Athena Force 8: Contact (12 page)

The gunman—the serial killer?—came nearer.

Faith ducked around another vault, into the mist.

It was a game of cat and mouse—and she’d never wanted to be the mouse. But go figure, her one night of self-defense for women hadn’t taught her how to disarm someone. The basic rules concerning armed attackers were pretty simple. If they want something you can live without, give it to them and live. If they want more, like to take you to a secondary crime scene, better to run. Except for trained professionals, most shooters missed most of the time, at least from a distance of over five feet.

It occurred to Faith that the man creeping after her had hit Butch with his first shot, in the fog, from at least twenty feet away. That didn’t sound like an amateur.

But who?

In any case, she wasn’t leaving Butch.

Seizing inspiration, she tied her excess skirts into a knot and used the wrought-iron fencework around an oversize family crypt to clamber onto its stone surface. She slid onto its whitewashed roof, onto her stomach, and peeked over the edge. Her perch was maybe as high as a garden shed, maybe a garage.

She saw the gunman now, a man dressed in gray, wearing a stocking over his head and creeping in her direction. He still had a pistol in his hand. And damn it, she didn’t.

She had to get rid of him, not just for her own protection but to go to Butch!

Then Faith realized how she could solve both those problems at once. Butch had a gun!

If only she didn’t have to cross an entire alley, ten feet of open space, to get to it.

“Madame Cassandra?” The gunman had circled the tomb that first hid her. Now he was looking down the different paths she could have taken—still, thank goodness, looking at the ground. He was still hissing his words in a strange whisper, eerily unlike a human voice. “Come out and die.”

Faith peered over the edge of the crypt, judged the distance to its neighbor as a workable four feet, and carefully rose into a crouch. One…

She tried not to be scared.

Two…

It was only what, twelve feet to the ground? Thirteen?

Three! She ran. Jumped. Landed and dropped to her bare knees with the barest scuffling noise before, she hoped, he could see her. Then she listened.

His footsteps sounded farther away. “You can’t avoid me forever, Cassandra.”

Oh yeah?

She did it again. And again. The third time, she misjudged the distance. One of her feet slipped as she landed, and she scraped her shin. But she managed to clamber back up to safety, then to look over the edge of that tomb.

The sky had definitely lightened to gray, but it was overcast. Wisps of fog still drifted amidst the City of the Dead. The gunman was a ways down the alley, nearer Butch—she didn’t like that part—but not looking this far for her. She had to take the chance of sliding her feet off the crypt roof, then her legs, then—

Her gloved hands scrabbled at whitewashed plaster as she slid all the way off and dropped to the grass below.

“Even if you run, I’ll find you,” warned the gunman. From his voice, she could tell he was facing the opposite direction.

Faith took that chance and dodged across the alley. She pivoted behind another tomb, panted and began to work her way back. Closer to Butch. Closer to the gunman. Closer to Marie Laveau.

Now she knew what mice in mazes must feel like, with walls rising up on all four sides and too many tantalizing openings to all be a worthwhile choice. She still didn’t like being the mouse. But she tried to move as quietly as one anyway, listening to be sure of where the gunman was.

“Why, what an intriguing sketch,” he whispered hoarsely. He must be looking at the folder Butch had brought. “I wonder who drew it?”

She moved from one tomb to the next, pressing herself tight against whitewashed brick or crumbling plaster, listening, then moving again. Closer, then closer, by frustrating increments. Only when she realized that the crypt she’d pressed against was scratched with
X
’s did she know that she’d made it.

Now came the hard part.

To get to Butch, and to Butch’s gun, she had to distract the gunman. And to do that…?

“Did you run away, little psychic?” demanded the gunman, his whisper too damned close to Butch’s weak moans. “Then I suppose there’s nothing left for me to do except tie up loose ends, is there?”

Faith crouched, picked up the first thing she could grab—a large conch shell left by some hopeful petitioner—and threw it. Hard. Across the alley.

It clattered satisfyingly.

Even more satisfying was the sound of the killer’s footsteps jogging in that direction. While he did that, Faith circled Marie Laveau’s tomb, then ran to Butch and fell to her knees by his side. She swallowed back her own moan at the sight of all that blood.

His eyes drifted open, focused slowly on her face. The veil had pulled loose, in all her climbing and jumping. Her wig might or might not be straight. But she didn’t give a damn whether he recognized her or not.

All she wanted to do was to hold him, to call for help, to press her hands on the bleeding hole in his chest. But first, she had to get the gun on his waistband holster.

Luckily, he was wearing it.

She unsnapped the holster and withdrew the gun, which was much, much heavier than she’d expected. She’d never held one before. She hoped she could do it now.

“Safety, darlin’,” murmured Butch on a gurgling exhale. For a moment, she thought he meant for her to be careful. Then she realized he meant the button on the side of the pistol.

She slid it back, heard a click. The safety was off.

“Two…” He coughed. Worse, he coughed up blood. “…handed.”

“Where’s your cell phone?” she demanded. “I have to call for—”

Then she heard it—the thrum of the gunman’s heartbeat, which had been moving away from her, turned back. His amazingly silent footsteps were returning.

Butch was right. She didn’t have time for the phone. She used both hands, her left bracing her right, like she’d seen in movies, and she lifted the pistol to hold it, arms extended, over Butch’s body.

From the mist, she heard that same tiny series of clicks that had preceded Butch’s being shot—a hammer being pulled back?

She was in the open, wide open, and the gunman wasn’t. She had only one hope, and that was to shoot first. So she did.

Blindly. But straight at the clicks.

The pistol leaped in her hands. At the same time, with another explosion, she saw a flash of blue flame from across the alley. Rocks sprayed upward from only a foot beside her, but she wasn’t leaving Butch again. She shot at where she’d seen the flame. So this was what people meant by cover fire.

“We’re across the street from a police station!” she shouted. “Think they’ve heard us yet?”

To make her point, she fired again.

Then she heard footsteps. Running footsteps. Running away.

Leaving behind misery, gunsmoke and the lingering scent of…She sneezed. Was that cayenne pepper?

Desperate, Faith searched Butch’s coat pockets for his cell phone. She found it, tried not to fumble it with her stupid gloved hands, dialed 9-1-1.

Butch’s lips moved. If she didn’t have such excellent hearing, Faith doubted she’d have heard him whisper, “Taping you…
Cassie….
”

When she met his fading gaze, she saw recognition there…recognition, and the sweetest grandfatherly smile pulling at his bloodstained lips. This close, he knew damned well she was Faith. He was warning her to protect her identity.

“You’d better…get. N—” Butch choked.
“Now.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she muttered, pressing a wad of her skirt to his wound as she held the phone to her ear with her other hand.

On a low, lingering breath, Butch sighed the name, “Roy.”

The operator asked Faith to state her emergency.

“Officer down,” she said, instinctively adapting Cassandra’s Virginian drawl. “Marie Laveau’s tomb in the St. Louis Cemetery. He’s been shot—Detective Sergeant Butch Jefferson has been shot. Send EMTs. Hurry!”

“Is the shooter still on the scene?” asked the male operator, with the kind of calm that only a trained professional could manage.

“No.” God help her, Faith hoped she wasn’t lying. But she might well have lied to get help here faster. “He ran away. Please hurry!”

“We’re already dispatching emergency teams, ma’am. Just stay on the line. Could you tell me your name?”

But Faith hung up. They had what they needed to know.

And Butch’s eyes, still open, couldn’t see anything anymore. Her skirt wasn’t stopping blood, because he’d stopped bleeding. She couldn’t hear his breath. She couldn’t hear his heart.

Oh, God. Not Butch….

Hearing sirens and shouts, Faith realized that she had a decision to make. She could either wait for the authorities and implicate herself seven ways to Sunday—in disguise, holding a gun, powder on her hands…or at least on her gloves. Or she could slip away, let the fictitious Madame Cassandra take the heat for the anonymous call, and escape to keep looking for the killer.

Butch had told her to “get.” She hoped this was what he’d meant.

She ran.

Gun, cell phone and all.

R
oy.

The last word on Butch’s lips had been his partner’s name.

After she’d gotten well away from the cemetery, from what would surely be a manhunt the likes of which New Orleans had rarely seen, Faith made her way across the backstreets of the French Quarter to the Mississippi. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe she needed the sense of eternity that the huge, slow river offered. Maybe she needed to decide what Butch had meant with his dying word.

Or maybe she just needed to sit at the base of the levee, water lapping at her feet, and stop shaking. Stop crying.

She stared at the bloody gloves she wore, gloves that had pressed against Butch’s wound, gloves that had fired a gun. Chances were, she’d left fibers from them all over the place. She stripped them off her arms, like stripping off another identity. She had to get rid of them. And the gun.

And Butch’s cell phone. Especially if it had some sort of global positioning satellite chip in it, she couldn’t risk keeping it with her for very long. But she had to do something first, and she had to decide how to do it.

Roy.

Surely Butch hadn’t meant that the gunman was Roy—had he? Could even he have recognized his partner, with that stocking over the man’s head? Faith couldn’t believe Roy was guilty, and not just because of how painfully her chest contracted at the very idea. She’d watched the gunman move, sly and nearly silent, like some kind of commando ninja—had Roy ever in his life managed to be silent? Roy had power to him, not grace. She thought the gunman had been smaller than Roy, too, though he hadn’t gotten that close to her. And she’d heard his heartbeat….

She blinked, belatedly recognizing something.

She’d heard the gunman’s heartbeat, rapid with excitement…and she hadn’t heard that strange skip she’d come to fear.

This may not be the same man who’d killed Krystal and Nessa. Was she now dealing with
two
killers?

She made her decision from plain, old-fashioned decency.

By now, the EMTs were probably arriving, probably trying to revive Butch. Would anyone have thought to call his partner yet? She doubted it. Not during the lifesaving efforts.

Roy at least deserved to be told.

Looking at the phone in her hands, Faith quickly figured it out. She’d been through four cell phones, all of which she’d managed to break or lose before giving up on them. This one was like her third. Press the button under Menu. Then Contacts. Then Roy at Home. Press the green button to call.

The phone rang, and she wondered how the hell she was going to do this. Any way she could, she guessed, as it rang again. She began to worry, on the third ring…

Then, with the rattle of a handset fumbled from a table, Roy’s voice answered with sleepy, affectionate annoyance. “What the hell are you doing calling this early, you old fart? How do you know I don’t have a girl with me?”

Faith’s breath caught with something close to a stabbing pain. He had Caller ID. He thought…

Well, it was obvious what he thought.

“Detective Chopin,” she half-drawled, half-whispered. He’d spoken with her as Faith too often, lately. But she’d learned this morning just how effectively whispers could disguise a person’s voice. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

His voice deepened to an immediate threat, sharpened by worry. “Who the hell is this?”

“It’s Madame Cassandra, Detective.”

“What the fuck are you doing with my partner’s phone?”

There was no way to do this except to do it. “He met with me this morning, to show me some pictures. There’s been a shooting, detective. He’s dead.”

Roy.

For a long moment, she heard silence on the other end of the line. Silence and a ragged, stunned breathing.

“The EMTs are with him at the St. Louis Cemetery, by Marie Laveau’s tomb,” she continued. “But it’s too late. Whoever it was had come for me. I am so sorry….”

“You—” His voice choked off. When he tried again, his words resonated with a darkness she’d never imagined. She heard shuffling now. The sound of someone trying to get up, get dressed, without hanging up the phone. “You’d better be joking, bitch. If this is real, if you set this up—”

“Listen to me,” she insisted. “You need to know something. Two somethings. Whoever shot him was not the serial killer—”

“And why the hell would I think it was?” He really
didn’t
buy that the killer had come after Cassandra. Damn.

“Also, Butch’s last words were concern for you.”

Then she hung up.

The phone rang in her hand, almost immediately, but she turned it off. He had to finish getting dressed, getting downtown, finding out that she’d spoken the truth.

In something of a daze, she tucked Butch’s cell phone into one of her gloves, then tied both gloves around the gun with multiple knots.

Then she threw the whole ugly trophy into the Mississippi, a river famed for never giving up her dead…or many of the living that went into it.

Goodbye, psychic contact.

Then Faith went home to get out of these awful, tragedy-stained clothes before the morning light made her too conspicuous.

“I don’t know which kind of psychic killer is worse,” said Moonsong at breakfast two mornings later. She put down the newspaper, which Absinthe, in a rage at the headline, had stolen from a neighbor. “Someone who kills psychics, or a psychic who kills.”

“If the psychic kills a cop, that’s definitely worse.” Absinthe stood at the refrigerator, staring inside as if some kind of better food would magically appear. “We need their protection. It was bad enough when they suspected us of being rip-off artists. Now—”

“Now they think we’re all in some big conspiracy to hide this Cassandra person,” finished Evan, who’d settled for dry cereal. “If you say you never heard of her, they ask why not? You were smart, Faith.”

Faith looked dully up from the Pop-Tarts she’d toasted and now couldn’t eat. She hadn’t eaten very much during the past two days, knowing full well that her secrets muddled the investigators’ understanding of the twenty-four hours before Butch had died, and watching the twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours after his death pass with no arrests. She’d had nightmares. She’d felt downright brittle at work. Luckily, Greg, who knew she’d known and liked Butch, had done what he could to make things easier for her. “Smart? How am I smart?”

“Not letting anyone know you’re psychic. You haven’t had the police hounding you at work, asking stupid questions you can’t answer.”

No,
she thought.
I’ve just had Butch’s corpse laid out in the back room.

“I’m not psychic,” she said.

“Oh, give it up.” Absinthe slid the plate with the Pop-Tarts away from Faith and to her own place. “Of course you are.”

“No. I’m not. I…” Faith searched for a way to explain it—hard to do, when she still didn’t understood herself. “I can smell things—that Moonsong spent time with a smoker last night, that Evan spent time with a
pot
-smoker last night and that Absinthe had sex the day before yesterday with someone who wore a lot of patchouli.”

Her three roommates were staring at her now, intrigued.

Absinthe said, “Hey, I showered.”

“Yes, you did. Twice. You used my soap this morning, after your run. I can smell that, too.”

“I ran out of mine. So sue me.”

“I can hear things,” Faith continued. “Evan’s heart is beating faster than Moonsong’s or Absinthe’s—he’s taking this more seriously than you two are. His breathing is more shallow, too.”

“You never explained it this way before,” he said.

“And if I touch you, any one of you, I can feel things.”

Absinthe took a bite of the Pop-Tarts. “Like, say…a psychic?”

Fine. Faith held out her hand.

The others exchanged significant looks. They knew how she felt about touching people. But of all of them, Absinthe was least likely to shy away from a dare.

She put her bare hand with its chipped black nails into Faith’s.

Sensations poured through the connection between them—more subtle than touching a stranger would have been, easier than if Faith hadn’t been braced against the touch, but still powerful.

“You’ve got a toothache,” said Faith. “There’s a tightness in your jaw from it. You’ve been eating a lot of peppermint lately—I can taste that. You…”

She concentrated.

Absinthe pulled her hand free, cocking her head, staring a dark challenge.

“You used to be anorexic,” decided Faith more softly, interpreting what she’d sensed. “A few years back, before you learned it was healthier to tell the world to go to hell. It left scars in your heart and your kidneys, and it weakened your joints, like the way a year of drought shows up in the rings of a tree.”

“I guess I was wrong.” Evan sat back from his cereal. “You’re not psychic at all.”

“I’m not! I mean—I know I’m
something,
I would never claim to be normal, don’t think I’m saying that. Being psychic would be normal compared to me. But it’s more like I’m hyperaware. Moonsong could touch your forehead and tell whether you have a fever. I can touch your forehead and tell if you have a hangover. Absinthe could smell if you’ve been in an herb garden in the past hour. I can smell if you’ve been in an herb garden in the past few weeks. It’s just…it’s like the volume’s turned up. But a psychic…”

They continued to stare at her.

“Okay, here’s what I
can’t
do. I’m not empathic, like Moonsong. I can’t tell whether Absinthe is pissed off or relieved that I just said those things about her. Her heart sped up a little, but that was it.”

Absinthe shrugged. “Like I give a shit.”

Moonsong translated, “She doesn’t mind. Oh. Well, she minds me telling you that. Sorry, Absinthe.”

Absinthe handed Moonsong a piece of Pop-Tarts. “Shut up, Goldilocks.”

“And I can’t look at a spread of cards the way Krystal would and tell you where your worst problems are coming from, or how things will resolve themselves. Even if I can sense that someone’s lying, because of the way their body changes, it doesn’t mean I have the slightest hint about what the truth is. And I can’t even begin to see the future.”

“Not all psychics can,” Evan reminded her. “Just clairvoyants.”

“But most have pretty good instincts. I don’t even have that.” If she had, maybe Butch would still be alive.

As if to prove several of Faith’s points, Moonsong said, “You’re really upset over Butch’s death, aren’t you?”

Faith nodded, but said nothing else. While the others finished their breakfast and headed out—Saturdays were big days for the tourist trade—she stayed home and felt…confused.

She wished she felt she could confess her involvement to her roommates, could let them know who Madame Cassandra really was. But Celeste, who’d called her that first morning after Butch’s death, had warned her to keep quiet.

“The partner of that dead detective, he came looking for Cassandra and he’s out for blood. Take my advice, girl. You do not want a piece of this.”

Poor Roy. “But he’s wasting time looking for Cassandra while the real killer’s getting free. Maybe if he just understood—”

“He
won’t
understand. I said
out for blood,
not exploring possibilities. When I told him I didn’t know anymore about you than your description—the black-haired gypsy description—the man picked up one of my statues and threw it into the wall and broke both of them—the statue
and
the wall. He’s got himself quite a temper, does Detective Chopin.”

Faith could imagine Roy doing just that. Considering how close he’d been to Butch, she could imagine him doing more. Celeste was right. She didn’t want a piece of it.

Which was too bad, since she already had a piece. Extra large.

“Besides,” Celeste had added. “Butch doesn’t think it’s a good idea.”

Did she mean…? “Celeste, you
didn’t!
”

“I’m a medium, girl. That’s what I do. He thinks his friend’s gonna need you as
you,
and that won’t happen if he knows you’re Cassandra.”

“But—”

“Okay, here’s another reason. You said the man who killed the detective was gunning for Cassandra, right? If word gets out that you’re Cassandra, then he’ll know where to find her. Now you lay low, you keep your mouth shut and you let them catch the real killer first.”

And so far, that’s what Faith was doing.

But she felt like an unforgivable coward. And worse…

Worse, she felt guilty. It didn’t help when Celeste insisted there was no Cassandra—there was, and she was Faith. The fiction of Cassandra was, at least in part, the reason Butch was dead. The fiction of Cassandra was the reason Roy had been stalking the French Quarter like a madman with a badge, risking his job and apparently not giving a damn.

Celeste had shrugged off his outburst. “I needed to replaster anyhow.” But if Roy lost his temper around the wrong person, the NOPD could be out two good detectives instead of one. And it would, at least in part, be her fault.

Advice or no advice, Faith knew what she had to do.

She stopped by work, despite it being Saturday, and looked up Roy’s address on the database. He might be working this case all hours—against all regulations, considering that the death of a partner should bar him from the investigation—but he still was used to working nights. It was Saturday morning, now. Unless he’d gone home with someone else, he’d be there.

She caught a cab.

She had no idea how much she would tell him. But she knew she had to tell him something.

And she couldn’t make the proper judgment over the phone.

Detective Roy Chopin lived in the Irish Channel, a narrow stretch of the city between the Garden District and the river. Other than how much fun St. Patrick’s Day was supposed to be in the area pubs, the neighborhood had a lousy reputation. Faith was surprised to see more than one of the faded old houses being renovated. It looked like even the Channel was starting to benefit from the magic of urban renewal.