Possession (2 page)

Claire…

The stranger in the door turned and their eyes met. As on the street, he was caught off guard by the dark grayness of her eyes, the fullness of her mouth, her innate sexuality in stark contrast to the severe cut of her suit and her stiff demeanor.

He was aware she was moving, reaching back inside her jacket. He watched as she hauled out her firearm and pointed it in his direction, both hands braced against the weapon.

“FBI. Stay where you are.”

Call him paranoid, but Claude Lafitte of Barataria Bayou in Jefferson Parish had no intention of doing anything of the kind.

W
HAT HAD BEGUN
as a run-of-the-mill follow-up had turned into something much more dark and dangerous.

Akela held her hands steady as she pointed her standard FBI issue 10mm semiautomatic weapon at the man who had just come up the back stairs holding two plain white bags.

The man who had steadied her on the street.

The realization hit her at the same time she suspected he was going to make a run for it.

She was a crack shot. It was one of the talents that had propelled her to the top of her class at the Academy. Imagine, a good girl from a high-society family being able to shoot the tail feather off a mallard at a hundred yards and leave the duck none the wiser.

At this short distance, she could render the man immobile with a simple squeeze of the trigger.

But while shooting to disable a suspect was ac
ceptable by FBI standards—the Bureau’s leeway having increased in that regard with the looming terrorist threat—she didn’t think the NOPD would appreciate her putting a piece of lead into their suspect. Because even though she was there by sheer luck, and she was a federal law-enforcement officer, the local police department would have jurisdiction over the homicide case and over the suspect she was staring at down the barrel of her gun.

And that he was the suspect in question, the Claude Lafitte the woman at the front desk had told her had rented the room for a few more hours, wasn’t in doubt if only because the other three rooms on the floor had already been vacated and stood empty.

She heard footsteps on the second set of stairs behind her. She glanced to find two uniformed NOPD officers, guns drawn, running into the hall. When she looked back toward the suspect, she found him gone, the bags he’d been holding on the top step.

“Damn!”

Dropping her gun to her side, she dashed for the other set of stairs, watching as the man disappeared down them. She ran after him, yelling for him to freeze. She hit the back courtyard at a dead run, edging around tables and small trees then bursting
into the lobby through open double French doors. One of the police officers came back down the front stairs and reached the open area at the same time she did. She shook her head to indicate she didn’t know where the suspect was.

An arm snaked around her from behind and hauled her against a rock-hard chest.

“We meet again,
cher,
” the suspect whispered into her ear, yanking her closer and prying the gun she held from her frozen fingers.

Never in her six years as an agent had she lost control of her weapon.

Earlier, sexual awareness had made Akela’s heart beat fast; now pure adrenaline had it slamming against her chest. She moved to jam her heel against his instep. He easily avoided the attempt along with the elbow she simultaneously tried to land to his midsection, the double move a standard one designed to catch the assailant off guard so she could gain the upper hand.

He easily prevented her from twisting from his grasp, his strength more than she could challenge without the benefit of the other two moves.

He cocked her gun and pressed the cold muzzle against her temple.

“My worst fear is being killed with my own firearm.”

The words her Quantico weapons instructor had said on the first day of class rang through her mind. She hadn’t understood the significance of the fear until this minute.

Lafitte tsked the NOPD officer and his partner who joined him. “No, no, no. You won’t want to be doing that, friend.”

Akela realized he was nudging her closer to the front door.

“Hostage situations never end well for the hostage taker,” she told her captor, her voice laced with steel as she dug her fingernails into the arm holding her.

She felt his warm breath on her ear. “I imagine they don’t usually turn out well for the hostage, either, so I’d suggest you behave.

“Back,” Lafitte ordered the officers.

Akela thought of the difference in shooting procedures and wished two fellow FBI agents were with her rather than NOPD officers. An agent would have shot Lafitte already, no matter the danger to her.

“Back, I say.” The gun disappeared from her temple as Lafitte waved it at the two policemen.

“Claude,” the woman manning the front desk said, her head appearing from behind the counter. “Don’t do this.”

“Shush, Josie,” he told her.

Akela took full advantage of his distraction and tore out of his hold at the same time as she reached for his outstretched arm holding the gun. He easily grabbed her right hand and twisted it, forcing her to her knees in a crude but effective move that left her feeling as if he’d cracked a bone with his strong grip.

“Put your guns down. Now!” Lafitte ordered. “Josie, go collect them.”

“I’ll do no such thing.”

Lafitte aimed the gun he held at the counter and squeezed off a shot. The loud sound reverberated against the high ceiling as a bullet splintered molding off the side of the check-in counter.

Josie scurried to do as he asked.

Lafitte dragged Akela back to her feet and held her face-to-face with him. Up this close, she could see the blue flecks in his green eyes, feel the heat of his body permeate the front of her blouse, feel the tips of her breasts chafe against his chest as she struggled against him.

“You’re coming with me,” he said. “It would be best if you didn’t fight me.”

“Best for whom?”

He grinned at her.

Akela’s breath caught in her throat.

Then just like that, Lafitte was pushing her through the front doors and with a knowledge of the Quarter that far surpassed Akela’s, he snaked a path through clubs and bars and strip joints until Akela wasn’t sure she’d be able to find her way back without a map.

Within minutes they stood behind a large Buick. He tightened the arm around her neck and she gasped for air, fighting him as he unlocked the trunk then moved so he could jerk her hands behind her back. Akela kicked backward, catching him in the knee with her heel, then shot forward, out of his grasp and toward safety. She got three feet when he grasped her and yanked her back.

Akela sucked in a breath.

“My intention is not to hurt you,” he said, twining strong fingers into her hair as he worked with his other hand to wind what felt like duct tape around one of her wrists.

“Well, then, you failed.”

“Not my fault.”

“What would you have me do as an agent of the FBI?” she asked. “Go willingly?”

“It would make things easier.” Something in his voice made her pretty sure he was grinning again.

He released her hair and grabbed her free arm,
winding duct tape around that one, as well, then binding her wrists together behind her back.

Akela tried to jerk away from him. “You’re free. You don’t need me anymore.”

He had finished tying her hands yet stood still behind her. “Mmm. Maybe what you say is true.”

She whipped around to face him, damp tendrils of her hair sticking to her cheek. “So release me.”

“Then again, maybe keeping you is my ticket out of the city.” Maintaining a restraining arm against her legs to keep her from kneeing him, he wound more duct tape around her ankles, then opened the car trunk and, more gently than she would have thought possible, placed her inside.

He moved to close the hood. “Claire…is she…”

Akela squinted at him. The name of the victim at the hotel had been Claire Laraway.

Surely he wasn’t asking her if she was dead? He was the one who had killed her.

“Just so you know,” she said. “Very soon that gun’s going to be back in my hands. And when it is, this conversation is going to go very differently.”

He unrolled some more tape then bit off a short length of it with white, even teeth.

“I already think there’s been enough conversation,” he said, then put the tape over her mouth and closed the trunk.

C
LAUDE DROVE
through the narrow city streets, his stomach tight, his senses on high alert. The car was clean and couldn’t immediately be traced back to him because it was registered to his and his brother’s company, not to him personally.

He braked at a stop sign and watched as a squad car cruised by on the street in front of him. Clean or not, it wouldn’t keep his likeness from showing up on the computer screens on every squad car in town. He reached for an LSU ball cap on the floor of the backseat then smoothed his longish hair back and put the cap on. After switching on the radio that was set to a zydeco station, he cranked up the volume, both to drown out the sound of the pretty agent kicking against the trunk and to make it appear to those he passed that he had nothing more pressing on his mind than making a run for a gallon of milk.

Claire was dead. He didn’t have to be a genius to figure that out. When he’d left her, she’d been smiling, half-asleep, hugging a pillow between her bare breasts, her skin rosy pink, her eyes full of naughty suggestion. Acid lined his stomach at the thought of all that life being drained from her, and mere minutes after he’d crawled out of a bed they’d shared for the night—a bed he’d had every intention of returning to.

Instead, he’d returned to find another beautiful
woman holding a gun on him and to learn that Claire was dead.

His hands tightened on the steering wheel, tension radiating from his every muscle.

“One of these days your wicked ways are going to catch up with you, Jean-Claude.”

The warning had come from Thierry’s mouth two years ago, just after his brother had married Brigitte, and Claude had taken his fill of the maid of honor’s generous attentions.

“One morning you’re going to wake up to find a gun pressed to your forehead by a jealous husband or a jilted lover. Then where will you be?”

He’d chuckled at his brother, who hadn’t been all that unlike him—at least until he’d met Brigitte.

Claude ran a hand over his face. Somehow he didn’t think Thier would have predicted things would go down quite this way when he’d forecasted Claude’s doom.

Some minutes later, as he entered the on-ramp for Highway 10, he realized that without really knowing where he was going, his instincts had sent him in the direction of the bayous, where a man could disappear as easily as a gator in the deep swamps and towering cypresses.

Another kick to the trunk.

Claude turned up the music louder and let the car lead him home and to safety.

As for the woman…he’d decide what to do with her when the time came.

A
KELA’S LEGS
threatened to cramp up. She struggled against the restraints at her ankles and her wrists, then gave another angry kick at the backseat of the high-end vehicle, glad only that the trunk was large and she at least had a little room to maneuver.

The best she could figure was that she’d been in the car for at least half an hour, although she couldn’t be sure because she knew that in such situations the passage of time became distorted, so that five minutes seemed like an hour, essentially proving Einstein’s theory of relativity. Around ten minutes into the drive, she’d heard the unmistakable sound of the tires hitting a stretch of elevated pavement, possibly over a bridge. Canal Street? The causeway? The T Bridge? She couldn’t be sure.

She felt around for the cell phone she managed to shift from her jacket pocket, although she couldn’t read the display. She’d blindly pushed
the 911 button, but with her mouth covered, she couldn’t tell the answering officer where she was. And since caller ID didn’t extend to cell phones yet, it was pretty much a lost cause.

The car began to slow. Staring up at the dark roof of the trunk, Akela closed her cell phone and fumbled to put it safely back into her right jacket pocket. The small piece of modern technology could be all that stood between her and freedom. And she couldn’t chance that Lafitte would take it away from her when he finally reached his destination.

Thankfully about fifteen minutes ago he had turned down the volume of the radio so the speakers so near her ear no longer pulsed with the sounds of washboard-heavy zydeco. Still, Akela didn’t think her hearing would ever be the same. She knew why he’d done it, of course: to mask her attempts to make as much noise as she could by thrashing against the trunk.

The car shuddered, likely having hit a pothole. She squinted into the darkness, listening hard, and heard the unmistakable sound of gravel hitting the undercarriage. They must have moved from a paved road to a cruder means of passage. The car dipped again, and she bounced, her hip coming down hard on what she figured was the nut holding the spare tire in place under the thin carpeting.

Where was he taking her?

The sound of gravel was replaced by what she thought might be dirt.

Fear wadded in her throat. If Claude Lafitte had killed Claire Laraway, what did he have in mind for her?

Louisiana was not without its serial killers. Russell Ellwood was arrested in 1998, suspected of killing twenty-six people in an eight-year period. Then there was the more recent Bayou Killer, who was believed to have killed at least seven young women.

Finally, the car stopped. The absence of movement caused Akela to slump in relief against the bottom of the trunk. The reaction was short-lived as she heard the clinking of keys and then was blinded by the sudden burst of light when the trunk lid sprang up.

“Hope you weren’t too uncomfortable.”

She struggled to sit up. She felt hands on her shoulders and Lafitte lifted her out of the trunk just as easily as he had put her inside. With her legs still bound, his restraining arm was all that prevented her from falling to the hard ground face-first.

And it was, indeed, ground beneath her feet. More specifically, dirt. Avoiding looking at her captor, she glanced around at the towering cypresses and live oaks covered in Spanish moss,
the kudzu and the swamp that surrounded them. Cicadas buzzed loudly and somewhere something dropped into the water, causing a rippling plop. She had little doubt that Lafitte had taken her to one of the bayous surrounding New Orleans. But which one? Was the Mississippi River or the Gulf of Mexico closer? Did people heavily inhabit the area, or were gators the main occupants?

“Where are we?” she asked as he closed the trunk.

Of course, her question was little more than a hum because she still had the tape over her mouth.

Finally, she looked into Lafitte’s face. He squinted at her, as if trying to read her intentions, then sighed and scooped her up like a sack of flour.

“There will be time enough for conversation later.”

Akela couldn’t help her expression of shock, even though she’d been trained to keep careful control over her reactions.

Later? In most hostage situations, the hostage was released the moment he or she was no longer needed. So why was Claude Lafitte keeping her? And what did he plan to do with her once he was done?

For a man so big, he was surprisingly gentle. Though the earth beneath his booted feet was harsh and uneven, he held her in such a way that prevented any jarring. Akela stared at his strong pro
file. Tousled dark blond hair spiked over his broad forehead. His features were too craggy to be considered handsome, but somehow when combined with his full mouth and intense green eyes, he commanded attention. She caught a partial glimpse of a tattoo on his left arm. It looked like a crude, green snake slithering out from under the sleeve of his T-shirt.

His gaze met hers and he gave her a crooked grin. “Almost there.”

Almost where?
she wanted to ask, but couldn’t.

She looked around again at the backdrop of the bayou. As a native of New Orleans, she was familiar with the Crescent City’s surrounding swamps, but much like the city’s French Quarter, she’d never spent an extended amount of time there. She preferred air-conditioned surroundings as opposed to the wet, oppressive heat she felt pressing in on her from all sides here. It was almost as if the swamp itself hung in the air.

She heard his boots hit something other than dirt and realized he was climbing a set of wood stairs.

The small house could have been any one of a thousand just like it: one story, elevated on stilts to prevent the wetlands from claiming it, with wood shingles in need of a fresh coat of varnish. A cry from a bird drew her attention upward and
she stared at a vulture perched watching, as if hoping the trussed-up package Lafitte carried would eventually be presented to him.

Akela’s feet met with the solid wooden platform of the porch. She blinked at Lafitte as he pulled a knife out of his pocket. With a clean whoosh of metal against metal, the four-inch blade popped up, closer than was comfortable. He bent over and cut the tape at her ankles.

Akela fought not to show her relief.

Lafitte watched her closely. “What, you thought I had other intentions?”

She opened her mouth to speak. A lesson in futility as the duct tape prevented her from enunciating clearly.

Lafitte leaned closer to her, considered the tape, then looked into her eyes. Akela’s breath caught as she read the unmistakable suggestiveness in his eyes.

“No one’s going to hear you out here,
ma catin,
” he murmured.

Akela froze as his nose rubbed briefly against hers, nothing more than a feather’s touch. Her reaction was anything but brief or feathery. Fire seemed to burn through her veins at the purposely sexual move.

“Just the same,” he said, “you make any noises
that don’t have to do with conversation…or pleasure, and the tape goes back on.”

Pleasure?

She nearly choked as he slowly pulled the tape from her sensitive skin, her breasts feeling suddenly tender, her body going on alert.

“That’s good,” he said, apparently approving of the fact that she hadn’t screamed.

She turned around. “My hands?”

He squinted at her through the sun that dappled through the canopy of live oaks. “Stay the way they are for now.”

Part of her FBI training had been learning how to maneuver efficiently with her hands tied behind her back. If the bindings were low enough on her wrists, she could even contort herself so that her hands were in front rather than behind her. But the thick tape allowed for no such movement. And the surrounding remote terrain guaranteed that even if she did make a run for it, she wouldn’t get far.

He turned her back around to face him, his gaze holding hers captive as he placed his hands on her shoulders. Akela swore she could feel his heat even though the temperature had to be somewhere in the nineties and the cloth of her jacket separated them. He slid his fingers up to her neck, placing his thumbs near her pulse points. She swallowed
thickly, reading almost a smile and something darker in his eyes. Then he moved his hands down her arms, causing her to shiver in instant response.

She gasped when he moved his hands from the sleeves of her jacket to inside the front flaps.

“Hold still,” he said quietly.

Akela didn’t think it was possible to hold still. Not with him touching her so intimately. And while it should be her instinct to survive which prompted her heart to beat fast, she suspected it was her growing awareness of him as a man that made her pulse race and restlessness settle into the core of her limbs.

He pulled her ID wallet from her inside breast pocket, his actions breaking Akela from whatever Cajun spell he’d momentarily put her under. Next he took her cell phone from her right front pocket.

He opened her ID and seemed to compare her with her picture.

“Brooks, Akela, you’ll excuse me if I say you’re much more beautiful in person.”

She turned her head away, feeling naked without the accoutrements of her job. During her ride in the trunk, some of her hair had escaped her tight French twist, and tendrils now stuck to her damp face.

He pulled her gun from his waistband and put it and the cell phone inside a large and apparently
empty water barrel, then secured the top. After he pocketed her ID, he pulled a wood-slatted chair on the porch closer to her. “Sit. The place will be hot as hot gets until it airs out a bit.”

Akela remained standing, watching as he retrieved a key from inside a coffee can in the middle of dozens of others on the corner of the porch then opened the front door of the house. After sparing her a glance, he went inside.

And Akela immediately turned toward the staircase.

Before she got two steps, Lafitte was tugging her back and forcing her to sit on the chair backward, so that her front was against the back and her legs over the sides, making her skirt ride up.

“Ah, even a man such as myself can’t help but take such bad manners personally.”

Akela raised her brows high. “How do you expect me to take your kidnapping of me?”

His small smile proved he wasn’t beneath appreciating irony. “Fair enough.” He slowly waggled a finger at her, then tapped the tip of her nose, his gaze seeming to linger a little longer than necessary on her lips, which felt swollen from the tape. “But try that again and I’ll be forced to take greater measures to ensure such attempts aren’t an option.”

He turned toward the door again, disappearing inside the one-story house. She heard windows being opened, fans being switched on. She took advantage of the temporary freedom to look around. The bayous stretched out in front of the house with nothing breaking the green, mossy landscape. Not a house or boat to be seen. She couldn’t make out the sound of any cars, meaning they were far enough away from any major roads not to be heard.

The hinges on the screen door squeaked and she snapped her head to find Lafitte stepping back outside. He’d taken off his T-shirt and was wiping the sweat from his face with it. Akela couldn’t help taking in the rock-hard ridges of his abs. The thickness of his biceps. The smoothness of his tanned skin. A jagged scar ran under his right nipple—an old wound that by the looks of it had never been tended properly. He turned from her and lifted the lid off another barrel, submerging his shirt into the water inside, giving her full view of another scar on the long flanks of his lower back near the waist of his jeans—jeans that hugged his bottom and thighs to pure male perfection.

She caught sight of the rest of the tattoo she’d seen earlier on his upper left bicep. It had indeed been a snake. It formed the
S
in USMC. United
States Marine Corps. The snake possibly signifying he had been a sniper, which would explain why he was comfortable around guns, and also why he seemed to know his way around a volatile situation.

She turned her face away from him.

Who was this man? And why was she attracted to him as much as she was repulsed by him?

There was nothing but the sound of a kingfisher calling overhead as Lafitte filled his shirt with water then squeezed it over his head, dampening his hair until it shone darkly, droplets clinging to his skin.

“Did she suffer?”

Akela wasn’t sure she’d heard the question at first. Lafitte still had his back to her and was now dousing his face with the water.

He glanced at her over a broad shoulder, his hair dripping down into his face, making him look even more like a wild predator.

She cleared her throat. “I don’t know,” she said. “Did she?”

He went still for a couple of long moments, and then he turned, T-shirt in hand. “Claire was still very much alive when I left her.” A shadowy look that could have been pain shifted over his face. Then he wrung out the shirt and hung it over the railing. “And happy.”

He caught her looking at his abs and she quickly looked away.

Even given her current circumstances, Akela couldn’t help but appreciate the fine image he made. Men like Claude Lafitte graced the covers of half the books at the bookstore. All Louisiana would have to do in order to improve tourism was to issue a poster of him looking exactly the way he did now, the untamed bayou surrounding him, and women would come in swarms.

Yes, she admitted, even she was having a hard time ignoring the sexual aura he exuded in waves. She’d felt it when she’d run into him on Bourbon Street, before she’d gone inside the hotel to find the woman dead: a sort of fundamental electrical current, an awareness that drew a healthy female to a virile male.

“What was your relationship to the deceased?” she asked quietly, making the mistake of looking up into his face for his reaction—a mistake because his reaction was a dark and dangerously sexy look.

“I should think that’s obvious.”

“The only thing that’s obvious is the possibility that you are her killer.”

“I don’t make a habit out of killing women I en
joy,” he said quietly. Too quietly. “But I suppose I should be relieved that you admit there’s a possibility that I didn’t kill her.”