Voodoo Woman Read online

  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. Ari
el 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?”