by Tracy Wolff
She’d been laid out naked in Jackson Square, her legs and arms bound behind her with thick rope, her body severely bruised. Her throat had been slashed—not deep enough to kill her instantly, but more than enough to let her bleed out slowly. Next to her in the photo was the long length of black satin she had been covered with when she was discovered.
Genevieve added pertinent details they’d discovered through three months of investigating, including the date Lorelei had gone missing, her approximate time of death and her unusual after-hours schedule, as well as her boyfriend’s name and alibi.
“Cyndi came next.” Shawn’s voice was harsh with anger as he pulled out photos of the forty-five-year-old nurse. Unlike Lorelei, Cyndi had been a blond—at least until the killer had shaved her head.
Two weeks ago, they’d found her brutalized body in the Dumpster behind Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop—one of the oldest buildings in the Quarter. She’d been fully clothed, her head bashed in. Shawn had originally wanted to call it a mugging gone bad, but the coroner had turned up evidence of rape and sodomy, as well as missing fingertips that indicated she’d gotten in some pretty good licks before the killer had taken her. If he hadn’t been afraid of his DNA being discovered, he never would have cut off poor Cyndi’s fingers.
They pinned much of Cyndi’s file to the board before moving on to Jessica Robbins and doing the same with hers. When they had done all they could, they stepped back and surveyed their handiwork.
“You know, any cop looking at this would think we were insane to believe they were connected,” Shawn commented as he leaned against the side of his desk.
“Blond, redhead, brunet,” Genevieve intoned. “Range of ages. Different method of murder in each one.”
“The only thing that’s the same is the rape—and the beating.”
“They were all killed about seventy-two hours after they disappeared,” Genevieve said as she stared at Lorelei’s vacant eyes. “But they weren’t all dumped right away. He held on to Cyndi for a while.”
“Or they just didn’t find her in the Dumpster until after she’d been there awhile.”
Genevieve was shaking her head before he finished. It was an argument they’d already had three times since catching Cyndi’s case “You’ve got to stop harping on that. Jefferson said no way, not with this heat. The rate of decomposition wasn’t nearly high enough. They found her within hours of when she’d been put in there.”
“So why would he hang on to her and not the others? It doesn’t make any sense.” Shawn shoved a frustrated hand through his hair, started to pace between his desk and the back of the room.
“Opportunity?” she commented. “The bar’s on Bourbon Street, for God’s sake. Maybe he couldn’t get her there before then.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.” His tone was more than a little doubtful. “But we’re talking about a guy who was able to lay a girl out in Jackson Square in the middle of the afternoon and not be seen. Somehow I doubt a Dumpster at the back of a popular bar would give him much trouble.”
They fell silent for a few minutes as they studied the board. Finally, Shawn said, “You can see why Chastian’s giving us a hard time. These women don’t have a thing in common.”
“Not even neighborhood or occupation,” she agreed, going through the list she’d already run in her head dozens of times. “Even the manner of death and distribution of bodies is very different. I know all that.”
“You also know that a serial killer has a usual type and method and he sticks to that type religiously. This guy’s doing none of that.”
She shrugged. “Maybe he’s a new breed.”
Shawn stared at her in disgust. “Like the old breed isn’t good enough?”
“I don’t know. But I’m telling you, it’s the same guy.”
She stepped closer to the photos. “Each of them is cut right here.” She pointed to each woman’s upper thigh. “Even in Cyndi’s case, where he didn’t use a knife anywhere else.”
Shawn ground his teeth as he followed her finger across the board. “Fuck.”
“Yeah, my sentiments exactly.”
“Hey, Delacroix, Webster, want a slice of pizza?” called Roberto Torres, another detective who sat a few desks in front of them. “My partner’s wife has him on a low-cholesterol diet.” He said the last words as if he was describing a fate worse than death.
Genevieve turned and smiled at the suave Puerto Rican detective, and checked out his suit while she was at it. Known among the squad as the best-dressed homicide detective, he took as much ribbing as she did. And that was saying something. He was also one of the few detectives who, like Shawn, looked at Genevieve and saw her, not just a woman trying to crash into the good old boys’ club. She’d always liked him for that.
“How’d you know I was starving, Roberto?” She reached for a piece of the gooey pepperoni pie.
“ ’Cuz you got that hungry look. I swear, you white girls never eat.”
“Sure we do.” She laughed and took a huge bite of the pizza. “See?”
“Only ’cuz I brought it to you. Otherwise, you’d be sitting there, wasting away while this no-good loser let you.” He nodded at Shawn, who was in the process of snagging a piece of pizza for himself.
“Hey, I’m always up for eating,” Shawn protested. He nodded at Genevieve. “She’s the one who’s always saying she wants to finish one more thing before we go.”
“See what I mean? These white girls, they’ve got no sense of self-preservation.” Roberto took another bite of pizza, his eyes wandering over the murder board they’d just set up. “So, what are you guys working on over here?” He glanced at the crime scene photos, winced sympathetically. “Man, three open homicides in three weeks. And such nasty ones.”
He nodded at the photo of Jessica. “So what are you thinking about her? A senator’s house, man. That’s rough—the chief’s spent more time talking to the press in the last two days than he has in the last two years.”
“We’re kind of stumped.” Shawn shrugged, then took a bite of pizza. “What do you think?” he asked when he was done chewing, and nodded toward the board.
“She wasn’t a piece on the side?”
“If she was, the senator’s denying it up one side and down the other. And we can’t get anyone—in his camp or hers—to say otherwise.”
“Blackmail?”
Genevieve shook her head—she’d spent half of yesterday looking at that angle to please her lieutenant.
“Well, there’s got to be something—beyond the normal sadistic crap, I mean. You don’t just dump a body in a senior senator’s house for no reason.”
“That, my man, is exactly what we’ve been thinking.” Shawn pulled a folder off Genevieve’s desk. “Look at—”
“Hey, why do you have all three of those girls up on the same board?” Torres’s partner, Luc Viglio, asked as he snagged the last piece of pizza from the box.
He was a huge bull of a man and old enough to be Genevieve’s father, but he still blushed when she raised an eyebrow at him. “Hey, one piece never hurt anyone.”
Torres laughed. “Yeah, unless your wife finds out.”
“What she don’t know …” He glanced again at the murder board. “So are you thinking these three are connected somehow?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Torres answered. “They’ve got nothing in com—” His voice cut off as he saw the grim glance Genevieve and Shawn exchanged.
“Are you kidding me? You think one guy did all three of them?”
“It’s looking more and more like it.”
Viglio stepped closer, read the time lines and abbreviated notes Genevieve had pinned to the board. “I don’t see it. What am I missing?”
“I don’t know, just a feeling.” Genevieve snatched the folder out of Shawn’s hand and laid it open on the desk. Normally, she and Shawn were prone to playing things closer to the vest, but frankly, they could use all the help they could get. Even more, she’d like to ha
ve her theory validated by a couple of senior detectives before she took it back to Chastian and got shot down—again.
“The level of torture’s the same in each murder,” she explained, pulling out the ME’s reports and showing them around, along with notes they’d made on the cases.
Torres and Viglio looked over what she and Shawn unearthed. Except for the occasional obscenity, they were quiet as they digested what they were seeing.
Finally, when the silence had stretched Genevieve’s nerves to the breaking point, Torres said grimly, “We’ve got another fucking serial killer on our hands.”
“Yeah.” Viglio rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “What’s the city coming to when we have a new one of these guys working the area every few months?”
Torres ignored his partner. “What’d Chastian say about this theory?”
“He didn’t believe me when I first brought it up.”
“Did you show him all this?” demanded Viglio.
“He hasn’t been around much the last couple of days.”
“He’s here now.” Torres nodded toward the lieutenant’s office. “Get in there. And when he finally gets a clue and gives you backup, tell him we’ll be happy to work with you on this.”
Shawn nodded, clapped a hand on Torres’s back. Seeing as how Genevieve was the social pariah of the department—and had been since she was promoted to it three years before—the offer held a lot of meaning, and they both knew it.
It was nice to know that someone besides Shawn didn’t mind working with her.
“Yeah, okay.” They headed toward Chastian’s office together. “He’s going to want to know if we have any suspects.”
“I know that, but this guy hasn’t made any mistakes yet.” She closed her eyes, prayed that the lieutenant would take them seriously. “We’ve got nothing.”
Before Shawn could answer, Chastian’s voice barked out, “Webster, Delacroix, get in here!”
“What have you got?” Chastian’s voice was more brusque than usual, his annoyance obvious, as they walked into his office,.
“Sir.” It was Shawn who spoke, since they both knew their boss had a tendency to listen to him much more than to Genevieve.
As Shawn laid the evidence on the table, Genevieve tried to pay attention—hoping to catch something she’d missed in the thousand and one times she’d already gone over it. But her mind kept wandering back to Cole. What was he doing right now? Was he still angry with her?
“Would you care to join us, Delacroix?” Chastian’s sarcasm drew her attention, had her flushing before she could stop herself.
“Sorry, sir.” Burying her embarrassment, she looked him straight in the eye.
“Shawn seems to think we’re dealing with another serial killer and would like to get a profiler on this right away.” His eyes dared her to try to take any of the credit for the idea.
Swallowing back her anger, she tried to tell herself that it wasn’t important. That as long as she and Shawn got what they wanted, it didn’t matter if the lieutenant went the extra mile to antagonize and humiliate her.
But it did matter—not who got the credit, but the fact that no matter how hard she tried or how good she was at her job, she was never going to be accepted the way Shawn and Roberto and Luc were, just because they were men. Even after all these years, it grated much more than she usually admitted to herself.
But she couldn’t say what she was thinking, not when it was a guaranteed way to keep her homicides on the track to Nowheresville. So instead, she gritted her teeth and said, “I think Shawn’s right, sir. A profiler could really help us with this.” She cleared her throat.
He nodded gravely, though his dark eyes mocked her show of subservience. “All right, then.” He turned back to Shawn. “And depending what the profiler says, I’ll decide whether you need Viglio and Torres backing you up.”
“Sounds good, LT.” Shawn smiled, his eyes warning Genevieve to stay with the program.
Knowing Shawn was right, she swallowed back the bile scalding her throat and added her thanks to his.
“It’s settled, then. I’ll call my friend at the Bureau and see what he can do for us.” Chastian settled behind his desk. “I’ll let you know what he says.”
“That’d be great.”
“Absolutely.” Genevieve wanted to puke. She wanted nothing more than to kick Chastian’s ass, and instead she was stuck kissing it. What the hell kind of world was it when you needed to beg to get the resources to do your job correctly?
But she waited until they were back at their desks before she made a comment. “That guy is such an asshole.”
“Yeah, but he’s the boss.” Shawn’s shrug said it all.
“I still don’t know how that happened.”
“He didn’t used to be so bad.” Shawn walked back to the murder board and stared at Jessica’s face for long seconds. “He changed after his wife left him, got a lot less human.”
She shook her head. “I can’t imagine him any other way. The thought of him as a decent guy gives me the shudders.”
“Hey, now, I didn’t say decent. I said not so bad.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not hard. I can’t imagine him much worse.”
Chapter Ten
Cole lowered his video camera slowly, unhappy with the images he was recording. The crew was going to be here in a few weeks to film and he wasn’t nearly ready for them, his mind too full of Samantha and Genevieve to concentrate on the documentary he was being paid to make.
He’d come out today, still miserable over his fight with Genevieve and determined to get some work done, but nothing was going the way it was supposed to. All along he’d planned to do a segment on the topless bars and sex shops that proliferated on the streets of the Big Easy, but he’d wandered from one to the other today—filming and trying out commentary in his head—and nothing had seemed right. He couldn’t get Genevieve out of his thoughts enough to concentrate on anything else.
Fuck! He couldn’t believe how thoroughly they had managed to blow things the other morning, and he wasn’t sure their budding relationship could ever recover. He’d reached for his phone to dial her number on more than a few occasions in the last four days. But each time, he’d hung up before punching in the final digit. What would he say if she answered? What if she didn’t answer? After what had happened between them, he was pretty damn sure Genevieve would want nothing to do with him. With them.
Shoving a hand through his hair, Cole contemplated his options as he walked the pothole-ridden streets of the Quarter. He should go home—he had a million things to do, starting with finding someone else to help him look at the homicide scenes he wanted to use for the documentary.
Sidestepping the street cleaners rolling down Bourbon, he shook his head in disgust. Could he have handled things with Genevieve any worse? If events were happening the way she’d described, of course she’d have been suspicious of him—she was a cop, for God’s sake.
And though he had almost no respect for cops as a breed, Genevieve knew how to do her job and do it well. She rarely let anything stand in her way when she was on a scent, so of course she’d had to ask him about the murders. Add to that the fact that he was omitting things he didn’t want her to know, and was it any wonder her bullshit detector was going crazy?
But he hadn’t been prepared, hadn’t expected it of her right then. He’d left the kitchen after the most intimate sex he’d ever had in his life and returned to find her armored up and on the offense. It had … hurt, though he felt like a total candy-ass admitting it.
Glancing up, he realized he’d stopped in front of Wild Plums, one of the French Quarter’s premier sex shops. He’d planned on starting his film here, with a wide-angle shot of the store amid the Quarter’s craziness, before slowly narrowing in on the posters that covered every available window space—posters that spoke of sex and other, darker pleasures.
He’d been thrilled when the idea had hit him, had spent days getting the timi
ng right. But now that he was here for some preliminary shots, he couldn’t work up an ounce of interest.
Probably because he would much rather be having sex with Genevieve than focusing on its darker side. Or maybe the problem was that he wasn’t digging deeply enough, that he was simply scratching the surface of a topic that needed to be explored in depth.
Violence was endemic in these sex shops and bars—he’d read enough police reports to understand that. And yet a lot of people in healthy relationships came here too—a fact that made the job of tying everything together that much harder.
With a resigned sigh, he shoved his camera into his case and pulled open the blacked-out door. Maybe a look inside would help him figure out what he was missing.
But as he wandered the rows of magazines and videos and novelties, he found himself at a loss. There was nothing here that he wanted to put in his documentary, nothing here that helped him understand—or explain—the elusive tie between sex and violence that permeated this city like bourbon at Mardi Gras.
Impatient, he turned to leave and was halfway to the door before he caught sight of the largest display of bondage and S/M items he’d ever run across. For a moment, he froze—his mind’s eye already taking in what the display would look like on film.
Whips and paddles. Clips and cuffs and satin ties. A truly awe-inspiring collection of leather wear and blindfolds all displayed against dark purple silk. His fingers actually itched with the need to pull out his video camera and record the display—along with the thoughts pouring through his brain. Here was what he’d been looking for—a perfect example of how closely pleasure and pain could be intertwined.
In his head he was already rearranging the documentary, leading off with this display and a voice-over that talked about the violent edge of consensual sex. He could imagine the words clearly, could imagine his voice asking what happened when things got out of hand? When safe words weren’t listened to? When pleasure became unbearable pain?
He winced at the thoughts crowding his brain, images of the dead women running through his mind despite himself. But it doesn’t have to be like that, a little voice whispered in the back of his head.
