by Nancy Gideon
“Thank you for lunch.”
His grin flashed quick and wide. “You are very welcome.”
She returned to her desk, feeling rather smug herself. As she settled in behind her pile of paperwork, she glanced at the photographs of those she loved. She needed to get another frame.
A glimpse to her right caught the detectives at the next bank of desks staring at her.
“What are you looking at?” she snarled. “It’s not like you’ve never seen me take a lunch hour before.”
Then she unwrapped her sandwich and got to work, a satisfied smile playing about her lips.
DEVLIN DOVION LOOKED up from his slide, surprised to see Max, then smiling. “Looking for Charlotte?”
“Just had her for lunch.”
Dovion grinned. Of all of Cee Cee’s coworkers, the burly medical examiner was the only one who seemed to have no problem with Savoie and his mobster attachments. The big man, who looked like Jerry Garcia might if he were still on that eternal tour, had a soft spot for his friend’s daughter and a curious interest in her first and only choice for a love affair. Because Charlotte trusted Dovion so implicitly, Max had lowered his guard a notch to get to know this man who’d proven to be an ally. “What can I do for you, Max?”
“She mentioned you had a rather strange case laid out on your table.”
Dovion leapt on Max’s interest with glee. He loved an audience, and most of those who arrived down here were lacking in the interactive department. When Charlotte had mentioned that Max might enjoy learning about his cases, Dev had been thrilled. He also figured it would be a good way to get a sense of the fella without being too obvious.
“Yes, indeed.” He wheeled his chair to an adjacent counter where he had arranged several pictures. “Strange isn’t the word. I’ve seen plenty of strange. This just defies explanation.” When Max leaned over, Dovion was alerted by his tension. “You’re not going to throw up, are you?”
Max leveled a cool stare at him, then examined the photos. “What am I looking at?”
Dovion identified various sectors of the brain on a normal specimen, then did a comparison with the splatter in the cranial cavity of his John Doe.
“The damage appears to be from the inside outward, instead of the other way around,” Max noted.
Dovion beamed. “Exactly.”
“What could have caused something like that?” Max asked, mirroring Dev’s own intrigue.
“Short of having an explosive charge detonated inside his frontal lobe, I have no idea. No traces of any foreign residue. Fascinating. Just fascinating.”
Being around death all day gave Dovion a different slant on life, so he abruptly changed the subject. No sense wasting any time beating around the bush.
“Charlotte is very fond of you,” he began.
“Is that right?” Max’s gaze followed him as he went over to one of the many sinks, peeled off his gloves, and scrubbed up with quick efficiency.
“That’s not big news to you, but it is to anyone who knows her. It hasn’t been easy for her to trust anyone enough to spend personal time with them. Most fellas don’t have the patience or the sense to find out why, but there’s a reason for it.”
“I know.”
Dovion studied Max intently. “She’s told you about her past?”
“We don’t have any secrets.”
Now, that was news. Dovion had taken her home from the hospital when she was just a seventeen-year-old kid, beaten and abused in ways that sickened him. Her father had been out on a case, and Dev had been as close as a brother to Tommy Caissie until that moment. What kind of father sent someone else to bring home his injured child? Cee Cee had pretended that hadn’t hurt her almost as much as the shattered bones.
“You break her heart, we’ll tangle,” he told Max.
“Duly warned.”
“You’re shaking in your sneakers, I’m sure.”
“Right down to the laces.” A faint smile, completely innocent of any mockery.
Damned if he didn’t like the boy for that bit of respect.
“Good.” He gave Savoie another long look, then ventured, “I don’t have an ID on the vic yet, but I think he’s one of yours.”
Max’s pulse gave a nasty jump. “One of mine?”
“He was armed and found floating down by the docks. There were signs of more conventional trauma to the body. He’d been worked over pretty thoroughly.”
Tension beat a fierce tattoo in Max’s head. “That doesn’t make him my employee.”
“That doesn’t make him an altar boy, either.” Dovion shrugged. “Want to see if you recognize him? We’re waiting for a print match, but it would speed things up if you could come up with a name.” He pulled out a drawer, then dragged down the zipper on the plastic bag inside.
Max’s anxiety tightened; his temples thundered with the beginning of a headache, one of the many he’d had this week after having never suffered one before in his life.
At the first glimpse of red hair, his stomach turned over. His gaze shifted away until he got a grip on his gut, until he was certain his expression would reveal nothing.
Tito Tibideaux had been pale in life, and death had bleached his skin to a skim-milk transparency. Against that pallor, the bruises stood out starkly on Philo’s younger brother’s face, detailing the brutality he’d endured. Someone had beaten him into an almost unrecognizable pulp before he’d succumbed to that final energy pulse that blew his brain apart.
“Anyone you know?”
“No. Sorry. Can’t help you.”
The zipper was tugged back up with a quick, impersonal pull, then Dovion glanced up at his smooth, blank expression.
“I guess I’ll see you Saturday.” At Max’s blink of surprise, Dovion smiled. “News travels fast when it involves someone of your…affiliations. Not afraid of stepping into that social lion’s den for Charlotte’s sake?”
“Not many things frighten me.”
One of those things was the sight of Philo Tibideaux’s baby brother under plastic. Because Max suspected that he’d inadvertently put him there.
He left the morgue on the lower level. In the shadows of the overhead doors, with the pain in his head so intense it skewed his vision, he leaned against one of the city vehicles, buckling under the sudden surge of sickness that boiled up to spew out on the asphalt. He sagged against the fender until the hot and cold shivers subsided, then finally straightened to face a harsh, killing fact.
His time was up.
“MAX, GOT A minute?”
He looked up from the stack of mail he’d been staring at sightlessly for the last half hour. A minute was more than he wanted to give Francis Petitjohn. Francis, with his sly smile and furtive eyes, who’d happily kill him and step over his warm corpse to his cousin Jimmy’s position. The position Jimmy Legere had given to a wild card like Max Savoie, instead of keeping it in the family, stunning the criminal underworld of New Orleans. Max still hadn’t decided whether to thank or curse his mentor for that overwhelming responsibility. On this dreary afternoon, he was leaning toward the latter.
“What is it, T-John?”
“Have you had time to look over those prospectus sheets Cummings’s people sent over? They need an okay on the costs so they can present the package to the zoning and building commission folks.”
Max blinked his eyes into focus and pushed the papers around on his desktop until he unearthed the proper documents. He tried to concentrate on the long list of figures and codes, but the headache that had been building like a low-pressure front for what seemed like days prevented him from zeroing in on them.
“I haven’t had a chance to. Have you gone over them?”
Francis recovered quickly from his surprise. “Sure. I’ve overseen a couple of projects like this for Jimmy.”
“Does everything look all right?”
He shrugged. “Yeah. Had McCracken and his people go over every decimal point and board foot. Don’t have a lot of confidence in Simo
n Cummings’s honesty, and I suspect the feeling is mutual. This is just the preliminary round, no big deal, but I don’t want them to think they can get away with anything. I’d stack Jimmy’s bean counters against Cummings’s swindlers any day. I can explain it line by line to you, if you’d like.”
He drew himself up to enjoy the sense of superiority. It was rarely that Max, with his massive ego, deferred to him on anything. Trust had been broken between them long before Jimmy’s blood had been spilled by T-John’s hand. He watched Max rub his eyes, saw the slump of his shoulders, and was quick to snap up the advantage. Careful not to appear too eager, he said, “Or I can just take care of it for you, if you want. Doesn’t matter to me.”
Max looked up, his gaze assessing T-John with an instinctual caution. “I know McCracken. He’s a good man. Take him with you.”
“You bet. You want I should bring the final draft back for you to read over?”
“I’ve got some things I need to do now, and I probably won’t be back in until tomorrow.”
“Okay. I’ll see to things. I’ll leave a copy in your box.” He hesitated, not wanting to push it too far by asking, then went ahead. “You all right?”
Max’s gaze narrowed, but instead of the suspicion T-John feared, there was dull weariness. And gratitude.
“Fine. Thank you.”
“No need to thank me, Max.” No, indeed. Not when he was being handed the opportunity he’d been waiting for, like a submerged alligator watching for someone to carelessly get too close to shore. With a smile, Francis’s jaws snapped tight on the means to destroy the man standing in the way of what should have been his.
Cheveux du Chien. Hair of the Dog. A barred door led down a shadowed hall into a soaring, dark warehouse club with an unnatural clientele. Among them, Max Savoie usually felt right at home.
But not tonight. Not with the news he carried.
A few months ago, he had no idea this place existed, no idea these strange beings existed. He thought he was alone. The only one who moved through the human world with a secret so dark and deep, his life depended upon its being kept. A secret his mother taught him to hide. A secret Jimmy Legere had trained him to exploit. A secret that now targeted him for danger and brought that threat to those who’d opened up their world to him and looked to him to lead them.
Because although he was the same, he was also amazingly different. He was a pureblood: His centuries-old lineage knew no weakness from human intermingling. His skills knew no boundaries except the imagination.
They were shape-shifters, and he’d just begun to understand what that meant. There was so much for him to learn—but no one to teach him, now that his father was dead. There had to be someone else who held the key to the knowledge of his past. But now killers were on their way to make sure he didn’t have the chance to find that truth.
He walked between the crowded tables, his own presence shielded while he swept the room for anything unusual. He could read his clansmen with the ease of a glance across a boldly printed page. There was no mystery to these basic beings. Herd animals, his father Rollo had called them with contempt. Creatures with no subtlety or stealth. Recognizing them by individual scent and psychic signature came easily to Max now. His clan. His family.
But sometimes he saw more; a shimmer of their thoughts occasionally teased him. And every once in a while, when he met their gazes, he’d see images moving across the black screen of their pupils. He always quickly looked away. These were things none of them spoke of being able to do, so he kept them to himself. He was no stranger to secrets.
As he passed them by, he felt the shock of their awareness when they saw him, the fear and awe that came with it. Though he didn’t relish their homage the way Rollo would have, he didn’t underestimate its power. Or its obligations.
“Where y’at, Savoie?” Jacques LaRoche, the club’s owner, bellowed from across the room. He was a huge, bald mountain of aggressive muscle and fierce loyalty. Max had never had a friend, so he was hesitant to attach that name to their relationship, but he liked the bold LaRoche. And more than that, he trusted him. Another unfamiliar and vaguely distressing emotion he was trying to adjust to.
Seated on the other side of the big bar was Philo Tibideaux, Jacques’s second on the docks, where they ran the workers for Max. Workers that filled this club after hours to be what they couldn’t be where human eyes could see. Beings with unnatural quickness, with abnormal senses, with the ability to take a fierce animal form that would have had them hunted to extinction if they were discovered. Because humans destroyed what frightened them. That was the first harsh lesson Max had ever learned.
Gesturing to the two of them and the office, Max continued through the noisy cluster of tables as the hard beat of the techno spin reverberated between his temples. It was with relief that he closed the soundproof door and gave his ears a rest. But the headache continued with almost eye-watering intensity.
Then the tall, lanky redhead entered a step ahead of LaRoche. The minute the door closed, Max got right to it.
“I was asked to identify a body at the morgue today. I told the ME I didn’t know who it was, but that wasn’t true.” He turned to the younger man, his stare steady and unblinking. “I’m sorry. It was your brother.”
Philo took a staggering step backward. “Tito? No. You must be mistaken.”
LaRoche gripped both his friend’s arms when his knees failed him. His intense gaze was on Max, his voice was low and somber. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I wish I wasn’t.”
Too stunned to feel grief, Philo dropped into the chair LaRoche steered him to. “Tito can’t be dead. He’s going to meet me here in an hour. He was starting a new job yesterday. I was gonna buy him some drinks and we were gonna close the place down. He can’t be dead.” He looked to Max, his eyes swimming. “He can’t be.”
“Who was he going to work for?” Max kept his voice firm, needing Philo to concentrate on something other than his loss.
“He didn’t say.”
“What kind of job was it? On the docks? In the city? Think.”
Philo blinked, tears spilling down his drawn face. “I doan know. Let me think. Some kinda delivery job, he said. He was gonna work third shift last night for training, then tomorrow he was gonna start on second.”
“Who gave him this job? How did he find it? In the paper? Through a friend?”
“No. No. I thought it was kinda strange, but Tito, he called it good fortune.” A crazy laugh escaped him, filled with irony and disbelief. “Some fellas not from around here started making talk with him, at a rib joint down in the warehouse district. They was looking for a fella who knew his way around town, who was familiar with the business, the players, and the neighborhoods, who had a way with people. He told them he was their man. He told them there wasn’t nobody he didn’t know in the Big Easy.”
And that confident boast had gotten him killed.
As Philo began to weep into his hands, Jacques asked, “What happened, Max?”
“Somebody beat him pretty good. They found him floating this morning. Did he ever carry a gun?”
“Tito?” Philo answered with a choked laugh. “No. Never. He was afraid he’d shoot his own foot off.”
“He had one on him. Maybe he took it off of whoever killed him.”
“How did he die? Tell me how he died.”
“He was killed by a pulse. A sort of psychic explosion in the brain.”
Both of them simply stared at him until finally Philo said, “I’ve never heard of that. Who can do that sort of thing?”
“I have,” LaRoche said grimly. “It’s something only a pureblood can do. Why would Trackers be after your brother?”
Philo shook his head, mystified.
“They weren’t after Tito,” Max told them quietly. “They were looking for me.”
Three
MAX WAS STANDING on the side porch, leaning against one of the faded pillars while he looked toward the ri
ver. Cee Cee just watched for a moment, letting her love for him sweep her away like the current of that powerful water, not struggling against the fear of drowning the way she used to.
Soft rain blew against him, dampening his gorgeous grey linen shirt so that it clung to the long, hard line of him, almost transparent. Moisture dotted his short black hair, which was bristled from restless finger combing.
He didn’t notice the dampness. Nor did he appear to notice her, which made her frown slightly as she approached him in his lonely vigil. Then he reached back for her hand without looking around, and she smiled as she slipped her fingers across his palm. He drew her into the curve of his side.
“You’re all wet, Savoie.”
“So you tell me, detective—more often than I enjoy hearing.” He brought her hand up to his lips for a light kiss, then held her palm over his heart. She wasn’t fooled by his mood. Beneath the glassy surface calm, his waters ran deep and troubled.
“I like it when it rains at night.” His voice was low, wistful. “You want to think that when you wake up in the morning, all the grime will be washed away and the world starts over clean.”
“If only it worked that way.”
“With the world. And with people.”
Because she sensed he needed to be calmed more than he needed to be questioned, she teased, “Any particularly dirty thoughts you need to have rinsed clean?”
A small smile. “A few.”
“Care to share them with me?”
He nuzzled her hair. She felt him inhale deeply, breathing her in. “One involves rose petals, those new shoes you just bought, and your handcuffs.”
“You leave my flowers alone.”
A chuckle vibrated beneath her cheek.
“How about a long shower and a soft bed?” she suggested.
“Hmmm, that could work. And you wearing nothing but those shoes.” A pause. “And the handcuffs.”
“Deal.”
He glanced over her head before she was aware of movement behind them.
“Is there anything else you need this evening, Mr. Savoie? Detective?”
“No, thank you, Helen,” he told his housekeeper softly. “We’ve got everything right here.”
