Blood on the Bayou: A Cafferty & Quinn Novella Read Free Page A

We have it as a top priority, but we don’t have any DNA results back yet. It all sounded like a prank when they walked in here. I don’t have your ability with the strange or whatever, but I do have a cop’s sixth sense. And something tells me that this is going to get worse, and weirder, before it’s all over. Will you talk to these women for me, please, Quinn? God help us, we might have been kids back then, and it’s not like we don’t still have our fair share of pretty awful crime, but this could be like last time.”
    And he knew what that meant.
    Serial killings.
    “We have to jump on this,” Larue said. “Or the whole damned bayou, and maybe this town itself, will run red with blood again.”
     
    * * * *
     
    “I’m opening up,” Danni Cafferty called to her friend Billie McDougal.
    She walked across the first floor of the old house at the corner of Royal Street that she’d inherited from her father, unlocking the door of the shop portion and flipping over the OPEN sign.
    She was smiling.
    It was going to be an exceptionally good Friday because she couldn’t wait for the night.
    They, meaning herself, Quinn, Bo Ray Thompkins, Billie, Father Ryan and Natasha, also know as Mistress LaBelle, were going to get together as soon as they all closed up for the day. Also, it was going to be a night when they could bundle up a bit. New Orleans was actually chillyin January. Even the mules drawing the carriages filled with tourists seemed to enjoy the respite from the heat, clopping down the streets with what seemed like a hop in their steps.
    They were planning an evening of great food and music. Not necessarily an all-nighter, which was easily possible in a city that never slept. Her shop, the Cheshire Cat, would be open tomorrow, a Saturday, but not until eleven. And Quinn, a might-have-been-guitar-player, was scheduled to sit in with friends down at a bar on Chartres Street. She loved when he played. He wasn’t quite as good as many of their friends, who spent just about all of their waking hours playing their guitars. But he could have been if that’d been his goal. He was a natural and he loved it.
    And she loved Quinn.
    Go figure . When he first strutted into her life she’d thought him an arrogant hunk. She’d hated the fact that Angus Cafferty working with Quinn had been a secret her father had kept from her.
    But things were different now.
    And it wasn’t just physical, though he was near the perfect man, lean of muscle, all six-four of him. It was that she knew that even when he’d been hero-worshipped by kids as a star athlete, he might have been oblivious but never cruel. She’d thought him the biggest ass the world had ever known when they first met. But eventually, she learned, after her father’s death and through a difficult and deadly case involving the theft of a special statue, that he was far from it. He’d changed and become a man with a dedication to the world and those around them.
    A person even her father had trusted.
    Sure, the beginning hadn’t been easy, and life still made things a challenge between them. But there was something that made the challenges worth it, and sleeping with him every night certainly helped ease away the day’s dilemmas.
    “I’m ready,” Billie called to her, grinning.
    His words trilled.
    Billie had come to America with her father from Scotland. And though he’d been in the States for years, his rich Scottish burr hadn’t faded. Tall and gaunt with a thick thatch of white hair, Billie could have easily stood in for Riff Raff in a performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show . He was as dear to her as a man could be, her self-appointed guardian after her father’s death, and the one who, with Quinn, had finally allowed her to see just what her father had really collected through the years.
    “I’ll be bringing me pipes,” Billie assured. “And don’t roll your eyes at me, lass. I’ll just see if I can’t be part of one or two