Jodi pushed papers aside from the long length of tables and I set the box and bag in the clear space. “Gimme,” Jodi said of the coffee. I poured a cup from the travel box the café had put together and she took it, inhaling the aroma before she inhaled the coffee itself. “God, this is so much better than the swill we scorch here. I needed this.” A moment later she took a beignet and bit in. Through the powdered sugar and fried pastry she said, “So. What do you want?”
I followed her lead, took a beignet, and bit in. The taste was incredible. Sweet, hot, and perfect. Through the pastry I said, “I need info. And I have something to trade.” Jodi made a little “go ahead” gesture with her pastry and I said, “I need to know about any dark-haired male vamps or blood-servants who currently have short beards.” I demonstrated with a finger to show her the shape. “And who may wear earrings. Hoops.”
“Yeah?” Jodi watched me speculatively, and from the look in her eyes, she had something for me. “What do you have to trade?”
“Info on a vamp gather.”
“Old or recent?”
I popped the last of my beignet into my mouth and pushed it in with one finger. Chewed. Swallowed. Grinned. Letting her wait. “Planned.”
Jodi’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped. “No shit? Uh, sorry. No kidding?”
“None at all. And if you help, I’ll ask Leo if you can attend. He’ll probably say no, but it’s worth a shot.”
“I’d give my ex-husband’s left testicle to attend a gather. Actually, I’d give both. Wrapped up in a box with a bow.”
I chuckled. I’d only recently discovered that Jodi had been married once. It hadn’t lasted long and it had ended badly when the ex had tried to sleep with Jodi’s cop partner. Who was male. And not gay. “Like I said. I can’t promise anything. But I can tell you as much as Leo lets me about the gather, like date and time, info I’ll get tonight. I do know that it’ll be soon. Deal?”
“One of my sources spotted a new vamp in town. He goes by the name Jack Shoffru, and we have records on him back to the mid seventeen hundreds. Scuttlebutt from way back when, like ancient history gossip, says that he ran with Jean Lafitte.”
“The pirate?” I asked, startled, talking around the pastry and thinking about the gold earring. I had been thinking gay vamp, but the earring could certainly have been piratical. I kept my smile in and swallowed my bite of beignet.
“Yeah. Him. Lafitte made Louisiana his stomping grounds, until he disappeared in 1823.”
I stopped cold, another beignet halfway to my mouth. Disappeared was a vamp term, used when a vamp had lived too long unchanged and unaged in the human world. It also was a term they used when they were first turned and went into forced containment in their master’s scion lair for the necessary ten years or so of curing, the time and the condition of insanity referred to as the devoveo. “Sooo, are you saying that Shoffru actually is Lafitte?”
“No. They hung together. A lot. Records suggest that he was a ship’s captain in Lafitte’s fleet and a partner in Lafitte’s warehouse in the city in 1805. Anyway, Shoffru has been gone for nearly two centuries, and is now a big-time MOC in Mexico, which was also a stomping ground for Lafitte. Now he’s back. I’ll e-mail you his file as soon as I nail down some particulars.”
“That would be great,” I said. “A pirate on Leo’s territory. Yeah. I need to talk to the MOC.” I stopped. “When did he get here? To New Orleans? And . . . do vamps have passports? How did he get here from Mexico?”
“My sources are still tracking that down and trust me, it should not be taking so long. No one is saying, but I have a feeling that either he compelled humans to let him in without papers or he snuck in over the border.”
I sat back on the tabletop, letting the formerly unmatched puzzle pieces find a few new empty slots. “So, does Galveston have a port where he could have come over?”
Jodi looked at me strangely. “Yeah. Why? What do you know?”
“Not a thing; just a wild guess. See if any record goes to Shoffru renting a limo in Galveston. If he did, then that would be the port he entered through, maybe, and the method he used to get here. And if my guess pans out, that would mean you would be willing to share all you have on him, right?”
“Deal. But right now I need info on the gather. Is security going to be a problem?” she asked, changing the subject.
“Shouldn’t. Maybe traffic problems the night of. I’ll keep you informed if we need traffic cops.”
“And if you get me into the gather I’ll be your biggest fan.”
“I’ll try to make it happen.” I nodded at the photos on the whiteboards. “Anything new on the cold-case missing witches?”
“Not much.” Her mouth turned down. Jodi’s mother was a witch, as her aunt had been. For her, missing witch cold cases were a personal issue. “So many lost,” she said. “So few bodies ever found. They have to be somewhere.”
“Or turned and chained in a vamp’s basement.”
Jodi spun slowly on a heel and looked at me, her eyebrows forming a slight V. “Yeah. Maybe.”