Contact

by Evelyn Vaughn

  Easygoing as ever, Greg nodded and turned his chair to better watch the concert, signaling the waitress for more coffee.

  Faith headed out onto the deck, which was marginally quieter now that the rooftop calliope had stopped tooting out its carousel melodies. She hurried up an open stairway, away from the sound of the jazz band but closer to the churning wash of the two-story paddlewheel not far beneath her. At least the signal was stronger here, standing by the outside railing. She dialed her home number, covered her outside ear with her hand to block out the worst of the noise, and waited.

  The phone rang.

  It rang a second time.

  It rang a third time.

  The line clicked as the answering machine picked up. It was Evan’s voice, following Tamara Corbett’s theory of safe answering machines. “Hi! You’ve reached our apartment, but you haven’t quite reached us. If you want to leave a message for—”

  Faith disconnected, still nervous. Her roommates were psychics. There was a killer on the loose who murdered psychics and who might very well know his way around their apartment.

  After only a moment’s hesitation, she dialed a new number.

  “Detectives Division,” answered a tired voice, on the second ring. Behind him the distinct bustle of the station sounded almost as loud as the paddlewheel Faith was muffling.

  “I need to talk to Detective Max Leonard, please.” Faith winced. Well, she couldn’t very well ask for Roy. Not the Roy who’d glared hatred at her as she left the station. Not the Roy who wanted to burn her ass.

  Max had recently transferred from Baton Rouge, he’d said. If Faith had a chance at objectivity with anybody…

  “Hey, Boulanger, comment ça va?” That was Cajun for “how’s it going?” Max must be reading the caller ID.

  “It’s not Greg, Detective Leonard. It’s Faith Corbett. I have a favor to ask.”

  “Really?” Max pitched his voice a little louder, stiff with the awareness of an audience. “How can I help you, Ms. Corbett?”

  The expletives that sounded near him were unmistakably Roy’s. Faith ignored them and the distinct click once the expletives stopped, which meant Roy had picked up on another line.

  “I’m worried about my roommates,” she continued, hating that she had to ask for help but unwilling to risk her friends. Especially if the killer was really after the fictional Cassandra. “They aren’t answering the phone. Hopefully they’re just working the Square, but it’s rare for all three of them to be out during the midday heat, and if somebody got into my apartment once, to see what I had in my closet…. I know you don’t owe me any favors, but since whoever was in the apartment might be the psychic killer—you know, since he called me Cassandra….”

  She stopped talking in order to listen closer to the strange shuffling on Max’s end. When Max spoke, it was halting, as if he was going off someone else’s script. “Why is it you can’t check on them yourself, sweetheart? Are you afraid to go in alone?”

  Okay, so his dose of niceness came with some condescension.

  “I’m stuck on a riverboat.”

  “A riverboat?”

  “Greg took me to lunch. Look, I’m worried, and since the psychic killer is yours and Roy’s case, I was hoping you’d check it out. It’s simple behavioral psychology. If he’s been there once, he’ll go back. The only way to catch—”

  But she didn’t finish her sentence.

  She caught a whiff of danger on the air—of power, of lust, of evil—only as something dropped past her line of sight.

  Something red.

  The serial killer drew the cord taut, catching the phone, then yanking Faith’s chin up and backward. The dropped phone skittered away from her, over the side—and into the churning wash of the twenty-five-ton paddlewheel.

  Chapter 18

  If Faith hadn’t been on the phone, she would be dead.

  As it was, the cord cut deeply against the underside of her chin. It cinched the heels of her hands, hands that had thankfully been against her ears, hard against her jaw. Hardened residue of dried blood bit into the skin of her wrists, her throat, and with it—

  Nessa’s horror that she would never see her mom again….

  Krystal’s surprise, her terror—and a sense of recognition. Chet?

  Oh, God. The horrible, gargling noise from her own throat as she lost her breath mingled with a borrowed memory of the noises Nessa and Krystal had made, and Penelope Lafayette, and the nameless first victim. Faith was dying four times at once, sliced deep with the immediacy of what those poor women had gone through, telegraphed into her through their blood. But she knew how to stop it, this time.

  At least, she knew how to stop the feedback.

  She dragged downward with her hands against the red cord, keeping it from crushing her airway completely. She snapped her head backward.

  Right into the killer’s face.

  A blast of light, the pain of impact, blinded her momentarily. A cough wheezed out of her, with nothing to replace it. But like before, like when she’d fought the gangbangers, striking out somehow blocked the influx of images. Now, blessedly, it was just her, some guy and the churning paddlewheel below them.

  Only one murder, hers, not the other four. Attempted murder. But damn it, she couldn’t breathe!

  Faith swung her head back again, impacted his face, and the universe reeled.

  The killer wailed wordless protest and pain, the sound wet with fresh blood. The rope dug deeper into her throat. Faith stomped down, hard, on the foot behind her, glad to feel her heel crunching across his toes. The rope dug deeper still. Faint with dizziness now, hurting and breathless, she slammed her head back a third time.

  Blackness threatened her vision from the outside in. Blackness and nausea. But this time, the killer stumbled.

  It was just enough for Faith to gasp a sharp, painful breath. She dropped to her knees, ducked her head, let her own body weight pull her free from under the slackened cord.

  Numb hands still caught in it, she rolled on the deck to face her bent assailant. Brown hair. Quiet eyes.

  The same man she’d seen at Celeste’s. The one Butch had been trying to ID when he’d died.

  The serial killer.

  His red cord had twisted cruelly around her hands, with her turn. She still didn’t let go. It wasn’t merely the best damned evidence she was going to get on the guy.

  It was this bastard’s weapon of choice.

  Still down, using her weight in their tug-of-war, she kicked at him. She wished her shoes were harder as she connected with his shins, with his knee, each impact lurching through her. She was losing the feeling in her hands, could see her fingers turning white from lack of blood. The killer wore protective leather gloves. He pulled the rope tighter, lifting her half off the deck with his strength. Despite the churning paddlewheel below, she could hear his distinct heartbeat now, the strange miss to its rhythm. His pheromones of conquest were turning rank with frustration.

  “Let go,” Faith ordered, surprised to hear how raspy her voice sounded. And she pulled something that her repeated head butts into his face had given her. “Chet.”

  His eyes widened. Faith could feel the bones in her hands crunching together under the twisted cord. Since kicking at him didn’t help, she slid her legs under her and rose, hard, right into him. He stumbled backward. She helped, with a full-body tackle.

  He fell back onto the deck. She landed on top of him and his unusual heartbeat, on purpose. She tried to dig her elbows into his chest, her knee into his privates, but her now-numb hands stayed trapped.

  Still playing tug-of-war with the murder weapon.

  For a moment, she could feel wetness on her face. Spray from the huge blue paddlewheel slicing past, mere yards below them. Then the killer rolled with her, slammed her against the railing—and one of Faith’s legs slid under the rail, right over the edge of the deck.

  Into the nothingness above the mighty Mississippi.

  Damn it! If she h
ad to be genetically engineered anyway, why couldn’t she have gotten the superstrength?

  Well, she hadn’t.

  But she’d gotten something. The killer—was his name really Chet?—thrust himself against her again in violence, in fear, in something even uglier. Faith’s hip slid over the sharp wooden edge of the deck.

  She could feel the paddlewheel’s spray across her ankle now.

  Using every bit of strength left in her arms, no longer able to tell she even had hands where the cord had cut off all feeling, Faith leveraged herself a few inches higher, drew the man closer and buried her bare face into his bare neck.

  And bit his jaw, like the vampires Krystal had feared.

  And now, now she got Chet.

  He’d gone off his antipsychotic meds.

  He’d been burning incense and scented candles. Their scent was almost as powerful on him as the scent of death.

  He’d spent time in an institution, where they’d taken his shoelaces. Now he had a room at his mother’s old house. Someone took care of him. His—

  Jealousy. Jealousy so sharp that it burned in her gut like a sympathy pain. Particularly jealousy of one person…the Master. A woman got naked for the Master once. She laughed at Chet when they caught him watching. “I’m psychic,” she’d said.

  He needed to be psychic. Nobody would laugh at him again.

  He needed her!

  With a wordless wail, he shook Faith away from his neck and shoved her, hard, more precariously across the slick wooden deck.

  Her other leg fell over the side of the boat. She lurched abruptly downward. Only her hands, tangled in the cord he held, and her shoulders against the bottom rail kept her from falling. From the deck below, she heard someone scream.

  She held on in every possible way. “Who’s the Master, Chet?” It felt like talking past sandpaper. Her throat ached. She wanted to throw up.

  But at least she got words from him. “Shut up!”

  “Who was the woman? The one who laughed at you. Was she your first? The first one you killed?”

  “Shut up! You don’t know anything!”

  “I know everything!” Remembering Roy’s book of superstitions, Faith said, “This cord drains people of their energy, right? Well I’m draining your psychic energy, Chet. Right now. Every drop you got from Krystal. Every drop you got from Nessa. If you don’t let go, you won’t have any left at all.”

  She was lying, but it worked.

  “No!”

  “They’ll put you back in the asylum.” God. She actually felt cruel, saying it. As twisted and evil as this man was….

  But what was her alternative? “They’ll laugh at you.”

  “Shut up!”

  She tried to swing one leg back up onto the deck. “Going.”

  Chet shook his head.

  “Going,” she repeated. “Every bit of stolen power. I’ve got Penelope’s now, too. You’re just some weak, stupid boy again, Chet. Stop this before I get everything.”

  Their gazes held, linking them just as tightly as the cord.

  “Gone,” said Faith.

  And with a howl of despair, Chet let go of the cord. He vaulted over the white railing and dropped.

  Released, Faith dropped too. Body weight slid her downward. Wildly, she swung her arms at a rail-post and, with a lurch, she caught it with her elbows and hung.

  Only then could she look. Had he dived into the river, into the deadly wash of the paddlewheel?

  No. He’d swung lithely to the deck beneath her.

  Swung, landed and started running.

  She swung, too—just as she saw Greg racing up the stairs, horror on his usually inexpressive face. “Faith!”

  One thing at a time. Faith wasn’t as graceful about it as Chet had been. Her hands were still bound, still deadened. But after two swings she arched through the air and landed, only slamming one hip against the second-deck railing. She barely had time to bruise a knee as she fell before she was up and running after the killer.

  Trying to twist her hands free at the same time.

  Like before, when the killer had fled Celeste’s, Chet’s main method of escape was to push past other people, using them as obstacles to her pursuit. He slammed an old woman against one of the dining room windows and sent a toddler sprawling perilously close to the boat’s edge—that cost Faith more time as she slowed, before she saw that the child’s mother had snatched him to safety.

  By then, Chet was almost to the bow.

  Faith tore after him, finally wrenching one hand free of the cord. Jazz music from the dining room, “When the Saints Come Marching In” taunted her with its jaunty familiarity. Chet didn’t have much choice of where to go. He skidded down the open stairway, rabbiting toward the bottom deck.

  Faith slid down the painted railing for speed, landed on the polished wood floor, and kept after him. He was heading for the stern again, the stern and the turning, thumping wheel, which looked even larger from here than it had from above. He stopped before he got there and spun, his head pivoting from Faith to the river to Faith.

  “Don’t do it,” she warned him, shouting over the churning wash. Feeling was starting to come back to her hands in agonizing throbs. She kind of wished it hadn’t.

  He shook his head. His jaw was bleeding where she’d bit him.

  “Even if you survive the wheel, the river will kill you. She won’t protect you, this time. She doesn’t give up her dead.” And we may never know who you were. Why you killed. Who your first victim was. We may never prove your guilt.

  Or my innocence.

  He shook his head again.

  “I’ll give you back some of your power!”

  Chet’s eyes widened, more disbelief than hope.

  “I’ve…cleansed it now.” Wow, was she making this up. “Like running it through a filter. Now it’s not just power, it’s good power. It won’t…” She tried to put words to the sense of desperation, of need, that she’d gotten off of him. “It will last better than the other times. It will taste better.”

  Chet took a quick step back. He was pressed against the rail now, paddles of the blue wheel rolling downward right behind him, like some wet, dizzying backdrop.

  Slowly, Faith lowered the red cord with one stiff hand and reached out with the other. “Come on. Look, you don’t have to steal my energy. I’m offering it. That’s how powerful I am.”

  And slowly, warily, the killer reached outward.

  His gloved hand closed around hers. But if she concentrated—

  He felt like pain. He felt like humiliation. Most frighteningly, he felt like a sucking void—there was a hole in him, a gaping, ragged hole where pieces of his humanity should have been, and they were gone. The parts that kept most people from killing just weren’t there.

  Their absence had turned him vicious, pain or no pain. He wasn’t safe for the rest of society. Ever.

  Maybe Chet saw something in her face as she fully comprehended that, comprehended that he could kill for reasons so foreign to her, he could never be predicted. That he would kill again and again. Or maybe this had just been a con. He spun and threw her against the railing, her head too close to the paddlewheel now.

  And Faith…she went somewhere dark herself. She threw herself against him, wrenching her hand free of his, hurling them both down onto the deck. She caught him across the throat with one arm as she landed on him. And before he could fight back, she drew the cord slowly across his face, where he could see it.

  His eyes widened in horrified recognition of who could take whose power now.

  “Goodbye, Chet,” Faith rasped.

  Then she slammed the flat of her hand into his nose, breaking it and knocking him unconscious.

  Not an hour later, Faith sat in the open back of an ambulance at the Toulouse Street Wharf. Her feet dangled, and her hands and throat were bandaged. She’d already been photographed from all angles by the police crew to support a charge of assault. Luckily she had no damage that required disrob
ing. The bruises on her hip and knee were from swinging around a riverboat like Tarzan, not from Chet. Her hands and her neck, though…

  They hurt. But nowhere near as badly as Krystal’s must have, or Nessa’s. The secondhand memories of what had happened to them clogged Faith’s throat, as surely as the swelling from her attack.

  Faith sincerely hoped assault was not what they nailed this guy for.

  She’d already watched one ambulance shuttle Chet off toward the Charity Hospital, complete with a police guard. Now she was watching Roy and Max—who still had the serial killer case whether or not Roy had gotten back onto Butch’s—as they interviewed fellow passengers. Watching, and eavesdropping.

  They asked the standard questions. “Did you notice anything unusual?”

  “Did you see the man any earlier in the cruise?”

  “When did you see the blonde leave the dining room?”

  Sometimes they tried to trip someone up, just to confirm their story. “So the girl pushed little Timmy out of the way? Oh, okay. Yeah. It was the guy who did that.”

  Faith wasn’t completely comfortable with the direction some of the questions took—or their answers. The Antebellum had been nowhere near full, not for an afternoon tour on a workday in the blazing August heat. Chet had been surprisingly careful; nobody had seen him attack her, and people had only noticed the scuffle once Faith’s legs appeared dangling off the third deck. Even Greg had had to admit that he didn’t actually see “the suspect” initially attack Faith. He’d only seen them fighting.

  “But come on,” he’d added loyally. “Either he was trying to push her off or to pull her back up. Which do you think’s more likely?”

  “I wasn’t there,” said Roy bluntly. “So what happened next?”

  What happened next, by all accounts, was that Faith chased the suspect down two decks, including one flight of stairs, and then broke his nose. The authorities’ best proof that Faith had been the victim of this encounter, and not the perpetrator, was her word and the ligature marks on her throat. And considering the circumstances of the morning, Faith didn’t expect the police to give a lot of credit to her word.