City of the Dead

by Eileen Dreyer

Chastity looked up at him, her eyes wide with distress. “Willow Tolliver. The body in the bayou. When Eddie Dupre saw her, she was dressed as a nun. I’m wondering if that could be some kind of message. Like the angel baby and the voodoo offerings, ya know?”

  Gaudet stared at her a minute, then started flipping pages in his notebook, looking for something. “They still don’t have an ID on her, you know.”

  “Is it my sister?”

  “No.” He faced her with those comforting eyes. “This woman was younger, although she had had children.”

  “Yes, two. I’ll go bail it’s Willow.”

  He nodded. “I’ll check on it.”

  Chastity remembered something else suddenly, now that she was on that train of thought. Something that should have clicked the minute she’d heard about how Willow was found. But then, she’d heard that when she was on an ER gurney.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Sister Mercy. The people at the fertility clinic called Faith Sister Mercy.”

  Sergeant Gaudet perked up like a beagle. “You didn’t say that before.”

  Chastity glared at him. “Do you know how many directions this thing has taken?”

  His smile was sweet. “Welcome to my world. Now, tell me what you think.”

  She shrugged. “Willow looks like my sister. Could somebody have killed her thinking she was Faith? Then all three women might have been killed by the same person. I wonder if they found a circle avulsed on her cheek.” She sighed, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “I wonder if she had any cheek left to avulse.”

  “She didn’t.” He took another look at his notebook. “Uh, your sister. Do you know if she had any affinity for Saint Jude?”

  “Saint Jude?” Chastity asked. “Patron saint of the hopeless? Why?”

  “Just that there was a Saint Jude statue found with the, uh, body in the bayou.”

  Chastity instinctively shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”

  But she wasn’t sure. What if Faith had come to rely on Saint Jude, had prayed to him, as Frankie Mae had built her altar to her orisha? What could she have been praying for?

  And, being Chastity, she wondered if maybe she should have tried harder to find her sister. Intervened before she needed a saint who only performed miracles of deliverance. Before she’d needed delivering from anything.

  But that was a stupid thought. Because if Faith had needed saving, it would have been from her own father. And if he’d run true to form, he’d hurt Faith long before Chastity had even been born.

  “I think I’ll talk to some people at those clinics,” Sergeant Gaudet said, calling Chastity back to attention. “It does seem to figure into all the comings and goings.”

  “So you don’t think I’m just weaving a bunch of coincidences into a big tapestry of paranoia?” Chastity asked.

  He considered his notebook a moment longer. “Maybe. But maybe not. You say New Life is using questionable practices?”

  “Yeah. I also got the feeling that Faith was paid in cash. I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t some accounting gymnastics going on there.”

  “What about the Arlen Clinic?”

  Chastity sighed. “I haven’t seen anything objectionable, but who knows? All I know is that the murderer seems to have focused on these women’s desperation for a baby. And they were all connected with Arlen. And at least two of them had terrible things to say about New Life. If I could get hold of Eddie Dupre, I might be able to give you a better answer.”

  Gaudet finished writing and closed his book. “You were about to head home, I hear. Back to St. Louis.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  His expression folded into concern. “Much as I hate to tell a woman she can’t escape a hurricane, we have at least two murders you seem to figure into.”

  Chastity gaped all over again. “Are you saying I can’t leave?”

  He gave a small shrug. “You want this cleared up, don’t you?”

  She wanted her dog. She wanted to crawl into her nice comfortable bed in St. Louis and never leave it again. She wanted to run so far away from her father he’d never find her again.

  It didn’t look like that was going to happen.

  The police might well answer the question of who was behind this, but Chastity wasn’t at all sure they’d do it in time to keep Faith safe. If only she could figure a way to do it without involving Kareena and James.

  “Here’s my card,” Gaudet said, handing it over. “Anything occurs to you, let me know. I’ll do the same. And please. Be careful.”

  Chastity responded with her own card. She should have felt better. The police were finally listening to her. They were going to look into those fertility clinics and see if they had anything to do with the murders.

  They were going to be able to get records and information she never could. They might find out why a fertility clinic would be involved in multiple murder.

  But the minute that idea came to mind, Chastity realized that it didn’t work anymore.

  Maybe it could have with Faith’s disappearance.

  Not with the murders.

  Not these murders.

  Standing there in a utilitarian police station waiting for James and Kareena and a hurricane the size of Texas, Chastity couldn’t collect her thoughts enough to understand it. She just knew that, like bad shoes and rationalizations, the theory just didn’t fit anymore.

  It took two hours of alcohol to figure out why.

  James wasn’t sprung until almost dusk. The lawyer who finally showed up was something straight out of central casting. Clad in a white Tennessee Williams suit and bow tie, he was shorter than Chastity, rounder than Paul Prudhomme, and fluent in French and Cajun charm. Chastity was sure she’d seen him in The Big Easy.

  It didn’t matter. The lawyer took fifteen minutes to produce James. His posture impossibly rigid, his face impassive as a frieze, James allowed Kareena to guide him out the door and all the way down to the Big Dawg, where they proceeded to get James completely wasted.

  It was there, perched on an impossibly high bar stool that put her directly at eye level with Carol the bartender’s precarious seventy-year-old breasts, that Chastity finally figured out what was wrong with the idea that somebody protecting a felonious fertility clinic would murder three women.

  Those three women.

  In just that way.

  “It’s personal,” Chastity said into her gin.

  James looked over from where he was seriously depleting the city’s supply of Macallan scotch. “What?”

  Chastity looked up to see that his eyes were still brittle and old. She imagined locked doors did to him what bleach and lavender did to her.

  She didn’t want to put him through this again. She didn’t want to hurt him or Kareena or Faith. She didn’t want anybody else to die.

  And James and Kareena didn’t even know yet about Lloyd.

  So she tried to distract him. “You have that sky on the ceiling of your cell, too?”

  He didn’t so much as flinch. “The penitentiary library had a good astronomy section.”

  Chastity was on his left, faced with all those terrible burns and that claw of a hand. A view full of the devastation he’d suffered for an act of justice.

  Chastity understood that kind of justice. She desperately wished someone had thought to visit it on her father. She knew it wasn’t legal or ethical or kind. But there were times when kind just didn’t answer.

  She had no right to ask it of James.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  James made a lurching turn, so she could catch sight of smooth skin. “Why? You didn’t ask me to beat the crap out of that guy.”

  “I asked you to put yourself at risk again.”

  He glared at her a minute, as tightly locked away as she’d ever seen him. Then, amazingly, he smiled. “Don’t be silly. This time I’m getting paid.”

  Even so, Chastity reached over and took hold of his scarred hand. He flinched. But he forgot to pull away.
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br />   “What’s personal?” he asked. “You said it’s personal.”

  Chastity shook her head. “Nope, you’re off the case. I can’t do this, James. I can’t put you two at risk any longer.”

  “And how are you going to find your sister?”

  The sister she hadn’t seen in ten years, as opposed to these two people who had helped her with no questions asked. This man who had risked more for Chastity than she thought she could bear.

  “I don’t care. I’m going home.”

  She wasn’t, of course. But he didn’t need to know that.

  He did. He shook his head. “Might as well let me drive. I’m gonna keep looking anyway.”

  “Why?”

  His grin was a bit lopsided.“’Cause whoever did that to Frankie pissed me off.”

  She sucked in a breath, struggled with all those deaths. Deaths she had a feeling she was responsible for. They accumulated there, right beneath the weight of her sister Hope and her mother and the rest of the sins she’d ever committed. But in the end she told James what she thought about them, because she knew he wasn’t being frivolous. He wouldn’t stop.

  “Those murders,” she said, then looked away to think. It only put her in line of sight with those massive mammary glands of Carol’s, wobbling over to refill James’s drink. Chastity shook her head and focused on the street scene beyond. “They were personal, James. Don’t you think so?”

  “How?”

  Chastity waved an unsteady hand. “Those women weren’t just killed. They were demeaned. Their most precious beliefs were degraded. The message wasn’t just to stop. It was that what they were doing was worthless. That they were worthless.”

  James blinked a couple of times. “Okay.”

  Chastity leaned closer, intent on her message. “He got right in their faces. Eye to eye, so he could smell the fear on them. And then he calmly blew them to hell.”

  The more she talked, the more frightened she became. Because she’d somehow led the murderer right to those women. She’d put them in the line of fire and then walked away, without even knowing it.

  But why?

  “Do you really think that any place of business could be so threatened that they’d go to that much trouble?” she asked. “To leave a message like that?”

  “Maybe if the person who’s threatened takes it all personally.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t see that at either place.”

  “What about Eddie Dupre?”

  Chastity chewed on that a minute. “Okay, maybe Eddie. But…”

  “But?”

  She shrugged, all the thousands of bits of information they’d collected swirling around in her chest. “I don’t know. I didn’t get that kind of attitude from him.”

  “Who did you get it from?”

  But she wasn’t ready to say that yet. Especially in a biker bar in the Quarter to a man more drunk than she. Some things should only be acknowledged in the light of day.

  If they were acknowledged at all.

  “We’ll track down Eddie tomorrow if it’s the last thing we do,” she said instead.

  It was just what they did do. The next morning Eddie was the first stop on their rounds. And for a minute, it looked as if Chastity would finally be able to rely on the police to solve all her problems. That they would not only answer all her questions, but do it before Faith could possibly come to harm.

  Chastity thought that because, when they pulled up to Eddie’s house, the police were already there.

  Not just the police. A full crime scene. Yellow tape, technicians, cameras, the whole works. But before Chastity even had a chance to fear for Eddie’s life, he walked out his front door with Sergeant Gaudet’s hand on his elbow.

  Eddie was cuffed and arguing. The police were chattering like blackbirds on a wire. Another TV news truck had just pulled up, and the neighbors had congregated in the street. And there, blocking the street in front of Eddie’s house, was a white New Orleans police van. Not the crime scene van, though.

  The haz-mat unit.

  Hazardous material, like toxic waste and bodily fluids.

  Two men stepped out in full protective gear and lumbered right past Eddie as he was led down his lawn.

  “Don’t hurt them!” Eddie shrieked, tears streaming down his face. “Don’t hurt my babies!”

  Which was when Chastity saw what the haz-mat guys were heading for. Propped against a little car that had been driven halfway up Eddie’s lawn, as if Eddie were in a tearing hurry to be gone. One glinted silver in the dull sunlight. Another already sat in the open trunk, like a keg looking for a party.

  Metal tanks, two of them, just like the ones Chastity had seen at the Arlen Clinic. The kind that held frozen embryos.

  Eddie had been taking his work home with him.

  Could he really be the killer? Chastity wondered. Could there be a reason for him to turn on the women who had relied on him? Could Eddie Dupre really have stared down a woman like Frankie Mae Savage and then murdered her?

  Stepping out of the cab, Chastity fervently hoped it was so. Because by the time she saw Eddie Dupre in handcuffs, she realized that the only other real alternative was unthinkable.

  Twenty

  It should have been unthinkable. Chastity wanted it to be unthinkable. But by the time she saw the police pull Eddie from his house, she’d already had the kind of morning that made her wonder.

  She’d woken to another flat, still morning, James in the kitchen, and more hurricane warnings on TV. Bob was flirting with Level 4 status, and the screen was filled with shots of Grand Isle at the southern tip of Louisiana, where they were bracing for an eight-foot storm surge.

  “We going to see Eddie Dupre this morning?” Chastity asked, feigning disinterest as she poured herself some coffee.

  “Almost this afternoon,” James said, his eyes on the screen.

  “My taxi driver wasn’t here.”

  Her taxi driver looked like he belonged in one of those crypts he so coveted.

  “A hurricane’s coming,” he said. “Why don’t you just go home?”

  She glared at him. “Same reason you can’t go anywhere. We’re involved in some homicides. I thought felons couldn’t get cab licenses.”

  “You need proof of residency and a working knowledge of English to get a license.” He shrugged, his attention on the TV. “Of course, it helps if your Uncle Tibby’s a city constable.”

  “Of course.”

  “Why are you so afraid of water?”

  That brought things to a screeching halt. Chastity fought for air and lost. She grabbed her purse for her velvet bag and wondered what good she thought it would do her.

  She was just about to ask him why locked doors frightened him, when her phone went off. Her hands were shaking, but she went ahead and answered it, even knowing perfectly well who it was.

  “Yes, Max.”

  “I’ve been calling you for two days!” he accused.

  “Well, here I am.”

  “Are you all right? I heard about that woman’s murder this morning on the news. That cabdriver.”

  Chastity grabbed her coffee and walked out into the living room where the west-facing windows kept the hardwood floors cool and shady in the morning. She looked out again to that flat, uninspiring sky. “Yes, Frankie Mae. I’m fine, though.”

  “That’s good. I’m glad. What are the police saying?”

  It took Chastity a second to answer that. His voice had suddenly sounded so agitated. Almost excited.

  “I don’t know, Max. Why should they tell me anything?”

  “You were there. I saw you on the news.”

  Wonderful. “They didn’t tell me anything.”

  It was Max’s turn to pause. Chastity imagined him huffing in frustration and wondered if she was being unfair.

  “Did she tell you anything about Faith?” he finally asked. “Do you know where she is?”

  Chastity suddenly felt cold in a room the temperature of a sauna. �
�No. I’m sorry, Max.” She closed her eyes. “I need to tell you something. I was just about to call you. I’m scheduled to fly out of here today.”

  Well, that got his attention. “Fly out?” he demanded. “Where?”

  “I’m going home. I can’t stay with the hurricane coming.”

  “But you can’t! You promised you’d find Faith! What if she’s in danger? What if we don’t find her before the hurricane hits?”

  Chastity fought the urge to argue and won. This time. “I’m sorry, Max. I’ll come back afterward. Just not now.”

  She heard him breathing over the line, quick pants of frustration. Or fury. She couldn’t tell which.

  She just knew that she couldn’t tell him any more. That she didn’t trust him, especially after that last meeting with him. After what she’d been thinking.

  Those murders had been personal.

  Those murders had been about power and control and domination.

  And Max had proved himself a master of all three.

  She didn’t have a single piece of hard evidence to back up that feeling. Just the fact that he seemed to know how to distract her. That he locked away the information Chastity needed the most and managed to keep her out of it by the simple trick of making her afraid.

  He’d been so surprised to see that ring. So stricken.

  But he knew how to make her afraid.

  “Before you leave,” he was saying, his voice urgent, “will you meet me here? There’s something…something you should know. Something that might change your mind.”

  “What, Max?”

  “No. It’s not something I can just say over the phone. Come to the house, Chastity. Come where I can talk to you in private.”

  “No, Max. I can’t.”

  Not that house. Not where he had all the control.

  “Somewhere! Meet me somewhere!”

  “The Whistle Stop? Where we met before?”

  “No. Not a restaurant. I don’t need people gawking. Neither do you, once you find out. What about my office?”

  Chastity stared out the window toward the flat sky. She thought of how adept Max was at controlling a situation. She thought of how much worse it was when he was on his own home turf.