Keeping Watch

by Jan Hambright

  Backtracking, he pulled a business card out of his pocket and laid it on the table in the entryway. “Officer Tansy is posted in a squad car out front. He’s one of the officers being assigned to protect you from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.”

  He reached out and took the offending paper from her hand. “Feel free to call me on my personal cell if you need anything.”

  Turning, he reached for the knob, opened the door and stepped out onto the porch, pulling it closed behind him. But the soft click of the latch did little to separate him from her. He could still feel her ire as he headed down the sidewalk, motioned to Tansy, crossed the street and climbed into his car.

  Adelaide Charboneau was safe for now. But he still hadn’t located Clay Franklin for questioning. Using that detail alone, he’d been able to secure her nighttime protection, but there were still twenty-four hours in a day.

  A measure of foreboding circulated in his veins like slow-acting poison. He shook it off, fired the engine and drove away.

  Chapter Four

  For the third time in an hour, Royce stared at the personnel file on his desk. Checking into the background of anyone he suspected of a crime was standard operating procedure, but this file belonged to Adelaide Charboneau, and he couldn’t fight the urge to squirrel it away and read it in private somewhere.

  Did anything in it allude to her intangible talents? Map out her ability to pull sketches of perpetrators right out of a victim’s recall like she claimed she could?

  Doubtful, he snatched up the manila folder, stood and headed for the copy room in the basement. To be more precise, the tiny cubicle next to it, with a desk, a chair and a locking door. It was rumored to have been a utility closet at one time, before being commandeered by a former police chief who couldn’t seem to get his reports transcribed in the rat race upstairs.

  Royce almost ran into Detective Hicks, who nodded and paused next to him. “I got Missy Stuart’s autopsy report half an hour ago.”

  His interest peaked. “Cause of death?”

  “Succinylcholine.” Hicks’s lips pulled into a grim line. “Whoever took her drugged her with the paralytic, posed her body and left her to die at the scene. The medical examiner’s report indicates she died of suffocation as a direct result of the drug.”

  “They use succinylcholine in the medical field, don’t they?”

  “Yeah. To paralyze a patient for intubation before surgery. If no intubation takes place, the drug paralyzes the muscles of the diaphragm, making it impossible for a person to breathe. They’re fully conscious for the duration. It has no sedative properties.”

  “So the monster who injected her may have stood by and watched her suffocate, paralyzed and unable to fight back?”

  “Looks that way.” Hicks shook his head in disgust.

  Rage soaked through Royce, leaving him more determined to find the sick bastard responsible and put him away.

  “I’m working a lead.” He squeezed the file in his hand. “We’ll get this guy. We have to.”

  “I’m pounding the halls over at Tulane. Maybe someone saw the person Missy left with.”

  “We’ll catch up this afternoon at briefing?”

  “Yeah.” Hicks headed for his desk, and Royce hauled it to the stairs, preferring the echo of his shoes on solid concrete to the drone of the elevator.

  What kind of person did something that heinous to another human being?

  He passed the door to the second floor, paused, jogged back up four steps and exited the stairwell. Moving along the hallway, he stopped and entered the research department.

  Megan Lorry looked up from behind her desk. “Detective Beckett. I haven’t seen you in here for a long time. What can I do for you?”

  It was true. He liked to work his own case research. But voodoo? It was something he considered benign. He had no cause to search for information. Until now.

  “I need a summary on a voodoo sect called the Materia. I’d like to know their origin, customs and rituals if possible, and anything you can find on someone they call a Beholder. I’d like to know what their function was within the sect.”

  Royce was sure Megan’s eyes had glazed over by the time he put his request in writing and left the department for the dark halls in the belly of the station.

  If Adelaide claimed to be a Beholder, then he needed to know what he was dealing with, didn’t he? Justification. He needed justification for feeling like he did about her revelation. Skeptical.

  He hit the bottom of the landing, exited through the stairwell door and headed for the cubicle.

  Once inside, he locked the door, settled into the chair at the desk and opened the file.

  Adelaide Charboneau was educated, beautiful…abandoned?

  Shuffling through the contents of the folder, he found a faded photograph. His throat constricted in an odd way as he dissected the fuzzy photographic details of Adelaide’s past. She’d been abandoned in a church as a newborn, approximate age, five days old. The grainy picture was a snapshot taken that day. A Sunday morning according to the police report that had been filed by the priest. He’d come in to prepare for mass and found the tiny infant wrapped in a blue blanket, asleep in one of the back pews.

  He picked up the photograph, switched on the lamp sitting on the corner of the desk and held the picture under the light.

  How had she dealt with her abandonment? Did its psychological effects permeate her life through present day? Had it shaped her, molded her into the person she was? Did it explain her strange claim of being a Beholder? Leave her with an inherent need for attention?

  In the bottom right-hand corner of the photo, barely within the frame, he spotted something. He raised the old eight-by-ten glossy closer to the light, trying to make out the shape.

  It was a crude doll.

  Strange. He doubted a priest would have a doll on hand to give to an abandoned infant. Intrigued, he put the picture down and rummaged through the reports until he found a listing of any and all items found with her. One thing stood out. Adelaide had been listed as a male infant in the police report, boy Baby Doe number twenty-two. He ran his finger down the list and found the item at the bottom under blue baby booties. Gris-gris doll.

  “I’ll be damned.” He rocked back, contemplating the discovery. He didn’t know much about voodoo, but he did know that a gris-gris doll was a voodoo symbol. But a symbol for what?

  Broadening his search, he found a child services report and scanned it. He read the section twice. Adelaide’s gender wasn’t discovered to be incorrect until after she’d been removed from the church and taken to a shelter. After an appropriate diaper change, it was discovered that the infant wrapped in blue was a girl. Odd. It was almost as if someone, perhaps her mother, wanted everyone to believe she was a baby boy.

  Royce’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his shirt pocket. “Detective Beckett.”

  “Detective. Justin Blain, Auto Theft Division. I got your report on the black Mustang that tried to run you down last week.”

  “Did anything come back?” he asked.

  “We’ve got a unit, a dive team and a tow truck en route to Lake Cataouatche. A boater discovered a submerged car in eight feet of water using his fish-finder. It’s out at the Westside boat ramp. His kid dove down and got the plate number. It came back to a 2005 Mustang GT, black in color, reported stolen around the same time as the incident.”

  “Great news. It’s about time I caught a break in this case.”

  “There’s more. The kid came up sputtering and claims he saw a hand floating through the back window.”

  Royce froze, trying to join the ends of a thread that didn’t match up. “Westside boat ramp?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be right there.” He closed his phone, slipped it into his shirt pocket and gathered up Adelaide’s history. He tucked it all back into the folder, along with the curiosity it had churned up inside him, and left the cubbyhole.

  ROYCE COASTED THROUGH THE laid-back town o
f Ama, Louisiana, and took the Westside boat ramp road, a narrow strip of asphalt that cut through thick groves of moss-draped cypress and Tupelo gum trees.

  He’d been fishing out here with his dad and little sister, Kimberly, as a kid. Not much had changed about the landscape since then.

  Tension bunched the muscles between his shoulder blades. Those were good times. Good times right before his sister was abducted.

  Royce jammed on the brakes, jolting to a full stop as a couple of deer trotted across the road in front of him and vanished into the underbrush on the other side.

  “Close call,” he whispered. It was time to exit his walk down memory lane and get focused. Kimberly had survived the ordeal and come home alive. Alive was all that mattered.

  Taking his foot off the brake, he stepped down on the gas pedal and drove the last half mile to the lake. He pulled off the road and out of the trees into an open area, where the boat ramp slid into the murky water.

  The dive team was already shedding their oxygen tanks, and a wrecker was wrenching the car up out of the depths via the tether they’d attached.

  Royce parked well out of the action and climbed out of the car, seeing the rear end of the Mustang break the surface of the water.

  It certainly looked like the tail of the car that had attempted to put him six feet under.

  “Are you Detective Beckett?” a uniformed officer asked, coming toward him. “Yeah.”

  “Troy Jensen. My supervisor said you’d be en route. He said this vehicle may be the one someone used to try to run you down.”

  “It could be. The first two numbers on the plate were thirty-two.”

  Royce watched the trunk of the car make it into the light of day and felt his gut tighten. “Look at that.”

  The officer followed his line of sight just as a hand flopped back from the rear window with the receding water. “Looks like the kid wasn’t kidding. There’s a body inside the car.”

  Royce moved closer, watching the car roll up the boat ramp with water slicking off its silt-covered black paint. What were the odds? Could the corpse inside be the driver who was in the alley next to Adelaide’s house that night?

  He watched Officer Jensen chock the wheels to keep it from rolling back into the lake and open a rear door.

  Water gushed out of the car, pouring onto his shoes and soaking his pants up to his knees.

  Jensen stepped back, shaking his head, and pulled a pair of latex gloves out of his pocket. “Joe,” he hollered over his shoulder to another officer. “Get CSI down here.”

  Royce moved closer. “What have you got?”

  “Looks like murder. I don’t know any sane person who would zip-tie themselves to a sinking automobile.”

  He studied the spot where the man’s ankle had been secured to the steering wheel. The sheer brutality made his skin crawl.

  “Can you pull his wallet?” Royce asked, staring at the contorted position of the body folded over the front seat. It was almost as if the man had been in the back when his leg was pulled over the seat, and his ankle secured. He hoped like hell an autopsy would reveal he was already dead when he hit the water.

  “Yeah.” Reaching into the back pocket of the man’s jeans, the officer worked his wallet out and opened it. “Clay Franklin. Age twenty-seven, 415 Dalton, Metairie. Do you know him?”

  Royce almost choked, whether on the rotten stench of the lake mud the car had disturbed, or the fact that he was looking at his only witness.

  “Yeah. I’ve been looking to question him in a case since last week.” Alarm fired along his nerves, leaving a toxic residue deposited in every corner of his mind.

  Clay Franklin couldn’t have been behind the wheel of this car that night, because he was peeping in Adelaide’s window.

  “I’d like Gina Gantz on this one. She’s the best.”

  “No problem.”

  He turned and headed for his car to wait for the CSI team to arrive. He needed any evidence Gina and her team could find, and he needed it now.

  If Clay Franklin was killed by the same man driving the Mustang that night, then he needed to find a link to Adelaide Charboneau before it was too late.

  IT WAS HAPPENING AGAIN.

  Adelaide fought the overwhelming sensation and burrowed deeper into her pillow, but the image in her head wouldn’t be denied. It came again…and again…stronger…more persistent, until a full picture moved through her consciousness, demanding, pressing…horrifying.

  She bolted up in bed, flanking her head on either side with her hands.

  The woman’s features were clear now. Wide-set brown eyes, dark hair fanned out around her face, the index finger on her right hand pointing in an unknown direction.

  “Dear God.” She threw back the covers and climbed out of bed. Her body trembled as she pulled on her robe, tied the belt and walked into the hallway.

  By the time she reached the studio she was fully awake. She climbed onto the stool at her drawing table and opened her sketch pad.

  With decisive strokes she began the process of capturing the woman’s image with every sweep of her pencil. Her heartbeat escalated in her eardrums, her breathing hitching up. In a hurried flourish, she finished the sketch, and stared into the face of the next victim.

  A shudder racked her body, sending a chill through her that rippled down to her bare toes.

  Royce…she had to tell Royce. If there was even the slightest chance they could find the woman before the killer did, she had to take the risk.

  He believed she was a freak, she knew that much. This would only cement his skepticism. But what if the woman hadn’t died yet? It had taken two days from the night she drew the first victim’s face until the day her body was discovered.

  She tore the page out of the sketch pad and left the studio, hurrying for the stairs, and the cell phone lying on her nightstand upstairs. A shadow crossed the filmy glass next to the front door, and she paused in her tracks.

  Fear grazed her nerves.

  Officer Tansy was outside. It was possible he was checking the perimeter of the house.

  She took a measured step forward, hanging close to the wall.

  Outside, the porch light flickered and went out.

  Had she moved the house key from under the mat?

  Uncertainty pushed her forward. She didn’t plan on sticking around long enough to discover who was outside the front door.

  She bolted for the stairs, taking them two at a time.

  Behind her in the foyer, she heard the knob rattle back and forth.

  Darting into her room, she closed the door.

  Not this time. She couldn’t let him take her this time.

  A degree of overwhelming determination wiggled up her spine. Her gaze locked on the highboy next to the door. She put the sketch on the bed and hurried to the other side of the room. Pressing her back to the heavy piece of furniture, she leaned into it.

  It gave against the force and inched along the wall. A surge of energy she didn’t know she possessed drove her to push harder, and she didn’t yield until the highboy was squarely blocking the door to her bedroom.

  He wouldn’t just kick it in this time. This time she would keep him out long enough for the officer, or Royce, to catch the bastard, but one piece of furniture wasn’t going to be enough and she knew it.

  If she could move the dresser, too, she could butt it up against the bed and create an impenetrable barrier.

  Pulling the end of the dresser, she swung it away from the wall and around, positioning it between the highboy and the bed.

  She picked up her cell phone off the nightstand, and paused to listen to an array of sounds coming from somewhere downstairs.

  He could be inside the house, but she wasn’t sure, and she had no clear view of the street, or the officer’s car parked at the curb.

  A loud crash echoed from downstairs. Her studio?

  Was he after the drawings?

  Opening her phone, she punched in Royce’s cell number from m
emory. It rang three times and rolled over to voice mail.

  “He’s here again, Royce. I blocked him out of my bedroom with some furniture for now, but I don’t know how long it’ll hold. Please hurry.”

  She flipped the phone shut, and jumped when a punishing blow hammered the bedroom door, followed in succession by another one.

  Shaking, she stepped back, leaning against the wall next to the window, listening to his brutal attempts to get in.

  Her defenses had to hold. They had to keep him out long enough for help to come. Clutching the phone, she dialed 911. Royce wasn’t coming this time. She made peace with that fact, and listened to the operator at the other end of the line verify her information and ask for her situation.

  The pounding stopped.

  Had he given up?

  Maybe Officer Tansy realized there was something going on and had come into the house to help her?

  “Stay on the line with me, Miss Charboneau. I’m dispatching an officer to your location.”

  She dropped her gaze to a sudden flicker of light skimming through the crack at the bottom of the bedroom door.

  The earth shifted in surreal time as she watched the tiny flicker settle in the center of her room and burst into flames.

  Tossing the open phone onto the bed, she lunged for a pillow, grabbed it and beat the fire down.

  Was he crazy? Didn’t he know she could die if the fire had spread? Sucking in a gulp of caustic smoke, she fought a violent cough. In the background she heard the whisper of the worried dispatcher talking over the discarded cell phone, but it was the hollow tap of boots on the stairs that drew her scrutiny.

  Was he leaving? Please, God, make him leave.

  Caution hedged her steps as she tiptoed to the door. But the hammer of reality sent her stumbling back in a panic.

  A curl of smoke slid under the door, tangling with the glow of fire dancing outside in the hallway.