Out of Mind

Chapter 25

“You’re sure Marley and Willow are okay?” Gray asked Ben. “I’ve seen what those things are capable of, and it isn’t pretty.”

Gray was a very unhappy man at the thought of Marley being closer to any danger than she had to be.

It was lunchtime and they’d just arrived at Café du Monde in the French Market.

“Sykes is on it,” Ben said, repeating what Gray already knew. “Nat asked for you and me to come. If we made an excuse to stay away, he’d ask too many questions.”

“Let him ask,” Gray said belligerently. “Marley’s my wife, not his.”

“You think this is easier for me?”

Gray sighed and shook his head.

Ben slid his arms forward on the table, picking up powdered sugar as he did so. “I didn’t know Café du Monde was a cop hangout,” he said, watching tourists laughing and snorting the white sugar from platters of hot beignets all over their clothes. The more they brushed at the powder, the more it spread, and not all of them kept laughing.

“It’s not,” Gray said. In this light, with one side of his face in sunlight, if Ben concentrated, partially using his third eye, he could see faint signs of the vicious scars showing through from the inside of his cheek, scars from wounds that had all but slashed their way to the outside. “Nat’s decided he’s invisible here because people he doesn’t want to see don’t think to look for him in this crowd.” He would never have found the almost-hidden scars from Gray’s childhood if Willow hadn’t explained what had happened and given Ben’s powers another challenge.

Willow’s ability to see hidden scars and read what they meant was unusual.

A kid in an apron slid cups of café au lait in front of them.

He dropped the check on the table and said something Ben couldn’t hear over a sudden riff from a clarinet. Ben handed over a couple of bills. The clarinetist sat just outside the metal fence around the café and a banjo player joined him to swing into “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball.” The guy on the banjo cranked out the words in a pleasingly rusty crackle.

People sweated slowly by on the sidewalk.

“You want to move somewhere quieter?” Gray bellowed.

Ben saw Nat approaching with Bucky Fist and shook his head. “I like it right where we are, and I guess it does what Nat wants it to do. He’s something else. How he manages to look like Mr. Congeniality when he’s churning inside, I’ll never know.”

Conversation paused an instant when Nat swung his wide shoulders through the crowd, his skin shining against his white shirt. When Nat grinned, Ben laughed at the sigh he heard from a teenage girl nearby.

Bucky twirled a chair on one leg, set it down backward and sat astride. He wore his baseball cap back to front over most of his curling, sandy hair and rolled a toothpick in and out of the gap between his two front teeth. He looked like everybody’s idea of the charming-goofy all-American brother.

Gray had filled Ben in on Bucky, who was one of the toughest cops Gray—a former supertough cop himself—had ever met. He pointed out that anything less would become a meal for Nat Archer.

“Hey, man,” Nat said, gripping first Gray’s, then Ben’s hand in a hard thumb hook. “How’s it going?”

Sliding into a chair, Nat put both hands flat on the table and leaned in. “We may have something. We just got the news.”

Ben breathed out through pursed lips.

“Looks like we got a common thread,” Bucky said, serious now.

“We’d like to have your cooperation, Ben.” Nat’s head didn’t move a lot, but Ben figured he knew the position of anyone within ten yards.

“Why?” Ben said.

“Willow was there when Chloe Brandt died. She was questioned then, but I’ve got more to ask. Some of the things I’m going to say to her—the questions I’ll ask—could piss her off. Pissed-off witnesses are a pain in the ass. I’m hoping you can make sure she stays reasonable. I’ll be using photographs. That’s where I want your help, Gray. You and Marley saw the victims we had a few months ago. Blades thinks there are similarities between those and Mrs. Brandt.”

“You’ve heard from Blades,” Gray said. “What did he say?”

“Baker and Green, different weapon from Brandt.”

Ben thought about that. “So what does it mean? Two killers or two weapons?”

“Blades thinks two weapons, two killers.” Nat said. “Copycat.” He let his eyelids droop.

“But you don’t,” Ben said.

The big shoulders rose a couple of inches and stayed there. “We’ve got three corpses and the cause of death on all three is heart attack. That’s a nice way of saying they were scared to death. With some sort of bat—I don’t know if there was any bat—dive-bombing you, you could get frickin’ scared. The Green woman lost an eye before her heart quit.”

Ben wrinkled his nose. “How come that didn’t hit the news?”

“You know why.” Nat gave him a straight look. “We won’t be talking about it anytime soon. Chloe Brandt’s face isn’t the only place she was cut.”

“Define cut,” Ben said.

“Similar to Baker, but not the same,” Nat told him. “Baker’s are puncture wounds. Jabs. Brandt’s got multiple short slash wounds made with a very sharp, chisel-ended weapon. Fairly small weapon. There are welts under the wounds that could have come up before or after she was cut. What’s on her face is nothing compared to the ones in her scalp. Most jammed into the skull itself before they were yanked out and the next one was made. Blades says nine of them. The hair was soaked with blood.”

“The wounds still didn’t kill the victim,” Bucky said. “This is all some sick thing about fear.”

“Yeah,” Nat said. “Her neck was broken, too. My take is one killer, two weapons—this time around. Tried to make it look as if the brass corners on the daybook did some of the damage to Chloe Brandt. Nothing doing there. Blood on the book, okay, but the wounds don’t match the corners, and the corners would be demolished if they’d been used. I don’t know why they bothered with it.”

“You want coffee?” Gray asked, although his own drink was untouched. Nat looked different to Ben, sharp-featured like a man on the hunt. He’d slipped back into homicide detective mode.

“Nah,” Nat shook his head. “We need to go. Now.”

Ben drained his cup and stood up. “Where? The morgue?”

“Uptown,” Nat said. “Brandt house.”