She nodded her head against his shoulder.
“I don’t want to lose you, so you have to be extra careful. I would come down there with you but…”
But he’d only be in her way.
She leaned back and placed a hand on her father’s cheek. “Don’t worry, Daddy. It won’t be long before I’m bringing your grandchildren up here for a visit.”
“You have children?”
He was truly shocked, but he should have been able to do the math. When would she have had time to have children since she cut off communication with him?
She smiled at his unguarded reaction to the thought of being a grandfather. “No, I don’t. Not yet. Give me a little time to work on that. I need a willing partner first, don’t I? He isn’t convinced he loves me yet.” Truthfully, she wasn’t quite there yet either. But she knew it was coming. “I’m going to get a flight to New Orleans as soon as possible. I’ll let you know I got there safely. And this time, I’ll tell you where I live. I’m not hiding anymore. I promise.”
The concern on his face didn’t disappear.
“I have to do what I have do.”
She had a duty to fulfill. If Lance Bowman didn’t understand anything else, he understood duty.
He placed his hand over hers on his cheek. “You can come back home anytime.”
Funny. She’d told him once before that New Orleans had become home to her. That hadn’t changed. It was time for her to go home.
Chapter Twenty-three
Nick had found a parking spot around the corner from Johnny J’s bar. It was a little pathetic that he was standing across the street from the place where she used to work gazing at the people inside through the dirty window. Darwin needed to hire a window cleaner, or get off his lazy ass and clean the windows himself. Despite the cloud of dirt on the window, Nick could easily see into the bar. Herb’s huge form passed the window on occasion. There was a new bartender behind the bar, and surprise surprise, she looked like Jerilyn.
But she wasn’t Jerilyn. The first time he’d spotted the new bartender, his heart had nearly thumped out of his chest. He’d rushed into the bar, only to be disappointed when the woman turned her face toward him. The beer he’d ordered hadn’t gone down smooth.
His cell vibrated on his hip. Petrie nearly punctured his eardrum.
“Where are you, Moreau? We have another DB in the eighth.”
Nick wasn’t in a mood to play nice. “You mean there’s a dead body in the Quarter? Why can’t you just say so, Petrie?”
Muffled grumbling peppered his ear. “You’re an ass.”
“Yeah, I know. So what’s the address?”
“The Royale Chateau.”
The old dump of a hotel on Royal? Nick’s heart dropped to the bottom of his gut. Another abandoned building.
Petrie cleared his throat and resumed his report. “The responding officer said it looks similar to the Ardoin case.”
Not what he wanted to hear. Exactly what he had feared. “It? Define it. The body looks similar. The scene looks similar. The cause of death looks similar. What are you trying to tell me, Petrie?”
For once, Petrie seemed speechless. Had he hurt the guy’s feelings? With an overabundant caseload and an understaffed major crimes squad, there was no time for sensitivity training.
Nick rubbed his forehead where a fresh headache had formed. They’d had a similar conversation only a few weeks ago. Déjà vu. That’s where he was. He wasn’t going to tell Petrie he was already on Bourbon.
“I’ll meet you there.” He disconnected before Petrie could call him on his attitude. Nick didn’t want anyone separating him from his crappy attitude. It was his, and dammit he was hanging onto it.
Nick made it to the scene before Petrie or the assistant ME.
The responding officer met him halfway across the room. “Looks like we got us another one like the Ardoin girl.”
He groaned and squinted at the nameplate on the responding officer as the man approached. Hooper. He’d never worked with the guy before.
Nick didn’t want another murder on his load, and he certainly didn’t want another killing like Alison Ardoin’s. He’d just about convinced himself and his captain that Ardoin was a one-off. It hadn’t escaped Ed that there had been no more killings like Ardoin’s since Jerilyn had left town. Ed didn’t like coincidences any more than Nick did.
Now, Nick stood over a young woman in an abandoned hotel. Once again, a man who claimed to be a ruin porn photographer had found the body. This time, the photographer wasn’t Jackson Deville. The man stood to one side of the room waiting for Nick to interview him. This time, the hapless photographer looked like he was about to puke.
Instinct riffled through Nick. The scene had been staged to resemble Ardoin’s death. He glanced toward Hooper. The man seemed a bit too excited to be working the crime. Was death something to celebrate?
Nick’s first impression of the scene? The killer had not only copycatted the killing, but he was openly mocking it.
He squatted and visually inspected the cut across the victim’s neck. A slash, not a puncture wound. Strike one. No blood pool. Strike two. The victim had been dumped instead of killed on the spot. Strike three. And what was with the damned rose in the victim’s mouth?
All his life, he’d heard about the Curse of the Single Red Rose. The killer hadn’t gotten the curse right. Didn’t the legend say the rose was supposed to be clutched in the victim’s hand? Didn’t all the curses victims die in the hotel?
Nick could easily see what the assistant ME was going to tell him. The victim had been tortured, and her blood had been drained from her lifeless body. Unlike Alison Ardoin, who had been very much alive when she bled out.
Before Petrie had even tiptoed into the room or Dodge Corolla had set his kit next to the body, Nick had already concluded that the woman wasn’t one of Jackson Deville’s victims.
****
It had been a long, freaking, horrible day. Just as Jeri had foreseen, there was a victim in the morgue with a Jane Doe tag on her toe and a photo on his whiteboard. No ID. Her fingerprints didn’t hit on AFIS. The only things he knew about her were that she had died a horrible death and she had once been in the same grocery store as Jerilyn Bowman.
The grocery was a place to start. He could show Doe’s morgue picture around, ask if anyone in the neighborhood knew who she was. Maybe he’d get lucky and someone would recognize the woman. He just needed to talk to Jeri and find out which store.
That’s all he had to go on. Whoever had dumped Doe’s corpse in The Royale Chateau Hotel had done a great job cleaning up the evidence behind him. No trace. No fingerprints. No footprints. No blood. Nothing. There was so much debris in the hotel that it was difficult to tell what, if anything, had been disturbed by the killer. All Nick had in the way of evidence was that damnable rose in her teeth. Once the public found out about the rose, the rumors would start flying, and he would be unable to stop them.
The killer knew what he was doing. He had killed before and thought he knew how to stage a scene to throw the cops off. Cocky. The killer thought he was that smart. Maybe he was. Hopefully, he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. Hopefully, he would eventually trip himself up. Hopefully, Corolla could pull some trace from her body at autopsy that would point Nick in the right direction. He needed a good lead. Nick wasn’t holding his breath.
So much bruising on her body. Someone wanted something from the woman that she wasn’t giving up easily, and Nick wondered if she was connected to organized crime in New Orleans. It was a clean kill, an organized kill, a practiced kill. If she was connected, the crime families in town would never admit to knowing her name.
What kind of man tortured another human being, especially a woman? Nick would never be able to understand that kind of cold disregard for life.
He parked his car on the curb, walked the driveway to the back of the property, and climbed a set of rickety stairs. His landlord rented him the apartment over his garage, a one car gar
age.
When he got to the top, he found his door slightly ajar. He wouldn’t deny it; he’d been a little paranoid ever since Wakefield had disappeared after the shooting. His recently issued service weapon came out of the holster at his side. The gun he had carried the night Wakefield had shot him was still missing.
Now that Wakefield was dead, Nick would probably never find the stolen weapon. Its loss had caused Nick all sorts of grief. Every lost weapon had to be explained and documented. Ed had fumed at him, as if he had wanted to have his gun turned back on him.
Wakefield’s death had not eased Nick’s paranoia.
Nick stuck the barrel of his gun through the crack and nudged the door further open with the toe of his shoe. For the first time in a long time, the door didn’t creak when it swung. He spotted someone sitting at his small kitchen table. With a sigh of relief, he re-holstered the weapon.
“Jeri?”
She turned, and on first sight of him, her eyes lit up like bonfires on a dark night. In a flash, she was on her feet facing him. The tension in her shoulders made Nick believe she was straining to hold herself back. Despite her obvious hesitation, his inclination was to rush toward her and wrap his arms around her. Every muscle ached from the self-control he exerted over his body.
Her first words stunned him, but maybe they shouldn’t have.
“You’ve found her, haven’t you? You’ve found Jane Doe.”
There was no use asking her how she knew.
She moved a step closer, which brought her a lot nearer. His apartment was that small.
“I’m sorry, Nick.” And her face showed her remorse. Genuine remorse.
He laughed, an uncomfortable hiccup of strained mirth. “Well, you didn’t kill her, did you? You were in Tennessee with the Bowmans. I’m sure they will give you an alibi for her time of death.”
Her eyebrows pulled together, creating a deep wrinkled frown. “Why do you always assume that an apology is a murder confession, Nick?”
Did he?
“So why are you sorry then?”
She sighed, and it seemed the remorse flowed from her like a wide, deep river. “I thought leaving New Orleans would stop him from killing again. But it hasn’t.”
“Why did you think that?”
“Because all the victims… Most of the victims are linked to me. All of them except Jane Doe. She’s not one of his.”
She was confusing the hell out of him. She hadn’t been able to stop the killing by leaving town, which would imply the killer had killed while she was gone, but the only new victim was Jane Doe, and she’d just said Doe wasn’t one of the serial victims. So what was she trying to say?
“I can see that I’m confusing you, so let me try again. Okay?”
He nodded his agreement, not that he thought she would be able to clarify anything she’d just said.
She pressed her lips together. Maybe the words didn’t form easily. Though, he saw no hint of deceit in her eyes or on her face.
“You know…I told you I’d seen your whiteboard with more pictures on it. I gave you the list of names. Did you find those girls? Are they okay?”
She was deflecting, but he’d let her.
“When I talked to them a few weeks ago, they were all still alive. They were all little curious why I was asking them questions about a man with a camera. It’s hard to ask open-ended questions without scaring someone. You know that, right?”
She stepped even closer. Her eyes blazed with urgency. “You need to make sure they’re still okay.”
“And ask them what? I can’t keep going back without explaining to them why I’m asking them questions. I have nothing to show them to justify my intrusion into their lives.”
Her teeth clamped down on her thumbnail.
He reached over and pulled her hand out of her mouth. “Why the sudden concern for them? Tell me what you think you know.”
“Your pictures… You would put them in order on your board, wouldn’t you? You’d organize them like that, wouldn’t you?”
He waited for her to continue.
“They’re out of order. Jane Doe is second, but she shouldn’t be second. She should be third. I’m afraid…I’m afraid he’s already killed one of them.”
“We haven’t found any more victims with the same MO…except the woman we found today.”
Jeri shook her head. “Jane Doe isn’t one of them. She isn’t on his wall.”
Nick’s insides jerked. Jeri was about to say something he wouldn’t want to hear, but he had to hear her out. She’d been right about Jane Doe.
“What wall? Where?”
Her eyes brimmed with tears. That’s when he noticed that the blue was fading out of her hair, and that her long waves were almost the same color as Alison Ardoin’s hair. Her eyes were a similar blue. They were about the same height, same weight, same build. A chill swept over him.
“I know you won’t like this…”
“Probably not.”
“I went back to the apartment where Alison died before I left town.”
Nick huffed with irritation. “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t like it.”
“I had another vision.”
He braced himself for the inevitable revelation. It was coming, and Nick had no doubt it was about to smack him right in the chest. Her eyes seemed to search his, perhaps silently begging him not to overreact.
“Go ahead. Tell me. What did you see?”
“He has a wall somewhere. It’s covered with pictures of me with other women, and all of them look sort of like me. But she’s not on the wall. Jane Doe isn’t there. She’s not one of his. The woman that died in the bar…she is. Her picture isn’t there.”
This wasn’t the way he’d envisioned their reunion. But she had started them down this path, so he had to follow her. “So then…what you’re saying is…that he chooses women who have met you?”
She nodded.
“And they all sort of look like you.”
She nodded again.
“So they are a sort of surrogate for you?”
She flinched. “No, I think they are a surrogate for my mother. He’s fascinated with me because I’m the ultimate surrogate for her.”
How long had Deville been following his daughter around town taking pictures of her with potential victims? “If he’s already identified his victims, you don’t have to be here for him to kill them.” He knew his words were harsh, but he had to see her reaction.
She sucked up a ragged breath, part inhale and part sob. “I don’t know how far into the future I was seeing. What if he hasn’t finished the wall yet? What if he’s waiting for me to come back to take more pictures? What if I can stop him before he chooses another victim? If he’s not finished with the wall… I think I could lure him out of hiding—”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“We have to get him to show his face, Nick. That’s the only way to catch him. He won’t kill me, Nick.”
“How do you know that?”
He wasn’t disagreeing with her about the identity of the killer. No, his objection was to her ill-conceived plan for stopping Jackson Deville. The fear of losing her was too great to allow her to become bait. She shrugged, but it was clear she knew the answer to his question and didn’t want to explain. He would let her off the hook for not answering for now, but he was coming back to the subject. He’d hit her with the question again when she least expected it.
“How’d you get into my apartment?”
She blinked at him. “Your door was unlocked.”
Panic raced through him. All the paranoia he’d kept at a low simmer boiled over. He grabbed Jeri by the elbow and pulled her toward the still open door. “We’ve got to get out of here. Right now.”
She pulled back. “What’s wrong?”
“Just a gut feeling. Please…let’s just go.”
Nick didn’t know where they were going, but he knew they had to go somewhere and fast. He remembered to lock the door behind them. Jeri fo
llowed him down the stairs without protest. She didn’t ask where they were going, as if she knew he didn’t have an answer yet.
When they were in his car, she leaned over the console toward him while he was shifting into reverse. “Didn’t you miss me even a little bit?”
Damn, where had that question come from? It was like she’d held onto it until he was distracted just so she could hit him between the eyes with it when he least expected it.
What good would it do to pretend he hadn’t missed her? He shoved the gear back into park and turned toward her so she could see his sincerity. “Every day and every night.”
She tilted her head, and a puzzled frown formed. Obviously, not the answer she had expected. Or…maybe it was. Maybe she hadn’t expected him to admit the obvious.
Chapter Twenty-four
Jeri thought Nick was going to drive around New Orleans all night. He kept glancing at first his rearview and then at his sideview mirrors, grimacing and muttering to himself.
“You think he’s following us, don’t you?”
Nick jerked his head to catch her eye and then returned his gaze to the side streets of the Irish Channel.
“I can’t see him if he is.”
“He was in your apartment.”
Nick glanced at her again, a quick peek. “That wasn’t a question.”
She shook her head and concentrated on her unpainted fingernails so he wouldn’t see her expression. It was more important to hear his reaction to what she was about to say than to see it. “No, it wasn’t. I know he was there.”
“How do you know?”
She shrugged. “I just do.”
She worried her lower lip. Jeri was about to explain things to him that she had just figured out. So everything she wanted to tell him was new to her as well.
“Before I left for Nashville, I could see things. Now…I know things too.”
“Know things?”
“Imogene introduced me to people that could remember where the gift came from and how it’s supposed to be used. I’ve been able to…redirect my gift…to clarify it. I found out it’s not enough to see; I have to be able to interpret what I’ve seen. I have to know what it means. Otherwise, I might try to change someone’s destiny. Some things aren’t meant to be messed with.”
Second Sight (Prescience Series Book 1) Page 21