Fragile Darkness (20 page)

It was a good thing the guy had just finished or he totally would have peed himself. He was huge, bigger than Jackson, but whatever he saw in the detective's eyes made him bolt faster than my heart could pound.

Wonderful, I thought as Jackson dragged me in. Another bathroom.

Stale urine hung in the air, the faint residue of fresh pot. Pulling back, I twisted toward Dylan.

Three obviously underage girls stood beyond the door, watching. I couldn't tell if they were fascinated, terrified, or jealous: with his glistening ebony skin and ultratoned body, Detective Jackson looked like he'd stepped straight out of an action flick.

He slammed the door, and locked it.

“What are you doing here?” Something hot and a little wild flashed in his eyes, like that of a father catching his daughter in her boyfriend's bedroom.

It didn't matter if I lied or told the truth. He wasn't going to like either.

I went with truth. “Looking for someone.”

“With the Fourcade boy? Did he bring you here?”

I chewed on the inside of my lip, shaking my head.

“You know what this place is, don't you?”

I tried to retrieve my arm from his hand, but his hold tightened. “I'm not doing anything wrong,” I pointed out.

He was a big guy. I'd always known that. But he dominated the small, boxy bathroom like a street cat prowling a dollhouse. “You're sixteen years old.”

Okay, there was that. Club Rouge
was
a bar.

I told myself not to be afraid. This was Detective Jackson, after all.

But LaSalle had been a detective, too,
his partner.
And we were alone in a small locked room. And his eyes were really wild, not the least bit controlled or cop-like, as they usually were.

“It's Mardi Gras,” I pointed out, blinking against the burn of ammonia. “Half the people here are underage. No one's checking IDs.”

Everyone knew the cops had bigger things to worry about with thousands of people packed into the Quarter.

“And I'm not drinking,” I said.

He came at me without words, wedging me against the disgusting wall and taking my wrist in his hands, pressing two fingers to the pulse point there.

I knew that it raced. How could it not?

“What are you
doing
?” The first claws of panic worked up the back of my throat and thinned my voice. “This is me, Trinity.”

Releasing my wrist, he lifted his other arm and shone a penlight in my eyes. “And this is the third place like this you've been in four nights.”

Whoa.

Someone pounded on the door.

“You think I'm on something,” I realized. “That's why we're in here.” Where Jackson could be a cop and his cover wouldn't be blown. Where he could test me for signs of illegal substances.

Concentration carved a deep line in his normally flawless forehead. His pupils were small, focused, his breath amazingly rhythmic.

I swallowed hard. “I promise I'm not. I was looking for someone. That's all.”

He lowered his arms and stepped back, and right before my eyes, the cop/drug dealer persona morphed into just a man, the one who'd stood steely-eyed with his gun in his hand, his partner in a pool of blood at his feet.

It was one of the few things I remembered from that afternoon.

“I don't ever want to see you in a place like this again,” he said in a voice so dangerously quiet I barely heard him. “No matter how bad things get.”

Scared, I realized. Detective DeMarcus Jackson actually looked scared. For me.

“You said you were looking for someone. Who?”

I thought about hedging, but didn't see the point. I wasn't doing anything wrong, other than the underage thing.

“A friend's boyfriend.” I slid my phone from my pocket as the pounding at the door started again.

“Hey! Open the eff'in door!”

“His name is Will,” I started, distractedly.

“Ingram,” Jackson finished for me, and with the name the bathroom shrunk around us, creating a nauseating little box.

“How'd you know
that
?” I asked.

Water dripped from the faucet, one drop after another, leaving rust in place of enamel.

“The better question is,” Jackson said, “why are
you
looking for him?”

“I told you. He's a friend's boyfriend.”

“Kendall,” he supplied.

“Yes.”

“And how do you know her?”

I told him. With the assault on the door over, I told him about the Greenwood party and the vision that was trying to form, my concern that Will was in the path of something bad.

“How do
you
know them?” I asked.

He let out a slow breath, much like the first time we met, when he and LaSalle had come to talk about Jessica's disappearance. He was so stalling.

“Please,” I said. “If there's something—” My mind raced with possibilities. Jackson was a cop. He knew about Will. I had a vision trying to form.

There had to be a connection.

“If there's something I need to know, if something's going on, you need to tell me.”

His frown told me he knew I was right. I could also tell he hated that.

“Not here,” he said with a quick glance at the two urinals I'd been trying not to look at. “We've drawn enough attention.”

I pressed my lips together. If there was one thing a cop who tried not to stand out didn't like, it was drawing attention. “Y'think?”

*   *   *

After explaining to Deuce and Victoria what was going on, we left the bar, Dylan first, me second, Jackson last. He escorted me to my car and followed me home. Dylan, thankfully, rode with him.

Inside the condo, everything looked as it had that morning, with paint-splattered tarps covering the furniture and the ladder still propped against the sage green of the wall. Not yet nine, Aunt Sara was still at the shop and would be for at least another hour.

“Redecorating?” Jackson asked.

Acutely aware of Dylan standing by the window, I reached down and snagged Delphi. I kept forgetting to eat, but she didn't. I was pretty sure my once-emaciated cat had put on another pound.

“Aunt Sara wanted a change,” I said, focusing on Jackson.

He ran a finger along the newly sage surface. “That's understandable.”

“I like the brick better,” I murmured.

“How's she doing?” He turned back to me, his eyes suddenly haunted. “I keep meaning to give her another call.”

But what did you say? They'd both been deceived at a fundamental level. I could only imagine what it was like for Jackson, a cop—
a detective
—to realize how completely he'd been played.

“She's trying.” It was that whole illusion thing Gran had perfected. If you pretended the world was a bright, shiny place, if you pretended you were a rock-solid person, then maybe, like slathering paint over bricks, that was the world you were creating.

“She's trying to make everything okay,” I said.

A flicker of rage crossed Jackson's face. His dreads gave him the musician look, but in that moment, he was all murderous, betrayed cop.

“So … about Will,” I initiated as Delphi wriggled from my arms and trotted over to rub against Dylan.

If Jackson wouldn't get to the point, I would.

“What's going on? How do you know Will?”

His eyes met mine, and from one breath to the next, cool, calm slid over the rage.

The prelude was over.

“Six months ago a kid named Jeremy Albright hung himself from the family basketball hoop. He was nineteen, a premed major at Tulane. He was the first.”

I cringed, lifting my arms to hug myself. Suicide was one of those things I didn't get.

“All-state basketball player in high school,” Jackson said. “Straight-A student.”

“What happened?” Dylan asked from across the room.

Girlfriend? Parents? Pressure?

Jackson's mouth formed a flat, straight line. “Two weeks later, a seventeen-year-old in Baton Rouge loaded her three little sisters into the car and drove into one of the LSU lakes.”

I cringed.

“There were witnesses,” Jackson went on, as if that was what he was, a witness giving testimony. “Some guys riding bikes.”

How had I not heard about this?

“That's the only reason the little girls lived.”

“And the seventeen-year-old?” Dylan asked.

Jackson shook his head, bringing a few messy dreads against his eyes. “She made it, if you want to call it that. She's alive, but has no memory of what she did. No memory of anything.”

It was a lot to take in.

“No idea how she got pregnant.”

I braced my hand against the plastic-covered table, only peripherally aware of Dylan scooping Delphi into his arms.

“Her parents said she was always a quiet girl,” Jackson said, “never dated, never talked about boys. Until three weeks before the lake stunt.”

Dylan, sounding very much like a cop's son, wandered closer. “What happened then?”

“She came to New Orleans for a choir concert and met Jeremy Albright at a club in the Quarter.” He did that cop, pause-for-emphasis thing. “Club Rouge.”

My eyes widened.

“That's when she changed.”

Dylan's gaze, all steady and sharp, met mine. “You think he gave her something?” The question was for Jackson, but it threw me back to the night before, when trees had chased me from the club, and the moon had bounced like a yo-yo.

Jackson kept surveying the condo, lingering for a moment on the counter, where Aunt Sara's la-la pills sat next to the votives.

“We started investigating,” he finally said. “Aaron…” His breath sawed off. His eyes were tortured. Shoving all that away, he pushed on. “There were others, a few suicides, a couple of runaways, but nothing that linked them together. No pattern. Nothing widespread.”

In my head I did the math. Six months before placed us back in the fall. “That's around when Jessica went missing,” I realized.

“We thought her disappearance might be related, yes,” Jackson said. “LaSalle pushed that theory.”

I bet he did.

“And he might have gotten away with it,
with her,
” Jackson said quietly. “If not for you.”

Eyes stinging, I looked down at the soft band of leather around my wrist.

“There was another incident last night,” Jackson said, “at the old multiplex in N'awlins East.”

That had me snapping back to attention.

“Not as severe,” he said as the memory of Grace's texts came back to me. “But a sixteen-year-old thought it would be funny to run through a party with a switchblade.”

At the same party where Grace had sensed desperation, I'd been drugged, and Will had frantically fled.

“So what are you thinking?” Dylan asked. When had he ended up right beside me? “Bath salts or something?”

Jackson nodded, his eyes darker than the night beyond the window. “They call it bliss.”

Bliss.

“It's why we're all here,”
the guy at the party had murmured.
“To be beautiful, for bliss.”

“It's a potent hallucinogen,” Jackson was saying, but I barely heard, not with the memories tripping through me, of Amber's glassy, doll-like eyes, and her offer of bliss. “Small doses make for short trips; larger doses combined with alcohol send you so far out of your mind some people never get back.”

“It helps, doesn't it? Makes the bad go away, the pain, and leaves only the bliss?”

“It showed up in Europe first. We're only beginning to see it on the street here,” he said as I slid my hand into my front pocket. “We know it's highly addictive. But because effects are either short-term or fatal, without a cluster or a pattern, by the time we isolate a user, it's too late.”

My fingers closed around the little pills Amber had given me. “What do you mean too late?”

 

TWENTY

“Their brain is fried.”

A new picture started to form,
a bad picture,
a lot bigger than I'd thought at the beginning of the night.

“You think Will's a user,” I realized, but even before Jackson pulled his phone and crossed to the sofa, the answer glinted in his eyes.

Yes. He thought Will was a user.

He stopped beside me, angling the screen so that I could see it. “These are the known victims.”

Victims. Not users or addicts.

Too fast he scrolled through the pictures of a bunch of kids, guys and girls, flicking from one to the next before I could make out much besides empty stares. They all had that.

Just like Amber.

Finally he stopped, giving me plenty of time to take in the image of Will curled in a fetal position in front of an altar. Naked.

“That was ten days ago,” he said. “At the cathedral.”

My stomach rolled.
What?
“He doesn't even look alive.” His skin looked like the pale marble beside him.

“Father McSweeny found him. He was unconscious.”

“What happened to him?” Dylan asked.

Detective Jackson took the phone from my hands. “He ran. Before any of us could get there, he shot up and started spouting off from the Bible, and bolted out a back door.

“By the time he showed up at his house the next day and his parents got him to a hospital, blood tests didn't show anything.”

The coldness swept in, worse than before. The shadow-bodies on the ground, the vibration from Will … totally not a coincidence.

“He was in an accident,” I started, trying to knit the pieces together.

“Yes, I know,” Jackson said. “And he's hallucinating as it is. Combined with bliss, that puts him doubly at risk.”

But they're not hallucinations!
part of me wanted to explain, but I saw the look in Jackson's eyes and knew now wasn't the time. He'd come to accept the things I could do, but without further evidence, there was no point saying anything about Will. The best thing to do was to get Will to Julian and see if he could help us find the rest of the vision. Maybe together it would work.