Detective Defender

by Marilyn Pappano

  “And?”

  Ducking her head, Martine pressed the bridge of her nose to ease the tension gathered behind her eyes. She was tired and blue and melancholy and sickened by the recent events. She wasn’t sure she could bear one more day of the nerves that had been stretched taut ever since hearing Paulina’s voice on the phone or the creepy bleak weather or the sensation that something terribly wrong was connected to it. She didn’t want to know what had happened to her former friends, wanted to erase them from her memory, wanted to jump on to the first plane heading to London and ask her mom to cuddle and pamper and coddle her into a brighter, sunnier, safer place.

  As if London didn’t have fog and rain.

  “Martine.” DiBiase’s voice came from nearby, and she looked up. He’d moved around the room, transferred the plastic bin to the table and seated himself beside her, all without her hearing a thing. The intensity was still etched in the lines of his face, but it wasn’t so harsh now. She couldn’t have blamed him if it was. She’d been less than helpful so far with his investigation.

  “Did you go for coffee?”

  She shook her head. “Paulina—Paulina said, ‘Someone knows.’ She didn’t know who or how, but they knew, and they were coming after us. She said Callie was already dead, that Tallie and Robin had disappeared and might be dead, and that they—this someone—wouldn’t stop until they had also killed us.”

  It took every bit of air in her lungs to get the words out, and for one awful moment she couldn’t replace it. Her chest was tight, her brain too dazed to give the command to breathe, so that when her body couldn’t wait one instant more, her lungs dragged in oxygen with a terrible, broken wheezing sound.

  DiBiase laid his hand on hers where it curled tightly around the quilt. His skin was warm against the ice of her own, his palm large enough to cover her fisted hand, his fingers closing tightly around hers in a way that made her feel safe. It allowed her to breathe evenly, regularly, and chased away the panic.

  It took a few heartbeats for her to realize that for the first time in years, hostility wasn’t foremost among her emotions toward him. She was grateful for his steadiness and solidness and for the sense of security he gave her.

  Many deep breaths later, the moment passed. She wiggled her fingers free of his, found a tissue to wipe at her eyes, then searched wildly to find even the slightest sarcasm. “Do they teach you that in detective school? Calming Hysterical Females 101?”

  He didn’t move back to his original seat, but he did lean back, putting some precious space between them. “I have two younger sisters. I had advanced training in how to make females hysterical by the time I was ten. Calming them is sort of the same stuff in reverse.”

  “Huh. I never thought of you as having sisters to torment.”

  “Or be tormented by.”

  “Then you probably also have a mother and a father.”

  His look was wry. “And grandparents, three nieces and two nephews. No, I didn’t magically come to life as the perfect guy. I had to work to get where I am.”

  She smiled very faintly, then looked past him at the stark-white pieces of paper on the table. Grimness settled over her like a cloak, icy and awful, and it echoed in her sigh.

  “You ready to go on?” DiBiase asked.

  If she said no, would he give her more time? Or would he try to wheedle, cajole or charm her into continuing? Ten minutes ago, she would have said he couldn’t have done it, but he’d just proved her wrong.

  She nodded.

  “What was Paulina talking about? What did this someone know?”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again. Her dad had been wrong. Telling the truth wasn’t always easiest. She could think of at least a hundred lies that she could tell with far more polish than the truth would get. Her mom had probably been correct that it was the right thing, but Martine would give anything to keep their foolishness from that long-ago night to herself.

  Anything except someone else’s life.

  * * *

  Jimmy listened to the creaks of the old building, the occasional vehicle sounds from outside and not much of anything else. Any pedestrians out there weren’t lingering; the residents weren’t walking their dogs; no one’s windows or doors were open to share their music. It was quiet in a city that was rarely quiet, a strange-enough occurrence to set a vague unease niggling between his shoulder blades. New Orleans was a city of magic and myth—the unexplained often happened in this town—but this weird combination of cold and fog and murder carried a sense of menace he couldn’t recall experiencing.

  It was just coincidence. The logical part of his brain knew that, but it felt like...more.

  “Martine.” He liked the sound of her name. Liked the feel of her. The smell and the taste of her. It had been a long time since their night-gone-bust, but a man didn’t just forget the feel of a woman like her in his arms.

  This time when she opened her mouth, words came out, determination dragging them one by one. “Our last year in high school, we had a new teacher, Mr. Fletcher. We called him Fletcher the Letcher. He was about our fathers’ ages, and he was creepy. It wasn’t anything hugely overt. He looked at girls when he thought no one noticed him. If we got caught in a crowded hallway with him, he was always accidentally bumping into us, brushing against our boobs, fondling us but, of course, never on purpose. He was just a jerk. As far as we knew, he never took it any further, never did anything that he couldn’t claim was an accident, but it was gross. We really hated him.”

  Jimmy reached for the printouts she’d given him and wrote a couple of lines. Maybe Fletcher the Letcher had gone further, with his victim too embarrassed to confide even in her best friends. That kind of betrayal of authority could certainly cause a teenage girl who otherwise had everything she needed to succeed to wind up terrified, paranoid, on the run and then murdered.

  “The Saturday night after graduation,” Martine went on, “the five of us went out in the woods near our houses. Someone brought some weed, and someone sneaked a bottle of booze from their house. We decided it would be fun to put a curse on Mr. Fletcher, to—to stop him from being such a perv. We put together a crude voodoo doll out of a bandanna and twigs and Spanish moss, and I made up a chant, something really juvenile about making him stop bothering the girls. At the end, we stuck a stick through its chest, and Paulina skewered its crotch with a metal nail file. It was just...silly. A game. None of us knew anything about voodoo. We were high and tipsy and stupid. That’s all it was.”

  Using the lid from the storage box as a table, Jimmy used his own shorthand to document the story while waiting for her to go on. In his experience, there was always more, and he had the patience of Job when it came to waiting.

  Martine pushed back the quilt and stood, pacing to the nearest window, then to the next one, then flipping the switch on a space heater tucked into the corner. She’d changed the loose pants she’d worn this morning for faded jeans that clung to her hips and every inch of her long legs, and added a chambray shirt over the long-sleeved T-shirt. With all that, she was still pale, her skin still bearing the faintest tinge of blue. She’d always been so confident, so capable, that he wouldn’t have thought her afraid of anything.

  But, of course, she was. She feared the one thing everyone did, even him: something happening to the people she loved. Hadn’t her initial response to seeing Jack this morning been fear that trouble had befallen Evie and the kids?

  Arms folded across her chest, she paced the length of the room on the opposite side of the table, making a neat little turn at each end. “We did our moronic ritual, stayed until the weed was gone and the booze was gone and it was late and we were sure we could get into our houses and into our rooms without our parents catching us, and then we went home. The next morning...” Her voice faltered, and so did her steps. She stood at the window, staring out, but Jimmy knew
for damn sure it wasn’t the courtyard or the building next door she was seeing.

  “The next morning we heard Mr. Fletcher had been found dead. He’d been shot in the chest and in the groin. A day or two later, his wife was arrested. She confessed, said she didn’t want a trial and went to prison.”

  “But you were convinced—” He considered it a moment, then changed tacks. “Your friends were convinced that somehow your ritual had caused his death. Had made her kill him.”

  Still staring out, she nodded. “It ended everything. Our entire lives’ worth of friendship. I tried to tell them it was ridiculous. We had no power, no experience, no knowledge. We’d been playing a dumb game, and it was just a coincidence that he’d died, but they felt so guilty. They left town, put as much distance between all of us as quickly as they could. As far as I know, other than the twins, none of us had any contact until Paulina showed up yesterday.”

  Like Jimmy had told Alia, he didn’t know much about voodoo, despite a lifetime in Louisiana. He respected it for the religion it was, but as for the curses, the gris-gris, the powerful magic... Maybe he was skeptical, but he didn’t believe the most skilled voodoo priestess could kill a man using nothing more than a doll and words. And Martine and her friends had been, by her own admission, far more stupid kids than skilled medicine women. Young, easily influenced and gullible enough to believe they had unleashed forces that cost a man his life.

  “He wouldn’t be the first philandering husband whose wife took her revenge on the family jewels,” he remarked.

  She glanced over her shoulder at him, a faint movement that might have been a smile tugging at her mouth, then sat down again.

  “I take it you never told anyone about this.”

  She shook her head.

  “And they probably never did, either.”

  “I don’t believe so. They were too scared and ashamed.”

  “So who did Paulina think had discovered the secret?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  He tapped his ink pen but didn’t quite let it touch the pad. The noise when it did tended to annoy the hell out of Jack, Alia or anyone else he was working with. They preferred not trying to think with the relentless tap-tap-tap for accompaniment, so he’d learned to be satisfied with just the movement.

  “She obviously thought it was tied to Fletcher’s death. Maybe because of Callie’s death? Do you know how she found out about that?”

  “No.”

  “Other than thinking someone was out to kill her, how did she seem to you? Like someone going through a bad time that would pass or maybe someone with real long-term problems?”

  “Someone was out to kill her.”

  “Yeah. I’m just trying to figure out what her mental status was before you saw her, before she took off from home in the middle of the day and disappeared for the next three months. Her husband’s driving over from Alabama, so I’m meeting him tomorrow, find out what he knows.”

  Martine shrugged, her features sad. “She was troubled. She looked like she wasn’t sleeping at all, like she'd lost a lot of weight. Her clothes didn't fit. Her skin didn't fit. I remember thinking she looked...scared to death. And she accused me of thinking she was crazy.”

  “Did it cross your mind?”

  She was reluctant to answer. It always surprised him how many people took to heart the bit about not talking badly of the dead, when it was usually the bad parts he needed to solve a crime. Once a person was dead, there were no more consequences. Secrets didn’t help anyone.

  Finally she nodded. “It did. You can’t imagine the difference from that night in the woods and yesterday. She used to be so bright and happy and full of life, and then she looked like an escapee from a horror movie set.”

  A pretty good comparison, Jimmy thought, remembering his first impression of the graveyard where the body had been found. Halloween 47: Everyone Dies.

  If it turned out that Paulina hadn’t been unnecessarily paranoid, everyone could—would—logically include Martine.

  Every muscle in his body knotted. He would be damned if he would let that happen. Even with the grudge she nursed against him, life wouldn't be the same without her in it.

  “So...can I ask a question?”

  His gaze flicked up to her face, and she seemed taken aback by the ferocity of it. He blinked, swallowed hard and worked to substitute something bland and far less intimidating. “I can’t promise I’ll answer.”

  “How was Paulina killed?”

  Damn, he’d been expecting that. People who cooperated usually felt entitled to a little information in return, and they usually asked one of two questions: Why? Or How? There was never a satisfactory answer to the first; even if the victim was a lying, thieving, murdering thug, there was always someone in his world who’d loved him and didn’t believe he’d deserved to die.

  As for the how, Jimmy didn’t believe it brought comfort, except along the lines of died-too-quickly-to-feel-any-pain. Shot, stabbed, beaten, run down in the street, drug overdose, bomb, burned alive, torture, ritual, poison...dead was dead. But families felt compelled to ask.

  He carefully lined the edges of the papers she’d given him and folded them in half. “She had blunt-force trauma to the back of her head.” Enough to render her unconscious, according to the preliminary autopsy reports, but not the cause of death. That appeared to be, as Leland had suggested at the scene, the removal of her heart.

  The same manner of death as Callista Jane Winchester.

  “There’s something else.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t...”

  “Was it... Is it connected to Callie’s death?”

  Suddenly Jimmy felt tired. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d talked to families about the horrible things done to their loved ones. No one outside of a coroner should know as much about the ends of strangers’ lives as he did. It just wasn’t natural.

  But it was the career he’d chosen—or maybe it had chosen him. He was always too late to save the victim, but he usually managed to get justice for them and, often enough, saved another life or two along the way.

  He fully intended to save Martine’s life.

  “Yes. I’m pretty sure it was. The...other details of the cases match.” Exhaling heavily, he stood. “I’ve got a lot of files to read, a lot of people to talk to, but finding Tallie and Robin are at the top of my list. If they’re alive, we’ll keep them that way. You, too. Don’t go out alone. Don’t meet any other old friends who happen to call. Don’t forget there’s a killer out there.”

  For a long time, still pale, still looking as fragile as spun glass, she held his gaze. When she finally looked away to open the storage bin, her hands trembled. “I picked out some pictures of the girls in case...” She brought out an envelope and offered it, but when he took hold of one end, she had trouble letting go of the other.

  “Thanks. It helps to put faces to names.”

  “I also have...” This time she pulled out the yearbook from her senior year. The girls, their friends and any possible rivals and Fletcher the Letcher, all in one book. He’d meant to ask for it but got distracted. She’d saved him a trip.

  He accepted it, along with the plastic shopping bag she plucked from a box meant for the store, and slid everything inside to keep it dry. He needed only one more thing before he went back to the office: a source to talk to about the possible voodoo aspects of the case. He’d intended to ask Martine a few questions but not now. She was freaked out enough already. Asking Who can tell me about the ritual taking of human body parts? would send her over the edge. He would find his source another way. That was what he got paid the big bucks for.

  “Look, Martine—”

  “Please don’t tell me not to worry.”

  “Oh, hell, no. Two of your friends have been murdered half a country apart.
You’d damn well better worry.” He shoved his fingers through his hair. “I just wanted to say... I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t ask what he was sorry for—Paulina’s and Callie’s deaths, being a jackass, leading her on, pissing her off. Any of it. All of it. She just nodded grimly.

  “If anything out of the ordinary happens, call me.” He offered his business card. “Anything—a hang-up, a customer who seems vaguely familiar or overly friendly, anything at all. Okay?”

  Her face was as colorless as before. “Okay,” she said in little more than a whisper. “Thank you.”

  “Now come downstairs and lock the door behind me.”

  She obeyed, moving so lightly on the stairs that he felt her presence rather than heard it. When they reached the dimly lit foyer, he hesitated, his hand on the doorknob, then faced her. “It’ll be okay.” They were meaningless words—okay might come in a few weeks, a few months, a few years or not at all, because no matter what happened in the end, Paulina Bradley and Callie Winchester were still dead—but people seemed to appreciate hearing them, and it filled some need in him to say them.

  She drew a deep breath, squared her shoulders and straightened her spine. Her chin lifted a notch, and a smile touched her mouth. “My mama says everything will always be okay, because even though we can’t change what’s happened, we can change the way we deal with it. If the human race wasn’t adaptable, it would have ceased to exist before it ever got started.”

  “Your mama’s a smart woman.” He opened the door, and the air in the small space turned cold and damp. After stepping outside, he gave her his usual grin. “You’ll be hearing from me.”

  He closed the door and waited until he heard the lock engage before going down the steps. In the instant before the snick of metal sinking into metal, he heard her murmured response.

  “Lucky me.”

  * * *

  After rattling around her apartment for half an hour, Martine realized that DiBiase’s instruction not to go out alone wasn’t as simple as it sounded. She had excess energy to burn, and the best way to do that was to bundle up and head out for a rapid-paced tour of the Quarter. But she’d learned this morning how easily someone could follow her when her senses were hampered by her rain slicker, she didn’t own an umbrella and she didn’t find that physical misery made anything better.