Unsympathetic Magic - Laura Resnick [148]
“None taken,” said Max.
“Look.” I pointed to the hilltop. The angry churning of the black clouds was dying down, the flashes of lightning were fewer and less fierce, and it looked as if the storm gathered directly over the watchtower was starting to break up.
“The dark loa have had their meal,” Max said. “They’re preparing to depart.”
“What are those?” Biko asked.
In the intermittent flashes of light overhead, we could see thin columns of smoke curling upward from two spots on the plaza and several places on the spiral iron staircase inside the tower.
“Her creatures,” Max said. “Their existence ended when hers did.”
“Oh, right,” said Biko. “You said once that to dispatch the zombies . . .”
Max concluded, “We would simply have to dispatch the bokor.”
“Looks like the Petro did it for us,” said Biko. “Even so, there wasn’t anything simple about it.”
“But how did you know about her?” I asked. “Or that I was in danger? Or that she had poisoned—”
“After the citywide power failure, Detective Lopez came to my shop looking for you. Two patrolmen he had dispatched to the foundation to find you had already reported that you weren’t there. With no way of reaching you by phone—”
Biko said, “All the towers went down when the power failed. No one’s been able to use a cell phone all night.”
“Detective Lopez started hunting for you in the places he thought you might be. Your apartment, my shop. He told me his next stop would be the set of the television show.”
“The show!” I said. “I’m supposed to be at work!”
“Are you kidding?” Biko said. “We’re in a major power blackout, Esther. No one’s working except emergency personnel.”
I realized that if Lopez was willing to speak to Max and to the staff of The Dirty Thirty, he must have been very worried about me.
I said, “After realizing I wasn’t with the cast, he probably suspected that the patrolmen he had sent to the foundation had been hoodwinked.” I gave a scant summary of what Catherine had related to me about his behavior when he arrived. “By then, he must have realized I was in danger.”
“Meanwhile,” Max said, “in his anxiety about you, Detective Lopez was rather more forthcoming than usual. He told me his suspicions about Catherine Livingston. Recognizing that he is a man of very conventional beliefs in certain key ways, I did not precisely share my suspicions with him, but we did come to a mutual understanding that something was wrong at the Livingston Foundation, we both feared for your safety, and we should each try to find you by any means available.”
Wow. To trust Max to look out for my well-being suggested that Lopez had been at wit’s end by then.
“So I proceeded to the Garlands’ home, where I asked Puma and Jeff to recount to me again how Martin Livingston had died,” said Max said. “Considering the story now from the detective’s perspective—his conviction that Martin Livingston’s wife murdered him—certain features of the unfortunate event suddenly suggested an obscure method to me.”
“A method of murder?”
“Yes. Since Martin’s confessed murderer is now dead, we’ll never know for certain, but I believe Catherine put a curse on him that is known as ‘sending the dead.’ It is a particularly dreadful way to die. The bokor sends dead spirits—in many cases, destructive, malevolent ones—to inhabit the victim. The result is often a delusional form of apoplexy.”
“A massive stroke accompanied by hallucinations,” I said.
“And fatal,” added Biko. “Once we realized Dr. Livingston might have killed her husband, and might done it using all the voodoo, Vodou, hoodoo, and other stuff she’s learned over the years, a lot of other things fell into place. Max and Puma saw the pattern, and they realized that your life might be the big mojo offering that she was going to make to the dark loa who were bringing storm clouds over the city.”
We looked up at the Mount Morris Park watchtower again, where our evil adversary had so recently met her well-deserved end.
“Hey, look,” I said.