Desperate Souls Read online

“You’ll think I’m crazy.”

  “Trust me. I already do.”

  “You’re my best friend. I mean that.”

  Edgar took a step closer, impatience sketched across his face. “Jake …”

  “Her name is Ramera Evans.”

  Edgar’s simmering anger evaporated. “That means nothing to me. You’re barking up the wrong fire hydrant, brother.”

  “Malachai and his people know her as Katrina. You know her as Dawn Du Pre.”

  For a moment, the lack of any reaction at all by Edgar made Jake think his friend hadn’t heard him. Then Edgar chuckled, and the chuckle blossomed into hysterical laughter. He held up his hand, gesturing for Jake not to speak. “Oh, Jake. I don’t know what to do with you. Are you back on the sauce or the blow? Or have you even moved on to Magic?”

  “Even if I was frying my brains again, it wouldn’t change what happened to us last night.”

  Edgar’s expression and voice turned dead serious. “No, it wouldn’t. But at least then I could forget about what you just said.”

  Jake took out his cell phone, cued up the video feature, and offered it to Edgar. “I’m sorry.”

  Edgar cast a wary look at the cell phone in Jake’s hand, then took it from him. Jake watched Edgar’s expression as the video played. The blue light from the small screen highlighted his features as they registered disbelief, then shock. Then the footage stopped.

  “Play it again,” he said.

  Jake took the phone, reset the playback, and handed it back to him. “Again, I’m sorry.”

  “When did you shoot this?”

  “Just a couple of hours ago. I told you I had a lead on Malachai. I bugged his mother, then followed her to Caribbean on 125th.”

  Edgar’s voice turned as cold as the ice in a glass of vodka on the rocks. “What else do you know?”

  “Ramera Evans was born in the Bronx. She was an only child. When she was eight years old, her parents were butchered by drug dealers after they called the cops on a bunch of corner boys. They were murdered in their apartment. She was there, but she hid in the closet. I’m guessing that’s why Papa Joe’s little girl was allowed to live.”

  Edgar’s jaw tightened, and his eyes grew shiny.

  “She went to live with her maternal grandmother, Louise Du Pre, in New Orleans. Grandma must have been a good woman, because Ramera went to Tulane University on a full scholarship. She majored in history and world religion and wrote a book called The Dark Art of Voodoo, considered the definitive history of voodoo.” And Old Nick hired Ramera to serve on his voodoo research team, a detail Edgar didn’t need to know.

  “Then Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and Grandma Du Pre drowned in her own living room. Sometime after that, Ramera ceased to exist. No payroll records, no income tax records, no credit card records.” Because Old Nick financed her reinvention of herself.

  “Based on her rental information, Dawn Du Pre moved here ten months ago.” Probably right after Old Nick’s death when the coast was clear for her to operate without detection. “There are no records of her existence prior to that and no records of an income source now. She doesn’t own a PR firm, and if she freelances, her clients pay her cash.”

  Edgar’s expression remained stoic. “Anything else?”

  “That’s all there is.”

  Edgar gave him a slight nod. “Thanks. I owe you one.” He turned to leave.

  Jake grabbed his arm. “Hey, wait a minute. Where are you going?”

  “To find that bitch and see what she has to say for herself.” He said it matter-of-factly, as if the answer was obvious. “Alone.”

  “She and Malachai will kill you without giving it a second thought.”

  “If it comes to that, I’ll do whatever needs to be done. It might as well be by my hand, right?” Edgar started walking.

  Jake fell into step with him. “I’m going with you.”

  “I don’t want you with me on this.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’ll just mess things up, like you did with the Cipher.”

  Jake froze. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Edgar turned to him. “It means you fucked up. Just like you always fuck up. And as usual, I covered your ass.”

  Jake’s mouth opened, but no words came out. He remembered when Edgar had called to tell him that Kira Thorn had provided an alibi for him on the night Marc Gorman was executed in his own apartment.

  “The building across the street from Gorman’s had a fancy new HD security camera in its lobby. You can take a frame grab from that footage and blow it up twenty times over without any loss in resolution. It showed Gorman leave his building, then you enter it, then him return, and you leave. Guess who got dead in the meantime?”

  Jake felt himself turning numb. I always thought he suspected, but he knew the entire time. “What happened to the footage?”

  “What do you think? I destroyed the source file. Nobody else saw it.”

  “You never said anything …”

  “Neither did you, so I let it be. Hey, I loved Sheryl. I’m glad you did that fucker. But I took a big chance covering for you. I knew that as long as you didn’t get caught some other way, my secret was safe.”

  “I’d have done the same for you.”

  “I know that. But this isn’t the whole story, is it?”

  Oh, shit, Jake thought.

  “Kira Thorn. Your supervisor at Tower International. Why did she come into the station and provide an alibi for you?”

  Jake took a deep breath. He had hoped this moment would never arrive. “Because she wanted to have me killed, so I couldn’t reveal any of the dirt I uncovered on the company.” No need to complicate matters by telling him the Cipher worked for Tower.

  Edgar’s eyes registered a glimmer of surprise. “What happened to her?”

  Jake said nothing.

  Edgar jabbed a finger at the space separating them. “I can understand what you did to the Cipher, but this executive? You went too far.”

  “It was self-defense.” You see, Kira transformed into this giant spider monster and tried to eat me alive …

  “I’d like to believe that’s true, but I’m going to take care of business my way tonight, and I don’t want you anywhere around me. Maybe you can be my alibi. Don’t follow me. I mean it.”

  Jake watched Edgar disappear into the night.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Katrina entered her apartment building at a brisk pace, aware that Malachai’s driver, Forty-five, watched her every step from his Jeep. It hadn’t been easy to convince Malachai to let her visit her “sister,” whom she claimed lived in the building instead of herself, but she had been persistent. It was imperative that she return to the apartment where Dawn Du Pre lived. She was certain she had seen Jake Helman at the nightclub, and she was just as certain that he had seen her and taken her photograph with his cell phone camera. And then he had hightailed it outside. Had she mentioned this to Malachai, especially after Jake’s name had just come up at the apartment she maintained as Katrina, he would have done something stupid. And she needed Jake alive.

  But she also knew that Jake would tell Edgar she had been Malachai’s companion at the club. Edgar had proven a useful source of police information the last couple of months, but she knew him to be a righteous man capable of righteous anger, and she could not afford for that anger to be directed at her. He was a good man and a wonderful lover—much better than Malachai—but he had outlasted his usefulness.

  “Good evening, Miss Du Pre,” said the doorman, who rose from his station at the lobby counter.

  “Hello, Randy.”

  She boarded the elevator, and as the door closed, she saw Forty-five staring at her from the Jeep idling at the curb. She felt better as soon as she no longer saw him, because that meant he no longer saw her. The game she had played between Malachai and all his soldiers and with Edgar had proved exhausting. As much as she would miss Edgar, she looked forward to a simpler appro
ach to her business. It was much easier to lie to one man than two, and soon she wouldn’t need to lie at all.

  As the elevator rose, her mind drifted back to this morning when her zonbies had eliminated Papa Joe and his crew. The little girl whose life she had spared—Joe’s daughter—had affected her more than she had at first realized. Those wide brown eyes had reached into her soul, something she did not allow people to do. Of course, the girl’s own soul had been damaged after seeing both her parents murdered, as Katrina’s had been scarred by the killings of her mother and father so long ago.

  Following those murders, a double funeral for her parents was held in the Bronx. Her mother’s mother, Grandma Louise, had come to New York, and Ramera understood that she would be returning with the old woman to live with her. Grandma Louise had been a tall, friendly woman who did what she could to make her granddaughter feel at home in the old New Orleans house, which Ramera thought smelled like rotting wood.

  Grandma Louise had frequent visitors: several old ladies who liked to get together once a week without fail. They wore bonnets and long skirts and jewelry, just as the slaves of old had done. They whooped and hollered and smoked cigars, which disgusted Ramera.

  “Whatchoo going to do with that girl child?” one of Louise’s friends said one day.

  Louise looked down at Ramera and said, “I’m gonna teach her some of that ?l’ black magic.”

  All the women laughed.

  But Louise had been sincere, and she schooled Ramera in the ways of vodou. Ramera viewed the rituals as traditions and approached them from a scholarly point of view in college. Her book The Dark Art of Voodoo brought her to the attention of Nicholas Tower. It was while working as one of his research members that Hurricane Katrina had claimed Grandma Louise’s life. Bitterness at the lack of government response to the crisis consumed Ramera’s soul, and she learned to embrace that bitterness. Just a few years later, she understood true power and wielded it like a weapon.

  Stepping off the elevator, she strode to her front door and inserted her key into the lock. She enjoyed living here and enjoyed her time as Dawn Du Pre, away from Malachai and the brutal world into which she had immersed herself. Entering the apartment, she flicked on the hallway light, then closed and locked the door. She entered the living room and kneeled before a round glass table upon which stood a thick purple candle. It was the only vodou artifact she had permitted Dawn to possess, and it appeared to be decorative.

  She struck a wooden match and lit the candle’s wick, then rose and went into the bathroom. From a shelf in the medicine cabinet she took out a small plastic bag. Using tweezers, she removed one of the curly black hairs collected in the bag, which she had removed from a pillow on her bed. One of Edgar’s hairs. She took the hair into the living room and deposited it into the candle’s flame.

  Then she kneeled on the floor once more and, reaching deep into her soul, chanted in the ancient tongue she had discovered while doing research for Nicholas Tower. The language was an odd mixture of French, Spanish, African, and Native American tongues. As the guttural sounds rose from within her, she pictured Edgar’s face and body. She became aroused as she chanted:

  Take this one,

  Chain his soul,

  Transform his body

  Into his prison!

  “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do,” Edgar said behind her, startling her so much that she jumped to her feet with one hand over her heart.

  After leaving Jake alone at the Carl Schurz Park walkway, Edgar had run full speed to his car, which he had parked outside the park entrance, one of the benefits of being a cop. Keying the ignition, he raced to Central Park, crossing over to the West Side, then uptown along the West Side Highway. His head throbbed with the stunning revelation that Dawn had been cheating on him with the city’s new drug kingpin; that she had most likely been using information she had gleaned from him to assist Malachai in his conquest of the drug trade; and that, if Jake was right, she was the driving force behind the plague of undead slaves infecting Manhattan.

  Impossible, he thought. He accepted that Dawn had played him in some Machiavellian chess game but not that she was somehow capable of resurrecting fatally overdosed junkies as zombies.

  Not zombies. Zonbies.

  Jake had managed to surprise and impress him. His former partner had always been a schemer, too smart and too reckless for his own good. It had not been a huge decision for Edgar to destroy the digital file of Jake entering and exiting Marc Gorman’s building. In his opinion, serial killers deserved death, and Jake had spared the state and city untold expense in what would have amounted to a sensational trial.

  But Kira Thorn’s sudden disappearance troubled him. He and Maria had sat with Kira when she had vouched for Jake’s whereabouts the day of Gorman’s murder, and nothing about her demeanor suggested she was capable of ordering a hit on Jake. Then again, he had slept with Dawn—had fallen in love with her—and had never suspected that she could possibly be entangled with Malachai and Black Magic.

  Damn it! He pounded the steering wheel’s rim. How could he have been so wrong?

  Parking in front of Caribbean, he ran inside and paid the admission fee rather than advertise that a cop was on the premises. There was no telling if someone would alert Malachai or whether or not Edgar would need to conceal his identity. He circled the club’s interior three times before concluding that Malachai and Dawn had already left.

  Maybe Jake scared them off without realizing it.

  He knew of just one place to look for Dawn: at her apartment. She had given him a copy of her keys on their one-month anniversary. Now he stood before her, the living room filling with the burning candle’s sweet scent. She had been chanting in a language he did not recognize. Vodou?

  “Edgar!” Dawn said, her surprise palpable.

  He appraised her dress. Blatantly sexual, not sophisticated at all. “That’s a different look for you.”

  Her expression turned pensive. “Did Jake speak to you?”

  Edgar drew his Glock from its holster. “What do you think?”

  She swallowed. “Then there’s no need to play games.”

  “I never played games with you. I loved you. I guess I still do. It’s pretty funny, isn’t it? A guy my age getting his heart broken.”

  “I’m sure you’ve broken plenty of hearts. Your son’s mother’s, for one.”

  “Don’t ever talk about my son or his mother. Put them out of your mind right now.”

  She offered a nod of concession. “For what it’s worth, I do care about you.”

  “I never figured you for a drug dealer’s whore.”

  “I’m not Malachai’s whore. He’s mine. So are you.”

  He tightened his grip on the Glock. “Keep talking, lady. It isn’t helping your case.”

  “What case? Are you planning to arrest me, lover? On what charge—infidelity? I didn’t realize that was a legal offense, and we’re not even married.”

  “We might have been.”

  Mocking laughter escaped her lips. “Oh, did you plan on proposing to me? How sweet. No, thank you. I grew up in poverty and never plan to go down that road again. Your salary couldn’t pay for my wardrobe budget.”

  Edgar felt his skin turning hot. “So you’re all about the money, huh? Maybe you should have slept with Gary Brown or Frank Beck instead of killing them.”

  Dawn took a step forward. “I didn’t know who they were when I met you. And I knew that you were close to Jake.”

  Edgar could not mask his surprise. “Jake?”

  She took another step closer. “That’s right. You were my way to reach him.”

  “What do you want with Jake?”

  She stood before him with the barrel of his gun pressed between her breasts. “That’s for me to know and you to find out, darling. If you can.” Her eyes flicked down to his gun. “Are you going to pull the trigger or talk me to death?”

  With his free hand, he reached into his pocket and took out
his handcuffs, which he tossed onto the table behind her. The metal clinked on the glass. “Put those on.”

  She smiled. “One for the road, huh? You’re on.” Turning, she slinked back to the table. With deliberate exaggeration, she bent over, giving him an unobstructed view of the contours of her ass. Looking over her shoulder at him, she stood up with the handcuffs dangling from one finger. “Are we going into the bedroom, or do you want to take me right here?”

  “I wouldn’t put my dick in you again if you were the last woman on Earth.”

  She allowed the handcuffs to slip from her finger, and they clattered on the carpet. “That’s what you think, boyfriend. You’ll do anything I tell you to.”

  Edgar heard his heart beat in his chest.

  What the hell?

  No, not his heartbeat and not in his chest. Drumbeats in his head. What had Jake said about hearing them? “I’m not your puppet. You can’t whip me.”

  “You think? Stick that gun in your mouth.”

  “Go to hell.”

  No longer smiling, she burrowed her eyes into his. “Do it.”

  Edgar’s arm bent at the elbow, aiming his Glock at the ceiling. Then he raised his elbow to the level of his shoulder.

  I didn’t do that!

  His forearm shook as he resisted whatever force commanded his body, his muscles aching. Sweat formed on his brow from the strain. The gun inched closer to his face. Using his left hand, he seized the wrist of his gun hand and tried to push it away. Unfortunately, he was right-handed. Staring down the Glock’s barrel, he felt the muscles in his face twitch and jump. Releasing his wrist, he grabbed for the gun and tried to wrest it free from his other hand. No good: his right hand would not relinquish its hold on the weapon, which kissed his lips.

  “Open your mouth,” Dawn said.

  Glancing at her with bulging eyes, Edgar felt panic as his mouth opened through no effort of his own.

  “Good boy.”

  He felt the metal scraping over his teeth, the barrel pressing against the roof of his mouth.

  “Now get down on your knees.”

  He sank to his knees on the carpet, praying the impact would not trigger the gun.