Murder in the Irish Channel (Chanse MacLeod Mysteries) (29 page)

I tried the driver’s side door, and it was unlocked. I yanked it open and swore.

Abby’s cell phone was plugged into the cigarette lighter, charging.

Wherever she was, she didn’t have her phone.

I unplugged it and put it all into my pocket and headed for the front door of the bar.

I pushed it, and it swung open. I stepped out of the rain and flipped on a light switch next to the door. The bar was empty. “Abby?” I called. “Barney? Is there anyone here?” I walked behind the bar. There was no one in the kitchen, no one in the walk-in refrigerator. The doors to both the office and the storeroom were locked. I pounded on them and listened for sound, but heard nothing.

“Damn it, Abby,” I swore under my breath as I headed back for the front door. “Where the hell are you?”

I dashed back to the SUV and checked Abby’s phone. It had about a fifty percent charge, so I touched the icon for recent calls.

Sure enough, she’d called Barney Hogan. Obviously, she’d had him meet her at the bar.

And now they were both missing.

I got back in the car and called Jeph, ordering him to do whatever he could to find out if Barney Hogan owned any property anywhere in the city besides the bar. “Will do,” Jeph replied. He hesitated. “There’s something else I found since I talked to you last—I wasn’t sure if I should call you…”

“What is it?” I replied, irritated.

He told me, and another piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

“Find out if Hogan owns any more property anywhere, and hurry,” I snapped, hanging up. I cursed at myself for not checking into Hogan more thoroughly as I pulled back onto Tchoupitoulas Street.

I drove as fast as I dared over to Constance Street.

I parked in front of Jonny’s house, which was ablaze with light, and splashed my way up the walk to the front door. I started pounding, and within minutes the door was opened. Jonny gaped at me. “What the hell are you doing out in the middle of such a terrible storm? Are you crazy?”

I pushed past him. “Where’s Heather?”

She was standing in the doorway to the rest of the house, her hugely pregnant stomach out in front of her, a smirk on her face.

“Where is she?” I snarled. I wanted nothing more than to smack the smirk right off her face, baby or no baby.

“Who?” she said, her voice mocking.

“Dude—” Jonny said, coming around and getting in between me and his wife.

“Jonny, what do you know about your wife?” I asked. “Like what do you know about her father?”

Her face remained impassive. “I never knew my dad.”

“That was true, I think, for most of your life, but it hasn’t been true for a while, has it?” I didn’t wait for her answer—it would have just been a lie anyway—and went on, “You know your father now, don’t you, Heather?”

“You think you’re so damned smart, don’t you?” she jeered.

Jonny looked at her and back at me, his face puzzled.

“Your father is Barney Hogan,” I continued, watching her face. “Your mother left him before you were born, that was true, and you grew up with a different last name—your mother remarried when you were a child, and her second husband’s name is the one you grew up under.”

Her face twisted. “Barney Hogan was my sperm donor, not my father.” She waddled into the living room, her hands pressed into her back. She winced as she sat down on the couch. “He owed me. I didn’t have anything growing up—my mother and stepfather worked their fingers to the fucking bone trying to keep a roof over our heads. So, yeah, when my mother died and she told me who my father really was, I wanted some payback.”

“So, was the scam your idea or his?”

“Hey—I didn’t know he was going to kill people.” She held up her hand. “That wasn’t part of the plan.” She looked over at Jonny. “Nor was falling in love with Jonny—that wasn’t supposed to happen either.”

“What are you talking about?” Jonny’s face was confused, his voice tentative.

“The money, Jonny, it was all about the money.” I shook my head. “Your mother has quite a bit stashed aside—and
so do you.
Even after buying this house, there’s about another hundred thousand in your trust fund.”

“You married me for the trust fund?” He stared at his wife, his face draining of color.

“You think I would have married you for money?”

“Barney was definitely working Mona for hers,” I went on. What I believed were Heather’s motivations were immaterial—the two of them could work that out for themselves. “But what I want to know—what I need to know right the fuck now—is where is he keeping Mona and Abby?”

“Abby?”

“My partner.”

Heather took a deep breath. “He has a fishing cabin out near Manchac, on the edge of the swamp.” She hesitated, but when she saw the look on my face, quickly gave me directions. “That’s where he was keeping Mona. I don’t know anything about no assistant.”

I walked out of the house, and the last thing I heard before the door shut behind me was Jonny saying in a very small voice, “All this time you’ve known where my mom was and didn’t say anything?”

There were a lot of issues to be worked out there.

I started the SUV and headed for the highway. I hesitated—it might be better to call Blaine and Venus, but they were out of their jurisdiction in Manchac—they’d have to call the state troopers and get them involved, the local sheriff, and all the while time would be wasted. I made the decision to call them once I was on I-10 and out of the city.

I headed over to Claiborne Avenue, swearing at slow-moving cars and passing them whenever I could—sometimes illegally. I took the Claiborne entrance on I-10 West, but even on the highway people were driving slowly. I hoped the railroad underpass out past the Citypark exit, which was low and always flooded, had been pumped out. There was a massive pumping station running along the highway out there, so I kept my fingers crossed. The fact that traffic was moving was a good sign—if the underpass was impassable, the traffic would have been backed up all the way to the West Bank.

There was some water, but nothing the cars couldn’t handle—yet they still slowed down and passed through tentatively, like they were afraid the ground would somehow open up and swallow the cars whole if they went faster than ten miles per hour. I swore at all of them, trying to keep calm.

The only reason Mona was still alive was because the other check from Morgan Barras was still not cashed.

It didn’t make sense to me—once Barney knew he couldn’t get his hands on the other check, why not kill her and be done with it, dump her body in the swamp somewhere? Hell, he could have
forged
her name.

But he didn’t know where the check was—and neither had Heather.

Mona had been smart to hide the check. I’d only found it by accident, and I had to admire her courage and resolve in not telling him where it was. It was the only reason he had to keep her alive, and the moment she told him where it was, she was a dead woman. She had to know, and somehow she kept from telling him. Of course, she couldn’t know I’d found it and Jonny had given it to me for safekeeping.

I remembered Jonny’s confusion when he took me to his mother’s—the lights were too bright, the air conditioner too low, which his energy-conscious mother would have never done. Heather had gone over there, to look for the other check.

The check was in my hands, and undoubtedly Jonny had told Heather about it.

That’s when Barney should have killed Mona, when he should have known the game was up. The check was locked up and neither he nor Heather had any way of getting a hold of it—unless he came to my house, held a gun on me, and forced me to turn the check over. He would have had to kill me—and even though he’d killed Robby O’Neill, he seemed to have a real problem with killing people.

So why exactly had he killed Robby O’Neill?

Mona must have told him all about Robby’s money problems—and how she intended to get the money for him. She must have cashed the one check and given it to Robby. That was the part I didn’t get—
why
had he taken Mona? He’d killed Robby and stolen the money—sure, he and Heather had wanted to get their hands on the other cash as well—but that money was for Jonny.

Killing Mona—Jonny would have gotten all the money in his trust and the fifty grand on top of it if she were dead—and Mona’s money would be divided between her three children.

So, why take Mona?

It didn’t make any sense.

I flew past the Loyola exit and drove onto the bridge that led over the Lake Pontchartrain marshes and the Bonne Carre spillway. I hit the speed dial on my phone and cursed when I went straight to Venus’s voicemail. I left her a long and detailed message and told her I was heading out there before hanging up and tossing the phone into the passenger seat. It bounced off and went into the floorboard. I cursed, but couldn’t look away from the road. It was a bumper-to-bumper crawl, and there was no way I could take my eyes away from the taillights in front of me for even a moment.

I eventually made it to the turn-off for I-55 North and breathed a sigh of relief as I left the heavy traffic behind. The Manchac exit I was looking for wasn’t that much farther along, and the fishing camp, while a bit isolated, seemed rather easy to find.

Twenty minutes later I found the dirt road leading back. I parked, blocking the way in and out, and tucked my gun into the back of my pants. The rain was still coming down hard, and the little road had turned into a river of mud. I walked along the gravel on the side, the soft earth giving under my feet, and eventually made me way around to a small clearing with a graying dock out onto the water just beyond what was little more than a shack with a tin roof.

There was a light on, but there was no car in sight.

I crept up to the window and glanced in.

I could see Abby, tied to a chair, a gag tied around her mouth.

There was no one else in sight.

I kicked in the door and stood there, crouched, my gun raised and ready.

A door to my right opened, and I swiveled, ready to shoot.

Mona O’Neill gasped and raised her hands. “Don’t shoot!”

“This is all my fault.” Mona sighed. “I’ve handled all of this so damned badly right from the very start, I deserve whatever comes to me. I’ll go to jail.”

She was sitting at the small table, and I had my gun trained on her. I’d forced her to untie Abby, and now I wanted some answers before we headed back into the city.

“You killed your son, didn’t you?”

Shamefacedly, she nodded. “It was an accident, I swear. I know, I should have called the police, but I panicked. Really, I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. So I called Barney.”

“What happened?”

“She got the money for him, all right,” Abby said, watching her closely as she flexed her arms and legs, trying to get her blood flowing again. It was cold inside the little cabin, and the wind was whipping around it, getting in through cracks in the flimsy walls. The rain kept up a steady drumbeat on the tin roof.

“We argued.” Mona hung her head. “I told him I was done with him—he wasn’t my son after this, and I never wanted to see him or speak to him again, even if it meant not seeing my grandchildren. He was so horrible to me—you have no idea the terrible things he said to me in order to get the money. I’d sold out my baby to Morgan Barras to keep him out of jail, and all he could talk about was that I owed him, that I was a whore, that Jonny was my bastard.” She sighed. “He made me so angry, I couldn’t help it. I just picked up something and whacked him with it. He went down, and just like that—I’d killed my son.” She closed her eyes and hugged herself. “I don’t know how long I stayed there, just thinking oh my God, and cradling him. I got blood all over me. And finally, I called Barney. He told me not to call the police, to stay there, he’d have to wait until the bar closed, but if I waited there, he’d come meet me and fix things.”

“And?”

“When he arrived, we put Robby in his desk chair, and then I cleaned.” Her voice was deadpan, free of any emotion as she remembered the details. “I used bleach—I know that messes up the DNA—and then Barney shot him and fixed it so that his body fell. He said it would look like he got the crack on his head when the chair went over, and that the police wouldn’t really do a whole lot of looking at it—with the two shots, they’d just assume he was shot and that would be it.”

I bit my lower lip. Venus and Blaine were good cops, but the city morgue was overburdened and underfunded. There was a very good chance the coroner would just go through the motions and not look for anything further than the gunshots wounds.

“Barney said the best thing for me to do was hide out here,” she went on. “And I was so crazy I listened to him. I wasn’t in my right mind, you have to understand.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I’d just killed my son! He told me that all I had to do was be gone for a while, and he would fix things. If I just hid out here, we could take the money and disappear together.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but Abby cut me off. “That’s a nice little fairy tale,” she said rather snidely, “but it’s full of holes. But it was a really nice try.” She turned to me. “I went to see Barney at the bar—he drugged me and brought me here. I’ve kept my mouth shut—but I really wanted to hear what lies she’d spin.” Abby laughed. “You’re going to have to do a lot better than that if you want to avoid the death penalty, you miserable old bitch.”