She hammered away at him. “The physicians see two possible origins of her illness, physical or neurological.”
“Right,” Dupree said. “Mental illness caused, at least in part, by exposure to something toxic.”
“They mentioned that possibility. But are you sure we’re talking about the same thing?”
“I don’t know,” he said faintly. “What are you talking about?”
“About what I saw upstairs in a padded cell: a woman with feeble vital signs, absence of ego, a belief she was dead, complete surrender of human awareness—”
“Sure sounds like zombification to me,” Charbou muttered.
“You could call it that,” Dupree agreed. He was fading fast.
Amaia got down beside his stretcher and bent over him. She noticed that his fingers were curled around a little gray pouch. Dupree jerked it away and hid it under the sheet.
“That’s not what I’m going to call it,” she told them. “It’s not just people from the banks of the Mississippi who’ve heard of the surrender of will. And I’m not talking about zombification. It’s a much more deliberate approach and it’s far crueler: brainwashing with drugs. GHB, scopolamine, flakka, even jimsonweed—people call it the devil’s snare.
“European police forces have been working hard over the past few years to break up human trafficking networks that subjugate women with drugs, keeping them semiconscious with substances that rob them of their will. Some of their victims knew more or less what was going on. They perceived they were being held as prisoners, but afterward they recalled living in a stupor and dreaming—or rather, experiencing—nightmares that never ended. Most of those rescued were astonished to learn they’d been in a haze for years. They couldn’t remember a thing. A few months ago, I arrested a man who abducted women, locked them up, and kept them high on Rohypnol. They were totally at his mercy. And there’s scopolamine, the rapist’s drug; in some cases it’s been used to induce individuals to empty out their bank accounts or give up passwords and identities.”
“I’m not disputing any of that,” Jason Bull replied, “but maybe you do have to be born along the Mississippi to assume that poudre de mort, death powder, reduced Médora Lirette to the condition she’s in now. Tetrodotoxin, if you want to use the scientific name. The victims of your trafficking networks regained their self-awareness once they were off the drug. Médora never will. She knows exactly what she’s missing.”
“Is that what she said Samedi took from her?” Charbou asked.
“Le petit bon ange. The good little angel that lived inside her. Her soul.”
“Okay now, it seems to me we’re getting pretty far off the subject.” Charbou was still pissed off by all this. “I’m no FBI super-agent,” he snarled at his partner, “but in my opinion it seems pretty harebrained to think that a single incident establishes a modus operandi. Médora disappeared during a natural disaster, but so what? It’s crazy to think they were going to wait ten years before doing the same thing again.”
Dupree sat up on his stretcher. The agony of the effort bathed his face in sweat.
Johnson was alarmed. “We should let him rest.”
Dupree motioned to ask for a moment to recover.
Bull went to his side and whispered, “Tell them, please.”
Dupree stared into the invisible distance. Then he told them.
“Hurricane Betsy devastated Louisiana in 1965. The levees broke, the city flooded, people drowned. I was only four. The night the hurricane hit, my father’s cousin Nana was taking care of several children in addition to her own daughter: four neighborhood girls, my sister, and me. My father and mother were trapped on Grand Isle. The parents of those girls, like mine, were away, either in Baton Rouge or down on the coast. We were up all night in Nana’s attic, which did have a window. A group of strangers invaded the house before dawn, tied Nana and me up, and carried off the girls. It was in the newspapers for years. ‘The Treme Six,’ they called them. At first, the police treated the case as a kidnapping, but they never found a trace of any of them. Two years later, their names were officially added to the list of people who went missing during the hurricane.”
With uneasy glances, they all held their breath, uncertain how to react.
Dupree went on. “But I was there. I was really little, but I know the hurricane wasn’t responsible. I saw who did it . . .”
Johnson said what they all were thinking, “Samedi.”
Dupree didn’t reply.
“How old were the home invaders?” Johnson asked.
“I know where you’re headed,” Bull intervened. “It happened forty years ago. Thirty years went by between the attack on the Dupree family and the Médora Lirette case. We told you we received instructions to stand down, and that’s what we did. But we’ve been watching. And we’re pretty sure Samedi’s been back several times.”
He ticked them off on his fingers. “On September 20, 1996, a year after Médora Lirette was taken, a fifteen-year-old girl named Andrea López disappeared from a trailer park outside Gretna. Her mother, a crack addict, claimed that Death came and took Andrea away.
“On January 11, 1999, a man was arrested in Acadia Parish and charged with complicity in the disappearance of his two daughters, fourteen and sixteen years old. He was a real scumbag, the sort who’d probably have sold them if he’d gotten the chance, but he kept insisting that armed men led by a demon broke in and carried his daughters off.
“In Estherwood, Samantha Oliver’s mother went to the police because her daughter disappeared during a storm. They assumed the girl was a runaway, even though the old woman across the street swore she saw dead men do it. According to her, they were led by Baron Samedi.”
Charbou frowned. “If there’s somebody abducting girls out there, why would he dress up like a weirdo?”
“To throw people off his trail,” Johnson said. “I spent two years investigating religious sects and illegal rituals. I learned back then that in eighty percent of the crimes involving magic or satanism, the magical or supernatural element was used deliberately to confuse people. And it almost always did. Media outlets go wild for that kind of thing. Only about two in every ten cases involved people who really believed that stuff.”
Bull nodded. “We don’t assume Samedi is an individual. Samedi’s more like a cult with a leader, a bokor, who puts on that identity to terrify and dominate. This wouldn’t be the first time. It’s common knowledge that down in Haiti, President François Duvalier sometimes dressed up as Baron Samedi and cavorted on the balconies of the presidential palace. He even went out into the neighborhood to scare people into believing the president himself was Samedi or at least was protected by Samedi. In any case, a witness, no matter how reliable, is immediately discredited as soon as he claims that the death baron carried the girls off. It sounds so absurd that the police turn a deaf ear. If we hadn’t been tracking disappearances of young girls that occurred during disasters, we’d probably never even have noticed.”
“Sherrington’s victimological profile,” Amaia mused. Dupree nodded, feeling understood. “You posit the existence of a predator or a facilitator—which would make him even harder to trace.”