Dead of Night 5

Somewhere along the way, they found a half-empty pack of Marlboros and, cigarettes dangling from their lips, they pushed their bikes along the colonnaded sidewalks of Bourbon Street, gawking at the transvestites, peeking through the darkened doorways of the strip clubs, grinning because they thought they were a couple of badasses who’d pulled a fast one.

Eventually, they made their way to North Rampart where they spent some time watching a tattoo artist through a shop window. Sean had turned—he didn’t even know why—and caught a glimpse of his mother entering the park across the street. It never even occurred to him that he might be mistaken. He just knew it was her.

His first inclination was to slip inside the tattoo parlor before she saw him, but he didn’t have to worry about that. She was too preoccupied by the man who waited on the other side of the gate. He was tall, handsome and well-dressed. Not the kind of guy who worked in the refineries like Sean’s dad, but someone who probably had a cushy office job downtown.

When Sean’s mother walked up to him, the man put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close. A moment later, they disappeared into the park.

Stunned, his heart hammering against his chest, Sean waited until Donnie went inside a store for a Coke and then he ditched him. Tearing across the street, he hid his bike in some bushes and then went through the gate.

He knew the park well enough, having been there the previous year on a school trip. He’d had a crush on his fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Chauvin, so he’d been uncharacteristically attentive that day as she’d guided them through the highlights. All that came back to Sean as he wandered past the famous statue and across the square to the far side of the park, where he finally found his mother in the arms of the stranger, kissing him in a way Sean had never seen her kiss his father.

As he stood watching them, a murderous rage had taken hold of him, a fury so deep and devastating he found himself trembling, his hands squeezed into tight balls at his sides. He wanted to step out of the shadows and confront them, scream at them. He wanted to punch someone so bad it was almost a physical ache.

Instead, he watched for a moment longer, then turned and raced out of the park. By the time he got home, his mother’s car was already in the drive, but he didn’t want to face her. He never wanted to see her again.

So he got back on his bike and rode to the deserted school playground, sat alone on the merry-go-round and smoked another cigarette, not caring who saw him. When he got home, long after dark, he caught hell from his father for causing his mother to worry, which Sean found so ironic he was sorely tempted to rat her out. He wasn’t sure why he kept silent. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to hurt his father, but more likely, he wanted to pretend that what he saw in the park hadn’t really happened. That everything in his life was still as normal as it had been that morning when his mother woke him up for school.

Two weeks later, she was gone.

It had taken Sean a long time to get over her betrayal. Of all the people in his life, he had loved her the most, but now she was nothing more to him than a distant memory.

And on the rare occasions when he found himself in Louis Armstrong Park, he didn’t view it through the eyes of the disillusioned kid he’d once been, but from the jaded perspective of a cop who had seen too much. And that was fitting, he supposed, because the park had changed, too. No longer a tribute to the city’s rich heritage, it was now a dangerous place where the naive or unarmed should never wander after dark.

And on the even rarer occasions when Sean looked back on his childhood, he didn’t remember his mother’s smile or her twinkling eyes or the books she’d read to him when he was little or the nights she’d sat up with him when he was sick. Instead, he recalled the way she’d hurried to her lover in the park. The way she’d been able to leave a son and husband so easily for a handsome, well-dressed stranger.

What Sean saw now, when he looked back, was the tragic decline of a decent, heartbroken man whose only fault lay in his inability to make a restless woman happy. Sean had often wondered over the years if his father’s grief had caused him to deliberately swerve into the path of the oncoming truck. The man didn’t drink or take drugs, and the accident had occurred in broad daylight. Most people who’d known Tommy Kelton had concluded that he must have fallen asleep at the wheel. There was no other explanation. None that anyone wanted to name.

His father’s frame of mind the day of his death would forever remain a mystery to Sean, just like his mother’s whereabouts. He had no idea where she was, or if she was even still alive. He’d never tried to find her, because he didn’t see the point. He already knew everything he needed to know about her. He’d known it since the day he’d watched her in the park.

But Danny’s assessment about Sean’s past was way off base. It had no bearing on Sean’s failed relationships. He had only himself to blame for the pain he’d caused Sarah—and now Catherine—and if he’d learned nothing else, he at least knew enough to own his mistakes.

All this flashed through Sean’s mind in the time it took to drive past the park. And then he brushed his thoughts aside, forgot them, as he focused his attention on the line of patrol cars and emergency vehicles he could see up ahead.

“Shit, I just thought of something,” Danny said. “Lapierre mentioned the flat was behind an old voodoo shop. Do you remember that case a while back where the guy strangled his girlfriend and cut up her body in the bathtub? Son of a bitch put her head in a pot of water on the stove. That apartment was over a voodoo shop on North Rampart. You don’t think it’s the same place, do you?”

“It’s not the same place,” Sean said.

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

Danny glanced at him. “Oh, Christ, what was I thinking? You worked that scene, didn’t you?”

Sean said nothing. That case, more than any other, still kept him awake at night.

“Man, that place must have been a fucking nightmare. Body parts in the oven and freezer.” Danny glanced at Sean. “I can stomach a lot. You know how I am at autopsies. Cool as a cucumber. But something like that...I don’t know, Sean. I think something like that could give a guy problems for a long time. Maybe mess him up in the head for good. Not that I’m suggesting there’s anything wrong with you.”

“No, of course not.”

“Is it true you found potatoes and carrots cut up beside the stove?”

“Jesus, Danny, do you really need the details? Let’s deal with one nightmare at a time, why don’t we?”

“Yeah, you’re right, but I can’t help wondering what makes a man snap like that. Murder in the heat of the moment is one thing, but hacking up the body of a woman you once loved...” He shook his head. “Sometimes it makes you wonder what any of us are capable of, under the right circumstances. Look at what happened during Katrina.”

“You’re just bound and determined to blow sunshine up my ass this morning, aren’t you?”

Danny grinned. “I’m doing my best.” He pulled in behind one of the squad cars and parked.

The area around the shop had been cordoned off, but as usual, a crowd had gathered on the street. Unlike the aloof bystanders who had stood outside the Marigny crime scene in the wee hours of the morning, a handful of the curious here were more aggressively inquisitive. Daylight had emboldened them, and they stopped just short of the yellow police tape, craning their necks to get a look down the narrow alleyway where most of the action was taking place.

As Sean and Danny approached the sidewalk, the chatter quieted, and for one split second, the only sound Sean heard was the tinkle of glass wind chimes hanging in the window of the shop next door. It was as if time stood still, giving him a moment to shrug off the remnants of one horror show before plunging headlong into another.

And then the reprieve ended with a burst of static from an officer’s radio and the raucous laughter of a homeless man as he shuffled past the crowd on the street.

Flashing their shields to one of the young patrolmen at the perimeter, Sean and Danny dipped under the tape and headed toward the back of the building.

The alleyway was like dozens of others that were in or near the Quarter. Dark, dank and reeking of filth. The brick walls on either side were tagged with graffiti, and among the broken beer bottles that littered the cracked pavement, Sean spotted the occasional discarded syringe.

The apartment was on the ground floor and the door opened directly into the alley; there was no stoop or porch. A couple of now-dead begonias in coffee cans had been placed on either side of the door in a feeble attempt to disguise the stench of urine that emanated up from the gutter.

Two cops searched through the trash along the buildings and a third stood talking to Tony Vincent, the coroner’s investigator. Sean spoke to them briefly as he opened the door.

The smell hit him like a fist in the face.

“Fuck,” Danny said, and took a step back. He fished the Vicks from his pocket and dabbed a healthy dose underneath his nose. “I love the smell of menthol in the morning,” he said with a grimace.

He didn’t offer to share because Sean never used anything. He didn’t find the vapor all that effective, and he’d learned early on that the presence of smells at a crime scene could provide valuable clues. The trick was learning how to peel away the overpowering odor of decay in order to detect the more subtle scents beneath.

Stifling his gag reflex, Sean stood just inside the door and glanced around. The studio apartment had a galley kitchen and a tiny bathroom that opened off the living-sleeping quarters. Like in a lot of old buildings in the area, the ancient plaster and brick had been patched over the years to update the plumbing and wiring. The space was cramped and dingy, and on cold nights, probably drafty as hell.

Lance Mosley and Charlie Grimes stood with their backs to the door as Patrice Petty, the crime-scene investigator, collected evidence on and around the body and another officer shot video footage of the crime scene.

The temperature inside was several degrees colder than outdoors, and Sean found himself shivering as he slid plastic booties over his shoes.

Charlie Grimes turned and gave them a nod. “Glad you boys could make it. Come looky what we got here.”

Charlie was in his early fifties, tall and thick around the middle, a big bear of a man with black hair going gray at the temples. He was a good detective, amiable and dependable, if not overly creative in his investigations. Mosley, his partner, was younger and far more ambitious, but his arrogance could sometimes be a problem and he possessed none of Charlie’s innate good humor. He wasn’t well-liked in the department, but Sean had never had a problem with him.

As he joined the semicircle that had formed around the body, Sean’s gaze dropped. The victim, a young female Caucasian with dark hair and a slender build, lay facedown on the floor. Her head was turned to one side and the matted hair that fell across her cheek obscured her features. She was naked from the waist up, and the first thing that caught Sean’s attention was the tattoo on her back. It looked identical to the one on the Jane Doe in the morgue.

But unlike the Marigny crime scene, there was no blood on the floor, no symbols on the walls and ceiling, no paraphernalia to suggest she’d been tattooed at the scene. She’d been killed somewhere else, her body dumped here for a reason they had yet to discover. The building number was 1204. No way could you get six-sixty-six out of that.

“Looks like she’s been here at least four or five days,” Mosley said after the crime-scene investigators had finished with the body and moved on to another area of the room.

Sean glanced up. “Do we know who she is?”

“Not yet. All we know for sure is that she didn’t live here. The flat’s been vacant for a couple of weeks.”

“Who found her?”

“The shopkeeper...Alexandra Lacroix,” Charlie said. “Calls herself Madame Lacroix. Claims she’s a voodoo priestess descended from Marie Laveau.”

“Don’t they all?” Danny muttered.

“Said she started getting whiffs of something dead by the time she locked up yesterday. She’s got some pretty rank stuff in that shop or else she might have noticed the stink earlier. Said she thought it was a dead rat in the wall and called the landlord as soon as she got home. He came over around eight this morning to let in the exterminator and that’s when they found the body.”

“Who’s the landlord?”

“Guy named Finch. Leslie Finch.”

“Who else has a key besides Finch?” Sean asked.

“The previous tenant ran out on his lease a couple of weeks ago, and Finch said he hadn’t had a chance to change the locks.”

And probably never would have, Sean thought. “When was the last time someone was in here before this morning?”