He knotted his hands into fists. After what she’d done, she didn’t deserve to live. She deserved to be punished. To suffer the bayou.
One of the men shouted that they had to find the girl murderer. He ran for a pirogue to take on the river to search for her.
Although if the swamp devil or the gators got her first, there would be nothing left to bury, nothing but mutilated flesh, bones and tissue….
No, he’d find her first. Then he’d make her pay for killing his father.
CHAPTER ONE
New Orleans—thirteen years later
One week before Mardi Gras
“I KNOW YOUR secrets. And you know mine.”
The hairs on the nape of Britta Berger’s neck stood on end as the note slipped from her hand to the wrought-iron table. She’d already sifted through a half dozen letters for her Secret Confessions column at the magazine she worked for, Naked Desires. All erotic. Some titillating, others romantic as they described various private confessions and sexual fantasies. Some bordered on S and M. And others were plain vulgar and revealed the debauchery of the South’s sin city.
But this note felt personal.
An odd odor wafted from the envelope, a scent she vaguely recalled. One that made her skin crawl.
Powdery sugar from her morning beignet settled like snowflakes on the charcoal-gray paper as she glanced around the crowded outdoor café to see if someone was watching her. A drop of sweat trickled into her bra, a side effect of the record high temperatures for January.
Or maybe it was nerves.
The French Quarter always seemed steeped in noise, but today excitement buzzed through the air like mosquitoes on a frenzy. The twelve days of partying and parades leading up to Mardi Gras had already brought hordes of masked creatures, artisans, musicians, voodoo priestesses, witchdoctors, tourists—and crime. Bourbon Street fed the nightlife and drew the tourists with its infamous souvenir shops, voodoo paraphernalia, palm readers, street musicians, strip clubs, jazz and blues clubs and seedy all-night bars. And then the hookers…
The massive crowd closed around her as the sidewalk seemed to move with them. Any one of them could be the enemy. Any one of them could have sent her the note.
Battling panic, she reread the words. I know your secrets. And you know mine.
Yes, she’d done things she wasn’t proud of. Things no one else must ever know. They would say she was a bad girl. But she had done what she had to do in order to survive.
The very reason she was the perfect editor for the Secret Confessions column. She wanted her privacy. Understood that the written word could be evocative. But the fantasies deserved to be kept anonymous.
Just as she tried to do with her identity. Always changing her name. Running.
And what better place for her to hide than in the heart of New Orleans, so near to where it had all happened? Working for this magazine was the perfect cover, the perfect way for her to blend with the masses.
But how could the person who’d written the note know about her past? The horror. The shame. The lies.
They couldn’t. It was impossible. She’d never told a soul.
Furious, she stuffed the note inside the envelope. It was probably just a prank from some sex-starved fan who wanted to win her attention—like the pervert with the fetish for penis rings who’d exposed himself to her in Jackson Square last week.
Just because she printed sexually explicit material, some people thought that she understood their individual desires. Condoned their behavior. And that she wanted them personally.
Shivering at the thought, she tried to shake off her anxiety. No one knew the real Britta Berger.
And no one ever would.
She took a deep drink of water to swallow the remnants of the beignet which had lodged in her throat. In the background, the singer drifted into a slow tune, crooning out his heartache blues. A tall man, around forty with a goatee and wire-rimmed glasses, strode by and stared at her. She froze. Was he going to stop? Tell her he had sent the note? That he’d been following her? Waiting to watch her reaction?
Oddly, though, he winked at her and strode down the crowded sidewalk toward the Business District. She breathed out a sigh but forced herself to take a mental snapshot of the man in case she saw him again.
Time to let old ghosts die. Move on.
Shaking off her paranoia, she started to close the envelope but a photo fell into her lap. A picture of a dead woman or some kind of sick joke?
Her heart pounding, she examined the picture more closely to see if it was real.
A naked woman had been tied to a four-poster bed. The bedding appeared rumpled and stained with blood. The woman’s eyes were wide-open in terror, outlined in crudely painted-on black makeup, her slender young face contorted in agony. Ruby-red lipstick covered her mouth, and was smeared as if she’d hastily applied it. The remainder of her makeup was grotesque, overdone to the point of making her look like a whore. And the bloodred color of the lipstick matched the crimson red teddy that had been ripped and lay at her bare feet.
Where had the photo been taken? She scanned the room for details. An alligator’s head hung on the scarred wall in the dilapidated shanty. A snake was coiled by the bed.
A lancet pierced her heart.
Inhaling sharply, Britta zeroed in on the necklace dangling around her bruised throat. The black stone was shaped like a serpent swallowing its tail.
Britta had seen that same necklace before. Years ago….
The man had tried to make her wear one, but she’d thrown it into the dirt and run.
The scene moved in slow motion in her mind. The scents of rotten vegetation, blood, mutilated animals. The marsh rose from the depths of her darkest hours to haunt her. Like quicksand the muddy soil tried to suck her underground. Alligators and snakes nibbled at her heels, begging for dinner. Bones crunched where one had found his feast.
She closed her eyes. Banished the images and sounds. Visualized herself escaping. Slowly, her breathing steadied and the panic eased in her chest. She was overreacting.
The picture was probably fake.
But the yellowish-blue tint to the woman’s skin and the blood looked real. And Britta’s gut instincts told her that the woman had been murdered.
DUSK DARKENED THE SKY around the backwoods, blurring the lines between day and night as the murky Mississippi churned and slapped against the dilapidated shanty.
Detective Jean-Paul Dubois stared at the crime scene in disgust. The woman had been viciously murdered. Blood covered her bare chest and had dried onto the stained sheets of the bed. A scarlet teddy lay at her feet, which were bound to the footboard with thick ropes, and her hands were tied to the headboard. Whoever had killed her had defiled her body—left her naked, bound, posed, her heart literally ripped apart with some kind of ancient spear.
His gaze fell to the serpent necklace and he recognized the symbolic meaning. Good fighting evil.
Apparently the evil had won this time.
The CSI team arrived but he held up his hand for them to wait, then bowed his head for a moment, silently offering a prayer of reverence before he allowed them to move forward. With two sisters of his own and the never-ending guilt of his wife’s death on his conscience, seeing any female hurt and stripped of her dignity grated on his soul. At least Lucinda had not suffered rape or this humiliation. But still her death had cut him to the bone.
He had to put her out of his mind. Had to work, keep busy, pay penance for his mistakes by saving others.
The Dubois men were cut from Cajun cloth.