The Storm Murders (16 page)

“I’m flying down there.”

“The hell you are.”

“I am! I’ll be on the next flight out.”

“No offense, Bill, but there’s nothing you can do to help. There’s nothing
I
can do. I’m calling for one reason only. I didn’t bring his coordinates with me. I need to get in touch with Rand Dreher, ASAP.”

“Do you have a pen? I’ll dig up the number in a second. But I’m going to call him myself and get him to call you.”

“Why do that, Bill? I’ll call him. Save a step.”

“And if he’s not in? You’ll end up calling him back endlessly. I’ll do that. Okay, here’s the number.”

Cinq-Mars wrote it down and also agreed to allow Mathers to call Agent Dreher first. He negotiated that agreement by first getting Mathers to forget about coming down to New Orleans himself.

“You know you’re not my boss anymore, right?” Mathers argued.

“Maybe not, but I’m still the voice of reason. Stay put, Bill. Look, I may need you there. You might be able to run some things for me as they come up. Down here, you’re just another tourist. Like me.”

Mathers consented and urged Cinq-Mars to take care before he signed off.

É
mile hated every second that ticked by, and yet was surprised when Agent Dreher called him back within two minutes.

“My God,
É
mile. I can’t believe this.”

“Believe it.”

“I’m stunned. I’m just so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

“You can start by telling me what you don’t want to tell me.” Cinq-Mars didn’t expect an honest reply. Water torture. If he could maintain the drip, sooner or later Dreher might yield.

“There’s nothing I can tell you,
É
mile, that will be of any use.”

“Never ask yourself, Dreher, why people hate law enforcement.” He could feel his instincts taking over. Old habits, old talents, intended to keep his counterpart off-guard and unstable. “Was he one of yours?”

“Who? What?” Like Mathers, he had probably just been roused from sleep.

“The man with the pale pigment splotches on his face. Jefferson Grant. Some kind of half-assed private eye. Was he one of yours?”

“Why? What did he do?”

“That sounds like an admission to me. Is it?”

“What did he do?”

“He’s dead.”

“
É
mile. God. What the hell’s going on down there? How’d that happen?”

“Looks like a spike wound through the heart and a finger cut off. Ring any bells? Again with the missing finger. I don’t want my wife’s to be next, Dreher.” The way he said the man’s name carried threat and vitriol.

“Okay.
É
mile. Okay. Take it easy. He was working for me.”

“So he was spying on us.”

“Not spying. Protecting.”

“Yeah, well, he just gave his life to the cause. But from what I hear he wasn’t the type. Couldn’t you post one of your own agents, instead of some shabby ex-cop?”

“I never thought it would come to this. If I had I wouldn’t have let you go down there. But putting one of my own on the job—they’d ask too many questions.
É
mile, honest, I didn’t think there was any real
danger
.”

“You were definitely wrong about that, Dreher.”

“Call me Rand.”

“I don’t care what your name is!
I’ll call you Mr. Asshole if I’m in the mood. Your man is dead. How’s that for danger? As for questions, I have a few. Who did I need to be protected from that you hired him in the first place? By itself, that shows you thought this was dangerous. What aren’t you telling me, Dreher?”

He could hear the other man take a breath and sensed him formulating a response. “
É
mile, it’s nothing sinister. You’re unofficial. You went down there to ask questions about a cold case. Who might come out of the shadows for something like that? I just—if you got into trouble, I wanted to be alerted and to have somebody in place to help you out. That’s all. Somebody who knows the ropes on both sides of the fence. New Orleans is not an easy jurisdiction to be working in.”

So he was being thoughtful. At least, that’s what he wanted him to believe. Cinq-Mars was standing now, gazing out the window at the peaceful city lights flickering below. He felt that yawning gap of darkness between himself, from this height, and the softly illuminated streets below, this black abyss, into which his wife had vanished. He felt the floor, the ground, the whole of the earth, side-slipping out from under his feet, himself falling into a despair, an oblivion, he’d never known.

“Apparently, Dreher, you know whom to call down here, to pull up a low life like Grant.”

“I had advice.”

“So make more calls. Kidnapping’s a federal offense, no? The local police are doing a thorough job, I’m impressed so far, but we don’t know where this leads.”

“I’ll get help to you,
É
mile.”

“I want top people. Fuck the budget. Can you do that?”

“Consider them on their way.”

“Send the cavalry.”

“You’re at the hotel? They’ll be there.”

“Yeah,” Cinq-Mars said, “the hotel. Dreher, top people. Do you need an incentive? Think about this. I’m no longer a cop. I’m no longer bound by confidences and secrecy. My wife knows everything that I know about this case.”

The pause at the other end felt weighted, even accusatory. Cinq-Mars knew why. One way to keep a spouse safe was to make damn sure they knew nothing. In that sense, he had screwed up, but Dreher wasn’t going to say so under these circumstances.

He spelled it out for him. “If the people who took her want to know what I know then it’s reasonable to expect that they do so by now.”

“I hear you,
É
mile. But they wouldn’t expect her to know anything.”

“Not unless they ask.”

His voice was quiet, determined, when he said, “They won’t harm her,
É
mile.”

That suggested to Cinq-Mars that he was making an educated guess about who snatched her up. “And you’re confident of that why? Isn’t this whole thing a trail of dead bodies? Isn’t that why I’m here? So why should Sandra be safe?”

“Because—” Dreher started, then stopped. He knew that he was traipsing closer to what he did not want to say and to what
É
mile Cinq-Mars was after. But he chose to forge on and told him, “Because they have no reason to.”

“Whereas the others, someone had reason. What reason?”

But Agent Dreher knew his limits.

“
É
mile, I’m sending help right away. Let me get onto that. I know who I want on this.”

“Yeah? You got somebody to call you trust? Who trusts you? This I gotta see.”

Cinq-Mars turned away from the window, the city, as he punched off his phone. The night beckoned him into a freefall from which he might not surface. Sandra’s finger, her life. He had to go hard until a positive outcome arrived. Otherwise he might just collapse.

He took a step and winced. Oh no, this he could not allow. Of course it had come upon him. The plane travel, all the sitting he’d been doing, then the stress bounding through his bloodstream. Another step and his left lower side ignited with pain. He wondered if he hadn’t slipped a disc. He could not falter now. Sandra needed him. He could not avoid doing what was necessary, and so Cinq-Mars lay on his back upon the bed, breathed deeply into his belly, then into his lungs, and stretched his considerable length and held his breath before he slowly let the air out as if deflating an air mattress and brought his arms down to his waist. He did that once more before he permitted himself a few normal breaths to keep from hyperventilating. Then he repeated the procedure several more times until he lost count. When he stood up again, he was somewhat okay. Semi-normal. Out of pain with decent mobility. He was able to function.

As he stepped toward the corridor he acknowledged that the incident was both symbolic and fortuitous. In this crisis, he had to make sure to look after himself or be rendered useless.

FOURTEEN

Everardo Flores had arrived back at the hotel, his trip home interrupted in similar manner to Sergeant Dupree’s. Unlike Dupree, he returned looking impeccable, as if to start a new day. Had he let the breeze catch his hair on the way out, had he slackened his tie, no such gesture toward ease and relaxation was apparent now. Reconfigured as a coiffed, groomed hotel representative before daring to return inside the Hilton, he struck the rather studied figure of a meticulous and composed individual.

The moment he entered, a subordinate informed him that on his watch a man in the hotel, neither guest nor employee, had been murdered in a vacant room.

Instead of going straight to Dupree as several officers asked him to do, he went off to find
É
mile Cinq-Mars. Flores was directed to the seventeenth floor, and as
É
mile stepped out into the corridor, the head of security rushed to greet him, his concern and loyalty going first to the welfare of a hotel guest rather than to the dictates of the local New Orleans detective.

He came at
É
mile in such a rush it appeared he might tackle him.

For his part,
É
mile suppressed a desire to fly off the handle. Before he could think of a single articulate word he felt an inappropriate rant surging through his veins—“What kind of a hotel are you running here anyway?”—which would escalate into a diatribe against the Hilton chain and, in due course, possibly denounce the Hilton family and generations of their progeny—“Do you think I care one whit about Paris Hilton?” The lunacy of his rage alerted him to his own imbalance. He was so rarely off his centerline that this unwanted mental harangue was indicative of an impending collapse. He reined himself in, hard and fast.

“Mr. Cinq-Mars. My God! I’m so sorry.”

“Mr. Flores, what do you know?”

“I’m sorry? Know? Nothing!”

“What have you heard? Do you know about the dead man?”

“Oh. Sorry. Yes. I believe I’m up to speed, sir. Are you all right? You don’t look well. The shock. I understand. Your wife! But where are you going now?”

“Where’ve you been? Home?” Cinq-Mars stopped walking and turned so abruptly that Flores rammed into his chest. The former detective looked down on Flores in his policeman’s practiced accusatory style. “Were you home?”

“Almost. I came the moment I got the call. I take it she’s not answering.”

Cinq-Mars gazed closely at Flores. So rarely was he behind in any conversation. He realized also that he felt light-headed, mildly faint, and he wasn’t at all used to that. “Excuse me?” he asked.

“You’ve called her?”

“Are you—” He abbreviated that dormant rage again, in this case censoring a torrent of personal insults. Forcing himself to be calm, or calmer, he understood at least part of what the man meant. “As radical as this may seem to you, Mr. Flores, my wife did not bring a cell phone along on the trip. What would be the point in two of us paying for additional coverage in the USA? Do you have any idea how expensive that is?” He was offtrack again. “In any case, no, I can’t call her.”

Simultaneously, Flores appeared both enlightened and confused.

“What’s the matter?” Cinq-Mars inquired.

“Then how do you know—” He stopped himself, probably because he didn’t want to appear to be the ignorant hotel security man.

“Never mind,” Cinq-Mars told him. “You’ve just given me an idea. Come on. I need to get back to my room. Then we’ll find Dupree. How can we find Dupree?”

As it turned out, Everardo Flores could assist him with that. He got in touch with his associates in Security and tracked down the man staying close to Dupree without letting him out of his sight. First, they rode an elevator to the eleventh floor.

“I’m confused,” Flores mentioned as the car slid downward. “What idea did you get from me, sir?”

Cinq-Mars answered quietly. “You came back when we called. That’s a clue.”

“That’s a clue? Asking stupid questions, that’s another clue, I suppose?” he grumbled. Flores wanted, and yet didn’t want, to press him for an explanation.

“Maybe. In this instance, it hasn’t hurt.” Cinq-Mars assured him, “You’ll see.”

In his room, he worked at a pace, sorting through his wife’s things.

“What?” Flores asked, baffled. He stood at the door, holding it open.

“Hang on.” When Cinq-Mars broke for the elevators again Flores hurried to catch up. This time they rode a car down to the eighth. As the elevator doors slid open, the pair hurried to find Dupree.

In the corridor it became clear that Everardo Flores was not totally up to speed. He had not been made aware that cops were waking up guests. He was stunned. They stepped into the room where Dupree was seated on a bed.

“What the hell is this?” Flores demanded.

“Keep your voice down,” Sergeant Dupree told him. “Y’all don’t want to distress your guests, do you?”

“You’re waking them up!”

“Ah, but we speak very softly when we do so. I find it makes all the difference in the world when you drag somebody from a deep sleep, don’t you?”

An empty room served as a temporary command post while his people were on that floor. If a guest wanted to complain, or worse—have a fit, or go into a feverish paroxysm at this interference with their carefree dreaming hours, or, as in a few cases, become belligerent about an interruption to their porn-watching and whatnot—then they knew where to find him and Dupree could talk them down. Flores saw the merit in that, but remained upset that guests were being disturbed.

“Better to have us rather than killers and kidnappers wake them up, no? But don’t worry, Mr. Flores, we’re not telling people that. Or would you rather they knew?”

Then Dupree saw Cinq-Mars standing behind Flores.

“Mr. Cinq-Mars. We’re doing our groundwork. Nothing’s turned up yet.”

“We’ve erred,” Cinq-Mars said. He stepped further into the room. “I erred. She’s not in the building.”

“Say what? This was your idea. It’s worth pursuing, no?”

“Your idea?” Flores flared.

“We missed the obvious.”

“Okay,” Dupree allowed. “How do you figure?”