City of the Dead

by Eileen Dreyer

  If only she found her sister for him.

  No, not her sister.

  Her mother.

  But that wasn’t Chastity’s reaction.

  Chastity’s reaction was simple. She sat on a slightly damp bench in a park that was already dipping and groaning with the advent of a new thunderstorm, and all she could think of was that she was sure now.

  She had no more proof than she’d had before sitting down. Certainly nothing concrete enough to take to the police. She might not ever find a shred of evidence that would hold up in court.

  Max was brilliant, after all. He’d certainly kept her bobbing on the end of his line easily enough. She imagined he could probably do the same for anybody else who had questions.

  But Chastity didn’t have any more questions.

  Susan Reeves and Willow Tolliver and Frankie Mae Savage were dead because they’d tried to help her sister escape an abusive husband. They were dead because Max Stanton had murdered them.

  And if she betrayed her suspicions, Chastity knew he’d murder her, too.

  “Thank you for telling me, Max,” she said, steeling herself to pat him on the arm. “I mean it. It helps explain so much. But it doesn’t make it any more possible for me to stay. I’ll call the minute I get back to New Orleans. I promise.”

  It was a lovely thing she’d learned from her forensics training. The only promise that meant anything was the one made under oath. At least when dealing with a suspect.

  “But Chastity—”

  But Chastity got to her feet. Max didn’t need to know that her knees were so gelatinous they could hardly hold her up. He didn’t need to know that she was appalled and terrified and so suddenly sick at the thought of whom she’d been sitting with that she wasn’t sure she’d make it off the square before mortifying herself. He didn’t need to know that she was looking for James like a life preserver on a high sea.

  She was a trauma nurse. A forensic nurse. She was an expert at containing disaster. She knew how to defuse an imminent threat.

  “Thank you, Max. I’ll call.”

  And she just walked away.

  “I didn’t see your father,” James said quietly as he joined her on the path to the wrought-iron gates.

  “You didn’t have to,” Chastity said, her eyes focused on the cool white facade of the cathedral across the street. “Max thought he had enough ammunition without him. I don’t suppose you can see what he’s doing.”

  James looked back to nod, as if saying good-bye. “Just standing there watching you. He looks kinda…”

  “Dumbfounded?”

  “Feral.”

  Chastity fought a new round of shakes. “I was afraid of that.” She’d hoped for a chance to sneak into the cathedral unnoticed. To slip into a pew in the back and let the incense-rich hush settle on her shoulders. To pray to a God she wasn’t even sure existed that she’d come out the other side of this, when even Tante Edie hadn’t seen it for sure.

  She didn’t see it for sure, either.

  Especially now.

  “Would you drive me to the airport?” she asked, walking on.

  Following, James stared at her. “Thought you weren’t leaving.”

  “I’m not. But I need Max to think I am.”

  He started to look back again and thought better of it. “And you think he’s going to follow us.”

  “Oh, yeah. I think he is.”

  They walked across Chartres to St. Ann, where James had parked the cab. “Then you think…”

  She thought Max would be disappointed that the most intense feeling she had after that meeting was relief that her father hadn’t shared it.

  “I’ll tell you what I think when we’re on the way to the airport.”

  James must have recognized the less than sturdy condition of Chastity’s knees, because he handed her into the cab himself. With his braced hand.

  It was unintentional, but Chastity was left with a quick reminder of actions and consequences. Exactly what she needed when she’d just decided to go after a multiple murderer.

  She had to find her sister. She had to get her the hell out of New Orleans. She had to find proof that Max had killed those women for no more reason than that they’d helped his wife.

  Chastity was amazed that it had taken her this long to figure that out. She was furious that she’d been so fooled.

  She was a good forensic nurse. Nothing got by her on her job. Nothing. But Max had made her look like an amateur.

  Max the controller. Max the scientist. Max, who hadn’t simply tried to get his wife back. He’d taken the time—he’d taken the unbelievable chance of stopping long enough—to leave the women who’d hidden her from him a message.

  You can’t stop me.

  You can’t beat me.

  You can’t ever again think that you are smarter or stronger or more perseverant.

  “You okay?” James asked.

  That was when Chastity realized that he’d settled her into the front seat and then slid into his own side. He reached across with that terrible, sore hand and patted her on the arm.

  “Don’t do that,” she snapped, flinching.

  He pulled away, frowning.

  She sucked in a quick breath. “I’m still working on that comfort thing,” she admitted. “I can’t afford to cry right now.”

  James nodded. Hooked his seat belt and started the engine. “All right, then. Let’s go.”

  She was shaking and sweating again, and damn tired of both. She kept rolling the idea of Faith as her mother around on her tongue, as if the idea of it would suddenly take on a different taste, a more concrete texture.

  Max was right. She should be shattered. At least she should feel different: bigger, smaller, unable to quite fit into the same skin anymore. But she didn’t. She hadn’t been lying. Her biggest change had come ten years ago, the day she’d walked into the police station in St. Louis County. That was the day she’d taken the greatest chance, laying herself out over an abyss she still hadn’t crossed. It was the day she’d come the closest to telling the real truths about herself.

  Which was the most amusing part of what Max had tried to do today. The only truth that still really ate at her had nothing to do with who her mother was. And if anybody was going to force it out of her, it wouldn’t be Max. It would be James.

  And here she was sitting close enough to him to touch in a car made humid and small in the rain.

  Time to get her focus back.

  “Do voodoo believers have wakes?” she asked, watching her hands play with the straps of her too-abused purse.

  James took a quick look her way. “You going to Frankie’s wake?”

  “If it’s okay. Are outsiders welcome?”

  “Don’t worry. Frankie will be buried with all the rites of mother church. The voodoo practitioners will help prepare her, and then hold their own ceremony later.”

  Chastity knew that at any other time, she’d have a quart of questions about ritual and belief. Right now, she didn’t have time. Max had tried to distract her. She was not about to let him. “Fine. Maybe somebody there knows where Frankie stashed my sister.”

  “What do you think?” James asked, flipping on his blinker and swerving past a slower taxi. “Is Max a murderer?”

  Chastity watched the houses crawl by. She listened to the quick click of the wipers and the low hum of jazz from James’s radio. “Max is a murderer. And I’m not at all sure anybody’s gonna catch him.”

  “What did he say to convince you?”

  “He said Faith is my mother.”

  They almost ran smack into a streetcar. “Pardon?”

  Chastity still watched out the window. “It explains a lot, really.”

  “But she would have been…”

  “Twelve. Makes it easier to understand why we never had a comfortable relationship.”

  Poor Faith. Poor little twelve-year-old girl, swollen and frightened and trapped in that terrible place.

  For the first time s
ince Chastity had met him, James lit up a cigarette in his cab. Chastity almost asked for one. She almost asked him to stop and pick up a fifth of Jack.

  She’d get a couple of stiff drinks at the airport. She’d slam down about a quart of gin and call Sergeant Gaudet. Then she’d wade back into this city on the verge of a hurricane.

  Just the sound of water sloshing away from the wheels of the cab made her want to vomit.

  “You seem kind of complacent about the whole thing,” James said.

  She shrugged. “As I told Max, I’m not as surprised as I should be. I just wish I’d known a long time ago. It might have made everything easier.”

  James shot her an incredulous look. “Easier?”

  She managed a smile. “A lot of behavior in my family finally makes sense, ya know?”

  James shook his head. “And here I was traumatized by being related to rodeo clowns.”

  He surprised a giggle out of Chastity. “Hell, that’d traumatize me, too. Incest is disgusting. Clowns are just scary.”

  They stopped at Kareena’s long enough for Chastity to pretend to gather her stuff and haul it back out to the cab. Then they joined the river of evacuees who were trying to get away from the city before disaster struck.

  Highway 90 was bad and Highway 10 was worse, bumper to bumper, with taillights flashing in syncopation and lightning stuttering across the sky. The interior lanes were awash, and trucks spewed up a spray that made Chastity flinch.

  “I really don’t like this,” she muttered, her free arm tight around her backpack and her feet instinctively rising every time they hit a puddle.

  “Close your eyes,” James suggested. “I’m the only one who has to watch.”

  “If I don’t watch, I could be surprised.”

  “Seems to me it never made a difference if you watched or not.”

  Well, that took the rest of Chastity’s breath. “You’re right,” she admitted. “It made no difference at all. It’s just an illusion of control.”

  But then, sometimes the illusion was all you had.

  An hour later Chastity hefted her luggage in one hand and her cell in the other as she traversed the Louis Armstrong International Airport. It was hard to hear. The concourse was packed with frantic vacationers fleeing and natives making a strategic retreat.

  Once again, Chastity stood in line, this time for security. She wasn’t taking any chances, especially since James had caught sight of Max’s BMW not more than four cars behind them on the freeway. She’d just purchased another standby ticket. If she needed to, she’d walk all the way to the gate before turning back.

  She hadn’t seen Max yet. She had seen plenty of families, a few gaggles of frat jocks looking very disappointed, and a man with a white rat on his shoulder. The only one not impatient with the length of the security line seemed to be the rat.

  During the months she’d spent living out of her car, Chastity used to drive to the airport in St. Louis, just to watch the people. To pretend she was happy and normal and going somewhere interesting. She’d watched anxious young men clutch flowers and restless children clutch patient parents as they walked the halls, and she’d wondered if that was what it meant to be part of something.

  She hadn’t thought of that in a long time. Good thing she was thinking about it now, when everybody she saw looked cranky and frantic. Nobody looked like they wanted to be going where they were headed, and somehow it made her feel less alone.

  “Ms. Byrnes?” a whisky-rough voice asked in her ear.

  “Excuse me, Sergeant Gaudet,” she said, shoving her ear bud a bit farther in so she could hear better. “I got a bit distracted.”

  “We need this to be fast, ma’am. I don’t have much more time to work on this. We’re all getting pulled soon.”

  Chastity wished she had a drink. Instead, she had a four-year-old who wanted to jump on her shoes. “Breaking out the rain slickers and flashlights, are you?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Maybe as soon as tomorrow.”

  And she wasn’t really boarding a plane to escape. “You don’t know how sorry I am to hear that.”

  “Me, too. Now, you were telling me how your brother-in-law murdered these women.”

  She had told him everything, from the visit of Dr. Hayes-Adams to the moment she’d walked into the airport. He’d listened in complete silence through it all.

  “Yes, sir.” Somebody bumped her and Chastity spun around, only to find an old Indian man waving apologies. She swore she saw gray hair at the back of the line. “That’s what I believe he did.”

  “Well, there’s only one problem with your theory, Ms. Byrnes,” Sergeant Gaudet said. “There’s no way your brother-in-law could have committed those murders. He has an alibi for both.”

  Chastity’s heart stopped. “What kind of alibi?”

  “He was on the surgery schedule both mornings.”

  Chastity went still. “You checked?”

  “I told you I would.”

  She nodded to herself, out of reason relieved. He’d believed her. He’d at least taken her seriously. The line moved, and she shoved her backpack forward with her foot.

  “Thank you, Sergeant.”

  But the alibis. Why hadn’t she thought of that?

  Because she hadn’t suspected Max. Not really. Not of more than being the kind of husband a woman would run from.

  But he was the kind of husband who was neat and precise and organized. He was the kind of murderer who’d planned those murders as if they were sacrificial offerings. Of course he’d have an alibi.

  “Did you check to see if he closed his cases?” she asked, furious that she’d wasted so much time on the wrong leads. Frantic with the need for action. Now that she knew, she wanted it over. She wanted him caught and her sister safe.

  Her mother.

  Whatever.

  For a moment the sergeant was silent. “What do you mean?”

  Chastity opened her eyes. Focused. Tried hard to pull her suddenly hyper excited brain into order. “Tulane is a teaching hospital. It’s not uncommon at all for teaching surgeons to let the residents and fellows do the hardest work.”

  Sergeant Gaudet huffed. “Well, that makes me feel more secure.”

  “They have to learn sometime, Sergeant. The question is how much supervision they got from Max at critical times.” She was pretty sure she heard the sergeant mutter an oath that would be censored on a talk show. She couldn’t help but grin. “Depending on the surgeon and the staff, it might not even show up on the records that the doctor didn’t actually finish the case. If you check from your side, I’ll have Kareena do the same from hers, okay?”

  “Kareena Boudreaux?” he asked.

  “Yeah. That okay?”

  “Kareena’s a fine woman,” the sergeant assured her. “Professional and empathetic. Beautiful eyes.”

  Chastity damn near laughed. She had no idea what that had to do with anything, but what the hell? “I’ll pass it along, Sergeant.”

  “You do that. I’ll wait to hear from her. In the meantime, I have a question for you. Have you ever seen the doctor in a black car? A sedan.”

  Again it took her a minute to answer. “Black? No. His car’s silver. A BMW, why?”

  Was that him, over by the baggage X-rays? Was he watching to make sure she left?

  “Yes, ma’am. A 2005 BMW 745i. Another sweep of the Saint Roch neighborhood came up with a witness who saw a late model black sedan parked on Derbigny a couple blocks over from Saint Roch’s right about the time of Susan Reeves’s murder.”

  The hair lifting on the back of her neck, Chastity struggled to concentrate. She had the most unholy suspicion that it was Max there, just beyond the ungainly shuffle of the security line. That somehow he could hear every word she said.

  “It wasn’t Lloyd Burgard’s car?”

  “No, ma’am,” Gaudet said. “The car he drove was white. It was parked right behind the black one.”

  Which meant that Lloyd had probably seen the murd
erer after all. He could easily have identified him. And now, just like Frankie and Willow and Susan, he was dead.

  “I don’t suppose you found out—”

  “If there was a gray-haired doctor seen leaving Lloyd’s room about the time of his death? No. I’m afraid nobody saw anything. You’re sure you haven’t seen a black car?”

  Chastity moved up again in line, took another look back. Saw nothing. “No. Could the car be registered to my sister?”

  “No, ma’am. It’s not.” He took another of those silences that Chastity was beginning to dislike. “The cab your friend drives is black.”

  “Anybody in that neighborhood would be able to tell a late model sedan from that cab, Sergeant.”

  “He did call the cab dispatcher and ask that Frankie Mae Savage meet him.”

  “He did not. Somebody else did that.”

  “Tough to prove.”

  “You’ve obviously read his history, Sergeant. Do you really think he murdered Frankie?”

  This time the woman in front of Chastity turned around. Chastity smiled. “Working on a screenplay,” she mouthed, hoping the woman didn’t see her sweat.

  On the other end of the line, the sergeant didn’t pause. “No, Ms. Byrnes. I really don’t. But I’m the only one. I’m just trying to tell you.”

  “Then we have to catch the doctor, don’t we?”

  “If you say so, ma’am.”

  “Will you help?”

  She suffered through another long silence, during which she shuffled forward another few steps and tried to see that gray head over the crowd. Finally, though, the sergeant sighed. “Makes more sense than anything else we’ve come up with. Now, you want to give me something on those women you say won’t talk to me?”

  Chastity actually smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  So Chastity gave him what she had. She even gave him the password to get onto the Arlen Clinic donor page, just in case.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant. I know it’s tough to buy this one. I appreciate your listening.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I just hope you’re not…”

  “Prejudiced? Shortsighted? Caught with my head up my ass?”