by Stacy Green
I feel sick, but I need to know the truth. “Did I abandon her? Was she alive when I escaped?”
“No,” she says. “He choked the others—I think it was something sexual for him. But he sliced her throat right in front of you. To break you.”
I sink to the ground. She’s so blunt and cold. But I understand why. She doesn’t have much soul left.
Lyric drops to her knees in front of me. “He said you were a track star. He’d gone to one of your meets, just to watch you. He talked about letting you get a head start and then gunning you down when he was done with you. I had to give you a chance to save other girls.”
“How many more did he kill after you left Jasper?”
Lyric takes my shoulders. “Too many. But we can end it. I can draw him out.”
“You said you haven’t seen him.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t know where to look,” she says. “He’s older now. But so are we. We’re bigger, stronger. Colder. We can kill him.”
Slice his throat just like he did Mickie’s. Dump him in a shallow grave.
Cage said the only thing that gave his family any peace was having his sister’s body to bury. “If we kill him, there are families who don’t get closure.”
“I can give them that closure,” Lyric says. “I was there, remember?”
“That’s not good enough,” I say. “Those families deserve the right to see him go to trial. To see him be executed.” I push myself to my feet and reach for my cell.
Lyric slaps it out of my hand. “I’m not dealing with any cops.”
“You won’t be in trouble,” I say. “You were the biggest victim of all.”
“I’ve had plenty of time to come forward. I know how the cops in this city work.”
“Things have changed since Katrina, I promise. And Cage is different.”
“Don’t you understand? He’ll come for you now. He obsessed over you for years. I promise you he doesn’t give up. He didn’t get what he wanted from me the first time, so he waited almost five years to make his move.”
My head throbs. The stress is building up in me. I don’t know how much more I can take. I suck in deep breaths, but they’re hot and foul and make my stomach turn.
Lyric’s fingertips dig into my shoulders. “We have to stick together. We’re family now. And I can give you back your memories.”
“Only the bad ones.”
“But you’ll have answers.”
My throat burns. “You’ll only tell me who he is if I help you, right?”
She nods.
I close my eyes and try to think. Lyric is all I have. Except for Miss Alexandrine. And Cage. They would both be so disappointed. So would my real parents, who haven’t done anything but want their daughter back.
I open my eyes. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.”
Her jaw tightens, her mouth drawn into a tight line. Her chin trembles. She releases my shoulders, and I take her hand.
“Please, trust me. Cage won’t blame you.”
Lyric sighs and nods. She bends over to pick my phone up off the ground. “I’m really sorry. For everything.”
Her hand swings up. She’s not holding my phone. She’s got a chunk of concrete that’s fallen off a tomb.
“Lyric, no!”
50
Cage’s cell rang as he drove toward St. Louis No. 1. He hit the touchscreen, and Dr. Metz’s voice filled the car.
“We have an ID from the pin found with the adult female in the first grave,” Metz said. “Shannon Powell, a twenty-five-year-old waitress from a town about twenty miles away from Jasper. Weird thing is, she went missing the morning after Annabeth escaped.”
She lives.
Lyric’s humanity had been destroyed long before she helped Annabeth escape. Returning to New Orleans after Annabeth’s story made the national news meant she was probably looking for Annabeth—and likely still working with her kidnapper.
“She was grabbed walking to work,” Metz said. “She left her parents place in the country at 5:30 a.m. It was a nice spring morning, and she had a fifteen-minute walk to work. She never showed up.”
Why take this woman? She was too old for his tastes. “Any luck on cause of death?”
“It’s hard to say if the trauma came before or right after death, but her skull was bashed all to hell. From the fragments we recovered, her nose was shattered, along with both eye sockets and one side of her jaw. She would have been unrecognizable.”
Rage at Annabeth’s escape, and this poor girl ended up a scapegoat? But why not take that out on Lyric for her betrayal? “You have a formal ID on Mickie yet?”
“We’re stalling, but we’re going to have to announce it by mid-morning tomorrow. Her skull was intact enough that matching dental records is relatively easy. Sorry we can’t hold it off any longer, but I’ve got my job to do too.”
Cage understood. “Thanks for getting us this far. Let me know if you ID any of the other victims.”
The cemetery’s border wall of crypts loomed ahead. Cage parked a block away, grabbed his weapon out of the glove compartment and holstered it, then stuck his badge under his T-shirt. Strolling around this neighborhood at night was dumb. Hopefully, Annabeth had gotten inside safely.
Sweating, he jogged around the cemetery’s perimeter. The walls were at least a foot taller than Cage. Annabeth couldn’t have jumped them without help. Maybe she’d already come and gone or hadn’t even been here.
He rounded the corner at Conti Street. A figure slouched near the end of the cemetery, knees drawn up to its chest. “Annabeth?”
A foul aroma of body odor and filth hit him, and Cage halted a foot away. The man snored softly, a cookie wrapper in one hand and an empty beer bottle in the other. Layers of dirt covered his white shirt and cutoff jeans. Cage had been told most of the homeless stayed in the more traveled areas of the French Quarter, partially for safety and to ask tourists for money. The remnants of the dangerous projects across the street were the perfect place for drug deals and God knows what else.
He nudged the sleeping man with his foot. “Sir, wake up. It’s not safe for you here.”
The man stirred and opened his eyes. They were bloodshot and cloudy. “I grew up ’round here, boy. Can take care of myself.”
“Then maybe you can help me. Have you seen a young girl trying to get over the wall tonight? She’s got long dark hair and is wearing a blue shirt.”
“You Cage?”
Cage stilled. “You know Annabeth.”
The old man got to his feet and stepped closer. The stench rolling off him turned Cage’s stomach.
“I went and got something to eat. She told me not to come back but,” he glanced over the wall, “this place ain’t safe at night. And I don’t mean spirits. Guess I fell asleep waiting.”
“She was okay when she went over the wall?”
“As right as she could be,” the man said. “She’s off sometimes, but I got no right to judge. And she’s a good girl. You want me to boost you over too? Twenty bucks.”
Cage dug the bill out of his pocket and handed it to the man. “I can get myself over. Thanks for helping her.”
“All right.” The man reached for Cage’s hand. “She said you were good people.”
Cage shook it and felt guilty for wishing he’d brought hand sanitizer.
“She’s scared and worked up about something,” the man said. “You take care of her and get her on back to Alexandrine’s. She can’t be wandering ’round at night like this. And tell her I said I’ll see her soon.” He stuck the bill in the front of his pants and headed down the street.
It took Cage four trips to get enough bricks from the torn-down building. He climbed the wobbly stack of bricks and hoisted himself over. Pain shot through his shins when his feet hit the ground. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and tried to figure out where the hell he was. The night seemed twice as dark inside the concrete walls, and the jumbled rows of stone crypts robbed him of his sense of direction
.
The place swallowed him. The air felt thick, like walking through vapor. Inside the concrete walls, the night was completely silent, as though they were still in the wilderness and the city hadn’t grown up around St. Louis No. 1.
Cage navigated around the vaults as fast as he dared. Uneven flagstones covered the winding, narrow aisles and some of the smaller brick tombs had worn down to a single layer. Falling in the congested cemetery pretty much guaranteed a head wound.
The short, white pyramid tomb loomed to his right. He cut left down the wider path. The Sanité family tomb was just ahead.
“Annabeth!”
She lay on her back in front of the tomb, arms outstretched. Blood streamed from a gash in her forehead.
Cage dropped to his knees and scrubbed his hands against his jeans and then pressed his left hand over the gash. Her pulse beat steadily beneath his fingers.
The wound wasn’t as deep as it looked, but he kept pressure on it. “Annabeth, wake up. It’s Cage.”
She moaned but didn’t open her eyes.
He patted her cheek. “Please. I don’t want to carry you out of here.”
“Mmm.” She licked her cracked lip and raised her right arm. “Yes, carry me, please, Agent Sexy.”
He sighed in relief. “Look at me and tell me who did this.”
Her eyes finally fluttered open. “Lyric did this to me.”
Miss Alexandrine carefully cleaned Annabeth’s wound. “Girl, you know better than to be running ’round that cemetery at night.” She pulled back and examined the dried wound on her forehead.
“Can you stitch it up? I don’t want to go to the hospital.”
“Of course I can.” Alexandrine dug through her kit. “Butterfly bandages should work. Why would Lyric hurt you now? Are you sure it was her?”
“She told me about the pot gris gris bags. And I know she came here first.”
Alexandrine nodded at Cage. “And this one thought I imagined her.”
“He wouldn’t believe me if the bone doctor hadn’t found out that wasn’t Lyric in the grave.”
“Lyric is going after her,” Cage said. “She wanted Annabeth to help her kill him.”
He still wasn’t sure Lyric hadn’t been sent to trap her. She had to be angry knowing that Annabeth had taken her place instead of bringing help.
“She doesn’t blame me.” Annabeth resumed the argument they’d had on the drive back. “She understood.”
Cage didn’t buy it. Any normal person would be out for revenge—Lyric had suffered through unimaginable abuse and then endured years more because Annabeth never brought help.
“What else did she say?” Alexandrine asked.
“That my kidnapper couldn’t handle that I got away, even though he claimed I was dead. Lyric said he couldn’t get what he wanted from her the first time he tried, so he waited.”
Alexandrine’s hands stilled. “What did you just say?”
“Lyric said it, not me.”
Alexandrine took her by the shoulders. “Tell me exactly what she said.”
Her tone must have scared Annabeth; she shrank back and tried to wiggle free. Alexandrine didn’t let go. “What did she say?”
“That he didn’t get what he wanted from me the first time, so he waited almost five years to make his move. Please let me go.”
Alexandrine released her and touched the ring that rested on Annabeth’s collarbone. “Bondye mwen. Charlotte, out e konnen. Mwen te antò.”
Annabeth’s fingers closed over the priestess’s. “Kiyes li ye?”
“It’s my fault,” Alexandrine whispered.
“What’s your fault?” Cage didn’t understand a damn thing the women had said, but he knew it was important. The air in the small cottage shifted and compressed. Pressure built in his ears the same way it always did when he flew. He sensed someone in the hallway, just out of his field of vision, but it was empty. The reek of the spilled oil in the hallway magnified, even though the liquid had been cleaned up.
“When she first filed the report,” Alexandrine said, “Charlotte swore she knew who took Lyric. I talked her out of putting down the name because he’d left town years ago. It was too outlandish, and I thought the police would be wasting their time. And Charlotte always blamed him for … I thought she wasn’t thinking clearly.”
Cage rubbed his eyes and forced his head to clear. The stench of the oil was getting to him, making him feel uneasy and half-sick. “What’s his name?”
Alexandrine sagged in her chair, suddenly fragile and old. “Anthony Thomas.”
51
Alexandrine told the story through teary eyes. Seeing the woman cry unnerved Cage. He’d focused on taking notes and trying not to puke from the damned oil spill stench.
Charlotte Gaudet had insisted Anthony Thomas caused her daughter’s overdose. The police didn’t agree. Thomas disappeared, and Lyric came to live with Charlotte.
Lyric’s mother caught Thomas watching a video he’d taken of a twelve-year-old Lyric in the shower. They fought, and Lyric had fled to her grandmother’s. Lyric’s mother was found dead from an overdose the next day.
Cage jogged to his car, taking in deep breaths of air, but the musky scent seemed to have nested in his nose. Blocks away, the party at Bourbon Street emitted a smoky glow. Across the road, the arched entryway at Louis Armstrong Park illuminated the north end of the street. Headlights turned off the main road onto the narrow, cracked road. Sam George jumped out of his car and stalked toward Cage, Krista and Bonin hurrying behind him.
“You tell me where my daughter is right now, or I’m calling your boss.”
“She’s inside with Miss Alexandrine.” Cage blocked the man’s path up the slanted stone steps. He hoped their mutual guilt party earlier would make it easier to get through to him.
“There’s been some developments in the case. We have a lead on the kidnapper. Annabeth needs space right now.” He looked at Bonin. “A real lead.”
Krista joined her husband. Dark circles rimmed her eyes, and her cheeks were red from crying. She looked past Cage at the old cottage. “We’ll give her space, I promise. But can I speak to her, just for a moment?”
Cage glanced over his shoulder. Annabeth stood on the other side of the screen door, only her silky black hair visible. “If she’s okay with it.”
“Stay here,” Krista told her husband. “You’ll just make it worse.”
She climbed the two steps, her hands raised. “I’m not going to try to talk you into anything. I just want to tell you something.”
Cage tried to watch Sam and Annabeth at the same time. He wasn’t going to let her be upset again. Her memory might give them more vital details.
“Go ahead,” Annabeth said.
“We love you more than anything,” Krista said. “We want to be there for you, however you need us. I know things will never be the same, but I hope you’ll allow us to start fresh when this is all over. On your terms,” she added.
Cage strained to see the girl’s expression, but the meager porch light cast her in shadow.
“Krista,” her husband demanded, “what are you saying? She belongs in Roselea with us.”
Krista still faced the house, but her words sliced through the air. “Sam, enough. She’s not the same person. After what she’s been through, she’s earned the right to call the shots.”
Sam said nothing, but his veneer appeared to crumble as it had done before. “I just want her home.”
“She is home,” Krista said softly. “And only a few hours away. We can see her on weekends. Right?”
Annabeth slowly opened the screen door. “I’m okay,” she said at her mother’s gasp. “Just smacked my head, that’s all. Miss Alexandrine already stitched it up.”
Krista’s hands flexed at her side. Her desperation to touch her child made Cage long to see his own.
“As for the weekends,” Annabeth said. “I’d like that.”
Krista’s entire body seemed to melt. “Thank you
, sweetheart. We’ll leave you with Miss Alexandrine. I know she’ll take good care of you.” She edged forward, fingers trembling. Cage tensed, but Annabeth remained steady, her eyes focused on her mother.
Krista brushed her fingers over her daughter’s cheek. “We’ll see you soon.”
“Over a hundred Anthony Thomas’s in Louisiana and Texas combined. About half of them are the wrong age or skin color, but I can’t narrow things down any further.” Bonin snapped her laptop shut.
Alexandrine said Thomas was around the same age as Lyric’s mother, which put him around fifty. She described him as white, wiry, and shifty-eyed. He and Lyric’s mother lived in the Lower Ninth Ward until her death. Anthony left town shortly after.
Katrina had swept their old house away, along with half the others on their street. Bonin and Cage had gone door to door in a four-block radius in the Lower Nine, asking if anyone remembered the couple or Lyric as a child and came up empty.
“A lot of Katrina survivors didn’t come back,” Bonin said. “But this is the Lower Nine. The people here are proud. Most of the families go back generations, and a lot of them have stuck around to rebuild. Someone here has to know something.”
Cage popped two aspirin and wished he had more coffee. Ranger Lewis had called an hour ago. The associate who handled the sale of the land to L.M. Gaudet died of a heart attack last year. No one else at the bank had any memory of the sale. Too many years had passed.
“Sonofabitch blends in,” Bonin said. “Knows how to work the system.”
“Anthony Thomas isn’t his real name.” Cage was certain. “Lyric said he had aliases.”
Cage had left a message for Sean Andrews. He was the only other link to Lyric’s past and their best hope for getting Thomas’s real name.
Alexandrine had found a picture of Lyric and Charlotte around the time her mother died. Lyric looked more like a grown woman than a twelve-year-old. “He would have been in his early thirties when he first tried to molest her, right?”
“Roughly, if he’s around the same age as her mother.”