Chapter Sixty-Eight
I stared out at the great, sweeping live oaks. Then I noticed the plump magnolias and sloppy, fanning banana trees of the Garden District. There was nothing else for me to do. The surveillance continued. Jamilla was starting to repeat herself. We both were, and that became a running gag between us. Sections of the day's Times-Picayune were all over the backseat of the car. We had read it cover to cover. "There's no physical evidence tying Daniel or Charles to a single murder. Not in any of the cities, Alex. Everything we have on them is circumstantial, or theoretical, hypothetical bullshit. Does that make any sense to you? It doesn't to me.' She was talking, probably just to talk, but she was making sense. 'It just doesn't add up. They can't be that good. No one is.' We were parked four blocks north of the house on LaSalle. The domain. We could get there in seconds if anything developed, but so far, nothing had. That was the problem. Daniel and Charles rarely left their two-hundred-year-old mansion, and when they did, it was only to go shopping, or to a fancy restaurant downtown. Not surprisingly, they had good taste. I tried to answer Jamilla's question. 'It makes some sense to me that we can't link them to the early murders.You know as well as I do - once a murder case gets old it's almost impossible to find witnesses, or compelling evidence. I don't understand why we haven't found anything on the recent murders, though.' 'That's what I'm thinking too. We have witnesses to the killings in
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Savannah and in Charleston, but no one recognizes photos of Daniel or Charles. Why not? What are we missing?' 'Maybe they don't commit the actual murders themselves,' I said. 'Maybe they used to, but not anymore.' 'Don't they want to feast on the kills? Drink the blood? What other purpose do the murders serve? Are they symbolic? Is this part of some arcane mythology? Are they creating a new mythology? Jesus, Alex, what the hell are these two monsters doing in New Orleans?' I didn't have answers to her questions, or my own. No one did, unfortunately. So we sat in the car, tried to keep cool in the heat, and waited for Daniel and Charles to make their next move. If they were so careful and so good then why did we know about them, why were we here?
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