The End Of Desire: A Rowan Gant Investigation (5 page)

“Gotta light, Mistuh?” she asked before I’d
made it two steps.

Even though it was against my better
judgment, I stopped and looked back at her. In the dim swath of
yellow spilling from the overhead light, I could see enough of her
face to tell that her vacant eyes were fixed with a
substance-induced glaze. I didn’t really want to know which
substance. Her vinyl skirt was too short, her top too tight, and
her makeup too thick. She looked like she was in her late forties,
but something about her felt like she was maybe all of fifteen.

I rummaged quickly in my pocket, withdrew a
book of matches and tossed them the short distance to her. She
missed the catch even though my aim was dead on, so she stooped to
pick them up. While she was doing so, I took a quick glance around
to make sure I wasn’t being set up for a mugging or some such and
then hurried on to my vehicle.

As she stood again, she let out a hoarse
giggle and called after me, “Ah won’t bite, shuga. Unless tha’s
what ya’ wan’ me ta’ do.”

By now I had the car door open and since I
had originally backed in was just getting ready to turn and slip
into the driver’s seat. Out of reflex, I shook my head while saying
across the top of the sedan, “No thanks.”

I heard her reply as I was pulling the door
shut.

“Ya’ sure ya’ not lookin’ fuh comp’ny,
bay-bee?”

If she said anything after that, I didn’t
hear it because the windows were up, the engine was running, and I
was already pulling out of the parking space.

B
en had given me something
to go on whether he realized it or not. It was tenuous, I admit,
but it was something. He’d told me they found the victim in a motel
room, specifically, the no-tell type. So, that was where I would
start my search.

When I first set out, I even gave serious
consideration to the fact that the murder might have happened right
where I was staying. In fact, I was less than a mile up Airline
Highway when I literally thought about turning around and going
back, imagining for a moment I might be able to exchange some cash
for information from my next-door neighbor. That sort of
transaction would probably make me her easiest client of the night.
Of course, that would all hinge on whether or not she actually knew
anything, and she hadn’t struck me as the type to stay up on
current events that weren’t a part of her immediate future.
Besides, at the rate she’d been going, she had most likely already
found someone in need of her particular brand of personal services
by now, and I would have to wait until I could catch her between
clients. In my mind, standing around waiting for that to happen
wasn’t exactly an enticing prospect considering the fact that I was
sure to be faced with extricating myself from another sort of
proposition yet again. On top of that, it didn’t sound particularly
safe either. But, in the end it wasn’t fear or even the distaste
that kept me from making the U-turn. There was a niggling hunch in
the back of my head, and it kept telling me that I needed to look
somewhere else. So, I listened to it.

I had seen the crime scenes in Saint Louis;
therefore, I knew the types of venues the killer chose. While they
were certainly establishments of the hourly rate persuasion, they
were more along the lines of seedy in a quaint, un-redecorated
sense—things like outdated, mismatched furniture and paint or
wallpaper that hadn’t been in style for over twenty years. But, the
important point was that they were clean. They definitely weren’t
anything on the order of the squalid hole where I had taken up
temporary residence.

There was a gut feeling I had about Annalise,
or maybe it was her alter ego, Miranda, for all I knew. Perhaps
both. It was the product of an ethereal connection I’d made at the
second Saint Louis crime scene, and all I could say was that I had
picked up an impression. That impression had now formed itself into
a theory. To me, it seemed she saw herself as above such a place as
the Airline Courts. In fact, I was dead certain she perceived
herself as above most everything and everyone.

Even so, she still picked motels well known
for clandestine meetings of a sexual nature for her kills. There
could be a handful of logical reasons for this, not the least of
which was the fact that she could almost count on absolute privacy,
given the nature of the business. But, logic wasn’t what drove a
serial killer. Something the experts liked to call a stressor was
the motivational culprit.

So, while the logical reasons may well be
factors, if my feeling was correct, she was choosing them for an
altogether different, and very specific reason—that being
nostalgia. My guess was that, in typical serial killer form, she
was attempting to recreate something from her past, possibly even
her first kill.

The question that remained for me was which
one of them was responsible? Based on the period of the motels, it
almost had to be an event in Annalise’s life, since everything so
far indicated Miranda had been dead for better than a century and a
half. But then, why was Miranda seizing on it?

Of course, that was just another part of the
big, scary puzzle.

I’m sure my theory wasn’t new. The FBI
profilers had more than likely come up with the very same idea, or
something close. However, mine was based on observation and a quick
brush with the
Twilight Zone
,
as my friend would say. So, when all was said and done, I had no
credentials to back it up; therefore, it was really just a mental
stab in the dark. Still, it was all I had to work with, and right
or wrong, it narrowed down my possibilities
significantly.

Or, so I thought.

That last assessment changed the moment I
pulled into a combination gas station/mini-mart and thumbed through
the hotel listings in a tattered phone book. Even after discounting
all lodging that was obviously upscale or I knew to be a reasonably
respectable chain that didn’t fit the image I had kludged together,
there was an exorbitant number of local motels that I didn’t know
enough about to confidently exclude. In fact, I gave up on my
cursory count when I hit 50 and there were still more to go.

What started out in my head as a promising
slip up by Ben had now turned into a daunting task that my
exhausted brain wasn’t at all interested in tackling. It then
crossed my mind that my friend hadn’t actually slipped up. He
probably already knew how overwhelming it would be.

Of course, even if the list had only been a
dozen or so locations as I had hoped, I still had yet to figure out
how I was going to determine which one actually was the scene of
the homicide. Calling the numbers and asking if they’d recently had
a murder in one of their rooms didn’t present itself as a terribly
attractive or even productive option. Nor did driving to each one
and hoping for a psychic impression to tell me when I’d arrived
where I needed to be. Given the way my head already felt, I
probably wouldn’t be aware of one if it happened anyway.

I still had an option though. Ben had told me
they didn’t run a story in the paper, but I wasn’t entirely sure I
believed him. He could have been lying, which was something he was
more than willing to do if he felt it was in the best interest of
the person he was trying to protect, namely me.

If that was the case and it actually had been
reported in the newspaper, maybe it would point me to the correct
place. I knew that idea was full of if’s and maybe’s, but it was
really my best option at this point. However, it was also something
that wasn’t going to happen at this hour. It would have to wait
until well after sunrise when I took my planned trip to the New
Orleans Public Library because the paper I needed would be nearly a
week old, and that would probably be the only place I could get my
hands on it, if at all.

I actually felt my shoulders fall in a
physical response to the realization. The growing weariness had
been held at bay by sheer will, and that was now crumbling in the
face of failure. The extra high dose of aspirin I had taken wasn’t
helping either. While it was only doing a little to dull the edge
on my headache, it was definitely going a long way toward enhancing
my exhaustion. I caught myself yawning as I stood at the payphone
and knew what little energy I had left was draining from me as if
someone had just pulled a cork to let it out.

Now that I had to postpone this nocturnal
quest, my thoughts were relegated to returning to my motel room, so
I could at least try to get a few hours sleep. I ripped the pages
from the phone book and stuffed them into my pocket, just in case,
then turned and started back toward my car. Before I made it as far
as the front bumper I stifled two more eye-squinting yawns.

I stopped in my tracks and sighed heavily,
rubbed my forehead for a moment, then turned and aimed myself at
the door of the mini-mart. If I was even going to make it back to
the motel in one piece, I was going to need a cup of coffee.

* * * * *

“I
jus’ started ‘em
fresh,” the man behind the counter offered as he watched me head
for the coffeemakers. “Dey should be ready in jus’ a coupl’a
minutes.”

“Thanks,” I replied, giving him a nod as I
continued over to the stand where the brew was streaming from a
stained filter basket into an equally soiled carafe.

Using what I saw as a judge, it was a safe
bet the coffee wasn’t going to be top-notch, so I pulled one of the
large cups from the stack and started prepping it with sugar
packets. After dumping in six, re-examining the size of the vessel
and adding another three, I began rooting through a tray of
flavored creamers. After finding a half-dozen that matched, I lined
them up then started peeling back the tops and dumping them in.

The fatigue had now worked itself into every
nook and cranny of my being, so by the time I picked up the fourth
creamer, my hands had decided not to operate in accordance with
what my brain was telling them to do. Before I could manage to tear
back the foil top, I fumbled the small plastic container, and it
fell from my hand then rolled across the aisle floor. I turned and
knelt down to retrieve the escapee, and when I did, my eyes caught
a silvery glint of light bouncing from a somewhat familiar
shape.

Wrapping one hand around the fugitive
condiment, I pushed my glasses up onto my nose with the other and
continued to kneel there, staring at the object. The gratuitous
trinket section was positioned immediately across from the coffee;
probably some marketing guru’s brilliant idea for how they could
move high-profit-margin, cheap plastic toys by catching junior’s
attention while the parent was getting a cup of java. I had no
doubt that it was effective to some extent because it now had my
undivided attention.

Of course, I was focused on a particular
item. Dead in the middle of all of the junk was a peg which held
several blister cards, each of them containing a toy police badge,
whistle, and plastic handcuffs. Ben’s earlier comment rolled
through my foggy brain, “You ain’t packin’ a badge, so you’re just
another civilian ta’ them.”

He was correct. But now, like some fateful
sign, here was a badge, and it even looked pretty convincing given
the short distance between it and me. It wouldn’t stand up to any
manner of scrutiny, that much was for certain, but if it was just a
quick flash it might work.

“Ya’ okay over dere, cap?” the man called
out.

“Yeah,” I answered and, realizing I’d been
staring at the toy just a bit too long, offered up an explanation.
“I just dropped a creamer, and I didn’t want to leave a mess over
here for you to have to deal with.”

“Dere ya’ go,” he replied, a thankful note in
his voice.

I sighed and looked away from the toy rack
then muttered a personal admonishment under my breath as I stood,
“Yeah Gant, impersonating a cop. That’d be really bright, wouldn’t
it?”

Stepping back over to the low counter, I
finished adding the creamers to the cup then poured in the just
finished coffee on top. I was happy to see that it blended to a
milky brown instead of the sickly grey I’d faced before at other
such establishments.

Wandering over to the checkout stand, I
placed the cup on the counter then dug in my pocket for my
wallet.

“Dat gonna be two-sixty,” the man told
me.

I tossed three ones in front of him.

“You gotta silvuh dime?” he asked.

I shoved a hand into my pocket in search of
the change but found nothing but the car keys and the crumpled
pages from the phone book.

“No, sorry,” I offered with a shake of my
head. “Don’t worry about it. Just keep the change.”

“Awrite,” he replied, giving me a quick
nod.

I picked up my coffee and started for the
door but halted as the thought of the phonebook pages in my pocket
began bludgeoning my grey matter. Then, without thinking anything
through, I seized on one of the names I remembered seeing, turned
back to face the man, and said, “Mind if I ask you something? I
just drove in and I’m looking for the Keys Motel?”

“Dat’s no problem,” he replied, pointing past
me. “Ya’ jus’ go down Airline a coupl’a miles and dere it is.”

“Great, thanks,” I offered with a weak smile
then let out a nervous chuckle which I’m sure was more a product of
the lie I was telling than any sort of acting skill. On the heels
of the laugh I added, “You know, I heard there was a weird murder
that happened there recently. You hear anything about that?”

“Naw, somebody told ya’ wrong on dat,” he
told me, shaking his head and jerking his thumb in the opposite
direction. “Da’ murder happened ovuh for da’ Suthun Hosp’tality.
Dat’s back up da’ road.”