Doing the Devil's Work (22 page)

“No.”

“You think that woman’s a killer?”

“No.”

“Me neither.” Preacher started the truck. “Forget about Leary. She’s the only woman in New Orleans with long brown hair? Even if it is hers, by the time Drayton gets the lab work on that hair sample I’ll be dead and you’ll be long retired. Cops who the lab techs actually like pay off mortgages before they get lab work back, forget about cocksuckers everyone hates.”

Preacher shook his head. “Let it go. We’re not private investigators. We’re not social services. We’ve been through this. Not your problem.” He tapped his badge. “Not
our
problem. Don’t make it so. Mark my words, someone will end up suing you for something. That’ll be the thanks you get. Don’t you have enough problems?” He dropped the truck into reverse. “You hearing me?”

Maureen stepped away from the truck, her hand in the air. “See you back at the district.”

Preacher backed up. He pulled out into the street. Instead of driving away, he stepped on the brakes and waved Maureen over to him. “One thing I want you to remember.” He held up two fingers. “This is twice now.”

“Twice what?”

“Twice that you’ve been around Drayton, discussing this murder he’s working, and twice you’ve failed to mention your knowledge of people of interest to the case. One of whom actually has long brown hair. If it’s not a cover-up, it’ll do till the cover-up gets here.”

Maureen froze inside. “Are you kidding me? You
told
me to stonewall him. You shot down my idea about Madison Leary thirty seconds ago.”

“I’m not criticizing or accusing,” Preacher said. “I’m reminding you of the facts at hand. We’re not out of the woods, is what I’m saying. Don’t relax, and don’t tell Quinn or Ruiz about your meeting with Drayton. They might think he was asking about them. We don’t need the suspicious vibes going around. That’s exactly the kind of thing Drayton finds useful.”

Maureen felt light-headed. She couldn’t keep up. “What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t think Drayton’s gonna keep trying to drag us into his problems?”

“It means,” Preacher said, “that if Drayton wants to step on his dick on this case, you need to let him. Stay clear of it. Stay clear of Leary and anything else connected to the Gage and Cooley murders. Breach of duty and moral conduct are terminable offenses. Remember what the chief said, ‘Lying is dying on the NOPD.’ Remember that you’re on probation until next August. We’re not even required to give you a termination hearing.”

He swung the truck around Maureen and headed down Washington toward the river, finishing the block on the wrong side of the road and leaving Maureen standing in the street, marveling and terrified at how effortlessly she was losing control of her life.

The mangy tabby she’d seen earlier sat on the hood of a parked car, looking at her, its tail twitching, its eyes aglow with reflected light.

18

The next morning, Maureen tumbled out of bed five minutes before noon. She’d gotten four hours of sleep. As she walked out of the bathroom, she realized she’d swallowed a couple of painkillers before checking to see how her ankle felt. Wearing satin pajama bottoms and a loose-fitting NOPD tank top, she brought her phone and her coffee onto her porch, where she drank sitting in her rocking chair. Across the street, today dressed in baby blue, the little girl worked her pink tricycle up and down the broken sidewalk.

A group of sparrows wet their wings in a rainwater puddle on her walk, one bird keeping a single eye trained on her while the others washed and preened. The ornaments in the miniature jungle that was her neglected garden reminded Maureen of a bizarre set of ruins hidden in a colorful rain forest. The plants buzzed with bees, butterflies, and dragonflies. Lizards of every shade of brown and green hunted insect prey among the leaves. Maureen enjoyed imagining the lizards as tiny dinosaurs stalking the tropical wilds of her front yard.

She glanced through the newspaper, skipping the headlines and checking the forecast for signs of the October cool. There was none, but no rain was expected for her detail that night. The Gulf remained blessedly clear of late-season storms. She’d almost survived her first hurricane season. She folded her paper, set down her coffee mug, and rubbed her eyes. At some point in the afternoon, she’d catch another two hours of sleep. No matter how late into the night she’d worked, sleeping into the afternoon left Maureen depressed. Waking up even at five to twelve made a world of difference in how she felt. She stretched and yawned, rocking in her chair, breathing in the humid air. The streets washed with rain, her garden aglow in the light of another hot and sunny day, made the events of the previous night feel less sinister.

She pulled one of her own red hairs from the front of her tank top.

She thought of Drayton’s evidence bag.

Leary had claimed a sexual encounter with Gage in the pickup. The hairs had been left behind then, or if there’d been a struggle getting Leary into the truck. Made perfect sense. She didn’t need lab work and DNA for that. And it wasn’t outlandish to think Gage hadn’t showered since the traffic stop. She was pretty sure he hadn’t changed his shirt. She wouldn’t ask Quinn or Ruiz or Preacher if they remembered what he’d worn at the traffic stop. She didn’t need to remember. She needed to stop thinking about it, to follow Preacher’s advice—no, she corrected herself, his orders—and leave the matter be.

She understood Preacher’s warning about her sins, about her lies of omission. His admonishments about duty and moral conduct were not jokes. They were not hyperbole.

As big a dick as Drayton was, Maureen thought, she was the one obscuring by omission the murder victim’s recent history. Hell, she’d stood by while Quinn had destroyed physical evidence of the victim’s possible associates and activities. She was guilty of multiple fireable offenses. She was quite possibly a felon. A criminal. She’d fucking
handed him
that piece of paper. She couldn’t be more complicit had she tried to be, had she meant to be. She needed to remember that she was only as clean as the cops around her. By protecting them she was protecting herself. She sipped her coffee. And she’d had such high hopes for her new career, her new life.

The police superintendent had instituted what he called an “honesty and truthfulness” policy not long before she’d enrolled in the academy. Any lie, the policy declared, about anything, no matter how minor, constituted grounds for termination. She’d seen three dismissals in her short time on the job already, one of them an officer, over things much less significant than impeding a homicide investigation. She could probably stay out of jail if what she was doing came to light. The NOPD had seen enough of its own people go to prison over the last few years. But keeping her job would be impossible. She’d be a washout. A failure and a reject.

As a young girl she’d been kicked out of two junior high schools for bad behavior. Smoking, fighting, cutting class, abusing her teachers. Mostly, she had trouble with male authority figures, or they had trouble with her, depending on who was asking. She could be viciously hostile toward them; other times she was too welcoming of their attention to her misbehaving. She liked boys. Her mother, Amber, blamed Maureen’s runaway father for everything. He’d disappeared when Maureen was eleven. Maureen blamed him, too, because it was convenient and none of the adults in her life were willing to contradict her. Most seemed willing to let her rage, as long as she did it somewhere else.

She’d squeaked through a third school when her mother, crushed flat by heartbreak, loneliness, a full-time department store job, and a maniacal offspring had threatened her with doctors, medication, and boarding school. After the eighth grade, somehow, Amber got Maureen admitted to a last-chance all-girls Catholic high school. She did better there, suddenly disdainful of the attention she used to crave, turning her anger inward in the school halls, and finding an outlet for it as a runner. She ran like mad, for miles, like something was chasing her.

She’d graduated, though as a senior she’d been bounced from the track team, despite setting school and Staten Island records as a long-distance runner. The nuns had no sense of humor about an athlete running on cigarettes and amphetamines. Not one that ran Cs in the classroom. After high school, except for running and cigarettes, she struggled to stick with anything, even drugs, unless she counted waiting tables. Which, she thought, sitting on her porch, there was a good chance she’d be doing again before Halloween the way things were headed. For the first time in fifteen years, for the first time in her adult life, she didn’t want to be on her own anymore. She wanted to be part of something. Something bigger and stronger, something that made her
feel
bigger and stronger, than she was alone. Something she had
chosen
. In the NOPD, in New Orleans, she’d found a place, finally, where she wanted to belong, to stay. Whatever happened to her in the future, she decided, it would happen in New Orleans. No fucking way was she going back to Staten Island. No way was she moving back into her mother’s house. She’d walk into the Mississippi before she’d go back up north. This place, as brief as her time in New Orleans had been, this was her life now, for better or worse.

Across the street, two crows perched bobbing and cawing in the sunlight on the red-tiled spine of the roof. Preacher was right. He was always right. She needed to put some distance between herself and the Gage case, to get back to regular, standard, non-attention-grabbing police work. She activated her phone. She’d call Quinn, firm up their plans for the evening, see if there was anything she needed to bring with her. She saw that in the night, the early morning, really, while she’d slept, she had gotten a phone call. She thumbed her way to the lone message on her voice mail. The number was blocked, or unlisted. The caller had left a message.

At first, Maureen took it for a wrong number, or a pocket call. The message began with several moments of near silence, whispers, slow breathing, maybe the muffled sounds of distant traffic. Out of the background noise a voice arose, softly singing. A woman’s voice, singing low, as if she wanted no one other than Maureen to hear her.
Look at that deep well,
the voice sang.
Look at that dark grave.

The same lines, the same melody, repeated three times before the caller had hung up. Gentle, like a secret lullaby. Or a spell. Or a warning. The throaty voice was unmistakable. From somewhere in New Orleans, Maureen knew, Madison Leary was singing to her. Maureen looked at her phone, put it back to her ear. Beyond bizarre. The question was why. And how had she gotten the number? What else did she know? Maureen’s address? Preacher would understand her pursuing something like this, Maureen thought. Handling it solo was the best way to keep it quiet, right? She wouldn’t even wear her uniform. Where had Leary gotten the number? Maureen wondered again. Someone had given it to her. Maureen had an idea who, and where to find her.

19

Maureen found Dice in the Marigny, sprawled in the newly cut grass in a corner of Washington Square, a small, pretty, tree-dense park between Frenchmen Street and Elysian Fields, not far from the corner where she’d left off Marques.

In the center of the park, Dice’s friends sat in a circle, passing around a thin joint. Dice sat off to the side of the group, cross-legged, plucking a slightly funky repeating riff on the worn strings of her banjo, tapping her booted foot in the grass. As Maureen approached the circle, she recognized a few faces from the other night. They made no attempt to hide their weed as they packed a bowl to follow the joint around the circle, daring Maureen to say something to them. She could hear the righteous diatribes percolating in their throats.

She ignored them. She headed straight for Dice.

“Afternoon, Officer,” Dice said, without looking up from her instrument.

“We need to talk,” Maureen said.

Dice looked up. “I don’t know what about. I brought your friend home, like I promised. I watched him walk into his grandmother’s house.” She smiled. “That is one serious lady. She’s not a huge fan of yours. I liked her.”

“It’s not about Marques,” Maureen said. “It’s about someone else.” She gestured over her shoulder with her thumb. “Come to the Rose Nicaud with me. I’ll buy you lunch and a coffee. When was the last time you had a salad? You could use one.”

“What if I already had lunch?” Dice asked, peering up at Maureen from her pickle bucket, one eye closed. “And I hate salad. What else you selling?”

“Coffee and lunch. And I won’t call for a unit to come by and kick your pot-smoking friends out of the park and run warrant checks on them on this beautiful sunny day. Best deal you’re gonna get.”

Dice stood, turning toward her friends. “Hey, I’m going over the dark side with lady law over here. I’ll be back in a few.”

A couple of the other kids grunted to show they’d heard. The skinny boy from the other night waved and grinned. The others glowered at him and he blushed. Maureen tried to remember the last time she’d been that high.

“Let’s go, copper,” Dice said, striding through the grass, her banjo over her shoulder.

“You don’t want to leave that here?” Maureen asked.

“With those thieves?” Dice replied. “I wouldn’t trust them with my worst pair of panties. If I wore any, that is.”

Maureen and Dice left the park through the open iron gate and crossed Frenchmen Street. They took an outside table for two on the narrow sidewalk, under the awning of the café. Big, cartoonish faces had been drawn in colored chalk on the concrete. Maureen thought she recognized one, by her glasses, as the city council president. Inside the café, she bought each of them a large black coffee and something to eat. Dice accepted a microwave-warmed slice of broccoli quiche. Maureen had a jerk chicken sandwich that left her sweating under her eyes.

“You mentioned the last time I saw you that you’d kicked the heroin,” Maureen said, dabbing at the moisture on her cheeks. “Nice work. I can see the difference in you.”