“I wouldn’t ask if I thought it was anything more than a lightning strike possibility. This guy is starting to unravel fast, and my guess is his associates will give him up pretty quick rather than risk him jeopardizing their day-to-day.”
“All right. Unraveled can be unpredictable. I’ll assign Max there for night duty. I’m sure he’ll ask his friend Dale to take shifts with him so one of them is on the property or with her at all times.”
Leland felt a surge of emotion at Matt’s generosity. Max, the head limo driver at K&A, was a former Navy SEAL, and his buddy Dale was a retired SEAL.
“Janet will make me pay for that. Are she and Max married yet?”
“Still considering it, but it’s a moot point for them. They know they’re it for each other.”
“Yeah. It can be like that, I guess.”
“I guess.” The amusement in Matt’s voice as he parroted him had Leland hunching his shoulders. “Okay. I’ll bring her up in the next few hours. Should I call Marcie?”
“No, I’ll handle that. She and Cassandra are out until late tonight doing some things, but Lucas will be there. You just focus on Celeste.”
“Thanks, Matt. I know this is bad timing. I’m sure you’re all up to your eyeballs in wedding planning.”
“The women are up to their eyeballs. They just want us out of the way. Janet is the head of that ship, so she’ll probably be fine having Max assigned elsewhere for a few days. I had to type up a memo by myself this morning because she was resolving some worse-than-famine-or-flood crisis involving wine glasses.”
“Memo typing. Can’t imagine anything more traumatic than that.”
“Janet put far less effort into hiding her sarcasm when she said almost the same thing.” Matt’s amusement registered through the phone. “I appreciate your restraint. Oh, and Lucas said to tell ‘The Duke’ he’d have a hitching post set up to park your white horse at the wedding.”
Leland chuckled, tension easing. “Asshole. Listen, Matt, I know Celeste is going to resist the idea, so if it’s at all possible for Marcie to give her a quick call and ask her to come, I think it would go over better.”
“That’s what I was thinking. She’ll see through it, as will Marcie, but Marcie likely can use an additional hand.”
“I wouldn’t ask, except—”
“You’re sure it’s necessary.” Matt sobered again. “Don’t give it a second thought, Leland. Marcie would be the first to tell you that keeping a friend safe trumps everything else. Especially if that person is more than a friend.”
Leland pursed his lips. “Yeah.”
“So how long have you two been seeing one another?”
“You asking for me or for your wife?”
“My wife, of course.”
“Good. I thought I was going to have to pull your man card.”
“You know if I crack the seal on that bourbon, it’ll be long gone before you get here. Answer the question.”
“Long enough.” If there was anyone who could understand that statement, the man on the other end would. Like everyone else who knew Leland, Matt was aware he hadn’t been dating much these past couple years, so if he was seeing someone now, she mattered. It wasn’t casual. Matt was a Dom through and through himself, which meant he’d deduce the nature of their relationship, or at least the way it seemed to be headed. As that Yes, sir went through Leland’s mind again, he increased his grip on the porch rail. Did she know that every step she made toward opening up to him like that just made him want to bind her to him all the more?
“Fair enough,” Matt said smoothly. “We’ll be having a more intimate get-together that night after the reception, at Ben’s Garden District place. You and she are welcome to join us if you feel comfortable. It will just be the core group plus a very small handful of trusted friends. Ben’s converted the whole floor into a private dungeon. You’d have some excellent options to explore together.”
“Appreciate that.” The idea definitely sparked some interest, now that he was feeling a little less uptight about her whereabouts for the next few days. But he wouldn’t get ahead of himself. She still had to agree to stay with Marcie, let alone agree to anything else. “We’ll keep it in mind. Thanks, Matt.”
“Not a problem. See you in a few days. Marcie will call her within the hour.”
Leland clicked off, putting the phone at his belt as he stepped back inside. He heard Celeste moving around in her bedroom, so now that he had some time, he took a closer look at his surroundings. The night he’d picked Celeste up, she’d practically met him on the curb, but he could see why she’d been reluctant to let him into her house.
She didn’t have a home. She had an office and storage facility. Clippings were spread out on the kitchen table, some fanned out together, some grouped in stacks. The back wall of her kitchen nook was all corkboard, covered with clippings, pictures and sticky notes.
He swept his glance around the room. The couch had a bed pillow and a rumpled blanket on it, a fitted sheet over the cushions telling him that was where she preferred to sleep. No pictures on the walls. Just bare and white, not that the starkness was too noticeable with the magazines, books, notebooks and files stacked up on chairs and scattered over the top of the entertainment center and coffee table. Her TV was a painfully small flat screen, sitting on top of some books in the middle of the much larger opening provided by the entertainment center. From the furniture’s scarred appearance, he expected she’d picked it up from a secondhand store.
Except for some pretty little figurines on her kitchen window ledge, he didn’t see any indication she was into decorating or personalizing her space. However, she was conscious of cleanliness. No dirty dishes in the sink, and the one countertop in the kitchen she wasn’t using for her work was clean. The place smelled good, like her, that vanilla flower fragrance, mixed with the smell of books and paper. The wood floor was vacuumed. She didn’t mind clutter, but she didn’t like dirt. Other than her bedroom, it looked like the house had one other room beyond the hallway bathroom. That room was probably a guestroom she’d turned into additional office space.
He was curious about her bedroom and backyard, to know if anything more personal could be found there. She’d had a couple potted flowers on the front porch, lush groupings of purple-and-gold pansies, easy to find in a city devoted to its LSU Tigers. He could hear drawers opening and closing, the occasional mutter as she talked to herself about whether this or that might be the right thing to take. He only caught snippets of that, but he registered the tone of her voice. Still unsettled by the situation, but doing okay. He’d rein himself back, stay out here, give her space.
Stepping closer to the corkboard wall, he saw that her surroundings might be cluttered, but her mind was extremely well-ordered. He quickly found the relevant pieces she’d used to put together Dogboy’s involvement in the murders of the hookers and Loretta Stiles. Who would have thought to connect animal control reports on dead dogs to two murders? And she’d asked the right questions, been in the right places to find out about Dogboy, his involvement in the store owner beating.
Figuring out crimes was the detectives’ bailiwick, but looking at the details she’d put together, Leland understood why the captain had a good opinion of her. Her generous heart was evident here as well. She’d pinned up a school picture of Loretta Stiles, a pretty fifteen-year-old with a shy smile and intelligent eyes who would never get any older. Leland remembered her face had been severely beaten, her body stabbed both by knife and rape. He put his hand on the picture. When his gaze shifted to another picture in the same section, he fished out his reading glasses and leaned in to get a better look.
The snapshot had been taken outside. The woman, obviously a prostitute, had struck a sassy pose and smiled at the camera, a tight-lipped gesture likely to hide bad teeth. She had sharp cheekbones and a delicate wrist, revealed under her sleeve because she’d lifted her hand to hold the side of her head as she threw it back, a jaunty starlet pose with her
hip cocked. He saw a drug habit in the set of her face, the look in her eyes, but there was also laughter in her expression. As if it had tickled her to be asked for a picture.
“When I get to know my sources well enough, I take a photo of them,” Celeste said, coming to stand beside him. She folded a garment bag over a chair and propped a small rolling suitcase next to it. “DeeDee obliged.”
Just as he’d done with Loretta Stiles, she stepped closer to put her hand on DeeDee’s picture. “She was smoking a cigarette, offered me a drag. I hadn’t smoked since I was a teenager, so I said no. She acted all outraged. ‘Bitch, you think I gonna give you a disease? You too good to put your lips where mine have been? Shit, can’t blame you on that. You’d run screaming if you had to put your lips where mine have been.’”
Celeste did a credible imitation of a street hustler, such that Leland’s lips twitched, though he didn’t smile, because her eyes didn’t smile. They stayed focused on DeeDee. “So I reach for the cigarette, fine. She jerks it out of reach and smacks at my hand. ‘Bitch, you crazy? You don’t smoke the cigarette of a skanky ho. Your pretty lips will rot and fall off.” Then she laughed at me and strolled away. ‘I gotta work. You go do what you do. We both make the world a better place, right?’”
Celeste’s gaze slid from there to a clipping from the newspaper. Just a couple paragraphs, no headline to it, though she’d penned the date in the corner. She put her hand on it, two fingertips covering the scrap of paper. “When someone is killed,” she said, “the killer becomes the important one. The one who gets the press as we all speculate why he did it, how he did it, how much suffering did he inflict. Rather than how much suffering she endured. It bugs me. There are so many that don’t seem to matter, but everyone matters. There are all sorts of voices in dark corners of the world, where they feel like if they screamed at the top of their lungs, no one would ever hear them.”
He reached out to touch her, but she moved away. Without her hand on the article, he saw it was a clipping from the newspaper’s crime report summary about DeeDee’s death. No name given. He shifted his gaze back to Celeste, who had pivoted, her gaze sweeping the room as she grimaced.
“It’s like Mel Gibson’s place in Conspiracy Theory. I was going to clean it up, and then I figured I’d be better off just renting someone’s house for the day and telling you that’s where I live. Especially after I saw your place. What guy is that neat? Makes me feel like a freak.”
“Celeste.” He stepped up to her again, closed his hand on her wrist to hold her in place. She turned her green-gold gaze to him.
“I wish you’d killed him today,” she said. “I don’t care if that’s right or wrong. I know he probably had a fucked-up childhood, but a lot of us do. Doesn’t give him the right, you know?”
“No, it doesn’t. If I had killed him, I wouldn’t be sorry in the least. Because then you wouldn’t be in danger now.”
She shook her head. “I’m not dismissing your concern, but I really can’t imagine he’s going to go out of his way to track me down. He went the easiest route to find me today.”
“Maybe, but I’d rather not take any chances. I called—”
Her phone started to ring and Leland stifled a curse. He should have told Matt to give him at least thirty minutes. He hadn’t wanted Marcie’s call to be the first Celeste was hearing of his plan for her. But when she glanced at the view screen and her expression clouded, he knew that wasn’t the expression she’d have if she was receiving a call from a friend.
“Hey, Trice. What’s going on?”
§
“Not a lot.” But her sister didn’t really call unless she needed something, so Celeste made a noncommittal sound and waited for her to continue. Fortunately, Patrice didn’t make her usual effort toward pointless small talk, a pretense that she’d called for social reasons. Good. Celeste just wasn’t in the mood today.
“Can you do me a big favor, Celly? I know it’s a pain in the ass. I have a small box of stuff at Mom’s. I know I should have picked it up last time I was in town, but you know how she is. I was just wanting to get the hell out of there and forgot it. Well, she called to say she needs to dump some stuff because she might be selling the trailer, et cetera, et cetera, but basically she’s moving another new guy in with her. I’m afraid if I ask her to hold it for me until the next time I’m in town, she’ll just toss it. There are a couple things in it I’d really like to have.”
“Who’s the guy?”
“Don’t know and didn’t ask. She sounded in a hurry when she called me anyhow.”
As usual. Celeste closed her eyes, rubbed her temple.
“I’m really, really sorry to ask. I know you hate going out there.” Her sister sounded suitably chagrined. Celeste didn’t blame Patrice for calling only when she needed something. There was no reason to pretend they were poster children for World’s Greatest Family. As the oldest child, Celeste had made sure her two brothers and her sister finished high school, got out of that trailer park, but there hadn’t been room for a lot of touching Little House on the Prairie scenes during that struggle.
“No, it’s okay. It might take me a few days to get to it.” At Leland’s quizzical gaze, she put her hand over the phone. “My sister needs me to pick up a box at my mom’s.”
“We can get it on the way if you want.”
It was bad enough Leland was seeing her living space. Letting him see where she’d grown up and having him meet her mother? Not happening.
So she shook her head, ignored the disappointment in Trice’s voice. “I promise I’ll do it soon, Trice. Hopefully before the end of the week. Don’t worry. I’ll call Mom and tell her to hold on to it until then.”
“Oh, okay.” Relief took over from disappointment. “You’re the only one she halfway pays attention to anyway. It should be fine, then. Uh, I have to get back to work. Hope everything’s good there?”
Translation: Please just say fine so we don’t have to stay on the phone with one another. “Yep. All’s good here. I’ll text you when I ship the box.”
“Celeste, we have time,” Leland said when she clicked off. “Unless she’s hell and gone in the opposite direction.”
Her mother lived just outside Baton Rouge, right on the route toward New Orleans. She was tempted to tell him she lived in Texas or California or Alaska, but what would happen when he found out differently? Thinking about her relationship with him lasting that long was unsettling enough. She wouldn’t inject a lie into the mix.
“Not today,” she said shortly. “I just can’t deal with my mom today.”
“Even if you have a cop at your back?” His brow creased. “Is that the problem? Why I’m escorting you to New Orleans might upset her?”
“No, not really.” She could show up on her mother’s doorstep with a Secret Service protection detail, have open boils on her face and be wearing a clown costume, and her mother would never think to ask her anything about herself. Then she bit her lip, because she could have seized that opening as the best reason not to go by. She needed to work on her ability to lie to him. Yeah, because that was the secret to a successful relationship, right?
Leland stepped closer to her again. If he took her hand, it gave her that feeling of safety, of warmth. When he gripped her wrist as he did now, his fingers caressing her pulse and palm, that feeling was enhanced by a weakening in her knees, a funny feeling in her belly, especially when he combined it with the chin tip, holding her face. “Celeste, what’s the problem? Mama will have a stroke and die if she sees you’re involved with a black guy?”
“If I thought that would happen, I’d take you there in a heartbeat.” Oh Christ, she hadn’t meant that. She shook her head at his look. “Sorry. When we were growing up, the white girls in the trailer park would do that sometimes. Bring black boys home to upset their parents. It’s sort of like that, but not what you think.”
“Are you ashamed of being with me?” He asked the question neutrally and her brows shot up to her
hairline.
“Seriously? No. Double no.” She sighed. “The worst she’ll do on that score is pull me off to the side and say something like ‘Is this the best you think you can do?’, as if you're less, because you’re black. Typical white trash reaction, but I don't want her to treat you like that. I don’t subject anyone I care about to my mother.” She tried for a smile. “Don’t let that go to your head. I would include casual acquaintances on that list.”
He considered that. “You have enough to worry about, and I don’t want you stressing about that box. Let’s go by and get it. You’ll introduce me to her, and she'll do what she's going to do. I'm going to respect her as long as she respects you, because she's your mother.”
“I’d really rather not go there.”
“Will that be any different when you get back? It’s already been a shitty day, what with getting shot at and what happened to Jai. Why not just get all the shitty stuff done in one fell swoop?” He dropped his grip to her hand, laced fingers. “And you get to do it with someone watching your back.”
She couldn’t give in to him on this one. It was beyond a bad idea, especially after everything else today. But she didn’t want to talk to her mother about keeping the box for a few days, either. If she went by and picked it up, it would be over.
“You like watching my back just because it gives you an excuse to look at my ass,” she said, putting him off, trying to rally a defense that would end the conversation before she agreed to something cosmically stupid.
“Don’t need an excuse. I plan to do a lot more looking at it. Among other things.” He touched her face. “Let’s go stop by your mom’s and head for New Orleans. And as tempting as the hotel idea sounds, I have a better idea for you. Marcie is staying at Lucas and Cassandra’s this week. They have a big place. I want you to stay there until the wedding. I’ll drop you by there tonight and come back tomorrow night after my shift.”
Soul Rest: A Knights of the Board Room Novel Page 26
