City of Sins. Daniel Blake

      ‘You know those parameters we put into VICAP yesterday? Snake, ax, all that.’

      ‘Yeah.’

      ‘We got a hit.’

      ‘The system takes that long? It came back yesterday with nothing.’

      ‘The system’s real time. We got a hit ’cos someone else – a local cop, by the look of it – just entered exactly the same keywords.’

      ‘This cop; where is he?’

      ‘Natchez. Natchez, Mississippi.’

      On a good day, with light traffic, Natchez was three hours from New Orleans. Today was a good day. Patrese was there just before ten.

      The victim, Dennis Richards, had been staying at the Best Western on Grand Soleil Boulevard, a few yards from the Mississippi River. One of the local detectives took Patrese aside and briefed him.

      Dennis had been found at about four a.m. by an early-morning street-cleaning crew, though the pathologist reckoned he’d already been dead a couple of hours by then. His body had been sited a block or so away, round the back of the hotel, half-hidden under trees near the junction of October and Bluff streets. He looked to have been in his mid-fifties, skinny with long, matted dreadlocks, and he was black.

      Patrese raised his eyebrows. Different sex, different race: very unusual. Serial killers usually stuck to one gender, and rarely crossed racial lines.

      Check this, the detective said: the address on Dennis’ hotel registration card was a New Orleans one. Ursulines Street; did Patrese know it?

      Patrese did indeed. Ursulines was in the Tremé neighborhood, heart and soul of the city’s music scene. But he wasn’t thinking about that, nor that this whole thing was clearly shot through with New Orleans, one way or the other. Patrese was thinking that a murder in Louisiana and one in Mississippi made it an interstate case, and interstate cases belonged to the FBI. This was his baby now.

      He turned his attention back to the detective. What had Dennis been doing in Natchez?

      They were still trying to find that out, but maybe the room was a clue.

      The room? Dennis had been found on the street.

      The detective led Patrese inside.

      Dennis had certainly done a good job of disguising the Best Western corporate blandness. Dark red drapes hung from the walls, heavy and still in the warm air. Against the far wall stood a table laid with a white tablecloth.

      Patrese let his gaze travel slowly over the table, registering each object in turn. A pile of stones. Two candles: one white, the other black, both held in miniature metal skulls. Midway between the candles, a glass of water. A candle snuffer. An incense burner. A pestle and mortar, next to a small pyramid of crushed herbs. A switchblade. A pair of scales. Two sheets of parchment. Four nails, each about five inches long.

      Despite the heat, Patrese shivered. He didn’t know for sure, but he could take a pretty good guess as to what this was – especially when a man from New Orleans was involved.

      A voodoo altar.

      There was a video camera on a chair in the corner. Not a tourist one, either: a proper TV camera with shoulder stock, attached microphone and integrated Betacam tape. The kind of kit that news crews and documentary makers use.

      One of the Natchez crime-scene officers hooked it up to the TV in the hotel room, and began to play the tape.

      It started with Dennis himself standing on a street in the French Quarter, talking to the camera.

      ‘I’m a self-taught voodoo priest, a houngan. Everybody know me as Rooster, ’cos they say that during a ceremony one time, I put a live rooster in a trance, bit its head off, drank its blood using the neck as a straw, ripped the breast open and ate it raw. As for whether that’s true, I ain’t sayin’. Don’t seem to have done my rep no harm, though.’ He cackled as the camera panned back, revealing the shopfront behind him: Rooster’s Voodoo Emporium.

      Patrese recognized it. There were several places like that in the Quarter, all dolls, potions, charms and paraphernalia. They claimed to be serious voodoo places, but most of their customers were tourists.

      As if on cue, the footage cut to Rooster leading a conga line of out-of-towners through the streets. He was wearing a black top hat over his dreadlocks, carrying a long staff crowned with a plastic human hand and a monkey skull, and busy spinning improbable yarns about curses and spells. The camera panned over the faces of his audience. They were loving it.

      A couple of seconds of screen snowstorm, and then Rooster was back, this time bare-chested and in a field somewhere. He ate some glass, lit a firestick and swallowed the flames. Looked at the camera again. ‘I’m a seeker. I want to find things. Voodoo explained things to me better than anything else I ever come across. I like the ecstasy in voodoo, the acceptance of your true being, whoever you are. I’m gay. In voodoo, no problem. Voodoo takes your sexuality as just part of the way God made you. Ain’t too many other religions do that, hey?’

      Twilight. Fires blazing by the water’s edge. The steady, hypnotic pulse of drums. A crowd; two, three hundred, perhaps, standing in concentric circles. In the middle were two people wearing robes. One was Rooster. The other was wearing a mask, but from her physique and gait, she was clearly a woman.

      There was a box on the ground in front of them, about the size of a coffin. The masked woman, the priestess, raised her hands to heaven and began to chant, always staring at the box.

      A slow, rhythmic shuffling in the crowd as the music began to seep into them.

      The priestess bent down and lifted the lid from the box. She was saying one word over and over again, and it was a moment or two before Patrese caught it.

      Zombie.

      No way, Patrese thought. Zombies were the stuff of cheap horror flicks. They didn’t exist in real life, surely? Even in New Orleans.

      The box was the size of a coffin. Human sacrifice.

      The priestess was chanting again, and now the crowd was taking it up.

      Eh, eh, they sang. Bomba hen hen.

      Shuffling round in their circles, they began to dance. Jerky, spasmodic; an arm flung out here, a leg kicked there.

      Eh, eh. Bomba hen hen.

      Rooster was leading the chant, Patrese saw. The priestess seemed almost to be in a trance; her head was rolling on her shoulders as though her neck was broken.

      The crowd joined hands, spreading the current like electricity. The chant rose and fell in crashing waves as their dance became increasingly frenzied. Sweat flying in the firelight; glistening bodies strobed against leaping flames.

      Rooster was a dervish in the middle. Infected.

      Eh, eh. Bomba hen hen.

      The priestess reached down into the box. With a yell audible even above the chanting and the drums, she pulled out what was inside and thrust it skyward.

      A snake.

      She wrapped it round herself. It looked too big to be a rattler – more like a python or boa – but Patrese couldn’t be certain. He thought of what Kat South had said about adults teaching children to fear snakes.

      The priestess suddenly ripped off her mask and looked straight at the camera. Patrese recognized her instantly: how could he not have? She’d been all over the news for the past couple of weeks.

      It was Marie Laveau.

      The footage cut back to Rooster right here, in this very hotel room.

      ‘The voodoo I do is good voodoo.’ He laughed. ‘Try sayin’ that after you had a few daiquiris. Most voodoo folks do good, whatever people think. But, like any place, there’s always some bad apples around too. And I been hearing things on the vine, you know? That’s why I come here to Natchez. I’m