Papa Danwe, but we needed to make sure our flanks were secure. If the Haitian wanted a war, it sounded a lot less insane if he had support from other outfits in the area.
“You want me to put out the word for the guys to go to the mattresses?”
“I think not. Everyone will have heard about the killings by now, but I don’t want any special precautions to be taken. Unfortunately, I think we need to leave the bait in the water to draw out our fish.”
Rashan was a pretty nice guy, but whenever I forgot that he was also a cold, calculating, mobbed-up Sumerian sorcerer, he said something like that to remind me.
“Okay,” I said, “what about Lee?”
“The body was removed immediately. Even in L.A., the authorities will eventually notice a corpse floating in a canal. Ringo is down at the bar—he can give you directions if you’d like to investigate the scene.”
“Yeah, but I probably won’t find anything more than I did at Jamal’s apartment.”
“Is there anything else you wish to report?”
I thought about Adan. I could tell Rashan I’d met his son at the club and I wanted to date him. I could tell him about the Vampire Fred. I could tell him Adan had seen some of Papa Danwe’s boys at the club where Jamal had been hanging out. He probably deserved to know.
“That’s all I’ve got.”
“Very well, then, Dominica. I will leave you to continue your inquiries.”
The old man turned away. I left him there watching the stage, and my sins of omission chased me from the club.
I drove out to the place where Jimmy Lee’s body was dumped, one of the many concrete runoffs that crisscross Los Angeles County. It was in Hollywood, near the reservoir. It wasn’t outfit territory—most of the tags on the sloping concrete walls were mundane Crips-and-Bloods or Mexican Mafia shit.
I didn’t know exactly where the body had been found, or even if it had been found in the same spot it was dumped, so I just scanned the area with my witch sight. At the bottom of the spillway, tangled in some debris, I spotted a bedspread stained with Jimmy Lee’s juice. I guessed it had been on Jimmy’s bed the night before, and the killer had wrapped his corpse in it.
I waded down into the shallow, stagnant water and inspected the cover. Not all of the juice on the bedspread was Jimmy’s—it was black and it didn’t smell human. I leaned in and tasted it. Mostly it tasted like filthy canal water, but I was able to get a little magic from it.
I got an image of a tall, slender man in dark clothes scrambling down the side of the canal. Jimmy’s corpse was wrapped in the bedspread and slung over the man’s shoulder. The guy didn’t seem to be struggling much under the weight. It was impressive because he was injured, bleeding black juice into the cloth of the bedspread. Maybe one of Jimmy’s wards had gotten a piece of the bastard.
When he got to the bottom, the man flipped the bound corpse into the water and climbed quickly back up to where a pair of headlights marked a waiting car. I had the sense that someone else was standing there, a silhouette by the open driver’s door.
That was all I got. I considered taking the blanket with me, but I didn’t really want to fish it out of the canal, and I didn’t really want to ride around with physical evidence of a homicide in my car. I crab-walked my way up from the canal and returned to my Lincoln.
I hadn’t seen enough to identify anyone—certainly not the figure standing by the car, and not even the guy carrying Jimmy’s body. I knew who the guy was just the same—I recognized the juice. It was the Vampire Fred. Call it a hunch, paranoia or wishful thinking, but I’d known when I saw him at the Cannibal Club that I’d connect him to the murders.
The problem was that he couldn’t actually be the killer. The murderer had definitely been a sorcerer, and a pretty accomplished one. The vampire might be many things, but a sorcerer he was not. I’d known that the first time I saw him. The only juice he had was what he got from sucking blood out of people’s throats.
So the Vampire Fred was an accomplice. The figure standing by the car had probably been Papa Danwe. I was a little surprised the Haitian would take a personal interest in disposing of dead bodies. The figure might have been Terrence Cole, the henchman, but I didn’t think it was large enough.
So why was Papa Danwe using a vampire as an accomplice? Vampires could occasionally be useful as straight muscle, but that’s about it. If the Haitian needed someone to dump dead bodies for him, surely he had plenty of worthy candidates in his own outfit.
Vampires are somewhat resistant to a sorcerer’s subtler magics. I couldn’t probe Fred’s thoughts the way I could if he’d been human. If you knew you were going up against other sorcerers, that would be a pretty strong qualification in an accomplice.
I drove into Chinatown and let myself into Jimmy Lee’s apartment. One of the wards on the front door had been discharged, and I found a little more of Fred’s juice there, staining the wood and the hallway carpet. Jimmy had definitely put up more of a fight than Jamal. Good for him. It occurred to me that the killer hadn’t cleaned up the vampire’s juice. For that matter, he’d missed the stain on the floor of Jamal’s apartment, the one left by the soul jar.
Why? If he was good enough to scrub away all traces of his ritual magic, why not clean up the rest of the mess? I tried to think about it like he would. If I were the killer, all I really cared about was protecting my own identity and the details of my rituals. I didn’t want anyone to find out who I was, and I didn’t want anyone to find out why I’d chosen to squeeze Jamal and Jimmy Lee. Those were the big secrets, and as long as they stayed that way, I was covered.
Papa Danwe had really screwed the pooch when he left the stain from the soul jar, though. I’d been able to use that juice to identify the artifact, and I’d been able to connect the soul jar to the Haitian. This in itself wasn’t hard to believe—gangsters screw up all the time—but it seemed out of character for a cunning son of a bitch like Papa Danwe. Maybe he could only clean up his own magic. That was a lot more than I could do. Maybe he didn’t clean up the juice from the soul jar, or the juice that leaked out of the vampire when the ward popped him, simply because he couldn’t.
It occurred to me that he might have wanted me to find the stain and track the soul jar, but that idea didn’t lead me anywhere useful and I put it away. Clues had been hard to come by, and the soul jar had been the biggest one I got. I wasn’t a detective, but I knew I could paralyze myself if I started to second-guess all my leads.
But why had Papa Danwe left Jamal hanging in his apartment, and then made a feeble attempt to dispose of Jimmy Lee’s body by dumping him in a canal? I felt like I was in a poker game where I was sure I was being outplayed, but I wasn’t sure exactly how or what I should do to escape the trap.
I searched the rest of Jimmy’s apartment, but I didn’t find anything more than I’d found at Jamal’s. Maybe a real investigator would have had more luck, like those forensics experts on TV. Fingerprints, fibers—there could be all kinds of evidence that I had no way to find, and no way to analyze if I did find them. Not for the first time, it occurred to me how limited magic was, especially when dealing with another sorcerer who knew how to cover his tracks and block me at every turn.
I found myself wondering, again, if I was in over my head. Rashan obviously trusted me to handle this situation, but why? I had to admit it really wasn’t magic that was limited—it
