Anita Blake 24 - Dead Ice (72 page)

He hit her hard enough that she fell to the floor, but she kept talking. “Melvin’s Diner, Trust Bank, Lucky Lady strip club.”

The man in the corner rushed out into camera view. Short black hair, trimmed neat, and a hooded sweatshirt with a design on it. He grabbed the zombie’s arm and the moment he touched her she stopped talking. I could still feel her energy and his now, but I couldn’t hear her in my head. His touching her had put her back under his control. Damn it.

He kept his face turned away, but he spoke to me, not to the zombie when he said, “Anita, I’ve wanted to meet you.”

“Type: We should have coffee sometime and talk.”

A voice off camera read back my words to him. He laughed. “A coffee date with Anita Blake, my mother would be so happy.”

The screen went blank. I couldn’t feel the zombie anymore except as a vague sensation. “I’ll know that zombie again when I get close enough to it, but I can’t hear her now.”

“They cut the feed,” Brent said. “They’re gone.”

“What was all that the zombie was saying?” Gillingham asked.

“Clues,” Manning said.

“She was trying to tell us things she’d heard or seen, to help us locate her, I think,” Brent said. He typed in what we could remember, and then went back over the screen capture of the video for any place in Illinois that had a Trust Bank, Melvin’s Diner, and a Lucky Lady strip club.

“Trust Bank is a Midwest chain, that’s not helpful. There are about twenty Melvin’s or Mel’s Diners across the country, but there’s only one Lucky Lady strip club. Holy shit! We may know what city they’re in!”

I prayed that he was right, and that we found them soon, and I said thank you, because when God lets you hear the prayers of the dead, well, He’s pulling out some serious stops for you. I was grateful. I’d be even more grateful when we found Ruthie Sylvester and set her soul free, set all the souls free that we’d seen imprisoned on the videos. Then I wanted the animator, or voodoo priest, or whatever the fuck he called himself punished to the full extent the law allowed. If we could prove that he’d killed any of the girls so he could trap their souls at the moment of death, then it was an automatic death sentence, because it would fall under the magical malfeasance acts. If someone killed with magic or for magical purposes, they were treated like rogue vampires or shapeshifters. It was the only time a warrant of execution could be issued specifically for a live human being. I hoped we proved it. I didn’t have to be the one to pull the trigger on him, but for this, he needed killing. I’d have apologized to God about that whole vengeful thing, but I’d read the Old Testament; I was pretty sure He’d be okay if we helped Him out with that whole “Vengeance is mine saith the Lord,” just this once. I felt that little pulse that I got sometimes when I prayed; it usually meant that I’d get what I asked for, or at least He was listening. Holy Wrath of God, Batman, your ass was going to be ours soon, you soul-trapping son of a bitch.

T
HREE DAYS LATER
I was standing in the room where they’d filmed the videos. It was really half a room, with the other half set up with a box of props and even a makeup area, as if the zombies, or their customers, really cared that much. I stood looking down at the bed that had been the main prop for all that horror and thought aloud, “Where are you, you son of a bitch?” Apparently, I said it out loud.

“Did you say something, Marshal?” Gillingham was sitting at the mirrored makeup area in her Windbreaker with FBI emblazoned on it, but then I was in my U.S. Marshal’s version of the same. We were both wearing our body armor, which was standard for most fieldwork.

“Sorry, talking more to myself, just wondering where the hell our bad guy is.”

“We caught a lot of bad guys,” she said, and turned around to face me. She looked more herself somehow in the dark pants and boots than she had in the costume conservative skirt outfit. The only thing still the same was the upper layer of her hair being held back by a barrette, and the lack of makeup, but that part was pretty standard for most female operatives in the field.

“We caught a lot of the guys helping make the videos, but they swear they didn’t know if he trapped the soul at the moment of death, which means they didn’t think they were doing anything illegal.”

“If they didn’t know the zombies might be murder victims then they weren’t.”

“See, that’s the thing, regular zombies always kill their murderer. They are unreasoning, almost unstoppable killing machines until they strangle or tear apart the person who murdered them, but these were as pliable as a normal zombie.”

“And you have no idea why,” she said.

“No, not really. It’s almost as if the soul going into them so soon after death prevented the normal homicidal fixation to kick in.”

“More’s the pity,” she said.

“Yeah, that would have been a short, unpleasant career for him. Instead he’s still out there somewhere able to start all this over, or worse.”

“How worse?”

“He could make the perfect sex slave if he knows how to give control over to a customer the way Dominga Salvador did. Hell, I know how to bind a zombie to a client so they can control it for a day or two. With the soul intact and never coming out, the zombie might be able to pass for human indefinitely.”

“Do you honestly believe that no one would notice it was the undead?”

I thought about Thomas Warrington. “If you could keep the mind and body from ever rotting, and retain the personality, hell, Teresa, the zombie itself might not know it was dead.”

“But it would never age, eventually someone would notice that,” she said.

“That could take decades,” I said.

“Mother of God.” She whispered it and crossed herself. Funny what habits stay with us in times of stress.

The FBI hostage rescue unit, HRU, had been the ones that raided the place once everyone figured out where it was, because they were closer, and though in the movies it would have been just our little band of agents and psychics, in real life you didn’t make potential hostages wait eight hours for rescue, or give the bad guys an eight-hour head start on destroying evidence and fleeing the country. So Manning, Brent, Gillingham, Larry, and I had come late to the party.

They’d found the zombies, including Ruthie Sylvester, in the basement, lying in a heap like someone had swept the garbage up in the center of the room, except this center had been an altar. I’d only seen pictures of the zombies piled up, but they’d left the broken shards of pottery and glass scattered around the bodies, and the chalk drawings that covered the floor and the walls were still there, so that there was only a narrow walkway through it all. The drawings were verve symbols meant to draw and keep power in a place. It was the inner sanctum of a voodoo priest, or priestess, and it was damn near identical to the setup that Dominga Salvador had had almost seven years ago in her basement in St. Louis. She had had extra rooms off of her altar room though, and they had contained more of her creations. She’d learned how to take dead flesh and melt it together like wet clay and make monsters. She’d used human and animal zombie remains so it had been particularly horror-show worthy. The practitioner in New Mexico who could do it had used only human parts, so his haunted me more, but I was still glad that the new guy couldn’t do it.

They’d brought in a voodoo expert, who was still here when we arrived. I’d asked him if the basement setup had to be that way, or was there room for variation. He said there was room for variation, but he wasn’t a follower of voodoo, only an academic, so I didn’t trust him to have real world knowledge, because he didn’t.

I’d ask Manny when I got back home. He’d know. I couldn’t use anything he gave me in court, but the information might help me figure out if having the verve downstairs so close to the same arrangement as Dominga’s was part of how this awful spell was done. Did that mean they had to kill the girls in that room and capture their souls right there? If it did, then the guys in custody were lying, because you’d notice if living girls went downstairs, but zombies came back up. Or was everything below so he could make the bottles that captured the soul? If that was true, then the other men and one woman we had in custody might honestly not have realized they were part of a murder conspiracy. I just didn’t know enough, and the FBI expert wasn’t sure enough to testify in court, so unless we could prove they knew, they actually hadn’t broken any laws. We might have to let them go. I didn’t want to do that. Hell, he wasn’t even sure you had to capture the soul at the instant of death. But did we really believe that they’d just waited for the right type of natural death to occur so they’d get a nice-looking corpse? No, but we couldn’t prove they hadn’t done just that. Damn it!

“Why don’t any of the files on Dominga Salvador show the verve like we have here?” Gillingham asked.

“I told you, she had to literally whitewash everything and destroy her creations when she realized she was going to be raided by the cops.”

“So we only have your word for it looking identical to this.”

“Yeah, as your boss keeps pointing out.”

“I’m sorry for that. Jarvis is usually really excited about meeting new psychic talents.”

“I think he likes meeting new bright and shiny straight-out-of-the-academy talent, because you’re still willing to drink the FBI-flavored Kool-Aid. I’m a little past waving the company flag and saying, go, team.”

“I think I’ve been insulted,” she said, but smiled to take the sting out of it.

“It’s not your fault that Jarvis recruited you for his pet program when you were young and impressionable. I remember being a rookie and thinking I could save the world.”

“You don’t believe you can save the world anymore, Anita?”

“No, Teresa, I don’t. Some nights just saving myself takes everything I got.”

The door opened and Very Special Agent Jarvis walked through. He was tall, athletically thin, with dark hair cut short and neatly, with eyes that seemed to see everything and approve of maybe half of it; the rest he distrusted completely. I fell into the half of the world he distrusted.

“When are you going home, Marshal Blake?”

“When I feel that I’ve got no more to contribute here, Special Agent Jarvis.”

His face made that little moue like he’d tasted something sour. “I think you’ve given us all the information that you have to offer.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that he’s still out there?”

“Of course.”

“Then why do you keep trying to give me the bum’s rush, when I’m probably the best you have at dealing with the undead, which is his specialty?”

“I have one of the most powerful touch clairvoyants to come down the pike in a decade, all she has to do is find something he’s touched.”

“Touched often,” I said.

He nodded. “I grant you that.”

“He took everything, Jarvis. Beck can’t find any common item that belonged to our missing man,” Gillingham said.

“I can’t believe we don’t even have a name,” I said.

“Sir, he’s just sir,” Gillingham said.

“It’s like he treated them all as if he were their dominant and they were all submissive to him. He was on a serious power trip.”

“No one will argue with that,” Jarvis said.

“Wait, did you say your clairvoyant is trying to find common items to touch?”

“Yes.”

“What about the zombies he made?”

“We tried that, but she got the impressions from the bodies themselves. Their lives, not his.”

“Beck was hysterical for hours after that,” Gillingham added.

“No need to overshare, Agent,” Jarvis said.

“Sorry, sir.”

“Damn it, we can’t lose him like this.”

“They say he took one zombie with him, the most lifelike. He only let her do two films with actors, and he never took her soul out and let her rot. She was special to him, they all agree on that,” Gillingham said.

“Do we have the videos of her?” I asked.

“Yes, they weren’t put out online, but they have them.”

“Do we have a still frame for a picture?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“If she was special to him, maybe he knew her when she was alive?”

“We do know our job, Marshal.”

“Sorry, I’m just brainstorming.”

“Well, we don’t really need your brainstorming, we’re pretty good at it ourselves here at the FBI.”

“Why don’t you like me, Jarvis?”

He looked startled. “I don’t dislike you, Blake.”

“I didn’t ask that, I asked why don’t you like me?”

“I heard you were direct.”

“Yeah, now are you going to answer the question?”

“You are uncontrollable. Your powers seem to have grown exponentially and no one knows what the limit of that power is, or if you have limits to your necromancy. You have your uses for helping the common good and keeping the peace, but your gift has been misused for centuries. Necromancers always seem to be creating armies of the undead and trying to conquer countries.”

“Actually, everyone says that, but I can’t find a single historical account of it really happening; can you?”

He was caught off guard for a moment, but he recovered his surety and his prejudice rapidly. “I don’t have to debate with you, Marshal. You can go home and leave things in our capable hands.”

“You mean in the hands of people you can control, with talents that don’t scare you.”

“The man we’re chasing, this Sir, is a necromancer like you. Will you argue that he’s not evil?”

“He’s evil, but he’s not necessarily a necromancer. He could just be a powerful voodoo practitioner. I hesitate to call him a priest, because that implies followers and I think he’s solitary.”

“His powers are still over the dead and he has abused them.”

“I don’t abuse my powers.”

“You raise historical figures for academics to question. You raise families’ lost ones so they can cry at the grave and ask forgiveness. You raise people from the dead over disputed wills and grand jury testimony. You disturb the dead for money, Marshal Blake; I think that is an abuse of power.”

“So you think the touch clairvoyants working in the major museums worldwide to help with antiquities are abusing their power?”