"I'll have the case transferred to my arson task force; it's our jurisdiction anyway."
"You do that." The cell phone in her car rang, and she nudged him aside to open the door and answer it. "Vincent."
She listened as the dispatcher relayed the latest news from the hospital, and closed her eyes briefly, wishing she could slam her head into something. Sorry, J. D., I did what I could.
"Got it. Relay this to Captain Pellerin—tell him I think we ought to issue an APB for Duchesne. Right. Keep me posted." She ended the call.
"Is it J. D.?"
"Sort of. A technician was found strangled at Mercy. He was taking X rays of our witness, who was last seen driving away from Mercy in a stolen car." She met Cort's gaze. "Your brother went after her."
Cecilia Tibbideau heard the front door of the trailer slam, and glanced around the tiny, spotless kitchen before she set down the basket of laundry. "Billy?" She rubbed her palms against the front of her apron. "That you?"
"Goddamn bitch." His footsteps made hollow, heavy thuds on the floor as he strode into the kitchen. His thin face was flushed and shiny with sweat, and he was carrying a half a six-pack and a bottle wrapped in a brown bag. "Get me a glass, Cee."
She went to the cabinet and took down her husband's favorite drinking glass, a beer stein he'd stolen from a local bar. She made sure it was clean before she set it down on the table in front of him. "You hungry, honey?" Sometimes he didn't get so drunk if he had something to eat first. "I kept your plate in the oven—"
"Shut up." He opened the bottle and poured a measure of whiskey into the stein, then thumped the bottle down on the table.
Cecilia hadn't expected him home so late—he'd said he had a job to do that would take all morning, but he wanted dinner hot and on the table at five. It was past seven now. There were fresh bruises on his face, and his bottom Up was split. Caine Gantry had done that.
He met her gaze. His eyes were bloodshot, and one looked like it was starting to swell. "What you looking at?"
"Nothing, Billy." She ducked her head. "I'm sorry."
"You're sorry. You're damn right, you're sorry." His gaze moved around the kitchen, then focused on the basket of wet clothes. His voice went low and soft. "You ain't got your chores done yet?"
Cecilia looked down at her folded hands. "It's the last load. The rain got to them before I could."
He made a snorting sound and took another drink. "You been sittin' round watching game shows all day again."
"No, honey. I cleaned the kitchen and did the wash and fixed you a nice dinner." He'd forgotten that he'd gotten mad watching the evening news and thrown the set across the room.
Billy wasn't a big man, but he could move fast when he wanted to. He was up and had her by the shoulders before she could blink. "Don't you he to me."
"The TV set's broke." She cringed away from his hot breath. He'd never hit her yet, but there was something different about him today—something frightening in his eyes. "I can't watch it."
"But you want another one, don't ya?" He slammed her back against the refrigerator. "A bigger one? A better one?"
"I don't. Really I don't, Billy." She could hardly breathe, caught between his weight and the hard flat door. "I—I don't like TV."
"You got something better to do?" His eyes narrowed. "You been talking to that dyke next door again?"
She shook her head.
"Better not."
Billy hated Lilah, their next-door neighbor, but it wasn't because she was a lesbian. Cecilia suspected that her husband had tried to hit on Lilah more than once, and she'd flatly refused.
Maybe sex would calm him down. "How about I make you feel better, honey?" She licked her lips, the way he liked her to.
"Been wanting it, huh?" He stared at her breasts. "Can't get enough of me."
She hated sex with him, but it was better than tiptoeing around him for the rest of the night.
His eyes went to the window, and his expression changed. "I ain't got time." He let go of her and went back into the bedroom. He came out with his shotgun and a box of ammunition. "I'm going hunting. I'll be back later."
He hadn't gone hunting in years. "All right."
"Don't sulk now." He yanked up the hem of her skirt and ground his palm against her crotch. "I'll take care of you later."
After her husband left the trailer, Cecilia didn't move. Only when she heard his truck pull out onto the road did she pull down her skirt and let the tears go. She felt so dirty when he touched her like that—like she was some whore instead of his wife.
"Cecile?"
The sound of Lilah's voice made her wipe her face with her apron. "Just a minute." She didn't open the screen door. "Did you need something?"
"I heard Billy shouting." The busty blonde peered out from under her umbrella. "He hit you?"
"No, I told you, he never hits me."
Lilah walked up the steps and closed the umbrella as she opened the door and stepped inside. Under her coat she was wearing one of her work outfits—a spangled orange minidress that hugged her voluptuous curves—and the glitter made Cecilia blink. "I heard him clear across the yard this time. You got to get yourself away from that man, girl."
Get away from Billy Tibbideau? She almost laughed. She had no family to go to, and she'd dropped out of school at sixteen, so no one would hire her. Billy was all she had.
"I could help you get a job." Her neighbor tugged up the edge of the low-cut bodice. "Bartholomew's hiring."
Lilah danced five nights a week at Bart's Strip Club, but she had a gorgeous body and no qualms about showing it off. Cecilia didn't even like undressing with the lights on. "Thank you, but I couldn't do anything like that."
Her neighbor rolled her eyes. "You'd be waiting tables, honey, not stripping."
Lilah kept talking about the job, but Cecilia couldn't concentrate on what she was saying. She kept thinking of Billy carrying the shotgun out to his truck.
"Thanks again, but I'm fine," she interrupted her neighbor in midsentence, and opened the screen door. "Excuse me now, I've got some work to do."
After Lilah left, Cecilia went to the phone. She'd call Caine and tell him Billy had gone out to do some hunting. Caine would have to decide what, exactly, her husband intended to hunt.
Chapter Five
Sable didn't slow down until she was out of the city and on one of the lesser-traveled back roads into the bayou, and even then she couldn't stop shaking. How did he find me so fast?
J. D. had told the ER staff they weren't to tell anyone she was there. Marc's murderer must have followed her from the fire to the police station, and from there to the hospital. Or one of the cops had told him where to find her.
He'd strangled that young technician so he could get to her. What else was he capable of doing?
Now that she'd stolen a car, she'd have to move quickly, and stay on the move. If the police caught up with her—if J. D. caught up with her—she wouldn't get another chance to run. And she had to see Caine first.
Caine Gantry had a lot to answer for.
The turnoff to Gantry Charters was marked by a neat, hand-lettered sign at the corner of a narrow dirt road, and as she turned she heard the faint sound of outboard motors and men shouting. Caine's boats were coming in from a long day out on the water, which meant his entire crew would be on the docks, unloading their catch and whatever passengers they'd brought along for the ride. It was Monday, so there probably wouldn't be too many tourists wanting to fish.
As she shut off the headlights and coasted to a stop a few hundred yards from the dock, she saw the silhouette of the big man standing at the end of the pier, dragging a bulging net dangling from a deck hoist over the side of a big charter boat. He centered the net and lowered it almost into a huge, square wooden barrow, then released it. The oysters hitting the wood clattered like dishes someone had dropped breaking.
He won't do anything to me in front of his crew, she promised herself as she got out of the car and h
eaded for the dock. After what Remy did for him, he wouldn't dare.
"I took him around dat good spot over by Darel's place, 'n' dat's where I heard dat hummin' again," Tag McGee, one of the older men on the crew, was telling the others as they unloaded their catch. The lean, weather-battered Cajuns who worked for Gantry had lived on the water all their lives, and if they weren't fishing or hunting, they were talking about it. "It bein' a full moon 'n' all, I tell the Yankee mebbe it's the old black slaves what drowned in the bayou during the War a' Northern Aggression. Then he say, 'Can we go on back now? I think I done caught enough.'"
All the men chuckled at that. Caine said something low to the old man, who threw up a hand.
"I showed him it weren't nothing more than a shoal a' black drum fish, hummin' together under the water, boss." Tag shook his head in disgust. "He say, 'I don't want catch me no haunt fish.'"
"Still spooking the paying customers, Tag McGee?" Sable said in a soft voice, drawing every eye and bringing the work to a temporary standstill. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself."
Caine turned toward her, but with the sun setting behind him, his face remained in shadow.
"Evenin', Ms. Duchesne." Tag looked from her to his boss, cleared his throat, and then waved his arms at the men. "Y'all get your asses in gear 'n' move these barrows over to the wet house."
Suddenly everyone was busy again except Caine, who merely waited and watched as Sable walked steadily across the silvered planks to his boat. Only when she halted a few feet away did he speak. "You're supposed to be in the hospital with a bump on your head."
"It wasn't much of a bump." She eyed the short-handled shovel he picked up. "Did you hear about the fire?"
"It was all over the radio and TV." He thrust the shovel into the pile of oysters and picked up the end of the barrow. The big muscles in his upper arms knotted, but he pushed it past her as if it weighed no more than a baby carriage. "Everyone in the state knows. Go home, Isabel."
Sable followed him back to the wet house, where the men would clean the fish and the oysters before loading them into huge refrigerated bins. Caine took his barrow to the side of the shack, where one of the men was staking a sheet of chicken wire over a dugout pit of glowing coals. After using an outside hose to spray down the catch in the barrow, Caine started shoveling the oysters onto the chicken wire. The water dripping from the shells made the coals hiss and steam rise from the pit. "Caine, we have to talk."
"No, we don't." He paused to wipe some sweat from his brow and eyed the tree line. "Go to Remy's. He's worried about you."
"It's important."
"I got a crew to feed." He went back to shoveling the fresh oysters onto the chicken wire, then took some burlap sacks from a bucket of salt water and draped the mound of shells. "Turn 'em in ten minutes," he told the man tending the pit, then shoved the barrow to one side and went around Sable.
She stopped him with a single question. "Were you in the city this morning, Caine?"
Something crackled in the bushes.
Caine stared out at the swamp before he turned on her. "You go on home, Isabel," he said, his voice as flat as his black eyes. "You go on home right now."
"Oh, I'm not leaving." With the light in his face, she could see the change in his expression. "Not until you tell what you've done."
"What have I done?" He came to her and took her by the arms, his grip hard. "You come in here." He marched her to the wet house, and pointed to the big refrigeration cases. "You see those? I'll be paying on them, and the ones I had to install on my boats, for the next five years. They're making me buy a separate charter license for each of my boats now, too. Most of the small outfits round here have been shut down because they can't do the same." He released her. "I didn't do that, Isabel. LeClare did that to us."
She knew the old argument. Laws had been passed requiring oyster fishermen to refrigerate their catch almost immediately after harvesting the beds, to prevent contamination. There was also much stricter licensing now, as well. Marc had been one of the primary movers on the legislation. "It's to keep people from getting sick, Caine," she reminded him.
"LeClare and his kind have been harvesting beds where there's sewage spill-off," he snarled. "No one fines them for the oysters they fish out of the shit washed down from the city. No one blames them for making people sick."
"The state is closing down those beds and you know it." She sensed the men gathering around them in the dark, but refused to let them intimidate her. She was Remy Duchesne's daughter, and she'd known most of them from the time she could walk. "Billy was at the warehouse, wasn't he?"
"I fired Billy," he told her. His expression changed, became more withdrawn. "You'll have to ask him where he's been."
"Did he do it on your orders? Are you telling your men to set fire to Marc's properties?"
The anger faded from his face as he let his gaze wander down to her shoes and back up again. "Only fires I light are under the covers, chère," he drawled, reaching out to glide his callused fingertips along the curve of her cheek. "They take a long time to burn."
She knew what he was doing—he couldn't scare her off with his legendary temper, so he was falling back on the other thing he was famous for. Hilaire had told stories about Caine's appetite for women, how he sometimes brought two girls home with him so he wouldn't have to go out a second time, but Sable hadn't really believed that. She could only remember the shy, silent boy who had worked for her father.
The boy had grown up, she realized, swallowing hard as he gathered a handful of her hair and rubbed it between his fingertips. And maybe his rep was a little understated. "I'm not interested."
He smiled and bent down, holding her by the hair when she would have stepped away.
"Aren't you, Isabel?" He breathed the question against her brow as he slid his thumb across her lower lip in a slow, taunting caress. When she opened her mouth to reply, he rimmed the inside, testing the edge of her teeth. "Don't you feel just a little hot now?"
Some of the men chuckled.
She ignored the blatant sexuality and focused on his eyes. She knew he was putting on an act—wasn't he? She turned her head to one side to avoid his probing thumb. "Why are you in such a hurry to get rid of me?"
"You're not interested?" He dropped one hand on her shoulder, and the other over her heart. "Then why are you trembling, little girl?" He revolved his hard palm over the peak of her breast. "Your nipple is hard. You cold?"
"No." Shame, not desire, made her shiver. She didn't want Caine, but she couldn't stop her body from responding to the stimulation. "I'm disgusted."
"With me?" He cupped the back of her neck and tipped her chin up to brush a featherlight kiss over her lips. "Or yourself? Maybe those city boys didn't teach you right."
Dread settled in the pit of her stomach as she remembered something Marc had told her. "If Marc had become governor, he would have introduced new legislation to hire more Fish and Game wardens, to stop illegal harvesting and smuggling. That would have put you and your friends out of business. You knew that."
Caine lifted his head. "Now he won't. Run along, Isabel."
She wanted to shriek at him, to claw his face. "I never thought you'd follow in your father's footsteps, Caine."
His smirk disappeared. "You don't know the first thing about me."
She remembered falling onto Marc's body, and the blood on her hands. "Did you kill him, Caine?"
"No, but I'm glad he's dead." Now he had his hands on the lapels of her stolen lab coat, but there was nothing seductive about it. "You got anything else you want to say to me before I toss your smart ass in the river?"
"You're pathetic." She looked at his crew, who were silently watching the exchange. The impassive faces outraged her. "Don't you know what they'll do? Marc LeClare was a powerful man. The police will come in here looking for Billy, and anyone who helps him will go to prison. Including your idiot boss here. Then who's going to provide for your wives and your children?"
An angry murmur ran through the crew.
Caine didn't like that. "You'd best worry about who's gonna take care of you now, chère."
A shadow separated from the trees, and dull metal glinted as a man pointed a gun at Caine's head. "That's enough," J. D. said. "Let her go."
The big Cajun slowly took his hands from the white lab coat. "Well, now, ain't this a night for reunions?"
Sable stared at J. D., torn between horror and relief. How had he known where she would go? Would he get her out of here?
"Come here, Sable." J. D. kept his aim level and motionless. "Now."
The crew moved forward, forming a tight wall behind Sable and Caine. She glanced over her shoulder and saw oyster knives appear in tight hands. "This isn't finished, Caine. I'm going to tell them."
"You do that, Isabel." The big man gave her a small push in J. D.'s direction. "But take your cop boyfriend on outta here first, before he ends up like your daddy."
Moriah watched as Laure sobbed against Elizabet Gamble's shoulder. She wished she could do the same, but anger and guilt had somehow frozen her inside.
She'd tried to do what she could for Laure after she'd met her at the police station, but when Moriah had seen Isabel Duchesne, it had rendered her almost completely speechless.
Of course Laure had adored her husband, and was simply devastated. Moriah knew she should have been able to say something, summon some words of condolence, but instead she'd merely hovered and tried not to think about Isabel Duchesne, or how she could have known Marc LeClare.
She'd failed, naturally. She had never completely forgotten about Sable. The image of the shy girl in her cheap lace dress had haunted her for years.
Moriah had called her mother, but she was out shopping, so she had been obliged to drive Laure home. The only other person she could think to call was Elizabet Gamble, who happened to be one of Laure's oldest friends. She had come, and was now providing the sympathy and comfort Moriah couldn't.
She was glad that Elizabet and Louie had come, but Moriah had never felt more useless in her life.
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