Voodoo Woman Read online

  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 i
nvoluntarily. 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.