We held the postmortem in the back of a French Quarter bar. We had the room to ourselves, and for a couple hundreds, I made sure it stayed that way. Having normal people walk in on the conversation seemed graceless. The sound system in our room was turned off, but Louis Armstrong rolled in from the front, his voice like a cheerful landslide. The chairs were all wooden and worn, three different layers of paint showing in carefully calculated decrepitude. A waitress brought us a bowl of salted peanuts and drinks. Light lagers for me and Aubrey, water for Chogyi Jake, Guinness for Ex. Karen got something hard; a bottle of bourbon and a tall glass.
“Okay,” Karen said when the waitress had gone, “time to reassess.”
She leaned forward in her chair, one hand brushing a stray lock of hair from her eyes. She was in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a tight-fitting leather jacket that she didn’t take off when she came inside.
“I don’t think Glapion knew we were there before the loa possessed Aubrey,” Karen said. “If Daria’s Sight had tipped them off, they would have been prepared.”
“Prepared?” Aubrey said.
“Possession is bad,” Karen said. “Shot in the face is worse. It didn’t go the way we planned, but it could have been much worse.”
Aubrey bristled, and I changed the subject before things could degenerate.
“Do we know anything we didn’t know before?” I asked. “We saw Sabine. That counts for something, right?”
“Yes,” Karen said. “We didn’t get to follow her, and I don’t think there’s much chance that they’ll go back to Charity now that they know it’s compromised. But we have confirmed that Sabine is in the city.”
Ex cleared his throat. If Aubrey looked like the victim of violent crime, Ex looked like someone fighting cancer. The exorcism had left him wasted, dark circles under red-rimmed eyes, a sense of weariness that verged on melancholy on him like an illness. He didn’t look at us, his eyes focused on the center of the table.
“What about the time frame?” he asked. “We’re here to stop a murder, and the killer knows we’re coming close.”
“What about it?” I said, specifically to Karen. “You’re the resident expert on this thing. Did we spook it? Will it move up the schedule, kill the girl sooner?”
“I don’t think it can,” Karen said. “When I was chasing it, there were… gaps. Normally when you see a serial killer, they start off needing a lot of time between victims, then slowly ramp up. They need more and more, faster and faster. This one didn’t do that.”
“Because it’s stuck on a timetable?” I asked.
Karen took a deep breath and let it out slowly, giving herself time to think.
“More that the thing is in a new host body,” she said. “When the murderer’s just a human being, the first kill is the hardest. There are inhibitions to overcome. The second time, it’s easier, and so on. With the rider, it’s in a new person. There are fresh inhibitions that come with the new personality. Whoever it was in before could have killed twenty people, but Amelie Glapion hasn’t killed anyone she loves. Not yet.”
“Didn’t seem to make much difference for me,” Aubrey said. There was an edge to his voice.
“It did,” Karen said. “I don’t care what kind of wards and cantrips Eric put on her, Marinette would have killed Jayné if you hadn’t been holding it back.”
Aubrey blinked, sat back in his chair, and drank his lager. I felt a rush of profound gratitude to Karen for pulling even a little of the poison back out of him. He hadn’t been able to overcome the rider, but he hadn’t been thoroughly ineffective. Fighting a losing battle isn’t the same as being powerless.
He caught my eyes and smiled. I felt a little blush rising in my cheeks and turned away. When I looked back up, he was still smiling a little. Ex coughed.
“Then the question is,” Chogyi Jake said, “when did Legba take Amelie Glapion?”
“Yes, how long ago did it take her,” Karen said. “And how strong-willed is Glapion. And how much power has it regained. There are a lot of variables, and there isn’t a way to get good information.”
“What would we do with it anyway?” I said. “It’s not like we can get the wards up on the new house any faster than we’re doing. The only thing I was thinking… can we skip grabbing Sabine and head straight for Amelie Glapion?”
“No,” Karen said. “If we go straight for the rider, it will spook and kill the girl, and it won’t matter how much Grandma wants to stop it. I can promise you that.”
“That’s happened before?” Ex asked.
“Close enough,” Karen said.
A fast tapping sound came from the tabletop, almost like a phone set to vibrate. I was a little surprised to see that my fingers were making it. I considered my hand. Yeah, I thought. The smell of this ain’t quite right. But Karen’s certainty carried me. This was her show, after all. She was the expert. We were just the hired help.
“From here, we have several options to pick the trail back up,” Karen said. “None of them are great. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the tools I had when I was with the bureau.”
“Tools?” I said, latching onto the word.
“Databases. Surveillance teams. Numbnut beat cops to go canvass neighborhoods,” Karen said. “Running solo, or even with a small team, just doesn’t have the same range, but we’ll do the best we can.”
Chogyi Jake, Aubrey, Ex, and I all exchanged glances. Karen frowned.
“Am I missing something?” she asked.
“We may have some other resources,” I said.
IT MIGHT have been petty of me, it might have been small, but the surprise and pleasure on Karen’s face made me feel like I was worth something.
“Let me read this back, dear. Sabine Glapion,” my lawyer said from the other end of the cell connection. She spelled out both names, then went on. “Granddaughter of Amelie, sister of Daria. Approximately sixteen years of age, but not attending school.”
“I know she was in New Orleans last night, and I have reason to think she’s still here.”
“All right. Just whereabouts? You don’t want her contacted?”
“Just where she is,” I said. “I’ll take it from there. But sooner would be good.”
There was a small, sharp sound on the other end of the connection. It had a finality to it, like something being closed.
“I’ll get back to you as soon as I have something, dear,” she said. “If anything else comes up, you’ll let me know?”
“Absolutely,” I said, then dropped the connection.
“You think that’s actually going to work?” Karen said. I could hear in her voice that she wanted to believe, but didn’t quite dare to.
“Pretty confident,” Aubrey said. Either he was sharing some of my smug, or I just wanted to see it in him. “Jayné’s lawyer isn’t someone I’d cross.”
“Well,” Karen said. Then, a moment later, “All right, then.”
“We still need the wards up on the safe house,” Ex said. “And the van. And we need a refrigerator and some food at that place. I don’t think we’re going to want to order delivery pizza with a girl tied up in the back.”
“It will take longer, working alone,” Chogyi Jake said. “Two more days, perhaps?”
Ex took a long drink, the last of the black stout sliding past his teeth.
“We don’t have time,” Ex said. “I can help with it.”
“After last night…” I said.
Ex looked up at me, his eyes hard as stone.
“This is what I do,” he said. “I can handle it.”
“I’ll help out too,” Aubrey said.
“It’s a two-man job,” Ex said.
“Then I’ll get the fridge.”
“Okay, but food first,” I said. “We’re getting snappish, and that always means low blood sugar. Karen. Is the food any good here?”
“You’re in New Orleans,” Karen said. “The food isn’t bad anywhere.”
“We’ll get burgers or something on the way,” Ex said as he stood. “Aubrey. Jake. Shall we?”
The others rose, and half a beat later, I stood up too. Karen’s bright eyes shifted between Ex and Aubrey, then to me. There was a question in her gaze, so the sudden, inexplicable appearance of a stick up Ex’s ass might not have been entirely my imagination.