Jan Hambright - Keeping Watch

“I’ll pull the file and we’ll bring him in for questioning. See if his shoe imprint matches the one we found under your studio window the night you were dragged from your home. It doesn’t match the ones we photographed on your kitchen floor that night, so it’s safe to confirm he wasn’t the man who broke in and tried to abduct you. It only quantifies the fact that there are two of them.”

Fear bubbled up again, and she worked to push it back from the edge of her thoughts. She couldn’t function if she let it escape; it would only send her into a cycle of terror she couldn’t defuse.

“Did he leave any evidence at the scene?”

“None that we could find.”

Regret welled inside her. If only she’d have seen the man’s face. She’d love nothing better than to let her pencil and sketch pad reveal him and land him in jail.

“And then there’s this.” He reached for the sketch on top and flipped it over. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

Adelaide stared at the disturbing drawing. Her throat constricted. Looking up, she met his gaze. Lying about the drawing wasn’t going to work. Detective Beckett possessed more determination and persistence than she’d ever be able to challenge.

“It’s a depiction of my death.”

Royce rocked forward in his chair. Leaning across the table, so close she could smell the slightest hint of his sultry aftershave. His handsome features were set in dead-serious resolve, and she let his intensity coil around her, drawing her into the emotion.

“You can’t mean that,” he whispered. “She’s wearing your face, but I’ll be damned if I believe that’s you.”

Brushing the stunning sketch with her gaze for an instant, she again raised her eyes to his. “Then be damned, Detective, because that’s how I’m going to die.”

She dropped her stare back to the haunting image, disturbed by the tone of certainty in her own voice. Certainty, yes, but acceptance? It was the first and best-developed image of the sketches she’d been compelled to draw for weeks now. It depicted her lying faceup in the trunk of a car. Her hands bound in front of her with duct tape. Her hair fanned out around her face. Eyes wide open, lips parted in a silent scream. A deep ugly gash slashed across her throat.

“I believe you saved me from this the other night.” She focused on him. He clamped his teeth together, sending a visible ripple of tension along his jawline.

“This will be my fate, Detective, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

“You can’t believe I’d ever let that happen to you, Adelaide.”

Hope surged inside her for an instant, but dispersed quickly, dragging her back into a reality she couldn’t paddle her way out of.

“I’ve made peace with it. These things happen. God knows in my line of work, I’ve drawn the deplorable things one human being can do to another.”

She reached for her sketches, but he beat her to them and covered her hand with his.

“Effective immediately, I’m posting a uniformed officer outside your home. This nut job is still out there, and you’re not safe until we catch him.”

“I’d like my sketches back. They’re not part of this investigation.” She pulled in a breath, watching Royce’s mouth soften, followed by the rest of his features.

“I’m sorry, but I plan to hang on to them for now.” He removed his hand from over the top of hers and picked up her drawings, then stood up.

“I want you to go home and feel safe. We’re going to catch these people.”

“Thank you, Detective. I’m sure you will.” Someday. She couldn’t embrace his assertion because she knew what she knew, and that truly frightened her.

Royce turned for the door and reached for the knob, just as a knock thumped against the wood.

He pulled it open, feeling like an oppressive weight rested on his shoulders and crushed him into the carpet. He’d consider her outlandish claim, but it was too far out there, like shelving two centuries of knowledge only to again believe the sun revolved around the earth, and the moon stood still.

Zoned out, he glanced at Chief Danbury’s face. He took a step back. Something big must be going on to drag him out of his office and upstairs.

Friction snapped in the air between them and heightened his interest.

The chief raised his hand and acknowledged Adelaide. “Miss Charboneau.” He motioned Royce out into the hallway and pulled the door closed behind him.

“What’s up?” Royce asked.

“I need you to roll on a homicide call that just came in. Detective Hicks and Detective Lawton are already on their way to the scene. A deceased female has been found out in Bucktown on the edge of City Park.” He turned and headed for the elevator. Royce fell in next to him.

“It looks like a ritualistic killing. The body was posed. We may have some sort of a serial killer on our hands.”

Royce absorbed the chief’s information, but it was the word ritualistic that played bad inside his head and raised his caution level. That was his take on the disturbing drawings he carried in his hand right now.

Adelaide Charboneau’s sketches were of ritualistic-style murders and posed female victims. Four, to be exact, excluding the one she claimed would be her own. But only one of the four victims in the sketches had a face. A haunting face he couldn’t get out of his mind.

He tried to relax as they stepped into the elevator, tried to dumb down the persistent feeling of dread growing inside him like kudzu, but the insidious vine had already taken hold, and it couldn’t be uprooted.

WATER AS FAR AS THE EYE COULD see blurred Royce’s vision as he exited Veteran’s Memorial Boulevard, headed due north straight for Bucktown and Lake Pontchartrain. A beautiful view…an ugly place to die.

Deleting his last thought, he sobered, recalling the sketch of Adelaide he’d shuffled into the others and locked in his desk drawer at the station. None of it made sense, at least not within the parameters he used to define the world. How did someone even go about sketching their own murder, much less somebody else’s?

Ahead he saw the flashing lights on police units lined up in succession until he could almost believe they disappeared into the flat gray water. On the opposite side of the street he spotted a WGNO-TV van with its occupants in the process of gearing up.

He eased his car in on the tail of the parade, cinched his tie and stepped out of the air-conditioned car straight into a wall of heat.

Good thing cool-on-the-outside Ice Man Beckett was his motto, but he left his jacket on the front seat and headed into the fray, passing five patrol units before he saw Gina Gantz climbing out of the back of the CSI van.

“You came to the circus,” she said when she saw him, but she wasn’t smiling, and he could always count on her for that.

His nerves pulled tight. “Have you already been to the scene?”

“Yes.” She swallowed.

“How bad?”

“The chief has two more technicians rolling in to help me collect evidence.”

“Brutal?” he asked.

“Creepy is more like it. No blood, no gore. Just a beautiful young woman, murdered and posed for some sick reason.”

Royce took a deep breath and settled in next to her as she walked toward a perimeter of yellow crime-scene tape.

He flashed his badge to the uniformed officer guarding the scene, lifted the crime tape and followed Gina underneath it. Glancing down toward the water, he spotted Detectives Hicks and Lawton standing with several other officers.

His skin was pretty thick. Armored in fact, but it came with the job. It had to.

Hicks glanced up, spotting him as he stepped closer.

“Detective Beckett.”

Nodding to the detective who outranked him by a couple of months, he got his first look at the victim.