Read Online Vieux Carré Voodoo by Greg Herren - Free Book Online Page A

stopped talking. I wrapped my arms around myself. I was shivering.
    “You think it may have been the call that upset him so
much?”
    I nodded. “It had to be. I was worried about leaving him.
But after a few minutes, he was back to normal, so I thought he was okay.”
    Venus looked out into the street for a moment before turning
back to me and shrugging. “At first, it seemed pretty clear that he jumped. But
when we saw the inside of his apartment…” She let her voice trail off. “You’re
positive he couldn’t have jumped?”
    “He couldn’t have jumped.” I kept my voice steady. “There
was no way he could have climbed over the railing. He wasn’t that agile.”
    She nodded, her face impassive. “His apartment was
ransacked,” Venus went on. “Would you know if anything was missing? Can you come
up and take a look?”
    “I could try.” I thought for a moment. “Although my
mother”—I swallowed. Mom. Someone was going to have to tell my parents—“would
probably be better, or his maid. He was kind of a pack rat.” I shrugged. “He
kept everything, and the place was really cluttered. You think it was a
robbery?”
    “You mind taking a look around?” she asked, ignoring my own
question. “We’re going to need to take your prints, too—if you were there this
afternoon, we need to rule your prints out.”
    I took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s go.”
    I followed her down the passage to the back stairs. The
numbness and shock were starting to wear off. I still was having some trouble
wrapping my mind around the idea that Doc was dead. I was also dreading having
to call my parents and tell them. When we reached the staircase, Venus turned
and asked, “Did he have any relatives?”
    “He has a sister up in Vicksburg, I think.” I shook my head.
“He never really talked about her much. But my parents—they’d know.”
    Venus nodded and started up the stairs with me right behind
her.
    I don’t know what I was expecting to see when we got up to
the apartment, but it was a shock.
    Ransacked
wasn’t a strong enough word for what had happened to Doc’s apartment. It
looked like a bomb had gone off inside. The back parlor, where I’d toweled dry
earlier, was completely destroyed. The couch and the chairs had been slashed.
Their stuffing spilled out of the rips and was scattered all over the floor.
Tables were overturned. Books had been pulled down from the shelves and
scattered all over the carpet. Some of them had been torn apart, their pages
scattered here and there. The big mirror on one wall in its gilt frame had been
smashed. His bric-a-brac, once carefully arranged on tabletops and on the
shelves, lay everywhere. Some of it was in pieces. Art had been removed from the
walls. Some of it had been ripped from the frames and tossed aside like so much
junk. Other frames still held the art, but the glass had been smashed, the
prints scarred and slashed. The floor was covered with shards of glass that
glittered in the light. My jaw dropped. “Oh, wow,” I whispered. “This is
awful
.”
    Venus just nodded. “You said Garrett was an old family
friend?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Did he have any enemies?”
    “Doc?” I turned back to her in disbelief. “No. Well, yeah.
He used to feud with other historians, but it was all academic stuff. He used to
talk about it some, but I really didn’t pay a whole lot of attention. But to
kill him? And do all this?” I shook my head. “I can’t believe someone would be
angry enough over an academic dispute to do this.”
    “You’d be surprised what people will do,” she deadpanned.
    “I guess,” I replied dubiously, trying to remember what the
last feud had been about. We’d been at Mom and Dad’s for dinner in January. Doc
was telling us about some scathing critique he’d done for some historical
magazine about some book about—what had it been? I hadn’t paid much attention;
it all seemed kind of silly to