Lucas was eating a taco. His jaws tore into the shell as if it was stone and he was a titan determined to eat it. He chewed loudly, his teeth gnashing together with the motion. His stack of tacos was dwindling and he showed no signs of stopping. My fears about having enough tacos might have been justified.
Gabriel was eating slower, as if it were a herculean task to eat the taco. He didn’t slam his teeth together with the fierceness that Lucas was; instead, it was as if every movement was calculated. Obviously, neither of them was happy. I wasn’t sure if it was because of Brady Wilchek or the incident with the Taser.
Neither had spoken to us since they joined us in the hospital parking lot to eat a late dinner amongst the light polluted sky. I busied myself by reexamining the photos I had seen on the plane. They made more sense now.
The pattern, which appeared random, really wasn’t. The wounds tore through the best features of the males that bore them. Brady Wilchek’s best feature was his incredibly white smile. The attacker had widened it by slicing the corners of his mouth. These gashes were straight. The others went with the curve of bone or tissue changes. They were hurried, frenzied, but widening his smile had been slow and purposeful. The others had similar marks in different places. One victim had a gash that went from his cheekbone to above his eyebrow. It sliced across his eyelid. Yet, it hadn’t been deep enough to damage the eye. That took skill.
With the tacos devoured, Lucas turned his attention to the group. His jaw was set firmly, making the hinge of his mandible visible. He was going to yell at me and I prepared myself for the onslaught.
“Wilchek is a dead end,” Lucas said. I frowned. “Not only does he not remember much, I couldn’t stimulate his memories and he’s…” Lucas made a gesture with his hands that made no sense to me, rolling one of them to the side.
“He’s an idiot,” Gabriel explained. “He’s convinced himself that his life is ruined and he’s more worried about that than catching his attacker. He actually asked me how he was supposed to have children now.”
“I didn’t think his genitals were injured,” Xavier said.
“They weren’t,” Lucas answered. “Carly Simon’s song about vanity fits him to a tee. I have never met anyone that was more self-absorbed. The level of narcissism is astounding and might be higher than any psychopath on the planet.”
“So, he’s a psychopath?” I asked.
“No, he’s a straight up narcissist,” Lucas stated. “He’s a spoiled, entitled, rich kid with delusions of his own importance. He has the personality of a wet sock.”
“Interesting,” I said. “Do you want me to don a short sleeve shirt and shorts and go have a talk with him?”
“It wouldn’t help,” Gabriel answered. “As you would put it, he’s a waste of good carbon. His only role in this universe is as fertilizer. We’d have more luck talking to a turtle about the case.”
“I think we are going to try to talk to the other victims in the morning. One is from New Orleans and another from a small town nearby,” Lucas said.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Stop Tasering yourself,” Lucas suggested.
“It worked,” I answered. “My migraine is gone and my head feels fine.”
“I want you and Xavier to walk the area tomorrow. Start at the bar and go from there. Fiona can map possible routes from where he was found to the bar. Let’s get a couple hours of sleep,” Gabriel announced, climbing behind the wheel of the van.
Our hotel was not one of the traditional chain hotels, rather a large, hulking building that overlooked the French Quarter. Each room had a large balcony that looked down upon the streets below. I wasn’t tired, most likely the result of the Tasering. Instead of going to bed, I stood on the balcony and chain-smoked. Dawn was still a few hours away. The streets were as deserted as I imagined they got. A few drunks staggered along the sidewalks, looking for their hotels or homes or whatever they had lost during the night. One group of revelers passed below me, their voices echoing in the quiet as they made boisterous conversation that wasn’t completely coherent.
Despite it being night, the air was still muggy. It hung around me, thick enough to feel. A moistness to it made droplets of water bead up on my skin. My mind told me we had dropped in temperature enough to hit the dew point, which was why water was mysteriously appearing on me, but a more primal side told me that wasn’t entirely the reason.
I wasn’t afraid of voodoo dolls or evil eyes. However, I wasn’t entirely sure that some forms of magic didn’t exist. Everyone had some sort of experience that couldn’t be explained and mine had involved Haitian voodoo. I reminded myself that I was not in Haiti and that Cajun voodoo wasn’t the same, but it did nothing to ease the tension in my shoulders.
As a student at the University of Michigan, I had a roommate who was from Haiti. She’d been a wonderful girl. However, she came from a long line of Haitian voodoo priests and priestesses. Her uncle disagreed with her decision to get an education rather than work in the family business. During winter break, he came for a visit. He was only in town a few days, but by the time he left, she had lost nearly twenty pounds. Before the start of the next semester, she had died from an unknown illness. She was convinced her uncle had poisoned her, but there were no indications or traces of the poison in her system. Girl code dictated that I hide anything she wouldn’t want her family to see. I deleted her browsing history, threw away all her adult toys and movies, and searched for anything else that might be a disappointment. During the search, I found a beautiful necklace under her bed. I hung it in the living room and I became sick.
By the time, her mother showed up to collect her things, I was a wreck of my former self. I had lost weight, couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, and was fidgeting all the time. The campus doctor thought it was part of the grieving process and prescribed antidepressants. They didn’t help. I’d been on them for almost a week and was getting worse, not better, when her mother showed up. She walked into the apartment we had shared and screamed, not a yelp of surprise, but a scream of pure terror. She had marched over to the amulet and she began grilling me about it. Where had we gotten it? Why was it hanging in the living room? I told her what I knew; that I had found it under her daughter’s bed. She took it away with her and promised I’d get better once it was removed.
She was right. The day after the amulet left the apartment, my appetite improved and I could sleep again. I received a letter about a month later, explaining that the girl’s uncle had confessed to leaving the amulet there. Her mother hoped I had recovered and was very sorry that he had tried to kill both of us. I wrote back telling her that I had recovered just fine. I never heard from her again.
I had nearly been killed by a hex; a hex I knew nothing about. It wasn’t a matter of the power of suggestion. I hadn’t been physically ill, as far as bacterial or viral infections. I hadn’t been mentally ill, like the doctor thought. There was absolutely no reason for the symptoms and effects I had felt while that amulet had hung in the living room or the miraculous recovery the moment it was removed. Needless to say, being in New Orleans had an effect on me as a result.
Of course, it was ridiculous. Cajun voodoo had become more of a tourist attraction. Shops sold gris gris bags and offered to cast love spells down here. People went into the shops for souvenirs and asked for spells with a healthy dose of skepticism. I was far more likely to get food poisoning than hexed in New Orleans, but I still knew it existed. Some primal part of my brain refused to turn off and let go of the thought that I didn’t want to be in a city filled with voodoo practitioners.
The same part kept insisting that the cuts had to be related to black magic. The idea was preposterous to say the least. Magic was about attacking the soul and killing the flesh through mystical ways, not slicing and dicing people’s faces. Also, contrary to popular opinion, most voodoo priests and priestesses avoided black magic. They felt it stained their own souls to use it.
Black magic was more likely to involve Palo Mayombe than any other religion, and its closest relative was Santeria, not voodoo, Cajun or otherwise. However, in Palo Mayombe, the victim was likely to be sacrificed, not cut up. This meant we had a run of the mill, garden variety serial killer in the making. We were being called in for the maturing phase, which was unusual for us. Normally, we were only called in for the aftermath. I worked on compartmentalizing my feelings about magic and voodoo from the fledgling killer. Once upon a time, I had been exceptionally good at this. Lately, not so much. I knew the cause, but not the solution. Having Patterson killed seemed extreme, even to me, and would not help my crisis of identity. If anything, it would prove how close mine and Patterson’s mental makeup was. I was trying to separate us, not find ways in which we were similar.
Unfortunately, the more I looked, the more I was struck with the reality that the only thing separating Patterson and me was my life experiences. It was hard to believe that being kidnapped at eight or attacked by a serial killer at sixteen, or even being hexed with a voodoo curse could be good things. Yet, they were. They had kept me focused on not giving in to my killer instincts and to keep an open mind to life, anything could happen, even the fantastic. Everything else, including my DNA was shared with Patterson, The Butcher. I flicked another cigarette butt off the balcony and watched the pinprick of light disappear below me. There was a monster running around New Orleans and once they got a taste for blood, they were going to crave it. Pondering about my life in comparison to that of serial killers wasn’t healthy anyway. One day, I would just have to suck it up and admit that I was one stressor away from being no different than the monsters I chased, but today wasn’t that day.