by Mallory Kane
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Mallory Kane. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.
Entangled Publishing, LLC
2614 South Timberline Road
Suite 109
Fort Collins, CO 80525
Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.
Dead Sexy is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC
Visit our website at www.DeadSexyBooks.com
Edited by Anna DeStefano and Nina Bruhns
Cover design by Heather Howland
ISBN 978-1-62266-939-4
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition June 2012
The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction: Glock, Converse All-Stars, BMW.
This book is dedicated to Sherrilyn Kenyon,
who always told me one day Dev would have his own book,
and to my editors, Anna and Nina, who helped me make it happen.
Prologue
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
JULY
The fog off the river swirled around the lone figure as he stepped onto the abandoned wharf. His baggy jeans bunched over his Converse sneakers and a hoodie shadowed his face from the few security lights that hadn’t been broken or burned out. As he walked past a pile of discarded crab traps, a rustling noise made him jump.
“Hey,” he said, taking a step backward and squinting into the shadows. The back of his neck prickled. His hand closed around the pocketknife he’d stowed in his hoodie. “That you?”
The rustling got louder. He backed up another step, stumbling over a frayed bit of rope. He held his breath. Don’t be a river rat, he thought. They were nasty-ass things.
Then he heard another noise—a muffled cough and a groan.
“Yo,” a rusty voice said. “Got a smoke, kid? Or a drink?”
“Naw,” he said, walking past the old fool. His scalp tingled. He didn’t like it down here, especially in the fog. You couldn’t see crap. At least the noise hadn’t been a rat.
He walked all the way to the end of the dock, where the planks had been battered and chewed by dozens of boats rubbing against them over time. He gazed across the water at the bridge. He didn’t know which one it was, but he liked looking at it. Its strings of lights reminded him of Christmas when he’d been little and dumb enough to still believe in Santa Claus.
He wasn’t sure when his mom quit trying to take care of him. Must have been years before the man she’d married had kicked him out of the house. His shoulders drew up automatically, as they did whenever he thought about home—or what had been his home before that man had moved in.
He heard footsteps behind him. Familiar footsteps. “Hey man, where you been?” he asked. “Did you see that homeless dude back there? Hell, I thought he was a rat.”
He turned, pushing the hoodie back off his head. “You got a smoke?” He felt something cold press into his neck. “What’re you—” His hand shot up as a deep stinging replaced the cold. He saw a flash of metal and a spurt of blood—his blood.
Shocked and suddenly weak, he tried to move, to get away somehow, but his foot slipped. He staggered backward and stepped right off the end of the dock into the unforgiving waters of the Mississippi River.
Chapter One
She knew who the killer was. The thought slammed into Reghan Connor’s sleep-hazed brain, bringing her wide awake. Her fist clenched around the cell phone she held.
“Reghan? Did you fall asleep? Hello?”
She threw back the bedcovers and squinted at the clock. Four-thirty in the morning. She flicked off the alarm, which was set for five o’clock, and rubbed her eyes. “No, Annie, I’m here,” she said on a yawn. “Where did they find the body?”
“Near an abandoned warehouse on the Alabo Street Wharf. That’s—”
“Within a couple of miles of where the first kid was found.” Ten days before, floating in the river, his throat slit. Annie had called her then, too. Not in the middle of the night. She’d called later in the day, once she’d found out that the dead teenager had been a resident at the Thibaud Johnson Center for Homeless Teens. “What about cause of death?”
“His throat was slit.”
“Oh Annie, are you sure? Just like the other boy?” A nauseating surge of adrenaline made Reghan’s fingers tingle and her scalp burn. The wounds were the same. Didn’t that make two kids from the Johnson Center who’d washed up by the river within less than two weeks of each other? It was no coincidence. Or maybe it was. Kids died all the time in New Orleans. It was tragic, a waste of young lives, but it was true.
Maybe the connection between the two deaths was a coincidence, or they were drug- or gang-related—dozens of those happened in New Orleans every year. But no. She couldn’t let herself off the hook that easily.
“Is Detective Gautier there?” she asked Annie, trying her best to put a casual note into her voice. If she had talked to Dev Gautier last week, would there be one less dead kid in New Orleans tonight?
“I don’t know,” Annie replied. “I notified Detective Givens, since he caught the first case. But I’ll bet Givens called Gautier to ID the body because of the similarity of the wounds.”
Annie was probably right. “Call me if you hear anything else.”
“I can’t. This is my last break. And please. The cause of death is being withheld from the media, so please don’t say anything about it to anyone. I could lose my job.”
“Who am I going to tell? Givens?” Reghan put a smile in her voice. “No way. I’m not ratting out my best informant.” Through the phone, she could hear the metallic buzz of chatter from police radios. Annie was back at the switchboard. “I’ll let you go.”
“You’re not thinking about going down there, are you?”
“I guarantee you I won’t be the only reporter on the scene.”
“No,” Annie shot back. “Just the only one with a personal vendetta against Detective Gautier. Please, Reghan—”
“I do not have a personal vendetta against him. I just see him for who he really is. You see him as some kind of a hero. Apparently, it means nothing to you that his entire life was a lie.” She swung her legs off the bed and looked around for the jeans she’d taken off last night.
“You told me to call you with anything about him,” Annie said.
Reghan almost laughed. “And if he’d been spotted taking a bribe or roughing up a drunk, would we be talking right now?”
“What is wrong with you?” Annie snapped. “In the first place, he would never do that. And in the second, Detective Devereux Gautier is a hero to a lot of people. I’ll bet that poor boy they pulled out of the river tonight thought of him as a hero.”
“Okay, okay. I give up. I need to go. I’ve—” Reghan paused. “I’ve got to read over my questions and notes for my show this morning. I was planning to get up at five anyway.”
She knew that Annie had a thing for any man in uniform. Her friend positively worshipped cops. She also knew Annie was wrong about Gautier. He was no hero.
But he might be the target of a maniac.
She said good-bye, and for a couple of seconds after hanging up she looked at her smart tablet. But she just wasn’t able to concentrate. Annie had asked her what was wrong with her. It had been a frustrated rhetorical question, but Reghan considered it now.
What was wrong with her? Nothing.
The better question was, what was wrong with the world? Annie’s outlook was pitifully naïve. She believed that men like Devereux Gautier became police officers for heroic, altruistic reasons. But Reghan knew better. There are no heroes, she wanted to tell her friend. Heroes and knights in shining armor were for kids’ fairy tales. In real life, people never lived up to expectations. That’s why they called it real life.
She headed into the bathroom, still arguing with herself about the coincidence of the two boys’ deaths. Was she going crazy, or had convicted murderer Gerard Fontenot actually told her back in February that these teenagers were going to die? She cringed, thinking about Fontenot’s eerie eyes and slithery voice. After brushing her teeth and splashing her face liberally with cold water, she buried her nose in a towel. The day had already promised to be long and stressful, even before Annie called. And Reghan still had to go over her notes before the morning’s show.
She was interviewing a city councilman about his outspoken opinions of what should and should not be taught in public schools. Her TV news program, The Real Story, was famous for being controversial, topical, with no punches pulled. But yesterday afternoon she’d gotten a tip that had ratcheted this segment up from merely contentious to downright scandalous. The councilman, who had run on a platform of decency and family values, was about to be sued for sexual harassment.
It had taken her hours to verify the information. She was comfortable with her research and sources, but before she confronted him on the air, she wanted to double-check everything one last time. She had no intention of being surprised by a single tidbit that she’d missed.
On her show, she did the blindsiding.
She tossed the towel down and pulled her hair back, anchoring it with a barrette. Back in the bedroom, she picked up her watch from the bedside table and checked the time. Almost five. She had to be at the WACT studio by six in order to be ready to go on the air at nine. She grabbed her tablet, and stuck it and her phone into her purse.
Who was she kidding? She hadn’t fooled Annie, and she wasn’t fooling herself. Her notes would keep until right before the show, because right now she was headed down to the Alabo Street Wharf. She needed to see for herself what had happened to the teenaged boy who’d been pulled out of the river.
She headed downstairs, a curious mixture of anticipation and dread hitting the pit of her stomach. It occurred to her that she’d been unconsciously waiting for Annie’s call. Because Gerard Fontenot had sat in front of her five months ago in the visitors’ room of Angola prison and told her it was going to happen. Getting the phone call from Annie was like hearing the other shoe hit the floor.
Was she crazy, for believing a crazy man?
Fontenot was a psychopath who had kidnapped and faked the death of Dana Maxwell, the wife of Dev Gautier’s ex-partner, Cody Maxwell. Fontenot had persuaded her producer to send her to Angola for an interview about the case, but then he had refused to answer any of her questions. Instead, he’d spent the entire time raving about his brilliance, his innocence, and his plan for revenge against Devereux Gautier, whom he blamed for putting him in prison. She’d come away from the interview confused and more than a little spooked.
But what if he hadn’t been raving? What if he really was exacting the revenge he had hinted at? Revenge on Detective Gautier. She had to know for certain. And warn him.
As she grabbed her keys off the coffee table in the living room, she paused briefly, her gaze sliding over her brag shelf where she kept the DVDs of her news segments. Looking at her watch, she ran a quick calculation in her head. Probably ten minutes to the wharf from here, maybe ten minutes to look at the body, then ten or twelve to get from the wharf to the WACT building. She had two minutes to spare. Did she want to keep them for cushion, to make sure she got to the studio by six?
Her hand went unerringly down the alphabetized shelf to the DVD labeled “Fontenot, February 24.” She hesitated. It would take her only a few minutes to listen to Fontenot’s disturbing words one more time and decide if his ravings sounded as ominous and prophetic as she remembered. She shuddered as she turned on the TV and inserted the DVD into the player.
When the screen lit up, the camera was on her. She watched herself lift her chin and look straight into the lens. Bert, the cameraman, flipped on a bright light, then proceeded to adjust its angle. She could hear the faint metallic whir of the camera.
“Lighting’s perfect,” Bert said. “We’re ready to go.”
As if on cue, the eerie wail of a metal door opening assaulted her ears. She watched herself cringe and hunch her shoulders. Bert swung the camera toward the door. A uniformed prison guard backed through it, pulling Gerard Fontenot’s wheelchair with him, then turned and rolled the chair up to the big, scarred interview table and set the brake as the metal door clanged shut.
Fontenot looked small and feeble in the industrial chair. He could be someone’s grandfather instead of the diabolical killer Reghan knew him to be. It was difficult to imagine the hunched man in a worn blue flannel bathrobe, his legs covered by a blanket, literally scaring his wife to death by putting snakes in her refrigerator, or forcing Dana Maxwell to lure her husband, Cody, into a deadly trap, or outsmarting the police for years before his own arrogance finally tripped him up.
She fast-forwarded. When she stopped the recording, the camera was in close-up on Fontenot’s face as she spoke. “—stated in court that you blame Detective Gautier for the accident that put you in a wheelchair.”
“Of course. With a careless brush of his hand,” Fontenot imitated the gesture, “he trapped me forever in this metal prison.”
“Mr. Fontenot, it was the justice system that put you in prison.”
“My dear Reghan. You are smarter than that. I’m not talking about the penitentiary. I’m talking about this damn chair. You know the story. During his oh-so-daring rescue of his partner, Maxwell, and his wife, Gautier slammed me against a marble-topped table and broke my spine. I will never walk again. That cretin stole my freedom. But I am not defeated. I have resources I have not even begun to tap.”
“Resources?” her voice queried.
Even now her scalp tightened and her stomach turned in anticipation of what he was about to say.
“I will reach out, Ms. Connor. I am the father, the child, and the spirit. No one can equal me. Your Detective Gautier will suffer much more at my hand than I ever did at his. He will know the hell of watching that which he values most, destroyed.”
She punched the off button and grabbed her purse and keys and headed out to her car, feeling no more sure than she’d been before she’d watched the disk. Fontenot’s words were ominous, yes, and she was certain anyone would view what he’d said as a threat to Dev. But a threat was a far cry from proof.
Maybe once she got to the crime scene and found out if the dead teen was connected with the Johnson Center, she could decide once and for all if Fontenot was behind the killings, or if his prophetic words had been just the ramblings of a maniac.
As she approached the docks of the Port of New Orleans, blue and red flashing lights guided her to the scene. Parking at the top of Alabo Street Wharf, she pushed through the crowd of onlookers to the area cordoned off by yellow tape.
There was a stark, surreal quality to the scene. Spotlights set up by the Crime Scene Unit cut a watery path through the haze off the river, and wispy spirals of steam rose into the relatively cool predawn air, off streets still warm from yesterday’s sun. Flashing strobes lent an eerie old-movie aura to the movements of the crime scene techs as they went about the gruesome business of photographing and cataloguing the murder scene.
She stood there for a moment, just watching, feeling goose bumps rise on her skin as rivulets of sweat trickled between her breasts. The air was heavy and humid, only a shade cooler than hell, and it smelled like fish and rain and automobile exhaust. She, like everyone who’d lived in New Orleans all their lives, had learned to deal with the weather, but had never really gotten used to it.
People shouted back and forth, and every few seconds the sound of another siren split the air as an official vehicle arrived or left. Someone bumped into her from behind. She turned her head, the words “pardon me” automatically forming on her lips, but whoever had jostled her was gone, melting back into the faceless crowd. A fleeting smell of something sweet added an odd undernote to the other smells that wafted on the mist.
Then someone adjusted the beam of a spotlight, and she saw him.
Dev.
Apprehension squeezed the breath out of her. The fact that Detective Givens had called him to the scene gave her the answer she’d been looking for. This dead teenager was also one of Dev’s.
She had no trouble keeping him in sight, even with the ebb and flow of the crowd of rubberneckers. He was a couple of inches taller than everyone around him, his harshly handsome face and confident bearing drawing every eye. Faded black jeans and a black T-shirt under a summer-weight sport coat that looked effortlessly wrinkled were molded to his lean, powerful body. He was standing, hands at his side, looking down. From the grim expression on his face, she knew he was looking at the body. He stood with legs apart, like a warrior prepared for any attack. As she watched, he brushed the tail of his jacket aside and slid his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. A flash of light on metal drew her eye to his belt, where his New Orleans Police Department detective’s badge was clipped next to the black leather holster that held his service weapon.
Without warning, a memory hit her—the slight scrape of the stiff leather of that holster against her abdomen when it caught a thread on her favorite silk blouse. She clenched her fist, digging her car keys into her palm, using the pain to cleanse the image from her brain. After all this time, after all that had happened, she should be past such a knee-jerk physical reaction to seeing him again.
Just then, he raised his head and looked in her direction, his face starkly planed like a sculpture in the harsh spotlights. The impact of those black, piercing eyes almost buckled her knees. But his gaze paused only for an instant, then moved on, sweeping the crowd.
