The narcotics detective regarded him thoughtfully. “What kind of plan?”
“The kind that involves you not telling anyone but Brooks, Drew, and me the next time your informant calls with information, then letting us run the operation,” Remy said.
Lorenzo flinched. “I don’t think Captain Barron would ever go for that.”
“That won’t be a problem since a key part of the plan is not telling him either.”
* * *
It was almost one o’clock by the time Triana got to her mother’s shop. She hadn’t been able to wait to read the police and coroner’s reports Bodine had given her, so after leaving the diner, she’d hopped off the streetcar at the Tulane station and run across the street to the public library. At that time of the day, it hadn’t been hard to find a quiet cubicle out of the way to review the files.
Even though she’d pored over thousands of reports like this in her job, it had been difficult to read these. This wasn’t just a random murder. This was her father’s. But she’d forced herself to push the emotions aside as much as she could and focus solely on the facts in the reports.
She’d hoped the file would provide some details she might be able to dig into with her forensic skills, but there had been no unusual hairs, fibers, trace evidence, or even fingerprints found at her father’s club. Like Bodine had said, the blood of the two attackers her father had apparently killed was not in the system, and the bullet casings didn’t come back as related to any other reported crimes.
She’d hoped the animal tranquilizer used on her father might be a different story. Xylazine was a sedative and analgesic used for horses and other large animals. The coroner had found several large, deep puncture marks on her father’s body, indicating he’d been hit multiple times with a dart gun of some kind. The dosage used on her father had been extreme, and the coroner estimated that nearly fifteen milliliters of the stuff had been dumped into his body. That would have been a lot for a full-size horse. For a human—even one as big as her father—it would have been fatal in minutes.
But even though Triana had never heard of anyone using xylazine on humans in regard to murder, it appeared no one had done anything with the information. She’d read through the reports several times and found no record that the coroner or detective in charge of the case had checked with ViCAP or any other state criminal database to see if something like this had happened before.
Triana had called a friend at the crime lab in Houston and asked the woman to check for other murders involving the use of this drug. Her friend had been curious, wanting to know if this had anything to do with her father’s death, but when Triana said it wasn’t something she wanted to get out to the rest of the lab, her friend had promised to keep it quiet.
It was entirely possible that the reason there hadn’t been a note in the file about a ViCAP check was because the coroner had done his job and hadn’t found anything, but it wouldn’t hurt to check again, if for no other reason than it would give her something to do while Bodine was digging into the angle that her father had pissed someone off right before his death. Bodine promised to let her know if he learned anything and asked her to do the same.
As Triana walked into the shop, she couldn’t help smiling when she saw her mom behind the counter, tying up gris-gris bags and putting price tags on them. Her mother looked up and returned her smile.
“So you finally decided to come home, huh?” she teased.
Triana laughed. She’d texted her mom earlier that morning, before her meeting with Bodine, and again before stopping at the library. So it wasn’t like her mother hadn’t known where she was and that she was safe.
Walking over to the counter, she set down her purse and the envelope so she could help with the gris-gris bags. She absolutely loved the smell of the combination of herbs and spices her mom put in them.
Her mother glanced at her as she reached for another bag. “Since you spent the night with Remy, that must mean your date went well.”
Triana’s first instinct was to say it was wonderful and that they had a great time, but she caught herself. Her mother was as much her friend as her parent, and if there was one person in the world she could tell about her date with Remy—minus the part about them sleeping together—it was her mom. Besides, if she didn’t talk to someone about Remy and how much she liked him, she was sure she would explode.
But wanting to talk about Remy and actually getting the right words to come out were two completely different things. Especially because her head was still swimming with everything she’d been feeling. Thankfully her mother didn’t rush her as she tried to get her thoughts together.
Finally, she took a deep breath and opened her mouth, hoping the right words would somehow find their way out. “It went extremely well. I can honestly say that I’ve never been with a man so charming, engaging, relaxed, confident, or so…”
“Attractive?” her mother finished.
Triana grinned. “Yes. Without a doubt, Remy is the most attractive man I’ve ever seen, much less dated. The funny thing about it is that I don’t think Remy knows how incredibly handsome he really is. I saw at least a dozen women trying to catch his eye when we walked into Muriel’s and he didn’t even notice. He never looked at a single one of them. In fact, he never took his eyes off of me the entire night.”
Her mother’s lips curved. “Why would he? Remy’s as smitten with you as you are with him.”
Even though Triana appreciated her mother’s analysis of Remy’s feelings, she couldn’t help laughing. “Mom. No one uses the word smitten anymore. And even if they did, I’m not sure I’d say I’m smitten with him. It’s a little too early for anything like that.”
Her mother lifted a brow. “What word would you use then, if not smitten?”
Triana opened her mouth, all ready to try to put the crazy feelings that had been zipping back and forth through her head all morning into a single, simple word. She failed.
“I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “What I’m feeling right now is too complicated to fit into a single word or even a whole bunch of words. All I can say for certain is that I’ve never been with anyone like Remy. I can’t stop thinking about him.”
“You seem to have done a decent job of saying how you feel right there,” her mother said. “And whether you want to admit it or not, you are smitten with him.”
Triana knotted the ribbon on the gris-gris bag she was working on. “I can’t be smitten with him. That would mean I’m falling for him, and that would be certifiably insane considering we’ve only gone out once.”
Her mom laughed. “First off, I think you get a little credit for being friends with Remy in high school. It’s not as if you just met the man two days ago, you know. Even if you had, there’s nothing crazy about falling fast. It simply means fate put you in front of the man you were meant to be with. There’s nothing insane about that. In fact, it’s magical.” When Triana looked skeptical, her mother continued. “If it makes you feel any better, the exact same thing happened when I met your dad.”
