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Twenty minutes later, they pulled up in front of Francie Letourneau’s small apartment with renewed purpose. The now-dead maid had worked for two now-dead wealthy women from Ocean Boulevard. Ruth Abrams’s death was clearly a murder by strangulation. Now Drummond and Johnson were questioning whether Lisa Martin really had accidentally dropped the Bose radio in her bathtub. Had she been killed too?
They got the landlord to open the maid’s apartment, stepped inside. Johnson gagged at the smell coming from a makeshift altar in the corner.
A rooster’s severed head had been placed upright in the dead center of a tin pie plate. Two inches of chicken blood congealed and rotted around the head. The bird’s feet were there too, set with their talons facing a doll made of bound reeds, stuffed burlap, and cornhusks.
A long thorn of some sort jutted out of the doll’s groin. There were two more thorns in the heart. A fourth one penetrated the top of the head.
“Santeria.” Drummond grunted. “She must not have left it behind in Port-au-Prince.”
“Who’s the doll supposed to be?” Johnson said.
“Let’s figure it out,” the sergeant said.
They searched for almost an hour.
In a manila envelope on a small desk, Johnson found receipts from the prior month for a new couch, television, and Cuisinart food processor. In the top drawer, he found the receipt for the Apple MacBook Pro that was still in the box on the floor, next to the filing cabinet. Everything had been bought with cash.
The lower filing cabinet drawer was partially open. One file had been shoved in hastily and it jutted above the rest. Johnson pulled it and saw that the day before Letourneau died, she’d bought a brand-new phone and upgraded her plan through Verizon.
Johnson called the number, heard it go straight to voice mail. He made a note to pull her phone records.
Drummond returned after searching the bedroom.
“Anything?” he asked.
“She spent a lot the past month,” Johnson said. “All cash. I figure close to four thousand. I looked at her bank accounts. There’s no eight grand, and no record of a safe-deposit box.”
“Well, she wasn’t keeping it under her mattress,” Drummond said. “I’ve been over every inch of this place, both bedrooms, kitchen, all of it, and—”
Johnson looked at the sergeant. He had stopped talking and was fixated on the altar and the doll.
“Maybe Ms. Francie was craftier than we thought,” Drummond said, walking over. “Maybe she left that chicken blood there knowing it would reek and the voodoo stuff knowing it would freak out anyone who might break into her house looking for cash.”
He lifted the maroon cloth, revealing the legs of a folding card table, the carpet, and nothing more.
“Good thought, though,” Johnson said.
Drummond got down on his knees, reached under the card table, and said, “You give up too easy, Miami.”
The sergeant worked his fingers into the carpet and ripped up a one-by-two-foot section that had been held in place with Velcro strips. He got out a jackknife and pried up an edge of the floor.
Drummond reached in, came up with a black leather purse, and eased out from under the voodoo altar. He stood up, brought the purse over to the desk, and opened it.
The sergeant whistled, shook his head, said, “Francie, Francie, what did you get yourself into?”
Johnson peered into the purse. “If those are real, Sarge, there’s a lot more than eight grand in there.”
Chapter
50
Starksville, North Carolina
Sharon Lawrence held up well under Naomi’s initial cross-examination. She stuck to her story about Stefan drugging and raping her and being so afraid of him she didn’t report it until after he was under arrest for Rashawn Turnbull’s murder.
“You have a lot of girlfriends, Sharon?” Naomi asked.
The girl nodded. “Enough.”
