“Alone?”
Her chin came up under the challenge of his gaze. “Yeah.”
Chopin leaned closer, faux conspiratorial. “And why would you do an idiotic thing like that?”
Well, duh. “Because the alternative would have been not to go after him?”
He grinned as he straightened, fishing a notebook out of his shirt pocket. “Krystal Tanner,” he muttered, making a note. “Ten-fifteen. You’re not on the force, so how is it I know you?”
She was surprised he’d remember her, even vaguely. Then again, powers of observation went back to his cop-ness. “I’m an assistant evidence technician for the city. Faith Corbett.”
She fisted her right hand, hoping he wouldn’t want to shake. The man was intense enough without risking direct contact.
“Yeah, that’s it.” He nodded and, to her relief, kept his own hand busy taking notes. “You’re one of Boulanger’s day shift, working the desk, right? Sometimes you make pickups and drop-offs at the station. So Corbett, how is it you know the deceased?”
Poor Krystal. One minute she’d been dancing, drinking, celebrating life. Then she’d headed for the ladies’ room and…God. The deceased.
“She’s my roommate.”
Chopin stopped writing and angled his wide gaze back to her, brows furrowed. “Oh. I’m…uh…”
Why was it some men had trouble expressing even the most conventional courtesy, lest it betray some emotion? Faith saved him the effort. “Thanks.”
“So, Bernie, you went charging after this killer and…?”
Had he just called her Bernie? Unwilling to be distracted, Faith repeated the story as quickly as she could without looking too suspicious, increasingly aware of him studying her as he listened and took notes. She felt as if he could see every hair on her arms, every piece of grit embedded in her tummy, every scrape on her knees. It wasn’t sexual—there was a corpse at their feet, after all. Well…not any more sexual than any man staring at a woman’s bare tummy, anyway. But such intense scrutiny made her uncomfortable.
Like he could maybe see just how weird she was.
“You didn’t get a good look at him?” Chopin demanded, when she finished. At least he hadn’t interrupted her.
“Just the bottom of his feet.”
“And you didn’t ask anybody if they saw him leave the storeroom?” His mouth had gone back to threatening. His questions were starting to feel like little shoves of energy.
“No, everyone was distracted by finding Krystal.”
“And how was your relationship with the vic?”
Faith’s mouth fell open. “Why are you questioning me as if…oh.” But she knew the answer to that, too. “The first person on the scene’s always the first suspect, right?”
“Yeah.” Chopin didn’t even bother to apologize for his suspicions. But he did include her in another mocking grin.
“Nothing personal, hon. It’s one of those hard truths, like ‘everybody lies.’ Statistics would put the odds on either you or her boyfriend-slash-husband.”
“She didn’t have a boyfriend or a husband.”
“Could I see your hands, please?” Shove.
Faith spread her bare palms for him. Only when she felt his interest spike—a minute change of his temperature, a sharp inhale through his teeth—did she notice the pink lines where she’d pulled herself up through the ceiling, the bleeding cut from that exposed nail. “Oh…” she whispered.
For a moment she felt dizzy with the very real possibility that she might be charged with this crime. So much for keeping a low profile!
“Don’t sweat it. If you’d done the deed, you’d have lines on the sides of your hands, too. Here—” to her relief, he indicated where he meant with his pen, not his finger “—and here. Besides, she’s fashion-model tall—pushing six feet? I’m no M.E., but I’m betting the ligature marks on her neck would be a lot lower if you did her. Unless you somehow made her kneel first, which, how could you without imminent threat, and I don’t see anyplace you could’ve hidden a gun. Or much of a knife. Nice shirt, there.”
“You’re smarter than you look,” said Faith, fully aware it was her own way of shoving back.
“’Cause of my fashion sense, or ’cause I’m not hauling you down to the station yet?” Detective Chopin looked less exhausted as he eyed her. “Usually I’m the brawn of the outfit. Right, Butch?”
Strike three.
“Now, Roy,” demanded Chopin’s partner from the doorway. Here stood the sweet, trustworthy man whose arrival Faith had feared even beyond the slap-in-the-face energy of the younger Roy. “What are you doing harassing this here helpful citizen? Sugar over vinegar, son. Sugar over vinegar. How do you do, Miss? I am Detective Sergeant Butch Jefferson. I am most terribly sorry to have to meet you under such clearly distressing circumstances, and I apologize for my partner’s appalling lack of manners.”
“He’s the Good Cop,” muttered Chopin amiably, still taking notes. Which made him what?
Butch, who had more than twenty years on his thirty-ish partner, extended both a genuine smile, which made his dark eyes crinkle at the corners, and his worn brown hand. There was no way Faith could refuse to take the latter. Not without rousing suspicion and requiring more conversation, which—around Butch Jefferson, anyway—she wanted even less than touching.
With a determined smile, she allowed Butch to envelop her hand in his.
It wasn’t anywhere near as unsettling as touching his partner would have been. Butch’s personal energy was slow and easy, like the Mississippi in the summertime. The flashes of possible information that accompanied his touch—widowed, volunteered with Big Brothers, loved beer and boiled crawfish—he released it all so freely, it didn’t carry the unsettling jolt of so many other people.
“Faith Corbett,” she said—the first time she’d ever given this particular cop her real name. Please don’t recognize me.
“From evidence,” added Bad Cop, who proceeded to take over most of the talking.
The older detective didn’t seem to realize he and Faith had spoken before, much less that it had had nothing to do with her job with the crime-scene unit.
Then again, she’d chosen Butch Jefferson last year specifically because he didn’t have a terribly suspicious nature—not for a homicide detective, anyway. She’d always used a fake accent, the dozen-or-so times she’d telephoned him. And she’d given him a fake name, Madame Cassandra. But the information she’d passed on as Detective Jefferson’s anonymous contact with the psychic community had always been real.
As long as the information stayed anonymous, Faith could remain useful. But if he recognized her voice, or learned the tips came from her…
Well, either he’d see her like Chopin had—young and blond and thus somehow unreliable—or he’d see her like the few other people who had learned her secret.
Freak.
Worse, they would want to know how she did it. And that, not even Faith could tell them.
She honestly didn’t know what she was.
But whatever she was, keeping quiet about it was one of the few things her nervous mother had gotten right. Look what happened to Krystal.
The thought caught Faith by surprise. How could Krystal’s murder have anything to do with the tarot reader’s special abilities?
She stiffened, increasingly aware of the gurgling drain beneath Roy Chopin’s surprisingly accurate narrative of her night. It would keep running until the night shift for the crime-scene unit arrived.
Running water?
She might only do glorified clerical work for the crime-scene unit, so far. She might only be an assistant crime-scene technician. But she knew the water had to mean something.
What?
Amidst the Bourbon Street crowd that lingered into the night, attracted by flashing lights and yellow police tape, He closed His eyes to savor His…His amplification.
Strength. Meaning. Confidence. Yes!
That last time hadn’t been a fluke,
after all.
He stood for what may have been hours, too powerful to tire of it, relishing how helpless the so-called authorities looked. Patrolmen had come and gone, as had an ambulance. Now the photographers and the crime-scene investigators, the night shift, had arrived. But He waited.
He wanted to see the detectives leave as ignorant as when they’d arrived. Stupid, arrogant suits. He wanted to gloat.
When finally they emerged, a younger man with an old black partner, they didn’t seem as helpless as He’d hoped. The younger one looked dusty enough to have been clambering around the crawlspace over the ceiling.
But they didn’t look satisfied, either. Or done.
Both seemed distracted by the blond bitch who’d chased Him from His kill before he was done. The one with the green tank top and the miniskirt. He didn’t like that one at all.
“Let me or Roy get you a cab now, Miss Faith,” He heard the black man say. “Gang activity’s gotten worse, not far north of here. No need for you to take chances.”
“No,” said the girl, all but backing away. “Really. My roommates will walk with me. We’ll be safe together.”
The trio who shuffled nearer, red-eyed and lost, looked as if they needed more protection than they would provide. Even the man among them had the posture of a girl.
Those three looked familiar—from Jackson Square.
More psychics?
Even as He thought that, as His breath fell shallow and His heartbeat sped and his groin tightened, the one called Miss Faith suddenly turned her head. Her unnerving green gaze raked across the remaining onlookers as if she knew what she was looking for.
He leaned back just enough to hide behind the shoulders of some good ol’boy. When He dared look again, she’d gone. She seemed to deliberately ignore the detectives staring after her. She was too busy dividing her attention between her friends and the street around them, like a little blond bodyguard.
He dared breathe again after they turned a corner. More than one psychic there, for sure.
The kind of people with power to spare.
A few more like tonight, and even the Master could no longer control Him.
Chapter 2
Faith couldn’t tell if she’d really sensed the killer among the onlookers, or if it had been her imagination. Sure, she was weird. But could she really recognize a particular heartbeat, a particular smell, in that kind of crowd?
Probably she’d just been distracted by Roy Chopin and Butch Jefferson watching her retreat.
“They asked a lot of questions,” noted Moonsong, after a block. “Who Krys dated, if we knew anybody who would want to hurt her. That was nice and thorough of them.”
“Bull! Did you see how they looked at me when I told them I’d met Krys at an astrology class?” Between grief, guilt and frustration, or maybe the simple boredom of waiting out the administrative elements of a crime scene, Absinthe had chewed most of her black lipstick off. “Like I was crazy. Like Krystal was crazy. It’s disrespectful, is what it is.”
“Krystal would have thought it was funny,” Moonsong insisted. Her real name was Emily, but a surprising number of psychics changed their names. It wasn’t so much to hide their true names—like Faith masquerading as Madame Cassandra when she made anonymous calls to the police. It was more about…identity.
About making a fresh start, even honoring their unusual abilities.
“Well, it’s not funny,” said Absinthe who, because Faith had helped her through the paperwork of a legal name change, really was Absinthe. Faith had majored in pre-law, before dropping out.
Until she knew what she was, it seemed premature to settle on what she should do.
Moonsong’s expression set. “But she would have thought it was. Remember? Whenever people got all cynical about what she did, she’d say, ‘That is so Queen of Swords.’”
Absinthe laughed. “Or she’d say, ‘Don’t get all Virgo on me.’”
Then she pressed a black-nailed hand to her mouth as her laugh shuddered into a sob. Moonsong circled her dark arms around her, and the two of them walked like a four-legged, two-headed creature.
So much for an endless slumber party. Faith wrapped her arms around herself and tried not to picture Krystal’s dead blue eyes and the welts on her throat. Mostly she tried not to imagine the moments before Krystal had died.
She and her three roommates took the same close, shadowed, cobblestone streets that had seen five of them heading out mere hours before. Never had the quieter, late-night backstreets of the French Quarter seemed so empty.
“Would you…?” Evan hesitated beside her, then forged on. “You don’t like to be touched, right?”
Faith longed for normal contact at that moment far more desperately than she feared the intimacy. “It’s not so bad if you don’t touch bare skin. I mean…yes. I could use a hug.”
So awkwardly, like a junior-high kid learning the waltz, Evan positioned one hand on Faith’s shirted back, the other on her denim-covered hip, and drew her tentatively against his shirtfront.
She laid her cheek on his shoulder and sighed. The worst of the night’s horrors eased, if only a little, under the comforting thrum of his concern and his heartbeat, gently muffled by the pressed cotton of his shirt.
What a sweet, sweet man. They were kind, all of them.
Krystal. Tears of gratitude and loss burned in Faith’s eyes.
Faith’s roommates knew her secrets—the few she’d figured out herself, anyway. Better yet, they accepted her abilities without demanding explanations. They respected her need for privacy. And they were, for the most part, able to deal with her despite her issues. The so-called fringe really had become friends.
A little over a year ago, Faith had gone to a psychic fair to figure out if being psychic was why she was such a freak. She’d hoped that maybe, like in the Ugly Duckling story, she would discover she’d been a swan all along. A psychic swan.
It didn’t happen that way. They turned out to be swans, all right, but she was still something different and strange. A heron, maybe. Maybe something weirder, like a platypus.
God, she’d wanted to be one of them. To be one of anything. But she couldn’t predict the future. She didn’t get reincarnation. The only impressions she felt off runes or tarot cards were a sense of who’d last held them, partly because of how they smelled. The true psychics used paranormal, extra- sensory skills. Faith’s abilities seemed to be pure sensory.
Just…sensory with the volume turned up.
These weren’t her people, after all. But she’d liked them—and more important, they’d brought out her protective instincts. As Absinthe pointed out, a lot of people distrusted psychics. And too many psychics depended on ethereal defenses when they could use a good lesson in kickboxing. After an incident at the psychic fair’s “open circle,” when Faith had faced down some large, loud disbelievers, she’d realized that this half-hidden community needed someone like her. Someone who could kickbox, sort of, and who wouldn’t hesitate to do so. Even the ex-military pagans, when in a sacred circle, had hesitated.
Faith had not.
She hadn’t started protecting them just to buy their friendship. Between her mother’s paranoid habit of relocating every few years, and Faith’s own issues about touching, Faith had resigned herself to being a loner. But the psychic community had welcomed her. When one of Krystal Tanner’s roommates had moved out, and they’d started looking for someone to pay a fifth of the rent, they’d asked Faith, who’d jumped at the chance to fulfill that slumber-party dream of sisterhood.
Now Krys was dead. Murdered.
Faith pulled back from Evan’s platonic embrace, smiled her sad thanks, and continued walking.
Some protector she’d turned out to be.
“I heard what happened. Are you all right?”
The man who asked that, two days later, was Faith’s supervisor. Black-haired, brown-eyed, bearded Greg Boulanger ran the day shift of the crime-scene unit. He was something of a Cajun
science geek with the extra strike against him of being management. At almost forty, he was clearly too old for Faith’s interest. And yet she liked him. A lot.
And not just because she felt loyal to him for hiring her.
The best way she could describe how comfortable she felt around Greg was that he had a quiet presence. Kind of like her roommate Evan did. Besides, like so many of the people who worked evidence, Greg often smelled of balloons. It was because of the latex gloves, Faith knew. But the scent had remarkably pleasant, innocent associations, all the same.
“I’m fine,” she assured him. He stood beside the desk where she sat. Although his brown eyes seemed concerned behind his wire-rimmed glasses, Greg didn’t come at her with the shield of sympathy that so many other people in the office had…probably because, despite being a nice guy, he remained distracted by the job.
“Even coroners aren’t cavalier about the bodies of people they know,” Greg insisted. “People you know are different. They’re supposed to be.”
“I’m okay.”
“You should probably take some time off.”
“No. Really. I kind of like being here.”
Greg’s eyebrows rose as he looked around them. Unlike those on television, the crime-scene unit consisted of four rooms and one small hallway, crowded into too little floor space on the third floor of a generic municipal building. Faith’s desk, up front, was open to a room with three other desks and two crowded worktables. Books overflowed on shelves. The place smelled like a cross between a library and a science lab, with an undercurrent of death because of the morgue down the hall.
“I’ve been handling the practical stuff,” Faith tried to explain. “Calling her family—Krystal was from East Texas. Packing her belongings for when they come. Contacting a local funeral director to make arrangements for after…”
Her need for a deep breath surprised her. So much for Krystal’s lessons in stress management through breath control. Maybe Faith wasn’t so okay after all.
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