Heather Graham (2 page)

“Jimmy, we’re not here to assess her boobs or her butt,” Mark said more firmly.

“Okay, we’re not here to assess them; but there they are, and they’re still great. What in God’s name was the guy doing killing a prostitute when he had someone like that back home?”

“Come on, now, my boy, you’ve been in this business long enough to know that the world is full of psychos—and that even your more normal garden-variety breed of man can behave like damned psychos at times.”

“I couldn’t have left her for a prostitute,” Jimmy said with a sigh.

“Gina L’Aveau wasn’t your usual prostitute,” Mark replied casually.

Jimmy glanced at his friend long and hard. Then he shrugged and agreed, “No, Mark, she wasn’t your usual prostitute. Not at all. You okay with this?”

“Of course I’m okay with this.”

Mark, growing more impatient now as they waited for a conference with the doctor assigned to their murder suspect, turned away from Jimmy’s inquiring eyes. He looked Jon Marcel’s wife up and down again. Her name was Ann. Ann Marcel. He’d almost taken her for a kid at first. She was tiny—she’d be stretching it to claim to be five-foot-three. But she wasn’t a kid. On closer inspection, she looked like she was somewhere in her early to mid thirties. Maybe even a little older. Small, compact—but he had to give Jimmy and his taste some credit—she was nicely compact. She had a beautiful shape in a small package. Her hair was shoulder length, a very light blond, her eyes were almost a startling green next to her fair skin, and her features were as fine and delicate as those of a perfectly crafted doll. She was wearing what must have once been a cool spring dress, soft fabric in earth tones that both floated and hugged her form, except that now, in most areas, the dress no longer floated; it was covered in blood. Caked with it.

“Jon Marcel is an artist,” Jimmy said, as if that explained everything.

Mark arched a brow to him. “Meaning?”

Jimmy shrugged a little defensively. “Who knows? I mean, I hear some city paid a guy a fortune once to wrap some islands in pink in the name of art. I just mean that artists can be a little strange.”

“Jimmy, what the hell are you getting at?”

“I—I—maybe they shared their conquests.”

Mark arched a brow to him.

“Ah, come on, Mark, you know what I mean.” Jimmy was just a little bit red-faced. He might be frank in his ogling of an appealing woman, but he wasn’t the type to engage in too much male shop talk if the subject turned kinky.

“Ah,
ménage-à-trois
?” Mark said.

“Yeah.”

“She doesn’t look the type.”

“How do you look a type?” Jimmy demanded defensively.

“Maybe you don’t ‘look’ a type,” Mark said. “But she still doesn’t ‘look’ the type.”

Some things defied explanation.

“Aren’t the wildest thoughts supposed to lurk in the minds of the mildest people. Look at Superman’s alter-ego—Clark Kent. I rest my case.”

“Yeah,” Mark muttered. They should be resting this case damned quickly. If just a few lab tests came back positive, there would be no doubt that Jon Marcel would be facing murder charges. He swallowed, determined not to betray how shaken he had been by the case, that he’d been entangled more than he should have been since he’d gotten the call from headquarters to head quickly for the murder scene. An hysterical tourist had called in after tripping over the body; the cops in uniform had informed him that they had arrived while the corpse was still warm.

Not so when he’d gotten there, just seconds before the guys from the coroner’s office. No, she’d been cold then. Cold, lying in a pool of blood, her eyes still opened, all those dreams that had lived somewhere in her heart somehow seeming to reflect in those opened eyes. She had been a pretty woman. Pretty even in death. She might have been just lying there waiting for the life of her dreams to start, except that she lay in a pool of blood.

And the life within her had grown cold.

“Lieutenant?”

One of the uniforms had been talking to him as he knelt looking at the body. He’d gone cold himself. Had some trouble trying to get his breath. He stood. “Corby,” he said, acknowledging the young beat officer. “What’ve we got?”

It was good as far as information went. So it seemed. There had been a trail of blood leading from the murder scene. To the residence of an Ann Marcel. And it turned out that Mrs. Ann Marcel had just put in a 911 call, and her husband, covered in blood, was in the middle of emergency surgery.

He again knelt down by the corpse of what had been a beautiful, if sad, woman. “So you fought back, baby. Good for you.”

The lab techs were all there, taking samples of anything they could, being especially careful to follow the blood trail to Ann Marcel’s place.

Henry Lapp, an assistant at the coroner’s office, told him, “Lee will take this one himself. I’ve given him a call at home; he’s coming right in. You know Lee—he thinks we miss things if we take too long to get to an autopsy, so this one looks pretty pure and simple. She was cut up and she fought back and her murderer ran. We should be able to run right after him.”

“Yeah,” Mark had told him. “Maybe the guy will talk right away. Jimmy and I are heading straight over to the hospital. Ask Lee to hang on until I get to him.”

Since then, he and Jimmy had been here. Waiting. Watching the small blond woman. Shaking their heads. Why did it seem that women fell so easily for the wrong men?

“To be fair,” he heard himself say aloud, “I sure as hell don’t know much about this guy. Or his wife.” Again, he shook his head. She wasn’t irrational; she wasn’t hysterical. Her eyes occasionally filled with tears and overflowed as she listened, then spoke, then listened again. Mark was startled when his heart suddenly seemed to lurch within his chest—and tighten because of her. Fool, he warned himself impatiently. He’d been here, literally right here, in this very hospital, in somewhat similar circumstances, plenty of times before. He’d respected the pain of loved ones; but he’d kept his professional distance, and he’d been ready to question them politely, courteously—but relentlessly when necessary. He’d been here before, watching a woman sob over a man. But he’d never quite felt this absurd urge to comfort someone.

Especially when he was actually thinking she was surely more than a bit of an ass to weep over a fellow like this one.

Mark loved New Orleans. Loved it almost like a parent loves a kid. He’d grown up here; he knew the streets, knew the society, knew the dangers and the pleasures. New Orleans beckoned and harbored those from all walks of life. Crooked politicians, antiquarian belles, musicians, artists, writers, coffee connoisseurs. Sainted and very Catholic little ladies and men; street toughs with knives, guns, poison, and voodoo magic when all else failed. New Orleans could be trashy, tarnished—a place where a man needed to look over his shoulder every minute. It could be a place with a hundred people standing dead still in a square, white, black, Cajun, Hispanic, Northerner, Southerner, all mesmerized by the mournful tune of one sad old man putting his heart into a horn. It was the charming patter of patois French, the smell of delicious baking, the aroma of coffee, the charm of a wealth of flowers, the bustle of the Mississippi. To many, New Orleans could be pure charisma.

Still, he never misjudged the violence and danger of his city, yet he never forgot to love it despite that danger or violence. Back to peg one, and his odd feeling that he wanted to comfort this woman. He loved his city, but dammit, he’d been here before, waiting to talk to a perp on his deathbed, watching the tears of a wife or lover who just couldn’t understand how her man had gone so bad. It wasn’t that the sight didn’t usually move him; it did. Pain was always hard to watch. But the years allowed a cop a certain removal. The job demanded it.

Maybe this evening just wasn’t going to prove to be easy, period. It had taken an emotional toll on him since he’d first reached the scene of the crime.

Maybe things were just getting worse. He should step back. Let somebody else take on this one.

Yet he wasn’t going to step back, and he knew it. So he kept standing there with Jimmy, waiting.

It didn’t seem that there was really any mystery here. Gina L’Aveau was a stripper who was willing to take on a number of johns as well. She’d met up with an artist who was painting stripper/hookers, and something had gone wrong, something emotional had come up. He’d stabbed her; she’d fought back. She was dead, he was dying. Sad, plain, simple. One for the books that could be closed. God, why did he feel so damned bad? Christ, this was his job.

He was tired. He wanted to get on with it. He wanted to see if Jon Marcel had survived the surgery, and if there was a possibility that he might be able to talk. Tell them about his crime.

Now, as he watched, the doctor set a steadying hand on Ann Marcel’s shoulder, then started down the hallway to Jimmy and Mark. He was a man in his mid-fifties, reeking of competence and solidity. “Gentlemen,” he acknowledged, shaking their hands.

“Anything?” Mark asked.

The doctor shook his head. “It took us two hours to sew him back up. He lost a lot of blood. He’s sliding in and out of consciousness right now, and I’m afraid that he’s going to slip into a coma.”

“You don’t think there will be any way we can question him?” Mark asked.

“Certainly not tonight. We’re going to have to do our best to keep him alive tonight.”

“What are his chances?” Jimmy asked. Mark saw that Jimmy was staring at Ann Marcel. A nurse had come to her, and Ann Marcel was nodding her head gratefully. She started to follow the nurse.

The policewoman, Holly, started to follow Ann Marcel. The nurse halted her.

They weren’t going to let the cops talk to Marcel, but they were going to let his wife in, so it seemed.

“You’re letting Mrs. Marcel see him?” Mark queried politely.

“Sixty seconds’ worth,” the doctor said. “Sixty seconds’ worth.”

“Mrs. Marcel?”

The kindly nurse who had been so good to her since her frantic arrival in the ambulance with Jon was at her shoulder.

She’d come to tell her the cops were ready to talk to her, Ann thought.

She’d
felt
those cops. Since the two men had gotten there. They’d kept a courteous distance while they had all awaited word from the doctor, but still, despite the fact she’d been half insane with worry, she’d
felt
them there, watching her. She was anxious to talk to them, anxious to demand that they find Jon’s attacker, because that would be doing something instead of just standing here so worried, and so powerless...

Yet they watched her strangely. The one who looked like a sad and weary brown bear. And the other one. The tall fellow with the boxer’s shoulders. Old eagle eye.

Well, he wasn’t old. He wasn’t young. Late thirties? Maybe middle forties? It was so difficult to tell with men. She thought grudgingly that men often seemed to improve with age. She suddenly had a mental image of a roomful of men wearing T-shirts with the caption “Aged to Perfection!”

Whatever his age, he did wear it well. In fact, she was horrified to realize she was wondering if he would appear as hard and rugged and tightly in shape if he wasn’t wearing the jacket and trousers. She didn’t think he actually worried about his physique; keeping fit was probably more of a casual thing with him, or so it appeared by the way he stood.

Nice body. Fine. The rest of him was intriguing as well.

His hair was auburn with silver streaks at the temple, longish, brushing over his collar. He had a wonderfully masculine face, a
craggy
face, a Clint Eastwood, western-type face, all strong planes and angles, squared, firm jaw, good, high cheekbones.

It would be a great face to paint, she thought instantly. Full of character. Intelligence, strength, determination. Umm. Maybe pig-headedness. He watched her constantly. She was certain that he had her analyzed down to the bones. Maybe that was good. He’d find out what had happened to Jon.

Maybe not. Those silver eyes flicked over her with what might have been something like contempt. He’d looked at her and shaken his head a few times. It was irritating. Very irritating. Especially when she could
feel
his damned eyes, and felt compelled to watch him in return. Once, a rush of warmth had swept through her, and she’d turned to find him watching her. Up, down. Taking in details. What she looked like. What she wore. And what was she doing thinking about this?

Jon...

She was here because of Jon.

She didn’t want to think about the cop who was watching her.

Still, wasn’t it better to play twenty questions in her mind regarding a strange cop than it was to worry herself sick about Jon while she waited? Some macho by-the-book pain-in-the-ass she’d probably never have to see again.
Yes!
Yes, think about this guy. He was annoying, maybe, but he kept her from being so afraid for Jon. Don’t think about Jon’s injuries or his chances, think about the man.

The cop—in plainclothes. Casual tweed jacket over Dockers. They had told her he was a cop when he’d come in with his long-faced buddy, but it wouldn’t have mattered. The second she’d felt those eyes, she’d known what he was. And that she was being assessed. She was anxious to say anything she could that would help with Jon; equally, she was strangely uneasy. She was drawn to the man—admittedly, he was disturbingly attractive. But she felt defensive already. Why? The cops were the good guys. On her side.

“If they’re ready for me—” she began.

“No, no, dear. They’re going to give you a second to see Mr. Marcel.” The nurse took her hand.

“A second—”

“Well, a minute or so. He’s just come out of tough surgery, and he’s hanging in. He needs complete rest if he’s to survive.”

“But he has a good chance—”

“Now, Mrs. Marcel, you’re a strong woman, and the doctor has been honest with you, right?”

“Yeah,” Ann told her.

She was strong. Right.

But once she had been propelled into Jon’s cubicle in recovery, Ann swallowed hard, finding it difficult to look at him. Now, she could allow her limbs to feel like Jell-O, allow her knees to give; whereas before, when he’d been bleeding everywhere, she’d had to keep her wits about her. She’d had to do her best to stop that bleeding; to warm him, to keep him from going into shock.