Pretty Dead (23 page)

A month ago she wouldn’t have believed she’d ever allow Jackson Sweet into her bed again, but now they were having sex in the middle of the day like two teenagers.

She was gettin’ soft. She didn’t like that. Jackson did that to her. He’d done that to her in the past. Made her weak; made her lose her resolve. Gave her a baby that was crazy. Got her acting like any other lovesick woman. And she wasn’t any other woman.

“Stay,” she told him when she saw he planned to join her in her search for the noise. He was as helpless as a kitten. How he’d managed to walk to her house she wasn’t sure. A mojo, most likely. But his condition hadn’t kept him from coming inside her while she sat astride him. “Stay in bed, weak man.”

He laughed, but the sound was breathy and spoke of illness.

After finding out about his cancer, she’d tried another round of roots, different roots, but nothing seemed to be helping her conjurer man, and she was about to sacrifice an animal, even though she didn’t like killing of any kind. She’d had enough of killing. But for Jackson Sweet, she’d kill.

“What time is it?” he asked, looking around the room for a clock. “I have to meet Audrey to walk her home from school.”

“You’re too sick to walk a girl home. What she need that for?”

“Protection.”

Now it was Strata Luna’s turn to laugh. “Darlin’, you couldn’t protect a spider.”

“Maybe I could if you’d quit draining my strength.”

“I’m going to the tunnels.” She felt a flash of pain at the memory of what had happened down there, and how her own flesh and blood had betrayed her.

“Don’t think about her,” Jackson said, aware of her thoughts.

They’d always been that way, from the first time her eyes fell upon him and he’d made her warm between her thighs, back when he was young and strong and everybody feared him. Then he went away, and Strata Luna never stopped thinking about him, sometimes with hatred, sometimes with despair.

Now here he was, in her bed, tamed like a sick animal was tamed, his hair long and gray, his arms unable to hold her the way they once had. But what remained was that aura of power and inner strength, and his eyes, when he looked at her, were every color, and every color made black.

Strata Luna would never admit to having love for him. Never. Because Jackson Sweet didn’t live for anybody but himself. Of that Strata Luna was certain. He’d not only turned his back on Elise; he’d given Strata Luna a baby he’d never seen. So now she was careful. She would let him into her bed, but not into her heart. She’d learned her lesson there.

He watched her with a silence that ran as deep as his soul, then whispered, “Marie.”

Hearing that name on his lips made her both sad and happy. Nobody but a few cats and dogs knew Strata Luna’s real name was Marie Luna. Her dead daughter, the daughter a police officer killed to save David Gould, had been her namesake.

Strata Luna used to call her girl “sweet Marie,” a little inside joke since the child had been fathered by Jackson Sweet. Strata Luna might have told him if he’d stuck around, but there hadn’t been much reason after he’d packed his bags and never looked back.

He’d stopped by and told her he planned to disappear, said men were after him and that his very bones, the bones of a conjurer, were worth a fortune. He’d told her a body would be found and buried on St. Helena Island, and people would say it was the body of Jackson Sweet.

“My woman—she’s pregnant with my child, and the men who are after me would use her to get to me. So I gotta go. And I gotta die. Once I’m dead, the child will be safe,” he’d said.

His woman.

His child
. That child being Elise.

Strata Luna was
the other woman
. His diversion.

In that moment, she’d realized she was just the darker and false reflection of his real life, but she wasn’t his real life. And she didn’t have his heart. They’d sought each other out when the moon was full bright and drugs were singing in their young bodies, their souls needing a bit of graveyard dirt on them to satisfy the craving for a life and destiny they’d been too new to fully understand. They were more like sleek black cats born to the same litter under the same broken porch under the same meteor shower.

He’d come to her, not out of love, but because he’d seen himself in her eyes.

She’d kept his secret, along with her own. Maybe out of spite, maybe ’cause who needed a man, anyway? But his desertion had planted a root of bitterness deep in her bones. And she wasn’t the only one he’d damaged. Elise Sandburg had suffered too. She and Elise had been twisted by the same wind. How strange and pathetic for a man to cause such suffering just by his very absence. Didn’t seem right.

Yet despite her resolve, Strata Luna had felt herself softening of late, even before Jackson came knockin’. She figured it was because of Elise. Funny, being friends with a detective—but Elise was different. Elise was Jackson Sweet’s kid. Which had made Elise and her Marie half sisters.

Think of that. Just think of that.

If he’d stayed, would things have been different? Would Marie Luna still be alive? Or would he have looked at their daughter, known her evil, and understood that the child couldn’t be allowed to draw another breath?

These were the thoughts that went through Strata Luna’s head whenever she lay beside the old man with cancer, a man she still ached for even though she didn’t want to.

She refused to linger, even though he urged her to return to his side. “I’ll be back,” she said, gliding from the bedroom and into the hallway to take the wide, sweeping staircase to the first floor.

Strata Luna’s mansion had once been a morgue. It was huge and sprawling and too much house for one person, yet at the same time it was everything she needed, because more than anything she needed to lock out the world, and she needed a place to feel safe.

She’d thought of leaving a few times, but Delilah, her younger daughter, had died here. Sometimes, on still nights, Strata Luna sat next to the fountain and reached for the reflection of the moon and stars just like her beautiful, darling girl had done the night she drowned. And she would feel a sense of peace. No, she would never leave this place.

The sound she’d heard earlier wasn’t as strong now, almost like a cat scratching, and for a moment she thought Javier could check in the morning. Jackson Sweet was probably right. It was some rabid rat, come up from the Savannah River.

But the sound persisted.

She followed another set of steps, these narrow and dark, down to the wine cellar, to the wooden door with the curved top and three two-by-fours so no unwelcome visitors could enter her house through the tunnels.

“Who’s there?” she demanded.

“Me.”

Human. Male. Not a rat. “Who is me?”

“David. David Gould.”

Now she recognized the voice. Yankee, with a hint of smooth Savannah drawl.

She slid the boards from the brackets and tossed them aside. Then she turned the dead bolt and pulled open the door.

David fell into the cellar, rolled to his back, and blinked at the dim lights. “Fancy meeting you here.”

If he hadn’t spoken, she might not have believed it was him. His hair and face were covered with a layer of dirt, his white shirt was unbuttoned, sleeve torn, his stomach bare, dress pants caked with mud and filth, a tie wrapped around one bicep.

“Is that blood?” she asked.

He tried to look at his arm, gave up, and let his head drop back to the floor, wincing as it hit. “Sorry to be such a pain in the ass. I’ve been shot. I’m pretty sure there’s a BOLO out, and my face is probably plastered on all the news stations, so if you want to call the cops, I wouldn’t blame you.”

“I don’t have a television.”

He let out a weak chuckle as he rolled to a sitting position. “Of course you don’t.”

“Come on upstairs. You can get cleaned up, and then I’ll look at your arm.” She held out her hand.

He eyed it doubtfully. “You’ll get dirty.”

“Honey, I’m already dirty.”

He laughed again. The fact that he still had a sense of humor was a good sign.

He grabbed her hand, and she pulled him to his feet. Once upright, he staggered backward and hit the wall.

“Stay there.”

While he leaned against the wall with his eyes closed, she locked and barricaded the door.

“Put your arm over my shoulder.” She guided him into position, grasping his hand while wrapping her free arm around his waist. “How’s that?” she asked.

“Cozy.”

CHAPTER 36

T
he morning after David’s escape, Lamont caught up with Elise in the police department parking lot. He’d obviously been waiting for her to arrive—a behavior more in keeping with Jay Thomas’s MO.

“I’ve got a search warrant for Gould’s apartment and car,” Lamont said with relish. “If the building manager won’t let me in, I’ll break down the door.”

Elise was sure Lamont would love a display of force. “That won’t be necessary. I have a key,” she said.

“Knew it.”

“You really don’t.” She turned around to head back to her car. “I’ll drive.”

“No need. Avery’s coming with me.”

“I’ll drive,” Elise repeated, firmly this time. No way was she turning Lamont loose in David’s apartment with no one to keep an eye on him. She’d seen him with Avery, and Avery was too easily intimidated.

Moving back across the parking lot, she noticed Jay Thomas’s car wasn’t in its usual place. He typically beat her to the police station no matter how early she arrived. Funny how she so often didn’t notice him when he was around, but she noticed when he was gone. What would his story angle be now, with David on the run?

It hadn’t happened yet, but she’d agreed, at the mayor’s insistence, to allow Lamont to speak at a press conference scheduled for later in the day. She fully expected the agent to share the DNA results, along with more details of David’s escape. Right now David’s face was plastered all over the local news and would surely be hitting the national media anytime. Once again, Savannah had managed to capture the attention of the rest of the country, and not for being the safest place to live.

While cameras were rolling, Mayor Chesterfield planned to introduce Elise as the new interim chief. “We must present a united front,” he’d told her over the phone. But what she dreaded most was fielding questions about David.

On the way to Mary of the Angels, Lamont grudgingly rode in the passenger seat of Elise’s car. Ten minutes later, they arrived at David’s apartment building. “I can’t believe Gould lives in this hole,” Lamont said as they took the marble stairs to the third floor; he’d refused to get in the cage elevator. “It’s a sign of his mental deterioration.”

“It’s not the happiest of places, but it’s grown on me.” Even as she defended David, Elise found herself agreeing with Lamont on a certain level. She was pretty sure her partner’s choice of housing had originally been a punishment. The dark sorrow of Mary of the Angels had appealed to him when his soul was hurting.

On the third floor, Elise slipped the key into the ancient lock and pushed open the door.

Isobel hid under the bed while Elise and Lamont searched the space. At one point, Elise took a break to clean the litter box and put out fresh food and water.

“Nothing but this,” Lamont said with disappointment two hours later. He held up an evidence bag containing the brown prescription bottle of sleeping pills.

Not exactly true. It seemed David had saved all of his worked crossword puzzles. May 12 was missing, a finding Elise wasn’t yet sure she should mention—she was afraid Lamont would read too much into it. David carried his unfinished crossword puzzles with him until he finished them, so it wasn’t necessarily unusual for a recent puzzle to be missing.

“Let’s check out his car,” Lamont said, holding up a spare set of keys he’d taken from a hook next to the door. “I spotted it in the parking lot.”

Going through David’s vehicle was like processing an archeological dig as they sifted through the layers of years. In the console between the seats Elise found a newspaper.

With gloved hands, she pulled it out, stood back, and unfolded it.

Her small sound of dismay caught Lamont’s ear, and he abandoned his search of the driver’s side to look at her over the roof of the car—and to especially look at what she held.

The May 12 paper, with the crossword puzzle removed. Not cut with scissors, but torn.

Everything she thought she knew about David Gould shifted and collapsed, and yet she refused to believe murder was anything he’d done with conscious thought. And now he was in hiding. Not only in hiding—he might have left the city, all because of her. All because she hadn’t been able to see what was right in front of her.

While Elise’s mind reeled, Lamont circled the car, evidence bag in hand. She wanted to drop and pound her fists against the ground. Instead, without a word, she passed the paper to him.

He gave it a quick scan, smiling when he spotted the date. He pulled out his phone and took a series of photos. The clearest one would be sent to John Casper and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to see if it matched the piece found in Major Hoffman’s throat. Elise had little doubt as to what they’d find.

Lamont attached the image file to an e-mail and hit “Send.” “Should have confirmation within hours,” Lamont said. “Now we just need to find Gould.”

“That might not be so easy.”

His eyebrows lifted in mock disbelief. “Come on, Elise. How stupid do you think I am? Somebody tipped Gould off yesterday, and I know damn well it was you. I’m willing to let that go if you help me get him for good this time. You’ll be hearing from him if you haven’t already. When you do, we’ll be ready.”

CHAPTER 37

I
don’t have anything much against rootwork,” David said, “but does it have to include things like cat piss and some nasty-smelling weed?”

It was late morning, the day after Strata Luna had answered David’s knock, and he was comfortably settled in one of her bedrooms, the bed itself so soft he almost got trapped in it a couple of times.