Contact
Evelyn Vaughn
Mills & Boon Silhouette
Her anonymous tips to the New Orleans police had helped to crack some of their toughest cases. But the cops didn't know that this elusive contact worked in their own evidence department–or that Faith Corbett was psychic.Faith had no idea her gift was the result of genetic engineering and part of a twisted heritage her mother had kept from her–until a serial killer started hunting for psychics and chose Faith as his next target. To catch the killer, she'd have to reveal her identity to a skeptical detective whose faith in her could mean the difference between life and death….Athena Force: The adventure continues with three secret sisters, three unusual talents and one unthinkable legacy….
The ties that bind may be the ties that kill as these extraordinary women race against time to beat the genetic time bomb that is their birthright….
Lynn White:
With enhanced senses, and superspeed and strength, this retrieval specialist can breach any security—but has she been working for the wrong side?
DECEIVED by Carla Cassidy
Faith Corbett:
This powerful psychic’s secret talent could make her the target of a serial killer—and a prime suspect for murder.
CONTACT by Evelyn Vaughn
Dawn O’Shaughnessy:
Her superhealing abilities make her nearly invincible, but can she heal the internal wounds from years of deception?
PAYBACK by Harper Allen
ATHENA FORCE: The adventure continues with three secret sisters, three unusual talents and one unthinkable legacy….
Contact
Evelyn Vaughn
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
EVELYN VAUGHN
has written stories since she learned to make letters. But during the two years that she lived on a Navajo reservation in Arizona—while in second and third grade—she dreamed of becoming not a writer, but a barrel racer in the rodeo. Before she actually got her own horse, however, her family moved to Louisiana. There, to avoid the humidity, she channeled more of her adventures into stories instead.
Since then, Evelyn has canoed in the East Texas swamps, rafted a white-water river in the Austrian Alps, rappelled barefoot down a three-story building, talked her way onto a ship to Greece without her passport, sailed in the Mediterranean and spent several weeks in Europe with little more than a backpack and a train pass. While she enjoys channeling the more powerful “travel Vaughn” on a regular basis, she also loves the fact that she can write about adventures with far less physical discomfort. Since she now lives in Texas, where she teaches English at Tarrant County College SE, air-conditioning remains an important factor. Feel free to contact her through her Web site, www.evelynvaughn.com, or by writing to: P.O. Box 6, Euless TX, 76039.
For my sisters at Silhouette Bombshell.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 1
I t was sensory overload. Especially for her.
“You been here before?” shouted the bartender over the noise. He was a gruff old Vietnam-vet type with a long cowboy moustache and tattoos, but Faith didn’t sense any threat off him. Of course, in this chaos, he’d have to come at her with a switchblade before she sensed a threat.
Maybe noise created its own kind of pseudo-silence—a benefit to partying with her new roommates that she hadn’t expected.
“Here, New Orleans?” she shouted back from the sanctuary he’d allowed her on his side of the bar, out of the worst of the crowd. “Or here, DeLoup’s?”
With a bottle of tequila he pointed at her green crop top which read, Tulane University. Ah, proof of her previous life. He could see she’d been in New Orleans awhile now. He grinned. “DeLoup’s.”
Faith shook her head and grinned back while, ever in motion, the bartender set some tourists up with shot glasses, lemon and salt. She usually avoided places like DeLoup’s. She wouldn’t be here now except that she hated to back down from a challenge.
Like she’d told her mom in that last, ugly argument before she’d moved out, she was through hiding in the shadows. Faith wanted people in her life, even if only people on the margins of society could really accept her. And people—social people—went dancing. And drinking. And…
And other things she’d avoided.
On that determination, she said, “It’s fun!”
And despite her enhanced senses, inexplicably keen for as long as she could remember, it was. Fun. In a throw-you-in-a-blender-and-hit-puree kind of way.
Jazz music bounced off walls hung with crooked neon beer signs and dented license plates. It mixed with laughter and shouted conversation—and heartbeats, the vibration of dozens of thudding heartbeats. Bare, multicolored bulbs dangled from ceiling fixtures, not quite reaching some of the bar’s intense shadows, but Faith could see in the dark almost as clearly as she could in the light. Frigid air-conditioning fought a losing battle against the hot, humid Louisiana night that poured into the bar every time the doors opened, not to mention the heat rolling off of its gyrating patrons. The aromas of beer and rum, sweet fruit drinks and fried appetizers mingled with colognes, breath mints and sweating, pressing humanity.
Faith could also smell the emotions, almost like perfume, could hear them on intermingled heartbeats. Currents of attraction. Patches of jealousy. Pockets of lust. From more than one area she smelled the decay of unhappiness and uncertainty.
And a whiff of…fear?
Faith frowned. Surely she’d imagined that amidst all the confusion. But real fear had its own scent, cold and acrid like metal. She did a quick head count of the roommates who’d brought her here.
Absinthe, a kohl-eyed Goth, dirty-dancing with a frat boy.
Evan, the unassuming, sandy-haired boy-next-door type, dancing with the kind of wiry, sharp-eyed guy who never pledged a fraternity.
Innocent Moonsong, hair dyed far lighter than her brown skin, rings and necklaces and piercings glistening as she belly danced in solo circles, with at least three admirers looking on.
And Krystal…
Where was Krystal?
The bartender’s hand settling onto Faith’s bare shoulder might as well have been an exposed power line. But instead of electricity she got a hard shock of concern, curiosity, wary attraction. Now she sensed that he smoked more than cigarettes…took pain pills for old pains…had pins in his knees from that wreck, shrapnel from when he saw some buddy blown up—
She stumbled back, away from the uninvited information dump, away from her own freakishness. She caught herself with an elbow on the bar’s sticky wooden surface. Jazz music swirled back in around her.
When the bartender reached for her again—“You okay, kid?”—Faith ducked quickly back, avoiding contact.
“I’m—” But what could she say? She was a freak, strange enough that even her mom couldn’t explain it, strange enough that the most accepting friends she’d found so far were French Quarter psychic readers, not exactly mainstreamers themselves. That wasn’t new. But tonight, she was a freak with a missing roommate. “I have to go find my friend. I haven’t seen her come back from the restroom.”
Which lay across a sea of dancing, mixing, pressing people.
Not that Faith had a choice. Something was wrong.
Like a swimmer taking one last breath before diving into freezing water, she braced herself, then stepped into the dancing crowd.
Every person who brushed or bumped her brought a static jolt, a blare of fragmented sound, a blast of intense scent. Like being in a pinball machine. She was the metal ball, drawn by a force as sure as gravity in one direction while too many uncaring obstacles knocked her everywhere else. Zap. Ring. In the confusion, she got only flashes of real or imagined information.
This one told her husband she was at a girlfriend’s house. That one lost out on a raise. Another just tried E for the first time.
Faith gritted her teeth as she waded through them all, finally pushing into the moderately quieter back hallway with the pay phone and the bathrooms. The door marked Filles was closed, so she knocked. “Krystal?”
Nothing. Certainly nothing good. If she concentrated, Faith could hear a heartbeat, but there was something strange about it. Something…off.
She tried the doorknob. If she wound up invading someone’s privacy, she could always claim to be drunk. The door opened barely half an inch before catching, latched with an old-fashioned hook-and-eye to go with the Old N’awlins flavor.
It was enough for Faith’s gaze to track three things.
The back of Krystal’s pale-blond head, where it lay still on the linoleum.
The faucet, pouring water into the pedestal sink.
And a booted foot seeming to levitate upward off of that sink to vanish, ghostlike, into the ceiling.
Faith jammed her hand into the crack and sliced upward, hard. The hook snapped free. Then she was in the room, skidding to her bare knees onto the gritty linoleum beside…
Beside a human shape that used to be her friend, one of her new roommates. No.
Faith didn’t have to feel for a pulse. She could hear Krystal’s lifelessness in her silence—no heartbeat, no breath. She could see the purpling stripe, like a gory scarf, around her friend’s throat, could smell death amidst the usual toilet smells, a stagnant scent, along with the remnants of that cold, metallic fear and…
And something that turned her stomach even more harshly than this violent death. That scent was also an emotion, but one she’d never caught before. And it came from—
She looked up at where the booted foot had vanished—presumably with a killer attached—and at a white ceiling panel that hadn’t been replaced quite straight in its channel.
No time to think. If she stalled on the enormity of what must have just happened in here, like a normal human would, any chance she had of identifying Krystal’s killer would vanish.
Good thing Faith wasn’t normal.
Springing to her feet, she kicked the door shut and jammed the hook back into place—protect the evidence, right? Then she scrambled onto the sink’s edge and rose, stretching upward for the metal runner that supported the drop ceiling. She had to go on tiptoe, precariously balanced on porcelain, to wedge her fingers around the metal bar. The I-shaped runner gouged cruelly into the flesh of her hands. Wishing she’d done more chin-ups at the gym, Faith had to make do with swinging herself once, twice.
On her third try, she kicked a second panel loose and caught that runner behind her knees. Now she hung like a scantily dressed U, shoulders straining, but it was enough. Stepping her feet closer to her hands with awkward lurches, glad she’d worn running shoes instead of heels, she edged her knees close enough to give her leverage.
She wedged her head and arms up past the wood-fiber panel into the narrow crawlspace of the drop ceiling.
She heard a slither of movement, rapidly retreating.
Crawl was the right word for this suspended space, Faith thought, wriggling quickly in after the fleeing suspect. The drop ceiling, a precarious collection of acoustical tiles balanced on an exposed framework of metal channels, lay barely a foot below the wooden joists of the upper roof. Her view up here was obstructed not just by the darkness, which she could handle, but by lengths of taut hanger wire and aluminum air-conditioning ducts swathed in paper-wrapped, pink fiberglass insulation. But she could hear him—statistics told her it would be a him, as surely as did instinct and smell. She twisted in the direction of the telltale scuffling and caught a glimpse of retreating boot soles, barely ten feet ahead of her.
Faith launched herself after them, not on hands and knees but on thighs and forearms, her bare tummy and legs rasping across years of accumulated dirt. Her neck ached with the strain of keeping an eye on her quarry as she wriggled after him. The ceiling panels felt horribly unstable beneath her. They probably were—those yard-by-yard squares—barely an inch thick, suspended from the joists by mere wire. From beneath her she caught wafts of jazz music, shouted conversation, blurred heartbeats and breaths and mingling emotions. But ahead of her…
She heard the distinct rhythm of her quarry’s pounding heart and breathed in his smell as it faded from that strange, stomach-turning scent to surprise and distress at her pursuit.
Not surprisingly, he was bigger than her. The crawlspace was even tighter for him. It was slowing him down.
Faith was maybe eight feet behind him now. She dragged herself closer, digging with her elbows, scrabbling with her arched feet.
One of his shoulders glanced off a metal duct.
Now she was barely six feet behind him, putting her hips into it.
He had to flatten onto his stomach to avoid a low-hanging swag of electric wiring that had pulled free of its staples.
Now she was barely four feet behind him. She caught her hand on an exposed nail and barely noticed the slice of pain. She kept crawling.
He stopped. Why? Three feet, two…
Faith reached out her hand, ready to grab the killer by the ankle if that’s what it took. She doubted she could capture him alone, but she’d come to know evidence. She could damn well tear some vital clue off him.
But with the appearance of a sudden square of light, he vanished.
At least, that’s what it looked like. Even as she gaped, Faith realized that the man had punched out another ceiling tile and dived, headfirst, into whatever lay below.
Wriggling closer, she peered over the edge of the runner and saw metal racks, industrial-size bottles, cardboard boxes. Storeroom. She pivoted onto her hip, her shoulder brushing a joist above her as she rolled on her side and dropped her feet down first. Then she levered herself the rest of the way through the ceiling and let go.
With a light thud, she landed in a crouch on the floor below.
The storeroom was empty—of everything but storage, anyway. Faith shouldered quickly out the door….
And found herself behind the bar again. The man she’d been after could be anybody amidst the milling, churning crowd now. And the bartender wasn’t there to say who’d just appeared from the storeroom.
Like everyone else, he’d apparently been drawn away by the shrill screaming coming from the bathrooms.
With a deep breath, Faith dived back into the crowd, an overly aware pinball trying to go in one inexorable direction.
“You touch anything?” demanded the first officer on the scene, a tall brown patrolman named Lee. He’d responded not to the bartender’s 9-1-1 call but to one of DeLoup’s customers rushing out onto Bourbon Street to fetch help.
“Of course I did,” admitted Faith. “But I’ve contained the scene since.”
The shrieking CPA who’d found Krystal had not pushed the door hard enough to force the hook-and-eye latch a second time. Apparently, when she’d looked in, she hadn’t wanted to.
Faith had gotten there just as the bartender shouldered his way through—in time to keep him from compromising evidence.
The patrolman, after an unsteady look at poor Krystal’s blue-tinged face and a grateful check of Faith’s ID badge, agreed to leave the bathroom to her while he worked crowd control.
“Not like you can go anywhere,” he said, as if the ceiling panels weren’t gaping like missing teeth above the still-running sink.
One down. But Faith wasn’t worried about patrolmen.
“Did you throw up?” asked a kindly EMT not ten minutes later, about the running water. A good-looking guy named Steadman, he was careful to step only where Faith had indicated he should. The likelihood that the crime-scene investigators could pick up a single distinct boot print off the chaos of a bathroom floor were low, especially with something gritty, like sand, crunching underfoot. Faith should know. But it didn’t hurt to be careful.
“No. I found the water that way.”
“Did you check for the victim’s pulse?”
“She was already dead when I felt her wrist.” And she hadn’t needed to check for a pulse to know that. But Faith had wanted to leave a fingerprint, just in case. Her mother had stressed the need for paranoia about Faith’s freakishly acute senses since childhood. Leaving proof of an unnecessary assessment had seemed a better idea than trying to explain that she could hear the absence of her roommate’s heartbeat.
Steadman crouched easily beside Krystal’s body and eyed the straight-line bruising around the neck and the welts where, if Faith had to guess, Krystal had gouged her own throat trying to dig away the killer’s garrote. Steadman, too, seemed to check for the absent pulse more out of procedure than practicality. “She looks familiar. Didn’t she read tarot in Jackson Square?”
Faith stiffened, concerned he would recognize more than Krystal. Not that Faith had been on the Square for a while. She’d only been…experimenting. It had been a failed experiment.
“Yes,” she said. “She did.”
He swore under his breath and stood. “Well, ma’am, this is one for the cops, the coroner and the crime scene unit.”
Two down. But Faith wasn’t worried about EMTs, either.
Again she found herself alone with the body. She looked into Krystal’s staring eyes, not quite able to reconcile the corpse with the tall, vivacious young woman who’d offered to style Faith’s hair before they’d headed out that night. Krystal.
It had always been one of Faith’s favorite daydreams, to live with a bunch of other women. Roommates, sisters, dorm-mates at some kind of boarding school—no matter the details, she’d always imagined it would be like an endless slumber party. Like…belonging. This new apartment—rather, her newly rented half room in a very old apartment—was her first real effort toward that.
But slumber parties usually didn’t include murder.
Now she wished she’d accepted Krystal’s offer, despite her dislike of being touched and Krystal’s overreliance on hair-spray. Krystal had been teaching her breathing and relaxation techniques to control her oversensitivity. They’d been friends, though maybe not as close as normal people got. Faith wasn’t sure she knew how to get close to other people. Now she’d lost any chance to get closer to this one.
She hadn’t expected losing someone to hurt like this.
Still, the worst part about standing here in the bathroom, alone with Krystal, wasn’t that guilt. It wasn’t the eerie stillness, a now blatant absence of jazz music, laughter and shouted conversations that made the simple gurgle of water running down the drain become deafening. It wasn’t even being this close to a dead person.
The worst part was the lingering…smell was what Faith could best call it, but that wasn’t wholly correct. A perverted sexuality hung in the air, part musk, part heat. It had been left by the killer and this horrible, irrevocable thing he’d done. It smelled like power. Dominance.
Evil.
More than the corpse’s presence, that atmosphere of evil twisted deep in her stomach.
“So,” drawled someone loudly. Though the man in the unbuttoned coat didn’t throw the door open hard enough to bounce it off the wall, he might as well have, the way Faith jumped at his arrival. “What do we know?”
Damn. Not only had the detectives arrived, they included Roy Chopin.
Faith had been around Chopin only a handful of times. He was a rangy man with a rolling walk, blunt and expressive. He wore his brown hair styled back from his long face, to keep it out of his tired eyes. His mouth alternated between threatening and mocking, and his jaw looked like a dare. His sheer physicality made her uncomfortable, even without touching. He didn’t have to touch. A cop in every sense of that word, Chopin seemed to expect the whole world to get out of his way. To judge by his cocky attitude, the world usually did.
Tonight, though, his presence felt welcome as it washed over the crime scene like a rainstorm clearing out the gutters of Bourbon Street. Imagining all this ugliness through his detached gray eyes demoted Krystal’s death from a scene of horror to a mere shame and, more to the point, a puzzle to be solved.
Faith grasped gratefully at that air of detachment. She would return to the horror soon enough, after all. And she would need all her wits. Where Chopin went…
Well, when his partner arrived, she’d be three down. The detectives were the ones who had worried her all along.
For good reason.
In the meantime, Chopin was already looking impatient.
“This is Krystal Tanner,” she reported. “I found her like this at about ten-fifteen. Someone was climbing out through the ceiling. I went after him, but he had a pretty good head start, and— What?”
Chopin had shaken his head, his tired eyes widening.
“You went after him?” he demanded.
“Yes.”
He looked her up and down. She sensed the way he saw her as surely as she could read his perusal of the scene. She was a blond-haired, ponytailed coed with full lips, unusual green-gold eyes and tanned arms and legs, bared by the miniskirt and crop top. The outfit had seemed a better choice before her crawl through the filthy roof space.
“Alone?”
Her chin came up under the challenge of his gaze. “Yeah.”
Chopin leaned closer, faux conspiratorial. “And why would you do an idiotic thing like that?”
Well, duh. “Because the alternative would have been not to go after him?”
He grinned as he straightened, fishing a notebook out of his shirt pocket. “Krystal Tanner,” he muttered, making a note. “Ten-fifteen. You’re not on the force, so how is it I know you?”
She was surprised he’d remember her, even vaguely. Then again, powers of observation went back to his cop-ness. “I’m an assistant evidence technician for the city. Faith Corbett.”
She fisted her right hand, hoping he wouldn’t want to shake. The man was intense enough without risking direct contact.
“Yeah, that’s it.” He nodded and, to her relief, kept his own hand busy taking notes. “You’re one of Boulanger’s day shift, working the desk, right? Sometimes you make pickups and drop-offs at the station. So Corbett, how is it you know the deceased?”
Poor Krystal. One minute she’d been dancing, drinking, celebrating life. Then she’d headed for the ladies’ room and… God. The deceased.
“She’s my roommate.”
Chopin stopped writing and angled his wide gaze back to her, brows furrowed. “Oh. I’m…uh…”
Why was it some men had trouble expressing even the most conventional courtesy, lest it betray some emotion? Faith saved him the effort. “Thanks.”
“So, Bernie, you went charging after this killer and…?”
Had he just called her Bernie? Unwilling to be distracted, Faith repeated the story as quickly as she could without looking too suspicious, increasingly aware of him studying her as he listened and took notes. She felt as if he could see every hair on her arms, every piece of grit embedded in her tummy, every scrape on her knees. It wasn’t sexual—there was a corpse at their feet, after all. Well…not any more sexual than any man staring at a woman’s bare tummy, anyway. But such intense scrutiny made her uncomfortable.
Like he could maybe see just how weird she was.
“You didn’t get a good look at him?” Chopin demanded, when she finished. At least he hadn’t interrupted her.
“Just the bottom of his feet.”
“And you didn’t ask anybody if they saw him leave the storeroom?” His mouth had gone back to threatening. His questions were starting to feel like little shoves of energy.
“No, everyone was distracted by finding Krystal.”
“And how was your relationship with the vic?”
Faith’s mouth fell open. “Why are you questioning me as if…oh.” But she knew the answer to that, too. “The first person on the scene’s always the first suspect, right?”
“Yeah.” Chopin didn’t even bother to apologize for his suspicions. But he did include her in another mocking grin. “Nothing personal, hon. It’s one of those hard truths, like ‘everybody lies.’ Statistics would put the odds on either you or her boyfriend-slash-husband.”
“She didn’t have a boyfriend or a husband.”
“Could I see your hands, please?” Shove.
Faith spread her bare palms for him. Only when she felt his interest spike—a minute change of his temperature, a sharp inhale through his teeth—did she notice the pink lines where she’d pulled herself up through the ceiling, the bleeding cut from that exposed nail. “Oh…” she whispered.
For a moment she felt dizzy with the very real possibility that she might be charged with this crime. So much for keeping a low profile!
“Don’t sweat it. If you’d done the deed, you’d have lines on the sides of your hands, too. Here—” to her relief, he indicated where he meant with his pen, not his finger “—and here. Besides, she’s fashion-model tall—pushing six feet? I’m no M.E., but I’m betting the ligature marks on her neck would be a lot lower if you did her. Unless you somehow made her kneel first, which, how could you without imminent threat, and I don’t see anyplace you could’ve hidden a gun. Or much of a knife. Nice shirt, there.”
“You’re smarter than you look,” said Faith, fully aware it was her own way of shoving back.
“’Cause of my fashion sense, or ’cause I’m not hauling you down to the station yet?” Detective Chopin looked less exhausted as he eyed her. “Usually I’m the brawn of the outfit. Right, Butch?”
Strike three.
“Now, Roy,” demanded Chopin’s partner from the doorway. Here stood the sweet, trustworthy man whose arrival Faith had feared even beyond the slap-in-the-face energy of the younger Roy. “What are you doing harassing this here helpful citizen? Sugar over vinegar, son. Sugar over vinegar. How do you do, Miss? I am Detective Sergeant Butch Jefferson. I am most terribly sorry to have to meet you under such clearly distressing circumstances, and I apologize for my partner’s appalling lack of manners.”
“He’s the Good Cop,” muttered Chopin amiably, still taking notes. Which made him what?
Butch, who had more than twenty years on his thirty-ish partner, extended both a genuine smile, which made his dark eyes crinkle at the corners, and his worn brown hand. There was no way Faith could refuse to take the latter. Not without rousing suspicion and requiring more conversation, which—around Butch Jefferson, anyway—she wanted even less than touching.
With a determined smile, she allowed Butch to envelop her hand in his.
It wasn’t anywhere near as unsettling as touching his partner would have been. Butch’s personal energy was slow and easy, like the Mississippi in the summertime. The flashes of possible information that accompanied his touch—widowed, volunteered with Big Brothers, loved beer and boiled crawfish—he released it all so freely, it didn’t carry the unsettling jolt of so many other people.
“Faith Corbett,” she said—the first time she’d ever given this particular cop her real name. Please don’t recognize me.
“From evidence,” added Bad Cop, who proceeded to take over most of the talking.
The older detective didn’t seem to realize he and Faith had spoken before, much less that it had had nothing to do with her job with the crime-scene unit.
Then again, she’d chosen Butch Jefferson last year specifically because he didn’t have a terribly suspicious nature—not for a homicide detective, anyway. She’d always used a fake accent, the dozen-or-so times she’d telephoned him. And she’d given him a fake name, Madame Cassandra. But the information she’d passed on as Detective Jefferson’s anonymous contact with the psychic community had always been real.
As long as the information stayed anonymous, Faith could remain useful. But if he recognized her voice, or learned the tips came from her…
Well, either he’d see her like Chopin had—young and blond and thus somehow unreliable—or he’d see her like the few other people who had learned her secret.
Freak.
Worse, they would want to know how she did it. And that, not even Faith could tell them.
She honestly didn’t know what she was.
But whatever she was, keeping quiet about it was one of the few things her nervous mother had gotten right. Look what happened to Krystal.
The thought caught Faith by surprise. How could Krystal’s murder have anything to do with the tarot reader’s special abilities?
She stiffened, increasingly aware of the gurgling drain beneath Roy Chopin’s surprisingly accurate narrative of her night. It would keep running until the night shift for the crime-scene unit arrived.
Running water?
She might only do glorified clerical work for the crime-scene unit, so far. She might only be an assistant crime-scene technician. But she knew the water had to mean something.
What?
Amidst the Bourbon Street crowd that lingered into the night, attracted by flashing lights and yellow police tape, He closed His eyes to savor His…His amplification.
Strength. Meaning. Confidence. Yes!
That last time hadn’t been a fluke, after all.
He stood for what may have been hours, too powerful to tire of it, relishing how helpless the so-called authorities looked. Patrolmen had come and gone, as had an ambulance. Now the photographers and the crime-scene investigators, the night shift, had arrived. But He waited.
He wanted to see the detectives leave as ignorant as when they’d arrived. Stupid, arrogant suits. He wanted to gloat.
When finally they emerged, a younger man with an old black partner, they didn’t seem as helpless as He’d hoped. The younger one looked dusty enough to have been clambering around the crawlspace over the ceiling.
But they didn’t look satisfied, either. Or done.
Both seemed distracted by the blond bitch who’d chased Him from His kill before he was done. The one with the green tank top and the miniskirt. He didn’t like that one at all.
“Let me or Roy get you a cab now, Miss Faith,” He heard the black man say. “Gang activity’s gotten worse, not far north of here. No need for you to take chances.”
“No,” said the girl, all but backing away. “Really. My roommates will walk with me. We’ll be safe together.”
The trio who shuffled nearer, red-eyed and lost, looked as if they needed more protection than they would provide. Even the man among them had the posture of a girl.
Those three looked familiar—from Jackson Square.
More psychics?
Even as He thought that, as His breath fell shallow and His heartbeat sped and his groin tightened, the one called Miss Faith suddenly turned her head. Her unnerving green gaze raked across the remaining onlookers as if she knew what she was looking for.
He leaned back just enough to hide behind the shoulders of some good ol’boy. When He dared look again, she’d gone. She seemed to deliberately ignore the detectives staring after her. She was too busy dividing her attention between her friends and the street around them, like a little blond bodyguard.
He dared breathe again after they turned a corner. More than one psychic there, for sure.
The kind of people with power to spare.
A few more like tonight, and even the Master could no longer control Him.
Chapter 2
F aith couldn’t tell if she’d really sensed the killer among the onlookers, or if it had been her imagination. Sure, she was weird. But could she really recognize a particular heartbeat, a particular smell, in that kind of crowd?
Probably she’d just been distracted by Roy Chopin and Butch Jefferson watching her retreat.
“They asked a lot of questions,” noted Moonsong, after a block. “Who Krys dated, if we knew anybody who would want to hurt her. That was nice and thorough of them.”
“Bull! Did you see how they looked at me when I told them I’d met Krys at an astrology class?” Between grief, guilt and frustration, or maybe the simple boredom of waiting out the administrative elements of a crime scene, Absinthe had chewed most of her black lipstick off. “Like I was crazy. Like Krystal was crazy. It’s disrespectful, is what it is.”
“Krystal would have thought it was funny,” Moonsong insisted. Her real name was Emily, but a surprising number of psychics changed their names. It wasn’t so much to hide their true names—like Faith masquerading as Madame Cassandra when she made anonymous calls to the police. It was more about…identity.
About making a fresh start, even honoring their unusual abilities.
“Well, it’s not funny,” said Absinthe who, because Faith had helped her through the paperwork of a legal name change, really was Absinthe. Faith had majored in pre-law, before dropping out.
Until she knew what she was, it seemed premature to settle on what she should do.
Moonsong’s expression set. “But she would have thought it was. Remember? Whenever people got all cynical about what she did, she’d say, ‘That is so Queen of Swords.’”
Absinthe laughed. “Or she’d say, ‘Don’t get all Virgo on me.’”
Then she pressed a black-nailed hand to her mouth as her laugh shuddered into a sob. Moonsong circled her dark arms around her, and the two of them walked like a four-legged, two-headed creature.
So much for an endless slumber party. Faith wrapped her arms around herself and tried not to picture Krystal’s dead blue eyes and the welts on her throat. Mostly she tried not to imagine the moments before Krystal had died.
She and her three roommates took the same close, shadowed, cobblestone streets that had seen five of them heading out mere hours before. Never had the quieter, late-night backstreets of the French Quarter seemed so empty.
“Would you…?” Evan hesitated beside her, then forged on. “You don’t like to be touched, right?”
Faith longed for normal contact at that moment far more desperately than she feared the intimacy. “It’s not so bad if you don’t touch bare skin. I mean…yes. I could use a hug.”
So awkwardly, like a junior-high kid learning the waltz, Evan positioned one hand on Faith’s shirted back, the other on her denim-covered hip, and drew her tentatively against his shirtfront.
She laid her cheek on his shoulder and sighed. The worst of the night’s horrors eased, if only a little, under the comforting thrum of his concern and his heartbeat, gently muffled by the pressed cotton of his shirt.
What a sweet, sweet man. They were kind, all of them.
Krystal. Tears of gratitude and loss burned in Faith’s eyes.
Faith’s roommates knew her secrets—the few she’d figured out herself, anyway. Better yet, they accepted her abilities without demanding explanations. They respected her need for privacy. And they were, for the most part, able to deal with her despite her issues. The so-called fringe really had become friends.
A little over a year ago, Faith had gone to a psychic fair to figure out if being psychic was why she was such a freak. She’d hoped that maybe, like in the Ugly Duckling story, she would discover she’d been a swan all along. A psychic swan.
It didn’t happen that way. They turned out to be swans, all right, but she was still something different and strange. A heron, maybe. Maybe something weirder, like a platypus.
God, she’d wanted to be one of them. To be one of anything. But she couldn’t predict the future. She didn’t get reincarnation. The only impressions she felt off runes or tarot cards were a sense of who’d last held them, partly because of how they smelled. The true psychics used paranormal, extra- sensory skills. Faith’s abilities seemed to be pure sensory.
Just…sensory with the volume turned up.
These weren’t her people, after all. But she’d liked them—and more important, they’d brought out her protective instincts. As Absinthe pointed out, a lot of people distrusted psychics. And too many psychics depended on ethereal defenses when they could use a good lesson in kickboxing. After an incident at the psychic fair’s “open circle,” when Faith had faced down some large, loud disbelievers, she’d realized that this half-hidden community needed someone like her. Someone who could kickbox, sort of, and who wouldn’t hesitate to do so. Even the ex-military pagans, when in a sacred circle, had hesitated.
Faith had not.
She hadn’t started protecting them just to buy their friendship. Between her mother’s paranoid habit of relocating every few years, and Faith’s own issues about touching, Faith had resigned herself to being a loner. But the psychic community had welcomed her. When one of Krystal Tanner’s roommates had moved out, and they’d started looking for someone to pay a fifth of the rent, they’d asked Faith, who’d jumped at the chance to fulfill that slumber-party dream of sisterhood.
Now Krys was dead. Murdered.
Faith pulled back from Evan’s platonic embrace, smiled her sad thanks, and continued walking.
Some protector she’d turned out to be.
“I heard what happened. Are you all right?”
The man who asked that, two days later, was Faith’s supervisor. Black-haired, brown-eyed, bearded Greg Boulanger ran the day shift of the crime-scene unit. He was something of a Cajun science geek with the extra strike against him of being management. At almost forty, he was clearly too old for Faith’s interest. And yet she liked him. A lot.
And not just because she felt loyal to him for hiring her.
The best way she could describe how comfortable she felt around Greg was that he had a quiet presence. Kind of like her roommate Evan did. Besides, like so many of the people who worked evidence, Greg often smelled of balloons. It was because of the latex gloves, Faith knew. But the scent had remarkably pleasant, innocent associations, all the same.
“I’m fine,” she assured him. He stood beside the desk where she sat. Although his brown eyes seemed concerned behind his wire-rimmed glasses, Greg didn’t come at her with the shield of sympathy that so many other people in the office had…probably because, despite being a nice guy, he remained distracted by the job.
“Even coroners aren’t cavalier about the bodies of people they know,” Greg insisted. “People you know are different. They’re supposed to be.”
“I’m okay.”
“You should probably take some time off.”
“No. Really. I kind of like being here.”
Greg’s eyebrows rose as he looked around them. Unlike those on television, the crime-scene unit consisted of four rooms and one small hallway, crowded into too little floor space on the third floor of a generic municipal building. Faith’s desk, up front, was open to a room with three other desks and two crowded worktables. Books overflowed on shelves. The place smelled like a cross between a library and a science lab, with an undercurrent of death because of the morgue down the hall.
“I’ve been handling the practical stuff,” Faith tried to explain. “Calling her family—Krystal was from East Texas. Packing her belongings for when they come. Contacting a local funeral director to make arrangements for after…”
Her need for a deep breath surprised her. So much for Krystal’s lessons in stress management through breath control. Maybe Faith wasn’t so okay after all.
“After her body’s released?” Greg finished for her, gentle.
Faith nodded. “And contacting the coroner to see when that will be. The family wants to have two funerals, one here for her friends and one in Caddo, just for them, so I’ve been helping to arrange that.”
Greg picked up the sheaf of evidence reports that still needed to be entered into the computer system and turned it over. “All the more reason you need a break. Things are crazy with that gang shooting.”
Krystal’s death hadn’t been the only murder that weekend.
“But this is a break. Everyone at home…well, they were friends with Krystal longer than I was.” Her roommates smelled of salty tears and wet misery. Their very breathing sounded like an uneven dirge. The usually strong Absinthe’s moods seemed to carry an unpleasant edge of guilt, too. Not that Faith blamed any of them. She felt more than a little guilty that her own grief felt so distant and so, well…mundane.
Absinthe had distracted herself by increasing the spiritual “shields” around their apartment, with incense and crystals; she’d stayed up all night making protective amulets for each of them. Faith wore hers even now, under her top, more for sentimental reasons than because she believed in it.
She didn’t disbelieve.
Moonsong had taken to bed, hoping Krystal’s spirit could contact her in a dream so that they could say a proper goodbye—though Faith thought it was as likely that grief or depression had simply exhausted her. Evan, bless him, had run interference with Krystal’s other friends, spending hours on the phone, answering the same questions over and over. No, they didn’t know why anyone would have killed Krystal. No, the police knew nothing. No, they couldn’t believe she was dead.
Maybe that was the difference. Faith was the only one among them to have spent time with Krystal’s corpse. She very much believed her friend was dead, so she seemed best able to handle all the customary indignities that shouldn’t be heaped on people in mourning, either her roommates or the poor Tanner family.
Greg sighed. “Then don’t go home. Go to the zoo or the aquarium. Take a riverboat ride. Go shopping.”
Faith shook her head. She could justify forgetting Krystal for whole minutes at a time, to focus on her work. But to shop? “I’m good here.”
“That’s debatable.”
She stared, confused, and he sighed. “Since you’re personally involved, you’ll want to keep some extra distance from this case. You understand that, don’t you? It’s not that I distrust you, but if anything compromises the evidence…”
“I understand.” Between this job, and her pre-law work at Tulane, she got evidence.
Her boss’s pale eyes focused on her as intently as they might focus on a strand of hair, or a fingerprint, or a particular bug he might be studying. Which, from Greg, was quite a compliment.
She was still startled when she caught a whiff of attraction. Even more when, almost as if an afterthought, he tucked a strand of her blond hair behind her ear.
Because he was wearing latex gloves—he almost always did, around here—the touch didn’t send an unpleasant jolt through her. In fact, she wouldn’t describe the sensation as unpleasant at all.
He was a human. She was a human. It was human contact.
But here, it still unnerved her. To judge from how his eyes widened, it unnerved him, too. Greg stepped quickly back, fisting his hand as if he’d done something wrong with it. And he hadn’t. It wasn’t like he’d traced her lips, or her collarbone. It wasn’t like he’d told her she looked hot in black.
“I…” he said, then cleared his throat. “Sorry. We’ve still got that Storyville shooting to deal with. I’d better go check on some ballistics results the lab was faxing over….”
To maybe the relief of both of them, Faith’s phone rang.
She smiled reassurance at Greg as she picked it up, but he was already hurrying away. “Evidence,” she said.
“I told you the Quarter was a dangerous place.”
Faith hadn’t had time to brace herself against this second wave of guilt. “Mother?”
“I just saw the news,” insisted Tamara Corbett. “Krystal Tanner—she’s one of your roommates, isn’t she? The one from Texas?”
“Well…she was.”
“Please, Faith. Don’t try to make light of it!”
“Trust me, Mom. I’m not making light of anything. But there’s no reason for you to worry. You know she wasn’t killed at the apartment, don’t you?”
“But she was in the Quarter. Were you there, too?”
Faith scowled at her computer screen, not sure how to answer that.
“Oh, baby…” moaned her mother, which was even worse than lecturing. Tamara had always been overly protective of Faith. All they’d ever had was each other. Leaving home to move in with Krystal and the others had been one of the hardest things in Faith’s life. Especially since she’d been able to hear the reality of her mother’s despair in her catching breath, in her pounding heartbeat, as she left. She’d been able to smell it on her, to taste it in the air.
But that wasn’t the only thing Faith had been sensing when she moved out. The guilt in the air hadn’t just been her own. And until her mom was able to explain what that was all about…
Well, wasn’t Faith’s life complicated enough?
“I’m okay, Mom,” she said now, feeling like the grown-up in this equation. “I mean, of course I’m not okay, but considering everything, I’m as good as can be expected. Try not to worry.”
That was like saying try not to fly away to a frightened bird.
Or like saying try not to wonder where you’re from to a fatherless girl, which was essentially what her mother had said whenever Faith tried to pursue the mystery that shrouded her past. Had she inherited her freakishly keen senses from her dad’s side of the family? Was it possible she might have cousins, even distant cousins, even one, who understood what she was going through?
Tamara had always refused to talk about Faith’s dad. He’d left them, he hadn’t wanted them, he’d died, and that was that. Her stubbornness on that front made it easier not to bleed sympathy for her seeming apprehension now.
“I’m terrified you’re going to pull a Thomas King,” said Tamara, referring of course to the Navy SEAL team leader who’d vanished and been thought dead for over a year, until his recent dramatic rescue. Because of the political ramifications of his mission, he was still making news. “If something happened to you, what would I do? Maybe you should move back home. For a while. Just until things die down.”
“What things? The funeral? My friends’ grief? They need me now more than ever, Mom.”
“But you’re so close to Rampart Street, to Storyville….”
“You’re the one who moved us to the murder capital of the United States.” As soon as she said that, Faith regretted it. Not only was it cruel, but it put the city in far too dark a light. “I’m sorry, Mom—”
“No. You’re right. I’m just glad to know you’re safe.” And Tamara hung up.
“Damn!” Faith hung up, too, and pressed fingers to her forehead. She loved New Orleans. She’d been just as glad to leave Kansas City, where she and her mom had lived for two years before coming south. New Orleans had a dark side, yes. But the flaws of this old, magical, slow-moving city were what made it feel like home. It made her own flaws—or her eccentricities, anyway—more acceptable somehow. More normal, even.
Faith had longed to be normal her whole life. Living amidst the quirks of the Big Easy was as close as she’d come to it, especially once she’d found the psychic community. The older she got, the more aware Faith became of how guilty her mother felt. About something. Tamara wouldn’t say and Faith couldn’t—wouldn’t—sense it off of her. It was one thing to stumble across a jumble of half-clear impressions about someone. It would be another thing entirely to drag out someone’s hard-kept secrets. That would be invasive. A violation. Damn it.
But whatever it was, Tamara shouldn’t also feel guilty about moving them here.
The phone rang again and Faith took a deep breath before answering it. “I’m fine,” she repeated.
“Glad to know it,” said a much deeper voice than the one she’d expected. “That’s exactly the word I would have used.”
His energy actually seemed to pulsate out of the phone. Or was that just the man’s inability to moderate his voice?
“Detective Chopin,” greeted Faith, sitting up. Like he could see her. At least he’d called, and not his partner. Faith had been on the phone with Butch Jefferson as an anonymous contact too often to risk letting him recognize her disembodied voice. “Do you want to talk to one of the technicians, or maybe Mr. Boulanger?”
“If I’d wanted to talk to them, I would’ve called them,” he said. “I figured…that is, I thought I’d ask…”
Faith waited, feeling as handicapped as if she’d been blindfolded. All she could hear over the line in this busy office was that Chopin sounded frustrated. If he were here, she could have read his body language and his scent and even his temperature as if he were holding up cue cards with personal insights. On the phone…
Maybe that’s why she and cell phones had such a bad history. She resented their limitations.
“You are Faith Corbett, right?” asked the cop, managing a slightly quieter voice after all.
“Yes, Detective. What can I do for you?”
“I just wanted…” Chopin swore, and his voice went normal again. Which meant, pushy. “Evidence. On the Tanner case. We’re past the 24/24, and I need a damned progress report.”
The 24/24 stood for the day before and the day after a murder, the time from which the most valid clues came. Soon, people’s recall would fade. Undiscovered physical evidence might vanish. That’s why the majority of murders were solved within the first forty-eight hours.
Krystal had been dead thirty-seven hours and counting.
“I’m not supposed to involve myself with the Tanner evidence, Detective Chopin.”
“Which wouldn’t keep you from looking from a safe distance, right? So what’s the status? And call me Roy.”
He had her there—she had looked, on the computer network. She just hadn’t modified any files. “We’re still waiting on the M.E. for the autopsy results, and so far Officer Hinze hasn’t found concrete matches on any of the fingerprints from the scene. Considering that there were over fifty prints and partials, that’s still going to take some processing. The footprints will be even more tricky—for some reason, there was a lot of spilled salt on the floor. You know this one went to the night shift, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I know. So, is the body still there? Did it—” Then he said, “Aw, f—” He bit off the swear word. “I’m sorry. Hell. I almost forgot it was your friend. I mean…uh…she.”
“You were right the first time,” Faith assured him. The evidence in the morgue was no longer Krystal. “I hope you’ve got some leads on the bastard who murdered her.”
He knew better than to commit himself. “Just to humor me—the body’s still there?”
As in many cities, the crime-scene investigators were not part of the police department, so they didn’t have offices at the police station. Neither was this unit part of the parish— Louisiana talk for a county. As soon as the city coroner finished with the corpse, it would be released to the funeral parlor or moved back to the parish morgue. But as long as it remained evidence to be examined…
“The body’s still here.” Faith’s fingers darted across her keyboard to access the proper file and confirm that. Looking only. No interference. “Why do you need to know? Do you need to see it for…something?”
“Unless the M.E. has something pertinent to the case, I’m just as happy leaving that part to you folks. Hell. Maybe I do need to talk to Boulanger.”
“Hold a moment, and I’ll put you through.” Never had she felt more like a glorified secretary. But at least her job kept her near law enforcement. She’d dropped out of college the previous year when she was questioning everything, including why she’d thought she would even want to be a lawyer. But in the meantime, she had to pay the rent. This job felt…right.
Greg’s voice mail clicked on, and Chopin swore again.
“Would you like to leave a message?” Faith asked.
“No. I’d like you to find him. I need to see if anything got—” Did he start to form the T from taken, or was Faith imagining it? “Hunt Boulanger down and have him call me. Got it?”
“Yes sir, detective sir,” said Faith.
“You’re cute when you’re a smart-ass,” said Chopin, as if he could see her, and hung up.
Faith let the phone roll off her shoulder into her waiting palm. Her neck felt cricked already. But once she had the receiver in her hand, she held it for a long moment, as if she’d be able to sense anything of importance off of it.
Other than the fact that Officer Leone had used her line recently, she sensed nothing. Not off the telephone, anyway.
Roy Chopin had called her cute. Actually, at the start of the conversation, he’d called her fine, too. Then he’d gotten self-conscious.
He’d called to talk to her? Using her friend’s corpse as an excuse? Surely not.
She’d thought she was socially inept.
Since she’d been sitting too long anyway, Faith decided to head down to the autopsy room where the medical examiner would be working his magic. If Greg wasn’t with him, she could work her way back from there, but there was no reason to waste time checking the nooks and crannies if she’d only find him where he usually was—with the evidence.
The frigid autopsy chamber was large for a room, but small for a morgue. Only a dozen stainless steel drawers fronted one wall, with three slabs—two regular steel tables, one with a trough underneath it—positioned down the room’s center. Two of the tables had a sheet-draped body on them. It seemed sad, them left out like this, but Faith supposed bodies were too heavy to put away every time someone ran out for coffee or a bathroom break.
Either way, nobody was here. Nobody living, anyway.
She glanced toward the sheet that she thought hid Krystal’s corpse. This time, she couldn’t smell her friend’s presence because she was breathing shallow, through her mouth. Although everything here had been made for easy cleaning—the floor, the tiled walls like a bathroom’s, lots of metal—even the reek of disinfectant couldn’t mask the odor of death.
“Tell me,” she whispered, keeping her distance as she’d promised Greg she would. Never had she more fervently wished that she really was psychic. “Tell me who did this to you.”
Then her head—Faith’s head, of course—came up. She heard something in the hallway, male footsteps. Someone was coming.
Someone who didn’t belong here. In fact…
She didn’t know those boots. So why did they concern her?
She concentrated, straining to catch this particular heartbeat. It pulsed more rapidly than the heart of someone who was simply taking care of tasks at work. It sounded more like someone doing something they shouldn’t. And in this otherwise lifeless room, surrounded only by hearts that never would beat again, she recognized it.
The killer was coming.
Time to leave, thought Faith—but her feet didn’t move. It wasn’t from courage. Some instinct more powerful than her desire to see the killer’s face was holding her transfixed, listening to those footsteps, listening to that heartbeat. What was different about it? A murmur? A rhythmic anomaly? Could she even be sure it was the killer, and not her imagination?
Her head couldn’t. But her instincts weren’t letting her go out there, all the same.
The problem was, he was coming in here. She didn’t have to be psychic to guess that. This room was at the end of a hallway. He was coming in here, and either she stood here and waited for him, or she left by forcing herself to walk right by him—
Her feet weren’t cooperating.
He was barely ten feet from the door, if that much. She could hear it. Nine feet. Eight….
Faith wanted to stand her ground. But she’d been raised on paranoia for too long. Almost in defeat, she spun, tugged open one of the steel drawers at her feet—
A man’s ashen face stared back up at her. One of the dead gangbangers. Being a crime victim, he didn’t look happy, even in death.
The footsteps were only six feet from the doorway. Five….
She kicked that drawer smoothly closed and yanked the handle of another. It glided open, empty. She swung in, feet-first.
Three feet from the doorway…
Planting either hand on the disinfected, death-scented linoleum beneath the drawer, Faith pushed backward, sliding herself into the dark, steel confines of a drawer that normally held dead bodies.
Chapter 3
I t was cold. Cold and dark, and so very, very close.
Not that the former residents of this drawer had needed to see or stay warm.
On her stomach, Faith tucked her arms beneath herself, both for warmth and to lever her face farther from the steel slab that had held countless corpses. She shivered. Even her extra-keen eyes could see nothing. She could hear nothing. Was this thing actually soundproof? If so, was it so the dead could sleep peacefully…or so that the living wouldn’t hear them?
Stupid, thought Faith of her own fancies. Stupid, stupid. Now that she’d committed to this foolish course of action, she felt frustrated with her own cowardice. That, and its impetus.
A person couldn’t really have such distinct hearing that she could recognize a specific heartbeat, from down the hallway. Could she? Not even a freak like her. It had to be her imagination. Or maybe she was mentally deficient. Her mother had never wanted to consult a doctor about Faith’s “condition.”
Even if she wasn’t crazy, and the visitor to the morgue was the killer, why hide? She’d had a chance to see the man’s face, to finally know who had done this horrible thing to her friend…
But even now, when she considered pushing out of this body locker, she couldn’t quite summon the courage. She’d been in shock when she’d gone after the killer at the bar. Now, in daylight, facing him down seemed even more foolish than hiding from him.
Even in here.
She could feel her muscles stiffen, her breath strain in this cold, solid tomb of sensory deprivation. If she raised her head, she bumped it on steel.
Something felt sticky under one elbow—don’t think about it!—and she shivered harder.
Minutes passed.
Desperate, she harnessed her thoughts back to logic. Okay, suppose the intruder really was the killer from the bar. What the hell would he be doing here? How could he have gotten past security? Why would anyone take such a risk?
The last question echoed through her skull as surely as her own heartbeat and chattering teeth echoed blindly, deafening, back at her in this closed metal drawer. Why?
Roy Chopin had almost asked if anything had been taken from Krystal’s body. Faith felt sure of that. But shouldn’t he be asking about Krystal’s personal possessions rather than her corpse? What could be—
Taken from a corpse?
Oh, God. A trophy.
When the bodies on the slabs had merely been things, the empty remains of crime victims, hiding made sense. But when Faith thought of them being further victimized—here, where they should at least be safe—she couldn’t stand it.
She might already be too late. Safety be damned. Planting her hands on the sides of the drawer, wincing to imagine whatever else might have touched the same spot, she pushed forward—
And bumped her head on steel.
No.
She was locked in?
No! Barely swallowing back an embarrassing whimper, she fumbled at the front of the drawer. Oh, God, no. She couldn’t have made such a horrible mistake. What if she suffocated in here? What if nobody found her for days? She would never have a chance to make up with her mother. She would die a virgin. It would be like being buried alive!
When her hands encountered a latch, her relief was dizzying. Her reaction to the snick of that latch, to the rush of air that now smelled fresh in comparison to where she’d been, was heaven itself. But she didn’t have time to savor it as she threw open the door to the body drawer. She pushed the tray that held her forward, rolled stiffly off it, braced herself for an attack from—
From nobody.
Faith crouched there beside the open drawer, her heart pounding, her hands fisted, and faced an empty examination room. She spun one direction. Turned the other. Nothing.
Had she imagined it?
But no. She wasn’t imagining the scent that lingered beneath this smell of antiseptics and death. It didn’t matter if most normal people wouldn’t be able to smell it; many smokers couldn’t discern scents like baking bread or cheap perfume either, but that didn’t mean the smells weren’t there. This smell was here, too. Part musk, part heat. Power. Dominance. Evil.
If Faith needed further proof of intrusion, Krystal’s corpse now stared blankly at the ceiling.
Someone had moved the sheet from her blue-lipped face.
Still catching her shuddering breath, skin crawling from her momentary entombment, Faith took a hesitant step closer to her friend’s remains. The bruised horror that had once been Krystal’s slim, smooth neck seemed all the more blasphemous. Her eyes were open, blank. Her pale blond hair…
Was something different about her hair?
Faith bent closer, peering at it. There was definitely a blunt wedge where a chunk of hair by Krystal’s temple had been inexpertly sliced away. Someone had taken—
A knock at the open doorway startled her so badly, Faith sprang back from the corpse with a cry. Then she stared at her boss, confused. How had Greg gotten so close without her hearing him?
Just how upset was she?
Still, now that she did notice him, his heartbeat sounded comfortingly, familiarly like Greg. He wore Nikes, not boots. He, at least, wasn’t the killer.
“This is your version of keeping distance from the case?” he asked, pale eyes frowning behind his glasses.
Faith flushed. “I came looking for you and I…I found her like this.” It was technically the truth. She was just leaving out the middle part, where a more honest woman would say, and I heard someone coming and hid in the drawer and then climbed back out once he was gone and then I found her like this.
“Like what?” He came closer. He had a clipboard in one hand, a pen behind his ear, fresh gloves flapping out of his pocket. That was so Greg. Now that she’d noticed him, he wasn’t the least bit silent. Just…quiet-natured.
Easy to be with.
“Uncovered. And…some of her hair’s been cut off. Did the medical examiner take it to run tests?”
Greg took her by the shoulders—luckily his hands made contact with her sleeves, not her bare skin, but subtle sensations flowed across her all the same.
Nothing bad.
“That’s it, Faith. You’re done for the day. I don’t care where you go, but you’re too close to this case to be here until we’ve finished processing the evidence. Consider it bereavement leave.”
This time, Faith was aware of someone else coming. He didn’t sound like a threat. He sounded like the medical examiner. “But Greg, look. She’s missing hair.”
At least he looked—which meant he also let go of her. And he frowned. “That’s odd.”
“Then the M.E. didn’t…?”
“Didn’t what?” asked Dr. Mandelet, entering. He was a round man with café-au-lait skin, curly black hair and a neatly trimmed beard, his accent faintly touched by the Caribbean. His shoes, Faith noticed, had crepe soles.
“If you took hair to test, wouldn’t you take it by the root?” asked Greg, using his pen to ruffle the fresh, blunt cut amidst Krystal’s perm.
“I’d want the follicle attached, yes. But—” Close enough to see the cut himself, Mandelet swore. Then he glared at Faith. “Did you do this?”
“No!”
“Of course she didn’t,” agreed Greg. This time, his hand on her shoulder felt downright comforting. His belief in her innocence felt simple, straightforward. Easy. She found that she could still concentrate on the situation around them, even with this subtle, physical connection to another human. Interesting. “So who would have?”
“Didn’t you say the DB was a tarot reader?” asked the M.E.
Faith frowned. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“It matches her hands.” Now that he had an audience, Mandelet drew one of Krystal’s waxy hands out from beneath the sheet. Faith caught a glimpse of her friend’s bare hip beyond it, and felt embarrassed for her. “She’s got calluses on the inside joints of her fingers, on the edges of her thumbs. See? Feel here.”
Faith shook her head.
Mandelet grinned, clearly thinking Faith’s hesitance had to do with the fact that Krystal was dead, not knowing that Faith had hesitated to touch her even when she lived. “Trust me. This young lady knew her way around a deck of cards. So what I’m thinking is, one of her witchy friends snuck in.”
“What? No!”
“Faith,” cautioned Greg. “We’re just theorizing.”
“It’s happened more than once around here, especially in the funeral homes,” Mandelet insisted. “Voodoo practitioners. People pretending to be voodoo practitioners. Pagans. Psychics. Hair and nail clippings are a big deal to those kinds of weirdos.”
Faith’s roommate Evan, a practicing Wiccan, would call it the Law of Contagion. Having a piece of something, or something that had been in constant contact with your focus, was considered as good as having the actual focus.
“Huh.” Greg sounded amused. But he also dropped his hand from Faith’s shoulder, so she couldn’t tell why he was amused and had to get her information the old-fashioned way—by turning to him. He was taller than he looked.
“I was just thinking about how important hair and nail clippings are to us,” he explained. “Maybe this is another case of magic and science being more closely connected than they’re given credit for.”
Sometimes Faith really liked Greg.
“Anyway,” said Mandelet, and from the way he eyed Faith, she knew he hadn’t completely discounted her as a suspect in the hair theft, “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
But before he twitched the sheet back over Krystal’s face, Faith had to ask. “Wait. How—exactly how did she die? I really need to know.”
Mandelet and Greg exchanged a look, and Greg nodded. The M.E. shrugged and pulled the sheet farther down, so that it barely covered Krystal’s breasts. “You work here, little lady. How about you tell me?”
“She’s a desk clerk,” protested Greg, but this time Faith didn’t appreciate his protection.
“She was strangled,” she said, starting with the obvious. “I don’t know what he used—”
“He?” inquired Mandelet.
“Women only account for a tenth of the murder arrests made, right? And then they usually kill lovers or their children. And aren’t women more likely to kill from a distance, like with poison, than in a physical attack?”
Both men were nodding. So Faith felt sure enough to ask, “But what did he use?”
“Wire garrote?” suggested Mandelet. “That would be a professional’s choice.” But he waited for her response.
“That would leave a cleaner line, wouldn’t it?” She bent closer to what had, thankfully, been reduced back to evidence. “And a belt would have left a wider mark. I’m thinking some kind of cord or rope?”
“Silk,” agreed Mandelet. “Red silk. I removed fibers from the wound. If we can find that rope, her DNA will be all over it. The killer may have left epithelial evidence on it from his own hands as well, so that we can work toward a second DNA match.”
“And if we can’t find the rope? Did she maybe scratch him, or pull some of his hair, or—”
The M.E. shook his head. “The only tissue under her nails was her own, from when she fought the rope. There was evidence that she’d had sex in the last few days, but not recently enough for us to match the semen. It seems to have been consensual, in any case. The pattern of tearing on the—”
“That’s enough,” Greg interrupted firmly, and drew the sheet over Krystal’s face. “This is getting too personal. Faith, you’re taking a few days off, and that’s that.”
She nodded slowly. If we can find that rope…
It was as good a place to start as any, and she couldn’t very easily start looking for it if she was at work all day. “You’re right. I’ll go. Thank you, though. Both of you.”
“When you get back, you’re welcome to sit in on a few autopsies,” offered Mandelet, and as disgusting a thought as it was, Faith recognized the compliment in his offer. “You have a good eye for it. You don’t want to stay a clerk forever, do you?”
“Stop poaching my administrative staff,” warned Greg, saving Faith the necessity of answering that question. She really didn’t know what she wanted, in the long term.
But in the short…
She wanted to find Krystal’s killer.
“You should call Detective Chopin,” she said, as she and Greg left the examination room. “That’s why I came looking for you. He wants to ask you some questions.”
About whether anything had been taken. She’d let the detective and the CSU supervisor work that part out, though.
She had her own investigating to do.
Faith hoped she wouldn’t be the only one of the roommates to resume work that Monday. She figured their landlord, some British guy who lived with his wife north of the lake, would want his rent whether there were four people or five living in his multiroomed French Quarter apartment.
She found Evan, at least, where she thought she would, a ten-block walk from work.
Jackson Square.
If Bourbon Street was the heart of the nighttime French Quarter, Jackson Square—spread between the spires of the St. Louis Cathedral and the wide Mississippi River—was its daytime heart. Tankers and barges made their slow way down the expansive river, along with riverboats playing bright calliope music. Cab horses with their great, grassy scent pulled open carriages on slow tours of the oldest part of the city. Street performers—balloon clowns, mimes and today, a truly talented saxophone player—plied their talents in exchange for tips from the tourists. Different psychic readers set out chairs or tables in what Faith had learned was a silent hierarchy, the best readers at one end of the Square, the less experienced at another.
Krystal had been one of the best.
And artists, protected from the heat by little more than oversize patio umbrellas, hung their work on the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the Square, hoping for a sale or a commission.
Evan was one of those artists. He did portraits and was particularly skilled with charcoal and pastels, though he could do caricatures for a quick ten bucks as well.
The humid August air smelled of grass, azaleas, coffee and beignets as Faith crossed the sunny square to her friend’s purple umbrella. “Hey.”
“Hey there!” He stood from the canvas camp-chair where he’d been sitting, sketching on heaven knew what, as he saw her. Evan had been raised an old-fashioned southern gentleman, by a Garden District family that expected him to become a doctor and marry a debutante. His decision against either option had caused something of a rift in his family, though they still invited him for holidays. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
“They threw me out,” she admitted, sinking onto the cement base of the fence so that he’d feel comfortable sitting as well. “My boss is calling it bereavement leave, but what that really means is, they’re uncomfortable having me so close to the evidence.”
Evan’s eyes widened. “They don’t suspect you, do they?”
“I doubt it. But most murdered women are killed by someone they know. Since we knew Krystal, we might know her killer. So there’s always the chance I might try to cover something up, you know? Why take that risk? Although…”
Evan resumed his seat and turned the page in his sketchbook. “What?”
“Were you aware that Krys was seeing anybody? Even sleeping with them?” Usually, Faith could catch a whiff of other people off her roommates, if they’d gotten close. But not always. She tried to give them their privacy.
“Not that I know of.” Evan shrugged. “So are you going home now?”
“No. What I want to do… This may sound weird.”
Evan grinned. “No. Not that. Anything but weirdness.”
“You know the community better than I do. Are you aware of any readers who are good at finding things that are lost?”
“Like what?”
“Krystal’s murder weapon.”
Evan gulped, his hand slowing on the page of sketch paper. “Oh.”
“The bastard used some sort of cord or rope, and he didn’t leave it with her body. When you pull that hard on something, then some of your own tissue is rubbed off. So if I can find the cord, we might be that much closer to finding the killer. Assuming he didn’t take it with him, of course. Or wear gloves.”
Evan looked kind of green, but he forged on anyway. “I do know of one person who’s good at psychometry. She can touch something and tell you all kinds of things about it, like who held it last, and how they were feeling, and where they were. Nose like a bloodhound, too.”
Her recognition of his sarcasm had everything to do with the pitch of his voice and the slight change of his body temperature and scent, and nothing to do with paranormal abilities. “I’m not a psychic.”
“Sure you are. You’re just a different kind of psychic than most of us.”
“No! Moonsong’s a psychic—she can look at a person’s palm and tell all kinds of things that have nothing to do with how their heart’s beating or how they smell. And Absinthe, with her horoscopes. Even Krystal. She could shuffle those cards and lay them out and tell you things nobody could have guessed. She could predict—”
She stopped, tilted her head, met Evan’s eyes.
“She could predict the future,” he said softly, guessing or intuiting or maybe even reading what she’d just thought.
“So why couldn’t she predict hers?”
“Well, some readers believe they can’t see their own destiny, that they’re too subjective to have any clarity.”
“Or maybe she did predict it,” supposed Faith, “and just didn’t tell anyone.”
“Or maybe she predicted it, and just didn’t tell us.”
“Absinthe,” said Faith, standing.
“Absinthe,” agreed Evan. Neither of them imagined that a frightened Krystal would go to Moonsong. Moonsong, for all her innocence and kindness, was one of the protectees of their little group, not one of the protectors. But Absinthe took no prisoners. And if she’d known something…
It certainly would help explain some of the extra grief and guilt their usually implacable roommate was feeling.
“I’ll go see what she knows. And then I’ll try to find someone who can help me find that rope. Are you sure you don’t have any suggestions there?”
“Look, I’ve heard of some things my circle and I could try. Not psychic, but magic. Like maybe using a pendulum over a map to locate an item or a person, that sort of thing. But if it was my killer you were looking for, I’d put my faith in you. So to speak.” Evan turned his sketchbook. “Do you mind if I display this?”
He’d done a charcoal sketch of Faith, every line of her face a graceful curve, a stylish edge. Her reaction—surprise, pride, uncertainty—all of it mixed in her chest, and she took an uncertain step backward. “I—”
“I know it’s not that good,” Evan insisted.
“No! It’s—” Beautiful. But how could she say that? “My mom would have a cow,” she said instead, changing the subject. “Once I got my picture in the paper, when my sixth-grade class sang Christmas carols at a nursing home, and she called the paper to complain about not getting permission. She never liked…”
Never liked the idea of strangers seeing Faith. Never wanted the publicity.
“That’s okay,” said Evan, with a shrug. “If you want, I could—”
“No. Go ahead and hang it. It shows what a great artist you are. Mom won’t know about it, and if she finds out, she can lump it.” Or finally do me the favor of explaining what the hell she’s hiding. “I’ve got to go talk to Absinthe.”
“Between the lot of us, I bet we can find Krystal’s killer,” said Evan hopefully.
Faith said, “We can at least help.”
In more ways than one.
By that evening, she had enough with which to make a call. It was awfully soon after her interview with the detectives the other night. But for Krystal, Faith had to risk it.
The information she’d gotten from Absinthe was too weird—and too pressing—to ignore.
And forty-two hours had passed since Krystal’s murder.
It was time to revive Madame Cassandra.
Chapter 4
“T he dead woman,” Faith said, with the fake Virginia accent she’d adopted for these anonymous public-telephone contacts, “was having nightmares about vampires.”
“Vampires?” repeated Detective Sergeant Butch Jefferson, from his mobile.
In his background, Faith heard someone else—his partner, Roy Chopin. “She’s gotta be kidding you.”
“Y’all clearly don’t understand dream interpretation.” As soon as she’d decided to pass information from her psychic companions to the New Orleans Police Department months ago, Faith had known she must remain anonymous. For one thing, she’d been raised to keep a low profile, a habit difficult to shed. For another, explaining that she was merely speaking for the psychics, instead of as a psychic, would lessen her already shaky credibility.
Instead, when she made contact, she pretended to be a reader herself. She’d pulled the name Cassandra out of the blue, probably because she believed herself to be conveying the truth, as surely as the ancient Greek heroine had, and because, like that mythic Cassandra, Faith honestly doubted anyone in authority would believe her.
“Well then, Miss Cassie,” said Butch, his drawl far more real than hers. “Won’t you please enlighten us?”
“I would be delighted.” She readjusted the black receiver of the pay phone in the Aquarium of the Americas. She never used private numbers to call Butch. “Dreams can’t generally be taken at face value. They tend to be symbols.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“If Miss Tanner feared vampires, that could mean she was afraid of being drained of power, of energy.”
She heard Butch say, away from the mouthpiece, “She thinks maybe the dead psychic was worried about being drained of power.”
“Could be she just went into withdrawal when Anne Rice moved to the suburbs,” said Chopin.
“Could be,” insisted Faith, “that she was predicting something about her own death. Being murdered is about as drained as a girl can get, isn’t it? Did either of you nice detectives get the impression that the murderer might believe in magic?”
“I fear we’ve been too short on likely suspects to do that kind of questioning,” admitted Butch. Whether or not that part was true.
“Well, y’all should check. All kinds of details could have magical meaning, which could tell you something about your killer. For example, if you found salt at the crime scene.” She knew they had. “Salt’s a protective substance, magically speaking. Or if there’s a chance she was strangled with something made of natural fiber, that would indicate a killer who’s concerned with energy transference.”
She’d learned of the dreams from Absinthe. Moonsong had explained the significance of salt, and of a silk cord versus, say, nylon.
“You don’t say,” mused Butch. “Miss Cassie, I do believe you may be on to something here.”
Then she had to wait while he repeated the insight to his partner and fielded the usual smart-mouthed responses. Faith shifted her weight, feeling exposed in the bluish light, filtered by displays of wavering water. The Aquarium of the Americas would be closing in half an hour. She hoped to finish this call before they made any kind of announcement that would tell the detectives where she was.
She also wore a black wig and sunglasses, in hopes of skewing anyone’s description if the police traced the call and come around asking questions.
It was during long delays like this that she got the most paranoid. She also didn’t like having the time to notice that whoever had used this public phone before her had drunk more than one hurricane. It reeked of rum.
“So what’s your opinion, Miss Cassie?” asked Butch. “Was Krystal Tanner killed by one of her spiritualist co-workers?”
“No! I mean—most folks who work on, shall we say, the edge of expected reality? They understand the consequences of karma. If this man you’re after wanted to take Krystal Tanner’s energy, he’s likely some kind of untrained wannabe.”
“Why is it you think that?”
“Only two things could make him think he can escape the karmic repercussions of murder, Detective Sergeant. Either he’s got such strong personal power, psychic shields, that he doesn’t have to worry about it—in which case he’d know that someone else’s energy wouldn’t do him a whole lot of good—or he’s too ignorant to know better.”
Butch murmured what she’d said to his partner, then asked, “Do you have anything else for us just now, Miss Cassie?”
She heard a slow beeping on his end of the line, like a car door had been opened while the key was still in the ignition. They’d arrived at wherever they were going.
“If this fellow’s a wannabe magic user, he might try some kind of crash course,” she suggested. “There’s a psychic fair Wednesday night at the Biltmore Hotel.”
“The one that had those strange fires last year?” Apparently the damage had been almost entirely external. Then again, almost every old building in the Quarter had some strange story to tell.
“That’s the one. There won’t just be readers there, there’ll be experts offering classes. Someone who wants to learn about manipulating energy, chances are he’ll show up.” That had been her first introduction to the magic community of New Orleans, anyway. “And on the chance that he might be looking for more victims, that would be the place.”
“I appreciate that advice,” said Butch. “But if you don’t mind me asking, Miss Cassie…”
Which was when she felt them. Rather, felt him.
Roy Chopin was like a walking car alarm of energy—and he was getting closer. They’d traced the damn call!
“Tsk, tsk,” said Faith, frowning, and hung up.
Then she headed deeper into the aquarium, mingling with the other visitors, and was around a corner before the detectives ever made it through the entrance, much less to the pay phones.
He loved that they were all frightened of Him.
He was, in fact, the talk of the Crescent City Psychic Fair! For a while He felt happy just sitting outside one of the ballrooms at the Biltmore, watching the people come and go, listening to their conversations. He could tell some of the psychics by how they dressed—tie-dyed shirts, multiple necklaces with different charms hung on them, gauzy, sparkly skirts. They were the ones who talked the most about Krystal Tanner—that’s what the newspapers called the other night’s human battery—and their fears about who might be next. He could tell the visitors by their dazed expressions as they scanned the fair’s program, and by their uncomfortably loud jokes, pretending that they were here as a lark when, really, each of them wanted to believe. And then there were the ones in-between, the ones He couldn’t be sure about.
Like that green-eyed blonde.
She was the same one who’d chased Him away from Krystal Tanner. She’d caused trouble for Him. And she wasn’t scared.
He felt stronger, when people were scared. He felt more real. So he didn’t like her. But was she a psychic? She didn’t seem to be attending any of the workshops, but neither had she paid for tickets—readings cost between five and twenty-five dollars, in five-dollar increments, depending on how skilled one’s reader was. She wasn’t even carrying a program, and almost everyone carried programs. Instead, she seemed to just be moving from one ballroom to the other, almost…patrolling.
As if someone like her could protect these witches from the likes of Him.
In any case, if she had no abilities, she was beneath His notice. Once He saw the detectives from the other night approach her, He decided it was time to slip into one of the smaller lecture rooms, to hear about “Chakras and Personal Energies.”
Maybe then, He’d figure out how to draw more fear out of these people. Soon, if He kept feeding, even the Master wouldn’t be able to contain Him.
Then He would be free.
Faith felt Chopin’s approach, but she decided not to turn until he said something. Why advertise that she could hear his footsteps and his strong heartbeat, could smell his unique scent of coffee, aftershave, motor oil and forcefulness on the hotel’s Freon-edged air?
“Don’t tell me you believe in this junk?” he demanded, as he leaned around her elbow.
Faith blinked at him, his suit coat rumpled, his tie loose, his top two collar buttons undone to show a tanned throat and a thatch of dark chest hair. He needed a shave and a haircut, and—to judge by the shadows under his intense eyes—a good night’s sleep. That extra edge of coffee—black, and lots of it—told her he was pushing himself too hard. If it was to solve Krystal’s murder, she liked that about him.
If it wasn’t, then she was still annoyed about him trying to catch her—as Cassandra—the previous evening, even if he hadn’t succeeded.
“I didn’t know you were a believer either,” she countered, then had to laugh at the face he pulled in reaction. “Hello, Detective Jefferson,” she added to Chopin’s more easygoing partner. She knew his real title was Detective Sergeant, but since Cassandra called him that, it seemed a good idea if Faith did not.
“Call me Butch, ma’am.”
Even better. “Okay, Butch. Are you two here officially?”
“We figured we’d take a look at the kind of folks Miss Krystal knew,” explained Butch, while Chopin looked on like a kid dragged to his sister’s school concert. His mouth was in threatening mode, and his jaw was definitely a dare. “Maybe track down that missing lover. Ask a few people if they saw anything. Do you know any of the psychics ’round here?”
“Sure. All three of my roommates are reading tonight.”
Chopin let his head fall back, relieved. “So that’s why you’re here. Keeping an eye on them, right?”
Which was true, but she didn’t like his tone. “That, and to maybe get a past-life analysis or have my aura cleansed. Were you two looking for someone in particular?”
“Yeah,” said Chopin. “The killer. Any suggestions?”
She had to remember that it was Cassandra who’d brought them here, not, as far as they were concerned, Faith. But it was surprisingly easy to hesitate, to glance around. “A few minutes ago I saw the guy who tended bar at DeLoup’s the night Krystal died. But I was talking to him at the time of her murder. And none of my roommates know who Krystal was dating. I believe them.”
“Here’s a thought,” suggested Butch. “We need to figure out more about why this fellow targeted a psychic. Why don’t I make the rounds, talk to some of these fortune-teller types, while Roy here trades you a cup of coffee for an overview of this little community. How would that work for everybody?”
If everybody was Faith and Roy, they just stared at him.
Chopin snapped out of it first, shrugging his rangy shoulders. His suit coat hung open to show the gun and badge on his belt. “Uh, sure. Couldn’t hurt, right?”
Yes, it could, thought Faith. But she wasn’t sure why. She didn’t sense any threat from this man. He was pure cop, and even if she’d been a suspect through her close knowledge of the victim, the evidence couldn’t be less incriminating. He wasn’t out to arrest her. He was…
Was he interested in her?
She’d smelled that shift of pheromones often enough in her life to know that yes, he was. But she also knew physical interest wasn’t exactly an on/off switch for most men, or quite a few women. Sometimes even inappropriate men, like a professor or a doctor, or even her boss, couldn’t help their body’s reactions. All she could hope was for them to guard their behavior. Most, like Greg the other day, did just fine.
Other than calling her cute on the phone, which could’ve just been teasing, Chopin was also keeping it cool. Distant. Although as she continued to hesitate, his brows drew together into a foreboding frown, like he was taking it personally.
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll tell you whatever I can, Detective Chopin.”
“You can call him Roy,” insisted Butch with a grin and a wave, veering off toward the first ballroom.
“That guy’s as subtle as an ax to the head,” muttered Roy, forcing an after-you gesture that was hardly sulky at all.
“I’m guessing you don’t get out much?” said Faith, preceding him toward the wide, curved stairway. The restaurant’s bar, the only place to get coffee, was off the lobby on the ground floor.
His presence, behind her, felt downright tangible. “Not that it’s any business of his or yours, but no, I don’t. I’m a little busy what with all the murderers and scumbags running around needing to get caught.”
“All work and no play…”
“Is exactly the sort of thing Butch would say. So how do you like your coffee, Miss Corbett?”
She didn’t bother requesting that he call her Ms. Corbett. She let him fetch the drinks, too. That sort of thing mattered to some guys. For her part, she waited at a little bistro table, her chair turned so she could watch the foot traffic to and from the stairway to the ballrooms and the psychic fair.
“So what can I tell you about the psychic community around here?” she asked, turning her back on the passersby when Chopin returned with the coffee. He was not a graceful man. She felt relieved when the drinks were on the table.
“How’d you get involved with this element?”
She blinked, unused to being taken by surprise. “Am I still a suspect, Detective? I was scheduled to go back to work tomorrow, after the memorial service, but if there’s any question…”
“No, you’re not.” Holding her gaze, Chopin leaned over the table, his presence all but enveloping her. “And it’s Roy.”
Faith considered him and the way his pulse and body temperature belied his cool attitude. “Oh. Well, if you’re asking for personal reasons…I mean, if you’re asking because you’re interested…” She didn’t quite have the guts to finish that sentence, unsure as she felt. “Anyway, you really should be clear about that, and not hide it behind official business.”
He sat back now, folded his arms, studied her. Then he nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Tomorrow’s my night off. Go out with me.”
She stared. For someone who telegraphed his emotions that strongly, he’d surprised her twice in just a few minutes!
Maybe he only telegraphed what he wanted to telegraph. The strength. The intensity. The threat. Things that would tell any suspect with a few brain cells to rub together that this wasn’t anybody to mess with. The other stuff, the more personal stuff, he hid that pretty well.
She only caught a whiff of regret when something in his intense eyes faded. “Or not,” he said, shrugging. “I just wanted to get that out of the way before—”
“Okay.” Now she’d been surprised three times. She hadn’t expected to be surprised by herself, though.
He blinked at her, then widened his eyes, raised those expressive brows. “Okay?”
“Tomorrow night. It’s a date.” Faith was so used to reading what other people gave off, it took her a moment to realize that the flip-flopping in her stomach came from her, not anyone or anything else. But that reaction, at least, wasn’t surprising.
She didn’t date. Being whatever she was—not knowing what she was—made things way too complicated. And now she’d said yes? To a homicide detective? One she was hiding things from?
But I’m only hiding Cassandra, she thought grimly. I’m only hiding that I’m not…normal.
What was she supposed to do, make every possible date contingent on a confession of her abnormalities? Magazines suggested that a person keep private problems like STDs or past relationships quiet until at least the second date…or before getting naked, whichever came first. Why was her own freakishness any different?
Now she could barely breathe past the butterflies. What had she done?
She’d taken a defiant stab at being normal, that’s what.
“Good,” said Roy, with a decisive nod. She could tell he was pleased, though he hid it well. “Now, could we move on to the important stuff? How long have you known these people? Not because you’re a suspect—but how well do you understand them?”
It was easier, talking about impersonal things like the New Orleans occult community. And the Big Easy definitely had a thriving occult community. Of course, Chopin—Roy—knew a lot already. He’d seen the Voodoo Museum and Marie Laveau’s tomb. He knew where the vampire bars were—not for true immortals, as far as Faith knew, but for wannabes marginally more Goth than Absinthe. Lord knew Roy couldn’t have patrolled Jackson Square without seeing the readers. But he’d never taken the time to learn what really motivated the psychics.
Until now. When in detective mode, he wasn’t a lousy listener.
Faith explained that none of them seemed to be cult members—an official cult had to have a leader, and the majority of psychics were self-taught. She clarified the more innocent reasons that readers often chose new names, and how careful most of them were to abide by the vice laws that—hopefully—kept people from being defrauded by cons like the old curse-removal ploy. She thought she did a pretty good job at not focusing too intently on the detective’s thick wrists while she talked, or the dark hair on the back of his wrists, or his big hands as he cradled his cup of coffee and stared intently at her, listening. She thought she managed not to breathe in his scent and think about their upcoming date too often.
Would he touch her?
Would he kiss her?
Did she want him to?
How ridiculous was it that she was freaking about something this basic at twenty-two years old! It was time to practice Krystal’s quiet breathing techniques.
“So upstairs,” he said, thankfully oblivious, “some of the readers as you call ’em only charge a nickel a pop.”
“Nothing that cheap,” said Faith. “It starts at five dollars….”
Roy grinned as if she’d said something cute. He looked a lot more approachable when he grinned, even if it was mocking. “Butch was right. You are an innocent. A nickel is five dollars, hon. And when I say that for some of those readers, you need a Jackson to get past the door…?”
She didn’t like being an innocent. It sounded too close to being stupid. “You mean a twenty? Got it.”
“So why the difference? I mean, it’s fantasyland either way. Do they actually think there’s something there?”
“It’s not fantasyland.”
He cocked his head as if waiting for the punch line.
“Really,” she insisted. “Some of the readers are so good it’s uncanny—”
“Look, Corbett, I’ve read reports. There’s all kinds of tricks people use to make it seem like they’re reading your mind when they’re just telling you what you want to hear. Now if Miss Cleo up there’s only charging a Jackson for it, I can live and let live—I mean, it would cost that much for a hand…uh, for, uh, other kinds of happy feelings that are less legal. If you know what I mean.”
He paused, examining her. “I honestly don’t know if you do know what I mean. I think I like that about you.”
She was pretty sure she did know what he meant, but it seemed counterproductive to say so. Especially when her tummy was flip-flopping just because he’d said he liked her.
Get a grip. You aren’t even sure you like him!
“So the amount they charge makes a difference to you?” she asked.
“The clients are asking to be duped. But what I want to know is, do these people honestly not realize they’re fleecing anybody?”
“Maybe you should get to know them better.” Faith couldn’t keep the ice out of her tone, and Roy visibly drew back. “If you did, you’d know that the majority of psychic readers are honest people trying to provide an honest service. They aren’t fleecing anybody. They decide what to charge based on who’s been practicing the longest and who has the best track record.”
“Come on. If everyone up there was really psychic, why wouldn’t they win the lottery instead of getting paid a few Jacksons at a time?”
“This is a psychic fair. It’s community outreach. Personal readings cost a lot more than a few Jacksons.”
“Not an argument in their favor.”
“And psychic abilities don’t necessarily work that way. How’s your eyesight?”
Damn, but he had expressive eyebrows. “Come again?”
“You’ve got pretty good eyesight, right?”
“Sure.”
“So tell me who’s standing in front of the Eiffel Tower right now.”
He snorted. “I couldn’t say.”
Faith folded her arms, trying to look severe. “I thought you had good eyesight. Were you conning me when you said you had good eyesight?”
“But,” he countered, clearly enjoying himself, “if I got on a plane and flew to Paris, I could describe anyone in front of the Eiffel Tower. Why wouldn’t one of those psychic types get on their imaginary plane and fly wherever they needed to go to get a good look at tomorrow’s lotto numbers?”
Which left Faith with nothing better than, “It doesn’t seem to work that way.” It sounded lame, even to her ears. “And then there’s karma.”
They scowled at each other. Then Roy tried a different angle. “So how good a rep did Krystal Tanner have? As a reader, I mean.”
“She was one of the best.” And she was. You’re so lonely, she’d told Faith during that first reading, and that without even touching her. Because you sense so much, you try not to sense anything at all. You haven’t found your soul mates yet—or they haven’t found you. You’re scared to let people know your secrets. So’s the woman who raised you…your mother…?
“Who else is considered good?”
Faith gave him a few names, most of whom were upstairs, several of whom were published. “Then there are some who don’t do the public fairs.”
“Name one.”
“Celeste Deveaux, I guess—she was a lousy fortune-teller, but she’s supposed to be an excellent medium. She doesn’t like doing readings for people whose grief is still fresh, so she avoids walk-in readings like this. There’s a witch who goes by Hecate who’s the real deal, but she’s out of state right now.”
He actually had his notepad out of his pocket, writing these down. “A witch. Great. Give me more.”
No, she thought, annoyed with his pushiness as well as his cynicism—and still, damn it, noticing his thick wrists. Then she had a truly bad idea. An unmistakably bad idea.
So why did it appeal so strongly?
You’re playing with fire. Don’t even think about it.
“Come on,” wheedled Roy, turning on the charm. He would never be a model, not with the tired eyes, definitely not with that nose. But something about him… “Someone. Anyone.”
By now, the alternative would have been to bite her tongue off. “She’s not well known, but I’ve heard rumors of someone in town who’s supposed to be very good. Very, very good. It’s a Greek name…Cassiopeia? No, that’s not it….”
He sat up. “Cassandra?”
She widened her eyes. He liked innocence? Well here was innocence. “That might be it.”
Roy was gritting his jaw so tightly as he shook his head that she feared he might break some teeth. Wow. He really didn’t like Cassandra, did he?
Better to know that now, she guessed. “Not that I’ve ever seen the woman. Apparently she keeps to herself.”
“Yeah, but you’ve heard something.” Like that, he was leaning over the table again, warm and demanding and coffee-scented. Practically leaning over her. Practically touching. “Tell me what you’ve heard.”
Caught now, she would have been glad for almost any interruption.
She still felt a cold horror wash through her as she recognized something—a footstep, a heartbeat—behind her.
The killer was here.
And he was feeding.
Chapter 5
F aith spun in her chair and stared at the red-carpeted lobby, where at least two people had just left the hotel. It had been him. She was sure it had been him!
“And now I’m talking to myself,” muttered Roy, behind her.
She didn’t bother stopping to explain. She slid off her bistro chair and took off out of the bar.
“Hey!” Roy yelled. But Faith was busy racing across the oriental rug of the lobby, putting her shoulder into the revolving door, stepping out into the spattering rainfall that was New Orleans in August. She looked one way.
Nothing.
She looked the other.
Nothing. Rather, there were plenty of people heading in both directions, umbrellas hiding their faces or heads bent against the rain. This was the French Quarter! Tourists wandered, enjoying the rain like they might a special effect in a theme park. Partygoers hustled, trying to keep their good clothes dry. A trumpet player on the corner ignored the rain to wail out a tune reminiscent of Al Hirt, with a hat by his feet for wet tips. The air was thick with the perfume of plopping raindrops on hot concrete, underscored by the scent of the nearby river, of ice cream and soft pretzels, of wisteria from a nearby courtyard. But whatever Faith had sensed inside had faded.
It didn’t make any sense.
She’d felt him going in this direction! It wasn’t like he could suddenly ditch his unique heartbeat, like someone pulling off a mask…was it?
“What the hell was that?” The words, immediately behind her, didn’t startle her anywhere near the way Roy Chopin’s hands, catching her damp arms, did.
Oh, God! Like an exposed power line.
Faith stiffened, but not in time to escape the sudden burst of energy that sizzled through her, the emotions, the images. Someone fed him home cooking on a weekly basis. He liked beer. He spent too much time around the jail and the station and on the streets. His underlying edge of violence was a constant problem for him. He’d had sex sometime in the last month but that’s all it had been, sex, he didn’t love the woman—
With a mew of protest, she wrenched away from him, spun to face him.
Then she saw how his eyes widened, how he raised his spread hands and took a step back as if to show her he was unarmed despite the belt holster. She smelled his sudden guilt and confusion. That’s when she realized how she’d hunched down into herself at his touch. Like some kind of frightened victim.
Deliberately she squared her shoulders, raised her chin, even if it felt like she’d snap something, forcing herself back into a posture she didn’t yet feel. So much for being normal.
Roy Chopin kept his distance, lowering his hands slowly, clearly meaning to convey how harmless he thought he was. He squinted against raindrops in his eyes. “You okay there, Corbett?”
But he was looking at her as if she wasn’t okay at all.
“I…I don’t like being touched,” she said, blinking back against the wet. Her voice sounded only a little husky from sheer mortification. There was a statement that would win dates, for sure. “You startled me.”
“I’m sorry.” The hands were by his sides again. He was starting to relax, to breathe again, hair dripping across his forehead. She’d scared him.
“No, I’m sorry. I know it’s weird.”
“I didn’t touch you till you were already out here,” he said. For a minute, she was confused. Then he said, “You just ran off. What’s up?”
He wasn’t just confused about her reaction to his touch. He was confused about how she’d bolted.
I sensed the killer. Then I didn’t.
“I thought I heard something,” she said, which was at least true, if lame.
He was feeding. The thought came to her again—but what had it meant?
The fear, when it hit, hit hard. Absinthe! Moonsong!
Evan!
She spun for the hotel again—but luckily, before she could put the icing on her embarrassment cake, Butch Jefferson came through the revolving door. “Now what are you two doing out here in the wet?” he demanded, the seriousness in his gaze contradicting his friendly tone. “Son, I got something upstairs you should see.”
Chopin gave her an after-you gesture, so they headed inside in detective-Faith-detective order.
It was a handwritten note. Someone had found it at the empty table where Krystal would have “read.” Their shout of alarm had drawn the attention of others.
Now too many bystanders clustered and whispered, while Butch and Roy studied the piece of Biltmore stationary without touching it.
“‘She was delicious,’” read Roy, frowning. “‘The next one will be even tastier.’”
The whispering of the psychics and guests and hotel staff became something closer to a group moan—a noise with too many words to retain any individuality, merely distress. But they were communicating the same fear, something Faith had already half guessed herself.
Hadn’t she suggested the killer might come here to scope out more victims?
“He’s a serial killer,” she whispered, giving voice to what the others were murmuring amongst themselves…kind of like she did with her informative calls as Cassandra.
“No,” said Roy firmly, standing. “There’s no proof of that. He’s just trying to get as much mileage as he can off of the one killing we do know about.”
“But—”
“This is a note, not a body,” he insisted, while Butch used tweezers to lift the page into a Ziploc bag from his pocket. These detectives came prepared. “Don’t buy into his game, Corbett. It’s what he wants folks to do.”
He was feeding, thought Faith again—and now it made sense. The killer had been high on the fear he’d created. That’s why he’d left the note—to create fear. That’s what she’d heard in his pulse, in his heartbeat.
She shivered.
Roy made a disgusted sound. “You’re wet. You want my jacket?”
“No.” She managed to stop him before he could shrug it off. “I should probably get my roommates home. It looks like things are closing up early, after this.”
“They were in the main ballroom the whole time, right? As long as they didn’t see anything suspicious, head ’em out.”
“Thank you for the coffee.”
Roy was frowning at the now-bagged note, holding it up to the light. He wasn’t even looking at her. But he said, “Seven okay?”
That took Faith by surprise. “What?”
He slid his gaze from the missive to her, mouth threatening again. “Tomorrow night. Date. Seven?”
Despite her attack of the heebie-jeebies out front? The only thing more embarrassing than the idea that this was now a pity date was the idea of him knowing she knew it was a pity date. “Okay,” she said, as they both turned to their own particular duties.
Butch looked immensely pleased with himself.
Faith had never been to a funeral before. She had no family besides her mother—no grandparents, no great-aunts or uncles, nobody whose passing would have required she attend their services. Since she and her mother tended to move every few years, she rarely made friends long enough to see one of them die. So she wasn’t sure how Krystal’s memorial service compared to other funerals.
But she knew she hated it.
The grief was palpable—grief from Krystal’s parents, who’d come to collect the body; grief from all her friends; grief from some members of the community who’d shown up without even knowing Krystal, just as a way of expressing their anguish and outrage over this murder in their city.
That last group made Faith wonder if perhaps moving every few years hadn’t been a good enough excuse for not attending funerals in the past, after all.
Butch Jefferson and Roy Chopin were there, too, though they stayed in back. Faith supposed they were taking note of who attended. She remembered from a criminal psychology class that some killers liked to see the results of what they’d done.
In any case, the detectives’ solemn distance seemed respectful, and Faith knew she could count on them to notice anything suspicious. She kept her focus on the people who needed her more. Her roommates. The family.
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