Bayou Hero (5 page)

She leaned past him to see the small pods of camera-wielding people on the far side of the street.

“Some people claiming to be relatives stopped by, too. Wanted to go in and get some precious little something-or-other the admiral or his wife promised ’em the last time they were here.”

“Ah, families. Gotta love them.”

She climbed the driveway again, studying the windows, the outdoor spaces, the lawn, the flowers, the detached garage. How well had the killer known this place? Had he been a regular guest? Had he lived for a time in one of those curtained rooms upstairs? Had he been a she, come back from her own disappearance to take revenge on the husband who’d cost her a son?

Once she was inside the house, she wandered through the common areas downstairs before going upstairs. This time she ignored the admiral and Camilla’s suite, turning the opposite direction. The first room she came to was a guest room—lovely, richly decorated. Across the hall was another, and next to it, a girl’s room. This room was impressive and, judging from the pristine state and the faint scent of paint, recently decorated.

The admiral had two young granddaughters, just the right age to appreciate the whimsical colors and design of the room. Every girlie princess fantasy had been incorporated into the space, with enough toys and dress-up clothes to make any girl happy to move in.

The whole prissy/happiness/light room made Alia shudder.

Back into the hall and down to the last remaining door. The knob creaked when she turned it. It was one of those curtained rooms she’d noticed outside. It smelled stuffy, and a flick of the light switch illuminated a layer of dust everywhere. Pale blue walls, a single bed, a desk and wooden chair, a bookcase. No pictures on the walls, no linens on the bed, no television or computer or books on the shelves. No keepsakes. No clothes in the closet. No sign that anyone had lived in the room in the past twenty years.

Or, at least, seventeen.

They hadn’t kept anything that showed a fifteen-year-old boy had lived here, hated here, plotted to escape from here.

Landry would probably be happy that they’d sanitized his memory from the room. After all, he sure appeared to work hard at sanitizing their memories from his life.

Chapter 3

A
s Landry lost sight of the Jackson home in the rearview mirror, he took a few deep breaths of relief. Now he could go home. Push his family back into the dark little corner they belonged, at least until morning. Go back to being just Landry instead of Jeremiah Jackson III.

Blue Orleans, the bar where he worked, was located in the French Quarter, an old brick building that stood, faintly crooked, between a restaurant and a vacant storefront. The job came with an apartment upstairs and his own off-street parking. He pulled into the space that ended at an elaborate iron gate set into a matching fence and kept anyone without a key away from the courtyard and the apartments beyond. Beyond the fence, there was a fountain, flower beds and brick walkways that led to two doors downstairs and two sets of stairs, one for each place upstairs.

He took the stairs on his left, coming out on a long landing that had been a balcony in the original house. The brass numeral three that had fallen off the door long ago had left an impression of the number in faded red paint. In fact,
faded
was the best description for the entire building. What had been a pricey, showy home fifteen decades ago reminded him of an aging, wrinkled beauty queen: a ghost of its former loveliness but with its grace and gentility intact.

He’d just finished opening a few windows when his cell rang. After a glance at the screen, he debated answering long enough for the caller to hang up. A moment later, the phone beeped, signaling a voice mail. In the cool, dim light of his bedroom, he sprawled across the bed before playing the message, closing his eyes at the soft greeting.

“Landry, it’s Dr. Granville. I heard the news about Captain Jackson... I guess I should make that Admiral. I understand he’s been promoted since the last time I saw you. Anyway, hearing the news made me think of you, and I wanted to tell you if you need to talk—and you know, of course, that I think you should—I’m still here or I can refer you to someone else.” The faintly accented voice paused before going on. “Take care of yourself through this, Landry.”

He noticed as the message clicked off that she hadn’t offered condolences.

Victoria Granville, blonde, British and beautiful, was a few years younger than his mother and knew him better than anyone, including his mother. Without her, he wasn’t sure he would have survived being Jeremiah’s son.

But he didn’t need to talk to her now. He was okay with his father’s death. His only care was a vague sort of relief. The admiral was dead. Now he could burn in the fires of hell, where he belonged, and Landry...

Landry was free. At last. Thank God.

He just didn’t feel that way yet.

He dozed awhile, but his sleep was restless. Funny how things never changed. He was thirty-two years old, but in his dreams he was just a kid again, gangly, scrawny, and couldn’t defend himself or anyone else. In that same realm, Jeremiah was always three times larger than life, menacing, cruel, willing to squash Landry like a bug.
No one will notice if you’re gone. No one will miss you.

Right back at you, old bastard
, Landry thought as he changed into clean shorts and a T-shirt advertising the club. He’d begun working at Blue Orleans before he was old enough to legally set foot in the door, running errands, tending bar on occasion, helping to throw out the belligerent drunks. His boss, Maxine, had always counted policemen among her clientele; a few free drinks or a food run down the street for the best po’boys in the city made them overlook the underage help.

Tonight Landry hadn’t been on the clock long before the first cop he could identify strolled through the doors: Jimmy DiBiase, still wearing the white shirt and dark pants, looking pretty wrung out. Landry’s gaze automatically looked past to see if Kingsley was following him, but there was no sign of her.

“Give me something cold on ice.” DiBiase slid onto the bar stool in front of Landry, lifted a handful of peanuts from the dish and cracked one.

“You wanna be more specific?”

The cop glanced over both shoulders, then said, “Water’ll do.”

Landry filled a tall glass with ice, then topped it off with his bottled water supply beneath the bar. He added a straw, a few wedges of lemon and lime, then set it down. “Where’s your partner? I thought you guys were attached at the hip.”

DiBiase smiled. “Nah, the divorce decree pretty much took care of that.”

Landry couldn’t have gone any stiffer without facing physical threat. Divorce decree? Special Agent Kingsley had been married to good ole boy DiBiase? It was a hard pairing to wrap his mind around. The beauty and the beast. The good, the bad and the ugly. She was cool, elegant, prettier than she wanted people to know, and DiBiase was a New Orleans homicide detective. You didn’t have to say much more than that for people to get the picture.

DiBiase grinned. “Surprised you, huh? Hell, it surprised me back when she said yes. Not so much when she cut the ties and wished me to the depths of hell.”

Now that part was easier to imagine. Alia in a fussy, lacy, girlie gown? Alia promising forever to DiBiase? Settling into life all lovey-dovey as Mr. and Mrs. and planning a future? None of those images would form. But kicking DiBiase to the curb, maybe with a particular level of viciousness? Yeah, he could see that.

DiBiase grinned again. “It was my fault. I can’t even point any fingers her way, which is just as well since she’d probably break them.” He took a drink, then said reflectively, “Hell, she’d have been justified shooting me a time or two, but she never threatened me with anything more than a stun gun. Believe me, nothing wakes a man up quicker than finding one of those pressed to his throat.”

Landry filled an order for one of the waitresses, who smiled coyly at DiBiase while she waited. “You two work together often?” he asked when she left to deliver the drinks. Just making conversation. He didn’t give a damn about either DiBiase or Alia Kingsley. He just wanted them out of his—and more importantly, Mary Ellen’s—life.

“Nah. We’re only doing it now because we’ve got civilians among the victims, although they tend to get lost in the admiral’s shadow.”

A lot of people had got lost in the admiral’s shadow, pretty much everyone who spent any time with him. Camilla had once said he was the sun around which the world rotated. Her smile at the time, Landry remembered, had been sickly. Sad.

“Your sister’s pretty shaken up.”

The muscles in Landry’s neck tensed. “She’s got a soft heart. She cries over roadkill.”

DiBiase chuckled, then turned serious in the space of a heartbeat. “I asked her for a list of your parents’ friends. We’d like the same from you.”

Landry filled an order for another waitress, who also smiled coyly at the cop while she waited, then traded full bottles of Corona for empties for the two guys sitting at the opposite end of the bar. When he returned to DiBiase, he said levelly, “I haven’t been part of the family for a long time. I don’t really remember any names.”

Except for Jeremiah’s special friends. He could recite those names in his sleep: a lawyer, the head of New Orleans’s largest advertising firm, a university dean, an adviser to a governor. People hidden deep in memory, frequently appearing in bad dreams.

Maybe the dreams would stop when they were all dead, too.

“See what you can come up with,” DiBiase said. Rising from the stool, he drained the last of the water, then headed out the door.

Or maybe the dreams wouldn’t stop until
he
was dead.

* * *

With notes scattered around her, her laptop and tablet both on the coffee table and a bowl of buttered popcorn next to her, Alia looked up to give her eyes a break. The ceiling fan swirled slowly, enough to cool, not enough to mess up her piles, and an impossibly thin woman on the television talked in an impossibly cheery voice about the miracle bra she held in her hands.

A glance at the clock showed it was nine, which made it seven in Coronado, California, where her parents lived. She called them most Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays, except when social plans interfered—her parents’, not hers. She went on dates occasionally and had a girls’ night out once a month. Otherwise, it was pretty much work all the time.

How am I going to get grandchildren at this rate?
her mother good-naturedly complained.

Better adopt them
, was Alia’s usual response. It was her job to protect kids when she could, to get justice for them when she couldn’t. Let someone else have them. Hell, she didn’t even want a pet.

Wriggling out from under everything without upsetting it, she got to her feet and padded into the kitchen for a refill on her drink. Mornings, she mainlined coffee; during the day, she stuck with water; alone in the evenings, she drank Kool-Aid. Jimmy had given her a hard time about it until she’d put him in a wrist lock and brought him to his knees.

He’d learned not to get between a girl and her Kool-Aid.

With her glass in one hand, she grabbed a half dozen bite-size candy bars from the dish on the counter and headed back to the living room, where she traded the candy for her cell phone. Her mother answered after only two rings.

“Hey,
mamacita.
”

Her mother sniffed. “That’s
mẹ
to you,
chica
. Hold on. Your father’s trying to take the phone away from me.” There was an admonishment, then the sound of a door closing before her mom said, “I’m back.”

“I take it Dad’s seen the news.”

“The news, the internet, his old navy shipmates’ gossip loop. We saw you just for a few seconds on the national news. You looked thin.”

“I am thin, Mom.”

“Are you sleeping well?”

“Yes.”

“Eating well?”

Alia looked at the empty wrappers on the coffee table: one hamburger, superlarge fries and two tacos, along with butter-stained napkins from the popcorn. “Yep.” Was it her fault if her mother defined
eating well
as a balanced meal while Alia took it to refer to quantity?

Mom sniffed again. “We also saw Jimmy on that news clip. You keep your distance from him.”

“Kind of hard, Mom. We’re working the case together.”

There was a moment of silence before Lisa sighed. “I don’t know whether to be more worried about the ugly things you see or that you’re looking for a crazed killer or that you’re spending time with Jimmy DiBiase.”

Knowing she couldn’t reassure her mom about the first two—Lien Hieu Kingsley would never believe her daughter was grown enough to see ugly things or deal with ugly people—Alia said lightly, “I’m immune to Jimmy now.”

“You loved him so much.”

“I did. Until I didn’t.” It hadn’t been easy, especially when she’d thought he meant the vows he’d taken, but trust and love could survive only so many betrayals. One too many, and her love had stopped. One moment it was there. The next it was gone, never to return.

“Uh-oh. Your father found me. You be careful, sweetie.”

“I will, Mom.”

Again, there was the soft sound of conversation before her father came on the line. “How are you, scooter?”

“Never gonna live down that name, am I?”

“Aw, but you were so cute with that toy scooter. You rode it everywhere you went, to meet me at the door, to the dining room, to the potty.”

“I tell people you call me that because I ate scooter pies after every meal for years.”

“Well, there is that.” His chuckle was followed by a hesitation, then... “Are you assigned to the case?”

“Yes, sir.” He’d never made her call him
sir.
There had been Daddy, then Dad and the occasional rank. But when it came to work, well, she was an NCIS agent, and he was
an admiral. Retired or not, it was hard to shake the
sir
.

She would bet
sir
or rank had been the only titles Jeremiah Junior had accepted from Landry and Mary Ellen.

Finally she got to the point of tonight’s call. “Did you know him?”

“There aren’t that many admirals. You can’t help but meet them all sooner or later.”

“What did you think of him?”

“Jerry was a good officer. Hard-nosed. Strict. By the book, but fair. He never asked more of the people under his command than he gave himself.”

“Did you ever meet his wife?”

“Hmm. Not that I can recall.”

“She and the son and daughter didn’t accompany him to any of his duty stations, but I thought maybe she’d shown up for some official functions.”

“I remember him talking about his daughter like she was the prettiest, smartest, best daughter in the world, which was ridiculous since everyone already knew that was you. But I never knew he had a son. Huh. I would have figured any son of Jeremiah Jackson would have wound up in the navy himself.”

Just like any son of Charles Kingsley’s. Alia hadn’t been willing to go quite that far, but she couldn’t deny his approval had played a role in her application to NCIS.

Though he would have loved her no matter what career path she’d chosen. Could Landry Jackson say that about his own father?

She doubted it.

“It’s gonna be one hell of a funeral,” Dad said.

“I bet it will be.” It would have been a spectacle even if he’d died peacefully in his sleep, between all the senior-ranking officers and Pentagon officials, the upper crust of New Orleans society and the city’s love of a good funeral. But with the admiral brutally murdered, his daughter in shock, his son’s presence unwilling, his wife’s whereabouts unknown and law enforcement scrutinizing everyone in attendance, it just might be a circus.

“If you weren’t working, I’d be tempted to come. Show my respects to Jerry. See New Orleans. See you. It’s been a long time.”

Alia smiled. She’d flown to California for Christmas and stayed nearly two weeks. Still, it was nice to know he missed her. “I’ll let you know all the gaudy details. Maybe someone will collapse beside the casket and confess all.”

“It would be convenient, wouldn’t it? You watch out for yourself, okay?”

“I always do, Dad.” She hung up, then unwrapped a candy bar. She bit it in half and let the chocolate slowly dissolve in her mouth while thinking about what her father had said.
Jerry was a good officer.
How much had Jeremiah hated being called Jerry? Likely someone who outranked him had first called him that, and others had picked up on it.