Private Passions

by JoAnn Ross

  “Those roses were from the rapist?” Karyn’s lips turned down in an appropriate frown, but Desiree recognized the glint of excitement in the producer’s expressive eyes.

  “You’d better dust off your mantel,” she said as Desiree waited for the operator at the downtown police complex to answer the phone. “Because this is definitely Emmy-winning material. When news breaks that the French Quarter rapist is writing you love letters—”

  “It’s not a love letter.”

  “Okay, a fan letter, whatever. But when the word gets out, you’ll probably get offers from the networks—60 Minutes, 20/20, maybe even Nightline. Make me one promise.”

  “If I can.” Growing more and more impatient, Desiree was tempted to hang up and dial 911 since no one was picking up the damn phone.

  “When you go on Nightline, put in a good word with Koppel for me? I’d love to go network.”

  As appalling as she found the prospect of becoming part of the story she was covering, Desiree could not deny that the idea of appearing on Nightline, and getting to talk on the air with Ted Koppel, was more than a little appealing.

  “Hello?” she said when a voice on the other end of the line finally answered. “This is Desiree Dupree from WSLU-TV, calling Detective O’Malley regarding the recent French Quarter rapes.”

  She listened, frustrated, as the voice on the other end of the line began to give her the official “no comment” line.

  “Yes, I realize he’s busy on a case,” she said, interrupting the desk sergeant, “but I think he’ll talk to me. I’m not looking for a ten-second sound bite for the six o’clock news. Tell him the rapist he’s trying to apprehend wants to arrange a meeting.”

  Desiree was not surprised when the detective made it to the phone in record time. He’d told her to stay put and he’d come to her.

  She was waiting at her desk, staring with dark dread at the florist’s box she’d retrieved from the ladies room, when she heard his deep, familiar voice across the room. Glancing up, she noticed he’d stopped by Karyn’s desk.

  They might just be taking it day by day, but they were obviously both more involved than Karyn, at least, was willing to admit. Although their expressions were schooled to make it appear they were simply having a casual conversation, there was no mistaking the private messages their eyes were exchanging.

  Although it hurt her pride to admit it, Michael O’Malley had never, in all their time together, looked at her the way he was looking at Karyn. Nor had she, Desiree decided honestly, looked at Michael with nearly as much intensity and hunger.

  Sensual tension surrounded the couple like a field force until, strangely embarrassed, Desiree dragged her gaze away and pretended interest in the newest stack of memos sent down from the lofty echelons of station management.

  “Is this them?”

  Desiree turned her attention from the memos and looked a long way up into O’Malley’s ruggedly handsome face.

  He’d dispensed with polite formalities—like saying hello—which wasn’t that surprising, since he’d reverted to the Joe Friday, just-the-facts-ma’am mode he tended to fall into whenever he was working on an important case. She’d seen it happen too many times to take offense.

  “Yes,” she said, understanding that he was referring to the flowers that took up a major portion of her desk. “I’m afraid I probably got my fingerprints all over the box.”

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Since it came from the florist, I doubt if the guy even touched it.”

  He rubbed his chin as he studied the flowers. “Aren’t roses usually sent out as buds?”

  “That’s usually the case.”

  “Is there a card?”

  “No. In fact, at first I thought they were from...” She paused, strangely unwilling to bring Roman Falconer into the investigation.

  “From who?” he prompted.

  “No one.” It was her turn to shrug. “I have a high profile in the community. Sometimes strange men send me flowers.”

  “Strange men like your stalker.”

  “Yes.” As they exchanged a long glance fraught with memories, she knew they were both thinking the same thing. She’d met Michael when he’d shown up at the station to investigate her case. Thanks to him, the man in question was currently serving time in the Louisiana State Prison.

  Although O’Malley’s behavior had been nothing short of professional during the investigation, it would have been impossible to ignore their shared, mutual attraction. The night her tormentor was finally behind bars, Detective First Class Michael Patrick O’Malley and Desiree had become lovers.

  “I called the florist,” she said, returning to his reason for coming to the station, “to see if he could tell me who’d sent them. But the man paid cash.”

  “I’ll drop by and see if I can get a description.” His gaze slid from her face to the roses again. “He must have arranged to buy them open like that. Which means the florist would have to hold them for a few days.”

  “I suppose so, unless the delivery boy wasn’t really from the florist.” Her blood instantly ran cold as another, chilling thought occurred to her. “Oh, my God. You don’t think he could have been the one, do you?”

  “It’s hard to say. But just in case, I’ll want you to meet with a police artist. Along with anyone else here who saw the guy.”

  “Fine.” Desiree nodded, wishing she’d paid more attention to the young delivery man.

  “Where’s the letter?”

  “Right there.” She pointed to it, not wanting to touch it again.

  He skimmed the lines, cursed under his breath, then, holding the paper by the edges, slipped it into a glassine bag, which he labeled, then stuck in his jacket pocket. He scooped up the flower box. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we’ll just drive around the city and talk about this guy.”

  “Why can’t we talk here?”

  “In a television newsroom?” His tone suggested that he’d rather attempt to discuss the case on Bourbon Street on Fat Tuesday. “As impossible as it’s probably going to turn out to be, I’m trying to maintain a low profile on this case.”

  “So you said. And I still don’t agree with that tactic.”

  “What else is new? We’ve never agreed on much of anything,” he reminded her. He plucked her purse from the desktop and held it out to her. “Let’s go.”

  There had been a time when being ordered around by this man would have made her see red. When she realized that his autocratic behavior no longer irritated her, she took that as proof positive that things really were over between them.

  “I love it when you pull out that macho, me-Tarzan, you-Jane act, O’Malley,” she said in dulcet tones. Bestowing her sweetest, most-feigned smile on him, she took her purse and walked out of the newsroom, leaving him to follow.

  Which he did. But not before, Desiree noticed, stopping to exchange another brief word with Karyn.

  “You realize, of course, that she’s going to want to put this on the air,” Desiree said five minutes later as the car inched its way through the holiday tourists crowding the Quarter. The same tourists, she reminded herself, that the city council was so concerned about frightening away.

  “Who?” he asked, slanting her a glance as he waited for a red light at Canal Street.

  “Karyn.” She waited a beat. “In case you’ve forgotten, she is a news producer. And when a serial rapist sends flowers and a letter to a reporter, like it or not, that’s news.”

  He stared straight ahead as he pondered that. But watching the way his fingers tightened on the steering wheel, Desiree suspected he’d not yet seen Karyn in a professional light. Originally from Georgia, the producer was the quintessential southern belle—soft as spun sugar on the outside, hardened steel within.

  “I don’t want this to get out. Not yet,” he said at last.

  “Is this the mayor talking? Or Detective First Class Michael O’Malley?”

 
; There was, Desiree decided, a difference. If she was being asked to withhold a story for political reasons, the mayor and the rest of the city council could kiss her Emmy.

  If, on the other hand, O’Malley was worried about her blowing his case, she’d be willing to listen.

  The light changed. When the driver of the car behind them blared its horn, he cursed. “Let’s wait until we get somewhere we can talk,” he suggested. “Without worrying about traffic.”

  Since the day had dawned bright and balmy, after stopping at a convenience store for two cups of coffee, O’Malley drove to Audubon Park. The sprawling expanse of green, which extended all the way to the river, had once belonged to Bienville, the founder of New Orleans.

  Many of the huge oak trees went back two centuries, to when the land had been part of the plantation where sugar had been granulated for the first time, in 1794. The spreading black limbs turned walkways into covered alleys, which wandered around peaceful, winding lagoons, fountains and statuary, including a bronze statue of John James Audubon, after whom the park was named. Entering the leafy environs, Desiree and O’Malley settled down on a bench in a white gazebo overlooking Whooping Crane Pond.

  The December sun was warm, drawing students from Tulane and Loyola universities across St. Charles Avenue, some of whom turned the lawns into study halls, while others rode rented bikes and horses along the tree-lined paths.

  Desiree and O’Malley remained silent for a moment, sipping coffee, watching a family of ducks on the small, man-made pond. Although she was admittedly impatient, once again Desiree waited, knowing the detective’s penchant for choosing his words carefully.

  “Yesterday, at breakfast,” he said finally, “I was giving you the official party line.”

  “Jeez. What a surprise.”

  He shook his head in frustration. “You know, I’d almost forgotten how sarcastic you can be.”

  “To know me is to love me,” she retorted with a grin. “As for you spouting the mayor’s spin on the crime, I figured that out for myself.”

  “Beauty and brains,” he drawled. “If you weren’t such a smart ass, I probably would have married you.”

  “As I recall, it was me who didn’t want to get married,” she countered. Actually, at the time, neither one of them had been eager to make a run for the altar. “So why don’t you just fill me in on our killer and save the sweet talk for Karyn?”

  He shot her a surprised glance. “Is it that obvious?”

  “Only about as obvious as the nose on that ruggedly handsome Irish mug of yours.” Watching the embarrassed red flush rise from his white shirt collar, and knowing how he hated discussing personal feelings, Desiree took pity on him. “I’m happy for you, Mike.” She put a hand on his arm. “Truly.”

  He expelled a relieved breath. “I told Karyn not to worry. That you wouldn’t be upset if you found out we were seeing each other.” He shook his head again. “But you know women. Always making an emotional issue of everything.” As he realized what he’d just said, he began to backtrack. “Not that you...what I meant was...”

  In spite of the gravity of the situation, Desiree laughed. “Point taken. And I think I’ll accept what you were trying to say as a compliment and let it go at that. So, tell me why I can’t open tonight’s newscast with my obvious lead story.”

  “Because you’re more involved than you think. And I don’t want to risk you getting hurt.”

  “Don’t you think that’s being a bit overprotective? Despite the flowers, I don’t think the guy’s thinking of me as a woman, but rather as a reporter. A reporter who can make him a star.”

  “I would have agreed. Until the flowers.”

  “What about the flowers?” Other than the fact that for some reason she could not discern, they’d made her skin crawl even before she’d known they were from the rapist.

  “They’re the same kind he gives his victims. Afterward.” His eyes darkened with a fury she’d only witnessed once before—after he’d arrested a prominent businessman for impregnating his own thirteen-year-old daughter. “But he isn’t as generous with them. They only get a single rose. A single full-blown, bloodred rose.”

  An icy chill ran up her spine, then down again. “Perhaps, in some insane way, he simply thought two dozen roses might make me more inclined to tell his story,” she suggested, the rationalization sounding feeble even to her own ears.

  “I might be willing to buy that. Except for the other thing.”

  She was almost afraid to ask. “What other thing?”

  “The reason we know it’s the same guy is because he’s got the same M.O.”

  “The roses.”

  “The roses.” He nodded. “And the fact that he ties the girls up.”

  “Surely that’s not so unusual. In rape cases.”

  “No. But it’s what he uses to do it with.”

  A feeling of impending doom swept over Desiree, reminding her of a time when she’d been eleven, and she and a girlfriend had gone to a Halloween haunted house put on by the New Orleans Jaycees. Although she’d put on a brave front, secretly she’d been terrified as she made her way through the narrow, dark hallways, knowing that at any moment some monster was going to leap at her from the shadows.

  That was the same way she felt now.

  “Tell me it’s a normal piece of clothesline.”

  He enclosed both her hands in his. “He uses silk ribbons, Desiree. Scarlet ribbons. The same kind used on the florist box. The same kind—”

  “I used in my story.”

  Although the sun continued to shine overhead, Desiree felt as if a dark cloud had suddenly turned the sky ominously black.

  And on the warmest December day on record, she suddenly began to shiver.

  7

  “YOU CAN’T POSSIBLY THINK that he knows...” Her words clogged in her throat. No. The idea was unimaginable.

  “That you wrote those sex books?” O’Malley finished for her. His expression was as grim as she’d ever seen it. His eyes were hard, his jaw jutted out and deep lines bracketed his unsmiling lips.

  “Erotica,” she corrected automatically, her voice sounding as if it were coming from far, far away. Like from the bottom of the river. “Have I mentioned that I hate it when you refer to them as ‘sex books’?”

  “Call them what you like, you can’t deny that they glamorize rape.”

  They’d had this argument more times than Desiree cared to count. O’Malley was one of the very few people who knew she was the author of those slender volumes of erotica. She’d been working on one during the brief time they’d been living together, and it would have been impossible to keep her secret from any lover, let alone a skilled detective.

  “My books don’t glamorize rape any more than those murder mysteries you eat up like popcorn glamorize serial killing,” she countered. Caught up in the familiar argument, she momentarily forgot the dread that had swept over her when she’d heard about the scarlet ribbons. “As a writer, I try to get a reader to suspend disbelief. To lose herself in a story.”

  “A story about one of the most brutal acts committed against women.”

  “In real life, that’s true.” She would willingly grant him that point. “But I don’t write about real life, O’Malley. Scarlet Ribbons was pure fantasy.”

  “Try telling that to the rapist who sent you those flowers.”

  He definitely had her there. Desiree felt her argument collapsing like a pricked balloon.

  “Point taken.” She rubbed her temples. As she looked up at him, a vulnerability she seldom allowed to surface showed in her worried eyes. “It has to be a coincidence.” She forced herself to remain calm. To think.

  “How many people know you wrote those books?” he asked.

  “There’s you, of course. And my agent. And my editor. And Jan, in the contracts department.” She dragged a hand through her hair as she thought the matter over.

  “I suppose there’s a possibility that my editor may have let something
slip in-house, but she realizes that it could damage my reporting career, so I doubt she’d make such a mistake.”

  “What about the bank? Obviously you cash checks from the publisher.”

  “The publishing house writes a check to my agent. Who then takes out his ten percent and writes me a check—under my pseudonym—for the remainder. Which I deposit by mail.”

  “In a local bank?”

  “Actually, no. I’ve set up an account under my pseudonym in a bank in the Grand Caymans.”

  “Are you telling me that you’re laundering the money in some off-shore bank?” His tone, and his expression, were incredulous.

  “I’m not laundering anything,” she insisted on a huff of frustrated breath.

  It was times like this, when they’d start arguing over anything and everything, that she remembered why they were no longer together.

  “I’m just trying to keep my anonymity. And off-shore banks aren’t nearly so picky about knowing exactly who they’re dealing with.”

  “For good reason,” he muttered disgustedly, “since most of their clients are crooks.” His own frustration showing, he rubbed his square jaw thoughtfully. “So what you’re saying is that it’s highly unlikely that anyone in New Orleans knows you’re the writer of sex—okay, novels of erotica,” he corrected at her sharp look.

  She opened her mouth to answer when, once again, Roman came to mind. Although she’d been surprised to find her books in his personal library, at the time she’d convinced herself it was merely a coincidence.

  Now she couldn’t help but wonder.

  “Desiree?” O’Malley prompted.

  No. She shook her head. The mystery writer might be a little unorthodox, but what writer wasn’t? He might have a few rough edges, but so did a lot of men. And the fact that he was the kind of dark and dangerous male who made her feel both vulnerable and excited at the same time, and all too aware of being a woman, did not mean that he spent his nights roaming the French Quarter, like some twentieth-century Jack the Ripper, preying on helpless women.

  “I’m sorry.” She schooled her expression to one of calmness. “I was thinking about what whoever sent those flowers might want from me.”