“Now, girl, you cannot let the murder of a no-good pimp get you down!” Cissy protested.
“It’s not the murder of a no-good pimp so much as the fact that the no-good pimp managed to get murdered right by my door,” Maggie admitted. “And then, somehow, he managed to get his little blood droplets leading right to my door.”
“Honey, those cops dusting around the doors and hallways told me that they didn’t find a thing inside the building,” Marie assured her.
“And,” Angie, who had stayed behind as well, assured her dramatically, “Cissy should know. She spent the day flirting with a handsome young Adonis.”
Maggie arched a brow. “A cop? You were flirting with one of the cops?”
“You have something against cops?” Cissy drawled.
“Only upon occasion.”
Cissy grinned. “Well, honey, this fellow was an Adonis. Built like a brick. And he was tall. Being six-even for a woman is not easy. He was a good six three. I could date him, and wear heels.”
“Marry him, and create Amazon children!” Angie quipped.
“Was this Adonis black or white?” Maggie asked.
“Black, honey, the only kind,” Cissy assured her, and laughed. “It wasn’t your lieutenant.”
“My lieutenant.”
“Best-looking white boy I’ve ever seen,” Cissy assured her.
“A homicide detective investigating my building is not a good-looking white boy—he’s a pain.” But Maggie smiled suddenly. “I’m glad that your Adonis came along—at least it seems some good has come from the day. Did he ask you out?”
Angie snorted in an unladylike fashion. “Did he ask her out? She’d asked him before she’d found out if he spoke English!”
Maggie arched a brow to Cissy.
“I merely suggested that a man, weary after a day searching for clues which didn’t exist, might enjoy an evening of jazz. So if you want to see this Adonis, you’d best come along with us tonight.” Maggie still hesitated. She’d been surrounded by people all day, and the visit from the police had been unnerving, to say the least. That blood drops led directly to her door was incredibly disturbing, and that she knew she’d be hounded by the police in the days to come was even more so. She needed a little time alone to gather her thoughts.
“We’re not going to give you a chance to back out,” Angie said determinedly. “We’ll go right from here.”
“Oh, I don’t know, I’m not really dressed for a night at a jazz club—”
“It’s summer in New Orleans, tourists are crawling around in silly T-shirts and cut-off shorts, and you’re worrying about what to wear?” Cissy demanded.
“Especially when you only have to take your pick of clothing from any mannequin on the floor,” Angie said.
“Heck, in some of these clubs lately, you could go naked with just a belly chain and be completely fashionable and go totally unnoticed,” Angie said.
“Maggie, naked, unnoticed? I don’t think so,” Cissy protested.
“Well, you know darn well that I’m exaggerating!” Angie said with exasperation.
“Hey, hey! Okay, I’ll go!” Maggie protested. “It will be good to hear Dean play.”
“I’m changing first,” Angie said determinedly. “If that’s all right—I’d like to use your shower, Maggie, if I may.”
“Sure. You go ahead,” Maggie said. She had a private bath off her office—a rather extravagant luxury, she had told herself, but she loved it. She had a big, white marble bath with a whirlpool, a separate shower stall encircled with etched glass, and a marble vanity that stretched forever. Against the white marble, the floor and walls were in brilliant red, black, and gold. She reflected that it was just barely saved from looking as if it belonged in a high-class whorehouse by the delicate Venetian lace curtains that overlay the heavier gold draperies covering the windows that looked over the building’s courtyard garden.
“Cissy, if you want, and you were planning on going straight from here, you can shower after Angie—”
“No way. I’m third. If we let you go last, you’ll find some work you need to do and you’ll try to bow out of joining us.” She swung around, looking at the simple black sleeveless dress on the mannequin beside them. “Now this—is perfect.”
“For you or me?” Maggie asked, laughing.
“Honey, I’m already perfectly beautiful in basic black. This is you, and you know it.”
“I try not to design clothing I don’t like,” Maggie said. Cissy rewarded her with an exasperated glare.
“Black is your color. Your skin is so pure, just like marble. And with your hair ... why, honey, it’s pure fire against black and white.”
Angie giggled. “What an admiration society. Too bad we’re all straight.”
“Men just forget to compliment women,” Cissy said serenely. “Sometimes we have to admire ourselves.”
“Since we’re all so beautiful,” Angie said, “let’s get dinner reservations.”
“I’ll take care of it. You two get going,” Cissy insisted.
Dinner.
Maggie was surprised to realize that her stomach was somewhat queasy.
A man had been viciously murdered just steps from her door. A pimp, a lowlife, a no-good SOB, most probably. And still...
“Dinner will be great,” she said. “A nice night out. We’ll forget all about ...”
“Dead people!” Angie announced.
Maggie arched a brow, hesitating. “Right. We’ll forget all about dead people.” Pierre LePont had been at his job well over twenty years. Though Sean knew many forensics men and women—and cops—who joked with graveyard humor, Pierre wasn’t among them. He’d never seen Pierre munch his lunch while a stiff lay on a nearby table; the man maintained a respect for the dead that was sometimes humbling to those who worked with him.
Still, death could be a terribly humiliating state in itself. In life, Anthony Beale might have threatened and bullied, and defied dust and dirt in his Armani suit. Now, his body was naked and pasty white and his head lay in a separate stainless-steel receptacle on a gurney by the autopsy table.
No matter how antiseptic it might be, the morgue had a smell. Antiseptic death, but death all the same.
“What have you got for me?” Sean asked Pierre, walking around the corpse, studying the pasty flesh. It was damned odd looking, worse than the skin on some of the corpses he’d seen dragged out of the Mississippi after days in the water.
“Not much blood,” Pierre said, arms crossed over his chest as he stared at the corpse. Beale had already been autopsied, and sewn back up. He was ready to go back in the drawers. He looked somewhat like a replica of Frankenstein’s monster, sutures holding together the Y cut done on his chest for the autopsy.
“So he was killed elsewhere and moved—”
“I didn’t say that.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying he had damned little blood left in him. That’s why he hasn’t got any color.”
“All right, so he was decapitated. Blood would have gushed out of the arteries ... unless he was killed before he was decapitated and ... hell, blood just doesn’t disappear.”
“I believe the blow to the throat at the time of death is what killed him. I’d thought maybe he’d died from a heart attack and then been decapitated, but that wasn’t the case. Not enough trauma to the heart.”
“Still, Pierre, he must have been killed elsewhere. Actually, he must have been killed in a similar fashion to the way we slaughter animals. Hung up and drained of his blood, then dumped where we found him.” Pierre shrugged.
“What does that mean?” Sean asked, aggravated.
“That’s a possible scenario.”
Sean threw up his hands.
Pierre stubbornly tightened his crossed arms over his chest. “I’ve taken our Jane Doe out again,” he told Sean, indicating a sheet-covered corpse on a gurney a few feet away. “Jane Doe, decapitated, left on top of a tombstone, internal organs laid out around her. No blood. No damned blood.” Sean sighed, running his hands through his hair. “It looks like we’ve got some kind of ritualistic killings going on. Some voodoo cult or Santerias or the like. Killing for blood.”
“Doing a damned good job of it,” Pierre said.
“What have you got for me from the corpse?”
“Not much, I’m afraid. A left-handed killer with tremendous strength.”
“Would it have to be a male?”
“Sean, that’s a politically incorrect question these days.”
“Oh, come on, Pierre—”
“A male, or a female, with tremendous strength. I would imagine that most persons with that kind of strength would be male. But there are no guarantees these days.”
“So the killer is probably a left-handed male into ritualistic killing,” Sean murmured. “You’re right. That’s not a hell of a lot to go on.”
“Sorry,” Pierre told him. “When we get the DNA reports back, we might have more. Computers have done a lot to help. Who knows, we might get a match-up with some bizarre crimes elsewhere.”
“Pierre, we’ve weeks to go on the DNA,” Sean said wearily.
“Yes, well ...”
Sean took a step toward the corpse, shuddering as he looked at the neck—and the severed point where the head should lie. He hesitated, feeling his stomach lurch as he leaned closer to the dead man’s throat.
“What’s this?”
“What?”
“That puncture point... there.”
Pierre came around the corpse. Right next to the point where the head had been severed was a single, slight indentation that might have been a puncture wound.
“You know ... damn, I hate to admit it. I’m not quite sure.”