Desperate Souls (37 page)

Peering through her Toyota’s windshield, Maria approached the caravan of RMP cars, unmarked detective units, and other assorted emergency response vehicles with a growing sense of unease. Multicolored strobe lights illuminated the Grant Street neighborhood like a rock concert, silhouetting the uniformed POs who stood interspersed along the yellow tape that surrounded the crime scene.

As the last detective called in, she had to park almost a block away, and she checked her hair and makeup before getting out. Ordinarily she didn’t worry about such things, but ordinarily she wasn’t awakened by a phone call from Night Watch Command in the middle of the night ordering her to a triple homicide site. Answering the call, she had feared that Edgar’s body had turned up somewhere and felt relieved to learn that three hoppers had been killed instead. Without time for a shower, she had pulled her curly hair into a ponytail and dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved sweater.

As she followed the sidewalk to the crime scene, she saw light blue breaking up the gray sky and sunlight outlining the brick-faced apartment buildings on either side of the street.

Nothing like a little dawn to show the city’s garbage,
she thought, wondering when the sanitation workers’ strike would end. She flashed her gold shield at a sleepy-eyed PO and ducked beneath the crime scene tape.

“The cavalry has arrived,” Bernie Reinhardt said, holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand. His eyelids drooped as much as his blond mustache.

“You’re the primary?” Maria said.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. The department’s suffering an extreme shortage of murder police tonight. Since I’m on your Black Magic Task Force, they pressed me into service until you could get here.”

Maria looked at the Crime Scene Unit members photographing three corpses on the sidewalk. Teenage boys, from the looks of them. “Why the shortage?”

“There were seven similar incidents tonight in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Someone’s finally declared war on whoever’s running Black Magic.”

“A rival gang?”

Bernie nodded. “Twenty-four stiffs in groups of three. With our current manpower shortage, the bosses are looking at a hell of a lot of OT.”

“Maybe this is payback for our Machete Massacres.” “I’d hazard a guess Prince Malachai is learning that leadership is overrated right about now. Come on. I’ve got something to show your expert eyes.”

He led her over to the nearest corpse, a sixteen-year-old boy with cornrows tight to his scalp. A bullet hole in the center of his forehead resembled a third eye.

“Look at his hands.”

Crouching low to the ground, Maria studied the boy’s gun hand. All his fingers lacked third joints, and their ends had been sewn shut with black thread. She looked at the other hand and saw the same thing.

Bernie crouched beside her. With the pointer finger and thumb of his free hand, he separated the dead boy’s cracked lips, revealing mangled gray gums. “No fingertips, no teeth, no identification. Same thing with the other two and all the bodies at the other crime scenes.”

Maria looked at Bernie in disbelief, then took out a pair of latex gloves, snapped them on, and duckwalked to the corpse’s feet. Seizing the ankle of one leg, she pulled off the sneaker and sock covering the boy’s foot and recoiled.
No toes, either!
Leaving the sock and shoe beside the foot, she rose.

“Someone went to a hell of a lot of trouble to make it hard for us to identify these guys,” Bernie said.

“There’s no blood. If the killers messed with these corpses after killing the vics, they did it somewhere else and dumped them here.”

“This is a known drug corner. Odds are these kids worked it. If your theory is right, they were abducted, executed, mutilated, and returned here. Why go through all that trouble? Why not just kill them and run?”

“To send a message.”

“Okay, I’ll give you that. But why sew the ends of their finger stubs?”

Maria shuddered despite the rising sun. “What kind of monsters are we dealing with?”
And what the hell happened to Edgar?

As Malachai walked through the abandoned Long Island City factory, Marcus felt the walls closing in on them. They had come so far in the last year since Mal had hooked up with Katrina, and now, just when they had reached the pinnacle, they stood to lose everything, all because of one man. Corpses littered the industrial floor, each with at least one bullet hole in its head. Another dozen bodies lay unmoving upon the tables set up near the furnace. Worse, the packing area for the drugs was empty.

“How many?” Malachai said.

Marcus did not like giving his boss bad news. “Twenty-four here, another thirty between eight of our spots in Manhattan and Brooklyn. We got hit hard. He’s dismantling our entire operation.”

Forty-five stood watch in the doorway behind them, his arms folded across his man boobs.

“How much Magic did he get?”

“At least twenty bricks.” He saw the anger building in Malachai’s face. It showed in his eyes and in the way he kept drawing in his lips.

“How the hell did he find this location?”

“He probably waited until sunrise, then followed some of our dealers back here. Papa Joe would have done the same thing if he’d figured out what our workers are. I told you, we need to house those things in a separate area, keep the factory workers and the sellers separate, just like in the old days.”

“Damn it!” Malachai kicked over a stainless steel cart used to transport the kilos of Black Magic. “Okay, first things first. You need to find us a new location, so we can set up shop. Look for something in Brooklyn this time, somewhere around Prospect Avenue. Make sure you find a secondary location nearby where these things can go at the end of the night. I’m going to have Katrina send every fucking zonbie we have after Helman. He has to go down today.”

Marcus blinked at his commander. “You mean in
daylight
?”

“That’s right. Helman probably thinks he’s safe in the daytime. We’re going to keep him on his toes 24-7. Sooner or later, he’ll fuck up, and then he’s ours. I think I’ll turn him onto a little Magic, then flay him alive. Let him walk around without his skin and his soul screaming for help in a skull full of mush.”

“But other people will see our”—he hated using the word—
“slaves
for what they really are.”

“I don’t care.” Malachai’s lower lip quivered with anger. “I want Helman dead.”

Marcus couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The zonbies were supposed to be their dirty secret. Look what had already happened in the Polo Grounds. “This will be bad for business. Can’t Katrina just do him like she did those two cops?”

“Nah, she can’t reach him. Some ‘psychic interference’ bullshit I don’t understand.”

“Then let’s do this thing ourselves. Helman dropped so many of those things that the city’s meat wagon picked a bunch of them up before we could.” He had hoped for a better opportunity to release that piece of information.

Malachai snorted like a bull, and Marcus anticipated another outburst. “When it rains it motherfucking pours, doesn’t it? The cops won’t know what to make of those bodies, even when they cut them open.”

“You send those things out into the daylight, where people can see them, and they’ll figure it out. You’ll destroy everything we’ve got faster than Helman can.”

Malachai opened and closed his fists. Marcus knew he needed to hit something.
Someone.
Instead, he unleashed a primal scream.

Marcus lowered his voice. “I think we need to lay low with this supernatural shit. It’s getting out of control. We’ve already wiped out the competition, so let’s go back to selling what we used to: coke, heroin, crack. Put this Black Magic on the back burner.” He had to be careful suggesting a course of action that contradicted Katrina’s plans.

“He’s right,” Katrina said.

Marcus flinched.
Oh, shit.
He turned to see Katrina gliding past Forty-five in a short lime green dress that hugged her curves and showed off her long legs.
I
am?
He couldn’t recall her ever agreeing with his advice.

“I thought I told you to wait in the car,” Malachai said.

Marcus liked that Malachai believed he was in charge of Katrina. It struck him as humorous that his boss didn’t even realize he was pussy whipped.

“I wanted to see the damage for myself,” Katrina said with no rebuttal from Malachai as she looked around the abandoned factory.

“Those things need to fight better,” Malachai said.

“It’s not that easy. I can program them all with general reactions, but if you want me to actually pull their strings, I can only do it one at a time.” She cast a sideways glance at Marcus, who felt a chill run down his spine. “With the other drug operations out of business, we need to expand our horizons. It’s time to start selling the more traditional products again. Put people on the street in the daytime, pushing the old-school shit, and let the zonbies own the night.”

Marcus saw what Katrina was doing. She wasn’t looking to curb the use of voodoo in their organization; she just wanted more money. She had only pretended to go along with his suggestion to appear cooperative.
Think of something else …

“People cost money,” Malachai said. “People can give us up to the cops. People try to take down the boss. That’s what you told me when you sold me on this shit in the first place, and you were right.”

Katrina stepped closer to Malachai.

Work your magic, lady,
Marcus thought.

“My strategy worked. You’re the power in this city now, not Papa Joe. But we need to diversify. It makes sense economically, and by owning the entire drug market, you’ll keep our enemies from rebuilding their operations. A wider variety of drugs will also keep the cops from concentrating solely on Black Magic, and the longer we keep that on the down low the better.”

Marcus saw the wheels in Malachai’s brain turning. A smile spread across his boss’s lips.
I knew it.
When it came to Katrina, Malachai had become predictable, a true weakness.

Malachai stroked Katrina’s long hair. “I like it. But what about Helman? We can’t let him continue to cut us off at the knees.”

Katrina smiled. “Don’t worry. I have plans for Helman.”

Maria and Bernie sat facing Lieutenant Mauceri in his glass-faced office in the Detective Bureau Manhattan on East Twenty-first Street. Maria sipped orange juice through a straw while Bernie worked on another coffee. Wearing a wrinkled vest, Mauceri had rolled up his sleeves.

You’re doing a heckuva job, L.T.,
Maria thought, still resenting that she had been excluded from the investigation into Edgar’s disappearance.

“Cards on the table,” Mauceri said. “We got thirty DOAs in three boroughs, and there’s no question they’re linked. Each stiff was mutilated in an identical manner. Since the vics all appear to have been hoppers, this points to the biggest drug war this city’s ever seen. And since the head of the Black Magic Task Force is MIA and this department is operating with a skeleton crew, the chief of detectives has authorized me to absorb what’s left of BMTF into Homicide. Welcome aboard, Reinhardt. For the time being, you’re murder police.”

“Do I have any say in this?” Bernie said.

“None at all.”

“In that case, I’m happy to be here.”

“You’ll liaison with Gang Prevention. This is their mess as much as it is ours.” Mauceri pointed at them. “It only makes sense to partner you two up.”

“I already have a partner,” Maria said in an arch tone. “No offense, Bernie.”

Bernie sipped his coffee. “None taken.”

Mauceri kept his cool. “I don’t see your partner anywhere, Vasquez. Produce him.”

“Assign me to assist Missing Persons, and I will.”

“Not happening. I need you here, and I’m not letting go of you. And if you have any notion of conducting a personal investigation on your own time, forget it. There’s no room in your life for any other cases. Since you and Reinhardt are the only BMTF members still around, I’m making you jointly responsible for all these murders. That’s thirty names in the Green Book.”