Day One:
Chapter Four:
"One and Two and Three again - And One was still as Three-,
And Two was One - And One was Done - And still it seems to be-"
The long stretch of highway led him around the mighty Mississippi and up toward the Garden District. The Garden District was the home of old money. The strong family ties were laid down and nourished there.
Most of the family inhabiting in the stately old manors were buried, conveniently enough, in the Lafayette Cemetery that their mysterious grave dust came from. The cemetery was plopped right smack dab in the middle of the Garden District. Although less popular and infamous than it's counter part the St. Louis Cemetary, the leafy Lafayette Cemetery was filled with ornate, 19th-century tombs.
In the charming Garden District, oak-shaded streets are lined with a diverse mix of homes, from single-story cottages to the grand historic mansions and lavish gardens of St. Charles Avenue- a favorite for tourists along the Mardi Gras parade route. Boutiques and antique shops sit alongside fine-dining restaurants, casual cafes and local bars on and around Magazine Street.
It was there, amongst the mess of shops that Leon Kennedy found himself rolling up to the first of his sources on voodoo.
A quick phone to Quint had the gears turning on more potential sites, but this one was easily enough found on YELP. She had five stars for being "awesome sauce squared, yo." She was a fortune teller, it would seem, and heavily immersed in the culture of the popular town that she inhabited.
Her name was Sheva Alomar and she was a fore teller of many things.
Whether laced with elements of voodoo or not, general fortune telling was a popular "sport" in New Orleans, a real tourist draw for those seeking to know their future, their past, and their present path to happiness or misfortune. The most commonly available forms of the practice were palmistry - where a medium would interpret the lines on the hand like reading a blue print of the brain, offering the viewer a portrait of the "forces" that guided and controlled the destiny of the hand in question - and tarot readings. There was some math, it would seem, involved in palmistry and some science.
The ancient art of tarot was largely revered as a "psychic" trait, where the seeker comes to the medium to be enlightened of the "truth" from symbols, messages, and divination of the "images" the medium received during the reading. lt was entirely spiritual and wasn't anything like reading the blueprint of the brain.
Sheva Alomar did both. She was also known for using her spirit animals to regard your path and find your answers in the beyond.
Honestly? It was probably mumbo jumbo, but he'd promised the FBI Agent currently considering him for murder that he'd check her out. Her name on a flyer in the Cafe Du Monde had led him here while Quint was digging up more leads.
The little house was quaint and charming. It was more on the edge near the Irish Channel than in the heart of the Garden District, but it was still part of the core, essentially. It was an adorable little shotgun style house in bright pink and purple. That was the thing about the Irish Channel - it never lacked for color.
This area was formerly a neighborhood of Irish working class immigrants who fled Ireland during the potato famine in the early 19th century. Many of these Irish workers helped build the New Basin Canal, which connected Lake Pontchartrain to the city. There were other immigrants as well, such as, Italians, Germans, and free African Americans. During the 20th century, most of the immigrants living in the Irish Channel worked in the nearby Port of New Orleans, and the many breweries that were common. They found the small cottages and rows of shotgun houses very affordable compared to the adjacent, more affluent, Garden District neighborhood.
Sheva Alomar made the bright colors and little house look inviting and revealing. It offered mystery and intrigue even as it told you that you were welcome. A good combination, and a brilliant business set up. Wind chimes hung from the pretty porch and tinkled in the heavy breeze musically, offering the flash of crystals and the deeper gong of bamboo with each rustle of movement.
He caught the scent of night blooming jasmine and sweet olive trees, a New Orleans staple, as he swung his leg over his bike and moved to knock on the bright yellow door.
The wafting scent of sage escorted him into the little house at the call from within.
It was dark and relaxing inside. It was cool and refreshing from the blistering heat outside. It was nice to escape it for a moment.
From beyond a beaded curtain, a pretty thing emerged. She was chocolately skin and big eyes. She was draped in shimmery scarves and a tiny little excuse for a skirt on ten feet of legs. She wore crystals and jade jewelry and tinkling bells on a chain around her flat, taut, toned little belly.
She smiled sweetly at him, "Welcome, seeker. Have you come to find your truth?"
At this point, he was thinking he might have come to find an woody, because she looked like a fortune teller from a porno he'd once watched as a boy. He laughed lightly and put his hand out to shake hers. "Looks that way, I'm Leon Kennedy, and I was actually hoping to ask you some questions."
Brow lifted, Sheva gestured to two plush arm chairs in pretty blue satin. They sat across from each other.
Between them? A big cage with an enormous yellow snake of some kind. It slithered, eyeing Leon like it might want to take a huge bite out of his throat for having dirty thoughts about his mistress. It was a buttery yellow color mixed with iridescent blue and white scales. He wondered if they'd match the ones at the crime scene.
Sure. That was likely after all, that he'd stumble right onto the killer by sheer luck. Sure. Yep. And the sexy fortune teller across from him was, also, going to drop right here and start "seeking his truth" right out of his trousers.
The idea made him chuckle and grin at her.
Sheva smiled politely, "What brings you to me, Mr. Kennedy?"
She rolled a small scrying stone in her hand as she spoke, watching his face calmly. The wall behind her was laced with crystals and masks paying homage to her ancestors. Candles lined the small buffet in rich wood against her other side, showing flickering shadows on the dusty rug.
Leon eased his boot over his knee, charming her with a smile. "I'm a seeker, Ms. Alomar, but not for my fortune."
"All men seek fortune now, Mr. Kennedy, let us not lie about that." Her accent was british mixed with cajun. It was lovely and said she was probably here by way of Africa.
"You got me there, chere, but I'm here to find out about this." He showed her the sketch of the veve done for Baron Samedi. Sheva took it, studying it intensely.
She lifted her gaze to his face, amused, "That's the Baron Samedi. The loa of greed and debauchery. Are you acquainted, Mr. Kennedy?"
He laughed, lightly. "Sometimes, I suppose. But I found that at a murder scene I'm investigatin."
Sheva sat back now, looking more interested, "Really? Are you police?"
He laughed, lightly, "No. Hah. No. For one whole day, yeah, I was. Not anymore."
"...not cut out for the thin blue line?"
He grinned at her, enjoying her teasing. He wasn't an idiot either, he got the subtle flirting behind it. "Apparently not. I'm a PI, now. I'm working the scene for the family of a victim. I'm hoping I can go places that being a cop would stop me. I just need the right...spirit guide it seems."
She laughed, rolling the stone in her pretty palm. "Where are you hoping I can guide you to, Mr. Kennedy?"
Leon lifted a brow, smirking, "Where else? The truth."
She nodded, lightly, and actually seemed to like that answer. "What can I tell you to help you in your quest?"
He leaned forward, keeping his eyes on her face, "Start with voodoo, and Samedi. Why would someone use him in a death ritual?"
Sheva rolled her shoulders, shrugging a little. "As well as being master of the dead, Baron Samedi is also a giver of life. He can cure any mortal of any disease or wound, if he thinks it is worthwhile. His powers are especially great when it comes to voodoo curses and black magic. Even if somebody has been afflicted by a hex which brings them to the verge of death, they will not die if the Baron refuses to dig their grave. So long as this mighty spirit keeps them out of the ground -they are safe."
Leon considered that, applying it to the nature of the crime scene. "So, if maybe they were sacrificing to him in order to cure themselves?"
"If they are ill, possibly. In addition to that, he also ensures all corpses rot in the ground to stop any soul being brought back. What he demands in return depends on his mood. Sometimes he is content with his followers wearing black, white or purple clothes or using sacred objects; he may simply ask for a small gift of cigars, rum, black coffee, grilled peanuts or bread. But sometimes the Baron requires a voodoo ceremony to help him cross over into this world."
They held eyes as she finished. It was pretty clear what she was saying here.
"You're saying someone would invoke him, offer him a human sacrifice in exchange for their own life, and guarantee he crossed over to climb his offering."
"Yes. If we wanted to infer why one might invoke him, that's a good enough reason, don't you agree?"
He did actually. It meant, possibly, their culprit was trying to keep from dying himself and using young girls to keep himself that way. He was a modern Elizabeth of Bathory, bathing in the blood of his victims for eternal youth.
Leon studied her pretty face, "What if he denied the offering?"
Sheva shivered, holding his gaze, "Then the victim may rise again from their grave. Left unable to cross over, they would become...something else. Something dark and unholy. They would...become undead."
Leon wanted to be sure what she was saying here, "A zombie?"
Sheva looked very serious now. No joking. No flirting. She said, "Yes. A zombie. A forsaken one."
Mumbo Jumbo.
Zombies. Stupid to think such things could exist. Stupid.
And yet the hair on the back of his neck was standing up.
He nodded, jotting down in his notebook as they talked. "I need to know who to contact, Ms. Alomar, about Samedi. About who might...often...invoke him. You know what I'm asking here."
She held his gaze again, "Mr. Kennedy...we practitioners are often a small club of dedicated advisers. To "give one up" to an authority is a direct violation of what we stand for. You're asking me to turn against my own people here. That is not something that is taken lightly in our small community."
He offered her the picture of Marianne Costas - the crime scene one that Ryman had made copies of for him. Horrible. Frightening.
And he watched it drift over her pretty face.
"Help me, Ms. Alomar. So this doesn't happen again. She was young. She was smart. She's dead now. Butchered. And you could be protecting the person who killed her. If we're right here, he didn't kill her for anything other than power and preservation. Help me stop him. Please."
Sheva lifted her pale gaze from the photo. She glanced again at it and back at his face. And finally, she answered, "I can get you names. Give me a few hours."
He nodded. He touched her hand. He held her gaze, "Thank you."
"Don't thank me, Mr. Kennedy. I'm betraying my faith here. I take that very seriously. I only offer it now because I agree with you. There's no reason for this. Invoking Samedi for something like this is horrendous. It's dark magic. It's blood magic. And I won't be a part of it."
She rose. She gestured with her head.
"I'm going to go make some calls. Please show yourself out."
He offered her a card with his number on it.
"Call anytime, Ms. Alomar. I mean it."
"I will. Good day to you, Mr. Kennedy."
She disappeared behind her beads. Leon stopped by the cage with the snake, he hesitated, and he used his fingernail to scrape one tiny scale from the edge of the cage. The snake eyed him, narrowly.
"Hey...you shed it, buddy. I'm just borrowing it to rule your mistress there out as a suspect. So take it easy."
And he was talking to a snake.
In a house of mumbo jumbo.
Discussing invoking loas in a voodoo ritual meant to raise the dead or offer them up or bring them back as monsters.
Lord.
Just another day in his line of work really, dealing with the weird, the odd, the pointless, the strange, the unusual, the unheard of, and the mythical.
"...the story of my life."
He opened the door and stepped out into the brisk sunshine.
Claire was having luck herself sipping a cool glass of water while she waited for the prints to reprocess.
Kevin Ryman had set her up at a computer in an empty office at the police station.
She was scanning old microfilm while she waited. It was pulling up anything she could on old murders that might connect, at all, with what was happening. She did a wide search, covering the country first and then narrowing it down to just New Orleans when that attempt came up too broad.
The article that populated first had her clicking and reading it.
And spidey sense started to tingle.
Early one afternoon in late January 1911, a police officer in West Crowley, Louisiana received an urgent phone call. Neighbors feared something terrible had taken place at 605 Eastern Avenue, and indeed, when Officer Clax arrived at the house, he found the home's three occupants—a man, woman, and small girl—lying in bed with their skulls split open. The bed was drenched in blood, and bloody footprints speckled the floor. The doors were locked, indicating that the killer had come in through a window and murdered the Birkin family while they slept. There was a bucket of blood in one corner, and at the head of the bed, just above the bashed-in bodies, stood a life sized tribute to Baron Samedi. The article refered to it, actually, as "a grim reaper" but it wasn't. It was Samedi. In his pale faced skull like glory. In his top hat and his evil grin.
The veve on the floor was smeared with blood and dust and chalk. But it was his. It was the same veve.
The local newspaper called it "the most brutal murder in the history of this section," but it was just one of similar slayings that would terrify parts of Louisiana and Texas in the early 1900s. Each subsequent article told a similar story. Each time she clicked, her alert rang in her head. She was jotting and printing, gasping and reading.
The crimes would become connected to rumors of a deranged Voodoo priestess and a cult called the "Followers of the Way," which was said to butcher its victims as part of their strange rites. But though suspicion initially focused on several men, the murderer was suspected to be female. Later study of old DNA found that to be true. And she was never caught.
Modern forensics might have identified her and stopped her. But back then, Claire mused, there was no hope of science to help them catch a killer. There was evidence of a cult but it was impossible to pin point more than a few suspected members.
A little more than four weeks later, on February 25, the murderer struck again, killing five members of the Spencer family in Lafayette, Louisiana. By then, the police began to suspect that their crimes were so similar they may have been "the work of the same terrible monster." A month later, in Rockfort Island, Texas, Alfred and Alexia Ashford were murdered in a similar fashion, along with their three children.
The murders continued even as the country began to see the toll of the wide swath. Again, like these, they were wide spread in origin. No one connection could be found.
The newspapers had a field day, and seized on the idea that the murders were connected to a Voodoo ritual. One of the first to take that angle, the Raccoon City Gazette, published a story on the Spencer Mansion murders titled "Outbreak! Voodoo Doctor strikes again!" The story suggested the crimes were connected to human sacrifice that took place as part of a Voodoo ritual, and emphasized the idea of the number five as somehow having ritualistic relevance. "Two months ago, six members of the Wesker family perished at the hands of the fanatics but left alive an infant that had been born only the day before the tragedy and in all probability had not been taken into consideration when the plans for the human sacrifice were consummated," the reporter for the paper wrote. "Now comes the Spencer tragedy with its five victims, thus completing a series of sacrifices of five separate families, each evidently intended to have involved five victims."
What did it all have to do with what was happening now?
Sacrifice. Human sacrifice in fives to Baron Samedi. Why?
And how did a crime from a hundred years ago play into what was happening now?
What was the likelyhood any of it was related? Was it possible it was simply strange coincidence?
There was one surviving infant of the murders. Claire clicked on the link for the family that had died: Wesker.
The youngest child was Albert. The only surviving Wesker.
He was laid to rest in the Lafayette Cemetery No.1.
She breathed, fast and low, "The same as the grave dust. The same as the fucking dust. Wesker...WESKER...what do you have to do with it all?"
The machine behind her beeped, revealing the fingerprint analysis was complete. Claire turned, looking at the read out. A match. A big one. A sure one.
The bone fragments were all the same victim. A "suicide" named Steve Burnside. She rolled her chair to pick up the print out. It was Burnside's obituary and profile.
Handsome kid, young, and with shaggy hair and dopey smile.
She studied him for a long moment, "What do you have to do with Wesker, Steve Burnside? And what does all of it have to do with Marianne Costas, Ann Blanchard, and Christa Walsh?"
There were no answers.
But she was betting she'd find some in the cemetery with Leon Kennedy.
Located in what now was the heart of the Garden District, between Washington, Sixth, Prytania, and Coliseum streets, Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 was the oldest of the seven municipal, city-operated cemeteries in New Orleans. It was a non-segregated, non-denominational cemetery. There were immigrants from over 25 different countries and natives of 26 states as identified on the closure tablets.
Since the water table for New Orleans put it below sea level, the dead were never buried. They were left in mausoleums that ranged from poor and plebeian to extravagant and rich. Vaults lined the narrow walks, offering the viewer the chance to speculate on who was entombed within. Few plaques were present, preventing you from knowing the family that had seen the end of a loved one.
Weird symbols were written on some of the walls of the tomb, some kind of language that Claire couldn't even begin to guess at. It was messages, surely, but to whom? Over what?
Impossible to know.
Technically, the cemetery had business hours, but a flash of a badge and a little smile found her walking amongst the tombs at just beyond dusk.
She was looking for a specific name. She had a map given to her by the person at the desk but it was little help. It only pinpointed a generalized area. It didn't offer much help beyond that.
The biggest tomb in the graveyard drew her eye. The name atop it was emblazoned in a heavy stone scrawl: WONG.
The Wong family was prominent in New Orleans. It owned half the city in terms of elite power and politics. It had fingers in pies that Claire couldn't even begin to guess at.
She studied the enormous mourning angel that graced the tomb. The plants surrounding it were fresh and lovely. The ivy that climbed the stone was pristine and pretty. The angel knelt in pious prayer, offering its lovely wings and folded hands in tribute to the blessed lord it served.
Claire considered it, sighing. A lot of money went into honoring the dead that rested within that tomb.
Her gaze shifted and glanced over the tomb beside it...and stopped.
Wong...WESKER.
Beside it, in a smaller and simpler stone tribute. WESKER.
Claire shifted toward it, excited and anxious. The door was sealed shut. There was no getting inside but the tomb looked disturbed. Cracked stone, shifting base, signs of infiltration and derelict neglect were present and raised her hackles.
She poked at the lettering on the door, considering it.
How many were laid to rest in there with the dead Albert Wesker? How many Weskers were there?
And where was Leon Kennedy while she was poking around in a creepy ass cemetery in the dark?
She aimed her small pen light between the crack in the door, trying to see inside. The light flickered over the spiderwebs and dust inside. It showed shadows and...something skittered. She aimed her light at it and -
"Whatcha doin there Lara Croft? Tomb raiding?"
Claire squeaked and dropped her light. She leaped a foot in the air and spun around, a hand pressed to her bosom in surprise.
There was the grinning face of the supernatural Indiana Jones, watching her with a twinkle in his gorgeous eyes.
"See anything good in there?"
Claire gave him a narrow look. "You won't believe what I found out."
"Yeah? Me either."
They talked, sharing intel, engaging each other in a quick and friendly way. Admittedly, she liked him. It was hard NOT to like him. He was charming. He was clearly intelligent. He was easy on the eyes.
He knew what he was doing.
And being in the private sector afforded him the ability to dig into things that might red flag for her if she tried.
It was a pretty good partnership they had started here.
If she could just stop picturing his chest with water beaded on it.
Finally, Leon queried, "You think there's something that'll help us in that tomb? Over a hundred year old corpse?"
"...why not? You said you think these people might be trying to raise zombies or something."
"...true. It all sounds fucking dumb doesn't it?"
"A little." She laughed. She shook her head. "It would help to know what kind of names might be on this list you're expecting."
"Yeah...I'd be curious to see if Wesker is on there."
Claire nodded, poking her light back into the crack to see if she could see anything in the tomb. "Me too. Any chance there's Wesker's surviving in the area?"
"Not to my knowledge. But I'm not exactly an authority."
"Who might be?"
They both turned. They both considered the elaborate tomb that waited beside the one they were hoping to raid. They glanced at it, and then at each other.
Leon lifted a brow. Claire poked a finger into her glasses to push them up her nose.
They both smirked.
The answer there was pretty simple. Who knew everyone and anyone in New Orleans? Who had their fingers in all the pies and knew all the names worth knowing?
Who could probably tell them about "Wesker" and what, if any, significance the name had?
The name beside the tomb. The name above the pious angel.
WONG.