An amused grin tugged at his mouth. “Yes. Enough to watch you on more than one occasion?”
“No.” She ran the drawing session over in her mind, sorting for important details she may have missed. “Not at first. But he did take to staring at me profusely once I revealed the sketch of his attacker to him. It made me uncomfortable.”
“That’s an affliction the bulk of the department’s males seem to have in common with Mr. Franklin.”
Embarrassment bloomed on her cheeks. “I wouldn’t know about that.”
His eyes narrowed for an instant, and she wondered about his thoughts. It was true, she’d been approached time and again by the officers of the NOPD, but Detective Royce Beckett was the first one who sparked any interest inside her.
“I’ll pull the file and we’ll bring him in for questioning. See if his shoe imprint matches the one we found under your studio window the night you were dragged from your home. It doesn’t match the ones we photographed on your kitchen floor that night, so it’s safe to confirm he wasn’t the man who broke in and tried to abduct you. It only quantifies the fact that there are two of them.”
Fear bubbled up again, and she worked to push it back from the edge of her thoughts. She couldn’t function if she let it escape; it would only send her into a cycle of terror she couldn’t defuse.
“Did he leave any evidence at the scene?”
“None that we could find.”
Regret welled inside her. If only she’d have seen the man’s face. She’d love nothing better than to let her pencil and sketch pad reveal him and land him in jail.
“And then there’s this.” He reached for the sketch on top and flipped it over. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
Adelaide stared at the disturbing drawing. Her throat constricted. Looking up, she met his gaze. Lying about the drawing wasn’t going to work. Detective Beckett possessed more determination and persistence than she’d ever be able to challenge.
“It’s a depiction of my death.”
Royce rocked forward in his chair. Leaning across the table, so close she could smell the slightest hint of his sultry aftershave. His handsome features were set in dead-serious resolve, and she let his intensity coil around her, drawing her into the emotion.
“You can’t mean that,” he whispered. “She’s wearing your face, but I’ll be damned if I believe that’s you.”
Brushing the stunning sketch with her gaze for an instant, she again raised her eyes to his. “Then be damned, Detective, because that’s how I’m going to die.”
She dropped her stare back to the haunting image, disturbed by the tone of certainty in her own voice. Certainty, yes, but acceptance? It was the first and best-developed image of the sketches she’d been compelled to draw for weeks now. It depicted her lying faceup in the trunk of a car. Her hands bound in front of her with duct tape. Her hair fanned out around her face. Eyes wide open, lips parted in a silent scream. A deep ugly gash slashed across her throat.
“I believe you saved me from this the other night.” She focused on him. He clamped his teeth together, sending a visible ripple of tension along his jawline.
“This will be my fate, Detective, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
“You can’t believe I’d ever let that happen to you, Adelaide.”
Hope surged inside her for an instant, but dispersed quickly, dragging her back into a reality she couldn’t paddle her way out of.
“I’ve made peace with it. These things happen. God knows in my line of work, I’ve drawn the deplorable things one human being can do to another.”
She reached for her sketches, but he beat her to them and covered her hand with his.
“Effective immediately, I’m posting a uniformed officer outside your home. This nut job is still out there, and you’re not safe until we catch him.”
“I’d like my sketches back. They’re not part of this investigation.” She pulled in a breath, watching Royce’s mouth soften, followed by the rest of his features.
“I’m sorry, but I plan to hang on to them for now.” He removed his hand from over the top of hers and picked up her drawings, then stood up.
“I want you to go home and feel safe. We’re going to catch these people.”
“Thank you, Detective. I’m sure you will.” Someday. She couldn’t embrace his assertion because she knew what she knew, and that truly frightened her.
Royce turned for the door and reached for the knob, just as a knock thumped against the wood.
He pulled it open, feeling like an oppressive weight rested on his shoulders and crushed him into the carpet. He’d consider her outlandish claim, but it was too far out there, like shelving two centuries of knowledge only to again believe the sun revolved around the earth, and the moon stood still.
Zoned out, he glanced at Chief Danbury’s face. He took a step back. Something big must be going on to drag him out of his office and upstairs.
Friction snapped in the air between them and heightened his interest.
The chief raised his hand and acknowledged Adelaide. “Miss Charboneau.” He motioned Royce out into the hallway and pulled the door closed behind him.
“What’s up?” Royce asked.
“I need you to roll on a homicide call that just came in. Detective Hicks and Detective Lawton are already on their way to the scene. A deceased female has been found out in Bucktown on the edge of City Park.” He turned and headed for the elevator. Royce fell in next to him.
“It looks like a ritualistic killing. The body was posed. We may have some sort of a serial killer on our hands.”
Royce absorbed the chief’s information, but it was the word ritualistic that played bad inside his head and raised his caution level. That was his take on the disturbing drawings he carried in his hand right now.
Adelaide Charboneau’s sketches were of ritualistic-style murders and posed female victims. Four, to be exact, excluding the one she claimed would be her own. But only one of the four victims in the sketches had a face. A haunting face he couldn’t get out of his mind.
He tried to relax as they stepped into the elevator, tried to dumb down the persistent feeling of dread growing inside him like kudzu, but the insidious vine had already taken hold, and it couldn’t be uprooted.
WATER AS FAR AS THE EYE COULD see blurred Royce’s vision as he exited Veteran’s Memorial Boulevard, headed due north straight for Bucktown and Lake Pontchartrain. A beautiful view…an ugly place to die.
Deleting his last thought, he sobered, recalling the sketch of Adelaide he’d shuffled into the others and locked in his desk drawer at the station. None of it made sense, at least not within the parameters he used to define the world. How did someone even go about sketching their own murder, much less somebody else’s?
Ahead he saw the flashing lights on police units lined up in succession until he could almost believe they disappeared into the flat gray water. On the opposite side of the street he spotted a WGNO-TV van with its occupants in the process of gearing up.
He eased his car in on the tail of the parade, cinched his tie and stepped out of the air-conditioned car straight into a wall of heat.
Good thing cool-on-the-outside Ice Man Beckett was his motto, but he left his jacket on the front seat and headed into the fray, passing five patrol units before he saw Gina Gantz climbing out of the back of the CSI van.
“You came to the circus,” she said when she saw him, but she wasn’t smiling, and he could always count on her for that.
His nerves pulled tight. “Have you already been to the scene?”
“Yes.” She swallowed.
“How bad?”
“The chief has two more technicians rolling in to help me collect evidence.”
“Brutal?” he asked.
“Creepy is more like it. No blood, no gore. Just a beautiful young woman, murdered and posed for some sick reason.”
Royce took a deep breath and settled in next to her as she walked toward a
perimeter of yellow crime-scene tape.
He flashed his badge to the uniformed officer guarding the scene, lifted the crime tape and followed Gina underneath it. Glancing down toward the water, he spotted Detectives Hicks and Lawton standing with several other officers.
His skin was pretty thick. Armored in fact, but it came with the job. It had to.
Hicks glanced up, spotting him as he stepped closer.
“Detective Beckett.”
Nodding to the detective who outranked him by a couple of months, he got his first look at the victim.
“Her name’s Missy Stewart,” Hicks said, glancing down at his notepad. “She’s twenty, a student at Tulane, reported missing the day before yesterday by her roommate.”
Royce pushed back a rush of anger over the senseless killing and put his detective face on. Cold, hard, analytical thinking solved cases, not emotionally clouded judgment.
He stepped closer, studying the details. “You found her wallet open and displayed next to her body?” It was something missing in Adelaide’s sketch.
“Yeah. It wasn’t moved or touched by the jogger who found her this morning. We believe it was placed there by the killer.” Hicks motioned with a tilt of his head. “You saw her right hand?”
“Yeah.” But he didn’t need to take a second look. He knew the positioning of the body. Laid out, fully clothed. Long hair fanned out around her face, eyes wide open and fixed on the sky. Legs together. Left arm straight at her side, right arm stretched out, level with her shoulder. Right thumb locked across three fingers, and her index digit pointing in a southerly direction.
“The chief’s right. This looks ritualistic in nature. Any idea what her cause of death is, and what the devil this grainy substance is around the body?” Another detail missing in Adelaide’s depiction of the crime scene, but she was still four for six.
Gina looked up from her task, reached into her pocket and pulled out a GPS locator for the exact placement reading.
“Judging by the fixed open position of her eyes, my best guess is some sort of drug.” She put the GPS button down at the tip of Missy Stuart’s finger. “The substance around the body is where this gets creepy. The granules are sodium chloride.”
“Common table salt.”
“Yes.” Gina took the reading. “This has voodoo written all over it, Beckett. Dark magic. I don’t believe in any of it, but some folks do and salt plays a role in some of their rituals.”
She reached down and picked up the marker. “Are you okay, Beckett? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Ghost? No. A sketch? Yes. Voodoo was a wrinkle he hadn’t anticipated, but he planned to confront Adelaide Charboneau and have her try to explain why the dead woman at his feet matched one of her sketches. He wouldn’t take any mumbo-jumbo dark magic reasoning for this.
He’d charge her with murder, or at least accessory, arrest her and haul her off to jail.
“HOLD ON TO YOUR HATS, FOLKS. There’s another tropical storm brewing in the Atlantic. This one has affectionately been named Kandace, and she’s packing winds of seventy-five miles per hour. She could reach hurricane status by week’s end—”
Adelaide pushed the off button on the TV remote and tossed it onto the coffee table. Two storms were her limit. One packed wind and rain, the other packed a badge and a gun, and enough sex appeal to brew his own weather system.
Why he hadn’t blown down her door yet, she didn’t know, but she was sure he’d roar in much sooner than Kandace.
The department was abuzz with details about the girl they’d found murdered in Bucktown. Normally it would have been internalized, but the fact that she’d been posed and circled with salt seemed to give everyone permission to speculate on the dark magic details.
She owed her own certainty to some of the telltale details. The victim’s pointing finger on her right hand, the fan of hair spread out around her head, eyes wide open. All details she’d been compelled to sketch over and over again.
Buzzed with the jitters, she got up off the sofa and went into the kitchen to make a cup of herbal tea.
Detective Royce Beckett was an intelligent man, a good cop. He’d no doubt done a comparison between the victims in her sketch and the body found this morning.
Adelaide turned on the burner under the kettle, pulled her favorite smiley face mug out of the cupboard and opened the tea canister on the counter, selecting chamomile.
She wasn’t an investigator, but she had enough sense to know things weren’t going to get better. Not for her…and certainly not for the women in the sketches.
The front doorbell chimed.
Dropping the tea bag into the mug, she braced herself for the grilling ahead. She’d probably do the same thing if she were in his official capacity.
A knot of tension sat heavy in her stomach by the time she reached the front door and glimpsed the shadow of his imposing silhouette outlined through the filmy glass flanking either side of the door.
Hesitation stringed through her, and she went up onto her tiptoes to stare through the peephole, confirming what she already knew. Detective Royce Beckett was here, holding a rolled-up sketch in one hand, and he wasn’t happy.
Pulling in a cleansing breath, she stepped back and opened the door.
“Detective.” She smiled, even though he didn’t.
“We need to talk.”
In the background the shrill whistle of the kettle at full boil saved her from the intensity of the moment. “Tea?” she asked over her shoulder as she hurried down the long hallway to the kitchen, hearing the front door close behind him.
“No, thanks. This isn’t a social call.”
Worry jumbled her nerves as she turned off the stove, lifted the kettle and bathed the tea bag in scalding water. The comparison between the steaming cup and what was coming was just too unsettling, and she set the kettle down on the back burner.
Chair legs raked against the kitchen floor, and she turned around, prepared for the only line of questioning he’d be able to follow.
“I heard about the murdered woman they found out in Bucktown. I’m sorry for the tragedy her family is suffering—”
“Cut the niceties, Adelaide. I’ve got this.” He unrolled the sketch, grabbed a couple of apples out of the dish on the bar where he sat and positioned them on the sketch so it wouldn’t roll back up.
Next, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a photo.
She didn’t have to ask what it was, she already knew, and for an instant she wanted to curl up along with the sketch, if she could only get the apples off it.
“It’s a perfect match, Adelaide.” He stared at her across the bar. Her throat tightened. There was sorrow in his dark eyes. Sorrow, remorse…and pain? She wanted to reach out for him. To feel his arms come around her shoulders, to feel his proximity soothe her fear.
“I don’t want to arrest you as an accessory, but if you leave me no choice, I’ll do it. I need an explanation, and I need it now.”
Her gaze locked with his, her knees wobbling as she leaned against the counter for support. “I lied to you when I said I didn’t know what the word behold meant.”
“The one we found carved into the wood under you studio window, presumably by Clay Franklin?”
“Yes.” She hesitated, considering the ramification of the revelation. It was a secret she protected, didn’t share and certainly hadn’t told Clay Franklin about, but Royce needed to know the truth about her.
She pushed back and moved around the counter toward him, feeling the need to be closer. The need to convince him of her innocence. “But he didn’t complete the word. It’s Beholder.” She stopped next to him. “I’m what was once known by the now-extinct Materia voodoo sect as a Beholder. I see pictures of assailants coming directly from the mind’s eye of the victims I help, and I sketch them.”
If her revelation sparked any sort of understanding in Royce, it didn’t register on his face. His features were masked, unreadable…hostile?
“Yes.”
“It’ll be a cold day in hell before I ever sign on to mumbo jumbo that outrageous. It doesn’t hold an ounce of tangibility, and if it did, then why are these drawings being seen from a killer’s point of view?” He pushed his chair back and stood up. “I’m going to act like this bizarre conversation never transpired. I’d like you to do the same.”
Disappointment piqued her nerve endings and slammed into her brain with a force that shook her resolve. What had she expected? That her secret talent would be revered? That Royce would accept her revelation and welcome it?
“Please.” She reached out for him, laying her hand on his forearm.
Heat arced into her palm and zipped up her arm. Transfixed by the sensation, she stared up at him.
His eyes narrowed for an instant, confirming her belief that he’d felt it, too, she was sure of it, but he nonchalantly pulled back with conviction he didn’t feel.
“Someone circled Missy Stuart with a ring of salt. The claim is it has voodoo connotations. If I find out you’re involved…”
Fire burned inside Royce as he stared into her luminous green eyes. What the hell was happening to him? He wanted to kiss her, wanted to feel her body tangled up with his, for no other reason than an insatiable desire to touch her.
“There’s enough circumstantial evidence to haul you in, but you’d make bail before morning.”
Her chin came up, her eyes trained on him, and he found a quality of determination in their green depths.
“I’ll come willingly, but it isn’t going to change anything. More of them are going to die, Royce. More of the horrific depictions in my drawings are going to happen. It’s not if. It’s when.”
Frustrated, he turned around and headed for the front door, stopping only at the sound of her bare feet tromping along the hardwood right behind him.
“Don’t forget your evidence.” Her tone was mildly condescending.
He paused and turned toward her, painfully aware of how vulnerable she looked standing in front of him. Her long dark hair tousled around her face. Her eyes bright and wide with anger. Hell, he couldn’t blame her for feeling indignant. He would, too, under these circumstances. No one liked to be accused of a crime, much less convicted without a trial.
Keeping Watch Page 4