The Voodoo Killings (27 page)

I stopped Cameron and pointed towards the stall. “There, that stall with the grey and black things hanging from the rafters.”

Cameron followed my finger, then crinkled his nose. “Are those—? It can’t be.”

“Rotten cuts of meat of unknown origins? Exactly. Ghoul food.”

One of the ghouls sensed the scrutiny and swivelled his head in our direction. The market gas lamps weren’t nearly as bright as the electric sodium fixtures lighting the boardwalk, but we still got a good look. The ghoul wore a thick leather apron over a sailor’s sweater and black canvas dock pants, as well as a leather hat that matched the texture, if not the colour, of his face. His skin had been cured to a deep brown leather and the flesh drawn taut over his bones. Any stores of fat were long gone, along with most of his nose. Leaving the socket exposed. When he turned his face, I noticed a patch of yellowed, exposed bone on his chin where the skin had worn off. Cameron only partly succeeded in not making a face.

“Most ghouls wear hats: they only keep their hair for a year or two before it starts falling out. The skin goes leathery and wrinkled like that fast. And don’t ask me how they get the meat to rot quite like that without falling apart. Some secrets are best left unknown.”

Cameron couldn’t take his eyes off the ghoul. “Why would anyone—”

“Live like that? It does come with benefits. Zombies like you and Lee can see Otherside, but you can’t warp it. Ghouls can—something about the body still decaying. A lot of people in the paranormal community think it’s a decent trade-off. The older a ghoul gets, the stronger it gets as well.”

As if sensing they were the subject of my impromptu ghoul-versus-zombie lesson, two more ghouls turned and narrowed their eyes at us. Then one yelled our way in Polish.

Cameron stiffened. “What did he say?”

“I’m assuming, ‘What the hell are you looking at?’ I never bothered learning Polish. They don’t exactly like being the centre of—” I shut up as all three ghouls lifted their noses to sniff the air. Shit…

“What are they doing?”

“They’re hard-wired to smell rotting meat.”

The ghouls made a point of sniffing a little longer as they kept their yellow gazes on us. Then one of them grunted something in Polish and they all turned their backs to us.

“Here, Cameron, hold these,” I said, handing him the books.

He took them, looking warily at me.

I lifted his shirt to check the knife wound.

“Hey!” Cameron said as I peeled back the bandage.

The skin around the wound was oozing yellow fluids now tinged with green. It wasn’t healing. I replaced the bandage and pulled his shirt—Aaron’s shirt—back down.

“It’s not good, is it?”

Well, it wasn’t great. “Your wound here got their taste buds going,” I said. “You’re not decaying, but you’re not exactly healing either. You’ve had two packets of brains, three if you count the drink Lee gave you, in the past seven hours—” I was about to tell him my
theory about his bindings limiting how much he could heal, but then thought better of it. Instead, I said, “A normal zombie would have healed an hour ago. But you’re not a normal zombie.”

“A one-of-a-kind zombie,” Cameron said. “Somehow that feels like it should be ironic or something.”

“At least you’ve kept your sense of humour.”

When we reached the bottom of the great staircase, Cameron asked, “Where to next?”

“Well, it’s coming up on morning now. I figure it’s high time to swing by your place. I’m hoping we’ll find a clue there as to what Max did to you, or what went wrong.”

He frowned. “Someone is killing zombies, and practitioners are trying to raise an undead myth, and we’re going to rummage around my apartment?”

“I figured, from all those drawings on my desk, you’d want to see your paintings, make sure they were okay.”

Cameron shot me a sideways glance. “No offence, but catching a serial killer strikes me as a higher priority.”

I smiled. “Don’t worry, I’m not leaving you there alone.”

We kept walking in silence until Cameron finally asked, “So you’re really not going to contact the ghoul?”

“Nope.”

Cameron shot me a sideways glance. “I barely know you, and don’t figure you for the type who’d back off from a lead like that.”

“Who said anything about backing off?”

“You just said you weren’t going to contact Lee’s suspect.”

I shot Cameron my best Cheshire cat grin. “Who said anything about contacting the ghoul? I’m contacting his victims.”

CHAPTER 16

YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU

A good view can make just about any city look pretty, even on a rainy morning right before the sun comes up, when the sky is the greyest and ugliest. It’s the shine of the street and car lights, and the fact that there is still enough darkness to cloak the things you don’t want to see. Having said that, the view of Seattle harbour from Cameron’s apartment would blow the postcard pictures away any day, rain or sun.

It turned out that he lived in an exclusive building complete with concierge and front desk. No one had a place here unless they had a lot of money to blow. The concierge had given me a suspicious once-over when we’d entered the building. Apparently Cameron coming home at 6 in the morning with a female companion was not out of the norm, just not one with frizzy hair and clad in leather.

But Cameron’s studio itself was about as pared down as you could get. The walls had been reduced to brick facade, between drywall where his paintings hung. The floors were concrete with a few rugs to soften them. With the exception of a partitioned-off
bedroom, it was open plan, with canvases occupying most of the space in lieu of the usual furniture and TV.

I tore my eyes off the city view and headed back to the two books, which I’d left lying open on Cameron’s kitchen table. Though I’d taken a quick nap when we got here, it didn’t feel as though it had put any dent in my Otherside hangover. Thank god Cameron had coffee, and speaking of which…I stifled a yawn and got up to refill my empty mug, stealing a glance at Cameron to see how he was holding up. The trip back here was clearly long overdue: Cameron had been standing in front of the same canvas for more than an hour. I thought more of it was covered in paint now, but it was hard to be sure.

I’d already found Cameron’s address and appointment book and flipped through it. He was one of those people who preferred to keep his agenda on paper. He’d noted three appointments leading up to Thursday, and it was the third one I wanted to broach with Cameron, but not until he finished working on his painting. I figured I’d give him that.

The chapter staring up at me dealt with Ifrit, or Fire Jinn. Compared with the accounts I’d read of King Solomon’s Jinn, Lee’s text lacked storytelling but made up for it with detail. There wasn’t just one set of binding symbols and inscriptions for each type of Jinn, there were many, though all of them were incomplete. As Lou had pointed out in his notes, most were a mash of old pre-Islamic Semitic symbols, a seemingly haphazard mix of Arabic, Aramaic and Canaanite.

I turned another page to confront three more sets of Ifrit bindings, these ones with red Xs as placeholders where the missing symbols might go. Each set of bindings was more convoluted and contradictory than the previous. No wonder a Jinn hadn’t been made in a thousand years: no one could sift through all these bindings.

One of the symbols matched a partial I’d found at Marjorie’s. According to the book, it was ancient Aramaic. I checked my drawings of the other partial symbol from Marjorie’s. I found it on the same page but in a different group. This one was supposedly
Canaanite. I marked the page with a sticky note and flipped to the next spread. The two symbols appeared twice more, both in incomplete bindings.

I leaned my head against the back of the chair and closed my eyes. So what the hell did it mean? Did whoever was trying to raise Jinn have an actual set of bindings to work off, or was it trial and error?

Something metal struck the concrete floor behind me. As I turned to see what it was, I knocked my coffee mug over. A paint can rolled by my feet and under the table, leaving a trail of thick pink paint.

I swore and pulled the books out of harm’s way; Lee would kill me if I got coffee on the pages. I glared at Cameron as I took a roll of paper towels to the paint spill.

“Sorry,” he said without moving his eyes from the canvas. Whoever coined the phrase “You can’t take it with you” did so without having met a zombie or a ghost. Taking their shit with them is the first thing the dead try to do.

Case in point: as soon as we’d stepped into the apartment, Cameron had been fixated on his artwork at the expense of everything else. They were done in multiple mediums—pencil, charcoal, watercolour, chalk, oil—and were mostly abstract, though in some there were figures and images hidden beneath the swaths of colour. Were they any good? They had a certain artistic integrity, though I’m the first to admit I wouldn’t know artistic integrity if it bit me.

“Are you done rifling through my personal accounts yet?” Cameron asked.

I’d made him hand over his laptop and cellphone and all the passwords. I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss any clues. When I got fed up with the bindings and murder accounts, I switched to sifting through those, though as of yet I hadn’t turned up anything I didn’t already know or suspect.

“Well?” he said, still not tearing his eyes off his painting.

“Not even close.”

There was another pause, then, “What do you really think happened to me?”

“Honestly?”

At that, he turned to me and I waved him over to the table. I flipped the appointment book around to show him the meeting I’d found—with his drug dealer late Thursday afternoon, right before he’d died. “I think you accidentally overdosed, just like you and Max were afraid you would.”

Cameron stared at the entry. There was no surprise or resistance on his face, just acceptance. “Then why didn’t Max’s binding work the way it should?”

“Well, when I worked for the PD, we had a couple of instances where someone died of an overdose and the drug dealers panicked. They paid hacks to raise the victims so no one could prove time or place of death. If you accidentally died and someone paid a practitioner to raise you, Max’s bindings would have got messed up.” I shrugged. “Or maybe Max didn’t really know what he was doing and your memory tanked just because.”

Cameron greeted that with silence, then turned and went back to his work. I tried to focus on the Jinn book.

“When are we going to talk to the ghosts?” Cameron said at last.

“
We
aren’t talking to the ghosts,
I’m
talking to the ghosts.
After
I go to look at Aaron’s new victim.
You’re
staying right here.”

He frowned at me. “Is it the best idea for me to stay here?”

“Your wound’s not healing, true, but otherwise you’ve been stable since we went to see Lee. To be honest, I’m more concerned about someone figuring out you’re a zombie than you zombieing out again.” Considering the zip code, I highly doubted anyone would pull a globe in his vicinity if he stayed here. If I was wrong, and the worst happened…well, better off here than while I had my back to him chatting with ghosts.

“I meant, is it safe for you?” he said. When I looked confused, he added, “You collapsed the last time you did the Otherside thing, and you don’t exactly look like a picture of health right now.”

The zombie had a point. “To talk to these guys, I need to channel Otherside—”

“And being near you when you do that might be enough for me to lose it?”

I nodded.

He went back to painting.

“Cameron, what would you rather do? Stay here working or come see dead bodies and murdered ghosts?”

He snorted.

“If it makes you feel any better, these are not the kind of upstanding ghosts you want to meet.” Not that Nate was upstanding, but Nate had only drowned when he’d died. Not pretty, but child’s play compared with murder victims. “I’ll leave you a cellphone. If something goes wrong, if you even
think
something is going wrong—”

“I’ll call,” Cameron said.

I stifled another involuntary yawn. “Look, if you want to do something useful, convince your art dealer to meet us at Club 9 tonight too.” That was where we were supposed to meet Cameron’s girlfriend Sybil. With any luck, we’d run into Cameron’s drug dealer as well. That was one person I wanted to be watching when he saw Cameron.

“If you’re so certain I overdosed, why bother?”

“Because I’m not a hundred percent certain you did. I’d like to rule out every other possibility.
This
,” I said, pointing to the appointment book entry again, “is coincidence. It doesn’t prove anything.”

Cameron looked away from the canvas, out the window. A little light was seeping through the grey morning sky. Might even get sun later today. “I was trying really hard. Whatever Max was doing was working for me,” he said.

What was I supposed to say in response to that?

I checked the time on Cameron’s clock: 9 a.m. now. If I left at 9:30, I’d have enough time to get to Pioneer Square and meet Sarah, Aaron’s partner, by ten. I had a half-hour to kill and tried to focus on Lee’s Jinn text, but my eyelids began to droop. Son of a bitch. At this rate I’d be useless when I got to the crime scene. Maybe dousing my face with cold water would help me stay awake. I headed to the washroom.

I turned the faucet and waited for the water to grow icy before splashing it over my face. Three handfuls later, I couldn’t feel the
tip of my nose, but I’d stopped yawning. I dried myself off, straightened and stretched. Then I pulled down my collar to check the blue bruises on my neck in the mirror.

“Son of a bitch—” I stumbled back into the towel rack as my reflection vanished, replaced by Gideon’s face.

He frowned at me, not homicidally but more as if he was frustrated and impatient. “You haven’t delivered my message yet,” he said.

I forced my heart rate down and pushed myself off the towel rack. Never let a ghost see you scared. I walked up to the mirror and said, “Yes, I did. I left a message on Max’s answering machine.”