Contact

by Evelyn Vaughn

“You’ll have to.” Even the cops looked at Faith when she said that. She smiled, shrugged, turned her back and lowered her voice. “I’m not moving home with you, Mom. I’m perfectly safe here.”

  “Your roommate’s dead and you were attacked in your own courtyard!”

  “I doubt they’re related.” No matter what Absinthe said. “The MOs are completely different.”

  “Don’t talk as if you’re some expert on law enforcement. You’re a desk clerk!”

  “Don’t minimize what I do.” Maybe it wasn’t what Faith hoped to be doing in five years, but it was a start. “And don’t pretend I’m a child anymore. I’m staying here, and that’s final. The two attacks aren’t related. Really. And the police said they’ll make more frequent patrols near us. We’re locking the courtyard gate when they leave. Anyway, that’s why I’m running late and why I wanted to know how important it is that we talk tonight. If it’s really that immediate, I’ll take a cab.”

  Tamara snapped at the chance. “Bring a suitcase.”

  “And once we’ve talked I’ll come right back, no matter how late it is. But if it will wait until tomorrow, why don’t I come over after work? In the daylight?”

  For a long time her mother was silent. “Tomorrow will be fine.”

  Faith wasn’t that surprised. Tamara had her faults, but not caring about Faith’s safety was hardly one of them. “You sure?”

  “Yes, you come tomorrow evening, while it’s light. I’ll make pork chops.”

  “Thanks.” Faith turned to see another man and woman appear in their doorway. These were NOPD detectives—she could tell by the world-weary looks and plain clothes. Not Roy or Butch. This was their night off. “I should probably go.”

  “Wait. I won’t keep you, baby, I promise,” Tamara insisted.

  “But…do you think there’s even a chance someone could have hired these men to attack you?”

  The question came from so far out in left field, Faith had trouble processing it. “They attacked Evan. I just got in the way.”

  “Never mind,” said Tamara quickly. “We’ll talk tomorrow night, then. You take care of yourself, promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “You promise.”

  “Cross my heart,” Faith insisted. Then, after the requisite I-love-you’s, she turned to the detectives.

  Roy’s presence hit the office like a storm front. As soon as he pushed through the doors, Faith’s head came up from where she’d been reading a poorly written form—some cops had handwriting second only to doctors. She was almost surprised that the other papers weren’t blowing off her desk.

  “So I go by the department gym to lift some weights before shift,” announced Detective Chopin to her, as if they’d been in the middle of a conversation. He grabbed someone’s desk chair as he stalked by, whirled it in a circle, planted it in front of Faith’s desk and straddled it from behind. He braced his forearms across the chair back, leaned over them and fixed Faith with that deep gaze of his. “This beat cop from third shift’s working off his night. He says, ‘Wait till you hear this one. This little blond number, she takes down five gangbangers.’ He describes the whole thing. We’re both laughing, ha ha, at the idea of some cutie wiping the floor with these delinquents.”

  Faith knew he was describing her, but she waited for the punch line, watching those eyes. And those wrists. And those fresh-from-the-gym arms. He’d showered after his workout; she could smell his fresh deodorant soap along with the coffee. His hair was still damp. She felt an internal fluttering again, half-push, half-pull. He made her uncomfortable, and she still wasn’t sure what to do with that.

  Roy’s fake expression of amusement sobered, just like that. “Then he tells me the address,” he growled.

  She shrugged.

  “I say, ‘Hey, I think she’s the one who stood me up last night.’ He says, ‘That should be a relief.’”

  “I didn’t stand you up,” Faith pointed out. “I called first.”

  “Yeah, that makes it all better. You took down five gangbangers?”

  “No, I took down three gangbangers. One of them wasn’t fighting us, and Evan knocked another one over.”

  “Oh.” His taut nod radiated sarcasm. “Well, that’s different.”

  “Why are you angry at me?”

  “’Cause the way I read the report, you could’ve just stepped back inside and called 9-1-1.”

  “And left Evan alone with them? That’s no alternative at all. He’s the one they were after.”

  “I’m thinking not for long they weren’t.”

  “You’re interrupting my work,” Faith announced, and turned back to her data entry.

  “Bernie.” By thigh power alone, ignoring her rolled eyes at the strange nickname, Roy propelled the chair he straddled, a chair without wheels, against her desk. A metallic clang sounded, and a pen rolled off from the impact. “Appearance is everything to those guys. They aren’t going to like it that a girl beat them up.”

  “Not my problem.”

  “It will be when they try to even the score.”

  She looked up at that. “Are you trying to scare me?”

  He widened his eyes, like, duh. “Is it working?”

  “No. Go away now.”

  “I’m here to see Boulanger.”

  “I could tell.” She gestured to her desk, the only thing separating her from his intensity and the corded arms under his T-shirt. “He doesn’t seem to be on my desk right now. Maybe you should try his office.”

  “You’re cute when you’re a smart-ass, but I’m not sure I need the agony of dating someone who’s gonna end up on that slab back there.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I stood you up, isn’t it?”

  “You still haven’t told me why.” He spread his arms. “What’s not to like?” His mix of arrogance and self-deprecation made her smile, despite herself.

  “Maybe you’re too pushy. Maybe you scare me.”

  She’d meant the second comment to be teasing, but the truth of it struck her uncomfortably. The way Roy scowled, it didn’t strike him so well either. She remembered how she’d acted when he’d grabbed her in the rain. Damn.

  “I don’t know what to do about that,” he said, leaning back in the chair, studying her. “It’s not like you can’t take me, right?”

  She couldn’t help it. She eyed his broad shoulders, his pumped biceps, his big hands. Just thinking about trying to fight him off gave her the shakes.

  But not in the same way fighting off gang members had. Not even necessarily in a bad way.

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” she said, hiding her gaze by looking down at her paperwork.

  “Looks like you did a job on your knuckles. So where’d you learn to fight like that, anyway?”

  “Tulane.” And maybe from my Dad. She’d been thinking about it a lot, since the previous night. Could a person inherit her father’s fighting skills, without ever having met him? If her father could fight, why hadn’t her mom mentioned it before?

  Luckily, Greg arrived. “Hey, Roy. What’s up? I didn’t know you were on this early.”

  “I’m here to ask you about the note.” Roy stood. “And I heard Faith here was heading to the station on her lunch hour to ID the mug shots of a few of her victims. I thought I might walk with her.”

  “And what,” challenged Faith, amused that he was telling this to Greg before he mentioned it to her. “Carry my books?”

  “Yeah, and if my newspaper route pays off, maybe I’ll even buy you a soda. Grow up. It’s damage control because you’re a magnet for bad guys, is what it is.” He talked big, but she sensed his concern was real. That had to concern her, too.

  “Do you mean just the gangbangers?” she asked. “Or do you know something else about the serial killer?”

  Roy planted both hands on her desk and bent over them, his face uncomfortably close to hers. Coffee. Soap. “There’s no proof he’s a serial killer. If he were, we’d have to bring in the feebies, and I’m not
going there without more than one body.”

  Feebies were the FBI, whose jurisdiction included serial killers. Cops and the FBI weren’t exactly a model for interagency cooperation.

  “He may have been at the psychic fair to scout victims,” Faith insisted. “He says he’ll kill again.”

  “Which makes him a potential—” Instead of finishing, he rolled his eyes in defeat, straightened and nodded at Greg.

  “Tell her, will you? The chance of this one whack-job going after her is a lot lower than the chance of an entire gang trying to recover their lost dignity.”

  Greg, looking from one of them to the other, said, “Faith told me about the attack last night. You don’t think it’s connected to her dead roommate?”

  “No, but I’m not above using it as an excuse to talk her into dating me.” Waving her away, Roy headed for Greg’s office. “All likely agony aside.”

  “She doesn’t date co-workers,” Greg said.

  “Are we co-workers?”

  But then Greg shut the door. Not that it kept Faith from hearing, if she made the least effort. But since the only reason Roy was talking about her was to annoy her, he immediately changed subjects to something more important.

  The killer’s note.

  Faith went back to her data entry, but she worked slowly, quieting the sound of her fingers on the keys to better follow snatches of what was going on in Greg’s office. Apparently the handwriting analysis had shown that the writer might be mentally disturbed, but he hid it well. Roy said that was good news, but he was being sarcastic. He admitted that they’d questioned Krystal’s boyfriend from the previous year but had to let him go; he wasn’t the killer. They had no idea who the killer was.

  “We got nothing,” Faith heard him admit. “Butch has resorted to listening to some psychic contact he’s got.”

  “What, Cassandra?” Greg laughed. “I talk to Butch, too.”

  “An anonymous contact is bad enough, but an anonymous psychic contact?” Roy swore crudely. “I say if they aren’t willing to meet you face-to-face, they aren’t worth it.”

  “When you’ve exhausted all the possibilities…” Greg reminded him, a shrug in his voice.

  “And in the meantime we’ve got a bunch of so-called readers who are either scared out of their wits or not scared enough, and a few hangers-on like that assistant of yours who swings either direction. Hey. Tell me something.”

  As Roy lowered his voice, Faith’s fingers slowed to a stop on her computer keyboard.

  Then he asked, “You ever talk to her mom? What’s up with that one?”

  Greg said something about only speaking to Mrs. Corbett once, when Faith was out, but Faith couldn’t hear clearly anymore, not through the buzz of understanding that filled her head. Roy thought her mother was crazy? When had he talked to her mom?

  But the answer to that was suddenly obvious. It must have been last night, when Faith cancelled the date. That must be why Tamara, in a panic, had called Faith.

  Faith stood, torn in two directions. On the one hand, she couldn’t call Roy out on this without letting him and Greg know she’d overheard. So much for banter, bulging biceps and the possibility of him carrying her imaginary books.

  On the other hand…

  Damn. The only other alternative was to pretend she didn’t know about it, and that was no alternative at all.

  She stalked to Greg’s office and hurled the door open, not bothering to knock, startling the hell out of the two men inside.

  “You called my mother?”

  Chapter 7

  By the time Faith stepped off the St. Charles streetcar a few blocks from her mother’s Garden District residence that afternoon, she felt physically ill.

  Not just because of the shouting match she’d had with Roy Chopin, one that had ended with them writing each other off for good. Not just because of how bad her behavior had made her look in front of Greg, who wasn’t just her boss but someone whose opinion she very much valued.

  Not even because of the time she’d spent in the horrible atmosphere of the police station, turning pages of mug shots that carried energy of countless victims before her—though that had been its own ordeal.

  She felt sick because, without knowing what her mother would confess, Faith had apparently read enough, subconsciously, to know she wouldn’t like it. She’d suspected that, avoided that, for far too long. Her increasing awareness of Tamara’s secrets was partly why she’d moved out.

  And now it was time to face them.

  The Garden District was the most elegant representation of old New Orleans, a showcase for mansions and arching oak trees. Moving there from Kansas City had been like stepping into a version of Gone With the Wind in which the north had lost. From the streetcar stop, Faith passed several stately homes—the Deveaux Villa, the Bernard House—before she reached the Manning Mansion, a showplace surrounded by iron fencing, fronted with Doric columns and accompanied by a cluster of historic outbuildings. One, which used to be the white-bricked carriage house, had been adapted to a separate residence at about the same time the Mannings had traded their four-footed horsepower for the kind that took gasoline.

  That’s where Faith’s mother lived, where Faith had lived during her college years. Mr. Manning had old money and political clout, but he wanted to be an author…except, he had no interest in actually writing. Tamara was a talented writer. She sometimes wrote as Tammy Betts, but her favorite job was ghosting for clients such as Manning. When her agent hooked the two of them up, room and board in such a prestigious neighborhood had been one of Tamara’s main reasons for taking the job.

  As long as Michael Manning’s historic murder mysteries kept selling, Tamara had one hell of a zip code. She still couldn’t understand why Faith didn’t value locale the way she did. But there were some things Faith had never understood, either.

  Such as why her mother, clearly a talented writer, never took her own byline. And now, why a simple phone call from a police detective, on personal business, had thrown her into a panic.

  “I told her who I was,” Roy had insisted, annoyance at her accusations turning into temper. “I asked if you were there. She said ‘no,’ I said ‘thanks for your time.’ What’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal is, you scared her half to death!”

  “I noticed. And I gotta tell you, someone who scares that easy is guilty of something.”

  Which was exactly what Faith hadn’t wanted to hear, exactly why she couldn’t be reasonable with him, exactly why she’d pushed him into giving up on her.

  Because she knew, in her heart, that it was true. Her mother was guilty of something—worse, something concerning Faith. She didn’t want to hear it. Not from anybody. The consequences…

  Was it wrong to not want to know certain things?

  “Consider that and the way you are,” Roy had said.

  “What do you mean, ‘the way I am?’”

  “That not-liking-to-be-touched business. Makes me wonder what happened to you, if maybe you got touched wrong. Makes me wonder if you even know it, or if you were so young, you forgot. Makes me wonder if your mom hasn’t forgotten squat, so she gets freaky when a cop calls. And that makes me wonder if she’s the sort of woman who brings home guys who don’t just abuse her but spread the joy. That’s what I mean. But hey, what do I know? I just do this for a living.”

  And this from a man who’d never even met her mother! Faith had told him exactly what he could do with what he did for a living, and that had been the end of that.

  Except for the fact that she couldn’t dismiss his accusations as easily as she could dismiss him.

  “Mom?” she called, after unlocking the two dead bolts with her keys and opening the door. “It’s me, Faith.”

  “You’re here early.” Tamara came out from the back office, looking relieved. She was a small woman with dark, curly brown hair and startlingly pale-blue eyes. The carriage house apartment was charming—exposed brick interiors, copper pipes
running across the ceiling like some kind of modern art, regular panes alternating with stained glass in the windows. Tamara, who’d always had the skill of seeming to fit in anywhere, matched the home beautifully. “Is everything all right?”

  Faith meant to say that sure, everything was great. But when her mother enveloped her in a soft hug, a mom hug, no way could she lie. Her mom was one of the few people in her life that Faith could touch easily, probably because she’d done it so often that she’d adapted to the sensations, like a person learns to tune out a permanent smell or a continuous noise. That made her Faith’s sole source for easy contact. Faith didn’t want to lose that.

  “No,” she mumbled into Tamara’s shoulder. “I mean, I’m okay,” she hurried to add, when her mother drew back in alarm. “But everything else…”

  “Your murdered roommate,” guessed Tamara. “And that horrible attack last night.”

  Faith laughed. “Mom, I haven’t told you anything about the attack except that it happened. Why would you describe it as horrible?”

  “Because anybody who would dare hurt my baby is by definition horrible.” Which was exactly why Roy’s accusations were so crazy…. Well, some of them. “Come into the kitchen with me. I’ll start dinner.”

  “The detective who called you last night…” Faith hated even mentioning Roy, but she had to know. “Is he what scared you?”

  Tamara, who’d been unhooking pans from the hanging rack, paused. Although Faith had long ago gotten in the habit of ignoring her mother’s vital signs, if only from courtesy, she now made a point to notice. Tamara’s pulse sped up. Her pale eyes darted to the left. “You know that a detective called?”

  “Yes, Mom. He said his name was Roy Chopin, right?”

  Tamara nodded, tightly, and continued to get out the makings for pork chops. “But he said you broke a date with him. He had to be mistaken. You wouldn’t date a—”

  “A cop?” supplied Faith. “Why wouldn’t I? I work with them every day.”

  “Which I still hate. You know their reputation around here.”

  Faith had heard the rumors from the mid-90s. Better to be pulled over by a carjacker than a New Orleans cop, people had once joked. But she and her mother had lived halfway across the country back then. “The city’s been working to change that for a decade, Mother.”