John Ringo - Princess of Wands

“Evie did a runner two weeks ago,” Dolores replied. “Lots of the girls have. New Orleans don’t seem like a good place to be right now. I don’t know where she went, maybe Baton Rouge, maybe St. Louis.”

“Nobody saw Marsha after she was talking with Carlane?” Kelly asked.

“You think it’s Carlane?” Dolores responded, eyes wide. “He’s been around since before I got here.”

“No,” Kelly said. “That’s not what I said. I’m just getting old and trying to cut down on the walking. Since I’m looking for the last person she was known to have talked to, which is never the murderer, I’m just trying to figure out who that was. If it wasn’t Carlane, who was it?”

“Christy said she saw her late evening, maybe after midnight,” Dolores replied, frowning in thought. “Up Dumaine Street, off her regular beat. Looked like she was heading somewhere. But last time I saw her was talking to Carlane and she ain’t been seen since Saturday night.”

“Okay,” Kelly said, sighing. “You see Carlane, tell him I’m looking for him, like him to give me a call. Just a friendly conversation. Or I can go find him, or have the black and whites go find him, and it won’t be so friendly.”

“I’ll pass it on,” Dolores said. “You be careful.”

“Always,” Kelly replied, walking off into the crowded night.

You get anything talking to the girls?” Lieutenant Chimot asked.

They were going over the daily take on the case. The department had set up a task force with Chimot, who was one of the three lieutenants in Homicide, in charge. It was late, but nobody was getting much sleep as long as the investigation was going on. There were five other sergeant detectives working the case but Kelly sort of figured if anybody was going to find the perp it would be him. The other detectives were straight-arrow homicide dicks; in other words they could just about see lightning and hear thunder.

Most homicides were pretty straightforward investigations. There was a dead body on the floor and a person, usually a spouse, standing over it mumbling about whatever had set them off. File the paperwork, go to court, walk the jury through the chain of evidence and you were done. Then there were the gang shootings, which usually came down to somebody boasting and squeezing the name out of a singer.

Serial killers were different. They usually worked alone and they were generally smart, often very smart. They covered their tracks. Talk about profiles all you wanted, they didn’t fit in happy little categories. They could be black, white, Hispanic or more mixed than Tiger Woods. They could be single or married. They might frequent hookers or avoid them like the plague. No two were ever exactly the same, whatever profilers tried to say. They were not all, or even mostly, single white males with a “loner” personality. The Green River killer had been a married white male who was referred to as “exuberant.” The Atlanta killings perp was a single black male. The Los Rios killer had been a married Hispanic.

And this case was right off the charts. Very rarely did serial killings involve multiple individuals. There had been one series in California that involved two killers and a case in Charlotte that had involved six or seven. But in the latter case, one of the killers turned evidence before they’d killed more than one girl. The last case he could think of that had involved high multiples perps and multiple killings was the Manson case.

The one near constant was that they tended to start with hookers and eventually worked their way to… tastier game. Nobody wanted a gutted corpse, but by the same token there was a much higher interest in missing schoolgirls than in hookers. Kelly liked the streetgirls for all they could be a pain in the ass. But they chose their jobs and they knew the risks. He didn’t want to be there when a black bag got slit open to show some junior high girl who had been snatched walking home from the bus. Or some oblivious college girl who had just been trying to have a good time on Bourbon Street.

“Dolores saw her talking to Carlane sometime Saturday night,” Kelly said, glancing at his notes. “And she was seen later, alone, on Dumaine Street. I’m going to talk to Carlane but I’d say it’s a dead-end.”

“Who’s Carlane?” Detective Weller asked.

“Pimp,” Chimot answered. “Been around for at least twenty years. Bastard to his girls, but…”

“But why would he all of a sudden start offing them, right?” Kelly said. “And none of the girls were from his string; they were all independents.”

“Trying to increase his take?” Chimot said. “Not really his MO, though, is it?”

“No,” Kelly agreed. “But I’ll talk to him. Right now, it’s the only lead we’ve got.”

The town couldn’t be called a one-horse town because there wasn’t enough grass for a horse to eat. It was basically a slightly wider, slightly drier spot in the swamp. There was a dilapidated courthouse, a small Piggly Wiggly, a closed gas station and an old mansion that had a sign out front that said “Thibideau House.” Since there was a “Vacant” sign next to it, she had to assume it was the town’s lone hotel and there was a light on that revealed a large, covered front porch.

She parked around the side and went to the front, hoping that the light meant somebody was still awake. The door was open so she pushed on it and listened to the creak with a slight sense of humor. You don’t get good creaks like that every day. They need either real artistry to create or just years of neglect. It was more than the hinges, the whole wall seemed to creak as the door swung open.

She poked her head through the open door and looked inside curiously. The ornate foyer was in as bad condition as the exterior. The house had clearly once been a prime residence to someone addicted to gilt and red velvet. Time and the elements had worked their way on the foyer, however, to an even greater extent than on the door. She cat walked across the floor, just to make sure none of the flooring was going to give way. But there appeared to be no one in sight.

“Cooee?” she called, trying not to laugh. “Anybody home?”

All she needed was to be broken down by the side of the road for the bad movie impression to be complete. No, there should be a—

“You be late, missus,” a husky voice said from her right. Stepping through the door Barb could see an old black woman rocking next to the empty reception desk. “You be very late.”

“I’d say I was lost, but I don’t know if it counts if you’re trying,” Barbara said, grinning and walking all the way into the dimly lit lobby.

“Only counts if you don’t want to be lost, missus,” the black woman said, grinning back. “Been tryin to get lost my-own-self before. Always find my way back home.”

“Nice place,” Barb said. “I don’t suppose there’s a room available?”

“We bout full up of empty rooms, missus,” the woman said, getting to her feet creakily and going behind the desk. She swung an old fashioned ledger around and pointed to a line. “Need your name and address and such and your make of car and tag. If’n you don’t know the tag, jest a description will do.”

Barbara picked up the old pen tied to the ledger with fishing line and after trying to get it to work dug in her purse for her own. Finally she had the ledger filled out.

“Be thirty dollar a night,” the woman said. “Don’t take no plastic. If you ain’t got the cash, you can pay me tomorrow.”

“I’ve got cash,” Barb said, trying not to smile again. It was so charmingly informal it reminded her of Malaysia. The back areas, not Kuala Lumpur which was just New York with worse humidity and drainage. She dug out two twenties, crisp from an ATM and received a crumpled five and five incredibly dirty ones in change. She hadn’t felt so at home in years.