Cold Read online

  “She’s not my girl, no,” Veronika said, sighing a little. “She’s Harry’s, damn him and his rugged, manly good looks and dripping heterosexual appeal.”

  It was Detective Norton’s turn to make a face. “Who’s Harry?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Veronika said. “We’re here about that little incident on Fremont last night. My partner here turned in a piece of ID that you guys were going to try and get a match on. Any word on that?”

  “Let me take a peek at the file,” Norton said and plopped down on her chair, tapping away at the keyboard a few seconds later. “I swear they haven’t updated our computers since the late 1900s.”

  “You still running Windows 97?” Veronika deadpanned. “Because in some ways, I think that might be better than 10.”

  Norton stared at her a little blankly. “You some kind of tech nerd?”

  “I’m a woman of many interests,” Veronika said. “But right now, I’m mostly interested in finding your perp and beating their speedy little ass with a sock filled with quarters. And my plasma-burning fists, though that might be too quick and merciful.”

  “Must be nice being exempt from ‘excessive force’ citations,” Norton mumbled as she stared at her computer screen. “Okay, I have something here.”

  “Talk to me,” Veronika said. “Hell, sing for me if it involves an address.”

  “Two possibilities,” Norton said, scrawling something on a Post-It pad. She tore it off a second later, strolling over to us and offering it Veronika. Not me, because obviously I was a fly on the wall in all this. “Didn’t I give you my number, Acheron?”

  “You did, and I would have used it last night—” Veronika waved at the bandage on her forehead, smiling impishly “—but I spent the evening in the hospital. Not sure if you heard that.”

  “I didn’t,” Norton said, looking her over. “You okay?”

  “Doing better now,” Veronika said, smirking at her. She waved the Post-It. “Call ya later.”

  “You better.” Norton was smiling too.

  Veronika didn’t say anything until we hit the main steps, already out of the station. “And that’s how it’s done.”

  It took my brain a few seconds to decipher what she meant by that. “Uh…did you just admit you’re flirting with the local cops to get help?”

  “Well, I’m actually interested in Norton, too,” Veronika said, rolling her eyes as she descended the sun-bleached stairs. “But yeah, I don’t have a problem using every available avenue to do my job.”

  Part of me wanted to ask exactly how far that ethos went, but it was a very small part of me and easily drowned out by the more sensible rest of me who screamed DON’T ASK DON’T ASK DON’T ASK until the temptation passed. “Guess we need another car,” I started to say.

  Veronika just waved her phone at me. “Already on the way, with the first destination already set.” She waved the Post-It with the addresses. “Let’s check them out, shall we?”

  56.

  Brianna

  “Why did I tell her that?” Brianna drummed her fingers against the steering wheel. She was westbound, northbound on I-10 heading toward Baton Rouge. New Orleans was in the rearview, and the temptation was to not even look back. She wasn’t yielding to that temptation, though, brushing the strands of brown wig hair out of her eyes and glancing into the rearview every few minutes to make sure there weren’t blinking police lights behind her.

  She’d been beating herself up asking the same question over and over for the last hour. She’d hit up a small safe house she kept in Algiers, grabbed the beat-up 2008 Kia she’d bought for pennies, and hauled ass out of town. Brianna felt lucky to have made it out of her confrontation with Sienna Nealon alive—if you could call it that.

  Had she just been starstruck? Hell, Sienna Nealon was the reason she’d started down this road anyway. Reading about her attitude toward taking revenge, back in the early days, when no one had known her? It had inspired Brianna. Sienna Nealon hadn’t taken the death of her first boyfriend lying down; there was a trail of bodies that had proven she wouldn’t put up with that shit.

  And Brianna had known those feelings, and had felt the same. She’d gone through the cycle after Emily’s death—disbelief it could be her, at first, after seeing her on the news. That didn’t last long. She’d known almost immediately, of course. The fury came next, the unbelievable anger that this could have happened, even though it had been long in coming. There was no escaping it, though, no matter how much she wished it could be different, or how low she got.

  Eventually, it just came down to realizing…Emily was dead. And though it was probably her own fault, in the immediate sense, it really wasn’t, in the wider worldview.

  It was his.

  Ivan Warrington was responsible.

  Now that son of a bitch was governor of Louisiana, and Emily had been found in a spillway down in Plaquemines Parish, arms probably full of track marks and her veins filled with that poison she couldn’t keep herself off of.

  If that wasn’t the kind of injustice that stuck in your craw, Brianna didn’t know what was. And it had certainly stuck in hers. She didn’t know any way to get past it other than one—

  Destroy the damned obstruction.

  So that’s what she’d set out to do with Ivan Warrington. She wished now that she’d done it a year ago, when Sienna Nealon was still out of the picture, but…

  She didn’t have the powers a year ago. She hadn’t read about Sienna Nealon’s own revenge plan a year ago. She’d only found all that out after the Revelen incident, when she’d been poking around.

  And now she’d come face to face with Sienna Nealon herself, and…damn. It had all just sort of come out.

  Okay, not all, but enough. And hadn’t Sienna said Warrington had felt dirty to her? Wasn’t that something?

  But still…why would Brianna have said what she did? She’d as much as identified herself to Nealon, and after keeping her mouth shut for years about Emily. After all this planning, she’d hoped to be able to walk away once Warrington was dead. She hadn’t even bothered claiming Emily’s body, another calculated decision to let her carry through with the plan.

  Brianna’s head whirled, moving back and forth between hope at Sienna Nealon’s words about Warrington being scum and her actions, which had been to put two bullets into the rooftop Brianna had been hiding behind. If it came down to a real, honest to goodness fight between her and Sienna, she did not like her chances. At all. In fact, she probably needed to think on how to make sure she didn’t come out the immediate loser in that fight.

  Either way, it was time to disappear for a while. Warrington could wait, and Sienna Nealon wouldn’t hang around New Orleans forever. Neither would Warrington, really. He’d head back to Baton Rouge soon enough, and Brianna would head to her next safe house and encamp for a while. Not show her face anywhere, take grocery deliveries, really bury herself for a spell. And eventually Nealon would leave—if she didn’t get the son of a bitch for Brianna—and Warrington would go back to doing his usual thing.

  Then, if all else had failed, she’d kill Ivan Warrington then. And hopefully still walk away.

  57.

  Sienna

  The New Orleans Herald-Tribune offices felt about like I’d have expected any local newspaper office to be—crowded, noisy, too many people packed into too little space, but probably about a fifth as many as there’d been twenty years ago, before the newspaper industry started getting their teeth kicked in by the internet.

  The receptionist had barely raised an eyebrow at my request to see Whit Falkner, following up on Michelle Cheong’s tip. She just called ahead then motioned me through into a bullpen. If it was a little quieter, that was probably because people were typing less than they were talking, skimming the internet less than they were making phone calls, though all those things were happening. I counted thirty desks and twenty-eight people on my way to Whit Falkner’s cubicle, and I wondered if that was usual for a newspaper offi
ce these days, or if I’d caught them at an off time.

  I’d checked in, albeit briefly, with Burkitt, before heading to the Herald-Tribune offices. He was still tied up at the scene, and probably would be for some time. I didn’t bother to ask about Holloway and he didn’t mention him, presumably guessing I wanted Holloway to tag along for this about as much as I wanted to run my bare chest across an industrial-scale cheese grater before plunging into a vat of lemon juice. It was a good guess on his part, if it was intended. He could have just as easily forgotten about the douchebag. I certainly wish I had.

  There was a brass nameplate on Whit Falkner’s cubicle bearing her name, and a stately black lady with chocolate skin and a nearly shaved head waited for me there, leaning back out of her cube to watch my approach. She nodded along as I took the last few steps, like my footsteps were in synch with a beat in her head. She slid out to meet me, not bothering to get up. “It really is you,” she said, staring me down. “I thought maybe Rachel had got it wrong.”

  “It really is me,” I said, “and honestly, I’ve gotta wonder what kind of nutbag would think impersonating me was a good idea. If they did, I could only hope one half of one percent of the hell I’ve caught the last few years landed on them.”

  She kept nodding along, gesturing me toward a conference room that ringed the bullpen. “Come on. Let’s talk in private.”

  I eyed the other reporters, all of whom were watching me now, except for one lone guy still talking on the phone, utterly oblivious. “Yeah,” I said. “Wouldn’t want you to get scooped or something.”

  We headed into a plain conference room and she shut the door behind me. She was probably only a couple inches taller than me, but with broader shoulders and similar hips. She gave me the up and down, and I knew what she was thinking because I’d heard it a million times before from people with less of a filter: “I thought you’d be taller.” Damned TV, giving people stupid expectations about my height. She didn’t say it, though.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?” she asked. “You finally sit down with a reporter for an exclusive interview and chose me?”

  I shook my head. “No chance in hell the FBI lets me do an interview with anyone. They won’t even let me have a Twitter account.”

  She paused, thinking for a second. “I hear you have a mouth like a trucker and a propensity to spout off during conflict.” Her teeth showed in a slow grin. “They’re probably doing you a favor on that Twitter thing.”

  “Probably,” I conceded. “I’m here because a little birdie—”

  “Who?”

  I sighed. “I thought reporters respected the sacredness of keeping their sources confidential?”

  “We do,” she said, “and if that’s what it is, I’m down with—”

  “I’m just giving you crap. It’s Michelle Cheong.”

  Her eyes widened. “The Triad Queen-pin? She sent you my way?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “with regard to Emily Glover and Ivan Warrington.” Whit got quiet, and her head bowed enough for me to know I’d hit something. “I see you have a story here.”

  “No, I don’t, actually,” she said, stirring out of her quiet. “I tried to get a story out of it. Tried hard, in fact. But I could never get a second source to confirm, and Emily herself—who gave me the whole sordid tale—never went on the record.” She glanced up at me. “You know what happened to her?”

  “Dug her corpse up myself last night,” I said. “It surprises me that a bold and intrepid reporter like you wouldn’t have said anything about her being the Jane Doe of the Caernarvon Spillway.”

  Whit flinched. “She had a sister, you know? Up in Baton Rouge? I know the word reached her there—”

  “Name?”

  Whit didn’t even have to think about it. “Brianna. Brianna Glover. You should look her up; she’s famous in her own way.” Whit nodded along again, putting something together that she didn’t share. “Anyway, I know she heard about it. But she kept quiet. I didn’t have to think too hard about why that might be, especially when I did a little digging and found out the cause of death. Emily was chasing when I talked to her. Girl couldn’t hardly sit still.”

  “What did she tell you about Ivan Warrington?” I asked.

  “This isn’t a story I can tell—” Whit started.

  “Brianna Glover is the one trying to kill Warrington,” I said, and Whit didn’t react. “I just confronted her at the Riverwalk after chasing her down, and she inferred the motive was personal, but she wouldn’t say what it was. Now, I’ve got suspicions, obviously, all the dark parts of my mind active and piecing together terrible ideas about what men of power do with girls half their age—”

  “It’s…just about what you’d think,” Whit said, getting very still. “The Glovers were an old family in Baton Rouge. Good name, big money. But the daddy, he didn’t want to tread on that like the other parents. Tried not to spoil his daughters. Brianna was on a competitive shooting team—”

  “That explains a lot.”

  “—and he made both girls get jobs, work for their money, as teens,” Whit said. “Tried to keep ’em grounded so they didn’t become spoiled brats. Unfortunately, Emily chose babysitting as her first moneymaking career. Started at thirteen. For the Warrington family.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said, cringing.

  “Yeah,” Whit said, nodding again. “It went about like you probably see it in your head. Fine the first couple times, then suddenly Ivan Warrington stops being the perfect, charming gentleman when he drives her home afterward. He starts showing her a different side of himself. Oh, it started innocently enough.” Whit’s face was twisting the longer she talked, fury starting to drip out. “‘Ever had whiskey? Have a little sip. Ever seen a nudie mag? Take a look at this. Ever done’—” She quivered in disgust. “Well. It went like that from there. She says she didn’t want to, but it didn’t matter. She was thirteen, he was in his thirties. It happened. Again and again. For years.”

  “Dammit,” I said, my eyes squeezed closed.

  “This is the part of the story I could get. Her grades fell off a cliff,” Whit said. “She went from being one of the hardest-working and brightest in her class to being surly, uncooperative. She’d get up when she was forced to, go to school all day, go to bed when she got home, and not get up again until they made her. Her parents thought she was just being a teenager.” Whit pursed her lips tight. “She didn’t say a word about anything. Hell, she wouldn’t talk to me about it until she was high, which was another reason I couldn’t go to print with it. A single source who was lit up every time I talked to her? Attacking a man who—at the time—was just a legislator with a bright future?”

  “Those kind of attack pieces run every day,” I said. “And they usually have less basis in truth than what you’re working with.”

  “Look,” Whit said, holding up a hand, “I may know it’s all true, in my gut, but it doesn’t change the fact that Warrington, when asked for comment, denied it all. See, I went to journalism school long enough ago that they were still teaching me that you can’t accuse people of a felony in print without evidence. There was none, no witnesses to back up anything. Emily’s parents are both long dead, and she says they would have denied it, too, even if they had known about—which they didn’t. Family image, you know?”

  I chewed my lip, my hands clenched tightly into fists. “What about Brianna?”

  “Don’t know,” Whit said. “Emily never told me she had a twin sister. I had to find that one out myself. The girls couldn’t have been more different, at least from what I could see. Brianna went to the Olympics on the competitive rifle team. Won the Silver for Team USA down in Rio de Janeiro. Emily ended up in the gutter, and dead in a swamp spillway. I don’t know that they had much contact after each went their own separate ways.” She shook her head. “You sure it’s her taking shots at Warrington?”

  I nodded. “She’s really pissed at him. And now I know why.”

  Whit nodded. “He migh
t not have done it directly, but Warrington as good as killed that girl. The problem is, you’ll never prove it. Emily never talked about it to anyone contemporaneously. Warrington had her scared witless. The best I could do for corroboration was talk to a couple of her teachers and get them to confirm a behavior shift. But it was weak tea; their recollections were fuzzy at best; we’re talking about people who teach hundreds of kids a year, and Emily wasn’t the worst they dealt with by far. She just went from being among the best to quietly crashing and burning. It wasn’t like she turned violent and beat the ass off every girl in school. She just…” Whit shrugged.

  “Faded away.” I stared at the industrial grey carpeting.

  “Yep.” Whit nodded. It seemed to be her signature. “Some of the teachers I talked to didn’t even remember her. Like she never even existed. And how she ended up, buried in an anonymous grave? It really is like her life counted for nothing.”

  “The guy who paid for that burial plot?” I tapped my fingers against my pants leg, feeling the soft, slightly damp cotton beneath my fingertips. “He’s a political operator. Some sleazeball named Mitchell Werner.”

  “Pffft,” Whit scoffed. “I know that trash. He and Warrington are connected at the hip. You think…?”

  “That Werner operated as a proxy for Warrington in picking up the tab for Emily’s burial?” I stared at her, fury boiling in my mind. “The thought crossed my mind. Warrington does have that whole ‘I am so compassionate my heart bleeds tears of sadness for you’ thing going on.” I folded my arms back across my chest. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he felt a little guilt about the human debris he left in his wake and decided to do the ‘gentlemanly’ thing about it. But, you know, in the chickenshit manner of not actually doing it himself.”

  “Doing it himself might have raised a couple questions,” Whit said. “I could have reported on that. As it was…” She shook her head. “Once I knew it was Emily, I thought it was over. The story, I mean.”