Diabolical (Shaye Archer Series Book 3) Read online

  “We can, but we know Clancy was working New Orleans at the time this girl was sold. She could have come to New Orleans from another city, but it’s more likely she’s from New Orleans or somewhere nearby.”

  “If that’s the case, then we’ve got a big hole in our data. If this girl was off-grid as far as social services is concerned and the parents are a no-show, she might never be reported.”

  “I know.” Jackson struggled to control his frustration. He tapped his desk, staring at the monitor as if a solution were going to materialize on the screen. “What about this? If the girl is local and not reported, then she’s got a crap home situation, right?”

  “That’s probably a given.”

  “Then chances are social services would have been called in, at least once.”

  Grayson shook his head. “There’s no way we can check up on every fifteen-year-old that social services took a peek at. Hell, for all we know, they could have seen the kid years ago, if they investigated her household at all. It would take days to go through that amount of data, even if we only went back a year and only in the New Orleans area. And that’s assuming I could get this witch hunt approved in the first place. We don’t exactly have the manpower to spare.”

  Jackson’s expression must have shifted at the words “witch hunt” because Grayson put his hand up to stop him from replying.

  “I’m not saying I think it’s a witch hunt,” Grayson said. “I’m inclined to think you’re onto something, but we’d never get departmental resources approved for a search. Not right now. And besides, I can’t see how knowing who the victim is would help us find her now.”

  Jackson slumped back in his chair and blew out a breath. Grayson was right. Even if they could convince Captain Bernard that this course of investigation was viable, they didn’t have the staff to pursue it, not with so many resources already pulled for the Clancy investigation.

  “I guess I was hoping if we could identify her,” Jackson said, “then maybe someone has seen her—you know, could give us a place to start looking.” Then an idea swept through his mind and he straightened up. “What if we had someone else do the research? Someone who already has clearance?”

  “There’s no one with clearance that isn’t already assigned to a double workload.”

  “Corrine Archer is still on medical leave. She’d have access to the files at social services. Surely she could be cleared to have information on the missing girl.”

  Grayson’s eyes widened. “Whoa, I don’t know. Sure, Corrine has access and she’s one sharp cookie, but her daughter was also this guy’s prisoner.”

  “Which gives her more reason to want him caught than anyone else in this city except Shaye.”

  Grayson stared over Jackson’s head at the wall, and Jackson could tell he was weighing the risks and possible rewards against the potential for the entire thing to blow up in their faces. Finally, he nodded. “We’ll have to run it by Bernard.”

  “Of course.”

  “No time like the present,” Grayson said. “If he goes for it, we can give Ms. Archer a call and see if we can go talk to her.”

  Jackson nodded and hopped up from his chair. He was glad they were going to talk to Corrine in person, assuming Bernard approved this line of investigation. Jackson couldn’t fathom telling Corrine over the phone that another child had been sold to the same man who’d purchased Shaye. Apparently, Grayson felt the same way. It ticked the senior detective up another notch in Jackson’s estimation. He’d already known Grayson was a good cop. It appeared he was a good man as well. Jackson’s overall attitude about his job and his future with the department had improved by a mile in the past twenty-four hours.

  Bernard was in his office and Grayson took the lead, explaining their theory and the desire to ask Corrine for help going through records at social services.

  “That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?” Bernard asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Grayson said, not even trying to hedge. “Unfortunately, a stretch might be all we have to go on with this case.”

  Bernard nodded, his expression grim. Jackson knew the mayor had already paid Bernard a visit, and word around the water cooler was he’d received a call from the governor as well. The amount of pressure on him to get those journals deciphered and put more of these despicable people behind bars must be practically crippling. Jackson did not envy the man his position. Not one little bit.

  “Okay,” Bernard said finally. “If Ms. Archer is willing to do the research, I don’t see how it could possibly hurt.” He gave them a strained smile. “I always did like betting on a long shot.”

  He stepped out of the alley and into the parking lot, clutching the long, ornate knife in his right hand. Her car, a Lexus, was parked on the back row, making his job easier. No one paid any attention to a man walking across a parking lot, and on the back row, he was out of sight of the sidewalk as soon as he stooped down. The gap between the front bumper of the car and the concrete wall that formed the rear of the parking lot made the perfect hiding place.

  He crouched and peered around the car, pleased to see that the front row of vehicles, mostly made up of contractor vans and SUVs, effectively blocked him from street view. All of the businesses in this area had security cameras, but only one was nearby and it was at a jewelry store across the street. That camera would be focused on the sidewalk and road in front of the store, not a parking lot across the street and certainly not the back row of the parking lot.

  Despite the relative seclusion provided by the row of vehicles, he wouldn’t have chosen this place for the work at hand if there had been another option. Public places were never best, especially during daylight hours. But the woman lived in a secured high-rise with valet parking and in the days during the past two weeks that he’d tracked her, he’d never seen her leave the building at night. Her daily schedule, though, had been simple to ascertain. Work, gym, dinner, home. Monday through Friday. Breakfast, then teaching senior aerobics at a community center on Saturday.

  The building that housed her physical therapy practice was in a busy area and had full-time security guards for the building and parking lot. The community center, however, was located some distance from the nearest parking area and it was one of those unmanned lots where you shoved some bills in a slot and went on about your business. Saturday was his best option.

  He checked his watch and frowned when he saw it was a good ten minutes past the time she should have arrived at her car. The street was lined with retail shops between the community center and the parking lot. If she’d gotten distracted by the displays and decided to waste time shopping, it would put him behind. He had other targets to locate and eliminate, and some of them were proving harder to find than he’d originally thought. Nine years had given people time to change jobs, homes, spouses, and even states. As soon as this one was taken care of, he was headed to Florida for the next on his list, which is why the current delay was making him antsy.

  He peered around the car again and caught a glimpse of her on the sidewalk in front of the parking garage, looking down at her cell phone. She walked slowly into the lot, both hands on the cell phone as she went. Probably texting. The entire world was obsessed with technology. He found it exhausting.

  Finally, she shifted the phone to one hand and pulled her car keys out of her purse with the other. The car beeped, signaling that the doors were unlocked. Clutching his ceremonial knife, he crept around the front bumper and to the passenger side of the vehicle. As she moved toward the driver’s door, he slipped around the side of the car and then to the rear as she stepped up to the door.

  She was reaching for the door handle when he struck. Quick and stealthy as a cat, he moved behind her, put his left hand over her mouth, and slit her throat with the knife. She didn’t even have time to struggle. He heard a gurgle as air and blood pushed through the incision, and then she collapsed.

  He grabbed her purse and hurried away from the car along the back of the parking lot, then ent
ered the alley, making sure he never looked toward the street as he walked. When he got into the alley, he removed the surgical gloves he’d been wearing and grabbed the backpack he’d stashed behind a Dumpster. He cleaned the knife with a towel and placed it in the leather sheath, then he put the towel, the purse, and the gloves into a plastic bag, wrapped it tightly, and stuffed all of it into the pack.

  The alley led onto a residential street. He’d parked two blocks away. He grabbed the pack and hurried out of the alley and set off down the sidewalk. No police sirens wailed in the distance. No one pointed. No one even looked at him.

  Two down.

  8

  Harold Beaumont hung up the phone and grabbed a beer from the refrigerator before heading out onto his back porch. It looked out over Santa Rosa Sound with its blue water, tons of birds, and excellent fishing. The sun was setting now, and bursts of yellow and orange glittered on top of the water like a disco ball. It was a nice view—one that usually brought out a smile from a tired, cynical old cop. But today it didn’t so much as elicit a twitch of his lips.

  Even though he’d left New Orleans shortly after retiring, he’d kept up with the local news. You could talk the cop into retirement, but that just meant he wasn’t getting paid anymore. It didn’t stop the mind from processing crime, especially when it was in your home territory. Especially when it was headline news, like the Clancy case.

  He took a swig of beer and sat in a lawn chair, mulling over the information he’d just received. All the news reports had been filled with drama and outrage but few facts. Harold knew that was usually for one of two reasons—there weren’t any facts to be shared or the police were holding back facts to help eliminate suspects. In this case, Harold would have bet his million-dollar view on the second option, and he was right. The phone call he’d just received confirmed it.

  The news was all regular folks had, but Harold wasn’t regular folk. He had an inside source that kept him in the loop with what was happening at the NOLA police department. Sergeant Robert Royer had worked beat with Beaumont for two decades before he had to give it up because of a bad knee. If you could just shoot them if they ran, he probably could have put in another ten years, but department policy required you to chase them instead. At least, that’s the way Bob liked to tell it. It always got a smile from other cops. Civilians were usually less amused. They didn’t understand the things cops dealt with day in and day out, so they couldn’t wrap their minds around firearm humor as a coping mechanism.

  So Bob had moved off the streets and behind the front desk, running the show from the inside, as Harold liked to say. And things had gone well. Harold had thought moving Bob out of the action would set him straight to private work, but Bob surprised Harold by not only taking the desk sergeant position but claiming he enjoyed it.

  Bob always had been the biggest hound dog for information that Harold had ever met, so he supposed he could see the appeal on that level. The desk sergeant was the hub of the police station. Nothing happened that didn’t pass in front of them, and since Bob had been around for a long time, most of the guys stopped to share their stories or to run theories by him. The end result being that Bob knew more about crime and politics in New Orleans than anyone else in the department.

  Usually Bob called Harold with a juicy bit of gossip about who’d just gotten their asses handed to them by Bernard or a crime that was outside the norm, but this time, the call was one Bob hadn’t enjoyed making.

  Shaye Archer.

  Harold couldn’t even think her name without the hair on the back of his neck standing up. Even after all these years, he could see her standing in the street, illuminated by his patrol car headlights, covered in blood and God only knew what else, white as a sheet, and staring straight through him as if he weren’t even there. In thirty-two years on the job, Harold had never seen anything so horrible and he hoped he never did again.

  That idiot he’d been partnered with after Bob moved to the desk had immediately dismissed her as a runaway junkie, but Harold knew better. Whatever had happened to the girl had been so horrible she’d stepped outside of her own mind. She might have been drugged, but that wasn’t the only thing going on. Her expression was that of someone whose life was so bad, she’d mentally escaped it. As soon as she’d been admitted to the hospital, Harold had called Corrine Archer. If anyone could help the girl, he thought, it would be Corrine.

  And he’d been right.

  Corrine had not only personally taken the girl in but had gotten her the best of everything—doctors, psychiatrist, physical therapist, tutors—everything she needed to recover from a horror she couldn’t remember. And despite all odds saying that Shaye Archer didn’t have a chance at a normal life, she’d managed one, at least on paper.

  On paper, she was a first-class student, a hard worker, and generous with charity, and she appeared to have all the makings of an excellent private investigator. Harold had allowed himself to slip into a good place when it came to Shaye. They’d won. Good had triumphed over evil and Shaye was proof.

  Then Clancy happened.

  Calling it a can of worms was the understatement of the century. This was Pandora’s box. In all his years on the force and all the years he’d listened to his own father talk about cases, Harold had never heard anything like the Clancy case. Sure, you saw things on television—those true-crime documentaries and such—but this was different. This was his town and his people.

  He’d known the day would come when Shaye would want to talk to him. For years, he’d stiffened slightly when the doorbell rang, thinking it was time, but the years had passed in silence, and he’d finally assumed Shaye was determined to put her forgotten past behind her. He couldn’t blame her. He would have done the same thing.

  But this was different. Everything had come home to roost and Harold had no doubt that Shaye was right in the thick of things, trying to ferret out her past. He couldn’t blame her for that, either. If someone flung the door open right in your face, it was hard not to step through it. Which also meant something for him.

  It was time.

  Time to head back to New Orleans and schedule a visit with Ms. Archer. Time to live that night one last time, for her sake and for his. Because it wouldn’t truly be over until the man who’d tortured Shaye was identified and punished. But right now, he had a more pressing problem than a four-hour drive and figuring out how to start the conversation he’d never really wanted to have.

  Someone was watching him.

  He was careful about it. Never coming close enough to the house to set off the motion lights or get caught on a camera, but Harold knew he was out there. He could feel him watching. Maybe from the wooded area surrounding his home. Maybe from a boat anchored in the sound. But definitely somewhere nearby and more than once.

  The first time Harold had felt him was the week before when he’d been in the garage working on his bass boat. He’d grabbed a spotlight, pulled out his gun that he still kept on him at all times, and headed across the road to the undeveloped acreage that spread out miles in front of him. He’d found a set of footprints in the bushes close to the edge of the property and had tracked them a couple acres through the woods to a road, but there were no houses nearby, so no one to question about a car parked there or the man driving it.

  Since he’d arrived in Florida, Harold had kept mostly to himself. The only person who knew him by name was the guy who owned the bait shop, but Harold couldn’t picture Old Joe making his way through the woods with his cane to spy on Harold in his garage. And for what purpose would someone watch him anyway? Harold had arrested plenty of people in his day, but he couldn’t think of a single one who would waste time tracking him down today.

  No. This was about Shaye. He had no proof, but he knew it as surely as he knew the sun would rise tomorrow. Which meant whoever was watching him was getting scared. All these years and no one had ever taken a peek at him. Clancy gets exposed along with his journals and now Harold is suddenly interesting. It was
n’t a coincidence. And if Harold was important enough to watch, then Shaye was probably in danger.

  He polished off the beer and headed back inside. It was time to put his plan into action, because the last thing he intended to do was set out for New Orleans with some psychopath on his tail. He reached for his cell phone on the kitchen counter and dialed.

  “Joe? Remember that favor I asked you about last week? Well, I need it tonight.”

  Corrine opened the door to the two detectives and motioned them inside. They both greeted her politely and followed her to the kitchen, where Eleonore was seated at the kitchen counter, drinking tea. Jackson wasn’t surprised to see the psychiatrist in attendance. As Corrine’s best friend and Shaye’s therapist, she’d be in on everything going on with the Archer women.

  “I hope you don’t mind Eleonore being here,” Corrine said. “When you said it was about the Clancy journals, I asked her to come. I want her in the loop on everything that has to do with Shaye, even if it’s not directly related to her.”

  “Of course,” Grayson said, and extended his hand to Eleonore. “I don’t think we’ve ever met formally, but I’m a big fan of your work. I’m Detective Grayson.”

  Eleonore shook his hand. “It happens, I’m a big fan of your work, too.” She smiled at the detective and Jackson saw Grayson’s shoulders relax a bit. Corrine Archer and Eleonore Blanchet might be the two most intimidating women in New Orleans. It made him feel a little better that Grayson was as careful around them as Jackson was.

  “Have a seat, gentlemen,” Eleonore said. “I’m getting a crick in my neck.”

  They slid onto stools next to Eleonore, and Corrine stepped behind the counter across from them. “Would you like something to drink?” she asked. “I know you’re on the job but I have sweet tea, soda, and water. I can make coffee if you prefer that.”