by Jana DeLeon
Francis was not as lucky.
The dress hit the bird, making him swear, and completely covered him.
“Oh my God, you’re not wearing a bra!” Ida Belle said.
“Help! They’re suffocating me!” Francis yelled. “I swear I don’t have the guns or drugs!”
I was trying to figure out whether uncovering the bird or covering Gertie was the priority when the front door burst open and I heard Carter yell my name. Gertie whirled around, giving Ida Belle her backside.
“You’re wearing a thong!” Ida Belle said. “Someone shoot me.”
“I don’t have the guns!” Francis yelled again.
Carter came running down the hall and I grabbed the chalkboard off the kitchen wall and thrust it in front of Gertie as Carter burst into the room, weapon drawn.
“I’m dying!” Francis yelled.
“So am I,” Ida Belle agreed and closed her eyes.
Carter looked at the dress-covered bird flopping around on the perch and me standing in front of Gertie holding a chalkboard, and he shoved his gun back in its holster.
“What the heck is going on here?” he asked. “I thought someone was being attacked.”
“I’m being attacked!” Francis said. “I’m dying. I’m dying.”
“There was a problem with Gertie’s dress,” I began then shook my head. “It’s a story for later…and by later, I mean after we have clothes back on Gertie. So if you wouldn’t mind heading back to the living room and looking outside so she can go back into her bedroom without flashing anyone else, that would be great.”
He didn’t even say a word—just turned around and headed back down the hall, shaking his head. Ida Belle yanked the tablecloth off the table and tossed it to Gertie.
“Your front windows are open,” she said. “Half of Sinful probably heard that bird yelling and saw Carter come bursting in the door with his weapon drawn. There will be a crowd on your sidewalk.”
Gertie wrapped the tablecloth around her like a toga, cast a final woeful look at the dress, and went stalking off down the hall. Ida Belle pulled the dress off Francis and gave the upset bird a grape. Francis walked up and down his perch, fluffing his wings out and reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
“It’s safe now,” I called out.
Carter came in and cast a suspicious eye at the bird.
“God said let there be grapes,” Francis said, and Ida Belle tossed another one at him.
“Don’t mind Francis,” I said. “He’s got a bit of PTSD.”
Carter shook his head and slumped into a chair. “You’d think living with mobsters and nuns would have prepared him, but apparently there’s no way to prepare for living with Gertie.”
Ida Belle nodded and lifted her beer. I held up a beer from the fridge and he nodded.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” I said as I sat. “Is there a change with Emmaline?”
He shook his head. “I’m afraid not, but Walter finally convinced me that he could handle guard duty while I came home to eat and check on things here and try to take a nap. I think I’ve annoyed him and the nurses with all my pacing.”
Ida Belle gave his hand a pat. “People like you aren’t made for sitting still, especially when there’s things that need doing. But you have to trust that we’re doing everything we can. And that’s no light statement.”
He gave her a small smile. “I know it’s not. You guys can run circles around a lot of seasoned law enforcement, much less that idiot Palmer. Just seeing him get Gertie’d on that video made my day. Seriously, I had to go outside. They thought I was having some sort of attack.”
“I had a similar reaction,” Ida Belle said. “Except mine was fear of getting away.”
I looked over at Ida Belle, who gave me a slight nod. I hated to get Carter all stirred up again, but he needed to know what we’d found.
“There’s a couple things I need to tell you,” I said. “First, about St. Ives.”
I explained how the whole stolen golf cart and porta-john incident was about my breaking into Palmer’s work laptop. Carter raised an eyebrow but didn’t say a word. I explained how St. Ives didn’t exist so even the police were in the dark.
“Then who the heck is he?” Carter asked.
“I wish we knew,” I said. “Because there’s more.”
I told him Ida Belle’s suggestion that we check out the motel and he groaned.
“Please don’t tell me you left some poor naked guy tied up there again,” he said.
“Not this time,” I said.
“Did you blow anything up?” he asked.
“Not a single thing,” I assured him.
“Hmmm,” he said. “You guys are slacking. What did you find in the room?”
“The room had been cleaned,” I said. “But St. Ives had just checked in the night before, and since he bought it later on, it wasn’t him that packed up his toothbrush and clothes.”
Carter nodded. “The killer cleaned up.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We figure he lifted St. Ives’s phone, car keys, wallet, and room key when he killed him, then took the car to the motel, cleaned it out, then dumped the car somewhere.”
“And that could be anywhere,” Carter said.
“We thought you might be able to run a search for recently reported abandoned vehicles,” I said.
“I could do that, but if I was the killer, I would have dumped it in the bayou. Or if I didn’t know the area, I’d have parked it in the city where it wouldn’t be noticed for weeks. Either way, I would have gotten rid of his personal items in a dumpster somewhere far away from the car.”
Ida Belle sighed. “It probably wouldn’t tell us anything anyway. Nothing about St. Ives is real. Heck, for all we know, the car was stolen.”
“Certainly seems possible at this point,” Carter said.
“There’s something else,” I said. “Something you’re going to be really unhappy about.”
“Tell me,” he said.
I grabbed the photo from the kitchen counter and pushed it across the table. “I found this under the bed. I’m guessing it fell off the nightstand and the killer missed it when he cleared St. Ives’s belongings out.”
Carter’s eyes narrowed at the photo. “This was taken in my mother’s backyard.”
“I know,” I said.
“Oh my God,” Carter said. “Renting the house next door to my mother wasn’t bad luck on Sinful’s part. It was intentional. He was watching her.”
“It appears that’s the case,” I said. “But why? And if St. Ives was stalking Emmaline, who killed St. Ives? I can’t believe he went after her in the funhouse and someone with a completely separate grudge followed him inside and killed him. Then her house was broken into the same night? There’s no way any of that is a separate incident.”
“No, it’s not,” he agreed. “But I can’t come up with any reason for those things to have happened. There’s no logical way to connect them. The only thing that does is my mother, and I have no idea why.”
He cursed and slammed his hand on the table.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “Is there anything we can do about Emmaline? Maybe take a round of guard duty?”
He shook his head. “I want you guys on this investigation. Nothing else. What’s next?”
I hesitated.
“We probably shouldn’t say,” Ida Belle said. “Just in case anything goes sideways, you never knew about it.”
I nodded. “I don’t want you compromised in any way. It’s best if you don’t know what we’re doing until after.”
He blew out a breath. “Otherwise, I’m an accomplice. I get it. I still don’t like it but I get it. Promise me that you’ll be careful. I’m not worried about you getting arrested for interfering with Palmer’s investigation. He won’t come up with anything that can make that stick and I heard through the grapevine that the DA hates him as much as the rest of us do. But whoever killed St. Ives has an agenda that we’re completely unaware of. And
that worries me. It’s harder to dodge a bullet when you don’t know what direction it’s coming from.”
“True,” I agreed. “We’ll be careful and honestly, I don’t see us getting into trouble tonight. Gertie has a date.”
Carter relaxed a bit. “Oh well, that changes things a little.”
“A little?” Ida Belle said. “She almost killed her bird with her dress, and you don’t even want to know what she had on behind that chalkboard. I’m going to need therapy.”
Carter grimaced. “Don’t tell me or we’ll both have to go.”
“I need therapy,” Francis said. “And a grape.”
Ida Belle tossed him another one.
“Jeb is going to get lucky,” Francis said. “He can ice his back when I leave.”
Ida Belle sighed. “That woman has got to stop telling that bird everything. He’s like having a recorder. I already know too much about her life. I don’t need to know that one percent of stuff she says when she’s talking to herself.”
“Speak of the devil,” I said as Gertie walked back into the kitchen.
“So what do you think?” she asked.
The cheetah print leggings and midriff wouldn’t have looked out of place in a gym and maybe on someone much younger and fitter, but at least she could undress herself.
“Works for me,” I said as Ida Belle handed me a twenty.
“I liked the tablecloth better,” Ida Belle said.
“Carter?” Gertie asked.
“I learned long ago to never have an opinion on the way a woman chooses to dress,” he said.
“Smart,” Ida Belle said.
“Self-defense,” he replied.
“I’m going with this, then,” Gertie said. She waited a couple seconds then waved her hands at us. “Well, get out of my house. I have a date to go on.”
“Remember our deal,” Ida Belle said.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Gertie said.
Carter raised one eyebrow.
“Gertie agreed to leave off the sexy details of her date if we rode the Zipper,” I explained.
“And I’ll keep my word,” she said. “But I have no control over what Francis might say.”
Ida Belle sighed. “I knew there was a loophole.”
Chapter Fifteen
It was close to midnight and Ida Belle and I were hovering behind the hot dog shack at the very end of the fairgrounds. Brandon was still working the House of Mirrors and had been in our sights for the last thirty minutes. I guessed he wasn’t going back to the funhouse, either by choice or by management decision. Probably good thinking.
People had been slowly trailing out of the fair toward the parking lot since we’d arrived, and now there were only a few stragglers left wandering around. The fair employees had started closing things down a couple minutes before. Brandon had gone into the attraction, locking the door behind him, then come out the exit a couple minutes later. I assumed it was a final walk-through to make sure no one was inside as he closed and locked the door behind him.
He left the attraction and I expected him to head behind it and across the field toward the employee trailers but instead, he started walking toward the parking lot.
“Where’s he going?” Ida Belle asked.
“I have no idea,” I said. “Let’s hope no one is picking him up, because we’ll never get to your SUV in time to follow.”
We hadn’t wanted Ida Belle’s SUV to be the lone car standing in the parking lot. That would be far too suspicious if Palmer was lurking around anywhere. We’d briefly considered a rental but that was easily traced, so we couldn’t see going through the trouble and expense to get caught with it anyway. So Ida Belle had backed the SUV into the tree line near the highway and we’d hiked it up to the fairgrounds. It was about a quarter-mile walk so totally doable, but if Brandon got into a vehicle and drove off, he would be hard to catch.
“I don’t like it,” Ida Belle said. “There’s no reason for him to go that direction unless he plans on driving away from here.”
“I know.” This was not something we’d planned for.
Ida Belle pulled her keys out of her pocket and handed them to me. “Take off for the car.”
“You’re going to let me drive your baby?”
“Hurry up before I change my mind. You run faster than me. I’ll make my way to the end of the parking lot.”
I pocketed the keys and slipped far enough away from the buildings that the light no longer hit me and headed off. The ground was uneven and the moonlight was limited so I couldn’t risk a full-out sprint. I’d trained for blind night running in the CIA, but as I hit a dip in the ground and lost a second getting my balance back, it occurred to me that I probably needed to revisit some of that training if I was going to keep running through swamps and woods. Still, I thought I made decent time and jumped in the SUV and fired it up. I pulled out of the trees and onto the highway, then floored it.
Holy crap that vehicle could move!
I’d known that, of course, because I’d been in it a million times running from the bad guys and we’d always gotten away. Okay, once we ended up using a rocket launcher, but as far as I was concerned, it still counted. But being a passenger was nothing like driving. Good Lord, no wonder Ida Belle was obsessed with her vehicle. This was the biggest rush I’d had in a long time. Even the airboat had nothing on this SUV.
I had to let off the gas far too soon for my taste, but I made the exit for the fairgrounds in practically no time. I swung off the exit headed for the parking lot, forcing myself to temper my speed so as not to attract attention. There were still some cars left in the parking lot and more exiting, so I just drove slowly past them. The windows were tinted so dark no one could see inside, even if I passed under the light, so at least there was that. But where was Ida Belle?
I was halfway down a row when she stepped out from behind a pickup truck and jumped inside. She pointed toward the back of the lot.
“He got in an old Ford truck back there but hasn’t gone anywhere,” she said.
“You think he sleeps in his truck?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Anything is possible, but we can’t stay here. Head back toward the highway. There’s only one way out of here. We can sit somewhere off the highway and watch for him.”
I followed a couple cars out of the parking lot and was happy to see no one was behind me. Ida Belle pointed out a spot just to the side of the access road and I went off-roading for a bit and backed into the trees.
“Let’s trade,” I said.
“You sure?”
“It’s your vehicle and I know sitting in the passenger seat is killing you. Plus, you’re a much better driver than me. Besides, if I drive it too much longer, I’ll end up buying one and Carter doesn’t need any more stress in his life.”
Ida Belle grinned. “It’s something, isn’t it?”
We switched places and then settled in for the wait, deciding to give it an hour. If Brandon was going anywhere, that would give him plenty of time. On the chance that he was living in his truck, we weren’t about to sit there all night. We’d been there about fifteen minutes when I saw the truck approach.
“That’s him!” I said, shaking Ida Belle out of her semi-sleep.
She started up the SUV but didn’t turn on the lights and waited to see what direction he was going to go.
“Where the heck is he going this time of night?” Ida Belle asked.
“The motel, maybe?”
“Nope. He’s entering the highway in the other direction.”
“Surely he’s not staying in New Orleans. That would be more expensive on motel and commute fees. That old truck of his has to drink gas.”
Ida Belle nodded and pulled out onto the service road. She waited until he had disappeared in a dip in the road before entering the highway and turning on her headlights.
“I suppose he could be going to party, but it does seem odd,” she said. “Maybe he’s got a girl there.”
“Maybe. Firs
t thing tomorrow, we need to dig into more background information on Brandon. I don’t trust him.”
“You don’t trust anyone.”
“True. But everyone else isn’t the person on site when Emmaline was attacked.”
Ida Belle frowned. “Speaking of which, he’s taking the exit for the hospital.”
Instantly, I went on high alert. “Why would he go to the hospital this late at night?”
“Maybe he hurt himself on the job today. If that’s the case, he wouldn’t have asked to leave before closing. Not as afraid as he is of being fired.”
“True, but he didn’t show signs of an injury. I’m going to text Mannie and give him a heads-up. I don’t like it.”
“I don’t either.”
I sent Mannie a text giving him a description of Brandon and did my best not to rush Ida Belle. She was staying far enough behind not to draw attention and that’s exactly what she needed to do. But I really wanted to be on top of Brandon. If he went anywhere near Emmaline, he was going to answer questions, even if I had to call on Mannie’s skills to get those answers. This was no time to play around.
Ida Belle turned off her lights again as we approached the hospital parking lot. There were no cars around other than Brandon’s truck, and he’d turned in already. She crept toward the parking lot and we saw him park on the outskirts of the lot to the side. Ida Belle stopped near hedges at the entrance and killed the engine. Brandon got out of his truck, looked around for a bit, then headed toward the ER entrance—the same entrance that accessed the ICU rooms.
As soon as he got inside the sliding doors, Ida Belle started up the SUV and floored it into the parking lot, stopping just inches from the drive-through to let me out. I hurried up to the door and peered inside as she backed up to park and. I saw Brandon speaking to the nurse at the front desk. He was holding up his left hand and motioning to it with his right. Maybe Ida Belle had guessed correctly. Maybe he’d injured himself and didn’t want to clue management in. The nurse nodded and headed through a door behind her, probably to find someone to handle Brandon’s issue.
“Well?” Ida Belle asked as she came up beside me.