Phantom of the French Quarter
Colleen Thompson
Marcus Le Carpentier was a phantom in the night, a man who let no one in and always kept a low profile. So when he accidentally witnessed a beautiful local woman stumble upon a dead body, the last thing Marcus planned on was getting involved. He'd done that before…and had been living with the dangerous consequences ever since. But since leaving a very frightened Caitlyn Villaré alone didn't sit well with Marcus, he promised to help and then return to the shadowy corners of New Orleans, alone. Unfortunately, Caitlyn's discovery brought a killer out of hiding and Marcus was thrust back into the limelight, protecting Caitlyn, hunting down a madman–and failing to find all the usual reasons why it would be best if he walked away…
“I have to leave here, Caitlyn. I have to leave here very soon.”
When more of her hair slid free, she pulled off the hat and, with a nervous flutter, fanned her face with its broad brim. “I know you can’t help me. But at least you don’t treat me like some melodramatic little girl.”
“First of all, you’d be crazy not to be upset after everything you’ve been through.” Finally giving in to the need to touch her, he took her hand and stroked his thumb across her knuckles. “And believe me, I have never seen you as a little girl, not for a single moment.”
Leaning closer, he skimmed his lips over her soft cheek and whispered into her ear, “It’s a woman that I’m touching, a woman that I dream of. Or do you need a reminder of that, Caitlyn?”
Phantom of the French Quarter
Colleen Thompson
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To every booklover who’s ever passed along a favorite story and
told a friend, a sister or a perfect stranger,
“You absolutely have to read this.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
After beginning her career writing historical romance novels, Colleen Thompson turned to writing the contemporary romantic suspense she loves in 2004. Since then, her work has been honored with the Texas Gold Award, along with nominations for RITA
, Daphne du Maurier, and multiple reviewers’ choice honors, along with starred reviews from RT Book Reviews and Publishers Weekly. A former teacher living with her family in the Houston area, Colleen has a passion for reading, hiking and dog rescue. Visit her online at www.colleen-thompson.com.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Caitlyn Villaré —A beautiful young tour guide with a passion for old French Quarter cemeteries, Caitlyn will do whatever it takes to save her fledging business—even if that means trusting the mesmerizing dark-eyed stranger she first glimpsed among the tombs.
Marcus Le Carpentier —Brooding and mysterious, this funerary art photographer has every reason to avoid police attention. Yet he cannot ignore the evidence his images have captured…or the smoldering attraction that threatens to ignite each time he encounters Caitlyn.
Josiah Paine —Caitlyn’s hot-tempered former boss was furious that his best tour guide left to start a rival business. Has his thirst for vengeance gone beyond his angry words?
Max Lafitte —Jealous of Caitlyn’s overnight success, does this aging tour guide have a far older reason to despise her?
Mrs. Eva Rill —Hidden beneath her black veil, this mysterious white-haired woman bristles with angry accusations—accusations that may only be a ruse to lure Caitlyn to her death.
Reuben Pierce —Hired to protect Caitlyn from the dangers of the Quarter, this retired cop-turned-bodyguard sees no greater threat than the fugitive photographer who seems so determined to spirit her away.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Epilogue
Chapter One
In an old French Quarter cemetery that cradled saints and sinners alike, dawn stained the slumbering fog bloodred. Layer after layer, it awakened, rising like the resurrected dead and swirling in soft eddies around the young woman cutting through it.
“It has to be here somewhere,” Caitlyn Villaré called over her shoulder. Tension tightened her voice, and perspiration curled damp tendrils of long blond hair that clung to the fair skin at her temples and behind her neck. Her hand swished impatiently through the clotted June air, disturbing a small cloud of biting gnats.
From the next row of graves, a bull of a man wearing a rumpled chino blazer and a salt-and-pepper buzz cut shot her a grim look. “Let’s not get your hopes up too high. I saw the rock that old bat was wearing, and if some lowlife caught sight of it out here…”
Reuben Pierce let the words die, but his grim brown eyes did the talking for him. An old friend of her father’s, the retired cop served as her assistant, fellow tour guide and bodyguard. Or babysitter, as Caitlyn thought when she was most exasperated with her over-protective older sister, Jacinth.
But he was right, Caitlyn admitted to herself. As soon as the two of them had escorted her party of tourists out through the cemetery gates last night, unsavory types had undoubtedly descended, trolling for any leavings—and hoping to surprise any straggler foolish enough to return for a private viewing.
Only last month, a lone tourist—not one of her clients, thank goodness—had been found here, his pockets turned out and his throat slashed, his cooling corpse lying in a congealing pool of blood. She shivered at the thought of it, hurrying her steps, and said to Reuben, “If I don’t find that ring, that horrible old woman will tell everyone I stole it.”
Caitlyn’s stomach tightened with the memory of the shriveled crone, a tiny, wrinkled figure who’d worn a black lace veil over the silken white coil of her hair. At first Caitlyn had taken her attire for a costume, not unlike the gypsy storyteller outfits she herself wore to help enliven her tales of New Orleans’s famous cities of the dead. But at four o’clock this morning, when the old woman calling herself Eva Rill had furiously rapped her cane against Caitlyn’s front door, she was still dressed entirely in black, right down to the little round hat with the raven’s feathers and the lacy cloud of netting.
Widow’s weeds, her getup would have been called in an earlier century, but Caitlyn, who loved costuming as much as any of her fellow theater students, imagined them the garments of a dark witch…or an Old World sorceress.
“You should have heard the shrieking,” Caitlyn went on. “She said she’ll file a complaint with the police if I don’t return the ring by noon today. Swore she’ll have my license pulled and I’ll lose everything I’ve worked for…everything Jacinth and I are turning ourselves inside out to try to—”
With the fog lifting, she saw the roll of Reuben’s eyes and heard his scoffing laughter.
“Come on, kiddo. Calm down. First of all, what kind of idiot wears a rock the size of a pigeon’s egg around the Quarter after dark? Even a tourist should know better. And who’s gonna honestly believe you could somehow manage to slip that ring right off her bony finger without her noticing and screaming bloody murder?”
“Josiah Paine, that’s who.” Caitlyn grew morose, thinking of her former boss, the man who’d taken a chance on hiring her not long after she and her sister had come to New Orleans to settle their grandmother’s estate. They hadn’t planned on staying in the city their mother had refused to speak of, the city where their father had been murdered when Caitlyn was an infant. Nor had the sisters planned on falling in love with the crumbling Esplanade Avenue mansion they’d inherited, or the decaying, magnolia-scented tales of a place that all too quickly felt like home.
“Or at least he’ll pretend he buys it,” she grumbled, “so he can scare off every potential customer in earshot.”
“Paine can be a pain, all right.” Reuben gave a shrug. “But the more he trash-talks your business, the more free advertising the fool’s giving you. I’ve told him as much myself.”
“I’d rather find the ring than test your theory.” Caitlyn poked among the weeds screening a stone obelisk, her mood darkening with the memory of the night her former boss had erupted, accusing her of holding back tip money, which he claimed as his due.
She’d grown used to his moods, his tendency toward pitting the employees against one another, even his shouting, but that night he had laid hands on her, slamming her so hard against a wall that she’d found bruises later. Embarrassed that she’d put up with his abuse for so long, she’d told no one, instead walking out and putting the whole sordid episode behind her.
And savoring the sweet revenge of seeing her dramatic delivery and winning people skills earn her the sort of word of mouth his cowed and miserable employees never could. Though she still couldn’t afford an office of her own, she was booking more and more business using her home phone and computer.
Caitlyn moved along the row of tombs, weathered structures built in deference to the high water table’s alarming tendency to float coffins to the surface. Some of the houselike vaults, mausoleums and monuments were more recent, clearly well tended, while others tilted, crumbling within the confines of fenced familial plots. Losing sight of Reuben, she followed the route she had taken last night, the pathway leading to the cemetery’s oldest section.
So intent was she on her search that she never noticed how the chorus of morning birds fell silent. Nor did she pay any heed to the fiery disk of the sun climbing above the bruised horizon.
Half-hidden by another spray of weeds, she caught the bloody wink of a ruby flanked by a pair of teardrop diamonds. Her heart leaping with joy and relief, she opened her mouth to call to Reuben.
And that was when she noticed that the ring adorned a finger. A finger on a hand so pale, it might have been chiseled out of marble.
A hand connected to the outstretched arm of a young woman lying on her side behind a tombstone, her features set and rigid, her long blond hair fanned out…
And her green eyes looking like those that stared back at Caitlyn from her mirror every morning.
Except that these were glassy, hollow, as dead as the girl who lay there and said nothing, though her open mouth, obscenely rimmed in still-moist red lipstick, remained forever frozen in a hell-born silent scream.
MARCUS LE CARPENTIER HAD HER in his sights. So ethereal, so fragile, she looked as though she might crumble into dust with the weight of the slivered sunbeam that pierced the fog layers like the devil’s darning needle.
Like the light, his caress came from a distance, focused by a lens that captured the rising bands of moisture, the single, slanting ray and the wings of the stone angel atop the mossy tomb. He blew back thick dark hair from darker eyes, his skin tightening with delicious anticipation.
When he saw this dawn angel, Isaiah would be so pleased, but it was nothing compared to the pleasure Marcus himself was deriving from this moment.
Moving the tip of one long finger atop the shutter button, he held his breath and framed the ethereal light, the mist, the haunting artwork he had come so very far and through so very much to—
A gasp caught his attention a split second before something struck him from behind, hard enough to send both his four-thousand-dollar camera and its case flying. As he fell, Marcus instinctively grabbed for the one indispensable, irreplaceable item he had left to his name.
It hit the hard stone corner of a raised vault with a splintering noise before bouncing off and striking the bricked surface below.
“No!” he shouted, as he fell down on hands and knees.
Adrenaline pounding through him, he leapt panting to his feet, his fists already rising to ward off another attack.
The blonde who’d fallen into him scrambled out of reach, an instant before a piercing scream erupted from her rounded mouth, quickly drawing a brute with a graying buzz cut and blood in his eyes.
“What did you do to her?” The huge man stepped from the mist to move in on him, his own fists raised like a prizefighter’s.
Marcus stood his ground, an eerie calm icing his voice. “To her? Let’s talk about what she did to my camera, plowing into me like that.”
Though he towered over Marcus’s six feet, the man with the buzzed hair stopped short, studying his younger, lighter adversary. With the force of a stare that made most fights unnecessary, Marcus kept the human pit bull at bay.
Meanwhile, the young woman, no older than her early twenties, finally found her voice. “Not him, Reuben. It’s the—she’s dead!”
Both men followed her pointing finger toward a body. A body even paler than the terrified blonde who had destroyed his camera.
In every other respect, they looked virtually identical. Beautiful, with rivers of hair like summer moonlight and rounded eyes green as the bayou.
Except that one was still as stone, with her mouth agape and a lurid line of color bruising her alabaster neck.
“Holy hell.” Reuben jerked a cell phone from his rumpled jacket. “Who is—she looks almost like—”
“Like me, I know.” Terror pinched the living woman’s voice.
Marcus knelt beside the crumpled female, his hand reaching to confirm what his eyes already knew. The skin of her wrist was cool and unyielding, as well as pulseless. Along the underside of her bare outstretched arm—her top was sleeveless, and ink-black to match her short skirt—he focused on the line of livid purple, then the bruising on her neck. The splash of blood at the hollow of her throat seemed garish in contrast to her otherwise unblemished pallor.
But not nearly as horrifying as the way the eyes glittered when a ray of sunlight pierced the fog.
Rising with an oath, Marcus backed away, taking in the unnatural sheen of the blond filaments, the glassy stare that, he saw with a jolt, was real glass. Turning his head to take in the living woman, he realized that the dead one didn’t look like her, not really…?.
Even though someone had apparently taken pains to make her seem that way.
Reuben began speaking into the phone, reporting their location and the discovery of a corpse, so Marcus directed his attention to the living woman.
“That’s a wig she’s wearing,” he pointed out. “And those eyes. They aren’t natural, either.”
She edged close enough that he could hear the quick rhythm of her breathing, could feel the nervous energy pulsing from her. Peering at the body, she said, “Why would someone do this?”
Don’t get involved, warned the instinct that four years of running had honed to a keen edge. Yet the fear in her red-rimmed eyes, the popped pearl button on her ivory blouse and the torn knee of the pants that skimmed her slender body made her need so real and immediate, so human, that he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “Who knew you would be here? Some admirer you’ve turned away? An ex-boyfriend who can’t let go?”
Fear flashed over her beautiful features, and she shook her head. “There’s no one like that, no one in a long time. But there was this old woman—she accused me of…”
Her trembling hand pointed to the ring the corpse was wearing, a ring with a stone so large, he suspected it was as artificial as the long blond hair and green eyes.
Why couldn’t the body be a fake, too? A mannequin, arranged and decorated as a bad joke? But the cool flesh had felt all too human, and the horror of the gaping mouth was all too real.
Reuben flipped his phone shut and in a take-charge voice said, “Police are on their way. They’ll want to talk to us.”
Something in Marcus froze at those words. To hide his reaction, he turned away and scooped up his rattling Nikon, along with several small items that had fallen from the camera bag.
“Sorry I ran into you. It was just so—so awful, seeing her, that I—” the woman said before Reuben overrode her, his flat brown stare boring into Marcus.
“What’re you doing out here at this hour?” The huge man sounded coplike himself, suspicion tightening his clean-shaven jaw.
Marcus raised the camera in answer, then tossed back the question. “And the two of you were out here because…?”
“We were looking for a lost—” the woman started.
“That’s none of his business, Caitlyn,” Reuben warned her before his voice softened. “You’re hurt.”
“No, I’m fine. I’m…” She glanced down at a few drops of blood that had seeped through the torn material at her knee. Shaking her head, she said, “Never mind that.”
She looked into Marcus’s face, her expression a brand of innocence he’d forgotten existed in the world. “I’m Caitlyn Villaré, from Villar-A1 Tours. This is my assistant, Reuben Pierce.”
Considering the difference in their ages and the man’s obvious protectiveness, Marcus would have been less surprised to learn that Reuben was a doting father or an uncle. But not a sugar daddy, not to this angelic-looking blonde.
“We were looking for something one of my clients lost here last night,” she told him. “A ring.”
“I’m Ethan. Ethan Thornton.” The lie came smoothly, honed by years of practice at using different names in different cities. Only this time, for the first time in memory, he felt the kick of conscience. “I have an interest in funerary art.”
“You have an interest in taking pictures of dead girls, too?” Reuben challenged. “Maybe setting up your own—”
As Marcus fixed him with another cold stare, Caitlyn cut him off. “Reuben, this is horrible enough without you pointing fingers. I’m sorry, Mr. Thornton.”
Reuben’s expression said he wasn’t, that he remained suspicious. But at least he backed off, muttering only a face-saving “Cops’ll be here any minute. Guess we’ll leave the questions to them.”
The three of them stood in awkward silence, avoiding eye contact as they waited for—and, in Marcus’s case, dreaded—the first sirens to pierce the delicate veil of birdsong.
Caitlyn glanced down at the body, then looked away quickly and hugged herself as a chill rippled over her flesh. “I’ve never seen someone—I mean, I was with my mother when she died of cancer. But that was nothing like this.”
Reuben took her arm and steered her toward a stone bench. “Here, why don’t you sit down? You’ve had a shock, and you’re still bleeding. And there’s no need to stand there looking at…it.”
“Her,” Caitlyn corrected, ignoring the damp slab of concrete he was indicating. “She’s still a person, isn’t she? We can give her that much, at least.”
Still a person. Soft and serious, her words slipped beneath Marcus’s armor, beneath the skin itself. And he couldn’t help but wonder, could a woman who found humanity in a grotesquely altered dead girl see a man like him, a man who’d fallen so far and so hard, as—
Too dangerous to go there, to allow himself to feel. At the moment, thinking was required. Thinking and watching until he finally found the right moment to fade into the background, to move on to the next city and forget those glassy, green eyes…along with their living mirror image in the face of Caitlyn Villaré.
Chapter Two
“Tell me more about the man who fled the scene before the officers arrived, the one who told you his name was Ethan Thornton.” In the airless interview room at the police station, Detective Lorna Robinson leaned her considerable weight onto her forearms, flattening her flesh against the table. With her cropped, red-streaked hair and her chunky wooden jewelry, she locked in on Caitlyn with a striking hazel gaze a few shades lighter than her rich brown skin. “Could you describe him for me again?”
“Tall and on the slim side. His eyes were almost black.” Caitlyn closed her own eyes in an attempt to find the words to describe him. Exhausted as she was from her interrupted sleep and the backwash of emotion, she wanted nothing more than to finish this discussion and go home. “His hair was wavy, long and dark brown.”
“How long, would you say?”
“It brushed his shoulders, I think. A little tousled but clean.” There was so much more Caitlyn couldn’t find the words for. How his hands were long and elegant as a sculptor’s. How his gaze shifted, stone to liquid, with currents of thought running deep and swift beneath the espresso-colored surface.
How the sight of him, the rich timbre of his voice and the way he carried himself had sent attraction knifing through her. But she said nothing, knowing the tidal pull could only be an illusion, that shock had been what left her quaking—the discovery of a body that looked more like a sister to her than dark-haired Jacinth ever had.
A need to call Jacinth had Caitlyn’s stomach clenching. But if she did, her older sister would rush home from the summer seminar she’d just begun teaching in Mississippi—and they desperately needed her earnings to pay the looming tax bill on the house.
Besides, Caitlyn was tired of being protected. Even more than that, she was sick of being treated like brilliant brunette Jacinth’s idiot blonde sister, despite the fact that she’d graduated with high honors from a well-respected theater program last year, and had gotten a successful business up and running, mostly on her own, within months of her arrival in this city.
“Still with me, Ms. Villaré?” Straightening, Detective Robinson tapped a pen against her notepad. “I asked, how was this Mr. Thornton dressed?”
Caitlyn frowned, considering. “His jeans were pretty faded. The shirt was loose, long sleeved, open at the throat. It was white, and kind of old-fashioned. He looked old-fashioned, too.”
The detective looked up from her scribbling. “I thought you said he was young.”
Caitlyn shook her head. “He was young, no more than his late twenties. It was just—the hair, the shirt. He might have stepped out of the Renaissance, or a pirate movie.”
Detective Robinson smiled. “You have a very different way of describing people, know that?”
Caitlyn shrugged. “Even storytelling has its occupational hazards. So what did Reuben tell your partner about Mr. Thornton?”
When he’d been ushered toward a different interview room, Caitlyn had protested, but Reuben had shushed her. The retired cop had told her in his brusque voice, Don’t worry, chère. It’s just procedure. And it’s not like either of us has anything to hide.
“Right now, I’m only interested in what you think.” Annoyance furrowed Detective Robinson’s brow. “You’re sure you didn’t see him leave? Or hear a vehicle or something?”
“At first I thought he’d gone off with one of the officers or something.”
“We’ll work on tracking him down. Would’ve made it a lot easier if he’d shown up in the system under the name he gave you.”
“You mean he lied?” She knew it was ridiculous, but Caitlyn took the deception personally. The stranger had looked straight at her, with those ink-dark eyes, and he’d lied to her point-blank.
A spark of humor lit the detective’s eyes. “You really are young, aren’t you, hon?”
Caitlyn barely had time to feel insulted before Robinson added, “I can tell you from experience, there’re plenty of citizens out there who aren’t too eager to get involved in police matters. For a whole variety of reasons.”
Caitlyn felt the blood drain from her face. “Of course, I understand that, but he—you don’t think he could have been the one who…?” She pictured the still-unidentified woman’s marble-pale skin, the gaping, bloodless mouth set in a voiceless scream. Had the man Caitlyn had literally run into after the discovery, the man who’d looked as stunned as she felt, really been a killer?
Was it possible anyone so handsome could do such ugly, sick things? Shivering, she hugged her arms, though the room was warm and stuffy.
“Too soon to say.” Pulling a card from the pocket of her dark brown jacket, Detective Robinson added, “But you hear from him or see him, call me—any time. It’s possible this man could pose a danger.”
An unspoken truth hung like smoke between them, and Caitlyn saw the reminder in the detective’s eyes of how closely she resembled the dead woman. Or how likely it seemed that the corpse had been deliberately altered to look like her.
Though Caitlyn still held out a thimble’s worth of hope, no one had suggested the resemblance was coincidental, especially after she’d described Eva Rill’s threats at her home last night—the same threats that had led Caitlyn to the body.
“Don’t worry. I’ll definitely call,” said Caitlyn, relieved to think the interview had finally come to an end.
But the detective wasn’t finished. “Let’s get back to the old woman,” she said. “This Mrs. Rill, was she acting strange on your tour last night?”
Caitlyn sighed. “I thought the black veil and the dress seemed odd. But we saw weirder last night—everything from piercings and a rainbow Mohawk to a bunch of handsy frat boys with more hurricanes than sense inside them,” she said, referring to a drink popular with Bourbon Street revelers. “So, no, I didn’t notice one quiet little old lady in particular.”
“Until she showed up at four in the morning to accuse you of theft.”
When Caitlyn nodded, the detective wondered aloud, “How would she know where you lived in the first place?”
“Why don’t you ask her? I gave you her number at least an hour ago.”
Last night the old woman had insisted she take it down so Caitlyn could call her if she “decided to return” the missing ring.
“I went ahead and tried it after I showed you in here. The number’s to a mortuary over in the Garden District. They never heard of any Eva Rill.”
The female detective leaned in even closer, piercing Caitlyn with a needle-sharp gaze. “How ’bout you?”
Shocked by the woman’s sudden change in tone, Caitlyn snapped, “Me? Are you—are you insinuating that I know Mrs. Rill, or made up the story about her coming to threaten me last night? Why? Why would you think such a—”
Sound echoed through the small room as Detective Robinson tore a sheet of paper off her pad and then ripped it several times. “Let me show you why, Ms. Villaré,” she said as she printed large block letters, one to a scrap.
She turned the letters around, allowing Caitlyn to read: E-V-A R-I-L-L.
Leaning in, the detective asked her, “You’re absolutely certain you don’t have anything you want to tell me?”
“Like what?” Caitlyn shot back as she watched the dark hands rearranging letters, sliding them around like the pieces in a shell game.
Sliding them around until they spelled her own name: V-I-L-L-A-R-E.
AN OLDER SILVER CHEVY RUMBLED like low thunder beside the wrought-iron fence that hemmed in a Grand Lady. Or at least that was what his mother would have called the towering white plantation-style mansion, with its Greek Revival columns and elegant two-story veranda.
Beside the house stood a venerable live oak, its twisted Spanish moss-cloaked branches reminding Marcus of an old man scowling at the threadbare fugitive parked near his front door.
“Just keep driving,” Marcus told himself. But his gaze remained fixed on the Villaré house, a place that whispered his name more loudly than anywhere he’d wandered.
But then, New Orleans’s siren song had been calling from the first moments he had smelled the Mississippi River’s muddy perfume, heard the raucous strains of Preservation Hall jazz, and tasted the café au lait and beignets he’d sampled near Jackson Square. By the time he’d made it to the cemetery yesterday, what was meant to be a brief visit for a few shots had taken on the weight and texture of homecoming.
As well it might, for the New Orleans he’d left at the age of five was the last place he had felt safe. The last place his mother’s arms had ever held him.
Now it was the last place, the riskiest place, he could possibly be. And the Villaré mansion was by far the most dangerous spot in it.
Forget it. Forget her, breathed a voice he recognized as reason’s.
Yet after one last look around, Marcus climbed out of the car he’d chosen for its anonymity, a Chevy whose plates were regularly, if not quite legally, traded.
Beneath a steel-gray sky he approached the front gate, his palms sweating in the sultry afternoon heat. The tips of his fingers made damp impressions on the manila envelope containing the print. Not the photograph he’d gone to the cemetery specifically to capture, but an inadvertent image he couldn’t talk himself into ignoring any more than he could forget the two blondes, one living and one dead, he had seen this morning.
You still have time to turn around.
Iron hinges creaked and he was inside, telling himself he could be safe and away in seconds as he walked up the steps and knelt beside the oversized front door. Before he could slide the envelope beneath the mat and leave, the door cracked open as far as the chain latch would allow.
“Reuben’s calling the police now.”
His gaze snapped to Caitlyn Villaré’s face, peering from behind the door.
Rising slowly so he wouldn’t scare her, he offered her the envelope. “Camera’s broken, but there were shots still on the memory card,” he told her. “Including one I thought you might find interesting.”
Rather than reaching for the envelope, she scowled at him. “Why did you leave earlier? Why did you run from the police?”
He tried a smile. “Didn’t run. I just left. Who has time to waste getting tangled up with—”
“I don’t like being lied to, Ethan.” Her gaze intensified, breaching levies he had spent years building.
“All right, then.” He drew a deep breath and said, “I’m Marcus,” without understanding why. He hadn’t revealed his name in years now. Hadn’t thought he ever would again.
“How did you find me…Marcus?” she asked.
If speaking his real name after so long was a relief, hearing it on her lips brought such a rush of pleasure that he couldn’t speak until she began to close the door, apparently giving up on an answer.
“Your website had a number,” he explained, wondering what had happened again. “It was easy doing a reverse search on the net to find the address.”
“Of course,” Caitlyn murmured. “I guess that you and the old lady must have had the same idea. Jacinth really was right about not using our home number for the business.”
“She was right. It’s not safe.”
Caitlyn rolled her eyes. “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
He snorted and then glanced over his shoulder. “Take the photo. Give it to the cops when they show up.”
“Why?” she asked. “What’s in the picture?”
He shook his head, while behind him, thunder murmured, an uneasy harbinger of predicted storms. “Nothing, maybe. Could be just another cemetery visitor. A widow, out to see her—”
“Let me have that.” The door strained against the taut chain, and Caitlyn’s hand shot out, pale and delicate.
Marcus knew he should shove the envelope at her and take off. But if her pit bull of an assistant really was here, wouldn’t he be pushing forward to deal with Marcus himself by now? Innocent as she seemed, Marcus suspected the sweet-faced blonde had lied to him about Reuben’s presence. Maybe she had lied about the police being on the way, too.
Looking into her vulnerable green eyes, he thought of lingering to find out if he was right. Then he reminded himself that his future and his freedom weren’t his alone to gamble.
But his instinct to protect wasn’t listening to reason, so he slid the eight-by-ten out of the envelope and pointed to a figure he hadn’t noticed out in the cemetery that morning. Using his laptop and a portable photo printer, he’d enlarged a detail near the margin: a tiny, shriveled woman peering from behind a houselike tomb. Silhouetted by the shadowed dawn, she’d been caught in the act of lifting a black veil from her face, a movement that revealed the furtive malevolence of her expression.
“I have to leave,” he said to Caitlyn, “but I thought you should have this. It may be nothing, but—”
“Wait, Marcus. Let me look at that.” Unlatching the door, she snatched the print from his hand and studied it intently, noticing that a smoke-gray Persian cat had emerged and was winding around her ankles. “This is my customer, from last night’s tour. The one who lost her ring.”
“The ring the dead woman was wearing?” he asked, putting together the pieces.
Caitlyn gave him an appraising look before nodding at the photo. “She stood right here on this doorstep at four this morning. Shrieking like a banshee that I stole the thing.”
Marcus glanced over his shoulder before saying, “To lure you to that cemetery. To that body.”
As the cat stared at him disdainfully, Caitlyn nodded. “I can’t think of any other reason. Did you see anyone else this morning? Any other people nearby?”
He opened his mouth to speak, then snapped it closed again to listen to the thinnest thread of sound. A sound that gradually grew louder, beneath the lightest pattering of the raindrops that had just begun to fall.
A siren, he realized as he backed away, head shaking. Obviously someone really had called the police after all.
“Wait!” she called. “Don’t leave. I didn’t…”
But the spell had finally shattered. Remembering his obligations at last, Marcus had turned away already. He broke into a loping run, vaulting the low gate to save the second it would have taken to pull it open.
As he swung into the gray sedan, he jammed the key into the ignition, then drove off wondering if Caitlyn had been stalling him from the start. Intentionally delaying his departure until the police arrived to take him into custody.
Chapter Three
His grandmother had collected doll babies by the hundreds, which his mother had arranged on shelves around the room where he’d slept as a boy.
How he’d hated those damned dolls, staring at him through the days and nights. How he’d pleaded with his mother to box them up, to let him put up his sports pennants and his model racecars—the kinds of decorations he wouldn’t have to hide from other guys.
Year after year she had stubbornly refused, saying it would be disrespectful of Grandmama’s memory to hide them all away, and that the narrow bungalow—a damned shack, really—was far too small to put them elsewhere.
“Then keep them in your room,” he had at first demanded and then pleaded, tears streaking down his red face.
But they both knew she wouldn’t, that the men who visited her at night could never do their dirty business with all those glass eyes staring at them.
And after a while, it was all right. He grew used to his silent companions. Grew to prefer them to the classmates he couldn’t invite over anyway.
DRIPPING FROM THE RAIN, Reuben returned from the hardware store, and Caitlyn quickly filled him in about her visitor.
“You opened the door to that man? Spoke to him like some old friend?” Shaking his head, he set the rain-spattered bag with the new deadbolts he’d gone to buy, after insisting the house needed to be better secured, on the kitchen counter.
Like nearly every part of their white elephant of a legacy, the once-rich wood needed attention. But that she could ignore for now, unlike the faltering air conditioner that had left the whole house stewing in its juices.
Back in Ohio, where she’d grown up, a summer rain would have cooled things. Here, it only made June’s heat more oppressive.
“I kept the chain latched,” she explained. “And I thought if we talked, I could find out—”
“Fat lot of good that would’ve done you if he’d had a gun. This is a serious situation. You’ve gotta use your head.”
She looked away, feeling her jaw tighten, wanting to explain that she had. She’d learned to trust her instincts about people, even if she couldn’t explain them in any way that made sense to Reuben and her sister, who thought the world was built of hard facts and right angles. And who assumed that anyone who saw it otherwise was hopelessly naive.
“Off the counter, Sin,” she scolded her grandmother’s ancient Persian.
Fluffy the cat, whom the sisters had rechristened “Sinister” in honor of his hateful, orange-eyed stare, hissed at her before twitching his tail and jumping down to pointedly ignore her.
“It’s my job to keep you safe.” Reuben’s tone softened a fraction. “So let’s not get all girlie on me.”
“He told me his name’s really Marcus.” She felt an echo of the electrical zing of intuition assuring her that this time he had told the truth. That he wouldn’t hurt her. “Would he have done that if I’d hidden and speed-dialed the police?”
“Marcus who? He show you any ID to back up that claim?”
“Oh, sure. And volunteered a cheek swab so you could run his DNA, too.”
Reuben gave a snort and grinned before changing the subject. “Anyway, what’s this about some picture?”
Still annoyed, she laid it on the counter. “It’s Mrs. Rill,” she said, for lack of another name to call the woman.
She had already filled him in on Lorna Robinson’s disturbingly clever anagram trick, the way the detective had hinted that Caitlyn’s involvement might be more than that of a potential victim. That perhaps someone might have cooked up a sick way to gain publicity for her fledgling tour-guide business.
Reuben had laughed when Caitlyn told him, and promised to call an old friend from his years on the force—Detective Robinson’s partner, Davis—to set the cops straight about that ridiculous idea.
Sweaty and exhausted, Caitlyn wasn’t sure which she found more upsetting: to be suspected of a crime or laughed off as a suspect.
Though he hadn’t touched the photo, Reuben studied it intently. “That’s the old bat, all right. I wonder how she’s mixed up in this? Can’t see a frail old biddy like her as the killer.”
At the word “killer,” the dead woman’s face flashed through Caitlyn’s mind. Only this time, she thought about the green eyes. Glass eyes, the same as she’d seen…
“Josiah Paine’s a hunter,” she blurted. “He has heads hanging all over his office.”
“Former employees?” Reuben asked drily.
“Deer, mostly, and this poor, moth-eaten black bear. An armadillo, too, and there’s even a whole stuffed alligator.” She shuddered, recalling how creeped out she’d been by his “curiosities,” though he swore the customers loved them. “Those animals all have glass eyes, too.”
“So you’re thinking…?” Reuben sketched out an arch with the tip of his finger, a bridge from one idea to the next. “That’s a pretty big stretch, from Bambi hunter to psycho killer. What sportsman doesn’t have a few old trophies hangin’ ’round his—”
“We already know he can’t stand me.”
“And I can’t stand Creole cookin’. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna kill and stuff a Cajun chef to intimidate them others.” He shook his head. “Listen, sugar, you’re one heck of a tour guide—I never get tired of hearin’ you tell stories ’bout the ghosts of old N’awlins. But you’d better leave the cookin’ to the Cajuns and the detectin’ to the pros.”
Heat stung her cheeks. “Don’t patronize me, Reuben. I’m serious about him.”
“Then tell it to the police—” he gestured toward the photo but still avoided touching it “—when we turn this thing over to ’em.”
WHEN DETECTIVES ROBINSON AND DAVIS ARRIVED to collect the photo, Caitlyn brought up Josiah Paine immediately, but Robinson’s partner, a pudgy, balding man with woolly gray brows and small, pointed teeth, was quick to shrug it off. “I know Josiah real well. Sure, he burns a little hot, likes to shoot his mouth off, but under all that, he’s a teddy bear. A guy you can always count on for a nice donation when we’re raising money for a cop’s sick kid or something.”
Looking toward Reuben, Davis added, “You remember him, don’t ya, Rube? Picks up rounds at Tujague’s every now and then.”
“That’s what I was tellin’ Caitlyn,” Reuben answered. “Paine’s a lot of things, but he’s no killer.”
Caitlyn might have grown up in Ohio, but she recognized Good Old Boydom when she heard it. Frustrated, she tried zeroing in on Robinson. “You only think you know him.”
Detective Robinson merely frowned and changed the subject. “Didn’t you call us about some picture?”
“In here,” Reuben said, and four sets of footsteps echoed on the marble tile leading beneath an immense chandelier hanging high above them from a vaulted ceiling embellished with hand-painted nymphs and satyrs. The nineteenth-century fresco had cracked and peeled in places, as badly in need of restoration as the rest of this white elephant of a legacy. But that didn’t stop Caitlyn from loving it completely—and hoping, scheming and praying for some way she and her sister might hold on to it.
They passed the formal parlor, filled with prissy, somewhat dusty furnishings that looked far too fine to sit on, and Detective Davis whistled through his small teeth. “Nice place.”
Caitlyn thanked him and said, “The photo’s right here, in the kitchen.”
After giving them a chance to look it over, she said, “She’s definitely the woman from last night’s tour. ‘Eva Rill.’”
Her fingertips formed quotes around the name.
Detective Davis produced an evidence bag and slipped the photo inside. “Maybe we can circulate this, find someone who knows her. If we can bring her in for questioning, check out her family and associates, it’s a good bet she’ll lead us to the killer. Best bet we have,” he said, and turned to Reuben, “unless we can track down this Marcus fellow you told me about when you called.”
“I don’t think he’s involved,” Caitlyn said. “I got the feeling he’s just a really private person. That’s why he didn’t want to be drawn into—”
“We have to consider the possibility,” Detective Robinson said, her light hazel eyes serious, “that Mrs. Rill is this guy’s accomplice—maybe his own grandma, for all we know. Because whoever committed this crime may very well be a man obsessed with you. Sexually obsessed.”
“Why would you say…” Caitlyn was no prude, but she found it hard to get the word out past the sudden lump in her throat. “Why would you say sexually? How can you be certain the killer’s even a man?” Let alone that man? she added silently. And what kind of woman would help her grandson murder someone, anyway?
The two detectives shared an uncomfortable glance.
“What?” Caitlyn pressed. “Someone sent me to find that body, someone who made that poor girl look as much like me as he could. So I have the right to know what this is about.”
“I’m afraid that the dead girl, a Megan Lansky,” Detective Robinson said soberly, “appears to have been sexually assaulted.”
“Wait a minute. I know that name,” Reuben said. “She’s that missing girl—I saw her parents on the five o’clock news, pleadin’ to find out if anybody’s seen her. Pretty little thing.”
Detective Davis nodded gravely, then turned to Caitlyn. “Lansky was a Tulane student, disappeared a couple of nights ago after partying on Bourbon Street. Her friends told Missing Persons she’d mentioned hooking up with some group going on a cemetery tour.”
A chill slithered along Caitlyn’s backbone, then coiled in her stomach. “Are you sure she’s the girl we found this morning?”
“Poor kid’s father just ID’d her.”
Caitlyn’s knees loosened, and she braced herself against the counter. “Do you—do you have a picture of her? The way she looked…before?”
Detective Davis quickly produced one. In it, Megan Lansky smiled, a beautiful girl with wavy, light brown hair and sparkling blue eyes. Beautiful and so young, someone who should be near the beginning of life’s journey instead of lying, pale and bloodless, in a cold drawer at the morgue.
Was she dead because some sick person had thought she resembled Caitlyn? Could it have been some crazy customer from one of Caitlyn’s tours? She thought of drunken troublemakers and one lovesick young man who had sent her a half-dozen admiring emails and phoned repeatedly, coming on way too strong in his quest for a date. But none of them seemed dangerous—or at least not the brand of dangerous that led to things like rape and murder. To gouging out blue eyes and replacing them with green glass.
Tears leaking, Caitlyn shook her head. Her voice trembled, but somehow she managed to remain coherent. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her. What about you, Reuben? Could she have come on one of our tours this week?”
Reuben studied the photo for some time before he shook his head. “Damned shame, a young girl like that. Makes me want to kick the guts out of the sick bastard who would…”
He closed his eyes, his face reddening. “Twenty-eight years on the force, you’d’ve thought I’d grown myself a tougher shell. Maybe it’s for the best I went and got myself…”
Davis’s woolly eyebrows drew closer together. “So neither one of you knew Megan?”
To be absolutely certain, Caitlyn checked their receipts, but Megan Lansky wasn’t listed among the credit card payments.
“You might try the other tour services,” she suggested, and couldn’t resist adding for good measure, “You might try Josiah Paine.”
HOURS LATER, SHE WAS STILL UPSET as Reuben drove her toward the cemetery in his Crown Victoria, a great boat of a car he said reminded him of his days driving police cruisers. Considering the threatening thunder and a new round of storms forecast for this evening, she thought a real boat might come in handy before this night was over.
Hunched over the wheel, he shot a scowl in her direction. “You should be back at home, chère, doors and windows locked tight, and me bunking on one of them fancy horsehair excuses for a sofa.”
Caitlyn smoothed her skirt, a gauzy, handkerchief-hemmed creation she had made from the evening gowns of a grandmother she had barely known. “Unless you want your paycheck bouncing, we need to get out there and work.”
The black car jerked to a stop as a light went from yellow to red. “You think I give a damn about money right now? With some sick—” Cutting himself off, he shook his head. “This is way bigger than money. This is your life we’re talkin’ ’bout here.”
“That’s right,” she said, heart thumping. “It’s my life. And I still mean to live it.”
And that meant she needed to get back to work to pay the bills. More than that, she needed to feel the words that flowed with every story, to watch the rapt eyes of her listeners and hear collective gasps. Her drama professors and scouts alike had assured her she had ample talent, presence and beauty to command the stage or screen. But in one audition after the next, she had lacked some crucial, unteachable ingredient: a real connection with the audience. She’d finally discovered such a bond while sharing the stories she’d collected volunteering in the old French Quarter nursing home where her grandmother spent her last days, a place Caitlyn had gone in the hope of learning something of the woman she and Jacinth had never been allowed to know.
A die-hard history major, Jacinth brushed off the tales Caitlyn collected as “unsubstantiated melodrama,” but even she had been unable to hide her excitement over one involving their own ancestor, Victoria Villaré, who had allegedly used a secret passage to spy on Union officers who had occupied her home during the Civil War. For long months after hearing of it, the sisters had searched in vain for some sign of a hidden doorway, but for Caitlyn, the proof had never been the point.
A block from the cemetery, they found a parking space. As they climbed out, thunder rumbled, and Reuben asked, “You sure about this? It’s gonna be a night fit for one of them ole rougaroux you like to scare the tourists with.”
When an image of Megan Lansky’s bone-white corpse flashed through Caitlyn’s mind, she shivered at the thought of the legendary Cajun werewolf, a zombie-like monster said to drain its victims dry. Though the French called them loup-garou, the Cajun version was every bit as frightening. But rougaroux weren’t stranglers, nor were they controlled by tiny old ladies who used creepy anagrams as names and claimed mortuary numbers as their home phone.
Reaching onto the backseat floorboard, Caitlyn grabbed a pair of umbrellas, along with her flashlight, and forced herself to grin at Reuben. “You know as well as I do,” she said, her voice only a bit shaky, “these ‘dark and stormy nights’ are great for business—and if I don’t get back on the horse tonight, I’m afraid I’ll never set foot in this cemetery again.”
Twenty minutes later, she was sharing her great, great, great grandmother’s story with the dozen or so tourists who joined her not fifty yards from the spot where she had found the body. Senior citizens, urban hipsters and lovers of the paranormal, she held them all spellbound as they stood beside the wall vault containing the remains of more than a dozen Villarés, including the famous Victoria, Caitlyn’s grandmother Marie…everyone except her father, whose body had never been recovered from the swamp, where he’d been murdered by a fishing buddy.
As thunder rumbled all around them and the low clouds’ bellies flickered with lightning, only Reuben Pierce seemed immune to the mood she was creating. He constantly wandered the group’s perimeter, aiming his flashlight between rows of tombs, and bristled when another tour group encroached on their territory.
Edging closer to where he stood while her clients took pictures of the surrounding tombs, she whispered as the wind gasped through the nearby treetops, “Relax, it’s only Mumbling Max. You know how he’s been lately.”
“Mumbling Max” Lafitte was the guide who’d taught her the ropes for Paine, a balding, gray-haired man whose uninspired performances quickly convinced her that she could do a whole lot better. Dull as he was, Max had hated being outshone by a young upstart—and hated it even more when his boss repeatedly humiliated him about it. To get even with her, Max was always horning in on her tours, trying to drown out her stories with his drone.
A cool breeze stirred her hair, a welcome breath of fresh air that was quickly followed by the rain.
“Last week’s offer stands,” Reuben said above the patter on the tops of their umbrellas. “You say the word, I’ll have that weasel scamperin’ outta here like—”
He never had the chance to finish, as a deafening explosion and a blinding white streak filled the air. With a reflexive shriek echoed by the scattering tourists, Caitlyn dropped the flashlight and her umbrella, and ran, instinctively avoiding the sharp crack of falling wood from the lightning-struck tree.
But she only made it a few steps before something struck her. With a pain like a hatchet splitting her skull, the chaotic scene fell silent and all the world winked out.
Chapter Four
Before Marcus’s stunned eyes, the night shattered into stark frames. Blackness and confusion. Lightning flash-lit still shots.
A dark figure dragging off a fallen blonde. Dragging her away to—
No! Shaking off the shock of the ear-splitting boom, Marcus didn’t think but reacted solely on instinct. An instinct to protect Caitlyn Villaré at all costs.
Hurtling through the pitch dark, he struck like a guided missile. The force of his leap knocked the kidnapper off his feet.
Knocked him down and made him drop her as the rain crashed down in blinding sheets. Marcus ducked two broad swings before coming up with a spinning hook kick that should have taken his opponent’s head off.
Instead, he heard a startled grunt and felt the impact as his foot struck either the man’s shoulder or his chest. Rather than staying to throw more punches, Marcus’s opponent turned and vanished, out of sight and out of reach.
But had he left for good? Or was he only waiting for a second opportunity?
And how could Marcus follow and catch him, when he couldn’t possibly leave Caitlyn lying, crumpled and unconscious, in the rain?
AS HE PACED the cramped motel room hours later, Marcus’s pulse throbbed at his temples and his heartbeat boomed in his ears. What the hell had he done? Had his lonely, nomadic existence worn him down so badly that he’d decided to crush it out like a burned-down cigarette?
If I wasn’t a criminal before, I am now, he realized, as he stared at the beautiful blonde woman sleeping in his bed. Still, for all his remorse, his fingers itched to touch the shutter button, to record the contrast of the angel in repose against the grungy hell of this bottom-rung dive.
Great idea—give them proof you’re an obsessed animal.
Regardless of the temptation, he knew it would be days before the lens arrived to fix his camera, and probably only hours before he was taken into custody for kidnapping.
How would he explain the drastic steps he’d taken to safeguard Caitlyn Villaré—or the unanswerable yearning that her presence, the very thought of her, set off in his soul?
Insane. You’ve had some kind of break with reality. Wasn’t that what the shrinks would say when he tried to make them understand? The cops and the DA would have another name for it, especially once they discovered the charges against him back in Pennsylvania.
Murder, arson—each flare of memory seared his awareness, choked him with the bitter ash of regret.
But he had to keep his mind on present problems, such as the item he had accidentally scooped up in the cemetery while collecting the things that had spilled from his camera case. The new evidence that had driven him to risk contacting Caitlyn again.
He thought, too, of the low-life motel clerk, the one witness who had seen him walking in supporting Caitlyn.
“Your girl have one too many?” The skinny kid had laughed, his beaky nose poking through a screen of greasy hair and his vintage heavy-metal T-shirt as holey as his black jeans.
“Just tired,” Marcus had assured him.
The clerk’s leer said that he knew better, and he’d handed Marcus a card with his name, Craven, and a number scribbled on it. “You decide you need somebody to drop her somewhere later, just text me your room number. For a little cash, I’m your man to make things happen. Anything you want.”
Marcus had passed Bird Beak two twenties to ensure that he wouldn’t be disturbed, but he had to take it on faith that Craven was exactly what he appeared to be: an opportunistic lowlife who would sooner sell his grandma than talk to the police.
As light rain pattered against a grimy window, Caitlyn moaned and shifted. Marcus’s relief slid free in a sigh, because if he’d been wrong and she failed to regain consciousness, if she—he scarcely dared to think it—died, all of this would be for nothing, and he might as well go turn himself in.
At the chipped sink, he ran warm water over a thin washcloth, then wrung it out, and returned to sit beside the bed and gently clean her face. She stirred, and he smiled, the first real smile that had crossed his features in… He shook his head, unable, or perhaps unwilling, to remember a time when he’d still been his own man, pursuing fame instead of hiding from it.
“Caitlyn,” he said softly. “Caitlyn, can you hear me?”
Her eyelids cracked open, lamplight reflecting off irises the shade of moss touched by the morning sunlight. Relief washed over him, a floodtide of emotion.
She stared at him for a moment before those eyes flashed open and she scrambled away until her back was pressed against the peeling, laminated headboard. Looking around wildly, she cried, “What—where am I? What are you doing here? What happened?”
But she didn’t scream—not yet—something Marcus counted as a blessing.
“Let me explain,” he said, rushing to cram in as much as he could before the inevitable explosion. “You’ve had an accident, or not really an accident. I’m pretty sure someone hit you on the head. I caught him dragging you off in the chaos after the lightning strike.”
He could still smell the ozone, still hear the tourists screaming and scattering as a male voice—Reuben’s? —warned them to stay together for their safety. But Marcus’s eyes, already adjusted to the darkness from his long wait, had seen more than the others—perhaps because Caitlyn had been his sole focus from the spot where he had watched in silence, mentally framing every angle for a photo he had no camera to take. And waiting for his chance to…
“I had to get you out of there,” he tried to explain.
She shuddered, revulsion twisting her mouth. “So you could abduct me, drag me to some sleazy hotel and—”
“No! It wasn’t like that. I never touched you that way. I only meant to keep you safe.”
She tugged at her peasant blouse, which had fallen off her shoulder, and narrowed her eyes. “Then why not take me to a hospital? I was—”
Her hand drifted toward the side of her head, and before he could warn her, she was hissing in pain, fingers coming away tacky with coagulating blood.
“Ow…” Her face lost color, putting him in mind of the dead girl’s from that morning. “He—whoever hit me could’ve killed me.”
“You’ve been stirring, making noises. I didn’t think you were under too deep,” Marcus said, but even to his ears, the excuse rang hollow. “And once I’d taken you—because I was afraid he’d come after you again—there was no way I could go anywhere the police could…where they could get hold of me.”
“So instead you disappeared again, like some sort of phantom—only this time, you’ve dragged me with you.” Her expression hardening, she said flatly, “You’re on the run from the law, aren’t you? That’s why you wouldn’t get involved this morning. Why you were afraid to stick around tonight.”
Her eyes flicked toward the softly shifting light of a slow-motion slideshow on his laptop. His photos from the cemeteries, running as a screen saver. But she said nothing of them.
“I was afraid for you this evening,” he insisted. “You have no idea how damned hard I’ve prayed—”
“To what gods, Marcus?” The stone angel’s image, miraculously captured in the instant before she’d knocked the camera from his hands that morning, flashed across the screen. “Do they have a separate pantheon for stalkers?”
“This is the thanks I get for saving you? For watching your every breath these past two hours? I’m no damned stalker, Caitlyn. I swear to you, I’m only—”
She bolted upright, flinging aside a cobweb-thin sheet and swinging her feet to the floor. “Two hours? Oh my God. Poor Reuben—he’ll be frantic. He’ll have called the police. And Jacinth, too—my sister.”
She stood, or tried to, wobbled and then sank down again with a groan.
“I know they’ll be worried.” Marcus struggled beneath the weight of resignation. “I know that, and I’m sorry. But you’d better rest for a few minutes before you call. Before you report…whatever you decide to tell them.”
His gaze locked onto hers and held it. But instead of the accusations, the curses, he’d expected, he saw something soften in her eyes.
“You’re going to let me do that?” she asked.
He nodded. “Of course. Which is not to say I’m going to stick around and wait to be arrested.”
She studied him for several moments. “Why were you out at the cemetery tonight? I mean, your camera is broken, right?”
“I was hoping you’d show up,” he confessed. “I was hoping for a chance to catch you alone for a moment.”
Her brows rose. “While I was leading a tour group?”
He smiled and shook his head. “I never said it was a great plan. But I was thinking maybe afterward you’d let me take you for a cup of coffee.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, Reuben would’ve loved that.”
“I was hoping your pit bull would look away for a minute.”
“He’s not my pit bull, he’s my assistant. He’s just a little… He used to be a cop, so he’s naturally protective.”
“Protective’s one thing, but he looks like he enjoys ripping off heads just for fun.”
“He grew up in a shack on Noble Street, smack up against the old projects,” she said. “So what did you expect, a handshake and a warm welcome?”
Worry creased the smooth skin of her forehead, and moisture clumped her lower lashes. “Reuben may look like a tough guy, but he’s going to be absolutely beside himself with me gone.”
“Then call him,” Marcus said. “Tell him you’re all right.”
Caitlyn looked worried. “You’ll really let me do that?”
Marcus nodded solemnly. “I said I would. But if you can wait for just a minute, there’s this one thing I have to show you first.”
“This better not involve any body parts, or I promise you, I’ll scream louder than you’ve ever heard a woman scream before.” Her eyes sparkled like a honed blade. “In theater school, they always called me the girl with the made-for-horror-movie lungs.”
“I remember from the cemetery.” With another smile pulling at one corner of his mouth, he pulled the matchbook from his jeans pocket and tossed it to the bed. “That’s the only thing I’m whipping out. Even if you beg me.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” she murmured, picking up the matchbook.
“This morning in the cemetery, I accidentally grabbed this when I was gathering the stuff that fell out of my bag. I didn’t notice it ’til later, after I’d already left your house.”
She turned the matchbook cover, reading the advertising logo: New Orleans After Dark Guided Tours.
“I worked with Josiah Paine’s company,” she said, her voice trembling, “before I went out on my own.”
“How does your old boss feel about the competition?”
Her gaze dropped, and she ran a corner of the sheet through her fingers, flicking the frayed hem with a chipped pink thumbnail. There was an unconscious sensuality in the small gesture, one that left Marcus too aware of their closeness in this cramped room, of the gulf of need that hollowed him out when he looked into her face.
In his mind’s eye, the thin mattress grew feather-soft and cloud-thick. The worn cotton sheets rewove themselves from sumptuous threads of wine-rich silk. She lay back, her rain-tangled hair brushed to a fine sheen and splayed out against the heaps of fluffy pillows.
Looking away, he bit down hard on his tongue, desperate to bring both his imagination and his body to heel before she noticed and really did scream.
“Paine was furious about it,” Caitlyn admitted in answer to his question. “But he never would’ve lost me if he’d kept his hands to himself.”
Marcus’s focus snapped back to her. “He put the moves on you?” He all but growled the question, a dark possessiveness roaring through his veins. If this Josiah Paine had touched her…
She shook her head, then lifted her hand toward the lump. “Ow—no. I didn’t mean that. He just—he always had a temper. But one day he took it too far.”
“How far?” Marcus ground out.
A delicate flush colored the exposed skin above her breasts. “One night he accused me of holding back tip money.”
“What did he do?”
“The jerk shoved me, and I walked out. Started my own company, Villar-A1 Tours.”
“Revenge?” he asked, as his own subconscious crept in that direction. Imagining himself pummeling a man he’d never met for a woman he hadn’t even known at this time last night.
What the hell’s wrong with me?
Picking up the matchbook and turning it around, she pressed her mouth into a grim line. “Turns out, it’s not as sweet as I expected. Especially not if Josiah’s insane enough to have killed poor Megan Lansky.”
“That’s the dead girl?”
Caitlyn told him about the student who had been reported missing, and how Megan had told her friends she was going on a cemetery tour. “The police thought about mine first, because of the resemblance and because I found her, but what if she went on one of Josiah’s? He leads groups himself some nights—he’s actually quite good—when one of the regular guides takes a night off or he’s short-handed.” She wrapped her arms around herself and added, “His employees tend to quit a lot. Or he gets mad and fires them. He’s kind of famous for it. If I’d known when I first came to town…”
“Then the police are investigating him?”
“I doubt it. He seems to be a drinking buddy of some of the detectives. They acted like his temper’s nothing but an old joke between—”
Cutting herself off, she began looking around, lifting the covers. “I really need to call Reuben. Where’s my bag? My cell phone?”
“Sorry, but I didn’t see them.” Marcus picked up the receiver of the phone at his elbow. With a meaningful look, he passed it to her, and then forced himself to sit there, his jaw gritted, while he waited to find out if she would rain fresh hell down on his head.
CAITLYN FOUGHT TO LOOK AWAY and couldn’t, held captive by the grim resolve on his face. Whatever she did or said, she realized Marcus wouldn’t try to stop her. Wouldn’t ask for help in keeping his involvement hidden, no matter what it cost him.
Though he’d cared enough for her, a virtual stranger, to bring her first the photo and then the matchbook from the crime scene, he expected nothing in return. Not even hope’s ghost lived behind his storm-dark eyes.
Thunder murmured in the distance, followed by an answering frisson of awareness that sparked along her backbone. Alone inside this room, he could have done anything while she lay helpless. Could have but hadn’t, only watched over her instead. Praying she would waken, he had told her.
Surely those details said something about the man he was. Perhaps more than the fact that he was avoiding the police.
Forcing herself to drop her gaze to dial and wait for an answer at the other end, she barely squeezed out a syllable of greeting before Reuben’s worry blasted through the phone line.
“Are you hurt, girl? Where did you go? I’ve been goin’ crazy lookin’. Called out half my buddies from the force to try to find you.”
Her eyes stung at the pain she heard in his voice. Pain that Marcus had inflicted on a man who had shown her and her sister nothing but kindness since the day they had arrived in New Orleans.
“I’m sorry,” she blurted. “So sorry you were frightened. What about the tour group? Everyone okay?”
“No one hurt, just shaken.”
“And you?”
“You answer me first, chère,” Reuben shot back.
“I’ll be fine. I just…” She wanted to explain, but Marcus’s regard, the weight of his bitter expectation, stopped her.
Looking into his dark eyes, she imagined she could almost hear him saying, I’m already in the wind, so I don’t give a damn what you do. How long had it been since anyone had offered him the slightest support?
“This is so embarrassing,” she said, astonished by the words that poured out. “When the lightning struck, I just—I panicked, Reuben. I don’t know how else to explain it. I ran and ran before I understood what I was doing.”
Marcus lifted dark brows in a question.
“I tripped,” she added. “I must’ve hit my head. When I opened my eyes, it was pitch-dark. So I got up and started searching for you.”
“What? Where are you, Caitlyn? Let me come and get you.”
She slipped her hand over her eyes, hiding from her own lies. “I would’ve called before, but I lost my purse and my phone—”
“I’ve got ’em,” Reuben told her. “But where the hell are—”
“That’s great. Thanks, Reuben. I’m safe. Really.” Some trained actress, she thought, recognizing the too-swift cadence and high pitch of her own panic. “I ran into a friend, and he’s putting me in a cab. I’ll be home soon. We can talk there.”
“What friend? What’s this number you’re calling from? If you’re in trouble, just say ‘okay.’”
“I’m not in trouble, promise,” she said lightly. “See you in a little bit. Bye.”
“Caitlyn, don’t hang—”
Guiltily, she replaced the receiver, handling it as carefully as she might a stick of dynamite. And ignoring it moments later when the phone rang and rang and rang.
MARCUS SAW SHE WAS STILL TREMBLING as he sat beside her on the bed and pulled her into his arms, unable to resist the tidal force of the impulse washing over him. Because against all odds, Caitlyn seemed to see him, the man behind the fugitive. She sighed against him, her body relaxing into his embrace.
It was more than anyone had done in years, and though he’d meant only to comfort her in her obvious distress, the result unleashed a passion that had him tipping back her head and slanting his mouth over hers. The shock of contact, the warm, full wetness of her mouth beneath his, sent raw desire spearing through him.
Yet he pulled back when she froze like a fawn. Pulled back to whisper, “You never need to fear me. To fear this, Caitlyn. Never…”
Half expecting her to scream or slap him, he waited, his breath held with the worry that four years punctuated only by the most fleeting and unsatisfying liaisons had cost him the ability to read a decent woman’s cues. Had the connection he felt been a mirage formed out of loneliness and need?
Heat bloomed in her green eyes an instant before she closed them, leaning forward a bare fraction of an inch—but just enough.
In the gritty gloom of that small, cramped space, their kiss became all the world’s light, focused to form one perfect, concentrated beam. A beam too bright to look at, too hot to bear for long.
Overwhelmed, he pulled his mouth from hers, only to dip his head to slide softer kisses along her neck, behind her ear, as, reverently, his hand skimmed along her ribs and waist, then found the sweet flare of her hip.
Her breaths were coming faster, as hard and quick as his own. Her soft fingertips feathered light caresses at his jawline.
With their bond a starved man’s sustenance, Marcus could have feasted all night, feeding at the subtle notch beneath her pulsing throat, the willing heat of her mouth. But his impatient body had its own imperative, and before he knew what he was doing, he was untying and loosening the bodice of her peasant blouse.
Caitlyn pushed his hand away and sucked in a startled lungful of air. Jerking back, she fixed wide eyes on him, with passion, confusion and regret all playing staccato-swift through her expression.
“No.” She slipped around him to clamber out of the bed. “No, I can’t. This isn’t me, for one thing. And Reuben’s waiting, worried. I have to go. I have to.”
With each word, she backed farther out of his reach.
“Caitlyn, it’s all right,” he said, though his body grieved her loss already. “There’s no need to be upset.”
Beyond listening, she turned from him, scrambling to unfasten the door’s cheap chain and deadbolt.
“Don’t go,” he said. “I’ll call a cab, like you told Reuben, and then I’ll see you to it. You have a head injury, and this neighborhood’s not safe for—”
But it was too late. Door swinging wide, Caitlyn blazed straight through it, not hesitating for an instant before she raced out into the sultry Crescent City night.
Chapter Five
Caitlyn slipped around a corner and ducked behind a trashcan, her heart a snare-quick drumbeat in her chest. She strained her ears to hear past the muted thump of a bass from somewhere nearby, her breath held until she heard footsteps pounding past. Marcus’s footsteps, she was certain, even before she heard him calling her name. He sounded frantic, as worried as Reuben had been on the phone.
“What am I doing?” Her whisper echoed in an alley that reeked of garbage and a pungent smell she didn’t dare risk considering too closely.
Though the rain had finally stopped, recriminations bounced back at her off wet brick and concrete: Reuben’s and the detectives’ warnings about Marcus, along with Jacinth’s scolding that she was too quick to think the best of all those she encountered.
In every other way, you’re brighter than anybody I know. In Caitlyn’s memory, her sister’s dark eyes gleamed with worry as she spoke. But you’re going to end up hurt if you keep dragging home strays and feeding strangers.
Caitlyn sighed, realizing they’d all been right. She’d been dangerously naive, and kissing Marcus, a man who’d carried her beyond the help of Reuben and the police, proved it.
It proved, too, that she had gotten over her boyfriend in Ohio, who’d waited only three days after her move before texting that he guessed he wasn’t cut out for long separations. Apparently he’d never been cut out for monogamy, either, according to her friends.
As devastated as she’d been, when she tried to picture Tony’s face now, all she could see was Marcus, looking at her the way a lion looks at a gazelle. At the thought, her stomach quivered, though less with the fear she should be feeling than with the longing to call him back and offer herself up for his dinner.
Scowling at her own foolishness, she shook it off and moved on. As she crept back toward the streetlight, her head ached and her nausea reawakened.
A door swung open just ahead of her, blocking her escape from the alley. Loud music and cigarette smoke poured out of what she supposed must be a bar. An instant later, three men followed, each one bigger and louder than the last. With nothing taller than a small forest of discarded beer bottles for cover, she pressed her back against the wall and trusted to the shadows, her instincts warning her that she mustn’t make a sound.
“Come on, how ’bout a taste here?” a jumpy outline wheedled. “Hook me up, bro—c’mon.”
“Screw that,” said a hulking figure. “You show the green and we’ll deal.”
“Ain’t jerkin’ us around, are you?” a third voice demanded. “’Cause if you’re wastin’ our time…”
A palpable threat hung in the air, and Caitlyn winced at the realization that she’d stumbled onto a drug deal. Icy terror twisting in her belly, she waited, holding her breath and praying they would finish their transaction quickly and ooze back inside. Oblivious as they were, it might have happened that way. And probably would have, had the edge of her skirt not caught a standing longneck and tipped the bottle over.
In the narrow space, the clatter of glass echoed loudly.
Caitlyn turned and raced toward the alley’s opposite—and mercifully open—entrance.
Almost immediately, footsteps followed, accompanied by a man yelling, “Hey, sweetie! Come to Papa!” and a roar of coarse laughter.
And then more footsteps, hard on her heels, closing in with every step.
SWEAT WAS STREAMING down Marcus’s face by the time he heard raised voices and men’s shouts of excitement.
Tell me it’s not Caitlyn. But he didn’t allow the wish to slow him as he rushed toward the disturbance.
He was quick to realize he wasn’t the only one hurrying to find out what was happening. In this seamy collection of strip clubs, last-call dives and liquor, lottery and po’boy sandwich shops with bars on every window, young men, transvestites and a few hard-looking women tended to mill around at midnight, many of them up for anything to ease their squalid boredom.
Especially the kind of “anything” involving a fresh-faced, beautiful young woman who clearly didn’t belong.
By the lurid glow of a neon sign alternately flashing the messages Girls, Hell Yes! and Clothes, Hell No! he spotted at least a dozen lowlifes stumbling in the same direction. Not caring who he pissed off, Marcus pushed his way through oily clumps of humanity, parting them with such speed that only a handful of curses and one fist caught him—a glancing blow he barely felt.
His thrumming heart in his throat, he finally spotted Caitlyn as she threw open the door of an older silver car and called to the driver, “Oh, thank God it’s you.”
Marcus wanted to shout to her but didn’t, deciding she was safer with a friend—even her damned pit bull—than she could ever be with him. The door closed and the car zoomed off, leaving him standing there alone, staring after her.
At least for the few seconds before the drunken bikers he’d shoved caught up.
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