New Orleans: 5 June 7:05 A.M. Central time
The next morning, the sun came up like a big orange ball in a clear blue sky, and the city of New Orleans steamed.
Jax pulled his rented Pontiac G6 in close to the curb and parked. Beside him, what was left of Tulane University’s Psych Annex smoldered behind lines of yellow crime scene tape that flapped lazily in the warm breeze coming off the river.
Jax opened his car door. Crime scene tape meant crime. Maybe this wasn’t going to be a simple case of gas explosion—accidental death—investigation closed after all. So much for his tickets to tonight’s performance of Turandot at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House—and any hope of changing Sibel’s mind about the future of their relationship.
A New Orleans city cop with the massive jowls and ponderous belly of a dedicated beer lover reluctantly left the steps he’d been leaning against and ambled over. “I’m sorry, sir. There’s no parking here. You’re gonna have to move your car.”
Jax flashed the man a friendly smile and held up an Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms badge. The badge looked real because it was—just like the ones from the FBI and the Office of Homeland Security, and the press corps card Jax also carried. He even had an IRS ID he used when he really wanted to scare people.
“Agent Jason Aldrich, ATF.” He nodded to the fire-scorched pile beside them. “What can you tell me about this?”
The patrolman stood up straighter and stuck his thumbs in his waistband to hitch up blue trousers pulled low by the combined weight of holster, handcuff case, ammunition pouch, radio, and collapsible combat baton. “You’ll want to be talking to Lieutenant Ahearn. He can tell ya what you need to know.” He turned his head and yelled, “Hey, Lieutenant. We got the ATF here.”
A lean, small-framed man with sandy hair and a sprinkling of freckles across a sunburned nose had been standing beside the blackened remnants of what had once been a red Miata. He now turned, pale eyes squinting against the brightness of the sun as he waited for Jax to come up to him.
Lieutenant Ahearn was not as impressed with Jax’s ATF badge as the patrolman had been, although he was careful to veil his hostility and surprise behind a show of cooperation. “Everything’s preliminary at this point, I’m afraid,” he said in the crisp, peculiarly cropped New Orleans accent that sounded more like the Bronx or Jersey than the mint-julep-sippin’ South.
“I understand that,” said Jax. “And I don’t want you thinking we’ve any interest in taking over your investigation, because that’s not the way it is. We’re just wondering what you’ve found about this fire that makes you think it’s suspicious.”
“Suspicious?” The lieutenant blinked. His short blond eyelashes and eyebrows were so fair they virtually disappeared against his white skin. “Well, I don’t know how things are up in Washington, D.C., but down here, we find a man with a couple of bullet holes in his head in a burned-out building, and we tend get suspicious.”
A comedian, thought Jax, still smiling. “Any leads?”
The detective met his smile with a steely glare. “I think you’ll need to go through channels to get that kind of information, Mr. Aldrich.”
Jax sighed. It was too hot for this. “Let me explain something to you…”
Half an hour later, having invoked the specter of six hundred incompetent idiots from Homeland Security descending on Ahearn’s investigation, Jax sat in the G6 with the air conditioner running full blast and put a call through to Matt. “See what you’ve got on a woman named October Guinness…That’s right, the lady listed in the police report as having called in the fire. Lives at 5815 Patton.” Jax glanced across the street at the brick house with Italianate arches on the corner where a middle-aged woman with madras shorts, long skinny legs, and a straw hat was setting a flat of begonias along the front edge of the shrubbery.
He heard Matt von Moltke’s breath ease out in a long, troubled sigh. Matt always took this stuff way too personally. “Found something, did you?” he asked.
“’Fraid so.” Jax straightened his tie and thumbed through his wallet to find his press card. In his experience, middle-aged women who lived in big expensive houses were far more forthcoming with journalists than with ATF agents. “Looks like your man Youngblood ended up with a couple of bullets in his head.”
“And this woman? This October Guinness?”
Jax shut off the engine again and opened the door. “She was here when the building blew. According to the cops, she was working with him. Which may or may not mean anything. I’ll let you know.”
Jax’s conversation with the Uptown lady who lived in the raised cottage across from the Psych Annex was only vaguely informative.
She’d been in the back room watching television when the place blew, although she stood out on her front porch for a good forty-five minutes and watched the Annex burn. For much of that time she’d had company in the form of a young, pale-faced girl with big eyes and a tendency to start violently at loud noises. October, the girl had said her name was.
Jax gave the Uptown lady a business card that read: JACOB ANDERSON, ASSOCIATED PRESS. Then he went looking for October Guinness.