Cry Wolf

by Tami Hoag

  Jack prowled the grounds of L'Amour, too restless to be hemmed in by walls. He hadn't slept in . . . what? Two days? He'd lost track of time, lost track of everything but thoughts of death and worthiness . . . and Laurel. He couldn't get her out of his mind. Such indomitable honor, so much courage. He couldn't help caring about her. She was too pure, too brave, too good.

  Too good for the like of you, T-Jack . . .

  Dieu, what irony, as twisted as a lover's knot, that the most caring thing he could do for her would be not to care about her at all. Everything he touched died. Everything he wanted withered just within his grasp. He had no right to take her as part of his penance for other sins.

  He walked down to the bank of the bayou and stood in the deep moon shadows of the live oak, staring out at the glassy water, the pirogue that bobbed at the end of the dock. The night sang around him, a chorus of frog song and insects in between thundershowers. A breeze teased the ends of the moss that hung down from the branches, and they swayed heavily, like ropes on the gallows.

  He could see Evie's face hanging there in front of him, pale and pretty even in death, her beautiful dark eyes full of accusation and anger and disappointment. Evie, so trusting, so loving. He had loved her so carelessly, had taken so casually the precious gift she had made of her heart. Shallow, selfish bastard that he was, he had taken all she offered as if it were his due, part of the spoils of his success.

  The guilt that weighed on him was heavier than anything in this world. It pressed down on him from above, in on him from all sides. He jerked around in a circle, looking for an escape route and finding none. He tried to back away, but came up against the rough trunk of the live oak, the bark biting into his back through the thin fabric of his T-shirt as the guilt pressed in on him.

  Tipping his head back, he closed his eyes tight against the pain, and scalding tears trickled in a stream across his temples and into his hair. There were no adjectives in his writer's mind to describe the anguish, no words for the way it raked through his heart.

  “Bon Dieu, Evangeline, sa me fait de le pain. Sa me fait de le pain.”

  He whispered the words over and over, a hoarse, broken chant for forgiveness, a mantra for relief from the terrible weight of his remorse. But he was granted no pardon. He knew he deserved none, because no matter how sorry he was, Evie would always be dead. And all the dreams she had dreamed would be dead. And all the babies she had planned to love would never be at all.

  Because of him.

  “Sa me fait de le pain,” he mumbled, his face contorting against the pain. He turned into the trunk of the tree and pressed his cheek against the corrugated surface, clinging to the tree as regret wrung tears from him with merciless hands.

  Sweet, sweet Evie, his wife.

  Sweet, sweet Annie, like family.

  Sweet, sweet Laurel . . .

  Bad Jack Boudreaux. Never good enough. Not worthy of love, never meant for a family. Never anything a decent woman should want. A bastard, a cad, a killer.

  What a cruel lie to think he could have anything. Better not to care at all than watch something so precious, something so deeply desired, slip through his grasp like smoke, like a magician's trick—there and gone in a heartbeat.

  As fragile as life—there and gone in a heartbeat.

  Whining softly with concern, Huey padded up to him and nosed the hand that hung limp at his side, sniffing for trouble or a treat. The dog's rough pink tongue slid along his palm hesitantly, offering comfort and sympathy, and Jack pulled away.

  “Get outta here,” he growled, swinging an arm at the dog.

  The hound scuttled back clumsily, ears cocked, his head tilted in a quizzical expression. He woofed softly, falling into a play-bow and wagging his slender wand of a tail.

  “Get outta here!” Jack roared.

  All the anger and hurt that had gathered into a hard ball inside him burst like a nova and sent a hot, white rage through him. It tore out of him in a wild cry, and he lashed out at the dog, the toe of his boot just grazing Huey's rib cage. The dog let out a yelp of betrayal and fright, and ran ten feet away to stand cowering, looking at Jack with his mismatched eyes as hurt and innocent as a child's.

  “Get the hell away from me!” Jack snapped. “I don' have a dog! I don' have a dog,” he repeated, the adrenaline spent, his voice a ragged whisper. “I don' have nothin'.”

  And he turned and walked away from the hound, from L'Amour, and disappeared into the shadows of the night.

  Chapter

  Twenty

  Thunder rolls like distant cannon fire. Clouds scud across the night sky like tattered wisps of smoke. The battlefield runs red.

  The captive taunts and screams in the night in the swamp. Agony like a wild euphoria fills the air with electricity and the sweet, cloying scent of blood. Desperation and hate. Need and desire. Emotions twist and tear apart, overwhelming both captive and captor. The walls of the shack tremble with the terrible power of dark needs unleashed in the predator and in the prey lashed to the bed.

  More than the hunter had bargained for. Madness strips away control, pulls even the soulless over its edge and into the maelstrom.

  Outside, the wind rips through the trees, lays flat the slender stalks that grow in the shallows. The creatures of the night bolt and shy, heads turning, eyes wide, nostrils scenting the air as they turn toward the eye of a vortex of violence. The moon punches a hole in the blackness, but the thunder rolls nearer, and lightning fractures the sky like cracks in glass.

  The storm comes. Without. Within. Savage and wild. Screaming. Slashing. Rain pelts the bayou and tears at tender growth. Blood spatters walls, prey, and predator. The silk tightens. The end rushes up from the black depths of hell. The moment explodes with power unimagined. With triumph, with defeat, with release from torment—torment from within and without.

  The wind dies. The storm wanes. The need ebbs. Control settles in place like dust. Calm returns, and logic with it.

  Another dead whore for the unsuspecting to find. Another crime committed to go unsolved. The predator smiles in the blood-drenched night. An adversary might suspect, but none will believe her.

  Laurel didn't awaken, she was torn from sleep. In the middle of a dark, disturbing dream, cold, frantic hands reached into her psyche and pulled her out of one realm of existence and into another. She emerged gasping for air, like a swimmer breaking the surface after a long dive in frigid waters. The air around her was warm and moist, a pocket of heat and humidity that had sucked in through the French doors to escape the storm. The room was dark and still, a stillness that held something other than simple quiet. Loss. She felt alone in a way she had never felt before in her life, and her thoughts turned automatically toward Savannah. She had never been alone; she had always had Savannah.

  Heart bumping hard against her breastbone, she fought to untangle her legs from the sheet and raced out onto the balcony in nothing but the camisole and slip she had fallen asleep wearing. Down the corridor she ran to the set of doors that opened into her sister's room. She fumbled with the latch and threw them back, stumbling as she pitched herself into the bedroom.

  The stillness lingered here, too, hanging like a shroud. An unseen hand closed around Laurel's throat as she looked around the room. The bed was unmade, empty, the covers left in a drift, pillows strewn everywhere. It looked the same as the last time she had seen it. She tried to swallow the fear that crowded her tonsils and turned slowly, taking in the jumble of jars and pots and bottles on the dressing table, the discarded clothes draped over chairs and abandoned on the floor. There was no way of telling when last Savannah had occupied the room.

  A chill raced over her and seeped bone-deep into her. Tears pooled in her eyes. She twisted her hands together, pacing beside the bed. “Don't be stupid, Laurel,” she muttered, her voice cutting and harsh. “Savannah has slept elsewhere more times than you can count. Just because she isn't here tonight—that doesn't mean anything. She's with a lover, that's all.”
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br />   To distract herself, she tried to think of which one it might be. Ronnie Peltier with his jackhammer penis. Taureau Hebert—the man Savannah had fought over with Annie. Jimmy Lee Baldwin—who preached morals and played bondage games. Conroy Cooper—whose invalid wife had been terrorized only the night before.

  The tag lines that accompanied each name swarmed in Laurel's mind like gnats. She was trained to add up facts as an accountant does a row of figures. She was trained to put puzzle pieces together in her sleep. Tonight she wanted to do neither. The subtotal of the column, the picture that began to take shape—both gave an answer she didn't want to know.

  Standing beside the bed, she leaned over and gathered up Savannah's champagne silk robe, bringing the elegant fabric to her cheek. Cool, soft as a whisper, smelling of Obsession. She didn't want to think that Savannah was ill. She didn't want to face the truth that the sister who had mothered her and shielded her had declined to this point without her doing anything but judging. How many times had she wished Savannah would block out the past, rise above it, get beyond what Ross Leighton had done to her? While Laurel herself had lived to atone for that same past, ignoring her martyrdom, calling it a career.

  Tears spilled across the silk, and she wished with all her heart her sister would walk through the door so she could go into Savannah's arms and beg her forgiveness. But no one came through the door. Only the empty room heard her cry.

  Drained, she tossed the robe back on the rumpled bed and wandered back out onto the balcony. The latest fit of rain had passed, leaving everything dripping. Moonlight caught on droplets, turning them to diamonds. The wind rustled restlessly in the trees. Laurel curled an arm around the pillar outside her own room and leaned against it, her gaze traveling the distance to L'Amour.

  Some people said it was haunted. She wondered if the ghosts that haunted Jack had anything to do with the history of the house, or if they were his own, brought here with him from Texas.

  He'd been at the heart of the Sweetwater incident, Vivian had said. Sweetwater was a Houston subdivision built by developers that touted the good life, a place to raise families. A little piece of heaven that backed onto a little piece of hell. Illegally buried in the field beyond, drums of chemical waste poisoned the ground. Laurel hadn't followed the case except in snatches caught on the nightly news. She had been wrapped up in legal battles of her own. She remembered the barrels had been almost impossible to trace. The trail had led from dummy company to dummy company.

  Jack had unraveled the snare for the feds. He was the best man for the job, she supposed, because, if Vivian's information was correct, he had been the one to lay the paper trail away from Tristar. If she hadn't known him, she would have called him a dozen names. Ruthless, godless, greedy bastard would have been one of the nicer ones. But she did know him. She knew he had clawed his way up through the ranks because he thought he needed to prove himself. What must it have done to him to reach the peak only to find out he was on the wrong mountain? He said he had crashed and burned and taken the company down with him.

  And his wife?

  The word lay bitter on Laurel's tongue. She might have said she didn't want him, didn't want any kind of a lasting relationship, but the bald truth was she didn't want to think of his loving someone else.

  But had he loved her, or had he killed her?

  A light winked on in one of the second-story windows of L'Amour, faint, as if it came from a room within the depths of the house. Faint, yet it pulled at her like a beacon. She needed to know who he really was. Which Jack stood behind the final facade? The shark, the rogue, the man who claimed he didn't care about anyone but himself, or the man who had held her and offered her comfort, who had come to her rescue, who had distracted her from problems and fears?

  She couldn't see him as a killer. Killers didn't warn potential victims away or walk them home to keep them safe. No, “homicidal” wasn't a word she could apply to Jack. Troubled. Angry. Wounded.

  Wounded. The word struck a chord inside her. The light in the old house beckoned.

  Jack climbed the stairs to the second floor, bone tired, his body aching, begging for sleep. But he knew his mind would never grant the wish. Not tonight. Ignoring the rustlings of mice in a pile of fallen wallpaper down the hall, he shuffled into his bedroom and flicked on the lamp that perched on his desk a level above the old black Underwood typewriter. A white page glared up at him, reminding him not of deadlines or plot twists, but of Jimmy Lee Baldwin. Jimmy Lee standing above his devoted followers, asking them where demented minds get the inspiration to kill.

  Their eyes meet in the dim light of the woods. Predator and prey. Recognition sparks. Realization dawns. Awareness arcs between them. Strange needs commingle. Dark desires intertwine. It is understood that the game will end in death. She opens her arms to welcome it, to end the torment that has haunted her life.

  A slim silver blade gleams in the dark. . . .

  What followed was death, presented in a way that was disturbingly seductive, poetically artistic, gruesome and graphic, and frightening as hell.

  That was his job—to frighten people, to keep them awake nights and tighten their nerves until every sound heard in a lonely house held the potential for unspeakable terror. People called it entertainment, not inspiration. He wouldn't think otherwise. To believe it inspired meant to take responsibility, and everybody knew Jack Boudreaux didn't take responsibility for anyone or anything.

  “They say she never met him here.”

  Jack's head came up, and he looked toward the door, not entirely certain what he was seeing was real. Laurel stood just outside the chipped white door frame, against a background of black. A pale portrait of a woman in a flowing skirt painted with old cabbage roses, a blue cotton blouse with the tails hanging down. She was a vision, an angel, something he should never have touched. Better to have longed from a distance and had her only in his imagination. No one could take that away.

  “Madame Deveraux,” she said and took a step nearer. “Her wealthy, married lover, August Chapin, built this place for her. Everyone in the parish knew. He flaunted his obsession for her, much to the shame of his poor wife.”

  Jack found his voice with an effort. “She never met him here?”

  “Mr. Chapin, yes. The man she truly loved, no.” She walked into the room slowly, lingering by the tall French doors, out of the glow of the desk light. “She loved a man named Antoine Gallant. A no-account Cajun trapper. He refused to set foot in the house Chapin built to house her as a whore. They met in secret in a cabin in the swamp.

  “Of course, they were found out. His pride smarting sorely, Chapin challenged Gallant to a duel, which he meant to win by tampering with the pistols. Madame Deveraux learned of the plot just minutes before the duel was to take place. She rushed to warn her love, but the men had already stepped off the distance and had turned to take aim. In order to save Antoine, she hurled herself in front of him and took Chapin's shot herself. She died in Antoine's arms.”

  She wandered to the old rolltop desk and stood behind it with her hands resting on the high back. Her expression was somber, searching as she slowly scanned the room with her eyes. “I grew up hearing her spirit still haunted this house.”

  Jack shrugged, avoiding the penetrating stare she turned on him. “I haven't seen her.”

  “Well,” she murmured, “you have ghosts of your own.”

  Oui. More than you know, angel.

  “Someone mentioned Sweetwater today,” Laurel said, treading carefully. “You were Tristar's man, weren't you?”

  He smiled bitterly and took a bow, backing away from the desk. “C'est vrai, you got it in one, sugar. Jack Boudreaux, star shyster. Wanna bury some poison and get away with it? I'm your man. I can tie the trail in a Gordian knot that loops around and around, and twists and doubles back and dead-ends. Holding companies, dummy corporations, the works.” He jammed his hands at the waist of his jeans and stared up at the intricate plasterwork medallion on the ceili
ng, marveling not at it but at his own past life. “I was so clever, so bright. Working my way up and up, never caring who I stepped on as I climbed that ladder. The end always justified the means, you know.”

  “In the end, you brought them down.”

  One dark brow curving, he pinned her with a look. “And you think that makes me a hero? If I set houses on fire, then put the fires out after the people inside had all burned, would I be a hero?”

  “That would depend on your motives and intent.”

  “My motives were selfish,” he said harshly, pacing back and forth along the worn ruby rug. “I wanted to be punished. I wanted everyone associated with me to be punished. For what I did.”

  “To the people in Sweetwater?” she asked cautiously, studying him from beneath the shield of her lashes.

  He halted, watching her intently out of the corner of his eye, old instincts scenting a trap. “Where are you trying to lead me, counselor?” he asked, his voice a low, dangerous purr. Slowly, he moved toward her, his gait deceptively lazy, his gaze as hard as granite behind a devil's smile, one hand raised to wag a finger in warning. “What kind of game are you playin', 'tite chatte?”

  Laurel curled her fingers into the fabric of her skirt and faced him squarely, her face carefully blank. “I don't play games.”

  Jack barked a laugh. “You're a lawyer. You're trained to play games. Don't try to fool me, sugar. You're swimmin' with a big shark now. I know every trick there is.”

  He stopped within inches of her, leaning down, meeting her at her level, his nose almost touching hers. In the soft lamplight his eyes sparkled like onyx, hard and fathomless.

  “Why don' you just ask me?” he whispered, his whiskey-hoarse voice cutting across her nerve endings like a rasp. “Did you kill her, Jack? Did you kill your wife?”