“It’s me,” Detective Pierce Boudreau said. “Y’all might want to come see something.”
“Where are you?” Flynn asked.
“I’m at a vacant lot corner of Law and Desire. And I’m not alone. There’s a woman with me. Unfortunately she’s dead.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. What’d you know about how she got that way?”
“Not a whole lot as yet. We found her pocketbook discarded in a Dumpster nearby. There was a slip of paper in it has your name and address on it.”
A bad feeling took hold of Flynn. She tried to rein it in, to tell herself it was a coincidence, but then Boudreau spoiled that by adding, “ Her driver’s license was in the pocketbook too. Name on it is Jeannette Larue. That mean anything to you?”
“Yeah—” Flynn sighed. “She’s a client—was a client, I guess. She was supposed to come see me today. I just figured her for a no-show.”
“She was coming to see you about her missing daughter?”
“Ah, you know about that.”
“Yes I do. I’ll see you here soon then, Flynn, shall I?”
“I’m on my way.” Flynn hung up, blew her cheeks out in another sigh. It wasn’t a common occurrence for her clients to turn up dead when they should’ve been in her office, and Flynn didn’t much like that it had happened now.
Charlie the cat leaped onto the desk and sprawled in front of her, purring softly for attention. Flynn gave him a scratch behind the ears. She had inherited the cat when his owners left the city after Katrina. “Y’all will have to amuse yourself for a while,” she told him. He pressed his head into her palm and purred again in response. “Your adopted momma has to go out. Seems that my client went and got herself murdered. It’s like I keep saying, Charlie—shit always happens.”
Charlie said “Miaow!” but whether he was agreeing with her or not, Flynn couldn’t tell.
CHAPTER TWO
Desire Street never had been what even the most unscrupulous realtor would chance to describe as a ‘des res’. Since Katrina had ripped through the city, Desire had been turned into a weed—and rubble-infested ruin. The narrow roadways were buckled and cracked, empty lots punctuating the rows of dilapidated shotgun houses and FEMA trailers. Everywhere was knee-high grass and weeds, strewn with garbage and clotted with dried river mud. The corner lot of Desire and Law was the perfect place to dump a body.
Flynn pulled up behind an NOPD cruiser and the gray unmarked Coroners Office van. In spite of the inclemency of the weather, a knot of looky-loos had gathered behind the crime-scene tape, to exchange misinformation and to sneer at the efforts of the cops. Trust in authority was often in short supply here. Detective Boudreau and her partner, Detective Waylon Murray, stood inside the tape, in conversation with the Coroner’s assistants. The detectives wore dark-colored plastic rain ponchos with NOPD stenciled on the backs in white lettering. The sour expression on Boudreau’s face, and the little trails of water running down her forehead and nose, suggested that the ponchos were not doing an effective enough job of keeping the wet out. Flynn flipped up the hood of her own waterproof jacket and jogged across the lot to join the detectives.
Boudreau greeted her with a dour nod. Waylon lifted his upper lip in a gesture that could have been a sneer or an attempt at a smile—with Waylon it was often hard to tell the difference. Flynn ignored him, concentrating on Boudreau who made a much more pleasant something to concentrate upon.
“Thanks for coming out, Flynn. Y’all haven’t eaten lately, I hope?”
Flynn twitched a humorless smile. “Not so lately that it’ll be a problem.”
The body had been left laying out in the open, amidst some high weeds. Rain and depredation by small animals had probably destroyed any forensic evidence, at least on the outside of the body. Flynn had seen her share of death and bloody violence, had dealt out much of it, but she still had to steel herself to look at the ruin of the human being at her feet. Jeannette Larue’s left hand had been hacked off at the wrist, her right foot just above the ankle, ragged edges of white bone standing out starkly against the greenish marbled flesh. She also had been gutted, everything inside pulled out.
“Dear God,” Flynn muttered, pressing the back of one hand against her mouth.
Boudreau gave a grim little shake of her head. The dreadlocks that she kept her hair done in clicked together beneath the loose hood of her poncho. “I don’t think He made a whole lot to do with this. Forensic is a bust, obviously. This wasn’t the kill site either—too clean. Coroner isn’t saying anything definite yet, but he was willing to estimate that she’s been dead for between twelve to twenty-four hours. Y’all see this?”
Flynn looked to where Boudreau was pointing, noticed the crudely fashioned symbol carved into the dead woman’s flesh just above the rise of her left breast. She looked up at Boudreau in surprise and consternation. “It’s a veve,” she said and the detective nodded. The cutting was crude, the edges of the wound ragged and bloated, discolored with putrefaction, so that Flynn had difficulty discerning which Loa the veve belonged to. “Papa Legba,” she guessed.
Boudreau nodded again. “That’d be my take, yeah.”
“But what the hell is his sign doing on—on this?” Flynn asked.
Boudreau pooched out her lips, shrugged. “Someone either is using bad ju-ju, or that’s what they want us to think. When did she contact you?”
“Three days ago. The way she told it to me, her daughter isn’t the sort of girl would just up and vanish for even a day, let alone over a week. Her concern seemed genuine, so I told her I‘d hear her out. Who found the body?”
“Couple kids out hunting for scrap. They don’t know shit about how it got here though.” Boudreau gave Flynn a sour-eyed look. “Little creeps think it’s cool that they found a naked, fucked-up dead woman. You believe that shit?”
Flynn shrugged. Yeah, she believed it. And not just of kids today either. They would have been hyped themselves, if they had found a body when they were kids.
Boudreau sucked in her lower lip, frowned briefly into middle distance. “We’ll recheck the missing person report Mrs Larue filed, of course. Maybe we missed something.”
Flynn nodded. She stepped aside as the Coroner’s assistants began loading the victim into a black plastic body bag.
“Y’all want to accompany me to the dead woman’s home?” Boudreau asked, diverting her attention.
“I’m kind of in this whether I want to be or not.”
Boudreau tilted her a wry look. “That you are.”
In life Jeannette Larue had resided in Kenner, one of the small cities which satellite New Orleans, making up the greater Orleans Parish. Boudreau called ahead to the Kenner PD to have one of their detectives meet with them at the Larue house.
“What in the world was a white middle-class woman from Kenner doing all the way over on Desire?”
Flynn shook her head as she made a right turn at an intersection onto a street lined with ancient live oaks. Leafy branches met and intertwined above the centre of the road to form a short tunnel, sunlight shining through the rain-spackled leaves turned a brief glassy green. Outside of the Larue home, a Kenner PD cruiser was parked at the curb, and a tall, rangy guy in his mid-fifties leaned on the hood, smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone. He put both away when Flynn and Boudreau pulled up.
“Detective Boudreau?” He looked at Flynn.
She shook her head, jerked a thumb at Boudreau. Malone extended his hand to Boudreau first, then to Flynn, introducing himself as he did so. “Sam Malone. So the body you found…it really is Jeannette Larue then?”
Boudreau nodded at the same time as she shook the detective’s hand. “I’m afraid so. Pierce Boudreau. This here’s Willie Rae Flynn. She’s a PI. Mrs Larue was scheduled to meet with her today about her daughter.”
The Kenner detective eyed Flynn. “Anthea, yeah. Been gone for a week,” he said and Flynn nodded. Malone added, “Missing daughter and dead mother. I don’t know abou
t anyone else, but I’m getting a bad feeling about this.”
The Larue house was a camelback shotgun that looked as though it had been recently given a new coat of powder-blue paint. Malone proceeded Boudreau and Flynn to the front door, used a lock-picking tool to open that up.
“Did you know Mrs Larue and her daughter, Detective?” Boudreau inquired.
Malone shook his head. “Not personally, no. I did talk to the neighbors, to some of Anthea’s school friends, and to the folks they both went to church with. Everyone had the same good stuff to say about both women. All I’ve heard about Anthea is what a good girl she was, how into school and church she was. But you know, sometimes it’s the quiet ones you gotta watch, eh?”
“Teenage girls. Nothing more unpredictable,” Boudreau agreed.
Inside, the house held that over-warm, just-going-stale smell indicated it had not been aired out for at least a day or two. As with all traditional shotgun houses, the front door opened directly into the living room, with each successive room placed directly behind the other, all connected by a series of doors and narrow hallways. A second floor had been added at the rear to afford two more bedrooms and a second bathroom.
“So, y’all have any idea of what you’re looking for here?” Malone inquired.
Boudreau grimaced. “Anything that might connect these two God-fearing women to Voodoo.”
Malone’s eyebrows did a quick jig up and down his forehead. “Well, have at it then,” he invited them, and he took a seat on the couch, picked up a magazine from the coffee table.
The rooms on the first floor yielded very little of interest. Jeannette Larue appeared to have been a proud housekeeper—there was hardly a speck of dust and nothing out of place.
“I’d go mad living in this kind of perfection,” Flynn muttered as she opened drawers in the kitchen. Boudreau, her head and shoulders poked inside the refrigerator, grunted in response.
“It’s too neat, if you ask me,” the detective added darkly. Flynn gave her an arch look and Boudreau shrugged. “I mean, who lives in a place as neat and tidy as this—it makes me itchy just to look at it. Don’t tell me y’all think this is natural?”
Flynn laughed, shrugging as she followed Boudreau into the bathroom. “To each their own, Pierce.”
The contents of people’s medicine cabinets often revealed a surprising amount about them, but the most exciting thing in the Larue medicine cabinet was a tube of antiseptic gel.
Anthea’s bedroom on the second floor was also astonishingly neat, prompting Boudreau to further complaint. “What fucking teenage girl keeps her bedroom as neat as this?”
“The God-fearing, church-going, good girl that everyone says Anthea is?” Flynn suggested.
There was nothing at all to be found in the Larue home that suggested a Voodoo connection, and Flynn and Boudreau returned to the living room with no further insight into the death of Jeannette Larue. Malone glanced up from his reading as they entered.
“So did y’all find what you were looking for—roosters ready for blood sacrifice or whatever?”
Boudreau snorted, shook her head. “Y’all mentioned that Mrs Larue and her daughter are churchgoers?”
Malone nodded. “They attend the church over on Oklahoma Avenue. George Petersen is the reverend there.”
“How about a Mr Larue—?” Boudreau worked her eyebrows. “I don’t see any signs of a man’s presence around this house. There’re no dirty socks lying on the floor and the toilet lid is down.”
Even Malone had to smile at that. Closing the magazine and dropping it back on the table, he shook his head. “Far as I know there hasn’t been a Mr Larue since 1999. Anthea’s father died in a car accident in June of that year.”
“Uh huh. Any mention of boyfriends, either Mrs Larue’s or Anthea’s?”
Malone shook his head again. “Mrs Larue told us that her daughter was too busy with school to be bothered with boys. That’s why she was convinced Anthea hadn’t just run off to be with some boyfriend.”
Boudreau’s phone rang and she excused herself to talk on the front porch. Flynn leaned up against the wall by the window, arms loosely folded across her chest, and picked a spot in middle distance to stare at. Detective Malone made no effort to talk to her, and she returned the favor by ignoring him, too. It wasn’t that hard. A few moments later, Boudreau poked her head into the house. “That was Waylon. Seems the boneheads who took Mrs Larue’s initial missing person report were so damn convinced that Anthea bugged out to be with her boyfriend that they only did the most cursory of investigations.”
“And people think the NOPD don’t care,” Flynn said wonderingly.
Boudreau gave her a filthy look but didn’t offer any argument. Instead she sighed and said, “I guess we’re just going to have to do what the boneheads didn’t do, and we can start by talking to Reverend Petersen.”
Reverend George Petersen met with Boudreau and Flynn in the tiny rectory of his church where they found him going over some ledgers. He gave them an easy, friendly smile as he invited them to sit down.
“How can I help you, Detectives?”
Boudreau pointed to herself. “I’m Detective Boudreau. NOPD. This is Willie Rae Flynn. She’s not a detective.”
The reverend’s gaze flicked between them. Then he said, “New Orleans? I rather assumed you were with Kenner PD?”
Boudreau shook her head. “I’m sorry, I should’ve said that we’re investigating a homicide occurred in New Orleans. The victim was from here in Kenner.”
The reverend began to look worried, leaning forward with his hands flat upon the blotter on his desk, his gaze intent upon Boudreau. “Someone from my congregation.” He made it a statement, not a question but Boudreau nodded in the affirmative anyway.
“The victim was a Mrs Jeannette Larue. Are you familiar with her?”
Reverend Petersen’s expression collapsed and took on that stunned, hammered quality of incredible shock. His mouth worked a few times soundlessly before he managed to speak again. “Of course, yes, I know Jeannette. She’s a member of my congregation. Oh my—” his fingers clenched on the blotter, their tips turning bloodless white, and for a moment he squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again, tears glistened at the corners. “Jeannette, oh no….No. But how could she…please, Detective, tell me what happened to her?”
“When was the last time you saw Mrs Larue?” Boudreau asked, ignoring Reverend Petersen’s question for the moment. He stared at her.
“Uh, I would say maybe three or four days ago. Detective, please —tell me what happened to her?”
Boudreau gave him the bare facts, leaving out the details, and not just because they were grisly; until they had reason to believe otherwise, everyone was a suspect in Jeannette Larue’s murder, including the Reverend Petersen. His face became an ashy grey color as Boudreau spoke, and he moved his right hand to a simple silver cross that he wore on a chain around his neck, fingering it tightly.
“Oh Lord, how terrible. Oh dear—” suddenly he frowned. “What about Anthea? Jeannette’s daughter—has she been found yet? Does she know about her mother?”
“Anthea Larue’s whereabouts have not yet been ascertained.” Boudreau let Reverend Petersen have a moment or two to digest this news before she tilted a questioning look at him. “We were wondering if you might have any ideas about Anthea’s disappearance?”
He shook his head. “No. I’m sorry, I don’t. I was shocked when Jeannette told me that Anthea had lied about going to visit with friends. Anthea is also a member of our church. She started coming to our Sunday School when she was four years old—” he made a wistful smile. “But that isn’t what you want to know, Detective, is it? I’m sorry. Anthea is such a nice, polite, well brought up young lady. A credit to her mama. She’s never been in any trouble that I know about. That’s why I was so stunned when Jeannette told me she’d lied—it just did not seem like something that the Anthea I know would do.”
“I see.” Boudreau
did not sound as though she saw at all. “Do you know if Anthea had a boyfriend ? Maybe someone she met here at church?”
Reverend Petersen gave a rueful smile. “Detective, Anthea is a very goal-directed girl. She has set her sights on doing well in school and going to college. She wants to become a nurse. I don’t think she feels that she has time for boyfriends at the moment.”
“But you wouldn’t know for sure if she was seeing anyone?”
“No, Detective, I suppose I would not…” Petersen hesitated, reconsidered for a moment before adding, “She certainly wasn’t seeing anyone from this church or neighborhood anyway. That I would know. Otherwise, well, maybe I don’t know as much as I think.”
Boudreau asked then if Reverend Petersen knew whether Jeannette Larue had ever been involved with Voodoo, or had any problems with anyone who had connections to Voodoo. He looked shocked at the mere suggestion.
“I have never heard Jeannette speak of Voodoo, not ever at all,” he declared. His watery gaze darted between the women, lingering for a moment on Flynn, his lips parting a little way and then closing tight again, as though he had been about to say something only to change his mind at the last moment. He let his gaze switch back to Boudreau as she spoke to him again.
“Reverend, do you know of any reason that Jeannette Larue would be in the area of Desire Street?”
“Desire Street?” he echoed. Surprise widened his eyes. Reverend Petersen was having a day full of surprises, not one of them good. “I can’t imagine what would take Jeannette there, no. I’m sure she didn’t know anyone from that area either.”
Boudreau nodded. She started to rise from her seat, and Flynn followed suit. “I think that will be all for now. Thank you for your time, Reverend,” she said.
“Yes. Yes, of course…anything else I can do—”
“We’ll be sure to let y’all know, sir.”
They were almost to the door when he spoke up again. “Detective, I should tell you that Jeannette has no family other than her daughter.”
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