Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Nevada Barr

  "Fuck!" A fist slammed into the plywood with such violence the rest of them jumped. "There's got to be something! The pedophiles find kids somehow, for shit's sake!" Jordan was back with his redundant vocabulary.

  "You know Les Bonnes Filles? That five-star boutique hotel between St. Peter and St. Louis up toward Rampart?" Tanya asked slowly, as if reluctant to divulge the name.

  Everyone but Anna and Clare nodded.

  "I used to get work out of there."

  "No shit!" Star exclaimed. "Our little college mama hooked for a living?" She laughed. "Now that was worth staying after school to hear."

  "Not for a living," Tanya said.

  "For pin money," Clare suggested.

  "For fun," Tanya said and glared at them, defying anyone to pass judgment.

  Nobody did. They were all denizens of the glass house in Dick's that night.

  "The place has a high-end clientele--rooms run four hundred and up a night, and there's no gym and no parking to speak of. What they sell is service. I don't know if the hotel doesn't know about it or just pretends not to, but the head concierge has a thriving little referral business. I don't know what-all services he's got on his speed dial, but it might be worth a shot. Pervs come in all financial brackets."

  "Thanks," Clare said sincerely.

  "Don't use my name," Tanya said as she reeled in her scarf from Candy's fingers and stood to go.

  "I won't," Clare said.

  Anna wouldn't if she didn't have to.

  Jordan might just for the hell of it.

  Tanya left, twitching her scarf like a cat's tail.

  "When are you going to do that thing to me and give me my hundred dollars?" Candy demanded.

  "Tomorrow when we have had some sleep and haven't had any beer," Clare said. "What time do you get up?"

  "Noon," Candy said.

  "Try three thirty or four," Star said.

  Candy stuck her tongue out.

  "I'll be over in the afternoon," Clare said, and the meeting was adjourned.

  Candy left with Star and Delilah. Anna and Clare remained where they were, sipping the last of their beers. Anna's eyes were so heavy and so gritted with sad lives and cigarette smoke that, if she listened carefully, she fancied she could hear the skritching when she blinked. The fatigue that earlier excitements had banished was back, but in the version where one is too tired to sleep. She had expected little from the dancers. As it was, Tanya had given them a direction to try; that was more than she'd hoped for. Still, the sense of letdown and the enormity of the task blossomed in the dregs of the night.

  Clare dug another nonfiltered Camel from her pack of cigarettes. Anna watched as she went through the ritual of tapping and lighting, then pinched a piece of tobacco off her tongue. "You know a mistake a lot of actors make?" Clare asked.

  Anna said nothing.

  "When they smoke they flick tobacco off their tongues, but they smoke filters. No tobacco. Makes me crazy."

  "Speaking of crazy," Anna said. "Who smokes? Jordan or Clare?"

  "He smokes more than I do," Clare said defensively. If she found the question--or her answer--odd, Anna saw none of it in her face.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Anna and Clare left Dick's by the front door, Clare double-locking it behind them. Even at 5:00 A.M. Bourbon Street was not devoid of life. As the last of the revelers were staggering back to their hotel rooms and the bartenders and dancers were counting their tips, the Quarter's distinctive cleaning vehicles were launching an assault. Small, shiny black three-wheelers with silver-white Texas longhorns emblazoned across the sides, they invaded like an army of dung beetles, sweeping up and washing away another long night's ordure. They dropped down a block for the more pleasant walk along Royal.

  Toward Dumaine, where the classic iron fence wrought in the shape of cornstalks kept guard over the gently decaying old hotel of the same name, a huge rat trundled down the gutter.

  He was sleek and fat and unafraid, putting Anna in mind of Templeton in Charlotte's Web.

  "God, I hate rats," Clare said. Jordan flipped his cigarette butt at the little beast. "Did you hear a year or so back about rats eating that baby down here?"

  "I did. Maybe the baby was dead before the rats came on the scene." She doubted that was true, but she shared it because, since Templeton was the only bona fide fur-bearing wildlife she'd seen in a while, she felt duty bound to protect and defend him.

  The farther from the tourist area they walked, the darker the streets grew. Vintage streetlights were right for the city but didn't cast much light, and what they did was absorbed into green-gold halos of mist around the lamps. Fog had come in off the river, bringing with it a glamour that cloaked the historic quarter in timelessness, the illusion heightened by the distant clop of horses' hooves as one of the carriage drivers came into the Quarter to do whatever a coach driver might do in the predawn respite.

  "Hey."

  A whisper out of the dark. Whispers were almost impossible to locate directionally; too much air and too little sound for the eardrums to separate out the niceties.

  To either side of the street were the houses New Orleans was known for: shotguns and shotgun duplexes with steps to raised doorways, deep porches, barred shutters, brick alleyways between the houses no more than a yard wide. Regardless of the city's ambient light, there were a whole lot of darks left.

  Anna stopped Clare while they were at least a baseball bat's reach from the shadows.

  "Up here, shit-for-brains." The whisper had become a croak. Rude as it was, the insult bespoke a familiarity that allowed Anna to let her guard down a fraction of an inch. She and Clare followed this slightly more robust vocalization back to the man making it.

  "Hey, Danny," Clare said. At the top of a stoop, crowded into a portico that would not have been deemed spacious by a Labrador retriever, at least three of Jordan's punk pals had crashed in a tangle of limbs and ragged cloth and bits of metal poking out of inked-on skin.

  "Step into my office," Danny said. A hand with long broken fingernails and ingrained dirt floated out of the darkness. A finger crooked, and Anna couldn't but admire the man's flair for the dramatic. Edward Gorey's works as performance art. The steps were cement with low cement banisters flaring into flat circles at the bottom. Clare sat on one; Anna propped her foot on the other. She was not yet secure enough to compromise her ability to run away.

  "You have something for me or not?" came a snarly voice, and Anna corrected her earlier assumption. It was not Clare who'd taken a seat at the bottom of the stairs, it was Jordon. Having witnessed again the seamlessness with which Clare shed one skin and slipped on another, Danny's act paled in comparison, somewhere south of walk-on and north of chorus boy.

  "Tinka here--" Danny's hand, a pale spidery smudge in the nest of punks, lifted the head of a girl sleeping on his lap. It looked as if he lifted it by the hair, but surely not, Anna thought. "Tinka spotted your yellow jacket for you." Two black holes appeared in the gray oval as Tinka opened her eyes.

  "Ungh," she said, and Danny gently lowered her head back onto his thigh.

  "So you said we could have drugs, money, whatever we wanted," Danny said.

  Jordan lit a cigarette. He moved his wrist as if to offer Danny a smoke, then changed his mind and tucked the pack back into his pocket. "What do you want?" he asked when he'd gone through his routine of breathing toxins and pinching bits of tobacco off the tip of his tongue.

  Watching this process, Anna could understand why, back when sex wasn't dangerous and cigarettes were still sophisticated, so many actors in so many movies smoked so many cigarettes. The ritual of lighting and puffing gave the audience time to enjoy the nuances brought to the screen. Despite the dim light, Anna had watched Jordan slide from interested to deadly bored. Or maybe just plain deadly.

  "Why, I want what everybody wants, man, I want it all. Drugs and money and money for drugs." Danny smiled. Anna caught the glint of his teeth through the beard and general dinginess. The guy had
to brush regularly to keep his teeth that white. Maybe good oral hygiene was his only failing in his chosen profession.

  "What have you got for me?" Jordan asked on an exhaled stream of smoke that curled up into the fog illuminated by the streetlight.

  "I told you. Tinka saw the guy in the jacket. How many assholes can there be with leather jackets the color of a lemon?"

  "Saw him where?"

  "Money first, man." The hand drifted out of the shadows again, palm up, as if he were feeding the birds or checking for rain.

  "You haven't given me shit," Jordan said in bored tones.

  For once, Anna was glad Jordan, and not Clare, was at the helm. Clare would have been turning her pockets inside out, too desperate for any scrap of information to negotiate.

  "When did Tinka see him?" Anna asked. Both Jordan and Danny ignored her.

  After another minute of tobacco and testosterone, Jordan said, "When did Tinka see him?"

  Anna would have rolled her eyes had anybody been interested enough to notice.

  "I don't know. Midnight maybe," Danny replied.

  "Where?" Jordan asked as casually as Clare would let him.

  "End of Bourbon, near Canal. We'd been up there on the bikes--"

  "Were you with her?"

  "Nah. I'd--"

  "Did she follow him?" Jordan asked. "See where he went?"

  "Jesus, man! Back off. Tinka!" Danny took his annoyance out on the sleeping--or otherwise unconscious--girl, jerking his leg until her head bounced off his knee. Tinka pushed herself up with unsteady arms, and the jittering leg smacked her hard on the nose.

  "Whuh the fuh . . ." she muttered, struggling to a seated position and patting her nose. Her hands were encased in gloves with the fingers cut off, and in the shadowy entryway it created the disturbing illusion of white grubs congregating in the middle of her face.

  "What'd yah hit me for?" she whined.

  "Jordan asked me to," Danny said, and his clean white smile flashed in the dark. "Tell him about the yellow jacket."

  Tinka blinked. A trickle of blood, black as tar, trickled from her nose. The punks were wasting their time panhandling, Anna thought. They could make serious money just lying around in dark corners along the Vampire Tour route.

  "I saw him," Tinka mumbled.

  "Did you follow him?" Jordan asked.

  "Yeah. He went into the McDonald's on Canal."

  "And after that?"

  "I dunno. I was eating fries somebody left, and some fucking bitch threw me out."

  Thrown out of McDonald's. Anna hoped the girl would find her way up in the world--at least to being tossed out of Applebee's or T.G.I. Friday's.

  "You better take what we got, because you don't have much time to catch up with this jerk-off you're so hot on," Danny said.

  Anna's flagging interest was doing its best to ally with a sleepless night and fog her brain. This remark brought her back to full alert.

  Jordan perked up, too, if staring at the tip of a burning cigarette could be said to show an increase in cerebral activity. Time was the enemy Clare had nightmares about. Anna knew it ran out fast for stranger-abducted children. Most were dead within hours of the abduction. Few lasted days. It was the rare child who was allowed to survive to adulthood and, in many ways, not the luckiest.

  "Why is time running out?" Anna asked when it became apparent Jordan was locked into a paralysis of hope or fear, or simply the grip of Clare's fingers around his esophagus.

  Danny didn't look at her. Since the question was clearly one he wanted to answer, he directed his reply to Jordan. "It's getting hotter by the day. Eventually even the toughest arbiter of bad taste is going to have to leave his sartorial signature at home."

  Anna wondered which Ivy League college Danny had dropped out of when he became a traveler and why he wanted them to know it.

  Jordan flipped his cigarette butt into the street. Anna cringed inwardly. Violent crime was one thing. Littering was another. There was no motive for littering, nothing to gain. Under certain circumstances crime could be considered a career choice. Littering was just a character flaw.

  Ignoring her as he'd been doing so stunningly since Clare had subsided at the advent of the nest of gutter punks, Jordan reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a square of white paper. Unfolded, it was about twelve by twelve inches. After smoothing it carefully on his knee, he held it up for Tinka to look at.

  Interested, Anna scooted up her side of the steps until she could see it as well. It was a pen-and-ink drawing of a face, a pretty good likeness to that of the man she'd chased when Mackie followed him, the man Clare had guessed was the one called Dougie. It was a face that was easy to remember and easy to caricature. The hair was thick and jet black and slicked down against the skull. His features resembled those of Elvis Presley, but they'd all been compressed into a narrow band between a low forehead and a short jaw.

  "This the guy?" Jordan asked.

  "Yeah," Tinka said, squinting through whatever drugs clouded her vision. "Maybe. Yeah, I guess."

  "Where did you get that?" Anna asked. For a moment she thought this question was going to be ignored as well, but Jordan decided to be civil.

  "An artist on the square drew it from my description."

  "It's good," Anna said.

  Jordan folded the paper and slipped it back into his pocket; then he took out a billfold that looked as if it had been stuffed in hip pockets for a decade or more. Anna admired the attention to detail. Knowing a new wallet would clash with Jordan's persona, Clare must have stolen or found it. Jordan took out two twenty-dollar bills, folded them in half lengthwise, and, with two fingers, held them up toward Tinka.

  Danny's hand intercepted the transaction, and the forty dollars vanished into the front of his coat.

  "You gave me nothing tonight," Jordan said evenly. "The money's for nothing. Next time give me something I can use." With that, he stood and slouched off, leaving Anna to trail behind, feeling about as surreal as a ghost, a real live dead ghost.

  Within a couple of blocks, Clare fought for and won supremacy again. Or, more likely, Jordan had abdicated for the time being. These changes of character were bothering Anna less and less. She wasn't sure that was a healthy development.

  "We do have nothing," Clare whispered. The whisper was broken, the end ragged. The woman was crying. Anna had watched a lot of people deal with weeping. Paul gathered them to him, and they felt safe and comforted. Molly let them cry it out in a supportive and therapeutic environment. Lisa, a woman she'd become friends with in Texas, broke down and cried with them, and they felt understood and less alone.

  Anna had never figured out what to do. She'd tried two of the three options, but it hadn't worked out all that well for her. Probably she was too prickly for the first and too impatient for the second. She'd never tried Lisa's method. It wasn't that Anna never cried; she just didn't like having witnesses.

  So she did what she always did; she pretended it wasn't happening. "We've got your forty dollars' worth," she said as if Clare were sniveling over the pocket change and not the lives of her children. Anna began ticking off the night's gains. "We have a lead on a man called the Magician from Delilah. It's weak, but it's a start. We've got the name of a high-end procurer from Tanya--the concierge at Les Bonnes Filles. We know Dougie has been to the quarter twice in seven days and that he ate at McDonald's. That suggests pattern. Pattern gives us hope we'll see him again and next time we'll follow him.

  "We've also got direction, which is more than we had when we started out this morning. Tomorrow, you'll hypnotize Candy and we may get something from that. Then you're going shopping."

  "Shopping?" Clare asked, confusion pulling her out of her funk.

  "Yes," Anna said. "We're moving Jordan uptown."

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Anna woke just before eleven. It had been years since she'd slept past seven in the morning and, most nights, she was in bed by ten. The 5:00 A.M. quitting time and the long m
orning's sleep, so reminiscent of her college days, left her with a not unpleasant sense of walking on the wild side. Following on the heels of this taste of youth was the realization of age: Time was running out. She snatched her shorts from the floor, wriggled into them, and cinched the belt. Pattering down the narrow stairs, she pulled on one of Paul's old sheriff's shirts, the patches cut off, and buttoned it before she grabbed her laptop and let herself out of the courtyard.

  At CC's, a hot latte on the table beside the laptop, she hooked into the Wi-Fi. Frederick had come through. She downloaded the files he'd sent and was home before noon. Sitting at the little patio table in the courtyard, she called 411 on her cell phone and got the number for Les Bonnes Filles. Clare had undoubtedly given Jordan not only a last name but a full history when she was creating the character. Anna had no idea what it was, so she made the reservation in the name of Jordan Sinclair. Maybe it was the name Clare that suggested it, but Anna thought it sounded like the name of a rich man, and she wanted the concierge to smell money.

  That done, she called her husband and let his love and the magic of the Arabica beans of her second latte bring her gently into the mellow spring in Geneva's courtyard. Mackie, Jordan's color-assisted dog, was outside and amused himself by watching turtles watching him.

  As she was saying good-bye to Paul, the complaining of the rusted gate on Jordan's side of the house cried across the bricks. By Mackie's exultant rush down the walkway, Anna guessed it was Clare returning from wherever she'd spent the morning.

  "Back here," Anna called.

  Clare, wearing Jordan's clothes but having cleaned up for her morning's work, came into the courtyard dragging a rolling suitcase with several bags hooked around the handle riding it piggyback. Her arms were filled with more bags, all with the Brooks Brothers logo on them.

  "Holy smoke," Anna said. "Brooks Brothers? You must be hemorrhaging money."

  "Five thousand six hundred forty-three dollars and eighty-seven cents," Clare said, dumping it all to the bricks and dropping her cheaply polyestered rump into the chair across the table from where Anna was nursing her coffee.