The Whispering Room

Two

Present day

There is no odor in the world like that of rotting human flesh, Detective Evangeline Theroux thought as she climbed out of the car.

The scent hung heavy on the hot, sticky air, an insidious perfume that stole her breath and turned her stomach. It was all she could do to stifle her gag reflex.

A group of uniformed officers stood in the over-grown front yard of the deserted house and Evangeline could feel their eyes on her. It was like they could smell her weakness and were anticipating with relish a mortifying display.

Jerks.

As if she would ever give them the satisfaction.

A female police detective wasn’t much of an anomaly these days, but there were those in the New Orleans PD who still clung to their good-ol’-boy mentality. Evangeline was accustomed to hostile scrutiny from some of her male colleagues, and she knew better than to give them any unnecessary am-munition.

Turning away from those condescending glances, she swallowed hard, though she pretended to survey her surroundings—a ghost street in the Lower Ninth Ward. A no-man’s-land of abandoned vehicles and tumbledown houses that served as an enclave for the city’s crack merchants and the homeless.

This was the section of New Orleans hit hardest by the floodwaters, and it was also the last neighborhood in the city to be rebuilt. Some referred to it as the “bad” side of the Industrial Canal because of the crime rate. Others called it Cutthroat City.

Her late husband, Johnny, had once called it home.

Evangeline mopped her brow as she waited for Mitchell Hebert to get out of the car. The swampy heat was not helping her queasy stomach. Earlier, clouds had drifted in from the gulf, bringing a cool breeze and a quick shower, but now the purplish banks had given way to a robin’s-egg-blue sky. At ten-thirty on a June morning, the temperature was already in the high nineties and the steam rising from the drying puddles felt like a sauna.

“You smell that?” Mitchell asked as he climbed out of the car. “That’s dead-body smell.”

“You think?”

The older detective eyed her suspiciously. “You don’t look so hot this morning.”

That was an understatement if she’d ever heard one. Evangeline had been up half the night with the baby, and she looked and felt like a hundred miles of bad road. But lack of sleep was the least of her problems. With the impending anniversary of Johnny’s death, she was finding it harder and harder to emerge from the dark cloud that had hovered over her since the funeral.

A year ago, her life had been as close to perfect as she could imagine, and now it lay in ruins, the joy and sunlight replaced by a cold, gray loneliness. Happiness was a concept she barely remembered. Now she awakened each morning to the stark reality of a future without Johnny. Sometimes she felt so hopeless and lost, she had to pull the covers over her head and weep before somehow mustering the strength to swing her legs over the side of the bed and begin another day without him.

But Evangeline’s lifestyle didn’t allow for a breakdown. She was a cop and a single mother. She had her and Johnny’s son to think about, plus all the responsibilities that her job entailed. Lives were on the line. She couldn’t afford the luxury of wallowing in despair, no matter how much she might wish to.

Mitchell was still sizing her up. “You’re not gonna faint or something, are you?”

She gave him a thin smile. “Have you ever known me to faint?”

“And that, in a nutshell, is your problem, girl.”

“I didn’t realize I had a problem.”

“You don’t always have to work so damn hard to prove how tough you are.”

Oh, yes, I do.

But all she did was shrug.

She knew that wasn’t the end of it, though.

Mitchell had that fatherly look on his face, the one that signaled he was about to impart a necessary but unpleasant truth.

He nodded toward the officers. “They’re not the enemy, you know.”

“Sure feels that way sometimes.”

“Maybe you just need to lighten up.”

“If by lighten up you mean let a bunch of infantile ass-clowns humiliate me so they can feel good about themselves, then no thanks.”

“You know something? It might actually help if you let them see you toss your cookies at a crime scene once in a while. Li’l ol’ thing like you. You make them look bad.”

“That’s their problem. Besides, I don’t see you upchucking in the bushes to get brownie points.” Placing an icy can of Dr Pepper on the car’s fender, Evangeline tightened her blond ponytail. Her hair felt damp and lank even though she’d shampooed it in the shower that morning.

“Different situation,” Mitchell said. “I’m a man. We’re supposed to be hardcore.”

Evangeline cut him a look. “You did not just say that.”

In spite of the teasing quality in Mitchell’s tone, Evangeline knew there was an element of truth in what he said. She did try too hard to be tough and cold and cynical, and her stoicism in the face of blood and gore—and in the wake of Johnny’s death—made some of the officers uncomfortable. Of course, they didn’t see the reflection of a devastated woman that stared back at her from the mirror each morning. All they knew was the facade she erected for work and so they didn’t know what to make of her. Here she was, a mere slip of a woman with the constitution of a vulture, as she calmly and methodically picked through human remains.

Someone had called her a ghoul girl once and the nickname stuck. On the surface, the teasing had seemed good-natured, but there was a disturbing undercurrent of scorn in the murmurs and stares that accompanied her arrival at every crime scene. Especially since Johnny’s death.

Evangeline had discovered a long time ago that a woman in her position was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t. Showing weakness might make her more palatable to some of her macho colleagues, but it would also cost her their respect.

She would never admit it, even to Mitchell, but her cast-iron stomach was an illusion, just like the fragile veneer that hid her desolation. Her insides were still recoiling from the smell, and she would have liked nothing better than to join the young patrolman throwing up at the corner of the house, their smirking comrades be damned.

But instead she swallowed the bile in her throat and squared her shoulders as she walked across the yard. The sick officer looked up in embarrassment as he wiped a hand across his mouth.

“Here.” Evangeline handed him what was left of her Dr Pepper. “It’ll help a little.”

He took the drink with a shaking hand and held the cold can to his face. “Thanks.”

“Softy,” Mitchell teased as they climbed the porch steps.

“Shush. Someone might hear you.”

“And wouldn’t that be a shame?” He paused, as if bracing himself before they entered the house. “You ever think about getting out of this racket, Evie?”

“At times like this, yeah.”

“I’ve told you about my uncle, right?”

“The one who owns the security firm in Houston?”

“He’s getting on in years and he needs somebody he can trust to put in charge of his operation.”

“Meaning you?”

“That’s the plan. You play your cards right, there might be a place in Houston for you, too.”

Evangeline sighed. “It’s a nice thought, but I have too many ties here. I’m not going anywhere.”

Not to Houston, anyway. It was hotter than hell in Houston, just like in New Orleans.

If I move anywhere, it’ll be to someplace with snow, she thought wistfully as sweat trickled down her back.

“Just give it some thought is all I’m saying.”

“You’re like a dog with a bone,” she grumbled.

“I’m trying to look out for you, kiddo. A city like Houston has a lot to offer a smart gal like you. Might be a good place for you and J.D. to start over.”

“J.D. is barely five months old. He doesn’t care where we live.”

“Yeah, but police work’s not such a hot profession for a single parent. With Johnny gone, you’re all that boy has left.”

And just like that, with his name spoken aloud, Evangeline’s dead husband was right there with them on the dilapidated porch.

She couldn’t see him, of course, but for a moment, his presence seemed so strong, she was tempted to reach out and grab him, hold on for all she was worth.

She knew only too well, though, that her fingers would clutch nothing but air.

Still, Johnny was beside her as she stepped into that chamber of horrors. The chill at her nape felt like the whisper of his breath; the gooseflesh that prickled along her arms was the brush of his ghostly fingers.

Whether she could see him or not, Johnny was there.

He was always there.

Inside the house, the techs were already hard at work. Two uniforms stood just inside the door talking to Tony Vincent, the coroner’s investigator, and Evangeline acknowledged them with a brief nod before she quickly scanned the litter-strewn room.

A few years ago, the squalor would have appalled her because the house she grew up in had always been spotless. Now the filth barely registered as her gaze came to rest on the victim lying facedown on the floor.

She took note of his size—average height, average build, but the suit he wore looked expensive and she would bet a paycheck his loafers were Italian. This was no derelict. This was a guy who’d had access to money, and judging by the flash of the gold Rolex on his left wrist, plenty of it.

“Do we know who he is?”

“His name’s Paul Courtland. We found his wallet,” one of the officers explained when she raised a questioning brow. “Still had cash in it, too.”

“Looks like we can eliminate robbery as a motive,” Mitchell muttered.

“He has a Garden District address,” another officer piped in. “One of the historic places on Prytania.”

Mitchell whistled. “Old house, old money.”

“Paul Courtland,” Evangeline murmured. “Why does that name sound so familiar?”

“He was all over the news last fall,” Mitchell said. “Sonny Betts’s attorney?”

“Oh, right.”

Sonny Betts. As slimy and vicious as they came and that was saying a lot for New Orleans.

Betts was one of the new breed of drug thugs that had flocked back to the city after Katrina. More ambitious and more brutal than their predecessors, guys like Betts no longer hid in the shadows to conduct their nefarious business practices because the city’s corrupt legal system and lawlessness allowed them to operate with brazen impunity in broad daylight.

“The feds put a lot of resources into building a case against Betts, and then Mr. Big-Shot-Attorney here goes and gets him off without even a slap on the wrist,” Mitchell said. “I think it’s fair to say they were more than a little pissed.”

“No kidding.”

He nodded toward the victim. “You think Betts had a hand in this?”

Evangeline shrugged. “Seems a poor way to thank a guy for keeping your ass out of a federal pen, but I wouldn’t put it past him.”

Tony Vincent walked up just then and Mitchell clapped him on the back. “Anthony! How goes the morgue business these days?”

He grinned. “Clients ain’t complaining.”

His gaze drifted to Evangeline, and she pretended she didn’t notice the lingering glance he gave her. She didn’t like the way he’d started looking at her lately. He was an attractive guy and he had a lot going for him, but she wasn’t ready to date. Not even close.

She couldn’t imagine herself going out to a movie or to dinner with anyone but Johnny. She couldn’t imagine another man’s lips on her mouth, another man’s hands on her body. She got lonely at times, sure, but never enough to betray the memory of her husband.

Which was not a very realistic or even sane way to spend the rest of her life, she freely acknowledged. But it was how she chose to live it at the moment.

Tony was still watching her. “Y’all ready to get this show on the road?”

Evangeline tried to ignore him, but, damn, the man really was something to look at. Almost too handsome in her book. She didn’t go for the pretty-boy types.

Never in a million years would Johnny have been considered a pretty boy. Or even conventionally handsome. Not with his broken nose and crooked smile. But right up until the day he died, his boy-next-door looks had made Evangeline’s heart pound.

“What have you got so far?” she asked crisply, snapping on a pair of latex gloves.

“Advanced putrefaction and seventeen-millimeter maggots. This guy’s been here for a while.”

She wrinkled her nose. “We can tell that from the smell. Can you be a little more specific?”

“Best guess, four to five days, but in this humidity…” Tony shrugged. “We’ll know more when we get him on the slab.”

“Cause of death?”

His eyes twinkled. “Oh, you’re going to love this.”

Yeah, I just bet I will.

They moved in unison to the body and squatted.

With his gloved hands, Tony turned the corpse’s head so they could see the right side of his face, which was severely swollen and discolored.

Extracting a pen from his pocket, he pointed to a spot near the jawline.

“What are we looking at?” Mitchell asked curiously.

“Puncture wounds. Skin necrosis is pretty severe so you have to look hard to spot them. See here?”

“What made them?” Forgetting about her previous wariness around Tony, Evangeline moved in closer to get a better look.

He gave her a sidelong glance when her shoulder brushed against his. “Would you believe, fangs?”

“What?”

He laughed at her reaction. “No need to sharpen the wooden stakes just yet. I don’t think we’re dealing with a vampire. See this dried crusty stuff on his skin? I’m pretty sure that’s venom, probably mixed in with a little pus.”

A thrill of foreboding raced up Evangeline’s spine. She had a bad feeling she knew what was coming next. And for her, dealing with the undead would have been infinitely preferable.

“Holy shit.” Mitchell stared at the body in awe.

“You saying this guy died from a snakebite?”

“Bites,” Tony clarified. “They’re all over him.”

“Jesus.”

A wave of nausea rolled through Evangeline’s stomach, and her skin started to crawl. She didn’t like snakes. At all. It was an inconvenient aversion for someone who had lived in Louisiana all her life. Serpents in the South were almost as plentiful as mosquitoes.

Evangeline was pretty sure her almost pathologi-cal loathing could be traced back to a specific incident in her childhood, while she’d been visiting her grandmother in the country. They’d been fishing from the bank of a bayou, and Evangeline had been so intent on the bobble of her little cork floater among the lily pads, she hadn’t noticed the huge cottonmouth that had crawled out from underneath the rotting log she’d perched on.

“Evie, honey, don’t you move a muscle. You hear me?” her grandmother had said in a hushed tone.

Evangeline had started to ask why, but then she froze when she saw the look on her grandmother’s face. She glanced down to find a thick, ropey body coiling around her ankle.

She’d seen snakes before, plenty of them. Her brother used to catch garter snakes in the yard and keep them in a cage in his bedroom.

But a cottonmouth was a far cry from a harmless garter snake.

The power of those sinewy muscles as they bunched around her leg both terrified and repulsed her. As she watched in horrified fascination, the snake lifted its black, leathery head and, tongue flicking, stared back at her.

For what seemed an eternity, Evangeline had sat there motionless, barely breathing. Finally, just as her grandmother arrived with a garden hoe, the snake unwound itself from her leg and glided to the water where it swam, head up, into a patch of cypress stumps.

But for the rest of the day, Evangeline couldn’t get the image of that serpent out of her head. She imagined it crawling back up out of the swamp and following her home.

Even safely inside her grandmother’s house, she saw that thick, patterned body everywhere—draped over a chair, coiled in a doorway, slithering underneath the covers of her bed. The hallucinations had gone on for weeks.

She shuddered now as she stared down at the dead man.

“I found bites on both ankles,” Tony said. “And two on his right hand. When we get him stripped, we may find even more. This guy was a veritable snake magnet.”

“Boy howdy.” Mitchell’s tone was grim, but Evangeline could detect an undercurrent of excitement in his voice. This was something different from their normal caseload of stabbings and shootings.

She wished she could share his enthusiasm, but snakes? It could have been anything other than reptiles and she would have been fine. A disem-bowelment, no problem. Mutilation, all in a day’s work. But not snakes. No way.

Mitchell shifted his weight, balancing himself on the balls of his feet. “Poor bastard must have died in agony.”

“No doubt,” Tony agreed. “Probably suffered heart failure.”

“No chance this was an accident?”

Tony shook his head. “Not likely. Do you know how rare it is for someone to die of a snakebite in this country? There’re only about a hundred and fifty cases a year.”

“Only?” Evangeline tried to suppress another shudder. “That sounds like a lot to me.”

Tony turned to her. “Relatively speaking, it’s not. Most hospitals and clinics stock antivenom, although I read somewhere that the supply is running low because the company that made it isn’t producing it anymore. I guess there isn’t enough profit in it.”

“He probably lost consciousness within a few seconds and the snake kept striking,” Mitchell said. “If it was a moccasin, those bastards are vicious. Some people will try to tell you their aggression is a myth, but don’t you believe it. I’ve got stories that would curl your hair.”

“I’ve always heard a bite from a cottonmouth feels like a hammer strike,” Tony said. “But I don’t think one snake could have done this much damage to a grown man. Not even a pit viper. Even after the first couple of bites, he should have still been able to get away.”

Unless he was restrained.

Gingerly, Evangeline lifted the cuff of the victim’s shirt with a probe and peered at his right wrist. There was so much swelling and the skin was so discolored, she couldn’t tell if he had ligature marks or not.

She moved to the left wrist, where she noticed faint bruising just below the edge of the Rolex.

“Could have been caused by the watch band when his arm puffed up,” Mitchell said over her shoulder.

“Maybe,” Evangeline said doubtfully. “But like Tony said, a grown man should have been able to get away, even after the first couple of bites. There must have been a reason why he couldn’t. And how the hell did he end up in here?”

“I wish I could help you out,” Tony said with a teasing smile. “But my job is just to bag ’em and tag ’em.”

“And we’ll need some time before you do that,” Evangeline said.

“Sure thing. Just holler when you’re finished.” His eyes glinted with amusement as he added, “Have fun, Ghoul Girl.”

Evangeline didn’t bother getting irritated. What would be the point? Instead, she turned back to the dead man.

The swelling and discoloration around the wounds was a good indication that he hadn’t died quickly. The venom had had time to spread, and what the poison had done to the body was ghastly.

“Looks like something from a horror movie,” Mitchell muttered.

“Yeah. Or a nightmare.”

Evangeline couldn’t help wondering who the dead man had left behind. A wife? Kids?

She knew something about the anguish and loneliness that faced his loved ones in the coming weeks and months.

For the longest time, she’d tried her damnedest not to let the victims and their families get inside her head, but no matter what she did, no matter how thick she built her defenses, they still found a way in.

They whispered to her in her dreams, screamed at her in her nightmares. And when their silent pleas tugged her from sleep, she obligingly rose in the middle of the night to go over and over the minutiae of their case files, hoping, always hoping, she would find something previously missed. She’d found that the young ones were especially tenacious.

This victim was no child, but what had been done to him was obscene and Evangeline knew it would haunt her.

It already did.

“What do you think?” she asked Mitchell.

“I think we’ve got ourselves an interesting case here.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

Mitchell glanced over his shoulder, then lowered his voice. “Jesus, Evie. What the hell are we dealing with? Some kind of voodoo shit?”

“I don’t know. Could be, I guess.” But in spite of how the media tried to play up sensational cases, ritual murder was rare, even in New Orleans.

Evangeline moved to the victim’s feet and examined the soles of his expensive shoes. “Take a look at this, Mitchell.”

He came up beside her. “What’d you find?”

“The bottoms of his shoes are caked with mud, but I don’t see any muddy footprints in here, do you?”

“Which means he didn’t walk in here under his own steam.”

“No big surprise there.” Evangeline glanced around. “Whoever dumped him probably figured it’d be a while before he was found.”

“Question is, was the poor bastard alive or dead when they left him?”

“There should be evidence of lividity somewhere on the body.”

A movement in the corner of the room gave Evangeline a start, and it took all her willpower not to retreat from that filthy, ramshackle house as fast as she could. For all she knew, the serpents that had attacked the victim were still slithering around somewhere in the piles of rubble.

Great. Just great.

Coming face-to-face with a pit viper was all she needed to make her day complete.

All right, get a grip. It’s not a snake. Probably just a rat. Or a big old cockroach.

But Evangeline had a sudden mental image of the victim, hands and feet bound, a gag in his mouth to stifle his screams as sinewy bodies crawled all over him, up his pant legs and down the collar of his shirt.

She imagined his agony as the razor-sharp fangs sank into his soft flesh and the poison spread through his bloodstream, making him weak and sick and maybe even blinding and paralyzing him.

She stood so abruptly, a wave of dizziness washed over her and she put out a hand to steady herself.

Mitchell rose and looked at her in surprise.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I just don’t like snakes.”

“Who the hell does?”

“No, I mean…I’ve got a real phobia about them,” she admitted reluctantly.

A slow grin spread across Mitchell’s face. “Well, I’ll be damned. Detective Theroux has a weakness after all. Who would’ve thunk it?”

Evangeline’s answering smile was forced. “Okay, so now you know my secret. Snakes are my kryptonite. No need to let that get around, is there?”

Mitchell kept right on smiling. He was definitely enjoying himself. “Oh, hell no. We wouldn’t want anyone thinking you’re human, now would we?”

“I’m serious, Mitchell. It’s like you said earlier. It’s different for a man. Different set of rules. But for someone like me…you know I’d never hear the end of it.”

Plus, it wouldn’t be above some of the guys to plant rubber snakes in her desk. Or even real ones, for that matter. She could just imagine the kick they’d get out of her reaction. Some of the more juvenile cops lived for that kind of crap.

“Now don’t you worry, Evie girl. I’ve got your back on this one,” Mitchell said, but he was still grinning from ear to ear and she had a bad feeling it was only a matter of time before word got out.

“So why don’t I trust you?”

“Beats me.” His amusement faded and his expression turned serious. “Hey, no joke, you don’t look so hot.”

She swatted a mosquito from her face. “I just need a little air. What do you say we get out of here and go knock on some doors?”