“Thank you, Danni,” Brad said. “And we will take you up on that for now.” Brad looked at her. He clearly recognized that the two of them coming to her house wasn’t the permanent solution he knew he was going to need.
Detective Larue came striding into the room. Quinn rose quickly and said, “Jenny, Detective Larue is here now, so we need you to think hard and tell us everything that happened.”
“He’s out there,” Jenny said. “He’s out there...in our city. He’s killed and killed...and he was here. In our house. In our room.”
“From the beginning, Jenny,” Quinn said.
Larue glanced at Quinn. “It will be easier if we do this down at the station. Jenny, we’re going to let the crime scene techs come through and see if they can find any evidence. He was in here, right? He might have touched something. He might have left some evidence. It’s best if we leave that to them, and we can go to the station and sit, have some coffee and let you tell the story as it happened, okay?”
“I’ll get you a jacket, baby,” Brad said.
Jenny suddenly stood and squared her shoulders. “No—he was in the closet. I heard him, and I peeked and...he was wearing gloves, Detective. Even I know that means there won’t be any prints. But he was in the closet, so I don’t think we should touch anything in there. God knows why. Oh! I saw his hair. He had this dark kind of punk-crazy hair. God! He was creepy. How he can walk down the streets and not be seen, I just don’t know.”
Danni said quietly, “Because he gets rid of the mask the second he’s away. And the hair is probably a wig that’s easily removed. And there aren’t many people out when he’s...when he’s attacking people. He operates in the one sweet spot when New Orleans is fairly quiet, partyers worn out and early people just getting up.”
“Let’s head out, shall we?” Quinn said.
They’d already been up all night. By the time they reached the police station, the sun was well on its way up.
Danni’s phone rang. She answered it and was greeted by Billie swearing, which didn’t happen often. But despite his exhaustion of the night before, he’d gotten up early when he heard Bo Ray moving around, and they had seen Wolf sitting by the backyard door and not holding sentinel in front of Danni’s room. They’d immediately realized that Danni and Quinn weren’t there and started looking around for an explanation.
“A note!” Billie was saying now. “A phone call, a text message!” he chastised her. “Don’t you know that this old ticker has already taken quite a lickin’ with the Cafferty clan, eh?”
Danni apologized, trying to explain without missing what was going on around her.
“I’m grateful as hell that your friend is safe,” Billie said. “But next time you remember to phone home, girl, you got me?”
Danni caught Quinn watching her. When she hung up, he said softly, “I overheard. And he has a point. But then, I have a few words for you, too, when the time is right.”
She glared at him. He wouldn’t have done any differently—and they both knew it. But she didn’t say a word.
Larue had arranged chairs in a conference room. He had a tape recorder going, and he identified himself and those in the room, explaining that Jenny LaFleur would be describing an event in which her home had been broken into by the suspected killer of Holton Morelli and Lawrence Barrett. Then he added, “And possibly the murder of Arnold Watson, as well.”
Jenny went through what had happened minute by minute. “Brad had just left,” she said. “He’d only been gone a minute or two. Then I heard a knock on the door. I thought it might be Brad, that maybe he’d forgotten something, but he has a key, so to be safe I looked through the peephole. I saw the man there, and it was like he had no face. Later I realized it was a mask, but right then he was just this scary faceless person, so I backed away and pretended no one was there. A few minutes later I went back to the door to check, and he was gone. I called Danni to tell her what had happened. She told me to call the police, but I felt stupid then. What was I going to say? A creepy freak had knocked at my door? Then...then I heard something slam against the door while I was still on with Danni, and I jumped and dropped the phone. I saw the wood start cracking around the bolt, so I ran to my room. I thought hiding under the bed was too obvious and that he would definitely look in the closet, so I wedged myself under the dressing table.”
“A very smart spur-of-the-moment plan, Miss LaFleur,” Larue told her. “What then? You saw him in your room, right?”
Jenny trembled. “A little. I heard him—heard his footsteps. I saw him at the closet, and I’m pretty sure he looked under the bed. I saw his hands when he was at the closet. He was wearing gloves.”
“What kind of gloves?” Larue asked.