Out of Body

by Stella Cameron

  “I saw someone and I’d like to talk to them.” She needed to practice a more conversational tone. Marley cleared her throat and tried again. “How d’you think I’d find a person without knowing their name or where they live?”

  She groaned at the thought of risking what he might say after outrageous questions like those. And she must make sure he didn’t find out about the dollhouse. He would want to take it away if he discovered the danger it had got Marley into.

  When she tried to call him, his phone rang and rang. “If I can help you, I will. Leave a message.” He might not be out, but his voice on the answering machine meant he was unavailable.

  Could be lifting weights.

  “Marley?” Willow called.

  She gave her stash cupboard a longing glance, but got resolutely out of bed, quickly changing her clothes, and went to the sitting room.

  All she could see of Willow were coppery-red curls as unruly as Marley’s own dark red ones, sticking out over one arm of the rust suede couch. “I was just feeding the toads,” Marley said loudly to be heard over the television. “I like ’em fat when I pop them in a spell.”

  “Hah-hah,” Willow responded. She sounded distracted.

  “Have you seen Uncle Pascal this afternoon?” Marley asked.

  “Mmm, he and Anthony went out.”

  Anthony was Uncle Pascal’s trainer. Frustrated, Marley hurried around the couch and sat on the edge at Willow’s feet. “I really need to find him.”

  “I don’t know where he is,” Willow said, her voice sharp and rising. “Shh. I can’t hear with you talking.”

  Television was Willow’s addiction.

  Winnie-the-traitor sat in the curve of Willow’s diminutive body, eyes closed, pretending to be deeply asleep.

  “Didn’t they say where they were going?”

  “Nope.” Willow hauled a turquoise-and-gold cushion onto her hip and stood it up to form a screen between them.

  “Uncle loves to chatter about his outings.” Marley wrestled the cushion away. “Are you sure—”

  “Shh!” Willow hugged Winnie close. “The police conference is starting.”

  Frustrated, Marley gripped one of Willow’s ankles and gave it a shake.

  “Stop it,” Willow said, waving her aside. “This is important. It’s horrible…and scary. We all need to know about it. Haven’t you heard what’s happened?”

  “I guess not.”

  “They found a woman dead in the river. They think she was thrown there. And she got mauled by a gator.”

  “In the river?”

  “I don’t know if she was mauled there or somewhere else, then put there,” Willow said. “And don’t tell me there aren’t any gators in the river ’cause I already know. They’re pretty sure it’s murder.”

  Marley shuddered. “Horrible.”

  “There’s a panic because there are three other women who have gone missing. They’re saying they’re all singers in the Quarter. The police are going to hold a press conference. It should already have started.”

  Marley looked over her shoulder at the television. On a split screen, a podium crowded with microphones stood vacant on the right side. On the left there were several photographs. An announcer’s voice, female and strident, rushed along, “We’ll bring the conference to you live the moment it starts. Meanwhile, here are photographs of the missing women and Ms. Cooper. Shirley Cooper, whose body was found this afternoon, is in the larger picture.”

  “Nobody even knows when they went missing,” Willow said. “Not for sure. It’s horrible. It could be someone’s targeting singers.”

  Four women.

  Marley had seen two of them.

  Neither of those two had been Shirley Cooper.

  3

  “This is a fucking mess,” Detective Nat Archer said, staring at a crowded whiteboard on his office wall. “I get a floater in the river at noon—I hate floaters, the water messes up evidence. And it looks like an alligator tore into this one. A gator attack in the Mississippi. You ever hear anythin’ like that?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. “Now everyone thinks three missing singers are connected to the body we found in the river, and they’ll wash up in bits and pieces, too. They got an army down there by the river lookin’ for a damn gator.”

  Gray Fisher watched Archer’s back, the broad, tensed shoulders, long fingers shoved into his pants pockets. “So you could end up pulling three more bodies out of the river—give or take a few missing pieces,” Fisher said, grateful that he wasn’t on the force anymore.

  “Goddammit, Fisher, I’m not laughing at this.” Archer gave him an unflinching, almost black-eyed stare. “You do know you’re the closest thing I’ve got to a suspect?”

  “Because I came in for a friendly chat?” Well, hell!

  “A chat about supposedly looking for a missing woman. One of our missing women. You haven’t told me how you knew about the vic.”

  Even creased from a long day’s wear, Archer’s white shirt gleamed. It made his dark skin look even darker. Fisher didn’t like the way the other man looked at him.

  “I didn’t know about the…You’re pissing me off. I didn’t know Shirley Cooper. I never even heard her name until I came to this office today. I came looking for information about Amber Lee. I thought you and I were friends and I could do that. When I got here I hadn’t heard there was a search on for several women.”

  “Journalists are journalists and they’re mostly a pain in the ass. You’re an investigative journalist.” Archer’s eyes moved away from Fisher’s. “That’s worse than any other kind.”

  “I’ve been a journalist for years. It hasn’t stopped us from being civil—until now.”

  The office was beneath street level and muggy. Throughout the subterranean warren of rooms, old cigarette smoke tainted the air. Fisher sat in a metal folding chair with his legs stretched out and his heels on the piece of orange carpet that spread from beneath Archer’s desk. If you stood still on that carpet a little too long, the bottoms of your shoes got sticky. Maybe it was soaked in nicotine from years of service.

  Windows along one wall overlooked the corridor. Mangled blinds hung at random angles and didn’t stop anyone outside from seeing the entire room and whoever was in it.

  Archer let out a long sigh and drew his lips back from his teeth. Dimples, there whether he smiled or not, were out of sync with his big frown. “We’re friends,” he said. “Until you give me a reason to be somethin’ else. You were a great cop, just like your dad. I wish you’d stuck around. You would have been my partner after Guy Gautreaux left for good. I’d have liked that. But you had to write stories for crissakes.”

  Fisher had been a good enough cop, but he had wanted to write about the kind of people he met on the job every day. He knew the Quarter like the back of his hand—the clubs, the bars, the strip joints. Shops and their owners. And the everyday work force: portrait sketchers, palm readers and card readers, folks who hung out with bags of grave dust, rodent droppings and chicken feet in their pockets; dancers, singers, musicians, pushers, pimps, pavement princesses, pickpockets and crackheads—both the zombies and those who still had a few gray cells left to fry.

  There was a lot of humanity existing on the very edge, people with rich or crazy histories, and often crazier here-and-nows.

  “When will we know exactly how the vic died?” Fisher asked. “If it was before or after the gator?”

  “The autopsy should be going on now, if Blades got to it.”

  Fisher grinned with half of his mouth. “Blades is a first-rate M.E. I still say he chose the profession to fit his name.” He made a note about the autopsy in his notebook.

  “I don’t think you’ll risk asking him about that one again—if you ever see him.” Archer jotted several more lines on his board.

  “It’s not my fault if he doesn’t have a sense of humor,” Fisher said, and had a mental image of the tall, stooped man with his cadaverous face. “What’s your best gu
ess on this woman?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “Let’s get back to where we were,” Archer said. “You weren’t finished spilling your guts when the press conference came on.”

  “I wasn’t spilling my guts.”

  “Seemed to me like you had a lot to say.”

  Fisher let it go. “You ever see gators in the river?”

  “Nope. Heard of one a time or two.”

  “I don’t believe it.” But Fisher supposed they could get there somehow. “I guess Katrina could have caused just about anything.” The hurricane continued to get blamed for most things and it was often guilty.

  Archer began a fresh round of pacing back and forth, picking up crime scene photos from his desk in one direction and peering at them through slitted eyelids; dropping the grisly images of Shirley Cooper down again on his return. The body looked as if it had been in an outsize blender. He had held the photos up for Fisher to see when her name was mentioned on TV a while earlier.

  “You could have been going to say just about anything.” The detective hadn’t forgotten his previous line of questioning. “What would you have said if you hadn’t found out we had a body?”

  “I didn’t think about a body at all. Not one way or the other. Did I know I was going to walk in here in time to watch a press conference and hear about a bunch of missing women?”

  Archer scowled. “The chief couldn’t wait to get in front of the cameras.”

  After another detective had interrupted them to tell Archer to turn on the TV, Fisher had watched Chief Beauchamp’s press conference. He learned the case was Archer’s and that he’d begged off being on camera, not that reporters wouldn’t get to him soon enough. And that was the burr up Archer’s ass.

  “You know the press will be all over this like white on rice. That’s why you’re so mad. There’s probably a posse of ’em hanging outside right now. And the calls are going to start. Get used to it.”

  “Now you’re a mind reader,” Archer said through his teeth.

  “I know you,” Fisher told him. “I know they rode you like a rented mule in the Cassidy case and you’re still sore from it.” Benton Cassidy, a rich, spoiled kid with a father who could hire any hotshot lawyer for sale, had almost walked even though everyone was convinced he’d killed his young stepmother and the son she’d had by Cassidy’s father.

  “Cassidy’s going to rot in his cage until he croaks,” Fisher went on. “Your side won in the end.”

  Archer grimaced. He lifted a slim, frosted glass bottle of Bong Vodka out of his bottom desk drawer and pulled two paper cups from a dispenser on the wall beside his personal water cooler.

  “Every crime’s public property now.” Vodka gurgled into the cups.

  “It’s always been that way.”

  “They didn’t used to expect every detail.” The vertical crease between Archer’s brows had become permanent. “What they want most is what you don’t have and may never get.”

  “The guy from the Times brought up the seven other women who disappeared and never showed up again.”

  “Yeah,” Archer said. “But they were spread out and the type that make themselves vulnerable.”

  “Weren’t they all on the street?” Fisher asked.

  “I think so,” Archer said. “Can’t remember. And it stopped a couple of years back.”

  “But the cases were never solved. And they weren’t singers.”

  Archer’s frown darkened even more and he shook his head.

  “There could still be a connection,” Fisher said. “The perp may have waited until he felt safe to start again.”

  “Thanks, Sherlock,” Archer said.

  Fisher felt deeply morose. “I don’t know how you afford this stuff on a detective’s salary.” He looked into the soggy cup he’d been given. “Can’t you get some crystal glasses to drink it out of? On the arm—”

  “Fuck you,” Archer said, then he snapped open a smile. They both knew he was too straight to be on the take. “The only things I take on the arm are expensive dinners, and women, of course.”

  As far as Fisher knew, Archer continued to have only one woman in his life. She lived out in Toussaint on Bayou Teche and was an off-limits topic unless Archer brought her up.

  The booze blasted Fisher’s throat. It might not be his favorite treat, but this stuff packed a wallop. It was good. He thought he’d finish the drink before he revealed a new detail. This one might turn out to be part of the case that was currently eating Archer’s hangnails.

  “Bucky Fist’s still at the scene,” Archer said of his current partner. “He’s probably got an audience he’d like to feed to a goddamn gator. I thought Lemon would be slamming tips at me already. I reckon there’s so many it’s takin’ him a lot longer than he likes to weed them out.”

  Lemon was a semiretired cop who worked phones on this type of case. He was good at pinpointing what was worth passing on and where it hung in the pecking order. Five years ago he’d lost the use of his legs in an ambush. By some miracle, the bullet he took didn’t put a crimp in his connubial bliss—Lemon made sure no one thought otherwise.

  The way Archer talked, as much to himself as to anyone else, made Fisher think the other man had as good as forgotten he wasn’t alone.

  “We’ll know soon enough if Shirley Cooper was killed somewhere else—Lake Pontchartrain for instance—and taken to the river afterward,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Archer said. “We haven’t found the spot where she went in the water yet. The body could have traveled a long way. There were no signs of a struggle near where she got hung up.”

  “Hung up?”

  “On a motorboat’s propeller. It was moored, thank God. The owner felt a thump and found her.”

  “Nice surprise,” Fisher said.

  He sucked in a large swallow of the firewater and contemplated the prospect of dropping a new bomb. Archer had suggested, most likely in jest, that he suspected Fisher because he’d come in to ask about Amber Lee.

  Things could get worse.

  He drained the vodka. “I know Liza Soaper, too,” he said, expecting the blank look he got. It took only moments for blank to be replaced with angry disbelief.

  “I interviewed her, but I didn’t know she’d gone missing. That happened after I worked with her.”

  Archer pointed a very long, blunt finger at him. “Shut up, and answer me when I ask a question. Whatever game you’re playin’ here is about over. Are you serious about knowing both Soaper and Lee?”

  “Absolutely. Can you check to see if Lemon’s holding up anything useful? He could be…”

  “Can it,” Archer said. “I told you I’m asking the questions.”

  “You need tips and I want you to get them.”

  “Why did you know those women?”

  “I interviewed them for a piece on making it in New Orleans. As jazz singers. I’m working on it now.”

  Archer might as well have told Fisher he didn’t believe a word he said. The message was clear in his eyes. “How many other singers have you interviewed?”

  Letting out a long breath, Fisher finally said, “None. Just the two.”

  “You got more singers on your list?”

  “I’ve got some prospects.”

  “You sure Shirley Cooper wasn’t one of them?”

  Fisher sat up straighter. “Is she a singer?”

  “I don’t know yet. Do you?”

  “No,” Fisher said. “I told you I didn’t.”

  “She lived with a boyfriend. He’d already reported her disappearance when we found the body. How about the fourth one, Pipes Dupuis?”

  Fisher put his forehead in his hands and leaned over his knees. “Yeah, Karen Dupuis, she’s the next one after Amber Lee. She was the next one I intended to talk to. It’s a tough world, y’know, trying to make it as a musician or singer here. Talent pours into the Quarter. Only a few ever make it big.”

  “Save the informational an
nouncement.” Archer appeared to consider his next move. He checked his watch, then reached out a hand to hover over his phone. “Looks like you’ll be working a different story real soon. I should put you in an interview room.”

  Fisher buried a rush of anger. “Whatever you say. You’re the boss. How did you find out about Liza Soaper and Amber Lee? How did you link all the women together?”

  Archer looked as if he’d refuse to answer, but he shrugged and said, “Liza’s landlady said her lodger went out to work one night and never came back. That was about ten days ago.”

  “You’ve known she was missing that long without making it public?”

  “Yeah.” And Archer’s hard eyes warned Fisher not to have any opinions about that. “The case didn’t come to me then. They were hoping to get some leads before any suspect got frightened out of the area. Amber’s been gone a few days. Pipes dropped out of sight last night.”

  “Who reported them?” Fisher asked.

  “Sidney, that’s Amber’s singing partner, reported Amber missing. She didn’t arrive at Scully’s for work one night and hasn’t been seen since. Pipes took a break between sets at Caged Birds last night and we can’t find anyone who saw her afterward. Or her daughter…” Archer paused, staring at Fisher. “Erin. The kid’s five or six and she wasn’t mentioned in case it put her in more danger. If she’s still alive, the killer might decide she’s too much of a liability and get rid of her.

  “While her mother sang, she slept in a dressing room. They didn’t go home—or they didn’t get home. The band Pipes sings with is sure she and the kid were snatched. No husband or lover on the scene.”

  Fisher winced. “Too bad about the kid.”

  Archer gave him an exasperated look. “I don’t like it that you may be part of the problem. Not at all.”

  “If you thought I was a problem, you wouldn’t be answering my questions.”

  “If you already know the answers, what difference does it make?” Archer pushed around the mess of papers on his desk. “We’ll get through a few preliminaries right here. If you’re willing to do that? Informal?”