"Jesus."
She shone the light into the front room-a parlor-backed out of the doorway, and continued down the hall, past a small, elegant dining room, past a bathroom. A blocky ginger cat bolted out of the next room and streaked past them, growling, making a beeline for the stairs. Laurel paused to get her heartbeat down from warp speed, then ducked into the room the cat had dashed out of.
Bookcases covered the walls from the twelve-foot-high ceiling to the polished pine floor. Here the scent of Danjermond's expensive tobacco was strongest, the furniture polish an undertone to leather chairs and the faintly musty-sweet aroma of old books. A handsome cherrywood partners desk dominated the floor space. Behind it, an entertainment center held shelves of sophisticated stereo equipment.
Laurel skirted around a wing chair and took a look at the desktop. She was afraid they would have to go upstairs to find what they were looking for. Her instincts told her a killer would keep items that secret, that meaningful, in his most private lair-his bedroom. But a study was a close second, and Danjermond obviously spent a good deal of time in his.
Slipping around behind the desk, she cast the light over a humidor, a tray of correspondence, an immaculate blotter. She slipped two fingers into a brass pull and tried the slim center drawer.
"Damn, it's locked."
Jack scanned the bookshelves by the thin, silvery light from the window, looking for a title that might strike a spark. People often hid things in books. Hollowed them out and filled them with treasures and secrets. He assumed there wasn't time to look through all of them, and searched for a likely candidate instead, but there were no titles like The Naked and the Damned, or The Quick and the Dead, or anything else that might appeal to a twisted sense of humor, just tomes on law and order, classics, poetry.
"Where's Danjermond?" he asked, pulling out a Conan Doyle first edition.
Laurel tried the drawers on the file cabinet with no luck. "Being toasted by the royal order of pearls and girdles as a man they can all look up to and entrust with the chastity of their debutante daughters."
She checked her watch and swore. They needed to find something soon, before the window of opportunity slid closed and locked them inside.
"What happens if we find something?" Jack asked as they climbed to the next floor. "We don' exactly have a warrant, angel. No judge in the country would allow evidence obtained this illegally."
"All I need is one piece," Laurel said as she crept past a small guest room and a linen closet. "Just one damning piece I can take to Kenner and hit him over the head with. He's probably turning your place upside down as we speak. Danjermond is trying to build a case against you."
The news stopped Jack in his tracks. He had thought Kenner was grasping at straws, not that anyone in the courthouse had a plan. "He really thinks he can pin Savannah's murder on me? And Annie's?"
"And four others. And don't think he won't figure out a way to do it. The man has a mind a Celtic knot would envy."
And she was going to stop him, Jack thought, watching as she shone the beam of the flashlight into another bedroom. She was risking what was left of her reputation in part to protect him.
"Bingo," she muttered, and pushed open the door.
The bed gave the room away as Danjermond's-a massive mahogany tester with ornately carved posts and a black velvet spread trimmed in gold. The underside of the canopy was decorated with shirred white silk. Jack reached up and pushed a section of fabric aside to reveal a mirror. Laurel said nothing to his arched brow. She didn't allow her mind to form any kind of scenario. She didn't want to imagine where Danjermond's sexual tastes ran, because one thought would lead to the next and on to delicate wrists bound and screams for mercy and-
"You okay, sugar?" Jack whispered. He didn't even try to stop himself from slipping his arms around her and pulling her back against him. She had gone pale too suddenly, her eyes were too wide. He bent his head and pressed a kiss to her temple. "Come on. We'll take a look and get the hell outta here."
Like every other room they had seen, this one was immaculate, impeccably decorated, strangely cold-feeling, as if no one lived here-or the one who did was not human. Not a thing was out of place. Every piece of furniture looked to be worth a fortune. Nothing appeared to have sentimental value. There were no photos of family, no small mementos of his youth. A barrister's bookcase between the windows held another collection of antique books-first editions of erotica that dated back to Renaissance Europe. But there was nothing else, no jewelry, no weapons, no photographs.
Disappointment pressed down on Laurel. She should have known better than to think Danjermond would make it easy on her, but she had hoped just the same. Now that hope slipped through her grasp like sand. If the evidence she needed wasn't here, then it could be anywhere in the Atchafalaya.
And with the disappointment came self-doubt. What if she was wrong? What if the killer was Baldwin or Leonce? Or Cooper. Or some nameless, faceless stranger.
No. She closed the last drawer on the dresser and straightened, rubbing her fingers against her temples. She wasn't wrong. She hadn't been wrong in Scott County; she wasn't wrong now. Stephen Danjermond was a killer. She knew it, could feel it, had always felt something like wariness around him. He was a killer, and he thought he was going to get away with murder.
If she couldn't find one way to implicate him, Laurel knew she would have to find another. And the longer it took her, the more women would die, and the more time Danjermond would have to build a case to frame Jack. The longer he would play his game with her, destroying her credibility, her confidence, her belief in a higher law than survival of the fittest.
"Let's go," she whispered, hooking a finger through a belt loop on Jack's Levi's and pulling him away from the bookcase. "I doubt he'll be back from the dinner for another hour, but we can't take chances."
"Wait."
It hit Jack like an epiphany as the flashlight beam swept across the collection of books. A trio bound in faded red leather sitting side by side by side on the upper left-hand shelf. L-Petite Mort, volumes one, two, and three. The Little Death. His eyes had scanned past them when he'd first realized that this collection was erotica. Erotica-the little death-orgasm. The title hadn't seemed out of place, but as he guided the beam of the light across the bindings, a sixth sense tensed in his gut like a fist.
Gently, he lifted the glass panel on the front of the case and slid it back out of the way. The three volumes came off the shelf as one.
Emotion lodged like a rock in Laurel's throat as she shone the light across a tangle of earrings and necklaces. More than six pieces. Many more. Tears swimming in her eyes, she reached in with a tweezers she'd pulled from her pocket and lifted out a heavy gold earring. A large circle of hammered gold hanging from a smaller loop of finely braided strands of antiqued gold.
"This is-" The present tense stuck to the roof of her mouth. She swallowed it back and tried again. "This was Savannah's. She had a pair made in New Orleans. A present to herself for her birthday. She was wearing the other one when they found her."
Jack kept his silence as they watched the gold hoop turn and catch the light. There were no words adequate to assuage the kind of pain he heard in Laurel's voice. Gently he closed the box and returned it to its spot in the bookcase. Laurel just stood there, her gaze locked on the earring, her eyes bleak. Jack slid an arm around her shoulders and bent his head down close to hers.
"You got him, sugar," he whispered. "That's the best you can do."
"I wish it were enough," Laurel murmured. She handed him the flashlight and dropped the earring into a Ziploc bag.
They took a final, quick glance around the room to make certain they had left everything as they had found it, then Laurel led the way into the hall, flashlight scanning the floor ahead of them-until the beam fell on a pair of polished black dress shoes.
Her first instinct was to run, but there was nowhere to run to. He stood between them and the head of the stairs. Behind her, Jack swore under his breath.
Slowly, she raised the flashlight, up the sharp, flawless crease of his black tuxedo trousers and higher, until the beam spotlighted the barrel of a silencer on the nine-millimeter gun he held in one hand and the pair of small canvas sneakers he held in the other.