Girls Just Wanna Have Guns (14 page)

“Sure thing.”

“Hang on, not so fast. I should probably warn you that the house I was just at is no longer an actual house.”

“Is it a puppy?”

“Ha.”

“You have a spare key and the code. Have at it. I’ve been meaning to remodel that kitchen anyway.”

They said their good-byes and in less than ten minutes, she’d cleaned up the food wrappers, thrown some clothes and toiletries in a satchel, and met Trevor in the living room. He was standing by the side of the window, scanning the front.

“We’ll have to go out the back,” he said, and she eased up close to him and peered past where his hand barely parted the curtains: two different TV stations had set up cameras. The manager had kept them from entering the premises since it was privately owned; odds were they were setting up at every exit.

Front and center, though, was Reggie O’Connor. Bobbie Faye gritted her teeth. People had warned her that Reggie was the kind of person who’d look in your face while she put a knife in your gut, but Bobbie Faye hadn’t believed the warnings. It was tough being a strong woman, as Bobbie Faye knew directly, because there was the constant expectation to be demure, deferential, a good little Southern belle. That crap could just bite it, and she understood the kind of flak Reggie had gotten trying to muscle her way into a bigger market by scooping her male colleagues. Bobbie Faye would have thought that would have created a bond between them, maybe something supportive they could have shared. Then Reggie had targeted Bobbie Faye. It was probably the show titled B
OBBIE
F
AYE:
S
HOULD
S
HE
B
E
S
PAYED
? which was most memorable, though the B
OBBIE
F
AYE
: F
ORCE OF
E
VIL
O
R
J
UST
P
LAIN
S
TUPID?
was a close runner-up.

She wasn’t overly fond of Reggie.

Bobbie Faye looked at Trevor and knew what he was thinking: sugarcane field. The trailer park backed up to a huge field with green sugarcane about a man’s height, and the rows were just far enough apart for a motorcycle to fit in between the stalks. It was going to be a pain to push it through the tight space—they would get smacked with every stalk they passed. They’d parked three trailers down when they’d arrived because Trevor didn’t want to be obvious, and they were leaving the same way they’d entered: out the back door. They were barely down the back steps into the privacy-fenced yard (a tiny twelve-by-twelve-foot “patio”) when the wooden gate to her fence started to open.

From:
Simone

To:
JT

Alert—cell phone activity. Incoming to BF. Signal originated in Italy.

From:
JT

To:
Simone

Shit. Buyer’s from Italy. Do you think BF is planning to sell?

From:
Simone

To:
JT

We have to assume yes.

Cam slipped through the back gate of Bobbie Faye’s patio area, his gun drawn. He listened: no noise coming from her home. He eased toward the back door and nothing seemed disturbed. Still, given the day’s events, there was no assuming that all was okay.

He’d seen the TV cameras set up in the front of the trailer park, so he’d hidden his truck a half-mile down the road and taken to the sugarcane field to avoid the media. The back door was locked. He glanced overhead—no news helos. Yet. They were all probably too busy covering the bridge or Marie’s. He put his gun away long enough to jimmy the lock; he kept a nice lock pick set hidden in what looked like a regular pocket knife. It wasn’t something he advertised. He’d had to go into an old apartment Bobbie Faye had before they’d started dating, before he’d become a cop, and stop an asshole who’d trapped her there. He hadn’t had a pick that time, and breaking through the freakishly well-made door had taken an eternity. It had only been when he’d finally broken through that he realized she’d kicked the bastard’s ass and the crying had come from the idiot as he whimpered for her to just let him leave.

This time, he didn’t want to show forced entry.

Cam stood just inside Bobbie Faye’s back door, in the living room/dining room combination and the place smelled like . . . chili cheese dogs. She’d been here recently, for the aroma to be that strong. He looked in the
kitchen trash and sure enough, Ardoin’s take-out bags were crumpled there. Sonofabitch, he’d missed her. He pulled out his cell phone to call her and there was a missed text message from her—had to have been delayed when he’d hit the crappy wireless reception area on his way to her trailer.

From:
Bobbie Faye

To:
Cam

I’m 5 × 5.

Five by five
. Slang for
wonderful
. Which was her way of saying
I’m breathing, but let’s not get too hopeful about it
.

Cam scanned the room, his cop’s eyes picking up every detail that was different from her last trailer. He hadn’t actually yet been inside this slightly less-beat-up model (“newer” would have been too generous). He could see she had salvaged a few of her things—some family photos, that dumb clock Stacey loved, some toys, and a few oddball knickknacks which had meaning to Bobbie Faye but probably to no one else. Except him. He knew that French-drip coffee pot was the one they’d found at a flea market one lazy summer afternoon; she’d loved the red enamel color and kept it at her place to make him coffee on Saturday mornings when he stayed over. Next to it was a rock about the size of his palm, only it wasn’t a standard rock, but a piece of silica he’d found once and thrown against her window when they were kids. He hadn’t expected to break the damned glass, and she’d landed in huge trouble, but she’d saved it, all silvery and black. There were other things, but he forced himself to look away from the old to see what was different: a new TV and VCR; well, used-for-new. Probably bought them down at Dusty’s Thrift Shoppe.

The place smelled like her perfume—light, airy, something called Angel, he thought, which if the marketers had had a clue, should have been called Temptation. Or Damnation. He eased back toward her bedroom and he closed his mind to the scent as he moved in and out of the rooms. Clearly she wasn’t there, and he should have already finished his mission and left. He sure didn’t need memory lane. He just needed that DNA sample. One that would show that it wasn’t her hair at the murder site. One that would show that the killer had also been on that bridge, though how it had happened to be next to Bobbie Faye’s bloody handprint was going to take some explanation.

He stopped in her bedroom, noticing the open closet door, the empty hangers on her bed, the look of her dresser drawers having been shut and not quite closed, as if she’d left in a hurry, and a cold trickle of worry pricked at the base of his spine. It looked like she’d taken some clothes, and her makeup bag was gone from the tiny bathroom. And so was her favorite hairbrush. He rummaged around in the cabinet, knowing her habits as well as he knew his own, and in a basket on a top shelf, there were a dozen or so ponytail bands. Two had caught hairs in them. These should suffice for Maggie to match to determine if one or both hairs from the two different scenes were Bobbie Faye’s.

He hadn’t thought, ’til that moment, what he would do if they were a match. Could he be handing the DA the very information he’d need to make a good case against Bobbie Faye? Circumstantial as all hell, but then many cases came down to circumstantial evidence.

Cam faced the mirror, arms braced on either side of the sink. The hairs he had weren’t admissible—he had no warrant, no permission, and they definitely weren’t something discarded in public he could have simply picked up. Nor could he argue she’d left hair behind on a brush in his house—he’d given everything of hers back. Maggie wasn’t supposed to still have the hair from the murder site, and her conjecture that the hair on the bridge was a match to
Bobbie Faye’s was just that—a conjecture. Still . . . what if doing this gave the DA evidence against her?

He was breaking ten kinds of laws, not to mention ethics, just being there. She wasn’t his girlfriend, hadn’t wanted his help, and they hadn’t been able to have much more than a barely civil conversation in a year. Even if she
had
been his girlfriend, he’d have been duty-bound to comply with any search warrants, and if she’d been staying at his place, he’d have handed over anything he’d owned, like his hairbrush, if it had been on the warrant’s list. So what was he doing here breaking laws to try to help her?

His cell phone rang, and he saw it was Benoit. He hesitated; Benoit would ask him the kinds of questions he wasn’t sure he wanted to answer just yet (like had he lost his mind).

“Yeah,” he answered.

“Can you meet me at your house?”

“I’ve got some leads to follow up.”

“Yeah,
cher
. You’re gonna want to meet me. Twenty minutes.”

Benoit hung up, and Cam’s worry ratcheted into overdrive. It wasn’t like his best friend to be anything but laid-back.

Cam pinched the bridge of his nose, clenching his eyes shut, and tried to shove away the awareness of the headache throbbing. When he opened his eyes, he blinked, adjusting back to the light, and that’s when something shiny glinted from the small space where the bathroom vanity didn’t quite meet the wall in the cheap-ass trailer. He leaned closer, assuming it was a piece of jewelry, and he had his pocketknife out on reflex, planning to fish it out for her (ignoring his constant inner argument over not being the guy who was supposed to be doing that sort of stuff for her anymore), and that’s when he realized it was larger than jewelry, and it was brass.

Brass
casings
. In the bathroom?
Weird
was his first thought, and then, as he bent over to inspect it more closely without having to touch the brass, he knew something
about this was beyond weird. And wrong. There were at least four casings back there. Bobbie Faye didn’t typically pick up her brass after shooting at Ce Ce’s firing range—she knew the twins were dead broke and needed to recycle the brass to make extra money. If it had been just a single casing, he’d have assumed it was something Stacey had somehow found and wedged behind the sink with the typical wily behavior of a five-year-old, but he found it odd that she’d have a single casing to play with, much less four. Bobbie Faye would have never let Stacey play with anything that might make the five-year-old think bullets were toys. His ex might be crazy, but she was exceptionally careful about that kid.

Cam used his pocketknife to pry the top casing out and laid it on the vanity countertop. He then retrieved a second, and then a third, and the dread that swamped him forced him to admit what he was thinking about: there were five missing casings from the jeweler murder scene. Five. And as he pulled the fourth casing out from the spot behind the vanity, he saw a fifth which had fallen in a little ways further. It took using a pair of scissors with the pocketknife to maneuver the brass out without touching it, but there it was, lying next to the other four.

Cam didn’t really believe in coincidences. Five missing casings. A jeweler murder. Rumor that Francesca had been saying something about diamonds when she was at Ce Ce’s. (Well, if Maimee was to be believed, and frankly, he’d never seen a woman go so clean off her rocker so fast as Maimee had gone after Edgar had lost their retirement and life savings.) Then there was Maggie’s phone call about the hair on the bridge matching the hair at the murder scene. And on the other side of all of those coincidences was the woman he’d intended on marrying.

It was surreal that she and Trevor were pushing a motorcycle through the rows of the sugarcane field behind her trailer park—Bobbie Faye was pretty sure she’d hopscotched over reality two explosions ago—but what she
really couldn’t reconcile was the fact that Cam had broken into her home. From their hiding place in her shed, they’d watched him come through that gate and go up to her door and then pick the damned lock. Even if he was just checking to see if she was okay, and if he thought that maybe she wasn’t, that maybe she’d needed help, he would normally have knocked and shouted for her to come to the damned door. In fact, he’d have started by banging on the front door and then he’d have barreled around to the back, on the off chance that she’d dragged her bleeding body to the back door by mistake, and then he still would have knocked.

Except, he hadn’t. He’d broken into her trailer, big as you please. He was the man who’d been so hell-bent on adhering to doing what was “right” that he’d arrested her sister for a DUI instead of calling Bobbie Faye and letting her get Lori Ann into rehab, quietly. When she’d gotten upset over that, he’d made it clear he was a good cop who didn’t bend the rules. He made it
crystal
clear she was the one kind of girlfriend a good cop would never want. So why was it o-freaking-kay for him to bend the rules when
he
wanted something? What in the
hell
he’d wanted, she had no clue.

She glanced over at Trevor. He’d been watching her stew.

“Do you want to go back and kick his ass?” Trevor asked with a mischievous glint.

“No,” she said. The last thing she needed was a shouting match with Cam right now, and she particularly didn’t want to have to answer questions about Francesca or diamonds or explosions or anything until she’d had time to think. She looked down the row she and Trevor navigated, the tall sugarcane leaves shooting up and then drooping open, umbrella-like, forming a canopy of green overhead as far as the eye could see. It looked like she was going to have a while to think before they were safely far enough away to start the bike.

“If you ever come back to Louisiana again, I promise
I’ll show you something prettier than exploding houses and stifling hot farms.” Maybe she’d even have gotten the grant to start up her South Louisiana tour business and could afford to treat him to something nice, like a fancy dinner out.