Touch of Evil (4 page)

And that the one woman he’d actually been sleeping with refused to be seen with him.

Still, it was a hell of a lot easier on a man’s ego to be looked up to than pitied. For a moment, Ross considered inviting Kenneth to join his morning workouts, but there was no way Fleming could keep up with the pace Ross had been setting these last few weeks as he steadily rebuilt his stamina.

“Why don’t you go home and get some rest now.” Kenneth gestured magnanimously toward the door. Through its glass, security lights strove vainly to keep the night at bay. “I’ll hold over for you. Cover the first half of your shift tomorrow.”

“I’ll take you up on that, Ken. Just don’t expect me to cover any more of your screwups in return.”

At his car, Ross stripped off his lab coat and pulled on a denim jacket against the evening chill. Late or not, he meant to track down Laney.

He started out by driving to Aunt Ava’s, where Laney had been living, the last he’d heard. Though not nearly as grand as Ross’s mother’s home, the handsome Craftsman bungalow belonging to her twin sister was located in the historic area near downtown’s antique and gift shops. When he pulled up at the curb, Ross found the gray-and-white house dark. The gas lamppost was unlit, too, though it normally burned all night.

With both his aunt and mother out of town, Ross made a mental note to check the lamp on his day off. Hitting one of the speed-dial numbers on his cell phone, he climbed out of the old convertible. “Come on, Laney,” he muttered as he opened the painted iron gate and let himself into the yard. But the phone in his aunt’s house went unanswered.

Surely, in a town as small as Dogwood, the news of Caleb LeJeune’s death had quickly reached her. But the question
was, had Laney barricaded herself inside to weep over the loss of the band she’d referred to as “her life” or gone to one of her sisters’, cousins’, or friends’ houses so as not to be alone?

Ross puffed out a breath, frustrated by the thought of a long night spent tracking her down—not to mention the anthill he’d be kicking by alarming his drama-prone relations.
Please be inside, Laney,
he thought as he climbed the porch’s stairs and knocked at the front door.

No one answered, but through the lace sheer covering the sidelight window, he spotted a sight that made his heart jerk painfully in his chest…

Silhouetted by a dim light shining from the rear of the house, a rope dangled in the kitchen doorway. Suspended above one of his aunt’s dining chairs, the hangman’s noose gaped like an empty socket, waiting for its neck.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root…

—From “Strange Fruit,” Abel Meeropol,
in a poem later set to music and
performed by Billie Holliday

“Laney,” Ross shouted, praying he could stop her as he fumbled for the key Aunt Ava had given him. It took him three tries to fit it into the lock and turn it, an interval he measured in the wild gallop of his own pulse, the shallow burn of his breath.

The front door swung open and he rushed inside, his hand flipping on a light switch as he repeated his cousin’s name.

Sound came at him from two opposite directions: an incongruously raucous burst of song—accordion and fiddle with a washboard scrape of rhythm—tumbling down the hallway, along with the quieter but unmistakable
creeeeak-click
of the back screen door closing.

Ross charged past the dangling noose, knocking the chair onto its side as he raced into the kitchen. With his mind on the string of suicides, he thought of nothing but catching Laney before she had the chance to do herself harm, most likely after listening to recordings of her late band.

His gut dropped like a stone when he heard her voice behind him.

“What are you
doing,
Ross?”

He wheeled around to see his cousin, who stood trembling as she stared wide-eyed at the noose. With her wavy, dark
brown hair sliding out of a long ponytail, her face splotchy, and her lashes clumped with tears, she wore sweatpants with a T-shirt—and clutched a wooden bat in her hands.

“Is this some kind of sick joke?” Always a small woman, barely topping five feet, she sounded shaken-up, bewildered.

“Someone was in here,” he said, gesturing toward the laundry room. “I saw that rope through the front window. When I came in, I heard the door shut.”

He hurried to the laundry room as Laney flipped on lights. Though the screen door had closed, the inner door, normally left locked, stood ajar.

As he started through it, his cousin gripped his arm. “Don’t go out there.”

Taking the bat from her hands, he stepped out onto the back steps, where he scanned the yard for any movement. But without the aid of streetlights, it was even darker out here than in the front yard. And thick bushes, his aunt’s prized crape myrtles and oleanders, offered far too many hiding places for anyone who might be lurking.

“I’m calling nine-one-one.” Laney spoke to him through the screen door, a cordless phone in her hand. “Please, Ross. Come inside. Anyone who would do
this
…” She glanced back toward the kitchen, her gaze fixed on the noose. “They wouldn’t hesitate to hurt you. And I couldn’t…I couldn’t stand to see you murdered. Like all the rest of them.”

Tuesday, October 20

“This is garbage, bullshit.” Justine’s chief deputy, Roger Savoy, stalked the hospital room as he spoke, walking back and forth through a shaft of morning sunlight and gripping a Styrofoam cup of coffee so hard, Justine half expected it to explode at any moment. “You wait. It’s going to turn out this is nothing but a hoax.”

She had seen Roger this agitated on only one prior occasion,
when the recount she’d demanded swung the election in her favor.

“Stand still and explain. Please.” Though Justine’s doctor had cleared her to go home as soon as the paperwork was finished, her brain felt wrapped in woolen blankets, and pain shafted through her skull when she tried to follow Roger with her eyes. At least she was dressed to leave the hospital, in the jeans, chambray blouse, and Western boots her father had picked up from her home. A dark suit might have lent her more authority, but she felt a hell of a lot more in control than she had in the butt-baring cotton gown she’d worn overnight.

Mercifully, Roger stopped his pacing. “I think that girl hung the noose up there herself, just so she could holler ‘hate crime.’”

After moving from the bed to a chair, Justine skewered him with her most incredulous look. “Why would Laney Thibodeaux want to do a thing like that?”

Savoy’s expression soured. “So she could get the FBI in here, tromping all over our investigation.”

“Because…?” Justine prompted.

“Because she claims there’s a conspiracy, of all the damned things. Says those suicides weren’t suicides at all, but some kind of elaborate scheme to shut down her group.”

“I wasn’t aware the dance-hall and party-band circuit was so cutthroat,” Justine said wryly. “But what makes you think she set this up?”

“Aside from the way she acted, there was no sign of forced entry,” Roger said, “even though she swears she had the doors locked.”

“So why didn’t she hear this break-in?”

“Back in her bedroom listening to music in the dark is what she told me. Listening to recordings of her band and imagining all sorts of craziness. Acted suspicious, if you ask
me. Right off, said something about a noose being an instrument of intimidation to a person of color.”

Justine, who hadn’t grown up in Dogwood and sometimes missed the small town’s subtext, didn’t follow. “She considers herself black?”

Justine had interviewed the singer to determine whether Jake Willets had seemed especially despondent after his friend Hart’s death. Laney Thibodeaux was a tiny thing, with long, dark hair and striking hazel eyes that held a kittenish appeal. Neither her facial features nor her complexion made her racial makeup obvious. Because both Laney’s late boyfriend and her mother had been white, Justine—if she’d thought of it at all—had made the same assumption about Laney.

“She says her daddy was half black and the teachers around here made her check that box her whole life. So she’s damned well checking it right now,
using
it to try and force us to come up with another explanation for her friends’ deaths. Because she can’t accept the true one.”

As little as Justine liked Roger, she trusted his instincts on this. It did indeed sound as if Laney Thibodeaux might be playing them, especially since she hadn’t said a single word earlier to indicate she doubted the medical examiner’s ruling. The way Justine remembered it, Laney had blamed herself for her boyfriend’s death, had cried over how she might have stopped him if she’d only paid closer attention to Jake’s mood.

Had Caleb LeJeune’s death sent her plummeting into the realm of shadowy conspiracy? Unhinged by guilt and grief, did she indeed find murder easier to handle than a rash of suicides?

Justine shivered as the fine hairs rose behind her neck. “Is she back home now?” If Laney had chosen to stay there, after the alleged break-in and what she claimed was a terrorist
threat against her, she was either uncommonly brave or flatout lying. “Maybe I could stop by for a chat on my way home.”

Neither Justine’s family doctor nor her father would think much of the idea, but she wanted to get her own read on this situation.

“We have her at headquarters right now. She got a little out of hand when she figured we weren’t going for her story. Started getting hysterical and…well, she pushed Deputy Baker a little.”

Justine closed her eyes. “Tell me you haven’t charged her with anything.”

She could all too clearly imagine her department linked to news stories reporting that they’d arrested a grieving, and highly photogenic, mixed-race “victim” of an alleged hate crime. Such a story would go nationwide in a heartbeat, with all too many predisposed to believe the South still harbored lynch mobs.

Both the FBI and protesters would swoop in, exactly as they had in the now-infamous locales of Vidor in East Texas and Jena, Louisiana. It wouldn’t matter that two of the three men found hanging here had been white. That detail would be lost in the rush to paint their town, which depended upon its reputation as a friendly tourist destination, as uniformly racist.

On a personal level, Justine saw another risk as well: that Ross Bollinger would try to intervene on his cousin’s behalf. Last night, Justine’s injury might have trumped the bitterness between them, but with Laney under fire, it would all come roaring back.

“Don’t worry. I knew better,” Roger assured her. “I explained to Miss Thibodeaux’s cousin that we’re keeping her for her own safety.”

“Her cousin,” Justine repeated. “You mean the doctor, the one who treated me?”

“That’s the one. And we have the girl in an interview room, not a holding cell. I’m heading in to interview her, if she’s calmed down.”

“Thanks, Roger.” Maybe losing the election had finally taught him to cover his own ass, along with the department’s. “Still, maybe I should come in and—”

A tapping at the door interrupted, but instead of her father returning with her discharge papers, as Justine expected, Ross Bollinger stepped inside the room.

At the sight of him, Justine’s stomach clutched. Not so much because of his cleft-chinned good looks and the linebacker physique that struck her every time she saw him, but because this was the first time she had seen him looking so tired and disheveled, with his sandy-colored hair mussed and the collar of his untucked polo-style shirt awry. No white coat this time, and he looked furious, as she had never seen him.

“You people have my cousin in custody,” Ross began, “for no reason whatsoever.”

You people.
Justine gritted her teeth, and Roger bristled, as he was all too prone to do. But before he could say something unfortunate, Justine stood and intervened.

“Chief Deputy Savoy was just telling me,” she said, “how he had Miss Thibodeaux brought in for her own safety. We’re taking her suspicions seriously, and we’re especially concerned about last night’s break-in at her home.”

Ross locked gazes with her, clearly trying to discern whether he was being bullshitted. Justine, who could bullshit in her sleep if need be, didn’t bat an eye. And why should she, simply because she’d given in to weakness, to loneliness, with this man for a short time?

So what if he’d hurt her when he’d abruptly told her it was over? Wasn’t she the one who’d set the ground rule,
No regrets?

Ross looked away first, turning his glare on Savoy. “That’s
right, Deputy. It
was
a break-in, and not some setup my cousin threw together for attention.”

“No one’s saying that.” Justine raised her palms in a bid for peace.

“
He
said it, last night,” Ross insisted, “or he might as well have.”

“I’m sorry if you got that impression, Doctor.” Savoy tried for sincerity, but Justine heard resentment. Resentment of the political realities that forced him to back away from his gut instinct.

She heard something else as well: that he’d already lost his objectivity in this case. That he’d automatically discounted Thibodeaux’s suspicions.

“Impression, my ass,” Ross said. “You might as well have called my cousin a liar to her face. I’ll vouch for her, and if that’s not good enough, my whole family will tell you Laney’s never been the type to—”

“Dr. Bollinger—Ross,” Justine cut in, keeping her tone firm rather than trying to compete in volume. “We’re all feeling the impact of these deaths, the whole community. And I can only imagine how your cousin must be feeling. These were her friends, people she worked with every day. And she told me she’d been living with Jake Willets.”

Surprise registered in Ross’s gray eyes, as if he hadn’t known his cousin had been shacked up with Jake in his apartment. But it took the doctor only a moment to regroup. “So what’re you implying? That Laney’s so grief-stricken, she would pretend to break into her own house and—”

“Miss Thibodeaux wouldn’t need to bother breaking into her mother’s home,” Roger interrupted, displaying the condescending attitude that had likely cost him the election. “She’s got a key, the same as you do.”

Bollinger glared a challenge. “So are you accusing her or me now?”

“No one’s accusing you of anything.” Justine shot her deputy
a warning look. “Or anyone else, either. Not until we have all the facts.”

“My aunt gave me the key”—Ross shot Savoy another dark look, as if daring him to contradict—“so I could help keep things up around the house. I know my aunt’s place inside and out, the shed, the garage, the attic. And I’ve never seen any rope like that one on the premises.”

“Looked brand-new to me,” Savoy said. “Still kinked from the package.”

Bollinger fixed Savoy with another annoyed look. “So you’re thinking my cousin went out and bought a new rope and somehow managed to tie a perfect hangman’s knot. How many young women do you think even know how to do that?”

“How many young women sing for a band named Hangman’s Bayou?” Roger fired back. “Which might’ve given her—hell, it could’ve given the whole bunch more than a passing interest in noose making. Noose making and noose history. Maybe she used that know-how to make us believe this ridiculous conspiracy theory of hers.”

“
You’re
the one who’s being ridiculous.” Stalking toward the door, Ross said, “
My
old college roommate’s a criminal defense attorney down in Houston. I’m calling him right now.”

“Roger, I need you to step outside for a few minutes,” Justine said. “I want to speak to Dr. Bollinger alone.”

“You’re hurt,” Savoy told her. “You shouldn’t be worrying about this. I’d expect the doc here to know that better than anybody.”

He sounded almost protective, Justine marveled. If she hadn’t known for a fact how he felt about her, she would have been impressed.

“It’s all right, Roger. But if you see my dad out there, would you mind asking him if he could hold up for a few minutes?” Knowing her father, he’d be swapping law enforcement war stories with Savoy in no time.

“I’ll be standing right outside. That I promise you.” Roger leveled a meaningful gaze at Ross.

As the door closed behind the deputy, the testosterone in the air thinned noticeably, and Ross had the grace to look contrite. “He’s right. I’m sorry, Justine. I was so worried over Laney that I barged in here and—”

“No need to apologize,” Justine said, eager to defuse this situation. “I want to know what’s happening. With the case. With you, Ross.”

As if she’d struck a nerve, he winced. Which seemed strange to Justine, considering that
he
had been the one who had refused to settle for a strictly physical affair.