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  Prologue

  A blue jay swooped in and perched on the naked cherub’s toe. Too conceited to splash in the fountain with the abandon of the lowly sparrow, the jay took one sip of water, then jetted from the courtyard. He seemed disdainful of the serenity enclosed within the old brick walls which were covered with clinging, flowering vines. Bumblebees buzzed industriously among the pastel blossoms. Hanging baskets of ferns still dripped from a predawn shower. On the waxy leaves of philodendrons and camellia bushes, drops of rainwater glistened in the bright sunlight.

  “So Rapunzel let down her cascade of lovely, golden hair, and the prince used the heavy locks to scale the stone wall of the tower.”

  Claire Laurent, who’d been listening intently, looked skeptically at her mother. “Wouldn’t that hurt, Mama?”

  “Not in fairy tales, darling.”

  “I wish I had long, golden hair.” The girl sighed wistfully.

  Mary Catherine patted her five-year-old daughter’s tumble of russet waves. “Your hair is too lovely for words.”

  The tranquility of the courtyard was shattered abruptly when Aunt Laurel barged through the screen door. “Mary Catherine, they’re here again! And this time they have a paper saying they can take Claire away.”

  Mary Catherine stared vacantly at her aunt. “Who’s here?”

  Claire knew. Even if her mother did not, Claire remembered the man in the dark suit who smelled of wintergreen breath mints and oily hair cream. He’d come twice to the house, contaminating Aunt Laurel’s parlor with his offensive odors. A woman carrying a large leather satchel always came with him. They talked to Aunt Laurel and Mary Catherine about her as though she were deaf or not there at all.

  Claire didn’t understand all the words, but she grasped the nature of these conversations. They always left Aunt Laurel distraught, but her mother suffered terribly. After their last visit she had stayed in bed for three days, crying incessantly. It had been one of her worst spells and distressed Aunt Laurel even more.

  Claire scuttled behind the wrought-iron chair where her mama was seated, trying to make herself small and invisible. Fear clutched at her throat and made her heart pound in her narrow chest.

  “Oh, dear. Oh, dear.” Aunt Laurel’s chins were wobbling. She twisted the handkerchief clutched in her pudgy hands. “I don’t know what to do. Mary Catherine, what can I do? They say they can take her.”

  The man appeared first. His hawkish eyes darted around the courtyard authoritatively; he was as territorial in bearing as the blue jay had been. Finally his eyes pinpointed the lovely young woman who sat like a living portrait against the picturesque backdrop.

  “Good morning, Miss Laurent.”

  Watching from her hiding place behind her mother, Claire saw him smile. She didn’t like his smile. It was as insincere as the garish grin on a Mardi Gras mask. Even outdoors she could smell his sickeningly sweet hair tonic and breath candy.

  Aunt Laurel’s words had terrified her. Take her where? She couldn’t go anywhere without her mama. If they took her away, who would look after Mama? Who would pat her shoulder and sing softly to her when she got sad? Who would go after her when she sneaked out of the house during one of her spells?

  “You no longer have a choice regarding your daughter’s guardianship,” the drab woman in the ugly gray dress told Mary Catherine. She spoke harshly, and the leather satchel weighed down her arm. “This is not a good environment for your child. You want what’s best for her, don’t you?”

  Mary Catherine’s finely boned hand fluttered to her chest and fingered the strand of pearls that lay against her lace collar. “I don’t understand these things. It’s all so… confusing.”

  The man and woman glanced at each other. The man said, “Rest easy, Miss Laurent. Your little girl will be well taken care of.” He nodded brusquely at the woman. She stepped around the chair and seized Claire by the arm.

  “No!” Claire yanked her arm from the woman’s hot, damp grasp and backed away. “I don’t want to go with you. I want to stay with my mama.”

  “Come on now, Claire,” the woman cooed through a brittle smile. “We’re going to take you to a house where there are lots of other children to play with. You’ll like it. I promise.”

  Claire didn’t believe her. She had the pointed nose and furtive eyes of the rats that scurried through the garbage in the alleyways of the Quarter. She wasn’t pretty, soft, and good-smelling, and, even though she was attempting to speak kindly, her voice didn’t have the melodious rise and fall of Mama’s.

  “I won’t go,” Claire declared with the obstinacy of a five-year-old. “I won’t go anywhere without my mama.”

  “I’m afraid you must.”

  The woman reached for Claire again. This time her grip held, although Claire struggled to free herself. “No! No!” The woman’s fingernails dug into her arm, breaking the skin. “Let me go! I’m staying with Mama and Aunt Laurel.”

  Screaming, she wriggled and kicked and flailed her arms and dug the heels of her black patent maryjanes into the bricks and everything else she could think of to do that might break the woman’s hold on her, but it was inexorable.

  Aunt Laurel had regained her composure and was berating the man for separating a child from her mother. “Mary Catherine suffers from spells of melancholia, but who doesn’t? Hers are just more deeply felt. She’s a wonderful mother. Claire adores her. I assure you, she’s perfectly harmless.”

  Heedless of Aunt Laurel’s earnest pleas, the woman pulled Claire through the screen door into the kitchen. The child looked back and saw her mother still sitting in her chair, limned in mellow sunlight. “Mama!” she cried out. “Mama, don’t let them take me.”

  “Stop that yelling!” The woman shook Claire so hard that she accidentally bit her tongue and screamed louder, in pain.

  Yanked from her stupor by her daughter’s wail, Mary Catherine suddenly realized that Claire was in peril. She pushed herself up from the wrought-iron chair with such impetus that it fell over backward and cracked two of the courtyard bricks. She ran for the screen door and had almost reached it when the man clamped his hand on her shoulder.

  “There’s nothing you can do to stop us this time, Miss Laurent. We have the authority to remove your daughter from these premises.”

  “I’ll kill you first.” Mary Catherine grabbed the neck of a vase on the patio table and swung it toward his head.

  With a sickening thunk, lead crystal connected with flesh. The blow opened up a three-inch gash on the social worker’s temple. When Mary Catherine dropped the vase, it shattered on the bricks. Water drenched the front of the man’s dark suit. Roses fell randomly around their feet.

  He bellowed in anger and pain. “Perfectly harmless, my ass,” he shouted into Aunt Laurel’s face. She had rushed forward to restrain Mary Catherine.

  While her mouth filled with blood from the cut on her tongue, Claire continued to fight the woman as she dragged her through the house. The man lumbered behind them, stanching the flow of blood from his temple with a handkerchief. He was cursing liberally.

  Claire kept her eyes on her mother as long as s
he could. Mary Catherine’s face was distorted by torment as she strained against Aunt Laurel’s clutches. Her arms were extended beseechingly toward her daughter.

  “Claire. Claire. My baby girl.”

  “Mama! Mama! Mama!…”

  Claire sat up suddenly in her wide bed. Her chest was heaving and she couldn’t catch her breath. Her mouth was arid, her throat raw from having silently screamed in her sleep. Her nightgown was stuck to her damp skin.

  She threw off the covers, drew her knees up to her chest, and rested her forehead on them. She didn’t raise her head until all vestiges of the nightmare had vanished and the demons of memory had slunk back into their lairs in her subconscious.

  She left her bed and walked down the hall to her mother’s room. Mary Catherine was sleeping peacefully. Relieved, Claire got a drink of water from the bathroom sink and then returned to her bedroom. She changed into a fresh nightgown and straightened the covers before getting into bed again. It would be a while, she knew, before she went back to sleep.

  Recently she’d been plagued by recurring bad dreams that forced her to relive the worst moments of her troubled childhood. The origin of the dreams was no mystery. She knew their source. It was the same evil presence that was currently endangering the peace and security she had worked so diligently to maintain.

  She had thought these past heartaches had been buried so deep that they would never be unearthed. But they were being resurrected by a malevolent intruder. He was a threat to those she loved. He was wreaking havoc on her life.

  Unless she took drastic measures to change the course of events, he would ruin the future she had planned.

  Chapter One

  The Reverend Jackson Wilde had been shot in the head, the heart, and the testicles. Right off Cassidy figured that was a significant clue.

  “Hell of a mess.”

  The medical examiner’s remark was an understatement, Cassidy thought. He guessed the murder weapon was a .38 snub-nose revolver, fired at close range. Hollow-tip bullets. The perpetrator had definitely wanted to blow the victim away. Tissue was splattered on the headboard and sheets. The mattress was saturated with blood that pooled beneath the body, which, beyond the devastating damage from the bullets, hadn’t been butchered or dismembered. Grisly as it was, Cassidy had seen much worse.

  What made this murder scene particularly messy was the identity of the victim. Cassidy had heard the startling news bulletin over his car radio while fighting morning rush-hour traffic. He’d immediately executed an illegal U-turn even though he had no business rushing to the scene without authorization. The policemen who had cordoned off the Fairmont Hotel recognized him and automatically assumed that he was officially representing the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office. None had questioned his appearance in the seventh floor San Louis suite that was crowded with investigators who were likely to destroy evidence in their eagerness to collect it.

  Cassidy approached the medical examiner. “What do you think, Elvie?”

  Dr. Elvira Dupuis was stout, gray-haired and butchy. Her sex life was constant grist for the gossip mills, but none of the conveyors spoke from firsthand experience. Elvie was liked by few and despised by most. No one, however, disputed her competence.

  Cassidy loved having her on the stand if she was a witness for the prosecution. He could count on her answers to be forthright and unequivocal. When she took the oath on the Bible, she looked sincere. She always had a profound impact on jurors.

  In response to his question, the middle-aged pathologist pushed her eyeglasses more squarely onto her square face. “My initial guess is that the head wound got him. The bullet destroyed most of his gray matter. Chest wound looks a little too far to the right to have burst the heart, although I can’t rule it out as the mortal wound until I’ve cracked his chest. The shot to his balls probably wouldn’t have killed him, not instantly anyway.” She looked up at the assistant D.A. and grinned mischievously. “But it sure as hell would’ve thrown a wrench into his love life.”

  Cassidy winced with empathy. “Wonder which shot was fired first.”

  “Can’t say.”

  “My guess would be the head.”

  “Why?”

  “The chest wound, if it didn’t kill him, would have immobilized him.”

  “His lungs would have flooded. And?”

  “And if somebody had shot me in the crotch, I’d have reflexively tried to protect the area.”

  “Dying with a death grip around your balls?”

  “Something like that.”

  She shook her head. “Wilde’s arms were at his sides. No sign of a struggle or adverse reaction of any kind. I’d guess he felt perfectly at ease with whoever offed him. He might have even been asleep. He didn’t see it coming.”

  “Victims rarely do,” Cassidy muttered. “What time would you guess it happened?”

  She lifted the corpse’s right hand and revolved it around the wrist joint, testing the rigidity. “Midnight. Maybe before.” Dropping the hand back onto the sheet, she asked, “Can I have him now?”

  Cassidy gave the brutalized body a final once-over. “Be my guest.”

  “I’ll see that you get a copy of the autopsy report as soon as I’m finished. Don’t call and start bugging me for it before I’m through or it’ll only take longer.”

  Dr. Dupuis had assumed that he would be prosecuting the case. He didn’t qualify his involvement at this point. It was only a matter of time. He would have this case.

  Moving aside to give the forensic crew room to maneuver, Cassidy conducted a visual investigation of the hotel bedroom. The articles on the nightstand had already been dusted for prints. A fine, black film clung to everything. Various items were being carefully placed in separate plastic bags and labeled. Robbery could be ruled out as a motive. Among the articles on the nightstand was a Rolex wristwatch.

  A police photographer was taking pictures. Another policeman wearing surgical gloves was on his hands and knees, examining the carpet for fibers.

  “Has any press been allowed in yet?”

  “Nope,” the officer on his knees replied.

  “Keep them out as long as possible and hold all vital info close to your chest. Our office will prepare a statement later in the day when we know the facts.”

  The officer acknowledged the instructions with a nod.

  Leaving the policemen to do their jobs, Cassidy wandered into the parlor of the suite. Opaque drapes had been drawn across the two walls of windows, making the room appear dim and gloomy in spite of its pastel and white decor. Huddled in the corner of a peach velvet sofa was a young woman, her head bent, her face buried in her hands. She was sobbing uncontrollably. A young man sat beside her. He looked nervous, even frightened, as he tried in vain to console her.

  They were being questioned by an NOPD homicide detective. Howard Glenn had been in the department for more than twenty years, although he was a rogue and not particularly liked by his colleagues. His appearance didn’t attract companions or solicit friendships. He was dingy and disheveled, he chain-smoked unfiltered Camels, and overall he looked like he belonged in a 1940s film noire. But he was well respected throughout the local law-enforcement community for his dogged method of investigation.

  As he approached, Glenn glanced up and said, “Hey, Cassidy. You got here quick. Crowder send you?”

  Anthony Crowder was the district attorney of Orleans Parish, Cassidy’s boss. He sidestepped the question and nodded down to the couple on the sofa. “Who’re they?”

  “Don’t you watch TV?”

  “Not religious programs. Never saw his show.”

  Glenn turned his head and said out the side of his mouth so that only Cassidy could hear, “Too bad. He’s been canceled.”

  Cassidy glanced over his shoulder into the bedroom where Elvie Dupuis was overseeing the transference of the bagged body from the bed to the gurney. “He damn sure has.”

  “This is the evangelist’s wife, Ariel Wilde,” Glenn inf
ormed him. “And his son, Joshua.”

  The young man looked up at Cassidy. Cassidy stuck out his right hand. “Assistant District Attorney Cassidy.”

  Joshua Wilde shook hands with him. His grip was firm enough, but his hands were soft, smooth, and well tended, not a working man’s hands. He had expressive brown eyes and ash-brown hair worn long and wavy on top. He was good-looking, on the verge of pretty. Born a century or two earlier on another continent, he would have frequented fashionable salons and dabbled in writing romantic poetry. Cassidy doubted that he’d ever thrown a baseball, camped out, or played shirts and skins with the guys.

  His voice was as southern and cultured as a cask of Jack Daniels. “Find the monster who did this to my father, Mr. Cassidy.”

  “I intend to.”

  “And bring him to swift justice.”

  “Him? Are you sure it was a man who killed your father, Mr. Wilde?”

  Joshua Wilde was flustered. “Not at all. I only meant… I used the masculine pronoun in a generic sense.”

  “Then it could have been a woman.”

  Until now, the widow had failed to acknowledge the introduction while weeping into a shredding Kleenex. Suddenly Ariel Wilde tossed her pale, straight hair over her shoulders and fixed Cassidy with a wild, fanatic gaze. Her complexion had no more color than the white plaster lamp on the end table, but she had beautiful blue eyes enhanced by extraordinarily long lashes and the shimmer of fresh tears.

  “Is that how you solve murder cases, Mr…. what was it again?”

  “Cassidy.”

  “Do you solve crimes by playing word games?”

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  “You’re no better than this detective.” She sneered contemptuously at Howard Glenn. “Instead of going after the killer, he’s been questioning Josh and me.”

  Cassidy exchanged a telling glance with Glenn. The detective shrugged, tacitly granting Cassidy permission to intervene. “Before we can ‘go after the killer,’ Mrs. Wilde,” he explained, “we have to learn exactly what happened to your husband.”