The Voodoo Killings (26 page)

“So what happens? It explodes?”

Lee pursed her lips, considering. “I suppose it does. When Otherside is released from the confines of a sorcerer’s spell, it searches for somewhere to lodge itself. Anything can happen, from starting a fire to striking someone dead.”

“To tearing inscriptions right off a zombie,” I added. “That’s what you think happened with the murders, don’t you? Someone’s trying to make a Jinn and the spells are backfiring.”

She nodded. “My brother always suspected that Jinn bindings required a mixture of Otherside and sorcery to work. Which is why I ask about the sorcerer’s ghost.”

Yet she’d withheld the information…I stopped myself. No sense getting upset about Lee’s cagey nature at this point. “You think Gideon is behind the murders?”

She shook her head. “No. A sorcerer’s ghost retains only a fraction of his power and spells. These inscriptions would be well beyond Gideon’s capabilities. But he may have traded the information to a human practitioner, maybe knowing their intentions or maybe not.”

Gideon was in the middle of an argument with Max over payment. “Max isn’t involved in the murders, Lee, he can’t be,” I protested.

She nodded. “I agree that Maximillian is not behind this. I’m merely pointing out the coincidence of the sorcerer’s ghost appearing in Seattle and the murders. It would be wise to question Gideon about the Jinn if and when the opportunity presents itself.”

“I thought you wanted me to stay the hell out of it?”

“As you so eloquently put it, with three victims the circumstances have changed.”

Lee ducked into her office and returned carrying two large volumes, one under each arm. She dropped them on the bar and tapped the leather cover of the larger, scrapbook-sized book. “I believe these are the references you wished to consult.”

I carefully flipped it open. The first yellowed page was a collection of newspaper clippings, glued down and wrapped in Cellophane. The earliest was dated 1888 and was a short report of the deaths of a dozen or so crib girls, struck by a sudden illness. The article was little more than a warning: “Stay away! Sick people!” Crib girls were about the lowest form of prostitute there was, Chinese slaves who lived and died in wooden shacks, or cribs, down by the docks, in easy reach of passing sailors. Death by disease wasn’t an uncommon fate.

Beside the report were handwritten notes, in both Chinese and English, listing dates and numbers. Below those were four detailed drawings of female torsos, with cut marks and black Xs over the organs, each diagram marked with a number that corresponded to a note above. Shit, these were autopsy reports. The crib girls hadn’t died of disease—they’d been murdered, and horribly so. Three binding symbols were noted in the margin.

“These are your brother’s notes, aren’t they?”

Lee nodded. “But please continue. You will see why I did not immediately consider these relevant.”

I flipped to the next set of clippings, spread over two pages, decorated with newsworthy headlines of murder. The first was dated May 23 of the same year, right after the crib girls’ deaths had been reported. It detailed the murder of a seamstress. In the Seattle of that era, a seamstress was often also a prostitute. According to the tax
rolls, there were more seamstresses living in Seattle than on the rest of the west coast combined, San Francisco excluded.

I flipped to the next page and was faced with anatomical diagrams and notes detailing where each girl had been found, with an
X
marking where each of the bodies had been mutilated. I checked the Xs against the original victims. Each had been mutilated differently and had had different parts excised: tongue, eyes, heart, kidneys. The list read like a bad horror film. More symbols had been annotated; some were Arabic, and others I recognized as Celtic runes and voodoo symbols. All of them were used in creating zombies.

Lee turned the page to the next set of clippings. The headline
WHITECHAPEL COPYCAT
stared up at me in stark black print from the otherwise yellowed page. The Jack the Ripper Whitechapel murders had been committed over almost three years, spanning April 1888 to February 1891. Though the killings in London had just started, the news had had plenty of time to reach America. In my world, even now, people loved to speculate as to the nature of the killings, the most popular theory being zombie experimentation using fresh volunteers.

This was the first article in the book that was accompanied by a photograph, a flattering black-and-white headshot of a pretty woman with classic blond corkscrew curls and a porcelain-doll face. The caption read “Anna Bell, June 18, 1870–June 18, 1888.” Her eighteenth birthday. Her murder diverged from the pattern of the crib girls’ deaths in that it did not occur at the docks but where Anna had lived.

“Either the killer knew her or that was one hell of a coincidence,” I said to Lee. Then I noticed the story mentioned Louise Graham, the high-end madam whom Lee had worked for, and at the same time too. “You knew her?” I said, pointing to the portrait of Anna Bell.

“We worked together, briefly. She had been in Seattle two years longer than I and had done well on her own, and even better once Madame Graham recruited her. We were not friends, but we tolerated each other as well as could be expected. Before Madame Louise opened her brothel, Anna Bell had run a lucrative side business out of the Oriental Hotel as a body dealer.”

I let out a low whistle. Back in Seattle’s early days, the university was always looking for cadavers for the med students to dissect. They were hard to come by, so the faculty offered ten dollars a cadaver—a lot of money back then. The university quickly had to add a couple of rules: no knife marks, ligature marks or signs of strangulation. The odd man or woman with no family, no friends, just passing through Seattle, would end up drowned under the pier after a night of hard drinking; the university rules said nothing about drowning. Turn-of-the-century Seattle had attracted a damnable mix of creative folk.

Lee leaned over and pointed to a paragraph three-quarters of the way down the article, her white nail with painted pink cherry blossoms striking the Cellophane with a soft tap.

“The reporters and police were used to bar brawls and muggings. They were at a loss when it came to dealing with a sophisticated killer. For example, they never noticed that all the women were killed on Thursday nights, almost always by the docks.”

I flipped back to double-check. Sure enough, every girl had died on a Thursday night. “Lou did, though, didn’t he?”

Lee turned the page, revealing another of her brother’s annotated anatomical drawings. This one had many more notes on it, and showed more detailed bindings on the body. His sketch of the murder site included eight of the Arabic symbols drawn in sequential order.

“Since this murder happened in my own backyard,” Lee said, “I was able to sneak Lou in while the police and coroner argued over how to move the pieces.” She flipped the page over to another torso diagram, this one of Anna. “There were similarities among the bodies, the types of cut marks, the tools, zombie symbols…The selection of organs removed was always different, as my brother also noted and the police and coroner failed to catch. But this,” she said, flipping the page once more, “was what truly concerned Lou about Anna Bell’s murder. Something he had not been in time to catch at the previous scenes.”

Lee opened the second book, which was the one she’d shown me before with the Jinn references. She pointed to a series of symbols
labelled by Lou as incomplete Jinn bindings. I looked back and forth from it to Lou’s sketch of the scene. The third one from the top was identical to the ones found at the site of Anna Bell’s murder.

I glanced up at her. “Whoever killed those women really was trying to make a Jinn.”

“That is what my brother strongly suspected.”

“Lee, you knew—”

“I knew nothing except that the Jinn symbols and the explosion pattern at Marjorie’s were similar to the ones Lou found on these murder victims over a hundred years ago. I did not wish to elicit a panic.” She shook her head and scowled, not at me but at the situation. “With three murders in two days, that now seems unavoidable.”

Marjorie had been killed on Friday night, and Aaron had come to me after my disastrous seance tonight to tell me about the death of the practitioner. None of the victims had been cut up, and two of them were zombies. The only true similarities to the old crimes were the Jinn symbols.

“You had a suspect in mind, didn’t you?” I said.

Lee worded her answer carefully. “I
still
have a very dangerous suspect in mind, Kincaid. A ghoul, the same one Lou suspected a hundred years ago. Unfortunately, I have not yet pinpointed his whereabouts—”

“Bullshit, Lee. You know where every undead in the underground city is!”

Her eyes narrowed. “That may be true, but finding this one is not a simple task.”

I laughed. “No, you want to keep the fact that a serial killer emerged from the underground city under wraps. In these times especially.”

Lee drew in breath, something she rarely did. “It will take me time to extract him. He is holed up in the third-level docks.”

My anger dissipated. Lee might run the place, but even she stopped short of the caverns on the third level. Everyone with a grain of sanity did, zombies included. Until the early 1930s, the underground docks had held a black market where the paranormal
communities had traded with boats coming in from the surface, but that traffic had fallen out of use in favour of more subtle routes. Since that time, they’d become a slum of a sort where the feral zombies and ghouls were sent along with the sane ones who could no longer pay their bills. It was not a safe place.

“I have not been complacent. I’ve had the lower docks quarantined ever since you brought me the details from Marjorie’s. No one has entered or left.”

A few more things clicked into place. “So even if this ghoul is responsible for Marjorie’s murder, he couldn’t have killed the practitioner or your zombie.”

She made a sharp clucking sound in disagreement. “I suspect he has an access route to the surface—”

“Or we’re dealing with an accomplice.”

Lee levelled me with a stare. “That is the only way I see him being able to evade all my agents.” She sighed. “As much as I’d like to keep this private, excluding you and Aaron at this juncture would only hasten the possibility of exposure and failure.”

Translation: leaving me and Aaron in the dark would only help the killer, meaning there was a greater chance more murders would occur and that someone on the surface would put two and two together and make the paranormal connection. If that happened…well, a mob armed with torches from Home Depot, anyone?

“Believe me, Kincaid, neither of us wants a Jinn loose in the city.”

Or under the control of someone who didn’t care how they made one. I needed to see the bodies….

I reached for the books, but Lee put her hands on top of them. “On one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“You will be employed and paid by me while working with Aaron, and you will bring me everything and anything you find. A thousand dollars a day until we find the culprit, ten thousand if you apprehend the accomplice.”

This was uncharacteristically generous. “What’s the catch?”

“Under no circumstances are you to try to contact the ghoul.”

“What if the killer strikes again on the surface, and it is your ghoul?” Cameron said.

Lee and I turned to stare at him, Lee in irritation and me in surprise. I’d thought Cameron was still totally zoned out.

“Well? What if Kincaid runs into the ghoul on the surface?” Cameron challenged. “What is she supposed to do? Stand there?”

Lee shook her head. “I do not believe the ghoul will risk the surface, not while I am searching for him. It would be safer for him to use his accomplice.”

“A lot of ifs,” Cameron said. “And not much leeway.”

Lee glared at him, but despite her displeasure, she considered the point he’d made. At last she turned to me. “Fine. If you come across the ghoul in Seattle, be my guest, but my restriction about contacting him still stands. Do I make myself clear?”

I thought it over. “All right. I promise I won’t contact the ghoul.”

Lee ran her finger once more along her brother’s notes. “Be careful, Kincaid. Any person living or dead who is willing to raise a Jinn is not to be trifled with.”

I took the books and nodded to Cameron. He downed the last of his concoction and climbed off his stool. We turned to go.

“Kincaid?”

I glanced over my shoulder at Lee.

“My advice concerning the sorcerer’s ghost? Deliver the message for him and try to determine if he knows anything of Jinn being raised in the city, then forget you ever had the misfortune to hear the name Gideon Lawrence. He has a reputation for offering people things they cannot refuse.”

—

We wound our way along the boardwalk towards the main underground city entrance, weaving between zombies and the odd ghoul. It was 5 a.m. and still dark above ground, so I had no qualms about us crawling out into the alley in Pioneer Square.

I held up the books. “Do you have any idea how much detail is in these?”

Cameron fell into step beside me. “I think she’s holding back. She knows more about the murders than she’s letting on. I know when people are hiding details—I’ve had enough experience at hiding stuff over the years.” He was referring, no doubt, to his attempts to hide his mental illness.

“You already suspected the murderer might be a zombie,” Cameron continued.

“
And
I was wrong,” I said.

Cameron shrugged. “Same difference. Both are living dead who eat brains.”

“Ah, now that’s where you’re wrong.”

We were passing by the market, which never closed, and I scanned for the right stall….There it was. I spotted the regular pocket of Polish ghouls, one of which specialized in ghoul delicacies. That the ghouls in the city were almost exclusively eastern Europeans wasn’t a surprise. Becoming a ghoul was the preferred method of living past death in that part of the world, despite the gruesome appearance.