“So where does that leave us?”
“Here’s my guess,” she said. “Whoever authored that piece is not a nice person. The article, by the way, never condemned the idea of a voodoo cult that captures girls. Just talked about it. Other than undercover cops and researchers, anyone who travels down the Odin Internet road is rotten to the core. Does that help?”
“I think so, thanks.”
“You still down in New Orleans?”
“Just about to board a plane with Heather, heading to Washington.”
“Say hello to Heather for me. She’s a special young woman. And you be safe.”
The last hurdle would be boarding. I still knew that anything could happen, and I wouldn’t relax until we were on board and in the air.
Thirty minutes before takeoff, boarding started. As we stood in the crowded line that snaked to the boarding desk, I suddenly felt played out. Empty. Out of nowhere, a sense of fatalism washed over me. Maybe it was the natural result of an endless series of attacks, most of them when I had least expected. The frailties of the flesh. But when it’s coupled at the same time with the onslaught of the world and the devil, it can be an utter drag.
Just then the advice from Rev. John Cannon came bounding into my head, like a big dog demanding attention and pressing its wet nose into my face.
“Rely on the Spirit, that’s what. Make room for faith in all this, Trevor. This isn’t like improving your golf game, you know.”
Time to quit complaining. Self-pity is a destroyer. A tool of the enemy.
To my delight, boarding was uneventful. Heather and I had seats together, and after stowing our carry-ons in the overhead, I plunked down into my seat with my laptop and gave her my iPad.
She immediately demanded a recap of my experience with the two men from the Department of Homeland Security. I told her everything.
Heather asked, “All it took was your showing them the e-mail about winning the Morehaven case?”
“Technically, yes.”
“Technically?”
I added, “I also told them God wanted me on this flight.”
She looked at me funny, studying me for a while, but didn’t respond.
I wrapped it up. “And so here we are.”
Heather wanted to know about the call from Ashley Linderman. I told her what Ashley said about the sinister Odin web network.
Then I let her into my head. “Something’s been bugging me.”
“Like?”
“Like the fact that voodoo is like a virus: it has a number of different strains.”
She gave a knowing nod.
I continued. “Of course, you’re the budding anthropologist, so you already knew that.”
More nodding from her, this time with a sarcastic wink.
I continued. “Minerva Sabatier was into voodoo big-time. Then some outside outfit shows up and wants to team up with her. She unwittingly sticks her big toe into it and then realizes what it’s really into: child abduction, human trafficking, and murder. The worst. She decides in a moment of personal conviction to pull out, maybe even expose it, as documented in the notes in her Bible. Soon thereafter, she’s poisoned by her personal chef, who uses a toxic potion that is a favorite of the most nefarious kinds of voodoo cults. Something that may also have been added to a coffee cup offered to Assistant Attorney General Paul Pullmen in my hotel room to disable him before he was so terribly mutilated. After all, there weren’t any signs of a struggle.”
Heather said, “And your point is . . . ?”
“I need to get a handle on a voodoo cult that fits our profile—specializing in violent, sadistic behavior. Not just spell casting or dancing around fires. But sexual abuse. Bloodletting. Human sacrifice.”
Her answer was simple. “I’ve already done some thinking about that. Let me check it out.”
When we were up in the air and the restriction on devices was lifted, Heather dove into my research project, using my iPad again.
Meanwhile, on my laptop, I checked out the three-word phrase that had intrigued me ever since Dick Valentine spoke it—the name of the Internet enterprise being investigated by Jason Forester before he died. The outfit connected with sex slavery of young girls. Kuritsa Foks Videoryad. It must have been the same hideous site that Henry Bosant was told to access. Russian-sounding, he said.
So I went with that and fed it into an online translator. It spit out the English version: Chicken Fox Videos.
In sex abuse and prostitution cases, the word chickens is a twisted term of art, referring to young sexual victims of older predators. I could guess the meaning of fox.
I closed my laptop, suddenly aware that Heather was staring at me.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I’ve got something for you.”
“Hit me.”
“The dark net stuff and specifically the Odin site that Ashley mentioned.”
“What did you find?”
Heather said, “It’s about Odin. Do you know who he was?”
“A mythological god.”
“A Norse god, to be exact. But that’s not the important part. What’s important is what Odin might have to do with that criminal Internet site.”
“Teach me.”
“He was one of the chief gods. There are three things about him that might be important. The first is that he was the god of outlaws. Think about that. The Odin network is all about masking criminal activity.”
“I follow you.”
“Second, he had a lust for power.”
That grabbed me.
“Lastly, and I think you’ll especially like this,” Heather said, “Odin was able to enter the world of the dead. There’s the supernatural angle. I know you’ve been looking for it.”
Heather was right. From where I was sitting, that was a home run.
Then she gave her last comment, a kind of throwaway.
“One final tidbit. Just a footnote. One author said if she had to align Odin the Norse god with one philosopher in particular, it would probably be Friedrich Nietzsche.”
There was that name again. I found myself staring off.
Heather squinted at me. “Did you hear what I said?”
“Yes, sorry. I was just thinking of something. Good research.”
“Then there’s that other thing you wanted.”
“Right, on the violent side of voodoo . . .”
She said, “Well, I found something. A very scary variation of voodoo. It’s called Palo Mayombe.”
“Great. Maybe we’re getting closer.”
“I’ll have to dig a little further. But that’s a start.” There was weariness in her voice. “Boy, I’m feeling brain-fried.” She sighed and said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Do you ever get tired of this?”
I could see where she was heading.
“I’m talking,” she said, “you know, about the battle. Against horrible people who do horrible things. Chasing monsters.”
“Tired?” I said. “Yes.”
As I spoke, I noticed the dull fatigue in her eyes. I gave a nod to the overhead screen above her seat. “Why don’t you give yourself a rest. Catch an in-flight movie. Get your mind off this stuff for a while.”
53
For the rest of the flight, I was lost in my own thoughts, trying to construct a rough game plan for our Washington expedition.
By the time our jet was approaching Reagan National Airport and the announcement came for electronic devices to be shut off, I glanced over at Heather and noticed that she had not been watching the movie. Instead she was glued to my iPad, which she had open in her lap.
Finally she turned to me with a Cheshire-cat grin and said, “I found something.”
I said, “Sorry I ruined your movie by laying research projects on you.”
Heather shot back, “And I’m sorry to ruin your appetite with the research I’m about to dump on you.”
At that point, she proceeded to ex
plain the tormented life of a Mexican drug lord named Adolfo Constanzo.
“He died violently in a 1989 shoot-out,” she said.
“Not unusual for a drug dealer.”
“This guy’s not your usual cocaine kingpin. As a boy, his mother had taken him to Haiti, where he became an apprentice to a local voodoo witch doctor who was a practitioner of Palo Mayombe.”
Now she had my attention.
Heather explained, “Palo Mayombe cult followers believe that the ceremonial killing of living victims is the key to empowerment. Animal sacrifices are considered useful, but human sacrifice is the real deal. The bones and body parts are used in a nganga, a cauldron ceremony to impart that power.”
“How did this drug dealer use it?”
“Constanzo figured that the practice of Palo would make him rich and would also protect him from the police. And for a while, it must have looked like it was working. In Mexico, he became a powerful crime figure, even though he was a young guy, about my age. At first he dug up corpses in graveyards for his cult practices. Then he moved on to murder and mutilation of live victims. He ran a drug cult called the Narcosatanists, and he killed more than twenty people whom he then used in his ceremonies. One poor victim was a University of Texas student. When that happened, it hit the news in the US.”
Recalling the macabre dismembering of Paul Pullmen and the machete lying next to his corpse, I asked, “Any mention of the use of a machete on his victims?”
“In fact,” she said, “that was the weapon of choice in Constanzo’s warped Palo Mayombe world. Then there’s this, a headline from the New York Post from 2000—‘Human Sacrifice Rare, but It Happens’—tying it to Palo Mayombe. More recent reports too. One from the National Geographic News in 2005. Plus a report from the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, warning about ritualistic abuse and killing of children connected with certain voodoo practices. It was picked up in June 2014 by publications like International Business Times and Business Insider. Trevor, this stuff is real. . . .”
As Heather closed the iPad, I was thinking through what she had just told me. The voodoo subcult she described was a close fit to the murder of Assistant AG Paul Pullmen. My own knee-jerk was to assume that this violent form of voodoo only flourished in third-world countries and that it didn’t seem to fit with urbane Washington, DC, the global seat of power and sophisticated politics. It was hard to fathom a Palo Mayombe mastermind lurking somewhere in the federal bureaucracy. But then I knew too well that evil didn’t have cultural or geographical borders.
The landing gear lowered, and the wheels of the jet hit the runway with a squeal.
By then, I had picked the starting point for my investigation. It was the only name that made sense to me at that moment. Someone who worked in DC. But it had been years, and I wondered if he would remember me.
By the time we left the terminal, I had already left a voice message for Gil Spencer, deputy assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice.
Gil and I were fresh out of law school when we were both hired as attorneys in the New York City public defender’s office.
Eighteen months later, I took a job in the private sector to handle criminal cases at Tobit, Dandridge & Swartz, eventually becoming a full partner. Not too long after, Gil landed a job as a staff attorney in the DOJ and moved to Washington and then up the legal ladder at Main Justice.
I was hoping my history with Gil Spencer would open the door, though perhaps only barely. It had been a lot of years with no contact between the two of us.
But Gil was a logical choice. He had close access to key players in this tragedy. When Jason Forester died, Gil had been the assistant to Paul Pullmen and would have inside intel that I didn’t have but needed. Whether he could share it with me was another matter.
Heather and I were standing on the airport’s public transportation level, waiting for a car rental, when a return message from Gil Spencer came through. His voice was high-pitched and thin, and he was talking fast. “Trevor, this is Gil. Please call me back, but only on my cell.”
Once he had delivered his cell number, he hung up. No good-byes, no “talk to you then,” no salutations. Nothing.
When I reached him, he was practically hyperventilating.
“Trevor, I can’t believe you’re calling me right now. In terms of the timing, I mean. This is absolutely spooky. You have no idea.”
“Why so?”
“Your name came up.”
“How?”
“Meetings. Postmortems about Paul Pullmen’s murder. Came up again today, in fact. It’s crazy.”
“In what way?”
“Can’t really talk now. We need to rendezvous.”
“Can we do it quickly? Time’s of the essence.”
“I haven’t taken a lunch break.” He gave a sardonic laugh. “Yeah. Like that’s something new. I’ll tell my secretary I’m taking a late lunch. Right now, in fact. We’ll meet. But it’s got to be off-site. Out in the sticks somewhere. Nowhere near Capitol Hill.”
There was a momentary silence. Then he said, “Okay. I’ve got the place. Rock Creek Cemetery. My aunt is buried there. There’s a statue on the grounds called Rabboni. Ask at the cemetery office; they’ll tell you where it is.”
I walked with Heather to the Metro station at the airport and handed her my cell phone. When I had time, I would have to pick up another for myself—one of those TracFones, something to use until Heather could replace hers.
I told Heather about my upcoming meeting with Gil Spencer at Rock Creek Cemetery. I asked her to take the rental car into the heart of the city, and we set a time and place to meet for dinner later.
I wanted her to be my proxy in the interim. “Book two rooms for two nights at the Mandarin Oriental. Then call Pastor Wilhem Ventrie in Port Sulphur. Ask him to contact Henry Bosant. The guy at the Dead Point abandoned cemetery.”
“You ever notice how you have this thing for graveyards?”
“Hey, I’m not the one picking the spooky sites.”
She laughed.
“So,” I continued, “have the pastor ask Henry Bosant to call you. When he does, he needs to give you an update on the nasty business going on along the river. Maybe Bosant can corroborate what Dick Valentine told us about the rushed timetable.”
“Why don’t I just call Bosant directly?”
“Better to have the pastor pave the way.”
“Send me your number as soon as you get yourself a phone. I’ll call you if I find anything. And, Trevor . . .”
I eyed her as she seemed to be sifting through things in her mind.
“Just . . .” She bit her lip. “Just be careful.”
54
I rode the Yellow Line Metro, getting as close as I could to Rock Creek Cemetery. I exited at the Petworth Metro station, finishing the rest of the trip on foot. When I arrived, I passed under a black wrought-iron archway that announced the three-hundred-year-old cemetery, and I went right to the office.
A map showed the location of the Rabboni statue, and there was a written blurb about it. I headed through the landscape of trees and rolling hills and grave markings until I found it—a life-size bronze image of a woman in a robe emerging from a stone alcove, her right hand lifting the hood from her head and her left arm outstretched to something beyond. There was pathos in her face. The meaning of it required an understanding of the story where she was an important part.
I spotted a bench in front of the statue and sat down. It wasn’t long before I heard a voice.
“She looks scared. The statue, I mean.”
I turned toward the voice and recognized Gil Spencer right off. But he had changed, his hair thinning, his face pale, and bags under his eyes. The toll taken on Justice Department lawyers by endless hours and working in a cauldron of professional pressure.
Gil pointed to the bronze likeness of the woman that over the last century had turned a streaked, greenish hue. “One descriptio
n I read said she looks ‘horrified.’ But I think that’s taking it too far.”
I said, “It’s supposed to be Mary Magdalene. A woman who had seven demons. Then she met Jesus and was healed. The Gospels tell the story.” I pointed to the spot next to me on the bench. “Have a seat.”
Gil looked around in all directions before sitting down. “Thanks for meeting here. I can’t afford to have eyes on me.”
“Look,” I started out, “before we talk, in full disclosure, you need to know I’ve had an unconventional career path since we last met.”
Gil cocked an eyebrow. “Always the prince of understatement. Yeah, I know what you’ve been doing. Litigator Today called you one of the top five criminal defense lawyers in New York City. Then everything went south for you. Including your license to practice law. Followed by your stint with the NYPD as their chief Ghostbuster.”
I didn’t react. No need to quibble over job titles.
Gil said, “Yeah, I heard it all. But to me, you were always the guy with the killer trial skills, especially during cross.”
“No more,” I said. “Now I’m out there on the fringe. But look at you . . . one rung away from being the top dog for the Criminal Division at DOJ. Good for you.”
Things got somber when Gil changed subjects. “So on the phone, I said your name had come up. My advice: be careful who you trust. If you go skipping into DOJ with your story, you’ll be digging your own grave. Better not do that. And by the way, reading the case files that Jason Forester and Paul Pullmen were working, I think you’re onto something.”
“Tell me more.”
“I’ve got to be careful what I share. One thing for sure—someone inside the system is sabotaging things. Documents missing. Hard drives erased. It’s getting dangerous. Jason Forester gone. And now Paul Pullmen murdered.”
“About my name coming up . . .”
“Yeah. You see, he was planning on talking with you right before he died.”
“Right. Paul Pullmen must have thought he was meeting with me in my hotel room in New Orleans. Instead, the killer showed up.”
The Empowered Page 24