Bound by Moonlight (29 page)

Oh, Max. Poor little boy.
Her eyes were damp and she placed her palm between his tense shoulder blades, rubbing gently, wishing there was a way to erase the pain she was forcing him to recall.

“Baby, I’m so sorry. But this isn’t about Stan Schoenbaum and those others who hurt you. This is about a teenage girl who’ll die alone if we don’t find her. It’s
got
to be about that girl, Max.”

“Why? Why does it have to be? Why can’t it be about me? About a little boy in the brutal hands of those who should have protected him. Policemen, Charlotte. Your colleagues. Your friends. None of you gave a damn about me. None of you would have cared if I had died in that ditch, bleeding and alone.”

“I would have. I would have cared.”

He turned to face her, his eyes flat and unblinking. “Then don’t ask me to do this, Charlotte. It’s too much. Not for him.”

“For me.”

“It’s not about you! Don’t make it about you.” Yet even as he shouted that, a part of him realized that it was. It had everything to do with two teenage girls in a warehouse, suffering at the hands of monsters. The anguish of that tore through the last of his composure.

“I saved you, Charlotte. I rescued you. Don’t make me into someone who can save them all. It’s not what I am. It’s not what I do. I’m a destroyer, not a savior.
I don’t care about that girl. I don’t care what happens to her. I just hope it’s something so awful, he won’t be able to close his eyes for the rest of his life without seeing the horror of it and remembering what he did to me.”

She had to stop those awful words from pouring out of him. Cruel, hate-filled words so searingly vicious, they were a knife to her heart. Words that said a bridge between their two worlds could never stand.

Her palm dealt out a silencing blow, with just enough force to stun him, and bring his hand up defensively to cover his mouth before he turned his back on her.

“Detective,” Giles said softly. She hadn’t known he was in the room. He put his hand on her arm. “Time to go.”

When she balked, he tugged insistently. She shook him off at the hallway and continued on with her shoulders squared to the front door.

Sighing, Giles turned back to face an equally combatant posture and waited. A second. Two.

With a roar, Max grabbed the edge of the heavy wooden desk and flung it, computer and all, through the French doors, across the porch, and out into the yard. As shredded lace curtains settled over the broken glass, Max sank down slowly to his knees, rocking forward, lacing his hands over the back of his neck to begin a soft wailing howl.

The low, mournful sound made the hairs stand up on Giles’s arms as he placed his hand on Max’s shoulder.

“That’s not quite what I meant, boss man. Not what I had in mind at all.”

__________

“H
E WON’T DO
it,” she said tightly as she came down the front porch steps.

“Damn him, that selfish son of a—”

Her hard shove drove Schoenbaum down to the ground. “You fucker,” she growled as she stepped over him. “Stay the hell away from me. Boucher, with us.”

Babineau and Boucher exchanged glances as she got behind the wheel of the car. They climbed in wordlessly and were thrown back into the seats as she stomped on the gas, kicking up loose stones to shower the downed detective.

“S
AVOIE.
L
EAVE A
message.”

“Heya, Max. I’m just sitting here in this crappy station missing you, thinking about you, wishing I was home sharing a meal, sharing a conversation, sharing a bed with you. Just wanted to let you know that, and to tell you that I’m sorry I pushed so hard.

“I should have been thinking about you. I shouldn’t have asked. I do care, and I do understand, and it’s okay.” A pause while she drew in a shaky breath. “Talk to you soon.”

As the last hours of the workday wore down to a miserable end, Cee Cee knew she couldn’t let things go until she made contact with him. She had a mountain of paperwork chaining her to her desk, following their booking of Judith Farraday, but she took another minute and dialed the house.

“Helen, is Max there?”

“No, Detective.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back? I need to talk to him. I need to . . . I need to talk to him.”

There was a long pause, then Helen’s crisp response. “He said he had some business to take care of out on the bayou. But then, you’d know about that— and what it’s going to cost him, don’t you?”

M
AX HATED THE
smell of stagnant water and decay. He didn’t mind the damp, the cold, or the filth. But the stink that called up his half-remembered fears unsettled him. Donald Lamb’s scent kept him going, following the faint hints Lamb left when he’d pull a branch out of the way so his shallow pirogue could slip through.

Max kept to the paths and boggy surfaces where he could skim across, trying to avoid the chilly plunges up to his knees, sometimes to his waist. He kept his focus on the scent of Kelly Schoenbaum from her leather watchband, and the traces left by Lamb’s careless touch. He knew the area well enough to have a general sense of where he was going. After that it would be luck rather than skill.

He kept a nervous eye on the edge of darkness pushing daylight closer to the tree line, where soon it would be out of sight. The very last thing he wanted was to spend the night in the bayou, and precious little could push him to it.

Just one thing, actually.

He felt his phone vibrate but was busy leaping from branch to branch, tree to stump. Once he had solid ground beneath him, he checked his calls and saw Charlotte’s name. What could she have to say that
he would possibly want to hear at this moment? This woman he loved. This woman he would do absolutely anything to please.

Still angry and feeling more than a little bit guilty over his behavior, he put the phone away to continue on at a hard, punishing run. He’d go another hour. Maybe by then he could put his ego aside to listen.

At the end of those sixty minutes, the sun was gone and he was treading carefully on unstable physical and mental ground, spooked and anxious.

There were no more paths, just deceivingly quiet patches of green over black glassy waters. He was deep inside the treacherous swamps, with so much area still to cover. Soaked through, weary and chilled, he leaned back against the scaly trunk of a cypress tree, his gaze sweeping the gathering blackness as if it hid all sorts of unseen dangers from him. He took out his phone and felt water run out of it.

“No. No. Charlotte.”

He needed to hear her voice to keep from going under. Sinking fast, he shook the phone until the display lit up and, with a whisper of thanks, keyed in her message.

Heya, Max
.

He squeezed his eyes shut and the terror fell away as her voice stroked him in a soothing caress.

Missing you, thinking about you, wishing I was home sharing a meal, sharing a conversation, sharing a bed with you.

Emotion rose fast and thick; images of her danced behind his eyelids. Charlotte smiling as she dropped into his lap with her cup of coffee on the wide veranda.

Her feet in his hands as she spoke so passionately about the details of her case. The sound of her sigh, the weight of her palm rising and falling with his breaths as she curled close to him in the night.

I do understand, and it’s okay.

The screen flickered as the signal wavered and died.

And he was alone.

Charlotte, don’t leave me. Don’t leave me here.

He projected the words like a wounded cry, and almost at once sensations of heat brushed over him, around him, through him. The teasing scent of her
Voodoo Love
filled his nose, driving away the odor of dank waters. And he could hear her voice stroke across his mind.

Come back, baby. Don’t open the door alone.

I love you,
sha.

I want you, Savoie . . . I’m wearing new shoes.

He wouldn’t have thought anything could wring a laugh from him under the circumstances, but it burst out so loud and sudden, it scared up a noisy flutter of wings from unseen night birds. Then the darkness settled once more. And his soul settled into a saving calm.

After that, he had no idea how long he waded through the chest-high muck. Time only mattered as it applied to the frightened girl awaiting rescue. He no longer noticed his own fatigue. He was pure power now, tough and fierce concentration. Lamb’s trail was stronger here, brushed across dangling leaves and hanging moss, imprinted on bark and lily pads.

Then, finally, a different scent.

The metallic bite of blood and suffering and fear.
Of Kelly Shoenbaum, and the girl on Dev Dovion’s slab. And of dying horribly.

He shut his eyes as the rain of bloody pearls began.

Run! Run! Don’t look back, Max. Don’t look back.

Then it was gone. The shivery nausea, the shadowed memories. Trapped behind a closed door.

And he moved on.

The stilt house was so covered with moss and vines, it seemed organic. Nothing about it suggested it held a living being, but Max could sense her there, could hear her faint respirations.

The door held another of Donald Lamb’s exceptionally sturdy locks. Max tore through the wood panel with the rake of his claws and punch of his fist.

She was on the plank floor, blindfolded, her mouth taped, hands cuffed, ankle shackled to the wall. Her nude body was ravaged by abuse, bug bites, and starvation. She huddled, alarmed by the sound of his entry, too weak to do more than whimper.

He’d claimed not to care about this girl, but there was no way he could look at her and not be moved.

“Kelly,” he said in a low voice, “my name is Max. Your daddy sent me to bring you home. Don’t be afraid. No one’s going to hurt you ever again.”

C
EE
C
EE PACED
the parking lot at the Cajun Life museum for at least an hour. Max had telegraphed that single image to her, but nothing about what it meant. Giles had picked her up at Oscar’s insistence that Max needed them and that they should hurry. They waited with her, along with an ambulance and Kelly’s anxious father, in hopes of a good outcome.

She stopped suddenly. Max.

She could feel him. Could feel his fatigue and the chaos of his emotions, but that was all. He wouldn’t let her get closer. So she waited and worried, and nearly wept when he emerged from the trees carrying a blanketed figure in his arms.

“Kelly!”

She put up a hand to halt Stan Schoenbaum when Max jerked to a standstill. “Wait, Stan. Just wait here.”

Let her be alive. Let her be alive.

She couldn’t read anything in Max’s face except weariness. He looked terrible—scratched, filthy, and exhausted.

“Are you okay, baby?”

“Yeah. And so is she.”

Uttering a soft thanksgiving, Cee Cee gestured for the gurney. Schoenbaum raced ahead of it to take his daughter from Max’s arms, weeping unashamedly. When he’d assured himself that she was breathing, he looked up at Max, relief and gratitude twisting his features.

“How can I thank you?”

“Don’t mention my name as being part of this.” He took a step back, his eyes going flat and cold. “I found I couldn’t blame the daughter for the father’s sins.” And he turned away, walking toward Giles and Oscar where they waited by the car.

As Kelly was placed on the stretcher and her vitals quickly taken, Cee Cee hurried after Max. He turned when she called out to him, his glance lowering to her Doc Martens.

“Those aren’t new, and they’re not terribly sexy.”

“I wanted to give you some incentive.” She embraced him tightly, complaining, “Geez, you stink.” That didn’t keep her from running her fingers through his hair, from tipping his head down so she could kiss him softly. “Thank you. I gotta go with them.”

“I know. I need to go home and shower for about two days.”

“I’ll see you later, Savoie.”

She moved back so he could continue to where Giles and Oscar waited.

T
HE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR
hours were a media circus.

All business, wearing a sober jacket over dark jeans and an elegant string of pearls about her neck, Detective Charlotte Caissie, with Stan Schoenbaum, gave a press conference concerning the rescued victim whose identity was being protected. They cited the teamwork of their two units for their success in ending the Tides That Bind killer’s spree. Schoenbaum’s voice betrayed only the slightest tremor when he relayed that the young victim’s status was guarded, but that a full recovery was expected. Neither could be lured from their statements when Karen Crawford asked for the name of a mysterious citizen who carried the naked girl out of the bayou, protecting her own source for that leak as confidential.

Watching the press conference from the overly bright showroom floor of the Sweat Shop, Alain Babineau smiled.

Good for you, Ceece.

“Mr. Babbit, isn’t it?”

Babineau turned to regard Simon Cummings in surprise. “Yes, that’s right. You remembered.”

“There’s very little that slips by me.”

“Mr. Blu isn’t in yet. And I was just leaving.”

“Then maybe you’ll let me buy you a meal, and we can discuss people and things we might have in common.”

“All right. Hey, Barry,” he called to the bartender. “Heading out. See ya tomorrow night.”

“Laissez les bons temps rouler.”

Babineau waved a hand and followed the businessman outside.

Cummings picked a place several blocks away, where the light was low and the scent of grease and hot sauce was part of the ambiance. “I love this kind of food. It’s worth the morning jog through Audubon Park to pay for the occasional indulgence.”

While they waited for catfish and fried okra, Babineau said, “Thanks for not giving me up to Blutafino.”

“Babineau, right? I remember you as being the cooler head of the partnership. I thought you were Homicide.”