Contact. Evelyn Vaughn
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a deep breath, Faith dived back into the crowd, an overly aware pinball trying to go in one inexorable direction.
“You touch anything?” demanded the first officer on the scene, a tall brown patrolman named Lee. He’d responded not to the bartender’s 9-1-1 call but to one of DeLoup’s customers rushing out onto Bourbon Street to fetch help.
“Of course I did,” admitted Faith. “But I’ve contained the scene since.”
The shrieking CPA who’d found Krystal had not pushed the door hard enough to force the hook-and-eye latch a second time. Apparently, when she’d looked in, she hadn’t wanted to.
Faith had gotten there just as the bartender shouldered his way through—in time to keep him from compromising evidence.
The patrolman, after an unsteady look at poor Krystal’s blue-tinged face and a grateful check of Faith’s ID badge, agreed to leave the bathroom to her while he worked crowd control.
“Not like you can go anywhere,” he said, as if the ceiling panels weren’t gaping like missing teeth above the still-running sink.
One down. But Faith wasn’t worried about patrolmen.
“Did you throw up?” asked a kindly EMT not ten minutes later, about the running water. A good-looking guy named Steadman, he was careful to step only where Faith had indicated he should. The likelihood that the crime-scene investigators could pick up a single distinct boot print off the chaos of a bathroom floor were low, especially with something gritty, like sand, crunching underfoot. Faith should know. But it didn’t hurt to be careful.
“No. I found the water that way.”
“Did you check for the victim’s pulse?”
“She was already dead when I felt her wrist.” And she hadn’t needed to check for a pulse to know that. But Faith had wanted to leave a fingerprint, just in case. Her mother had stressed the need for paranoia about Faith’s freakishly acute senses since childhood. Leaving proof of an unnecessary assessment had seemed a better idea than trying to explain that she could hear the absence of her roommate’s heartbeat.
Steadman crouched easily beside Krystal’s body and eyed the straight-line bruising around the neck and the welts where, if Faith had to guess, Krystal had gouged her own throat trying to dig away the killer’s garrote. Steadman, too, seemed to check for the absent pulse more out of procedure than practicality. “She looks familiar. Didn’t she read tarot in Jackson Square?”
Faith stiffened, concerned he would recognize more than Krystal. Not that Faith had been on the Square for a while. She’d only been…experimenting. It had been a failed experiment.
“Yes,” she said. “She did.”
He swore under his breath and stood. “Well, ma’am, this is one for the cops, the coroner and the crime scene unit.”
Two down. But Faith wasn’t worried about EMTs, either.
Again she found herself alone with the body. She looked into Krystal’s staring eyes, not quite able to reconcile the corpse with the tall, vivacious young woman who’d offered to style Faith’s hair before they’d headed out that night. Krystal.
It had always been one of Faith’s favorite daydreams, to live with a bunch of other women. Roommates, sisters, dorm-mates at some kind of boarding school—no matter the details, she’d always imagined it would be like an endless slumber party. Like…belonging. This new apartment—rather, her newly rented half room in a very old apartment—was her first real effort toward that.
But slumber parties usually didn’t include murder.
Now she wished she’d accepted Krystal’s offer, despite her dislike of being touched and Krystal’s overreliance on hair-spray. Krystal had been teaching her breathing and relaxation techniques to control her oversensitivity. They’d been friends, though maybe not as close as normal people got. Faith wasn’t sure she knew how to get close to other people. Now she’d lost any chance to get closer to this one.
She hadn’t expected losing someone to hurt like this.
Still, the worst part about standing here in the bathroom, alone with Krystal, wasn’t that guilt. It wasn’t the eerie stillness, a now blatant absence of jazz music, laughter and shouted conversations that made the simple gurgle of water running down the drain become deafening. It wasn’t even being this close to a dead person.
The worst part was the lingering…smell was what Faith could best call it, but that wasn’t wholly correct. A perverted sexuality hung in the air, part musk, part heat. It had been left by the killer and this horrible, irrevocable thing he’d done. It smelled like power. Dominance.
Evil.
More than the corpse’s presence, that atmosphere of evil twisted deep in her stomach.
“So,” drawled someone loudly. Though the man in the unbuttoned coat didn’t throw the door open hard enough to bounce it off the wall, he might as well have, the way Faith jumped at his arrival. “What do we know?”
Damn. Not only had the detectives arrived, they included Roy Chopin.
Faith had been around Chopin only a handful of times. He was a rangy man with a rolling walk, blunt and expressive. He wore his brown hair styled back from his long face, to keep it out of his tired eyes. His mouth alternated between threatening and mocking, and his jaw looked like a dare. His sheer physicality made her uncomfortable, even without touching. He didn’t have to touch. A cop in every sense of that word, Chopin seemed to expect the whole world to get out of his way. To judge by his cocky attitude, the world usually did.
Tonight, though, his presence felt welcome as it washed over the crime scene like a rainstorm clearing out the gutters of Bourbon Street. Imagining all this ugliness through his detached gray eyes demoted Krystal’s death from a scene of horror to a mere shame and, more to the point, a puzzle to be solved.
Faith grasped gratefully at that air of detachment. She would return to the horror soon enough, after all. And she would need all her wits. Where Chopin went…
Well, when his partner arrived, she’d be three down. The detectives were the ones who had worried her all along.
For good reason.
In the meantime, Chopin was already looking impatient.
“This is Krystal Tanner,” she reported. “I found her like this at about ten-fifteen. Someone was climbing out through the ceiling. I went after him, but he had a pretty good head start, and— What?”
Chopin had shaken his head, his tired eyes widening.
“You went after him?” he demanded.
“Yes.”
He looked her up and down. She sensed the way he saw her as surely as she could read his perusal of the scene. She was a blond-haired, ponytailed coed with full lips, unusual green-gold eyes and tanned arms and legs, bared by the miniskirt and crop top. The outfit had seemed a better choice before her crawl through the filthy roof space.
“Alone?”
Her chin came up under the challenge of his gaze. “Yeah.”
Chopin leaned closer, faux conspiratorial. “And why would you do an idiotic thing like that?”
Well, duh. “Because the alternative would have been not to go after him?”
He grinned as he straightened, fishing a notebook out of his shirt pocket. “Krystal Tanner,” he muttered, making a note. “Ten-fifteen. You’re not on the force, so how is it I know you?”
She was surprised he’d remember her, even vaguely. Then again, powers of observation went back to his cop-ness. “I’m an assistant evidence technician for the city. Faith Corbett.”
She fisted her right hand, hoping he wouldn’t want to shake. The man was intense enough without risking direct contact.