Athena Force 8: Contact (9 page)

Since then, she’d gotten such a good reputation that she could afford her own two-room parlor only three blocks off of Jackson Square. The back room, her “reading room,” was used for nothing except her one-on-one séances.

When she went in for a reading on Saturday afternoon, Faith had expected blue velvet or glittery stars or crystal balls. What she got was tasteful dark paneling, rich carpeting, three upholstered chairs and artistic black-and-white photography of angelic sculptures.

More importantly, she got a
feeling.

The air in here practically vibrated. Faith had no doubt that something otherworldly happened here on a regular basis, anymore than she’d doubt the sun rose while watching it with her own eyes. Celeste was a legitimate medium.

So why weren’t her skills kicking in for Faith?

“Talk to me,” the older woman whispered into the ether, her dark eyes half-closed, unfocused. She swayed in her chair, her hands spread. “This here little girl wants to meet her daddy. She’s got some questions she deserves to have answered.”

Faith held her breath. She could tell Celeste was in a legitimate trance—her heartbeat had slowed significantly, as had her breathing and something harder to pinpoint…her brain waves? But that was insane. Even a freak couldn’t hear or smell or see brain waves…could she?

“I’m calling on Faith’s father to come talk with us, now,” insisted Celeste, sounding vaguely annoyed. “No, not you,
chère.
No, not you either. I’m looking for Faith’s daddy.”

Finally, Faith had to breathe. It felt like inhaling past a hole in her chest. So much for her brilliant idea.

Celeste’s heartbeat picked up, returning toward normal. Her own breathing deepened. She opened her dark eyes. “I’m sorry.”

Faith shrugged. “That’s the chance you take with psychic abilities, right? Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t?”

Unlike her own abilities, which seemed surprisingly consistent, another reason she thought she wasn’t psychic.

“For me, they usually work better than
that.
” Celeste stood and offered her brown hand. She wore many rings, some crystal, some silver, some copper, but the one she seemed proudest of was a simple gold wedding band. “I try not to use this room for anything but readings…don’t want to dispel the energy. How about we go out front while we try to figure this out?”

Faith didn’t take her hand. Between the fight with Roy, having to look at mug shots in the sludge-for-energy police station and the blowup with her mother, and now her disappointment with Celeste’s help, she felt too emotionally vulnerable.

But she followed to the front room, nevertheless, and sat where Celeste gestured, at a small consulting table.

“It’s a skill I inherited from my great-grandmother, So-lange,” explained Celeste, getting them some iced tea. “That witch was something—all my cousins and I inherited power from her. She’s the one who first lived in that house you mentioned, in the Garden District. My folks live there now.”

“So if it normally works,” said Faith, “why not this time? Can you think of any particular reason you wouldn’t be able to contact my father?”

“If he weren’t dead, for one,” suggested Celeste jokingly. Considering that Faith didn’t know anything about the man, though, even that was possible. “Or it could be us not having his name. Having a name, or an item that once belonged to him, that really helps.”

“
I’m
an item that once belonged to him.” God, but she sounded pitiful.

“Now none of that! There’s other reasons, too, good reasons. You’re what—twenty-two? That means the man could’ve been dead as many as twenty-three years. Most folks take longer than that to reincarnate, but you never know. If his soul’s busy elsewhere, I doubt even my great-grandmother could’ve found him.”

Celeste’s reasons made sense, but Faith could only imagine what kind of skeptical spin someone like Roy Chopin would put on them.

“Wait a minute, there,” challenged Celeste. “What’s with that face? You don’t believe me? I wasn’t going to charge you, girl, but if you start pulling an attitude on me…”

That, and the scolding expression Celeste wore, was enough to drag a smile out of Faith. “I was just thinking how easy it is for other people who don’t believe to dismiss what you do. Baseball players don’t always hit the ball, do they? And yet they’re still called baseball players. And sometimes a doctor’s patient dies—”

“Don’t I know it,” agreed Celeste.

“—but he’s still a doctor. It’s as if some people
want
to disbelieve.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Celeste took a sip from her tall glass of tea. “Does this ‘some people’ have a name?”

“He’s just some man I decided not to go out with.”

“I hope you didn’t pull away just because the poor boy doesn’t believe you’re psychic.”

“
I
don’t believe I’m psychic.”

Celeste considered that, as if weighing several items, then shifted in her chair. “First of all, don’t you make the mistake of tuning out anyone who can’t see what we see. I’ve been there and done that, girl, and it’s no good. My husband, he didn’t believe in my abilities when we started dating, but it was my pride got in the way, not his disbelief. Love’s the real power, not anyone’s ability to read thoughts or speak to the dead or see the future. Love’s the ultimate good.”

Love?
That sounded so…gushy. “This isn’t the same thing. At most, maybe it’s chemistry. Or maybe just masochism. It’s done with, anyway.”

Celeste folded her arms. “Mmm-hmm.”

When in doubt, turn the subject back to the other person. “So, did your husband ever change his mind? About your abilities, I mean?”

“Sure he did, eventually. After we were already engaged. But what’s important is that he believed in
me,
and
I
believed in my abilities.”

“I don’t believe in mine. I mean, I don’t believe they’re psychic. I can feel things, hear things, smell things….”

“Sweetie, you’re the best natural psychic I know.”

“This from as bad a reader as you were?”

“Fake it till you make it, girl.” Celeste’s eyes brightened as she lit on an idea. “In fact—why not let yourself
pretend
you’re psychic, just for a while? You might be surprised by what falls into place. If you don’t want to out yourself, then let your inner psychic be someone else. Give her a different face. A different name.”

“Madame Cassandra?” suggested Faith, with a laugh.

“There you go, M.C.,” agreed Celeste, who’d heard Faith use the name at least once before. “For all you know—”

The door opened and another client came in from the shimmering August heat. He was a young man. Brown hair. Quiet eyes. Faith looked up at him, strangely drawn, as Celeste finished.

“—Madame Cassandra could turn out to be one of the most powerful forces in New Orleans.”

Then Celeste looked up at her visitor—and blanched.

Faith looked from the man to her friend, then back. There was nothing about him to warrant Celeste’s reaction or Faith’s discomfort. He seemed like the type the words “mild mannered” had been invented for. Sure, she sensed an edge of interest, of expectancy about him, but if this was his first visit to a medium, that would explain it. Right?

So what was niggling at her? What was she noticing without yet understanding?

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said softly. “I can come back when you’re done.”

“Get out,”
commanded Celeste.

The client blinked, surprised. His heartbeat began to pick up, a normal reaction to her rudeness and yet…

“What is it?” he asked.

Celeste stood, pointed a ringed finger at the man. “Get the hell out of here!”

Then she swayed, not so much dizzy as…as altered.
She’d just gone into an instant trance.

Watching, probably unable to tell the difference, the man took a deep, unnervingly satisfied breath. His pulse was beginning to race now, speeding with something close to pleasure—

And then Faith heard it.

Something strange about his heartbeat. Something that hadn’t been there seconds ago. Something she’d heard before.

In the bar. In the morgue. In the hotel lobby.

All that, and a scent she didn’t even
want
to identify.

“Your victims,” moaned Celeste, clearly channeling now. “Can’t you sense them, thronging around you? They’re crying for vengeance. They will have it, boy. Don’t you bring that shit into my place of business.”

Then her eyes snapped open, wide and ferocious.
“They’re gonna take you down!”

The man took a quick step back, clearly startled to realize that Celeste wasn’t the least bit scared.

Faith, on the other hand—Faith was scared. Even before she recognized what she’d smelled as blood.

The faintest whiff of week-old blood. Krystal’s blood.

Even before that, Faith knew.

She was face-to-face with the killer.

F
aith leaped to her feet, sending her chair skittering wildly out behind her. Startled, the killer looked at her—and recognized her. The way his eyes widened, his breath caught, he might as well have announced it.

Then he spun and raced into the street. And there was no alternative.

She went after him.

The streets of the French Quarter were thick with tourists and vendors and performers this early in the evening, when there was still sunlight, but marginally less heat. The killer plowed through them, knocking over a woman in a sundress, pushing a man in a ball cap against a wrought-iron gate. In a flash, he’d vanished around the corner onto Chartres Street.

Faith dove through the holes he’d created. As she skidded around the corner, she caught sight of him again and ran faster. She also tried to memorize everything she could from the back.
Caramel-brown hair. Green shirt.
They pounded past a pretzel vendor. Past Toulouse, heading for Jackson Square.
Maybe six feet tall,
she thought.
Wiry build.

Faith’s feet and her heartbeat created a percussive background to her sprint. But that wasn’t all she heard, and she could definitely recognize him now. That distinctive extra skip in his heartbeat. That scent—

Past St. Peters. She was already breathing hard, sweating. God, but it was hot out!

His scent was the same smell she’d first caught in the ceiling of the DeLoup bar, a scent of fear. He didn’t want to be caught. Go figure.

But if he really had something on him with Krystal’s DNA still present—something like Krystal’s hair, or the murder weapon—Faith would sell years off her life to catch him. When an old man taking a picture stepped inadvertently in front of her and she had to dodge around him, she grunted out a curse for those lost seconds. What she wouldn’t give for superspeed, instead of supersenses!

The killer shoved past a mime, sent balloons flying from a balloon-animal clown, and tore through the square. So did Faith, right past the statue of Andrew Jackson on rearing horseback.

She thought she might be gaining on him. But at the other side, her quarry dove under an open-top horse carriage, right between the front and back wheels. Faith wasn’t quite that foolhardy. She went over the carriage, past a couple who looked to be on a date.

“Hey!” protested the man.

“Sorry!” gasped Faith as she launched herself off the other side, landed running and dodged traffic across Decatur. Past that lay a wide bank of stairs up to the levee. Her quarry was already halfway up by the time she hit them. Beyond those, two separate stairways created a vee against the stone wall. The killer took the right set of stairs. Swinging around with the help of the railing, gulping mouthfuls of August air, Faith pummeled after him. She might be in good shape, but she was gasping for breath as she hit the top. There lay Washington Artillery Park and, past that, the Moonwalk overlooking the Mississippi.

And no killer.

Following her instincts, Faith hurried across the bricked walking path, her head pivoting in both directions, her keen senses alert. She knew this view pretty well. The iron benches. The old-fashioned lampposts. And beyond the walk, lapping at the levee’s tumble of stone blocks, stretched the wide expanse of the river, exuding its own impersonal power. The Mississippi spread out like a lake, barges and tankers making their slow way along her depths. Just to the south, calliope music danced from one of the riverboats at the Toulouse Street Warf.

But no killer.

“Damn!” she exclaimed, and kicked a beer can someone had left lying on the ground. It bounced down the levee and into the river, which wasn’t what she’d meant to happen. “
Damn
it!”

Somehow, he’d gotten away.

Faith got back to Celeste’s just in time to hear her friend say, “One other person. But she left, after he did. She, uh, goes by the name of Cassandra.”

Celeste was talking to a pair of street cops.

Oh, great! Faith quickly faded back onto the street, but not before she saw the officers exchange significant glances. Luckily, with her hearing, she was able to wander to a stand selling T-shirts and pretend to examine those while still listening.
Allons Danse,
read the first one she picked up, a zydeco shirt.
Let’s go dance.

“Cassandra, huh?” asked one of the patrolmen, just as Faith could have predicted he would. “Would you mind describing her?”

Celeste said, “I would rather describe the killer, if you don’t mind.” And she said it with the kind of attitude that spoke at growing frustration.

“Like we explained to you,” said the other officer, “we’ll file your statement, but it’s not going to carry a lot of weight. You didn’t see this man commit any crime. He didn’t confess to anything.”

“He didn’t have to. His victims were right there with him!”

Still listening, Faith exchanged the first shirt for one with a cartoon crawfish on it. It read,
Suck WHAT?

“Uh…yeah.” Now the first cop was clearly humoring her. “We’ll make sure to mention that in our report. You have yourself a nice day, Ms. Deveaux.”

He barely waited until the door closed behind the pair of them to burst out laughing. Putting down the shirt, Faith got the feeling there’d be another funny, ha-ha story to tell over free weights in the gym. Once the patrolmen rounded the corner, she went into Celeste’s shop.

“Oh,
my!
” Celeste flew to her feet as if levitated. “Are you all right? Did you catch the bastard? New Orleans’ finest is about as useful as a screen-bottomed bucket.”

“You
told
them Cassandra was
with
you?”

Celeste blinked, surprised by Faith’s vehemence. “I don’t know about you, but there’s plenty of folks around here who wouldn’t want their real names given to the police. If you heard, you could have come in and corrected me—”

“No!” Faith took a deep breath to calm herself down. The footrace through the heat and the crowd had tired her, and now this. “No, then I’d have to explain why you called me Cassandra, and then they’d know…It’s a secret. But I can’t let them connect Cassandra to me, not if I can avoid it.”

She paced across the room, turned around and paced back. The part of her that had always been drawn to the law hated this, hated not giving the police every bit of information she could, including the fact that she’d chased someone they wouldn’t believe was the killer in the first place. But to the part of her that had grown up with her mom, moving every few years and keeping a low profile, this came too easily. “Whatever you do, don’t describe me.”

“So what does Cassandra look like?”

“I’m not asking you to lie.”

“And I’m not saying I will. So what’s she look like?”

Faith considered it. “Black hair,” she admitted—that was a given, considering the wig she sometimes wore as a failsafe during her anonymous calls. “I like to pretend she’s a little shorter than me. She dresses like…like a gypsy, I guess.”

“You do have her down, don’t you?”

Faith considered her alternatives, then sank into one of Celeste’s chairs and leaned closer. “Do you remember last year, when the city manager’s assistant went missing?”

“That little redhead.” Celeste nodded.

“Krystal told me that she’d done a reading for her, not a week before she vanished, and warned her that her boss was dangerous. I said for her to go to the police, but she said a beat cop had been hassling her, acting like he’d take her in on vice charges. She didn’t trust any of them. So I asked around, checked out the different detectives, and called Butch Jefferson. I told him I had a psychic tip—which I did, it just wasn’t
mine.
And when he asked for my name, I said—”

“Madame Cassandra,” guessed Celeste, sitting back. Now she understood. “But they never convicted the city manager.”

Faith hadn’t realized how freeing it would feel, to have someone know all this. “Yeah, but he’s not the city manager anymore, either. There may be an old boy’s network around here, but it doesn’t mean a free ride. Once the detectives got close, he was finished. And Krystal and I were the ones who put them close.”

“So you’ve been a police contact for a year? Even before you started working in evidence?”

“Cassandra can point them in the right direction, but nothing she says is admissible in court. They can’t even get a search warrant based on it. I started wanting to do something legitimate, something as Faith. Now that I work so closely with the police, Detective Jefferson knows Faith, too. And I’d rather he not know we’re the same person.”

“And why is that? Would he be the ‘some people’ who wants to disbelieve in psychic abilities?”

“No, that’s his partner. But if anyone connects me to Cassandra, my credibility is shot. So’s hers. Especially since they think Cassandra’s getting this psychic information herself. I’ve kind of…well…”

“Oh, sweetie. Don’t stop now.”

“I might have told the partner that Cassandra was one of the most powerful readers in the city.”

Celeste’s smile widened. “And you thought you were lying?”

But Faith didn’t want to go there again. “So you’ll keep my secret?”

“I told ’em Cassandra was with me. As far as I’m concerned, that’s who it was. It’s not like they believe I saw the killer anyway. Or that I could know it was him.”

“How
did
you know? What did you see?”

“I didn’t see anybody—except him, I mean. That’s not how it works. I heard them. The loudest voice was Krystal’s.”

Faith hadn’t expected her breath to catch in her throat like that, her heart to squeeze quite that tightly. Krystal dead was bad enough. Krystal haunting her murderer…

Then something else distracted her. “But not
just
Krystal? Oh, my God. Who else?”

Celeste hesitated, studying her rings, then looked up with a new determination in her dark gaze. “Madame Cassandra, how about you and me go ask Krystal ourselves?”

Butch picked up on the second ring. “Jefferson here.”

“Hello there, Detective Sergeant,” drawled Faith.

Celeste widened her eyes, surprised by the fake Virginian accent. Standing across the counter from her, using her shop’s phone, Faith shrugged. She had to disguise her voice somehow, didn’t she?

“Well if it isn’t Miss Cassie!” greeted Butch, sounding as delighted as ever. “How’re you doing? I hear you had some excitement this evening.”

So Faith hadn’t imagined the patrolmen’s reaction to her fake name. “Not enough excitement for you and that partner of yours to bother with now, was it? Don’t you think my friend Celeste is important enough to rate detectives?”

Roy was saying something at the same time—something about “again?” and “feeding you now?”

After an echoing rustle—covering the phone—Butch whispered, “I’ll tell you if you give her a chance.” Then his voice got clearer. He was addressing her again. “We meant no disrespect to your medium friend, Miss Cassie.”

In the background she heard, “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“It’s just that sometimes we have to, you know, delegate.”

“The problem with delegating is, sometimes you don’t get the whole message passed on,” Faith warned. “Did those nice officers tell you what a close look Celeste got at the killer?”

“The alleged killer,” Butch corrected her.

“They didn’t offer to have her see a composite sketch artist or anything.”

“The sketch artists cost money, Miss Cassie.”

Faith ignored the bark of laughter—not Butch’s—that followed his statement. Had she really considered dating that jerk?

“Here’s what she’s going to do, being such a good citizen and all,” she drawled, glancing back at Celeste. “She’s going to get one of the street artists to draw the man she saw, off her description. Then she’ll get that picture to you, just in case. Then when you catch the man, you can owe her a big apology. How’s that?”

“We appreciate any help,” Butch assured her. “If we catch the fellow, and it’s the man in her picture, then we’ll be happy to apologize.”

In the background: “Or arrest her as an accomplice.”

“Since you’re so appreciative, I’ve got more information,” Faith said. “You’re dealing with a serial killer.”

There was a long pause while Butch mumbled that announcement. Then he said, “I reckon you’ve heard tell of that note from the Biltmore, Miss Cassie, but that’s not enough—”

“He’s killed three people,” she insisted. “Krystal Tanner, and two others before her. The first one doesn’t seem to have been premeditated, but he liked the taste. That’s when he went after the second one. All three were women, Detective Sergeant. And all three may have been psychics.”

“It would surely help if you could provide their names.”

This was where psychic information so often fell short. Krystal hadn’t been sure. The first girl had died ten, even fifteen years before, and had been reduced to a bare wisp of lingering anguish. But the second…“The second woman’s name started with a
P.
Pamela, or maybe Patricia.”

Again, Butch passed on the information. Roy tried to whisper, but Faith didn’t need her keen hearing to hear him say, “Or Prudence or Peppermint Patty. Does she expect—”

“Tell your partner,” she drawled, finding a certain amount of freedom in her Cassandra persona, “that he’s a horse’s ass.”

Celeste covered her mouth with a ringed hand to stifle a laugh, and Faith pressed her lips together. This anonymity thing was more fun than she’d expected.

“Well tell your psychic friend,” called Roy at the phone, after Butch passed on the message, “that she’s a fake and a coward. If she really had information, she’d bring it to us in person so we could see if she’s legitimate. Instead, she’s just wasting our time.”

Faith gritted her teeth. “Two other women, Detective Sergeant. Both psychics. Both strangled. That shouldn’t be so hard to find. You take care now, all right?”

“You, too, Miss Cassie. And thank you kindly.”

She hung up. She didn’t think they’d been trying to track her this time—the noise in the background had been the bustle of the police station, not the drone of a car. Still, she meant to go out the back way, just in case.