Mostly Murder

by Linda Ladd

  “You did bring your cameras, right, Nancy?”

  “Yeah, but I better call in the whole team and get them out here quick. This scene is going to be a nightmare to process. I don’t like this voodoo stuff, either. It scares me, and I’m not afraid to say so. Zee, what does that design in the cornmeal mean?”

  Zee shrugged, and nobody else volunteered the information, so Claire knelt in front of the victim while Nancy got out her camera equipment and started filming their every move. She stared at the etchings in the cornmeal, probably drawn with a finger or some kind of stick. Could’ve even been a knife.

  “Okay, this looks like two snakes to me. Drawn upright in vertical positions with large loops at the end of the tails. Look here, at the top. They’ve got heads with fangs coming out. And this looks like stars, or asterisks, maybe, in between them. And what’s that? A plus sign on the far right. See it? Or maybe it’s a cross?”

  Claire looked up at Zee, who still looked repulsed by the whole thing.

  “So what’s going on here, Zee?”

  Zee shrugged again. “Don’t ask me, but Mama Lulu’s gonna know how to decipher all this ritual stuff. It probably represents a Loa. That’s a voodoo deity. I don’t really know much about voodoo shit, and I don’t think I wanna know.”

  “Well, I want to know.” Claire stood up. Great, now they had to deal with a voodoo killer, for God’s sake. What next? A zombie running out of the woods with a machete? She stared down at the body and realized that the poor woman in front of them might very well have been mutilated and murdered while Claire slept peacefully on the houseboat not even thirty yards downhill on the bayou’s bank. Could that even be possible? How could he have gotten the victim into the house without Claire hearing anything? Had he come in through the woods surrounding the house? Claire definitely would have heard any vehicle or boat approaching anywhere near the property, and she was a light sleeper. Surely the crime had been committed when she wasn’t there.

  Zee was obviously thinking the same thing. “You’ve been stayin’ down in that houseboat at night, right, Claire? You sure you didn’t see nothin’ or hear nothin’?”

  “Like I said, nothing out of the ordinary. I’ve spent quite a few nights here, and there’s no way I wouldn’t have heard somebody wandering around up here. It’s so quiet—nothing but crickets and frogs and an occasional boat.”

  “He could’ve done her and set all this up during the day when you were working. When was the last time you came inside the house?” Nancy said, focusing her camera and snapping still shots.

  “Black and I came out here once right after we moved to New Orleans. We came in the house then, but I haven’t been inside again since I’ve been staying out here.”

  “You can stay with me until he gets back, if you want,” Nancy offered. “What’s your connection with these people, anyway?”

  Claire really didn’t want to get into that part of her personal past, but this time she was going to have to. “I lived here for a while when I was young. It still belongs to the same family. We visited them at the restaurant on their boat, the Bayou Blue, and they said I could use the houseboat anytime I wanted. So I took them up on it. As far as I know, nobody else ever comes out here.”

  Nancy said, “Oh, I love the Bayou Blue. Especially the Cajun Grill up on the second deck.”

  Not wanting to go any further into her connection with the LeFevres family, Claire changed the subject. “How long do you think she’s been dead, Nancy?”

  “I’d say several days, maybe less. It’s hard to tell. I’ll have to do the autopsy to get you anything definitive. There’s no obvious cause of death. It could be strangulation. Or, she could have a fatal wound hidden under that creepy robe she’s got on.”

  “Zee, get more officers out here ASAP. I want this entire property grid searched, all the way out to the road.”

  “You got it.” Zee quickly dialed up another detective and told him to bring out his team and a retrieval unit.

  As soon as he hung up, Claire said, “Zee, I don’t know anything about voodoo rituals, but this looks to me like some kind of sacrifice.”

  “Could be. I’ve seen pictures kinda like this.”

  Claire jumped on that. “You’ve seen altars like this? With dead bodies?”

  “No, just the altars. No dead bodies.”

  “Give us a little bit of background on voodoo so we’ll know what we’re dealing with.”

  “Okay, but Mama Lulu can tell you more. It’s kinda a mixture of African religions and Christianity. See the crucifix there? And the pictures of the Holy Mother? And those bottles probably have spells and potions in them. I doubt it’s a real voodoo priest or priestess who did this. Might be somebody who wants us to think it is, though.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the way the face is painted up. That’s meant to create fear. Some voodoo priests paint themselves up to look like skeletons for their ceremonies. Some do it to look like zombies. That’s a big part of voodoo, or it used to be. I dunno. Like I said, I’m no expert on this kinda stuff. I stay away from it.”

  “So things like this aren’t prevalent around here anymore?”

  “Not dead bodies on altars. But people still practice voodoo, and they take it serious, too. It’s a religion to them, and nothin’ to joke about. There’s a bunch of voodoo shops over in the French Quarter, too. Not too far from where you and Nick live. Haven’t you been in any?”

  “No, I haven’t. Guess I’ll check them out now, though.”

  “Mama Lulu’s the one we need to talk to,” Zee said again.

  “And we will, but right now we need to figure out who this woman is.” She looked at Dionne again. “Has anybody called in a missing person?”

  “Not since I came on this morning. If she’s from out here on this bayou, we’ll hear about it soon enough.”

  “Nancy, do you have a portable fingerprinter?”

  “Yep, right here. Got it into the budget last year. Let me finish with my shots, and we’ll see if we can get us a good one. Her skin looks pretty rough in some places. We’ll see.”

  A short time later, they heard a car approaching. Zee said, “Here comes Saucy and the guys. They made good time.”

  That would be Ron Saucier. Everybody at the office called him Saucy. But in her opinion, nobody on God’s green earth was less saucy than he was. In fact, she bet ten words hadn’t come out of his mouth since she’d been in the parish. According to Zee, Sheriff Russ Friedewald had brought him into the office about eighteen months ago, without telling anybody much about him, but had tacitly let everybody know that the where, what, and why of his hiring was nobody’s business. Claire decided they must have been old friends. She did figure Saucier had been a sailor because he usually wore short sleeves, and she’d seen the anchor tattoo on the inside of his left arm.

  The only other thing she knew about him was that on his lunch hour, he took a sack lunch across the street from the office and sat alone in the city cemetery. Every day, the exact same thing. Bizarre, to be sure. Someday she was going to walk over there and see whose grave he sat and stared at for so long.

  A minute later, Saucier walked into the room. Funny thing was, she found the guy strangely attractive, strangely being the operative word. He was tall and looked to be in his mid-forties, maybe even in his fifties, with graying blond hair in a buzz cut, his eyes usually hidden by aviator sunglasses, and his face weathered by lots of sun exposure. He looked like retired military, a mystery man, to be sure. Today he had on a camouflage T-shirt and matching utility pants.

  “What d’we got?” he said, staring down at the corpse. He squatted down beside the altar, and she saw a long and ugly scar down the side of his neck. It looked almost as if his throat had been slashed from ear to ear. Can’t get more mysterious than that. He had some kind of interesting past all right, one nobody knew anything about, and they were all afraid to ask.

  “Voodoo?” he asked, looking sidelong up at Claire.
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  “That’s what Zee says. Or, could be a very good fake.”

  “True, they don’t usually have dead bodies on them. This looks like somebody wants us to experience a bit of drama. You live on that boat down there, right?”

  Claire wondered how he knew that. “I’ve been staying out here some.”

  “And this happened right under your nose?”

  Claire frowned. “Yeah, I guess it did. How’d you know I’ve been out here?”

  “I saw your car when I was frog giggin’ the other night. I’ve got a cabin downstream a ways.” He stopped, actually grinned up at her. Yes, he had a nice smile, but it was the first one she’d seen. “I heard you playing your violin the other night.”

  Well, that was embarrassing. Even more than that, she was shocked at his new Chatty Cathy routine. “You could hear me?”

  “Clear as a bell. I’m just about a mile downstream. The music just floated down over the bayou like an angel’s song.”

  Claire and Nancy exchanged startled glances. Good grief, that sentence had to total ten or twenty words. That was a record for Saucier. Not to mention that he had even waxed poetic. She had never heard him say so much. Maybe voodoo altars got him all revved up and made him spout iambic pentameter.

  “Well, hope I didn’t keep you awake. I was out on the upper deck looking at the stars and picked up an old fiddle I found on the boat.” Bored and missing Black like crazy, she added to herself.

  “You’ve got to be professionally trained, right?”

  “Oh, God, no. Learned when I was young, had to practice a lot, but I haven’t played for years until recently.”

  “Didn’t sound like you were out of practice.” Saucier looked up at her, his sunglasses now pushed atop of his head. His eyes were vivid blue with very dark lashes. She’d never seen them before. “I actually got out of bed and sat on the porch where I could hear you better. What was it? Violin Concerto in E Minor, right? Mendelssohn? I think that’s probably the most exquisite violin piece ever composed. And you played it so hauntingly and beautifully that I actually got choked up.”

  Exquisite? Haunting? Choked up? Good God, this guy was definitely more than met the eye. Maybe he’d never said much until now, but he knew his classical music.

  However, Saucier was evidently finished comparing notes on violin music. He said, “Okay, what’d you know so far?”

  Back to harsh reality. Dave Mancini and Eric Sanders showed up and tramped into the room. Both were patrol officers that she’d only met once, right after she’d joined up. Dave Mancini was young and green, apparently just out of the academy. He seemed like a serious guy, never smiled, rarely spoke, just listened and learned. Eric Sanders she’d met once and never wanted to meet again. He was a real loud and obnoxious motormouth type. He was tall, with rusty hair in a flat top and wire-rimmed glasses—smarter than smart, especially with computers, but subzero with the social skills.

  “Okay, Nancy, let’s finish up and try to get her fingerprints.”

  Nancy had already filmed the video, and she handed the camera to Mancini and told him to continue filming. After she took a couple more photographs of the altar from different angles, she knelt and lifted up the sleeves of the velvet gown and found the woman’s hands. They were bound together tightly with black duct tape, the fingers entwined in a prayerful position. Something had been placed in them, making it look almost as if she held a bouquet of flowers. They watched Nancy snap several pictures of the hands and then pull the fingers off the object.

  “Oh, my God, Claire, it’s a voodoo doll.” She stared down at it and then up at Claire, an awful expression overtaking her face. “And I think it’s supposed to be you.”

  Everybody looked at Claire, and then down at the doll in Nancy’s gloved hands. Something about the horrified looks on their faces bothered Claire. Go figure. But this was a superstitious group, all born and bred in the bayous, each and every one, and mostly from French Cajun families, to boot. Voodoo dolls upset them en masse. “You’re kidding. Let me see it.”

  Nancy handed the thing over. Frowning, Claire took it, held it flat in her open palm, and examined it closely. It was her all right. No doubt about it. Hard to miss, in fact, since the killer had affixed a close-up shot of her face over the doll’s head, one that appeared to have been cut from a newspaper article. It was held in place with two long straight pins, one stuck in each ear. More disturbing, each of her eyes had a big black X marked on it, just like the victim’s. And her mouth had black vertical lines that represented stitches. Blond strands of human hair were attached to the doll with what looked like glue, and the killer had colored in her eyes with a light blue marker. Jeez. How sick can you get? And not a little disconcerting, to be sure.

  The handmade doll wore dark clothes, and they looked a lot like the black pants and black department polo shirt that Claire wore to work every day. POLICE was printed on the back of the shirt in white letters, and there was a tiny silver badge made out of aluminum foil on the doll’s chest, held in place by another pin. There were also pins in each temple, in the heart, in the abdomen, and between the legs. Claire stared it and felt a shudder undulating up from the base of her spine. She forced it down but with not a little difficulty. Okay, she was now officially creeped out to the max, no doubt about it.

  Chapter Three

  Claire stared down at the voodoo doll in her hands for a moment, and then attempted a stab at humor. “Well, now, I think you might be right, Nancy. This guy knows me from somewhere. Don’t think he likes me much, either.”

  Nobody said a word, certainly didn’t laugh, in fact, they were acting as if they were already at her memorial service. Not confidence building, to say the least. Finally, Zee said, “So leavin’ the body out here where you happened to be sleeping was not a coincidence.”

  Nancy jumped up. “You need to get off this case, Claire. Right now. You’ve been through enough of this kind of crap. This guy is baiting you or warning you off, or both. The sheriff needs to take you off and let the rest of us handle it.”

  “I don’t warn off all that easily. And I don’t believe in voodoo.”

  Zee said, “Don’t take this lightly, Claire. Voodoo, either. Looks like this guy’s a real lunatic and he’s obviously after you.”

  Claire had to admit that it certainly appeared that way, but that didn’t necessarily make it so. One thing she did know for sure, Black was absolutely going to freak out. He was still shaky from the last time a crazy man had stalked her. “Okay, I get it. I’ve been warned, but that doesn’t have to mean this guy’s after me personally. It could mean he wants to scare me off this case, just like Nancy said. That’s what I think this is all about. I think he did this to scare us. Right now, we need to finish up out here and get her to the morgue.”

  Everybody continued to stare at her—in a morbid manner, she might add—and nobody looked convinced. In fact, they looked more than a little spooked. But voodoo obviously spoke to their emotions and not in a good way. Claire tried again. “Well, she’s out of rigor. Decomp’s definitely started. Are the fingertips intact enough, Nancy?”

  “Looks like it. I’ll give it a try.”

  They all stood back silently and watched Nancy remove the hand-held device out of her bag and press the victim’s forefinger into the slot. The device immediately began scanning law enforcement databases for prints. Claire hoped to hell they got a hit. This case was unsettling, by design, she felt, and the sooner they got the guy, the better they’d all feel. And with this voodoo craziness going on, the newspapers would have a field day. Nobody said anything, just stared at the victim’s pitiful painted and stitched-up face. Claire put the doll down on a sheet of evidence paper and tried not to look at it again.

  This poor woman had been killed while Claire lay in her bed and slept like a baby. Or maybe when she was playing the violin and waking up Saucier. Maybe the killer had watched her from the window of this very room. A chill rippled across her heart and raised goose bumps down
both her arms. C’mon, get a grip, she told herself.

  Well now, Black had wanted to get her away from the lake so she wouldn’t run into any cases like this one. Wrong. Now she was smack dab in the middle of a psychopath’s murder scene, and a scarier one than usual. Okay, maybe what Black didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. But the thought of having to lie to him went against her grain. One thing she couldn’t stand in a relationship was lying. She and Black didn’t lie to each other. They were honest, told it the way it was, and gave each other the freedom to do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, without having to report in.

  Putting Black’s probable intense overreaction to this new development out of her mind, she tried to think it through. At first glance, she had figured the killer had decided the old house was abandoned and a good place for him to play his deadly games. When her car wasn’t there, it certainly looked abandoned. But the houseboat was in good repair and maybe was sometimes used by the LeFevres. Surely the perpetrator had checked all that out before choosing the place. No, it was more likely that this guy knew her, or about her, and it was pretty much a given that he didn’t like her snooping around the bayous and getting in his way.

  But when had he placed the body on the altar? Some afternoon before she got off work? Or while she slept? That idea was unsettling. Nope, some wacko creeping around and stitching eyes closed with thread while she was snoozing peacefully yards away did not sit well with her. Whatever the reason, this guy wanted her to find the body and the doll. Hell, he was probably the one who had called it in anonymously. Why me though? Now that was the pertinent question.

  Since everybody else remained hushed, seemingly in a state of tension and dread, Claire didn’t say anything, either. At least, they were all serious now. Time to look at things objectively. Okay, they had a voodoo altar, which was rather ridiculous in itself. But she wasn’t a Cajun or superstitious or easily terrified. They were. Black was, too, where she was concerned. So that meant he really was going to raise hell. Maybe she should be terrified. But she wasn’t, not yet, and she wasn’t a basket case, which was a step in the right direction if she intended to run this case.