Nick nodded. “Because we found traces of blood in her trunk, and the car was parked in front of their apartment. So I pushed him to tell me he’d dumped her in the trunk and taken her somewhere to get rid of her body. He never would admit it, and I couldn’t prove anything, so I had to let him go. But every once in a while, I revisit the case and show up at his front door…just to remind him I haven’t forgotten about her or him.”
“So Wakefield followed Audrey’s boyfriend to the bar?”
“No. He followed the boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend to the bar. The girlfriend before Audrey. Sophia Cannon. At one time, I thought maybe Sophia had something to do with Audrey’s disappearance. Maybe she was getting even with Audrey for stealing her boyfriend or something. I ruled her out and focused on the boyfriend, Dylan Hunter.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s coming back to me now. So St. Denis has an interest in the case now, and you’ve been fiddle-farting around helping out Charlotte Soileau while Jane Doe is growing cold and getting staler by the minute?”
The case wasn’t that old or getting that cold.
“You still got a thing for her?” Ed could be so blunt.
Charlotte hadn’t ever thought about Nick in a romantic/passionate/sexual sort of way, despite the fact that she’d learned early on how big a crush he’d had on her. She was ten years older and married to the job. Something in her past had kept her from getting emotionally involved with anyone. Partners weren’t supposed to get busy. She was happy to be his mentor, to be his friend, but that was as far as she was willing to go. Nick had never had a chance with her. Now, he just felt foolish for having even thought of her that way.
Her awareness of his feelings had begun to make things awkward between them, and then she’d taken a beating and ended up in the hospital. He’d tried to cover for her when she’d come back to work too soon. That hadn’t ended well for either of them. Then, she had left the job and gone back to St. Denis Parish where she’d come from, and Nick had picked up the pieces and gone on with his life. What else could he do?
“Nick, are you listening to me?”
He jolted out of his inner thoughts and returned his attention to the boss. “Sorry. What?”
“Where’d you go?” He tapped the end of his pencil on the desk. “Is there something else you wanna tell me? Cause I got the idea you weren’t done yet, and I need to get home. Tracey promised me Étouffée, and I don’t want to piss her off by being late.”
Since when had Ed ever worried about being late? Or pissing off Tracey?
Nick shook his head. “I was also doing a favor for a friend of mine with the Nashville PD.”
“Have you spent any time doing your own job, Nick?”
He shifted in the hardwood seat. Deliberation and confidence were flying out the window and dissolving in the New Orleans heat. “I’ve been working the Doe case.”
“So what’s this favor you’ve done for your friend in Nashville?”
Ed could jump back and forth between sub-subjects without missing a beat. Rumor was that was how he’d been able to elicit so many admissions out of uncooperative interviewees.
“There’s a deputy commissioner up there… His daughter came down here to go to Tulane Med School. She dropped out and cut off contact with her parents. It looked like Flynn wasn’t giving the case much attention, so my friend on the Nashville PD asked me to look into it as a favor because his boss—the deputy commissioner—was about to have a conniption fit and come down here himself if someone didn’t find something out about the girl. Gary said that wasn’t going to go well for anybody.”
He’d known Gary Purcell for a long time, and Gary had done a few favors for him. Looking into the missing person case was the least he could do for a fellow law enforcement officer.
The tapping of Ed’s pencil increased in frequency. “And why didn’t Flynn pay much attention to this case?”
“The girl is over twenty-one, and there was no evidence that she’d left here unwillingly. No foul play. She gave up her apartment, dropped out of school, and went off the grid.”
And her father had acted like a horse’s behind.
Ed nodded. “An adult. So there’s nothing we can do about it. If the girl wants to cut off contact with her parents, that’s her choice.” He leaned on his elbows. “So what else?”
“I found her.”
“Okay, so case closed. Tell dad you found her. Move on. Why is this a problem?”
Nick dragged in a deep, replenishing breath. “She’s the woman that Sheldon Deville grabbed before he died… And she doesn’t want her father to know she still lives here or what name she’s using. She has her reasons. So I’ve been trying to work the Deville case without using her real name because she doesn’t want to be found.”
Ed sighed and rubbed the back of his head. “You know how we’re gonna have to play this, right?”
Nick nodded, unhappily. “Eventually, her real name is going to be connected to this case, and I won’t be able to shelter her.”
Ed studied Nick with a hard, unrelenting stare. “You got a thing for her?”
“Really, Ed? What makes you think that? Just because… Never mind.”
“You sound kind of defensive.” The pencil tapping ceased. Ed leaned forward. “You’d better not let this girl get next to you. This case sounds very complicated, and you don’t need to get involved with a person of interest.”
Why, oh why, did Ed have to use the word complicated?
Ed stood to his full height, six foot two. “You know what you gotta do, Nick.”
Not a question. That sounded like a command.
Nick nodded. “Call the father and fill him in before he finds out she’s involved some other way. The thing is… The deputy commissioner isn’t her biological father.”
Ed raised his eyebrows.
“We found a picture of a young girl, maybe four or five years old, in Deville’s backpack. When we had the computer guy age progress the picture… Well, she looks just like…” He paused. Should he say her real name? “She calls herself Olivia Hammond.”
“Olivia Hammond died in the floods after Katrina.”
Oh yeah, Nick was aware that the real Olivia was dead. But how did Ed know that?
“I saw Petrie running a background on the name and asked him what case he was working. Someone has to keep an eye on the guy.”
What was Ed implying? That Nick wasn’t properly supervising his trainee?
“So what’s her real name?”
The moment Nick had dreaded had finally arrived. As uncomfortable as the rest of their conversation had been for him, this was the part that would likely cause Ed some heartburn. “Jerilyn Bowman. Since she doesn’t know who her biological father is and she looks so much like the age-progressed photo, I want to compare her DNA against Sheldon Deville’s.” He cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. “I don’t think she’s going to give me a swab willingly, so I…umm…I grabbed a soda can out of her trash.”
Ed groaned. “Do you like her for Deville’s murder?”
Nick didn’t. Not really. Asking for the DNA comparison was just a gut instinct sort of thing. The blood evidence in this case was important. Deville had given Jeri a tube that had held some blood. The blood had been drained from Jane Doe. A sticky residue had been left on Doe’s neck. Nick believed that Sheldon Deville had gathered some of Jane Doe’s blood in the tube, but why had he given the empty tube to Jeri? Was Deville the killer? Was Jerilyn, possibly a blood relative of Deville’s, involved in the murder?
“I haven’t ruled her out.”
“Okay, you got it. I’ll put in an urgent request. We need this case cleared. Anything else you need?”
Ed was a little too agreeable.
“No. I’m good.”
“Have you considered whether Jane Doe’s killer has killed before?”
Yes, he had. That idea had been crawling around in the back of his mind. “It doesn’t seem to me the killer knew his victim. It was an impers
onal sort of kill.” An indicator of a serial kill, but not the only indicator.
“Focus on Jane Doe, Nick. We need this guy stopped before he becomes a bigger problem.”
Ed circled his desk and opened his office door. Nick had just been dismissed.
****
Nick studied the whiteboard in front of him.
Petrie moved to stand beside him. “You got a thing for the girl?”
“Why does everyone ask me that?” He’d blurted the question before he’d given it a good think through. “No, I don’t. That would be a bad, bad mistake.”
Petrie laughed. “So you’ve thought about it, and since when do you avoid bad mistakes?”
What was that supposed to mean? What bad mistakes had he not avoided? Was his attraction to Jeri so obvious that both Ed and Petrie had asked him the same thing?
“Doesn’t matter how much I think about it, that’s not gonna happen.”
“She’s kind of quirky, isn’t she? I mean the black fingernails and the lipstick. The crazy ass hair. Don’t you think she’s a little—”
“Weird. She’s weird.”
“Is that your type, Moreau?”
He had to ignore Petrie’s jabs. Nick didn’t have time for that kind of crap. The Jane Doe case was getting colder by the minute, and they still didn’t know who she was or who the photographer was or how the photographer and Deville were connected or how Jerilyn Bowman was connected to any of them.
No one had seen Jane go into the building. No one had seen anyone leave. No one on the street had recognized her photo. No one knew where the photographer lived. Nick’s usual informants had come up with a big fat zero.
The same had been true of Deville and his murder, with one exception. The neighbor had seen Deville toss his backpack into the dumpster. No one seemed to know where the street bum lived. Jeri had told him that the guy always paid for his drinks and tipped her well. Maybe he wasn’t homeless. Maybe it was a disguise. Where did the man get his money for drinks?
Petrie turned so that he got between Nick and the whiteboard. “There’s something you’re not telling me. Maybe a lot of something. I don’t like being responsible for what I don’t know. Are you gonna talk to me?”
Nick pointed toward the picture of Jane Doe. “Do you think she’s his first kill?”
His question caused Petrie to bounce back on the balls of his feet and bump his head on the board. “Is that what you’ve been thinking?”
“Not until today.” He shoved Petrie aside and tilted his head to consider the slim evidence he had noted on the board. “Don’t you think this all…” He waved his hand. “A little too clean. A little too precise. A little too…” He’d run out of descriptives. “He didn’t leave anything behind. No fingerprints. No skin under her nails. No hair. No fibers. No impressions of bloody footprints. No murder weapon lying around to make things easier. All we have is that ring of strawberry syrup around the hole in her neck. Makes me wonder if he knows about evidence collection techniques. I don’t want to jump to any conclusions, but…”
“Yeah, yeah. I get it. You don’t want to work a serial case. Nobody wants it to be a serial, so the captain wants you to make sure it’s not. A serial killer on the loose would be bad for business, what with the height of the summer tourist season approaching. That’s what has the big dogs all barking.”
Damn, the man had a way with words.
Nick twisted to view the board from another angle, as if that would clear things up. “I’m pretty sure that’s what Ed’s afraid of. I think he’s hinting he’d like me to investigate it that way just to prove it’s not. In case anyone asks. So this is what we’re gonna do.”
Petrie turned his attention back to the board, caressing his patchy Van Dyke beard.
“We’re going to search the database for similar cases just in case he’s done something like this before in another jurisdiction.” Nick wanted to punch himself. They should have already done that. What was wrong with him? Distractions, that’s what.
Petrie groaned. “VICAP? You know how tedious that can be.”
Yes, he did. That’s why he was putting his rookie detective on the chore.
Petrie threw out an observation. “I can’t believe Jane Doe isn’t a missing person. Why has no one asked about her?”
“Maybe she wasn’t missed.”
That happened. A runaway sometimes wasn’t reported simply because the person’s family was glad they were gone.
Nick shook his head. “Maybe it’s time to push Ed for a public appeal…”
He felt someone’s presence right behind him and halfway expected Ed to be standing there. When he turned, Jeri surprised the snot out of him. “What are you doing here?”
How had she gotten past security? How had she gotten past so many cops and ended up in the major crimes squad room? Someone should have stopped her before she got that far.
She didn’t answer him, so he grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her a little. “Jeri, answer me. How did you get in here?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? Are you telling me this is like what happened at…yesterday?” Damn, he’d almost mentioned the crazy scene at the fire.
She pointed at the whiteboard. “There should be five.”
Her comment sent a sharp stab of dread right through his heart. He’d just been arguing against the possibility he was looking for a serial killer.
“Whatdaya mean there should be five?” His voice trembled when he asked.
“There should be five women on the board.” She stepped forward and lightly touched Jane Doe’s morgue photo. “She isn’t Jane Doe though. She’s Alison Ardoin.”
Petrie spluttered his question. “How do you know that?”
“Her name was above her picture.”
Nick placed a hand on her upper arm. “Where did you see that? Where was her name above her picture?”
She pointed toward the whiteboard. “I saw that board. There were five of them.”
Petrie spewed his disbelief. “That board? How could you have seen that board? We’ve never had five on the board.”
Was that what Petrie focused on? Nick was more concerned with the idea that Jeri had seen the board filled up with information relating to not one but five cases.
Nick nudged her to look at him. “What happened, Jeri?”
She glanced at him, fear etched all over her face. “I went down to the store to get some food because the apartment didn’t have anything in the fridge. I bumped into a woman…” She turned her gaze back to the pictures on the board. “She was the second woman.”
He wasn’t ready to believe in Jeri’s psychic abilities…not yet…but if she could name a future victim and prevent a crime…no matter how she knew the potential victim’s name…he’d play along. “What was her name?”
“She’s Jane Doe.”
Petrie muttered incoherent objections, drawing attention to them from several other detectives who had wandered into the room since the crazy conversation had started.
Nick had to get control of the situation. “Jeri…” He sighed deeply, mostly for show. “You can’t keep doing this. You’re imagining things again. Go home and get some rest. I’ll come by tonight and make sure you’re okay.”
“But, Nick—”
He guided her toward the squad room door where a uniformed officer stood watching them. “Mac, would you take her home?”
The officer nodded. “Where do you live?”
She turned and blinked at Nick, and he answered for her. “She moved into Conrad’s apartment.”
Officer McKenzie nodded. He was the perfect accomplice in Nick’s campaign to offer unofficial witness protection when the city, parish, or state wouldn’t provide it. Mac had escorted several of Nick’s rescue projects to their temporary, under-the-radar address, but most of all, Mac had kept his mouth shut, suggesting that he and Nick were on the same page when it came to protecting potential witnesses.
As soon as Jeri was out the door, Petrie grabbed Nick and swung him around. “What was that all about?”
“She’s a little nuts. That’s all. I’ve been handling her carefully.” He shook off Petrie’s grip. “And before you say anything…no, it’s not because I have a thing for her. I think she knows more than she’s telling, and I don’t want her doing a runner. I think we’re going to need her testimony sooner or later.”
“So that’s why you’ve set her up at Chateau Moreau?”
Nick leaned back from Petrie. “What?”
“Oh, come on, Moreau. Everybody knows about the arrangement you have with that idiot that manages Riverview West.”
Nick had always thought it a strange name for the place. Riverview West was nowhere near the river, and it certainly wasn’t on the west side of town. An outsider had named the place. Someone who didn’t know the geography of New Orleans.
Nick pointed toward Petrie’s computer. “Are you gonna get onto that VICAP search or not?”
“Oh, yeah, sure. What are you gonna do?” Petrie didn’t sound happy.
“I’m gonna do a search for a woman named Alison Ardoin.”
Petrie threw up his hands as if he’d heard it all. He dropped into his rolling chair and began pecking at his poor, defenseless keyboard.
The two men sat across from each other, their desks facing each other. Neither talked for a long, long time. Petrie was obviously pissed. About exactly what, Nick wasn’t sure he had the time or the inclination to care.
After a couple of hours of emailing and begging for information, Nick glanced up from his computer screen to catch Petrie’s eye. “I found her.”
Petrie raised his eyebrows.
“Alison Ardoin is a missing person out of Beaumont, Texas.”
He turned his screen to face Petrie. Nick had kept increasing his search area, but he’d finally located her missing person report.
Petrie leaned forward, concern wiping any semblance of calm from his face. In fact, the guy almost appeared panicked. “How did she know the woman’s name? Not good, Nick. Not good. You just let her walk outta here. You let her cloud your judgment. What if she’s Jane Doe’s killer? Or whatever she said her name was—”
Second Sight (Prescience Series Book 1) Page 11