by Nancy Gideon
“Until she decided she had a better idea.”
A somewhat cynical smile. “Exactly.”
Genevieve’s idea was to build a better, stronger, and ultimately superior species, he explained. Unlike the elitist Chosen who’d educated her, she saw the value in what the Shifters offered. Power. Strength had been bled from the intellectuals in the North. They were physically fragile and emotionally barren, which Genevieve saw as a disadvantage. Plus subjugation of a work force was never a permanent solution when it came to control. Too many unstable variables. So when whispers of the Shifter’s Prophesied One created a current of uneasiness amongst the Chosen, she sought to embrace and manipulate the idea. She began by using the ruling class’s studies against them, not to breed a better Chosen citizen but to create the means to overthrow them.
“While she remained in Chicago, grooming programs that would suit her plans, I came here to New Orleans to establish a base amongst the Shifter refugees from which we could work without being noticed.”
“St. Bartholomew’s.” Cee Cee’s contempt could hardly be contained. “Who’d suspect a priest was really a very clever actor?”
He didn’t shy away from her withering glare. No trace of guilt or regret was evidenced in his words. “I’m not a complete fraud. I did attend seminary school. My own personal Creationist theories are just slightly different, is all.”
“Is that what you call trying to play God? I’d call it something else.”
He did look slightly uncomfortable then. “I know I’ve disappointed you.”
“Disappointment doesn’t even come close to what I think about you using the church to experiment on the unsuspecting. On those who trusted you.”
“I’ve done good here, Lottie. For this parish. For these people.”
“At what cost?”
“None. I’ve never demanded anything from those I’ve helped. None have been harmed.” A flicker of indignation tightened his features, making him look less benign. Making Cee Cee wonder how he’d ever fit in with the elegant Chosen. But a more pressing question surfaced.
“What about Ben Spratt?”
Benjamin Spratt, St. Bart’s quiet, simple janitor. He’d attended to every tiny detail to bring a glow to the church, and he’d adored Mary Kate Malone in her sanctified robes as Sister Catherine. Cee Cee’d been stunned when his past suddenly surfaced on the eve of a murder investigation implicating Max Savoie. While she’d grabbed gratefully at facts that would free her lover from suspicion, the cooler, analytical part of her never quite accepted Ben’s availability as a scapegoat. Even if he hadn’t been human.
Michael Furness’s gaze softened. “I did everything I could for him. I gave him a safe sanctuary. He was a tortured soul, yearning to make peace with what he’d done. I gave him purpose. And that peace he deserved.”
Her accusation denied his claim. “You sacrificed him. You gave me those reports that linked him to Victor Vantour’s murder.”
“For Max.” Impatiently, he waved off her look of outrage. “Don’t pretend with me, Lottie. You knew Max had killed those animals who abused Delores Gautreaux, and that Mary Kate sent him to see it done. You knew he killed those men who attacked you practically outside our walls. And how he did it. Is that the truth you’d have rather had surface? Would you have arrested Max and Mary Kate and locked them away? Ben was an unfortunate casualty for the greater good. He was more than willing to be used. It was the penance he’d been searching for. His life for Max, for Mary Kate.”
Cee Cee took a shaky breath. Tears pooled at the thought of the poor, gentle giant on his knees blissfully scrubbing the tiles in the narthex, whose only crime was that of twisted Shifter genetics.
“You told him about Vantour.” Grief and guilt squeezed about her ribs.
“Yes. I knew what he’d do. Vantour was scum. He’d violated the young woman Benjamin loved. It was a long overdue wrong that needed righting.”
“At your convenience and direction.”
“Yes. I won’t apologize for it. As I once told Max, dark things are sometimes necessary to prevent a greater evil. Max understood that.”
A defying heat fired in her eyes. “He did not. You used him, just like you used Ben, with your pious sentiments and greater goods. Who gave you the right to decide those things? Not those robes you’re masquerading behind.” When Furness stared her down unblinkingly, she continued.
“What about Mary Kate? Did you use her, too? Did you prey on her pain and fear to manipulate her? To allow her to hide here where she never had to heal or face her demons? You might as well have put that gun to her head and squeezed the trigger for her, the way you probably did to Ben’s to cover up your transgressions in that fire Legere’s men started.”
A soft gasp alerted them to the presence of another in the room. Mary Kate Malone stood in the doorway, frozen and pale. Before Cee Cee could make a move toward her, she bolted and ran as fast as her awkward gait could carry her into the shadows of the nave.
“Let her go,” Furness said wearily, catching Cee Cee’s arm. “It’s a truth she needed to hear. Finally.”
“What kind of monster are you?” Cee Cee spat at him, daring him to explain. Shocked by his response.
“The kind Genevieve Savorie made me when she had me on her leash. I wasn’t her colleague, Lottie. I was her property.”
Cee Cee could only gape at him.
“Don’t try to find Genevieve,” he warned. “If you go back to Chicago, you’ll never leave alive. If she comes here to New Orleans, she’ll kill us all.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Those grim possibilities haunted Cee Cee as she searched for her best friend. Mary Kate was not in the building. One of the shelter residents said they saw her leave out the side door where Susanna Duchamps had been waiting to give her a ride. That provided a temporary relief. If she was with the kind and practical doctor, she was in good hands until Cee Cee had the opportunity to talk with her. In her delicate state of transition, Mary Kate’s world would be thrown into upheaval by what she’d heard. After the earlier traumas she’d suffered, she’d rebuilt her damaged psyche on the stability offered by St. Bart’s and Father Furness. Now that was crumbling and Cee Cee would not allow her to plunge back into darkness.
But her intention of driving to the Institute was U-turned by an unexpected call from Philo Tibideaux.
“Detective, how soon can you meet me at the trailer?”
The shape beneath the tarp was definitely a body.
“Anyone I know?” Cee Cee asked as she closed the door to the crowded sweat box of a mobile office behind her.
From where he was sitting at the Formica-topped table, Philo used the toe of his boot to lift the cover from the figure stretched out on the floor. “You tell me.”
Boze Reading. At least that’s what she gathered from the portion of his face that wasn’t caved in.
“Dammit!”
“I take that to mean you were acquainted.”
Cee Cee dropped heavily into the chair across from the scowling redhead. “We were.”
“Seeing as how my dayshift is now two short, I think I’m gonna want a few more details.”
She eyed him cautiously, not sure how far he could be trusted. But then their only lead was lying at her feet. “He was going to be our inside man on an investigation into a Shifter fight ring.”
“Doan look like that worked out too well for him. He was carrying a whole lot of cash he didn’t get a chance to spend. He get that from you?” When she nodded, he asked, “You wanting it back, or can I use it to see him buried and give the rest to his mama?”
“That’d be fine.” With a heavy exhale, she let her shoulders droop. “Where did he turn up?”
“This morning in the dumpster outside. I asked around but nobody knew nothing.”
“There’s an epidemic of that.”
She met his defiant stare until he glanced away to mutter, “I ain’t involved in this.”
“He told me
as much.” She let that lay between them as fact, not a statement of good faith.
Philo turned back to her, expression stripped down to bare candor. “I like you, Detective. I owe you for what you done for my brother, seeing him buried and for seeing those what kilt him just as dead. I believed you when you said you wanted to protect us. That’s what I want, too. But I can’t go in with those you run with.” Meaning Silas, Max and Jacques. “But that doan mean I can’t help you.”
“How 'bout we start by sharing what we know?” she suggested.
Philo started. “I ain’t been strictly honest with you.”
No surprise there, but Cee Cee simply said, “Oh?”
“I had nothing, nothing to do with that business the other day. I was glad to hear you and MacCreedy got out okay.”
She didn’t comment, instead urging, “What business were you involved in?”
“I been approached by a fella name a Casper Lee. I knowed him for a while. He be a bit of a shady character, but I ain’t never had no trouble with him.”
“What did Mr. Lee want with you?”
“He wanted to know if my Patrol could do some security work for him down on the bayou. I tole him that weren’t what we were about . . . at least not for the pay he was offering.”
“And what was that?”
“Barter. Our services for a taste of his product.”
Cee Cee straightened. “What kind of product?”
“I believe you already know. You come to ax me about it the other day. It wasn’t mentioned by name, but I believe you called it poison.” He reached into his pocket and put a small plastic pouch on the table. “I found that in Boze’s jacket. Probably what’s been making him such a riled up pain in the patootie these past few days. Now I don’t mind a good drunk and a respectable hangover, but this brain-scrambling stuff I got no truck with. And I don’t like it messin' with my crew or my Patrol. If there’s something I can do on the down low to make it disappear, I’m in, long as nobody else hears about it.”
They shared a look and a bonding nod.
“Just play hard to get for now,” Cee Cee encouraged. “Draw this Casper fellow out. Be coy but not skittish, like you’re entertaining the idea of getting in bed with him.”
Philo grimaced. “Something tells me he’d be right fine with that idea in ways I don’t care to reciprocate. Not that I gots anything against folks who play for their own side.”
“I’m asking you to get into his back pocket not his pants.”
“That I can do.”
“And be careful. I don’t know what this business with our dead friends has to do with the other.”
But she had a good idea of where they were leading. To Carmen Blutafino. He’d slipped justice too many times to be allowed to get away with anything more.
And then Philo Tibideaux knocked her thoughts out of the park by asking, “How’s your friend? The one who’s the nun?”
He evaded her surprised look, immediately snagging her suspicions. “She’s better.”
“Tell her I said hey.”
The awkward way he mentioned that suggested it wasn’t a polite inquiry over a stranger. The fiery color in his cheeks was even more telling and had her asking rather stiffly, “How do you know Mary Kate?”
“She was nice to my brother. Taught him to read music after school.”
Tito Tibideaux was the mysterious boy Mary Kate had been tutoring during the fall of their senior year? Now they really had something to talk about!
Carefully, she asked, “Have you seen her lately?”
“No. Not for years and years. She just come to mind when I was . . . when I was cleaning out Tito’s place. I decided to take over the rent.” The sorrow in his voice just about broke her heart, a reminder that he’d not only been cut off from his friends but from his only family.
Cee Cee put her hand over his for a brief empathetic squeeze. “I’ll tell her. I’m sure she’ll be pleased to know you remember her fondly.”
His gaze shot up then quickly away. “Not exactly fondly. I didn’t really know her all that good. She was Tito’s friend.”
Ah ha! Another of Mary Kate’s conquests. The streets of New Orleans had been littered with them like broken bead strands after Mardi Gras. Cee Cee smiled at him. “As a friend then.”
He returned the smile, agreeing, “As a friend.”
Another press of his hand as she told him again, “Be careful. I don’t have so many friends that I can afford to lose any of them.”
“Ditto, Detective Darlin'.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
“I’m sure she’s all right.”
Max’s comment didn’t lessen Cee Cee’s white-knuckled grip on the screaming orange muscle car tearing out of New Orleans. Her reply was curt. “You don’t know her like I do.”
“That’s true.” He faced forward, focusing on the road ahead. “I don’t know her at all.”
He could feel her looking his way and knew her expression would be etched with contrition. He didn’t want her pity. He wanted her.
Max may not have remembered the scarred nun who’d moved like a ghost about his imprisoning room when she’d thought he wasn’t awake, but over the course of the day he’d learned about her history second hand from Giles St. Clair. About two best friends raised under St. Bart’s roof—Mary Kate Malone, a vivacious, outgoing orphan; and Charlotte Caissie, the darker side of the friendship coin abandoned by an alcoholic mother and, for the most part, by a workaholic father. The inseparable duo had been snatched off the street after a high school basketball game. Jimmy Legere intended to use them as leverage to keep Detective Tommy Caissie from testifying in a pending court action. The two men holding them in a dank dockside warehouse had other plans. By the time Max stumbled upon them four days later, the girls had been viciously brutalized. He’d taken one look at Charlotte’s snarling defiance as she struggled to protect her traumatized friend, and he’d been lost, heart and soul.
That was the story as Giles told it.
Breaking from his slavish loyalty to Jimmy, Max had rescued them. Mary Kate had helped Max burn the bodies after he ripped apart the men who’d violated their innocent hostages. And he’d left an unconscious Cee Cee at the hospital. She believed her memory of the beast that had saved them to be a nightmare and hadn’t understood her strange attraction to her enemy’s right-hand man. Not until after he’d breached her thorny resistance with a kiss, and she’d discovered that he wasn’t a man to be feared. He wasn’t a man at all.
It hadn’t been easy for her to accept her love for someone both mobster and monster, someone who opposed her values and beliefs, who challenged her sense of justice—of humanity, itself. But just like Max’s, her emotions knew no such reservations.
She’d had his back against enemies both human and unnatural. He heard the truth of that in Giles’s animated retelling. They’d sacrificed without hesitation, had given without restraint, all that they were to one another. Only to have that rich reward of happiness stolen.
Max wanted it back. He wanted those memories, but if he couldn’t reclaim them, he would find a way to recreate them. The tenacious female in the car beside him deserved that.
She was unsure of him. He got that loud and clear. Hell, he was unsure of himself. His brain was shredded, his emotions scrambled, and behind them both was that insistent throb of tension, its beat warning all might not be well.
“I just don’t know where she’d go other than St. Bart’s or the Institute,” his mate was saying. “I don’t know how she’ll react to what she overheard.”
“How 'boutchu, Charlotte? How do you feel about it?”
She shot him a startled glance as if her own response had never occurred to her. It probably hadn’t. “I’ve always anticipated the worst in people. Mary Kate’s not like that. She’s trusting and naïve.”
His reply was quiet. “Maybe you don’t know her as well as you think. She’d been arranging retribution against those who’d harmed her floc
k. That’s not particularly trusting or naive.”
Cee Cee had no comment, but he could tell his had upset her. The irony of it was inescapable. He was desperately trying to find a past to cling to, and she was stubbornly refusing to accept what she knew about hers.
“I’ll help you find her, sha. I’m not without resources.”
The naked gratitude in her expression did funny things inside his chest. When she clasped his hand tightly, those sensations settled lower.
Smiling slightly, Max glanced at the road ahead. And was riveted.
They drove alongside a high brick wall topped with iron spears that seemed to stretch for miles. His breathing grew labored as they reached the secured entrance. Then the gates opened, and Max saw everything ahead through the eyes of a frightened boy crouched in the backseat of a limo that reeked of death. The child he’d once been.
Live oak sentinels lined a seemingly endless drive, framing the sprawling plantation house with its long windows, hugging porches and air of faded elegance. As they drove toward it, a sense of relief settled around Max like the wrap of a mother’s arms.
He was home.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The moment they stepped out of the car, Cee Cee knew she’d made the right choice. Susanna had warned that a return to River Road before he was ready would trigger responses Max couldn’t control. That’s what Cee Cee counted on.
Everything about who and what her lover was had been shaped, if not created, within the crumbling estate. Jimmy Legere had rescued a near catatonic child from the swamps where he’d clung to the lifeless body of his mother and brought him through the iron gates to live and serve. The clever mobster had cared for him, had raised him in sheltering isolation to answer one voice—his.
On an evening such as this, she and Babineau had come calling to question Legere about a brutal murder in the city. The moment Max slipped out of the shadows at her unprotected back to ask who she was wearing on her shoes, they’d begun a sexually charged cat-and-mouse that continued until the night she’d returned investigating Legere’s death. The night Max realized that Jimmy’s affection had come at a terrible cost.
