Grimacing at the taste of bitter dreams in her mouth, she forced herself to get up and gather the papers and the pen. She snatched them up, one by one, following a trail of them across the floor. She dug her glasses out of the folds of the bedspread, slipped them on, and combed her bangs back with her fingers. The gears of her brain strained into motion with much creaking and grinding, slipping and catching.
Baldwin, Cooper, Leonce, Ross. Names and question marks filled the pages. Notes, hunches, feelings. Hunches and feelings weren't admissible in a court of law. She knew that better than most people.
She walked to the French doors, shuffling the pages, brow furrowed as she retraced the ramblings of her mind. Not Jack. The bold declaration caught her eye, and her heart gave a traitorous thump. Bits of evidence tried to surface in her mind-his duality, the way he could seemingly appear and disappear at will, his past, his profession. And she beat every one of them back down.
Through the windowpanes she could see a bit of L'Amour-mysterious, shabby, standing alone on the bank of the bayou-and she let herself wonder for just a second what he was doing, whether he regretted the things he'd said to her, whether he wished as strongly as she did for the feel of familiar arms around him.
"You've known him how long? A week?"
God, was it only that? It seemed so much longer. The minutes and hours of the past week had somehow been elongated, magnified, and packed densely with experience and needs and fears. It seemed like forever, and at the same time, it could never be enough.
Not productive thinking. He didn't want her, didn't want any chance at a relationship. He wanted his solitude and his self-inflicted pain. He wanted to play the party animal, then go home to his empty prison. And when she was thinking straight, she knew it was just as well that she leave him to it. She needed time to heal-the old wounds and the new. She needed to get her world back on its axis and find her own place in it. A fresh start was what she needed, not a man with a past haunting him.
Craving a breath of fresh, rain-washed morning air to clear her muzzy head, Laurel set the notes aside on a table, unlocked and swung open the doors, as she had done hundreds of times in her life.
A scream tore from her throat and she shot back across the room before her conscious mind could even register what she had seen. Hand clutched to a heart that was racing out of control, she forced her eyes to focus, forced her brain to accept the information sent to it.
Wound around the outside door handle was the limp, dead body of a cottonmouth snake.
"Goddamn it, I thought you were watching her, Deputy Pruitt!" Kenner bellowed.
The thin, pasty-faced young man stood on the balcony outside Laurel's room looking as if he were contemplating the advantages of jumping off.
"Yessir, I was, sir," he said, trying unsuccessfully to swallow the knot in his throat. His Adam's apple bobbed as his eyes darted to the body of the snake. Christ Almighty, he hated snakes. Everyone knew he hated snakes. Dollars to doughnuts, Kenner would make him unwrap this one from that handle and bag it as evidence. It looked to be a good four feet long. "I came on at four A.M., sir, and I swear I didn't see nothin'. I watched this house like a hawk."
Kenner swaggered to the door, reached down, and flicked a finger under the head of the snake. It flipped up, exposing the patches of cream color on the underside of the throat, and flopped back down, hitting the wood with a dull thud. Deputy Pruitt turned a little grayer. Kenner scowled. Goddamn prissy kid.
"You came on at four. Myers left. How long did the two of you stand around chewing the fat out by the cars?"
Despite his pallor, a hint of red managed to creep into the deputy's cheeks. "Just a while, sir. There wasn't nothin' goin' on. We'da heard."
Snarling, Kenner stepped up to his underling and jabbed the kid's sternum hard with a forefinger. "There sure as hell was somethin' going on, and the hell if you heard it," he growled.
Pruitt clenched his jaw against the need to wince. "Yessir," he mumbled, miserable.
"Bag that snake as evidence, and don't touch one other goddamn thing. If you so much as smudge a fingerprint, I'll cram that cottonmouth down your throat. Do you understand me, Deputy Pruitt?"
"Yessir." Too well. The image had him on the brink of gagging.
Kenner jerked away and turned back toward Laurel.
She sat on the bed in jeans and the T-shirt she had slept in. Caroline stood beside her, wrapped in a white silk robe, her expression the fierce look of a tiger whose cub had been threatened. Mama Pearl, a vision in red chenille, had planted her enormous bulk on a vanity stool that all but disappeared beneath her.
"Y'all didn't hear anything, didn't see anything?" Kenner asked.
Laurel answered, pushing herself to her feet. "For the fourth time, no."
She hadn't seen anything, hadn't heard anything. She had awakened haunted by the feeling of eyes on her. Her skin crawled.
Caroline crossed her arms and started pacing beside the bed, her lips pressed into a thin line of disapproval. She cut a dark, sharp look at Kenner. "This is intolerable, Sheriff. My niece is being tormented by a psychopath, and your office can't manage to do so much as to keep her safe inside a locked house?"
"The house was under surveillance, Miz Chandler."
"It would seem it was under better surveillance by the killer than by your deputies."
Kenner shot a look at Pruitt, who was damn near green as he fumbled with the long, rubbery body of the dead snake, then his gaze moved beyond. Beyond the balcony, beyond the courtyard, to the house Jack Boudreaux had taken. The house of a dead whore. It would have been a simple matter to watch for the change of shifts, slip into the garden, and climb the stairs. Wrap a dead cottonmouth around the door handle-just as the killer had done in Blood Will Tell.
He'd been scanning the collective works of Jack Boudreaux last night. After seeing the kind of stuff that rotted in the man's imagination, the sheriff had no difficulty picturing him as a killer.
"It won't happen again, ma'am," he growled. He dismissed Caroline and swung around to Deputy Wilson, a kid who had been built for the NFL but not blessed with speed. "Go see if Boudreaux is home. I want to have me a little talk with him downtown."
"Why?"
Laurel's question drew a narrow stare from the sheriff. "Why not?"
Because I know him. Because I've slept with him. The answers weren't going to dissuade Kenner.
He strode from the room with his linebacker at his heels, leaving the unhappy Pruitt to wrestle with the snake and the contents of his own stomach.
Mama Pearl rocked herself up from the little vanity chair and reached out to pat Laurel's arm. "You come on down to my kitchen, chère. I fix you tea and biscuits with honey."
"I'm sorry, Mama Pearl," she said, moving to the wardrobe to hunt for clothes. "I have to get down to the courthouse."
Caroline's brows snapped down over her dark eyes. "Laurel, you can't mean it! You've had no rest and one terrible shock after another! Stay here," she insisted, wrapping an arm around her niece's shoulders, keeping her from reaching for a blouse. She hugged Laurel hard, emotion suddenly clogging her throat. "Stay here with me, sweetheart," she whispered. "Please. I don't want you getting involved in this. I don't want to lose you, too."
Laurel looked from her aunt to the door, where the snake hung in a single loop and Deputy Pruitt leaned over the balcony disgracing himself all over the clematis vine. "I'm already in it, Aunt Caroline," she said softly. "And there's only one way out."
Jack woke with a pounding in his head and pounding on the front door of the house. He wished he could manage to ignore both. The banging in his head was the farewell gong of a substantial amount of Wild Turkey. The banging on the door turned out to be a very large deputy named Wilson, a man without sympathy or humor, who hauled him downtown to "have a little talk" with Sheriff Kenner.
Now he was sitting in a straight chair that had to be an antique from the Inquisition, staring across a scarred table at Kenner's ugly mug.
"Do you want a lawyer?"
"Do I need one?" Jack returned, arching a brow. "Am I being charged with something?"
"No. Should I be charging you?"