The Heat (7 page)

Jennings swallowed and he knew that the man on the other end of the line most likely heard it, it was so loud. The lump in his throat was too big and too dry. “Yes, sir. I understand.”

Yellow tape had been draped across both ends of the neighborhood street, so Daniel parked at the end of the road and another officer lifted the tape for him as he ducked beneath it.

Already, Daniel could smell the blood, and the Mayor’s house was still several hundred yards away. From behind the mask of a pair of mirrored sunglasses, Daniel cocked his head to the side and lifted his nose ever so slightly. He’d expected to catch Cole’s scent right away. After all, if he’d been able to detect him on a busy city street such as the one beside the cantina where Lily and her friends had been dining, then surely he’d be able to pick it up outside of the scene of a bloody crime that Cole had committed.

But his scent wasn’t there. At least, it wasn’t discernible yet, anyway.

Daniel’s teeth clenched and a cold sensation settled at the base of his spine. Surreptitiously, he scanned the area around the crime scene. The coroner’s van was parked near the curb; behind it was an ambulance, its lights flashing but its sirens silent. A fire truck effectively blocked entrance and exit from the other side of the street, its long shining red body nose to bumper from sidewalk to sidewalk.

Civilians had gathered all along the perimeter of the scene; frightened and curious neighbors, some of them pillars of high society. Daniel would have to deal with them himself. When it came to those whose money was the life blood of Baton Rouge, public relations required a certain amount of personal finesse.

A news crew had already arrived. Daniel could hear them with their rapid-fire chirping of questions, directed toward any officer who was careless enough to meander within ten feet of the woman with the microphone.

Several more news crews were undoubtedly on their way. Daniel sighed and his gut clenched. It was bad news when the media arrived at the scene of a crime before the Police Chief did. He would have to come up with some kind of excuse. He seriously doubted that, “Sorry, I had to mark my intended mate” was going to fly with Channel Nine or the six-o-clock viewing public.

A medical team was just exiting the Mayor’s mansion. As they stepped out the double front doors, they peeled off latex gloves and the small blue-white booties that they’d had pulled over their shoes. Daniel approached them and the coroner looked up. “Chief,” he said. Daniel nodded once in greeting. It was a somber greeting for a somber occasion.

The coroner’s gray-white hair was slightly frizzy in the post-storm humidity and his contacts were easily discernible against the bloodshot, yellow-white of his tired eyes. His face looked like a road map of forced, sympathetic smiles and deep, sincere frowns. His name was Jeffrey Hershel and he’d been the coroner for twenty-nine years.

Daniel had noticed, over the years, that people tended to start to look a lot like whatever it was they did for a living. Pastry chefs always got fat and smelled like chocolate. Rock stars began to dress and dye their hair until they were as colorful as their lyrics. Plumbers always started to look like shit, eventually. And after being around enough dead bodies, Jeffrey Hershel had begun to take on the appearance of a corpse. Not an easy job. It made Daniel wonder whether, as a peace keeper, he himself walked around looking like living, breathing crime.

Detective Aiden Knight sidled up to stand next to the coroner. He was a ruggedly handsome, tall, well-built man, nearly the same height as Daniel. His shoulder-length, brown hair was carelessly trimmed. He had stark amber eyes, but there was a darkness around them and the stubble on his chin lent him the air of one who hadn’t enjoyed the luxury of sleep or a shave in quite some time. He had a small black notebook in his hand. “Chief,” he greeted Daniel.

Again Daniel nodded. He sighed, glancing once toward the front door behind them and the horror that waited inside. “What have we got, gentlemen?”

“Housekeeper and piano teacher found the body this morning at around eleven thirty a.m. Housekeeper arrived to find the piano teacher sitting on the porch, waiting to be let in. Apparently, she’d had lessons scheduled for eleven. Housekeeper has a key.” Detective Knight gestured to a pair of women who stood off to one side, next to the yellow tape, their shivering forms wrapped in blankets, despite the midday warmth. They were clearly in a state of mild shock.

“Have you had a medic tend to them?” Daniel asked.

“Yes, sir. They were each given a sedative, but we’ve asked them to remain on site for questioning.”

Daniel nodded again. He could sense, at this point, that he was delaying the inevitable. He didn’t want to go inside. The Mayor hadn’t been the closest friend Daniel had ever had – but he was close enough. Daniel had enjoyed dinner with his family on more than one occasion, and every holiday season they exchanged gifts in the warm and friendly environment of the Mayor’s home.

It wouldn’t be a warm and friendly environment now.

As if sensing his boss’s hesitation, Detective Knight leaned over and spoke softly near Daniel’s ear. “Everything has been photographed and tagged, Chief. All we need is your eye and your statement.”

Daniel nodded. He took a deep, steadying breath and nodded again, as if to reassure himself. The detective handed him a pair of gloves and booties and Daniel slipped them on. Both men then stepped to the side and Chief Daniel Kane entered the Mayor’s home.

From the first sound of his muffled boot on the marble tiles of the foyer, Daniel sensed the immense difference that death brings into a home. It isn’t just the silence where there should be music and the clanging of pots and pans, a television or stereo playing, a child’s laughter. It was not just the smell, which for him was particularly telling. Instead of cinnamon potpourri or the lingering cloy of honeysuckle stuck to the bottom of someone’s shoe, it smelled like flash bulbs and silicone and the graphite of pencil leads. It smelled like blood and urine and fear and gunpowder.

But it wasn’t just the smell, either.

No. It was something else. There was almost a new vibration in the air. Or, a lack thereof. It was as if life itself had resided in the home, an entity reminiscent of waves of light and sound – and now it was gone. And the air was bare. Empty. Stale.

It was almost unbeatable. Daniel found himself holding his breath as he marched, like a man on the green mile, down the hallway to where the stench of death became strongest.

It was the little girl he saw first, and Daniel froze in his tracks, instantly recalling the feel of her weight on the tops of his boots as he’d danced with her last Christmas. He instantly heard her laughter. And he was almost undone.

“Chief?” Knight was beside him; the two were alone, but for the bodies of the fallen in the living room around them. “You okay?”

Daniel shook his head. Once. But he said nothing. His gaze skirted from the sleeping child to her mother and then to her father, the Mayor.

He could smell them all here. Not just their blood, but them. The people that they once were. He could smell the Mayor’s aftershave and his wife’s perfume and his daughter’s bubble gum.

Layered over these scents, like sand solidifying fossils, were other scents.

Gunpowder. Daniel spotted the gun, where it had been tagged and bagged beside the Mayor’s body. He knew, even without looking at it closely, that the chamber was empty. There was enough gunpowder residue along its barrel and coated, like invisible dust over the furniture and floor in the living room to tell him that much.

There was the remnant scent of the police officers who had come and gone, their tired sweat, the starch of their uniforms, the deodorant they kept in their lockers at the station. He could smell traces of the medical team that had investigated the scene. Their plastic gloves and disinfectant. And even the carbon from the flashes used by the crime scene photographer left a faint signature.

The scent of one officer, in particular, was of interest to Daniel. “Jennings is here?” Daniel found himself asking. His voice sounded dead, even to his own ears.

“Yes, sir. He and Mayfield were the first on the scene. They’re outside. Jennings said he had some information for you anyway, so he’d wait to talk to you.”

Daniel nodded. Or he thought he did, anyway. It was difficult to tell. As he gazed down at the bodies of the family he’d known so well, his body felt far away and foreign.

He was losing it.

He turned, slightly, as if to speak to Knight alone, and barely managed to pull his eyes off of the blood-splattered Hello Kitty doll that rested a few inches from the little girl’s deathly still fingers.

Though he spoke in a whisper that only the detective could hear, the tone of his voice was so low, so dangerously angry that anyone hearing it would have paled at the sound. “I can’t smell Cole here.” It was a statement, simple and hard. “Can you?”

“I just handcuffed and marked my mate against her will and without any kind of explanation and then had to leave her alone in my bed because Cole shows up in town at the same time that she does.
Coincidence?
” He whipped off his mirrored sunglasses, and gazed at the detective. “I seriously fucking doubt it. So why can’t I smell that British bastard here?” he hissed, furiously. “I
know
he’s here. I
know
he did this.” Daniel roughly gestured to the mess around him. “He did this so that he could get to Lily when I have no choice but to leave her alone and unprote-”

At once, Aiden ripped the shades out of his chief’s grip and opened them back up again, sliding them over Daniel’s ears and slamming them back into place. Daniel winced slightly when the metal hit the bridge of his nose, but it seemed to snap him out of whatever had taken hold of him. He blinked, realizing that he was trembling with some unfamiliar emotion.

Aiden glanced around them, making certain they were alone before speaking. “If you left her alone, then assign someone to watch over her and don’t waste time about it, boss. As for where Cole is and why we can’t scent him here – we’ll deal with that right after we tend to the Mayor’s relatives and the media.” Aiden leaned in close to peer directly into the mirrored darkness behind his boss’s shades. “You need to
breathe
, Chief,” he said. “Reign the wolf in. Your eyes are glowing.”

Daniel gazed at his friend for a long, silent moment. And then he straightened. After a moment, he nodded. Aiden was right.

This wasn’t Daniel’s first rodeo. It
was
, perhaps, his roughest. But not his first.

He could handle this. He just had to think. Take care of business. He took a slow, deep breath and ran a hand through his thick blue-black hair. He
had
planned on putting an officer out in front of his house. But in his haste to get to the Mayor’s mansion; in his harried state of –
discomfort
– and anger, he’d neglected to do it.

At least Tabitha was there. Or, should be anyway. He hated to admit it, but despite the fact that his sister had kept Lily’s secret from him for all of these years and he was definitely peeved at her for it, he was certainly depending on her a lot right now. If Lily woke up while Daniel was gone and Tabitha was there alone with her, his little sister would have to explain….
Everything
.

“I’m going out to speak with Jennings. Try to find some way to deal with the media until I can get there,” he told the detective. He would get the information he needed from Jennings and then send Jennings and Mayfield to the house.

The detective nodded and stepped aside so that Daniel could pass.

Outside, the crowd had thickened and all of the other news crews had arrived. When they saw Daniel coming out of the mansion, they began shouting at him almost at once. They were sharks and they had smelled blood in the water and they wouldn’t be held off for long. Daniel’s jaw tensed and his gums ached where his fangs had been dying to make an appearance for the last hour.

He kept them at bay and made his way to where officer Allan Jennings stood, waiting inside the yellow tape beside an ancient, moss-draped oak tree. He held a white coffee cup in each hand and when Daniel approached, he held one out for him.

“I’m sorry, Chief.” Jennings spoke softly. “Rough day.” His expression was one of genuine regret.

Daniel nodded and took the cup. “Thanks.” He could smell the coffee, deep and black and free of cream or sugar. He could smell other things, as well.

He could scent the Mayor on Jennings. There was the incredibly faint but cloying scent of the Mayor’s aftershave and the starch of his tailored suit hanging around the officer.

It made sense. Knight had told Daniel that Jennings was the first to arrive on the scene.

Daniel looked down at his coffee. He considered taking a sip, but his stomach turned a little at the thought. There was too much going on inside of his mind – and his body – at the moment. So, instead, he held the coffee in his hand and asked, “You were the one to find the Mayor and his family?” He wanted to ask about Cole. It was all he really wanted to know. But he was the Police Chief for a reason, and his job took precedence. The Mayor had been murdered. There was a protocol to follow.

“I responded to the call, sir. I was just down the street when the maid and the piano teacher found the bodies.”

“And Mayfield?” Daniel asked. Mayfield was Allan’s partner and the two were nearly inseparable.