Devil Dead

by Linda Ladd

  When she came to the old dock again, she stopped there and listened some more. She heard the crying coming from the nearby trees, and she walked that way, cautiously keeping her back to the water, shining her light back and forth, both in front and behind her, alert for danger, gun up and ready. About two feet behind some thick and thorny bushes, she finally saw the little white puppy. His leash was caught up somehow on a downed log, and he jumped up and started wagging his tail and yapping shrilly when he saw her. It was the puppy Novak had given the girl all right.

  Still, Claire remained ultra-cautious. She shined her flashlight around the dark moss-draped trees and tried to get through to Novak on her phone. He didn’t pick up, either. She left a message for him, telling him that she had found the dog and was bringing it to him over at Mary Lou Picard’s house, and to wait there for her. Then she made sure no one was lurking in the dark bushes before she knelt down beside the pup and untied the rope. He wiggled around, yapping in joy and dancing with canine glee and feeling soft against her hands and sounding relieved that somebody had finally come to untangle him. Once he was free, the pup jerked on the leash, looking out into the swamp and wanting to run down some kind of partially cleared footpath that wound its way through heavy underbrush beneath a thick stand of cypress trees with big trunks that were partially surrounded by water.

  “No way, dog. We are not stepping foot in there. Come on, I’m taking you to Novak.”

  The dog was still straining and pulling toward the trees, as if he were trying to tell her something, as if he wanted her to take him down that dark and swampy path to nothing remotely good. Yeah, like that was gonna happen. Not a good idea. Nothing about any of this was a good idea. Not for her continued good health, anyway. Her self-protection antenna rose up and pretty much went berserk. That poor dog was gonna have to take no for an answer. She wasn’t going into the swamp alone in the dark, not for any reason. She was gonna take the dog to Novak and let him deal with it.

  Backing away, she headed for her SUV, constantly flashing her light around on the spooky moss hanging off the trees, somehow feeling highly threatened. She finally scooped up the dog and put him in the front seat of her car and then climbed into the driver’s seat and hit the locks. Afraid? Her? Yes, yes, and no doubt about it. Maybe Novak liked the primordial mud and swamplands, and Black, too, but Claire would take it in light doses and in the light of day and once in a month of Sundays.

  Once back out on the blacktop road, she felt better and headed straight for the relative normalcy of Mary Lou Picard’s Hansel and Gretel/Frankenstein-esque cottage, hoping Novak would still be there. It was right down the road and not too far. The dog rode with his paws on the dashboard, having a good ol’ time, his tail wagging to beat the band. But he wasn’t raising Cain anymore. She turned up the driveway and found the house, the yard lit up by several dusk-to-dawn lamps dotting the perimeter of the property. A few windows in the house shone brightly with lamps, though. Mary Lou’s car was in the driveway, but Novak’s truck was nowhere to be seen. Now what? After a moment, Claire lowered the window an inch, got out again, left the headlamps on and the dog inside, whining and scratching at the window. It was deathly silent outside, except for the excited puppy sounds and the ever-vocal crickets, and she meant the death part quite literally. Probably because her nose picked up the indescribable, awful, and unforgettable odor of death and putrefaction that was hanging like a living, unbreathing pall over the entire place. Crap. Somebody in the immediate vicinity was dead, or maybe it was a dead animal. She hoped to hell that it was a dead animal. Wouldn’t surprise her, not with the local taxidermy enthusiasts hunting and haunting the life span of every animal in a twenty-mile radius. Still, it was extremely unsettling.

  She dialed up Black but once again got his voice mail. He was no doubt still in with his problem patient. She told him where she was and left a similar message and hung up. Then she called Novak again. No answer. His voice mail didn’t pick up, either. What the hell was going on? After that, she considered calling in the police but hesitated since she didn’t know if it was a dead body or just an animal carcass. Then she just stood there and listened to the night creatures, who had suddenly decided to have one raucous hoedown in the swamp behind the house.

  Finally, after standing beside her car door for a little while, waiting and watching, she left the puppy pawing on the window glass and walked over to the front porch, her gun in her hand. The odor of death became stronger as she approached the house, and her resolve became weaker. She climbed the steps and waited there, listening. The front door stood ajar. Which was never a good sign in her line of work. The foyer was dark. Everything was pin-drop silent inside the house. Just that almost tangible to the touch, stomach-turning stench of decomposing flesh, designed to ripple cold waves of gooseflesh down any rational person’s limbs. Okay, time to retreat until reinforcements arrived. She wasn’t gonna be stupid and walk into something dangerous without Novak’s backup. Especially in the dark and in a swamp and with the smell of death permeating her hair and clothing.

  Heading for the car again, she walked swiftly and stayed inside the headlight beams, spooked now, oh, yeah. She pulled out her phone to call 911, and that’s when she just barely caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned toward it, swiveling her weapon ahead of her, but then she was tackled down low from behind by a second attacker and went down hard on her shoulder on the gravel. Her assailant rolled quickly with her, got behind her, his arm around her neck, and had her throat in a chokehold before she could get off a shot. The pressure of his arm cut off all air, and she struggled desperately against his tight hold, trying to twist enough to get him with her gun. Then the other one was there, grabbing her gun arm.

  Blinded by the car lights and practically suffocated now, she lost her hold of her gun when somebody hit her forearm with something hard and metal. With both hands clawing desperately at the arm cutting off her breath, she tried to draw in air, but she couldn’t get any. He had her locked into an expert chokehold, right forearm pressing brutally into her gullet, his other hand tightly gripped on the back of her neck. He gradually increased the hard, brutal, and unrelenting pressure against her throat. After several seconds, she stopped fighting, her lungs bursting for want of oxygen, and then, slowly, everything went to black inside her head. No light, no noise, no nothing.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Almost an hour earlier, right after Novak had left Claire and pulled out of Adonis’s driveway, he felt his cell phone vibrate. He shifted in his seat and pulled it out. Caller ID said Claude Beaucheme, his good buddy in Paris. Novak’s mother had come from one of the most influential families of France, one that still enjoyed the upper and privileged echelons of French society. He’d spent enough years in his youth living in Paris among his St. Pierre kin to count some very important people among his friends. Claude happened to occupy a high post in the Ministere de la Defense and had access to highly classified information. Novak had called in a favor, and it looked like it was gonna pan out and just when they needed it to.

  Out of respect, he spoke to his old friend in French. “Hello, Claude? You find out anything?”

  Claude started talking rapidly, also in French. Novak listened without speaking as Beaucheme told him that he had gotten access to a still shot from the airport security cameras outside Charles de Gaulle and had already texted the photo to Novak’s cell phone. Novak listened to the rest of his findings, thanked him, asked about the health of Claude’s family, hung up, and then pulled over on the shoulder while he loaded the picture onto his phone. A few seconds later, the photo popped up, and he stared at the woman standing beside Pierre Dubois on the sidewalk outside the airport. He recognized her at once. Lydie Creedy. Beaucheme had also told him that the police found Creedy’s fingerprints at the scene, and that her prints traced back to a top-priority security that even he couldn’t penetrate with his high-level security clearance, so he wasn’t sure exactly who she was or what she was up
to.

  Novak stared at her picture, frowning, thinking hard about the new development. Either Creedy was wanted by the government for something highly confidential or she was a covert operative herself. It probably had to be one of those two things. One thing for certain, he was gonna find out who she was and what she was doing in Louisiana. He started to call Claire with the info but then decided to handle the new information on his own. He was gonna find Lydie Creedy, and she was gonna tell him everything he wanted to know. And he would use tactics that Claire Morgan just might not like or approve of. He pulled up Creedy’s GPS coordinates again. She must be off work now and was on the road heading southwest, getting very close to a place called Cut Off, which lay just south of Larose. He started his truck, determined to intercept her and follow her home.

  Novak was getting increasingly antsy with every passing moment. On the other hand, he also felt slightly better about the way things were going. He had a good lead now, and a suspect that he could track down and interrogate. Whether it would pan out or not, that was another matter altogether. His gut told him it would, though. Something about Creedy’s behavior had seemed a little off to both him and Claire. Just something about her wasn’t quite right. Hell, nothing was right. Not with Adonis lying dead in the morgue and burned beyond recognition.

  Determined to find Creedy and get some answers out of her, he glanced at the GPS coordinates again. He could catch up to her if he hurried. He turned the truck around and headed back toward Thibodaux. Following her signal, Novak finally caught sight of Creedy’s black Taurus about fifteen minutes later, out on LA 1 close to Galliano. He pulled out behind her, hung about three cars back. She had lost him before. It wasn’t gonna happen again, not with the tracking device. Fortunately, and though the traffic was sporadic, there was enough to keep her from spotting him. He frowned when Creedy turned on a deserted road and then finally ended up on Novak’s very own gravel road.

  He followed, farther back but near enough so that he could keep track of her car. It took about ten more minutes before she turned into a narrow driveway, one that was just a half mile or so from Novak’s back property line. The place had been a rental property for the last ten years, but he had no idea who was living there at the moment. A brand-new mailbox loomed up on the opposite side of her driveway with nice little glow-in-the-dark numbers but no name. When Lydie’s taillights disappeared down the entry road behind the trees, Novak pulled off onto the shoulder and switched off his headlamps.

  He killed the motor, got out, and walked across the road to the weedy driveway. He had better go in on foot. Better to know who and what he was dealing with before he barged into their midst. The moon was out, full and bright and white and high in the sky, but he still used his flashlight to light the ground in front of him. He was used to walking in the bayous at night, but the swampy properties along the bayou abounded with all kinds of nasty things that knew how to kill a man. Creedy’s property was pretty much set out in the same direction as his own home, with the house sitting adjacent to the drive and the bayou running somewhere behind the property. Cypress trees, tall and covered with vines gone wild, and mighty live oaks and pecan trees and mimosas and magnolias, their massive limbs hung with the long, waving beards of Spanish moss, and about a million gnats hovering in clouds that he had to fight his way through. He found a game trail that something had made through the undergrowth but continued sweeping the ground in front of him with his flashlight beam for water moccasins and all the other deadly things that inhabited the area after nightfall. Especially the gators, now that he had moved up closer to the water. But he was used to all those things. He had been out in the swamp at night many times. He knew what he was doing.

  Not so far into the dark underbrush, Novak picked up the rank odor of decay and stink of stagnant water. Now he was very close to the water overrun from the bayou. He could hear the slow ripple of the stream. He kept going, not worrying too much about the cracking of twigs underfoot or crackling of dead leaves, at least he didn’t until the house loomed up through the dense vegetation. It took a couple of minutes to reach the thick pampas grass clustered all around the edges of the yard.

  The black Taurus was parked out front. There was some kind of barn or shed out back, one with a dusk-to-dawn light glowing at one corner inside a cloud of fluttering moths and gnats. The windows were lit up, upstairs and down, but most were covered with curtains. A shadow moved around upstairs, back and forth, back and forth.

  Keeping down low, he moved swiftly across the backyard. There was one window with the blinds open, and he could see when Creedy entered it from the front of the house. It looked as if she was dragging something behind her. But she was alone, and she crossed into the kitchen, totally unaware that he was stalking her. He moved stealthily up closer to the back porch, crouched down a few seconds, and then made his way silently up the steps and eased open the screen door. An instant later, he was at the back door. The knob turned easily. She wasn’t on guard, and she was not expecting unwelcome company. Maybe she wasn’t an undercover officer, after all. If she was, she wasn’t very good at it.

  Novak squeezed his fingers tightly around his .45, not taking any chances, not after having seen the blackened remains of poor little Adonis. He breathed in deeply, steadied himself to utter calm, and then he thrust open the door, weapon in his hand.

  “Don’t you move.”

  From her place at the table, Lydie let out a startled cry but then she thrust her hands up in the air, as if she was used to being held at gunpoint. She had been weeping; her eyes looked weak and swollen and her face red and blotchy. She had on a tight white tank top and tight jeans and had no telltale bulges so didn’t appear to be armed. There was a rolling red canvas suitcase on the floor beside her chair.

  “What do you want?” she said, a tad more calmly than he would have expected any woman to be when surprised at gunpoint inside her home late at night. Her eyes were steady now and riveted on his weapon.

  “Just keep your hands up there,” Novak said quietly. He moved across the room and roughly patted her down. He came up with nothing but quickly located a loaded weapon lying on the kitchen counter. A compact 9 mm, very similar to the Glock 19 that Claire Morgan carried. He tucked it down into his waistband.

  “We need to talk. And you better tell me the truth. I don’t have much time, but I am capable of making you do whatever I want. Believe me when I say that I’ll use whatever force it takes.”

  “Who are you? Why are you here?”

  “That doesn’t matter. A good friend of mine died tonight and I’m in the mood to kill somebody, and you just might fit the bill.”

  Lydie Creedy sat very still, hands still high. “Who died? What’s this got to do with me?”

  “Well, let me see. I’ve got a few choices. Remember that guy you flew to Paris with not so long ago. He’s dead now, drained of blood, too, and on that neat little farm he’s got outside Paris, the one out in Fremainville.”

  Lydie’s face twisted with pain, and then she broke down in a flood of tears. “Oh, God, I just found out.”

  That surprised Novak, all right. So she was going to admit she knew the dead guy. “Who is he to you?”

  Sobbing, she wiped at the tears wetting her cheeks. They looked real enough to Novak. But he stopped being taken in by weeping women a long time ago. Some used their feminine wiles to their advantage and he wasn’t one who ever fell for it. “He’s my husband. And he’s dead. He was fine when I left the farm. Who killed him? Tell me.”

  He hadn’t been expecting that, either. Novak eyed her suspiciously for a long moment. She could very well be trying to throw him off. He glanced around the room again, half expecting somebody else to jump out at him. He shifted his back to a wall. “The Paris police think you did it. They’re out lookin’ for you right now. They got your fingerprints at the murder scene and a surveillance tape with you walking out of the de Gaulle with him the day you arrived.”

  “I was there. Of co
urse, I was there. That’s our farmhouse, where we live. We were resting out there for a few days, spending some time alone together before I had to come back to the States and get back to work. He was supposed to fly to Geneva a couple of hours after I took off. He was fine when I left him. I swear it.” She started sobbing again. “He was fine. He was happy, in a good mood …”

  Novak still knew that she could be lying through her teeth. Trained operatives could do that. He’d seen them. “Well, he wasn’t fine when they found him. Somebody filled up a bathtub with his blood and used it to smear satanic symbols all over the walls.”

  “Oh, my God. Oh, God, they must’ve followed us home.” Okay, now Lydie’s show of grief was beginning to look legitimate to Novak. He’d give her that. “Oh, my God, my God,” she wailed with the most horrible kind of guilt in her voice. “He’s dead, and it’s my fault.”

  “Sit down, lady. You’re gonna tell me who the hell you really are and what you’re doin’ out here.”

  Lydie slumped down into the chair and stared at him, her hands still up. “Okay, now listen, you’ve got to listen to me, mister. Please, you’ve got to. I didn’t kill him, I swear to God, I didn’t. I would never hurt him. He was my husband. I loved him!” She started in with the crying again. “Who are you? Why are you here? What do you want with me?”

  “I’m looking for somebody. A girl named Andrea Quinn.”

  “So you’re a private detective?” Lydie asked him. She suddenly looked very relieved.

  “Look, Creedy. Let’s just quit with the bullshit. Tell me who you are and why you’re down here in the bayous and what you know about Andrea Quinn.”

  “Lydie Creedy is my real name. I work at Interpol. So does Pierre. We were assigned here to find one of our people who went missing on assignment in New Orleans.”

  Novak just stared at her. “What do you take me for, lady?”