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“Did you follow me out here from town to harass me, Mr. Robicheaux?”
“Is that what I’m doing? Harassing? I thought we were just having a friendly conversation.”
“Then your conversational skills need to evolve past the Neanderthal stage.”
“I don’t plan to do a lot of conversing. Two brief statements should cover everything. One, I don’t like the idea of my brother’s death being made into tabloid entertainment. Two, I sure as hell don’t want the details surrounding his murder being manipulated by Dr. Norman Guilliot.”
“Murder? The police report indicates that your brother’s death was suicide.”
“Yeah, well don’t go laying your money on what the cops say, Ms. Pierson.”
“What makes you think Dennis was murdered?”
“Not think. Know.”
“What makes you know?” she asked, trying to sound only mildly interested.
“I was with Dennis last night. He had plans and eating a bullet wasn’t one of them.” John stepped closer, but the fury he’d exhibited when he first arrived seemed to have settled into a brooding pain that glazed his eyes and made them dark as night.
The mood switch tangled Cassie’s emotions. Had he concocted some bizarre murder plot in his mind to keep from facing the fact that his brother had taken his own life, or did he know something he wasn’t saying? Was it possible that the sleepy bayou town of Beau Pierre harbored a cache of frightening secrets?
“If I were you, Ms. Pierson, I’d get in that car and drive back to New Orleans, find some nice little story about the mayor or concentrate on the city’s plague of potholes.”
“What is it you want from me, Mr. Robicheaux?”
“Nothing. I’m only suggesting you not become one of Dr. Guilliot’s pawns.”
“You surely aren’t accusing Dr. Guilliot of killing your brother.”
“Look around you,” he said, motioning toward the broad estate beyond the ornate gate. “The gold mine of the patron saint of the scarred and wrinkled rich. My brother was a lowly, dispensable anesthetist, a nice scapegoat for Ginny Flanders’s death. You figure it out from there.”
Finally he released her from the power of his hypnotic stare and walked back to his pickup truck. He climbed behind the wheel and drove away without a backward glance.
She stared after him, feeling as if something more than a conversation had passed between. The guy had uncanny powers, a prowess at seducing the mind that bordered on the paranormal, but that didn’t mean his accusations were on target.
Still when she turned to stare once again through the massive iron gates, she felt a sense of foreboding creep into her bloodstream and raise the hairs on the back of her neck. This had nothing to do with her, but deadly secrets had a way of entangling anyone who stumbled into their path.
And if there were secrets, she was certain John Robicheaux of the dark eyes and fiery Cajun blood was part of the mystery.
Either way Cassie felt sure she hadn’t seen the last of the man. She’d reserve judgment until later on, whether that was good or bad.
JOHN HAD KNOWN the reporters would start pouring into Beau Pierre before Dennis’s body was good cold. That’s why he’d done his homework, picked out the best one to pull into his murder theory. He knew the sheriff would try to downplay it, and Guilliot’s lawyers in the Flanders’s trial definitely would, but John had no intention of letting that happen.
He’d decided the Crescent Connection was the way to go. The magazine had clout and they’d eat up a controversy like this, gnaw on it and give it so much attention, the sheriff would have to conduct a real investigation. That’s why he’d asked Lily Robert down at the café to let him know if someone from the Connection showed up asking questions. Not much went on in Beau Pierre that Lily didn’t hear about.
He hadn’t expected the reporter to be female—or pretty—but it didn’t matter to John. He’d said his piece, planted the thought, and that should do it.
Cassie Pierson. The name sounded familiar. Pierson. As in Drake Pierson, Flanders’s high-priced, fancy talking attorney. Damn. That’s why her name sounded familiar. He’d read an article on the infamous attorney not long ago, and it had mentioned that his ex-wife was a reporter, even called her by name.
All the better. Drake Pierson would surely notice his ex’s article and he’d play the suspicion of murder to the hilt.
I’ll make Guilliot pay, Dennis. I’ll make the sonofabitch pay. And if it’s not him that killed you, I’ll find the man who did.
He’d see that justice was done. But that wouldn’t bring Dennis back. The pain of that hit again, the force of it almost doubling him over.
“MURDER.” The word rolled off of Olson’s tongue at their Monday morning meeting, and his lips settled into the kind of thoroughly satisfied smile some men might link to sliding their tongue over a dip of Häagen-Dazs ice cream.
Cassie stared at him, amazed once again at the way he transformed from a dull, robotlike creature into a canty, euphoric dynamo the second the possibility of a juicy story made an appearance. Patterson Olson was nearing forty but possessed that nondescript agelessness that let him pass for any age between thirty and fifty.
His muscles were no more defined than Cassie’s, though he was lean with thick, brown hair and a classic nose. None of his features set him aside as particularly handsome or unattractive, his most noticeable flaw being a chin that seemed to collapse into his neck.
He picked up a pen, drew a page-size question mark on the top of a yellow legal pad, then pushed the pad across his desk and toward her. “There’s your story!”
“A question mark?”
“The question. Suicide or murder?”
“There are no facts to back up a murder claim.”
“We’re not trying the case, Cassie. We’re giving our readers information to arouse their curiosity and titillate their minds. They can make their own judgements.”
“Based on unfounded rumors.”
“Based on facts you’re going to gather for us and on information provided by the brother of the victim—a man with his own fascinating story and shaded past.”
“Are you sure we’re talking about the same John Robicheaux?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know who he is?”
“Would I be asking if I did?”
“He was a brilliant trial lawyer. He almost convinced me once a guy was innocent, and I knew for a fact he was guilty.”
“Then you know John Robicheaux personally?”
“Professionally. I was working for the Times Picayune when he was practicing. I interviewed him a few times.”
“What was he like then?”
“Abrupt when it suited him. Persuasive when he needed to be.”
“Manipulative?”
“Do you know a trial lawyer worth his fee who isn’t?”
“Why did he quit practicing?” she asked, still finding it hard to imagine the guy had practiced criminal law.
“Ever heard of Gregory Benson?”
She tossed the name around in her mind. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”
“It was eight years ago.”
“I was twenty-four and finishing up my master’s in journalism at the University of Texas back then.”
“Benson kidnapped a ten-year-old girl in south Mississippi and killed her. Only he kept her alive for a few days, raped and tortured her repeatedly before he finally drowned her in the Pearl River.”
“Don’t tell me John Robicheaux got that guy off.”
“Not that time, but he had just six months earlier—won an innocent verdict on rape and murder charges against Benson in the death of a young teenager in Slidell.”
“Sonofabitch.”
“Yeah. That’s what a lot of people said. John didn’t say anything in his own defense, just gave up his practice and left town.”
“I don’t blame him for taking down his shingle and moving back to the swamp. I don’t see how he can live with himself.”
“He was a lawyer, Cassie. He did his job.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Don’t go all rigid and righteous on me. This is a big story, the kind that can get Crescent Connection the type of clout we’re looking for. And that will require your being friendly to the guy. Keep him talking to you.”
“In other words, you want me to suck up to him.”
“That’s one way of putting it. And that’s just the beginning. I want you to dig into every aspect of the situation. Find out who Dennis was dating, who he might have talked to about Ginny Flanders’s death, if he had a drinking or a drug problem. Snoop into every niche and corner of his life, or at least the life he had until the wee hours of Saturday morning.”
“That won’t be easy. The population of Beau Pierre is primarily Cajun. They’ll bond together against an outsider.”
“Then don’t be an outsider. Become a fixture in Beau Pierre. Get a room down there. Hang out with the locals. Make yourself available. There’s always someone who will talk.”
“You’re not serious about my renting a room down there, are you?”
“Serious as a street flooding in May. Keep me posted on everything. I’d like a couple of stories before Saturday’s print deadline. Hell, if this is as big as it sounds, we might even do a special issue on the ‘Beau Pierre Mystery.’ Sales numbers could swell by a hundred thousand. Dr. Guilliot. The Reverend Flanders’s dead wife. John Robicheaux’s past. And a possible murder. We’ve got it all.”
And Olson was going to start salivating any minute—which was reason enough to clear out of his office. She’d go home, pack a few things, then drive down to Beau Pierre and try to find a decent motel with a vacancy somewhere in the area.
But first she had a phone call to make.
Back in her office, Cassie called information and requested the phone number for Minden High School. She’d given up on the idea of joining her mother in Greece, but all the talk of scandals and murderous secrets was upping her apprehension level, probably unnecessarily so.
Her mother was perfectly fine, off with an old high school friend on the adventure of a lifetime. And at fifty-nine, it was about damn time.
Once she had the number, Cassie called the school and made her request.
“Could I ask why you need that information?”
“I have a lost mother,” she said, teasing, but was immediately sorry she’d put it that way. The words had an ominous ring to them and they seemed to hang in the air after she’d blurted them out.
She explained about the trip in as few words as possible, focusing on the fact that she couldn’t locate an itinerary. Then she gave them both her mother’s maiden name and Patsy David. “I’ll feel better if I can talk to my mother and be assured that the trip is going well. So if I can get a contact number for Patsy David, I’d really appreciate it.”
“I understand. I’d be worried half to death if it was my mother, but then she’s never gone farther than Shreveport without Dad. Did you check the Minden phone directory for a phone number for Patsy David?”
“I did. There was no such listing. That’s why I thought I’d see if you had some kind of alumnae records that include a current contact number.”
“We don’t that I know of, but I’m new here. Give me a few minutes and I’ll see what I can find out. Would you like for me to call you back?”
“No, that’s okay. I’ll hold.”
Cassie scribbled a few notes as she waited, her mind shifting back to John Robicheaux. She tried to picture him pleading a case in front of a jury, imagined that hard body in a suit, the tie a little loose around his neck, his dark eyes peering into those of the jurors.
“Are you certain you have that name right?”
“Patsy David, class of ’64. That’s her maiden name, but I understand she never married.”
“That’s right. Patsy David from the class of ’64 never married.”
“Do you have a current name or address for her?”
“Patsy David is dead, Ms. Pierson. She died in a car accident her senior year of high school.”
CHAPTER FOUR
CASSIE PICKED UP the postcard, this time checking the postmark. It had been mailed from Athens, Greece, on the fourteenth of May, five days after her mother had left Houston. She picked up the second one. Santorini. Mailed May 20.
Her mother had clearly lied about her traveling companion, but not her destination. But if she wasn’t with Patsy, who had she gone with and why had she felt the need to lie? Could this possibly be a romantic tryst far from the prying eyes of anyone who knew her?
Cassie tried to picture her mother in the arms of a man other than Butch Havelin. The image was too ludicrous to jell. But then, how much did she really know about her mother these days? She’d been so caught up in her own problems with Drake that she’d seldom gone home for visits and she couldn’t remember the last time she and her mother had actually had a conversation about anything more important than plans for holidays or a sale they were having at Nieman Marcus.
But, a lover? It was extremely unlikely.
The phone rang, startling Cassie from her troubled trance. She grabbed the receiver. Surely it was the school secretary calling her back to say everything she’d told her a few minutes ago was a mistake.
“Hello.”
“Is this Cassie Pierson?”
A male voice, rich with a Cajun accent. “Yes. How can I help you?”
“I understand from Lily and Robert you were in Beau Pierre yesterday asking questions about the Magnolia Restorative and Therapeutic Center.”
“I was. Who is this?”
“Dr. Norman Guilliot. I’m assuming you’re interested in the center as a reporter rather than a potential guest.”
“I’d like to do a story on Magnolia Plantation for the Crescent Connection. We’re a cutting-edge magazine that focuses…”
“I’m familiar with the magazine. If you’re coming out in the hopes of digging up dirt, then don’t waste your time. There is none.”
