“What took you so long?”
The flat, disembodied voice sent my cell and my shriek high into the heavens.
But it wasn’t a slasher.
It was Sullivan.
I yanked down my jacket to stop myself from yanking him down—to the hallowed ground. “I’m sure you get a real charge out of sneaking up on people in cemeteries.”
He stood before me in a fitted black suit and mirrored sunglasses that glinted like steel. “I do when they’re about to contaminate my crime scene.”
“Look, I’ve been hired—”
“Save it, Amato,” he interrupted. “I know you’re working for Santo because I referred you.”
His statement was so shocking that I would’ve flung my phone again if I’d known where it was. And I realized that I’d been so unsettled by the crime, I’d forgotten to ask Josh Santo how he’d gotten my name. “Why would you refer me?”
“This is a sensitive investigation.” He folded his arms against his broad chest. “Mass hysteria is an understatement for what’ll happen if the details get out about what went on in that crypt.”
His comment did nothing to quell my concerns about the case. For the sake of my skin—and bones—I decided to play nice. “Was it that bad?”
“The victim was strung up by his heels, and his jugular was slit.”
My stomach turned upside down like I’d been strung up by my heels. And I thought of that supposed spirit’s words to Chandra about Anthony, not to mention the jugular-obscuring scarf I’d left lying on my dresser. “Is it true that his blood was drained?”
He nodded. “Down to the last drop.”
Coffee came to mind—and I resolved to switch to black tea.
The detective’s phone rang, and he pulled it from his inner suit pocket. “This is Sullivan.”
While he listened to the caller, I started searching for my cell. I didn’t see it around the crypt, so I checked a neighboring tomb. A tree was growing from the top, and it had been there for so long that its roots had shattered the concrete on one side. I kicked a pile of leaves at the base of the broken wall, and I found something.
Not my phone.
A bone.
A human bone.
The scream took root in my belly and sprouted from my mouth like the tree from the tomb.
A pair of arms wrapped around me—strong and, gratefully, flesh-covered.
“It’s all right.” Sullivan’s tone, like his embrace, was strangely soothing. “That kind of thing happens in these old graveyards.”
I stayed still for a moment, suspended in the surreal scene.
Why was Sullivan holding me?
Was this a trick?
A precursor to a takedown?
And, whatever it was, why didn’t I detest it?
My phone began to ring, and I jerked from his arms as though I’d been burned by the fires of hell. I turned and resumed the search for my cell so he wouldn’t see the heat spreading to my cheeks. It wasn’t my reaction to the bone that I was embarrassed about—it was my reaction to him.
“Bradley Hartmann.” Sullivan sounded like he was reading the name.
I spun around and discovered that he was reading it—from my phone display.
He shot me a wicked smile and put the device to his ear. “Wes Sullivan here, Brad old boy. I didn’t think we’d get a chance to chat again after I arrested you for sucker-punching me in that strip club. You been staying out of trouble?”
Bradley had seen Sullivan slip the infamous five-dollar bill into my stripper thong, and his punch was proof that he didn’t share my nonna’s appreciation for the tip. So it went without saying that he would appreciate hearing his arresting officer answer my phone even less. Before the dastardly detective could do anymore damage, I wrested the device from his grip.
“H-Hey, Bradley,” I said, surprisingly—and suspiciously—breathless. “We were, uh, investigating a homicide.”
“You didn’t tell me you were working another murder case.” His tone was a lot like Sullivan’s had been when he’d caught me at the crypt.
“I was only contracted for the case a couple of hours ago.”
“That must be why you’re out of breath,” he said as dry as that old bone I’d uncovered.
“What? I don’t understand.”
“Because you ran right to the scene.” The sarcasm that dripped from his voice seemed to seep through the receiver.
My body went as stiff as one of the cemetery statues while I processed his implication. Did he think I’d been kissing Wesley Sullivan when he called? “Wait a minute—”
“I already waited—make that wasted—a minute listening to that damn detective.” He spoke like he was talking through his teeth. “Now I’m being called back to my meeting.”
Classic Bradley—all work all the time.
“Then I’ll let you go,” I huffed. And puffed. “I wouldn’t want you to miss a single second of a meeting on my behalf.” I practically punched End, trying not to note the symbolism of the gesture, and shoved the phone into my pocket.
Wanting to look anywhere but at the detective, I stared into the distance, and a withered rose on a tomb caught my eye. Was it a sign of the state of my relationship with Bradley?
Dying?
Or…dead?
“Trouble in paradise?” Sullivan asked.
That was an ironic choice of words given our surroundings, and I was in no mood for irony. “You had no right to answer my phone.”
He gave a low chuckle, but it might as well have been a mwa-ha-ha. “It sure was fun, though.”
“Is that why you referred me to Josh Santo? To have some laughs at my expense?”
“Maybe I like the way you shake things up.” He did a shimmy, mimicking my striptease.
My fingers formed fists. “I stripped to solve a strip club murder. I hardly think that applies in this case.”
“From what I’ve read, funeral strippers are pretty popular in China and Taiwan.” He lowered his lenses and leered. “The people of New Orleans would take to them too, if you were taking it off.”
My huffing and puffing turned to spitting and sputtering.
But Sullivan just grinned.
“Hidey-ho,” a burly male bellowed as he pushed a wheelbarrow full of chains to the crypt. Except for his purple tank top and beige cargo shorts, he looked like a thirty-something Santa. And he was every bit as jolly.
“Hey, Phil, I’ve gotta run.” Sullivan jerked his thumb in my direction. “But do me a favor and keep this one from crashing the crime scene, would ya?”
“Happy to oblige, Detective.” Phil grinned and tugged at his tool belt, revealing a tattoo of a cat in pajamas. “I am the crypt keeper.”
I took a step back. A merry crypt keeper was not the cat’s pajamas.
Sullivan pulled his keys from his pants pocket. “Hey, since I won’t be here when your boyfriend calls back, give him a message for me.”
I refused to respond.
“Tell him I said it’s time to get his priorities straight.” He gave my arm a tap and walked away.
I stood there, stoic. But I was reeling from his remark. Was the situation with Bradley so obvious that even Sullivan could see it?
The detective stopped short. “Oh, and Amato?” He turned and pointed at me. “You be careful around that Santo character.”
A statement like that was worth breaking my stony silence for. “Why? What do you know about him?”
Sullivan removed his steely sunglasses and slayed me with a steely stare. “He was here at the cemetery the night of the murder.”
5
“So you referred me to a homicidal vampire?” I shouted after Sullivan, but he’d already disappeared among the tombs.
Phil tapped me on the shoulder, and I spun on him like a Tasmanian Devil.
“Hoo! Someone’s jumpy.” He chuckled. “Before you go, I’d like to call your attention to a rare opening at Saint Cecilia.” He grinned and gestured game-show-host s
tyle to a crumbling crypt with a For Sale by Owner sign like it was a prize trip to the Netherlands instead of a one-way ticket to the netherworld.
My upper lip fled to my nostrils. “You can buy a used tomb?”
“You can rent them too.” He tipped the wheelbarrow, and the chain hit the ground with a ghostly rattle.
New Orleans had a lot of unusual customs, but renting graves was beyond bizarre even for The Big Easy. Because, last I’d heard, death was permanent. “Why would anyone do such a thing?”
He shrugged. “They have to rent if the family crypt is already cooking a loved one.”
My stomach burned like an incinerator. “Mind clarifying that?”
“These babies are like pizza ovens.” He patted the top of a tomb. “They cook bodies for a year and a day minimum per Judeo-Christian mourning rituals. When a new body comes along, we empty the bones into a bin below.”
My passion for pizza fizzled. “It’s a great opportunity and all, but I’m not here to, uh, shop. I came to see the crime scene.”
“You heard the detective. No can do.” Phil picked up the end of the chain and dragged it around the side of the crypt.
I followed, checking the area for anything unusual. “Could you at least give me some information about the murder?”
“Since I found the body, I’d say so.”
Sullivan seemed to trust Phil, but his sunny disposition made me suspicious, particularly since he’d found the deceased. “When did you find it?”
“Late Sunday night.”
I recognized the irony of my next question, but I had to ask. “Do you work the graveyard shift?”
Phil shook with laughter, and I half expected him to ho ho ho. “Nice one.” He wiped a tear from beneath his glasses. “By the by, that expression came from the Victorian practice of putting a bell called a Bateson’s Belfry in the coffins of the deceased to make sure they weren’t buried alive. Relatives stayed at the cemetery to listen for the ring. Same with ‘saved by the bell’ and ‘dead ringer.’”
I’d had my fill of Phil and his cheerful chatter. “That’s fascinating. But why were you here if you didn’t have to work?”
He clamped a padlock on both ends of the chain, securing the crypt. “I popped by after spending the weekend at a Do-It-Yourself taxidermy workshop in Texarkana. I’d forgotten my dissection kit at the office.” He rubbed his hands together. “And I was ready to get to stuffing.”
Alibi aside, the dissection kit was a cutting reminder that he and I were alone—in a place bodies were buried. From the corner of my eye, I scanned the cemetery for a visitor or an escape route. “So, what prompted you to look inside this crypt?”
He put his arm around the statue of the winged woman. “Nike had been moved. When I straightened her, I noticed the door had been pried open.”
“What did you see inside?”
His eyes narrowed. “Chevals-diable.”
I assumed it was a Cajun curse word. “That bad, huh?”
“The crypt is crawlin’ with ‘em.”
My head tipped forward. “With bodies?”
He looked at me like I was looney. “With chevals-diable. It’s French for devil’s horses, but around here we call ‘em graveyard grasshoppers.”
My skin prickled at the lexical lessons—and a possible insect infestation.
“It was no coincidence that they chose this crypt.”
I looked at Phil like he was the loon. “The bugs?”
“No, the killer. Because we don’t know who did this, I used the colloquial singular ‘they’ to avoid the gender discrimination inherent in ‘he’ and ‘she’.”
Yes, we wouldn’t want to discriminate against a murderer.
“What I meant was, a Greek-American man wearing a Greek fraternity shirt in a Greek Revival tomb?” He pursed his lips and shook his head. “That was intentional.”
When he put it that way, I had to agree. “How do you know the victim was Greek?”
“Sullivan mentioned his surname, Charalambous. Clearly of Cypriot origin.”
To me it just sounded like one of those fancy names they gave to cheap booze. “What was on his shirt?”
“The letters Delta Upsilon Delta, which is apparently the fraternity that reported him missing.”
The frat house was my next stop. “Are there other Greek Revival tombs in St. Cecilia?”
“Not many. In choosing a final resting place, locals went for architectural styles that were fashionable for houses and public buildings at the time.” He winked and stroked his beard. “You know NOLA. We put the ‘fun’ in funeral.”
Phil wasn’t wrong about that, especially considering the jazz funeral phenomenon. But still. “What can you tell me about the body?”
He held up a finger. “You mean, what can I show you. Before the police came, I took pictures of Gregg. I do that for all of our departed residents and guests. I find it promotes a sense of family.”
I tried to close my mouth but couldn’t—until I remembered those devil bugs. “Can I see them?”
He twisted his mustache à la Dick Dastardly. “The detective didn’t say anything about pictures, now did he?”
His devious behavior did nothing to quell my concerns, and it didn’t help that dusk was descending on the cemetery. But I had to get a look at the crime scene one way or another.
He led me to a caretaker building that wasn’t much bigger than the crime scene crypt and opened the door. “Ladies first.”
Desperately hoping he’d left that dissection kit at home, I stepped inside the dim room, keeping him in my peripheral vision.
He entered and rummaged through the drawers of his desk, and I studied my surroundings. The office had the musty odor of a mausoleum, but it looked like an armory. Antique weaponry adorned the walls, and there was an anvil and a variety of tools scattered around the floor. Even more unsettling, there was a shelf with books on anatomy, embalming, and zombies.
Phil pulled out a cleaver.
I went rigid.
Was he about to siphon my blood?
And stuff me?
“Might I interest you in a charcuterie board?” He grabbed a salami from the clutter on his desk.
My body went slack, and I sunk onto the anvil.
He whacked off a salami slice. “Not to brag, but I cured the meat myself in a casket buried underground.”
My saliva went on strike. Given the cemetery setting and his taxidermy hobby, I didn’t dare ask where the meat had come from, not to mention whether the casket he’d cured it in had been occupied. “My parents own a deli, so I’m good.”
“Fine profession. If I wasn’t already living the dream, I’d be a deli owner. Or a butcher.” He chewed the meat with gusto and kissed his fingertips. “Mm. Buonissimo!” Then he removed a photo album from the bookshelf and flipped the pages.
I stood, and my stomach seized both because of the oily salami smell and the content of the photographs. For most of the “residents” and “guests” he’d taken two pictures, one in the casket and another after he’d removed them from the tomb. And he’d posed with each one as though they were at a party.
“Here we go.” He tapped a Polaroid.
I took the album and sunk back onto the anvil. I’d seen some awful crime scenes before, but this one would haunt me. The victim was kneeling and slumped face forward in a pool of black grasshoppers. “Are they eating his blood?”
He gave a happy ha. “Good grief, no. Chevals-diable are herbivores. They eat moss and the like. And most of his blood had been drained from the gash on his jugular and the two holes on his wrist.”
A jolt went through me, and Josh’s Osmond teeth flashed before my eyes. “Holes? Like the blood was sucked out?”
“Or drained. You can’t see it from the way he’s sitting, but his ankles were bound with a rope, and he’d been hung upside down from a hook.”
Chandra’s words shook me all over again—he’ll be strung up like an animal and have his blood drained. �
�How…how did he get to the ground?”
“My theory? He got himself down, which was quite a feat considering his age.” He bent over and turned the page. “I cleared the chevals-diable to get this shot.”
The camera angle of the second photo made two things clear. The victim was facing the wall when he died, and his right index finger was stained red.
Why?
Because he’d used his own blood to write a message on the wall, just above the floor.
Campari Crimson.
The front door of Delta Upsilon Delta opened, releasing a waft of dirty laundry, marijuana, and stale pizza that practically knocked me off the porch of the Greek Revival mansion. My eyes stung from the stench, and when my tears cleared, I blinked at the twenty-something bleached blonde who stood before me in a sheer black chiffon robe and pink teddy. “Maybe Baby?”
“Who’s askin’?” her helium-pitched voice squeaked.
“Franki Amato. You helped me with a case at Madame Moiselle’s, remember?”
Maybe waved her champagne bottle. “I ain’t seen Franki in months.”
I wished there was a swing or patio furniture around because the case was draining, and it wasn’t because of the blood-swilling vampires. “I’m Franki, so you have seen me.”
“Okay.” She moved to close the door.
I kept it open with the butt of my hand. “What are you doing at a frat house? Dancing?”
“I quit the strippin’ business.” She straightened, but then swayed on her high-heeled slippers. “I got tired of being objected by men.”
If she didn’t want to be “objected” by men, she’d picked the wrong outfit—in both senses of the word. “What are you doing now?”
“I’m a mom.”
That statement shook me more than the stench. “A mother? Really?”
“Uh-huh. I got twenty sons.” She took a swig from her bottle, and rightfully so after that revelation.
“Wait.” A light went on in my brain, which was more than I could say for Maybe’s. “You’re the frat housemother?”
Campari Crimson Page 6