The End Of Desire: A Rowan Gant Investigation

by M. R. Sellars

  Felicity was darting across the asphalt, weaving between parked cars with the nimbleness of her petite stature. She didn’t seem to be running from me as much as she seemed to be running toward something.

  I heard shouting voices coming from various positions around the lot and the street in front of it combined with a sudden rush of heavy footsteps in the distance. I suspected the FBI team had spotted her and were responding.

  My wife swivel-hipped around the end of an SUV, aiming herself toward a petite, dark-haired figure that was walking briskly up the aisle just beyond. I tried to follow but misjudged the gap, catching my shoulder hard against a truck’s mirror bracket. I stumbled, slamming sideways against another car. In that instant I lost sight of my wife, but I could now hear the angry screams of two women engaged in what could only be a fight. I pushed off and continued between the parked vehicles, hooking around the end of the SUV in the direction of the commotion, and launched myself into the aisle.

  As I ran out I could see the source of the screams. My wife and the other woman were rolling on the pavement several yards away. I ran toward them as I heard more shouts and pounding footsteps.

  I covered the distance as quickly as I could, reaching out as I ran. When I made it to them, Felicity was on top of the other woman with her hands clasped around her neck. A stream of French was spewing from her mouth, and the only word I could recognize was chienne.

  Grabbing beneath her arm, I slipped my own in up around her chest and latched onto her opposite shoulder. Using my other hand, I dug my thumb into one of her wrists and wrenched her hand free as I pulled her back.

  Annalise coughed hard as I struggled to pull my wife off her. Felicity continued to scream in a mix of French and English, kicking as we fell back. With her free hand, she reached around and took hold of my hair, wresting my head roughly to the side. We both tumbled onto the asphalt, her on top of me squirming and still kicking.

  I fought to hold on to her, but the air was suddenly forced from my lungs as added weight forced down on my chest. Annalise landed on top of us, screaming her own barrage of French-peppered verbiage. I heard Felicity begin to gag as the tables were now turned. She released my hair and swung her arm up, digging her nails into Annalise’s cheek. I heard her shriek as the claws dug in, but the struggle continued. The shouting voices were now right on top of us, and the footsteps were now shuffling nearby instead of pounding in the distance.

  A half second later, I heard Annalise scream, “That’s mine, chienne!”

  My unbearable headache instantly became even worse, and I tasted blood in my mouth. An unearthly scream echoed inside my skull. It was just like the wail I had heard the day I cut the binding in our back yard. I didn’t know what Annalise was claiming as her own, but I knew it had something to do with the connection between her and Felicity.

  My wife went limp then shuddered and began to yelp as Annalise continued on the offensive. The disorientation of Miranda’s sudden exit had taken hold, and Felicity was no longer fighting back. I loosened my grip on her and, in a panic, I twisted against the cold asphalt in an attempt to pull myself out from under them before Annalise could do any damage to her. Just as I managed to kick my legs around and started to extricate myself, I felt both their combined weights pulled from my chest. In the same moment, I was unceremoniously rolled onto my stomach, and my hands were being pulled behind my back as handcuffs were applied.

  “Rowan!” Felicity called from a few feet away, her voice strained and confused.

  I turned my head, but I couldn’t see her.

  Behind me I could hear Annalise still screaming some especially nasty sounding French as the agents wrestled her to the ground.

  “Rowan!” Felicity shouted again, the anxiety in her voice audibly stepping up another notch.

  “It’s all right! It’s going to be fine!” I called back to her before I laid the side of my face against the cold pavement and sighed heavily, “It’s finally over,” I muttered to myself. “It’s going to be fine.”

  Friday, December 16

  12:16 A.M.

  FBI Field Office

  St. Louis, Missouri

  CHAPTER 44:

  I had been here before. Sitting in this very office, in this very chair, while my wife was being fingerprinted, interrogated, and falsely accused of the crimes that had started this entire ordeal better than a month ago. The blob of metal bits that made up the magnetic sculpture sitting on the edge of the desk in front of me had probably morphed shape a time or two since then, though I couldn’t tell it by looking. But, other than that, the office hadn’t changed. It was just as I remembered it.

  I pushed up from my slouched position and readjusted myself in the chair before letting out a tired sigh and rolling my head to the side to look at my wife. She was curled up as only she could do, with her head lying on her arm where she had draped it across the back of her own seat. Her eyes were closed, and she was breathing evenly, but I knew she wasn’t asleep. She looked almost at peace, and that was a sight I hadn’t seen for quite some time.

  “How are you feeling,” I asked softly.

  “Tired,” she answered, her thick Irish accent applying its inflections to the word.

  “Yeah…” I agreed. “How about other than that?”

  “Aye, you mean?”

  “Yeah, I mean.”

  “Like I just woke up from a nightmare.”

  “Uh-huh,” I grunted. “Me too.”

  We sat in silence for a while before she yawned audibly and stretched as she repositioned herself in the chair.

  “It’s really over, isn’t it then?” she asked.

  “I think so,” I replied. “Miranda, anyway.”

  I heard a click and turned to see the door behind us swinging open. A blonde woman a few years older than Constance entered.

  “Mister Gant, Miz O’Brien,” she said, her own voice sounding tired.

  “Agent Parker,” I returned.

  “You’re free to go,” she said. “I’ll be happy to drive you home if you’d like.”

  “Is there any word on Constance?” I asked.

  She bit her lower lip and nodded. “Only that she’s still in surgery.”

  “Aye, but she’s going to be okay, isn’t she?” Felicity asked.

  “All we know is she’s critical,” she said. “She lost quite a bit of blood. Our SAC and director are both at the hospital now. So is your friend, Detective Storm.”

  “Do you think you could take us there instead?” Felicity asked.

  Parker nodded. “I can do that.”

  As we both stood up, she said, “Oh, before I forget… I wanted to return this to you, Miz O’Brien.” She pulled a small paper envelope from her jacket pocket and held it out toward Felicity. “Devereaux claims it’s her necklace, but we saw her yank it from your neck when we were pulling her off you. It looks like an heirloom, so I thought you might want to have it back.”

  The angry scream, “That’s mine, chienne!” immediately flitted through my brain, along with the ethereal wail of anger and loss. Behind it came the memory of Ben asking me if Felicity had such a piece of jewelry, all because Lewis insisted she had been wearing it when he met her at the bondage club. The connection became instantly clear.

  Felicity reached for the envelope, but I thrust my hand out ahead of hers and snatched it from Agent Parker’s fingers. “I’ll take that.”

  Felicity cocked her head at me and furrowed her brow. “Rowan, that’s…”

  “Trust me, you don’t want it,” I said.

  “But…”

  “I’ll explain later. Right now, I have a feeling we need to just get to the hospital as soon as we can.”

  FACT OR FICTION?

  A Note About The Legend Of The LaLaurie Family

  Some of you may or may not be familiar with the legend of Delphine LaLaurie and the horrific tortures she allegedly inflicted upon her servant slaves. I will not endeavor to go deeply into the legend—or quite possibly my
th—here, as it would take far too many pages. In fact, it would be a book in and of itself, and has been written by authors other than me. Suffice it to say, the story can easily be found with a simple search on the web or a visit to the library. The newspaper articles recounting the horrors actually do exist. Unfortunately for us, as it all occurred in the early 1800’s there is no one left alive who knows what really happened behind the walls of the LaLaurie mansion.

  Some say that what you read in those articles is the gospel truth. Others say it was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and the horrors ran far deeper. Still others say that Delphine LaLaurie and her family were the unfortunate victims of jealousy and “yellow journalism” meant for the sole purpose of besmirching their good name. And, there are those who will tell you that the truth lies somewhere in between, hiding in the murky shadows of the often repeated story. Alas, as I said, we will never know the real truth, but the legend has grown and become one of the timeless “horror stories” of the Crescent City used to entertain the morbid curiosity of tourists. The best advice I can offer is to research the story yourself, if you are interested, and draw your own conclusions. Quite obviously, for the purposes of this novel, I chose to treat the story as a slice of reality.

  The tie-in of my novels with this long told legend came about when my dear friend, Dorothy Morrison, introduced me to the story. Later, during my visit to New Orleans, working post-Katrina cleanup, I had occasion to visit the library and become even far better acquainted with the saga surrounding Delphine LaLaurie and, as one would expect, it piqued my own morbid curiosity.

  The concept for the Miranda Trilogy had started as a one book Rowan Gant Investigation centered on a dominatrix as the killer. As you, my readers, have now surmised, the story itself grew well beyond the pages of a single book. When I first began researching facts and settings for the plot—as well as the name Miranda itself—I happened upon an obituary. That obituary was from the New Orleans Bee newspaper and was almost word for word the same obituary quoted by Rowan in this novel, including the date the notice was originally published. The notable exceptions to the recounted verbiage are Miranda’s age and surname. The real Miranda identified in the obituary was twenty years younger, had a different last name, and to my knowledge was in no way related to the LaLaurie family.

  So, in effect, as we novelists tend to do, I fictionalized a small bit of reality. The concept for Love Is The Bond—and eventually the Miranda Trilogy—expanded to encompass my own somewhat bastardized version of the LaLaurie legend—that being the addition of a sister named Miranda and the tie in with the completely unrelated death notice in a better than 150-year-old newspaper.

  All I can say is that our minds work in very strange ways. Well, at least mine does…

  M. R. Sellars

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  An active member of the HWA (Horror Writers Association), M. R. Sellars is a relatively unassuming homebody who considers himself just a “guy with a lot of nightmares and a word processing program.” His first full-length novel, Harm None, hit bookstore shelves in 2000 and he hasn’t stopped writing since. He says that the biggest adjustment he has had to make with his writing career is coping with the time spent away from his family while traveling on promotional tours. Still, he approaches it with the same humorously deadpan and occasionally acerbic wit that he applies to life in general.

  All of the current novels in Sellars’ continuing Rowan Gant Investigations saga have spent several consecutive weeks on numerous bookstore bestseller lists as well as a consistent showing on the Amazon.com Horror/Occult top 100.

  Sellars currently resides in the Midwest with his wife, daughter, and a host of what he describes as “rescued, geriatric, special-needs felines.” At home, when not writing or taking care of the household, he indulges his passions for cooking and hanging out with friends.

  M. R. Sellars can be found on the web at:

  www.mrsellars.com

  Brainpan Leakage the M. R. Sellars Satire Blog

  www.brainpanleakage.com

  OTHER BOOKS BY M. R. SELLARS

  The Rowan Gant Investigations

  HARM NONE

  NEVER BURN A WITCH

  PERFECT TRUST

  THE LAW OF THREE

  CRONE’S MOON

  LOVE IS THE BOND

  ALL ACTS OF PLEASURE

  THE END OF DESIRE

  BLOOD MOON

  MIRANDA

  (Available in both print and e-book editions)

  Other

  YOU’RE GONNA THINK I’M NUTS…

  (Novelette included in Courting Morpheus Horror Anthology)

  MERRIE AXEMAS: A KILLER HOLIDAY TALE

  (Novella)