But that didn’t mean she could bear watching him drive away. Heart beating in a panicked rhythm, she hurried out the back door, toward the truck where—
“What on earth?” she asked, realizing that the thing moving inside the truck’s cab wasn’t Marcus. Wasn’t even human.
It was a dog. A big, frantic, yellow Lab mix running back and forth across the bench seat, and periodically stopping to dig and whine at one door or the other.
She heard the dog crying, and then it barked desperately as it caught sight of her. Plunking its huge paws against the window, it scratched with such fervor that despite her confusion about how it could have gotten in there, she hurried to let it out.
With a yelp, the animal burst past her the minute she opened the door, collar tags jingling as it raced away—presumably heading home—with its tail between its legs. Pushed backward by the big dog’s passage, Caitlyn stumbled.
Stumbled and collided with something large and powerful that had stolen up behind her to clap a hand over her mouth before she could even draw breath for a horror-movie scream.
MARCUS NEVER KNEW WHAT HIT HIM as he stepped around the corner of the bungalow, never even knew he’d been hit until the moment he opened his eyes to see a pair of skinny teenage boys crouched next to him, their impossibly long limbs folded like the legs of a grasshopper.
“This what got you, mister?” he asked.
Marcus blinked and squinted, and the twin figures came together, merging into a single boy in running shorts, his dark skin marred by acne and his big hand holding a branch as thick as his wrist. As Marcus’s vision swam into focus, the silvery predawn light showed blood and a few of his own hairs embedded in the bark.
As badly as his skull throbbed, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see brain matter there, as well. The pain intensified as his gaze flicked to the blaze of dawn lending color to a greasy smear of sky.
Which meant, he realized, that he must have been out for…how long? Two hours? Maybe three?”
“Caitlyn,” he moaned. “Where’s Caitlyn?”
Oblivious, the boy explained, “My track team home-boy Darius, he run down to his house to call for help. They send an amb’lance any minute. The 5-0, too, I ’magine.”
At this reference to the police, Marcus tried to stand but wobbled back down onto the grass. “Need to find her right now. Find out if she’s still in Apartment 1B.”
If she’s still alive, he thought, fear clawing at his gut. Because if Caitlyn had been able to, surely she would have come out and found him long before this. What if she had come out, if his assailant had struck him merely to lure her into the open?
When Marcus tried to rise again, the teenager pressed down on his shoulder. “You stay right here. I get your girl for you.”
Marcus tracked the progress of the boy’s white running shoes as he jogged out of sight, and listened to him hammering on the apartment door for several minutes.
“She might not answer!” he called, though it made his head throb even more. “Stick your head inside and tell her Marcus needs her.”
He listened as the boy called, “Miz Caitlyn? Your man need you. Marcus hurt out here. He need you to come help him.”
The kid jogged back a minute later. “She not answering. Don’t think she in there. Awful quiet.”
“Can you give me a hand?” Marcus asked him. “I need to make sure whoever hit me didn’t hurt her, too.”
The boy took a full step backward, looking nervous. Flashing his pale palms, he said, “Listen, mister. Cops’ll be here any minute, and I don’t want to get caught up in your business. ’Specially not with somebody mean enough to beat a man down with a stick.”
Marcus struggled to his feet but would have fallen had the boy not, however reluctantly, caught him by the arm. Marcus yelped, a shock of pain from his gunshot wound rocketing through him.
Letting go, the kid turned toward the street. “Sorry, man. I’m sorry. I gotta get back to my run.”
Marcus thanked him, suspecting the teenager not only feared whoever had hit him but also getting blamed by the police, especially given the difference in the colors of their skin.
He staggered toward the front door, his concern firmly on Caitlyn. Had she failed to answer out of fear, or was she inside but hurt—or worse?
He went in shouting her name, then stumbled through the apartment checking each room, pausing only when his vision grayed out. His panic mounted when he found her nowhere inside, so he went out through the back door to check out the truck.
Dread sucker-punched him at the sight of the passenger door standing open and the partly shredded upholstery inside. Who the hell had done that? Caitlyn, in a struggle?
A memory sailed back into range, his glimpse of something through the window, something moving inside the truck. Had a vandal done this, or an attacker sick enough to gouge out women’s eyes and replace them with cold glass orbs?
“Caitlyn!” Her name rose on a wave of pain, on the dawning certainty that she was nowhere nearby. With the sound of sirens coming nearer, he decided he couldn’t trust the police to listen to him. Quickly he gathered his belongings from the house and drove off in the pickup with no idea where to find her, or who might have the stealth, the malice and the skill to coldcock not only him but most likely Reuben Pierce, too, in order to isolate and abduct Caitlyn.
In order to kill her…
Head pounding and face sticky with the clotted blood that had run from his scalp, Marcus risked pulling into a fast food joint with a nearly empty parking lot. Slipping through the side door, he ducked into the restroom and cleaned up enough so he wouldn’t be pulled over as he cruised the streets.
Even after the cold-water wash-up, he looked rough, he knew, but he forced himself to take a moment to pick up a large coffee, which he used to wash down a couple of the painkillers he had on him from last night.
Sitting in the parking lot, he pushed aside his lingering pain, his panic and the long-held survival instinct that warned him the police were enemies. Once he reached the NOPD switchboard on his cell phone, he asked to be connected with Detective Robinson, the officer Caitlyn had mentioned in connection with the news about his brother.
“Detective Lorna Robinson,” a woman answered.
“This is Marcus Le Carpentier,” he started.
“Where are you, Mr. Le Carpentier? We’ve had officers searching for you all night. Are you all right?”
Not buying into her “concern,” Marcus reminded himself to keep the call short, before she could triangulate his location.
“It’s for your own safety,” Robinson added. “Understand that? You’ve clearly gotten on the wrong side of the wrong person.”
“Tell me about it,” he said. “But right now I’m a lot more worried about Caitlyn Villaré. She’s gone missing.”
Holding back only the intimate details, he laid out the events of the previous night for the detective, from the gunshots after Caitlyn met him at the cemetery to her disappearance.
“So if you were being hunted, why didn’t you call for help last night?” Robinson sounded aggravated. “We know about your brother, what you did for him. And we know from witnesses that the ambulance crash was no accident, that a dark sedan aimed right for it, and that someone shot at you afterwards.”
“At the time, I had no idea what you knew or didn’t. Or whether I’d end up dead trying to turn myself in. A cop was hurt in that wreck —”
“Killed,” Detective Robinson stated flatly.
“I’m sorry to hear it. Really sorry. But considering the circumstances, emotions are bound to be running high. High enough to get a suspect shot.”
“You’re not a suspect.”
“Whatever you say, Detective… But right now, I don’t give a damn about what happens to me. All I care about is finding Caitlyn before that bastard decides to…” He couldn’t bring himself to name aloud the fears crowding into his mind. “Before he lays a hand on her.”
He has alrea
dy, and you know it. Caitlyn never would have gone without a fight.
“Okay, Marcus. I understand exactly what you’re saying,” Detective Robinson said. “So do you have any idea where we should be looking? Or who might want to hurt Ms. Villaré?”
He let out a long breath, relieved beyond measure that he’d contacted the one cop who was willing to listen to him. “I’d check up on Josiah Paine, for starters. After I warned him to quit threatening her, the son of a bitch shot me.”
“You’re saying it was Josiah Paine who shot you?”
“Forget about that right now. I’m only worried about what he might do to Caitlyn.”
“He threatened her? Directly?”
“Yesterday. Outside the post office, she said. He implied he had friends who would ‘take care of her,’ and that he could make the cops look the other way.”
“Oh, did he?” Acid edged Robinson’s voice. “Let’s see that bloated windbag try it on me. I’m certainly not one of his old boy drinking buddies.”
“And Paine has an employee, a guy named…” Marcus struggled to dredge up the memory. Something Old Louisiana. Something that reminded him of…pirates? “Lafitte, that’s it. His name is Max Lafitte, and he hates Caitlyn for showing him up. She said he’s got some kind of grudge against her parents, too.”
“Her parents?” Lorna Robinson’s attention perked up. “They’ve been dead now for…”
“I’m not sure,” Marcus answered, “but she mentioned that her father was murdered.”
“Here it is. Back in the eighties,” Detective Robinson said. “Not long before those prostitutes were found with the blond wigs and green glass eyes. Was Caitlyn’s mama, by any chance, a blonde, too?”
“I have no idea what she looked like. But it’s possible, don’t you think, that Caitlyn resembles her enough to trigger something like this in a sick mind?”
“One very sick mind I’d like to get off the streets and into a cell. So do you have any other ideas for me? Anybody else, while we’re out rounding folks up?”
“You might ask Reuben Pierce. Retired cop who works with Caitlyn. He ended up in the hospital with a concussion last night, and I’ll lay you odds he was hit by the same guy who knocked me out. I don’t know which hospital, though.”
“Pierce?” she asked, and in the background, Marcus heard her rapid-fire keystrokes on a computer. “You think he was assaulted? I don’t see a report of that here, but maybe it hasn’t been logged in yet.”
Marcus thought about the dark sedan, so like an officer’s unmarked car. He thought about the crash last night, intentionally caused by someone who knew how to hit a vehicle and make it lose control without destroying his own car.
“You know what? Let me check one more thing,” Lorna Robinson said. “I ordered Pierce’s jacket sent up, but when my partner vouched for him, I didn’t make it a priority to… Here, I’ve got it. Right in the middle of the pile.”
Marcus visualized a cubicle with a desk stacked to the ceiling. Homicide in the Big Easy must be one busy department.
“Well, well,” said Lorna Robinson, her tone darkening. “You know what, Mr. Le Carpentier? I’m a good cop. Worked damned hard for sixteen years to get myself promoted and transferred here where I am.”
Marcus realized then that she was an outsider, a woman who’d fought her way up through the mostly white and mostly male ranks. That might explain her willingness to speak to him so freely. Either that or she was sharp enough to see her candor as the best way of gaining his cooperation.
“I’m tired of corrupt clowns who took the easy way out all their years in, counting on the code of silence to protect them when they tell people they’re ‘retired.’” She all but spat the word in her disgust. “Retired my ass. Reuben Pierce got caught takin’ bribes from bad guys about eight years back. Ended up retirin’ before he could get fired.”
“They charged him with corruption?”
“Looks to me like they were just happy to have him gone. Might’ve been some strings pulled, too, a little of that old boy business, to let him off with his pension. But that’s all water under the bridge,” she told Marcus. “What I’m wondering right now is, what’s this damned dirty cop been up to lately?”
Marcus added grimly, “Does his file mention if any of those bribes he took came from Mr. New Orleans After Dark? I understand the man’s running a loan shark business on the side.”
“Oh, is he now?” He heard the shuffling of papers before she answered, “I don’t see Josiah Paine mentioned in all this, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t involved.”
Marcus could easily imagine another of the man’s “friends in the department” keeping his name out of it.
“I’m guessing the next thing you’ll do,” Marcus thought aloud, “is check with other cops and hospitals to find out whether Reuben Pierce was really attacked last night at all.”
Chapter Twenty-One
When Caitlyn came to, she heard yelling in the room, a series of shouts that made her cower back onto whatever—a couch? a bed?—he had dumped her on while she was still unconscious.
Pain flared at her slight movement, her neck and throat in agony where he’d choked her from behind during their struggle, and her arm still stinging from whatever had been in the shot he’d used to knock her out. With her sight blurred and head spinning, she made out two figures but could not yet focus on the face of either one.
But though the older woman had her back to Caitlyn, there was something familiar in her voice, something so chilling that it stole the breath from her lungs.
“She can’t stay here. I won’t have it.”
Shock spun through Caitlyn as she realized that this had been last night’s caller on her voice mail—the “nurse” who had left the message saying that Reuben was hospitalized with a concussion.
A lie, Caitlyn now realized. Because as she blinked and squinted, Reuben himself came into view. With a cry of disbelief, the full horror of the situation slammed her. Her attacker was the same man she had loved and trusted like a father—a man she and Jacinth had so quickly accepted when he had introduced himself as a family friend and former cop. When he had helped them after their grandmother’s funeral. When he had quietly, insidiously, wormed his way into their lives, proving himself so trustworthy and indispensable that Jacinth didn’t hesitate to put him on the payroll after Caitlyn started up her business.
“It can’t be you,” she moaned, willing it to be a nightmare. “You can’t— Reuben, it’s me. Please, Reuben, please snap out of it!”
“It has to happen here, Maman. They’re all waiting.” Reuben ignored her, looking at the older woman, his voice sounding so little like the man she’d known that Caitlyn had to double-check to be sure she had been right about who he was.
Though his physical features were the same, she saw something hideously unhinged revealed in his eyes.
“Don’t you see, Mother?” he asked, his face contorted and terrifying. “The attendants are all ready and the wedding guests assembled. Our wedding guests.”
Wedding? He means to marry me? Horrified, Caitlyn’s eyes darted around a musty-smelling room lit only by a glowing lantern in the middle of a filthy floor. She was lying beside it on an aged bed that gave her a view of four walls covered in a peeling floral paper and lined entirely—save for one boarded-over window—in shelf after shelf…
Of dolls of all descriptions…a legion of them. Big dolls, little dolls—there had to be hundreds, casting weirdly elongated shadows whose owners’ empty, artificial green eyes stared out from beneath mops of pale blond hair.
She screamed and struggled to get up, only to find that her wrists had been shackled to the wooden bed frame. Crying out as she pulled against the chains, she demanded, “Let me go, you psycho. I’m not about to marry you.”
“You hear that, Reuben, boy? You have to get rid of her.” His mother’s voice cracked, bringing to mind the ancient Eva Rill of the widow’s weeds and armed threats.
“Eva Rill” reached up, grabbing her son’s collar. “Sophie never wanted you, boy. If she had, she wouldn’t have run off and married Villaré. So show some sense, for once in your life, and get rid of the body before they come here looking for you.” The body? A rising crop of chill bumps overrode all other horrors. Turning to the saner party, Caitlyn pleaded, “You have to help me, please, ma’am. You have to make him understand that I’m not my mother. Please, for Reuben’s sake. I won’t tell anyone. I’ll work with you to get your son help, if you’ll only let me go.”
The white-haired woman whipped around with astonishing speed for someone her age, swooping in to hiss in Caitlyn’s face, “You little fool—it’s all your fault, don’t you see? He was so much better after she left town with you and your brat sister. So much better. He had a good job, with good benefits.?… He built us a fine house.”
If this shabby room were any indication, Caitlyn couldn’t say much for the old woman’s taste.
“But you had to show up in town, you with your damned hair and those cat’s eyes. Shaking your tail feathers in his face just like your—”
Caitlyn shook her head emphatically. “No. It wasn’t like that. Reuben was— He’s always been a friend, almost like an uncle to me. That’s all. I swear I never—”
“I did everything I could to convince you to leave. I went along with his fool plan, got you to the cemetery so you could see what you’d made him do again, for the first time in such a long time. I even showed up at your house, waved that gun in your face and shot through your window. Yet you still refused to run.”
“I didn’t understand. I swear it.”
The sound of a crack filled the room before she even registered the old woman’s bony slap.
Cheek stinging, she listened as Reuben’s mother insisted, “Your slut mama ruined his life. Did she ever tell you? She promised she would marry him. Later on, she tried to laugh it off, pretend it was nothing but a misunderstanding, a flirtation. Claimed she was joking, that’s all. Because all the while she was leading my poor boy around by his pecker, she was carrying on with a man from an old family, a man with money, not some dirty whore’s son from the wrong side of the—”
Phantom of the French Quarter Page 16
