The parents looked at each other, then back to Gould. 'You must go now.' It was obvious that they recognized the emblem. And that they were afraid.
'Does your son have this mark on him?' Gould persisted.
'Go!' The old man got to his feet and pointed toward their car. Elise began moving away. Gould followed.
'It's possible that Angel was a prostitute at Black Tupelo,' Gould said as he and Elise made their way through loose sand to the car.
'The parents were too effusive about their son's innocence,' Elise agreed. 'If that's the case, then we have three prostitutes.'
'Two of them dead, one a vegetable.'
'One may have died of an unconnected heroin overdose.'
'It's also possible Angel is being punished by his own society. Could also be an unconnected coincidence.'
At the car, Elise paused with her hand on the door handle and looked at Gould. 'And then we have Mr. Harrison. Where does he fit in?'
'He doesn't. I'm not saying there isn't a connection. I'm just saying he doesn't fit.'
'The victimology is all over the place.'
'Which takes us back to the possibility of unrelated crimes,' Gould said.
'Could Harrison have been an accident?' Elise added. 'Did he get poison meant for someone else?'
'For the moment, let's say they are connected. Then we have to ask ourselves what the killer was trying to accomplish by stepping outside his MO. It could be one of several things: The perpetrator could be doing it for attention. He could also be doing it to confuse us. Or he could be escalating.'
Inside the car, Gould removed the plastic lid from his drink. 'Here's another angle.' He shook the cup, ice rattling. 'Remember how Jeffrey Dahmer drilled holes in the skulls of his victims while they were still alive?'
'Oh, yeah.' How could Elise have forgotten such a horror? But now that Gould had brought it up, memories of what she'd read about the case came back. 'Then he shot them full of battery acid. Yikes.'
'In an attempt to create zombies,' Gould said around a mouthful of ice.
Of course. 'Is that what's going on? Is somebody trying to create mindless playthings? Is this all about absolute control?'
Elise's phone rang.
John Casper.
'I checked out every prostitute we've had through the morgue in the past two years,' he told her. 'Guess how many came up?'
'I'd think the norm would be around one or two a year,' Elise said.
'We've had twelve in two years.'
'Wow.'
Gould perked up, listening intently to Elise's side of the conversation.
The figure Casper had given her was hard to absorb. And even more astounding was that no one had noticed. 'Causes of death?' Elise asked.
'All drug related. And we're talking street drugs like heroin. Cocaine.'
'At least that's what it says on the death certificate. Which is why nobody looked into the deaths,' Elise guessed.
'Exactly,' Casper said.
She adjusted the air conditioner while the car idled. 'What about exhuming some of the bodies?'
'That's where we run into a problem. Most of them were cremated.'
'Makes sense,' Elise said. 'It's the cheapest way to go.'
'Especially when the state's picking up the tab,' Casper added. 'A lot of these kids were probably runaways, with no family, no money.'
'Perfect targets no one would miss. I'm wondering how long this would have gone unnoticed if Harrison hadn't been poisoned,' Elise said. 'But what about the bodies that weren't cremated?'
She heard keys clicking. 'Three of them were shipped back to their families in different parts of the country. Another one went to Charleston.' Some more clicking. 'Here it is. One guy, named Gary Turello, is buried in Savannah 's Laurel Grove Cemetery. We have all of his identifiable scars and tattoos on file. Just give me a second while I look it up…'
More clicking followed by silence.
'Let me guess,' Elise said. 'Black Tupelo.'
'Yep.' That one syllable held tremendous satisfaction.
She looked at Gould, whose eyebrows were raised in question. She nodded.
'If we get him exhumed, what are our chances of finding tetrodotoxin at this point?' Elise asked.
'You can encounter a lot of problems when trying to analyze samples obtained from embalmed bodies,' Casper said. 'It makes a difference how much embalming fluid the funeral director used. And whether or not the casket leaked. I've seen organs that had to have the water literally wrung out of them.'
'Thanks for that nice visual.'
'You're welcome. Turello was buried a year and a half ago, but I'd say it's definitely worth a shot.'
'Is there any way to rush this through the approval process?' Elise asked.
'I'll put in a call to the state medical examiner at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in Decatur,' Casper told her. 'She's the one who'll have to sign off on it, but considering the gravity of the situation, that shouldn't be a problem.'
'How long will it take?'
'I'm guessing one or two days. Sometimes we run into people who don't want their loved one disturbed. That's understandable. If that happens, then we have to petition the court for disinterment, which could take a whole lot longer.'
'Let's just hope the family complies,' Elise said. She thanked him and disconnected.
In her room above Black Tupelo, Flora assembled all of the items Strata Luna had told her she would need for a love-drawing spell: High John the Conqueror root and goofer dust, along with a piece of brown paper torn from a bag. Waterproof red and black pens, a new spool of red thread, a small red flannel bag, and a sharp knife.
From the other side of the wall, in the room adjacent to hers, came sounds of sex.
Hushed voices. Laughter. The frantic squeaking of a mattress.
Flora should be working too, but she had more important things to do.
On the brown paper, she wrote the name David Gould seven times in black ink. She rotated the paper a quarter of a turn and printed LOVE ME OR DIE over his name seven times in red ink.
She immersed the name paper in a bowl of her own urine, then wrapped and shaped the soaked paper around the root. That was followed by the goofer dust and red thread.
She wound it round and round until the paper was entirely covered, then tied it off with several large knots, leaving a length of thread for hanging.
Strata Luna had told her the secret was to store the root in the red flannel and keep it wet with urine.
With her finger wedged between two knots, Flora swung the covered root back and forth.
'David Gould, love me or die. David Gould, love me or die.'
Chapter 15
Strata Luna had agreed to meet Elise at four in the afternoon in a small cemetery near a church on St. Helena Island, a place that was steeped in Gullah heritage. It was also where Jackson Sweet was supposed to have been born.
Elise followed a crude map that had shown up at her home in a manila envelope sealed with the Black Tupelo design. The church ended up being a two-story clapboard structure blasted gray by wind and sand.
A long black car with Georgia plates was parked not far from the building, its front bumper a few inches from a fence tangled with heavy vine. Elise swung her car around and backed up, keeping a good fifty feet between the two vehicles. She looked over her left shoulder to see her buddy Enrique behind the wheel. He smiled and pointed
