“Why do you think?”
“He was practicing a ritual he learned in Africa. It gives him power.” A partial truth, but no matter.
“Did you help him?”
“No. No one helps him. It’s personal. It has to be done alone.”
“What has to be done alone? The killings?”
“Yes, that and the consumption of the extracted body parts. Portions of the posterior atrial wall, the spleen, and the anterior uterine lining of the mother, and from the baby, a piece of the midbrain, including the pituitary, the hypothalamus, and the pineal body.”
He gives me a long look. “So you know all about this stuff, huh?”
“A good deal. Not as much as he does, of course.”
“And why is that?”
“Because I’m just a fairly proficient apprentice sorcerer, while he is a fully accredited, extremely powerful witch.”
“Uh-huh,” he says, and I see he is starting to deflate. He thought he had a big piece of his big case and now he’s starting to think he’s got a mere nut who’ll walk on an insanity plea. I say, “Of course, he’s not as powerful as he will be. That’s why he’s doing the okunikua. “
“The …?”
“The okunikua. It’s Olo, it means the fourfold sacrifice. It’s a dontzeh thing, or it used to be?sorry, a witch thing. The Olo disapprove of it. But my husband enjoys revivals. He needs one more baby and then it’ll be done. It’d be nice to stop him before he gets it and completes. I’m not sure anything can stop him if he completes, except maybe Olodumare.”
“Who’s that?”
“God. The Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and all that is seen and unseen. The Ancient of Days.”
I smile helpfully. He puts on a false one, and leans back and knits his hands behind his head.
“How do you know he needs one more?” he says. “Maybe this last one, in your yard, was number four. Maybe he did one somewhere else that we don’t know about.”
“No,” I say. “They take the breastbone of the last one. It becomes an amulet. An idubde. “
“I hope you’re not being cute, Jane,” he says. “Crazy I can deal with, but not cute. Why don’t you drop the mumbo-jumbo and just tell me how he does it. What does he have, some kind of spray? He sprays a knockout drug, right?”
“He could. But he can make the stuff in his own body. The faila’olo, and the chint’chotune, sorry, I mean the invisibility and the? I guess the closest translation would be power over thought via sorcery, those he can do himself. Like sweating or breathing. He’s not a regular kind of person anymore. Olo sorcerers know how to modify their bodies, through programs of ingesting mutagenic compounds, combined with mental and physical disciplines. They’re walking drug factories. They can exude psychoactive drugs, extremely powerful, highly targeted ones, from the melanocytes on their skin surface. It’s all mediated by the pineal body. That’s how he made that paarolawats at the bus stop.”
“What’s a parlo … you mean Swett?”
“A paarolawats is what you would call a zombie. A person who is essentially dead, but the witch can give him certain simple tasks to do and can ride in him if he wants.”
I see pity appear in his eyes. The poor nutcase is what he’s thinking. This infuriates me. I shut my own eyes and take two deep breaths, centering. “Oh, Christ in heaven!” I cry. “Look, you think I’m some sort of pathetic cultist with a bundle of weird ideas, and you’re not listening, really, you’re not writing it down in your little book. Focus on this, Detective Paz: This is real! It’s as real as guns and cars. It’s a fifty-thousand-year-old technology that you don’t understand, and unless you do understand it enough to work with me, you have about as much chance of stopping Witt Moore as a bunch of savages have of stopping a locomotive by stretching a grass rope across the tracks.”
“Cute,” he says, smugly. “What we’re going to find here is that your guy’s got some powder in a jar that he’s immune to himself, and he’s got some way of shaking it out so it affects people in a certain area, and he’s got a gang of fellow fruitcakes who like to cut up pregnant ladies, which explains how he can be in two places at once. Occam’s razor, Jane. You’re a scientist, you know about Occam and the simplest explanation. So we don’t have to worry about zombies or the goddamn pineal gland.”
He pulls out a cell phone. “If you want to tell me about that version, Jane, I’m all ears. Otherwise, off we go.”
I had not thought it would be so exhausting, and I feel a pang of sorrow and regret about me and Marcel in Chenka, what it must have been for him trying to convince me. I say, “You are a moron, Detective Paz.”
He nods agreeably, makes a call and asks for a search team, and for someone from Family Services to take Luz to one of those friendly foster homes you read about in the papers all the time. I start to cry, and I say, “Please, couldn’t she stay here? My neighbor would be happy to take care of her. She’s had a terribly rough time and she’s very frightened of strangers.” I haven’t cried in a while, so that I am a little overwhelmed by the gush, especially since I am amphetamine bone-dry. Detective Paz is unmoved, however. He says, “Hey, listen, Jane, I’m really not a hard-ass. We can work any deal you want if you start talking sense.”
And more in this vein, which dries me up better than speed could; fury, the best antihistamine. I say, “If you are using a little girl as a bargaining chip to get me to tell you acceptable lies, which you must know are lies, then you’re not only a moron, but a sadistic moron. But have it your way?okay, you got me. My husband is the leader of a highly trained band of skilled assassins using African juju powder to cloud the minds of his victims and their guards.”
“Good,” he says, smugly. “And you’re a part of all this? The band?”
I say, “Oh, Christ! Don’t be stupid! Sorry, that’s not an option. Think, will you! I am a rich woman who’s been hiding in pauperage, doing menial work, for two and a half years. Who was I hiding from, and why?”
“The cops,” he says with assurance.
“Because I killed my sister?”
“Or helped him do it, and took the rap for it by faking that suicide.”
I see how this is so much simpler for him to believe, that criminal mastermind with hosts of minions and exotic drugs, simpler than what is really happening. I sink back into silence. There is no point in thinking further now.
Cars arrive. Cops emerge, one of them a female. I am read my rights, cuffed, and placed in the back of a patrol car. I see Paz talking to the lynch-mob man. The man looks at me with those eyes, which I am surprised to see are kindly and sad. Another car pulls up, with a Children’s Services badge on the side. Out of it comes a large black woman in a violet pantsuit, who could be Mrs. Waley’s long-lost sister. She talks to Paz for a while, and then, to my surprise and relief, gets back in her car and drives away. I see Paz walk across the street and speak with Dawn. I may have misjudged him, or perhaps he is a more subtle manipulator than he first appeared to be.
The policewoman drives me to police headquarters, where I’m placed in a cell by myself. After about forty minutes, Paz comes by and takes me to an interview room, windowless, tiled, with the usual one-way glass mirror/window, and asks me if I am ready to make a statement. I say I’m not, and I wish to contact my attorney. He seems disappointed, but tries to hide it behind the usual bland cop mask. I thank him, however, for not giving Luz to Mrs. Waley’s sister, and he shrugs it off. “No problem,” he says. I suspect that it will be a problem if his superiors ever find out. I’m pretty sure he knows who Luz really is, and he hasn’t blown the whistle as far as I know, which will be an even bigger problem for him, covering up on a homicide. Why is he doing it? Deep waters here. After he leaves, I wait ten or so minutes and then a female officer enters and takes me to a phone.
I dial one of the few numbers I hold in memory. A woman answers, “Mr. Mount’s office.” I ask to speak to him and she asks who’s calling and I say, “Jane Doe, his sister.” A considerable pause here. “Jane Doe is deceased,” she says. I say, “Yes, but I’m alive again. Get him for me, would you? And tell him I could smell the flowers of Bermuda when I died on the North Rock Shore.” I have to repeat this and chivvy her a little, but she does something and there is some light classical hold music, Boccherini, I believe. My brother comes on the line. “Jane?” His voice is hesitant and breaking, and I start to leak again.
I say, “Yeah, it’s me, Josey.” I listen to the hiss of the line. My hand on the phone is trembling and sweaty. I am not ready for this, for the terror of love.
