River Road (12 page)

I got my cell and punched in the number. Did I call her Blue? Berry? Muffin?

Turned out to be a non-issue. The woman who answered the phone identified herself as Libby. “Muffi isn’t here right now,” she said, her voice husky and sultry and designed to make a guy roll over and beg. Then again, she was a nymph. How else should she sound?

“I need to hire a diver.” I introduced myself and launched into what I hoped was a not-too-revealing but still coherent explanation of the river problem—excluding anything to do with dead wizards or merman suspects. “I know it’s short notice, but we really need someone to go with us to Plaquemines Parish tomorrow. Do you think Muffi will be back by then?”

“Who else will be going?” Libby asked. “I’m sure Muffi will want to know.”

I wondered how nymphs got along with other species. “Uh, we’ll have a wizard, a werewolf, a shapeshifter, and a merman,” I said. Come to think of it, that assortment would scare me away. At least the undead pirate wouldn’t be along this time.

“I’ll handle it, sweetie. Just tell me where and when, and we’ll have someone there,” Libby purred. “Because we just
love
fur and fins.”

CHAPTER
12

I returned from my jog a little before six a.m., craving coffee and a shower, maybe at the same time. Alex had begged off running this morning since he’d stayed up late getting Jake prepped for his first official enforcer assignment, so I was surprised to walk in my back door and find him sitting at my kitchen table in his jeans and a black T-shirt. He was drinking the coffee I’d put on before I left and doing what looked suspiciously like paperwork for the Elders. The work had him so engrossed he didn’t look up.

I poured myself a cup of Kahlua-flavored roast and settled into the seat opposite him. “Is that what I think it is?” The Elders loved reports. Early in our partnership, I’d tried to out-report Alex, but it didn’t last long: He was all about following the rules and I was all about procrastination.

“Yeah, figured I might as well do it while—” He blinked at me. “Have you been running? I thought you were still asleep.” The fact I’d just come from outside at the ass-crack of dawn wearing shorts, Nikes, and a T-shirt finally made it past his obsessive alpha brain waves. “I figured you’d back out when I said I wasn’t going.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.” I liked running now that I was used to it, but I’d never admit it. “I just woke up early.”

He smiled at me. Alex was a serious guy, but when he smiled he looked like a kid. A really big, sexy kid. “I knew it. You like it. You should alternate it with weights. I can pick out some starter hand-weights for you.”

Yeah, that was happening. I closed my eyes as the hot, sweet coffee spread healing caffeine through my system. “I will never lift weights. I don’t need to lift weights.”

Alex scanned my body with a clinical detachment I found alarming. “It’ll be great for your upper body strength. Let me see your biceps. I bet you have no muscle tone.”

I reached in the corner behind me, picked up the elven staff, and pointed it at him. “I have enough to lift this, hound.”

I settled back in my chair, laying the staff on the table. “Oh, by the way, a representative from the Greater Mississippi River Nymphs, possibly someone named either Libby or Blueberry Muffin, will meet you at the office at noon to dive for water samples. Tish Newman is going too.”

After Alex and I talked to Doug Hebert’s widow, I planned to lock myself in my library and figure out what was wrong with the water. Somehow.

Alex sipped his coffee and tried to keep a serious look on his face, but lost. “A nymph named Blueberry Muffin is going? Makes me
hungry
.” He put a little growl in his voice for emphasis.

I laughed. “Stop being such a guy. Just make sure she dives for some water samples without the mers being in the water. After that, I don’t want to know what you do with her.” Well, actually, I could get every sordid detail from Tish, although the idea Alex might engage in any nymphscapades made me extremely grumpy.

“Jean Lafitte’s not going, is he?” Alex sifted through papers as though the answer didn’t matter, but I hadn’t done my grounding ritual this morning and got a sense of uneasiness wafting from him. Normally, Alex was unreadable.

“No, Jean’s out of the picture unless we have problems with the mers. Why?” I couldn’t interpret Alex’s expression, but thought it looked kind of nervous. He and Jean had coexisted well yesterday once we were past the Corvette issue, but nothing about Jean had ever made Alex nervous. Homicidal, maybe.

“I just asked because I didn’t want to be party to another felony. I do have friends on the NOPD.” Alex got up and poured the rest of his coffee into the sink, but stayed at the kitchen window, his back to me. “Remember I said you owed me for not turning him in for auto theft?”

Uh-oh. “I thought you were being hypothetical.”

“Hypothetically, then, I’ll consider us even after next Saturday.” He still had his back to me.

I felt my own nerves skittering. That was a week from yesterday. “Hypothetically, what might be happening then?”

“My mom’s birthday dinner. She’s expecting my girlfriend to come with me.”

Alex didn’t have a girlfriend unless Leyla had been promoted. Oh, God. I knew where this was going. “And who might that imaginary girlfriend be?”

He cleared his throat. “You know, the one I’ve been seeing since Katrina. The one who works for the FBI, that I met on a case. The one named DJ.”

I banged my head on the table. Alex and I had posed as a couple after Katrina. It had been easier to explain than the whole
Tracking-Down-a-Rogue-Voodoo-God
thing. Word had eventually filtered back to Mama. But that was three freakin’ years ago.

It took all my resolve to keep my voice calm and not lob my coffee cup at his head. “Why is she expecting your girlfriend DJ to come to her birthday dinner?”

Alex sighed and flopped back into the kitchen chair. “Because I never told her we weren’t really a couple?”

I stared at him, trying to understand how this big hulk of a man who collected weaponry with such relish was afraid of his mother. The woman had to be a class A harpy. A harpy who thought I’d been dating her baby boy for a long, long time. Just kill me now.

“We will not be even after this,” I told him. “You’ll owe me. This is much bigger than covering up a felony.” Plus, I could always come down with a last-minute illness. Come to think of it, I felt feverish already.

Relief washed over Alex’s face. “You’re right. I’ll owe you big-time.”

For someone who hadn’t had a date since the Stone Age, my dance card was looking full between my evening with Jake, Norma Warin’s birthday party, and my dinner date with Jean Lafitte. I couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that none of the three guys was human, or even a wizard. Maybe I’d make like a nymph and start collecting species. Rene and Robert were handsome in a volatile, semi-hostile kind of way.

Of course they could also be wizard killers.

I left Alex to finish his paperwork and went upstairs to shower and dress for my new job. What does an investigator wear? As a deputy sentinel, my usual uniform had been jeans and a sweater or T-shirt. But it seemed that if I were going to interview witnesses and such, my look should say “professional” and not “Café du Monde.”

I stared into my closet. Nothing says serious like a suit, and I had one. Only one. I needed to go shopping for a more professional wardrobe.

I took a shower, tugged a fitted gray jacket over a black tank, and shimmied into the black pencil skirt I’d worn to meet Jean Lafitte. Low black pumps raised me all the way up to five-six. I dabbed on a little makeup, wrangled my unruly hair into a loose twist, and I was set.

Since a wizard murderer was on the loose, I stuck the elven staff in my oversized bag, along with more vials for the nymph to collect water samples.

Alex, who’d added a sports coat to his enforcer ensemble in a nod toward dressing up, gave me a crash course in interrogation on the way to the Heberts’ house in Metairie. I’d never admit it, but ever since I’d learned our job as sentinels was expanding to involve prete investigations, I’d been obsessively watching old reruns of
Law & Order
.

“I’ll do most of the talking,” Alex said. “But don’t be afraid to ask Melinda Hebert questions—trust your instincts.”

My instincts told me to stay home and let him handle it. “So, will we play good cop/bad cop? I want to be the bad cop. I’m not the warm, nurturing type.”

He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Really?”

Jerk. “So, what should I do?”

“Stop watching cop shows, for one thing. Look, Melinda Hebert’s going to be raw—her husband just died and all she knows is what Elder Zrakovi told her when he transported over to give her the news last night.”

At least Zrakovi told her and not Adrian Hoffman, who I suspected had the compassion of a fruit fly. Why that man had the job of being the public face of the Elders, I’d never understand.

Doug’s file had held very little information about his wife. “She’s a human, so I should be able to read her emotions,” I said. “But Doug wasn’t a practicing wizard. He never formally gave his magic up, but he wasn’t active. I don’t know how much she’ll know about anything wizard-related.”

Alex nodded. “Except we don’t know for sure his death is wizard-related. Maybe he had enemies at Tulane.”

I huffed. “Get real. College professors make formal complaints to the faculty ombudsman, and bitch and moan to their department chairs. They don’t slit their colleagues’ throats and carve off body parts.” University politics were brutal, but leaned more toward psychological mutilation and career sabotage.

“All I’m saying is to keep an open mind,” he said. “Listen to anything she says that doesn’t ring true, even things she doesn’t think are important. People usually know more than they think, even if it’s a new habit or quirk. Just make conversation.”

“I can do that.” I stared out the window at the glut of traffic as we left Uptown and eased into Mid-City. “Think Jake’s ready to take on some merman and nymph weirdness today?”

Alex paused before answering. “We’ll see. I just hope he can hold it together. Your buddy Jean was right about the loup-garou. I’ve never seen one that could maintain control under stress. Four out of every five weres I’ve had to put down as an enforcer have been loup-garou.”

Put down
. Alex had killed loup-garou. No wonder he was freaked. “Jake’s a Marine. They do all that mental toughness training, right? It should give him an advantage.”

Alex took his eyes off the road long enough to give me a measured look. “I wasn’t kidding about you not being alone with him, DJ. Whatever you guys do Wednesday night, keep it public.”

I bit back a smartass comment. Jake was a subject best left alone, at least until after Wednesday night. If whatever spark we’d had before the loup-garou attack was gone, the need to argue about it evaporated. We might have dinner, make small talk, listen to music, and decide that’s all there was. Besides, I wasn’t talking to Alex about anything Jake and I might or might not do in private.

I stared out at the buildings of Mid-City as we headed toward the I-10. The devastation to this part of town had been one of the biggest shocks to me when I’d come back to New Orleans after Katrina. The news had somewhat prepared me for the Lower Ninth Ward and even Lakeview. But not Mid-City. It’s the place I still have nightmares about, all the houses leaning from the winds and marked by ugly brown bathtub rings that recorded the flood levels. Now, the water marks were gone, and so were a lot of the old buildings. Some new ones had sprung up in their places, others had been raised on high piers, and still others had been replaced by weed-infested vacant lots.

We drove into the suburb-on-steroids that was Metairie, turning in to a neighborhood of small, neat wood-framed houses. At the corner of Iris and Tomkins, we parked and got out at a tidy white house with a screened-in porch. It had the solid, square look of the 1930s, before brick took over and ranch-style houses sprouted on every street.

Alex stopped the car in front, and I opened the Mercedes door. I sat there, frozen, trying to decide how to get out. My narrow skirt hemmed in my legs like I’d been mummified. I’d managed to get in the car with some measure of dignity, but exiting was a different matter. My friend Eugenie had talked me into buying this skirt, but she hadn’t given me lessons on getting in and out of cars in mixed company.

Finally, I grabbed the hem of the skirt, hiked it to mid-thigh, and swung my legs out. Once I was on my feet, I tugged it back down and turned to catch up with Alex. I’d assumed he was already at the Heberts’ front door, but he was sitting in the car, watching me.

I leaned down and looked in at him. “What’s the problem?” If he was laughing at me, I’d kick him with one of my pointy heels.

His expression was unreadable. “You should wear that skirt more often. It’s hot.”

A couple of seconds ticked by as I waited for the punchline, but he just pulled his keys from the ignition and got out. I tried to dip a finger into his emotional pool; his mind was locked tight. We kept our relationship on the level of fourth-grade banter. That hadn’t felt like banter.

Alex and I had admitted to a mutual attraction early in our partnership, but I wasn’t sure how to feel about him actually verbalizing it. I followed him silently to the entrance of the Hebert home.

The door, painted dark blue to match the house’s shutters, opened before we got there. Melinda Hebert met us with red-rimmed, puffy eyes. Under different circumstances she’d have been extraordinary—tall, with dark copper hair and a complexion perfect enough to advertise skin-care products. Today, though, her hair hung lank, and a shapeless Tulane sweatshirt and jeans enveloped her. A pretty, marquis-cut green stone that looked like peridot hung on a silver chain around her neck, her only adornment.

Alex introduced himself and flashed his FBI badge. I had my Green Congress sentinel and FBI consultant badges with me but both of us flashing badge seemed overkill. This was his gig. I stayed behind him and kept my mouth shut.