by Mallory Kane
“Guerrant, guard the door. If you see anything, holler. I need to clear the area.” Reilly slipped out the door of the cottage and canvassed the area. He didn’t see anyone. He checked the seashell-and-gravel path that connected the cottages. It ended at the fence that surrounded the inn’s grounds. The fence was green chicken wire, designed to disappear amid the landscaping. It would be absurdly easy for someone to climb it and vault over. He shone the flashlight into the thicket on the other side of the fence. Nothing.
He circled around the cottages, just to be sure there was nobody lurking, then walked up to the door where Guerrant was standing guard.
“Didn’t see anybody here,” Guerrant reported.
When Reilly entered, Christy was struggling to sit up. She looked up at him. There was a scrape on her cheek. She blinked. “Reilly Delancey,” she said hoarsely. “Not the detective.”
“Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “The scaphoid bone in my wrist is fractured, although it’s not displaced. Please help me up.”
Scaphoid bone? Reilly had no idea what she’d just told him, but he had heard the words wrist and fractured. “No. You stay right there. Don’t move. I’m calling—”
Christy pushed herself up using her left hand and pressed her right hand protectively against her ribs.
“—the EMTs,” Reilly finished with a sigh. Super-confident. Super-cool, even after being attacked. Even with a broken wrist. Did that come from being a physician? Or from what must have been a very difficult childhood? Either way, he was glad she was alive.
Giving up on the notion that she might listen to him, he crouched beside her, ready to steady her if she felt faint or got sick. She looked a little green around the gills.
“Help me up,” she ordered. When she tried to move, her mouth tightened and the tension along her jawline increased.
He had his phone out. “No. You’ll wait for the ambulance—” he started.
Using just her left arm, she struggled to get her feet under her. With a sigh, he slid his hands under her arms and helped her to her feet. “Do you ever listen?”
“I—know my own body,” she replied, putting a notion in Reilly’s head that he quickly banished.
She teetered between one high heel and one bare foot. Earlier at the courthouse, he’d observed that she was just about as tall as his nearly six feet. But now, as she put her weight on her bare foot, she seemed small. Her shoulders under his hand felt bony—feminine—sexy.
She still appeared dazed, and if the situation weren’t so dire, she might have looked comically awkward with one shoe on and one shoe off. He gently pushed her down into the chair, a little surprised when she didn’t protest.
He watched her carefully. She held her wrist cradled against her, protecting it. A large red area on her forehead was swelling and turning purple. Her lips were white at the corners. The scrape on her left cheek blossomed with tiny beads of blood, like early morning dew on a red flower.
She caught him checking out the scrape. “It’s nothing more than an abrasion.” She tentatively pressed it with a finger. “I’ll probably have a mild contusion,” she said, then added, “a bruise.” She frowned. “And a larger one on my forehead.”
“Your wrist—” Reilly started.
“I told you, it’s not displaced. It won’t need setting. I’ll wrap it and get a wrist guard. There’s no need for medical treatment.”
“That’s not your call,” Reilly informed her as he dialed one-handed. “What happened?”
She shook her head as if trying to clear it and touched the bruise on her forehead. “I was hit from behind. Knocked to the floor. I thought—” She stopped.
Reilly ordered an ambulance then hung up. “You thought what?”
She shook her head again. “Nothing. The man said, ‘Go back where you came from or you’re as dead as your sister.’”
The words shocked Reilly. “He said that? Those exact words? Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Although she looked like a frightened, hurt young woman, her reply was confident and smooth.
“What else did he say?”
“Nothing. He got off me and left.”
“Did you get a good look at him?”
She shook her head. “I tried to turn over and get up but my wrist—” Her voice gave out.
“You’re positive it was a man?” Reilly asked.
She looked at him frowning. “Of course.”
“Why ‘of course’?”
But before she could answer, the crunch of heavy boots on seashells and gravel announced the arrival of the police. Two uniformed officers appeared at the door to the cottage, their weapons drawn.
Reilly indicated the badge at his belt. “Deputy Reilly Delancey, SWAT. Dr. Moser here was attacked.” He didn’t know the officers, but both of them glanced his way when he told them his name. He’d long since stopped being surprised by that.
In and around Chef Voleur the name Delancey always drew a reaction. Depending on the situation and the people, the reactions were vastly different. Reilly figured the two officers knew or had heard of Ryker.
One of the officers stepped over to Christy and the other faced him.
“Delancey? Deputy Buford Watts. How’d you get here?”
“Dr. Moser is involved with a case of my brother’s, Detective Ryker Delancey. I had given her my phone number in case she couldn’t reach him.”
The officer’s gaze sharpened. “Moser. Not—the October Killer?”
“There’s no reason to get into that,” Reilly responded, knowing as soon as the words left his mouth that he was wrong. Given what her attacker had said, there was definitely a reason to get into that.
“No? Do you know who attacked her?”
“Not yet.”
“Her father killed half-a-dozen women,” Watts said, his gaze studying her.
Four, Reilly corrected silently, sending an apologetic look toward Christy. The deputy was being deliberately insensitive.
“What if it was a victim’s family member?” Watts continued. “Have you gotten specifics?”
“Just got here myself,” Reilly answered. “I’d like to be in on your interview though.”
The officer didn’t have any objection. Within a few minutes, Christy, who was still refusing medical treatment, Reilly and the two officers were seated at the dining room table in the main house of Oak Grove Inn.
“Now, Ms. Moser,” the first officer started.
“It’s Doctor Moser,” Reilly inserted, just as Bardin’s wife bustled in, wrapped in a voluminous fleece robe.
“For goodness sakes! What are you doing to this poor girl?”
Reilly tensed at Ella Bardin’s use of the word girl. He glanced at Christy sidelong, trying to send her a signal not to insult Ella, but she wasn’t paying any attention to Ella’s choice of words or to him. She was staring into space and frowning.
“Get out of the way, all of you,” Ella continued.
“Ella—” said the older officer.
“Buford Watts, you just hold your horses.” Ella turned to Christy. “I’ve put some water on to boil, and I’ll get you a cup of tea in just a minute, unless you’d rather have coffee?”
Christy realized that Ella was talking to her. She looked up and her stiff demeanor softened just a little, barely enough to notice. “Oh, thank you. Tea is fine.”
“And here.” Ella Bardin stepped over to a recliner and pulled an afghan off the back of it. “Cover up with this. The very idea—” this aimed at the three men “—of leaving her sitting there in that torn skirt. What kind of gentlemen are you?”
Watts answered, “The kind who’re trying to find out who attacked her, Miss Ella.” His words were measured.
The younger officer grinned at Ella. “I sure could use something warm to drink, Miss Ella.”
Ella looked at him. “I’m sure you could,” she retorted as she started back toward the kitchen.
&n
bsp; Watts turned his attention back to Christy. “Dr. Moser, could you tell me your full name please?”
She straightened. “Christmas Leigh Moser. That’s L-E-I-G-H.”
Watts’s eyebrows raised, then lowered.
Reilly’s did too. Christmas. He thought about what Christy had said about her sister, and remembered Ryker mentioning Moser’s other daughter. Her name was odd too. Summer? No, Autumn.
He assessed Dr. Christmas Leigh Moser. Somehow, the name, which could easily have seemed silly, fit her. He wasn’t sure why he thought that.
Buford Watts wrote something on his pad, then addressed Christy again. “Good. Now if you would, tell me exactly what happened.”
“Certainly,” she said coolly. “As you obviously already know, my father is Albert Moser.” She waited for confirmation from the officers. They nodded.
“I flew in from Boston late last night.” She paused. “I had to find physicians to take my patients before I could leave,” she explained. “I went to his arraignment this morning. Then this afternoon I received a call that he had suffered an MI—a heart attack, so I went to the hospital.” She stopped to take a fortifying breath. “He’s in the cardiac care unit. I left there around six o’clock, stopped at a liquor store to pick up a bottle of wine, then drove here, to the inn. I parked in the lot out there.”
“That’s your car? The rental?” Deputy Watts asked.
She nodded. “Just as I parked the car, a light-colored pickup pulled in next to me. I walked to my cottage—Cottage Three,” she amended. “I unlocked the door, but before I could enter, something hit me from behind. The blow knocked me to the floor. I landed on my wrist and fractured the scaphoid bone.”
Both officers’ gazes went to her right hand, which she held against her torso. At that moment, Reilly saw the flash of red lights through Ella Bardin’s lace curtains and heard the crunch of tires on shells and gravel. “There’s the ambulance,” he said, earning him an angry glance from Christy.
“I told you—” she started, but he sent her a look that his brother Ryker had dubbed “The Silencer.” It worked. She pressed her lips together and merely glared at him.
The EMTs made quick work of her broken wrist. For the most part, she’d been right. There was little that could be done about the bone that was broken. The EMTs iced it for a few minutes, then applied a pink cast that covered her palm and half of her thumb, and extended about four inches up her forearm.
“You need to ice your forehead too,” he said, scrutinizing the bruised skin. “It’ll help keep the swelling down, and maybe prevent a black eye.”
“I know,” she responded archly.
The EMT glanced over at Reilly, then applied a small bandage to her cheek. The bandage was also pink, with ladybugs on it.
Reilly was pretty sure Christy had no idea what was on the bandage. The wink one of the EMTs gave him on the way out confirmed it. Their way of getting her back for lecturing them about the futility of putting a cast on a scaphoid fracture.
Once the EMTs were gone, the officers resumed the questioning.
“You were saying that someone knocked you to the floor,” Buford Watts prompted her.
She adjusted the ice pack. “Yes. I’d just unlocked and opened the door when I was hit from behind. The man landed on top of me. I tried to roll over, or buck or kick, but he was too heavy.”
Reilly noticed a faint shiver tense her muscles. He doubted the officers saw it. They seemed mesmerized by her striking appearance, or maybe her calm recitation of what had happened.
Watts asked the question Reilly had asked her before. “You know it was a man? Did you get a good look at him?”
“No.” A sharp syllable. “I was on my stomach and he was on top of me. But it was a man. No question.” She met each officer’s gaze, but didn’t look at Reilly. Then she took a deep breath. “I know because he was straddling me.”
Reilly’s breath stuck in his throat. “Did he—?” he croaked, earning a stiff glance from the officer in charge. This wasn’t Reilly’s case. Not technically. For their purposes, he was merely a witness—the first person the victim had called.
Christy Moser looked directly at him for the first time since they’d come into the house. As before, when he’d looked into her eyes at the coffee kiosk, he thought he saw something underneath their cool darkness.
She gave a slight negative shake of her head. “I wasn’t raped,” she said quickly. “But it was obvious that he was male.”
The younger officer’s face turned pink. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, then cleared his throat. “Did he—did he take anything?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Apparently his only purpose in attacking me was to give me a message.”
“A message?” the officer echoed.
Christy opened her mouth but before she could speak, Ella Bardin was back with a steaming mug of fragrant tea. “Here you go, dear. I’m sorry it took so long, but I wanted to wait until the EMTs were gone.”
The two officers eyed the hot drink with covetousness in their gazes, but if Ella Bardin noticed, she gave no sign of it. Christy thanked her and held the cup in her left hand.
“You said the attacker left you a message?”
“That’s right. He pushed my face against the hardwood floor and said, ‘Go back where you came from or you’re as dead as your sister.’”
Reilly watched the two officers. Both of them sat up straight in their seats.
“Your sister?” Watts said.
At the same time the younger officer echoed, “Get out of town?”
Christy Moser held up the hand with the cast. Her fingernails were perfectly manicured, except for the right index one, which was raggedly broken. “Let me explain,” she said, much more calmly than the officers’ outbursts. She took a quick breath and continued.
“My sister was murdered five years ago, on Bienville Street in the French Quarter. Her death was ruled a mugging, but my father was certain that she was murdered by a married man with whom she was having an affair. The night she died was her birthday and she’d gone down to the Quarter to celebrate.” The word celebrate took on an ironic tone. Reilly wondered just how much Christy knew about her sister and the man she’d been seeing.
“I’ve been in Boston for the past six years, doing a residency and then a fellowship in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital. I had—” She paused and a fleeting shadow crossed her face. “I wasn’t aware of everything that was going on. However, I believe that my attack this evening proves that my father was right. My sister’s death wasn’t just a mugging. And apparently whoever killed her feels threatened by my presence here.”
Reilly noticed that the two officers seemed bewildered. He sympathized with them. He’d barely kept up with her rapid-fire explanation and conclusion, and he had the advantage of knowing something about the case from Ryker.
The lead officer looked at Reilly then back at Christy. “I think we need to get an official statement from you—downtown. And I’m going to call CSI to look for trace from the man who allegedly assaulted you.”
“Allegedly?” Her voice was frosty.
“Legal terminology,” Reilly commented in an effort to soften the officer’s words. He was afraid if Christy stiffened any more, she’d break.
Turning to Watts, he said, “Can the statement wait until tomorrow? Dr. Moser is exhausted.”
Watts sent him a glaring look, but nodded. “Sure. We can take the official statement tomorrow. But Ms.—Dr. Moser, you might want to give some thought to what you want in the official record. If you’re prepared to make a written sworn statement to everything you’ve just told us, then you are accusing the man who assaulted you and threatened your life of killing your sister. If we’re able to find any trace evidence and match it to someone, your statement accuses that person of murder.”
Christy waited a few seconds, watching the officer closely, but he didn’t say anything else. She nodded. “That’s exactly right, Officer. I am definitely acc
using the man who attacked me of murdering my sister.”
Chapter Three
After the police finished questioning Christy, they cordoned off and locked Cottage Three, holding it as a crime scene until the CSI team could process it the next day.
Ella Bardin insisted that Christy sleep in the front bedroom of the main house of the Oak Grove Inn, the Lakeview Room. It didn’t look out over any lake Reilly had ever seen, but there were photos of famous lakes all over the room, including Lake Pontchartrain. After Ella made sure the room was in perfect condition, she excused herself, saying she had an early morning. Tomorrow was French toast day and she had to get up at five o’clock.
Reilly deposited the few items the officers had allowed Christy to grab from her cottage onto the antique dresser and turned to say good-night to her.
She was standing in the middle of the room, watching him carefully. She definitely looked the worse for wear. She’d twisted her glossy black hair into some kind of knot, but it was coming undone. Her torn skirt would have been indecent if not for the black lace slip. Her stockings were in shreds, and she’d long since discarded the single shoe and her jacket.
Her expression reflected her experience. It was at once angry, bewildered, frustrated and scared. Reilly felt an odd urge to cross the room and pull her into his arms. But Dr. Christmas Moser wouldn’t appreciate him peeking beneath her tough exterior. In fact, he knew what she’d say if he tried to offer comfort.
That does not accomplish anything, Officer. Surely you realize that.
“I heard your father had a heart attack,” he said. “He’s in the cardiac unit?”
She nodded.
“I’m sorry. You don’t need any more stress right now.”
“What’s on your mind, Officer Delancey?”
The question surprised him. He’d already noticed her keen observation of the officers as they checked out her and her story. His grandmother’s saying, “doesn’t miss a trick,” certainly applied to her.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” he parried.
“I doubt that.”
He inclined his head in agreement. If she was up to answering questions he had plenty to ask. “All right. How long did you say you’d been in Boston?”
