River Road (30 page)

The large front window had been covered with a mural. At first glance, the brown river winding through the center of the painting appeared to be surrounded by banks covered in thick trees and brush. Closer inspection showed that among the vegetation cavorted dozens of nubile young things in various stages of, uh, activity. I was tilting my head and trying to unravel a confusing tangle of limbs underneath a nicely painted live oak when the door opened.

“Oh my Zeus, you scared me!” A little blond bombshell with painted-on leggings and a sports bra squealed as she ran into me.

“Are you Muffi?”

The bombshell giggled. “Oh no, Muffi’s inside at the front desk.” She looked at me with vacant blue eyes and a tiny frown creased her perfect brows. “We don’t get many women customers, but that’s okay. Muffi can talk to you about our new male escorts.”

Yeah, I’d be talking to Muffi about a lot of things once this case was done. I had a feeling the nymphs were not going to mainstream well.

I stepped inside the cool, dark entry filled with old wood and the cloying smell of incense and flowers. A small fountain to the left of the door, behind the mural, added a tinkle of water to the air-conditioned quiet, and a staircase rose behind the single desk in the room. A parlor to the right was filled with heavy sofas, oversized chairs, and a few contraptions with handcuffs. I so didn’t want to know.

Another petite blonde sat at the desk, smiling.

I smiled back. “Are you Muffi?”

“Yes, and we have just the thing you need—I don’t know how you found out about it so quickly but it’s going to be great,” she said with a chirp. Before I could interrupt her, she picked up the phone.

“No—wait. I don’t want an escort.”

She frowned. “Are you sure? They’re satyrs!”

Good Lord. I was so going to shut them down when I had time.

I took a deep breath. “Let’s start over here. I’m Drusilla Jaco, the wizards’ sentinel for the region, and I came here to talk to you about some murders in Plaquemines Parish, and in particular a nymph named Libby.”

“Libby?” Muffi pointed me to a seat while she pulled out a file folder. “I don’t remember a Libb—oh, wait. Here we go.”

She pulled out a sheet of paper and studied it. “We keep records on all our people coming in from the Beyond. No one works in New Orleans without checking in with us.” She looked up at me anxiously.

“That’s good,” I said. “You need to keep up with them. What about Libby?”

She shrugged and handed me the paper. It contained exactly four words:
L
IBBY.
O
CTOBER
13.
V
ISITOR.

“So, Libby isn’t a member of your organization?”

Muffi beamed, pleased at my insight. “Nope. I remember her, though. Tall woman. All the Mississippi girls are blond and petite. You could pass for one of us!”

Yeah, next time I needed to go undercover. “So you didn’t send Libby to help the wizards with a diving project?”

She looked at me blankly. “We didn’t send anyone.”

A chill raced through me. Libby had been hanging around whenever we did repairs, and she egged on the fights between the mers. If she was coming in from the Underworld via the Styx, she’d have to create new rifts in the riverbed every time we plugged the old one up. I didn’t have a clue what her motive might be, but in that photo she and Melinda Hebert looked enough alike to be sisters.

CHAPTER
30

Jake called my cell as I drove home, looking for Alex.

“I haven’t seen him since we got back from the funeral,” I said. “He’s supposed to be in Plaquemines, talking to the mers.” What was I, the Warin social secretary? “Did you get Melinda’s autopsy report?”

“Yeah, he dropped by here but it came in after he left, and he’s not picking up his cell. Anyway, here’s the reason it’s taken so long.” Papers rattled in the background. “The coroner for Plaquemines Parish sent his reports to the state, and they sent it on to the CDC—they’re all in a pig-swivet. Her blood doesn’t type—they’ve never seen anything like it.” He paused and let that sink in. “She ain’t human, I’m thinkin’.”

Holy crap.

Damn it, I’d known there was something off with her. I’ve always been able to read the emotions of humans, and the Elders wouldn’t take me seriously. I thought about Melinda as she’d been that day Alex and I interviewed her. The disheveled appearance, the sweatshirt, the necklace. The freakin’ necklace.

“Shit.” I pulled my car against a curb before I wrecked it.

“What’s wrong?” Jake’s voice rose, tinged with anxiety. “Where are you?”

“I’m okay—I just need to talk to the Elders. I’ll call you back.”

I speed-dialed Adrian Hoffman.

He sounded resigned as he answered the phone. “Yes, Ms. Jaco? What do the mermen want now?”

“What happens if a nymph marries a wizard?” I asked.

Long silence as he shifted mental gears. “Well, there’s no law against it. You’d just have to put in a request to the Elders and the head of the Water Species Convention and get it approved. I’d advise against it. The nymphs tend to be emotionally unstable. What wizard are you talking about?”

“Doug Hebert. Actually, I’m talking about Melinda Hebert,” I said impatiently. “Is there a chance she is a nymph? Wouldn’t you guys have a record of that somewhere?”

And if I’m right, you idiots should have figured this out before Tish got killed.
I fought to keep the anger out of my voice.

“There’s nothing in his file,” the Speaker said, and I heard the sound of a keyboard. “It clearly states on their marriage record that she is human.”

I thought furiously. “I think the nymph who’s been supposedly helping us, Libby, could be our murderer, and has a connection to Melinda Hebert. I found a picture of them together.” I took a deep breath and kept going. “Do you verify that a spouse is human? I mean like require blood tests or something?”

Hoffman snorted into the phone. “Why in Merlin’s name would we do that? And you have absolutely no proof that the nymph is the murderer. Nymphs are very simple, peaceful creatures.”

I thought about Libby cheering as Jean, Robert, and Denis tried to tear each other to shreds, and our talk about how easy it was to deceive men. She was neither simple nor peaceful. “So if Doug Hebert lied about his wife being human, you’d have no way of knowing?”

“You’re being ridiculous. Why would he lie?” Hoffman’s voice got deeper and his British accent heavier. “If he’d wanted to marry a nymph, no one would have objected. You need to stop concocting lunatic theories and figure out who killed her husband. Forget Melinda Hebert. She’s insignificant. She doesn’t matter.”

Asshat. Everybody matters to somebody.

“One last question. If a prete wants to hide what he is, and has the help of a wizard, what’s the best way to do it?”

“You bloody imbecile—you are giving me an oral exam on magic? You work a spell, or charm an item of clothing or jewelry. Now don’t call back until you have something to report.”

The line went dead. My next report was going to have a lot to say about Adrian Hoffman.

On the rest of the drive home, I tried to come up with a plan. Doug Hebert had married a nymph and kept a charmed peridot around her neck to hide her species. I had no proof, but it would explain the amount of magic active in her house the day we’d questioned her. Why Libby killed both of them, I hadn’t figured out. But she’d done it.

I needed to find her, and the best way to do that was to find the Delachaise twins, especially Robert. Did he and Rene know what Libby was up to, or had she fooled them as she claimed it was so easy to do?

Grabbing the mail out of my box, I unlocked the back door and went in the kitchen, noting the slight pressure of my protective wards as I entered.

I sat at the table, watching Sebastian bat the magic-infused eyeglasses off the table and around the floor until he batted them close enough for me to bend over and grab them. “Find your rubber mouse,” I told him. “I might need these again.”

He jumped on the table and sat a few feet in front of me, giving me the feline stare of death from his crossed blue eyes. I slid the glasses across the table at him. “Fine, have at it.” He batted them onto the floor and chased them into the living room.

I dug out my cell and tried to call Alex but got voice mail. I started to call Jake back, but remembered Alex’s concerns about sending Jake into the field. What if he wanted to storm off to Plaquemines to find Libby himself? As much as I wanted this enforcer job to work out for Jake, I wasn’t going to be the one to throw him into a trial by fire, or by nymph.

What about the twins? Robert, especially, could be in danger from Libby. He also might not believe me. But Rene might. I scrolled through my phone’s contact list for Rene’s number, cursing as the low-battery icon began blinking.

Jotting the number on a napkin, I plugged in the cell charger and went to my desk phone. I was surprised to see the message light blinking on the antiquated answering machine I had hooked up to it. The annoying computerized menu said I had two new messages.

The first was from the Tour Blood office, inviting me to sample the company’s new vampire-led French Quarter ghost tour.

I erased it and moved to the next message, freezing at the sound of Libby’s dusky voice. “Drusilla Jaco, are you there? This is Libby. I would like to meet you at Pointe a la Hache this afternoon to discuss some things that might help your investigation.” I just bet she did.

“Hello? Libby?” I stared at the machine, my pulse thumping in fear as Alex intercepted Libby’s message. “DJ’s not home, but I can meet you if it’s important.”

She practically purred. “That would be a lovely diversion, Alexander.” She gave him instructions on where to go.

“I’ll meet you at three.”

The call ended. I stood frozen to the spot, ignoring Sebastian as he methodically untied my shoelaces with his teeth. The clock on the wall over the range hood said three thirty.

I grabbed the receiver and punched in Rene’s number.

“Yo, wizard. Where y’at?”

Any other time, I’d have laughed at Rene’s mix of Urban-Cajun greetings, but I could barely breathe. “Have you talked to Alex? He was supposed to be coming out your way.”

“Yeah, babe. He left here and was heading over to Tidewater to talk to those asshole Villeres.”

“Have you seen Libby today?”

“Ain’t you full of questions? She was here till about two, but ain’t here now. Why you wantin’ Libby?”

I told him my theory. That Libby might be related to Melinda Hebert, that she’d been the one to kill the professors. And she’d killed Tish, trying to get to me. I didn’t know why yet, but I knew in my gut I was right about all of it.

There was a long silence on the other end. “You sure about this? I mean, Libby’s been out here with me and Robert a lot these last two weeks, and I ain’t seen nothing to make me think she’d kill anybody.” He paused. “She don’t like wizards much, babe, but lots of us don’t, especially the ones who were around in seventy-six.”

I was tired of hearing about old grudges. “I’m going out to find Alex. If Libby comes back to Orchard, call me, okay? Don’t tell her. And be careful.”

“We can handle ourselves, wizard.” He hung up.

So he was annoyed. He’d have to get over it.

Before I left, I went upstairs to my library. I had to see where, exactly, Alex was. I pulled a black glass bowl from a shelf and a bottle of purified water I kept in the little refrigerator in the corner. I also grabbed one of Alex’s protein bars he kept stashed in the fridge.

Taking my loot to the bathroom and closing the door behind me, I lit candles and sandalwood incense, then doused the lights. Outside under a full moon would have been better, but this would do. Water in bowl, right finger in water, protein bar belonging to Alex in left hand. Time for a little hydromancy. I leaned over the bowl, closed my eyes, and willed a bit of magic into the water as I visualized him.

Hydromancy came in handy for finding missing things—or, in this case, people. Libby had told Alex to meet her in Pointe a la Hache, a tiny riverside community in Plaquemines Parish that spanned the east and west sides of the Mississippi. It was near the last breach site and had about thirty residents before Katrina, most of whom reached the rest of the parish by ferry. I wasn’t sure how much the population had rebounded, but Libby had said she’d be at an abandoned building just downriver from the ferry landing.

I opened my eyes and watched the water cloud, then clear. I should have been able to see Alex, no matter where he was. I closed my eyes and fought the panic trying to claw its way into my head. It didn’t mean he was dead. It could just mean … I shook my head to erase a similar conversation I’d had with myself while trying to scry Gerry after Katrina. He hadn’t been dead either, but he’d been in a lot of trouble.

I cleared my mind and visualized Gandalf instead, sending more power into the bowl. This time, an image appeared in the water—the big golden dog on the ground, not moving. I fought back tears as I watched the image, desperate to see movement.

Think, DJ.
Alex couldn’t be dead—he’d have shifted back to his human form. If he was injured, he could be staying in canine form to heal faster. I moved my fingers around in the water gently, trying to shift the image to see where he was. The river ran to his left, a lot of generic trees and grass around him, some kind of white square building behind him. I’d just have to go to Pointe a la Hache and work from there.

CHAPTER
31

I grabbed my keys, cranked the Pathfinder, and drove east. Traffic clogged all the lanes of the Crescent City Connection bridge crossing the river onto the Westbank, and crawled all the way to Belle Chasse. Finally, I was able to get out of traffic and head down Highway 23 into Plaquemines. Banks of clouds gathered overhead, and rain looked inevitable. Our first really cool weather of the year was due overnight.

The rendezvous spot Libby had chosen was easy enough to find. The big ferry terminal came first, crossing the river to Point a la Hache, and then a quarter-mile later a small cinderblock building with a missing roof sat surrounded by piles of rotted hurricane debris. Alex’s black Mercedes sat in front.