Moreau stuck his head through the open door. “How are you holding up?”
“I’ll be okay. I don’t usually freak out like that.” She pushed down her desire to panic and run.
“This isn’t a usual situation. Most people would freak out. You wanna tell me what happened? It might help to talk about it.” His reassurance was almost comforting.
She nodded, silently permitting him to ask his inevitable questions. He squatted next to the open door so that his eye level was lower than hers. Nice. It was an obvious attempt to put her at ease.
He smiled and tightened his grip on the doorframe. “So what were you doing here?”
Jeri sniffed back the surge of anxiety that followed his question. “Herb…the bouncer at Johnny J’s…he said this is where that murder happened. I was just curious.”
No, it was more than that. She couldn’t get the image of the woman she’d seen lying on the floor of the bar out of her mind. For some reason, she’d connected the dead woman at the hotel with the image she’d seen in the bar. But that was crazy, wasn’t it? The two things couldn’t be connected, could they?
Moreau rubbed his hand over his mouth. She could read his body language. The cop wasn’t sure he believed her.
“Was the other man already here when you got here? Not the one who died. The other one.”
“No. He scared the hell out of me when he first walked up… He said he was a photographer. He knew which room that woman was in…the one that was murdered.”
“Do you know him?”
Jeri shook her head. “I’ve never seen him before.”
Disappointment shadowed the cop’s features. He didn’t ask a follow-up question, and his silence pushed her to continue her to talk.
New tension knotted the muscles between her shoulders. “He said he thought I was photogenic and wanted to take my picture.” She paused and rolled her shoulders to relieve the kink that had formed in the middle of her back. “I mean…what a bunch of crap. Look at me. I’m not the kind of girl that a photographer discovers on the street. I’m nobody’s muse.”
The cop smiled. “I think maybe you’re too hard on yourself. You definitely have a unique persona.”
She offered him a half smile in return for the half compliment. The warm feeling disappeared like mist on a sunny day. Seriousness took over. “I can’t prove I didn’t kill the old man, you know. My alibi walked away.”
The cop looked like he wanted to beat himself up for letting the photographer get away without questioning him. He’d gone ballistic when he discovered the man was gone, berating every other cop on the scene.
He studied her with tired eyes. “So had you ever met the dead man before?”
Good. Her subtle deflection had nudged him away from asking her what the photographer had whispered in her ear just as Moreau had walked up to them.
“Yeah. We call him Weirdo. He comes into the bar…he came into the bar almost every night and ordered a drink I’d never heard of before. He missed last night though…”
She hadn’t wanted to tell the cop about the weirdo’s drink and the reddish liquid he’d brought with him in the tube, but maybe the cop needed to know. What if the tube and the red liquid were the keys to finding the killer? What if Moreau found out she knew about the red liquid and she hadn’t said anything? She could get into a lot of trouble for keeping her mouth shut. But opening her mouth now was going to pull her even deeper into the cop’s investigation. Just what she hadn’t wanted.
“He’d just left right before you came in the other night. He dropped something in the trash, and Herb found it when we were cleaning up.”
“What was it?”
“A glass tube that had a reddish colored liquid in it. The stuff smelled awful. Like a mix of strawberry syrup and blood. He wanted me to mix it with Crown Royal. He called it Royal Blood. The etchings on the glass are kind of pretty. So I kept it. I was gonna wash it, but I haven’t yet.”
Moreau’s nose wrinkled with disgust. “You were gonna keep it even though it had someone’s blood in it?”
“I didn’t think it was blood until just now.” Her eyes strayed to where the medical examiner’s assistant was examining the dead man. “I should have already told you.”
“Yeah, you should have. I’m gonna want to see it.”
She shivered. “You can have it.”
He smiled, and amusement flickered in his blue eyes. “If it’s evidence, you might not get it back.”
She wrapped her arms around her. “I don’t think I want it back. Not now. Not if it held a murdered person’s blood…”
Moreau pushed them to go forward. “So when did you first see the old man?”
“I was trying to get away from the photographer because he was starting to freak me out when I backed into Weirdo.” What should she call him? The dead man deserved to be called by his name instead of being referred to as Weirdo. Now that he was dead, it seemed so disrespectful.
The thought struck Jeri as odd. She’d been going by someone else’s name for months. Didn’t she deserve to be who she was too?
“Did he say anything?”
She hesitated. Her rational mind told her she should tell the cop everything, but a deep inner voice, the kind a person shouldn’t ignore, urged her to keep the dead man’s words to herself. The photographer had warned her not to tell Moreau about the gift. Why?
She looked the cop straight in the eye and lied to his face. “He said something, but I couldn’t understand what he said.”
She stopped there. Saying too much would give away the fact that she wasn’t telling the cop the truth. Never cover a lie with a ton of words. Her father had taught her that.
****
Against his better judgment, Nick had driven Jerilyn to her apartment. He could have gotten a uniformed officer to take her home, but somehow he believed that would have freaked her out even more. It was telling how shaken she was that she had told him where she lived. Not that he didn’t already know.
He parked on the curb and left his car idling. After peeking at her in the seat next to him, he sighed. The woman was nowhere near ready to be on her own. He’d seen so much murder and mayhem that he was probably a little too jaded, a little too cynical, a little too numb. Jerilyn acted like so many people who had never seen a horrible death up close and personal. His sympathy for her surprised him.
Jerilyn had stopped crying over an hour ago, but it appeared the waterworks could begin again at the slightest provocation. Her tears seemed to aggravate her; she kept swiping at them. She had tried so hard to make him think she was tough, projecting a badass image. He’d bet the image hid a buttload of insecurities. Even tough people break when you hit them in the right spot.
She sucked back a sob.
That did it. He couldn’t dump her out onto the street and tell her he’d be in touch. He might regret letting sympathy for her mute his skepticism about her innocence, but at the moment, he couldn’t ignore her trauma.
Nick turned off the engine, removed his key, and popped the door open. She reached out to him and then drew her hand back before she touched his arm. He stopped and turned to face her. Indecision reflected in her blue eyes, a light, almost turquoise that had brightened into blue-green by her tears.
“You don’t have to walk me in. I’m…o…o…okay.”
“No. You’re not.” He paused, realizing the stupidity of arguing with her. He had to take a firm stance. “I’m going to make sure you get safely inside.”
Jerilyn sniffed hard, vacuuming all of her sobbing back up her nose. “Do you…do you…do you think I’m in danger?”
I wanted to make sure you got home okay. You’re still kind of shaky. Sometimes the shock doesn’t hit you until hours later…after something like that.”
Her smile wobbled on her lips. “Okay. Well, then… Thanks.”
Knowing the neighborhood and assuming how much money she probably didn’t make, she was lucky to have found an apartment so close to a stop
on a bus line that would connect with another line that would take her to the Quarter.
When she pushed open the door and flipped on the light, a dim bulb illuminated the small space. Her place was a single room on the back of someone else’s house. She had shoved her bed against one wall and a small dinette table against another. A sink, a narrow stove, and a refrigerator clung to a third wall. A floor to ceiling curtain blocked the toilet and the shower from view. The brightly colored blanket was a stark counterpoint to the drab color of the paint on the walls. One lone window would have provided minimal light if the day hadn’t been so overcast.
Half of his day was gone. He’d been on his way to the medical examiner’s office to view the body of Jane Doe when he’d gotten the call that another person had died in front of the same building. Petrie had gone to the medical examiner’s office to get Corolla’s report on Jane Doe while Nick had headed out to the new crime scene.
Jerilyn shivered and dropped onto the side of the bed. Her eyes seemed to dart everywhere, yet she focused on nothing. He studied her tense shoulders. Once again, an unexpected surge of sympathy swept over him.
Nick kept going over her answers trying to figure out when she had lied. It was near the end when she seemed to change her tone. Until then, she’d been cooperative and informative. Then, it seemed her answers had become disjointed, like she was relating things in snatches of clarity. He had cut the interview short and offered to take her home instead of pushing her to explain her seemingly vague answers to his questions. He’d planned to hit her with a new set of questions after he’d had time to think about her non-answers.
He kept all his questions inside his head. Now was not the time. He’d get nothing new or coherent out of her. Nick feared the woman needed trauma counseling. Further questioning would have a to wait.
Her hysterical reaction didn’t exonerate her. She could be in shock from attacking the old man. Or she could be in shock from watching him die in front of her. The absence of blood on her, except on her hands and chin, suggested that she hadn’t killed the man. With that much blood on the guy, if she had done the crime, she’d be covered in blood as well. Had she witnessed the murder and pretended she’d only seen the aftermath?
Like she’d said, her alibi had walked away.
“Well…you have my card. If you need anything…” He turned toward the still open door.
“Wait!” Panic resonated in her voice. She jumped to her feet and rushed toward him, only to halt abruptly within inches from him. “You aren’t going to leave me alone, are you?”
He rubbed the back of his aching neck. “Jerilyn…you’ll be okay. Just lock your door behind me. Whoever killed that man… His murder has nothing to do with you. The killer won’t be looking for you.”
Gut instinct forced the reassuring words from his mouth. He’d just uttered the kind of thing a cop should never say to a person of interest. Never let them rest. Keep up the tension. He could be wrong, so wrong about her.
She winced. “Are you sure about that?”
He couldn’t guarantee anything. He’d long ago learned a lesson about making promises he couldn’t keep. “You didn’t see anything, did you?”
She bit her lower lip.
He dared to put his hand on her shoulder. She placed her hand over her mouth and stepped away from him, as far away as she could get in the tiny room. In her eyes, he believed he saw fear, not of an unknown killer, but fear of him. Her gaze seemed to stray toward the world outside the open door behind him.
He glanced over his shoulder. “What’s the matter?”
Jerilyn’s eyes grew wide.
His patience disappeared in a flash. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s wrong.”
“I’m not the one in trouble.”
Nick moved toward her. “Who’s in trouble?”
Closing the space between them was a mistake. The way she cringed… Her pupils dilated, and her nostrils flared. Jerilyn was preparing to fight.
He moved back a couple of steps and lifted his hands. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to crowd you.”
She shook her head and rolled her shoulders. Her eyes had been somewhat glazed, but in an instant, she snapped out of her trance-like mood. “You need to leave.”
He couldn’t agree more. If he stayed, he would certainly demand that she explain her strange behavior, and he needed time to prepare more detailed and pointed questions that would expose the holes in her witness statement.
Back in his car, he stared at the house where she lived. So many unanswered questions, and her interview had only created more.
Because of his disappearing act, the photographer was now his primary person of interest in the death of Jane Doe and the old man Jeri called Weirdo, and because of Jeri’s presence at the scene when the old man had died, Jerilyn’s involvement couldn’t be ignored.
****
Jeri paced the few steps back and forth in her cramped apartment. She was scared, but not of being alone. She feared the images that had raced through her mind would come back again. Horrible visions. A dead woman on the floor of the bar. A woman caught in a fire. A man holding a bloody knife over a woman. There were too many of them now to ignore. She didn’t understand where the visions had come from or why they had invaded her mind, but she wanted them to stop. The things she had seen weren’t just her imagination. Or maybe they were. Maybe she was going crazy.
A vein in her temple pulsed. She pressed her hand to her chest and tried to draw in a deep, replenishing intake of oxygen. It was no use. A weight pressed on her, forcing her to struggle for every breath.
The cop had left, and she wished he’d stayed a while longer, despite her snarky demand that he leave. If he had, she might have found the courage to tell him the hard things, about the part of her experience that hadn’t made any sense. Jeri had kept quiet about Weirdo’s strange words. For some reason, the inside of a police car didn’t seem like a safe place to unload that kind of thing. Moreau had left, and the chance to bring him into the weirdness had left with him. She was alone with what she’d seen.
She believed her vision in the bar and the murder of the woman were connected. Had she said so, Moreau probably would have taken her to the nearest psych ward. She knew how cops thought.
The strange words the dead man had whispered in her ear before he had died swirled around in her mind. Even stranger was the photographer’s insistence that she not tell Moreau. She pressed trembling hands to her forehead. What did the weirdo mean when he said she was the chosen one? What gift was he giving her?
All of that was bad enough, but what she’d seen when Moreau had placed his hand on her shoulder scared her even more. She’d seen through the eyes of someone who had pointed a gun at the cop and fired. The image of the cop’s face contorting as he clutched his chest, crumpled, and then fell to the ground sent ripples of dread through her. She’d always been in tune with her sixth sense. Instinctively, she knew that she had seen Moreau’s future rather than his past. But how could she have? She was no psychic.
Was this the gift the old man had passed on to her? If so, she didn’t want it.
She collapsed onto the bed sideways with the top of her head pressed against the wall. In a few more hours, she would have to get up and go to work. For the first time since she’d ditched her old life, she wanted to go back home to Nashville, even if that meant her father would lecture her about responsibility on a daily basis.
Jeri reached under her pillow and pulled out a pay-as-you-go cell phone. She sucked back a ragged breath and texted her mother.
Mom just wanted you to know I’m OK.
She didn’t wait for a response before she turned off the phone and dropped it into the glass of soda she’d left on the small table next to her bed. Someone had told her that was the quickest and easiest way to destroy a cell phone. That should keep her father from pinging the phone to determine her location. Jeri imagined his anger and frustration when his attempts to locate her had once aga
in been thwarted. Normally, annoying him would have brought a smile to her face, but this time, there was no satisfaction.
Her gaze riveted on the glass tube on the shelf above the sink. She’d forgotten to give it to the cop, and he’d forgotten to ask her for it.
Chapter Five
Nick stood in front of the derelict building with its rusty wrought iron railings and stared up at the decaying façade to the third-floor window. The old girl could use a fresh coat of paint and a little TLC.
A chilled wind picked up, blowing across the Quarter off the river only a few blocks away. The Mississippi did a crazy thing, bending and flowing west to east, only curving back southward toward the Gulf after it had passed New Orleans. The west bank was south of New Orleans proper. The Mississippi flowed due north as it passed the Quarter. Directions were given as how a location related to the river or to Lake Pontchartrain. Riverside. Lakeside. Downtown. Uptown. Midtown. The contrary flow of the Mississippi caused a lot of confusion for visitors.
Nick squatted on the narrow sidewalk next to the secondary crime scene, the spot where the old man had died. The block in front of the building and the entrance to the alley on the side had been cordoned off with yellow tape. The bloody, messy primary crime scene was in the back, hidden away from onlookers. For most of the day, the curious had stood on the other side of the tape gawking at the crime scene people while they did their job. At nearly sundown, Nick had the sidewalk to himself.
“What were you doing here, old man?” He muttered at the corpse that had already been removed, still able to recall the sight of his lifeless body.
A woman’s voice startled him from behind. “He’s street trash. Where else is he gonna go?”
He rose and turned to find an older woman standing on the wrong side of the yellow tape. “Please step back on the other side of the tape, ma’am.”
She shook her head, defiance sparkling in her dark eyes. “I run this shop.” Her knobby finger pointed at the business on the first floor that was well within the boundaries of the tape.
Second Sight (Prescience Series Book 1) Page 4