13

River water squished out of my shoes with each step. I noticed a storefront that had a For Rent sign on it. The window of the empty store was covered with paper, but there were posters on the side going into the alley. They were pictures of a few younger women and several girls of varying ages, from children to middle schoolers perhaps, with their birth dates and when they had disappeared. My heart sank. I studied one of them: Peggy Tanner. Disappeared eight months ago. Blonde hair, green eyes. Twelve years old.

I remembered Turk’s comment about the dead girl they found at Bayou Bon Coeur. Please, God, I prayed silently, keep Heather from showing up on one of those posters. Keep her safe. And help me find her. Then, as I kept walking and feeling more desperate, I added, Anything, Lord. Give me anything.

It was getting dark as I walked down Bourbon Street, feeling helpless and hungry and, of course, still soaked. The lights were on at Bud’s Diner, so I stepped in. The place was crowded. All I wanted was to get some directions to the nearest cabstand.

A guy I took to be Bud was behind the cash register, cracking jokes with a customer who was paying his bill.

A waitress with a plastic menu scurried up to me and said, “Hi, honey, I’ve got a table for one and it’s got your name on it.”

I shifted in my stance, my shoes squish-squashing and creating a small pond of water on the floor. I thanked her but said I was only looking for a cab to get me back to my hotel. As she eyeballed my soaked clothes, she asked which hotel, and when I told her, she said it was only a few blocks away and gave me directions. I thanked her and pulled out a soggy five-dollar bill and handed it to her as a tip for her help.

I stepped out to the vestibule of the diner, and just for laughs I pushed the power button on my cell phone again. Incredibly, it lit up. I couldn’t believe it. I immediately tried to call Heather, but it went straight to voice mail.

I tried Heather’s number one more time, hoping by some miracle that Heather would pick up, and I noticed two uniformed New Orleans cops approaching the cash register to pay for their meal. As I heard the disheartening sound once again of Heather’s voice mail, the police officers started up some friendly banter with Bud. He responded by saying something to them about their “fishing a limo out of the drink tonight.”

I clicked off my cell phone and listened closer.

One of the officers shook his head. “C’mon, Bud, does everybody in this city have a police scanner?”

Bud chuckled. “Best radio show in town. So who was the dead guy in the trunk of that car in the river?”

“Come on, knock it off,” the officer said.

His partner added, “Hey, Sarge, maybe we ought to take Bud with us to the coroner’s so he can sit in on the autopsy too.”

Then the waitress I had talked to swept up to the register, right in front of Bud and in front of the two cops, and she waved my wet five-dollar bill in the air and said, “Who pays a tip with soaking-wet money anyway?”

Bud replied, “Somebody involved in money laundering,” and they all laughed.

Except for me. I wasn’t laughing. I quickly stepped outside to the sidewalk.

The picture was clear. The corpse rolling around in the trunk of the limo must have been the real chauffeur. And my spooky chauffeur was probably his replacement —as well as his slayer.

Meanwhile, I was the person who exited the limo and crawled out of the Mississippi.

I was fast-stepping away from the diner, hoping to get out of sight before the two patrol officers left the restaurant and spotted me.

The list of my entanglements in suspicious events had expanded: insulting the legal profession in the presence of the attorney general; being hauled off stage by FBI agents; having a hotel room where a high-ranking government lawyer would end up being decapitated; and lastly, catching a ride in a limo that had a homicide victim in the trunk.

It didn’t take a forensic detective from NCIS: New Orleans to build the chain of evidence: a car submerged in the river, containing a dead body in the trunk; the possible murder weapon in the limo, with my prints on it; and then I show up a few blocks away, wearing waterlogged clothes and handing out soaking-wet money.

That was bad enough. But there was something even worse than my being innocently implicated in yet another murder: Heather was still missing and unaccounted for.