Keeping Watch

by Jan Hambright

  “I thought you’d like to know, Jim is stable for now. But they don’t know what caused him to code. They’re moving him into a secure room in the ICU.”

  Royce stood up. “Thanks for the information.”

  “You’re welcome.” The officer nodded and disappeared into the corridor.

  He glanced at his watch. “Let’s head back to the station. We’re executing the search warrant on Clay Franklin’s house in an hour.”

  Adelaide stood, feeling her knees wobble for an instant before they locked beneath her. She’d never been kissed like that before. The lip-lock had a transcending quality that left her feeling as if she’d somehow been there, and not been there; it was as if someone else had controlled it.

  “I’m going to search missing person’s reports for the past couple of days. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find the woman in my drawing.”

  She headed for the door and stepped out into the hallway, aware of Royce next to her as they moved down the corridor, aware, too, of the way he reached for her elbow, withdrew and reached again, finally pressing his hand against the small of her back as they entered the elevator.

  He was hesitant, so was she, but one fact stuck with her. She had enjoyed kissing Detective Royce Beckett immensely, perhaps more than she should have, considering they had a professional relationship.

  Still, stress had its advantages. Or was it the release?

  ADELAIDE LISTENED TO THE HUM of the car’s tires on the asphalt as she stared at the southern horizon through the windshield.

  They hadn’t spoken a word to one another since they’d climbed into the sedan for the drive back to the station.

  A measure of foreboding latched onto her emotions as she studied the bank of black clouds heading up tropical storm Kandace’s siege on the city. The storm was on track to make landfall by day’s end, and even though they wouldn’t receive a direct hit, the rain bands could wreak havoc.

  She glanced over at Royce behind the steering wheel, wearing a grimace, and she suddenly wanted to see him smiling and laughing instead of locked in cop mode. She took things pretty seriously herself as a rule, but he bordered on the extreme. What drove him? What made him put his badge on every day and show up?

  “If you have something to say, please do it.” He cocked his head for an instant and looked at her before turning his attention back to the jam-packed traffic on I-10.

  “I was just wondering if you ever smile.”

  He snorted and grinned, showing her a quick flash of white teeth. “Like that?”

  “Yes, it’s a start, but since we’ve been joined at the hip by Chief Danbury, and we’ll be spending all our time together, you’d do well to lighten up.”

  A true expression of humor rumbled up from his throat, and Adelaide listened to him chuckle. It had a softening quality that clung to her spirits, raising them exponentially.

  “That wasn’t so difficult, was it?”

  “No.” He flipped on the blinker and exited the freeway. “This job beats you down. I’ve seen enough horror to last me a lifetime—”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  He pulled in a breath, but remained quiet, almost melancholy from her vantage point.

  “My adopted sister, Kimberly, was abducted when she was five, and taken for three days.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “She came home alive, but damaged.” He cast her a sideways glance that stirred up her sympathies.

  “Did they catch the perpetrator?”

  “No. He’s still at large all these years after the incident because I couldn’t describe him to the police with enough accuracy that they could find him.”

  “You were there when it happened?”

  “Yeah. I was six years old. The kidnapper popped the screen off our bedroom window, climbed in and took her. I woke up and got a face-to-face look at the man. It could have been me. It should have been me.”

  Adelaide’s heart squeezed in her chest. Survivor’s guilt? “You can’t mean that.”

  “I’m not certain anymore. It was a long time ago. I do know that because of me, her abductor is still out there. He could still be taking kids for all I know because I couldn’t help.”

  “You’re helping now.” She met his gaze with her own and smiled. “That’s why you do what you do. You help people, Royce. You come when they call…like you did for me.”

  “You make it sound a lot more noble than it really is.”

  “I can help you.”

  He braked at the end of the off ramp, waiting for the light to change. “Help me?”

  “The image is still inside your head, isn’t it?”

  “Always.”

  “I can release it, if you’ll let me.” She waited for his response, but it didn’t come until they pulled into the parking lot at the station and climbed out of the car.

  “I’ll think about your offer,” he said as he guided her into the department.

  Hope churned inside her at the prospect of tackling his demon. Heck, she was already picking up on the image leaking from his memory.

  Discomfort flooded through Royce like a dam break, but the worst part was his uncertainty about its cause. He didn’t know if it stemmed from her willingness to sketch his sister’s abductor, or the disturbing fact that he was beginning to believe she really could.

  Red faced and irritated, Chief Danbury stood at the front desk, spotting them immediately.

  There was trouble, Royce knew it the instant they made eye contact. “Hey, Chief. What’s up?”

  He studied Adelaide for a moment before facing Royce. “We just took a missing person’s report on a young woman named Wendy Davis. She vanished from a shopping center out in Jefferson Heights day before yesterday.”

  Caution set up shop in the pit of his stomach. “Have we got a photo for an APB?”

  “Yeah. I just put it through on the wire. A copy along with the report will show up on your desk in a few, or you can look at it in the communications room right now.”

  “Thanks, Chief.”

  “Don’t thank me, just find her.” He turned and headed for his office.

  “Do you think it’s her?”

  “I don’t know. But we’ll do a comparison to the drawing you sketched last night. I have it right here.” He dug into the back pocket of his slacks and fished out the folded drawing. It still smelled like smoke, and the acrid scent reminded him of how close Adelaide had come to death last night.

  “Come on.” He pointed her toward the communications room and followed her inside.

  An officer was just removing the photograph from the APB fax when they reached the counter.

  “Detective Beckett, homicide division. I need to take a look at that photo.”

  “Sure.” He snagged it from the tray and handed it to Royce. “Make sure it gets back to the chief, or my tail’s in a knot.”

  “Not a problem.” But there was a problem, a huge problem, a murderous problem.

  Royce stared at the picture of a pretty young female, age twenty-three, with wide-set brown eyes and long dark hair.

  The victim in Adelaide’s sketch and the missing woman were one and the same.

  Chapter Six

  Adelaide’s heart rate climbed, her breathing ramping up with excitement as Royce pulled in next to a black-and-white police car in the driveway of Clay Franklin’s house.

  She’d never been in the field before. Never experienced the rush of adrenaline she was sure Royce and his fellow cops felt every day of the week.

  “Put these on,” he said, slapping a pair of latex gloves into the palm of her right hand. “You’re only here as an observer. Look, don’t touch.”

  She nodded and took the gloves. A measure of her excitement subsided. “If I see something of interest—”

  “You call me.” He stared at her and she allowed her gaze to slip to his lips as she recited his look-don’t-touch mantra. “The place could be chock-full of evidence. If you compromise it, it can’t be used in court.�
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  “Clay is dead.”

  “Exactly. His autopsy showed that he didn’t drown, he died of blunt force trauma to the head. If he was killed here, we need the physical evidence to catch his killer, or at least, an evidentiary link to whoever did it.”

  “Understood.”

  “Good.” He flashed her a smile that could melt the polar ice caps and climbed out of the car.

  Being under the watchful eye of Detective Royce Beckett was going to be a lot harder than she’d ever imagined. She got out of the car and fell in line behind him as they approached the front door of the little square house, right behind a pair of uniformed cops with a battering ram.

  A sudden chill caressed her body, and she instinctually glanced behind her, feeling a jolt of uneasiness glide down her spine.

  The house was fairly secluded, surrounded by moss-draped oak trees, and not in the best part of town.

  Clay Franklin was a Peeping Tom, and a sicko, who’d robbed her of her privacy. She understood that, but what she didn’t understand was the overwhelming sensation of being watched right now.

  It crawled through her brain and settled at the base of her skull. She looked around again, shrugged her shoulders a couple of times and stopped next to Royce.

  The officer tried the knob.

  Locked.

  Next, the heavy equipment came to bear on the rickety front door, and with a single swing of the ram, the latch caved and the door shot open.

  “Police!” The officers entered the house, and exited moments later. “It’s clear, Detective.”

  “Take the outside perimeter, check the trash cans, the garage out back. Anything that looks suspicious, I want to see it.” Both officers nodded and moved past them, then took off in opposite directions to search the perimeter of the house.

  A white van pulled up in front of the house, and CSI Gina Gantz climbed out and rounded the front of the vehicle with a camera on a strap dangling from around her neck. She headed straight for them.

  “You’d think I was the only CSI tech in the department, as much as you request me, Beckett.” A broad grin pulled her lips back from her teeth, and her focus trained on Royce alone.

  Irritation zinged across Adelaide’s nerves. Gina Gantz was openly flirting with him.

  Taking a sideways glance, Adelaide tried to establish whether or not he was reciprocating, but she had to admit she understood why Gina did it. Detective Royce Beckett was a good-looking man, from his close-cropped dark hair and ripped body, to his sexy brown eyes, that narrowed as he studied her with an intensity that could boil water.

  “You have to put them on, Adelaide, or you can’t enter the scene.”

  Snapped back into reality, she quickly pulled the latex gloves on, feeling like an inept schoolgirl caught staring at a popular jock.

  “Sorry, it’s my first time out on a search warrant.”

  Royce cracked a smile, amused by her out-of-sorts demeanor. “Relax. We’re just going to have a look around.”

  Behind them, Gina cleared her throat, and he realized she’d said something to him earlier, but he didn’t know what. “Let’s do this,” he said, stepping through the open door into the living room of the home. He didn’t need distractions. Not now, not when other people’s lives hinged on his ability to do his job with a clear head.

  Adelaide’s proximity made it anything but clear.

  Sobering under the weight of his analysis, he ground to a stop in the middle of the room. Caution riled the edge of his nerves as he turned toward the wall behind the front door.

  “I’ll be damned.” He stepped closer to the wall and the collage of pictures taped to the plaster.

  He heard Adelaide’s quick intake of breath right behind him. “What is this, what do they mean?”

  “Obsession.” He stared at the hundreds of pictures of Adelaide, taken at various times of day. Each one cut out and mixed with the rest. “It matches his MO as a Peeping Tom. Can you identify when it started?”

  She stepped closer and studied the pictures. “I sketched the composite of the man who mugged him, about a month ago.”

  He watched her tilt her head to the side and narrow her eyes. “Looks like this has been going on for at least that long. See this one?” She pointed to a shot of her watering her flower bed.

  “Those are my alyssum. The purple was just beginning to bloom about a month ago.”

  “So the catalyst for his obsession started after you sketched his mugger?”

  “Looks that way.”

  The intrusive click and flash of the camera behind them reminded him they weren’t alone in the room.

  Taking hold of her elbow, he steered her out of frame, into the kitchen and out of earshot. “Do you think he knew you were special?” It didn’t come out like he planned, but he pressed on. “He’s probably the one who carved the word behold into the side of your house. He must have figured it out.”

  “It’s possible, but I do everything I can to keep it a secret. Still, he did look at me sort of strange when I revealed the drawing. He tried to backtrack on some of the details after the fact.”

  “Can you be more specific?” Royce asked, studying her with an intensity that almost felt like a caress.

  “It was almost like he didn’t want me to draw a true depiction of the man who brutally assaulted him in an alley in the French Quarter and stole his wallet. If memory serves, he’d been forced to file a report only because Officer Brooks found him within seconds of the attack and called an ambulance, and since he, too, had caught a minor glimpse, Brooks needed Clay Franklin to give the details, or the suspect would go unidentified.”

  “What if he knew his mugger, and feared retaliation if he identified him? That could explain why the accurate sketch alerted him to your abilities.”

  “Yes, but not how he knew what they were. What I am, and what I can do.”

  One of the officers stepped into the kitchen.

  Royce turned toward him. “Did you find anything?”

  “We found some sort of crushed mask on the floor in the garage, and the place is wrecked. A struggle of some sort definitely took place out there.”

  Royce turned and headed for the front door, followed by the officer, Adelaide and Gina.

  Caution slipped into him as he stepped through the narrow doorway into the remodeled detached garage. A twenty-by-twenty-foot structure that had been converted into a man-room, complete with a TV, now lying facedown on the floor, and a mini-fridge that hung open exposing a six-pack of beer with two cans missing. A single light fixture hung from the ceiling, and in the middle of the floor was a Songe mask.

  Adelaide’s breath caught in her throat. Taking tentative steps forward, she stopped, bent over and stared down at the ugly mask that seemed to stare back.

  It was splintered in half, split down the middle by a forceful blow of some kind. But even the damage couldn’t distort its grotesque features.

  A chill piqued her senses, sending a rush of fear deep into her brain.

  “Any idea what it means?” Royce asked from next to her.

  She straightened. “There’s no high ridge crest on this one. Its magic isn’t powerful.”

  “Franklin was a bit player?”

  “I don’t know.” She turned to him, needing to feel his arms around her. She squelched the insistent urge. “Whoever tried to kill Officer Tansy was wearing a mask with a high ridge on the crown. This one doesn’t qualify. We need an appointment to see my cultural anthropology professor, Charles Bessette. He might be able to give us answers about the mask’s symbolism and magic.”

  “Bag it, Gina. See if we can obtain a DNA sample from around the mouth. We need to know if Clay Franklin ever wore it.”

  “I’ll get it processed and tagged.” Gina left the garage, and the officer followed, leaving them alone in the suffocating afternoon heat that infused the dingy room, even though she was ice-cold.

  Royce reached for her.

  Adelaide didn’t resist; she didn’
t want to, and only the feel of his arms coming around her chased the formidable chill from under her skin.

  “Officer Tansy was attacked by a man in a mask. Clay Franklin was already dead by then. There are more of them out there if we can just make some connections.”

  His grasp on her tightened.

  She closed her eyes, but the images behind her lids only reinforced what she already knew.

  There was nothing magical about the crude wooden mask carved into a devilish face, with bulging red eyes, parted by narrow slits for human eyes to see out of. Thick lips pulled back over jagged teeth, its hideous features meant to terrorize for some unknown reason.

  No…the evil behind this mask was flesh and blood.

  ROYCE PULLED OUT OF EXCHANGE Alley onto Conti Street, slowed and took a left onto Royal.

  Adelaide was silent on the passenger seat next to him, a fact that worried him. She’d never mentioned how her relationship with her parents was, but it was none of his business anyway.

  He braked hard at the corner of Royal and Iberville. The sultry notes of a jazz classic emanated from a trio playing their instruments in the parking lot on the corner.

  “Do you like jazz?” he asked, keeping his eyes on the band of tourists crossing the street in front of them, wearing flame-orange T-shirts. “Yes. You?”

  “Most of it.”

  She looked over at him and smiled, setting his emotions to a jazzy beat of their own that he could no longer silence. He liked being in close proximity to her.

  “Your parents live in Destrehan?”

  “Yes. Get on I-10 West, then I-310 South.”

  “I know where it is.” He glanced up into the rearview mirror at a dark blue sedan three cars back. “I use to catch catfish out there.”

  “And you don’t anymore?”

  “No time for it.” Royce pulled through the intersection, cruised a block and stopped at the light on Canal Street. Looking in the review mirror, he watched the lead car behind him pull into a parking slot, leaving a single car behind them, including the blue sedan.

  The light turned green, he accelerated and the car directly behind him peeled off onto Canal. He made the other side of the intersection and coasted down St. Charles Avenue, with the blue sedan right behind them.