by Maria Luis
Even in spring, New Orleans’s heat was Hell personified. Satan relaxing in a sauna. Archangels dropping out of the sky from heatstroke. Souls scratching at the gates of Hell. People—
Nathan scrubbed his forearm across the sweat beading on his forehead. He’d arrived not long after the EMTs, not that they’d been able to resuscitate the victim. Back at marine boot camp on Parris Island, Nathan and the other grunts had been taught that stab wounds to the gut were almost always a straight trip to Lights Out. With so many organs, intestines, and whatever else was going on in the stomach—Nathan was a marine, not a doctor—there was little chance for survival.
Glancing down at the body, Nathan slid his Ray-Bans off his nose and hooked them over the collar of his polo. Yeah, there was no chance for this guy. One drag of what could only have been a knife to the thigh, and another three deep incisions played a circumference around the man’s navel.
Beside him, Brady took out his phone and placed a call to the Coroner’s Office. “Yeah, we’ve got a homicide . . . . No, I think—” He pulled the phone away from his ear, hand cupping the receiver as he looked at Nathan. “How long do you think he’s been dead?”
Two hours. Maybe three. He noted the deep discoloring of the man’s skin along his back, the back of his arms and legs, even his ears. Thanks to his career choices, Nathan had seen his own fair share of the no-longer-living. Friends while deployed in the Middle East—locals, too. As a cop and homicide detective, there had been drug abusers with one hit too many and domestic cases where fights escalated to the incomprehensible.
For the most part, bodies decayed the same—unless some real fucked-up shit had gone down. This guy . . . “Three hours, tops.”
As Brady related the information to the coroner, Nathan stepped back and surveyed the scene. Yellow caution tape had already been secured. A few street officers lingered by their marked cruisers. Soon the area would be swarming with the coroner’s assistants and crime lab technicians grabbing photos, reviewing the scene, swabbing for fingerprints.
Absently, he noted that if Jade had already started working, she could have been here. Could have been looking down at a face that was as gray and empty as a wisp of smoke.
“All right, thanks,” Brady said into the phone. “Yeah, we’ll see y’all soon.”
“They comin’ down?” Nathan leveled a look at the group of people standing on just the other side of the sectioned-off area. While a few of the older folks were huddled together, three teens stood with their phones aimed at the victim, as though waiting for the soul to reclaim its body and return from the dead. Nathan’s fingers balled into a fist—the kids were being disrespectful, but they didn’t know any better.
“Yeah, everyone is on their way.” Stepping to the side, Brady backtracked to where he’d parked his unmarked vehicle. “We need to do a sweep of the area.”
Nathan followed, hands shoved deep into his pockets. “What do you need from me?”
They were already three hours into the case and there wasn’t a single lead. An I.D. had been pulled off the victim’s body, though, at least giving the man an identity. Charlie Zeker. Until this morning, he’d lived not so far from here, maybe four blocks toward the river. Nathan itched to get going, to start nailing down suspects and stringing the clues together, but he’d have to wait until Brady, as his sergeant, made the call.
Brady unlocked his old-as-hell Crown Vic (so old, they didn’t even make them anymore for the department), its door screeching like a furious cat’s howl as it opened, before ducking the upper half of his body inside to rummage around.
The rummaging stopped, and Brady emerged with a clipboard in his free hand and a serious expression. “You want this case?”
Nathan’s heart might as well have stopped. Sure as hell his fingers twitched in his pockets. “What?”
“This case?” His best friend lifted the clipboard and shoved it flat against Nathan’s chest. “You want field experience, aside from providing assistance to the other detectives? You’re now in charge of this investigation.”
A weird feeling slid through him at the sound of those words. Grief—because no one deserved to die a death like the one which had rendered Charlie Zeker lifeless. Relief—because he suddenly had the opportunity to prove his own merit within the department.
It wasn’t like he’d never worked on a case before. Nathan was good at providing assistance. Maybe it was the marine mentality that still hadn’t slipped from him, but he took orders well and followed through to perfect execution. He never shied away from working over-time, so long as it helped one of his brothers or sisters get their perp. He’d done surveillance at all hours of the day (or night), just because a coworker had asked if he were free.
If Nathan wasn’t free, he quickly stripped his schedule.
End of the day, he was his job.
But this was the first time he’d have the chance to lead an investigation on his own. And there was no way he’d rest until the murderer was caught.
Six hours and forty-three minutes later, Nathan had two things going for him: the first was his dogged determination, which he was sure would somehow bite him in the ass one day because the word “quit” didn’t exist in his vocabulary. The second was that he was one lucky bastard.
After scouring the neighborhood for possible leads, he stumbled across an older woman seated in a rocking chair on her front porch. She wore one of those dresses that looked more like a sheet. Her white-as-snow hair was tucked up under a handkerchief, and her skin had more wrinkles than an overly ripe prune.
The fact that she lived less than a block away from the murder scene was all Nathan needed as motivation to move his feet up her porch steps.
“Excuse me, ma’am?” He kept his voice low, unthreatening. In his experience, folks in the city got jittery when unmarked vehicles rolled up and enforcers of the law stepped out.
Then again, the old lady still hadn’t looked in his direction.
“Ma’am? My name is Detective Danvers. I was wondering if you’ve got a few minutes to talk to me.”
She continued to look west toward the sunset. Her porch didn’t have all that good of a view. A three-story building blocked any chance of her seeing anything besides cracked, concrete walls, some broken windows, and a few dead plants. The sunset peaked out from either side of the eyesore that was the former apartment building.
When the woman continued her silence, Nathan had the absurd thought that she wasn’t real. A spirit, maybe. Call him crazy but he’d seen his fair share of ghosts in the sandbox that was Iraq. Apparitions that your tired-as-hell eyes swore were real, moving figures. But then you blinked and poof! Gone, as if they were never there at all. Nathan had returned to New Orleans and continued to see those eerie figures winding down the street, shopping in the same aisle at the grocery store, sitting on the bar stool next to him at his favorite pub.
Sometimes, if he wasn’t careful, he still saw their faces in his sleep.
But then the woman sighed, a loud sound that escaped her chest like rattling chains. Trembling fingers went to a pack of cigarettes teetering on the rounded edge of the rocking chair’s armrest. The lid was flipped open, a Marlboro Red withdrawn. Nathan watched as those same trembling fingers brought the death-stick to her mouth and lit the end with a lighter that she pulled from a pocket of her sheet-dress.
Eyes flicked his way and Nathan flinched.
The irises were a foggy blue, nearly translucent, as they fixed somewhere to the right of his body.
“Ya here because of Shawna?” asked that raspy voice. Smoke billowed out into the humidity-rife air.
Nathan peered over his shoulder, wondering if she was talking to somebody else. Blind though she was, she must have heard his movement because she snapped, “I’m talking to you, boy. Ya here because of Shawna?”
Lowering himself to the top stair, he slid onto his ass and rested his elbows on his knees. He’d discovered years ago, as a street officer, that his height intimidated
people. Even though the old woman couldn’t see him, old habits were hard to break. He eyed her cigarette. Forced his fingers to unclench.
“Who’s Shawna?”
The rocking chair picked up speed, sending the creaky porch into an ee-aw-ee-aw apoplectic fit. “Sure you’re looking for her,” the older woman was saying. “We both know what she did.”
Unease tightened in Nathan’s gut. “Ma’am, are you referring to the homicide that took place today?”
“I don’t know where she is, boy. If I did, I would have slapped her silly.” She sucked hard on the cigarette and let the smoke release from her nose. “Ya think I didn’t tell her not to do it? I says to her, he might’a been cheatin’, girl, but it ain’t worth no trip to lockup.”
She attempted to tap the cigarette’s cherry against the armrest but missed by about three inches. “Talkin’ about stabbing and all that. God will always remember your sins, I says.” Another tap of the Marlboro, but this one made contact and the ashes scattered in the stifled breeze. “God will always remember your sins. You have sins, boy?”
Caught off guard by the abrupt change in conversation, Nathan flinched. She couldn’t see him, had no idea that he felt like tossing up his on-the-go lunch from Subway this afternoon. He doubted it’d taste as fresh on the way up since it hadn’t even tasted fresh on the way down. So why did he feel as though she knew all? Knew everything he kept locked deep inside behind the jokes and the laughs and the endless flirting?
“Ma’am,” he started slowly, hoping to gain control of his chaotic thoughts, “let’s keep talking about Shawna, all right?”
The rocking chair stopped mid-sway. “Everyone has a sin or two. Never did get around to baptizing Shawna—gotta wonder if I’m at fault for her ways, Detective. I started the girl down the wrong path.”
Nathan felt the strangest compulsion to alleviate the woman’s guilt. “Ma’am, we’re all responsible for our own actions. We can’t . . . Don’t blame yourself for whatever Shawna has done.”
“You’ve seen what she’s done.” The words were said around the religious puffing of the cigarette. “It’s why you’re here.”
He closed his eyes. He’d almost wished she hadn’t spoken. Almost wished he could leave her here to her cigarettes and the fading sunset that was more mauve and gray now than red and yellow and pink.
He forced the question he didn’t want to ask. “Did Shawna follow through with her promise to stab someone?”
“Charlie was her husband, boy. Not that it made him any good—he’s been cheatin’ since the day he put a ring on her finger. My poor girl found out that Charlie, well, he’s got another family. A boy. Two girls. Shawna has no children. Charlie said to her he didn’t want no children and she believed him.”
The sun finally made its final dip into the horizon, leaving the sky bereft of the vibrant colors. He wondered if that was why the old woman kept to her cigarettes—to keep her warm when the world was often a cold, hard place. It’d been that way for him. Chain-smoking day after day in the hope of easing the permanent freeze from his body.
It hadn’t worked.
“Can you tell me what Charlie looks like, ma’am?”
“Looked like, boy.” Another tap of the cigarette, which had already burned all the way down to the filter. “We both know he’s dead. But he’s got . . . Shawna always said he had a big smile for everybody. Mattered none if he knew them or not. Brown hair. Light-colored eyes. A little heavyset, because this old porch always creaked under his feet.”
“Do you know his height?”
The older woman tipped her head to the side in thought. “Iffa I were standing and he was next to me . . . ” She made a rough estimate with her hand above the top of her head. “Maybe two hands taller.”
An exact description for Charlie Zeker, to say nothing of the coincidence between the first names. Nathan bounced the heels of his feet on the porch. He didn’t want to take the old woman in but he didn’t see any other option. She knew so much, and it was unlikely Shawna would ever show her face unless it was to speak to her mother.
“Ma’am, I’m going to have to bring you into the station.” When he saw her body jolt, he hastily added, “You are not under arrest. But the man you described fits the description of the victim—and we need to convince Shawna to turn herself into the police.”
A second cigarette was withdrawn from the pack. “You won’t hurt her none?”
“No, ma’am. It’s an awful situation all the way around, but no harm will come to your daughter.”
“Iffa I knew where she was . . . ”
“I’d highly suggest that you point me in the right direction.” Nathan desperately wanted to jump up and pace the length of the porch to work out his adrenaline. But he’d come so far and he wasn’t keen on sending the old woman into a panic. “The law can only do so much to protect you from becoming an accessory.”
She seemed to ponder this for a moment, rocking back and forth. “All right, I’ll tell you.”
Nathan sucked in a huge breath of relief. “Good, I—”
She cut him off mid-sentence. “But I wanna see her, Detective. Before y’all put her away, I want her brought to me.”
“Done.”
She dropped the cigarette to the porch, using her slipper to pat around and put out the small, burning flame. She missed, so Nathan stood and stamped out the cig under the toe of his boot, just like he’d done hundreds of times himself.
Over the next few minutes, he helped the old woman gather a few things before guiding her to his unmarked vehicle. He opened the door for her, adjusted her sheet-dress when it tangled around her thin legs, and promised her a stop by Popeye’s when she asked for some mashed potatoes and gravy.
It was only on their way to Headquarters that she spoke again, her raspy voice once again reminding him of rattling chains. “You never did tell me what your sin is, boy.”
Nathan kept his hands on the wheel, gaze focused on the road ahead.
“Detective?”
His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “Wanting too much.”
7
Carrollton, New Orleans
It was Sunday. The Sunday. Aka the day Danvers was meant to help Jade put together her new furniture.
For the umpteenth time that afternoon, she checked her cell phone. One text message from Sammie. A missed call from her mother. Jade sighed. No calls or texts from Nathan Danvers.
Honestly, it was probably for the best that he’d forgotten. Sure, Jade didn’t know a single soul in New Orleans yet, aside from the Cartwell family. Sure, she’d been strangely looking forward to hanging out with him today. Really, it didn’t matter that Danvers had found something better to do—she was not bummed, and she certainly wasn’t moping.
She dropped her gaze to the boxes littering her bedroom. She’d been at it since six a.m. this morning. From the looks of it, she’d still be unpacking her life when nighttime rolled around this evening.
Shifting to her knees, she pushed her phone aside and surveyed the room, debating on her next move.
A sharp knock came on the front door. And then another.
Jade flew into action.
She lunged over an empty box, grabbed pairs of underwear and bras from the floor with one fist, and tossed them all into the cardboard box. The box was shoved into her bedroom closet just as another rap came at the door.
He was here and—Jade’s feet ground to a halt. She’d been so busy organizing and unpacking that she’d completely forgotten about the food she’d promised him. Crap.
“Jade?” Danvers called out from the other side of the heavy fire door. “You okay in there?”
It was too late to turn back now.
Smoothing down her hair with the flat of her palms, Jade tromped over to the entranceway and swung open the door.
Her breath whooshed out of her lungs as her gaze came level with his chest.
He wore an old T-shirt with sliced off sleeves, leaving his muscular a
rms bare to her perusal. And oh, did she look. No female on the planet could have stood opposite him like Jade was now and still managed to ignore the masculine perfection that was Nathan Danvers. Basketball shorts hugged a narrow waist and black sneakers completed the look. Her gaze went to his arms again. He looked like he could pick her up with just one hand and throw her over his shoulder without breaking a sweat.
She told herself that the thought wasn’t incredibly appealing.
Lucia Harper would be disappointed to learn that her middle daughter was a liar.
When Jade finally managed to bring her gaze to his face, it was only to find him grinning wolfishly.
“Don’t say it,” she warned with a finger-thrust at his chest. Which was hard as a rock because, well, of course it was—Danvers had the appearance of a Greek statue, all lean and sinewy muscles. She barely refrained from dropping her gaze to his crotch—based off his overall size, she doubted that the classic “leaf” would do the job of covering up the goods.
“Don’t say what?” His voice curled like smoke around her. He still stood on the welcome mat she’d put down just that morning, and, for whatever reason, it seemed momentous that he was her first guest. A bit like that fate. Not that Jade believed in fate. She was more of a make-it-happen kind of girl.
Danvers lowered his head. “Don’t say that you just ogled me? Don’t worry, I’m not easily embarrassed.”
No, but she was embarrassed. As heat climbed her face, Jade wondered if she’d stepped off the deep end. She’d never experienced such an immediate reaction to a man. She wanted his muscular arms wrapped around her waist. She wanted to feel his lips on hers . . . . But she wasn’t looking for a relationship.
Don’t forget about your mother.
Lucia was the perfect example of what happened when you let a man get in the way of your dreams. Jade loved her dad, she did, but there was something to be said about how Kevin Harper had married and continued on with his career while Lucia’s dream of becoming a pediatrician faded during the years of skinned knees, birthday parties, and childhood crushes.