“Jackson Crow by Jackson Square,” Detective Jaden Montrell said dryly. “Well, hell, I hear that this city is where your division first came to life, is that true?” he asked.
“Yep,” Jackson murmured, looking up and down the alley and shaking his head. He turned to Montrell who was, in his opinion, a damned decent detective. He was a man who knew how to use all his resources be it for facts or forensics, or for theories, stories told by the man on the street, or more.
He’d ordered that there be a man dedicated to the area because the supposed “werewolf” they’d taken into custody had told them that the “witches” in the alley were the ones who had turned him into a Rougarou. But Officer Boyer, on duty during the night, had been distracted by a bar fight, a switch in duty that could not be condemned because one of the combatants had been threatening others with a knife. So . . .
There they stood, looking along the alley. Then Jackson walked forward hurriedly, frowning as he studied the ground.
“Maybe nothing happened here last night?” Montrell asked hopefully.
But Jackson was already shaking his head. “See the ground here—someone was dragged along to the . . .” he broke off, walking quickly along the way to Chartres Street. “Someone was dragged along here.”
“Someone or maybe just something!” Montrell said. “I mean . . . first, thank you for staying into the holiday weekend, I know . . .”
His voice trailed and he shook his head. Yes, they’d caught the “Rougarou” killer. And it was hard to believe that someone pretending to be a “witch” had, in the man’s demented mind, turned him into a monster. And while Montrell didn’t want to believe it, in truth he did. And that’s why he was glad that Jackson was there with professional partner and wife, Angela.
“Ah, Jackson, then what the hell? Okay, say someone was attacked, knocked out, dragged through to the street, and likely once there, was thrown into a vehicle. Where do we go from there? If someone drove out of the area, they could be anywhere by now!”
And sadly that was true.
“I think we have a chance of finding out what else is going on,” Jackson told him. “If someone was just taken last night, we have a chance of stopping whatever they’re intending to do.” He took a deep breath. “Angela is at the morgue right now—”
“I know,” Montrell said, “with the bloodless corpse fished out of the Mississippi at the crack of dawn this morning.”
He nodded. “This is a two-pronged thing,” Jackson told him. “You have the ‘witch.’ What his or her agenda is, we don’t know. Except they were getting a kick out of creating Cajun werewolves. But they know that those so-called monsters have been caught. They’re going to change this up, or maybe they already had a few pokers in the fire. A bloodless corpse—”
“Vampires,” Montrell said, sighing. “You know, we have a few legal ‘vampire’ groups around here. They just share bits of their own blood.”
“Right.”
“This isn’t a voodoo thing—” Montrell began.
“I am not suggesting it is. I know a few very legitimate voodoo practitioners here,” Jackson assured him.
“Right. Yeah. I should know that about you,” Montrell said, looking down the street. But he shook his head in frustration. “So, what the hell do we do? Walk around the city and try to find someone with blood caught in their mustache or dripping down their chin or something like that?”
“We know that this person has been hiding out in the shadows of Pirate’s Alley. By day, the place is busy and filled with light. When you get into the late, late hours when the barshave actually closed, it gets dark. There’s someone who has been attacking people here. We need to set up a real sting—”
“And if they see us, they’ll just move their operation.”
“Not if we get it stopped. Let’s get to the station. I want to meet Angela there and get her and our team of brilliant computer techs on this. People are communicating somehow. There are those creating monsters, and those who have been turned into monsters. And one way or another, that group has been on social media.”
He didn’t add—couldn’t add, not in the rational world—that they had a bit of unusual help. Out in the bayou, seeking the “rougarou,” they had met a man.
A dead man. A long dead man. And he was now in the heart of the city with them. The city he had loved in life and protected to this day. A man who had told them how people had appreciated the Lafitte brothers who had brought goods into the city, who taught them great history about the fires that ravaged the area, what had remained, and what had been rebuilt. Alain Laurant had lived during a tumultuous time, but if his spirit was any indication, he had been a good man. And in his spectral form, he remained every bit as willing to help.
And despite how painful it must have been for him, he was currently at the morgue with Angela.
“Let’s head in, and I’m going to hope that Angela is the whiz online that I’ve heard her to be!” Montrell said.
Jackson nodded. Except . . .
He thought about the streets of New Orleans. There were so many street musicians here, and many of them were better than those who might charge large ticket prices to be seen at an arena venue or the like.
Some of them were quite interesting in their musical repertoire, too. He thought of a particular group he and Angela had seen the night they had arrived in the city and justgone walking along Royal Street. They’d called themselves the Shadow Demons. They’d been good, but their music had been heavy metal—nothing wrong in that. He loved lots of heavy metal, but he loved almost any kind of music. But they’d done a number of their own songs, and the lyrics in those songs had included suggestions of “bloody good times” and “death in the darkness and the darkness in death.”
“We need to take a quick stroll here, first,” he told Montrell.
“Oh?”
