by Cindy Dees
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t get me started. Gary is a hard-core believer, but in my three years with him, I have yet to see a real ghost.”
“Thank God,” Bass muttered under his breath. She wasn’t sure whether or not she was supposed to have heard that remark, but she responded to it anyway.
“You didn’t think I actually believe in all this woo-woo stuff, did you?” She burst out laughing at the notion. “Filming America’s Ghosts is just a job...in an industry where getting steady work is a rare gift.”
He grinned. “You have no idea how glad I am to hear that.” Their gazes met and the sparks exploded again. Lord, he was attractive. And this funny, friendly version of him was darned near irresistible. Men never flirted with her. She was the mousy one they looked past to find the hot girls.
“I thought folks in New Orleans were superstitious,” she countered. “That they go for voodoo and fortune-tellers and ghosts.”
“I’m not from New Orleans. I’m from the low country west of the city.”
“As in bayous and alligators?” Her eyes went wide. No thank you to either of those!
He grinned broadly. “Everyone gets all hepped up about a few bitty ole’ gators. You stay out of their way, they’ll pretty much stay out of yours.”
“They still scare me to death,” she declared. “They eat people.”
“Only the big ones actually eat people. The smaller ones might bite your leg off or take a chunk out of your side, but they can’t swallow you whole.”
She snorted. “If you’re trying to make me feel better, you’re failing spectacularly.”
He shrugged. “Gators are primitive, and they are predators. But they’re not completely stupid. And they perceive us as predators in return. They honestly do try to stay out of our way for the most part. Now, if you want to worry about critters where I come from, those would be snakes. We’ve got ’em all. Copperheads, cottonmouths, even rattlesnakes. Sometimes they’re so thick you can’t go thirty feet without seeing one.”
“Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. I do not do snakes.”
He laughed. “City slicker.”
“Guilty as charged. I’m a city girl all the way.” She slugged down the last of her coffee and finished off her beignet with a lick of her fingers.
“What would you normally be doing at this time of day?” Bass inquired.
“Sleeping. We work late at night, and I often sleep till noon.”
“God, that sounds decadent,” he mumbled.
“It is. Then I get up, go for a run, eat, and spend the afternoon editing dailies.”
“Dailies?”
“The raw footage I shot the night before. I do a rough cut and pull together all the best footage, then I send that video and the rest of the raw video to the post-production folks back in New York. They create the finished show.”
“Do you want to go back to your place now and crawl into bed for a few hours?”
Her shocked gaze shot to his. She swore she caught a momentary glint of amusement behind those bright blue eyes, but she couldn’t be sure. Jeez, Carrie. Not everything the poor man says is an invitation to have sex. She must be even more attracted to him than she realized—or admitted to herself.
“Umm, no. No time to sleep,” she answered belatedly. “I’m going to have to reschedule tonight’s show shoot until tomorrow and hope Gary turns up in the meantime. Besides, I’m too worried to sleep, and that cup of coffee’s gonna keep me revved up for a few hours.”
“Then how about we head back to Pirate’s Alley? You can walk me through what happened.”
Like she was going to refuse to cooperate with the police investigation? She followed in his wake as Bass elbowed his way through the morning coffee crush, and she breathed a sigh of relief as they stepped onto the sidewalk once more. Along with her fear of snakes, she wasn’t a particular fan of being crushed in crowds. She supposed that came from being small and easy to overlook.
“Claustrophobic?” Bass murmured.
“How did you know?”
“The look of relief on your face when we made it out of that crowd.”
Note to self: the cop is definitely as observant as I am.
“Jackson Square’s not far from here,” he said. “Are you up for a walk?”
Stretching her legs after all the stress of the past few hours, maybe burning off a little adrenaline, sounded great. She nodded and he headed out.
She was impressed that he shortened his stride so she could keep up. Thank God. She hated having to racewalk or half jog to keep up with people.
The pedestrians crowding the sidewalks all appeared to have places to go and things to do, ignoring each other and barely noticing the elegant old city they passed through. As for her, she couldn’t keep her gaze from straying up to the wrought-iron balconies and tall, shuttered window casements. Goodness, this city was photogenic.
“Tell me about yourself,” Bass asked.
“Not much to tell.” She clammed up out of habit. Police were bad. Say nothing to them.
“Let me rephrase that. What’s the research going to tell me when my people are done looking you up?”
“Why are you going to look me up?” she demanded. “That’s an invasion of privacy!”
“This is a police investigation, Miss Price.”
“Call me Carrie. Miss Price makes me sound like an old lady.”
“Only if you’ll call me Bastien. Or Bass.”
She mumbled an affirmative. But it felt weird to think of calling this intimidating detective by his first name. The flirty guy had definitely given way to the cop as soon as they left the restaurant. His jaw had gone hard again, and he was back to asking her pointed questions and then staring a hole through her when she answered him.
“You’re dodging my question, Carrie. Who are you?”
He was totally right, of course. She was dodging him. “What do you want to know about me?” she asked, feeling surly.
“Where are you from?”
“Born and raised in New York, north of Albany.”
“Your whole life?”
“Yup.”
“Do you like snow?”
“Hate it,” she replied with genuine passion.
“Me too. Miserable stuff to crawl around in.”
“When did you figure that out? And where? It’s not like it snows around here very often.”
“If I told you I’d have to kill you.”
“Oh, puh-lease. That’s such a tired line.”
He flashed her a brief grin. “And yet, I stand by it.”
He sounded serious behind that boyish smile of his. Yikes.
They arrived at the mouth of Pirate’s Alley, but it looked completely different this morning. It was still narrow and historic looking, but the fog and mysterious darkness were gone, replaced by street artists setting up easels and clipping sketches to the wrought-iron fence of St. Anthony’s Garden. A clerk was opening up a hat shop on the corner, and in the bright light of day, the alley looked completely harmless. A few pedestrians strode past, not meandering as if they were there to visit the alley, but passing through en route to somewhere else.
“Why isn’t the alley blocked off with police tape? Isn’t it a crime scene?” she asked.
“The NOPD can’t officially investigate a kidnapping for forty-eight hours. A crime hasn’t technically taken place yet. I’m going ahead with the preliminary work unofficially, based on that video of yours. Which the forensics guys haven’t verified as being authentic, by the way.”
“It’s authentic!”
“I believe you,” he said soothingly. “But you also have access to high-tech equipment that could doctor film images easily. The NOPD will have to verify that tape before they act on it.”
She huffed, annoyed. She had no reason to fake Gary’s k
idnapping.
Bass was speaking again. “...besides, I went over every inch of the alley last night and didn’t find any evidence whatsoever.”
How could a crime have happened in this exact place just last night? Life had gone on completely unaffected by Gary’s abduction. It didn’t seem fair, somehow.
“...and how deep in the alley were you when those men approached Gary?” Bass was asking.
“Oh. Uhh, down this way.” She walked nearly halfway down the alley. Using lampposts as references, she estimated where Gary had been standing when the attack happened. “Gary was about here, and I was about twenty feet back that way.” She pointed to where they’d come from.
“I’ll pretend to be Gary, and you go stand where you were,” Bass directed her. “I’m going to call your cell phone, and you talk me through what happened.”
She backed away from him. Her cell phone rang, and Bass’s voice caressed her ear. “Can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear,” she managed to choke out. “Can you hear me?”
“I’ve got you five by five.”
As she recalled, that was military speak for him hearing her just fine.
“Talk me through it,” he murmured in her ear.
She gulped at his sexy drawl. “Umm, Gary was walking backward slowly. He got to where you are now and stopped to talk about the ghosts from the old prison. That’s where they jumped him. Right where you are now.”
Bass stopped moving. “Then what?”
“I stopped as well to film what I thought was a staged attack. When they grabbed him, they started moving away quickly. I couldn’t run after them or my camera would jiggle too much. I wasn’t using a steady cam rig last night.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a harness a cameraman wears. The camera’s mounted to it. The harness compensates for my movement or shaking in the camera to keep the filmed image perfectly steady. Hence the name.”
Bass turned and started walking away from her swiftly. “Follow me at the speed you were walking last night. I want to time how much of a head start the kidnappers had on you.”
She did as he ordered, dismayed at how rapidly he pulled away from her and disappeared around the corner at the far end of the alley. She started counting seconds in her head as she continued to walk at the speed she remembered moving last night. About here, she’d sped up some. Not too fast. About like that.
Fifty-five. Fifty-six. She reached the end of the alley and Bass stepped out from behind a building on the corner. “Almost a full minute,” she said in dismay. “God, if only I’d known he was in real trouble, I could have run after them. Maybe seen a getaway car. Gotten a license plate.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over it,” Bass replied. “You might have ended up kidnapped right along with your boss. Or, if you had caught up with them, even worse could have happened to you. For all you know, they were armed and dangerous. At least this way, you survived to report the crime.”
“Aren’t there traffic cameras or something you guys can pull footage from to find out where Gary went once he and his captors reached this street?”
“We’ve got partial closed circuit coverage of the city, but far from every block of it is covered. The cameras here point into Jackson Square, not up and down Chartres Street. I put in a request last night for the footage to be pulled, but I’m not hopeful it will help. Plus, it’ll take a day or two to get it.”
“Who on earth wants something from Gary? He’s just a schlocky ghost hunter with a moderately successful TV show. It’s not like he’s rich or anything. He’s perpetually broke, in fact.”
“That’s what I plan to figure out.”
She stared up at him entreatingly. “You have to find him. He wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
“Tell me this, Carrie. Do you think you might be in danger, too?”
Shock passed through her body like a wave of icy water. “Me? Why me? I’m nobody.”
“Are you sure the two of you didn’t see something, maybe film something, that someone didn’t want seen?”
“No, I’m not sure. We’ve been filming here and there around New Orleans. Background shots for filler during the show’s voice-over narrations.”
“I’m going to need to see that footage. All of it.”
“Uhh, sure. It’s back at my place.”
“Then that’s where you and I are headed next.”
Chapter 4
Bass followed Carrie up the stairs to her apartment once more. The tush on that woman was literally making him sweat as he watched it twitch from side to side at eye level in front of him. She might be petite, but damn, she was put together. Her body was athletic, but she moved with grace. She was a runner, huh? Her thighs would be lean and strong, and her stamina better than most, both of which would be great in bed—
Stop. That.
Of course, she was also totally off limits. The list of ethics violations he would be charged with if he got involved with a suspect in an active investigation boggled his mind. As he’d hoped she would, when he got her out of the precinct and doing something social like sharing a meal, she had loosened up with him quite a bit. The girl definitely had some bad history with police going on.
He also hadn’t failed to notice that she consistently dodged his questions when he asked for details about her personal life. No matter. His office’s research assistant was top-notch, and she would find out everything there was to know about Carrie Price.
One other thing he’d noted at breakfast. Carrie wasn’t showing any of the agitation of a criminal the police were closing in on nor was she showing him any blatant evasiveness. At least not where her boss was concerned.
He was increasingly convinced that Carrie herself hadn’t kidnapped her boss. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t been a co-conspirator. She’d had access to her boss’s computer for hours last night. She could have used the time to wipe away evidence. Indeed, he’d had a quiet word with the lab tech this morning and asked him specifically to look for evidence of tampering.
Maybe Carrie was angling to get her boss’s job. Or maybe she had a personal beef with the guy. She certainly did have enough knowledge of Gary’s schedule and movements to help set up a kidnapping.
As he passed the second floor en route to Carrie’s apartment, Bass checked the seal he’d put on Gary’s door last night. It was unbroken, and the yellow police tape still crisscrossed over the doorway. She hadn’t lied to him about that, at any rate.
Carrie let him into her place, which had been straightened up since last night. Nervous energy? Or maybe a guilty conscience?
“It’ll take me a minute to pull up all the tape we’ve shot since we got here,” she said nervously.
Watching her closely, he dragged one of the other kitchen chairs around the table in front of the computer monitor. Why was she so jumpy? What was she hiding from him? His gut might be telling him she wasn’t a felon, but it was damned well telling him she was keeping secrets from him, too.
He really wanted her not to be guilty of rubbing out her boss. But he’d learned long ago not to judge people by their appearances...or in this case, by the intensity of his attraction to her.
Carrie Price was hard to describe. Just when he settled on cute, she would go and do something sexy like smile sidelong at him with those captivating eyes of hers. Or she would pause for a millisecond when she was leaning past him, appearing to inhale the scent of him. He’d nearly turned to her last night when she did it the first time—to do what, exactly, he didn’t know. Kiss her maybe. But then she’d stepped away and gone back to being as adorable as a feisty little kitten.
“Here’s the footage we shot the first day. It’s mostly long shots of approaching the city.”
He glanced at the monitor and then glanced again, surprised. “Were you in a boat in Lake Pontchartrain when you shot that?”
“Gold star for the local boy knowing what his city looks like.”
He snorted. “It’s my job to know this town like the back of my hand.”
“I’ve got nearly twenty hours of raw film. Do you want to watch it all, or just watch certain types of footage? Oh! Or I could run it at double or quadruple speed.”
“I think we can safely skip the long shots. You weren’t likely to catch enough detail in a shot like that to freak out a bad guy.”
“Not to mention a bad guy probably wouldn’t know I even shot the film. All of this stuff is shot through zoom lenses. In many cases, I’m standing off at a much greater distance than the shot would lead you to believe. Zoom lenses allow me to control what goes into my camera frame and what I cut out.”
Her entire face lit up when she talked about her job. Obviously she was passionate about it.
They moved on to the film of the first show Gary had shot in New Orleans. He’d been chasing the ghost of Jean Lafitte. One of New Orleans’s most famous residents, the pirate and his brother, Pierre, loomed large in the city’s early history. The pair had smuggled in shiploads of luxury goods that had made New Orleans an attractive place for wealthy people to settle, in spite of the wretched climate, disease, floods and uncertain political future. The Lafittes were entirely obvious targets of a ghost-hunting show looking to romanticize New Orleans’s history.
Carrie had a great eye, and he’d never seen the city look better than through the lens of her camera.
“You have a gift for avoiding shooting drunks, panhandlers and crazies,” he commented.
Carrie replied, “People want to see the sanitized, magical version of the locations we shoot. Places where ghosts could plausibly exist. They don’t want to see the ugly reality of the world.”
That made sense. However, it meant the likelihood of Carrie having filmed someone or something that had caused her boss to be abducted were not good.
It took them several hours to go through all the pertinent raw film, and he saw nothing and no one that could have triggered an attack on Gary Hubbard. As much as he would enjoy continuing to sit next to the delectable Miss Price, he had a job to do. And the bars would be open by now. Time for him to pound the pavement and rule out Gary having gone on a bender last night. Local bartenders were pretty good about pouring drunk tourists into cabs and getting them back to their beds safely. Which was why he seriously doubted Gary was lying in an alley somewhere sleeping off a hard night of drinking.
