Warrior in the Shadows by Marcus Wynne Page B

sandstone wall, outlined in red, colored white within the lines, with cross-hatching across the chest. The arms and legs angled upward, with what appeared to be a long bulbed tail dangling below.
    "Is that a tail?" Charley asked.
    "A penis, actually," Kativa said. "The Imjins were said to travel by bouncing on that knobbed penis, much like a kangaroo travels by bounding."
    "What's an Imjin?" Mara asked.
    "This is the image," Charley said. He looked at Kativa with an intensity that made her uncomfortable. The amused look was gone, replaced by a fixity of eye that reminded Kativa of her cat when she was stalking a helpless bird. "What can you tell us about it?"
    "Where did this image come from?" Kativa said.
    "It was drawn on the wall of a crime scene."
    "That doesn't look like paint."
    "It's not. There's some paint, but most of it is blood and body fluids from a murder victim."
    "Oh, my God," Kativa said.
    Mara touched Charley's shoulder. "Show her the other photographs."
    He looked at her, then slid the manila folder across the desk at Kativa. "I'd be careful with them. They're quite ugly."
    Kativa looked through the photographs and felt herself go pale when she came to the overview photograph that showed the body of Madison Simmons hanging upside down. She forced herself to look at the photograph again and noted how the body was staged. She put the photographs down and made herself stack them neatly end to end, before she placed them on top of the manila folder and pushed it away with only her fingertips.
    "I've seen enough, thank you."
    "What do you think?" Charley said.
    "I've seen something much like the body as well."
    "Tell me," Charley said, leaning forward in his chair.
    "The body, the way it was set… were there parts… missing?"
    "Why do you ask that?"
    "In the puri-puri ritual, in the ritual killing, some parts of the person's body are taken, sometimes eaten by the sorcerer."
    Charley sat back in his chair. "The killer trimmed out portions of abdominal fat and ate it along with the victim's kidneys."
    "Oh, my God," Mara said. She sat down heavily. "You didn't tell me that."
    "That's another part of the ritual," Kativa said.
    "You said that before. What ritual?" Charley said.
    "Do you know anything at all about Australian Aboriginal culture?" Kativa said.
    "If I did, I wouldn't be sitting here," Charley said.
    "What I mean is the background," Kativa said.
    "No."
    "Australian Aboriginal culture has a very unique mythos, the Dreamtime it's called. They believe that the entire world was created by the Rainbow Serpent who made the world and everything that lives in it. Part of their belief system is what they call the Dreamtime, a reality and a time that exists concurrently with the day-to-day reality we know. Aboriginals believe they can go back and forth between the Dreamtime and the day-to-day reality through magic rituals. When in the Dreamtime, they can see the future and the past, and they can commune directly with their ancestral spirits, or the elemental forces of nature. This is a very simple explanation of a complex subject, are you following me?"
    "I'm with you," Charley said.
    "For your purposes, there are four kinds of magic. There's hunting magic, to help the hunter find the prey, to join his spirit to the spirit of the animal they hunt. There's improvement magic, magic to improve circumstances, to call down rain, to improve health, so on. There's love magic, powerful magic to influence a young man or woman to come together with the person who wants them. And then there's puri-puri, the black magic of death. It's meant to kill someone who has wronged or alienated someone within the tribe. That's what the inversion of the body is about… puri-puri drawings to inflict the ritual magic always show the target of the magic upside down, an inversion or reversal of the normal order of things."
    "So this image is supposed to kill the victim?"
    "No, this image is not strictly speaking a puri-puri drawing," Kativa