In the centre of the room were three long banquet tables, mostly empty save for a few small items that Hilary had been working on before she’d left the room. Brian followed the woman to the centre table and she motioned for him to sit while she moved to a shelf full of legal boxes marked with various letters and numbers in black marker on the side.
“Are you a religious man, Mr. Littrell?”
Such a formality made him feel older than his years so after quickly informing her to call him by his given name, he nodded. “I am what most people would describe as religious. I believe in God, I go to church. Why?”
“What I’m about to tell you…” she said, the tail end of the sentence drifting off while she pulled a box down from the shelf and moved it to the table. “It’s something that most religious people would not believe and might even consider to be blasphemous or evil. If you want me to tell you more about the man you’re wondering about I need to know that you’re going to be able to accept some things as reality that seem unorthodox.”
Brian smiled but it was tight-lipped and anxious, his hands gripping the edge of the table. He stared wide-eyed as Hilary began rummaging through the box pulling random objects out that she then placed on the table. "Does this story end with an alien abduction?"
Her hands stopped and she stared down into the box with a sigh. "Please don't mock me," she said. "I'm sure there are probably aliens out there but I have no proof they're real. Black magic is real, though. That's what this story is about Mr. Litt...Brian. It's definitive proof that there are people out there with the power to play God."
From the box she pulled a stack of photographs and laid each one out in front of Brian in chronological rows. He watched as she laid each photo down but aside from the apparent age and the quality of the film he failed to see much in the way of a connection between the photos. There was a man in each of the photos, some seemed to be family photos while others mug shots and some candids. There was a slight resemblance between the men but nothing beyond the fact that they were all caucasian, somewhat fair with a slender face, overhanging brow and light coloured eyes but that’s where it ended.
Bypassing any explanation about the photos, Hilary began to tell Brian the story of her father. He was a well respected sociologist who specialized in the area of folk religion. For years he had studied the way remote communities formed and practiced their own religions. His explorations took him all over South America and and Caribbean before leading him to areas of Louisiana that most of the American public weren’t aware existed. There were still thriving communities of Haitian descendents living deep in the Bayou, completely off the grid. It was a place where tribalism was still apparent and generations of people still put their faith in witch doctors and the magic of Voodoo.
During his journeys he met a Voodoo Priestess who told him of a local legend, of a man cursed for all eternity to never age, never die, but to be forced to forever suffer with the pain of losing his soul and his one true love. After learning as much from the woman about the legend as he could, her father began to put together the pieces of the life of Joseph Gabriel.
Newly married and an officer in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, he had spent the first part of the war on the east coast, where most of the action was happening. When the Union captured New Orleans in the spring of 1862 he had been dispatched to Louisiana to head up a platoon of soldiers in an effort to keep the North from getting control of any more ports along the Mississippi.
Heat records had been set that summer that wouldn’t be broken before Global Warming became a common catch phrase. It was a miserable place to be and a miserable time to be in it. Not particularly well liked, Captain Gabriel’s unit had been assigned to secondary duties in the area, which essentially meant rounding up slaves who had escaped from their owners or been freed by Union soldiers.
They were left to search endless miles of swamps and forests for men and women who knew the area so much better than they did. Local legends spread like wildfire around the military camps about the marshland being a hot spot for Voodoo. Some of the soldiers who were from the area even claimed to have seen black magic done with their own eyes and it had everyone spooked.
One day, when Joseph Gabriel took a group of men deep into the damp, muck-filled forests the stories, combined with an ominous feeling of dread, the sounds of the animals and creek of the tall pines was enough to scare everyone away. They abandoned him in the forest and ran the other way. Not wanting to be called a deserter, he kept going forward by himself.
“What my father learned,” Hilary said. “Is that day he stumbled upon a group of people performing a Voodoo ritual. They took him hostage and held him for weeks. He wasn’t able to move because they were using some sort of poison from the plants and animals in the swamp that left him completely paralyzed but still aware of what was happening around him.
“These people were of the belief that consuming the organs of your enemies gave you their power. Different organs represent different strengths. In some African tribes, warriors would cut out the still beating heart of a foe and consume it, believing that they would be made more powerful by absorbing their enemy’s soul. To these slaves, this white man had an incredible amount of power so they took it from him.”
Brian swallowed hard, feeling as though a rock was stuck at the back of this throat. “They...they ate him?”
“Parts of him,” Hilary confirmed. “He was just another animal to them. In this religious sect, the liver held the most significant source of a person’s power. They believed that the liver of a brave man makes any man who partake in it also brave. It’s a well documented practice all throughout history.
“Where things get interesting is that they didn’t kill him. They had suffered outrageously at the hands of men like him and they wanted him to suffer, too. So, the Priestess, after cutting out his liver, while he lay bleeding and dying but unable to move, put a curse on him so that he would live an eternity without his bravery, without his strength, without his power and without anyone he loved.”
Brian couldn’t help but be skeptical, even though she’d warned him that he would have to suspend his reality of what could really be in order to accept the story. It just seemed to crazy to be true, like something off the cover of a trashy tabloid, right next to the Bat Boy update.
“I know you don’t believe me,” Hilary said, reading the expression on Brian’s face. “You don’t have to, but I need for you to look at these pictures again. They are the same man. My father died desperately trying to prove that this man existed but was never able to and was ostracized by the scientific community for even accepting that this fable could be real.
“Joseph Gabriel, Gabriel O’Dell, Nick Carter, whatever you want to call him, is the now the most powerful practitioner of black magic in the world, that I’m aware of. If your friend is the key to me finally being able to prove that this person exists then I beg of you to work with me. His girlfriend’s life depends on it...if she’s even still alive.”
Knox paced back and forth across the marble floor, he and Jensen waiting for a significant turn in their investigation. They wouldn’t have lab results from the remains that were found at the hotel for at least a day or two, even with their direct access to federal labs that could expedite the process. What they did have was enough evidence to show that the last place anyone had seen Lauren alive was the hotel and the last person she had been with at the time of her disappearance was her boyfriend who didn’t really seem to be concerned about her whereabouts.
Lawyers were currently laying it all out for a judge in order to get a warrant to bring Nick Carter back to Georgia for questioning. They didn’t expect he would be sitting around at home waiting for the police to drop by unannounced so it would probably be a day or two before he turned up. By that time, Knox expected to have definitive proof that Lauren Kitt was dead and enough to go on to show that Nick Carter had killed her.
Because her body was significantly burnt, they weren’t not going to be able to use this instance to link Nick to any of the other crimes they suspected he might be involved in. Everything would be circumstantial because without a missing liver, the indications of choking, or any of the other details from the other crimes, there was no way to show beyond a reasonable doubt that these deaths were in any way linked.
What they expected to hear from the medical examiner is that this woman, whoever she really was, was killed somewhere inside the hotel, dismembered and brought down to the basement where she was put inside the furnace and left to burn. The next step was to get a judge to allow them to question Nick Carter and search every video camera feed in the hotel for what Knox hoped was the damning evidence of murder.
