KILLING ME SOFTLY (10 page)

But feared it would never be complete enough.

Renee jerked awake to the shadowy light of night and tried to breathe, but the weight of memory pushed down on her like the dark slimy water that had almost ended her life. That's what she needed to remember. The night of the attack. The devastating evidence she'd uncovered the day before. The horror of seeing a knife flash in the darkness, of feeling it slice into her flesh. The screaming and the blood. The running. The crash.

With a hand to her mouth, she slipped from bed and pulled on the bulky robe the hotel had provided. Nothing made sense. Nothing. She was a smart woman. Perceptive. Thorough.

How could she have been so wrong?

The soft ring of the bedside phone halted the unsettling line of thought. Exhaling, she reached for the receiver. "Gran?"

"I'm sorry," the caller said, and though her voice was rough and tough, she sounded frightened. "I must have the wrong room. I was trying to reach Renee Fox."

"That's me," she said. "I'm Renee. Who's this?"

"The name doesn't matter," the woman said. "But you need to know that you're looking in the wrong place."

Cain stepped back from the pool table in the back of Leroy's and studied the last three balls on the green felt. One stripe, the eight and the cue. "Did they find her?"

D'Ambrosia took a beer from the waitress and handed her a stack of ones, then waited until she was out of earshot before answering. "Some teenagers stumbled across her car at the old Windmere factory in Algiers. She was in the trunk."

Cain swore softly. Violence he understood, even accepted. Retribution came with the territory. But it was the car that got him, the car that sneaked in like a sucker punch to his gut.

Savannah's car had vanished.

Savannah's car had been found submerged in the murky waters of Manchac Swamp.

Sometimes he still awoke at night, as cold and wet as he'd been that June evening when he'd watched a nameless, faceless cop take a crowbar to Savannah's trunk. Cain had stood in the drizzle like a man facing his execution squad, jaw set, arms at his sides, watching but unable to stop, unable to do anything or feel anything—not the rain, not the horror that seeped through the canvas of his jacket and into his skin. There'd been only the agonizing weight of each second that dragged by, slower and slower until each mocking riff of his heart felt like a broken lifetime.

Until the trunk popped open.

And then he'd gone to his knees.

"It's your shot," D'Ambrosia said, and only then did Cain realized he'd violated his own personal rule and let himself go back.

"Merde,"
he muttered, leaning over the table to check an angle. They weren't talking about Savannah. They were talking about the sixty-seven-year-old mother of a casino manager who'd gone to the cops with what he knew. "How's Fenton taking it?"

D'Ambrosia rolled the bottle of beer in his hands. "Like he's supposed to—as a warning."

"What condition was the body in?"

"Alive." D'Ambrosia squatted to study Cain's shot. "Bound and gagged and roughed up, but alive."

Cain wasn't proud of the quick rush of envy. "
Oncle
has other plans for him then." Otherwise, Keith Fenton would be planning a funeral, not lining up insurance coverage.

"What about the woman?" D'Ambrosia finished off his beer. "You think she's involved?"

The question sounded casual enough, part of the give and take between men on opposite sides of the law, but the same side of justice. D'Ambrosia could lose his badge for conspiring with Cain and both men knew it.

Cain rocked back on his heels and studied his shot, then rolled forward and slid the cue he'd been using for the past fifteen years between his fingers. "Eight ball in the back right pocket," he called as he sent the white ball spinning across the worn felt. It slammed into D'Ambrosia's striped ten, which nudged the adjacent black ball straight into the back right pocket.

"Son of a bitch," D'Ambrosia swore, pulling out his wallet. "I'm done."

"You were done before we ever started," Cain pointed out. D'Ambrosia's finesse with darts did not carry to the pool table. But it did extend to interrogations. "Leave the woman to me."

The detective forked over his last fifty. "She could be a plant."

Cain shoved the wrinkled bill into his pocket. "She could."

"Pretty lady sent in to distract you," D'Ambrosia went on, voicing the very thoughts that taunted Cain as he'd driven from Bayou de Foi to New Orleans. "Gets you all hot and bothered while
Oncle
moves in for the kill."

Cain looked up at his friend and pierced him with the same look he'd given the airline pilot he'd busted trying to ferry dirty money out of the country. "She can try."

D'Ambrosia understood what he didn't say. "And you'll enjoy every minute of it?"

The woman was thirty-five miles away, tucked safe and sound in the big poster bed of her hotel room, under surveillance, and yet the heat of anticipation rushed through him.

"Funny thing about playing games." With a dark smile, he tossed his cue stick onto the table. "A smart man only falls into the same trap once."

Twenty minutes later, Cain maneuvered his car into a tight spot along St. Charles Avenue. During the day, the street was lined with tourists and locals, out for sight-seeing or a walk, catching a ride on one of the streetcars that rumbled through a tunnel of oaks stretching from Audubon Park to the Quarter.

But at this time of night, most of the activity had died down, leaving only the occasional college kids crowding into a late night café or drunks looking for the mansion that belonged to the vampire writer.

Cain took it all in as he strolled up a sidewalk, lined by bloodred mums, to a welcoming front porch dripping with colorful bougainvillea even in November.

A single light burned beside the screen door.

He didn't have to knock. The door swung open and the woman stepped into the night. The white silk robe he'd picked out for her shimmered in the darkness as she opened her arms. "You're late."

CHAPTER EIGHT

"
Y
ou can call me angel."

Frowning, Renee studied the woman who'd called her the night before. Actually, woman was a stretch. The thin blonde seemed more like a girl. Early twenties, tops. Long blond hair framed a delicately featured face, and for a fractured moment Renee felt as though she were looking at herself in a mirror.

Then reality slashed in, reminding her that she no longer wore her hair blond. Among other things.

They sat at a small table across from the cathedral in Jackson Square, normally occupied by a palm reader named Magdalene—the perfect cover for a chance meeting that would not arouse suspicion.

In the mornings, while the rest of the Vieux Carré slept off the excesses of the night before, the pedestrian mall bustled with tourists and locals, merchants and street artists. The rich scent of coffee drifted in from across Decatur. Even the horn player already stood in place, loitering outside Café du Monde and playing "When The Saints Come Marching In," despite the frigid wind blowing across the river.

"Angel?" Renee asked.

"That's what he calls me."

"He?"

"Cain," the girl said, the one who looked so very much like Renee had. Once.

Renee braced herself. "I take it you know him."

"I do," Angel said, but her smile, an unsettling combination of fascination and bone-chilling fear, said so much more. It was a contrast Renee knew well, the way a recovering alcoholic gazes at a glass of scotch just before he falls off the wagon.

"You know him, too," Angel said. Understanding stripped away pretenses and heaved the truth between them. "But I bet you never took his money."

It took every ounce of willpower Renee had not to jerk back from the table—and the images trying to form in her mind.

"They think that just because they got more money than God, they can buy whatever they want. Women. A good time. Fast cars or judges or juries. Doesn't matter. They own it all."

"You're saying the Robichauds bought Cain's acquittal?"

"His cousin is with the D.A.'s office. You do the math."

Renee already had. "Gabe removed himself from the case."

"So they say," Angel said, lifting a hand to fiddle with the small gold hoop at her eyebrow. "Whether you believe them or not is another story. People like them say
what
they want to,
when
they want to. If someone gets hurt in the process, too flipping bad, right?"

Renee stilled. "Did someone hurt you, honey? Cain? Is that what this is about?"

Angel shook her head, sending stringy hair flinging into her face. "He never hurt me, not physically, anyway."

"Then how?"

Blue eyes closed, opened a heartbeat later. "You got any idea what it feels like to go to bed with a man but wake up with a stack of hundred-dollar bills?"

Something dark and cold tightened through Renee. "Cain Robichaud paid you for sex?"

The girl looked down, said nothing.

"Angel." Renee squeezed the palm she still held in her hand. "Talk to me."

Angel brought her index finger to her palm, where she slowly traced the curve of her lifeline. "Let's just say when Cain was a cop, he had a fondness for mixing business and pleasure. I … obliged him on both fronts."

Everything inside Renee went brutally still. She sat there staring at the girl she now realized was a prostitute, but saw only a tall man in a dark jacket, a pair of dark hypnotic eyes and an insolent smile.

Just mixin' business and pleasure,
belle amie
. Nothing wrong with that.

Depends upon how you do the mixing.

I think you'll like it … like it a lot.

She had. But now she shoved hard against the unwanted memory. There had never been any commitment between her and Cain, no promises, but hearing a hooker parrot Cain's words shredded her in ways she'd never imagined possible.

"And just how did you oblige him?" she forced herself to ask. She'd come here for information, after all. The truth.

No matter how badly it hurt.

Angel looked up, startled. "You want details?"

The image formed all by itself, of Cain and this girl, together, hot and naked and sweaty, rolling and twisting, thrashing, bringing each other to the brink and back.

Clenching her jaw, she pretended to study Angel's fate line. "Facts."

"I gave him what he wanted," Angel said. "He made it worth my while to watch that casino owner who was carrying on with his sister. Adrian Trahan. There was bad blood between those two."

Bad blood was an understatement. Cain and her brother hated each other. Renee didn't want to ask the question but had to. "You think he killed him?"

Angel's hand twitched. "Can't say for sure but when he came to me the night they found Trahan's body, he was … different. I mean, he was never a man for chitchat or foreplay, but that night he was all over me the second I opened the door. Before he left he told me he didn't need me to watch Trahan anymore. Things had taken a different … direction."

Renee sat back. "He came to you the night they found the body?" That, she knew, was a bald-faced lie.

"Not really the night, it was more like the morning. It was just starting to get light when Cain showed up."

The coldness spread deeper. Renee wanted to deny the girl's words but couldn't. The simple truth was she had no idea where Cain had gone after he left her town house just before dawn.

The feeling of devastation came back to her, wound like a silk scarf around her neck.

Angel stuck her left arm across the table. "You want to see my other hand—it can't look like we're just chitchatting."

Renee stared at the girl's hand, her pale flesh and long, elegant fingers full of silver rings. She wanted to hate her, this deceptively fey prostitute with the huge lost eyes and the compromised soul. But all she felt was pity … and the sobering realization that the two of them weren't that different.

Cain hadn't paid Savannah with money, but with the currency of illusion and hope, dreams she'd wanted desperately to believe could come true.

Swallowing, she watched a tattered maple leaf fluttering around on the breeze. "How often did Cain come to you?"

Angel shrugged. "Three or four times a week … most every night he wasn't with that reporter."

Renee leaned closer over Angel's palm, focusing on her heart line. "Savannah Trahan."

"Poor woman had no idea she was sleeping with the man she was trying to nail. It was hardly a surprise what happened to her."

"Why not?"

"Cain's thorough," Angel said, watching the maple leaf settle next to her hand. "Once he realized he'd never get that woman to quit snooping around by sleeping with her, he had no choice but to silence her."

Cain twisted against the sheets and cracked open an eye, cursed the quiet trill of his mobile phone. He didn't want to be interrupted, didn't want to leave her hot and flushed and eager for more. It had been so damn long— The phone kept ringing.

Swearing, he reached for the damn thing and stabbed the talk button. Then he swore more creatively.

"What do you mean not there?" he demanded, and just like that the last vestiges of the dream shattered, leaving him tangled in the sheets, ready and naked, but alone. "Where the hell is she?"

Millie's explanation didn't come close to satisfying him.

"What about her suitcases? Are they in her room?"

His chest tightened when the hotel manager said no. "Did you hear anything?" Images formed before he could stop them, a disturbing sense of dread that made no sense. He wanted her gone, after all. He wanted her out of his town and his parish.

But he didn't want her to end up like Savannah.

He slammed his feet against the soft Oriental rug and stood, welcomed the slap of cool air against flesh still hot from the dream. "Was there any sign of a struggle?"

The need to get back to Bayou de Foi ground through him, but before he could pull on his jeans, his uncle's voice came across the phone. "Looks like she took your advice after all, son. There's nothing out of place here, no sign of forced entry or anything untoward. Hell, the bed is even made."