“I, however, do.”

“Okay,” I huffed. “Anyway, things really escalated a couple of days later when Officer Hobbes was found dead in a motel. This time there was absolutely no question about the whole B and D, S and M thing. All of the trappings were right there in plain sight. But, this time there was a new twist to the scene. Artifacts were present that lead me to believe some sort of convoluted Voodoo ritual had taken place.”

“Voodoo?”

“Yeah, Voodoo. Well, a horribly bastardized version of it really. I’ll leave out the gorier details since you asked me to, but let’s just say it was twisted. What happened in that room may have started out as consensual sex play, but that’s not how it ended. It also didn’t have anything to do with true Vodoun religious practice…it was just sick…

“What’s even worse is that once again there was an overwhelming sense of female sexual arousal permeating the room. Almost to the point of being stifling-for me anyway. It was then that I was absolutely positive the killer was a woman and that she had literally gotten off on torturing this man to death.”

“You felt it deeply, didn’t you, Rowan?” Helen asked.

The tenor of her question told me she already knew the answer, but I gave it to her anyway. “Yeah. From both sides of the fence, actually.”

I paused and absently attempted a drag on my cigar only to find that it had gone out once again. Instead of relighting it, I simply fiddled with the band, twisting it in an endless circle.

“Anyhow,” I continued. “Felicity had a meeting with a client that morning, so she didn’t go to that crime scene with me. But, while I was standing there talking to Ben, she just suddenly showed up. The problem was, it wasn’t really her. She was acting haughty and abusive to everyone, calling herself Miranda, and had even started speaking with a heavy Southern drawl. That’s about the time I started doing the math and figured out she was being possessed by a Lwa.”