Chapter Seventy
Something had to break for us. At seven in the morning, I sat alone at a table outside the Cafe du Monde across from Jackson Square. I ate sugar-dusted beignets and sipped chickory-laced coffee. I stared off in the direction of the spire of St Louis Cathedral and listened to the bleating horns of riverboats coming down the Mississippi. It should have been a nice time of the morning, except that I was frustrated and angry and filled with energy that I didn't know what to do with. I had seen a lot of bad cases, but this was possibly the most difficult to comprehend. The gruesome murders had been going on for more than eleven years, but the pattern was still unclear, and so was the motivation of the killers. As soon as I reached the FBI offices, I got the disturbing news that a fifteen-year-old girl was missing and that she lived less than six blocks from the magicians. It was possible that she was a runaway, but it didn't seem likely to me. Still, she had been gone less than twenty-four hours. There was a briefing scheduled and I went upstairs to find out more, and also why I hadn't been alerted earlier. When I entered the session that morning, I sensed the frustration everywhere that I looked. It was hard to imagine a worse result: we suspected that we had tracked down the murderers, but there was nothing we could do about it. And now there was a possibility they had murdered another victim right under our noses.
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VIOLETS ARE BLUE
I sat down beside Jamilla. Both of us had containers of hot coffee plus the morning edition of the Times-Picayune. There was nothing about the missing girl; apparently the New Orleans police had sat on the disappearance until early that morning. Kyle was angry. He just wasn't himself. He was storming about the front of the room, his right hand nervously combing back his dark hair. I didn't blame him - everything about the investigation depended on FBI cooperation with the local police. The NOPD had broken that trust, broken it badly. Tor once, I sympathize with Mr Craig,' Jamilla said. 'The locals were way out of line.' 'We could have been working on the girl's disappearance for hours,'! agreed.'What a mess, and it's getting worse.' 'Maybe this is our opportunity. I wonder if we could get inside the house during the party tonight. What do you think? I'd love to give it a try,'she whispered.'Everybody who goes to the so-called Fetish Ball will be in costume, right? Somebody needs to get inside that house. We need to do something.' Kyle stared directly at Jamilla and me. He raised his voice.'Can we have one meeting?' 'He means can he have his meeting,' she whispered. I wondered why she had taken such a dislike to Kyle. He was acting strange though; the pressure of the case was getting to him. Something had him on edge. 'Tell him what you think,' I said. 'He'll listen. Especially now that the girl is missing.' 'I doubt it. But what can he do - fire me?' She swiveled around to face Kyle. 'I think we could probably get inside the house tonight during the party. And if we don't, what do we lose? The missing girl might be in there.' Kyle hesitated, but then he said, 'Do it. Let's see what's in the house.'
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