Killer Chef

  A lot of cops don’t. They feel the more time a suspect or witness has to mentally prepare his story, the more evasive he’ll be during questioning. But Caleb’s years of experience have taught him otherwise. Let criminals stew a bit, let them sweat, and they’ll be more likely to contradict themselves—and, Caleb hopes, confess.

  “Mr. Albatross-Gomez,” he says, finally entering the sterile interrogation room after letting Mitchell sit in there alone for forty minutes. He sits down at the metal table across from him. “We meet again.”

  Mitchell’s eyes are darting all over. His breathing is quick and shallow. The room is air-conditioned but his brow is damp. All classic signs of withdrawal—or guilt.

  “Whatever you think I did,” Mitchell whispers, shaking his head, “I…I didn’t.”

  “You weren’t at the scenes of all six murders? You didn’t have pictures of them? You didn’t kill all those people?”

  Mitchell shuts his eyes tight and starts rocking back and forth. The guy is clearly unbalanced.

  “I…I was there,” Mitchell admits. “And…yeah, I did. But I didn’t kill anybody, I swear! I was just the—the delivery guy, you know?”

  “No. I don’t. Explain it to me.”

  “There were these little cardboard boxes. Okay? All I did was drop them off at the restaurants. I got paid a thousand bucks each time. That’s a fortune to me, man!”

  “‘Little cardboard boxes,’” Caleb repeats skeptically. “What was in them?”

  “I don’t know. Honest. I didn’t ask any questions. The first one I just left by the back door of Patsy’s at like three in the morning. The next day I heard some people got killed there. I thought it was a weird coincidence.”

  “Go on.”

  “Couple days later, I dropped off another little box. At Café Du Monde. This time, I peeked inside it. This little vial. Like the ones they sell on Canal Street, with lavender or tea tree oil. I was nervous, so I went back that night and hung around, just to make sure everything was cool. When I saw those two people start shaking and choking and keel over…I got scared. So I ran.”

  Caleb folds his arms, not sure how much of this ridiculous story to believe.

  “Where did you get these little boxes from?”

  “All different places. One was in some bushes in an alley in the Lower Ninth. Another was under a stone at the Robert E. Lee statue in Tivoli Circle.”

  “Who paid you to do this? Who arranged these ‘deliveries’?”

  Now Mitchell shuts up. He stares at the ground, his feet dancing a little jig.

  “I…I don’t remember.”

  It takes Caleb everything he’s got to keep from reaching across and strangling the guy. He doesn’t even feel the need to get into the third set of murders.

  “You know what I think? You’re sick in the head. You get off on seeing folks suffer. You’re an addict with deep connections to the drug world who could easily get his hands on the synthetic poison found at each scene. You murdered six innocent people for sport. Then you tracked me down—the cop coming after you—at my truck, just for the thrill of it.”

  Caleb rises and marches toward the door. Mitchell tries to stand, too, but jerks forward. His left wrist is handcuffed to the metal table, which is bolted to the ground.

  “I didn’t know!” Mitchell pleads, his voice cracking with emotion. “I just needed the cash. You gotta believe me!”

  “Here’s what I believe,” Caleb replies. “You’re going to rot in jail.”

  Chapter 24

  Caleb is sweating bullets. His feet hurt like hell. His lower back is on fire.

  But he hasn’t felt this good in a very long time. Mitchell is behind bars awaiting trial. And there hasn’t been another Grim Waiter murder all week.

  “Would you hurry up already?” Marlene calls out from the other side of the Killer Chef truck’s kitchen. “That catfish is going in somebody’s stomach, not out on a date.”

  Caleb ignores his ex-wife’s quip and finishes preparing the final sandwich order of the night as meticulously as all the others. He drizzles precisely ten drops of homemade hot sauce over a fried fillet of catfish. He painstakingly arranges a neat mound of Creole-inspired coleslaw on top. Then he carefully wraps it in paper.

  “You know, you bust my chops when I don’t work hard enough,” Caleb says, passing the sandwich to Marlene, who hands it down to their last customer, a middle-aged local musician with a ponytail running down his back and an alto sax case slung over his shoulder. “Now you’re giving me a hard time when I do?”

  “Aw, I’m just kidding, darling,” Marlene says, turning off the grill and starting to scrub out the fryer. “I guess I’m just a little tired. Our line hasn’t been that long since all that Grim Waiter nonsense first started. Not like I’m complaining or anything.”

  Caleb tidies up his workstation and then starts doing some dishes. “Food business is back up all around the Quarter,” he says. “I don’t think anybody’s complaining.”

  “Um, excuse me?” A woman’s voice is heard from outside the truck.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” says Marlene without even turning around. “We just closed up.”

  “That’s too bad,” the woman replies, raising her voice so Caleb can hear her. “I was hoping your partner could serve up something spicy.”

  Marlene rolls her eyes, but Caleb grins big. He recognizes that voice right away.

  He steps to the cashier window to see Andrea Feldman standing outside. She’s wearing a curve-hugging little black dress, her auburn hair is all done up, and her hazel eyes seem to sparkle in the twilight.

  “I was just wondering, Detective…now that our case is closed…if you’d care to join me. For a drink. I know a spot in Tremé that makes an old-fashioned that’s to die for.” She blushes. “Maybe that wasn’t the best choice of words.”

  Caleb smiles, tempted by the invitation. The weeping mess he met last week is gone—replaced by the dangerous, seductive femme fatale he fell hard for the first time.

  He looks over at Marlene, who can anticipate exactly what he’s about to ask.

  “Go. I’ll finish the cleanup, do inventory, and lock up. Enjoy yourself. I mean it.”

  With a grateful nod, Caleb unties his greasy apron and peels off his sweaty T-shirt, throwing on a clean one.

  It’s not exactly his typical date outfit, but it will have to do.

  The rest of his night isn’t going to be typical, either.

  Chapter 25

  Caleb sits beside Andrea in a cozy booth inside a dim speakeasy. They’ve just clinked glasses—toasting to “Moving on!”—and taken the first sips of their old-fashioneds.

  It’s good, Caleb thinks, but certainly not “to die for” like Andrea claimed—a thought that, for a split second, makes his throat tense up. An attractive, professional couple out for a drink, they fit the Grim Waiter’s victim profile to a T. But Mitchell is in a holding cell downtown. They’re safe.

  Right?

  A few more seconds pass. When neither he nor Andrea shows any signs of poisoning, Caleb finally exhales. But Andrea is still focused on her drink.

  “My apologies, Detective,” she says, wrinkling her nose at it. “I remember their recipe being not passable but exceptional. I hope you’re not too disappointed.”

  Refined palate—Caleb appreciates that.

  “Not at all,” he assures her. “It tastes to me like they used white sugar instead of brown, and Angostura bitters instead of Peychaud’s. But the company makes it delicious. By the way, you can call me Caleb.”

  “In that case, Caleb…maybe we should have a nightcap back at my place?”

  Caleb doesn’t say no. She taps her iPhone, and before he knows it, a black SUV is pulling up outside. As they slide into the leather backseat, Caleb feels a little jittery, like they’re back in high school. And he likes it.

  As they walk up the pathway to her massive violet-hued mansion, a gust of wind whips off the Mississippi and sends a chill up his spi
ne.

  Caleb hesitates again.

  Part of him considers giving Andrea a gentlemanly peck on the cheek and heading home. But there’s something about this woman—the way she smells, the way she talks, the way her hips move—that is just too enticing to turn down. And when she whispers, “There’s a special room upstairs I want to show you,” Caleb’s curiosity gets the best of him.

  They make their way through the familiar Degas-lined hallway, then up a spiral staircase to the second floor. Andrea opens a door to reveal a spacious parlor that’s utterly different from the refined elegance of the rest of the house.

  It has a pool table. A giant flat-screen television. An L-shaped wet bar. And it’s filled with sports memorabilia, especially from the University of Wisconsin. An oversized Bucky Badger stuffed mascot is even perched on one of the bar stools.

  “You didn’t tell me you had a man cave,” Caleb exclaims, taking the place in. If he had any doubts that Andrea was basically the perfect woman, he doesn’t anymore. “What’s with all the Badger stuff?”

  “It’s where I went to college,” Andrea explains, stepping behind the bar and pouring them each two fingers of top-shelf bourbon. “I’d never been to a single sporting event in my life…until I started dating the quarterback. Our relationship didn’t survive, but my love of Wisconsin football did. Why are you giving me that look?”

  Andrea hands Caleb his drink, but he places it right back down on the bar and embraces her.

  The moment their lips meet, they both give in completely. They half-walk, half-grope their way into the bedroom, leaving a trail of clothing in their wake.

  When it’s all over, Andrea falls asleep almost at once.

  Caleb doesn’t.

  It was a fun night, no doubt about it. But as he lies there next to her, wide-awake for nearly an hour before deciding to slip out, something just doesn’t feel quite right.

  Chapter 26

  Dorothy never steps foot out of her natural habitat: the dim maze of colorful wires and flickering computer monitors on the third floor of NOPD headquarters.

  Which is why when Caleb spots her walking through the detectives’ bullpen on the first floor carrying a laptop, he knows right away that something big is up.

  “Isn’t this a nice surprise,” he says as she approaches his desk. “I wish I’d known you were coming, Dorothy. I would have bought some pastries and coffee, like always.”

  “Save that buttering up for some bread,” she quips, setting her laptop on his desk and firing it up. As before, her fingers move around the keyboard so fast they practically blur. “You know how Albatross-Gomez isn’t cooperating with prosecutors?”

  “Right,” Caleb says. “I’d love to know if he had accomplices, who his poison supplier was, all that stuff. But I heard he’s not talking much. Then again, he’s facing six life sentences, possibly even the needle. I don’t blame him for pleading the fifth.”

  “Well, he may not need to speak after all. Take a look at this.”

  She spins her computer screen around to reveal streams of numbers and data, indecipherable to a layman like Caleb.

  “What exactly am I looking at?”

  Dorothy explains that her team has been combing through the victims’ cell phones for nearly a week now, looking for any suspicious activity, or anything that might link them back to Albatross-Gomez. But they’ve only had access to five of the victims’ phone records. Until now.

  “Jonah Leach, the man killed at Clancy’s, didn’t send texts or make calls in the usual way,” Dorothy explains. “He worked as a venture capitalist and dealt with sensitive information all the time, so he only communicated via an app called iScramble. It digitally encrypts all text and voice messages, both incoming and outgoing, and makes accessing traditional phone records virtually impossible.”

  Caleb nods, understanding where Dorothy is going with this. “Virtually impossible. So I assume you’ve just found a way to decrypt it?”

  “Exactly. I broke the hex-encryption key myself, thank you very much. We have hundreds of calls and thousands of texts to sift through. Here are some of the numbers that came up recently, in order of frequency.”

  She points to a spreadsheet on her laptop screen. It’s a phone number beginning with the 504 New Orleans code.

  Caleb considers the number. It feels eerily familiar. He types it into his own phone’s keypad to see if it matches any of his contacts. “Oh, shit…” he mumbles when a name comes up.

  “Wow. It’s…it’s Andrea Feldman’s cell! Martin Feldman’s ex-wife.”

  Dorothy nods grimly, apparently not surprised that Caleb and Andrea have a personal relationship.

  “Well, those two shared some racy messages over the last few months. Until a few weeks ago, when Jonah tried to end the relationship. And Andrea didn’t take it very well at all.”

  Caleb is speechless, shaken to his core. Andrea has been romantically involved with all three of the Grim Waiter’s male victims. Of course it can’t just be a coincidence. She must be somehow involved. But how? Is she being punished vicariously, forced to watch three ex-lovers be killed? Or is she the one doing the killing?

  There’s only one way to find out.

  Chapter 27

  Patience is one of Caleb’s strong suits. Whether waiting for a ball of dough to rise or a suspect to slip up, he has a knack for staying calm and determined, no matter the circumstances.

  But right now? That patience is being put to the test.

  Driving an unmarked vehicle from the police pool, Caleb has been parked down the block from Château Feldman for the better part of forty-eight hours, keeping an eye out for Andrea.

  The detective in him is hoping he can catch her in the act and link her back to the murders.

  But the red-blooded man in him is praying she’s innocent, that there must be some explanation, that the woman he has feelings for isn’t also a ruthless killer.

  After two days of zero movement inside or outside Andrea’s palatial home, at around ten o’clock on the second night of Caleb’s stakeout he sees a woman jogging across the front yard…wearing a Wisconsin Badgers hat. Not an everyday sight here in New Orleans.

  It’s dark, making it difficult to distinguish her shape, but there’s no doubt in his mind it’s Andrea.

  Steeling himself, Caleb slips on a nondescript dark baseball cap of his own, gets out of his sedan, and discreetly starts to follow her.

  He jogs behind Andrea without being seen for nearly a quarter of a mile. But he’s thrown for a loop when they pass the stately old Ursuline Convent and the Beauregard-Keyes House—a small, southern version of the White House painted canary-yellow.

  The jogging route Andrea is taking is unusual. But Caleb stays on her tail, despite her brisk pace. He debates calling out to her, pretending that he was out for an evening run, too.

  But something tells him not to. Something tells him to see where Andrea goes.

  When they reach St. Philip Street, it finally hits him.

  Andrea is running right toward the Killer Chef truck.

  Because he’s been on the stakeout tonight, Marlene is working it alone. Caleb is supposed to be there, by her side, cracking jokes, helping her shut the place down and keeping her safe. If he doesn’t get there fast, who knows what—

  “Shit!” Caleb cries out as he trips over a loose piece of concrete in the sidewalk and tumbles forward to the ground, hard. Of all the times to be clumsy.

  He picks himself back up as quickly as he can…but when he looks around, he realizes Andrea is gone.

  This isn’t good. Caleb starts running again. His only thought is to get to the truck, fast.

  Chapter 28

  Caleb’s lungs are burning when he reaches the Killer Chef truck.

  He slows and approaches quietly, with great caution. The side panel is already down, covering the cashier and takeout windows, preventing him from seeing inside. The truck’s rear door is closed, too—strange, because Marlene typically leaves it aja
r, especially when she’s working alone.

  Caleb can just sense it: something isn’t right.

  He considers calling for backup, but in a situation like this, every second counts. He doesn’t want to spook Andrea, either, and make her do something she doesn’t mean to.

  Slowly, carefully, Caleb creeps closer toward the truck.

  He stops near the rear stairs when he hears a commotion of some sort going on inside. Even with no knowledge of what’s happening, he has to act. Now.

  Caleb draws his sidearm and flips off the safety. Cautiously he reaches for the rear door’s handle. Finding it unlocked, he turns it and pushes it open.

  Chapter 29

  There she is, her back to him, wearing that Wisconsin Badgers cap—and by her stance and his view of a trembling Marlene, she appears to be wielding a knife.

  But it’s not Andrea standing there with her back to him…it’s Patsy.

  What the hell is this?

  Standing just a few feet behind her, Caleb’s first instinct is to tackle Patsy and take her down. But he decides to make no sudden movements at all. He doesn’t even want to make eye contact with Marlene, since it might clue Patsy in that he’s there.

  “I wear my heart on my sleeve, Marlene,” Patsy replies, her voice cracking with pain. “When I fall, I fall hard.” She sniffles. “I fell in love with him. And he dumped me. That was hard enough. Then he paraded his other girlfriend all over town!”

  Caleb is still standing frozen, afraid to move a muscle, unsure what to do next.

  “So why are you here?” Marlene asks. “Why now?”

  “Shut up, you bitch!” Patsy screams, waving her knife wildly. “Like you don’t know. This is about Caleb. After that night of the deaths—it was so obvious to me that you two were still in love. Admit it. Admit it, damn it!”

  Caleb debates taking a step closer, but he just can’t bring himself to risk it.