“They threatened to kill you?”
“They threatened worse than that.”
“What’s worse than dead?” Lacey asked intently.
“If you have to ask, you don’t know half as much about this case as the cops are afraid of.” Veronique took another long drag off her cigarette and leaned back in her chair.
As Veronique’s words sank in, merging slowly with the ugly suspicions Lacey had been dancing around for months, Lacey’s mind raced to assimilate the new facts. Originally, she’d told herself she didn’t have enough proof to leap to conclusions, but the more she learned, the harder it was to ignore her instincts screaming at her.
Which was why she had spent the last month scouring every news report, tabloid article, and blog posting on the subject. Had gotten her hands on the trial transcripts and police files and pored over every word in them. Had talked to everyone she could find who was involved in the case. Nothing—nothing—had so much as hinted at what her gut told her was going on.
“This isn’t your garden-variety prostitution ring, is it, Veronique?” she asked when she was able to speak around the sudden lump in her throat.
Lacey kept her voice steady through sheer strength of will, when everything inside of her was a maelstrom of confusion. She didn’t know what had gone on here—didn’t know what was still going on—but she was smart enough to smell a cover-up when she saw one. And in this case, there was more than one. “This is more. It has to be. Girls are disappearing. You’re scared to death. It’s—”
“Don’t say it!” Veronique cut her off sharply, then glanced over Lacey’s shoulder to the street beyond the window. When their eyes met, Veronique’s were once again glazed. Once again afraid. “Don’t even think it.” She picked up her purse and stepped unsteadily away.
“What happened to your girls, Veronique? The records said you had hundreds of girls working for you, yet only a handful went to prison. Most of the others disappeared into thin air. Nobody could track them down.”
“You’re making it sound really bad.” She ground out her cigarette, then quickly lit up another one, all without taking her eyes from Lacey’s. “And it’s not like that at all. I treated my girls well. They were happy.
“If you continue with this, if you keep pushing, all you’re going to do is get yourself killed—and maybe a whole bunch of other people as well. Find something else to write a book about, before you end up in over your head. This is too dangerous.”
“Like you?” Lacey spoke softly, as if her tone would somehow negate the destructive power of her words.
Veronique smiled, and it was the saddest sight Lacey had ever seen. “Over my head? Honey, I’m in so deep I’ll probably never see the surface again. Listen to what I’m telling you before it’s too late. Trust me, you don’t want to end up like me.”
She turned away.
“I can help you.” The words shot out of Lacey’s mouth before she knew she was going to say them, but once they were out, she knew she wouldn’t take them back even if she could. The offer was impulsive and impractical and wouldn’t do a damn thing to help her write her book. But Veronique needed help, and it really didn’t matter if she’d gotten herself into the mess she was currently in. It was obvious she wanted out, but didn’t know how to go about getting there.
“You can’t help me.” Veronique stumbled back, and there was anger in her face now. Anger and a fear so deep it could only be called terror. Lacey winced away from it before she could stop herself. “In a few more days, you won’t even be able to help yourself.”
“Veronique.” She reached for her, but the former madam shrugged her off like she was a particularly persistent gnat, and kept walking.
Out of the dining room.
Out of the restaurant.
Straight out of luck.
Lacey kept watching her—too skinny, too drugged, too scared to do herself any good—until she was completely out of sight.
Then picked up her own bag and started walking home, anger and confusion and her own fear churning in her stomach as Veronique’s words—and her own questions—ran through her head again and again.
Dangerous.
Where did the girls come from?
More than prostitution.
Police involved.
Where did the girls come from?
Dangerous.
Can’t help me.
In over your head.
Where did the girls come from?
The longer Lacey walked, the more furious she became. Continuing down Decatur to Conti, she turned left at the narrow street and headed toward her apartment. Tourists thronged around her, brightly colored beads at their necks and yard-long drinks in their hands in an effort to combat the late-afternoon heat. They were an interesting sight, and she was new enough to New Orleans that on a normal day she would have enjoyed the spectacle. But today, when all she wanted to do was get to her apartment and her computer and her research, the crowds just annoyed her.
She swung an absent right onto Bourbon, passing by a couple of the Big Easy’s more notorious strip clubs. Pictures of half-naked girls in compromising positions adorned the windows, and for a minute it was all she could do to keep from getting sick. All she could do not to cry as she finally allowed her suspicions free rein.
With Veronique’s words echoing in her head, Lacey ran over what she knew, along with what she could only guess at. If this wasn’t just a prostitution ring—as Veronique had admitted to her—then what was it?
A drug ring? Were the girls somehow involved in drug smuggling? What else could have scared Veronique so badly? What else could have made every witness, every source she’d managed to uncover clam up so completely? The world of drugs was a dirty, disgusting one—more than one of the books she’d written in the past eight years had touched on the subject—and most of the kingpins stopped at nothing to keep their secrets. To many of them, murder was nothing more than a means to an end. And torture—torture was considered an amusing pastime.
Approaching a beautifully restored building that looked more like an antebellum mansion than a strip club, she studied the lewd pictures on the outside wall and windows, as her mind went over the evidence she’d managed to accumulate so far.
With everyone clamming up on her, there wasn’t as much as she’d like. But there was enough for her to start building the foundations of her book. Though logic told her this was about drugs, her instincts told her it wasn’t—or, at least, that it wasn’t solely about drugs. But maybe her instincts were wrong. Maybe it was drug running that had Veronique so freaked out. God knew, she wasn’t the first woman involved in the case who had been higher than a kite while Lacey had interviewed her. And she wouldn’t be the last.
But it didn’t feel like that, didn’t have the same characteristics she’d seen when she’d written her books on the San Diego/Tijuana and Miami drug trades. Besides, simple, low-level drug trafficking didn’t bring the kind of fear she’d seen in Veronique’s eyes, any more than it bought the kind of police and district attorney cover-up that she was becoming convinced had gone on here.
If this case reached as high as she thought it did—past the New Orleans and Louisiana politicians already exposed, and into the most elite of Washington’s upper echelon—then she couldn’t imagine that it was really about the drugs. Most politicians were too savvy—and too scared—to get involved with high-level drug trafficking.
She continued looking at the pictures of girls in various states of undress, doing any number of sexually suggestive things. Her gaze was drawn again and again to the picture of a young woman dressed as a schoolgirl. She was wearing a very short plaid skirt, white knee-highs and saddle shoes. Her hair was in pig-tails and she was licking a long, phallic-shaped lollipop. She was also topless.
In any other city, the club owner would have been arrested for breaking public decency laws. In New Orleans, he was celebrated.
Her stomach churned as her gaze landed on the old-fashioned light
pole not more than three feet away from her. And, more specifically, on the flyer attached to it.
The flyer was like any number she’d seen in her life—bright pink, with a HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? message at the top. But it wasn’t the message, or even the information beneath the picture or even the information beneath the picture, that kept her transfixed. Anne Marie Winston. Last seen on March 19, 2007, on the University of Calgary campus. Last heard from on May 23, 2007. Call came from a Bourbon Street pay phone.
No, it was the photo of the young, beautiful blonde that took up most of the eleven-by-seventeen-inch sheet of paper that had her staring, her mind racing. Reaching out with great care, she pulled the flyer free from the lamppost. She’d seen this girl before—she just knew it. She was one of the girls who’d been busted in the prostitution ring, but had disappeared before she had a chance to stand trial.
The hair was wrong. If this was the girl she thought it was, her mug shot had shown her with much shorter, dark hair. Lacey had spent hours studying those photos, and she knew this girl was one of them.
She was a missing person? Lacey looked at the flyer again. Last seen going to school in Canada. How did a Canadian college student end up hooking in New Orleans? And why?
She turned around, stared blindly at the wall of photos and tried to find an explanation that didn’t involve kidnapping and sexual slavery. She couldn’t.
As her mind worked, she became aware of what she was staring at, and the investigative instincts that had helped her so many times before kicked in with a vengeance. Walking closer to the wall, she began to search through the vast collage of snapshots that covered the windows of the club. The photos were small and run-together, the faces almost indistinguishable as the various photographers had been more concerned with other parts of the girls’ anatomies.
She studied picture after picture, wondering if she was losing her mind. None of the photos matched the face of the girl on the missing-persons flyer. She was about to give up, convinced her imagination was running away with her, when she found what she was looking for in the top row of pictures.
She studied the photo for a second, her face all but pressed up against the glass, and tried to tell herself she was wrong. That the girl dressed in a pair of skimpy black panties, spread-eagled and handcuffed to the bed, wasn’t Anne Marie Winston, the same girl on the missing-persons flyer. But when she held up the flyer, the resemblance between the two photos was clear: The eyes were the same, the cheekbones, the fine gold necklace and butterfly around her neck.
She ignored the disgusting pose Anne Marie was in, ignored the lack of clothes and too heavy makeup, and tried again to figure out the ins and outs of how this girl had ended up on this wall. How she’d ended up in this city when she’d gone missing from a school that was on the other side of the continent.
Legs buckling, she sank to the ground with a sigh, wrapping her arms around her stomach as all the information she had so far come across worked through her mind. She didn’t know how long she sat on the dirty curb at the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse, locked in her own little world, while unfazed tourists passed her by. Sweat trickled down her neck, down her back, but she ignored it. Just like she ignored the smell of urine and puke that saturated the humid street.
She let all the information she had so far come across stream through her mind. As she sorted it out, refocusing her attention from prostitution to slavery, she grew more and more convinced that she was finally on the right track.
She was knee-deep into plans to change the focus of her investigation—and the book—before it hit her that what she was considering wasn’t the book she’d been contracted to write. It wasn’t the story the publisher was expecting, and it wasn’t the story she’d originally wanted to tell.
It was a million times uglier.
A million times more dangerous.
And yet, she knew she couldn’t walk away. Not if what she suspected was true, that young girls were being kidnapped and forced into sex slavery. Not if everyone who had the power to stop it—the NOPD, the DA’s office, the FBI—was willing to look the other way.
And why are they willing to look the other way? she asked herself viciously. Money? Fear? Involvement? All three?
Whipping out her notebook, she made a few quick notes, putting her thoughts down in a stream-of-consciousness style that she hoped would help her piece the puzzle together. But she couldn’t concentrate. The street was spinning and she was having a horrible time keeping her balance. Reaching out, she braced a hand on the building and took a few slow, easy breaths until the Tilt-A-Whirl in her head started to slow down.
She had to do something, had to call someone. But who? The NOPD, whose spectacular lack of cooperation had already left her in a bind writing-wise? The FBI? But the girl wasn’t a U.S. citizen, wasn’t officially their problem.
So who? She glanced down at the flyer one last time and realized she didn’t have a choice. She would have to start by calling Mark and Carrie Winston, the contacts listed on the flyer.
Maybe they’d be able to tell her that Anne Marie was home safe, that the suspicions of sex slavery running through her head were just that.
As she turned to head home, movement from the balcony two stories above the strip club caught her eye.
Glancing up, she froze as she realized she was being watched by a man who, despite his suave and sophisticated appearance, had an air of brutality about him. Dressed in a tailored black suit and dress shirt, an expensive watch gleaming at his wrist, he looked like he could be anything from a stockbroker to a doctor. But the ice in his blue eyes, the cruel twist of his lips, told her he was something a lot more sinister. Something she’d do better to avoid.
Yet she didn’t look away, didn’t start moving down the street toward home as had been her original intention. Though his scrutiny caused ice to skitter down her spine like the sharpest of razor blades, she couldn’t help returning the perusal.
Instead of aggravating him, her attention seemed to amuse him and his lips twisted into a smile that was both interested and sadistic. Unwilling to give an inch, she wiggled her fingers in a brief but purely feminine wave. A quirk of one blond eyebrow was his only response, but it was enough to tell her that she had surprised him.
Tossing him a small smile that didn’t meet her eyes, she turned and headed down the street. As she walked, she wondered who he was. And why he had found her so interesting.
Gregory watched with a smile of pure enjoyment as the redhead walked away. She had spirit, that one, and a fire that could keep a man warm in a Siberian prison. Or, he acknowledged with a wary tilt of his head, burn the hell out of him if he let his guard down.
But what had she been doing out there? He’d noticed her when she was still half a block up—strolling down Bourbon Street with purpose in her stride and heat in her eyes. She’d looked like she’d known exactly where she was going, and he’d pitied the poor tourists who’d crossed her path. For a minute, he’d thought she was going to beat the old guy in the Hawaiian shirt who’d stopped directly in her path.
He’d continued watching as she’d skirted the old geezer, because he was fascinated by the way she moved. By the passion that vibrated inside of her. By—and he was being completely honest here—the sheer power of her beauty.
She was a looker, no doubt about that. Long red hair, big green eyes, a delicate body that cried out for domination; she was every fantasy he’d ever had and never known he was missing.
When she’d stopped in front of his club, he’d been astounded. Had wondered if she felt his interest the way he felt the siren call she issued with every slap of her hot-pink stilettos against the pavement. But she hadn’t glanced up, hadn’t revealed an awareness of him as she’d stared, transfixed, at the pictures on the outside of his club.
But then she’d reached for one of the flyers that had been on the pole outside his club for months. He’d never paid any attention to it—after all, since Katrina, flyers papered every po
le in the Quarter, advertising services, looking for people who had gone missing in the floods, promising to rebuild the city to its former glory.
Yet the way she’d looked at the flyer and his walls—not to mention whatever she’d written in that little notebook—had ice skittering up his spine. What had been on that flyer that was so interesting to her? And what did it have to do with his club?
Despite his concerns, when she’d sunk to the curb in front of the club, he’d almost bounded down the two flights of stairs that separated them to see if he could be of assistance. Which was quite a role reversal from him, as he was much more used to playing the big, bad wolf than he was the prince who rescued damsels in distress.
He knew the prudent thing to do would be to find out what was in that notebook. If it was damning, he could have Jim dispose of the body in the lake. But even as he told himself to give the order, he didn’t do it. There was something about her that got to him. Something that made all the beautiful women downstairs pale in comparison.
If he killed her, he would never discover what it was that made her so attractive, and he knew himself well enough to know he wouldn’t be able to rest until he figured out what that quality was.
Until he possessed it. Possessed her.
“Jim.” He spoke quietly, but his bodyguard/assistant heard him and came through the balcony doors in a hurry.
“Yes, Mr. Alexandrov?”
“Have her followed.” He gestured to the woman who had so intrigued him.
Jim didn’t question him, didn’t argue, didn’t point out the fact that she was almost out of sight. He just picked up the phone and barked orders into it. Less than a minute later, two men moved deliberately onto Bourbon, their eyes scanning the clumps and streams of bustling humanity for her bright red hair.
As his men went to work, Gregory amused himself by continuing to watch the redhead sweep down Bourbon Street. She was smaller and more slender than he usually liked his women, but there was a passion about her he found enticing. And the sway of her gently rounded ass wasn’t bad either.