Carnival

by Kory M. Shrum

  “That’s the one.”

  “I had to make three phone calls for this,” Sampson said grumpily.

  “Don’t give me that,” King said, rubbing his nose. “I sent you the info on both the Robinson and Henley cases yesterday.”

  “Fair enough.” Sampson smacked his lips. “To answer your question, no. He’s had no prior charges, but he had two comments on his work record that I think you might find interesting.”

  King twirled a pen between his knuckles. “I’m listening.”

  “Two girls at his school have made complaints about him.”

  The pen stopped twirling. “What kind of complaints?”

  “One said he was keeping her after school to do work.”

  “Sounds teacherly.”

  “Yeah, but she claims that she didn’t need to do the extra work and thought he was trying to get her alone.”

  “That sounds less teacherly.”

  “Her official statement called him ‘creepy.’ The school dismissed her claims until her mother got involved. She’s a pediatrician, pillar of the community, something like that. They gave the girl an exam and she tested out of his class and into the AP course. She graduated six months later. Problem solved. The other girl had the same problem, but her family moved out of state before it was resolved.”

  This wasn’t anything King could use for a bona fide case against Fish. Predatory behavior toward female students certainly counted as part of the habits of murderous sociopaths, but unfortunately something as ambiguous as a student–teacher conflict wouldn’t hold in court.

  King scratched at his jaw. “Anything else?”

  “Yes,” Sampson said conspiratorially. “And this is more interesting.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “One night Fish was stopped by a patrol car.”

  “What time?”

  Papers shuffled on Sampson’s end again. “Just past midnight. The patrol car stopped him because he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.”

  “Careless,” King clucked.

  “When the officer got out of his car, he realized the back bumper was soaked in what he first thought was mud.”

  King sat up in his seat. “It wasn’t mud.”

  “Nope. The officer asked him to get out of the car, explained why he’d stopped him, and brought him to the back of the car to show him the blood.”

  King couldn’t suppress a laugh. “What did he say to get out of this?”

  “Claims he hit a deer and that it must’ve been the deer’s blood. The cop makes him open the trunk anyway, but there’s nothing in there save the tire and jack. A few reusable grocery bags. And the cop can’t test the blood right there on the side of the road, so he gives him the ticket and lets him go.”

  “Seems lenient.”

  “Especially given the fact that if he’d been a black man, and not just a white guy in a button-down, he probably would’ve been shot.”

  King agreed.

  “But the best part,” Sampson said, “is that Fish traded in that car two weeks later.”

  “That is interesting. Especially if the blood wasn’t from a deer. Were there scuff marks?”

  “Yep. Maybe some shoes kicking out?” There was a long pause. “Christ. People are sick.”

  “Yeah, it gets into your head if you’re not careful. But I admit, there’s also something stimulating about it.”

  “Robbie.” Sampson’s tone was suddenly grave. “I’m worried about your mental health, buddy.”

  The door opened, and Piper appeared with two paper-wrapped sub sandwiches in her arms. She arched her eyebrows at King’s expression, but he shook his head. Nothing to worry about.

  “I told you. I’ve got an interest in cold cases. Keeps my mind young.”

  Sampson laughed. “That’s what Sudoku is for.”

  Piper placed the sub sandwich and his change on his desk before pulling a cold diet soda from their mini fridge. He thanked her with a wink and a thumbs-up.

  “Fish has the look, I admit,” Sampson said. “But what have you actually got on the guy?”

  King pulled the tab on the soda, enjoying the crack of the opening can. “We’ll find out, won’t we?”

  The door chime rang again, and a man in uniform crossed the threshold into the detective agency. His black boots thudded heavily against the wooden floor.

  “Hey, Donny,” Piper said before taking a big bite of her sub sandwich. “What can we do for you?”

  The police officer nodded toward King. “I need to talk to him if he’s got a minute.”

  Piper met King’s gaze with her lips pursed in question.

  Sampson must’ve heard either the chime or Donny’s voice. “You gotta go, I take it?”

  “Yeah,” King admitted, putting his soda on the desktop. “But thanks for calling and letting me know what you found out.”

  “Anytime.” Sampson ended the call without saying goodbye. It was a bad habit that King had set the precedent for, so he couldn’t complain.

  King stood and offered his hand. “Hey, Donny. How’ve you been?”

  “Not bad,” he replied blandly, barely shaking King’s hand.

  King knew the local cop as one of the officers who commonly patrolled the French Quarter. For that reason, he was a friendly and familiar face, with his ragged eyebrow scar that bisected his left brow and a small cleft lip scar from a surgery he’d had as a kid.

  Piper pulled up one of the chairs so that Donny could sit across from King.

  “Oh, it’s okay,” he protested. “I can’t stay long.”

  And yet he sat down.

  “What can I do for you?” King was trying to discern the source of the cop’s nervousness. He’d never worked with one of the street cops on a case before, and nor would it make sense that Donny would come to King with information when good law enforcement absolutely required that the chain of command be upheld for all evidence and procedures so that they could pass a conviction in the court of law.

  Maybe it was a personal inquiry. God, King hoped Donny’s wife wasn’t having an affair.

  “It’s about Melandra,” Donny said.

  “What?” Piper and King said in unison.

  King shot her a look. You can stay, but be quiet.

  Piper rolled her eyes and made an impatient gesture with her hands. Fortunately, this was done behind Donny’s back.

  “I was patrolling last night with Ramika, and Mel called out to me. At first she looked, well, I’m not sure how to describe it. Like she was pissed but also pretty scared. She said she’d been robbed.”

  “By who?”

  “That’s the funny part.” Donny shook his head. “I saw the man who was talking to her. I’d spotted her before she spotted me, actually, but I was working and she was talking to this guy so I didn’t think nothing of it. But then I see her coming at me and he grabs her. That’s when I knew something was up. But then he sort of disappeared before I got to her.”

  Disappeared. King’s stomach dropped. He thought of the man in the leather hat with the crow feather sticking out of one side and the bone choker stretched across his dark throat. Hadn’t he disappeared on King too?

  King relayed this description.

  Donny sat up straighter. “Yeah, that’s him. You’ve seen him?”

  “Yeah,” King said, recalling the way the man had rolled his eyes up to meet King’s from the street below. “And I’ve seen him pull the disappearing act.”

  “By the time we got to speaking, she said she hadn’t been robbed and was clearly trying to smooth it over, you know? I didn’t want to push it, but what could I do?”

  “Nothing,” King said sympathetically.

  Donny licked his lips and sheepishly met King’s gaze.

  King leaned forward and grinned. “But you did do something, didn’t you?”

  “Not officially.” Donny flashed a guilty smile. “Between you and me, I might have gone across the street to the convenience store and got the security tape from Larry. I
might’ve also got a match on the guy. I just wanted to know who the hell he was.”

  “And?”

  “The name’s Terrence Lamott. He just got out of prison two weeks ago for murder. And he’s Melandra’s husband.”

  King glanced at Piper and saw her reddening face and working jaw. She looked ready to explode.

  Donny rubbed his forehead as if a headache was coming on. “He’s on parole, so he can’t fuck up or he goes right back in, but that doesn’t mean shit.”

  “People reoffend all the time.”

  “Anyway, Mel might not want to talk about it, but I thought at least I could tell you. You live and work so close, you can keep an eye on her.”

  Donny stood from his seat.

  King, sensing the departure mixed in with the apology, reached across the desk and offered his hand. “Thanks for telling me. I appreciate it.”

  Piper bounced in her seat, making her chair emit tiny desperate squeaks. Both King and Donny glanced her way.

  She stopped bouncing. “Sorry.”

  “If that guy starts giving her any shit, call me.” Donny dragged his chair across the room to where Piper had taken it from.

  “Will do.”

  With an apologetic smile, Donny slipped from the office out into the sunlit streets.

  Piper was out of her chair before the door fully closed. “Husband. Husband! Did you even know she was married?”

  “No,” King said, absentmindedly flicking the pull tab on his soda. Because Mel had told him a different story. In her version, she had been married to an abusive alcoholic for many years and then she’d divorced him. It had been ugly, but she had gotten a nice settlement out of it and it had allowed her to buy her shop. The idea she’d lied—felt like she had to lie—formed a cold rock in the pit of his gut. “No, I didn’t know.”

  “And he’s a murderer! Who stole something from her!”

  “You need to calm down,” King said, but his own irritation was biting at the back of his neck.

  “Calm down?” Piper cried. She threw up her hands. “This murderer is harassing her and stealing her shit and she’s too scared to even talk to us about it. I will not calm down. We have to do something.”

  “She must have a reason for wanting us to stay out of it,” King said. He wasn’t sure if he was trying to reassure Piper or himself. A horrible tight sensation had formed below his solar plexus and was growing. The nerves in his arms and legs felt jittery with weakness. She lied to me. She lied to me.

  Piper crossed her arms over her chest. “She’s wrong. She needs us.”

  Think, King scolded himself. Think! Why would she lie? Embarrassment? Fear? To protect you?

  “And he’s a murderer,” Piper muttered to herself while pacing. “Mel is married to a murderer. And not the good kind like Lou. He’s the bad kind of murderer.”

  “We don’t know who he killed or why.” King covered his eyes.

  “What are we going to do?” Piper asked, coming up on the balls of her feet expectantly.

  “Shhh. Be quiet. I’m trying to think.”

  “Think later. What are we going to do?” Piper paced anxiously in front of him. “We are going to do something. We have to get rid of this guy. What if she was in witness protection and he found her? We—we have to protect her!”

  “Of course we’ll protect her,” King said.

  The problem was King knew Melandra. This omission, though surprising, made sense to him. It also meant that given what he knew about Melandra, she was already protecting herself. And if she was, the question was from what?

  Something must’ve happened. Somewhere in their shared history, something must have happened. I have to figure out what it was. I need more information.

  It would take a lot of asking. He’d have to talk to her family, his family, old friends. Cell mates and people from his time in prison—because boy, don’t people talk in prison. He’d have to go through the husband’s records and history. This would take a while, but he had to see the situation clearly—both what was on and off record—if he was going to help Mel.

  King lifted his phone, chewing his lip while he considered which call he should make first.

  22

  Lou was perched on a stool inside the busy ramen house when she felt the tug in her abdomen. Someone was calling for her. It didn’t feel like panic or the nerve-singeing ignition of all-consuming fear. But it got her attention. She dipped her chopsticks into her warm bowl of Tonkatsu and glanced at the bustling Tokyo street beyond, trying to get a sense of where the call was coming from.

  Japanese, which had always been a beautiful and melodious language to her, filled her ears. It was complete with the exception of two American tourists sharing a table near the back of the noodle shop. Their brash, loud mouths ran as their cameras and shopping bags crowded around their feet.

  Another desperate pull, this one a little more urgent than the last.

  She did the math in her head. It was almost noon in Tokyo, which meant that it was almost ten in New Orleans.

  With a sigh, Lou shoveled as much of the food into her mouth as possible, placed a generous stack of yen beside her bowl, and nodded to the chef on the other side of the counter. “Dōmo arigatō gozaimashita.”

  Then Lou was walking toward the bathroom in the back, a room so small she couldn’t fully extend her arms without brushing the tiled walls on all sides.

  No matter. She only needed its momentary darkness, long enough for the shadows to overtake her, wrap her body with their power, and sift her through the underbelly of the world.

  A new bathroom formed around her. The smell of cooking meat and smoke was replaced with the rancid burn of alcohol. The voices were all American now, and about twenty times louder than they needed to be as they fought to overcome the Beyoncé track blasting through the unseen speakers. The walls vibrated.

  Lou stepped out of a dark corner into the bar itself, and was greeted by a crush of bodies. She spotted Piper right away.

  “There you are.” Piper stepped forward, flipping one blond pigtail over her shoulder, and hooked her arm through Lou’s.

  “What’s going on?” Lou asked.

  “I’ll tell you outside. I’m sweating to death in here.”

  Piper pulled her through the throng of bodies, aware that more than once her guns shifted beneath her leather jacket, pressing into her ribs. If the passersby felt it, they showed no sign.

  Because everyone is drunk, Lou thought. They aren’t noticing anything.

  Piper raised her hand and waved to a small throng of girls near the DJ booth. One bit her lip and pouted, giving Lou a ruthless once-over the moment before Piper pulled her from the bar and into the open street. It was twenty degrees cooler outside, but crowd control wasn’t much better.

  “Are you ditching your friends?” Lou asked.

  “Sort of. I invited them out because I’m trying not to think about freaking Dani, or the fact that Mel’s husband is a murderer and out of prison and I have an exam in two days that I don’t feel remotely good about—”

  “Stop,” Lou said, pulling her to a halt in the middle of the street. Outside the bar, it was easier to smell the alcohol on Piper’s breath. She was well on her way to drunk. “Say all that again. Slowly.”

  “I mean, Scarlett is nice but I shouldn’t be sleeping with one woman when I’m thinking about another one. That’s not healthy, man. And drinking and screwing all night has never helped anyone pass an exam.” She burped and pressed her fist into her chest. “That I know of.”

  Lou pushed her sunglasses up on her head. “Tell me about Mel and the husband.”

  Piper pinched the bridge of her nose. “Oh man that burns. Ever burped in your nose?”

  “Mel,” Lou insisted. “Has a husband?”

  “It turns out that creepy guy I don’t like is Mel’s husband. And he just got out of prison a couple weeks ago after being in there for twenty-something years for beating his pregnant girlfriend to death. He’s a cheat
er, woman beater, and baby killer, man. A total trash human.”

  Lou listened carefully as Piper recounted Donny’s story. As some point she realized that Piper hadn’t texted her when she’d needed her. Unlike King, who always sent his messages like a page, Piper had relied on the fact that her simple desire to see Lou was enough to summon her.

  “You didn’t page me. How did you know I’d come?” Lou reached out and steadied Piper on her feet.

  “I didn’t know you’d come. I just hoped.”

  “And if I hadn’t?”

  “I would’ve tried paging you, but I like knowing I can reach you like this.” She placed her fingers at her temples and hummed. “I don’t know when another Dmitri Petrov is gonna show up. And I’m not going to wait until I’m actually kidnapped—again—to make sure the alarm system still works, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “I won’t let anything like that happen again,” Lou said. And she was surprised by both the admission and the swell of possessiveness that rose in her chest at the idea of someone hurting Piper.

  “Back at you.” Piper blushed, looking embarrassed. “But King said we can’t kill the husband. Yet. He’s investigating the guy or something. But I swear to God, if he puts his hands on her…” Piper rolled her eyes to the sky and pretended to choke an imaginary neck. “I’ll kill him.”

  Lou thought of Fish and the tender way his wife leaned toward him, smiling as she offered her cheek for a kiss. No, she thought. Sometimes the monsters stay hidden in the dark. “You’re certain he’s threatening her now?”

  “Oh yeah. And we’re going to do something about it, because she’s Mel. She’s one of us. We’re not going to let some sleaze bucket assho—” Piper bit her lip the moment her eyes fixed on something over Lou’s shoulder. She hiccupped. “Oh shit. Be cool.”

  Lou felt the girl behind her before she stepped into Lou’s line of sight. The impulse to pull her gun or turn and seize the person approaching rose in her. But since Piper’s expression looked somewhere between apologetic and annoyed, she suspected this would’ve been an overreaction.