by Tami Hoag
She was exhausted, body and soul, but she forced her mind to work. Like an athlete who had been away from the game with an injury, she felt every move was an effort, but the skills were still there. If she could hang on to the emotion, control her feelings, think clearly, the thoughts would flow easier and answers would come.
Baldwin. His name was a slash of capital letters at the top of the page. He was a liar and a con man. He had a temper. It wasn't difficult to imagine him getting rough with a woman. He had known Savannah, but what about Annie? Why would she have had anything to do with him? She might have gone to him on her parents' behalf. Might even have thought to discredit him with sex.
What about the other women? What about the jewelry? Could Baldwin have gotten Savannah's necklace into her purse without her knowledge? She would never have allowed him near enough when she had the bag with her, but Laurel remembered too clearly the feeling of being watched the night of Annie's wake, when she had come home and gone into the courtyard. The pocketbook had lain on a bench all night. Anyone might have crept into the garden . . .
. . . like Jack.
No. She wouldn't even consider it. Jack was no killer.
Did she think that because it was a fact, or because she loved him?
Loved. Past tense.
The thought triggered another memory. Conroy Cooper packing his bags. “. . . I loved Savannah as best I could . . .” Loved. Past tense. She scribbled the words down and lifted the pen to chew thoughtfully on the end of it. It was difficult to picture Cooper as a killer with his warm blue eyes and his warm molasses voice.
“Not everyone is what they seem, Laurel. . . .”
She sketched a question mark beside Cooper's name and went on.
Leonce made her uncomfortable, but not through any effort to do so. She felt vaguely guilty suspecting him. He had helped out the Delahoussayes all he could. He'd done his best to be a friend to her. Did she have any real reason to question him?
He had known Annie and Savannah. The others? He traveled some to sing with bands in other towns. That gave him opportunity, but short of questioning him herself, she had no way of knowing the when or where of his schedule. He liked to flirt, but the scar had to turn more women off than on. What kind of resentment would build inside a man from that constant rejection? Enough to make him hate women? Enough to make him kill?
The thought of resentment brought thoughts of Ross, and she added his name to the list, but knew that had less to do with fact than feeling. Still, look what he'd gotten away with for twenty years with no one suspecting.
Laurel blew a breath of frustration up into her bangs as she contemplated the list. Six women were dead. There had to be something that linked someone to all the murders.
Then why hadn't anyone caught him?
A chill crept over her flesh as she stared out the French doors into the dark of the night.
Eyes shine in the night along the bayou. The creatures of the night stalk and prowl. In the shadows the predator waits, watches, savors thoughts of victory. Above, an adversary sits in the glow of a lamp and wonders. An answer may come, but none will believe the truth. Too clever, too cunning, instincts too sharp to make a mistake. Mistakes are made by the weak, by the desperate, by the victim. The predator's mind is clear and sharp. No clouds of grief. No distractions of conscience. Only thoughts of ultimate victory and the taste of blood.
Jack rose from his desk to wander through the halls and rooms of L'Amour, trying not to think, trying not to feel, not at all surprised when he found himself on the balcony, staring across at the light in Laurel's room. She wasn't sleeping. Again.
He couldn't blame her. He knew what it was to lose someone. He knew the automatic questions and recriminations. Could I have done anything to stop it? How could I have let it happen? He still asked himself those questions of Evie's death. Laurel would ask them in regard to Savannah. She would take the burden on her small shoulders. He had accused her of arrogance, but that wasn't it. Responsibility. In a world that seemed increasingly out of anyone's control, Laurel chose to take responsibility—not only for herself, but for everyone around her.
And he wanted responsibility for no one.
But he wanted her love.
Selfish through and through, Jack.
He wasn't meant for love. Had never been. The comforts and warmth of it were for other men, better men.
Even as he thought it, he heard Laurel's voice, trembling with pain and pride. “. . . I'll be damned if we don't have the power to get past all that and be something better.”
He had thought so, too, once. He'd been wrong. He wouldn't risk being wrong again. The pain was too much, too cruel, for a heart that had been broken too many times.
For another long moment he stood on the balcony and listened to thunder rumble in the distance and watched the light across the way. The air was heavy with the scent of rain and the feel of something dark and restless, like eyes in the night. For a second he thought he was being watched, but the restlessness was within him. A need for something he could never have, regret for things he couldn't change. Slowly, he turned and went back in to his bottle and his work with the idea of immersing himself in both.
And in the dark shadows along the bayou, a predator's eyes shine.
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
Laurel woke with a start and headache. Her breath came in pants as the residual uneasiness of a dream hung around her. Eyes. She'd felt eyes on her, staring from the dark. But she hadn't been able to see the face, had only known somehow that it was familiar.
It was only a dream, but the uneasiness lingered as she sat up slowly and took stock of herself and the room around her. It had rained. The glass of the French doors was spattered with windblown droplets. The weather system had moved on, but gray still clung to the sky where dawn should have been.
She rubbed a hand over her face, groaning a bit as the headache kicked the backs of her eyeballs. She didn't know how long she had slept. An hour, maybe two. The state of the bedclothes was a testimony to how badly she had slept. The sheets were torn loose from the foot of the bed, the spread was rumpled. The notes she had made were scattered.
Grimacing at the taste of bitter dreams in her mouth, she forced herself to get up and gather the papers and the pen. She snatched them up, one by one, following a trail of them across the floor. She dug her glasses out of the folds of the bedspread, slipped them on, and combed her bangs back with her fingers. The gears of her brain strained into motion with much creaking and grinding, slipping and catching.
Baldwin, Cooper, Leonce, Ross. Names and question marks filled the pages. Notes, hunches, feelings. Hunches and feelings weren't admissible in a court of law. She knew that better than most people.
She walked to the French doors, shuffling the pages, brow furrowed as she retraced the ramblings of her mind. Not Jack. The bold declaration caught her eye, and her heart gave a traitorous thump. Bits of evidence tried to surface in her mind—his duality, the way he could seemingly appear and disappear at will, his past, his profession. And she beat every one of them back down.
Through the windowpanes she could see a bit of L'Amour—mysterious, shabby, standing alone on the bank of the bayou—and she let herself wonder for just a second what he was doing, whether he regretted the things he'd said to her, whether he wished as strongly as she did for the feel of familiar arms around him.
“You've known him how long? A week?”
God, was it only that? It seemed so much longer. The minutes and hours of the past week had somehow been elongated, magnified, and packed densely with experience and needs and fears. It seemed like forever, and at the same time, it could never be enough.
Not productive thinking. He didn't want her, didn't want any chance at a relationship. He wanted his solitude and his self-inflicted pain. He wanted to play the party animal, then go home to his empty prison. And when she was thinking straight, she knew it was just as well that she leave him to it. She needed
time to heal—the old wounds and the new. She needed to get her world back on its axis and find her own place in it. A fresh start was what she needed, not a man with a past haunting him.
Craving a breath of fresh, rain-washed morning air to clear her muzzy head, Laurel set the notes aside on a table, unlocked and swung open the doors, as she had done hundreds of times in her life.
A scream tore from her throat and she shot back across the room before her conscious mind could even register what she had seen. Hand clutched to a heart that was racing out of control, she forced her eyes to focus, forced her brain to accept the information sent to it.
Wound around the outside door handle was the limp, dead body of a cottonmouth snake.
“Goddamn it, I thought you were watching her, Deputy Pruitt!” Kenner bellowed.
The thin, pasty-faced young man stood on the balcony outside Laurel's room looking as if he were contemplating the advantages of jumping off.
“Yessir, I was, sir,” he said, trying unsuccessfully to swallow the knot in his throat. His Adam's apple bobbed as his eyes darted to the body of the snake. Christ Almighty, he hated snakes. Everyone knew he hated snakes. Dollars to doughnuts, Kenner would make him unwrap this one from that handle and bag it as evidence. It looked to be a good four feet long. “I came on at four A.M., sir, and I swear I didn't see nothin'. I watched this house like a hawk.”
Kenner swaggered to the door, reached down, and flicked a finger under the head of the snake. It flipped up, exposing the patches of cream color on the underside of the throat, and flopped back down, hitting the wood with a dull thud. Deputy Pruitt turned a little grayer. Kenner scowled. Goddamn prissy kid.
“You came on at four. Myers left. How long did the two of you stand around chewing the fat out by the cars?”
Despite his pallor, a hint of red managed to creep into the deputy's cheeks. “Just a while, sir. There wasn't nothin' goin' on. We'da heard.”
Snarling, Kenner stepped up to his underling and jabbed the kid's sternum hard with a forefinger. “There sure as hell was somethin' going on, and the hell if you heard it,” he growled.
Pruitt clenched his jaw against the need to wince. “Yessir,” he mumbled, miserable.
“Bag that snake as evidence, and don't touch one other goddamn thing. If you so much as smudge a fingerprint, I'll cram that cottonmouth down your throat. Do you understand me, Deputy Pruitt?”
“Yessir.” Too well. The image had him on the brink of gagging.
Kenner jerked away and turned back toward Laurel.
She sat on the bed in jeans and the T-shirt she had slept in. Caroline stood beside her, wrapped in a white silk robe, her expression the fierce look of a tiger whose cub had been threatened. Mama Pearl, a vision in red chenille, had planted her enormous bulk on a vanity stool that all but disappeared beneath her.
“Y'all didn't hear anything, didn't see anything?” Kenner asked.
Laurel answered, pushing herself to her feet. “For the fourth time, no.”
She hadn't seen anything, hadn't heard anything. She had awakened haunted by the feeling of eyes on her. Her skin crawled.
Caroline crossed her arms and started pacing beside the bed, her lips pressed into a thin line of disapproval. She cut a dark, sharp look at Kenner. “This is intolerable, Sheriff. My niece is being tormented by a psychopath, and your office can't manage to do so much as to keep her safe inside a locked house?”
“The house was under surveillance, Miz Chandler.”
“It would seem it was under better surveillance by the killer than by your deputies.”
Kenner shot a look at Pruitt, who was damn near green as he fumbled with the long, rubbery body of the dead snake, then his gaze moved beyond. Beyond the balcony, beyond the courtyard, to the house Jack Boudreaux had taken. The house of a dead whore. It would have been a simple matter to watch for the change of shifts, slip into the garden, and climb the stairs. Wrap a dead cottonmouth around the door handle—just as the killer had done in Blood Will Tell.
He'd been scanning the collective works of Jack Boudreaux last night. After seeing the kind of stuff that rotted in the man's imagination, the sheriff had no difficulty picturing him as a killer.
“It won't happen again, ma'am,” he growled. He dismissed Caroline and swung around to Deputy Wilson, a kid who had been built for the NFL but not blessed with speed. “Go see if Boudreaux is home. I want to have me a little talk with him downtown.”
“Why?”
Laurel's question drew a narrow stare from the sheriff. “Why not?”
Because I know him. Because I've slept with him. The answers weren't going to dissuade Kenner.
He strode from the room with his linebacker at his heels, leaving the unhappy Pruitt to wrestle with the snake and the contents of his own stomach.
Mama Pearl rocked herself up from the little vanity chair and reached out to pat Laurel's arm. “You come on down to my kitchen, chère. I fix you tea and biscuits with honey.”
“I'm sorry, Mama Pearl,” she said, moving to the wardrobe to hunt for clothes. “I have to get down to the courthouse.”
Caroline's brows snapped down over her dark eyes. “Laurel, you can't mean it! You've had no rest and one terrible shock after another! Stay here,” she insisted, wrapping an arm around her niece's shoulders, keeping her from reaching for a blouse. She hugged Laurel hard, emotion suddenly clogging her throat. “Stay here with me, sweetheart,” she whispered. “Please. I don't want you getting involved in this. I don't want to lose you, too.”
Laurel looked from her aunt to the door, where the snake hung in a single loop and Deputy Pruitt leaned over the balcony disgracing himself all over the clematis vine. “I'm already in it, Aunt Caroline,” she said softly. “And there's only one way out.”
Jack woke with a pounding in his head and pounding on the front door of the house. He wished he could manage to ignore both. The banging in his head was the farewell gong of a substantial amount of Wild Turkey. The banging on the door turned out to be a very large deputy named Wilson, a man without sympathy or humor, who hauled him downtown to “have a little talk” with Sheriff Kenner.
Now he was sitting in a straight chair that had to be an antique from the Inquisition, staring across a scarred table at Kenner's ugly mug.
“Do you want a lawyer?”
“Do I need one?” Jack returned, arching a brow. “Am I being charged with something?”
“No. Should I be charging you?”
Depends, he thought. Heaven knew he was guilty of plenty. He dug a cigarette out of the breast pocket of his chambray shirt and dangled it from his lip. “You catch a lot of idiots with that question?”
“A few.”
He struck a match and sucked crud deep into his lungs with the kind of greed known only to an ex-smoker fallen off the wagon.
“What do you call two thousand lawyers at the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain?” He left the appropriate pause for an answer, even though Kenner just sat there glaring at him. Jack flashed him a wry grin and blew twin streams of smoke out his nose. “A good start.”
Kenner didn't so much as blink. “Where were you this morning about four o'clock?”
“In my bed, dead sound asleep.”
“Interesting choice of words.”
Jack shrugged expansively. “C'est vrai. Words are my life.”
“Yeah,” Kenner sniffed. “I've been reading some of your best-sellers, Jack. Blood Will Tell. Evil Illusions. You've got a sick mind.”
“I'm just doing my job,” Jack said glibly. He rubbed the ruby stud in his earlobe between thumb and forefinger and gave Kenner a wry look. “You're the one plunked down six bucks for the pleasure of reading it.”
“I got them from the library.”
“Ouch.” He winced. “No royalties from you.”
Again Kenner ignored him, sticking to his own agenda. “Pretty reckless of you to steal ideas from your own work.”
Dread hit Jack in the belly like a boot. M
on Dieu, not again, not another dead girl. He sat up straighter and abandoned his cigarette in the tin ashtray on the table. “What are you talkin' about?”
Kenner planted his elbows on the table and leaned forward, as well, jaw set, eyes narrowed. “I'm talking about slipping over to Belle Rivière while the deputies were changing shifts and wrapping a dead cottonmouth around the handle to Laurel Chandler's bedroom door.”
A potent combination of rage and fear swirled through Jack, and he surged to his feet, sending the chair screeching back on the linoleum. A killer had been playing games with her. Apparently the game was not over. And on the heels of those feelings came the guilt that a truly twisted mind had borrowed from his imagination.
He stalked the cheerless box of the interrogation room with his shoulders braced and his hands jammed at the waist of his jeans, doing his best to fight it all off. What he really needed, he told himself, was to get the hell out of town for a while. Until the killer was behind bars. Until Laurel had packed up and moved on with her life.
He stopped his pacing in front of what had to be a two-way glass and stared hard at the reflection of himself, wondering who might be on the other side.
Kenner watched him with hard, cold eyes, trying to read every nuance of expression and movement. “You didn't happen to have anybody in bed with you can vouch for your whereabouts?”
Jack swung around to face him, brows pulling low over his eyes. “I wouldn't do anything to hurt Laurel.”
The word “liar” rang like a gong in his head, but he ignored it. He had pushed her out of his life for her own good, not to hurt her. And damn but he missed her already. The thought of her finding that snake, especially after everything else she had gone through, made him want to go to her to protect her. But he couldn't do that. Wouldn't. He was nobody's white knight.
Something thumped against the door, breaking his train of thought, then came the sound of an argument loud enough to be heard quite clearly.