Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
The investigation had made him visible. He would continue investigating—visibly, predictably, exactly as expected.
But behind that performance, he would hunt.
The architect wanted him distracted. The factions wanted him managed.
He would give them what they expected.
And while they watched, he would find the hand that had set this trap—and remove it from the board.
ELEVEN
Baptiste called before dawn.
Bastien stood at his window on Dauphine Street, watching the last figures of the Quarter’s night population dissolve into doorways and side streets. He had not slept. The decision from the previous night sat in his chest alongside the curse—he would stop following the trail the killer laid and start cutting across it. He would stop being bait. He would hunt.
His phone lit against the sill, and Baptiste’s name filled the screen.
“Where.”
“Tremé. Old Creole townhouse on Governor Nicholls, just off Claiborne. Abandoned, maybe ten years.” Baptiste kept his voice low and even, but a tightness in the vowels pulled them half a note higher than they should have rested. Bastien had heard that tightness only twice before. “You’ll want to see this yourself.”
“Contained?”
“Quiet. No NOPD, no witnesses. A contact in the Arceneaux network found it and called me direct. I’ve held at the threshold.”
“Twenty minutes.”
He pocketed the phone and took the stairs to the street.
August hit him the moment the door opened. Humid air wrapped his skin, thick and wet, carrying the heat that the city’s brick and plaster had absorbed throughout the day and now pushed back into a night too saturated to accept it. The temperature had not dropped below eighty-six in eleven days. New Orleans in high summer did not cool. It relented in the hours between four and six, and then the heat returned.
The drive to Tremé passed through the Quarter’s predawn register. Delivery trucks idled on Decatur. A saxophone case leaned against a lamppost on Royal, its owner asleep on a bench ten feet away. Stray cats crossed Burgundy in the headlights, their shadows long and liquid on the pavement. Bastien turned onto Rampart, and the Quarter gave way to the neighborhood that had carried the brass bands and the second lines and the Mardi Gras Indians and the shotgun houses through two centuries of flood and rebuilding and flood again.
Governor Nicholls Street waited under the amber wash of the city’s sodium lights. The townhouse sat between a renovated double-gallery and a vacant lot where a building had stood before the storm took it. The two-story Creole construction wore its stucco exterior in cracks that mapped decades of settling and neglect. Boards covered the ground-floor windows from inside. A wrought-iron balcony on the second story listed to the left, its supports rusted through. A ligustrum hedge had consumed the side passage, dark leaves pressing against the walls, swallowing the gap between house and fence one season at a time.
Baptiste stood at the front entrance, where a door hung on one hinge, its lock forced months or years ago. He was tall and broad through the shoulders, his dark skin catching the streetlight’s amber glow. He wore what he always wore for fieldwork—dark jacket, practical shoes. His hands hung at his sides and did not move. They should have moved. Baptiste’s hands talked when he talked, punctuated his points, adjusted his cuffs, carried his thoughts into the air between him and whoever he addressed. Tonight they stayed flat against his thighs.
“How long ago?” Bastien asked.
“I arrived forty minutes back. Haven’t crossed the main room’s threshold. The contact’s gone—I sent him home.”
Bastien stepped past him and entered the townhouse.
The foyer opened into a hallway where plaster walls had crumbled in patches, exposing the lathe beneath. Dust coated the floor in a layer thick enough to hold footprints, and Bastien found two sets—Baptiste’s, running from the front door to the edge of the main room and back, and a second, smaller set entering from a rear door and moving in a single direct line toward the interior. The contact had walked in, reached the main room, and walked out. No one else had disturbed the dust.
The smell arrived in layers. Mildew came first, the permanent stink of enclosed spaces in a city built on a swamp. Old wood followed—cypress and pine, the bones of a house built before the Civil War, still holding its shape through the stubbornness of materials chosen by builders who understood what humidity would demand. Beneath the mildew and the wood, faint copper reached him. Blood, but restrained, permitted to exist only in the quantity the killer required.
Beneath the copper, rot threaded through everything else. Not the organic collapse of flesh surrendering to the processes that followed death, but the townhouse itself dying—wood returning to the earth it had been cut from, plaster returning to powder, iron returning to rust. That dying mixed with the smell of the body Bastien had not yet seen, and the combination produced a silence that pressed against his eardrums with the density of held breath.