Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Nevada Barr

  When she'd first been drawn into Clare's search for the girls, she'd given it some thought, but not nearly enough. Aiding and abetting a fugitive wanted for a capital offense wasn't a casual crime. It was a stint-behind-bars kind of crime. Like the proverbial frog, Anna'd boiled herself to death one teensy illegal act at a time.

  Jail terrified her. Falling into the machinery of the legal system terrified her. Being at the mercy of lawyers terrified her. The thought of being incarcerated poured panic into her until her bones felt soft with it.

  Maybe she could tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and damn little of that--as an old cowboy she'd known growing up had been fond of saying. She could tell them that she'd met a man named Jordan who shared a courtyard with her, that she had gone to Bonne Chance with him because she was curious about what went on inside, that he had led her down the stairs to the whorehouse and she'd decided she'd be safer if she dressed as a worker. Then mayhem ensued.

  Sure, seasoned law enforcement officials would buy that without asking any embarrassing questions. Without realizing she did so, she buried her nose in Dana's soft hair and took some comfort from the sweet smell of a child.

  Try as she might, she couldn't remember just how or why she thought she would be able to get away with it. There'd been some vague notion of, should she and Clare succeed, just drifting quietly away unnoticed while Clare pretended never to have known her. Three dead policemen, a dead thug, a governess burned to death, a major structural fire, and a herd of costumed children had a way of shining the spotlight of the law on a girl.

  Would Paul come to see her on visiting days?

  Could she keep from killing herself long enough to get to visiting days?

  Hacking coughs and rattling voices brought Anna back into the courtyard, and she watched as Clare, carrying two children, Mackie at her heels, emerged from the gray fog of smoke like the Pied Piper, seven tiny children in pajamas and two teenagers, one with an infant in her arms, clustered around her.

  "Vee," she said, her smile wide and white in the sooty face. "Vee was in the nursery. Mackie found her."

  Anna didn't think she had a smile left in her but noticed she was grinning back.

  "This is Aisha," Clare said, indicating the second little girl in her arms, a bird-boned child with huge dark eyes.

  "Aisha, alive," Clare said.

  From inside the house came a roar, and smoke gusted through the French doors filling the courtyard.

  "The place is coming down," Anna said and struggled to her feet, Dana heavy against her side. "Help me," she ordered, and one of the older girls took Dana from her. "Hold hands," she said to the children, and, leaning heavily on the girl carrying Dana, Anna led the way toward the back of the courtyard where the men had herded the "jewels."

  Through the door in the brick was a sizable parking garage. The doors to the street were open, and whatever they'd intended to use to transport the children was gone. When the fire started, the driver must have panicked and gone, leaving the children to burn to death. In a confused clot the kids in their absurd costumes milled around; some sat on the concrete, some cried, some just stood mute and still.

  Together, Anna and Clare brought them out onto the sidewalk and across the street where the flames would not reach them. Sirens sounded loud in the distance. Fire trucks were coming.

  Anna started to sink down to sit on the curb. "Wait!" Clare cried. A single cab was meandering down Rampart. "Up," Clare said, grabbing Anna's arm and hauling her back to her feet. "You can't be found here." With the jacket she'd used to shield Dana, she covered Anna's bloody dress, then hailed the cab and helped her into it.

  Anywhere else, the cabbie would have been full of questions. In New Orleans, crowds, even of children, in costume at daybreak caused little comment.

  Logic, and the searing pain in Anna's side, would have had her ordering the cabbie to the nearest emergency room, but, by law, doctors had to report gunshot wounds. Anna returned to Geneva's, let herself into the garden, and made her painful way to the guest cottage. The governess's dress was stiff with blood and beginning to adhere to her body. She found scissors in a kitchen drawer and used them to cut it off. That done, she wet a dish towel and washed the blood from her hands, face, and side.

  When the wound was exposed, she was surprised to find it wasn't the black round hole left by a bullet but a deep gash. Pressing the edges gently, she could feel a foreign body lodged beneath the skin, as if a shard of glass had been broken off inside of her. The wound was still bleeding, but not copiously.

  Sacrificing another of Geneva's dish towels, she folded the cloth into a square and pressed it over the gash. The trek up the stairs to her bedroom took much of her remaining energy and started the blood flowing again. Leaning against the wall for support, she pulled on a pair of old khaki shorts and a shirt. By the time she got to Geneva's French doors, the edges of her vision had turned black and the world was beginning to swim sickeningly.

  "It's too early and you stink," Geneva said in welcome.

  "I've been hurt," Anna said. "Could you call me a cab?"

  It was after four when she came out of the anesthesia and the strange and troubled sleep that followed it. Her side was bandaged, her mouth tasted of burning plastic and bile, and she had to go to the bathroom. Clare sat in the blue plastic visitor's chair next to the curtain dividing the room. There wasn't a patient in the other bed, and three little girls, dressed in real little-girl clothes, played quietly on the white cotton blanket, a game involving the worn stuffed dog she'd seen on Clare's pillow, a metal water pitcher, and an emesis basin.

  Clare was showered and dressed in a flowing skirt and top she'd probably picked up at the French Market. The light fabric did little to cover the terrible thinness the past weeks had wrought on her form. The crown of thorns had been scrubbed from her forehead, and she wore lipstick.

  "You look like a girl," Anna croaked.

  Clare rose, poured water into a plastic cup, put a straw into it, and held it to Anna's lips.

  Anna took the cup, pulled the straw out, and drank.

  "You look like shit," Clare said kindly.

  "It wasn't a bullet," Anna volunteered. "It was a chunk of Dougie's rib."

  "God! I hope they loaded you up with antibiotics," Clare said. "Have you called your husband?"

  Anna hadn't. She'd been awake between the anesthesia and the nap--the doctor had told her about the bone fragment. She'd told him she'd fallen while running along the river walk, tumbled down the rocky side toward the river, and felt something gouge into her. He didn't believe her, but he didn't seem to believe much of what his patients told him and had neither the interest nor the time to try to ferret out the truth. There'd been time to call Paul then, but she hadn't gotten up the nerve.

  "You want to call him now?" Clare asked.

  "In a bit," Anna said.

  "Is he going to be pissed?" Clare asked.

  "In a word," Anna said. "What's happening with everything?" she asked to change the subject. "I take it you aren't going to be arrested for murder."

  Clare didn't laugh. "Believe it or not, it was a close thing. Cops--all cops--hate to be wrong. I was interrogated for over six hours. They stopped short of waterboarding, but just barely. You can't believe how bad they wanted to get me on something. I have to go back for another 'session' tomorrow."

  "The death of the police chief and his minions?"

  "It looks like I'll get a pass on that. I guess the brotherhood breaks down with corrupt locals and federal agents. They'll leave me alone if I keep my mouth shut. The statement given to the newspapers was that the girls had been kidnapped by a person or persons unknown and that I found them locked in the storage garage behind Bonne Chance. The 'unsub' "--Clare gave a wry smile at the jargon--"is suspected of setting fire to the warehouse to destroy evidence." Clare sat again. Her eyes never off the three children for long, she watched them dancing the dog around the pitcher. "The police came when the fire
trucks did. They got a guy driving a van that they think was the van they were going to transport the kids in. The FBI grabbed him, and maybe he'll talk. Nobody wanted to tell me much. I know the other children were taken to a shelter. They'll try to find their parents but aren't hopeful. Most of them were probably sold rather than kidnapped, and most of them are from out of the country. The two older girls who were watching Vee and the littlest kids were graduates of the whorehouse and shouldn't face any kind of prosecution."

  "The policemen and Dougie's bodies burned?"

  Clare nodded. "Yes, but they'll still probably be able to identify them. The fire department got the fire out fairly fast, from what I hear. I don't know what will be said of police participation. The agents who talked with me don't want to make too much of it yet. They want the man called the Magician. Evidently he's the core of the operation, him and two others they know of. David--" At the sound of their father's name, both Vee and Dana looked up hopefully, and Anna guessed Clare hadn't told them he was dead yet.

  "David was working with the FBI to find this Magician. He was doing everything he could to get Dana and Vee--and Aisha--back." This comment was for the three little girls, Anna guessed, so they would feel better about their father. After what they had suffered, it would be a comfort to know their daddy had never abandoned them.

  "Was that why your house--" Anna began, but Clare shook her head fractionally and looked at the girls. She gave them a smile. They went back to their game.

  Clare pulled her chair up close to the bedside and partially pulled the curtain between her and the children. Leaning her elbows on Anna's bed she said, in a voice scarcely louder than a sigh, "Yes. That's why the house was bombed. The FBI said David had told them a container holding illegal aliens was arriving in the harbor. He gave them the wrong dock number, and by the time they got there it was empty. They thought it was an honest mistake."

  "You don't?" Anna asked and was shushed though she hadn't said anything alarming.

  Clare went on in a faint whisper. "I think Aisha was arriving in that container. That's why David and Jalila rushed out to meet it. I think he wanted time to get her away before the FBI arrived. He lied so well the Feds didn't get there till after Dougie and Blackie had come and gone--there to harvest children. I think there were dead children in the container and Blackie and Dougie took them."

  "Why?" Anna asked, genuinely confused. The obvious and odious answer clicked in her brain, and she wished she hadn't asked.

  "Not that--God, at least I hope not that," Clare said, reading Anna's look of revulsion. "It's possible they switched Dana and Vee with the corpses. If the children weren't dead, I don't think they would have killed them."

  "Unless they were too 'broken' to be of any value," Anna said.

  "God," Clare said again. Shaking the idea from her as she might shake a spider from her hair, she went on. "The agent who talked with me did say they thought some men had followed David and Jalila to his apartment. Probably because they figured out David was exposing them. They killed Jalila and left her corpse in David's apartment so it would look like a domestic thing--David, me, and the lover. Then put David back in bed and fired the house. That's when I think they put the dead children in the house and took Dana and Vee to cover their losses."

  "Why--" Anna began, but Clare held up a hand, stopping her.

  "We're never going to know why they did what to whom, why they carted bodies all over hell and gone, unless Blackie tells us. My guess is Blackie and Dougie were trying to cover their tracks at the behest of their boss, who knew the Feds were closing in."

  For a while Anna digested the information. She hoped Blackie would cooperate with the FBI, hoped he would finger the rest of the ring, but had a feeling he might not live long enough to do it. Even if he lived and talked, Anna doubted he knew who the Magician was. That this creature was still out in the world sickened her. After a while she nodded toward the curtain. "Are the girls . . . okay?"

  Clare nodded. "So far as it goes," she said tersely. "Vee and Aisha were in the nursery. It had been on Bourbon Street, but when an agent got too close, they moved to the fancy house. The littlest were saved for special occasions."

  Anna waited.

  "Medicinal uses," Clare said.

  It took a second or two, but Anna got it. It was still believed in many parts of the world that sex with very young virgins cured AIDS and other STDs. This time it was she who called upon the Almighty: "God."

  "Or not," Clare said.

  Clare was but inches from Anna's face, breathing on her. Something was wrong, different. "You don't smell like an ashtray!" Anna exclaimed.

  "Clare Sullivan, mother of two--now three--doesn't smoke," Clare said evenly.

  "And Jordan?"

  Clare winked solemnly. "He may sneak a fag now and then." With that she stood and shook out her skirts. "We should go. Give you some privacy to call your husband. Besides, the four of us need some serious nap time." To Anna's surprise, Clare leaned down and kissed her on the cheek before she left.

  For a while, Anna stared at the phone beside the bed as if it were a snake about to bite her. It crossed her mind just not to tell Paul anything, but, as a good and attentive husband, he was bound to notice a new vicious scar on her middle. Then she thought of lying to him, feeding him the same line she did the doctor.

  She was more afraid of losing him than of anything she'd ever been afraid of in her life. He would forgive her. Not only was he a good man, but he was, after all, in the business of forgiveness. Technically, the only promise she'd broken was to tell him beforehand if she planned on doing anything risky, but love wasn't about the technicalities. It was about the totality of who one was and the respect for the totality of the beloved. Anna had not been open or forthright. She'd let in the creeping darkness of half-truths, evasions, and secrets. She'd broken trust. That sort of break was long in the mending.

  She picked up the phone and set it on her lap. Steeling herself, she dialed his number. When he picked up she told him everything, every law broken, every lie by omission, every move she'd made. Then she shut up.

  And listened to the silence.