She hadn’t been keen on moving back here.
In fact, she’d thought Seattle—with its vibrant waterfront, cooler climate, rugged snow-capped mountains within driving distance, rough-and-tumble history, and most importantly, the over two thousand miles of distance from there to Louisiana—had been a perfect place to settle down.
Well…aside from Zoey and that nasty little indiscretion with Luke. She took a long swallow from her glass.
Be fair, Abby, her conscience argued, Luke’s involvement with Zoey hadn’t been a little indiscretion, it had been a full-blown, heart-wrenching, mortifying affair!
“Bastard,” she growled, then drained the glass and shoved it into the dishwasher.
She should have divorced Luke when she’d learned he’d cheated during their engagement, but oh, no, she’d been stupid enough to give the marriage another chance. He’d sworn to change his ways if she’d just move with him to New Orleans.
She’d been dubious of the marriage being able to resurrect again, of course, but the temptation for a new start had been hard to resist, and at that point, she’d been foolish enough to think that she still loved her husband.
“Idiot,” she muttered under her breath, returning to the living room and the dust rag sitting on the windowsill. There had been other reasons for moving to New Orleans, or the area surrounding it. Hadn’t she always promised herself that she’d return to the place where her life had changed forever when Faith Chastain had fallen to her death? Hadn’t Abby decided that the only way to put the ghosts of the past to rest was to visit the hospital, take pictures of it, reexamine that night that was so fragmented in her mind?
“Oh, Mama,” she said, once again picking up the framed head shot and staring into eyes so like her own. She glanced at the fireplace where, only a few nights earlier, she’d burned the photos of her marriage. Black curled ashes still clung to the grate.
Her cell phone rang. She could hear it singing inside her purse, which sat in the dining room next to her portfolio. She hurried to the purse, snatched up the slim phone, and flipped it open. “Hello?”
“Hi, Abby, this is Maury,” the caller said. Abby’s heart sank. “Maury Taylor. You remember. I work with Luke.”
“Of course I remember you.” Her voice grew cool. Maury the moron.
“Look, I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Luke, have you?”
“No,” she said slowly, sensing a trap. Maybe this was one of her ex-husband’s pranks. He was known for setting people up while he was on the air, then letting the whole listening world laugh at the victim’s expense. Even if the show wasn’t airing at the moment, he would tape his victim’s responses and replay them over and over again when the show was broadcasting. Her stomach tightened.
“You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. Why would I hear from him?”
“I don’t know.” There was an edge to Maury’s voice. Worry? Panic? “He, uh, he didn’t show up at the station yesterday. Missed the program completely. We had to air an old program we had on tape from last summer.”
She wasn’t buying it and really didn’t care. She was finished with Luke Gierman. “So why do you think I’d know where he was?”
“I don’t know. I thought you might have heard the show we aired earlier this week, the one on ex-spouses.”
She didn’t respond, but felt heat climb steadily up her neck. Bastard, she thought, imagining Luke at the microphone, spewing his lies. Her fingers clenched over the phone.
“He, uh, well, you probably already heard, he really ripped you up one side and down the other.”
“And that would make me want to talk to him?” she mocked, somehow managing to hold her temper in check. She still wasn’t convinced this wasn’t a setup. “What a charmer. I have no idea where he is. Good-bye.”
“No, look! Abby,” he said anxiously, as if afraid she would hang up on him. “I’m sorry. The program was…over the top, I know, but that’s what his audience likes, what they connect to.”
“So?”
“So…after that program, Luke disappeared. He didn’t show up at his health club and you know he always works out after the show.”
She remembered. Didn’t comment about Luke’s obsession with staying in shape. It wasn’t just about looking or feeling good, it was some kind of rabid mania.
“No one has heard from him. I went over to his town house, but no one answered the door. I’ve called his home phone and his cell and he’s not answering.”
“He’ll surface,” she said, refusing to be sucked into Luke’s antics.
“But—”
“I haven’t seen him. Okay? And as he so publicly made certain of, I’m not his wife anymore.” She was angry now, and her tongue wanted to go wild. “I don’t keep tabs on him. Why don’t you talk to his girlfriend?”
“Nia…yeah…Luke and Nia…”
When he trailed off, she asked impatiently, “What?”
“Nia doesn’t know where he is.”
She could tell he’d been going to say something else. Whatever it was, she didn’t care. “Maybe she does and she’s not saying.”
“This isn’t like him.” Maury sounded worried. Really worried.
Good. Let him stew about Luke’s whereabouts. To her surprise, Abby didn’t care about Luke’s shenanigans or his love life at all. And she wasn’t worried about him. Luke was known to pull all kinds of publicity stunts. He was just the kind of guy to fake his own death to give the ratings a shot in the arm. “I haven’t seen Luke since last weekend when he picked up Hershey, the dog we share custody of. Sorry, I can’t help you. And he’d better be taking care of my dog.”
“Okay, okay, but if you do hear from him, have him call the station immediately. The producer’s ready to tear Luke a new one.”
“Oh, great.” Just what she needed to hear. She hung up and refused to consider what Luke was up to. It didn’t matter anymore. They were divorced. Period.
And his things were out of the garage.
Still, she walked into the bedroom and opened the second drawer of her nightstand, on what had once been Luke’s side of the bed.
There, as it had been for years, was his father’s service revolver. Picking up the .38, she felt a pang of guilt for having lied to her ex about the weapon, but her remorse was short-lived.
For now, she was keeping the gun.
“Okay…so what have we got here?” Detective Reuben Montoya, in jeans, T-shirt, and a black leather jacket, stepped carefully toward the door of the small, dilapidated cabin in the bayou. Morning sunlight was crawling through the trees and brush, burning off the last of the night fog. The smell of the swamp was thick in his nostrils: slow-moving water, rotting vegetation, and something else, a stench he recognized as that of decaying flesh. His stomach turned a bit but he contained it. For the most part he’d always been able to button down his emotions, work the scene, and not lose his lunch.
“It looks like a murder-suicide,” the deputy, Don Spencer, theorized. He was short, with pale blue eyes and reddish hair buzzed into a military cut. “But not everything adds up. We’re still figuring it out. Crime-scene team’s been at it for an hour.”
Montoya nodded and looked around. Several officers had already roped off the crime-scene with yellow tape and were positioned around the perimeter of the little cabin stuck in the middle of no-damned-where. “You the first on the scene?” Montoya asked as he signed the security log.
“Yep. Got the call into dispatch from a local—a fisherman who admits to trespassing. He was on his way to the river, noticed the door hanging open, and walked in.”
“He still here?”
The officer nodded. “In his truck, over there.” Spencer hitched his chin in the direction of an old, battered Dodge that had once been red, but had faded after years of abuse by the hot Louisiana sun. In the bed was a small canoe and fishing gear. Montoya glanced at the cab of the truck, noticed the black man seated inside. “His name is Ray Watson. Lives abou
t six miles upriver. No record.”
“Is he the only witness?”
“So far.”
“Have him stick around. I’ll want to ask him some questions.”
“You got it.”
Hankering for a smoke, Montoya slipped on covers for his shoes, and made his way toward the house, careful not to disturb an investigator snapping pictures of the overgrown path to the door. Weeds had been crushed, leaves pulverized, and it was evident that several sets of footprints led to the steps.
Montoya made his way through the open door and stopped dead in his tracks.
“What the hell is this?” he said, looking at the crime scene and feeling his stomach clench.
Harsh lights illuminated the small room where blood, feathers, vomit, and dirt vied for floor space. The air was punctuated with the smells of cordite, blood, puke, urine, and dust. Investigators were filming and measuring, lifting latent fingerprints, and searching for trace evidence.
In the center of it all was the crime scene where two victims had died. One of the victims, a white man in good shape, who looked to be in his early forties, was lying naked as the day he was born and staring faceup. Blood had trickled from the hole in his chest, but not as much blood as Montoya would have expected. The man had died quickly.
“Jesus,” Montoya muttered.
The second victim, a young woman wearing a white silk and lace wedding gown, was lying atop the dead guy. She appeared to have fallen over him from what looked like a single gunshot wound to her head. Her long ponytail was splayed across her bare back where the neckline of the dress scooped low. Some of the blond strands were bloody and tangled from the wound at her temple.
A photographer clipped off shot after shot, his flash strobing the already macabre scene while Bonita Washington, the lead crime-scene investigator, was busily taking measurements around the bodies. Her black hair was pulled into a tight bun at the base of her skull, her eyes trained on the floor as she squatted near the vics.
“You sign the log, Montoya?” she asked. Wearing half-glasses and a sour expression, she looked up from the sketch she was drawing. She skewered him with a don’t-mess-with-me look. African-American and proud of it, Bonita ran the criminologists team with an iron fist and a keen eye.
“What do you think?”
“Just checkin’. No one gets in here without signin’ my security log. I need to know everyone who comes in here and keep a record of it.” One dark eyebrow arched, and above her rimless glasses, her intense brown eyes didn’t so much as flinch as she stared at him. “You have been known to bend more than your share of rules.” She was absolutely not taking one ounce of crap today.
“I signed in. Okay?”
“Good. Where’s Bentz?”
“On vacation with his wife. Vegas.” Rick Bentz was Montoya’s partner. Had been for years, ever since Bentz had moved from L.A. and Montoya had been a junior detective. The only time they’d not worked together was a few months when Montoya had taken a leave of absence from New Orleans to work a case in Savannah. A sour taste filled the back of his throat as he thought of those painful weeks, but he pushed any memory aside and concentrated on the here and now. And it was bad. “Bentz will be back in a few days,” he said, rubbing the goatee that covered his chin. He flashed Washington a grin. “For now, you get to deal with me.”
“How could I be so lucky?” she said with the slightest trace of humor, then, her expression turning stern again, pointed at the two bodies with the eraser end of her pencil. “Careful where you step, what you touch. We’re still collecting fingerprints and trace.”
Montoya shot her a look as he pulled a notepad from the back pocket of his pants. “I’ve been at dozens of scenes, Washington.”
“Okay.” She was still frowning, but gave him a quick nod as she slipped into a more companionable mode. “I did the preliminary walk-through. Everything appears to have happened in this room. From the blood splatter and body position, it looks like both vics were killed right here.” She jabbed a gloved finger at the floor of the cabin. She was obviously convinced of where the crime had happened, but her brow was still furrowed, her frown intense. “But it’s been staged.”
“Staged?”
“Um-hmm. What we have here is either a murder-suicide or a double murder. Haven’t figured that out yet. But I will.”
He didn’t doubt it.
“I think the man was tied to that chair over there.” She indicated an old metal and plastic dinette chair that had been shoved into a corner of the room. “Traces of blood on it, and you can see that it was dragged through the dust…footprints beside the tracks. Shoes. Our boy here”—she motioned toward the dead man staring sightlessly upward, his eyes glazed, his face bloated—“isn’t wearing any. And we can’t find a pair. They’re too big for the girl, so I’m thinkin’ we’ve got a third party. A big man from the footprints around. We’ll just call him Size Twelve.”
“The killer.”
“Yeah, the male vic is a size nine and a half, maybe a ten. This whole scene appears staged to me, but not done well enough that we wouldn’t figure it out immediately. As I said, either the killer’s an idiot, or he wants us to know that he’s behind it; he’s just showing off.” Her eyes narrowed as she looked at Montoya over the tops of her half-glasses. “There is GSR on the female vic’s hands, and a little blood, but this whole place feels off.”
“Who threw up?”
“Her, by the looks of her clothes.”
“A wedding dress? She was a bride?”
“Don’t know. Don’t think so…over there in the pile? Running shorts and T-shirt. She changed. Or was changed. Premortem, the blood spatter is all over the wedding dress.”
“Why would she change?”
“Beats me.” Dark lines creased her forehead and she tapped her pencil to her lips as she thought. “But whoever our killer is, he wants us to notice that the guy is stripped bare, naked to the world, and the girl is on her way to her own wedding…or something like that. Go figure…”
Montoya didn’t like what she was suggesting. He stared at the man lying faceup, the woman’s body draped over his. Something about him…
“You recognize the male vic?” she asked, again pointing with her pencil at the dead man with the thinning brown hair.
“Should I?”
“Luke Gierman. Local celebrity of sorts. Shock jock.”
“Gierman’s Groaners,” Montoya said, remembering the controversial radio personality. He’d never met Gierman but had seen his photo in the newspapers a few times.
“ID was on him. Cash and credit cards undisturbed, or so it seems. He had two hundred and six dollars on him and a receipt from an ATM from First Congressional Bank on Decatur Street for two hundred dated the night before last at 6:36 P.M.”
“He could have been abducted about that time.” He decided to review the cameras at the bank.
“Maybe. As for her…” She pointed a finger at the dead woman lying atop Gierman. “Courtney LaBelle, according to the student identification card in her wallet. She wasn’t carrying a purse, just one of those slim card holders she’d stuffed into a small pocket of her running shorts. No credit card and only five bucks with her. But she did have a driver’s license that indicates she’s from the city, address is in the Garden District.” She clucked her tongue sadly and shook her head. “Eighteen years old.” The edge of Washington’s jaw hardened. “The ME took a preliminary look, thinks from the lividity, flaccid stage of rigor, and body temperature, the TOD was the night before last, probably between ten P.M. and three A.M. He can’t get any closer than that.”
“Not long after Gierman’s ATM transaction.”
“Yep.”
“Did she know Gierman?” Montoya said, glancing at the corpse of the girl. Her skin was waxy, her face bloated, but he guessed she had been beautiful just a few days earlier.
“That’s what you need to find out. Gierman allegedly had a thing for younger girls and she would definitely
qualify.”
Montoya was already taking notes. Bonita Washington bugged the hell out of him sometimes, but she was good at her job. Damned good. Making it hard to argue with her, harder still to rib. “We got the weapon?”
“Yep. Bagged and tagged. Twenty-two pistol. Found in the female victim’s hand.”
He took in the floor again. Feathers, dust, mud, and blood covered the old planks. “What’s with the feathers?”
“A pillow. Probably strapped to Gierman. Maybe to mute the sound, I don’t know, but it was left by the chair.” She pointed and Montoya examined the flaccid bag of an old stained pillowcase. A hole was blown in its center, the faded fabric and feathers within singed and darkened with blood. “Shot at close range.”
Montoya stared at the bodies, tried to imagine their places before death and how they ended up almost in a lover’s embrace.
“As I said, I’m guessing from the marks on Gierman’s legs and arms, that he was bound, maybe his ankles tied to the legs of the chair, that would match the bruising on his body. Though it’s missing now, I think there had been tape over his mouth. There are still traces of some adherent on his face.”
Montoya looked closer, noticed the flecks of grayish matter sticking to Gierman’s whiskers and cheeks. A rectangular red mark was visible against his pale skin and even his lips were raw looking, as if the tape had stuck to them before being roughly ripped away.
“They aren’t married?”
“He’s single. Divorced, I think. And I don’t know about her, but she’s got a hell of a scrape on her left ring finger. Looks like a ring was pulled off and took a lot of skin and flesh with it.”
“Jesus,” Montoya muttered, spying the girl’s bruised and raw finger.
“I guess the ‘I do’s’ didn’t go easily,” Washington muttered, a sick joke to lighten the scene.
Montoya had seen more than his share of bizarre killings since joining the force, but this was right up there with the best of them. He straightened. “Do you think this was some kind of mock wedding…that our killer was the preacher and the ring was forced on, then yanked off…did we find it?”