Calling the Dead, page 18
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sept sighed as she turned into the parking lot that ran behind the Café Du Monde and the shops beside it. With each block she passed she got angrier that they’d called her back to this place. Her skin crawled at the possibility the guy she was chasing had been here.
Lourdes stopped her at the steps that led up to the bench on the levee where Sept had taken Keegan earlier. “You need to know that it’s definitely our guy, and this one seems personal.” A flash of Tameka’s body made Sept peer up toward the line of benches. If he had the audacity to do that to someone here, they’d have to deal with a stack of bodies before she caught up with him. “Why do you think he’d pick this place?”
“I was here tonight with a date.”
“Here, as in the general vicinity?” Lourdes asked.
“What bench is the victim on?” Sept started the walk up, curious now as to what awaited her.
“The guy’s slumped over the first one on the right.”
“Then let me rephrase. I was here with a date on that particular bench.” The area around the bench was roped off, and Bruce was doing a good job of keeping everyone on the other side of it. The two officers who’d called it in were on the other end, talking to the group of visiting police that had wandered over from the camp.
The guy was slumped over the bench, one of his arms dangling over the top swaying in the slight breeze. When Sept shone her light she noticed a small pool of blood on the wood slats. However, the most interesting thing about the scene wasn’t the familiar shepherd’s hook finger-painted in blood, but the number seven with a line drawn through it on the man’s forehead.
“You think it’s the number of kills?” Bruce asked Sept as she carefully scanned the body from head to toe.
“Only if we missed some bodies, and considering where we found the last one that’s possible, but this one is probably a warning to me.”
“How do you figure?”
“Sept…it’s the number seven in French,” Lourdes told Bruce.
“Shit, you probably think I’m an idiot, but it’s been a long day.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Sept shone her light on the man’s feet, which were soles up with just the toes hitting the ground. “Who found him?”
“We lucked out,” the primary officer who’d responded said. “A group of highway patrolmen from Illinois found him, since this is their usual jogging route.”
“When George and Alex get here, make sure they take a picture of this guy so one of you can drive it over to central lockup. I was out here earlier and had to call in two punks looking for an easy score.”
“What’s that got to do with this guy?” Nathan asked. He’d jogged up and was still breathing hard.
“They’re all wearing the same jacket. If it’s gang-related I don’t recognize the colors, but I’m not working the streets searching these guys out. Some new blood’s come to town after the storm, trying to carve out their piece of the action. Maybe that’s all this is, but like I told Lourdes, I doubt it.” Sept continued to look for any other markings on the body.
“You didn’t see this guy earlier?” Nathan asked.
“The two guys I had taken downtown were only armed with knives, so maybe this guy was their backup. But when he saw me draw my weapon he hung back, not wanting to get one of his friends shot.”
Nathan put on a pair of gloves he dug out of his pocket and felt along the guy’s waistband. “If this one had a gun or knife, it’s gone now.”
“That means he probably didn’t have either one.”
“The killer might have taken it as a souvenir,” Nathan said.
“Our guy’s not a tourist, and this was quick and unplanned.”
Nathan moved to the back pocket of the loose jeans and pulled out a wallet. “Take me through it, then.”
“Our guy was sitting here and this poor bastard walked up for some reason and got stabbed,” Sept said, and accepted the wallet and opened it in search of ID.
“Did he speak and tell you what happened when you first got here or something?”
“Put your detective hat on, Nathan, and take in the scene.” Sept spoke softly so as to not embarrass him. “When you walk up to something like this, you immediately ask yourself how this guy got dead. What happened, where was he standing, how far away was the killer, and what was he killed with? You try to answer as many of the questions on your mental list as you can here so you spend less time chasing down the answers.”
“He got stabbed.”
They picked the body up gently, with help from Sept, to check if that was the right answer to the first question.
“If he landed like this, he had to have been standing close to the bench to fall forward at that awkward angle.” Nathan answered the second question Sept had posed, and she nodded. “Like in Donovan’s scene, our perp had to have been standing close to get a kill in one shot, and he took the time to write a number seven on his forehead. What’s that about?”
“I brought Keegan here earlier to watch the sunset and have a glass of wine. We talked for an hour before we left to go to her house for dinner.”
“Here as in this park?” Nathan pointed to the ground.
“Here as on this bench.” The body had no more answers than Nathan had, but they needed to find something much more important. “Either this guy is one hell of a guesser when it comes to my dating patterns, or it’s one hell of a coincidence, or—”
“Oh, my God, he followed you here?” Nathan said. “You didn’t see anyone?”
“It was a date, Nathan, not a surveillance job.”
“Do you think he’s targeting you?”
“I need a little time before I can answer that.” She turned and looked out over the water. No one treaded water here and survived because of the current, but there was one way to hide.
The Corps of Engineers had long ago covered the levee along the river in this area with stones, since they were less susceptible to erosion. The incline was steep enough that, if you sat quietly, you could escape detection unless someone on the benches looked straight down.
When she’d been here with Keegan, Sept had glanced out over the water, but she had been more interested in their talk than in spotting someone playing a serious game of hide-and-seek. If he’d sat there and watched them, because Sept didn’t believe in so fortuitous a coincidence, he’d seen her with Keegan. Considering how Keegan was dressed and the fact that this freak who had a morbid fascination with people’s hearts had clearly followed them, he knew exactly who Keegan was and where to find her.
As soon as Keegan answered her phone, she asked, “You miss me already?”
“You know it.” Sept tried her best to keep her voice upbeat. “As soon as I’m done here I’m coming back, no matter how late it is, but until then I want you to do me a favor.”
“If it has to do with stilettos and fishnet stockings, I’m too short to pull it off.”
Sept laughed so quickly that she snorted, which in turn made Nathan, who was standing next to her, laugh even louder. “I’ll be the judge of that, but that’s not the favor. Is Jacqueline still there?”
“She should be. I didn’t hear her go out, and she’s too old to sneak out the window anymore.”
“Go wake her up and ask her to help you lock all the windows and doors, and don’t answer the door for anyone until I get there.”
“It would’ve been better if you’d asked for the shoes and hose, Seven. What you’re asking is scaring me.”
“Hold on.” Sept put her hand over the bottom half of the phone and faced Nathan. “Get a car over to her house uptown and tell them to sit outside until I get there. I can’t prove he was watching us earlier, but I don’t want to take the chance and have something happen to her.”
“You got it.” Nathan headed to the group of officers talking to their visiting brothers.
“When I get there I’ll explain the whole thing. I’m probably being paranoid, but if I’m wrong, I want to err on the side of caution, as they say. Keep the phone with you, and if you hear anything out of the ordinary, call me.”
“You’re coming back tonight, right?”
“I have a few more things to do and I’ll be there.”
“Stay safe until then, okay?”
Sept scanned the inquisitive crowd and tried to single out the one who was watching but wasn’t curious. “You too, and I’ll call you when I’m close so I won’t scare you.”
“It’s too late for that.”
“Sorry, sweetheart, I’ll try and make it up to you later.” Sept hung up and waved to George as he walked over. “Tante Fern will think you’re having an affair,” Sept said, using the French word for “aunt.”
“When I get these calls she gets the bed all to herself, so I think she secretly likes them,” he said, then put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “What we got now, cher?” George asked, as he put his bag down. Since they were mostly alone in a sea of people, he called Sept what his parents often did, which loosely translated to “loved one.”
She pointed to the guy’s forehead. “I think it’s a personal note to me, but this time I won’t need any professor to tell me this means, ‘Sept, I’m going to get you.’ As much as I like getting mail, I would’ve preferred Hallmark.”
“Bastard should know it’s not a good idea to poke the bear with a stick.”
“The bastard is off his rocker, so I’m guessing he doesn’t know any better.” When Nathan stepped back and held his thumb up with the other hand, meaning a car was headed to Keegan’s, Sept knocked her fist against his. “Before you start anything, Uncle George, take some shots of the crowd, and try to get everyone. Nathan and I’ll watch, and if anyone tries to walk away we’ll chase them down.”
“You think he’s here?” George asked.
“I think he was here earlier, and if he has that kind of superiority complex, he has the balls to come back and check on his handiwork and laugh at what bumbling idiots we are.” Sept told him about how she’d started her evening, which made George take double the shots.
“Want us to do anything else?” Lourdes asked, with Bruce standing next to her.
“I hate to make you wait until all this dies down”—Sept waved to Alex as he joined George—“but could you two hang around and assign someone to sit on this spot until I get back in the morning?”
“Anything in particular they should watch for?”
“Just the general area, but no one, and I don’t care who they are, gets down on those rocks until I get back here. I’d do it now but I don’t want to miss anything.” Sept stared down into the darkness of the levee slope, trying to imagine where the killer sat and listened to the story she’d told Keegan. “This guy knows who I am, and it’s time we balanced that out by trying to get closer to him.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll take care of it,” Bruce said.
“Don’t make a big announcement about it, and tell whoever stays to park their unit down the street. If he took the chance of coming out here once tonight, maybe we’ll luck out and he’ll be back.”
As everyone did their job, Sept and Nathan walked toward the wharves of the Port of New Orleans. They’d been closed since the storm and had only recently started receiving small shipments to gear them up for full operation after the first of the year.
“How ordinary must you appear that you can stab someone through the heart and simply walk away?”
“Did you say something?” Nathan asked.
Their footsteps sounded loud against the wood of the pier, and Sept felt like an idiot for not asking herself that question before. “Think about it, Nathan,” she said as she slowly swept the shadows with her flashlight. “What does this guy look like that no one notices him?”
“What do you mean?”
“So far we have four victims that we know of. It was easy to find Donovan, as well as Robin Burns and this guy. The fact that we stumbled over Tameka accidentally could mean we have more like her and we just haven’t found them yet. Of the four, one of them was blind, so we’ll have to take her out of the equation, but the other three, what was their excuse?”
Nathan held his hands up as if he didn’t know how to answer the question. “Excuse for what? I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“When you work scenes like Tameka’s in your mind, you want to believe this was some bloodthirsty monster, but in the end the truth is what makes you shiver. Because when the media talks to the neighbors they can’t believe that the killer was Joe Blow, who lived a quiet life with his two poodles. Killers like this one never turn out to look like the monsters our head wants them to be. They’re successful for so long precisely because they blend in.”
“Like Ted Bundy?”
“It makes sense, doesn’t it, and explains why Donovan, Tameka, and that poor bastard back there let this guy so close.”
“They thought he was harmless.”
Sept nodded and felt like she was finally making some headway.
“You heading back to Keegan’s?”
“I owe her a big explanation, along with an apology. The fact that some homicidal maniac might have seen us together, then killed some guy so he could finger-paint some more, should make a huge impression on her mom, sister, and grandmother.”
“Hey, I’m new to this, but I haven’t heard very often of these types of people targeting the police that are after them. That’s right, isn’t it?”
Sept nodded and rolled her shoulders, trying to loosen the tightness. “Most of the time, but it’s not unheard of.”
When she got back to the levee, the techs were gathering evidence and Lourdes and Bruce were watching the crowd. “You heading out?” Lourdes asked.
“Yeah, but I’ll be back first thing in the morning. If they find something, call me tonight. He’s close, I can feel it, and he’s made this personal. The other murders were for something else, but this one tells me that he thinks I can’t find him. I don’t scare that easy, asshole.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The drive back to Keegan’s was fast and quiet, and Sept had time to arrange her thoughts. She was missing something simple, but for the life of her she couldn’t figure it out. It was unlikely for the killer to get away with three of the four murders without detection, considering what public places he’d picked, but he had. And after Tameka she thought he’d found his “thing,” but now he was back to the quick kill.
When she turned off St. Charles she stopped and talked to the patrol guys sitting in the car in the front of the house. They reported that the street and the house were quiet, except for Keegan and Jacqueline looking out the front windows every so often.
“Thanks, guys. You can take off.” On the way back to her car she punched redial. Keegan picked up on the first ring. “You want me to come in the front or the back?”
“Park your car, because you’re not going anywhere else tonight. I don’t care who gets killed.”
After Sept entered through the back door and enjoyed a hug and a kiss from Keegan, she spotted the pie they’d had after dinner sitting out on the table, with a carafe of coffee. “I’m going to gain a hundred pounds at this rate,” she said.
“I’ll think of some way for you to work it off, but right now I want you to have a piece of pie and tell me why a police car’s been parked in front of our house all night long.” Keegan stripped Sept’s jacket off.
“We’ll have pie later.” Sept took her hand and held out her other one to Jacqueline, then walked them to the den and the large sofa. “I was called out for a murder in the French Quarter. The victim was found lying across the bench where we had our drink earlier today, Keegan, and whoever killed him used his blood to paint a seven on his forehead with a line drawn through it.” Sept kicked her shoes off and put her feet on the coffee table.
“You think the number had anything to do with you?” Jacqueline asked.
“That’s the only clue the perp left, but yes.”
Keegan didn’t say anything, but she held her hand to her stomach.
“Donovan’s was the first in a spree of homicides that have left me with four open cases, if you count the one tonight.”
“And they’re related how?” Keegan finally asked.
After Sept described the series of murders, she said, “The game’s changed, and if he’s targeted me and he’s crazy, I don’t want him coming after you.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
“That I’ll be here every night sleeping on this great couch, and that you need to stay in contact with one of us at all times. If I could, I’d put a unit with you, but the department will never approve that.” She kissed Keegan’s temple. “No matter what, you have to promise that you’ll never be alone and you’ll be hyperaware of your surroundings.”
“Is there some reason you have to sleep on the sofa?”
“I haven’t been asked to sleep anywhere else.”
“While you two work out the details, I’m going to bed,” Jacqueline said. “But don’t even think about trying to sneak out of here before I get to talk to you some more, Sept.” She kissed both of them good night and waved as she disappeared up the front staircase.
“You okay?” Sept asked when Keegan got even closer and almost straddled her legs.
“I feel more weird than anything. I don’t normally have some psycho killer watch me while I’m out on a date, but considering who my date was, I don’t have anything to worry about.”
Sept put her fingers under Keegan’s chin and brought her head up. “I’m serious about you being careful. Trust me when I tell you that you do not want to put yourself in any situation where this guy gets a crack at you.” The kiss that followed was full of enough passion that Keegan lay back and dragged Sept with her. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“I’ll be careful, but I’m not sorry to have a bodyguard sleeping with me every night, and she won’t be on the sofa. Let’s go upstairs.”
The bed covers were thrown back in a heap, clearly because of Keegan’s quick exit from the bed after Sept’s first call from the scene. If that had frightened her, Sept couldn’t tell as Keegan began to undress her. She removed each item, then folded it and hung it on the back of the chair close to the bed. When Keegan was done, Sept stood naked before her with only the light from outside shining on her body.
