“Jayné?” Aubrey said.

“The movie,” I said. “Turn it off.”

SIXTEEN

The screen was empty gray. Night had turned the windows of the house into dark mirrors. Some brave, early spring cricket sang defiance at the world, as likely to attract a predator as a mate. Aubrey and Chogyi Jake sat on the couch together, the bowl of popcorn forgotten between them.

“Okay,” I said, pacing the floor, my mind bouncing around like a monkey behind my eyes. “So here’s the thing. I think we’ve been wrong the whole time.”

“About what, exactly,” Chogyi Jake asked. From anyone else, it would have felt like an attack. In his voice, it was just an opportunity to be a little more exact. I took a deep breath and tried to put the whirling cloud in my mind into a straight line.

“It doesn’t all fit together, does it?” I said. “We’re looking for this rider that got voted off the island, but we’re seeing this old lady who’s been leading a voodoo cult in the same place for years.”

“But we know she’s a rider,” Aubrey said. “She tried to kill you.”

“Legba tried to kill me,” I half-agreed. “But Legba doesn’t make sense as the exiled rider. Amelie Glapion’s been doing the whole voodoo queen thing for years, and her family’s been at it for generations, right? I mean Amelie was grooming her daughter to take over, and now Sabine.”

“I thought that was what makes her a good target for Legba,” Aubrey said. “That she’s…”

“What? Powerful? Prepared? Surrounded by people who know how to deal with riders?” I said. “That’s my point. If I’m the exiled rider, she’s the last person I’d want to possess.”

“Maybe her cult wasn’t really dealing with riders. Maybe they were just a religious thing. Fakes,” Aubrey said. I could hear in his voice that he was struggling to follow me.

“They knew enough to open the way for Marinette. Dr. Inondé said they were the real deal,” I said. “I think Legba’s been in Amelie Glapion the whole time, and probably her mother before her. Legba isn’t the exile. Legba’s been in New Orleans the whole time, going from mother to daughter down through the generations, just like with Marie Laveau. Like a family business.”

“Then what’s Karen been chasing?” Aubrey said.

“You remember what Karen said about riders being mistaken for each other?” I said, finding the words as I went. “About there being another rider that can do that stop-time thing that Legba did?”

“The one that had the same ecological niche,” Aubrey said, nodding. “Like the wolves and hunting cats.”

“Carrefour,” Chogyi Jake said. “Its name was Carrefour.”

“And the Freddy Krueger on steroids thing that went after Sabine didn’t look anything like the snake monster that came out of Amelie,” I said.

“Different riders,” Aubrey said. “You think there’s two different riders.”

“So Carrefour-not Legba-gets kicked out of Haiti,” I said, waving my hands to illustrate each point, “and it rides Mfume up to Oregon. Only Mfume gets caught. He’s stuck in prison, so it… I don’t know. Shifts. It moves into someone powerful enough to be useful. And then it starts isolating the new horse, right? It kills her partner. It kills her parents.”

“Her parents?” Aubrey said. “You mean you think Karen…”

Chogyi Jake made a small, satisfied sound in the back of his throat and smiled thinly. There was no particular pleasure in the expression.

“The hurricane injured Legba badly,” Chogyi Jake said. “Amelie Glapion suffered a stroke. The intended heir died, leaving Sabine to be promoted whether she was prepared for it or not.”

“Vulnerable,” I said. “It left them vulnerable. Carrefour found out, and it figured this was its chance to come back.”

“The wolves start dying out, and the hunting cats come in,” Aubrey said, starting to follow my logic.

“And so Karen comes to New Orleans,” I said. “Maybe it takes her a while. Maybe she doesn’t know it’s happened or exactly who Legba’s riding. There’s a bunch of people who say they’re voodoo queens or houngans or whatever. Maybe Carrefour needs to figure out who the right target is.”

“Or who would get the new daughter organism,” Aubrey said. “With Amelie’s daughter dead in the storm, Karen-Carrefour-would have to find out who was going to be the next host.”

“Exactly,” I said. “But it turns out even the riders who used to be part of Carrefour’s team-the Petro loa like Marinette-have closed ranks against it.”

“Marinette,” Aubrey said, then paused. He seemed lost in himself, but only for a moment. “She hated Karen. She hated Karen more than she hated Legba.”

“And right after the exorcism, I asked Karen about trying to recruit the local riders. She shot me down because she knew everyone was against us,” I said, still pacing. “Carrefour didn’t have any local allies. And Carrefour had kept Karen isolated, so there wasn’t anyone she could bring in.”

“Except the hired guns. Meaning Eric. Meaning us,” Aubrey said.

She’d kept me off balance. She’d taken me out to the club instead of leaving me to my research. She’d dismissed me every time I’d questioned her. She’d seduced Ex. And when I started doing things on my own and asking too many questions, she’d told me to leave.

I’d been a chump.

“It answers everything,” Aubrey said.

“Well. Not everything,” Chogyi Jake said, “but it-”

I held up my hands, palms out. My fingers were trembling. My blood felt slightly electric.

“Okay, hold on. Before we get too freaked out, let’s just… look at it. I mean, maybe I’m wrong,” I said. “When I went missing, who was with Karen?”

Chogyi Jake and Aubrey glanced at each other. I couldn’t stop talking.

“I’d just said how we ought to warn Sabine, Karen said no we shouldn’t, and then I went AWOL, right?” I said. “If Carrefour is riding Karen, it might think I was running off to spill the beans. It freaks out and decides to go after Sabine right then. But that can’t be true if one of you guys was with Karen the whole time. If she has an alibi for the time when I was getting my ass kicked, then I’m wrong.

“So was she with someone when it happened?”

The silence wasn’t any longer than two or three breaths together. It seemed like hours. Aubrey cleared his throat.

“No, she wasn’t,” he said. “I think we have a problem.”

THE FIRST flight back to New Orleans left at five in the morning, but had a huge layover and didn’t get us on the ground until early evening. A later flight would actually get us there earlier. Waiting in the terminal with the Monday morning business commuters, I kept reminding myself that by not going immediately and as fast as I could, I’d actually get there sooner. Intellectually, it made perfect sense, but my guts wanted the rush of speed, the appearance of heroic action. Something.

Because I had missed the cues, because I had been pushing myself too hard and letting myself get distracted, Ex was sleeping with a serial killer that slaughtered its lovers. I wanted to take it all back, to fix it, and I wanted to do it now, dammit.

“Joseph Mfume was part of a jailbreak from the Oregon State Penitentiary two years ago,” the lawyer said from my cell phone. “The reports were that they recovered a body from a river that was identified as him, but apparently that wasn’t quite true.”

“Right. And the others?”

“Only preliminaries,” she said. “Kent and Catherine Black died in a fire eight months after Mfume was incarcerated. The insurance paid off, so the adjusters didn’t think it was particularly suspicious. But…”

“But Karen worked arson cases,” I said, remembering the detail from the original background report.

“Exactly,” the lawyer said. “Michael Davis died in a rock-climbing accident.”

“Were there any witnesses?”

“None so far, but I only got your message this morning. There’s still a great deal of work we can do.”