Lost Souls Division

by James LePore

Genres: Private Investigators; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

Three intense, mesmerizing short novels featuring one of the most distinctive thriller characters to emerge in years.

Meet Zev Evans, the ex-cop, ex-war hero turned anxiety-ridden fixer with a plate in his head, a pharmacopeia in his pocket, a chaotic but keenly observant mind, and a fearsome set of skills. Given to reciting mantras to calm the wild horses in his head, the half-Jewish, half-Sicilian Zev finds himself at the center of three challenges that can only be solved by someone with his unique talents.

Breathe in Grace: Zev investigates an illegal organ trafficking ring that exploits vulnerable immigrants for kidney transplants. When Zev is hired to protect a Guatemalan boy who needs a kidney transplant, the mission quickly becomes personal.

The Eyes of a Wolf: Zev is drawn into a dangerous rescue mission when a friend who once saved his life calls for help. He uncovers a web of criminal activity involving human trafficking, corrupt officials, and cartel violence, and he runs into direct conflict with cartel inforcers and corrupt law enforcement.

The Lost Souls Division: When a Haitian chef whose daughter died from a mysterious drug overdose asks Zev to find those responsible, Zev learns that the overdose involved a unique blend of fentanyl and voodoo-derived neurotoxins, suggesting a criminal operation that fuses Haitian spiritual practices with the synthetic drug trade. As Zev's investigation reveals a web of corruption and violence stretching from New York’s elite to the criminal underworld.

Filled with tension and ethical dilemmas, these short novels make for addictive reading.

Publisher: The Story Plant

Print pages: 256

Sample

One year ago today I was sitting on the wooden deck that juts out from the side of my cottage drinking a cup of coffee laced with bourbon. I had lost Donato a month before and was more depressed than usual, hence the Knob Creek at nine a.m. Donato had once brought me out of a seizure by aggressively licking my face as I lay passed out on my kitchen floor. He might or might not have been a seizure detecting dog, a perro de convulsiones, as Eva put it, but I became very close to Donato after that. My hope was that he would teach Moishe, my one-eyed cat, his special power, assuming he had one, but I haven’t had a seizure since the one Donato woke me from so I can’t be sure. Moishe might be a gato de convulsiones, but I worry that the plate in my head confuses him. He'll sometimes touch the area on the top right where the plate is, gentle taps, doing research or maybe trying to get better reception.

After Donato died, Moishe had a seizure himself, or what I thought might be a seizure. He wobbled around the cottage for a few minutes, tensed up suddenly then fell over out cold. I called Eva, who said, "Popi, I will send somebody." The somebody turned out to be a defrocked veterinarian from the Bronx with a drinking problem who made house calls. By the time he got to the cottage Moishe was up and around. The vet said it might have been a partial seizure and gave me some phenobarbital capsules. I tried to get one into Moishe's mouth but quit when he gave me a look that I quickly decided I never wanted to see again. I don't take my pheno either, so, among my numerous other neuroses, I live with the thought that at any moment God will decide to throw either Moishe or me, or both of us, violently to the ground and possibly kill us. It is my hope in that event that Radar, the misshapen dog that Eva gave me after Donato died, will figure out what to do. Eva swears she got Radar from a Santeros breeder of seizure detecting dogs in upstate New York "near the Canadian border." I have my doubts, especially about Santeria, but I have not challenged Eva on this story, since, if I did, she would respond with something like, "so you don't think I know where the Canadian border is?" Seriously, that's her; a master of deflection. I keep my thoughts about Santeria to myself as this is a touchy subject with Eva, who claims to be a TradCath but sees the spiritual value of sacrificing the occasional chicken as long as it's eaten post haste. In her words, con toda la velocidad posible.

Eva went to Nevada some years ago to divorce her fat Mexican husband but gave up after six months and came home. Last year she got a letter from a lawyer in Mexico City informing her her husband had died. It contained a copy of a death certificate, a check for five thousand dollars and a release for her to sign. She threw the release away and cashed the check. We celebrated that night. The next morning while she was getting dressed she told me she was a free woman and that if I asked her to marry me, she would say no. "Will you marry me?" I said, still in bed. "Maybe," she said, smiling, "but probably not." I smiled too, watching her beautiful ass disappear into her jeans.

Behind me I heard Moishe jump onto the sill of the window above the kitchen sink. A minute or so later I watched as a blue van drove onto my property, made its way down my long gravel driveway and parked parallel to the deck, ten feet away from where I was sitting. The lettering on the van said “Helle's Kitchen”. A black woman in her early thirties got out. She was tall and slim, with close cropped hair, high cheek bones and pale gray eyes, dressed in a white double-breasted chef's shirt, black pants and pink running shoes. Gold hoop earrings gleamed in the morning sunlight against the deep brown of her neck. Angeline Helle.

"Mr. Zev," she said.

"Angeline," I said, standing and gesturing to the weathered Adirondack chair across from mine. I watched as she stepped lightly to the chair and eased into it, unslinging her shoulder bag and placing it on the deck next to her.

"Coffee?"

"No, thank you."

She sat.

"Tea? I have elderberry brewed. It's pretty good."

"Sure."

Inside, Moishe was still on the windowsill, staring at the van, where a white dog with a black circle around each eye had appeared at the passenger window. Radar was on the couch taking his first long nap of the day.

I spilled a little bit of the tea as I set her mug down. I am not handsome. My head is deformed on the outside and probably on the inside as well, so, when I have to interact with a goodlooking woman, I get a little nervous. Plus, Eva told me that if I ever have sex with another woman she would kill me.

"Are you working?" I asked when I settled down.

"Yes. I have a job not far from here. I left my people there setting up."

"What did Eva tell you about me?"

"She said you were neurotic. Muy neurotica."

"I am."

"But unafraid."

I shrugged. I had been afraid many times in my life, but never when my life was in danger, which I knew is what Eva meant. When making the fight versus flight decision, my brain does not compute flight or danger. I go into the fight mode so rapidly that I only know what I did by seeing the strewn bodies and vaguely remembering it afterward. I attribute this phenomenon to my innate skillset, my Israeli special forces training, and the plate in my head. When I told my neurosurgeon that I thought the plate, which she had put in, had sped up my reflexes a hundred-fold, she told me that I might be right as she had fabricated it in a secret underground lab using a metal found only in the ice at the magnetic North Pole. She nevertheless urged me to continue taking my pheno, which, as I have said, I do not do. I gave her a hand with a problem she had a few years ago and after that she was not so cavalier about my theory.

"They usually don't go together," Angeline continued, "but I can see they do in you."

"How do you see that?"

"I am Haitian, I have zye klé, clear eyes. You would say clairvoyant." She pronounced clairvoyant the French way, with that nasal business at the end.

"I thought I detected an accent."

"Creole."

"How do you know Eva?"

"She used to babysit Bee-Bee."

"Your daughter. Beatrice."

She nodded, staring straight at me, her eyes, large, clear and unreadable, level with mine.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Find the people who killed Bee-Bee."

"And then what?"

"I will do the rest."

"How?"

"You don't need to know."

"Yes I do."

"Why?"

"Whatever you do will lead back to me."

"It won't. I will have a curse put on them."

"Voodoo?"

"Vodou, yes. It can be done."

"What kind of a curse?"

"I don't know yet, perhaps insanity. Nothing that can lead back to you, or me."

"When you say people, fentanyl ingredients are made in China and sent to Mexico to be put together, then sold here. In China it's now illegal. The factories are all underground or protected by the government. The Mexican cartels are untouchable. The chiefs pay chemists to make the pills. They have small armies protecting their operations. You can never trace the pill that killed Beatrice to its source, or to one person. If you did you'd never get to them."

"It wasn't typical fentanyl."

She pulled a thick document from her bag and handed it to me. On the first page, under the circular logo of the New York City Medical Examiner, the name Beatrice Evangeline Helle appeared, followed by her date of death, 01 June 2022.

"Page 7," Angeline said.

I flipped and read:

• 2.50 mg/dl NPF alpha-methyl fentanyl and 3-methylfentanyl

• 2.3 mebufotenin benzoate

• 19.3 unknown neurotoxins

The cause of death was listed as "NPF-induced respiratory failure."

"NPF?"

"Non-pharmaceutical fentanyl."

"Mebufotenin benzoate?"

"It's a psychedelic. Vodou priests secrete it from frogs or plants."

"Unknown neurotoxins?"

"They are probably also vodou, top secret vodou, used to make zombies; slaves without speech or will power. The oungans–the priests–make zombie poisons from snakes, lizards, human remains. Only the oungans know what they are, what they do, where to get them and how to use them."

"You think the pill that killed Beatrice was not made in Mexico?"

"I don't think so."

"What about Bee-Bee's father? Is he around?"

She took a breath, her eyes narrowing. Memory, I thought, a blessing and a curse.

"I was raped by two armée cannibales. One of them is the father."

"Armée cannibale?"

"A gang of teenage killers. I was thirteen."

"Do they eat their victims?"

"No, they feed them to their dogs."

"Your parents?"

"My parents are dead. They were killed in church by men in army uniforms, anti-Aristide militia."

"How did you get here?"

"I was working in the laundry room of a hotel in Port-Au-Prince. One of my neighbors was watching Bee-Bee. She came to the hotel with the baby to tell me my parents were dead. Boat people were leaving then but they were being turned back or brought to Guantanamo. I got the job by giving sex to the hotel manager's son on his sailboat, a white boy madly in love with me. Five of us stole the boat that night. Two weeks later we were in Miami. I was nursing, otherwise Bee-Bee would have died."

"So you have a green card."

"I am naturalized."

Moishe was now scratching at the window behind me. This meant he wanted his second breakfast. When Moishe was feral, he refused to come into the cottage. When Grace appeared, he came in, unhurried, like he owned the place. I fed him night and day for five years, in all kinds of weather, buying him different kinds of gourmet food, sometimes reaching his bowl into the crawlspace under the deck where he hung out in bad weather. It didn’t matter. Once inside he ignored me and stuck to Grace like glue. Grace left and never came back. Moishe has not gone out since. I can leave the door open all day and he won't go out. He had enough of the wild and can now tolerate me.

"He wants to eat," I said.

"Do you want to feed him?"

"He can wait a few minutes. Who do you want me to find? Be realistic."

"The patron here."

She took an envelope out of her shoulder bag and put it on the table between our teacups. I picked it up and gave it back to her. "I'll think about it," I said.

She stood and extended her hand. I stood and took it. It was a long, slender hand; cool to the touch. I held onto it for a second as I looked at her. Her pale eyes–lamps shining out of that dark face–looked like they could cast a spell on me if she was so inclined. She may in fact have. I think about those eyes from time to time as I sit and write this story.

"Can I take your picture? I asked.

"Why?"

"Before and after."

She shrugged. I took the picture. At the door of her van she turned and said, not smiling, "I'll need a lock of his hair."