The End Of Desire: A Rowan Gant Investigation (41 page)

“Rowan!” Felicity called from a few feet
away, her voice strained and confused.

I turned my head, but I couldn’t see her.

Behind me I could hear Annalise still
screaming some especially nasty sounding French as the agents
wrestled her to the ground.

“Rowan!” Felicity shouted again, the anxiety
in her voice audibly stepping up another notch.

“It’s all right! It’s going to be fine!” I
called back to her before I laid the side of my face against the
cold pavement and sighed heavily, “It’s finally over,” I muttered
to myself. “It’s going to be fine.”

Friday, December 16

12:16 A.M.

FBI Field Office

St. Louis, Missouri

I
had been here before.
Sitting in this very office, in this very chair, while my wife was
being fingerprinted, interrogated, and falsely accused of the
crimes that had started this entire ordeal better than a month ago.
The blob of metal bits that made up the magnetic sculpture sitting
on the edge of the desk in front of me had probably morphed shape a
time or two since then, though I couldn’t tell it by looking. But,
other than that, the office hadn’t changed. It was just as I
remembered it.

I pushed up from my slouched position and
readjusted myself in the chair before letting out a tired sigh and
rolling my head to the side to look at my wife. She was curled up
as only she could do, with her head lying on her arm where she had
draped it across the back of her own seat. Her eyes were closed,
and she was breathing evenly, but I knew she wasn’t asleep. She
looked almost at peace, and that was a sight I hadn’t seen for
quite some time.

“How are you feeling,” I asked softly.

“Tired,” she answered, her thick Irish accent
applying its inflections to the word.

“Yeah…” I agreed. “How about other than
that?”

“Aye, you mean?”

“Yeah, I mean.”

“Like I just woke up from a nightmare.”

“Uh-huh,” I grunted. “Me too.”

We sat in silence for a while before she
yawned audibly and stretched as she repositioned herself in the
chair.

“It’s really over, isn’t it then?” she
asked.

“I think so,” I replied. “Miranda,
anyway.”

I heard a click and turned to see the door
behind us swinging open. A blonde woman a few years older than
Constance entered.

“Mister Gant, Miz O’Brien,” she said, her own
voice sounding tired.

“Agent Parker,” I returned.

“You’re free to go,” she said. “I’ll be happy
to drive you home if you’d like.”

“Is there any word on Constance?” I
asked.

She bit her lower lip and nodded. “Only that
she’s still in surgery.”

“Aye, but she’s going to be okay, isn’t she?”
Felicity asked.

“All we know is she’s critical,” she said.
“She lost quite a bit of blood. Our SAC and director are both at
the hospital now. So is your friend, Detective Storm.”

“Do you think you could take us there
instead?” Felicity asked.

Parker nodded. “I can do that.”

As we both stood up, she said, “Oh, before I
forget… I wanted to return this to you, Miz O’Brien.” She pulled a
small paper envelope from her jacket pocket and held it out toward
Felicity. “Devereaux claims it’s her necklace, but we saw her yank
it from your neck when we were pulling her off you. It looks like
an heirloom, so I thought you might want to have it back.”

The angry scream,
“That’s mine, chienne!”
immediately flitted
through my brain, along with the ethereal wail of anger and loss.
Behind it came the memory of Ben asking me if Felicity had such a
piece of jewelry, all because Lewis insisted she had been wearing
it when he met her at the bondage club. The connection became
instantly clear.

Felicity reached for the envelope, but I
thrust my hand out ahead of hers and snatched it from Agent
Parker’s fingers. “I’ll take that.”

Felicity cocked her head at me and furrowed
her brow. “Rowan, that’s…”

“Trust me, you don’t want it,” I said.

“But…”

“I’ll explain later. Right now, I have a
feeling we need to just get to the hospital as soon as we can.”

A Note About The Legend Of The LaLaurie Family

Some of you may or may not be familiar
with the legend of Delphine LaLaurie and the horrific tortures she
allegedly inflicted upon her servant slaves. I will not endeavor to
go deeply into the legend—or quite possibly
myth
—here, as it would take far too many pages.
In fact, it would be a book in and of itself, and has been written
by authors other than me. Suffice it to say, the story can easily
be found with a simple search on the web or a visit to the library.
The newspaper articles recounting the horrors actually do exist.
Unfortunately for us, as it all occurred in the early 1800’s there
is no one left alive who knows what
really
happened behind the walls of the LaLaurie
mansion.

Some say that what you read in those articles
is the gospel truth. Others say it was only the tip of the
proverbial iceberg, and the horrors ran far deeper. Still others
say that Delphine LaLaurie and her family were the unfortunate
victims of jealousy and “yellow journalism” meant for the sole
purpose of besmirching their good name. And, there are those who
will tell you that the truth lies somewhere in between, hiding in
the murky shadows of the often repeated story. Alas, as I said, we
will never know the real truth, but the legend has grown and become
one of the timeless “horror stories” of the Crescent City used to
entertain the morbid curiosity of tourists. The best advice I can
offer is to research the story yourself, if you are interested, and
draw your own conclusions. Quite obviously, for the purposes of
this novel, I chose to treat the story as a slice of reality.

The tie-in of my novels with this long told
legend came about when my dear friend, Dorothy Morrison, introduced
me to the story. Later, during my visit to New Orleans, working
post-Katrina cleanup, I had occasion to visit the library and
become even far better acquainted with the saga surrounding
Delphine LaLaurie and, as one would expect, it piqued my own morbid
curiosity.

The concept for the
Miranda Trilogy
had started as a one book
Rowan Gant Investigation
centered on
a dominatrix as the killer. As you, my readers, have now surmised,
the story itself grew well beyond the pages of a single book. When
I first began researching facts and settings for the plot—as well
as the name Miranda itself—I happened upon an obituary. That
obituary was from the
New Orleans
Bee
newspaper and was almost word for word the same
obituary quoted by Rowan in this novel, including the date the
notice was originally published. The notable exceptions to the
recounted verbiage are Miranda’s age and surname. The real Miranda
identified in the obituary was twenty years younger, had a
different last name, and to my knowledge was in no way related to
the LaLaurie family.

So, in effect, as we novelists tend to
do, I fictionalized a small bit of reality. The concept for
Love Is The Bond—
and eventually
the
Miranda Trilogy—
expanded
to encompass my own somewhat bastardized version of the LaLaurie
legend—that being the addition of a sister named Miranda and the
tie in with the completely unrelated death notice in a better than
150-year-old newspaper.

All I can say is that our minds work in
very strange ways. Well, at least
mine
does…

M. R. Sellars

An active member of the HWA (Horror Writers
Association), M. R. Sellars is a relatively unassuming homebody who
considers himself just a “guy with a lot of nightmares and a word
processing program.” His first full-length novel, Harm None, hit
bookstore shelves in 2000 and he hasn’t stopped writing since. He
says that the biggest adjustment he has had to make with his
writing career is coping with the time spent away from his family
while traveling on promotional tours. Still, he approaches it with
the same humorously deadpan and occasionally acerbic wit that he
applies to life in general.

All of the current novels in Sellars’
continuing Rowan Gant Investigations saga have spent several
consecutive weeks on numerous bookstore bestseller lists as well as
a consistent showing on the Amazon.com Horror/Occult top 100.

Sellars currently resides in the Midwest with
his wife, daughter, and a host of what he describes as “rescued,
geriatric, special-needs felines.” At home, when not writing or
taking care of the household, he indulges his passions for cooking
and hanging out with friends.

M. R. Sellars can be found on the web at:

www.mrsellars.com

Brainpan Leakage the M. R. Sellars Satire Blog

www.brainpanleakage.com

OTHER BOOKS BY M. R. SELLARS

The Rowan Gant Investigations

HARM NONE

NEVER BURN A WITCH

PERFECT TRUST

THE LAW OF THREE

CRONE’S MOON

LOVE IS THE BOND

ALL ACTS OF PLEASURE

THE END OF DESIRE

BLOOD MOON

MIRANDA

(Available in both print and e-book editions)

Other

YOU’RE GONNA THINK I’M NUTS…

(Novelette included in Courting Morpheus Horror
Anthology)

MERRIE AXEMAS: A KILLER HOLIDAY TALE

(Novella)