Kitabı oku: «The Keepers», sayfa 3

“That will work. Thanks, David.”

“So, will you have some lunch? As my guest, of course.”

“I appreciate the offer, but it’s going to be a long day.”

“Where are you off to now?”

“The morgue,” Jagger told him.

Fiona arrived at Underworld while lunch was still being served. She walked up to the hostess stand, and the woman standing there looked up at her with patronizing patience. She looked Fiona up and down, and would have sniffed audibly if it weren’t against all sense of Southern courtesy. She was dressed in black, and had long black hair, black eyes and enormous breasts.

“Yes? A table for … one? I’m afraid there’s a wait,” the woman said.

Shapeshifter, Fiona thought.

And she probably knew damned well who she was, and what she wanted.

“I’m sorry, I’m not here for lunch at all. I need to see Mr. Du Lac,” Fiona said.

“Ah,” the woman said, just looking at her.

Fiona wasn’t in the mood for a staring contest.

“If you would be so kind, I would deeply appreciate it if you would tell Mr. Du Lac that I’m here.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“I’m quite certain that he’s expecting me,” Fiona said.

“He’s a very busy man. Perhaps you could leave your card.”

“Perhaps you could inform him that Fiona MacDonald is here. In fact, I strongly suggest that you do so right now.”

The woman lifted her chin. Fiona could tell that she was about to stall again.

Fiona hated changing. She seldom had to do so, but she was adept at the art that was her birthright. She could do so in an instant, and change back so quickly that anyone seeing her who didn’t know would assume it had been a trick of the light. So …

She changed. She gave something that was a warning growl, fangs dripping and bared.

And then she changed back instantly.

“You don’t need to get huffy,” the woman told her. “Right this way.”

She led Fiona past the scattered tables in the courtyard. Beneath one of the lovely umbrellas with its fleur-de-lis in black and gold, she saw David Du Lac comfortably seated.

He had been leaning back, eyes shaded by his dark glasses, hands folded, toes tapping to the sounds of the jazz band.

His pose was casual, but he had seen her coming. He rose, extending his hands to her, a broad smile stretching out across his features.

“Fiona, my dear, welcome, welcome to my club.”

She accepted his hands, along with the kiss he gave her on each cheek. “Valentina, be a dear and see that Miss MacDonald receives a libation right away. What will it be, my dear? A Bloody Mary is always a lovely concoction for lunchtime.”

“I’m fine, really.”

“You must accept my hospitality,” David insisted.

“Iced tea, please,” Fiona said.

She noticed that Valentina, the bitchy shapeshifter, as she would always think of the woman from this moment forth, did sniff audibly then.

“Certainly, David,” the woman crooned.

“David, you know why I’m here,” Fiona said, watching the bitchy shapeshifter swish away.

“Don’t mind her. She’s a jealous vixen if ever I’ve seen one.”

“She’s a triple D with feet,” Fiona said. “Hardly likely to be jealous of me.”

“Ah, my sweet child, what you don’t know about your own sex!” David said, then grew serious. “But never mind. I do know why you’re here.”

“David, this wasn’t just someone who went insane and attacked a woman, then tried to hide her body. It wasn’t someone trying to create his eternal love. This was an act of … war, really. She was left where some city guide with tourists in tow would find her. She was put on display, stretched out … David, this is extremely serious.”

“I do know that, my child,” he said.

“I’m not a child, David,” she reminded him quietly. “I’m the Keeper.”

“Fiona, no offense meant. But you’re supposed to step in when we can’t police our own.”

“This was the action of a rogue, David.”

“Yes, yes, of course. And I promise you, if we’d known he—or she—was out there, we would never have let it happen. But have some faith, Fiona. Please. Jagger DeFarge is working the case and—”

“He’s a vampire, David. He doesn’t want to believe that he’s hunting down one of his own.”

David leaned back, stretching his arms out as if to encompass not only his club but the entire city. “Fiona, I love my life. Or death. Or afterlife. However one chooses to refer to this existence, I’m a good man.”

“David, I wasn’t accusing you of anything.”

“My point is that I don’t want anyone taking this away from me. I enjoy the money, frankly, not to mention the beautiful creatures of all kinds who cross my threshold. I revel in the music. Would I risk losing this? If I knew who had done this, I promise you, I would see to it that Jagger DeFarge knew, and that our own council handled the matter immediately. You must believe me.”

A friendly ash blond waiter with a broad smile delivered her ice tea and asked if she wanted anything else.

“The crawfish étouffée is to die for today,” David told her.

“Thank you, but—”

“Please,” David said.

She was hungry, and she had to have lunch somewhere. “Fine, thank you,” she said.

David grinned broadly, delighted, as the waiter moved on to place her order.

“David, you know that I will follow this all the way through, that I’ll be in everyone’s face everywhere,” Fiona said.

“It will be charming to have you here,” he assured her. “Fiona, I swear, I will do my utmost to help you in any way that I can. But I am asking you something, too. Give Jagger DeFarge a chance.”

“I have to give him a chance, don’t I? He’s with the police—he’ll be front and center in the investigation,” she said dryly. “But here’s what I won’t get from Jagger, David. I don’t believe he’ll tell me when he’s suspicious of someone. He’ll protect his own until the very end—and he may cause more deaths by his unwillingness to believe the killer is a vampire.”

“That’s not true,” David said.

A throat was cleared behind them. “Crawfish étouffée,” the young waiter announced, giving Fiona a fascinated smile. She thanked him as he refilled her tea and handed David another Bloody Mary.

“Who do you suspect?” she demanded, when the waiter had left them at last.

“No one,” David said.

“You’re a liar. But if you point me in a certain direction, I will be discreet as I investigate,” Fiona said.

“No one, really….”

“Liar. Who is the most belligerent? Who wants to go back to the old ways?”

David looked away.

She followed his line of vision toward a tall man across the courtyard, just on the other side of the small stage reserved for the jazz band. He was flirting with a woman seated at his table. She was middle-aged, slim and elegant, with fingers that dripped jewels. She was laughing delightedly at something the man was saying.

“Who is he?” Fiona demanded, staring at David. “He’s a newcomer to the area, but a vampire, I can smell him a mile away.”

David sighed. “Well, of course, you can,” he murmured. “All right, all right. That man is Mateas Grenard, and yes, he’s not been here long. He immediately sought out the council, though, before anyone had to find him and ‘welcome’ him to the city. He has openly disagreed with some of our rules, but isn’t that the American way?”

“There’s not much else I can tell you,” Craig Dewey said. They were in autopsy. The corpse of the beautiful blonde still looked as angelic as when it had first been discovered. “I haven’t opened her up yet—we’ll get to that tomorrow. We’ve done the death photographs and taken what blood we could for tests—which was hard, since she’s been drained almost completely dry. If there’s a quarter of a pint left in her body, I’d be surprised. Cause of death—well, I could be wrong, but it looks pretty obvious that she bled out. It’s as if it was siphoned from her body. We’ve tried to find semen stains, and we ran a rape kit … with intriguing results, particularly given what we just found out in the last few minutes. Determining sexual assault has been almost impossible.”

“What? Why? Was there evidence of semen? Or condoms?”

“At least seven different brands,” Dewey said dryly. “We’re taking it step by step. I’m sorry, but it’s the only way, even though—I know you want to catch this killer before panic fills the city.”

There was something that seemed eternally sad about the snow-white body on the table, though the white gown had been replaced by a morgue sheet.

“You said you found something out in the last few minutes,” Jagger said. “You know who she is?”

“Got a match on her prints. The results posted to your office and mine about five minutes ago,” Dewey told him, an odd look on his face.

“What is it?”

“Snow White here isn’t what she appears to be. Her name is Tina Lawrence. She worked at Barely, Barely, Barely, which is a pretty lowbrow establishment across Rampart from the Quarter,” Dewey said, offering him the report folder.

Jagger scanned it quickly.

The angelic Miss Tina Lawrence had a rap sheet a mile long. Drugs, prostitution and assault and battery.

“Wow,” he said.

“Not a nice young lady,” Dewey said.

Jagger winced. “She knifed a college student for being four dollars short,” he said quietly.

“Keep reading. She tried to cut the balls off another john. Get this, she admitted she wanted to kill him. Amazing she wasn’t in jail,” Dewey said.

“We can pick people up, but we can’t always get them past the legal systems and the pleas and the deals,” Jagger said. “Seems she got off that because she had some drug connections and the D.A. offered her a plea in order to pick up a few of her friends who were higher up in the drug chain.”

“Not a nice girl. Actually a deadly girl—and now a dead one,” Dewey commented. “Well, anyway, there you have it. I guess you’ll be heading off to the strip club,” Dewey said, punching him lightly on the arm. “Have fun.”

“Thanks.”

Jagger walked out of the autopsy room and left the morgue. He called Tony Miro, and told him where to head to start questioning Tina Lawrence’s friends, coworkers and employer, and to pull the credit card receipts and find out who had been in attendance at Tina’s last show. He needed to hang around near the morgue.

Waiting for the sun to fall.

As Dewey had said, Tina Lawrence hadn’t been a nice girl. She’d been a deadly one.

He could only begin to imagine the horror that would be Tina Lawrence as a vampire.

Chapter 3

The coroner’s office never closed. It employed all manner of forensic specialists, along with financial and clerical staff. Under the Napoleonic Code of Law still in effect in Louisiana, the New Orleans coroner’s office was responsible not only for the classification of death, but also the evaluation of sex crimes and the overall general health of the citizens of the city, specifically recognizing serious threats from disease. It was a busy place. By day pathologists, forensic psychiatrists, patient liaisons, nurses in charge of sexual assault exams, forensic anthropologists, forensic odontologists and more clogged the corridors.

Death didn’t stop at any particular time of day, so naturally a morgue couldn’t close.

But by nightfall the accountants, assistants and usually even the experts in such fields as toxicology, entomology and more had called it quits for the day, and only a skeleton crew—if the pun could be forgiven—were on duty. The dead, after all, were dead.

Usually.

Fiona headed down Martin Luther King Boulevard and arrived outside the building’s entrance while it was still early; she watched as people came and went, and then kept on watching as they mainly went.

There was no choice then but to go through the change, to concentrate and enter as a vampire would, in a shroud of mist.

The guards never suspected a thing as she went by; the outer offices, where a few doctors were still working, were easily breeched; and she breezed by the night attendant sitting outside the morgue without being noticed. Because several people had died in recent days, she took a chance and searched through the records to find the right body.

Then she headed into the dim, chilly room.

To her surprise, the body of Tina Lawrence had not been slid away neatly into a refrigerated slot but she was stretched out on an autopsy table.

The room smelled heavily of antiseptics and chemical compounds, not so much of death itself, yet the very antiseptics made it seem that the scent of death was prevalent in the air.

She slipped in and concentrated hard on regaining her customary form, aware that during the good times she should have been practicing her transformations techniques. But all the while she couldn’t help wondering why they had left Tina Lawrence as she was.

Fiona knew that the tenor of the investigation had changed; the news media had released the woman’s identification and touted her past record. Reporters had a knack for finding out what the investigators had barely discovered themselves.

While the media had no doubt thought that releasing the victim’s background was a good thing—a reassurance to most citizens that they were safe—Fiona was certain that Jagger considered the knowledge to be dangerous. It was hard to catch a killer when everyone knew too many details about the victim and the crime. Cranks, crackheads and anyone else looking for a little notoriety might decide to confess to the crime. But New Orleans was still raw, still learning painful lessons after Katrina’s devastation, and Fiona was certain that most of the media believed they had done a good thing by releasing the information that the victim had led something much less than a blameless life. A majority of the city’s women would be able to think, I’m safe. I’m not a stripper or a prostitute, and I’ve certainly never been arrested.

On the other hand, the news about the victim’s past had made Fiona incredibly nervous. Tina Lawrence must not be allowed to go through the change. Fiona had known what she had to do from the beginning; the information about Tina’s past had only made it all the more urgent.

And so, as she retook her human form there in the autopsy room, she worried that the medical examiner assigned to the body might come back any minute to begin working on it still, that the assistant she’d passed in the hall might step in at any time, or that she might be caught by someone else entirely unanticipated who could enter any second.

A sheet covered the body, and all she had to do was pull it back and use the stiletto sharp stake she had brought, making sure that she pierced the heart.

She wasn’t surprised that Tina Lawrence wasn’t yet marked by the Y shaped incision of autopsy. Given the circumstances, Fiona was certain that it had taken some time to transfer the body to the morgue, and then the victim would have been fingerprinted, photographed and …

She wasn’t sure what else.

She actually didn’t want to know what else.

All she had to do was make sure that Tina Lawrence did not wake up.

But as she approached the corpse, she heard a noise in the hallway and the door started to open, so she dived behind a stainless table holding an array of instruments, most of them totally unfamiliar.

The night attendant stuck his head in, looked around briefly, then closed the door and left.

She started to breathe a sigh of relief, then realized that she was hearing something in the room. No, someone. She glanced quickly up at the table, but the corpse hadn’t moved. She held her ground, listening, her heart pounding.

Nothing. She looked around in the dim light and waited. Still nothing. She started to rise and saw a flurry of motion behind her.

Instantly alarmed, she started to change, but she wasn’t quick enough.

Someone tackled her hard and forced her down to the ground.

She instantly went into combat mode, lashing out with her arms and legs, delivering one solid punch that brought out a startled “Oomph,” from her attacker before he caught and secured her arms, straddling her.

She found herself looking up into the eyes of Jagger DeFarge.

“Fiona!”

“DeFarge!” she lashed back angrily. “Get off me.”

He didn’t comply, though he released her arms as he remained straddled over her, staring down at her angrily.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.

“It’s obvious what I’m doing here—cleaning up the mess,” she replied.

“It’s my concern,” he told her.

“No, it’s mine. I’m responsible in circumstances like these, and I have no guarantee that you’ll do the right thing,” she replied.

“Well, I’m here, and I’m handling the situation,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest and staring down at her.

“Will you please get off me?” she inquired.

Before he could respond, the door opened. The young night attendant walked in, flicking on the bright overhead lights.

Jagger and Fiona stared at one another as the attendant let out a startled cry.

Jagger rose instantly to his feet, shushing the man with authority. “It’s all right. I’m Detective DeFarge, just looking for Dr. Dewey and the results of this autopsy.”

“I’m about to put her on ice for the night,” the attendant said. “Dr. Dewey will be in first thing in the morning to start the autopsy.”

As he spoke, the corpse on the gurney jackknifed into a sitting position, the sheet falling to reveal her naked torso.

The young man opened his mouth to let out a scream, but Jagger leaped over the table in an instant, slipping behind him and silencing him with a hand over the mouth, pulling the door shut with his other hand.

Tina Lawrence glared around, a hissing growl coming from her lips.

Then she parted those lips to reveal dripping fangs.

Despite her calling in life and the way she’d died, Tina Lawrence was still beautiful. Her blond hair cascaded over the white flesh of her shoulders, and despite the terrifying distraction of her fangs, she had lovely wide blue eyes, which settled on the attendant with hunger.

He spoke from beneath Jagger’s hold, his words muffled but audible. “She’s alive. She’s alive!”

Jagger stared at Fiona. “Take him—quickly. Silence him.”

She hurried over to where Jagger was struggling with the attendant—both to hold him still and to keep from hurting him. She grasped the young man’s arms, staring into his eyes. “Quiet now, quiet. It’s all right. You’re dreaming this. You’re asleep at your desk, and you know that you have to wake up, that you have a job to do….”

She kept speaking softly. Jagger apparently assured himself that everything was fine and turned toward the corpse of Tina Lawrence, but as he did, the corpse leaped naked from the table, ready to pounce on Fiona and the young attendant.

Jagger slipped between them just in time.

As she continued trying to calm the attendant, Fiona saw that Jagger had taken a weapon from his jacket.

It was far superior to her own, a long stake, honed to a sharp point, even narrower than hers. He took Tina Lawrence into his arms, and, just before her newly grown fangs could tear into his throat, he struck hard, delivering the lethal blow directly through the wall of her chest and straight into her heart.

The corpse collapsed against him.

Despite her prowess with hypnotic mind control, Fiona began to lose the young morgue attendant.

He began to emit a low moaning sound and started to slip lower in her arms.

She had a feeling then that he must be a football player—a blocker or a tackle—with Tulane or Loyola, because she simply didn’t have the strength to stop him from falling. Though she tried to hold him upright, she began to slip to the floor.

She heard Jagger swearing softly as he shoved the corpse of Tina Lawrence quickly back onto the table and came to help her.

But by then the attendant had passed out cold.

“We’ve got to get him back to his desk,” Jagger told her.

“What if someone else is in the hallway? There are still people in the building,” she warned.

“Get out there and make sure no one is coming,” he told her. “Quickly.”

“Why me?”

“Well, you obviously can’t lift him.”

“All right, all right, I’m going,” Fiona said, and pointed an angry finger at him. “But you don’t give me orders. I am the Keeper!”

“And you’re going to have a hell of a lot to keep if you don’t get moving,” he told her.

She wanted to reply; she wanted the last word.

But they needed to hurry. She rushed out into the hallway.

It was clear.

“Now,” she told Jagger, sticking her head back into the autopsy room.

Luckily the attendant’s desk was just down the hall. She rushed toward it, ready to fend off anyone who might come by.

Jagger had lifted the attendant as if he were no more than a ten-pound lapdog and was hurrying toward the desk. Just beyond the desk, Fiona saw a door opening. She rushed toward it just in time to see an older man in a lab jacket about to come through.

“Oh!” she said, staring at him, trying to lock her eyes on his and demand his attention.

Apparently she succeeded, because he stared curiously back at her.

“Hello,” he said weakly.

She smiled. “You’re so tired—you’ve been working very hard. Go and get your things, then go on home and have a nap. You’re hallucinating, you’re so tired.”

“I’m so tired,” he echoed. “You’re a lovely hallucination.”

“Thank you.”

He was of average height and weight, with close-cropped white hair. He was usually very dignified looking, she was certain, but right now he was staring at her with wide-eyed wonder.

“You’re daydreaming, sir. You have to go home. You need some rest.”

“Yes, yes, but … why don’t you come, too, and make this a really good daydream? An erotic daydream, maybe. Please?”

Fiona groaned inwardly.

“That wouldn’t be a very good idea. You probably have a wife, and I think she’s your daydream.”

“All right.”

He stepped back the way he had come, closing the door.

As she turned, she almost screamed herself. Jagger had come up quietly behind her.

“He’s at his desk. He’ll wake up confused. Poor boy may never be the same. He’ll have some memory … but he’ll just think that he imagined everything,” Jagger told her. He was staring at her with amusement, and she could tell that he must have heard her conversation with the middle-aged man in the lab coat.

She pushed against his chest. Like a rock, but he moved back. “This is a disaster,” she said, her voice a low and angry whisper. “You need to let me handle things.”

“With what? A sledgehammer? So you could let the whole world know something was going on in here?”

Fiona ignored that. It was true that he had definitely … taken care of things.

But he was a vampire. And a vampire was normally loath to kill another vampire.

“The corpse?” she asked briskly.

“The corpse will have nothing but a tiny hole through the heart. If you had done this, it would have been obvious that someone had been here. Do you understand?”

“Your weapon is the right one. I’ll see that I improve on my arsenal,” she snapped.

“We need to finish up quickly,” he said.

He hurried back to the autopsy room, checking the hallway after she followed him in, then closing the door.

“The sheet,” he said, which irritated Fiona, since she was already returning Tina Lawrence to her original position on the table and covering her with the sheet.

Jagger just had to straighten it.

“Now let’s get the hell out of here,” he said.

He changed in a split second, appearing to be no more than mist, and heading out. Cursing silently, she did her best to make the change as quickly and efficiently.

Still, he looked impatient when she met him back on the street, though she couldn’t have been more than a few seconds behind him.

“You could have caused a real problem in there tonight,” he told her.

They had met on the street corner, beneath the shadow of a giant oak that dripped moss. He was tall, dark, lean, strikingly handsome—and deadly—in the glow of the flickering electric streetlight. Powerful in a way that was frightening, that stole her breath.

She wasn’t afraid of him, she told herself.

She was the Keeper.

“I was there to see that the right thing was done,” she said with dignity. “And I would have managed just fine—if you hadn’t come in and messed everything up.”

“I’m a cop, and I know how to manage any situation—especially one that has to do with vampires.”

“I repeat. I am responsible. I am the Keeper. Your Keeper.”

He bristled at that, and took a step closer to her. He used a body wash or aftershave that was subtle and masculine, and despite herself, she took a step backward, not sure if it was because she was intimidated—or because she found herself too attracted, too tempted to lay her hands on the broad expanse of his chest.

She forced herself to stay still as he took a step closer to her, pointing a finger and touching her just above her cleavage.

“You are the Keeper. But you’re overstepping your bounds. You’re supposed to step in when we can’t handle a situation ourselves. In this case, I was handling the situation just fine.”

She shook her head. “I can’t trust you to kill a vampire,” she said, her words soft.

“You have to trust me.”

“A vampire has committed murder,” she reminded him.

“That’s not proven,” he insisted. “Look—we’re on it. Give us a chance, Fiona. Good God, learn from your parents. They were amazing, because they understood delegation.”

“My parents are dead,” she reminded him angrily.

She was surprised when he seemed to soften, when something in his eyes became gentle, almost tender.

“I’m sorry. Please, give me a chance … as a cop—and as a vampire. I will get to the bottom of this, but none of us will be in good shape if we get the city abuzz with rumors, and all the underworld starts getting edgy and worried. Please.”

She nodded. “I don’t want a panic erupting, either, but that’s the point. I have to keep watching—that’s what Keepers do,” she reminded him. She was overwhelmed by the sense that she needed to get away from him. She didn’t want to be this close, didn’t want to be noticing his physique or realizing that his scent was extremely evocative. She wanted to be irritated from a distance; she wanted to solve the problem herself, because she was the Keeper.

“I have to get home,” she heard herself say a little nervously.

“I’ll drive you.”

“I have my own car,” she told him quickly.

“I’ll walk you to it,” he told her.

“I’m all right. This is my city.”

“And like every city, it has crack houses, drug addicts and plain old thugs. I’m a cop—I do my job even when the denizens of the underworld aren’t out causing trouble. I’ll walk you to your car.”

“Honestly, Jagger, I’m a Keeper.”

“And a Keeper—just like a vampire, werewolf, shapeshifter, pixie, pooka, leprechaun or even a lamia—can be taken by surprise. Why the hell do you think our kind had to escape the old world, then flee places like Salem, to find a place where we could blend in? We’re all vulnerable, Fiona, despite whatever strengths we have. We’re all vulnerable—in so many ways.”

He took her arm as they walked down the street. She wanted to wrench from his touch, but …

The lady doth protest too much, methinks, she thought.

But she was so acutely aware of him!

They reached her car.

“Good night, Fiona,” he said, as he opened her door for her.

“You’ll keep me apprised—of everything going on? From a cop’s standpoint and a vampire’s?” she inquired.

He nodded.

“I have to follow up and investigate. You know that.”

“Have some faith in me, please,” he said.

“I’m having faith. But I’m using what I’ve got, too, that’s all.”

“I’ll report in daily,” he said.

“Yes, you will.”

He smiled suddenly.

She frowned, looking at him. “I don’t see anything to smile about in any of this, Jagger.”

“Oh, certainly not. Not in the situation.”

“Then?”

“You just have to have the last word, don’t you?” he asked.

She didn’t reply, just slid into the seat, and he closed the door. She stared at him and turned the key in the ignition. He stepped away quickly as she gunned the engine, then started to ease out onto the street.

A good exit, she told herself.

Except that she could hear his husky laughter even as she drove away.