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  I wanted to tell her that I was not a destructive force, that I did not want to hurt her, but the words seemed paralyzed in my throat. She was standing close, so close I could feel the warmth of her body.

  She closed her eyes and turned away from me, leaning back against the wooden pillar that supported the veranda. I was suddenly hungry for her and had to fight the urge to take hold of her body and crush it to mine. She opened her eyes as though she had sensed my thoughts.

  “She’d grown tired of him. She loved him, but he’d become an old man, not in years, but in his mind. In his soul. She was young, alive, hungry….”

  “So she was having an affair.”

  “I told you, I don’t know. But she was thinking of divorce.” She shook her head. “I think he knew, but don’t let your imagination run away with you, Lacklan. He’s a kind, gentle man.”

  “Like Othello?”

  “No, not like Othello.”

  “That night, was she with you or was she at a club?”

  Her eyes trailed down from my face, to my chest and to my hands. “Can I have one of your cigarettes?”

  I pulled a Camel from the pack and handed it to her. She put it between her lips and I flipped the Zippo. She leaned into the flame and inhaled. She leaned back as she let out the smoke. “She was with me. We were going to go to the Blue Lagoon.”

  “Bat played trumpet there.”

  “He’s good. She liked to listen to him. He was playing that night.”

  “But you didn’t go.”

  She shook her head. “We stayed and talked. She was upset. She didn’t know what to tell Charles. They’d started sleeping in separate rooms.” There was something quietly tragic in her expression. “Servants gossip. I think the whole of Burgundy knew, except poor Charles. He couldn’t accept it, but she couldn’t bring herself to be with him anymore. She thought… she knew, he had realized. She knew she was going to have to tell him. But she still loved him, as a friend. More than a friend. Family.”

  “There was somebody else.”

  “I keep telling you I don’t know.”

  “And I keep not believing you.”

  She shrugged, like she didn’t care. “A lot of the time she said she was going out to listen to jazz, she wasn’t. At least not in the clubs.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When our parents died, we inherited two houses. This one, which belonged to my stepfather, and another, smaller one, which belonged to my mother. I got this one as my home, because Sarah was married and already had that monstrous mansion, and she got the smaller one. Charles never knew about it.”

  I frowned. “Why?”

  “She always thought of it as mine because it had belonged to my mother. So it just sat there, closed up. When things started to go wrong with her and Charles, I advised her to use it as a studio. She was a talented watercolorist. Not great, but good. It was a place where she could get away from a relationship that had become a prison; a place where she could be creative, be herself, listen to music. A place where she knew she was emotionally safe.”

  “You talk like a psychologist.”

  “A psychiatrist.”

  “So she came to you for help.”

  “I advised her to create a space for herself, where she could make a wise choice about the future, about what she wanted to do.”

  “Did you go there with her?”

  “Once or twice, not often. It was her space. Don’t ask me if she took lovers there. I don’t know.”

  “Where is this house?”

  “On the Sara Bayou, in the woods north of here. Over the bridge on Tunica Road. It’s called Solitude.”

  I felt the heat of the cigarette on my fingers and stepped over to the table to crush it out in the ashtray. As I did it, I asked on impulse, “Are you married, Simone?”

  She took a moment to answer, watching me. “And that is relevant how?”

  I smiled without much humor, not sure how to answer. “Another perspective…”

  “You asking or telling?”

  “I don’t know. Are you? Married?”

  “No. There are no men in my life.”

  I had nothing left to ask her, but I didn’t want to leave. We stood a moment staring at each other, her still leaning back against the wooden column, with the flaking white paint, the cigarette smoldering in her fingers.

  I said, “Thanks for the beer. Thanks for being honest. I’ll think about what you said, all of it.”

  She watched me go down the steps to my car. As I opened the door, she said, “That’s the most dangerous thing of all, you know?”

  I looked up at her. “What is?”

  “A destructive force that thinks.”

  I didn’t answer. I got in the car, turned silently around, and headed back the way I had come.

  Seven

  That evening I met Bat at the Blue Lagoon on Desiré Street, a small cul-de-sac off St. Claude Avenue, in the heart of town. He wasn’t working that night. Harry, his boss, had told him he didn’t want him working there till the trial was over. People can be helpful like that.

  Despite the hour—it was after eight—the temperature had not dropped and it was still unseasonably warm and humid, and half the patrons were out, drinking on the sidewalk. Above, the clouds were dense and a luminous, smoky orange, reflecting the lights from the town.

  We shouldered through the crowd, made our way to the bar and ordered an Irish and a Scotch, then carried them to a table in the corner. For a moment, we drank in awkward silence. Then, I said, “I went to see Simone.”

  He stared into his drink, tipping it this way and that. “Oh yeah?”

  “It seems Sarah was not as happy in her marriage as most people thought.”

  He arched his eyebrows, but aside from that made no expression with his face at all. “Oh, right.”

  “Seems she was planning to divorce him.”

  He finally looked at me, shook his head and sighed. “I wouldn’t know anything about that, sir. Like I said, I barely knew her.”

  I gave one nod and after a moment went on, “Also, Carmichael had a change of heart.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He sent a car for me this morning. Seems he thought about what I said and believes I’m right. He’s employed me to find out who killed Sarah.”

  “That’s a bit fuckin’ weird, innit?”

  “Is it? Not really. He saw the logic that a killer of your experience would not leave his fingerprints and his weapon all over the place for the cops to find.”

  He stared at me a moment. “Oh.”

  “So I examined the crime scene, or, more accurately, the crime scenes.”

  “What do you mean, scenes?”

  “She was killed upstairs in her bedroom, but he attempted to kill Carmichael downstairs, in the drawing room.”

  He frowned, nodded, and said, “OK, and?”

  I thought about it a minute. “Let me give you my impressions first, then we’ll try and make sense of them. First thing that struck me, there was a hell of a lot of blood. It was a through and through wound to the belly, four shots, but it was more blood than I have ever seen from that kind of wound.”

  He looked uncomfortable and took a swig of his whisky. “What else?”

  “The shots were accurate at about twenty feet, well grouped. But downstairs, the guy couldn’t shoot to save his life. Literally. At twenty feet he shot twice, three or four feet wide and high. Then he ran. Carmichael got off three rounds, but he was just as bad. Carmichael was a Marines Gunnery Sergeant.”

  That caught Bat’s attention and he stared at me. “And he couldn’t hit a target at twenty feet.”

  “Maybe it’s not as odd as it sounds. He was in the Corps about thirty or forty years ago. He was shocked and it was a moving target.”

  He wasn’t convinced but he said, “OK, if you say so.”

  “So, I’m turning this around in my head and here are my initial thoughts. I’m trying to visualize what h
appened. Sarah has been out visiting her sister. She comes home early and Carmichael is out, having dinner at a restaurant. She goes upstairs and by eleven she’s in bed, presumably asleep.”

  “You got this from Simone?”

  “Partly. You know her?”

  “Just, you know…” He made a coming-and-going gesture with his hands, like they had crossed each other sometimes in the bar.

  I nodded. “Sure. Anyhow, at some time around eleven, the killer gets into the house, either through the front door or through the French doors at the back. The police report says they could find no forced entry. He goes upstairs to the bedroom and enters without waking her. And here is where it gets complicated.”

  “How?”

  I sighed, still turning it over in my head and wishing I could light up a cigarette. I took a swig and sighed again.

  “Because he takes out the gun that you have previously left your prints on, and he does not leave his prints over the top, which means he is wearing latex, surgical gloves. He puts four rounds into her, very tightly grouped, then he leaves your prints on the bedpost and on the door handle, which means he has taken the trouble to make latex copies of your prints.” I paused, watching his face. He looked depressed. I continued. “He then left the room and went downstairs to the drawing room. Presumably he came in that way, via the woods, and planned on leaving that way. But as he’s making his way toward the French doors, Carmichael comes in and turns on the light. The guy panics, lets off two rounds and runs. Carmichael goes upstairs to check on his wife and our guy makes good his escape across the lawn and into the woods, where he carefully leaves the revolver for the cops to find.”

  I sat back and he stared at me, incredulous. “He made fuckin’ latex copies of my prints?” He waited a moment, trying to read my face. “Are you having second thoughts? Are you thinking I done it?”

  “No. I am convinced you didn’t. Stay with me, Bat. Questions: one, what made this guy choose you for the frame? Two, what makes a guy shoot with such accuracy one moment, and then miss wildly the next?”

  He drained his glass. “Well,” he said, smacking his lips and placing it carefully back on the table. “The prints and the shooting all point to a pro—a real pro. Real pros don’t go to pieces because the lord of the manor comes home. So the bad shooting on both parts was a fake, which means that Carmichael was in on it, or employed this bloke to do the job.”

  I signaled the waitress for two more drinks. “That was my first thought, and the obvious conclusion. But it has a weakness.”

  “What?”

  “Everybody, including Carmichael, thought Sarah would be out that night till late, as she usually was when she went to listen to jazz. She told him she was going out for the night. They were coming here, in fact, to listen to you. She went to her sister’s to pick her up, but they got talking about Sarah’s problems with her husband, and in the end they didn’t come. Sarah went home to bed instead.”

  “So who knew she was home?”

  The waitress brought the drinks, and when she’d gone, I flopped back in my chair and sighed. “On the face of it, Simone. Not exactly an ace hit man.”

  He spread his hands and shook his head. “Well, then, what the fuck?”

  “Right now, Bat, there is only one way it makes any sense to me.”

  “There’s no way it makes fuckin’ sense to me, sir. ’Scuse my fuckin’ French.”

  “Think about it. Everybody loves her. She does good works for the community and the environment. At first, I thought maybe there was a jealous lover, or her husband. But when this woman goes out to listen to jazz, apparently that’s not a euphemism. She really did go out to listen to jazz.”

  “I told you that, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, you did. So nobody wanted her dead, and nobody except her sister knew she was there at that time…”

  I saw his face clear as the penny dropped. “Fuck. She wasn’t the target. He was.”

  “That’s the way my mind is going, at least.”

  “A man like that might have enemies.”

  “You don’t make that kind of money without treading on some toes. So…” I watched him.

  He waited.

  I said, “What made the killer choose you?”

  He sighed. “Honest, I have no idea.”

  “I can’t help you, Bat, if you don’t level with me.”

  “I am!”

  “I know you’re hiding something, Bat.”

  He looked away, toward the door, where the crowds were gathered, laughing.

  “I can’t force you, pal. But you are not doing any of us any favors by hiding stuff from me. Hell, Bat, what? You don’t trust me?”

  “It ain’t that. You know it ain’t.”

  “What, then?”

  He stared at the tabletop a while, then said, “So what you going to do?”

  “You mean apart from giving you a sound thrashing and throwing you in the Mississippi?”

  “Yeah, aside from that.”

  “I’m going to tail Carmichael for a couple of days. I figure if he was the intended victim, whoever it was is going to have to try again. If that’s the case, then they will probably be watching him. So I am going to try to watch the watcher. I also need to find this guy who set you up. But that is going to be hard if you won’t talk to me.”

  He looked mad for a moment. “I am talkin’, in’t I?”

  I put my elbows on the table and stared him in the face. “Why you?”

  He looked away.

  “No, Bat, you’re not talking. You’re bullshitting me and I am trying to save your life. I don’t appreciate it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not stupid, Bat. I know what you’re doing. But you’re making a mistake.”

  He shrugged and held my eye. I could see there all the obstinacy that had got him into the Regiment in the first place, the obstinacy that had made him one of the best of the best. He had made up his mind, and I knew that nothing I could do would make him budge.

  “OK, pal. We’ll do it this way. But you have to realize, sooner or later, whatever it is you are hiding will come out.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but not through me it won’t.”

  “OK.” I slapped him on the shoulder. “You want to get some food?”

  We ordered a couple of burgers and while they were being fried, he asked me, “So, what do you think of Simone?”

  I smiled. “She’s as hot as a Carolina reaper. Smart, too. What about you?”

  He shook his head. “Nah, not my type. Too fuckin’ dangerous. Too deep.”

  “You got that right. What’s your type, then, Bat?”

  We’d had the same conversation a hundred times, from the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to the rainforests of Colombia, but it was a good place to revisit and remind ourselves that we were allies, comrades in arms, contra mundum.

  He sat back, a lopsided smile on his face, gazing up at the ceiling. “English rose. That’s my type. Peaches and cream complexion, demure, real cut glass accent, like Kate Beckinsale, know what I mean? Bit of class, faithful, shy, blushes easy. But a right fuckin’ daemon in the bedroom!”

  We laughed out loud and spent the rest of the evening talking about the old times, remembering old friends, some—not many—dead in action. All of them unique, singular men, because the SAS has a policy of recruiting eccentrics and creative thinkers. We even sang a few songs, and when the band started to play, Bat pulled out his comb and a piece of paper, and jammed with them from where he was sitting at our table, getting more applause and cheers than the band.

  At two AM, we stepped out and I walked him home, arm in arm, singing obscene army songs under the angry sky, defying the world to do its worst. We were the Clan, invincible.

  At his door, I gripped his hand in mine. “Stay strong, Bat. We’ll win. We always do.”

  “Who dares wins, right?”

  “Right, who dares wins.”

  He went inside and I made
my way down Congress toward Chartres Avenue and the Soniat, turning over in my head his description of the ideal woman. I had a feeling I could not shake that, bar the cut glass Beckinsale accent, he had described Sarah Carmichael down to a T.

  Eight

  Next morning, I was up at six and went for a run before breakfast. It was pitch black and as warm as a summer day. The TV in reception was saying that the NWS’ worst fears were confirmed. Hurricane Sarah had turned north and was now headed across the Gulf straight for New Orleans, causing havoc and leaving utter devastation in her path. The death toll was high, and rising, and the damage to property was already being calculated in the billions.

  She was coming, and bringing death with her.

  I ran for two miles out of town, through the forest along Tunica Road. I crossed the bridge over the Sara Bayou and came to some open parkland at the junction with Solitude Road. North, the landscape opened up into farmland, but south, where it followed the bayou, the forest grew dense and dark.

  I trained for an hour as the horizon in the east turned from black to a menacing, leaden gray. Then I headed back. As I ran, a small column of trucks and cars, laden with their essential possessions, was pulling out of Burgundy, headed north.

  Back at the hotel, I stopped at reception, drenched in perspiration, to collect my key. Luis was still glued to the News Channel.

  “You’re not leaving?” I asked him.

  He made a face and shrugged, reaching for my card. “They saying it’s gonna blow itself out over the Gulf. New Orleans gonna get the brunt of it, but it’ll be a tropical storm by then, you know what I’m sayin’? It ain’t gonna hit Baton Rouge, never mind Burgundy. People panicking, but we a hundred miles from New Orleans, ain’t nothin’ gonna happen this far north.”