River Road (9 page)

“No, the cleanup teams are all Blue Congress.” It took specialized skills to do cleanup tasks like tamper with medical records and re-create crime scenes.

Alex stuffed half the trash bag into his pocket. “Then since we’re fairly sure there’s a wizard involved, let’s see what else we can find and not worry about where we walk or what we touch. If the guy’s clothes are out there, we might find something else.”

I hadn’t seen Alex this pumped in a while. There hadn’t been a lot to shoot or investigate since Katrina, when he’d still been in serious enforcer mode. I had a feeling that with the borders down now officially, that was about to change. I wondered how happy he would be with sentinel work. As an enforcer, he’d been on the extreme end of the Elders’ security teams, and he’d been good at it. How long could an adrenaline junkie keep the peace and smooth out problems before getting bored out of his skull? Something to ponder.

I tied the big plastic bag around my waist and followed him to the rail, sliding back into Rene’s shrimp boots and splashing into the water with a lot more ease than the first time. I looped in a wide circle to avoid getting near the body and trailed Alex into the high reeds, stopping next to a dense bush a foot taller than me.

“I’ll look this way, you take that way,” he said, pointing me to his left. “Easiest method is to pick a couple of landmarks and cross back and forth between them systematically to make sure you don’t miss anything.”

Right. Landmarks. The bush would be a good one. I turned to my left and picked another—a tree about thirty yards away, the only thing sticking up high enough for me to see above the grass line.

I walked slowly, scouring the ground in front of each step and pushing aside vegetation taller than me to clear a path. The towering reeds pressed in on all sides, with nothing but green stalks visible around me and a patch of blue, cloudless sky above. I held my breath as something rustled on my right, followed by a deep-throated groan and a snort. My pulse began to pound hard enough to feel throughout my body.

“Alex, is that you?” I whispered. The rustling stopped, and everything fell silent. Alligators lived out here. Nutria, the monster-sized rodents with long orange teeth. Wild boar. I didn’t want to meet any of them.

I took a deep breath, determined not to scream like a pansy so one of the men would feel obligated to come and rescue me. Rising on tiptoes, I scanned the top of the grass for my tree and continued toward it. One quiet step in front of the other, stopping to listen in between.

I don’t know how far I’d gone before I spotted something dark a few feet ahead. Focused on it, I quit watching the ground and
eeped
as the next step sunk my left leg knee-deep in swamp mud. My other foot landed on the edge of my garbage bag and slid, pitching me shoulder-first into the muddy grass. So the land wasn’t quite solid. Good to know.

After heaving my buried leg free from the goop, I sat there a moment, using a muddy hand to scoop mud off my arm and neck, listening for movement. More rustling reeds, then nothing. My breath sounded loud enough to echo.

I rose to my knees and crawled. Standing seemed like too much effort since I’d probably just fall again, plus I’d make a bigger target for the herd of wild boar skulking nearby and making dinner plans with me as the entree. I dodged the big hole I’d made and advanced at the pace of a snail’s grandmother, trying to be quiet. A few feet ahead, I finally found it—the small leather square wedged in a dense thatch of grass. A wallet.

Sitting on a clump of brush, I wiped my hands on my tank and lifted the wallet by the edges, touching as little surface as possible. A distinguished face looked back at me from a Louisiana driver’s license. Jeffrey Klein. I did some quick subtraction and figured his age at thirty-five. An address in New Orleans’ Mid-City neighborhood. A Visa and MasterCard peeked from the card slots, and more than fifty dollars in cash was arranged neatly in the center partition. I felt in the enclosed section behind the driver’s license window and extracted two additional cards. A Tulane University faculty I.D. identified Jeffrey Klein as a member of the biology faculty. The other was a certification card from the Congress of Elders. Professor Klein was not only a wizard, but a member of the Green Congress. My congress.

Goose bumps spread over my arms as I sat surrounded by the tall reeds, and I froze as the rustling resumed, a dry, crackling noise like wind passing through a field of corn. Except there was no field. No corn. No wind. Even Rene had remarked about it being an unusually still day in Pass a Loutre.

Something touched my shoulder from behind, and I screeched.

“Why are you sitting on the ground,
Jolie
?”

Crap on a freakin’ stick. I’d have killed Jean if he hadn’t already been technically dead. “It’s easier to go into cardiac arrest down here,” I snapped, waiting for my heartbeat to return to normal. I had a serious case of the creeps. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

Not covering up evidence that would implicate his buddy Rene, I hoped.

Jean grabbed an arm and hauled me to my feet, raising his eyebrows as I turned to face him. He held his bulky pistol in his right hand. “I was searching for you after hearing the call of a
cocodrie
.”

“Holy shit.” That grunting noise was an alligator? I needed to go home and have a drink.

Jean frowned. “You should not use such language,
Jolie
. It is not befitting a young woman. And why are you coated with mud? You must avail yourself of a…” he frowned as he sought the word he wanted “… shower. There is a room in my hotel suite in which water comes from the wall and one may bathe standing up.”

Imagine that.

“I fell down,” I said. “And I need to get out of this grass. Let’s go back to the boat.” We’d discuss my foul mouth at a later date, preferably somewhere an alligator wasn’t stalking me.

After dropping the wallet into the mud-coated trash bag, I followed Jean back to the water’s edge, where I splashed my face and stomped around in the shallows, trying to get the worst of the mud off Rene’s boots. My jeans and tank were hopeless. I looked like I’d been mud-wrestling in a WWE title bout, and lost.

Alex emerged from the marsh behind me, carrying his own garbage bag. “Found something else,” he said. “Did you scream? What did you—” He stopped when he saw me, then treated me to a slow, thorough appraisal before biting his lower lip.

“I was practically devoured by an alligator,” I said. “And if you laugh, I swear I’ll turn you into a toad and leave you in the swamp. Don’t think I can’t do it.”

He might suspect I was lying, but he wouldn’t risk being wrong.

He cleared his throat. “I didn’t say a word.”

“Anyway, I found our dead guy’s wallet,” I said, holding up my bag.

Alex frowned and held up his own bag. “So did I.”

CHAPTER
9

One pair of pants, a single shirt, one pair of shoes, one dead guy—and two wallets belonging to Green Congress wizards who both taught biology at Tulane. Add them all up, and my headache got a whole lot worse.

Alex and I compared driver’s licenses and tried to match one of them to the body. “The face is too messed up to be sure, but the hair looks like Doug Hebert’s,” Alex said, raising his driver’s license higher and studying what was left of the face.

“Yeah, and Jeffrey Klein is only five-nine and a little heavy-set, and this guy looks thinner and taller—how tall was Doug Hebert?”

“Six-even.” Alex squinted at the laminated card and growled, sounding a lot like Gandalf, as I’d named his canine alter ego. “You’re Green Congress. You don’t know either one of these guys?”

I shook my head. “There are at least fifty of us in New Orleans because of the river and the universities.” Greens tended to mainstream as professors or researchers since our strengths were in potions and ritual magic, which had a lot of ties to biology and mathematics and engineering and chemistry. Our abilities made us good environmental researchers and scientists—or risk-management consultants. We’re the wizard version of Geeks-R-Us.

“I thought I’d met most of the wizards in town, but I don’t know these guys,” I said, thinking that if the killer wanted to make the body hard to identify he’d done a good job. “And if this is Doug Hebert, where is Jeffrey Klein?”

“Maybe Jeffrey Klein is the killer,” Alex said. “I still don’t know for sure if this is a case for the sheriff or the Elders.”

“We start with the Elders,” I said. “If this is Doug Hebert, any kind of blood or genetic testing in a medical examiner’s lab would have scientists lining up to write papers on the freak show, at least if he’s a wizard by blood, and I assume he is.” Humans with magical abilities—sixth-sensers—could work their way up to witch or minor mage but rarely had the chops to make it into one of the four congresses.

Jean’s assertion that I didn’t fit into the human world any better than he did popped into my head, and I quickly brushed it aside. So I have a few unusual blood components and an odd DNA strand or two. Big freaking deal. Still didn’t put me on the pirate’s undead playing field.

“I’m going to call them,” I said. “They earn the big bucks.”

We rejoined Jean and Rene on the boat. The mer still looked a little peaked. And—what a surprise—he was still pissed off.

“There’s somethin’ awful down there in that water, wizard,” he said before I’d even gotten both feet back on deck. “If you gonna take three days to figure it out, you got to pay me for lost income I’m missin’ by not bein’ able to hunt while you screw around with your magic spells. And if the wizards want me to play taxi, bringin’ you out here again by boat, I want to get paid for that, too.”

I was hot. I was dirty. My head ached. Another aquatic bully was not on my wish list.

“Look, Rene, here’s the deal.” I advanced on him, ready to fight. “We’ll solve the water problem as soon as we can. If Denis or one of his clan poisoned it, we’ll take care of them. See that dead guy out there? He comes first. If you and your brother try to go around me, you’ll be the ones I arrest.”

By the time I finished, the mer and I stood nose to nose—well, nose to Adam’s apple—and I reached in my pocket for my mojo bag so I could keep his cold, hard anger at bay. The bag was soggy from my adventures in the swamp, but its protective magic still wrapped around me like a soothing blanket.

I edged around him without breaking eye contact. “I have to make a phone call.”

Turning my back on him, I walked to the rail and pulled off the shrimp boots. The left one came off with a squishing sound, and I upended it, dumping an inch of water and a golfball-sized clump of mud over the side. Pulling my phone from my backpack, I limped into the wheelhouse in muddy sock feet. We’d probably have to pay to have the deck hosed down as well.

Cell service was spotty out here, but I had no doubt I could press speed dial for the Elders and be talking to someone in authority in a matter of seconds. The big guys could do crap like that.

I was right.

The Speaker of the Elders, Adrian Hoffman, answered with a rich, resonant voice that would have been pleasant if I hadn’t known the sharp tongue attached to it. He was fortyish, with skin the color of toffee, a taste for expensive-looking ear jewelry, and a sawed-off shotgun of an attitude. I’d never figured out if he was a real Elder or just a PR flack, but he always answered the Elders’ hotline.

I gave Hoffman the highlights on the trip to Pass a Loutre. “Is there any way for you to know if the body we found was Doug Hebert?” I asked. “Or to know where Jeffrey Klein is? Also, we’ve decided to let the mers go with a tracking charm but I can’t promise they won’t kill each other before we get the water tests back.”

I’d had plenty of sarcastic exchanges with Adrian Hoffman over the last three years, and he’d always made me feel one tiny step short of total idiothood. Which was okay because I thought he was a pompous ass. I tapped my foot and waited for him to verbally abuse the way we’d handled the situation.

Instead, he sighed and uttered a few vague curses. The click of a keyboard echoed from his end of the connection. “Doug Hebert’s life force disappeared from our tracking database this morning, so I assume that is whose body you found,” he said. “We were in the process of contacting his wife to find out what happened.”

More clicking, and another put-upon exhale. “Jeffrey Klein, it would appear, died a half-hour ago.”

Crap. “Do you have any way of knowing where he is?” I looked out the front window of the wheelhouse, where Rene and Jean stood talking. Alex had returned to shore and was scouring the area around the body again.

“Unfortunately, no,” Hoffman said. “But we’ll need to examine Doug Hebert’s body. Create a transport and send him to us. 4B, Edinburgh.”

Elder Central, in other words.

“What about the mers?”

He muttered something about frying a fileted mer for dinner and eating it with chips. “Question all of them, and make sure Mr. Delachaise and Mr. Villere understand their entire clans will be held accountable for any violence. We’ll send the whole bloody lot back to the Beyond if need be.”

Yeah, I’d be delivering that message. When I got around to it.

“In the meantime,” Hoffman concluded, “we’ll have our local enforcer start a search in the area for Jeffrey Klein’s body.”

“You mean leave Alex out here?” That was a bad idea. I was about tapped out for the day, magically and physically. Plus, Rene’s patience was gone.

“Not the
sentinel
Warin,” Hoffman said, assuming his
you’re a blithering idiot
tone for the first time. “Jacob Warin, the new enforcer. Chances are the body is in the same vicinity you are in now. And tomorrow, not today. It will soon be getting too dark there to search, will it not?”

“It will.” I wished Jake didn’t have to come out here and deal with pissed-off mermen and dead wizards. Was he ready for it? I looked over the marsh, the water feeling eerie and malevolent around the dots of land despite the bright sunshine. Somewhere, maybe nearby, Jeffrey Klein had died only thirty minutes ago.