Authors: Tami Hoag
Disappointment pressed down on Laurel. She should have known better than to think Danjermond would make it easy on her, but she had hoped just the same. Now that hope slipped through her grasp like sand. If the evidence she needed wasn't here, then it could be anywhere in the Atchafalaya.
And with the disappointment came self-doubt. What if she was wrong? What if the killer was Baldwin or Leonce? Or Cooper. Or some nameless, faceless stranger.
No. She closed the last drawer on the dresser and straightened, rubbing her fingers against her temples. She wasn't wrong. She hadn't been wrong in Scott County; she wasn't wrong now. Stephen Danjermond was a killer. She knew it, could feel it, had always felt something like wariness around him. He was a killer, and he thought he was going to get away with murder.
If she couldn't find one way to implicate him, Laurel knew she would have to find another. And the longer it took her, the more women would die, and the more time Danjermond would have to build a case to frame Jack. The longer he would play his game with her, destroying her credibility, her confidence, her belief in a higher law than survival of the fittest.
“Let's go,” she whispered, hooking a finger through a belt loop on Jack's Levi's and pulling him away from the bookcase. “I doubt he'll be back from the dinner for another hour, but we can't take chances.”
“Wait.”
It hit Jack like an epiphany as the flashlight beam swept across the collection of books. A trio bound in faded red leather sitting side by side by side on the upper left-hand shelf.
L-Petite Mort,
volumes one, two, and three.
The Little Death
. His eyes had scanned past them when he'd first realized that this collection was erotica. Erotica—the little death—orgasm. The title hadn't seemed out of place, but as he guided the beam of the light across the bindings, a sixth sense tensed in his gut like a fist.
Gently, he lifted the glass panel on the front of the case and slid it back out of the way. The three volumes came off the shelf as one.
Emotion lodged like a rock in Laurel's throat as she shone the light across a tangle of earrings and necklaces. More than six pieces. Many more. Tears swimming in her eyes, she reached in with a tweezers she'd pulled from her pocket and lifted out a heavy gold earring. A large circle of hammered gold hanging from a smaller loop of finely braided strands of antiqued gold.
“This is—” The present tense stuck to the roof of her mouth. She swallowed it back and tried again. “This was Savannah's. She had a pair made in New Orleans. A present to herself for her birthday. She was wearing the other one when they found her.”
Jack kept his silence as they watched the gold hoop turn and catch the light. There were no words adequate to assuage the kind of pain he heard in Laurel's voice. Gently he closed the box and returned it to its spot in the bookcase. Laurel just stood there, her gaze locked on the earring, her eyes bleak. Jack slid an arm around her shoulders and bent his head down close to hers.
“You got him, sugar,” he whispered. “That's the best you can do.”
“I wish it were enough,” Laurel murmured. She handed him the flashlight and dropped the earring into a Ziploc bag.
They took a final, quick glance around the room to make certain they had left everything as they had found it, then Laurel led the way into the hall, flashlight scanning the floor ahead of them—until the beam fell on a pair of polished black dress shoes.
Her first instinct was to run, but there was nowhere to run to. He stood between them and the head of the stairs. Behind her, Jack swore under his breath.
Slowly, she raised the flashlight, up the sharp, flawless crease of his black tuxedo trousers and higher, until the beam spotlighted the barrel of a silencer on the nine-millimeter gun he held in one hand and the pair of small canvas sneakers he held in the other.
“I believe these are yours, Laurel,” he said in that same even tone of voice he used for all occasions. “How considerate of you to take them off.”
“What happened with the League of Women Voters?” she asked, a small, detached part of her mind wondering how she could be so calm. Her pulse rate had gone off the chart. Her blood pounded so in her ears, it was a wonder she could hear herself think. And she asked him about his dinner as if this were the most normal of circumstances.
Danjermond frowned in the pale wash of light that reached his face. “In view of all the recent tragedies, I thought it inappropriate to allow the festivities to go on as they would have ordinarily.”
“A selfless gesture.”
A small, feline smile tucked up the corners of his mouth. “I can be a very generous man, when I so choose.”
“Did you ‘so choose' with my sister?” Laurel asked bitterly, her voice trembling with rage, her left hand trembling badly enough to rattle the small plastic bag holding Savannah's earring.
He tipped his head in reproach, but his gaze went directly to the evidence, and anger rolled off him like steam. “Now, Laurel, you don't really expect me to answer that, do you?”
“You might as well,” Jack said, easing out from behind Laurel. He took a step and then another to Danjermond's left, forcing him to split his attention between them. “You're gonna kill us now, too—right?”
Danjermond contemplated the question for a moment, finally deciding to be magnanimous and gift them with an answer. “
C'est vrai,
Jack, as you might say yourself. It isn't quite according to my plan, but adjustments must sometimes be made.”
“Sorry to inconvenience you,” Jack drawled sarcastically, moving a little forward, enough to draw Danjermond's full concern. The barrel of the gun swung even with his chest.
“That's near enough, Jack. Don't come any closer.”
“Or what?” Jack taunted. “You'll shoot? You're gonna shoot anyway. Dead is dead.”
“No, no,
mon ami,
” Danjermond purred. “There is most definitely a difference between instant death and being made to beg for death. Your cooperation could make all the difference for Miss Chandler.”
Jack weighed the odds, not liking them. Danjermond was going to kill them. Heaven only knew what kind of hell he planned to put them through. He had murdered at least six women, brutally, horribly. Jack had long ago ceased to care what happened to himself, but the idea of anything like that happening to Laurel was intolerable. He couldn't just stand helpless and let it happen. Damned if he was going to play into the hands of a madman.
Never looking away from Danjermond, he grabbed Laurel's arm and jerked it up, shining the beam of the flashlight in Danjermond's face, at the same time, twisting his body to shield Laurel and push her off to the side.
Danjermond swore and flung an arm up to block the blinding light. The gun bucked once in his hand, the explosion reduced to a soft thump by the silencer. A fat Chinese vase on a stand along the wall shattered, sending shards of porcelain flying in all directions. Water cascaded to the floor, and delphinium stems fell like pickup sticks.
Propelled by Jack's weight, Laurel stumbled sideways and fell to her knees. The flashlight sailed out of her grip and crashed to the floor, rolling out of her reach, sending bands of bright amber light tumbling across the wall. She tried to scramble after it, but Jack was in front of her and Danjermond beyond him, and it was clear the battle between them was far from over.
Head down, Jack lunged for Danjermond, planting a shoulder hard in the man's chest. The two of them landed on the polished wood floor, inches from the head of the stairs, and began wrestling for control of the gun. Jack grabbed hold of Danjermond's arm and slammed it hard against the floor, but before he could shake the pistol loose, a white-hot pain sliced into his right side, momentarily shorting out all thought and all strength.
Howling in pain and rage, he twisted around to find the source. A jagged shard of white porcelain protruded from his side with Danjermond's hand closed around it, as if around the hilt of a knife, blood oozing from between his fingers. As Jack reached to dislodge the impromptu knife, Danjermond swung the gun up and slammed it into his temple.
In the blink of an eye, the balance of power shifted. Jack struggled to stay on top as his consciousness dimmed, but the world dipped and tilted beneath him. Then suddenly they were rolling, through the water, over the broken vase, pain biting, muscles burning, heart pumping.
He managed to get a hand on Danjermond's throat and started to squeeze, but the district attorney was on top of him and pulling back, pulling away. Bringing the gun up. Laurel might have screamed, but all Jack was certain of was the sharp
thunk!
of a bullet splintering the floor millimeters from his head as he let go of Danjermond's windpipe and knocked his gun hand to the side.
Jack surged up, twisting to reverse their positions. Pain sliced through his side, pounded in his head. He blocked it out and fought on adrenaline, groping, pushing, turning. Danjermond's back slammed into the delicately turned white balusters that guarded the second-story landing, cracking one and shaking the whole balustrade, and the gun came out of his hand and skidded across the floor, toward the stairs.
Laurel jumped back as they wrestled, wanting to do something, but the gun was on the other side of the hall and the flashlight was somewhere on the floor beneath the tangle of grunting, straining male bodies. She glanced around for something, anything, she might use as a weapon, finding nothing, but she wasn't about to settle for prayer.
Do something, do something
, she chanted mentally, turning and running back into Danjermond's bedroom. She had to find a weapon, something she could hit him with, stab him with, anything.
Jack slammed a left into Danjermond's face, then lunged up and forward, scrambling for the gun that was just out of his reach. His fingertips hit the silencer, and it spun away, sliding through the pool of water and broken glass. Focused, intent, he grabbed for it again and closed his fingers around the rubber grip on the handle.
At the same time, Danjermond found the flashlight. As Jack came up and started to swing around with the gun, Danjermond came to his knees and swung the flashlight like a club. It caught Jack a vicious blow on the side of his head, snapping his head around and clouding his vision to a gray blur. Brain synapses shorted out. The gun fell from his hand and tumbled down the steps, firing a useless shot into the wall.
He tried to stand, tried to block the second strike, but the messages never connected with the appropriate muscles. The blow landed, and everything faded to black.
Laurel burst out of the bedroom with a heavy ginger jar lamp in her hands, brandishing it like a club to swing at Danjermond's head. But he grabbed her arm as she stepped into the hall and her gaze went to Jack, and the lamp crashed to the floor.
“Jack!” Laurel screamed as he lay limp at the top of the stairs, the side of his face running with blood. Thoughts flashed fast-forward through her mind in that one elongated moment she stood there staring at his still body in the dark hall—he was dead, she'd lost him, she was alone with a killer.
She started to move forward, but Danjermond held her.
“Careful, Laurel,” he said quietly, his breath whistling in and out of his lungs. She could smell his sweat and his expensive cologne. She could smell blood and could only hope it was his. “You don't want to step on glass,” he murmured.
“You're insane,” she charged, her voice a sharp, trembling whisper. She twisted around to glare up at him, her breath catching at the sinister cast his features took on in the orange-shadowed glow of the flashlight.
“No,” he said in return, smiling ever so faintly, his cool green eyes on hers, unblinking. “I'm not.”
Chapter
Thirty
“I dislike compromise as a rule,” Danjermond said as he worked at binding Jack's hands and feet. “But one has to be flexible in times of emergency.”
Laurel sat on an elegant Hepplewhite shield-back chair in the front hall, her wrists bound to the arms with straps of white silk, her ankles bound to the front legs. She wanted to scream, but silk clogged her mouth, leeching away the moisture and literally making her gag.
She watched Danjermond with a sick sense of dread pushing at the base of her throat and a strange, lethargic numbness dragging down on her. Dreamlike. No, nightmarish. If she could believe this was a nightmare, then it wouldn't be real. A trick of the mind. She couldn't decide what would be better—to be alert and terrified with the reality of the situation, or to be stunned senseless and believe it was all a bad dream.
Danjermond looked up at her, as if he had expected some response to his statement. He had taken the time to change out of his tuxedo and neatly bandage the hand he had cut during the fight. He was now in black jeans, boots, and a loose-fitting black shirt, an outfit that made him look like a modern-day warlock.
He had spread a blanket out on the floor so as not to get Jack's blood on the Oriental hall runner, and he checked and double-checked the bindings on his unconscious prisoner to make certain they were tight enough to hold but not so tight as to make impressions beneath the padding he had used first. The Bayou Strangler's victims were the ones who were to have bruises on their wrists, not the Strangler himself.
Laurel's gaze kept slipping down to Jack. She wasn't certain he was breathing. He had been unconscious nearly half an hour. Utterly motionless. Blood, sticky and brilliant red, matted his hair and glazed his temple and cheek like candy on an apple, but she couldn't tell whether or not he was still bleeding.
Dead men don't bleed.
She stared at his chest, willed it to move.
“I would rather have brought him to trial,” Danjermond went on. He rose gracefully and picked up a glass of burgundy from the hall table, sipping at it thoughtfully, savoring the wine. “That was my intent all along. A murderer on a spree in Acadiana, running unchecked, no one able to stop him—until he reached Partout Parish. That was why I left the bodies where they could be found. There are, of course, many ways of disposing of bodies so as not to leave a trace. A man can get away with murder again and again if he is intelligent, careful, coolheaded.”
He finished his drink. The grandfather clock chimed the hour. Eleven. Jack still didn't move.
With a sigh, Danjermond hauled him up off the blanket and maneuvered him into a fireman's lift. Without a word to Laurel, he went down the hall, toward the kitchen. She heard the back door open and close, then silence.
Oh, God, Jack, please be alive, please come around. I don't want to die alone.
Alone. As Savannah had been, as Annie had been, as all those other women had been. God knew how many. He had left six bodies to be found because that suited his plans. There could have been dozens more, all of them gone without a trace, swallowed up by the Atchafalaya, never to be seen again, the victims' cries for pity heard only by the swamp.
The numbness began to fade, and fear took its place. Tears rose to burn the backs of her eyes.
A vision of Savannah's face floated through her mind. The scents of formaldehyde and ammonia with death lingering, cloyingly sweet, beneath it all. The stainless steel table. The draped figure. Prejean murmuring something apologetic. Savannah's face—not as it had been in life, but as death and its aftermath had distorted it.
The back door opened and closed again. Footsteps sounded in the kitchen, in the hall. She bit down hard on the gag and tried to beat back the tears with her lashes.
Don't show fear. He feeds on fear. It gives him power
.
“All right, Laurel,” Danjermond said, kneeling down to untie her feet. “We're going to go for a little drive.” He looked up at her and smiled like a snake. “To my little place in the country.”
Laurel knew the action was both futile and foolish, but she kicked him anyway, as hard as she could with her bare foot, catching him square in the diaphragm. He fell back, wheezing as the air punched out of his lungs, the look on his face worth whatever price he would make her pay.
Coughing, he rolled onto his knees and forced himself to his feet with one arm banded across his belly. He leaned against the hall table, sending her a sideways glare of pure, cold hate.
“You'll pay for that, Laurel,” he ground out between short, painful gasps.
She met his glare evenly.
Don't show fear. It gives him power.
“Defiant little bitch,” he said, straightening slowly. A fire lit in his clear green eyes, glowing bright as he came toward her. “Just as your sister was,” he said, smiling. “Right up to the end. She defied me. Dared me. I think she quite liked being tortured. There was a certain . . . exultant quality to her screams.
“And she laughed,” he said softly, bending over her, careful to stay to the side. He brought his face down even with hers so she could see the wicked pleasure on his features as he spoke. “She laughed as I took my blade and cut her breasts.”
Slowly, he reached out and cupped her breast with his long, elegant hand, testing its weight, molding its shape. He rubbed his thumb over the hard nub of her nipple, around and around, his gaze locked on hers, then began to tighten his fingers, squeezing and squeezing until she could no longer hold back the whimper of pain.
“She was completely insane by the end,” he whispered.
Laurel shuddered, trembling with revulsion as much as fear. She had expected him to strike back at her physically, but this was much worse. Psychological torment, giving her the intimate details of her sister's murder. She would rather have been beaten. And he knew it.
“She wanted the sex,” he said, untying her wrists from the arm of the chair. “Even when she knew I was going to kill her, she had an orgasm. Even as I tightened the scarf around her throat, she had an orgasm as powerful as any I've ever experienced.” He met her eyes once again, that slight smile curling the corners of his wide, sensual mouth. “But then they say death is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Perhaps you'll experience that kind of ecstasy, as well, Laurel.”
She was shaking uncontrollably as he hauled her up out of the chair and tied her hands behind her back. Thoughts of Savannah flashed through her mind. Thoughts of the two of them as children, before Ross had entered their lives and twisted the paths they would take. In that moment she hated him as much as she hated Stephen Danjermond. More. But it wasn't going to do any good to dwell on the past. The present held a clear and imminent danger. She was going to need all her energy, all her strength—physical and mental—directed to getting out of this alive.
Danjermond guided her out of the house the back way and took her around the side to an old carriage house that now served as a garage. They bypassed the Jaguar in favor of an old brown Chevy Blazer. He stuffed Laurel in the passenger's side and closed the door.
While he walked around the hood, she twisted around awkwardly to see Jack facedown on the seat behind her. He lay motionless, body bent at an awkward angle, feet on the floor behind the driver's seat. The dark blanket had been tossed carelessly over him and covered him from chin to boots.
In minutes they were driving out of town without having passed a car or a pedestrian who might have taken notice of them. When they were well beyond the town limits, alone on the bayou road, Danjermond pulled over and untied the gag.
Laurel spat the wad of cloth out of her mouth, glaring at him in the gloom of the cab. “You won't get away with this,” she charged hoarsely, her throat and mouth parched.
Danjermond flicked a brow upward as he slid the Blazer into gear and started them on their journey once again. “What a trite line, Laurel. And ridiculous. Of course I'll get away with it. I've been getting away with it since I was nineteen.”
He chuckled at her involuntary gasp of horror, like an indulgent adult amused at the naivete of a child. “I was a college student,” he began, leaning over to push a cassette into the tape player. Mozart whispered out of the speakers, orderly and serene. “I was an excellent student, naturally, with a great future ahead of me. But I had certain sexual appetites that required discretion.
“My father introduced me to the pleasures of the darker side of sex—indirectly. As a boy I once followed him on a visit to his mistress, and watched them through a window, fascinated and aroused by the games they played. I followed him many times after that before I realized he knew. When I was fourteen, he allowed me to visit her myself. To be properly initiated.
“I learned the privileges of wealth and the wisdom of discretion early on. So I knew better than to appease myself with a coed. Whores are much better at pleasing a man, anyway, and so much more expendable. I got carried away with one. Strangled her while we were in the throes of passion.
“No one ever suspected me. Why would they? I was the handsome, talented son of a prominent family, and she was just another whore who fell victim to a professional hazard.”
Laurel listened, shocked and repulsed at the lack of feeling in his voice. He was completely without remorse, completely devoid of conscience. Emotionless, soulless; he had said so himself that day at Beauvoir. There would be no appealing to his sense of mercy or humanity, because he didn't have any. Escape was their only hope, and that hope was so slim as to be nearly nonexistent. She couldn't leave Jack, couldn't take him with her even if she could somehow get away. And what chance did she have out here, barefoot with her hands tied behind her back? None. If Danjermond didn't get her, something else would.
They turned off the bayou road and onto a narrow dirt track that led deeper into the swamp. Branches slapped at the sides of the truck as it crept down the path. The growth was so thick, the headlights barely penetrated. Laurel felt cocooned within the dark confines of the Blazer, cocooned in a bizarre world where Mozart played while a murderer calmly told her his life story.
She tried to memorize the turns they took, tried to gauge how far they had gone, but everything seemed distorted—time, distance, reality. Her arms ached abominably from being held in such an unnatural position. Every lurch of the truck sent pain shooting between her shoulder blades.
She glanced into the backseat at Jack, and her heart flipped over as his left eye blinked open for a moment. He was alive. Though not much, it was something to hang on to.
“You surprised me, Laurel,” Danjermond said. He slowed the Blazer to a crawl as he piloted it through a shallow stream. As they climbed back onto what passed for solid ground out here, he stared at her across the cab, his lean face lit by the glow of the dashboard instruments. “I really didn't think you would break into my home. Even after you lied to Kenner, I believed you were too ‘by the book' for that.”
“I don't give a damn about the book,” she said. “I believe in justice. I'll take it whatever way I can get it.”
He smiled at that, truly pleased, and faced forward again as the path turned and ran along a bank. “I was right. You're much stronger than you thought, Laurel. It's really too bad I had to catch you with evidence that could incriminate me. I would have enjoyed a longer game.”
He would have put her through Scott County all over again—the accusations, the disbelief, the desperation, all of it—for his own amusement. Laurel wanted to berate him for calling life and death a game. She wanted to rail at him for playing with the system he had sworn to uphold, but there seemed no point in it. He believed he was above it all—the law, the rules of society. And to date he had no reason to think otherwise. He had fooled everyone, had gotten away with the ultimate crime again and again.
“What will you do with us?” she asked flatly, deciding it was better to know than to imagine.
“I will lead the sheriff out to the site of a grisly murder-suicide I heard about through an anonymous tip. Poor Jack went over the edge at last. Couldn't deal with what he'd done to you. Took a gun and shot himself in the head.”
Thereby obliterating the head wound Danjermond had already dealt him. And she would die exactly as the others had died, tying Jack firmly to the series of murders. Danjermond would see to every detail. No one would question the outcome.
“Not quite the glamour of a trial,” she muttered.
“No. I do regret that. But still, there will be a good deal of regional and national news coverage, and as district attorney I will, naturally, act as spokesman for the parish.”
“Naturally.”
“Don't take it too hard, Laurel,” he said, as he piloted the Blazer into a ramshackle shed that was tucked between trees and nearly obscured by vines. He cut the engine and turned to face her. “You couldn't have won. You couldn't have stopped me.”
Laurel said nothing. She stared at him across the narrow space of the cab, remembering clearly the way he had looked over the dinner table in the house she had grown up in.
“You believe in evil, don't you, Laurel?”
Yes, she did believe in evil, and she knew without a doubt that she was looking into the face of it.
He hauled Jack out of the truck first, carrying him out of the shed and out of her sight. Laurel struggled against the cloth that bound her hands, while her gaze scanned the cab for some kind of weapon—both acts useless. Danjermond was back for her quickly, and guided her ahead of him by her bound hands, down the muddy bank to an old
bâteau
that bobbed among the reeds.
At his prodding, she climbed in and sat on a black tarp on the flat bottom of the boat, with Jack lying in a heap behind her. Laurel leaned back and brushed her fingertips along the scuffed leather of his boots, trying to take some comfort in his nearness, and then her fingers stumbled over the lump of a knot.
Danjermond's attention was on the outboard motor. With a snap of his wrist, it roared to life and the boat eased away from the shore.