City of the Dead Read online

  City Of The Dead

  Eileen Dreyer

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  Copyright © 2005, 2020 by Eileen Dreyer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  This book was previously published as Sinners and Saints.

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  eBook ISBN: 978-1-64457-184-2

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  The New Orleans Neighborhood Biweekly

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Before You Go…

  With a Vengeance

  Also by Eileen Dreyer

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To Rick, who believed through four long years of college tuition without help. There’s nothing big enough I can ever give you back.

  No man becomes depraved in a single day.

  JUVENAL

  Author’s Note

  Believe it or not, City of the Dead was written before we ever heard of Hurricane Katrina. In fact, it premiered as SINNERS AND SAINTS three days before Katrina hit. I can’t make stuff like that up. This is my love poem to the New Orleans that existed before the storm, and the New Orleans that has been coming back since. There is no place in the world like it

  The New Orleans Neighborhood Biweekly

  Bobby’s Byline

  June 2—Eddie Dupre had an uninvited guest at his hurricane party last night. As you all know, Eddie always puts on the finest celebration to kick off the beginning of hurricane season. There was a parade down Bourbon over to Royal—where Eddie lives in the Faubourg Marigny—with music, dancing, and appropriate costumes (Eddie was luminous as Dorothy Lamour).

  Unfortunately, the party mood was soured when it was discovered that a nun lying passed out in the alley behind Eddie’s yard not only wasn’t a partygoer, she wasn’t passed out. She was dead, with her face obliterated, possibly by a shotgun blast. Too, too gruesome.

  Now she might not even have been a nun, but we’ll never know, will we? It seems that by the time Eddie got back to the site with the police, the holy woman had vanished…along with any evidence she’d ever been there.

  Here’s the best part, though, babies. It seems that when she went to her last reward, our good sister was wearing a near-flawless seven-carat emerald and diamond ring. Sure redefines those vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Don’t you just want to know what kind of obedience earns you sparklies like that?

  One

  2005 — St. Louis, Missouri

  Omens come in all sizes. Hair standing up at the back of the neck. Crows on a telephone wire. Shapes in a cloud or a chill in the wind. A hundred innocuous things designated by tradition or superstition, and a thousand more kept in a personal lexicon.

  Chastity Byrnes carried around quite a full lexicon of her own. Not just the regular omens handed down from generation to generation of Irishwomen, like birds in the house meaning death, or uncovered mirrors at a funeral meaning death, or any of the other myriad Irish omens meaning death. Chastity embraced a plethora of personal portents inexplicable to anyone but her.

  Chastity was a trauma nurse, and only ballplayers and actors were more superstitious. So in addition to the usual signs of doom, Chastity dreaded quiet shifts, the words “I think something’s wrong,” and holidays.

  And the number three. Chastity absolutely loathed the number three. Everything happened in threes, from births to deaths to every disaster in between.

  Like the omens Chastity received that hot June day in St. Louis. She should never have ignored them. After all, Chastity paid more attention to her omens than to her bank balance. She lived by Murphy’s Law as if it were the first commandment. But that hot, sultry summer day, even though she knew better, she blew off those three omens as if they were parking tickets.

  To be fair, they weren’t easy omens to recognize, like a black cat or the hoot of an owl. They were more like odd things that made a person want to look over her shoulder.

  The chaos theory.

  A phone call from a brother-in-law she didn’t know she had.

  Lake Pontchartrain.

  Innocuous in themselves, but each of them sent a skittering of unease down Chastity’s back that should have had her keeping a wary eye out for trouble where there seemed to be none.

  Three omens.

  Well, maybe four. But the fourth could have just been Chastity’s bad luck. On the way in to work that day, Chastity lost her driver’s license. She didn’t consider it an omen at the time. More a “shit happens” kind of thing. But if it hadn’t happened, she never would have heard about the chaos theory, and Chastity would always believe if she’d missed that, nothing else would have followed.

  The cop who stopped her was a buddy. All cops in town were buddies of trauma nurses. But he wasn’t smiling when he strolled up to the window of her hot red Mini Cooper.

  “Not that I’m not impressed, Chaz,” he said, an eyebrow raised at the speeds she managed. “But this is your third warning. In three weeks.” There was that number again. “And there are all those unpaid parking violations….”

  Chastity ended up locking her car at the side of the highway and riding to work in a police cruiser, thirty minutes late for her shift. Which put her smack in the middle of a trauma code just in time to hear the chaos theory.

  She’d been scheduled to work triage that day. She got bumped instead to Trauma Team One. Not that she minded. Chastity had joined the staff at St. Michael’s mainly for the trauma. Particularly the kind of trauma they saw at St. Michael’s.

  Chastity wasn’t just a trauma nurse anymore. She was one of two new forensic nurse liaisons at St. Michael’s. It was her job not only to save patients but preserve any viable forensic evidence that might prove a possible criminal or civil case. She made sure abuse victims didn’t fall through the cracks, rape victims got better treatment from the hospital tha
n they did from their attackers, and unknown patients were identified. She helped police and hospital personnel work more efficiently together.

  So she wasn’t surprised when she didn’t even get a chance to reach her locker before she got yanked into Trauma Room One to help resuscitate a sixteen-year-old gunshot wound victim.

  “About time you showed up,” one of the nurses said from where she was pumping in fluids.

  The room was already in turmoil, half a dozen staff members spinning and colliding around the room like pinballs. Blood oozed over the side of the table, and paper and sterile wrappings littered the floor. The patient had been shot in the upper abdomen. He’d already been paralyzed and intubated, x-rayed, ultrasounded, and evaluated. A forest of lines snaked from chest, arms, throat, and penis, and blood was being recycled from his chest. The staff had probably been working on him for about five minutes.

  “You’re lucky to have me at all,” Chastity assured them all, slipping booties over her brand-new magenta tennis shoes. “I was supposed to be on crowd control out front today.”

  “Are those uniform?” Moshika Williams asked from her position by the boy’s left chest. Moshika Williams was the trauma doc in charge. A seriously brilliant trauma fellow, she stood square and solid, and ran a code like a traffic cop on speed.

  Chastity lifted a foot free of the sticky mess on the floor and spread her magenta-clad arms. “They match my new scrubs.”

  “Which are very…bright.”

  “Bright,” Chastity agreed with a nod as she finished gowning up. “Exactly. It all reflects my new attitude.”

  “Your forensic attitude?”

  “My happy attitude. My life is in harmony…well, except for the need to find a ride to work tomorrow. But otherwise, I am now in balance. Harmony, Moshika. It’s the word of the day.”

  “Not for Willy here. His clothes are on the counter, by the way. We didn’t even cut ’em through the bullet hole this time.”

  “I’m very proud of you all. You’ve saved the crime lab untold grief. Now, if you just haven’t sneezed on everything….”

  Gowned, gloved, and shielded, Chastity pulled out her camera and her swabs, her rulers, and her paper bags to save the evidence, which hadn’t already been washed away in the attempt to save Willy’s life.

  Moshika bent over the chest tube she was preparing to insert. “And you’re in time to hear what I just learned.”

  Chastity wasn’t the only one in the room who groaned. The only disadvantage to working with Moshika was the method she used to keep herself calm in a crisis. Some people whistled. Some cracked knuckles or told jokes. Moshika lectured. She shared all the tidbits of random scientific information she’d been stuffing into her overheated brain as if anybody hip-deep in blood and vomit really wanted to know the latest guess about what the hell a quark was.

  This time what she wanted to share with the class was the chaos theory. Bent over her patient, she waved a scalpel in Chastity’s direction. “You missed the first part of this, Chaz.”

  “I’ll get the notes later. Everybody smile.”

  Everybody smiled. Chastity snapped shots of the slightly elliptical bullet hole just below the kid’s sternum, and especially the soot ring and powder stippling that surrounded it. Willy had been capped at very close range.

  “Well, it’s interesting,” Moshika assured her, bending back to her work. “The chaos theory says that no experimental result can be perfectly replicated. There is always a variable that can’t be duplicated.”

  Chastity nodded as if she understood and hummed Brigadoon as she measured and swabbed and sealed. It was easier that way. Chastity hummed show tunes to keep herself focused. The fact that they drowned out Moshika’s lectures was just a fringe benefit.

  But then Moshika went and ruined it all. Her fingers probing the patient’s chest for the tube placement, she looked straight at Chastity with those huge, bright black eyes of hers and said, “Now here’s the part you should find most interesting. Especially considering your new attitude. It seems that according to chaos theory, just at the moment when a system attains its most perfect harmony, that’s when it’s really just about to spin out of control.”

  The hair literally stood up on the back of Chastity’s neck. Right in the middle of a trauma code, she stumbled to a dead halt. “What the hell did you have to say that for?” she demanded.

  Moshika, too busy with inter-costal spaces, didn’t hear. But the damage had already been done. She’d said it, hadn’t she? She’d said it to Chastity, who had told Moshika no more than three minutes ago that life had finally found a certain harmony.

  An odd thing to contemplate during a trauma code, certainly, but the truth was that Chastity was at her happiest during trauma codes. She loved action, she loved the rush of adrenaline, she loved the challenge of forensics. She loved living on the edge, and she could safely do that within the oddly precise ritual of a trauma code. Chastity was practicing at the forefront of twenty-first-century nursing, and she loved it.

  Even knowing she was to be separated from her lovely little car for a bit, until Moshika had opened her interfering mouth, Chastity had been happy.

  Instinctively she reached a free hand into her lab coat pocket, where along with pens and penlights and laminated trauma scale cards, she always kept a small velvet drawstring bag. She wrapped her fingers around it for a minute, just for the feel of it. Just to make sure it was still there.

  “Chastity?”

  She could have used a better name, of course. Chastity was, after all, such a cosmic joke. Her mother had named her daughters Faith, Hope, and Chastity.

  Not Charity.

  Chastity.

  As if Mary Rose Byrnes had either had an odd sense of prescience or a catastrophic need for denial.

  “Chastity, there’s a call for you.”

  Chastity looked up to see the new secretary leaning in the doorway, her focus more on the disaster in the room than on the recipient of her message. No big surprise. The secretary was new, and it took a while to get used to the ambience of the place. The patient lay naked and alien-looking in the midst of bedlam. The air was rank with the smell of blood and bowels. Machines crouched at each corner of the cart, and staffers shuffled around like bumper cars in an attempt to get Willie safely to surgery before his heart gave out along with his liver and left lung.

  Chastity was now helping the team do that very thing. She’d collected all the evidence she could. She’d taped the boy’s hands inside brown paper bags to protect defensive or blowback evidence, and she’d collected photos and personal effects. While everybody else ran Willie Anderson to CT-Scan and then to OR, Chastity would instead pass her information and her specially taped bags to the police.

  “There’s a call for you,” the secretary repeated, her lips pursed into a moue of distaste at the wreckage in the room.

  “I’ll call them back later, Kim,” Chastity answered as she dropped an empty IV bag onto the littered floor and stretched across two techs and the patient to change EKG leads.

  “Call her Chaz,” Moshika told the secretary as she finished sewing in the chest tube. “Gives her stature.”

  “Makes her sound like a made man,” a paramedic snorted.

  Moshika laughed, her big horn-rimmed glasses glinting in the fluorescence. “Considering the fact that she looks like Peter Pan, it couldn’t hurt.”

  So she still shopped for her jeans in the boys’ department, Chastity thought. Big deal. So she wore her hair in one of those cheesy pixie cuts, and it happened to be blond. It was easier that way. She was in harmony, damn it.

  She had a boxer puppy named Lilly and a flat in south St. Louis painted like a Mexican cantina. She had friends she socialized with regularly, enough money to support her habits, and a fast little car to give her the illusion of control. No surprises, no problems, no new traumas that woke her up any more than the old traumas did. She had some peace within herself, as long as she kept to her comfortable rituals and safe
ty zones.

  She had balance.

  She was happy.

  Which, as any Irishwoman knew, spelled disaster. The chaos theory was just the scientific spin on that old, unimpeachable Irish truth that good things never lasted.

  “I’ll still call ’em back,” Chastity said.

  “It’s long distance,” Kim insisted. “From New Orleans. He said it’s a matter of life and death.”

  For a second, everyone in the room stopped and looked at her.

  “Yeah, okay,” the secretary said, blushing, because she was still that new. “But he says he’s your brother-in-law.”

  Chastity only hesitated for a second before pulling up a new Lactated Ringers IV bag to hang. “Really? I didn’t know I had a brother-in-law.”

  “And your sister’s missing?”

  Another lurch nobody saw. “As opposed to the last ten years she’s been missing?”

  Again there was a brief silence. But then, Chastity wasn’t going to explain that, either. Especially when her heart was suddenly pounding, and her hands had gone sweaty.

  Balance. Harmony.

  Shit.

  Chastity made another grab for the bag in her pocket. Soft velvet wrapped around tumbled hard edges. Reassurance. Comfort.

  “You have a sister?” Moshika asked, sounding a bit affronted.

  Chastity didn’t face her friend. “I never said I didn’t.”