Murder in the Irish Channel (Chanse MacLeod Mysteries) (28 page)

I just put my head down and kept walking.

I cut across Martin Luther King at the light and paused to catch my breath. I was cold—the wind was getting stronger and colder, and the massive branches of the live oaks in the park were swaying. I could see deep water cascading down my driveway into the swirling mass of water at the foot of my driveway. The sidewalk in front of my house, and my front yard, were already underwater, and I could see the waves being thrown up by cars and trucks lapping against the bottom brick step leading up to my porch. The water was rising even as I watched. Coliseum Street was also under a rising tide, and the longer I waited the worse it was going to be. I splashed across to the park, and my feet sank into the soupy mud, making sucking noises as I strained to extract my feet, one at a time, on my way over to Camp Street.

By the time I was weaving my way through the cars that had pulled up onto the park to wait out the flooding, I could see that the water was already up to my third step and halfway up the slope of my driveway. It was over my knees as I crossed Camp Street, and holding on to the umbrella was an increasingly difficult struggle with every step I took. But finally I was climbing my front steps, and I could see that my living room lights were on—so at least I hadn’t lost power. I unlocked the front door, pushing it open as I kicked off my shoes. The porch was soaked, and I pulled off my socks and tossed them to the side. I closed the umbrella, put it down, and stepped inside, stripping naked as soon as I closed the door and locked the deadbolt. I ran to the bathroom and grabbed a towel, drying myself off and wrapping it around me as I walked into the bedroom. I slipped on a hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants before going back into the kitchen and starting another pot of coffee.

My teeth were chattering as the coffee brewed—my apartment was freezing, and I slid my house shoes on my wet, cold feet. I poured a cup of coffee and took a drink, letting the warmth flow through me as I walked back into the living room. I grabbed my notebook, sat down on the couch, and pulled a comforter over me as I flipped it open and started reviewing my notes while the computer powered up.

I plugged my phone into its charger.

I gnawed on the end of my pen.

The case didn’t make any sense, and it never had, from the very beginning. It hadn’t ever felt right to me—but it was nothing I could prove, nothing I could put my finger on and say
this is it—what the hell.

The thing to do was go back to the very start and review everything, everything I’d found, everything I’d been told.

Fact: Robby O’Neill had embezzled money, had committed a crime. His employers were willing to simply fire him and not press charges if he returned the money he’d taken. He needed about fifty thousand dollars. He’d threatened to go to court and expose his mother as an adulterer and his brother as a bastard to get the money in Jonny’s trust fund—but Lorelle claimed it wasn’t true, so Mona would
certainly
have known it wasn’t true, that the threat was empty. DNA tests were expensive and took a while, but that’s all it would have taken—and Robby didn’t have the time to wait. So, why would Mona have cared?

The only plausible reason she would have is
if it were true.

So, Lorelle had either lied or simply hadn’t known the truth.

Why would Lorelle lie?

I looked at my phone and thought about calling her, but decided there was no point. If she’d lied, she was hardly going to admit to it over the phone.

But if she
had
knowingly lied about Jonny’s parentage, well, maybe she had lied about other things as well.

I flipped through the notebook to my notes from Lorelle’s interview.

And there it was. At the time, it had gone right past me—I had no reason to think anything was odd about it.

Lorelle had said:
Morgan Barras had sold Mom and Robby and Jonny a line of bullshit…Robby and Celia both thought—I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t say.

Yet Lorelle had said she and Robby weren’t close, barely spoke
.
She and Jonny had also said that Robby wasn’t close to their mother. I thought back—no, come to think of it,
Jonny
hadn’t exactly said that—he said that Robby thought he was “better than us.” At the time, I’d just assumed he’d meant all of them.

But what if he’d just meant himself and Heather, and
not
their mother?

I shook my head. But what reason did Lorelle have for killing her mother and her brother? Somehow, I couldn’t see her committing either crime. She was a suburban soccer mom.

But I’d never checked her financials.

I got my phone and called Jephtha. “Chanse!” He answered. “Dude, I’m glad you called—sorry, I’ve been meaning to call you.”

I bit my lower lip. “Did you find out something important?” I somehow managed to say in a calm and clear voice. I could clearly hear a computer game running in the background.

“I’m sorry,” he replied, and I knew he was—he always was. “But you know, I was working on this new game I think is going to be huge and I forgot to call you and I was going to pass it on to Abby but she went out while I was working on the game and she hasn’t come back yet—” He paused. “You know, that’s kind of weird. She said she’d only be gone about an hour or so, and it’s been a lot longer than that and she hasn’t called.”

“What?” I looked at the clock. It was almost one. I’d left Abby before nine. “What time was it when she left?”

I could almost see him thinking. “Well, she woke me up at a little after nine, asked me if I wanted breakfast. I got up, and when I got out of the shower, she was on her computer—I got some coffee, it said it was nine forty on the coffeemaker, but Abby has that set about twenty minutes fast, and then she jumped up and said she had to go check on something, and she’d be back in an hour—so she’s been gone almost three hours and she hasn’t called.” His voice began to sound worried.

I sighed. “It’s probably nothing—it’s raining pretty hard and the city’s flooding, she’s probably just riding it out somewhere.”

“You’re probably right.” He sighed. “But usually she calls, you know?”

“What was the information you had for me?” I interrupted him, trying to get him back on track.

“Oh, yeah, sorry.” I could hear papers rustling around, and the computer game went silent. “Here it is. I would have e-mailed it to you but I know how you are about stuff—” He stopped talking.

Which meant he’d hacked into a website or a computer. “Who’d you hack into?”

I heard a sharp intake of breath.

“Jeph?”

“Chanse—I’m really worried about Abby.”

I sighed, getting a little annoyed. “Jeph, we talked about that—like I said, she’s probably just riding the flooding out somewhere.” As though to emphasize my point, thunder roared loud enough to shake my house. I got up and walked over to my front door, peering through the blinds. It was even darker outside than it had been—and the water was now up to the top of the fourth step. I bit my lip.

The water never went higher than the fifth step, at least I’d never seen that happen in all my years in this apartment. The pumping stations were already at work, and even if the rain kept up, by that time the pumps would be working at full capacity and the water would start receding. Coliseum Square was full of parked cars—and there was an abandoned car at the corner of Melpomene, sitting in water halfway up its doors. I shook my head in sympathy. I’d gotten caught in a flash flood shortly after I moved to the city, and it had taken about six hundred bucks to get my car running again.

And the musty smell had never really gone away.

“This is what she was looking at before she left this morning.” His voice was trembling.

“How could she have been looking at something on your computer? You said she was at hers.”

“Our computers are networked.” He launched into a long technical explanation that made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever, but the bottom line of it was the document he was looking at had been looked at since he’d originally downloaded it at three in the morning, and the IP address was Abby’s computer.

I wanted to reach through the phone and throttle him. “What the hell is it, Jeph?”

“I didn’t think it was all that important, just thought it was kind of curious,” he said defensively. “But if she was looking at it—”

“Get to the fucking point!”

“You know Barney Hogan?”

“What about him?”

“I thought I’d check his financials, you know—Abby had mentioned he was like one of the last people to see Mrs. O’Neill alive, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he was about to lose his bar—he was behind a couple of months to the bank—and now he’s not anymore.”

I felt a chill run down my spine. “How much did he owe the bank, Jeph?”

“About thirty grand. He paid it back in full on Friday.” He swallowed. “And that was what Abby was looking at before she left the house.”

I ran over to the front door and peered out through the blinds.

The rain hadn’t let up. If anything, it seemed like it was coming down even harder. But the swirling, dirty floodwaters looked like they were finally receding; I could see the top two steps in front of the porch. “Damn it.” I cursed myself for not buying an SUV instead of my fuel-efficient Ford Focus. I tried to think of someone—anyone—I knew who owned one, and couldn’t. I was stuck until the flood waters went down and I could safely get the Focus out of the parking lot.

There’s nothing more frustrating than having to wait when you need to get somewhere.

I replayed my interview with Barney and Jermaine again in my head: Jermaine saying Mona had been extremely agitated when she’d come in on Thursday night, and Barney smoothly saying she was upset because her vigil partner had canceled on her yet again and wanted him to sit vigil with her.

I hadn’t paid any attention, hadn’t thought to pursue that line of questioning any further, just let it drop.

I cursed myself out yet again as I paced around the living room. I tried Abby’s cell phone but it went straight to voicemail.

With a heavy sigh, I called Venus.

“Casanova.”

“Venus, it’s Chanse.” I tried to keep my voice calm, tried to keep myself calm. “Abby’s missing, and I think it’s bad. I’m trapped, can’t get my car out because Camp Street’s flooded.”

“Tell me about it.” Venus sounded irritated and tired. “You’d think it never floods here, the way people are. We’re all buried—wrecks, stranded motorists—what do you want me to do? Come get you?”

“She’s in danger.” I heard my voice starting to shake, and struggled to get a grip on my adrenaline, tried to slow my heart rate. Getting worked up wasn’t going to solve anything, wasn’t going to get me to where I needed to be. I started explaining what I believed, and she listened.

“You got any evidence, hard evidence, to back any of this up?” she asked finally.

My heart sank. “No.”

“Chanse, you know I would if I could, but I can’t.” She sighed. “There’s no way I can go to my boss and get relieved out of flood duty to go off on what might be a wild goose chase because you
might
be right. He wouldn’t even bother to tell me no. You remember what it’s like for the department when the city floods. I’m sorry, man. But the pumping stations have all come on line, and you should be able to get out of there soon. I’ll do what I can, but man, my hands are tied.”

“Venus—”

“Hang on a second.” She must have put her hand over the receiver, because I could hear the muffled sound of her talking to someone, and then Blaine came on the phone.

“Chanse, this is Blaine. Look, if you need my SUV, take it. Use the spare key to let yourself in the back door—the alarm code is 6069—and the keys are hanging on a hook just inside the back door—the hook’s labeled.”

Venus must have grabbed the phone back from him. “And you call us for backup as soon as you have something, you got it? Don’t be playing hero, you understand me?”

I hung up the phone and raced back to the bedroom. I pulled on a pair of jean shorts, a black T-shirt, and socks and shoes. I grabbed my umbrella and went out the front door.

The water was now down to the first step, but I could see the curb on the park side of Camp Street was only under a couple of inches of brown, murky water. I grabbed my gun and put it in my waistband, locked the front door, and headed across Coliseum Square. I was soaked by the time I got to the big house Blaine and his partner shared on the other side of Coliseum Square, a few houses from the corner at Polymnia Street. I found the spare key, let myself in, turned off the alarm, and grabbed his keys. I went into the garage, used the remote to open the door, and started up his gray SUV.

Two minutes later I had backed out onto Coliseum Street, and I headed for Race Street, the wipers slapping back and forth as the tires threw up a huge wake of water as I took the turn a little too fast and drove toward Tchoupitoulas. Cars were still driving at a crawl, and I swore as I illegally swung out around them to pass them. The SUV threw up huge wakes of water, and I felt a little bad about possibly swamping some of the cars I was passing.

After what seemed like an eternity, I was turning into the parking lot of the Riverside. Abby’s Oldsmobile was sitting in the far corner. I parked alongside it and looked through the rain-drenched windows. Nothing.