few more expletives, and then he gave a resigned nod. “ I’ll tell you! Okay? I’ll tell you every fucking thing I know about her, and anything else you wanna know. Just - please! Don’t shoot me!”

“ That might still depend on what you tell me, Johnny,” Flynn said. She was messing with him because she didn’t like him and she wanted to mess with him - just for the hell of it. “ So, start talking and let’s see if you can’t spare me the cost of engaging a valet service to get the bloodstains outta my nice ride.”

He talked fast, his words falling over one another in their haste to get out. Flynn listened, and kept the gun trained on him, just to give him some encouragement.

The mambo called herself Jean-Marie, Johnny said. No last name, just Jean-Marie. With a hyphen. Johnny opined that the Jean - the French version of John - was probably for Dr John, and Marie would be for Marie Laveau, probably the most famous New Orleans Voodoo priestess there ever was. Flynn didn’t disagree. This modern-day Jean-Marie was a white woman, and she had acolytes - followers - all over the city.

“ You’ve met her then?” Flynn asked.

Johnny reluctantly admitted that no, he had never dealt with Jean-Marie directly, only with her representatives.

“ Then how do you know she’s a white woman?” Flynn asked.

Johnny shrugged. “ Her man - Antoine - he deals wit me a lot, an he said she was the ‘best white mambo he’d ever met’.”

Flynn’s ears pricked. “ This Antoine - what does he look like?”

Johnny drew a deep breath, closed his eyes briefly. He actually shuddered as he let the breath out. “ What’s he look like? He a white dude, looks like a fuckin Dutch barn that grew legs and arms, is what. Big. Muss be six-four, sumthin around there. Scary fucker.”

That could be Boudreau’s suspect, Flynn thought. “ What do you do for the mambo? I’m told that you ‘procure’ things for her?”

Johnny gave an eager nod, happy to be back on familiar ground. “ I guess you could say I procure stuff for her, yeah. She wants a goat - say, a white goat - she sends Antoine to me an’ I find her a white fuckin goat. Antoine comes and collects it, brings me my money for services rendered. Sometimes it’s other stuff, like chickens, or roosters. Or stuff like stones from some cemetery, or a bunch of weeds from the river.”

“ Strange requests,” Flynn pointed out.

Johnny shrugged. “ Mebbe, but she pays me an I don’t ask no questions.”

“ How’d you and Antoine stay in touch?”

“ He calls me. We meet in the cemetery - ” Johnny hooked a thumb in the general direction of St Louis Cemetery No. 2. “ He always uses payphones. An I always get paid in cash -  the hustler grimaced. “ Sometimes I wonder why I keep on doin it, since I’m scared practically shitless of this Antoine dude - and of her. She the real deal, man, she can even read minds.” 

Flynn’ s expression must have betrayed her skepticism. Johnny bobbed his head, eyes wide and aglow with the sincerity of a believer. “ She knows stuff, this Jean-Marie, she really does. Like, she knew one time when I tried to stiff her on the cost of sumthin an’ she sent a temp’ray curse to me? I got the chills an’ pukin for three days ‘til she sent Antoine over to give me sumthin stopped it all. Told me never to stiff her like that again, an’ I tell ya, I ain’t never.”

Flynn sighed. “ It’s all psychology, Johnny. Y’all want to believe you’ve been cursed - not that you’ve just eaten a bad taco.”

Even as Flynn was speaking, Johnny shook his head in denial. He scratched at a zit on his face, eyes drifting, a dreamy smile on his face. “ There is one good point to procurin for the mambo though - I gets to go in that shop… ” he trailed off into a wide, lecherous grin that Flynn just wanted to take some pliers to. “ It’s just off Royal? Real interestin lil’ shop, an’ this really cool good-lookin chick wit green eyes runs it. I get nearly all the stuff for Jean-Marie in there.”

Flynn sucked air in as she realized that Johnny was talking about Ariel Rousseau, and Ariel’s store, Voodoo Realty. Not for a second did she consider that Jean-Marie was anything other than a clever con, but that didn’t make her any less a bad person to cross. If Ariel were to inadvertently poke at some ant hill only to discover it was a hornet’s nest, Jean-Marie might come after her with some very real-world violence.

“ This mambo, Jean-Marie…” Flynn allowed her upper lip to curl. “ Has she ever asked you to procure any human beings for her?”

Johnny’s eyes got impossibly wide and seemed to fill his entire face. He shook his head. “ Human beings - you mean, like people?”

Flynn nodded. “ What the fuck did you think I meant, Johnny?” she demanded.

Johnny licked his lips, shook his head again, but harder this time. “ Uh uh. No way. She ain’t never asked me to do that, nossir, an I wouldn’t even if’n she did. I ain’t goin anywhere near that shit. You gotta believe me on that.”

Flynn did believe him. She asked Johnny a few more questions about the mambo, and when she figured he was dry, she told him to get the fuck out of her car…forget he ever saw her face if he wanted to keep his nuts in the place God intended for them to be. Pale as a ghost, sweat popping out on his upper lip, Johnny Cakes fell all over himself once more as he scrambled out of the Trans Am.

Flynn called after him, “ Oh, Johnny, one more thing…” His shoulders bunched in fear and he looked around reluctantly. Flynn gave him a humorless smile.  “ If I were y’all, I’d think about getting out of New Orleans for a while. At least until Jean-Marie decides to move on herself. You feeling me, Johnny?”

Johnny Cakes stared at her for a moment. Then he nodded. He sprinted off into the darkness.

He hadn’t even tried to retrieve his knife, Flynn realized. With a derisive snort, she tucked the .32 away in its ankle holster, and leaned over the seat to close the passenger side door Johnny had forgotten in his haste. As she drove away, she thought about the hustler’s forgotten knife, and she shook her head. No doubt by morning some project kid would have happened upon it, and he’d take it, thinking himself the Big Man On Campus because he had a knife. Eventually he’d use it to stab one of his little project friends to death.

Oh well. Such was the natural cycle of life in The City That Care Forgot.

CHAPTER EIGHT

There were forces at work, human forces which aligned themselves against her. Fools convinced they could defeat her and stay the hand of the Old Ones.

Such fools did not understand that the Old Ones were too powerful to be stopped.

She had to prepare herself for the final and most important part of the ritual, setting the Old Ones free so that they might walk between the worlds of the living and the dead. She had to make her physical body, and her spiritual self ready to act as a human conduit for them. As the first step in doing so, she needed to bathe and she lowered herself into a bathtub of steaming water into which a potent cocktail of herbs and powders, roots and bones, and her own blood, had been mixed. The brackish water moved around her body, bits of root and bone scraping her naked flesh, the heat searing it.

“ Guide me,” she whispered.

The mambo became light-headed as images lit up the backsides of her eyelids, and visions fired off in her brain in rapid, colorful succession. She breathed deeply, making herself relax into the experience of meeting the Loa on their plane of existence.

There was Erzulie, smiling enchantingly with her full, red-lipped mouth and crystal-blue eyes. And Ogun, his long penis fully erect, his jet-dark eyes ablaze with lust. Papa Legba appeared, too, as a friendly face to guide her, and with him came Damballah and the Baron Samedi. Behind these Loa, in the shadows, were the Old Ones, watching and waiting.

Laying back against the smooth metal side of the bathtub, the mambo let her head droop backward and her hands sink beneath the water’s surface, seeking her own sex. All the time she watched the voyeuristic pleasure on the faces of the Loa and the Old Ones.

The final ritual had to involve a third sacrifice, that of someone for whom a love was unrequited. The mambo needed to find the right person, and to do that she would ask for the guidance of the Loa. She thought of the ritual to come, and a surge of renewed lust catch at her body, bucking it, twisting it in the water. She moaned her pleasure, and thrust her fingers deeper inside of herself. When the moment was right, the chosen sacrifice would share with her in drinking this water which would have been enriched with her own juices and those of the Loa. 

And those fools who thought they could stop her? She laughed. They would be the first to feel the wrath of the Old Ones. They would die hard deaths, screaming in agony, begging their own God to save their tortured souls. But their God would be as powerless as they were. 

“ It will be done,” the mambo whispered.

CHAPTER NINE

Dana Jordan had not intended that yesterday would be the day when she finally asked Flynn why they had never gotten together; the question had just sort of popped out without forethought.

Now that she had Flynn’s answer, neither could she deny that what she had heard had stung her, mostly because what Flynn had said about her was true. Whatever else Dana might have implied, she’d never seen herself as a one-night-stand person. But neither did she think Flynn had been completely truthful about her own reasons for avoiding a relationship, and that too, filled Dana with frustration.

Still thinking about the PI the following day, and about whether they had any chance of ever getting together in future, Dana sat at her desk at the newspaper office, trying to muster even a little enthusiasm for work that she usually loved. The Voodoo murders story would run all week - it was big news, even in a city where murder was not uncommon. There wasn’t a whole lot of information to go on - not even after talking to Flynn - but Dana had managed to cobble together a respectable piece from what she had. Today though, her heart just didn’t feel in it.

On impulse she shut down the screen she was trying to work on and called up a new file, one which contained research she had done in moments of downtime. Personal research, the file contained everything she had been able to find out about Willie Rae Flynn.

It didn’t amount to much at all. A birth certificate, a couple of early high school records, and a newspaper report concerning the death of a New Orleans man, Michael John Flynn. The report stated that Mr Flynn had fallen into a canal after a night of heavy drinking. The incident occurred near the old Florida projects, back in the mid 1980s. Michael John Flynn had been well-known around the blue-collar Irish Channel area, both as a hard drinker and a brawler. Michael John Flynn had also been the father of Willie Rae Flynn.

Flynn never talked about her early life, and rarely said much about her life in New York City. She would change the subject whenever Dana tried to bring it up. Of course, that had made Dana even more curious. Willie Rae’s mother, Miriam Pirie Flynn, had been one of those clumsy, uncoordinated women who were always walking into things. At least that was what Miriam claimed on the few occasions when her neighbors felt they could not sit back and listen to Michael beat any more shit out of her and had called the police. Miriam had never once pressed charges against her abusive husband. When he died in the canal accident, she placed a strangely loving obit in the newspaper. She herself had died nine years ago from cirrhosis of the liver after suffering from alcohol addiction for many years. Sometimes fate was a cruel bitch, Dana reflected.

A wife-beating drunk of a father and a weak-willed mother who also turned to drink - that wasn’t the kind of start in life anyone would wish to dwell upon.

Flynn had no siblings, and no other family members that Dana could find. There had been an uncle on her mother’s side, living down in Evangeline Parish, but he disappeared during Katrina and hadn’t been heard from since. The chances were good that he’d died in the hurricane which eviscerated Evangeline Parish.

Dana looked up as Sy Lehane came bustling toward her, and she quickly shut down the screen before he could see that she was mooning over her personal crush on company time.

However, the editor was distracted by other, bigger things. “ Anthea Larue’s body has been found,” he announced. “ Same ritualistic killing as her mother.”

“ Damn,” Dana said softly.

Sy nodded, but his eyes were alight behind his glasses, his nostrils flared with the scent of a story. “ This is big,” he gloated. “ Even without the Voodoo angle, it’s the kind of tragic stuff people eat off the front page with a spoon.” 

What that said about humanity, Dana did not care to dwell upon and so she asked instead if Pierce Boudreau were handling the daughter’s murder?

Sy nodded. “ There’s a press conference today. I was thinking maybe you could get some sort of jump on that with Detective Boudreau?”

Dana was not sure what sort of ‘jump’ she might be able to get since Boudreau would be reluctant at best to do her any favors. Neither did Dana imagine Flynn being further involved with the investigation now that it was an official NOPD case. Still, Flynn was sleeping with the lead detective and Dana wondered if she could use that knowledge to wheedle some information out of either.

“ I’ll talk to Flynn again,” she said.

If last night had been shitty, this morning was double shitty with sprinkles of crap on top. Boudreau tottered home in the wee hours, exhausted and pissed off, to crawl fully-clothed into bed. She slept until the alarm clock woke her again at six-thirty am and then, feeling hardly refreshed and still in a bad mood, she shed yesterday’s rumpled, sweaty clothes, and took a much needed shower that made her feel somewhat better. She grabbed a cup of coffee to go from the deli down the street and drove back to the station with the heavy feeling that she never had left it.

A call-back message awaited at the station. Reverend George Petersen had called with new information. New information - or just old information that he had withheld? Boudreau dialed the number and the reverend answered on the third ring.

“ Reverend Petersen, it’s Detective Boudreau. You called me, I believe?”

“ Yes. Thank you for calling back, Detective.” He cleared his throat in a way that, in Boudreau’s experience, often signaled the lead-up to a confession. “ I’m afraid that I may have misled you somewhat regarding Anthea Larue the other day, Detective.”

“ Uh huh?” Boudreau kept her tone neutral. She leaned forward, elbows on the desktop, using the fingers of her free hand to massage her temples where a headache was threatening to bloom into something would have her chewing aspirin by mid-afternoon. Flynn and her fucking weed. Of course, no one had held her down and forced her to partake of Flynn’s weed. Boudreau considered herself to be a good cop, a fair cop, an honest cop, but sometimes… well, even the best cops needed a little R&R.

“ Um, yes, and I’m really sorry,” Reverend Petersen went on, sounding awkward and abashed in a way that Boudreau didn’t doubt was genuine. She wished, however, he’d just get on with telling her now so that she could go hunt down some aspirin.

“ That’s fine, Reverend, you’re telling me now,” she said as soothingly as she could.

“ Thank you for being understanding, Detective. I told you that Anthea didn’t know anything about Voodoo, but the thing is that I, uh -  I found something a few weeks ago. It dropped out of her school backpack when she was leaving the church after Bible class. A Voodoo drawing - what do they call those things?”

“ A veve?” Boudreau guessed. She was sitting up now, heart beating a little faster as she scrambled for a pen and paper.

“ Yes. It was hand drawn on a piece of paper. I picked it up, meaning to give it back to Anthea, but when I saw what it was - well, I thought it wasn’t something a young and impressionable girl ought to have in her possession.”

Snooping and interfering were alive and well in the world of over-protective adults like the Reverend. Smirking, Boudreau opened a drawer in her desk, hunted for some aspirin there. She found none, gritted her teeth in annoyance. “ Do you still have this drawing in your possession, Reverend?”

Reverend Petersen confessed that he had thrown away the drawing. Disappointed, Boudreau asked if he could at least describe the veve to her?

He could, describing the veve specific to Erzulie, the Loa of love and sensuality. Whilst that hardly fit with Anthea’s grisly fate, Boudreau figured it at least linked one of the Larue women with Voodoo. Opening another drawer in her desk, she rummaged through a stack of old files and tissue boxes, discovered an ancient bottle of aspirin buried underneath those. She shook out four pills, dry-swallowing them.

“ I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you this right away,” Reverend Petersen added.

“ Don’t worry about it.” Boudreau sighed. “ Pretty much everybody lies to us at some point. I’d be disappointed, I think, if they didn’t.”

“ That’s a very cynical attitude, Detective,” Reverend Petersen opined.

Boudreau snorted quietly. “ It comes with the job. But thank you, for coming forward with this information now. Every little bit helps us.”

“ Are you…” Reverend Petersen hesitated. “ How is the investigation going?”

“ Slowly,” Boudreau told him. She thanked the reverend again for his - albeit belated - honesty and hung up quickly, not wishing to field any further questions from him. The fact that he had withheld information didn’t exactly make him any less of a suspect and, even though Boudreau’s gut was telling her that Reverend Petersen had nothing to do with either Anthea’s or Jeannette’s murders, she nonetheless intended to check him out six ways to Sunday. The Erzulie veve connected Anthea to Voodoo only in the most tenuous sense. They were still a long way from connecting either her, or her mother, to the killer.

The veve itself could’ve come from any number of sources. Anthea could have drawn it herself, or downloaded it from the Internet. Even had she purchased it from a Voodoo dealer, there were literally hundreds of stores throughout the city selling assorted Voodoo, Santeria, and general hoodoo shit. Combing through all of those would be like looking for one single needle amongst haystacks filled to the brim with identical needles.

Boudreau called together four uniforms, handed them each pictures of Anthea - and of her mother for good measure - with instructions to show them around all of the Voodoo, Santeria, and hoodoo stores in the city.

One of the uniforms gave her an incredulous look. “ Y’all are kidding, Detective, right?” Boudreau’s expression told him that she was indeed very serious. He shook his head, tried to backtrack. “ I mean, it’ll take weeks to cover all the stores - and that’d just be the licensed dealers. It’s a long shot, is all I’m saying.”

“ Thank you for your input, Officer Malcolm,” Boudreau told him. “ The sooner y’all get started then, don’t you think?”

That done, Boudreau ran a background check on Reverend George Petersen, and updated her checks on Antoine Camber. Antoine’s parents were Lois and David, both of whom were deceased in a long-ago car accident. Antoine inherited a small fortune and a considerable chunk of real estate upon their deaths, some of which he parlayed into his own business managing hedge funds for other rich people. The business did well until about a year ago when Antoine’s game appeared to have slipped. Boudreau wondered what caused the slip…drugs maybe, or alcohol. Those were the usual suspects when someone rich and successful suddenly stopped performing so well. In addition to the Lee Circle condo, he owned a fishing cabin on Bayou Castine, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Boudreau was vaguely familiar with the place - little more than a dot on the map, popular with out-of-towners who liked to fish on weekends.

Her phone rang whilst she was looking at Bayou Castine on a Google map, and she reached for it, pinning the receiver between her neck and shoulder as she continued to type coordinates into the Internet site. “ Detective Pierce Boudreau.”

“ Good morning,” Flynn’s voice greeted her.

“ Flynn. What can I do for y’all?”

“ Listen, I may have got a lead on your mambo.”

Boudreau scowled. “ I seem to recall last night you said something about this being my case now?”

“ So?” Flynn’s voice became edged with irritation.

“ So what are you doing still digging in my sandbox, Flynn?”

“ Do you want the information I have, Pierce, or do you not?”

Boudreau did want it, and said so. In fact, she needed all the information she could get right now, although she didn’t say that to Flynn. The PI told her about Johnny Cakes, and his information suggesting that Antoine may be the go-between for a mambo named Jean-Marie. Boudreau entered Johnny’s name into the system, came up with a couple of public nuisance beefs.

“ I doubt Johnny is a player on this board,” Flynn said and Boudreau grunted agreement. Jean-Marie, on the other hand, was an interesting prospect.

“ And where did you get this information?” Boudreau demanded.

“ You sure you want to know?” Flynn chuckled. “ I mean, plausible deniability and all that.”

Now Boudreau had a bad feeling. Like acid indigestion, only it wasn’t caused by eating bad crab cakes. She closed her eyes, swallowed on the taste of bile in back of her throat. “ Just tell me that it didn’t come from Ariel Rousseau.”

“ Not this time, no. This came from Harvey Destrehan.”

Boudreau choked. She scowled at the phone. “ Flynn,” she grated, “ you can’t be sharing privileged information with that fat, skeezy bastard.”

“ I didn’t share anything with Harvey. But while we’re on the subject of Ariel - she deserves a heads-up on the mambo thing. She could be in danger if she doesn’t know who she’s supplying for.”

Boudreau huffed a sigh. “ She’s only in danger if y’all keep telling her shit,” she pointed out. She slammed the phone down and sat for a moment, just scowling at the wall, letting her irritation at Flynn wear itself out banging its head against that. Then she got back to work.

Her initial background check on Reverend Petersen revealed nothing immediately suspicious and he dropped a few more places down the rather bare-looking suspect list. Boudreau put in a request for the reverend’s military service records anyway, and then she went to back to pondering on Antoine Camber’s whereabouts. She could put in a request to the locals out by Slidell to check out the cabin, and wait maybe days or even weeks to have them do so if they were busy. Or she could head there herself and take a look.

She hunted down Waylon in Evidence Lockup where he was cataloguing stuff taken from the Lee Circle condo. When she asked if he wanted to go with her to check out Camber’s cabin, he shook his head.

“ Can’t, Pierce. Cap’n says I have to get this crap tagged and stored. Sorry.”

Boudreau sighed. “ Okay. I’ll head out there myself, just for a look. If it seems like Camber is there, I’ll radio for backup.”

Waylon nodded absently as he boxed and tagged a bloodied section of flooring torn up from the condo. The building super would have a fit at that no doubt, Boudreau thought wryly. “ Okay. Cool. Be careful, Pierce. I reckon this guy’s a freakin’ nut job, I do,” Waylon told her.

Boudreau grinned at her partner. “ Hedge fund manager into Voodoo and ritual murder, ya think he’s nuts, really?” 

On her way out of the building, she ran into Dana Jordan as the Orleans Weekly reporter was entering. Boudreau tried to duck into a stairwell to avoid her, but no luck, the reporter spotted her and followed her.

“ Detective Boudreau! Hold up a minute, please!”

Grimacing, Boudreau kept going, pretending not to have heard the reporter’s shout. Last night, Flynn had told her about the purloined morgue photo that had found its way into Sy Lehane’s possession, and how Dana had come to her looking for information on the case. There had been no point in Boudreau wasting her ire on the morgue employees who leaked the photo. She had, however, been less than happy knowing that Flynn talked to the reporter.

“ Y’all can’t see straight when it comes to Dana Jordan,” she had sighed to the PI. Flynn hadn’t denied it, and that made Boudreau even more mad. “ You know she’s gonna write it up. She’ll tip the killer off.”

Flynn had shrugged. “ Press would’ve got hold of it sooner or later anyway.”

Boudreau could’ve pointed out that she’d have preferred for it to be later, but she sensed she was already wasting her breath and let the argument drop.

Right now she had neither the time, nor the will, for a showdown with the reporter but as Dana followed her into the stairwell, Boudreau finally stopped, held up a hand and shook her head firmly. “ No comment.”

“ Come on, Detective Boudreau, I just want a quote,” Dana pleaded.

“ There’s a press conference today, but I imagine you already know that. Save your questions for that.” 

Dana persisted, unfazed. “ There’s a Voodoo angle to the murders - are you treating that seriously, or as a ruse orchestrated by the killer?”

Boudreau threw her a poisonous look. “ Whatever Flynn has been whispering into your ear, y’all aren’t going to get any confirmation from me.” She clattered down the stairs, footfalls ringing on the stone steps, the reporter staying doggedly on her heels.

“ Look, I’ll be straight - I’m here to ask for a heads-up, Pierce. Please? This is a big story. Voodoo gets a bad rap, and if there’s a serial killer at work in the city who is using Voodoo - ”

Boudreau came to such an abrupt halt and wheeled so fast on Dana that the reporter stuttered to a halt. Forced to take a step back, uncertainty flickered in her expression as Boudreau stabbed a stiff finger at her. “ If I were you, I wouldn’t let Captain Embry hear you using the words ‘serial killer’ and ‘Voodoo’ in the same sentence.”

“ Looks bad for the tourists?”

Boudreau raked a hand through her dreadlocked hair. “ Yeah, it looks bad for the fucking tourists. That’s the bottom line. This city is just starting to get back on its feet after Katrina - last thing it needs are rumors about some deranged serial killer gutting people in Voodoo rituals. Y’all see what I mean, Dana?”

“ I do.” The reporter nodded. “ So the official stance of the lead detective on the investigation is - what? There is no serial killer, and no Voodoo connection?”

Boudreau shook her head in disbelief at the reporter’s ballsy attitude, then razored a deadly serious look at her. “ I’m not Flynn. You can’t work me the way you do her.”

“ You have a serial killer in your city. He’s using Voodoo rituals - perverted ones, sure - but Voodoo all the same. The general media is going to get hold of this sooner or later. At least I’ll be fair.”

“ Oh, definitely no comment about that.”

They had reached the level of the parking garage where Boudreau straight-armed the door and stepped through, expecting the reporter to leave her alone. To her annoyance, Dana continued to follow. “ Let it go,” Boudreau growled over one shoulder. “ Come to the press conference like everyone else. Don’t use your acquaintance with Flynn just to get ahead of some story.”

Dana frowned. “ What exactly is your problem with me, Pierce?”

There it was. Boudreau sucked air in, held it for a count of three, and then blew it out hard. When she was sure she could face the reporter without giving in to the urge to punch her, she turned around. “ I don’t like you. Simple as that.”

“ Why?”

“ I need a reason to dislike someone? Okay then - you’re a reporter. How’s that?”

“ Fine. I get that you don’t like me as a reporter - ” Dana shook her head. “ But it’s more than that, Pierce, isn’t it? There’s some other reason for your dislike of me . It’s just too personal.”

A tangle of emotions caught in Boudreau’s chest. She did not need this reporter knowing how much she liked Flynn, nor how badly she wanted for Flynn not to become involved with anyone else. But she suspected that Dana already was starting to put those pieces together. “ There is nothing else,” Boudreau lied.  “ I just don’t like reporters. Now, leave me the fuck alone. I have a job to do. An important one. Unlike some people.”

And she spun on her heel, heart pounding against her ribs as she stalked away. It was all she could do not to run.

Each time Boudreau saw Lake Pontchartrain she had to remind herself that it only had the appearance of an inland sea because the far shore was always beyond the horizon. In fact, Pontchartrain was a relatively shallow puddle of water, just forty miles wide east to west and twenty-five miles wide north to south. Normally quite placid, during seasonal storms Pontchartrain could get choppy enough to be dangerous. Swimming in the lake had long been illegal, and the water sports had once been popular were now largely banned. Boudreau used to come to the lake a lot as a kid. These days, not so much. Heading out to Bayou Castine, she took the I-10 through Mid City, skirting Lakeview and Wilshire Heights and jumping over to Metairie to get on the Pontchartrain Causeway. Twenty-four miles running northwards to Mandeville, the twin spans of the causeway was a stopover for vast migrating flocks of the same purple martins found roosting around the cathedral on Jackson Square. It was to see these pretty little birds that Boudreau had come to Pontchartrain as a kid.

Across the lake in Mandeville she stopped at a service station to buy gas and to use the restrooms. She had checked out a vehicle from the motor pool, a beat-to-shit sedan of a shade not to be found on any color chart, manufactured in a distant decade when gas did not cost so much and nobody worried about the environment. Any attempt to claim expenses back from the department for the pool car would probably take until Boudreau retired. But the roads around places like Bayou Castine could be rough and the alternative would have been to risk damage to her own vehicle. No way the department would ever pay her back for that.

As she drove, her thoughts drifted to her reaction to Dana Jordan’s questions, particularly the foolish way in which she had tried to deny that her dislike for the reporter was personal. Now, of course, Dana would know for sure that Boudreau thought of Flynn as more than just someone on the side.

“ Christ, even I didn’t know I cared that much,” she muttered aloud to her own reflection in the rearview mirror.

But she did. She cared. And knowing that Flynn was interested in the goddamned reporter just ate her up sometimes. She wanted to be faithful to Carol, wanted their relationship to be successful and honest and all the rest of that ever-loving crap, but she just couldn’t deny that she had feelings for Flynn which stood in the way of such idealistic domestic bliss.

“ Fuck it.” Boudreau scowled at her reflection. “ Keep your mind on the job.”    

Bayou Castine did not have much but what it had was pretty. Antoine Camber’s cabin, situated a good way out of town, could only be reached by following a single-track road - little more than hard-packed dirt which probably turned into a quagmire during rainstorms and which made Boudreau glad all over again that she’d taken a motor pool vehicle - through dense bayou country. Set back from the road and surrounded by foliage, the closest neighboring cabin more than five hundred yards away, the cabin was the ideal place to hide out.

Boudreau parked a little way distant and walked to the entrance road, using the tree line for cover. She could see no vehicles parked out front, but Camber could’ve left the Lexus around back. On the run, and armed - which Boudreau was prepared to assume he was - he would surely be on the lookout for cops. She un-tucked her shirt, let it hang over her gun and badge. He might not be so suspicious of a lone black woman on foot.

There were no signs of life around the cabin. Boudreau mounted the porch and rapped with her knuckles on the wooden doorjamb.

“ Mr Camber?” she called out, trying not to sound like a cop and failing. “ Antoine Camber? Please come on outside if you’re here.”

Boudreau stepped to one side and cupped her hand against the window glass, peering into the gloomy interior. Dusty, off-gray curtains hung on the inside of the window, obscuring her view. She backed away again, followed the porch around to a side door and knocked on that.

“ Guess y’all weren’t stupid enough to come here, after all,” Boudreau muttered, disappointed. She turned the corner of the cabin, and she almost walked straight into Antoine Camber.

The hedge fund manager loomed in front of her, a huge mountain of a man, wild-eyed and disheveled, breathing heavily, and swinging a two-by-four at elbow height.

Boudreau came to a dead halt, heart jumping into her throat, her gaze jerking immediately to the two-by-four. With an effort, she looked back into Camber’s wild eyes, just managed to hold her voice steady as she addressed him.  “ Mr Camber,” she said, “ I need for you to put that weapon down. Right now.”

His eyes were glassy and their focus kept slipping in and out. Boudreau backed up a careful step, reaching as she did so for the snap on her hip holster which had chosen that moment to become stuck. As she grasped at it, trying not to let the panic creep in, her sweaty fingers slid uselessly around the leather.

“ I didn’t want do it,” Camber said suddenly.

Boudreau frowned, momentarily distracted by the announcement. “ You didn’t want to do what?” 

Camber shook his head.  “ I didn’t want to do it! She told me it would be alright! She told me I’d have money, and power too! She promised me! Then she gave me all those fucking drugs and - and I didn’t know shit anymore!”

Boudreau had no idea what the man was talking about and right now she didn’t much care either. She just wanted to get her gun out, preferably without spooking Camber into any rash actions, and make him put that goddamned two-by-four down, get some handcuffs on him. Then they could shoot the breeze all he wanted.

“ Mr Camber, I’m sure you didn’t want to do it…” Boudreau made her voice soothing. She still had no real idea what ‘it’ was, except maybe the murders of Jeannette and Anthea Larue, but she didn’t want to make any wrong guesses out loud that would risk setting Camber off. “ If you’d just like to put that thing down, we can go someplace and talk. How about that?”

Apparently he had other ideas. He suddenly found his focus and glared at Boudreau as she tried to back up. Then he raised the two-by-four and swung it in a wide arc toward her. Boudreau whipped sideways, but still the weapon caught her a blow on the side of the head that made her skull ring with sound and sent her stumbling off the porch. She came down hard in the packed dirt of the yard, the impact with the ground jarring her right shoulder and sending a searing pain through the whole side of her body that instantly numbed her arm into uselessness. Dazed, feeling reality start to un-tether from her, Boudreau tried to crawl away toward the road. She heard Camber’s booted feet hit the dirt behind her.

“ Antoine don’t - ” Boudreau began.

He swung the two-by-four again. This time it smacked Boudreau between the shoulder blades and laid her out flat on the dusty earth where her forehead bounced, her teeth clacking together painfully as dirt sprayed into her face, up her nose, and into her eyes, stinging those to tears. Hot lightning bolts of pain arced up and down her spine.

Her last thought was “ Oh Hell no!” and then the lights all went out.

Antoine Camber’s head buzzed with fervent whispers and seethed with bloody images. The visions would come and torment him, then vanish with an audible cartoon-like pop! He heard the voices of the Loa talking to him amidst the whispers and the things that they said nearly drove him crazy. He wanted it to stop but he didn’t know how to make it stop. Through it all, the single thought that now tortured him was - I killed a cop. I killed a fucking cop for her.

He needed to get away from he’d done. He also needed more drugs to make the whispering stop. After dragging the cop inside the cabin and leaving her there on the kitchen floor, Antoine threw away the two-by-four, matted and stained now with the cop’s blood and hair at one end, and ran to the cop’s vehicle. He drove away from the cabin, fast. He’d taken her gun, too, but not her cell phone, some part of his brain not yet ruined by drugs warning him that a cell phone signal could be traced. Besides, cell phones were often useless out here in the bayou.

In a panic made worse by his jonesing for more of the Zombie Dust, Antoine drove fast and recklessly, twice nearly running other drivers off the road, to Slidell where he used a payphone at a service station to call the mambo.

She first calmed his panic and hushed his incessant, near incoherent babble, and then she told him that everything would be fine, that all he needed to do was return to her. Come home. Antoine, practically blubbering with gratitude, said that he would do so immediately.

“ Ditch the cop’s vehicle first,” the mambo instructed him, “ because they’ll be looking for it and we don’t want to draw attention, do we?”

Antoine agreed that they didn’t want to do that and said he would get rid of the car right away.

“ And don’t come here,” the mambo added sharply. “ Go to the home of your sister acolyte. I will let her know to expect you.”

“ Yes, Mambo,” Antoine agreed gratefully. “ I won’t let you down again. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I - I doubted you, Mambo.”

“ Just come home, my son, and I will see that you are given what you need,” she told him.

Antoine hung up, surprised to find that his cheeks were wet with hot tears. He brushed them away, embarrassed, and returned to the cop’s car. It was an ancient beater anyway, better off pushed to the bottom of the bayou, which was exactly where Antoine intended to leave it. The gun, he would keep. Just in case anyone else tried to stop him from returning to the mambo’s side.

After all, he’d already killed a cop. He was in the shit up to his neck. The only one who could protect him now was the mambo.

CHAPTER TEN

After her unhappy encounter at the Green Door Club, Flynn woke next morning feeling out of sorts and restless. She went for a run to work out some of the tension, returning to feed Charlie, and to shower before heading out again for coffee and beignets. The regret lingered, but some of the anger at herself had dissipated. A visit to Ariel’s store might cheer her up, she figured, and she had the pretext of using the visit to give Ariel a heads-up on Jean-Marie anyway. To her disappointment, the store remained closed and all of her attempts to rouse Ariel by knocking or calling up to the apartment above failed to elicit a response.

On the walk back to her office her phone rang. “ Yeah?” she answered curtly, her mood a little soured once more.

“ Hey. Uh, is this a bad time?”

Waylon Murray was perhaps the last person Flynn expected to hear from. She didn’t much want to talk to hear from him either. “ What is it, Waylon?” she asked.

“ Y’all seen Boudreau lately?”

“ Last I saw her was yesterday.” This technically was true since it had still been ‘yesterday’ when Boudreau arrived at Flynn’s apartment late last night. “ What’s up, Waylon? Y’all can’t keep track of your own partner? Might need to brush up on those detective skills of yours.”

“ Oh, ha ha. You’re real funny, you.” Waylon paused. “ Thing is, Boudreau was supposed to be at a press conference, but she’s kind of AWOL. She went out to Bayou Castine - ” with obvious reluctance, Waylon filled Flynn in on their suspect, Antoine Camber, unaware that she already knew much of what he told her.

“ This Camber dude,” he added, “ has a fishing cabin out at Bayou Castine, and Boudreau, she went to check it out. I ain’t heard from her since. Can’t raise her on her cell neither.”

“ You’ve tried her radio?”

At the top of the street, a noisy, gaudy second-line appeared and Flynn watched it for a moment before ducking into a side street and covering her free ear with her palm to shut out the din. Even funerals in New Orleans were an excuse to get loud and celebrate. Normally Flynn liked a second-line as much as the next person, but not when she was on the phone.

“ Jesus Christ, Flynn. I know y’all think I’m as dumb as a fuckin fence post, but I ain’t really,” Waylon snapped.  “ ‘Course I tried her fuckin radio. Can’t reach her on that neither.”

Cell signals often became spotty the deeper into the bayou you went, but Waylon should’ve been able to raise Boudreau on the shortwave police radio. Flynn bit back a sigh. “ I could take a spin out there,” she offered.

There was a pause, then Waylon cleared his throat. “ Y’all would do that?”

“ I got nothing else to do right now.”

“ Well, ’kay then. And, uh, thanks, Flynn. I guess I owe you.”

“ That you do,” Flynn said grimly and hung up on him.

Although there seemed to be no immediate reason to panic over Boudreau’s being AWOL, Flynn nevertheless returned to her office and there she retrieved a Remington 870 Wing-Master pump-action 12-guage shotgun from the locked cabinet in which she kept all of her guns. If Boudreau had gotten into any tight spots, there was no better weapon for opening those up than the Wing-Master.

Boudreau came to lying on a cold stone floor, her entire body one big all-over throb. She cracked open a tentative eyelid, blinking away the wateriness there until she could focus on the bottom edge of a stove standing three feet from her head. Her right arm had become pinned beneath her and a prickly, fiery numbness throbbed through the limb like fire ants crawling beneath her skin. Gingerly, Boudreau lifted her head from the floor, turned it slowly first to the right and then to the left, feeling the bones in her neck crackle and rub together in a way that sent a wave of nausea through her, forcing her to close her eyes again and concentrate on breathing until the world stopped swimming around her.

Teeth gritted, knowing the pain in her arm would be ten times worse when blood started flowing through the limb again, Boudreau made another attempt to ease herself up from the floor, using her good arm for leverage and flipping herself over onto her back. When the pain came, it felt as though someone were pouring scalding water down her arm. She kept her teeth clenched hard enough to hear her own jaw crack, breathed shallowly through her nose as she prayed not to pass out all over again, until finally her circulation began to return to normal and the scalding pain eased to a bearable tingling. Huffing out a long sigh of relief, she reached up with her other hand to feel about her head, her fingertips meeting with a sticky dampness just above her right ear. Camber had ripped a good-sized chunk from her scalp when he’d hit her with that two-by-four.

Boudreau crawled to a sturdy pine table in the middle of the kitchen and used that for support to pull herself upright. She patted her pockets in search of her cell phone and gun, finding neither.  “ You fucker,” she muttered between clenched teeth. If Camber used her official service weapon whilst it was in his possession, there’d be official forms and inquiries following her beyond the fucking grave.

Footsteps approached along the wooden porch outside, the sound causing Boudreau to freeze, and her heart to surge into her throat.

It could be the mail man, she reasoned. Or it could be Waylon. Eventually he would realize that she hadn’t checked in for a while and he’d raise the alarm. Or it could be Camber, come back to finish her off. Clinging to the table, still dizzy and nauseous, and without a weapon, too, Boudreau knew she was a sitting duck. Her gaze jerked uneasily toward the door as whoever was outside rattled the knob.

“ Waylon - ?” she hissed. Her own voice reverberated inside her head, sounding too loud and too sharp, threatening to shatter the fragile eggshell that her skull become. She winced.

“ Pierce - ?” a familiar voice called. “ Y’all okay?”

Flynn! Boudreau’s wince of pain turned into a happy grin.  “ In here,” she replied.

“ I’m gonna have to shoot this lock out. Y’all cover your ears now,” Flynn warned her.

Boudreau leaned on the tabletop with both elbows, placed her palms flat against the sides of her head, taking care to avoid touching the wound above her ear. Still the retort from the shotgun was as loud as a thousand firecrackers going off at once. Her ears rang with it and tiny, sharp slivers of pain embedded themselves in each side of her skull.

Flynn strode into the kitchen, a Remington 12-guage shotgun hoisted across her shoulder, twin barrels trailing wisps of smoke. Her gaze alighted at once on Boudreau bent over the table, head clutched in her hands, moaning as the pain bounced around inside of her skull. Flynn smiled.

“ What the hell, Pierce? Y’all look like hammered shit.” 

Boudreau lowered her hands and glared at the PI. “ Gee, thanks. Way to make a gal feel special, Flynn. What the fuck are you doing here, anyway?”

Flynn twitched an eyebrow. “ Rescuing y’all, it would seem.” She rested the shotgun on the table, freeing her hands to drag a chair out from beneath the same. The skreeking of the chair legs on the stone floor made Boudreau wince all over again. Flynn helped her to sit, ignoring the grumbling that Boudreau did. “ So what in the blue fuck happened to y’all -? ” Flynn frowned. “ Waylon called me, all in a tizzy because he hadn’t heard from you. I said I’d come take a look but hell, I thought I’d find y’all sitting on the bayou, enjoying a picnic.”

Boudreau sighed. “ Sorry to disappoint. I found Camber - well, he kind of found me. Him and his two-by-four.”

“ Whoops. I take it that he’s gone?”

“ Yeah. With my gun.”

“ I didn’t see any vehicles outside either. I guess he took that, too, huh?”

Boudreau groaned. “ Sonofabitch!”

Flynn smirked at her over one shoulder as she stepped over to the sink where she found a relatively clean dish rag to douse with cold water and brought that to Boudreau. “ Here you go - hold this on the wound. Y’all are bleeding everywhere.”

“ Yeah, wouldn’t want to mess up Mr Camber’s nice cabin.” Boudreau looked around at the busted door. “ Y’all just need to make an entrance, don’t’cha?”

Flynn gave her an innocent look. “ Well, hell, yeah - ” she said, grinning. “ Where would the fun be in life if you didn’t make a dramatic entrance now and then? Y’all sit tight here, Pierce. I’ll go find someone with a landline. No cell signal out here in the boonies.”

Boudreau leaned back, the wet cloth pressed to her skull. She closed her eyes. “ I ain’t going anywhere.”

Flynn found a neighboring cabin with a working landline and called Waylon, filling him in quickly on what had happened. 

“ I’ll get the paramedics from Slidell out there right now,” he promised.

“ This will have to become official now,” Flynn reminded him.

“ I’ll square things with Cap’n Embry. Make it all look nice and tidy. Y’all just look after Pierce, please?”

“ Of course.”

The paramedics arrived in less than twenty minutes, just before Waylon and a local cruiser out of Slidell. Waylon joined Boudreau and Flynn inside the cabin whilst the paramedics checked out his partner. They asked her the usual questions regarding a head injury. Did she lose consciousness? how long was she out? did she have any headache? nausea? double vision? Boudreau snapped answers back, insisted she was fine, would be fine just as soon as someone patched her up and gave her some goddamned painkillers, stopped asking her damned silly questions. She really was a terrible patient.

“ Jesus motherfucking Christ,” Boudreau declared to Flynn when the paramedics announced that her injury would require a trip to hospital, and several stitches.

“ Language,” Flynn chided her.

Boudreau shot her a poisonous look.

“ You behave, you,” Waylon told her sternly and she gave him a look, too. He just grinned. Then he stepped outside for a moment with Flynn.

“ There’s a piece of two-by-four over there in the weeds - ” she pointed and Waylon followed her gesture, his pale features tightening with anger and dark thoughts. “ It’s matted with hair and blood - Pierce’s, I’d bet. You might want to bag and tag it.”

“ I’m on it. And - thank you, Flynn.”

“ Don’t mention it.”

Flynn meant it. Waylon knew it. 

The paramedics completed the ride into New Orleans in record time, lights flashing and siren blaring the whole way, all much to Boudreau’s mortification. She complained bitterly about that, too, when Flynn met her in the ER, having driven back in her Trans Am without the traffic-dodging benefit of lights and sirens.

“ Y’all want they should’ve dawdled along, taken in the scenery?” Flynn asked.

Boudreau growled something beneath her breath which Flynn didn’t quite catch but which she didn’t need to hear to know was obscene. Whilst a small battery of tests were run on the detective and a nurse found to clean and stitch her wound, Flynn went to scare herself up a cup of coffee.

“ Doc says I have a mild concussion and a sprained shoulder,” Boudreau told her when she returned. The detective rolled her eyes. “ A couple thousand bucks outta my insurance for that? I could’ve fucking diagnosed myself for free.”

“Are you cleared to go home?” Flynn asked.

Boudreau nodded. “ Someone needs to stay with me,” she added.

Flynn raised her eyebrows. Boudreau sighed. “ Is it such a fucking chore?” she demanded.

“ Yes,” Flynn told her simply.

Boudreau had been instructed to take at least one week off from active duty, something which Captain Embry endorsed. She was livid. “ A week,” she raged to Flynn. “ What in hell am I going to do at home for a week at home? Sit around and watch TV while I eat fucking ice cream and get fat?”

“ It’s only a week,” Flynn pointed out.

Boudreau’s glare warned her to shut up.

Before discharging her from the ER - with a bagful of pain pills from the hospital pharmacy - the doctor warned that if Boudreau’s dizziness or nausea worsened, or if she experienced double vision or excessive tiredness, that she should return immediately. He wagged a stern finger. “ And absolutely no drinking alcohol with those pills, Detective.”

“ Yes, Dad,” Boudreau muttered. As she was being driven away from the hospital in Flynn’s car, she demanded, “ What the fuck is ‘excessive tiredness’ anyway?”

Flynn shrugged. “ I think maybe it means if y’all fall asleep and can’t wake up, you would be in some serious shit.”

“ Yeah - ?” Boudreau snorted. “ Well, if I fell asleep and I couldn’t wake up, then how in hell would I get myself to the fucking ER?”

“ That’d be why you’d be in serious shit.”

Boudreau shifted uncomfortably. “ I don’t want to be a pain in the ass about this staying with me shit. I mean, if you’ve got - someplace else you’d rather be -? ”

Flynn smiled. “ It’s no problem to me. We could find a movie on Pay-Per-View, get some popcorn going…have ourselves a real girly sleepover.”

Boudreau stared at her. “ Have you ever had a sleepover, Flynn, girly or otherwise?”

“ Hell, no.”

“ I didn’t think so. Jesus, even the thought of you doing anything girly creeps me out.”

In the end they agreed that Flynn would take Boudreau home, help her to get settled, and come back later with food. No popcorn, Boudreau warned, and nothing remotely girly. Flynn left her ensconced on the couch with her pain pills, a couple water bottles, and the TV remote. Boudreau held the remote up, scowled at Flynn.

“ I feel like there’s a backhoe digging my brain outta my skull and y’all seriously think I wanna watch Judge Judy?”

“ Anything particular you want me to bring back?” Flynn asked, ignoring the sarcasm.

“ Yeah. How about that mint chocolate-chip ice cream I never got?”

Flynn shook her head. So much for not wanting to be a pain-in-the-ass.

Flynn returned briefly to her own apartment to grab some clothes and to check on Charlie. The cat still disapproved of her absence, displaying this by twice clawing her on the hand when she tried to stroke him. Flynn left him food, and water, and made sure to leave a window open for him to come and go by, and then she threw some clothes into a bag for her overnight stay. Charlie followed her around the apartment, meowing at her.

“ Just one night,” she promised the cat. “ I mean, I don’t think I could bear Aunty Pierce for more than one night. She ain’t the best patient.”

Before heading back to Boudreau’s place, Flynn stopped by Voodoo Realty again, and this time she found Ariel at home.  Attired in a red silk kimono and nothing else, she drew Flynn inside and laid a hand on her chest, leaning in to kiss her.

“ I need to talk to you,” Flynn said.

Ariel gave a mock sigh. “ Just talk, Willie Rae? Again? Damn it, you’re killing me.”

Flynn smiled. “ Sorry.”

Ariel preceded her upstairs to her apartment above the store, the familiar scent of cinnamon and patchouli wafting back to Flynn as she followed. At the top of the stairs, Ariel stopped and turned around, leaning against the wall and giving Flynn a slow, sexy smile. “ Y’all keep coming around like this, a girl might start to get ideas.”

Flynn swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry as she paused on the top stair.  “ What kind of ideas?” she asked.

In response, Ariel hooked a finger into her belt buckle, tugged her close and kissed her. This time Flynn didn’t even try to resist.

“ I do have something I need to do tonight - ” Flynn heard the husky reluctance in her own voice. The sheer want.

“ Well, that makes two of us then because I have something I want to do tonight, too…” Ariel arched one eyebrow and let her fingers trail lazily from Flynn’s belt buckle all the way down the front of her jeans.

Flynn felt herself moisten, her breath quicken, but she forced herself to step out of Ariel’s tempting embrace. Holding the smaller woman by the shoulders, she looked down into the luminous green eyes that teased her. “ Seriously, Ariel. I have to baby-sit Pierce Boudreau tonight. She has a concussion.”

Ariel pouted. “ Aw, poor Pierce. Doesn’t she have a girlfriend to do that?”

“ She’s staying at her mama’s for a few days. And you and I really do need to talk. You’re familiar with a hustler named Johnny Cakes, right?”

Ariel blinked as she regained her equilibrium. “ I know Johnny Cakes, yeah. He comes in the store to buy stuff. He’s always trying to impress me -  ” she rolled her eyes. “ The guy is an ass-clown. So, why are you asking about Johnny Cakes, anyway?”

Flynn gave her a grim smile. “ The woman he’s buying that stuff for might be a killer. Her name is Jean-Marie. That name mean anything to you?”

Ariel shook her head. “ Who is she?”

Briefly, Flynn explained the possible connection between Jean-Marie and the murdered women. As she talked, she watched the color drain from Ariel’s face and impulsively she pulled the smaller woman back into an embrace, even though she knew where that could lead. “ Stay away from Johnny Cakes and anyone else might be connected to this Jean-Marie person, please. ”

All at once Flynn no longer wanted to even pretend that she had come here just to warn Ariel about Jean-Marie. Tilting the smaller woman’s face up to hers, Flynn kissed her again. Lust made hard twinges deep in her own belly. She worked a hand between their bodies, untied Ariel’s kimono, letting it fall open in front. As she had suspected, Ariel was naked underneath. Her body, tight and smooth, the flesh pale so that the dark triangle of downy hair between her legs stood out starkly, made Flynn’s pulse race as she recalled some of the more unusual things that Ariel could do with that body. As though reading these thoughts straight out of Flynn’s mind, Ariel felt for the zip of her jeans, lowered it slowly, and slipped her hand inside. Flynn heard a low, reverberating sound of sheer yearning, and she realized - not without considerable shock - that the sound came from her own throat.  Her head filled up with the cinnamon and patchouli scent of Ariel’s perfume.

“ So whaddya think,” Ariel whispered, “ you got time to stay for a little while?”

Flynn thought she could feel her insides melting. “ Kiss me again and maybe I’ll find I do have the time,” she murmured.

Ariel obliged.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Dana Jordan had been surprised to find Pierce Boudreau absent from the press conference. It was usual for the lead investigator on a case to be present. Taking her place with the other reporters in the lobby of the police building, Dana had listened to Captain Willard Embry, standing alone on the podium set up for the press conference, give out a rote statement.

Yes, the NOPD were investigating the double homicide of a mother and daughter from Kenner. No, they were not currently thinking in terms of a serial killer. Yes, they had a suspect. No, there would not be any information given out on that suspect, not at this time.

Embry had played down any suggestion of Voodoo being involved in the murders, and fielded most of the assembled reporters’ questions with the skill of a born politician. After the unproductive conference, not feeling much the wiser and still pondering where Boudreau had got to, Dana returned to the newspaper office and wrote the best follow-up story to her initial piece that she could using the information she had. Sy then asked her to check out another story, and that took her the best part of the afternoon. When she finally did get back to the office, she found two messages awaiting her. A Special Agent Erin Krueger from the FBI field office in New Orleans had called, requesting that Dana call her back ASAP. That raised her eyebrows. Sy also had left a note telling her that Detective Boudreau had been injured at a crime scene. Flynn, his note added, might have been with Boudreau at the time. Sy had gone home for the day and didn’t pick up on either his land line or his cell. A call to the NOPD switchboard got Dana nowhere either. Concerned, but not yet worried, she tried Flynn’s cell, only to have it go straight to voice mail.

She seethed with frustration, muttering to herself, “ What the hell is it with everyone today? Is no one answering their goddamned phones?” she left a terse message for Flynn to call her back, and then she turned her attention to the mysterious FBI agent. The Bureau rarely called reporters unless they needed a favor from the media.

Before calling Agent Krueger back, Dana did some online research and discovered that Erin Krueger came to the FBI in 1998, having transferred there from another branch of the Department of Justice. Krueger had served out of three different field offices, starting in New York, moving to West Virginia, and finally six months ago, she landed up in New Orleans. There was nothing specific in her online bio regarding which agency she served with previously, leading Dana to wonder if it had been the CIA, or maybe the NSA.

“ So what do you want, Agent Krueger?” Dana murmured as she dialed the number.

The voice which answered was dark and smoky, with the hint of a Midwest accent lurking beneath the carefully modulated speech. “ Federal Bureau of Investigation, New Orleans office. Special Agent Krueger speaking.”

“ Hello. This is Dana Jordan, with the Orleans Weekly. You called me, Agent Krueger?”

A hint of warmth crept into the agent’s voice, but Dana suspected it, too, was carefully planned. “ Yes, indeed I did, Miss Jordan. First of all, allow me to thank you for getting back to me so promptly. What I need to talk to you about is not something that I’m comfortable with going into over the phone. I wonder, would it be convenient for you to come over to my office where we can chat more freely?”

As if the feds ever did anything ‘freely’. Dana actually considered refusing, and instead forcing Agent Krueger to come to her, but only for a moment. You didn’t want to piss the feds off. It was always better to play nice with them. “ I could certainly do that, Agent Krueger. When would you like me to come over?” she asked.

There was a brief beat of silence. Then Agent Krueger suggested, “ How about right now?”

The New Orleans FBI field office was housed in a modern four-storey building situated on Leon C Simon Boulevard and constructed especially for the purpose of housing an FBI field office. The flat-roofed rectangle of red stone and beige-painted stucco looked liked the world’s most impersonal layer cake. Dana parked in the visitor’s lot, entered the ugly building through a high arc of glass panels that were, in her opinion, a pretty useless stab at cheering the place up with Art Deco. An obviously junior agent met her in the foyer, escorted her through various security checks and onto an elevator to the third floor where he delivered her to Agent Krueger’s office. It bore the generic stamp of all government offices: gray carpeting; gray walls; acoustic tiles on the ceiling; functional furniture. Efficient air conditioning hummed quietly in the background. Levelor blinds - also grey - had been drawn all the way aside to allow natural light to enter through the large window. Dana knew that all of the windows in the FBI building had been replaced after 9/11 with bomb- and bullet-proof glass, and she often wondered what difference that was expected to make if the bomb were planted inside the building? She also knew that agents low on the totem pole were given offices at the front of the building, with a view of the parking lots and the traffic on Leon C Simon, and that those higher up were awarded offices to the rear with views of the Mississippi River. Agent Krueger’s office had a spectacular river view.

“ Miss Jordan,” Agent Krueger greeted her. “ Thank you for coming over at such short notice.”

In complete contrast to her drab surroundings, Special Agent Erin Krueger was a woman of startling beauty. At least five-feet-ten or -eleven, with the athletic build of someone who did a lot of swimming and running and other highly physical pursuits, Agent Krueger was either a natural blonde or she knew the whereabouts of the world’s greatest hair stylist. She had ice-blue eyes and a bone structure that was good enough to have put her on the cover of Vogue. Dana supposed if ever the FBI needed a poster-child for recruitment, they could do worse than put Erin Krueger’s picture out there. The agent smiled, showing white straight teeth which were a triumph of both genetics and a great dental plan.

“ Please - have a seat,” she invited.

Dana sat, surreptitiously lowering her gaze to the agent’s hands where they rested on the desktop. No rings adorned the long, slim fingers.

“ Can I get you anything, Miss Jordan? Coffee? A soda?” Agent Krueger closed the file she had been reading and crooked an eyebrow at Dana, who shook her head to indicate that she was good. The cool gaze lingered on her for a moment. “ Yes, I am a natural blonde - lucky me - and no, I’m not married, which is why I don’t wear any rings.”

Dana blinked. Agent Krueger smiled, allowing a hint of humor to glide through her ice-blue eyes. “ I spend every day observing people, Miss Jordan, their body language, what their eyes are saying that their lips aren’t. And, without being boastful, I am considered to be very good at it.”

“ Okay…” Dana gave a slow nod. “ Remind me never to get into a poker game with you. So, what did you want to talk to me about that couldn’t be said over the phone?”

“ Willie Rae Flynn.”

Dana blinked again at the unexpected turn of the conversation. Krueger believed in getting straight to her point apparently.

“ How well do you know Willie Rae Flynn?”

Dana shrugged. “ We’re - friends, I would say.”

Reclining in her chair, crossing one leg over the other at the knee, Agent Krueger rested her elbows on the arms of her chair and made a steeple of her fingers. Not everybody could get away with steepling, Dana reflected, but it suited this woman. Her ice-blue eyes became once again unreadable. “ Let me tell you a little about Willie Rae Flynn,” she began. “ Starting in 2001, when the body of a New York businessman who had known connections to a prominent Mob family was fished out of the Hudson River. He had been garroted. Whoever did it, they used piano wire and it was clearly a professional job.”

“ A Mob hit?” Dana guessed.

The smallest of smiles played on Agent Krueger’s mouth. “ It may well have been the Mob who ordered the hit, but it was certainly not any of their usual people who carried it out.”

Dana fancied she could feel Agent Krueger’s stare prying into her head, gauging her every reaction, looking for tells. It was easy to imagine a suspect, locked in an eight-by-twelve concrete box with this woman’s implacable ice-blue gaze for company, developing the irresistible urge to confess - even if it was to something they hadn’t done.

“ We became involved on that case because the deceased was scheduled to testify in a RICO case against his former Mob bosses. I was the agent in charge. Long story short, Miss Jordan, we were able to ascertain information led us to believe the hitter may have been a woman who used the alias ‘Hilda Bergen’. We checked it out, but all we found was a tenuous connection between ‘Hilda Bergen’ and another woman named ‘Sally Cooper’ who ran a high-class matchmaking agency. The office out of which both women supposedly operated, in fact turned out to be a derelict building.”

“ Sounds like you hit a pretty solid dead end,” Dana remarked.

Now it was a clearly rueful smile that flickered on the agent’s lips, gone almost in the instant it was formed. “ We were not getting anywhere on the dead businessman or the hitter, I admit that. At least not until a woman named Barbara Calabrese came forward. Mrs Calabrese was the wife of a high-ranking member of the same Mob family who had employed the dead businessman’s services. She claimed that her husband was the one who arranged the hit, and that she had been with him when he spoke to the hitter. She wasn’t supposed to be there, but a series of those unfortunate coincidences often occur in life, led to her presence at the meeting. She saw her husband and a woman talking, which surprised her enough that she decided to be a tad nosy.”

“ I’d probably have felt the same way,” Dana said.

“ Mm. Mrs Calabrese thought she recognized the woman to whom her husband talked - granted, it was dark and they were standing maybe twenty feet away - but she was pretty damned sure all the same.”

Dana made a face to reflect the skepticism she felt. “ That would hardly stand up well in court.”

“ Probably not,” Agent Krueger admitted. “ Mrs Calabrese’s reason for coming to us would have made any testimony look suspect also. She found out her husband was having an affair, decided to take her revenge by ratting him out for arranging the hit. In return we agreed to place her in the Witness Protection Program.”

Dana shook her head in disbelief. If she tried to take this to her editor, she would have been thrown out of his office. No newspaper would accuse someone of being a hired assassin based solely upon the word of a jealous soon-to-be ex-wife. No respectable newspaper anyway.

“ It didn’t matter in the end - ” Agent Krueger bit a corner of her lip, grimaced at Dana. “ Barbara Calabrese was killed in a hit and run three days after she made first contact with us. It looked like an accident. I’m certain it wasn’t.”

“ Do you think the same killer hired to take out her husband also made the hit on Mrs Calabrese?” Dana asked.

Agent Krueger shrugged. “ I had no way of determining that. All we had was a conversation with Mrs Calabrese that was never recorded. She refused to talk to us on the record until we had protection in place for her.”

“ What did the conversation concern?”

“ Barbara Calabrese had a brief fling with a younger woman whilst she was in California, attending college there to study for a nursing degree. It was several years ago and Mrs Calabrese admitted that she had liked to party back then in a very serious way. Alcohol, drugs, sex, the works, She did think, however, that the woman with whom her husband met, was the same woman with whom she’d had the fling.” 

Something dark and secretive slid behind the agent’s ice-blue eyes, making Dana think of a shark gliding beneath the surface of cold blue water. “ The description she gave rang bells for me. I  remembered briefly meeting a woman on an occasion when I was working for, uh, another agency. I only met this woman fleetingly, in a hotel bar in Havana. She told me that her name was Wynne Foster and that she was an assassin.”

Dana blinked. “ She just came out with it? She was joking surely?”

Agent Krueger shook her head. “ I had the feeling she was telling me the truth. I also felt she recognized what I was back then - ” as Dana opened her mouth to ask a question, the agent held up a hand for her continued silence. “ No, Miss Jordan, I will not be going into any detail about what that was. Suffice to say it wasn’t as though I could do anything with the information she gave me. But I knew in my gut that the New York hitter was the same woman I had met in Cuba. I tried to investigate - I really did - but I got nowhere. Every avenue I turned down, it was a dead end. This woman suddenly just did not exist in any reality.”

“ A ghost,” Dana murmured.

Agent Krueger twitched a smile. “ I don’t believe in ghosts, Miss Jordan. Anyway, the whole investigation was shut down, and all of us agents were all assigned to other cases. I was transferred out of the New York office to West Virginia. But, Miss Jordan, I didn’t stop looking into the New York hitter. I became obsessed with the idea of finding her.”

“ Why?” Dana asked.

Agent Krueger shook her head. “ I’ll get to that in due time. For now, let me tell you about another case. A kidnapping. Little girl, aged four, snatched from outside of her home in West Virginia, in broad daylight. The local police wasted two days before calling us in.”

The first forty-eight hours in a kidnapping were crucial. During that time the kidnappers would be most likely to panic and dispose of the victim, most often dead.

“ By the time the locals got their heads out of their asses, the trail had all but gone cold as yesterday’s dinner, ” Agent Krueger went on grimly. “ We had to start our investigation from scratch, which wasted even more precious time. We finally discovered an old boyfriend in the wife’s past who had been put away for kidnapping and assaulting a girl of five years of age.”

“ Shit,” Dana breathed.

“ Shit is about right. Turned out this asshole had actually moved into town just a week before the kidnapping. When we went to talk to him, he’d vanished. Skipped out on his rent, his job, everything. We found the girl’s body eight days later, buried in a shallow grave just over the state line. There was a lot of decomp and some animal predation, so the ME couldn’t get an exact time of death. His best guess, however, was death occurred less than twenty-four hours after she was taken. She had been sexually assaulted, repeatedly, in ways you don’t want to hear about. I certainly don’t want to talk about them. The cause of death was manual strangulation.”

Dana’s stomach clenched. Agent Krueger gave her a hard stare. “ His fingernails had dug so deeply into the skin around her neck that he actually left some of his own DNA. DNA which belonged to the ex-boyfriend. We started a huge manhunt, but he still managed to elude us. Then, about a year later, we got a call from a local police chief in some rinky-dink little town in rural West Virginia. He had a John Doe fitted the description of our guy. Myself and another agent went down there, made a positive ID. The guy had been living in a shack out in the middle of nowhere, making a living from the land and selling some furs illegally by the looks of it, all completely off the grid which explains why we couldn’t find the sonofabitch. He must’ve panicked after he killed his ex’s child, knew we’d catch up to him sooner or later, and gone to ground. Anyway, it appeared he died in some kind of hunting accident. Shot himself in the leg, tried to crawl to help, didn’t make it. Died from a combination of blood loss, shock, and dehydration.”

“ But you didn’t believe that,” Dana guessed.

“ Hell no - ” Agent Krueger leaned forward and placed her forearms on the desktop. The nails of her right hand clicked softly against the Formica top. “ When we went to tell the family, they just didn’t seem all that surprised. I mean, they tried to act in all the ways people should act when they get that kind of news, but there just seemed something hinky about their whole performance. And then I spotted something as we were leaving. A necklace. Draped over a picture of their daughter on the mantel. The same necklace they had described the girl as wearing on the day she disappeared. I asked them about it. Said they had found it when they moved home - they moved about six months after their daughter died, couldn’t stand looking at the place they were in any longer - found it under the daughter’s bed. They were mistaken about her wearing it the day she went missing, they said. It was perfectly reasonable explanation, of course…” Agent Krueger’s upper lip curled, as though she were tasting something bitter and unpleasant. “ The agent who was with me bought it just fine. But not me. Over the next year, there were three more guys turned up dead. All of them suspected of kidnapping, molesting, and killing children. The deaths of these men were all ruled accidental.”

Dana tilted a curious look at the agent. “ You didn’t believe that either?”

Agent Krueger shook her head, gave a thin, humorless smile.

“ How does this connect to the New York hit woman, and what does any of it have to do with Flynn?” Dana asked.

“ I’m getting to that. One of the fathers of the molested girls had a connection to the New York Mob, the same Mob family Barbara Calabrese’s husband worked for. It was slim, I agree, but it was a thread, and I tugged on it. I found a ten thousand dollar withdrawal from the father’s account at the end of that thread.”

“ Doesn’t prove anything,” Dana countered.

“ You’re right. But there was more.” Agent Krueger leaned back so that she could open up a drawer in bottom of her desk. From it she extracted a plain white envelope, and placed that on the desktop. “ In this envelope is something which was found at a death scene…that of one of the suspected pedophiles. It didn’t match any of the clothes belonged to the deceased, and so the local law enforcement bagged it and stored it in their Evidence Lockup. They didn’t suspect foul play, they were simply being thorough, which was lucky for me. I was able to obtain this piece of evidence and process it. Take a look, Miss Jordan.”

Dana slid the envelope toward her, feeling her heart suddenly thud in her chest as she pried the flap up and stuck two fingers inside, withdrawing a Ziploc evidence baggie. Inside the baggie was a small blue button, the kind that might have come from a shirt or top. Dana raised a questioning glance to the agent.

“ I got a partial print from that button, Miss Jordan,” she said. “ I ran it through the system, but nothing popped. Not then. I left a flag on it in case anything ever did.”

Dana swallowed, eyes darting between the button and Agent Krueger. “ And something did?”

The agent nodded. “ In 2005 someone named Willie Rae Flynn applied in New Orleans for a private investigator’s license. Flynn’s prints were a match for the one on that button. The thing is, no one else knows about it but me.”

A chill bloomed at the base of Dana’s spine, wound its way up to the middle of her back, and settled in at a point midway between her shoulder blades. “ You withheld evidence,” she said quietly. Agent Krueger’s model features tightened as she nodded once again.  “ Why?”

The FBI agent reclined in her chair again, re-crossed her legs, and made her fingers into another steeple. “ I put it together. I knew Willie Rae Flynn was the same woman had worked out of New York as a hitter, the same person killed these men. The same woman that Barbara Calabrese had known. And she was the woman I’d met before. I withheld the evidence and what I knew, Miss Jordan, and I waited for a position to open up down here in New Orleans, because I had no desire to bring Flynn to justice.”

Dana’s heart was beating much too fast now. Her palms felt greasy and cold. A small circle of sharp pain throbbed behind her left eye, threatening to bloom into a full blown headache as she tried to sort through what she had just heard. She saw a knowing smile flicker on Agent Krueger’s lips. The gesture made Dana want to change her clothes, her skin even. “ What do you want with Flynn?” she asked.

“ I want her to kill someone for me.”

The shock she felt must have been written all over Dana’s face because Agent Krueger raised both hands and made a patting gesture in the air with her down-turned palms. “ There’s a very good reason I want this person dead, if it makes it any easier,” she explained, her tone so perfectly reasonable tone that it almost made Dana forget she’d just said she wanted Flynn to kill someone for her. She reached up to rub above her temple with two fingers, massaging the flaring headache there. “ You were CIA before you joined the Bureau, weren’t you?” she asked dully. The slight rise of the agent’s eyebrows confirmed this. Dana frowned. “ Why don’t you just kill this person - whoever they are - yourself? I bet your CIA training included how to kill people and make it look accidental.”

“ Obviously I’m not going to answer that. It isn’t quite so simple, anyway.”

“ Never is, is it?” Dana grimaced. “ So who do you want Flynn to kill, if you don’t mind my asking that at least?”

“ My stepfather,” Agent Krueger replied promptly, shocking the hell out of Dana yet again. She stared into the calm expression in the agent’s eyes. “ He’s a very important man, high up in a certain government department. He is also an abusing monster who sexually and physically abused me for years.” A look of mingled disgust and discomfort rippled across Agent Krueger’s face. She sucked air between her clenched teeth. Obviously, the memory of what her own stepfather did to her caused her tremendous pain. Weakness, Dana thought, did not sit well on this woman. “ He was such a nice guy around everyone else, so well respected and liked, that no one would have believed me if I’d told them what was going on. I tried to tell my mother once - she wouldn’t hear anything about it. Told me that I was making it up for attention.”

It was an all too common story heard from thousands of abused children. The adults around them, unable to accept that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, recognize such a monster in their own midst, retreated instead into deep denial. “ Why didn’t you go straight to Flynn with this? You’re taking a huge risk, involving a reporter,” Dana pointed out.

Agent Krueger’s expression turned sly. “ I don’t think you ever want me to get even the idea that you were threatening me, Miss Jordan. It wouldn’t be advisable,” she said.

Dana’s flesh prickled with goose bumps. She would bet that Erin Krueger had killed people before; if not as an FBI agent, then almost certainly during her days with the CIA. The agent held Dana’s eyes in a level gaze. “ If I were to approach Flynn, she would likely assume it was an FBI sting to take her down, and quite simply, she would never talk to me,” she explained.

The words rang false but neither could Dana see any thread with which to pull the excuse apart yet. She twitched a frown at Agent Krueger. “ You want me to be your go-between, that’s it, isn’t it? To negotiate with Flynn. What influence do you think I have with her?”

“ From what I gather, Flynn likes you. That tells me she might be willing to listen to you.”

It was entirely possible that Agent Krueger were vastly overestimating Dana’s influence with Flynn. “ Just supposing I were to buy any of what you say, Agent Krueger - what would be in this for Flynn?”

Agent Krueger laughed. “ You are smart, Miss Jordan. I knew you were. That’s something, however, that I will only discuss with Flynn, should she agree to talk to me.”

Dana drew a breath in. “ I’ll talk to her. But I can’t promise you anything more than that.”

Agent Krueger nodded. “ Thank you.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Even though Flynn didn’t want to leave Ariel, she made herself do so and returned to Boudreau’s place where she found the detective still slumped on the couch, flicking through the TV channels.

“ Thought you didn’t want to watch Judge Judy?”

“ It’s the Discovery Channel. Y’all bring me some beer?”

“ I brought you Cokes. Doc said no alcohol.” Flynn scooped Chinese food from the cartons onto two plates, grabbed some cutlery from a drawer, and detached two cans of Coke from the six-pack, carried everything into the living room. “ How’re you feeling anyway?”

” Like hammered shit. I think that’s how you described it, right?” Boudreau stabbed a fork into the heap of pork and noodles on her plate. “ Where’d you get to anyway? No - I don’t want to know that. I can smell fucking patchouli oil on you. Y’all were visiting with Ariel again.”

“ What if I was? Would you be jealous?” Flynn smirked.

Boudreau curled her lip. “ Of that green-eyed bitch? Hell, no. But seriously, Flynn, I know y’all like her, but just be careful, okay? She’s a con.”

“ Ex-con. She’s going straight now.”

“ That’s what they all tell themselves. I don’t trust her.”

They would never see eye to eye on the matter of Ariel, that much was clear. Flynn shrugged and changed the subject. “ Has Waylon gotten anywhere with identifying the mambo yet?”

“ Nope. He’s still running it through the system. Unsurprisingly, mambos don’t tend to advertise their services on Google. Probably ‘Jean-Marie’ isn’t even her real name.”

The muted television played a game show in the background, reminding Flynn that she hated game shows. She hated most things on TV. Given the choice, she’d rather read a book, or rent a movie. “ No luck with finding Antoine either?” she asked.

Boudreau shook her head, eyes on the silent TV screen as she gestured with her greasy fork toward the back of the cottage. “ Y’all can sleep in the spare room, by the way. Bed’s still made up in there from when Carol’s sister was visiting.”

“ What? I don’t get to spend all night with you?” Flynn widened her eyes and turned down her mouth in a parody of hurt. “ I don’t know if I can bear it.”

Boudreau took a couple of the pills that the doctor had given her and tottered off to her bedroom to lay down, and Flynn padded through to the kitchen to make herself some coffee. As she waited for it to percolate, her thoughts turned back to Ariel, and specifically how being with Ariel had been everything she remembered, maybe even better than she remembered it. Sex with Ariel was as different from sex with anyone else Flynn had ever been with. Ariel had a talent for making it so good that you could almost wonder if maybe she had cast some kind of ‘love spell’ on you, especially when she performed that neat little trick where she could make you come using just her left nipple. But it wasn’t just the sex. Flynn could talk with Ariel - talk with her about anything, including her mixed feelings for Dana Jordan.

“ I know I can’t be with her, so why can’t I stop thinking about her?” Flynn had asked.

“ Love is a strange animal,” Ariel had told her. “ It makes us do things we never normally would dream of doing.”

Flynn had nodded. “ I wish I didn’t feel this way,” she confessed. “ It makes my life complicated. And I don’t want that kind of complicated.”

Ariel had laughed, shrugged. “ Too bad then that we don’t always get what we want. Sometimes we get what we need,” she said.

Amen to that, Flynn thought as she poured herself a cup of coffee.

Lying face-down, naked, with her hands secured at the wrists by red silken scarves tied to bedposts on either side of her head, Flynn became aware of someone standing alongside of the bed. She turned her head, and saw Ariel, naked also, her soft white skin glistening with an aromatic oil, smiling as she told Flynn to relax. She climbed onto the bed, straddled Flynn from behind, and began rubbing herself against Flynn’s butt, smearing sticky wetness there.

Flynn groaned and moved against the bed, trying to find relief for herself. Then Ariel leaned down and spoke into her ear. “ This is how you take them, isn’t it?”

“ I don’t know what you mean?”

Ariel bore down harder until Flynn gasped and began to writhe against the silk sheets beneath her, desperate to get herself off. “ Yes, you do know what I’m talking about. You can’t even stand for them to look at you. You’re afraid if they do, they’ll see you for who - for what - you are.”

Flynn shook her head. “ No. You’re wrong. ”

Ariel kissed her on the side of the neck, the shoulder, an earlobe, soft kisses that sent shivers racing across Flynn’s shoulders and made her scalp tingle. She could feel the orgasm building up inside of her.

“ I know you, Flynn. You can’t hide from me. And you can’t hide from them either. Look -” Ariel pointed and Flynn followed the direction of her gesture, blinking into the shadows that surrounded the bed where she perceived dark, hunched shapes like the outlines of creatures not quite human but not quite animal either. These strange and cold-eyed protean things watched her from the shadows with red eyes and hungry mouths.

“ Who - what is that?” Her heart clenched until the blood pounded in her ears but her face felt cold. Desire fled from her, replaced by fear.

“ The Loa see you.”

Flynn felt Ariel come, warm stickiness dripping over her buttocks and running down between her legs.

“ The Loa see you, and they know who you are! Listen to them!”

Flynn heard music, loud rock music. It intruded upon the dream, pulling Flynn from the world of the dark into the light, into wakefulness. Her eyelids sprang apart and she bolted upright on the couch in Boudreau’s living room, realizing at once that she could still hear the music. She located Boudreau’s phone on the coffee table and fumbled it to her ear, cutting off the loud warbling of Journey.

“ Flynn.” Her voice came out husky, both with sleep and with the residue of the fear that had pervaded her dream. She expected it would be Waylon calling, maybe about a break in the case, or - God forbid - another murder but it was Dana Jordan’s voice that exploded in her ear.

“ Flynn! Jesus Christ, I was starting to think you’d died or something!”

“ No. No, I’m alive. Deaf now, but alive,” Flynn responded, bewildered by the sound of the reporter’s voice on Boudreau’s phone. “ What - how did you get this number?”

“ I was worried about you,” Dana said, ignoring Flynn’s question. “ I heard what happened out at Bayou Castine. Are you alright?”

Scrubbing a hand over her eyes, rolling her shoulders to work the kinks out of her muscles, Flynn tried to push away the clinging remnants of the dream and the uneasy sensation that something had followed her out from it. “ I’m fine. Pierce got a bit beat up and the doc said someone should stay with her. Carol’s away at her mother’s house, so I volunteered. Dana, you do know what time it is, right? And why the hell are you calling Boudreau’s phone? How’d you even get her number?”

The reporter’s tone became defensive. “ Maybe you should try switching your own goddamned phone on then. I left you a dozen messages on it. I got this number from Boudreau’s partner - ” Dana’s tone softened again. “ I was worried about you.”

“ I switched my phone off when I was at the ER with Boudreau. I must’ve forgotten to switch it on again,” Flynn explained. “ Sorry if I freaked y’all out.”

“ Well, I’m glad you’re alright…” Dana hesitated. “ Look, can you meet me tomorrow? I have - there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

“ Sure, I’ll meet you. ” Flynn suggested brunch at Café du Monde, around ten, and Dana agreed. For  a moment the reporter seemed on the verge of saying something else, the ether humming with expectation, and then the moment was gone and Dana simply bid her goodnight instead.

Flynn spent a few minutes first erasing Dana’s number from Boudreau’s phone memory and then changing the ring tone to something reminded her less of handlebar mustaches and tight leather pants. Whilst she did so, fragments of the dream popped back into her memory, giving her a jolt of desire tinged strangely with guilt and unease. The words Ariel had spoken in the dream - about how Flynn hid from the women she fucked - taunted her. It was true that she hid from those women she picked up, just as she hid from everyone in her life.

Now that she was awake Flynn figured she ought to check on the patient. She found Pierce asleep and alive, although snoring like a warthog. Flynn backed out of the bedroom again without disturbing her. It would take more than getting beaned to kill Pierce Boudreau, she reflected. Maybe shooting would do it. But you might want to take the bleeding carcass out back, run it over with a truck a few times. Just to be sure.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

She knew now what she had to do. The Loa had visited her again, given to her the instructions of the Old Ones. They had also sent a propitious sign regarding the final sacrifice. But time grew short, they warned, the moon would soon be full, and Full Moon was the best time for the final part of the ritual to be completed. The mambo needed to act fast.

She visited a cemetery in a less salubrious area of the city, going there specifically because she would not be disturbed in what she needed to do. There were other places where the power was greater - where her connection to the Other Worlds would have been stronger - but those places were too public, and since she could not risk exposure at this stage, she settled instead for making use of the St Roch Cemetery. She drove there with one of her closest, most trusted acolytes to perform the first part of the final ritual, a sleeping rooster in a cage traveling with them in back of the vehicle. Its blood was required for the final ritual, and the blood had to be shed in a cemetery.

As the City of The Dead drew closer, the mambo began to feel the power of the Loa, and of the Old Ones, reaching out to her. She opened herself up to them, welcomed them in as she touched the amulets she wore around her neck. On each were carved the veves of the respective Loa to whom she must appeal to assist in the final ritual, and each amulet had been smeared with a variety of substances, including the mambo’s own menstrual blood. Human blood - especially the blood of a woman’s menstruation - was a most powerful tool indeed.

The mambo brought her aged vehicle to a lurching halt at the gates of St Roch Cemetery, waking the rooster which screeched loud enough to jolt her acolyte out of their own light trance.

“ We are here. We must act fast,” the mambo said.

In her mind’s eye she pictured the intended third sacrifice. The Old Ones saw it, too, smiling and nodding their delight with this choice. A numinous light filled the mambo’s mind and a pure joy suffused her soul. Knowing that the Old Ones approved caused tears of ecstasy to bleed down her cheeks. This sacrifice would be all the sweeter, too, because it would prove  to one who professed scornful disbelief the true enormity of the Old Ones’ power. The mambo smiled to herself.

It was true what they said…

…it matters not whether you believe in the Loa, only that the Loa believe in you.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Flynn was making coffee next morning when Boudreau shuffled into the kitchen wearing a Disney World t-shirt, matching boxers, and oversized slippers in the shape of big-eared rabbits’ heads. Flynn couldn’t help but laugh.

“ Not a fucking word,” Boudreau growled. She sighed, plucked the t-shirt away from her chest, and looked down at her feet in the huge floppy-eared slippers. “ Carol got me them for my birthday - as a joke.”

Flynn clamped the smile, nodded solemnly. “ It’s good to know that Carol has a sense of humor underneath that starchy hide of hers. Y’all want some coffee?”

“ I want a large bourbon and beer chaser. And a cigarette. And to kill the fucker did this to me. But yeah, I’ll take coffee.” Boudreau into toward the living room.

“ No consuming alcohol with those painkillers. Doctor’s orders, remember?”

Boudreau manufactured an innocent tone. “ Really? I heard “ Not too much alcohol with those painkillers”. I’m sure y’all must’ve been mistaken, Flynn.”

Shaking her head, Flynn brewed two cups and carried them to the couch where Boudreau sat slumped in front of the blank screen of the TV. Some of the most colorful bruising Flynn had ever seen had erupted overnight across the side of the detective’s face. It bloomed a garish, poisonous purple-green-brown-black hue, like rotted eggplant, spreading from her temple to her cheekbone. Boudreau noticed Flynn’s admiring stare, and lifted her lip in a sneer.

“ I don’t want to hear a word about this either.”

“ My lips are sealed. Just like your eye.”

“ Fuck off, Flynn.” 

“ Carol is gonna love it. And it goes real well with the bunny slippers.”

With a resigned sigh, Boudreau leaned back against the couch, and then winced when her stitched head came into contact with it. “ Y’all don’t know what it is that I see in Carol, do you?” she asked out of the blue.

Flynn hesitated. She was rarely comfortable with conversations about other peoples’ love lives - or her own love life, for that matter. “ I guess I don’t. But it isn’t really much of my business anyway,” she muttered.

“ She’s steady. She works in a bank. She looks and acts normal. She is normal. I know I never have to worry that she’ll do something might wind up reflecting badly on me or my career. Is that a purely selfish motive for being with someone?”

Since they appeared to be going there anyway, Flynn gave the question a moment of thought. Then she shrugged. “ All kinds of love are selfish in some way.”

Boudreau threw her a surprised look.

“ What? You thought I couldn’t be deep?  Y’all do love Carol, right?”

“ I’m not sure I do sometimes.”

Flynn had no ready response to that. She chose silence instead, waited for Boudreau to elaborate.

Or not. “ How do you suppose Antoine Camber is mixed up in all of this Voodoo murder shit?” Boudreau asked.  “ He kept yammering at me about how he ‘didn’t want to do it’…while he was swinging that two-by-four at my head.”

Flynn let the conversation go in this new direction. “ Maybe the mambo is controlling him?” She frowned at a damp patch in the wallpaper, high up behind the television set. Goddamned dampness, you found it in all kinds of places. In the almost constant humidity of New Orleans it never went away completely. “ Y’know, Ariel told me she had a cell mate who was into Voodoo. Just about every woman in the prison - black and white both - would come to this woman for all kinds of shit. She was raking money in, and no one fucked with her either. Some of these mambos use drugs to control certain of their followers. Like zombies.”

“ Whenever folks feel like regular religion has failed ‘em, they turn to the fringe-nut stuff,” Boudreau sighed. She cocked an eyebrow. “ D’you remember all the Voodoo signs got painted on doors during Katrina?”

Flynn nodded. “ I saw a few, yeah.”

“ Ariel’s been very informative, hasn’t she?” Sarcasm dripped from Boudreau’s words. Flynn rolled her eyes. “ Yeah, I know. You don’t pry into my love life, so I shouldn’t pry into yours. Fuck you. I’ve been warned to stay home and do shit-all for the next few days. Cap’n Embry says if he sees my face around the station, he will suspend me…his words exactly. Fussy fucker, like he’s my Mom. So I’m in a bad mood, and that means I’ll pry if I want to. I expect y’all to be my eyes and ears on the street for now, Flynn. That means I can’t have you distracted by Ariel Rousseau’s charms. Whatever they are.”

Flynn took her empty coffee cup into the kitchen, rinsed it under the faucet. “ You know Waylon ought to be all the eyes and ears you need, Pierce. I’ve got stuff of my own I need to do. But I will stay in touch with Waylon. Just make sure you tell him to be okay with that. You know how he feels about me.”

“ Waylon loves y’all really. He just has trouble expressing his emotions.”

Flynn walked out of the kitchen, scooped her jacket from the chair where she’d left it last night. She shook her head at Boudreau. “ Funny thing that - Waylon has no trouble expressing his negative emotions about me.”

Flynn rode from Boudreau’s place to her own apartment lost in a mire of thoughts, most of which concerned Ariel and Dana. The two women elicited similar and yet differing responses in her, and Flynn was both alarmed and fascinated by her own feelings regarding each. She retrieved the Wing-Master from the trunk and carried it inside, stopping briefly to scoop a handful of mail from behind the door, and to pet Charlie, who appeared from under the stairs to entwine himself around her legs. He mewled loudly at her. “ Yeah, I know. You want fed.” She gave the cat an affectionate scratch. “ Seems like everybody wants a piece of me. I suppose I ought to be flattered.”

Charlie followed her to the office and watched her, with a feline’s supreme indifference to the affairs of humans, whilst she locked the shotgun back in the gun cabinet and dropped the mail, unread, on her desk. Then she headed upstairs to her apartment to feed the impatient cat and to shower and change before meeting with Dana Jordan.

Café du Monde was perhaps the most famous coffee stand in New Orleans. Flynn was a regular customer and she was immediately seated under the pavilion delivered her coffee and beignets promptly. Around Jackson Square, the artists and street mimes - starting to return after Katrina had swept them, too, out of the city - were firing up their acts, and Flynn idly watched them. At ten-thirty on the dot, she spotted Dana Jordan across the street, and she raised a wave to attract the reporter’s attention.

“ Good morning,” Flynn greeted Dana with a genuine smile.

“ Hey.” The reporter sat down, then looked around at the queue of people waiting to be graced with a table. “ You must have friends in some very high places.”

“ Low ones, too,” Flynn assured her.

“ Hard to tell the difference in Louisiana sometimes.”

A waitress approached. Dana asked for coffee only.

“ Have a beignet,” Flynn suggested, grinning. “ Live dangerously.”

Beignets, donut-like squares of deep-fried sweet pastry liberally sprinkled in even sweeter powdered sugar, might well have qualified as the messiest foodstuff ever invented, but they were undeniably delicious. Dana considered for a moment, then nodded.

“ And I’ll have a refill,” Flynn added, smiling at the waitress.

Ever since Dana had sat down, Flynn had been surreptitiously running an appreciative eye over the reporter, appreciating what she saw. “ So, last night you sounded as though there were something important you wanted to talk about?” Flynn asked.

Dana hesitated, her gaze dropping to the tabletop. “ I was worried about you.”

“ Nice to know someone is worrying about me.”

“ Hmm…” Dana flicked a smile on and off. The she changed the subject. “ How is Pierce today?”

Flynn shrugged. “ When I left her, she was bitching and moaning about being told to stay home. My guess is she’ll live.”

Still keeping her gaze fixed on the tabletop, Dana nodded. “ That’s good.”

Flynn was about to pursue the matter, but the coffees and beignets arrived and she remained silent whilst the waitress laid the table. Dana sipped her coffee, then bit into one of the sweet pastries. Powdered sugar dripped from her lips onto her blouse, sticking to her fingers when she tried to wipe it away. The tightening in her gut, the catch of her breath, made Flynn wonder - not for the first time - why this woman could so effortlessly make her feel things she did not want to feel?

“ How’s the case going?”

The sound of Dana’s voice dragged Flynn from her ruminations. She shook her head, sipped some coffee whilst she recovered herself. Then she told Dana briefly some of the things Ariel had shared with her. Those weren’t privileged information. Dana leaned forward across the table, her reporter’s interest piqued, oblivious to her right elbow sitting in a ring of spilled powdered sugar and coffee. “ So who’s Ariel then?” she asked.

Uh oh.  “ Ariel is an old friend,” Flynn answered carefully. “ She made some wrong choices and wound up in jail for a time. Now she runs a little Voodoo supply store…” Flynn’s cell phone rang, sparing her the need to go into further details. She checked the caller ID. “ Hey Pierce - where y’at?”

“ Going slowly out of my mind with boredom. I mean, what do housewives find to do all fucking day? Besides eat Moon Pies, and watch crap TV?”

Flynn snickered. “ Y’all called me just to moan about that?”

“ No. I called Waylon. He says the lab got a good print from Anthea Larue’s student ID that matched other prints taken from around Camber’s apartment. But wasn’t a match to anything in the system - so far. And the Slidell cops found my department vehicle. You want to hear where?” Boudreau blew an angry sigh down the line. “ Found it in the fucking bayou. Just as well I didn’t take my own car. Carol would’ve had a goddamn fit if I got that car damaged. She got me the loan on it.”

Flynn gave a dry chuckle. “ It’s good to know that Carol has both a sense of humor and her priorities in order. Waylon tell you anything else?”

“ Yeah. No sign of my fucking piece in either the vehicle or the bayou. I’ll be filling out reports on that for the rest of my career. Remind me, when we catch up with that asshole Camber, to give him an extra smack in the teeth. Autopsy report on Anthea Larue is in. Anthea died first, in much the same way as her mother - same weapon used, sexual assault. Blah blah blah. And there was a veve carved on her. Baron Samedi. He’s something to do with cemeteries and the dead, isn’t he?”

“ Yes, he is,” Flynn confirmed. “ He’s also one of the oldest and most powerful of the Loa.” She heard a rasping noise on the line, followed by a soft hiss of gas as Boudreau lit up a cigarette. She had given up smoking eight months ago at Carol’s insistence, but must have kept a pack around for emergencies. Flynn declined to comment. She wasn’t Boudreau’s girlfriend, it wasn’t her place to nag her about her habits.

“ Oh, and those drugs I told y’all that we found in Camber’s condo,” Boudreau added, exhaling smoke. “ The stuff in his medicine cabinet was your common-and-garden variety tranquillizers, sleeping tablets, and assorted shit of that nature. Waylon has been trying to contact all four of the different doctors prescribed the shit to Camber. The other stuff - the powder, it’s a bit more interesting. Some weird mix of herbs and hypnotics, an hallucinogenic or two, some other even weirder shit. There’s something with a big-ass Latin-sounding name I can’t even pronounce, but it does things to the adrenalin apparently. Sounds like maybe Camber might’ve been tripping off his tits when he attacked me. Fits with the way he was babbling, I guess.”

Boudreau went quiet for a moment, the line humming softly to itself in the silence. Flynn heard her inhale again on the cigarette. “ Whoever made up this concoction, Flynn, they are one talented chemist.”

A chill crawled up from the base of Flynn’s spine and settled between her shoulder blades. Boudreau had just echoed Ariel’s own very words.

“ They call it Zombie Dust,” Flynn said. Her mouth was dry and she had to gulp down some coffee. She saw Dana give her a sharp glance from across the table. “ The mixture you’re describing is actually a variation on the classic Zombie Dust. It’s way more powerful and allows for the mambo to control her subjects more effectively. It’s also incredibly addictive.”

“ Well, that’s a cheery thought. A big-ass murderer running around the city high on some addictive Zombie Dust variant - ” Boudreau sighed. “ I hate my job.”

“ Anything else breaks, call me,” Flynn told her. She hung up, turned her attention back to Dana Jordan. “ So. No more stalling. What did you want to talk to me about?”

Dana frowned at the crowded café. “ D’you think we could take a walk? It’s kind of busy in here, and this isn’t something I’d want to be overheard.”

“ Okay. I’m intrigued. Lets walk and talk.”

They left Café du Monde and headed for the brick walkway along the levee. The musky and salt smell of the river mingled with the diesel fumes from boats that constantly plied its winding length, and the sweet scents of coffee and deep-fried pastries wafting from the many cafes and restaurants. Flynn paused for a moment on the levee to breathe the scents in.

Dana smiled at her. “ You really love this city, don’t you?”

New Orleans was like a voluptuous, attractive woman who could appear to be both perennially in her prime and past her best: fun-loving and exotic, but sometimes capricious. And yes, Flynn loved her.  She smiled back at Dana, nodded. They were walking in the opposite direction from the old Jackson Brewery building, reinvented as a shopping mall. So many shopping malls all over America, Flynn reflected. It was as though Americans could not get enough of buying shit they did not really need. Credit over-extended sinners seeking redemption through worshipping at the temples of the barcodes. She waited until they reached a quiet spot where the throngs of people heading to the mall thinned out into a few fishermen and straggling pedestrians, and then she stopped, faced Dana with a quizzical look.

“ You didn’t bring me here to discuss my feelings about New Orleans, did you?”

As Dana Jordan gazed back at her, Flynn saw something cloud the reporter’s dark eyes - an uncertainty, almost a fear. “ I got a call yesterday - from an FBI agent,” Dana said. “ Her name is Erin Krueger. Does that ring any bells?”

Flynn shook her head. “ Should it?”

“ She says she headed up an investigation in New York into the murder of a Mob guy. Agent Krueger believes that you were the hit woman.”

Flynn went very still inside. “ This FBI agent - what else did she tell you?” she asked coldly.

Dana’s eyes went wide with the revelation. “ Shit,” she breathed. “ You were a hired killer, weren’t you?”

Flynn moved in quickly to close the distance between them, circling one arm around Dana’s neck, the other around her waist, pulling her into an embrace and a kiss. Taken aback, Dana chose to follow her first instinct, which was to respond to being kissed. Her arms went around Flynn’s back where Flynn felt the warmth of her palms pressing there. The sensation sent goose bumps riffling up and down her arms and legs, made her scalp tingle and tighten. As Dana arched her neck up, moving in tight and letting her mouth open a little, Flynn could not resist gently probing with her tongue. The reporter sighed, and kissed her harder. Flynn felt the sharp sting of guilt through her own desire. This was not what Dana thought it was and when she found that out momentarily, she was going to be pissed. Nevertheless, Flynn slipped both hands beneath Dana’s jacket, letting them roam over the reporter’s incredible body. It felt good to do so, but she broke contact after a few moments, and stepped back.

Dana’s face was flushed, her pupils wide within the dark irises. “ What did - why did you do that?” she asked, flustered.

Flynn breathed in. “ I had to be sure you weren’t wearing a wire.”

Dana blinked as the humiliating realization began to dawn. “ Wait - you thought I was wearing a wire? That I’d spy for the fucking feds?”

Flynn gave a half-shrug. Her insides felt hot and itchy. This wasn’t going the way she had imagined it might.

Dana’s face twisted with disgust. “ Jesus! You already knew about Agent Krueger’s investigation, didn’t you?”

Flynn nodded.

Dana frowned. “ How could you know that?”

“ I had certain people who…well, let’s say they helped me out in my previous profession. I was aware that the FBI attempted to investigate a hit woman whom they suspected to be working out of New York in the 90’s, but I didn’t know who the lead investigator was. Until now.”

“ She said she met you once before…” Dana’s forehead crinkled as she recalled her conversation with Agent Krueger. “ In Cuba. At some hotel bar in Havana. She said you actually told her that you were an assassin? You said your name was Wynne Foster.”

“ And she claimed her name was Erica Kane.” Flynn smiled grimly. “ I do recall her. Dark hair, dark eyes?”

Dana blinked. “ No. She’s a blonde, with blue eyes. Did you really tell her that you were an assassin? Just like that, you blurted it to a perfect stranger. That was kind of dangerous, wasn’t it?”

Flynn felt a smile tug at the corners of her mouth. “ I think I may have recognized a kindred spirit in ‘Erica Kane’, whether or not I quite realized it at the time.”

“ She was CIA?”

“ I suspected she was, yes. So what did she want with you?”

Dana sucked in a deep breath. “ She has evidence. A button. It’s got your print on it.”

Instinct told Flynn that Agent Krueger would not have approached a reporter with this information, not if it were her intent to open a new investigation. “ There’s more, isn’t there?” she stated flatly to Dana and the reporter nodded again, reluctantly.

“ She wants you to kill someone - her stepfather. She claims that he abused her for years as a child.”

That took Flynn by surprise. She frowned. “ That doesn’t make any sense.”

With a shrug, Dana Jordan added, “ It seems that Agent Krueger knows all about how you killed some members of a pedophile ring operating in and around West Virginia. Her own stepfather abused her, so I guess she figured - I don’t know. That she could bargain with you to kill him maybe?” Dana’s tone turned hesitant. “ Is it true, Flynn? Did you kill those men?”

There seemed little gain in keeping this a secret from the reporter now, and so Flynn nodded. She looked off toward the sun-dappled strip of river in front of them. It still awed her to think that, during Katrina, this river had actually run backwards for a time, such had been the force of the winds. Nature was a great wonder indeed. Unlike human beings, who were often horribly predictable and did things for reasons that displayed how depressingly mundane evil was. “ I would do it again, too. Those guys really did deserve to die.”

“ And the other people you killed - did they all deserve to die? How many have there been?”

“ I didn’t keep score.” Flynn followed the laborious progress of a freight barge upriver, watching its oily wake churn the water to a brownish sludge. “ I don’t know how many of them deserved to die, or even if any did. I know I never killed children, the elderly, or the disabled.”

There was an audible click as Dana swallowed. “ What about women?”

“ A few.”

Dana shook her head. “ I don’t know you at all, do I?”

Now Flynn turned her gaze away from the river barge and directed it back to the reporter. When she saw the expression of mingled unease and disgust with which Dana looked at her, she felt something in her chest tear loose. She gritted her teeth against a swell of unfamiliar emotions. “ You never did know me.”

Without thought that Flynn had just admitted to being a hired killer, Dana Jordan stepped forward and abruptly slapped her in the face. Flynn took the blow without flinching, which apparently made Dana mad all over again. She seethed, “ No, I don’t damned well don’t know you! And I seriously don’t know whether I want to know you now.” The impulse to visit some of the humiliation she was obviously feeling upon the cause of it, prompted Dana to lash out again, only this time Flynn caught hold of her wrist before she could make contact.

She pulled the reporter close, feeling Dana’s heartbeat against her own chest as their bodies met. “ I’m sorry I misled you about kissing you,” she said, “ but, please, don’t try to hit me again. If it makes it any better, I did enjoy the kiss. I’ve been wanting to do that ever since I met you five years ago.”

Dana glared, the heat of humiliation burning in her face. She tried to pull her wrist free, but Flynn held on. “ Let me go,” she grated. “ I’m not one of your marks, or whatever you called them.”

“ You won’t try to hit me again?”

“ No. But I might try to kill you.”

With an abrupt laugh, Flynn let go of the reporter’s wrist and took a step back to give her space. “ It’s targets, by the way,” she added. Dana frowned at her in confusion. “ We called them targets. The people I killed.”

“ Well, that’s blunt. Thank you for correcting me.”

Rubbing her wrist where Flynn had gripped it, Dana walked stiffly away toward a wooden bench. Behind the bench, the inclement spring heat had started to bring to bloom sculpted azalea bushes, and all around those erupted a yellow-green-pink riot of flowers. A stone statue of some New Orleans dignitary from decades ago loomed over the flowerbeds with a sort of frozen, patriarchal righteousness. Flynn hesitated, then followed Dana, and sat down, making sure to give the reporter space, fixing her gaze upon the stone statue.

“ I’m not scared of you,” Dana said, with a defiance that amused Flynn, and pleased her, too. She had long ago guessed that Dana Jordan might be tougher than she looked.

Flynn tilted an eyebrow. “ You’re a little bit scared of me, admit it,” she teased.

Dana sighed. “ Okay. So maybe I’m a little bit scared of you.”

“ I’m sorry about grabbing your arm. I would never hurt you intentionally.”

“ You’ve killed people, Flynn. How can you be sure what you might do?”

“ I’m not going to kill you…” Flynn was devastated that Dana would even entertain such a terrible notion. She scowled at the river, afraid to look Dana in the face, afraid that she might give her own mixed feelings away. “ I like you. Really like you. You know that.”

There was a beat of silence, then Dana said, “ Yeah, I know. And I’ve always liked you, Flynn. No point denying that. But this - this is one hell of a shock. Just tell me one thing - why did you stop being what you were?”

Flynn had no ready answer for that question. She reached into her jacket for her cigarettes, lit one and inhaled, mostly to give herself time to think of something to say. Finally, she just shook her head. “ I’ve asked myself that a lot. I wish I could give you an answer, but I just don’t know. I think I got tired of it. Of the killing. Of always looking over my shoulder and not being able to trust anyone.”

“ But you haven’t really stopped looking over your shoulder, or not trusting people, have you?” Dana spoke softly but with such feeling that Flynn blinked and frowned at her. The reporter gave her a sad smile. “ It’s why you’ve been keeping me at arm’s length, isn’t it? Because I’m a reporter. Do you really think I would treat you as a story?”

Flynn scowled at the redbrick sidewalk between her own feet. She heard Dana blow a sigh. “ Jesus, Flynn. That isn’t who I am. I would never do that to a friend - to you.”

“ That’s all I am then?” Flynn’s heart twisted, surprising her with the force of disappointment.

“ You’re the one who would never let me in,” Dana reminded her. She cleared her throat awkwardly. “ What are you going to do about Agent Krueger?”

“ I’m not sure yet. I promise I won’t kill her though.”

“ Oh, very funny.”

“ Sorry. I mean, I don’t think she’s any immediate threat to me.” Flynn let her voice soften. “ What about you? Us? Where do we go from here?”

“ I don’t know - ” Dana gave her head a quick shake. “ I need time to figure it out. I mean, what you and I are, or could be. You understand, right?”

“ Yeah, I do. I hate it because I think you’re saying you need to stay away from me in order to do that. But I get it.”

Dana stood up abruptly. She breathed in, and then looked at Flynn in such a way made that thing - grief, disappointment, unrequited fucking love, Flynn just didn’t have a name to put to it because she’d never experienced it before - tear loose in her chest all over again. “ I’ll call you,” Dana said.

As Flynn watched her walk away, the tight hunch of Dana’s shoulders spoke volumes about how she really felt, and Flynn realized that she didn’t want this to be how it ended between them. They had to be able to find a way past this. She dropped the cigarette half-smoked to the ground, crushed it beneath her heel with just a little more vigor than necessary, and then she took out her cell phone, dialed a familiar number.

The line was answered with a stark one-word salutation: “ Speak.”

“ Danny, I need a favor.”

“ State it,” Danny Cho commanded.

Danny was one of those people with whom Flynn had worked in New York, and who had helped her to leave behind her life there. A tech genius, Danny could hack into any computer system in existence, forge any document that a person might ever need. He was also the coldest, meanest, deadliest sonofabitch that Flynn had ever met. And the CIA had trained him to be everything he was.

“ I need for you to find me everything you can on Special Agent Erin Krueger with the New Orleans FBI field office,” Flynn told him.

The line hummed quietly whilst Danny digested this. Flynn knew there was absolutely no chance of anyone listening in on their conversation, neither by design nor accident. Danny would not allow such a thing.

“ I think she might’ve been CIA at some point,” Flynn added.

“ Ooh, one of ours. Trained to kill by our very own government.”

“ Your tax dollars at work. Is it a problem, Danny?”

He cooed down the line at her. The sound brought goose bumps out on Flynn’s flesh. “ My specialty are problems, dear heart.”

“ Good. Because I need to know about her stepfather, too. No name or details.”

“ I shall work my magic and get back to you as soon as, dearest.”

Danny hung up without goodbyes or any of those pleasantries indulged in by normal people. Danny was, of course, not a normal person. No sooner had Flynn closed her phone than it began to ring and she flipped it open again, half-hoping it would be Dana calling. It wasn’t. Boudreau’s pissed-off voice greeted her instead.

“ Waylon just called. We got a hit on the prints found in Camber’s condo. They belong to a woman named Helen Dufresne…” Boudreau pronounced the name Doo-frain. Flynn heard computer keys clicking, and wondered if Captain Embry knew that his detective, who was supposed to be out sick, was accessing the NOPD records from home. “ This Dufresne woman, she’s a con. She was doing heavy state time on two counts of murder, and one of supplying stolen goods. Got paroled early - that’d be just about one year ago - because the prison system is overcrowded, and the bitch is pretty.”

It was well known by law enforcement and legal professionals - and by the criminal fraternity, too - that when it came to female cons, the prettier they were the more likely they were to be paroled early. Justice was blind, except when it came to a pretty woman.

“ She met with her parole officer a grand total of two times, and then she promptly dropped off the grid,” Boudreau added. “ Nothing. No driver’s license, no current address, no family, no utilities, no credit cards…she’s in the fucking wind.”

“ No, she’s in New Orleans,” Flynn said grimly. She heard Boudreau snort on her end of the line. “ Someone - someplace - knows her. Y’all just need to keep looking.”

“ Oh, ‘we’ do - so you agree it’s our case again, is it?”

Flynn started walking back toward Jackson Square. “ If you need my help, Pierce, you know where I am. I’d be happy to assist the NOPD in their endeavors to make my city a safer place in which to live.”

Boudreau hung up. When she did so, Flynn heard her still laughing at that notion.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Flynn walked back to Bourbon Street, got in her car, and just started driving with no particular destination in mind. Sometimes, when she was upset, angry, or simply had a lot on her mind, she liked to drive aimlessly and play the radio as she drove. She twiddled the knob through the FM band until she found a local station playing a mix of classic rock and country, and some 80’s pop. By the time she had driven almost to Bayou Barataria, she was feeling a good deal more calm, and Queen had warned her of another one biting the dust, Kenny Rogers had invited her to go down in a blaze of glory with him, and Duran Duran had asked her if there was something they should know?

Her phone rang.

“ I have your information,” Danny said, with his customary lack of preamble.

“ Then I am suitably impressed by the speed of your magic,” Flynn told him.

“ Thank you, dear heart. I shall, of course, forward everything to your usual secure email, but there’s something I think you need to know immediately. First of all, let me just get this out of the way…Erin Krueger is a looker, and then some.” Danny chortled. “ She seems to be single, too. I would almost be hopeful, if it weren’t for the rest of what I found. She was indeed ‘one of ours’, as you put it, but she wasn’t just CIA, or even Black Ops. She was part of an elite unit within the Agency does not exist in any conventional records. This unit is buried so deep I required the electronic equivalent of a backhoe to unearth even the meager amount I did. And you know how good I am at unearthing those secrets others do not wish to be unearthed.”

Danny didn’t believe in false modesty when it came to his own abilities. Flynn smiled. “ What’s the purpose of this unit?” she asked.

“ Assassinations on US soil mostly, as far as I can gather.”

Technically, the CIA had no jurisdiction within US borders; their theatre of operations was overseas. Of course, such mere technicalities could be worked around, if and when it suited any ‘higher purpose’ deemed by the Agency.

Flynn frowned. “ When I met Krueger in Cuba, she told me that she was working there.”

“ Oh, she may well have been,” Danny agreed. “ You know how our government feels about sticking to its own rules.”

“ You said ‘worked’, past tense.”

“ The unit was officially disbanded in the late 90’s but there are hints it might still be active unofficially. Oh - and Agent Krueger’s relative? That would be Assistant Director Richard Cunningham. Assistant Director of the CIA. He’s running for the State Attorney’s office in Virginia. I’m not certain, Flynn, because much of the records have been redacted, but I think Cunningham might have had some early connections to the unit in which his step-daughter served. So why did you need to know about him? He sounds like the kind of man that you’d prefer to stay very far away from.”

The more Flynn learned about Special Agent Erin Krueger, the more curious she became to know more about the woman - and whatever angle Krueger might be playing. That the agent was playing an angle, was in no doubt in Flynn’s mind. She switched lanes, ready to take an upcoming exit and head back to New Orleans. “ His step-daughter wants me to take him out,” she explained to Danny. “ Did you get an address for our intrepid agent?”

Danny relayed an address in the Upper Garden District. He also offered a small piece of advice. “ Be careful of tangling with either AD Cunningham or his step-daughter…as gorgeous as she is, there’s something hinky about that family dynamic.”

Flynn smiled grimly. “ Thanks, Danny. I figured there was an agenda. I’m just not seeing it yet.”

She hung up and zoomed down the exit ramp. It was time to pay Special Agent Erin Krueger a welcome-to-the-city visit.

The FBI agent was renting single-storey shotgun house set in a small courtyard of rambling, overgrown bushes and flowerbeds. Banana trees grew on either side of the gate and the front door. Trailing vines wrapped around the porch. Flynn figured that gardening services must’ve come as part of the rental package since Erin didn’t strike her as the type to enjoy kneeling in the dirt, pulling weeds all day.

Inside, the furnishings had the generic look of having been provided by the rental agency. Nowhere were there any of the knick-knacks and gewgaws collected by people who intended to settle in one place for a long time. Erin Krueger believed in traveling light and leaving little trace of herself behind. After poking her head into the living room and kitchen, finding nothing of interest there, Flynn made her way to the single bedroom. A glance through the closets and drawers revealed that the agent evidently spent most of her government salary on clothes.

As she moved from the bedroom to the bathroom, Flynn halted as she heard a key enter the front door lock. Apparently Erin had chosen today to come home early from work. Flynn melted silently back into the bedroom, pushed the door almost closed and flattened herself against the wall, slipping the .45 out of its holster at her back as she did so. The front door opened. A few moments later a faucet ran in the kitchen, and Flynn counted five seconds, listening to the running water, and then she opened the bedroom door.

The muzzle of a huge Magnum .357 met her, the black eye of the barrel almost touching her nose, and Flynn stopped dead, her arms reflexively moving out to her sides, gun held pointed downward and loose between her fingers.

“ Willie Rae Flynn,” Erin Krueger said from behind the gun.

She gave Flynn a smile of dazzling insincerity. Nice teeth, Flynn noted. Nice everything, in fact. Danny had been right that Erin Krueger had looks to die for. Only Flynn imagined people really had died for those looks.

“ Didn’t your Mama ever teach you that it’s rude to break into other peoples’ homes?” Erin inquired.

Flynn twitched a smile at her. “ My Mama didn’t teach me much of anything, truth to tell. My bad luck y’all picked today to come home early, huh?”

“ Indeed it is, Flynn. Now, you’re going to put that gun down. Put it down real slow and easy on the floor. Then kick it over here to me.”

Flynn lowered herself into a crouch, hands still held out on either side of her body, and she laid her weapon on the carpet. She rose again, used her right foot to kick the gun away from her. It slithered across the carpet, thumping up against the baseboard.

“ Good. Now let’s walk to the living room. And keep those hands where I can see them.”

Erin stepped to one side to allow Flynn to emerge from the bedroom. Once the PI was in front of her, she pressed the barrel into the nape of Flynn’s neck. The cold steel felt uncomfortable there and Flynn tried not to think about how dumb she’d been to put herself in this position, thinking instead about how she was going to get out of this awkward situation. “ I should’ve been more careful,” she said in a conversational tone as she walked down the hallway. “ With y’all being ex-CIA, and all.”

“ Yes, you should have been a lot more careful. And good for you, finding out that I’m ex-Agency. Did your little friend Danny tell you that?”

So she knew about Flynn’s continuing connection to Danny Cho. That was unexpected and not at all welcome news. “ How’d you know about Danny?”

“ Oh, I know all about Danny…and about you…and Detective Boudreau…and about your reporter friend, Dana Jordan, too.”

Hearing the mention Dana’s name, knowing that Erin Krueger had been looking into Dana’s life, gave Flynn a hot flush of anger which she tamped down quickly because it was unproductive. “ Y’all have been keeping an eye on me. I’m flattered,” she said.

Erin snorted.  “ Don’t be. In here.”

“ Y’all need to be getting some personal shit in here. It’s so bare…” Flynn dropped into a crouch in the doorway, brought her head back with all the force she could muster, ramming the back of her skull into the agent’s midriff. Her breath whooshed out on a pained grunt, her body instinctively doubling over in response to the assault. Flynn rose out of her crouch, and spun around, slammed the heel of one hand into the soft underside of Erin’s jaw - not hard enough to knock the agent unconscious, just enough to stun her. With her other hand, Flynn smashed Erin’s wrist into the doorjamb, twice, hard enough to make the agent yelp with pain and drop the gun. Flynn grabbed it, danced back out of reach. “ Not so tough now, are you? Take a seat, Erin. We need to talk.”

The agent sat in one of a pair of matching brocade armchairs on either side of a fireplace looked like it hadn’t been lit in the last decade. She rubbed alternately at her jaw and her wrist, glaring at Flynn with ice-blue eyes brittle now with dislike. Flynn had to work for a moment to reconcile the woman seated before her with the woman she had met in Havana.

“ Last time we met, your hair was black, and you were wearing dark contacts.”

Erin twitched a wry smile now at Flynn. “ Guess I was more your type then, huh?”

“ Y’all turned me down, as I recall. Guess I wasn’t so much your type.”

“ Or maybe I just don’t like to mix business with pleasure -” Erin tilted a curious look at Flynn. “ You’re pretty good. Faster than I’d have expected. Who trained you?”

Flynn smiled. “ The same people trained you, I expect.”

Erin’s eyes widened with sudden comprehension. “ Well, shit. You were CIA, too - ”  she barked a humorless laugh. “ I’ve heard the rumors about people like you. Freelancers trained by the Agency. No record whatsoever, you could never be traced back to the Agency, nor to anyone connected with it - am I correct?”

Flynn nodded. “ They employed our services when they needed not just plausible, but absolute denial. I’m not even sure your stepfather would have been aware of us, although he has some interesting history in the unit you served with, doesn’t he?”

That struck the chord it was intended to. Erin’s face twitched. She glanced away from Flynn, to the dead fireplace.

“ So, now that you know something about me that you didn’t before, how about some quid pro quo here, Clarice? Tell me why y’all really want me to kill your stepfather - the Assistant Director of the CIA? I hear he’s running for the State Attorney’s job in West Virginia. Ambitious fellow. ”

“ That’s Richard,” Erin sneered. “ It’s like I told your reporter friend - he abused me for years. And I can’t do it myself. I’d be the primary suspect.”

Flynn shook her head. “ I think y’all have an agenda, Erin. There are a hundred ways available to you to do this. You don’t need me.”

“ You’re over-thinking this, Flynn.”

“ Yeah. The Agency also taught me to be suspicious always, trusting never.”

“ That must’ve made your life hard?”

“ You tell me?” Flynn cocked her head, smiled. “ Here you are, an ex-CIA agent turned FBI agent. Y’all went from one cesspool of paranoia to another.”

Erin shrugged. “ Maybe I’m comfortable with my paranoia. Are you comfortable with yours?”

“ That isn’t relevant here, Erin. Let’s stick to why you think I can - or would - help you to murder the Assistant Director of the CIA.”

“ Surely Dana Jordan must have mentioned the little piece of evidence you left at a crime scene - ?” Erin made a tsk-tsk sound, smirking now at Flynn. “ That was careless of you.”

“ A single button doesn’t prove a whole lot,” Flynn pointed out. “ Besides, didn’t you ever wonder how your investigation got shut down? Who shut it down?”

Erin took a moment to process this information and then she sucked air between her clenched teeth, closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, she gave Flynn a brief glimpse of the dazzlingly insincere smile. As insincere as it was, that smile could knock most people’s knees out. Flynn wondered what things it had made people do for Erin Krueger in her past life as a CIA agent. “ The Agency covered your ass. Of course they did. Did they take out Barbara Calabrese, too?”

“ I don’t know. They tended not to share the finer details of their plans with me. I just did what I was told to do. Didn’t ask questions. Took the breaks where I found them.”

“ Does Dana Jordan know that you were CIA?”

When Flynn shook her head, Erin frowned.

“ Why didn’t you tell her that the Agency recruited you to kill for them? Wouldn’t it be better she thought that than thinking you became a killer of your own volition?”

Flynn blinked at the agent without saying anything.

“ Oh hell, no - ” Erin shook her head. “ It means more to you to have her think you acted on your own, than for her to know you were coerced? Even if it was by the goddamned government? Pride, Flynn. Your pride won’t let you tell her. That’s so - butch of you.”

“ I don’t care what it is. Besides, the Agency didn’t make me everything I am. Why should I blame them for it just because it’s easier?”

Erin gave her a long, cool look, and then she nodded.

“ Now,” Flynn said with a grim smile, “ let’s just imagine for a moment that I agreed to kill your stepfather. What would really be in it for me?”

Erin shifted in her chair, rubbing her wrist and wincing a cold smile at Flynn as she did so. “ Let’s say you did kill Richard Cunningham for me, yes. I would be in your debt, of course. Any time you needed something that the Bureau could assist you with, you would just need to call me.”

Flynn made an amused frown. “ That’s awfully generous of y’all.”

“ What can I say? I’m a generous sort of gal.” The dazzling smile flashed briefly on and off again. Flynn was almost getting to like it.

“ And if I say no, what then?”

Erin shrugged with one shoulder. “ Then I’d have to accept your decision and find another way to kill my bastard stepfather. Like you said - the button isn’t enough to convict you of anything on its own. And any new investigation I tried to open would only get shut down again since the Agency is probably still protecting you. Once you’re in, you’re never really out, are you?”

“ Nope. I guess not.”

Flynn had never deluded herself that her one-time CIA masters had entirely ceased watching over her when she walked away from her previous existence. Nor did she delude herself that their continuing interest in her was anything other a result of their own self-interest. She imagined that they were also watching Erin Krueger’s every move for much the same reasons. She stood up.

Erin watched her, frowning.

“ I’m going to go collect my gun now and leave,” Flynn said. “ I’ll take your piece with me. I’ll leave it at the end of the walkway where you can find it.”

“ And my offer?”

Flynn shook her head. “ No deal. Y’all have an agenda. I don’t trust that agenda, whatever it is.”

Erin accepted this with a bland expression - and a question. “ What is this all about, Flynn - the PI gig, I mean? Why do you do it? Is it some kind of redemption that you’re seeking?” Her mouth twisted into a nasty smile. “ Redemption comes at a price, you know.”

Flynn tilted her head into a puzzled expression. “ And what would you know about the price of redemption, Agent Krueger?”

In the hallway, she fetched her own gun from where it had fallen, stuck it back into her hip holster, and then she walked out of Erin Krueger’s home without looking back. 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Dana Jordan felt as though her world had fallen out of its normal orbit and was spinning through uncharted space. When she left Flynn on the riverside, she spent an hour walking around in a daze, hardly knowing whether she ought to be hurt, relieved, or just plain angry. The way in which she’d allowed her to be tricked her into kissing Flynn - thinking about that brought a flush of humiliation to Dana’s face. It made her angry, the manner in which it had happened, but she had enjoyed the damned kiss too, and she believed Flynn when she said she enjoyed it.

It wasn’t the first time she had thought Flynn might kiss her. Five years ago, during Hurricane Katrina, they had both narrowly escaped death after the levee gave way, almost trapping them with a flood of canal water. Flynn had driven like a demon to the home of a friend in the Upper Garden District where the flooding was less severe, and there they had remained for the following several days. Flynn had not elaborated on who her friend Danny was, nor on how he could afford to live in a Garden District mansion and surround himself with expensive technical gadgetry, and Dana had the sense that she ought not to pry either. Something about Danny frightened her on a visceral level.

He possessed some highly sophisticated satellite radio equipment, and his own oil generator with enough fuel to last for a week, even running all the technology, and using this equipment, they had listened - with mounting horror - to the drama unfold across the stricken city. Eventually, Danny had been the first to venture out from the house on the fourth morning after the levee breaches. He didn’t return until five hours later, and when he did, he was soaked in sweat and dirty water and his features were drawn and ashen as he had described scenes of near-biblical disaster to the two women.

As she had listened to Danny’s tale, the realization of just how close their own brush with death had been, scared the hell out of Dana. During their last night spent together at his mansion, she had curled up with some blankets on a couch in the living room, and tried to read a book by the glow of a hurricane lamp, the cat named Charlie snuggled beside her, but her mind had kept on returning to just how close they’d come to being swept away by the wall of water rushing over the breached levee. Then Flynn had appeared from the kitchen, a mug of hot chocolate in each hand, and she joined Dana sitting on the couch. For a little while they had sipped the chocolate in silence.

Then Dana had asked, “ Are we ever going to get through this?”

“ This is New Orleans,” Flynn had told her simply. “ We know how to survive here.”

As they talked, they had drawn physically closer until Flynn’s shoulder rested snug against Dana’s and the sides of their thighs touched. Dana had told herself it was because the mansion was drafty, that they were huddling for body warmth, but deep down she had known it was more than that. Even though she had only been acquainted with Willie Rae Flynn for a short while - and under pretty dire circumstances - she had already taken a huge liking to the private investigator.

“ I owe you my life, you know that,” Dana had blurted.

That was when Flynn had turned to her and looked so deep into her eyes that Dana was sure Flynn was going to kiss her. Except it hadn’t happened. Instead, Flynn had looked away and abruptly risen up from the couch. Muttering something about ‘checking the doors were locked’, she had practically run from the room. Next day they were able to return to their own homes and although they’d remained friends, and the attraction between them remained also, they had never come quite so close again to acting upon it.

Just wandering around, dreaming of what might have been, wasn’t making Dana feel any better and finally she returned to the newspaper office. There she tried to concentrate on work, but her thoughts still drifted, and each time they drifted back to Flynn, she would end up thinking about the kiss they finally had shared. Then the same opposing sensations of warmth and excitement, revulsion and humiliation, would course through her and she would become angry and humiliated and sad and confused all over again. When she caught herself typing the same line three times, she decided to call it a day. She shut down her computer, walked to Sy’s office and popped her head in there, mumbling some lame-ass excuse about having a migraine and taking the rest of the afternoon off.

He nodded, peering at her with an almost parental concern. “ Go home. Sleep. Don’t come back until you feel better,” he told her. “ You’re my best reporter. I need you operating at one hundred percent.”

Dana felt worse than ever for deceiving the kindly editor. She slumped out of the newspaper office, never having felt so alone since she had first come to New Orleans. There was no one she could turn to with this. No one she could unburden her confused feelings to. No one who would understand, anyway. Outside, a spring rainstorm was teeming down, the streets awash in rain the color of old dishwater. Rain was supposed to wash the world clean, Dana thought morosely, but this just made the city look dirtier and more sleazy than ever. Puddles slicked the road surface, the oily sheen of the water reflecting the blurry neon signs of assorted bars, clubs, and shops along Magazine Street as Dana jogged to her car. She would head home, she figured, not to sleep off her imaginary migraine but to drown her churning thoughts in a bottle of wine and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

As she pulled out into the suicidal traffic that occurred every time it rained in New Orleans - people in the city seemed to think rain meant you had to drive faster and more recklessly just to prove you were bigger than Nature -  the realization hit her that there was someone she could talk to: the friend whom Flynn had spoken about. Ariel Rousseau. Dana recalled that Ariel owned a Voodoo supply store off Royal Street, and she turned the car around to head over that way instead.

The store was closed, a sign hung in the window proclaiming that it would not open again until further notice, with an apology for any inconvenience hastily scrawled below that. Dana started to turn away, but her eye caught the quick movement of a window blind above, and she stopped, stepping back far enough from the building that she could crane her neck to look up.

“ Hello?” The echo of her voice bounced off the looming walls on either side of the alleyway.

The blind moved again and a figure was silhouetted briefly against the glass. As Dana raised her hand in a hopeful wave, the blind abruptly fell back into place, and moments later a woman appeared downstairs in the store. She opened up the door just wide enough to peer out.

“ Ariel Rousseau?” Dana asked hopefully. The woman nodded. “ I’m Dana Jordan. I’m a friend of Willie Rae Flynn’s. I was wondering - could I talk to you?”

“ Why?” Ariel frowned.

“ I just - ” Dana sighed. She leaned forward, one hand braced on the doorjamb, and appealed to the store owner. “ Look, I heard something from Flynn today, and it’s kind of knocked me sideways. I really need to just - I need to hear something about her that will make it seem better. Do you understand?”

Ariel hesitated, then she nodded. “ You found out what Flynn did before she came back to New Orleans, didn’t you?”

“ Yes.”

“ Then you’d better come in.” Ariel stepped back to allow Dana to enter. “ Come on upstairs. I was just making some tea. It’s raspberry. You’ll like it.”

Although tea was the last thing on her mind, Dana murmured acceptance as she followed the smaller woman through the cluttered store and up a flight of stairs. If a cup of herbal tea was the price of hearing something - anything - might mitigate this morning’s terrible revelations, then she would drink it, and do so cheerfully. As she followed Ariel, Dana took a moment in which to critically examine the woman. Physically striking, especially her mesmerizing green eyes, Ariel Rousseau exuded an air of easy sensuality, a confidence in her own femininity and sexuality. It wasn’t too hard to figure what Flynn might see in her then. Dana felt a tiny pang of envy.

Ariel glanced at her over one shoulder. “ So what do you want to know about Flynn?”

“ I guess that she isn’t just someone who is - was - a killer.”

“ Oh, Flynn is much more than that,” Ariel assured her. “ You’ve known her since the hurricane, right?”  Dana nodded. “ Then you must have seen that there’s more to her. She has honor, for a start. And she’d do - well, she’d do just about anything for the people she cares about. Please, go on into the living room, take a seat. I’ll only be a minute.”

Dana stepped into the room indicated. An African theme predominated, reminding her that her hostess was a Voodoo supplier. Although she thought Flynn had said Ariel didn’t practice the religion herself. Maybe she thought keeping the theme going in her private quarters would afford her a better sales technique. Dana wandered around, looking at things, picking the odd item up to examine it more closely. Most of the stuff had ‘Made In China’ labels on the bottom. It would probably be difficult for an ex-felon to get a passport to travel overseas and collect objects d’art, Dana reasoned dryly. She found a deep-backed wicker chair by the window and sat down, still thinking about how close Flynn really was to the green-eyed woman who owned this strange little store, and why it made her so damned jealous to think about it.

After all, she’d never envied Pierce Boudreau for her affair with Flynn. Perhaps the difference was that Pierce already had a partner and - despite the detective’s obvious feelings for Flynn - the two were unlikely to ever become anything more than an affair. On the other hand, Ariel appeared to be a free agent, and because she’d been in trouble with the law too, Flynn probably felt a kinship with her.

Ariel reappeared then, bearing a silver tray with two cups and a small pewter teapot balanced upon it. “ Here we go - ” she smiled as she laid the tea tray on an occasional table next to Dana’s chair and crouched to pour a dark red liquid into both cups. Steam rose from the liquid, bearing with it a distinct smell raspberry and cinnamon.

“ I flavor it with cinnamon pods,” Ariel explained.

“ Thank you.” The tea tasted sweet and savory at once. Pleasant. Refreshing.

“ Do you know about Flynn’s father?” Ariel asked then.

“ I know he died after falling into the canal. He was drunk.”

“ He was a mean, vicious drunk. And abusive to Flynn and to her mother.” Ariel sat back on her heels, the small teapot held in one hand as her gaze drifted to a point in middle distance. “ But his death was no accident. Flynn killed him.” She cut her gaze sharply back to Dana as she imparted this last piece of information, as though to gauge her reaction.

Stunned, Dana almost swallowed a mouthful of the tea the wrong way. She lowered her cup, stared at the store owner. “ Flynn killed her father?” she echoed.

Ariel nodded. She poured tea for herself, took it to a matching wicker chair on the other side of the table. “ He wasn’t a nice man at all. She did what nobody else had the guts to do.”

“ You almost sound like you admire Flynn for it?”

Ariel shrugged. “ Her father was a bastard. So was mine.” She sipped her tea. “ If you ask me, Flynn did the world a favor by taking out that garbage.”

It made a warped kind of sense. Many women who had been systematically abused by a man close to them would not see what Flynn had done as an act of violence in itself. They would see it as justice. The kind of justice which, sadly, they didn’t often obtain from the law courts. It was difficult for Dana, however, to empathize with the despair that might drive a person to murder their own flesh and blood as she had never suffered any such abuse. Her throat felt dry and she picked up the tea to take another mouthful.

“ She never really told me about how she ended up in New York, killing for a living,” Ariel admitted. “ She just said that she had to get as far away from New Orleans as she could, and somehow wound up in the hired assassin game.”

The room was warm. Too warm. Ariel could’ve done with opening up a window. Dana put her tea down and slid her jacket off, surprising herself when she dropped the garment to the floor. “ Oops,” she muttered, bending forward to retrieve it. Her fingers felt numb as she tried to pick it up. A long spiral of vertigo uncoiled before her and, grabbing at an arm of the chair, she pulled herself back upright, puzzled at the sheer effort it took to do so. It wasn’t just her fingers that were numb now but also her arms and legs. Her eyelids felt heavy, too.

“ Flynn would never hurt anyone she truly cares for - ” Ariel was speaking but Dana had trouble following the words. They sounded slurred, out of sync. She frowned as the store owner smiled at her. “ Flynn loves you, you should know that, Dana. She’s in love with you. She doesn’t want to admit it, especially not to herself, because she’s afraid that she’d want to be completely open and honest with you - and that you would walk away from her, because of her past.”

Blackness began creeping in around the periphery of Dana’s vision. With difficulty she focused on Ariel, tried to tell the store owner that she didn’t feel too well, perhaps she ought to go home -?

In response Ariel rose and leaned over to peer into her eyes. “ Don’t fight it. It will be easier if you don’t,” she advised.

Fear flittered through Dana’s heart. “ What have…” her own voice came out sounding slurred. Her tongue suddenly felt as big and clumsy and alien as a dead slug in her mouth. She shook her head, the movement seeming to her to be made in slow motion, the words barely making sense. “ What…have you - you done to me?”

“ It’s just a harmless paralytic drug,” Ariel told her. “ I put it in your tea. A couple swallows are all it takes. Don’t worry though, it’ll wear off. The Old Ones need you fully aware.” 

Dana sucked breath in, blew it out again slowly, trying to force herself calm. Bright dots of red popped within the darkness that encroached on her vision and although she tried to blink the effect away, she succeeded only in making herself feel nauseous.

“ You’ll make a very good sacrifice, Dana,” Ariel said.

Sacrifice? What the hell was she talking about?

Dana opened her mouth to speak but only a strangled wheeze came out that frightened her worse than anything yet. Ariel patted her on one of her uselessly numbed hands. “ You’ll be fine if you just go with it. Your sacrifice won’t be in vain either, I assure you. You’ll die, and Flynn will never know whether you loved her back or not. Her pain will nourish the Old Ones.”

Old Ones? Who in fuck were the Old Ones?

“ But don’t worry about Flynn. I’ll take good care of her after you’re gone, Dana. I can make her happy in ways you’ve never dreamed about, believe me. I already have, in fact.” Ariel laughed, the sound seductive and cruel at once.

Dana wanted nothing more than to be able to clamp her hands over her own ears to shut out that mocking voice, to make the sting of the words go away, but she couldn’t move at all now.

“ Thank you for your contribution to the final ritual,” Ariel whispered.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Waylon Murray’s morning had been spent sat in front of a computer, wading through the hopelessly muddled and incomplete Orleans Parish records for any mention of a Helen Dufresne. After a while, as he scrolled through the endless names and numbers on screen, he had fallen into a mild trance, his eyes frequently tracking so that he had to stop and go back. He almost missed it - a property listing in the name of Helen Dufresne. Picking up the phone on his desk, Waylon called his partner at home. Boudreau answered before the first ring had even finished, leading Waylon to suspect she’d been sitting by the phone just waiting for a call. He grinned. Typical Boudreau - couldn’t quit working even with a head injury. “ Hey, you. I got something here might be interesting,” he greeted her. “ That Helen Dufresne - she owns the lease on a store sells Voodoo shit. It’s called Voodoo Realty. Weird name, huh?”

Boudreau sucked air in. “ Waylon, did you just say ‘Voodoo Realty’?” she asked.

“ Yeah. What, you know it?”

“ I know it’s run by Flynn’s friend - Ariel Rousseau.”

“ Huh. Ain’t that a coincidence?” Waylon slid the phone between his neck and shoulder so that he could tap some keys on the computer. “ Lease is definitely in Dufresne’s name. Maybe this Ariel just manages it for her, huh? I’m gonna go over there anyway, check it out. Just thought you’d wanna be in the loop, Pierce.”

“ Yeah. Yeah, keep me there,” Boudreau told him. “ Call me after y’all been to the store, okay?”

“ Sure thing, Pierce.”

Voodoo Realty was closed. Waylon pounded on the downstairs door, rang the bell a dozen times, but all he got was a sore finger and yowled at by a passing stray cat. He sucked on the finger, scowled at the cat. Stepping back from the darkened storefront, his frustration bubbling, he looked around the alleyway and wondered if it were even worthwhile attempting to question the neighbors…probably not, he decided. This was New Orleans. Unless the people who owned this store were regularly sacrificing goats on the front stoop, chances were good that their neighbors left them alone, in return for the same favor. Waylon blew out a sigh and as he turned to leave, his eye landed on a dark-colored sedan parked halfway down the alley in a loading zone. He wouldn’t normally have bothered with this - he was a Homicide detective, not a meter maid - but he was having an otherwise unproductive day and felt like spreading some of the misery around. So he called in the plate number to Dispatch.

A few minutes later the information on the vehicle’s owner came back to him and suddenly he wondered whether the vehicle being here, in this alleyway, near this store, were a coincidence at all? The sedan was registered to one Dana Jordan, a reporter with the Orleans Weekly newspaper. Waylon remembered Boudreau once having a run-in with the good-looking reporter several years back, something for which Waylon’s usually laidback partner still harbored a grudge, so much that she had bitched at great length to Waylon just the other day about Flynn’s talking to the reporter.

“ You got some bug up your ass about that woman, you do,” Waylon had told his partner and Boudreau had given him the stink-eye.

More intriguingly still, Dana Jordan had called Waylon himself recently. She’d called and begged him to give her Boudreau’s cell number. The reporter had heard about the incident on Bayou Castine and professed to be concerned because she couldn’t raise Flynn on her cell phone. Waylon had given her the number but only with great reluctance and after making her promise that she wouldn’t tell Boudreau where she got it from.

“ Lotta women with a connection to Willie Rae Flynn turning up in this investigation,” he muttered. On his way back to the station, he called Boudreau again to update her about the reporter’s vehicle being in the alleyway.

“ So where is she?” Boudreau wanted to know, but Waylon didn’t have an answer to that. He told Boudreau instead that he was coming in to try for a search warrant on the store.

“ I figured I’d plead ‘probable cause’ based on the association of two known felons.”

Boudreau laughed without a trace of humor. “ Known felons associating in New Orleans - yeah, that’ll fly. Good luck, Waylon.”

The moment Waylon told her that Helen Dufresne was the owner of Voodoo Realty, something began nagging at Boudreau and it wouldn’t let go. She got on her laptop, used her NOPD badge number to log into the Department of Corrections official records, and waited a considerable time for the system to spit out the information she asked for. Her sense of frustration at having to sit home futzing around on the computer - instead of being out there, on the street, taking care of this business herself - was so intense it was damn near pleasurable. But she had a concussion, she was still dizzy and nauseous, in no condition to drive or to do her job efficiently, and that meant all she could do was sit around and wait for a slow and archaic system to spit out an answer to her question.

Then Waylon called again, and another piece of the puzzle fell into place for Boudreau. The picture she was beginning to see was not a pretty one, however.

“ That goddamned reporter,” she muttered, “ can’t keep her beak outta anything. Just has to make my life more complicated than it already is.”

When the answer she was waiting for finally came back from the Department of Corrections’ system, Boudreau sat for a long time just staring at her computer screen, her gut churning. At length, she picked up her phone again and speed dialed Flynn’s number.

“ Hey, Pierce,” Flynn began, “ sorry I haven’t checked in. I’ve been kind of caught up with stuff and - ”

“ Listen to me, Willie Rae,” Boudreau cut in. “ The mambo, Jean-Marie - her real name is Helen Dufresne. She owns Voodoo Realty. She was also Ariel Rousseau’s cell mate up at the state pen. Helen was the most respected, and feared mambo in the prison system. And get this, Flynn - she used the mambo name ‘Jean-Marie’.”

For a long moment Flynn made no response. Boudreau gritted her teeth. “ You still there?” she asked.

“ I’m here. So what does this mean? Are you saying that Ariel is involved in the murders?”

Not for one second would Boudreau even have entertained the notion that Ariel Rousseau was an innocent in this situation. Oh no, that untrustworthy green-eyed bitch was hip-deep in these alligators - Boudreau would have staked her fucking pension on it. “ There’s more,” she told Flynn grimly. “ Ariel wasn’t just her cell mate, she was also Jean-Marie’s acolyte. And Flynn - Waylon was over by Ariel’s just a few minutes ago. He says Dana Jordan’s car is parked outside, but there’s no sign of either her or of Ariel.”

Flynn cursed.

“ I’m sorry,” Boudreau told her sincerely.

“ Yeah,” Flynn said. She hung up.

As she lowered the phone from her ear, Boudreau sighed and shook her head morosely. “ Oh Willie Rae, please don’t go firing up the garbage grinder,” she muttered.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

After speaking to Boudreau, Flynn immediately rang Dana Jordan’s cell phone but it went straight to voice mail. She also tried the reporter’s land line, and then her extension at the newspaper office. Getting no response from either, she finally called the newspaper editor, Sy Lehane, at home.

“ Dana had a migraine. She went home to sleep it off,” he told her.

With an increasing sense that something was very amiss, Flynn drove to Dana’s apartment building where a neighbor informed her that the reporter had left for work as usual this morning and had not returned since.

Flynn drove back to Voodoo Realty, more certain than ever that Dana was there, or at least had been there. Unlike Waylon Murray, she didn’t have to wait for a search warrant that might never materialize. She simply jogged around to the service alleyway at the rear of the store and there she climbed the fire escape to Ariel’s bathroom window. The lock broke easily with just a little force and once inside, Flynn headed directly for the bedroom. She had to force herself not to recall the hours of hot sex she’d enjoyed there just recently. Methodically she went through each drawer in a nightstand to the right of the bed until she found Ariel’s journal in one. Flipping to the last written page in the leather-bound book, she read the entry there.

It made a brief mention of Jean-Marie, and a ceremony planned by the mambo, which Ariel described as ‘culminating on the Full Moon’. She also rhapsodized on how this ceremony would bring herself, and Jean-Marie’ both great wealth, great power, and even greater respect’.

“ Yeah, y’all just dream on,” Flynn muttered through her teeth. In her mind she had begun to make connections which suggested Ariel had used her, that the sex had been just another part of whatever crazed, bloody plan she and the mambo were cooking up. She flipped back a few pages, and her heart stood still for several seconds.

Ariel had written about their encounter. In detail. She also had recorded everything Flynn told her about the Voodoo murders investigation. But that wasn’t what made Flynn’s throat close and her heart start up beating again hard behind her temples.

Ariel had written about Dana Jordan. Recorded in the tiny, neat handwriting were words that jumped off the page and stung Flynn’s eyeballs like needles.

This could be the FINAL SACRIFICE!!! I may have found her in Dana Jordan. I have put it to Jean-Marie and she agrees. All I need to do now is find a way to bring the sacrifice to us!

It would have made it easier on Flynn - on her conscience - if she could have told herself that Ariel was an unwitting player in Jean-Marie’s drama, that she had been dragged into a whirlpool of kidnap and murder by a woman who had a hold on her. But that would’ve been naïve. Ariel was not an unwilling player in anything - she was an active participant. Clearly, both she and Jean-Marie were fucking insane. Flynn breathed heavily through her nose, practically snorting her rage out as she scanned the handwritten pages for any mention of where Jean-Marie might be hiding out, or where they planned to take Dana to sacrifice her. As she did so, holding the journal in one hand, she dug her phone from her pocket and punched out Danny’s number.

“ I need you to find any properties held in a particular name,” she told him.

“ Shoot,” he said.

“ Start with Helen Dufresne…” she spelled that for him. “ Then try Jean-Marie Dufresne. You might also want to try Marie Laveau and Jean Lafitte. And all combinations of the above. You could also check out Ariel Rousseau and Antoine Camber.”

“ That’s a lot of names to check.”

Flynn could hear keys clacking busily on Danny’s end of the line. “ Like I said, start with Helen Dufresne.” Voodoo Realty was held in her real name, Flynn reasoned, so why not her other properties?

Whilst Danny worked, Flynn went through the journal a second time and carefully removed all of the pages where Ariel had mentioned either Flynn’s or Dana’s names. She also tore out descriptions of various antidotes, having an inkling that she might need these. When she was done, she stuffed the torn-out pages in her pocket and replaced the rest of the journal in the bottom drawer for the NOPD to find it there. Then she made her way through the rest of the apartment.

In the living room she found two teacups, both of which had dregs of a reddish-brown liquid clinging to the sides and bottom. Flynn sniffed the substance, smelled raspberries, and something tannic that she suspected would be a drug. On the floor beside the table she found a tiny pearl stud earring, and once again her heart clattered to a momentary halt.

Dana had worn earrings just like it when they met at Café du Monde.  

Anger built like a pressure wave that pressed against the bones of Flynn’s face. A hard wave of color rippled through her and lights popped against the backsides of her eyelids. Her entire body became light and heavy at once as adrenalin flowed to the parts where it was most needed for the fight-or-flight response. She remembered this feeling from those times when she executed a kill in her previous life.

Her phone rang, jarring her out of her rage.

“ Okay, we have a winner - ” Danny’s voice said in her ear. “ A property on North Rampart, in the name of Helen Dufresne.”

“ What kind of property?”

“ Commercial. Used to be a bar, but it looks like there have been some renovations done. Hmm, the place looks right into Congo Square.”

Flynn pocketed the earring, then removed the teacups to the kitchen where she rinsed and left them on the drainer with a stack of other dishes. It fit that Jean-Marie would choose Congo Square to perform her insane Voodoo rituals -  the once stomping ground of her namesake, Marie Laveau, would seem appropriate to the crazy mambo, no doubt. “ The remodeling - would that include soundproofing, by any chance?”

“ Indeed yes, dear heart,” Danny confirmed. “ Should I ask why you would think of that?”

Flynn grimaced. “ I think the person who had this property remodeled is performing human sacrifices there. And she wouldn’t want the neighbors to hear screaming.”

“ Oh my, no,” Danny opined mildly. There was little in this world that shocked Danny Cho.

Flynn strode back to the bathroom, ducked out onto the fire escape, and climbed down to the alleyway. The NOPD would eventually find the window broken and suspect someone had been there before them, but they would never be able to prove who it was. Nor, Flynn, hoped, would they care once they realized just what Ariel Rousseau and her ex-cell mate were up to.

Danny said wistfully, “ Whatever pile of shite you are stirring up down there in the Big Sleazy, I wish I were there to help you stir, darling.”

“ I know,” Flynn said and hung up. She pocketed the phone as she got into her Trans Am. She sat there for a few moments, contemplating what her next move ought best to be. Whatever she did, it was going to require assistance. There would be at least three people at the temple - Jean-Marie, Ariel, and Antoine - and maybe even more because who knew how many followers Jean-Marie may have gathered into her bloodthirsty flock. Danny would’ve been Flynn’s first choice of back-up except, post-Katrina, Danny had removed himself and his expensive technology to the drier, safer climes of Baton Rouge.

That left just one person who wanted something from Flynn, and who might be willing to do her a favor in order to get it.

She dialed the number Danny had supplied for Special Agent Erin Krueger’s personal cell phone. The line rang several times before Erin Krueger’s cautious voice asked, “ Who is this? And how did you get this number?”

“ In answer to your first question, Erin, it’s me, Willie Rae Flynn. As to your second question - well, I bet if you try really hard, you can probably guess the answer to that.”

Erin Krueger sighed. “ Danny Cho. Industrious little fucker. What do you want, Flynn?”

A line of no-going-back loomed straight ahead of Flynn. She took a deep breath. “ I need a favor from you, Erin. If you do this for me, I’ll take on that ‘task’ you wanted me to perform. You have my word on that. And I guess I’ll also be in your debt.”

“ I’m listening,” Erin Krueger said.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“ You’re sure about this?” Special Agent Erin Krueger looked across the passenger seat at Flynn.

“ Yeah, I’m sure.” Flynn nodded. “ How’s that wrist, by the way? Think y’all can handle a gun okay?”

Erin grimaced. Dressed in a dark leather jacket, dark pants, and a roll neck sweater, she looked like a model going on a fashion shoot - rather than an ex-CIA agent about to help a former hired assassin to kill people. “ I’ll be fine with a gun. But I owe you for that.”

Flynn gave a quiet snort. “ I’ll be sure to look over my shoulder every time I walk down a dark alleyway.”

Beyond the rain-blurry windshield of the Trans Am, North Rampart Street was shrouded in night a deep charcoal shade, and deserted save for a few hookers wandering desultorily toward the French Quarter. The moon, concealed behind a bank of silver-edged rain clouds, had not yet fully risen. A light, misty rain fell, stringing the street with threads of gray-white mist, pocked by the watery yellow illumination from sodium streetlights. Flynn looked toward Congo Square. Part of the greater grounds of Louis Armstrong Park, the historic square was pristinely landscaped and enclosed by a neat wrought iron fence, bearing very little resemblance to what it had been in Marie Laveau’s day. Nonetheless, you could still get a sense of the older, darker purpose which the square had served then.

Flynn’s cell phone began vibrating on the dashboard where she had left it. She picked it up, checked the called ID, then threw the phone back on the dashboard unanswered.

“ Detective Boudreau?” Erin raised an eyebrow.

“ Yeah.”

Boudreau had been calling repeatedly, each time leaving increasingly agitated messages for Flynn.

“ So how do we play this?” Erin asked.  

“ We kill them all,” Flynn stated simply.

“ And Ariel Rousseau - you want her dead, too?”

“ I’ll deal with her. You take Dana to the address I gave you. Leon will be waiting for you.”

Leon Shand was a medical doctor who’d long ago lost his license after he repeatedly treated gunshot wounds and failed to report them to law enforcement. Ironically, he now made his living by treating members of the New Orleans criminal underworld. He also treated people who couldn’t afford health insurance and who weren’t too bothered about not enjoying the sterile trappings of a hospital. Leon owed Flynn certain favors relating to his underworld clients.

She reached under her jacket, removed two modified Berettas fitted with illegal silencers, and handed one to Erin. “ You’re taking a huge risk, helping me do this,” she remarked. From the corner of her eye she watched the agent shrug. “ I appreciate it. Just so y’all know.”

“ You know it places you in my debt, too?” Erin looked at her expectantly and Flynn nodded.

 For a few moments they worked in silent tandem on their weapons: checking the slides were working, making sure a single round was chambered, sighting the weapons to get the balance right. There was, Flynn realized, a certain terrible, stark beauty in their deadly dance.

“ Truth to tell, I sometimes miss the old days,” Erin confessed. She smiled as she sighted along the sleek barrel of the Beretta. “ We would have made a good team back then.”

“ Imagine what the Agency could’ve accomplished,” Flynn agreed dryly. “ Y’all ready for this?”

“ Let’s rock ‘n’ roll.”

Tucking the gun inside her jacket, Erin stepped out of the car, looked both ways up and down the mist-shrouded street, and jogged across to the other side.

The section of North Rampart in which Helen Dufresne had purchased her property was a largely rundown mix of low-rent homes and commercial properties. Since Katrina, it remained half-deserted, many windows and doors still boarded and painted with the FEMA search markings. Looking at it all, Flynn was reminded of her early days in the city, of what it had been like before Katrina, and that made her blood boil. Five years on, she thought, and still so much repair work to be done. Just a half block from where the Trans Am was parked, decent homes crowded up alongside the poverty and ruin, testament to the contradictory nature of life in New Orleans. By angling the rear view mirror Flynn was able to watch Erin as she walked swiftly, hands tucked into the pockets of her jacket, head ducked low, toward the mambo’s property. To any casual observer, she would have appeared as nothing more than a woman hurrying home on a wet night. However, as she drew level with the property, she slowed her step enough to make a quick scan for any cameras or other security measures. Then she walked on, and at the end of the block, crossed the street.

The passenger door opened. Erin slid into the car on a waft of cold air. “ No visible security. Looks like an ordinary everyday door, too. Easy-pick lock, if you plan on going in the front door.”

Flynn grunted. “ I guess Jean-Marie just isn’t expecting anyone to try to break into her temple.”

“ Maybe it’s guarded by a hex,” Erin suggested with a grin.

“ Too bad for Jean-Marie that we’re not believers then.”

They got out of the car together this time, crossing the empty street, and walking straight up to the temple unchallenged. Even though it was before nine pm - early evening by New Orleans standards - the street was practically deserted. Those who were out and about had business of their own to mind -  much of it nefarious, Flynn guessed - and were disinclined then to be minding anyone else’s. Flynn examined the front door quickly, then used her lock-picking tools to open it up. As she swung it open, Erin moved ahead of her inside. Flynn followed and let the door close soundlessly behind them.

A passageway stretched straight ahead, lit by a series of torches in ornate sconces at intervals along each wall. Frowning, Erin reached up and passed a hand through the flame of one of these torches. “ Fake,” she muttered. She touched her fingertips to the wall. “ Plasterboard. Is anything the real McCoy in here?”

“ Probably not. The whole place has been extensively remodeled. ” Flynn moved ahead of the agent to follow the line of fake torches to the passageway’s end and a second door. She twisted around to look at Erin over one shoulder. “ I think we’ve found our temple.”

Erin nodded.

Flynn took a deep breath, and reached for the handle.    

The time was almost upon them. The Full Moon would shortly reach its zenith. All was prepared.

After the ritual bathing of the sacrifice came the anointing and adorning with nine strands of beads made from glass, roots, and the bones of a rooster sacrificed within the walls of a cemetery. The drug which had kept the sacrifice docile throughout the preparations had begun to wear off and Dana Jordan was waking up, making faint moaning sounds as her eyes flickered underneath her lids and her limbs twitched in fear. The mambo ordered her acolyte, Antoine, to take the cleansed sacrifice to the altar, and to bind her there.

“ And don’t even think about touching her, do you hear me?” she added severely.

“ Yes, Mambo,” Antoine muttered, head bowed, eyes downcast. He still was in the mambo’s disfavor after the fiasco with the second sacrifice, and he knew he’d have to work hard to regain a place in her good books.

Pity for him then that he wouldn’t be given that chance, the mambo thought savagely.

Whilst Antoine lifted the semi-conscious Dana from the bathtub and carried her through to the temple, Ariel helped the mambo to prepare herself for the ceremony. As she assisted Jean-Marie to pull on her white robes, tying them at the rear for her and smoothing them out across her shoulders, the mambo laid a hand on Ariel’s arm and lowered her voice to a whisper. “ We need to be free of Antoine. His influence has become toxic to the Old Ones. He needs to die. Tonight.”

Ariel was surprised. “ Won’t that upset the balance of the ritual?” she asked.

The mambo shook her head, showing a touch of impatience with her acolyte’s naivety. “ Of course not. In fact, it shall only sweeten the pot. I am entrusting the task to you. When the time is right, I shall give the signal and expect you to dispatch Antoine from this plane. Can I rely upon you?”

The time for hesitation was long past and Ariel quickly nodded her assent. Besides, Jean-Marie was right - Antoine had become a liability. Even the simple task of disposing of Anthea Larue’s body he’d managed to screw up, leaving the rotting corpse in his own apartment instead of taking it to the bayou and dumping it there as Jean-Marie had instructed him. This way, he had brought the authorities one step closer to them than they ever had anticipated. It was the drugs, Ariel realized. Antoine had become addicted to the Zombie Dust variant which she herself concocted. The mambo had known drugs were Antoine’s weakness when she recruited him, but she had not predicted how rapid his slide into addiction would be when he tasted Ariel’s clever combination of substances. 

The mambo bestowed a seductive smile on her acolyte and patted her arm, letting her long fingers with their scarlet-painted nails linger there. “ We will rule this earthly plane together, my darling,” she promised, in a husky voice that sent shivers down Ariel’s spine.

“ Frankly, I would’ve killed him soon as he came and told me about injuring that cop. He was a liability already, and doing something as stupid as that, well - ” Jean-Marie pooched out her lips, shook her head. “ But we needed him for tonight.”

“ I’ll take care of it, Mambo,” Ariel promised.

They walked into the temple together where Antoine had laid the sacrifice upon the altar, her wrists and ankles bound with hemp ropes soaked in a special mix of herbs, blood, and rum. Ariel noticed that his eyes kept darting to Dana Jordan’s exposed sex, and each time he looked, his tongue would dart between his lips in a vaguely obscene gesture. Jean-Marie had forbidden him to so much as touch this sacrifice, not until the Old Ones were finished with it, but having to be so restrained was obviously difficult for him. Ariel felt a wave of disgust rise in her gut that forced her to look away.

Resplendent in her white ritual robes trimmed with silver and gold to represent the Moon and Sun, with nine ropes of beads strung around her neck, and barefoot as the ritual required, Jean-Marie smiled as she watched the sacrifice prepared. It would have been bad luck for the mambo herself to perform the preparation, to have sullied her hands with such acts. She was required to be pure for this ritual.

“ Ariel, light the incense,” Jean-Marie instructed. She picked up a ceremonial bone-handled dagger laying on the altar by the head of the sacrifice. Dana Jordan’s eyes were impossibly wide and shining wet with fear, darting to and fro in a futile search for escape. Beads of sweat had gathered on her forehead, and trailed down her nose and cheeks. Jean-Marie sprinkled droplets of a sacred mixture over her, from forehead to feet, murmuring an incantation as she did so. Ariel spoke the sacred words in unison with the mambo, and Antoine, too, mumbled along, his glassy gaze fixed upon the sacrifice, drinking her nakedness in greedily, becoming visibly excited himself at the way fear had brought her nipples to rosy erection. The same disgust rose like bile in Ariel’s throat once again.

“ Old Ones…we beseech you!” Jean-Marie cried.

They were here, the Old Ones were here - Ariel could sense them. In just a short while, she would be able to see them, hear them, and even talk to them. It was not easy for mere humans to interact with the Old Ones. The rituals required to do so were complex, requiring strenuous concentration of mind, body, and spirit.

“ Accept our sacrifice!” Jean-Marie pled.

The mambo clasped the dagger in both hands, let the sharp tip of the blade bite into tender flesh and draw blood, and with several quick and expert flicks of her wrist she carved the veve of Damballah Wedo into Dana Jordan’s skin.

Flynn stepped into a queerly-angled room of fake stone walls and deep shadows. Her first impression was one of murky brown darkness tinged red by wavering light thrown by a series of flambeaux along the walls. The air was thick with the heavy, sickly sweet smells of incense, blood, and human sweat. As her eyes rapidly adjusted, she saw the fake stone walls adorned with garish, hellish images of the Loa and their worshippers engaged in various rituals, lit by flickering firelight that made the images seem to come alive and actually move in rhythm. Whatever incense was being burned, it created a sharp, resinous tang in the thick air that agitated the fine hairs inside Flynn’s nostrils and made her want to sneeze violently. Then the deranged kaleidoscope of images shifted and resolved itself into the single, starkly terrifying sight of Dana Jordan, naked and bound, laying on a stone altar in the middle of the temple. A series of veves were painted on her torso. Shadows cast by the flambeaux cut sharply across her face and body, gouging harsh lines into the awful paleness of her flesh. Just above her left breast a fresh wound glistened with blood.

A fiftyish white woman in white and silver-edged robes held a dagger, the edge painted in blood, above Dana’s immobile form on the altar whilst she chanted in a strange, guttural language. Perspiration beaded the woman’s face and neck above the robes. This must be Jean-Marie, Flynn reasoned. The infamous jailhouse mambo. She was an attractive woman alright, blonde and with the crystal-blue eyes that marked French descent, but she also bore an air of serenity and violence that mingled into one truly unsettling thing.

Jean-Marie and her acolytes reacted to the intrusion immediately and with expected violence. Antoine stepped toward them, his big hands curling into fists, his red-rimmed eyes narrowing. Ariel stepped instinctively back from the altar and the mambo, confusion and unease rippling across her face.

“ Get them!” the mambo screeched.

For a single instant time and reality buckled for Flynn. Each were ripped apart, leaving in their wake a dark and airless void in which everything that had existed in her life before this moment was gone and anything which might exist afterwards hung in suspension. She drifted momentarily in that void, her mind buzzing in the vacuum, a storm of emotion building deep inside of her, and then with the abruptness of an explosion, time unwound and expanded once more and reality snapped back into place. All the light and air rushed back in to fill up the void, and Flynn became aware that she could feel her own pulse pounding in her ears and vibrating through her clenched teeth. The bitter, metallic taste of hatred rushed into her mouth. She raised the silencer-equipped Beretta and stared into the undisguised hatred in the eyes of Jean-Marie, who hissed a curse between her teeth. She flipped the point of the dagger up so that it pointed at Flynn and Erin.

“ Fools!” she shrieked at them, her crystal-blue eyes wild and shining with the fervor of a believer.

Erin shot Antoine Camber twice as he lumbered toward them. The first bullet struck him in the chest and sent him staggering backward. He bumped into a plinth holding a stone statue of a Loa, sending statue and plinth both crashing to the floor where they shattered into a mass of dust and white shards. The second shot took him in the throat, blood and bone spraying from the exit wound and splattering one painted wall and part of the altar. As Jean-Marie screeched a sound of incoherent rage at the defilement of her altar, Antoine coughed up a gout of blood, and then he also crashed to the floor amidst the broken pieces of statue.

Jean-Marie screeched, “ You have dared to interrupt the ceremony and defiled the sacrifice! You will die!” Spittle flew from her lips. The dagger trembled in her hand. She exuded a glittery-eyed, unhealthy aura of near-rabid belief in something so outlandish that most people would go insane just trying to wrap their heads around how anyone could believe in it.

The storm of emotion roiling inside of Flynn broke free and raged through her with as much force as the floodwaters had broken through the levees five years ago. She shot Jean-Marie. The mambo made a choked-off urking sound as the  bullet entered through her forehead and blew out the back of her skull. The dagger fell limply from her hands, clattered to the floor and skittered away into a corner. As the mambo fell dead, Ariel screamed and backed away into a corner, hands frantically swatting at the red smears of blood on her face and arms.

“ Goodnight, bitch,” Flynn muttered. Ignoring the whimpering Ariel for the moment, she moved quickly to the altar and gently tugged the cloth gag loose from Dana’s mouth. The reporter sucked in a single whooping breath, and began to cough violently. Flynn untied the ropes from her wrists and ankles and slipped an arm under her bare shoulders, helping her to sit up. Face suffusing with color, eyes watering with the force of her coughing, she clung to Flynn.

“ I’ll see if I can find some water - ” Erin Krueger offered and Flynn gave her a grateful nod.

“ Are you okay?” She ran a critical eye over the reporter. The wound appeared to be superficial, not deep enough probably to leave a permanent scar. All the same Flynn’s stomach clenched and the red mist of anger descended on her again as she looked at how Jean-Marie had marked Dana with the veve of Damballah Wedo. 

“ I’m fine,” Dana managed to wheeze. She coughed again, then leaned into Flynn’s shoulder and closed her eyes. Flynn felt the reporter’s breath warm against her neck as Dana.  “ She - ” with a quick jerk of her chin, Dana indicated Ariel, “ gave me some kind of paralytic drug. Thank you, Flynn, for coming to get me.”

“ Never any question I wouldn’t,” Flynn assured her.

Erin reappeared then, carrying a tin cup that sloshed water onto the floor. “ I tasted it - seems fresh enough,” she said.

“ Thanks. Here. Sip this slowly.” Flynn held the cup to Dana’s lips whilst the reporter drank. She only managed a few sips before she began to shiver violently, however, and Flynn felt her flesh burning up. She threw a poisonous look in Ariel’s direction. “ What’s happening to her?”

Ariel’s already pale features had blanched to a ghostly gray. She looked sick with fear as she shook her head hard enough to make her dark hair fall over her eyes. “ It’s just the drug flushing through her system,” she whispered, using one trembling hand to push the hair out of her eyes. “ The Old Ones need her - aware for the completion of the ritual.”

Feeling both her gorge rise and an urge to just pick up one of those hideous Loa statues and beat Ariel to death with it, Flynn quickly looked away from the crouching woman, focusing on Dana instead. She indicated to Erin to hand over her jacket, which the agent did reluctantly. “ This is hand-stitched leather, you know,” she complained.

Flynn rolled her eyes. She draped the leather jacket around Dana’s shivering shoulders. “ Y’all can send me the dry cleaning bill. Right now you need to get her to Leon. Give this to him - ” she scooped the pages torn from Ariel’s journal out of her pocket and handed them to Erin. Then she lifted Dana’s chin with two fingers, angling her head so that she could look into the reporter’s dark eyes. “ Erin is going to take you to a friend of mine. He’ll look after you. He’s a doctor. This is over now, Dana. No one is ever going to need to know that you went through this, do you understand me?” She used her thumb to tenderly wipe the tears away from Dana’s pale cheeks. The flesh was damp and felt white hot.

Erin stepped forward, working her shoulder under Dana’s right arm and wrapping her own arm around the reporter’s back. “ You think you can walk?” she asked. Dana nodded grimly.

On impulse, Flynn picked up one of Dana’s limp hands, raised it to her mouth and lightly kissed the backs of the fingers. “ It’s gonna be okay,” she promised.

For a moment Dana held tight for a moment to her hand. “ Thank you,” she whispered again. Then she stood up from the stone slab of the altar and allowed Erin Krueger to lead her out of the temple, and the nightmare she had endured there.

CHAPTER TWENTY

After the door closed behind Erin and Dana, Flynn finally faced Ariel Rousseau. The familiar scent of cinnamon and patchouli radiated from her but now, rather than reminding Flynn of sex on a summer afternoon, it made her think of Ariel’s softly spoken lies and promises that were as hollow as a husked-out gourd. Firelight from the torches reflected in Ariel’s green eyes and against her jet-dark hair, giving her the look of a big cat that had been cornered and cowed.

“ You know that you’re not leaving here, right?” Flynn said.

Ariel gave her a flat smile. “ You can’t kill me. I know you think you want to - but you can’t hurt anyone that you care about. And you do care about me. I know you do. I remember what we did together.”

A joyless perversity in Flynn made her smile at this delusion. Did Ariel really think it was that simple? “ But I don’t care about you,” Flynn told her. “ What we did - that was just sex. Nothing more. I don’t love you. Not now. Not ever.”

“ No - ” Ariel shook her head. “ You’re lying, Flynn. We could’ve had so much more. We still can! Tell me, did you dream about me after we were together?”

Flynn’s whole body jerked in surprise. Ariel’s smile turned sly. “ You did. I knew it. What did it mean to you, Flynn?”

“ It didn’t mean anything. It was a dream, that’s all.” Against her better judgment, but curious too, Flynn lowered the Beretta. “ Why did you think I dreamed about you?”

“ We have a connection,” Ariel said simply. Her green eyes glowed. “ Don’t deny that at least, Flynn.”

“ We had a connection - maybe at one time,” Flynn corrected her. She extended an arm to indicate the temple. “ To what end was all of this meant?”

Ariel laughed softly. “ Power. What do any of us want out of this miserable fucking existence but power? Power over others to make them do our bidding. And you could have shared in it, Flynn. You still can. Just listen to me - ”

But Flynn gave her head a hard shake, cutting off the pleas. “ No. I told you that it’s over. There are no Loa. There are no Old Ones. All of it was moonshine fed to you by Jean-Marie.”

“ It is real,” Ariel insisted. “ I’ve seen what the Loa can do.”

“ Only thing is real here is that you assisted in the murders of two women and were about to help murder a third,” Flynn pointed out.

Ariel apparently found something funny in that. As she laughed, Flynn shot an arm out and landed an open-handed slap on her mouth. The laughter died abruptly as blood welled from Ariel’s lower lip. She licked it away with the tip of her tongue, curled red-smeared lips in a grotesque parody of a seductive smile.

“ Their sacrifices would have brought forth the Old Ones. Jean-Marie and I would have been so powerful. The Old Ones reward those who serve them.”

Flynn’s stomach coiled. She raised the Beretta again. “ Tell me how you convinced Anthea and her mother to be your sacrifices?”

“ The girl was first,” Ariel told her. “ She came into my store looking for a love potion, so I gave her an Erzulie veve. She was a virgin, that was obvious, and it made her just right for the first sacrifice. I convinced her to come back with the promise a ritual would win the heart of whatever goddamned boy she was having her feverish little virgin dreams about. After we sacrificed her, it was just as easy to call her mother and tell her that we knew where her precious little girl was. Anthea had told me all about how her mama was a good Christian woman - perfect for the second sacrifice.”

“ Jesus,” Flynn sighed, shaking her head.

Ariel gave her a sly look. “ I might’ve thought twice if I’d known that Jeannette Larue was in touch with you. The police are idiots, but I’d have known you were smart enough to figure it out. When you came into the store asking about that little fuckwit Johnny Cakes -? I thought you were onto me then.”

Flynn smiled. “ Don’t even bother trying to flatter me, Ariel. It isn’t going to work. Besides, I didn’t figure anything out - that was down to Pierce Boudreau.” She sucked in a deep breath. “ I assume that it was Antoine who raped both women?”

“ The Old Ones allow their faithful servants to use the sacrifices any way they may choose,” Ariel said with a shrug.

“ Rape,” Flynn stated.

Ariel’s jaw worked and her gaze shifted. “ Call it what you will.”

“ So - what? You seduced me as a way of distracting me?” The words stuck in Flynn’s throat, tasting sour and rotten there.

Ariel shook her head. “ Is that what you think? I love you, Flynn. And I can love you way better than that uptight little reporter bitch can.”

All at once the urge to punish Ariel drained out of Flynn as she realized just how lost inside her own delusions the woman was. In fact, Ariel was just lost, period. She wasn’t the same woman that Flynn had known that long-ago summer. She tilted a pitying look at Ariel now. “ How did this happen?”

Ariel scowled. “ Shit happens.”

Flynn nodded. The first rule of life: shit always happens. “ You’re right, shit does happen. But that isn’t what I mean. What happened to you, Ariel? This was never something that you would’ve done when I knew you before.”

Ariel’s green eyes snapped with anger. “ Prison, Flynn. Federal fucking prison happened to me. Until I met Jean-Marie…” she winced, shook her head. “ Well, it was bad for me, okay? Jean-Marie showed me how things could be.”

“ I get all that,” Flynn said, “ but a murderer - ?”

Ariel smirked. “ I think I hear a pot calling a kettle black. How many people did you kill? I’ve never judged you for what you were, Flynn. Can you say the same for Dana Jordan? Would she ever be able to let you touch her, fuck her - get inside her - without thinking about how much blood is on your hands?”

That no-going-back line loomed right ahead of Flynn. An angry pulse throbbed in her temples, beating in time to an inner voice that urged her to just go ahead and cross the fucking line. Last time she’d been in this position was on the night she spotted her drunken, abusive father staggering along the levee and she had known she could kill him, that no one would ever know what she’d done.

“ The Old Ones would find great use for you,” Ariel told her, and with a sly smile she nodded with her head at a point beyond Flynn’s left shoulder. “ If you just look hard enough, you’ll see them.”

A chill seized the back of Flynn’s neck, and her scalp tingled with it. Instinct made her turn her head and glance over her shoulder into the smoky red-tinged darkness.

In that moment of Flynn’s inattention, Ariel made a lunge for the ceremonial dagger dropped to the floor by Jean-Marie. She snatched the weapon up even as Flynn whipped her head back around and raised the Beretta.

“ Don’t do it,” Flynn warned her.

“ The ritual must be completed,” Ariel whispered. Flynn’s eyes widened in stunned horror as Ariel plunged the dagger deep into her own gut. A flower of dark red blood bloomed on the front of her white robe. Her hands fell away from the weapon and she slumped sideways against the wall.

Shocked, Flynn set the Beretta aside and grabbed Ariel by her shoulders, trying to push her upright against the wall. When that failed, she hovered her hands over the seeping wound, unsure what to do, then freezing in mid-reach when Ariel smiled up at her. Blood bubbled on her lips as she spoke.

“ Old Ones, come to me!”

Flynn jerked her hands away, stared at the dying woman.

“ Too bad it has to end this way, Flynn,” Ariel told her. “ You really could have had your very own Voodoo woman. Now I’ll be the final sacrifice…”

Flynn started to shake her head, to say something, but then she realized that Ariel would be dead before she finished the sentence, and instead she forced a smile. “ I’m sorry,” she said instead.

Ariel nodded. “ It is done,” she whispered.

One of the many skills Flynn had learned in her previous employment was how to stage a crime scene.

She worked fast. First she wiped the Beretta and pressed it into Ariel’s hands, leaving it on the floor beside her body. Then she rearranged the bodies of Antoine Camber and the mambo, and finally she doused the temple in oils. Carefully lifting one of the torches from its sconce, she used that to set light to the oil. It burned quickly and Flynn had to move fast to reach the door through a choking haze of rancid smoke.

She closed the door on the burning temple, and in her mind she heard Ariel’s words echo: Too bad it has to end this way. You really could have had your very own Voodoo woman. As she walked down the passageway to the street outside, she shook her head sadly. “ No, I couldn’t have had that. The price would’ve been too high, even for me,” she murmured.

That Ariel had been willing to take her own life the way she did, was testament to just how deep inside of the delusions spun by Jean-Marie she was. In her desperate need to see the mambo’s crazy predictions come true, she had turned herself into a twisted version of the final sacrifice.

Rain continued to fall, a hazy damp curtain of it strung across Rampart Street, obscuring the spires of the cathedral and the lights of the nearby Quarter. Flynn walked to the nearest payphone from there she placed an anonymous call to the emergency services, reporting a fire at the temple address. She hung up on the dispatcher’s questions, and continued walking toward the Quarter where she could become lost in the crowds. A shiver of wind blew through the trees lining the park fence on her left, the rustling of their leaves, unnaturally loud inside the gray fog of rain, making the hairs on Flynn’s neck rise. She turned sharply to look behind her, heart thudding, but the street was empty, and the absurdity of her own apprehension made her scowl. All that fucking Voodoo shit, it had gotten under her skin. In the distance, she heard sirens wail as New Orleans’ finest responded to the anonymous call.

She didn’t regret what she’d done tonight. Jean-Marie, with the help of Antoine and Ariel, had murdered two people to feed their collective delusion. Sending Jean-Marie back to prison - where her reputation would precede her - would simply have given her more of the notoriety and adulation which she craved. Ariel, too, would have eventually become as hardened as the mambo. Flynn hated that thought. It was better that they all should have died here tonight.

In the French Quarter, Flynn found a cab to take her to Leon’s home in the Upper Garden District. Leaning back in the cab’s rear seat, the heater raising steam from her clothing and warming her face, she momentarily wondered just how much her life - all of their lives - would be changed by tonight’s events?

Because murder always changed you, no matter who you were.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Flynn arrived at Leon’s Garden District mansion ten minutes later - coincidentally situated less than half a block from where Danny once had lived - to be ushered straight inside by his loyal houseboy and occasional surgical assistant, Chan. Leon himself appeared from a downstairs parlor close on the houseboy’s heels.

“ How is Dana?” Flynn asked immediately. 

Leon gave her a reassuring smile and a gentle pat on the arm. “ Your friend is going to be just fine. I made up the antidote just as it was described, and it seems to have done the trick. She’s sleeping now.”

Flynn nodded. “ And the - wound,” she added hesitantly,  “ will it be okay?”

“ Superficial,” Leon assured her. “ It will heal and she will hardly even notice it’s there. I know this probably doesn’t make it any better, but whoever did that her, they were an expert cutter.”

“ Yeah well, they had some practice,” Flynn muttered. “ Thanks for taking care of her, Leon.” 

“ Of course. Your, uh, other friend is with her.” Leon’s shaggy salt-and-pepper brows climbed his forehead. “ That’s an intriguing woman, Flynn. Ms Krueger, I mean.”

“ You don’t know the half of it.” Flynn gave a wan smile, then took a step toward the staircase. She paused to extend a hand to the doctor. “ Those pages, Leon, I’ll need them back.”

Leon sighed as he handed them over to Flynn. “ This would’ve been such an interesting read. I have never seen a drug quite like the one described - a fascinating Zombie Dust variant. This Ariel person is a talented chemist indeed.”

“ Was,” Flynn corrected. Leon’s brows rose. Flynn pocketed the pages to be destroyed later, and smiled. “ Ariel was a talented chemist. Sadly, she’s no longer with us.”

“ Oh dear. That is too bad.” Leon pursed his lips, then gestured toward the darkened upstairs of the house. “ Second door on the right, Flynn. When your friend wakes, she’ll be thirsty, but you shouldn’t let her drink too much water, nor too fast, or it will make her violently sick. I’ll have Chan bring you coffee. Make yourselves at home for as long as you need.”

Flynn nodded a thank you, then headed quickly upstairs.

As soon as she saw Dana, asleep in a massive double bed, buried beneath a sea of blankets, all of the anger and the sadness she’d felt leaving the body of Ariel Rousseau to burn in the temple, drained away, replaced by relief that this woman was alive. Flynn perched on an edge of the bed, gently laid a hand on Dana’s cheek, surprised to feel how feverish she was. The reporter’s breathing came in shallow, rapid bursts.

“ Leon said she might run a fever for a couple hours.”

Heavy curtains had been drawn across the windows, and the only, illumination came from a small ornate glass lamp on a table by the curtained windows. Erin Krueger sat at the table, a magazine spread open in front of her. “ He doesn’t seem to be too concerned about it,” she added with a shrug. “ He and his assistant cleaned her up some when I brought her in. All that Voodoo shit painted on her - did you know they used fucking rooster blood? God knows how I’m going to get that shit out of my jacket lining. Anyway, there toothbrushes and toiletries in the bathroom, and that Chan kid makes some pretty decent coffee.”

In her sleep, Dana’s facial muscles twitched and contracted spasmodically, her eyes darting back and forth beneath her closed lids as though she were dreaming. At length, Flynn stood up reluctantly from the bed and went to join Erin at the table.

“ Y’all handled yourself pretty well back there.” She leaned scrubbed both palms over her face, smiled between her fingers at the agent.

Erin tilted her a modest look. “ I’ve seen worse things than tonight’s little drama. But it’s going to take a toll on your reporter friend there. ” Flynn nodded weary agreement. “ She may need to talk to someone. If so, I can guarantee this guy’s discretion - ” Erin reached into her pocket, removed a white card from it, held that out across the table.

Flynn took the card and turned it over to read the name and telephone number printed on one side.

“ Dr Goldman deals with people who may have experienced traumatic events but whose, um, careers prevent them from talking to ordinary professionals,” Erin explained.

“ Thanks.”

“ And you’d better have this back.”

Erin took the Beretta from her jacket, slid it across the tabletop to Flynn. She pocketed it to be disposed of later.

“ Eventually someone might figure out that there were two different weapons involved in temple shootings,” Erin pointed out.

Flynn shrugged. “ Maybe. But it’ll take a good long time.” She gave a wry smile to the agent. “ New Orleans ain’t exactly in a hurry, in case y’all hadn’t noticed that.”

“ I have noticed, yes.”

There was a knock at the door and Chan entered, smiling and carrying a tray laid with two bone china coffee cups and a silver coffee pot. The houseboy smiled his way to them and continued to smile as he poured coffee for both women. There was sugar and creamer on the tray which he left for them. “ Anything you need, please fetch me,” he said.

Erin stayed to drink her coffee and afterwards, as shrugged into her jacket, she told Flynn that she would be in touch…  “ about that favor you owe me.”  Erin paused, and looked speculatively at the reporter asleep in the bed. “ You must care about her a great deal to have taken the risks you did tonight.”

Flynn nodded. “ I guess I do.”

“ The Agency taught us that love was dangerous because it could compromise us as operatives.”

“ I’m no longer an Agency operative. Neither are you.”

Erin allowed a brief enigmatic smile to cross her lips, then she cracked the door and stepped out of the room. The door closed softly behind her. Flynn poured more coffee for herself, and settled in to keep watch on Dana through the night.  

Despite the adrenalin and the coffee sloshing through her system, Flynn must have fallen asleep because she woke suddenly, struggling up from the chair and blinking in the sudden glare of the lamp. Dana was still deeply asleep, but she felt less feverish to the touch and her face now wore a peaceful expression.

Flynn went into the bathroom and there she took the pages from Ariel’s journal from her pocket, holding them over the sink as she lit the corner of the paper with her lighter. She waited, holding the edge between thumb and forefinger, as the paper burned. When the last piece had crumbled, she ran the faucet to wash the ragged, blackened specks away. Then she sat down on the closed lid of the toilet and made a call to Pierce Boudreau.

The detective sounded equally relieved to hear from her, and irked about the protracted absence of communication. “ Where in hell have you been, Flynn? I’ve been calling you all fucking day and night,” she stormed.

“ I’ve been with Dana Jordan,” Flynn told her.

Boudreau’s tone took on an instant hint of suspicion. “ Yeah? And where is the gallant reporter? Her car is still outside of Voodoo Realty, but there’s been no sign of her, nor of Ariel Rousseau.”

“ I don’t know about Ariel, but Dana’s fine. She had a migraine and had to leave her car in the alleyway. She called me to come pick her up and baby-sit her.”

“ Uh huh. You’re turning into a regular Florence Nightingale, ain’t’cha?” Boudreau remarked. She was quiet then for a moment, at length asking if Flynn knew anything about a fire had broken out at a North Rampart property last night?

Flynn raised a glance to her own reflection in the mirror above the sink, took a silent breath in before she told the next lie to her friend. “ Nope. What happened?”

“ Some property owned by Helen Dufresne caught on fire. There were three people inside. Fire Department didn’t get there in time to save any evidence, so we’ll likely never know if the blaze began accidentally, or if it was set deliberately. Interesting thing is, two of the bodies appear to have suffered gunshot wounds, and one was stabbed.”

“ Oh my. Any idea who the bodies belong to?”

“ Right now it looks like Antoine Camber, and Helen Dufresne were the shooting victims…” Boudreau hesitated long enough to clear her throat. “ We think the third might be Ariel Rousseau. I’m sorry, Flynn.”

Flynn said nothing. She listened to Boudreau breathing down the line. Then the detective said, “ You’ve been with Dana Jordan all night, is that right?”

“ That’s right.”

“ Migraine, huh?” 

More silence poured down the line. Flynn pictured Boudreau on the end of that silence, the way the detective would be frowning and gnawing on her lower lip as she mentally worked through what she was hearing, and then tried to match it to something in reality. “ Someone fired up the garbage grinder and fed three people down it tonight,” Boudreau said finally, “ but I think you’re telling me that you had nothing to do with that, right? Dana Jordan was never anywhere near Voodoo Realty. She never had anything to do with this situation. You had nothing to do with it either because you were with Dana Jordan all night. Is that how you want to play it?”

“ That’s how it is, Pierce.”

“ Fine. But just one thing - ?”

“ What’s that, Pierce?”

“ I fucking told y’all not to trust that green-eyed bitch Ariel Rousseau, didn’t I?”

A smile tugged at Flynn’s mouth. “ That you did, Pierce. That you did. And I should’ve listened to y’all.”

Boudreau grunted. “ Yeah. Well, you be careful, Flynn. I’ll call you later, let you know what the Fire Department and the coroner find.”

“ Okay.”

Flynn hung up. She knew what the Fire Department and the coroner were going to find - exactly what she had left for them to find. She closed the phone and returned to the bedroom where Dana still hadn’t stirred beneath her nest of blankets. Watching her for a moment, Flynn realized that she didn’t much care if she had to lie to Boudreau, or to anyone else, to protect this woman.

The first light of dawn had begun seeping into the sky, reducing the night to a thin smokiness when Flynn got up to switch off the lamp and crack the curtains a couple inches. Things always looked better in natural light, even if it was wan and still edged with a chill. As she slipped back between the covers, Dana groaned awake fully for the first time.

Flynn smiled down into the sleepy dark eyes. “ Hey. How y’all doing?”

“ Feel like I’ve been asleep for days - ” Dana frowned. “ How long have I been here?”

“ A few hours.”

“ God, I’m so thirsty.” 

With Leon’s warning about not allowing her to drink too much too fast in mind, Flynn helped Dana to sit up and to take a few sips of water. Despite the inauspicious circumstances, she couldn’t help but notice Dana’s nakedness as the blankets fell away from her. She had to force herself not to stare. Now was definitely not the time for that. She also noticed the wound again. The edges of it were slightly puffy, a pale reddish shade, and smeared in some antiseptic lotion. Flynn’s gut churned with the knowledge that she had helped to bring this situation about.

“ More,” Dana panted. But Flynn shook her head.

“ Doc says you have to take it slow, or you’ll be sick.”

“ Fuck him. I’m dying of thirst here.”

“ No way. Dr Leon’s orders. I ain’t cleaning up whoop either. Not even for y’all.”

Dana laid back down. “ Seems like you’re always rescuing me from something, Flynn,” she said, and a tiny smile flickered across her lips.

Flynn shrugged. “ All part of the service.”

“And I can’t believe you saw me naked. That’s something for me to be embarrassed about for the next twenty years or so.”

Flynn chuffed a quiet laugh. “ Would it help if I told you that I didn’t look?”

Dana considered this, then shook her head, her smile widening. “ Actually, I think I would be even more offended if you hadn’t looked. And forget what I said about being embarrassed. The hell I am.” She stopped smiling then, and flicked a concerned look at Flynn. “ What happened to Ariel? Did you - kill her, too?”

Flynn shook her head. “ Ariel killed herself. She stabbed herself with the dagger they were going to use on you.”

Dana turned away. Misinterpreting the gesture as one of disappointment or disgust, Flynn felt her heart begin to crack. “ Would you rather that I hadn’t killed them?” she asked in a low voice.

Dana looked around at her again, frowning but with a softness and puzzlement in her dark eyes. “ No. No, God help me, but I’m glad you did what you did. I don’t know what it says about me - I don’t like to think about it either - but I was so scared, Flynn. On that slab - altar - whatever the fuck it was, I thought I was going to die, for sure. All I could think about was how I’d die before I could tell you that -” she broke off and shook her head. “ I didn’t want to die and for it to be left between us the way it was.”

Flynn swallowed, her heart hammering as she wondered what Dana been about to confess. She watched a shudder wrack its way through Dana’s body, then two fat tears squeeze out from beneath her dark eyelashes. Flynn reached up and wiped them away with her fingertips. “ It’s over -” she began, but Dana shook her head again, raising a hand to halt Flynn’s words.

“ Listen to me,” the reporter said firmly. Her dark eyes implored Flynn, who swallowed and nodded. “ I know that we all have a bit of bad in us, that we all have the capability of doing what we know isn’t right, and then finding a way to justify it to ourselves. Doesn’t matter what we tell ourselves otherwise - it’s still going to be there, buried beneath all the civility and goodness - that primal part of us capable of killing another human being. It can get out easily if we find ourselves, or someone that we care about, in danger. But that isn’t all we are. It isn’t all you are, Flynn. There’s so much that’s good in you. Yes, there’s also violence, and that makes me nervous. I won’t lie to you about that. But there’s a whole lot more to you. Those are the parts I want to get to know better.”

Her voice made thick by emotion, Flynn said, “ I guess my primal brain is just a little closer to the surface than most. I spent a long enough time relying on it to survive, so I shouldn’t be surprised that it comes back so easily even now. Ariel said something to me - she said that you could never be with me. That you would never be able to reconcile the two sides of me.”

“ Yeah, well, Ariel Rousseau was not exactly what you’d call a stable and reliable judge of matters.” Dana tilted a curios look at Flynn. “ Ariel told me that you killed your father…was he the first person you killed?”

Flynn swallowed, nodded.

“ You made a deal with Agent Krueger for her help last night. She told me about it when we arrived here - before that crazy little doctor guy gave me something to make me sleep. You put yourself in her debt for me. I don’t take that lightly. Erin Krueger isn’t someone whose debt I would like to be in. But you did that for me, Flynn. And now Krueger knows about you.”

“ Erin isn’t going to be a problem.”

“ She’s an FBI agent. How can you be so sure?” Dana frowned.

Flynn twitched a shrug. “ I don’t know. I just - we’re not so unalike, Erin Krueger and me. Trust me on that.”

Dana began to question this, but Flynn only shook her head. “ Later. I’ll tell you about it later,” she promised. “ For now just trust me that Erin is not going to suddenly decide to arrest me.”

“ I hope not, Flynn, because I’d hate to lose you now that I’ve finally got you.”

Flynn felt her face grow hot and tight. Heat prickled at the backsides of her eyelids, too, and her heart clamored in her chest as though it were a small creature trapped in there, trying to find a way out.  She swallowed hard. “ I’m not going anywhere.”

“ Good,” Dana murmured. She pushed the blankets back. “ Hold me, Flynn, please?”

With only a momentary hesitation, Flynn stood up and toed both of her shoes off before slipping between the blankets. The sudden nearness of Dana, the feel of her warm, naked skin, almost stopped Flynn from breathing. She wrapped both of her arms around Dana, pulled her close until she could feel the hard buds of the reporter’s nipples brushing the underside of her arm.

“ You okay? You feel kind of tense.” Warm breath blew softly against Flynn’s neck. 

She bit her lip, drew in a shuddering breath. “ You have no idea how much I want to kiss you right now.”

“ That would be kinda inappropriate timing, wouldn’t it?”

“ It would be sucky timing. Doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about it though.”

Dana laughed quietly. Then she did something quite unexpected. She raised her face to Flynn’s and kissed her. The warm, wet urgency of the reporter’s mouth on hers sent a surge of desire through Flynn so strong that she suspected it might’ve knocked her on her ass if she hadn’t been laying down already. Heart racing, Flynn slid her hands down Dana’s back, tracing the outline of her ribcage, her hip, the outside of her thigh. Even from there, she could feel Dana’s heat radiating from between her legs.

“ Don’t stop there,” Dana sighed, pressing closer and opening her legs to allow Flynn access. Her fingers slid into the short hair at the back of Flynn’s head.

It would have been so easy to just make love to her right then, and really, it was all that Flynn wanted to do. But she was aware that Dana was still groggy from the drugs, and emotional from her experience, and for those reasons it would have felt too much like taking unfair advantage. With a groan then, she disentangled herself from the reporter.

“ I can’t. Not right now.” Desire made her voice hoarse. She shook her head, smiled down at Dana’s confused expression. “ It wouldn’t be right. I want it to be right.”

“ Oh God, now you decide to be romantic!” Dana groaned, but she kissed Flynn again, a chaste little peck on the cheek this time. Then she snuggled into the crook of her arm. “ What I would really like to do right now is take a shower. For about, oh, eight hours,” she added wryly.

“ There are some toiletries and things in the bathroom. Make yourself at home,” Flynn told her.

“ Mm. You sure you can survive without me for a little while?”

Flynn felt one of Dana’s legs twine around her own and she tensed, jerking a wide-eyed look at the reporter, who gave her a teasing smile.

“ Oh , you’re that sort, huh? Likes her women naked and submissive.”

“ You’re delirious,” Flynn muttered.

“ I know you said that you want it to be right - ”

Flynn nodded, scared to speak because she was sure she’d say Screw right!

“ Well, sometimes ‘right’ is all well and good, but it just isn’t right,“ Dana added and then she kissed Flynn again. This time, when Flynn tried to pull away, the reporter held on hard. “ You’ve strung me along for five years, Willie Rae,” she murmured against Flynn’s lips, her breath tickling there. “ I don’t want to wait another five fucking minutes. If you don’t make love to me as soon as I come out of that shower, I’m going to kill you.” 

“ Y’all have threatened that before.” Flynn started to laugh, then gave a mock yelp as Dana swatted her on the shoulder. She also unbuttoned Flynn’s shirt, let her hands linger over the PI’s small but form breasts and the flat hardness of her abdomen.

“ Just be naked when I get back,” Dana ordered her.

Flynn shook her head, affecting a shocked expression. “ Now who’s being all dominant?” she joked.

“ Oh, you better believe it.”

Flynn’s heart hitched, and then thumped hard again. She lay, feeling slightly dazed but unusually happy, and watched Dana walk into the bathroom, enjoying the sight of the reporter’s naked body. She felt her lips tingle where Dana’s had touched them, a sensation she wished would never stop. You can try to fool yourself all you like about this, Willie Rae, she told herself, but the truth is that you’re in love with her.

“ Oh boy,” Flynn muttered to the ceiling.

Dana re-emerged from the bathroom - not eight hours but still a good thirty minutes - with a fluffy pink towel wrapped around her middle and her hair still damp. She was greeted by the very welcome sight of a naked Flynn sitting on the side of the bed, and she paused for a moment to let her gaze drift appreciatively over the PI’s lean, hard-muscled body. Flynn was really too handsome to be called any of those traditionally feminine words. She was possessed instead of a faintly masculine beauty that made Dana a little breathless. Five years, she thought. Five years I’ve been waiting for this damn woman. There had been other women during those years, none of the dates startling successes, and there’d been only one with whom it had gotten to the physical stage. That had ended abruptly, and unhappily.

Flynn let her look her fill before reaching for her and unhooking the towel. The material pooled on the floor and Dana stepped over it, moving between Flynn’s spread knees, circling her arms around the PI’s neck. Flynn’s eyes went to the wound above her left breast and Dana saw the PI swallow. Flynn’s fingertips moved toward the wound, hovered over it. “ This is my fault,” she said hoarsely. “ I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I ever talked to Ariel about you -”

“ Stop.” Dana pressed a hand to one side of Flynn’s face. The skin felt taut and cool, a nerve jumping in the side of the lean jaw. “ Look at me, Willie Rae.”

Flynn lifted her eyes to meet Dana’s. “ It isn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known what Ariel and Jean-Marie were planning.”

“ I should’ve been more careful,” Flynn argued. “ I’ve spent my life being careful and the one time I’m not…this is what happens.”

“ Don’t do that.” Dana allowed just the slightest edge of annoyance to enter her tone. She saw Flynn’s eyes flare in surprise and smiled grimly. “ You Don’t get to be a martyr about this, Willie Rae. I won’t let you be. Now, can we please get back to where we were?”

Flynn slowly raised an eyebrow, then she nodded. She lifted Dana up easily into her lap, and Dana wrapped her legs around the PI’s back, pressing close, feeling Flynn’s hard, slightly roughened nipples brush against the undersides of her own breasts. She kissed Flynn again, rather more thoroughly this time, starting with her mouth, and moving along her firm jaw line, then down to her throat where Dana felt the muscles bunch and a pulse beat fast just beneath the skin. Her hands moved lightly up and down Flynn’s back. After five years of waiting, Dana wanted to melt right into this woman.

She sucked in a shuddery breath as Flynn‘s fingers found her, the muscles in her abdomen and thighs contracting with the heady rush of desire.

“ My God, you’re so wet,” Flynn murmured.

Dana nodded, her heart racing. “ That’s what five years of keeping a woman waiting will do.”

Flynn’s thumb brushed over her engorged, sensitized clitoris, making her gasp and grab at the PI’s shoulders, digging her nails in there. Turning her thumb in a slow circle over the twitching clitoris, Flynn slid one finger inside of Dana, seeking that area specially roughened for pleasure, caressing it, stroking it, and as Dana’s muscles contracted and gripped, she pushed a second finger inside. Five years of imagining this moment came to a head in a heated rush after just a few seconds. Flynn gently withdrew her fingers and stood up, lifting Dana with her as she turned around to lay her down on her back on the bed.

Flynn straddled her on all fours, ducking her head to kiss her first on the neck, and then on the shoulder, gently biting her there, before moving to her full breasts. Dana reveled in the cool burn of Flynn’s tongue on her skin as the PI worked her way down, moving steadily southward, but at a sweetly agonizing slow pace. When at last she felt Flynn’s lips drift between her legs, and the tip of a tongue flick across her swollen sex, a need of the most intense kind she’d ever experienced sent a jolt from her feet to the top of her head. Heat flushed her thighs. She grabbed a fistful of the sheet beneath her in one hand and Flynn’s short hair in the other, pushing the PI’s head down to where she needed it to be.

Flynn pressed a series of soft, teasing kisses against Dana’s swollen, throbbing clitoris, arousing her to an unbearable level, making her shudder against the bed. “ Ah Jesus, Flynn,” she gasped.  “ Just fuck me, please!”

In response to Dana’s plea, Flynn pushed her tongue flat against Dana’s twitching clitoris, and then curled the tip up, licked her from bottom to tip, then back again. Dana felt hot stickiness leak onto her own thighs, and she groaned with the effort of trying not to come instantly. Then Flynn slid both hands under her butt, lifting her up from the bed and running the tip of her tongue briefly back and forth the sensitive outer lips of Dana’s sex, before circling it in a small, tight orbit around her clitoris in a way that set the tiny nerve ends there all quivering at once. Dana hooked her legs around Flynn’s neck, pressing herself hard against the PI’s mouth as the orgasm roared up on her. She had to bite her lip to prevent herself from screaming aloud as Flynn thrust a deft tongue deep inside of her and brought her to a wildly bucking, head-spinning climax. Last thing they needed was to bring Chan, or Dr Leon, running into the room - how embarrassing would that be?

Still shaking, breathing in short gasps, Dana lay back in the PI’s muscular arms, sighing with pleasure as Flynn’s thumb traced the outline of her nipples. She let an exploratory hand move between their closely entwined bodies, seeking the wetness and warmth between Flynn’s thighs.

Flynn’s breathing hitched. “ So much for the submissive part then,” she muttered.

Dana sucked one of the bud-like nipples into her mouth, and gently ran the edges of her teeth back and forth across it until Flynn moaned. Her thighs clamped around Dana’s hand and she pressed herself into the fingers that probed her swollen sex. She rocked against Dana’s hand, quickly finding a rhythm to match. “ Careful, or you’re gonna make me come right away,” she groaned, voice husky and low.

Dana raised her head from the nipple just long enough to give Flynn a smirk and a quick kiss. “ That’s okay. I don’t intend to do this just once, anyway. Five goddamned years, we have a lot of lost time to make up for.” She guided the Flynn’s hand between her own legs again, to let her feel just how ready she was to prove her intent to do this more than one time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“ If you feel up to it, I can take you home?”

Dana frowned through a pleasant post-coital haze. “ Didn’t you say Dr Leon wanted to see me again?” she murmured.

“ Then he can do a house call. I’m sure he won’t mind.”

“ Yeah, I’ve noticed he’s very obliging when it comes to you, Flynn. I don’t suppose your funny little doctor friend would have some clothes in my size?”

Flynn quirked an eyebrow. “ Really? And I was kind of getting used to y’all being naked.” As Dana poked her hard in the ribs, she snorted a laugh and squirmed away from further assault. “ Okay, okay. I’ll go see if I can scare up some clothes for you, woman.”

Leon wasn’t home. Chan explained that Dr Leon had been called to attend a client someplace, and did not expect to return until mid-evening. He had instructed Chan to tell Flynn that he would call round to her friend’s home at a convenient time to check upon her. He fetched a mismatching bundle of clothing roughly in Dana’s size, apologizing for the footwear - a pair of souvenir Mardi Gras flip-flops. Flynn snickered when she saw Dana frown at those.

“ Imagine if I got a picture of this,” she said, toying with her phone camera.  “ The blackmail potential would be immense.”

“ Don’t even think about it,” Dana threatened. She threw back the covers and swung her legs over the bed, completely unabashed in her nakedness, and Flynn turned away to hide the flush of desire.

Wandering to the window, she lit a cigarette and smoked it whilst gazing down at the rain-drenched street and trying to make some sense out of her own feelings. She heard Dana say  “ About us…our situation - ” and desire soured into dread. But the reporter said, “ I meant it - about not losing you now that I have you. If I were being honest, I’d say that I’ve been in love with you since we met that night during Katrina.”

It took Flynn’s brain a moment to catch up to what her ears were hearing. She turned to see Dana giving her a frank stare. “ I don’t expect you to say that you love me, too, Flynn. I have an idea that might be expecting a hell of a lot just yet. But let’s get one thing cleared up - when we made love, your past and anything you’d done during it, none of that even occurred to me. Not once. Ariel Rousseau was wrong about that. And I’m fully aware that you slept with her -  you already should have a idea that I’m over that?”

Flynn blinked. Then she strode to the bed, took Dana’s face between her hands, and gave her a deep, slow kiss. “ I do love you,” she murmured, “ and I’m not afraid to say it.”

Dana smiled up at her. “ Okay then,” she said. She arched an eyebrow. “ But you have to tell Pierce about us - ”  she shook her head at Flynn’s baffled frown. “ Oh come on, don’t tell me that you don’t know how she feels about you? You have a - certain effect on women, Flynn.”

“ Not all of them,” Flynn said, embarrassed, thinking about how Erin Krueger had once turned her down. But Dana didn’t know about that and she gave Flynn a skeptical face now. “ Besides,” Flynn added with a shrug, “ Pierce already has a partner. She knows we’re just a - casual thing.”

“ Hmm. Well, you make sure that you tell her anyway, Willie Rae. Because I don’t like to share my toys,” Dana stated.

Dana’s apartment in the Warehouse District was neat and clean, appointed in a simple, modern style - altogether just what Flynn would have expected of her. Whilst Dana changed out of her borrowed clothing into something more her as she put it, Flynn navigated the unfamiliar kitchen to make eggs and coffee.

Boudreau called whilst she was whisking eggs in a bowl. “ How’s your patient?” she inquired dryly.

“ Recovering nicely, thank you,” Flynn told her.

“ Uh huh. Fire Department have been going over the Dufresne property. Place had been converted into some kind of Voodoo temple, by the looks of it. They think the fire started when some of those stinky-ass oils the Voodooists are so fond of got spilled and caught alight.”

Flynn poured eggs into a sizzling pan of butter. “ Accident then?”

“ Looks like it. But Antoine Camber and Helen Dufresne both were shot before the fire started, so that was no accident. Looks like Ariel shot ‘em, too. They found her with a half-melted Beretta beside her. She shot her cohorts, then stabbed herself to death. Can’t fucking imagine why she’d do that…” Boudreau’s voice trailed into troubled silence.

“ Guilt? Or maybe a power struggle that got out of hand?” Flynn suggested. She was deceiving her friend, and whilst that didn’t necessarily make her feel good, she also knew that sometimes what was right, and what was necessary, were not to be found even in the same vicinity of one another.

Boudreau took the bait. “ Anything is fucking possible right now. And honestly? I don’t know if I care. These people were doubtlessly responsible for killing two innocent women. Maybe the fact they all turned on each other and wound up dead is better than all three pleading out at trial. Jesus Christ, Flynn, is that you cooking that I hear? I thought y’all didn’t cook?”

“ I’ve been learning some new skills of late,” Flynn said with a smile.

Dana reappeared in the kitchen then, having changed from the borrowed attire into dark slacks with a gold-buckled belt, and a plain white man’s shirt with epaulettes at the shoulders, the neck opened to reveal an appreciable amount of cleavage. A tiny four-leaf clover on a delicate gold filigree chain hung just below the hollow of her throat. Flynn paused with the spatula in her hand hovering above the egg pan, and just stared at the reporter as the now familiar warm sensation of desire tickled at her.

“ You should put your eyeballs back, you might be needing them later,” Dana advised her in an arch whisper. She sat down at the table which Flynn had already set with cutlery.

Flynn cupped her palm over the phone. “ If that’s the last thing I see all day, I’d be extremely happy.”  Dana gave her a smile that was like the sweetest arrow to Flynn’s heart. Other parts of her anatomy, too. She held the phone between her neck and shoulder to flip the eggs, then put the spatula down to pour coffee for Dana. She carried that to the table. “ So what happens now?” she asked into the phone.

Boudreau sighed. “ I daresay the DA’s Office will rule it murder-suicide and that’ll be the case closed. Waylon got into Ariel’s store - he found a journal there. Some pages were missing - ” suspicion entered Boudreau’s tone. “ I don’t suppose you know anything about how those pages might’ve gotten torn out?”

“ Nope.”

“ I thought not. Anyway, there’s enough in the journal as it stands to strongly suggest Antoine, and Ariel, both acting on Helen Dufresne’s orders, killed the Larue women. Say, Flynn, do you think there are more of them?”

Flynn had turned back to the stove to finish cooking the eggs, and now she scooped those onto two plates along with buttered toast. Five minutes with Dana Jordan, and already she was making breakfast. It was more than she’d done for any woman in years, including Boudreau. “ More of whom?” she asked, confused by the detective’s sudden switch in conversational tack.

“ Jean-Marie’s bat-shit crazy acolytes. Y’all think there might be more?”

Flynn wedged the phone into her shoulder again to carry the plates to the table. She sat down, reached for the hot sauce, and shook some onto her eggs. She saw Dana frown, her lip curl in distaste, and shrugged at the reporter. Apparently they were never going to agree on eggs and hot sauce. Thinking about Boudreau’s question, Flynn wondered how many people in New Orleans were Voodoo believers? Thousands, she guessed. And how many of those believed in the variety of Voodoo that Jean-Marie had peddled? “ I don’t know, Pierce,” she replied honestly. “ Sure, it’s possible there are others. But I suspect when word gets out that the head has been cut off this Hydra, the body will simply wither and die.”

“ You know, that was damn near poetic, Flynn,” Boudreau said with wry admiration. “ They found vehicles belonging to Jean-Marie and Ariel parked close by the temple. Hopefully there will be DNA to tie them to the Larue women. The fire ruined any chance of getting forensic from the temple.”

There might be DNA from Dana in at least one of those vehicles, Flynn realized, but there was little she could do about that. Dana’s DNA would not show up in the system, and without a sample for comparison the NOPD would never likely be able to connect her with any forensic evidence.

“ So, tell me -” Boudreau added, “ what’s really going on with you and the reporter?”

Flynn paused forking eggs into her mouth. Her eye caught Dana’s, and her heart fluttered as the reporter winked at her. She looked down at her plate, smiled. “ Don’t know if I care to answer that right now, Pierce.”

The detective gave a low whistle. “ Oh man, Flynn, you and Dana Jordan? So y’all finally got it together. What, you bonded over a migraine?”

“ Something like that.”

“ Well, shit,” Boudreau huffed. “ Good luck with that, I guess. Listen, I don’t understand everything has happened over the past twenty-four hours, Flynn, and I suspect I never will. But just tell me this -  it won’t come back to bite any of us in the ass, right?”

“ Doubtful,” Flynn assured her. 

“ Fine. I can live with it then. Take care of yourself, and your reporter, Flynn. I’ll talk to you later.”

Flynn closed the phone and switched it off, not wanting to talk to anyone else right now.

“ That was Detective Boudreau, I take it?” As Dana tilted a questioning eyebrow at her, Flynn nodded. “ She doesn’t know about any of what happened?”

Flynn shook her head as she cut up a piece of toast and smeared some eggs onto it with a dollop of the hot sauce. “ It’s better she doesn’t know. This way Boudreau has official deniability.”

Dana then reminded Flynn of her promise to reveal why she was willing to trust Agent Krueger. “ You said that you both aren’t so unalike. So what did you mean by that?”

“ Erin was CIA…but you figured that, right?” Dana nodded. “ Well, I was trained by the CIA, too.”

Dana stared. “ You’re kidding?”

“ No.” Flynn shook her head. “ After I left New Orleans, I knocked around various places, doing whatever work I could find. I was always a tough kid, and a pretty resourceful one, too. I studied at night school, and eventually I was able to go to college. Criminology and law enforcement studies.“ She smiled at Dana’s surprised expression. “ I know, right? Anyway, the Agency recruited me from out of college.”

Dana’s surprised expression morphed into one of disquiet. “ The CIA actually recruits from our colleges then?”

With a wry smile, Flynn nodded. “ Y’all would be shocked at some of the shit our government gets up to. Especially in the name of homeland defense.”

“ I can imagine - unfortunately. So they recruited you, and what? You became an assassin for our government? I thought the CIA only worked overseas? Why didn’t you tell me this before rather than let me believe you were a hired killer by choice?”

Flynn held up a palm. “ Whoa. Let me explain. I was a freelancer. The CIA trained me, and technically, I was at their beck and call, but I was never officially employed by any agency of the US government. The CIA employ such freelancers when they need complete deniability of their actions.”

“ Actions on US soil?” Dana guessed. Flynn nodded confirmation.

“ I took contracts on an independent basis, too. That’s the thing - it wasn’t as though I were coerced by the Agency. In fact, I often enjoyed the work.” Flynn grimaced at the need she suddenly felt to confess this. She wished she could’ve just kept it a secret, but she sensed that would’ve been a bad way to start off this relationship. “ For a while I enjoyed it, anyway. Then - I don’t know - I guess I just stopped wanting to be that person. So I told my Agency handlers that I wanted out.”

“ And they agreed?”

Flynn arched an amused eyebrow at Dana’s surprise. “ Even the CIA doesn’t keep its operatives hostage. If you want out, you get out,” she chuckled. “ You just never talk about what you did for them.”

Dana’s brow crinkled with concern. “ What would happen if they knew you were talking to me?”

“ They don’t know. They aren’t going to know. So it’s a moot point,” Flynn assured her.

But she continued to look troubled, reaching across the table to grab Flynn’s hand in hers. “ You took a risk, telling me this. Another risk. Seems like you spend a lot of your time risking something or other for me. I guess I should be flattered by that - and I am - but it scares me, too, knowing that you trust me so much.”

“ Yeah. Scares me worse,” Flynn confessed. Her feelings for Dana Jordan were nothing new to her, she’d been harboring a crush on the reporter for five goddamned years, after all, but the sheer depth that existed to those feelings scared her more than anything else in her life ever had. Feeling this way about someone made you vulnerable, and vulnerability had always equated to weakness in Flynn’s world. Neither did she know how to deal with the fact that she’d been willing to kill three people all for the love of one woman. Killing for money, or on the orders of your government, that was one thing - killing out of love seemed somehow more of a primal response to Flynn. Disentangling all of her own conflicting emotions would take time, and a whole lot of effort, she knew that. 

“ Anyway, I love the fact you’re willing to risk this much for me. ” Dana let go of Flynn’s hand, and picked up her fork. She waved that at Flynn. “ You still need to let Pierce down as gently as possible though. I don’t need a jealous, spurned cop out to get me.”

Flynn arched an eyebrow. “ Did you really just use the word ‘spurned’?”

“ Yes I did.”

“ Women, jeez! Always so dramatic.”

A gob of egg spattered against the front of her shirt. Flynn’s mouth dropped open as she jerked a look at Dana, who smirked back at her. “ You’ve only got one woman to worry about now,” the reporter said.

Flynn mock-scowled. “ Shit. You mean I have to worry about y’all, too? Keeping you satisfied in bed and making you breakfast isn’t enough?”

The second gob of egg hit her in the forehead.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Sy Lehane never got his story, or at least not the story he had been expecting. He got a story, because Dana felt she owed him that much. She wrote a piece which dovetailed with the evidence Flynn left for the police and Fire Department to find at the North Rampart Street temple, and which completely omitted her own part in the events. Although she confessed to Flynn that it bothered her somewhat to be a party to these lies, she had even less desire to see her name splashed across the front page, especially if it were attached to the word ‘victim’.

“ What does that make me?” she asked.

Flynn shrugged. “ It makes you strong. It makes you someone who knows that sometimes things in life work out not the way we want them to, but the way we need them to,” she said.

Flynn had also given Dr Goldman’s card to Dana, explaining that Goldman was someone she could talk to if she felt the need to talk to a professional about her experiences.

“ Agent Krueger gave you this guy’s name?” Dana asked dubiously.

“ I checked him out. He doesn’t keep written records on his patients and he doesn’t insist on knowing your real name.” Flynn smiled. “ What? Y’all didn’t think I’d just take Erin Krueger’s word for it, did you?”

The DNA samples found in Jean-Marie’s vehicle matched both Larue women. In Ariel’s vehicle an additional sample was found which didn’t match any of the known players in the case, and which wasn’t in the system. Flynn suspected it was Dana’s DNA, but she kept that to herself. The New Orleans Office of The District Attorney made a public announcement, jointly with the NOPD, that the ‘Voodoo Murders’ case was now closed. As all of the key players had perished in an accidental fire at a property belonging to the suspected ringleader, there would be no prosecutions.

A little over two weeks after the events of the Full Moon night, a double funeral service was held for Jeannette Larue and her daughter Anthea. True to her word, Boudreau had the bodies released to Reverend Petersen’s care and he arranged everything with the help of his congregation, even inviting Boudreau and Flynn to attend the service. He insisted that their presence would have meant a great deal to the dead women. And so, on a beautifully mild New Orleans late spring day, the two stood at a double gravesite with over a hundred other mourners, and there they noted the passing of Jeannette and Anthea Larue. Reverend Petersen led the service and his words seemed to Flynn to be heartfelt, not the rote words you often heard spoken at funerals.

At one point, as the coffins of Jeannette and Anthea were being lowered into the ground side by side, Flynn’s eye was caught by the sight of a gentleman in top hat and black mourning suit standing off to one side of the main body of mourners. His face was painted in stark white, his mouth and eyes emphasized in deep black, and around his neck he wore several strands of brightly colored beads. Into his top hat he had stuck bright red rooster feathers and shiny gold coins, like old-fashioned pirate doubloons. He looked instantly familiar from the explicit paintings on the walls of Jean-Marie’s temple. Baron Samedi, Flynn thought and her neck prickled with a chill. He must have sensed Flynn’s eyes on him because he raised his head so that his gaze met hers, and he gave her a grin and a broad wink.

Boudreau nudged her. “ What’re y’all staring at? You look like you seen a ghost.”

“ Excuse me,” Flynn muttered. She stepped back, skirted the edge of the mourners, keeping her eye on the Baron impersonator who had spotted her approach and veered away from her. He dodged between gravestones and crypts but Flynn caught up to him easily.

She grabbed the man by the back of his tattered jacket and spun him around, slammed him back against a nearby crypt. “ Who the fuck are you?” she demanded.

He grinned at her, his teeth white against the black-face makeup that he wore. Flynn knew the black color was meant to indicate death and the grave, not a racial thing. Baron Samedi had no race. Red-veined blue eyes glittered from the face-paint as he raised a hand before his face and puckered his lips as though to whistle.

Flynn smacked his hand aside. A small square of unfolded paper tumbled out of his upended palm, a cloud of pale red dust floating from it to the ground. Flynn glared. She reached around her back, under her jacket, and pulled the .32 from her waistband. Pushing the barrel against the man’s midriff, she stepped close to him, close enough to smell the wine and cigars on his breath. A faint mustiness hung around his clothing, too.

“ Try anything like that again. Just give me a reason,” Flynn told him.

The Baron tilted his head, still grinning at her. He gave his head a small shake, then made a quite tsk-ing sound with his tongue against his teeth. “ We know you, Willie Rae Flynn,” he responded. His accent was pure swamp Cajun.  “ You are a troubled, violent soul, you. We know what you are, and what you need.”

A hot hard lump of anger ballooned in Flynn’s chest. Ringed around it, however, was an unease that she couldn’t put her finger on. She pressed the gun into the man’s scrawny middle. “ Stay away from me. Stay away from my friends. Or I will blow you the fuck away. Just like I did your crazy-ass mambo.” She smirked as the Baron’s smile faltered for the first time. “ Yeah. I blew that bitch’s brains all over the walls of her fucking temple. Maybe you’re right, Baron, I am a violent soul. Y’all would do well to remember that.”

She stepped back, still keeping the gun leveled at him. “ Now, git,” she ordered. She gave the gun a brief flick for emphasis. “ Get out of here before I shoot you anyway.”

“ It isn’t over yet, Willie Rae Flynn,” he whispered to her. He gave the spilled red powder a rueful glance, then he turned and started walking quickly away. Flynn watched him for a moment until she lost sight of him between the whitewashed crypts. Then she put her gun away and walked back to the graveside.

“ Everything okay?” Boudreau asked.

Flynn nodded. “ It is now.”

It wasn’t illegal to come to a funeral dressed as your favorite Loa and Baron Samedi was the Keeper of Cemeteries, Flynn supposed, but that the man she had just chased off was a follower of the late Jean-Marie, she didn’t doubt either. He had come here to deliver his warning to her, to let her know that they were still out there, scattered throughout the city, and that they knew who she was. Neither was it the first time lately that she’d seen one of them hanging around.

Jean-Marie’s remains had been cremated and anonymously sealed in a crypt. She had no family who could be traced and the state didn’t want her gravesite to become any kind of Mecca to her followers. Antoine had no living relations either and was similarly placed in an anonymous grave at a cemetery outside of New Orleans. Flynn, however, had claimed the ashes of Ariel Rousseau. Even though Ariel had betrayed her, Flynn didn’t want her last resting place to be as cold and anonymous as those of Jean-Marie and Antoine, and so she paid for a small, unmarked crypt in Metarie to be Ariel’s final resting place.

Whilst she was there, having watched the remains sealed into the unmarked crypt, she thought she smelled patchouli oil and, looking around for the source of the scent, she spotted a tall, attractive woman with jet dark hair and a deep cinnamon tan, standing by a water fountain nearby, silently watching her. The mysterious woman had worn a low-cut red dress and carried a red parasol over one shoulder. Something about her appearance struck Flynn as incongruous and she had taken several steps in the woman’s direction, the urge to speak to her suddenly coming over her, but before she could get close enough to even call out, a man had appeared abruptly from around a corner, stepping straight into Flynn’s path, and in the confusion of the collision, Flynn lost sight of the woman with the parasol. But she was left with the unsettling impression that the woman had been connected in some way to both Ariel and Jean-Marie.  

Detective Sam Malone was also amongst the mourners at the Larue funeral. The Kenner detective nodded to Flynn and Boudreau, but he made no attempt to make conversation with them.

“ He probably thinks the NOPD fucked up,” Boudreau muttered as they walked away after the graveside service. She shook her head morosely. “ He’d be right, too. We did fuck up. We didn’t catch the people who killed those women.”

Flynn frowned. “ Sometimes it works out that way - cases don’t so much get solved as they just unravel. Y’all know that, Pierce. I’d reckon Malone knows that, too.”

Boudreau stopped walking. Flynn carried on for a half-step before she realized Boudreau wasn’t moving and she turned back to face the detective with a quizzical expression. Boudreau’s jaw worked as though she were chewing on her own frustration.

“ What?” Flynn asked.

“ Sometimes I hate it - ” Boudreau sighed. “ I hate when innocent people die. I hate when I don’t get the bastards who did it. I hate the fucking job sometimes, Flynn.”

“ Are you saying y’all want to quit being a cop?”

Boudreau sucked in a deep breath. She looked up at the sky, squinting against the glare of the sun, and shook her head. “ No. I’m just saying I hate when it ends up this way, is all.”

“ Y’all need to stop beating yourself up about it,” Flynn advised. “ The people who killed Jeannette and Anthea, they’re dead. Gone. They got what they deserved.”

“ Is that what you think? That they deserved to die?” Irritation edged Boudreau‘s voice. “ And what about justice?”

“ There are different kinds of justice,” Flynn pointed out.

With a hard shake of her head, Boudreau turned away and resumed walking. Flynn hesitated, trying to figure out what the detective wanted her to say, and then she gave it up, simply walked after her without a word. When they reached the Trans Am, parked across the street from the cemetery in the shade of the thick black trunk and spreading green foliage of a live oak, Boudreau stopped again and leaned on the vehicle with her arms folded along the roof. “ You know what really burns me most about this?” she demanded.

Flynn shook her head. She had a feeling that Boudreau was about to tell her.

“ Jeannette and Anthea really were good people. They were the honest-to-fucking-God genuine article. And they get brutally murdered by a couple nutbag ex-cons and some hedge fund manager up to his eyeballs in drugs and fucking debt. You know all those different doctors were prescribing to Camber -? ”

Flynn nodded, still feeling it was best if she didn’t speak yet.

Boudreau’s mouth curled in distaste. “ Not one of those doctors were aware of the other. They didn’t know they were all prescribing a cocktail of meds to Camber. How’s that for a fucked up system?”

“ Modern American healthcare, don’t’cha love it?” Flynn smiled without humor.

“ Hmm. And I still wonder whose was the DNA we took from Ariel Rousseau’s vehicle - ” Boudreau gave Flynn a piercing look. “ I guess we’re never going to know that, huh?”

“ I guess not,” Flynn agreed blandly. It wasn’t like Boudreau to be quite so introspective, not even about something as hard to swallow as the Larue deaths. There had to be something else on the detective’s mind, something far more personal. Flynn eyed her hard and steady. “ Y’all want me to tell you that life ain’t fair, that it is fucked up? I think y’all know that already. So, what really is going on with you?”

Boudreau pushed herself away from the car, opened up the passenger door. She shrugged out of the black blazer worn for the funeral, tossed it onto the rear seat, and unbuttoned the collar of her black dress shirt. “ Carol thinks we ought to get married,” she announced. The she ducked into the car and slammed the passenger door, leaving Flynn blinking at the empty air in shock.

“ Married?” Flynn repeated once she was in the car.

Boudreau blew air in a hard sigh that managed to sound embarrassed, pissed, and confused all at once. “ I don’t mean she literally wants us to get married. She’s talking about some kind of civil thing - signing papers, putting all our shit in joint names. Maybe holding some kinda ceremony. Whatever. I don’t know. She fucking sprung it on me - came home from her mama’s three days ago and just blurted it out.”

“ What did you say?” Flynn asked.

“ I didn’t know what to say. I told her I needed time to process.”

“ How’d she take that?”

Boudreau chewed on her lower lip. “ She was disappointed, I think.”

“ So how do you feel about it?”

For a long moment, Boudreau frowned into middle distance without saying anything. Her eyes were clouded with the kinds of thoughts and emotions that Flynn was uncomfortable just being around. Finally she said, “ I told y’all before that I’m not always even sure that I love Carol, right?” and Flynn nodded. “ Well, that’s still true. But she is steady, and she is respectable, and that’s gotta be good for me, hasn’t it? Maybe for that reason I could do worse and I ought to just marry her. But I don’t know if that’s a good reason to ‘marry’ someone.”

“ Lot of ‘maybes’ and a lot of questions in there, Pierce,” Flynn pointed out.

Boudreau nodded miserably. “ Here’s another one - maybe I’m afraid if I don’t do this for Carol, she’ll leave me and find someone else who will. And I’ll end up on the fucking shelf. I mean, you’ve got Dana Jordan now, and you’ve made it clear she ain’t prepared to share y’all with anyone…What would I have without Carol?”

Flynn almost wanted to laugh at Boudreau’s melodramatic notions of her own future as an old maid sat upon some dusty shelf, unloved and unwanted, but she had an inkling that laughter might piss Boudreau off right now. She was also aware of gripping the steering wheel too tight, that her heart rate had picked up when Boudreau mentioned the ending of their affair, and she let her fingers relax slowly, willed her heart to slow down. Dana had warned that Pierce felt more deeply for her than Flynn realized, that she mightn’t take their break-up so easily, and she’d been right. Flynn made an awkward shrugging motion. “ Maybe life’s too short to worry on this shit and it’s a good enough reason then?” she suggested.

Boudreau snorted. “ Y’all are the great Agony Aunt of the South all of a sudden?”

“ Not me, no,” Flynn said, scowling. “ Hell, I’d have been happy if y’all had never mentioned this.”

Although Boudreau had taken the day off to attend the double funeral, she had brought her cell phone, and it rang now, relieving both of the embarrassing need to continue the awkward conversation. Boudreau answered curtly, then she listened for several seconds before blowing out a hard sigh. “ Where’s the body?” she demanded.

Flynn threw a sharp glance across the seats as unease squirted into her gut. She saw Boudreau frown. “ Desire Street? You are fucking kidding me, right?” Apparently whoever was calling wasn’t kidding because Boudreau cursed a couple times, then sighed again and told the caller to stay put, they’d be there in ten minutes. “ Don’t let anyone remove the goddamned body until we get there,” she added before hanging up. She glared at Flynn. “ They’ve just found another body on Desire. In exactly the same fucking spot as Jeannette Larue. Y’all will never guess who it is.”

“ Probably not,” Flynn agreed neutrally.

“ John Wilson. Ring a bell - ?” Boudreau grimaced. “ Maybe you’d be more familiar with him as Johnny Cakes?”

Flynn closed her eyes. “ Aw, fuck no.”

“ I’m afraid so,” Boudreau sighed. “ We should get over there.”

Johnny Cakes had been killed someplace else and his body dumped on the corner of Desire and Law Streets, in almost the exact spot that Jeannette Larue had been found. The older crime scene had been released days ago, but now a new strand of crime scene tape fluttered between two telephone poles. Waylon Murray met Boudreau and Flynn as they ducked under the new tape.

“ Anyone else got déjà vu?” he asked dourly.

Boudreau gave him a grimace. Flynn just shrugged and stepped past him to look down at Johnny Cake’s skinny white body, naked and bloody, discarded amidst the weeds and the garbage. One cloudy hazel eye stared sightlessly skyward. The other one had been ruined by the ice picked rammed through it into Johnny’s brain. Unlike Jeannette Larue, the only desecration to Johnny’s body had been the removal of his tongue. Flynn felt sorry for the pathetic little hustler. She looked around at Waylon with raised brows. “ How long has he been here?”

“ Coroner thinks less than twelve hours.”

“ Is this connected to the Larue case?” Boudreau asked.

Waylon looked down at the body, and pooched out his lips. “ I wouldn’t have said so, ’cept for we found this -” he looked around over one shoulder, beckoned a crime scene tech to them. The tech handed Waylon a plastic evidence bag which he held up for Flynn and Boudreau to see. “ This had been forced into his throat after the tongue was cut out.”

Flynn took the bag from the Cajun’s outstretched hand and she and Boudreau looked more closely at the hand-drawn veve on the piece of yellow parchment paper that the bag contained. “ Maman Brigitte,” Flynn said. Boudreau glanced quizzically at her and she pointed to the dagger drawn in the center of the veve. “ The dagger stands both for the incisive vision to see what really is what, and swift and brutal justice to wrong-doers.”

“ She’s like a kind of judge then,” Boudreau murmured and Flynn nodded agreement. The detective frowned. “ But who would be delivering justice to Johnny Cakes in this manner?”

“ It’s a message,” Flynn sighed. Boudreau’s gaze turned sharp. “ From Jean-Marie’s followers. They think poor little idiot Johnny here betrayed them to us - I might have had a hand in that by going to Ariel to warn her - and so they found him and made a lesson out of him to anyone else might be thinking of blabbing. It’s also a message to us that they are still around, leaving him here, same place they left Jeannette Larue. Damn it!” Flynn gave her head an angry shake. “ I told the little idiot to get out of town for a while.”

“ Looks like he didn’t heed your advice.” Boudreau sucked in a breath as she looked off toward the rows of shotgun houses and FEMA trailers on either side of the street, the boarded-up bars and vandalized corner stores, and the debris still scattered around even five years after Katrina. She brought her gaze back around to the body of John Wilson a.k.a. Johnny Cakes, and blew the breath out hard. “ I really hoped we were done with those crazy fuckers.”

“ We probably are. For now,” Flynn told her but this news didn’t seem to cheer the detective up any. She took the evidence bag from Flynn, handed it back to Waylon with a disconsolate shake of her head. Her freshly redone dreadlocks clicked together almost musically. “ Get this into Evidence Lockup. And let’s try to keep the media from going at this with knives and barbecue sauce, huh? Flynn, that means no pillow talk with your reporter squeeze.”

Flynn snorted, drew Boudreau a dour look, but the detective only shrugged and added, “ I mean it. Y’all don’t say shit to Dana about this.”

“ Fine,” Flynn agreed tightly.

Waylon turned to leave, and then hesitated, looking uncertainly between Flynn and Boudreau. “ Pierce, there’s something else y’all should know,” he began. Boudreau’s jaws clamped together with an audible snap and she stared at her partner as though willing him to just vanish and take whatever else bad news he had with him. No such luck. Waylon pointed a finger at the evidence bag. “ The veve - it was actually inside this very bag. We didn’t put it there, Pierce. We found it like this.”

She blinked. “ In an evidence baggie?”

Waylon nodded, swallowing hard enough to make his Adams apple jerk.

“ Get it to the lab,” Boudreau told him in a low voice and Waylon nodded. “ Make sure it goes first in the queue and any results are sent straight to me or you. If anyone from NOPD touched this fucking bag - even by accident - I want for us to be the first to know about it. Make sure the lab understands that, Waylon, ya hear?”

“ I hear,” he said grimly and he moved off, giving Flynn a curt nod as he passed which she returned in kind. Waylon suspected her of having broken into Ariel Rousseau’s store and removing the pages from the journal, which had only added to his suspicion, if not his general dislike, of her. Flynn was hardly bothered at all by the thought.

She walked with Boudreau back to the Trans Am, the detective apparently deep in thought, frowning and gnawing on her lower lip. As they drove away, Flynn assumed Boudreau was thinking about the fresh murder and the implications of an NOPD evidence baggie being left at the scene. Then, out of the blue, the detective asked, “ If Dana wanted for y’all to get married, would you agree to it?”

Flynn’s lifted her eyebrows in uneasy surprise. “ Shit, Pierce, me and Dana aren’t anywhere near that stage yet.”

“ But y’all love her, right?” Boudreau persisted.

Uncomfortable with the turn of the conversation, Flynn looked away from Boudreau’s sharp glance and gave a stiff shrug. “ Yeah, I guess I do,” she mumbled.

The detective grunted softly. She cupped her chin in her palm, her elbow resting on the rubber seal along the passenger window. “ Hell, maybe you’re right,” she conceded.  “ Maybe life is too short to over-think shit, and it is a ‘good enough’ reason to go the hell ahead.”

“ It’s up to you,” Flynn told her.

Boudreau’s mouth quirked in a half-smile. “ Yeah, it is, isn’t it?”

EPILOGUE

3 Months Later

On a warm, sunny Saturday morning in July, Flynn left Dana in bed at her Bourbon Street apartment, and she drove out to Lakeshore Drive, past the University of New Orleans, to a quiet picnic spot on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. She parked in a turnaround there, and walked down the grassy slope toward the lake shore where she took a seat on a wooden bench and lit a cigarette to await the arrival of Special Agent Erin Krueger. The sun warmed her back and shoulders, and glinted on the glassy blue surface of the lake. For many years it had been illegal to swim or to conduct water sports of any kind in the lake, and truthfully, who would want to? Lake Pontchartrain was a cesspool of pollution. Since Katrina there had been persistent rumors of alligators living there, washed into the lake by the storm surge. But the lakeshore was still picturesque in parts.

Since the discovery of Johnny Cakes’ body on Desire Street, there had been no more Voodoo-related killings. Johnny’s killers remained at large. The evidence baggie in which the Maman Brigitte veve had been sealed contained no usable forensic or fingerprints, although it was found to have come from a batch stolen from the NOPD Evidence Lockup four months ago.

Jean-Marie’s followers appeared to have gone underground, perhaps to await the rise of a new mambo who would lead them to power and glory. Flynn sincerely hoped never to see that day. She hadn’t experienced any further ‘sightings’ of the Baron Samedi, nor had any more dreams about strange protean gods, and she wanted to keep it that way. She had enough to think about, just trying to learn to be in an intimate relationship with someone.

A silver Jeep Cherokee pulled up beside the Trans Am and Flynn idly watched Erin Krueger step out. The agent, casual in jeans, white t-shirt, and a lightweight blue jacket, with dark wraparound shades on her face, walked down to the bench and took a seat alongside Flynn.

“ Seems like I always forget how hot Southern summers are,” she sighed.

Flynn nodded. “ Gonna be a barn-burner, too. My condolences, by the way, on your recent loss.”

Erin twitched her head in acknowledgement.

Flynn kept her gaze on the lake. “ I believe y’all have something for me?”

From the corner of her eye, she saw Erin Krueger nod and push a hand into her jacket, extracting a manila envelope from inside. She held the envelope out to Flynn, who took it wordlessly and tucked it into her own jacket.

“ Aren’t you going to look inside?” The agent sounded surprised.

Flynn shook her head. “ I think I can trust y’all.”

Erin gave a little eyebrow shrug. Then she changed the subject. “ How is Dana doing these days?”

“ She’s good, considering - well, considering everything. She’s decided to go see that doctor y’all recommended.”

“ Ah. Wise decision. He’s very good.”

“ Y’all know that from personal experience then?”

Erin laughed and shook a warning finger at Flynn, who shrugged. “ Hey, y’all can’t blame me for trying, right?” she laughed.

“ How about you? ” Erin added, giving Flynn an arch look. “ How are you coping with knowing what you did for her?”

“ It scares me,” Flynn admitted. “ I’ve never let anybody get that close to me before. Hell, I’ve never let anyone get close to me, period. I love Dana, I really do. I’m having a hard time dealing with what that means to me though.”

It was easy to talk to Erin Krueger. Realizing that both surprised Flynn and yet didn’t surprise her at all. She and Erin really were not so different. They shared a background in the Agency, of course, but Flynn had come to suspect it was more than that - that it was, in fact, something deeply inherent in their natures which bonded them. “ I killed those people because I love Dana, and because I didn’t want her dragged through a court case where she’d have to relive it in front of lawyers. Not to mention it’d be in every fucking newspaper in America.”

“ And you wanted vengeance,” Erin added with a simplicity and a lack of judgment that made Flynn look at her sharply. The agent gave her an enigmatic smile, reminding Flynn of how she had smiled as she was leaving Leon Shand’s house when Flynn had pointed out that they were both no longer with the Agency. “ I can relate - it’s the kind of people that you and I are, Flynn. But you already know that. It also made you feel vulnerable to know that you were - and would be again - willing to go to those lengths, didn’t it?”

“ Yes,” Flynn agreed softly.

“ Leopards can’t change their spots.”

Silence stretched between them. It was not an uncomfortable silence, merely that of two people who understood each other completely, and who didn’t need words to fill the spaces up with. Eventually, Flynn cut a sideways glance at Erin. “ In Cuba, you told me that you were there to kill someone. Was that true?”

“ It was, yes. I felt immediately that you were telling the truth when you said you were an assassin, and I felt comfortable sharing that information about myself with you in return. Tell me, Flynn, who was your handler within the Agency?”

“ Gavin Childress.”

Erin looked around at her in apparently genuine surprise. “ Mine too. I wonder if he knew that we met in Havana?”

“ The man always was a turdweasel with his nose in everyone’s business,” Flynn sighed. A smile ghosted across her lips. “ So yeah, I expect he did know.”

“ I hear Childress is in line to become the next Assistant Director. A pointy-headed little bureaucratic turdweasel like that, he’ll be well suited to the job.”

Flynn snorted. “ Did you know this before your stepfather met with his unfortunate accident?”

“ I may have. I don’t clearly recall.”

Flynn took a final drag on her cigarette, dropped the butt to the ground, and crushed it beneath her boot heel. “ How about you tell me something - why’d y’all leave the Agency?”

“ I got shot,” Erin said simply. “ The guy standing next to me was the intended target, but I got hit in the leg by a stray bullet and nearly bled out before I made it to a clinic where they patched me up and contacted my handler. I sort of lost the taste for it after that. Childress got me the position within the Bureau. Did you know that FBI agents are more likely to die by suicide, usually by shooting themselves, than to die in the field?”

“ I didn’t know that.” Flynn shook her head.

“ What about you - why’d you quit?”

Flynn shrugged and looked away again. A family - mother, father, two kids, and a retriever dog - went by, laughing and tossing sticks for the dog to fetch, like characters straight out of a 1950’s TV sitcom. Flynn watched them for a moment, felt a vague pang of something that might’ve been envy, or just indigestion. “ It’s a long story. I might tell y’all someday.” She stood up from the bench, shoved her hands in the pockets of her jacket as she looked down at the agent. “ I think y’all have a hidden agenda, Erin, I really do. But I guess we’ll deal with that later. I’ll be seeing y’all around.”

“ I’ll be here, Flynn. And thank you.”

Flynn gave her a bland look. “ Of course I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

As she started to walk away, the sound of soft laughter made her halt and turn around. She frowned a question at Erin.

“ I was just wondering - ” Erin began and Flynn raised an eyebrow. “ That night in Cuba if I had accepted your offer…how differently things might’ve turned out between us?”

Flynn smiled into middle distance. Then she winked at Erin. “ Well now, that’s something to think about, isn’t it? Just don’t tell Dana that you’re thinking about it - she doesn’t like to share her toys apparently.”

Erin Krueger waited, remaining seated on the bench until Willie Rae Flynn had got in her car and driven off, and then she took the cell phone from her pocket and hit a familiar number on the speed dial. The line connected to another phone in a distant country and was picked up on the third ring.

“ Good morning,” a man’s voice said, “ or is it good afternoon there?”

“ Afternoon, sir,” Erin said, both by way of correction and greeting. “ I trust that you are well?”

“ As well as can be expected, my dear,” the voice replied. There was a moment’s hesitation before he added, “ I imagine that you are calling because you have news for me?”

“ Yes, sir. It seems that the AD met with an unfortunate accident. He’s dead and the Agency are seeking his replacement as we speak.”

“ My condolences to you, Erin. And I do hope the Agency find a truly worthy replacement for dear Richard.”

“ Thank you, Mr Childress,” Erin said.

“ And our mutual friend?” Gavin Childress inquired.

Erin kept her gaze locked on the calm blue surface of the lake. “ A series of quite unexpected - but also fortunate - events have expedited that cause, sir.”

She heard a throaty, wet chuckle on the line. “ Oh my. How very - beneficial for us. You must tell me all about it sometime, my dear.”

“ Yes, sir.” Erin smiled as she recalled something Flynn herself had said. “ One takes the breaks where one finds them, sir.”

“ Indeed.” Childress chuckled again. “ So, she is on board?”

“ I should say that Flynn will definitely be amenable to a proposition when the appropriate time comes.”

“ Very good, my dear. Very good indeed. I shall look forward to our next conversation. Goodbye for now.”

“ Goodbye, sir.”

Erin pocketed the phone again and leaned back on the bench. She crossed her legs and balanced her wrists on her uppermost knee, forming a steeple with her fingers. Still gazing out over the placid surface waters of Lake Pontchartrain, she thought about how what appeared calm and inviting on the surface, could often conceal danger below. The bed of the lake was covered in silt poisoned by the myriad of heavy industry in and around south Louisiana, stirred up by Hurricane Katrina. It reminded Erin of herself and Flynn - two leopards with similar spots hidden beneath the everyday camouflage that each had chosen to wear.

“ They’re coming for you, Willie Rae Flynn,” she said softly, “ and you’d better pray that you’re ready for them when they do.”

AFTERWORD

This is a work of fiction and I have accordingly taken certain artistic license with the truth, which includes changing small details of the geography of New Orleans to suit the story. My apologies then to the lovely denizens of New Orleans for taking these liberties with their wonderful city.

Also, whilst I don’t claim to be any manner of Voodoo expert, I have read extensively on the subject. I employed parts of my knowledge within the narrative of ‘Voodoo Woman’. I did also, however, change and exaggerate the functions of the Loa mentioned. Although there may well be “older gods” associated with the Voodoo religion - as there are just such older gods associated with most religions - I don’t know this for sure. Certainly the practice of Voodoo did once involve human sacrifice and cannibalism, but today those aspects are mostly defunct. One can never say “completely defunct” because one never knows what people may be getting up to in secret. Voodoo, like any religion, likely has its own extremists. For the most part, however, it is a non-violent religion which respects life and nature, and so my apologies also to any Voodooists who may have been offended by my work of fiction.

Book 2 in this series, preliminarily titled ‘The Girl Who Sang The Blues’, will be available late 2012 / early 2013. Or whenever I get it finished. I don’t tend to work very quickly. In the meantime, keep watching my website for extracts. And other stuff.  

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

EPILOGUE