I sat back. “No explosives, no chemicals. I’ll take it into the yard to open it.” Neither of them asked how I knew it was explosive-free, and I didn’t volunteer enlightenment. I carefully lifted the envelope and carried it to the side door and into the yard. Behind me, the porch light came on and I was aware of them standing side by side behind the closed door. Angling my body so the prevailing wind would carry anything within away from me and away from the house, I opened the flap. Three photographs were inside. “It’s okay,” I said without looking up. “I’ll be inside in a minute.”
The photos were originals, one black and white and two in color; one color shot arrested my attention. The tints were wasted by time and sunlight, the oranges, yellows, and reds bright and glaring, the blues and greens muted. It was a picture of Bruiser and a blurred form, maybe Leo, both dressed in clothing from the early sixties, standing over the body of an animal. Or, not an animal. A werewolf. It was caught in half human, half wolf form, and from the distortion, it was changing, or trying to. From the blood, it was dead or dying. Leo and Bruiser were both holding hunting rifles.
The background was not south Louisiana, but a hilly locale. A Land Rover stood in the background, dust covered, rock formations behind it. The photograph wasn’t proof of murder, but it was suggestive of some kind of crime.
The black and white photograph was even older, a posed shot of a woman, probably mixed race, with sparkling eyes, full lips, high cheeks, and tip-tilted eyes. Her black hair was piled up in waves and curls that looked artless and had probably taken a maidservant hours to accomplish, and tresses draped to her shoulders as if accidentally fallen there from the touch of a careless but loving hand. She wore a dress from another time, all white lace and silks and a bow under her breasts. She was beautiful in a way I’d never be. I often wanted to hate women like that, but she looked so happy, so in love, it was impossible to dredge up negative emotion. I turned the photo over and read the faint handwriting on the back. “From Magnolia Sweets to Leo, my love.”
The third photo was actually four digital shots, printed out together on computer paper. They were of Rick. In one, he was standing in the breezeway of a hotel, a thin slice of the cityscape in the background. He was dressed in biker gear, one hand braced high on a wall, one knee bent, in a negligent, masculine pose. He was with a girl, his hand on her nape, as if pulling her into a kiss. She was wearing a short skirt and gold, six-inch stilettos, her upper body hidden. In another, he was kissing her, his back to the camera, only her legs showing. In another, he was following her into a hotel room. She was red-headed, petite, delicate, sexy, and feminine. All the things I’d never be. And this woman I did hate with a spear of pain that stabbed through my chest.
The fourth shot was Rick with a woman in a setting with a trellis and window basket of flowers. In this one, long black hair hung to her thighs, her arms up and twined around him, languorous. Safia. He was kissing her. Distantly, I noted that the woman’s body size and skin tones matched in all four photos. Safia had worn a red wig to meet Rick at a hotel?
My breath ached when I drew it in, belatedly, painfully. A reasonable voice in my head said, He’s undercover. He has a job to do. It’s only a job. A less reasonable voice that had angry Beast-overtones said, Mine. And clawed at my heart. But I’d just narrowly avoided sex in the shower with Bruiser. I had no reason or right to feel pain or betrayal.
I folded the paper carefully, so the photos didn’t crease, and tucked it into my jeans pocket. I stuffed my feelings away too, without looking at them, and shoved the voices, the reasonable one and the angry one, deeper. I had a job to do.
I went back into the house and placed the black and white photograph in front of Bruiser, who was sitting with Evangelina at the table, sipping tea. I added sugar and cream to the third prepared mug and sat across from them.
Bruiser studied the photo and his lips turned up in a winsome smile, the kind people give when presented with a remembrance of an enchanted time. “I remember the day this was taken. There was this photographer, Ernest something.”
“Ernest J. Bellocq?” I asked. I’d seen his work before. He took photos of Storyville and other neighborhoods in New Orleans for years, and had been the first, and so far as I knew, the only, photographer to capture vamp images on film until digital photography became common. Vamps had never imaged well on silver used in the photographic process.
“Yes, that’s the name. Maggie was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen. I was half in love with her when I was a young lad.” I laid the color photo in front of him, and Bruiser’s face changed. He swore and looked at me, his face closed off, thinking. Calculating? Concocting a story? Maybe.
“No one was with Leo and me when we made this kill.” He made it sound like a legitimate hunt, not a murder, but I kept my mouth shut on the comment. “So who took this and why did he bring it to you?”
“Someone with an agenda. Someone who knows most of what’s going on and wants me to figure out the rest for him.”
“Without giving himself away,” Evangelina said.
CHAPTER 15
Good Nose on Ugly Dog
I looked at the sky out the window and judged that it was several hours until dawn on Saturday. I hadn’t slept a full eight hours in days and my eyes felt gritty and dry, my body jumpy and strained, my mind fuzzy and overloaded. I needed a good sleep or a good hunt. I needed to inspect Safia’s body in the morgue with animal senses to see/smell what I’d missed in human form. I needed to scout vamp HQ with better than human senses too, but with the security cameras on twenty-four/ seven that was going to be impossible. And I needed to get away from Evangelina and Bruiser. Far away.