Burnt Black

by Ed Kovacs

  “Hey, Brutus. That kick combo? Didn’t look like it came from a guy who just fell off a two-story building.”

  “Yeah, but I landed on a tub of lard.”

  Honey wore black Revgear training shorts and a sports bra, which answered in the negative the question of whether she had much in the way of body fat. “Grab a pad, I want to get in some upper body,” she said.

  I found an MMA Elite Muay Thai training pad, slipped it over my right forearm—the arm that wasn’t bruised—and we moved into an open area. “Sorry I couldn’t come to the hospital,” she said, “but I heard you were okay.”

  “No worries. I figured you had a SWAT debriefing, after action reports.” I held up the pad and we faced off.

  “Our guys only killed two of the Skulls, so we matched your score.” Honey assumed a guarding stance, her legs a natural walking step apart.

  “One-one-two,” I said, calling out a punch combination. I held the pad firmly, in front of my face, and Honey thumped it with two jabs and a right cross.

  “Chief got himself into trouble with the press. He said a homicide detective had been injured. A sharp reporter from the AP wanted to know why Homicide was involved in the raid. Pointer tried to BS her but it didn’t work. Now that reporter’s like a dog with a bone. News of the raid went out on the national wire. So we’re back on the Sanchez/Ruiz case. Just you and me. But no more grandstanding, like out at Tulane.”

  “One-two-one-two,” I said, nodding, as Honey’s left-jab/right-cross punches tagged the pad with a healthier bite. Kruger’s words echoed in my brain: “Enjoy your time off while you can.”

  “Drake’s home-phone number?” said Honey. “We found it in two of the cell phones the Skulls carried.”

  I nodded, not surprised the Mexicans had Drake’s number. “Interesting. One-two-three-two.” Jab, right cross, left hook, right cross. Honey quickly warmed to the task. I’d seen her kick more ass than most men I knew had.

  “And we found a certain business card.”

  “One-six-three-two. Business card?” She stung the pad with a blistering jab/right uppercut/left hook/right cross.

  “For Crafty Voodoo. With a cell number on it written in a woman’s hand.”

  “One-one-two. Whose number?”

  “Kate Townsend’s,” said Honey, drilling the pad. “The chief wants us to make lemonade out of this lemon. Pronto.”

  “Then I know where we’re going right now.”

  * * *

  Tony Fournier lived in LaPlace, in sleepy St. John the Baptist Parish. Honey had asked me to drive her unit, but first we stopped at my loft to retrieve my Ruger; I now carried it and the .380 with extra mags.

  I turned onto Fournier’s quiet street of single-family, middle-class homes with large yards just before 10 P.M. I held fond memories of attending countless Andouille Festivals in LaPlace, where the thing to do was guzzle beer as you munched on the spicy sausages. They even crowned a Teen Andouille Queen, although why a girl would want to be named the “spicy sausage queen” is beyond me. My less-fond memories of LaPlace were of making banzai shopping runs to the Walmart in the aftermath of the killer Storm, since it was the closest business to New Orleans that was open and had toilets that worked, electricity, and goods for sale.

  “Tell me again why we’re showing up late without calling first?”

  “You mean aside from the fact I don’t trust anyone but you?” I joked. “The guy has been obsessed with Drake for how many years?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “So he’s got an agenda with us. I guarantee he wants to insert himself into the case, make himself invaluable. So I want an unedited look at Mr. Fournier before we consider taking him into our circle.” I’d gotten his home address from NOPD personnel and wasn’t surprised he lived out of town, since many New Orleans cops who retire tend to settle elsewhere.

  Honey nodded. “We going to share what we got?”

  “Let’s play that by ear. Kruger didn’t exactly sing his praises yesterday when I asked if he knew him. Said he was an okay homicide dick but kind of an odd-duck loner.”

  “There’s the address,” she said. “The big lot on the corner with all the fencing.”

  “And security lights. Maybe Tony’s expecting trouble, too.”

  “What do you mean ‘too’?”

  I didn’t answer, as I slowed the vehicle. Fournier’s front door suddenly opened and a woman bolted out. But not just any woman.

  “Honey…” I said, not quite believing what I saw.

  We both watched as a man who had to be Fournier hustled out of the house yelling after the woman as they argued. They stood engrossed in a back–and-forth and hadn’t spotted us yet, and we were far enough from them that I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  “This is beyond strange.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the same female I saw the night we went to Crafty Voodoo. She was standing in the window of the apartment on the second floor when you parked your unit on Chartres.” Without a doubt, the same haunting, pale beauty with long, black hair now stood on the front lawn arguing with the former occult specialist of the New Orleans Police Department.

  “You sure?”

  “I’ll never forget that face. At the time, I thought it was Kate Townsend.”

  “But you didn’t get a close look.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s her.”

  The young woman, whose high heels and short skirt suggested she was heading for a night on the town, stormed over to a new Lexus parked in the driveway, and Fournier doggedly followed.

  “Then what the hell is going on?”

  I watched as she opened the door to the Japanese sedan. “Good question. Let’s make her acquaintance.”

  I turned on the wig-wag headlight flashers and parked in front of the gate, blocking the driveway. We got out holding our gold shields in the air.

  “NOPD Homicide,” I announced. “Sorry to interrupt, but we drove a long way out here and don’t have much time.”

  I figured I’d put the ball in Fournier’s court. After all, it was he who had approached us. As Honey and I stood there watching through the automatic gate, the two of them very consciously altered their body language and hid the tension between them.

  “You must be Baybee and Saint James. Tony Fournier.”

  Fournier couldn’t be more than five feet five and one hundred and fifty pounds, and his pale face had more deep wrinkles than a balled-up wad of cellophane. I knew him to be in his late forties, but his thick, sandy hair hadn’t even hinted at turning gray. The incongruity of a middle-aged guy having young man’s hair and an elderly man’s face struck me as weird. He wore neatly pressed jeans, sneakers, and a cardigan sweater.

  “Guess we missed you at Broad Street,” I said.

  “Can you move the unit? My niece has a party to go to. That’s why we were arguing. I told her she had to be back before dawn and she didn’t like that.” Tony’s remark had sounded like a joke, but he didn’t smile.

  The pristinely beautiful woman, who I pegged for early twenties, possessed a haunting sadness. I instinctively felt she didn’t smile naturally but “remembered” to do it now and then. As if reading my mind, she showed her perfect white teeth and flashed me a smile that could melt diamonds.

  “My uncle worries too much.”

  I riveted her with my eyes. Her outfit left little to the imagination; the short, tight skirt showcased firm, nicely rounded buttocks; a sheer celadon-colored silk blouse revealed substantial breasts and a thin waist. Her shapely legs sealed it: She was an absolute stunner.

  “I’m Detective Saint James, Miss…?”

  She never took her eyes off of me, but I didn’t see a spark of recognition. Maybe she hadn’t noticed me on Chartres Street. “Anastasia Fournier.”

  “This is my partner, Detective Baybee.” As the ladies exchanged brief nods, I memorized her license plate number. “Please drive carefully. There are a lot of crazies out there.”

/>   “So my uncle tells me.”

  I forced myself to break eye contact with a woman who I could simply look at for days. Charisma? Sensuality? I wasn’t sure what the word was, but Anastasia Fournier had exotic good looks combined with a raw animal magnetism—a dangerously addictive combination.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Fournier’s home was a completely unspectacular middle-class abode furnished with the kind of cheap pressboard furniture that looks good from a distance. Considering how elaborate his security system was, you’d think he was sitting on Fort Knox, which told me his concern was personal safety and not the safekeeping of material goods.

  Anyway, bargain-basement furniture or not, it was comfortable enough, and his living room had no obvious occult artifact collection or display. Emphasis on obvious. I spotted small talismans here and there—basically miniaturized versions of what Honey and I had seen elsewhere in the last two days. I even noticed a tiny sigil wood-burned into a window frame.

  After spending five minutes with the guy, it became clear Fournier was the bookish, serious type. He hadn’t smiled, but then I’m not sure I would have seen it since his door knocker of a nose dwarfed his face. The guy seemed to be carrying some awful unseen weight on his shoulders, and I had little doubt but that the weight was Professor Robert Drake.

  “Your security lights and fencing remind me of an FOB. Expecting trouble?”

  “I wish I was as secure as a Forward Operating Base. And yes, I’m expecting trouble. Always. I’ve made enemies. They probe me from time to time.”

  “You mean like attempted burglary, or mugging—”

  “I wasn’t talking about a physical probe,” he barked.

  Okay. Seemed like Tony was a little out of sorts tonight. “Sorry if our timing was bad here. We didn’t know we might be interrupting something.”

  “Anastasia’s father Tom is … was my older brother. He married a gal up in Alexandria, and they both died in a boating accident about three years ago. Tom was an old hippie—no life insurance, retirement, investments, didn’t even own his own home. Their daughter had just turned eighteen but had no place to go. She’s been with me ever since.”

  Honey and I just nodded. We would have to learn for ourselves why Fournier’s niece had been in Kate Townsend’s apartment, because we sure as hell weren’t going to telegraph to Fournier that we knew that. The fact that I couldn’t make sense of it completely derailed the line of questioning I had worked out.

  “Mr. Fournier—”

  “Call me Tony,” he said without an ounce of warmth.

  “Your files on Drake were … exhaustive. Why put so much time into the guy?”

  “You probably heard that I had been the department’s de facto occult expert.”

  “Why was that?” asked Honey.

  “My father was a minister, my mother a folk healer from Lafayette. So at a very young age, I was already mixing ‘alternative’ beliefs with Christian, kind of like the way the voodoo folks mix things with Catholicism.”

  Fournier tended to speak slowly, as if parsing his words carefully.

  “My mother had more influence on me. As a teenager I read esoteric books—Rosicrucian writings, treatises by Manly P. Hall, works by British occultists, Egyptian mythology and magic, and so on. People in the department knew I had these interests, and so when presented with strange cases—I worked narcotics at the time—they began to consult with me. I moved into Homicide about five years before I retired.”

  “But your obsession with Drake goes back fifteen years,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t call it an obsession.”

  Honey and I didn’t respond and just stared at him.

  “Anyway, your question was why did I put in so much time and effort on Professor Drake? Fifteen years ago I worked patrol in the Second. My partner and I came across a homeless kid one morning. Right outside Drake’s curio shop in Riverbend. He was half naked, pretty scraggly. I say ‘kid,’ but he was nineteen. Honest to God, the kid was terrified. Not completely coherent. He talked about his friend Jimmy, and said parts of him were for sale inside the curio shop.”

  “‘Parts of him’?”

  “Exactly. Now maybe the kid was high on drugs. But he talked about Drake, said he’d been to his house. For sex parties. Said that he and his pal Jimmy had argued with Drake. He told me there was a lampshade in the shop made from Jimmy’s skin.”

  Fournier placed his hands over his water glass for a moment and closed his eyes as if performing a blessing, then took a sip.

  “The shop was closed, so not much me and my partner could do. I called my sergeant, and he told me to write up an MIC and forget about it. I wrote the MIC, and we gave the kid a ride to his apartment. But I couldn’t forget about it, so I passed on a detailed report to a homicide detective I knew. A week later, the kid’s body was found in the Seventh Ward with a wooden stake through his heart. Cold-case detectives still have it.”

  “And you think there have been dozens more like this kid.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Does Drake fit the profile of a serial killer?”

  “I suppose he does, if that would include ritual human sacrifice as part of his religion.”

  “You believe that?” asked Honey.

  “Yes. He’s not a pure voodoo priest, he’s an amalgam. He’s definitely into Palo Mayombe.”

  “Palo Mayombe?” asked Honey.

  “Some refer to it as the dark side of Santeria, but that’s being unfair. Slaves from the Congo imported the religion to places like Brazil and Cuba. It’s an animistic, a shamanistic religion where you communicate directly with the spirits. Human bones are one of the tools of Palo, so more than a few practitioners have gotten into trouble by digging up graves to get at some bones.”

  “Seems like a natural fit, since Drake is a bone specialist.”

  “Yes, but he also studied certain Aztec and Maya sects that performed human sacrifice by drugging an unwilling young person, putting him or her on an altar and then cutting out the heart in front of the gathered masses. The priests would place a human skull carved from stone, usually quartz, into the victim’s body cavity, then would use the skull as some kind of religious icon. Drake has a collection of human-size quartz skulls, and he has privately stated that some of them were used in such rituals. He’s a powerful sorcerer and he’s not squeamish about shedding blood. Both of you are in grave danger.”

  Honey didn’t hide her derision. “I think I’m in grave danger of being talked to death. No offense.”

  “None taken. Drake is going after both of you. With red magic. Trust me. Just as he’s been after me for many years.”

  “You look pretty healthy,” said Honey.

  “I take countermeasures.”

  “What is red magic?” I asked.

  “Let’s just say he’s coming after you to kill you, but he’s letting you know up front what’s coming.”

  “How would you know he’s doing that?” asked Honey.

  “I’ll answer that by asking you to tell me about the strange occurrences you’ve had in the last couple of days. Bad luck, accidents…?” said Fournier. “I still have friends in the department. I heard about the mad-dog attack.”

  Fournier saw that I had raised my eyebrows just a bit.

  “I’m sure there’s more, but keep it to yourself if you want,” he said.

  “Okay, look,” I said, “I’ve read your files. If something comes up—”

  “How do you figure Sanchez and Ruiz were killed?” he asked.

  “It’s an open question as to whether they were murdered,” said Honey.

  Fournier looked at the two of us and shook his head. “You’re keeping me out of the loop.”

  “You’re retired. We came here because you approached us. It’s a courtesy call. Not a recruitment gesture.”

  Fournier sat silently for several long moments, just looking at us. “I’ll be happy to check your houses, apartments, wherever you live. Look for items they p
laced there to attack you.”

  “Thanks for your time, Mr. Fournier,” said Honey, standing up from the sofa.

  “You two have a pretty good rep and track record,” said Fournier. “But it’s important to know what you don’t know. And right now, you’re both clueless. No offense.”

  “None taken,” I said, parroting his earlier remark. “If you weren’t able to nail Drake, and you think we’re clueless, why contact us?”

  “I try to remain hopeful. In spite of everything.”

  Honey and I crossed to the door. Fournier moved quickly to join us and took my hand. I could feel something in his palm as we shook hands.

  “For good luck,” he said.

  I looked down and saw a black stone pendant on a silver chain. Some kind of mystical symbol was etched into the stone.

  “What could it hurt?” he asked.

  Honey looked on disapprovingly, but I kept the charm.

  “Guess we’ll find out.”

  * * *

  Honey took surface streets up to the I-10, then kept it at seventy as we headed south across swampland and skirted Lake Pontchartrain en route to New Orleans. I ran Anastasia’s plates, and dispatch informed me the Lexus was registered to Tony Fournier at the LaPlace address.

  Honey looked at me askance when I hung the talisman pendant from Fournier on her rearview mirror.

  “That’s against regulations.”

  “Please humor me.”

  She shook her head. “Except for seeing the girl? This trip was a waste of time.”

  “Wish I could have put a GPS tracker on her Lexus.”

  “You’re working as a homicide detective. Not as a PI. We can’t do that.”

  “We just can’t get caught. I mean, it’s only you and me, but we need to be running surveillance on about five people.”

  “Ruling out coincidence, what could Anastasia have been doing at Kate Townsend’s?”

  I didn’t have an answer and exhaled audibly. “It’s been a long day and I didn’t sleep much last night.”

  “Me either. Bad dreams.”

  I didn’t ask. I knew I’d be up late again, reading FBI reports on ritualistic murder and other accounts of the occult. A couple of theories had started to form in the dark corners of my brain. Theories that put the lie to the innocent notion that Honey was right and we had overdoses on our hands, and not some sadistic killer.