Cajun Gothic (Blood Haven) Read Online Free PDF Page A

bazillionth
time did nothing for instilling clarity. He’d supplied all his peoples’
research jottings, file photos, newspaper clippings, and some cross-over links
to similar deaths in areas served by the parent company. Obits. Next of kin.
    That’s where New Orleans had popped, and the reason
I was flying down on an all-expenses budget jaunt to look into a similar set of
‘circumstances’. Unsolved and unresolved. Four hookers, over a period of six
weeks, all united by occupation but not necessarily by body type, or even
location. All drained dry.
    It was the tail-end of hurricane season. One of the
Goth Fests was in full swing when it, the incidents, started—Fall… nearly a
year ago. The first body barely made a ripple, nor did the second. By the
third, conspiracy theorists and those favoring serial killer stats had the
forums abuzz. One, two, three: bam, bam, bam. Like clockwork. The fourth hadn’t
been found until much later, and it was only through TV quality CSI-work that
links to the other three ‘ritual murders’ could be established.
    Tabitha was first on the list, short and stocky, skin
the color of milk chocolate and on the far end of her use-by date judging from
the fuzzy file pic. A Detective Rochon and his new partner had gotten a
heads-up, strangely enough from the whore’s pimp. Time of death was put at too
far out to be useful and, as with my city’s body count, hardly worth the fuss.
Plenty more where she came from.
    Det. Rochon also pulled number two, same pimp making
the call. More brown sugar, tall, skeletal lean. No pic, just the description.
Documentation didn’t seem to be a strong suit down there.
    Their pimp had shot to the top of the leader board,
name of Baptiste, whether that was first, last or only name wasn’t noted. His
alibi on number two was solid, and the man was rattled to his shiny wingtips.
He pulled all his girls and rabbited before his right to remain silent ink
dried.
    Number three was the freshest, discovered next to a
dumpster just hours after being drained. She was the only white girl,
relatively young, in her mid-to-late teens. No identification and no one to
claim her. Likely an independent contractor, aka runaway.
    A few enterprising newshounds with math skills added
up the bodies and came to enough speculation and sensationalism to jack the
murders to page three. The force got put on mild alert in the red-light
district, but beyond that no one in an official capacity seemed to care. The
pimps reportedly hired muscle to patrol their allotted turf for a while. It
didn’t take a genius to see they were doing that to show the city fathers some
good faith efforts to clean up their own shit without unduly taxing official
coffers. It worked to some extent.
    Number four was an afterthought, too decomposed to
be of use, but they had a name from dental records and some next of kin in a
northern parish with roots in Superstitionville. When the candles and charms
failed to pony up the perp, law enforcement lost interest.
    It didn’t help that inclement weather wreaked
last-gasp havoc on both the law-abiding, and not so law-abiding, citizens. Whoever,
whatever, had chowed down on the ladies of the night slipped away with the last
of the storms.
    I did the notes in chronological order,
cross-checked some missing persons, traipsed through homeless person reports, and
even missing teens, trying to trace some vector aiming toward my town. Nothing
popped.
    What did pop was another beer tab, looking to
hydrate after Annie’s excellent, but fire-breathing repast. Sometimes osmosis
worked just fine for me. Shuffle the papers, move stuff around, pile A here,
list of whatevers there, letting my subconscious have at it.
    I’d already had the ‘aha’ moment the night before.
What I needed was backstory… and a why. There’d been a tail, I was sure of it.
Was it the Goth—Vamp—chick from Haven? If the mythology was true, then the
answer to that was… unlikely. It’d still been