Heather Graham (11 page)

Sleep was the only thing they seemed to miss out on in the deal.

There was no reason to be more afraid than usual—poor Gina. It was heartbreaking. But Gina had just been playing too many places. Falling in love with the artist, keeping Harry on a leash, teasing Jacques Moret when either the desire urged her or the loneliness got her down. With everything going, she’d still call on other friends when boredom seized her, or when she just couldn’t seem to see things straight.

Gina had played with fire. And she’d gotten burned. Poor, sweet, confused kid. Still, her murder had surely been personal.

There was no reason to fear the streets...

But she shouldn’t have started walking home. A mist was rising, dampening the streetlights, settling over the city. Ghostly images of the old, narrow, darkened streets hovered before her. A dog howled; the fog seemed to whirl from the ground, up and around old wrought-iron balconies, fences and gates. The scent of gardenias wafted on the air, curled in with the mist. She didn’t have far to go.

The streets seemed uncannily silent. Jazz had ceased to fill the streets with its trumpets, horns, and saxes. She began to sing to keep herself company.

“Goin’ down by the river where it’s warm and green, I got a lot to think about—” She broke off. She was singing from a Concrete Blond album.
Bloodletting
. She loved Concrete Blond. She adored that particular album, because there were direct references to New Orleans.

“O you were a vampire, and baby I’m walking dead...”

Oh, good, maybe now was not the time for such a song to keep haunting her.

Too bad.

The tune kept spinning through her head. The streets remained eerily silent.

Was it always this quiet this late, or this early, as it might be?

Turn...her street was coming up, right in front of her. She heard her own breath, heard her own footsteps. Ahead, out of the silence of the fog, a wrought-iron gate creaked.

The gate stood ajar. She felt as if she was on a movie set. More and more fog seemed to be spilling from the gate. Any minute a man in a floating black cape and top hat would take a menacing and deadly step out into the narrow streets from the field of mist and fog. The moon would rise, and light would reflect from the glittering steel blade that he carried.

“Get a grip, April!” she said aloud firmly. She slipped her hand into her shoulder bag, her fingers curling around the can of Mace there. The open gate was right in front of her. She slowed her footsteps.

She was holding her breath she realized.

“Mee-oow!”

April let out something between a gasp and a scream as a cat suddenly shot out from the garden. She was shaking, relieved. A cat. A damned black cat. She looked through the silver mist filling the garden beyond the gate. A child’s swing set stood by a bird fountain. A tricycle was rolled against the fountain; a water gun lay against the tricycle. April inhaled deeply, laughing at her fears.

Then she froze once again. Chills seemed to sweep up her spine, paralyzing her momentarily.

Because
she
wasn’t moving, yet she could still hear footsteps. Coming from behind her.

She spun around. There was no one there.

No one. The street was silent again. Quaint old houses on quaint narrow streets, shrouded in a blanket of mist and fog.

She turned to hurry home.

Step, step...

Extra steps. They were back. The footsteps.

Someone else’s footsteps.

Following her. Furtively.

She started to run.

And behind her...

Her pursuer began to run as well.

By the afternoon, Mark felt as if he’d been at the office for two days running. He couldn’t seem to catch up on his sleep.

God, he was tired.

It was this case.

It was Gina.

And it was Ann Marcel.

Stop, he warned himself. He was becoming obsessed with the woman. Because she was lying. Marcel had said something to her.

What?

Damn, he just felt too tired to think straight.

Maybe Brit was right. Maybe his soap was just wrong, he thought.

He stared at his desk. It was piled high with papers to be studied, reports to fill out for the D.A.’s office. He tapped his pencil against the wood, watching the papers blur as he did so.

Jimmy came by, perching on the edge of his desk. “You with us, Mark?”

Mark glanced up at him. He nodded.

“I heard Lee Minh sent in his completed report.”

“Yeah. Apparently the FBI gave him some computer help, and the DNA testing is in.”

“And?”

Mark shrugged. “Jon Marcel was indisputably with Gina L’Aveau on the day she was killed.”

“With her?” Jimmy said. “He had sexual intercourse with her.”

“Yeah, he had sexual intercourse with her. We knew that.”

“Now we know it for a certainty. Looks cut and dried. We just need to finish up the paperwork, and the D.A.’s office can charge him.”

“Can’t charge a guy in a coma,” Mark reminded him.

“But the legal process can be prepared to snap him up the minute he comes out of that coma.”

Mark frowned at him.

“Well, come on, you think he’s guilty, right? Mark, he was covered in her blood.”

Mark pointed the pencil at Jimmy. “No murder weapon,” he reminded him.

“We should have gotten a search warrant for the wife’s place.”

Mark shook his head determinedly. “No.”

“Hell, Mark—”

“The guy was dying; Ann Marcel didn’t know that there was anything to cover up. Cops were immediately all over her living room. I can guarantee you, she didn’t make any decisions about whether to dial 911 or hide a knife first. She tried to save his life.”

“So where’s the knife?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ve searched all over.”

“Right. So that means—”

“It means Marcel was smart enough to figure out a way to get rid of the knife in a manner in which we could never find it.”

“As he was bleeding nearly to death,” Mark commented.

Jimmy frowned. “Mark, with all the evidence we’ve got, you can’t mean that you’re starting to believe that Ann Marcel could be right? Mark, smell the coffee, Marcel and L’Aveau were wearing each other’s blood—”

“Jimmy, a good defense attorney could fight that all the way. Truthfully, I think that Jon Marcel is guilty. I think he got jealous—maybe she got jealous. Maybe they threatened each other, and things got carried away. But everything I’m saying right now is a maybe. Because we know one of two things did happen here. Either Gina stabbed Marcel and Marcel stabbed her, or there was a third party—who stabbed them both.”

Jimmy shook his head, pounding with his palm on one side of it as if his brain might be waterlogged.

“Mark, they’d had lots of sex that day. They’d been together. They were both wild people who had argued rather fiercely before, according to eyewitnesses.”

“Jimmy, I told you. I’m convinced that the guy is guilty as hell. But we need more. No knife, Jimmy. No murder weapon.”

“We do need the damned knife,” Jimmy said mournfully. He wagged a finger at Mark. “Watch out for Ann Marcel. She’ll have you convinced Marcel is the friggin’ pope if you’re not careful.”

“I think she knows something, Jimmy. Anyway, she’s our only real link,” Mark said.

Jimmy sniffed.

Mark’s phone rang. Still staring at Jimmy, he picked up his receiver.

Captain Evers was on the line. “Tyrell just called in. We’ve got another dead body for you.”

“Where?”

“A couple of kids playing by the river found her. The divers are on their way; I’d like you and Jimmy on this one.”

“Why? What is it? Another stripper?”

“It’s a Jane Doe right now. We don’t have anything on her, but I’d like to know who she is as soon as possible. She’s naked—no I.D.”

“Give me the address; we’re on our way.”

He glanced at Jimmy, jotting down the captain’s directions.

“Another—stripper?”

“Another dead woman. That’s all we’ve got at the moment.”

He started out. Jimmy followed behind him.

“Jesus,” he said.

“Jesus—what?” Mark demanded.

“I sure hope you—I sure hope we don’t know this one.”

“Right.”

“One thing, Mark.”

“Yeah, what?”

“If it is another stripper, it means that the guy we got vegetating in the hospital is innocent.”

Mark hesitated. “Yeah, it might mean that. C’mon, let’s hurry.”

Jon Marcel could be innocent if the murders were related. Hell, if their body had been a murder victim. He didn’t know anything yet; he didn’t want to speculate.

He was back to Jimmy’s original thought.

He sure as hell hoped that he didn’t know this one.

W
ALKING INTO THE CLUB,
Ann felt like a complete fool.

She’d changed five times to try and choose an inconspicuous outfit for a single woman entering a club alone where the emphasis was on the women strippers.

Actually, she didn’t think such an outfit existed.

She had finally chosen a simple black cocktail dress with cap sleeves and a scoop neck. Quiet, she hoped, elegant, and dignified. Not so risque she ran the danger of appearing as if she was trying for a pickup, not so prim and proper that she would look absurd and stand out too glaringly—a fish out of water.

A fish out of water...she thought, entering Annabella’s. She was a fish out of water, all right. A damned whale shark.

It wasn’t that there weren’t other women in the club. There were.

They were with men.

They tended to be in the bar area, sipping drinks, talking, not really concentrating on the stage. The men with them weren’t really concentrating on the stage. They were more involved with the women in their company. The music seemed to be the main appeal; the stage a backdrop for relationships that needed little infusion.

Panic seized her as she walked in. What was she doing here? She was mad. Totally insane.

But what else could she do.

Annabella’s.

It was the name Jon had whispered to her. When he should have been saying her name—as in thanks, Annie, for trying to save me. Or when he should have at least been trying to say the name of the person who had attacked him. Annabella’s itself hadn’t attacked him; a club couldn’t walk down a street or alley wielding a knife.

So all that she could imagine was that he had said Annabella’s because the answer was here. Somewhere.

Or with someone.

Fool. She couldn’t find answers just by coming here.

By standing in the entry.

Feeling that...

She was being watched. Ah, yes, from the first seconds when she had stepped through the doorway, she had felt that she was being watched.

No great intuition. There was a strikingly handsome black man sitting at the bar. He flatly stared at her as she stood in the entry. Couples glanced up at her, and seemed momentarily amused and intrigued by her presence. There were two burly fellows near the door—bouncers, she decided. They watched her with annoyance, apparently assuming she’d be trouble.

So much for dressing carefully for the occasion. Dressing so that she’d just fit in with the clientele. It wasn’t the clothing, she realized. Everyone else was relaxed. She was as tense as a piano wire.

She felt ridiculous.

She was going to do a marvelous job of trying to be a subtle snoop.

She tried not to pause after she first made it through the door. However, she had to get her bearings. To her left, once she entered, was the dais where the musicians played. Good musicians. Right now, they were involved in a medley of old show tunes. Four musicians played; Ann was certain that the dais accommodated more players. Perhaps they took turns going on break, and managed to keep the entertainment flowing more smoothly by doing so.

Straight ahead of her was a darkened area; it was filled with tables that looked upon a stage. Along the curve of the stage, chairs had been set; the outer rim of the stage itself had been set up as a bar. That would have been the place to be; it was nearly impossible to discern anything about those sitting there except that they were humanoid in form and had—in most cases—hair on their heads. But of course, those rimming the stage were all gentlemen. Or
men
of some kind or the other at the very least.

There were four dancers on stage at the minute, all in different stages of undress. Two male, two female, two black, two white. All four exquisitely perfect in their movement and form. Despite her determination not to hover obtrusively in the entryway, it was exactly what Ann did. She understood perfectly Jon’s determination to try to catch some of the grace and beauty in his
Red Light Ladies
. Jon hadn’t yet chosen to paint the men—but Ann imagined he would have gotten around to it. Naturally, being the healthy male heterosexual he was, he was going to find the beauty in the females first. But she knew Jon. When his one series had been completed, he would have gotten to the males. Just like the women on the stage, the men moved with fluid and mesmerizing grace. They were perfectly, beautifully, strongly formed.

She could have helped him with the men, she reflected, trying to analyze her opinion of the club.

It wasn’t what she had expected, but rather, in an odd way, like Jon’s paintings. There was nothing cheap here, nothing tawdry. When the dancers moved together, sensuality rather than sexuality of movement was emphasized. The dancers were intoxicating, erotic...and romantic. The choreography and staging, down to the colors and sexes of those involved, were beautifully planned.

A little motion distracted her from the dancers; she had that feeling of being watched again.

Of course she was being watched. She looked ridiculously out of place, and half of the people in the club were staring at her. No. She looked up and around. This time it felt as if the very walls were watching her.

“Pardon me, but who are you and what are you doing here?”

The voice came from behind her, deep, rich and husky. She spun quickly around, startled to see that the exceedingly handsome black man had left his seat at the bar and come to talk to her.