City of the Dead Read online

  “No. You never gave me an ax.”

  “Probably because I didn’t want to spend my night in the waiting room at the city lockup. You really kill your sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “You did not. I know you better’n that.”

  “But I did. I killed Hope.”

  She’d just wanted to go to the movies. It had been five days since her father had disappeared, handcuffed and convicted, into the back of the county courthouse. Five days since her mother had told her that her job now was to watch over Hope, since she was the one who had made her sister get up and humiliate herself in public. But Chastity had watched over Hope her whole life, and she was tired. She was sixteen, and she wanted to go to a movie.

  “Hope was an artist,” Chastity said, slumping back onto one of the stairs. “Did I tell you that?”

  Kareena eased down next to her. “You didn’t tell me anything.”

  Chastity stared down at the harsh angles and shadows of the stairs. “Watercolors. She painted shorelines. Bright blue skies and wispy clouds. Children playing in the sand.” Chastity smiled, thinking of the painting in her bedroom. “It sounds sappy as hell, but they were beautiful. They were who she wanted to be.”

  Kareena’s voice was unbearably gentle. “What happened?”

  Chastity shook her head. “My father happened. Hope was the daughter who gained the weight. Another classic behavior. She was also suicidal and silent, but especially after the trial. After she stood up and told the world what her father had done to her.”

  She smelled it the minute she stepped into that terrible house. Bleach and lavender. And something worse. Something that reeked of devastation.

  “Hope? Hope, where are you?”

  Hope was in the still, red water. Staring, her wrists weeping the last of her blood and her hair floatmg like lank seaweed.

  When she heard the lapping water and the laughter in her dreams, that was what she saw.

  “I gave up,” Chastity said. “I just couldn’t take it anymore, and I gave up.”

  “On Hope?”

  “It was my responsibility to watch her. It was my job to make sure she lived through the night.”

  “And she didn’t.”

  “I went to a movie. She climbed into the bathtub and slit her wrists.”

  Chastity laughed again, a harsh sound that echoed in the stairwell. “In the bathtub, for God’s sake.”

  “Did you know she was gonna do it when you left?”

  Chastity looked over to see Kareena watching her. “You know something? I’m not sure.”

  It was an example of how good a nurse Kareena was. She didn’t try and hold Chastity. She just laid a hand on her arm, where it wouldn’t intrude. “I think you’ve done your time, girl.”

  Chastity’s smile was terrible. “You never do enough time for something like that, Kareena.”

  “And your momma left right after that?”

  “Ten days later.”

  Kareena just shook her head. “And you were sixteen. You sure had more than your share, that’s for sure.”

  Chastity sat on that stair, the cold of concrete seeping through the silk dress. She tasted her failure against her tongue and it was familiar. Guilt and regret and loss. Fury and frustration, and Max had recognized it.

  No, she knew. He’d relied on it.

  “So you think Max, he knew that about you?” Kareena asked, as if she’d been sitting inside Chastity’s head.

  They both looked back up the stairs. “Yeah, I do. And I think he’s yanking my chain with it to distract me. He’s done it before.”

  “Why?”

  Chastity sucked in a breath. “I wish I knew.”

  Kareena nodded. “You think Max, he involved in this? Like the murders and shit?”

  Chastity took her time, really thinking about it. “No. You didn’t see his face that day the cops came. He was literally gray with shock. But I’m beginning to think that there’s something going on he doesn’t want us to know about that might be important.”

  That seemed to be all Kareena needed to hear. Climbing to her feet, she held out a hand for Chastity. “Then we gotta go. We gotta find out about that jewelry, and then I’ll go talk to those girls at Tulane again.

  Somethin’ goin’ on with a surgeon who’s that popular, somebody’s got to know about it.”

  Chastity gingerly climbed to her feet. “Thanks, Kareena. I really appreciate it.”

  “Hell, girl. Don’t thank me. This is the most fun Kareena’s had since Mardi Gras.”

  They were walking out of the building when Chastity’s phone rang. “Yes?”

  “This is Detective Gilchrist.”

  Finally, she thought. “Yes, Detective.”

  “I wanted you to know, Ms. Byrnes. You were right.”

  For a second, Chastity couldn’t focus. “About what?”

  He sounded tired. “Lloyd Burgard. It seems he has a passion for digital photography.”

  Cameras. Could that be the camera Faith had been afraid of? Had Lloyd caught her doing something she was afraid to be seen doing? Could it be that easy?

  “Yes?”

  “His sister came to us. It seems Lloyd took a picture of Susan Reeves’s body.”

  The air seemed to leave Chastity’s lungs. “I beg your pardon?”

  “At Saint Roch’s. We’re just about to serve a search warrant for his house and car. I thought you should know.”

  “Lloyd Burgard was at Saint Roch’s?” she demanded. “I never saw him.”

  “Seems a lot of people didn’t see a lot of things, Ms. Byrnes.”

  “And you think he killed her? That somehow he found out we were going to meet her there and he killed her instead?”

  “Or he followed her from her home. He’s been pretty fixated on the people at that clinic.”

  No, Chastity thought. No, it didn’t feel right. Schizophrenics stayed locked into predictable patterns. This didn’t fit.

  “No,” she said. “He didn’t kill her.”

  “No?” the detective echoed, much less congenially.

  Chastity closed her eyes and pulled up Lloyd in his business suit and his complex, complete delusion. She could see the flash of purple as it slid along the blade of that knife, and her stomach dropped all over again. “Crazies are pretty predictable, Detective. Their weapon has to do with the delusion, and the delusion just doesn’t change. If Lloyd killed Susan, I think he would have used a knife. Just like he tried to do on me.”

  “I’m just doing this as a courtesy, Ms. Byrnes,” Gilchrist reminded her.

  “And I appreciate it, Detective. I hope with all my heart that you find the pistol that killed Susan and the shotgun that killed Willow Tolliver. But you’re not going to find them with Lloyd.”

  “Ma’am, we still don’t have an ID.”

  “I know that, Detective. But I think I’m going to end up being right. And there’s something else. I have new information about my sister. Lloyd said he saw her last at New Life fertility center. I found out she was auctioning off her eggs for a pretty hefty sum there. But she only collected half her last payment and didn’t show up to complete the course.”

  There was a brief pause. “Ms. Byrnes…”

  She heard it in his voice. He fully expected to find Faith wherever Lloyd had dropped her. And Chastity didn’t blame him. She just didn’t want him to try and collect his arrests in one basket.

  “Answer me this, Detective. If my sister were just afraid of some crazy guy who’s harassing fertility clinics, why wouldn’t she just call the police?”

  The search warrant on Lloyd Burgard’s house and his sister’s car was served an hour later. The Fifth District handled it, but Tony Gilchrist invited himself along. He stood with Lillian Burgard by the front porch as computers were seized, clothing rifled, and drawers searched. He watched as they found hundreds of pictures of innocuous subjects significant only to Lloyd. Reams of yellow-lined paper stuffed into clipboards so Lloyd could set hi
s flight of ideas down in ink. Newspaper clippings and half-full medication bottles and a stuffed bear that calmed him at his worst.

  They found two other knives, tucked beneath Lloyd’s mattress, and a pair of pinking shears in his jacket pocket. They found no pistol. No shotgun. Nothing that tied him to the Susan Reeves killing except for a photo of her lying at the feet of Saint Roch.

  The coppers from the Fifth weren’t too bothered. They thought for sure they’d find something soon. They figured that as soon as Lloyd was sane enough to talk, they could get it out of him.

  Detective Anthony Gilchrist suddenly wasn’t so sure. What was worse, he had the terrible feeling that if Lloyd Burgard hadn’t killed Susan Wade Reeves, he might have seen who had.

  Eighteen

  The verdict was in on the rest of Faith’s jewelry.

  “Good copies,” Donald Lee Guidry proclaimed as he handed back the snarl of jewelry Chastity had given him.

  Donald Lee was a cousin of James’s. Not one of the rodeo clowns, he owned a store on Magazine that sold art, jewelry, and stationery in a tiny, crowded space between an antique store and a tattoo parlor. He took no more than five minutes to deliver his judgment.

  “Everything’s fake?” Chastity asked, by then aching and exhausted.

  She got a shrug from the pencil-thin, blond young man. “The good stuff. It’s well done, but definitely fake. Except for the pearls. Those are originals.”

  “How much would the cache have gone for, do you know?”

  “Without knowing the quality of the stones, no. Enough for a couple years’ good college education, though.”

  Which meant that by the time Chastity made it back to Max’s to finally change from her Faith clothes, she was not only aching and exhausted, but frustrated. She’d spent the day collecting pieces to her puzzle, and not one of them seemed to fit. She really needed a hot shower and a drink, not necessarily in that order. That was if she stayed awake long enough for either.

  With Kareena’s help, she changed in record time, rinsed her face and hands in the kitchen sink, and made it back out front in time to see James standing in the foyer, his phone to his ear.

  “Okay, Frankie, tomorrow,” he said. “And it better be good.”

  Conversation over, he flipped the phone closed and straightened.

  “Who was that?” Kareena asked.

  Chastity wanted to get out of there. She was so tired and sore she thrummed with it. But she found herself stalled by Max’s office, staring at it as if it were malevolent.

  “You okay?” James asked her.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I have a feeling I should get back into that room and finish looking around. There’s something in there I think Max didn’t want me to see.”

  Not that she wanted to. She wanted to know what she’d missed in that room, but she wasn’t sure she had the guts. After all, her father waited for her in there. And Max had made sure she knew that.

  He’d anticipated her reaction. He’d known she would be susceptible to that kind of manipulation. The subtle control of words and innuendos. He’d known perfectly well how to dominate a woman who had spent her life trying to come out from under the burden of abuse.

  “I wonder what kind of relationship Max had with his first wife,” Chastity mused out loud. “And what kind of relationship she had with her parents.”

  Kareena looked from Chastity to the closed door. “You hearin’ voices from in there?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m replaying a conversation from the other day. Susan Reeves said she didn’t think Arabella was up to Max’s weight. I think she was right. And that she wanted us to know.”

  “You think Max was abusing her?”

  Chastity shrugged. “I’m beginning to think that he’s far too enamored with the concept of control.”

  Kareena laughed. “Name me a big-ass surgeon who isn’t.”

  “He’s going to be home soon,” James reminded them both.

  Chastity nodded, still distracted. “Yeah. Okay. I’d rather find people to talk to on the other side of the river anyway.”

  “Funny you should mention that,” James said as he opened the front door. “That was Frankie Mae Savage on the phone just now.”

  That caught Chastity’s attention. “The cabdriver? What did she want?”

  “She says somebody’s going to talk to us tomorrow at three. We’re going to Bayou St. John.”

  Chastity blinked. “We’re going to a bayou to meet a voodoo queen? Isn’t that a bit colorful, even for here?”

  James’s smile was dry as dust. “Priestess, not queen.”

  “A real priestess wouldn’t use St. John,” Kareena huffed. “That’s just for the tourists now.”

  Chastity lifted an eyebrow. “They went there before?”

  “Favorite place for voodoo worship in the old days.”

  Chastity scowled. “I hope she’s not just entertaining this tourist. I really need to talk to her.”

  “Frankie takes her religion seriously,” James assured her. “This is just an easy place to meet.”

  “She say anything else?”

  “She said don’t do anything until we see her. Not anything.”

  Chastity couldn’t help but laugh. “Well, that’ll be easy. I can hardly walk, much less anything.”

  “In that case,” James said, “let’s blow this pop stand.”

  They blew.

  The next morning was the scheduled homicide meeting at Cold Case, where the Fifth District lieutenant would present the Susan Wade Reeves murder as one of his six for the week. Armed with the results of the search warrant served on Lloyd Burgard and the autopsy results Detective Dulane had shared on the floater in Jefferson Parish, Tony Gilchrist met Sergeant Obie Gaudet from Cold Case for breakfast at Mother’s beforehand to put in a few words.

  He still couldn’t claim a murder, but he had information, and Obie was the one whose name was on the Stanton file. He hoped Obie would help make sense of everything he had. He also hoped Obie could light a fire under the ass of the coroner’s office, which hadn’t so much as sent a preliminary report on Susan Reeves.

  He had Chastity Byrnes making tracks up his ass, and he had a nasty little niggle in his cop gut that said she might have something. He wanted somebody else to know. Especially since he’d just gone over everybody’s head and put Lloyd Burgard on suicide watch over at Charity, just in case he wasn’t the murderer the Fifth District thought he was.

  Not that he thought the Fifth District were bad cops. They were overwhelmed cops, overworked and understaffed. They would be perfectly happy to put the Reeves homicide in Lloyd Burgard’s basket so they could get back to the multiples that plagued them. Gilchrist just wasn’t so sure anymore that that was a good thing.

  Obie Gaudet was the best. A near legend on the force who’d trained Gilchrist in the arts himself, Obie was a twenty-year vet with coarse, near-blue-black skin, narrow eyes, and a wide nose made wider by altercations with suspects. Obie had a gravel voice from too much gin, bad breath from too many smokes, and a smile that made him look like a six-year-old. Obie listened better than a good whore.

  “So you got this woman missing, this other woman dressed like a nun in the swamp—”

  “She wasn’t dressed like a nun when she showed up in the swamp,” Gilchrist said, drawing geometries on his paper place mat.

  “But she was havin’ intimate relations with Saint Jude when they found her. And you don’t think it was consensual?”

  “In New Orleans? Who the hell knows?”

  Obie nodded. “Uh-huh. And a dead lesbian socialite dressed like a dead woman—”

  “In pearls.”

  Obie’s eyebrow rose. “She still had her pearls?”

  “Her purse and Cartier watch were gone. The pearls stayed. None of the stolen merchandise has surfaced.”

  Obie nodded. “And an attack on the woman asking about those women. And you don’t think the psycho had anything to do with it.”

/>   “With the last attack, yes. Everything else?” Gilchrist shrugged. “I don’t want them jumping to conclusions.”

  “You think this is all tied in.”

  Again Gilchrist shrugged. He spent a minute shoving eggs around an already greasy plate. “I think it should be considered.”

  Obie pulled out his third Camel of the morning and lit it. “Okay. Give it all to me again. Especially that part about how the Saints are stealin’ that boy’s soul. I just love that part.”

  And Gilchrist did while Obie listened, as still as a statue, the smoke floating from his wide nostrils. At the end, Obie nodded and stubbed out his cigarette in his coffee cup. “Interesting, all right. Makes you itch, right in that too-many-coincidences spot in your gut. I sure hope it isn’t as complicated as you think, though.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Obie grinned like a little boy. “Haven’t you heard? We got a hurricane comin’. It does, nobody be left in town to solve it.”

  They had a hurricane coming. It was the only news on James’s radio while they drove up to Bayou St. John. Bob, hovering somewhere near Cuba, had just gained Level 3 status, which meant he could tear down trees, roofs, and small buildings. There were hurricane watches out from Galveston to Biloxi, but the big news was that they’d finally determined where Bob’s most likely landfall would be.

  New Orleans.

  It just figured.

  He wasn’t due for three more days, but there were frontal lines full of tornadoes and heavy rain to precede him. As if Chastity weren’t having enough trouble breathing.

  She wanted to go home. She wanted to be safely back on dry land, where it didn’t flood, where her father couldn’t pop up and she didn’t see Hope in her sleep, where she didn’t have to face James with the memory of what she’d tried to do in his apartment.

  He hadn’t betrayed her once. Not by word or look did he remind her that she’d fallen so hard off the wagon she’d had a big bruise on her ass even before she’d fallen off those four-inch heels. Which only made it worse.

  She really had done so much better hiding in plain sight.