Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) Read online

  New Orleans had been making headlines with corruption in high places since Huey Long, but still Anna was shocked. "The FBI, then," she said.

  Jordan puffed out a breath full of exasperation and disgust. "And tell them what?" he demanded. "That we've got an old picture of a guy who might be the police chief with a doll on his lap who might be a little girl and that this means there's a high-end child prostitution ring? Don't be an ass."

  Jordan leaned across the table, so close Anna could smell his punk homeless reek. "And say we got real lucky," he said. "And they started an investigation. They were down here investigating prostitution for eighteen months. Eighteen fucking months! You know what they found? Three hookers. Bozo the clown could find a dozen in thirty minutes on a Saturday night.

  "Are you going to help me, or are you going to sit around with your head up your butt?"

  Anna was stung. She didn't like Jordan. He was a vicious, violent, foul-mouthed twit. Clare was a different thing. Clare she would help.

  "My head's out," she said evenly. "What now?"

  Anna's coffee was gone. She wanted another cup, but she didn't stir to fetch it from the cottage. Mack was licking her foot, and, though she was aware the gesture was meant to be kind, she didn't particularly relish having dog spit all over her toes. Still, she didn't bother to move her foot.

  Sitting there in pink jammies and flip-flops, her red and silver hair loose around her face, her hands looking old and small on her coffee cup, she felt more or less helpless. Not only did she not have the color of law behind her, she didn't have Paul's advice and strength.

  Lying to him was going to damage them both in some indefinable way. She wasn't fool enough to believe not telling wasn't the same as lying in a marriage. There would be omissions and evasions and, ultimately, an erosion of trust. Even if Paul never knew why. For a moment she considered backing out of the whole thing.

  One look at Jordan and she knew she couldn't. He, too, was feeling lost and helpless, and bits of Clare were beginning to show through. The demon that was devouring Jordan, robbing him of physical mass and mental control, was the mother of two, her desperate need consuming them both from within. They didn't have much in the way of resources left. Anna had seen people go crazy before. She was seeing it again.

  "Let's lay out what we've got so far," she said briskly.

  TWENTY-TWO

  What now? Clare echoed Anna's question in her mind as she rose from the ashes of Jordan to the misery that was Clare Sullivan. What could they do? How could they proceed? Picturing Vee, then Dana, on the knee of the man in the picture, their sweet faces caked with paint, the supple little bodies tarted into a sick fantasy, she felt she could claw her way through walls to get them--but crazy murdering mothers were never even allowed near those walls. Crooked cops, velvet-voiced boys who jerked off over corpses, all the machinery of a man's world stood between her and her children. If they were still alive.

  They're alive, she told herself. If they were dead I would know it. That had been her mantra since the night of the fire, and it was growing thin, sounding more and more like a pathetic lie.

  Shaking herself the way Mackie did when his fur was wet, she blasted apart that train of thought. That way madness lay. Her eyes slewed toward her tablemate.

  Sitting in the sun, the shadows of the leaves flickering hypnotically, the ranger was playing footsie with Mack like there was all the time in the world. Pink flannel pajamas, red and white hair falling in witch waves around a face that had been left out in the sun too long, didn't strike Clare as much of a federal agent.

  Clare felt a bubble of hate and fear boil up inside her and looked away, resting her eyes on Geneva's French doors, so Officer Pigeon wouldn't see it. Whatever else the woman's faults were, she saw things. She saw Jordan when he was invisible to everyone else, saw the hatred people felt for him, saw the demons and the wrongness in everything he did.

  She saw it, but she wasn't smart enough to figure it out, Clare thought. The possibility that she was a good enough actress that no one, regardless of IQ, would have figured it out didn't cross her mind. There had been a time she had pride and a sense of self, a sense of achievement, but that time was so impossibly long ago Clare had forgotten she no longer remembered it.

  Clare knew she ought to be grateful: grateful that maybe the pigeon wasn't going to be a stool pigeon and call the police, grateful that Ms. Pigeon promised not only to remain silent but to help, grateful that she was no longer alone, that someone believed she didn't kill her children. But she wasn't.

  Anna Pigeon had allowed in an evil so virulent that it could scatter Clare's mental house of cards to the edges of the universe: hope. When Anna said she would help, Clare had felt hope. It weakened her, made her afraid. If she could hope, she could lose hope. Better to be Jordan running on adrenaline and revenge; better to be a man who had no children, only a dog. A man who might not believe Dana and Vee were still living but had every confidence he would rip out the throats of the men who took them with his teeth if he got a chance.

  Clare gathered herself together, whisking into a pile the debris of mother and actress and wife, then pulled Jordan over the detritus of herself like a cloak, wrapping the punk tightly around her bones.

  If the bitch turned on them, he could always kill her, Jordan thought as he narrowed his eyes and addressed the pajama ranger.

  "This is what we've got so far," he said. "We know David and the Cajun are connected. The Cajun had David and Jalila's daughter. The Cajun was at the explosion of the house; he had a key to David's apartment and was there with the man who killed Jalila--if the Cajun didn't kill her himself.

  "We know the Cajun and New Orleans are connected: He was bringing Aisha to the 'Bourbon Street Nursery,' the yellow leather jacket that went missing in Seattle is here in New Orleans, and Mackie knew the smell of the guy wearing it.

  "We know David was also connected to New Orleans," Jordan continued, finding power in cataloging what he knew, what Clare knew. "David visited here a number of times. Clare--I--didn't pay much attention to the bills regarding his garment business, but I think she remembers seeing he had dealings with a clothing firm here; he bought or sold something to do with fabric or machines or whatever."

  Jordan watched the pigeon tilt her head and look a little sharper when she heard the third-person references. They made her uncomfortable. That was too damn bad. They made Clare uncomfortable as well, but Jordan didn't worry about it.

  At the end of the day, Ms. Pigeon would reconcile Jordan and Clare and sit happy in her own sanity. Whether Clare could or not, Jordan didn't much care. If her children--or killing the fucks who took them--didn't make her whole, Jordan was going to be as good as she got.

  "We know David imported undocumented workers from the Mideast, women to sew and cut." Jordan went on with his list. "You've got to figure some had kids. Maybe David's undocumented workers--or their kids--were connected with the sex slave trade.

  "That's it. I don't know where the Cajun is. You screwed up me catching the yellow jacket. I don't know where the major whorehouses are, don't know if they still do kids in a big way. I don't know fuck-all. You got anything better?"

  "My brother-in-law, Frederick, is ex-FBI," the pink ranger said after a moment. "He runs a computer detective business from New York, cyber-sleuthing. He might help. I'll think on it. See you tonight."

  With one last pat to Mackie, she picked up her empty coffee cup and moseyed back to her cottage.

  Jordan sat for a minute seething. Left to himself, he'd have yelled, "Make your fucking call," but Clare held him back. Clare, too, had hoped for more, hoped for a miracle, hoped for magic. It was the hope thing again. Anna Pigeon had opened a box worse than Pandora's and into a world of horror released hope.

  Clare had had a two-show role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit when they were shooting a sequence in Seattle. She'd played a computer whiz. Though she didn't know how it was done, she did know the FBI cyber-sleuth brother-in
-law might be able to find out details about Police Chief Walter Le Beau and the garment trade in both Seattle and New Orleans. He might also be able to access information on David's finances, import/export patterns, business partners, and travel. Given that David--Daoud Suliman--was a Middle Eastern man living and working in the United States during the Bush years after 9/11, he'd probably been monitored by more than one federal agency.

  For all she knew, their phones could have been tapped and their computers hacked. What was deemed "national security" and what "right to privacy" had become very hazy. For the first time in her life, Clare was grateful for the taste of fascism America had gotten. If it helped her find Dana and Vee, she didn't care if Big Brother peeked through the bedroom blinds at night.

  "Fuck her," Jordan said suddenly, and, with a sense of relief, Clare started sinking into his ready anger.

  Mackie whined, and Clare's abdication was interrupted. "What is it, little guy?" she asked in her own voice. Mackie's face was round, and his eyes so like those of an Ewok that Clare'd always thought George Lucas must have had a shih tzu or a Lhasa when he was a little boy. Mackie tilted his head the way he did when he was listening to her, as if, could he only get the angle of his ears to her mouth just right, he would be able to make out what she was saying.

  Clare was all the family Mackie had left--and, but for the grace of whatever, Mackie was all Clare had. Not Jordan, Clare.

  Talking with Anna Pigeon, she'd lost the sense that Jordan was a character she created, that they were two separate individuals. His domination had seemed natural, inevitable, like it happened in every body, this fight between good and evil, hope and despair, violence and sense. It had felt normal. Was this how people went insane? One day the most natural thing in the world was to let an entity, an "other," slide into the skin and push out the original personality?

  Clare shuddered, as part of her made note of the sensations should she ever play a female Dr. Jekyll. Given how thin and wasted she had become, it brought out sweat on her forehead. Softly, so Geneva wouldn't hear and Mackie wouldn't howl, she began to cry. Folding in half, arms trapped between her torso and her thighs, she rocked herself and wept until tears dripped from her face to the bricks and Mackie began to lick her cheek with concern.

  There came a crack and a fog and a cold that froze Clare's despair. With a jacknife jerk, she sat up, vacant-eyed.

  Then, "Come on, Mackie," Jordan said, twitching Clare's body into action. "Let's go visit our gutter punk pals. Maybe Dan'll know something about the city's leprous underbelly."

  TWENTY-THREE

  The trains Clare had jumped with the punks on the trip south from Seattle were a blur of soot and fear and noise. She'd spent most of the time holding on to Mackie for fear he would jump from the train or not be firm under her arm when she ran for a moving boxcar. In the absence of her daughters and her home, the little dog had become the grail in which what remained of her heart was carried. If anything happened to him, Clare knew it would be the last straw she would ever feel strike her back.

  By the time they landed in New Orleans, she'd known the punks' names--or the names they had given themselves: Danny, Rain, Darwin, Peter, and Stacy. When they detrained she'd gone with them. Along with five others, they'd bedded down in an abandoned house near South Claiborne, almost under I-10. Even all these years after Katrina there was no shortage of abandoned houses that either no one laid claim to or no one bothered to tear down. Mecca for squatters, runaways, and druggies.

  Despite all this quality time, Clare had not bonded with the punks. At first, she hadn't spoken but simply followed them, did as they did, always a few yards away, a little behind, immersing herself deeper and deeper in the character of Jordan, creating his back story, something she'd done a hundred times.

  Once the punks figured out Jordan wasn't going to hurt or rob them, they accepted him. When Jordan shared his cigarettes, then bought a couple of joints and shared those, they let him sit closer. Jordan did, because the known was safer than the unknown and most of Danny's little gang was young and seemed nonviolent.

  Because Jordan didn't fit the profile of a pierced and tattooed traveler or hardcase old-timer, they figured he was on the run from the law for something serious. Which, in fact, was the case. To Clare's surprise, this lent Jordan stature in their little group. Still, there were no beginnings of friendship, just a mutual understanding of sorts.

  Though she hadn't thought it possible to feel more miserable than she did, she found the squat depressing, the filth, the drugs, and the vermin--two-, four-, six-, and eight-legged--too frightening. Her third night in the city, she hadn't gone back but slept on a bench on the river walk. A schizophrenic man--that was her take on his mental state--had chased her off his bed with a broken bottle. There was a protocol to being homeless, and Clare did not know it. If it hadn't been for Jordan's reflexes, she might have been cut.

  The middle of the next day she saw the FOR RENT sign in Geneva's window.

  Clare bought a secondhand laptop and a cell phone and started surfing the Web for any hint of her children. Jordan spent a lot of time with the punks. They hung out on Bourbon Street, panhandling for the most part and occasionally dragging out a guitar one had found in a squat in another town and learned to play a few chords on. It was a way to stay on the street and watch without being noticed by anybody. As odd as the punks were, they were human and they were company.

  Jordan found Dan and his gang on Chartres behind St. Louis Cathedral, leaning against the iron fence, enjoying the scowls of the artist who had set up there to sell her wares. Danny was the accepted leader. He was tall and bearded and in his thirties. Of the five of them, Danny was the only one who gave off the vibe of someone who would kill. The others, Jordan figured, would do violence only as a group. Taken one by one they were weak and pathetic and trying to cover it with rudeness and vandalizing their own bodies to spite an indifferent public. For them, Jordan felt little but disdain.

  "Got any smokes?" Danny said by way of greeting.

  Jordan slid down the fence till his bony butt rested on the sidewalk, fished a crumpled pack out of the pocket of his shirt, and shook one out. Danny took it, bummed a light, and then took the rest of the pack as if it were his due.

  "Fuck that shit," Jordan said and snatched it back. He and Danny smoked in silence, letting the sun soak into their faces and the nicotine into their brains. Rain--not her real name, Jordan figured--played with the newest puppy.

  The bulls the railroads hired to keep the yards secure didn't like to mess with punks with dogs. If they busted a punk with a dog, a city ordinance made them take that dog to the pound and, if it bit them or anybody, do a long rabies thing. Bulls didn't want to do that much work. So the travelers collected dogs. When they left a town, sometimes they took them. Mostly they left them behind to fend for themselves.

  Rain had lost a dog in Sacramento when they'd jumped. It had fallen under the wheels of the train. At the squat she'd picked up a new puppy and was happy as a little girl playing with it, getting it to bite at a weed she'd pulled up. Rain was fifteen and had seven piercings in her face: both eyebrows, two through her lower lip, her tongue, her nose, and one through the middle of her left cheek. Her body and her hygiene were not able to support so much metal, and the nose and cheek wept all the time.

  The new dog couldn't have been more than eight weeks old. It was a mutt, a bit of black Lab, Airedale mustache, retriever tail, paws that could have been given it by a St. Bernard. The paws were so big he tripped over them, and both girl and puppy grinned hugely.

  Darwin, Rain's boyfriend and so called because he looked kind of like the missing link, was totally ripped on something and examining the end of one of his dreads. Jordan didn't know where the other two were.

  "Where's Peter and Stacy?" he asked, letting smoke trickle out with his question.

  "You working for the fucking Census Bureau now?" Danny asked.

  Jordan let it go. It was just noise. "I'm looking
for a guy," Jordan said finally, grinding out his cigarette on the cement, then tossing the butt into the gutter. Jordan hadn't told them why he'd come to New Orleans; he hadn't told them much of anything and didn't plan to.

  "Peter swings both ways," Danny said. "If you're looking for an ugly guy."

  Jordan didn't laugh. With Danny's punks laughing was a sign of weakness.

  "Give me another smoke," Danny said.

  Jordan shook one out and another for himself. This time Danny didn't try to take the pack. They both leaned back their heads and pulled in deep lungfuls of smoke.

  Clare hadn't smoked for so many years she'd thought the addiction was gone. It wasn't. It had been waiting for that first drag. She'd only quit because she knew it would be bad for the fetus, then for the children. Unless she could again be a mother, there was no need to live a long life.

  Smirking, Jordan took another drag. "This guy I'm looking for was on the river walk the other day, the one with the yellow coat that my dog ran after."

  "That why you cut out? I thought you had the runs."

  "Maybe it was something you ate," Rain said, still teasing the puppy with the weed.

  "I followed him to an alley off Dumaine--I think it was Dumaine. He pulled a knife on me and I lost him," Jordan said.

  "Sounds like you got lucky." Danny scratched in his beard with a thoroughness that bordered on lewd.

  "I was wondering if you guys would watch for him, let me know if you see him, maybe where he goes."

  Danny and his punks never asked for anything but cigarettes and money, not even so much as "Please pass the salt" or "Will you watch my dog?" Whether it was an unwritten rule or nobody had needed anything in the time Jordan been in their company, he didn't know.