Voodoo Woman

by Devon Marshall

  “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 tha
t 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 eye
balls 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.