Athena Force 8: Contact (4 page)

“I’m terrified you’re going to pull a Thomas King,” said Tamara, referring of course to the Navy SEAL team leader who’d vanished and been thought dead for over a year, until his recent dramatic rescue. Because of the political ramifications of his mission, he was still making news. “If something happened to you, what would I do? Maybe you should move back home. For a while. Just until things die down.”

“What things? The funeral? My friends’ grief? They need me now more than ever, Mom.”

“But you’re so close to Rampart Street, to Storyville….”

“You’re the one who moved us to the murder capital of the United States.” As soon as she said that, Faith regretted it. Not only was it cruel, but it put the city in far too dark a light. “I’m sorry, Mom—”

“No. You’re right. I’m just glad to know you’re safe.” And Tamara hung up.

“Damn!” Faith hung up, too, and pressed fingers to her forehead. She loved New Orleans. She’d been just as glad to leave Kansas City, where she and her mom had lived for two years before coming south. New Orleans had a dark side, yes. But the flaws of this old, magical, slow-moving city were what made it feel like home. It made her own flaws—or her eccentricities, anyway—more acceptable somehow. More normal, even.

Faith had longed to be normal her whole life. Living amidst the quirks of the Big Easy was as close as she’d come to it, especially once she’d found the psychic community. The older she got, the more aware Faith became of how guilty her mother felt. About
something.
Tamara wouldn’t say and Faith couldn’t—wouldn’t—sense it off of her. It was one thing to stumble across a jumble of half-clear impressions about someone. It would be another thing entirely to drag out someone’s hard-kept secrets. That would be invasive. A violation. Damn it.

But whatever it was, Tamara shouldn’t also feel guilty about moving them here.

The phone rang again and Faith took a deep breath before answering it. “I’m
fine,
” she repeated.

“Glad to know it,” said a much deeper voice than the one she’d expected. “That’s exactly the word I would have used.”

His energy actually seemed to pulsate out of the phone. Or was that just the man’s inability to moderate his voice?

“Detective Chopin,” greeted Faith, sitting up. Like he could see her. At least he’d called, and not his partner. Faith had been on the phone with Butch Jefferson as an anonymous contact too often to risk letting him recognize her disembodied voice. “Do you want to talk to one of the technicians, or maybe Mr. Boulanger?”

“If I’d wanted to talk to them, I would’ve called them,” he said. “I figured…that is, I thought I’d ask…”

Faith waited, feeling as handicapped as if she’d been blindfolded. All she could hear over the line in this busy office was that Chopin sounded frustrated. If he were here, she could have read his body language and his scent and even his temperature as if he were holding up cue cards with personal insights. On the phone…

Maybe that’s why she and cell phones had such a bad history. She resented their limitations.

“You are Faith Corbett, right?” asked the cop, managing a slightly quieter voice after all.

“Yes, Detective. What can I do for you?”

“I just wanted…” Chopin swore, and his voice went normal again. Which meant, pushy. “Evidence. On the Tanner case. We’re past the 24/24, and I need a damned progress report.”

The 24/24 stood for the day before and the day after a murder, the time from which the most valid clues came. Soon, people’s recall would fade. Undiscovered physical evidence might vanish. That’s why the majority of murders were solved within the first forty-eight hours.

Krystal had been dead thirty-seven hours and counting.

“I’m not supposed to involve myself with the Tanner evidence, Detective Chopin.”

“Which wouldn’t keep you from looking from a safe distance, right? So what’s the status? And call me Roy.”

He had her there—she
had
looked, on the computer network. She just hadn’t modified any files. “We’re still waiting on the M.E. for the autopsy results, and so far Officer Hinze hasn’t found concrete matches on any of the fingerprints from the scene. Considering that there were over fifty prints and partials, that’s still going to take some processing. The footprints will be even more tricky—for some reason, there was a lot of spilled salt on the floor. You know this one went to the night shift, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I know. So, is the body still there? Did it—” Then he said, “Aw, f—” He bit off the swear word. “I’m sorry. Hell. I almost forgot it was your friend. I mean…uh…
she.
”

“You were right the first time,” Faith assured him. The evidence in the morgue was no longer Krystal. “I hope you’ve got some leads on the bastard who murdered her.”

He knew better than to commit himself. “Just to humor me—the body’s still there?”

As in many cities, the crime-scene investigators were not part of the police department, so they didn’t have offices at the police station. Neither was this unit part of the parish—Louisiana talk for a county. As soon as the city coroner finished with the corpse, it would be released to the funeral parlor or moved back to the parish morgue. But as long as it remained evidence to be examined…

“The body’s still here.” Faith’s fingers darted across her keyboard to access the proper file and confirm that. Looking only. No interference. “Why do you need to know? Do you need to see it for…something?”

“Unless the M.E. has something pertinent to the case, I’m just as happy leaving that part to you folks. Hell. Maybe I do need to talk to Boulanger.”

“Hold a moment, and I’ll put you through.” Never had she felt more like a glorified secretary. But at least her job kept her near law enforcement. She’d dropped out of college the previous year when she was questioning everything, including why she’d thought she would even want to be a lawyer. But in the meantime, she had to pay the rent. This job felt…right.

Greg’s voice mail clicked on, and Chopin swore again.

“Would you like to leave a message?” Faith asked.

“No. I’d like you to find him. I need to see if anything got—” Did he start to form the
T
from
taken,
or was Faith imagining it? “Hunt Boulanger down and have him call me. Got it?”

“Yes sir, detective sir,” said Faith.

“You’re cute when you’re a smart-ass,” said Chopin, as if he could see her, and hung up.

Faith let the phone roll off her shoulder into her waiting palm. Her neck felt cricked already. But once she had the receiver in her hand, she held it for a long moment, as if she’d be able to sense anything of importance off of it.

Other than the fact that Officer Leone had used her line recently, she sensed nothing. Not off the telephone, anyway.

Roy Chopin had called her cute. Actually, at the start of the conversation, he’d called her fine, too. Then he’d gotten self-conscious.

He’d called to talk to her? Using her friend’s corpse as an excuse? Surely not.

She’d thought
she
was socially inept.

Since she’d been sitting too long anyway, Faith decided to head down to the autopsy room where the medical examiner would be working his magic. If Greg wasn’t with him, she could work her way back from there, but there was no reason to waste time checking the nooks and crannies if she’d only find him where he usually was—with the evidence.

The frigid autopsy chamber was large for a room, but small for a morgue. Only a dozen stainless steel drawers fronted one wall, with three slabs—two regular steel tables, one with a trough underneath it—positioned down the room’s center. Two of the tables had a sheet-draped body on them. It seemed sad, them left out like this, but Faith supposed bodies were too heavy to put away every time someone ran out for coffee or a bathroom break.

Either way, nobody was here. Nobody living, anyway.

She glanced toward the sheet that she thought hid Krystal’s corpse. This time, she couldn’t smell her friend’s presence because she was breathing shallow, through her mouth. Although everything here had been made for easy cleaning—the floor, the tiled walls like a bathroom’s, lots of metal—even the reek of disinfectant couldn’t mask the odor of death.

“Tell me,” she whispered, keeping her distance as she’d promised Greg she would. Never had she more fervently wished that she really was psychic. “Tell me who did this to you.”

Then her head—Faith’s head, of course—came up. She heard something in the hallway, male footsteps. Someone was coming.

Someone who didn’t belong here. In fact…

She didn’t know those boots. So why did they concern her?

She concentrated, straining to catch this particular heartbeat. It pulsed more rapidly than the heart of someone who was simply taking care of tasks at work. It sounded more like someone doing something they shouldn’t. And in this otherwise lifeless room, surrounded only by hearts that never would beat again, she recognized it.

The killer was coming.

Time to leave, thought Faith—but her feet didn’t move. It wasn’t from courage. Some instinct more powerful than her desire to see the killer’s face was holding her transfixed, listening to those footsteps, listening to that heartbeat. What was different about it? A murmur? A rhythmic anomaly? Could she even be sure it was the killer, and not her imagination?

Her head couldn’t. But her instincts weren’t letting her go out there, all the same.

The problem was, he was coming in here. She didn’t have to be psychic to guess that. This room was at the end of a hallway. He was coming in here, and either she stood here and waited for him, or she left by forcing herself to walk right by him—

Her feet weren’t cooperating.

He was barely ten feet from the door, if that much. She could hear it. Nine feet. Eight….

Faith wanted to stand her ground. But she’d been raised on paranoia for too long. Almost in defeat, she spun, tugged open one of the steel drawers at her feet—

A man’s ashen face stared back up at her. One of the dead gangbangers. Being a crime victim, he didn’t look happy, even in death.

The footsteps were only six feet from the doorway. Five….

She kicked that drawer smoothly closed and yanked the handle of another. It glided open, empty. She swung in, feetfirst.

Three feet from the doorway…

Planting either hand on the disinfected, death-scented linoleum beneath the drawer, Faith pushed backward, sliding herself into the dark, steel confines of a drawer that normally held dead bodies.

I
t was cold. Cold and dark, and so very, very close.

Not that the former residents of this drawer had needed to see or stay warm.

On her stomach, Faith tucked her arms beneath herself, both for warmth and to lever her face farther from the steel slab that had held countless corpses. She shivered. Even her extra-keen eyes could see nothing. She could hear nothing. Was this thing actually soundproof? If so, was it so the dead could sleep peacefully…or so that the living wouldn’t hear them?

Stupid,
thought Faith of her own fancies.
Stupid, stupid.
Now that she’d committed to this foolish course of action, she felt frustrated with her own cowardice. That, and its impetus.

A person couldn’t really have such distinct hearing that she could recognize a specific heartbeat, from down the hallway. Could she? Not even a freak like her. It had to be her imagination. Or maybe she was mentally deficient. Her mother had never wanted to consult a doctor about Faith’s “condition.”

Even if she wasn’t crazy, and the visitor to the morgue
was
the killer, why hide? She’d had a chance to see the man’s face, to finally know who had done this horrible thing to her friend…

But even now, when she considered pushing out of this body locker, she couldn’t quite summon the courage. She’d been in shock when she’d gone after the killer at the bar. Now, in daylight, facing him down seemed even more foolish than hiding from him.

Even in here.

She could feel her muscles stiffen, her breath strain in this cold, solid tomb of sensory deprivation. If she raised her head, she bumped it on steel.

Something felt sticky under one elbow—
don’t think about it!
—and she shivered harder.

Minutes passed.

Desperate, she harnessed her thoughts back to logic. Okay, suppose the intruder really was the killer from the bar. What the hell would he be doing here? How could he have gotten past security? Why would anyone take such a risk?

The last question echoed through her skull as surely as her own heartbeat and chattering teeth echoed blindly, deafening, back at her in this closed metal drawer.
Why?

Roy Chopin had almost asked if anything had been taken from Krystal’s body. Faith felt sure of that. But shouldn’t he be asking about Krystal’s personal possessions rather than her corpse? What could be—

Taken from a corpse?

Oh, God. A trophy.

When the bodies on the slabs had merely been things, the empty remains of crime victims, hiding made sense. But when Faith thought of them being further victimized—here, where they should at least be safe—she couldn’t stand it.

She might already be too late. Safety be damned. Planting her hands on the sides of the drawer, wincing to imagine whatever else might have touched the same spot, she pushed forward—

And bumped her head on steel.

No.

She was locked in?

No!
Barely swallowing back an embarrassing whimper, she fumbled at the front of the drawer. Oh, God, no. She couldn’t have made such a horrible mistake. What if she suffocated in here? What if nobody found her for days? She would never have a chance to make up with her mother. She would die a virgin. It would be like being buried alive!

When her hands encountered a latch, her relief was dizzying. Her reaction to the snick of that latch, to the rush of air that now smelled fresh in comparison to where she’d been, was heaven itself. But she didn’t have time to savor it as she threw open the door to the body drawer. She pushed the tray that held her forward, rolled stiffly off it, braced herself for an attack from—

From nobody.

Faith crouched there beside the open drawer, her heart pounding, her hands fisted, and faced an empty examination room. She spun one direction. Turned the other. Nothing.

Had she imagined it?

But no. She wasn’t imagining the scent that lingered beneath this smell of antiseptics and death. It didn’t matter if most normal people wouldn’t be able to smell it; many smokers couldn’t discern scents like baking bread or cheap perfume either, but that didn’t mean the smells weren’t there. This smell was here, too. Part musk, part heat. Power. Dominance.
Evil.

If Faith needed further proof of intrusion, Krystal’s corpse now stared blankly at the ceiling.

Someone had moved the sheet from her blue-lipped face.

Still catching her shuddering breath, skin crawling from her momentary entombment, Faith took a hesitant step closer to her friend’s remains. The bruised horror that had once been Krystal’s slim, smooth neck seemed all the more blasphemous. Her eyes were open, blank. Her pale blond hair…

Was something different about her hair?

Faith bent closer, peering at it. There was definitely a blunt wedge where a chunk of hair by Krystal’s temple had been inexpertly sliced away. Someone had taken—

A knock at the open doorway startled her so badly, Faith sprang back from the corpse with a cry. Then she stared at her boss, confused. How had Greg gotten so close without her hearing him?

Just how upset was she?

Still, now that she did notice him, his heartbeat sounded comfortingly, familiarly like Greg. He wore Nikes, not boots. He, at least, wasn’t the killer.

“This is your version of keeping distance from the case?” he asked, pale eyes frowning behind his glasses.

Faith flushed. “I came looking for you and I…I found her like this.” It was technically the truth. She was just leaving out the middle part, where a more honest woman would say,
and I heard someone coming and hid in the drawer and then climbed back out once he was gone and
then
I found her like this.

“Like what?” He came closer. He had a clipboard in one hand, a pen behind his ear, fresh gloves flapping out of his pocket. That was so Greg. Now that she’d noticed him, he wasn’t the least bit silent. Just…quiet-natured.

Easy to be with.

“Uncovered. And…some of her hair’s been cut off. Did the medical examiner take it to run tests?”

Greg took her by the shoulders—luckily his hands made contact with her sleeves, not her bare skin, but subtle sensations flowed across her all the same.

Nothing bad.

“That’s it, Faith. You’re done for the day. I don’t care where you go, but you’re too close to this case to be here until we’ve finished processing the evidence. Consider it bereavement leave.”

This time, Faith was aware of someone else coming. He didn’t sound like a threat. He sounded like the medical examiner. “But Greg, look. She’s missing hair.”

At least he looked—which meant he also let go of her. And he frowned. “That’s odd.”

“Then the M.E. didn’t…?”

“Didn’t what?” asked Dr. Mandelet, entering. He was a round man with café-au-lait skin, curly black hair and a neatly trimmed beard, his accent faintly touched by the Caribbean. His shoes, Faith noticed, had crepe soles.

“If you took hair to test, wouldn’t you take it by the root?” asked Greg, using his pen to ruffle the fresh, blunt cut amidst Krystal’s perm.

“I’d want the follicle attached, yes. But—” Close enough to see the cut himself, Mandelet swore. Then he glared at Faith. “Did you do this?”

“No!”

“Of course she didn’t,” agreed Greg. This time, his hand on her shoulder felt downright comforting. His belief in her innocence felt simple, straightforward. Easy. She found that she could still concentrate on the situation around them, even with this subtle, physical connection to another human. Interesting. “So who would have?”

“Didn’t you say the DB was a tarot reader?” asked the M.E.

Faith frowned. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It matches her hands.” Now that he had an audience, Mandelet drew one of Krystal’s waxy hands out from beneath the sheet. Faith caught a glimpse of her friend’s bare hip beyond it, and felt embarrassed for her. “She’s got calluses on the inside joints of her fingers, on the edges of her thumbs. See? Feel here.”

Faith shook her head.

Mandelet grinned, clearly thinking Faith’s hesitance had to do with the fact that Krystal was dead, not knowing that Faith had hesitated to touch her even when she lived. “Trust me. This young lady knew her way around a deck of cards. So what I’m thinking is, one of her witchy friends snuck in.”

“What? No!”

“Faith,” cautioned Greg. “We’re just theorizing.”

“It’s happened more than once around here, especially in the funeral homes,” Mandelet insisted. “Voodoo practitioners. People pretending to be voodoo practitioners. Pagans. Psychics. Hair and nail clippings are a big deal to those kinds of weirdos.”

Faith’s roommate Evan, a practicing Wiccan, would call it the Law of Contagion. Having a piece of something, or something that had been in constant contact with your focus, was considered as good as having the actual focus.

“Huh.” Greg sounded amused. But he also dropped his hand from Faith’s shoulder, so she couldn’t tell why he was amused and had to get her information the old-fashioned way—by turning to him. He was taller than he looked.

“I was just thinking about how important hair and nail clippings are to
us,
” he explained. “Maybe this is another case of magic and science being more closely connected than they’re given credit for.”

Sometimes Faith
really
liked Greg.

“Anyway,” said Mandelet, and from the way he eyed Faith, she knew he hadn’t completely discounted her as a suspect in the hair theft, “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

But before he twitched the sheet back over Krystal’s face, Faith had to ask. “Wait. How—exactly how did she die? I really need to know.”

Mandelet and Greg exchanged a look, and Greg nodded. The M.E. shrugged and pulled the sheet farther down, so that it barely covered Krystal’s breasts. “You work here, little lady. How about you tell me?”

“She’s a desk clerk,” protested Greg, but this time Faith didn’t appreciate his protection.

“She was strangled,” she said, starting with the obvious. “I don’t know what he used—”

“He?”
inquired Mandelet.

“Women only account for a tenth of the murder arrests made, right? And then they usually kill lovers or their children. And aren’t women more likely to kill from a distance, like with poison, than in a physical attack?”

Both men were nodding. So Faith felt sure enough to ask, “But what did he use?”

“Wire garrote?” suggested Mandelet. “That would be a professional’s choice.” But he waited for her response.

“That would leave a cleaner line, wouldn’t it?” She bent closer to what had, thankfully, been reduced back to evidence. “And a belt would have left a wider mark. I’m thinking some kind of cord or rope?”

“Silk,” agreed Mandelet. “Red silk. I removed fibers from the wound. If we can find that rope, her DNA will be all over it. The killer may have left epithelial evidence on it from his own hands as well, so that we can work toward a second DNA match.”

“And if we can’t find the rope? Did she maybe scratch him, or pull some of his hair, or—”

The M.E. shook his head. “The only tissue under her nails was her own, from when she fought the rope. There was evidence that she’d had sex in the last few days, but not recently enough for us to match the semen. It seems to have been consensual, in any case. The pattern of tearing on the—”

“That’s enough,” Greg interrupted firmly, and drew the sheet over Krystal’s face. “This is getting too personal. Faith, you’re taking a few days off, and that’s that.”

She nodded slowly.
If we can find that rope…

It was as good a place to start as any, and she couldn’t very easily start looking for it if she was at work all day. “You’re right. I’ll go. Thank you, though. Both of you.”

“When you get back, you’re welcome to sit in on a few autopsies,” offered Mandelet, and as disgusting a thought as it was, Faith recognized the compliment in his offer. “You have a good eye for it. You don’t want to stay a clerk forever, do you?”

“Stop poaching my administrative staff,” warned Greg, saving Faith the necessity of answering that question. She really didn’t know what she wanted, in the long term.

But in the short…

She wanted to find Krystal’s killer.

“You should call Detective Chopin,” she said, as she and Greg left the examination room. “That’s why I came looking for you. He wants to ask you some questions.”

About whether anything had been taken.
She’d let the detective and the CSU supervisor work that part out, though.

She had her own investigating to do.

Faith hoped she wouldn’t be the only one of the roommates to resume work that Monday. She figured their landlord, some British guy who lived with his wife north of the lake, would want his rent whether there were four people or five living in his multiroomed French Quarter apartment.

She found Evan, at least, where she thought she would, a ten-block walk from work.

Jackson Square.

If Bourbon Street was the heart of the nighttime French Quarter, Jackson Square—spread between the spires of the St. Louis Cathedral and the wide Mississippi River—was its daytime heart. Tankers and barges made their slow way down the expansive river, along with riverboats playing bright calliope music. Cab horses with their great, grassy scent pulled open carriages on slow tours of the oldest part of the city. Street performers—balloon clowns, mimes and today, a truly talented saxophone player—plied their talents in exchange for tips from the tourists. Different psychic readers set out chairs or tables in what Faith had learned was a silent hierarchy, the best readers at one end of the Square, the less experienced at another.

Krystal had been one of the best.

And artists, protected from the heat by little more than oversize patio umbrellas, hung their work on the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the Square, hoping for a sale or a commission.

Evan was one of those artists. He did portraits and was particularly skilled with charcoal and pastels, though he could do caricatures for a quick ten bucks as well.