The Voodoo Killings (12 page)

It wasn’t the answer he wanted. It never is. Still, he nodded and headed back to the stove.

“Hey, did Nate say anything to you before he bugged out? Like where he was going?”

“Yeah, he said he had someone to visit.”

I snorted. Nate was a recluse; he didn’t have anyone to visit. I flipped open my laptop to check the missing persons section of the police database again. The browser was already open, to Mindy May’s website, with a second tab open on her Facebook page.

Nate was stalking his ex-girlfriend again.

Cameron glanced up from the frying pan. I closed the pages and clicked on the police database. “My roommate is being an idiot. Again.” There wasn’t a chance in hell Nate’s ex had a set mirror hanging around her place, so how would he even catch a glimpse of her?

Still no missing report filed on Cameron. A thought struck me: if my access to the missing persons list hadn’t been revoked, maybe I still had access to the paranormal cases. It was worth a shot. I typed Marjorie’s name into the search window and, sure enough, I found her listed in the open paranormal cases. But there was next to nothing on the break-in or her murder. It was within the realm of possibility that they simply hadn’t had a chance to enter the data yet, though Aaron and Sarah were both usually better about getting the staff to update new case files….I closed the browser down.

“How do you like your eggs?” Cameron asked.

I still had one hell of an Otherside hangover, but far be it from me to turn down a breakfast I don’t have to make. I slid into one of the chairs at my two-person kitchen table so I could watch him. “Over easy. Bacon, extra crispy.”

The frying pan sizzled as two eggs went in. Cameron deftly flipped them, gently deposited an egg on each plate, then passed one to me along with a set of cutlery. Where he’d found the forks and knives in my sink’s bottomless pit was beyond me.

He looked from his plate to mine. “I can still eat…normal food, right?”

I snagged a piece of bacon. “Yes, but put your plate back down on the counter for a moment and don’t turn the frying pan off.” I popped the bacon into my mouth and nodded to the silver cooler sitting by the fridge.

Cameron followed my eyes, then swallowed. “I was afraid of that.”

I bit into another piece of bacon. I don’t know exactly how long it’d been since someone had made me breakfast, but it was far too long.

Cameron picked up Mork’s metal cooler and set it on the counter. I’d have to throw the frying pan out after this, or maybe send it on its way with Cameron.

“Okay. Open it up.”

He kept the cooler at arm’s length as he undid the catch. Gas from the dry ice flowed over the rim. “Now what?”

I dipped my second piece of bacon in the egg yolk and ate it. “Take a knife out of the very bottom drawer.” I kept my tools of the trade separate from the cooking appliances. I’m messy, but not that messy.

“Next, grab one of the sealed bags. That’s dry ice in there, so—”

Too late. He’d reached in with his bare hand.

“Ow! Jesus—” He dropped the vacuum-sealed bag on the cutting board and stared at his ice-burned fingers.

I shook my head and got up. “You may be dead, Cameron, but shit still hurts.”

He headed to the sink to run his fingers under cold water. “No, really? I hadn’t figured that one out yet.”

“Here, let me take a look.” I went over to him and shut the tap off, then lifted his hand to examine it. Cameron swore. I ignored him.

The tips of his fingers were covered in circular white welts the colour of cooked chicken breast. Brilliant. Just fantastic. With no circulation, they’d take a long time to heal, even with an infusion of
fresh brains. I wrapped a clean dishtowel around his hand and sat back down with my coffee. “Be happy the skin didn’t peel off.”

“No offence, but this is like the mother of all benders.”

I took another sip of coffee. “None taken. Now cut the bag open and try not to get any—Never mind,” I said as the contents spilled onto my clean cutting board. I’d be throwing that out as well.

“Now what?”

“What do you think? Cut it up, put it in the frying pan, give it a good searing, then stick it on your plate.”

He placed the knife he’d used to open the bag beside the cutting board and covered his face with his unburned hand. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

I pushed my now-empty plate towards the side of the table and cradled my coffee mug. “Those disgusting little packets are all that’s standing between you and turning into a walking worm bag. Eat them or not—it’s your choice.”

Cameron stared at me, then at the knife, then at the brains on my soon-to-be-disposed-of cutting board. “Un-fucking-believable,” he said. One big breath later—out of reflex, not necessity—he’d diced the brains into cubes and dumped the whole lot into the frying pan. He jumped back as the pan sizzled.

I stuck my nose over the coffee to mask the smell. “For Christ’s sake, hit the fan.”

Cameron looked as though he was going to hurl. “Seriously? I’m about to eat the most disgusting thing ever and you’re worried about the smell?”

“It’s no worse than what you drank last night.”

Cameron swore and hit the fan.

“And add ketchup. Lots of it. At least until you get used to it.”

He stirred it for a few minutes then dumped the mess on his plate beside the eggs and bacon and toast. He grabbed the brand new bottle of ketchup from the counter and squirted what had to be half the contents on top. He put it on the table and, after finding a clean mug in the sink, poured himself a cup of coffee and took three large sips before sitting down in front of his plate.

He picked up his fork and dug in with the same kind of Hail Mary grace he’d shown chugging Lee’s brains concoction.

While he ate—or, more accurately, scarfed down his food in between giant gulps of coffee—I kept watch for a twitch, a miscue. After five minutes I had to concede that if Cameron remembered to breathe and got a pair of coloured contacts, short of pulling a globe, I’d never guess he was a zombie.

But he should have been like this last night. And the strange clockwork symbols mixed in with his bindings had to be causing problems, otherwise Lee would never have commented on them—or, rather, refused to comment on them. Part of me wanted to send Cameron on his way, with that cooler and the cutting board, but he’d taken so long to stabilize, what if he came unstuck?

I sat back and sipped my coffee, keeping him company as he got it all down, keeping one ear on the morning news. No reports of murdered or otherwise missing artists. Also no report about events at Marjorie’s Coffee Shop, not even the break-in.

Cameron chased the last bite down with another gulp of coffee and set his fork on the plate.

“So, now that you’ve got most of your cognitive skills back, Cameron, I need your help with something.”

“What?”

“Who turned you into a zombie and how the hell did you end up wandering around the docks by yourself last night?”

Cameron picked up both our plates and headed to the sink. He started the water and let it run for a minute, staring at the flow. Just when I figured I’d overestimated the return of his cognitive skills, he said, “I don’t know.”

“Well, start with how you roped Max into doing it.”

He turned the taps off with more force than was necessary and faced me. “That’s just it. I woke up this morning and remembered who I am, where I live, what I did last weekend. I remember my credit card pin, for Christ’s sake. But I have no idea how I died or how I ended up a zombie. I have no idea who Max is, or whether I roped him into anything.” He shook his head.

I searched his face for the lie. There wasn’t one. “Let’s start with what you do remember. Raising zombies usually doesn’t happen last minute on a Friday night. It takes weeks, sometimes months to plan. And Max doesn’t come cheap.”

He shook his head again. “I don’t know anyone named Max.”

Something I’d seen Aaron do with witnesses gave me an idea. “You say you remember what you did last weekend. So walk me through this week, starting with Tuesday.” By my estimation, that was the absolute earliest day Cameron could have died.

Cameron concentrated hard. “Monday night I was at an opening, Gallery 6. I club-hopped with the owner, Samuel, who’s a friend, for a few hours afterwards, than we hung out at my place—”

I’d heard of the owner of Gallery 6. Samuel Richan. He was a middle-aged Argentinian infamous for travelling the globe finding new and talented artists who initially earned him only the ridicule of the art community but eventually garnered him a fortune. He’d settled in Seattle a decade ago and opened a space near the convention centre. I followed Richan because predicting art trends with any accuracy was like pegging a World Series winner two years ahead of time: you either were some kind of savant, had one hell of an in with the mob, or had figured out a way to use Otherside.

“And then?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, what time did he leave? What time did you wake up Tuesday?”

He frowned. “I think I slept in, met a friend for coffee…”

“You don’t remember, do you?”

I could see him concentrate and then give up. “I can’t remember what I did Tuesday night either.”

His memory was patchy. It was known to happen, but mostly in zombies raised from corpses that had been in the dirt too long, not fresh zombies like Cameron.

“What’s the next thing you can remember?”

“Wednesday night. A girlfriend of mine was in town. I picked her up, we went out…”

A girlfriend. As in one of many. “What about Thursday morning?”

He shook his head.

“Okay, did you drop her off at the airport? A hotel?”

“I have no idea.”

Still, that was two people now who’d been with Cameron around the time he’d died: the gallery owner and the girlfriend. Short-term memory loss was consistent with serious head trauma, but I’d expect to see visible damage. Drowning could explain the memory loss too, but there’d have been salt on Cameron’s clothes.

“You were likely still alive on Thursday morning. You were raised on Friday night, so the very latest you could have died was sometime early Friday morning. Try really hard: is there anything else you remember? Anything at all that happened Thursday or Friday?”

Cameron stared at the counter, his brows knit.

My phone rang. I swore and scrambled to get it out of my pocket. Maximillian Odu’s name flashed on the screen.

Finally
. “It took you long enough—”

Max’s cool voice came across the line: deep and inflected with the gravelly notes age brings. There was still the distinct touch of New Orleans that he’d never quite been able to shake, despite living in Seattle for over thirty years. “Kincaid, it is good to hear your voice.”

Ha. Like hell it was. I covered the mic with my finger. “Cameron, I just have to deal with—” What exactly did I tell Cameron? That I was stepping out to have a conversation with the guy I was pretty sure raised him then ditched him outside a bar? “With someone who’d better have some damn good answers,” I said, then ducked into my bedroom and closed the door behind me, waiting until the latch clicked shut before uncovering the mic.

“Max, you son of a bitch, do you have any idea what I’ve been doing for the last twelve hours? I’ll give you some clues: it’s something you lost, starts with
z
and ends in
e
.”

“Kincaid, I know you must be upset—”

“That doesn’t even
begin
to cover it—”

“There was an accident,” Max interrupted.

“What kind of ‘accident’ results in you leaving a zombie outside my local bar?” I balanced the phone between my ear and neck as I grabbed jeans and one of Nate’s old concert Ts out of my cleanish-clothes pile.

There was a pause on Max’s end. “You found Mr. Wight at Catamaran’s?”

Jesus, he hadn’t even known where his zombie had got to. I’d assumed he’d sent Cameron there for a reason.

I took a deep, slow breath. Berating Max over the phone wouldn’t rile him up one bit. I was remembering exactly why I’d cut short my apprenticeship. No one could get a rise out of me like he could, except maybe my mother.

“Yes, Max. Catamaran’s.” I lowered my voice so Cameron could not possibly hear. “Not to drill home the point here, but you owe Randall one hell of an apology after we get this sorted. He did
not
have to call me.” I knew for a fact that Randall had Aaron’s number on speed-dial. Catamaran’s wasn’t too far from Seattle’s main drainpipes, the ones that carried sewage and rainwater into the harbour. You’d be amazed what crawls out of those things every now and again. “More to the point, besides owing me serious favours for babysitting him all night, you owe me five hundred for brains—Mork upped his price—and on top of that, I had to deal with Mork!” Max knew Mork gave me the creeps.

There was another pause on Max’s end. If it hadn’t been for the cough, from years of smoking cigars, I might have thought he’d dropped the call.

“How closely have you looked at Cameron?” Max finally asked.

I snorted. “Close enough to know you made a fully anchored zombie. Unconventional with those damn head bindings, though. I still haven’t figured out what the hell they’re there for, or why his memory is still partly shot. I expect you to enlighten me.” Lee’s advice from last night reared its head. “Max, he’s
stable
, isn’t he?”

Officially, we aren’t allowed to bind a ghost
permanently
to a body anymore, in the way Lee was bound, for example. But there was no law against temporarily tangling a ghost up in a net of Otherside
bindings. Provided it was done right, the zombie was animated just long enough to answer a couple of questions. Once the bindings destabilized, it turned into a harmless, inanimate corpse. But Cameron wasn’t one of those; Max had done something different.

“He should be quite safe,” Max said. “I only wish you had not taken the initiative to acquire Mork’s services.”

I couldn’t believe it. He was offended that I’d helped Cameron out without waiting to consult him. It was like the time I’d added Nordic runes to stabilize the zombie we were having trouble raising for a court case without asking first. It hadn’t mattered that I’d been right. “You’re welcome for my cleaning up your mess,” I said.