Phantom Of The French Quarter
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Was it possible anyone so handsome could do such ugly, sick things? Shivering, she hugged her arms, though the room was warm and stuffy.
“Too soon to say.” Pulling a card from the pocket of her dark brown jacket, Detective Robinson added, “But you hear from him or see him, call me—any time. It’s possible this man could pose a danger.”
An unspoken truth hung like smoke between them, and Caitlyn saw the reminder in the detective’s eyes of how closely she resembled the dead woman. Or how likely it seemed that the corpse had been deliberately altered to look like her.
Though Caitlyn still held out a thimble’s worth of hope, no one had suggested the resemblance was coincidental, especially after she’d described Eva Rill’s threats at her home last night—the same threats that had led Caitlyn to the body.
“Don’t worry. I’ll definitely call,” said Caitlyn, relieved to think the interview had finally come to an end.
But the detective wasn’t finished. “Let’s get back to the old woman,” she said. “This Mrs. Rill, was she acting strange on your tour last night?”
Caitlyn sighed. “I thought the black veil and the dress seemed odd. But we saw weirder last night—everything from piercings and a rainbow Mohawk to a bunch of handsy frat boys with more hurricanes than sense inside them,” she said, referring to a drink popular with Bourbon Street revelers. “So, no, I didn’t notice one quiet little old lady in particular.”
“Until she showed up at four in the morning to accuse you of theft.”
When Caitlyn nodded, the detective wondered aloud, “How would she know where you lived in the first place?”
“Why don’t you ask her? I gave you her number at least an hour ago.”
Last night the old woman had insisted she take it down so Caitlyn could call her if she “decided to return” the missing ring.
“I went ahead and tried it after I showed you in here. The number’s to a mortuary over in the Garden District. They never heard of any Eva Rill.”
The female detective leaned in even closer, piercing Caitlyn with a needle-sharp gaze. “How ’bout you?”
Shocked by the woman’s sudden change in tone, Caitlyn snapped, “Me? Are you—are you insinuating that I know Mrs. Rill, or made up the story about her coming to threaten me last night? Why? Why would you think such a—”
Sound echoed through the small room as Detective Robinson tore a sheet of paper off her pad and then ripped it several times. “Let me show you why, Ms. Villaré,” she said as she printed large block letters, one to a scrap.
She turned the letters around, allowing Caitlyn to read: E-V-A R-I-L-L.
Leaning in, the detective asked her, “You’re absolutely certain you don’t have anything you want to tell me?”
“Like what?” Caitlyn shot back as she watched the dark hands rearranging letters, sliding them around like the pieces in a shell game.
Sliding them around until they spelled her own name: V-I-L-L-A-R-E.
AN OLDER SILVER CHEVY RUMBLED like low thunder beside the wrought-iron fence that hemmed in a Grand Lady. Or at least that was what his mother would have called the towering white plantation-style mansion, with its Greek Revival columns and elegant two-story veranda.
Beside the house stood a venerable live oak, its twisted Spanish moss-cloaked branches reminding Marcus of an old man scowling at the threadbare fugitive parked near his front door.
“Just keep driving,” Marcus told himself. But his gaze remained fixed on the Villaré house, a place that whispered his name more loudly than anywhere he’d wandered.
But then, New Orleans’s siren song had been calling from the first moments he had smelled the Mississippi River’s muddy perfume, heard the raucous strains of Preservation Hall jazz, and tasted the café au lait and beignets he’d sampled near Jackson Square. By the time he’d made it to the cemetery yesterday, what was meant to be a brief visit for a few shots had taken on the weight and texture of homecoming.
As well it might, for the New Orleans he’d left at the age of five was the last place he had felt safe. The last place his mother’s arms had ever held him.
Now it was the last place, the riskiest place, he could possibly be. And the Villaré mansion was by far the most dangerous spot in it.
Forget it. Forget her, breathed a voice he recognized as reason’s.
Yet after one last look around, Marcus climbed out of the car he’d chosen for its anonymity, a Chevy whose plates were regularly, if not quite legally, traded.
Beneath a steel-gray sky he approached the front gate, his palms sweating in the sultry afternoon heat. The tips of his fingers made damp impressions on the manila envelope containing the print. Not the photograph he’d gone to the cemetery specifically to capture, but an inadvertent image he couldn’t talk himself into ignoring any more than he could forget the two blondes, one living and one dead, he had seen this morning.
You still have time to turn around.
Iron hinges creaked and he was inside, telling himself he could be safe and away in seconds as he walked up the steps and knelt beside the oversized front door. Before he could slide the envelope beneath the mat and leave, the door cracked open as far as the chain latch would allow.
“Reuben’s calling the police now.”
His gaze snapped to Caitlyn Villaré’s face, peering from behind the door.
Rising slowly so he wouldn’t scare her, he offered her the envelope. “Camera’s broken, but there were shots still on the memory card,” he told her. “Including one I thought you might find interesting.”
Rather than reaching for the envelope, she scowled at him. “Why did you leave earlier? Why did you run from the police?”
He tried a smile. “Didn’t run. I just left. Who has time to waste getting tangled up with—”
“I don’t like being lied to, Ethan.” Her gaze intensified, breaching levies he had spent years building.
“All right, then.” He drew a deep breath and said, “I’m Marcus,” without understanding why. He hadn’t revealed his name in years now. Hadn’t thought he ever would again.
“How did you find me…Marcus?” she asked.
If speaking his real name after so long was a relief, hearing it on her lips brought such a rush of pleasure that he couldn’t speak until she began to close the door, apparently giving up on an answer.
“Your website had a number,” he explained, wondering what had happened again. “It was easy doing a reverse search on the net to find the address.”
“Of course,” Caitlyn murmured. “I guess that you and the old lady must have had the same idea. Jacinth really was right about not using our home number for the business.”
“She was right. It’s not safe.”
Caitlyn rolled her eyes. “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
He snorted and then glanced over his shoulder. “Take the photo. Give it to the cops when they show up.”
“Why?” she asked. “What’s in the picture?”
He shook his head, while behind him, thunder murmured, an uneasy harbinger of predicted storms. “Nothing, maybe. Could be just another cemetery visitor. A widow, out to see her—”
“Let me have that.” The door strained against the taut chain, and Caitlyn’s hand shot out, pale and delicate.
Marcus knew he should shove the envelope at her and take off. But if her pit bull of an assistant really was here, wouldn’t he be pushing forward to deal with Marcus himself by now? Innocent as she seemed, Marcus suspected the sweet-faced blonde had lied to him about Reuben’s presence. Maybe she had lied about the police being on the way, too.
Looking into her vulnerable green eyes, he thought of lingering to find out if he was right. Then he reminded himself that his future and his freedom weren’t his alone to gamble.
But his instinct to protect wasn’t listening to reason, so he slid the eight-by-ten out of the envelope and pointed to a figure he hadn’t noticed out in the cemetery that morning. Using his laptop and a portable photo printer, he’d enlarged a detail near the margin: a tiny, shriveled woman peering from behind a houselike tomb. Silhouetted by the shadowed dawn, she’d been caught in the act of lifting a black veil from her face, a movement that revealed the furtive malevolence of her expression.
“I have to leave,” he said to Caitlyn, “but I thought you should have this. It may be nothing, but—”
“Wait, Marcus. Let me look at that.” Unlatching the door, she snatched the print from his hand and studied it intently, noticing that a smoke-gray Persian cat had emerged and was winding around her ankles. “This is my customer, from last night’s tour. The one who lost her ring.”
“The ring the dead woman was wearing?” he asked, putting together the pieces.
Caitlyn gave him an appraising look before nodding at the photo. “She stood right here on this doorstep at four this morning. Shrieking like a banshee that I stole the thing.”
Marcus glanced over his shoulder before saying, “To lure you to that cemetery. To that body.”
As the cat stared at him disdainfully, Caitlyn nodded. “I can’t think of any other reason. Did you see anyone else this morning? Any other people nearby?”
He opened his mouth to speak, then snapped it closed again to listen to the thinnest thread of sound. A sound that gradually grew louder, beneath the lightest pattering of the raindrops that had just begun to fall.
A siren, he realized as he backed away, head shaking. Obviously someone really had called the police after all.
“Wait!” she called. “Don’t leave. I didn’t…”
But the spell had finally shattered. Remembering his obligations at last, Marcus had turned away already. He broke into a loping run, vaulting the low gate to save the second it would have taken to pull it open.
As he swung into the gray sedan, he jammed the key into the ignition, then drove off wondering if Caitlyn had been stalling him from the start. Intentionally delaying his departure until the police arrived to take him into custody.
Chapter Three
His grandmother had collected doll babies by the hundreds, which his mother had arranged on shelves around the room where he’d slept as a boy.
How he’d hated those damned dolls, staring at him through the days and nights. How he’d pleaded with his mother to box them up, to let him put up his sports pennants and his model racecars—the kinds of decorations he wouldn’t have to hide from other guys.
Year after year she had stubbornly refused, saying it would be disrespectful of Grandmama’s memory to hide them all away, and that the narrow bungalow—a damned shack, really—was far too small to put them elsewhere.
“Then keep them in your room,” he had at first demanded and then pleaded, tears streaking down his red face.
But they both knew she wouldn’t, that the men who visited her at night could never do their dirty business with all those glass eyes staring at them.
And after a while, it was all right. He grew used to his silent companions. Grew to prefer them to the classmates he couldn’t invite over anyway.
DRIPPING FROM THE RAIN, Reuben returned from the hardware store, and Caitlyn quickly filled him in about her visitor.
“You opened the door to that man? Spoke to him like some old friend?” Shaking his head, he set the rain-spattered bag with the new deadbolts he’d gone to buy, after insisting the house needed to be better secured, on the kitchen counter.
Like nearly every part of their white elephant of a legacy, the once-rich wood needed attention. But that she could ignore for now, unlike the faltering air conditioner that had left the whole house stewing in its juices.
Back in Ohio, where she’d grown up, a summer rain would have cooled things. Here, it only made June’s heat more oppressive.
“I kept the chain latched,” she explained. “And I thought if we talked, I could find out—”
“Fat lot of good that would’ve done you if he’d had a gun. This is a serious situation. You’ve gotta use your head.”
She looked away, feeling her jaw tighten, wanting to explain that she had. She’d learned to trust her instincts about people, even if she couldn’t explain them in any way that made sense to Reuben and her sister, who thought the world was built of hard facts and right angles. And who assumed that anyone who saw it otherwise was hopelessly naive.
“Off the counter, Sin,” she scolded her grandmother’s ancient Persian.
Fluffy the cat, whom the sisters had rechristened “Sinister” in honor of his hateful, orange-eyed stare, hissed at her before twitching his tail and jumping down to pointedly ignore her.
“It’s my job to keep you safe.” Reuben’s tone softened a fraction. “So let’s not get all girlie on me.”
“He told me his name’s really Marcus.” She felt an echo of the electrical zing of intuition assuring her that this time he had told the truth. That he wouldn’t hurt her. “Would he have done that if I’d hidden and speed-dialed the police?”
“Marcus who? He show you any ID to back up that claim?”
“Oh, sure. And volunteered a cheek swab so you could run his DNA, too.”
Reuben gave a snort and grinned before changing the subject. “Anyway, what’s this about some picture?”
Still annoyed, she laid it on the counter. “It’s Mrs. Rill,” she said, for lack of another name to call the woman.
She had already filled him in on Lorna Robinson’s disturbingly clever anagram trick, the way the detective had hinted that Caitlyn’s involvement might be more than that of a potential victim. That perhaps someone might have cooked up a sick way to gain publicity for her fledgling tour-guide business.
Reuben had laughed when Caitlyn told him, and promised to call an old friend from his years on the force—Detective Robinson’s partner, Davis—to set the cops straight about that ridiculous idea.
Sweaty and exhausted, Caitlyn wasn’t sure which she found more upsetting: to be suspected of a crime or laughed off as a suspect.
Though he hadn’t touched the photo, Reuben studied it intently. “That’s the old bat, all right. I wonder how she’s mixed up in this? Can’t see a frail old biddy like her as the killer.”
At the word “killer,” the dead woman’s face flashed through Caitlyn’s mind. Only this time, she thought about the green eyes. Glass eyes, the same as she’d seen…
“Josiah Paine’s a hunter,” she blurted. “He has heads hanging all over his office.”
“Former employees?” Reuben asked drily.
“Deer, mostly, and this poor, moth-eaten black bear. An armadillo, too, and there’s even a whole stuffed alligator.” She shuddered, recalling how creeped out she’d been by his “curiosities,” though he swore the customers loved them. “Those animals all have glass eyes, too.”
“So you’re thinking…?” Reuben sketched out an arch with the tip of his finger, a bridge from one idea to the next. “That’s a pretty big stretch, from Bambi hunter to psycho killer. What sportsman doesn’t have a few old trophies hangin’ ’round his—”
“We already know he can’t stand me.”
“And I can’t stand Creole cookin’. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna kill and stuff a Cajun chef to intimidate them others.” He shook his head. “Listen, sugar, you’re one heck of a tour guide—I never get tired of hearin’ you tell stories ’bout the ghosts of old N’awlins. But you’d better leave the cookin’ to the Cajuns and the detectin’ to the pros.”
Heat stung her cheeks. “Don’t patronize me, Reuben. I’m serious about him.”
“Then tell it to the police—” he gestured toward the photo but still avoided touching it “—when we turn this thing over to ’em.”
WHEN DETECTIVES ROBINSON AND DAVIS ARRIVED to collect the photo, Caitlyn brought up Josiah Paine immediately, but Robinson’s partner, a pudgy, balding man with woolly gray brows and small, pointed teeth, was quick to shrug it off. “I know Josiah real well. Sure, he burns a little hot, likes to shoot his mouth off, but under all that, he’s a teddy bear. A guy you can always count on for a nice donation when we’re raising money for a cop’s sick kid or something.”
Looking toward Reuben, Davis added, “You remember him, don’t ya, Rube? Picks up rounds at Tujague’s every now and then.”
“That’s what I was tellin’ Caitlyn,” Reuben answered. “Paine’s a lot of things, but he’s no killer.”
Caitlyn might have grown up in Ohio, but she recognized Good Old Boydom when she heard it. Frustrated, she tried zeroing in on Robinson. “You only think you know him.”
Detective Robinson merely frowned and changed the subject. “Didn’t you call us about some picture?”
“In here,” Reuben said, and four sets of footsteps echoed on the marble tile leading beneath an immense chandelier hanging high above them from a vaulted ceiling embellished with hand-painted nymphs and satyrs. The nineteenth-century fresco had cracked and peeled in places, as badly in need of restoration as the rest of this white elephant of a legacy. But that didn’t stop Caitlyn from loving it completely—and hoping, scheming and praying for some way she and her sister might hold on to it.
They passed the formal parlor, filled with prissy, somewhat dusty furnishings that looked far too fine to sit on, and Detective Davis whistled through his small teeth. “Nice place.”
Caitlyn thanked him and said, “The photo’s right here, in the kitchen.”
After giving them a chance to look it over, she said, “She’s definitely the woman from last night’s tour. ‘Eva Rill.’”
Her fingertips formed quotes around the name.
Detective Davis produced an evidence bag and slipped the photo inside. “Maybe we can circulate this, find someone who knows her. If we can bring her in for questioning, check out her family and associates, it’s a good bet she’ll lead us to the killer. Best bet we have,” he said, and turned to Reuben, “unless we can track down this Marcus fellow you told me about when you called.”
“I don’t think he’s involved,” Caitlyn said. “I got the feeling he’s just a really private person. That’s why he didn’t want to be drawn into—”
“We have to consider the possibility,” Detective Robinson said, her light hazel eyes serious, “that Mrs. Rill is this guy’s accomplice—maybe his own grandma, for all we know. Because whoever committed this crime may very well be a man obsessed with you. Sexually obsessed.”
“Why would you say…” Caitlyn was no prude, but she found it hard to get the word out past the sudden lump in her throat. “Why would you say sexually? How can you be certain the killer’s even a man?” Let alone that man? she added silently. And what kind of woman would help her grandson murder someone, anyway?
The two detectives shared an uncomfortable glance.
“What?” Caitlyn pressed. “Someone sent me to find that body, someone who made that poor girl look as much like me as he could. So I have the right to know what this is about.”
“I’m afraid that the dead girl, a Megan Lansky,” Detective Robinson said soberly, “appears to have been sexually assaulted.”
“Wait a minute. I know that name,” Reuben said. “She’s that missing girl—I saw her parents on the five o’clock news, pleadin’ to find out if anybody’s seen her. Pretty little thing.”
Detective Davis nodded gravely, then turned to Caitlyn. “Lansky was a Tulane student, disappeared a couple of nights ago after partying on Bourbon Street. Her friends told Missing Persons she’d mentioned hooking up with some group going on a cemetery tour.”
A chill slithered along Caitlyn’s backbone, then coiled in her stomach. “Are you sure she’s the girl we found this morning?”
“Poor kid’s father just ID’d her.”
Caitlyn’s knees loosened, and she braced herself against the counter. “Do you—do you have a picture of her? The way she looked…before?”
Detective Davis quickly produced one. In it, Megan Lansky smiled, a beautiful girl with wavy, light brown hair and sparkling blue eyes. Beautiful and so young, someone who should be near the beginning of life’s journey instead of lying, pale and bloodless, in a cold drawer at the morgue.
Was she dead because some sick person had thought she resembled Caitlyn? Could it have been some crazy customer from one of Caitlyn’s tours? She thought of drunken troublemakers and one lovesick young man who had sent her a half-dozen admiring emails and phoned repeatedly, coming on way too strong in his quest for a date. But none of them seemed dangerous—or at least not the brand of dangerous that led to things like rape and murder. To gouging out blue eyes and replacing them with green glass.
Tears leaking, Caitlyn shook her head. Her voice trembled, but somehow she managed to remain coherent. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her. What about you, Reuben? Could she have come on one of our tours this week?”
Reuben studied the photo for some time before he shook his head. “Damned shame, a young girl like that. Makes me want to kick the guts out of the sick bastard who would…”
He closed his eyes, his face reddening. “Twenty-eight years on the force, you’d’ve thought I’d grown myself a tougher shell. Maybe it’s for the best I went and got myself…”
Davis’s woolly eyebrows drew closer together. “So neither one of you knew Megan?”
To be absolutely certain, Caitlyn checked their receipts, but Megan Lansky wasn’t listed among the credit card payments.
“You might try the other tour services,” she suggested, and couldn’t resist adding for good measure, “You might try Josiah Paine.”
HOURS LATER, SHE WAS STILL UPSET as Reuben drove her toward the cemetery in his Crown Victoria, a great boat of a car he said reminded him of his days driving police cruisers. Considering the threatening thunder and a new round of storms forecast for this evening, she thought a real boat might come in handy before this night was over.
Hunched over the wheel, he shot a scowl in her direction. “You should be back at home, chère, doors and windows locked tight, and me bunking on one of them fancy horsehair excuses for a sofa.”
Caitlyn smoothed her skirt, a gauzy, handkerchief-hemmed creation she had made from the evening gowns of a grandmother she had barely known. “Unless you want your paycheck bouncing, we need to get out there and work.”
The black car jerked to a stop as a light went from yellow to red. “You think I give a damn about money right now? With some sick—” Cutting himself off, he shook his head. “This is way bigger than money. This is your life we’re talkin’ ’bout here.”
“That’s right,” she said, heart thumping. “It’s my life. And I still mean to live it.”
And that meant she needed to get back to work to pay the bills. More than that, she needed to feel the words that flowed with every story, to watch the rapt eyes of her listeners and hear collective gasps. Her drama professors and scouts alike had assured her she had ample talent, presence and beauty to command the stage or screen. But in one audition after the next, she had lacked some crucial, unteachable ingredient: a real connection with the audience. She’d finally discovered such a bond while sharing the stories she’d collected volunteering in the old French Quarter nursing home where her grandmother spent her last days, a place Caitlyn had gone in the hope of learning something of the woman she and Jacinth had never been allowed to know.
A die-hard history major, Jacinth brushed off the tales Caitlyn collected as “unsubstantiated melodrama,” but even she had been unable to hide her excitement over one involving their own ancestor, Victoria Villaré, who had allegedly used a secret passage to spy on Union officers who had occupied her home during the Civil War. For long months after hearing of it, the sisters had searched in vain for some sign of a hidden doorway, but for Caitlyn, the proof had never been the point.
A block from the cemetery, they found a parking space. As they climbed out, thunder rumbled, and Reuben asked, “You sure about this? It’s gonna be a night fit for one of them ole rougaroux you like to scare the tourists with.”
When an image of Megan Lansky’s bone-white corpse flashed through Caitlyn’s mind, she shivered at the thought of the legendary Cajun werewolf, a zombie-like monster said to drain its victims dry. Though the French called them loup-garou, the Cajun version was every bit as frightening. But rougaroux weren’t stranglers, nor were they controlled by tiny old ladies who used creepy anagrams as names and claimed mortuary numbers as their home phone.