He raised a handgun with a long barrel and fired.
Thwap.
Mercer’s muscles went weak, shock making her ears ring as the gentleman crumpled to the floor. The gallery owner started to scream, but the man fired again, shooting her in the face. Thwap. Stumbling backward, Mercer clapped a hand over her mouth to restrain her cry. The shooter stepped to where the man lay. Standing over him, he fired two more rounds. As he began to turn, Mercer dropped to her knees underneath the window, her pulse racing. Oh, God. He hadn’t seen her, had he?
Her lungs cramped at the ominous echo of footsteps. She could tell by the sound that he was still in the main gallery. Probably looking for others. He would check the back rooms, too. Terror made her lightheaded. There was no way out without being seen.
Find somewhere to hide! Go!
Her panicked gaze swung around the space. A hulking, antique armoire sat diagonally in one corner of the room. She moved to it on rubbery legs. Her heart sank when she realized there wasn’t enough room between it and the wall for her to squeeze behind. She hesitated, then opened the armoire’s front with a soft snick. It was the kind that had been used for clothing storage a century or more ago. Drawers and shelves were in the top half of its interior but the bottom half was open, with hooks on the back panel for hanging garments. She had no choice. Mercer got inside it and, crouching, she closed its doors, her hands cold and perspiration beginning to bead on her upper lip.
Please, God. Please don’t let him find me!
Moments later, footsteps came to a halt outside the room. Her flesh pebbled, fear sluicing through her as she huddled in the dark. If he opened the armoire, she was dead. Blood rushed in her ears. It was all she could do to keep her breathing shallow, to not gulp air. Through the keyhole, she could see him. Early forties, receding brown hairline and a coldly impassive face. He had been wearing sunglasses, but he had since removed them and clipped them onto his jacket pocket. His eyes swept the room as he entered, the gun gripped in his hand. As he began moving closer to where she hid, Mercer prayed.
Oh, God! I’ll do anything. Please just let him go away!
He stopped a few feet from the armoire and looked directly at it, making her blood chill in her veins. She held her breath until her lungs threatened to burst. Mercer nearly went limp with relief when finally, he turned, exited the room, and traveled farther down the hall, based on the sound of his footsteps. What seemed like an eternity later, she heard him walk past the room again. Then the gallery’s front door opened and closed.
She remained in the stifling, cramped space for several minutes, afraid to leave the dark confines of the armoire.
He’s gone. I have to get out. I have to see if I can help those people.
I have to call for help!
Her legs had gone numb from the crouching position. She inched open the armoire’s doors and slowly emerged. Carefully, she peered into the main gallery through the window. Seeing the two sprawled bodies, a hard tremor went through her. But the shooter was gone. Taking her cell phone from the small cross-body bag she wore, Mercer moved unsteadily down the hall. As she entered the main gallery, she placed a hand on the wall for support. Seeing the carnage at close distance, horror rose like bile in her throat. Still, she inched carefully closer, nearly panting in terror. Dear God. Nausea swept through her. The gallery owner didn’t have a face anymore, just blood and tissue where her features had been. Blood covered the man’s chest. Part of his skull had been blown off, and chunks of bone and gore lay on the floor. Crimson spattered the white wall and the paintings behind where they had stood. The coppery odor of blood hung in the air, mixed with an acrid odor that some part of Mercer’s brain recalled. Gunpowder. Her father had taken her skeet shooting as a teenager.
Despite the grisly scene, she forced herself to bend down to shakily touch the side of the man’s neck. She did the same to the gallery owner. But as she had already known in her heart, neither had pulses.
Standing upright again, she fought another wave of nausea. Mercer closed her eyes, trying to regain her equilibrium, trying to block out the slaughter. She had to get her too-fast breathing under control. Her shaking fingers somehow managed to dial 911 on her phone. When an operator answered, it took several tries for Mercer to find her voice. It finally emerged, sounding too high and unnatural, like it wasn’t hers at all.
“I-I need help. Please! At The Bluth Studio on Queen…two people…they’ve been shot!”
“They’ve been shot?” the operator repeated. “Is the shooter still in the area?”
Her eyes darted to the closed door. “No. I mean, he left. He went out. I-I don’t know where he is now.”
“Are the victims breathing? Are they conscious?”
Mercer looked at the bodies again. She tried to swallow, but couldn’t. Nothing seemed real. Her voice broke. “They’re…gone. Please, just send help!”
Chapter Three
Charleston Homicide Detective Noah Ford studied the crime scene, a bitter taste in the back of his throat. The coroner’s initial exam was over, and through the gallery’s windows he could see the hearse waiting to transport the bodies once detectives had their look and Forensics processed the scene. Clad in jeans and a T-shirt, he wore latex gloves and paper booties over his sneakers, having been called away from an afternoon at his sister’s house where he had been repairing his nephew’s bike.
“Real shame about this. The Bluth Studio is practically an institution around here,” the uniformed officer who stood beside Noah said. Since the officer’s beat included the French Quarter, he had been among the first responders and Noah had brought him back inside to get a rundown on what he had found upon entering.
“And you were right,” the officer added. “I talked to the coroner outside. The driver’s license in the male vic’s wallet is Sterling Deveau’s.”
Deveau was a U.S. district court judge. Noah had recognized him. He had testified in his share of cases in his more than a decade of being a cop, and he’d been in Deveau’s courtroom on numerous occasions. Noah peered down at the bodies. No matter how many crime scenes he had worked, the violence still hardened his stomach. Blood had begun to congeal where Deveau’s right temple had been. It appeared that he had taken one to the head and two to the chest. They would know for certain following the autopsy.
The uniform spoke again. “So, what do you think, Detective? A robbery? The Quarter’s usually a safe area, especially in daytime.”
“I’m not thinking anything yet.” He still had an eyewitness to talk to, hopefully some security footage to review. Noah’s attention shifted to the doorway. Tyson Beaufain stood just outside the gallery’s high-ceilinged foyer, where he was donning the latex gloves and foot coverings required to enter the scene. An African American with close-cropped hair, he was in his late thirties and was a few years older than Noah. They had been partners for the past six years.
“Thanks for holding down the fort, man,” Tyson said as he reached Noah, his gold shield on his hip along with his holstered gun. “I was halfway back when my phone starts blowing up.”
“Fish biting?”
“Reeled in a largemouth bass this morning the size of my arm. It fought like a real badass, but I won. Got him in my cooler in the trunk along with some other beauties.”
Noah knew that Tyson had been at the remote fishing cabin on the upper end of Lake Marion. Tyson’s wife and twin daughters were away for the weekend to visit family and, as soon as he’d gotten off duty on Friday, he had headed up to the place that he had recently inherited from his grandfather. Noah had been invited, but had declined. He’d had a date—a recent divorcée his sister had been pushing him to ask out—but there had been no real spark. Probably his fault, he conceded.
“You can go back out,” he told the uniform, who exited.
Tyson gave a low whistle. “The male vic. That who I think it is?” He frowned as he peered down at the bodies. Around them, crime scene techs were doing their jobs—dusting the
gallery’s interior for prints, swabbing for touch DNA and marking shell casings on the floor with small yellow cones. A tech with a camera was photographing the high-velocity impact spatter that looked like a fine, rusty mist on the expensive oil paintings.
“Sterling Deveau,” Noah confirmed. “We’re also pretty sure the female vic is Alexa Rice, the gallery’s owner.”
“There’s not much left to ID.”
“It’s her gallery and her purse with her driver’s license is in a desk drawer.”
Extracting a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket, Tyson dropped down onto his haunches and used the pen to lift up the edge of Deveau’s sport coat, revealing a holstered handgun. Noah had looked for it himself earlier, since it was widely known that the judge carried a concealed weapon due to threats that he had received over the years.
“That piece didn’t do him much good.” Tyson let the coat drop again as he stood. “He didn’t even get a chance to draw.”
Noah filled Tyson in on what he knew so far. Several other pairs of detectives were also milling about, but Noah had already been informed by the cap—Captain Walter Bell, head of Charleston’s Police Investigations Bureau—that he and Tyson were being assigned as lead detectives on the case. They had recently closed a major investigation, which meant they had more bandwidth, at least more than some of the other detectives in the busy unit.
“I hear we have a witness. Where is she?” Tyson wanted to know.
“At the Fleur-De-Lis, for discretion. A uniform’s watching over her.”
Tyson looked down again at the two bodies. “How’d she not end up like them?”
“My understanding is that she hid. She got a good look at our guy, though.”
“You talked to her yet?”
“Not yet,” Noah said. “I’m about to go over there. Do you want to come?”
“You go ahead. I’ll take over chain of command here.”
Removing his gloves and shoe coverings at the door, Noah left the gallery. Outside, controlled chaos prevailed. Luminescent yellow tape cordoned off the sidewalk and a portion of Queen Street as uniforms worked to keep onlookers outside of the crime scene’s perimeter. A crowd had gathered once police had ascertained that there was no active shooter in the area and partially reopened the street. Tony Garber and Bobby Durand, another pair of detectives, were talking to some of the bystanders, and a team of uniforms was conducting a grid search around the gallery’s perimeter, looking for evidence. As Noah began walking toward the Fleur-De-Lis Hotel, the blue lights of patrol cars flashing into the fading, late afternoon sky above him, Bruce Tan, who worked in IT for them, called out, halting him.
“You’re not going to like this, Noah,” Bruce said as he approached. “I just got off the phone with the security company. Those cameras mounted inside the gallery are dead—they were scheduled to come out to repair them tomorrow morning.”
Frustrated, Noah ran a hand through his dark hair. This made their witness even more important. He preferred digital proof over eyewitness testimony, which was notoriously fallible. “How long have they been out?”
“The company noticed the outage midday, right after the gallery opened, and contacted the owner. They’re short-staffed on the weekend and tomorrow was the earliest they could get someone out.”
Noah pressed his lips together. He didn’t believe in coincidence.
He thanked Bruce for the information before walking the three blocks to the old hotel, which had a cocktail hour going on in its lush courtyard despite the disorder just down the street. Waiting for a horse-drawn carriage to pass, he then jogged across the asphalt and strode up several steps to the hotel’s front.
“She’s in the manager’s office, Detective.” A uniformed officer who had been leaning against the back of a Victorian sofa straightened as Noah entered the lobby. Giving a nod, Noah walked to the closed door. He knocked before entering.
“Ms. Leighton?” he said to the attractive blonde who rose from the couch as he came inside. “I’m Detective Noah Ford.”
They shook hands. Her slender fingers were cold, he noted, her face pale and soft-blue eyes reddened. Noah felt a tug of sympathy. He had arrived at the scene after the first responders had already whisked her off-site, before the media had gotten word of the shooting. Based on what he’d been told, Mercer Leighton had been able to view the shooter through the keyhole of the antique armoire where she had taken refuge.
Nervously, she glanced down at her hands. “They tested me for gunpowder residue.”
“It’s routine. It’s to eliminate you as the shooter.” He indicated the couch where she had been seated, and she sat down again. “Can I get you a glass of water?” he asked.
“The officer outside brought me a bottled water earlier, but thank you.” She absently rubbed at her upper arms, her anxiety palpable.
The only other seat in the office was behind the desk, so Noah sat on the other end of the couch and turned toward her. “I know you’ve already gone through it for the officers, but could you recount to me exactly what happened? What you saw and heard?”
Taking a tremulous breath, she relayed what she had seen from a back room in the gallery. How she had hidden when she realized that the shooter was looking for others. She struggled to speak, her eyes misting as she described returning to where the bodies were. Noah reached for a box of tissue on an end table and, moving closer, he handed it to her.
“You’re doing good,” he assured her in a low voice. He waited a moment before probing further. “And you had a clear view of the shooter?”
She nodded, wiping at a tear on her cheek. “He…came into the room and stood just a few feet from where I was hiding. I could see him through the keyhole.”
Noah imagined the terror she must have felt. “Ms. Leighton, I’m going to ask you to close your eyes and focus. Tell me everything you remember about him. His face, his height, what he was wearing.”
Tightly clutching the crumpled tissue, she closed her eyes and described the man she had seen.
“…He also wore a ring on his right hand, the one that held the gun,” she added after she had given a physical description. “I was crouched inside the armoire, so I was at eye level with it. It was yellow gold and had some kind of design, maybe Celtic? I couldn’t see it all that well, but it looked like a cross inside a circle.”
She paused reflectively, biting at her full bottom lip. “The gun had a long barrel. He pulled it out from underneath his jacket after he came into the gallery.”
The barrel she described was most likely an attached silencer, something Noah had suspected. The shooter had used it to mute the sound to some extent. It had worked further in his favor that it was late on Sunday afternoon, which meant many galleries in the Quarter were already closed, including the ones on either side of The Bluth Studio.
He asked a few more questions about the man’s appearance before telling her that she could open her eyes again. Her long, silky lashes fluttered open and her bleary gaze met his. She appeared somewhere in her early thirties. Despite her casual clothing, there was something decidedly high-end about her.
“Why were you at The Bluth Studio today, Ms. Leighton? I understand that you’re a tourist. Were you sightseeing?”
“I’m not a tourist,” she corrected, rubbing faintly at her brow. “I live in Rarity Cove. I just moved back there a month ago.”
The first responder that Noah had talked to must have confused that information.
“We…I…bought a painting from Alexa Rice a few years ago.” She shrugged weakly. “I just wanted to go back and browse, I guess.”
It hadn’t escaped him that although her hands were bare, she wore two rings—white-gold or platinum, one with a diamond and the other a simple band—on a delicate chain around her neck. Noah guessed that she was widowed, probably fairly recently, the latter based on the fact that she had initially said we before changing it to I.
“What happened today, Detective Ford?” she asked, her face
tense. “Was it a robbery? Some kind of domestic violence situation?”
“We don’t know at this point. I’m sorry.”
“Who was the man who was killed?”
“We’re still trying to identify him,” he lied, unable to give out such information until Deveau’s next of kin had been notified.
She bowed her head and lightly pressed her fingers to her eyes. “Those poor people,” she whispered.
Unsure of what else to do, Noah placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. “We’re done for now, Ms. Leighton. Thank you. But we may have other questions. I’d also like to get you with a forensic artist as soon as—”
The room’s door opened and a man entered with the uniformed officer on his heels. It had been years, but recognition as well as surprise flickered through Noah. The woman stood and went into Mark St. Clair’s arms, pressing her face into his chest.
“I got here as soon as I could,” he said as he held her.
“I know Mom’s closer.” Her voice was muffled against his shirtfront. “But I-I just couldn’t call her.”
Noah had risen from the couch, as well. The officer who had ushered in St. Clair spoke to him, sounding apologetic. “I checked his ID, Detective. He says that he’s her brother. Your witness called him.”
Chapter Four
“I can’t stop thinking about Carter’s call for help.” Sitting in the passenger side of Mark’s Volvo, Mercer stared absently out at the passing scenery that was shrouded in darkness. It was unsettling that just a few years after the attack that had nearly taken Carter’s life, she had made a similar 911 call, caught in her own nightmare. Her hands twisted together in her lap. “I’m starting to think we’re not the luckiest family.”
In Dark Water (Rarity Cove Book 3) Page 2