Bonfire Masquerade (4 page)

“Who was that woman you were talking to before?” I asked. Something about her look intrigued me—she really knew how to stand out.

“Her name is Nicole Leveaux,” Daniel said, as he craned his neck to try and find her. “I'll introduce you later. She may look silly, but don't let her fool you. She is one of the sharpest, hardest-working businesspeople in this city. She's this town's main purveyor of Mardi Gras beads, voodoo charms, and just about every other cheap souvenir you could ever not want.

“These two are both jockeying to buy my warehouse. Or at least what's left of it. Nicole wants to turn it into another of her tourist stores. And Aaron wants … what is it you said you wanted to do again?”

“To design the future,” Aaron said, his blue eyes twinkling. “That space could become an anchor in the New Orleans skyline.”

“Right, whatever that means.” Daniel laughed. “But tonight is no night for business. Tonight is a night for fun. So please, girls, make yourselves at home. The
crème de la crème of New Orleans is here, waiting to meet you.”

At that moment, a waitress bearing a tray with three delicate champagne flutes came over.

“Sparkling cider?” She held the tray out before George, Bess, and me. We each took one.

“A toast to New Orleans,” I said. We clinked glasses. And somehow, within ten seconds, we'd each been spun off to different ends of the room. Guest after guest came up and introduced themselves to me. Some asked to dance. Others told me they'd heard so much about me, the famous “girl detective” from River Heights. It was what I imagined being a celebrity must feel like.

All in all, the party was a great success, right up until the end, which came abruptly. A shriek cut over the music. The guests stopped dancing. I turned just in time to see Yvette stagger into the room.

“Daniel's been murdered!” she screamed.

CHAPTER
4

JOE
STRIKE ONE

“This is sick!” I yelled again. ATAC had really come through this time. Our hotel was the nicest place I'd ever been—and we'd been in some pretty fancy places on our ATAC missions.

We were in the penthouse suite, which turned out to have a small rooftop cabana next to a private pool! We had our own elevator up, which would come in handy in case we needed to get out in a hurry. Best of all, ATAC had hooked up the suite with some high-tech electronics. I was investigating the setup right now.

“Look, ESPN 2! In high-def!”

“Rad,” replied Frank. “Now we can watch … what is this? Competitive foosball?”

“So some of their shows are lame. It's still objectively
awesome that we have a huge flat-screen television with every channel on Earth.”

We'd been in New Orleans for about four hours, and I'd already decided it was my new favorite city. It wasn't even officially Mardi Gras yet, but there were still tons of people out in the streets in costumes. Everyone seemed to be having a great time. It was definitely the happiest place I'd ever been.

Well, aside from all those fires and everything.

“So what do we got, bro?”

Frank was sitting at one of the desks in our suite, going through the package that had been waiting for us when we arrived.

“Not much,” he said. “This is a list of the twenty or so places where this gang has already struck. So far, the local police haven't found anything that connects them. Different areas of town, different owners, different kinds of places. Some of them probably didn't even have much to steal.”

He pulled out a large folding map of the city and hung it on the wall. Then he took out a box of different-colored thumbtacks. He put a tack in each place that had been robbed. Then, with a tack of the matching color, he hung up the description of the location. When he was done, it looked exactly like … nothing. No clue there.

“Something to keep thinking about,” I said. “Next.”

“Honestly, there's not much else. Well, there's this.”

Frank pulled a smartphone out of the box. It looked like it had been dropped—badly.

“Whose is it?”

“Some rich kid named Andrew Richelieu. Apparently, the gang stole it from him during one of the robberies downtown. He didn't even notice it was gone. The police recovered it from the crime scene and traced it to him. It's broken, and they haven't been able to recover anything from it—no prints, no voice-mail messages, no outgoing calls. I think if we try taking out the SIM card and putting it in a new phone—”

I cut Frank off. “That's totally happened to my phone before. Remember when those bank robbers shot me, and my phone stopped the bullet? Toss it here. Let me work my mo-Joe on it.”

Frank picked up the phone and walked it over to me. I held it up for a second and looked at the cracked case. I weighed it in my hand.

Then I hit it as hard as I could against my other hand.

WHAP!

“Joe! What are you doing?” Frank leaped out of his chair.

“Relax, bro. Watch.”

I held up the phone and hit the power button. Nothing happened. We stared at it.

“Uhh … ,” I said. Maybe I was wrong about that whole “mo-Joe” thing.

Then, suddenly, the screen came to life.

“Ha! Score one for the Joe-ster.”

“Nice job, Joe!” said Frank. He came over with a long cable.

“What's that for?” I asked.

He plugged it into the side of the phone, then pressed a button on a remote control he had in his other hand. Suddenly the screen of the phone was replicated, hundreds of times its normal size, on the television.

“Whoa. We have got to get ATAC to redo our rooms at home.” This place was seriously awesome.

The phone still wasn't working 100 percent. We couldn't see the recent calls, and all the text messages looked like they were written in Swedish. But we were able to check out all of Andrew's music—a large and boring collection of the latest pop hits.

“He must just download every song that hits the Billboard charts,” Frank said as we scrolled through pages of music.

We had more success with the recent videos. There was one filmed on the day Andrew's phone was stolen. Frank clicked on it, and the television filled up with a jerky, rapidly moving image.

Six or seven—or maybe eight?—people in costumes were running down the street, laughing. They all seemed to be carrying purses.

“This is weird,” I mumbled.

“No, it's footage from the robbery! They broke into a women's accessories store!” Frank was excitedly pointing to one of the pieces of paper he'd hung up on the wall.

It was hard to make out much from the video. I couldn't even tell if the person holding the phone had turned on the camera on purpose. It was so jerky that they might have just accidentally bumped it. We could see the gang, but they were so covered up it was impossible to get any distinguishing marks. We couldn't even see their hair!

Then, as randomly as it started, the video clicked off.

“Look—,” Frank started to say, right as the image disappeared.

“What?”

“Right there, before the video ended. I think there was a sign! Scroll back.”

It was hard to get the phone to cooperate, but after a few tries, I got it to go through the video, frame by frame. Finally, in the last shot of the video, I saw what Frank had seen: a street sign in the upper right corner of the picture.

“Can you read that?” I squinted, but I couldn't make it out.

“One second.” Frank pushed a few more buttons on the remote control. The image enlarged, but it was now too blurry. A few more buttons, and it sharpened again.

“Mazant!”

I pulled up the phone's map function and typed in Mazant Street, New Orleans. A map of the city filled the TV screen. Thankfully, Mazant was a small street only a few blocks long, right by the Mississippi River in a neighborhood appropriately named the Bywater.

“Looks like we've got somewhere to start,” I said.

Since our goal was to go undercover and find out who these thieves were, ATAC hadn't given us a flashy car this time around. We had a pair of old, beat-up-looking bikes.

I was a bit disappointed, but they turned out to be the perfect thing for getting around the city. The streets were narrow and jammed with people getting ready for Mardi Gras. Driving would have been impossible. But the bikes made it easy to zip around the city. In no time at all, we were down in the Bywater.

It was, quite literally, on the wrong side of the tracks. We rode our bikes over them and
bump-bump-bumped
our way into the neighborhood. It was an industrial area, although there were lots of residential streets. But there were also many big warehouses, some active, some abandoned. The streets were quieter here. After the craziness of the French Quarter, it was almost a relief.

But it was also a bit spooky. We rode past entire blocks without people. Once, a dog chased us down the
street, growling and barking up a storm. Thankfully, it dropped off at the end of the block. We rode past graffiti left over from Hurricane Katrina that read
LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT
.

Finally we passed a coffee shop, which seemed a likely place to start our investigation. Outside were two small tables, filled nearly to overflowing with punks and hippies. Two large brown mongrel dogs lounged by the side, kin to the one that had chased us.

We pulled over a few blocks away and locked up our bikes.

“You want to do the talking, or should I?” I asked Frank.

“You can take this one,” said Frank. “I'll hold the bag.”

We'd worked out a plan before we left the hotel. If these guys were heading this way after one of the robberies, they either had a place out here, or they were reporting back to someone. Either way, they'd be carrying all the stolen goods, and they'd probably be looking to move them fast. That meant they needed to find somewhere to fence them. We'd check out pawn shops, too, but chances were there was someone here who dealt in stolen goods. We needed to find that person. We had a backpack filled with “stolen goods” that we'd bought in the hotel gift shop and kept the tags on. Each one had a radio transmitter on it, the size of a pinhead,
which would allow us to monitor its location. We just needed to get one thing in the hands of the right person.

We walked back to the shop. As we walked inside, we listened to the people at the tables. A girl with a lip ring was talking loudly to everyone outside.

“Yeah, so then I broke his window, opened the door, and yanked him right out of the car. Tossed him on his behind. It was awesome!”

I shot Frank a glance. These were definitely the right people to talk to. We grabbed two coffees from the counter and went back out to sit on the stoop. We talked to each other for a few minutes, waiting for a lull in their conversation. Finally the chance came when the two other people at the girl's table got up. The guy on the left whistled, and the two dogs stood up and loped after him. Frank and I grabbed the seats they left behind.

“Hey,” I said as we sat down. The girl eyed us with a flat, wary stare.

“What's good?” she said.

“We heard you talking earlier. Got our attention.”

“Oh yeah?” Her eyes sparkled for a moment. “What y'all get into?”

“We got some stuff we're looking to sell.”

I gestured to Frank, and he opened the backpack.

“It's good stuff. We boosted it this morning.”

“What?!” The girl shot up in her chair. She grabbed a
laptop bag that I hadn't noticed sitting under her chair, and pulled it protectively close to her. “Dude, I was talking about ZOMG Kill Five! What is wrong with you?”

Her yelling had caught the attention of some of the other people at the coffee shop, who were starting to gather around us. Hastily, Frank zipped up the backpack and we stood up.

“Is there a problem here?” The man and woman who had been working the counter strolled out of the coffee shop. Casually—too casually—they were holding baseball bats, as though they were about to play a pickup game. I had a feeling our heads were about to be the balls!

“No, no sir,” Frank started to say, but the girl cut him off.

“They're trying to sell some stolen stuff!”

This was going from bad to worse. Before the crowd totally had us hemmed in, Frank and I took off running. They started chasing us, a dozen or so people, two baseball bats, and out of nowhere, another dog.

“Get them!”

“Teach them to steal stuff in our neighborhood!” Someone threw a rock, and I saw it bounce off Frank's backpack. This was definitely not good. I'd never really understood the phrase “angry mob” before now.

Thankfully, ATAC had trained us for this sort of situation. Frank and I split up at the first intersection. From
there, it was just a matter of hopping fences, hiding behind cars, and doubling back until we had exhausted our pursuers.

And ourselves.

By the time we got back to our bikes, we were both panting, covered in sweat.

“There has to be a better way to do this,” said Frank.

“I have an idea,” I said. I pulled out my phone. Frank smiled when he heard the voice on the other end.

CHAPTER
5

NANCY
GHOST TOUR

And just like that, my vacation was officially over. With Daniel dead, I went straight into detective mode. I can't help it. Where there's a crime, there's a criminal. And catching criminals is what I do.

After Yvette's scream, the party fell into chaos. Guests were shouting. Some grabbed their things and left in a hurry. Others tried to comfort Yvette. Dad ran into the office to confirm that Daniel was dead. When he came out and placed himself in front of the door, I saw from the look on his face that it was true. I wasted no time in calling 911.