King of Swords

Raquel Fajima — day-shift manager at the forensics lab smiled broadly when she saw Max standing at her office door, miming a knock. They'd known each other for ten years and still laughed about the night they'd first met, when she was still working call-outs and Max was in uniform. A group of frat boys had blown themselves up in their car with a grenade, and Raquel and Max had had to look for ID in all the gore. Raquel had made a bunch of tasteless wisecracks while Max — still new to gruesome kinds of death — had been trying to hold on to the contents of his stomach because he didn't want to appear weak. Raquel had found a useable index finger stuck to an eight-track tape. She'd bagged the finger and, after she'd seen the tape was Deep Purple's In Rock, looked all around at the mess in the car and said, 'Serves you right,' which had made Max laugh so hard he'd puked anyway. She could have slipped into fairly cosy gear as lab manager, spending her time delegating, juggling and going to meetings; instead she played an active role in cases, working on samples that came in, writing them up and testifying in court.

Max and Raquel had remained friends over the years, occasionally meeting up for all-night drinking and bitching sessions, but these were few and far between now she was married and had a two-year-old son.

It was 8.15 in the morning. Raquel was drinking a cup of jasmine tea at her desk. Max could tell she hadn't been in the lab long because she wasn't wearing her white coat, her dark brown curly hair was still down to her shoulders, and she was seated. Every time he saw her he usually had to

compete for her attention with the microscope she was hunched over.

They kissed each other on either cheek and Max sat on the chair opposite her desk, which was completely clear of everything bar a phone and lamp. All the shelves were full of files and thick leather-bound medical books, and there were more files on the windowsill. She had no photographs or personal items of any kind anywhere in the office. Here she was all about work. Her personal life stayed at home.

They exchanged pleasantries. Her boy was well, as was her husband. She understood he was in a hurry and cut to the chase.

What can I do for you?'

ŚYou know the samples you took out of the courtroom shooter's stomach? What've you isolated and IDed so far?'

'The tarot card everyone remembers.' Raquel stood up and went over to a filing cabinet and opened a drawer marked 'Ongoing'. She ran her finger along a series of hanging files, then pulled out an orange wallet folder, which she riffled through to find a list. She then stooped down to the 'Links' drawer and pulled out a grey folder.

'Some meal he had!' she quipped, sitting down and looking through it. 'Shooter's first course was a soup of Kool Aid, sand, crushed sea shell and bone — we're fairly sure it's human, that's still tbt — to be tested. Next, diced sirloin of tarot card. The card was high-quality cardboard and coated with a plastic seal, making it harder to digest. He had that with a tasty side salad of cashew leaves, bressilet — poison ivy — two kinds of stinging netde, mandrake and a bean, also tbt. Not common. His third course consisted of a side order of choice creepy crawlies: a tbt snake, a few millipedes, tarantula legs, bouga toad and —'

'A what toad?'

'Bouga toad. B-O-U-G-A. Their gland secretions are toxic. Cause catatonia in large doses. Shooter's liver and

kidneys contained traces of tetrodoxin. Tetrodoxin's another toxic substance commonly found in puffer fish. A large enough dose can put you in a coma or plain kill you.

'This was all in some kind of potion designed to render the person who took it incapable of controlling his own actions,' Raquel said, tapping at the grey files. 'I've seen this kinda stuff before. Look at this.' She slid over the grey file.

It was an autopsy report on a black man, aged thirty five, who had wandered into incoming traffic on USi on 13 February 1979. He'd been hit and killed by a Buick, which had turned over, killing the driver and his passenger. The contents of the collision victim's stomach were almost identical to those in Moyez's killer — except for the bean and the tarot card.

And then he noticed something else - the man had been registered deceased on 8 July 1977. He was called Louis-Juste Gregoire, a Haitian resident, who'd lived in Overtown. His grave was in the City of Miami Cemetery. His first death certificate stated he'd died of natural causes.

'I'm sure you've heard of zombies,' Raquel said.

'Sure.'

'Forget what you think you know - Night of the Living Dead and all that. In Haiti, Louisiana, certain parts of West Africa and South America they practise two kinds of voodoo.

There's the traditional kind called rada, which is peaceful and harmless, and there's the Hollywood-movie kind — the dark variant called petro or hoodoo. This is all about worshipping evil spirits, putting death spells on people, human sacrifice, orgies. Zombies stem from hoodoo.