Venom: A Thriller in Paradise (The Thriller in Paradise Series Book 3) by Rob Swigart

bent down to remove Orli’s hat.
    “It was missing. Someone got on board, killed the crew, and left in the lifeboat.”
    “How’d they get on board? Why take the lifeboat?” She folded the sun hat and put it in the big cloth diaper bag hanging from the back of the stroller.
    “I was afraid you’d ask that.” Cobb was peering into the inside of his porkpie hat. Nothing in there but questions.
    “They were already on board,” Patria suggested. She lifted Orli from the stroller and sat down with the child on her lap facing her. She started to make funny faces. Orli laughed.
    “No mention in the log. The whole crew was present and accounted for. And dead. Except one, and she’s not talking. Doesn’t seem to know who or where she is.”
    “Sounds like black magic to me. Someone put the hex on her.
’Ana’ana
, someone prayed them all to death.” She put her nose against Orli’s and made chuffing sounds. “With a little help, maybe?” she added between chuffs. Orli rewarded her by blowing a big saliva bubble that burst against her face.
    “Okay.” Cobb went to the window and stood beside Chazz, looking out. Patria smiled, seeing them there, the large bear of her husband next to the small, neat Japanese detective. “We have many puzzles and few answers. Kimiko found them; they all seemed to be dead. They all seemed to die at around the same time, reason as yet undetermined, though the proximal cause of death was respiratory failure. It now seems likely someone killed them. We don’t know who. We don’t know how. We don’t know why.”
    “All we know is what and when?” Chazz murmured. It was only a half-question.
    Sy stood up. He seemed somewhat bored yet still intrigued by the conversation. “We may know how. Partly, anyway,” he said.
    “Powder?” Chazz turned back and sat in his chair, which creaked alarmingly as he leaned back and clasped his hands behind his neck. He would play Dr. Watson to Sy’s Sherlock.
    “If there’s something topically active in the powder, then they could have been killed by it on the deck. They walked over it and got it on their feet. Bingo, poisoned.”
    “Except that the captain, for one, was wearing shoes.” Cobb did not take the powder seriously as a cause of death.
    “Oh, yeah.” Sy was depressed. “I forgot about that.”
    Cobb turned back to Patria. “What was that about magic?”
    “Black magic, I said. A bit like
’ana’ana
, the old Hawaiian kahuna who would pray an enemy to death. It was part of the cultural belief system, that’s why it would work. No good if you don’t believe. Perhaps the powder was a sign, a warning of some kind, not really a poison.”
    “These were Europeans, mostly. American, Canadian, Tahitian, French. Why would they be subject to some weird primitive magic?” Sy was a scientist, a rational man.
    Chazz shrugged. “This isn’t getting anywhere, is it? And I have a class to teach in an hour. Somebody did something weird, some spooky magic nonsense with ground-up bones and junk. That somebody is gone, probably left the islands by now, especially since everyone on the ship is dead. My guess is the answer is wherever the ship came from, not here.”
    “Tahiti?” Patria asked, looking up from her interplay with Orli. “Don’t know about any dark arts from Tahitian history. Mostly a sunny place, despite the white man. It sounds more like Haiti or someplace. Voudun, zombies, that sort of thing.”
    That stopped him. “What?”
    Patria pursed her lips and looked up at the ceiling. “Mixtures of African animism, Christianity, folk medicine. My specialty, remember? We should go to Tahiti, check out any recent visitors from the Caribbean. Of course,” she added thoughtfully, “it could be Southeast Asian…”
    “No way. We don’t need to go to Tahiti. Cobb, tell her.”
    “Not me, my friend. I don’t know yet. But if these people were killed, and it was because of what went on in Tahiti, it might be a good idea. Sammy